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International

Why You Shouldn’t Fret Much Over Russian Election Interference

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9 minute read

From The Rattler

By J.D. Tuccille

Governments are always screwing with other countries politics. It’s often ineffective.

If you missed the news, Russians are interfering in American politics again. If you missed history, Russians are always interfering in other countries’ politics—and so is everybody else, including the U.S. Screwing around with foreign elections is a popular sport for the world’s regimes, though it’s not clear that websites, bogus social media accounts, and funds funneled to a political-commentary network will return more bang for Putin’s rubles than did past social media shenanigans.

Russia, Again

“The Justice Department today announced the ongoing seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as ‘Doppelganger,’ in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws,” according to a September 4 government press release. “In conjunction with the domain seizures, the U.S. Treasury Department announced the designation of 10 individuals and two entities as part of a coordinated response to Russia’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.”

The indictment specified “the defendants, have deployed nearly $10 million, laundered through a network of foreign shell entities, to covertly fund and direct U.S. Company-I [which] publishes English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube.”

“Many of the videos published by U.S. Company-I contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy,” adds the indictment. “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

Based on details in the indictment, Company-1 has been identified as Tenet Media (since shuttered), which managed a stable of right-wing pundits including Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson. The company promoted, the indictment says, “nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.”

Very nefarious, right? Well, maybe not. While Tenet founder Lauren Chen has gone quiet and lost her gig with Blaze TV and channels on YouTube, Tenet’s contributors seem baffled by the whole thing.

“The Culture War Podcast was licensed by Tenet Media, it existed well before any license agreement with Tenet and it will continue to exist after any such agreement expires,” insists Tim Pool. “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show.”

Benny Johnson also says, “I am the only person who ever had editorial control of my program.”

Translated Russian documents outlining a “guerilla media campaign in the United States” caution their intended audience that “in the United States there are no pro-Russian and/or pro-Putin mainstream politicians or sufficiently large numbers of influencers and voters. There is no point of justifying Russia and no one to justify it to.” The campaign was meant to exploit “the high level of polarization of American society” by paying commentators to say things they were already saying.

It’s not clear they got a lot of mileage from that program.

Not a Lot of Bang for the Ruble

“Numbers like those might sound impressive,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote of the Tenet pundits drawing 16 million YouTube views after receiving $10 million. “But my Twitter analytics informs me that over the past year, my posts garnered 463 million views. So Russia’s dastardly scheme reached a small fraction of the people my dumbass posts do.”

That’s typical for foreign meddling in our already messy domestic politics.

“It would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior,” concluded a 2023 analysis of Russian interference in the 2016 election published in the journal Nature Communications. The authors added, “we did not detect any meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior.”

In 2020, foreign influencers worked against each other, including supposed allies in the latest Axis of Evil. A 2021 report from the government’s National Intelligence Council, which reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), found “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party” while “Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects.” Also meddling were forces including “Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela.”

This sort of sounds like a cost-effective means of funding U.S. elections—just let foreign intelligence operations pay for them. But the ODNI report cautioned these schemes “undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US.” Which means getting us upset and pointing fingers about foreign interference is a goal of these schemes.

The same can almost certainly be said when U.S. agencies join the fun.

Election Interference Is a Game the U.S. Also Plays

“I was alarmed in 2016 by how policymakers and commentators frequently described Russian interference in our election as unprecedented,” according to the Wilson Center’s David Shimer, who wrote Rigged (2020) on the topic. “Many former CIA officers told me in interviews that they viewed the ’48 operation in Italy as the agency at its best. And in the aftermath of that operation, as the CIA’s chief internal historian put it to me, the agency and the KGB went toe to toe in elections all over the world.”

The National Endowment for Democracy, founded by Congress in 1983, is “dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organizations.” It does so through “grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad.” I find the NED and its goals less troublesome than those of Russians funding U.S. political pundits, but I bet lots of people elsewhere disagree. Fundamentally, it’s all part of the same international contest to screw with the internal debates of allies and adversaries alike.

So, take reports of Russian interference in American elections with a grain of salt, knowing that Putin is paying Americans to say what they already believe, and the U.S. does the same in other countries. Importantly, none of that interference prevents you from making your own decisions.

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Great Reset

Are climate-obsessed elites losing their grip over global politics?

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By James Corbett

Bill Gates appears to be spearheading a new push towards a Malthusian ‘One Health’ agenda instead of global temperature concerns amid a sudden shift in the climate change narrative.

Guess what, folks? The climate emergency has been cancelled!

That’s right, as my listeners will know by now, no less a personage than famed climate crusader Dr. [sic] Bill Gates is now admitting that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise“ after all.

As my loyal listeners will also know by now, Gates has his reasons for backtracking on his decades of climate scare-mongering. (SPOILER: it’s not because he’s suddenly realized that the climate scare is a hoax!)

READ: Bill Gates switches stance on climate change, says it won’t bring ‘humanity’s demise’

Unsurprisingly, this very public about-face has caused much hand-wringing in the clique of climate fearmongers. Take Michael Mann – yes, that Michael Mann. He has already penned a lengthy screed to excoriate Bill for raining on the climate doomporn parade.

As for old Billy boy himself, he wants everyone to know that they’re getting him all wrongManBearPig is still super cereal, guys! In fact, Bill’s spending on the climate crusade is actually increasing!

But whether Gates’ backpedaling enables him to win him back his climate-fearing friends or not, perhaps the most important part of his new climate message was the timing of its release. You see, “Three tough truths about climate” – the blog announcing his changing views on the climate emergency – was subtitled “What I want everyone at COP30 to know,” and it was released on the eve of COP30, the U.N.’s annual global climate summit.

So, what does this (anthropogenic) tempest in a teapot tell us about the future of the climate scam? Let’s find out.

COP30

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a party going on in Brazil right now!

No, the party that’s currently underway is #COP30, aka the “Conference of the Parties,” or the annual global climate change conference put on by the U.N. If you want the real skinny on what the COP is and the role it plays in the nascent global governmental power structure, you need to read my editorial from last November, “THIS is How Global Government is Run (and What’s Coming Next…)

Long story short: the “Conference of the Parties” is the annual meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Established in Article 7 of the UNFCCC as “the supreme body” of the convention, it is tasked with “[p]eriodically examin[ing] the obligations of the Parties” to the treaty. It also assesses those parties’ climate change mitigation measures and policies and, of course, “mobilize[s] financial resources” to help line the pockets of U.N. kleptocrats … uhhh, I mean, to appease the angry weather gods.

As I pointed out in my editorial last year, since no one ever reads the fine print of bureaucratic documents, the climate technocrats were able to embed all sorts of goodies right there in the rules of procedure for the UNFCCC COP, such as Rule 30:

Meetings of the Conference of the Parties shall be held in public, unless the Conference of the Parties decides otherwise.

And Rule 32:

No one may speak at a meeting of the Conference of the Parties without having previously obtained the permission of the President.

And Rule 42:

Decisions on matters of substance shall be taken by consensus, except that decisions on financial matters shall be taken by a two-thirds majority vote.

READ: Pope Leo’s Vatican quadruples down on support for the green agenda

Just a decade or two ago, when the vast majority of the public still believed that the climate hoax was “settled science” and that scientists would never lie or twist the truth for a political agenda (oh, how naive!), the annual COP was a truly nerve-wracking affair. Each year, this globalist shindig threatened to put another nail in the coffin of national (let alone individual) sovereignty, and brought the world another step closer to a U.N.-led global government.

In fact, the COPpers admitted as much in their own words. For instance, do you recall that, on the eve of the COP15 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, EU President (and Bilderberg lackey) Herman von Rompuy declared 2009 to be “the first year of global governance” and insisted that the COP in Copenhagen “is another step towards the global management of our planet”?

Back then, when the climate change religion was in the ascendant, it seemed that nothing could derail the globalists and their quest to create a global government on the back of the fake “climate emergency.”

But, interestingly, the cultural tide has shifted in recent years and COP30 is already looking set to be a flop for the climate confabulists.

FLOP30

It’s not just Bill Gates who is spoiling the COP30 party. The U.S. government has already decided it’s not going to send any high-level representatives to this year’s climate hoax conclave.

Even the climate conspirators – perhaps reading the direction the political wind is blowing – have shown themselves reticent to play the game anymore. As of last month, only 64 of the UNFCCC’s 198 parties had even submitted their national plans for cutting greenhouse emissions – plans that are required of each party to the 2015 Paris Agreement. And, according to the climate doom-mongers and corporate fake news repeaters masquerading as “journalists” at The Guardian, those plans that have been submitted “fall drastically short of what is needed to stave off the worst effects of climate breakdown.”

Of course, all of this is made-up nonsense. The COPpers may as well be fretting about how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin or precisely how many unicorn farts are needed to power their trillion-dollar green energy swindle. As Corbett Reporteers know by now, there are dozens of questions that need to be asked (and answered) before we can come to a determination of what “average global temperature“ even means. And that’s not to mention the question of the validity of the temperature records from which such assessments are being made or the reliability of the models that are being used to extrapolate from that dodgy data.

New reports coming out weekly are shining more and more light on how the climate emergency hoax has been perpetrated. This week’s inconvenient truth for the climate fraudsters? A new study demonstrating that reduction in air pollution actually exacerbates global warming.

READ: The real reason why the West is not having children (it’s not just cost of living)

You might expect the fraudsters would be ashamed to continue to lie so brazenly to the public … but if you do expect these power-hungry pathocrats to feel shame over their actions, then you clearly haven’t watched Dissent Into Madness yet. Instead of being remorseful, the psychopathic swindlers are doubling down on their scam, flying to Brazil to put on yet another farce in the name of “saving the earth.”

The first order of analysis – and, sadly, the point at which many critics of the UNFCCC and its “Conference of the Parties” tend to stop – is to simply point out the hypocrisy of the summit’s attendees.

The VIPs fly in on private jets and relax at $1,000/night resorts while they lecture us peons about reducing our comparatively miniscule carbon footprint.

To prepare for the earth-saving event, the Brazilian government felled tens of thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest and destroyed a vital ecosystem so it could build a new highway from the local airport to the summit venue.

In fact, such is the level of hypocrisy on display at these annual soirees that even climate activists have taken to calling it out.

But this isn’t about “hypocrisy,” really. To rephrase something I wrote about Matt Hancock – the Covidiot authoritarian who imposed lockdowns on the U.K. while breaking his own rules to conduct a secret affair – the people who are hectoring and lecturing the public to reduce their carbon footprints aren’t motivated to expand their own footprints out of a cheeky “rules for thee, not for me” mentality. No, they’re doing it because they know the whole “climate emergency” narrative is BS.

In truth, this isn’t about science. It never was. That’s why pesky facts that go against the Angry Weather God religion have been ignored and memory-holed.

Fortunately, more of the public than ever is finally aware that “the science” is not settled. They are waking up to the fact that they’ve been had for the last 40 years by a bunch of Chicken Littles who are not interested in saving the earth but in scaring people into giving over their power to global technocrats.

Hence Bill Gates making his narrative adjustment. Suddenly it’s not about temperature. Now it’s about health! You like health, right?

Given that COP30 is about to belly flop and no one is expecting anything of importance to come out of it, we may be tempted to simply take the win, declare the climate hoax over, and move on to the next news story of the week.

But perhaps we should take a closer look at what’s really happening here before we climate realists throw a party of our own.

STOP30

The first thing to note is that reports of the climate scam’s death may be entirely premature. For those poor, deluded souls who still believe that the new BRICS multipolar world order is going to save us from the dastardly Western technocrats, you might want to read up on how the BRICS are now introducing “multipolar” carbon markets in the name of keeping the 2030 agenda on track.

But what do we make, then, of prominent climate technocrats like Bill Gates seemingly changing narrative tack on the climate doomsday scenario?

Yes, Gates is flipping the Angry Weather God script. He realizes that the public is no longer buying the absurd theory that CO₂ is some magical thermostat with which we can dial the “global average temperature” up and down as desired. Thus, he suddenly wants us to know that temperature isn’t the best way of measuring the impact of climate change. Now, he wants us to concentrate on a different metric: improving lives.

READ: UN to launch ‘disinformation’ taskforce to silence critics of globalist Agenda 2030

This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.

And you know what? If Gates were to stop there, he’d actually be right (more or less). Regardless of the tenths of a degree (tenths of a degree, I tell you!) of “global average temperature” change that may (or may not) have taken place in the post-industrial era, the real point is to enhance the quality of people’s lives in a warming (or cooling) world. To this we might add that the quality of the environment and the well-being of animal life is another relevant factor, but otherwise, this is a much more sensible approach than that of the climate apocalypticists, who insist we must end industrial civilization and eat bugs (or Impossible Burgers) and live in locked-down 15-minute cities to prevent some long-predicted but never-arriving temperature rise.

Of course, as I discussed in my recent appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show, Gates has his own motivations – financial and otherwise – for this change of heart.

As it turns out, Gates is not interested in genuine human well-being. He’s interested in demolishing any roadblocks to the erection of power-hungry AI data centers, and he’s also interested in continuing the climate agenda under another guise: One Health.

You see, the climate agenda was never actually about temperatures or greenhouse gases or preventing a climate emergency. That was just the codswallop that was forced down the public’s throat to create a cadre of true believers (a.k.a. useful idiots) who would be willing to push the real agenda.

The real agenda was always about control. It was about the ability to confine people to their designated eco-ghettos while the real rulers of the planet jet about overhead, monopolizing the earth’s natural resources. It was about imprisoning us neo-feudal peasants in our climate hovels to eke out a subsistence living from the carbon rations doled out to us under the new global government’s Universal Basic Enslavement program.

That’s the vision that the climate technocrats (and their poor, deluded true believers) have been working toward.

So, even if Gates is swapping in a new metric for measuring progress toward that technocratic goal, he isn’t changing the goal itself. Now, he (and no doubt some of his globalist compatriots) will start focusing on the next iteration of this scam: the Malthusian, anti-human “One Health” agenda.

In short: Yes, COP30 is turning into FLOP30. The global government will not be announced in the freshly cleared Amazonian rainforest. In fact, few will pay any attention to anything that comes out of this year’s climate confab.

But that does not mean that the fight against the globalist technocrats is over. On the contrary, we’re just entering into a new stage of that conflict.

READ: Pope Leo XIV warns ‘world is burning’ from ‘global warming’ at first ‘Care of Creation’ Mass

Remember: this isn’t about “equilibrium climate sensitivity” or the inaccuracy of climate models or the non-existence of weather stations. It’s about the attempt to create a one world government. And if the global warming fairytale isn’t working for the technocrats anymore, they’ll just tell us a new fairytale until we stop listening to them altogether.

This is not the time to pat ourselves on the back. We can’t rest on our laurels yet. Rather, now we must redouble our efforts to warn people about this new scam and inform them that it is (at base) the same as the old scam.

Reprinted with permission from The Corbett Report.

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Health

NEW STUDY: Infant Vaccine “Intensity” Strongly Predicts Autism Rates Worldwide

Published on

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH's avatar Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Across countries on three continents, a 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.

new cross-national study from Italy’s National Research Council, spanning multiple developed countries across three continents, has identified a remarkably strong association between early-life vaccine intensity and autism prevalence. The number of vaccine types and doses administered before 12 months showed exceptionally high correlations with national autism rates.

A 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.

The correlation is enormous — r = 0.87 for vaccine types and r = 0.79 for vaccine doses. In regression models, vaccine intensity alone explained 81% of the variance in autism prevalence across nations.

This is not an isolated signal. It directly corroborates earlier U.S. state-level data from DeLong (2011) — and aligns with the 107 positive-association studies catalogued in the McCullough Foundation’s Landmark Autism Report.


Key Findings

Coccia used cross-national 2021 autism incidence data paired with WHO-reported infant vaccine schedules. Countries were grouped into relatively comparable healthcare and surveillance systems (North America, Europe, and advanced Asian nations) to reduce detection and reporting bias. The primary exposures were:

  • number of vaccine types given ≤12 months, and
  • total number of doses delivered ≤12 months.

Autism prevalence per 100,000 children served as the outcome, and general vaccination coverage rates were statistically controlled so only vaccine intensity and timing were isolated.

The results were striking but unfortunately expected:

 

  • Countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore give ~15 vaccine types and 20 doses before age one — and have the highest autism prevalence (~1,273 per 100k).
  • Countries like Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and the UK give ~8 vaccine types and 9 doses — and have significantly lower autism rates (~834 per 100k).
  • 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.
  • The regression model (log–log) explained 81% of the variance.

 

Coccia then used quadrant mapping to classify nations:

  • Critical Risk Zone: high vaccine intensity + high autism (U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore)
  • Protection Zone: low vaccine intensity + low autism (Nordic countries)
  • Transitional Zone: countries on track to move upward as vaccine intensity rises (Italy, UK)

The conclusion is clear: Early-timed and compound vaccination strongly tracks with rising autism rates.


How DeLong (2011) Fits In

DeLong’s analysis of CDC data found that each 1% rise in U.S. childhood vaccination coverage was associated with ~680 additional cases of autism and speech/language impairment nationwide.

Where DeLong examined state-level associations between how many children were fully vaccinated and subsequent autism/SLI prevalence, Coccia provides the first true cross-national dose–response analysis — showing that the number of vaccine types and doses given before age one powerfully predicts national autism prevalence.

Both studies point in the same direction:
more vaccination in early life → higher autism prevalence.


How This Strengthens the McCullough Foundation’s Landmark Autism Report

Our Autism Report reviewed 136 vaccine-related studies:

  • 107 studies inferred positive associations between vaccination or vaccine components and ASD/NDDs.
  • All 12 vaccinated vs unvaccinated studies found better neurodevelopmental outcomes in completely unvaccinated children, including far lower rates of autism.
  • Found strong, consistent increases in cumulative vaccine exposure during early childhood and the reported prevalence of autism across successive birth cohorts.

We concluded:

Combination and early-timed routine childhood vaccination constitutes the most significant modifiable risk factor for ASD, supported by convergent mechanistic, clinical, and epidemiologic findings, and characterized by intensified use, the clustering of multiple doses during critical neurodevelopmental windows, and the lack of research on the cumulative safety of the full pediatric schedule.

Coccia independently arrived at a highly similar conclusion:

This study offers a critical contribution to the ongoing discourse on vaccine safety and neurodevelopment by identifying a statistically significant association between early-life vaccine intensity and national autism rates.


All evidence points to the same conclusion:

Early, clustered vaccination is the strongest modifiable driver of rising autism rates.


Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

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