Pentagon Says Austin Remaining in Hospital, No Specific Date for His Release
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is still in the hospital and there is no specific date for his release yet, the US Defense Department said on Monday.
“Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III remains hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center but is recovering well and in good spirits. Since resuming his duties on Friday evening, the Secretary has received operational updates and has provided necessary guidance to his team… While we do not have a specific date for his release at this time, we will continue to provide updates on the Secretary’s status as they become available,” Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement.
Ryder added that on Saturday, Austin held talks with US President Joe Biden.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that Austin had been hospitalized four days prior after he experienced complications following an elective medical procedure. NBC News reported on Saturday that the US defense secretary spent four days in the intensive care unit following his hospitalization. Politico reported later that the Pentagon had kept the White House in the dark about Austin’s hospitalization for three days and notified Congress 15 minutes before releasing the official statement.
BREAKING: UN Planning New Pandemic To Establish Planetary Dictatorship
ZeroHedge January 6th Debate Highlights With Glenn Greenwald, Alex Jones & More
Saturday night marked the second ZeroHedge debate, which pitted Glenn Greenwald, Alex Jones and Darren Beattie against the Krassenstein brothers and Destiny – with Ian Crossland from Timcast moderating. The topic: Was January 6th a manufactured crisis?
For those who lasted all three hours of this incredible debate, our hat goes off to you.
Meanwhile, here are a few highlights in case you missed it:
To kick off the festivities, everyone was asked the fundamental question over whether the Capitol riots of 2021 constituted an insurrection. Stephen Bonnell (a political commentator by the name of “Destiny”) succinctly made the affirmative case, while journalist Glenn Greenwald deemed it “laughable.”:
The darkest day in American history?
InfoWars founder Alex Jones asked panelists whether the Jan 6 riots surpassed Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in severity. Ed Krassenstein replied that “it depends” but ultimately concluded it wasn’t while Destiny answered by calling Jan 6 a “uniquely horrible event”:
Trump’s Culpability
On the question of whether Trump bears responsibility for the “insurrection”, Brian Krassenstein cited the high number of convicted rioters who claimed to have acted in service of the former President. Revolver News founder Darren Beattie alluded to the infamous murderer Charles Manson — who was motivated by imagined secret messages contained in The Beatles’ song Helter Skelter. “Trump is essentially Helter Skelter?” Beattie asked:
Was the 2020 election “stolen”?
It’s a question that lies at the heart of this debate. The answer to determines whether Trump and his supporters’ grievances and actions taken as a result were legitimate.
Destiny — asserting the negative — raised the issue of Trump’s close advisers telling him there was insufficient evidence of widespread voter fraud, while Greenwald offered a nuanced perspective: perhaps the election was not “stolen” but “rigged” by entrenched forces within the U.S. intelligence apparatus:
Ray Epps
Beattie — whose outlet Revolver.news reported extensively on the mysterious Epps — answers a series of pointed questions scrutinizing his reporting from Destiny and the Krassensteins:
Watch the full debate here and help our debate series by subscribing to ZeroHedge Premium, as well as our Rumble and YouTube channels:
Claudine Gay, DEI, and the War in the Middle East
A little over six months ago, Claudine Gay was appointed president of Harvard University, the first black president of that now embattled institution. She recently resigned her post, only to retain a $900,000 salary as a professor. No doubt her appointment had more to do with the imperatives of an engulfing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda and less to do with the quality and volume of her scholarship, later found to be riddled with plagiarism.
Gay’s academic credentials are certainly not commensurate with the position of president at what was once one of the most venerated institutions of higher education in the United States and the world. With only one monograph and nine peer-reviewed single-author academic articles on her curriculum vitae, it would be a wonder how the fifty-three-year-old Gay rose through the academic ranks so swiftly if not for her race and the intersectional demands of DEI.
By comparison, I have authored four academic books and as many peer-reviewed, single-author academic articles as Gay and arguably contributed to more rigorous fields, including the history of science, philosophy, economics, etc. (sans plagiarism). Gay’s work focuses largely on the political representation of blacks, the voting patterns of blacks of different socioeconomic statuses, and affordable housing, among other related topics. After reading some of Gay’s papers, I concluded that she is not the total academic slouch that some critics have made her out to be. Yet her nova-like career has been fueled by affirmative action and turbo-charged by DEI.
Her ultimate undoing, however, did not stem from her academic performance, or lack thereof. She was, after all, promoted to the presidency by the Harvard Corporation, the top governing board of the university, with the self-same credentials. The plagiarism in her academic writing came to light only after her ill-fated appearance at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, following the events of October 7, 2023, and beyond. Israel’s immediate response to the Hamas attack sparked pro-Palestinian protests at Harvard and other universities, protests which supposedly featured calls for the “genocide” of Jews, although there does not seem to be any evidence for such claims.
It was not Gay’s plagiarism but her performance on Capitol Hill that triggered powerful opponents to scrutinize her presidency, although they should have done so much earlier. Her plagiarism served as a pretext for removing her from office. During that Congressional hearing, recapped by the Harvard Crimson, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly asked Gay whether calls for genocide on her campus violated Harvard’s code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment. Gay responded by saying that she found such speech “personally abhorrent,” but continued with the refrain, “We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even to views that are objectionable, outrageous, and offensive.” This claim is certainly untrue, as my own academic history and that of dozens of academics makes clear. And many speakers scheduled to give talks on college campuses can attest to the fact that academia has become utterly intolerant of views that differ from the prevalent “social justice” orthodoxy, as can a bevy of students who have dared to voice views at variance with the official creed. Harvard ranks last among American colleges and universities for free speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Stefanik’s relentless questioning continued: “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” Gay answered, “It can be, depending on the context.” The badgering went on, and Gay’s answers were deemed scandalously insufficient by Stefanik and the rest of the committee, and, perhaps no less importantly, by prominent Harvard donors and alumni. Rather than allowing herself to be backed into a corner, Gay should have instead asked for evidence of calls for “genocide.” Stefanik ended the questioning by calling for Gay’s resignation.
Meanwhile, had universities remained altogether neutral on political issues, as they should, Gay would not have been caught in the position in which she found herself. But the more she kept digging, the deeper the hole she occupied. Gay later apologized on social media, saying, “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” referring to the subjectivist postmodernist notion that truth is a function of identity, a notion that Ludwig von Mises termed “polylogism.”
Gay issued a series of statements about the Hamas attack and its aftermath. Soon after, William A. Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and an alumnus and donor, began a personal investigation of his alma mater. In a statement that has been called Ackman’s “Anti-DEI Manifesto,” published on X, Ackman stated, “I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8 before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.”
Ackman continued by stating that the student protests “began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel” and further suggested that the anti-Israel sentiments expressed by students constituted “antisemitism.” Antisemitism, he averred, was rife on college campuses: “Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.”
Ackman then quickly pivoted by suggesting that antisemitism was not the root of the problem after all but rather a symptom: “I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.”
I have been writing about the oppressor/oppressed dyad for years. I’ve suggested that this configuration is what postmodernism has in common with Marxism. Postmodernism translates Marxist class categories into identity terms. Ackman’s point was that the oppressor/oppressed schemata ended up figuring Jews as oppressors, and thus, Palestinians (and Hamas) as oppressed. This ideology, he implied, explains the rationale for and the fervor of the protests and vilification of Israel, as well as Gay’s ineffectual responses.
Antisemitism, Ackman went on to suggest, is merely an instance of a broader problem—DEI, which operates under this binary.
The conflation of criticisms of the DEI paradigm and the politics of war in the Middle East is a tactic well suited to enlist critics of DEI into the ranks of pro-Israel supporters. This is, in fact, the same trick to which Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, and other prominent critics of campus orthodoxy have also resorted. However, it is a sneaky maneuver that establishes a false equivalency. While student protesters may have been indoctrinated to see all issues through this oppressor/oppressed prism, it does not represent the sole rationale for opposing Israel’s execution of the war in the Gaza Strip.
Claudine Gay has fallen prey to her own ideology, one which values identity and supposed victimhood above the truth. She has learned that some identities trump her own. The same ideology and identity politics are being wielded to justify Israel’s massacre in the Gaza Strip and to bully and harass its critics.
BREAKING: UN Planning New Pandemic To Establish Planetary Dictatorship
Social Media Addiction Putting Humanity at Crossroad of Freedom & Serfdom
As the New Year commences, I peeked into the rearview mirror and rediscovered an article that appeared in Lisa DePasquale’s diurnal newsletter, Bright. Published on January 3, 2023, by StudyFinds [one word], the headline was a terse red flag for the future of our free republic: “The Social Disaster: Children Who Frequently Check Social Media Face Significant Brain Changes.”
Based upon a then recent study from the University of North Carolina, the gist of the article is in equal parts instructive and alarming:
‘The findings suggest that children who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,’ says Eva Telzer, a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s psychology and neuroscience department and a corresponding author, in a statement.
‘Social media platforms provide adolescents with unprecedented opportunities for social interactions during a critical developmental period when the brain is especially sensitive to social feedback,’ the study concludes. This longitudinal cohort study suggests that social media behaviors in early adolescence may be associated with changes in adolescents’ neural development, specifically neural sensitivity to potential social feedback.
It is not difficult to understand Big Tech’s venal motives for catering to customers’ psychology to increase their use of social media: the corporations’ already humongous profits.
But the societal dimension of hardwiring youth to become hypersensitive to “social feedback”—i.e., “peer pressure”—within their network will have an immense and deleterious impact upon a free society.
Certainly, it is not lost upon the administrative state, who is hellbent upon controlling (often in conjunction with legacy/regime media) both the means and messages of citizens’ interactions on social media, be it censorship, pushing bogus, statist narratives, etc.
Per the paper published in JAMA Pediatrics, “students who look at social media at least 15 times daily were the most sensitive to social feedback.”
While these students are the most at risk, their peers are not far behind them:
“Previous research shows that 78 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds report checking their devices at least hourly each day and 35 percent look at the top five networks ‘almost constantly.’”
Understandably, the researchers assert that “further research examining long-term prospective associations between social media use, adolescent neural development, and psychological adjustment is needed to understand the effects of a ubiquitous influence on development for today’s adolescents.”
Let’s give them an admittedly non-expert head start on this research by gazing back even further in our rearview mirror to March 20, 2018, where StudyFinds previously published another alarming article, “It’s Not Your Smartphone You’re Addicted to, It’s the Social Interaction.”
It’s author, Ben Renner, succinctly lays out the findings by the researchers at McGill University:
“[people’s] urge to socialize is actually an ingrained human need resulting from eons of evolution. For those who argue spending too much time on a smartphone makes a person anti-social, the authors say overuse is actually the product of being hyper-social.”
McGill psychiatry professor Samuel Veissière admitted, “There is a lot of panic surrounding this topic. We’re trying to offer some good news and show that it is our desire for human interaction that is addictive – and there are fairly simple solutions to deal with this.”
What, one may ask, is “this?”
“Many of the most addictive smartphone apps such as Facebook or Snapchat tap into this constant search for meaning and the ingrained desire to see others and be seen by them… Veissière insists the need for social interaction is a positive instinct, but in the age of constant connectivity to the internet and the variety of social platforms it provides, that instinct can be kicked into ‘overdrive,’ leading to unhealthy addictions.”
Okay, but what are the proposed “simple solutions?”
“Veissière and his team recommend turning off push notifications on your phone if possible and purposefully setting aside time to check your phone to help battle these addictive impulses.”
Yet, for a hypersocial citizenry addicted to social media and “high on likes,” these simple solutions are the hardest, as anyone experienced in treating substance abuse addictions can attest.
And it is almost impossible when the institutions subverted by the elitist Left are colluding to use social media “approval” to compel the citizenry into compliance with the state’s directives.
Adjusting the rearview mirror to 2020, the COVID pandemic provided the paradigm by which we can view the damaging effects of the administrative state’s coordinating with Big Tech, Big Pharma, the legacy/regime media, academia, and their shock troops of left-wing trolls (paid and otherwise) to enforce its arbitrary and capricious effects upon the populace.
“Wear the mask” and “get the vaccination” meant you are a good citizen; if not, you are a homicidal cretin “killing people” and worthy of any punishment society wishes to inflict upon you.
So, too, 2020 also showed how the administrative state and Big Tech could collude on election interference by denying and censoring stories about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Anyone trying to bring the truth to light was censored and “deplatformed” from their social network and its feedback—a cyberspace shunning.
Now, in 2024, through the deliberate, debilitating din of the Communications Revolution, we can glean the insidious aim of the administrative state, Big Tech, and a host of leftist institutions and minions: the erosion of individual liberty and the perverse inversion of subordinating sovereign citizens into subjects of the government. Doesn’t history instruct how, in attempted revolutions/coups, the cabal urgently prioritizes capturing and controlling society’s means of communication? Using social media to cajole, coerce, and inure citizens into conforming within the “collective” and its “hyper-socialism,” the Left’s first punishment for exercising non-state-sanctioned, independent thought and dissent is and will continue to be the ostracization from one’s social interactions. Other punishments, such as job loss, harassment lawsuits, etc., will follow. Frankly, what is being “cancelled” but being locked in a virtual gulag?
Thus, while the solutions may be simple, such as dismantling the administrative state, reforming their colluding leftist infested institutions, and offering hope to those addicted to “likes,” etc. – they will be decidedly difficult. But the future of our free republic requires an intervention. Inaction is not an option, especially given the speed AI is metastasizing within an already social media addled populace.
For those whose decisions are driven in whole or in part by social media, they may well refuse to admit the problem as they wheel and whistle past the graveyard of individuality and liberty. For those of us not driving under the influence of social media, as we peer out the windshield to the crossroad of freedom and serfdom ahead, one has the sensation of time slowing down as a collision unfolds.
BREAKING: UN Planning New Pandemic To Establish Planetary Dictatorship
The NWO Blueprint Is Out in the Open: Depopulate With Medical Tyranny & Use Replacement Migration to Destroy Civilization — Sunday Night Live
Guest host Chase Geiser lays out the New World Order’s two-pronged plan to destroy society: unleash untold suffering and death using medical tyranny while simultaneously flooding civilization with millions of third world migrants who will unquestioningly obey any of the establishment’s orders.
Watch the live broadcast on X:
?#InfowarsSNL: The NWO Blueprint Is Out in the Open: Depopulate With Medical Tyranny & Use Replacement Migration to Destroy Civilization — Sunday Night Live @realchasegeiser
— INFOWARS (@infowars) January 8, 2024
Tune in UNCENSORED: https://t.co/8L209IHXoO https://t.co/TVWX4Vr2Ac
Tune into this live broadcast at MadMaxWorld.TV and spread the word!
Epstein, Clintons & Cash: Why Zelenska Foundation is Vehicle to Divert Aid to Corrupt Ends
The release of the Epstein documents has once again cast shadow over the Clintons and their philanthropic activities — and raised questions about their joint project with Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenskaya in September 2023.
Unsealed court filings over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein named over a hundred of rich and powerful people connected to the billionaire pedophile — including former US President Bill Clinton and his aide Doug Band.
Ironically, back in 2003, Doug Band helped kick off now-famous Clinton Foundation international initiatives with the aim of rehabilitating Bill’s post-presidential image, marred by sex scandals, and turning the ex-president into “the world’s philanthropist in chief,” writes Vanity Fair.
The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), one of the foundation’s international projects, was supposedly started in league with Jeffrey Epstein — who died in Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial — late in 2004-early in 2005, according to Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who has been investigating the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years.
Ortel said the Clinton Foundation and its numerous offshoots were nothing but a vehicle to transform the once-broke presidential family into mega-multi-millionaires and help their associates to get rich too. The Wall Street analyst is highly skeptical about the Clintons’ new joint endeavor with the Zelenskys, who have also been mired in corruption allegations.
“By the time Hillary Clinton commenced work with Ukraine’s First Lady, the Clinton family had more than twenty years of experience breaking key charity laws, especially in New York City and State which, to date, have targeted Donald Trump and his family for charity frauds, but allowed Clinton charity frauds to expand in scope, scale, and international breadth,” Ortel told Sputnik.
“In fact, ‘Clinton Global Initiative’ and ‘The Clinton Foundation’ have not complied with laws concerning ‘public charities’,” the Wall Street analyst continued. “These laws require that such entities be controlled by truly independent boards of directors, bar creation of ‘private gain’ through their operation, and forbid partisan political activities.”
The Olena Zelenska Foundation
The Zelenska Foundation was founded in 2022 with the declared aim of attracting foreign businesses, funds and donors to “restore Ukraine’s human capital”. The Foundation’s public launch took place on September 22, 2022 at a charity event in New York during the opening of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.
The event was attended by former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, then-British foreign secretary James Cleverly, actor Matt Damon and “a wide circle of diplomats and businessmen”, according to the Ukrainian president’s official website.
Around that time Hillary Clinton started wooing the Ukrainian first lady, who received the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award for exceptional leadership in December 2022 and the 2023 Clinton Global Citizen Award in September 2023. Hillary and Olena’s partnership, which started in 2022, resulted in the CGI Ukraine Action Network announced by the Clintons in September 2023, according to The Independent.
Ortel noted that the Clintons have a long record of collaborating with the Ukrainian elites, including oligarch Viktor Pinchuk and his wife Olena — daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. Like Zelenskaya, Olena launched a foundation, this one to raise funds to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine, and cooperated closely with the Clintons. Her husband is well known as one of the most generous donors to Clinton charities.
“The Clinton family began operating in association with various persons in Ukraine by 2003 even though the original purported Clinton charity – The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation never legitimately obtained approvals to operate outside Little Rock, Arkansas for any charitable purposes other than housing Presidential Records for Bill Clinton’s period as President (20 January 1993 through 20 January 2001) and allowing interested parties to perform research on these records at the Presidential Center,” explained Ortel.
“Without complying with applicable state, federal and foreign laws, Bill Clinton and his cohort of co-conspirators then ostensibly raised money for a raft of ‘charitable’ projects, including in Ukraine, for which there has never been proper accounting. If Ukraine maintains legal records on charities (an open question), there should be filings available to investigators that might allow authorities to compare claims made by Bill Clinton concerning his work there with apparent legal reality,” he continued.
According to Ortel, “as during the Clinton years as Secretary of State, there is no oversight of monies flowing towards Ukraine from donors who believe they might be helping Ukraine repel Russia’s special military operation.”
Given the lack of oversight and the sordid public record of the Clinton family charities, Ortel suspects the joint effort by the Clinton and the Zelenskys “is likely nothing more than a vehicle to divert aid to corrupt ends.”
Corrupt Elites and Minor Trafficking in Ukraine
In December, 38-year old Alex Soros, son of billionaire George Soros, met with the Zelenskys in Kiev. Alex, an heir to his father’s financial and NGO empire, struck a partnership deal between his Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Olena Zelenska Foundation and gave $1 million to expand projects ostensibly to support Ukrainian children.
Child welfare has become a political football in Ukraine after the Kiev regime and Alex Soros promoted the unfounded narrative of Russia “stealing” 700,000 children from Ukraine — which some observers believe is just “projection.”
During an informal meeting of the UN Security Council in November, Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia clarified that since the beginning of the special military operation, Russia had welcomed over 730,000 child refugees from Ukraine — most of them with their parents and just 2,000 from orphanages of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. A total of around five million Ukrainians and Donbass residents have sought refuge in Russia over the past 21 months.
By contrast, the Kiev regime lacks transparency about the fate Ukrainian children sent to Western countries by the nation’s authorities. In May an evacuee from Artemovsk (also known as Bakhmut) told Sputnik that the Ukrainian authorities used to “abduct” children from residents and, under threats of being stripped of their parental rights, parents were forced to leave for areas under Kiev’s control.
Likewise, on July 19, Donetsk People’s Republic Senator Natalia Nikonorova, who is also a member of the parliamentary commission investigating Kiev’s crimes against children, told the Russian media about multiple instances of unlawful “evacuation” of minors from the territory of the Donbass republics by the Kiev regime. Over 400 children from orphanages in Mariupol and Volnovakha vanished without trace after the Kiev regime’s illegal “evacuation,” the senator said.
Nikonorova also raised concerns about reports in the Ukrainian and Western press about “the possible work of so-called ‘black transplantologists’ in Ukraine.” According to her, there is evidence that children were subjected to medical examinations regarding “the health of their organs” prior to the “evacuation” by the Ukrainian authorities.
The Western press has also raised the alarm about the fate of Ukrainian minors, most notably unaccompanied ones. In July 2022, The Independent published an article entitled “British paedophiles travelling to Poland ‘to target Ukrainian child refugees’”. The newspaper, quoting the National Crime Agency (NCA), reported that at least ten known sex offenders traveled to refugee camps in Poland claiming they were providing “humanitarian assistance” to Ukrainian refugees. The NCA said there were 5,000 unaccompanied Ukrainian minors at the time.
It remains unclear whether the Olena Zelenska Foundation, whose declared aim is restoring Ukraine’s human capital, is doing anything to remedy that situation.
Meanwhile, the recently-unsealed Epstein files show that ethics and morals of the rich and powerful are questionable, with Bill Clinton exposed as “liking his girls young” and even threatening the US media to protect himself and convicted sex offender Epstein.
“Human trafficking and slavery flourish in war and following national disasters,” Ortel said. “If the fake elites truly cared about protecting vulnerable children and women (as well as men), they would make examples of the traffickers and slave-traders. Instead, watching the curious case of Jeffrey Epstein and his allies/enablers, too many powerful people may have gotten too close to the flames of vile temptation. Charities need to open their financial books and records and accept a new, tighter era where odious villains will be punished harshly. It will take public outrage and determination to bring charity gangsters and goons to justice.”