Special Counsel: sabotaging the GOP House Majority

 

Note to readers:  This report demonstrates why I so often link to Sundance at Conservative Treehouse.  Most of us could not dig into the weeds to this extent – and make sense of it – as he does.  The appointment of Jack Smith as Special Counsel is not just about Trump;  it’s about blocking the slim GOP House majority from exercising its majority.  Here’s an extract:

Sunday Talks, Democrat J6 Committee Confirms Intent
to Transfer Evidence to Special Counsel
During Lame Duck to Begin Republican Targeting Operations

If you doubted the intent of the primary function of the appointment for Special Counsel John Smith, you can put that doubt to rest now.  . . .

Primary goal, create enough of a legal mess as to obstruct any republican legislative effort against the Biden White House.  Additionally, if Smith’s DC team can pick-off a few republican House members under charges of “supporting an insurrection“, the political power will revert back to the Democrats in office.

They didn’t just think this up overnight.

This is why the January 6 committee never ended.  They are using J6 as a weapon against their losing the House to republicans.  The Democrats are now structurally targeting Republicans with the appointment of Jack Smith.  It’s actually a brilliant move.  The executive is now investigating the legislative branch; the legal structure of this eliminates the separation of powers issue.

The DOJ is not investigating republicans, they are investigating defined criminals; insurrectionists that are national security threats, that happen to be republicans.  See how that works?  

Read the rest of Sundance’s analysis here.  This “investigation” will not only neuter some of the GOP in the House, it will be the reason the Special Counsel can block any public explanations under cover of not being able to compromise the ongoing investigation.  And it gets worse:

Then you have the congressional representatives under investigation and search warrants on their phones, text messages, emails, etc…. AND the added benefit of using DOJ-NSD defined terms of “national security threat” (that’s why they emphasized insurrection) to gain FISA warrants on an entire incoming congressional delegation.

# # #

Election fraud update 2022

 

One day you think you have a handle on how widespread the corruption is.  Next day,you read that it’s overwhelming and so much worse than you thought.  Elizabeth Nickson at Substack explains some of what we are seeing and have seen with respect to election fraud:

What's happening in Nevada? Arizona? Upstate NY?  This:

A Big Store, Pig in a Poke, with a Pidgeon Drop and a Kansas City Shuffle

. . .

Instead, for the past 12 years, we have been undergoing something called a Parallel Election. This happens everywhere, up and down ticket, but most particularly in swing states which determine the direction of the country, and drilling down, in the Pivot Counties within those states that decide the direction of the state.

 During the 2016 election, the old tricks which could move an election between 6% and 10% failed, given the surge for Trump. Therefore, a new more organized and fiendish scheme was devised[1].  Hitherto, the thieves had moved the country by increments into “equally divided”, bouncing back and forth between one side and another, making sure that, whatever happened, the Uniparty stayed in power.

Trump destroyed that.

The country is not evenly divided between right and left. It is easily 60-65% populist (right and left) now. Easily. This is probably true in every Western democracy. Every Western democracy is stolen. Every single one.

“In 2016, President Trump won 2,652 of 3,139 counties in the US, leaving Hillary with 487 counties. He didn't just win the majority in those counties, but took them by margins of 68% to 96%, in a total blow out.” And the counties he didn’t win, the swing counties, were stolen.

. . .

A few weeks ago, I described the magic glitch programmed into Dominion voting machines, discovered on machines in Colorado:

“This is how it worked. A few thousand votes into the process, the machine was programmed to create a new database and it moved most already cast votes into that database, after which it began to change votes using the 2010 census. Prior, the operators had identified people whose records showed on said 2010 census, had never voted. They registered them to vote and they voted for them. The packet traffic into every single precinct from China (mostly) during the night of November 3rd was massive, hundreds of thousands of trackers into every precinct, checking totals, altering votes thousands of times in every single county.”

A parallel election. Effected on machines invented, made and sold by literal communists. The software of which we are not allowed to view because it is “proprietary”.

. . .

All the little local precincts that used to count votes were decommissioned. All votes were brought in and counted in the Big Store, a warehouse out of the public eye, with few windows.’

120,000 fake votes were manufactured and brought into the Big Store by Post Office contractors. (We all saw the photographs.)

They were held back until they found out how many votes Biden required.

The "Pidgeon Drop" in most basic terms, is substituting one item, or container, for another item, or container.

The “Kansas Shuffle”. Stenstrom observed pallets of ballots moving up and down the three elevator banks, over and over again. . . .

So much more detail at the link here.   

# # #

 

The Big Ugly

Defining terms:  Sundance at Conservative Treehouse (CTH) has been calling this battle ‘The Big Ugly‘ for around a decade: The Big Ugly battle is essentially the fight between the grassroots working class base of MAGA voters and the professional political snobs in control of the Republican Club boardroom.

And now, Sundance has nailed it again.  He figured out that the mid-term election Red Wave might still materialize, but it's likely that as of now, conservative voters are already demoralized, because the media and GOPe did -- and still are -- gaslighting the public:

We’ve seen this exact playbook before.

The delayed “official results” from Colorado, Arizona and Nevada are all part of the organized narrative engineering from SoS [Secretary of State] offices, party officials (local and state) and corporate media. 

…

In the big picture, the goal was to undermine and deflate the MAGA base represented by President Donald Trump.  2022 midterm MAGA wins downplayed and or delayed. 2022 MAGA losses overemphasized, highlighted and promoted as part of the script.  That’s what we are seeing now.  That’s all we are seeing now.  

And this blog bought into the Red Ripple reports.  As Mark Twain said, it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.  Count me as un-fooled.  At least yesterday, we blogged on Trump’s success rate with endorsing candidate:  95% of Trump-endorsed candidates won.  So far.  (And I hope the conservative blogosphere re-thinks the decisions to throw Trump under the bus.)

On Thursday, Sundance fleshed out the bigger picture. You may find encouragement not only in his analysis but also in the reader comments.  He starts off:

The Democrats and professional Republican class both want to see the populist movement destroyed for the same reason Mitch McConnell wanted the Tea Party destroyed in 2010.  The assembly of the united middle-class and blue-collar base inside the Republican Party, essentially the broad MAGA movement, represents a Main Street threat to Wall Street control of the GOPe.

There are trillions at stake.

As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ megadonor and Citadel hedge fund billionaire, Ken Griffin, openly admitted recently the Wall Street goals are (1) stop the populist movement and (2) get the Republican Party back in alignment with the multinational “corporate world.”  These are the same goals of the Republican leadership in Washington DC and the same goals as the corporate media who serve as the public relations firms for Wall Street.

The collaborative group, which includes the entirety of the funding mechanism and management behind Ron DeSantis, viewed the 2022 midterm election as an opportunity to reset the Republican Party away from the populist MAGA influence.  The strategy was to roll out of the August DOJ Mar-a-Lago targeting, directly into a nationally rebranded DeSantis operation and then lead up to the 2022 midterm election.

Anything that can cast Donald Trump as a negative would be enhanced, and anything that would cast the MAGA movement as a positive would be diminished.  In part, this is the intent behind the delayed positive election results from key MAGA races in CO, WA, NV and AZ, combined with emphasis on the negative - albeit controlled - election ballot outcomes from Michigan and Pennsylvania.

At the 30,000-foot level the attacks against President Trump are, quite frankly, attacks against the MAGA populist movement represented by President Trump.

Read the entire posting here.  The posting concludes with President Trump’s Statement re: Ron DeSantis.  I recommend reading Sundance’s posts a couple of times;  there's a lot to absorb. 

# # #

Department Homeland Security and censorship

 

Libby Emmons at The Post Millenial reports on more corruption and censorship, with various tech platforms colluding with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS):

DHS LEAKS: Starting in 2020, DHS began meeting with Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and more monthly to coordinate 'content moderation' efforts

Prior to 2020, it was reported that DHS met with Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other platforms in order to coordinate "content moderation" operations.

The Department of Homeland Security has been working to influence big tech platforms. This became originally evident when the Biden administration launched the ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board early in 2022, but has been a focus of their efforts even beyond that now-defunct unit, and before.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit that revealed via appended meeting minutes that former Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, who was formerly an official with DHS, told a DHS director in February 2022 that "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It's really interesting how hesitant they remain." This according to The Intercept.

Prior to 2020, it was reported that DHS met with Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other platforms in order to coordinate "content moderation" operations. These meetings were part of an ongoing initiative which saw collusion and collaboration between DHS and big tech to determine how "misinformation" would be dealt with on those platforms.

Areas that came under this purview included the withdrawal from Afghanistan, undertaken disastrously by President Joe Biden in August 2021 as well as the origins of the Covid-19 virus, which became controversial enough that users were kicked off social media platforms for expressing the hypothesis that the virus originated in a Wuhan, China lab. A Senate report found last week that this was the most likely scenario. Information that could undermine trust in financial institutions was also targeted.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, signed by President Donald Trump, opened the door to this as it formed a new branch within DHS, which then undertook to deal with online "disinformation." CISA stated its understanding that the mission of that branch of DHS was "evolved," and meant to communicate their concerns on "disinformation" to social media companies. Social media companies took DHS' word for it.

There’s lots more here, including exposing how they did it / continue to do it.  

# # #

The 2016 “Flight 93” essay: Michael Anton vindicated

 

Yesterday’s blog linked to William A Jacobson’s “pep talk” for conservatives.  Today, the executive editor of The Federalist, Joy Pullmann, looks back on what Michael Anton was predicting in 2016, and why we all need those pep talks.  Here’s an extract – towards the end of her column:

Biden’s Destruction Of America Vindicates
Mike Anton’s 2016 ‘Flight 93’ Essay

. . Anton was also right that Trump’s top issues — border security, international trade, and endless foreign wars — were broadly popular and could form the basis of a national renewal. The Biden administration’s gross and dangerous mismanagement of all these issues has vindicated this analysis as well. We’re just two years into Biden’s divisive, lawless, scorched-earth reign, and one already wonders if there will be anything left of our country after two more.

On the flip side, Trump’s platform and four years in office transformed and united the Republican Party. The only people who haven’t figured that out are the people who misread the nation and their own constituents and refused to man up and admit it, forfeiting their credibility to lead. Their cowardice and softness have revealed themselves as more dangerous than Trump’s rudeness and intimidation, and voters are over it.

Riding the center of the maelstrom, Trump’s presidency did change the political winds, in ways Anton couldn’t predict. For one, Trump cracked the right’s tolerance for political correctness, a major victory. We are now free to say, yes, we do want our border secured, and to call that racist is simply unserious and callous to all the women and children trafficked and raped by the cartels. We can say that anti-white racism is also racism, and it’s the right that maintains the strictest zero-tolerance policy on racism.

Trump’s moderate appeal and bull-in-the-China-shop bashing of the racist stigma barrier set the GOP toward becoming a truly multiracial working-class and middle-class coalition party. The amplified media propaganda machine and woke incest between big business and government has prompted a deep and wide backlash, alienating normies from the Democrat Party. In this, Trump’s presidency helped people awaken to their true political foes and allies, clarifying what time we are in and who is a talk-only grifter and who’s a legit freedom fighter.

Anton also couldn’t account for Covid opening so many people’s eyes — except many among self-appointed conservative “leadership,” who acquiesced instead of fighting for actual constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, free speech, and not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”! They left resisting the communists to ordinary citizens, such as the few Democrat lawyers who still believe in civil rights, apolitical doctors who formed impressive new messaging and policy coalitions, and mom bloggers with kids banned from school.

We don’t need the right’s Monday morning armchair quarterbacks to do anything but get out of the way as Ben Sasse did. . . .

Read Ms. Pullman’s full column here.  It’s one to bookmark.

# # #

Another reason to hold off on EVs

 

Bob Hoge at RedState reports:

Oops, Electric Vehicles Are Exploding
After Water Damage from Hurricane Ian

President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg all want you to buy electric vehicles in the future, with Newsom even aiming to ban gas-powered cars by 2035. Just be prepared that your new automobile might explode if the battery gets too wet.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer & State Fire Marshal, tweeted Thursday:

There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start. That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.  

Video and lots more from RedState at the link here.

PS Memo to self: Trump rally tomorrow in Arizona;  Trump scheduled to speak at 4pm Mountain Time / 6pm Eastern Time.  

# # #

An Elegy for the FBI

 

George Parry is a former "federal Organized Crime Strike Force lawyer, a unit chief in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and a special organized crime prosecutor in central Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s." His blog "An Elegy for the FBI" at Knowledge is Good was cross-posted at the American Spectator.  Here's some of it:

. . . It’s quite remarkable to watch a once revered and legendary organization metaphorically slit its own throat in public. But that’s exactly what happened when the FBI raided President Donald Trump’s Florida home purportedly to retrieve official Trump administration documents.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the search warrant cited the Presidential Records Act and possible illegal handling of classified information and that the raid came two months after Justice Department lawyers visited Mar-a-Lago “seeking more information about potentially sensitive material that had been taken there from the White House.” 

But if document retrieval was truly the goal, why didn’t the FBI obtain and serve a subpoena duces tecum instead of resorting to a gangbusters-style ransacking of Trump’s home? After months of discussions with the president’s lawyers, during which they voluntarily handed over 15 boxes of presidential documents to the National Archives, was there some reason to believe that a raid was necessary to prevent the destruction of what remained at Mar-a-Lago?

. . .

There are many more such examples that amply demonstrate that the FBI has been reduced to being the armed muscle and praetorian guard of the Democrat Party. But, while all of that is bad enough, the FBI’s ill-conceived raid on the home of a former president who also happens to be the leading political opponent of the bureau’s masters in the Biden regime, is a historic, hideous, and radical abuse of its law enforcement authority that has obliterated the bureau’s relationship with a vast swath of the American public. To those citizens, the bureau’s agents are no longer regarded as the respected and stalwart G-Men of legend. They are now widely and justifiably mocked and dismissed as the Stasi, Gestapo, KGB, secret police, and banana republic thugs for hire. 

Thanks to the raid of Trump’s home, the FBI is not only faced with having lost the confidence and cooperation of almost half of America. It has also transformed itself into a despised moral leper colony — a painted, hagged out, repellent, and whorish mockery of what it used to be. . . .

Much more at the link here.  Irreversible damage.

# # #

October : Halloween preview

Seen around the blogosphere:

# # #

Planet Earth: Down the Drain?

 

Ed Brodow isn’t too optimistic, either; his title is “Running the World into the Ground”.  Here are the first few paragraphs at American Thinker:

The actions of the people who are in charge of governments are supposed to benefit the countries they serve -- in theory, at least. In practice, the opposite is true. In the West, our leaders are destroying everything they can get their hands on.

This is certainly an apt description of the Biden/Harris administration. They inherited a healthy country from President Trump. The economy was taking off, inflation was practically nonexistent, the U.S. was energy independent for the first time in decades, and the border was closed. So what did Biden do? He immediately set out to reverse everything Trump achieved.

Who can claim to be better off under Biden? The economy has tanked, inflation is at a 40-year high, people can’t afford to heat their homes or fill up their cars with gas, crime statistics are off the charts, and confidence in America is at an all-time low. Biden’s open-border policy, which is opposed by a majority of American citizens, is leading to social unrest and economic chaos. A country without a functioning border is not a country, yet that is where Biden has taken us.

America is marching toward totalitarianism as Biden empowers the DoJ and FBI to go after his political opponents, i.e., at least half of the population. His worst offense, however, is following the climate dictates of the World Economic Forum. Biden is torpedoing the robust U.S. economy in service of a totally false assumption -- that human beings are able to change the planet’s climate. He is raising taxes so that billions of your dollars can be wasted on ridiculous anti-fossil fuel projects.

Biden has declared war on the energy industry in the name of global warming. He wants us to believe that oil, gas, and coal are killing the planet. What is the result of his climate policy so far? “Harvesting of fuel was cut back drastically,” explained Bill O’Reilly, “and that caused the price of oil worldwide to rise, and that caused the price of gas at the pump to rise, and that lit inflation, as all other goods went up in price as well because they are trucked in to the stores and businesses. That is all on President Biden.”

First, human beings are incapable of controlling the climate, which operates in cycles and always has since the planet was created. Second, our economy is dependent on fossil fuels, and -- contrary to the lies fed by the administration -- fossil fuel alternatives do not exist, and will not exist in the foreseeable future. . . .

Read the rest here.  Mr Brodow ends on the hopeful note that the next two elections in the U.S. will reflect the wishes of the voters.  Fingers crossed.

# # #

Biden’s "House of Horrors" speech

 

Image via Conservative Treehouse:  Albert Speer would have been proud.

"Biden's malodorous speech on Thursday, bathed in communist red light, was bloodcurdling in its ramifications.  His contempt for at least seventy-five million Americans was disgraceful.  The man is suffering from cognitive decline and is striking out at his political opponents in furious anger.  All of his accusations about "MAGA Republicans" are true of his party, of himself; the speech was a grand exercise in projection and gaslighting."   -- Patricia McCarthy at American Thinker

For President Trump’s reaction, click here. 

For Sundance on the optics: click here.

For Issues & Insights Board editorial: click here 

Most networks didn’t broadcast his speech.

# # #

Biden Takes On the Soul of the Nation ~ UPDATED

 

A F Branco cartoon

So pResident Biden will be delivering his “Soul of the Nation” speech Thursday, Sept 1 in primetime - 8pm. I found J. Robert Smith’s preview of this evening’s speech at American Thinker here.  But I have not yet found the speech itself scheduled in the TV listings. 

I would put this speech in my Must Miss category, but if I find that Mr Vodkapundit is going to Drunkblog it live, I’ll add a link later today.  Otherwise, I’ll look for commentary online to share after the speech.

UPDATE:  It’s being broadcast on C-Span.  As of 7:40pm, no sign of Drunkblogging at PJ Media.  ... As of 8pm, still no sign of Drunkblogging at PJ Media.  Apparently, no vodka is strong enough.

UPDATE 2 as of 7:45pm:  Sundance has posted livestream links here.  

# # #

The endgame is one-party rule

Democrats Are Lying and Everyone Knows It

Well, not everyone.  Here’s part of Stephen Kruiser’s column from yesterday at PJ Media:

. . . Let us begin with a point of clarification. I am well aware that we live in a representative republic and not a democracy, but I’ll be using the latter description because that’s what is being employed in the false narrative I’d like to pick apart.

. . .

The assault on democracy that the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are carrying on about is very much in progress, but it’s coming from them. They are waging a full-scale ideological war on anyone who doesn’t agree with their increasingly commie policies. Make no mistake about this: their endgame is one-party rule in the United States of America.

. . .

The laundry list of things they lie about grows every day and has done so at a greater pace since Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Russia collusion. J6 was an insurrection. The 2020 presidential election was one of the cleanest ever. Republican efforts to shore up election integrity are racist.

On it goes.

Of course, Democrats’ false narratives don’t become narratives without the corrupt corporate mainstream media aiding and abetting them. 

. . .

Read the full column here.

# # #

The Redacted Affidavit

The Babylon Bee has obtained a partially unredacted page of the FBI’s affidavit justifying the raid on Mar-a-Lago:

click to embiggen

# # #

Sundance’s preview of the midterms

 

This blog recently linked to Sundance’s overview of the Uniparty; click here.

Unfortunately, once you see the strings on the UniParty club marionettes, you can never return to that moment in time when you did not see them.

I continue to link to Sundance at Conservative Treehouse to encourage more readers to see those marionette strings.  Sundance is my go-to source for analyses on the Uniparty machinations, and he is beginning his previews of the midterms:

Long before President Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago was raided, both political clubs in DC appear to have developed a map to stop the voters from interfering in the DC business model.  Always remember, the color of the flag atop the dome matters not, the provided indulgences underneath the dome do not change.  Destroying the populist movement known currently as the MAGA base, formerly the Tea Party, is as much a goal for the red club as it is the blue club.

Shortly before August 8, 2022, club agreements were made, prior strategies within the DNC and RNC wings were triggered, and events began unfolding according to the script. In the aftermath of the raid the club’s narrative engineers now begin to finish setting the stage.  “Democracy is at risk” because of this populist uprising. 

… But it’s not the polling per se’ that people should be paying attention to. Instead, it’s the overarching national midterm election narrative being created.  There’s a vulgarian hoard out there creating all of this angst and trepidation you are feeling. Voters are going to have to decide if they want instability (an election outcome against the interests of Washington DC), or stability (an election outcome congruent with the interest of Washington DC).

This is how the abuser system works.  If you leave, you have no idea what might happen next; however, if you stay, you have the benefit of familiarity.  Even though the abuse is painful (‘we’re on the wrong track), at least it is consistent and predictable.  Skilled abusers leverage psychological resignation.

You might scoff at the metaphor, but on a larger national dynamic that’s our reality. . . .

Read the entire analysis here.

# # #

The Melting Pot is Boiling Over

A.F. Branco at his best, via Townhall:

# # #

Cashless & Jobs memes

 Two memes seen at Bookworm Room: 

and . . .

# # #

The Weaponization of Justice

 

Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics takes another look at the FBI: 

Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.

. . .

Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.

This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.

Essentially what the FBI was saying is “We know where you live, and we aren’t afraid to come for you.” They even rifled through Melania Trump’s closet, as if she might have been hiding top-secret documents in her hat box. When do we find out they also spent an hour sorting through her lingerie?

This is sickening, no matter how much MSNBC and the Washington Post want you to think you can still trust the FBI. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over again, and I must be a Democrat.

Read the full column here.

# # #

Neil Oliver: Trusting Authority

Below is the closing part of the transcript from Neil Oliver’s latest contemplation.  Usual thanks to Sundance for posting it at Conservative Treehouse.

. . . Rather than dismiss as yet another conspiracy theory the idea of cash being ultimately replaced with transactions based on the exchange of what amount to glorified food stamps that will only be accepted if our social credit score demonstrates that we’ve been obedient girls or boys … how about taking the leap and focusing on the blatantly obvious … that if we are not free to buy whatever and whenever we please, free of the surveillance and snooping of governments and the banks that run them, then we have absolutely no freedom at all.

And while we’re on the subject of money and banks, why not pause to notice something else that is glaringly obvious – which is to say that the currencies of the West are teetering on the abyss, and that one bank after another is revealed, to those who are bothering to watch, as being as close to bankruptcy as is possible to be without actually falling over the edge.

Then there’s the so-called vaccines for Covid – I deliberately say “so-called” because by now it should be clear to all but the willfully blind that those injections do not work as advertised. You can still contract the virus, still transmit the virus, still get sick and still die. Denmark has dropped their use on under-18s. All across the world, every day, more evidence emerges – however grudgingly, however much the various complicit authorities and Big-Pharma companies might hate to admit it – of countless deaths and injuries caused by those medical procedures.

And yet here in Britain and just about everywhere else, governments continue to try and get those needles into as many arms as possible, even the arms of the smallest and youngest. The ripe stink of corruption is everywhere. I trusted authority for most of my life.

Now I ask myself on a daily basis how I ignored the stench for so long. Across the Atlantic, the Biden White House sent the FBI to raid the home of former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden and his son Hunter – he of the laptop full of the most appalling and incriminating content – fly together on Airforce 1. No raids planned on the Obamas, nor on the Clintons. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and onwards to China. Her son Paul, an investor in a Chinese tech firm and with seats on the board of companies dealing in lithium, was along for the ride, into that part of the world where three quarters of the world’s lithium batteries are made. Taiwan leads in that technology.

It is hard to think the unthinkable. It’s hard to think that all of it, all the misery, all the suffering of the past and to come might just be about money, greed and power. It is hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool and taken for a ride. It’s hard, but the view from the other side is worth the effort and the pain. Open your eyes and see. 

Read the full transcript (or watch the video) here.

# # #

Steyn: More on Our Banana Republic

 

Ben Garrison cartoon via NewsAmmo

The inimitable Mark Steyn published his “Criminalizing Opposition in a Pseudo-Republic” column yesterday about the FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago.  And as always, Mark has some historical perspective on this latest action by a corrupt DOJ & FBI:

For almost a decade and a half now, the American "republic" has been decaying to the defining condition of a one-party state - that is, the total merger of the ruling party and the state. Last night, the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US Department of Justice signed off on a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so we've now moved into hardcore banana-republic territory: the regime's cops are busting into the home of the opposition leader. We're told this is because Trump took some "classified" documents with him when he left Washington. Yeah, that's always a pretext for an armed raid: You could ask Hillary Clinton or Sandy Berger.

. . .

I see Kevin McCarthy is now threatening Merrick Garland with an "investigation" and ordering him to preserve all documents. Ooooooh! Maybe, after the coming Republican landslide, they can appoint an independent counsel; maybe John Durham or Robert Mueller is available. Why would anyone take McCarthy's threat seriously? If you don't grasp that in today's America there is no equality before the law, there is no point even discussing public affairs.

. . ..

If that's the best McCarthy can do, it's hopelessly insufficient to the moment: There ought to be total non-cooperation with the regime by the GOP with the intent of bringing it to a standstill - because this "administration has gone way beyond politics and is corrupting institutions to a degree that will make violence inevitable.

Oh, but don't worry, says McCarthy, there's that Big Red Wave coming in November.

Yeah, right. A throwaway line from The Mark Steyn Show of December 15th 2020:

By the way, when they mention Covid and 2022, that's code for: 'Yeah the US midterms are gonna get stolen too.'

Read Mark’s full column here.  Recommended.

# # #

Our Banana Republic

 

image credit: politicaltilt.com

The blogosphere is full of reports and commentary on the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence Mar-A-Lago, but Robert Spencer’s column atFrontPageMag is the one I am linking to today.  Mr. Spencer begins:  

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal.

. . .

This is no longer a republic, except of the banana variety. It may be a republic again someday, but for now, the great American experiment is over. Born July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, died August 8, 2022, in Mar-A-Lago, at the hands of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Christopher Wray.

Read the rest here.  President Trump’s announcement is on most websites, including here.  

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