By controlling the media, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates can prolong a crisis indefinitely while they accumulate unprecedented wealth and power over humanity.
On Feb. 15, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published a Feb. 11 Associated Press article applauding the censorship of those who criticize the government’s pandemic response policies.
Gates used millions in grants to transform the once proudly unbridled The Guardian into his personal newsletter. With $250 million, he purchased immunity from criticism by news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Gates also made large contributions to charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the The New York Times, according to an August 2020 investigation by Columbia Journalism Review. He similarly disarmed NPR and Public Television by making them reliant on his support. In exchange, these outlets shield his sketchy projects from critical scrutiny.
Gates is arguably the world’s biggest vaccine maker. As its largest contributor, Gates controls the World Health Organization which, according to Foreign Affairs, makes no significant decision without consulting the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He similarly exercises dictatorial authority over an army of quasi-governmental agencies that he largely created or funds: Path, GAVI CEPI, Unicef etc. These agencies have demonstrated their power to turn the globe into a captive market for Gates’ vaccine enterprise.
The mainstream network news shows, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox have put COVID Terror, Vaccines Salvation and the obligatory shaming of dissidents on a 24-hour loop with each segment (and I use this term in every sense of the word) with pharmaceutical advertisements.
These outlets have turned their weekly talk shows into fawning hagiographies for Gates’ regular satellite tours in which credulous, obsequious Sunday morning talk show hosts lob softball medical questions to a billionaire with no public health training.
Nobody ever asks Gates or his mini-me, Tony Fauci, why they chose to spend tens of billions in taxpayer dollars on speculative vaccines and zero dollars investigating the many off-the-shelf, off-patent medications that have demonstrated extraordinary success in the hands of private doctors — medications that might have ended the pandemic a year ago.
The media, which has enabled this global hostage crisis, is arguably the most consequential criminal enterprise in human history. As Rahm Emmanuel observed, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Gates and Fauci have demonstrated that by controlling the media, billionaires and their government cronies can prolong a crisis forever and accumulate unprecedented wealth and power over humanity.
In the aftermath of the shocking and tragic news about Ravi Zacharias’s private life, one of our ministry school grads, herself a longtime missionary with her husband, wrote to me, asking, “Would you consider writing something in regards to the Ravi scandals? I know this is sending believers into a whirlwind of confusion.”
She continued, “I guess what people are saying is how could a man who sounds so spiritual, lead so many to Jesus, be so deeply involved in willful sinning? When things like this happen to someone with such influence. It sends people into a whirlwind of doubt.”
Many others are asking the identical questions. How, then, should we respond?
1) Anyone can lead a double life. For many years, I have told ministry leaders and ministry school students that it is all too easy to learn to lead a double life. And, on a certain level, all of us learn how to compartmentalize.
Let’s say that you’re an elementary school teacher dealing with a difficult financial situation that has you on the verge of bankruptcy. This has your attention during every waking moment of your life, except when you’re teaching the children. Then, you put on your smiling face, teach your lessons, and act as if you didn’t have a care in the world.
Even parents learn to do it in the home, not wanting their children to see fear or anger or some other, negative emotion. We all learn to play-act on some level or another.
Sadly, it’s the exact same thing with ministers of the gospel. We learn to play-act too, even in ways that are noble at first.
You’re pastoring a church and right before your Sunday sermon, you get terrible news about an old friend who committed suicide. But the cameras are on and you’re about to start your live feed and your people need some encouragement, so you ask God for help, you steel yourself, and you preach with passion. Then, afterwards, you break down and cry.
Or you’re flying overseas for a major series of meetings and your flights are delayed, meaning that you get off the plane and have to go straight to the first service. You are jet lagged, your body has no idea what time it is, and your brain is fogged. Yet you ask God for grace, and to your amazement, the message hits home.
There was no time to pray, no time to prepare your thoughts, no time even to rest and recover. Yet the Spirit worked through you. Soon enough, this becomes a habit. No prayer. No preparation. Just ministry. You have become a professional – and I mean that in the worst sense of the word. It can happen to anyone.
It’s the same with entertaining secret sin in our lives. It may take years, even decades, before that sin catches up to us in a public, outward way. But all the while it is destroying us on the inside. All the while, we are becoming performers, having compartmentalized our lives. There is the public, ministry self and there is the private, hidden self.
The longer this goes on, the harder our hearts become. We become more hypocritical, more polished, more deviant. We not only compartmentalize our sin but we rationalize it. We might even justify it. “I’m a man of God who sacrifices much for the ministry. Surely, I’m allowed some perks along the way!”
In New Testament times, Jesus had severe rebukes for many of the Pharisees. But from what we understand from other, contemporary sources, these men were highly respected religious leaders. Yet to some of them Jesus said, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:25-27).
To repeat: this can happen to any of us. That’s why all of us should stop for a moment and ask ourselves, “Am I leading a double life?”
The problem is that, for a Christian leader in particular, it is very hard to come clean and ask for help. Even if you are a loving husband who is a blue-collar worker and not a pastor or preacher, would you find it easy to tell your wife you were struggling with porn? Or you were getting pulled into an emotional relationship with a female co-worker?
How much harder is it for a Christian leader to come clean and ask for help? Yet that is what each of us need to do should we find ourselves struggling. Accountability, as painful as it is in the short term, is a God-send in the long term. (We’ll return to the subject of accountability later in this article.)
The tragedy is that, if we do not stop and get help, we can lead two very distinct lives, to the point of completely deceiving ourselves. This alone should jar us into reality in the here and now.
2) God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable. When Paul wrote these words in Romans 11:29, he was speaking specifically of the nation of Israel. But we can see elsewhere in Scripture that the same principle can apply to individuals.
Sometimes, while reading Judges 16, I have been shaken to the core. There we are told that Samson, whom God gifted with supernatural strength and who had been raised up to deliver Israel from her enemies, slept with a Philistine prostitute. This was an especially heinous act, not only because it was a sexual sin but because it was a sexual sin with Israel’s arch enemy.
The text states that when the Philistines came to attack Samson in the middle of the night, “he arose and took hold of the doors of the gate of the city and the two posts, and pulled them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron” (Judges 16:3).
Can you imagine that? He just had sex with a Philistine prostitute. He is guilty and he is unclean. Yet he still has his supernatural strength. The gift still operates. How sobering, and how terrifying.
Citing the denomination’s rapid growth and a desire to make way for younger leadership and a more effective organizational structure, Hillsong Church Global Senior Pastor Brian Houston announced Sunday that he and his wife, Bobbie, have decided to transition away from their leadership role.
Gary and Cathy Clarke, lead pastors of Hillsong Church London, who are also responsible for much of the denomination’s growth in Europe, were announced as the leaders who will take over the global management of the church over the next two years.
“I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and praying and thinking about the future and the way ahead, what life looks like for a church moving forward. For Bobbie and I, moving forward and I guess globally we’ve grown so rapidly and it’s been really a time when what has become clear is we need to put a whole lot more structure into what we’re doing globally,” Houston explained during the church’s annual Vision Sunday service at the Hills Convention Centre in Sydney, Australia.
Houston, who founded the church with his wife 38 years ago, said the denomination — which has pastoral staff in 24 nations, representing some 123 campuses and locations — is “virtually impossible, unsustainable” for them to manage the work alone.
“It’s really at a point where it’s virtually impossible, unsustainable for us to be able to lead everything that we’re leading right now and so I want to look at ways that we can share that load and over these next couple of years heading up to that church being 40 here,” Houston said. “I would like to really put in place younger leaders. Younger leaders here in Australia and younger leaders around the globe.”
While they are looking to transition away from church leadership, Houston said he and his wife “aren’t going anywhere” or “retiring” but they want to do more things in the next season of their life.
“We’re heading towards our 70s. I’m 67 this week and in our 70s there’s a whole lot of things … in our hearts in terms of what we would like to be doing, what we want to be doing and so that’s kind of how I see the future looking so I’m not putting any time on this or anything like that. We’re definitely not retiring,” he said. “We’ll be around but I do think it’s the right season to just look at a whole new season.”
Houston’s announcement comes after a series of sex and financial scandals erupted in the U.S. arm of the church in recent months. The Australia-based church has also been facing scandals locally as well.
Gary and Cathy Clarke, lead pastors of Hillsong Church London, will transition into a more global role at the church. | YouTube/Hillsong Church
Around the time church received complaints about inappropriate sexual relations between staff and volunteers at Hillsong NYC, which led to the dismissal of lead pastor, Carl Lentz, the embattled Australia-based denomination was also in the throes of investigating the sexual assault of a Philadelphia pastor’s daughter at its headquarters.
Anna Crenshaw, who is the daughter of Victory Church Senior Pastor Ed Crenshaw, revealed that Jason Mays, a Hillsong staff administrator, volunteer singer and the son of the church’s head of human resources, sexually assaulted her at a social gathering while she attended Hillsong College in Australia. It took a serious fight from Anna and her father to hold Mays, who is listed as creative director and head of sync at Hillsong Music, accountable.
Pastor Crenshaw told The Christian Post on Friday that he was forced to get the police involved when he found the church leaders’ response to the attack on his daughter wanting.
“I don’t expect Hillsong would have been able to keep anything bad from happening. That could happen in any organization. But what I would expect of Hillsong is proper care and follow-up. And that’s what was missing,” he told CP.
Paula White, the spiritual adviser to former President Donald Trump, says she doesn’t care that some Christians have criticized her work with Trump.
According to The Christian Post, in a Jan. 17 sermon at her City of Destiny Church in Florida, White said she is not a “heretic” or “prosperity preacher,” names which she says other Christians have used to describe her.
“They started by calling me a prosperity preacher. You know who that was? Christian magazine. Church. Then they called me a heretic. You know who that was? The head of ethics of one of the largest denominations. The church,” White said.
White was referring to a 2016 tweet from Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission leader. In the tweet, Moore said “Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe.”
She describes her ministry as “Charismatic Pentecostal.”
White served as the chairwoman of Trump’s evangelical advisory board. She also delivered the invocation at his inauguration in 2017.
White said her work with Trump was an “assignment” from God and wasn’t a political move.
“If your name’s not God, your opinion doesn’t matter and your acceptance is not needed,” she said. “If your name is not God, Jehovah, Yahweh, El Shaddai, Jesus Christ then your opinion doesn’t matter and your acceptance is not needed.”
In her sermon, she said Christians are divided and need to pray for unity.
“Don’t tell me we’re the party of unity with this and we’re going to unify, and every second we have, we’re just hurting people more and more and more, politicizing people’s lives. God didn’t call me to the world. I was sent on assignment to do things in the world, but I’m called to the church. And when the church is this polarized and this divided, God help us. How can we not mourn?” she said.
She also added that she has turned down invitations to speak recently because she believes the requests are “a bunch of hypocrisy.”
“I get a lot of invitations every single day. ‘Come on, bring healing to the nation. Bring everybody together.’ I’m like, you’re asking me to come on a show that I’m going to fight with people? ‘Cause I can’t in my good conscience,” she said.
US President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump listen while campaign adviser Lara Trump speaks during a Make America Great Again rally at Kenosha Regional Airport November 2, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, would instantly become the candidate to beat if she chose to run for the U.S. Senate to succeed retiring North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, according to people in the Trump family’s political orbit.
“She would immediately galvanize conservative support, and not just because her last name is Trump,” a former Trump 2020 adviser with close ties to the Trump family told The Epoch Times. “Lara knows North Carolina and North Carolina knows her. If she decides to run, she’d bring an unmatched ability to connect with voters, while also being able to raise the money necessary to compete in a close election.”
Lara Trump is a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, who describes herself in her Twitter profile as an “NC girl in NYC.” She is married to Eric Trump, the middle son of former President Donald Trump; the couple has two children.
“If Lara decides to run, she will trample the competition in a Republican primary. It won’t be close,” a former Trump White House official told The Epoch Times. “And as far as the general goes, remember North Carolina is a state that former President Trump won twice, and Lara probably has room to grow that support with independents who value a softer tone.”
Reports about Lara Trump considering a Senate run in North Carolina surfaced as recently as November last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) reignited the conversation by flagging her as the biggest winner following the former president’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial.
“The biggest winner I think of this whole impeachment trial is Lara Trump,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Jan. 14. “My dear friend Richard Burr, who I like and have been friends with for a long time, just made Lara Trump almost the certain nominee for the Senate seat in North Carolina to replace him if she runs.
“Certainly I would be behind her because she represents the future of the Republican Party.”
Burr, who announced in 2016 that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection in 2022, was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial. The state’s GOP swiftly condemned him for the vote.
“North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing,” party Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Burr voted against convicting Trump of the two charges against him. He led the Senate Intelligence Committee during its years-long investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, which found no evidence that either Trump or anyone on his campaign colluded with Moscow.
Jason Meister, who worked with Lara Trump on the advisory board to the Trump campaign, told The Epoch Times that the former president’s daughter-in-law would surely win if she decided to run.
“Lara Trump is an authentic leader of the America First movement, and she greatly understands the unique challenges our country faces with the Biden administration. The state of North Carolina would be lucky to have her serve,” Meister said.
“She was also an integral part of President Trump’s campaign both in 2016 and 2020. We’re in the midst of the gut renovation of the GOP, and we need to remove the deadwood. And that’s sort of how I see the impeachment vote.”
A survey last year by Big Data Poll that assessed Lara Trump’s image in North Carolina showed her “above water” in terms of favorability, with 11 percent more favorable views than unfavorable. Meanwhile, roughly 1 in 5 North Carolinians said they weren’t familiar enough with her to form an opinion, including a large number of independents, suggesting that she has “room to grow,” Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, told The Epoch Times.
“I have told people before that I do think that she should run if she wants to be a U.S. senator, because she would be very strong,” Baris said. “Now that we have the election and we saw who voted for Donald Trump and how he kept the state of North Carolina in his column, I think, really, it would take someone like Lara Trump for the Republicans to hold it.”
Trump won the state by 1.3 points in 2020 against Joe Biden and by 3.6 points in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
According to Baris, the growing political influence of the Research Triangle—an area in North Carolina anchored by three major research universities and dozens of large corporations—requires any viable Republican contender to draw votes from registered Democrats in the western part of the state who often vote Republican in federal elections.
“For the presidency and for the Senate, they can vote Republican and often do. But they have been less likely to do so over the last two years. Because these are working-class, old school, ancestral Democrats, and they don’t like traditional Republicans,” Baris said.
“So somebody like Lara Trump, especially if she had the same strong message as her father-in-law, I think would be a very strong candidate.
“Without those working-class people, the math just doesn’t add up.”
Baris said Lara Trump impressed him as a great retail politician while on the campaign trail.
“She could get up in front of a crowd, and then when she gets off the stage, she can mingle,” Baris said, noting that connecting with people face-to-face is key for Republicans because of the media’s left-leaning bias. “You really have to be able to do that if you’re going to run for the Senate, especially if you are a Republican.”
The impeachment trial and subsequent acquittal of the former president made Lara Trump an even stronger candidate because Republican primary voters overwhelmingly view the impeachment as a political maneuver by the Democrats, according to Jim McLaughlin, a Trump campaign pollster who has worked with more than 70 members of Congress, 14 U.S. senators, and 10 governors.
A recent survey of voters in battleground states by McLaughlin and Associates showed that 60 percent of all voters viewed the impeachment as a waste of time. Meanwhile, 80 percent of Trump voters and 76 percent of Republicans were less likely to vote for a member of Congress who voted to impeach Trump.
“That whole impeachment is why people hate Washington,” McLaughlin told The Epoch Times, pointing to the multiple crises facing the nation.
McLaughlin, who polled for the Trump campaign during the first impeachment trial, said the former president’s approval ratings were “as strong as they ever were” following the acquittal.
“I think it’s one of those things that makes them—Donald Trump, Lara Trump—makes them even stronger,” McLaughlin said. “Anybody with President Trump’s name would be a great candidate, let alone his daughter-in-law.”Follow Ivan on Twitter: @ivanpentchoukov
After former President Donald Trump threatened to ban the Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok on national security grounds last year, its parent company ByteDance started to work out a deal for Oracle and Walmart to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations. But now, with Trump out of office, that deal appears to be dead.
“The deal was mainly designed to entertain demands from the Trump administration,” an unnamed source told the South China Morning Post. “But Trump is gone, and the raison d’être of the deal is gone with him.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week President Joe Biden’s administration has not taken a “new proactive step” against TikTok, which has over 100 million users in the U.S., according to Vanity Fair.
Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were concerned that the app, which collects a large amount of user data, is required to share that information with the Chinese government if requested. Former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, however, claimed they were a Chinese company “in name only.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the plan to force the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a majority-U.S.-ownership group including Oracle and Walmart had been shelved as Biden undertook a review of Trump’s efforts to address the security risks posed by Chinese tech companies.
Discussions between representative of ByteDance and U.S. national security officials on data security and methods of preventing the Chinese government from accessing Americans’ data continue, the Journal reports.Related Stories:
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 29: A pro-life activist holds a sign during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court June 29, 2020 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court has ruled today, in a 5-4 decision, a Louisiana law that required abortion doctors need admitting privileges to nearby hospitals unconstitutional. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Two Tennessee lawmakers have proposed a bill that would permit a biological father to petition a court to halt a woman who is pregnant with his unborn child from getting an abortion, The Hill reported on Tuesday.
The bill, which was introduced by state Sen. Mark Pody and state Rep. Jerry Sexton, states that once the injunction is issued, the court must hold a hearing with both parties within 14 days. If a woman violates the injunction and obtains an abortion, “the court may hold the respondent in civil or criminal contempt and punish the respondent in accordance with the law.”
Fox32 Chicago reported that another stipulation of the bill is that the person who tries to stop the abortion does not need to provide DNA evidence to prove that he is the biological father.
Instead, the petitioner only needs “a voluntary acknowledgment of paternity that is not subject to being rescinded or challenged.”
The legislation does not specify if it also applies to instances of rape.
Pody said that the proposal is trying to bring both parents together on abortion decisions, according to One America News Network.
Stressing that the father is just as much of a parent as the mother, Pody said “it took two of them to create this human being and we believe that they should have that opportunity to raise that child.”
Children’s Health Defense has created a video of Dr. Liz Mumper’s presentation titled “How Will We Know That a COVID-19 Vaccine is Safe?” This presentation is the result of a collaborative effort between Dr. Mumper and the team of doctors, scientists, and researchers affiliated with CHD.
Dr. Mumper carefully provides detailed answers to two questions often asked by the public: “What does a safe and effective vaccine look like?” and “How will we know that a COVID-19 vaccine is safe?” She reviews many of the reasons why vaccines, as they are currently produced, are not safe, and explains that every year there are tens of thousands of adverse events, many of them resulting in serious conditions or even death.
Dr. Mumper reviews the scientific community’s numerous concerns about the safety of a COVID vaccine and its ingredients, providing information about each of the top COVID vaccine candidates. Lastly, she discusses the legality of mandatory vaccination in a free republic which proclaims to defend the rights of “we the people.”
Lawsuits filed by Children’s Health Defense and the Environmental Health Trust argue the FCC dismissed 1,700 filings of evidence showing radiation contributes to cell damage, DNA damage, infertility, carcinogenicity, cognitive deficits and cardiovascular disruption.
Two separate health advocacy organizations have sued the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its complete dismissal of evidence of serious health impacts from wireless technology devices and infrastructure, such as cell phones and cell towers.
The cases have been brought after the FCC completely dismissed all evidence presented to it during a six year public inquiry which the FCC opened itself. The FCC, which is “an independent agency of the U.S. government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States,” opened the inquiry in 2013, asking the public to submit comments to the inquiry’s docket as to whether or not the FCC should review its 1996 Radio Frequency (RF) radiation guidelines. The inquiry was closed in December 2019.
During that time tremendous amounts of scientific and human evidence of physical harm caused by radiation emitted from wireless technology such as Wi-Fi and cell towers, was submitted to the FCC in 1,700 filings. The filings contain peer-reviewed studies that show radiofrequency radiation contributes to cell damage, DNA damage, infertility, carcinogenicity, cognitive deficits, and cardiovascular disruption, among a wide array of negative health effects.
The scientific studies and testimony of the physical harm caused by RF radiation were requested by the FCC for the purposes of reassessing their “radiofrequency exposure limits and policies” after Congress’s Government Accountability Office recommended such a commission.
But the FCC summarily dismissed the evidence, without explanation.
The FCC declared that “the vast majority of filings were unscientific, and even the filings that sought to present scientific evidence failed to make a persuasive case for revisiting our existing RF limits,” the FCC stated in a resolution to close their inquiry.
The FCC also cited “sister” agencies such as the FDA, stating, “No evidence has moved our sister health and safety agencies to issue substantive policy recommendations for strengthening RF exposure regulation.”
“The Director of FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health advised the Commission, as recently as April 2019, that ‘no changes to the current standards are warranted at this time,’ the FCC continued.
“Upon review of the record, we find no appropriate basis for and thus decline to initiate a rulemaking to reevaluate the existing RF exposure limits,” the FCC concluded, referring to its 1996 RF radiation exposure guidelines.
Their unsupported dismissal of both scientific studies and firsthand experience testimony prompted both the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and the Environmental Health Trust (EHT) to sue the FCC.
“Children’s Health Defense and the Environmental Health Trust filed separate cases against the FCC, but filed joint briefs,” report Children’s Health Defense. The cases were heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
That response as well as other remarks by the judges critical of the FCC’s continued adherence to the 1996 guidelines has sparked hope for what the advocacy organizations are calling a “landmark case.”
“I hear all the time from people whose lives are devastated, and they don’t know what to do, they don’t know where to go, and they need help. Some are driven to suicide. And as a society we owe them an answer,” said Scott McCollough, an attorney for CHD, during a press conference which the advocacy organisations held on the case’s oral arguments. McCullough presented the arguments on behalf of the CHD, the EHT, Consumers for Safe Cell Phones, and other petitioners.
“Hundreds of people wrote [to the FCC] with just horrible letters; It tears you up to read what these people told the Commission. They did nothing. They kicked everybody in the teeth. We described it as a gut punch in our brief and that’s exactly what it was,” said McCollough.
CHD and EHT argued in their jointly filed briefs that the FCC did not back up their decision with any evidence of their own. The groups are arguing that the dismissal “lacked evidence of reasoned decision-making” and therefore was “arbitrary.” It was furthermore, they said, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the National Environmental Policy Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, “because it failed to consider the impact of its decision on public health and safety.”
‘We don’t deal with humans, only frequencies’
The FCC’s approach to claims of RF radiation harm is encapsulated by one phone call, said CHD attorney Scott McCollough while opening his oral argument in court.
“One of the petitioners recently contacted the FCC to seek redress for injuries she attributes to RF exposures. The commission representative said, ‘We don’t deal with humans, only frequencies,’ and hung up,” McCollough revealed.
“They [the FCC] don’t understand biological effects, and they don’t want to. It makes their head hurt,” McCollough later said during the press conference.
That is why, McCollough argues, that the FCC continues to insist there is no evidence that wireless technology causes harm, in the face of the 11,000 pages of scientific and human evidence showing “profound harmful effects and widespread sickness from wireless technology” filed by theCHD, the EHT, and their fellow petitioners in the case.
And these 11,000 pages are only “the tip of the iceberg” regarding the harmful effects of wireless technology, explained attorney Dafna Tachover, CHD’s 5G and Wireless Harms director. “In these kinds of cases, we have to rely on the evidence that was submitted to the docket,” Tachover said during the press conference.
Included in the 11,000-page “Joint Appendix” are “references to thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies showing DNA damage, reproductive harm, neurological effects such as ADHD, and radiation sickness, which seems to be the most widespread manifestation of wireless harms,” reported CHD.
“The evidence shows effects on the brain, including impaired blood flow and damage to the blood-brain barrier, cognitive and memory problems and effects on sleep, melatonin production and mitochondrial damage,” the CHD report continues.
CHD also reported that the evidence found the “Causal mechanism of harm”: Oxidative Stress, which “was found in 203 out of 225 studies,” and “can lead to cancer, non-cancer conditions and DNA damage.”
Judges critical of the FCC
During a press conference on the oral arguments of the case, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of CHD, said that the organizations “were blessed with what we call a ‘hot bench.’”
“A lot of work on the argument was done by the judges who were clearly familiar with the case and were extremely skeptical of FCC’s position,” Kennedy said.
During the oral arguments for the case Judge Millet challenged the FCC attorney multiple times regarding the FCC’s reliance on the FDA, and the inadequacy of the FDA’s input.
“How was it reasonable for the FCC to rely so heavily on a response from the FDA that did not address the very things you asked for information on: devices [other than cell phones], the use of multiple devices and physical harms other than cancer?” Millet asked.
The FCC attorney admitted, “You’re right, that their statements spoke specifically about cell phones.”
The FCC attorney also admitted that even after the FCC “made very clear” that they rely upon “other agencies with expertise in this area,” they were met with silence.”
“We formally solicited the views of other agencies with expertise in this area, we made very clear that we wanted to rely on them. We relied on the views of expert agencies in adopting these limits in the first place,” the FCC attorney told the judges.
When asked by Judge Millet if the FCC relied on agencies besides the FDA, the FCC attorney said: “We formally seek the input of all expert bodies in this area, and we left the docket open for seven years giving ample opportunity to weigh in and not one of these bodies said you need to change your standards. And we’re not arguing that silence should be construed as endorsement, but it shouldn’t be construed as disapproval of the agency’s existing limits.”
Is the regulation of the FCC fit-for-purpose?
Reflecting on this silence of the “expert” agencies during the case press conference, McCullough suggested that the regulation system was no longer fit-for-purpose.
“Over all of this time it has become obvious that agencies that are charged with regulating entities almost inevitably become captured by them,” he said. “They are inculcated in how the industry [works] and they begin to develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome by these agencies that they have to deal with. Quite frankly, that’s all they see most of the time.”
Tachover asked Kennedy during the case press conference what he thinks is “the most effective thing that our movement can do to create change.”
He replied, “I think we have to keep the pressure up on the agency. The ultimate issue is we’ve gotta get money out of politics, because as Scott pointed out, agency capture is not controversial. There are hundreds of articles that document the process. It occurs, as Scott says, directly and indirectly. In some [agencies] it’s innocent, but in most of them it does become corrupt. And it’s reinforced through budgeting.”
He went on to describe how the agency “capture” process can work.
“As highly visible and powerful regulators approach retirement age, they know that they can quintuple their salary by going to work for the agency that they regulated,” he said.
“And so usually in a year or two, before they approach retirement, they begin doing really extravagant favors, highly visible favors for the industry that they regulate. As it happens, those regulators are the people who chair the departments, and hire new people, and who set the example for their underlings. And gradually the entire agency becomes subsumed in the process,” Kennedy continued.
“The judges in this country, and really everywhere, will not give us victories in a vacuum. We have to lay the public groundwork. We have to show the judge that the public is out there and they want reform. That there are people like you who have been injured. We need to come in with those stories, those very powerful parables about how democracy is failing, it’s being held up to ridicule, and people are being harmed in terrible ways. And we need a grassroots movement to continually promote those stories,” Kennedy concluded.
