Moved to Substack

The Cleveland Tea Party blog has moved to Substack.  

New URL:  <https://clevelandteaparty.substack.com/>

Or click here.

If you’re a regular reader, bookmark the new location!  

You can also choose to request updates/notifications by email.

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Turn off the television

 

Adam Mill at American Greatness shares with his readers why they need to turn off the television:

If Americans can’t get reliable information from
the subverted legacy media, then we’ll find other routes

. . . One day we may learn the circumstances and terms under which the legacy news media surrendered its independence to the permanent government’s operation to control and manipulate domestic political opinion. Totalitarian governments can look with envy upon the message discipline across the supposedly independent American media outlets of our supposedly free press. But like so many other things the Left touches, it destroyed the legitimacy and effectiveness of the legacy news media. Americans can tell when they’re being manipulated. So they’ve increasingly turned off television news.

To paraphrase Matt Walsh’s movie title, “What is a television?” That flat screen mounted on your wall might be capable of receiving televised signals from broadcasters. But more likely, the “television” on your wall has become just another screen on which to watch videos streaming from the internet. If you want to watch cable television, you probably need to find an airport or to go pay your grandparents a visit. Otherwise, there’s no longer any need to suffer through the coordinated Soviet-style propaganda.

The full column is here. 

NOTE:  This blog is moving to Substack during June 2023: the above blog now also appears at the new site here.  If you’re a regular reader, bookmark the new location! 

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The Perfect Coup

cartoon by Bob Gorrell

Andrea Widburg, a/k/a Bookworm Room, posted “The Perfect Coup” - a hypothetical scenario – but one that’s been unfolding before our very eyes:

[Trump’s] indictment isn’t the first step;
it’s the last in a series of steps going back to 2016

If I were trying to overthrow a duly elected president, I’d start by saying that he conspired with a foreign power to cheat in the election. I’d believe I could get away with this charge because I would have the media on my side, relentlessly pounding away at the narrative. It would help that members of the president’s own party, despising him for destroying their cozy little arrangement with the opposition, refused to support him politically.

When it became apparent that the president was hugely effective at governing on those things that matter to ordinary people, such as the economy, national security, immigration, energy policy, etc., and that the false charges of treason and cheating, I’d look ahead to throwing the next election.

What I would need is a way to prevent the president from campaigning and a way to institutionalize election fraud. Thankfully, I would have gamed out long before the election what a government can do if faced with a pandemic infection. COVID’s appearance was providential. 

I would disagree here.  IMHO, COVID’s appearance was deliberate, as were the draconian protocols of vaxxing and masking (see e.g., Emerald Robinson here or Dr Robert Malone’s speech in Mexico City in March 2023).  But the balance of Ms Widburg’s scenario is spot-on.  Click here for the rest of it. 

NOTE:  This blog is moving to Substack during June 2023: the above blog now also appears at the new site here.  If you’re a regular reader, bookmark the new location! 

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US Enters Banana Republic Territory

 

Mark Wauck at Meaning in History has as succinct a take on the Trump indictment as any of the commentary I’ve read:

. . . For now I’ll simply state that Trump is correct. He IS an innocent man, innocent of any charges stemming from his possession of documents relating to his presidency. Make no mistake about this. It’s a joint, bipartisan, project of the Uniparty. The Republican participants—key among them Bluto Barr—retain the right to criticize Zhou, whom they helped put in the White House, but they will support the attempted lynching of Trump. The DC political establishment has closed ranks with the Deep State to assert its right—as against We The People—to select the POTUS and to punish anyone who transgresses against their Will to Power. This is a day that will live in infamy.

Mr. Wauck’s posting is here.

Moving to Substack: this blog now also appears here.

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Moving to Substack

 

To readers of the Cleveland Tea Party blog:

Starting today, this blog re-introduces itself on its new Substack platform.  For about two weeks thereafter, the blogs will post concurrently on this site as well as on Substack, to give readers time to update their “favorites” list.

Substack has attracted many posters, including high-profile contributors such as Dr Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Matt Taibbi, and Salman Rushdie. Many of these contributors have been censored or marginalized for questioning official narratives, challenging government policies, and the like.  When I visit these pages, I do not find critical content labeled as “misinformation.”

The Cleveland Tea Party blog is a small fish in the blogosphere, yet it has been censored as well.  Three times, there’s been a noticeable and otherwise inexplicable spike in web traffic; the spike lasts for a few days, and as far as I can tell, only a deliberate testing and manipulation of the algorithms can explain the phenomenon.  And in all three cases, when the numbers are no longer artificially inflated, the traffic reverts to approximately half of the previous averages.  After three such episodes, the most recent being in May, instead of getting hundreds of hits a day, it’s rare to get over 100 in a day.  It does seem to be a pattern.

Some readers have asked why they cannot find this blog doing an e-search:  they report getting links to a robot about tea-drinkers.

So we’ll be maintaining both sites for a couple of weeks before closing down the blogspot site.  The new Cleveland Tea Party at Substack is here. 

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A Dark Day for America

 

This will come as news to nobody.  From the announcement on America First Report):

President Donald Trump has been indicted by the Department of Justice over the classified documents debacle. He posted about it on his Truth Social account:

Page 1: The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is “secured” by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.

Page 2: I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

Page 3: This is indeed a DARK DAY for the United States of America. We are a Country in serious and rapid Decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!

A dark day indeed.  

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Dr Scott Atlas: A Plague Upon Our House

 

Wendi Strauch Mahoney at UncoverDC summarizes some of the shocking politics inside the Trump White House's COVID Task Force: 

According to a book by Dr. Scott Atlas, Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the Trump Administration, controlled most of the messaging and communication coming from the Coronavirus Task Force to the American people and governors. In his book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” he describes his time as an advisor to the President starting in late July 2020. He resigned at the end of November of the same year.

During his brief tenure, Atlas was a lone voice against Birx’s absurd fixation on COVID cases rather than infection rate fatality data as a metric to justify the widespread lockdowns that destroyed the lives of many Americans for almost three straight years. He and many others believe the lockdowns probably did more harm to the American people than the virus itself.

Atlas is a neurologist and a Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. His expertise in public policy far exceeded others on the task force, including Birx. Atlas served as a dispassionate, apolitical, and objective voice in the White House. His many relationships with respected scientists outside D.C. also served him well.

The conclusion:

It is also well understood that there was an unstoppable governmental apparatus in place that would frustrate the ability to get new information to the American people. To be clear, these thoughts are not to badger but to prepare. It is critically important to recognize that life-saving information was and still is available to those who want to see it. Just know that the apparatus of control has not disappeared. A refusal to acknowledge the truth will almost certainly ensure the pandemic of 2020 or, worse, will unnecessarily control you again.

The rest of the coverage is here, and it’s not fun to read.  And while Dr Atlas faults the COVID task force for resisting President Trump’s initiatives, he faults Trump for not replacing members of the task force who blocked him.

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Wildfires: why so many across the lake?

 

The haze was not so bad over Lake Erie yesterday, but the east coast was under an air quality alert due to the wildfires in Quebec and Ontario. John Carter raises questions about who or what caused these wildfires.  Eco-terrorists?  Canada’s deep state?  From his Substack column:

There are currently over 100 fires raging throughout Quebec and, now, Ontario. The number goes up every time I go to check Google, last I saw was around 160. The closest is just over 100 km from here.

Wildfires on this scale, at the point in the year, are in my experience unprecedented. Ten of thousands of people in outlying communities have already been evacuated. So far about 3.5 million hectares have burned.

click to embiggen or check it out at the link

As you can see, not only are we on track for the worst wildfire season on record, the temporal pattern is completely out of step with what we normally see. In every other year, wildfire season is mid-August, mid-July at the earliest. The beginning of June is unheard of.

   . . .

That leaves, as far as I can make out, three broad categories of perpetrators: a foreign state actor; the Canadian government itself; or non-state actors.

So which is it? Mr Carter leans to the Canadian government itself, and he explains why.  But he concludes with a reasonable disclaimer:

I want to finish by emphasizing that neither I nor anyone else I know has any proof that these wildfires are caused by arson, or if so that this arson is the result of self-inflicted damage by the Canadian state. That is all pure speculation based on the highly anomalous behaviour of the wildfires (a large number starting more or less simultaneously two months earlier than normal), along with the known policy vectors of the current ruling class, and the demonstrated tendency of that ruling class to ‘make their own reality’, so to speak. This is the same ruling class, remember, that blew up the NordStream pipeline and then pretended Russia did it. They’re not above committing acts of terrorism on a vast scale if they think it will benefit them. With the reputation they’ve made for themselves, it’s easy for many of us - certainly for me - to believe that they would do something like set an entire country on fire purely to spook the populace, and that is perhaps the grimmest comment possible on the times in which we live.

Read his column here.

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Digital control of your finances and your Health ID

Ken Macon at America First Report has the update on the excuses we will hear about as the globalists go about controlling our financial transactions:

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is working on an AI system to monitor global transactions. It says it’s in an effort to combat money laundering.

The system, dubbed Project Aurora, will use machine learning to track financial transactions globally to flag patterns of money laundering. According to the BIS, the system can identify money laundering structures performed by money mules.

However, for the system to achieve its goal, governments and corporate banks will have to allow streamlined access and open their systems for the AI to monitor transactions. Some banks already use AI systems to flag unusual behavior. However, Project Aurora will require global access on a terrifying scale in terms of privacy.

The idea of combatting “money laundering” is being used to justify giving governments and banks surveillance power over financial transactions.

The project could be abused to target people for both their financial and political activities.

The BIS is also working on Project Icebreaker, which would create a system where all banks can regulate and homogenize all currencies to create one global exchange model and give the BIS the power to punish and country or company that goes against its ideologies.

And then there’s the digital health ID initiative. The headline to this report: “Another COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Is Coming True.”  Leah Barkoukis reports at Townhall:

The World Health Organization announced Monday it is expanding on the European Union’s digital COVID-19 vaccine passports, using the system as "the first building block" towards creating a WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network. 

"Building on the EU's highly successful digital certification network, WHO aims to offer all WHO member states access to an open-source digital health tool, which is based on the principles of equity, innovation, transparency and data protection and privacy," said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement. "New digital health products in development aim to help people everywhere receive quality health services quickly and more effectively." 

According to the WHO statement, the world body will take up the EU system this month, reportedly to “facilitate global mobility” and protect people “from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics.” . . .

"Protect people"? No, it’s all about control.  More at the link here.    

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Remembering D-Day

On this day in 1944, the Normandy Invasion, also called Operation Overlord or D-Day, was launched.  D-Day marked the beginning of the Allied invasion of western Europe during World War II. Below is a Navy team in training:

They landed on Utah Beach. Blogger's late father is first row center -- the skipper.

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Descent into a Clown World

  

At Freedom First Network, J B Shurk explores America’s “Descent into a Clown World.” Here’s an extract:

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.  By yielding to those who have always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining in the Marxists’ good graces.  Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible quantity.

It is not that politically conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to mind their own business.  Their first reaction to a company’s success is not envy.  They do not immediately turn their sights on how best to confiscate another’s good fortune.

People who work hard for what they own do not worry about what somebody else owns.  They simply seek to be left alone.  . . .

One problem is that while communists are organized, passionate, and good at messaging, conservatives “simply seek to be left alone” – it’s just not an effective marketing message.

The full article is here.

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FISA abuse: corruption at the DOJ and FBI

 

When the DOJ’s abuse of the FISA court procedures first came to light in 2018, this blogger thought that violation of FISA rules – lying to a judge is a felony – would finally result in indictments and successful prosecutions.  It’s now 2023.  The fearless investigative reporter, Sundance, has gone through the Durham Report, footnotes and all, and exposes yet more layers of corruption.  It’s a long read, but it’s also a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the rot.  Some have commented that the FBI is in need of reform.  No, it needs to be shut down.  Here’s the opening at Conservative Treehouse:

BIG QUESTION and A BIG COVERUP –
Durham Report Brings Sunlight on Detail Never Released
by IG Michael Horowitz About FBI Targeting Trump

I’m going to go into the deep weeds on this story, because many people are missing a key facet.  The names behind the Trump targeting operation are included, along with citations for independent checks by House congressional investigators.

Inside the recently released report by John Durham [CITATION], the special counsel outlines how former FBI Director James Comey was intimately involved in the creation of the Carter Page FISA application.  Durham notes that Comey kept asking the DOJ National Security Division and FBI counterintelligence investigators, “Where’s the FISA, we need the FISA.”  However, John Durham never interviewed James Comey or Andrew McCabe.  The former FBI Director and Deputy refused to cooperate or give testimony to John Durham.  So, how did John Durham have details about the demands of Comey?

The answer is found in the footnotes.  Durham reviewed transcripts of interviews given by Andrew McCabe to the Office of the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, who previously investigated FBI conduct in the origin of the Carter Page FISA.  Durham pulled quotes from that transcript. [Footnote #1207, page 199 – Durham Report]

[facsimile of transcript with footnote]

♦QUESTION: If Andrew McCabe gave testimony to the OIG about the motives and impetus of FBI Director James Comey in pushing for the Carter Page FISA application, why did the OIG report never outline those transcribed interviews?  Why was the interview transcript never included in the 2019 OIG report?

[NOTE to Congress.  Now that you know a transcribed interview of Andrew McCabe exists in the OIG office, request the transcription and release it to the public.]

Let me answer those questions without the customary pretending from the DC professional political class.  The short version is that OIG Michael Horowitz was trying to protect the DOJ and FBI. The longer version is a coverup that includes Rod Rosenstein, Bill Barr and yes, John Durham.  I will share that story below.

“Where’s the FISA?  We need the FISA?” ~ James Comey

The DOJ-NSD and FBI Co-Intel needed to find a safe and legal way to spy on the Trump campaign. The 2016 FISA Title 1 surveillance of former FBI employee Carter Page became the fraudulent justification for that intent.  . . .

Much more here.  It’s jaw-dropping.  

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Diversity vs competency

Harold Robertson at Palladium Magazine has an essay “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis” (h/t Andrea Widburg).  He starts off:

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen. 

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

And here’s his conclusion:

Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today. 

The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.

Read the rest here. It’s a long read, and Mr. Robertson is not optimistic, but as Ms. Widburg concluded: “If we recognize and address it, maybe it’s still possible to pull the airplane of state out of its deep dive toward the earth.”

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Your Sunday meme with Bert & Ernie

 

Posted in observance of the suspension of any Debt Ceiling

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It’s Up to the States

 

Luis Miguel at The New American is looking beyond the DC swamp – in order to drain the swamp:

Congress Won’t Drain the Swamp — It’s Up to the States

No politician at the federal level is going to drain the swamp, because the federal government is the swamp.

It’s human nature. No one with great power is going to strip himself of that power. That’s like expecting Genghis Khan to step down from the throne. It’s not going to happen.

. . .

The United States began as a federation of sovereign states unified for mutual defense. But eventually, the capital they created — Washington, D.C. — became its own political entity and usurped control over the states that had created it. The state-created federal government, seated in Washington, D.C., now operates on its own independent of the states and opposed to their interests.

. . .

Furthermore, Washington is a city-state in which the ruling dynasty is the globalist cabal. Everything else is a facade. All the congressmen, senators, bureaucrats, intelligence officers, and generals who live and work there are servants of the globalist oligarchy, not representatives of the people. The entire system in D.C. is designed to protect the interests of the cabal — Congress can’t completely reform it from within.

“Everything else is a façade”.  Again, that fits right in with Sundance’s scenario that all of the DC political construct is a “Potemkin Village”, maintained to provide us plebes with the “Illusion of Choice.”  Mr. Miguel concludes:

This is why it is up to the states, through nullification and an aggressive reasserting of their states’ rights, to rein in the federal government. For if D.C. is the swamp, then the city must be drained — and only the states have the power to do it.

Read the full column here.

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The Biden pResidency takes a fall

 

Yesterday, pResident Joe Biden took a nasty prat fall at the US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.  The short video is at Treehouse here.  But the clip is also up on the Telegram channel Slavyangrad, a Russian channel (no link; it’s subscribers only). 

So the world watches.  Many call Biden’s presidency a case of elder abuse.  True, but it’s also tragic and embarrassing to witness America now as a global laughingstock.  Matthew G. Andersson at American Thinker just published a column, “Why the White House Wants War,” and he thinks Biden’s pResidency is even worse than embarrassing.  Mr. Andersson’s frightening conclusion:

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.  It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order.  Biden was installed not just as an Obama proxy, but as a signal of weakness. . . .

The full article is here. 

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Now we know where Jim Jordan stands

 

The Freedom Caucus can now re-brand as the RINO Caucus.  Politico reports:

Jim Jordan and other key conservative firebrands have caused a fair share of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s biggest headaches. But instead of leading the rebellion this time, they helped him quash it.

As the House Freedom Caucus was preparing to discuss whether to officially oppose the speaker’s bipartisan debt deal — a move that would potentially galvanize conservative opposition — Jordan (R-Ohio) phoned several fellow members with a request, according to a person familiar with the calls. The former chair of the group urged them to hold back, effectively giving conservatives who wanted to vote with McCarthy license to do so.

Jordan, a longtime McCarthy antagonist turned ally, almost got his wish. The group took no official position until hours before the vote, when most members had already made up their minds.

The beloved House Freedom Caucus co-founder — who gravitated toward McCarthy after the now-speaker tapped him for a senior spot on the Oversight Committee — helped out in other ways. The Ohio lawmaker spoke up in favor of the deal in private calls and meetings, including taking the mic at a closed-door huddle on Tuesday night, just hours after many of his fellow conservatives had spent the day trashing the deal.

This report concludes with this:

If most Republicans get on board, it means threats against his speakership won’t gain real traction. And with two-thirds of the GOP conference backing the deal Wednesday, it seemed to be working.

“We didn’t do it by taking the easy route,” McCarthy said in a celebratory post-vote press conference. “It wasn’t an easy fight, I had people on both sides upset.”

But he added: “I think we did pretty damn good for the American people.”

No debt ceiling.  No serious budget process.  J D Rucker considers this bill an existential threat.  His take is here.

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