The Establishment’s Desperate Demands That Nobody Engage With RFK Jr. Plus: Does Cuba Have the Right to Host Chinese Bases on Its Soil? | SYSTEM UPDATE #103
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is consistently receiving between 15 and 20 percent among Democratic voters, while Marianne Williamson is receiving 6 to 8 percent.
That's close to one-third of the Democratic Party electorate, which, before the campaign is even underway, is saying they intend to support a candidate other than Joe Biden.
Nonetheless, the explicit position of the Democratic Party and its operatives and MSNBC personalities is that Joe Biden is already the Democratic nominee, and that he will not even consider debating any Democrat running against him for the nomination.
But this insistence of ignoring RFK extends far beyond the Democratic primary.
It includes the liberal corporate media outlets.
Last week, RFK sat down for a remarkable four-hour discussion with America's most popular podcast host, Joe Rogan.
Their discussion was wide-ranging.
Though it mostly focused on what RFK argues are the decades of lies from the health policy establishment about vaccines, including the COVID vaccine, as well as, and this is crucial, the extent to which the health regulatory agencies, including the NIH and CDC, have been completely captured by industry interest.
In other words, the government agencies that are supposed to exert oversight of the pharmaceutical industry are instead controlled by that industry's richest and most powerful corporations.
As part of that discussion, Rogan and RFK discussed a physician named Peter Hotez, who became one of the leading stars of liberal cable TV and social media during the COVID pandemic.
He calls himself Dr. Peter Hotez or Prof. Peter Hotez, MD, PhD.
Over the last several years, Hotez has expressed some truly alarming and ultimately false views, including demanding for months that everyone has the supreme moral duty to stay at home in order to stop COVID, only for a densely packed street protest movement including demanding for months that everyone has the supreme moral duty to stay at home in order to The post-George Floyd Black Lives Matters protest, at which point he urged everyone to participate in those protests.
Yes.
He also equated skepticism over vaccines to terrorism and depicted it as a Kremlin plot and thus urged highly militaristic and despotic efforts on the part of the U.S.
government to, in his words, aggressively suppress such ideas.
Hotez also relentlessly mocked the notion that COVID came from the Wuhan lab, and he still does that.
Even while the most elite scientific units in the Department of Energy and the FBI now believe a lab leak is the most probable cause of the COVID pandemic.
During that interview with Rogan, RFK said that Professor Hotez, MD, PhD, was one of the most dishonest people on public life in the US, and that he had repeatedly requested that Hotez debate him.
But Hotez, while giving countless, adoring, uncritical interviews to MSNBC, CNN, and even TMZ, refused to respond to RFK's debate request.
After that program, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to a charity of Hotez's choice if he would simply debate RFK and Rogan's programs about all the differences they have on these rather crucial issues.
Others jumped on board this call for debate, including Elon Musk, and soon the amount reached was over $1 million to be donated to a charity of Hotez's choice simply for appearing for this debate.
One would think that a debate between a highly informed environmental lawyer who spent decades suing corporate polluters and health agencies, RFK, and one of the most influential and beloved COVID preachers in liberal media, Professor Hotez, MD, PhD, would be of great value for the country.
It would be.
Yet immediately people who call themselves journalists, Those who should most seek debate on the most consequential policy debates instead intervened and began demanding that Hotez not lower himself to debating RFK.
They published articles and did cable monologues on why Hotez should not put himself in a position where his views would face critical scrutiny and accountability, even though those views have long been intended to influence American public opinion and for NR policy.
Watching journalists try to stop debates is like watching them become the leading advocates for censorship, which in turn is like watching a cardiologist extol the virtues of cigarette smoking.
It is completely contrary to the values that are supposed to define journalism.
Yet it is as unsurprising as it is repugnant to watch these employees of media corporations do exactly that.
Why are liberal establishment loyalists so eager to ensure that nobody engage with or debate RFK Jr.? ?
And why are they particularly desperate that the pieties and orthodoxies they peddle to the public about COVID and lockdowns and the pandemic origin and vaccines through people like Professor Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, never be openly debated?
We'll examine those motives tonight.
Then a major leak of top secret information has occurred again, this time to the Wall Street Journal, which reports that U.S.
intelligence has discovered that the governments of Cuba and China have agreed to have a Chinese military base stationed on Cuban soil.
That raises this question.
Does Cuba, a sovereign country, have the right to host the Chinese military on its soil if it wishes to do so?
When it comes to Russia, the position of the U.S.
government, especially those who support endless proxy war in Ukraine, is that Russia has no say of any kind over what happens in Ukraine.
If the Zelensky government wants to hose U.S.
military and intelligence officials on its soil, if it wants to be part of NATO, if it even allows the U.S.
to change its government as it did in 2014, then that's no business of Russia's.
Russia has no right to object to whatever the Kiev government does right on the other side of the Russian border.
So does this same reasoning apply to Cuba and the United States?
And for that matter, the U.S.
is currently encircling China with multiple military bases to multiple countries, including some that have nuclear-tipped warheads and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers.
If the U.S.
is justified in regarding Chinese bases in Cuba as deeply threatening and provocative, and many are calling for the Biden administration to take aggressive action to expel China from Cuba, Does China have the same right when it comes to U.S.
bases in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and Australia?
Does Russia have the same right regarding a massive NATO and EU presence on the other side of its border in Ukraine?
We'll examine those vital foreign policy principles tonight or whether there are any identifiable principles at all in play.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
The American establishment is done debating.
They don't debate any longer.
They issue decrees.
They impose judgments.
They force you to do things.
And rather than engage with any dissent or objections to what they're saying and doing, their only tactic is instead to find ways to suppress and censor it.
To censor it off Big Tech.
To marginalize the people who are dissenting and prevent them from having access to any media platforms and increasingly social media platforms and even increasingly finding ways to criminalize any kind of dissent.
Working around the First Amendment as much as they possibly can.
That is the critical context to understanding what happened with the aftermath of RFK Jr.' 's remarkable four-hour appearance on Joe Rogan's program, which, if you haven't watched, I really urge you to do so.
A significant part of that program was devoted to RFK Jr.' 's views about vaccines and about the COVID vaccine and the way in which health policy officials have been lying to the American public for decades and how they lied repeatedly throughout COVID.
He also makes the critical point that the entire health agency inside the United States government has been completely captured and co-opted.
By the very pharmaceutical companies they're supposed to scrutinize and exercise oversight over, just like it's true for so many other parts of government where the precise industry that is supposed to be regulated is instead in charge of those agencies through the revolving door and through enormous amounts of donations to those agencies.
And so there's essentially no safeguards at all on what pharmaceutical companies can do.
And that is a major reason why RFK Jr. is running.
But as he told me when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, and as he has repeatedly said, including on Joe Rogan's program, he's not actually running for president on the basis of his views on vaccine.
He has a broad agenda that is part of his very fundamental and principled and clearly vehemently held views about why the liberal establishment, why the Democratic Party, why the U.S. government, government, why the bipartisan consensus has become completely corrupted.
And as you listen to RFK Jr., and I listened to him when I interviewed him, I then listened to that entire episode with Joe Rogan.
I spent Monday and Tuesday, two hours each, or two and a half hours each, in a dentist chair, and that's what I was doing, was listening to that episode in full.
It becomes very evident that RFK Jr.
is a very serious person.
Remember that he didn't just pop up to run for president out of nowhere.
He spent 30 years as a highly regarded environmental lawyer.
And one of the things he says, and as a former litigator, I know this to be true, is that the only way you can successfully sue companies, the only way you can successfully litigate is if you immerse yourself at an expert level.
degree in whatever topic it is that you're litigating.
There's no way you can successfully question expert witnesses or dissect documents without having an expert level knowledge of the field in which you're suing.
And RFK Jr. has spent the last 30 years suing major corporate polluters, analyzing the effects of all kinds of chemicals and other toxicities in our water supply and in our food supply.
He sued major factory farming companies like Smithfield and he's constantly been in litigation against the parts of the government that are supposed to regulate The healthcare industry, the NIH, the CDC, and knows Dr. Fauci and that entire realm of government very well.
He spent years writing what became a best-selling book based on thousands of footnotes.
He knows what he's talking about, even if he's somebody who, at the end of the day, you're not entirely convinced of all of his views.
About which politician could you say that, that you're convinced of all of his views?
That the politician is bereft of any conspiracies and the like.
RFK Jr.
is a serious person.
He has a serious critique.
Well beyond the question of vaccines, of the Democratic Party establishment, the U.S.
government, and the bipartisan consensus, the shared views, which are many, between the two political parties.
And it's therefore not surprising that there's this desperate effort to make sure that he is not engaged with, that he's not given a platform to debate That is what the establishment does above all else.
Now, let's remember that while, as we're about to show you, there was this outpouring of anger and indignation over the mere suggestion that someone as elevated and lofty as Professor Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, should have to debate some peasant who's nowhere near his level.
Even though this very same Peter Hotez has not exactly been confining himself to the lofty heights of peer-reviewed science or journals, he has instead been spending the last several years deliberately turning himself into a Twitter star and a cable news star, constantly going on the scummiest MSNBC shows like Joy Reading, Chris Hayes, and the various CNN shows where he's routinely heralded as a hero and as a great man, Hours on Morning Joe.
He's not somebody too high-minded to lower themselves to a podcast like Joe Rogan's, which has at least ten times the audience as those other programs that I just named on which he's been spending his time.
In fact, he's been on TMZ where he's talked about the origins of COVID, claiming that it is preposterous to believe that it might have come from a lab leak, and he has gone around saying the most really alarming and exturbing things, I don't blame them, For wanting to keep him shielded from any kind of debate or critical scrutiny at the hands of somebody who really knows what they're talking about, like RFK Jr.
Because it would instantly reveal this person not only as dishonest, but as demented.
He's a true authoritarian.
He wanted dissent from their pieties and orthodoxies on lockdowns and COVID and vaccines to be criminalized.
He demanded the U.S.
government treat it like terrorism.
To say nothing of all the many things that he insisted were true that turned out to be completely false.
But let's remember that even the issue of Joe Rogan himself and that podcast, precisely because it reaches so many people, Ten times more than anyone on corporate media or on corporate television could dream of reaching.
And precisely because he's not controllable by pressure campaigns or the views of liberal corporate media, he's someone they can't control, which is what they hate the most.
They don't want him just prevented from hosting a debate between RFK Jr.
and Peter Hotez.
Remember, they wanted him off of Spotify completely.
Here's a article I wrote back in January 2022.
You might've remembered that at the height of COVID, there was this move by these 1960s rock singers who have 150th of the audience at best of Joe Rogan on Spotify, who began demanding that Spotify either remove Joe Rogan's show entirely, or they would take their music off of Spotify.
And of course, Spotify did exactly what you would expect Spotify to do, which is laugh in the face of these people who were trying to use their very minor leverage to demand that the most popular podcast program in the country that millions of young people listen to that Spotify paid $200 million in order to obtain be banned.
But as this article I wrote, Demonstrates the real point of that.
What that really revealed is that the religion, the paramount tool of the liberal establishment, is censorship and suppression of dissent.
They know the public has lost faith and trust in what they say.
They know the public is tuning them out.
They know the public regards them as liars.
All for very valid reasons.
And instead of trying to fix The rotted characteristics that have caused the public to justifiably conclude that they're not to be trusted, the only tactic that they are seeking to pursue instead is to regain control of discourse by suppressing dissent, by censoring everybody who they cannot control.
And so this whole explosion of liberals on MSNBC and in the New York Times to say that it's disgusting to even suggest that Peter Hotez should debate RFK Jr.
on the Joe Rogan Show was really a kind of distraction from the broader picture that they want Joe Rogan banned entirely from being heard.
They want his show off Spotify.
They want every independent outlet banned from Spotify.
And not only do they want Joe Rogan banned from Spotify, they also want RFK Jr.
banned from being heard.
They don't want to debate him, they want to censor him.
Over the past month, many people who are on YouTube, owned by Google, which donates enormous amounts of money to the Democratic Party, Have said that even for hosting RFK Jr.
or by mentioning his name, Google has suppressed them.
RFK did an interview with Jordan Peterson on YouTube as part of the Daily Wire and Google removed that video.
Others who just did a segment on RFK Jr.
have had their videos demonetized and suppressed.
There is a genuine campaign, a steadfast campaign by Big Tech To silence the opponents of Joe Biden and specifically to ensure that RFK Jr.
is not heard from.
Just like there was a major campaign to try and remove Joe Rogan from Spotify.
They want to take everybody who they can't control and who are dissidents to their views and either destroy them or censor them.
That is their real tactic and it is vital to see that.
Just how despotic our climate has become.
Now, let me just show you a video of some comments RFK Jr.
made on the Joe Rogan Show, just to give you an idea of what RFK's critique is of the Democratic Party when Joe Rogan asked him why it is that he's running for president, why it is that he's seeking the Democratic Party nomination against RFK Jr., here's what, against Joe Biden, here's what RFK Jr.
had to say.
I think, you know, both parties have lost their way.
In my party, the Democratic Party has become the party of war, it's become the party of censorship, it's become the party of pharmaceutical companies, of, you know, the neocons, this very aggressive belligerent foreign policy that's forever wars.
And then, you know, the kind of political suppression that we saw, and this really, this kind of, this bizarre turning our backs on the American middle class, which is the only thing that sustains democracy.
If you don't have a middle class, you cannot, any political scholar, you know, political scientist will tell you that if you have large aggregations of wealth at the top, And widespread poverty below.
That formulation is too unstable to support democracy.
And the middle class has just been wiped out in this country and nobody's talking about it.
So there you hear his critique.
It goes way beyond vaccines.
My party, the Democratic Party, has become the party of endless war, the party of censorship, the party of neocons, and an aggressive foreign policy that seeks endless war.
And it's become completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry to the point where there's no more middle class in the United States and this vast inequality where elites continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class is threatening intrinsically so to democracy because even the founders recognized That once you have economic inequality that becomes too severe where the middle class disappears, that inequality will seep into the system of political rights and legal equality and destroy democracy.
That is RFK's broader critique of what the Democratic Party has become.
It should not be hard to understand why people desperate to nominate Joe Biden at the age of 82 Are desperate to make sure that person is not heard from.
He's an incredibly articulate and informed speaker.
And he has a very compelling story that resonates particularly with Democrats.
I listen to it.
It's going to make a big impact if people hear it.
About how his father, R.F.K.
Jr.
in 1968, R.F.K.
rather senior, was able to unite left and right.
And overcome dreary partisan divisions because he told the truth about the war in Vietnam and about the true way that the military-industrial complex worked and especially about oligarchy in the United States.
And that, the ability to unite left and right, is the most potent weapon in American politics for the ability to destroy control by the two parties and the establishment pieties that they steadfastly protect.
Now, after the appearance on Joe Rogan, where RFK said in particular that there was someone who was an egregious pathological liar and a charlatan when it came to COVID, the person who just so happens to be the most beloved within liberal media precisely because he's such a liar, a shameless liar, Peter Hotez, And R.K.
mentioned that he's repeatedly asked Professor Hotez, Ph.D., M.D., to debate him and Hotez refuses.
Joe Rogan, as you can see in this Newsweek article, went on to Twitter and offered $100,000 to a charity of his choice, of Hotez's choice, if he would come on his show.
The article reads, quote, Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan has offered $100,000 to a vaccine expert to debate Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
on his show.
Rogan challenged Dr. Peter Hotez following an interview he had with Kennedy Jr.
Hotez is Dean at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.
During the interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Kennedy Jr.
doubled down on claims that vaccines cause autism, which has been repeatedly disproven after British anti-vaccine expert Andrew Wakefield's study into an apparent link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and the condition was exposed as flawed and ultimately retracted.
Following the interview, Hotez hit out at Rogan and Spotify over the interview and described the podcaster as sharing, quote, vaccine misinformation.
In response, Rogan tweeted, Peter, if you claim what RFK is saying is misinformation, I am offering you $100,000 for the charity of your choice if you're willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.
The article focuses exclusively on one specific claim of the many RFK has to make, namely that vaccines cause autism.
That maybe was 20 minutes of the four hours of that interview.
And even if you disbelieve the link between vaccines and autism, and I'm open-minded on that question, even I would say citing more so on the side of those who say that the link is disproven,
RFK has a very compelling case to make, a very evidence-based case, and I would like to hear someone like Dr. Peter Hotez, MD, PhD professor, have to contest it and have to explain why the specific claims RFK Jr.
is making are invalid.
That's the way rational public policy discourse is conducted.
Not by calling someone a loon and demanding they be censored by Google.
But by engaging them, especially when it's a person with credentials who's a serious individual who has long been respected within Democratic Party politics the way RFK Jr.
has.
And I would particularly like to hear a debate on the things where I think RFK Jr.
is exactly right.
About all the shifting explanations and the lies and the complete lack of principle and the despotism and authoritarianism that drove these public health officials and their pronouncements on COVID.
Probably the thing that destroyed my faith in public health experts more than anything, and I went into the COVID pandemic with scientists and doctors and the health establishment as one of the last fields for which I harbored any trust at all, or any respect at all, was I listened to them for four months insist that it was the moral duty of every person to not leave home for any reason.
You couldn't leave home even to go to a funeral of a loved one.
You couldn't go to an outdoor cemetery of somebody being buried.
You couldn't visit your parents in the hospital as they were dying.
You could only speak to them at best through FaceTime in the hospital.
If you were somebody who objected to strict government lockdowns and quarantines and school closures, And you wanted to exercise your constitutional rights to object to those policies by gathering with your fellow citizens and protesting, which is a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
You were condemned as a sociopath and a reckless killer of people's grandmothers for leaving your house.
It was so insane that CNN and others turned into a hero, some deranged lawyer, Who would get dressed up as the Grim Reaper and go to shame families for the crime of going to outdoor beaches where the sun was out in order to get outside and protect their kids' mental health.
And he would go and shame them by dressing up as the Grim Reaper and accusing them of spreading death everywhere because they were outdoors on a beach.
That's how much the moral absolutism was accepted that there was no reason to go outside.
In fact, There is no moral justification for leaving your house.
Stay at home.
Now obviously we watch one after the other.
Major politician get caught telling everybody to stay at home and then they would go out.
Nancy Pelosi got caught going to a hair salon.
Gavin Newsom got caught dining in a closed door indoor restaurant with lobbyists.
And then he lied about it saying it was an outdoor restaurant and it wasn't.
And even if it were, which it wasn't, people were being shamed for taking their kids to a beach.
And Boris Johnson and on and on and on.
Justin Trudeau.
All sorts of politicians violated that.
But the thing that destroyed faith and trust in the health policy industry establishment was when George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department and a protest movement erupted that was filled with densely packed street protests.
People were on top of one another by the tens of thousands.
In defense of this protest, all throughout the country for months, and the very same health experts who said that anyone who leaves their house for any reason, including to engage in political protest, is an immoral sociopath, immediately turned around on a dime when it was a protest movement they liked ideologically, and said that not only is it justified to leave your house, it's a moral obligation to do so.
On the grounds that racism was a greater risk to the public health than COVID.
So they just changed their scientific advice based on ideology so flagrantly and out in the open.
Why would you trust anyone who does that?
And Peter Hotez was one of the people who did that.
He insisted for months on all these networks and on social media that you are not to leave your home for any reason.
And the minute that protest movement broke out that he liked, he insisted everyone has the obligation to go.
I would love to hear him be questioned about that.
And there are very few people who could do so effectively.
RFK Jr.
is one of them.
And the Joe Rogan program in particular is the most conducive to a debate like that because it goes on for as many hours as it needs to.
There's no time constraint.
It's not like on cable news where you're forced to confine yourself to five and six and seven minute talking point sessions in between commercials where you're talked over by the host or Mehdi Hassan screams at you and then go writes a book about how he's so great at debates.
Joe Rogan is unfailingly civil and polite.
No one is ever interrupted on that show.
I listened to RFK Jr.
talk for an hour and a half, but barely any interruptions.
And that's the experience with every guest.
I was on Joe Rogan's show.
That was my experience.
You just, he'll ask you questions and then give you as much time as you want to speak.
And they know that.
They were trying to act like it was going to be some wrestling event where people are going to be screaming over Peter Hotez.
Peter Hotez would have all the time in the world to speak.
That's precisely what they're afraid of.
So here you see the tweet from Rogan after he asked Hotez to come on his show.
Hotez had been on Joe Rogan's show twice previously, so it's not like he considers himself above Joe Rogan's program.
And in fact, he wanted to go on Joe Rogan's program again.
He was saying, let me come on your show, just not without that bad man to challenge me.
And Rogan said, this is a non-answer.
I challenge you publicly because you publicly quote-tweeted and agreed with that dogshit Vice article.
If you're really serious about what you stand for, you now have a massive opportunity for a debate that will reach the largest audience a discussion like this has ever had.
If you think someone else is better qualified, suggest that person.
Because when Rogan first asked it there, you see, Hotez replied, Joe, you have my cell, my email.
I'm always willing to speak with you.
He didn't want to go on with, RFK Jr., somebody who's an expert in this topic.
And what makes it so much worse is the Vice article to which Rogan was referring, which I'll show you, was an article essentially complaining that Spotify allows Joe Rogan's program to be heard at all.
And that was one that Peter Hotez had Promoted.
There you see the tweet from Hotez, citing, of course, a liberal employee of a corporate media outlet, Vice.
He wrote an article basically complaining that Spotify should be censoring Rogan even more, shouldn't even allow his show on.
And the tweet wrote, quote, Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation.
It's a tweet by, it's an article by Anne Merlin.
And Hotez says, it's really true, Anne Merlin, just awful.
And from the online attacks I'm receiving on this absurd podcast, it's clear many believe this nonsense.
So of course the media immediately jumped not only to Hotez's defense, but to the idea that nobody should debate RFK Jr.
at all.
They're obviously desperate for Joe Biden to win the nomination, just as they were in 2020.
But what they're really afraid of is this passionate critique by RFK Jr., not only of the lies told about COVID and his claims about vaccines, which you're free to believe or not, but the much broader indictment of the establishment of which they're all part.
And again, their only tactic, the only thing they know, the instinct that they have in every case is to suppress rather than engage.
That's why they're censorship fanatics.
Now, let me just show you a couple of The amazing inconsistencies in Hotez's claims over the years that he could never ever reconcile if forced to.
But of course, he only confines himself to media outlets where they never confront him about anything, where they herald him as a hero and a genius.
And that's where they want him to stay.
So you probably remember that in 2020, when Donald Trump was pledging to have a vaccine ready by the end of the year, Many Democrats openly scoffed and expressed vaccine skepticism.
Kamala Harris said, I would never take a vaccine recommended by Donald Trump.
They spread vaccine skepticism because they wanted people to think that whatever vaccine the Trump administration produced was fraudulent, that it wouldn't work, that it was dangerous.
Kamala Harris said openly, I'm not going to take any dirty, filthy, dangerous vaccine the Trump administration provides.
And Peter Hotez was one of those people similarly saying the same thing.
Here you see in Yahoo News in September of 2020, doctors alarmed as the FDA floats emergency use of COVID-19 vaccine bypassing trials.
You may remember that people were desperate to get this vaccine into people's hands.
And the only way to do that, to skip over all the clinical trials normally required by the FDA, is to invoke the emergency use provision of the FDA, which allows much shorter and less thorough vaccine trials to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
And because it was the Trump administration, many doctors were saying, this is irresponsible.
You cannot allow a vaccine to come to the public through the emergency use FDA provision, because that would be reckless use of because they were petrified that Trump would benefit politically If he succeeded in getting a vaccine into the hands of people to save lives from COVID, this is what scumbags they are.
Think about that.
They were pretending to be so concerned about the COVID pandemic and people dying from it, but just like they prioritized their political ideology when it came to advice about whether you can leave the house or not, depending on what kind of protest it was, They completely changed their views on whether we should use the emergency use procedure to get vaccines into the hands of the public when it was Trump doing it versus Biden.
So here begins the article, quote, epidemiologists and vaccine experts are alarmed by FDA administration, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn's recent assertion that he will consider approving a coronavirus vaccine before the completion of late stage clinical trials.
The FDA Commissioner can issue a so-called Emergency Use Authorization, EUA, on his own if he determines that the benefits of rushing the vaccine into production outweigh the risks.
But several vaccine experts told Yahoo News that they are deeply concerned by the idea.
No vaccine has ever been approved on an EUA basis, said Dr. Peter Hotez.
A top vaccine expert, except ones to overcome unusual technicalities on a military anthrax vaccine.
Quote, we don't do EUAs for vaccines, Hotez said.
It's a lesser review.
It's a lower quality review.
And when you're talking about vaccinating a large chunk of the American population, that's not acceptable.
He was adamant that there be no COVID vaccine.
Without undergoing the normal battery of long-term clinical testing because it's unacceptably said to rush a vaccine into the hands of the population without putting it through the normal rigors of clinical testing.
On October 23rd, President Trump called a press conference to announce an E-Way for convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19, which was controversial in its own right, but the people who might receive it are already sick.
Vaccines, by definition, are given to healthy people.
In that light, it is vital that clinical trials be allowed to run their course, especially given the novel approaches some labs are employing in their coronavirus efforts, said Hotez.
A professor of pediatrics and the dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
So there you see when Donald Trump was president, Hotez was petrified that people would get a vaccine that worked and that would benefit Trump politically in the 2020 election.
He wanted the vaccine kept out of the hands of the public.
Suddenly, here in October 21, 2021, when Joe Biden is president, from the AGMC, you have Dr. Peter Hotez on the urgent need for a COVID-19 vaccine for children.
And this is what he says, quote, what must parents and providers consider with the FDA's EUA, Emergency Use Authorization, of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children?
Hotez, I would have liked to have seen more of a full-throated endorsement of the vaccine.
The vote was unanimous except for one abstention, but the need for a vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 is clear.
We've had more than 8,300 hospitalizations with this big 5-10 fold increase in the number of hospitalizations over the summer because of the Delta variant, because it's so highly transmissible.
I think the one concern that was raised is the fact that the clinical trial leading to the Emergency Youth Authorization in 5-11 year olds was done in 2,200 kids.
Roughly 1,500 got the vaccine and 700 plus got the placebo and that would not be sufficient to see one in 10,000 events.
I think that was perhaps the only reservation, but overwhelmingly the risk of severe COVID-19 leading to hospitalization far outweighs that potential possibility of myocarditis in the younger kids.
So just think about that.
When it came to adults in the Trump administration, Hotez wanted to block the vaccine on the grounds that emergency authorization was reckless.
Under Joe Biden, He wanted to rush this vaccine, even for children under the ages of 5 to 11 who were barely dying of this disease.
It was extremely rare.
And he wanted to skip over the EAU and get these vaccines into the hands of children as quickly as possible, completely changing what he said for obvious political reasons.
Now, this is something that he did in almost every media appearance through the years.
You can trace how he just constantly changed what he was saying without any indication that he said the opposite, as these vaccines proved to be completely different than the way they were depicted.
You, of course, remember that the vaccine was sold to us on the grounds that it would prevent anyone vaccinated from contracting the disease and passing it to anyone else who's not vaccinated.
They were claiming it's a pandemic now, only of the unvaccinated to try and stigmatize unvaccinated people.
And ultimately they began forcing people to take the vaccine who didn't want it by threatening their jobs and firing people in large numbers who refused to take it, including people who worked in healthcare and in the military and many other fields.
They wanted to deprive them of autonomy over what to put into their own body based on assurances about this vaccine that repeatedly proved to be untrue.
Here is a video montage prepared by the journalist Dan Cohen in June of this year, so just a few days ago, of Peter Hotez and how he just completely changes whatever he needs to say at any given moment to suit his political interests of the moment.
Let's take a look at that.
Whatever vaccine is really offered to you.
Hotez said that once enough people were injected with two doses, viral transmission would stop and other measures would no longer be necessary.
News is good.
It's saying even after six months, it still looks like it's really strong and durable.
So this is going to be a long-lasting vaccine.
A single dose is not very effective, but two doses, fully vaccinated people are.
A week or two after the second dose.
The masks can start to come off.
And guess what?
You can have everything you've asked for in terms of not requiring social distancing and masks.
We can have an extraordinary quality of life.
This is time limited.
It's not in perpetuity.
Well, if this is not in perpetuity, we are going to vaccinate our way out of this epidemic starting in the summer.
If enough Americans get vaccinated, we could actually halt virus transmission.
Potentially.
You know, if you do the simple math, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Once you get over 65 percent of the population with a single dose of the vaccine and 50 percent with two doses, the amount of transmission will really start to decline.
60 to 70 percent.
60 to 80 percent threshold.
We need to get to about 75 percent before we interrupt transmission.
Around three quarters of the U.S.
population.
Roughly 80% of the U.S.
population.
Two doses turned to three.
I think ultimately a third immunization with the mRNA vaccines will probably be needed at some point.
We thought there was a pretty high likelihood we might have to give a third immunization down the line anyway at some point because we had no idea about the durability of protection of any of these vaccines.
So if you got a two-dose Pfizer Moderna vaccine, think of it as a three-dose vaccine.
We ultimately will need to give a third immunization and I've been pretty much saying that all along.
This was always a three-dose vaccine and so this was all predicted and predictable.
I've always said this is a three-dose vaccine.
Two mRNA vaccines were always a three-dose vaccine.
We've known for a while that this was going to be a three-dose vaccine.
The big unknown is what happens to those of us We've got three doses.
I don't have the answer.
You need that third immunization to get a 30 to 40 fold rise.
After you get that third immunization, you do get a big boost in virus neutralizing antibodies.
By November 2021, the U.S.
population had met what Hotez and the government called fully vaccinated.
Today, we hit two important milestones.
80% of adults now have at least their first shot, and 70% of adults are now fully vaccinated.
But the goalposts were shifted, and the booster campaign was just getting started.
We're going to have to change the definition of fully vaccinated.
counts as full immunization will be three doses just because we gave those first two doses so close together.
The idea that two immunizations constitutes full immunizations, it's not even close.
You need that booster and you probably need the second booster.
If you've gotten a single boost and you're eligible, get your second boost.
The solution here is just continue mass vaccination as aggressively as possible.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to interview that person.
Even for 15 minutes, I don't have a $200 million Spotify contract like Joe Rogan does, nor am I the richest person in the world like Elon Musk, but I am tempted also to offer money to a charity of Peter Hoge's choice just to come on the show for 20 minutes to allow me to question him on these completely contradictory statements that he just makes so recklessly based on whatever his need of the moment.
And that's by far not the worst stuff he's done and things he said. - Amen.
The way in which he completely and radically changed his scientific counsel based on political and ideological preferences is so flagrant and so repugnant That I would probably start with that.
Here, for example, is a tweet that he posted in June of 2021.
This is a year after he told everybody that they should go and attend the Black Lives Matter protests and he wrote, quote, Reported this morning in the Houston Chronicle, Alex Jones will attend an anti-COVID-19 vaccine protest here in Houston on Saturday.
Can you imagine people going so far down this anti-vax rabbit hole jeopardizing their kids' lives or their lives or the lives of their kids?
For what?
This is the new face of Republican extremism?
So he even blatantly and explicitly constructs his views based on his partisan preferences, but he also, that is not a scientific judgment.
Whether you can go and attend a protest safely does not depend on the ideology of that protest or how noble ideologically or politically it is.
If it's dangerous to go to a protest protesting vaccine mandates, it's by definition just as dangerous To go to densely packed street protests for Black Lives Matter.
Which protest you can go to, and distinguishing protests based on their politics is not a scientific judgment, it is an ideological one.
And yet these people constantly exploited their professional credentials for nakedly political ends.
And in doing so, destroyed trust and faith in their credentials.
And now they want to turn around and say, how dare you think that I should debate somebody Who doesn't have my credentials or anybody for that matter.
I'm a scientist.
I don't debate.
I just go on TMZ and enjoy a read show and spout lies constantly.
Here in June of 2020, so basically, After he spent four months shaming everybody who left their house for any reason, he tweeted this, quote, Many thanks to Chris Hayes tonight.
I explained why it's not so simple to just say protests will bring back COVID-19.
Rather, structural racism causes three times higher COVID-19 deaths in African American populations and rates already increasing in many states.
Which was his argument for why you shouldn't go to any protest of any kind except the ones that he likes.
Now, this might be the thing that disgusts me the most about Peter Hotez.
This isn't just a politicized statement masquerading as a scientific judgment, nor was it just a flagrantly wrong view.
This was despotism and authoritarianism that has driven so much of the policy in the United States and the West more broadly.
Obviously the 9-11 attack was instantly exploited to erode civil liberties, but more recently almost every crisis has been as well, from Russiagate and the election of Trump to January 6th to the war in Ukraine and especially the COVID pandemic.
Each of those justified All new levels of aggressive censorship in which the state and corporate power were unified, which is the definition of fascism, to police and suppress dissent from our political discourse.
And Peter Hotez was one of the leading advocates for this in some of the most alarming tones you will ever hear.
So here is an article he published in Nature Magazine, the Nature Journal, in April of 2021.
And the title of it was COVID Vaccines, Time to Confront Anti-Vax Aggression.
And there you see the headline, Halting the Spread of the Coronavirus Will Require a High-Level Counteroffensive Against New Destructive Forces.
He's really talking about people who question the vaccine.
And notice how any questioning of anything he says means that you're, quote, anti-vax.
You may like vaccines, you may believe in the science of vaccines, but you may be opposed to vaccine mandates, or you might be questioning the safety of the COVID vaccine or the need for it given low death rates.
And you just will immediately get accused of being quote, anti-vax, which in the world of Peter Hotez is a form of terrorism.
They wanted to criminalize any questioning of their pieties.
Here's what he wrote, quote, The United Nations and the highest levels of government must take direct, even confrontational approaches with Russia and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
So, of course, just like they do with every single view that deviates from their pieties and their decrees, immediately it's cast as a Kremlin program, UNF.
You don't have any mind of your own.
If you question what they're doing, it means you're acting on behalf of Russia, wittingly or otherwise.
And he's demanding confrontational, direct approaches to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
How can you advocate the dismantling of a group that has views that you dislike?
The Constitution allows people to be anti-vax, whatever that means, even if it means the maximalist view of hating all vaccines and not wanting them, or the far more common one of questioning the efficacy of the COVID vaccine, or whether it was necessary for children, or whether mandates were justified.
Peter Hotez has no right to dismantle organizations that organize based on that dissent.
That dissent is constitutionally protected.
He goes on, the task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks, and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril.
It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counter-offensive.
I'm sorry, but that is really demented.
That is authoritarian at its core.
Is it any wonder by these liberal establishment media figures and political figures who turn this person into a prophet don't want him subject to meaningful questioning?
If you were Peter Hotez, would you want to be questioned on that?
If you were somebody who turned into a hero, would you want him to be required to debate?
And the fact that Joe Rogan offers hours of time to debate where no cable host can interject and save him with a commercial break or by filibustering is precisely what they fear the most.
They're not afraid that the Joe Rogan program would be a screaming match.
They're afraid that it won't be.
That's why they want Joe Rogan off the air and why they want RFK Jr. censored.
And it's why they want Peter Hotez shielded from debates.
Now, as I mentioned, this high-minded man of science who's too elevated to lower himself to a debate on the Joe Rogan program with RFK Jr.
went on TMZ.
That's how desperate he was to be a cultural celebrity.
He went on to TMZ in June of 2021.
If you go on TMZ, you go anywhere.
And this is what he said while on TMZ.
Listen to what he said. - Postulate that it came out of a laboratory doesn't hold water and there is no smoking gun to say that it's of laboratory origin, either accidental or deliberate.
It's not impossible, but what I've been calling for and many of us have been calling for is we do need to know the origins of COVID. - So your issue is that Jon Stewart and others who are embracing this theory are just jumping the gun.
It's not that it's not possible.
You're just saying they're jumping the gun and saying this without the evidence.
That's right, and they're putting the entertainment value of this over and above what's reality, and it causes a lot of damage because a number of scientists who work on coronaviruses, including myself, feel that we're being under attack right now.
The scientific community is open to the idea, but what I object to ...is the fact that they make it sound like it's fait accompli, when in fact it's the less likely hypothesis of how COVID-19 originated, and it's tone-deaf to the collateral damage that it has on scientists and the scientific community.
It nauseates me how petulant he is.
He's somebody going around the world seeking to impose his views on everybody else, to force you to take into your body against your will a vaccine that he advocated for only when Joe Biden was president, but when Donald Trump was president said was too dangerous to endorse.
And then he constantly takes anybody who questions him and either puts them into the category of anti-vax, someone who should be treated as a terrorist and treated with aggressive counter measures, or starts whining that to suggest that their explanation about where this pandemic originated makes no sense is some attack on scientists.
Now, of course he said that he was open to the possibility, but that is a lie because for the first year of this pandemic, Big Tech, at the behest of the Biden administration, censored any attempt to have that debate.
If you were to go online on Facebook or Google and say that you didn't believe the government's claims, that there was this naturally occurring zoonotic leap from pangolins or bats to animals, Or to humans from these dirty Chinese markets, as they explained it.
But instead, suspected, as Jon Stewart said and Stephen Colbert, may be the fact that there's an actual coronavirus research facility in Wuhan, the very city where this virus originated.
Maybe those two things are connected.
Maybe the work at the Wuhan lab into bat coronaviruses is what actually might have caused this virus to first appear in Wuhan.
That seems pretty coincidental.
And yet, if you said that, you really were banned.
It was the official policy of Facebook and Google not to allow that dissent or that debate.
That letter in Lancet that Dr. Fauci organized days after the world's leading virologist and immunologist told him That they believe this pandemic came from a lab and was created by in a lab and not naturally occurring.
And he got them three days later to sign on to a Lancet letter saying the debate is closed.
And anybody who questions the origin of this pandemic, as may be coming from a lab, is not only engaged in disinformation, but is attacking scientists.
This exact language that Peter Hotez weaponized here.
That was all lie, and it was a year later that the Biden administration admitted that it did not know the origins of the pandemic.
They didn't know if it came from a lab or not, and would investigate, and only then did Big Tech permit the debate, now that the government was saying it's okay to debate it.
Peter Hotez says, it's possible, but it's by far the least likely explanation, and yet the elite scientific teams at the Department of Energy and the FBI both now say, That the most probable explanation for this pandemic is that it leaked from this lab, from US-funded research at this lab, which is why people like Peter Hotez and Dr. Fauci were so desperate to mislead you into thinking that might have happened because they were the ones with the blood on their hands.
Isn't it amazing that these people who purported so much concern about people dying of COVID And wanted to take away all your civil liberties, your right to protest, your right to dissent, your right to control what goes into your own body in the name of such concern over this pandemic.
Don't care at all what caused the pandemic.
They know what caused the pandemic.
They know.
They knew from the start that it came from research that they themselves engage in and support.
And obviously that's an extremely dangerous realization.
That research approved of and funded by Anthony Fauci by the U.S.
government in conjunction with the Chinese government killed millions of people all around the world and wrecked world economies.
I would also, if I were them, want to exploit my scientific credentials to say that only crazy people think that and to prevent that from being mentioned, which is exactly what they did.
It was authoritarian in the extreme to prevent debate on this question.
And Peter Hotez is one of the people who was involved directly in that kind of research, which is why he was one of the good soldiers coming forward and saying, it's almost impossible for this to be the case.
People who are claiming this are engaged in an unfair attack on scientists.
Hear from the transparency group, the U.S.
Right to Know.
We shouldn't need transparency groups like this.
This is supposed to be the job of journalists.
But they don't do that.
From August of 2022 by Emily Koop, quote, Critic of congressional probe into gain-of-function research helped fund Wuhan gain-of-function study.
And there you see a picture of Peter Hotez.
The Republicans wanted a congressional investigation into whether gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab led to the pandemic.
Gain-of-function research means manipulating viruses in order to study them that make them more dangerous, more contagious for humans.
Which is almost certainly now, it appears strongly, how this pandemic leaked from the lab and turned into a pandemic.
How this virus leaked from the lab and turned into a pandemic.
And Peter Hotez never disclosed the fact that he himself was involved in this research when he was denouncing efforts to find out.
Quote, a prominent scientist who has denounced a congressional investigation into gain-of-function research helped fund Wuhan Institute of Virology gain-of-function work flagged by congressional investigators.
Peter Hotez, Dean of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, has been a fierce critic of potential hearings next year into a possible lab origin of COVID-19.
And whether the NIH prematurely discredited the hypothesis.
Hotez described the hearings as nothing less than a, quote, plan to undermine the fabric of science in America in a viral tweet thread last week.
Hotez also dismissed as a, quote, an outlandish conspiracy the possibility that a lab accident sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
Remember, the US government itself now believes that this outlandish conspiracy is the most likely explanation.
It goes on.
However, Hotez's own 2012 to 2017 NIH grant for the development of a SARS vaccine had the stated aim of responding to any, quote, accidental release from a laboratory, in addition to a possible zoonotic spillover of the virus.
The $6.1 million NIH grant also raises the possibility of, quote, deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack.
Quote, SARS outbreak remains a serious concern, mainly due to a possible zoonotic reintroduction of SARS-CoV into humans, accidental release from a laboratory, or deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack, the grant's description reads.
It's not clear why Hotez has dismissed the possible lab release of SARS-CoV-2 as preposterous after having conducted research for years to prepare for a possible accidental or deliberate release of SARS-CoV.
Hotez helped fund research on a controversial chimeric coronavirus.
While casting concerns about Wuhan's lab as fringe, Hotez has not mentioned his own connection to a project involving the laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that has come under Congress's microscope.
The project was helmed by Jing Xi, a senior scientist and, quote, virus hunter at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nicknamed the Bat Lady.
As part of his NIH grant, Hotez subcontracted funding for research on combined or chimeric coronaviruses, a scientific paper shows.
Hotez's grant underwrote two of Xi's collaborators on the project.
In a 2017 paper, co-funded by Hotez, Xi and her colleagues generated a recombatant virus from two SARS-related coronaviruses.
Sheath's participation in the joint project was funded in part by EcoHealth Alliance, the paper shows.
Quote, the work here should have been at least, the very least, heavily scrutinized, said David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert.
Quote, this work should have been heavily reviewed for gain of function and probably should have been subject to the pause prior to December 2017.
Hotez serves on the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a panel of experts working to scrutinize the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The chair of that commission is Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist.
We interviewed Professor Sachs because back then he believed that COVID was naturally occurring, the lab leak was unlikely, and now has realized that that was the result of a lot of deception on the part of the people with whom he was working.
The article says, Jeffrey Sachs has in recent weeks called for an impartial investigation of the lab leak hypothesis.
He says he doesn't know, he believes that research is needed.
Meanwhile, Hotez has suggested that the Commission's final report should not incorporate Sachs' concerns.
Quote, whenever I discussed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was at laboratory release, Hotez strongly rejected the possibility, but never explained to me, ordered the Lancet Commission, that he actually has a grant that was based on that very kind of risk.
He should certainly have been clear on that, said Sachs.
This is the same group of people, this part of this cabal, that has done this work, this very work on gain-of-function research, on attempting to determine whether gain-of-function research can lead to lab leaks, who have been neck-deep in this kind of research.
The fact that they were the ones, through that Lancet letter, who pronounced this to be a fraud, or disinformation, when they were so conflicted From the very beginning is just a huge scandal, a massive, gigantic scandal.
The Lancet even acknowledged a year later that that conflict should have been disclosed.
But all these people are conflicted, including Peter Hotez.
And the evidence is now very clear that there was gain-of-function research funded by Dr. Fauci through the Echo Health Alliance.
There has been all kinds of Evidence to emerge demonstrating that, and yet here you have Peter Hotez, who is at the center of it all, who has repeatedly changed his story, who has got caught lying, who has clearly politicized this pandemic, who is a complete authoritarian, who wants to censor any kind of dissent, and now he's come more into the public view as a result of RFK's
Insistence that he be able to debate Peter Hotez on the best possible platform to hear it.
Best because it's the best format.
Best in terms of how many people hear it.
And it's journalists.
Journalists.
Employees of large media corporations with the HR title of journalists, they don't break stories, but this is what they do.
They immediately dive in and intervene in defense of Peter Hotez and insist that he be shielded from scrutiny, that he's far too sophisticated and important of a man to have to debate someone like RFK Jr.
Now, as I said, this is the mentality of the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment.
They do not debate.
Here is Simone Sanders who used to work for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and is now an MSNBC host on some weekend show.
Here she is on Morning Joe discussing the candidacy of RFK Jr.
and why Joe Biden will never ever debate him.
Let's listen to that.
Bobby Kennedy Jr., doing well.
He's at 19%.
Hasn't really gotten that much out there.
And I'm starting to hear more and more talk about him.
Are we going to actually have a challenge here?
I'm trying not to laugh, Joe.
Can I stop you for a second?
Do you know how many people said the same thing about Donald Trump in 2015 on this show?
Yes, because there was going to be a Republican primary, but I really think that The Mealy Mouth Democrats, as I like to call them, and some of my progressive friends who would like to live in a fantasy land, they need to come back to reality.
And the reality is this.
The sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat.
A Democrat that would like to run for re-election, so much so that he has declared a re-election campaign.
In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process.
There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else to stand on.
So we're going to have another Bobby?
Kennedy in an empty chair in the debate, right?
There will be no debating.
Yeah, no debate.
The Democratic National Committee administers the debates and they're not going to set up a primary process for debates for someone to challenge the head of the Democratic Party.
David, a lot of Democrats concerned about Joe Biden.
They may not be saying it in front of the television camera, but man, get those cameras off.
Just look at that open contempt they have for everybody.
Imagine just coming out and saying that.
There will be no debating Joe Biden.
This process is done.
The DNC doesn't allow debates.
It doesn't allow voting.
It doesn't allow elections.
They're going to pick who the nominee is.
It doesn't matter what voters want.
This is their mindset with everything.
They know that people hate them.
They know people distrust them.
And their tactic increasingly is to try and do everything possible to ensure that there's no dissent permitted.
They'll focus on RFK and they'll say for 10 to 5 minutes at most in this interview we talked about the radiological dangers from 5G or they'll focus on the asserted connection between vaccines and autism to say he's a conspiracy theorist and therefore should be banned from Having a platformer from being taken seriously?
Who is a worse conspiracy theorist than these people?
Like Joe Biden?
Who falsely said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?
Who said that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Al Qaeda that led to a war that killed a million people?
Who constantly peddled the lies for years?
That the Kremlin had taken over control of the United States government through sexual and financial blackmail held over Donald Trump?
Even as Trump did things like armed Ukraine with lethal weapons and worked to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
Things that disprove the conspiracy by itself attacking the vital interest of the Kremlin.
This insane conspiracy theory, these are the people who spread it.
And then they're going to turn around and claim other people are conspiracy theorists who aren't to be taken seriously.
This is about nothing other than solidifying their own power, both the establishment wing of politics and their allies in the media.
And doubling down on the fact that they're hated and saying we're going to accept the fact that we're getting hated, we're going to accept the fact that we're not trusted, and our solution to that is going to be to ban debate of any kind.
We will criminalize dissent, we will get it off Big Tech, we will marginalize it to the point that it cannot be heard.
And every single thing that I just went through, including that last comment, exhibits That tyrannical mindset more than anything else.
censorship is their religion, banning dissent is their primary goal, and protecting their own power is really their only objective.
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There's a new major leak of top-secret information, except in this case, nobody really seems to care about who it is who leaked this top-secret information.
There's no FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago in order to find the top-secret leaker.
People have just accepted the fact that there's yet another leak of top-secret information since it happens every single day and provided that it serves The establishment agenda rather than undermines it as is true of this case is just considered to be how Washington and the media function.
So this particular story is about how US intelligence purports to discover a new deal between Cuba And China, that would call for the placing of Cuban military and spy bases in Cuba, which is 90 miles away from the coast of Florida, although not part of the United States.
It is a sovereign country, Cuba is.
And the question becomes, do they have the right to decide what happens on their soil without the United States having to approve?
Here's the Wall Street Journal article from June 8th that reads, quote, Cuba to host secret Chinese spy base focusing on the U.S.
Beijing agrees to pay Havana several billion dollars for eavesdropping facilities.
China and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island and a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S.
According to U.S.
officials familiar with highly classified intelligence so presumably this is a crime to leak this although I promise you no one is going to ever look for the leaker.
An eavesdropping facility in Cuba roughly 100 miles from Florida would allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up and tell electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S.
where many military bases are located and monitor U.S.
ship traffic Officials familiar with the matter said that China has agreed to pay cash-strapped Cuba several billion dollars to allow it to build the eavesdropping station and that the two countries had reached an agreement in principle.
There was a newer Wall Street Journal article from yesterday that provided more details in particular saying that the base will be a military base that will host Chinese military troops and we're already seeing calls from many people
In the United States saying this is something that should not be permitted, the United States should take very aggressive action and tell the Cubans they are not permitted, even though it's their soil and their sovereign country, to host the Chinese military on Cuban soil.
Here, for example, is a video of John Bolton on CNBC on June 20th of 2023.
Let's listen to what he had to say.
I think we need to make our point in response to substance, really, not style.
So let's take the Cuba thing as an example.
You know, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you said, we had a deal, in effect, with the Soviets.
They wouldn't try and put military or additional problematic facilities in Cuba, and we wouldn't overthrow the Castro government.
I mean, you can like that deal or not, but that was the deal.
We have no such deal with China, and I think we ought to make it clear to the successors to the Castros in Cuba that if they go ahead with this China operation, we don't consider ourselves bound by any agreement with the Soviet Union as it affects China.
I mean, I think we've got to put some pressure on Cuba here.
I'd go a lot further than that in many respects, but I'd at least make it clear we're not going to sit by while China increases its presence 90 miles off our shores.
But what do we do then?
Well, as I say, I think we make it clear to the Cuban leadership that their regime is in jeopardy, as it was before the deal with the Soviets.
I think Cuban-Americans would support that, and I think we've got to make it clear that this foreign establishment on soil of a Western Hemisphere country violates the Monroe Doctrine, and we're not going to accept it.
Alright, do you hear that?
John Bolton says, We're going to tell them, we entered into a deal with them where we said, look, we might overthrow your government.
We'll agree not to overthrow your government as long as you do what we want.
Namely, you don't put Russian weapons or Russian troops on your soil because it's too close to the United States.
So apparently, the United States has the right, as it sees it, to just go overthrowing governments whenever it wants, unless those governments do what we tell them.
In particular, he cited the Monroe Doctrine, which, according to John Bolton, means that every country in the Latin American region, not just Cuba, but Central America and South America, is basically the property of the United States, or our zone of influence because it's so close to our border or in the same hemisphere as us.
And the United States has invoked that doctrine many times to overthrow governments in Latin America, or threaten to do so, or invaded them or gone to war with them based on the perception that they were allowing onto their soil the Russians or the Chinese or whomever that we felt was too threatening.
Because our view is, for the entire region near us, we rule that region.
We can overthrow your government.
We can invade you if you allow anything on your soil that we regard as threatening.
That was what John Bolton just said.
And that has been the policy of the United States government for a long time.
And therefore, we don't want Chinese troops near our border.
And we should tell the Cubans, if you don't immediately withdraw that agreement to have them there, we may overthrow your government.
Now, the reality is the United States government has been attempting to overthrow the Cuban government for decades.
We sponsored an invasion of Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs and it was a complete disaster.
It was a debacle.
That's what led JFK to fire, finally, the CIA director, Alan Dulles, out of embarrassment about what a disaster that operation was.
But ever since, the United States has been trying to overthrow the Cuban government through blockades that have starved its population.
Why are we blockading the Cuban government?
Why is it the business of the United States what government Cuba has?
And I've asked that question before, if you're an America First.
Adherent, or somebody who believes in an anti-war posture?
What right does the United States have to go starving populations around the world in order to get rid of the government that we dislike, which we're doing in Venezuela, in Syria, in Cuba?
The argument is, these are countries that can threaten us based on what happens on their soil, and therefore we have the right to take action, including military action, to prevent it in response.
Now, just to note, the Pentagon denies this report that the Chinese are building a listening post in Cuba.
There you see the hill on June 8th when the Wall Street Journal came out.
It says, quote, the Defense Department is denying reports that China has reached a deal with Cuba to build an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island nation.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder called a Wall Street Journal report on the apparent deal, quote, inaccurate during a briefing on Thursday.
But again, there were subsequent Wall Street Journal reporting just yesterday or this week that provided more details.
Now, the question I have is this.
I actually have two questions.
The Russian government, when it has been funding and supporting a civil war, a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine since 2014, when the United States government effectively changed the government of Ukraine and installed when the United States government effectively changed the government of Ukraine and installed a pro-American leader, even though the democratically elected president's term was not up, we helped remove that leader by working with Ukrainian forces
And then we all heard that videotape of Victoria Nuland choosing the next leader of Ukraine right on the most sensitive part of the Russian border.
And then for eight years the United States has been arming Ukraine?
You probably remember the scandal involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden was about the fact that the energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its board because they wanted access to Joe Biden.
Why did they want access to Joe Biden?
Why would Ukrainians want access to Joe Biden?
Joe Biden is the American vice president, not the Ukrainian one.
The answer was because the United States had been running Ukraine as like a colonial puppet since we installed that government in 2014.
And the view of the Russians has been exactly the same view that the United States has of Cuba, as you just heard it expressed by John Bolton through decades of behavior, which is, of course it's in our interest what happens right on the other side of our border.
We're not going to let NATO and the United States run wild in Ukraine.
And the argument of the US administration and the establishment of both parties that support this war Is that Ukraine is a sovereign country, Russia has no right to object to anything that Ukraine does, it's Ukrainian territory, Ukrainian soil, and Russia has no right to react in any way.
So then how can anyone justify the U.S.
taking exactly the opposite position when it comes to Chinese bases in Cuba and say that, well because Cuba is so close to the United States, Or El Salvador and Nicaragua are so close to the United States or Chile or Brazil or Colombia are so close to the United States that we have the right to intervene and overthrow governments and go to war if they allow anything on their soil that threatens us.
How do you reconcile those views?
Unless you want to say, which is at least honest, well the U.S.
is good and therefore can do whatever it wants and Russia is bad and therefore it can't.
But to pretend that there's some kind of principle at stake here is obviously confounding.
And in fact, not only did the United States invade Cuba in 1961 because of concerns that it was getting too close to Moscow, the United States almost started a nuclear war in 1962.
Out of concern about Russian missiles in Cuba that the Cubans had invited them to put there precisely to protect them from United States aggression since the United States had just tried to overthrow Cuba, the Cuban government, the year before.
We didn't just threaten to invade, we almost started a nuclear war based on the principle that what happens right near a border is, of course, of great interest to us and we will go to war to prevent it.
So how, if that's our position, can we then turn around and tell the Russians that they have no right to object to the Americans and Europeans and all of NATO running wild in Ukraine, right on the side of their border, that was twice used to invade Russia in the 20th century.
And remember, in World War II, Russia lost one-seventh of its population.
One-seventh.
Tens of millions of people to defeat the Nazis.
So right now they look at that same part of the border where they were twice invaded and they look over at Germany run by fanatical warmongers, particularly these people in the Green Party, these women who ran on the basis of ushering in a feminist foreign policy that they said was going to be less aggressive and instead they're fanatical about arming the Ukrainians to fight Russia.
And you now again have German tanks moving east right up to the Russian border.
We interviewed Sara Wagenknecht, who's the leader of the German Left Party, one of the few voices in Germany opposed to this war, and she said, imagine how traumatizing it is for Russia to have German tanks right again going to the Russian border through Ukraine.
But the Russians look over their border and see what's happening in Ukraine, and they regard that as infinitely more concerning than how the U.S.
sees what's happening in Cuba with China.
And yet the position of the establishment and the bipartisan consensus seems to be we have every right to even use military aggression against China, against Cuba, to remove the Chinese, but the Russians have no say at all in what happens in Ukraine.
Let me propose another issue, which is that if you listen to American officials, they are saying things like it is extremely disturbing That the Chinese would want to have a military presence so close to American soil in Cuba.
At the very same time, and when I had RFK Jr.
on my show, he talked about this a lot and said how provocative and needlessly antagonistic it was, the United States has physically encircled China.
With military bases in Guam and the Philippines and South Korea and Japan and Australia with nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at Chinese cities and B-52 aircraft that are nuclear capable.
And we're constantly buzzing along the Chinese border and our argument is this is not Chinese soil.
This is international waters or international airspace or the countries of Guam and the Philippines and South Korea and they want us there.
But then we turn around and tell Cuba they don't have that same right.
Let's look at the BBC.
From February of this year, you see there, the U.S.
secures a deal on Philippines bases to complete an arc around China.
And it reads, quote, the U.S.
has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines, a key bit of real estate, which would offer a front row seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.
With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of U.S.
alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south.
The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
The deal, which in part reverses the U.S.' 's departure from their former colony more than 30 years ago, is no small matter.
Indeed, it is no small matter.
Here from March of 2023 is the Japan Times, headlined, An Anxious Asia, Arms for a War It Hopes to Prevent.
Quote, to minimize risk and maximize deterrence, U.S.
officials have been hunting for real estate.
The Philippines, Japan, Australia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and U.S.
territories across the Pacific are all working with Defense Department officials on expanding military access and facilities, often with the U.S.
proposing investments in shared infrastructure.
Also from March of 2022 in the Asian Times, U.S.-led alliances are slowly but surely encircling China.
The AUKUS alliance, which is Australia, the U.S.
and the U.K., reveals its nuclear plans while emerging U.S.-Japan-Philippines military alignment changes the calculus around Taiwan.
Again, we're physically encircling China.
At once, two different trilateral alliances are emerging, both built around America's, quote, integrated deterrence strategy amid intensified fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the near-term future.
On the one hand, the US, UK, and Australia have taken a fateful step in their AUKUS alliance by green-lighting the production of a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, drawing on cutting-edge Rolls-Royce nuclear reactors.
All right near the Chinese homeland.
In the next five years, the U.S. and U.K. are also expected to station nuclear submarines in the Western Australian capital of Perth, while Canberra is slated to purchase several U.S.-made Virginia-class submarines over the next decade.
The AUKUS submarine deal allows the three Anglophone allies to project power across the region, especially in the contested waters across the so-called First Island Chain, which extends from the East China Sea to the Taiwan Strait and all the way across the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, there is a burgeoning Japan-Philippines-US-JAFAS trilateral alliance in the making, with similar strategic objectives and even greater geographic immediacy.
The upshot is a fast-emerging tripartite defense framework, which will be indispensable to an effective deterrence strategy against China over Taiwan and the broader first island chain theater.
Both Japan and the Philippines, Taiwan's most immediate neighbors, are undergoing foreign policy revolutions.
For its part, Tokyo is recasting its post-World War II pacifist foreign policy by embracing a more proactive strategic role in the region, just like Germany is doing.
Japan is now contemplating the prospect of exporting sophisticated weapon systems to besieged nations, notably Ukraine, in preparation for a potential showdown over the island of Taiwan.
The U.S.
has stepped up its drills across the Western Pacific with a growing emphasis on so-called, quote, distributed lethality, namely increasing the offensive power of individual components of surface force and then employing them in dispersed offensive formations known as hunter-killer SAGs.
Now, if you want to say that the U.S.
is justified in putting nuclear-powered submarines and nuclear-tipped missiles and nuclear-capable B-52s all around the region of China, surrounding it, encircling it physically, then I want to hear the principle that says that the U.S.
can simultaneously treat as some sort of act of aggression The Cuban invitation to China to put military bases on Cuban soil.
Now again, if you're somebody who just believes that the US is so inherently good that it can do things other countries are banned from doing, and you say that, I will at least respect that for being candid.
But if you want to pretend that you're applying some sort of principles or values, universal values of foreign policy, it is difficult to say the least.
To simultaneously justify massive deployments all throughout the Pacific, physically encircling China, flying planes of every kind, spy planes and fighter jets right off their coast, while acting outraged that now there's a Chinese base in Cuba.
And I would say it's similarly true of the attempt to tell the Russians But they have no right to be concerned about what's happening right over their border in Ukraine.
If the U.S.
can be asserting some sort of prerogatives over Cuba and all of Latin America, then certainly the Russians have a right to be concerned about what's going on in Ukraine.
You hear people in the United States now saying we should invade Cuba, we should change their government as punishment for stationing Chinese bases on their soil.
Why can't Russia then do the same?
Here from September of 2014 in Reuters, you have this headline.
This is ten years ago or nine years ago, eight years before the invasion.
Quote, NATO countries have begun arms delivery to Ukraine.
Ukraine's defense minister said on Sunday that NATO countries were delivering weapons to his country to equip it to fight pro-Russian separatists and, quote, stop Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A ceasefire negotiated by envoys Ukraine, Russia, the separatists, and Europe's OSCE security watchdog has been in place in eastern Ukraine since September 5th.
It is broadly holding despite regular sporadic violations, especially in key flashpoints such as Donetsk.
And here you see in September of 2021, this was four months before Russia crossed over into Ukraine.
The board, the headline in Reuters, Ukraine holds military drills with US forces and NATO allies.
They were holding military drills right on the Russian border in Ukraine.
And then four months later, the Russians invaded saying they were facing an existential threat by the placement of NATO and European forces and American forces right on the other side of the border.
And we said, that's outrageous.
Russia has no right to object to what's going on in Ukraine.
As we put bases all around China and then tell the Cubans they can't have China bases in Cuba because it's too close to our soil.
All you have to do is look at the Cuban Missile Crisis and what the U.S.
position was.
Here from the National Archives in fall of 2002 was a 40-year commemoration of what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis when the U.S.
almost started a nuclear war because it objected to the placement of Soviet missiles in Russia, in Cuba.
And it reads, quote, October 14th was cloudless and the U-2 flight got some good photos, pictures that over the next few days were analyzed and reanalyzed.
They provided positive proof of what the United States had for months suspected that the Soviet Union was installing medium range nuclear weapons in Castro's Cuba, capable of striking major U.S.
cities and killing tens of millions of Americans within minutes.
All of that is true, by the way.
About the U.S.
bases surrounding China right now.
Faced with this dramatic documentation, President John F. Kennedy immediately decided that the missiles would have to be removed and called his most trusted advisors together to serve as an executive committee of the National Security Council.
His job was to develop possible responses to the buildup of missiles and the consequences the buildup represented.
Forty years later, what is now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which lasted for several weeks, is remembered as the hottest moment in the Cold War between East and West and a defining moment in Kennedy's presidency.
You don't have to be a good U.S.
forces around the world were placed on alert.
Four tactical air squadrons were readied for airstrikes over Cuba, with missile sites, airfields, ports, and gun emplacements as their potential targets.
More than 100,000 troops were sent to Florida for a possible invasion of Cuba.
The Navy dispatched 180 vessels into the Caribbean for a planned amphibious exercise involving 40,000 Marines.
B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons were in the air at all times.
The U.S.
came very close.
to nuclear annihilation because of the placement of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil.
And the U.S.
now is reacting the same way with the placement of Chinese military bases on Cuban soil, if that's actually even true.
The question then becomes, how is it that we can tell Russia that they just have to swallow The flooding of Ukraine right over their border with all kinds of Western weapons and the joint military exercise right up onto their border with NATO and the West and the United States, as happened in September of 2021, and tell the Chinese that they have to swallow the placement of nuclear missiles and nuclear bases in every country in the immediate vicinity surrounding them and encircling them physically.
One of the things that RFK Jr.
argued on my show, and that other people have argued as well, is that the Chinese are highly unlikely to invade Taiwan unless they feel sufficiently threatened to do so.
Why do we need nuclear bases and military bases all over the world, including right on the Chinese border?
Why do we need to involve ourselves so heavily in Ukraine?
And if you want to say we have the right to do so, then what's the answer to why we have the right to object to what's happening in Cuba and the placement of Chinese there?
This world in which the United States creates principles that only apply to it, and rules that it imposes on all other countries, that world is over.
No one accepts this anymore.
The United States no longer has that superpower monopoly.
The world is aligning against it.
We showed you that speech by Fiona Hill, who is a hardcore hawk on both Russia and China, who warned United States policymakers that the world sees this complete lack of principles in foreign policy and is aligning against the United States in response to it.
We're driving the world into the arms of the Chinese just like we drove the Russians into the arms of Beijing.
Something we never wanted to do during the Cold War with this kind of mindset.
With people like John Bolton and telling the world we will change the Cuban government if we don't like what they're using Cuban soil before and at the same time encircling China and Russia with all kinds of threatening missiles.
Maybe you want a world in which the United States can Act as sovereign of the world with no challenge.
That's not the world in which we live anymore.
And it's an extremely dangerous mindset to continue to pretend that we have the power to do that.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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