The Washington Post Still Shilling for Cuba’s Bogus Healthcare

By cancel culture, I mean the idea that people have rights and responsibilities and obligations and entitlements based on their skin color or their ethnic origin. A person’s identity is defined by the group they belong to. There are no individual rights. There are only group rights.

The cancel culture rejects the political view encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence. In particular, it rejects the idea that people have a right to pursue their own happiness. It also rejects the idea of basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.

Offensive speech can be seen as a “micro aggression” – and thus a form of force. There are no limits to what constitutes such aggression. For example, if you say you voted for Donald Trump, or you like capitalism, or you think free markets have lifted people out of poverty all over the world, you might be accused of offensive speech.

The cancel culture believes in persecuting people who have offensive ideas – by getting them fired, by silencing their writings and their speech, by silencing their access to the Internet and through social ostracism.

When you try to make a reasonable argument against any of this, you make the mistake of thinking reason is the arbiter. It isn’t. The cancel culture rejects the role the modern world has assigned to reason, logic and the scientific method. It sees the Age of Reason, The Enlightenment and indeed all of western civilization as enemies – rather than the path to the good life and the good society.

The answer: the world of ideas abhors a vacuum. What we might call “20th century liberalism” has been intellectually dead since the end of the Vietnam War. What we might call “20th century conservatism” has been dead for at least two decades. The cancel culture swept in and occupied the space that was otherwise abandoned.

Throughout most of the last century, the dominant intellectual viewpoint was called liberalism. It was the political philosophy that gave us the modern welfare state. But by the mid-1970s, liberals had run out of any useful ideas on how to solve economic problems. For the next 25 years, the political winds all over the world were anti-communist and anti-socialist. With leadership from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, all the interesting ideas were suddenly coming from the right.

The flat tax, private social security accounts, school choice, deregulation, privatization – these solutions were debated everywhere and enacted to one degree or another in many countries.

The left generally opposed this trend. But they had few alternatives to offer. So, the arguments almost everywhere were over policy ideas coming from the right.

The liberal approach to economic problems was almost always more government – more regulation, more spending, more control. But in the area of civil liberties, 20^th-century liberals kept faith with 19^th-century classical liberalism. They believed government should be held at bay and staunchly defended the right of people to speak, write and demonstrate on almost any topic.

The problem is: the argument for government intervention in the economy can be used with equal force in the world of ideas. Trade between two people, liberals used to argue, might make both traders better off. But there can be negative “external effects” for others and that justifies a role for government. Unfortunately, the same can be said of speech. Indeed, some speech is designed to upset others and make them feel uncomfortable. Does that mean government should intervene? By the time this argument was made, liberalism was so intellectually bankrupt that it produced almost no resistance.

What about conservatism? When Bill Buckley established National Review in 1955, he announced that “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Small wonder, then, that such ideas as the flat tax, Social Security privatization and school choice did not originate on the pages of his magazine. Buckley’s conservatism was not about reform, it was about stopping reform.

Where did the free enterprise reform ideas of the last quarter of the 20^th-century come from? They mainly came from Milton Friedman, who called himself a “liberal,” meaning a 19^th--century classical liberal. Just as the classical liberals were reformers, so was Friedman. And while the National Review crowd welcomed these ideas, it only weakly supported the idea of a free market and never made a moral case for it.

What about free speech and First Amendment rights? It may be an uncomfortable memory, but the conservatives of the 1950s had their own cancel culture. Buckley, for example, wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy. He seemed to approve of hauling people before congressional committees and asking them about their political beliefs. He didn’t seem to mind very much when they lost their jobs because of their politics. As for the First Amendment, some conservatives questioned whether it really belonged in the Constitution. (See the essay by Willmoore Kendall in What Is Conservatism?) National Review writers also advocated outlawing movies judged to be pornographic.

Milton Friedman was a libertarian. He believed in “free minds and free markets.” But as an intellectual force, this point of view attracts a very small percentage of the electorate. As we entered the 21^st century, people who called themselves “conservative” became increasingly focused on the culture wars – taking positions that had little appeal to young people. As I wrote recently at National Review, they showed little interest in free market reforms that would be most beneficial to those at the bottom of the income ladder.

Liberals progressively abandoned virtually everything they once believed about civil liberties and about race relations as well. Very few of them today would agree with Martin Luther King’s idea that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Into the vacuum stepped a cancel culture that is collectivist, racist, anti-capitalist and unapologetically irrational. It is dominating, because it has no real opposition.

But ah! This hardly meant that Castro’s nomenklatura, and their U.S. lobbyists and business partners suffered any financial reversals. The mere licensing approval by OFAC, you see, meant $6 million for the Castro-Family-Crime-and-Terror-Sponsoring-Syndicate (grotesquely mislabeled as “Cuba” by the mainstream media.) Chances are, the Crime-and Terror-Sponsoring-Syndicate’s U.S.-based lobbyists and business partners shared in the swindle’s booty...

Indeed the Castro regime’s medical swindles are many and varied. The screening of Michael Moore’s Castroite infomercial titled Sicko some years back was a signal for the Stalinist regime’s other propaganda assets to chime in. “Cuba has developed the world’s first meningitis B vaccine, which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or the United States due to U.S. sanctions,” reported (i.e. dutifully transcribed from Cuban propaganda ministry hand-outs) Anthony Boadle from Reuter’s Havana Bureau shortly after Sicko’s release in 2007.

Of this 27-word sentence by one of the world’s most respected news bureaus exactly 14 words were true. This vaccine was not available in the U.S. and Europe -- but hardly because of sanctions. In fact, in 1999, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department granted the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham a license to market the Cuban vaccine in a joint venture with Castro’s medical ministry -- pending FDA approval.

And why not? Castro’s minister of public health himself, Carlos Dotres, had hailed the vaccine as “the only effective one in the world!” Highly impressed, Bill Clinton’s FDA chief Dr. Carl Frasch said it could annually prevent “1,000-2,000 cases” of the dreaded disease in the U.S., and 110 U.S. Congressmen promptly signed a special letter to then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright beseeching her to allow this breach of the diabolical U.S. embargo “if only to protect the lives of America’s children!”

That was 20 years ago. The reason the vaccine is not available today in the U.S. and Europe is simply that -- like so many other Castroite concoctions and proclamations dutifully trumpeted by news agencies that earn Havana bureaus and lobbyists who partner with mass-murderers -- the vaccine is a farce and its sale a swindle. And, at least in this case, most civilized countries refuse to help propagate the swindle on their citizens.

Some countries discovered the swindle the hard way: “Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaías Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institute, specializing in biotechnology.

A 1999 study by Brazil’s Centro de Vigilancia Epidemiológica (Center for Epidemiological Research) seconded Dr. Raw: “The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under four years old -- the major risk group for hepatitis B -- showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”

The Washington Post’s propensity to parrot the Castro regime’s propaganda is also reflected in its staff. The Washington Post’s former Latin American correspondent Nick Miroff (he reports from Washington D.C. nowadays) is married to a former educational apparatchik of the Castro regime named Camila Harnecker. She is the daughter of the founder of the Castro regime’s military intelligence (G-2) apparatus. This notorious KGB-protégé, Che Guevara-chum and Stalinist torturer was named Manuel “Barba Roja” (Red Beard) Pineiro.

In brief, the man who (had he not been offed by Castro in typical Stalinist fashion after his services expired) would have been the father–in-law of a star Washington Post reporter is the gentleman with the ZZ Top-type beard alongside his soulmate and fellow mass-torturer and murderer Che Guevara himself in this picture.

Significantly, at the time of its founding in 1959, Castro’s G-2 was under the close tutelage of Soviet GRU torturers who had interned with the masters themselves, Stalin and Beria.

“Barba Roja’s” wife (the WaPo reporter’s late mother-in-law) was Maria Marta Harnecker Cerda, a Chilean Communist who worked for Salvador Allende and scurried to Stalinist Cuba upon Augusto Pinochet’s (just-in-time!) liberation of Chile.

"...What about free speech and First Amendment rights? It may be an uncomfortable memory, but the conservatives of the 1950s had their own cancel culture. Buckley, for example, wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy. He seemed to approve of hauling people before congressional committees and asking them about their political beliefs. He didn’t seem to mind very much when they lost their jobs because of their politics..."

I had a discussion with a few Freepers in passing the other day about Joseph McCarthy.

Boy, do people like this author piss me off.

What an ignorant jackass he shows himself to be with this statement, and this, someone who makes his living rightly pointing his finger at the communists who took over and hold power in Cuba. However, for someone who fancies himself an expert, enough to get paid for working with a keyboard.

I damn well approve of Josph McCarthy "hauling people before congressional committees and asking them about their political beliefs". Maybe they should have done that down in his beloved Cuba before they let tyrants like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara take over.

And one more thing-these weren't Buddhists or Falun Gong who were working at a corner store as clerks stocking shelves. These were people collaborating with and working with extremely hostile foreign powers to overthrow our government.

And McCarthy wasn't saying they shouldn't be able to work or even be in jail, though the majority of them damn well should have been in jail for their treasonous activities.

McCarthy's view was that these people shouldn't be in the military or government positions, especially those that worked with sensitive data because their allegiance was NOT to The United States of America but to the Communist party and the Soviet Union, a country with which we had an undeclared state of war with for nearly half a century. And our government and institutions were riddled with them.

And he has been proven correct with nearly every single person (if not EVERY one of them) who appeared in front of him. They were all engaged in subversive and illegal activities on the behalf of the Soviets and the Communist Party to which they belonged in most cases.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was a hero. He sacrificed his office, reputation, and eventually his life in his valid quest to to bring this issue into the public light. bought at least several more decades of time for our country, where being a Marxist was (and should be) considered shameful.

Look at where we are now. The ideological descendants of the subjects of McCarthy's hearings and the foes in the media and government who fought and opposed him now hold power. And they mean us ill will, exactly the same as those people who opposed McCarthy and supported the Soviet Union and Communist Chinese.

Yes. This attitude by this man, who DAMN well should know EXACTLY what Joseph McCarthy was fighting against, appears to be completely ignorant of the facts.

Shameful.

You are correct. I read the entire article in this thread, then read that article. They aren't the same article.

Thank you. I have read some of Fontova's work before, and I was astonished and angry that he of all people would write that.

He didn't.

The text of this article is at: How Did the Cancel Culture Become Dominant So Quickly?

The one you meant to post is at this URL: The Washington Post Still Shilling for Cuba’s Bogus Healthcare

In retrospect, I think I became a bit disoriented because it was so unlike what I had seen him write before.

Anyway, thank you for pointing that out. Kaslin, you may wish to contact the moderators to fix that.

It is a pretty good article, thanks for...well, for TRYING to post it...:)

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