By Peter Barry Chowka

EXCLUSIVE.

“These are the times that try men’s souls .” At the time of the American Revolution (1776), English-born American patriot, revolutionary activist, and pamphleteer Thomas Paine wrote those words in his influential broadside, Common Sense.

His words seem applicable to these current times. His writings back then helped to inspire action and ultimately a revolution. Now, effective action on the part of traditionalists-conservatives-patriots to restore the nation seems like it may not be possible.

On Monday, July 2, I went looking for new updates about the Occupy Portland ICE situation which I was following so closely last week and wrote three major articles about. Please read them here (Part 1), here (Part 2), and here (Part 3). It has taken a lot of work to get the story straight. Basically, as of today (July 3, 2018) the left wing status quo prevails. The encampment of hundreds of radical leftists outside Portland ICE HQ is still in place. It looks like it is going to be allowed to stay there indefinitely. The occupiers pledge that they are not going home until they and their “comrades” (yes, comrades) achieve total victory in shutting down ICE along with their other objectives. Read on.

The efforts of the left wing Communist Occupy zealots to close down ICE, is accompanied by their demands to close down the prisons and open the borders. It proceeds unimpeded. Portland, Oregon a.k.a. The People’s Republic of Portland is Ground Zero in this crazy pro-Communist effort that has now spread to many cities nationwide. Incredibly, many prominent mainstream Democrat politicians across the country are increasingly supporting these insane radical positions. Member in good standing of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a Congressional primary election in New York last week is the tip of the spear in that regard. She openly supports no Ice, no borders, free health care, free college education, allowing illegal aliens invaders to stay here and import their large families with full benefits, and the impeachment of President Trump.

The shocking and obscene radical banner above about an ongoing occupy action in New York City is featured on the Portland Abolish I.C.E. PDX Twitter page. It calls for “no prisons no ICE no borders” and adds “chinga la migra” which translates as “f—k migra.” The word migra is a derogatory Spanish language slur for U.S. immigration officers often used by illegal aliens.

What accounts for these insane Communist positions becoming mainstream in the United States? One could cite many factors. An influential but often overlooked one is the profound demographic shift that has taken place in the United States of America.

Starting in the 1960s, at the hands of Democrat politicians when they controlled the Congress with veto proofmajorities, changes in immigration law kicked off that demographic shift. Slowly at first but later turbocharged by subsequent globalist administrations over the course of four or five decades, the country went from a majority of residents who traced their ancestry to Great Britain and European countries to a near majority of individuals from Mexico, Latin America, Africa, and other s—thole countries. That is an honest if politically incorrect description of the demographic shift. It is confirmed by accounts like the following published in the mainstream media with little notice.

According to Newsweek June 22, 2017, in an article titled “Will America Remain White? More Non-Hispanic Whites Died Than Were Born in U.S. Last Year:”

The non-Hispanic white population was the only race or ethnic group to experience more deaths than births between July 2015 and July 2016, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the same time period, the Asian and Hispanic populations saw the largest increases, as the United States continues to become more diverse.

From the Baltimore Sun August 8, 2017, “Whites Will Soon Be the Minority in Number:”

The U.S. population has been predominantly white since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. As late as 1950, whites accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s population, according to U.S. Census figures. But in the past six decades, whites’ share of the overall population has dropped to 61 percent. . . In certain places this [population shift to minority-majority] is already underway. Hawaii and the District of Columbia became majority-minority in 1980, California and New Mexico in 2000, Texas in 2004, and Nevada last year. The white share of Nevada’s population plunged from 83.2 percent in 1980 to 49.9 percent in 2016. Nonwhites are drivers of the demography of the national and state populations. For example, nonwhites accounted for nearly 96 percent of the 14.4 million people added to the U.S. population between 2010 and 2016. Latinos were responsible for close to half of the national growth. The white population rose by just over 650,000 during the six-year period, making up only about 4 percent of the increase. [Emphasis added]

These statistics, published in mainstream publications, are based on official U.S. Census statistics. They deserve serious consideration.

If the trends continue – and they surely will – the United States will be a totally different country soon. In fact, it already is. It is no longer the country whose people cheered when Democrat President John F. Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Today, Democrats demand free health care, free college tuition, and, increasingly, free guaranteed annual income for everyone in the country including illegal aliens! And they want to impeach the duly elected 45^thPresident of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The political platform of the Communist Party USA is close to being totally implemented in the country without a shot being fired.

As 2018 reaches its halfway point and we are on the eve of what should be a solemn and meaningful holiday, the 4^th of July, Independence Day, a declining audience of mostly aging white people of European origin, with a very few independent-minded people of color thrown in, even pays attention to the meaning of the holiday. They are the ones who read the articles in publications like American Thinker, the Hagmann Report, and similar outlets, but little can be done to change the country’s direction. Too many people approve of that transformation, as President Barack Hussein Obama described it – the inexorable slide downward into Third World status that seems to be picking up speed. The power of the state is simply too great to resist. It is orders of magnitude greater than the power of the British occupiers during the Revolutionary War. And these days, despite President Trump being in the White House, most individual state power is aligned with the increasingly radical left – because the Shadow Government and the Deep State remain in power positions in many cases behind the scenes and in a lot of cases now, also quite openly feel comfortable in carrying out their dirty seditious deeds. 

What’s happening in the numerous cities where anti-ICE actions are going forward is emblematic. Politicians and even police departments in those cities are now on the side of the lawbreakers, whether they are the occupiers or illegal aliens – or even criminal illegal aliens who are members of gangs like MS-13. Nancy Pelosi recently defended members of the savage murderous Latino MS-13 gang as children of God who should not be called names. The criminal illegal alien, previously convicted of 7 felonies and deported from the U.S. a half a dozen times, who killed Kate Steinle by shooting her dead on a pier in San Francisco was acquitted by an American jury on all charges relating to her death (which his defense lawyer admitted he was responsible for) in an act of jury nullification. Leftists supported and praised the jury’s verdict.

Last weekend, a small group of conservatives obtained a permit for a legal march in the city of Portland and a rally. There were only about 150 of them. A violent mob of Antifa goons showed up, wearing masks, black clothing, and helmets and carrying weapons, and descended on the legal march. What the police and media called a “riot” ensued and the coverage depicted the scene as “antifascist” demonstrators challenging an extreme right wing group as if the latter, peacefully and legally marching, were the cause.  It was a text book example of Fake News reporting. This was the case both in mainstream print and Internet publications and Sunday evening on the CBS TV nationwide network news broadcast. It’s as if the Daily Worker (the house organ of the Communist Party USA) was ghost-writing the reporting.

An excerpt from Fortune, May 23, 2017:

Two years ago, two married Princeton professors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, released an alarming study, showing that white middle-aged Americans were suddenly dying much more frequently than in the past. The results were surprisingly given that mortality rates for the U.S. population had in general been falling since 1900.

The authors partly blamed what they called “deaths of despair”—deaths from alcohol and drug poisoning, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis, which have risen dramatically for whites.

Happy Fourth of July, America. I hope that it’s not our last.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture.  He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Peter is scheduled to make his next video Skype appearance on The Hagmann Report on Thursday, July 5, 2018 between 8-9 PM EDT. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

A trip to New York City in the days right before Christmas 2019 wound up being an unexpectedly revelatory experience. Every December, the area of Midtown Manhattan around the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the dazzling decorated store fronts on Fifth Avenue draw hundreds of thousands of visitors from every state in the nation, scores of foreign countries, and cities and towns that make up the metropolitan NYC area itself.

This year 2019 was no exception. But as one who grew up in the NYC metro area and who has visited numerous times during Christmas seasons since then, I was not quite prepared for what I saw and experienced this year during my first holiday stay in the city in seven years.

First, taking note of what might be some positive signs: Massive construction of new high rise buildings was in evidence everywhere in central and downtown Manhattan. Several buildings just south of Central Park, for example, still under construction, are already so tall that they dwarf surrounding buildings and have completely changed the distinctive skyline of Manhattan.

The streets of Manhattan this month were bustling with vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and stores seemed to be doing a brisk business with block-long lines of customers waiting to be admitted to some of them. I do not recall seeing that phenomenon in previous years.

These and other signs would seem to reflect positively on the state of the economy in the third year of the Trump presidency.

But looking a little more closely and a bit deeper, there are many troubling signs of negative change and decay.

Just as there is chronic vehicular traffic gridlock on many of the nation’s highways, there is now – at least during the Christmas season – near-impenetrable human gridlock on the sidewalks and streets of central Manhattan. I have never seen a crush of people bringing pedestrian traffic to a near complete standstill as I have this year in NYC. The area around the Rockefeller Center tree and on Fifth Avenue, for example, more closely resembled the massive crowds packed into Times Square for the annual New Year’s Eve ball dropping.

Since this situation – the increase in the number of people on the streets every year to a point where the sidewalks are now almost unnavigable – is continuing to worsen, I wonder what future years will be like.

English, or unaccented idiomatic American English, is rarely heard – and not just because of the presence of foreign tourists. It was impossible, for example, to communicate with some key staff at a highrise midtown hotel, almost all of whom are immigrants and have clearly not learned even the basics of the language of their new country.

The appearance of the crowds on the streets – not including the foreign tourists – was decidedly down and out. Contrast that picture with archival photos of NYC at Christmastime in decades past but not so long ago, when almost everyone was nicely dressed and appeared to be middle- or upper-middle-class.

A common sight was groups of disheveled men eating a meal on paper plates while standing or sitting on the curb or a low building wall. The source of their food was a pushcart or stall right on the street selling greasy grilled food, the smoke and smell of which permeated the air.

Police, fire department, and ambulance sirens were heard every couple of minutes as gridlocked cars, taxicabs, and trucks did their best to somehow make way for the emergency vehicles to pass.

The condition of the pavement on the sidewalks and streets in the heart of Manhattan was disgraceful. Some of the patched and uneven sidewalks looked like they haven’t been improved on since the 1960s. A decade and a half of Green-worshipping mayoral administrations (Mike Bloomberg’s and now Bill DeBlasio’s) have remade many major avenues and streets, with infrequently used wide bike lanes robbing valuable space for motor vehicles, resulting in even worse traffic gridlock.

Trash and garbage littered the streets and even the walkways and lawns of Central Park which, despite the cold weather, was a magnet for crowds of strollers on the Saturday before Christmas.

The downbeat appearance at street level of the city reminded me of the bad old days under Democrat mayors in the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s – until finally the ascent to power of a Republican, Rudy Giuliani, who served as NYC’s mayor for two terms from 1994 to 2001. By unleashing the police to enforce the laws; cleaning up Times Square’s disrepair, decay, and filth; and taking other proactive, commonsense steps, Giuliani’s administration significantly improved the quality of life in the city for everyone, including visitors, by orders of magnitude.

Since 2011, New York has had as its mayor the socialist Bill DeBlasio, who has been a disaster in too many ways to count. His policies, mostly championed by the 51 members of the radical City Council (most of whom reflect the leftist views of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad”), have clearly made life in NYC demonstrably worse.

Finally, this observation: The December holiday season is – or was until recently – all about Christmas. These days, the word “Christmas,” however, was often not seen or not mentioned prominently in advertising or in storefront displays. An incredibly obnoxious, state-of-the-art booming sound and light show projected on the building that houses Saks Fifth Avenue, according to one observer, was more appropriate for the gaudy Las Vegas strip.

The huge multi-block area around Broadway and Times Square is now a sea of enormous pulsating video screens, blaring and exploding their advertising messages. Night has been turned into day by the surreal power of the screens. It’s like George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel 1984 come to life.

I was surprised upon entering a brand new flagship Nordstrom store on 57^th Street that the music being played, loudly audible throughout several floors of the enormous store, was not Christmas music but rap and hip hop recordings sequenced by a live DJ – more appropriate for a trendy disco.

Meanwhile, in human interactions, a greeting or a parting comment of “Merry Christmas” was usually met with “Happy Holidays.” In fact, many of the people one encounters look as if they will be celebrating Kwanzaa or some African or Third World religious ritual or perhaps nothing at all this month.

But it’s too politically incorrect to report that kind of thing now, isn’t it? But fortunately, not in this space.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2020!

An earlier version of this article appeared at American Thinker.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s website is http://peter.media.  His new YouTube channel is here. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

Author of new book claims USSR represented good guys during & after World War II.

You can’t make this stuff up. After four years of the American Left, and Democrats, arguing that post-Communist Russia is our #1 mortal enemy – responsible for colluding with Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign – a stunning new spin has emerged, thanks to a new book published last week and an article about it at a leading Leftist Web site.

The title of a feature article Tuesday in The Daily Beast by the author of the new book is bad enough: “9 Reasons to Thank the USSR: How We Got the Cold War Wrong.” As anti-Communist historian and author Diana West tweeted about it, “Can’t recall reading anything more appalling on more levels.” The Beast is appalling enough on a daily basis, alright, but this article and the book it summarizes should scare the living daylights out of every patriot out there.

The 800-word article, and the 512-page book it is drawn from, Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness, are by Brian T. Brown. At his Twitter, Brown – big surprise: he’s not a friend of President Trump or conservatives – describes himself as a “Bumbling but devoted adventurer in dark alleys of American paranoia.”

In the Daily Beast, Brown (hold on to your hat) offers an entirely new radical left revisionist reboot on the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union on the 30^th anniversary this month of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

It was a conflict suffused with fear, paranoia, and a whole lot of lies. This means much of what many of us learned in school about the struggle between the U.S. and USSR was very, very wrong.

Here’s the first buried truth. We fired the first shot. Harry Truman rushed to drop the atom bomb to end the war in Japan to prevent the Soviets from joining the battle in the Pacific. Joseph Stalin got the message. The nuclear arms race was underway.

But our enemy, the so-called evil empire, was really a figment of our fevered imaginations.

Brown’s article, let us say, goes further downhill from there, as he asks:

What would the Cold War have been like if, during history class, American kids learned that the world forever owed a debt of gratitude to Soviet forces and Soviet citizens? Their remarkable resilience saved democracy as much as did George Patton and Iwo Jima.

He then cites “nine reasons why we should’ve thanked the Russians after World War II instead of engaging them in a decades-long Cold War.” Reason #5:

THE REAL MENACE: Joseph McCarthy barely believed a word he said and found zero communists in government roles.

In response, Diana West tweeted a link to M. Stanton Evans’ 2014 article at Breitbart, “McCarthyism By the Numbers.” West’s tweet included a screen shot of a list of fifty names of Americans who, Evans wrote, included:

Suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or before his committee; identified in sworn testimony, FBI archives, or other official security records as Communists or Soviet agents; or took the Fifth Amendment when asked about such matters.

Rather than quote any more of Brian T. Brown’s “reasons,” interested readers are directed to his article.

Brian T. Brown: The enemy is us

Leaving no doubt about the essence of Brown’s revisionist spin, a summary of his book at Amazon explains:

Someone Is Out to Get Us is the true and complete account of a long-misunderstood period of history during which lies, conspiracies, and paranoia led Americans into a state of madness and misunderstanding, too distracted by fictions to realize that the real enemy was looking back at them in the mirror the whole time.

The revisionist history represented by Brown’s article, and presumably at much greater length in his book which was published in hardcover on November 5, seems absurd. However, one needs to keep in mind that this kind of “history” is now the status quo party line being taught at a majority of American colleges and universities. It’s this fact that helps to explain why recent surveys, like this annual poll in 2019 by YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, have found that “Young Americans continue to lose faith in capitalism and embrace socialism.” Summarizing the survey, Axiosreported on Oct. 28:

19% of millennials and 12% of Gen Z said they thought the Communist Manifesto “better guarantees freedom and equality for all” than the Declaration of Independence.

The title of the Axios article, “70% of millennials say they’d vote for a socialist,” seems ripped from the headlines as we see many if not most of the Democrat Party’s leading 2020 presidential wannabes lurch increasingly to the radical left in order to satisfy their party’s socialist/communist-loving base.

The “bottom line” conclusion of the Axios article seems like an understatement: “Young people’s political views often change as they grow older, but their support for socialist ideas and leaders is a sign that the old rules of politics are changing fast.”

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s website is http://peter.media. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

“The idea that (Trump) was in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous.” — Vladimir Bukovsky 2019

Vladimir Bukovsky, the most famous surviving anti-communist Soviet dissident, has passed away. The sad news broke almost simultaneously early Sunday evening EDT in a tweet from journalist Diana West at 6:07 PM and in a news release emailed by Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center at 6:34 PM. This reporter was also one of the first to report the news on Twitter at 7:11 PM EDT on Sunday October 27^th.

In poor health in recent years, Bukovsky, age 76, according to Childs had died of cardiac arrest at Addenbrookes Hospital near his home in Cambridge, England on Sunday evening at 9:30 PM local time in the UK.

In the 24 hours following Bukovsky’s death, his passing was taken note of in feature articles and obituaries by most of the world’s major media, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian.

Bukovsky had lived in the West since he was traded for a Chilean communist in a swap in Zurich in 1976. Before his release to freedom, he had spent a dozen years locked up in the old Soviet Union in prisons, gulags, and mental institutions.

The announcement of Bukovsky’s death emailed by Childs, and posted as an obituary at the Bukovsky Center’s Web site, summarized his life as a dissident in the Soviet Union and his achievements since his departure from the USSR in 1976:

A leading Russian human rights writer and activist, Bukovsky spent a total of 12 years imprisoned by the USSR. After his release to the West in 1976, he spent his last four decades writing and campaigning against successive regimes in his homeland.

Bukovsky first gained notoriety as a student writer and organizer in Moscow. In 1963, he was arrested for possessing forbidden literature. Rather than put him on trial, Soviet authorities had him declared mentally ill and locked him in a psychiatric hospital — a common tactic used in the USSR to discredit dissenters and confine them without appearing to be holding political prisoners. He was arrested again in 1967 and sent to a labor camp for three years.

After his release, Bukovsky created an international uproar when he had psychiatric hospital records for six well-known dissidents smuggled to the West in 1971. International psychiatrists’ organizations studied the records and charged Soviet doctors and the government with creating false diagnoses as a way to indefinitely detain possibly thousands of political opponents who showed no medically recognized symptoms of mental illness.

A gifted writer, Bukovsky was revered for his ability to document both the daily insults and grand oppression of Soviet prison life, and to convey with detail the soul-crushing effects of torture on both prisoner and jailer.

In 2019, one of Bukovsky’s most substantive works, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, was finally published in English in the United States for the first time by Ninth of November Press. It had been scheduled for publication in the U.S. in the 1990s, but never came out. Meanwhile, it was published in England and a number of European countries including, ironically, Russia. The book is based on internal Soviet era documents that Bukovsky got his hands on and managed to copy and smuggle out of Russia when he visited the former USSR under Boris Yelstsin’s post-communist regime in the early 1990s. The 2019 English language version of Judgment in Moscow brought renewed attention to Bukovsky, and he was interviewed at length earlier this year by several leading American journalists, including Celia Farber, who wrote two extensive articles for the Epoch Times, one of them a Q & A that she had on the phone with Bukovsky.

Farber’s articles (here and here), and three lengthy interviews with Bukovsky by Jay Nordlinger published in the National Review (here, here, and here), really need to be read in their entirety to get a full appreciation of the richness in experience and analysis of this man who never sold out his principles.

Asked about the left’s ongoing charges of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, Bukovsky told Farber:

Mind you, the idea that he was initially somehow in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous. I mean he is doing his thing, with some limitations in his understanding of Russia. But calling him a Moscow agent is ridiculous. You might like or dislike him. He has strong character, not very critical of himself, and so forth, but to suggest that he is Moscow’s agent is absolutely ridiculous. . . The president is limited by legislation, by Congress, by whatever. It’s not in his power to change the course of the country as much as they suggest. The president is only an executive officer and that’s it.

Following the news of Bukovsky’s death, journalist Diana West immediately employed her prolific Twitter account to share her thoughts about Bukovsky in a series of incisive tweets and an appreciation of him posted at her Web site. West wrote:

How do we mark the consequence and courage of such an extraordinary man who chose to lead his life in outspoken opposition to evil, who chose to sacrifice years of his life in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals rather than submit to communist slavery?

In many ways, Diana West is a Western intellectual counterpart to Bukovsky. Her scholarship, especially in her 2013 book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character and more recently in The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, has shed considerable new light on the decades-long collusion between many influential political and cultural leaders of the United States and the old Soviet Union. As Farber concluded after speaking with Bukovsky:

Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it turns out, was correct, but was the wrong messenger, and wound up derailing the cause of anti-communist awareness for half a century.

For more information, the Bukovsky Center Web site, run by volunteers, has been updated with news of Bukovsky’s passing and will be an ongoing source of information.

A two-minute film clip of a clandestine 1970 video interview with Bukovsky in a park outside Moscow, with the caption “The man on camera [Bukovsky] risks his life by speaking,” has been posted as a memoriam to him at YouTube here. It is highly recommended viewing.

As I wrote in an email of condolence to my friend Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center:

The death of someone who I respect, even if I never met him, usually stops me in my tracks, occasions deep thoughts, and is ultimately rather depressing. . . When you think of what Bukovsky lived through, and survived, it really is astonishing. Re-reading his 2019 interviews Sunday, it was so clear that his perspective today was grounded in a life of truly amazing and unique experiences and was so valuable.

[An earlier version of this article was originally published at American Thinker on October 28, 2019.]

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 6½ hour-long testimony in the House on Wednesday was expected to be a big ratings win for the three cable news and three broadcast television channels, all of which covered it wall to wall. Not only did the event under-perform, but so did President Trump’s key media nemesis, CNN, which came in dead last at #6.

The red hot competition for viewers apparently led MSNBC and CNN to add a new level of fakery – both before and after Mueller’s testimony. MSNBC contributed to the “conspiracy theory” that Fox News was planning to black out live coverage of Mueller, while CNN obfuscated its poor showing in a post-Mueller hearing TV ratings analysis.

Conventional wisdom has it that when the news is perceived to be bad for President Trump, Resistance outlets MSNBC and CNN get a boost in viewership. Mueller’s long-awaited testimony was expected to turbo charge the Resistance and re-ignite talk of impeaching the president, although his performance clearly underwhelmed. Still, Fox News, the channel perceived as the most friendly to the president, won both the day of coverage (by its news anchors and reporters) and prime time, when opinion shows are programmed on all three cable “news” channels.

According to Nielsen Media Research, as reported by Forbes on Thursday:

Fox News drew a total audience of more than 3 million viewers between 8:15 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. ET, leading all broadcast and cable competition. MSNBC finished second with 2.4 million total viewers, followed by ABC (2.12 million), NBC (1.99 million), CBS (1.91 million) and CNN (1.5 million). CBS, it should be noted, is currently dark in 10 million American households because of an AT&T dispute with DirecTV, Nexstar and other carriers, which may have dampened its overall ratings.

Among viewers 25-54, the demographic group most valued by advertisers, NBC-TV finished first, with 536,000 viewers. ABC was second, with 489,000 viewers, followed by Fox News Channel (441,000 viewers), CBS (406,000), CNN (365,000) and MSNBC (347,000).

The weekend before Mueller’s testimony, a widespread “conspiracy theory” emerged – with the assistance of MSNBC – claiming incorrectly that Fox News would not broadcast the hearings live because they were expected to embarrass President Trump. In fact, Fox News had been running prominent on air promos for weeks advertising its plans to cover the hearings live, initially on Wednesday July 17 and then a week later when the Mueller show was re-scheduled.

The details of this hanky-panky suggest a new, down low strategy on the part of a cable news channel to try to depress the ratings of a competitor. On Sunday, frequent MSNBC contributor Joyce Vance tweeted her 337,000 followers the false information that Fox News would not cover the hearings. After criticism on social media, she deleted the tweet, claiming it was a sarcastic joke – but not before author and Resistance keyboard warrior Stephen King tweeted the fake news about Fox’s plans to his 5.33 million Twitter followers.

On Monday, as Brian Flood reported in an article at Fox News dot com on Tuesday, Vance’s claim had “morphed into a full-blown conspiracy theory – and anti-Trump liberals don’t seem to care.” In fact, on Monday, MSNBC guest Rick Wilson spread the fake news during an appearance on the channel and was not corrected.

According to Flood:

Wilson appeared on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” and apparently missed the memo that Vance deleted her inaccurate tweet prior to his segment.

“Now Fox isn’t covering the hearings,” Wilson said during a discussion about the upcoming Mueller testimony.

[MSNBC host Nicole] Wallace didn’t correct him and responded, “Really?”

“They’re apparently not going to take them live. Everybody else is taking them live,” Wilson said, misinforming MSNBC viewers in the process.

“TV viewership for Mueller hearings falls flat,” an article on Thursday about the Mueller hearing ratings by Brian Stelter, CNN’s chronic Trump nemesis, significantly failed to note that CNN came in last. Instead, Stelter contrasted the total ratings for Mueller’s testimony with the numbers for James Comey, Michael Cohen, and Bret Kavanaugh when each of them testified before Congress. Stelter:

If Democrats were banking on massive viewership of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s televised testimony, they’re feeling broke today.

The Mueller hearings had a loyal audience, but they didn’t break any ratings records. Not by a long shot.

Preliminary Nielsen ratings totals — which are subject to adjustment — show an average of 13 million viewers across six major networks Wednesday.

Stelter’s closing comments ironically give one some hope that viewer interest in taking President Trump down is finally waning:

When the final Nielsen ratings come in, the Mueller hearings are likely to be in line with Michael Cohen’s testimony back in February.

In a possible sign of Trump-related fatigue, neither the Mueller or Cohen hearings were as highly-rated as former FBI Director James Comey’s explosive day of testimony in June 2017, which drew about 20 million viewers.

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

A probing investigation into the history of the planned Communist takeover of the USA that is now well underway.

© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.

In a video from last December that has only recently gained attention, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff – Saikat Chakrabarti – wears a t-shirt with the face of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who was allied with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II. Bose actually met with monstrous Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler at the height of the war.

The picture gives us an indication of part of the lineage of the ideas of AOC and Chakrabarti – including her advocacy of what she calls a Green New Deal. Another hint of their agenda is contained in the Washington Post’s fawning profile of Chakrabarti.

The WaPo article reports:

Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. . . Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” [emphasis added]

So, according to its key author Chakrabarti (AOC’s “brain”), the Green New Deal is not about climate change “at all.” The real agenda behind it is a socialist-Marxist-transformation of the United States, starting with a complete government takeover and regulation of the entire economy – essentially pounding the last nail in the coffin of what remains of free market capitalism.

At last count, the House resolution on the Green New Deal has been co-sponsored by six of the major 2020 presidential candidates: Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar.

This news got me to thinking about some of the major, if less widely-recognized, origins of the Green New Deal. The combination of “Green” with “New Deal” is significant. It was the revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first socialist president, who promised a “New Deal” for America when he was running for the office in 1932 in the throes of the Great Depression. That’s what won the presidency for FDR in 1932 – much like Barack Obama rode a bad economy, or the perception of one, and the promises of “Hope” and “Change” to victory 76 years later.

As Diana West and other historians and authors have documented, the communists in our midst began their dirty work a century ago. The long march of Marxist ideas imported from Europe, that took root particularly in the labor movement and dark corners of academia in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, was interrupted during WW II and the prosperity and expansion of the post-war period when the U.S. became the leader of the Free World. Some Republican and Democrat politicians perceived the dangers that domestic communists were posing in the late 1940s, however, and tried to do something about the problem – personified by Sens. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and Richard Nixon (R-Calif.), Rep. John E. Rankin (D-Miss.), and others.

After these efforts were stigmatized and dispatched as “witch hunts” and “blacklisting” by the Establishment, American communists regrouped and went forward. Their efforts were buttressed by a new generation of children born right before and during WW II (“Red diaper-doper babies”) and followed – significantly – by tens of millions of spoiled, impressionable Baby Boomers.

In the 1960s, the decade when the oldest Baby Boomers were coming of age, everything started to change. It was the decade that socialism of the Marxist-communist kind became turbo-charged – and like a stealth jet fighter was launched screaming into the future.

Not every leftist Baby Boomer, of course, was or became a card carrying communist. They were more like useful idiots. All that was required was an adjustment of many young people’s thinking to make them susceptible to feeling guilty about things like slavery, income inequality, and harming the planet. Post-adjustment, their brains became fertile ground for left wing manipulators. An appalling number would carry this sense of guilt – for being white, middle class, and/or successful – far into adulthood.

In 1962, a group of dedicated young Reds met at Port Huron, Michigan to plot the socialist-Communist takeover of the United States. Their vehicle was the radical group Students for A Democratic Society or SDS. This band of radical agitators, formed in 1960, was the U.S. equivalent of the small group of Bolshevik radicals that took over Russia a half a century earlier.

The SDS had learned a lot from the failures of the earlier generation of commies in the U.S. who had dabbled with attempts at violent revolution – all of them unsuccessful. The U.S. in the 1920’s and ‘30s – despite the Depression – still had a viable patriotic middle class, a strong Judeo-Christian foundation, and traditional family values. These qualities and an overwhelming sense of national unity essentially inoculated most Americans against communist influence.

The SDS meeting in 1962 in Michigan, which few took note of at the time except the participants and a handful of campus radicals, issued the Port Huron Statement. It was a manifesto calling for a revolution that would begin on college and university campuses and spread from there throughout American society.

The SDS had been founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. According to Wikipedia:

SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905.

The organizers of the SDS immediately distinguished themselves from the moribund and doctrinaire Old Left and saw their new campus-based model as the vanguard of a New Left. These modern communists derived inspiration from Fidel Castro’s triumph in taking over Cuba in 1959, the emerging Cultural Revolution in Mao Tse-Tung’s China, and the communists in North and South Vietnam fighting the U.S. and holding their own in the rapidly expanding Vietnam War.

At Port Huron in June 1962, among the participants was Tom Hayden (1939-2016). He was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement/SDS manifesto. A few years later, Hayden was one of the Chicago 8/7 radicals arrested and tried for fomenting the mob riots at the Democrat National Convention in August 1968 and for other crimes. In the next decade Hayden would go on to marry Hanoi Jane Fonda and get elected to multiple terms in the California State Assembly and Senate – serving a total of 18 years. During Jerry Brown’s first two terms as California Governor (1975-’83), Hayden was one of Brown’s key advisors on a variety of policy issues.

The photograph above speaks volumes. It vividly depicts the power and influence of two of the most prominent leftists (in the case of Tom Hayden, a communist agitator) at the highest levels of government. The setting is a speech by California Gov. Jerry Brown (at the microphone on the right) speaking to the California delegation at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in NYC. On the stage with Brown (L-R) are labor activist Cesar Chavez, U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (bald head and eyes visible), SDS honcho and Chicago 7 trial defendant Tom Hayden, Mrs. Hayden a.k.a. Jane Fonda, and U.S. Sen. John Tunney (clapping his hands). Two of the most famous leftists-communists (Hanoi Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden) invited on the stage with the three most powerful politicians in the state of California – two sitting United States Senators and the Governor who himself had been a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, coming in second to the victor Jimmy Carter. Photo above taken and © by Peter Barry Chowka.

Photo below: Three years after the photo above that was taken in 1976, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda had become two of Gov. Jerry Brown’s closest advisors. Here, on May 6, 1979, (L-R) Brown, Fonda, and Hayden are seen together standing on the Western portico of the United States Capitol building observing a massive No Nukes demonstration taking place below. All three of them addressed the radical gathering. Photo taken and © by Peter Barry Chowka.

In 1962 in its Port Huron Statement, the SDS targeted racism and established the meme of “participatory democracy” (i.e., putting an end to a Constitutional representative republic that is the basis of the United States). The organization also had its eye on the Democratic Party. Quoting the Port Huron Statement:

An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests.

Approximately 55 years later, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the country, voted at its annual convention to support Democratic Party candidates for election as the best way to establish Socialism-Marxism in the United States. As I wrote in an article at The Epoch Times on August 8, 2018:

The DSA’s national convention in 2017 adopted three goals. The first two, endorsing Medicare for All and supporting organized labor, were pro-forma. The third one, however, outlined a bold new proposal to elect open socialists by running them as Democrats. [emphasis added.]

The 1962 SDS Port Huron statement prominently highlighted the need for “university reform.” Wikipedia:

The Port Huron Statement argued that because “the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent,” it should rally support and strengthen itself by looking to universities, which benefit from their “permanent position of social influence” and being “the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.” [emphasis added.]

A large part of the success of propagandizing the masses – especially young people – to embrace socialism and then communism was facilitated by the Cultural Revolution – including sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – that came to prominence in the 1960s. This axis of evil influences hypnotized and brainwashed young people, especially college students. It tore them away from their long-established moorings including their families, and also began the downfall of traditional Judeo-Christian religious faith that had been the cornerstone of the nation since its founding including the first English-speaking settlements here in the early 1600s.

Moving past the rest of the 1960s and ahead to 1970 – and something called Earth Day. . .

The first “Earth Day” took place on April 22, 1970. It was the brainchild of liberal Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), a hero to the left who embraced a wide variety of far left positions. Nelson was an early environmentalist and a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1969, the so-called Moratoriums organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a.k.a. “The Mobe,” represented the high water mark of the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Also in the fall of 1969, Sen. Nelson came up with the idea for Earth Day. He foresaw it as promoting local demonstrations and teach-ins advocating environmental awareness and action at high schools, colleges, and universities around the country. It was inspired by and modeled after the 1960s anti-war teach-ins on American campuses that successfully laid the groundwork for the ensuing anti-Vietnam War peace movement.

As the new decade of the 1970s dawned, America’s campuses had been primed for action, and the first Earth Day was a success. It continues annually to this day and has expanded worldwide. These early fledgling environmental activist actions on campuses, including Earth Day, planted the seeds for academia to gradually but inexorably take the lead in instilling and then spreading far left ideology and ideas throughout the mainstream of society – by corrupting the minds of the youth and influencing them in their subsequent careers. Riding the wave of feel-good environmentalism, they were among the first steps in the successful mainstreaming of radical left wing radicalism.

The colleges and universities of the ‘60s and ‘70s provided the perfect environment – a sociological petri dish – to successfully grow the new communist-inspired ideas including social justice; the division of Americans into hyphenated, racial, ethnic, and sexual special interest groups; and environmental activism.

The college I attended during that time was pretty conservative – more than most – at least when I arrived there. Most of the professors were conservative. But a new generation of profs, younger and more liberal and radical than the tenured professors, was moving in. Even though they were in the minority, the new leftists quickly became the most popular teachers. They were the ones who started dressing like the students. They listened to rock music, smoked dope, had parties for students at their off-campus apartments, and taught from the new left wing canon (think Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, Che Guevara, and Carlos Castaneda). They actively participated in the Cultural Revolution that was sweeping America, inspiring students by their example.

The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. It was an ad hoc, local, feel-good Age of Aquarius-type party on a nice day in early spring. I remember students at my campus sunning themselves on the lawns, listening to some speeches, throwing Frisbees, and sending off balloons into the blue sky. Environmental apocalypse seemed far away.

A significant coincidence, if not a profound subliminal connection, is that on April 29, 1970 – exactly seven days after the first Earth Day – the Nixon Administration launched the invasion of Cambodia, widely viewed as an expansion of the Vietnam War that President Nixon had promised to end. The Pentagon’s intent was to cut the supply lines of the enemy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, who were invading our ally, South Vietnam, using the adjacent neutral country of Cambodia.

As the news of the Cambodia incursion spread, all hell broke loose. The anger on campuses was palpable and violence ensued on many of them. The fierce opposition on the campuses led to a student strike that shut down hundreds of colleges and universities. Many of them cancelled classes and final exams for the rest of the spring semester. The situation escalated into barely controlled chaos from coast to coast. It may have been the closest the country had moved towards mass insurrection since the Civil War. The killing of four students by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970 during a demonstration against the Cambodia incursion further inflamed the opposition to Nixon’s actions.

Student radicals organized massive demonstrations and the largest one took place ten days after the invasion began – on Saturday, May 9, 1970 on the Ellipse near the White House. I was there and it was one of the largest demonstrations in memory, with around a half a million people.

Although the era of massive anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was coming to an end in 1970, many of the radicals who honed their organizing skills in the 1960s took the advice of the Port Huron Statement and set their sights on academia (SDS functionary and Weather Underground domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is a prime example). Other radicals went into politics (Hillary and Bill Clinton, Tom Hayden, Bobby Rush). And last but not least, a new generation of leaders – taking power later or moving into positions of prominence today – including Barack Obama, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the other three members of the “Squad,” and too many others to mention – are carrying the torch for what started in the 1960s. Much of it, based on environmental radicalism, took root in the 1960s, expanded over the years, and has now morphed into the Green New Deal – one of the greatest Trojan Horse threats to the future of the United States.

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

This past week brought us the first (in two parts) live televised debates among the leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. A total of 12 debates are scheduled to take place through next April. The interaction among 20 Oval Office wannabes who made the cut to take the stage this time provided the first opportunity to get a clearer sense of the prospective 2020 Democrat presidential candidates and to take the measure of our opponents.

I say “our opponents” because these people are not only President Donald Trump’s opponents – they are my opponents, as well. I suspect that most of the people reading this article also consider these Democrat socialists their adversaries, too. The high probability is that one of these individuals will get the Democratic Party’s nomination next year and if he or she is elected, our lives will change forever, even more profoundly and irreparably than when Barack Obama was elected almost 13 years ago and undertook his toxic measures to “transform” America.

After closely watching the two debates last Wednesday and Thursday nights, which aired live on NBC and MSNBC – and in Spanish on Telemundo – (video debate one here, video debate two here) and reading the 42,000 words of the debate transcripts (part one here and part two here), it is easy to conclude that these candidates seem to represent the living embodiment of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel 1984. Lies, lies, and more lies were the order of the day – just like in 1984. The events’ success was palpable, however – Thursday’s debate drew more viewers (over 18 million) than any other primary election debate among Democrats in the history of American television.

In my opinion, all of the Democratic candidates – either wittingly or unwittingly – essentially want to ethnically cleanse us traditional conservative English-speaking Americans who are mostly of European origin – ethnically cleanse us and our entire history, achievements, and culture and relegate us and much of what our civilization has achieved to the “dustbin of history.” (That term was reportedly first used by Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky.)

Consider:

Over the decades, the Democrats and their minions – teachers unions, school administrators, local governments, and school boards – have turned our schools into indoctrination camps for the left.

Our colleges and universities, with the connivance and approval of Democrats, are now largely free of anything resembling freedom of speech. They are group think places where conservatives and their ideas have become almost extinct, while the lives of the occasional conservative speakers who venture into the campuses are in danger.

The Democrat-dominated popular culture and the mass media, instead of celebrating Western culture as they did during the height of the American Century, have been twisted into depraved cesspools of dark, violent and pornographic entertainment, further brainwashing many of our citizens and addicting them to distracting and destructive trash.

The political party of President John F. Kennedy now enthusiastically supports unrestricted illegal invasion and Open Borders, It also endorses abortion on demand – instead of “safe, legal and rare” – virtually unrestricted up to and even after the moment of birth. Meanwhile, all of the candidates insist that the once bipartisan Hyde Amendment be damned and the government be required to pay for all abortions.

The Democrats are anti-religion – or more accurately, anti-Christian – and they label us, who they mock as clinging to our Bibles and our our 2^nd Amendment rights, as “deplorables.”

The law itself has been twisted so that an increasing number of laws go completely unenforced, and major crimes from the streets to the suites go unpunished, with the result that our largest cities, almost all of them Democrat-controlled for many decades, have come to resemble Third World hell holes.

The tyrannical Big Tech matrix within which we conduct much of the business and interactions of our lives today is run by Democrats and is well along the way towards totally monitoring, censoring, manipulating, and controlling our communications, our thoughts, and our activities.

The last nail in the coffin of our most cherished expression of personal privacy, freedom, and choice – our own health care – is in danger of being taken over and controlled by the proposals of outright communists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren or one of their younger acolytes, as they force us into Medicare for All single payer health care.

And these people – these Democrat communists and their tens of millions of followers – see the Constitution and our Founding Fathers as enemies of their Godless but Gaia-worshiping techno state who need to be targeted and banished. Among other things, they want to abolish the Electoral College and continue to flood the country with illegal aliens – more than 4,500 a day are arriving currently – to ensure that they will win major elections in the future and maintain total one-party political power in perpetuity.

This, then, is a capsule summary of the Democratic Party today, as expressed by its leading national political candidates. It’s not “democratic” at all. That’s a total misnomer. It’s a statist, authoritarian, metastasizing mob of Maoists who want to transform this country so it’s no longer even recognizable – except to someone who rhapsodizes the good old days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They have said as much: Their hero – their Messiah – of the last decade, Barack Hussein Obama, promised on October 30, 2008 that we were “five days away from fundamentally transforming” the United States into something totallybdifferent. Having achieved a critical mass of numbers now and able to smell final victory, the heirs of Obama are ready to finish the task of amassing total power.

The Democrats are our enemy and, as Sun Tzu recommended in The Art of War, we must get to know and understand the enemy as a first step to defeating them – or we will be toast.

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s new website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

Joe Biden has made it official. At 6 AM E.T. this morning, the former Senator and Vice President, who held elective office continuously for 44 years (January 1973 to January 2017), announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination in a revamped Web site and a 3½ minute-long video. At least one-half of the video focused on the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 when a group of racists clashed with a counter group of Antifa and violence ensued. The left and the Democrats have tried to blame President Trump for the events and Biden picked up the cudgel.

The Antifa mob, Biden said in his video, was “a courageous group of Americans.” He continued:

We’re in a battle for the soul of this nation. . .

[We will look back on the presidency of Donald J. Trump] as an aberrant moment in time. . .

I cannot stand by and let that happen.

With Charlottesville as his touchstone, Biden also referenced President Thomas Jefferson, whom he criticized as “not always living up to our ideals.” My thinking: With Biden as president, get ready for a lot of obnoxious pandering including the banning of more statues of the Founding Fathers.

In the video, Biden is wearing a visible black earpiece in his right ear (a hearing aid? An audio monitor?). He was obviously reading a script from a TelePrompTer but was he also taking direction from an off-screen producer?

The new Biden for president Web site boasts a significant number of well-crafted bromides intended to appeal to both the middle class (or “working families” [sic], as the Democrats have previously referred to the underclass including tens of millions of illegal aliens who are replacing the shrinking middle class) and the far left that represents the activist base of the new Democrat Socialist Party.

Will Joe be able to pull it off? Currently, in early polls (which ultimately will count for little), he is in either first or second place among the 21 Democrat candidates who have declared thus far. Their number will probably increase. The months ahead promise to be quite a show.

Thomas Lifson added to my article at American Thinker this important comment:

Biden is taking the low road by implying Trump was praising the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, when from the context of his earlier words, he was clearly referring to the people seeking to preserve historic statues of Confederates. If he faces President Trump in a debate after securing the nomination, I expect President Trump to punch back hard on this distortion of what he said.

A version of this article was published on April 25 at American Thinker.

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter’s new website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

Victor Davis Hanson is a well-known conservative historian, academic, and author. He contributes commentaries prolifically on the current political scene to a variety of publications. He is a frequent guest commentator on the Fox News channel. When Dr. Hanson speaks, I listen.

On Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday, April 16, Hanson appeared live from his home in California for a three-minute Q and A on the burning of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. When a transcript of the program appeared online on Wednesday, I read his comments which were as impressive as when I first heard them.

His comments totaled 362 words. I can’t think of anyone who can fit more substance and meaning into so few words.

Victor Davis Hanson in conversation with Laura Ingraham, The Ingraham Angle, Fox News Channel, Tuesday April 16, 2019

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Hundreds marched through the streets of Paris today to ask for the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Lady. The cathedral named in her honor was heavily damaged by fire yesterday, but it is structurally sound.  French President Macron vows it will be rebuilt as donations pour in from around the world. And amid the tragedy at Notre Dame, there is a lesson to be learned.

Joining me now is Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Victor, you say there’s an irony in the history here in the aftermath of this architectural tragedy, tragedy in terms of what we’ve lost in church history. What is the irony?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, HOOVER INSTITUTION: After 800 years, we were the steward of this iconic representation of western civilization, Catholicism, Christendom. And of all the years, 2019, at the height of our sophistication and technology, I’m not blaming the French or anybody, but we were found wanting and we didn’t protect this icon. And we don’t build them anymore.

There’s great churches and cathedrals that go up all over the world, but, Laura, they are in Poland. They are in Cairo. They are in the Ivory Coast, they’re in Brazil, they’re in India. It’s almost as if the places that are less affluent without the technology of western Europe and the United States are like we used to be. They still believe in transcendence.  They still believe in something other than this world.

And so it’s going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don’t believe in what they represented. And it’s ironic, because we don’t like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don’t build cathedrals. We erace names. We say to Father Serra or Christopher Columbus, you don’t live up to our standards of race, class, and gender, moral superiority. Shame on you.

INGRAHAM: We’ll wipe you out.

HANSON: And when you have that attitude, you don’t have a reference. Yes, we are not good stewards of the inheritance that were bequeathed to us.

INGRAHAM: So Victor, in “Rolling Stone” today, this was what was written.  “Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France or the France that never was, a non-secular, white European France, but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making.” So kind of an interfaith, very large gathering house, Victor, is that what the new cathedral will be?

HANSON: Yes, the person who said that of course, they could be at Verdun and say to the German army you shall not pass, and save French democracy from the Kaiser, or they could have been in the French resistance in World War II and say we’re not going to let the Nazis take over the beauty and wonder of France. And this is the France of Madame Curie, and this is the France of the Enlightenment. So for this ignoramus to say that modern France is so much greater than its checkered past, he’s a creation of French intellectual excellence and beauty and cultural superiority in many ways.

We owe – much of the world owes a lot to France, and that was embodied with the Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s embodied in the Louvre, it’s embodied in the French Academy. And he should be really ashamed of himself, because he’s a pygmy, and he’s really sitting on the shoulders of giants whose names we have forgotten in this period of intellectual and cultural arrogance.

INGRAHAM: Victor, we talk about this a lot. We are almost out of time.  But universities spend an enormous amount of time, students’ time and energy and tuition dollars, tearing down western civilization. It wasn’t so great, the music wasn’t so great, architecture, history riddled with racism and classism and all these other things.

So all day long on colleges, we hear western civilization, bad. Then people cry when they see this spire collapse in the flames that can never be rebuilt as it was built. We don’t have the wood. We don’t have the artisans. It can be rebuilt, but it will never be what it was. But they spent all day trashing western civilization, and now people are rightly mourning it. But it’s an imbalance. Final thoughts, real quick.

HANSON: Because they feel something. They feel there is a spiritual loss, there’s a cultural loss. But they are too timid or cowardly to articulate it, because to articulate it would not be politically correct. But it’s such beauty that transcends things. They can feel it. They just don’t want to admit they feel it.

INGRAHAM: They don’t want to admit the God thing. Victor, thank you so much. Great to see you, as always.

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter’s new website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.

© by Peter Barry Chowka. With the arrest in London on April 11, 2019 of WikiLeaks co-founder and director Julian Assange, the issue of the Pentagon Papers case from almost a half century ago has been given new attention.

Assange, as most people know, had sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 rather than face trumped up accusations of rape in Sweden which he believed would have resulted in him being extradited for trial to the United States. His “crime” according to many in the U.S. is that he conspired with Bradley (a.k.a. Chelsea) Manning in 2010 to steal and publish sensitive documents relating to U.S. conduct in the Iraq War and the occupation of the country.

Without going into the details of all of that here, suffice it to say that the incarceration of Assange in London, and his possible extradition to the U.S. for trial, stands to open a Pandora’s Box of issues relating to freedom of the press and freedom, in general, vis-a-vis the public’s right to know what their government is doing in their name. The existence and machinations of players who have come to be identified as the Deep State may also come into play.

The issues and questions concerning Assange (hero or villain?), freedom of the press, etc., are complex and they are dividing both the left and the right. Many conservatives, for example, see what Assange is alleged to have done in publishing the purloined U.S. military documents as treasonous and deserving of severe punishment. Others point to WikiLeaks’ sustained release of Hillary Clinton’s top advisor John Podesta’s embarrassing emails in 2016 as having shed important light on the machinations of Clinton and the Democrats – which it is commonly believed helped to get Donald J. Trump elected president.

If WikiLeaks is seen as a journalistic entity and Assange as a journalist, how is what they and he did in bringing important information to light different than what the press did in publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971?

Following Assange’s arrest, talking heads on TV and many journalists dredged up the Pentagon Papers case (1971-1973) for comparison purposes. This piqued my interest. As a young journalist in Washington, D.C. in the early 1970s, I reported on the Pentagon Papers case. A decade later, I met and became friends with one of the two individuals who conspired to obtain, photocopy, and release the Pentagon Papers to the press – Anthony J. (Tony) Russo, Jr. His fellow conspirator – who, like Russo was indicted and went on trial for their actions – was the much better known Daniel Ellsberg.

I thought it appropriate – to help us gain a better understanding of the issues of the Pentagon Papers from Russo, one of the two most primary sources – to publish here my obituary of Tony Russo originally published online on September 1, 2008. That 5,600 word article – reproduced below – includes most of the transcript of a mid-2001 interview that I did with Russo on the 30^th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Russo, by the way, with several masters degrees from Princeton University, was an expert on evaluating issues relating to conventional medicine and its successes and failures. He was also a proponent of alternative medicine. Over the years after I met him, I frequently mined his expertise in those areas in a series of articles and interviews that I wrote.

The obit and the 2001 interview explain the context of all of this – and hopefully will shed some light on the Pentagon Papers and one of its principal protagonists – Tony Russo – in light of the media’s comparing the Pentagon Papers, and Daniel Ellsberg, mostly, to the situation going forward now involving Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

I have updated some non-working links in the article.

Originally published online September 1, 2008:

Tony Russo of the Pentagon Papers (1936-2008) 

He Spoke Truth to Power From the Military to the Medical-Industrial Complex

© By Peter Barry Chowka 

(September 1, 2008) On August 6, 2008, Anthony J. (Tony) Russo died at age 71 in Suffolk, VA. The news of his death was first reported in a feature obituary in the Los Angeles Times on August 8 and soon afterwards in features by AP, the New York Times, CNN, and most other mainstream media (see end of article for links).

Russo merited this level of attention because of his important role in leaking the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret study of the Vietnam War, to the press in 1971. His fellow co-conspirator in that action, Daniel Ellsberg, is generally given near-exclusive credit for making the Pentagon Papers public but both Ellsberg and Russo were involved in the action – in fact, both of them were indicted by the government for their actions and were tried in federal court in Los Angeles in 1972-1973.

I was introduced to Russo in Los Angeles by the late Leon Shelley in July, 1981. Shelley was a retired pioneering Canadian film producer who devoted the last several decades of his life to networking throughout North America and in the UK in the field of alternative medicine.

Like Leon, Tony Russo also was a critic of the conventional medical system. His work in that area was one of the major focuses of our interactions. Over the years, he and I shared many discussions about his critiques of modern medicine, and I had the occasion to publish several articles about and interviews with him, the first one in the summer of 1983.

I last spoke by phone with Russo in the spring of 2007, and he said he had been unwell. Nonetheless, despite his unflagging, sarcastic, and amusing critiques of the Establishment, he still projected an ever upbeat, optimistic view of the world.

Following is a revised introduction and an interview that I did with Russo seven years ago (June 2001), on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. I tried to focus on Russo’s thoughts on health and medicine, within the context, of course, of his noteworthy role in contemporary American political history – as Wikipedia’s entry for him is titled, “Anthony Russo (whistleblower).”

Tony Russo is a major, if not quite appropriately heralded, figure in the history of American politics and freedom of information. As the ultimate whistle-blower, he played a pivotal role in the copying, dissemination, and publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Papers, prepared in the late 1960s, are the U.S. Defense Department’s incendiary, multi-volume secret history of the Vietnam War. They exposed the questionable decision-making by every U.S. administration from 1945-’68 that led to the escalation of the war in the mid-1960s, the decade-long quagmire that followed, and the ignominious end to the conflict.

The publication of the first chapters of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times on June 13, 1971 resulted in the Nixon Administration obtaining a federal court order two days later that prevented further publication of the documents – the first instance of prior restraint of the U.S. press in American history. On June 30, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (6-3) that allowed the publication of the Pentagon Papers to continue uncensored. The Papers subsequently saw the light of day as a number of other U.S. newspapers joined the Times in publishing them. A whole new degree of clarity was brought to the history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Indo-China. According to national security archivists Thomas Blandon et al, “The epic legal battle that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to lift the prior restraints [is] arguably the most important Supreme Court case ever on freedom of the press.”

For his part in leaking the Papers, Russo was indicted with his co-conspirator Daniel J. Ellsberg, who served in Vietnam as an official with the Defense Department and the State Department. (During the past three decades, Ellsberg has worked hard to achieve a prominent public profile and he is usually given undeserved exclusive credit for leaking the Papers. In a May 31, 2001 review of Tom Wells’ biography of Ellsberg Wild Man at amazon.com, Russo writes, “the Ellsberg personality is so inflated it needs to be brought to earth.”)

The federal government charged Russo and Ellsberg with thirteen counts of espionage, theft, and conspiracy for leaking the Papers. The resulting 89-day trial in 1972-‘73 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, U.S. vs. Russo and Ellsberg, exposed the Nixon Administration’s illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg and actions by the Plumbers unit – an extra-legal covert operations spy team with links to the CIA and the FBI, organized at the highest levels of the Executive branch in the wake of the Papers’ publication.

The trial revealed that the Plumbers, among other things, had violated the constitutional rights of Ellsberg by breaking into his Beverly Hills psychiatrist’s office on September 3, 1971 and rifling confidential files in search of damaging information about Ellsberg. The same group of Plumbers was responsible for the infamous Watergate break-in in June 1972.

After the Plumbers’ actions were exposed and other prosecutorial irregularities came to light, the trial came to a halt on May 11, 1973 and all charges against Russo and Ellsberg were dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. In declaring a mistrial and granting the defense motion for dismissal, Byrne said the government’s actions “offended a sense of justice.” He added, “The conduct of the Government has placed the case in such a posture that it precludes the fair, dispassionate resolution of these issues by a jury.” Byrne ruled that the government’s conduct was so egregious that the defendants could not be retried. (According to The New York Times, May 12, 1973, “a quick poll [of the jury] this evening showed that at least half of them would have voted to acquit the defendants.”) The trial’s unsavory revelations ensured that the road to Nixon’s downfall and resignation (in August 1974) was set.

The leaking of the Pentagon Papers was a monumentally defiant act on behalf of freedom of information and an event of lasting influence, not only in terms of the unraveling of the hidden history of the Vietnam War and the power of the Pentagon but of central authority systems in general. As it might be said today, the Papers, photocopied by Ellsberg and Russo one page at a time in the middle of the night on a Xerox machine in a small shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles that Russo had access to, “spoke truth to power.” Along with the protracted exposure of the Watergate scandal, the Pentagon Papers ushered in a more critical, questioning role on the part of the mainstream media and heightened the skepticism of the American public towards central authority.

Interestingly, Tony Russo, trained as a scientist, had an ongoing interest and worked periodically in the field of medicine. I first met and interviewed him twenty years ago when he worked for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on issues relating to alcoholism and health.

In June 2001, the thirtieth anniversary of the Pentagon Papers was widely covered in the media and served as the occasion for a number of leading editors and newspaper executives to participate in commemorative panels, congratulating each other for their roles in helping to ensure publication of the Papers. I had the opportunity to speak with Russo at length on June 14, 2001, thirty years and one day after their publication began on the front page of Sunday editions of The New York Times. We followed up our conversation with several e-mail questions and answers. As before when we have had a chance to talk, I was especially interested in how Russo’s work helped to shed light on complex medical issues that typically manage to avoid the proving light of day.

Tony Russo had two advanced degrees from Princeton University (Master of Science in Engineering and Master of Public Affairs), both awarded in 1964. In the mid-1960s he worked for the Rand Corporation, the quasi-government think tank, and spent a total of two years in South Vietnam at the height of the massive U.S. troop buildup. While in Vietnam, one of his main tasks was to prepare a report on attitudes of the Communist Viet Cong (a.k.a. National Liberation Front or NLF), based on extensive field interviews that he conducted with NLF prisoners and refugees. Significantly, during the same period (1967), Russo also wrote a seminal report, “A Statistical Analysis of the U.S. Chemical Crop Spraying Program in South Vietnam,” which explored the mix of chemical defoliants that, as he describes it today, were used against the Vietnamese people’s food supply.

I began our conversation by asking Russo about that 1967 report.

Peter Barry Chowka: So it can be said that the thirty-plus-year-long attention to issues like the health and environmental effects of Agent Orange and so forth essentially began with your report on chemical crop spraying back in 1966-‘67.

Tony Russo: That was the first one [report] I knew of that really questioned it. There were actually two Rand reports of the period that questioned the crop spray program: mine and the one by Frank Denton and Russell Betts. We worked as a team; Joan Roberts was also part of the team. We split up the work among us. My name alone went on one report, “A Statistical Analysis of the U.S. Crop Spraying Program in Vietnam.” The other report [“An Evaluation of Chemical Crop Destruction in Vietnam”] carried the names of Betts and Denton. Roberts got no credit because she was a research assistant. Their study was an analysis of interviews with refugees concerning the observed effects of the spray. My study was an econometric analysis of the variation in the size of combatant rice rations across the geography of the country. I ended with a recommendation that the chemical spray program be discontinued because it affected the whole economy which included civilians. It was clear from the [field] interviews that the peasants supported the “liberation gentlemen” [Viet Cong] and that the latter did not grow their own rice off in the hills somewhere. Victor Yannacone, the Agent Orange lawyer and the “granddaddy” of environmental lawyers, said the latter distinction was an important one.

I think that there were probably others at the time who were cautioning against use of the spray because of the toxicity. Betts and Denton found toxicity ratings for 2,4D in library books on toxicity that indicated spray in the concentrations used [in Vietnam] could kill an infant. Frank Denton was the spark plug behind our efforts. The research design of my econometric model was forged in dialog with Frank, the person at Rand from whom I learned the most about research.

PBC: What has been the long-term legacy of the chemical spraying?

TR: It has been horrendous as I have read about and seen on subsequent visits to Vietnam, one in 1980 and one in 1986. The land has been poisoned to a great degree as dioxin [one component of the spraying] has a long half-life in the soil. Fruit such as bananas grown in that soil is grotesquely misshapen. Birth defects are a result, birth defects that are passed to succeeding generations. At the hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, I saw a display of greatly misshapen fetuses preserved in jars in large number.

Professor Ed Cooperman had a large UN grant in 1984 for the purpose of doing extensive soil sampling in Vietnam in order to develop a contour map for the entire country but he was assassinated before he could carry out the project. I had worked very closely with him but the people who succeeded him gave me the cold shoulder. One of the highlights of my career was the month long trip to Vietnam in 1980 in which I worked closely with [the late] Dr. Ton That Tung in analyzing his data on birth defects and exposure to dioxin. I was fortunate in being able to make a contribution. Dioxin is still a problem in Vietnam as it is here in the U.S. The person leading scientific efforts today is Dr. [Arnold] Schecter from New York [editor of Dioxins and Health].

PBC: What kind of impact did the publication of the Pentagon Papers and all of the aftermath, and its long-standing legacy since 1971, have? Did its influence spread to opening up a new perspective on other Establishments, including for example the medical Establishment?

TR: I would say that the most important thing was the fact that truth – truth itself and the free flow of information – was an issue during that time, during what I call the Pentagon Papers action which was the publication of the Papers and the subsequent [United States vs. Anthony Joseph Russo & Daniel Ellsberg] trial. If you look at the publication alone, the most important thing was that it resulted in a trial. And that trial itself resulted from my having gone to jail in the summer of 1971, a non-cooperation civil disobedience strategy because I would not testify against Ellsberg before a grand jury.

PBC: Which was a different strategy than your co-defendant advocated?

TR: Right. First of all, it was a time when I was advocating solidarity with the Vietnamese and saying that the so-called enemy was not really the enemy – that we could be friends with them and we could negotiate peace with them – that they were the legitimate party. Now, at that very same time, [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger was in Paris trying to lie his way out of Paris. And mind you, Kissinger was Dan Ellsberg’s boss. So whenever I would talk to the press about the legitimacy of the independence movement, Ellsberg would go up the wall because he was bargaining tacitly with Kissinger for his freedom. You gotta understand that those guys [Ellsberg, Kissinger] all come from Harvard where the sacred doctrine is tacit bargaining and negotiating and game theory. What it amounts to is a kind of communication that is very similar to the behavior of criminals on the street, for example, prostitutes and dope peddlers. A dope peddler doesn’t walk up to you and say, “I have here some heroin and I have a price I could give it to you for” [laughs]. Instead, you know, he goes through a lot of winks and nods –

PBC: He’s got a shtick.

TR: Yeah. And it’s the kind that’s ambiguous. My contribution [to the Pentagon Papers] was advising [Ellsberg] to do it [release them to the press], organizing the photocopying, the grand jury struggle – it’s all complicated but you can look at it and say that’s [my actions are] what caused the trial [U.S. vs. Russo & Ellsberg]. I had two choices: I could have testified against Ellsberg and the U.S. would have gone to trial against him with the simple two-count indictment and they would have got him, especially with my testimony. So I could have testified, or not. And I did not. Without testifying, I went to jail for 47 days for contempt – a non-cooperation strategy that resulted in the second indictment, the trial. . .and our ultimately winning the case.

PBC: As you know, my work over the years has focused a lot on attempting to bring clarity to the medical business. In the 1970s, I started calling it the “medical-industrial complex” because it reminded me, in many respects, of the military-industrial complex. And in the same decade you were responsible for the Pentagon Papers action that struck at the heart of the secrecy and the foibles of the military-industrial complex. A lot of your focus over the years has involved examining medicine with a statistically-based approach and exposing some fallacies there, too. Do you agree that there are similarities between these two huge Establishments? Are there similar modi operandi in the way the medical business conducts itself and what you saw in the heart of the military, the Pentagon?

TR: There’s a great deal of similarity. In fact, you find that many people who retire from the military defense department area or intelligence area – many of them go into the health field.

PBC: High level management.

TR: Right. For example, Alain Enthoven of Stanford.

PBC: [Laughs] I’ve mentioned him in more than a few articles. He has been involved in high level national health care planning and contributed to the Clinton health care reform task force in 1993-’94. He was one of Robert McNamara’s [U.S. Secretary of Defense 1961-1968 and Vietnam War architect] “whiz kids.”

TR: Yes. The two systems have a lot of the same people. Retired military people, government intelligence people, et al go into the health industry when they retire or get “blown out” like me. Methodologies, policies, and practices used in large systems that often depend upon science and technology are interchangeable. The econometrics methodology I utilized in Vietnam to analyze the relationships between rice rations and rice production was the same that I used in Los Angeles County years later to analyze the relationship between liquor store concentration and alcohol problems.

PBC: You feel that the trial of yourself and Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers was more significant than it has been given credit for.

TR: The cat came out of the bag there. The main crimes of Nixon were exposed there [at the trial]. The trial was the most important factor in his downfall, more so than Watergate, which itself had been stimulated by the organizing of the Pentagon Papers investigators.

PBC: A.K.A. the Plumbers.

TR: Right – which is a real deleterious euphemism. When you call them “Pentagon Papers investigators,” it puts a new cast on everything. And it has parallels with not only medicine.

You see, I have gone forward with looking at disease as a system and have had a lot of success in treating it that way and have developed a new theory of disease which I call “systems epidemiology.” It takes the whole thing from the host, catalyst, and environment past the latest developments in epidemiology, which they call modern epidemiology, that includes the health care system. Well, I take it to the economy where you have classic epidemiology, developed into modern epidemiology, expanded to systems epidemiology, where you include the economy. And I use examples from work that has been done like [sociologist M. Harvey] Brenner‘s work at Johns Hopkins way back during the time of the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation [mid-1970s]. But it all goes to show that you can make connections between, say, unemployment and social stress as measured by the complex of the whole morbidity-mortality complex. And when it gets down to it, it’s also got a psycho-pathological analogy to it because war, lying, violence – don’t even call it “war” because people get mixed up behind that term, call it “violence” – violence, deception, lying, that all certainly has a psychological-psychiatric analog.

What you have is a lot of psychopathology in the medical authority.

PBC: I think you also have a lot of mythomania and monomania there, too.

TR: You do, you do. You have a situation where people have such a self-inflated view of themselves – that’s why opinion is given such stress. The word “opinion” [feigns a medical doctor’s voice]: “Well, I’m the most divine, and I’m really God, and so my opinion is extremely important!”

PBC: The medical powers-that-be tend to attribute all of the effects they see to their causes. Like “The one percent decline in the cancer death rate in the 1990s is directly accountable to our actions Therefore, we’re winning the war on cancer because of the drugs and the treatments.” When the reality is that they lie about and manipulate the statistics to begin with. An equally good argument could be made that their treatments are killing more people than they are helping.

TR: Yeah. I read the book by Walene James (Immunization: The Reality Behind the Myth) . She attacks vaccination and gets off into the problems with the Pasteur theory of disease –

PBC: As opposed to Antoine Béchamp [1816-1908]. The vaccination issue is getting more critical scrutiny among the mainstream and the media now. So you still follow developments in medicine?

TR: I do. I frequently see Bill Grant [Ph.D.] and Phil Murray [M.D.]. Phil is 80 years old now but he’s going strong. He’s quite a remarkable guy – an M.D., a dermatologist. He retired at 65 and after retiring he started reading alternative stuff and his daughter – I think she got a Ph.D. in nutrition – had a great deal of influence on him. When you ask him to recommend a doctor, he says he doesn’t know a good doctor [laughs]. He says that the naturopath, the N.D., will replace the M.D. in the 21st century. He’s quite a progressive guy. I see him about once every three or four days. Phil always has new photocopied material that he gives us, a group of four or five of us. He takes something like 25 newsletters, you know, expensive newsletters that doctors put out. He has turned us onto some really important people like [Robert] Cathcart, [M.D.] and vitamin C. Phil travels a lot, he goes to conferences. We bugged him for a long time – finally he got a computer and he’s getting online now. The poor guy – at 80 years old to adjust to something like that takes a lot of get up and go.

PBC: In layman’s language, what has your work shown about how medicine is practiced in this country and ultimately how successful it is? Have we been sold a bill of goods about how well we’e supposedly doing health-wise in the U.S.? Are we asking the right questions about medical care?

TR: My work has been in the area of epidemiology and program evaluation. There is far too little emphasis on epidemiology, nor is there enough emphasis on scientific program evaluation. When we do epidemiology in a comprehensive way, we ask, What about the public’s health? Do we know enough about the overall disease system to try to maximize health? Unfortunately, the decision makers, the policy makers, don’t ask these questions. They are more concerned about turf and profits. I found that research in epidemiology was not encouraged because findings might lead to political demands by the community. Medical research on the human organism on the other hand might lead to expensive new treatments from which high profits can be made. The public is not being represented but, rather, exploited. Research is not being done that could save many lives. Overall, we need to set up a research organization that would examine every link between disease, health care, the environment, and the economy. Every community should have a committee on public health that would ask the series of detailed questions that follow from the overall question, What about the public’s health? Health of communities should be monitored and the information should be available to the public.

PBC: Our country spends $1.5 trillion on medicine [note: In 2017 that figure had ballooned to almost $4 trillion]. It seems to me that centralizing or nationalizing it further will not get to the roots of the problem – including lack of primary prevention, under-utilization of cost-effective natural treatments, lack of medical freedom of choice and autonomy, people not taking personal responsibility for their lifestyle and treatment choices, etc.

TR: We need local committees of public health, as I said earlier. There should be a health section in the newspaper, or a Web site accessible to the public, that will carry the same data that the health planner sees. Data on diseases, care delivery, and care accessibility can be shown to the public in as detailed a fashion as desired. We see great detail in the sports page; why don’t we see an epidemiology page? Aren’t women, for example, interested in the patterns of breast cancer in their community at all levels, i.e., local, state, national, and global? And for men, aren’t they interested as well in prostate cancer? In both cases aren’t they in need of help when they are victims of denial? Information in as detailed a fashion as desired is the key, along with organizing the public and the public finding its voice.

We have definitely been sold a bill of goods about health. We are given slick advertising and commercials for expensive new drugs. We are in the hands of the pharmaceutical mega-corporations who are sapping our strength. In truth, disaster lurks around every corner because we do not ask the appropriate questions. We need to form committees of public health and encourage the appropriate kinds of research. We can begin by posing the right kinds of questions to our local health departments. For instance, Where in our community are health indicators the worst? Where, for example, is the worst census tract? Where is health the best? What are the indicators for all of the census tracts in our community? What are the socio-economic correlates of those health indicators? What are the industrial correlates of those indicators? What measures of pollution do we have for the census tracts? Where data are missing, what are we doing to fill that gap? If there are no data, we are playing Russian roulette with the lives of those people in our community. When are we going to make these issues the subject of public dialog?

To get back to what we were talking about earlier, Peter – the authoritarian personality. In medicine, you find the authoritarian personality in spades – in fact, you know, they even have a term for it, which is related to it: the physician ego problem. Now, you have that authoritarian personality and the system is very authoritarian. That’s very much like the Pentagon. Underlying that whole thing for me, when I look at the Pentagon Papers and the political problem of intervening in Third World countries and the American war in Vietnam, I just draw back to the scientific method. And I look at a definition I have which I got from the econometrics literature – a definition of the scientific method which has three steps: identify the system; measure the parameters of the system; and diagnose your measurements. That’s the cycle of the scientific method. Actually, preferably, when you attack a problem, you go through a whole bunch of those cycles. When you diagnose your measurements, you inevitably find error and that defines your next approach to the system and its measurement. I look at the Pentagon Papers as measuring the system. Step one would be kind of a philosophical problem or political-philosophical problem of your ideas about authority and leadership. And then you go out and measure it. Now we certainly had some ideas about leadership. And going out and getting the Pentagon Papers is a measure of that. Or, the Pentagon Papers study is a measure. And to make that public, to draw back the curtain, is to let the population in on it and of course that is what democracy is supposed to be about.

PBC: We need a Pentagon Papers for the medical business, too – including for the National Institutes of Health.

TR: There is certainly no excuse for secrecy in the medical field, in the health field. Yet we are plagued by it because the major players, the drug companies, they’re awash in secrecy.

PBC: It’s also really galling to me that when you see reporting on medical and health issues, the vast majority of the time, the mainstream media have no distance between themselves and the people they’re reporting on or the story. There’s a mentality of “We’re all in this fight together. Therefore, we can’t question the objectives or the means.” And this plays itself out every day: If there’s a program or a story on AIDS, or on cancer, for example, Ted Koppel or whomever will uncritically interview the head of the American Cancer Society, or Anthony Fauci, the head of AIDS for the government, or somebody else with a direct vested interest in the outcome of everything they’re doing. But that conflict of interest is never brought out in the media appraisal. There’s no other field in which, when it’s reported on, there’s this kind of complete whitewashing or suspension of critical overview – an inability to even begin probing. Rather, the media cheer lead, they wind up doing the PR for the area they’re supposedly reporting on.

TR: It’s amazing how we think we’ve got democracy but we’ve got nothing but a plutocracy and everything is manipulated.

We’ve stopped thinking and instead we take cues. It’s the authoritarian society. People look for the authority and they say, “That’s who I’ll take my cues from. I’m comfortable with that.” And people take the cues. Then a lot of logical fallacy follows. It’s [supposed to be] like, A is related to B and B is related to C, therefore A and C are related. But that’s a logical fallacy. They’re not necessarily related at all.

PBC: And it works that way at both the highest levels and the lowest levels, right in one’s community.

TR: That’s right. Still, the public has now taken the lead over health professionals – a very telling and extraordinary fact – in leading us to more consideration of “alternative” medicine. Let’s hope this momentum will continue to the public becoming more involved and knowledgeable in the manner I have discussed. The problem is, Where do we find the resources for education about prevention, treatment, and lifestyle considerations? Our airwaves and other resources are usurped by drug companies and mega-corporations to exploit our needs and fears in an obviously unfair way. What it all gets down to is that we need a political movement that meets its potential and gets people to vote. And vote for what? A health empowerment program that goes to the truth about our health status and our best potential health status.

PBC: You quoted your friend Phil Murray, M.D. saying he doesn’t know a good doctor and that the doctor of the future will be an N.D. What kind of role should so-called alternative medicine play in people’s health care? What kind of medical future would you like to see?

TR: The public should have access to the full range of therapies. The full range of therapies should be evaluated utilizing a temporal approach: look at the subject’s change over time. It requires data on client characteristics, treatment, and outcomes. Double blind studies are not absolutely necessary and are too expensive! Data gathered in the course of routine practice are valuable and can be the basis of scientific conclusions.

I want to see a medical future in which the momentum now evident in the client-led move to alternative therapies continues in the direction I discussed earlier: committees for public health at the local level that pose questions to all levels – local, national, and global. A comprehensive epidemiology is central to this concept: emphasis on all the linkages between disease, treatment and evaluation, care delivery, and relevant aspects of politics and the economy.

For more information,

Daniel Ellsberg’s August 7, 2008 statement on Tony Russo’s life and death

Anthony J. Russo, 71, Pentagon Papers Figure, Dies
New York Times August 8, 2008

Anthony J. Russo, 71; Rand staffer helped leak Pentagon Papers
Los Angeles Times August 8, 2008

Pentagon Papers figure dies
Washington Post August 8, 2008

Tony Russo (archived site)

“Lying About Vietnam”
Daniel Ellsberg
New York Times Op-Ed June 29, 2001

Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg
Biography by Tom Wells

Agency of Fear – Opiates and Political Power in America
By Edward Jay Epstein
Chapter 25 – The Secret of Room 16
About the Plumbers

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter’s new website is http://peter.media.  Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka