Jeremy R. Hammond

Even as a child, I had the persistent sense that something was deeply wrong with our society—a fundamental problem with “the system”, as my young mind vaguely conceived it.

I couldn’t understand why others didn’t seem to feel the same way. Far from sharing my sense of disturbance, most people glorified the system. At best, they acknowledged its “imperfections” as inevitable—as though it were naïve or futile to imagine a better way.

In school, we were taught that the US government is a benevolent force for good in the world, a beacon of light gifting the world with the blessings of “freedom” and “democracy”.

Back then, I didn’t know enough to question that. But certain things still bothered me, like the daily “Pledge of Allegiance” ritual. I didn’t dare refuse or voice my objection, but I sensed a contradiction: we were pledging devotion to “liberty” under compulsion, swearing an oath to an inanimate object hanging in the corner of the classroom.

I felt it was absurd and demeaning, but I kept silent and obeyed.

It’s not that I took the relative privileges I enjoyed as an American for granted. I understood how fortunate I was compared to the children I would see on TV who were growing up in war zones or impoverished countries. But I felt that, even if the US government was really the best system that humanity had ever produced, it still wasn’t nearly good enough.

For instance, even as a kid, it made no sense to me that every student was taught the same way despite the great diversity of individual talents and interests. Why wasn’t this obviously a fatally flawed approach? And why didn’t anyone else seem to notice—or care?

I often felt trapped, like my whole life had already been planned out for me by others. “Freedom” felt like an illusion when my choices all fell within narrowly predetermined tracks: go to school, get a diploma, go to college, get a job, work until retirement—then, finally, retire and try to enjoy the remaining years of your life.

I found it wholly uninspiring. What if I could make a living doing something I truly love, so that it hardly seemed like “work”? How about finding a way to contribute to society so that I wouldn’t ever want to “retire” from the task?

Fearing rebuke from my elders or ridicule from my peers, I mostly kept such “rebellious” thoughts to myself. But I eventually wondered: What if everyone else feels the same way I do, but they are just too scared to express themselves freely—like me?

I secretly hoped that I was not alone in my silent cowardice. I now know that I was not alone. People who shared my dissident ideas were out there, somewhere—and many of them also found the courage to stand up and speak out.

But it wasn’t until I began my journey into journalism that I fully grasped how deeply indoctrinated most people are into what I came to see as the state religion—a cult of collectivism that elevates obedience over individual rights.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, before that awakening, I resigned myself to a sense of powerlessness. And so, in the face of unrelenting pressure to conform, for a long time, I did . . .

As I reached adulthood, I didn’t feel like I had any choice but to attend college. It was expected of me, including by my parents, who had worked so hard to put my life on that ostensible path to “success”.

The problem was: I had absolutely no idea what I really wanted to do. How was I supposed to know?!

After all, we hadn’t received any training in school about how to determine your calling in life. I felt it was just another absurdity of the system that, at that stage, we were supposed to just pick something.

I had yet to experience the independence of adulthood. There was so much to experience! So many interests to explore! I still had so much to learn about the world around me—and about myself.

And so many years had already been wasted with school, which I viewed mostly as time that could have been spent much more productively. Rather than propelling us forward on the path to self-fulfillment, I felt it held us back and diverted us from that goal.

I felt the system was designed to produce automatons stripped of their individuality to serve a function determined by some faceless overseers who presumed to know best how a society ought to be organized.

Since I had to pick something, and I felt some artistic endeavor would be most fulfilling, I decided to go to school with the idea of becoming an independent filmmaker. I chose a university because of its location outside the city, its spaciousness and relaxed atmosphere, and its proximity to a forested ravine between campus and a river.

That is where I would go to escape from society. In the quiet sanctuary of the trees, I could find peace and relief from my feelings of anxiety and claustrophobia. Sheltered from the madness of the world outside by the forest’s concealing limbs, I could breathe easier and find inner calm. I could free myself from the endless distractions preventing me from being able to just process my thoughts and explore my own mind for a while.

As with primary education, we were taught nothing in college about how to be an entrepreneur. Although sometimes interesting, general education was mostly a distraction from my goal, and the more relevant classes didn’t train us in skills like how to organize an independent film project and secure funding.

Instead, the thrust of it was to prepare us to move to some city with a notable film industry, land an entry-level job doing menial tasks, and climb the career ladder with the hopes of someday reaching a position that could fulfill your passions. And by the time I graduated, with rapid advances in film technology, half of what I’d learned was already obsolete!

So, I came away from college with greater confidence about who I was but still with no idea what to do with or without my B.S. degree (pun intended)—or how I was going to repay the student debt I was now also shackled with.

With the educational system not being designed to assist in the task, I was left desperately yearning for a clear sense of my life’s purpose . . .

Having no idea what to do with my college degree, I returned to my usual summer job painting houses while stressing about what I was going to do for a permanent career path.

As chance would have it, I caught up with an old friend who explained how he’d just come back from Taiwan, where he’d gotten a job teaching English. He intended to return in the fall, and he encouraged me to join him.

That sounded like a crazy idea to me at the time, but I told him I’d think about it—and as the year wore on and I still had no idea what to do with my life, I decided this was my best option.

I was feeling trapped, longing for freedom; and there appeared no better opportunity to perhaps find it than leaving everything I knew behind and taking off on a whole new life adventure. I could reinvent myself—undergo a metamorphosis and leave the old me behind.

So, that is what I did. I sold my truck to buy my plane ticket, my plan being to find a job teaching English for the school season while figuring out a longer-term plan in the meantime. I arrived in Taiwan with only a backpack of belongings and enough cash to live on until I could find a job.

My original plan was to stay for maybe six months or so. I ended up staying twelve years, getting married, and becoming a father there. But that’s a whole other story . . .

Two weeks after I purchased my plane ticket, with several weeks left before I would depart the US, the 9/11 attacks occurred.

I didn’t know anybody who died in the attacks on September 11, 2001, but as with most Americans, it still affected me profoundly.

I remember when I first learned about the attacks, I was on the roof of a house. I was at a job cleaning windows with a coworker when our boss pulled up the driveway, got out of his truck, and shouted up to us about what had happened.

I had always enjoyed history classes in school and considered myself more aware of what was happening in the world than the average American, but I was still naïve enough at the time to ask myself one simple question . . .

“Why would people do this?”

What was the motivation? What was the underlying grievance that could drive people to commit such senseless acts of violence?

In the days and weeks that followed, as I watched the TV news after work, I repeatedly heard the answer from President George W. Bush that it was because “they hate our freedom.”

I couldn’t make any sense of that. I was such a ludicrous thing to say. It was obvious that we were being lied to—which only heightened my curiosity about the real reason.

After arriving in Taiwan, I started spending time between job hunts at an internet café near the hostel I was staying at. For the first time, I discovered the world wide web—an incredible library of just about anything I wanted to know at my fingertips!

I became obsessed with exploring all kinds of different interests and consuming a vast amount of information—and I would later often remark how I learned more valuable information in the first six months of exploring the internet on my own than in all my years of so-called college “education”.

My interests were vast, but because of 9/11, a primary research focus of mine was to understand the true nature of the US government and its role in the world.

And it didn’t take me very long to understand how US foreign policy was violating the rights of people living in the Middle East—including the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

With an initial focus on the events of 9/11, it quickly became clear through my research how we were being lied to—including the false claim that the attacks were a complete surprise to the US intelligence community.

It also became clear how the so-called “neoconservatives” had effectively taken control of the Bush administration and were utilizing 9/11 as a necessary pretext for advancing an imperialist agenda that predated the attacks.

9/11 was, in their own words, the “new Pearl Harbor” required to advance their aim of US global dominance—an aim that the Zionist neocons viewed as inseparable from Israel’s aim to dominate all the land formerly known as Palestine.

Part of that preconceived agenda involved overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq—and not out of any kind of security or humanitarian concerns.

After all, the US government had previously supported Hussein, and the neocons were clear in their aim of advancing US dominance in the Middle East, preserving the US dollar’s role as world reserve currency in the international oil trade, and eliminating a key regional supporter of Palestinians’ rights.

The more knowledge I uncovered with my research, the more I felt compelled to share it.

So, I started participating in various internet discussion forums while also sending emails home to friends and family warning how the US government was lying about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) as a false pretext to wage an illegal war of aggression.

In my naivete, I expected people to respond to my emails with appreciation for revealing the truth. Instead, I found myself under personal attack even by my own friends and family.

I was discouraged to learn that nobody wanted to hear the truth—and so they would attack the messenger. For telling the truth, I was roundly accused of being “unpatriotic,” “anti-American,” “un-Christian”, “pro-Saddam”, a “conspiracy theorist”, etc.

That experience traumatized me. For a long time, I just didn’t know how to deal with it. I couldn’t comprehend people’s reactions to the truthful and verifiable information I was sharing with them to combat the brazen lies emanating from the US government and mainstream media.

See, I had mistakenly assumed that all that is necessary to persuade someone is to provide them with facts and share logical conclusions. I learned a hard lesson through that painful experience . . .

Most people will choose to believe lies because the truth is just too uncomfortable for them to contemplate.

After that harsh reality dawned on me, I also realized that I would need to find a way to get my message through to people who actually cared about the truth.

That painful experience led me to seek out people who were at least willing to reasonably consider what I had to say—so the challenge became how to find those people.

Who were they? Where were they? How could I connect with them?

While nobody I knew personally back home had anything encouraging to say about my newfound activism, I did receive one sage piece of advice from an individual I’d met online. After I’d sent a particularly long email to my contacts about how the government was lying, this person replied to suggest I just start a free website with a service existing back then called “GeoCities”.

So, I did!

Because I was extremely introverted and wished to avoid any kind of public spotlight, I started out publishing my writings anonymously, while carefully supporting my arguments with references to demonstrate credibility.

However, I soon came to realize that if I wished to be perceived as credible and authoritative, it wasn’t enough to provide links to sources. Truth seekers wanted to know who they were getting information from, so I started writing under my real name and submitting my articles to various alternative news sources online, such as Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Znet, The Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, and Antiwar.com.

Slowly, my contributions at the margins of public discourse started gaining recognition by other truth-tellers working to get critical information through to the masses in the face of a mainstream media establishment that disseminated government and industry propaganda while proclaiming itself the sole arbiter of truth.

For years while earning a living as a teacher in Taiwan, I researched and wrote about US foreign policy as a “hobby” done in my “free time”—but as my passion for learning and sharing truth became increasingly time-consuming, I realized I had to somehow start earning money from it.

Partly with the hope of generating significant revenue from banner advertisements, I decided to launch a website aimed at publishing articles written by other independent researchers alongside my own.

So, in 2008, with the aim of providing an alternative news media platform to challenge mainstream propaganda narratives driving endless wars and bloodshed, I launched the website Foreign Policy Journal (FPJ).

The first iteration of the site was coded by hand using my self-taught knowledge of HTML and CSS! However, learning how to code was not my primary passion, so I happy to soon learn that WordPress was no mere “blogging” platform but a powerful content management system (CMS) that would enable me to bring my vision to life without so much manual labor.

Very soon after I launched FPJ in the fall of 2008, Israel launched its 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”.

I followed that historical event very closely, and for writing about how the US Congress was supporting and glorifying Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, I was honored with a Project Censored Award.

The mainstream media’s gross mischaracterization of that operation was transparently aimed at manufacturing consent for the longstanding US government policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

Witnessing this deception, I became determined to write a book to set the record straight about the US role in the conflict.

It was a monumental task, and I realized that to be able to explain the present-day situation would require an examination of the conflict’s origin during the Mandate era—when Great Britain enforced a belligerent occupation of Palestine to facilitate the Zionists’ settler-colonial project of reconstituting Arab Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state”.

The policy course Britain set out on with its infamous “Balfour Declaration” of 1917 ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine—which is how the state of Israel was established in 1948.

So, I splintered my grander book idea into an initial experiment in self-publishing focused just on the conflict’s origin during the Mandate era. The result was my 2009 book, The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict.

Around the time I launched FPJ, I had also made the decision to quit my teaching job at a school to start my own private tutoring business, which was my first experience with entrepreneurialism.

We lived mainly off my wife’s income while I worked on getting clients, but once I got rolling, I started making considerably more income by working fewer hours. This enabled me to finally start work on my major book project in 2011—my magnum opus on the topic titled Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

In addition to that book and my many articles on the subject, I’ve also published a short e-book titled Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which demonstrates through this prominent Israeli historian’s own research how the “Jewish state” of Israel was in fact established through the crime of ethnic cleansing.

In 2018, I obtained an advance review copy of a book advertised as a fresh, pro-liberty approach to the conflict, but which just regurgitates the same tired propaganda that has always been used to try to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. So, I published a rebuttal titled Exposing a Zionist Hoax: How Elan Journo’s ‘What Justice Demands’ Deceives Readers about the Palestine Conflict.

But going back to 2011, it would take me five more years to complete and publish Obstacle to Peace, and in the meantime, many other important events occurred . . .

I first become aware of Congressman Ron Paul in the early 2000s when I saw him speaking out against the Federal Reserve system, which I had recognized early on as a legalized counterfeiting operation that effects an upwards transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the politically connected financial elites—a system of effective enslavement.

I then also saw Ron Paul speaking out against the Iraq War and consistently advocating a sensible non-interventionist foreign policy. He earned my respect and admiration as a rare voice of reason in the government.

I had never considered myself a “libertarian” and didn’t really know what that word was even supposed to mean, given how it was so often misused by the media to mean someone who advocates chaos and lawlessness.

It was from Ron Paul that I learned that the essence of this political philosophy is instead belief in the principle of non-aggression.

Basically, every individual has a right to do as they please if they don’t infringe upon the equal rights of others. Essentially, the non-aggression principle is an understanding of liberty based on the golden rule.

After the collapse of the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, I began focusing research more intently on economics.

Ron Paul had accurately predicted the bubble, and I wanted to understand how. I began learning about the Austrian school of economics, whose luminaries advocate sound money and free markets.

As I came to learn, it was Ron Paul’s knowledge of the Austrian theory of the business cycle that enabled him to issue such prescient warnings about the harmful consequences of Fed policy.

In 2012, during the presidential campaign season, I continually saw people on social media, including some of my own readers, parroting the mainstream media characterization of Ron Paul as some kind of kook with crazy economic ideas.

These same people would at the same time heap praise on Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for his supposed wisdom.

I kept finding myself having to explain how Ron Paul had accurately warned against the Fed policy that caused the housing bubble while Paul Krugman had advocated that very same policy specifically for the purpose of fueling a boom in housing!

During that 2012 election season, I grew so tired of having to explain this repeatedly to people on social media that I decided to take a break from my work on Obstacle to Peace to write an article about it. By the time it was done, I figured it was long enough to try another experiment in self-publishing and make it into a short book.

The result was Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis.

Incredibly, without me spending a penny on marketing, strictly through word-of-mouth, my book ended up getting a rave review in none other than the Wall Street Journal-owned financial weekly Barron’s!

Written by Economics and Books Editor Gene Epstein, the review described me as “a writer of rare skill” and said my book was a “must-read” that “conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks”.

Mr. Epstein subsequently invited me to write several book reviews for Barron’s, and in time we became friends. In fact, I later shared the manuscript of Obstacle to Peace with him, and he graciously provided me with feedback that prompted me to invite him to write an Introduction for the book—which he did!

But back in 2012, when I published Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman, my magnum opus on the Israel-Palestine conflict was still four years away from publication—and something else happened in my life that year that would change everything . . .

One day in early 2012, I came home from work to be greeted by my wife with news that both terrified me and filled me with joy.

I was going to become a father!

I hardly felt ready to shoulder that responsibility, but I got immediately to work preparing to make the best choices possible for our child.

Realizing that we would soon have to start making important decisions about childhood vaccinations, I started applying the research skills I had acquired doing journalism to researching the medical literature for myself.

I had already learned not to trust the lying government, mainstream media, and supposed “experts”, so I fully anticipated finding a disparity between the public messaging about vaccines and the science.

Instead, I was shocked to discover an unbridgeable chasm.

Simply stated, what the government and media say science says and what science actually tells us are two completely different things.

Our son was born that fall, and we felt that my home state of Michigan would be a better environment. So, in the spring of 2013, I quit my tutoring business, and we moved halfway around the world to start a new life together.

It was the second time in my life that I’d left everything behind to basically start over.

I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I was intent on trying to figure out a way to make a living doing journalism while remaining totally independent. To that end, I established the legal entity under which I conduct my work, Worldview Media, LLC.

I aimed to transition my writing from being a spare-time passion to a full-time career.

Although I harbored no illusions that it would become a New York Times bestseller, I viewed the publication of my book Obstacle to Peace—through my own imprint, Worldview Publications—as an important step in that journey.

It wouldn’t make me rich, but publishing the book would build trust and authority, helping to establish me as a knowledgeable research analyst delivering unique insights and helping to simplify seemingly complicated—and controversial—issues.

But just as I was getting started, I encountered another major obstacle that risked throwing me off that path . . .  

Several months after my family moved from Taiwan to Michigan, I started experiencing unexplained and debilitating health symptoms.

The first problem was strange rashes that would appear suddenly and made me miserably itchy. Other symptoms soon followed, including such a severe migraine—my first ever—that I ended up in the emergency room.

As if I hadn’t had enough on my plate already as a new father who’d quit his job and moved his family halfway around the world to pursue a passion, I now found myself having to take time away from those priorities to try to figure out what was happening with my health.

For many years back in Taiwan, I had experienced digestive problems that doctors meaninglessly labelled “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” (IBS), but I had already learned to manage my gut symptoms by eliminating wheat from my diet.

So, when I started experiencing these other symptoms, it didn’t even cross my mind that they might be gut related.

The doctors had no answers for me, though, so I started applying my research skills again to investigating my symptoms in the medical literature—and I quickly concluded that I was suffering from a condition known as “leaky gut”, or intestinal hyperpermeability.

I tried to get help from “licensed medical professionals”, but the doctors proved less than useless, and their harmful ignorance was matched only by their arrogant condescension—like literally mocking me for doing my own research.

With one exception, all the doctors I sought help from refused to even acknowledge leaky gut as a real condition—notwithstanding the hundreds of studies I’d read about it and the thousands of results for it that would turn up for it in searches of the medical literature at PubMed.gov!

So, after repeated experiences dealing with the medical cartel masquerading as a “health care” system, I quit my vain efforts to get help from doctors and pursued my own path to healing.

My self-diagnosis proved accurate. By focusing on improving my gut health, after a few years of struggle, I was able to resolve the debilitating symptoms that the useless doctors insisted I’d just have to treat pharmaceutically for the rest of my life.

That experience further emboldened me to stop listening to ignoramuses with “MD” after their names and to start trusting my own knowledge and judgment.

Between that and the knowledge I was gaining through my continued vaccine research, I ultimately felt compelled to start writing about so-called “public health” policies in addition to my work on foreign policy and economic matters.

It was a daunting decision. For one, it seemed foolish from a financial and career perspective to veer down that other path just as I was preparing to launch my book Obstacle to Peace on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I also knew I would be placing a target on my back by committing heresy against the vaccine religion.

But once I’d acquired that knowledge from my own research on vaccines in the medical literature, I couldn’t not share it. I felt morally compelled to do so.

By 2015, I felt confident enough in my knowledge to take on that formidable challenge, and I started publicly speaking out against vaccine policies resulting in the systematic violation of the right to informed consent.

While some readers reflexively attacked me for it, my writings on the topic also drew a lot of new readers to my website—including parents of vaccine-injured children, nurses, doctors, and scientists—who expressed gratitude to me for speaking out and telling the truth.

I continued to write about international affairs and economic issues, but as a father now primarily concerned with my own son’s future and the threat to our liberty at home, I felt it increasingly imperative to shift my focus to the vaccine issue.

In 2018, I wrote a series of detailed articles exposing the fraudulent nature of the CDC’s universal flu shot recommendation, which ended up gaining the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who praised it as a “must-read”.

My work on the subject earned me recognition within the leadership of the health freedom movement, and I began collaborating on a freelance basis with Kennedy’s organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD)—which he has since left to serve as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In early 2021, I learned how the renowned pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas had his license “emergently” suspended after publishing a study in a peer-reviewed journal showing the astonishingly superior health of his completely unvaccinated patients.

I had an opportunity to interview Dr. Thomas, which led me to write an article exposing—among other things—how the regime of medical licensing is being weaponized against doctors who respect parents’ right to make their own informed decisions about childhood vaccinations.

That article, too, caught the attention of Mr. Kennedy, who encouraged me to publish a book about it, which I did. The only book of mine not self-published, it features a Foreword by RFK, Jr, and is titled The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board.

I have also had the honor of collaborating with Dr. Jeet Varia, a fellow in science and research at CHD, and Dr. Brian Hooker, the Chief Scientific Officer at CHD and the father of a son with autism. Dr. Hooker famously broke the story of the CDC whistleblower William Thompson as featured in the film Vaxxed.

I coauthored a paper with these two gentlemen thoroughly debunking the CDC’s claim that studies have proven that “vaccines do not cause autism” and showing why it is disinformation. Our paper was published in May 2025 in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

In it, we critically examine the 2019 Hviid et al. study out of Denmark purporting to show that the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism even in children with a genetic susceptibility. We show that their study couldn’t have disproven a link because it wasn’t faithfully designed to find one.

As we illuminate, the truth is that no study has ever been done to test the hypothesis that vaccines administered according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism with a genetic or environmentally caused susceptibility, and therefore it is not possible for the hypothesis to have been falsified.

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID‑19 a global pandemic in March 2020, and governments around the world responded by implementing extreme “lockdown” measures, I immediately began speaking out against the extreme authoritarianism.

Six months before prominent epidemiologists issued the Great Barrington Declaration criticizing harmful lockdown measures, I was advocating their same recommended approach of focusing protection on people at high risk, while younger and healthier people carried on with their lives and built up the population immunity required to end the pandemic and protect the most vulnerable.

Incidentally, one of the authors of that declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, later shared an article of mine on Twitter that exposed the CDC’s brazen lies about natural immunity versus that conferred by the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines, calling it “an absolutely blistering critique” of the CDC’s deceptions. Dr. Bhattacharya went on to become the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the second Donald Trump administration.

Although I had once again taken up a position attacked as fringe and lunatic by the mainstream media, I was later proven correct. The promised benefits of the lockdowns never manifested in the data, while their extraordinary harms have been absolutely devastating—and disproportionately borne by poor families and children.

I was also warning people from the start that the endgame of the lockdown madness was coerced mass vaccination, which also proved prescient.

While the media were busy manufacturing consent for the medical tyranny, I was busy debunking their government-approved lies and misinformation—such as the claim that natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2 was weak and short-lived.

When leading “public health” officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky claimed that two doses of an mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine would confer durable sterilizing immunity, ending the pandemic by stopping infection and transmission, I was accurately warning how they were brazenly lying.

My deep research into the scientific literature and the thorough corruption of the medical establishment had made me well prepared to shift the focus of my work to effectively combating the government’s unscientific and criminal policies.

Indeed, the lockdown madness and its coerced mass vaccination endgame were a crime against humanity—which we must do everything in our power to prevent from ever happening again.

It was largely because of the need to focus all my efforts on fighting the medical tyranny at home that I made the decision in 2020 to cease publishing Foreign Policy Journal.

Other factors in that decision included my desire to spend more time doing my own research and writing instead of reviewing and editing other people’s articles and the fact I had already shifted my focus predominantly to the vaccine issue.

Additionally, Google had already been censoring FPJ for a few years, effectively eliminating it from search results; and then in 2020, Google suspended my advertising account on the ostensible grounds that I had violated their terms of use by speaking out against the lockdowns.

While FPJ had become too financially unsustainable for me to continue, I kept the effort up and continued to publish my writings on site JeremyRHammond.com—where I decided I would not rely on banner advertisements for monetization.

I was terrified at the time that the already meager income I was earning would dry up because of the censorship and the impact on reader donations from the deliberate shutdown of the economy.

Instead, my opposition to the lockdowns struck a chord with many people, resulting in an unexpected inpouring of support and encouragement from appreciative readers who valued the depth of knowledge I delivered in my research essays.

For the first time, my goal of making a living as a journalist while maintaining total independence seemed achievable—if I could figure out how to sustain that level of support for the long-term.

Another positive development was the awakening of the libertarian community to the threat of medical tyranny. Before the pandemic, I felt extreme disappointment in the dearth of libertarian voices within the health freedom movement, whereas many prominent libertarians have since been very vocal in criticizing not only the lockdowns and COVID‑19 vaccines but also the formerly taboo topic of the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule.

Then in the fall of 2023, another major event occurred that once again required me to shift my focus and effectively alienate myself from many readers who’d known me only for my work in the health freedom movement . . .

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian armed group ruling the Gaza Strip, Hamas, broke out of this “huge concentration camp”—as it had described in 2004 by then head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland—and assaulted Israeli military bases and civilian communities.

Around 1,200 Israelis were killed, mostly civilians, and 250 people were abducted and taken back to Gaza as hostages in what Hamas called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”—a reference to what Palestinians call the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound and Israelis call the Temple Mount in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem.

Israel responded by launching a genocidal assault on the civilian population of the besieged Gaza Strip.

At the time, it hadn’t really written anything about the Israel-Palestine conflict for several years. I had felt that most of what I’d had to say about it was already contained in Obstacle to Peace, not much had changed since I’d published that book, and fighting the medical tyranny at home had simply become a more urgent priority for me as a father.

Plus, I had achieved a level of support for my efforts in the health freedom movement that I’d never obtained previously with my work on foreign policy, which had given me much-needed momentum.

But now the status quo had been shattered with an unprecedented level of violence that demanded my attention—particularly given the US government’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal assault.

Long-time readers who’d been following me since before I ever got involved in the health freedom movement sought my insights.

Within the libertarian community, I had also come to be recognized as a knowledgeable person on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a few weeks after the 10/7 attacks, I was invited as a return guest onto the popular Tom Woods Show to debate Israel’s assault on Gaza with one of the authors of an article in the Wall Street Journal shamelessly defending Israel’s war crimes as though this represented the proper libertarian position.

After that appearance, I was also invited by Mr. Gene Epstein to debate the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Soho Forum in Manhattan, New York—a prospect that terrified me as an extreme introvert who had never spoken before a live audience and dislikes being in the public spotlight, but which I nevertheless accepted due to the gravity of the situation and the importance of getting my message out.

By mid-November 2023, I had begun explicitly calling it a genocide according to the legal definition contained in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

At the end of December, the government of South Africa opened a legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for violating the Genocide Convention, and in January 2024, the court issued preliminary measures recognizing Israel’s actions as a plausible genocide and ordering Israel to take concrete steps to comply with the convention.

A month to the day after the ICJ issued that order, I was at the Soho Forum debate, where I was declared the winner for persuading more of the audience to my view than my opponent did to his.

Then in March, I was honored to accept an invitation to join The Libertarian Institute as a Research Fellow.

In numerous media appearances after that, institute director and indefatigable radio show host Scott Horton praised me as the libertarian movement’s top expert on the Palestine conflict—which was high praise indeed given his own encyclopedic knowledge about all things related to US foreign policy. He also praised my book Obstacle to Peace as “the definitive scholarly account of America’s role in the entire disaster.”

While my return to a focus on US foreign policy was well received within the libertarian community, my stance against Israel’s genocide was met with harsh denouncements from many within the health freedom movement.

I was appalled by the attempts to justify Israel’s crimes against humanity—including by RFK, Jr., whom I felt was destroying his legacy as a defender of children and human rights by defending the genocide (as I informed him personally out of friendship and respect).

In one network, I was told that my opposition to the slaughter was off topic, which I strongly rejected. There are no children in the world who need our help more right now, I pleaded, than the children of Gaza.

Whereas I had previously been disappointed that only a handful of colleagues within the libertarian community were speaking out against public vaccine policies, now that I’d switched my focus again, I was disappointed to find only a handful of colleagues within the health freedom movement who joined me in speaking out against Israel’s assault on the civilian population of Gaza—which has since been explicitly recognized as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and numerous UN independent experts.

For my defense of Palestinians’ human rights, I received an initial flood of angry emails from readers evidently unfamiliar with my prior work on foreign policy. Thousands of readers on my mailing list unsubscribed from my newsletters—including many donors who had supported my work on health freedom.

Although that was incredibly discouraging, I also received messages of encouragement from many appreciative readers who stood with me on both issues, along with financial contributions from generous individuals who felt the honesty and integrity I demonstrated with my writings and activism had earned their support.

In whatever area I have chosen to focus my research over the years, I have received recognition from prominent thought leaders as an insightful analyst and skilled writer.

Far from shying away from contentious issues, I have dared to take on some of the most controversial topics imaginable.

Of course, anyone who stands up and speaks out against the status quo risks facing personal attacks and denouncements not only from online critics, but also from colleagues, friends, and family.

I have certainly experienced such adversity for my own principled stances on various issues—but I have refused to let such opposition dissuade me from my mission.

No matter what challenges I have faced on this journey, I have persevered in my truly independent journalism, driven by a compulsion to do my part to help make the world a better place.

Although in my youth I felt powerless and directionless, I now believe—and have proven to myself—that we are all capable of making a difference.

Each one of us can make a positive impact if we put the time into learning, and if we can find the wisdom and courage to do what is right instead of what’s easy.

The easiest path at any given moment might seem like social conformity and silence, but we can’t lose sight of the harmful consequences of our inaction. The risks to our liberty, our health, and our children’s future are too grave to succumb to apathy.

We shouldn’t fear being treated as outcasts from a society that is so perverse and barbaric. We shouldn’t fear being treated as heretics for refusing to join with a statist cult.

Together, we can help achieve the paradigm shifts necessary to advance humankind toward a civilized society.

We must—for the sake of our children and future generations.

To that end, if you are not already a member, I encourage you to join my reader community!