abcnews | Former President Clinton, who ABC News has learned is identified as "Doe
36," is mentioned in more than fifty of the redacted filings, according
to court records. Several of those sealed or redacted entries are
focused on an effort by Giuffre's lawyers in mid-2016, first reported by ABC News, to subpoena the two-term Democratic president for deposition testimony about his relationship with Epstein.
According to portions of the
court record that were not sealed, Giuffre's legal team initiated
informal discussions with attorneys for the then-unnamed witness on June
9, 2016. That was a few days after the former president's wife, Hillary
Clinton, clinched the Democratic nomination for president.
Representatives
for Giuffre did contact the former president's attorneys in 2016 about a
potential deposition, a person familiar with the situation told ABC
News. Clinton's lawyers responded that his testimony would not be
helpful to Giuffre because, the person said, the former president had
never been on Epstein's island, as she had claimed.
Maxwell
called the move to question Clinton "utter nonsense" and a "transparent
ploy by [Giuffre] to increase media exposure for her sensational
stories through deposition side-show," her attorney Laura Menninger
wrote, according to an unredacted section of a court filing.
Giuffre's
legal team, in contrast, described the proposed testimony of Clinton as
"highly relevant" and "important to the fundamental claims and
defenses" in the case. The request was ultimately denied by U.S.
District Judge Robert Sweet, in a redacted ruling in late June 2016.
Giuffre's lawyers pressed the
Clinton issue again at a hearing in March 2017, six weeks before a trial
was scheduled to begin. According to a publicly available transcript,
Giuffre's team was then seeking to preclude Maxwell's side from
presenting testimony suggesting that Clinton hadn't been on Epstein's
island. Her attorneys argued it would be "inherently unfair" to Giuffre
because they had not been permitted to ask the former president if he
had ever been to Little St. James, as Epstein's private island estate
was known.
"You did not
allow us to depose him because you said it was irrelevant," McCawley
told Judge Sweet. "So now we're in a position where at trial they want
to put forth that information against my client, and I don't have an
under-oath statement from that individual saying whether or not he
actually was," she added.
Maxwell's
attorneys, according to the transcript, told the court Maxwell was
prepared to take the stand and testify that Clinton was never on the
island.
yahoo | Hundreds of sealed court filings pertaining to the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein are set to be made public
this week, and several prominent names -- including Britain's Prince
Andrew and former President Bill Clinton -- are expected to appear in
the documents.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled earlier
this month there was no legal justification for continuing to conceal
the ex-president's name and more than 150 names other "John and Jane
Does" mentioned in the records. Preska ordered the unsealing to begin
after Jan. 1.
The documents stem from a 2015 civil lawsuit
centered on allegations that Epstein's one-time paramour, Ghislaine
Maxwell, facilitated the sexual abuse of Virginia Giuffre, an alleged
trafficking victim. Giuffre also accused Epstein and Maxwell of
directing her to have sex with Prince Andrew and several other prominent
men. Prince Andrew denied the allegations and claimed he could not recall ever meeting Giuffre. He later settled a lawsuit she filed against him.
Most
of the prominent names that appear in the documents are already
associated in some way with Epstein; for allegations of wrongdoing, for
having worked for Epstein, flown on his planes, or visited his homes.
Some were mentioned during Maxwell's criminal trial in 2021. In some
instances, the only appearances of the names are in potential witness
lists or in proposed terms for searches of electronic records.
While Giuffre's allegations against Prince Andrew, and his denials,
have been widely reported around the globe, dozens of the sealed records
are expected to contain additional details from "Jane Doe 162," a
witness who testified she was with Prince Andrew, Maxwell and Giuffre,
then 17, at Epstein's New York mansion. Giuffre has alleged that
gathering, in 2001, was one of the occasions she was directed to have
sex with Andrew.
Giuffre made no allegations of wrongdoing by
Clinton, and there is no indication the sealed records contain evidence
of illegal conduct by Clinton. But Giuffre's claim that she met the
ex-president on Epstein's private Caribbean island emerged as a
contentious issue in the litigation, which was settled in 2017. Maxwell
contended Clinton had never been to Little St. James -- as Epstein's
island was known -- and assailed Giuffre's claim as a fabrication that
shattered her credibility.
Personal flight logs kept by one of
Epstein's pilots -- which surfaced in separate lawsuits against Epstein
-- showed that Clinton and his entourage had flown extensively on
Epstein's jumbo-jet to international destinations such as Paris, Bangkok
and Brunei in 2002 and 2003. But none of the available records included
the former president on a trip to Epstein's island.
The court
documents to be unsealed this week represent the eighth, and likely
final, round of unsealing records from the case since the Miami Herald
intervened for access to the records in 2018. Previously unsealed items
included multiple deposition transcripts of Maxwell and Giuffre, along
with sworn, but unproven, allegations that Epstein and Maxwell directed
Giuffre to have sex with several well-known men, including former Senate
Majority Leader George Mitchell, the late model scout Jean Luc Brunel,
billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, and others.
Maxwell denied the allegations, as did all of the men identified by Giuffre when their names surfaced.
This
batch will involve the names of additional Epstein associates, alleged
perpetrators, alleged co-conspirators, alleged victims, witnesses and
former Epstein employees. Several of the "Does" mentioned in the
documents are now deceased.
Former President Clinton, who ABC News
has learned is identified as "Doe 36," is mentioned in more than fifty
of the redacted filings, according to court records. Several of those
sealed or redacted entries are focused on an effort by Giuffre's lawyers
in mid-2016, first reported by ABC News, to subpoena the two-term Democratic president for deposition testimony about his relationship with Epstein.
hotnewhiphop | These days, Dave Chappelle is known for standing by his non-PC approach to comedy, and his new special is no exception. The Dreamer
arrived on Netflix today, raising eyebrows and getting social media
users talking. The special features various jokes about the trans
community, disabled people, Will Smith's infamous Oscars slap, and even Lil Nas X.
One of Chappelle's jokes centered around him meeting Jim Carrey on the set of Man On The Moon, in which the actor
stars as Andy Kaufman. "I was very disappointed because I wanted to
meet Jim Carrey and I had to pretend he was Andy Kaufman all afternoon.
It was clearly Jim Carrey. I could look at him and clearly see it was
Jim Carrey," he explained, citing Carrey's method-acting. "I say all
that to say … that's how trans people make me feel."
He later joked that in an attempt to mend his relationship with the trans community, he wrote a play about a trans woman. “To be honest with you, I’ve been trying to repair my relationship with the transgender community cause I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them... You know how I’ve been repairing it? I wrote a play. I did. Cause I know that gays love plays. It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving," he described, "It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n***a. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play she dies of loneliness cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.”
Chappelle didn't stop there, however. He went on to joke that he'd now be targeting disabled people. "Tonight, I'm doing all handicapped jokes," he declared. "They're not as organized as the gays and I love punching down." What do you think of the jokes Dave Chappelle made about trans people in his new Netflix special?
WOW 🚨 On The Record Testimony & Evidence That Barack Obama Created An Illegal Psyop Against The American People To Interfere In Future Elections
“2 days ago, my colleagues and I published the 1st batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, which show US… pic.twitter.com/1d2WpWcNe8
twitter |Oh wait until the truth gets out on ALL the things started by Obama.
That is of course if they don’t double down using new resources to mass censor and play psyops games on American citizens again.
Obama was pissed when Trump won because Obama had almost completed everything going on right now. Trump stopped it. Well delayed it that is. Trump cut funding to the WHO and stopped the Obama DOD Biodefense Council from fully being formed. It is now formed under Biden using your tax dollars.
Did the Obama and Biden Administration lay down an impressive enforcement foundation for the W.H.O., Climate agendas, global health agendas and World Economic Forum ideologies using the NDAA and DOD?
Lets break it down into a few parts:
FY23 NDAA:
Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) W.H.O. & Pandemic Preparedness
Did our representatives use the NDAA to establish foundations for a massive power grab under the W.H.O. U.N. Under the guise of pandemic preparedness, climate crisis & global health?
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthew1315/p/fiscal-year-2023-national-defense?r=2z8r4w&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
DOD CONTRACTS WITH BIG TECH AND PRIVATE CORPORATIONS FOR THINGS LIKE “DISINFORMATION” AI SOFTWARE
BIDEN EXECUTIVE ORDERS FOR THINGS LIKE FCC, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REGULATIONS, DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT FOR GREEN AGENDAS DOD contracts with Big Tech and private corporations for “disinformation” control Alethia, LCK strategies, Accrete - Biden Administration Executive orders and FCC changes
Have they established a massive tool for the Censorship Industrial Complex?
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthew1315/p/biolabs-in-wuhan-china-odessa-ukraine?r=2z8r4w&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
OBAMA, BIDEN, FAUCI CONNECTIONS WITH BIOLABS IN WUHAN, CHINA, ODESSA, UKRAINE, AND NIH LAB IN HAMILTON MONTANA IN REGARDS TO CORONAVIRUS AND OTHER ZOONOTIC THREATS
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthew131
caityjohnstone | We
could have been so much more. We have the ability to create a healthy
and harmonious world and collaborate to give everyone on earth
everything they need, and instead we’re killing the biosphere while
arguing about whether or not it’s anti-semitic to oppose an active
genocide.
We
could have peace on earth and move from competition-based systems to
collaboration-based ones to maximize our creative and innovative
potential and spend our existence exploring the outer universe and the
universes within ourselves, and instead we’re ramping up brinkmanship
between nuclear-armed states and arguing about whether or not it’s
ethical to rain military explosives on a giant concentration camp full
of children.
We
have the technology to let every scientist on earth share ideas and
information with each other around the world in real time in any
language, and instead we’ve fractured scientific development into
atomized little echo chambers of closely-guarded secrets in the name of
profit generation and “national security”.
How
did we get here? How were we duped into trading paradise on earth for
this lunatic dystopia? How did we allow ourselves to give up everything
our species has the capability to be in exchange for this nightmarish
paradigm of endless ecocide and exploitation and oppression and war and
militarism?
Near
as I can tell, it’s ultimately because our species evolved these
massive brains very quickly which we still haven’t learned how to use in
a mature way, like a kid learning to ride a bicycle right after the
training wheels have been removed. This has allowed us to dominate the
planet while still ourselves being dominated by primitive fear-based
impulses which were much better suited for our early evolutionary
ancestors as they strived to survive the dangerous plains of Africa as
small prey animals.
We
develop egos in early childhood to help us feel safe and secure in a
confusing world full of giants, which most of us go on to use in highly
maladaptive ways throughout the remainder of our lives. Our psychology
is riddled with cognitive biases, which the clever manipulators among us
can use to dupe us into mass-scale behavior which benefits them rather
than behaving in a way which benefits each other and our ecosystem.
The
most clever of these manipulators are able to use their cleverness to
rise to the top of our political, governmental, commercial and financial
systems around the world, and they use increasingly sophisticated
methods of propaganda to dupe the rest of us into moving in alignment
with their will. And their will is not wise or intelligent; it’s driven
by the same primitive fear-based impulses that the rest of the humans
trapped in egoic consciousness are driven by.
So
here we are. That’s why we now find ourselves in this profoundly
dysfunctional civilization where the biosphere is treated like an enemy
and human beings are treated like fuel and minds are being marinated in
an increasingly vapid mainstream culture where everything is fake and
stupid. That’s why we don’t have paradise on earth, and that’s why the
bombs are falling on Gaza today.
But
it is just a phase. A kid who’s learning to ride a bike doesn’t remain
on wobbly wheels forever. Eventually we’ll get the hang of this thing.
Eventually we’ll grow into these giant new brains of ours and become a
conscious species.
Assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out first, of course.
twitter | If you ACTUALLY want to fight antisemitism, I am absolutely convinced that your foremost priority right now should be to not let the Netanyahu government and his coalition of far right extremists define Jewish identity.
This is the real battle against antisemitism right now. Anecdotally all the people I see on X who are starting to veer into antisemitic territory - and I do agree there are some - have clearly been led to believe that the absolute psychopaths currently leading the Israeli government define what Jews are.
And it's clearly not helping that many Western governments are playing along the utterly toxic game of the Israeli government to try to define antisemitism as opposition to their policies... when these policies obviously look so horribly wrong to an overwhelming majority of the world's population. What do you think the common man thinks when he's told he's an antisemite if he opposes Israel making an absolute mockery of humanitarian law? At best the notion of antisemitism loses all its meaning to him, and at worst he may even embrace it...
Thankfully most people are still smart enough to make the distinction and not to take the antisemitism accusations by the Israeli government at face value... but it is dangerous territory. The whole world is absolutely appalled - and rightly so - by what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is criminally short-sighted for the Israeli government to insist so much that their actions are done in the name of all Jewish people, and such a narrative should be resolutely opposed.
Israel asks for more Apache combat helicopters, the U.S. refuses.
IDF actively uses Apaches over Gaza.
The load on the two IDF Apache squadrons is so great that the commander of the Air Force, Major General Tomer Bar, was asked to authorize a number of veteran pilots, aged… pic.twitter.com/hRDdVPSnBJ
caityjohnstone | “I’m not so sure about the Child-Killing Murder Robot,” Joe said after a sip of coffee while reading the morning paper.
“What??” his wife Anne exclaimed, visibly shocked.
“It’s
killed thousands of kids in its latest murder rampage,” Joe said. “I’m
starting to think maybe the Child-Killing Murder Robot isn’t such a
great thing after all.”
“Well of course it’s on a murder rampage!” said Anne. “Some people tried to turn it off!”
“Yeah
the Child-Killing Murder Robot does that whenever anyone tries to turn
it off,” replied Joe. “And you know what? I’m starting to think that
maybe they’re trying to turn off the Child-Killing Murder Robot because
they’re sick of the way it keeps killing children and murdering people!”
“It’s acting in self-defense!” Anne protested. “The Child-Killing Murder Robot has a right to defend itself!”
“It’s
been killing people constantly ever since that team of mad scientists
invented it back in the forties, Anne! After a certain amount of
child-killing and murder, eventually you’ve got to figure that maybe the
blame is on the Child-Killing Murder Robot. At the very least I think
our government should stop sending it batteries and ammunition.”
“Look,
Joe, I feel terrible about all the child-killing and murder, and I wish
it wasn’t happening. But this is a very complicated situation; it’s
been going on for many years, and I just don’t see what you could
possibly expect the Child-Killing Murder Robot to do at this point
besides continue to kill large numbers of children and commit murder at
mass scale.”
“Well,
maybe they could reprogram the Child-Killing Murder Robot so it doesn’t
have to kill children and murder people all the time?”
“But then it wouldn’t be a Child-Killing Murder Robot!”
“Yeah
I know, it would be a different sort of thing with a different sort of
system. But at least then all the murdering would stop and we’d have
peace.”
“The Child-Killing Murder Robot has a right to exist!”
“Why, Anne? Why does there absolutely need
to be a homicidal android that’s always in the news because it’s
constantly murdering human beings? I’ve seen people talking about one
possible solution where the robot is programmed to regard everyone else
as its equal so it doesn’t view them as needing to be murdered. Why
couldn’t we try that?”
“There is one Child-Killing Murder Robot in the world, Joe. One. And you’re saying there should be zero. You just want to commit genocide.”
Harvard President Claudine Gay participated in the political assassination of a brilliant black scholar at Harvard named Roland Fryer. This is just one of the many problematic aspects of her career. @BillAckman
— Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc. (@colonelkurtz99) December 12, 2023
yahoo | During the weekend that the corporation met to decide Gay’s future,
she participated in some of those discussions and had the opportunity to
review the corporation’s Dec. 12 statement in her defense before it
became public, two people involved in the process said.
According
to a person consulted by the corporation, the body discussed but opted
against releasing a detailed, public independent review in the style of
Stanford University, whose president resigned this summer.
Harvard’s
board is led by Pritzker, who was an early backer of Barack Obama’s
presidency and later served as secretary of commerce under his
administration. Despite her leadership role, Pritzker, a champion of
Gay’s, has not spoken publicly since the controversy began, leaving the
corporation to communicate through a single public statement.
The
other 10 members, in addition to Gay, include relatively unknown
financiers, donors, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California,
a former CEO of American Express and former presidents of Princeton
University and Amherst College.
The board meets several times a
year, and members serve six-year terms that can be renewed once. How it
identifies and chooses its members, who are known as fellows, is
something of a mystery. Outgoing members help select their own
replacements.
Pritzker has been the principal point of contact for major donors and others seeking to counsel Harvard on the path forward.
The
board seeks to build a well-rounded group of people who have
complementary expertise to help govern the university, said Richard
Chait, a professor emeritus at Harvard who studied governance in higher
education and was an adviser when the Harvard Corp. expanded in size
more than a decade ago.
Even after expanding, the panel is still
smaller than the boards of many other leading universities, according to
Chait, who said the average private university has about 30 or more
board members.
Board members are not paid for their role. “Not
only is it unpaid, but there is an expectation of a reverse cash flow —
all trustees have an expectation that the institution will be a
philanthropic priority consistent with their means,” Chait said.
The
corporation has weighed in on key questions — for example, in 2016, it
approved a change to the shield of Harvard’s law school, which was
modeled on the crest of an 18th-century enslaver.
In the past
several weeks, more faculty members, donors, alumni and outsiders have
raised questions about the corporation’s apparent failure to vet Gay’s
scholarship before promoting her to the presidency in July and for its
subsequent silence in recent weeks.
“The corporation should have
done their homework, and apparently they did not,” said Avi Loeb, a
Harvard science professor who has been publicly critical of the school’s
response after the Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people
were killed.
“They don’t engage in criticism the way they should,”
Loeb said of the corporation. “They don’t want the people who disagree
with them to speak with them.”
glennloury |Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.
He
was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American
Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur
“Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most
distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly
covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held
assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence.
It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and
consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because
it happens to challenge the status quo.
To do the kind of
work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be
fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price
for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was
accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my
opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But
Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail
his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.
I’ll
not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs
should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily,
heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist.
Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital
research not because it was poorly done but because they found the
results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.
Now,
I have been a friend and mentor to Roland for some time, and I’ve taken
great pleasure in watching him succeed. I can see how one might view my
criticisms of Harvard as biased. But this matter has been investigated
by others with no personal stake in Roland's career who have found
Harvard’s actions and reporting on them by the New York Times to be deeply flawed. I would point readers who want to know more to Stuart Taylor Jr.’s fine reporting for Real Clear Investigations.
Along
the same lines, the filmmaker Rob Montz has made a short documentary
about this subject. I’m interviewed in it alongside others who see this
fiasco for what it is, some of whom have much to lose by publicly coming
to Roland’s defense. People need to see this film. They need to know
the truth about Roland Fryer. So I ask you to watch and to judge for
yourself, and if you feel so moved, to share it as widely as possible.
strategic-culture | American President Joe Biden likes to talk about “inflexion points”
when he is lecturing about world affairs and the supposed superiority of
the United States. This year is indeed an inflexion point.
It was the year that the entire world saw the truly hideous and criminal nature of U.S. power.
Washington’s fueling of the futile conflict in Ukraine and the
despicable slaughter in Gaza is a wake-up call for the entire world. The
United States stands barefaced and grotesque as the primary purveyor of
war. There can be no doubt about that. For many it is shocking,
scandalous and frightening.
Tragically, it seems, for the world, every year’s end is an occasion
to witness and lament conflicts, wars and suffering over the preceding
12 months. Often the causes of wars and suffering are seemingly
unfathomable.
However, this year seems to be unique. The year ends with a
horrendous massacre in Gaza that is unprecedented and perpetrated by
Israel with the full support of the United States. The scale of
deliberate mass killing in Gaza makes it a genocide. The fact that this
abomination is occurring at Christmas time when the world is supposed to
celebrate the divine birth of Jesus Christ – the Prince of Peace – in
the very place where he was born some 2,000 years ago makes the
abomination all the more profane and damning.
What is particularly wretched is that the heinous destruction of
children is happening in full view of the world. There is no remorse or
pretence. It is full-blown premeditated murder done with cruelty and
sickening impunity.
Virtually the whole world is horrified by the devastating, relentless
violence and absolute violation of international law. The butchery by
the Israeli regime cannot in any way be rationalized by the previous
attack on Israel by Palestinian militants on October 7. Those killings
by Hamas have been cynically used as a pretext for the subsequent and
ongoing annihilation of Palestinian civilians.
This genocide could not happen without the crucial support of the
United States for the Israeli regime. Financially, militarily and
diplomatically, Washington is sponsoring the horror in Gaza as well as
the Occupied West Bank.
This week saw the U.S. once again obstructing calls at the United
Nations for a ceasefire and the urgent supply of humanitarian aid to
more than two million people. The World Food Program has declared a
catastrophic famine in the coastal enclave after more than 70 days of
bombing and blockade by the Israeli regime. More than 20,000 people –
mainly women and children – have been slaughtered with up to 7,000 more
missing, presumably dead. Israeli troops are carrying out mass
executions of terrified and traumatized human beings, according to UN
rights monitors.
The United States is arming Israel to the hilt and enabling it. U.S.
President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to join international demands
for a ceasefire. The United Nations has voted by an overwhelming
majority for a cessation of the violence. Washington has repeatedly
rejected the world’s pleas because the Biden administration is obscenely
amplifying Israeli lies and distortions. “Unwavering, unshakable
support” is how the White House arrogantly boasts about it without a
hint of shame that it is self-indicting.
Tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions have been flown to Israel to
carry out “indiscriminate bombing” (Biden’s own admission). One-tonne
bunker-buster bombs have been dropped deliberately on refugee camps and
hospitals. And still, the Pentagon shamelessly refuses to impose any red
lines on the use of its munitions.
This genocide has Israeli fingers on the triggers but it is
ultimately an American-sponsored genocide. Based on Nuremberg
principles, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu would be both in the dock,
accompanied by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and their
counterparts in Tel Aviv.
If there were previous international doubts about Washington’s systematic criminality, the whole world knows for certain now.
kunstler | And just like that — snap ! — the news
about the Colorado Supreme Court’s droll action against candidate DJ
Trump vanished from the front page (or top screens) of The New York Times.
Do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because the political Left has finally
managed to embarrass itself with a “lawfare” gambit so nakedly fatuous
that it exposes the faction’s drive to destroy the election process, and
with it our country.
This is what you get from a regime
that faked its way to power and now must strain to cover up its long
train of crimes, abuses, and effronteries to common sense, while running
out of tricks to keep fooling even its own deranged followers. Somehow,
the act of kicking a leading candidate off the ballot has finally
registered as inconsistent with “defending our democracy.”
Of course, the reckless abuse of law —
“lawfare” — proceeds from the Left’s disrespect for boundaries and
limits, which is exactly what law in principle concerns itself with. And
from there it’s a quick leap into totalizing bad faith, the operating
system for government under an imposter president, “Joe Biden.”
Suddenly, mere days before Christmas, when the people want to be
preoccupied with things other than politics, events merge explosively to
shape the fate of the nation.
In a sane world, the US Supreme Court
would not just summarily strike down the Colorado ruling, but would
issue a career-ending rebuke to the brain-damaged state justices who
managed to not learn a basic principle of due process: innocent until proven guilty
— that to brand someone a criminal, there must be a record of
indictment and conviction for a particular crime, and that, in the case
of Mr. Trump, a politically-motived fairy tale about an “insurrection”
doesn’t cut it.
Also, in a sane world interested in
truth and justice, the Republican-majority Congress would have months
ago convened new hearings about the Jan 6/21 Capitol riot to undo the
manifold perfidious frauds instigated by the previous Democrat-majority
committee under Chairman Bennie Thompson. By now, testimony should have
been compelled from Nancy Pelosi, the then Capitol Police Chief Steven
Sund, and former Defense Secretary Chris Miller about Ms. Pelosi’s
refusal to call in national guard troops to reinforce security around
the building, and to answer for the odd behavior of the Capitol Police,
such as opening doors for the mob and then serving as ushers to show off
the place. It seems obvious that many elected Republicans also have an
interest in supporting the Jan 6/21 “insurrection” fairy tale. Do you
still wonder why the evil entity infesting Washington is called “the
blob”?
The Substack blogger who styles himself as El Gato Malo offers the alluring theory that a SCOTUS ruling on whether the 14th
Amendment clauses that were applied to the presidency in the Colorado
case, could enable Special Counsel Jack Smith to slip-in a superseding
indictment (replacing the original indictment) in his DC Jan 6 case
against Mr. Trump with new insurrection / rebellion charges, thus
setting-up a fortified argument for states to chuck Mr. Trump off any
ballot. More “lawfare,” you see. Whatever it takes. . .!
More curiously even, we learn today, that an amicus brief
has been filed in the SCOTUS by former Attorney General Ed Meese (under
Ronald Reagan), and two constitutional law professors, Steven Calabresi
and Gary S. Lawson, challenging the legality altogether of Jack Smith’s
appointment as special counsel for prosecuting Mr. Trump. The amicus is
filed in the matter of Jack Smith’s certiorari petition to the court to
schedule Mr. Trump’s DC trial the same day as the Super Tuesday primary
—against the defendant’s objections. The amicus presents compelling
arguments that Attorney General Merrick Garland acted illegally in
appointing Mr. Smith, and if SCOTUS chucks him out of the special
counsel job, the whole mendaciously constructed scaffold of the Jan 6
prosecution goes out the window, along with the Mar-a-Lago documents
case.
Those of you with a deep interest in
blob lawfare treachery may also be interested in the courtroom win, this
week, by Brandon Straka, who launched the 2018 “Walk Away” movement to
persuade gays to leave the Democratic Party. He was present on the US
Capitol grounds the day of the Jan 6/21 riot, and was later sued by
eight “black and brown” Capitol Police officers, with the help of a
Soros-funded nonprofit law firm, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Straka was accused of causing the officers’ injuries (pepper spray and
“exhaustion”) and of conspiring to deprive them of their civil rights
(under the KKK Act of 1871). It came out in the course of testimony that
seven of the officers were on the other side of the enormous Capitol
building from Mr. Straka’s position the entire time alleged, and that
one of the officers was not even present at the Capitol or even in the
District of Columbia at the time. Such are the sordid dreams of lawfare
warriors and their useful idiots. . . .
Next up, as we turn the corner into a
fateful 2024 — and lately eclipsed by all these lawfare election
interference shenanigans — will be the perhaps even more consequential
hearings on the Biden family’s extensive international bribery
operations, which may shed some light on how come we suffer a president
and a party bent on destroying our country.
thecrimson |Former President Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud and
enthusiasm for his re-election drove supporters to storm the U.S.
Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study from the Harvard Kennedy
School’s Shorenstein Center.
In the most
comprehensive study to date of what motivated the Trump supporters to
attack the Capitol, Shorenstein Center researchers found that 20.6
percent of the rioters, a plurality, were motivated to take part in the
riot because they supported Trump. Another 20.6 percent of the rioters
cited Trump’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 presidential election was
rigged as their primary reason for participating in the Jan. 6 riot.
The
authors of the study — Joan Donovan, Kaylee Fagan, and Frances E. Lee —
wrote that their analysis found that the largest proportion of
defendants “were motivated, in part, to invade the US Capitol Building
by Donald Trump.”
The third most common reason for
attacking the Capitol: a desire to start a civil war or an armed
revolution, according to the study. Almost 8 percent of defendants
indicated it was their main motivation.
In an
interview, Fagan said she was surprised by how frequently support for
Trump and concerns about the election were cited as primary motivations
for joining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“I
don’t think I expected the result to be this stark,” Fagan said. “I also
certainly didn’t expect those two motivations to come up nearly exactly
as often as they both did.”
Though more than 800
have been federally prosecuted for their participation in the Jan. 6
Capitol riot, the study focused on 417 defendants charged with federal
crimes in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The
study, which was released as a working paper because it has not been
peer-reviewed, analyzed 469 court documents from the 417 defendants to
determine why the rioters decided to join the Jan. 6 attack in
Washington.
“The documents show that Trump and his
allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that
representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline,
but in imminent, existential danger,” the study said. “This belief
translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown,
which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to DC from far
corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s
most desperate hour.”
twitter |This is what an *actual* attack on democracy looks like: in an un-American, unconstitutional, and *unprecedented* decision, a cabal of Democrat judges are barring Trump from the ballot in Colorado. Having tried every trick in the book to eliminate President Trump from running in this election, the bipartisan Establishment is now deploying a new tactic to bar him from ever holding office again: the 14th Amendment. I pledge to *withdraw* from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is also allowed to be on the state’s ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to do the same immediately - or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country.
Today’s decision is the latest election interference tactic to silence political opponents and swing the election for whatever puppet the Democrats put up this time by depriving Americans of the right to vote for their candidate of choice.
The 14th Amendment was part of the “Reconstruction Amendments” that were ratified following the Civil War. It was passed to prohibit former Confederate military and political leaders from holding high federal or state office. These men had clearly taken part in a rebellion against the United States: the Civil War. That makes it all the more absurd that a left-wing group in Colorado is asking a federal court to disqualify the 45th President on the same grounds, equating his speech to rebellion against the United States.
And there’s another legal problem: Trump is not a former “officer of the United States,” as that term is used in the Constitution, meaning Section 3 does not apply. As the Supreme Court explained in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010), an “officer of the United States” is someone appointed by the President to aid him in his duties under Article II, Section 2. The term does not apply to elected officials, and certainly not to the President himself.
The Framers of the 14th Amendment would be appalled to see this narrow provision—intended to bar former U.S. officials who switched to the Confederacy from seeking public office—being weaponized by a sitting President and his political allies to prevent a former President from seeking reelection. Our country is becoming unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers.
amgreatness | The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They
apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what
leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they
assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply
because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their
opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.
Impeachment
The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current
House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally
investigating Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is
somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out-of-bounds entirely.
So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a
first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no
reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be
automatically acquitted in the Democratically controlled Senate, and
that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s
reelection efforts.
All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald
Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began,
and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month,
$40-million-special-counsel Russian-collusion hoax).
The Democrats tried to remove an elected president over a phone call
without a special counsel’s report. So Trump was impeached only after
the 2018 election led to a Democratic House majority, which went from
eating up nearly two years of his administration in the
Russian-collusion hoax straight into the impeachment farce. There was no
concern about the cost to the nation of putting an elected government
into a continual state of siege.
There is one difference, though, between the Trump impeachment and
the Biden impeachment inquiry. Donald Trump was impeached because he
accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying
Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil fuel expertise, an astronomical sum
to serve on the Burisma board—as the costly quid that earned the
lucrative quo from his dad Vice President Joe Biden.
No one now denies that Joe Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired
by threatening to cancel legislatively-approved U.S. aid. Shokin knew
about the skullduggery through which the Biden family eventually
received $6.5 million from Ukraine—and so Biden ensured his firing, and
publicly bragged about it in performance-art fashion.
In sum, Trump had a perfect right as commander in chief to delay (he
did not cancel) aid to Ukraine, to ensure that its government was not
still paying off the Bidens for their lobbying efforts on its behalf.
epochtimes | The
U.S. Space Command, the Pentagon’s newest and 11th combatant command,
has reached full operating capability, according to its commander, Army
Gen. James Dickinson.
Gen. Dickinson made the declaration during a headquarters town hall on Dec. 15, according to a statement. The U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) was created in 2019 at the direction of former President Donald Trump.
“Since
its establishment in 2019, USSPACECOM has been singularly focused on
delivering exquisite capability to the joint force to deter conflict,
defend our vital interests, and, if necessary, defeat aggression,” Gen.
Dickinson said.
“Thanks
to the disciplined initiative of our people and the support of our
joint, combined, and partnered team, I can confidently say we have
reached full operational capability.”
He
explained that the announcement followed an “in-depth evaluation of the
command’s capabilities,” including the ability to execute its mission
on “our worst day, when we are needed the most.”
The
declaration of full operating capability met certain criteria,
including having the appropriate numbers of skills across the human
capital and having the necessary command processes and functions in
place, according to Gen. Dickinson.
“As
the command has matured, challenges to a safe, secure, stable, and
sustainable space domain have significantly increased,” Gen. Dickinson
said. “Both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation
are fielding counter space capabilities designed to hold U.S., Allied,
and partner space assets at risk.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has said that it'll become a “major space power” sometime around 2030 and that it's planning to double the size of its space station in the next few years.
Rick Fischer, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, in a commentary published by The Epoch Times last month, warned that “China has no hesitation to arm its space stations and other large manned space platforms, including its bases on the moon and beyond,” no matter what China’s state-run media have stated.
“Until
the CCP expires or abandons its ambitions for hegemony on Earth, the
United States and its partners in space will need to achieve security,
meaning they will require military capabilities in space to use against
Beijing’s manned and unmanned space systems intended to attack the
democracies,” Mr. Fischer added.
The
command had completed its first training exercise with the U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command, which “served as a major step in validating the
headquarters staff as a ready, joint force,” Gen. Dickinson said.
“Our
work continues,” he said. “As the complexity of the domain grows, so
must our capability to deliver operational and strategic effects to our
nation and preserve the safety and stability of the domain.”
In July, President Joe Biden said the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters would remain at Peterson Air Force in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reversing President Trump’s plans to move it to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.
Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) both released statements on Dec. 15 welcoming the command’s news.
thepressunited |The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain
Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of
dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for
the sixth year running.
The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various
services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the
last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the
Pentagon has never successfully passed one.
This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly
by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an
American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of
defense spending.
The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its
$877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations
with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot
fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in
liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense
of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks
$886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared
to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent
indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public –
to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks
volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American
establishment.
Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a
ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality.
Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to
defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from
our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly
physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have
been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.
Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military
misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the
ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021.
Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent
decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to
withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing
down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi
venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its
20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.
scheerpost | srael will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.
Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its
murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically
cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with
any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized.
It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war
criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and
tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a
conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months
of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of
civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and
democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and
miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s
social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly,
repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations
of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations
come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is
distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in
the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who
see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the
Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white
supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in
Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s
oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have
their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way
Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians
and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural,
artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated.
Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots
and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public
discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes.
Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining
attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S.
and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are
terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for
rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The
cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians
as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed
genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
africasacountry |By pre-modern I mean the period before
the establishment of the centralized structure of power known as the
modern nation-state. This period differs from one part of the world to
another. In Africa and the Middle East, the nation-state is a recent
colonial creation.
Before the development of centralized
power, there were different forms of political powers that coexisted in
society. The rulers, whether one calls them kings or emperors or
sultans, held one form of political power, which we shall call royal
power. In places like Buganda, this royal power could be further subdivided into the power of the kabaka (king), the power of the namasole (queen mother), the power of lubuga (royal sister), and so on.
But there were also other society-based political powers held by the clans, the shrine,
the church, and so on. In the lands of Islam, the mufti produced (i.e.
interpreted) the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which coexisted with the laws
made by the rulers. The mufti’s legal opinion, though nonbinding, informed many judgments in the courts of law.
Thus the mufti was an important political authority even if he held no
government office. Elsewhere, the church made its own laws that
coexisted with the laws of the kings and emperors.
This kind of political arrangement in
which power was spread rather concentrated in one entity means that
there was no single political authority that determined who should be
included in or excluded from the political community. An outsider who
was rejected by one clan could be admitted by another. A heretic who was
persecuted in one village could find peace in a neighboring village. A
cultural stranger who was denounced today could be accepted tomorrow.
The terms of inclusion and exclusion were contestable, flexible and
abstract. There was no permanent or universal outsider.
The modern state, on the other hand,
does two things. First, it centralizes and monopolizes all political
power, including the power to determine who is a citizen and who is not.
Even if a clan in northern Uganda admits a Somali as its member, the
state of Uganda reserves the authority to revoke the citizenship of this
new clan member.
Second, the modern state
institutionalizes and reifies the criteria for determining who is
included and who is excluded in the political community. In Uganda, a
full citizen must be a member of an indigenous community that was living
within the borders of Uganda by February 1, 1926, as noted earlier.
This makes the nation-state an
inherently and extremely discriminatory form of political association
with no precedent in history. It seeks to dominate society completely
with specific emphasis on marginalizing and colonizing certain sections
of society.
To mitigate the marginalization of the
minorities, liberals (such as John Locke) introduced the ideas of
tolerance within the framework of secularism. The liberal nation-state
creates two spheres, namely, the public sphere and the private domain.
The private is the domain of religion and other cultural identities
while the public is the sphere of reason.
To ensure peaceful coexistence between
the national community and the minorities, liberals prescribe that
matters to do with religion, culture, and identity should be personal
business confined to the private domain. Public principle, including
state law, should be based on reason, not religion or any other cultural
prejudice. The assumption is that reason is neutral and objective
rather than being socially constructed. How can reason and public
principle be neutral and objective in an identity-based state? How can
an identity-based state produce a law that is detached from the cultural
identity of the state?
But there is even a bigger problem. If
liberal tolerance appears to have worked, it has only worked where the
minorities are too weak to threaten the dominance of the national
majority. Where the minorities gain some power and influence, they are
seen as a threat that must be dealt with. The rising popularity of far
right parties in Europe is partly fuelled by the supposition that the
minorities, including the Muslims and migrants, are purportedly gaining ground in these countries.
Indeed, Zionist ethnic cleansing
possibly seeks to reduce the Palestinians to small manageable numbers
that could eventually be tolerated without threatening the dominance of
the Jewish national community. The liberal notion of tolerance only
requires the national majority to tolerate the minorities, but it does
not ask why there should be a national majority in the first place. Thus
liberal tolerance does not offer a
meaningful solution to the fundamental problem of the nation-state,
which is rooted in the distinction between the national community and
the minorities.
All liberal interventions have failed
to end ethnic cleansing because liberalism operates within the framework
of the nation-state. Liberalism has no critique of the nation-state as
nation-state—it only critiques certain manifestations of the
nation-state. In other words, liberalism has no critique of the problem
itself; it only focuses on certain manifestations of the problem.
It is this conceptual narrowness of
liberalism that prompts political actors to create more nation-states as
a solution to the violence of the nation-state. When Jews were
persecuted in Europe, the European powers could not think of a better
solution than creating a separate nation-state for Jews. The consequence
was to reproduce the violence of the nation-state, this time in the
form of Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is for this reason
that the ongoing problem in Palestine cannot be meaningfully addressed
by resorting to the so-called two-state solution.
If such a solution was to be adopted,
what would happen to the non-Jews living in the Jewish state and what
would happen to the non-Palestinians living in the Palestinian state?
Considering that neither Jews nor the Palestinians are a homogenous
category, how would the state deal with internal differences in the form
of religious sects and ethnic factions of its national community?
thehill | New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) went after former President Trump on Friday, arguing that a second Trump term would be hampered by “chaos and distraction.”
“The guy just has chaos and distraction that follows him,” he said in an MSNBC interview Friday. “He’s not going to be able to get the stuff that we need done to fix this country.”
“Republicans want to go forward with the next generation of conservative
leadership,” he continued, downplaying the former president. “We always
want to be looking forward to the next opportunity to actually get
stuff done. Not just looking in the rearview mirror, worrying about
Trump litigating things.”
Sununu endorsed former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for
the GOP nomination on Tuesday. He used Friday’s interview to
springboard more reasons why he believes Haley is better suited for the
White House.
“Her numbers were surging long before I even got on board because she’s connecting with folks,” he said.
“By doing that, by spending time on the ground with our voters, she’s
earning their trust, and trust is a very rare thing in Washington
nowadays. People are liking it,” he continued. “She’s got that charisma,
more than any other candidate out there. And that connection is why
you’re seeing her numbers jump up.”
Despite the endorsement, Sununu complimented her GOP primary rivals Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie,
calling them “great friends of mine” and “good candidates.” He offered
no compliment for Trump or biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Haley has been gaining momentum in the polls, notably in New Hampshire, and often coming in second place. But, Trump still remains the clear GOP front-runner.
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