… turned the West totalitarian.

How China did it is explained very well by Michael P. Senger at Tablet:

“Lockdowns” –  the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people – have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?

Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.

The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.

One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.

One by one, governments of the world imported China’s totalitarian lockdown measures. Neil Ferguson [of Imperial College, London] , whose series of alarmist, wildly inaccurate models fueled lockdowns around the world, recalled how China’s example had inspired him:

I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.

In the U.K. Government’s official Coronavirus Action Plan from March 3, 2020, discussing social distancing, school closures, and rapid COVID test and vaccine development, nearly every source the U.K. government cited was from China. All the measures outlined in New Zealand’s official COVID-19 Elimination Strategy document—“physical distancing” “widespread testing” “surveillance”—were adopted from China based on the reported success of the CCP’s Wuhan lockdown. The New Zealand Department of Health deleted this document from their website one day after it received widespread attention on Twitter, after having been posted there for over a year.

In Germany, the federal government commissioned a confidential strategy paper “based on the scientific findings of expert teams from the University of Bonn/University of Nottingham Ningbo China” containing a “catalog of measures” to be implemented by Germany’s CDC, later obtained upon FOIA request by Germany’s independent Corona Committee. The strategy paper outlined, in detail, the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantine facilities, among other draconian measures. The paper specifically suggested “appeals to the public spirit” including two words that would soon become a worldwide propaganda slogan during the COVID-19 crisis: “together apart.”

Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all of these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage—let alone economic damage—six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.

Based on WHO guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators en masse, killing thousands before a grassroots campaign stopped the practice. Based on the WHO’s guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives, as confirmed by The New York Times.

The WHO’s PCR guidance was paired with new international ICD-10 codes for COVID deaths to make COVID-19 quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to this coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death. The result was a terrifying number of supposed “COVID-19 deaths” that bore little relation to the number of “excess deaths” in a given year, even in states and countries that employed few lockdown measures. This absurd number of “COVID-19 deaths” has been used to rationalize any manner of devastation caused by governments’ response to COVID-19—from bankruptcies and mental health crises to deaths from lockdowns themselves.

What’s transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative. The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP’s policies. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Articles from March 10, 2020, illustrate how media outlets adopted China’s narrative in unison. “How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks,” CNN admired. “Xi asserts victory on first trip to Wuhan since outbreak … China’s epidemic statistics suggest that its efforts have been effective,” trumpeted The Washington Post. “The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s response … ‘This epidemic can be pushed back,’ Dr. Tedros said, ‘but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,’” The New York Times repeated.

For journalists, indulging the fiction that China controlled the virus appears to have begun as a little white lie—a little something in exchange for all those goodwill seminars and ad placements. It was silly, of course, but what harm could that do?

The snowball effect of this little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies. Within months, they’d begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth communists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China.

“The U.S. has absolutely no control over the coronavirus. China is on top of the tiniest risks,” The Washington Post gushed. “The verdict is in,” Politico ruled, “China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.” “U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong,” The New York Times admired. “China beat the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism,” the Conversation lectured. “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” The New York Times suggested. “China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?” Salon whined.

It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment for failing to prevent the world’s march toward totalitarianism. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses, and whether those policies actually work.

Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real.

Read the rest, read it all here.

China has outwitted the West. Wrecked the economies of nations. Made us poorer, afraid, and less free.

The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

“President” Biden has gifted certain Islamic nations and all jihad organizations with a humiliating defeat of America in Afghanistan. 

One of them is Pakistan, which facilitated the Taliban rebellion while pretending to be an ally of the West – taking billions from America for …. what? Keeping a smiling face turned towards it?

Imran Khan, president of Pakistan, declared that now “the shackles of slavery” are broken in Afghanistan.

And the terrorist organization Hamas, offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, that rules ruthlessly over the Gaza strip, is crowing with delight.

The Investigative Project  on Terrorism (IPT) reports: 

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was among the first to congratulate “the Muslim Afghani people for the demise of the American occupation from its soil”.

We congratulate Taliban and its courageous leadership for this victory which culminates to its long Jihad for 20 years … We stress that the freedom from the occupation of America and its allies proves that the resistance of people and on top of the Jihad of our Palestinian people ends with victory and liberation.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephoned Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar … to personally congratulate him.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group also issued a congratulatory statement praising, “the dear Afghan people for liberating Afghan lands from the American and Western occupation. The Afghani Muslim people presented and staged the greatest jihadist glory against all invaders throughout their honorable history.”

IPT reports further on how the defeat of America is a model for all the jihadist movements:

Egyptian born Islamic Group (Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya) leader Assem Abdul Majeed hailed “The Conquest of Kabul: Praise be to God who honored the Mujahedeen (jihadists), [who] defeated the infidels and Today every believer rejoices And every hypocrite and atheist get angry.”

Separately, he wrote, “Have you seen how was power transferred to the Taliban quietly and without resistance?” He compared the Taliban’s determination to Egypt’s 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, saying it wouldn’t have happened “if the Brotherhood of Egypt had the courage and strength of the Taliban.”

Radical Muslim Brotherhood cleric Wagdy Ghoneim, who now lives in Turkey, posted a video in which he said, “God made Taliban victorious over America and the infidel western countries that united against it.”

From Yemen, where Islamists have been waging a bloody civil war since 2014, the spokesman for Houthi rebels boasted that “Every occupation has an end, long time or short, and now America is reaping failure after 20 years of occupying Afghanistan, so do the countries of aggression consider this?!”

But it is not just terrorist groups and jihadists celebrating the Taliban victory. Islamist affiliated governments and institutions joined the party.

Iran’s new ultraconservative president, Ebrahim Raisi, described the U.S. “military failure” as a chance for a lasting peace in Afghanistan. “America’s military defeat and its withdrawal must become an opportunity to restore life, security and durable peace in Afghanistan,” Raisi said on Iranian state television.

Tehran hosted Taliban officials last month to prepare for the vacuum expected after the U.S. withdrawal. “We are proud to have stood alongside our noble Afghan brothers and sisters during the jihad against the foreign occupiers,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said at the time.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Islamist government is offering the security and technical assistance. Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he is mulling meeting with Taliban leader. “The latest developments and the situation of the Afghan public are really, really troubling,” Erdogan told CNN Turk on Wednesday.

Pro-government Turkish media highlighted the Taliban’s willingness to forge strong relations with Turkey. “Turkey is our brother, we have many points in common based on faith,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said last month. “We want Turkey to leave the past and return to the present and the future. After that, we can ask for dialogue.”

Erdogan had strong ties with the Afghan mujahideen before becoming Turkey’s prime minister. He was seen in an old video sitting at the feet of Afghani warlord Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, known as the “Butcher of Kabul” in Afghanistan.

Turkey, it must be remembered is – incomprehensibly – a member of NATO!

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), Ahmed Raissouni, congratulated the Taliban for “the expulsion of the American and European invading forces. And this is a purely Afghan achievement that came thanks to continuous jihad, patience and sacrifices … We are ready to receive the scholars of Afghanistan and visit them and negotiate with them on issues of Islam and the application of Islamic Sharia as best as possible.”

Ahmed Bin Hama al-Khalili, the Mufti of Oman, congratulated “the brotherly Muslim people of Afghanistan for the clear victory and the valued victory over the aggressor invaders, and we follow this by congratulating ourselves and the entire Islamic nation for the fulfillment of God’s sincere promise.” Khalili’s statement is surprising since he is an official in a country considered a U.S. ally.

The Taliban previously allowed Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Muslim Brotherhood members already are mulling using Afghanistan as a new refuge, Al Arabiya reported. Their current home, Turkey, started clamping down on Brotherhood activities in an effort to mend strained relations with Egypt.

Brotherhood relations with the Afghan mujahedeen date back at least to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The ISIS affiliated terrorist group Boko Haram which has operates extensively in Nigeria, West Africa and African Sahel countries is believed to benefit emotionally from the recent withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Boko Haram would like to replicate the Taliban’s success and now has a model to believe in.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s takeover, turns Africa into the new frontline of terror, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari wrote in this Sunday’s Financial Times.

The Taliban victory reverses a decade of setbacks for jihadists and Islamists in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

And, most dangerous of all, China fully understands the lesson of America’s defeat.

The Global Times reports:

Afghanistan situation a lesson for Taiwan authorities

The US troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan has led to the rapid demise of the Kabul government. The world has witnessed how the US evacuated its diplomats by helicopter while Taliban soldiers crowded into the presidential palace in Kabul. This has dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the US.

How Washington abandoned the Kabul regime particularly shocked some in Asia, including the island of Taiwan. Taiwan is the region that relies on the protection of the US the most in Asia.

The situation in Afghanistan suddenly saw a radical change after the country was abandoned by the US.

From what happened in Afghanistan, [Taiwan] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help.

China is much more likely to invade Taiwan now, with the intention of annexing it, after America’s capitulation in Afghanistan.

But Taiwan will not necessarily “collapse in hours”, even without direct American help. It will fight. It has an army, and materiel. And it has cause: freedom.

We agree with the Global Times that Biden-ruled America is very unlikely to engage in war with China.

Biden’s America is a cripple.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern over the possibility that the U.S. is funding scientific research in China that could lead to its own demise.

A piece of news that is doubly surprising!

First surprise, lawmakers are contemplating the “demise” of the United States.

Second surprise, there are still some Democrats who object to the possibility. 

Andrew Kerr writes at the Daily Signal:

The State Department issued a fact sheet in May 2020, while Donald Trump was president, revealing that the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in a national strategy of “military-Civil Fusion” intended to eliminate barriers between civilian research and the Chinese military “in order to achieve military dominance”.

“In a clandestine and non-transparent manner, the CCP is acquiring the intellectual property, key research, and technological advancements of the world’s citizens, researchers, scholars, and private industry in order to advance military aims,” the fact sheet stated. “Joint research institutions, academia, and private firms are all being exploited to build the [People’s Liberation Army’s] future military systems—often without their knowledge or consent.”

Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Mark Warner, D-Va., joined Sens. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden demanding a complete review of all government funding of Chinese entities engaged in research that poses dual-use concerns.

They said:

U.S. taxpayer funding should not support any collaboration with [People’s Republic of China] entities that pose health, economic or security risks for the United States. The PRC has demonstrated lax biosecurity standards, violated the International Health Regulations (2005), attempted to steal intellectual property related to COVID-19 vaccines, and may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. The United States should not be partnering with or funding any country that exhibits these risk factors.

But, Andrew Kerr reports, that is exactly what has been done:

The National Institutes of Health has doled out nearly $46 million in taxpayer funds to 100 Chinese institutions in the form of subgrants since 2011 to conduct research.

U.S. taxpayers [continue to] foot the bill for research in a communist country that has violated international health regulations, stonewalled a proper investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, provided $600,000 in subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to conduct research that involved the genetic modification of bat-based coronaviruses.

Americans paid for the Covid-19 virus to be developed in a laboratory run by Communist China ?

To serve its military for purposes of conquest and world domination?

If that’s what happened, what were the people responsible thinking? What was Dr. Fauci thinking?

Fauci has defended his agency’s funding of the Wuhan lab amid growing concern that it could be linked to the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it would have been “negligent” for his agency not to do so.

“We have always been very careful. And, looking forward, we will continue to be very careful in what we do,” Fauci said when asked Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper if his agency will continue to collaborate with Chinese institutions in light of China’s resistance to a transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Fauci has vehemently rejected accusations from some in the scientific community and Republican lawmakers that his agency funded risky gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab, a form of research that involves the deliberate modification of dangerous pathogens to make them more infectious toward humans.

But why did he fund Chinese research at all? Why would it be negligent of his agency not to do so?

If Fauci gave tax dollars to Communist China to research infectious diseases, and that research resulted in the Covid pandemic, the outrage is so enormous, it dwarfs any act of treason ever committed against the United States. 

In fact, it is treason against the entire human race. 

And he’s still doing it? Nobody is stopping him?

Then those whose business it is to protect the US from its enemies are all traitors.

Where is the court that will try them? Where the law enforcers that will charge them? Where the public fury that can force them to answer for their colossal crime?

President Trump encourages and heartens us to believe America can and will recover from the killing sickness inflicted on it by the “Biden” junta.

But Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

The Biden Administration  has destroyed the idea of a border, with an anticipated 2 million entering the country illegally over a 12 month period. It demolished the idea of the police and prosecutorial deterrence curbing crime. It is ending the trajectory of America’s natural gas and oil renaissance that enriched the country, and freed it from Middle East entanglements. And it killed off the notion that government should seek to ensure that race is not how we collectively define the content of our individual characters.

Meanwhile, our enemies and rivals—China, Iran, and Russia especially—are giddy at what America has become. The American Left, they believe, has done a much better job of denying Chinese culpability for a Chinese-engineered virus than had the Chinese communist media.

America’s richest are placing their bets on a Chinese-Communist controlled 21st century, and will adjust accordingly.

Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, to see its cities burned, and looted, to weaken its economy and currency, to erode the unity of its once feared military, and to entrench the most effective critics of America in America—not in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Tehran, but in corporate boardrooms, campuses, newsrooms, Hollywood, Wall Street and the Pentagon—they could not have improved on what has happened in 2020-21, the era of our collective meltdown.

To read the whole persuasive argument leading to these conclusions, go here.

Is Hanson exaggerating?

Is he wrong?

Should we believe more in Hanson’s analysis or Trump’s vision?

China seems to be preparing to take Taiwan by force. Peacefully by force.

Hmmm.

In his speech on the 100th. birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, dictator if China, “spoke very forcefully about reunification with Taiwan”.

We quote from Investment Watch.

Xi Jinping said:

Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China. It is also a shared aspiration of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. We will uphold the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus, and advance peaceful national reunification. All of us, compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, must come together and move forward in unison. We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence” and work together to create a bright future for national rejuvenation. No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Most Americans have absolutely no idea how serious this situation is.

In Taiwan, there is a big push to formally declare independence, and if Taiwan formally declares independence, China will invade.

If China invades Taiwan, the U.S. military will intervene.

Will it? Under Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden?

If a military conflict between the U.S. and China suddenly erupted, it would probably not “go nuclear” initially.  But China has been feverishly preparing for a scenario in which nuclear weapons will be used.

China is expanding its missile silos. Satellite image analysis indicates that the country is increasing its nuclear weapon stockpile. At least 119 potential silos were identified in the desert in Gansu Province spread over 700-square-miles to increase their nuclear arsenal which is estimated to be made up of between 250 to 315 nuclear weapons. It comes as President Xi Jinping issued a warning to “bullying”foreign nations, telling them to stay out of China’s business.

Instead of focusing on making their military “more diverse” …

as the U.S. military top brass are absorbed in doing under “Biden’s” orders, and using the armed forces primarily to fight “climate change”  …

… the Chinese are actually working very hard to prepare for the next war, and the dramatic shift that we have been witnessing has stunned U.S. officials.

Because it could never have been predicted that China would make war – and especially not on Taiwan. Right?

Well, some were not stunned:

The discovery follows recent warnings by Pentagon officials about rapid advances in China’s nuclear capability. Adm. Charles Richard, who commands U.S. nuclear forces, said at a congressional hearing in April that a “breathtaking expansion” was underway in China, including an expanding arsenal of ICBMs and new mobile missile launchers that can be easily hidden from satellites.

In addition, the Chinese navy has introduced new nuclear-weapons-capable submarines to its growing fleet.

Would “Biden” take the US to war in defense of Taiwan?

If so, how?

By sending materiel to the Taiwanese?

By sending troops?

By attacking Communist China itself?

If that, and if China retaliates by attacking the US with nukes, would “Biden” counter with nukes?

Would allies – other NATO countries – fight with the US?

Would Russia fight with China?

And if the US did nothing to deter the annexation of Taiwan by China, how would its enemies interpret that?

A weak America is a temptation to its enemies. Whatever “Biden” might do, the price America will have to pay for letting a senile stooge of China become its president could be very great if China’s “peaceful” policy towards Taiwan is implemented.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Because of the “Delta variant”.

Joe Biden is claiming, on his official Twitter page, that the Delta variant of Wuhan coronavirus is “deadlier” than other variants seen during the pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Biden administration officials continue to defend, is claiming the Delta variant “spreads more efficiently” and that unvaccinated individuals are most at risk for serious illness or death.

He said:

I’m here to talk to you today about the Delta variant that causes COVID-19. The comparison is it is transmitted much more efficiently, which means the chances of getting infected upon exposure is greater than the dominant variant that we have now in the United States.

Republican Senator Rand Paul, who has been debunking claims from Fauci for more than a year, is pushing back.

After the Delta variant, will there be another and another?

Our dictators don’t want to let go this excuse for controlling us?

It does seem as if they want to keep us all perpetually frightened, obedient, masked, impoverished.

But no! Surely not! Would those humanitarians conceive such an evil plan?

Is it possible, do you think?

Here are some extracts from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry, showing that with all the many accusations of his being engaged in corrupt dealings, no evidence has ever been found that even a single one of them is true!

According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which “Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.”

Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since the early months of 2019, Biden and his father have been the subjects of unevidenced claims of corrupt activities in a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory pushed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies, concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts there on behalf of the United States during the time he was vice president. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”. 

In December 2020, Biden made a public announcement via his attorney that his tax affairs are under federal criminal investigation. The New York Times and CNN, citing sources familiar with the investigation, described the investigation as having started in late 2018 and being related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had provided legal and consulting services that generated foreign-earned income, citing a Senate Republicans’ report that says millions of dollars in wire transfers from entities linked to Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming were paying for such services.The New York Times reported that according to people familiar with the inquiry, FBI investigators had been unable to establish sufficient evidence for a prosecution of potential money laundering crimes, including after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden, and so the investigation progressed onto tax issues.

From 2013 to 2020, Biden served as a member of the board of the China-based private equity fund BHR Partners, of which he acquired a 10% stake in 2017 at a discount. The founders of BHR Partners included Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm (20% equity), along with US-based Thornton Group LLC (10% equity) and two asset managers registered in China. The Chinese-registered asset managers are the Bank of China (via BOC International Holdings-backed Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management) and Deutsche Bank-backed Harvest Fund Management. The BHR Partners fund invests Chinese venture capital into tech startups like an early-stage investment in Chinese car hailing app DiDi and cross-border acquisitions, in automotive and mining, such as the purchase of a stake in Democratic Republic of Congo copper and cobalt producer Tenke Fungurume Mining.

In September 2019, while President Trump was accusing Hunter Biden of malfeasance in Ukraine, he also falsely claimed that Biden “walk[ed] out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” and earned “millions” of dollars from the BHR deal. Trump publicly called upon China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities there while his father was vice president. Hunter Biden announced on October 13, 2019 his resignation from the board of directors for BHR Partners, effective at the end of the month, citing “the barrage of false charges” by then-U.S. President Trump. According to his lawyer, Biden had “not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors” nor had he received any return on his equity share in BHR. Biden’s lawyer George Mesires told The Washington Post that BHR Partners had been “capitalized from various sources with a total of 30 million RMB [Chinese Renminbi], or about $4.2 million, not $1.5 billion“.^[31]

Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014. Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, and a consulting firm in which Biden is a partner was also retained by Burisma.

Biden served on the board of Burisma until his term expired in April 2019, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month in some months. Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine. While serving as vice president, Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in encouraging the government of Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was widely criticized for blocking corruption investigations. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Shokin in March 2016.

Former President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed in 2019, without evidence, that Joe Biden had sought the dismissal of Shokin in order to protect his son and Burisma Holdings. Actually, it was the official policy of the United States and the European Union to seek Shokin’s removal.

We do wonder how the European Union came to be perturbed by Shokin’s doings. Is it possible that Joe Biden told them things that caused their uneasiness?

There has also been no evidence produced of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The Ukrainian anti-corruption investigation agency stated in September 2019 that its current investigation of Burisma was restricted solely to investigating the period from 2010 to 2012, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014. Shokin, in May 2019, claimed that he was fired because he had been actively investigating Burisma, but U.S. and Ukrainian officials have stated that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time of Shokin’s dismissal. Ukrainian and United States State Department sources note that Shokin was fired for failing to address corruption, including within his office.

In July 2019, Trump ordered the freezing of $391 million in military aid shortly before a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation of the Bidens. Trump falsely told Zelensky that “[Joe] Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son; Joe Biden did not stop any prosecution, did not brag about doing so, and there is no evidence his son was ever under investigation. The United States House of Representatives initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019 against Trump on the grounds that he may have sought to use U.S. foreign aid and the Ukrainian government to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko said in May 2019 that Hunter Biden had not violated Ukrainian law. After Lutsenko was replaced by Ruslan Riaboshapka as prosecutor general, Lutsenko and Riaboshapka said in September and October 2019 respectively that they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

During 2019 and into 2020, Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley investigated Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, as well as allegations that Democrats colluded with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2016 election. American intelligence officials briefed senators in late 2019 about Russian efforts to frame Ukraine for 2016 election interference. Johnson said he would release findings in spring 2020, as Democrats would be selecting their 2020 presidential nominee, but instead ramped up the investigation at Trump’s urging in May 2020, after it became clear that Joe Biden would be the nominee.Trump tweeted a press report about the investigations, later stating that he would make allegations of corruption by the Bidens a central theme of his re-election campaign. Johnson decided in March 2020 against issuing a subpoena for former Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko, a Giuliani associate who had made appearances on the pro-Trump cable channel One America News, after the FBI briefed him about concerns Telizhenko could be spreading Russian disinformation. The State Department revoked Telizhenko’s visa in October 2020, and CNN reported the American government was considering sanctioning him as a Russian agent. CNN reported that Vladislav Davidzon, the editor of Ukrainian magazine The Odessa Review, told CNN that in 2018 Telizhenko offered him money to lobby Republican senators in support of pro-Russian television stations in Ukraine. When Johnson released the final report on the investigation, it contained no evidence that Joe Biden had pushed for Shokin’s removal in order to benefit Hunter or Burisma.

In June 2020, former Ukrainian prosecutor general Ruslan Riaboshapka stated that an audit of thousands of old case files he had ordered in October 2019 had found no wrongdoing by Hunter Biden. Riaboshapka was described by Zelensky as “100 percent my person” during the July 2019 call in which Trump asked him to investigate Biden.

Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, released in May 2020 alleged snippets of recordings of Joe Biden speaking with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko during the years Hunter Biden worked for Burisma. The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared heavily edited, depicted Biden linking loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general. The recordings did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son. Poroshenko denied in June 2020 that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma.The United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach in September 2020, stating he “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”. The Treasury Department added Derkach “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election” including by the release of “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials”. Close associates of Derkach were also sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January 2021. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that Derkach was among proxies of Russian intelligence who promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Biden “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”.

Two Republicans on a Senate investigation committee in 2020 claimed that Russian businessperson Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, wire-transferred $3.5 million in 2014 to an investment firm linked to Hunter Biden. The report cited unspecified confidential documents. The report gives no indication that Hunter Biden personally accepted the funds.Biden’s attorney denied the report, saying Biden had no financial relationship with the woman and no stake in the partnership that received the money, nor did he co-found the partnership. However, Trump’s White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah repeated the claim, and in a press conference President Trump repeatedly claimed that Biden received millions of dollars from the former mayor’s wife. 

With all that lack of evidence, and all accusers turning out to be liars and/or Russian agents, it is hard on the poor man that reports still keep emerging which cast doubt on his innocence.

From the Western Journal:

It’s the [Hunter Biden] laptop that just keeps on giving.

According to a report published Wednesday by the New York Post, emails found on [it] show that now-President Joe Biden’s son brought his father to a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Washington during Biden’s tenure as vice president.

While previous emails found on the laptop had hinted at meetings between some of the shadier associates Hunter Biden picked up during his time on the board of the Ukrainian energy holding company Burisma, the report throws serious doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he had little knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Eastern Europe.

The meeting took place on April 16, 2015, in the so-called “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant described in a 2017 New York Times article as “the Georgetown restaurant where some of the world’s most powerful people go to be noticed but not approached. “

The importance of the date is that it came one day before one of the more controversial emails found on the infamous laptop, where Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to the then-vice president.

The guest list prepared by Hunter three weeks before the Café Milano dinner included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry. [But] Archer told Hunter that Baturina wouldn’t be attending; “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s Thunder, so she’ll be in town to meet with us but doesn’t want to come to dinner,” he wrote in a March 20 email. “That was just her thoughts. We could insist.”

“Obviously save a seat for your guy (and mine if he’s in town),” he added.

In a reply, Hunter said, “I think your guy being there is more trouble than it’s worth – unless you have some other idea.”

“Ok – the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security,” Hunter wrote in a March 26 email, according to the Post. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”

The reported dinner is yet another complication to the official Joe Biden line: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said in October of 2019.

And yet there are the emails, the golf outing with a Burisma executive in 2014, this dinner and other red flags.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an Oct. 15 editorial, a Senate report found multiple Obama administration officials knew about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma and that one official emailed colleagues saying that “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”

It is not kind to recall that Joe Biden “bragged that he got chief Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who once investigated Burisma, fired as a precondition for international aid in 2016 when the then-vice president was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine”. (The crime of which  President Trump was accused without evidence and for which he was impeached.)

In fact, Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry is one long exoneration, explaining away crimes he’s been accused of. His life seems to have consisted of little more than doing things that look unethical or positively criminal. But all of them, you see, can be explained. Every one of them. Explained.

For more about all these unevidenced accusations and others against Joe and Hunter Biden see our posts: The Biden scandal, October 17, 2020 (here), and The Bidens: models of decency, October 27, 2020 (here).

The press and CNN report – or don’t report; Wikipedia asserts; you judge.

The People’s Republic of China always knew this was going to come out. That’s why its propaganda quickly blew past the defensive “it was a natural occurrence” to the offensive “America secretly created it”.

Daniel Greenfield writes:

Why would the Communist regime keep pushing the lab theory, one that risked drawing attention to its own Wuhan lab?

Because the PRC knew that the pandemic had come out of a lab and that, once the initial anti-Trump frenzy died down, the truth would start coming out. Its best propaganda defense was a good offense that admitted the virus came out of a lab and blamed America.

The Communist narrative is likely to gain some traction in and out of America. A lot of the world is ready to believe the worst of America. And so are a lot of Americans.

All of this should have been discussed last year. But better late than never as the actual research starts breaking through the lies.

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals.

Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George’s University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working HIV vaccine, to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm.

The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.

While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered unique fingerprints in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.

That’s how the consensus sausage is made. Much as with global warming, it’s a top-down phenomenon in which dissenting views are marginalized and then suppressed. The resulting consensus is a wholly artificial product of a system, not a vigorous debate.

All of this comes after Biden tried to shut down former Secretary of State Pompeo’s investigation into the Chinese lab theory, only to have that leak out, forcing him to at least put on a show of beginning another investigation.

But here’s what Pompeo is saying.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Saturday that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was engaged in military activity alongside its civilian research — amid renewed scrutiny of the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from the secretive lab.

“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,” Pompeo said on Fox & Friends Weekend.

“They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refused to allow access to the World Health Organization when it tried to get in there.”

Everything in the PRC, much as in the USSR, has a military component. But it’s hard to think of what sort of activity involving the PLA could have been going on at the lab that wouldn’t have offensive bio-warfare applications.

China lied about this all along. The UN went along with the lie. So did much of our establishment. Some parts of it had been bought off by China. Others hated Trump so much that they were determined to shut down any notion that the virus could have come out of a lab.

China has killed millions of Americans.

And yet, President Biden is profiting from his son’s investments in China?

Surely not! Can Joe Biden really be so corrupt?

Well, yes.

Sky News Australia on the origin and purpose of the Covid-19 virus:

Rowan Dean explains how Dr Fauci helped Xi Jinping’s Communist China kill millions.   

Why would the oligarchy collectively named “Biden” expend blood and treasure to save the country it now governs when that country, the United States of America, is a rotten thing, sick with the disease of racism?

“We are  an imperfect union and have been since the beginning,” moaned Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “Biden’s” ambassador to the United Nations, speaking at a National Action Network convention recently.

The “Biden” Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is too busy at present to be bothered with foreign affairs. He is dealing urgently with “right-wing extremism” – which is to say “racism” –  in the ranks of the US military, and “executing diversity and anti-extremism training” for every member of his department.

Will “Biden” see any need to take action if America’s two strongest enemies expand their power by making war on their neighbors?

We may soon learn the answer to that question.

Gordon Chang, writing at Gatestone, sees two wars coming:

War could break out on both ends of the Eurasian landmass at the same time.

Two large aggressors are threatening to break apart neighbors and absorb them.

Russian troops are massing on the Ukraine border.

Chinese vessels are swarming Whitsun Reef of the Philippines in the South China Sea, and China’s air force is flying almost daily through Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone.

Vladimir Putin in 2019 said that Russia reserved the right to protect ethnic Russians outside Russia. This month, Dmitry Kozak, deputy head of Russia’s presidential administration, said his country might intervene to “defend” its citizens. If it did, he suggested, Ukraine would not survive.

Russians perceive Biden as feeble. 

China’s leaders are saying they do not believe President Joe Biden would defend Taiwan.

The Dragon and the Bear appear to be coordinating moves, as they have for some time. At the very least, each is acting with an eye to what the other is doing. Once one of these aggressors makes a move, the other large state, taking advantage of the situation, will almost certainly follow.

All the elements for history’s next great conflict are now in place.

So “Biden” is surely preparing for it?

Seems not. Seems that as far as the “Biden administration” is concerned, history’s next great conflict will just have to wait, at least until the diversity training course has been completed by the Department of Defense.