Tag: politics

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.

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.

The campaign for Michigan’s first Muslim candidate for governor is going about as well as one might expect:

Michigan’s first-ever Muslim candidate for governor, Dr. Abdul al-Sayed, took a shot at fellow gubernatorial candidate Patrick Colbeck on Thursday that some Republicans are saying was below the belt.

Colbeck, speaking at a candidate’s forum in East Lansing, expressed his concerns about Sharia law and the extremist Muslim Brotherhood’s tactic of civilization jihad. Colbeck took exception with an article he says was planted by Sayed supporters in the left-of-center website Buzzfeed,  which painted Colbeck as a fringe extremist using “unfounded conspiracy theories” against Sayed.

“What I have not heard is the Republicans on this panel, decisively and swiftly call out this kind of Islamophobia, this kind of racism, in the context that they are wanting to represent the state that has the highest per-capita number of Muslim Americans in the country. Now you may not hate Muslims, but I’ll tell you, Muslims definitely hate you!”

Remember, diversity is the USA’s strength! This should end well.

Kurt Schlichter points out that Christians are not obliged to give their enemies a free hand in ruling over them. Especially not in a democracy:

There are a lot of people frustrated that Christians back Trump and refuse to let his personal life be used as a wedge to pry off their support. They are mad that Christians are not playing their role as defined by their enemies. Christians are supposed to be scandalized and give up and lose. But they won’t.

Now, let’s understand this basic concept – Jesus was not some sort of whiny wimp who refused to confront the establishment and took comfort in his own righteousness while leaving others to do the heavy lifting. Jesus made people angry, because that’s what happens when you defy bad people. Being a Christian does not mean that you have to shrug and let the likes of Hillary Clinton be elected so she and her minions can fire up her anti-faith pogrom against those of us who dare worship God and not the elite she represents. Maybe you didn’t notice, but they do not accept the concept that we have any legitimate interests or rights. They hate us. And, if we are weak and stupid enough to allow them to take power, they will act on their bigotry and prejudices. Baking cakes is only the start.

Resistance is not merely an option. It is a duty. And resistance to evil – because the desire to suppress our faith is evil – is not somehow unchristian because it can be aesthetically displeasing. Fighting back is not always pretty. Jesus cleared the temple of moneychangers. He made a mess and got people angry. He didn’t sit on the sidelines and write ponderous articles lambasting the people tossing over the tables because “We’re better than that.”

Everyone seems to want to tell Christians that they are obligated to give in. There’s always some IPA-loving hipster who writes video game reviews when he’s not sobbing alone in the dark because no one loves him tweeting “Oh, that’s real Christian!” whenever a conservative fights back. I know that when I need theological clarification, I seek out the militant atheist who thinks Christ was a socialist and believes that the Golden Rule is that Christians are never allowed to never offend anyone.

The more evil the authorities, the more children of the Devil are in power, the more that the genuine Christian who is actually willing to follow the example of Jesus will increasingly tend to run afoul of them. Which is why, as imperfect an instrument as he may be, as imperfect an instrument as he is, Donald Trump is, as Schlichter points out, a rowboat sent by God to an America drowning in evil, both foreign and domestic.

Donald Trump is putting the last 38 years of failure on the part of the Republican party’s social conservatives in perspective with his forthright actions in office:

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to ensure that the faith-based and community organizations that form the bedrock of our society have strong advocates in the White House and throughout the Federal Government.

President Trump has signed an Executive Order entitled “Establishment of a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative” in order to:

• provide recommendations on the Administration’s policy agenda affecting faith-based and community programs;
• provide recommendations on programs and policies where faith-based and community organizations may partner and/or deliver more effective solutions to poverty;
• apprise the Administration of any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law; and
• reduce the burdens on the exercise of free religion.

Lest you think this is a mere exercise in meaningless bureaucratic symbolism, it’s definitely alarming the right people.

Anyone following the heinous “religious freedom” laws popping up around the U.S. understands that the coded language in a new executive order signed by Donald Trump yesterday has been used consistently and insidiously by conservatives to remove rights from LGBTQ people and women.

Read the executive order HERE. It’s alarming, to say the least.

This will be used to ensure that businesses and organizations have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on religious beliefs…. Be afraid, be very afraid. This has the fingerprints of organizations like Family Research Council and other anti-LGBTQ hate groups all over it.

(((David Brooks))) is alarmed by the fact that the Left is becoming as unlikely to provide safe haven for his particular form of globalism as the Right

Tribalism is in the air, on the left as well as on the right. It is based on a scarcity mentality, the idea that life is a zero-sum war between us and them. It emphasizes division and conflict, not solidarity and cohesion. It draws out the authoritarian tendencies in any movement. On the right, tribalism brings us the ethnic authoritarianism of Donald Trump. On the left, it seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.

You can see authoritarianism entering the left through two avenues. The first is nationalism. Not long ago, most of the American left tended to think transnationally — partly because problems like climate change are global, partly because it’s hard to regulate a global economy nation by nation, partly because progressives used to be psychologically averse to nationalism.

But national sovereignty is not withering away. Left-wing hostility toward European Union-type multilateral organizations is at record highs. Now a lot of progressive economic thinking is nakedly nationalistic. Bernie Sanders in 2015 derided a more open immigration policy as a “Koch brothers proposal.” It’s the old xenophobia — us or them, screw or be screwed. On trade, the left-wing populists sound like Trump.

The second stream fueling economic authoritarianism is identity politics. It used to be that big political divides were defined by economic interests; now, the cultural dog wags the economic tail. Identity politics defines the core political divides. When many progressives talk about economics these days, they take the habits of mind they developed when talking about identity groups and apply them to economic groups.

Translation: David Brooks’s (((identity group))) is fast running out of political wiggle room. When one very small identity group becomes massively overrepresented among the economically dominant, then obviously the economic redistributionism of the Left is going to merge with identity politics. How can it not?

The Left sees the One Percent as the primary problem. The Right sees the demographic change and economic decline of the nation as the primary problem. And if the One Percent are responsible for the the demographic change and economic decline of the nation, well, then both sides have more than a scapegoat, they have successfully identified the responsible parties.

This, of course, is why Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, and Jennifer Rubin are all calling for a third party. But it’s going to be a very, very small one of virtually no appeal to anyone who is of the nationalist Right or the economic Left. There is not much of a market for a party of warmongering globalists whose primary domestic priority is the economic strip-mining of the lower, middle, and upper-middle classes.

The same situation is developing in the UK, as the media-generated “anti-semitism” of the Labour Party is causing the traditional Labour-supporting Jews there to rapidly migrate to the Conservative Party, where their globalist priorities are unlikely to remain popular or influential for long.

A defeated Labour councillor, Adam Langleben, said it was a source of ‘shame’ for the party that Jewish people had felt obliged to vote based on ‘their safety’.

‘Thanks to all those who voted for myself, Humayune and Agnes today. It was the greatest honour of my life to serve West Hendon,’ he tweeted.  ‘We must NEVER have another election like this. No community group should have their vote dictated by their safety. That should shame us @UKLabour.’

Mr Langelben told the Guardian: ‘Every Jewish Labour household we visited, people said, “not this time.” Activists were being told, “this is a racist party, an anti-Semitic party”, doors were slammed in their faces.

It’s not exactly hard to figure out how that’s going to play out over the next decade. And it occurs to me that the so-called White British population now already had their vote dictated by their safety. That’s why they voted for Brexit.

This is why it was a massive mistake for US states to allow new residents to vote. This rootless nomad is moving on after all of 14 years because he doesn’t like the way the politicians for whom he voted are governing Seattle.

I KNEW Seattle was no longer a place for me when I met with Debora Juarez — the District 5 City Council member I had voted for.

Last September, at what I thought was going to be a friendly one-on-one meeting between an elected official and her constituent, I expressed some concerns that were on my mind. I fretted over the deterioration of a city with which I had fallen in love — a city that, despite my 21 trips to Europe, I still believe to be the most beautiful in the world.

I told my council member that Northgate, my home, had seen a noticeable increase in litter and graffiti. To my dismay, she seemed to suggest these issues were someone else’s job, not hers. So, I moved on to a bigger issue: homelessness.

When I first moved to Seattle 14 years ago, to attend the University of Washington, homelessness essentially didn’t exist at Northgate. Though I have never been a victim of or witness to a crime, some of my neighbors have been, and they believe homeless camps are the reason. Additionally, the conditions in such camps are often atrocious — not only are the homeless more likely to be victims of violent crime, they are susceptible to infectious disease, such as the hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego that sickened nearly 500 people and has killed 20.

I believe strongly that it is not compassionate to leave people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves to suffer and die on the street. Because many (but certainly not all) homeless people struggle with mental illness or drug addiction, I suggested that Seattle find a way to make it easier to provide treatment to these troubled souls — involuntarily, if need be. It could literally save their lives.

Juarez exclaimed, “What is this? Nazi Germany?” Appalled — in part because my grandparents survived Nazi Germany — I got up and walked out….So, my wife and I are heading to the Eastside. We really would prefer to stay in Seattle. But if safe streets, clean sidewalks, an affordable place to live and polite discourse is asking too much, we’ll gladly seek refuge in a city where quality of life and civility still matter.

Guess what sort of politician this guy is going to vote for in the next election in his new city. Almost certainly the exact same sort of politician he helped elect whose policies he is fleeing now.

This is why skin in the game matters. This is why it is a mistake for farmers to permit nomads to dwell among them, much less be permitted any voice in how they order their societies. When things fall apart, the nomad will move on and the farmers will be left to pick up the pieces as best they can. And this is why no immigrants, foreign or domestic, should be permitted any vote in a democracy or a republic for at least five generations.

The fact that one dislikes the consequences of one’s own vote enough to flee them should be sufficient cause to deny one’s future right to vote. Man’s ideologies and political philosophies have not yet caught up with his transportation technology and his ability to travel around the world to escape the consequences of his actions.

Mytheos Holt performs a post-mortem on the quixotic Evan McMullin campaign:

For the forces that backed him, McMullin was not the first, the second, or even the third choice for his appointed task—namely, to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency in the name of donor-driven True Conservatism™. Rather, the forces that supported McMullin leaped from one anti-Trump hero to another, starting with the plaintive-sloganed Jeb!, continuing with the vapid dreamboat Marco Rubio, and finally ending up desperately lining up behind Ted Cruz because at least he went on their cruises.

What separates McMullin’s backers from other Jeb!, Rubio, or Cruz supporters, however, was their total unwillingness to accept that sometimes a primary just wouldn’t go their way. In many cases, this was because they belonged to a class of people for whom losing wasn’t supposed to happen because of who they were. This was particularly true of Bill Kristol, arguably the man who built what little meager infrastructure there was for McMullin, hoping to put up someone, anyone, who would stop the GOP from rejecting its self-appointed neoconservative establishment rulers, and their domesticated coterie of social conservatives, who, goshdarnit, were just too Christian and principled to limit immigration, or to attack the interests of major metropolitan donor industries.

And so it was that people who had never had to fight to win a primary decided they were going to try and fight back against someone whose only experience was winning a primary he was never supposed to win by sheer force of will. First, they did it by attempting to force a brokered convention, which presumably would have produced someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan as the nominee. All they accomplished was screaming helplessly from the floor of the RNC like a certain highly distressed member of the #Resistance.

Not to be deterred, they then decided to follow in the august footsteps of George Wallace and John Anderson, and run a third party protest candidate to ensure that no True Conservative™ would have to sully his or herself with a vote for Donald Trump. And for a while, their push looked like it might be something to worry about. Names like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or even future Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis were bandied about with excitement. That is, until Romney, Sasse, and Mattis got wind of it and quickly made it plain that on no account were they involved in this, and would you please stop calling, Bill Kristol?!

But even after this, McMullin still wasn’t the first choice. That honor went to the august National Review columnist David French, who entertained the idea for just long enough to get a segment on Fox News complaining about how rude Trump supporters were. Then he promptly fled.

Only then, and finally, after casting about in the “darkness” of the dawning Age of Trump, the disappointed neoconservative Captain Ahabs realized they had to run someone if they wanted to look serious. Enter Evan McMullin, former House Republican Conference Chief Policy Director, former CIA agent, former investment banker, and man with nothing better to do because he was possibly the only unmarried Mormon over the age of 19 in Washington. And so, NeverTrump looked at McMullin, squinted, thought he looked enough like David French, and said: “OK, fine, you’ll do.”

Of course, quite rapidly it became clear that the chances of McMullin actually becoming president were someplace between zero and hahahahahahahaha . . . wait, what? But becoming president was no longer the point. It was all about sinking Trump, to prove to those awful populists who had dared to think for themselves, and not the way Bill Kristol and Bill Kristol’s donors wanted them to think, that they were servants, and could never live in the Big House as equals.

And so, a simple strategy for denying Trump the presidency was devised: McMullin would try to carve away enough of his voters in states with high Mormon populations so that even if Trump won a couple of swing states, the losses among Mormons would cancel out Trump’s victory. Whether McMullin won those states, or Clinton won them, was beside the point—which was, and only ever was, to hurt Trump. And, for a few moments, the strategy looked like it might work in Utah, right up until the Mormons thought it through, realized how much trouble they’d gone through making themselves part of the Republican coalition in the first place, and decided they’d rather not self-excommunicate for the sake of panicked Beltway grifters. Ultimately, McMullin came in third in Utah, behind even Hillary Clinton.

As has so often been the case, the light of the God-Emperor has revealed the true character of many a cuck and an America Secondist. I find myself wondering if McMullin even has the self-awareness to be ashamed of how he permitted himself to be used by Bill Kristol to screw over so many sanctimonious conservatives.

Then I recall who those sanctimonious conservatives were and how obnoxious they are, and I remember that I don’t care.

The South Korean president says the God-Emperor merits the Nobel Peace Prize:

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has shaken off a suggestion that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that U.S. President Donald Trump “can take the Nobel prize” as long as the Koreas receive peace in return.

Moon made the comment Monday in response to a suggestion that he receive the award by the widow of late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 after a summit with then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Moon held a summit with current leader Kim Jong Un last week in which Moon and Kim, the son of Kim Jong Il, walked together across the tense border and agreed to a raft of initiatives meant to ease animosity. Moon responded to the suggestion of Nobel glory by saying, “President Trump can take the Nobel prize. The only thing we need is peace,” according to the South’s presidential office…. Also on Monday, the North’s parliament adopted a decree to sync its time zone with South Korea’s this Saturday. North Korea’s official news agency said the move was made at the proposal of Kim, who found it was “a painful wrench to see two clocks indicating Pyongyang and Seoul times hanging on a wall of the summit venue.”

President Trump still needs to Drain the Swamp and Build the Wall before he can nail down Rushmore status, but he has already accomplished considerably more than anyone had a right to expect.

There is no question that the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to Donald Trump:

North and South Korea will seek a peace ‘regime’ to end the 68-year Korean War, their leaders announced today, after Kim Jong-un agreed to a ‘complete denuclearisation’ during historic talks. Kim became the first North Korean leader to step into the South for 65 years as he met with President Moon Jae-in for a peace summit.

The two sworn enemies exchanged a warm greeting at the 38th parallel in the truce village of Panmunjom before the pair held talks and planted a commemorative tree together. The dramatic meeting has been seen as a precursor to planned talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump next month.

This afternoon, Kim and Moon embraced warmly after signing a statement in which they declared ‘there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula’. The two countries said they will push for talks with the US, and potentially China, to officially end the 1950-53 conflict, which stopped with an armistice and left the Koreas still technically at war.

They also agreed to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons but did not provide any new specific measures outlining how to achieve the objective.

Kim said: ‘We are going to be one again, as we share the same history, the same language, the same culture, the same blood. We are going to happily look back at the hard times in the past when we achieve a new future. No pain, no gain. Let us go forward, step by step for the bright future together.’

This is a staggering development of the sort we have not seen since 1989. I expect the Nobel committee will give the award to Kim and Moon, of course, but the world knows who really deserves it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is already one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States of America.

And he hasn’t even delivered on either of his signature campaign promises yet. But he will.