Executive Summary
This week the receipts arrived all at once, and they point in one direction. The COVID-era public messaging effort now appears to have been an $11 billion taxpayer-funded campaign — direct government contracts, grants, commercial advertising relationships, relief loans, institutional partnerships, agency representation, and media distribution — all aimed at pushing lockdowns, masking, distancing, vaccination, boosters, and school and business closures. It was led by Anthony Fauci, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the NIH, HHS, and the Biden administration.
The talent list came with it. Pfizer's first payment went to John Legend. The World Health Organization paid Lady Gaga. The confirmed roster continues through musicians, athletes, late-night hosts, network anchors, studios, streaming platforms, sports leagues, and talent agencies.
At the same time, Anthony Fauci has been subpoenaed by three state attorneys general — Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia — over whether he personally profited from the guidance he issued. His government-issued phone, held from 2014 until he left in 2023, was apparently wiped and recovered carrying three contacts.
We also walked the USAID record all the way back. In 2010, millions of dollars were concealed in the budget as humanitarian aid designated for Pakistan and spent instead in Cuba — hidden from Congress, the Senate, and the White House National Security Council, and routed through Creative Associates International into Cayman Islands front companies. And we traced the line from the Weather Underground's migration into academia to New York City right now: 960,000 property records published online, 17,000 warning letters, and a lawsuit filed on August 7th.
Every act of accountability in this entire episode came from outside Washington. That is the story — and it is the good news.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
The $11 Billion Persuasion Budget Nobody Voted On
Start with the number. Eleven billion dollars of our money went into the COVID-era public messaging campaign. Not into ventilators. Not into research. Into persuasion — the work of changing what Americans believed.
The mechanics were mundane, which is exactly why they worked. Direct government contracts. Grants. Commercial advertising relationships. Relief loans. Institutional partnerships. Agency representation. Media distribution. Every pipe through which a message reaches a human being was rented at once.
Then came the names. The first talent paid by Pfizer was John Legend. The World Health Organization's payment went to Lady Gaga. From there the confirmed contracts run through Pink, Questlove, Michael Phelps, Martha Stewart, Megan Rapinoe, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Billie Eilish, David Beckham, and Stevie Wonder — and then past individuals into institutions: ABC Disney, NBC Universal, Viacom CBS, the BBC, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, YouTube, the NFL, NASCAR, Major League Baseball, ESPN, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and Creative Artists Agency. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert are on it too.
Notice what none of those names are. None of them is a health agency. What was purchased was not expertise — it was trust. Trust is the one asset a government cannot manufacture for itself, so it rented ours back to us at eleven billion dollars.
And the necessary partner to buying speech is suppressing it. On a Sunday broadcast this week, a guest told Margaret Brennan on her own program that people lost their jobs because the Biden administration censored people and told them they could not even talk about vaccine harms. He was careful about the timeline, too — he was censored under one administration and censored again under the next. That is not a partisan story. That is an apparatus that survives elections.
Fauci, Three State Attorneys General, and a Wiped Phone
Anthony Fauci has been subpoenaed by attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia. Their questions are not abstract.
They want a detailed list of the money — awards, professorships, book deals, board positions, private foundation partnerships, grants, financial incentives, and other professional opportunities that ran concurrent with his role and his public recommendations, and that affected businesses and consumers in their states.
The legal theory is narrow and it holds. Government officials carry a level of immunity in their official capacities. Immunity does not extend to personal enrichment. If a man profited personally from guidance he issued — guidance for which there is now evidence it was not grounded in science — that is a different question with a different answer.
Then there is the device. A government-issued phone he apparently held from 2014 until his departure in 2023. It was wiped. When investigators recovered it, it carried three contacts. Three.
We have watched this happen before — with the January 6th committee's devices, with a special counsel team's devices, and with a server that has still never been produced. One wiped device is an accident. A decade of them is a habit.
Here is the part that matters most, and it is the empowering part: every single state can do exactly what these three just did. Your power is in your state. That is not a fallback position. That is the constitutional design functioning as written.
USAID: Pakistan Money, a Cuban Hummingbird, and $1.2 Billion in Revolutions
Now the record that should end the debate about what USAID actually was.
In 2010, in the middle of the Arab Spring, millions of dollars were concealed in the federal budget as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan. Pull up a map — Pakistan is nowhere near Cuba. The money was spent in Cuba.
It was hidden from the Senate, from Congress, and from the White House National Security Council. It was routed to the contractor Creative Associates International. According to the Associated Press, that contractor set up what was described as a Byzantine system of front companies using Cayman Islands bank accounts, recruiting unsuspecting business executives who were never told the company had ties to the U.S. government.
And what did all that concealment build? A counterfeit Twitter. Cuba did not allow American social media in, so the operation cloned it — same interface, same like and retweet buttons — and named it Zunzuneo, the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. A bird, for the bird app. The entire trick was making it look like it came from Cubans.
That was not a one-off. Roughly $1.2 billion went into sponsoring activist groups and civil society organizations — teaching them to use Facebook, use Twitter, use hashtags, coordinate street protests, know which street to fill and which slogans to carry. The Arab Spring was a joint venture between the State Department, the CIA, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, whose tech camps exported the method worldwide.
The origin is documented. It traces to the Draper Report. USAID was built to project soft power into foreign nations — infiltration instead of invasion — aligning them with an order planned since the Second World War. By the count available now, roughly eighty-three regime-change operations came out of that apparatus. Then in 2016, the same machinery was turned inward, on us.
The Newsroom Is Part of the Structure, Not a Check on It
We should stop pretending that Margaret Brennan is a journalist covering this world. She is not merely a Council on Foreign Relations member, the way much of the press corps is — she sits on the board.
That distinction is everything. The CFR is the Atlanticist hub backing the USAID and Sustainable Development Goals architecture known as Agenda 2030. When the Sunday program that adjudicates that agenda is anchored by someone who helps govern the institution promoting it, we are not watching journalism. We are watching a house publication with better lighting.
The same week, attacking RFK Jr. on air, Dana Bash acknowledged that she does not read — she listens to the experts. That admission is the whole problem in one sentence. The people telling you the truth read everything, because they want to know rather than to recite.
None of this happened by accident. Our newsrooms are increasingly staffed by graduates of journalism programs — Columbia and NYU foremost among them — that now teach ideological alignment rather than reporting, and then feed those graduates into the New York Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. I was in those newsrooms in the nineties. They were not this.
The most important thing anyone said on the show came from a woman who once worked for China Radio International. She described being disgusted by the lies she had to tell — not disgusted with the regime, disgusted with herself. Humans are not built to sustain long-term lies. Wedge apart what you say and what you know, hold it open long enough, and it costs your mental and physical health. Her warning to American journalists was exact — you may lose the job today, but in another decade what you lose is freedom.
From the Weather Underground to a Staten Island Courthouse
Here is where history stops being history.
Students for a Democratic Society, operating as the Weather Underground, bombed the Capitol, bombed New York City, and hit the Brinks truck. Bill Ayers. Bernardine Dohrn. The FBI botched the cases. And almost every person involved in that violence, along with the Black Panther network they co-opted, went into academia — Chicago, New York, Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, Stanford. They were not defeated. They were tenured.
Two generations later, look at New York City. Approximately 17,000 homeowners received warning letters directing them to file for an exemption or face substantial charges. Roughly 960,000 property records — names, addresses, and appraised values — were published online. On August 7th, three New York City homeowners filed suit in Staten Island Supreme Court, backed by roughly 900 residents whose information was posted.
Yes, property records are technically public. But a record pulled one at a time by someone with a reason to look is not the same object as 960,000 records compiled, published, and paired with a warning-letter campaign. Aggregation changes the nature of the thing. It stops being a filing system and becomes a target package — the same shape we saw in the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution, which also began as lists.
Meanwhile the leadership of that movement cannot survive its own standard. A Grammy-winning billionaire's daughter campaigning to abolish rent has not paid the rent on her $2,300 apartment in six years. And the real human cost sits in the housing data Scott Turner has been surfacing: once a family enters public housing, the likelihood of staying on it for life runs near 90 percent, and roughly 82 percent of their children end up in the system as well. That is not a safety net. That is a generational holding pattern with a compassionate name.
Recovery Starts With an Honest Inventory — and Ours Is Remarkable
This is the addiction I wrote Americans Anonymous about, and every story above is the same story in different clothing. The suppliers are the people who profit from conflict and chaos — the eleven-billion-dollar messaging machine, the contractors, the foundations, the NGOs. The dealers are the captured institutions that distribute it: the newsrooms, the journalism schools, the universities that gave the bombers offices. The consumers are us, every time we take the hit and fight the neighbor instead of the machinery.
The bourbon cannot pour itself. The addict has to participate. And that is precisely why recovery is available to us — because participation is a choice, and choices can be changed.
Look honestly at what actually moved this week. Three state attorneys general, not Congress. Three homeowners in Staten Island, not the Justice Department. Every act of accountability originated below Washington rather than inside it.
So is D.C. salvageable? Not by D.C. But that was never the design. We the People are the answer, and this is a constitutional republic — purposely not a democracy, because our Founders understood that 51 percent ruling the 49 is the road to autocracy. Read the Federalist Papers. Read Washington's Farewell Address. Read the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. They have never been repealed. They have only gone unread.
Key Takeaways
- The COVID-era public messaging campaign appears to have cost $11 billion in taxpayer money, led by Anthony Fauci, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, the NIH, HHS, and the Biden administration.
- Pfizer paid John Legend and the World Health Organization paid Lady Gaga — with confirmed contracts extending to major networks, studios, streaming platforms, sports leagues, and talent agencies.
- Fauci has been subpoenaed by three state attorneys general — Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia — and his government phone, held from 2014 to 2023, was wiped and recovered with three contacts on it.
- USAID concealed millions of dollars as Pakistan humanitarian aid in 2010 and spent it in Cuba, hidden from Congress, the Senate, and the White House NSC, routed through Creative Associates International into Cayman Islands front companies.
- USAID spent roughly $1.2 billion on Arab Spring-style social media activism and built Zunzuneo, a counterfeit Cuban Twitter named for the local word for hummingbird.
- Margaret Brennan sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations — the hub backing the Agenda 2030 architecture her program is supposed to scrutinize.
- In New York, 960,000 property records were published online and 17,000 homeowners got warning letters; three homeowners filed suit in Staten Island on August 7th.
- Every act of accountability this week came from outside Washington — from states, from courts, from citizens. That is the constitutional design working exactly as intended.
Frequently Asked Questions
If Fauci has immunity, how can three states subpoena him at all?
Immunity protects a government official acting in an official capacity. It does not protect personal enrichment. Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia are demanding a detailed accounting of awards, professorships, book deals, board seats, and foundation partnerships that ran concurrent with his public recommendations. If he profited personally off guidance now shown not to be grounded in science, that is a separate legal question with real exposure.
Was USAID ever actually about aid?
The documented record says its purpose was soft power abroad, traceable back to the Draper Report. The 2010 Cuba operation is the clearest example we have: money hidden in the budget as Pakistan humanitarian aid, concealed from Congress and the National Security Council, routed through a contractor into Cayman Islands front companies, and spent building a counterfeit social media platform. That is not famine relief.
Why does it matter that a network anchor sits on the CFR board?
Because we are told we are watching scrutiny when we are watching an interested party. Board service is governance, not membership. Margaret Brennan helps govern the institution backing the very Agenda 2030 and USAID framework her Sunday program is supposed to examine. You cannot investigate the house you help run.
Isn't publishing property records just making public information public?
Public records are searchable one at a time by people with a reason to look. Compiling 960,000 of them into a published list — names, addresses, appraised values — and pairing that with 17,000 warning letters is a different act with a different effect. It puts targets on people's homes. That is exactly why three homeowners walked into a Staten Island courthouse on August 7th.
If Washington won't fix Washington, what can any of us actually do?
Everything that worked this week. States moved. Courts moved. Citizens filed. Find out whether your attorney general has opened an inquiry into pandemic-era contracts or profiteering, and write to ask. Read one founding document all the way through this month. Show up locally, in person, where the machinery has never figured out how to buy anything.
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