“The FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, according to a newly unsealed court document.
FBI officials say they have already fixed the problems, which the agency blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
But the failures to use the database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year. It may also create additional head winds for the FBI, which has been under attack for years by former president Donald Trump and his political supporters. House lawmakers aligned with Trump held a hearing this week trying to show that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is biased against conservatives.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, has pressured the FBI to address the problems, writing in the April 2022 opinion that was unsealed Friday that if the agency doesn’t perform better, the court will crack down and order its own changes to FBI practices.
The Section 702 database is a vast trove of electronic communications and other information that can be searched by the National Security Agency and the FBI. The FBI is authorized to search the database only when agents have reason to believe that such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes.”
Matt Farwell’s painstaking timeline of over a hundred years of American information suppression, secret bureaucracies, and “anti-disinformation” scares”
“The turn of the last century brought an age of revolutions, industrial warfare and nearly instantaneous communications across long distances. With these developments came an emphasis on another method of war: information war. This was the type of fight waged with what World War II Deputy Director of the Office of Censorship, Theodore F. Koop, called “Silent Weapons,” in a wartime memoir he published in 1946. Wrote Koop:
The censors’ shears were bayonets that not only formed a rear-guard national defense but also struck hard at the enemy in all three phases of warfare—military, economic, and psychological.
Koop would go on to run CBS News in Washington, DC. Well-known as a powerful media figure, he was also a trusted one, the man who hired Walter Cronkite.
Less well-known was that in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to run a secret national censorship program intended for use in Cold War emergencies. He accepted the offer while still a network news executive, serving in that contingency role under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
The methods of censorship had changed over time, matching changes in the communication technology. During World War I, the United States Government used the Postal Service, the Comstock laws and the reliance on publications reaching subscribers by mail as a wedge. When radio and television broadcasts became pre-eminent, the newly formed Federal Communications Commission began using its authority as stewards of the public airwaves to watch over content. Under the FCC Act of 1934, ostensibly private corporations like CBS, ABC and NBC were allowed to use the public airwaves only under license, acquiring revenue and learning the power of shaping the discourse from the nascent field of advertising.
Though it all, one thing has been remarkably consistent. Government targeted for special attention journalists who reported accurately on the ugly truth of American foreign policy, such as John W. Powell. Powell was an American journalist based in Shanghai who wrote a series of articles for the China Monthly Review (later, the Weekly Review), which said the Chinese government claimed the United States was using biological weapons in the Korean War. He was put on trial for sedition in 1959. The case dragged on in federal court in San Francisco for five years before the charges were dropped. It was enough to make him leave journalism forever.
The impulse to use censorship, and call all information that doesn’t square with the official narrative “disinformation,” is a bipartisan impulse, at least historically. Both Republican and Democratic administrations during the Global War on Terror sought to expand and refine the power of what we now call the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The latter was built, piece by piece, over a century of legislation, executive action, and regulation. A little less than a century after the passage of the Espionage Act, Barack Obama’s administration used it aggressively to target leakers. By that time, computers, the internet, and social media were all new platforms for communication and ripe targets for information suppression.
In an era where cultural memory is short and resources for learning about the inconvenient past are becoming more scarce, it’s useful to look at this century-plus progression in chronological order.”
6. Collins was really loved inside Twitter, even suggesting him to moderate one of their panels. When they met w/ reporters in NYC, he admitted that Twitter helped propel his professional profile and helped him get on NPR and TV. pic.twitter.com/89G3KeKYD6
8. Reporters apparently also help Twitter by flipping them bills under consideration.
"Our DC-based tech reporters have gotten advance copies of at least five bills …. that would give more power to regulators." pic.twitter.com/7dfT8a1R4I
16. Fox News producer for Dana Perino: "Is really eager to get us on the show …. Dana would be fair and not any more tough than the nicest person to question us in Congress." (I laughed when I first read this) pic.twitter.com/TMLSpRryEs
“Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon.
But the culture in which she was steeped began to take a toll on her mental health. As a white person, she felt responsible for America’s racist legacy of slavery, and worried about her relationship with her Asian American girlfriend. “I felt like I was hurting her, harming her, just by being white,” Cooney told me.
Though she knew she was a lesbian, she began to identify as nonbinary, a result of her understanding that being a “cis woman” was “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.”
One day in June 2020, she found herself suddenly unleashing a tirade against the next-door neighbor of a friend, a white man who said he supported BLM but had cops in his family whom he supported, too. “I had this moment afterwards where I was like, ‘This is not how I want to behave. I don’t want to be a person who just screams at people because they’re white.’ ”
Anxious and depressed, she had trouble concentrating on work. “I started just going a little crazy,” she said. She decided she needed therapy to work on both her “internalized white supremacy,” her “white guilt,” and to “become a better person.’ ”
In January 2021, Cooney sought help from a black therapist in Portland she found through a therapy database, who agreed to work with her around issues of race and gender.
Initially, they practiced mindfulness and self-compassion techniques, from forgiving oneself out loud to the “butterfly hug,” crossing arms and tapping the chest. The therapist even cried with her when she cried about sexual assault or feeling unsupported in relationships. Cooney felt supported and eventually, more in control, more accepting of herself as female.
Then something unexpected happened. The stronger and more mentally healthy she felt, the less Cooney viewed the world through the lens that had informed her activism—a binary perspective that split all people into categories: white and black, oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim.
“I care about equality, I care about racism, I care about homophobia, I care about trans people being safe. I just don’t want to walk around in the world where everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are dictated by their identities,” she said.
Cooney wanted to share her newfound realizations, but feared being canceled and ostracized—by her friends, fellow activists, perhaps even her girlfriend. The burden weighed on her, and therapy seemed the place to address it.
When she first tried to do so, in June, 2022, Cooney’s therapist reacted badly. She told Cooney that critiquing cancel culture was giving in to “white supremacy culture,” and said Cooney was making her feel “unsafe” as a black woman. By the end of the session, the therapist had given her an ultimatum: they could continue to work together and keep cancel culture discussions off the table, or “the relationship was over,” Cooney said.
Cooney continued with the therapist for six more months, but her therapist seemed to emphasize Cooney’s victimhood, reiterating that other people were responsible for her oppression as a gay woman. “She said, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’ ”
Cooney began pushing back, expressing views the therapist had declared taboo such as not wanting to categorize people based on their identities, or asserting that too many people were being shamed and punished for minor supposed transgressions. Finally, her therapist told Cooney their relationship was finished.
Ultimately, the thing she had feared the most—being canceled for her views—had happened, by the person with whom she was supposed to be able to share her deepest secrets. “I was just totally in shock, just kind of dead inside,” Cooney told me.
Cooney is not alone in finding therapy overtaken by the same kind of social justice ideology prevalent in schools, medicine, and the law. I spoke with more than two dozen therapists and clients who painted a disturbing picture of what happens in the treatment room when therapists make the tenets of this ideology central to their work, instead of offering empowering approaches that help patients make better choices and take control of their lives. Some patients, like Cooney, have also found themselves “fired” for expressing unacceptable thoughts.
I spoke to new therapists, some still in training, who describe a profession that teaches the ascribing of oppressor or victim categories to patients, based on their innate characteristics, instead of seeing them as individuals. Several sources said their applications to graduate schools required them to make a written commitment to anti-racism. Some said they’d been penalized for asking the “wrong” questions in class, detailing how this ideological encroachment damages their own mental health.
I reviewed mission statements and other documents released by professional organizations in recent years, revealing how this revolution has transformed the central tenets of the therapeutic process.
And I talked to psychologists and others fighting back. They described their alarm at how the very people who are supposed to help ease trauma become the source of it, as therapy sessions transform into ideological struggle sessions. British psychotherapist Val Thomas told me “the reason this happened is that activists captured the institutions and professional bodies of counseling and psychotherapy.”
At a time when as many as 90 percent of adults believe there’s a mental health crisis in this country, parts of the mental health profession are in crisis too. “
“We already knew that the claim Russia colluded with Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016 was false. Multiple investigations, including the Mueller report, have revealed as much.
So we didn’t really need a 306-page report from special counsel John Durham to tell us again that Russiagate was little more than a smear campaign. But Durham’s report, published earlier this week, is nevertheless shocking. It shows how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was actively involved in perpetuating the Russiagate hoax. It reveals how it undertook a multi-year investigation of Trump that it knew was groundless. And it exposes the extent to which the FBI worked with the Hillary Clinton campaign to spread lies about Trump’s ties to Russia in order to bring down the president.
In a democracy, we rely on security services like the FBI to remain politically neutral. But in the case of Trump and Russiagate, the FBI was politically partisan and abused its power. It effectively allowed itself to become a political weapon for the Democrats.
It seems FBI agents were motivated to investigate by a ‘prejudice against Trump’, writes Durham. Leading investigators, including former agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI attorneys Lisa Page and Kevin Clinesmith, demonstrated ‘pronounced hostile feelings’ towards Trump. In published text messages from 2016, Page asked Strzok, ‘He’s not going to become president, right? Right?!’ ‘No. No, he’s not’, Strzok responded, ‘we’ll stop it’.
One of Durham’s bombshells is that the FBI had no basis for opening its ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies in July 2016, just months before the November election. The FBI lacked ‘any actual evidence of collusion’ between Trump and Russia, and instead relied on ‘raw, unanalysed and uncorroborated intelligence’. The agency was so eager to nail Trump that it violated its normal standards and assessment process. Indeed, Durham found that in 2016, FBI officials ‘discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia’.
In July 2016 – the same month that Crossfire Hurricane operation began – the government received intelligence that Hillary Clinton had approved ‘a proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services’. In early August, CIA director John Brennan told President Obama, attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey about the dirty tricks being planned by the Clinton campaign. Brennan’s warning should have made the FBI sceptical of claims of Trump-Russia collusion. But it didn’t. Instead, it seemed to spur the FBI on in its own attempt to ‘vilify’ Trump.
In October 2016, the FBI made its first application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking authorisation to begin surveillance of the Trump campaign. The main evidence it presented to the court was the infamous Steele dossier, which consisted of numerous lurid, false claims about Trump, and had been commissioned – as the FBI suspected even then – by the Clinton campaign itself. Within the bureau there was ‘some concern that Steele had been hired by a law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research on Trump’, a senior FBI official told Durham. Yet, as the Durham report states, the FBI did not reveal to the court that it strongly suspected the dossier had been financed by Trump’s political opponent. The report adds: ‘The failure to provide this information to the FISC was a major omission in that the information clearly had the potential to affect the analysis of any bias in Steele’s reporting.’”
“The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, is a test that measures the knowledge of American students in various areas. The results of the NAEP test in U.S. history and civics, taken in 2022, were released early this month. They paint a grim picture: according to the data, just 13 percent of eighth-graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history, meaning that they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Additionally, about 20 percent of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores represent all-time lows on these two tests.”
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“Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics—the organization that creates, designs, develops, and implements the NAEP—told reporters that while the civics scores are “alarming,” even more distressing were the history results. While many analysts rushed to blame the Covid-induced school closures for the abysmal showing, Carr noted that the problems well predated the pandemic. “For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned. It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”
It’s not only students’ history and civics NAEP scores that are deficient. In November 2022, the scores released for the reading and math test taken earlier in the year showed that just 33 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders were proficient in reading, and 36 percent proficient in math. The eighth-graders did even worse: 31 percent scored as proficient in reading, while a painful 26 percent showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth and eighth graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”
Relatedly, the national average score on the 2022 ACT, a college admissions test, fell to 19.8 (out of a possible 36), down from 20.3 in 2021, according to data released in October 2022 by the nonprofit that administers the test. While education leaders invariably use the pandemic lockdowns as an excuse, the Wall Street Journal observes that this is the fifth consecutive year that ACT scores have declined, and the first time that the average score has dropped below 20 since 1991. English scores fell to 19 out of 36, down from 19.6 last year.
Weighing in on the NAEP history results, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona explained that the poor scores “further [affirm] the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” Fair enough, but then Cardona ludicrously proclaimed: “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes. We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”
Just how does keeping a six-year-old from being exposed to books with explicit sexual themes translate to banning books and censoring educators? As for funding, we are pouring record amounts of cash into the bottomless education pit, and it’s done very little to help. While there’s no doubt that the forced Covid shutdowns did damage, other causes explain why students are not learning effectively. As scholars Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu have chronicled, many students report increased ideological indoctrination in the classroom, which is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations. “One California student reported that a teacher at his school told the class that perfectionism and striving for perfection was part of white supremacy culture. Another of his teachers ‘made it seem like it was bad to have a good work ethic or to be supportive of meritocracy.’ In his school, grades were inflated, low grades were eliminated, late assignments were allowed, and multiple retakes of exams were permitted. Rigor simply disappeared.”
When teachers spend time forcing race- and gender-infused woke gibberish down the throats of American children, less time is available for more traditional subject matter. Here are a few of the myriad instances of students being hammered with the ravings of the woke:
In Buffalo, New York, students were told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” that might kill them at any time.
The San Diego Unified School District orders students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.”
In a training session for teachers in Seattle, schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.
In Springfield, Missouri, teachers are trained that people are given a “biological sex assigned at birth,” which often conflicts with their “gender identity” and “gender expression.”
In Illinois, the Evanston–Skokie school district has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to “break the binary” of gender.
West Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut has begun to introduce gender ideology in kindergarten as part of what it calls “social justice lessons.”
So instead of learning factual American history—the good and the bad—students are now at the mercy of far-left advocates pushing a radical racial and sexual agenda. Unless the education establishment reverses course in a hurry, parents, already responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing their children, will need to educate them as well.”
“The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against former President Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.
John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.
From John Durham’s report:
“CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that ‘they found no conspiracy.'”
As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on air with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.
Did I mention this was the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency?
Brennan must have been relying on that same gut instinct that led him to sign a letter asserting that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop, a journalistic effort with more corroboration than virtually anything connected to Trump’s alleged “collusion,” had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The House Judiciary Committee recently uncovered an Oct. 19, 2020, email from CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who was working with the Biden campaign to concoct “a talking point” to “push back on Trump” during the final presidential debates, asking Brennan to sign on to the “disinformation” letter. “Ok, Michael, add my name to the list. Good initiative. Thanks for asking me to sign on,” Brennan replied.
That’s all it takes for the former CIA director, a man who was given immense unchecked power — a man who oversaw secret kill lists and was the driving force behind drone strikes on civilians (including an American citizen) — to sign a letter he knew would obstruct the workings of “democracy” and the free press.
This is a man who still has access to classified documents. You might remember all the hand-wringing over broken norms when Trump allegedly barred intelligence agencies from sharing classified information with Brennan. The New York Times even gave him a column to argue that Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “why the president revoked my security clearance,” which, again, he almost certainly knew was a lie.
Of course, Brennan should have been denied access to any classified material and driven into exile after he was caught overseeing an operation of illegal spying on staffers in the Senate. CIA officials broke into Senate computer files and viewed emails and drafts of a report on torture. All of it was illegal. Brennan covered up the agency’s actions (also illegal), blamed the Senate and pushed to fire at least one staffer who was tasked with investigating his agency.
All this happened when the tan-suited Obama was in charge, so most people probably missed it.”
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Some of us have called it out for years, but few listened.
“Congressional Democrats have come under fire for their alleged attempts to undermine FBI whistleblowers, shielding the agency from accountability for its purported abuses.
Yesterday, Mary wrote about Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) trying to discredit FBI whistleblower Marcus Allen for retweeting a post that suggested: “Nancy Pelosi staged January 6.” However, it wasn’t his account or his tweet. This incident clearly illustrates the dismissive and hostile treatment of FBI whistleblowers from Congressional Democrats, as evidenced during the recent House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee hearing.
Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking Democrat, made the unfounded claim that Republicans had brought in former agents who had lost their security clearances due to being a threat to national security. These agents, she argued, were prioritizing their partisan agenda over their sworn duty to serve the country and protect its national security.”
Again, like I told you repeatedly, a fed op from day one.
BREAKING: The Washington, D.C. FBI Field Office CONFIRMED that undercover officers, confidential informants, and FBI assets were present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, despite FBI Director Wray testifying to the contrary! pic.twitter.com/AzBhilAsZ3
The FBI has retaliated against brave whistleblowers for exposing the abuses they've seen at the FBI.
There's no doubt that retaliation, and Democrat attacks on their character, will chill future whistleblowers. pic.twitter.com/ApAPdrnF3z
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) May 18, 2023
That’s their plan.
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The FBI distributed a memo titled “Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide” that said support for the Second Amendment and displaying the Betsy Ross flag are indications of violent extremists.
The FBI sent agents to track and report on the license plates of parents attending school… pic.twitter.com/G37QvfYBvO
Rep. @HagemanforWY: "The leadership of the FBI and the DOJ are corrupt. I will name names. Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland are corrupt. They know it, we know it, and the American people know it." pic.twitter.com/q9IMAtbmUA
Of course, the FBI bent rules. They’ve been bending rules since they ere founded – Palmer Raids, Red Scare, etc. They even spied on MLK. All law enforcement agencies break rules – hence we need to defund the police and redirect spending to prevent crime.
Of course, there’s censorship. Ask anyone who was in leftist politics since the powt war era. American media has always filtered news. They are private corporations – property rights deem they can filter anyway they want.Not sure why poeple are shocked – it’s been this way for almost a century.
Musk is a billionaire with a toy – why would anyone take his comments on twitter seriously
The mental health story of a 26 year old is not surprising. In any situation, where one has an ideological framework that narrows one’s outlook people lose the ability to be empathic and manage anger when confronted with opposing ideas. This happens no matter where a person is located on the political spectrum.
I teach History and Geography to middle school. It’s a thankless job. 12 year olds don’t want to learn history. There’s a couple of issues here.
History is no longer a memorization of facts. Almost any 12 year old can access the complete information needed from their own phone. It’s how they manage the information which is important.
Thus, the nature of the test is important. Memory skills are in decline. However, logic and information management are the same if not better as in the past. So if the test is about information management, then it should be the same as before. If it’s fact recall, I’m not surprised scores are down.
The other problem is the political interference in history. An American textbook used to read “Rosa Parks, an African American, protest against segragation by refusing to give up her seat to a white man” to “Rosa Parks was brave for asserting her right to sit on a bus seat”. There’s been a concerted move by some Republicans to dilute anything that put America in a bad light. Some joke that they are afraid their children will learn that grandma supported segregated schools. Yes, there’s leftist interference in school curriculum but interference in history is more right wing.
American students actually do quite well in the PISA test which compares internationally. In Science, the US scores 15th and in Reading 10th. Its only in Math, where they score in the 30s as one of the lowest in the OECD. At the university level, the US still has the best post secondary schools including some public land grant universities.
Its always interesting to read something here and then read things on Facebook and Youtube news streams.
Watched Jim Jordan as chair. His mannerisms and speech reminded me of students who had ADHD and anxiety.
In any case, Jordan withheld the testimony the “whistleblowers” gave to the Republicans from Democrats because the “whistleblowers” didn’t want it shared. How can you be a whistleblower if you only “blow the whistle” to people you like and don’t share it publicly? Jordan then told the Democrats they could question the agents about their testimony (despite not sharing their testimony). He should slow down and listen to himself. Until their testimony is made public and they are questioned publicly on this testimony, they’re not whistleblowers.
The FBI’s story is these agents broke security rules and did not listen to their superiors. For a newspaper to report the FBI’s version is not taking sides or being state propaganda but simply reporting different versions.
All this talk of whistleblowers, reminds me. Where are those whistleblowers who would implicate the Biden crime family or is that outrage going to slowly die away. Wonder if the FBI whistleblowers will also go away with nothing to show.
The Republicans (and Democrats) engage in outrage after outrage with very little time given to process information and to double check what is actually happening. The 20 homeless veteran story is a current example of this. Turns out no veterans were evicted for migrants. However, the lady who broke this story has fundraised well off the outrage.
Another outrage story – the Durham report – is also dying even as the right side of the Internet tries to amplify it. There’s nothing new in it and nothing happened because of Durham’s investigation. Amusingly, supporters of the Durham report claim it shows Mueller’s shortcomings. However, Mueller arrested and indicted far more people; many of them in the Trump administration. On this basis, there was no hoax.
I imagine all whistleblowers who go against the bureaucracy will go away eventually. One whistleblower testifying to congress gave a warning to other potential whistleblowers to NOT do it because the government will crush you and your family. The message will spread and the practice will die out.
The Durham report did not reveal anything we did not know before. People just didn’t care if we peddled lies and false reports as long as the coup was successful. It wasn’t technically successful, but it was a concerted attempt that did prevent a second term. Democracy has its limits, and it appears that the country shall eventually be reduced to being satisfied with the appearance of choosing our own form of tyranny. Welcome to Russia 2.0.
AJ – In reading HRW’s comments (not only on this thread, but previous threads), I certainly would not consider him a shill for the FBI (or the “other letter agencies”). He has often mentioned the FBI’s previous bad actions, and pointed out that it is only now, when they have turned their sights on “conservatives”, that those on the right are noticing.
Your comments about political interference in curriculum reminds me of my (Republican) mom’s story when she was a high school student in Iowa in the 1930s. One of their teachers challenged them with the question “Is it ‘my country, right or wrong?'” It stuck with her as a worthy challenge to ask oneself rather than following blind loyalty.
My rural NY friends — Quaker, 8 children, father a public defender, mom took the lead on home schooling — somewhat purposely steered their children toward the sciences when it came to college studies and majors as it was least likely to be infiltrated with either left- or right-wing ideas popular at any given time.
(They all graduated — Ivy League — and went on to impressive careers in, yep, math and the sciences, including architecture, veterinary science, teaching.)
My years in college — in the 1970s — were mostly influenced by the popular liberal ideas of the time. Jane Fonda was one of the more exciting guest speakers on our campus one year.
AJ — as DJ points out, I’m not a shill for the FBI or any law enforcement agency. I am amused its taken the right 100 years to notice what the left has known – the FBI targets political views. I suspect the right’s call to defund FBI will be followed by a new agency to target letists, i.e. get back to the traditional work of the FBI.
Debra – I don’t see any of the “whistleblowers” as actual whistleblowers. In the Biden “crime family” story, they appear to have “ghosted” the Republican or never existed in the first place. In the “weaponization” committee – you can’t be a whistleblower if you don’t share your story with the committee. I find it strange that Allan and O’Boyle are lauded for their military and police record, yet seem very wary of Democratic members of the committee. Here’s a chance to defend themselves and they don’t even share thier story.
Two party systems are not much of a choice nor democratic. The English first past the post system is antiquated, the Anglo world needs to move to a form of proportional representation – the New Zealand system is a good combination. With more parties, comes more choice and more representation and just as important the need to cooperate.
Musk has failed to pay rent in London, New York, and San Francisco. Good luck getting new office space. He’s also being sued by former employees for failing to pay the severance he owes them.
Rudy Guiliani’s lawyer has petitioned the court to release him from representing Guiliani. Apparently he hasn’t paid his lawyer.
Trump of course is famous for stiffing contractors.
Is this how the rich stay rich – avoid paying the hired help?
Wandering Views 
Of course they did.
Impeach Wray.
“FBI misused surveillance tool on Jan. 6 suspects, BLM arrestees and others”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-misused-surveillance-tool-on-jan-6-suspects-blm-arrestees-and-others/ar-AA1bpMij?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=8c504e37bcf94c629574c26517023b30&ei=49
“The FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, according to a newly unsealed court document.
FBI officials say they have already fixed the problems, which the agency blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
But the failures to use the database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year. It may also create additional head winds for the FBI, which has been under attack for years by former president Donald Trump and his political supporters. House lawmakers aligned with Trump held a hearing this week trying to show that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is biased against conservatives.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, has pressured the FBI to address the problems, writing in the April 2022 opinion that was unsealed Friday that if the agency doesn’t perform better, the court will crack down and order its own changes to FBI practices.
The Section 702 database is a vast trove of electronic communications and other information that can be searched by the National Security Agency and the FBI. The FBI is authorized to search the database only when agents have reason to believe that such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes.”
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And they’re lying, they fixed nothing.
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“A Century of Censorship
Matt Farwell’s painstaking timeline of over a hundred years of American information suppression, secret bureaucracies, and “anti-disinformation” scares”
https://www.racket.news/p/a-century-of-censorship?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1042&post_id=122247352&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
“The turn of the last century brought an age of revolutions, industrial warfare and nearly instantaneous communications across long distances. With these developments came an emphasis on another method of war: information war. This was the type of fight waged with what World War II Deputy Director of the Office of Censorship, Theodore F. Koop, called “Silent Weapons,” in a wartime memoir he published in 1946. Wrote Koop:
The censors’ shears were bayonets that not only formed a rear-guard national defense but also struck hard at the enemy in all three phases of warfare—military, economic, and psychological.
Koop would go on to run CBS News in Washington, DC. Well-known as a powerful media figure, he was also a trusted one, the man who hired Walter Cronkite.
Less well-known was that in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to run a secret national censorship program intended for use in Cold War emergencies. He accepted the offer while still a network news executive, serving in that contingency role under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
The methods of censorship had changed over time, matching changes in the communication technology. During World War I, the United States Government used the Postal Service, the Comstock laws and the reliance on publications reaching subscribers by mail as a wedge. When radio and television broadcasts became pre-eminent, the newly formed Federal Communications Commission began using its authority as stewards of the public airwaves to watch over content. Under the FCC Act of 1934, ostensibly private corporations like CBS, ABC and NBC were allowed to use the public airwaves only under license, acquiring revenue and learning the power of shaping the discourse from the nascent field of advertising.
Though it all, one thing has been remarkably consistent. Government targeted for special attention journalists who reported accurately on the ugly truth of American foreign policy, such as John W. Powell. Powell was an American journalist based in Shanghai who wrote a series of articles for the China Monthly Review (later, the Weekly Review), which said the Chinese government claimed the United States was using biological weapons in the Korean War. He was put on trial for sedition in 1959. The case dragged on in federal court in San Francisco for five years before the charges were dropped. It was enough to make him leave journalism forever.
The impulse to use censorship, and call all information that doesn’t square with the official narrative “disinformation,” is a bipartisan impulse, at least historically. Both Republican and Democratic administrations during the Global War on Terror sought to expand and refine the power of what we now call the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The latter was built, piece by piece, over a century of legislation, executive action, and regulation. A little less than a century after the passage of the Espionage Act, Barack Obama’s administration used it aggressively to target leakers. By that time, computers, the internet, and social media were all new platforms for communication and ripe targets for information suppression.
In an era where cultural memory is short and resources for learning about the inconvenient past are becoming more scarce, it’s useful to look at this century-plus progression in chronological order.”
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The press hates Musk because he exposed them and their enablers at Twitter.
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“How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors”
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-therapists-became-social-justice-warriors
“Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon.
But the culture in which she was steeped began to take a toll on her mental health. As a white person, she felt responsible for America’s racist legacy of slavery, and worried about her relationship with her Asian American girlfriend. “I felt like I was hurting her, harming her, just by being white,” Cooney told me.
Though she knew she was a lesbian, she began to identify as nonbinary, a result of her understanding that being a “cis woman” was “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.”
One day in June 2020, she found herself suddenly unleashing a tirade against the next-door neighbor of a friend, a white man who said he supported BLM but had cops in his family whom he supported, too. “I had this moment afterwards where I was like, ‘This is not how I want to behave. I don’t want to be a person who just screams at people because they’re white.’ ”
Anxious and depressed, she had trouble concentrating on work. “I started just going a little crazy,” she said. She decided she needed therapy to work on both her “internalized white supremacy,” her “white guilt,” and to “become a better person.’ ”
In January 2021, Cooney sought help from a black therapist in Portland she found through a therapy database, who agreed to work with her around issues of race and gender.
Initially, they practiced mindfulness and self-compassion techniques, from forgiving oneself out loud to the “butterfly hug,” crossing arms and tapping the chest. The therapist even cried with her when she cried about sexual assault or feeling unsupported in relationships. Cooney felt supported and eventually, more in control, more accepting of herself as female.
Then something unexpected happened. The stronger and more mentally healthy she felt, the less Cooney viewed the world through the lens that had informed her activism—a binary perspective that split all people into categories: white and black, oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim.
“I care about equality, I care about racism, I care about homophobia, I care about trans people being safe. I just don’t want to walk around in the world where everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are dictated by their identities,” she said.
Cooney wanted to share her newfound realizations, but feared being canceled and ostracized—by her friends, fellow activists, perhaps even her girlfriend. The burden weighed on her, and therapy seemed the place to address it.
When she first tried to do so, in June, 2022, Cooney’s therapist reacted badly. She told Cooney that critiquing cancel culture was giving in to “white supremacy culture,” and said Cooney was making her feel “unsafe” as a black woman. By the end of the session, the therapist had given her an ultimatum: they could continue to work together and keep cancel culture discussions off the table, or “the relationship was over,” Cooney said.
Cooney continued with the therapist for six more months, but her therapist seemed to emphasize Cooney’s victimhood, reiterating that other people were responsible for her oppression as a gay woman. “She said, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’ ”
Cooney began pushing back, expressing views the therapist had declared taboo such as not wanting to categorize people based on their identities, or asserting that too many people were being shamed and punished for minor supposed transgressions. Finally, her therapist told Cooney their relationship was finished.
Ultimately, the thing she had feared the most—being canceled for her views—had happened, by the person with whom she was supposed to be able to share her deepest secrets. “I was just totally in shock, just kind of dead inside,” Cooney told me.
Cooney is not alone in finding therapy overtaken by the same kind of social justice ideology prevalent in schools, medicine, and the law. I spoke with more than two dozen therapists and clients who painted a disturbing picture of what happens in the treatment room when therapists make the tenets of this ideology central to their work, instead of offering empowering approaches that help patients make better choices and take control of their lives. Some patients, like Cooney, have also found themselves “fired” for expressing unacceptable thoughts.
I spoke to new therapists, some still in training, who describe a profession that teaches the ascribing of oppressor or victim categories to patients, based on their innate characteristics, instead of seeing them as individuals. Several sources said their applications to graduate schools required them to make a written commitment to anti-racism. Some said they’d been penalized for asking the “wrong” questions in class, detailing how this ideological encroachment damages their own mental health.
I reviewed mission statements and other documents released by professional organizations in recent years, revealing how this revolution has transformed the central tenets of the therapeutic process.
And I talked to psychologists and others fighting back. They described their alarm at how the very people who are supposed to help ease trauma become the source of it, as therapy sessions transform into ideological struggle sessions. British psychotherapist Val Thomas told me “the reason this happened is that activists captured the institutions and professional bodies of counseling and psychotherapy.”
At a time when as many as 90 percent of adults believe there’s a mental health crisis in this country, parts of the mental health profession are in crisis too. “
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“The FBI is a danger to democracy
By obsessing over ‘Russiagate’, it let its anti-Trump prejudices get ahead of the truth.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/19/the-fbi-is-a-danger-to-democracy/
“We already knew that the claim Russia colluded with Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016 was false. Multiple investigations, including the Mueller report, have revealed as much.
So we didn’t really need a 306-page report from special counsel John Durham to tell us again that Russiagate was little more than a smear campaign. But Durham’s report, published earlier this week, is nevertheless shocking. It shows how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was actively involved in perpetuating the Russiagate hoax. It reveals how it undertook a multi-year investigation of Trump that it knew was groundless. And it exposes the extent to which the FBI worked with the Hillary Clinton campaign to spread lies about Trump’s ties to Russia in order to bring down the president.
In a democracy, we rely on security services like the FBI to remain politically neutral. But in the case of Trump and Russiagate, the FBI was politically partisan and abused its power. It effectively allowed itself to become a political weapon for the Democrats.
It seems FBI agents were motivated to investigate by a ‘prejudice against Trump’, writes Durham. Leading investigators, including former agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI attorneys Lisa Page and Kevin Clinesmith, demonstrated ‘pronounced hostile feelings’ towards Trump. In published text messages from 2016, Page asked Strzok, ‘He’s not going to become president, right? Right?!’ ‘No. No, he’s not’, Strzok responded, ‘we’ll stop it’.
One of Durham’s bombshells is that the FBI had no basis for opening its ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies in July 2016, just months before the November election. The FBI lacked ‘any actual evidence of collusion’ between Trump and Russia, and instead relied on ‘raw, unanalysed and uncorroborated intelligence’. The agency was so eager to nail Trump that it violated its normal standards and assessment process. Indeed, Durham found that in 2016, FBI officials ‘discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia’.
In July 2016 – the same month that Crossfire Hurricane operation began – the government received intelligence that Hillary Clinton had approved ‘a proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services’. In early August, CIA director John Brennan told President Obama, attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey about the dirty tricks being planned by the Clinton campaign. Brennan’s warning should have made the FBI sceptical of claims of Trump-Russia collusion. But it didn’t. Instead, it seemed to spur the FBI on in its own attempt to ‘vilify’ Trump.
In October 2016, the FBI made its first application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking authorisation to begin surveillance of the Trump campaign. The main evidence it presented to the court was the infamous Steele dossier, which consisted of numerous lurid, false claims about Trump, and had been commissioned – as the FBI suspected even then – by the Clinton campaign itself. Within the bureau there was ‘some concern that Steele had been hired by a law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research on Trump’, a senior FBI official told Durham. Yet, as the Durham report states, the FBI did not reveal to the court that it strongly suspected the dossier had been financed by Trump’s political opponent. The report adds: ‘The failure to provide this information to the FISC was a major omission in that the information clearly had the potential to affect the analysis of any bias in Steele’s reporting.’”
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And I would argue, this is by design. An ignorant electorate is an easily manipulated electorate.
“Uneducating America
The latest NAEP scores show that the nation’s youth are painfully ignorant about U.S. history and civics.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/uneducating-america
“The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, is a test that measures the knowledge of American students in various areas. The results of the NAEP test in U.S. history and civics, taken in 2022, were released early this month. They paint a grim picture: according to the data, just 13 percent of eighth-graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history, meaning that they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Additionally, about 20 percent of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores represent all-time lows on these two tests.”
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“Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics—the organization that creates, designs, develops, and implements the NAEP—told reporters that while the civics scores are “alarming,” even more distressing were the history results. While many analysts rushed to blame the Covid-induced school closures for the abysmal showing, Carr noted that the problems well predated the pandemic. “For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned. It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”
It’s not only students’ history and civics NAEP scores that are deficient. In November 2022, the scores released for the reading and math test taken earlier in the year showed that just 33 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders were proficient in reading, and 36 percent proficient in math. The eighth-graders did even worse: 31 percent scored as proficient in reading, while a painful 26 percent showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth and eighth graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”
Relatedly, the national average score on the 2022 ACT, a college admissions test, fell to 19.8 (out of a possible 36), down from 20.3 in 2021, according to data released in October 2022 by the nonprofit that administers the test. While education leaders invariably use the pandemic lockdowns as an excuse, the Wall Street Journal observes that this is the fifth consecutive year that ACT scores have declined, and the first time that the average score has dropped below 20 since 1991. English scores fell to 19 out of 36, down from 19.6 last year.
Weighing in on the NAEP history results, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona explained that the poor scores “further [affirm] the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” Fair enough, but then Cardona ludicrously proclaimed: “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes. We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”
Just how does keeping a six-year-old from being exposed to books with explicit sexual themes translate to banning books and censoring educators? As for funding, we are pouring record amounts of cash into the bottomless education pit, and it’s done very little to help. While there’s no doubt that the forced Covid shutdowns did damage, other causes explain why students are not learning effectively. As scholars Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu have chronicled, many students report increased ideological indoctrination in the classroom, which is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations. “One California student reported that a teacher at his school told the class that perfectionism and striving for perfection was part of white supremacy culture. Another of his teachers ‘made it seem like it was bad to have a good work ethic or to be supportive of meritocracy.’ In his school, grades were inflated, low grades were eliminated, late assignments were allowed, and multiple retakes of exams were permitted. Rigor simply disappeared.”
When teachers spend time forcing race- and gender-infused woke gibberish down the throats of American children, less time is available for more traditional subject matter. Here are a few of the myriad instances of students being hammered with the ravings of the woke:
In Buffalo, New York, students were told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” that might kill them at any time.
The San Diego Unified School District orders students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.”
In a training session for teachers in Seattle, schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.
In Springfield, Missouri, teachers are trained that people are given a “biological sex assigned at birth,” which often conflicts with their “gender identity” and “gender expression.”
In Illinois, the Evanston–Skokie school district has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to “break the binary” of gender.
West Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut has begun to introduce gender ideology in kindergarten as part of what it calls “social justice lessons.”
So instead of learning factual American history—the good and the bad—students are now at the mercy of far-left advocates pushing a radical racial and sexual agenda. Unless the education establishment reverses course in a hurry, parents, already responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing their children, will need to educate them as well.”
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He should be imprisoned, or worse, for his treason.
“John Brennan, Enemy of the People”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/05/19/john_brennan_enemy_of_the_people_149251.html
“The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against former President Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.
John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.
From John Durham’s report:
“CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that ‘they found no conspiracy.'”
As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on air with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.
Did I mention this was the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency?
Brennan must have been relying on that same gut instinct that led him to sign a letter asserting that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop, a journalistic effort with more corroboration than virtually anything connected to Trump’s alleged “collusion,” had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The House Judiciary Committee recently uncovered an Oct. 19, 2020, email from CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who was working with the Biden campaign to concoct “a talking point” to “push back on Trump” during the final presidential debates, asking Brennan to sign on to the “disinformation” letter. “Ok, Michael, add my name to the list. Good initiative. Thanks for asking me to sign on,” Brennan replied.
That’s all it takes for the former CIA director, a man who was given immense unchecked power — a man who oversaw secret kill lists and was the driving force behind drone strikes on civilians (including an American citizen) — to sign a letter he knew would obstruct the workings of “democracy” and the free press.
This is a man who still has access to classified documents. You might remember all the hand-wringing over broken norms when Trump allegedly barred intelligence agencies from sharing classified information with Brennan. The New York Times even gave him a column to argue that Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “why the president revoked my security clearance,” which, again, he almost certainly knew was a lie.
Of course, Brennan should have been denied access to any classified material and driven into exile after he was caught overseeing an operation of illegal spying on staffers in the Senate. CIA officials broke into Senate computer files and viewed emails and drafts of a report on torture. All of it was illegal. Brennan covered up the agency’s actions (also illegal), blamed the Senate and pushed to fire at least one staffer who was tasked with investigating his agency.
All this happened when the tan-suited Obama was in charge, so most people probably missed it.”
—-
Some of us have called it out for years, but few listened.
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Democrats know that the FBI’s misdeeds are also their misdeeds. CYA is in effect.
“FBI Whistleblowers Battle Against the Agency and Congressional Democrats
Congressional Democrats are trying to silence whistleblowers amidst partisan politics”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/05/fbi-whistleblowers-battle-against-the-agency-and-congressional-democrats/
“Congressional Democrats have come under fire for their alleged attempts to undermine FBI whistleblowers, shielding the agency from accountability for its purported abuses.
Yesterday, Mary wrote about Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) trying to discredit FBI whistleblower Marcus Allen for retweeting a post that suggested: “Nancy Pelosi staged January 6.” However, it wasn’t his account or his tweet. This incident clearly illustrates the dismissive and hostile treatment of FBI whistleblowers from Congressional Democrats, as evidenced during the recent House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee hearing.
Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking Democrat, made the unfounded claim that Republicans had brought in former agents who had lost their security clearances due to being a threat to national security. These agents, she argued, were prioritizing their partisan agenda over their sworn duty to serve the country and protect its national security.”
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Again, like I told you repeatedly, a fed op from day one.
Impeach Wray for lying under oath.
That’s their plan.
—
So the question becomes, what is the #USELESS GOP going to do about it?
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Shills for Dems, state propagandists.
These are just some of their victims.
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Self-awareness level: 0
Ronna is just one reason we have a #USELESS GOP….
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Of course, the FBI bent rules. They’ve been bending rules since they ere founded – Palmer Raids, Red Scare, etc. They even spied on MLK. All law enforcement agencies break rules – hence we need to defund the police and redirect spending to prevent crime.
Of course, there’s censorship. Ask anyone who was in leftist politics since the powt war era. American media has always filtered news. They are private corporations – property rights deem they can filter anyway they want.Not sure why poeple are shocked – it’s been this way for almost a century.
Musk is a billionaire with a toy – why would anyone take his comments on twitter seriously
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The mental health story of a 26 year old is not surprising. In any situation, where one has an ideological framework that narrows one’s outlook people lose the ability to be empathic and manage anger when confronted with opposing ideas. This happens no matter where a person is located on the political spectrum.
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I teach History and Geography to middle school. It’s a thankless job. 12 year olds don’t want to learn history. There’s a couple of issues here.
History is no longer a memorization of facts. Almost any 12 year old can access the complete information needed from their own phone. It’s how they manage the information which is important.
Thus, the nature of the test is important. Memory skills are in decline. However, logic and information management are the same if not better as in the past. So if the test is about information management, then it should be the same as before. If it’s fact recall, I’m not surprised scores are down.
The other problem is the political interference in history. An American textbook used to read “Rosa Parks, an African American, protest against segragation by refusing to give up her seat to a white man” to “Rosa Parks was brave for asserting her right to sit on a bus seat”. There’s been a concerted move by some Republicans to dilute anything that put America in a bad light. Some joke that they are afraid their children will learn that grandma supported segregated schools. Yes, there’s leftist interference in school curriculum but interference in history is more right wing.
American students actually do quite well in the PISA test which compares internationally. In Science, the US scores 15th and in Reading 10th. Its only in Math, where they score in the 30s as one of the lowest in the OECD. At the university level, the US still has the best post secondary schools including some public land grant universities.
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Its always interesting to read something here and then read things on Facebook and Youtube news streams.
Watched Jim Jordan as chair. His mannerisms and speech reminded me of students who had ADHD and anxiety.
In any case, Jordan withheld the testimony the “whistleblowers” gave to the Republicans from Democrats because the “whistleblowers” didn’t want it shared. How can you be a whistleblower if you only “blow the whistle” to people you like and don’t share it publicly? Jordan then told the Democrats they could question the agents about their testimony (despite not sharing their testimony). He should slow down and listen to himself. Until their testimony is made public and they are questioned publicly on this testimony, they’re not whistleblowers.
The FBI’s story is these agents broke security rules and did not listen to their superiors. For a newspaper to report the FBI’s version is not taking sides or being state propaganda but simply reporting different versions.
All this talk of whistleblowers, reminds me. Where are those whistleblowers who would implicate the Biden crime family or is that outrage going to slowly die away. Wonder if the FBI whistleblowers will also go away with nothing to show.
The Republicans (and Democrats) engage in outrage after outrage with very little time given to process information and to double check what is actually happening. The 20 homeless veteran story is a current example of this. Turns out no veterans were evicted for migrants. However, the lady who broke this story has fundraised well off the outrage.
Another outrage story – the Durham report – is also dying even as the right side of the Internet tries to amplify it. There’s nothing new in it and nothing happened because of Durham’s investigation. Amusingly, supporters of the Durham report claim it shows Mueller’s shortcomings. However, Mueller arrested and indicted far more people; many of them in the Trump administration. On this basis, there was no hoax.
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I gotta tell you HRW….
It’s amusing watching you shill for the FBI and other letter agencies, but only now that Democrats are in charge.
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I imagine all whistleblowers who go against the bureaucracy will go away eventually. One whistleblower testifying to congress gave a warning to other potential whistleblowers to NOT do it because the government will crush you and your family. The message will spread and the practice will die out.
The Durham report did not reveal anything we did not know before. People just didn’t care if we peddled lies and false reports as long as the coup was successful. It wasn’t technically successful, but it was a concerted attempt that did prevent a second term. Democracy has its limits, and it appears that the country shall eventually be reduced to being satisfied with the appearance of choosing our own form of tyranny. Welcome to Russia 2.0.
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AJ – In reading HRW’s comments (not only on this thread, but previous threads), I certainly would not consider him a shill for the FBI (or the “other letter agencies”). He has often mentioned the FBI’s previous bad actions, and pointed out that it is only now, when they have turned their sights on “conservatives”, that those on the right are noticing.
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HRW @ 7:03
Your comments about political interference in curriculum reminds me of my (Republican) mom’s story when she was a high school student in Iowa in the 1930s. One of their teachers challenged them with the question “Is it ‘my country, right or wrong?'” It stuck with her as a worthy challenge to ask oneself rather than following blind loyalty.
My rural NY friends — Quaker, 8 children, father a public defender, mom took the lead on home schooling — somewhat purposely steered their children toward the sciences when it came to college studies and majors as it was least likely to be infiltrated with either left- or right-wing ideas popular at any given time.
(They all graduated — Ivy League — and went on to impressive careers in, yep, math and the sciences, including architecture, veterinary science, teaching.)
My years in college — in the 1970s — were mostly influenced by the popular liberal ideas of the time. Jane Fonda was one of the more exciting guest speakers on our campus one year.
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HRW @6:41 — I suspect that’s exactly what’s playing out right now in our political culture.
Silo media sources, people locked in their own like-minded social (and media) circles, social media outrage …
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AJ — as DJ points out, I’m not a shill for the FBI or any law enforcement agency. I am amused its taken the right 100 years to notice what the left has known – the FBI targets political views. I suspect the right’s call to defund FBI will be followed by a new agency to target letists, i.e. get back to the traditional work of the FBI.
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Debra – I don’t see any of the “whistleblowers” as actual whistleblowers. In the Biden “crime family” story, they appear to have “ghosted” the Republican or never existed in the first place. In the “weaponization” committee – you can’t be a whistleblower if you don’t share your story with the committee. I find it strange that Allan and O’Boyle are lauded for their military and police record, yet seem very wary of Democratic members of the committee. Here’s a chance to defend themselves and they don’t even share thier story.
Two party systems are not much of a choice nor democratic. The English first past the post system is antiquated, the Anglo world needs to move to a form of proportional representation – the New Zealand system is a good combination. With more parties, comes more choice and more representation and just as important the need to cooperate.
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Musk has failed to pay rent in London, New York, and San Francisco. Good luck getting new office space. He’s also being sued by former employees for failing to pay the severance he owes them.
Rudy Guiliani’s lawyer has petitioned the court to release him from representing Guiliani. Apparently he hasn’t paid his lawyer.
Trump of course is famous for stiffing contractors.
Is this how the rich stay rich – avoid paying the hired help?
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HRW (re:6:47) – That was me who pointed that out. 🙂
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