Not a post here, just a link to a Matt Taibbi thread, CTI Files #4: The Hamilton 68 Connection, linking Terp, Jonathon Morgan, and the Hamilton 68 dashboard. Terp and Morgan worked on another NGO effort in 2014, joining Ushahidi, a Kenyan software company, open-source intelligence group (crowdsourcing). Wonder how much American taxpayers have sunk into these Dem/liberal cyber (NGO) efforts?
Morgan was the CEO of New Knowledge (now called Yonder), that specializes in information integrity. He also participated in a 2017 Dem false flag operation (creating fake Russian bots) against a Republican Senate candidate in AL. He’s linked to the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which ostensibly tracked down real Russian bots and fake Twitter accounts, yet were mostly just lists of ordinary people. Plus, his New Knowledge company was hired to pen the US Senate report on Russia’s social media operations.
With so many other big news events garnering media attention and a “boy who cried wolf” aura to all these highly partisan Congressional investigations, another House Republican led hearing into alleged Democrat weaponization of the federal government passed by last week with little notice. The opening witness statements were interesting and led me to some googling. The linked hearing video starts at the 36 minute mark. Committee Chairman, Jim Jordan, delivered his opening statement, followed by Democrat Representative, Stacey Plaskett, whose opening statement was a very typical Democrat, “nothing to see/Republicans are wasting our time” mantra. Plaskett was zinged last summer for what appeared to me to be a Freudian slip in an interview, where she said Donald Trump should be shot. She immediately backtracked.
Being weary of partisan investigations and Congressional grandstanding, I haven’t watched the entire hearing and don’t know if I’ll sit through the full three hours, but the opening witness statements included some information that likely is important. This hearing is an expansion of information by investigative journalists, Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, who looked into Twitter files Elon Musk provided to them when he bought Twitter last year and a few other witnesses, who spoke on free speech and censorship.
Yesterday I watched a YouTube video by an older lady homesteader, who was talking about her first experience having one of her videos removed from YouTube. I’m not going to mention her name, because I don’t want to cause her any harm. She was so cautious about her words, as she tried to explain her video YouTube pulled. That video was from six years ago. That would hint there’s a big purge of information effort ongoing. She related her social media history getting online with her gardening videos and setting up a blog. She said that video was from a National Heirloom Expo event, where she recorded a panel of speakers, one who is a current presidential candidate and they were discussing a chemical in a popular weed-killer. Some video from six years ago, by a small homesteading You Tube channel about a panel discussion at an heirloom seed expo was just banned…
No matter how much I’d like to move on from the American spin information war, I remain convinced this information war remains a serious threat to American free speech, our personal liberty and to our republic writ large. Some will likely consider this an overstatement or hysteria, but I believe it’s reality. While most of America, myself included, with all the other news events happening, didn’t pay an iota of attention to last week’s House hearing on the weaponization of the federal government, we probably should have been taking down notes.
It’s become a regular thing for several years to see YouTube videos where the content creator(s) mentions having videos demonetized or pulled. Similar complaints about social media moderation have been ongoing on other social media platforms. Of course, the most famous social media moderation action occurred on Jan. 8, 2021, when Twitter permanently banned former president, Donald J. Trump’s personal Twitter account. Although, I’d rather not be writing about the very online American spin information war, it’s real and it’s expanding and accelerating.
In 1998 the Clinton spin team launched what they termed a “scorched earth” spin effort to derail the Clinton impeachment investigation. Looking back at their rather thuggish efforts at witness intimidation and tampering (all women), cable news repetitive messaging barrages, with James Carville ranting nightly, and their nascent efforts at online spin information warfare on emerging social engagement venues (precursors to today’s social media platforms) things were less sophisticated than today’s high-tech/surreal psychological manipulation efforts at information manipulation and control. It’s always about control.
The Patriot Act, passed during the GWB Bush presidency, dramatically loosened the restraints on our intelligence agencies to gather information and monitor, not only foreigners, but American citizens. Sophistication in the Dem’s spin war grew and all sorts of academics devised theories and media manipulation tools to try to police and manipulate the vast media information terrain. By the Obama years, ideas and programs emerged to use things like behavioral nudge theory to manipulate (nudge) Americans into making better choices, especially in the health area. Nudge theory was the brainchild of American academic, Richard Thaler and popularized by a 2008 book, Nudge, written by Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The Obama administration embraced not only Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power, who served in the Obama State Department and later as US ambassador to the UN, they embraced incorporating nudge theory into US government programs to nudge Americans on what to think.
We’ve come a long way baby, as the first witness opening statement by Michael Shellenberger asserted there’s an entire “censorship industrial complex,” that formed and has been evolving since 2017. He described the formation of the Cyber Threat Intelligence League in 2017. He related that he received whistleblower information and this sounds eerily like another version of the Steele dossier, replete with an assist by people in intelligence circles in the UK and the US. Here’s a bit from the Schellenberge, Taibbi, Gutentag, Substack piece, CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show, published on November 28, 2023:
“The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016.”
So, while this is an assertion by some journalists right now, who claim they have a whistleblower providing information and documents, we’ll have to see what information comes out. It’s worth remembering Trump’s inauguration was January 20, 2017 and the Obama team, Democrats and the vast liberal media apparatus in America were going bonkers about “Trump the Authoritarian” and desperate to #Resist Trump, by any means necessary.
Another of the witnesses at this House hearing was Canadian Free Press journalist, Rupa Subramanya, who related what’s been going on in Canada to quell free speech. Using the COVID hysteria, Canada passed a new law, which allows the government to police speech and “debank” citizens for violating the speech laws. Subramanya testified more than 800 Canadians have had their bank accounts frozen, so they can’t access their own money.
Back in August I wrote a blog post, Who are the totalitarians?, where I mentioned efforts to crackdown on speech in the UK, Germany, Ireland and other countries were escalating. Now, we’re learning about a secret, hybrid UK-US program to monitor and control speech in America, hatched in the Obama White House, right before Trump took office, with tentacles into US and UK intelligence circles, but outside of executive branch (Trump’s) control and Congressional oversight, but allegedly having access to government funds.
And, as a reminder, in April 2022, the Biden administration launched, the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, within the Department of Homeland Security, headed by a flaming liberal, Trump-hating, COVID zealot, Nina Jankowicz, who had tweeted during 2020 that she wanted the government to get tough and lock us down. That DHS effort lasted three weeks, but never fear, the left will always try another avenue to push their progressive agenda through.
Again, if this story about a “CTI league” operating outside of government control or oversight, yet with powerful partisan political guiding hands and access to government funding, is true… Who are the totalitarians?
I went on Twitter/X this morning and of course, our liberal media’s rush yesterday to run with Hamas’ version blaming Israel for a “missile attack that destroyed a hospital in Gaza – claiming mass casualties – at least 500 dead.” turned out to be a lie. The IDF and US officials conclude it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired and hit a hospital. There’s been video footage from today showing the hospital wasn’t destroyed and it was the hospital parking lot that was hit.
Palestinian authorities, even before Hamas, routinely lied and created elaborate street theater productions of anti-Israeli propaganda – for decades this has been going on and is nothing new. However, all of this media embrace of the Hamas version ignited violent anti-Israel and anti-American protests around the world yesterday. The same liberal media that demanded endless verification of slaughtered Israeli (and American) civilians by Hamas, the same Hamas who is presently holding hundreds of hostage, took the Hamas spokesperson’s word yesterday without question.
This isn’t the first time the same crowd of liberal media and talking head class sided with terrorists though – they did it in 2020 when Trump was president and our military took out ISIS terrorist leader al-Baghdadi and Iranian terrorist mastermind, General Soleimani, because the liberal media didn’t want to give Trump any credit for that. Then Iran lobbed some missiles at US troops in Iraq .
Soleimani was the leader of the Iranian Quds Force and responsible for Iranian IEDs that were fed to terrorists in Iraq. He was responsible for hundreds of American soldiers being killed by those Iranian IEDs in Iraq, yet our media was glorifying him, all because Trump ordered US troops to take him out. This would be like our media cheering on Osama Bin Laden when US troops took him out.
I was on Twitter that night in January 2020 and then watched the Dems and liberal media spin effort take off, in real time, as those events unfolded and it was alarming to me. Iran lobbed missiles at US troops in Iraq, then Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off in Tehran. A big Dem/liberal media spin effort ignited. I was upset that these yahoos were siding with Iran, because they wanted to blame Trump for “causing” Iran to fire missiles at US troops in retaliation for the US eliminating Soleimani. The truth was Iran controlled the airspace at the airport in Tehran and was responsible for any planes taking off and landing at that airport. Their military accidentally shot down that Ukrainian airliner (although I was curious who all was on that plane). The US fired no missiles at Iran that night. Yet, these Dem and liberal media were spinning up “fog of war” and other crazy talking points, like asserting the shootdown happened due to “crossfire,” to absolve Iran of blame and blame Trump. There was no “crossfire,” since Iran was the only one firing missiles that night – attacking US troops in Iraq and shooting down a civilian airliner taking off in Tehran… They were willing to do damage control for the terrorist regime in Iran, even when US troops had been targeted by Iranian missile attacks that night – all because they hate Trump and wanted to blame him. It was the craziest thing I ever saw – until yesterday.
One of the big Dem spin queens during that Twitter spin effort was Susan Hennessey, who was working at Lawfare, but now is in the Biden NSA – yes, a person with that lack of judgment to spew pro-Iranian propaganda, when US troops were just attacked is at the Biden NSA. I’m including my challenge to her tweet, as verification of that spin effort, even though she sanitized her Twitter feed when she was picked to work at the NSA and that’s the person, whose tweet I was responding to in my first tweet:
What a deceptive bit of propaganda!
The US launched NO strikes that night – there was NO CROSSFIRE.
They're obviously radicals, so expect nothing different from them, but the American news media failed on an epic level yesterday. Something within the news media broke during the Trump era as scorched earth spin war, to destroy Trump, took precedence over fact-checking. https://t.co/FvJppeXSmf
I recall Andrea Mitchell gushing over the great General Soleimani too. Soleimani's terrorism resulted in hundreds of American deaths in Iraq from Iranian IEDs.
The difference now with our news media total absence of journalistic standards is their reckless scorched earth spin war way of reporting news helped ignite violent protests around the world.
One of those spinmeisters now sits at the NSA…protecting America. We are doomed with idiots like these running our news media and government. And the mainstream media hasn't even really delved into the Robert Malley, selling out America chronicles yet.
Yes, this terrorist-sympathizer is working in the Biden Department of Homeland Security – handling asylum claims.
Here’s a Marc Theissen post on Twittetr/X from this morning, pointing out that the New York Times yesterday used a photo from some other bombing, because today the images, show that hospital in Gaza was not destroyed yesterday:
This is turning into a huge embarrassment for the @nytimes. False headline, wrong picture. Total journalistic malpractice. Literally “fake news.” https://t.co/Oqqqt1Ekcd
I wasn’t kidding yesterday about how you have to be skeptical about every news report – no matter who is reporting it and be particularly wary of photos and videos, because images have always been easily manipulated – long before AI. When Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 50s, he routinely had people erased out of photos, if they got on his bad side and were… eliminated.
In my X thread from this morning I mentioned Robert Malley and somehow the liberal media hasn’t rushed to dig into that Biden scandal and I expect that story will get the Hunter Biden laptop treatment from the liberal media – they’ll pretend “nothing to see here.” Robert Malley was working at the Biden State Department and is the administration’s top Iran negotiator. He also worked for Presidents Clinton and Obama. In July, the Biden State Department announced that Malley’s security clearance had been suspended for mishandling highly classified information. Here’s an article about this guy: High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington. I’ll be writing a blog post about Robert Malley soon.
As events unfold in this Israeli-Hamas conflict, Iran’s hands are all over this Hamas attack. We have an administration with a lot of apologists for both Iran and Palestinian terrorists in it – even their recently suspended top Iran envoy – Robert Malley was allegedly feeding top classified information to Iranian spies…
Update: 10/18/2023 8:43 pm, I just saw this Twitter/X thread by journalist Drew Holden, who put together all the media Hamas disinformation from yesterday:
🧵THREAD🧵
A deadly blast hit Gaza yesterday. Hamas blamed Israel. The media rushed to parrot their claims. Evidence suggests they were lies. @FreeBeacon
Here are the outlets who carried water for a terrorist group to smear Israel ⤵️ https://t.co/z3RW3XVmEe
This morning I had a doctor’s appointment and decided to drop off a box I had in the back of my car at the Goodwill, which is near my doctor’s office. Then I decided to stop by Dollar Tree, which is also nearby, and look around. When I was checking out I told the cashier I think my decluttering plan needs more work. I went to the Goodwill to get rid of junk, then I went to Dollar Tree and bought more junk… At least it was under $10.
Okay, this is going to be a long politics post and I’ll probably be writing mostly politics posts for a bit. I’m not buying into the Dem/liberal media spin hysteria that the raid on Trump’s home was because of some “urgent” national security threat pertaining to Trump allegedly having classified information in boxes, which necessitated this dramatic FBI raid. I will never be a die-hard Trump supporter, so of course, I realize Trump might have classified documents, even highly classified ones. I also know Trump lies a lot, so I try to look for facts. I’m using some of my tweets in this post, to save some time.
I believe what’s going on in this episode of Dem/liberal media Spin Theater is not only about the J-6 hearing, but also trying to incite and demonize “MAGA Republicans.”
#Resist was about delegitimizing and doing everything possible to remove a POTUS from office. The ongoing Trump/Russia Collusion was used to try to remove Trump from office, by any means necessary.
There's more to come with this raid on Trump's home, beyond Trump. I believe Dems want to provoke a violent backlash, to use as cover to impose all sorts rules on silencing the smelly Walmart people & undesirable "MAGA Republicans." Watch the Dem spin as it evolves.
Sorry that part of this tweet thread has the same tweet twice, but the entire thread won’t copy and paste, and the last tweet keeps copying two tweets at a time.
This issue of a president’s ability to declassify and what steps he needs to take to declassify information has never been put to any tests – despite what all these liberal experts on CNN and MSNBC wax on about. The president has unique powers in the executive branch under our constitution, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.
The actual details of the documents aren’t even publicly known and the actual process of reviewing those documents and assessing their classification status has not been completed yet, so all the liberal media hyperventilating about “nuclear documents” is spin being fed to the media from inside the Biden administration:
DoJ has set up what is known as a “filter team,” a separate group of agents and lawyers to review materials taken in raid to determine whether any of them are protected before they will be provided to investigators. Shades of “Crossfire Hurricane.” https://t.co/b6VDI4w1pz
From the Clinton email scandal, I remember reading information about how it’s not just a matter of determining whether information is classified or unclassified. Information could have been marked classified, but is no longer classified and vice versa, information can be up-classified now, that was not classified originally. Plus, there are the different levels of classified information. And of course this issue of a president’s power to declassify has never been tested.
Yesterday, some liberal media people were on a spin effort to create more Trump drama, going on and on about how dangerous Trump was for wanting to declassify some highly classified information that alarmed intelligence officials. The president has the power to declassify any information he chooses, not intelligence officials. It’s been amazing to me that the liberal media and anti-Trump people worked so hard to impede and obstruct every decision Trump made. Here’s an example of that and my quote tweet:
Seems like every POTUS, except Trump, was allowed to use the power of the office according to the TDS left. Obama authorized drones strikes on American citizens – Al-awlaki & his 16 year-old son. Don't hear any outrage about that. https://t.co/ayzahsESdu
I have been quoting liberal media sources and official government reports on my Twitter quote tweets with facts. I am using their own words to show they’re either ill-informed about their own reporting or deliberately lying to generate anti-Trump hysteria. And that’s what I want to get into here.
One of my sons today told me liberal Twitter was full of talk about something called “stochastic terrorism,” another made up bunch of liberal bullshit.
One of the first people to toss around this term was Juliette Kayyem, former Obama Homeland Security official: https://t.co/abTf3XhVoF
I believe Dems are deliberately trying to stoke right-wing anger and incite outrage, so they can use any incident of violence as justification for silencing the right. I believe Dems are setting the staging to start cracking down on First Amendment free speech rights.
Last week President Biden convened a meeting with historians & they were there to talk about the potential for “civil war”:
One of those historians at this meeting was Michael Beschloss, who is very active on Twitter and he leaps to retweet every stupid Dem spin line, plus he appears on cable news frequently. He was one of the idiots who spun up the drama over Melania’s Rose Garden renovation and blabbing that it was an “authoritarian design.”
Beschloss has spread every cockamamie Dem spin narrative, with gusto – even casting the Melania's Rose Garden renovation, using the Jackie O design as inspiration, as an "authoritarian" design.
"The revamp will return the Rose Garden to its 1962 blueprint, with updated infrastructure, including better drainage and "a healthier environment for plantings that reduce the risk of leaf blight," says the release."https://t.co/hC5p9KSClE
Melania had convened a group of experts, funding for the renovation was done with private donations and she wanted to go back toward the Jackie O original design. When this original Twitter/liberal media spin attack about the Rose Garden started there were even crazy liberals ranting that her new design used only white roses and was “racist.” Those white roses are John F. Kennedy roses… That’s how crazy things are with the conspiracy theory rabbit holes (and yes, there are plenty of those on the right too).
Just to demonstrate that this is orchestrated to drum up “fear of a civil war” and dangerous MAGA people – here’s Beschloss again:
"ominously cites Lincoln"
More of the Dem "civil war" blather, they're amplifying. They want to incite the right & then sit back and pontificate about – "Look how dangerous those MAGA Republicans are"…
Trump dishes out attacks too, but there’s been a widespread Dem/liberal media/ big tech (and NeverTrumper) #Resist effort, to do everything possible to first delegitimize his presidency, using any means necessary, but also to demonize and marginalize his supporters. Some of the anti-Trump derangement has been cruel and so crazy that it’s stunned me:
The TDS rabbit hole alleging Trump hid secret docs in Ivana's casket, is so cruel and unhinged that at first I thought it must be some kind of dark humor, but after seeing several tweets about it, I think they believe this.https://t.co/sy457Xp6c8https://t.co/CY9vnPojIT
In another post I’ll rehash some of the ways the Hillary email investigation was handled so differently than a FBI raid on her home, but for this post I wanted to share this information about “stochastic terrorism” and how I believe this bullshit will be used to silence people on the right – labeling them as terrorists or as “inciting” terrorism.
As a reminder, a few days ago I mentioned the FBI bulletin listing American Revolution symbols as indicative of potential right-wing terrorism and FBI director, Wray played dumb about that when he testified in front of Congress last week. I use the Liberty Bell in my blog name, lol.
I have taken issue with FBI director, Wray, making excuses for Antifa a couple years ago and insisting it’s not an organization, so the FBI didn’t track them. This is total bs., because the US has tracked Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups for decades now and Al Qaeda and most of these jihadist groups aren’t typical hierarchical organizations either. The US government has spent a fortune studying how to track these types of groups and Islamist-inspired terrorists, since 9/11. There’s also a lot of research into leaderless and decentralized organizations. The book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman, explains a lot of different types of those organizations, beyond terrorists, and it’s an interesting read. If a homemaker, like me, can easily find this information, assuredly the crack experts at the FBI can too, then again they have experts like Peter Strzok… And as an aside, somehow the FBI always tells us they were aware of a jihadist terrorist, after an attack here in the US, but then say the “motive” is unknown.
In the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, by a radicalized young man, whose mother said he came back from a long trip to the Mid-East changed, law enforcement was still saying the motive in unclear. Same PC law enforcement response, as usual, with Islamist terrorist attacks.
Wray was completely focused on right-wing domestic violence, even when BLM and Antifa were rioting in cities across America. AG Barr broadened the focus to track extremism of all persuasions. With the urgency of the “threat” Trump posed with these boxes of documents in a storage room at his home, Garland pondered the matter for weeks and Wray cut out of a Congressional hearing early on a Friday, to take a weekend vacation, despite knowing they had a FBI raid planned to deal with the “urgent Trump threat” on Monday morning.
"For weeks"
Speaks to how urgent it was… And of course, Wray was so alarmed about the threat that he bugged out of a Congressional hearing early & went on a weekend vacation. Yes, it was just so alarming😱🙄🤡
Yes, this really is quite a Dem/liberal media clown show, but it’s very serious. Millions of Americans could find their First Amendment rights infringed upon under the guise of “provoking a civil war.” And be assured, the people who decide which speech needs to be silenced won’t be anyone on the right.
I ordered Mark Levin’s book, American Marxism, a few days ago and want to start reading it. I have Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, but he appears to suffer from TDS, in my opinion, and buys into all of the Dem/liberal media anti-Trump spin smear attacks automatically. That said, it is a good book.
Note: 8/17/2022, 8:11 am – I did some editing and added a few lines this morning. The hypocrisy and “rules for thee, but not for me” attitude among so many of the liberal elites always stuns me. I’d like to see someone ask Juliette Kayyem, who wants to silence “MAGA Republicans” and take away their rights, her opinion of the secret memo her husband, David J. Barron, wrote when he was in the Obama Administration. He was the author of the secret memo that Obama used as the foundation for drone striking American citizens. From Wikipedia:
“In 2009, while on leave from his faculty position, Barron rejoined the Office of Legal Counsel as Acting assistant attorney general. In 2010, he authored a secret memo which provided the legal foundation for President Obama‘s unprecedented decision to order a drone strike on Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was a radical Islamic militant living in Yemen.[5] Barron’s memo was described by The New York Times Editorial Board as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result.”[6]
This is going to be a long politics post with a lot of links & details, which I realize many people might be unfamiliar with, if they didn’t follow the Clinton email scandal closely. I did follow that investigation closely, as I have followed all of the Clintons scandals closely, especially since the Clinton impeachment scandal in 1998.
I believe the current raid on former President Trump’s home this past week had absolutely nothing to do with “nuclear documents” or “espionage,” but is a continuation of the Trump/Russian Collusion effort that began when the Clinton machine came up with the bogus Steele dossier, to paint Trump as “colluding” with Russia.
So, let’s start with a little bit of rehashing the social media and online dramas about banning right-wing people or people who get in the way of Dem spin narratives. I first became aware of this on Twitter a few years back when Twitter banned Alex Jones. Well, Jones is an easy person to dislike, but then things progressed to banning other right-wing people. Then the big threat Dems and liberal media began hyping since 2016 is “Russian disinformation.” By 2020, when the pandemic started, the big threat Dems and the liberal media were ranting about was “COVID disinformation” and actual experts, like Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine platform, who had differing opinions on the COVID vaccines, were banned. Of course, the most famous Twitter ban, is former President Trump.
On to some of the other online drama that’s gotten a lot of attention recently– Dems redefining words and social media trying to force compliance to the new definitions. Recently, the word “recession” was not only redefined on social media platforms, but Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came under fire for locking the “recession” page from edits, after a flurry of edits by people trying to fight to maintain the accepted definition and those trying to impose the Dems new definition. This occurred after the news broke that the US had just had two quarters of negative growth.
I had noticed the partisan Wikipedia editing back in 2016, after a Trump/Hillary debate when she accused Trump of fat-shaming a former Miss Universe beauty queen, Alicia Machado. I just happened to look up her bio and I found it interesting and began writing a blog post, when I checked back on Wikipedia that bio had been scrubbed. I am glad I had copied some of the original entry and the sources listed at the bottom of that Wikipedia entry for my blog post, You can’t make up this stuff … The highlights are mine:
There was also information that Machado was accused of driving the getaway car for her boyfriend, who was accused of attempted murder, in Venezuela and a judge accused Machado of threatening to have him killed and using her friendship with President Cadera to ruin him. Lovely lady it seems, and there was the liberal media fawning all over her and Hillary championing her, but the real kicker for me was this, Former Miss Universe Gets Citizenship, Will Vote Against Trump. Yes, this woman got US citizenship and I wonder with her history in Venezuela and her alleged connections to Mexican cartel drug lords, how well she was vetted for US citizenship. Those Mexican news sources were quoting the Attorney General of Mexico. The liberal media effort to turn crook, Michael Avenatti, into a national hero was no accident. They were running the Dem spin info war effort.
Moving on, here are a couple tweets of mine from yesterday:
Twitter right was worked up about Wikipedia redefining "recession" recently. Been following this Wikipedia editing a bit since 2016. Alicia Machado's Wikiepdia entry went through a cleansing after Hillary dumped the fat-shaming attack at the end of a debate with Trump. https://t.co/URmrWywrqc
I have been following the Clinton smear machine and the Dem/liberal media spin war closely since the Clinton impeachment, in hopes of trying to expose some of the vast corruption, in any small way I can.
I haven’t pieced together all of the details of what I think is happening, but here are two powerful clues. It’s who they try to silence that catches my attention.
Funny, don’t remember the FBI raiding Chappaqua or Whitehaven to find the 33,000 potential classified documents Hillary Clinton deleted. And she was just a former secretary of state, not a former president.
DEVELOPING: Investigators reportedly met back in June w Trump & his lawyers in Mar-a-Lago storage rm to survey docs & things seemed copasetic but then FBI raids weeks later. Speculation on Hill FBI had PERSONAL stake & searching for classified docs related to its #Spygate scandal.”
Turley also writes, “Sperry went on to note that “the current deputy general counsel at Twitter is also the former general counsel at FBI HQ under Comey. His name as you may know is James Baker, and he was the top attorney who reviewed the fraudulent anti-Trump FISA wiretap warrants for probable cause.”
I think this brings us closer to what is really going on and this isn’t about “nuclear documents,” but another cover-up in progress.
Finally, here’s a tweet by Catherine Herridge, CBS news senior investigative correspondent:
Then President #Trump issued this memorandum 1/19/2021 on declassification FBI Crossfire Hurricane records. Circulated to AG, DNI, CIA. May now be relevant once full holdings from Monday search at Mar-a-Largo catalogued. https://t.co/riiagd8ct6pic.twitter.com/T8YKrZptS7
Perhaps, they wanted to preempt Trump from releasing information on #Spygate, but all I am sure of is all this “nuclear documents” and “espionage” drama is deliberate misdirection.
That’s all I’ve got for now.
Update: 8/14/2022 I like details, so I want to add the sources that were with the Wikipedia entry for Alicia Machado, back in 2016, when I saw it. #8 & #9 were listed for the entry included in this blog post. I don’t speak or read Spanish and know nothing about Mexican news publications, but both news sources cited the Attorney General of Mexico;
Today is another politics post. I spent a lot of time today on politics Twitter. I have 54 followers on Twitter, so perhaps it’s all just tweeting into the wind. I hope that maybe one tiny bit I tweet might help powerful voices on the right fight back against the Dem spin info war. This blog post is going to be short, because I don’t feel like posting a lot of links to news stories and other stuff tonight.
I’m just going to share what I am concerned about with the Dems effort to destroy Trump, by any means necessary. I expect the Biden DOJ will try to charge Trump with serious crimes and where that leads I do not know. I don’t know if it will lead to civil unrest, but I am positive that whatever happens in regards to Trump, it won’t end with Trump.
The Dems and political left in America will target any other Republican politicians, who appear to be gaining traction, as is obvious with the endless stream of attacks against Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. So, this is about much more than just Trump.
The left’s culture war has met a lot of resistance, with ordinary Americans speaking out against things like the climate-change zealotry & hysteria, the gender politics, and the attacks on even our American symbols, recently. There was a leak of a FBI bulletin listing American Revolution symbols. FBI Director, Christopher Wray was asked about that in a recent appearance and he pretended like he knew nothing about it, because I feel certain he knew he’d be asked about that. Here’s a quote from a Reason article, American Revolution Images Might Reveal You as a ‘Violent Extremist,’:
“When the FBI puts out a bulletin on symbols “used by Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists,” and it looks like a catalog of T-shirts half the country might want to wear, it’s a strong indication that the feds are way off-base. It gets even sillier when part of the bulletin resembles a brochure for a Revolutionary War museum. Then again, George Washington and the Continental Army were, arguably, “Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists,” which is a reminder that governments aren’t necessarily the good guys”
Beyond all the politics, there’s been a War of Words raging for years now, that propels much of the left’s culture war. When even the sitting president goes to great lengths to target “MAGA Republicans” repeatedly, however that is defined (and that’s the thing – the definition will be fluid), as enemies of the state, I feel certain, that wherever this political drama, with the effort to destroy Trump ends up, Democrats and the Left intend to expand well beyond just certain Republican politicians.
Sorry, I refuse to ever go along with the left’s culture war and spin word games. I have spent over 20 years trying to understand the Dems corrupt spin information war and expose the corruption, in any way I can. I am a law-abiding American citizen, who doesn’t even have a speeding ticket on my record, BUT…
I refuse to use or buy into the spin words they’re trying to cram down our throats. Period!
“Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government. The Biden administration claimed the move would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump” and “help lower energy costs.” More than five million barrels of oil released from the U.S. emergency reserves, however, were sent overseas last month, according to a Wednesday Reuters report. At least one shipment of American crude went to China, the report said.”
Surprise, surprise, the article goes on to state that Hunter Biden has ties to Sinopec: : “In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.” The corruption with this is so grotesque and unconscionable, considering millions of Americans are struggling to pay these high gas prices and rapidly climbing inflation at the grocery store. This is wholesale public corruption that demands an investigation.
The liberal media instead is gearing up for a J-6 committee hearing that’s being scheduled for prime time. There’s not even any facade of being objective reporters among the liberal media anymore – they are just part of the Democratic Party communications operation.
I haven’t read through the Horowitz IG report yet, only skimmed a small bit of it, so I don’t feel confident to write much about the report yet. I do feel confident enough to say Horowitz found the Steele dossier to be totally unreliable, uncorroborated and due to the reliance on second and third sources, who were relaying rumors (not events they had any actual firsthand knowledge of), that “dossier” is just malicious gossip. That so many Obama officials, especially in the intelligence agencies and FBI bought into that dossier so completely should shock every American. That the mainstream media sold the Steele dossier without any independent verification or corroboration, speaks volumes about what the mainstream media is… and what it is not.
As I’ve been harping on for years now, the mainstream media, by and large, serves as a massive spin conduit of the Democratic Party and Democrat spin operatives. I really have been studying the Dem/media spin information warfare since the 1990s and since 1999, determined to work to defeat spin war in America. I’m not interested in defeating Dems, Trump, specific partisans, or people in the media, I believe the larger battle is to get enough Americans committed to rejecting spin information warfare as an acceptable way for American partisans and media to operate political messaging operations and media smear campaigns. Yes, yes, I know, talk about a Forlorn hope, lol.
With the public exposure of the Steele dossier, as just part of a massive Clinton campaign/DNC scorched earth spin operation to smear Trump as a “Russian asset,” you might think many mainstream media journalists would be apologizing for their reporting bogus partisan spin smears for 3 years, but you’d be wrong. The response is silence. The mainstream media is one long wall of silence, as they ignore Trump-friendly media pointing out all the bogus Trump-Russia reporting over the past three years. Many Trump-friendly reporters and pundits have spent two days on Twitter retweeting mainstream media Steele dossier reporting and demanding apologies, but it’s highly doubtful that will ever happen.
My best guess, if past is prologue, is the Dem spin operatives (many who are prominent mainstream media personalities) will start rewriting a new Trump-Russia spin script and once this Horowitz report furor dies down, slowly they will begin reseeding discredited parts of Steele’s dossier garbage and recasting it as now being partially corroborated or not completely false, due to some new “evidence” they conjure up with their new spin script. They can not afford to admit this entire Trump-Russia Collusion story was all one huge partisan smear campaign, but that’s what it was.
During the Dems’ Brett Kavanaugh smear campaign, not a single one of the witnesses, whom Christine Blasey Ford named as being at the party where she claimed she was assaulted, remembers any such party or event ever happening. Even Ford’s girlfriend, Leland Keyser, stated she never attended any party like that and that she has never even met Brett Kavanaugh. A year after that Dem Kavanaugh smear campaign, two NYT reporters wrote a book on the Kavanaugh story. In their media appearances, they were trying to resurrect Ford’s story as “credible” and yet, they failed to highlight the most important piece of new information they uncovered. Keyser told them that Ford friends had contacted her and pressured her to change her story and back Ford’s account or she would have embarrassing personal information leaked to the media. Too bad these ace reporters didn’t try to investigate who these Ford friends were and if anyone else was behind that blackmail effort.
The mainstream media in America now serves as just a spin front for the Democratic Party and political Left. So, while they report on the FOX News Trump spin propaganda constantly (and yes, FOX is without question a Trump spin megaphone), they see themselves as the “real journalists” tirelessly chasing down “facts”. And oddly all of these media spin warriors, seem to see themselves as noble, ethical… truth-tellers.
Our domestic scorched earth spin information war shows no signs of either side “winning” and in fact, what on earth is “winning” in an info war dedicated to spreading more and more spin garbage (LIES) faster and faster, in hopes of drowning out the other’s side’s spin (LIES)? Not just our media suffers from the degradation of this spin war, all of America suffers too. America will continue to lose credibility, continue to lose prestige, continue the escalating factionalization of our republic. Our institutions will continue to decline and be corrupted by this “by any means necessary” political ethos, while the threads of civil society that hold our society together will further fray.
Yes, quite a gloomy forecast, but again – Trump didn’t win with the Horowtiz IG report, because in a world where #Resist mentality dominates, Dems no longer accept outcomes (or facts) they don’t like. Alarmingly, neither does Trump.
I wanted to mention that despite my best intentions to write more blog posts, it’s very hard to work on my blog in the past year. My husband requires a lot more care and many days it’s hard to stay focused on organizing my thoughts, let alone trying to write something coherent. I still hope to continue writing blog posts, as I can.
Many thanks to the readers, who stop by, and especially to JK, a loyal poster of comments, who provides me many great links and ideas.
The rabidly partisan, completely corrupt political moment America is at didn’t begin with Donald J. Trump, even though he looms large in the American psyche since he rode down that golden escalator to enter the 2016 race. The public impeachment hearings will begin later this morning,so I’ve jotted down a few thoughts.
Yes, the Democrats and some of their intel friends orchestrated this case against Trump and yes, President Obama did plenty of way more corrupt things than this bribe in this phone call with the president of Ukraine. In fact, we are awaiting the release of the IG report Michael Horowitz has completed and the DOJ still has John Durham investigating 2016 corruption within the Obama administration.
Still from the information I’ve read, I do believe Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine was a quid pro quo and yes, as Andrew McCarthy has made the point repeatedly, often in foreign policy deals involve a quid pro quo. Where I part company with McCarthy’s view is I do believe Trump’s quid pro quo went way beyond trying to make a deal for the benefit of America. When Trump mentioned the Bidens he wanted dirt on the Bidens to help him politically, just like he and the Clinton campaign were searching for Russian dirt on each other in 2016. The other part of the call that bothered me was the president of Ukraine mentioned Giuliani believing he was the point man for the investigation Trump was demanding. This speaks to how Trump had Giuliani running around Ukraine as his personal attorney, yet Giuliani was perceived by the Ukrainians as an American government official.
American presidents can’t cut personal deals with foreign leaders while using the Office of the President. There is no way Trump, who lies more than he tells the truth and whose first idea for action as president invariably veers into the extremely corrupt range, was concerned about fighting corruption in Ukraine. Trump is the man whose “great” strategy for dealing with ISIS was to send the U.S. military to murder ISIS family members, believing that would scare ISIS fighters into surrender. Trump sending his personal attorney to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is over the line, in my book.
Since impeachment is a political process, not a criminal trial, I’d like to see what unfolds in these hearings, what crazy spin antics both Dems and Republicans engage in before deciding 100%, but from what I’ve read so far, yes, I would probably vote to impeach and I never expected to write those words. I will also support criminal prosecutions if Horowitz and Durham find criminal wrongdoing among Obama administration officials.
I’ve been disgusted and extremely disappointed in so many Republicans jumping on board with stupid spin antics, that sink to the level of the typical Dem spin sleaze. It started with Congressman Gaetz and the angry Republican mob storming the hearing room in the basement and it’s progressed to a pathetic display of spewing, vicious smear campaigns against the witnesses and nauseating groveling to Trump.
Lindsey Graham declared the hearing is all a sham and announced he wasn’t reading any of the transcripts the House Intelligence Committee released. This came after two weeks ago Republicans were ranting about Schiff was hiding the transcripts and demands that Dems release the transcripts. Last night Graham went one step further and announced he isn’t going to watch any of the sham hearings. Graham heads the Senate Judiciary Committee and will play a key role, if there is a Senate impeachment trial, but he’s announcing upfront he’s not going to take it seriously. Assuredly, many Dems in 1998 felt the Clinton impeachment was a sham too and they behaved in this same sort of spin theatrics that Republicans are staging… except in 1998, Graham was demanding that impeachment was a serious process.
Several of the FOX Trump spin team were pushing this mantra urging people not to watch the hearings. In what kind of world do you engage in a massive spin effort, telling Americans, “Don’t even listen to anything the other side says!’ The correct American form of civil political debate is to put your best case forward, not to spread smears and tell other citizens not to listen to the other side of an argument. Sickening!!!
Despite good intentions, I haven’t read through all of the House Intelligence Committee transcripts of the impeachment inquiry hearings. Tomorrow Ambassador William Taylor will testify in an open hearing, so I’ll be able to form a better opinion of his veracity.
What I’ve read so far of his testimony, he comes across as a straight-shooter type person – very much a by-the-rules guy. It’s understandable that Trump’s making things up as he goes style and total disregard for rules, ethical conduct or even following the law, would be alien to someone like Taylor.
In his opening statement (page 28, lines 7-8) Taylor states:
“The irregular policy channel was running contrary to goals of longstanding U.S. policy.”
On page 30, lines 2-3) he states:
“I began to sense that the two decisionmaking channels, regular and irregular, were separate and at odds.”
This problem of Trump working against his own administration official policy has been a consistent feature of how Trump governs, creating endless turmoil, undercutting his own team at every turn, then blaming them for the chaos his erratic behavior causes. No matter what chaos he causes, in the end, his administration officials, try to save him from disaster, often ending up being fired or publicly humiliated as their thanks.
This impeachment will likely end up with Trump being impeached in the House, acquitted in the Senate and more erratic and emboldened at the end of this process. The real problem I see from this Ukraine mess is one that at some point Trump may create a national security crisis that should have been avoided.
Taylor hits on this problem. Trump plays his own team members against each other and is more concerned about cutting secret deals with despots than he is about building a strong functioning White House team. In Trump’s world, the only player on the team that matters is Trump. He’s a one-man show and everyone else on his team is just an expendable stage prop.
In this Ukraine situation, Trump assuredly had the right to send his personal attorney to investigate and report back to him. The problem was his attorney was undercutting Trump’s official foreign policy team in Ukraine and engaged in foreign policy matters, which the U.S. embassy had no knowledge of. Even that might get a pass, although it’s best that in foreign countries America’s foreign policy team speaks with one voice, but the totally unforgivable part was Giuliani smearing the ambassador to Ukraine on TV and Twitter, undermining her credibility and damaging her reputation. She had no means to defend herself. If Trump wanted to fire her, he should have done that through State Department channels, so the State Department could assure the functioning and safety of the embassy were not negatively impacted. That Giuliani media smear campaign is despicable.
Trump engaged in this same sort of erratic decisionmaking many times in the past two and half years, where the Pentagon or other agencies found out about a complete policy change via a Trump tweet or comment on TV. He doesn’t even have the courtesy or common sense to talk to his top officials privately. He makes an erratic decision, then just tweets it out, often at odd hours of the late night or early morning. When Trump decided to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, after a phone call with Erdogan, he did not discuss this with top Pentagon officials before announcing the decision publicly.
Taylor saw the problem with Trump’s “irregular channel operating at odds with the regular channel, ” because that behavior is thoroughly corrupt and will lead to mission failure, but it can also cost lives when that sort of playing your own team members against each other occurs in a military operation. It could also have jeopardize the safety and security of the ambassador and the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, which is a very dangerous, corrupt country.
Americans, especially many who should know better in the government, pundits, former government officials, all see that Trump doesn’t bother to study any of the issues he’s making consequential decisions about, they know his erratic decisionmaking leads to constant chaos, they also know it’s reckless and usually gets in the way of the policies Trump’s administration state are the policy objectives, but they refuse to ever speak up and most keep making excuses for Trump, usually blaming the Democrats who hate Trump for all the problems or reminding that Trump is a businessman, not a politician. Well, he’s been on the job for almost 3 years and one wonders at what point Trump can be judged, based on his performance as President of the United States.
When Democrats turned a blind-eye to the Clinton corruption and the Obama corruption, Republicans railed about how amoral they were for never condemning corrupt behavior. Now that the shoes’ on the other foot, Republicans who make endless excuses for Trump, demonstrate that they are just as amoral as those Democrats whom they berated for years.
All I know now is that watching this pathetic display, on both sides, I have no use for any of these spineless swamp dwellers in Washington. What a bunch of sickening political hacks all around.
Back in the Fall of 2016, when the FBI released the notes on the interviews in the Clinton email investigation, I read through all of the notes released and wrote some blog posts about them. With the just released transcripts of the “impeachment inquiry” closed hearings, reading these transcripts seemed a good way for me to form my own opinion about the testimony and the hearing process, which has been much complained about by Republicans and Trump pundits.
I read through the former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch transcript (317 pages). Based on the transcript, the Democrats seemed to have a lot more time than the Republicans, Schiff seemed very heavy-handed in this hearing, but I didn’t get the impression the process was anything remotely “Soviet-style”. Yovanovitch made an opening statement, then the hearing progressed in blocks of time given to Dems and Republicans to ask questions. As one who has read a lot of Congressional hearing transcripts over the years and watched way more Congressional hearings than I care to admit (okay, years ago I was addicted to C-Span and even watched British and other foreign government goings on, along with the US Congress), so I’ve seen some really rancorous governmental proceedings over the years and while this one was heavy-handed, it wasn’t the worst U.S Congressional hearing I’ve seen. Schiff would have gained more credibility if he had not tried so hard to stage and control the hearing with the intent to control the spin narrative.
When I start reading a transcript I try to get a feel for facts that are undisputed, timelines of events and the veracity of the testimony. The media, pundits and politicians like to affix the term “credible” to witnesses that feed their partisan agenda and spin narrative, regardless if the testimony leaves huge gaping holes, is contradictory, lacks any corroboration and conflicts with other testimony or is even contradictory throughout the testimony, so I hesitate to use the term “credible” lightly. Yovanovitch’s testimony sounded credible to me and her answers, particularly the ones where she expanded on how she viewed US foreign policy objectives, how she evaluated events in a foreign country and laying out the conflicting issues that a US embassy deals with in complicated countries, like Ukraine, struck me as insightful, honest and coming from a seasoned foreign service professional.
She expressed complete support for the Trump official foreign policy, including the military aid, to Ukraine (pages 144-150 of the transcript). I’ve read the Yovanovitch transcript at NPR – HERE.
Marie Yovanovitch served in the US Foreign Service at the US State Department for 33 years, under 5 different US presidents and has served as an ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine. The Trump State Department asked Yovanovitch to extend her stay in Ukraine for another year and she was told by her superiors that they were happy with the job she was doing. Then Rudy Giuliani, Don Jr., Hannity and other Trump pundits escalated a media smear campaign against Yovanovitch on social media and on FOX News to destroy her reputation. Trump then fired her.
Trump appears to have been running two competing Ukraine policies, the official one, run through his State Department and which Yovanovitch worked to advance and a personal Ukraine policy, run through a back channel by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani and son, Don Jr. In the phone call with the president of Ukraine, Trump appears to me to have been advancing his own personal political objectives, not the official foreign policy objectives of his own State Department.
I’ll just cite some pages and lines in the transcript and comments, because I can’t just copy and paste them from that transcript and it will take me forever to figure out the screenshot stuff.
Pages 126-132, Yovanovitch explains how she was notified about being fired by President Trump and how her superiors told her she had to leave immediately out of security concerns that Trump might tweet something that could jeopardize her safety.
Pages 173-174, Schiff questions Yovanovitch about her knowledge of President Trump trashing her in his phone call with the President of Ukraine, saying she was a bad ambassador. This behavior of Trump’s is the most disloyal behavior of any American president, that I can recall and it’s not the first time Trump has engaged in trashing American officials while talking to foreign leaders. In our hyper-partisan political environment, it’s easy to just dismiss this as “Trump being Trump”, but around the world, every leader reads this as Trump has no loyalty to his own team. He is all about his own ego – that’s it. At some point, I fear, this “Trump being Trump” will lead to some serious national security crisis.
Pages 192-193, Trump while trashing Yovanovitch in his call with Zelensky went one step further than just trashing. On page 193, lines 9-15 is where Trump commits the ultimate betrayal of an American citizen as President of the United States, he issues a veiled threat against an American citizen talking to a foreign leader.
9 Q At the bottom of that same page, President Trump
10 says, "Well, she's going to go through some things."
11 Q What did you understand that to mean?
12 A I didn't know what it meant. I was very concerned.
13 I still am.
14 Q Did you feel threatened?
15 A Yes.
Pages 267-268, Yovanovitch asked the Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, for advice on how to handle this media smear campaign against her and his advice was to tell her she should “go big or go home” and he suggested she tweet out support for Trump and say all the smears were lies. He was advising a senior US diplomat to engage in overt political activity… That was his best advice…
This career Foreign Service officer, was asked to extend her tour as ambassador in a difficult country, with a lot of internal strife, by top officials in the US State Department – Trump’s State Department – and then she was left with no legal means to protect herself from a media smear campaign being led by the president’s personal attorney and his son. This is the most egregious abuse of power I’ve seen and no employee in America should be trapped in a hostile workplace environment where there’s absolutely no legal avenue to protect or defend against a media smear campaign coming from the chief executive’s office. All the partisan politics aside, what happened to Marie Yovanovitch is totally outrageous.
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