January 6 propaganda

 

image of scary J6 mob via Substack

Glenn Greenwald’s article (The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes: As Kamala Harris compares 1/6 to 9/11 and Nancy Pelosi introduces the cast of Hamilton to sing about democracy, today’s inanity should not obscure its dangers.”) is extracted at Instapundit:

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic . . . .

Full article is here via Instapundit.

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Handy summary of Russia Russia Russia

Via Bookwormroom:

click to embiggen or go to the Bookworm link here and scroll down.

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Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President

I’m on Newt Gingrich’s e-mailing list, but his column is also online here.

Lee Smith has written a book so important and so revealing that every American who cares about the future of our Republic should read it.

The Plot Against the President is a remarkable history of our times. It captures what historian Edward Luttwak called “the paper coup.”

Luttwak is a famous historian who wrote an authoritative study of governments being overturned by coups. Entitled Coup d’etat a Practical Handbook, it established Luttwak’s credentials when he analyzed the post-election war against President Trump.

As Smith reported: “The ‘anti-Trump operation,’ says Luttwak today, ‘was a very American coup, with TV denunciations by seemingly authoritative figures as a key instrument.’ The plot against Trump was a bureaucratic insurgency waged almost entirely through the printed word. It was the ‘Paper Coup.’"

Smith’s book is built around the courageous hard work of Congressman Devin Nunes and his team of Republicans at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Living through the last four years, it has been easy to confuse what was going on and who to trust and distrust.

Smith captures it all in one clear sentence: “Without the big titles and the national security bureaucracy’s legalistic self-defense mechanisms, the story was pretty straightforward: The Clintons hired a bunch of con men who got their dirty cop friends to frame Trump. The press and a corrupt prosecutor handled the cover-up."

Throughout all the confusion, Nunes and the courageous group he assembled kept pursuing the truth through what was an ocean of lies, obstruction, and resistance. In his book, Smith describes a pattern of senior US intelligence officials systematically undermining and targeting people seeking the truth – even one of Nunes’s own investigators, who was a former Department of Justice lawyer.

At the same time, instead of upholding the law, Mueller perverted it. The clear signal Americans got from the spectacle around the Mueller investigation was that the elites in this country were determined to smear the President, even though he’d done nothing wrong.

In fact, Smith writes that the Mueller investigation in fact just became an extension of the larger effort to oust the elected president, and Mueller was a “fixer” to cover-up that the effort was happening.

Nunes understood how Mueller had perverted his role. Smith explains: “Nunes had described ...Mueller produced a perfect feedback loop: intelligence leakers spin a false story to the media, the media publishes the story, Mueller cites the story, and the media and the Democrats then fake outrage at Mueller’s findings. It was as if Nunes were guiding a tour of the underworld."

The news media was so dedicated to the anti-Trump coup attempt that it was impossible to deal with them. Smith describes how Jack Langer, Nunes’s communications director, slowly realized that talking to the mainstream media was actually hurting the truth-finding effort rather than helping inform the public. It didn’t matter what Langer would tell the press because reporters, editors, and producers had already made up their minds about the substance of the story. Talking to Republicans was just a ploy to retain a whiff of objectivity.

At the same time that much of the media was skirting its traditional role, the very nature of the FBI-intelligence community war against Trump made it even harder for legitimate news media to be neutral. In order to get scoops, reporters had to agree to protect anonymous sources – and print what they were told. If they didn’t, they would lose access.

Smith describes the cumulative effect of the bureaucratic corruption and news media collusion (the real collusion story), and it is devastating.

Sadly, we had seen this kind of bureaucratic-news media corruption before, in 2003. It involved some of the same players – including former FBI Director Jim Comey. That time, they tried to destroy Vice President Dick Cheney by framing his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and forcing Libby to bargain for his freedom by selling out his boss.

However, Libby refused to lie about the Vice President and accepted a totally framed punishment. President George W. Bush commuted his sentence. The Washington Bar Association reinstated him for having been the victim of prosecutorial malpractice. President Donald Trump pardoned him completely.

As Smith writes: "the Libby case had been a baseless media-driven scandal, a press frenzy that had resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Mueller 2017 was a replay of Fitzgerald 2003. The latter went after Cheney, the former Trump.”

The current sickness in the Justice Department is deeply rooted. In addition to Smith’s book, informed citizens should read Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie. Powell is currently defending General Mike Flynn and challenging the entire case against him as an illegal frame by willfully dishonest prosecutors.

When you read The Plot Against the President, you will realize there is a lot more going on – and a lot of people may end up in jail for having attempted to destroy an elected president.

Every citizen should read it to understand how sick the system has become.

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Conrad Black: Choose Sides in This Civil War

image credit: tothedeathmedia

Conrad Black has a sobering if scary take on the minefields and treachery that President Trump has to deal with every day. Here are a couple of paragraphs (and considering the “Never Trump” bias of National Review, I am somewhat surprised that NR published the piece in the first place):

Trump opponents need to understand what the alternative is. The battle lines have been so sharply drawn, in what is now a bloodless civil war for direction of U.S. public policy, that the two sides cannot really communicate with each other. There is a commendable candor in Kellyanne Conway’s statement: “They hate us and we hate them.” . . .

. . .  There is now unfolding what must be the last civilized debate about the trajectory of events in Washington before the civil war moves from the heavy and frequent skirmishing that has intensified since the election to the fight to the death that seems inevitably to impend. The president said in a powerful address to a very enthusiastic audience in West Virginia last week, where he received the grace of conversion to the Republican party of the formerly Democratic governor, Jim Justice, that the entire special-counsel investigation into relations between the Russian government and the Trump campaign is “a total fabrication” and “an attempt to [reverse] one of the greatest political defeats in American history.” So it is.

. . .

Whether [Robert] Mueller conducts himself professionally or not, there is no excuse for a special counsel to have been appointed, and the president was (as he need not have mentioned publicly) badly let down by Sessions. The scramble of nominal Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, and drooling partisan Democrats such as Chris Coons, to pass redundant, grandstanding legislation to protect Sessions and Mueller is nauseating. Trump ran against and defeated both parties, the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, and most of their close collaborators in the Congress. The war continues and until the president has enough economic progress, or enough time without gaffes that the hostile media can amplify into a wall of noise, or a sudden foreign-policy success such as with North Korea or even Venezuela, if he wants to start moving the needle of the polls upwards, he will face the problem of cowardice and lethargy in his own party. Senator McConnell’s statement in Kentucky this week that Trump was responsible for the almost total failure of the Republican Congress to achieve anything in the past six months was just more self-serving claptrap from a familiar and very tiresome source. . . .

. . .

This is a civil war and the apostate conservatives should realize that, if Trump loses, they don’t get a new Reaganism in the Republican party and renewed importance and self-importance for themselves; they get the semi-permanent return of those responsible for the decline of America, the sleazy transformation of America into an ineffectual force in the world and into an inert, economically stagnant welfare state. The choice, for sane conservatives, is Trump or national disaster. . ..

Read the whole thing here.

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