Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11-29-23
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Today’s roundup focuses on three significant media trends: skepticism about Ukraine; skepticism about gain-of-function; and skepticism about UFO disclosure — all of which translate into a trend of profound post-pandemic erosion of trust in government.
Sorry for the late delivery today! As you’ll see, I tumbled down a couple rabbit holes that were deeper than I expected, and then ran into the morning’s legal duties (yep, my pesky responsibilities to clients and judges and stuff). I know some of you must have been frantic. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 One way we can detect significant emerging narrative trends is how media slides in sideways a new position. For example, when it was time to decouple masking, CNN’s TV doctor (and former Planned Parenthood director) Leanna Wen penned an op-ed saying they don’t work, or only work one-way, or something like that. After that, the drumbeat of mask skepticism in media increased, slowly and cautiously the government stopped pushing masks, and now nobody except medical fetishists are wearing the damnable things.
Meanwhile the CDC has never had to admit it was wrong about masks. It just changed the narrative. Shazam!
At the time, I correctly called out Wen’s op-ed as the leading edge of the narrative shift that it was. Now I’m seeing something moving again. It’s not just one issue though. It’s a tectonic narrative shift across a wide landscape of issues. The good news is that most of it is shifting toward the truth, toward positions that we all have held for going on at least two years now.
🚀 Possibly the best evidence appeared last week on The Hill’s active YouTube channel (with 1.8 million subscribers). Among other things, The Hill’s videos channel offers a weekday morning show called Rising, which describes itself as having bipartisan hosts, which I suppose is a way of saying ‘fair and balanced’ without having to actually say it. Anyway, its surprising, if not downright shocking November 26th episode (105,000 views) was titled, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs: What MSM WON’T TELL YOU About Ukraine-Russia, Nord Stream.
CLIP: Prof. Sachs on Ukraine-Russia, Nord Stream (11:50).
If you don’t recall him, Until recently a lifelong liberal, Sachs is a prominent and well-spoken economist, professor, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, President of the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and has been a special advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General. He has been called “one of the most influential economists of our time.”
It turns out that Professor Sachs is not too hot about the Proxy War.
The interview is astonishing, given The Hill’s left-leaning bona fides. The Hill is so dependably left of center that I regularly source it for the latest official narrative. (I initially watched this episode mostly because I was amused that the show’s title pitched The Hill as a plucky independent outlet battling the mainstream media.) This episode reflects a major narrative shift.
Just wait. The interview included spicy rhetorical crescendos like when the “liberal” anchor referred to Ukraine as “this proxy war,” or when Professor Sachs called the war an “absolutely stupid, avoidable conflict,” concluded “Biden played it wrong at every moment,” and advised people not to believe anything the government says.
Who does that sound like?
Professor Sachs sprinted out of the gate, starting his takedown of the existing narrative by connecting the current proxy war to the U.S.’s meddling in Ukraine back in the 2014 color revolution. But Sachs went further, claiming that Viktoria Nuland and Lindsay Graham bungled the whole thing at great cost to Ukraine:
SACHS: “The war’s been going on for nine years since the U.S. participated in the violent overthrow of a Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality for his country — not NATO… During this whole period, the U.S had a weak hand and it played it terribly… at every step Ukraine could have been saved but the U.S. kept upping the ante and Ukraine kept losing more.”
According to Professor Sachs — who is an actual expert on international politics — Ukraine’s losses starting with Crimea are directly attributable to U.S. bungling, and he even called out Joe Biden as the bungling co-author. If that’s not a sign that Biden’s political future is numbered, I don’t know what is. People like Professor Sachs don’t get where they are without having a solid sense of politics.
Dr. Sachs explained that, if it weren’t for U.S. meddling, the Ukraine would still own the Crimean peninsula, not to mention still have millions of now-departed citizens:
SACHS: “Then Russia retook Crimea. It wasn’t even demanding Crimea! It was demanding a lease on its naval base until 2042. But then it took Crimea. Then the U.S. upped the ante, sending in weapons, we’ve got your back. President Putin said in December 2021, ‘let’s negotiate over this.’ The U.S. said, ‘no way, it’s none of your business.’ Then the Special Military Operation started. Ukraine said in March 2022, ‘ok, ok, we can be neutral.’ The war could have ended then, but the U.S. intervened… Now Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of people, the population has declined by millions due to mass migration. They’ve just done a terrible job, and I’ve been saying this to the White House every step of the way… Biden played it wrong at every moment.”
Even the shows’ anchors seemed dismissive of the war. The tone of their questions suggested that the war’s poor prospects should have been obvious to everyone from the get-go:
MALE ANCHOR: “What were the intelligence, the defense experts thinking? Were they naive? Or did they actually think that somewhere before this point — where we’re not willing to fund the resistance any longer — that they were actually going to deal a lethal blow to Russia? Or at least eject them from the country?”
Professor Sachs not only agreed with the anchor’s cynical sentiments but went further, suggesting — unless I’m misunderstanding something — that Ukraine should just give up and the U.S. should apologize to Russia:
SACHS: “Robbie, I’m an old guy. I’ve been through this a lot of times (since) Vietnam. This is standard operating procedures of the United States. Over-promise. Over-Sell. Get into proxy wars. Then, they fail… (Look,) we’ve run out of time. We’ve run out of patience. We’ve run out of budget support. We’ve run out of 155 millimeter shells. And tragically, Ukraine’s running out of soldiers.
So that old line, that we’re in there to the last Ukrainian, is tragically, literally happening right now… Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of people in this absolutely stupid, avoidable conflict. So it’s gonna stop. It has to stop. NATO — that means the U.S. by the way, it doesn’t mean anything else — has to help to end this in the most favorable way by saying (to Russia), okay, okay, we’re not going to enlarge in in some lamebrain idea of George W. Bush Jr., and we (wrongly) kept it going, and we should’ve negotiated with you, the whole thing was a stupid idea. We’re going to have to say that.”
If the anchors are bipartisan, then we’re all bipartisan now. The anchors and Dr. Sachs all seem solidly on board with where Coffee & Covid readers have been for over a year now. Not only did the “liberal” female anchor dismissively call the conflict “this proxy war,” but she then pitched Sachs a softball over the most recent, utterly ridiculous, official narrative about the Nordstream bombing:
FEMALE ANCHOR: “Such an important point about the human cost. Ukraine is starting to recruit or conscript women into the military, (and) Max Blumenthal posted a disturbing video earlier this week of new recruits who all looked to be men in their fifties and sixties. So it does look like there has been just an incredible human toll in the people of Ukraine who’ve been made to fight this proxy war. But I did want to turn to this new reporting about the Nordstream pipeline last week, where it was reported a Ukraine military official played a central role in the 2022 sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. How credulously should we be looking at (this story)?”
I saw it but didn’t even bother commenting last week about the Washington Post’s latest preposterous claim that — it hurts to even try describing WaPo’s nonsense — a rogue Ukrainian intelligence agent who was acting alone orchestrated the entire Nordstream bombing, all by himself, without Biden or even Zelensky knowing one single thing about it. And of course, Biden and Zelensky would have opposed an illegal act of terrorism like that.
Supposedly this daring, 007-like, deep-sea diving, two-places at one-timing, nearly invisible man of mystery has, allegedly, been arrested for his terrible crimes against the international order and is now rotting in isolation in a remote Ukraine jail cell someplace extremely inconvenient for visitors.
Good grief. Only Washington Post reporters could be dumb enough to believe that anyone would buy that obvious prevarication. Professor Sachs doesn’t buy it either, and agrees with us over who is really to blame, strongly hinting the bombing was obviously the USA. More remarkably, Professor Sachs then advised the two young anchors — who seemed to agree — not to believe the government about anything:
SACHS: “First thing, don’t believe anything the government says. It makes up whatever is convenient. [Male anchor nods in agreement.] So, there’s absolutely no credibility to pinning it on one person who happens to be under wraps and in custody in Ukraine. I’m still going with Seymour Hirsch (who blamed U.S. Navy divers) till I hear otherwise, but who knows. I testified in the U.N. security council on a session calling for an independent, U.N.-led investigation. Who blocked it? The United States government… has blocked any real investigation in this.”
Welcome, Dr. Sachs! We have been advising people not to believe anything the government says for at least two years now. Every single thing Dr. Sachs said in this interview tracks with what we’ve all been saying since the Proxy War started. It’s not a good sign for Ukraine. (Soon I’ll cover some developing hypotheses about what desperate maneuver the Biden Administration will try next to avoid the appearance of another Afghanistan.)
So that was pretty good, but there was more. The Hill split Sach’s interview into two parts. The second part also tracked a major C&C topic area. In it, Dr. Sachs explained why he’s no longer a democrat. Can you guess why?
🚀 Rising’s November 24th episode was the ‘followup’ interview with Dr. Sachs (probably really just the second part of the original interview), titled, “Jeffrey Sachs on Rising: I Was a Democrat… COVID CHANGED THAT.” This episode had four times as many views (420,000) as the interview about Ukraine.
CLIP: Jeffrey Sachs on covid, gain of function research, distrust in government (11:20).
This interview made it obvious that Jeffrey Sachs sits at the intersection of some of the most significant issues of our era, including covid. From what I can tell, he’s now been somewhat sidelined — like many of us — because he’s taken mildly heterodox positions over the covid issue. Ironically, being sidelined has also given him more freedom to speak. As you listen or read the highlights below, consider how significant it is that someone like Dr. Sachs, with so much personal investment in the official narratives, and so much insider knowledge about what really happened, is coming around to our way of thinking.
Dr. Sachs began the segment with a bold statement that might’ve been copied and pasted from a Coffee & Covid post:
SACHS: “(There are) many hints (that Covid) could’ve come out of a U.S. lab, or a Chinese lab, or a partnership in the research. The problem with trusting anything is, when we have secretive government that is telling us lies, it just generates a huge amount of distrust about everything.”
Dr. Sachs wasn’t always on board. As he explained to the nodding anchors, he originally bought the official lab-leak explanation. Because science:
SACHS: “I fell right into the mainstream story in the beginning. I spent the first months explaining to my friends, ‘oh, all this stuff about conspiracy, coming out of a lab and so forth, is so much hokum and political manipulation.’ And then, as chair of a commission studying (the lab-leak) step-by-step, and being briefed by scientists, and then watching the wonderful work of — not the mainstream media, which COMPLETELY neglected this — but the Intercept, and U.S. Right to Know, and whistleblowers, who started letting us in on what was really said inside. It was shocking. At one point, I confronted one of the people on my own commission, and said ‘show me such-and-such document.’ He said, ‘oh, my lawyers say I can’t show you that.’ And I said, ‘well you can’t be on the commission, (because) we’re a transparent commission.”
At that point Dr. Sachs’ entire worldview began crumbling. He’d spent his life in government and politics. He was used to relying on the government to at least stumble around to doing the right thing, at some point. He was used to lay people (like us) making overheated assumptions about wrong motives because they don’t have all the facts or don’t understand all the complexities.
But then, Dr. Sachs lived through covid. And in his attempt to uncover the truth about what happened, he watched the democrats — his lifelong political party — circle the wagons to protect the government from any critical scrutiny, just when when the government was behaving at its worst:
SACHS: “I began to really see, close up, that there was so much lying coming out of NIH, coming out of Fauci, coming out of, unfortunately, the government — protecting all this. And now, it’s spilling out. But what is true to this moment — weirdly — the democrats don’t wanna look. So where Congress is looking is on the House side, where there’s majority Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, (they) are looking into this. But on the Senate side, with the democratic majority, it is absolutely ‘circle the wagons’ around Fauci — who is not even there! — or around NIH, or around G-d knows what.”
To Dr. Sachs, getting gain-of-function research under control isn’t a partisan issue. It is a life or death issue:
SACHS: “As someone who’s been a lifelong democrat — but I’ve left the party because I don’t want to have anything to do with any of these parties right now — I have to say it’s shocking to me that democratic Senators cannot understand this is not a partisan issue. This is a life and death issue. What kind of research is going on? What kind of laboratory manipulation is going on? What is going on under what we euphemistically probably, or perhaps, call our ‘biodefense industry?’”
In case you’re a new C&C reader, Sachs next eloquently and succinctly summarized the very same problem that we have been discussing here in the blog for two years now. While human cockroach Fauci is a figurehead, a murderous grifter, and a criminal actor, we also understand that he’s not the real problem. The real, fundamental problem is all the faceless, maniacal scientists tinkering around in labs right now and trying to make a Doomsday Virus:
SACHS: “I have gotten to understand — very well — that there is a tremendous amount of dangerous research that is not supervised, and it would behoove our democratic Senators, as well as the Republicans, to find out what’s happening. This is not about ‘getting Fauci.’ This is not about the past. This is about right now, what is happening in these laboratories? Because the fact of the matter is, our very, very clever scientists know all about manipulating viruses.
They know all about gain of function research. They know how to construct new viruses that are extremely dangerous by putting in pieces into existing viruses, pieces like the now-infamous furin cleavage site, which is part of the genome of the covid virus that makes it so infectious. And that was the object of research by U.S. scientists precisely to see if you put that piece into an existing virus, what happens to it? Well. Duh! Isn’t that research a little dangerous?”
In possibly the most hopeful part of the interview, Sachs disclosed that, number one, he knows where the bodies are buried. And two, he has been working with Senator Paul to try to convince democrats — so far unsuccessfully — to cooperate in a crackdown on dangerous gain of function research until we can figure out exactly what is going on:
SACHS: “I don’t know whether I should name names. But we’ve got scientists in the United States that do this, that are on the cutting edge, that were under Fauci’s funding, and in his shop, and working with the laboratories like (University of North Carolina and) Rocky Mountain labs. And there is a lot of reason to open those books to scrutiny right now. (Senator Paul) asked me to talk to my democrat senator friends over the years, and they WILL NOT TOUCH THIS. What is going on? This is not a partisan issue.”
And to put some icing on the episode cake, here are a few examples from the episode’s comments from folks who — like Jeffrey Sachs — also ditched the democrat party over covid and/or the jabs:
Sometimes our good news is tangible or quantifiable, like a new court decision, an indictment, a falling stock price, or a new bill signed into law. But sometimes the good news is a clear sign, like these interviews with Dr. Sachs, that the real, underlying narrative is finally shifting in the right direction.
It’s working. We’re moving the needle.
We have come a long way. We can now see the outlines of our clear progress in Dr. Sach’s commonsense comments, in his strong beliefs that mirror the reality we’ve been pounding the table about for two years now, and maybe even most clearly in The Hill’s young bipartisan anchors, who seemed to readily agree with Dr. Sachs across the board.
We are either already in a new phase, or we are rapidly moving into a new phase where the pandemic’s liars have lost the argument. I will continue pointing out the evidence as we finish out the year. I expect the new phase to very quickly become even more clear. Stand by.
👽 The odd UFO disclosure story is blowing out the lines and lighting up the media switchboard. In the first example, the UK Daily Mail ran a story yesterday headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: CIA’s secret office has conducted UFO retrieval missions on at least NINE crash sites around the world, whistleblowers reveal.”
The Daily Mail exclusive quoted three anonymous whistleblowers who were “briefed on the alleged top secret operations,” who described a secret CIA sub-agency with the uninformative name “The Office of Global Access” as being like a combination of the Impossible Mission Force and Men in Black.
On an aside, ultra-woke Chat GPT denied any such sub-agency existed, and then vomited up four times as many words scolding me about believing in conspiracy theories:
Chat GPT is useless. Somewhat better is Bard (Microsoft’s AI chatbot), which offered a much more informative response when asked about what appears to be a legit CIA department or division:
Bard’s description of the secretive group referred to a 1980’s mission to mine a deeply-sunken Soviet submarine (although the Mail article said the agency started in 2003), and like the Mail, Bard mentioned the OGA’s alleged involvement with UFO retrieval. So there you go, for whatever that’s worth.
Between the two chatbots, Bard’s version seems correct. The Daily Mail said National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) documents from December 2016 showed the OGA as being one of 56 CIA offices, and listed the OGA’s chief and deputy as two of the 286 director-level officials within the spy agency. And an October 2015 CIA org chart showed the OGA as one of nine offices within the agency’s ‘Science and Technology’ branch. So whatever the OGA actually does, it exists.
Quoting the three unidentified whistleblowers, the Daily Mail’s exclusive claims the OGA has recovered at least nine apparent ‘non-human craft’ – some in pieces wrecked after a crash, but two that were supposedly fully intact.
You have to understand. UFO space ships can, at times, be very delicate machines. While it is true they can fly faster than the speed of light, dodge micro-meteors and giant asteroids, withstand high levels of space radiation and the perils of vacuum, avoid radar, defy gravity and the laws of physics, navigate equally easily through the atmosphere and the oceans — you would be shocked how often they fall apart in inclement weather.
And whenever they do crash, the other UFO’s can never seem to reach them in time for a rescue. Apparently. That’s why the CIA’s impossible mission force can get to them first.
Anyway, the Daily Mail’s exclusive neatly reflected the emerging UFO narrative. According to this view, an agency like the CIA’s Office of Global Access travels the globe and accesses — but does not take title to — crashed UFO wreckage, then delivers the wreckage to eager, cooperative private defense contractors in the military-industrial complex. This way, any recovered tech never technically becomes government property. Thus, it remains shielded from pesky government audits and nosy inventories, and lawyers can further bury the alleged technology under lasagna-like layers of trade secret laws, non-disclosure agreements, and confidentiality covenants.
👽 The Daily Mail’s article was just the first example. The next one was Tucker Carlson’s most recent episode — his 42nd if you can believe it — which is also a flying saucer tell-all:
CLIP: Tucker says recovered UFO’s and alien bodies ‘are true’ (18:54).
In the episode, Tucker forcefully argued that the deep state is undermining disclosure about the government’s UFO secrets, even though disclosure has been explicitly required by an improbable — if not downright fantastical — bill that improbably passed easily into federal law earlier this year — a law that Fair Observer without irony dubbed “possibly the most significant law in human history.”
We simply don’t know how significant is the law in alien history. We don’t have that data.
According to Fair Observer’s bill analysis, the law’s mind-numbing bureaucratese included an incredible 169 references to “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” and the even more implausible euphemism “non-human,” which appeared in the bill a staggering twenty-six times. One presumes the bill’s drafters preferred “non-human” over “alien” so as to distinguish its meaning from the terrifying creatures streaming across the country’s Southern Border, but I digress.
Among other things, the new disclosure law exercised eminent domain over all allegedly-recovered UFO materials. That provision unceremoniously claws back any alleged turnovers of alien technology to private defense companies, to the extent such transfers happened, and whether or not they became trade secrets. In other words, the law promotes recovered alien technology into the same status as recovered shipwreck treasure, making such windfalls community property.
In Tucker’s latest episode, the world’s top influencer warned everyone that the intelligence community is, allegedly, trying to thwart the new disclosure laws.
👽 In the third example, just over a week ago on November 21st, Joe Rogan interviewed UFO whistleblower David Grusch, the former Air Force intelligence officer who previously co-managed the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena analysis at the National Geo-Spacial Intelligence Agency. I bet you never even knew there were so many different intelligence agency sub-departments, divisions, committees, and groups.
LINK: Joe Rogan interviews UFO Whistleblower David Grusch on Spotify (2:41:00).
What does all this enhanced UFO coverage mean? I could make some guesses, but I have no idea. Still, it means something. There’s no evidence the Daily Mail, Tucker, and Joe Rogan are intentionally working together, or that they’re all working for the ‘Global Access’ group or whatever it’s called. But it seems likely that there is some common cause — even if you just call it a zeitgeist — that is moving the UFO disclosure narrative in the same direction, toward a common endpoint.
Is the intelligence community resisting disclosure, like Tucker thinks, or is the intelligence community facilitating disclosure through a series of limited hangouts that look like leaking and whistleblowing? Color me deeply skeptical.
UFO disclosure news is not new. But the velocity of disclosure is accelerating faster than an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon that just got pinged by radar. Disclosure is rapidly going mainstream. The significance of this trend is unclear, but the effect is obvious: major media influencers, at least, appear convinced that the UFO phenomenon, or whatever you call it, is real. Where this all goes next will be even more fascinating.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! And brave the wintery cold tomorrow morning for a hot, refreshing cup of Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
