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FTR#1357 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

FTR#1358 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

FTR#1359 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: These pro­grams high­light aspects of Trump’s elec­tion:

Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Includes: Trump’s Madi­son Square Gar­den ral­ly short­ly before the election–“Nuremburg on the Hud­son;” Smed­ley But­ler’s grand­daugh­ter’s reflec­tion on his pos­si­ble stance on Trump’s 1/06/21 insur­rec­tion; Bomb threats direct­ed at Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­toral strong­holds on Elec­tion Day, alleged­ly by “Rus­sia”; The fire­bomb­ing of bal­lot box­es on Elec­tion Day; Pro­pa­gan­dized man­i­fes­ta­tions of alleged Iran­ian plot­ting against Trump’s life; Pro­pa­gan­dized man­i­fes­ta­tions of alleged Russ­ian plot­ting of ter­ror­ist events against the U.S.; The pro­pa­gan­dized alle­ga­tions of “North Kore­an troops” fight­ing in Ukraine; The pro­found­ly anti-Russ­ian actions of Trump’s first admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing sanc­tion­ing the Nord­stream 2 pipeline; Man­age­ment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s cam­paign by his “ex” CIA-offi­cer daugh­ter-in-law; The financ­ing of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s cam­paign by Tim­o­thy Mel­lon (scion of the oli­garch Mel­lon fam­i­ly and Don­ald Trump’s largest finan­cial backer; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s junkie past; Covid-19’s ongo­ing destruc­tion of human health; Pres­sure by big busi­ness to declare the pan­dem­ic “over;” The destruc­tion of the very con­cept of main­tain­ing pub­lic health.

NB: Mate­r­i­al about “Nurem­burg on the Hud­son” and reflec­tions of Smed­ley But­ler’s grand­daugh­ter on Jan­u­ary 6 are at the end of this descrip­tion.

1a. “Are We Just Ignor­ing How Rus­sia Open­ly Helped Trump on Elec­tion Night?” by Edith Olm­st­ed [Yahoo News]; The New Repub­lic; 11/06/2024.

Polling loca­tions in Demo­c­ra­t­ic strong­holds across sev­er­al key bat­tle­ground states received a slew of pho­ny bomb threats on Elec­tion Day, and while the FBI deemed that none of the threats were cred­i­ble, they still rep­re­sent a dis­turb­ing fea­ture of U.S. elec­tions: alleged inter­fer­ence from Rus­sia.

The FBI released a state­ment Tues­day say­ing that it was “aware of bomb threats to polling loca­tions in sev­er­al states, many of which appear to orig­i­nate from Russ­ian email domains.”  While the FBI under­scored that none of the threats had been found to be cred­i­ble, their pur­pose was undoubt­ed­ly to sow chaos and fear as Amer­i­cans attempt­ed to cast their bal­lots.

Many of those threats were direct­ed at sites in Ful­ton Coun­ty, Geor­gia, the state’s most pop­u­lous Demo­c­ra­t­ic strong­hold. Law enforce­ment offi­cials received at least five threats toward two Union City vot­ing sites, and two polling places were evac­u­at­ed for 30 min­utes each after receiv­ing threats.

Georgia’s Sec­re­tary of State Brad Raf­fensperg­er said in a state­ment that the non-cred­i­ble threats affect­ed “five to sev­en dif­fer­ent precincts” in the key swing state.

He also said that the bomb threats had been linked to one par­tic­u­lar “for­eign state actor.”

“We iden­ti­fied the source, and it was from Rus­sia,” Raf­fensperg­er said. “They’re up to mis­chief, it seems, and they don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accu­rate elec­tion.

“Any­thing that can get us to fight amongst ourselves—they can count that as a vic­to­ry.”

In Wis­con­sin, two polling places in the state capi­tol of Madi­son received threats accord­ing to Ann Jacobs, who leads the Wis­con­sin Elec­tions Com­mis­sion. Those threats also seem­ing­ly orig­i­nat­ed from Russ­ian email domains, accord­ing to the FBI’s office in Mil­wau­kee.

In Ari­zona, elec­tion offi­cials received fake bomb threats at four polling sta­tions. Ari­zona Sec­re­tary of State Adri­an Fontes said that the threats came from an email address end­ing in .ru, but empha­sized that he could not con­firm if the threats were actu­al­ly from the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment.

There were also dozens of bomb threats that have not been linked to the alleged Russ­ian email cam­paign.

Penn­syl­va­nia, a crit­i­cal bat­tle­ground state, also received a slate of hoax bomb threats. At least 10 polling loca­tions received threats in Philadel­phia alone. One loca­tion was shut down for 23 min­utes but lat­er received a court order extend­ing its hours to make up the lost time.

The threats in Penn­syl­va­nia were not just lim­it­ed to loca­tions in Philadel­phia Coun­ty. Offi­cials in Bucks, Cen­tre, Chester, Clearfield, Delaware, Luzerne, Per­ry, and York Coun­ties also report­ed receiv­ing bomb threats. Inves­ti­ga­tors in Penn­syl­va­nia have yet to specif­i­cal­ly link any of these pho­ny threats to Rus­sia.

In Michi­gan, there were reports of bomb threats at sev­er­al polling loca­tions, but none were cred­i­ble, accord­ing to a spokesper­son for Michigan’s Sec­re­tary of State Joce­lyn Ben­son.

Russia’s diplo­mat­ic mis­sion in the Unit­ed States dis­missed any alle­ga­tions of Russ­ian inter­fer­ence as “mali­cious slan­der.”

“We would like to empha­size that Rus­sia has not inter­fered and does not inter­fere in the inter­nal affairs of oth­er coun­tries, includ­ing the Unit­ed States,” the Russ­ian Embassy said in a state­ment. “As Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin has repeat­ed­ly stressed, we respect the will of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

1b. “Police are search­ing for the per­son who set bal­lot box­es on fire in Wash­ing­ton and Ore­gon. Here’s what we know” by Chris Boyette;  CNN; 10/29/2024.

Hun­dreds of bal­lots were destroyed or dam­aged in fires set Mon­day at two bal­lot drop box­es in the Pacif­ic North­west – and inves­ti­ga­tors are search­ing for a per­son they believe is respon­si­ble for both inci­dents.

Almost all the bal­lots that were dam­aged or destroyed were in a drop box in Van­cou­ver, Wash­ing­ton, while most bal­lots in a drop box in Port­land, Ore­gon, sur­vived a fire set the same day, elec­tion offi­cials said. The inci­dents are believed to be con­nect­ed to a third fire on Octo­ber 8, also in Van­cou­ver.

The fires came after a US Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty bul­letin from Sep­tem­ber obtained by the watch­dog group Prop­er­ty of the Peo­ple warned: “Some social media users are dis­cussing and encour­ag­ing var­i­ous meth­ods of sab­o­tag­ing bal­lot drop box­es and avoid­ing detec­tion, like­ly height­en­ing the poten­tial for tar­get­ing of this elec­tion infra­struc­ture through the 2024 elec­tion cycle.”

The fires were start­ed by devices placed out­side the drop box­es, author­i­ties said.

Vot­ing in Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton is done almost entire­ly by mail or bal­lot drop off. Less than 1% of peo­ple in Oregon’s Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty vote in per­son, coun­ty Elec­tions Direc­tor Tim Scott said. In Clark Coun­ty, Wash­ing­ton, 60% of the bal­lots received are from bal­lot drop box­es and 40% are received by mail, accord­ing to Clark Coun­ty Audi­tor Greg Kim­sey.

Here are the lat­est devel­op­ments:

• About 475 dam­aged bal­lots were retrieved from the burned bal­lot box in Van­cou­ver, Kim­sey told CNN.
• On Wednes­day, work­ers will search through the dam­aged bal­lots for infor­ma­tion in order to con­tact vot­ers about get­ting a new one, accord­ing to Kim­sey. The work­ers will be able to pull vot­er infor­ma­tion from the bal­lots despite the dam­age to them.
• Devices found at both scenes Mon­day and at the bal­lot box tar­get­ed ear­li­er in the month were marked with the words “Free Gaza,” The New York Times report­ed, cit­ing two law enforce­ment offi­cials. Inves­ti­ga­tors are try­ing to deter­mine if the sus­pect is a pro-Pales­tin­ian activist or some­one try­ing to sow dis­cord, accord­ing to the news­pa­per.

How the bal­lot box­es went up in flames

An “incen­di­ary device” was found attached to the side of a bal­lot drop box when Port­land Police respond­ed about 3:30 a.m. Mon­day, and secu­ri­ty per­son­nel extin­guished the fire, the Port­land Police Bureau said in a state­ment.

CNN has reached out to the bureau, which declined to com­ment on the report­ed writ­ing on the devices, but said they were sent for foren­sic analy­sis and will be exam­ined for “unique writ­ings and mark­ings.”

At a bus sta­tion in Van­cou­ver, just 15 miles from Port­land, anoth­er bal­lot box was set on fire ear­ly Mon­day, accord­ing to the Van­cou­ver Police Depart­ment. Respond­ing offi­cers dis­cov­ered a “sus­pi­cious device” on fire next to the box, police said.

CNN also reached out to the Van­cou­ver Police, who referred ques­tions about the case to the FBI.

“The US Attorney’s Office and the FBI want to assure our com­mu­ni­ties that we are work­ing close­ly and expe­di­tious­ly togeth­er to inves­ti­gate the two incen­di­ary fires at the bal­lot box­es in Van­cou­ver, Wash­ing­ton, and the one in Port­land, Ore­gon, and will work to hold who­ev­er is respon­si­ble ful­ly account­able,” US Attor­ney Tes­sa M. Gor­man and Greg Austin, act­ing spe­cial agent in charge of the FBI’s Seat­tle office said in a state­ment Tues­day.

All bal­lot box­es in Mult­nom­ah and Clark coun­ties have fire sup­pres­sant installed, elec­tion offi­cials said dur­ing a news con­fer­ence Mon­day. Scott said fire sup­pres­sant inside the Port­land box pro­tect­ed more than 400 bal­lots inside, and only three bal­lots were dam­aged. Elec­tion offi­cials said they plan to con­tact the three vot­ers affect­ed using “unique iden­ti­fiers on their bal­lot envelopes, so they can receive replace­ment bal­lots.”

Elec­tion offi­cials were still try­ing to count all the bal­lots destroyed in the Van­cou­ver fire, accord­ing to Clark County’s Kim­sey.

“Our best guess is clos­er to dozens than hun­dreds but there is no way to know,” he said Wednes­day.

Rough­ly 500 Clark Coun­ty vot­ers have request­ed replace­ment bal­lots, The Ore­gon­ian said, cit­ing the auditor’s office.

“Drop box­es are use­ful and secure ways vot­ers can return their mail bal­lot with­out using the US Postal Ser­vice,” Jay Riesten­berg, direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions for Vot­ing Rights Lab said. “They help cut down on bal­lots returned by mail, which can alle­vi­ate the stress put on the US Postal Ser­vice and local elec­tion offi­cials dur­ing busy elec­tion sea­sons.”

What should I do if my bal­lot was impact­ed?

John Burn­side and his wife vot­ed Sun­day after­noon by deposit­ing their bal­lots in a drop box near their Van­cou­ver, Wash­ing­ton, home.

The next day, he saw reports that some­one set fire to the box, destroy­ing hun­dreds of votes.

“When I saw the video of them scrap­ing the bal­lots out of there. I knew there was lit­tle chance that mine would have been work­ing,” Burn­side told CNN. “I don’t know that they were able to sal­vage any of the bal­lots out of that box.”

They’ve used that drop box in past elec­tions, Burn­side said, and it was dis­turb­ing that some­one would destroy it.

Burn­side said he looked online and saw their bal­lots had not been received, so they imme­di­ate­ly ordered replace­ment bal­lots. This time, he said, they’ll dri­ve across town to the elec­tion office so they can deliv­er their votes in per­son.

“It’s prob­a­bly a 20-minute dri­ve, but it’s well worth it at this point,” Burn­side said.

Kim­sey, the Clark Coun­ty audi­tor, said any­one who dropped off a bal­lot at the dam­aged Fisher’s Land­ing Tran­sit Cen­ter box in Van­cou­ver between 11 a.m. on Sat­ur­day and 4 a.m. on Mon­day should request a replace­ment bal­lot online at VoteWA.gov.

Author­i­ties look­ing for ‘sus­pect vehi­cle’

Evi­dence from the incen­di­ary devices found at the bal­lot box­es Mon­day shows the fires are con­nect­ed to each oth­er, as well as the Octo­ber 8 inci­dent in Van­cou­ver, said Port­land Police Bureau spokesper­son Mike Ben­ner.

Police iden­ti­fied a “sus­pect vehi­cle” seen leav­ing the scene of the fire in Port­land, they said in a news release Mon­day – a black or dark-col­ored 2001–2004 Vol­vo S‑60.
Accord­ing to the Ore­gon Depart­ment of Dri­ver and Motor Vehi­cle Ser­vices, 3,828 of those vehi­cles were reg­is­tered in the state – 558 of which have a valid reg­is­tra­tion sta­tus.

The FBI and the US Attor­ney for the West­ern Dis­trict of Wash­ing­ton put out a joint state­ment Tues­day, say­ing they “are work­ing close­ly and expe­di­tious­ly togeth­er to inves­ti­gate the two incen­di­ary fires at the bal­lot box­es” and “will work to hold who­ev­er is respon­si­ble ful­ly account­able.”

Enhanced bal­lot box secu­ri­ty

As Elec­tion Day nears, state lead­ers are encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to vote despite the inci­dents, pledg­ing increased secu­ri­ty around the drop box­es.

“There are mul­ti­ple ways for vot­ers to cast their bal­lot and make sure their voice is heard,” Wash­ing­ton Gov. Jay Inslee said.

The bal­lot box in Port­land has already been replaced, accord­ing to Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty Chair Jes­si­ca Vega Ped­er­son, and law enforce­ment in Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty and Van­cou­ver, Wash­ing­ton, plan to increase patrols of bal­lot box­es in the area.

“Vot­er intim­i­da­tion or any crim­i­nal act to under­mine the upcom­ing elec­tion is un-Amer­i­can & will not be tol­er­at­ed,” Ore­gon Gov. Tina Kotek said on X. . . .

1c. “How Trump ‘Appeased’ Rus­sia;” Moon of Alaba­ma; 1/06/2021.

Two years ago we wrote about Trump’s rela­tion with Rus­sia:

Putin Asks And Trump Deliv­ers — A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Rus­sia

Trump obvi­ous­ly wants bet­ter diplo­mat­ic rela­tions with Rus­sia. He is reluc­tant to counter its mil­i­tary might. He is doing his best to make it rich­er. Just con­sid­er the head­lines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense sus­pi­cions of Russ­ian influ­ence over him is sure­ly jus­ti­fied.

There fol­lowed 34 head­lines and links to sto­ries about Trump actions, from clos­ing Russ­ian con­sulates to U.S. attacks on Russ­ian troops, that were hos­tile to Rus­sia.

In fact no oth­er U.S. admin­is­tra­tion since the cold war has been more aggres­sive towards Rus­sia than Trump’s.

But some U.S. media con­tin­ue to claim that Trump’s behav­ior towards Rus­sia has not been hos­tile at all. Con­sid­er this line in Politi­co about anti-Russ­ian hawks in the incom­ing Biden admin­is­tra­tion:

Nuland and Sher­man, who entered acad­e­mia and the think tank world after leav­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, have been out­spo­ken crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s for­eign pol­i­cy — par­tic­u­lar­ly his appease­ment of Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin.

Where please has Trump ‘appeased’ Vladimir Putin?

Here are a num­ber of head­lines which appeared in U.S. media since we pub­lished our first list two years ago. Which of the described actions were designed to  ‘appease’ Putin or Rus­sia?

U.S. to with­draw from nuclear arms con­trol treaty with Rus­sia, rais­ing fears of a new arms race — Wash­ing­ton Post, Feb 1 2019

Putin says U.S.-Russia rela­tions are get­ting ‘worse and worse’ — Reuters, Jun 13 2019

Green Berets train Pol­ish, Lat­vian resis­tance units in West Vir­ginia — Army Times, Jul 8 2019

Trump Adds to Sanc­tions on Rus­sia Over Skri­pals — NYT, Aug 1 2019

INF nuclear treaty: US pulls out of Cold War-era pact with Rus­sia — BBC, Aug 2 2019

US Slaps New Sanc­tions on Rus­sia for 2018 Nerve Agent Attack — Dai­ly Sig­nal, Aug 2 2019

1000 U.S.Troops Are Head­ed to Poland — Nation­al Inter­est, Sep 29 2019

U.S. sanc­tions Rus­sians over attempt­ed inter­fer­ence in 2018 elec­tions — CBS News, Sep 30 2019

US for­mal­ly with­draws from Open Skies Treaty that bol­stered Euro­pean secu­ri­ty — CNN, Nov 22 2020

Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanc­tions on Rus­sia gas pipeline — BBC, Dec 21 2019

Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanc­tions on Rus­sia gas pipeline

21 Decem­ber 2019

Gas wars: The prob­lem with Nord Stream 2

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has signed a law that will impose sanc­tions on any firm that helps Rus­si­a’s state-owned gas com­pa­ny, Gazprom, fin­ish a pipeline into the Euro­pean Union.

The sanc­tions tar­get firms build­ing Nord Stream 2, an under­sea pipeline that will allow Rus­sia to increase gas exports to Ger­many.

The US con­sid­ers the project a secu­ri­ty risk to Europe.

Both Rus­sia and the EU have strong­ly con­demned the US sanc­tions.

Con­gress vot­ed through the mea­sures as part of a defence bill last week and the leg­is­la­tion, which described the pipeline as a “tool of coer­cion”, was signed off by Mr Trump on Fri­day.

Why is the US against the pipeline?

The almost $11bn (£8.4bn) Nord Stream 2 project has infu­ri­at­ed the US, with both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers oppos­ing it.

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion fears the pipeline will tight­en Rus­si­a’s grip over Europe’s ener­gy sup­ply and reduce its own share of the lucra­tive Euro­pean mar­ket for Amer­i­can liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas.

• Skate­board­ing pro­test­ers occu­py gas pipeline in Ger­many
• EU agrees tighter rules for Russ­ian pipeline

Pres­i­dent Trump has said the 1,225km (760-mile) pipeline, owned by Rus­si­a’s Gazprom, could turn Ger­many into a “hostage of Rus­sia”.

The US sanc­tions have angered Rus­sia and the Euro­pean Union, which says it should be able to decide its own ener­gy poli­cies.

Ear­li­er this week Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel said she was “opposed to extrater­ri­to­r­i­al sanc­tions” against the Nord Stream 2 project.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea has divid­ed Europe and infu­ri­at­ed the US

Ger­man for­eign min­is­ter Heiko Maas struck a more com­bat­ive tone, say­ing the sanc­tions amount­ed to “inter­fer­ence in autonomous deci­sions tak­en in Europe”.

Allseas, a Swiss-Dutch com­pa­ny involved in the project, said it had sus­pend­ed its pipe-lay­ing activ­i­ties in antic­i­pa­tion of the sanc­tions.

The US sanc­tions also tar­get Turk­Stream, a Rus­sia-Turkey pipeline, and include asset freezes and revo­ca­tion of US visas for the con­trac­tors.

Adver­tise­ment

How have Rus­sia and the EU react­ed?

On Sat­ur­day, the EU voiced its clear oppo­si­tion to the US sanc­tions.

“As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, the EU oppos­es the impo­si­tion of sanc­tions against EU com­pa­nies con­duct­ing legit­i­mate busi­ness,” a spokesman for the trad­ing bloc told AFP news agency.

Rus­si­a’s for­eign min­istry also strong­ly opposed the move, with min­istry spokes­woman Maria Zakharo­va accus­ing Wash­ing­ton of pro­mot­ing an “ide­ol­o­gy” that hin­ders glob­al com­pe­ti­tion.

The con­sor­tium behind Nord Stream 2 con­firmed that it would build the pipeline as soon as pos­si­ble, despite the sanc­tions.

It said: “Com­plet­ing the project is essen­tial for Euro­pean sup­ply secu­ri­ty. We, togeth­er with the com­pa­nies sup­port­ing the project, will work on fin­ish­ing the pipeline as soon as pos­si­ble.”

Why is Nord Stream 2 so con­tro­ver­sial?

For years EU mem­ber states have been con­cerned about the bloc’s reliance on Russ­ian gas.

Rus­sia cur­rent­ly sup­plies about 40% of the EU’s gas sup­plies — just ahead of Nor­way, which is not in the EU but takes part in its sin­gle mar­ket. The new pipeline will increase the amount of gas going under the Baltic to 55 bil­lion cubic metres per year.

Dis­agree­ments among EU nations were so strong that, ear­li­er this year, they even threat­ened to derail the project entire­ly.

The bloc even­tu­al­ly agreed to strength­en reg­u­la­tions against Nord Stream 2, rather than stop it com­plete­ly, and to bring it under Euro­pean con­trol.

Busi­ness­es in Ger­many, mean­while, have invest­ed heav­i­ly in the project. Chan­cel­lor Merkel has tried to assure Cen­tral and East­ern Euro­pean states that the pipeline would not make Ger­many reliant on Rus­sia for ener­gy.

There is con­cern in oth­er quar­ters, too. In May, cli­mate activists oppos­ing the use of fos­sil fuels occu­pied part of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in Ger­many.

The demon­stra­tors, who said the project would be more detri­men­tal to the envi­ron­ment than the author­i­ties had claimed, began skate­board­ing inside the pipes.

Police said at least five peo­ple had occu­pied the pipes near Wrangels­burg in north­ern Ger­many.

 

Trump sanc­tions Ros­neft, Rus­si­a’s largest oil com­pa­ny, for aid­ing Maduro in Venezuela - MSN, Feb 19 2020

Rus­sia Says New U.S. Weapon Threat­ens Nuclear War — Newsweek, Mar 7 2020

Trump Con­tin­ues to Be Exceed­ing­ly Tough on Rus­sia — Town­hall, Jul 25 2020

U.S.-Russia Mil­i­tary Ten­sions Inten­si­fy in the Air and on the Ground World­wide — NYT, Sep 1 2020

White House rejects Putin’s pro­pos­al to extend last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty - LA Times, Oct 16 2020

U.S., Russ­ian Navies Involved In Brief Con­fronta­tion At Sea — NPR, Nov 24 2020

US sanc­tions NATO ally Turkey over Russ­ian mis­sile defense — AP, Dec 14 2020

Pom­peo accus­es Rus­sia of sow­ing ‘chaos’ in the Mediter­ranean - Raw­sto­ry, Dec 15 2020

Exclu­sive: U.S. prepar­ing new sanc­tions to impede Rus­si­a’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline — Reuters, Dec 23 2020

Exclu­sive: U.S. prepar­ing new sanc­tions to impede Rus­si­a’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline

By Andrea Sha­lal

Decem­ber 23, 20208:23 PM PSTUp­dat­ed 4 years ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The Unit­ed States is urg­ing Euro­pean allies and pri­vate com­pa­nies to halt work that could help build the Nord Stream 2 nat­ur­al gas pipeline and is prepar­ing wider sanc­tions on the Russ­ian project in com­ing weeks, senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said on Wednes­day.

The out­go­ing Trump admin­is­tra­tion is ready­ing a fresh round of con­gres­sion­al­ly man­dat­ed sanc­tions “in the very near future” that it believes could deal a fatal blow to the Rus­sia-to-Ger­many project led by state gas com­pa­ny Gazprom , three offi­cials said.

“We’ve been get­ting body blow on body blow to this, and now we’re in the process of dri­ving a stake through the project heart,” said one of the offi­cials, who spoke to Reuters on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

Rus­sia this month resumed build­ing the $11.6 bil­lion (9.5 bil­lion euro) pipeline, which is 90% com­plete, after a one-year pause prompt­ed by exist­ing U.S. sanc­tions.

New work has been cen­tered on a 2.6 kilo­me­ter (1.6 mile) stretch in shal­low waters of Germany’s Exclu­sive Eco­nom­ic Zone but not yet in the deep-water sec­tions off Den­mark that com­prise most of the unfin­ished 100-km stretch.

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Wash­ing­ton says the project, which will increase Euro­pean reliance on Russ­ian gas, will com­pro­mise Euro­pean ener­gy secu­ri­ty. Rus­sia says the sanc­tions amount to “unfair com­pe­ti­tion” aimed at help­ing U.S. liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­ers, and insists it will fin­ish the pipeline.

The feud may not die down once Pres­i­dent-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20, for­eign diplo­mats say.

The U.S. pres­sure cam­paign on Nord Stream 2 is backed by both Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can law­mak­ers who fear it will bypass Ukraine, rob­bing it of lucra­tive tran­sit fees. Biden described the pipeline as a “bad deal” for Europe in 2016, and has crit­i­cized Moscow for its alleged role in a mas­sive cyber attack on U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies that was dis­cov­ered last week.

Nord Stream 2 did not imme­di­ate­ly com­ment on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of new sanc­tions. Last month it told Reuters that exist­ing sanc­tions and new ones in the defense pol­i­cy bill would, if imposed, direct­ly or indi­rect­ly hit more than 120 com­pa­nies from more than 12 Euro­pean coun­tries.

SHIP IN CANARY ISLANDS

Gazprom has had to retool its ships to do the del­i­cate deep­wa­ter pipelay­ing and may need the help of com­pa­nies from oth­er coun­tries to fin­ish the project quick­ly.

Wash­ing­ton has what it con­sid­ers “reli­able infor­ma­tion” about mod­i­fi­ca­tions being car­ried out to the Ocean­ic 5000, a crane ship, in Spain’s Canary Islands, upgrades that U.S. offi­cials say will equip the ship to lay pipe in deep water.

The offi­cials declined to iden­ti­fy which enti­ties could face sanc­tions for the pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed work, but said they were not tar­get­ing spe­cif­ic gov­ern­ments or gov­ern­ment offi­cials.

Sev­er­al Euro­pean enti­ties were involved, but some were “unwit­ting” of the impli­ca­tions for the pipeline, said one offi­cial, adding they could still escape sanc­tions if they made “a good faith effort to unwind their involve­ment.”

A Dan­ish reg­u­la­tor on Tues­day said a Gazprom ves­sel called For­tu­na would start work off Den­mark from Jan. 15 with the assis­tance of oth­er sup­ply ves­sels.

The project is grap­pling with finan­cial pres­sures and the depar­ture of key par­tic­i­pants, includ­ing Norway’s risk man­age­ment and qual­i­ty assur­ance firm DNV GL here last month. The State Depart­ment is due to issue an over­due report to Con­gress in the next weeks on com­pa­nies that could be at risk for help­ing the project, anoth­er offi­cial said.

DNV said new U.S. guide­lines meant it could face sanc­tions. The scope of the sanc­tions were expand­ed fur­ther in a veto-proof bipar­ti­san defense pol­i­cy bill passed this month.

That mea­sure would also tar­get indi­vid­u­als or com­pa­nies assist­ing Gazprom with “pipelay­ing activ­i­ties,” insur­ance, and ver­i­fi­ca­tion of con­struc­tion equip­ment.

U.S. sanc­tions have already added $1 bil­lion in extra cost to the project, said one of the U.S. offi­cials.

Ini­tial­ly slat­ed to become oper­a­tional in late 2020 or ear­ly 2021, Nord Stream 2 would dou­ble the capac­i­ty of Rus­sia to car­ry gas direct­ly to Ger­many.

Report­ing by Andrea Sha­lal; addi­tion­al report­ing by Tim­o­thy Gard­ner; Edit­ing by Mary Mil­liken and Alis­tair Bell

As we have writ­ten before:

When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Rus­sia, than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin’s influ­ence, know­ing­ly or unwit­ting­ly, could he end up doing Rus­sia so many favors.

Not.

1d. “How Europe Was Pushed Towards Eco­nom­ic Sui­cide;” Moon of Alaba­ma; 5/18/2022.

” . . . . As hawk­ish Under-Sec­re­tary of State for Polit­i­cal Affairs, Vic­to­ria Nuland, explained in a State Depart­ment press brief­ing on Jan­u­ary 27: ‘If Rus­sia invades Ukraine one way or anoth­er Nord Stream 2 will not move for­ward.’ The prob­lem is to cre­ate a suit­ably offen­sive inci­dent and depict Rus­sia as the aggres­sor. . . .”

1e. “Trump And Ukraine;” Moon of  Alaba­ma; 11/07/2024.

How will a pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump han­dle the war in Ukraine?

I doubt that he will be able to close down the war in 24 hours, as he had promised. I rather think that he will esca­late it. As I stat­ed two weeks ago:

I expect the new pres­i­dent to dou­ble down on the anti-Russ­ian project in Ukraine ...

A new Wall Street Jour­nal piece on Trump’s promise does not give me any rea­son to believe oth­er­wise.

Trump Promised to End the War in Ukraine. Now He Must Decide How. (archived
For­eign-pol­i­cy advis­ers close to the pres­i­dent-elect put forth dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a plan to effec­tive­ly freeze the front line

Like in Trump’s first term, dif­fer­ent fac­tions are set to com­pete to influ­ence the Republican’s for­eign pol­i­cy. More tra­di­tion­al­ly mind­ed allies such as Mike Pom­peo, the for­mer sec­re­tary of state now in con­tention to lead the Pen­ta­gon, are like­ly to push for a set­tle­ment that doesn’t appear to give a major win to Moscow. Oth­er advis­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly Richard Grenell, a top can­di­date to lead the State Depart­ment or serve as nation­al-secu­ri­ty advis­er, could give pri­or­i­ty to Trump’s desire to end the war as soon as pos­si­ble, even if it means forc­ing Kyiv into sig­nif­i­cant con­ces­sions.

But what are ways to do that?

One idea pro­posed inside Trump’s tran­si­tion office, detailed by three peo­ple close to the pres­i­dent-elect and not pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, would involve Kyiv promis­ing not to join NATO for at least 20 years. In exchange, the U.S. would con­tin­ue to pump Ukraine full of weapons to deter a future Russ­ian attack.

Under that plan, the front line would essen­tial­ly lock in place and both sides would agree to an 800-mile demil­i­ta­rized zone. Who would police that ter­ri­to­ry remains unclear, but one advis­er said the peace­keep­ing force wouldn’t involve Amer­i­can troops, nor come from a U.S.-funded inter­na­tion­al body, such as the Unit­ed Nations.

“We can do train­ing and oth­er sup­port but the bar­rel of the gun is going to be Euro­pean,” a mem­ber of Trump’s team said. “We are not send­ing Amer­i­can men and women to uphold peace in Ukraine. And we are not pay­ing for it. Get the Poles, Ger­mans, British and French to do it.”

The idea is laugh­able for sev­er­al rea­sons. It does not take Rus­si­a’s posi­tion into account. To con­tin­ue to arm Ukraine while keep­ing a cease­fire is an obvi­ous delay­ing tac­tic — noth­ing that will solve the con­flict. Rus­sia will only agree to some­thing that con­cludes the war for good. The assump­tion that Rus­sia would con­done Euro­pean NATO forces on the ground in Ukraine is also delu­sion­al.

Oth­er ideas are just a vari­ant of the above:

Ear­li­er this year, Kei­th Kel­logg and Fred Fleitz, who both served in Trump’s first White House, pre­sent­ed Trump with a blue­print that includes with­hold­ing weapons from Ukraine until Kyiv agrees to peace talks with Rus­sia. Ukraine could still try to regain lost ter­ri­to­ry, but would have to do so through diplo­mat­ic nego­ti­a­tions.

The only real way to stop the war is for the U.S. to drop all sup­port for Ukraine. The Euro­peans would bick­er about that but, if only for bud­get rea­sons, would like­ly fol­low through. It would then be up to Ukraine, hav­ing lost all sup­port, to make nice with Moscow.

Trump will like­ly select (neo-con­ser­v­a­tive) hawks to run his defense and for­eign poli­cies. They will take all pos­si­ble mea­sures, even against Trump’s declared will, to keep the war going. For them it is down to the last Ukrain­ian, then down to the last Euro­pean — if only to show that the U.S. will nev­er give up.

To cov­er for this Trump and his acolytes may well offer an imme­di­ate cease­fire. But that will not work.

As Dim­it­ry Trenin, the for­mer direc­tor of Carnegie Moscow Cen­ter, writes in Kom­m­er­sant (machine trans­la­tion):

If we are talk­ing about the ces­sa­tion of hos­til­i­ties along the exist­ing line of con­tact, then this approach is unlike­ly to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in Moscow. Such a “stop to the war” will be noth­ing more than a pause, after which the con­flict will flare up with renewed vig­or and, prob­a­bly, with greater inten­si­ty. The nature of the future Ukrain­ian regime, the mil­i­tary and mil­i­tary-eco­nom­ic poten­tial, as well as the mil­i­tary-polit­i­cal sta­tus of Ukraine are of para­mount impor­tance for Rus­sia. In addi­tion, it is nec­es­sary to take into account the new ter­ri­to­r­i­al real­i­ties.

All those items would require seri­ous con­ces­sions by the U.S. which the future Trump admin­is­tra­tion will be unwill­ing to give:

It is hard to expect the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to agree to a sub­stan­tive dia­logue on these issues, much less to take into account Rus­si­a’s core inter­ests. If he shows readi­ness, the dia­logue will start, but even in this case, an agree­ment is far from guar­an­teed.

There is also the major issue of trust:

A sep­a­rate top­ic is what can be con­sid­ered sat­is­fac­to­ry guar­an­tees in con­di­tions when both par­ties do not trust each oth­er at all. Two “Min­sk” agree­ments (2014 and 2015 agree­ments) were vio­lat­ed, the third attempt — the “Istan­bul” ini­tialed in 2022 — was thwart­ed, so the fourth one is unlike­ly to hap­pen. The only guar­an­tee that Rus­sia can rely on is a guar­an­tee for itself.

The only guar­an­tee to Rus­sia is a per­ma­nent (con­ven­tion­al) supe­ri­or­i­ty over Ukrain­ian forces. Any new arms for Ukraine would under­mine that. But acknowl­edg­ing Rus­si­a’s supe­ri­or­i­ty is exact­ly the loss the U.S. does not want to con­cede.

The author of Events in Ukraine comes to a sim­i­lar con­clu­sion:

Per­son­al­ly, this is what I pre­dict hap­pen­ing if Trump gets into office (if the ‘if’ is even nec­es­sary at this point). Trump pro­pos­es Putin a ‘com­pro­mise deal’ in Ukraine. Putin refus­es, giv­en that he’s win­ning on the bat­tle­field — see my mil­i­tary newslet­ters. Trump is enraged by this loss of face, and encour­aged by his Ukraine hawk advi­sors like Pom­peo (who called for a “$500 bil­lion lend-lease for Ukraine” this July), what does he do next? De-esca­late? Hard to believe.

Indeed — hard to believe.

The war will go on. Rus­sia will have to, as Gor­don Hahn pre­dicts, cross the Dnieper, retake Odessa and threat­en Kiev. Zelen­s­ki is unlike­ly to polit­i­cal­ly sur­vive such a sit­u­a­tion. Oth­er forces would come to the fore:

The piv­ot of deci­sion-mak­ing will then shift to Kiev and the ques­tion of whether Zelen­skiy or any Ukrain­ian leader is able to start peace talks at all, no less ones that pre­sup­pose loss of ter­ri­to­ry as part of any set­tle­ment with Moscow, with­out prompt­ing a domes­tic polit­i­cal cri­sis. The result­ing coup pok­er game could involve a Kiev-based coup led by intel­li­gence and secu­ri­ty forces, the HRU and/or SBU, or emerge from the periph­ery at the front with ultra­na­tion­al­ists and neo­fas­cists such as the Ukrain­ian Vol­un­teer Corps (DUK), Azov, and oth­ers, well-armed as part of Ukraine‘s armed forces, turn­ing their guns around and march­ing on Kiev in order to seize pow­er.
...
A U.S.-backed coup might pre-empt, pre­cede or facil­i­tate such a turn of events. Wash­ing­ton and Brus­sels might gam­ble that eas­ing or allow­ing the rad­i­cals‘ rise to pow­er is he only way to ral­ly what remains of the Ukrain­ian nation so the effort to hand Moscow a ‘strate­gic defeat‘ can be real­ized and fur­ther NATO expan­sion can be secured.

But a fas­cist coup, sup­port­ed by the U.S. or not, will not be able to change the sit­u­a­tion on the ground. Rus­sia would still have the upper hand and win the war.

Only a direct inter­ven­tion by NATO, could be able to change that tra­jec­to­ry. That how­ev­er would like­ly expand the war into a glob­al con­test that not even Trump’s hawks will want to pur­sue.

1f. “North Korea Enters Ukraine Fight for First Time, Offi­cials Say” by Michael Schwirtz and Julian E. Barnes; The New York Times; 11/05/2024.

West­ern and Ukrain­ian offi­cials have called the appear­ance of North Kore­an forces on the bat­tle­field a major esca­la­tion.

North Kore­an troops have entered the fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine, clash­ing for the first time with Ukrain­ian forces who are occu­py­ing a large chunk of Russia’s Kursk region, accord­ing to a senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial and a senior U.S. offi­cial.

The engage­ment was lim­it­ed, the Ukrain­ian offi­cial said, and like­ly meant to probe the Ukrain­ian lines for weak­ness­es. The North Kore­ans fought togeth­er with Russia’s 810 Sep­a­rate Naval Infantry Brigade, the offi­cial said.

It was unclear when the fight­ing took place. The Ukrain­ian offi­cial offered no details about casu­al­ties, but the U.S. offi­cial said a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of North Kore­an troops were killed. Both offi­cials spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to share sen­si­tive mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion.

The North Kore­an troops are part of what Ukrain­ian and West­ern offi­cials esti­mate to be a con­tin­gent of about 10,000 sol­diers sent by the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to bol­ster Russ­ian forces try­ing to dis­lodge the Ukraini­ans from the Kursk region. Ukraine’s forces cur­rent­ly hold about 250 square miles there after an incur­sion that began last sum­mer.

Though the bulk of the North Kore­an troops have not yet seen action, West­ern and Ukrain­ian offi­cials have called their appear­ance on the bat­tle­field a major esca­la­tion after more than two years of war.

In his night­ly address, Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky of Ukraine seemed to con­firm that North Kore­an forces had entered the fight, and he called on Ukraine’s allies to assist in con­fronting this new threat.

“The first bat­tles with North Kore­an sol­diers mark a new chap­ter of glob­al insta­bil­i­ty,” he said. “Togeth­er with the world, we must do every­thing to ensure that this Russ­ian step toward expand­ing the war — this true esca­la­tion — becomes a loss.”

The North Kore­an sol­diers began arriv­ing by boat in the far east­ern Russ­ian port city of Vladi­vos­tok last month, then embarked on a 4,000-mile jour­ney west to the Kursk region.

Much of the rest of the force could enter the fight in the com­ing days, the senior Ukrain­ian offi­cial said. The North Kore­an troops, the offi­cial said, have been divid­ed into two units — one made up of assault troops and anoth­er of sup­port troops who will orga­nize the defense of ter­ri­to­ry recap­tured from Ukrain­ian forces.

There has been debate in Ukraine and among its allies about the mil­i­tary sig­nif­i­cance of the North Kore­an troops. Some offi­cials have described their recruit­ment as an act of des­per­a­tion by Russia’s pres­i­dent, Vladimir V. Putin, whose forces con­tin­ue to take ter­ri­to­ry in east­ern Ukraine but at huge loss­es.

Oth­ers have said the deci­sion to deploy the troops was meant to weak­en West­ern resolve by show­ing that Rus­sia remains far from iso­lat­ed. The North Kore­an troops could also allow Rus­sia to divert more of its forces to offen­sive oper­a­tions on Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry, in par­tic­u­lar in the Don­bas, where Russ­ian troops are attempt­ing to take as much ter­ri­to­ry as pos­si­ble before the harsh win­ter sets in.

It is not clear what Mr. Putin promised Mr. Kim, if any­thing, in exchange for the troops. For now, Amer­i­can offi­cials say they have seen no evi­dence of a quid pro quo. But there are con­cerns that Rus­sia might pro­vide some kind of sig­nif­i­cant mil­i­tary assis­tance that could enhance the dan­ger North Korea pos­es to its neigh­bors and the Unit­ed States.

Last week, North Korea launched an inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile in the direc­tion of Japan, set­ting off a new flur­ry of anx­i­ety in the West.

In addi­tion to its troops, North Korea has pro­vid­ed Rus­sia 16,000 ship­ping con­tain­ers full of artillery shells, rock­ets and mis­siles since the sum­mer of 2023, accord­ing to U.S. and South Kore­an offi­cials. In June, Mr. Putin met with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang, where they restored a Cold War-era treaty of mutu­al defense and mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion between their coun­tries.

1g. “Rus­sia Plot­ted to Put Incen­di­ary Devices on Car­go Planes, Offi­cials Say” by Michael Schwirtz and Julian E. Barnes; The New York Times; 11/05/2024.

West­ern offi­cials are inves­ti­gat­ing whether devices plant­ed at ship­ping hubs in Europe may have been a test run by Russ­ian oper­a­tives for plac­ing them on planes bound for the U.S.

Rus­sia has been plot­ting to place incen­di­ary devices on car­go planes in Europe and even per­formed a test run this sum­mer, set­ting off fires at ship­ping hubs in Britain and Ger­many, accord­ing to four West­ern offi­cials briefed on intel­li­gence about the oper­a­tion.

The effort rep­re­sents a poten­tial­ly sig­nif­i­cant esca­la­tion of the Kremlin’s sab­o­tage oper­a­tions against West­ern adver­saries.

The goal of the plot, orches­trat­ed by Russia’s mil­i­tary intel­li­gence agency, the GRU, is not entire­ly clear, accord­ing to two of the offi­cials, all of whom spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive intel­li­gence mat­ters. It could have been what ulti­mate­ly occurred: to set fires with incen­di­ary devices placed at logis­tics hubs belong­ing to the pack­age ship­ping com­pa­ny DHL, per­haps meant to instill fear or deliv­er a warn­ing.

But West­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies are also inves­ti­gat­ing whether Moscow intend­ed some­thing more ambi­tious, and men­ac­ing, such as destroy­ing planes on Amer­i­can run­ways, set­ting off bombs at U.S. ware­hous­es or even blow­ing up air­craft midair. Offi­cials said that both the U.S. and its Euro­pean allies were poten­tial tar­gets of the Russ­ian plot.

The oper­a­tion is an effort by Russia’s pres­i­dent, Vladimir V. Putin, to inflict dam­age on the West for its sup­port of Ukraine’s mil­i­tary, offi­cials said. The Kremlin’s goal appears to be to shake West­ern back­ing for Ukraine or, fail­ing that, exact a price for it.

In the first two years of the war with Ukraine, the Krem­lin large­ly avoid­ed direct­ly pro­vok­ing Kyiv’s allies, par­tic­u­lar­ly those belong­ing to NATO, offi­cials said, fear­ful of a dan­ger­ous esca­la­tion. Today, any such ret­i­cence appears to have dis­solved, they said.

“Hos­tile activ­i­ty car­ried out on behalf of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion is increas­ing­ly tak­ing the form of ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties,” Poland’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice said in a com­mu­niqué pub­lished last month.

The Krem­lin has denied that its agents engage in sab­o­tage.

The incen­di­ary devices were plant­ed at DHL ship­ping hubs in Leipzig, Ger­many, and Birm­ing­ham, Eng­land, the West­ern offi­cials said. The fires caused min­i­mal dam­age and no injuries, they said, but the blazes raised the fright­en­ing specter of bombs poten­tial­ly being loaded on air­craft.

The Wall Street Jour­nal described details of the plot on Mon­day.

In a state­ment, DHL, whose glob­al head­quar­ters are in Ger­many, con­firmed “two recent inci­dents involv­ing ship­ments in our net­work.”

“We are ful­ly coop­er­at­ing with the rel­e­vant author­i­ties to pro­tect our peo­ple, our net­work and our cus­tomers’ ship­ments,” the state­ment said.

Last month, the Pol­ish author­i­ties announced the arrests of four sus­pects involved in plant­i­ng the incen­di­ary devices. The country’s Nation­al Prosecutor’s Office said the plot had been part of a test run with the ulti­mate goal of putting explo­sive devices on planes bound for the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, though the West­ern offi­cials could not con­firm this was the intent.

It is pos­si­ble that Rus­sia want­ed the option of even­tu­al­ly blow­ing up car­go planes fly­ing to or over Amer­i­ca. But the offi­cials briefed on the intel­li­gence said that would be a stark change from Russia’s cur­rent strat­e­gy of “hor­i­zon­tal esca­la­tion,” in which Moscow seeks to care­ful­ly man­age its respons­es to allied sup­port to Ukraine. Blow­ing up a plane over the Unit­ed States, which would revive mem­o­ries of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, would pro­voke a strong retal­i­a­tion from Wash­ing­ton, some­thing Moscow has want­ed to avoid.

But West­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies have not com­plete­ly ruled out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Moscow wants at least the option of car­ry­ing out such a provoca­tive attack; that would be espe­cial­ly true if the Unit­ed States enables Ukraine to strike deep­er into Rus­sia or pro­vides Kyiv with more pow­er­ful weapon­ry, some­thing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has so far resist­ed.

Over the last sev­er­al months the Trans­porta­tion Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion has added “secu­ri­ty mea­sures for U.S. air­craft oper­a­tors and for­eign air car­ri­ers regard­ing cer­tain car­go ship­ments bound for the Unit­ed States,” a spokesper­son for the agency said in a state­ment to the Times.

A U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cial, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, said at this time there was “no cur­rent active threat tar­get­ing U.S.-bound flights.”

The plot is part of a broad­er Russ­ian cam­paign of sab­o­tage in Europe, using van­dal­ism, arson and phys­i­cal attacks on indi­vid­u­als, offi­cials say.

In Feb­ru­ary, two assas­sins sus­pect­ed of ties to the Russ­ian intel­li­gence ser­vices killed a Russ­ian defec­tor in south­ern Spain. Last spring, U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies uncov­ered a Russ­ian plot to kill the chief exec­u­tive of a Ger­man arms man­u­fac­tur­er. And in Esto­nia, sev­er­al peo­ple are on tri­al on charges of com­mit­ting acts of van­dal­ism at the behest of Russ­ian intel­li­gence oper­a­tives, includ­ing break­ing the car win­dows of the country’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter.

“The scale of Russia’s attempts to sow dis­cord across Europe and the use of untrained crim­i­nals mean that it is very prob­a­ble that at some point there may be an attack where some­one is killed or where a civil­ian is seri­ous­ly harmed,” a spokesper­son for Estonia’s inter­nal secu­ri­ty ser­vice said in a state­ment recent­ly sent to The New York Times.

Offi­cials cau­tioned that it can be dif­fi­cult to defin­i­tive­ly attribute appar­ent acts of sab­o­tage to Russia’s intel­li­gence ser­vices, in par­tic­u­lar when they use local crim­i­nal prox­ies who may not even know whom they’re work­ing for. There have also been cas­es in which Russ­ian agents, in secret com­mu­ni­ca­tions with their boss­es, have tak­en cred­it for events they had noth­ing to do with, offi­cials said.

The sab­o­tage cam­paign is being waged almost exclu­sive­ly by the GRU, offi­cials said. It is an agency that Euro­pean secu­ri­ty offi­cials have long been famil­iar with. In 2018, oper­a­tives from the agency used a high­ly potent nerve agent in the attempt­ed assas­si­na­tion of Sergei Skri­pal, a GRU defec­tor who was liv­ing in Britain.

The agency was behind a sim­i­lar assas­si­na­tion attempt against a Bul­gar­i­an arms man­u­fac­tur­er, as well as explo­sions at weapons plants in the Czech Repub­lic and a thwart­ed coup in Mon­tene­gro, accord­ing to West­ern secu­ri­ty offi­cials.

After Russia’s full-scale inva­sion of Ukraine, the GRU’s activ­i­ties in Europe abat­ed some­what as Euro­pean coun­tries expelled oper­a­tives and lim­it­ed trav­el for Rus­sians. But in the past year, the agency has fig­ured out ways to restore its oper­a­tions.

“The GRU in par­tic­u­lar is on a sus­tained mis­sion to gen­er­ate may­hem on British and Euro­pean streets,” Ken McCal­lum, the direc­tor gen­er­al of Britain’s Mi5, the country’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice, warned in rare pub­lic remarks last month. “We’ve seen arson, sab­o­tage and more. Dan­ger­ous actions con­duct­ed with increas­ing reck­less­ness.”

Even so, offi­cials say, it is hard­er for Russ­ian intel­li­gence ser­vices to oper­ate on Euro­pean ter­ri­to­ry than it once was. Start­ing in 2018 and con­tin­u­ing through the start of the war in Ukraine, Euro­pean coun­tries have expelled hun­dreds of Russ­ian intel­li­gence offi­cers. A num­ber of deep-cov­er Russ­ian oper­a­tives, called “ille­gals,” have also been iden­ti­fied and arrest­ed.

This has left the intel­li­gence ser­vices, par­tic­u­lar­ly the GRU, increas­ing­ly reliant on crim­i­nal prox­ies, often hired over the inter­net, to car­ry out acts of sab­o­tage, offi­cials say.

These prox­ies are rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive to use and give Russ­ian intel­li­gence ser­vices a degree of deni­a­bil­i­ty. But they are also unre­li­able and prone to poor dis­ci­pline that can lead to botched oper­a­tions.

“They can’t use their own peo­ple; they’re hav­ing to do with crim­i­nal ele­ments,” Richard Moore, the head of Mi6, Britain’s for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vice, said in pub­lic remarks in Sep­tem­ber. “Crim­i­nals do stuff for cash. They are not reli­able; they are not par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­fes­sion­al, and, there­fore, usu­al­ly we are able to roll them up pret­ty effec­tive­ly. It’s not ama­teur­ish; it’s just a lit­tle more reck­less.”

“I think the Russ­ian intel­li­gence ser­vices have gone a bit fer­al,” he added.

1h. “3 charged in Iran-linked plot to assas­si­nate Don­ald Trump as revenge for killing Qassem Soleimani: DOJ” by Mike Levine and Aaron Kater­sky [Yahoo News]; ABC News; 11/08/2024.

Three peo­ple have been charged in an alleged Iran-linked plot to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump, an Iran­ian-Amer­i­can activist and two Jew­ish Amer­i­cans liv­ing in New York, accord­ing to a crim­i­nal com­plaint unsealed Fri­day in New York.

Farhad Shak­eri, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Load­holt are charged with mur­der-for-hire, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice. Rivera and Load­holt have been arrest­ed, while Shak­eri, who the FBI described as an “asset” of Iran’s Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard Corps, is believed to be in Tehran.

The IRGC tasked Shak­eri with sur­veilling and killing Trump to avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike in Bagh­dad in Jan­u­ary 2020, accord­ing to the com­plaint.

“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the nation­al secu­ri­ty of the Unit­ed States as does Iran. The Jus­tice Depart­ment has charged an asset of the Iran­ian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a net­work of crim­i­nal asso­ciates to fur­ther Iran’s assas­si­na­tion plots against its tar­gets, includ­ing Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald J. Trump,” Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land said in a state­ment announc­ing the charges.

Shak­eri emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States but was deport­ed in 2008 after serv­ing prison time for rob­bery, accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment. While in prison, he met Rivera and Load­holt and hired them to tar­get an Iran­ian Amer­i­can activist liv­ing in Brook­lyn, accord­ing to the com­plaint.

While she is not named in the com­plaint, the activist match­es the descrip­tion of Masih Aline­jad, a pro­lif­ic jour­nal­ist and human rights activist who has been crit­i­cal of the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment and tar­get­ed in mul­ti­ple plots. Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors announced crim­i­nal charges last month against IRGC Brig. Gen. Ruhol­lah Bazghan­di in con­nec­tion with an alleged mur­der plot against Aline­jad.

The IRGC also tasked Shak­eri with car­ry­ing out oth­er assas­si­na­tions against U.S. and Israeli cit­i­zens locat­ed in the Unit­ed States, includ­ing Trump, the com­plaint alleges.

PHOTO: For­mer Pres­i­dent and Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Don­ald Trump attends a town hall meet­ing in Cum­ming, Geor­gia, Oct. 15, 2024. (Eli­jah Nouvelage/AFP via Get­ty Images)

In mid- to late-Sep­tem­ber, Shak­eri told the FBI that the IRGC offi­cial instruct­ed him “to put aside his oth­er efforts” and “focus on sur­veilling, and, ulti­mate­ly, assas­si­nat­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States Don­ald J. Trump,” the com­plaint said. When Shak­eri told his han­dler it would cost a lot of mon­ey, the IRGC offi­cial is quot­ed as respond­ing “we have already spent a lot of mon­ey ... so the mon­ey’s not an issue.”

Shak­eri told the FBI that dur­ing an Oct. 7 meet­ing with his IRGC han­dler he was asked to pro­vide a plan with­in sev­en days to kill Trump. If it could not be done in that time­frame, the IRGC would pause its plan to kill Trump until after the elec­tion “because IRGC Official‑1 assessed that [Trump] would lose the elec­tion and, after­ward, it would eas­i­er to assas­si­nate [Trump],” the com­plaint said.

MORE: Sus­pect pleads not guilty in alleged mur­der-for-hire plot against Don­ald Trump

He also stat­ed he was tasked with sur­veilling two Jew­ish-Amer­i­can cit­i­zens resid­ing in New York City and was offered $500,000 by an IRGC offi­cial for the mur­der of either vic­tim, accord­ing to the com­plaint. He was also tasked with tar­get­ing Israeli tourists in Sri Lan­ka, the com­plaint said.

“Actors direct­ed by the Gov­ern­ment of Iran con­tin­ue to tar­get our cit­i­zens, includ­ing Pres­i­dent-elect Trump, on U.S. soil and abroad. This has to stop,” U.S. Attor­ney Dami­an Williams said in a state­ment. “Today’s charges are anoth­er mes­sage to those who con­tin­ue in their efforts — we will remain unre­lent­ing in our pur­suit of bad actors, no mat­ter where they reside, and will stop at noth­ing to bring to jus­tice those who harm our safe­ty and secu­ri­ty.”

2. “There are signs Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign is strug­gling” by A. Mar­tinez; Nation­al Pub­lic Radio; 06/25/2024.

NPR’s A Mar­tinez speaks with Amaryl­lis Fox Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cam­paign man­ag­er and daugh­ter-in-law, about the chal­lenges fac­ing Kennedy’s inde­pen­dent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

“The first pres­i­den­tial debate of 2024 will fea­ture only two can­di­dates, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. Inde­pen­dent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not able to meet CNN’s cri­te­ria for Thurs­day’s face­off. Add to that lack­lus­ter fundrais­ing num­bers, and there are signs that the cam­paign is strug­gling. Let’s ask Kennedy’s cam­paign man­ag­er. She’s also his daugh­ter-in-law, Amaryl­lis Fox Kennedy. So Thurs­day, your can­di­date will not be onstage with Joe Biden and Don­ald Trump. How much of a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty is that for the cam­paign? . . .”

3. “Kennedy Fam­i­ly Bliss! RFK’s Name­sake Grand­son Weds For­mer CIA Offi­cer at Fam­i­ly Com­pound” by Kathy Ehrich Dowd; People.com; 07/08/2018.

Robert F. Kennedy III wed for­mer CIA offi­cer Amaryl­lis Fox at the fam­i­ly’s famed estate in Hyan­nis Port, Mass­a­chu­setts

Anoth­er mile­stone has just tak­en place at the icon­ic Kennedy Com­pound on Cape Cod.

Robert F. Kennedy III, the name­sake grand­son of the famed politi­cian who was assas­si­nat­ed 50 years ago, wed for­mer CIA offi­cer Amaryl­lis Fox at the family’s famed estate in Hyan­nis Port, Mass­a­chu­setts, on Sat­ur­day.

“You may kiss the bride! Hur­ray Bob­by and Amar­il­lis [sic]!” Ker­ry Kennedy, the daugh­ter of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy, shared on Insta­gram.

The groom wore a blue and green flo­ral tuxe­do jack­et with tails and white pants while the bride chose an off-the-shoul­der white gown with flo­ral embroi­dery and a starfish crown on her head.

4a. “Conor Kennedy, the grand­son of Robert F. Kennedy, says he secret­ly enlist­ed to fight in Ukraine” by Caitlin O’Kane; CBS News; 10/21/2022.

Conor Kennedy, the grand­son of for­mer U.S. Sen­a­tor and Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert F. Kennedy, revealed on Insta­gram that he secret­ly enlist­ed to fight in Ukraine. Accord­ing to Kennedy’s post, he is now home after fight­ing with Ukraine’s Inter­na­tion­al Legion.

The 28-year-old post­ed an image on Insta­gram, appar­ent­ly show­ing him­self in a Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary uni­form. In the cap­tion, Kennedy says he was “deeply moved by what I saw hap­pen­ing in Ukraine over the past year.”

CBS News has not inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied Kennedy’s claims. CBS News has reached out to the legion, Mil­i­tary Defense of Ukraine and Kennedy for com­ment and is await­ing response.

“I told one per­son here [in the U.S.] where I was, and I told one per­son there [in Ukraine] my real name,” he said. “I did­n’t want my fam­i­ly or friends to wor­ry, and I did­n’t want to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly there.”

He said he had no pri­or mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence “and was­n’t a great shot,” but he “could car­ry heavy things and learned fast.”

“I was also will­ing to die there,” he writes. “So they soon agreed to send me to the north­east­ern front.” Kennedy said his time in Ukraine was short and he liked being a sol­dier more than he expect­ed.

Any­one with “a strong will to defend world peace” can join the legion, which enlists troops from around the world to help fight for Ukraine. Those who wish to enlist can con­tact the Ukrain­ian Embassy in their coun­try and inter­view for the role.

The war in Ukraine began in Feb­ru­ary, when Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin began an unpro­voked attack on the coun­try. Rus­sia launched new airstrikes this week, insist­ing it is only tar­get­ing pow­er instal­la­tions. Rus­sia has ham­mered Ukraine’s ener­gy and water sup­plies, and as pow­er cuts spread through the coun­try, civil­ians are being urged to ration pow­er. Civil­ians are also being killed dai­ly by “sui­cide drones,” launched by Rus­sia along with its mis­siles.

Last month, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion announced it will send anoth­er $600 mil­lion in mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine. This week, U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil spokesman John Kir­by said the U.S. will con­tin­ue to sup­port Ukraine “as best as we can,” but reit­er­at­ed that the U.S. will not put troops on the ground in Ukraine. The U.S. is lead­ing and coor­di­nat­ing inter­na­tion­al efforts to get addi­tion­al weapons and capa­bil­i­ties to the coun­try, Kir­by said.

In his post, Kennedy said his friends in Ukraine knew why he had to come home. “l’ll always owe them for their exam­ple. I know I’m lucky I made it back, but I would also take all the risks we took over again,” he said.

He called the war hor­rif­ic and praised the brave peo­ple he met. He encour­aged oth­ers to join the legion or help in oth­er ways, like send­ing med­ical sup­plies.

Kennedy is the son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his first wife Mary Richard­son Kennedy. He made head­lines for dat­ing Tay­lor Swift in 2012. His grand­fa­ther was assas­si­nat­ed in 1968 while run­ning for pres­i­dent, and his great-uncle, Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy Jr., was assas­si­nat­ed in 1963 while in office.

 4b. “RFK Jr. and the Pol­i­tics of Oppor­tunism” by Stew­art Lawrence; Coun­ter­punch; 08/22/2024.

. . . . More than half of his ear­ly fund­ing – about $20 mil­lion – through his Super PAC Amer­i­can Val­ues, came from a top Trump mega donor, Tim­o­thy Mel­lon, a scion of the Carnegie Mel­lon bank­ing fam­i­ly, who is also atop donor to numer­ous con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing MAGA Inc, the pre­miere pro-Trump super PAC. Anoth­er top donor was financier Omeed Malik, who leads an “anti-woke” invest­ment firm that helped launch for­mer Fox News host Tuck­er Carlson’s lat­est media ven­ture. Pre­dictably, Carl­son has also giv­en con­sid­er­able time and space to RFK, Jr. to pro­mote his cam­paign, while main­stream news out­lets, with a few excep­tions, have shunned him. . . .

 5. Revealed: RFK, Jr’s Best Dope Sto­ries by David Bon­ner; Coun­ter­punch; 08/27/2024.

RFK Jr. used to shoot hero­in with Kei­th Richards, which I guess is about as cool as shoot­ing hero­in gets.

Despite his expe­ri­ence with nee­dles, “Bob­by” (as his friends call him) gets a lot of grief from Democ­rats, med­ical experts, and his fam­i­ly for being an anti­vaxx con­spir­a­cy mon­ger.

Bobby’s drug­gie past is no secret—his 1983 hero­in bust was on the front page of The New York Times. And since endors­ing Trump on August 23, his smack-shoot­ing days have been mak­ing news again, my favorite exam­ple being The Atlantic’s tabloidy head­line “RFK Jr. Was My Drug Deal­er.”

How­ev­er, the media always fail to men­tion the Kei­th Richards stuff, which is real­ly the best part. For that, we must turn to the remark­ably sor­did mem­oir called Papa John, by John Phillips, leader of the pop­u­lar 1960s folk-rock vocal quar­tet The Mamas and the Papas.

For the ben­e­fit of the media, MAGA, and Coun­ter­Punch­ers, I’ve copied the rel­e­vant excerpts straight from Papa John’s out-of-print book and past­ed them below. You’re wel­come!

“One of my new acquain­tances was Bob­by Kennedy, Jr. Bob­by would usu­al­ly come by alone to do drugs…. Some­times he would come by sev­er­al nights a week, hang out, get high, then go out again.”

“Bob­by was always wel­come. He seemed to have life in bal­ance. He could shoot drugs inter­mit­tent­ly for a week and then shoot white-water rapids in some far-flung wilder­ness.”

“Bob­by had a taste for shoot­ing speed­balls that mixed the hazy eupho­ria of hero­in with the clear­head­ed invin­ci­bil­i­ty of coke. He could han­dle him­self quite well. We would sit up for hours and dis­cuss pol­i­tics, lit­er­a­ture, jazz, blues, art…”

“Bob­by had got­ten to know Mick and Kei­th and when they were over, we would stay up to all hours, take out the gui­tars, and sing blues songs all night. Bob­by loved acoustic-style blues the way Kei­th and Mick would play them, with the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta influ­ence of Robert John­son.”

“Iron­i­cal­ly, Bob­by and Mick shared an even more obscure field of knowl­edge: opi­ate sub­sti­tutes. He and Mick both — at dif­fer­ent times — asked me to sup­ply them with the metho­d­one-like Dolophine…. Almost no one had even heard of the Nazis’ World War II mor­phine sub­sti­tute.”

“Most coke addicts expe­ri­ence the same bizarre hal­lu­ci­na­tion: dis­gust­ing bugs either crawl­ing over them or, in my case, crawl­ing under my skin all over my body. It was the most har­row­ing aspect of shoot­ing coke and it blew open the door into the void of insan­i­ty. The more I shot coke, the more often I saw them: hor­ri­ble white bugs, like mag­gots, that wig­gled and crawled just below the sur­face of my skin. Freud knew of this psy­chot­ic reac­tion and it has since been called formi­pho­bia, from the French word for ant, four­mi. I believed not only that they were real, but that they lived in my eyes…. I once made Bob­by Kennedy stare at my eyes for fif­teen min­utes in the bath­room after shoot­ing up–so he could see them come out.”

6. “Enu­mer­at­ing Excep­tion­al Prop­er­ties of SARS Cov 2” by Antho­ny J. Leonar­di; Easy Chair; 10/15/2023.

The first common SARS virus

There is a huge lob­by for nor­mal­iza­tion of SARS Cov 2. Entire indus­tries depend on the public’s return to nor­mal con­sumer and work­ing behav­iors. As such, the ratio­nal­iza­tions and reas­sur­ances to the pub­lic that SARS Cov 2 is a nor­mal sea­son­al Coro­n­avirus are relent­less. These are con­struct­ed like hom­i­lies and catch-phras­es, such as “we must learn to live with it,” and, “it’s endem­ic,” with the impli­ca­tion of its endemic­i­ty refer­ring to the aban­don­ment of efforts which acknowl­edge its exis­tence, such as test­ing.

 

It is a com­plete mis­con­cep­tion that intro­duc­tion of a virus to the immune sys­tem makes sub­se­quent infec­tions like a com­mon cold, and that vir­u­lence is due to nov­el­ty. If nerves, organs, and immune sys­tems could speak, they would tell a tale of excep­tion­al inflam­ma­tion, aging, and death, which we must turn to sci­ence to hear. Pro­fes­sor Fuhrer would be tak­en aback to find there are efforts to exam­ine spe­cif­ic mech­a­nisms which tell anoth­er tale than his own.

Here, I will give you, the read­er, clear enu­mer­a­tions where SARS Cov 2 is unlike a com­mon cold.

1. SARS Cov 2 trig­gers a unique, long-lived inflam­ma­to­ry over­re­ac­tion unseen in Sep­sis and influen­za. https://genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13073-023–01227‑x

It caused cells of the immune sys­tem to react in a way to cre­ate fur­ther inflam­ma­tion and acti­va­tion of the immune sys­tem for an extend­ed amount of time. For tech­ni­cal facets of this, please see the paper.

2. SARS Cov 2 sends T cells into the brain while lethal influen­za does not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021–03710‑0

3. SARS Cov 2 direct­ly caus­es autoim­mu­ni­ty by repro­gram­ming a spe­cial type of T cell called the T reg­u­la­to­ry cell, which has nev­er been observed before. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.589380/full
4. The human genet­ic line has not prop­a­gat­ed any sar­be­covirus ele­ments there­fore nev­er has faced Sar­be­covirus infec­tion to the extent to evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly adapt, except in the unlike­ly the­o­ret­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty of extreme­ly neg­a­tive selec­tion (mean­ing infect­ed humans did not cre­ate prog­e­ny.)

There are more excep­tion­al facets but these are sim­ple and digestible. There is also more to write about but I must make a con­fes­sion. The sta­tus quo has mor­phed in such a way as to brow­beat sci­en­tists into dis­avow­ing a harsh real­i­ty in order to acqui­esce to cor­po­rate and busi­ness inter­ests. As we see the aver­age life expectan­cy decline, we have been left intel­lec­tu­al­ly out in the cold. The truth tellers have been assault­ed and crushed, and the indi­vid­u­als that com­prise the pub­lic, in denial, will put off the real­iza­tion of a below 70s life expectan­cy until each one approach­es retire­ment in piece­meal, just as all the grains of sand in an hour­glass do not fall at once.

7. “The For­got­ten Lessons Of Infec­tious Dis­ease Con­trol” by Nate Bear; Do Not Pan­ic; 1/31/2024.

Remembering the 19th and 20th centuries

Eight thou­sand Amer­i­cans died of covid in Decem­ber.

Already in Jan­u­ary more Amer­i­cans have died of covid than die of flu in an entire year.

In the UK, covid’s Jan­u­ary death toll will be around one thou­sand peo­ple.

Every week thou­sands are being left with post covid con­di­tions, includ­ing chil­dren.

Yet despite these hor­ri­fy­ing num­bers, more than four years after the start of an air­borne pan­dem­ic, almost no one is talk­ing about the air.

The thing the virus is in.

Cam­paign­ers are try­ing.

In the UK a moth­er con­front­ed a Labour politi­cian on radio about child absences from school and asked why she wasn’t rec­om­mend­ing schools upgrade air fil­tra­tion sys­tems to reduce viral par­ti­cles in the air.

She respond­ed that we need more evi­dence they work.

In response to demands for clean indoor air, dodgy sci­en­tists who have pushed to min­imise covid have said there is no good evi­dence air/HEPA fil­ters work.

In fact there is a moun­tain of evi­dence that they work. The study that said they don’t has been dis­cred­it­ed.

They’ve been work­ing in many indus­tri­al set­tings for decades. It’s one of the things that enables inten­sive pig farm­ing.

The Davos elite know they work. Last year Davos was lit­tered with them.

This year they held inter­views out­side.

The fight for clean air to reduce dis­ease trans­mis­sion is noth­ing new.

It is near­ly two cen­turies old.

By the start of the 20th cen­tu­ry tuber­cu­lo­sis had killed one out of every sev­en peo­ple who had ever lived.

Tuber­cu­lo­sis is caused by a bac­te­ria, and like the virus that caus­es covid, it is air­borne.

Until the dis­cov­ery of the tuber­cule bac­cilum in 1882, and because its preva­lence was so high among fam­i­lies of the same house­hold, it was believed to be a hered­i­tary dis­ease. It was in fact con­ta­gious, the bac­te­ria being spread through the air from per­son to per­son with­in a home.

Once this was dis­cov­ered, pub­lic health author­i­ties in the US ini­ti­at­ed a coun­try­wide pub­lic health cam­paign in astound­ing scope and scale. Stag­ger­ing pho­tos and posters tell the sto­ry of this time.

Doc­tors and nurs­es toured the coun­try, going into schools and libraries to give pre­sen­ta­tions to chil­dren and the pub­lic on what TB was and how it spread. Below is a pre­sen­ta­tion in a New York city school in 1900.

Pub­lic health offi­cials issued pam­phlets that stressed the impor­tance of fresh air for chil­dren both at home and in schools to pre­vent the spread of the dis­ease.

Dis­ease pre­ven­tion day was inau­gu­rat­ed in the US in 1914, doc­tors and nurs­es lead­ing march­es around the coun­try to spread aware­ness about the impor­tance of hygiene, clean­li­ness and fresh air. This is in Indi­ana in 1914.

In 1920 the Red Cross com­mis­sioned a pub­lic health poster pre­sent­ing it as man­ly to stop dis­ease from enter­ing your home. The con­trast with today’s tough it out, get-sick-to-get-well atti­tude, is jaw-drop­ping.

After the sec­ond world war, The Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion as part of FDR’s New Deal pro­duced star­tling pub­lic health posters warn­ing adults that kiss­ing chil­dren risked infect­ing them with TB.

Any­thing like this in the cur­rent covid con­text is impos­si­ble to imag­ine.

Unlike the half-heart­ed 18 month covid pub­lic health cam­paign we wit­nessed, the TB aware­ness cam­paign went on for decades.

Along­side the infor­ma­tion cam­paigns, mass test­ing pro­grammes were estab­lished across the coun­try to locate as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble with TB. Sana­to­ri­ums were opened where suf­fer­ers could con­va­lesce and recov­er. It’s even argued that archi­tec­ture in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry was heav­i­ly influ­enced by the design of sana­to­ri­ums that pri­or­i­tized win­dows, through drafts and open spaces, like this one in Ken­tucky.

And it worked. In 1900 it is esti­mat­ed there were mil­lions of cas­es of TB in the US, with near­ly 200 deaths for every 100,000 infec­tions. This had reduced to 115,000 cas­es in 1945 and by 1960 this had halved to 55,000. The rate of death went from 40 per 100,000 peo­ple in 1945 to 6 per 100,000 in 1960.

The real kick­er is this: such stun­ning suc­cess was achieved with­out antibi­otics or vac­cines, which only became avail­able for TB (the BCG vac­cine) in the late 40s and ear­ly 50s. In the US the BCG vac­cine was nev­er used, and to this day is only rarely used.

Social epi­demi­ol­o­gist Thomas McK­e­own found that the mor­tal­i­ty rate from tuber­cu­lo­sis in the US had already dropped 91% by the time of sig­nif­i­cant antibi­ot­ic use in the 50s. Antibi­otics and vac­ci­na­tion, he con­clud­ed, had con­tributed just 3.2% to the mor­tal­i­ty reduc­tion from tuber­cu­lo­sis since the 19th cen­tu­ry.

Non-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal inter­ven­tions were the foun­da­tion upon which vac­cines and treat­ments built.

The fight against infec­tious dis­ease one hun­dred years ear­li­er, in 19th cen­tu­ry Britain, like the sto­ry of TB in the US, pro­vides stark covid con­trasts and par­al­lels.

TB was one of the many infec­tious dis­eases that plagued the filthy cities of rapid­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing Eng­land.

It can be hard to believe just how far life spans crashed dur­ing this peri­od. In the first half of the 19th cen­tu­ry, aver­age life expectan­cy in Liv­er­pool for labour­ers in the city was just fif­teen years old. The aver­age for trades­men was just twen­ty-two.

While a lit­tle bet­ter in places like Lon­don and Man­ches­ter, aver­age life expectan­cy for labour­ers in most big cities was under 20 years of age. (Source)

 

Cities were grow­ing expo­nen­tial­ly, trade across the empire was flour­ish­ing, but indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion wasn’t lib­er­at­ing peo­ple. It was immis­er­at­ing them.

The indus­tri­al heart­lands of the impe­r­i­al core were sinks for human life.

Con­cerned that dis­ease and death was under­min­ing the project of indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, and fear­ing a rev­o­lu­tion among those con­demned to live in filth, the British gov­ern­ment com­mis­sioned Edwin Chad­wick to under­take an inves­ti­ga­tion into the con­di­tions of the work­ing poor.

Chadwick’s Report on The San­i­tary Con­di­tion of the Labour­ing Pop­u­la­tion of Great Britain said unsan­i­tary con­di­tions were linked to the spread of dis­ease. No one in this time real­ly knew why. Germ the­o­ry wasn’t estab­lished and the caus­es were con­test­ed. The lead­ing the­o­ry, of which Chad­wick was a pro­po­nent, was that rot­ting organ­ic waste cre­at­ed a mias­ma, or ‘bad air,’ that made peo­ple sick.

While he got this wrong, Chad­wick under­stood a basic fact: clean air and water were the keys to reduc­ing dis­ease out­breaks. His report led to the Pub­lic Health Act of 1848, under which towns had the pow­er to install sew­er sys­tems, ensure con­stant water sup­ply to homes, and build drainage that car­ried waste­water out­side urban areas for the first time.

The act was high­ly con­tro­ver­sial and opposed by many who saw it as an over­bear­ing intru­sion on people’s lives and it was defeat­ed in a par­lia­men­tary vote.

The boss­es of pri­vate com­pa­nies that sup­plied fresh water and removed sewage for mid­dle class areas lob­bied against the act, their busi­ness threat­ened by a nation­al sys­tem of clean water and sewage dis­pos­al. Lais­sez-faire ide­ol­o­gy dom­i­nat­ed, and politi­cians argued that if peo­ple want­ed clean water or sewage removal, that was their choice. Archi­tects fought against Chadwick’s demand that only cir­cu­lar, glazed sew­er pipes be used for car­ry­ing away water. They said they didn’t work, argu­ing for tra­di­tion­al square brick pipes, despite all the evi­dence.

The Times, England’s biggest news­pa­per at the time, wrote an edi­to­r­i­al rag­ing against the idea of “being bul­lied into health” by the gov­ern­ment.

 

I’m assum­ing much of this sounds famil­iar in the con­text of covid.

Masks are our glazed pipes, the you-do-you atti­tude on avoid­ing Sars2 the per­fect mir­ror to the lais­sez-faire atti­tudes of the 19th cen­tu­ry.

This pub­lic health act (which passed the sec­ond time), and espe­cial­ly its suc­ces­sor act in 1875 set the stage for sus­tained reduc­tions in infec­tious dis­ease and increased life expectan­cy. And they did so before the advent of mod­ern med­i­cine.

A King’s Col­lege London/Harvard study found that in 1900 the annu­al death rates for diph­the­ria, measles, and per­tus­sis (whoop­ing cough) in the UK were 40, 13, and 12 per 100,000 peo­ple respec­tive­ly. By I960 there were no deaths report­ed for diph­the­ria, and only 2 and 1 per 100,000 for measles and per­tus­sis.

The authors point out that: “most of the fall in death rates from measles and per­tus­sis occurred before the intro­duc­tion of their respec­tive vac­cines or the avail­abil­i­ty of antibi­otics.”

We have for­got­ten that pub­lic health gains, espe­cial­ly against infec­tious dis­ease, have always been fought for, and achieved, in a social con­text. They have nev­er been gift­ed to us by med­i­cine.

In 2016 researchers sur­veyed hun­dreds of peo­ple in the US, ask­ing them how they believed TB had been reduced so dra­mat­i­cal­ly. The major­i­ty said the reduc­tions were down to mod­ern med­i­cine. Very few men­tioned pub­lic health mea­sures.

The researchers said the wide­spread belief that mod­ern med­i­cine alone res­cued human­i­ty from infec­tious dis­ease is dan­ger­ous.

“If soci­ety fails to appre­ci­ate the impor­tant role non-med­ical inter­ven­tions played in reduc­ing past infec­tious dis­eases, it is like­ly to con­tin­ue to attribute mod­ern med­i­cine as the pri­ma­ry vehi­cle to improve con­tem­po­rary pop­u­la­tion health. Con­verse­ly, peo­ple will be less like­ly to sup­port pub­lic health inter­ven­tions or poli­cies that seek to improve pop­u­la­tion health by address­ing social deter­mi­nants of health.”

Vac­ci­na­tions and treat­ments give you an extra push away from the ill­ness and death infec­tious dis­ease brings, but they have nev­er been, and can nev­er be, the basis for pub­lic health.

Our pub­lic health insti­tu­tions, many med­ical pro­fes­sion­als and aca­d­e­mics, have for­got­ten this les­son of his­to­ry. Maybe they nev­er learnt it.

So here we are, in 2024, four years into a pan­dem­ic that is being wide­ly ignored because of the very rea­sons the researchers warned about.

As soon as the vac­cine roll-out began, the exhor­ta­tions to relax and go back to nor­mal start­ed. For many, vac­cines meant the pan­dem­ic was over. The arrow on this chart of cumu­la­tive deaths marks when vac­ci­na­tions began in the US.

 

The belief that mod­ern med­i­cine, not pub­lic health mea­sures, deter­mine the con­trol of infec­tious dis­ease, was, and remains, ful­ly in charge at the soci­etal lev­el.

We were led to believe the world had changed for 18 months, when in real­i­ty it had changed for­ev­er.

Because vac­cines, espe­cial­ly since covid, have become a prized object in the cul­ture war, it has become con­tro­ver­sial to state an his­tor­i­cal fact: infec­tious dis­eases of the past were defanged by pub­lic health mea­sures, not phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ones.

Our pub­lic health insti­tu­tions need to relearn this les­son, or learn it for the first time. And do it quick­ly.

Because every day the bur­den of covid grows, for indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies and for soci­eties. It is now hob­bling economies, with Ger­many falling into reces­sion due to work­er sick­ness.

Vac­cines and treat­ments should be the last line of pub­lic health defence, not the first.

If you make them the first, as our gov­ern­ments are now doing for covid, they will fail quick­ly, and they will fail repeat­ed­ly.

How much more fail­ure is nec­es­sary before pub­lic health author­i­ties return to doing the job they were set up to do?

8. “Does the pub­lic under­stand that ‘vari­ant’ means ‘vac­cine resis­tant?” by Julia Dou­ble­day; The Gaunt­let; 05/07/2024.

Getting boosted is critical because the virus is changing. Other forms of mitigation are critical to slow the rate of change.

Last week, the WHO announced that it will rec­om­mend cre­ation of a new boost­er for the JN.1 vari­ant of COVID-19. One lit­tle prob­lem: JN.1 was hyper-dom­i­nant all fall and win­ter but is quick­ly fad­ing away. Now, its descen­dent KP.2 is posi­tioned to take off in an ear­ly-sum­mer wave. By this win­ter, when we’re able to get the brand-new JN.1 vac­cine, the dom­i­nant vari­ant will most like­ly be a descen­dent of KP.2. In oth­er words, a dis­tant rel­a­tive of JN.1.

If you, like me, got the most recent boost­er, you got a vac­cine designed to help pre­vent and lessen symp­toms of XBB.1.5, the vari­ant most dom­i­nant in the win­ter of 2022–23. Dur­ing that win­ter, the boost­er was designed to com­bat the Omi­cron BA vari­ants, which were pre­dom­i­nant a year pri­or, in the win­ter of 2021–22.

You see the pat­tern?

Often when the top­ic of COVID is broached, peo­ple who have paid lit­tle atten­tion since ear­ly 2021 point out that “now we have the vac­cines.” Ok. Yes. But are you aware of what has changed since 2021? Specif­i­cal­ly, the virus?

When Mod­er­na and Pfiz­er announced their COVID-19 vac­cines, the effi­ca­cy of the shots was thrilling. Ear­ly data showed a reduc­tion in infec­tion - not just sever­i­ty, in actu­al infec­tions- of 90%+. Here’s a link to a Pfiz­er release which states:

Data from 43,448 par­tic­i­pants, half of whom received BNT162b2 and half of whom received place­bo, showed that the vac­cine can­di­date was well tol­er­at­ed and demon­strat­ed 95% effi­ca­cy in pre­vent­ing COVID-19 in those with­out pri­or infec­tion 7 days or more after the sec­ond dose….These piv­otal data demon­strate that our COVID-19 vac­cine can­di­date is high­ly effec­tive in pre­vent­ing COVID-19 dis­ease and is gen­er­al­ly well-tol­er­at­ed.

In the vac­cine world, this is a home run. No vac­cines are 100% effec­tive against infec­tion. But if you can get enough shots 90+% effec­tive in arms fast enough, you can achieve what is called herd immu­ni­ty. Herd immu­ni­ty is achieved when the “dis­ease grad­u­al­ly dis­ap­pears from a pop­u­la­tion and may result in erad­i­ca­tion or per­ma­nent reduc­tion of infec­tions to zero”. The virus runs out of hosts and dies out.

This was the explic­it goal of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, stat­ing in ear­ly 2021 that we could be “head­ing to herd immu­ni­ty by sum­mer”. His exact words were, “I feel con­fi­dent that by sum­mer, we’re going to be well on our way to head­ing toward herd immu­ni­ty”. This meant- at the time- get­ting to a place where the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion has immu­ni­ty to COVID, and there­fore vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple aren’t exposed. It’s crit­i­cal that peo­ple under­stand that Biden’s COVID response nev­er achieved its own stat­ed goals, rather, the pub­lic was gaslit into accept­ing a new goal: for­ev­er rein­fec­tions.

It’s crit­i­cal that peo­ple under­stand that Biden’s COVID response nev­er achieved its own stat­ed goals, rather, the pub­lic was gaslit into accept­ing a new goal: for­ev­er rein­fec­tions.

Not expos­ing vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple was a key goal of the lock­downs and oth­er mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures that we adopt­ed in 2020. COVID was/is dan­ger­ous, but the vast major­i­ty of abled peo­ple under 65 who got COVID did not die, even pri­or to the vac­cines. It’s odd to see young lib­er­als point­ing to their own mild infec­tions as proof that vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple don’t need to “live in fear,” because it’s very lit­er­al­ly the same argu­ment young MAGA peo­ple made in 2020. What MAGA attrib­uted to their immune sys­tems, lib­er­als attribute to the vac­cines, but the real­i­ty is they were nev­er the demo­graph­ic most at risk. The goal of lock­down was to avoid the expo­sure of vul­ner­a­ble groups that would lead to mass death and over­whelm health­care sys­tems and hos­pi­tals. The goal was to pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble groups until herd immu­ni­ty could be achieved.

As late as Novem­ber 2021, amid the Delta wave, Fauci’s pro­jec­tion for what “back to nor­mal” would look like- the point at which we could give up mask­ing and oth­er mit­i­ga­tions- was no more than 10,000 cas­es a day, nation­al­ly. Ide­al­ly, under 3300 per day. But today, dur­ing the low­est lull we’ve had in a full year, we’re see­ing 165,000 COVID cas­es dai­ly. The win­ter wave broke 1.5 mil­lion cas­es per day. Since Fau­ci set the bar of “under 10,000 cas­es per day” as the mark­er for “nor­mal,” we’ve nev­er had one sin­gle day with few­er than 10,000 new cas­es. In fact, we’ve nev­er seen a sin­gle day with under 100,000 new infec­tions, or 10 times his mark­er for “nor­mal”, and we’ve had many with over a mil­lion each win­ter- 100 times his mark­er for “nor­mal”. This is not herd immu­ni­ty, and it’s not what the gov­ern­ment pro­ject­ed or pre­pared for.

Per­haps this is why our gov­ern­ment offi­cials and media con­tin­ue to try to rede­fine herd immu­ni­ty and claim that we do have herd immu­ni­ty to COVID. Instead of explain­ing that the vac­cine-first (or rather, vac­cine-only) strat­e­gy was mis­guid­ed and has failed, gov­ern­ments keep mov­ing the goal­posts of suc­cess. They declare vic­to­ry while urg­ing us to get rein­fect­ed repeat­ed­ly. Rein­fec­tions, which, by the way, car­ry myr­i­ad long-term health risks includ­ing cog­ni­tive dam­age, heart dam­age, and dis­abil­i­ty, among oth­er things.

Herd immu­ni­ty is what we have for measles, small­pox, diph­the­ria, mumps, and oth­er vac­cine pre­ventable dis­eases. Vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple- even those who can­not be vac­ci­nat­ed because of med­ical con­di­tions- are pro­tect­ed from expo­sure to and infec­tion with these dis­eases by the immu­ni­ty of the herd. How is a vul­ner­a­ble per­son being pro­tect­ed by “the herd” if the plan is for them to get exposed over, and over, and over again? It’s ludi­crous.

The ear­ly high effi­ca­cy of the orig­i­nal shots is why their debut was met with such jubi­la­tion. Walen­sky, on Rachel Mad­dow, stat­ed:

today, the CDC report­ed new data that shows that under real world conditions…not only are the vac­cines for those folks, thou­sands of them, keep­ing those peo­ple from get­ting sick from COVID them­selves, those vac­cines are also high­ly effec­tive at pre­vent­ing those peo­ple from get­ting infect­ed, even with non-symp­to­matic infec­tion. And if you are not infect­ed, you can’t give it to any­body else.…. What this means is that we can get there with vac­cines. We can end this thing…now we know that the vac­cines work well enough that the virus stops with every vac­ci­nat­ed per­son.

A vac­ci­nat­ed per­son gets exposed to the virus. The virus does not infect them. The virus can­not then use that per­son to go any­where else. It can­not use a vac­ci­nat­ed per­son as a host to get more peo­ple.

That means the vac­cines will get us to the end of this

To reit­er­ate, Walen­sky explic­it­ly stat­ed that because the COVID vac­cines (at that time were believed to) pre­vent infec­tion, the shots could end the pan­dem­ic. This also implies that were the vac­cines not able to pre­vent infec­tion, they would not be suf­fi­cient to end the pan­dem­ic.

Our lead­ers over­es­ti­mat­ed the abil­i­ty of vac­cines alone to mit­i­gate COVID because of ear­ly data, before the virus had had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to coun­ter­punch us through muta­tion. By July 4, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion declared vic­to­ry over COVID. That fol­low­ing win­ter was the sec­ond dead­liest wave of the COVID pan­dem­ic. It was the dead­liest wave for can­cer patients.

Win­ter 2021–22 was a wave of mass death of the exact kind we’d tried to avoid. We saw thou­sands of peo­ple dying per day, while the good folks at the New York Times con­tin­ued to cov­er it as no big deal and even spin it as a pos­i­tive. It was the point at which many vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, being reas­sured that with the vac­cines and the “mild” strain cir­cu­lat­ing (Omi­cron, which was lat­er shown to be no milder than the orig­i­nal Wuhan strain), were exposed to COVID for the first time. Some of them paid for the mis­take of believ­ing our gov­ern­ment with their lives.

We will like­ly nev­er see a wave as acute­ly dead­ly again, because the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who could not sur­vive their first con­tact with COVID-19 are already dead.

40% of those who died dur­ing Omi­cron wave 1 were vac­ci­nat­ed. 60% of those dying by the fol­low­ing sum­mer were vac­ci­nat­ed, and vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple still make up the major­i­ty of deaths today. Yes, vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple are over-rep­re­sent­ed in the pop­u­la­tion- but as thou­sands con­tin­ued to die each week this win­ter, it’s a far cry from Biden’s claims that COVID had become a “pan­dem­ic of the unvac­ci­nat­ed”. In ear­ly 2022, his admin­is­tra­tion blamed unvac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple for over­whelm­ing hos­pi­tals while tens of thou­sands of vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple died in a mat­ter of weeks.

Here’s what hap­pened.

Through­out the pan­dem­ic, the Biden and Trump admin­is­tra­tions- and gov­ern­ments world­wide- have been prone to accept­ing the most opti­mistic sci­ence as the truth and pro­mot­ing those opti­mistic pre­dic­tions as sol­id facts. COVID isn’t the only are­na where this is true; we cer­tain­ly see it with cli­mate change. We saw it with our pre­ma­ture dec­la­ra­tion that COVID wasn’t air­borne. We saw it with our claims that peo­ple would only get COVID once. We saw it with the claims that COVID would prob­a­bly just ran­dom­ly get milder. And in the case of the vac­cines, we saw it with the idea that herd immu­ni­ty to COVID would be pos­si­ble, that the virus wouldn’t just quick­ly mutate around vac­cine pro­tec­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the virus mutat­ed very, very quick­ly.

Has this been well com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the pub­lic? Or does most of the pub­lic believe we are as well pro­tect­ed as we were in the spring of 2021?

Think of it this way: the MRNA vac­cines con­tain a lit­tle blue­print for the COVID spike pro­tein. Once your body receives the blue­print, it fol­lows the instruc­tions and builds a repli­ca of the COVID spike pro­tein- in the case of our first-round series of shots, it is specif­i­cal­ly, genet­i­cal­ly, the spike pro­tein of the ances­tral strain. Then, your immune sys­tem learns how to get rid of this spike pro­tein. It’s like a train­ing pro­gram for your body. When it encoun­ters the real spike pro­tein, your body reacts quick­ly because it has seen this pro­tein before.

One com­mon anal­o­gy used to explain virus­es, vac­cines, immune sys­tems and muta­tions is the mugshot. When your immune sys­tem encoun­ters a pathogen, it cre­ates a bunch of T and B cells spe­cif­ic to that pathogen- these are basic com­po­nents of your adap­tive immune sys­tem. After the pathogen is cleared, most of those pathogen-spe­cif­ic cells are also cleared from the body, but your immune sys­tem knows to hold on to a few of them, called mem­o­ry T and B cells. Think of your body’s mem­o­ry of the spike pro­tein as a sort of mugshot it can use to quick­ly iden­ti­fy COVID and respond.

When COVID enters your body, if your immune sys­tem has a mugshot of the virus, it can much more quick­ly and eas­i­ly mount defens­es; it might even clear the virus before it caus­es any symp­toms. Your body rec­og­nizes the spike pro­tein.

Now, what hap­pens when muta­tions appear on the spike pro­tein? Well, that pro­tein becomes hard­er and hard­er for the body to rec­og­nize. A cou­ple of muta­tions might be anal­o­gous to the crim­i­nal in your mug shot putting on a wig. But the Delta vari­ant, for exam­ple, had over a dozen muta­tions on the spike pro­tein. That starts to be more sim­i­lar to a full body makeover com­plete with nose job and BBL. The Omi­cron vari­ant had 30 muta­tions on the spike. It’s get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult for your body to rec­og­nize the virus as the crim­i­nal from your immune sys­tem mugshot. In oth­er words, it’s get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult for your body to match the pro­tein it remem­bers from your vac­ci­na­tions with the pro­tein in the newest COVID vari­ant, espe­cial­ly since so few peo­ple get updat­ed shots.

And of course, the muta­tions haven’t stopped. Omi­cron is quite genet­i­cal­ly dis­tant from Delta; JN.1 is quite genet­i­cal­ly dis­tant from Omi­cron. The greater the genet­ic dis­tance between the spike pro­tein in your vac­cine- which, for most peo­ple, are the ones they received in 2021- and the spike pro­tein of the cir­cu­lat­ing virus, the less effec­tive the vac­cines become. From a pre­vi­ous Gaunt­let arti­cle:

Last year, a study look­ing at data from 2022–2023 found that chil­dren under 5 who received the biva­lent boost­ers had an 80% reduc­tion in risk of ER vis­its, where­as those who received the orig­i­nal series Mod­er­na shots had only a 29% reduc­tion in risk of ER vis­its. Stud­ies con­tin­u­al­ly find that new sub­vari­ants “escape neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies induced by both vac­ci­na­tion and infec­tion”.

COVID’s abil­i­ty to mutate under­scores the need for peo­ple to get boost­ed, because old­er shots are more out of date and thus, less effec­tive. The media’s con­tin­u­al down­play­ing of COVID — their claims that COVID is “over” because we are “vac­ci­nat­ed now”, have actu­al­ly led to a wide­spread reluc­tance to get boost­ers, which the media then turns around and hand wrings over. Why would peo­ple rush out to get a new vac­cine when they’ve been told the virus is no big deal?

It’s also an odd choice to call the updat­ed vac­cines “boost­ers,” as this seems to imply a top­ping up of a shot you already received. We gen­er­al­ly don’t call flu shots “boost­ers,” because they are dif­fer­ent shots, for­mu­lat­ed for dif­fer­ent vari­ants. So are the updat­ed COVID vac­cines. But the insti­tu­tion­al desire to min­i­mize the ongo­ing issue of unmit­i­gat­ed COVID has led gov­ern­ments and media to be cagey about this.

How and why does muta­tion hap­pen? And why does the virus keep becom­ing more vac­cine resis­tant? Well, using the vac­cine as our first, rather than our last line of defense, is part of why we keep chal­leng­ing the pro­tec­tive capa­bil­i­ties of our vac­cines.

Muta­tions occur ran­dom­ly; when a pathogen copies itself, those copies con­tain ran­dom genet­ic mis­takes- muta­tions- that make the pathogen more or less fit. We call the genet­i­cal­ly dis­tinct copies vari­ants. The less fit copies are out­com­pet­ed and die out. The more fit copies are able to make more copies of them­selves and become more com­mon. If the new vari­ant hap­pens to be very fit- mean­ing very well adapt­ed to its envi­ron­ment- it might start to out­com­pete the dom­i­nant strain and ulti­mate­ly replace it.

Now, what hap­pens when COVID begins encoun­ter­ing a lot of vac­cine pro­tec­tion? The pre­dom­i­nant vari­ant is unable to spread and starts to die out. This is what was hap­pen­ing in sum­mer 2021, when Biden declared vic­to­ry. COVID was find­ing few­er hosts to safe­ly repro­duce in. But because COVID mutat­ed so quick­ly and with a high degree of genet­ic vari­ance, some of the orig­i­nal strain’s chil­dren hap­pen to be good at out­wit­ting vac­cine pro­tec­tion. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the Wuhan strain has 10 chil­dren, and 9 of them are eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied by the vac­ci­nat­ed body as look­ing sim­i­lar to the immune system’s mugshot. Which one sur­vives to dupli­cate itself? That’s right, the high­ly diver­gent strain- diver­gent mean­ing, genet­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent. The one the vac­ci­nat­ed body could not rec­og­nize.

Thus, the more the virus encoun­ters the vac­cine, and the more it’s allowed to repli­cate among vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple, the high­er the like­li­hood of devel­op­ing high­ly-diver­gent, high­ly-fit strains that evades vac­cine pro­tec­tion. That’s why a vac­cine should be the last line of defense COVID encoun­ters, not the first. With clean air pro­vid­ed by new, high-qual­i­ty ven­ti­la­tion stan­dards and HEPA fil­tra­tion, along with the imple­men­ta­tion of new tech­nolo­gies like far UVC, along with nor­mal­iz­ing mask-wear­ing, the virus would encounter few­er humans, and few­er vac­cines. It would then have few­er oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn how to evade the vac­cines.

Let’s take a step back. None of this means that vac­cines cause muta­tion or vari­ants. Muta­tion and vari­ants hap­pen whether peo­ple are vac­ci­nat­ed or not. What it means is that vac­ci­na­tion puts evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure on the virus to become bet­ter at hid­ing from vac­cine pro­tec­tion; infec­tion sim­i­lar­ly put evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure on the virus to evade immune mem­o­ry. That’s exact­ly what hap­pened and con­tin­ues to hap­pen. The vari­ants that are bet­ter at hid­ing from vac­cine pro­tec­tion and from pri­or immu­ni­ty through infec­tion go on to become dom­i­nant. That’s why, even though you already had COVID 2 or 3 or 4 times, you’re going to get it yet again.

This is not a very sus­tain­able approach to con­trol­ling a virus. The one com­po­nent of this “strat­e­gy,” if you can call it that, that “pro­tects” us from infec­tion is…. infec­tion. In oth­er words, not every­one gets sick at the same time, but only because we’re all get­ting sick over and over again. The vac­cine only-strat­e­gy relies on the infec­tions and deaths of vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple as part and par­cel of this rein­fec­tion nor­mal­iza­tion to main­tain an unsteady form of home­osta­sis with the virus. It’s this form of “bal­anced” coex­is­tence with the virus that gov­ern­ments are now try­ing to incor­rect­ly label “herd immu­ni­ty”.

In the con­text of COVID, this new def­i­n­i­tion of “herd” sim­ply means every­one has some degree of immu­ni­ty from their pre­vi­ous infec­tion, which will get topped up by their next infec­tion. It is a strat­e­gy that not only pro­duces for­ev­er rein­fec­tions, it is depen­dent upon for­ev­er rein­fec­tions. It not only doesn’t pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, it is depen­dent on harm­ing and killing them. It not only can’t pre­vent rein­fec­tions, it incor­po­rates con­tin­u­al rein­fec­tions as crit­i­cal to its “suc­cess”. (Note: this deci­sion to throw every­one under the bus of recur­ring infec­tions has wors­ened, not end­ed, the unsus­tain­able pres­sure on health sys­tems glob­al­ly).

I’ve spo­ken a lot about vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, but it’s inac­cu­rate to frame the needs of vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple as con­trary to the needs of the rest of the pub­lic. This is a rhetor­i­cal and polit­i­cal trick the media has engaged in since Omi­cron wave one, when it became clear vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple could not and would not be pro­tect­ed by vac­cines alone. Instead of acknowl­edg­ing that the “vac­cine only” strat­e­gy was based on bad sci­ence and wouldn’t work to end the pan­dem­ic, the media per­suad­ed “reg­u­lar” peo­ple who have “noth­ing to fear” from COVID, to turn on “vul­ner­a­ble” peo­ple, who very rude­ly won’t let us get back to nor­mal because of their self­ish desire to do stuff like keep being alive and not die.

Now, con­ser­v­a­tives had always embraced this fram­ing. From day one, Repub­li­can politi­cians and news orga­ni­za­tions like FOX raged that we were all being held in a hor­ri­ble state of cap­tiv­i­ty (wear­ing masks and not din­ing indoors) by the ter­ri­ble, rude, self­ish vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple who should just go die. But Omi­cron was the point at which it became clear that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic approach to pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple- vac­cine-only- had failed. And it’s this point at which lib­er­al out­lets also began to sub­tly adopt this Repub­li­can fram­ing. Sud­den­ly it wasn’t, stay home to save a life, it was, well, stay home if you’re at risk. Sud­den­ly it wasn’t my mask pro­tects you, your mask pro­tects me, it was “geez some peo­ple are real­ly annoy­ing about masks”. Col­lec­tive health became per­son­al risk assess­ment. The point at which COVID proved it would con­tin­ue to evade our vac­cines was the point at which lib­er­als decid­ed harm­ing vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple was ok, after all.

Break­ing the sol­i­dar­i­ty that had arisen between mem­bers of the pub­lic- par­tic­u­lar­ly lib­er­als and those on the left with dis­abled peo­ple- required con­tin­u­al refram­ing of COVID as a prob­lem that was over, that had become mild, and/or that couldn’t be con­trolled. It also involved refram­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble- those we’d orga­nized the COVID response to pro­tect ini­tial­ly- as annoy­ing, bad, pos­si­bly crazy, and def­i­nite­ly mean. We see that per­cep­tion echoed every­where today, even among left­ists tout­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty as the great prin­ci­ple of com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing (which it is). Instead of engag­ing with real con­cerns about the safe­ty of con­stant­ly rein­fect­ing every­body with COVID- which, it should be clear, is not at all safe and inar­guably awful for everybody’s health- peo­ple who don’t want to mit­i­gate often go on the attack against vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, call­ing them names and mock­ing them. This is a weak­ness on the left that is being exploit­ed to nor­mal­ize unprece­dent­ed lev­els of ill­ness among the entire pub­lic, not only the vul­ner­a­ble.

Now, stu­dent absences are record high.

Whole economies are enter­ing reces­sion because of the unprece­dent­ed num­ber of work­er sick days.

And Long COVID con­tin­ues to move for­mer­ly abled peo­ple into the vul­ner­a­ble cat­e­go­ry.

Break­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty will nev­er, ever, put the left in a place of strength. Not when it comes to trans peo­ple, not when it comes to immi­grants, not when it comes to dis­abled peo­ple. The media framed pub­lic health — the thing that pro­tects vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, but also every­one- as con­trary to the inter­ests of the major­i­ty. In this case, those inter­ests being “go back to nor­mal,” and “pre­tend noth­ing is hap­pen­ing.” In real­i­ty, we all ben­e­fit from pub­lic health and dis­ease mit­i­ga­tion. Just as wel­fare, and hous­ing for the home­less, and rais­ing the min­i­mum wage is in the inter­est of every­one in soci­ety, so too is mit­i­gat­ing dis­ease instead of let­ting it run ram­pant. The gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to mit­i­gate COVID by clean­ing the air, just as it has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to mit­i­gate cholera by clean­ing the water. Instead, the media has peo­ple argu­ing on behalf of allow­ing virus­es to spread freely. That is a coup of state pro­pa­gan­da, noth­ing less.

When peo­ple claim we are “in a dif­fer­ent place” because of “the vac­cines,” I know they have not engaged with the sci­ence around COVID since 2021. Vac­cines that were ini­tial­ly thought to pre­vent infec­tion and con­fer long-term immu­ni­ty were found to be capa­ble of nei­ther. The virus mutat­ed faster than expect­ed, and updat­ed vac­cines con­tin­ue to trail viral evo­lu­tion by a year or more. The herd immu­ni­ty strat­e­gy that Biden and the CDC open­ly pur­sued, failed and col­lapsed into a for­ev­er-rein­fec­tion night­mare.

Vac­cines reduce the risk of death and severe out­comes- includ­ing Long COVID. We should all get boost­ed because it’s bet­ter for your vac­cine pro­tec­tion to more close­ly match the genet­ics of the dom­i­nant vari­ant. But “reduce” and “more close­ly” isn’t enough to get us back to nor­mal when this virus is cir­cu­lat­ing at high lev­els year-round, rein­fect­ing peo­ple with­in months, and leav­ing a dev­as­tat­ing trail of dis­abling, long-term ill­ness. We also now know that more COVID rein­fec­tions increase your cumu­la­tive risk of Long COVID; what, then, is going to hap­pen to those “reg­u­lar” peo­ple after 10 infec­tions? 20?

The pub­lic needs to stop fram­ing vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple- peo­ple who are sim­ply warn­ing the pub­lic of the fate that awaits them after X num­ber of rein­fec­tions- as the ene­my. The ene­my is the unmit­i­gat­ed spread of this virus that is con­tin­u­ing to pro­duce vac­cine-resis­tant vari­ants we can’t pos­si­bly keep pace with. The ene­my is the insti­tu­tions that want to buy a fee­ble form of tem­po­rary immu­ni­ty with our health and our lives. The ene­my is the pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign that has every­one claim­ing, loud­ly and con­fi­dent­ly, that COVID is over, while catch­ing it for the fifth time in four years. The ene­my is the utter destruc­tion of pub­lic health for the sake of a nor­mal that isn’t com­ing back.

9.“Nurem­berg on the Hud­son” by Matthew Steven­son; Coun­ter­punch; 11/01/2024.

The Trump Amer­i­can Bund decid­ed to use Madi­son Square Gar­den to stage yet anoth­er of its Trump Reich rallies—complete with a sea of red hats, bank­rupt Rudy Giu­liani (tak­ing a break from his crim­i­nal tri­als and liq­ui­dat­ing his assets), and a val­i­um-packed Mela­nia who, when she greet­ed her hus­band on stage, had the blank look of Jodie Fos­ter in Pan­ic Room when con­front­ed by one of her tor­men­tors.

The ral­ly made head­lines because of the many racist jokes and allu­sions dished up in the Gar­den (“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s lit­er­al­ly a float­ing island of garbage in the mid­dle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puer­to Rico…”), although in the spir­it of the buck stop­ping there, Don­ald Trump lat­er said of the speak­er:

I have no idea who he is. Some­body said there was a come­di­an that joked about Puer­to Rico or some­thing. And I have no idea who it was. Nev­er saw him. Nev­er heard of him, and don’t want to hear of him. But I have no idea.

Oth­er­wise, the ral­ly was sim­ply a replay of the same speak­ers and speech­es that ser­e­nad­ed Trump at the 2020 and 2024 Repub­li­can nation­al con­ven­tions, as if no one in Trump­World could be both­ered to come up with new mate­r­i­al.

Trump made the same histri­on­ic, self-inflat­ed points he has expressed at every ral­ly in the last year, and he deliv­ered his for­mal remarks in the same See Spot Run monot­o­ne he has used to read all of his speech­es. But with his end­less digres­sions (“She even called for free sex change oper­a­tions on ille­gal aliens in deten­tion at tax­pay­er expense. Think of it. At taxpayer….She’s a rad­i­cal left per­son from San Fran­cis­co. She destroyed the place. But she lied about that, but she also lied about some­thing very impor­tant. For years and years, she said she had a job at McDonald’s…”), Trump’s speech last­ed almost two hours.

In all it was a six-hour affair to announce: “Vote for Trump on Novem­ber 5 and put an end to democ­ra­cy.”

* * *

The main­stream media high­light­ed the vile­ness of the ral­ly lan­guage, not just that used by Trump but the gems offered up by some of his bizarre pitch­men and women, who bounced on stage every ten min­utes for the first four hours of the spec­ta­cle, after which Trump, him­self, picked up the hit parade of insults.

For exam­ple, Asso­ci­at­ed Press led its account of the ral­ly in this man­ner:

The event was a sur­re­al spec­ta­cle that includ­ed for­mer pro­fes­sion­al wrestler Hulk Hogan, TV psy­chol­o­gist Dr. Phil McGraw, for­mer Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son, politi­cians includ­ing House Speak­er Mike John­son and Reps. Byron Don­alds and Elise Ste­fanik, and an artist who paint­ed a pic­ture of Trump hug­ging the Empire State Build­ing.

The account in the New York Times began this way:

Don­ald J. Trump’s clos­ing ral­ly at Madi­son Square Gar­den on the sec­ond to last Sun­day before the elec­tion was a release of rage at a polit­i­cal and legal sys­tem that impeached, indict­ed and con­vict­ed him, a vivid and at times racist dis­play of the dark ener­gy ani­mat­ing the MAGA move­ment.

A com­ic kicked off the ral­ly by dis­miss­ing Puer­to Rico as a “float­ing island of garbage,” then mocked His­pan­ics as fail­ing to use birth con­trol, Jews as cheap and Pales­tini­ans as rock-throw­ers, and called out a Black man in the audi­ence with a ref­er­ence to water­mel­on.

Anoth­er speak­er likened Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris to a pros­ti­tute with “pimp han­dlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the for­mer Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son mocked Ms. Har­ris — the daugh­ter of an Indi­an moth­er and a Jamaican father — with a made-up eth­nic­i­ty, say­ing she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ for­mer Cal­i­for­nia pros­e­cu­tor ever to be elect­ed pres­i­dent.”

Despite the rage and bit­ter­ness of the ral­ly (Nurem­berg, miss­ing only the columns of light?), Trump and Vance remain ahead in most of the bat­tle­ground state polls, and have a 50 per­cent chance of get­ting elect­ed on Novem­ber 5 and, there­after, imple­ment­ing their not-so-secret agen­da of turn­ing the Unit­ed States into a white-nation­al­ist Chris­t­ian nation in which it will be made clear that even Hitler “did some good things.”

* * *

It took me almost two days to watch all six hours of what felt like a Klan meet­ing under the big top at Madi­son Square Gar­den.

Some­times, need­ing a break from the vit­ri­ol, I would read the tran­script when I found the speak­er to be espe­cial­ly grat­ing. But then I would go back and lis­ten to the offend­ing pas­sages, just to be sure that they were still speak­ing at a polit­i­cal ral­ly and had not mis­tak­en­ly drift­ed off into the tents of a freak­ish side show.

The Gar­den ral­ly mat­ters at many lev­els, not only because it was billed as the last occa­sion before the elec­tion when Don­ald Trump would sum­ma­rize his case to be pres­i­dent to the Amer­i­can peo­ple; it would also offer him a last chance to eval­u­ate poten­tial mem­bers of his cab­i­net, from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and for­mer mem­ber of Con­gress Tul­si Gab­bard, both for­mer Democ­rats. (Over­all, Trump is most­ly drawn to turn­coats.)

The audi­tion was reduced to one act: the sup­pli­cants had to pros­trate them­selves on the biggest pub­lic stage to prove their undy­ing feal­ty to their lord and mas­ter, Don­ald Trump.

Here are some pro­gram notes from the foot­lights.

* * *

The evo­lu­tion of Robert F. Kennedy from main­stream lib­er­al Demo­c­rat to a Trump foot­man and shill is instruc­tive for the lure that Trump’s return to pow­er holds over many aspir­ing politi­cians from both par­ties.

Orig­i­nal­ly, Kennedy’s polit­i­cal fol­low­ing came out of his work for envi­ron­men­tal and cli­mate jus­tice. Going back more than twen­ty years, he cam­paigned for a clean­er Hud­son Riv­er and against strip min­ing in Appalachia.

Bob­by Jr. tes­ti­fied in front of Con­gress, wrote arti­cles and books, and even pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary film on the degra­da­tions of strip min­ing called The Last Moun­tain (2011). Now as a whol­ly-owned Trump man, I would imag­ine he owns a few coal exca­va­tors.

Come the pan­dem­ic, Kennedy turned into a rabid anti-vaxxer, equat­ing the work of Dr. Antho­ny Fau­ci and oth­er doc­tors with shaman­ism and voodoo. But because RFK Jr. spoke well—despite suf­fer­ing from spas­mod­ic dys­pho­nia, per­haps trig­gered by his years as a hero­in addict—people at least gave him a hear­ing, which encour­aged him to run for pres­i­dent in 2024 as a third-par­ty can­di­date (argu­ing that both major par­ties were bro­ken).

In the­o­ry, with the Kennedy brand syn­ony­mous with lib­er­al­ism, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden (then still in the race) and after­ward Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris had the most to fear from an inde­pen­dent Kennedy can­di­da­cy.

Except that once he was in the race (albeit with same chances as Wal­ter Mit­ty), Bob­by Jr.’s posi­tions were sim­i­lar to those of Don­ald Trump in that he was pro-Putin, pro-frack­ing, and in favor of the mar­ket sort­ing out the cli­mate cri­sis (even though that same mar­ket has turned the plan­et into a suf­fo­cat­ing hot house)—to the point that most mem­bers of his illus­tri­ous Demo­c­ra­t­ic fam­i­ly denounced his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign as a fraud.

In the end Bob­by Jr. sus­pend­ed his cam­paign but he remains on the bal­lot in sev­er­al states, in hope of fur­ther screw­ing the Democ­rats. And he endorsed Don­ald Trump and agreed to serve on his tran­si­tion team—and now is a head­lin­er at his ral­lies.

At the Gar­den, try­ing to excuse his pres­ence at a Trump ral­ly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to imag­ine that his famous father and uncle would also by now have become Trumpers. He said:

And I say I didn’t leave the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty left me. This is not the par­ty any­more of Mar­tin Luther King, of Robert Kennedy, of John Kennedy, that was the par­ty of peace, it was the par­ty of con­sti­tu­tion­al rights, of civ­il rights, of free­dom of speech, it was the par­ty that want­ed to pro­tect and nur­ture the mid­dle class, it was the par­ty that stood up to cen­sor­ship, to sur­veil­lance and stood up to the CIA, the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex and it was the par­ty that want­ed to pro­tect pub­lic health and women’s sports.

Only after Kennedy was safe­ly aboard Good Ship Tump was it revealed that his dal­liance with a New York mag­a­zine reporter involved the receipt of her nude pho­tographs.

Even though the exchanges last­ed almost a year, Kennedy claimed he was the vic­tim of sex­u­al harass­ment and threat­ened to denounce his vir­tu­al lover to the police or sue her.

All this came from a man who as his sec­ond mar­riage was fail­ing kept a diary of his dou­ble-dig­it, extra-mar­i­tal sex­u­al con­quests (with a points sys­tem to indi­cate how well he regard­ed each con­quest).

Now Kennedy’s role in the cam­paign is that of a Trump sur­ro­gate (on polit­i­cal issues; pre­sum­ably Trump doesn’t need any help abus­ing women on his own), and he can dream of serv­ing as Trump’s Sec­re­tary of Health and Human Ser­vices (and rec­om­mend leach­es and bleed­ing as the most evi­dent cures).

* * *

I con­fess that I scrolled through much of the speech­es of Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil. Hulk lost me with his intro­duc­tion:

Well, let me tell you some­thing, Trumpa­ma­ni­acs, wel­come to the house that Hulka­ma­nia built. You know some­thing? Usu­al­ly, when I’m in Madi­son Square Gar­den, I’m body slam­ming giants, I’m win­ning world heavy­weight titles and I’m crack­ing peo­ple over the heads with steel chairs and the ener­gy in Madi­son Square Gar­den is off the Richter scale. But today, Trumpa­ma­ni­acs, the ener­gy in here is some­thing like I’ve nev­er felt. The ener­gy of all these Trumpa­ma­ni­acs is the most pow­er­ful force in the uni­verse and, today, this is Don­ald Trump’s house, broth­er. You know some­thing, Trumpa­ma­ni­acs? I don’t see no stink­ing Nazis in here, I don’t see no stink­ing domes­tic ter­ror­ists in here, the only thing I see in here are a bunch of hard­work­ing men and women that are real Amer­i­cans, broth­er.

But I do take Hulk’s infer­ence that the pho­ny appeal of pro­fes­sion­al wrestling speaks to the same attrac­tions of the Don­ald Trump cam­paign.

Dr. Phil tried to gin up sym­pa­thy for Trump vot­ers who have been harassed or can­celled, or, yes, “bul­lied” for announc­ing their choice in the elec­tion. He said:

Why am I here? I’ll tell you why I’m here. I’m here to talk to and stand up for the peo­ple who have declared their sup­port for Don­ald J. Trump, or they got found out, or they want to do it, but they’re too intim­i­dat­ed. Because you know what hap­pens when some­body in this coun­try says, “Hey, I’m going to vote Repub­li­can. I’m going to vote Don­ald J. Trump.” They get can­celed, intim­i­dat­ed, mar­gin­al­ized, exclud­ed, or even fired or boy­cotted. And you know what that means? In short, that adds up to being bul­lied.

Sor­ry, Phil, but the last time I looked, it was the MAGA crowd (some wear­ing Viking head­dress­es) that was swing­ing the hock­ey sticks in the Capi­tol and reliev­ing them­selves on Nan­cy Pelosi’s desk.

* * *

I wasn’t sur­prised to see the talk show host and Trump enabler Tuck­er Carl­son in the flood­lights, although any time some­one with pre­ten­sions to jour­nal­ism turns up in a paid polit­i­cal adver­tise­ment I grieve a lit­tle for the inde­pen­dence of the pro­fes­sion.

The last time I caught up with Tuck Ever­last­ing, he was in a gild­ed Krem­lin chair and salon, per­form­ing unnat­ur­al (jour­nal­is­tic?) acts on the Russ­ian dic­ta­tor and hege­monist, Vladimir Putin.

Carl­son gave Putin two hours of prime­time cov­er­age (with very few fac­tu­al inter­rup­tions) so that the Russ­ian dic­ta­tor could explain why Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, and much of east­ern Europe are the right­ful domains of Sovi­et Rus­sia and why Putin was jus­ti­fied in attack­ing anoth­er sov­er­eign nation, one that in 1994 Rus­sia had agreed was an inde­pen­dent coun­try.

The Putin inter­view proved sev­er­al things: most­ly that Tuck­er knows almost noth­ing about Russ­ian his­to­ry, and thus wasn’t in a posi­tion to push back, for exam­ple, when Putin said: “For decades, the Ukrain­ian Sovi­et Repub­lic devel­oped as part of the USSR, and for unknown rea­sons, again, the Bol­she­viks were engaged in Ukraini­an­iza­tion.” (Here the word “Ukraini­an­iza­tion” can be under­stood as code for the Stal­in­ist geno­cide car­ried out in Ukraine in the 1930s by the liq­ui­da­tion of the kulaks and mass star­va­tion of the pop­u­la­tion.)

After throw­ing two hours of soft­ball ques­tions to Putin (I am assum­ing that Trump had a hand in reas­sur­ing his man Vlad that Tuck­er could be count­ed on as a syco­phant), Carl­son descend­ed into the Moscow metro and went to a local super­mar­ket where he gushed: “Moscow is so much nicer than any city in my coun­try.”

It would have been way beyond C stu­dent Carl­son to recall the sim­i­lar words of Lin­coln Stef­fens, who said in 1919, on his return from Rus­sia: “I have been over into the future, and it works.”

If you want to imag­ine the appease­ment polices of a future Trump admin­is­tra­tion toward Putin and Rus­sia, watch the Carl­son inter­view in the Krem­lin.

* * *

After rest­ing up from his adven­tures in the Moscow sub­way, Carl­son next found time to host a two-hour inter­view on his syn­di­cat­ed tele­vi­sion pro­gram with Holo­caust denier and Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er Daryl Coop­er.

Coop­er told Tuck­er that the “chief vil­lain” of World War II was Win­ston Churchill (not Adolf Hitler), and Carl­son sidled along­side the Holo­caust “explain­er” with his own white nation­al­ist think­ing on the great replace­ment the­o­ry, which has peo­ple of col­or squeez­ing white Amer­i­cans out of their own coun­try (a core belief of Trump ral­liers).

Coop­er said: “Mil­lions of peo­ple end­ed up dead, but that wasn’t their [the Nazis] intent.”Maybe it was the Jews them­selves who built all of those exter­mi­na­tion camps, such as Tre­blin­ka and Maj­danek?

Tucker’s head­lin­ing take on his guest, the Nazi-lov­ing Coop­er? He wrote: “Dar­ryl Coop­er may be the best and most hon­est pop­u­lar his­to­ri­an in the Unit­ed States. His lat­est project is the most for­bid­den of all: try­ing to under­stand World War Two.”

Is it any won­der, then, that at the Gar­den Carl­son could riff that Kamala Har­ris could well be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ for­mer Cal­i­for­nia pros­e­cu­tor ever to be elect­ed pres­i­dent.”

If that isn’t dis­cour­ag­ing, con­sid­er that it was Carlson—together with son Don Jr.—who pressed Trump Sr. to select J.D. Vance to run as his vice pres­i­dent.

It’s hard to imag­ine two men besides Carl­son and Don Jr. who know less about world his­to­ry, but Vance could be that man.

* * *

Most of the Trump hench­men and women giv­ing air time at Madi­son Square Gar­den were basi­cal­ly run-of-the-mill crazy.

Trump attor­ney Ali­na Hab­ba came out dressed for a roller dis­co and hung her glit­ter­ing jack­et over the lectern, as if it were a bar stool. Then she rapped to the crowd about “he da man” Trump as if he were a cel­e­brat­ed gang fig­ure (as I sup­pose he is).

Russ­ian and Syr­i­an bot Tul­si Gab­bard decid­ed to turn his­to­ry on its head and said: “…a vote for Don­ald Trump is a vote for some­one who will defend free­dom and every one of our God-giv­en rights that are enshrined in the Con­sti­tu­tion and Bill of Rights,” unless, I sup­pose, that’s the day he’s appear­ing as a dic­ta­tor and, as he has promised, sus­pend­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.

Some­one called David Rem seized the mic to say how Trump’s father, Fred, had paid his school tuition after his own father had died. He passed him­self off as a “life-long” friend of Don­ald Trump, until it became clear they only met a few weeks ago. Rem waved around a cru­ci­fix while say­ing:

Can you imag­ine Kamala Har­ris per­form­ing a ran­dom, kind, gen­er­ous act like that? Nev­er. Nev­er, ever. In fact, she is the dev­il, who­ev­er screamed that out. She is the Antichrist. At her ral­ly last week, she said that, “Jesus Christ fol­low­ers are not wel­come at my ral­ly. You should go down the block to Pres­i­dent Trump’s ral­ly.” Let me say this, and maybe I’m speak­ing for the Pres­i­dent and I shouldn’t, but I think that Pres­i­dent Trump loves Jesus fol­low­ers at his ral­ly. And I think that Pres­i­dent Trump, in what he has expe­ri­enced, knows that Jesus Christ is king.

Then there was a real estate pro­mot­er, Grant Car­done, who said, in equal­ly man­ic tones:

Ladies and gen­tle­men, Kamala Har­ris is the least qual­i­fied can­di­date to ever run for any polit­i­cal office in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. She makes her boss look com­pe­tent. She’s a fake. I’m not here to inval­i­date her. She’s a fake, a fraud. She’s a pre­tender. Her [sic – gram­mar has nev­er been a strong suit of the Trump crowd] and her pimp han­dlers will destroy our coun­try. They will. They’ve already crip­pled the dol­lar, man­u­fac­tured infla­tion, import­ed a virus, cen­sored your voic­es, fund­ed trans­gen­der surg­eries, and made emp­ty promis­es to the mid­dle class for 50 years.

Pre­sum­ably, the ven­tril­o­quist Trump could lat­er say of his col­league and talk­ing dum­my (Car­done) who called Kamala Har­ris a pros­ti­tute, “I have no idea who he is.”

* * *

By far the eeri­est remarks at Madi­son Square Gar­den came from for­mer White House aide and con­sigliere Steven Miller, the Dr. Evil of a Trump restora­tion.

With his head shaven, wear­ing a tight suit which seemed to have a hit-man cut to it, and seem­ing­ly the kind of per­son capa­ble of hav­ing long con­ver­sa­tions with him­self, the wound-up Miller said:

In nine days, your res­cue is com­ing. In nine days, your sal­va­tion is at hand. In nine days, Don­ald J. Trump is going to go back to the White House. We stand here today at a cross­roads, in the his­to­ry of this nation, in the his­to­ry of our civ­i­liza­tion. This is a choice between betray­al and renew­al, between self-destruc­tion and sal­va­tion, between the fail­ure of Amer­i­ca or the tri­umph of Amer­i­ca. I want you to think for a minute about the decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good peo­ple of this nation, their jobs loot­ed and stolen from them and shipped to Mex­i­co, Asia, and for­eign coun­tries, the lives of their loved ones ripped away from them by ille­gal aliens, crim­i­nal gangs, and thugs who don’t belong in this coun­try, a polit­i­cal sys­tem that pun­ish­es hard­work­ing cit­i­zens, oppress­es them at every turn, takes away the right to free speech, the right to polit­i­cal expres­sion, the right to fun­da­men­tal safe­ty in their own coun­try. Who’s going to stand up for our daugh­ters? Who’s going to stand up for the girls of Amer­i­ca, the woman of Amer­i­ca, the fam­i­lies of Amer­i­ca? Who’s going to stand up and say, “The car­tels are gone. The crim­i­nal migrants are gone. The gangs are gone. Amer­i­ca is for Amer­i­cans and Amer­i­cans only?” One man. And that man, ladies and gen­tle­men, that man took a bul­let for you. He took a bul­let for democ­ra­cy. And all we are ask­ing in return, all we are ask­ing in return is for nine days, for nine short, pre­cious days, you have to vote, vote, vote. Vote for free­dom. Vote for lib­er­ty, vote for sov­er­eign­ty. Vote for your chil­dren. Vote for your fam­i­lies. Vote for the right of free speech, the right to the Sec­ond Amend­ment.

Clear­ly, to Steven Miller, Trump is a cross between Jesus and anoth­er mis­un­der­stood white suprema­cist, Adolf Hitler.

* * *

Four hours into the tedious auto-erot­ic Vegas floor show, Mela­nia Trump was called to the stage to intro­duce her hus­band (so that in turn he could speak for anoth­er two hours).

Mela­nia uses fash­ion to express her rages (remem­ber her “I real­ly don’t care, do you?” jack­et that she wore to a migrant child deten­tion cen­ter?), and here she was wear­ing a below-the-knees zebra-print jack­et, as if maybe she was an endan­gered species. Seem­ing­ly her mes­sage to her porn-star lov­ing hus­band, who might have pre­ferred some­thing with a lit­tle more décol­letage, was: “I real­ly don’t care, do you?”

One way to inter­pret the entire Madi­son Square Gar­den Trump Fol­lies was that it was an effort by Don­ald to appear on stage with his wife and force her into a pub­lic reconciliation—at least some­thing long enough to be spliced into the 30-sec­ond TV spots to air the night before Elec­tion Day.

No doubt in exchange for a six-fig­ure appear­ance fee, Mela­nia showed up at the Gar­den, but her glum facial expres­sion was that of a hostage who might well have used lip­stick to write “Help me” on the palms of her hands.

She nev­er men­tioned Trump by name nor did she speak of any of his won­der­ful qual­i­ties. Instead she talked dys­pep­ti­cal­ly about New York City, end­ing by say­ing: “Let’s seize this moment and cre­ate a coun­try for tomor­row, the future that we deserve.” Such a sen­tence could be used on just about any occa­sion, includ­ing if she planned to mur­der him back­stage.

From a polite dis­tance (they looked like a cou­ple in the wait­ing room of a mar­riage ther­a­pist), Trump leaned in to kiss his wife, and all she offered him was a turn of both cheeks—the way Euro­peans greet strangers in a for­mal set­ting.

Mela­nia has rarely been on the polit­i­cal stage since a court in New York con­vict­ed her hus­band of sex­u­al abuse against E. Jean Car­roll and fined Trump $83.3 mil­lion for defam­ing Ms. Car­roll over sev­er­al years (by deny­ing pub­licly that he had vio­lat­ed her).

And what did Trump say of Ms. Car­roll that increased the dam­ages due to her to $83.3 mil­lion? He said: “Total­ly lying. I don’t know any­thing about her. I know noth­ing about this woman. I know noth­ing about her.”

10. Gang­sters of Cap­i­tal­ism: Smed­ley But­ler, The Marines and the Mak­ing and Break­ing of Amer­i­ca’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz; St. Mar­t­in’s Press [HC]; Copy­right 2021 by Jonathan M. Katz; ISBN 9781250135582; pp. 328–329.

. . . . A few weeks after the siege, I talked to Smed­ley Butler’s eighty-five-year-old grand­daugh­ter, Philip­pa Wehle. I asked her over Skype what her grand­fa­ther would have thought of the events of Jan­u­ary 6.

Her hazel eyes nar­rowed as she pon­dered. “I think he would have been in there. He would have been in the fray some­how.”

For an unset­tling moment, I was unsure what she meant. But­ler had much in com­mon with both sides of the siege: Like Trump’s mob, he had often doubt­ed the valid­i­ty of democ­ra­cy when prac­ticed by non­whites. (The most promi­nent Trump­ist con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about pur­port­ed fraud in the 2020 elec­tion cen­tered on cities with large immi­grant and Black pop­u­la­tions.)

Like many of the putschists, But­ler saw him­self as a war­rior for the “lit­tle guy” against a vast con­stel­la­tion of elite interests—even though he, also like most of the Capi­tol attack­ers, was rel­a­tive­ly well-off. More­over, the great­est pro­por­tion of vet­er­ans arrest­ed in con­nec­tion with the attempt­ed putsch were Marines. An active-duty Marine major—a field artillery offi­cer at Quantico—was caught on video push­ing open the doors to the East Rotun­da and accused by fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors of allow­ing oth­er riot­ers to stream in.

But I knew, too, that But­ler had tak­en his stand for democ­ra­cy and against the Busi­ness Plot, I would like to think he would have seen through Trump as well. But­ler had reject­ed Father Coughlin’s pro­to-Trumpian brand of red-bait­ing, anti­se­mit­ic con­spir­a­to­r­i­al pop­ulism, going so far as to inform FBI direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover of an alleged 1936 effort involv­ing the reac­tionary priest to over­throw the left-lean­ing gov­ern­ing of Mex­i­co. When a reporter for the Marx­ist mag­a­zine New Mass­es asked But­ler “just where he stood polit­i­cal­ly” in the wake of the Busi­ness Plot, he name-checked sev­er­al of the most left-lean­ing mem­bers of Con­gress, and said the only group he would give his “blan­ket approval to” was the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Labor. But­ler added he would not only “die to pre­serve democ­ra­cy” but also, cru­cial­ly, “fight to broad­en it.”

Per­haps it would have come down to tim­ing: at what point in his life the attack on the gov­ern­ment might have tak­en place.

“Do you think he would have been with the peo­ple storm­ing the Capi­tol?” I asked Philip­pa, ten­ta­tive­ly.

This time she answered imme­di­ate­ly. “No! Heav­ens no. He would have been try­ing to do some­thing about it.” He might have been killed, she added, giv­en that the police were so unpre­pared. “Which is so dis­turb­ing, because of course they should have known. They would have known. They only had to read the papers.”. . . .