Why No Consequences When CIA Hacked Senate Select Intelligence Committee Computers?

CTH  |  The contrast of ideological alignment between the HPSCI, SSCI and Intelligence Branch is crystal clear when viewed through the prism of cooperation.  You can see which legislative committee holds the power and support of the Intelligence Branch.   The SSCI facilitates the corrupt existence of the IC Branch, so the IC Branch only cooperates with the SSCI.  It really is that simple.

♦ The Intelligence Branch carefully selects its own members by controlling how security clearances are investigated and allowed (FBI).  The Intelligence Branch also uses compartmentalization of intelligence as a way to keep each agency, and each downstream branch of government (executive, legislative and judicial), at arms length as a method to stop anyone from seeing the larger picture of their activity.  I call this the “silo effect“, and it is done by design. I have looked the at stunned faces when I present silo product from one agency to the silo customers of another.

Through the advise and consent rules, the Intelligence Branch uses the SSCI to keep out people they consider dangerous to their ongoing operations.  Any appointee to the intelligence community must first pass through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, before they get a full Senate vote.  If the SSCI rejects the candidate, they simply refuse to take up the nomination.  The president is then blocked from that appointment.  This is what happened with President Trump over-and-over again.

♦ Additionally, the Intelligence Branch protects itself, and its facilitating allies through the formal classification process.  The Intelligence Branch gets to decide unilaterally what information will be released and what information will be kept secret.  There is no entity outside the Intelligence Branch, and yes that includes the President of the United States, who can supersede the classification authority of the Intelligence Branch.  {Go Deep} and {Go Deep}  This is something 99.9% of the people on our side get totally and frustratingly wrong.

No-one can declassify, or make public, anything the Intelligence Branch will not agree to.  Doubt this?… ask Ric Grenell, John Ratcliffe, or even President Trump himself.

♦ The classification process is determined inside the Intelligence Branch, all by themselves.  They get to choose what rank of classification exists on any work-product they create; and they get to decide what the classification status is of any work-product that is created by anyone else.  The Intelligence Branch has full control over what is considered classified information and what is not.  The Intelligence Branch defines what is a “national security interest” and what is not.  A great technique for hiding fingerprints of corrupt and illegal activity.

[For familiar reference see the redactions to Lisa Page and Peter Strzok text messages. The Intelligence Branch does all redactions.]

♦ Similarly the declassification process is a request by an agency, even a traditionally superior agency like the President of the United States, to the Intelligence Branch asking for them to release the information.  The Intelligence Branch again holds full unilateral control.  If the head of the CIA refuses to comply with the declassification instruction of the President, what can the president do except fire him/her?   {Again, GO DEEP}  How does the President replace the non-compliant cabinet member?… They have to go through the SSCI confirmation… See the problem?

The Fourth Branch Funds Itself From Multinational Private Sector Partnerships

CTH  |  Here we pick up the intelligence issues as they manifest after 9/11/01, and highlight how the modern version of the total intelligence apparatus has now metastasized into a fourth branch of government.  If we take the modern construct we can highlight how and why the oversight or “check/balance” in the system has become functionally obsolescent.

Factually, the modern intelligence apparatus uses checks and balances in their favor.  The checks create silos of proprietary information that works around oversight issues. That’s part of the problem.

Ironically the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the aftermath of 9/11/01 expressly to eliminate the silos of information which they felt led to a domestic terrorist attack that could have been prevented.  The ODNI was created specifically upon the recommendation of the 9/11 commission.

The intent was to create a central hub of intelligence information, inside the executive branch, where the CIA, NSA, DoD, DoS, and DIA could deposit their unique intelligence products and a repository would be created so that domestic intelligence operations, like the DOJ and FBI could access them when needed to analyze threats to the U.S.   This, they hoped, would ensure the obvious flags missed in the 9/11 attacks would not be missed again.

The DNI office created a problem for those who operate in the shadows of proprietary information.  You’ll see how it was critical to install a person uniquely skilled in being an idiot, James Clapper, into that willfully blind role while intelligence operatives worked around the office to assemble the Intelligence Branch of government.

♦ The last federal budget that flowed through the traditional budgetary process was signed into law in September of 2007 for fiscal year 2008 by George W Bush.  Every budget since then has been a fragmented process of continuing resolutions and individual spending bills.

Why does this matter?  Because many people think defunding the IC is a solution; it ain’t… not yet.  Worse yet, the corrupt divisions deep inside the U.S. intelligence system can now fund themselves from multinational private sector partnerships (banks, corporations and foreign entities).

The Fourth Branch Of Government

CTH |   That video of James Comey being questioned by Elise Stefanik was the first example given to me by someone who knew the background of everything that was taking place preceding that March 20, 2017, hearing.  That FBI reference point is a key to understand how the Intelligence Branch operates with unilateral authority above congress (legislative branch), above the White House (executive branch), and even above the court system (judicial branch).

After four days of research and meetings in DC during 2020; amid a town that was serendipitously shut down due to COVID; I found a letter slid under the door of my nearly empty hotel room with an introduction of sorts.  The subsequent discussions were perhaps the most important. After hours of specific questions and answers on specific examples I realized why our nation is in this mess.  That is when I discovered the fourth and superseding branch of government, the Intelligence Branch.

The intelligence branch is an independent functioning branch of government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the executive branch as most would think.  To understand the intelligence branch we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about three coequal branches of government, and replace that outlook with the modern system that created itself.

The intelligence branch functions, much like the State Dept, through a unique set of public-private partnerships that support it.  Big Tech industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that functioning; almost like an NGO.  However, the process is much more important than most think.  In this problematic perspective of a corrupt system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.

There are people making decisions inside this little-known, unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every facet of our lives.

None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not know how the system works.  I know this because I have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House committee seats.   They are clueless.  That is part of the purpose of me explaining it, with examples, in full detail and sunlight.

Successor Ideology Is A More Encompassing And Accurate Term For What Is Mislabeled Critical Race Theory

unherd  |  The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

Composed with a feverish, hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order, observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. 

What are these ISAs? Contrasted with the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system along with the family, and the legal and political system and the culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the possibility of political change through its wielding of the most powerful weapon, ideology. 

It is through ideology, Althusser asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realised and real­ises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”

Information Is Classified To Protect Elite Political Security Not National Security

caitlinjohnstone  |  As someone whose life's work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he'd have been in a prime position to know. He'd have seen time and time again how a nation's citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.

As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government's granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America's prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it's good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire's ability to control our understanding of what's happening in the world. This was a most egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not be allowed to stand. 

So an example is being made. In less polite times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national security concerns.

Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their political security. It's telling the world, "If you ever try to interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we will do to you." 

And, whether we fully understand what's really happening or not, that's the message that is being ingested here. Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange.

The Varieties Of Black Political Philosophy

sootyempiric  |  In circles I run in one will often see people advised to read black authors or engage with black thought. I take it the reason I see this so often is that in the bits of philosophy I mix in it is i) seen as good to be broad minded and well read in one's thought, and especially to be in touch with wha people from marginalised groups are thinking -- and ii) rare to actually be as much. This got me thinking about what this means, what sort of tendencies of thought or theory one might expect to encounter upon doing so.

For that reason I decided to categorise some of the tendencies of black political thought that I often encounter, and share that here. Each group is not much more than a loose affinity group, united by a theme. But I tend to think I can recognise instances of members of these groups when I see them - by what they stress, how they argue, what sort of things they think possible or impossible, or relevant or irrelevant. So I have tried to briefly summarise the thematic links I am picking up on, and then link some examples of each tendency to give the reader an idea of the sort of work or theorising I would expect from each group.

To be clear, the following is highly idiosyncratic. I am not - not - claiming that this in fact exhausts what's going on. In fact, I think there are ways in which my experience is clearly going to be unrepresentative, most obviously because I am not a political philosopher or theorist of any sort, and so am not going to be properly tapped into the right channels.  This is a very me-centric look at things, no pretences to the contrary. Nor am I claiming that these categories are neatly distinct, lots of people I will mention could fairly be said to participate in another of the named traditions. All I am claiming is that here are some distinctive currents of black political philosophy that I sometimes find myself interacting with or responding to. 

I don't want to delay the main event any further, so below is my taxonomy and after that I will reflect a bit on what I would take away from it.

Just got a seven day Facebook ban for quoting the declaration of Independence: pic.twitter.com/pDCvdA3VkK

— Irami Osei-Frimpong (@IramiOF) July 5, 2021

********** 

Before closing I really do wish to stress that there is a lot of very interesting work that does not fit neatly into this categories, that wasn't just a disingenuous disavowal of responsibility I can think of specific instances of good work outside this. There have been a few things exploring ideas about or around the notion of "post-racialism" (e.g.) or interpersonal relationships (e.g.). There continues to be work from some of our leading scholars on abiding issues related to colonialism or police racism that I do not think can be neatly categorised, and likewise with up and coming scholars working on whole new issues. Further, plenty of the people listed above cross categories - I mentioned the case of the elder Táíwò already, but I could also add that Cornell West, Angela Davis, and Brittney Cooper all do public intellectual work that could reasonably fit them in the liberal tradition. Likewise Nikole Hannah Jones, Appiah, and Chris Lebron have done work that would fit in the culturalist tradition. I couldn't and wouldn't want to circumscribe black political philosophy in any silly little list - there's a lot out there that this doesn't purport to include, and one should not be too rigid about things.

Rather, I see the value gained from the exercise to be this: there is a tendency, even among friends, to treat black thought as monolithic. Having a ready to hand taxonomy, along with some exemplars and notes about the different habits of mind that characterise them, will help one discern sources of difference, disagreement, and debate, internal to black political thought. One should not insist upon everyone fitting into all and only one box, but one should be on the look out for how different authors lay emphasis on different themes and where that is likely to pull them apart from other black political thinkers.

General Oliver Otis Howard Was A White Union General And Head Of The Freedmen's Bureau

WSWS  |  New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Instead, Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.

Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

According to a university press release, the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing.”

The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring racial conflict between blacks and whites.

Hannah-Jones’ lead essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than a garden-variety racist. 

The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by Hannah-Jones.

Her other writings have descended into outright racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.

1619 Project: Falsification To Obtain Power - What Lengths To Retain That Power?

WSWS  |  On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about “weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The “financialization” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times’ fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

 

FTC Chair Lina Khan And Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) Partner To Rein In Big Tech

greenwald |  The politics of this debate have become fascinating. There are key members in both parties who seem loyally devoted to shielding Facebook, Google and others from any meaningful reform, while an increasingly vocal bipartisan coalition — led by Cicilline and Buck — is clearly serious about using their legislative power to usher in more competition and reform. 

I spoke with Rep. Buck earlier today about his trajectory when it comes to fighting Big Tech, why so many Republicans and conservative think tanks remain so captive to Silicon Valley monopolies, and whether the ideological and partisan scrambling visible on this issue is reflective of a broader realignment or at least ideological scrambling that is changing the nature of coalitions on foreign and economic policy as well.

Buck has become one of the most informed and thoughtful Congressional voices on the dangers posed by Silicon Valley, and, as a result, I found our 30-minute discussion quite illuminating.

 

Is Capitalism Succumbing to Techno Feudalism?

yanisvaroufakis |  This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

 capitalism has undergone extreme makeovers at least twice since the late nineteenth century. Its first major transformation, from its competitive guise to oligopoly, occurred with the second industrial revolution, when electromagnetism ushered in the large networked corporations and the megabanks necessary to finance them. Ford, Edison, and Krupp replaced Adam Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher as history’s prime movers. The ensuing boisterous cycle of mega-debts and mega-returns eventually led to the crash of 1929, the New Deal, and, after World War II, the Bretton Woods system – which, with all its constraints on finance, provided a rare period of stability.

The end of Bretton Woods in 1971 unleashed capitalism’s second transformation. As America’s growing trade deficit became the world’s provider of aggregate demand – sucking in the net exports of Germany, Japan, and, later, China – the US powered capitalism’s most energetic globalization phase, with a steady flow of German, Japanese, and, later, Chinese profits back into Wall Street financing it all.

To play their role, however, Wall Street functionaries demanded emancipation from all of the New Deal and Bretton Woods constraints. With deregulation, oligopolistic capitalism morphed into financialized capitalism. Just as Ford, Edison, and Krupp had replaced Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher, capitalism’s new protagonists were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers.

While these radical transformations had momentous repercussions (the Great Depression, WWII, the Great Recession, and the post-2009 Long Stagnation), they did not alter capitalism’s main feature: a system driven by private profit and rents extracted through some market.

Yes, the transition from Smithian to oligopoly capitalism boosted profits inordinately and allowed conglomerates to use their massive market power (that is, their newfound freedom from competition) to extract large rents from consumers. Yes, Wall Street extracted rents from society by market-based forms of daylight robbery. Nevertheless, both oligopoly and financialized capitalism were driven by private profits boosted by rents extracted through some market – one cornered by, say, General Electric or Coca-Cola, or conjured up by Goldman Sachs.

Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

How's That Durham Investigation Coming?

theatlantic |  After the lunch with Balsamo, Barr and Levi went to the White House for a previously scheduled meeting with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. After talking briefly with Meadows, they went upstairs to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s office. As they were conferring, one of the counsel’s aides knocked on the door and told Cipollone that the president wanted to see him and then, pointing to Barr, the aide said, “And he is looking for you.”

Barr, Levi, and Cipollone walked to the president’s personal dining room near the Oval Office. Trump was sitting at the table. Meadows was sitting next to him with his arms crossed; the White House adviser Eric Herschmann stood off to the side. The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present. One told me that Trump had “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.”

He went off on Barr.

“I think you’ve noticed I haven’t been talking to you much,” Trump said to him. “I’ve been leaving you alone.”

Barr later told others that the comment was reminiscent of a line in the movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the main character, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, says, “I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.” Trump, Barr thought, was saying that he had been denying him his essence.

Trump brought up Barr’s AP interview.

“Did you say that?”

“Yes,” Barr responded.

“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”

“Because it’s true.”

The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

Barr thought that the president was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever seen him. His face was red. Barr’s AP interview was dominating every cable news channel except the one Trump was watching. The television in the room was tuned to the right-wing, pro-Trump network One America News, which was broadcasting a committee hearing of the Michigan legislature. The hearing featured disproven allegations of massive election fraud, including the testimony of a woman named Melissa Carone, who had worked at the counting location in Detroit and told the committee, “Everything that happened at the TCF Center was fraud. Every single thing.” The next day, Carone would testify again, next to Rudy Giuliani, during which time she slurred her words and appeared to be drunk. (Carone later denied that she had been drunk.)

“They saw the boxes going in!” Trump yelled, referring to the stories about boxes of illegal ballots being counted.

“You know, Mr. President, there are 662 precincts in Wayne County,” Barr said. Trump seemed taken aback that he knew the exact number. “It’s the only county with all the boxes going to a central place, and you actually did better there this time around than you did last time. You keep on saying that the Department of Justice is not looking at this stuff, and we are looking at it in a responsible way. But your people keep on shoveling this shit out.”

 

Toxic Pathologies In Liberal Discourse

greenwald |  While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.

I decided to analyze and dissect this conflict not in order to narrate everything that happened here or to arbitrate who is right and wrong with respect to every disagreement these parties are having. Instead, it is worth examining because the way this nasty exchange unfolded provides such a vivid and illuminating case study of two metastasizing cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Both of these weapons are ethically repugnant and corrupt — obviously so — yet somehow have become as common and accepted among Democratic Party followers as they are toxic and reprehensible.

From Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean to Rachel Maddow and countless other liberal cable hosts, casually and falsely smearing people as paid Russian agents is now completely normalized behavior in liberal culture. And the list of people whose reputations have been destroyed from evidence-free and cynically deployed sexual harassment allegations or other vague accusations of sexual misconduct is too long to comprehensively chronicle. I examine these two issues in the format of video, which can be watched on the player below, because that is where so much of it has played out and because it seemed that is how the severity and magnitude of these abuses could be most effectively conveyed:

Tribal Animosity Fuels The Insatiable Social Media Dopamine Buzz....,

pnas |  There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a Facebook research team warned the company in 2018 that their “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” This research was allegedly shut down by Facebook executives, and Facebook declined to implement changes proposed by the research team to make the platform less divisive (1). This article is consistent with concerns that social media might be incentivizing the spread of polarizing content. For instance, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed concern about the popularity of “dunking” (i.e., mocking or denigrating one’s enemies) on the platform (2). These concerns have become particularly relevant as social media rhetoric appears to have incited real-world violence, such as the recent storming of the US Capital (3). We sought to investigate whether out-group animosity was associated with increased virality on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter.

A growing body research has examined the potential role of social media in exacerbating political polarization (4, 5). A large portion of this work has centered on the position that social media sorts us into “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” that selectively expose people to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs (6⇓⇓⇓⇓–11). However, some recent scholarship questions whether the “echo chamber” narrative has been exaggerated (12, 13). Some experiments suggest that social media can indeed increase polarization. For example, temporarily deactivating Facebook can reduce polarization on policy issues (14). However, other work suggests that polarization has grown the most among older demographic groups, who are the least likely to use social media (15), albeit the most likely to vote. As such, there is an open debate about the role of social media in political polarization and intergroup conflict.

Other research has examined the features of social media posts that predict “virality” online. Much of the literature focuses on the role of emotion in social media sharing. High-arousal emotions, whether they are positive (e.g., awe) or negative (e.g., anger or outrage), contribute to the sharing of content online (16⇓⇓⇓–20). Tweets expressing moral and emotional content are more likely to be retweeted within online political conversations, especially by members of one’s political in-group (21, 22). On Facebook, posts by politicians that express “indignant disagreement” receive more likes and shares (23), and negative news tends to spread farther on Twitter (24). Moreover, false rumors spread farther and faster on Twitter than true ones, especially in the domain of politics, possibly because they are more likely to express emotions such as surprise and fear (25).

Yet, to our knowledge, little research has investigated how social identity motives contribute to online virality. Group identities are hypersalient on social media, especially in the context of online political or moral discussions (26). For example, an analysis of Twitter accounts found that people are increasingly categorizing themselves by their political identities in their Twitter bios over time, providing a public signal of their social identity (27). Additionally, since sharing behavior is public, it can reflect self-conscious identity presentation (28, 29). According to social identity theory (30) and self-categorization theory (31), when group identities are highly salient, this can lead individuals to align themselves more with their fellow in-group members, facilitating in-group favoritism and out-group derogation in order to maintain a positive sense of group distinctiveness (32). Thus, messages that fulfill group-based identity motives may receive more engagement online.

 

Is Somebody Hiding A "Secret" Bad White Boi Who Could Bring White Supremacist Sexy Back?!?!?

medium |  I rage against all of you, white, Christian nationalists; against Republicans who think voter suppression is somehow good for America. I rage against anyone who thinks that talking about how our country’s 245 years of hating on Black people is somehow divisive.

Why wasn’t red-lining divisive? Why wasn’t segregation divisive? Why wasn’t Trump’s support for white nationalists divisive? Why aren’t the suppressive laws designed to prevent minorities from voting divisive? How can asking these questions be divisive?! How can you melt so readily, snowflake, when all we do is ask these questions?

I know how: because my fellow white brothers and sisters are weak. They are whiners and spoiled. They are sore losers. The Republican Party builds its power base on divisiveness and hate because it is a failed political movement. It is intellectually bankrupt offering absolutely zero for the solving of our most pressing problems.

Many of my more hateful white brothers and sisters are suffering economically; and, while Democrats try to, say, slow the concentration of wealth that causes debilitating income inequality, the Republicans obstruct them thus preventing any legislation, or programs, from passing that might actually help Main Street. Then, rather than blame their failed polices for the suffering of their constituents, policies which only benefit the super rich, they say things like “racism against white Americans” is the cause. They blame critical race theory, which really no one but Fox, and the dumbest of the dumb in the Republican Party, is talking about.

I am raging. I rage against ignorance and my fellow white brothers and sisters who choose hate over love. No Black person is taking your job. Your refusal to think makes you feel they are. You insistence on voting for Republicans makes you think they are. If you dared to challenge the lies of the Republicans, of Fox News, you would see that what you suffer from is not related to race. It is related to class.

The problem is, they have you so perfectly worked up into a hateful froth that you are blinded. You are destroying us. You are embarrassing the rest of us white folks.

Turn off your Fox News and dare to think for yourselves white people before evolution decides we are not needed and made obsolete.

It Is A Thought Crime To Confabulate Black Nationalism And Critical Race Theory

mdcbowen  |  It is this idea of a zero-sum game of liberty that misguides many Americans into believing that double standards are necessary for ethnic minorities. Not a few of them enjoy the halo they think they’ve earned by confessing their racist sins, encouraging all of us to follow suit, like some kind of perverted collectivist alter call. That’s not the worst of it.

Part of the worst of it is the kind of stilted tyrannical leadership such blinded thinking inevitably generates. For if you think you’ve identified the problem and ossify its priorities into political correctness, you end up policing thought rather than liberating it. This ought to be one object lesson of the failures of black nationalism itself, something many have attended to thoroughly. The necessity of being the top black dog led to a dog eat dog world. Murder is murder. Ask the ghost of Bunchy Carter. Why indeed is there no black nationalist leadership in America today? Why wasn’t it the programmatic agenda of the National Urban League that invented and funded the research behind Critical Race Theory? Such national organizational unity was not necessary. Indeed unity gets in the way of diversity. So we should be thankful and we should be about trust-busting when it comes to the reinvigoration of freedom. Freedom wants to be free and no one should be slaves to ideological conformity. Everyone knows how they are held back, and they must push accordingly. The price of freedom varies for every man. There will never be a singular plan to solve the problem once and for all. 

However there will be an incremental plan, which will be sold just like Tide detergent. It promises to make you cleaner if you just buy in for your family. Then if enough families buy and put the sticker on their minivans, then you’ll have a clean vanguard. That’s what the Wokies consider themselves - the newest, latest and greatest who have always been at war with racist Eurasia, since Obama left office.

It is not ironic that the same existential dilemma is in effect for other moral agents. There’s nothing quite so pathetic as some Boomer who tells you how important it was that they marched with Dr. King. It has become something of a cliche, a buffalo nickel, an anachronism whose value has deflated over time. And yet it is clear to me that MLK’s vision was superior to that of the miserable Wokies and their neo-racist Critical Theorist enablers. Misery loves company, but it absolutely worships theoretical ideological company.

Is There A Common Cultic Language Pattern And Praxis?

newrepublic |  Among L. Ron Hubbard’s most pressing concerns was a singular problem: how to get his followers to turn their nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Like a Californian Hamlet, the founder of Scientology pondered the dilemma of “to be or not to be” and settled on beingness. There was no real basis for Hubbard’s morphological experiments, as linguist Amanda Montell explains in her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism; he simply “liked the sound of technical jargon.” So much so, in fact, that he published two extensive Scientology dictionaries filled with thousands of terms, many of which were borrowed (and subsequently mangled) from fields like psychology and software engineering “to create the impression that Scientology’s belief system was rooted in real science.”

Hubbard also wanted to establish, through language, a clear way of demarcating believers from nonbelievers (or, sorry—“suppressive persons”). A nonbeliever, for instance, would very likely struggle to parse the following exchange without the aid of Montell’s annotations:

“How are you doing?”

“I’ve been a bit out ruds [rudiments: tired, hungry, or upset] because of a PTP [present time problem] with my second dynamic [romantic partner] because of some bypassed charge [old negative energy that’s resurfaced] having to do with my MEST [Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, something in the physical universe] at her apartment.”

While this all comes across as profoundly idiosyncratic, Montell says there is in fact nothing unique or special about Scientology’s fascination with language. “The most compelling techniques” espoused by cults have had “little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or ‘Kool-Aid,’” says Montell. As she breaks down the glossary of terms espoused by members of QAnon, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, and even Crossfit, Montell says it is language that can best clue us in as to whether an organization we have joined is a cult or is at least engaging in cultlike behavior to extract resources out of its members. She develops a taxonomy of “cultish” linguistic tendencies from “the crafty redefinition of existing words” (i.e., calling a gym a “box” for no real reason), thought-terminating clichés (labeling good-faith doubts and concerns as “limiting beliefs”), and monikers that establish an us-versus-them binary (the “truth seekers” versus “sheeple” of QAnon).

Montell’s first book, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language (2019), explored everything from the history of sexist slurs like skank and hussy to the gendered assumptions about what it means to “speak with authority.” With Cultish, Montell is still writing about feminism, arguing that many of these organizations often target working-class and minority women who, feeling failed by capitalism, begin looking for some semblance of a social safety net. Nearly half of the victims of the Jonestown massacre were Black women, she points out, and the majority of people working for multilevel marketing companies are unemployed women living in blue-collar towns. An empathetic listener, Montell takes careful note of the empty words that cult members turn to for solace. Though written in punchy and fun prose style, Cultish is more than a fascinating guide to the workings of cults; it’s also an infuriating window into just how starved people have been made to feel for community and structures of collective care. 

Googling "Largest Teacher's Union Says Critical Race Theory" Reveals The "Hit Dog" In This Dispute

nationalreview |   "The attacks on anti-racist teachers are increasing, coordinated by well-funded organizations such as the Heritage Foundation. We need to be better prepared to respond to these attacks so that our members can continue this important work,” the item says, noting that the Heritage Foundation has pledged to reject CRT.

“Woke teachers unions have been put on notice that Americans will not stand for their racist CRT ideology,” Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson told The Federalist. “Now those same unions are funding a coordinated misinformation campaign to retaliate against Heritage Action and the Heritage Foundation for our defense of American students, parents, and teachers. But the American people will not be deterred, and their smear campaign will ultimately fail.”

The measure is not the union’s first foray into “social justice” — it supports Black Lives Matter and encourages teachers to sign a “pledge to grow the movement for racial justice in education.”

“We are working tirelessly to dismantle systems of oppression that prevent children from accessing a great public education because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, or nationality,” the NEA’s website says.

The union also lauds its commitment to forming partnerships “to build equitable systems” and offers links to resources on topics such as “Confronting White Nationalism,” “anti-racist” video “primers,” and “implicit bias” training.

Farmer Brown Fitna Play You With A Centralized Myth And Localized ___________________?

thehill |  President Biden promised to unify a fractured country. At the same time, his administration pledged to usher in a new era of transparency. Following the release of a highly anticipated government report on UFOs, Biden has a rare opportunity to live up to both commitments.

The UFO report prompted a flurry of bipartisan calls for a robust, open-minded investigation into these perplexing phenomena. If members of Congress can set aside seemingly intractable differences to take this issue seriously, the Biden administration – and the American public – should take note.

Beyond acknowledging that intelligence analysts are thoroughly stumped by mysterious objects – some of which appear to exhibit remarkable technology in restricted airspace – the report marks an extraordinary shift in how the government perceives UFOs. After seven decades of deflection, ridicule and brushing aside such encounters, the Pentagon is following in Congress’s footsteps and taking such phenomena seriously. Very seriously.

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Moreover, by demanding the report, Congress stumbled upon an issue that can unite Americans of all political stripes. Indeed, if strong, bipartisan statements on these encounters are any indicator, the UFO mystery could ultimately transcend the deep polarization of the post-Trump era.

America, after all, is at its best when it is united by curiosity about the unknown.

To that end, the Biden administration should declassify some basic, non-sensitive information, focusing on objects that seem to exhibit remarkable technology.

Of 143 unexplained encounters, 18 involved “unusual” “movement patterns or flight characteristics.” According to the report, analysts are attempting to determine if these objects demonstrated “breakthrough technologies.” This aligns with reporting by the New York Times that some of these craft accelerated, changed direction and submerged in seemingly extraordinary ways.

The report’s equivocation on these perplexing encounters stands in stark contrast to former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s unambiguous comments that “there are technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against.

According to Ratcliffe, intelligence analysts “ruled out” weather incidents, visual disturbances, foreign adversaries or ultra-secret U.S. technology as possible explanations for the most exotic phenomena.

If Ratcliffe’s statements are accurate, this is an extraordinary development. More to the point, the Biden administration has a rare opportunity to live up to its pledges to restore transparency and national unity. It can begin by releasing a numbered list of the report’s 18 “unusual” encounters alongside the intelligence community’s preliminary confidence levels (low, medium or high) that each object exhibited some sort of “breakthrough technology.”

Democracy Dies In Darkness...,

caitlinjohnstone |  We also caught a strong whiff of this new trend in the near-total blackout on the Hunter Biden October surprise last year, which only went mainstream because it stood to benefit one of America’s two mainstream political factions. After the New York Post first broke the story we saw mainstream media figures publicly explaining to each other why it was fine not to cover it with reasoning that was all over the map, from it’s a waste of time to it’s just too darn complicated to it’s not our job to research these things to the Washington Post’s notorious “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”

Anyone who dared publicize the leaks anywhere near the mainstream liberal echo chamber was bashed into submission by the herd, and without any legitimate reason it was treated like a complete non-story at best and a sinister Russian op at worst. And then, lo and behold, in April of this year Hunter Biden acknowledged that the leaks could very well have come from his laptop after all, and not from some GRU psyop.

And I think that whole ordeal gives us some answers into this disturbing new dynamic of complete blackouts on major news stories. Last year The Spectator‘s Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton’s 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to be uncritical of Trump’s opponent and suppress any news stories which might benefit them.

“For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the ‘but her emails’ dilemma,” Miller writes. “Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids’ table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump’s foibles. It’s an error no journalist wants to repeat.”

The Lie And The Cover-up Only Ever Magnify The Heinousness Of The Crime...,

medialens  |  As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricat­ing key accusati­ons in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland. 

As the Stundin article reported:

‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.

‘In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.’

Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

The Stundin article continued:

‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

‘Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’

The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.