In this interview, Dr. Peter McCullough discusses the importance of early treatment for COVID-19, and the potential motivations behind the suppression of safe and effective treatments.
McCullough has impeccable academic credentials. He’s an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, a full professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine in Dallas. He also has a master’s degree in public health and is known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals.
Early Outpatient Treatment Is Key for Positive Outcomes
McCullough has been an outspoken advocate for early treatment for COVID. In August 2020, McCullough’s landmark paper “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 Infection”1 was published online in the American Journal of Medicine.
The follow-up paper is titled “Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection (COVID-19)”2 and was published in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine in December 2020.
Perhaps one of the greatest crimes in this whole pandemic is the refusal by reigning heath authorities to issue early treatment guidance. Instead, they’ve done everything possible to suppress remedies shown to work, whether it be corticosteroids, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with zinc, ivermectin, vitamin D or NAC.
Patients were simply told to stay home and do nothing. Once the infection had worsened to the point of near-death, patients were told to go to the hospital where most were routinely placed on mechanical ventilation — a practice that was quickly discovered to be lethal. Many doctors also seemingly panicked and refused to see patients with COVID symptoms.
“I’m glad that I personally always treated all my patients,” he says. “I wasn’t going to have the virus slaughter one of my senior citizens. And it is, I think, terrible that none of our major academic institutions innovated with a single protocol. To my knowledge, not a single major academic medical center, as an institution, attempted even to treat patients with COVID-19.
But I did use my publication power, and my editorial authority, and my position in internal medicine and some specialty medicine to publish the breakthrough paper called ‘The Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19’ in the American Journal of Medicine.
It was an international effort, both community physicians and academic physicians. And to this day, that is the most frequently downloaded paper in the American Journal of Medicine.”
Early Treatment Guidelines Have Saved Millions of Lives
In December 2020, McCullough published an updated protocol, co-written with 56 other authors who also had extensive experience with treating COVID-19 outpatients. The article, “Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection,”3 was published in the journal Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, of which McCullough is the editor-in-chief.
“That paper, today … is the most frequently downloaded paper from BET Journal,” McCullough says. “It also is the basis for the American Association of Physician and Surgeons COVID early treatment guide.4
We have evidence that the treatment guide has been downloaded and utilized millions of times. And it was part of the early huge kick that we had in ambulatory treatment at home towards the end of December into January, which basically crushed the U.S. curve.
We were on schedule to have 1.7 to 2.1 million fatalities in the United States, as estimated by the CDC and others. We cut it off at about 600,000. That still is a tragedy. I’ve testified that 85% of that 600,000 could have been saved if we would have had … the protocols in place from the start.
But suffice it to say, the early treatment heroes, and you’re part of that team Dr. Mercola, has really made the biggest impact. We have saved millions of lives, spared millions and millions of hospitalizations, and in a sense, have brought the pandemic now to a winnowing close.”
While the World Health Organization and national health agencies have all rejected treatments suggested by doctors for lack of large-scale randomized controlled studies, McCullough and other doctors working the frontlines took an empiric approach. They looked for signals of benefit in the literature.
“We didn’t demand large randomized trials because we knew they weren’t going to be available for years in the future,” McCullough says. “We didn’t wait for a guidelines body to tell us what to do or some medical society, because we know they work in slow motion. We knew we had to take care of patients now.”
A Global Collusion to Harm Patients
When you look at how comprehensive and intense the censoring and suppression of early treatments were, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than this was a strategy aimed at securing emergency use authorization (EUA) for COVID gene therapies.
To get an EUA, there cannot be any safe and effective alternatives, and since the COVID shots are using a brand-new, never before used technology, making sure there were no effective treatments available was crucial for the success of the roll-out of these shots. Prestigious medical journals like The Lancet were even caught colluding with the drug industry, publishing a completely fabricated study on HCQ, showing it was dangerous. As noted by McCullough:
“What’s so interesting is how airtight the collusion was. It was extraordinary. Look at The Lancet paper [on HCQ]. You had a doctor from Harvard, a company called Surgisphere that had data, you had the reviewers at Lancet, the associate editor and the editor at Lancet. How could they all collude together to publish a falsified paper?
When that paper came out, we looked at it. I was checking the literature very carefully. [As editor-in-chief of two medical journals] I’ve reviewed more papers and analyzed more data, I think, than anybody in the game. And I can tell you, I looked at that paper and in two seconds, I knew it was fake. I mean, I do this every day.
I’m also the senior associate editor for the American Journal of Cardiology. That’s the most venerated journal in our entire field. And I can tell you that a paper like that would never get past my editorial desk because it was so obviously fake. It was a huge sample size that we knew was not possible at that time. And it was people in their 40s hospitalized with astronomical mortality rates.
It was just no way that was legit. And The Lancet let that hang up there for two weeks, scaring the entire world against hydroxychloroquine — which turns out to be one of the safest and most effective widely utilized in people with COVID-19. And when they took it down, it was unapologetic.
My interpretation of this is that was very intentional. What happened with ivermectin’s use in the ICU was also very intentional and a collusion … Dr. J.J Rashtak had used it in hundreds and hundreds of patients in Florida and published in CHEST, one of the best pulmonary journals, that ivermectin reduced mortality.
Yet to this day, hospitals across the United States flat out refuse to use ivermectin. Desperate patients and families have to get court orders to order these doctors to use ivermectin. So, there’s a mass mentality of almost intentionally harming patients.
There’s absolutely no grounds for doctors and administrators … to deny patients ivermectin. There is a global collusion, specifically in U.S. hospitals, to cause as much harm and death as conceivable. It’s beyond belief … These cases where the families had to get court orders to force the doctors and administrators to administer a simple generic drug, these are going to be case studies in medical ethics for decades to come.”
The Goal = Mass Vaccination
As for why patient harm was a desirable thing, McCullough believes the end goal was to secure the rollout of a mass vaccination campaign. All the propaganda we’ve been fed over this past year and a half points in that direction.
“Propaganda is the dissemination of false or misleading information by people of authority in a collusional manner. And that’s exactly what’s going on. We have a propagandized campaign for mass vaccination. There’s no doubt about it. It’s actually very overt … And believe me, there are hundreds of millions of people under the propagandized spell that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to deliver us from this crisis.”
What we do not know for sure is why the World Health Organization and governments around the world want a needle in every arm. Why are they so eager, so relentless in their push to inject everyone with this novel gene therapy that turns your body into a toxic spike protein factory?
The intent to vaccinate everyone is such that health authorities are not even acknowledging the fact that staggering numbers of injuries and deaths are occurring shortly after these injections. They’re even letting children die from these shots without any hint of slowing down the rate of injections. Why?
Our Next Task: Dispelling Vaccine Propaganda
While we’ve made great strides in circumventing censorship and getting the information out about early treatment, we still face a tremendous challenge, and that is dispelling the misinformation and confusion that surrounds the COVID shots.
Very clearly, there’s massive collusion to suppress the truth about these gene therapies as well. Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccines, recently spoke out about his concerns, and not only did YouTube ban the interview, but Wikipedia also erased his name from the historical section of the mRNA vaccine.
They clearly want everyone to believe that these shots are similar to, and even superior to, conventional vaccines. They absolutely do not want you to think of them as gene therapy, which is what they are. Even Malone himself has made this distinction.
Malone is more than a little concerned about the coercion going on to get people to take these injections. He’s also pointed out that there’s no comprehensive system in place to prospectively capture side effects, despite the fact that the manufacturers bypassed at least 10 to 15 years’ worth of safety studies, including toxicological studies. This too appears entirely intentional. Again, the question is why?
“They had no system to catch the complications, but even worse, they had no plans for safety. They had none of the traditional mechanisms for risk mitigation … [such as] critical event committees, Data and Safety Monitoring Boards, IRBs or Human Ethics Committees.
The public should know these are the structures that we have in place in biomedical research. I’ve led two dozen Data Safety Monitoring Boards. The co-sponsors of the U.S. vaccine program are the FDA and the CDC.
It’s their obligation to have in place, from the very beginning, a Clinical Event Committee, Data Safety Monitoring Board, and a Human Ethics Committee [and provide] regular updates, because these committees are supposed to be identifying signals of harm, and then make recommendations to the sponsors about how to make the program safer.
This was the fiduciary responsibility of the FDA and the NIH. Again, this is going to go down in regulatory history as one of the most colossal blunders of all time. How can you do the largest clinical investigation in the history of medicine and have no safeguards? You have no mechanisms to protect Americans from what could happen with the vaccine program?”
Why Were Standardized Safety Protocols Omitted?
As for the motivation or reason for ignoring virtually all standardized safety measures, McCullough says:
“There has been such a suppression of early treatment … and a complete propagandized campaign for social distancing, wearing masks, promoting fear, suffering, hospitalization and death. And to prepare the population for mass vaccination, the last thing they wanted to do is have anything that could potentially restrict the population that would be taking the vaccine.
And so, I don’t think they actually wanted any safety safeguards. I thought their goal, from the very beginning, was to try to railroad every single individual with two legs [into getting the shot]. The most important moniker was a needle in every arm.
When those billboards went up in every city in the United States, the stakeholders — which are the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, and then Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson outside the United States, and AstraZeneca — they meant business.
When they say needle in every arm, that’s not a joke. It’s not a needle in every arm for whom it’s appropriate, or a needle in every arm for medically indicated. No, it’s a needle in every arm of every human being. They mean it, and I think Americans should be frightened.”
A Crime Against Humanity
What we’re experiencing is really a crime against humanity, and hopefully the responsible individuals will ultimately be held accountable and found guilty of such a charge. As noted by McCullough:
“How could one possibly have a large clinical investigation, ask individuals to sign consent, and then provide no safety mechanisms, really provide nothing with respect to safety of individuals? Everything about the vaccine is about safety. The reports that have accrued are so voluminous that if the stakeholders wanted to make the case that the vaccines are safe, they should make it with data.
They don’t, they simply say the vaccines are safe. And the medical societies are just as complicit. If you go to the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, they say the same thing, “The vaccine is safe.” Within those organizations also, there’s a large swathe of individuals who are going to have to answer [for their actions].”
The Spike Protein Is Not a Cure; It’s a Disease Agent
As of June 18, 2021, we have 387,087 adverse event reports filed with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 6,113 deaths, a large portion of which occurred within days of injection, and 6,435 life threatening reactions.5
We also have very good evidence to suggest this is a gross undercount, in part due to general underreporting, and in part due to VAERS refusing to accept reports — particularly those involving deaths — and scrubbing reports that have already been filed. So, these already alarming numbers likely only represent the tip of the iceberg.
“We have red hot problems, like children and young adults developing myocarditis, inflammation of the heart. I just saw such a patient yesterday,” McCullough says. “These are proven cases. This is not make believe. This is for real.
So, you may ask the question, how in the world could this happen? Well, the first element of this happening is the vaccines as they exist today, either messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA, the mechanism of action is not safe. The mechanism of action poses a biologic danger.
These vaccines all trick the body into making the spike protein of the virus. The spike protein itself is pathogenic. It’s actually what makes the virus dangerous. It was the object of gain-of-function research. So, it has a dangerous mechanism of action. Why? Because the spike protein is produced in an uncontrolled fashion. It’s not like a tetanus shot where there’s only a certain amount of protein that’s injected.
This is an uncontrolled quantity of spike protein. Probably each person is different, so may have [lower] production of it. They have very little symptoms after the vaccine, they’re fine.
Hopefully that’s the majority of individuals, but there are unfortunate individuals that must have massive amount of spike protein, and that spike protein ravages the body wherever the spike protein is locally made, and we do know the messenger RNA and the adenoviral DNA gets distributed in all the organs.
So if messenger RNA is up in the brain and we start producing spike protein in the brain, we cause local brain injury. There are now well-described neurologic injury cases with the vaccine. Many of them. In the heart, it causes myocarditis and cardiac injury. In the liver, it causes liver injury, in the lung, lung injury, in the kidney, kidney injury.
And very importantly, the spike protein damages endothelial cells and causes blood clotting. So, blood clotting, the dreaded complication of the infection itself, is now caused by the vaccine. Everything we’ve found out about the vaccine since its release has been bad.”
What Can We Expect to Happen in the Future?
Beyond the acute injury phase, there’s the very real possibility of long term health hazards. If you make it past the first couple of months without significant problems, you’re still not out of the woods. My main concern is the possibility of paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE), also known as pathogenic priming, or antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which essentially results in a cascade of immunological overreactions that wind up killing you.
The autumn and winter of 2021 will be our first “trial by fire.” We’ll just have to wait and see how many fully “vaccinated” people end up succumbing to the seasonal flu and other infections. That’ll give us a benchmark for how prevalent PIE might be. When asked what he predicts for the future, McCullough says:
“We’re so busy with the acute toxicity to the vaccine. We’re just absolutely overwhelmed, so, it’s hard to imagine in three to six months where we will be … There are hints right now that the messenger RNA doesn’t break down in a few days, that the natural disposal systems that we have for the messenger RNA doesn’t work [for the synthetic mRNA].
Now, we don’t know about the adenoviral DNA. I have a more favorable view of the adenoviral DNA products in the sense that maybe the body … can fight that off and dispose of it. The Johnson & Johnson, per number of injections, has the fewest complications. And most Americans think just the opposite because of that misdirection activity.
I think the vaccine stakeholders intentionally picked on Johnson & Johnson in order to distract attention away from the terrible safety events we’ve seen with Pfizer and Moderna. The vast majority of all the devastation we’ve seen is with Pfizer and Moderna …
When you generate a really strong antibody response, it’s actually more pathogenic. The belief is it’s more pathogenic than the natural infection, because we’re seeing syndromes in vaccine victims that are way worse than getting COVID-19 itself. I mean, the syndromes are actually horrendous.
I have seen neurologic blindness, cervical myelitis, cerebellar syndrome. It’s absolutely awful. It’s depends where the messenger RNA goes … and everything I can put together biologically, and what I see clinically, is that vaccines aren’t going to work but for a few months …
After the first shot of mRNA, one is actually more susceptible to COVID-19. This has been shown time and time again. My first rash of patients with post-vaccination COVID-19 in my practice was always after the first injection. The theory here is that the body has been hit with the messenger RNA, the spike protein is generated, it’s damaging some endothelial cells, and there’s an immature library of antibodies that are being formed.
And those antibodies, instead of protecting against the next exposure to COVID-19, they actually facilitate entry. That’s called antibody-dependent enhancement, and I think there is evidence for that … As for what we can expect long-term, that’s anyone’s guess.”
Long Term Risks Are Unknown
Before COVID came along, the FDA required vaccine makers to provide 24 months’ worth of data before they’d allow it. This was truncated down to two months for the COVID shots. So, anyone who says the shots are safe long term is lying because no such data exists to prove this.
“The consent form says, ‘We don’t know if this is going to work, we don’t know if it’s going to last, and we don’t know if it’s going to be safe.’ They say that. So, anybody who takes the vaccine is going to have to think about this and understand that we don’t know anything beyond two months.
Given all the short-term risks, if there are any long-term risks, it is absolutely compounding this unknown. What I know based on the literature right now is there could be a risk given the narrow spectrum of immunologic coverage … There could be such a narrow immunity that more virulent strain could overwhelm it …
The most recent variant is the Delta variant. That’s the weakest of all the variants and the most easily treatable. But if someone, let’s say a nefarious entity created a more virulent virus, it could easily be designed to scoot past a very narrow immunity that hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, will be keyed to with narrow immunity.”
DNA Changes, Cancer and Chronic Illness Are Possible Effects
McCullough also discusses the risk that these mRNA injections might become permanently incorporated into your DNA by way of reverse transcriptase.
“There now have been enough studies to suggest there is some reverse transcription — that in fact the RNA creates DNA and then DNA gets permanently put into the human genome,” he explains.
“We know this from the natural infection. The T-Detect test actually checks the T-cells when it tracks the DNA. This is a commercial test you can get if you had COVID-19, and it looks for minor chromosomal re-arrangements that code for cell surface receptors on T-cells.”
The question is, if the synthetic mRNA or adenoviral DNAs in fact create permanent changes to the genome, what effects will that have? Could it promote cancer, for example? McCullough cites a recent paper indicating the spike protein might in fact affect two important cancer suppressor genes.
“This is disturbing because we’re using novel genetic material and it’s possible that they’re oncogenic. We know some other viruses are oncogenic, including Epstein-Barr virus. So, when that paper hit, we said, ‘Oh no, are we setting up people for cancer risk of solid organ cancers, like breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, et cetera.
It is a sick feeling what we’ve learned there. We do understand now that there must be cell damage that’s occurring with this spike protein inside cells. And that if it’s not turned off, that that spike protein generation could end up with some type of chronic disease.
There are elements of the spike protein that are similar to prions that occur in neurologic disease, for instance. There may be intracellular changes as the body keeps cranking the spike protein which you’re not supposed to crank, that causes other problems in cells …
Future development of heart failure comes to mind, gastrointestinal illnesses, pulmonary fibrosis, neurodegenerative diseases. We could be on to the start of a whole new genre of chronic disease in America due to this mass experimentation of genetic products in the human body.”
Impossible for Vaccination Program to Improve Disease Curve
In a sane and rational world not laboring under some hidden agenda to kill off a portion of the population, these shots would have only been rolled out to the highest-risk individuals. The rest of the population would have been excluded from the experiment.
Remember the COVID injection trials conflated absolute and relative risk. Pfizer claimed its mRNA shot was 95% effective, but that was the relative risk reduction — the absolute risk reduction was actually less than 1%.6 As noted by McCullough, healthy adults under 50, teens and children have a less than 1% chance of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, so they don’t have a medical need for it.
“You can’t make less than 1% smaller and have it be clinically meaningful. That’s the reason why the vaccine program will never have an impact on the epidemiologic curves. Dr. [Ronald] Brown from Canada has done the analysis. It’s impossible.
Someone sent me an email the other day [saying], ‘Dr. McCullough, don’t you think that the pandemic is being favorably impacted by the vaccination program?’ The answer is no. We look at the clinical trials. There’s less than 1% absolute risk reduction. It means that, mathematically, it’s impossible for mass vaccination to have a favorable impact on the population.”
COVID Shot May Raise Your Risk of COVID Death
What’s worse, McCullough cites data showing that those who have gotten the shot and end up with COVID-19 anyway have far higher rates of hospitalization and death.
“The CDC was so overwhelmed [with adverse reports], they gave up. God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans got vaccinated and got COVID-19 anyway. It looks just like regular COVID. In the data they had, it was a 9% risk of hospitalization and then a 3% risk of death.”
What this means is that, by taking the injection, you trade in a 0.26%7 risk of death, should you contract COVID-19, for a 3% risk of death if you get infected. If you’re younger than 40, you’re trading a 0.01%8 risk of death for a 3% risk.
The Way Forward Demands We Just Say No
If you want to hear more of what McCullough has to say, you can find his podcast, The McCullough Report, on America Out Loud. Every week, he talks to medical experts from different countries to get a range of perspectives and innovative approaches. In closing, he notes:
“My personal view is that I think the vaccine program has been a disaster. We should have just treated COVID-19 as an illness. We should never have shut down the schools or anything else. None of this wearing masks. We should have just treated the acute problem, and we would have gotten ourselves out of the pandemic.”
As for how we move forward, first of all, we need to stop the acute injury, and that means we need to stop taking these COVID shots. Beyond that, we’ll need to experiment to determine the best ways to block the damage done by the spike protein, for however long that is produced and stays in circulation.
“If there’s any mother who’s concerned about their child developing myocarditis, the way to avoid it is just don’t bring your child to a vaccination center,” McCullough says.
“Everyone is just going to have to learn to say no. We cannot be harmed by the vaccine if we just decline it. And the vaccine is completely elective. The CDC, the NIH, FDA, they’ve all said it’s elective. You don’t have to take it. Those agencies, by the way, they’re not taking it.
So, nobody has to take it. And everyone who is in a school or a university, or a workplace where they’re saying you have to take it, or say you have to take it for travel, the answer is no you don’t. You do not have to take it for travel. And yes, you can show up to work without the vaccine. And yes, you can show up to school without the vaccine.
These are forms of intimidation and almost every one of these institutions actually hasn’t written a policy. And if they don’t have a policy that’s been vetted with fair exemptions, that’s just intimidation. That’s like saying you can’t show up to work with a blue tie. If I want to wear a blue tie, I’m going to show up to work in a blue tie.
I think Americans are going to have to have that type of backbone in order to break this wave of propaganda, [this] ill intent that’s levered on the American people. I know so many people who are cowering … The fear is extraordinary …
If we had a Data Safety Monitoring Report in place, they would have been having emergency meetings at the end of January 2021, and said, ‘You know what? What we’re seeing is not good.’ We can actually calculate what’s called the competence interval.
When we exceed a competence interval for risks above a certain risk limit, we call it, and that [competence interval was exceeded] on January 22, 2021. Yet here we are, five months later. This will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far. There’s nothing close … You can imagine how many heads are going to roll when this thing ultimately comes to its finality.”
What You Need to Know About Early At-Home COVID Treatment | Dr. Mercola
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Reflecting the Authoritarian Climate, Washington Will Remain Militarized Until At Least March
Washington, DC has been continuously militarized beginning the week leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration, when 20,000 National Guard troops were deployed onto the streets of the nation’s capital. The original justification was that this show of massive force was necessary to secure the inauguration in light of the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
But with the inauguration over and done, those troops remain and are not going anywhere any time soon. Working with federal law enforcement agencies, the National Guard Bureau announced on Monday that between 5,000 and 7,000 troops will remain in Washington until at least mid-March.
The rationale for this extraordinary, sustained domestic military presence has shifted several times, typically from anonymous U.S. law enforcement officials. The original justification — the need to secure the inaugural festivities — is obviously no longer operative.
So the new claim became that the impeachment trial of former President Trump that will take place in the Senate in February necessitated military reinforcements. On Sunday, Politico quoted “four people familiar with the matter” to claim that “Trump’s upcoming Senate impeachment trial poses a security concern that federal law enforcement officials told lawmakers last week requires as many as 5,000 National Guard troops to remain in Washington through mid-March.”
The next day, AP, citing “a U.S. official,” said the ongoing troop deployment was needed due to “ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol.” But the anonymous official acknowledged that “the threats that law enforcement agents are tracking vary in specificity and credibility.” Even National Guard troops complained that they “have so far been given no official justifications, threat reports or any explanation for the extended mission — nor have they seen any violence thus far.”
It is hard to overstate what an extreme state of affairs it is to have a sustained military presence in American streets. Prior deployments have been rare, and usually were approved for a limited period and/or in order to quell a very specific, ongoing uprising — to ensure the peaceful segregation of public schools in the South, to respond to the unrest in Detroit and Chicago in the 1960s, or to quell the 1991 Los Angeles riots that erupted after the Rodney King trial.
Deploying National Guard or military troops for domestic law enforcement purposes is so dangerous that laws in place from the country’s founding strictly limit its use. It is meant only as a last resort, when concrete, specific threats are so overwhelming that they cannot be quelled by regular law enforcement absent military reinforcements. Deploying active military troops is an even graver step than putting National Guard soldiers on the streets, but they both present dangers. As Trump’s Defense Secretary said in response to calls from some over the summer to deploy troops in response to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”
Are we even remotely at such an extreme state where ordinary law enforcement is insufficient? The January 6 riot at the Capitol would have been easily repelled with just a couple hundred more police officers. The U.S. is the most militarized country in the world, and has the most para-militarized police force on the planet. Earlier today, the Acting Chief of the Capitol Police acknowledged that they had advanced knowledge of what was planned but failed to take necessary steps to police it.
Future violent acts in the name of right-wing extremism, as well as other causes, is highly likely if not inevitable. But the idea that the country faces some sort of existential armed insurrection that only the military can suppress is laughable on its face.
Recall that ABC News, on January 11, citing “an internal FBI bulletin obtained by ABC News,” claimed that “starting this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol.” The news outlet added in highly dramatic and alarming tones:
The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.
None of that happened. There was virtually no unrest or violence during inauguration week — except for some anti-Biden protests held by leftist and anarchist protesters that resulted in a few smashed windows at the Oregon Democratic Party and some vandalism at a Starbucks in Seattle. “Trump supporters threatened state Capitols but failed to show on Inauguration Day,” was the headline NBC News chose to try to justify this gap between media claims and reality.
This threat seems wildly overblown by the combination of media outlets looking for ratings, law enforcement agencies searching for power, and Democratic Party operatives eager to exploit the climate of fear for a new War on Terror.
But now is not a moment when there is much space for questioning anything, especially not measures ostensibly undertaken in the name of combatting white-supremacist right-wing extremism — just as no questioning of supposed security measures was tolerated in the wake of the 9/11 attack. And so the scenes of soldiers on the streets of the nation’s capital, there in the thousands and for an indefinite period of time, is provoking little to no concern.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that a mere seven months ago, a major controversy erupted when The New York Times published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) which, at its core, advocated the deployment of military troops to quell the social unrest, protests and riots that erupted over the summer after the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. To justify the deployment of National Guard and active duty military forces, Cotton emphasized how many people, including police officers, had been seriously maimed or even killed as part of that unrest:
Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop. This is “somebody’s granddaddy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.
(Cotton’s claim that police officers “bore the brunt of the violence” was questionable, given how many protesters were also killed or maimed, but it is true that numerous police officers were attacked, including fatally).
Cotton acknowledged that the central cause of the protests was a just one, noting they were provoked by “the wrongful death of George Floyd.” He also strongly affirmed the right of people to peacefully protest in support of that cause, accusing those justifying the violence of “a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters,” adding: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.”
But he insisted that, absent military reinforcements, innocent people, principally ones in poor communities, will suffer. “These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives,” Cotton wrote, adding: “Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.”
The backlash to the publication of this op-ed was immediate, intense, and, at least in my memory, unprecedented. Very few people were interested in engaging the merits of Cotton’s call for a deployment of troops in order to prove the argument was misguided.
Their view was not that Cotton’s plea for soldiers in the streets was misguided, but that advocacy for it was so obscene, so extremist, so dangerous and repugnant, that the mere publication of the op-ed by The Paper of Record was an act of grave immorality.
“I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” pronounced the paper’s Nikole Hannah-Jones in a now-deleted tweet. The New York Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner posted a multi-tweet denunciation that compared Cotton to an anti-Semite who “says, ‘The Jew is a pig,’” argued that “hatred dressed up as opinion is not something I have to withstand,” and concluded with this flourish: “I love working at the Times and most days of the week I’m very proud to be part of its mission. But tonight, I understand the people who treat me like I work at a tobacco company.”
Former NYT editor and Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen announced, also in a now-deleted tweet: “I spent some of the happiest and most productive years of my life working for the New York Times. So it is with love and sadness that I say: running this puts Black @nytimes staff – and many, many others – in danger.” That publication of the Cotton op-ed “puts Black New York Times staff in danger” became a mantra recited by more journalists than one can list.
Two editors — including the paper’s Editorial Page editor James Benett and a young assistant editor Adam Rubenstein — were forced out of their jobs, in the middle of a pandemic, for the crime not of endorsing Cotton’s argument but merely airing it. Media reports attributed their departure to a “staff revolt.” The paper itself appended a major editor’s note: “We have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” In addition to alleged flaws in the editorial process, the paper also said “the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”
There is a meaningful difference between deploying National Guard troops and active duty soldiers on American streets. But both measures are extraordinary, create a climate of militarization, have a history of resulting in excessive force against citizens engaged in peaceful protest and constitutionally protected dissent, and present threats and dangers to civil liberties far beyond ordinary use of law enforcement.
Why was the idea of troops in American streets so grotesque and offensive in June, 2020 but so normalized now? Why were these troops likely to indiscriminately arrest and murder black reporters and other journalists over the summer but are now trusted to protect them? And what does it say about the current climate, and the serious dangers it poses, that the public is being trained so easily to acquiesce to extreme measures in the name of domestic security?
We are witnessing the media and their public treat what ought to be regarded with great suspicion as not only normal but desirable, all through the manipulation of fears and inflation of threats. That does not bode well for those who seek to impede the imminent attempt to begin a new domestic War on Terror.
Parents shocked as Disney+ blocks kids younger than 7 from watching ‘racist’ ‘Peter Pan,’ ‘Dumbo’
“The Aristocats” was hit, too, reportedly because it has a Siamese cat character called Shun Gon.
Amazon Files Motion Against Mail-In Voting
Jeff Bezos and Amazon do not want their workers voting by mail on unionization.
Amazon says mail-in voting wouldn't be "valid or fair” and is encouraging in-person voting instead pic.twitter.com/1nBozsGqAH
— TalkRadio 77 WABC (@77WABCradio) January 24, 2021
For Most Americans, The Hipocrisy Never Ceases To Amaze. Apparently, Amazon Agrees With Donald J. Trump & Bill Barr: Voting By Mail Is Not A Good Idea.
“We believe that the best approach to a valid, fair and successful election is one that is conducted manually, in-person,” an Amazon spokesperson told news outlets. “We will continue to insist on measures for a fair election, and we want everyone to vote, so our focus is ensuring that’s possible.” ~ Click Here For More
Braynard on Fighting Corporate Censorship: “We have a plan, and it’s time to act!”
Look Ahead America has released its plan for fighting corporate censorship and is calling on patriots everywhere to join the effort.
“Social media networks, tech companies, and financial institutions are not entitled to tax dollars paid by citizens whom they censor, blacklist, and deplatform for engaging in legal speech and political activity,” said Look Ahead America Executive Director Matt Braynard. “So we’re calling on citizens to lobby state legislatures to declare government money and contracts off limits to such companies.”
“We’ve released a list of policy objectives to guide legislation on this issue covering everything from marketing spending, technology contracts, and divestment. And we’re training citizens on how to be grassroots lobbyists to advocate for these reforms at the state capitols.”
Look Ahead America will be hosting its first free, online-training session on how citizens can become grassroots lobbyist on Wednesday, January 27, and has released a copy of the policy objectives on its website, lookaheadamerica.org/speech.
Return to the New Normal – Ben and Glenn’s After Hours #5
In an episode slightly delayed by Ben’s melodramatic hypochondria (aka hospitalized with appendicitis), Ben and Glenn discuss the media’s swooning on Inauguration Day, what this suggests about how the press will likely cover Biden/Harris, the serious dangers of the new War on Terror being planned, and whether a left/right coalition is possible to stop i…
The Moronic Firing of Will Wilkinson Illustrates Why Fear and Bad Faith Mob Demands Reign Supreme
Will Wilkinson is about as mainstream and conventional a thinker as one can find, and is unfailingly civil and restrained in his rhetoric. But yesterday, he was fired by the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked, the Niskanen Center, and appears on the verge of being fired as well by The New York Times, where he is a contributing writer. This multi-pronged retribution is due to a single tweet that was obviously satirical and sarcastic and for which he abjectly apologized. But no matter: the tweet has been purposely distorted into something malevolent and the prevailing repressive climate weaponized it against him.
Neither Wilkinson nor his tweet are particularly interesting. What merits attention here is the now-pervasive climate that fostered this tawdry episode, and which has unjustly destroyed countless reputations and careers with no sign of slowing down.
During the Bush and Obama years, Wilkinson worked at the libertarian CATO Institute but, even then, he was not much of a libertarian. As he himself explained, he is far more of a standard-issue neoliberal that one finds everywhere throughout DC think tanks, the op-ed pages of large newspapers, and the green rooms of CNN, just with a bit wonkier style of expression and a few vague libertarian gestures on some isolated issues. That self-description was in 2012, and he since then has become even more of a standard liberal during the Trump era, which is why the Paper of Record made him a contributor opinion writer where he published articles under such bold and groundbreaking headlines as “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020.”
On Wednesday, the night of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Wilkinson posted this now-deleted tweet in which he was obviously not calling for violence. He was instead sardonically noting that anti-Pence animus became a prevailing sentiment among some MAGA followers over the last month, including reports that at least a few of those who breached the Capitol were calling for Pence’s hanging on treason grounds, thus ironically enabling liberals and MAGA followers to “unite” over that desire:
The next morning, a right-wing hedge fund manager and large-money GOP donor, Gabe Hoffman, flagged this tweet and claimed to believe that Wilkinson “call[ed] for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched.” Hoffman also tweeted at Wilkinson’s New York Times bosses to ask if they have “any comment on your ‘contributing opinion writer’ calling for violence against a public official?,” and then tweeted at Wilkinson’s other bosses at the think tank to demand the same.
It is unclear whether Hoffman really believed what he was saying or was just trying to make a point that liberals should be forced to live under these bad faith, repressive “cancel culture” standards he likely blames them for creating and imposing on others. This is how he responded when I posed that question:
I was not attempting anything. Numerous major news outlets reported on Wilkinson’s tweet, including Fox News. I simply documented the events on my Twitter feed yesterday. Clearly, many liberal journalists were outraged at his firing, noticed my documentation, and decided to inexplicably blame me for his firing. It’s ridiculous that many liberal journalists apparently had nothing better to do on Twitter, than blame a guy with less than 10,000 followers documenting events, for getting Wilkinson fired, considering many major news outlets reported on Wilkinson’s tweet.
When I pressed further on whether he really believed that Wilkinson’s tweet was an earnest call for assassination or whether he was just demanding that perceived “cancel culture” standards be applied equally, he responded: “I did not take a position either way on the matter. Wilkinson is perfectly capable of explaining the tweet and his intended meaning, since he wrote it. Clearly, given the content, the least one can expect is that he should give that explanation.”
Either way, intentional or not, Hoffman’s distorted interpretation of Wilkinson’s tweet produced instant results. That afternoon, Wilkinson posted a long and profuse apology to Twitter in which he made clear that he did not intend to advocate violence, but still said: “Last night I made an error of judgment and tweeted this. It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence. That’s always wrong, even as a joke. It was especially wrong at a moment when unity and peace are so critical. I’m deeply sorry and vow not to repeat the mistake. . . . [T]here was no excuse for putting the point the way I did. It was wrong, period.”
At least for now, that apology fell on deaf ears. The president and co-founder of the Niskanen Center, Jerry Taylor, quickly posted a statement (now deleted without comment) announcing Wilkinson’s immediate firing, a statement promptly noted by Hoffman:
Wilkinson’s job with The New York Times is also clearly endangered. A spokesperson for the paper told Fox News: “Advocating violence of any form, even in jest, is unacceptable and against the standards of The New York Times. We’re reassessing our relationship with Will Wilkinson.”
So a completely ordinary and unassuming liberal commentator is in jeopardy of having his career destroyed because of a tweet that no person in good faith could possibly believe was actually advocating violence and which, at worst, could be said to be irresponsibly worded. And this is happening even though everyone knows it is all based on a totally fictitious understanding of what he said. Why?
It is important to emphasize that Wilkinson’s specific plight is the least interesting and important aspect of this story. Unlike most people subjected to these sorts of bad faith reputation-wrecking attacks, he has many influential media friends and allies who are already defending him — including New York Times columnists Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat — and I would be unsurprised if this causes the paper to keep him and the Niskanen Center to reverse its termination of him.
All of this is especially ironic given that the president of this colorless, sleepy think tank — last seen hiring the colorless, sleepy Matt Yglesias — himself has a history of earnestly and non-ironically advocating actual violence against people. As Aaron Sibarium documented, Taylor took to Twitter over the summer to say that he wishes BLM and Antifa marchers had “rushed” the St. Louis couple which famously displayed guns outside their homes and “beat their brains in,” adding: “excuse me if I root for antifa to punch these idiots out.” So that’s the profound, pious believer in non-violence so deeply offended by Wilkinson’s tweet that he quickly fired him from his think tank.
Whatever else might be true of them, the Niskanen Center’s president and The New York Times editors are not dumb enough to believe that Wilkinson was actually advocating that Mike Pence be lynched. It takes only a few functional brain cells to recognize what his actual intent with that tweet was, as poorly expressed or ill-advised as it might have been given the context-free world of Twitter and the tensions of the moment. So why would they indulge all this by firing a perfectly inoffensive career technocrat, all to appease the blatant bad faith and probably-not-even-serious demands of the mob?
Because this is the framework that we all now live with. It does not matter whether the anger directed at the think tank executives or New York Times editors is in good faith or not. It is utterly irrelevant whether there is any validity to the complaints against Wilkinson and the demands that he be fired. The merit of these kinds of grievance campaigns is not a factor.
All that matters to these decision-makers is societal scorn and ostracization. That is why the only thing that can save Wilkinson is that he has enough powerful friends to defend him, enabling them to reverse the cost-benefit calculus: make it so that there is more social scorn from firing Wilkinson than keeping him. Without the powerful media friends he has assembled over the years, he would have no chance to salvage his reputation and career no matter how obvious it was that the complaints against him are baseless.
Humans are social and political animals. We do fundamentally crave and need privacy. But we also crave and need social integration and approval. That it is why prolonged solitary confinement in prison is a form of torture that is almost certain to drive humans insane. It is why John McCain said far worse than the physical abuse he endured in a North Vietnamese prison was the long-term isolation to which he was subjected. It is why modern society’s penchant for removing what had been our sense of community — churches, mosques, and synagogues; union halls and bowling leagues; small-town life — has coincided with a significant increase in mental health pathologies, and it is why the lockdowns and isolation of the COVID pandemic have made all of those, predictably, so much worse.
Those who have crafted a society in which mob anger, no matter how invalid, results in ostracization and reputation-destruction have exploited these impulses. If you are a think tank executive in Washington or a New York Times editor, why would you want to endure the attacks on you for “sanctioning violence” or “inciting assassinations” just to save Will Wilkinson? The prevailing culture vests so much weight in these sorts of outrage mobs that it is almost always easier to appease them than resist them.
The recent extraordinary removal of the social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate — not irrationally, even if cowardly — that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and — as is usually the case — it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.
The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in 2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign political comment at a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations refused to play their songs, Bush supporters burned their albums, and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the Iraqi dictator.
But two recent trends have greatly intensified this mania. Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions — from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art — and this weapon, which they most certainly did not invent, is now vested squarely in their hands.
But all weapons, once unleashed onto the world, will be copied and wielded by opposing tribes. Gabe Hoffman has likely seen powerless workers fired in the wake of the George Floyd killing for acts as trivial as a Latino truck driver innocently flashing an “OK” sign at a traffic light or a researcher fired for posting data about the political effects of violent v. non-violent protests and realized that he could use, or at least trifle with, this power against liberals instead of watching it be used by them. So he did it.
It’s exactly the same dynamic that led liberals to swoon over Donald Trump’s banning from social media and the mass-banning of his followers only to watch yesterday as numerous Antifa accounts were banned for the crime of organizing an anti-Biden march and how, before that, Palestinian journalists and activists have been banned en masse whenever Israel claims their rhetoric constitutes “incitement.”
Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you. And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does. You’ll be left with nothing more than lame and craven pleading that your friends do not deserve the same treatment as your enemies. Force, not principle, will be the sole factor deciding the outcome.
If you’re lucky enough to have important and famous media friends like Will Wilkinson, you have a chance to survive it. Absent that, you have none.
Trump’s Anti-Communist Legacy
President Donald Trump didn’t campaign in 2016 on a promise to confront the global spread of communism, but his efforts over the past four years against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its proxies, and other elements of the communist specter have become the centerpiece of his legacy. Viewed through this lens, the “America First” slogan was a fitting one for a campaign against a communist adversary and a medley of the causes it has co-opted in a decades-long campaign to supplant the United States as the most powerful nation in the world. The CCP has spent decades plundering American wealth through the theft of trade secrets, protectionist trade policies, and market distortion. The regime has used this wealth to fund a behemoth soft power campaign, undermining U.S. interests in every domain and gaining influence over multinational institutions. Despite significant interference from within his own government, Trump confronted the menace head-on …