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Courageous Discourse

Europe Turns Totalitarian

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In case anyone doubted what Vice President J.D. Vance said in Munich back in February, I can confirm that everything he said was correct—but I can also add that it was only a scrape on the surface.

Europe is going downhill. A wave of anti-democratic, anti-freedom laws, policies, and campaigns are rewriting the landscape of the continent where democracy and freedom were born.

This is nothing new per se—the Europeans not only invented the institutions of modern, Western civilization, but they also created Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. It also ignited two World Wars in the last century. On the upside, its political leaders spent a good long time after 1945 trying to stamp out all forms of totalitarianism—and yet here we go again:

A 16-year-old was recently removed from her high school by police in Germany. Her crime? Reposting a pro-AfD video on TikTok involving the Smurfs (the populist-right wing party’s color is blue). A woman in the United Kingdom was detined for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic; the land of George Orwell has someone arrested for a literal thought crime.

It gets worse:

An Austrian woman was arrested for calling Muhammad, who married a nine-year-old girl, a paedophile. Another woman, this time in Germany, was fined €80,000 [$87,190] for making a Nazi salute. Again in Germany, an AfD politician was arrested and fined for claiming that migrants commit more gang rapes than German citizens do (the court did not dispute her facts, but said they incited hatred).

On February 3, a court in Stockholm, Sweden, sentenced a man for so-called “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. The court applied the Swedish “hate speech” laws, make it a crime to criticize any ethnic or national group—except for ethnic Swedes. You can de facto get sentenced for blasphemy against Islam, but not against Christianity.

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Most of the attacks on individual freedom are taking place within the borders of the European Union. The Orwellian Digital Services Act from a few years ago, and by ominous rulings by the Court of “Justice” of the European Union, show that the crackdown on citizens’ freedom is not a spur of the moment. However, as Britain is demonstrating with its efforts to lead the anti-freedom crusade. leaving the EU is no guarantee that a country will protect even the most basic rights of its citizens.

The totalitarian ambitions of Europe’s political leadership are not limited to free speech. Back in January,

Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview … that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.

In other words, Bretton—who has also been referred to as the EU’s special “censorship czar” for his role in advancing encroachments on free speech—openly admits that the EU interfered with the domestic affairs of a member state to have an election result nullified. Why? Because the EU’s top brass did not like the outcome of the election.

The annulment of the election result was ordered by Romania’s supreme court, which—it might be worth mentioning—is a mixture of judges and politicians. It based its decision on allegations of “foreign interference” where foreign, of course, refers to Russia.

To date not a shred of evidence has been presented in support of the supreme court’s ruling.

After Thierry Breton admitted to the EU’s active, foreign interference in the Romanian election, he threatened that the EU would do the same to Germany if the national conservative party Alternative fur Deutschland, AfD, got too many votes.

Along the same line of contempt for conservatives and for the integrity of democratic elections, the EU has waged an administrative, judicial, and increasingly fiscal war on Hungary. For the past 15 years, the Fidesz party has governed Hungary based on a consistent but in not way radical conservative platform.

Given the unending hostility toward Hungary, you might think that the country’s prime minister Victor Orban has been restraining free speech and rigging or annulling elections. He has done none of that: all his government is ”guilty” of is promoting traditional families, protecting children from the LGBTetc movement, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, keeping taxes moderate, and encouraging foreign direct investment.

The result is a safe, economically thriving, socially cohesive, and family friendly country, right there in the heart of Europe. The Hungarian election system—the integrity of which has been proven time and time again—is an intriguing combination of proportionate and simple-majority representation. Voters get not one, but two votes to cast, one for each part of the system.

Four elections in a row, the Hungarian people have elected conservatives who prioritize Hungary and the needs of the Hungarian people. For this, they have received repeated showers of scorn from Brussels, including a barrage of accusations that Hungary is a semi-totalitarian state.

The implication, of course, is that Hungary does not have free elections, and yet every single election since at least 2010 has been meticulously scrutinized by foreign election observers. Not a single one of them has come up with any evidence of interference or wrongdoing by the government.

This is unsurprising, but it is also a point that leads us directly back to what former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said about the Romanian and German elections. In the view of the European Union, the democratic nature of an election is not determined by the form under which the election takes place. It has nothing to do with the secrecy of the ballot, the equal right of every citizen to vote, or the government’s respect for the election outcome. The democratic nature of an election is determined entirely by what opinions the winning parties hold.

If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.

The European Union has now reached the point where it actively tries to prohibit election outcomes that it ideologically disagrees with. This means that elections where the EU engages in foreign interference—as Breton explained happened in Romania—are about as democratic as elections in Russia.

Add the growing crackdown on free speech, and the comparison to Russia becomes even more compelling. Throw into the mix the blatantly political prosecution of Marine Le Pen in France, which has eerie similarities to the prosecutions of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny—and the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation boils down to a matter of time.

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Courageous Discourse

Healthcare Blockbuster – RFK Jr removes all 17 members of CDC Vaccine Advisory Panel!

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH's avatar Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

RFK Jr. Orders Clean Sweep of Entire CDC Vaccine Advisory Panel to End Decades of Corruption

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has just announced the removal of all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the panel tasked with recommending vaccines for the American public—citing longstanding corruption, persistent conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and a documented history of rubber-stamping vaccines without adequate scrutiny.

The full statement from Secretary Kennedy, published in The Wall Street Journal, is below:

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.

Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.

That is why, under my direction, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is putting the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda. The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.

Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.

ACIP evaluates the safety, efficacy and clinical need of the nation’s vaccines and passes its findings on to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine. It has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons. It has failed to scrutinize vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women. To make matters worse, the groups that inform ACIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust.

In 2000 the House issued the results of an investigation of ACIP and another vaccine advisory committee under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. It found that enforcement of its conflict-of-interest rules was weak to nonexistent. Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake. The CDC issued conflict-of-interest waivers to every committee member. Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines. A 2009 HHS inspector-general report echoed these findings. Few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms—97% of them had omissions. The CDC took no significant action to remedy the omissions.

These conflicts of interest persist. Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines. The problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt. Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy. The new members won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry—unafraid to ask hard questions.

A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science. In the 1960s, the world sought guidance from America’s health regulators, who had a reputation for integrity, scientific impartiality and zealous defense of patient welfare. Public trust has since collapsed, but we will earn it back.

This represents an extremely positive development. We hope ACIP will be repopulated with truly independent experts who prioritize public safety over Vaccine Ideology.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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Agriculture

Canada Greenlights Mass Culling of 400 Research Ostriches Despite Full Recovery from Bird Flu Months Ago

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH's avatar Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Federal court upholds CFIA’s reckless cull order—setting a dangerous precedent for the unscientific mass depopulation of genetically important animals.

In March, I interviewed Katie Pasitney of Universal Ostrich and Connie Shields to discuss the alarming implications of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) order to cull 400 research ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm in British Columbia over bird flu:

Canada Orders Mass Culling of 400 Research Ostriches Over Bird Flu, Refuses to Test Surviving Birds for Natural Immunity

Canada Orders Mass Culling of 400 Research Ostriches Over Bird Flu, Refuses to Test Surviving Birds for Natural Immunity

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has ordered the culling of 400 ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm in British Columbia, citing concerns over H5N1 bird flu. However, this decision is not based on sound science and could have serious consequences for both food security and medical research.

Universal Ostrich Farm is a research facility focused on studying the unique antibody-producing capabilities of ostriches. Their research has demonstrated potential in neutralizing viruses, bacteria, and even COVID-19, making it an important contribution to medical science.

In December 2024, the CFIA claimed that two deceased ostriches—which had been lying outside for over 16 hours—tested positive for H5N1 via PCR testing. Just 41 minutes after receiving these results, the CFIA signed an order to cull the entire flock.

The CFIA initially granted the farm an exemption, recognizing the birds as “genetically important.” Later, without clear justification, they reversed this decision, ordering their destruction.

Despite the importance of this research, the CFIA has refused to conduct further testing on the birds and has banned the farm from conducting its own tests, under threat of heavy fines and possible imprisonment. Why is the Canadian government refusing to study the potential antibodies ostriches have developed against H5N1 bird flu?

On January 31, 2025, a court granted a temporary stay of execution, halting the cull. However, the CFIA is appealing this decision, which means the culling could still proceed.

Today, we have received news that the reckless mass cull order will proceed despite their ostriches having already recovered months ago and developed natural immunity against H5N1:

Official Announcement: Federal Court Decision in Universal Ostrich Farms Inc. v. Canadian Food Inspection Agency

Dear friends and supporters,

We are absolutely devastated to share today’s Federal Court decision, issued on May 13, 2025. The court ruled in favour of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), upholding their order to destroy our beloved ostriches and rejecting our plea to save them.

The court’s decision accepted the CFIA’s justification under the Health of Animals Act and their use of the Stamping-Out Policy, which mandates the destruction of animals to control disease outbreaks, regardless of their health status. The court confirmed the CFIA’s approach, prioritizing trade obligations over the welfare of our animals.

In addition, we’ve been ordered to pay $15,000 in CFIA’s legal costs. You can read the full decision here: (2025 FC 878). https://saveourostriches.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/JR-T-294-25-and-T-432-25-Final.pdf

We are heartbroken by this outcome and uncertain about the future of our farm. As we navigate this incredibly difficult time, we ask for your patience and continued support. If you are able, please consider making a donation to help us manage the financial and emotional toll this has taken.

Thank you,

Universal Ostrich Farm

http://SaveOurOstriches.com

This deeply misguided decision sets a dangerous precedent for the Canadian government to recklessly depopulate animals at will.

By upholding the CFIA’s reckless cull order, despite the ostriches’ recovery and natural immunity, the court has prioritized trade protocols over scientific inquiry, animal welfare, and the advancement of life-saving medical research.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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