“Well, it’s a day ending in a “Y” so that must mean that the House Oversight Committee has come up with more bank records showing payments going from Hunter Biden’s shady network of overseas business partners and shell companies to The Big Guy. And this time there didn’t appear to be any diversionary efforts made to pretend they were “loan repayments” and the money didn’t pass through other family members first. Hunter’s company Owasco PC, which received huge amounts of money from China, set up a recurring monthly payment with checks going directly to Joe Biden. These payments were taking place in 2018 for an as-yet-unknown period of time. So remind us again how you never even spoke to your son or your brother (“or anyone, for that matter”) about their overseas business dealings. This seems to be pretty blatant and the House GOP has the receipts to back it up… literally. (NY Post)
President Biden received a recurring payment of $1,380 from his son Hunter’s law firm beginning in late 2018 shortly after a bank money laundering officer warned that the same account was receiving millions of dollars in Chinese government-linked funds without “any services rendered.”
A bank order shows that Owasco PC set up a “monthly” transfer to then-former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., with a voided check for the future president included in the documentation, which was released Monday by the House Oversight Committee.
A source told The Post that at least three recurring payments were made — on Sept. 17, Oct. 15 and Nov. 15, 2018 — totaling $4,140 to the elder Biden from Owasco PC as part of the order.
As with all of this malarkey, there will be understandable questions raised and it won’t meet any of Biden’s defenders’ definition of a “smoking gun,” but that’s fine. The bricks are stacking up quickly. First, there is the amount of the checks. By 2018, the Bidens had already grown quite wealthy and Joe was well established in his beachside mansions. How big of a deal would monthly payments of $1,380 be? Also, that’s a rather oddly specific amount as compared to a nice round number.
Both of those questions might be answered with a better look at the full network of shell companies. That single monthly payment might not seem like much, but perhaps this is only one string being tugged out of the much larger nest. If you’ve got dozens of shell companies all flushing cash toward you every month, that would quickly add up to some significant income. Also, the figure of 1,380 may have been chosen to throw bank investigators off the trail (and they already flagged them as suspicious) because it might have looked like some sort of “normal,” legitimate business payment plan.”
“Career Democrat and ABC host George Stephanopoulos completely emasculated Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma this weekend on his Sunday show. Right at the beginning of the interview, Stephanopoulos advanced a flurry of disinformation and lies, to which Lankford, who purports to be a conservative senator of the burgundy-red state of Oklahoma, bowed down in complete supplication:
Stephanopoulos: Your party’s leading candidate for president was on the stump yesterday repeating lies about the 2020 election. He’s called those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection hostages. He faces 91 separate felony counts himself. He’s raised the prospect of executing the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and terminating parts of the Constitution. In the face of all that and more, are you prepared to support Donald Trump if he’s your party’s nominee?
Oh, for crying out loud. What an absolutely preposterous line of questioning. Any Republican elected official with a room-temperature IQ and even a modicum of self-respect would be livid at the propaganda and lies and immediately push back. But not Lankford. Here’s how he responded:
Lankford: Yes, we haven’t had a single vote yet, George. This is still weeks and weeks away from our first votes that are happening actually in Iowa, then New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there are a lot of people that are going to make that decision. That’s not going to be me making that decision, that’s going to be the American people that actually make that decision.
Stephanopoulos pressed him, and Lankford remained impotent in the face of the questioning. In fact, he was so bad throughout the interview, he even quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s controversial homeland security secretary, as a role model on immigration enforcement. The entire state of Oklahoma looked worse as it went on.
Now, Lankford is more than welcome to stay out of the Republican primary or endorse whomever he thinks is the best candidate, but what he should not feel free to do is allow the corrupt media and other Democrats to destroy the country through propaganda and lies. Americans are absolutely desperate for even the tiniest bit of Republican backbone and leadership, not mealy-mouthed kowtowing to the press.
When you claim to be a conservative senator of a state so Republican that two out of every three voters in 2020 voted for Trump, and a lifelong Democrat operative in the media asks you a completely loaded agitprop question, you should hit it out of the park. Like so:
“First off, George, your audience should know that you just regurgitated back a diatribe of lies, mistruths, and Democrat propaganda. I’m not surprised, given your professional background and track record of maliciously pushing the false and dangerous Russia-collusion scam for so many years during and after the 2016 election, but I can’t allow your lies to go uncorrected.
“The public knows full well there were major issues in how the 2020 election was conducted — from Mark Zuckerberg’s more than $400 million on partisan get-out-the-vote efforts in key swing states, to the deliberate Hunter Biden laptop suppression that the major news and tech companies along with 51 intel officials participated in, to the tens of millions of mail-in-ballots and voting changes that did not follow state laws. So drop the dishonest, holier-than-thou nonsense about 2020 being the cleanest, most perfect election with nothing allowed to be scrutinized or discussed.
“Second, the public is also wising up to the fact that what the corporate media have spun to them about Jan. 6 hasn’t exactly been the complete truth. Yes, we know your line that this was the worst moment in the history of the world, requiring our FBI to do nothing other than arrest people who were anywhere near the event. Well, that, and arrest pro-lifers who are praying and parents who are attending school board meetings.
“But most Americans know that we have not gotten good answers about why Nancy Pelosi turned down security provisions ahead of what intelligence suggested would be a very contentious day, or what exactly was being done by the federal informants and federal agents who were present for the day’s events. They’re extremely worried about how left-wing rioters and criminals seem to be able to do whatever they want with very few repercussions, even when they’re attacking the Supreme Court, federal courthouses, the White House, churches, homes, and police precincts. And now with the release of some of the videotapes from that day, we see that most of the activity that day was not in any way what was hyped up and presented by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial.
“Finally, the Biden administration is at this moment doing everything in its power to put their leading political opponent in prison. They raided Mar-a-Lago, George. When other countries do things like this, when Putin does stuff like this, we say that means they don’t have free and fair elections. It seems the Democrats’ main strategy this election cycle is to attempt to put effective Republicans in prison, to bankrupt them, and to prevent them from speaking out about what is being done to destroy this country. I’ll note this isn’t working with the American people, as Trump now leads widely in almost all polls against Biden, a strong renunciation of what’s going on.
“So I ask you, George, are you prepared to start focusing on the major policy issues facing the country, or will you continue to push lies and propaganda to help put your political opponents in prison?”
You know, something like that.
To state the obvious here, using small words so that even the absolutely feckless and embarrassingly lame Senate Republicans can understand, praising Mayorkas, failing to correct lies about Republicans, and mumbling about how you’ll vote Republican if you are forced to is not a way to win elections. Yes, I’m sure it’s what Mitch McConnell told Lankford to go out and do, but it yields nothing but failure. The people of Oklahoma deserve an actual man to represent them, not whatever it is they’re getting in Lankford.”
—-
That would require guts, something lacking in the #Useless Gop.
“Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration; and the designation of nonviolent offenses as federal crimes of terrorism.
“A universal feature is the requirement that a Jan. 6 defendant, usually a supporter of Donald Trump, face trial in Washington, D.C., a city overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. Federal judges have denied every change of venue motion filed in Jan. 6 cases, arguing those who protested at the Capitol can get a fair trial in the nation’s capital.
The results so far appear to contradict the court’s collective conclusion. Court records show the jury selection process has repeatedly revealed a strong degree of bias against anyone tied to Jan. 6. At least 130 defendants have been convicted at trial – not one has been acquitted by a jury – and hundreds have been sentenced to prison time ranging from seven days to 22 years. Defense lawyers say this track record helps explain why the vast majority of defendants have opted for a plea deal rather than go to trial.
This is the same environment that now awaits the former president as he prepares to stand trial in Washington on March 4, 2024 for election interference, in addition to an array of criminal and civil cases against him elsewhere.
While Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team and Trump’s counsel spar over a number of issues, perhaps the biggest dispute will concern whether it will be possible to seat an impartial jury for the presumptive 2024 GOP nominee in a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden in 2020.
After Smith indicted Trump in August, a Jan. 6 defense attorney who is not representing the former president, J. Daniel Hull, told the New York Times that Washington “is the worst possible place for any Jan. 6 defendant, but especially Donald Trump, to have a trial.”
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan recently set a jury selection schedule for Smith’s four-count indictment against Trump for the events of Jan. 6. She ordered both parties to begin developing a questionnaire, due Jan. 9, 2024, that hundreds of D.C. residents will be asked to complete so the court can begin the initial step of weeding out unqualified jurors.
Stakes are high for both sides. Trump’s lawyers must navigate constraints on how many jurors can be stricken from consideration to ensure their client gets a fair trial. The Department of Justice must convince the American people that a case brought by a Democratic administration and handled by a Democratic-appointed judge with a record of inflammatory statements about the former president will be heard by unbiased jurors.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees, among other rights, “the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” In extreme cases, criminal defendants can petition to move their trial out of the prosecuting jurisdiction for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sustained, negative press coverage that taints the jury pool.
Trump’s lawyers are not discussing their strategy publicly, but sources have indicated to RealClearInvestigations that the defense will file a change of venue motion in the next month or two. Given the partisan composition of Washington, saturation coverage of the former president’s ongoing legal woes, and the city’s relatively small population, Trump will have a strong argument in favor of moving the trial outside of the nation’s capital.
Yet a review of Jan. 6 cases to date suggests the odds are against that. Not a single judge on the D.C. District Court has granted a change of venue motion even for high-profile trials such as those for members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, the so-called “militia” groups involved in the Capitol protest.
Despite nonstop local news coverage and nationally televised proceedings of the Democrat-run January 6 Select Committee that, in some instances, mentioned the defendants by name, Judge Timothy J. Kelly repeatedly rejected motions to move the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial out of Washington.
One month before jury selection began, Kelly acknowledged in a November 2022 order that the five defendants “have been the subject of more particularized and extensive media coverage than most January 6th defendants, in part because of the House Select Committee’s hearings this summer.” Nonetheless, Kelly, a Trump appointee, denied the defendants’ last-minute attempt to seek relief in another venue by noting, “the brighter spotlight on Defendants does not support transfer, mainly because the pretrial publicity here is national in scope, available to anyone across the country with access to a television or the internet.”
Jury selection lasted several days, an anomaly for Jan. 6 trials. Despite the lengthy process, the panel still included several D.C. residents who disclosed participation in Democratic protests, including Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, according to one court observer’s report.
After a four-month trial and six days of deliberation, the jury convicted the defendants in May on multiple charges while returning not-guilty verdicts on a handful of other offenses, including impeding police officers. One juror told Vice News that he and his cohorts unanimously concluded in less than a day that four of the five defendants were guilty of seditious conspiracy, an exceedingly rare charge traditionally reserved for individuals tied to foreign terror groups.
“[The jury] hated us with a passion,” Joseph Biggs, one of the Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges, told RCI in an interview from his jail cell in September. “They wanted to see us die. One of them said he wanted to see us buried under the jail.” Despite the individual’s stated desire to see the defendants dead, he was seated on the panel.
Judge Chutkan’s handling of her first jury trial for a Jan. 6 defendant, Russell Alford, also indicates how Trump might fare. Alford was charged in March 2021 with four misdemeanors for his 11-minute nonviolent walk through the Capitol.
In rejecting Alford’s bid to move his trial, Chutkan downplayed the partisanship of D.C. residents and surveys that indicated higher-than-average prejudice against Capitol protesters. In her April 2022 order, Chutkan insisted that “jurors’ political leaning are not, by themselves, evidence that those jurors cannot fairly and impartially consider the evidence presented and apply the law as instructed by the court.” She also claimed an “expanded examination will effectively screen for prejudice among potential jurors in this case.”
A review of court transcripts, however, raises questions as to whether Chutkan fulfilled her promise. A jury questionnaire exposed a bias so strong against Jan. 6 protesters that half the respondents were automatically eliminated from consideration. Many who remained were also problematic.
After one day of voir dire, which is the direct questioning of potential jurors, Chutkan still allowed individuals who expressed critical views about anyone involved in Jan. 6 to serve on the panel. One juror said people who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 “were probably guilty.” Another who worked as an investigator for federal agencies, including DHS and TSA, admitted he had “strong feelings about the individuals who gathered at the Capitol on January 6.”
Chutkan rejected a defense attorney’s request to remove that juror from consideration. “I’m going to deny it because he said he has training; he’s by nature trained to be skeptical. He has an opinion, but it appears that he is willing to confine his verdict to the evidence presented in the case.”
Did People Lie to Get on Jan. 6 Juries?
A staffer for Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico, also got the nod, despite telling Chutkan he knew many Capitol police officers – several of whom are routinely called as government witnesses in Jan. 6 trials – and his confession that the day was “pretty impactful” on him.
On several occasions, Chutkan reassured the skeptical defense team that the selected jurors would set aside personal feelings to objectively weigh the evidence.
The jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts in less than four hours.
Alford now wonders whether jurors were being honest. “They told us what we wanted to hear so they could get on the panel,” Alford told RCI by phone from a halfway house last month. He had just finished serving 176 days of a 12-month prison sentence imposed by Chutkan. “In any other jurisdiction, we would have won. We thought we could get a fair shake, but they all were connected to the government.”
Alford’s experience is not an outlier. Post-trial interviews with jurors have often revealed bias. In a lengthy discussion with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb following her service on an Oath Keepers’ trial earlier this year, a woman named Ellen, a former co-worker of Lamb, described how she desperately tried to get selected as a juror. When she finally was selected, Ellen admitted she “was shocked beyond belief.”
Over the course of several days of deliberations, Ellen said she successfully persuaded reluctant jurors to render guilty verdicts against the six defendants, including a 72-year-old who didn’t enter the Capitol and an autistic young man. She worked in tandem with a juror who had worked as a lawyer for the Department of Justice, the same government agency prosecuting the defendants. “How that was allowed, I’ll never know,” Ellen told Lamb. “He couldn’t believe it.”
Ellen also expressed disdain for the people on trial. “They weren’t even from big cities. These were people from, living, on farms in rural places, most of them had no concept of Washington, D.C.,” she told Lamb.”
—-
Read the rest. If the rule of law is ever gonna matter again, folks need to stand up to this miscarriage of justice, not stare at their feet as Dems and a biased court system run roughshod over a defendants legal rights.
The propaganda media have their new White House talking points I see….
A lot of overwrought anti-Trump articles seemed to pop up at virtually the same time in the last few days. Why? Call it a collective realization… https://t.co/UVSVBCqS6J
They’re terrified Biden can’t win, so they’re beginning to talk themselves into taking extraordinary action — call it assassination prep — to prevent another Trump presidency. Truly dangerous, deranged insanity from the professional left. https://t.co/9dJSRnHJGN
This is what you will hear from all liberal corporate outlets for the next year: no, this time we mean it! This time Trump *really will be* fascist!
These are the people imprisoning non-violent Jan 6 protesters, prosecuting Trump to win an election, censoring the internet: pic.twitter.com/t4QxWFCYjq
The alarm has gone off. Around this time in 2015, some in political/commentary class realized Trump could win GOP nomination. Freakout ensued, although many remained confident Trump could not win general. Now, warning machine has kicked into higher gear. pic.twitter.com/ZRtnloWAw2
Remember when BLM activists burned down a Wendy’s in Atlanta? They were finally convicted. For their crimes they will pay a $500 fine and receive no jail time. Remember, peaceful J6 protesters will be in jail for years. h/t @MagicBelle1pic.twitter.com/VHEBYNJsGi
How did people like this burrow into the center of the Trump administration? Pence should never have been in charge of the COVID response. Seemed like a good idea at the time but he and his staff worshipped Fauci and denigrated the President. https://t.co/iqyfwjxH8R
The person most responsible for unleashing the Fauci fraud on America is @OliviaTroye who was VP Pence's "COVID advisor."
In a recent article, Troye explains how her job was to misinform the Trump Admin at every turn. https://t.co/MygOB6bdkA
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) June 2, 2021
In Sept. 2020 @OliviaTroye was fired by Trump Admin after someone finally figured out she was another NeverTrumper on Pence's team. Almost the next day, Troye started an anti-GOP org. Then she publicly voted for Biden. While claiming to be a Republican.
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) June 2, 2021
Remember folks, Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings….
Well, other than the checks….
🚨BREAKING: The House Oversight Committee has uncovered evidence that Joe Biden received a recurring payment of $1,380 from his son Hunter’s law firm beginning in 2018, shortly after a bank money laundering officer warned that the same account was receiving millions of dollars in… pic.twitter.com/lqtiZ8ge0T
BREAKING NEWS: Second Circuit Court of Appeals grants bond pending appeal in the Douglass Mackey meme case
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just overruled the District Court in granting our motion for bond pending appeal. This ruling is huge because it means that the appeals…
“Pro-Trump meme maker Douglass Mackey, AKA, Ricky Vaughn, was sentenced to 7 months in prison in October for trolling Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
Mackey was facing a maximum of 10 years in prison for speech crimes.
Mackey was indicted in January 2021 by the feds for using the social media platform to ‘spread election disinformation’ to Hillary Clinton voters in 2016.
The Pro-Trump meme maker was later found guilty for trolling Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Mackey posted a humorous meme telling Hillary voters to text in their vote on Wednesday after the election. It was obviously a joke. Unfortunately for Mackey, the Marxists have no sense of humor. Douglass Markey was indicted and convicted on Friday for posting jokes online.”
We’re ruled by idiots, clowns, and wusses. Some of them are all 3.
Allowing your country to be invaded and then enlisting the invaders to “protect” you is next level treason. Durbin has done a lot of awful things, but this might top the list https://t.co/6Rhi9YssQ1
Here we go again, and the same clueless people will fall for it again.
And just look at the Atlantic, so principled and conservative.
Not. They’re just Democrat lite.
CNN's Jake Tapper and the cast of the ultra-elites at 'The Atlantic' want you to know they're very disppointed in you numbskulls who won't vote Democrat in 2024.
They just did 15 minutes on why America and the world will cease to exist if Trump wins.
I've been reading articles for years about UV robots were being studied for disinfecting opratories for several years prior to CoVid. I was shocked by the medias blatant disregard of the science behind UV disinfectant when Trump mentioned it. FDA approved 2023
In Florida's primary, you can vote for anyone so long as it is Biden. In other states, you may be able to vote for anyone so long as it is not Trump. Notably, these distinctly anti-democratic actions are being taken in the name of democracy. https://t.co/PGCoTMybSE
“Below is my column in the Hill on efforts to bar or limit voting in the primary and general presidential elections. What is so striking is how these distinctly anti-democratic actions are being taken in the name of democracy.
Here is the column:
Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.
Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly to save democracy.
Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black. Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.
This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot.
And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been cast.
This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and, on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not become them.”
In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.
There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”
The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice.
In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t Trump.”
They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
This effort is being supported by academics such as Laurence Tribe, who previously called for Trump to be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Mike Pence.
In a recent filing supporting this effort, figures as prominent as media lawyer Floyd Abrams and Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky have told the Colorado Supreme Court that preventing voters from being able to cast their votes for Trump is just a way of “fostering democracy.” So long as courts believe that a candidate’s speech is “capable of triggering disqualification,” that speech is unprotected in their view.
I have long criticized this theory as legally and historically unfounded. It is also an extremely dangerous theory that would allow majorities in different states to ban opposing candidates in tit-for-tat actions.
So far, these efforts around the country have met with defeat in court after court, but the effort continues, and with the support of many in the media.
Some national polls show Trump as the most popular candidate for the 2024 election, while a few show Biden slightly ahead. Yet, despite 74 million voters supporting Trump in the last election, these Democrats are insisting that voters should not be allowed to vote for him, in the name of democracy.
In fairness to Democratic partisans like Clinton and Maddow, they could well be right. The 2024 election could well prove the end to democracy — if these efforts succeeded in purging ballots of opposing candidates.
It is all part of an electoral variation on the Vietnam War claim that it is sometimes necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.
Democrats claim to be right and to have the best of motivations, which is why they feel justified in saving democracy by denying it to the voters. After all, it is all about motivation where any means are justified. They are trying to save democracy by limiting it.
Thus, it is an assault on democracy for Republican lawyers to challenge elections based on alleged problems with voting machines, but it is protecting democracy for former Clinton general counsel (and founder of the “Democracy Docket”) Marc Elias to claim that a machine could flip the results in favor of the GOP.”
Sooner or later, the monsters always turns on their masters.
But this is all OK because Orange Man Bad, right Never-Trumpers?
People say the government wasn't involved in censorship, but it was. And now, new documents prove that US military contractors urged & used a wide range of counter-terrorism tactics against civilians, including psyops, debanking, and changing Big Tech's Terms of Service. pic.twitter.com/mrV5dwWdHF
“During last Thursday’s Congressional hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Democratic members of Congress insisted that censorship efforts of groups like the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and the Virality Project (VP) were benign and not a violation of the First Amendment.
“It’s not the First Amendment!” said Rep. Dan Goldman, “It’s the [social media platforms’] Terms of Service…. And they are flagging it for the social media companies to make their own decisions. That is not the First Amendment. That is the Terms of Service.”
But the CTIL Files, a trove of documents that a whistleblower provided to Public and Racket, reveal that US and UK military contractors developed and used advanced tactics — including demanding that social media platforms change their Terms of Service — to shape public opinion about Covid-19, and that getting content removed was just one strategy used by the Censorship Industrial Complex.
The CTI League, which partnered with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), aimed to implement something called “AMITT,” which stood for “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques.”
AMITT was a disinformation framework that included many offensive actions, including working to influence government policy, discrediting alternative media, using bots and sock puppets, pre-bunking, and pushing counter-messaging.
The specific “counters” to “disinformation” in AMITT and its successor framework, DISARM, include many we have observed in our study of the Censorship Industrial Complex:
— “Create policy that makes social media police disinformation”
— “Strong dialogue between the federal government and private sector to encourage better reporting”
— “Marginalize and discredit extremists”
— “Name and Shame influencers”
— “Simulate misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and responses to them, before campaigns happen”
— “Use banking to cut off access”
— “Inoculate populations through media literacy training”
For issues like the Russiagate hoax to the Hunter Biden laptop to Covid-19, organizations within the Censorship Industrial Complex have used many of DISARM’s offensive methods like tabletop exercises, psychological inoculation, propaganda messaging, and punishment of dissent. Even its extreme proposal of debanking was used against Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
Far from simply protecting the public from falsehoods, both government and non-profit actors within Censorship Industrial Complex have followed CTIL’s exact playbook and have waged a full-fledged influence operation against Americans.
This influence operation has deep ties to security and intelligence agencies, as is evidenced through many examples of collaboration. In one instance of such collaboration, supposedly independent “disinformation researchers” like Renée DiResta coordinated a 2020 election tabletop exercise with military officials.
Defense and intelligence funding supports much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. For instance, Graphika, which was involved in both EIP and VP, receives grants from the Department of Defense, DARPA, and the Navy.
Pentagon-affiliated entities are heavily involved in “anti-disinformation” work. Mitre, a major defense contractor, received funding to tackle “disinformation” about elections and Covid. The US government paid Mitre, an organization staffed by former intelligence and military personnel, to monitor and report what Americans said about the virus online, and to develop vaccine confidence messaging. This government-backed military research group, Public discovered, was present in the EIP and VP misinformation reporting system, and in election disinformation report emails to CISA.
The AMITT framework also includes many counters we have yet to find concrete evidence for, but which we suspect may have been attempted:
— “Infiltrate the in-group to discredit leaders”
— “Honeypot with coordinated inauthentics”
— “Co-opt a hashtag and drown it out (hijack it back)”
— “Dilute the core narrative – create multiple permutations, target/amplify”
— “Newsroom/Journalist training to counter influence moves”
— “Educate high profile influencers on best practices”
— “Create fake website to issue counter narrative”
We may not know the extent to which all these counters were implemented, but we do know that the US military and the intelligence community have gone to extreme lengths to control what Americans can say and think.”
—–
And don’t forget kids, as always, the Deep State is a myth.
Being a VP to Trump may always draw the “traitor” charge from Trump followers in the end — which is why I hate to see anyone I admire go that route should Trump be elected again.
Interesting piece from Alberta’s recent book recalling a discussion he had with conservative Christian columnist Cal Thomas:
~ “I do wonder if he should have resigned,” Thomas said (speaking of Pence). “He and I talked about this once. I think his view was that he was being salt and light. He was privately counseling the president—I don’t know about personal things, but certainly about legislative things. And he felt that he would at least have some effect by remaining on the inside.”
Thomas cocked his head sideways, as if struggling with that rationale. “For the president to keep saying the things he was saying, especially asking him to do something unconstitutional—I can see the argument for resigning,” he said. “But I can also see the argument for staying there and fighting for what’s right.” ~
So far I am grateful that Tim Scott seems to be out of the running (and I’m not sure he’d accept a VP spot with Trump even if he were approached, but I’d hope not).
Being “salt and light” and an influence on the inside was an admirable approach, but one that didn’t work in the end (though may have worked here and there during the period they were in office before the blowup at the end). Pence did say he prayed for Trump daily.
But the die seems to be cast on that “influence from the inside” front. -dj
For my part I’m happy to see anyone that disagrees with the Trump agenda left out of consideration for vp or cabinet positions. It’s an ambitious agenda that garners powerful enemies and will take a lot of support to implement. It’s essential to have good minds and fundamental agreement in the administration. I suspect that Democrats and the Uni-party alike will be fighting it every step of the way, while the media and ill-wishers continue to snipe at the heels as they did before. It won’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
~ In an interview hours after former President Donald Trump was indicted for an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, one of his attorneys said that all Trump had ultimately asked his vice president to do was “simply pause” the Electoral College count at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Fox News the following night, Aug. 2, former Vice President Mike Pence called that claim “completely false.” Pence said Trump and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” asked him “to literally reject votes.”
“I think it’s important that the American people know what happened in the days before January 6,” Pence said. “President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes. I had no authority to do that.”
For those who might doubt him, Pence urged them to “read the indictment.” ~
Pence was asked to send the votes back to their state legislatures for confirmation. That would have caused a delay, but I don’t know that it would have changed the outcome. I believe it was technically a legal move, but untried. I understand that Congress has since clarified the law.
Irregularities in voting such as we experienced in 2020 are bound to make people uneasy.
That is what is so confusing with our news: so difficult to find the facts when news sources give such opposing stories. It is why it is important to read the other side. The Israel/ Hamas/ Palestinian reporting really brings that out.
I thought an indictment was an accusation. But then an indictment is after court. To add to any confusion!
Wandering Views 
Corrupt as the day is long.
“Drip, Drip. More Payments from Hunter Biden to The Big Guy”
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/12/04/drip-drip-more-payments-from-hunter-biden-to-the-big-guy-n596596
“Well, it’s a day ending in a “Y” so that must mean that the House Oversight Committee has come up with more bank records showing payments going from Hunter Biden’s shady network of overseas business partners and shell companies to The Big Guy. And this time there didn’t appear to be any diversionary efforts made to pretend they were “loan repayments” and the money didn’t pass through other family members first. Hunter’s company Owasco PC, which received huge amounts of money from China, set up a recurring monthly payment with checks going directly to Joe Biden. These payments were taking place in 2018 for an as-yet-unknown period of time. So remind us again how you never even spoke to your son or your brother (“or anyone, for that matter”) about their overseas business dealings. This seems to be pretty blatant and the House GOP has the receipts to back it up… literally. (NY Post)
President Biden received a recurring payment of $1,380 from his son Hunter’s law firm beginning in late 2018 shortly after a bank money laundering officer warned that the same account was receiving millions of dollars in Chinese government-linked funds without “any services rendered.”
A bank order shows that Owasco PC set up a “monthly” transfer to then-former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., with a voided check for the future president included in the documentation, which was released Monday by the House Oversight Committee.
A source told The Post that at least three recurring payments were made — on Sept. 17, Oct. 15 and Nov. 15, 2018 — totaling $4,140 to the elder Biden from Owasco PC as part of the order.
As with all of this malarkey, there will be understandable questions raised and it won’t meet any of Biden’s defenders’ definition of a “smoking gun,” but that’s fine. The bricks are stacking up quickly. First, there is the amount of the checks. By 2018, the Bidens had already grown quite wealthy and Joe was well established in his beachside mansions. How big of a deal would monthly payments of $1,380 be? Also, that’s a rather oddly specific amount as compared to a nice round number.
Both of those questions might be answered with a better look at the full network of shell companies. That single monthly payment might not seem like much, but perhaps this is only one string being tugged out of the much larger nest. If you’ve got dozens of shell companies all flushing cash toward you every month, that would quickly add up to some significant income. Also, the figure of 1,380 may have been chosen to throw bank investigators off the trail (and they already flagged them as suspicious) because it might have looked like some sort of “normal,” legitimate business payment plan.”
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Don’t be an establishment stooge like Lankford.
“You win elections by saying truthful things, not being sad and scared like Lankford and most other Republican senators are.”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/04/to-win-republicans-have-to-be-smarter-and-tougher-than-sen-james-lankford/
“Career Democrat and ABC host George Stephanopoulos completely emasculated Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma this weekend on his Sunday show. Right at the beginning of the interview, Stephanopoulos advanced a flurry of disinformation and lies, to which Lankford, who purports to be a conservative senator of the burgundy-red state of Oklahoma, bowed down in complete supplication:
Stephanopoulos: Your party’s leading candidate for president was on the stump yesterday repeating lies about the 2020 election. He’s called those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection hostages. He faces 91 separate felony counts himself. He’s raised the prospect of executing the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and terminating parts of the Constitution. In the face of all that and more, are you prepared to support Donald Trump if he’s your party’s nominee?
Oh, for crying out loud. What an absolutely preposterous line of questioning. Any Republican elected official with a room-temperature IQ and even a modicum of self-respect would be livid at the propaganda and lies and immediately push back. But not Lankford. Here’s how he responded:
Lankford: Yes, we haven’t had a single vote yet, George. This is still weeks and weeks away from our first votes that are happening actually in Iowa, then New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there are a lot of people that are going to make that decision. That’s not going to be me making that decision, that’s going to be the American people that actually make that decision.
Stephanopoulos pressed him, and Lankford remained impotent in the face of the questioning. In fact, he was so bad throughout the interview, he even quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s controversial homeland security secretary, as a role model on immigration enforcement. The entire state of Oklahoma looked worse as it went on.
Now, Lankford is more than welcome to stay out of the Republican primary or endorse whomever he thinks is the best candidate, but what he should not feel free to do is allow the corrupt media and other Democrats to destroy the country through propaganda and lies. Americans are absolutely desperate for even the tiniest bit of Republican backbone and leadership, not mealy-mouthed kowtowing to the press.
When you claim to be a conservative senator of a state so Republican that two out of every three voters in 2020 voted for Trump, and a lifelong Democrat operative in the media asks you a completely loaded agitprop question, you should hit it out of the park. Like so:
“First off, George, your audience should know that you just regurgitated back a diatribe of lies, mistruths, and Democrat propaganda. I’m not surprised, given your professional background and track record of maliciously pushing the false and dangerous Russia-collusion scam for so many years during and after the 2016 election, but I can’t allow your lies to go uncorrected.
“The public knows full well there were major issues in how the 2020 election was conducted — from Mark Zuckerberg’s more than $400 million on partisan get-out-the-vote efforts in key swing states, to the deliberate Hunter Biden laptop suppression that the major news and tech companies along with 51 intel officials participated in, to the tens of millions of mail-in-ballots and voting changes that did not follow state laws. So drop the dishonest, holier-than-thou nonsense about 2020 being the cleanest, most perfect election with nothing allowed to be scrutinized or discussed.
“Second, the public is also wising up to the fact that what the corporate media have spun to them about Jan. 6 hasn’t exactly been the complete truth. Yes, we know your line that this was the worst moment in the history of the world, requiring our FBI to do nothing other than arrest people who were anywhere near the event. Well, that, and arrest pro-lifers who are praying and parents who are attending school board meetings.
“But most Americans know that we have not gotten good answers about why Nancy Pelosi turned down security provisions ahead of what intelligence suggested would be a very contentious day, or what exactly was being done by the federal informants and federal agents who were present for the day’s events. They’re extremely worried about how left-wing rioters and criminals seem to be able to do whatever they want with very few repercussions, even when they’re attacking the Supreme Court, federal courthouses, the White House, churches, homes, and police precincts. And now with the release of some of the videotapes from that day, we see that most of the activity that day was not in any way what was hyped up and presented by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial.
“Finally, the Biden administration is at this moment doing everything in its power to put their leading political opponent in prison. They raided Mar-a-Lago, George. When other countries do things like this, when Putin does stuff like this, we say that means they don’t have free and fair elections. It seems the Democrats’ main strategy this election cycle is to attempt to put effective Republicans in prison, to bankrupt them, and to prevent them from speaking out about what is being done to destroy this country. I’ll note this isn’t working with the American people, as Trump now leads widely in almost all polls against Biden, a strong renunciation of what’s going on.
“So I ask you, George, are you prepared to start focusing on the major policy issues facing the country, or will you continue to push lies and propaganda to help put your political opponents in prison?”
You know, something like that.
To state the obvious here, using small words so that even the absolutely feckless and embarrassingly lame Senate Republicans can understand, praising Mayorkas, failing to correct lies about Republicans, and mumbling about how you’ll vote Republican if you are forced to is not a way to win elections. Yes, I’m sure it’s what Mitch McConnell told Lankford to go out and do, but it yields nothing but failure. The people of Oklahoma deserve an actual man to represent them, not whatever it is they’re getting in Lankford.”
—-
That would require guts, something lacking in the #Useless Gop.
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Nice to see some journalists are still doing journalism instead of Biden admin propaganda.
“Here’s the ‘Jan 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/05/heres_the_jan_6_jurisprudence_about_to_be_unleashed_on_trump_996431.html
“Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration; and the designation of nonviolent offenses as federal crimes of terrorism.
“A universal feature is the requirement that a Jan. 6 defendant, usually a supporter of Donald Trump, face trial in Washington, D.C., a city overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. Federal judges have denied every change of venue motion filed in Jan. 6 cases, arguing those who protested at the Capitol can get a fair trial in the nation’s capital.
The results so far appear to contradict the court’s collective conclusion. Court records show the jury selection process has repeatedly revealed a strong degree of bias against anyone tied to Jan. 6. At least 130 defendants have been convicted at trial – not one has been acquitted by a jury – and hundreds have been sentenced to prison time ranging from seven days to 22 years. Defense lawyers say this track record helps explain why the vast majority of defendants have opted for a plea deal rather than go to trial.
This is the same environment that now awaits the former president as he prepares to stand trial in Washington on March 4, 2024 for election interference, in addition to an array of criminal and civil cases against him elsewhere.
While Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team and Trump’s counsel spar over a number of issues, perhaps the biggest dispute will concern whether it will be possible to seat an impartial jury for the presumptive 2024 GOP nominee in a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden in 2020.
After Smith indicted Trump in August, a Jan. 6 defense attorney who is not representing the former president, J. Daniel Hull, told the New York Times that Washington “is the worst possible place for any Jan. 6 defendant, but especially Donald Trump, to have a trial.”
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan recently set a jury selection schedule for Smith’s four-count indictment against Trump for the events of Jan. 6. She ordered both parties to begin developing a questionnaire, due Jan. 9, 2024, that hundreds of D.C. residents will be asked to complete so the court can begin the initial step of weeding out unqualified jurors.
Stakes are high for both sides. Trump’s lawyers must navigate constraints on how many jurors can be stricken from consideration to ensure their client gets a fair trial. The Department of Justice must convince the American people that a case brought by a Democratic administration and handled by a Democratic-appointed judge with a record of inflammatory statements about the former president will be heard by unbiased jurors.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees, among other rights, “the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” In extreme cases, criminal defendants can petition to move their trial out of the prosecuting jurisdiction for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sustained, negative press coverage that taints the jury pool.
Trump’s lawyers are not discussing their strategy publicly, but sources have indicated to RealClearInvestigations that the defense will file a change of venue motion in the next month or two. Given the partisan composition of Washington, saturation coverage of the former president’s ongoing legal woes, and the city’s relatively small population, Trump will have a strong argument in favor of moving the trial outside of the nation’s capital.
Yet a review of Jan. 6 cases to date suggests the odds are against that. Not a single judge on the D.C. District Court has granted a change of venue motion even for high-profile trials such as those for members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, the so-called “militia” groups involved in the Capitol protest.
Despite nonstop local news coverage and nationally televised proceedings of the Democrat-run January 6 Select Committee that, in some instances, mentioned the defendants by name, Judge Timothy J. Kelly repeatedly rejected motions to move the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial out of Washington.
One month before jury selection began, Kelly acknowledged in a November 2022 order that the five defendants “have been the subject of more particularized and extensive media coverage than most January 6th defendants, in part because of the House Select Committee’s hearings this summer.” Nonetheless, Kelly, a Trump appointee, denied the defendants’ last-minute attempt to seek relief in another venue by noting, “the brighter spotlight on Defendants does not support transfer, mainly because the pretrial publicity here is national in scope, available to anyone across the country with access to a television or the internet.”
Jury selection lasted several days, an anomaly for Jan. 6 trials. Despite the lengthy process, the panel still included several D.C. residents who disclosed participation in Democratic protests, including Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, according to one court observer’s report.
After a four-month trial and six days of deliberation, the jury convicted the defendants in May on multiple charges while returning not-guilty verdicts on a handful of other offenses, including impeding police officers. One juror told Vice News that he and his cohorts unanimously concluded in less than a day that four of the five defendants were guilty of seditious conspiracy, an exceedingly rare charge traditionally reserved for individuals tied to foreign terror groups.
“[The jury] hated us with a passion,” Joseph Biggs, one of the Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges, told RCI in an interview from his jail cell in September. “They wanted to see us die. One of them said he wanted to see us buried under the jail.” Despite the individual’s stated desire to see the defendants dead, he was seated on the panel.
Judge Chutkan’s handling of her first jury trial for a Jan. 6 defendant, Russell Alford, also indicates how Trump might fare. Alford was charged in March 2021 with four misdemeanors for his 11-minute nonviolent walk through the Capitol.
In rejecting Alford’s bid to move his trial, Chutkan downplayed the partisanship of D.C. residents and surveys that indicated higher-than-average prejudice against Capitol protesters. In her April 2022 order, Chutkan insisted that “jurors’ political leaning are not, by themselves, evidence that those jurors cannot fairly and impartially consider the evidence presented and apply the law as instructed by the court.” She also claimed an “expanded examination will effectively screen for prejudice among potential jurors in this case.”
A review of court transcripts, however, raises questions as to whether Chutkan fulfilled her promise. A jury questionnaire exposed a bias so strong against Jan. 6 protesters that half the respondents were automatically eliminated from consideration. Many who remained were also problematic.
After one day of voir dire, which is the direct questioning of potential jurors, Chutkan still allowed individuals who expressed critical views about anyone involved in Jan. 6 to serve on the panel. One juror said people who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 “were probably guilty.” Another who worked as an investigator for federal agencies, including DHS and TSA, admitted he had “strong feelings about the individuals who gathered at the Capitol on January 6.”
Chutkan rejected a defense attorney’s request to remove that juror from consideration. “I’m going to deny it because he said he has training; he’s by nature trained to be skeptical. He has an opinion, but it appears that he is willing to confine his verdict to the evidence presented in the case.”
Did People Lie to Get on Jan. 6 Juries?
A staffer for Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico, also got the nod, despite telling Chutkan he knew many Capitol police officers – several of whom are routinely called as government witnesses in Jan. 6 trials – and his confession that the day was “pretty impactful” on him.
On several occasions, Chutkan reassured the skeptical defense team that the selected jurors would set aside personal feelings to objectively weigh the evidence.
The jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts in less than four hours.
Alford now wonders whether jurors were being honest. “They told us what we wanted to hear so they could get on the panel,” Alford told RCI by phone from a halfway house last month. He had just finished serving 176 days of a 12-month prison sentence imposed by Chutkan. “In any other jurisdiction, we would have won. We thought we could get a fair shake, but they all were connected to the government.”
Alford’s experience is not an outlier. Post-trial interviews with jurors have often revealed bias. In a lengthy discussion with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb following her service on an Oath Keepers’ trial earlier this year, a woman named Ellen, a former co-worker of Lamb, described how she desperately tried to get selected as a juror. When she finally was selected, Ellen admitted she “was shocked beyond belief.”
Over the course of several days of deliberations, Ellen said she successfully persuaded reluctant jurors to render guilty verdicts against the six defendants, including a 72-year-old who didn’t enter the Capitol and an autistic young man. She worked in tandem with a juror who had worked as a lawyer for the Department of Justice, the same government agency prosecuting the defendants. “How that was allowed, I’ll never know,” Ellen told Lamb. “He couldn’t believe it.”
Ellen also expressed disdain for the people on trial. “They weren’t even from big cities. These were people from, living, on farms in rural places, most of them had no concept of Washington, D.C.,” she told Lamb.”
—-
Read the rest. If the rule of law is ever gonna matter again, folks need to stand up to this miscarriage of justice, not stare at their feet as Dems and a biased court system run roughshod over a defendants legal rights.
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The propaganda media have their new White House talking points I see….
And of course, more trash from The Atlantic.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1731738683059962035
Lather, rinse, repeat.
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Justice, Democrat style.
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Mike Pence, still a traitor.
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Remember folks, Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings….
Well, other than the checks….
Yep.
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Finally, a less stupid court and judges.
—
“BREAKING: Federal Appeals Court Sides with Pro-Trump Meme Maker Douglass Mackey – Drops 7-Month Prison Sentence for Online Joke”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/breaking-federal-appeals-court-sides-pro-trump-meme/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=breaking-federal-appeals-court-sides-pro-trump-meme
“Pro-Trump meme maker Douglass Mackey, AKA, Ricky Vaughn, was sentenced to 7 months in prison in October for trolling Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
Mackey was facing a maximum of 10 years in prison for speech crimes.
Mackey was indicted in January 2021 by the feds for using the social media platform to ‘spread election disinformation’ to Hillary Clinton voters in 2016.
The Pro-Trump meme maker was later found guilty for trolling Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Mackey posted a humorous meme telling Hillary voters to text in their vote on Wednesday after the election. It was obviously a joke. Unfortunately for Mackey, the Marxists have no sense of humor. Douglass Markey was indicted and convicted on Friday for posting jokes online.”
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We’re ruled by idiots, clowns, and wusses. Some of them are all 3.
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Here we go again, and the same clueless people will fall for it again.
And just look at the Atlantic, so principled and conservative.
Not. They’re just Democrat lite.
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TDS is an ugly disease.
Truth? Science?
Means nothing to these people. Orange Man Bad is all that matters.
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Look at Trump, just crushing those norms….
Oh wait… no… not him.
—
“The Guardians of Democracy: Democrats Move to Protect Democracy from Itself”
“Below is my column in the Hill on efforts to bar or limit voting in the primary and general presidential elections. What is so striking is how these distinctly anti-democratic actions are being taken in the name of democracy.
Here is the column:
Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.
Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly to save democracy.
Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black. Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.
This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot.
And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been cast.
This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and, on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not become them.”
In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.
There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”
The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice.
In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t Trump.”
They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
This effort is being supported by academics such as Laurence Tribe, who previously called for Trump to be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Mike Pence.
In a recent filing supporting this effort, figures as prominent as media lawyer Floyd Abrams and Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky have told the Colorado Supreme Court that preventing voters from being able to cast their votes for Trump is just a way of “fostering democracy.” So long as courts believe that a candidate’s speech is “capable of triggering disqualification,” that speech is unprotected in their view.
I have long criticized this theory as legally and historically unfounded. It is also an extremely dangerous theory that would allow majorities in different states to ban opposing candidates in tit-for-tat actions.
So far, these efforts around the country have met with defeat in court after court, but the effort continues, and with the support of many in the media.
Some national polls show Trump as the most popular candidate for the 2024 election, while a few show Biden slightly ahead. Yet, despite 74 million voters supporting Trump in the last election, these Democrats are insisting that voters should not be allowed to vote for him, in the name of democracy.
In fairness to Democratic partisans like Clinton and Maddow, they could well be right. The 2024 election could well prove the end to democracy — if these efforts succeeded in purging ballots of opposing candidates.
It is all part of an electoral variation on the Vietnam War claim that it is sometimes necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.
Democrats claim to be right and to have the best of motivations, which is why they feel justified in saving democracy by denying it to the voters. After all, it is all about motivation where any means are justified. They are trying to save democracy by limiting it.
Thus, it is an assault on democracy for Republican lawyers to challenge elections based on alleged problems with voting machines, but it is protecting democracy for former Clinton general counsel (and founder of the “Democracy Docket”) Marc Elias to claim that a machine could flip the results in favor of the GOP.”
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Sooner or later, the monsters always turns on their masters.
But this is all OK because Orange Man Bad, right Never-Trumpers?
“During last Thursday’s Congressional hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Democratic members of Congress insisted that censorship efforts of groups like the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and the Virality Project (VP) were benign and not a violation of the First Amendment.
“It’s not the First Amendment!” said Rep. Dan Goldman, “It’s the [social media platforms’] Terms of Service…. And they are flagging it for the social media companies to make their own decisions. That is not the First Amendment. That is the Terms of Service.”
But the CTIL Files, a trove of documents that a whistleblower provided to Public and Racket, reveal that US and UK military contractors developed and used advanced tactics — including demanding that social media platforms change their Terms of Service — to shape public opinion about Covid-19, and that getting content removed was just one strategy used by the Censorship Industrial Complex.
The CTI League, which partnered with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), aimed to implement something called “AMITT,” which stood for “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques.”
AMITT was a disinformation framework that included many offensive actions, including working to influence government policy, discrediting alternative media, using bots and sock puppets, pre-bunking, and pushing counter-messaging.
The specific “counters” to “disinformation” in AMITT and its successor framework, DISARM, include many we have observed in our study of the Censorship Industrial Complex:
— “Create policy that makes social media police disinformation”
— “Strong dialogue between the federal government and private sector to encourage better reporting”
— “Marginalize and discredit extremists”
— “Name and Shame influencers”
— “Simulate misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and responses to them, before campaigns happen”
— “Use banking to cut off access”
— “Inoculate populations through media literacy training”
For issues like the Russiagate hoax to the Hunter Biden laptop to Covid-19, organizations within the Censorship Industrial Complex have used many of DISARM’s offensive methods like tabletop exercises, psychological inoculation, propaganda messaging, and punishment of dissent. Even its extreme proposal of debanking was used against Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
Far from simply protecting the public from falsehoods, both government and non-profit actors within Censorship Industrial Complex have followed CTIL’s exact playbook and have waged a full-fledged influence operation against Americans.
This influence operation has deep ties to security and intelligence agencies, as is evidenced through many examples of collaboration. In one instance of such collaboration, supposedly independent “disinformation researchers” like Renée DiResta coordinated a 2020 election tabletop exercise with military officials.
Defense and intelligence funding supports much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. For instance, Graphika, which was involved in both EIP and VP, receives grants from the Department of Defense, DARPA, and the Navy.
Pentagon-affiliated entities are heavily involved in “anti-disinformation” work. Mitre, a major defense contractor, received funding to tackle “disinformation” about elections and Covid. The US government paid Mitre, an organization staffed by former intelligence and military personnel, to monitor and report what Americans said about the virus online, and to develop vaccine confidence messaging. This government-backed military research group, Public discovered, was present in the EIP and VP misinformation reporting system, and in election disinformation report emails to CISA.
The AMITT framework also includes many counters we have yet to find concrete evidence for, but which we suspect may have been attempted:
— “Infiltrate the in-group to discredit leaders”
— “Honeypot with coordinated inauthentics”
— “Co-opt a hashtag and drown it out (hijack it back)”
— “Dilute the core narrative – create multiple permutations, target/amplify”
— “Newsroom/Journalist training to counter influence moves”
— “Educate high profile influencers on best practices”
— “Create fake website to issue counter narrative”
We may not know the extent to which all these counters were implemented, but we do know that the US military and the intelligence community have gone to extreme lengths to control what Americans can say and think.”
—–
And don’t forget kids, as always, the Deep State is a myth.
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Nothing to see….
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Being a VP to Trump may always draw the “traitor” charge from Trump followers in the end — which is why I hate to see anyone I admire go that route should Trump be elected again.
Interesting piece from Alberta’s recent book recalling a discussion he had with conservative Christian columnist Cal Thomas:
~ “I do wonder if he should have resigned,” Thomas said (speaking of Pence). “He and I talked about this once. I think his view was that he was being salt and light. He was privately counseling the president—I don’t know about personal things, but certainly about legislative things. And he felt that he would at least have some effect by remaining on the inside.”
Thomas cocked his head sideways, as if struggling with that rationale. “For the president to keep saying the things he was saying, especially asking him to do something unconstitutional—I can see the argument for resigning,” he said. “But I can also see the argument for staying there and fighting for what’s right.” ~
-dj
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So far I am grateful that Tim Scott seems to be out of the running (and I’m not sure he’d accept a VP spot with Trump even if he were approached, but I’d hope not).
Being “salt and light” and an influence on the inside was an admirable approach, but one that didn’t work in the end (though may have worked here and there during the period they were in office before the blowup at the end). Pence did say he prayed for Trump daily.
But the die seems to be cast on that “influence from the inside” front. -dj
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For my part I’m happy to see anyone that disagrees with the Trump agenda left out of consideration for vp or cabinet positions. It’s an ambitious agenda that garners powerful enemies and will take a lot of support to implement. It’s essential to have good minds and fundamental agreement in the administration. I suspect that Democrats and the Uni-party alike will be fighting it every step of the way, while the media and ill-wishers continue to snipe at the heels as they did before. It won’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
Debra
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There therein lies the very deep divide we all face in 2024. -dj
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And that’s just among conservatives, in-house. Divided movements and parties face an uphill climb to win any kind of national election.
-dj
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dj @12:21: What did Pres. Trump ask VP Pence to do that was unconstitutional?
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I am also curious on that point.
mumsee
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~ In an interview hours after former President Donald Trump was indicted for an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, one of his attorneys said that all Trump had ultimately asked his vice president to do was “simply pause” the Electoral College count at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Fox News the following night, Aug. 2, former Vice President Mike Pence called that claim “completely false.” Pence said Trump and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” asked him “to literally reject votes.”
“I think it’s important that the American people know what happened in the days before January 6,” Pence said. “President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes. I had no authority to do that.”
For those who might doubt him, Pence urged them to “read the indictment.” ~
-dj
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Pence was asked to send the votes back to their state legislatures for confirmation. That would have caused a delay, but I don’t know that it would have changed the outcome. I believe it was technically a legal move, but untried. I understand that Congress has since clarified the law.
Irregularities in voting such as we experienced in 2020 are bound to make people uneasy.
Debra
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That is what is so confusing with our news: so difficult to find the facts when news sources give such opposing stories. It is why it is important to read the other side. The Israel/ Hamas/ Palestinian reporting really brings that out.
I thought an indictment was an accusation. But then an indictment is after court. To add to any confusion!
mumsee
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