jonathanturley | Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked many in Washington by
appointing Eric Swalwell as a house managers in the impeachment of
President Donald Trump as he continues to face calls for his removal
from the House Intelligence Committee due to his alleged intimate
relationship with a Chinese spy. Swalwell has been bunkered down to
avoid questions from the media and the public, but he will now be one of
those prosecuting the case against the President.
He allegedly first met the spy, Fang Fang
or Christine Fang, in 2011. She not only raised money for Swalwell but
reportedly had a personal relationship with him. She also pushed
successfully for his office to accept an intern. He cut ties with her in
2015 after the FBI contacted him. Pelosi made no mention of the scandal
in heralding Swalwell’s credentials:
“Congressman Swalwell serves on House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he chairs the
Intelligence Modernization and Readiness Subcommittee, and on the
Judiciary Committee,” Pelosi’s office said in a statement. “He is a
former prosecutor and is the son and brother of law enforcement
officers. He is serving his fifth term in Congress.”
Usually a speaker selects House managers to reinforce the credibility
and integrity of the case against a president. Even before the current
scandal, Swalwell was viewed as a member who was a raw partisan. Last
year, it was revealed that (despite long denials) the FBI did send an
agent to report on his observations within the Trump campaign. As I
discussed in a column,
Democratic members spent years mocking allegations that there was any
spying or surveillance of Trump or his campaign by the FBI. That was
just a conspiracy theory. Now however there is proof that the FBI used a
briefing in August 2016 of then candidate Trump to gather information
for “Crossfire Hurricane,” the Russia investigation. It turns out that
it did not really matter after all and Rep. Eric Swalwell did not miss a
step. Swalwell declared
that such targeting of the opposing party and its leading presidential
candidate was “the right thing to do.” That’s it. A conspiracy theory
suddenly becomes a commendable act.
Previously, Swalwell also declared that if President Donald Trump
refused to give Congress the documents and witnesses that it has
demanded, he is clearly guilty of all charged offenses. Swalwell
declared “We can only conclude that you’re guilty.”
WaPo | Over
the past day, a lot of people have asked me how I feel. They are
usually referring to my covid-19 diagnosis and my symptoms. I feel like I
have a mild cold. But even more than that, I am angry.
I
am angry that after I spent months carefully isolating myself, a single
chaotic day likely got me sick. I am angry that several of our nation’s
leaders were unwilling to deal with the small annoyance of a mask for a
few hours. I am angry that the attack on the Capitol and my subsequent
illness have the same cause: my Republican colleagues’ inability to
accept facts.
When
I left for Washington last week, it was my first trip there in several
months. I had a list of things to accomplish, including getting my
picture taken for the card I use when voting on the House floor. For the
past two years, I appeared on that card completely bald as a result of
the chemotherapy I underwent to eliminate the cancer in my right lung.
It was because of that preexisting condition that I relied so heavily on
the proxy voting the House agreed to last year, when we first began to
understand the danger of covid-19.
I
was nervous about spending a week among so many people who regularly
flout social distancing and mask guidelines, but I could not have
imagined the horror of what happened on Jan. 6.
To
isolate as much as possible, I planned to spend much of my day in my
apartment, shuttling to the House floor to vote. But the building shares
an alley with the Republican National Committee, where, we’d later
learn, law enforcement found a pipe bomb. I was evacuated from that
location early in the afternoon.
The
next best option would have been my office in the Cannon House Office
Building, where just three of my staffers worked at their desks to
ensure safe distancing. Before I arrived, security evacuated that
building as well, forcing us to linger in the hallways and cafeteria
spaces of the House complex. As I’m sure you can imagine, pushing the
occupants of an entire building into a few public spaces doesn’t make
for great social distancing. Twice, I admonished groups of congressional
staff to put on their masks. Some of these staffers gave me looks of
derision, but slowly complied.
dailymail | The woman interrupted Schumer during his
press conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. During the encounter, she is
heard calling Schumer, who is Jewish, a 'racist, anti-Semite'.
'You're
nothing but a coward. Seeing you hide under your desk, I actually got
sexually excited over it. That's how much I loathe you. That's how much
I'm glad what they did.'
As the woman continued to rant about the Capitol riot, Schumer's security was seen trying to get her to leave.
'As
long as there’s unrest, there’s going to be unrest in these streets, I
don’t give a sh*t whether you believe me,' she yelled.
'Six feet! Six feet! Stand down! Stand down! Stand down!' she screamed.
sicsempertyrannis |The shape of what is
coming to America is already clear; a technology driven tyranny that
will make the Chinese leadership green with envy. Siri, Alexa and other
unknown AI demons will read, listen and watch everyone, everywhere,
always, not just for impure thoughts, let alone acts, but for even the
suggestion that an unapproved thought process is occurring.
The initial outcome of
such surveillance will be your appearance on lists. The "No fly" list,
soon to be followed by the "No train", "No credit card", "No
employment", "No drivers license", "No phone", "No internet access", "No
Education", "No voice", "No Welfare" and of course the "No firearms"
list. I call this process Human deplatforming.
The checks and balances
have been replaced with (Bank) checks and (Bank) balances. The richest
men in the world are overseeing this experiment which is going global
quicker than you can say "Google". They are enabled by the University
academics who as Raymond Asquith once observed are always prepared to
provide an intellectual justification for vile acts if the price is
right and journalists will laud said acts to the heavens as decent,
moral doings if they want a paycheck next week from their masters.
The Legislature is
bought. The Executive is bought. The Supreme Court are ninnies. The only
thing standing in their way is soon to be Ex President Trump. I don't
like his chances of becoming a rallying point, they are going to go
after his children.
Oh Yes, but you have
guns you say. Well those pasty faced, namby, pamby West Coast
transgender wokeists, as you call them, may not be able to shoot
straight but they have drones, swarming drones, robots and God knows
what else in the way of weapons. They have satellite data and almost
perfect intelligence regarding your behaviour. They don't have to shoot
accurately, they have machines to do that. They can and will commit
unspeakable acts of murder and destruction before they turn off the
monitor and jog off for a Latte. After all if you are not with us you
are a domestic terrorist aren't you? There is no middle ground.
consentfactory | So, welcome to 2021! If last week was any indication, it is going to
be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in which GloboCap
reminds everyone who is actually in charge and restores “normality”
throughout the world, or at least attempts to restore “normality,” or
the “New Normality,” or the “Great Normal Reset,” or “The New Normal War
on Domestic Terror” … or whatever they eventually decide to call it.
In any event, whatever they call it, GloboCap is done playing
grab-ass. They have had it with all this “populism” malarkey that has
been going on for the last four years. Yes, that’s right, the party is
over, you Russian-backed white supremacist terrorists! You Trump-loving,
anti-mask grandmother killers! You anti-vax, election-fraud-conspiracy
theorists! You deviants who refuse to follow orders, wear your damn
masks, vote for who they tell you, and believe whatever completely
nonsensical official propaganda they pour into your heads!
Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors
have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you
will atone! No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a
building without permission! The building where America simulates
democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into
the Chamber, into people’s offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi’s desk … ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!
OK, before I go any further with this essay, I need to explain to my
regular readers (in case it wasn’t already clear) that I’ve decided to
forswear every word I’ve ever written, and all my principles, and my
common sense, and join the remainder of my old leftist and liberal
friends in the orgy of online hate and outrage they are currently
mindlessly indulging in.
Yes, I realize this comes as a shock, but I have seen the GloboCap writing on the wall, and I don’t want to … you know, get ideologically “cleansed,” or charged with “extremism,” or “insurrectionism,” or “domestic terrorism,” or “populism,” or whatever. I’m already in enough trouble as it is for not playing ball with their “apocalyptic plague,”
and whatever else I am, I am certainly no martyr, and I have a career
in the arts to consider, so I have decided to listen to my inner coward
and join the goose-stepping global-capitalist mob, which is why this
column sounds slightly out of character.
mtracey | There was no real “coup attempt,” despite incessant politician and media histrionics to that effect. Just a pitiful outburst that was quickly dispersed.
It was clear
within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe
consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the
deliberately-stoked over-reaction. The bipartisan political and media
class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast
conviction that this was something like a “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection” —
which is literally how it’s being described on CNN. Under such
allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is
going to be demanded.
Few
entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably
than the tech companies. Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic
presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this
week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern
history. Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for
better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise
purged. Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube. Trump and his supporters
are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of
bonafide “threat” to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate
for revenge. And they have been gifted with a perfect “crisis” that
will justify their getting it.
patheos |Domestic Terrorist: Rep. Lauren
Boebert, a newly elected member of congress and a big QAnon supporter,
is facing calls for her arrest after live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s
location to terrorists as they stormed the U.S. Capitol earlier this
week.
Rep. Lauren Boebert
(R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash
after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-CA)
As Trump supporters were storming the Capitol, Boebert warned the terrorists that Pelosi had been moved, tweeting:
The Speaker has been removed from the chambers.
Before tweeting that Pelosi had moved, she had tweeted:
We were locked in the House Chambers.
In addition, Boebert tweeted encouragement to the domestic terrorists before the assault, declaring:
location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week.
KRDO | Friday at noon, the organization Rural Colorado United is holding
rallies at newly elected U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's offices all
across her district, including Pueblo, calling for her resignation in
the wake of Wednesday's riot at the US Capitol.
On Wednesday, Boebert objected to the certification of the 2020
Presidential election results in key battleground states, specifically
objecting to Arizona's electoral votes. However, all of the states
independently certified their votes before Boebert's objection.
"Madame Speaker, I have constituents outside this building right now
and I promised to be their voice," said Boebert on the floor of the
House of Representatives during the debate over an objection to the
Electoral votes in the state of Arizona. "It is my separate but equal
obligation to weigh in on this election and object."
Not long after Boebert's speech, supporters of President Donald Trump
stormed U.S. Capitol Building after a rally, attempting to stop the
certification of the election for President-elect Joe Biden. Five
individuals, including a U.S. Capitol Policeman, died as a result of the
riot.
thedailybeast | Two weeks before thousands of Trump rioters breached Congress, “Stop
the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said his group wasn’t violent—“yet.”
“One of our organizers in one state said, ‘We’re nice patriots, we don’t throw bricks,’” Alexander told a crowd at a Dec. 19 rally
at Arizona’s state capitol. “I leaned over and I said, ‘Not yet. Not
yet!’ Haven’t you read about a little tar-and-feathering? Those were
second-degree burns!”
Alexander,
who has described himself as one of the “official originators” of the
Jan. 6 rally in Washington, went on to use “yet” as a code word for
violence. Then Alexander told the Phoenix crowd about his plans for
Washington.
“We’re going to convince them to not certify the vote
on January 6 by marching hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
patriots, to sit their butts in D.C. and close that city down, right?”
Alexander said. “And if we have to explore options after that…‘yet.’
Yet!”
Alexander’s supporters cheered, yelling threats like “noose!” and “nothing’s off the table!”
Alexander
led a host of activists in ratcheting up the rhetoric ahead of
Congress’ certification of the electoral votes, threatening to “1776”
opponents of Trump’s re-election. Now that five people, including a
Capitol Police officer, are dead, however, Alexander has gone into
hiding, and the website promoting his Jan. 6 rally has been wiped from
the internet.
Alexander is defiant, saying he won’t “take an iota of blame that does not belong to me.”
“I didn’t incite anything,” Alexander said in a video posted Friday to Twitter. “I didn’t do anything.”
In reality, even as Alexander claimed his supporters were peaceful,
he repeatedly raised the prospect of using violence in the weeks ahead
of Jan. 6.
On
Sunday night, Twitter banned Alexander’s personal account and an
account for “Stop The Steal.” Alexander didn’t respond to a request for
comment.
Alexander is a convicted felon, after pleading guilty
to felony property theft in 2007 and felony credit card abuse in 2008.
Alexander first appeared in conservative politics in the Tea Party era
under the name “Ali Akbar,” organizing a group called the National
Bloggers’ Club that was tied to “shady data collection operations.”
In
the Trump era, now using a new name, Alexander emerged as an
idiosyncratic, trash-talking MAGA die-hard affiliated with figures like
InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, anti-Muslim Trump booster Laura
Loomer, blundering provocateur Jacob Wohl, and Trump ally Roger Stone.
Before Trump’s 2020 election defeat, Alexander was perhaps best known
for Donald Trump Jr. retweeting his groundless claim that Vice
President-elect Kamala Harris is not an “American Black.” He was invited
to the White House for Trump’s “Social Media Summit” with various
right-wing internet figures, and began frequently wearing orange
clothes, claiming God had given him a message that the color had special
significance for 2020.
The protests were the brainchild of Ali
Alexander, a controversial far-right operative who boasts more than
140,000 followers on Twitter, where he’s simply @ali.
“Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through
his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites
boosting it,” Mother Jonesreported Friday.
“Stopthesteal.us’s domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly
defunct political consultancy he’s affiliated with. After clicking the
site’s donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate
money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with
Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.”
Here in Louisiana, Alexander is better known by his legal name, Ali
Akbar. Although he now lives in Texas, for the past four years,
Alexander resided in Baton Rouge, a fact that has gone virtually
unnoticed in the torrent of coverage he’s recently generated.
In June 2019, Alexander made national headlines
for a racist tweet that asserted Kamala Harris was not “an American
Black” because her father was Jamaican. His comment was retweeted and
then later deleted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. The next month, Alexander was one of several controversial figures invited to the White House’s “social media summit.”
There’s more.
“According to a 2018 Politico report,
the night before the 2016 election, a PAC advised by Alexander
received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer,
the pro-Trump billionaire,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported in
September. “Alexander has associated with far-right figures including Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, according toThe Observer.”
In an August profile of Alexander, the Daily Dot
reported that he had “found a niche among the likes of anti-Muslim
activist and Republican Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer and
blundering political fraudster Jacob Wohl….The trio went to Minneapolis in June 2019 to film a documentary called Importing Ilhan,
which was severely mocked online for lacking credibility. The video
they produced was aimed at proving Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married
her brother. While filming, they also wore bulletproof jackets only to
turn out to report fake death threats against themselves to
authorities.”
gizmodo | In the wake of the violent insurrection at
the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone
researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users
across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe
haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved
into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.
The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby,
began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of
the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating”
evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab,
among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the
insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to
overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.
Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift
through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The
scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became
increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google
announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it
had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and
crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced
it was pulling Parler’s plug.
Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. In a tweet
early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler
video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded
to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.
@donk_enby later shared a screenshot
showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in
latitude and longitude.
The privacy
implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a
fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local
authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of
taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian
Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.
@donk_enby
describes herself as hacker, in the sense that she’s “someone with a
creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a
definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker
association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say
hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said. @donk_enby work has aided
other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for
Cybersecurity.
@donk_enby, whose efforts are documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, said the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive. (The two sites are not affiliated.)
BAR | It must be noted that back in 2005-06, when Pelosi was gearing up for
her first successful run for Speaker, she prevented Democrats from
holding hearings on the Katrina catastrophe in fear of identifying the
Party too closely with Black issues, and then forbade the Congressional
Black Caucus and all other Democrats from attending Republican hearings
on Katrina. All of the Black Caucus meekly complied with her diktat –
except for Atlanta Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was shunned by her fellow
Black congresspersons as a result. As Peter Gamble and I reported in The Black Commentator,
Pelosi “was able to convince the Congressional Black Caucus, as a body,
to stand down in the face of a horrific crisis: the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans.” The Black Caucus’s
political irrelevance and impotence can be dated to that debacle. AOC
and her Squad are on the same path – and the slope is much steeper in
this era of accelerating national and imperial decay.
“The death of 40 to 60 thousand Americans a year due to
lack of healthcare, and 300,000-plus Covid-19 fatalities to date, is
corporate-inflicted violence on a horrific scale.”
In her self-pitying funk, the Bronx fashion-plate and champion
tweeter -- a rival of Trump, in that regard – sounded no different than
the standard “because…Trump” Democrat, blaming the outgoing Orange
Menace for her own political cowardice: “[I]n a time when the Republican
Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the
results of our election, this is not just about being united as a party.
It's about being united as people who have basic respect for the rule
of law.” Having nothing to offer their “base,” Democrats make Trump the
excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters. What will they
do when the Orange Ogre is finally gone?
Doubtless, they will blame the Russians and a “handful of outspoken left-wing activists,” as MSN dubbed
the #ForceTheVote advocates, for undermining the smooth workings of
“American democracy.” However, the exodus of the leftmost ranks of the
Democratic Party has finally begun, and will accelerate in the
excruciatingly unending Covid-19 crisis, and as the post-Covid corporate
economic order emerges with the full collaboration of the Democratic
Party. The biggest benefactor of the New Year’s revolt is the Movement
for a People’s Party, coordinated by Nick Branna, which vows to run a
slate of congressional candidates in 2022 and mount a presidential bid
in 2024. For the first time in this century, significant numbers of
young people of all races – most of them unabashed Democrats only
yesterday, it seems – are expressing raw hatred for the Democrats, who
are richly deserving of the utmost contempt.
“Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters.”
Having witnessed and participated in the largest demonstrations in
the history of the United States in the past year, these young activists
correctly see elections as only one aspect of “politics.” Indeed, the
corporate monopoly has rendered electoral projects the narrowest, most
circumscribed arena of U.S. political expression. Left political
parties’ electoral activity must be an extension of grassroots and
“street” advocacy.
Covid-19 ensured the demise of Trump and has laid bare the
anti-people nature of racial capitalism and the corporate duopoly that
serves the oligarchs. Pelosi and her Democrats have shown themselves to
be one with the Republicans in enforcing the Race to the Bottom that
capitalists have imposed, worldwide, and whose noose has been tightening
in the United States for two generations. Medicare for All is anathema
to both corporate parties because it would go far towards deprivatizing
one-sixth of the U.S. economy but, just as importantly, it would greatly
diminish the precarity and desperation of workers who fear they must
take and hold any job that provides health insurance. The oligarchy
understands perfectly that its super-profits are derived from
super-exploitation of the precarity-stricken workers of the planet, and
on the deepening desperation of its own workforce.
WSWS | In a telling interaction on CNN Friday, retired capitol policeman
Theortis Jones said, “I think they allowed them to do what they did.”
The complacent moderator failed to ask who gave the orders to stand
back. The interview with the 37-year veteran was ended abruptly soon
after he added, “They were a part of allowing these people to come up to
the Capitol the way they did.”
The Democratic leadership is
boasting that it is conducting an investigation into the death of the
police officer who was killed in the riot. But this “investigation” will
be conducted by the Capitol Police and the FBI—the very institutions
that must themselves be subject to a thorough investigation for their
role in this ongoing plot.
The Capitol Police’s self-investigation
comes even as Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren reported that the
chief of the Capitol Police lied to her by stating that the National
Guard had been called up before January 6. The chief “was not truthful
to me,” Lofgren told the press. “It was just not true. They had not been
called.”
New details are also coming to light showing how close
Wednesday’s riot came to ending in a massacre or mass kidnapping event.
PBS Newshour correspondent Lisa Desjardins told NPR yesterday that she
realized the danger she was in when she noticed police had abandoned
their posts inside the Capitol building. She was barricaded in a room
with several congressional representatives who held hands and prayed,
worried that they were about to be killed.
An aide close to Vice
President Mike Pence also told CNN yesterday that the Trump
administration did not contact Pence or take any measures to ensure his
safety. Pence was with his wife, daughter and brother in the Capitol
building Wednesday as he presided over the electoral vote certification.
CNN wrote:
Several of the violent Trump supporters
who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming ‘where’s Mike
Pence,’ the source said, frightening the vice president and his family.
Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in
on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.
Online,
fascist militias are now preparing for an even larger event on
Inauguration Day. Hampton Stall, the founder of MilitiaWatch and an
expert on the US far-right, told the World Socialist Web Site:
There’s
a lot of really cryptic chatter and overt discussions of violence
around the January 6 event, but a lot of inauguration-related organizing
is related to a few different dynamics that have been planned for at
least a month’s time. One that stands out is the Million Militia March
apparently organized for 20 January at the Capitol. Propaganda and event
fliers have been circulating around militia chat groups.
Militia
members are also making plans for protests at various state capitols in
the days leading up to the inauguration. Stall added that while
Wednesday’s demonstration in Washington DC was largely unarmed, this may
change on January 20:
There are also multiple state
capital events organized for the 17th, 18, 19th and 20th. Fliers for
these events have been quite mixed as far as indications as to the
specific ideological tendencies of those organizing, whether it be ‘2A’
activism, overt militia organizing, Boogaloo, or something else
entirely. The one commonality is that all are expressly right-wing in
nature and often point to a militant or armed gathering.
Exactly
one year before the date of the scheduled inauguration, on January 20,
2020, the largest armed demonstration in US history took place in
Richmond, Virginia involving roughly 10,000 fascists. In December,
Trump’s fascist adviser Stephen Miller said, “The only date in the
Constitution is January 20,” adding that this was the “deadline” for
action to protect Trump’s presidency.
caitlinjohnstone | Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out
with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting
fascism and the actual policies and laws put into place will have
virtually nothing to do with any of those things. It will be geared at
preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for via
grassroots activism in the United States.
Listening
to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been
raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.
“Our democracyhas
been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced
you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for
president.
Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.
Liberals
learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and
now they are academic experts on both of these things.
The
narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from
“Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even
more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and
#MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.
Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:
To
support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of
monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over
human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens
to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.
Answering a question, related to what happened in the neighboring country, he said that his government will support alternative media, to guarantee the people the right to information, in the face of the risk that the traditional media and the networks tend to believe in a global media power, a Holy Inquisition that censors and silences.
"In all public media there must be possibilities for the work of communicators, of journalists. Of course, to the extent of our possibilities, but we should try to make sure that there are these opportunities to participate in public media.
"We have to be creating alternative means of communication, this thing that you point out as a blackout, this thing that they did in the United States is a bad sign, it is a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, censor. This goes against freedom, so let's not create a world government with the power to control social networks, a world media power. Furthermore, a censorship court like the Holy Inquisition but for the management of public opinion," he said.
It is very serious, he added.
"Of course we must be thinking about options, alternatives, because I do believe that it was a before and after in the case of social networks what happened a few days ago.
"Then I read the letter from the owner of Facebook and I felt it with much arrogance, talking about their rules and what? Freedom? And the right to information? And the role of legally constituted authorities," he said.
Then, said President López Obrador, we do have to think about that "not about trusting us because we already suffered for a long time what was the control of conventional media, social networks appear, it is a new stage, we all celebrate them.
"I still maintain that they are blessed social networks. But these recent events should concern us and we should not stop creating alternative media and always allow the people to be informed, to guarantee the right to information," he said.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Some cats will never get it through their thick skulls that I grew up with, fought and reconciled with, and continue to live and work with - the rednecked salt of the earth out'chere deep in flyover country. I judge strictly by the demonstrated content of man's character. Everything else is, as they say, STRICTLY CONVERSATION.
The .0001% is shitting its degenerate pants about now after last Wednesday's outburst.
Has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump. Jeezus H. Phukking Christ!!! How ruh-tarded would one have to be to even pretend that this is about T-Rump?!?!?!
Here's one such ruh-tard. Former California Gubernator and adulterous sack of fetid shidt, Ah-nold Schwarz-a-neggar....,
wikipedia | In 2012, the Henry Jackson Society
created a task force for Inclusive Capitalism Initiative project in
order to start a transatlantic conversation about the growing income
inequalities and their threat to the capitalist system.[20]
In 2014, Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, co-hosted by the
City of London and E. L. Rothschild holding company, was held in London
where the concept of inclusive capitalism was discussed as a practical
measure.[21] At another conference in 2015 the "Pathway to Action" was brainstormed.[22]
In the same 2015 year, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism was
registered in the United States as a not-for-profit organization.[23]Lynn Forester de Rothschild became the founding CEO of the Coalition. At the 2016 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism in New York City, participants expressed commitment to promote inclusive economic growth.[24]
Members of the Coalition expressed a belief that all stakeholders,
including business and society, should be engaged in the enactment of an
inclusive capitalism agenda[25][26]
In 2019, the Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism (EPIC) undertaken by the Coalition together with Ernst & Young
reported its findings in a white paper. It was a pioneering effort to
"develop a framework and identify meaningful metrics to report on
long-term and inclusive value creation activities that heretofore have
not been captured on traditional financial statements".[27]
In 2020, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a partnership of the Coalition with the Vatican, was created.[28][29][30]
Some pundits express optimism that it is possible to remake capitalism in a more inclusive and responsible way.[31]
“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority
of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to
create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically
inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.
Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?
The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted
that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of
the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow
its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write
the whole entire thing in a week.
This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:
“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995.
It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be
used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that
could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S.
military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent
detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for
National Security Studies said the bill would erode
‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would
‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to
investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’
Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.
unz |I think for most of us who were watching, we simply had an overwhelming feeling of Schadenfreude
— seeing the political elite that’s been selling us down the river and
making our lives hell for decades for once the ones cowering in fear.
This was most especially true of the Democrats, who got a taste of their
own medicine after endlessly excusing and justifying BLM and Antifa
violence over the past four years. Only a few weeks before, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted
an ill-timed message justifying protests, writing, “The thing that
critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite
language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore . . .
The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable.
Activists take that discomfort with the status quo and advocate for
concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small and grows.
To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable . . .
that’s the point.” On this, we can agree with her.
What if activists aren’t PR firms for politicians & their demands are bc police budgets are exploding, community resources are shrinking to bankroll it, & ppl brought this up for ages but it wasn’t until they said “defund” that comfortable people started paying attn to brutality
But
for me, I was no less happy to see the Republicans on the run. After
all, it is they who have been stoking the anger and resentment of
populist Americans, secure in their belief that they had conjured a
monster they completely controlled and that they could endlessly exploit
for their own purposes no matter what they did. Well, that monster
turned around and bit them on their fleeing asses on Wednesday. The
“people,” whom they love to claim they represent, went from being an
ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and
decided to take matters into their own hands. It’s important to remember
that, according to reports,
what first inspired the protesters to descend on the Capitol was when
word reached them that Pence had refused to challenge the certification
of the Electoral College result. They weren’t just angry at the
Democrats; they were angry at the whole lot of them.
Just
as among conservatives, there are those on the Dissident Right who see
this event as a tragedy, primarily because they believe that this
protest has discredited the populist movement. To such people, I can
only respond: What were you getting out of being well-behaved? It was
already clear before the Capitol occupation that no real attempt was
being made to win justice regarding the election results. Those
Republicans who have backed Trump in his efforts to challenge Biden’s
alleged victory have, for the most part, only done so because they want
to be able to tell their Trump-loving supporters that they did their
best, but that, in the end, the Democrats cheated them. I’m quite sure
that they’ve known for weeks that they had already done all they could
do through legal procedures; what they’ve been doing in the meantime was
merely theater for their constituents. None of them really wanted to
challenge the establishment; they are the establishment. So,
from our point of view, what is there to be gained by backing a lost
cause? A lost cause that, moreover, didn’t offer much to us to begin
with, given that every Dissident Rightist has been deeply disappointed
in the Trump administration? Sure, a Trump win was preferable to a Biden
win from our perspective, but it’s hardly worth quietly and passively
going down with the ship for him.
Of
course, even before the Capitol had been cleared, I started seeing the
conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork to claim that this was
yet another “false flag” event, just like every other historical event
to have occurred over the past 70 years. The main support for this claim
that I’ve seen is that it has been asserted that known Antifa members
have been identified in the crowd that occupied the Capitol. Even if
this is true, I don’t see what difference this makes. People in Antifa
are known to be attracted to violence and chaos, so it’s hardly
surprising that a few of them may have shown up to take part.
newyorker | In an interview, Brock confirmed that he was the man in the photos
and videos. He denied that he held racist views and echoed Trump’s
baseless claims of election fraud, saying that he derived his
understanding of the matter principally from social media. He told me
that he had gone to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate peacefully. “The
President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt
like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to
actually be there,” he said. Brock added that he did not identify as
part of any organized group and claimed that, despite the scenes of
destruction that day, he had seen no violence. When he arrived at the
Capitol, he said, he assumed he was welcome to enter the building.
Brock
denied that he had entered Pelosi’s office suite, saying that he
“stopped five to ten feet ahead of the sign” bearing her title that
insurrectionists later tore down and brandished. However, in the ITV
video, he appears to emerge from the suite. Brock said that he had worn
tactical gear because “I didn’t want to get stabbed or hurt,” citing
“B.L.M. and Antifa” as potential aggressors. He claimed that he had
found the zip-tie handcuffs on the floor. “I wish I had not picked those
up,” he told me. “My thought process there was I would pick them up and
give them to an officer when I see one. . . . I didn’t do that because I
had put them in my coat, and I honestly forgot about them.” He also
said that he was opposed to vandalizing the building, and was dismayed
when he learned of the extent of the destruction. “I know it looks
menacing,” he told me. “That was not my intent.”
Legal
experts said that people who breached the Capitol could face a range of
criminal charges, from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy.
“Presumably this person broke into Congress in order to stop or
intimidate or interfere with the counting of the Electoral College
certification, a fundamental feature of the peaceful transition of power
in the United States,” Alan Rozenshtein, a professor of law at the
University of Minnesota, said.
Brock, a fifty-three-year-old
father of three who lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, graduated
from the Air Force Academy in 1989, with a major in international
relations and affairs. In a LinkedIn profile that Brock recently
deleted, he described himself as having served as a chief operations
inspector and flight commander with the 706th Fighter Squadron, at one
point leading more than two dozen pilots. Brock told me that he served
in Afghanistan and, in a non-combat capacity, in Iraq, and that for his
service he received three Meritorious Service Medals, six Air Medals,
and three Aerial Achievement Medals. In a statement, Ann Stefanek, an
Air Force spokesperson, said, “This individual is no longer serving in
the Air Force Reserve. He retired in 2014. As a private citizen, the Air
Force no longer has jurisdiction over him.” Brock now works for
Hillwood Airways, a Texas-based private aviation company.
Brock’s
family members and his friend said that his service in the Air Force was
central to his identity. Several of Brock’s e-mail addresses and
social-media accounts featured his call sign and military nickname,
Torch. One family member said that Brock derived “this weird sense of
power” from his time as a military pilot, along with a Manichean world
view. “He used to tell me that I only saw the world in shades of gray,
and that the world was black and white,” the other family member said.
“He doesn’t understand the fallout and the people he’s hurting. And I
can’t imagine what he was doing there with zip ties, or what he thought
he was going to accomplish.”
slate | Call the zip ties by their correct name: The guyswere carrying
flex cuffs, the plastic double restraints often used by police in mass
arrest situations. They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense
of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in
full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms.
At least one had a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails. At least one, unlike nearly every other right-wing rioter photographed that day, wore a mask that obscured his face.
These are the same guys who, when the windows of the Capitol were broken and entry secured, went in first with what I’d call military-ish precision. They moved with purpose, to the offices of major figures
like Nancy Pelosi and then to the Senate floor. What was that purpose?
It wasn’t to pose for photos. It was to use those flex cuffs on someone.
In October, the FBI and state authorities charged 13 men with plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer,
the Democratic governor of Michigan. Members of that plot attended
protests at the Michigan Capitol in April, real planners of violence
mixing easily with those for whom guns are fun protest props. The
plotters discussed a summary execution—“knock on the door,” one wrote in
the group chat, “and when she answers it just cap her”—but settled on a
kidnapping, pulled off while police were distracted by a nearby
explosion. Think of that plot, as these men surely did, as a dress
rehearsal for what the zip-tie guys wanted to accomplish at the U.S.
Capitol on Wednesday.
theblaze | Here, I guess, I should apologize for not joining the rest of the
media in feigning outrage and calling for the trespassers to be tried
for treason. But I'm neither outraged nor feeling vengeful because of
their act of civil disobedience.
I understand it. It was an
inevitable repercussion from 2020 and what we've all witnessed the last
decade. It was Sir Isaac Newton's third law come to life.
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
For
four years now, the billionaire and millionaire elites who control
academia, the mainstream media, politics, popular culture, and the
sports world have framed Trump supporters as racist deplorables worthy
of elimination from society.
These same elites spent the past
decade elevating Michael Brown, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Rayshard
Brooks, Eric Garner, and other resisting criminal suspects to icon
status while simultaneously raising bail money for protesters willing to
riot, loot, burn, and vandalize in the name of racial justice.
This
blatant hypocrisy will not go unchallenged. You cannot ignore the
desires, concerns and feelings of 74 million citizens. You cannot write
them off as Nazis and answer all their complaints with allegations of
racism or sexism. That's fascism.
At this point, the Deplorables
should be commended for their restraint. Antifa and Black Lives Matter
search, burn, and destroy well into the wee hours. The Deplorables
returned to their hotel rooms by nightfall and watched our lawmakers
return to work inside the Capitol by 8 p.m.
The critics say
President Trump provoked Wednesday's political "violence." His refusal
to concede a corrupt election baited his followers to overrun the
Capitol with flags, put Ashli Babbitt in harm's way, and do enough
property damage to delay the Electoral College confirmation three or
four hours.
Fine. Guilty as charged.
But our president for
the next two weeks was not Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone provocateur. He
had plenty of collaborators. They work on all the major and cable news
and sports networks. They play in the NFL and NBA. They represent both
political parties, hold high positions in Hollywood, at Netflix, Google,
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The people wagging their
fingers the hardest at Trump and the Deplorables sanctioned, financed,
and promoted political violence throughout all of 2020 and for much of
the past decade.
Free To A Good Home
-
I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
-
Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
-
“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
-
With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
