jezebel | On Tuesday, a group of activists
interrupted the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners meeting,
calling for Police Chief Rick Smith’s resignation. One of those
activists, Keiajah “Kj” Brooks,
delivered a truly incredible speech where she called out the police
department for using photo ops with Black children for good PR, and then
proceeded to drag every single member of the Board of Police
Commissioners individually.
Brooks started talking and got straight to the point.
“Fair
warning, I’m not nice and I don’t seek to be respectable. I’m not
asking y’all for anything because y’all can’t and won’t be both my
savior and my oppressor. I don’t want reform. I want to turn this
building into luxury low cost housing. These would make some really nice
apartments.”
“So
I’m not here begging anything of soulless white folks and
self-preserving Black folks. You get one life, and you all in this room
have chosen profits over people. And that’s pathetic.
So I’m going to spend the next two minutes reading y’all for filth, something I’m sure nobody has ever done.”
And then she fucking DID.
I
can’t decide if it was better when Brooks told one man that he had
“nothing but pure apathy seeping through the bulging veins of your paper
colored skin” or when she completely skipped over one board member,
saying “had I not spent the entirety of the last six months dragging you
I would have more to say, but I don’t.”
They ended their time with an almost poetically perfect Bible verse.
“Anyways,
I’ll leave you soulless, profit-driven, avaricious, greedy, godforsaken
humans, including ANYONE who works in this building, with one Bible
verse. From the Bible. Detailing the life of Jesus. Jesus Christ, who
was another unarmed Black man murdered by authorities in the book you
Hellbound people claim to love so much. ‘What does it profit a man to
gain the whole world and forfeit its soul?’”
Straightlinelogic | What’s called the silent majority is
really the ignored majority, who for the most part are happy being
ignored. Their lives revolve their families, jobs, friends, and
community, not the media, publicity, polls, or politics. They’re sick of
elections well before they’ve seen their hundredth campaign ad,
received their hundredth mailer, or ignored their hundredth telephone
call. They know that politicians are phony and corrupt and make jokes
about them, but hope that their rulers don’t screw things up too badly,
cross their fingers, and vote for the perceived lesser of two evils.
There’s a shortage of blue-ribbon
pedigrees, Ivy League degrees, and gold-plated resumés among the ignored
majority, but a surfeit of hard-knocks wisdom and common sense.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will
learn in no other.” Everybody does foolish things, but by and large, the
ignored majority learns from the dear school and puts its lessons to
good use.
The gilded class denigrates those outside
it: Hillary Clinton deploring the “deplorables,” Barack Obama saying
working-class voters, “cling to guns or religion,” and Obama telling
entrepreneurs, “you didn’t build that.” Yet, it consistently, almost
invariably, demonstrates a complete lack of the common-sense street
smarts found in abundance among those it disparages.
The quotes’ condescending arrogance rankles, but at a deeper level
illustrate the real division in American politics—between the productive
class and those it supports. At the intellectual level it’s the
irreconcilable difference between those who believe that value can and
should be conferred by the government, and those who know it must be
created and produced. It’s believing or not believing that something can
be had for nothing.
Freeloaders’ delusion stems from
psychology, not ignorance. Every human faces a choice. They can produce
value or they can beg, borrow, defraud, or steal it from someone else.
For every advance humanity has made, there’s always been someone
claiming their unfair share. Most of what we call history is merely an
account of who’s stealing or defrauding from whom.
Because production is necessary for human
survival, not producing anything of value creates a gaping psychological
fissure, one not generally recognized or acknowledged. What’s generally
accepted is that humans grasp at rationales and justifications for
their actions, not just for the audience to which they’re playing, but
for themselves. Most political philosophy is just an elaborate
justification for theft and fraud. Political systems don’t spring from
philosophies, the philosophies spring from the systems’ actual or
potential beneficiaries.
WSWS | The most obvious error made by the 1619 Project—that the American
Revolution was waged to stop British abolition of slavery—became
indefensible after the Times’ own fact checker, Leslie Harris
of Northwestern University, felt compelled to admit that she had
“vigorously” opposed it. Silverstein tried to manage this exposure of
the Times’ dishonest suppression of the fact-checker’s
objection with a clever “cut and paste” modification of Hannah-Jones’
false claim. The original categorical denunciation of pre-1619 Project
historiography had read:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they
wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had
grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that
had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]
Silverstein added two words so that the amended version now reads:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of
the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was
because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776,
Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric
institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]
In
the original version, the defense of slavery is presented as “one of
the primary reasons” the colonists decided for separation from Britain.
In the 1619 Project version 2.0, the concern over the fate of slavery
motivates only “some of”—How many? Who? Where?—the colonists. Presto!
Problem solved. Or so Silverstein thought. But the modified statement is
still false. Far from being “conflicted” over slavery, until 1833 the
British Empire maintained its own lucrative slave plantations in the
Caribbean, where Loyalist slaveowners fled, human property in tow of His
Majesty’s Navy.
As for the Project’s quietly-deleted “true founding” thesis—which was emblazoned on the Times
website and repeated again and again by Hannah-Jones on social media,
in interviews, and her national lecture tour—Silverstein now claims that
this was the product of nothing more than a minor technical error, the
sort of snafu that is an inevitable outcome of difficulties for
modern-day editors, such as himself, in managing a “multiplatform”
publication and “figuring out how to present the same journalism in all
those different media.” With all of these formats to tend to, the
beleaguered editors of the Times just couldn’t get the story
straight! Silverstein does not seem to grasp that the criteria of
objective truth do not change as one moves from printed newspaper to
website, or from Facebook to Twitter. What is a lie in one format
remains a lie in another.
In addition to chalking up the mistaken
“true founding” claim to his far-flung editorial responsibilities,
Silverstein attempts to defend Hannah-Jones by implying that readers
failed to appreciate “the sense that this was a metaphor.” He should
have been more attentive, he says, to “online language [that] risked
being read literally.” This is among the most inspired of Silverstein’s
excuses. From here on in, whenever Times correspondents like
Judith Miller are caught lying, its editors may claim that the
journalists are writing in metaphors that are not to be read literally.
Silverstein
cites the original, “metaphorical,” version of the 1619 Project. This
is the version that was sent out to school children. It read, with
emphasis added:
1619 is not a year that most Americans
know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at
most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of
our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this
fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every
Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the
moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was
in late August of 1619?
He then quotes the revised passage, that has been made to the online publication only:
1619
is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our
country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who
can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if,
however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining
contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?
Perhaps
Silverstein hopes his readers will carelessly jump over this
scissors-and-glue work. He writes that the difference in the two
passages is “to the wording and the length, not the facts.” But
actually, there to be read literally in black and white, the
first passage refers specifically to an allegedly false “fact.” If a
metaphor is being employed in the original version, it is very well
concealed.
Silverstein repeats Hannah-Jones’ conceit that
historians have ignored the African American experience. Such a claim
exposes both Silverstein’s and Hannah-Jones’ ignorance of historical
literature. The 1619 Project is as much a falsification of
historiography as it is of history.
thefederalist | Fox News’ Tucker Carlson will be dedicating his entire prime time
program Tuesday night to a one-hour interview with Biden family
whistleblower Tony Bobulinski.
Carlson announced the programming Monday afternoon.
The Federalist confirmed with sources familiar with the plans that
Bobulinski, a retired Navy lieutenant and Biden associate, will be
airing tapes of Biden operatives begging Bobulinski to remain quiet as
former Vice President Joe Biden nears the finish line to the White House
next week.
Bobulinski first came forward last week with a public statement
emailed to The Federalist and other outlets going on-the-record to
corroborate incriminating claims to surface from the New York Post the
week prior and the long-anticipated Senate report published in September
on the Biden family’s potentially criminal business activity.
“Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and
frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various
potential deals that we were discussing,” wrote Bobulinski, confirming
that the identity of “the Big Guy’ in a May 17, 2017 email published in
the New York Post
is indeed a reference to Joe Biden. The same email showed Hunter Biden
was being offered a $3 million a year contract from a Chinese
businessman with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for
“introductions alone,” and 10 percent was flagged to be set aside for
“the Big Guy.”
On Friday, The Federalist published
explosive text messages from a Biden business associate instructing
Bobulinski to conceal Joe Biden’s involvement with deals related to the
CCP-linked firm.
“Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when you are face to face,” wrote James Gilliar.
americanthinker |When the Daily Beast
wrote its October 16 article, it labeled the Guo outlet’s claims as
“absurd on their face” and added that they showed “endless conspiracy
theorizing….” Since then, revelations from the New York Post,
Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and other anonymous sources have
confirmed that Hunter’s hard drive had compromising financial
information. Now, thanks to GTV’s videos and photos, it looks like Guo
was also telling the truth about a sex scandal.
In
other words, the allegations in the tweet about disks of evidence and
financial and sex scandals appear true. That makes it possible, indeed
probable, that the other allegation in the tweet is true: namely, that
not only has the FBI had Hunter’s computers since December 2019, but
also that both Nancy Pelosi and the DOJ have been sitting on the same
information since September 28, 2020.
As
if that’s not shocking enough, Guo’s outlets have made a few other
staggering allegations. These allegations are scattered throughout the
videos and summarized in this essay at GNews (emphasis mine):
This
video shows only the tip of the iceberg of what is important in the
Chinese Communist Party’s Blue-Gold-Yellow (BGY) program. They take
advantage of all those Western politicians, celebrities, and their
families who are greedy for Chinese wealth, and threaten them by getting
hold of and recording their sex and drug videos, forcing them to sell
out their countries and people, and even their own national security in
order to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party’s world domination.
U.S.
presidential candidate Joe Biden is 100% controlled by the Chinese
Communist Party as one of the most successful political instances of the
BGY program. He is also a target of the CCP’s 3F plan, which aims to “fall, fail, and fell,” to weaken, destroy and kill America!
The
Chinese Communist Party’s use of this tactic to threaten Biden and his
sons and to bribe them with large amounts of wealth is one of the major
causes of the disputes over the South China Sea, US-China trade,
intellectual property rights, and energy prices, etc., as well as Biden’s provision of large numbers of CIA intelligence agents in China to the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party has such a BGY program in the United States and in several Western countries in Europe. We
will have millions of videos and photos of government officials,
corrupt people, traitors, and criminals colluding with the Communist
Party to dominate the world.
Again,
merely because Guo’s outlets have been accurate about some things does
not mean that the above allegations are true. However, the following
three allegations, if true, are earth-shaking:
First: China has long owned Biden thanks to its having compromising information about his family (and possibly about him too).
Second: Biden identified CIA assets in China. The back story is that, between 2010 and 2012, China executed or imprisoned 18 to 20 assets who had bravely worked with the CIA, destroying a critical intelligence network.
Third:
Guo’s outlets have “millions of videos and photos” of people who have
worked with the Chinese against their own countries. If true, this
implies that Guo managed to get into China’s “blackmail” database and
can release that information.
If you thought Epstein’s secrets were big, these new claims, if true, could blow everything out of the water. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this information – again if it’s true – could realign politics in America and elsewhere.
jonathanturley | We recently discussed
how Vanderbilt professor and historian Jon Meacham gave a quiz in his
course on the 2020 Election in which students were asked “Was the
Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the
institution of slavery?” You had to answer “yes” or get points deducted.
It appears that the final exam in the class could
prove even more demanding for any intellectually honest student if
Meacham asks about the voters themselves. The NBC analyst this week
declared that President Trump and his supporters are examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain.”
It only got worse from there.
Meacham addressed a simple question of
whether Trump helped himself with his base in the second presidential
debate Thursday night. It is impossible on NBC, however, to refer to
Trump voters without some derisive or insulting precursor. Meacham did
not disappoint his audience.
“I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight,” Meacham said.
“The question for America is how big that base is. There is a lizard
brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the White man’s, the
anguished, nervous White guy’s lizard brain.”
Meacham was referring to a primitive part of the brain in psychological literature:
“Many people call it the ‘Lizard Brain,’ because the limbic system is
about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight,
flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.”
Of course, even with the lead held by Democratic presidential
candidate Joe Biden in the polls, roughly half of this country still
supports Trump (or at least rejects Biden, who Meacham has endorsed).
That is a lot of lizard people.
What is striking is that Meacham is supposed to give what NBC, MSNBC
and PBS present as neutral, scholarly analysis. But his comment about
Trump supporters having lizard brains captures why conservative or
independent voters view the networks as biased and gratuitously
insulting.
Indeed, these comments show that networks like NBC are now focusing
entirely on Democratic and liberal viewers — writing off half of the
American people as gag lines.
epochtimes | In May 2019 Joe Biden distinguished himself from all of the other
candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination by
ridiculing the idea that China is a strategic threat to the United
States. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he told a
campaign crowd in Iowa City. Biden had for years adopted a soft approach
to China. When President Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton,
was taking a tougher position towards China’s adventurism in Asia, Vice
President Biden was urging caution. Biden had formed a warm personal
relationship with Xi Jinping when Xi was vice president and
president-in-waiting.
In his second term, Obama replaced Clinton as secretary of state with
the more accommodating John Kerry. The dynamics help to explain why
Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia” was a damp squib. The United States stood
back while China annexed islands and features in the South China Sea and
built military bases on them, something Xi had promised Obama he would
not do. Breaking the promise has given China an enormous strategic
advantage.
Joe Biden cleaves to the belief, now abandoned by many China scholars
and most Washington politicians, that engagement with China will entice
it into being a responsible stakeholder. The University of
Pennsylvania’s D.C. think tank—named, for him, the Penn Biden Center for
Diplomacy and Global Engagement—aims to address threats to the liberal
international order, yet China is absent from the threats identified on
its website:
Russia, climate change and terrorism. Biden has spoken about China’s
violation of human rights but still clings to the idea of China’s
“peaceful rise.”
So does it matter if Joe Biden has a different view of China? It
does, because there is evidence that the CCP has been currying his favor
by awarding business deals that have enriched his son, Hunter Biden.
One account of this is given by Peter Schweizer in his 2019 book “Secret
Empires.” Some of his key claims were subsequently challenged and Schweizer refined them in an op-ed in the New York Times
(famous for fact-checking). In short, when Vice President Biden
travelled to China in December 2013 on an official trip, his son flew
with him on Airforce Two. While Biden senior was engaging in soft
diplomacy with China’s leaders, Hunter was having other kinds of
meetings. Then, “less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter’s firm …
which he founded with two other businessmen [including John Kerry’s
stepson] in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners,
whose largest shareholder is the government-run Bank of China, even
though he had scant background in private equity.”
thehill | The former vice president was asked in an interview on the
progressive political podcast "Pod Save America" released Saturday why
he hasn't highlighted concerns that the Trump family is
profiting off the presidency, a charge Trump has made against Biden's
son.
"It's a specific decision, and I just think it's crass," Biden said.
"I'm running against Donald Trump, not his children, and the American
people want to hear about their families, not about Trump's family or
my family, although I'm very proud of my family," he said. "It's just
not how I was raised. It's that basic. It's Donald Trump."
Critics
have long raised concerns about Trump's family profiting off his
presidency, with Democrats maintaining that his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner holding positions as senior White House advisers presents conflicts of interest with their businesses.
Ivanka
Trump has brushed off such criticisms, saying last year that her father
ran for office after making his money in real estate.
“His
wealth, and our wealth, collectively and independently, was created
prior to government service and prior to anyone in our lives having run
for elected office,” she told The Associated Press then.
“Most people do create their wealth post service. We created ours prior,” she added.
NYPost | What might the Bidens’ foreign benefactors have expected in return
for all this largesse? We can’t say. But some may see a correlation
between that foreign money and Joe Biden’s policy posture toward the
sources of that money.
Consider the case of the Penn Biden Center, a D.C. think tank named
after Joe Biden. According to the Center, its mission is to “Address
Threats to the Liberal International Order.” The Center analyzes the
threats of “Russia” and “climate change” in detail. But China — the
largest violator of basic human rights on the planet — does not make the
list. Why?
Perhaps we now know why.
The New York Post broke news
last week that Joe Biden himself may have benefited from his son’s
dealings. The Post quoted a cryptic message from one of Hunter’s
partners, saying that “10 [percent] held by H for the big guy?” The
recipient of that message, Tony Bobulinski, says “there is no question” that “H” stands for Hunter and the “Big Guy” is Joe Biden.
We gain further insight into the operations of Biden Inc. in emails
provided to us by Bevan Cooney, a former business associate of Hunter
Biden. Cooney, who is currently in prison for his role in the Indian
Bond Scheme that is sending Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer
also to jail, shared 26,000 emails that show what Hunter’s role was in
their business ventures. The Biden name was considered “currency” for
their foreign business ventures, and was a “direct…pipeline” to the
Obama-Biden Administration. Deals involving Hunter benefited from the
“Biden lift,” the help that the name would provide in overseas dealings.
After first dismissing the gathering scandal as a “conspiracy
theory,” the Biden team shifted to the position that Joe had never
talked with his family about their business dealings, then shifted again
to the position that he’d never met with his family’s business
partners. Now, with the latest document revelations, Joe Biden unveiled
his latest defense in the recent debate: “I have not taken a single
penny from any country whatsoever, ever.”
Team Biden points to Joe and Jill Biden’s tax returns as evidence
that Joe did nothing improper. It is worth noting that the family
members upon whom foreign entities showered money are not required to
disclose their finances.
theatlantic | For those trying to follow along at home, the emails produced by Tyrmand are not
the same emails that originally appeared on a laptop that Hunter Biden
supposedly left at a Delaware computer-repair shop, the laptop that then
became a story in the New York Post (and whose contents, according to a report in Time, were circulating previously in Ukraine).
This is a different cache, one that is even more tangential to the U.S.
presidential campaign and even harder to understand. In order to even
make sense of the messages’ content, the reader must learn the
backstories of a whole new cast of characters, not just Cooney but two
other convicted fraudsters named Devon Archer and Jason Galanis;
the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yelena Baturina; and Chris
Heinz, John Kerry’s stepson, who broke away from the group; as well as
their relationships, their jokes (they refer to Baturina as the “USSR
woman’s shot put champion”), and the rules of the ugly world they
inhabit. In order to link them to Joe Biden, you have to turn
somersaults, do triple flips, and squint very hard.
Those
who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not,
of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been
published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand’s email cache could reveal
(if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use
Hunter Biden’s surname and connections to get business deals or score a
visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about
Hunter Biden’s involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles
with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of
people visit the8 White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds
committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers. Compare that with, say, the Trump family’s well-documented hotel deal
with an Azerbaijani business family linked to the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps. Or the Trump family’s blatant use of its status to funnel money to its own companies. Or the Trumps’ illegal abuse of their charitable foundation. Or the president’s secret Chinese business bank account.
The Trump family is a living, breathing, walking conflict of
interest—so much so that much of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is most
easily explained through the lens of his personal greed and his hotel
investments, not as the emanation of any kind of American national
interest.
But this, of course, is not the point. In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News
contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of
actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or
Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy
world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might
have happened. They are also providing the raw material from which more
elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible
reference in last night’s debate to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” from
whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this
works. A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached
from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation
that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some
traction, in which case it is repeated again.
strategic-culture | People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the
future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise
and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up
from a war. Today’s war has been an economic war of the oligarchs
against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus
pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against
pluralist society. We are being confronted with this ‘great reset’,
alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people
have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen.
This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination
of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the
foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust
for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.
Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a ‘Build Back Better’ sign, speaking to the need for a ‘great reset’.
‘Build Back Better’ happens to be Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, which
raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are
the handlers who manage ‘Joe Biden’, and those managing ‘Boris Johnson’
working the same script?
The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this ‘great reset’ being carried out?
Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon
the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to
those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying
oligarchy.
What Johnson calls the ‘Great Reset’, Biden calls the ‘Biden Plan for
a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’. Certainly the
coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.
How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a ‘great reset’,
whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm
used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as
being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by
Neil Clark.
And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official
press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be
the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous
opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a
fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.
Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists
in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various
parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken
of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in
western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international
relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now
bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the
post-globalization paradigm.
pjmedia | Moreover, what other presidential candidate has refused to provide
his position on key issues, including whether he would pack the Supreme
Court? When has any other candidate haughtily waved off questions of
debate moderators and reporters with the sophomoric dodge that, “Trump
just wants you to focus on this issue (instead of what an SOB he is)”?
Adding insult to injury, when has the media ever let any candidate
off the hook like this, which is a scandal of unprecedented proportions?
Obviously, the media disrespects the electorate as much as the Biden
campaign does.
If anything is indisputably the media’s job, it is to bring out the
candidates’ positions on important issues, and packing the Supreme Court
and the Biden scandals are exceedingly important — and relevant —
issues. What would the media’s reaction be if Trump refused to answer
such questions?
The media dutifully promoted the canard that the Russians — yes, the
Russians again — were behind the emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But how will these crooked conspirators explain away the bombshell
revelation of Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, that
the “big guy” referred to in Hunter’s email is Joe Biden himself? How
will they handle Bobulinski’s assertion that Joe Biden was offered 10%
interest in a Chinese business deal?
But for my money, even these cover-ups don’t hold a candle to the
media’s scandalous concealment of Joe Biden’s declining mental acuity.
In his current state, Biden clearly is not fit for office, yet the media
ignores it while raising bogus questions about the uncannily vibrant
Trump’s capacity. Reality has finally trumped George Orwell’s
imagination.
Where is the perennial finger-wagger Bob Woodward when you need him?
The American public knows everything there is to know about Trump, as
they’ve scrutinized every molecule of his being and business dealings
and dug up every conceivably negative morsel about him during the last
four years.
baldingsworld | Lost among the salacious revelations about laptop provenance is the
more mundane reality of influence and money of major United States
political figures. Ill informed accusations of Russian hacking and
disinformation face the documented reality of a major Chinese state
financial partnership with the children of major political figures. A
report by an Asian research firm raises worrying questions about the
financial links between China and Hunter Biden.
Beginning just before Joe Bidens ascendancy to the Vice Presidency,
Hunter Biden was travelling to Beijing meeting with Chinese financial
institutions and political figures would ultimately become his
investors. Finalized in 2013, the investment partnership included money
from the Chinese government, social security, and major state-owned
banks a veritable who’s who of Chinese state finance.
It is not simply the state money that should cause concern but the
structures and deals that took place. Most investment in specific
projects came from state owned entities and flowed into state backed
projects or enterprises. Even the deals speak to the worst of cronyism.
The Hunter Biden investment firm share of a copper mine in the Congo was
guaranteed with assets put at risk by the larger copper company to
ensure deal flow to Hunter’s firm.
In another instance, Bank of China working on an IPO in Hong Kong
gave its share allocation to the BHR investment partnership. They were
able to do this because even though the Hunter Biden firm completed no
notable work on the IPO, it is counted as a subsidiary of the Bank of
China. The Hunter Biden Chinese investment partnership is literally
invested in by the Chinese state and a subsidiary of the Bank of China
owned by the Chinese Ministry of Finance.
The entire arrangement speaks to Chinese state interests. Meetings
were held at locations that in China speak to the welcoming of foreign
dignitaries or state to state relations. The Chinese organizations
surrounding Hunter Biden are known intelligence and influence operatives
to the United States government. The innocuous names like Chinese
People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs exist to “…carry out
government-directed policies and cooperative initiatives with
influential foreigners without being perceived as a formal part of the
Chinese government.”
Interestingly the CPIFA is under the Chinese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. When the investment partnership was struck in 2013, the
Minister of Foreign Affairs was Yang Jiechi. Yang would have been very
familiar with Hunter Biden from his days in Washington as the Chinese
Ambassador to the United States from 2001 to 2005 during which he met
regularly with Joe Biden chairing the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Today the same individual who oversaw institutions helping
shepherd Hunter’s investment partnership as the Minister of Foreign
Affairs is Xi Jinping’s right hand man on foreign affairs and member of
the powerful Politburo.
Most worrying is the financial leverage this gives the Chinese state
over a direct member of the Biden family. Despite the widely reported
$1-1.5 billion of investment the reality is likely much higher. A
co-founder of the investment firm reports the total assets under
management as $6.5 billion. While this number cannot be completely
replicated, given that two deal alone were worth in excess of $1.6
billion this number is not unrealistic at all. A 2% annual fee on
assets under management would generate $130 million annually. Add in the
20% fee on capital gains the firm would recognize and it is not
difficult to see Hunter’s stake being worth in excess of $50 million.
According to Hunter’s attorney, he did not invest his $400,000 in the
company until 2017. Even assuming the veracity of this statement, this
raises a major problem. Founded in 2013, the firm had large amounts of
revenue and assets under management by 2017. In other words, his
$400,000 stake would have already been worth far more than what he paid
for it. This paltry $400,000 investment worth more than $50 million now
would have realized a gain of more than 12,400% in three years.
The difficulty in eluding these concerns is their documentability by
anyone who cares to look. There is no potential for hacking because it
is all public record in China. Any journalist who wishes to look can go
review IPO prospectuses, news reports, or corporate records. There is no
secret method for discovering this data other than actually looking.
There is simply no way to avoid the reality that Hunter Biden was
granted a 10% stake worth far in excess of what he paid for a firm that
is literally operated and owned by the Chinese state.
I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and have significant concerns
about his policies in areas like immigration. Having lived in China for
nine years throughout the Xi regimes construction of concentration
camps and having witnessed first hand their use of influence and
intelligence operations, the Biden links worry me profoundly.
Whether Joe Biden personally knew the details, a very untenable
position, it is simply political malpractice to not be aware of the
details of these financial arrangements. These documentable financial
links simply cannot be wished away.
One of Joe Biden’s ways of contrasting himself with President Trump
has been to declare the election a battle of Park Avenue values vs.
Scranton, Pa., values.
Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.
The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice
president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make
millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm
is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with
drama and intrigue.
The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier
information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski,
who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and
Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of
accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.
He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago.
That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity
positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big
guy.”
Hunter Biden text exchange from June 2017 obtained by #FoxNews ranting to his business partners about not wanting to "sign over my family's brand", "the keys to my family's only asset" to Tony Bobulinski. Warning: foul language. pic.twitter.com/8gn1KuVOBu
In a matter-of-fact manner, Bobulinski states that the “email is
genuine” and that the former vice president and the man leading in the
2020 race is indeed “the big guy.”
My name is Tony Bobulinski. The facts set forth below are true and
accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation.
Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive. I am the
recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post
which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is
genuine.
This afternoon I received a request from the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate Committee on
Finance requesting all documents relating to my business affairs with
the Biden family as well as various foreign entities and individuals. I
have extensive relevant records and communications and I intend to
produce those items to both Committees in the immediate future.
I am the grandson of a 37 year Army Intelligence officer, the son of a
20+ year career Naval Officer and the brother of a 28 year career Naval
Flight Officer. I myself served our country for 4 years and left the
Navy as LT Bobulinski. I held a high level security clearance and was an
instructor and then CTO for Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. I
take great pride in the time my family and I served this country. I am
also not a political person. What few campaign contributions I have made
in my life were to Democrats.
If the media and Big Tech companies had done their jobs over the past
several weeks I would be irrelevant in this story. Given my long
standing service and devotion to this great country, I could no longer
allow my family’s name to be associated or tied to Russian
disinformation or implied lies and false narratives dominating the media
right now.
After leaving the military I became an institutional investor
investing extensively around the world and on every continent. I have
traveled to over 50 countries. I believe, hands down, we live in the
greatest country in the world.
What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I
am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the
Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was
brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter
Biden. The reference to “the Big Guy” in the much publicized May 13,
2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other “JB”
referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.
Hunter Biden called his dad “the Big Guy” or “my Chairman,” and
frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various
potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden
saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand
that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they
said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.
I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial
ROI. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment.
Once I realized that Hunter wanted to use the company as his personal
piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the
Chinese, I took steps to prevent that from happening.
The Johnson Report connected some dots in a way that shocked me — it
made me realize the Bidens had gone behind my back and gotten paid
millions of dollars by the Chinese, even though they told me they hadn’t
and wouldn’t do that to their partners.
I would ask the Biden family to address the American people and
outline the facts so I can go back to being irrelevant — and so I am not
put in a position to have to answer those questions for them.
I don’t have a political ax to grind; I just saw behind the Biden
curtain and I grew concerned with what I saw. The Biden family
aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars
from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled
China.
slate | On Thursday morning, a federal court released a 2016 deposition given by Ghislaine Maxwell, the 58-year-old British woman charged by the federal government
with enticing underage girls to have sex with Jeffrey Epstein. That
deposition, which Maxwell has fought to withhold, was given as part of a
defamation suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleges that
she was lured to become Epstein’s sex slave. That defamation suit was
settled in 2017. Epstein died by suicide in 2019.
In the deposition, Maxwell was pressed to answer questions about the
many famous men in Epstein’s orbit, among them Bill Clinton, Alan
Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew. In the document that was released on
Thursday, those names and others appear under black bars. According to the Miami Herald,
which sued for this and other documents to be released, the deposition
was released only after “days of wrangling over redactions.”
It turns out, though, that those redactions are possible to crack. That’s because the deposition—which you can read in full here—includes
a complete alphabetized index of the redacted and unredacted words that
appear in the document. For example, after cracking the redactions, we
know that Maxwell was asked about an email that Dershowitz allegedly
sent to Epstein. In that email, Dershowitz reportedly wrote that he was
“working on several possible articles about unfairness in the legal
process that allows false charges to be inserted into legal documents.”
Here’s how to deduce the redacted words, using former President Bill Clinton as an example.
When asked local Wisconsin TV station WISN if there was any legitimacy to comments by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that Hunter "together with other Biden family members, profited off the Biden name," the former Vice President replied "None whatsoever," adding (without finishing the sentence) "This is the same garbage Rudy Giuliani, Trump's henchman..."
"It's the last ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family."
Except, Hunter admitted he profited off his family name!
"If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?" asked ABC News' Amy Robach in an October 15, 2019 interview.
"I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect," said Hunter. "I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden," he added, "because my dad was Vice President of the United States."
"There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full-grown adult that — my father in some way hasn’t had influence over."
j|onathanturley | The convergence of law and politics is a common occurrence in Washington. While law is used to ascertain truth, politics is often used to obscure it.
That is why the truth is rarely evident in looking at a scandal straight on. Rather it requires peripheral vision or analysis – often what is not evident is what is most enlightening.
This
most famous example of such reasoning was found in Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze,” on Sherlock Holmes’s investigation of the
disappearance of a racehorse.
The local inspector asked if there was “any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes responds, “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
When the inspector objects, “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”
There is always something a tad curious of Washington legal scandals
in what has not occurred. That is why the latest Hunter Biden scandal is
so curious.
When the story broke in the New York Post, the Biden campaign was
faced with thousands of emails that purportedly showed clear support for
allegations that Hunter Biden was given millions as part of an
influence-peddling scheme related to his father, then-Vice President Joe
Biden.
There was ample reason to be skeptical about the sketchy account of a
computer being left by Hunter Biden at a computer store with a man who
cannot see beyond a couple of feet. And then there is the timing of
disclosure just weeks before an election.
The problem was the absence of “barks” from the Biden camp. The
computer files revealed a host of embarrassing pictures of Hunter Biden
using drugs or exposed in other embarrassing ways. The emails contain
dates and addresses that match up with confirmed records.
If they are fabricated, there were three barks that we would have expected within hours of the release.
Bark 1: This was not Hunter Biden’s computer
The most obvious response would be that this is not the computer of
Hunter Biden. After all, the computer store owner John Paul Mac Isaac
who is legally blind said that he could not recognize the person who
dropped off the laptop.
However, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has now stated, as a fact, that
“the laptop was left by Hunter Biden, in an inebriated, heavily
inebriated state with the merchant.” That does not purport with what
Isaac said.
However, there remains the question of a laptop with a “Beau Biden Foundation” sticker on it with highly incriminating files.
Someone in the campaign must have called Hunter Biden and he had to have told them whether or not it was his laptop.
The response on ownership has been crickets for days.
Bark 2: These were not Hunter Biden’s photos or emails
Even if the campaign cannot deny that the computer was Hunter
Biden’s, it could deny that these incriminating pictures and emails were
his.
Again, crickets.
Note that if these are fabricated emails or pictures, this would be a serious federal crime and the basis for legal action.
The Biden camp has no shortage of lawyers. Indeed, they have been
signing up lawyers in droves in preparation for election challenges.
Yet, there is not a single allegation of fraud or fabrication after days of a brewing scandal.
Bark 3: This is defamation
Perhaps this bark is the most telling. If these emails or pictures
are fabricated, it is a clear case of defamation and other tort actions.
It would seem that one of the hundreds of lawyers currently lined up
by the Biden campaign would fire off an “intent to sue” letter.
Truth is a defense to defamation, so the letter might start with the
earlier bark and deny that this was Hunter Biden’s computer and these
were Hunter Biden’s file.
One big difference between the legal and political worlds is that in
the latter there is no protection for the right to remain silent. In
politics, scandals can be managed but not silently.
Instead of these obvious barks, the public heard something closer to a
whimper: that the campaign could not find any notation on Vice
President Biden’s official schedule that he met with a Ukrainian figure
connected to the payments to his son Hunter Biden.It would be a curious
sight in itself for Biden’s official schedule to include “meeting with
Ukrainian connected to Hunter.” Many meetings are not part of an
official schedule that staffers know is subject to official records laws
for preservation and review.
That is what is so curious about the Hunter Biden story and, to move
from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Lewis Carroll, it is becoming “curiouser
and curiouser.”
guardian | Although unfortunate, the circumstances of the set-up appear
consensual, with Giuliani led to believe he was being courted. Bakalova,
24, is highly plausible in the sting, despite also having to pretend,
for the benefit of viewers, to be a feral child posing as a far-right
journalist.
In a radio interview after news of the scene broke, Giuliani claimed that he was only trying to take off his microphone and tucking in his shirt.
“I had to take off the electronic equipment,” Giuliani told WABC.
“And when the electronic equipment came off, some of it was in the back
and my shirt came a little out, although my clothes were entirely on. I
leaned back, and I tucked my shirt in, and at that point, at that point,
they have this picture they take which looks doctored, but in any
event, I’m tucking my shirt in. I assure you that’s all I was doing.”
He added that he had believed the interview with Bakalova was
entirely legitimate. “At one point she explained to me some problems she
had. I actually prayed with her,” he said. “And then I had to leave. I
had my jacket on. I was fully clothed at all times.”
Later on Twitter, Giuliani derided the film as “a complete fabrication”.
“At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever
inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold
liar,” he added.
justthenews | Giuliani dismissed suggestions that filing a police report as Trump's
private attorney two weeks before Election Day should be deemed
political.
"The conduct falls under the mandatory reporting requirements for
child endangerment," Giuliani said. "If I was the U.S. attorney or the
mayor or Bernie was still the commissioner, it would have been a crime
for us not to report what we had."
The police report is the latest drama to unfold from the week-old
Biden laptop revelations, news about which influential social media
sites choose to block from public view, including stories from The New
York Post, purportedly because of "potential harm." Facebook and Twitter
did not disclose any details of the "potential harm." Conservatives
have pointed out that the FBI has possessed the computer materials for a
year. Giuliani said the FBI's apparent inaction factored into his
decision to report the matter to local police.
"The FBI has had this for a long time," Giuliani said. "No indication
they did anything about this, so I went to the local police and said,
'What are you going to do about this?'"
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings
was a protege of the vice president’s late son Beau Biden, who served
as the state's attorney general from 2007-2015. She began her tenure as
state prosecutor in 2011 and was named Delaware's top law enforcement
officer in January 2019. Jennings' Chief Deputy Attorney General is Alexander S. Mackler, who was Vice President Biden's deputy legal counsel.
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