Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 6

Capitalist Media Coverage of Ukraine: Hopelessly Propagandistic From The Start

Sampling a long lecture series on the history of Ukraine provided by Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, author of "Bloodlands" and said to speak ten languages, one can easily get the impression that years of study are necessary before being able to judge the proxy war currently being fought in Ukraine. But shortcuts can help. Jumping ahead to lecture 20 by Marci Shore, an apparent colleague of Snyder's at Yale, it becomes apparent that hers is the perspective on Ukraine that Americans get night and day in the capitalist media, with everything romanticized as glorious self-defense against dark, oppressive Russia, replete with quotes from Polish Solidarity activists of old in an apparent attempt to convince us that Stalin is still in power in Moscow.

 

What we don't get from this and badly need, is a Russian nationalist perspective, which could teach us that Russia, no less than Ukraine, has its own inspiring, self-sacrificing heroes and noble acts, dedicated to rectifying outrages against its national sovereignty. In short, the United States is getting at most only half the story on Ukraine.

 

Everyone should be able to guess what would have happened if, following WWII, Mexico and Canada had been taken over by pro-Communist governments with Communist military bases placed right on the U.S.border, after which Communist incursions were launched into Texas, killing Anglos and banning English, even burning a few dozen American patriots alive in a Walmart for good measure. Would the U.S. have refrained from using force at that point? Of course not. Washington would have nuked Russia and China off the map long before matters go to that point. What accounts for Putin's restraint in not doing the same to the U.S.? This is a badly under-investigated question in the West.

 

Judging by the steady expansion of BRICS it appears that more and more of the world is well aware of U.S. hypocrisy, whatever it may think of Vladimir Putin.

 

Timothy Snyder series available via link below.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_

We Are Looking For Palestine

The sun rises and moves around.

It sets to visit other places.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

The birds wake up and look for food.

They chirp on the blossoming trees, laden with fruit, 

with peaches, apples, apricots, and oranges.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

The sea waves lap against the shore.

They glitter and dance with the fishers' boats.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

People travel to relatives and friends. 

They book round-trip tickets, stuff their suitcases

with gifts and books and clothes.

And we, we are still looking for Palestine.

Sir, we have no airports and seaports;

no trains, or highways.

We have no passable roads, sir!

We do have crutches and wheelchairs,

Young men with one or no legs, 

no longer able to work, as if there was work.

We travel to the West Bank or Egypt for surgery, 

even to set a broken leg.

But we need a permit to enter.

We stuff our suitcases with pictures and memories.

They feel very heavy on the ground; 

we can't carry them, neither can the roads.

They scar the surface of the earth.

We get lost in the past, present, and future.

When a child is born, we feel sad for him or her. 

A child is born here to suffer, sir!

A mother feels the great pain in labor.

A child cries after leaving her dark place.

In Palestine, our dark is not safe.

In Palestine, children always cry.

If we want to travel, we leave many times.

In Gaza, you leave via either Erez or Rafah,

a hard escape to make,

so we search for the visa interview.

Cairo, Istanbul, Amman? (But not in Palestine!)

We don't have embassies, sir!

The one in Jerusalem is farther

than the Andromeda Galaxy.

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years.

But our years stay heavy and dark.

It would take trillions of years.

Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.

Only cemeteries don't mind our bodies.

We no longer look for Palestine.

Our time is spent dying.

Soon, Palestine will search for us,

for our whispers, for our footsteps,

our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.

----Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise

Perverse Incentive Structure of Capitalism Responsible for UnitedHealth Executive's Assassination

The incoming Trump Administration is preparing to compel obedience to capitalist health care that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year by labeling lack of sympathy for the recently slain UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson as "terrorism." 

And they do not mean sympathy for him for having fallen into the tragedy of getting rich by denying people needed medical treatment, a form of legalized killing far more deadly than Luigi Mangione's lone act of assassination. They mean the mawkish sentimentality of treating Thompson as a selfless leader and dedicated father without regard for the immense destructiveness of the productive role he willingly embraced. Who cares, in other words, for the vast numbers of Americans injured and killed by a Profit Care system that considers them mere collateral damage in the feverish quest for limitless private gain.

Philosopher Irami Osei-Frimpong (see his wonderful podcast - The Funky Academic) has a helpful suggestion for dealing with this grotesque situation. Noting that the upcoming Mangione Trial is sure to dominate the national attention in 2025, he recommends we take advantage of popular anger to form a universal public health care party that will directly challenge for-profit health care at the ballot box, similar to how the abolitionists formed the Republican Party to challenge the pro-slavery Whigs in the 1850s. In those years new states were admitted to the Union in pairs, one slave and the other "free," as though the persistence of slavery didn't cripple everyone's freedom. Today we are assigned to Profit Care if we are under 65 and Public Care (Medicare) if we are seniors, as though the superordinate goal of profit didn't cripple the quality of health for everyone.

The United States remains the only developed country that doesn't provide free health care at the point of service, and the only one in that group that still tolerates medical bankruptcies. In fact, inability to pay medical bills is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. To the grief of illness and death is added the grief of economic ruin.

According to President Trump and his team, anyone who has a problem with this is a terrorist.

Assassinated Health Care Executive Was Paid $10 Million A Year To Reject Claims

"There are very few people in the history of the U.S. healthcare industry who had a bigger positive effect on American healthcare than Brian."

-----UnitedHealth Care CEO Andrew Witty on assassinated executive Brian Thompson, who increased the rate of rejected health care claims for the company, after it had already achieved the highest rejection rate in the industry 

Source: "Bill Burr GOES OFF on United CEO Killing," Breaking Points (podcast), December 9, 2024

The Public Life of Noam Chomsky

 Shame Was The Spur

 

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”

 

                                    -----NormanFinkelstein

 

“A gargantuan influence.”

 

                                    -----ChrisHedges

 

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . .heroic.”

 

                                    -----ArundhatiRoy

 

“Preposterously thorough.”

 

                                    -----EdwardSaid

 

“[A] fierce talent.”

                                               

                                    -----EduardoGaleano

 

“An intellectual cannon.”

                                               

                                    ----IsraelShamir

 

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”

                                               

                                    -----KathleenCleaver

 

 

by Michael K. Smith

www.legalienate.blogspot.com

 

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mindthat never rested.

 

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten,he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall ofBarcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in NewYork City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everythinga brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richestintellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off byhimself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reactionto the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance tofulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field oflinguistics with his book, SyntacticStructures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though hiscompetence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, hethrew himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters andarticles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrationsand draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked afive-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongsideNorman Mailer, who described him in Armiesof the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, andan air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”Atforty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, afterthe young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-styleraid.

 

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissidentintellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood inQuaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at thecenter of the Pentagon system at MIT.

 

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle ofthe Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservienceto power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment tofreedom, equality, and democracy, with abundant demonstrations of its actualvalues - greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim thatthe establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of thepowerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are apropaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood oflies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerousmisperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperialreality.

 

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble questto defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colonydesigned to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a gloriousexample of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a pathto self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom andslavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxyof neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”

 

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quicklyearned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues(the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a publicintellectual in American society at large and internationally. Thesecontrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia inhow he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’spolitical lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiencesthroughout the world.

 

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for hislack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizinghim as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentialsin that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. WhenChomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisitionwas behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language byimitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correctuse of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to accountfor the richness of even the simplest language use - obvious from an early agein all healthy children - who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve neverheard before.

 

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rationalscrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacityis actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriatestage of biological development in the same way that secondary sexcharacteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so manyother Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of theunfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor tointernational academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field hisun-credentialed insights utterly transformed.

 

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect lifefrom a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professionalacclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young childrengrowing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal andprofessional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared onthe horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into amajor activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along theway.

 

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenariesand client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist forcethat had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence withthe ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam throughnational elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders,the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years.Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force inself-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. clientstate) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itselfin power.

 

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National LiberationFront was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnameseindependence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia,and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all ofVietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, andno North-South military conflict.That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugatingthe South.

 

To head off the politicalthreat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. AirForce to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into“strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from thenationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willinglysupporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, butwithout a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.

 

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venueswere scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actuallygrateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from gettingbeaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking severalnights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomskyremembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where afew people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included thetopics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope thatmaybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “inthe very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start,helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism inprinciple but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomskycalled out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the warbe terminated without pre-conditions.

 

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy,Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindlyoppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fightin a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasizedthat a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civiliansociety of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirablecollapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. interventionin Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, thePentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poorand low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affectedby popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue ofunjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the mosteconomically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt thata universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into beingby strongly coercive economic forces.

 

Unlike hisestablishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracytheory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for knownfacts. For example, while there was no nationalinterest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing thecontagious example of a successful national independence movement in SoutheastAsia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to“go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversedthe outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officiallysocialist world instead of Washington.

 

Given theunanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky waskept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in thecorporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that hecouldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him offtrack, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?”– followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a hereticalconclusion.

 

Given his mastery ofevidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment criticsto confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them everdid. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardmentof inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of thelatter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouragedthem to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but noneof them did.

 

William F. Buckleyhad his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on hisown show – Firing Line. “Your historyis quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after thecelebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.

 

Neo-con RichardPerle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention anddenial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing developmentmodels, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason he wasreduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t findestablishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeplycynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.

 

Boston Universitypresident John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper contextwhen mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop OscarRomero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of theindependent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclosewhat context could possibly redeem such atrocities.

 

Dutch Minister ofDefense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis oncapitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions asa “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted everyone of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance toevaluating the thesis advanced in Chomsky and Herman’s book, “ManufacturingConsent,” which was the purpose of the debate.

 

The term“Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, thepractices of which more than amply confirm Chomsky and Herman’s thesis thatunder capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as apropaganda service for the national security state and the private intereststhat dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Chomsky andHerman’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’sallegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemyof the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres inEast Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactlywhat the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own sidewill be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggeratedor invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never inevidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.

 

These fourintellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of theestablishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraidto do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” relatedCockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds thathe was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issueshead-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That waswhy, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targetedChomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substituteinsult and distortion.”(emphasis added)

 

So unprepared werethese establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that theyactually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even againsttheir repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertionsabout him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to theeditor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.

 

Rather than takeoffense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If hehadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he wasdoing something wrong.

 

As unperturbed as hewas by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propagandapassed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told thestory of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he wasgrinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined thatthis was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeedgrinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.

 

The explanation forthese disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilificationwas infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But thedeadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being,unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.

 

This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping himwith the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. Anavid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, ofbooks growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from thePhiladelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realistclassics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev,Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, andMarxist and anarchist texts.

 

This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout hislife, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he wasalways surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read inseveral lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could beamusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol onceheard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, itturned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoiningroom.

 

Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that hewould liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for anyordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, accordingto his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion,in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the generalpublic, an important part of his reading load.Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personalcorrespondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest inChomsky’s work surged.His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mailsevery night until 3:00 a.m.,while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personalletters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting outthe writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s readingwas beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifesteditself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on DavidKimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectualstardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.

 

Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have beenmatched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to moreAmericans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures andtalks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era thatmeant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint,whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations allover the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, NewZealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos,Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activistsinvited him to visit.

 

The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followedthem. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleledmastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens ofdifferent topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tacticsto drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popularresistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminatingprecision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishingarray of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, andclarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflictspast and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to anymerely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereasChomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediatelyand historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to thenext, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decadeafter decade after decade.

 

The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether hespoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigiousuniversity. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky –were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too fewintellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education andpopular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strongpublic demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in beinga “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented afailure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public morethan it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to hisspeaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunningoratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudlyboring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences withemotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.

 

This preference for the analytical over the emotionallygratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the earlyeighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked theemergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popularsupport for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclearweapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions ofnuclear annihilation.

 

From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publiclyannounced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a worldwired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view thatparalyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achievingnuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention neededto be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy thatproduced outcomes. When theNuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York Cityin 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew fromthe event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastationof Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement topotentially terminal superpower confrontation.

 

While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on theawesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approachinsultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts wereultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headedby Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmationhearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.

 

In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views ofpopular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued togrow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (foryears after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably befound in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim forhis analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment toexposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he wonpraise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radicaljournalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, politicalhopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers,political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout theworld. With their constant compliments  ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he neverlost his humility.

 

Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressedby Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to himwhenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomskyhad no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed mea kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss yearslater, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative,and brilliant.”

 

Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed byChomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essencefor immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn aboutrefugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-pagebook on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute apropaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citinga footnote buried hundreds of page into the text. Branfman was also struck bythe fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to hisdeepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrificeffects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.Overall,Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combatinginjustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.   

 

A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted hisamazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was thetitle of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hourworkdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the nightdrinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available formorning interviews.

 

Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’sprovision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the dataof a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle andoppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice.“Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,”wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”

 

Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbeywrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.

 

British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky“extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking tohim “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” hemarveled.

 

Referring to the dissident classic, “American Power and theNew Mandarins,” historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailedChomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration ormisrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability“to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows forseveral possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, saidDuberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share hisposition – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talentin the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism soprevalent today.

 

The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressedadmiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for theawesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mindof such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering andinjustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although morethan any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over abreathtaking range.”

 

Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectualvertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” andimpossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures hisvoice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position[was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against thebetrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” Hisuniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication ofthe radical nature of his dissent.”

 

People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling ironyto describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going southsitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. . . . It occurredto me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speakerhimself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’sstaggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification,“As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting thatany number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly renderedobsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’spolitical work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I canread.”

 

Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’sapparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than forthe specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end ofthe Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear aman from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, adistinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with suchappreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that hisappreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language studyitself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seatedcreative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.

 

Where paradox doesexist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervertnatural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends ofpower. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population,as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible andeasily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.

 

In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using ourspecies intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself ingrowing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticismdisplacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survivalvalue of such intelligence.

 

Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about whichdirection our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escapelooming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with theunderdog.”About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”

 

In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving himparalyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.

 

His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however,remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, heraises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.

 

Still compassionate and defiant at 96.

 

Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.

 

Happy Birthday.

 

Mailer quoted in Robert F.Barksy, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 129.

 

Chomsky’s childhood, seeMark Achbar, ed. “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (BlackRose, 1994) pps. 44-50. Also, Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life ofDissent,” MIT Press, 1997) Chapter 1. Chomsky at Fred Hampton’s funeral seeChristopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at theUniversity of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfic8Z818

 

On U.S. neo-Nazi clientstates, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection AndThird World Fascism,” (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam,see Noam Chomsky, “American Power and the New Mandarins – Historical andPolitical Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; “At War With Asia – Essays onIndochina,” (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; “For Reasons of State,” (TheNew Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle –The United States, Israel & The Palestinians,” (South End, 1983); NoamChomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power – The Middle East And U.S.Foreign Policy,” (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, “Middle East Illusions,”(Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, WorldOrders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).

 

Chomsky appears to neverhave confused symbols of knowledge (credentials) with knowledge itself, and hehad early evidence that the brightest minds were often without credentials. Theuncle whose newsstand he helped work was extremely intelligent and well-read,even had a lay practice in psychoanalysis, but never went beyond fourth grade.Similarly, though his mother never went to college, Noam agreed that she was“much smarter” than his father and his friends, who he said “were all Ph.Ds,big professors and rabbis,” but “talking nonsense mostly.” On Chomsky’s uncle,see Mark Achbared.,“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994), p.50. On Chomsky’s mother, see Noam Chomsky (with David Barsamian), “ImperialAmbitions –Conversations On The Post-9/11 World,” (Metropolitan Books, 2005), p. 158.

 

Chomsky found politicalactivism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See MarkAchbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose,1994) pps. 65-6.

 

Noam Chomsky interviewed byPaul Shannon, “The Legacy of the Vietnam War” –Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18,November-December, 1982, pps. 1-5, available at www.chomsky.info.net

 

Noam Chomsky, “The ChomskyReader,” (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 224-5.

 

Chomsky quoted in Milan Rai,“Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995), p. 14.

 

Christopher Hitchens, CovertAction Information Bulletin event at the University of the District ofColombia, C-SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

 

Peter R. Mitchell and JohnSchoeffel, eds. “Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky,” (New Press,2002) pps. 35-6

 

See Noam Chomsky, “Vietnamand United States Global Strategy,” The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps.232-5.

 

“Firing Line with William F.Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.

 

“The Perle-Chomsky Debate –Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988,transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.

 

“On the Contras – NoamChomsky Debates with John Silver,” The Ten O’clock News, 1986, transcriptavailable at www.chomsky.info.net

 

Mark Achbar, “ManufacturingConsent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31

 

There was also a “debate”between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz in 2005 on the future of Israel/Palestine,although Dershowitz’s performance was not much more than intellectual clowning,with repeated “I” declarations demonstrating his inability to move beyondnarcissistic fantasy (“I believe,” “I think,” “I call for,” “I propose,” “Isupport,” “I have written,” “I can tell you,” “I favor,” “I see,” “I hope,”etc.). He irrelevantly quoted Ecclesiastes, called for a “Chekhovian” asopposed to “Shakespearean” peace, and ignored decades of total U.S.-Israeliopposition to anything remotely like national liberation for Palestinians.Chomsky wryly congratulated him for the one truthful statement he made, i.e.,that Chomsky had been a youth counselor at Camp Massad in the Pocono Mountainsin the 1940s. See “Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on theIsrael-Palestinian Conflict,” DemocracyNow, December 23, 2005

 

Alexander Cockburn in DavidBarsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (CommonCourage, 1992) p. xii

 

An understandable reactiongiven the “Newspaper of Record’s” grotesque distortions. On Chomsky’steeth-grinding, see Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles ofDissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. ix;Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at theUniversity of the District of Colombia, C_SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

 

Robert Barsky, “Chomsky – ALife of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) pps. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., “ManufacturingConsent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44

 

Noam Chomsky in DavidBarsamian, “Class Warfare – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage,1996) p. 26

 

“Noam Chomsky: RebelWithout a Pause,” 2003 Documentary

Robert Barsky, “NoamChomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 45

Bev Bousseau Stohl,“Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 53

Robert F. Barsky, “NoamChomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997,) p. 10

“A narrow focus on strategicweapons tends to reinforce the basic principle of the ideological system . . .that the superpower conflict is the central element of world affairs, to whichall else is subordinated.” Noam Chomsky, “Priorities For Averting TheHolocaust,” in “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p.

 p. 283

“The conclusion is that ifwe hope to avert nuclear war, the size and character of nuclear arsenals is asecondary consideration.” Noam Chomsky, “The Danger of Nuclear War and What WeCan Do About It,”  “RadicalPriorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 272.

“Chomsky and Krauss: AnOrigins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013

 

Fred Branfman, “When ChomskyWept,” Salon, June 17, 2012

 

Bev Boisseau Stohl, “ChomskyAnd Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 92

 

Alexander Cockburn in DavidBarsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (CommonCourage, 1992) pps. x - xi

 

Edward Abbey, ed., “The Bestof Edward Abbey,” (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.

 

Quoted in the documentaryRebel Without a Pause, 2003.

 

Martin Duberman quoted onthe back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first VintageBooks edition).

 

Edward Said, “The Politicsof Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263

 

James Peck, introduction toThe Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. vii - xix

 

 

Howard Zinn, “The Future ofHistory – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40.Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborationswith activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exactfigure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells thestory of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activistsin Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, andthe other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and farfrom unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps anunderstandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings onHim,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.

 

Paul Jay, “Rising Fascismand the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg,” The Analysis News, You Tube November2, 2024

 

Bill Moyers, “A World ofIdeas – Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women,” (Doubleday, 1989). Theinterview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview onDissent (1988),” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEYJM...

 

Milan Rai, “Chomsky’sPolitics,” (Verso, 1995) p. 6

 

Chomsky in “Chronicles ofDissent – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. 159

“Noam Chomsky,hospitalizado en Brasil,” La Jornada, June 12, 2024 (Spanish)

 

Chomsky was born on December7, 1928.

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RFK Jr. Praises Wacky Wellness Gurus, Blames Fauci For Everything From Bad Breath To Jock Itch

Son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1976, later earning a law degree from the University of Virginia. His career has been in environmental law, but he is best known for his anti-vaccine advocacy.

In 2011, he founded Children's Health Defense, an organization rooted in the conviction that vaccines cause more harm than the diseases they are supposed to protect us against. Financial contributions were modest until he began imitating Texans For Vaccine Choice, a "medical freedom" group warning loudly of vaccine harms. Donations then soared, increasing from $1 million to $15 million in three years while Kennedy preached the gospel of freedom to reject vaccines, which he claimed took more lives than they saved. By this time the Covid pandemic was in full swing and RFK had millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with his Twitter posts garnering more attention than those of the CDC. Children's Health Defense had become one of the most popular alternative and natural medicine sites in the world.

In July 2020, RFK announced that "people with African American blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood; they're much more sensitive." When baseball Hall of Fame member Hank Aaron died of natural causes the following year, he claimed that it was part of a "wave of suspicious deaths among the elderly following administration of Covid vaccines." In a propaganda film that debuted the same year (Medical Racism: The New Apartheid), he claimed that Covid vaccines were "just one huge experiment on Black Americans."

Two years before Covid arrived two babies in Samoa died due to nurses' error in preparing their measles vaccines (muscle relaxant was used instead of water). RFK responded via Facebook and in person, flying to Samoa to meet with the president and local anti-vaccine activists. He stirred up enough fear so that vaccine rates plummeted. In 2019, a measles outbreak hit the island and dozens of children died, nearly all of them less than four-years-old. RFK blamed the vaccines.

This is his standard message to parents on the topic: "It is criminal medical malpractice to give a child one of these vaccines." No professional medical association anywhere agrees with him.

Though he claims to be "pro-vaccine," he regularly compares vaccination to the Holocaust. On January 23, 2022, he told a rally, "Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did," an ironic comment given that her story ended in Auschwitz. He added that Jewish children under the Nazis had more freedom than American children today, and that Covid vaccine mandates were intended to make everyone a slave.

In the Trump era that kind of messaging resonated well enough so that he was able to quickly sell more than half a million copies of his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci - Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health," in which he argues that Fauci and other public health officials are dishonest actors, having fallen under the control of Big Pharma, dark money, and billionaires like Bill Gates.

The book is a tediously prolonged diatribe against Fauci, starting off with a Heroic Heroes honor roll, a rather dubious list of people's champions that includes "holistic psychiatrist" Kelly Brogan, who touts the health benefits of coffee enemas and urine therapy, and alternative medicine practitioner Tom Cowan, whose medical practice was crippled by a five-year probation imposed for his having prescribed an unapproved quack cancer treatment to a patient he never met. Both of these "heroes" deny the validity of germ theory, and Cowan even denies that the heart is a pump. 

When public health officials were struggling to figure out how to respond to the novel coronavirus, Brogan announced that pandemic response efforts were akin to the "dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust." For her, vaccines are part of a spiritual fight to the death with modern medicine.

Keeping pace with such heroes is no easy task, but RFK manages it with apparent ease. He actually endorses injecting a form of bleach as a treatment for Covid, approvingly citing the teaching protocols of popular alternative health practitioner Dr. David Brownstein on the matter. Says Brownstein: 

"We've been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can't be any different. In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We'd have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone." (emphasis added)

The butts out the window image is priceless, but just to be clear, RFK is talking about intravenous injections of hydrogen peroxide, which is a form of bleach. So we can stop pretending that Donald Trump is unique in believing that putting bleach in our bodies can cure Covid.*

RFK is also a full-blown AIDS-denier who says the symptoms we associate with an AIDS diagnosis are actually caused by "the gay lifestyle." He quotes Christine Maggiore, without mentioning that she, too, was an AIDS-denier, one who refused treatment and then died of the disease, as did her three-year-old daughter, who was infected and denied treatment by her mother. 

Much of this outlook comes from molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, whose work RFK eagerly promotes, who claimed that anti-retroviral drugs prescribed to HIV patients were actually poison, and convinced former South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) that that was the case. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic the South African government argued that HIV does not cause AIDS and antiretroviral drugs are not useful for AIDS patients. Multiple studies show that about 330,000 unnecessary AIDS deaths resulted from acting on this mistaken view.

But it is Anthony Fauci who supposedly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and RFK blames him for every real or imagined negative outcome during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Nowhere does he note or care that Fauci's political role was that of an adviser who didn't create policy, and whose recommendations could be and often were ignored. He refuses to accept that Fauci's responsibility for events was drastically less than he likes to imagine it was.

Nor does he take proper account of the complexity of events that contributed to the Covid disaster. For example, any fair recounting of the pandemic would have to concede that obfuscation early on in China guaranteed that pandemic response would go badly elsewhere. Beijing failed to make clear to the world that they hadn't contained the virus. 

The Trump administration had already contributed its own serious error, scrapping an extensive and detailed pandemic preparedness plan started by the George W. Bush administration and continued by Obama, leaving the U.S. unable to mount a rapid response to SARS-CoV-2. 

To make matters worse, the CDC made a big mistake in testing. WHO had its own test, which they were distributing to various countries throughout the world, as per standard practice, so that monitoring and testing for the virus could begin immediately. But the CDC opted to make its own test, which didn't work, giving lots of false negatives. This left U.S. health authorities weeks behind in detecting how far and fast the virus was spreading, which meant they had to rely on more extreme responses like lockdowns than they otherwise might have had to do. 

After thus forfeiting the chance to employ less drastic measures, the Trump administration then made the situation considerably worse by deciding not to lead at all, defaulting to a free-for-all between the states, which wasted colossal energy fighting over supplies and improvising fifty competing ways of responding to the crisis. Washington released general guidelines, but left implementation up to state governors. 

Blaming Fauci alone for all this makes little sense, however gratifying it may be to heap rage and contempt on a convenient scapegoat, and it is simply preposterous to describe the pandemic response as a coup d'etat against democracy, as RFK does. Pandemic measures have long since been lifted, and life proceeds very much like it did before Covid existed. Coup d'etat?

Regarding Covid as a merely "flu-like virus," RFK blows off concern over the damage it has inflicted, and lambastes lockdown measures for allegedly being solely responsible for the immense economic fallout and psychological damage done, especially to children. We have no way of knowing, he says, how many people died of isolation, economic privation, and other lockdown induced outcomes, though he assumes the number has to be enormous, because U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during lockdown.

But he can't even bring himself to consider that that narrowing of life span might have had something to do with a deadly new virus killing thousands of Americans every day and over a million people in two years. No amount of evidence can shake his conviction that the lockdowns did everything and the virus nothing.

Sensible people, however, cannot ignore the fact that Covid itself caused economic chaos as well as considerable emotional damage. Roughly one hundred thousand children lost their primary or secondary care-givers to the disease, an inherently traumatizing experience. Also, millions of children were infected and many thousands hospitalized for Covid in the U.S., and it would be foolish to think that all of them emerged emotionally unscathed. On top of that, children who suffer from Covid can be at risk for Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome and also long-Covid, not to mention that upwards of two thousand children actually died of the disease. 

All of this has to have contributed to sharply negative mental health outcomes for a wide swathe of the population, but RFK Jr. doesn't mention any of it, so fixated is he on assigning sole blame to Anthony Fauci. 

He laments that the rich got richer during the pandemic (bulletin: the rich are always getting richer under capitalism), while small business owners were ruined. This is true, but RFK's version of events simply notes that these things happened and then blames Fauci. He provides no proper analysis of the events themselves and no summation of what we ought to learn from them. For example, he ignores completely the glaring fact that many physicians in private practice were part of the wave of small business collapse, which they definitely would not have been if ivermectin were effective against Covid, as RFK insists that it is. Why didn't physicians write prescriptions for ivermectin if doing so would have saved their patients' lives and their own medical practices? RFK takes no account of what had to have been mass irrationality among doctors if his version of events is correct.

In an effort to convince us that public health officials badly over-reacted to events, RFK expresses regret that we cowered in fear from a virus akin to the flu, without noting that COVID killed more Americans in its first year than the flu did in the previous ten years, and about twice as many Americans as the entire Civil War did by the end of the second pandemic year. It's no simple matter to determine what would credibly constitute over-reaction to death on such a massive scale.

He complains about "two weeks to flatten the curve," as though it were a scientific prediction about the expected course of the pandemic rather than a political slogan, and ignores the fact that a prolonged pandemic response occurs by default if we continually refuse the solution, as RFK did. At no point in the pandemic did he pay any attention to Covid policy direction, preferring a do-nothing response, but without recognizing that refusing the solution simply guarantees the persistence of the problem. By definition policy won't work if people refuse to cooperate in implementing it.

Moving on from Covid, a favorite RFK claim is that none of our childhood vaccines have been safety tested, which is simply false. In fact, every childhood vaccine has to be safety tested, and all of them are closely monitored after being commercially released. That is one good reason why we have such an abundance of evidence demonstrating that anti-vax claims are untrue. 

One of RFK's biggest expressed concerns is the increase in chronic disease in the U.S. starting in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he just blames Fauci and vaccines for the trend, in defiance of logic. In fact, medicine progressed leaps and bounds during this period, and before, and children benefited greatly. In the second half of the 20th century childhood mortality rates decreased dramatically, and vaccines helped to eliminate deadly diseases common among children. Examples include childhood cancers, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, leukemia, and sickle cell disease. But RFK just ignores these developments, presenting a uniformly bleak medical picture and blaming Fauci for everything bad, real or imaginary.

Many of the babies that used to die we are now able to save, although they are often of very low birth weight, which correlates with a higher than average risk of chronic disease later in life. What RFK is clearly saying is that the U.S. was healthier before, when such children didn't survive (emphasis added). Given his training as an environmental lawyer he actually could make a positive contribution here by helping discover the social causes of disease. We know, for example, that children born to low-income families are more likely to develop chronic disease, because of poor nutrition and proximity to pollution sources like waste incinerators, but discovering real causes doesn't interest RFK, who prefers the laziness of blaming vaccines for everything.

He flatly ignores the inconvenient fact that vaccines were being administered to children decades before the 1980s, which, according to him, is when they triggered increased chronic disease. But why did vaccines suddenly turn toxic in that decade and not before? RFK doesn't say.

Unsurprisingly, he also believes that vaccines cause autism, a claim debunked to the point of tedium by many scientific researchers, and thus no longer even worth debating.

Aside from the money it's making him, it's clear that RFK's purpose in writing the book was to indulge a boundless hatred of Anthony Fauci, not illuminate our understanding of the Covid pandemic. This adolescent fixation contrasts sharply with Fauci's efforts to fight the scourge of deadly infectious diseases for his entire career. Most impressive was his relationship with the late Larry Kramer, an aggressively confrontational AIDS activist who denounced Fauci in print as an incompetent idiot and a mass murderer due to the federal government's grossly inadequate AIDS response, but gradually became his close friend after Fauci took no offense and invited Kramer and other activists to participate in AIDS advisory boards and workshops, against the advice of his scientific colleagues. Though their relationship never stopped being contentious, it proved immensely constructive, and Fauci's tearful good-bye to the AIDS activist when he finally succumbed to the disease in 2020 provides moving testimony as to how decent people can collaborate and care for one another even when they are officially opposed.

You won't find any such wisdom in RFK Jr.'s work.

 

*RFK notes in passing how ridiculous Trump's view on using bleach to fight Covid is, without realizing the significance of his own recommendation of hydrogen peroxide.

Sources:

On background information about RFK and Children's Health Defense, see Paul Offit, "Tell Me When It's Over," (National Geographic, 2024), pps. 89-94

On the measles outbreak in Samoa, see Dhruv Khullar, "The Fundamental Problem With RFK Jr.'s Nomination To HHS," The New Yorker, November 24, 2024

On RFK Jr.'s book on Fauci, see "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction," Dr. Dan Wilson, Debunk The Funk, March 2, 2022

On Kelly Brogan and Tom Cowan, see Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Conspirituality - How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, (Public Affairs, 2023) pps. 85, 159

On RFK Jr.'s endorsing injecting ourselves with bleach to ward off Covid, see Dr. Dan Wilson, "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci" - Chapter 1, Debunk The Funk, March 22, 2022

On the deadly consequences of AIDS denialism in South Africa, see Dr. Dan Wilson, "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s Bad Book on Fauci - Chapter 4," Debunk The Funk, April 20, 2022; Also see Anthony Fauci, "On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service,"(Viking, 2024) p. 157. 

On Larry Kramer and Fauci's friendship see Fauci, "On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service," (Viking, 2024) pps. 95-117.

RFK Jr. Praises Wacky Wellness Crusaders and Blames Fauci For Everything From Bad Breath To Jock Itch

RFK Jr. starts off his massive diatribe against Anthony Fauci ("The Real Anthony Fauci") with a Heroic Heroes honor roll, a rather dubious list of people's champions that includes "holistic psychiatrist" Kelly Brogan, who touts the health benefits of coffee enemas and urine therapy, and alternative medicine practitioner Tom Cowan, whose medical practice was crippled by a five-year probation imposed for his having prescribed an unapproved quack cancer treatment to a patient he never met. Both of these "heroes" deny the validity of germ theory, and Cowan even denies that the heart is a pump. 

Brogan also proves curiously eager to convince us that vaccines are part of a spiritual fight to the death with modern medicine. Just as public health officials were struggling to figure out how to respond to the novel coronavirus - no easy task - she announced that their efforts were akin to the "dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust." 

Uh, right.

As though seeking to out-do his heroic heroes, RFK Jr. bizarrely endorses injecting a form of bleach into the bloodstream as a treatment for Covid, which for him is merely a "flu-like virus." He approvingly cites the teaching protocols of popular alternative health practitioner Dr. David Brownstein on the matter. Says Brownstein:

"We've been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can't be any different. In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We'd have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone." (emphasis added)

The butts out the window image is priceless, but just to be clear, RFK is here talking about intravenous injections of hydrogen peroxide, which is a form of bleach. So apparently Donald Trump is not unique in believing injecting bleach may serve as a good medical treatment. RFK explicitly endorses it.

Turning to more serious matters, RFK is a full-blown AIDS-denier who says the disease is caused by "the gay lifestyle." He favorably cites the views of Christine Maggiore, without mentioning that she was an AIDS-denier who refused treatment and then died of the disease, as did her three-year-old daughter, who was infected and denied treatment by her mother. 

Eagerly promoting the AIDS-denial work of Peter Duesberg, RFK claims that anti-retroviral drugs prescribed to HIV patients are actually harming them. Duesberg managed to convince former South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) that antiretrovirals that allowed patients to live with AIDS were actually poison. Mbeki refused to allow patients to have the medicine, leading directly to more than 330,000 unnecessary deaths, according to multiple studies. 

Casually bouncing from accusation to accusation, RFK makes little effort to organize his thought. He seems to have vacuumed up every paranoid anti-vax fantasy off the internet and simply dumped it between the covers of his book, not caring that these recycled delusions have already been thoroughly debunked, some of them many times.

He blames Fauci for every real or imagined negative outcome during the pandemic. Nowhere does he note or care that Fauci's political role was that of an adviser: he didn't create policy, and those who did were free to ignore what he said, and often did. Fauci's responsibility for events was drastically more limited than RFK wants readers to believe.

Nowhere does RFK take account of the complexity of events that contributed to the Covid disaster. For example, any fair account of the pandemic has to note that obfuscation of events early on in China guaranteed that pandemic response would go badly elsewhere. Beijing failed to make clear to the world that they hadn't contained the virus, letting international airplane flights continue taking off after domestic flights had been shut down. 

The U.S. added to this bad response with a serious error of its own. An extensive and detailed pandemic preparedness plan started by the George W. Bush administration and continued by Obama was simply scrapped by Trump, leaving the U.S. unable to mount a rapid response to SARS-CoV-2. To make matters worse, the CDC made a big mistake in testing. WHO had its own test, which they were distributing to various countries throughout the world, as per standard practice, so that monitoring and testing for the virus could begin immediately. But the CDC opted to make its own test, which didn't work, giving lots of false negatives. This left U.S. health authorities weeks behind in detecting how far and fast the virus was spreading, which meant they had to rely on more extreme responses like lockdowns than they otherwise might have had to do. 

After thus forfeiting more sustainable pandemic restraint measures, the Trump administration then made the situation worse by deciding not to lead at all, defaulting to a free-for-all between the states, which wasted colossal energy fighting over supplies and improvising fifty competing ways of responding to the crisis. Washington released general guidelines, but left implementation up to state governors. 

Blaming Fauci alone for all this makes little sense, however gratifying it may be to heap rage and contempt on a convenient scapegoat, and it is simply preposterous to describe the pandemic response as a coup d'etat against democracy, as RFK does. Pandemic measures have long been lifted and life proceeds very much like it did before Covid existed.

Blowing off concern over damage done by Covid, which he dismisses as another name for the flu, RFK lambastes lockdown measures for allegedly having visited immense economic and psychological damage on children. We have no way of knowing, he says, how many people died of isolation and unemployment and other lockdown induced causes, though he assumes the number has to be enormous, because U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during lockdown,

But he can't even bring himself to consider that that might have had something to do with a deadly new virus killing thousands of Americans every day and over a million in two years. However implausible, he remains firm in his conviction that the lockdowns did everything and the virus nothing, and that we can't know how extensive the damage was, though RFK obviously wants us to feel free to let our imaginations run wild, which seems to be the aim of his book. 

Sensible people, however, cannot ignore the fact that Covid itself caused considerable emotional damage. Roughly one hundred thousand children lost their primary or secondary care-givers to the disease, an inherently traumatizing experience. Also, millions of children were infected and many thousands hospitalized for Covid in the U.S., and it would be foolish to think that all of them emerged emotionally unscathed. On top of that, children who suffer from Covid can be at risk for Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, and also long-Covid, not to mention that upwards of two thousand children actually died of Covid. 

All of this likely contributed to sharply negative mental health outcomes for a wide swathe of the population, but RFK Jr. doesn't mention any of them, so fixated is he on solely blaming Anthony Fauci for everything bad. 

He talks about how the rich got richer during the pandemic (bulletin: the rich are always getting richer under capitalism), and notes that small business owners were ruined by the lockdowns. This is true, but RFK's version of events simply notes that these things happened, and then blames Fauci. He provides no proper analysis of the events themselves, and no summation of what we ought to learn from them. For example, he ignores the glaring fact that many physicians in private practice were part of the wave of "small business" collapse, which they definitely would not have been if Ivermectin were effective against Covid, as RFK insists it is. Why didn't physicians write prescriptions for Ivermectin if doing so would have saved their patients' lives and their medical practices? RFK doesn't say.

In an effort to convince us that public health officials badly over-reacted to events, RFK laments that we cowered in fear from a mere "flu-like virus," without noting that COVID killed more Americans in its first year than the flu did in the previous ten years, and in two years about twice as many Americans as the Civil War did. It's no simple matter to determine what would credibly constitute over-reaction to death on such a huge scale.

He complains about "two weeks to flatten the curve," without noting that that was a political slogan, not a scientific prediction about the expected course of the pandemic. In any event, a prolonged pandemic response occurs by default if we continually refuse the solution, as RFK did. He wasn't listening to Covid policy direction at any time during the pandemic. How is it not obvious that refusing the solution guarantees the persistence of the problem?  No policy will ever work if people refuse to cooperate in solving it.

Moving on from Covid, a favorite RFK claim is that none of our childhood vaccines have been safety tested, which is simply false. In fact, every childhood vaccine has to be safety tested, and all of them are closely monitored after being commercially released.  That is why we have such an abundance of evidence demonstrating that anti-vax claims are untrue. 

RFK claims to be concerned about the increase in chronic disease in the U.S. starting in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he just blames Fauci and vaccines for the trend, in defiance of logic. In fact, medicine progressed leaps and bounds during this period and before, and children benefited greatly. In the second half of the 20th century childhood mortality rates decreased dramatically, and vaccines helped to eliminate deadly diseases common among children. Examples include childhood cancers, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, leukemia, and sickle cell disease. But RFK just ignores these developments, presenting a uniformly bleak medical picture and blaming Fauci for everything, real or imaginary.

Many of the babies that previously died we are now able to save, although they are often of very low birth weight, which correlates with a higher than average risk of chronic disease later in life. What RFK is saying very clearly is that the U.S. was healthier before when such children didn't survive. Given his training as an environmental lawyer he actually could make a positive contribution here by helping discover the social causes of disease. We know, for example, that children born to low-income families are more likely to develop chronic disease, because of poor nutrition and proximity to pollution sources like waste incinerators.

But working towards solutions doesn't interest him; he prefers the laziness of blaming vaccines for everything. 

He flatly ignores the fact that vaccines were being administered to children decades before the 1980s, which he identifies as the watershed moment when they started producing increased chronic disease. But why did vaccines suddenly turn toxic in that decade and not before? RFK doesn't say.

Unsurprisingly, he also believes that vaccines cause autism, a claim debunked to the point of tedium by many scientific researchers, and thus not even worth debating anymore.

In the end, it's clear that the only thing RFK really cares about doing with his book on Fauci is indulging his boundless loathing for the man. This adolescent fixation contrasts sharply with Fauci's tireless efforts to fight the scourge of deadly infectious diseases, which benefits us all. Most impressive was his relationship with the late Larry Kramer, an aggressively confrontational AIDS activist who publicly accused Fauci of being a mass murderer and an incompetent idiot due to the federal government's grossly inadequate AIDS response, but gradually became his close friend after Fauci took no offense and invited Kramer and other activists to participate in AIDS advisory boards and workshops, against the advice of his scientific colleagues. Though their relationship never stopped being contentious, it proved immensely constructive, and Fauci's tearful good-bye to the AIDS activist when he finally succumbed to the disease in 2020 provides moving testimony as to how decent people can collaborate and care for one another even when they are officially opposed.

You won't find any such wisdom in RFK Jr.

Sources:

On RFK Jr., see "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction," Dr. Dan Wilson, Debunk The Funk, March 2, 2022

On Kelly Brogan and Tom Cowan, see Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Conspirituality - How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, (Public Affairs, 2023) pps. 85, 159

On RFK Jr.'s endorsing injecting ourselves with bleach to ward off Covid, see Dr. Dan Wilson, "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci" - Chapter 1, Debunk The Funk, March 22, 2022

On the deadly consequences of AIDS denialism in South Africa, see Anthony Fauci, On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, (Viking, 2024) p. 157,

On Larry Kramer and Fauci's friendship see Fauci, On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, (Viking, 2024) pps. 95-117.

RFK Jr. Praises Wellness Crusaders and Blames Fauci For Everything From Depression to Jock Itch

RFK Jr. starts his long diatribe against Anthony Fauci ("The Real Anthony Fauci") with a Heroic Heroes Honor Roll, a rather dubious list of people's champions that includes "holistic psychiatrist" Kelly Brogan, who touts the health benefits of coffee enemas and urine therapy, and alternative medicine practitioner Tom Cowan, whose medical practice was crippled by a five-year probation imposed for his having prescribed an unapproved quack cancer treatment to a patient he never met. Both of these "heroes" deny the validity of germ theory, and Cowan even denies that the heart is a pump. Brogan is particularly eager to convince us that vaccines are part of a spiritual fight to the death with modern medicine. Just as public health officials were struggling to figure out how to respond to the novel coronavirus, she warned that their efforts were akin to the "dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust."  

RFK Jr. appears to be of similar mind. He does not believe that HIV causes AIDS, which he says is actually caused by "the gay lifestyle." He celebrates Christine Maggiore, an AIDS-denier who refused treatment and died of the disease, as did her three-year-old daughter, who was infected and denied treatment by her mother. RFK claims that anti-retroviral drugs prescribed to HIV patients so they don't die of AIDS are actually harming them. The danger inherent in spreading such ideas was illustrated dramatically in the 1990s when then South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki refused to allow anti-retrovirals to be given to AIDS patients, which a number of studies including a South African government investigation demonstrate resulted in more than 330,000 unnecessary deaths.

Bouncing from accusation to accusation, RFK makes little if any effort to organize his thought. He seems to have vacuumed up every paranoid anti-vax fantasy off the internet and simply dumped it between the covers of his book, not caring that these recycled delusions have already been thoroughly debunked, some of them many times.

He blames Fauci for every real or imagined negative outcome during the pandemic. Nowhere does he note or care that Fauci's political role was that of an adviser: he didn't create policy, and those who did were free to ignore what he said, and often did. His responsibility for events was drastically more limited than Kennedy wants readers to believe.

Nowhere does RFK take account of the complexity of events that contributed to the unfolding Covid disaster. But any fair account of the pandemic has to note that obfuscation of events early on in China guaranteed that pandemic response would go badly elsewhere. Beijing failed to make clear to the world that they hadn't contained the virus, letting international airplane flights continue taking off after domestic flights had been shut down. 

The U.S. added to this bad response with one of its own. An extensive and detailed pandemic preparedness plan started by the George W. Bush administration and continued by Obama was simply scrapped by Trump, leaving the U.S. unable to mount a rapid response to SARS-CoV-2. To make matters worse, the CDC made a big mistake in testing. WHO had its own test, which they were distributing to various countries throughout the world, as per standard practice, so that monitoring and testing for the virus could begin immediately. But the CDC opted to make its own test, which didn't work, giving lots of false negatives. U.S. health  authorities ended up weeks behind in detecting how far and fast the virus was spreading, which meant they had to rely on more extreme responses like lockdowns than they otherwise might have had to do. 

After more sustainable pandemic restraint measures had thus been forfeited, the Trump administration then made the situation worse by deciding not to lead at all, defaulting to a free-for-all between the states, which wasted colossal energy fighting over supplies and improvising fifty competing ways of responding to the crisis. Washington released general guidelines, but left implementation up to state governors. 

Blaming Fauci alone for all this makes little sense, however gratifying it may be to heap rage and contempt on a convenient scapegoat, and it is simply preposterous to describe the pandemic response as a coup d'etat against democracy, as RFK does.  

Blowing off concern over damage done by Covid, which he dismisses as another name for the flu, he lambastes lockdown measures for having visited immense economic and psychological damage on children.  We have no way of knowing, he says, how many people died of isolation and unemployment and other lockdown induced causes, though he assumes the number has to be immense. He emphasizes that U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during lockdown, but doesn't even consider that that might have had something to do with a deadly new virus killing thousands of people every day. Not possible, assumes RFK, firm in his conviction that the lockdowns did everything and the virus nothing, and that we can't know how extensive the damage was, though feel free to let your imagination run wild, which seems to be the aim of RFK's book. 

Sensible people, however, cannot ignore the fact that Covid itself caused considerable emotional damage. Roughly one hundred thousand children lost their primary or secondary care-givers to Covid, a rather traumatizing experience one would think. Also, thousands of children were hospitalized for Covid in the U.S., and it would be foolish to think that all of them emerged emotionally unscathed. On top of that, children who suffer from Covid can be at risk for Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, and also long-Covid, not to mention that upwards of two thousand children actually died of Covid. All of these likely contributed to sharply negative mental health outcomes for a wide swathe of the population, but RFK Jr. doesn't mention one of them, so fixated is he on Anthony Fauci as solely to blame for everything bad. RFK talks about how the rich got richer during the pandemic (bulletin: the rich are always getting richer under capitalism), and notes that small business owners were ruined by the lockdowns. This is true, but RFK's account of these simply notes that they happened, and then blames Fauci. There is no proper analysis of the events themselves and no summation of what we ought to learn from them. 

In an effort to convince us that public health officials badly over-reacted to events, RFK laments that we cowered in fear from a mere "flu-like virus," without noting that COVID killed more Americans in its first year than the flu did in the previous ten years. It was a lot worse than the flu.

He complains about "two weeks to flatten the curve," without noticing that that was a political slogan, not a scientific prediction about the expected course of the pandemic. In any event, a prolonged pandemic response occurs by default if we continually refuse the solution, as RFK did. He wasn't listening to Covid policy direction at any time during the pandemic. But it should be obvious that no policy can be expected to work if people refuse to cooperate in its implementation. 

Moving on from Covid, a favorite RFK claim is that none of our childhood vaccines have been safety tested, which is simply false. In fact, every childhood vaccine has to be safety tested, and all of them are closely monitored after being commercially released. That is why we have such an abundance of evidence demonstrating that anti-vax claims are untrue.

RFK Jr. claims to be concerned about the increase in chronic disease in the U.S. starting in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he just blames Fauci and vaccines for the trend, in defiance of logic. In fact, medicine progressed leaps and bounds during this period and before, and children benefited greatly. In the second half of the 20th century childhood mortality rates decreased dramatically, and vaccines helped to eliminate deadly diseases common among children. Examples include childhood cancers, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, leukemia, and sickle cell disease. But RFK just ignores these developments, presenting a uniformly bleak medical picture and blaming Fauci for everything, real or imaginary.

Many of the babies that previously died we are now able to save, although they are often of very low birth weight, which correlates with a higher than average risk of chronic disease later in life. We know that children born to low-income families are more likely to develop chronic disease. This likely has to do with poor nutrition and proximity to pollution sources like waste incinerators and environmental toxins in general. RFK could use his skills as an environmental lawyer here and help discover the actual causes, but he prefers to lazily blame vaccines instead. 

He flatly ignores that vaccines were being administered to children decades before the 1980s, which he identifies as the watershed moment when they started producing increased chronic disease. But why did vaccines suddenly turn toxic in that decade and not before? The question doesn't even occur to RFK.

Unsurprisingly, RFK also believes that vaccines cause autism, a claim debunked to the point of tedium by many scientific researchers, and thus not even worth debating anymore.

RFK's adolescent immaturity in blaming Fauci for everything contrasts sharply with Fauci's conduct in fighting the scourge of deadly infectious disease. Just consider his relationship with the late Larry Kramer, a confrontational AIDS activist who publicly accused Fauci of being a mass murderer and an incompetent idiot due to the federal government's inadequate AIDS response, but gradually became his close friend after Fauci took no offense and invited Kramer and other activists to participate in AIDS advisory boards and workshops against the advice of his scientific colleagues. Though their relationship remained adversarial for decades, it also proved immensely constructive, and Fauci's tearful good-bye to the AIDS activist when he finally succumbed to the disease in 2020 provides moving testimony as to how decent people can continue to work together and care for one another even while remaining officially opposed.

You won't see anything like that out of RFK Jr.

Sources:

On RFK Jr., see "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction," Dr. Dan Wilson, Debunk The Funk, March 2, 2022

On Kelly Brogan and Tom Cowan, see Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Conspirituality - How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, (Public Affairs, 2023) pps. 85, 159

On the deadly consequences of AIDS denialism in South Africa, see Anthony Fauci, "On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service," (Viking, 2024) p. 157

On Larry Kramer and Fauci's friendship see Fauci, "On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service," (Viking, 2024) pps. 95-117.

Trump's Deportation Plan is a Swift Kick in Our Economic Private Parts

While we certainly must take seriously president-elect Trump's threats to carry out the largest mass deportation in history, we should keep in mind that it promises to run afoul of major business interests he can't afford to ignore.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are ten to twelve million "undocumented" or "illegal" immigrants in the United States at the moment. Whatever ideological conflicts their presence generates, we can say with assurance that they are not the cause of the U.S.'s deep-seated economic problems. They did not cause the stagnation and decline of inflation-adjusted wages for eighty percent of American workers going back to the 1970s. They did not cause massive offshoring of U.S. production over the same period of time. They did not cause U.S. medical care to cost roughly double what it costs elsewhere in the developed world in exchange for worse health outcomes. They did not engineer the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top. In short, they are not the cause of the substantial erosion of the U.S. middle-class that Trump claims to want to restore to glory, just one more effect arising from it.

Openly abusing undocumented immigrants will solve none of our problems. The reason employers favor illegal labor is because it cannot defend itself. If wages are owed but not paid, severely underpaid, or contingent on impossible production quotas or a boss's sexual demands, what can undocumented workers do about it? They are here to take abuse, not challenge it.*

The industries in which illegal immigrants tend to be concentrated - construction, hospitality, agriculture - are key levers in managing inflation, the issue that is at least half responsible for Trump being re-elected. Rounding up and deporting millions of illegal immigrants will impose billions of dollars of costs in lawsuits, policing, camps, and possibly riot control if the effort involves "red state" national guard units acting as an occupying security force in "blue state" immigrant sanctuaries. What might be the social and financial costs, for example, of the Texas National Guard carrying out mass deportations in San Francisco? They're not likely to be slight, but they're very likely to be ugly. Restoring anything resembling social peace will probably cost more than Trump is bargaining for.

The national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. What wage would be necessary to get millions of native workers employed elsewhere to drop everything and work in construction, hospitality, and crop-picking in the wake of mass deportation of immigrant workers? Trump has no money set aside for that purpose and has proposed no substitute workers for the immigrants he plans to deport. Artificial intelligence can't do it; most American workers won't do it, at least not for the low wages employers are accustomed to paying for it.

Cheap, cheap, cheap may not be what made America great, but it is what made Big Business rich. If Trump tampers with that, Corporate America will remind him who he works for.

*Undocumented immigrants lack the time, energy, English, and cultural knowledge to even know where to look for help, let alone secure and pay for it. 

Source:

Richard Wolff, "Don't Listen To Liberals, Here's Why Trump Really Won," The Real News Network, November 21, 2024

The Possible Beginning of The End

 

The Possible Beginning of TheEnd

 

Proving beyond a shadow of adoubt that the only thing intellectually lower than Trump is his opposition, hewas re-elected by a more solid margin than last time. After one of the dumbestand most slanted hit jobs on American consciousness, with tens of thousands ofphotos of Harris beaming as in contemplation of dinner dishes filled with food insteadof animal waste, and Trump in an equal number looking as though he has not hada comfortable bowel movement in thirty or forty years, the public was expectedto react as their keepers, in their incredibly bigoted stupidity, expected. Themost dreadful outcome for the owners and operators of market democracy is thatactual working people may be closer to some power than ever since the new deal,though one should hardly expect anything nearly that good since there weresocialists and communists in the government back in those days and now we’relucky to have a handful of “progressive” reps left of the American Nazi party.At least slightly.

 

 

 

As further proof of completefailure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was evenoutspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusionof some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the worldbrought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds ofyears ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom andother good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later inPalestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions tobrutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teachingus that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our headsfilled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.

 

While the USA sinks moredeeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world risesand moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, arelative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperatelytry to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and notjust their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closerto ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capitalin its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media aircontaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderouswith each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy thatmay serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.

 

Those who speak of losingsomething that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthenthe foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matterthe fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas thosewith the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this casewas a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy tomake the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. Whilepopular comic book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control ofthe country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They wereelected to power in a more democratic though hardly ideal form of elections inwhich achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here innarcoleptic inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out withnothing. But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather aboutfascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being giventhat name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without healthcare and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spendtrillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and wellbeing of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack ofany human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocentsupporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving thathe and they have no idea of Groucho’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s onpolitical economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen peopleand virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities andother influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, newsfrom the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature inall its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff inexistence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction ofall of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profitseeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollarsto some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majorityof humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create realglobal democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.

 

Most recently the outgoingpresident who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap warmlyoffered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we haveto rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons onthe usa when such weapons are used on Russia. But of course good and decentAmericans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while theU.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of theworld but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists areonly concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s electionmay well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of theplanet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive ornegative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more thangreat masses of us were lead to believe.

Meanwhile the usual suspectswill fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocideand even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes whilethey learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professionalclass of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025gets old.

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