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January 2018

Red Thread, Pt. 5: When American “Collusion” Looks Like Russian Deception Diana West

If you’re joining late, Part 1 considers whether it really is likely that the anti-Trump conspirators would take the extraordinary risks they have taken simply to get Hillary Clinton elected president; or, perhaps, whether their collective panic has another explanation — a red thread? Part 2 minutely examines Nellie H. Ohr, the Russian-speaking-ham-radio-operator Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson tried in vain to hide from investigators, and finds a tangle of red threads; Part 3 notes that Edward Baumgartner, another Fusion GPS Russia expert, was a Russian history major at Vassar (Class of 1995) when Nellie H. Ohr was a Russian professor at Vassar. Part 4 examines ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s political background and finds that he and his “opposite number,” Nellie H. Ohr, may be birds of a red feather.

Ever since the “the Russian threat within” returned to American consciousness in the summer of 2016 as a media-elite projection onto Donald Trump, his America First MAGA agenda, and their supporters (which includes me, starting December 26, 2015), I have been perplexed, and even personally so. After all, in the course of writing a recent and sensational history of “the Russian threat within” called American Betrayal, I embarked on a course of continuing study of exactly how this “threat within” has been aided, abetted, camouflaged, protected and advanced by a conspiracy so immense, not to coin a phrase, for well over one hundred years.

However, right from the return of “the Russian threat within” in the summer of 2016, something didn’t smell right, wasn’t lining up. The general alarm over Candidate Trump sounded shrill and artificial next to the resolute quiet of the Obama years, especially when it came to “the Russian threat within” posed by a president whose mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist Party operative on an FBI arrest list in case of war with the USSR; whose close political aides, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, both, were descended from and mentored by Communist and/or Soviet operatives, some of whom were also associated with Davis. Not only was there no general alarm over this and so much more, there was media-enforced silence on these and related issues.

There was no general alarm over the 2009 “Russian reset” either: not over the arrest and quick expulsion of the Russian Illegals in 2010 (which the media treated like a Mission Impossible sequel); not over the Obama administration’s approval that same year of the sale of 20 percent of US uranium stocks to the Russian government; not over the hot-mike of Obama and Medvedev in 2012, where Obama, discussing missile defense, tells Medvedev “it’s important for [Putin] to give me space … after my election I have more flexibility” (former DCIA/Gus-Hall-voter John Brennan refused to recognize a question from a member of Congress about this); not over the transfer of military-use, space, and nuclear technology to Russia via the Obama-Clinton “Russian-rest” project known as Skolkovo, which, according to an Army study released in 2013, had, by 2011, “begun its first weapons-related project — the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.” Skolkovo is the least well-known of the Obama-Clinton Russian scandals, and perhaps the most damaging to US national security.

No, it was the Trump-Russia frenzy that became the juggernaut, racing around and around White House, threatening not only the Trump presidency, but also any grasp, any conception (vestigial as it is) of what “the Russian threat within” was or is. Meanwhile, as evidence separately began to mount of an anti-Trump “coup” — with links to the Kremlin — the decibels and static of the media-elite projections onto Team Trump rose also. For example, even as evidence was finally forced into the open proving that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign were the mystery-clients paying huge sums throughout much of 2016 to Fusion GPS to produce an intelligence “dossier” against Donald Trump and his associates in Moscow and from Russian government sources via American and British IC leftists, the media-elite-projectionists just kept turning up the Sensurround on that 20-minute meeting at Trump Tower that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had sought with Don Trump Jr. in June 2016.

Immigration Lies and Hypocrisy The crucial difference between the immigration of today and yesteryear. Walter Williams

President Donald Trump reportedly asked why the U.S. is “having all these people from shithole countries come here.” I think he could have used better language, but it’s a question that should be asked and answered. I have a few questions for my fellow Americans to consider. How many Norwegians have illegally entered our nation, committed crimes and burdened our prison and welfare systems? I might ask the same question about Finnish, Swedish, Welsh, Icelanders, Greenlanders and New Zealanders. The bulk of our immigration problem is with people who enter our country criminally from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. It’s illegal immigrants from those countries who have committed crimes and burdened our criminal justice and welfare systems. A large number of immigrants who are here illegally — perhaps the majority are law-abiding in other respects — have fled oppressive, brutal and corrupt regimes to seek a better life in America.

In the debate about illegal immigration, there are questions that are not explicitly asked but can be answered with a straight “yes” or “no”: Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.? Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country? Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border? The reason those questions are not asked is that one would be deemed an idiot for saying that everyone in the world has a right to live in our country, that Americans don’t have a right to decide who lives in our country and that foreigners landing at our airports have a right to just ignore U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

Identity Politics and Our Racialized Government Census Bureau refuses to midwife yet another identity-grievance scam. Bruce Thornton

The Census Bureau recently has rejected changes to the census that Obama had proposed as a parting gift to the Democrats. As the party of identity politics, the progressives were going to be gifted a new bloc of clients––“MENAs,” people of “Middle Eastern and North African” descent. As the tribunes of “people of color,” the Dems were eager to add yet another member to their conga-line of identity grievance. But the Bureau’s decision to reject the classification should be just the first step to completely discarding identity categories predicated on superficial and reductive characteristics.

First, our census rubrics like “black,” “Asian,” “white,” and the incoherent “Hispanic” are crude to the point of being meaningless. “Black” cannot express the incredible cultural, religious, social, and linguistic variety and diversity of the African continent and its diaspora. Neither does “Asian,” a geographical term equally as simplistic. “Hispanic” is a linguistic category even more hopelessly crude. So too with “white,” which lumps together under the rubric of superficial color a variety of cultures, mores, and classes. In fact, this impulse to label people by appearance is a leftover of “scientific racism,” the pseudo-scientific ideology of progressives in the first half of the 20th century that aimed to help Darwin out by excluding, sterilizing, and in Germany eliminating those deemed “inferior” and “unfit” because they weren’t “Anglo-Nordic,” that is northern European.

Second, our political system is predicated on “inalienable rights” that belong to individuals, not groups. Of course, all people are part of a collective identity, but that collective does not possess rights that are exclusive of individuals or that trump their rights. Such an idea of exclusive group rights reflects a persistent tribalism that rejects a universal human identity. The genius of the Founding was its recognition that universal human rights did not make everybody identical, but established a barrier against the attempts of any faction or group to dominate other factions, or compromise their freedom, or seize for itself power and privileges that encroach on others. Our collective identity is political, not biological. Within that unifying civic identity––the unum–– space is left for the expression of diverse identities––the pluribus–– created by region, religion, occupation, or ideology, whose potentially tyrannical contests for power and privilege are constrained by federalism, divided government, and the balance of power.

Identity politics rejects this foundation of our liberal democracy, and returns to zero-sum tribalism and its inalienable differences. One clan is given privileges denied to the others, or stakes a claim to political power specific to that clan. Backed by the coercive power of state institutions and regulations, identity is thus weaponized as selected clans compromise the freedoms of excluded clans, and reserve the right to violate the rights of others. We see this today with progressive assaults on the First Amendment to marginalize public speech about race that doesn’t follow the grievance narrative. Identity politics, then, is a form of tyranny that the Founders wanted to avoid.

Like the old Jim Crow racism, moreover, the identities are predicated on reductive, superficial characteristics that ignore all other factors––such as socio-economic class and its social capital, or our unique personalities, characters, beliefs, and talents––that make us who we are. The result is a meaningless notion like “white privilege,” as though less melanin can override wealth and education and social capital. I grew up in rural Fresno County with poor and working-class people of all colors, and I can tell you the Dust Bowl Scotch-Irish migrants had no more “privilege” than blacks or Mexicans. Their prospects were all pretty much the same: Vietnam, the penitentiary, or death. The lucky ones became carpenters or plumbers, the real lucky ones became school teachers or realtors. Some were hardworking and law-abiding, some were no damn good, as everybody called them. But you couldn’t tell which was which just by looking at the color of their skin. The valuable lesson I learned is that you have to take people one at a time, and judge them by their actions and the content of their characters.

The Urgent Case for Legislation against Facebook and Google By Pamela Geller

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions.

Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report. It labeled my site as “spam” and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report. The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal. The timing is telling. The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.

In fighting this shutdown, we had to go back to the drawing board in our lawsuit against these social media giants. The basis of our suit was challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.

Facebook and Google take in roughly half of all Internet ad revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In the U.S., Alphabet Inc.’s Google drives 89% of internet search; 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook Inc. product; and Amazon.com Inc. now accounts for 75% of electronic book sales. Those firms that aren’t monopolists are duopolists: Google and Facebook absorbed 63% of online ad spending last year; Google and Apple Inc. provide 99% of mobile phone operating systems; while Apple and Microsoft Corp. supply 95% of desktop operating systems.

Both companies routinely censor and spy on their customers, “massaging everything from the daily news to what we should buy.” In the last century, the telephone was our “computer,” and Ma Bell was how we communicated. That said, would the American people (or the government) have tolerated AT&T spying on our phone calls and then pulling our communication privileges if we expressed dissenting opinions? That is exactly what we are suffering today.

Ma Bell was broken up by the government, albeit for different reasons. But it can and should be done.

It’s not a little ironic that, according to Breitbart:

AT&T has called for an “Internet Bill of Rights” and argued that Facebook and Google should also be subjected to rules that would prevent unfair censorship on their platforms.

Did Fake News Lose the Vietnam War? Journalists wrongly portrayed the Tet Offensive as a U.S. defeat and never corrected the record. By William J. Luti

Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.

The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.

The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.

A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.

Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.

But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.

Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.

The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Dems’ Farrakhan Problem If Republican lawmakers held strategy sessions with David Duke, the party would be held to account. By Jeryl Bier

Hillary Clinton tried to make Louis Farrakhan an issue when she ran against Barack Obama in 2008. The Nation of Islam leader—infamous for calling Judaism a “gutter religion”—had praised the future president as “the hope of the entire world.” In a February debate, Mrs. Clinton demanded that Mr. Obama reject Mr. Farrakhan’s support, insisting: “There’s a difference between denouncing and rejecting.” Mr. Obama obliged and added: “There’s no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it.”

Three years earlier, Mr. Obama posed for a photo with Mr. Farrakhan at a Congressional Black Caucus gathering. The photographer, journalist Askia Muhammad, told the liberal site Talking Points Memo that a CBC staffer contacted him “sort of in a panic” about the photo. “I promised and made arrangements to give the picture to Leonard Farrakhan, ” Louis Farrakhan’s son-in-law and chief of staff. But he kept a copy, which he released last week.

Mrs. Clinton might have become president had the photo come out a decade earlier. It isn’t clear from the photo to what degree Mr. Obama was associated with Mr. Farrakhan. But the Congressional Black Caucus’s association is scandalous. Its members have met with Mr. Farrakhan on at least one other occasion.

On Jan. 13-14, 2006, the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity held hearings in New Orleans and Gulfport, Miss., on the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. After the New Orleans hearing, at least four CBC members headed to St. Augustine Church to meet Mr. Farrakhan, who had attended part of the hearing. CONTINUE AT SITE

Glazov Gang: Unveiling Jerusalem. Pierre Rehov’s new film embarks on a journey in search of a Temple and the Truth.

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/01/30/glazov-gang-unveiling-jerusalem/

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features filmmaker Pierre Rehov. He discusses his new film: Unveiling Jerusalem, which embarks on a journey in search of a Temple and the Truth. (To watch the film, visit UnveilingJerusalem.com).

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Dr. Charles Jacobs discuss Saudi Curriculum in American High Schools, where he unveils the meaning of “Jihad” in Newton:

Cleaning Up Comey’s FBI Director Wray needs to restore the bureau’s fallen reputation.

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, and his Twitter attacks on the FBI are a good example. New FBI director Christopher Wray seems to be undertaking a much-needed house cleaning of officials from the James Comey era who have damaged the bureau’s reputation, but Mr. Trump’s bumbling catcalls make that task all the harder.

A case in point is the resignation Monday of deputy director Andrew McCabe, which every Never Trump conspiracy theorist is blaming on the President’s machinations. The same President they claim is an idiot is apparently pulling off a Nixonian cover-up. If you’ve lost your mind over Mr. Trump, you’ll believe anything about him, even if it’s contradictory.

Mr. Wray has no choice other than to install new FBI leadership after the Comey calamity if he wants to assert control. That means removing the Comey loyalists who botched the Hillary Clinton email probe and may have inserted the bureau into a presidential election campaign on the basis of Russian disinformation from the Christopher Steele dossier. Cleaning house isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a necessity to restore the reputation of America’s premier law enforcement agency.

We’ll learn more about what happened in the Clinton email case when the Justice Department Inspector General concludes his investigation. But Mr. McCabe had done more than enough to warrant removal when he supervised the Clinton probe after his wife, Jill McCabe, had run for the Virginia state Senate in 2016 with the financial help of Clinton loyalist and then-Governor Terry McAuliffe.

The FBI’s ethics office cleared Mr. McCabe to stay on the Clinton case, but anyone with any ethical sense would have understood the appearance of a conflict of interest. He didn’t recuse himself from the Clinton case until a week before the 2016 election. Mr. McCabe’s name has since also appeared in troubling references in the text messages between FBI paramours Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the main agent on the Clinton probe.

Stephen Karetsky: Ulysses Grant in “The Holy Land” 1878

Reviews of Ron Chernow’s Grant omit the fact that this lengthy biography includes only one paragraph about the former President’s trip to the Holy Land in 1878 and that it is a misleading one. It implies that the only Jews there were in Jerusalem and that they were little more than beggars.

The reviewer follows suit. (Of course, Grant’s primary mission was not to visit and study the various Jewish communities there.) But, for some reason, Chernow omits an event of probable interest to many readers.

Finding that most of what is now the central area of Israel was almost entirely unpopulated, bleak, and consisting mainly of sand, Grant and his traveling companion, journalist John Russel Young, investigated what they were traveling over and determined that beneath the sand was fertile soil.

They both agreed that the area would be flourishing farmland if Americans had come there. This great development, of course, came very shortly afterwards with the arrival of Zionist Jews. Young’s contemporaneous accounts were printed in the American press as the trip proceeded.

His detailed, two-volume description of Grant’s worldwide tour was published soon after the two adventurers returned to the U.S. It is still in print and remarkably relevant to today’s headlines, e.g., China’s claims to Japanese islands.

You Know Your Awards Show is Terrible When Hillary Clinton is the Star Daniel Greenfield

Like most awards shows, the Grammy Awards exist to fill a narcissistic industry’s need for attention. And like most awards shows, it stopped making sense once most people began to stream shows, instead of being rooted to a television screen. And so the producers know quite well that aside from die hard fans and people who don’t have internet, most people will just see a few viral clips of their show.

And the highlight of the Grammy Awards is Hillary Clinton taking a shot at President Trump.

You know your awards show is terrible when…

1. Its highlight is Hillary Clinton

2. Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with your industry

3. The only thing anyone will remember from your autotune and lip sync party is a disposable comedy bit involving Hillary Clinton.

There. Now you don’t have to watch the Grammy Awards ever again.