The Unrivaled Power Of Google's Coalition Of The Connected

newsweek |  In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.

Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.

But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google's in-house "think/do tank."

I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.

He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S. policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."

It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.

Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called "coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:

Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.…

They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].

 

 

 

Nothing Boosts Trust In Government Like A CFR Panel Of Pasty CIA Alumni Talking About Trust...,

thehill |   In October, Thomas Weiss and I urged all of us to keep calm in the face of what might be a violent election and transition season. We foresaw the need to say, among other things, that the military should affirm the rule of law and their oath to the Constitution. Sadly, the Joint Chiefs felt the need to do just that last week.  

When President Trump extolled “strength” to a nascent mob in Washington on Jan. 6, he wasn’t talking about moral force. In militarized societies, the model of political change is often military.  War is the assertion of “might makes right,” the negation of the rule of law. 

Political scientists worry these days about democratic erosion, when the norms and institutions of previously stable representative democracies decline. We usually ponder the causes of erosion in other countries. 

Democracy is, on one hand, democratic elections where the people decide who will govern them, and processes for horizontal and vertical oversight and accountability. There is also a deeper conception of democracy — the norms of citizen deliberation, and human and civil rights that guarantee expression, inclusion and collective action. Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in public reason. The more democratic a society is, the greater the limits it has on the use of force both at home and abroad. We don’t take out weapons to resolve our disputes.

Democratic erosion or backsliding occurs when democratic institutions, norms and values are gradually — and sometimes almost imperceptibly — reduced. Democratic erosion includes the decline of competitive elections, the reduction in forums where citizens can deliberate and form policy preferences, and the diminished ability for accountability. The indicators of erosion also include constraints on freedom of the press, which reduces transparency and accountability, the unchecked accretion of power in the executive branch, and the loss of civil rights, including the right of assembly.

Democratic erosion has various causes. Some blame power-hungry executives who don’t want to give up power. The question, here, is why democratic institutions aren’t able to stop power-hungry elites who would concentrate power and economic resources.  

Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, in their book “Four Threats,” also highlight excessive executive power but then add political polarization, racism and nativism, and economic inequality that prompts the wealthy to mobilize to protect their position.  

War and militarism exacerbate all those things. But more than that, war and militarism are antipodal and undermining of democratic norms, institutions and practices.

To Date, No Evidence THAT The DOJ Has Investigated Russiagate, Huntergate, Or Systemic Election Fraud

AP |  In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but they’ve uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.

The comments are especially direct coming from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voter fraud could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail. 

Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, if they existed, before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud. That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election was certified. Soon after it was issued, the department’s top elections crime official announced he would step aside from that position because of the memo.

The Trump campaign team led by Rudy Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system with no evidence. They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers didn’t have a clear enough view at polling sites in some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened. The claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican judges who have ruled the suits lacked evidence. Local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making similar unsupported claims.

 

Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia Sees Election Fraud - With Certainty

americanthinker |  Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer.  "My experience," he attests," spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence[.]"  I will not belabor the point.  Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America.

So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say?  This:

1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and both are used to manipulate election outcomes.

2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these vulnerabilities in the past.

3. Dominion has been used in other countries to "forge election results."

4. Dominion's corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba.

5. Dominion machines are easily hackable.

6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.

Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at available data about the election and the vote results.  Based on that information, he concluded

1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.

2. The simultaneous decision in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia to pretend to halt counting votes was unprecedented and demonstrated a coordinated effort to collude toward desired results.

3. One to two percent of votes were forged in Biden's favor.

4. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.

5. The scanners failed to keep records for audits, an outcome that must have been deliberately programmed.

6. The stolen cryptographic key, which applied to all voting systems, was used to alter vote counts.

7. The favorable votes pouring in after hours for Biden could not be accounted for by a Democrat preference for mailed in ballots.  They demonstrated manipulation.  For example, in Pennsylvania, it was physically impossible to feed 400,000 ballots into the machines within 2–3 hours.

8. Dominion used Chinese parts, and there's reason to believe that China, Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.

9. There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.

10. The systems failed to produce any auditable results.

Based on the above findings, Dr. Keshavarz-Nia concluded with "high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in a [sic] hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred [sic] to Vice President Biden."

Shall We Pretend That Bill Barr Doesn't Understand The Iron Law, The Deep State, Or The PMC?

turcopolier  |  There are a lot of Trump supporters who are very frustrated, even angry, with the silence of Attorney General Bill Barr in the wake of last Tuesday’s attempted Democrat heist of the Presidential election. But there are indications that Barr, who understands what it takes to fight the entrenched bureaucracy that is aligned with a conspiracy that involves the media, tech companies and computer software companies supplying voting machines, is preparing to move in a dramatic, far reaching strike to expose this fraud.

I have a dear friend who knows Barr very well. Rarely does he show this kind of visceral anger. I find it difficult to believe that in the ensuing two months, Barr has decided to curl up into a fetal position and allow the Republic to be eviscerated.

Now look at the actions on Monday. Barr, following DOJ protocol, sent a letter authorizing federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities. That same day, the DOJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned.

Pilger is a compromised deep stater. I believe his resignation was, at a minimum, encouraged by Barr.

No Indictments Because Durham And His Deputy Dannehy Are Deep State PMC...,

NYMag |  On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall would damage Democrats, including Joe Biden, and help him win reelection. In Trump’s terminology, Durham’s report would reveal an “attempted overthrow” of his administration by Democratic insiders. But Justice Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from taking such actions within 60 days of an election because they might affect the outcome of the election. Both Durham and Dannehy believed that if they complied with Barr’s demands they would be violating this doctrine, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

Durham, who is the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, and Dannehy were also troubled that Barr had purposely misrepresented their work in numerous public comments, the two people said. According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election. (The probe remains ongoing.) In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

Shortly after the resignation of his prized deputy and with the election looming on the horizon, Durham phoned Barr. He forcefully told the attorney general that his office would not be releasing a report or taking any other significant public actions before Election Day, according to a person with knowledge of the phone call. Dannehy’s resignation constituted an implied but unspoken threat to Barr that Durham or others on his team might resign if the attorney general attempted to force the issue, according to a person familiar with Durham’s thinking.

After hearing from Durham in September, Barr informed the president and allies that there would be no October surprise, causing Trump to lash out. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win,” he told Fox Business last month. “[These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”

 

This Is Not About Biden, It's About The Crime Syndicate Behind Him

theautomaticearth |  With Biden you don’t get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went after Trump, the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies. And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal. How people do not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.

If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20 2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5 years.

How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.

It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.

The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be brought into daylight and before a court.

Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.

And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo. But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.

The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again, whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.

 

The Seth Rich Assassination And Coverup Yet Another Reason Julian Assange Must Die In Jail

sicsempertyrannis |  While the law enforcement and intelligence community, along with the mainstream media, has been pushing the meme that there is no basis to believe that Seth Rich, as claimed by multiple independent sources, had contact with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, the evidence suggests otherwise and it turns out the FBI has been covering up more relevant documents.

The first hint of the coverup came from David Hardy, an FBI Senior official, who affirmed in a 2017 affidavit that there were no responsive records. Hardy is the Section Chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section (“RIDS”), Information Management Division (“IMD”), Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), in Winchester, Virginia. Here are the relevant portions of his first affidavit:

(19) CRS Search and Results. In response to Plaintiff’s request dated September 1, 2017, RIDS conducted an index search of the CRS for responsive main and reference file records employing the UNI application of ACS. The FBI searched the subject’s name, “Seth Conrad Rich,” in order to identify files responsive to Plaintiff’s request and subject to the FOIA. The FBI’s searches included a three-way phonetic breakdown5 of the subject’s name. These searches located no main or reference records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request.

(9) By letter executed on November 9, 2017, OIP advised Plaintiff it affirmed the FBI’s determination. OIP further advised Plaintiff that to the extent his request sought access to records that would either confirm or deny an individual’s placement on any government watch list, the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such records because their existence is protected from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E). . .

David Hardy either was lying or dangerously incompetent. The FBI did have documents–emails to be specific. The FBI’s habit of stonewalling or denying that it has documents, in this case documents related to Seth Rich, is not unique to this case. Just ask Carter Page or General Michael Flynn.

  The FBI finally admitted to Judicial Watch in January 2020 that they had emails between the Washington Field Office and FBI Headquarters. These are dynamite because they show that the FBI’s Washington Field Office (which is not located at FBI Headquarters on 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC) was communicating with the FBI’s Peter Strzok and the Counter Intelligence Division. Why in the world would the FBI be involved in investigating what was supposedly a mere robbery of an unfortunate white victim (i.e., Seth Rich) and communicating on this investigation with the Counter Intelligence Division (CID) of the FBI. The CID only works international spy cases.

Here are the emails (I transcribed them and put them in chronological order to facilitate your ability to read them and understand what is being communicated).

Huntergate: What Comes Next?

revolver  |  What is the most incriminating thing on the hard drive? Rudy has suggested illegal things, and as Revolver reported, the FBI person tasked with the hard drive is associated with the child pornography division. Could you give more insight into how bad it is we’re talking about?

Mr. Bannon: Joe Biden is a liar, a fraud, and compromised by Chinese cash. In short, he is a national security crisis. The hard drive combines emails and text messages that show a massive involvement with companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Also, there are 25,000 images that show a drug-addled, depraved lifestyle — one that decent hardworking Americans will not want near the White House.

Revolver: The FBI has been holding onto the hard drive for almost a year? Any sense of why? Was there any indication that they were seriously interested in a criminal case, assuming that there is, in fact, illegal material on there? If not, why would the FBI simply hold onto information like that?

Mr. Bannon: The President must confront the director of the FBI on why the information housed on this hard drive was not moved on immediately. If the content of the hard drive had been released when received in November 2019, there would have been no impeachment of Trump, and Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic Party nominee. This confrontation should take place this weekend in the Oval Office. If Wray doesn’t have a bulletproof reason he should be fired in the room.

Revolver: What are your best estimates on how many foreign entities may have obtained possession of the hard drive? Chinese intel?

Mr. Bannon: It’s the actions represented on the hard drive that the American people must understand our enemies know about. The cash and equity given for access to Biden, the favors done for that cash, the drugs, the depravity. The CCP, Russian Intel, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Intel Services — they know the Bidens are for sale.

Did The FBI Conceal Huntergate In Order To Control Preznit Joe Biden?

americanthinker  |  It didn’t surprise the informed, and understandably a bit cynical, to hear that the FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop instead of seeking justice. The bureau was previously involved in an illegal plot to take down Donald Trump, after all, and its Deep State elements would assuredly love to see Joe Biden succeed him in January. So why would they reveal damning information on their establishment hope? Yet suppressing Huntergate perhaps provided a secondary benefit:

The information could be used against Biden once he was in office.

This wouldn’t be anything new. It’s believed that longtime, legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used “dirt files” on politicians for leverage; for one thing, it’s said, this enabled him to remain bureau head for as long as he wished. William Sullivan, once the number three official under Hoover, put it this way: From the moment the director got damning information on a senator, the man would be “right in his pocket.”

So not only could suppressing Huntergate get Biden in office, but then maybe it’s, “Nice presidency you’ve got there, Mr. Biden — I’d hate to see anything happen to it.”

Since the criminality in question could, apparently, put Hunter in prison along with destroying China Joe, the leverage is profound. It could not only be used to control Biden but also his wife, Jill, in the unlikely event she for a time is able to pull off an Edith Wilson (who supposedly ran the show when Woodrow Wilson became incapacitated). She wouldn’t want to see her stepson in the hoosegow and her family’s reputation ruined, after all.

Like The BLM Fraud - If Biden Wins The Lockdowns End

Every public school district in America should be planning for in person school next semester. It can be done safely, *even in places with pretty high community transmission*. We now have pretty good data to show that. https://t.co/4fCs2tqVHa

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 16, 2020

economicprism |   One of the absurdities of the coronavirus era is the purported faith in science by the political class; in particular, the left.  Joe Biden, for instance, said he would shut the country down if recommended by scientists.  Nancy Pelosi, this week, with respect to coronavirus stimulus, told Wolf Blitzer, that “…the science should call the shot and when they do, we should all trust it.”

“Trust, but verify,” counseled Ronald Reagan.  No doubt, the Gipper, didn’t envision the ridiculous science behind coronavirus containment policy.

President Trump, taking the advice of Reagan, recently verified the effects of coronavirus himself.  His findings, following a three day bout with the illness, revealed the science based policies that have been applied are not to be trusted.  Trump tweeted these conclusions:

“One thing that’s for certain: Don’t let it dominate you.  Don’t be afraid of it.  You’re going to beat it.”

According to Science magazine, “[Trump’s] repeated public dismissals of scientific expertise, and his disdain for evidence have prompted many researchers to label him the most antiscience president in living memory.”

Maybe so.  But when science is being used by policy makers to do stupid and destructive things, like locking down the economy, being antiscience is the intelligent choice.  What’s more, the World Health Organization now says it’s opposed to lockdowns, and told world leaders: “stop using lockdowns as your primary control method.”

We have a hunch that the science of lockdowns has little to do with stemming the spread of coronavirus.  We’ll have more on this in a moment.  But first, we must make an important distinction.  And to do so, we must take a brief diversion…

WHO And Former FDA Director Gottlieb Say No More Lockdowns!!!

"The idea that we're going to do a national, stay-at-home order ... it's just not going to happen," says @ScottGottliebMD. "When history looks back on us, the critical failing is going to be the fact that we were so blind to the spread back in April and May." pic.twitter.com/x7xJP1OvcX

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 12, 2020

NYPost  |  The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying countries should be careful how quickly they reopen.

WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine the Spectator reported in a video interview.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Nabarro said tight restrictions cause significant harm, particularly on the global economy.

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.

He added that lockdowns have severely impacted countries that rely on tourism.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” Nabarro told the outlet.

“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

When The Time Is Ripe The CIA Will Dust Off Its Playbook And Give The LARPS A Plot And A Purpose

foreignpolicy |  If proud boys and vigilantes can’t pull off a coordinated drive for power, they may opt for a time-honored approach in democratic politics: the “strategy of tension.” In a paper published this spring, University of Winchester criminologists Matt Clement and Vincenzo Scalia defined the strategy of tension as a political method of “state crime,” designed to produce “a climate of fear within communities. [Strategies of tension] employ deceit, threats, and acts of violence in order to maintain control across society through fear of the consequences of challenging the government of the day.”

The term was coined in Italy during the Years of Lead from the late 1960s to the 1980s, when political violence exploded, with bombings, kidnappings, and failed coups making weekly headlines. Under the strategy of tension, as the left grows more militant, influential, and strident in its demands, the right tries to inflame social tensions rather than defuse them. The violence has a dual purpose, to both suppress and provoke. The right’s aim is to cordon the left off from power by simultaneously intimidating them, eliciting escalation, getting the police to crack down, and using the chaos to manipulate public opinion and political alliances.

Virtually every member of the Western Alliance has had its own years of lead, not only Italy but Britain during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, France as it tried to cling to Algeria and was targeted by its own paramilitary terror campaign, South America in the years of Operation Condor, Mexico’s Dirty War, and so on. America is no exception. The country has been here several times before: Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s, when slave-owners and abolitionists faced off in murderous confrontations; the birth of the first Klan after the Civil War to resist Radical Reconstruction; and the wave of violence that accompanied the rise of the Third Klan during the civil rights movement. Elements of the left from John Brown to the Italian Red Brigades have also pursued violent accelerationist campaigns in pursuit of social change. But only the reactionaries have enjoyed approval from more mainstream sources of political power. Often, they got logistical support as well as material and legal cover from security services.

Clement and Scalia described the strategy of tension as a vicious cycle. State prevention of emancipatory politics leads to dissent, which is in turn repressed and delegitimized, further isolating social movements.

State prevention of emancipatory politics leads to dissent, which is in turn repressed and delegitimized, further isolating social movements.

With no outlet for their demands, activists pursue more radical confrontations, leading their opponents to justify almost any violence in maintenance of the oppressive regime.

That dynamic is on display in the response to this year’s BLM protests. Once initial police suppression was met with uprisings, the “good guys with guns,” “patriots,” and militias showed up. Ostensibly there to protect businesses and  support law enforcement, the armed right has instead brought Chekhov’s AR-15 onto the political stage. The inevitable exchanges of gunfire and vehicular assaults at protests demonstrate, as Christina Cauterucci recently wrote for Slate, the political ethos of “own the libs” has escalated into “kill the libs.”

In the classic model, the strategy of tension was associated with Cold War covert action and CIA interference in our allies’ domestic politics. After World War II, Western intelligence agencies really did organize “stay-behind networks” with alumni of both fascist regimes and anti-communist resistance networks in preparation for a possible Soviet invasion.

And a military threat from the east was only one strategic danger: The left, it was feared, could also rise to power in the West at the ballot box and through social movements. The CIA did put its hands on the scale in the elections like Italy in 1948, when left-wing parties were portrayed as Soviet puppets and systemically kept out of a coalition government. In the late 1960s, the rise of the New Left was indeed met with covert violence, police terror, and a string of false flag attacks by neo-Fascists intended to suppress, discredit, and isolate the young movement.

 

Q-Anon Had A GREAT, BRILLIANT, But Inevitably Doomed Run Against The Hegemons...,

logically |   A Logically investigation identifies a key QAnon figure as New Jersey resident Jason Gelinas. The investigation ties QAnon properties to a company owned by Gelinas, an information technology specialist who has held prominent positions at both Credit Suisse and Citigroup.

Ever since the shadowy figure known as Q made his first appearance on the 4chan imageboard in October of 2017, the author’s identity has remained a mystery. Since then, Q has posted thousands of ‘drops,’ converting legions of followers to the belief that Donald Trump is leading a global fight against a satanic cabal of child trafficking elites, commonly referred to in the QAnon world as the ‘Deep State’.

 
Over the years, Q’s posts would move from the 4chan forum to 8chan, and finally to its later iteration, 8kun. But these forums weren’t where most of Q’s followers would go to access the drops: most would find them neatly compiled on a site called QMap, now the main platform on which Q’s drops are published. For years it was believed that QMap was an endeavour that was independent of both the chan forums and the person or people posting Q’s drops, but recent discoveries concerning an IP address behind QMap raised questions as to whether Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and 8kun, an elusive figure in his own right, could also be Q. As some QAnon researchers have pointed out, however, the story of Q’s operations does not end with Jim Watkins.

In the world of QAnon, the site qmap.pub is something of a sacred text. It’s a site designed to collect Q’s posts on other message boards and collate them in a searchable database; over the years, it has grown to include glossaries on themes, profiles on people named across the drops (handily sorted into ‘Evil’, ‘Traitor/Pawn’, and ‘Patriot’), and even a prayer wall.

Most followers of QAnon tend not to visit Q’s posts on 8kun and the ‘chan’ boards where they are initially posted (the vernacular used on those sites is deliberately exclusionary and newcomers are often put off). This makes qmap.pub a crucial port of call for all QAnon information and a major node in how the movement disseminates its lore. The site has been hitting over 10 million monthly users since April of this year.

The developer of QMap has been known only as ‘QAPPANON’ since the launch of the site in May of 2018. They have a successful Patreon where they regularly post and update their following on the running of the website. They pull in over 600 patrons and a $3,320 a month income - although there is a $4,000 a month target for ‘running costs’ of the website. In addition to the website, QMap also had an accompanying app on the Google Play Store (for $2.99) until it was removed in May this year as “harmful content”. The user QAPPANON is synonymous with qmap.pub, acting as its sole developer and mouthpiece.

The QAnon community recognizes the importance of QAPPANON and how central QMap is to how the movement functions. In a recent campaign to deplatform QAPPANON from Patreon, QAnon power-influencer Praying Medic leapt to their defence, calling on his nearly 400,000 Twitter followers to help (and funnelling them towards QAPPANON’s Patreon). In addition, Praying Medic linked to the Patreon on his podcast, describing it as the “Qmap Patreon”.
 

MK-Ultra, JFK, Assange, Snowden, Epstein: Hegemonic "Reality" Riddled With Secrets And Lies..,

Time  |  In more than seven dozen interviews conducted in Wisconsin in early September, from the suburbs around Milwaukee to the scarred streets of Kenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, about 1 in 5 voters volunteered ideas that veered into the realm of conspiracy theory, ranging from QAnon to the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax. Two women in Ozaukee County calmly informed me that an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rape and torture children and drink their blood. A Joe Biden supporter near a Kenosha church told me votes don’t matter, because “the elites” will decide the outcome of the election anyway. A woman on a Kenosha street corner explained that Democrats were planning to bring in U.N. troops before the election to prevent a Trump win.

It’s hard to know exactly why people believe what they believe. Some had clearly been exposed to QAnon conspiracy theorists online. Others seemed to be repeating false ideas espoused in Plandemic, a pair of conspiracy videos featuring a discredited former medical researcher that went viral, spreading the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax across social media. (COVID-19 is not a hoax.) When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true.

This matters not just because of what these voters believe but also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense of shared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that might ordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by data on coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock market gains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers” or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won’t believe it. They are impervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected with conspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.

Democracy relies on an informed and engaged public responding in rational ways to the real-life facts and challenges before us. But a growing number of Americans are untethered from that. “They’re not on the same epistemological grounding, they’re not living in the same worlds,” says Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse who studies online disinformation. “You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.”

How Dare Devin Nunes Kwestin His Bettors At The Brookings...,

strategic-culture |  As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.

This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on Trump in the first place!

Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).

The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.

Nunes stated:

“You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”\

Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.

Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006 and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a “creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on his Linkedin account.

The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.

Russia! Russia! Russia! Still Evidently A Thing....,

NYTimes |  Russia continues to use a network of proxy websites to spread pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda in the United States and other parts of the West, according to a State Department report released on Wednesday.

The report is one of the most detailed explanations yet from the Trump administration on how Russia disseminates disinformation, but it largely avoids discussing how Moscow is trying to influence the current campaign. Even as Democrats on Capitol Hill have urged the American government to declassify more information on Russia’s efforts to interfere with the election, President Trump has repeatedly told officials such disclosures are unwelcome.

Most of the report focuses on an ecosystem of websites, many of them fringe or conspiracy minded, that Russia has used or directed to spread propaganda on a variety of topics. Those include an online journal called the Strategic Culture Foundation and other sites, like the Canada-based Global Research. The document builds on information disclosed last week by American officials about Russian intelligence’s control of various propaganda sites.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who announced the release of the report on Wednesday, said the State Department would offer rewards of up to $10 million for information to help identify any person who, acting at the direction of a foreign government, tries to hack into election or campaign infrastructure.

The report was prepared by the department’s Global Engagement Center, whose mandate is only to examine propaganda efforts outside the United States.

The report states that the Strategic Culture Foundation is directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and stands as “a prime example of longstanding Russian tactics to conceal direct state involvement in disinformation and propaganda outlets.” The organization publishes a wide variety of fringe voices and conspiracy theories in English, while trying to obscure its Russian government sponsorship.

Once You See The Deep State Government Criminal Enterprise You Cannot Unsee It

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton go back a long way.  George H.W.Bush headed the CIA and Bill Clinton was Gov.of Arkansas when the drug smuggling operation with the Nicaraguan Contras occurred. Mena Airport in Arkansas was a valued node on that drug trafficking network.

• Foreign aid money laundering is part of the deal – it’s like a grub stake courtesy of the US tax payer.
• Congress appropriates money
• Money goes out as foreign aid
• Foreign aid dispersed to companies that employ family and friends (Hunter Biden)
• Family of Congress critters invested in companies that received the foreign aid.
• Biden and company pulled the scam in Ukraine, Clinton’s did it in Haiti, Panama Papers etc….

shadowproof |  According to documents filed by former NSA Director Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA was speculating in commodities linked to China and Russia while receiving asymmetric information on the countries as part of his job. The use of asymmetric or non-public information for financial gain is a crime known as insider trading.

The shares Alexander bought and sold while head of the NSA include those connected to the secretive and politically sensitive potash market. The potash market is largely controlled by Russia and Belarus and one of the largest consumers of potash is China. With Russia and China – two countries the NSA targets for intelligence – as major players it is not hard to see how information coming across Director Alexander’s desk could be useful in getting an information edge on other speculators. Did he use his edge to profit?

Alexander also bought and sold shares in other commodities where asymmetric information on Russia and China could have been beneficial.

On the same day he sold the potash company shares, Alexander also sold shares in the Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., a state-owned company headquartered in Beijing and currently the world’s second-largest producer of aluminum. U.S. government investigators have indicated that the company, known as Chinalco, has received insider information about its American competitors from computer hackers working for the Chinese military. That hacker group has been under NSA surveillance for years, and the Justice Department in May indicted five of its members…
U.S. officials have long insisted that the information that intelligence agencies steal from foreign corporations and governments is only used to make political and strategic decisions and isn’t shared with U.S. companies. But whether that spying could benefit individual U.S. officials who are privy to the secrets being collected, and what mechanisms are in place to ensure officials don’t personally benefit from insider knowledge, haven’t been widely discussed.

And who knows if these were the only times Alexander was in a position to have non-public information while trading? The NSA comes across quite a bit of information that could be advantageous if someone was looking to make some financial trades. Did Alexander ever use that non-public information to trade in the financial markets?

Also troubling is former NSA Director Alexander’s attempts to seemingly privatize knowledge and relationships gleaned from his government service. Alexander has filed technology patents related to network intrusion and was recently forced to back off having an employee at his new company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, that still currently works for the NSA.

Alexander appears to be having some nice private benefits from his public service.

Tashina Gauhar: Not A Conspiracy - Rather - A Nexus

TCH |  Who was the internal coordinator for the legal and investigative crew?  Who was the bridge?  Answer:

Tashina “Tash” Gauhar, literally from the school and law firm of former Obama “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder.

2009- Tashina Gauhar is the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Intelligence. Ms. Gauhar has extensive experience working with the U.S. Intelligence Community and has held a variety of national security positions within the Department since 2001, including serving as an Assistant Counsel in the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review and later as the Deputy Chief of Operations in the Office of Intelligence, and recently the Chief of Operations. Prior to joining the Justice Department, Ms. Gauhar was an associate at the law firm of DLA Piper (then Piper Marbury Rudnick and Wolfe, LLP).  (link)

Tashina Gauhar was the Mid-Year-Exam (MYE) team member who was on a September 29, 2016, conference call with the FBI New York field office about the Weiner/Abedin laptop.  Tash Gauhar was directly at the center, no, the epicenter, of the most controversial time frame for the Mid-Year-Event team.

Tashina was one of only three MYE people who actually had the responsibility to review the Clinton emails from the Weiner/Abedin laptop. [The other two were Peter Strzok and the unknown “lead analyst”]

Tashina is probably only eclipsed by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok in the level of influence within the entire Mid-Year-Team apparatus.  “Tash”, as she was known to the team, is a hub amid a very tight circle.  Tashina Gauhar held a great deal of influence.  Suffice to say, the spawn of Eric Holder is a big deal in the story.

You know what other decision Tashina Gauhar was influential in?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal:

(link to pdf)

Note this meeting was on March 2nd, 2017.  Which prompted this announcement:

WASHINGTON POST, March 2 2017 – Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that he will recuse himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, which would include any Russian interference in the electoral process.
Speaking at a hastily called news conference at the Justice Department, Sessions said he was following the recommendation of department ethics officials after an evaluation of the rules and cases in which he might have a conflict.
“They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” Sessions said. He added that he concurred with their assessment and would thus recuse himself from any existing or future investigation involving President Trump’s 2016 campaign. (link)

Yes, the DOJ lawyer at the heart of the Clinton-email investigation; the DOJ lawyer hired by Eric Holder at his firm and later at the DOJ; the DOJ lawyer who was transferred to the Clinton probe;  the DOJ lawyer at the epicenter of the Weiner laptop issues, the only one from MYE who spoke to New York; the DOJ lawyer who constructs the FISA applications on behalf of Main Justice;…. just happens to be the same DOJ lawyer recommending to AG Jeff Sessions that he recuse himself.

Absent Probable Cause Biden And Obama DID Spy On Trump

TheHill |  The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.

The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.

Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.

Strzok is the FBI agent whose violation of FBI rules led Justice Department officials to refer him for possible criminal charges. Strzok did not hide his intense loathing of Trump and famously referenced an “insurance policy” if Trump were to win the election. After FBI officials concluded there was no evidence of any crime by Flynn at the end of 2016, Strzok prevented the closing of the investigation as FBI officials searched for any crime that might be used to charge the incoming national security adviser.

Documents show Comey briefed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on the investigation shortly before the inauguration of Trump. When Comey admitted the communications between Flynn and Russian officials appeared legitimate, Biden reportedly suggested using the Logan Act, a law widely seen as unconstitutional and never been used to successfully convict a single person, as an alternative charge against Flynn. The memo contradicts eventual claims by Biden that he did not know about the Flynn investigation. Let us detail some proven but mostly unseen facts.