Joy Reid Is A Sassy Blue-Check Establishment-Negroe Troll Licensed To Say Anything

mediaite  |   “Enter the Republican conspiracy senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow, Ron Johnson,” said Joy Reid on her 7 p.m. MSNBC show last week. By way of Moscow? I guess Johnson is a puppet of Putin, or something?

This wouldn’t be much of a story if it weren’t the third most outlandish thing Reid said in the last week. Instead, Reid is empowered to say what appears to be more hyperbolic and vitriolic comments, encouraged by her Twitter followers and, apparently, by her bosses at the NBC News-affiliated cable channel.

On Wednesday night’s Reid Out, the host was opining on the decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “open” the state and end the statewide mask mandate. With the chyron “Texas To End All COVID Precautions” (not true, but moving on), Reid had this to say about Texas and Mississippi: “These states, what they have in common, is they have structures which say black and brown lives matter less. All that matters is that Black and brown people get their behinds into the factory and make me my steaks. Make me my stuff. Get there and do my nails. Work. Get back to work now, and do the things that I, the comfortable, affluent, person need. Isn’t that what we’re seeing?”

There’s a lot here to unpack. Reid’s conclusion is that Texas is going to change Covid rules so “Black and brown people” can… “make me my steaks”? It’s confusing, and offensive — and spoken with such a total certainty, which makes it so much worse.

Which brings us to this tweet from Reid, also from Wednesday and also supremely confident, about what “people on the right” think:

I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in “the good old days.” To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression. Trump is the avatar for this “freedom.” https://t.co/RlqAFYe5Zr

— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) March 4, 2021

Yes, Reid apparently believes that “people on the right” would like to “openly say the n-word,” and that “not being able to be openly racist” is “oppression” to these people. Note — this is not directed at “racists” or “white supremacists.” It’s not even couching this as “some people on the right.” It’s just a blanket, across-the-board comment, according to Reid, that all people on the right think this way. Theoretically, Joy Reid works with “people on the right” — like Nicolle Wallace. But I mean this sincerely — does Joy Reid really know a single Republican?

Now She Gotta Be A Q-Anon Conspiracist Too?!?!?!?

politico |  While Trump praised the new hire on Twitter, calling Powell a “GREAT LAWYER,” legal observers scratched their heads. Powell, who is in her 60s (she would not confirm her exact age), had shared content from social media accounts associated with QAnon, the wide-ranging conspiracy movement holding in part that Trump is doing battle with demonic, pedophile-loving Democrats and members of the deep state. The timing was also odd. Flynn’s sentencing had been delayed at that point because of procedural issues, but it was expected soon. And Mueller had recommended that Flynn receive no prison time because of the “substantial assistance” he provided in the special counsel investigation. (Flynn, under Powell’s advisement, is not speaking to the media.)

It was clear soon enough that Powell was taking a different tack. In August, she moved to have Flynn’s case dismissed for what she called “pernicious” prosecutorial misconduct, and requested that Emmet Sullivan, the presiding District Court judge, hold prosecutors in contempt for allegedly hiding FBI documents and communications that she said proved Flynn was pressured to plead guilty. In a court brief filed in October, she asserted that Flynn had been “deliberately targeted for destruction” by the intelligence community. The government countered that it had already relinquished any relevant material and that Powell was advancing “conspiracy theories” to fish for evidence that did not exist.

This week, Flynn officially sought to withdraw his guilty plea “because of the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement,” as Powell wrote in a court brief. Sullivan pushed back the sentencing by another month to consider the unusual request. But, says Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former U.S. attorney specializing in national security matters, “The scorched-earth strategy that Powell is using is rarely effective with judges.”

That Powell was seemingly blind to this likely outcome speaks to her full embrace of the Trumpian ethos of grievance and “alternative facts.” Which wasn’t always her M.O.: A federal prosecutor herself for a decade, Powell turned on her own ilk and spent years making a forceful case against prosecutorial overreach—a legitimate issue. It was when her cause came to align with Trump’s and Flynn’s plight as targets of Mueller’s probe that she worked her way into a deep state-hating, MAGA-loving network that landed her a high-profile client.

But the MAGA echo chamber, it seems, doesn’t always benefit its residents once they’re outside that bubble. While a strategy of denial and attacking the enemy might have worked for Trump during the Mueller investigation (and might yet work for him in his impeachment trial), Michael Flynn is not the president. If her client ends up in prison, it might be because of the Trumpian strategy Sidney Powell embraced.

“Crackpot conspiracy theories get easy traction on the internet,” says John Schindler, a former NSA analyst who has been critical of Flynn, but also of Hillary Clinton and the FBI. “They’re less likely to do well in federal court.”

Did Sidney Powell Undermine The Georgia GOP Senate Runoff?

newsweek |  Sidney Powell, a former member of President Donald Trump's legal team who claimed she would "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" voter fraud lawsuit, undermined top Republicans ahead of two key Senate runoff races in the state by peddling baseless conspiracy theories.

The lawyer, who was cut loose by the Trump campaign on Sunday, claimed that the Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were paid to be involved in an alleged conspiracy around the use of Dominion Voting Systems.

"Georgia's probably going to be the first state I'm gonna blow up," Powell told the conservative network Newsmax TV yesterday.

She also made the unfounded claim on Newsmax that Rep. Doug Collins would have beaten Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in the special election for her seat, were it not for the alleged conspiracy.

"There's no telling how many congressional candidates should have won that lost by the addition of... the algorithm that they were running against whoever they wanted," Powell later added.

Loeffler finished almost 6 points ahead of Collins in the race to keep her Senate seat. She has now advanced to a runoff contest against Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidate vying to unseat her and overturn the Republican majority in the upper chamber.

After Powell appeared on Newsmax, the Trump campaign released a statement saying Powell was not a member of its legal team, nor working on behalf of the commander-in-chief in a personal capacity.

 

Talk About Q-Anon For Ten Minutes Without Mentioning L'Affaire Epstein Until The Final Minute?

 wbur | At least 14 Republican candidates with links to QAnon have made their way into runoffs or onto the ballot this November.

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory and loosely organized network centered around the belief that the U.S. is controlled by a cabal of child sex trafficking, Democratic elites hell-bent on bringing down President Trump.

Q and others in the collective make it clear they believe the news media is false. Kaplan says they often use the phrase “we are the news now” and claim “they're identifying what's really going on as opposed to the media lying to you,” he says.

Similar to many evangelicals, QAnon supports seem to believe the world is on the cusp of a great awakening. Adrian Hon, a game designer, says QAnon reminds him of an immersive multiplayer game and he's worried people could recreate the playbook.

Kaplan says people have compared QAnon to larping — a real-life role-playing game — because the group “puts what's going on, in some ways, in your hands.”

“You can do the research, you can feel involved, you feel like you can explain and figure out what's really going on behind the scenes and can make sense of ... what seems like chaos going around the world,” he says.

The Fed's $10 Trillion Defends The Assets Of The Rich - You Other M'Fers Are On Your Own!!!

 theanalysis |  The Federal Reserve is directly buying stocks, bonds, junk bonds, mortgages, junk mortgages, all to prop up the value of assets owned by the top 5%. This does not spur much new production or create jobs. Michael Hudson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast

If You Want to Go to War..., I'll Take You There!

wsws |  “White privilege,” “wealthy elites,” “mansplainers,” “old white people,” “ivory tower elites.” These are just a few of the epithets hurled at me and the four historians I joined in protesting the flawed and inaccurate history presented in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. A quick pass through Twitter reveals that some historians are “ashamed of,” even “heartbroken by,” our letter to the Times editor. One historian chastised us for criticizing the 1619 Project at a time when our “republic” is so dangerously divided! Really, historians? Is it no longer our right or responsibility to critique works of history, at least not when they’re about a long, ugly episode of our nation’s history? Does history not have to be accurate if the subjects were truly victims, as enslaved Americans surely were? But I digress.

On August 18, 2019, the New York Times released its highly-touted 1619 Project, featuring historical essays and original literary works aimed at “reframing” American history with a new founding date—1619, the year that 20 or more Africans were brought to Virginia—to replace 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. The project offers slavery and its legacies to contemporary American society as the nation’s central defining features. New York Times journalist and project director Nikole Hannah-Jones provides the project’s “intellectual framework,” which posits slavery as the dominant feature of North American settlement, and the American Revolution as a duplicitous movement designed to protect slavery from its abolition by the British Empire. Hannah-Jones urges that we remember Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln first and foremost for their racism rather than their ideals of nationhood. Her assertions on these topics were forcefully critiqued by historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and James Oakes in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), and by Sean Wilentz in the New York Times Review of Books (NYTR). My own criticisms, in an interview with the WSWS, centered on the Project’s historical treatment of class and race. I elaborate here on those remarks.

After reframing the meaning of the American Revolution, Hannah-Jones moves on to the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely touching on American abolitionism and ignoring the free soil movement, though both were seeds of the antislavery Republican Party. In discussing the nation’s wrenching effort to reconstruct itself after the Civil War, she asserts that “blacks worked for the most part. .. alone” to free themselves and push for full rights of citizenship through passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Rightly emphasizing the vigilante white violence that immediately followed the victories of a Republican-dominated Congress, she ignores important exceptions, including the Southern white “Scalawags,” many of whom were nonslaveholders who fought against the Confederacy in the war and participated with blacks and Northern Republicans in passing the Reconstruction Amendments.

Identity Politics When You're Concocting a Hoax? NYTimes1619 Project Some Bullshidt....,

wsws |  Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people” for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.

Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.

Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another

nakedcapitalism |  Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is the most insightful and revelatory book about American politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal almost four full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential  election cycle.

While Frank’s topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi’s is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class. In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up Taibbi’s book. And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi’s favorite book and vade-mecum, Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi’s chapter 7, “How the Media Stole from Pro Wrestling,” visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person (which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting — more on this soon enough).

Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc. to be an updating of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988), which he first read thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. “It blew my mind,” Taibbi writes. “[It] taught me that some level of deception was baked into almost everything I’d ever been taught about modern American life…. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw” (p. 10). For what seemed to be vigorous democratic debate, Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing simulation of debate. The choices voters were given were distinctions without valid differences, and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and a Big Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, between Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was all profit-making poisonous junk.

“Manufacturing Consent,” Taibbi writes, “explains that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it” (p. 11). And there’s an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of view of the big media corporations, a “narrative-ruining” buzz-kill. “The uglier truth [brought to light in Manufacturing Consent], that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across Indochina — ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries — is pre-excluded from the history of the period” (p. 13).

So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a starting point let’s consider the very useful metaphor found in the title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin Miller’s Boxed In: The Culture of TV. To say that Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic.

Government and Media are the Entertainment Divisions of the Military Industrial Complex

moonofalabama |  Since Donald Trump was elected president the New York Times' understanding of the 'Deep State' evolved from a total denial of its existence towards a full endorsement of its anti-democratic operations.

February 16, 2017 - As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America

A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as “deep states,” undermine and coerce elected governments. So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state?
Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real — and disturbing.

March 6, 2017 - Rumblings of a ‘Deep State’ Undermining Trump? It Was Once a Foreign Concept

The concept of a “deep state” — a shadowy network of agency or military officials who secretly conspire to influence government policy — is more often used to describe countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders. But inside the West Wing, Mr. Trump and his inner circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, see the influence of such forces at work within the United States, essentially arguing that their own government is being undermined from within. It is an extraordinary contention for a sitting president to make.

March 10, 2017 - What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist

American institutions do not resemble the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump’s own team, amount to a conspiracy. The diagnosis of a “deep state,” those experts say, has the problem backward.
...
Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase, allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed “deep state” from its formal meaning — a network of civilian and military officials who control or undermine democratically elected governments — to a pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political animus.

September 5, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Tulsi Gabbard Kicking Ass, Taking Names, and Looking Good....,

Tulsi Gabbard calls The New York Times and CNN — the hosts of the debate — "completely despicable" for alleging she is a Russian asset and Assad apologist. pic.twitter.com/0pzpA4nvRo

— Axios (@axios) October 16, 2019

But perhaps the highlight was her directly calling out the very sponsors of the debate, CNN and the New York Times, for their “despicable” and baseless attacks. 

“Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable,” she said.

The CNN charge specifically referenced comments made by Bakari Sellers on New Day on the morning of the debate. He said Gabbard is the “antithesis” of what the Democratic Party and the other candidates stand for, adding, “There is no question that Tulsi Gabbard, of all the 12, is a puppet for the Russian government.”

Factional Discretion in the Context of Narrative Concentration

Sports is one arena where the insistence on some objective fact (the ball was in or out? was it a catch?) has devolved into a set of rules so convoluted as to be indecipherable. We don't trust the discretion and judgement of the human official (in or out, ball or strike, safe or out), and demand something objective like "Hawkeye" to "get the call right" and "make the game fair."

Our enforcement of the law would be quite different if there wasn't the discretion of the arresting officer, the discretion of a prosecutor, and the discretion of a judge involved. We know as fact that more young black men are prosecuted for drug offenses than young white men, even though young white men and young black men use and sell drugs at roughly equal rates.

The bottom line is that we all rejoice when that person gets what he or she deserves, but none of us wants what we really deserve.

ghionjournal |  Aaron Maté is a Beast!
 

This statement was admiringly blurted out by political vlogger Jamarl Thomas on his program The Progressive Soapbox last week. What he was talking about was a recent interview that Aaron Maté, producer, journalist and on-air talent at Paul Jay’s Real News Network, did with veteran journalist James Risen, currently of The Intercept. What did they discuss? The jailing of Reality Winner—Risen’s source for a leaked NSA document about potential Russian digital interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential primary.

It stands to reason that Thomas calls him Aaron “Buzzsaw” Maté. Even during his youthful Democracy Now days, Maté showed a genuine talent for interviewing people with a dogged focus on facts and an absolute inability to let his interviewees get away with bullshit, regardless of their perceived status.

As I listened to this interview with Risen, I started having flashbacks to all the Columbo reruns I watched as a kid. If you’ve ever seen the old detective show with the inimitable Peter Falk, there was a formula: the disheveled working class Columbo would ask an endless stream of seemingly basic questions of his suspects, who were usually impatient and annoyed wealthy white people who thought he was far beneath them in the pecking order. Eventually, they would crack under the pressure of his incessant queries, realizing too late that he’d been amassing reams of factual evidence against them while they’d been too busy feeling superior to notice.

Black Political Agenda: Defund Israel/Deport All Replacement Negroes

Affirmative action is based on a view of equal protection that compensates for historical and present prejudice and lack of opportunity. It is premised on the notion that some of us start behind the eight ball and need an extra boost to achieve basic access. Favorable treatment for blacks is controversial because it appears to be applied in zero sum contexts. If you favor a black person, you have to disfavor a white one and that's the seasoning upon which Mr. Blum's cases are all based. It is not the definition of equal that causes the controversy. it is the adverse effect on whites, or in this case, proxy white replacement negroes. 

In the case of Harvard University, it would be trivial to favor blacks while protecting replacement negroes serving as proxies for poor whites. You see, kibutzim Blum pretends to be unaware of the historic legacy of Blacks in America - thus his elite racist bootlicking antics. Blum could of course trivially solve the zero sum angle he seeks to exploit by going after the 30% + alumni legacy admissions. Blum lacks the historical perspective, ethical fiber, and testicular fortitude to go after any elite affirmative action, well, because, these selfsame racist elites are the folks who pay his bills.

Ivy League "affirmative action" began shortly after World War II. It was stimulated by the GI Bill, which made college possible for veterans who never would have dreamed of going to college, let alone to an Ivy League university. The GI Bill demonstrated there was untapped national talent out in flyover. They found public high school students in the South, Midwest, and Far West with school records rivaling the best of the prep schools. Even when some public high school scores were slightly lower than preppy competitors, admissions committees sometimes chose the provincial public high school student over the privileged alumni legacy. They recognized high achievement in the face of educational and cultural disadvantage.

As a consequence, Harvard and its Ivy sisters began recruiting a few good men out beyond the inbred Lovecraftian prep schools and elite academies of New England and the Atlantic Coast. The Ivies understood that there was more promise in the lesser academic record than in the marginally better academic record. Moreover, they wanted a more diverse student body. 

This was the original affirmative action”. It transformed the Ivies into truly national and meritocratic institutions instead of elite regional colleges for those with wealth, privilege, and pedigree. Only when the same principles of national diversity and meritocratic selection—based on recognition of high achievement and the overcoming of disadvantages—came to include black student admissions,  did we experience white backlash and resentment.

NYTimes |  At the heart of the case is whether Harvard’s admissions staff hold Asian-Americans to higher standards than applicants of other racial or ethnic groups, and whether they use subjective measures, like personal scores, to cap the number of Asian students accepted to the school.

“Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s,” Students for Fair Admissions said in a court filing.

Harvard, which admitted less than 5 percent of its applicants this year, said that its own analysis did not find discrimination.

A trial in the case has been scheduled for October.

WaPo Making Up New Concepts of Tribalism to Claim "Trump Voters Are Wayciss"

WaPo |  You remember the photo, taken in early August, of two men at an Ohio Trump rally whose matching T-shirts read, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” (Now you can buy them online for $14.) It was a gibe that spoke to our moment. The Republican brand — as with presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney — used to be pointedly anti-Russian; Romney called Moscow our chief global enemy. In the Trump era, though, you can be a Republican Russophile for whom Vladi­mir Putin is a defender of conservative values. American politics, it has become plain, is driven less by ideological commitments than by partisan identities — less by what we think than by what we are. Identity precedes ideology.

“The Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity,” the veteran strategist and pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, a man of the economy-first school, has said. But once you come to grips with the potency of partisan-identity politics, the binary falls away. So does the assumption that the great majority of Republicans who support Trump are drawn to his noxious views. (That’s the good news in the bad news.) Among candidates who led in the Republican primaries, after all, his percentage of the vote was the lowest in nearly half a century. Identity groups come to rally behind their leaders, and partisan identification wouldn’t be so stable if it didn’t allow for a great deal of ideological flexibility. That’s why rank-and-file Republicans could go from “We need to stand up to Putin!” to “Why wouldn’t we want to get along with Putin?” in the time it takes to say: Rubio’s out, Trump’s in.

What’s true of partisan allegiance is true of ideological allegiance. In research published earlier this year, political scientist Lilliana Mason conducted a national survey that determined where people stood on various hot-button issues: same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, immigration, the Affordable Care Act, the deficit. Then they were asked how they felt about spending time with liberals or conservatives. About becoming friends with one. About marrying one.

WaPo All-In On "Trump is Wayciss"Theme

WaPo |  Republicans are in a pickle. The midterms are just two months away, Democrats seem more excited than ever, and the president’s approval ratings are anemic. Faced with the possibility of disaster, what message will they focus on for November? It sure is a mystery. I’ll let the New York Times reveal the answer:

Democratic nominees for governor include three African-Americans, two of them in the old Confederacy, a prospect that not long ago would have been unthinkable. Record numbers of women are competing in congressional races. Elsewhere, Muslims, gays, lesbians and transgender people will be on the ballot for high-profile offices.

That diverse cast is teeing up a striking contrast for voters in November at a time when some in the Republican Party, taking their cues from President Trump, are embracing messages with explicit appeals to racial anxieties and resentment. The result is making racial and ethnic issues and conflicts central in the November elections in a way that’s far more explicit than the recent past.

Who could have imagined that the GOP would choose to campaign on racial resentment? Only anyone who has paid attention to Republican politics in the Trump era.

What’s more, this is the only kind of campaign it can run as long as Trump is president and dominates the party. Republicans may take a different path once he’s gone, or they may not. But any campaign that involves Trump will always be about race.

The primary reason, of course, is that Trump makes every campaign about race because that’s just who he is. There are some positions he adopts insincerely — I doubt he cares one way or another what his administration’s policies on health care or education are — but when it comes to getting rid of immigrants or his belief in the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, he speaks from the heart.

But it’s also because Trumpism as a political strategy rests on stirring up racial resentment among white voters. He turned himself from a reality TV star into a political figure by becoming America’s most prominent proponent of the racist theory that Barack Obama was not born in America; he also insisted that Obama could only have gotten into college and law school because he was an affirmative-action admission who pushed aside worthier white applicants.

Is Omarosa Banned From CNN?

pagesix |  Is Omarosa Manigault Newman banned from CNN?

The controversial former White House staffer and ex-Donald Trump crony has been hawking her book, “Unhinged,” on rival MSNBC, but hasn’t been able to book an appearance on CNN.

“Don Lemon was offered one of the first cable interviews and passed,” an insider told Page Six.

We’re told Manigault Newman was also scheduled to appear on Jake Tapper’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, but CNN canceled the appearance.

Another source said CNN was initially only interested in booking commentators who would trash-talk the reality-show vixen. “They only wanted to book guests with nothing positive to say about her. They were specifically looking for people who would provide a more negative slant when discussing Omarosa,” the source said.

CNN |  Only a few paragraphs of Omarosa Manigault Newman's book are about Puerto Rico. But their claims are significant: that President Donald Trump lacked empathy in Hurricane Maria's aftermath and that the President and Chief of Staff John Kelly referred to Puerto Ricans in derogatory terms. 

The result, the new book titled "Unhinged" alleges, was a slow and cavalier response to the devastation wrought, especially when compared to Trump's swift and effective handling of the hurricanes in Texas and Florida weeks earlier.

 

Manigault Newman, a former senior White House adviser, wouldn't specify what offensive terms the Trump administration allegedly used when referring to Puerto Ricans, even when pressed to do so during one of her many interviews to promote her book.

 

CNN has not independently verified her claims, and the White House did not respond to CNN's requests for comment.

 

I was in Puerto Rico when the Category 4 storm tore through the island on September 20. I witnessed much of what the book describes about conditions and response on the ground unfold in real time. 

 

The White House has branded Manigault Newman a liar, and many have questioned her tactics, her motives and her accuracy. But based on what I witnessed in Puerto Rico and what I read in her book about the hurricane response, this might be one example where she got it right. 

 

Intelligence Community and Its Captive Media Oligopoly ARE the Enemy of the People

Globe |  A central pillar of President Trump’s politics is a sustained assault on the free press. Journalists are not classified as fellow Americans, but rather “the enemy of the people.” This relentless assault on the free press has dangerous consequences. We asked editorial boards from around the country – liberal and conservative, large and small – to join us today to address this fundamental threat in their own words. 

There was once broad, bipartisan, intergenerational agreement in the United States that the press played this important role. Yet that view is no longer shared by many Americans. “The news media is the enemy of the American people,” is a sentiment endorsed by 48 percent of Republicans surveyed this month by Ipsos polling firm. That poll is not an outlier. One published this week found 51 percent of Republicans considered the press “the enemy of the people rather than an important part of democracy.”  

“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors,” Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1971. Would that it were still the case. Lies are antithetical to an informed citizenry, responsible for self-governance. The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a free press to speak the truth to the powerful. To label the press “the enemy of the people” is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries.

Why Do Peasants Stay Inside The Cattle Pen Of Permitted Discourse?

caitlinjohnstone  |  Plutocrat-owned news media outlets lie constantly. When I say this I don’t mean that everything they say is false; many of the events reported by mass media are for the most part factual. Whenever it’s convenient for the loose alliance of western plutocrats, the political establishment those plutocrats own and operate, and the secretive government agencies with which they are allied, the plutocratic media tell the truth to the extent that it advances plutocratic agendas. But only telling the truth when it suits one’s agendas is the same as lying constantly.

A good liar doesn’t simply say the opposite of what’s true all the time; nobody does that. A good liar tells the truth enough of the time to gain a reputation as an honest and trustworthy source of information, and then, when the truth poses an obstacle to their agendas, they put the slightest spin possible on it to nullify that obstacle. They tell half-truths, they omit key pieces of information, and, with really important maneuvers like manufacturing consent for a strategic military destabilization in the Middle East or new cold war escalations against a nuclear superpower, they shift accountability for factual reporting from themselves onto secretive military and intelligence agencies. In this way they keep full control of the narrative and still ensure that the public supports agendas which do not serve the public interest.

This is evidenced by the fact that the public has continued collaborating with a system which kills the ecosystem we depend on for survival and allows people to die of poverty while spending trillions of dollars in needless wars overseas and an ever-expanding Orwellian surveillance network. Everyone besides the most powerful and their lackeys is aware on some level that the current system is not working for them, and yet the overwhelming majority of people keep playing into it by supporting mainstream parties that are fully owned and operated by wealthy oligarchs, and then shrugging and sighing when things keep getting worse.

This is because their consent has been successfully manufactured. Due to the fact that the governed will always vastly outnumber their government, any government necessarily depends upon the consent of the governed. The entire American populace could theoretically wake up tomorrow morning and decide they want to literally eat everyone on Capitol Hill, and there’s not actually anything anyone could do to stop them. The only thing holding existing power structures in place is the fact that the public consents to it, and, in a system which does not serve the interests of the public, the only thing holding that consent in place is the ability of those in power to manufacture it.

So if there’s ever any doubt that international network of ruling elites would pour billions of dollars into controlling public narratives, remember that their power (and potentially their very lives) fully depends on their ability to manufacture the consent of the governed. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If they lose control of the narrative, they lose everything.

‘AMERICAN PRESIDENT PAWN FOR PUTIN; PROMOTES SOVIET STRATEGY ON NATO’

Counterpunch |  Joe: I think you know that the NATO you are talking about was formed in 1949, four years after the German defeat (at the hands basically, as you know, of the Red Army), as a U.S.-led anti-Soviet military alliance. It was part of the Truman Doctrine, which legitimated all efforts to contain the communist “enemy” whether by military force (the suppression of the Greek communist partisans who had heroically resisted the fascists), by rigged elections (in France and Italy in 1946-48), by espionage, political assassinations, disinformation campaigns and military alliances.

I assume you know this history anyway. It might have been taught at Pensacola Catholic High School in the late seventies, or at the University of Alabama in the early 1980s, or you might have learned it during your law school years in Florida or during your brief tenure in Congress.

Anyway (as you know), when NATO expanded in 1956 to include the U.S.-occupied West Germany, Moscow responded—you might say, somewhat belatedly—by creating the Warsaw Pact. There were then 15 members of NATO (Spain joined in 1982). But the Warsaw Pact included only 8 nations at its height. Its forces were deployed precisely once during its existence, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress the Prague Spring movement. Albania had already been expelled from the pact, and Romania in this instance refused to participate. (Indeed Bucharest denounced the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia and sought closer relations with both the U.S. and China in its aftermath.)

The Soviets were less interested in “dividing” NATO than in preserving control over their own cordon sanitaire in “eastern” Europe—their control over the sphere they had conquered while destroying the Wehrmacht in 1944-45. (Moscow was no doubt pleased when Charles De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s military structure in 1966, but that was clearly the French president’s decision based on French nationalism.) The Soviets of course hoped for allies win in contested elections and to be appointed to high office in western Europe (although as you know, Joe, Truman forbade allies from allowing communists into their cabinets). Of course the Soviets were interested in dividing NATO—not to invade the NATO countries, but rather to defend themselves. This remains Russia’s objective.

As the Berlin Wall fell in 1988 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the expansion of NATO to include East Germany, as it was reunited with the West; in return he demanded a commitment from George H. W. Bush that the alliance would not advance “one inch” towards the east. You know very well that James Baker averred this publicly in Moscow.

And as you know, Joe, the U.S. has broken this promise since 1999 when Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary (the core of the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991 along with the Soviet Union) joined NATO. And then in 2004 George W. Bush (who had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul, and welcomed his help after 9/11) further broke it when he expanded the alliance to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. And then in 2009 with Albania and Croatia, and Montenegro last year (so Trump could join in on the process). Look at a map and see how NATO’s expanded and ask what would you think if you were watching from Moscow.

The anti-Russian NATO military alliance numbering 16 nations in 1991 now numbers 28, including four that border Russia. It is not your daddy’s NATO. It’s foolish of you talk about Moscow now using “Soviet strategy.” What do you mean by that? Do you know yourself? Make a specific comparison; I challenge you.

Joe, if you do not see why the Russian state (and people) would view this expanding alliance with anxiety you really are ignorant of history. The Russians are at once aware that they, not the NATO countries, have more often been the victims of aggression in the past, and they have no intentions of invading Europe. The Warsaw Pact has been gone 26 years. And Russians know better perhaps than people in this country how NATO has been used since the USSR collapsed. And how U.S. governments and mass media whip up fears among the people of this country that often become pretexts for aggression.

How has NATO ever been deployed? Never during the Cold War; it was not necessary. It was first used in Bosnia in 1994-5, then in Serbia 1999, then Afghanistan, 2001-present, then Libya in that disgraceful war crime in 2011. As for Russia wanting to divide NATO—well of course! RT reports positively on the rise of Eurosceptics and nationalists in NATO member states; the fact is, there is a lot of anti-NATO sentiment in Europe, especially in some eastern European countries. The anti-Russian sanctions the EU has adopted under U.S. pressure (exercised largely through the Brexiting UK) following the Kiev events and Russia’s re-annexation of Crimea, are not popular among European farmers and manufacturers. There are internal tensions in NATO that may weaken it. The Russians can try to exploit and exacerbate the contradictions but they can’t create them.

What's The Matter With John Brennan?

theburningplatform |  Putin moved against the so-called “oligarch’s, a mainly Jewish gang of ex-Communists who were in the forefront of looting the country.  Those he did not chase off to London (where you can see their greasy mugs swilling in the best restaurants, hookers on each arm) he placed under firm control.  He reorganized the economy for Russia’s benefit, not ours.  Meddling?  The United States and various European countries sent in armies of international do-gooders and busy bodies to undermine the Russian government and, among other things, promote the homosexual agenda and corrupt Russian youth.  Loudmouth journalists, the Russian equivalents of Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Trevor Noah and similar troublemakers (“pro-democracy” activists, all of them) were put on a leash.  Most surprisingly for me, and effectively for Putin, he restored the Russian Orthodox Church to its former importance and influence, a very Russian thing to do.  Is Putin a real Christian?  I don’t know.  Go ask him.  If it is merely a cynical ploy it has worked.  I might add that I admire the Russian Orthodox Church.  It is one of the few Christian churches that has rejected the filth and garbage of the modern world and remains focused on its real job, saving souls.  There are no faggot priests in it, I can tell you that.  Orthodox priests marry.

Putin shrewdly decided to focus on quality rather than quantity in his rebuilding of the Russian military.  If news reports are accurate (and I sure as hell hope they are not) the Russians have developed new generations of weapons against which we have no real defense.  China has done exactly the same thing.

There is no reason at all to believe that Russia has any intention of actually using those weapons against us in some new Pearl Harbor.  That being the case, Putin has made it crystal clear that he will not allow Russia to be pushed around.  Where is his redline?  Who knows?  I don’t want to find out.

The sight of a rejuvenated Russia, proud, controlling its own economy, conducting its won foreign policy in what it believes to be its own interests, throwing pedophiles and other perverts in jail, running foreign subversives out of the place, arresting or exiling Jewish gangsters, well, all of this is just too much for the globalists and the Neo-Con’s to take.

Then comes Trump!  Who woulda thunk it?  I seriously doubt if a single senior Russian ever imagined that Trump would emerge as a presidential candidate.  Did you?

This man, seen by the self-proclaimed elites of the U.S. and Europe as a turd in their punchbowl, is by any measure the most extraordinary person ever to occupy the White House.

Trump is not a Russian agent, he has not been blackmailed, he is not selling out the U.S., his interest in improving ties with Russia has nothing to do with his personal business empire, he did not have two Russian whores do pee-pee on Obama’s mattress.   Any person who claims to believe any of these things should be immediately marked down as either a fool, a Jew with an irrational ancestral hatred of Russia, a globalist, a Neo-Con, a leftist angry that Putin and Trump are both standing up for traditional culture (though neither are saints themselves), or somebody who either lost out on the Great Russia Piñata of the early 1990’s or fears that Russia will in some way hit them in the pocketbook, directly or indirectly.

There are several interest groups desperate to stop the building of a rational, normal, civilized relationship between the United States and Russia.  They include:

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