Category: Uncategorized
Alt★Hero #1 now on Amazon
Alt★Hero #1: Crackdown is now available on Amazon for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.When Captain Europa offers Janelle Jeanneret a recruitment deal she can’t refuse, the French model doesn’t hesitate to sign up with the Global Justice Initiative. After all, they’re providing her with a killer apartment in Brussels, a new outfit, and even a flashy new name, in addition to paying her an awful lot of money… and it’s even tax-free! But is there a catch? And how is a group of superhumans based in Europe going to go about establishing global justice anyway?
Alt★Hero is the first in an exciting new line of superhero comics from Arkhaven Comics.
We anticipate getting the French, Italian, and German digital editions out next week, after they go out to the backers. The Comixology edition should be the week following, with the limited edition gold logo print editions being published the week after that. The foreign language editions will also be published in print.
From the early reviews:
- The only thing missing is a Charles Atlas-style ad in the back. Can’t wait until Issue 2.
- It feels like GI Joe meets the Justice League. It was an enjoyable read that simply left me wanting to read the next installment. The character dialogue was top notch.
- It has a sharp, crisp story that sets the stage for some future stories, provides some good background on some characters, and establishes this series as one to keep an eye on.
- The world is a big place, and you need to actually understand other cultures and how geopolitics works in order to portray that diversity properly. Which explains why modern comics writers are usually so hopelessly out of their depth. This team isn’t.
- This is a fantastic start… It very much reminded me of the old Iron Man and Thor comics of the 80s I loved as a kid.
- Unique characters with incredible powers but very human attitudes in an interesting and unexpected story. And surprisingly funny!
- Great Heroes, great story, great value. This already returned my basic backing amount.
The Leopard and the Chickenhawk
A partial transcript of the Darkstream: Ben Shapiro is a Swamp Creature
Something very significant has just happened, something with global ramifications has just happened, and what that is is that the United States has finally lost its perceived moral superiority. It has lost the perceived moral high ground that it possessed for most of the last 50 or 60 years.
We’ve been arguing for decades that the US system is better than the Chinese system, that it’s better than the Soviet Union, that it’s better than the other competing systems, in fact, that’s where Francis Fukuyama came up with this idea of the End of History. Because what the End of History meant is that the neo-liberal world order had triumphed finally, once and for all. Now, we know that’s not true, Fukuyama himself has been backtracking on on that just because he wants to maintain his intellectual credibility, but what we’re seeing is that the United States system is just as corrupt as everywhere else.
You know I was reading a book called Il Gattopardo by an Italian writer and it’s a fascinating book because the author was a member of the Italian aristocracy himself, although he was writing about his grandfather who was a member of the Sicilian royal house, and what was fascinating to me, and what was very significant is the way that the unification vote in Sicily completely destroyed the faith of the Sicilian people of this particular town in the system because the guy who was conducting the vote falsified it. It was the very first chance they had to vote, they were voting on the unification of Italy which is called the Risorgimento, and all the different towns and and principalities and so forth were given the opportunity to vote on unification. In that town, the vote was reported as unanimous even though a number of people voted no, and knew they voted no. And the prince is talking to his gamesman, who admitted that he had voted no, and the prince realizes that through that act of faithlessness, through that act of corruption, through that desire to present a united, unanimous front, the people conducting the vote had rendered the entire process corrupt and false.
And that’s exactly what has happened with the revelations that the FBI was using the swamp creature Stefan Halper to interfere with the most recent presidential election, to interfere in the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But the damning thing the thing that is going to do, and is currently doing so much international damage are the revelations that Halper has been engaged in this activity since the Carter Administration.
This is the passage from Il Gattopardo, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, to which I referred with regards to the false reporting of the vote that took place in Donnafugata, and was reported by Don Calogero Sedara as 512 Yes, 0 No. Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, smells a rat despite having voted yes to unification himself, and asks his ferociously loyal attendant, Don Ciccio, how he voted.
The cool air had dispersed Don Ciccio’s somnolence and the massive grandeur of the Prince dispelled his fears; now all that remained afloat on the surface of Don Ciccio’s conscience was resentment, useless of course but not ignoble. He stood there, spoke in dialect, and gesticulated, a pathetic puppet who in some absurd way was right.
“I, Excellency, voted ‘no.’ ‘No,’ a hundred times ‘no.’ I know what you told me: necessity, unity, expediency. You may be right; I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes” (and he slapped the carefully mended patches in his shooting breeches), “and I don’t forget favors done me! Those swine in the Town Hall just swallowed up my opinion, chewed it, and then spat it out transformed as they wanted. I said black and they made me say white! The one time when I could say what I thought, that bloodsucker Sedara went and annulled it, behaved as if I never existed, as if I never meant a thing! I, Francesco Tumeo La Manna, son of Leonardo, organist of the Mother Church at Donnafugata, a better man than he is! To think I’d even dedicated to him a mazurka I composed at the birth of that . . .” (he bit his thumb to rein himself in), “that mincing daughter of his! “
At this point calm descended on Don Fabrizio, who had finally solved the enigma; now he knew who had been killed at Donnafugata, at a hundred other places, in the course of that night of dirty wind: a new-born babe: good faith; just the very child who should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms. Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “nos” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided.
Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, “Do what I say or you’ll catch it!” Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the I.O.U.s; your will is identical with mine.”
Don Fabrizio had always liked Don Ciccio, partly because of the compassion inspired in him by all who from youth had thought of themselves as dedicated to the arts, and in old age, realizing they had no talent, still carried on the same activity at lower levels, pocketing withered dreams; and he was also touched by the dignity of his poverty. But now he also felt a kind of admiration for him, and deep down at the very bottom of his proud conscience a voice was asking if Don Ciccio had not perhaps behaved more nobly than the Prince of Salina. And the Sedaras, all the various Sedaras, from the petty one who violated figures at Donnafugata to the major ones at Palermo and Turin, had they not committed a crime by choking such consciences?
Don Fabrizio could not know it then, but a great deal of the slackness and acquiescence for which the people of the South were to be criticized during the next decades was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them.
A perfidious Swampling
I told you Benny Shapiro was a) a made man and b) bad news. Believe it or not, he’s now openly defending the Deep State’s shocking interference with the U.S. electoral system:
Ben Shapiro attacked the President and defended the Deep State spy embedded in Trump’s campaign.
Shapiro tweeted: Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him?
Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him? https://t.co/hj3AsSuHCk
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018Shapiro slammed Trump again saying the FBI would have been remiss not to investigate.
Several things can be true at once:
1. There was no collusion.
2. There was willingness to collude by Papadapolous, Trump Jr., and possibly Manafort.
3. FBI would have been remiss not to investigate, even if it eventually came up empty.
4. Post-election leaks are scandalous.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018Ben Shapiro is defending the FBI informant who used cash to entice Papadopoulos to London. Ben Shapiro is defending Obama’s FBI even though they were spying on Trump before they opened the investigation.
As appalling as it is, Shapiro’s reaction is more than a little informative. Given the way in which his only consistent guiding principle is what he believes to be beneficial for his particular identity group, this defensive reaction gives us some idea of who Shapiro believes to be behind the very interference he is defending. That does not, of course, mean that he is correct.
It does, however, indicate that Shapiro is very likely a Swamp creature himself. That’s the connection that many people have failed to grasp: NeverTrump is a creation of the Swamp. It was a last-ditch attempt to derail what they were too late to realize was a threat. That is why all those self-proclaimed “principled conservatives” still refuse to support Trump despite all of his objectively conservative accomplishments. Trump is their enemy and they know it, even though most of the President’s supporters don’t.
This recent expansion of the special counsel’s investigation may help explain Swampy Shapiro’s bizarre outburst.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is looking more closely into Middle Eastern involvement during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as it is now exploring the role of an Israeli entrepreneur with ties to a Gulf monarchy, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Mueller has been conducting interviews about the work of Joel Zamel, an Australia-born Israeli businessman with experience in social media and intelligence gathering. Mr. Zamel is the founder of several private consulting firms—including a crowdsourced analysis firm called Wikistrat as well as the Psy Group, a secretive private intelligence firm with the motto “shape reality.”
UPDATE: The DOJ has just complied with the President’s public demand:
“The Department has asked the Inspector General to expand the ongoing review of the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application process to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation of persons suspected of involvement with the Russian agents who interfered in the 2016 presidential election. As always, the Inspector General will consult with the appropriate U.S. Attorney if there is any evidence of potential criminal conduct,” DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told Fox News.
UPDATE: Swamplings of a feather flock together.
Great chat between @benshapiro and @JonahNRO and I’m only tweeting this because as Jonah mentions, “In ten years we’re all going to be working for Ben.”
Only because no one else will have any need to employ dishonest, talent-free fake Right media whores.
UPDATE: Yes, Jonah Goldberg is a confirmed Swampling.
On another front, the great fight to prove that either President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election or that the “Deep State” conspired to in effect frame the president is really just an ugly contest of two groups of storytellers desperate to definitively print the legend — their legend.
SCARE QUOTES MEANS IT ISN’T TRUE!
The swamp, she is draining
Events appear to be moving forward at last. The God-Emperor has tweeted:
I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!
Let the signed executive orders flow like a mighty river.
Excerpt: Battlesuit Bastards
If you like military science fiction, or enjoy the world of Quantum Mortis, you really have to start reading Wardogs Incorporated. Book Three will be out before too long, so you should have time to read the first two if you haven’t already.
Our other patrols were back and casualty-free. Jock gathered us quickly. “They tracked the drop, boys. They know we’re here, they know we need this. And they have at least one tank. Open these containers as fast as you can and search for anything we can use to blow it to hell.”
“We’re going to need a crowbar,” Four-eyes said, using the word as if he’d always known it. I was already rifling through the toolbox in my jeep. I came out with a long screwdriver and a hammer. Jock grabbed the same, we raced to the first container and I started working at the thing. It had a lock of some sort that was supposed to be opened by some special tool. After a minute, I realized the hammer/screwdriver combo wasn’t going to cut it.
“Clear out,” I yelled, then fired a round into the lock. Still stuck. Then again. I hated doing that because of the ricochets. The third round cracked the lock and I pried with the screwdriver as Ward and Jones pulled at the door. It let go, almost throwing us on the ground, and we were greeted with a flood of packing peanuts. Brushing them away I got to the cardboard and shrink-wrap covered boxes inside, then cut into the first one with my bayonet. A spurt of red startled me until I smelled tomato. Great. More lasagna.
“Next!” I yelled, and we started on the next container. POW POW—two shots this time, then prying it open, then another flood of packing peanuts. “Come on, Four-eyes,” I said, throwing them away in fistfuls, “you really sure you don’t know what’s in these?”
“No,” he said. “I got weights but not contents. That last one could have been one long gun or ten thousand blankets.”
“Or a restaurant shipment,” I said, as I cut into the first box I could reach. This one opened without damage and I hit something metal, and cut around it and got my hand into the dark box and around a cylinder. I pulled it out. It had a picture on the side. Loquats in syrup.
I threw it down and went to the next container, which was already being opened by Jones and Ward.
“Hey!” yelled Jock. “We got some ammo over here!”
“Great,” I yelled back. “RPGs?”
“Negative,” he said. “Small arms.”
“Then we have to keep–” Four-eyes said, then suddenly fell to the ground as I simultaneously heard the crack of a rifle. I hit the ground hard and heard the rattle of answering fire from behind another container. I didn’t see the sniper—but I saw the pool of blood under Four-eyes and swore—he was already dead. Right in the neck. GODDAMMIT!
Ping-CRACK! I heard another bullet hit the container before the crack of the report. I sent a burst of fire up the field but still saw no-one. More answering fire rattled in my ears. Blood was rushing to my head as I went into the red zone—that madness you get under fire. Things slowed down as I spotted Ace behind the next container, rifle pointed over my head. He waved me in, and I ran in a crouch and hunkered down beside him.
“Ace,” I said, “you good?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking through his sight, rifle propped on his good knee. “I ain’t moving, so they’d better get in sight. Yes… okay… there you go… right–” CRACK! He sent a round and I saw a man jump up in the grass, then fall again.
“That might be it,” he said. “For the moment.”
“Stay here and snipe,” I said. All I could think about was hitting back. “I’m cracking cargo. Where did Leighton go?”
“TOMMY!” yelled Jock, “Over here!”
I ran three containers over to where he was pulling out a large wooden crate with Park’s help. A bullet whizzed overhead. Park sent a burst of fire back as Jock and I ripped off the lid.
“Whoa,” I said, realizing the interior of the box had multiple smaller boxes inside carefully nested in foam. I picked one up—it was really heavy. “What the devil are these?”
“Oh shit,” said Jock. “There are nuke shells. Lead-lined cases—made for a howitzer.”
“What the hell–” I said, then two more bullets hit the ground in front of me.
“Next container,” Jock yelled as we hit the ground and started crawling. “We can’t launch those things anyhow.”
Just as we got to the next container, there was a massive THUMP! and a crackling explosion of breaking glass and metal. I looked back—NO! MY JEEP!
A tank had crested the hill and blown up my goddamn jeep! Now I was pissed. I opened up with my rifle at the tank.
“Save your damn ammo!” Jock yelled at me.
“My JEEP!” I yelled back. “He blew up my goddam jeep!”
“Shut the hell up,” Jock said, then yelled to the rest of the guys. “Back—get back! Tank incoming!”
THUMP-CRACK! A shell hit one of the containers near me, sending a massive splash of liquid up into the air. I suddenly smelled apples. Apple juice. Great.
“Get to the woods!” Jock yelled. Howland was hauling Ace by one arm. I grabbed the other and we hauled it towards the woods, half carrying our pilot.
The other guys were winging rounds back but I was too encumbered to use my rifle. 50 meters… 40… meters… THUMP! A shell hit near us and threw us on the ground. Ace yelled in pain and I felt the sting of hot metal go into my right arm and neck. My ears were ringing. 35 meters to the woods. I pulled Ace up and Howland started to rise, then fell back to the ground and looked at me with a surprised expression as foam and blood poured from his mouth.
“Howland!” I yelled, letting go of Ace and putting my hand on him. He looked up at me and said something that came out as a bubbling hiss, then his eyes went blank and a final breath rattled from his throat. He was gone—and I saw why, his jacket was soaked with blood. Chest hit.
“Dammit!” Ace yelled. “We gotta move!”
I grabbed his arm but as we got up, THUMP! Another shell hit, knocking me on my ass. I looked back. Two tanks closing in, and at least a squad of guys coming over the top behind them. They’d spotted us and were closing in. “Come on!” I yelled, grabbing Ace and speeding him towards the woods. 20 meters, 10 meters—THUMP—CRACK! A tree in front of us blew into toothpicks, showering us with chips of wood as we closed in—and then were were in the woods. Ward grabbed Ace’s other arm as we went further in. The woods were way too thin for my liking. Mostly regrowth with lots of space in between cover.
“Over here!” Jock yelled. “Another container!”
There, half hung up in a tree was another container. Jock blew the lock off and we started yanking out packaging. Medical supplies and linens. DAMMIT!
Bullets zipped over us and leaves fell from the trees. The tanks had stopped for the moment, but I knew we were going to be joined by Corwistalians in a moment.
Jock nodded at Park and he went up a tree to watch the mottled light at the entrance to the woods. I didn’t see Jones anywhere.
I heard more gunfire behind us and whipped around. I couldn’t see anything, but Jock tagged my arm and I went back to look.
As I tip-toed, I heard a grunt from a little ways ahead, then a “Eureka!”
“Jones!” I yelled.
“Falkland—get over here!”
He’d found another container and busted it open. “Here’s the ticket!” he said, thumping the side of a long case. “120mm mortar!”
“Run,” I said to Jones. “Get the rest of the guys.”
He ran back. I heard the rattling of guns off in the distance as I dug around for a crate of rounds.
A moment later, Jones was back, along with Jock. “Park and Ace are coming,” Jock said, grabbing one end of a crate and throwing it out of the way. A bullet whizzed past us but we didn’t dare shoot back, knowing our guys were still coming. I found a box of rounds and thanked Ares for his provision.
Park and Ace came up and Park dropped Ace next to a tree and lent his shoulder to the effort. As I pushed, I saw blood on the sleeve of my jacket. Shrapnel. Don’t bleed to death now, I told myself as I pulled out rounds. I could hear the tank engines now. Way too close! “How the hell are we supposed to hit guys this close with a mortar?”
“Horizontal fire,” Ace yelled, pain on his face. “Jam the baseplate against a tree or something, then throw the shell down the tube.”’
“I swear, if the bad guys don’t kill us you guys will,” Jock said.
The corruption of the neo-liberal world order
The importance of the revelations concerning the Deep State’s involvement in directly manipulating US democracy for the last 38 years is going to have global repercussions, even if absolutely nothing comes of it in the USA itself. I addressed these recent revelations about Stefan Harper’s interference in the presidential elections in a Darkstream.
I’ve always been very cynical about US politics, but the thing that is amazing is that I wasn’t anywhere nearly cynical enough. It was it was just astonishing to me to read these revelations of what Stefan Harper has been doing since the 1980 elections. I mean this is absolutely and utterly remarkable, and you know, a lot of people are pessimistic that anything’s going to happen. A lot of people are saying “oh well what difference does it make now that we know, what is anyone going to do about this?” but the reality is that it is bringing the end of the neo-liberal world order closer.
The neo-liberal world order has already failed. Even people who were part of constructing it, and people who are true believers in it, people like Henry Kissinger, they know this. I mean, when you’ve got people like Francis Fukuyama, who was a firm and strong believer in the neo-liberal world order and he famously pronounced “the End of History”. Not fifteen years later, he’s been desperately trying to walk back his words and claim that that he meant something other than than his actual meaning and so forth because it is so readily apparent to everyone that the neo-liberal world order is failing.
But what we’re seeing here is that in addition to it failing, people are increasingly unable to even believe in the false front that it presents, and so it’s really, really remarkable to see how much this has changed, how much people’s perceptions have changed, not just in the United States, but around the world. Think about what this is doing in Russia, think about what this is doing in China, even more importantly, think about what this is doing in all the countries like Indonesia, in countries like Korea, in countries that are currently making decisions about which way they are going to go.
Defend the Right
Jon Del Arroz explains why it is wrong for those on the Right to attack Right-wing creators:
I will not attack fellow creators on the right ever. We’re already under immense pressure from above. We’re being banned from conventions en masse. We’re being blacklisted from publishers by threats from industry professionals. There’s no way you can ever get me to talk smack about someone who’s struggling as an independent to create art and make it against these insurmountable odds.
Every time you do it, you are holding our movement down.
I know it sounds counter intuitive, as the media will lambast Person X and make them look really bad! If only we had respectable creators, well then they couldn’t lambast and that’s what we need, right?
It’s wrong. No one on our side is respectable to their media machine or legion of groupthinkers. No one is even HUMAN on our side according to them. So what if we have some ideological differences? So what if the artistic project isn’t my cup of tea? It’s not like it’s some giant corporate promoted propaganda, it’s an independent person doing it on their time, taking enormous risk.
I’m only here to lift up the movement. I don’t care about disagreeing with someone on minor matters, I don’t even care if I love the product they put out. There’s personal reasons their product is done the way they want — that’s what art is all about. Sometimes there’s financial reasons that it looks or feels a certain way as well.
So I urge you, if you don’t like a book or whatnot or someone on our side, don’t say anything.That’s the best you can do. You’re not obliged to promote everything, but don’t squash this movement in its infancy.
I absolutely agree. Look at how the Left does it. They unstintingly praise even the most shoddy, error-filled nonsense as brilliant works of genius. Look at how the Fake Right does it; you need only read the recent reviews of Jonah Goldberg’s eminently forgettable new book by all the neocons hailing it as “a new conservative classic” and praising it to the skies.
They do this because it works. Hell, look at how most of you genuinely believed – and some of you still believe – that Jordan Peterson is a brilliant and important intellectual on the basis of nothing more than an extensive public relations campaign that began back in 2004 at Wodek Szemberg’s house.
Now, you might ask how I can reasonably endorse Jon Del Arroz’s policy when I have so publicly criticized Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Anglin, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, and others. The answer is very simple: they are neither creators nor are they genuine men of the Right.
People repeatedly ask me to denounce, disavow, or otherwise attack men like Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, and other men of the Right on the basis of our various philosophical and ideological disagreements. Don’t even bother. It’s not going to happen. Because I support what they are doing even though I don’t agree with them on everything.
FBI spy ID’d
The mysterious professor who spied on the Trump campaign for the FBI is identified:
In mid-July 2016, a retired American professor approached an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.
The professor took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Carter Page, whom Trump had named a few months earlier as a foreign policy adviser.
But the professor was more than an academic interested in American politics — he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source. And, at some point in 2016, he began working as a secret informant for the FBI as it investigated Russia’s interference in the campaign, according to people familiar with his activities.
The role played by the source is now at the center of a battle that has pitted President Trump against his own Justice Department and fueled the president’s attacks on the special counsel’s investigation. In a Thursday tweet, he called the probe “a disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt.”
In recent days, Trump and his allies have escalated their claims that the FBI source improperly spied on the campaign.
“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” he tweeted Friday. “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”
There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign. The source in question engaged in a months-long pattern of seeking out and meeting three different Trump campaign officials.
The Washington Post — after speaking with people familiar with his role — has confirmed the identity of the FBI source who assisted the investigation, but is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.
The source declined multiple requests for comment. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.
Page was one of three Trump advisers whom the FBI informant contacted in the summer and fall of 2016 for brief talks and meetings that largely centered on foreign policy, according to people familiar with the encounters.
“There has been some speculation that he might have tried to reel me in,” Page, who had numerous encounters with the informant, told The Post in an interview. “At the time, I never had any such impression.”
In late summer, the professor met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis for coffee in Northern Virginia, offering to provide foreign-policy expertise to the Trump effort. In September, he reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper.
It wasn’t too hard to work out this “secret FBI source” thanks to a Daily Caller article linked on Drudge directly below the Washington Post piece.
Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.
The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.
Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
The Washington Post’s feeble attempt to spin this is particularly amusing when it goes to the trouble to underline, “There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign.” They can’t even name the guy, but they are certain that no evidence concerning the nature of his involvement with the Trump campaign will be found?
Anyhow, Stefan Halper is a card-carrying neocon and Deep State operative. This is a MUCH bigger deal than Watergate ever was, and indicates that a serious fumigation of the FBI and other federal agencies is in order.
UPDATE: Holy cats, there is NO WAY this guy’s actions were even remotely innocent.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Should have known better
Last year I made an exception to my “do not talk to the media” policy when a journalist who contributes to Rolling Stone and has a history of writing relatively fair and substantive stories contacted me about doing a story on Castalia House. We arranged to meet for lunch, and the interview was a reasonably free-ranging one that was not indicative of the usual “bad person du jour” hit piece. So, I felt that it went pretty well and that it would not be a repeat of the usual “isn’t it terrible that you are such an unrepentant badthinker” narrative.
Spacebunny, of course, knew better. I should have listened to her when she told me to just ignore this request like all the others.
Last week, the same journalist went to visit Chuck Dixon in the company of another journalist, who turned out to be Al Letson, the host of Reveal, a public radio program and podcast showcasing investigative stories. They were not particularly interested in talking to Chuck about Arkhaven, about his books, about the comics industry, about how he “broke the Bat”, or about the fact that he is an industry legend, the most prolific comics writer of all time, who has been openly blackballed by Marvel. Instead, they were primarily interested in playing the “you’re really a bad person, aren’t you” prosecutorial game in support of the usual disqualify-and-discredit narrative for a story that is intended to run jointly in Rolling Stone and National Public Radio.
Apparently the straight story on Castalia House didn’t sell, because I received a request for a second interview from them yesterday. I declined the request, and informed them that if they require further support for their tedious narrative, they are certainly welcome to report that I literally feed SJWs to my Vile Faceless Minions and drink SJW blood while sitting on a pile of silvered SJW skulls and watching old newsreels of Mussolini. Let’s face it, that’s more accurate than anything they are likely to “report” now.
So, I will be returning to my previous policy of simply not talking to anyone in the mainstream media. Forget the nonexistent upside, there simply isn’t any point in doing so. One can get the same narrative, more or less, from Wikipedia and RationalWiki, if one so desires. And there is no shortage of books, blog posts, and videos from which one can ascertain my views and quote-mine my words.
Now, here is what may be a useful observation in case you do happen to make the mistake of talking to the media. The journalistic responsibility of a reporter or interviewer is to give you the opportunity to speak for yourself, in your own words. Contrary to what many of them appear to believe, they are not prosecutors or debate antagonists, so the moment that they start “pushing back”, cross-examining, or attempting to argue with you in any way, end the pseudo-interview and send them packing.
If a reporter wishes to publicly debate me as an equal on a level playing field, that’s fine. If a journalist wants review copies of a Castalia House book or an Arkhaven comic book, I’ll be happy to send a digital edition. I can’t prevent them from playing the “bad person du jour” game, but I will not participate in it.