Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante spoke at an event hosted by Axios on Wednesday, where he said that Houthis are displaying and deploying advanced weaponry, especially missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.”

He described that Houthis “are getting scary” in terms of their capability on display for more than a year in the Red Sea, where they’ve gone to war against Israeli and international shipping.

“I’m an engineer and a physicist, and I’ve been around missiles my whole career,” LaPlante said before the summit, called the “Future of Defense” in Washington, DC.

“What I’ve seen of what the Houthis have done in the last six months is something that — I’m just shocked.”

Among the surprisingly advanced capabilities include anti-ship ballistic missiles. Analysts have widely asserted that without doubt Iran is directly supplying these and other capabilities.

The Houthis have also routinely scored direct hits on commercial shipping vessels with both aerial and drone boats.

The Shia group has also claimed many times to have scored hits on US, UK, and other allied warships; however, the US has kept a tight lid on the extent of this, or actual damage, perhaps wishing to not give the Houthis a propaganda win.

According to the latest attacks on US warships via an announcement this week from the Pentagon:

Houthi forces attacked two American destroyers with drones and missiles as the ships transited the Bab el-Mandeb Strait entering the Gulf of Aden on Monday, a Pentagon spokesman said today.

The Houthis launched at least eight one-way uncrewed aerial systems, five anti-ship ballistic missiles and three anti-ship cruise missiles at USS Spruance (DDG-111) and USS Stockdale (DDG-106), which engaged all the projectiles, Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters on Tuesday. U.S. Central Command has not yet issued a statement.

The Pentagon says that the warships were not damaged in the attack, which contradicts the account of Houthi spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e, who quickly claimed the attack on the pair of destroyers was successful.

The past year has seen a number of videos like the below showing destruction of large tankers off Yemen’s coast:

Footage released by the #Iran-backed Houthis of their targeting the Greek-owned and operated bulk carrier Tutor has sent shockwaves throughout the shipping industry, especially after it was confirmed Tutor sunk on 19 June.pic.twitter.com/MkfQMzlHKM

— Bachar EL-Halabi | بشار الحلبي (@Bacharelhalabi) June 20, 2024

The enduring conflict in the Red Sea has been widely acknowledged as the biggest naval battle that US forces have been engaged in since World War II. Several US and Israeli airstrikes have hit Houthi positions hard over the last months, but this appears to have done little to erode Houthi capabilities.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Friday that the Islamic Republic will have enough enriched uranium for producing fissile material to achieve a nuclear weapon within just “one or two weeks.”

“Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” Blinken said at a forum in Colorado.

He did add a caveat, saying there’s as yet no evidence Iran is actively pursuing a nuke at this point; however, the timing is interesting given the White House crisis of Biden’s reelection bid, as well as the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to address Congress next week.

“What we need to see, if Iran is serious about engaging, is actually pulling back on the work that it’s been doing on his program,” Blinken continued.

“Second, we have been maximizing pressure on Iran across the board. We’ve imposed more than 600 sanctions on Iranian persons and entities. We haven’t lifted a single sanction,” he said.

And yet the irony here is that clearly the sanctions haven’t worked. While Biden and Democrats in general had long ago been frequent critics of Trump’s prior “maximum pressure” campaign, in reality little has changed.

Blinken still touted the Biden admin’s record on Iran at the Aspen Security Forum, describing, “When this administration came in, we tried to pursue again, nuclear diplomacy with Iran, because if you could at least take one problem off the board, which is Iran potentially with a nuclear weapon, that’s inherently a good thing.”

The White House says it has still been wielding a big stick, particularly in light of the Gaza crisis and the prior Israeli massive attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus which sent tensions spiraling.

Axios reported earlier this week that the Biden admin’s behind the scenes pressure campaign has yielded limited results:

• The U.S. officials said the Iranians came back with a response that included explanations for these nuclear activities, stressing there has been no change in policy and they are not working on a nuclear weapon.
• The exchange of messages and other information obtained by the U.S. and Israel addressed some of the concerns and somewhat eased anxieties over the Iranian research and development activities, U.S. and Israeli officials said.
• A U.S. official said that the message the U.S. sent to the Iranians was effective, but added there are still significant concerns about the Iranian nuclear program.

Iran has grown bolder in its declarations of late, and so all of the above doesn’t actually sound like “effective” diplomacy.

JUST IN: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Iran is "probably one or two weeks away" from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon.

The comment 'ironically' came at the same time as Rep. Michael Waltz said Trump's would-be assas*in Thomas Crooks had "3 encrypted overseas… pic.twitter.com/IqCQjfYbcp

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 19, 2024

Without doubt, Iranian leadership is watching the US presidential race closely, given that a potential future Trump administration will be stacked with Iran hawks, as was the first.

Israel has meanwhile vowed preemptive attack if its intelligence believes Tehran is bent on developing a nuke, and if it is on the threshold. At the same time, critics of Netanyahu have alleged his hawkish position is rooted in political survival, like with his hardline Gaza policies.

The secret campaign to counter what the U.S. “perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines,” launched during the same time the U.S. government was telling Americans COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” and censoring vaccine critics, alleging they were spreading “misinformation.”

Sinovac was the first available COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines in 2021, while vaccines from U.S. companies such as Pfizer and Moderna weren’t available until mid-2022.

Campaign ‘aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines’

According to Reuters, the campaign at first “aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid” provided by China using “phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos,” but then “morphed into an anti-vax campaign.”

The campaign began in the spring of 2020 and was not limited to the Philippines — it expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021.

“A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law,” Reuters reported.

The campaign was based on the principles of psychological warfare and was operated out of “trailers and squat buildings” at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

There, “U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message,” Reuters reported, noting that the facility remains the U.S. Department of Defense’s “clandestine propaganda factory.”

The “contractors” in question included defense contractor General Dynamics IT. Reuters accused the company of employing “sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts” created on social media platforms for the propaganda campaign.

The Reuters investigation identified at least 300 such accounts on X — formerly Twitter — almost all of which were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, which is Tagalog for “China is the virus.”

Examples of the tweets generated by the accounts, which questioned not just the Sinovac vaccine but other COVID-19 pandemic measures, such as facemasks and the use of PPE, include:

• “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!”
• “From China — PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
• “Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?”

The accounts had “tens of thousands of followers during the program,” Reuters reported, and came at a time when vaccine skepticism was high in the Philippines, leading the country’s then-president, Rodrigo Duterte, to threaten the unvaccinated with arrest. Duterte requested — and was granted — priority access to Sinovac.

This “anti-vax” campaign was launched by the U.S. government even as, in the U.S., the government helped fund behavioral psychology efforts — also known as “nudging” — “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”

The U.S. government has acknowledged the existence of its Southeast Asia propaganda campaign.

“A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details,” Reuters reported, citing a Pentagon spokeswoman who said that “a variety of platforms” were used “to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.”

The spokeswoman also claimed the efforts were in response to a “disinformation campaign” China launched “to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

While U.S. operated ‘phony’ social media accounts abroad, ‘bots’ blamed for spreading ‘anti-vax’ messages in the U.S.

Citing a 2023 study published in Vaccines (Basel) that concluded when people become skeptical about one vaccine, that skepticism tends to extend to other vaccines, Reuters suggested that the Pentagon’s campaign in Southeast Asia may have decreased vaccination rates in those countries.

However, this was done as part of a broader geopolitical effort, according to Reuters, noting that while the U.S. was already engaged in such operations before the pandemic, “COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China,” citing a former senior Pentagon official who called the pandemic a “bolt of energy.”

Reuters cited claims made by the Chinese government beginning in 2020 that the U.S. was responsible for the origin or spread of the virus in China and worldwide.

At the same time, as Duterte developed closer relations with China early during the pandemic, leading to his government attaining priority access to Sinovac, “U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries … closer to Beijing,” Reuters reported.

An order signed in 2019 by then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, along with a Pentagon spending bill Congress passed that year, “paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign,” Reuters added.

Reuters noted that the U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda. Reuters said it found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so, implying that there is no prohibition in U.S. law against the operation of such propaganda campaigns outside the country.

But, as the Pentagon and U.S. military waged the campaign in Southeast Asia, U.S. government officials touted COVID-19 vaccines as “safe and effective,” accused vaccine opponents of spreading “misinformation,” and urged social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to surveil or censor accounts engaging in such messaging.

And in 2021, the U.S. government implemented vaccine mandates domestically, for corporate workers, federal workers and military service members.

The domestic mandates came in the second half of 2021, and only after the U.S. government appears to have switched gears on using any rhetoric that could be construed as anti-vaccine, even outside the country’s borders.

According to Reuters, “By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging,” citing a former senior military officer who said, “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines.”

In 2021, public health experts and the media also blamed “bots” — or fake social media accounts — and figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense — for spreading “lies” about the COVID-19 vaccines on social media in the U.S.

According to Reuters, Facebook executives expressed concern to the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, saying that the company “had easily identified the military’s phony accounts,” which it said were “violating Facebook’s policies” and were “spreading COVID misinformation.”

In response, “The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook,” according to Reuters.

“The anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office,” Reuters reported.

While Big Tech companies may have expressed some concern about the Pentagon’s operations, the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed documents indicating these platforms collaborated with the FBI and other government agencies to censor COVID-19 counternarratives domestically.

Reuters reported that a 2022 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory flagged some of the social media accounts the Pentagon developed as “pro-Western bots.”

Yet according to the “Twitter Files,” the Stanford Internet Observatory, via its Virality Project, worked with Twitter and U.S. government agencies to develop an internal “ticketing system” for tweets opposing COVID-19 narratives to be further scrutinized for their content.

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he finds it “remarkable that the Biden administration ordered the Pentagon to run a propaganda campaign” in favor of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. at the same time that it was operating its propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia.

Government used social media tactics developed during its ‘War on Terror’

According to Reuters, the U.S. used social media misinformation tactics it originally developed during the “War on Terror.” Reuters noted that in 2001, “the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA.”

This included the creation of “front news outlets,” paying off “prominent local figures” and even funding “television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups.”

“By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices — themselves often secretly paid by the United States government,” Reuters reported.

These efforts initially included the development of online news websites but, according to Reuters, now encompass “a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences.”

But while the U.S. military and Pentagon applied such tactics, developed as a counterterrorism effort following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, domestic critics of COVID-19 vaccines and mask mandates were sometimes placed under FBI surveillance.

“If Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia,” Austin stated.

What’s more is that this came the very day that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned things could easily spiral toward nuclear war in the scenario that NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Watch:

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says if Ukraine falls he really believes NATO will be in a fight with Russia pic.twitter.com/lmOimGsSAH

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) February 29, 2024

According to the fuller context of the Pentagon chief’s statements, he emphasized that more Washington funding is crucial for Ukraine in order to prevent a situation where “one country can redraw its neighbors’ boundaries and illegitimately take over its sovereign territory.”

“We know that if Putin is successful here, he will not stop. He will continue to take more aggressive actions in the region. And other leaders around the world, other autocrats around the world will look at this and will be encouraged by the fact that this happened and we failed to support a democracy,” he added.

“If you are a Baltic state, you are really worried about whether you are next. They know Putin. They know what he is capable of. And, frankly, if Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia,” Austin said.

What is even more alarming about this statement is that everyone now knows that Ukraine forces are in retreat at this very moment, especially after the Russian capture of the city of Avdiivka, and surrounding villages.

Bloomberg on Thursday issued a report predicting total collapse of the Ukrainian front lines by summer, as the headline suggests (Ukraine Sees Risk of Russia Breaking Through Defenses by Summer): “Ukrainian officials are concerned that Russian advances could gain significant momentum by the summer unless their allies can increase the supply of ammunition, according to a person familiar with their analysis,” the report says. According to more from Bloomberg:

Internal assessments of the situation on the battlefield from Kyiv are growing increasingly bleak as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold off Russian attacks while rationing the number of shells they can fire.

Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Thursday that mistakes by frontline commanders had compounded the problems facing Ukraine’s defenses around Avdiivka, which was captured by Russian forces this month. Syrskyi said he’d sent in more troops and ammunition to bolster Ukrainian positions.

So the consensus narrative and belated mainstream media admission is that Ukraine’s military is a mere months away from clear defeat, and the top US defense chief just said NATO will go to war with Russia “if Ukraine falls”.

The conflict has reached a dire and perilously unpredictable moment indeed, and clearly the already slim chances of jump-starting serious peace negotiations to end the war are slipping away fast.

The Pentagon’s anti-white DEI programs for K-12 public school children of service members are still going on, though now they are hidden within the curriculum where few recognize its existence.

“The radical curriculum was not dismantled,” reports Open the Books, which worked alongside journalists, whistleblowers, various investigative nonprofit groups and members of Congress to dismantle DEI in the Pentagon’s K-12 school system.

“Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.”

According to Open the Books, the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, is abusing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by blocking details about the U.S. war machine’s DEI policies from coming to light.

“They bamboozled the public with window dressing in Congressional hearings while forcing woke extremism on the roughly 70,000 children of our military service members,” Open the Books says.

(Related: Will 2024 be the year that full-scale medical martial law comes to America?)

Brainwashing America’s children to hate whites with U.S. tax dollars

To put things into perspective, there are around 70,000 children of U.S. military service members enrolled in public schools under the umbrella of the Pentagon who are now covertly being brainwashed into anti-white DEI ideologies and doctrines.

Teachers at the Pentagon’s public schools are free to chat online with students about gender and sexuality in private conversations that are restricted from parental view. In fact, most Pentagon parents probably have no idea such chat rooms even exist as they are operating without parental knowledge or consent.

Children as young as four, if you can believe it, are being lured into LGBTQ+ conversations with public school teachers because elementary schools, the Pentagon says, are the “perfect time” to “really show students the diversity of the gender expression and gender activity.”

The DEI curriculum at large is pro-Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other left-wing causes that, generally speaking, are anti-white in nature. The purpose of these anti-white programs is to “challenge our beliefs, examine our own biases, and reflect on how we need to evaluate the structures and systems in our classrooms.”

There is also plenty of video content centered around “dissent” and “equity,” the purpose being to help public school teachers to brainwash children with “much-needed discussions about implicit bias and systemic racism, human rights, equity, social justice, dissent, protest, and empathy.”

The Pentagon also provides as part of its DEI curriculum a special teacher handbook that discusses how to have “critical conversations” with students about things like race and skin color, identity, privilege, and how “injustice” affects our lives and society.

“These ‘explicit conversations’ provoke ‘strong emotions’ and crying students are expected,” says Open the Books, quoting some of the curriculum material.

It is bad enough that such things are being taught to innocent children in the first place, let alone the fact that the Pentagon is hiding the curriculum while lying to the American public that it supposedly does not exist.

If you are interested in seeing who the vendors are that ally with the Pentagon to provide DEI curriculum, as well as probe the payments being made to facilitate it, check out the Open the Books full background dossier on the group’s investigation in to the matter.

Leave a comment about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.

Brainwashing children into DEI is a deep state dream come true. Find out more at Genocide.news.

Sources for this article include:

• OpenTheBooks.substack.com
• NaturalNews.com
• OpenTheBooks.com

As questions swirl over whether Austin deliberately secluded his cancer diagnosis and hospitalization due to complications from the earlier medical procedure, a recording obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed the aide asked the ambulance to avoid attracting attention. An internal review is ongoing into the breakdown in communication following Jan. 1, but the Pentagon on Wednesday could not confirm whether that review would be disclosed to the public.

“Again, as I highlighted, we’re conducting a review. The secretary has publicly come out and taking responsibility in terms of the need to do better — in terms of transparency as it relates to his medical treatment. So I’ll just leave it there,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a briefing Wednesday afternoon.

Recording of the call, which took place at 7:11 p.m. on Jan. 1 and was obtained by the DCNF via a Freedom of Information Act request, is mostly redacted. In it, an unnamed aid to Austin asks the dispatcher if the ambulance coming to pick up Austin from his residence in Virginia would dim lights and mute sirens.

“Can the ambulance not show up with lights and sirens? Um, we’re trying to remain a little subtle,” the aide says.

The dispatcher explains that it’s standard procedure to reduce lights and alarms inside residential areas, but that the emergency services department is required by law to run the flashing lights and sirens on main roads, citing Georgetown Pike and Leesburg Pike.

The Pentagon would not say on Wednesday if Austin requested the aide to press for the low-profile transit or if his security team or staff came up with the idea on their own. Austin maintains 24/7 security and staff support, Ryder said.

The 911 call was first reported by The Daily Beast.

I want to thank the doctors and nursing staff at Walter Reed for their professionalism and superb support during my stay. Now, as I continue to recuperate and perform my duties from home, I’m eager to fully recover and return as quickly as possible to the Pentagon.…

— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) January 15, 2024

The Pentagon announced plans on Jan. 9 to conduct a 30-day internal investigation into the circumstances surrounding Austin’s disappearance, focusing on identifying whether officials lapsed in communicating when and how the secretary delegated responsibilities, Kelley Magsamen, Austin’s chief of staff, said in a memo. Austin’s second-in-command, Deputy Secretary 0f Defense Kathleen Hicks, had carried out some routine duties on his behalf while on vacation in Puerto Rico, seemingly without knowing that her boss was out of commission.

“This review will help to ensure clarity and transparency when a determination has been made that certain authorities have been transferred, and that proper and timely notification has been made to the President and White House and, as appropriate, the United States Congress and the American public,” Magsamen wrote.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

(USRTK)—American researchers concealed their intention to conduct high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan under lax safety standards from the Pentagon the year before COVID-19 pandemic, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.

A 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and American scientists, has stoked concern that the pandemic resulted from a lab accident.

It proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2. Most worrying to some scientists: The proposal involved synthesizing spike proteins with furin cleavage sites — the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century. Indeed, some scientists have likened DEFUSE to a blueprint for generating SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.

New documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know now show that these experiments were proposed to occur in part in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S. — apparently to save on costs. American scientists at the center of the “lab leak theory” controversy appear to have concealed this from their desired funder — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.

The documents call into question the credibility of these scientists’ assurances that the pandemic could not have sprung out of their collaboration on coronavirus engineering research with the lab in Wuhan.

U.S. Right to Know has obtained an early draft of DEFUSE with comments from “PD” and “BRS.” Emails show these commenters to be “Peter Daszak” and “Baric, Ralph S.”

Daszak leads EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that discovers novel viruses. Baric helms a University of North Carolina lab with a focus on coronaviruses. Both Daszak and Baric have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research making coronaviruses more deadly or infectious.

The formal DEFUSE grant proposal states that Baric in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will engineer the coronavirus spike proteins and test their ability to infect human cells.

But in a comment on an early draft of the proposal, Daszak clarifies that the Wuhan Institute of Virology will in fact do much of this work, but that this is excluded from the formal proposal to make DARPA “comfortable.” The comment is addressed to Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi.

“Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…”

In another comment, Daszak said that he sought to “downplay the non-US focus of this proposal” to DARPA by not highlighting the involvement of the Chinese researchers, Shi and Duke-NUS Medical School Professor Linfa Wang.

“I’m planning to use my resume and Ralph’s,” Daszak wrote. “Linfa/Zhengli, I realize your resumes are also very impressive, but I’m trying to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”

In addition to the national security risks, conducting coronavirus engineering and testing work in Wuhan entailed greater biosafety risks, the American researchers privately acknowledged.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted research on SARS-related coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 in biosafety level two (BSL-2) conditions. Biosafety levels range from one (BSL-1) to four (BSL-4), with BSL-4 being the most stringent.

BSL-2 labs involve ventilated biosafety cabinets, with researchers in surgical masks and lab coats. Many scientists say viruses that may be transmitted through the air should at minimum be studied in BSL-3 conditions with ventilation and with researchers in more protective respirators.

An early draft of DEFUSE acknowledged that the engineering and testing of novel coronaviruses would occur at BSL-2. The proposal advertised this approach to DARPA grantmakers as “highly cost-effective.”

But “BSL-2” was edited to “BSL-3.”

In a comment on the document, Baric acknowledged that U.S. researchers would “freak out” if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab.

“In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells,” Baric wrote.

Recombinant viruses are viruses made by combining different genetic elements of interest.

“In china, might be growin these virus [sic] under bsl2. US reseachers [sic] will likely freak out,” he said.

Daszak and Baric did not respond to emailed questions.

“That’s really damning,” said Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and co-founder of Biosafety Now, an organization that seeks tighter regulations for gain-of-function research. “These revelations are important because these specific experiments could, quite plausibly, have led to the genetic engineering and accidental release of SARS-CoV-2.”

“BSL-2 experiments are more convenient and less expensive than BSL-3 experiments … However, BSL-2 provides a far lower level of biosafety than BSL-3 does. This lower safety level is especially dangerous for experiments involving viruses that can be transmitted by air,” Kinney said. “It is very concerning that Daszak and Baric appear to have considered it legitimate to move high-risk experiments from BSL-3 to BSL-2. It is also concerning that they appear to have considered doing so in secret, instead of disclosing this important change of experimental plans and biosafety precautions in their grant proposal.”

The formal DEFUSE proposal states under “risk mitigation” that “experimental work using bats and of transgenic mice will be conducted at the BSL- 3 level in WIV, Duke-NUS, UNC, or [USGS National Wildlife Health Center],” without specifying an institution. It does not appear to mention the biosafety level in which high-risk research in cell lines will be undertaken.

DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal, despite the scientists apparently whitewashing the national security and biosecurity dangers.

The documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know suggest the gain-of-function work of concern was not funded before the grant submission in 2018. However, questions remain about whether the work was subsequently completed without the DARPA funding.

Daszak has insisted that the experiments proposed in DEFUSE were never carried out.

“The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple,” Daszak said last year.

However, Daszak had the ability to push forward with research without funding when a separate National Institutes of Health grant was halted, an email obtained by U.S. Right to Know shows.

A progress report for that NIH grant for the year ending in May 2018 shows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and tested them in mice engineered to express human receptors.

‘Your luck may eventually run out’

Daszak has previously deflected concerns about the DEFUSE proposal in part by pointing to language in the final proposal stating that the gain-of-function research would occur at the Baric lab in North Carolina.

“This section of the proposal was written by collaborators at UNC in the U.S., where the work would have been carried out,” Daszak told Science earlier this year.

Wang has also said that the gain-of-function virology would occur in North Carolina.

The new documents show these statements to be misleading. In addition, Baric has in recent years called for “accountability” for labs in China for conducting risky experimentation with novel SARS-like coronaviruses at a BSL-2 level.

“As a sovereign nation, China decides their own biological safety conditions and procedures for research, but they should also be held accountable for those decisions,” he told MIT Technology Review in 2021. “If you study hundreds of different bat viruses at BSL-2, your luck may eventually run out.”

But Baric did not disclose his own foreknowledge and apparent complicity in the Wuhan lab’s lax biosafety standards.

While Shi was included in the email chain and addressed in Daszak’s comments on the draft proposal, it’s not clear whether Baric ever brought up the issue of biosafety levels directly with Shi or anyone else at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I would like to know if Baric had concerns about the risky live virus experiments being redistributed to labs operating at potentially low biosafety once funding was awarded,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute. “Seeing as how Baric recently described the pangolin SARS-like virus as an ‘optimal model’ for introducing a furin cleavage site into, is he at all worried that his collaborators might have carried out the experiments in DEFUSE independently of him and at lower biosafety?”

Daszak’s apparent effort to deceive DARPA fits a pattern of nondisclosure around the DEFUSE proposal. Despite its potential relevance to the origins of the pandemic, as well as Daszak’s role on the World Health Organization mission to uncover the origins, Daszak never disclosed the proposal to the public. It only became known to the world because of a leak to the independent online group DRASTIC.

The documents showing American collaborators may have concealed the extent of risky coronavirus virology happening in Wuhan follows years of revelations concerning inadequate biosafety precautions and trained personnel at that lab.

‘Freak out’

Evidence suggests Baric was accurate in his prediction that researchers would “freak out” about the coronavirus gain-of-function research underway in Wuhan’s BSL-2 labs.

When the novel coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, prominent scientists noticed with alarm that the gain-of-function work on novel coronaviruses occurred at an inadequate safety level.

“Performing these in BSL-3 (or less) is just completely nuts! IMO it has to be performed at BSL-4 with extra precautions,” Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen would observe privately in February 2020.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci — who had endorsed gain-of-function research and whose institute had helped underwrite the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance, UNC and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — asked in February 2020 whether certain experiments could have led to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

He asked whether a technique called serial passage — in which successive infections speed up evolutionary changes — had been conducted in mice engineered to express human receptors called ACE2. Baric had shared transgenic mice expressing ACE2 — the receptor that both SARS and SARS-CoV-2 bind to — with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL2 lab?” asked Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Wild West,” responded Jeremy Farrar, former head of the Wellcome Trust and current chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University virologist and former collaborator of the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology, told a reporter in an email that the work occurring in BSL-2 was “unacceptable.”

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology has worked with bat samples and cultured bat viruses at BSL-2. This is a matter of published record – materials and methods in two papers. This is unacceptable,” he said.

‘Mice don’t sneeze‘

Before the pandemic, Baric played a role in convincing the NIH to lift a pause on gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. A 2014 panel discussion about gain-of-function research regulations included Baric and involved discussion of polybasic cleavage sites like the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2.

“Mice don’t sneeze,” Baric told NPR in 2014 in opposition to the gain-of-function research pause, alleging mice could therefore not transmit coronaviruses.  However some viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can transmit through airborne aerosols.

The revelations about DEFUSE come on the heels of Congress passing a provision in an annual military spending bill last week that bars EcoHealth Alliance from using any defense funds in China.

The new documents also show the researchers intended to use less regulated SARS-related coronavirus research as proof of concept in order to extend their high-risk methods to more deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and Nipah.

“While we are specifically targeting SARS-realted CoVS, this strategy will be applicable to ALL bat-borne viruses in future,”reads a comment apparently made by Wang.

U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents in this report from a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Geological Survey. Read all of the documents here.

Karolina Corin contributed reporting.

Hovanic, 64, of Sharpsburg, Georgia, was arrested on suspicion of pandering, according to a press release the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office provided to the DCNF. Eva Tedder, administrator for the sheriff’s office, said Hovanic told the jail staff he works for the Department of Defense (DOD) located in Peachtree City, Georgia, where the Department of Defense Education Activity’s (DODEA) Americas division is located, according to the agency’s website.

A booking photo of Hovanic, which the Coweta County sheriff’s office shared with the DCNF, shows a man who closely resembles the man in DODEA Americas Chief of Staff Stephen Hovanic’s biography on the agency’s website. Photos of both men show a distinctive scar across the chin.

The biography also states that Hovanic lives in Sharpsburg, Georgia.

Hovanic was one of more than two dozen arrests over a two-day operation meant to locate victims of human trafficking, the Newnan Times-Herald reported. Six women, identified as victims of human trafficking, were rescued in the operation, which saw arrests on charges of pandering, drug possession, prostitution and pimping, according to the press release.

DODEA Americas and Hovanic did not respond to calls and emailed requests for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

Navy Commander Rob Green said that while the military vaccine mandate was officially rescinded in January, it may have caused irreparable harm and a “looming” readiness crisis, he told The Epoch Times. Cmdr. Green, who is on active service and risks retaliation for his views, emphasized that his views don’t necessarily reflect those of the Pentagon or the Department of the Navy.

In his book “Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines,” Cmdr. Green shared a number of compelling human stories from those who fought back against the military mandate and analyzed those actions in light of similar actions taken by America’s Founding Fathers.

From the very beginning, he argued that the mandate was “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” largely because service members were offered vaccines that were labeled as authorized for emergency use only, rather than having full Food and Drug Administration approval.

“The amount of coercion that took place to encourage service members to take the vaccine destroyed what little credibility our military leaders had left after the embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal,” he said.

“There has been a deep betrayal of trust starting with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to the Afghanistan withdrawal and now finally to the military vaccine mandate with the subsequent targeted removal of conscientious service members,” he said. “Senior military leaders are refusing to even acknowledge these mistakes, let alone attempt to correct them.”

“Service members who were kicked out or made the decision to leave [the military] because of the mandate are still reeling,” Cmdr. Green said. “But most people, including the media, have only focused on the tens of thousands [of service members] who either voluntarily or involuntarily separated.”

Meanwhile, “no one is focusing on the betrayal of trust for the hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to go along, but ended up with a shot in their arm anyway.”

“The initial push for an ineffective, unlawful vaccine followed by it being rescinded has resulted in a betrayal of trust beyond what words can describe,” Cmdr. Green said. “There is no doubt in my mind that recruitment and retention will suffer much more than it is now.

“Unless our leaders take radical actions to hold themselves and their peers accountable, the lack of trust in our military will result in a massive readiness crash,” he said. “It is a looming, unspoken mass exodus, and will likely come to fruition in the next three to five years, as those who felt betrayed come to the end of their enlistments or reach retirement eligibility.

“They’ve realized no one cares about the physical injuries caused [by the vaccine], or the harm to their individual rights,” Cmdr. Green said, referring to their right to refusal. In addition, he said that “as vaccine injuries become more prevalent, we are seeing the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] refuse to acknowledge any connection to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”

For Cmdr. Green, “This should be no different than how we take care of service members forced to live in asbestos-infested buildings or forcibly exposed to Agent Orange.”

In a recently published op-ed on LifeSiteNews, Cmdr. Green argued that by not holding anyone accountable for those failures, military leadership can no longer be trusted.

He wrote that no one was held accountable for the 7,000 lives lost in a Global War on Terror with “no clear strategic objectives or victory criteria.” He also pointed out that no one was held accountable for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal or the 8,400 service members separated over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

In an effort to change Department of Defense policy, he said, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) recently slowed the process of flag and general officer promotions, holding up promotions of over 300 admirals and generals. Cmdr. Green’s op-ed noted the dichotomy in how senior military leaders handled this promotion hold, as compared to the Afghanistan and COVID-19 vaccine mandate failures.

“Instead of correcting these critical betrayals [GWOT, Afghanistan, and COVID-19 Mandate],” Cmdr. Green wrote in his op-ed, “the three service secretaries have engineered a media blitz focused exclusively on the highest-level brass and their next promotions.”

According to Cmdr. Green, until there is accountability at the highest levels, “a significant number of service members will no longer trust our uniformed and civilian leaders to have the moral courage to do the right thing, to follow the law, or to stand up for service members’ constitutional rights.”

He said, “There is so much money at stake that ‘We the People’ are going to have to force [military leadership] to admit their mistakes and do the right thing. If we fail to do this and fail to hold our leaders accountable, the recruiting crisis will just be the tip of the iceberg, and the resulting readiness crash will leave us weaker and more vulnerable than we have been since the War of 1812.

“Personnel gaps across all ships in the U.S. Fleet ballooned from 7,000 to more than 18,000 in just under two years, and the crisis is deepening as the Navy and the other services are continuing to miss recruiting targets by wide margins,” he said. “The readiness bubble is about to burst. We’re going to see a shortage [of service members] like we’ve never seen before.”

Loss of Individual Liberty

Apart from the recruiting decline and the precipitous drop in public trust, Cmdr. Green said there’s another contributing factor that’s going to be detrimental to military readiness and the security of the nation.

“Senior military leaders have become enemies of the Constitution,” he said. “They swore an oath to defend the Constitution against foreign and domestic threats.”

“[Because] the Constitution enshrines individual liberty as paramount,” he said, “the entire point of the Constitution is not to defend the government from the people but to defend the rights of individuals in the face of some future tyrannical government.”

He says, “That future is now, and those in the military who sought to trample individual rights have made themselves domestic enemies to the Constitution.” For this reason, he said, “These leaders must be resisted, and God willing, eventually held accountable.”

Leaders Prioritize Political Agendas

Senior military leadership remains focused on pushing political agendas and not on supporting and enabling individuals to be the best citizens they can be in defending the constitutional republic, he said. For example, he noted that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is running rampant at places such as the Air Force Academy and is weakening the U.S. armed forces.

“These [DEI] programs are placing institutional problems on groups of people rather than judging each individual on their own words and actions,” Cmdr. Green said. “Ultimately, this is the destruction of the individual and individual rights in favor of grand political programs designed to coral groups of people into bins that make it easier for the government to control them.”

For the military specifically, “the current crop [of military leaders] want service members who are compliant and malleable. They want service members who are not willing to stand up for their own rights,” he said. “If they are successful in purging the military of patriots, the majority of those who remain [in service to the country] will likely be exactly what they want.”

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Davis Younts, a military defense attorney, shares Cmdr. Green’s concerns.

“Military service in our nation is and must always be based on an Oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he stated. “Unfortunately, much of the Department of Defense has become staffed by bureaucrats and politicians rather than leaders or true warriors.

“These bureaucrats treat their uniform as a costume to be worn in front of the cameras rather than a symbol of their commitment to stand for freedom.”

He says “The trampling of religious freedom and the decision to ignore basic fundamental and inalienable rights during the pandemic caused a crisis of trust not only among active service members but among the American public as a whole.

“This crisis will only continue to worsen unless there is a renewed commitment among military leaders to stand by their oath and place a higher value and the rule of law and integrity than their pension.”

Call for Accountability

The newly confirmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, recently issued his first Message to the Joint Force, in which he discussed the foundation of trust required for the profession of arms.

“Trust across the force, that we will do right by each other,” he stated. “The trust of our families, that we will care for them through trial and triumph, [and that] as Chairman, I will strive every day to strengthen these bonds.”

Bradley Miller, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who previously served as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division, was relieved of his command in October 2021 for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

Like Cmdr. Green, and in contrast to Gen. Brown’s comments, Mr. Miller says he’s witnessed a betrayal of trust in senior military leadership decisions in recent years.

“Commander Rob Green has called the senior military leadership to account for their unlawful actions and they have failed to answer that call,” Mr. Miller said. “As Green has steadfastly pointed out, the Pentagon leadership has repeatedly sided against the Constitution, against the law, and against the rights of its service members.”

“Military readiness is currently in a state of freefall,” he said. “This is not in spite of the actions by DoD leaders to prevent this crash, but precisely because of the actions they have taken that have directly led to it.”

In response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times, a Pentagon official said in an email, “Our research shows that the top barriers to service are concerns about death or injury, PTSD, emotional issues, and leaving friends and family—not political issues.”

“Concerns about vaccines and ‘wokeness’ are among the least likely to be raised as reasons not to join the military.”

This article was updated to add a comment from the Pentagon.

As a secondary theory, it seems at least possible that human elements from the darkest realms of government are behind it all and will use these technologies to further herd the people into their cages, both psychologically and physically. I tend to believe that if this is true, then it’s still being driven by Powers and Principalities and is therefore demonic in nature. With that said, here’s Michael Snyder…

(End of the American Dream)—We live in a world that is getting even weirder with each passing month.  In the old days, if you talked about “UFOs” and “aliens” a lot of people would be tempted to think that you were nuts.  But now “UFOs” and “aliens” are the subject of high profile hearings in Congress, and corporate news outlets are constantly running stories about new sightings.  It has become quite clear that something is going on in the skies above our heads, and this has sparked a tremendous amount of speculation.  Are we really being visited by entities from another world, or is something else going on?

Some of the aircraft that have been appearing in our skies are absolutely massive.  For example, a new Netflix documentary is examining the case of a gigantic “delta-shaped” UFO that was seen by hundreds of people in Texas over an extended period of time…

For five months after Halloween of 2007, more than 300 locals living 80 miles southwest of Dallas/Fort Worth in Texas began reporting something strange in their skies: a giant ‘delta-shaped’ UFO.

Estimates of its size ranged from ‘over 300 feet to one mile long,’ as the large ‘V-shaped formation,’ sometimes seen with seven orange-red lights, hovered above campfires, cruised past major highways and sped silently across the horizon.

Now, Netflix’s new UFO docu-series ‘Encounters,’ which premiered Wednesday, has delivered fresh details on this larger-than-life object witnessed by over 300 locals high above the desert.

So who is piloting these aircraft?

For decades, movies, television shows, novels and video games have been conditioning people to believe that they are “aliens” from another world.

But there are other theories.

In fact, a British news source just published a story about “a very large contingent of people” at the Pentagon that believe that these creatures are actually demons…

Pentagon commanders have clamped down on research into extraterrestrials because of their religious beliefs, it’s claimed.

Leading UFO researcher Ron James says senior figures in the US government fear aliens are in fact demons. Ron, who is Director of Media Relations for UFO research group MUFON, claims there is “a very large contingent of people” within the Pentagon who opposed the work of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program [AATIP] because they think the UAPs regularly reported by US military sources are piloted by creatures from Hell.

How did they arrive at that conclusion?

The article does not say.

But apparently this belief is so pervasive that it was even affecting who was getting funding…

He says he was told by Luis Elizondo, who has gone on record as being the boss of AATIP, it “was not just a little voice in The Pentagon…but a huge group of people thought the phenomenon that was being witnessed was demons”.

This fundamentalist Christian lobby within the US defence establishment “actually affected Elizondo’s ability to get funding, “ Ron says. Belief in both UFOs and the literal truth of the Bible is not entirely incompatible, he adds.

Of course there is quite a bit of evidence that supports the notion that these entities are not our friends.

According to Dr. Hugh Ross, human encounters with these entities are “always deleterious” and can never be categorized as beneficial…

As for the human reaction to these encounters, Ross also noted they are “never beneficial” and interactions are “always deleterious.”

“The best you’re going to come away from with one of these encounters is recurring, terrifying nightmares,” he said. “Worst case scenario, you get killed.”

Reports of alien encounters also mirror what some have experienced during claims of demonic activity, he said. From going into trances to engaging in automatic writing, Ross believes the parallels between possession and purported interactions with extraterrestrials cannot be ignored.

And it should be noted that a very high proportion of those that do have such encounters are involved in occult activities in some way.

So something very strange is definitely going on with these creatures. And these days members of Congress are even openly talking about them.

During a recent podcast, U.S. Representative Tim Burchett suggested that these entities appear to have technology that humanity “can’t handle”…

A Tennessee lawmaker issued a dire warning after claiming to have seen classified UFO footage that hasn’t been released to the public.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., speculated extraterrestrial life forms could have technology that humanity “can’t handle” during an appearance on the “Event Horizon” podcast.

“If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette,” Burchett said.

And he went on to say that we “couldn’t fight them off if we wanted to”…

Burchett is a sitting member on the House Oversight Committee, which has held hearings about potential threats of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a government-derived term for UFOs.

“We can’t handle it,” Burchett said during his podcast appearance about potential alien tech. “We couldn’t fight them off if we wanted to. That’s why I don’t think they’re a threat to us, or they would already have been.”

Burchett seems to believe that if they were going to attack they would have done so already.

But what if he is wrong? Or what if they have another insidious plan that does not involve direct warfare? There is so much that we don’t know.

Thankfully, new legislation may make it easier for information about UFOs to get out to the public…

The Senate passed an amendment in July that will be part of the National Defense Authorization (NDAA) for 2024.

Known as the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Discloser Act, it says Government agencies with records, samples of craft or ‘biological’ material must hand it over within 300 days.

President Joe Biden will have 90 days to appoint a nine-person Review Board responsible for investigating each record and determining if they are considered UAPs that should be disclosed to the public.

Any government agency possessing such records will be required to hand over printed and digital copies to the board, which has 180 days to investigate and 14 days to publish their findings.

Hopefully this new legislation will do some good. But why now? Why are they suddenly being so open?

As I asked in my most recent book, are we being prepared for something? I wish that I had answers to all of those questions. But I don’t.

I do believe, however, that a very evil agenda is at work, and I also believe that things will get much clearer during the months and years to come.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.