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In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, one of the many interesting concepts was the notion of “Crimestop,” the ability of well-trained citizens to self-censor their thoughts before they strayed into dangerous and forbidden territory. As conveniently summarized in the Wikipedia entry, Orwell wrote:

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Given the existing and ever-growing number of forbidden topics in contemporary Western society, this concept may or may not be applicable. Perhaps thoughts are being self-censored or perhaps merely words. Lacking eyes into human souls, it’s obviously difficult for us to distinguish between the two cases.

In any event, that concept entered my mind near the end of November when I began reading a full page of book reviews in the Wall Street Journal entitled “What Happened in Wuhan,” with the descriptive subtitle “Four books pursue theories of possible origins of the Covid-19 virus—and the question of cover-ups.”

Our global Covid catastrophe is probably the most important historical event since the end of World War II, and with its second anniversary now upon us, serious books analyzing the origin have finally begun to appear in print. I have extensively written on exactly this topic since April 2020, so the Journal review afforded me an excellent opportunity to compare my own analysis with those of the leading mainstream authors.

Until recently the media might have relegated any such discussion of Covid origins to the “fever swamps” of the conspiratorial fringe. The scientific establishment uniformly proclaimed that the virus was natural, randomly crossing over from some animal species in late 2019, and that was that. But then in early May, an 11,000 word essay by Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist, punctured that ideological bubble and persuaded a large and growing segment of the media that the virus had been the human product of some laboratory, a shocking possibility that launched a fierce public debate on its origins, including the question of who might have created it and why.

• Origin of Covid — Following the Clues
  Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
  Nicholas Wade • Medium • May 2, 2021 • 11,000 Words

Pride of place in the Journal review was given to a paperback version of Wade’s seminal essay, so only three new books were actually discussed.

Although they took a variety of different approaches, all three supported the so-called “lab-leak hypothesis,” the perceived alternative to the natural virus theory. Under this reconstruction, Covid is believed to have been accidentally released by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which contained the closest genetic match of the Covid virus and whose researchers were also known to have been involved in exactly the sort of “gain of function” experiments that might have produced it.

This evidence is purely circumstantial, but fairly compelling nonetheless, and the Journal reviewer certainly seemed to accept it. Given the magnitude of the global disaster, it is hardly surprising that the Chinese government has fiercely denied that any such lab-leak occurred. According to The Economist‘s detailed worldwide analysis of “excess deaths,” the Covid outbreak has already claimed up to twenty million lives, and enormously disrupted the activities of many billions more, so if Chinese government were proven guilty, the world’s geopolitical landscape might certainly shift.

One of the books discussed is by Jasper Becker, a British journalist who had spent 18 years as a Beijing correspondent, and the closing paragraph of the review quotes him as suggesting that a Chinese admission of responsibility could even lead to the downfall of the ruling regime:

The national shame might spell the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s seventy-year rule. It would start a political earthquake which would begin in China but spread around the world.

The reviewer notes that Becker draws upon history to suggest that China’s current denials cannot be trusted, emphasizing that during the Korean War the Chinese Communists had launched a major propaganda offensive, falsely claiming that the American military had used illegal “germ warfare” to attack China’s own forces:

This is one reason why Western intelligence agencies are likely to doubt or at least question official accounts about the origin of the virus and the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology…While the Chinese and Soviet governments pushed a completely false story of its enemies waging war with bioweapons against civilians, they actively pursued their own germ warfare programmes in secrecy.

Becker and the reviewer both reasonably argue that if a government has been caught lying in the past about biological warfare, its current claims about the Covid outbreak cannot be trusted.

I am sure that the vast majority of readers simply nodded their heads at all of these statements and earlier this year I would have done the same. But several months ago I had carefully investigated the history of American biological warfare and discovered that the story I had casually absorbed from our media was the exact opposite of the historical truth. Based upon declassified government documents and other fully mainstream sources, there was actually overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been telling the truth during the Korean War while our own denials had been false. America had indeed used illegal biological warfare during that conflict.

• American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words

I have no doubt that Becker was being entirely sincere, and his statements on that specialized historical question were simply due to his acceptance of the conventional media narrative rather than any deliberate deception. But suppose we now apply his own standard. Once we recognize that China had been truthful in the past, while America had both employed illegal bioweapons and then lied about their use, these disturbing facts must inform our own analysis of the Covid outbreak.

RFK, Jr. and the Anti-Vaxxing Movement

Over the last year or so, fervent anti-vaxxers have become a major presence on our alt-media website, a situation I found very disagreeable. Many of our longtime columnists—Mike Whitney, Paul Craig Roberts, Linh Dinh, Gilad Atzmon, and Israel Shamir—had also moved strongly into that ideological camp, with Whitney’s long articles drawing enormous readership from across the Internet.

I’ve never paid any attention to vaccines and my own views on the role they might play against Covid were entirely mainstream and conventional, as I explained a couple of months ago in a candid 9,000 word interview:

• Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections “Anti-Vaxx Crackpots”?
  Interview with Ron Unz
  Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • August 1, 2021 • 9,000 Words

The resulting comment-thread—heavily laced with ferocious attacks against me—soon exceeded 200,000 words and became quite sluggish, so I was forced to follow it up with two successive Open Threads on the vaxxing controversy. Several of the anti-vaxxing articles by Whitney, Roberts, and Dinh also provoked enormously long exchanges.

The commenting-software I’ve developed for this website is quite powerful and flexible, allowing meaningful debates that may easily reach the length of a hefty book, a situation quite rare elsewhere on the Internet. As a consequence, some of the anti-vaxxers declared that our million or two million words of anti-vaxxing discussions probably constituted the largest such repository in existence, an achievement that gave me rather mixed feelings.

I’d gradually discovered that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., heir to the famous family, was a leading public figure in the anti-vaxx movement, and he released his lengthy book on the subject last month. A commenter whose opinion I respect had strongly endorsed it, so I decided to get a better sense of the issue directly from that source, and bought it by clicking a button.

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Others apparently shared my interest. For ten days or so, The Real Anthony Fauci became the #1 bestseller on Amazon, and it has now accumulated over 1,500 reviews, 95% of them five-stars, which must be close to a record. The work also carried a couple of dozen strong endorsement-blurbs, mostly from medical doctors or scientists, including a Nobel Laureate, but also from public figures across the ideological spectrum including Oliver Stone, Tucker Carlson, Naomi Wolf, and Mark Crispin Miller. Meanwhile, despite its huge success and the famous name of its author, the work seems to have been greeted by almost total silence across the media.

I found the book itself rather unprepossessing. Although the text seemed fine and generally well-edited, I noticed some peculiar stylistic quirks. The text-margins were extremely narrow, so narrow that the pages lacked any chapter-headings, while the font-size was also smaller than normal, and tiny for the quoted passages. These unusual choices allowed a work that should have filled 600 or 650 pages to be squeezed down to just 480, but at the cost of some readability, with the intent probably being to minimize the length and the price. There were a couple of thousand reference-notes, but instead of being shown on each page or grouped together at the end, they were distributed chapter-by-chapter, which I found inconvenient. Worse still, the book lacked any index, severely diminishing the usefulness of the hard copy version, which I prefer reading. All of this suggests that the book was produced in considerable haste, but I think it would have been worth the effort to take an extra week to create an index or reorganize the notes, and perhaps this will be done in a second edition.

However, none of these flaws nor the apparent near-total lack of any media coverage or advertising seem to have hindered the rise of this gigantic #1 bestseller, proving that controversial content does still sometimes triumph over anything else.

But evaluating that content is another matter entirely, especially for an ignorant layman such as myself. A sizable fraction of the author’s two thousand source-references are to academic journal articles or discussions of other scientific studies, and I am neither a medical doctor nor a biological researcher, so even if I had tried to check any of them—which I did not—I wouldn’t have been able to properly weigh their evidence against that on the other side. Therefore, all my remarks, at least with regard to the scientific issues, should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Surprisingly enough, and very contrary to my expectations, Kennedy’s stated position on vaccines seemed rather mild, quite different from the wild fear-mongering so regularly encountered on the Internet. He claimed that many vaccines weren’t properly tested, often had harmful side-effects, and were promoted mostly due to the profiteering of greedy pharmaceutical corporations and their subverted governmental regulators, accusations far more moderate—and far more plausible—than I had assumed he would make. While it’s not at all uncommon for wild-eyed anti-vaxxers to warn of millions—or even billions!—of deaths due to the current Covid vaccination drive, I didn’t see any such egregious claims in the carefully-documented chapters of this book.

Some of his theories about vaccination efforts over the last couple of decades do seem rather implausible to me. He regards Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a nefarious mastermind behind the global vaccination project, though Gates’ suggested motive is the multiplication of his wealth and power rather than a diabolical plot to exterminate most of the human race, with the latter allegation being widespread among the more excitable anti-vaxxers. But despite reading Kennedy’s account with an open mind, I saw nothing to seriously challenge my own much more mundane explanation. After having been vilified in the 1990s as a monopolist who had become the wealthiest man in the world by selling mediocre, buggy software, Gates may have simply sought to redeem his reputation by funding completely innocuous do-good projects, and he selected public health and vaccines as obvious choices, never dreaming that two decades later these efforts would have become so exceptionally controversial.

Similarly, although there is certainly much to condemn in the responses of the American and European governments to the Covid epidemic, my own interpretation sharply diverges from that of the author. In his opinion, the lockdowns and other disease control measures taken by our political elites represented a planned, sinister strategy for destroying all our traditional freedoms and establishing a totalitarian police state, while what I saw instead was utter incompetence.

Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept

During the height of the NSA disclosures a few years ago, Glenn Greenwald probably ranked as the world’s most famous journalist, and his entire career had seemed something out of a left-liberal storybook.

Becoming disenchanted with his corporate law career at a top firm, he co-founded a small practice specializing in First Amendment issues, then started a personal blog denouncing the civil liberties violations of the Bush Administration. He gained such recognition for his insightful commentary that he was hired by Salon, the premier leftist webzine, and a couple of years later was recruited by the liberal Guardian, then at the height of its international reputation. His high-profile writings on governmental abuses drew the attention of Edward Snowden, the young NSA whistleblower, who offered him the story of a lifetime, complete with its James Bond flourishes in Hong Kong, and worldwide fame together with a Pulitzer Prize soon followed. No sooner had the echoes of those establishment accolades begun to fade than he returned to the front-pages as co-founder of a new international media organization aimed at providing honest reporting free from any political restrictions, an enterprise backed by a pledge of \$150 million in future funding from a public-spirited Silicon Valley multi-billionaire. That truly seemed a Cinderella tale complete with happy ending, fit to inspire future generations of liberal young journalists.

However, the story didn’t end at that point. The old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons of my childhood always included a “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment, providing a satirical account of what probably happened after the curtain came down, and over the past year Greenwald’s personal trajectory unexpectedly swerved into that territory. In late 2020, he angrily departed the sizable anti-censorship media empire he had helped to create because his own writing was being censored, choosing to return to his roots as an independent blogger on the new Substack platform.

As far as I can tell, none of his ideological positions had shifted more than a whit over the last decade or more, but the same views that had once enshrined him as the conquering hero of liberal and left-liberal journalists have now suddenly rendered him toxic and unwanted in those same quarters, with his sole remaining foothold in the traditional media being his regular appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, a FoxNews broadcast regularly attacked as representing the most extreme rightwing fringe still found on television. For at least three generations, American liberals had regarded our national security organs—the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI—as some of their greatest villains, with such hostile sentiments reaching their peak just a few years ago when Greenwald and Snowden revealed the massive scale of illegal NSA spying. Yet these days, former high-ranking CIA, NSA, and FBI officials are regularly featured and employed at liberal CNN and MSNBC, while it is Greenwald and Snowden who have become completely unwelcome. So we have a fable that ends with the brave knight slaying the beautiful princess and marrying the hideous dragon, quite an unexpected turn of events.

The breaking point for Greenwald came with the 2020 election. During the Democratic primaries, the reigning political oligarchs of the liberal establishment had faced down the unexpectedly strong Bernie Sanders insurgency by desperately employing every possible connivance to drag the widely unpopular Joe Biden across the finish line, then coupled him with Kamala Harris, a candidate so unappealing that she had dropped out of the presidential race long before the first vote had even been cast in Iowa. These arrogant Democratic kingmakers then discovered to their horror that although Donald Trump was greatly disliked, their own hand-picked candidates fell into the same category. An extremely dishonest racial media narrative had provoked America’s greatest wave of urban riots and looting in two generations, and while 200 of our cities suffered such severe unrest, a number of prominent Democratic activists responded to the scenes of chaos and disorder by loudly proclaiming that the solution was to “defund the police.”

Under such circumstances, many voters understandably began to wonder whether Trump—notwithstanding his disastrous four years in office—might actually be the lesser of the two evils. So to forestall that dangerous possibility, Big Media and Big Tech colluded to ensure that Americans voted the right way, imposing the most extreme political censorship of any modern election, yet even so their efforts nearly fell short.

According to the post-election media headlines, Biden won the 2020 race by a substantial margin and Trump’s claims of a stolen presidential vote represented the final proof of his criminal insanity, blatant lies that eventually provoked his deluded followers into storming the Capitol on January 6th. But as I pointed out a few days after that event, the official vote count told an entirely different story:

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history…Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump…

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the \$100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

As everyone familiar with media operations is well aware, late Friday afternoon is the best time to release new information intended to attract minimal attention. A perfect example of this came a couple of days ago in the distribution of America’s newly declassified intelligence report on the origins of Covid.

Back in August, a sudden media frenzy on the possible lab origins of the virus that had killed so many hundreds of thousands of Americans pressured the Biden Administration into tasking our 17 separate intelligence agencies with determining the origins of the disease. But their comprehensive “We Don’t Know!” was hardly the answer long sought by the American public, nor the best justification for their many tens of billions of dollars in annual funding.

So for obvious reasons, the intent was to slip the results into the public arena with as little notice as possible, and this was largely achieved, with the short resulting articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal buried deep on the inside pages, with correspondingly little attention from the rest of the global media as well.

• Updated Assessment on Covid-1 Origins (PDF)
  National Intelligence Council • 18 pages

But for those who bothered to read past the headlines, the government report was a mixture of sensible conclusions and understandable silence. The total number of America’s proliferating intelligence agencies is now approaching a score, and although they disagreed on numerous issues, there were some points of unanimity. Among other things, they claimed that the structure of the virus provided no evidence that it had been bioengineered, while greatly softening that seemingly important conclusion by noting that modern bioengineering techniques are extremely difficult to detect.

Over the last year, various pro-China partisans sometimes supported by China’s own media organs have highlighted scientific studies around the world that seemingly found traces of Covid infections in other countries long before the original outbreak in Wuhan, suggesting that the outbreak originally began elsewhere. But because of various technical flaws and methodological uncertainties, the report found this evidence quite doubtful, a conclusion very similar to my own.

The report repeats the standard view that original outbreak began no later than November 2019, and a much more significant conclusion became the headline in the WSJ‘s print edition: “Report Says China Lab Was Likely Unaware of Virus Pre-Outbreak.”

For more than a year, individuals aligned with former Trump CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have repeatedly claimed that secret intelligence information existed demonstrating that the Wuhan outbreak may have reached large-scale proportions or at least come to the attention of Chinese officials long before the generally accepted late December date. However, no such material is mentioned anywhere in this report, indicating that it doesn’t exist. Instead, our 17 intelligence agencies seem to strongly support the current timeline, agreeing that the Wuhan lab and the Chinese government probably first became aware of the new disease when the number of infections grew substantial, near the very end of the 2019 calendar year.

Given the natural political constraints upon these professional American intelligence analysts, I think their product was the best that could be expected under the circumstances. For obvious reasons, they completely excluded any discussion of some of the striking anomalies that have been a major focus of my own analysis over the last 18 months, an analysis that very strongly suggests that the Covid outbreak was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), probably carried out by rogue elements of our national security establishment.

The following few excerpted paragraphs summarize some of the most telling facts underlying that remarkable conclusion:

For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…

From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.

With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.

Concealing the Deliberate Israeli Attack

I’m not exactly sure when I first heard of the Liberty incident of 1967. The story was certainly a dramatic one, the attack upon an almost defenseless American intelligence ship by Israel’s air and naval forces late in the Six Day War fought against several Arab states. Over 200 American servicemen were killed or wounded by Israeli machine-guns, rockets, napalm, and torpedoes, representing our greatest naval loss of life since World War II. Only tremendous luck and the heroic actions of the sailors prevented the Liberty from being sunk with all hands lost.

The Israeli government quickly claimed that the attack had been accidental, a consequence of mistaken identification and the fog of war, but none of the survivors ever believed that story, nor did many of America’s top political and military leaders, notably Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director Richard Helms, and numerous top officers, including a later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Although a brief investigation ordered by President Lyndon Johnson quickly endorsed the Israeli account, over the next half-century the Liberty survivors regularly condemned that official verdict as a cover-up and a whitewash. Their deep outrage was only slightly assuaged by the flood of medals they had received from our guilt-ridden government, which established the Liberty as perhaps the most highly-decorated ship in American naval history, at least with regard to a single engagement.

The real-life events of that day almost seem like a script out of Hollywood. The first wave of unmarked attacking jets had targeted and destroyed all of the Liberty’s regular transmission antennas while also trying to jam all standard American broadcast frequencies to prevent any calls for help. A flotilla of torpedo boats later machine-gunned the life-rafts to ensure there would be no survivors. These relentless attacks lasted for more than an hour and completely perforated the vessel, with the sides and the decks being pitted by more than 800 holes larger than a man’s fist, including 100 rocket-hits that were six to eight inches wide, and a 40 foot hole below the waterline produced by a torpedo strike. Only a miracle kept the ship afloat.

But the desperate sailors braved constant enemy fire to jury-rig a single transmission antenna, allowing them to send out an urgent plea for help. Their SOS was finally received by our nearby Sixth Fleet, whose commanders immediately dispatched two waves of jet fighters to rescue the Liberty and drive off the attackers, only to have both flights recalled by order of America’s highest political leadership, which chose to abandon the Liberty and its crew to their fate. At the end, two large helicopters filled with commandos dressed in full battle gear and armed with assault weapons were preparing to board the Liberty, sweep its decks clear of any resistance, and sink it. But at that moment their headquarters apparently discovered that the ship had managed to report its plight to other American military forces, so the enemy broke off the attack and retreated. The first American assistance finally arrived seventeen hours after the first shots had been fired, as two destroyers reached the stricken vessel, which was still desperately trying to stay afloat.

This story combined so many elements of exceptional military heroism, political treachery, and success against all odds that if the Liberty had been attacked by any nation on earth except Israel, the inspirational events of June 8, 1967 might have become the basis for several big-budget, Oscar-nominated movies as well as a regular staple of television documentaries. Such a patriotic narrative would have provided very welcome relief from the concurrent military disaster our country was then facing in its Vietnam War debacle. But events involving serious misdeeds of the Jewish State are hardly viewed with great favor by the leading lights of our entertainment industry, and the story of the Liberty quickly vanished from sight so that today I doubt whether even one American in a hundred has ever heard of it.

Our news media has been almost as silent on the subject. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was naturally some coverage in our major newspapers and magazines, with several of the reports expressing considerable skepticism of the Israeli claims of having made an innocent mistake. But the Johnson Administration quickly imposed an extreme clampdown to suppress any challenges to the official story.

An American admiral soon met with all of the survivors in small groups, including the many dozens still hospitalized from their serious injuries, and he issued fearsome threats to those terrified young sailors, most of whom were still in their teens or early twenties. If any of them ever mentioned a word of what had happened—even to their mothers, fathers, or wives, let alone the media—they would immediately be court-martialed and end their lives in prison “or worse.”

With our journalists having great difficulty finding any eyewitnesses willing to talk and our government firmly declaring that the attack had been an unfortunate instance of accidental “friendly fire,” the newsmen quickly lost interest and the story faded from the headlines. Our government still remained so concerned about the smoldering embers of the incident that the surviving sailors were distributed across the other ships of our navy, apparently with efforts made to avoid having any of them serve together, which would have allowed them an opportunity to discuss the events they had barely survived.

The ensuing decade of the 1970s saw the Watergate Scandal unfold, culminating in the impeachment and resignation of a president, and numerous other sordid governmental scandals and abuses of power came to light in the years that followed, greatly eroding popular faith in the honesty of our government.

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These changed circumstances helped provide an opening to James M. Ennes, Jr., one of the young surviving Liberty officers, who defied the threats of prosecution and imprisonment in order to reveal to the world what had happened. Working closely with many of his fellow survivors, he spent years preparing a powerful manuscript and was introduced to a major publishing house by star New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who had written one of the earliest news accounts of the attack. His book Assault on the Liberty was released in 1979, producing the first major crack in the continuing wall of silence. Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contributed a Foreword to a later edition, and the facts and gripping eyewitness testimony almost conclusively established that the Israeli attack had been entirely intentional. There were quite a number of favorable early reviews and interviews, leading to strong initial sales and further media coverage.