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FTR #1160 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The program begins with discussion of operational links between the Nazi/GOP milieu analyzed in FTR #1159 and elements we have analyzed in the context of the destabilization of China. (For the convenience of the listener and reader, key points of that discussion are included in the broadcast and below in this description.)
In FTR #‘s 1103, 1143, 1144, 1153 and 1154, we detailed the presence of OUN/B‑connected elements in Hong Kong and working in a propaganda role vis a vis the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. In Hong Kong, elements of the Azov Battalion and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) have been active in conjunction with the “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong (under the auspices of an EU NGO.)
German national and End Times Christian Adrian Zenz, a fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, has been the go-to figure for Western media on the alleged persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a subsidiary element of the Captive Nations Committee and the OUN/B.
In previous programs, we examined in detail the activity of Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance–an organization crafted to “prevent” future pandemics, yet networked with the Pentagon and other national security bodies in work disturbingly suggestive of biological warfare research.
Joining Daszak in a commission assembled by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet is Jeffrey Sachs, economic adviser to Bernie Sanders and AOC and the principal economic adviser to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Sachs’ advice drove the Russian economy back to the Stone Age.
In this program we detail the strong, eugenicist overlap between “mainstream” anti-abortion organizations and their closely linked white supremacist colleagues. Seeking to maximize the birth rate of “Aryan” offspring and their percentage in the world’s population, they may be seen as being part of a political continuum which includes the Third Reich.
” . . . . Coexisting in abortion opposition is . . . . a white supremacist ideology that only desires to prevent white women from obtaining abortions, but uses universal opposition to abortion as a pragmatic screen for its goals. As Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America, told The Nation in an interview in September, for white supremacists, ‘opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, opposing feminism, in white power discourse, all of this is tied to reproduction and the birth of white children.’ . . . Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, ‘Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]…. It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.’ . . . . ”
Central to our analysis is a speculative, yet terrifying biotechnological element–gene drive technology. We have spoken about this in numerous previous programs.
” . . . . Gene drives have been dubbed an ‘extinction technology’ and with good reason: gene drive organisms are created by genetically engineering a living organism with a particular trait, and then modifying the organism’s reproductive system in order to always force the modified gene onto future generations, spreading the trait throughout the entire population. . . .”
” . . . . the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is forcing dangerous gene drive technologies onto the world. BMGF is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. military organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] ). . . .”
Just imagine what such technology–applied to human reproductive capacity–could do when deployed by fascist and Nazi elements in the military/medical establishment!
The emergence of such a development is being facilitated:
” . . . . a private PR firm called Emerging Ag, was paid US$1.6 million by the BMGF. Part of their work involved coordinating the ‘fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents,’ as well as running a covert advocacy coalition to exert influence on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the key body for gene drive governance. After calls in 2016 for a global moratorium on the use of gene drive technology, the CBD sought input from scientists and experts in an online forum. Emerging Ag recruited and coordinated over 65 experts, including a Gates Foundation senior official, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) official, and government and university scientists, in an attempt to flood the official UN process with their coordinated inputs. . . .”
At the conclusion of the program we present a very disturbing hypothetical concept: we fear that the effort to find viral pathogens around the world and make them more infectious via gain-of-function manipulations is intended to realize a global, eugenicist, exterminationist and white supremacist agenda by creating pandemics in the Third World, profit enormously by making vaccines to treat those pandemics and introduce gene drive technology into those populations via the vaccines in order to diminish reproduction in those populations.
The mRNA and DNA vaccines being produced by the DARPA-supported Moderna and Inovio firms should be considered in connection with this nightmarish working hypothesis.
1. It is important to note that serving, in effect, as an advance element for the neo-Liberal policies presided over by Yeltsin and crafted by Jeffrey Sachs & Company, the Free Congress Foundation served as an extension of The Crusade For Freedom and the incorporation of the ABN milieu into the GOP.
This was the political predecessor to the Yeltsin policies.
Dominating the Reagan administration, the ABN milieu was projected back into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union by the Free Congress Foundation, heavily overlapped with Laszlo Pasztor and the GOP Nazis dating from the Crusade For Freedom.
This phalanx played a leading role in the political tutoring of Boris Yeltsin’s IRG organization. Ultimately, Yeltsin’s forces were instrumental in breaking up the U.S.S.R.
Having their path cleared by the FCF, ABN and OUN/B, Jeffrey Sachs and the U.S. government-financed Harvard International Institute of Development then provided the advisory capacity to Boris Yeltsin which drove the Russian economy back to the stone age.
We wonder just WHAT he is doing co-chairing The Lancet’s Covid-19 inquiry commission? Are the Russians right about Sachs being CIA? Is THAT what he is doing on The Lancet’s Covid-19 inquiry commission?
“The Free Congress Foundation Goes East” by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf; Covert Action Information Bulletin #35; Fall/1990.
With the rapid pace of political change sweeping Eastern Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many opportunities have emerged for western interests to intervene in the politics of that region. In some cases, such a vacuum has been created that virtual strangers to the area several years ago are now able to actively participate in changing those societies from within.
These interventions are not only being practiced by mainstream organizations. The involvement of the United States Far Right brings with it the potential revival of fascist organizations in the East. One U.S. group, the Free Congress Foundation, has been plahying a role in Eastern European and Soviet politics and has ties to Boris Yeltsin and the Inter-Regional Deputies Group (IRG) in the U.S.S.R.
The Free Congress Foundation (FCF) was founded in 1974 by Paul Weyrich as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Weyrich, who had started the Heritage Foundation the year before, was heavily funded by the Coors family for both organizations.
Weyrich has kept one foot in the right wing of the Republican Party while dallying with the racist Right and the extreme Christian Right. In 1976, for instance, he and a handful of other New Rights (William Rusher, Morton Blackwell, Richard Viguerie) attempted to take over the segregationist American Independent Party (AIP), formed by George Wallace in 1968. The AIP was an amalgam of Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society elements. . . .
. . . . The IRG was established by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin and others in the summer of 1989. By the end of that year, a training school had been established for candidates to put forward the IRG program. Their electoral success this year propelled Yeltsin to the leadership of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. He immediately began forging collaborative relationships with the deeply reactionary leaders of the Lithuanian Sajudis party. The IRG has also served as a source of right-wing pressure on Gorbachev to dismantle socialism and the Soviet Union itself.
One of the key dangers in this agenda is the political vacuum it creates, allowing ultra-nationalist forces in a number of republics to take power. Such nationalist and fascist elements are already evident in Lithuania and the Ukraine. In the latter republic, the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) has gained influence in several parties and has mobilized large demonstrations that honor OUN leaders who abetted Hitler’s war on the Eastern Front. Similarly, several deputies Sajudis deputies served in German military units in 1944, and Sajudis has made declarations against ethnic Russians living in Lithuania. According to some reports, Poles have also been denigrated.
It should also be noted that the “radical reformer” Boris Yeltsin has dallied with Pamyat, the foremost Russian fascist group to emerge in the last several years. Pamyat’s virulent anti-Semitism compares to the crude propaganda of the early German Nazi Party in the 1920’s.
The FCF is not entirely disconnected from the history of the OUN. The Treasurer of the FCF board is Georgetown University Professor Charles Moser. Moser is also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ukrainian Quarterly, published by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a group dominated by the OUN. The Ukrainian Quarterly has praised military units of the German SS and otherwise justified the OUN alliance with the Third Reich which reflects the fact that the OUN was politically and militarily allied with Hitler and the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine.
The OUN, an international semi-secret cadre organization headquartered in Bavaria, has received financial assistance from the late Franz Joseph Strauss, the rightist head of the Bavarian state. Strauss also had a working relationship with Weyrich. . . .
. . . . Finally, FCF’s insinuation into the politics of the East must be judged by their selection of Laszlo Pasztor to head their Liberation Support Alliance, “which seeks to liberate peoples in Central and Eastern European Nations.”
Pasztor’s involvement in East European politics began in World War II when he joined the youth organization of the Arrow Cross, the Nazi party of Hungary.
When the Arrow Cross was installed in power by a German commando operation, Pasztor was sent to Berlin to help facilitate the liaison between the Arrow Cross and Hitler.
Pasztor was tried and served two years in jail for his Arrow Cross activities after an anticommunist government was elected in 1945. He eventually came to the U.S. and established the ethnic arm of the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon. He brought other Nazi collaborators from the Eastern front into the GOP. Some were later found to have participated in mass murder during the war.
The dormant Arrow Cross has surfaced again in Hungary, where there have been attempts to lift the ban on the organization. Pasztor spent several months in Hungary. When Weyrich later conducted training there, he was provided a list of Pasztor’s contacts inside the country. Weyrich reports that he conducted training for the recently formed and now governing New Democratic Forum.
Pasztor claims to have assisted some of his friends in Hungary in getting NED funds through his advisory position with NED. In 1989 he spoke at the Heritage Foundation under the sponsorship of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational umbrella organization of emigre fascists and Nazis founded in alliance with Hitler in 1943. It is led by the OUN. Pasztor spoke for the “Hungarian Organization” of ABN, which is the Arrow Cross. . . . .
2. Switching focus to the eugenicist philosophy at the core of the Underground Reich, we note the heavy degree of overlap between the pro-life movement and white supremacy.
” . . . . Coexisting in abortion opposition is . . . . a white supremacist ideology that only desires to prevent white women from obtaining abortions, but uses universal opposition to abortion as a pragmatic screen for its goals. As Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America, told The Nation in an interview in September, for white supremacists, ‘opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, opposing feminism, in white power discourse, all of this is tied to reproduction and the birth of white children.’ . . . Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, ‘Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]…. It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.’ . . . . ”
The anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy. In recent decades, the movement mainstream has been careful to protect its public image by distancing itself from overt white nationalists in its ranks. Last year, anti-abortion leader Kristen Hatten was ousted from her position as vice president of the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists after identifying as an “ethnonationalist” and sharing white supremacist alt-right content. In 2018, when neo-Nazis from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) sought to join the local March for Life rally organized by Tennessee Right to Life, the anti-abortion organization rejected TWP’s involvement. (The organization’s statement, however, engaged in the same false equivalency between left and right that Trump used in the wake of fatal white supremacist violence at Charlottesville. “Our organization’s march has a single agenda to support the rights of mothers and the unborn, and we don’t agree with the violent agenda of white supremacists or Antifa,” the group wrote on its Facebook page.)
But despite the movement’s careful curation of its public image, racism and xenophobia have been woven into it throughout its history. With large families, due to Roman Catholic Church prohibitions on contraception and abortion, Catholic immigration in the mid-1800s through 1900s sparked white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fears of being overtaken demographically that fueled opposition to abortion as a means of increasing birthrates among white Protestant women. At the time, Roman Catholic immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy who would be considered white today were among the targets of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. As sociologists Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay wrote with regards to the criminalization of abortion in the late 19th century, “While laws regulating abortion would ultimately affect all women, physicians argued that middle-class, Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions, and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.”
Hostile anti-Catholic sentiment cut both ways when it came to abortion, however. Until the 1970s, “pro-life” activism was firmly associated with Catholics and the pope in the minds of American Protestants. This deterred many Protestants from opposing abortion as a Christian moral issue—not only in the political sphere, but even as a matter of denominational teaching—because of its association with “papists” (a derogatory term for Catholics). Even the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 decriminalizing abortion did not immediately bring conservative Protestants around. As late as 1976, the conservative evangelical Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed resolutions affirming abortion rights. “The assumption was that it must not be right if Catholics backed it, so we haven’t,” commented John Wilder, who founded Christians for Life as a Southern Baptist ministry in 1977 as the resistance to the pro-life movement began to dissipate.
…
The cultural position of Catholics had shifted dramatically by the 1970s. As substantial immigration from Latin America and Asia posed a new threat to white numerical superiority, Catholics from European countries became culturally accepted as part of the white race, a readjusting of boundaries that maintains demographic control. The election of Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 demonstrated how far Catholic acceptance had come—at least among liberals. Although conservative evangelical opposition to his candidacy remained rife with anti-Catholic fears, the rhetoric was less racialized and more focused on concerns about influence from the Vatican.
To counter this lingering prejudice, conservative Catholic leaders seized on the opportunity offered by the specter of atheist Communism in the mid-20th century to establish themselves as part of a Christian coalition with Protestants, unified against a common godless enemy. As Randall Balmer has written, evangelical concerns about being forced to desegregate Christian schools spurred political investment that Catholic New Right leaders capitalized on and channeled into anti-abortion and anti-LGBT opposition.
For white nationalists, meanwhile, as Carol Mason wrote in Killing for Life, Jewish people replaced Catholics as targets for groups like the KKK. “Now that abortion is tantamount to race suicide…naming Catholics—whose opposition to abortion has been so keen—as enemies would be counterproductive,” Mason wrote. Militant anti-abortion and explicit white nationalist groups came together prominently in the 1990s when a wing of the anti-abortion movement, frustrated with a lack of legislative progress, took on a more violent character fed by relationships with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
White supremacists were already participants in the anti-abortion cause, as Loretta Ross wrote in the 1990s. In 1985, the KKK began creating wanted posters listing personal information for abortion providers (doxing before the Internet age). Randall Terry, founder of the anti-choice group Operation Rescue, and John Burt, regional director of the anti-abortion group Rescue America in the 1990s, adopted this tactic in the 1990s. Terry’s first wanted poster targeted Dr. David Gunn, who was murdered in 1993 in Pensacola, Florida. Gunn’s successor, Dr. John Britton, targeted by a Rescue America wanted poser, was killed in 1994.
The Florida-based KKK organized a rally in support of Dr. Britton’s killer, Paul Hill, and Tom Metzger, founder of the racist group White Aryan Resistance (WAR), condoned the killing if it “protected Aryan women and children.” Burt himself was a Florida Klansman prior to becoming Christian and an associate of both killers. “Fundamentalist Christians and those people [the Klan] are pretty close, scary close, fighting for God and country,” Burt told The New York Times in 1994. “Some day we may all be in the trenches together in the fight against the slaughter of unborn children.” Members of the Portland-based skinhead group American Front regularly joined Operation Rescue to protest abortion clinics. Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, “Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]…. It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.”
…
While in recent years, the mainstream anti-choice movement has been careful to distance itself from overtly racist and white nationalist groups and figures, embedded anti-Semitism appears in the trivialization of the Holocaust and in coded appeals to neo-Nazis. Abolish Human Abortion (AHA), a more recently founded group led by young white men (in a movement that typically likes to put female leaders at the forefront for better mainstream appeal) that views that pro-life movement as too moderate, created an icon linking the acronym AHA in such a way as to resemble “newer incarnations of swastikas that are proliferating among white supremacist groups,” according to Mason.
AHA claims that “the abortion holocaust exceeds all previous atrocities practiced by the Western World,” a statement that signals to anti-Semites an implicit disbelief in the Nazi Holocaust and a trivializing of real historical persecutions. The anti-abortion movement has long framed abortion as a holocaust—a holocaust that it depicts as numerically more significant than the killing of 6 million Jewish people. Historian Jennifer Holland told Jewish Currents that because Jewish people in the United States are more pro-choice than other religious groups, anti-abortion activists “often imply and even outwardly state that Jews are participating in a current genocide and were thus ideologically complicit in the Jewish Holocaust.” This frame sometimes goes hand in hand with outright anti-Semitic denial that the Nazi Holocaust even happened.
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Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley, discussing the possibility of implementing similar legislation in his state, revealed that nativist fears of replacement went into support for the idea. “When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing,” Baxley said of Western Europe. “And it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children.”
Anti-choice figures continue to tout demographic concerns—which at their core are a form of white nationalism—in order to oppose abortion. In the political sphere, Representative Steve King is the most prominent political figure to emerge as a symbol of both white supremacism and abortion opposition. “If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization,” King stated. King has taken far-right positions on both immigration and abortion, including defending rape and incest as necessary for historical population growth.
These overt expressions of demographic nativism by politicians making decisions about reproductive rights on the state and national level is cause for alarm. With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the alt-right—an umbrella for white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-Semitic mobilizations—the “kinder, gentler” image the Christian right and the “pro-life” movement have strategically invested in may be slipping, but also may be less necessary.
Coexisting in abortion opposition is an ideology that honestly seeks to end abortion for people of all races and ethnicities, alongside a white supremacist ideology that only desires to prevent white women from obtaining abortions, but uses universal opposition to abortion as a pragmatic screen for its goals. As Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America, told The Nation in an interview in September, for white supremacists, “opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, opposing feminism, in white power discourse, all of this is tied to reproduction and the birth of white children.”
Commenting on the strategic pragmatism of white supremacist movements, Jean Hardisty and Pam Chamberlain wrote in 2000 that “public advocacy of abortion for women of color might alienate potential far right supporters who oppose all abortion.” White supremacist leaders, like David Duke, have instead focused on other ways to deter birthrates among people of color, such as encouraging long-term contraception or condemning social welfare programs.
The relationship between Christian right anti-abortion, white supremacist, and secular male supremacist ideology is complex. While they often put aside their differences in order to collaborate on shared goals, the agendas are different and inclusive of conflict.
White supremacist responses demonstrated “complicated feelings” following the passage of the Alabama law, as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tracks hate and bigotry, reported. Some, like the founder of Gab, a popular alternative social media forum frequented by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, heralded the Alabama law. Other white supremacists were unsatisfied that the ban would apply to white women and women of color alike. Longtime white nationalist Tom Metzger eschewed the pragmatic approach in posting on Gab that he had instructed “comrades in the Alabama state legislature to introduce a bill that releases all nonwhite women within the borders of Alabama to have free abortions on demand.” (It’s not clear whether this claim is true or which representatives he meant.)
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The anonymous nature of many online forums, like The Red Pill, poses a challenge for determining how much influence members of these communities have. We might be inclined to dismiss Metzger’s claim to have “comrades in the Alabama state legislature” as mere bluster. But before Bonnie Bacarisse’s investigative reporting in The Daily Beast in 2017 uncovered New Hampshire Republican state Representative Robert Fisher as the founder of The Red Pill, which promotes conspiracist theories about feminist control of society and advocates manipulating women into sexual intercourse, these online misogynist forums were often assumed to be divorced from real-world politics. An online pseudonym that The Daily Beast has linked to Fisher’s personal e‑mail address advocated voting for Trump in 2016 because he’d been accused of sexual violence. A spokesperson for a state anti-violence group said that Fisher was part of a “very vocal minority in the NH House right now that is very antiwoman and antivictim,” and that there had been surprises in recent legislative votes.
These secular misogynist mobilizations address abortion in a variety of ways, though always through the lens of establishing male power and rights, even when endorsing legal abortion. Male supremacist communities seek control over women’s bodies, whether it is through denying abortion care or coercing it, or through defending or even perpetrating sexual assault.
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On Return of Kings (ROK), a website listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group for pickup artists (PUAs) and founded by Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by “Roosh V.,” the coverage of abortion has shifted from a position accepting of abortion—though not out of support for women’s human rights—to an increasingly anti-choice position. In 2013, abortion was discussed as beneficial because it reduces the minority population, demonstrating the racism already inherent in this ideology, and “sav[es] a lot of alpha players from having to write a check to a single mom.” Other posts promoted access to contraception as a means to prevent abortion, criticizing Christian right opposition to birth control as ineffective to stopping abortion.
Two years later, Valizadeh himself wrote a post on ROK titled “Women Must Have Their Behavior and Decisions Controlled by Men,” recommending that women receive permission from a guardian to access abortion or birth control. He continues, “While my proposals are undoubtedly extreme on the surface and hard to imagine implementing, the alternative of a rapidly progressing cultural decline that we are currently experiencing will end up entailing an even more extreme outcome.” (In case you’re wondering, Valizadeh has identified other offensive posts as satire, but made no such excuse for this one.) In another 2015 article, “The End Goal of Western Progressivism Is Depopulation,” he condemns abortion rights, birth control, and female empowerment as causes of declining population that risk Western culture. Valizadeh has admitted to perpetrating acts that meet the legal definition of sexual assault and has endorsed the decriminalization of rape. Though he later claimed that endorsement was a “thought experiment,” similar excuses have been used by other misogynist leaders such as Paul Elam to provide cover for their most egregious statements.
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In 2019, Valizadeh announced that he had found God and would no longer promote casual sex. His prior arguments about male control of women and his opposition to abortion and contraception on the basis of concern about population decline, however, fit seamlessly into his new perspective, demonstrating how easy it can be to shift from secular to religious misogyny.
As elements of the male supremacist sphere take on more anti-abortion and white supremacist positions, the confluence of this overt misogyny and racism with the anti-abortion movement may strengthen the support for harsher anti-abortion legislation that eschews the anti-abortion pragmatism of the past and becomes more overt about its criminalization of pregnant people. In 2019, Georgia passed a six-week abortion ban, currently blocked in court, that applies criminal penalties for murder (which includes life imprisonment or the death penalty) for terminating a pregnancy, with no exception for pregnant people self-terminating. Bills like this fulfill Trump’s and Abolish Human Abortion’s claims that the criminalization of abortion should include punishments for women; even though Trump backpedaled because of concerns from mainstream anti-choice groups, his support for this position is already out there, along with his dog whistles to white and male supremacists.
Anti-abortion violence has also been climbing in recent years, as has white supremacist and misogynist violence. Given the history of fatal anti-abortion violence in the 1990s perpetrated by individuals with the connections with white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, the confluence of these ideologies must be cause for concern beyond the political realm as well.
3. Central to our analysis is a speculative, yet terrifying biotechnological element–gene drive technology. We have spoken about this in numerous previous programs.
” . . . . Gene drives have been dubbed an ‘extinction technology’ and with good reason: gene drive organisms are created by genetically engineering a living organism with a particular trait, and then modifying the organism’s reproductive system in order to always force the modified gene onto future generations, spreading the trait throughout the entire population. . . .”
” . . . . the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is forcing dangerous gene drive technologies onto the world. BMGF is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. military organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] ). . . .”
Just imagine what such technology–applied to human reproductive capacity–could do when deployed by fascist and Nazi elements in the military/medical establishment!
The emergence of such a development is being facilitated:
” . . . . a private PR firm called Emerging Ag, was paid US$1.6 million by the BMGF. Part of their work involved coordinating the ‘fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents,’ as well as running a covert advocacy coalition to exert influence on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the key body for gene drive governance. After calls in 2016 for a global moratorium on the use of gene drive technology, the CBD sought input from scientists and experts in an online forum. Emerging Ag recruited and coordinated over 65 experts, including a Gates Foundation senior official, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) official, and government and university scientists, in an attempt to flood the official UN process with their coordinated inputs. . . .”
“Driven to Extinction”; ETC Group; 10/14/2020
As part of our contribution to a new Global Citizen’s Report ‘Gates to a Global Empire’, we explore the way in which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is forcing dangerous gene drive technologies onto the world. BMGF is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. military organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] whose exact level of investment is disputed). BMGF have also funded and influenced lobbyists, regulators, and public narratives around gene drives, in an attempt to push this dangerous sci-fi sounding technology into real world use, shifting research priorities on industrial agriculture, conservation and health strategies along the way, and attracting the interest of the military and agribusiness sectors alike.
Full report: Global Citizens’ Report “Gates to a Global Empire”, published by Navdanya International
Full article:
Driven to Exterminate
How Bill Gates brought gene drive extinction technology into the world
By Zahra Moloo and Jim Thomas, ETC Group.
In 2016, at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy in New York, Bill Gates was asked to give his opinion on gene drives, a risky and controversial new technology that could—by design—lead to the complete extermination of the malaria-carrying mosquito species, Anopheles gambiae. If it were his decision to wipe out this mosquito once and for all, given the risks and benefits being considered, would he be ready to do it? “I would deploy it two years from now,” he replied confidently. However, he added, “How we get approval is pretty open ended.”
Gates’s ‘let’s deploy it’ response may not seem out of character, but it was an unusually gung ho response given how risky the technology is widely acknowledged to be. Gene drives have been dubbed an “extinction technology” and with good reason: gene drive organisms are created by genetically engineering a living organism with a particular trait, and then modifying the organism’s reproductive system in order to always force the modified gene onto future generations, spreading the trait throughout the entire population.
In the case of the Anopheles gambiae project (that Gates bankrolls), a gene drive is designed to interfere with the fertility of the mosquito: essential genes for fertility would be removed, preventing the mosquitoes from having female offspring or from having offspring altogether. These modified mosquitoes would then pass on their genes to a high percentage of their offspring, spreading auto-extinction genes throughout the population. In time, the entire species would in effect be completely eliminated.
Although still new and unproven, gene drives have provoked significant alarm among ecologists, biosafety experts and civil society, many of whom have backed a call for a complete moratorium on the technology. By deliberately harnessing the spread of engineered genes to alter entire populations, gene drives turn on its head the usual imperative to try to contain and prevent engineered genes from contaminating and disrupting ecosystems. The underlying genetic engineering technology is unpredictable and may provoke spread of intended traits. The notion that a species can be removed from an ecosystem without provoking a set of negative impacts on food webs and ecosystem functions is wishful thinking and even taking out a carrier of an unpleasant parasite does not mean the parasite won’t just jump to a different host. Moreover, the implicit power in being able to re-model or delete entire species and ecosystems from the genetic level up is attracting the interest of militarities and agribusiness alike and runs counter to the idea of working with nature to manage conservation and agriculture.
That Gates is so enthusiastic about releasing this powerful genetic technology is not so surprising when one scratches the surface of the myriad institutions that have been researching and promoting gene drives for years. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) whose exact level of investment is disputed). Gates is not just another tech optimist standing on a business stage calling for gene drive release to be allowed—his foundation has poured millions of dollars into gene drive research for over a decade. Yet direct research funding is not the only way in which the BMGF has accelerated the development of this technology. They have also funded and influenced lobbyists, regulators, and public narratives around gene drives, in an attempt to push this dangerous sci-fi sounding technology into real world use, shifting research priorities on industrial agriculture, conservation and health strategies along the way.
Funding the Research
While the controversy around gene drives is recent, promoters like to emphasize that research towards creating gene drive technology has been in the works for many years. From its inception, much of this research has received direct funding from the BMGF, funneled through different academic institutions. The beginning of current research into genetically modified extinction technology can be traced back to 2003 when Austin Burt, a professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Imperial College in London, was working with yeast enzymes, noting how ‘selfish genes’ were able to reproduce with a greater probability than the usual 50–50 ratio that occurs in normal sexual reproduction. In a paper, he explained how these genes could be adapted for other uses, such as in mosquitoes, where the destruction of the insects could be embedded directly into their genes. Burt, along with Andrea Chrisanti, another biologist at Imperial College, applied for a US$8.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which they received in 2005) to take forward their theories and apply them in a lab, eventually creating an international project called ‘Target Malaria’. In an interview with Wired magazine, Chrisanti explained how this funding and the relationship with the BMGF was instrumental in the further development of gene drives technology. “If you need a resource, you get it, if you need a technology, you get it, if you need equipment, you get it. We were left with the notion that success is only up to us,” he said.
At the same time, in 2005, the BMGF was also channeling money into the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), as part of a larger US$436 million grant for a project called the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative. Through the FNIH, a biologist at UC Irvine, Anthony James, was injecting DNA into mosquito embryos to create transgenic mosquitoes resistant to dengue fever. These mosquitoes were able to reproduce which meant that normal mosquito populations could possibly be replaced by GM mosquitoes if only a way could be found to drive the engineered genes into populations. In 2011, James’ lab genetically engineered the mosquito species Anopheles stephensi with genes that made it resistant to malaria.
All these developments were significant, but they had not yet led to the creation of gene drives. That moment came in 2015, when two scientists at UC San Diego, California, Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz, created a gene-construct that could spread a trait through fruit flies, turning the entire population yellow. The technology they had developed used a new genetic engineering tool called CRISPR-Cas9 which could cut DNA and enable genes to be inserted, replaced or deleted from DNA sequences. In effect Gantz and bier built the genetic engineering tool directly into the flies genome so each generation genetically engineered its offspring. CRISPR-Cas9 technology was instrumental in the creation of the gene drive and in late 2015, functional gene drive modified mosquitoes were created. This is what the Gates Foundation was waiting for. In 2016, an official with the Gates Foundation said in an interview that malaria could not be wiped out without a gene drive; all of a sudden this ‘extinction technology’ was considered not just desirable, but “necessary” in the fight to end malaria.
Since then, the push for further research and deployment of gene drives has gained considerable momentum—mostly propelled by Gates dollars. The BMGF has funneled even more funding into taking gene drive research forward. In 2017, UC Irvine received another US$2 million directly from the BMGF for Anthony James to genetically engineer the malaria-carrying mosquito species Anopheles gambiae, with a view to eventually releasing them in a trial. Meanwhile, Target Malaria, the flagship research consortium that came from Burt and Chrisanti’s work, has received US$75 million from the foundation. This has been used to create labs in Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda in order to begin experimenting with gene drives in Africa, and in 2019 Target Malaria released 4,000 genetically modified (not gene drive) mosquitoes in Burkina Faso as a first step in their experiment. Their goal is to release the gene drive mosquitoes in Burkina Faso in 2024. BMGF has also bankrolled further gene drive research in Siena Italy, Jerusalem, Israel and Boston, USA.
Synthetic Biology and Agricultural Interests
Although mainstream media coverage of gene drive developments emphasizes Gates’s grandiose philanthropic intentions in eliminating malaria and saving lives in Africa, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to Gates’s direct funding of gene drive research.
Gene drives are classified as part of a controversial field of extreme genetic engineering known as synthetic biology (synbio) or ‘GMO 2.0’ in which living organisms can be redesigned in the lab to have new abilities. Synthetic Biology aims to redesign and fabricate biological components and systems that do not exist in the natural world. Today it is a multi-billion-dollar industry which creates compounds like synthetic ingredients (synthetic versions of saffron, vanilla etc), medicines and lab-grown food products. Gates’s ambitions for this radical biotech field extend beyond gene drives and malaria research and into the field of synbio. In an interview, he said that if he were a teenager today, he would be hacking biology: “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start—biological molecules.”
The Gates Foundation has had a substantial influence on the synthetic biology industry since its inception. In 2005, when the field was still relatively new, the BMGF gave a grant of US$42.5 million (and later more) to the University of California Berkeley and Amyris, a startup synbio company, in order to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin in a laboratory with genetically engineered microbes. The aim of this grant was not only to create the antimalarial drug, but also to create new biofuels, medicines and high value chemicals. The founder of Amyris, Jay Keasling, has told ETC Group that the Gates funds were contingent on finding other more profitable lines of business in addition to artemisinin and so initially the technology was simultaneously applied to biofuel production. Jack Newman, a scientist at Amyris explained that “the very same pathways” used in artemisinin “can be used for anticancer (drugs), antivirals, antioxidants.”
While using philanthropic funds to bankroll a private biofuel business might seem ethically questionable, the supposedly beneficial target of making an antimalarial molecule may not have been so positive either. In 2013, after many years of research by the UC Berkeley Laboratory and Amyris, it was announced that the French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, would launch the production of synthetic artemisinin. Commercial production of the compound was hailed as more affordable than naturally grown artemisinin, which is farmed in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Vietnam and China. However, what was not mentioned during all the hype around the synthetic production of the compound was that artemisinin farmers in these countries would lose their livelihoods as a result of the sale of the synbio version. In the hype and supported by philanthropic money, prices for artemisinin crashed and some natural artemisinin extractors were shuttered. Eventually, even the synthetic product proved too expensive to sell.
The BMGF investments’ in syn bio go further still. The Foundation invested in a number of other synbio companies including Editas Medicine, a genome editing company that controls the CRISPR-Cas9 technology behind gene drives, and Ginkgo Bioworks, which creates microbes for application in fashion, medicine and industry. Gates is also keen on the so-called “cellular food revolution” which grows food from cells in a lab. His investments in the sector include Memphis Meat, a company that creates cell-based meat without animals, Pivot Bio, which creates engineered microbes for use in agriculture, and Impossible Foods, which makes processed meat-like burgers from a synthetic biology-derived blood substitute.
That Gates is pouring so much money into an industry that is oriented toward shifting agriculture and the food systems toward hi-tech approaches is no accident, given how influential the Foundation is in global health and agriculture policy generally, and in promoting industrial agriculture in the global South and especially Africa. In the case of gene drives, while most international debate has focused on their application in malaria and conservation, the industrial farm is where gene drives may first make their impact; the very foundational patents for gene drives have been written with agricultural applications in mind. In 2017, a secretive group of military advisors known as the JASON Group produced a classified study on gene drives commissioned by the US government which was tasked to address “what might be realizable in the next 3–10 years, especially with regard to agricultural applications.” The JASON Group was also informed by gene drive researchers who were present during a presentation on crop science and gene drives delivered by someone from Bayer-Monsanto. Other groups involved in gene drive discussions behind the scene include Cibus, an agricultural biotech firm, as well as agribusiness majors including Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience. The startup Agragene, whose co-founders are none other than the gene drive researchers Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz of University of California at San Diego, “intends to alter plants and insects” using gene drives. The JASON Group and others have also raised the flag that gene drives have biowarfare potential—in part explaining the strong interest of US and other militaries in the technology.
Shaping the Narrative Around Gene Drives
Not only has the Gates Foundation funded the underlying tools of the syn bio industry and moulded gene drive research for years, it has also been quietly working behind the scenes to influence the adoption of these risky technologies. The way in which policy and public relations about gene drives research has been shaped by the Foundation becomes clear when one examines what happened immediately after the creation of the first functional gene drives with CRISPR Cas9 technology in late 2014.
In early 2015, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine announced that they would have a major inquiry into gene drives—an unprecedented move for such a brand new (only months old) technology. The study did not explore just the science of gene drives, but also aimed to frame issues around policy, ethics, risk assessment, governance and public engagement around gene drives. It was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Several panel members were recipients of Gates funds.
The Foundation has also channeled money into the MIT media lab, home to Kevin Esvelt, who directs a group called Sculpting Evolution and was among the first people to identify the potential of CRISPR-based gene drive to alter wild populations. Last year the MIT Media Lab was embroiled in a controversy when it was revealed that it had received donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Through Epstein, the media lab secured US$2 million from Gates although it is not clear for which project.
One of the most controversial findings which illustrate the extent to which the Gates Foundation is invested in influencing the uptake of gene drive technology was made in 2017 by civil society organizations following a Freedom of Information request. That process led to the release of a trove of emails revealing that a private PR firm called Emerging Ag, was paid US$1.6 million by the BMGF. Part of their work involved coordinating the “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents,” as well as running a covert advocacy coalition to exert influence on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the key body for gene drive governance. After calls in 2016 for a global moratorium on the use of gene drive technology, the CBD sought input from scientists and experts in an online forum. Emerging Ag recruited and coordinated over 65 experts, including a Gates Foundation senior official, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) official, and government and university scientists, in an attempt to flood the official UN process with their coordinated inputs.
Emerging Ag now manages an overt advocacy network also funded by the BMGF called the Outreach Network for Gene Drive Research whose stated intention is to “raise awareness of the value of gene drive research for the public good.” Its members include researchers and organizations that work on gene drive research, stakeholder engagement, outreach and even funders. Almost all of its members are separately funded by the Gates Foundation. In 2020, Emerging Ag received another grant from the Foundation for $2,509,762. . . .
Following up on the disturbing new revelations about the close and chummy relationship between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein and the influence Epstein had on Gates’s philanthropic giving, along with earlier reporting on the far right attitudes of Epstein, including the view that food and medicine should be kept from the global poor to prevent over-population, here’s a New Republic piece from last month that adds another important story about another potentially troubling role Bill Gates’s philanthropic interests:
It turns out Bill Gates has spent the last couple of decades championing a model for how the world can work together to address global diseases and pandemics. It just happens to be the case that Gates’s model is one that manages to protect the monopoly-based intellectual property rights system that the global pharmaceutical industry is based on. And it also just happens to be the case that, at the time Gates first jumped into the issue of intellectual property rights in the face of global pandemics, his company Microsoft was facing antitrust suits on two continents. Yes, Gates’s sudden interest in global disease was that self-serving.
But the worst part of this chapter in history is the issue that was being globally debated at the time Gates jumped into this area in 1999: The intellectual property rights system that, back in the 90’s, was systematically pricing poor countries out of the marketplace for expensive HIV drugs by artificially raising the prices of these drugs well beyond the cost of production. Countries with HIV rates above 20% simply couldn’t afford the medicine. Not because it was incredibly expensive to produce the drugs but purely due to intellectual property rights and the pricing power that comes with the effective monopolies created by the system. In a year when the pharmaceutical industry managed to turn itself into a global pariah industry after suing South Africa to prevent the manufacture of cheap HIV drugs, Bill Gates arrived to convince the world that there was no conflict between delivering medicine to the world’s poor while maintaining a system of monopoly intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals that ensured drugs would be expensive for decades to come.
It’s that crass self-serving nature of Gates’s charitable work on vaccines and pharmaceuticals that’s part of what this is such an important piece of history today. Because as the following piece describes, when the scale of the COVID pandemic first hit the global community in early 2020, the initial model for a global response put out by the World Health Organization was one that decidedly prioritized making global affordable access to vaccines over the protection of intellectual property rights. And then Bill Gates stepped forward with an alternative model. An alternative model highly favorable to the pharmaceutical industry that ultimately prevailed. As a result, we’re living in a moment when the developed world is getting rapidly vaccinated at the same time the developing world is facing the prospect of vaccine shortages through the next couple of years. Profits prevailed over public health. Mission accomplished:
“How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”
It’s hard to read that summary of Bill Gates’s more than two decades of work in the vaccine development field and not arrive at the conclusion that he has played one of the more consequential and underappreciated roles in shaping the global COVID pandemic response. A role be focused on ensuring the continuation of a system of granting monopoly intellectual property rights for vaccine developers even in the face of major global pandemics. When it seemed like the entire world was united behind the idea of pooling together knowledge, resources, and intellectual property rights to ensure everyone everywhere would get access to a vaccine as soon one is safely available, manifested as the WHO’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C‑TAP), Gates was literally launching an alternative global vaccine development initiative — the COVID-19 ACT-Accelerator — designed to ensure the maintenance of the global intellectual property monopoly system for vaccines remains intact. Flash forward to today, the developing world is still barely able to get a vaccine. The Gates model quietly won a very consequential victory:
And we shouldn’t be surprised by the central role Bill Gates as been playing in this fight to protect monopoly intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals. It’s the same battle he’s been fighting in the software sector for decades. Starting with the profound role Gates played in defending the pharmaceutical industry’s morally contemptible decision in 1999 to sue to prevent the manufacture and distribution of HIV medicines in the HIV-ravaged developing countries of the world. It was such an overtly gross position that the industry achieved global pariah status that year. That was went Bill Gates entered the vaccine development debate, seemingly working hand-in-hand with the industry. It’s a reminder that Gates’s ostensibly noble interest in vaccine development doubled as a kind of indirect legal bottle to protect his own monopoly-based software fortune. A battle he began waging in 1999 in defense of keeping generic HIV drugs out of the hands of poor countries:
As we can see, it was this legacy from over two decades ago — a legacy of embracing the pharmaceutical industry’s farcical ‘no one will develop new drugs if we can’t make wild profits’ arguments in the face of the HIV pandemic — that the Gates model for COVID vaccine development was built upon. The Gates model that was ultimately adopted and is now the model for future pandemic responses.
So while we can’t predict where the next pandemic will hit, when it will strike, or what kind of disease it will be, we can predict with complete confidence that the next pandemic will be wildly profitable to an already wildly-profitable industry. Because priorities.