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Courageous Discourse

Pete Hegseth & J.D. Vance Tell Europe’s Leaders to Grow Up

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9 minute read

By John Leake

Growing up is the often painful process of coming to terms with the reality of one’s own limitations, and recognizing that it’s impossible to gain anything in life without hard work and sacrifice. Wisdom lies in recognizing that—as the economist Thomas Sowell would put it—getting what we want often requires a tradeoff. Children, particularly the children of indulgent parents, struggle to recognize this. They want everything NOW and they don’t want to give up anything to get it.

For some time now I have perceived that the European Union—both the supranational entity and the constituent nations—are governed by childish people with childish ideas about what is best for their countries. This has been very painful for me to watch, because I love Europe and spent the happiest years of my life living there.

Especially distressing has been the ruin of Germany with stupid “green energy” initiatives that have wrecked it’s brilliant manufacturing sector, and with its bizarre welcoming of young males from the Arabic-speaking world.

The objective of these policies is apparently to destroy the 1). Economic security of young German men who had long enjoyed great, skilled labor jobs, and 2). the physical security of young German women.

The entire “green energy” hoax completely ignores the laws of thermodynamics, while allowing millions of young Arabic men into Germany ignores the basic reality that most of them have nothing to do in Germany but hang out and chase cute German girls. Any grownup man with a shred of common sense instantly recognizes the folly of these polices.

Equally idiotic has been the willingness of Germany’s so-called leaders to wreck the the excellent relationship that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This relationship—expressed by the construction of the NordStream Pipeline—was built on the essential facts that Germany needed Russia’s plentiful and cheap gas, while Russia (which has an economy smaller than that of Texas) needed a market in which to sell it.

Under the baleful influence of the equally moronic Neocons in Washington, German officials decided to wreck this relationship by playing along with the U.S. fantasy of dominating Ukraine, even if it meant destabilizing the balance of power in Europe and wrecking Germany’s fruitful relationship with Russia.

In the last few days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance have been in Europe, with Hegseth giving talks to NATO officials in Brussels and Vance giving a talk at the Munich Security Conference.

In stark contrast with the creepy weirdos in the Biden administration, the youthful and handsome Hegseth and Vance cut fine figures at their respective talks, which were the most incisive I’ve heard in years. Compared to Kamala Harris’s mealy-mouthed and jarring ramble at the 2022 Munich Security Council—which was apparently designed to insult Russia and dismiss its legitimate security concerns—Vance’s talk was elegant and crystal clear.

The message of both Hegseth and Vance to Europe’s leaders was essentially the same—namely, it’s time for them to grow up and recognize the hard facts of life. Just as the U.S. can no longer afford to indulge its own “regime change” fantasies all over the world, Europe can no longer afford to wreck itself with inane, virtue-signaling fantasies about green energy, mass migration, and Ukraine.

Vance also pointed out the sheer nonsense of claiming to be dedicated to democracy while at the same time persecuting popular parties and even trying to nullify election results. The overheated rhetoric about the rise of conservative populist parties being “far right” and “Nazi” has gotten so tired that no one outside of privileged political and leftist circles believes it.

Hegseth made the following clear:

  1. NATO membership for Ukraine is not a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement
  2. As part of any [postwar] security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine
  3. A return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, an official Ukrainian war aim, is “an unrealistic objective.”
  4. Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.
  5. The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.

In other words, the U.S. will no longer pursue an antagonistic relationship with Russia in Europe, especially in Ukraine, but will seek a negotiated settlement. If the Europeans want to persist in having an antagonistic relationship with Russia, they are on their own and will have to pay for it.

Hegseth was criticized for what appeared to be making concessions to Russia before President Trump had even commenced negotiations with Russia. The (Neocon) National Review gave him a hard time for this, and an equally hard time for apparently walking back some of these remarks the following day, which made him seem amateurish.

And yet, let’s face it— a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders is “an unrealistic objective” at this point.

Is a single American, English, German, or Austrian reader of this post willing to die fighting Russia in order to ensure that Ukraine’s 1991 borders are restored?

If you, dear reader, are too old to fight in Ukraine, would you be willing to sacrifice one of your children to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders?

Samuel Johnson famously remarked:

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Likewise, when a man knows that either he or his young sons are going to be sent abroad to die to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. In light of this, I believe it is high time for the Neocon armchair warriors in Washington to quit talking and start enlisting.

Join the army, get into shape, and get your asses over to Ukraine. On the flight over, you may take heart in reading Kipling’s poem to a “Young British Soldier,” which concludes with this heart-rousing stanza:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains 
       An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
              Go, go, go like a soldier,
              Go, go, go like a soldier,
              Go, go, go like a soldier,
                  So-oldier of the Queen!

Neocons, go to your Gawd like a soldier!

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Courageous Discourse

Europe Turns Totalitarian

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

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

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

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

It gets worse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.

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

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

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Courageous Discourse

March 2020 Intel Brief to PM Johnson: “COVID-19 WAS ENGINEERED IN WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY”

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FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse) By John Leake

Briefing from former head of SIS and other top security analysts stated unequivocally that pandemic originated at WIV, refuted fraudulent “Proximal Origins” paper by Andersen et al.

Fellow Substack author Michael Schellenberger just shared an intelligence briefing dated 27 March 2020 from Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence, and other ranking security analysts to Prime Minister Johnson. The following is a reproduction of the first page.

In other words, Sir Richard and his team expressly told Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 27, 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 came out of the WIV.

Note that the authors state that the Nature Medicine paper published by Andersen et al. (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”) is incorrect and that:

the scale and nature of its errors and its prime source (Zhou et al) raise important further non-virological questions, including of geo-strategic and domestic security, that can be addressed separately in slower time.

We judge therefore, that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is conducting information operation to embed the natural causation narrative, and, by misdirection, and to conceal the true origin and responsibility.

We know from Andersen et al.’s private e-mail correspondence with Anthony Fauci in late February 2020 that they knew that SARS-CoV-2 was not of natural origin.

This raises an extremely pressing question: Were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, and Anthony Fauci working for the PRC?

Sir Richard Dearlove and his colleagues raise this suspicion, because they must have known that Andersen et al. weren’t simply hoodwinked by Chinese virologists Zhou et al.

We know that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Professor Ralph Baric were collaborating with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID was supporting their research as well.

Setting aside questions about the legality of their research, shouldn’t all of these people be arrested and tried for the fraudulent concealment of information of vital public interest?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to conceal from the British public the reality disclosed in this memo. Does British law make him immune from liability for concealing this matter of vital public interest from the British people? Note that Johnson also took decisive action to sabotage peace talks between Ukraine and Russian in Turkey in March 2022.

Should the British people trust Johnson’s representations about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia—representations that have been endorsed by his successor, Keir Starmer? For all the British people know, Johnson received security briefings about this conflict that contradict what he has told them about the war.

Then there’s the abominable mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain that characterized everyone who pointed out the obvious indications of the lab origin as “conspiracy theorists.”

The New York Times just published an ass-covering Opinion titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”—as though the Times editors someone managed to remain ignorant about the mountain of evidence of this until now.

The disclosure of this British intelligence memo comes on the heels of almost identical disclosures about the German government of Angela Merkel. As investigative journalist Michael Nevradakis just reported in the CHD Defender:

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, determined with 80%-95% certainty in 2020 that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — but successive governments kept the information “under lock and key,” according to a German investigative report.

The report, published jointly on Wednesday by Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, was the result of an 18-month investigation.

The investigation found that in 2020, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel commissioned a BND operation code-named “Project Saaremaa” that targeted Chinese agencies and research institutions.

When the BND’s investigation concluded that a Wuhan lab leak was the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Merkel government prohibited the spy agency from releasing its results to the public.

When Mr. Nevradakis asked me what I thought about the German disclosure, I told him the following:

The revelation that German intelligence knew that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, and was not of natural origin, is no surprise, given the vast amount of evidence that the pathogen was not zoonotic. It’s also not surprising that the Merkel government decided to conceal the spy agency’s findings.

The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has long worked very closely with the CIA, and the Merkel government consistently complied with Washington’s directives. Concealment of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with the German government’s concealment of Paul Ehrlich Institute’s assessments about many elements of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For over three years, Dr. Peter McCullough and I have expressed our conviction that the cover-up of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the greatest organized crime in history. The latest revelations about the BND and the Merkel government confirm our long held suspicions.

For a full copy of the March 27, 2020 Security Briefing to Prime Minister Johnson, click HERE.

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