Russia’s nuclear arsenal of nearly 6,000 warheads is just as formidable as our own, and its revolutionary hypersonic delivery system far superior. A command by Russian President Vladimir Putin could annihilate the bulk of America’s population in less than an hour.

Under such dangerous circumstances, our need for careful and circumspect behavior towards the other nuclear superpower is obvious, but the reality has been entirely different. With one or two exceptions, we carefully avoided any potentially disastrous confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s height of our old Cold War, but in the recent years and especially the recent months of our renewed conflict, we have done exactly the opposite, now spending many tens of billions of dollars to wage a deadly proxy-war on Russia’s own border. Top media pundits and leading U.S. Senators have publicly called for Putin’s assassination, and our officials have boasted to the pressof their successful role in killing numerous Russian generals. Such extraordinarily provocative actions would have been unimaginable under President Ronald Reagan, let alone his more restrained predecessors such as Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon.

Yet oddly enough, while most of our mainstream media routinely castigated and condemned Reagan for his occasionally harsh rhetoric against our Communist Russian adversary, today virtually all of our major media regularly spews forth vastly harsher condemnations of Christian Russia and its leadership. Indeed, these outlets spent four years denouncing President Donald Trump for being insufficiently anti-Russian, sometimes even accusing him of being a Russian puppet. A couple of years ago such extremely irresponsible behavior had led the late Prof. Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York Universities, an eminent Russia scholar, to declare that the threat of global nuclear war was as great as it had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, and we can only imagine what he would be saying today.

But in many respects, the near-total silence of the media on some matters is just as dangerous as their jingoistic anti-Russian rhetoric on others.

Several months ago, the Russian government declared it had obtained hard evidence that a number of Ukrainian biolabs funded by America had spent years producing illegal biological warfare weapons for planned use against Russia. Both Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson noted that the statements made by Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland in her Congressional Testimony seemed to confirm the reality of these remarkable Russian claims. But virtually every other mainstream Western journalist either ignored this explosive issue or ridiculed the Russian charges.

Then a few weeks ago, Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, held a public briefing at which he expanded on those accusations, suggesting that the Covid virus had been created by America as an illegal bioweapon and deliberately released in an attack. The disease soon spread worldwide, killing some 18 million people, including many hundreds of thousands of Russians and more than a million Americans, while disrupting the lives of many billions. If that Russian charge were substantiated, such an Covid biowarfare attack would rank as one of the most important events in the history of the world, probably only exceeded in significance by the two world wars.

Yet none of those shocking claims by a top Russian general were ever reported in the American media, and when the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted them out, its account was suspended by Twitter for distributing “false information.” Apparently, our response to extremely disturbing information is to censor it, under the Ostrich-like principle that “what we don’t know can’t hurt us.”

But such total media suppression merely prevents the American public—and American elected officials and policy-makers—from obtaining an accurate knowledge of the world, and this is an extremely dangerous situation. Over the years, I’ve often characterized America as a regime run by its Ministry of Propaganda, and last month I emphasized the importance of dethroning America’s reigning Lords of Illusion.

Our elites regard Russia as our bitter international adversary, so perhaps a case could be made that our popular media organs should avoid providing a public platform for that country’s officials, or even covering the presumably self-serving accusations of its top military commanders. But there is another recent example of media silence that is impossible to justify under any circumstances.

For decades, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has ranked as a pillar of our academic establishment, and in 2020 he was selected to chair our Covid Commission, created to investigate all aspects of the deadly epidemic that had taken so many millions of lives.

But over the last few months, Sachs has courageously repudiated the officially-endorsed Covid narrative and instead unleashed a series of bombshell accusations.

In May, he co-authored an article in the prestigious PNAS journal presenting the strong evidence that the Covid virus had been bioengineered and calling for an independent investigation of its true origins, a dramatic pronouncement ignored by almost all Western media outlets. Since then, he has expanded on that theme with a series of major public statements and interviews, declaring that the virus was apparently the product of American laboratory biotechnology, suggesting a possible connection to our country’s longstanding biowarfare programs, while repeatedly denouncing the orchestrated cover-up of all this important information. At the beginning of July, a short clip of his remarks went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating over a million views.

As the serving chairman of our Covid Commission, it is difficult to imagine any American who can speak with greater authority than Sachs on the origins of the worldwide epidemic that has killed so many millions. In any properly functioning media environment, his recent public statements would have already produced a series of banner headlines in all our major media outlets. Yet instead, scarcely any Western publications have even acknowledged his words.

Although Sachs has not directly endorsed the Russian biowarfare accusations, he does emphasize important facts that seem quite consistent with those explosive charges. Given that reality, the near absolute blackout that the mainstream media has imposed upon his views seems especially reprehensible.

For example, last Monday morning the New York Times carried a major front-page story by Steven Lee Myers, one of the newspaper’s “misinformation specialists,” who denounced and ridiculed the Russian biowarfare accusations, which he explicitly characterized as “falsehoods.” According to the article, the Russian government has declared that America is in violation of the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention and therefore invoked its authority to hold formal hearings in Geneva to present the evidence and allow evaluation of those claims, the first such session in a quarter century. Yet this obviously momentous development was dismissed as self-evidently false propaganda. Early in his piece, Myers stated that “Russia has offered no proof” while failing to note that the Russians had called the hearing so that they could provide exactly such proof to the world’s representatives.

But the most outrageous omission in that lengthy 1,900 word piece was the complete absence of any mention of Jeffrey Sachs or his explosive allegations, although the Russians had repeatedly cited him. The Times obviously feared to inform its readers that American chairman of the Covid Commission was accusing his own government of an ongoing cover-up of the origins of the virus, a position that might seem to lend credibility to the Russian charges.

According to the Times, nearly 4,000 articles have already appeared in the Russian media this year promoting their biowarfare claims. This surely demonstrates the perceived importance of the issue, and many of the more recent pieces have included Sachs’ revelations. So most Russians may now be aware of these important facts, but virtually all American media outlets have totally ignored them, carefully maintaining the ignorance of our own population.

Thus, our country is faced with a bizarre and almost unprecedented situation. The Russian government has publicly accused America of creating and deliberately releasing the Covid virus in a biowarfare attack, thereby killing 18 million people around the world including more than a million of our own citizens. And over the last few months, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, chairman of our own Covid Commission, has confirmed that the virus was bioengineered and denounced an ongoing cover-up of its true origins. Yet virtually all of our major media outlets have maintained a near-absolute silence on those developments, failing to inform any Americans of those bombshell revelations.

These circumstances might seem to provide a perfect opening for the alternative media to play a crucial role, covering the important matters that a compromised mainstream media has so carefully avoided. And such heavy alternative coverage might eventually force mainstream outlets to follow along and report those facts as well, lest they be abandoned as uselessly dishonest by too many of their regular readers.

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, alternative media outlets have remained just as silent as their mainstream rivals.

Since early 2020, Covid-related issues have become a central focus of alternative media coverage, but the dramatic declarations by Prof. Sachs and the Russian government have attracted only a tiny sliver of interest. Last month, Nathan Robinson interviewed Sachs for his Current Affairs webzine and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did the same for his podcast, but otherwise the cupboard seems bare.

I’m not even sure that the bombshell biowarfare accusations of the Russian government have received any significant alternative attention outside of Russia’s own RT and Sputnik outlets. It’s quite possible that last week’s front-page Times story ridiculing those Russian charges constituted more coverage than the sum-total previously received over the last few months across the entire alternative media landscape, with the obvious exception of our own website.

What explains the remarkable silence of so many alternative media journalists? I think part of the answer is fear—fear of a story that is so potentially gigantic, fear of being labeled a Russian agent, fear of deplatforming. Some alternative podcasters have explicitly told me this, and I suspect that those concerns are widespread across their community.

A few weeks ago I published a piece arguing that a story may sometimes be just too big for the mainstream media to consider covering, and the same may obviously apply to many elements of the alternative media.

However, I think a far larger factor in this pattern of silence is that over the last year or more so much of the alternative media has become totally focused upon an entirely different aspect of the Covid issue, namely the vaccines developed to combat the disease. A huge and militant anti-vaxxing movement has suddenly appeared from almost nowhere, probably now encompassing some 15-30% of the American population and almost monopolizing online Covid discourse.

Most fervent anti-vaxxers have only slight interest in the origins of the virus itself, which they dismiss as unimportant, and many of them doubt that Covid is dangerous or even that it exists, while they believe that the vaccines are enormously deadly. As an extreme example of this regrettable tendency, a couple of months ago Dr. David Martin, a prominent and influential anti-vaxxer, warned that up to one-third of the American population would soon be dead from vaxxing, and demanded Nuremberg-style tribunals for those responsible for this looming disaster. Political activists or alternative websites can devote only a limited amount of time and space to a given topic, and the anti-vaxxing crusade has absorbed a huge fraction of all Covid-related interest.

My own views on vaccines have always been quite mainstream, and I view the anti-vaxxing movement as a tremendously misguided distraction, so much so that I have speculated it might have been deliberately fostered for exactly that reason. If the most energetic and vocal elements of the alternative media focus overwhelmingly upon vaxxing issues and pay little attention to the virus itself, they are much less likely to cover the dramatic public pronouncements of the Russian government or Prof. Sachs, whose views on vaccines seem as conventional as my own. In a recent piece I discussed the plausible possibility that over the last dozen years, a strategy of “cognitive infiltration” has been used by disinformation operatives to divert the conspiracy-community down blind alleys and away from those issues most threatening to the political establishment. The sudden appearance of the massive anti-vaxxing movement may be a perfect example of this:

There exist some indications of which issues are truly feared by our ruling elites and which are merely considered irritations. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the prominent public figure who leads the moderate wing of the anti-vaxxing movement, and his anti-Fauci book became a #1 Amazon bestseller despite unrelenting media hostility. Over the last couple of years, his Children’s Health Defense website has gotten huge traffic by specializing in articles fiercely condemning the alleged dangers of vaccines. But just one day before he released his recent podcast interview with Prof. Sachs on Covid origins, his website was suddenly banned by both Facebook and Instagram. Apparently, some topics are much more threatening than others.

For whatever combination of reasons, over the last few months alternative outlets have chosen to boycott Prof. Sachs almost as thoroughly as have their mainstream counterparts. If this continues, the alternative media would have revealed itself to be politically bankrupt and useless on a public issue of the greatest global importance, being no better than the New York Times, CNN, or any of the other mainstream media publications they so regularly denounce. I would argue that providing sufficiently strong coverage of Sachs’ dramatic Covid revelations has become the litmus test of credibility within the alternative media community, and so far least, nearly all alternative publications seem to have failed that test.

However, that could easily change. Most journalists, whether mainstream or alternative, take comfort from traveling in herds and reporting on the same stories emphasized by most of their colleagues. So if one or two sufficiently influential alternative outlets begin making Sachs and his statements a leading issue, many other outlets may quickly begin to do the same.

I’d like to think that my own analysis of the Covid epidemic might eventually follow a similar trajectory. Since April 2020 I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak was due to an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), probably carried out by elements of the Trump Administration but without the President’s knowledge or authorization. Taken together, these articles have been viewed nearly 800,00o times, while also being collected into a freely downloadable eBook and an Amazon print paperback.

Over the last couple of years a fierce debate regarding my Covid hypothesis has raged on the discussion-threads of our own website, encompassing over 18,000 comments totaling more than 2.6 million words. During these lengthy exchanges, I have encountered few strong arguments against this scenario, other than the claim that even rogue elements of the Trump Administration could not have possibly done anything so reckless and foolish, having such disastrous consequences.

But I think the most plausible reason a casual reader might have for disregarding my analysis has been the argument from silence. If my case were actually as strong as I claimed, surely it would not have been totally ignored for so long by virtually every mainstream and alternative journalist in America. Only obviously fatal flaws in logic could explain such a lack of coverage.

However, the utter silence that has similarly greeted the public revelations of Jeffrey Sachs and the accusations of top Russian generals suggests otherwise. If almost every media outlet in the West can ignore the headline-worthy public statements of the chairman of the Covid Commission, it is easy to understand why they would have done the same to my own far more controversial and far less solidly-established analysis.

But I’d like to believe that once there is a major breach in the dam, an enormous flood of long-avoided information will soon flow outward.