A post-abortion woman named “Leena” tells the following story:

I’m now 21 years old, and I had my abortion 2 months ago… I was about six weeks pregnant.

It was, and has been, the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. I didn’t want to do it… I just felt stuck, like I had no choice.

My boyfriend and I had been together for only about six months, and were living together. We were not having protected sex, so my pregnancy was bound to happen.

He knew, before I did, that I was pregnant. He told me for a couple of weeks, and I kept saying, “Nah, nah… my period isn’t due yet.” But I was wrong.

One Saturday, I went to the grocery store to pick up my pregnancy test, and secretly took it that day. When the pink line came up fast, I was completely shocked. I walked out of the bathroom, not being able to speak, and just motioned for my boyfriend to go look in the bathroom.

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The first thing he said to me was, “His name is Alex.” I was in more shock than he was, almost crying. But in the back of my mind, I was so happy. I’d always wanted a baby. I’d always imagined myself pregnant. It was finally happening for me.

For the next few days, my boyfriend told me he’d support me in whatever decision I made, whether it was to keep it, or have an abortion. I always said I didn’t know, but I secretly knew I wanted the baby. I figured, we’re both adults, we both work, and I’m planning on going back to school. To top it off, we’re in love and planned on getting married. I could do this.

But suddenly, he put down the line. I had to abort the baby. We weren’t ready financially or emotionally, he said. I didn’t want to. I cried, and cried.

I couldn’t function during the day. I made an appointment at the abortion clinic. I cried, and cried. The night before my appointment, I cried, and begged him to let me keep it.

There was nothing more I wanted than to keep this baby. I wish I would have been stronger. But I wasn’t, and I went through with it. The morning of my appointment was dark and rainy. We drove, and I was numb.

Once we got inside, I was shocked at how many women/girls were there. I cried from the time that they called my name, to the time I went under anesthesia.

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. And I would never go through it again.

To this day, I hate seeing pregnant women. It can ruin my day to see one. Babies, even.

It breaks my heart to know that in February, I would have had my own. The worst thing is that I feel like I don’t have anyone to talk to.

My boyfriend and I are still together, but it’s not the same. He doesn’t understand what it feels like. God love him, he does try. But a man will never know what an abortion feels like.

The moment you find out your pregnant, you have an instant bond… something that no one will never be able to understand until they experience it themselves.

Did I do the right thing? I still ask myself that everyday. If I took away the emotions, I would say, “Yes.” I’m only 21 years old, and I still have my entire life.

I’m trying to get through school, and work full time to get through it. My boyfriend and I are broke. We are scraping by, with rent every month. Financially, we could not support a baby right now.

But, with the emotions? Yes, I wish I did have that baby. That was my child and, even without any money at all, that would be the love of my life… So its hard to say. Its over now, and I have to get on with my life.

 I will always love that little boy with all of my heart and, someday, I’ll have him again. Till then, I just have to learn to be strong.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.

The post I Wanted to Keep My Baby, But My Boyfriend Pressured Me Into Abortion appeared first on LifeNews.com.

James Comey knew exactly what his recent cryptic social media post meant, the US president has claimed

US President Donald Trump has accused former FBI director James Comey of posting a since-deleted social media post calling for his “assassination.”

Comey posted a photograph of seashells spelling out the numbers ‘86 47’ in a now-deleted Instagram post on Thursday. He captioned the cryptic post with “cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

White House officials and Republicans quickly interpreted the post as a coded threat to the 47th US president, arguing that the number 86 is intended as slang for ‘get rid of’ or ‘kill’.

Comey subsequently deleted the image and explained in a separate post: “I posted a picture earlier of some shells I saw on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

Trump isn’t convinced.

“He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant,” he told Fox News in an interview on Friday.

That meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.

“If you’re the FBI director… and you don't know what that meant? Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant,” the president added.

Donald Trump Jr. also saw Comey’s Instagram post as a call to murder his father.

Just James Comey causally calling for my dad to be murdered.

This is who the Dem-Media worships. Demented!!!! pic.twitter.com/4LUK6crHAT

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey could face legal consequences for the incident.

“The rule of law says people like him who issue direct threats against the president of the United States, essentially issuing a call to assassinate him, must be held accountable under the law,” she said in an interview with Fox News on Friday.

Comey and Trump have been at odds for years. The US president fired him as the FBI director in 2017, during his first term in the White House. Trump later accused him of spreading “false statements and lies” and of being a “dirty cop.”

During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump survived an assassination attempt when a gunman took shots at him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The would-be assassin grazed Trump’s ear with a bullet, killed a spectator in the crowd behind him, and injured several others. In addition, at least one other plot to kill Trump was foiled in the lead-up to last year’s election.

Adriana Smith was 9 weeks pregnant when she sought medical treatment for severe headaches. Medical providers gave her medication but didn’t realize Smith had multiple blood clots in her brain until it was too late. Smith was declared brain dead about 3 months ago. A Georgia hospital has been keeping her on life support since, and her son is now about 21 weeks. Doctors are hoping to get him to 32 weeks.

These situations are rare, but not entirely unprecedented. One systematic review found that, in 35 cases of maternal brain death, 77% of neonates were born alive and 85% of those born alive had normal outcomes by 20 months after birth. However, in this study the mothers experienced brain death on average closer to 20 weeks gestation and were on life support for an average of about 7 weeks. Smith was only 9 weeks pregnant when she was declared brain dead, and she’s already been on life support for over 12 weeks. It’s certainly possible her son could be born alive and healthy, but the odds aren’t clear.

Smith’s family said doctors told them they can’t take Smith off life support due to Georgia’s abortion law. Media coverage doesn’t quote any doctors, attorneys, or any experts involved in either Smith’s case or Georgia law generally.

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Georgia law defines abortion as “the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy…” Removing life support would not involve “administering” anything. It’s not clear Georgia’s abortion law is actually the issue here.

It’s more likely that Georgia’s law regarding withdrawing life support for pregnant patients is the issue. GA Code § 31-32-9 states that doctors can’t withdraw life support from pregnant patients unless both (1) the fetus isn’t viable and (2) the patient had an advanced directive explicitly stating she wanted withdrawal of life-sustaining measures.

Note this code isn’t a result of Dobbs. It was enacted 15 years prior, in 2007. Most states have similar measures, including pro-choice states such as Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.

Source

So far I haven’t seen media coverage — or abortion advocates — make any mention of what Smith herself would have wanted in this situation. (I find it’s pretty common for abortion advocates to not seriously consider that some women would not want our unborn children to die, even if it costs us.) If abortion advocacy were primarily about autonomy, you’d think Smith’s likely perspective would be worth at least considering.

I also haven’t so far seen any mention of the perspective of Smith’s boyfriend, her son’s father.

There is discussion of the perspective of Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, who is upset that doctors said it’s not ultimately up to Smith’s family whether to take her off life support. Still even Newkirk says that, had it been the family’s choice, they “might not have chosen to end the pregnancy.”

It’s a testament to how very little abortion advocates value unborn children, that even in a case where the woman (1) cannot be harmed by continuing the pregnancy and (2) may very well have wanted her child to live, the framing is outrage that her son’s life is prioritized.

LifeNews.com Note:  Monica Snyder is the executive director of Secular Pro-Life, an organization that uses non-religious arguments to promote the pro-life perspective. Snyder worked as an investigator with the human rights organization, Live Action, to investigate the Washington-Surgi Abortion Clinic to expose their late-term abortion practices. This appears in the November issue of National Right to Life News.

The post Doctors Fight to Save Life of “Brain Dead” Mom’s Unborn Baby appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The nation’s leading abortion business “failed in attempting to rewrite the science of human development,” as a state Supreme Court ruled that the term “fetal heartbeat” legally protects unborn children from abortion at six weeks.

The South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 2023 Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, which safeguards babies from surgical or chemical termination the moment medical technology can detect “cardiac activity, or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart.” After losing a previous case to declare the law unconstitutional, Planned Parenthood focused its third round of jurisprudence against the act on trying to redefine the onset of a “fetal heartbeat” from six weeks to at least nine weeks, affording the abortion giant to commit three more weeks of unrestrained abortion. But justices ruled that Planned Parenthood did not believe some of its own arguments, which relied heavily on semantics.

The state Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that, while medical professionals may “disagree on [the] precise meaning” of nearly every medical term in the law, its use of the term “fetal heartbeat” constitutes a “biologically identifiable moment in time … when electrical impulses are detectable on an ultrasound — which even Planned Parenthood acknowledges occurs at approximately six weeks of pregnancy.”

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“Time and time again, we have defended the right to life in South Carolina, and time and time again, we have prevailed,” said South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R). “Today’s ruling is another clear and decisive victory that will ensure the lives of countless unborn children remain protected and that South Carolina continues to lead the charge in defending the sanctity of life.”

The ruling comes as a triumph for pro-life state lawmakers, who saw Democrats storm out of the legislative proceedings over the original 2021 heartbeat bill, after House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford (D-74) declared, “[The] Democratic caucus is not going to participate in this farce of a vote about pretend life.”

“We commend the South Carolina legislature and Governor McMaster for enacting a pro-life law that relies on sound medical science and statistical evidence, which shows that a detectable fetal heartbeat reliably and overwhelmingly predicts a healthy live birth. The state’s high court was right to uphold this law, which is critical for protecting mothers and their unborn babies,” Erin Hawley, vice president of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Life and Regulatory Practice, told The Washington Stand. “All human life is worth protecting, and the people of South Carolina have been eager to affirm life and prevent the obvious harms that abortion causes women and their children.”

Justices Reject Planned Parenthood’s Word Games

In its unsuccessful efforts to loosen the law’s protections, the nation’s largest abortion business engaged in a series of tendentious semantical arguments. Planned Parenthood tried to argue doctors cannot measure a “fetal heartbeat,” because a child’s heart is not fully developed and separated into four chambers until nine weeks’ gestation. The abortion giant also claimed, “while there is repetitive detectable embryonic electrical activity after approximately six weeks,” that activity is not “steady or rhythmic” until “after approximately nine weeks.” Finally, Planned Parenthood attorneys quibbled over the law’s use of the term “fetal,” asserting that “it is uncontroverted that there is no ‘fetus’ until after nine weeks of pregnancy, as at six weeks there is only an embryo.”

But the court rejected these word games. “Using the common, ordinary understanding of these words, the text of the definition of ‘fetal heartbeat’ describes what a medical professional may observe as electrical impulses on an ultrasound at approximately six weeks of pregnancy,” the justices ruled. They added that legislators regularly used the terms “fetus” and “embryo” interchangeably. And although Planned Parenthood now disputes the onset of a fetal heartbeat, “we could find not one instance during the entire 2023 legislative session in which anyone connected in any way to the General Assembly framed the Act as banning abortion after approximately nine weeks” rather than six.

Conservatives, Planned Parenthood, and Judicial Activists Agree: Fetal Heartbeat Begins at Six Weeks

Justices cited Planned Parenthood’s previous legal arguments to imply the organization argued in bad faith. “While Planned Parenthood now argues its doctors are unclear as to which point in time abortion is prohibited” under the fetal heartbeat protection act, “it has previously stated the language from both the 2021 Act and the 2023 Act clearly prohibits abortion at approximately six weeks.”

The court noted that Planned Parenthood’s 2021 legal injunction referred to the heartbeat bill as a “Six-Week Ban,” a conclusion its legal counsel repeated during oral arguments.

Planned Parenthood’s website once admitted that during weeks 5-6 “[a] very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop.”

Wednesday’s ruling also noted that liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the 2021 Whole Women’s Health case said the Texas Heartbeat law’s protections took effect “starting approximately six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period.”

Rather than detect a fetal heartbeat, Planned Parenthood suggested the court allow abortionists to determine a child’s gestational age by measuring the distance from its cranium to rump. But, the ruling stated, “Planned Parenthood was unable to say what the decisive measurement would be that would indicate the embryo had completed the transition into a fetus, nor have we been able to do so.”

Planned Parenthood Cannot ‘Rewrite the Science of Human Development’: Pro-Life Advocates

Pro-life advocates celebrated the state court’s clear and unequivocal ruling.

“Planned Parenthood has failed in attempting to rewrite the science of human development to further their agenda for more abortions and more profit. The level of science denial from this abortion giant that receives $800 million in taxpayer funding annually should astound South Carolinians who overwhelmingly re-elected Gov. Henry McMaster and state Republicans after they enacted the heartbeat law,” SBA Pro-Life America Political Director Caitlin Connors stated. “We celebrate that the justices saw through Planned Parenthood’s charade and upheld the law that protects 4,829 lives annually.”

After the law took effective in late August 2023, the number of abortions carried out in the state fell by 78% the first month after the heartbeat protection went into effect and remained flat.

“The pro-life movement continues to win in defending life-affirming laws in state courts following the Dobbs decision. This is a great victory not only for South Carolina, but for mothers and unborn children across the state,” Carolyn McDonnell, litigation counsel for Americans United for Life, remarked. “This is justice. This is truth. And every child saved is worth it,” added 40 Weeks for Life.

Lisa Van Riper, president of South Carolina Citizens for Life, called the ruling “a win, not only for the heartbeats of the unborn, but for all the members of our human family who may become or who are vulnerable in our society.”

State Attorney General Alan Wilson (R) promised he would “continue to stand for life, defend the law, and fight for the will of South Carolinians in every courtroom.”

As of March 26, 16 states had laws in effect protecting unborn children at six weeks or earlier, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly a part of Planned Parenthood.

The court victory prodded SFLAction President Kristan Hawkins to urge state lawmakers to pass the more protective Human Life Protection Act (H. 3457), which would protect unborn children from abortion at conception and penalize abortionists who ply their trade in the state with a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and/or two years in prison. The bill, introduced by State Rep. John McCravy (R-13), who leads the General Assembly’s South Carolina Family Caucus, would allow an abortion to prevent a woman’s death or “serious risk of a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function, not including psychological or emotional conditions.” It has no impact on in vitro fertilization (IVF) or any form of hormonal contraception including so-called “emergency contraception.”

Steve Petit, president of the Palmetto Family Council, hailed Wednesday’s court decision even as he promised to sustain legislative momentum toward protecting all unborn life. “We celebrate this ruling as a significant step toward a culture that honors the inherent dignity of every human life, and we will continue our work to see life fully protected from conception to natural death across the Palmetto State,” he said.

LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

The post Victory For Babies as South Carolina Supreme Court Upholds Heartbeat Law appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Karim Khan was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leadership at the time the accusations surfaced, Alessandro Bruno told RT

The timing of the sexual assault allegations brought against International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan is extremely suspicious, geopolitical analyst Alessandro Bruno told RT in an interview on Friday.

The fact that the ICC’s head prosecutor was working on a high-profile case at the time, which involved the issuance of arrest warrants against the Israeli leadership, “raises many questions,” he added.

Last May, Khan announced that he would apply for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as top figures in the Hamas leadership, for war crimes committed in the Gaza conflict. The ICC issued the warrants last November, around the time when accusations against Khan surfaced.

The Chief Prosecutor has since taken leave from his role, pending the outcome of an external investigation, multiple media outlets reported on Friday, citing the ICC. Khan has denied any wrongdoing.

“The timing of the allegations is, in my view, extremely suspicious. Extremely!” Bruno told RT on Friday.

“The fact that the prosecutor was working on an important case concerning alleged genocide in Palestine and related accusations against the prime minister of Israel, I think I would have a little bit of skepticism as well,” he added.

Bruno suggested that, given Khan’s central role, the allegations could affect the ICC’s work on the case.

“The accusations could very much compromise the court’s decision, because he was the lead prosecutor on the case,” he said.

The analyst also noted that the scandal could further “undermine” the ICC’s credibility, especially in countries like Israel and the United States, neither of which are members of the court.

When asked why ICC member states Poland and Hungary refused to comply with the court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, Bruno replied that the judicial body mostly works against the leaders of developing countries.

READ MORE: ICC called on to investigate Biden

“It is a controversial body. It’s supposedly run by the UN, but it has had bite, interestingly enough, against dictators in developing countries,” Bruno said.

Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manilla on an ICC warrant in March, and extradited to The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. An overwhelming number of previous extraditions by the court involved individuals from African countries.

The sides have reached a mutual understanding to continue negotiations following discussions in Istanbul, Hakan Fidan has said

Moscow and Kiev have agreed in principle to hold follow-up negotiations to resolve the Ukraine conflict, according to Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who participated in the talks as an observer.

The announcement follows the meeting between the delegations in Istanbul on Friday, facilitated by Türkiye, marking the first direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in three years.

“The delegations of Russia and Ukraine have reached a principled agreement regarding a new meeting,” Fidan said on X (formerly Twitter).

Fidan stated that the parties have agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war from each side, representing the largest such swap since the conflict escalated in 2022. Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky and Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov confirmed the agreement.

Both sides have also consented to share written proposals detailing conditions for a potential ceasefire, he added.

The talks followed a surprise invitation last Sunday by Russian President Vladimir Putin, to restart negotiations to resolve the conflict.

There is no set timeline for Russia and Ukraine to exchange ceasefire proposals, but a fundamental agreement to do so has been reached, a TASS source reported.

Türkiye has consistently positioned itself as a neutral mediator, leveraging its diplomatic relations with both Russia and Ukraine to facilitate dialogue.

In 2022, Medinsky’s team negotiated a potential peace deal. Its terms offered Kiev Russian security guarantees in exchange for neutrality and restrictions on its standing army. At the last moment Kiev unilaterally pulled out the negotiations. David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation, later revealed following the pre-approval of the draft treaty that then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had told Kiev to “just fight,” leading to the continuation of hostilities.

On March 31, a 21-year-old woman required emergency transport from the Flossmoor Planned Parenthood in Illinois after a failed dilation and evacuation abortion. This botched abortion brings the number of known women injured in just one month by Illinois abortion facilities to six – with a grand total of eleven Illinois injuries in 2025 so far.

According to 911 records provided by Pro-Life Action League, this woman was suffering from “intractable pain with an unknown source.” Intractable pain is generally defined as pain that is so severe, relentless, or debilitating that it does not respond to typical treatments.

The Planned Parenthood staffer listed off several strong medications already in this woman’s system from sedation for the abortion: ketamine, fentanyl, and Versed. At the time of the call, the staffer said the woman was also being administered “50 of additional fentanyl for her pain.”

Even with such powerful medications, her pain was still so severe that she required an ambulance.

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Though the Planned Parenthood staffer did not specifically mention an abortion injury, she did admit they were unable to finish the D&E procedure. The reason is not clearly stated, whether it was directly related to the intense pain or some other complication. The staffer also never volunteered where the pain was located, only that it was from “an unknown source.”

Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue comments, “If you develop horrific pain just moments after undergoing something as traumatic to the body as a dilation and evacuation abortion – which Planned Parenthood wasn’t able to complete, meaning they botched it – you’d think the pain would be from a very obvious and likely source, not an ‘unknown’ one.”

During a D&E, the mother’s cervix is dilated and her baby is painfully dismembered by using special tongs with teeth that can grab onto hands, legs or other body parts and tear them from the uterus. The head often has to be crushed in order to finish removal.

“It’s clear that this mother is in need of emergency care, but there’s a second victim in this, and every, abortion,” adds Newman. “If Planned Parenthood was unable to complete an abortion that is only considered successful after a child’s body has been torn limb from limb, I shudder to think what state this baby’s body might have been left in from an unfinished D&E. Was the child’s body even fully removed from the mom?”

Just days before this botched abortion took place in Flossmoor, national news broke of a lawsuit filed by a woman who underwent another botched D&E in Illinois, during which abortionist Keith Reisinger-Kindle tore a quarter-sized hole in the woman’s uterus and left half of the child’s dead body in her abdomen.

“Illinois is called an ‘abortion destination,’” says Newman, “but ‘abortion devastation’ is a much more accurate description. Illinois no longer requires abortion clinics to be regulated. Routine inspections, common sense safety protocols, oversight and accountability – all of those are now optional, and it shows. Women are practically being streamlined into emergency rooms all over this state.”

In the month of March, alone, six women landed in the emergency room after botched abortions and complications in clinics across the state:

• March 5, Planned Parenthood (Aurora, IL) –  Emergency transfer for a woman in her late twenties with heavy bleeding following a “procedure” (i.e. an abortion).
• March 7, Hope Clinic (Granite City, IL) – Citizens witnessed a patient walk herself to the emergency room across the street from the clinic.
• March 11, Hope Clinic (Granite CIty, IL) – Citizens witnessed an ambulance transfer a woman from the clinic to the hospital across the street.
• March 13, Near North Planned Parenthood (Chicago, IL) – Emergency transfer for a 23-year-old woman with heavy bleeding “post-procedure” (i.e. an abortion).
• March 22, Hope Clinic (Granite City, IL) – Emergency transfer for a 30-year-old woman who was “having too much bleeding.”
• March 31, Planned Parenthood (Flossmoor, IL) – Today’s main story, a 21-year-old woman with “intractable pain with an unknown source” after a failed D&E abortion.

“Operation Rescue is keeping a close watch on women being injured in the unregulated, unconscionable, abortion state of Illinois, while state officials standby and do nothing to hold these clinics accountable,” adds Newman.

Thanks to the diligent documentation of groups like Pro-Life Action League and other caring sidewalk advocates, Operation Rescue has been able to maintain a running tally of abortion injuries this year, investigating each one.

“Since January 1, eleven women have been injured by six different clinics,” Newman says. “Last year, we investigated a total of 18 emergencies in this state. Now, we are not even six months into 2025 and we have almost reached 2024’s total. Illinois lawmakers need to wake up and acknowledge that patients – not abortion clinics – are the ones who need protecting in their state.”

LifeNews Note: This article was originally published by Operation Rescue, a leading pro-life, Christian activist organization dedicated to exposing abortion abuses, demanding enforcement, saving innocent lives, and building an abortion-free America. The author, Sarah Neely, is Chief Operating Officer for Operation Rescue.

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The New York Times this week reports that the Trump administration has canceled many grants that were to fund “research” on “misinformation.” This is being presented by the media as a dastardly deed that will supposedly allow the spread of misleading or false information through various media channels.

Of course, if there were any genuine interest in studying the most egregious efforts to spread misinformation, media outlets like the Times would study themselves and their friends in the regime. After all, few organizations have been more complicit than the national American media and the US foreign policy establishment when it comes to spreading much of the worst propaganda in American history. I say “worst” because this propaganda has often been used in service to the worst ends: to gin up support for a variety of wars resulting in the deaths of thousands—sometimes even hundreds of thousands—of innocents.

Relatively recent media-regime partnerships in propagandistic misinformation include the “Russiagate” hoax, various efforts to obscure US meddling in Ukraine, and the nearly nonstop drumbeat of “news” stories over the past twenty years designed to push for regime change in various countries from Venezuela to Russia to Libya and to Syria—where the Assad regime, according to US design, was recently replaced by Islamist terrorists. And then, of course, there is the nonstop stream of misinformation designed to prop up the State of Israel and obscure its many war crimes. And let’s not forget the fictional “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq which the US presented to the United Nations as established fact.

Throughout all this, the interventionist “foreign policy blob” in Washington received near universal support from its friends at publications like the Times and the Washington Post.

The United States did not invent these tactics. Over the past 100-plus years, however, perhaps no regime was more innovative than the British when it came to inventing “facts” designed to manufacture popular consent for wars and more foreign intervention. The United States has done its best to adopt similar methods, however, and creating invented narratives in service to the regime’s foreign policy goals is now standard operating procedure for the American state as well.

The Great War: The Turning Point

Throughout history, most great powers world have long lied to buttress their war efforts, but these efforts greatly increased in magnitude and sophistication during the twentieth century, mostly with the assistance of increasingly centralized organs of mass media.

For an insightful narrative on how this new “propaganda state” developed, we can consult the works of historian Ralph Raico, who suggests that the true turning point came with the First World War when the British regime, with the help of the media, engaged in a propaganda campaign of impressive effectiveness. Specifically, Raico posits that modern wartime propaganda began with “the Belgian atrocity stories of 1914, which was maybe the first great propaganda success in modern times.”

The stories of which Raico speaks were part of a concerted British campaign to wildly exaggerate German aggression in Belgium and to send the message that the Germans were a barbaric race unlike the civilized French and British people of Europe. It was mostly based on an official British government report known as the Bryce Report. The report made countless unsubstantiated claims about mass rapes, children with their hands cut off, violated nuns, and Canadian soldiers crucified on barn doors. This produced horror and anti-German zealotry around much of the world.

But there was one problem: it was nearly all based on lies. Raico writes:

What is the story of the Belgian atrocities? The story of the Belgian atrocities is that they were faked. They were fabricated. They were phony. The pictures were photographed in particular buildings which are known in Paris. The stage sets were designed by designers for the Parisian opera. The stories were made up out of … whole cloth and spread by British propaganda as another weapon in the war—especially in the war for the minds of the neutral countries. …[T]his turns a good deal of public opinion against the Germans.

Raico adds one especially ironical note, and quotes historian Thomas Fleming, who according to Raico,

to his credit, mentions that the real cases of people, including children, with their hands cut off occurred in the Congo beginning in the 1880s, at the behest of the Belgian king Leopold II. Because of their great extent and nearly incredible cruelty, it’s those that deserve to be called “the Belgian atrocities.”

Chief among those neutral countries that were targets of British propaganda, of course, was the United States.

The British regime was desperate to have the Americans enter the war on the American side, and the British almost spared no trouble or expense convincing the Americans that the British were fighting against an enemy of untrammeled malice. The program was very successful. Raico notes that an

ingrained bias of the American political class and social elite was galvanized by British propaganda. On August 5, 1914, the Royal Navy cut the cables linking the United States and Germany. Now news for America had to be funneled through London, where the censors shaped and trimmed reports for the benefit of their government. Eventually, the British propaganda apparatus in the First World War became the greatest the world had seen to that time; later it was a model for the Nazi Propaganda Minster Josef Goebbels. Philip Knightley noted:

British efforts to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side penetrated every phase of American life. . . . It was one of the major propaganda efforts of history, and it was conducted so well and so secretly that little about it emerged until the eve of the Second World War, and the full story is yet to be told.

The Americans Adopt British Methods

Ultimately, the British propaganda effort worked and the United States government enthusiastically entered the war on the side of Britain. This went against what was still a very large portion of the American public’s antiwar preferences, but the British had won the American elites over to their side.

After all, as the British effort mounted, even the Republican party’s leadership began pressuring Woodrow Wilson to take a more hardline anti-German stance. As Raico puts it “Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the leadership of either of the major parties.”

Once the US entered the war, the US implemented its own propaganda barrage, and now it took on an additional dimension of outright censorship. For this, the media and the nation’s intellectuals were enlisted to push the war message, and, as Raico writes

public schools and the universities were turned into conduits for the government line. Postmaster General Albert Burleson censored and prohibited the circulation of newspapers critical of Wilson, the conduct of the war, or the Allies. The nation-wide campaign of repression was spurred on by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the U.S. government’s first propaganda agency.

Just one example of the regime’s capture of educational institutions could be found in how The New York Times praised the President of Columbia University for dismissing faculty members who opposed the regime on conscription.

American Propaganda After the Great War

The Second World War brought another resurgence in war propaganda, and this time, American cooperation with British forces was virtually guaranteed ahead of time. By 1939, Roosevelt was comfortable promising King George VI “full support for Britain in case of war,” as Raico puts it.

By 1940, even before the US entered the war, The US government was working hand in glove with the British government to convince Americans of the necessity of US involvement in the war. As Raico notes, the full extent of this collaboration was covered up for decades, although,

In 1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson, the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with orders to use any means necessary to bring the United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic U.S. intelligence service. Churchill even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937, Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.”

Vidal was so impressed—in a bad way—by the continued success of British propagandists in this effort that he remarked:

For those who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s. The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture…. Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly infiltrated by British propagandists.

Raico describes how closely the US and the UK collaborated in these efforts, and how successfully. By 1941, there was no doubt where the US regime would come down on the war issue. The primary question by then was how much Roosevelt would be able to drum up American hostility against Japan. In this respect, of course, he succeeded quite well.

A general worldview favoring endless international intervention was supplemented and cemented in the American mind for decades afterward by the ultimate purveyors of propaganda: the government schools. First and foremost was an effort to ensure that executive power was unlimited in international affairs claimed by Roosevelt and his successors. Raico writes:

Back in 1948, Charles Beard already noted the dismal ignorance among our people of the principles of our republican government: American education from the universities down to the grade schools is permeated with, if not dominated by, the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs. Coupled with the flagrant neglect of instruction in constitutional government, this propaganda . . . has deeply implanted in the minds of rising generations the doctrine that the power of the president over international relations is, for all practical purposes, illimitable.

The US propaganda apparatus became less focused on British concerns after the war, but was deftly turned toward promoting US regime interests during the Cold War. In his work on the Truman years, Raico notes that by the late 1940s, Truman was also pressing for fresh hostilities, including open warfare, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union. Those who resisted, especially Republicans form the Taft wing of the party, were accused of being Stalin apologists.

In this, Truman, in what had become a well established pattern of American life, was assisted by elite journalists at media outlets. Raico notes:

Truman’s campaign could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic cooperation of the American media. Led by the Times, the Herald Tribune, and Henry Luce’s magazines, the press acted as volunteer propagandists for the interventionist agenda, with all its calculated deceptions. (Thee principal exceptions were the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times–Herald, in the days of Colonel McCormick and Cissy Paterson.) In time, such subservience in foreign affairs became routine for the “fourth estate,” …. Overwhelmed by the propaganda blitz from the administration and the press, a Republican majority in Congress heeded the Secretary of State’s high-minded call to keep foreign policy “above politics” and voted full funding for the Marshall Plan.

Voices in favor of peace were shouted down and banished from public discourse. Historian Steven Ambrose sums up the Truman-media victory:

When Truman became president he led a nation anxious to return to traditional civil-military relations and the historic American foreign policy of noninvolvement. When he left the White House his legacy was an American presence on every continent of the world and an enormously expanded armament industry. Yet so successfully had he scared hell out of the American people, the only critics to receive any attention in the mass media were those who thought Truman had not gone far enough in standing up to the communists. For all his troubles, Truman had triumphed.

By the end of the Truman years, the pattern was well established, based largely on the earlier efforts of British propaganda that was developed years earlier. Here were all the elements of manufacturing consent that would be employed during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the arms wars of the 1960s and 1980s, and the new “regime change” wars of the post-Cold War world.

In this, we perhaps find the answer to a question posed by Raico during one of his lectures:

Isn’t it funny how, with the possible exception of Vietnam, all of America’s wars have been justified and have been right and good? I mean, what are the odds of something like that? A major power’s every war has been good, and the enemy has always been unbelievably horrible?

He already knew the answer. It was the state’s propaganda that made it possible for Americans to believe that virtually every new war is some kind of crusade against evil. Thanks to propaganda, the American thinking on foreign policy—which, in an earlier age had been more pragmatic and less moralistic—had taken on its modern tone of quasi-religious righteousness.

Indeed, in this contrast with America prior to the twentieth century, and the concomitant degeneration into an era of total war, we get some hint of just how much a century of relentless propaganda has fashioned the American mind.  Only in examining its history can we hope to fully understand the insidiousness and effectiveness of these methods. It is necessary to also have knowledge of their origins and this allows us to better understand the transformation that took place in the first third of the twentieth century as the American mind became accustomed to a nonstop and creeping propaganda that is still so present in American foreign policy today.

Reprinted with permission from Mises Institute.

The problem with Eastern Orthodoxy not making connections and developing their doctrine of Original Sin as it concerns the BVM’s Immaculate Conception, Sinlessness in this life, dormition rather than death and possibly the Mediatrix of all Graces, is that they don’t continue their own tradition, prior to their Great Schism, in making connections, developing theology and refining doctrine and deepening it into dogmas. 

• The Orthodox Christians acknowledge the inheritance of consequences from Adam's sin, such as mortality, a weakened will, and a tendency towards sin. 
• "Original Sin" as a Disease:

  Orthodoxy often uses the metaphor of sin as a disease that affects humanity's nature and leads to a state of estrangement from God. 

The Orthodox disconnect as it concerns the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary, while in the womb of St. Anne was consecrated and divinized by God the Most Holy Trinity. She was divinized as is a part of Orthodox doctrine as  Orthodoxy emphasizes the concept of "Theosis," or "divinization," which is the process of growing in union with God through grace, rather than simply being freed from guilt.

It is repugnant to the Schismatic Orthodox as to Catholics that God Incarnate would enter the womb of a woman with sin and undivinized by God’s Grace! A woman with the potential to be a grave sinner.

While the Orthodox have developed a belief of the dormition of Mary, rather than her death, they have no explanation as to why. It is because of their theology of Divination of God’s people by His grace alone. For Mary it happened in the womb of Anne and thus divinized she could not experience original sin, sinfulness, disease or death. Where is her body now? Do the Orthodox say there is a tomb? No she’s in heaven, body and soul- Assumption. 

We can go on and on to support all Catholic development of doctrine which is rooted in the West’s and East’s understanding of Original Sin and its consequences and Mary who was conceived free of that by God’s grace alone. 

The only reason the Eastern Orthodox don’t accept Catholic development of doctrine or the deepening of it isn’t because they don’t have a tradition of it prior to their Great Schism but because they are arrogant in refusing to unite with the Supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome and follow the truly orthodox development of doctrine or deepening of it that developed after their Great Schism but in union with their own theology of Original Sin!

The problem then, isn’t the development of doctrine but the arrogance born of schism with the pope.