Tag: politics

Was Mar-A-Lago a Trap?

Karl Denninger thinks it might have been:

It has now developed that the Raid at Mar-A-Largo was supported by an affidavit that positively identified both the presence of documents that were retained or taken by Trump in violation of Federal Law and where they were.

The FBI was specifically interested in Trump’s “newer” safe, so presumably that’s where they were told the documents were.

Except…. The safe was empty.

Trump has refused to release the copy of the warrant served on him, which is his right. But let’s take a slanted-eye view of this, which upon learning that very specific information was presented to the Judge immediately came to mind.

Let’s presume Trump believed he had a mole in his organization and he thought he knew who it was. And let’s remember that the DOJ and FBI did screw him with Russiagate, which they knew, it was developed, was bullshit and yet used it to go after him anyway, and even worse, fed it to Congress as Articles of Impeachment. That was an active scam and nobody was prosecuted for it, while if you did the same thing as a false report to them you could and would go to prison for it.

Further, Trump knew the Archivist was sniffing around because they’d contacted him back in February and he turned over a bunch of stuff. Ok.

So let’s put forward the theory that he leaks that he has something particularly juicy, very illegal for him to have retained and its in the safe.

He leaks this to one — and only one — person.

The raid happens.

It’s certainly an intriguing theory. And President Trump is certainly devious enough to have gone along with such a plan. But only time will tell; if the raid is followed up by a world-shocking arrest of him, that would tend to signify a very different situation.

I’m more than a bit dubious myself. What would this accomplish besides unmasking yet another traitor inside Team Trump?

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The Raid on Mar-A-Lago

President Trump announces a federal raid on his personal home:

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. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

The political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years, with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!

Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 E-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable. She even took antique furniture, and other items from the White House.

I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it. Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped.

I will continue to fight for the Great American People!

This is a really bad sign for the continued existence of the United States as a unitary political entity. The primary requirement for the peaceful transition of power is to always permit the previous office-holder effective immunity for his actions in office, however they might be deplored by the office-holder who succeeds him, and to leave him alone.

This federal action is more in line with third-world banana republic tradition, which usually means coups, corruption, and regular government collapses.

And while President Trump was the greatest US President since Andrew Jackson, his courage failed him in the end. Now he’s beginning to learn the price of failing to fight when the situation requires it.

Then again, it was said that “the first arrest will shock the world”….

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Shafting the Citizenry

The US government can’t afford to help Americans, because it’s too busy sending their tax money to foreigners. At this point, even the French Revolutionaries are looking on from Hell and saying, “wow, and here we thought Marie Antoinette didn’t care about the people.”

She may have been indifferent to their hunger, but at least she wasn’t literally shipping French bread to Burkina Faso or Equatorial Guinea.

UPDATE: They’re not just evil, they’re also stupid.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday ratified the entry of Sweden and Finland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with a vote of 95 to 1.

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Incompetent or Irrelevant?

A commenter at Dominick Cummings substack points out something obvious that the UK media, despite the massive coverage it has dedicated to the Conservative Party’s leadership battle, has not even mentioned:

Implied odds from bookmakers

Liz Truss – 75.8%

Rishi Sunak – 23.8%

Seems to be bearing out exactly as anticipated with Sunak popular among MP’s but quite unpopular among party members due to his high taxation, high spending HMT record plus a slice of members feel some loyalty to Boris.

The real contest was always who made the final two with Rishi. Curiously the MP’s never seemed to realise this?

The smart play for any Tory MP’s was to form a small block and support Rishi up to the penultimate round and then switch support as a block to another candidate in exchange for some future power.

But none of them did anything like that, those supporting Rishi assumed he could win the members vote.

It was the Mordaunt / Truss camps arm wrestle over Kemi Badenoch’s supporters that happened last week, that decided the next PM.

Badenoch to Mordaunt is a weird move from right the centre. The more natural switch was Badenoch to Truss. Mordaunt really needed to pick up some of Sunak’s supporters but the Mordaunt camp, nor the Sunak supporters seemed to figure this out.

The delta was 8 MP’s. So a block of ~10 MP’s could have negotiated quite a lot of power for themselves. If they played this contest correctly. But we just don’t see that kind of decentish competence anywhere in contemporary politics, it’s really weird.

Now Sunak gets to lose to Truss instead of Mordaunt. We could speculate that Truss will probably put Sunak to the sword, whereas Mordaunt would probably have had Rishi in government.

Rishi Sunak is the new David Miliband.

Truss is the new PM.

Alarmingly the Conservative Parliamentary party hasn’t got a single competent politician in it, not one, not one MP who can navigate a simple leadership contest by forming a small block and negotiating power.

Incompetence… or irrelevance? I would argue the latter.

Mordaunt was well ahead of everyone in the one-to-one polls, including Truss, until the media began hammering her for her very questionable flip-flops on trannyism. This is why, despite her support for Brexit, the MPs began leaving her in favor of Truss, despite Truss being a lunatic neocon-controlled Remainer.

But how did that happen? WHY did it happen? Because the globalists needed Truss to win and they control the UK media. Mordaunt was the potential danger, because being a fame-whoring, post-ideological populist, she would almost certainly have reduced Britain’s support for the only globalist program that now matters, the war in Ukraine. Losing Britain meant losing Italy, Spain, France, and probably Germany as well, leaving only the USA, Poland, and the Baltics to fight Russia, China, and the rest of the world.

Sunak is a globalist creature through-and-through, but he was never going to win because he’s Indian, he’s not British.

Modern politicians are incompetent – see Creepy Joe Biden – but more importantly, they are entirely irrelevant. This is not merely a post-ideological age, it is a post-political one.

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Boris Johnson to Resign

Another of the many Clown World governments collapses.

Boris Johnson resigns LIVE: PM will QUIT and address the country TODAY after cabinet urged him to ‘go now’ and dozens of Tories fled his sinking government.

The Johnson regime is among the first to fall, but it won’t be the last. And while it’s not because of the UK support of The Empire That Never Ended’s war on the sovereign world, Johnson’s attempt to nail himself to the Ukraine cause certainly didn’t help.

UPDATE: He’s trying to hang on post-resignation until October. What a clown!

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Joe Rogan is a Narrative Puppet

If his Spotify contract wasn’t enough to prove it to you, his recent comments on President Trump should suffice to do so:

Podcaster Joe Rogan has said he will never host ‘threat-to-democracy’ Donald Trump on his podcast despite having been asked multiple times.

During a Monday airing of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan vehemently shut down the possibility of interviewing the 45th President of the United States.

‘I am not a Trump supporter, in any way, shape or form,’ Rogan, 54, said. ‘I have had the opportunity to have him on my show, more than once, and I have said no every time.’

The controversial podcaster weighed in on the devastatingly polarized political spectrum in America and said he was not interested in giving Trump a platform because the former president is an ‘existential threat to democracy itself.’

Donald Trump was, and is, very far from perfect. While I now understand why he didn’t cross the Rubicon after the 2020 election fraud – not much point in doing so when you don’t have the legions with you – I will never understand why he didn’t pardon the January 6th demonstrators. But regardless, he was the greatest US president since Andrew Jackson, and for a pint-sized nobody like Rogan to disrespect him so publicly only underlines what a useless talking hand puppet Rogan is.

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Fake Patriot Front

First, I expressed my opinion on Gab.

Fake and Gay and Fake some more. Patriot Front couldn’t glow any harder if you bathed each and every agent in a nuclear reactor for 24 hours. No one, in the entire history of government enforcement, who has ever been arrested has ever been permitted to keep wearing their hats and sunglasses, much less their masks.

This is pure theatre.

Someone sent me a DM, to which I responded in what everyone here will regard as an entirely predictable manner.

“You should really remove that post about calling Patriot Front feds. You are losing massive support and getting ratio’d remove it and all will be atoned.”

I repeat: Patriot Front is fake. It is OBVIOUSLY fake. It’s not even as legitimate as the Tea Party, which at least was a genuine grass roots organization before it was subverted and corrupted.

If you want to believe otherwise, that’s fine. I am aware MPAI. But I have never cared what anyone thinks about my opinions and I am not about to start now. So, if you wish to stop following me or supporting me over this, that is absolutely 100-percent fine with me.

And about that “getting ratio’d”: I note that the current ratio is 1.5k UP and 56 DOWN.

In other words, Patriot Front is not only Fake and Gay, but it also has defenders on social media who blatantly lie about the most easily verifiable facts. If it looks like #fedposting and it smells like #fedposting…

By the way, the ratio is now 1,700 to 78. Looks like the budget for the social media op was only $1,000.

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A Little Late, Donald

Donald Trump stops listening to Ivanka nearly six years too late:

Donald Trump turned on his daughter Ivanka Trump after her testimony to the committee investigating the January 6th insurrection revealed she didn’t think the 2020 presidential election was rigged. In the clip of her interview to the committee that was played during Thursday’s primetime hearing, Ivanka backs up Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertion that the election wasn’t stolen from her father.

‘I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying,’ she says.

The former president said on Friday that Ivanka was ‘not involved in looking’ at the results of the 2020 election.

‘Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as attorney general (he sucked),’ Trump wrote on Truth Social, the network he helped establish after he was banned from Twitter.

It was a shocking turn of events. Trump and his daughter were known for their close relationship and she was seen as his favorite child. She served as an adviser in his White House and Trump often said she could be president one day.

It’s a real pity he didn’t set both Ivanka and Jared aside when he was first elected to office. As political advisers, they were literally worse than useless.

And yes, the 2020 US presidential election was rigged even worse than the 2000 and 1960 elections. For example, there is literally ZERO chance that Joe Biden got more votes in Minnesota than Obama in 2008, Obama in 2012, and Hilary Clinton in 2016. Zero. You’d have to be entirely ignorant of statistics and statistical reality to even pretend that there were no shenanigans.

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SJWs Discover Unintended Consequences

Academic SJWs at Stanford are alarmed to discover that when individuals are deplatformed from mainstream platforms, they build their own platforms and become even stronger. Naturally, their response to this is not to conclude that individuals should not be deplatformed, but rather that the platforms should be themselves deplatformed.

Previous research has found that deplatforming toxic users tends to decrease overall reach and income for content producers. However, while deplatforming users, apps, and companies on mainstream platforms may have resulted in a less toxic ecosystem and prevented the spread of hateful messaging on those platforms, it also helped materially preserve Gab as a platform and financially enriched its owners.

Our findings document several unintended real-world side effects of the deplatforming of both users and platforms, raising the possibility that other interventions on mainstream platforms such as downranking and limiting visibility might curb toxic content more effectively than shifting the problem elsewhere. If deplatforming is deemed the most desirable solution for a given scenario, it may be that this deplatforming would need to be more thorough and widespread to be effective. Hence, more study is needed in several areas:

• What dynamics and characteristics determine whether deplatforming is effective in reducing toxic message spread across the social media ecosystem as a whole?

• What is the real-world net effect of attempting to deplatform platforms or apps themselves, versus merely disabling or moderating user accounts on mainstream platforms?

• What determines whether a deplatforming will result in continued or increased revenue for its targets and associated communities?

• Beyond deplatforming toxic individuals and services, are further actions possible (or desirable) to ensure that revenue does not flow to toxic venues?

For example, payment processors have already cut ties with Gab—is there more that could be done to disrupt other financial flows? Answering these questions may prove crucial to developing more holistically effective Trust and Safety practices at the platform, infrastructure, and regulatory levels.

Gabufacturing Dissent: An in-depth analysis of Gab, David Thiel and Miles McCain, Stanford Internet Observatory, June 1, 2022

The eventual recommendation of the academics is obviously going to be putting pressure on hosting services, payment systems, the media, and even governments to deplatform and otherwise attempt to silence those who have been designated Toxic Content Producers, because the reduced interest in the mainstream-approved content, the inability of the mainstream platforms to produce profits, and the exposure of massive amounts of platform fraud, are making the alternative platforms increasingly competitive with their mainstream counterparts.

Of course, pursuing this course of action is eventually going to lead these academic SJWs to discover the same bitter reality that has recently dismayed the politicians of Clown World: while Toxic Content Producers are being deplatformed by Clown World, Clown World is itself being deplatformed by Toxic Content World, which happens to make up the vast majority of the planet and controls the vast majority of its resources.

The biggest winners of the Content Wars are going to be those who are able to successfully bridge The Great Bifurcation of the two semi-global economies, and the battle-hardening of those who have been repeatedly deplatformed, dehosted, and demonetized is going to give a massive advantage to the Toxic Content Producers.

The Ride Never Ends.

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No Confidence in Bozo

Given that Boris Johnson appears to be as shameless as he is sexually incontinent, it is unlikely that he will resign even after having been caught lying to his party, his nation, and the British Parliament regarding what the British media calls Partygate. But it will be interesting to see how many Conservative MPs have had enough of his buffoonish imitation of a cartoon Churchill, although given the fecklessness of the Labour Party leadership and the absence of any creditable alternatives besides Jacob Rees-Mogg, one would expect him to survive the vote.

Boris Johnson is facing a dramatic vote of no confidence today as rebel Tory MPs chose their moment to strike.

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, confirmed this morning that he has now received the 54 letters from Conservative MPs needed to trigger a vote. The secret ballot, which will take place at Westminster today between 6pm and 8pm, raises the possibility that Mr Johnson’s tenure could come to a crashing end less than three years after he won a stunning 80-strong Commons majority.

It comes after a steady stream of Tory MPs called publicly for the Prime Minister to stand down in the wake of Sue Gray’s report into illegal Covid parties in No 10 and Whitehall. In order to oust the Prime Minister however the rebels will need 180 MPs, and allies of Mr Johnson – including members of the Cabinet – have made clear he is determined to fight to stay on.

Besides Rees-Mogg, who is unfortunately every bit as clueless about World War Clown as Johnson, Dominick Cummings is about the only first-class political mind in the UK these days, but he’s even more hated by the media and even less likely to ever be elected Prime Minister than I am. He was, however, certainly right about the prospects for the Johnson administration last fall.

Reminder… Last autumn pundits were telling you to prepare for a decade of ‘unassailable Boris’ who had sorted out No10 with ‘grownups’ and ‘gripped’ Whitehall, his relationship with the Chancellor was solid, breaking the ‘no income tax’ guarantee was ‘popular’(!), and Boris had nothing to fear from the old Vote Leave team.

I told you No10 was a shitshow, would collapse in chaos, the PM and Chancellor relationship was broken, the tax increases would be a policy and political disaster particularly given the looming cost of living nightmare, and I said — I’ve sold all my shares, prepare for supply chain meltdown, Putin whacking Europe including over energy, energy spikes, and financial market chaos.

Boris is happy to escalate because he thinks the more MPs think about war the less likely they bin him before July and if he makes it to August he has a good shot at surviving to the election. So he sends out the human handgrenade — my nickname for Liz Truss because she blows up all she touches — to redefine our goal as pushing Russia out of Crimea, thus setting us up for either humiliating failure or world war.

And today, he was proven correct about the timing of the vote of no confidence, as it has come more than a month before 21 July 2022. So one hopes he will post a prediction of the result before the votes come in.

I still think the letters will come in before MPs rise for summer…

UPDATE: Not looking great for Bozo. Even if he wins, as one expects he will, it may not be by enough to preserve his political viability. Most British Prime Ministers who win no-confidence votes end up resigning within months.

Theresa May faced a vote of confidence in her leadership on December 12 2018. News that the contest would take place was announced early that morning by Sir Graham Brady – then, as now, the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee of MPs – with the ballot taking place the same day between 6pm and 8pm. By 12.16pm that day, Theresa May had got to the public backing of the 158 Tory MPs she needed to win the vote. And the Daily Mail’s deputy political editor John Stevens points out today: ‘It is now 1pm and Boris Johnson is only up to 82.’

My impression is that no one in their right mind wants to even think about going to war against the Sino-Russian alliance with Boris Johnson at the helm.

UPDATE: He needed 180, he got 211. So, he survives for now. But the 148 no-confidence votes were much higher than anticipated, and indicates that the Johnson ministry is probably nearing its end.

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