Section One: Very Bad vs Cataclysmic: Come Back With Me to That Day

So Comey had testified on May 3, 2017-that you should come back with him to that day and tell him what you would do:

FBI Director James Comey told Congress Wednesday that revealing the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email probe just before Election Day came down to a painful, complicated choice between “really bad” and “catastrophic” options. He said he’d felt “mildly nauseous” to think he might have tipped the election outcome but in hindsight would change nothing.

“I would make the same decision,” Comey declared during a lengthy hearing in which Democratic senators grilled him on the seeming inconsistency between the Clinton disclosure 11 days before the election and his silence about the bureau’s investigation into possible contacts between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

‘Really bad’ or ‘catastrophic’: Comey defends Clinton choice | AP News

Comey’s attitude on the Comey Letter is similar to the Daniel Jones Derangement Syndrome people: for six years they scapegoated Jones and insisted that he sucked and no it wasn’t worth getting him an OL or receivers as it would make no difference and now that he has OL and receivers they’re like “if only he’d play so well the last six years”-without the slightest irony. This is how Comey talks about the Comey Letter. OR how Russia hacks like Hasanabi cum John Mearsheimer cum Bad Empanada-they insist that their insistence Russia would never invade was the intelligent prediction even though it proved dead wrong-Mearsheimer literally was writing another “Russia will never invade” screed in foreign Policy when a friend came to him and showed him the headline on February 22 2022.

Bad Empanada actually claimed vindication when contrary to his prediction Russia did invade Ukraine. Right being wrong only makes you righter. Again this is Comey’s logic too.

As we’d discussed in Chapter Comey Still Hasn’t Apologized as Schoenberg says:  Comey’s  Letter was the biggest mistake in the history of mistakes.

“The other reason that I focus on Comey’s mistake is that he has yet to admit he made a mistake.”

Comey, Comey, and more Comey! | Schoenblog.com

Exactly-as I’d argued in this previous chapter Comey has been angling for redemption without repentance-he wants to be forgiven for the Comey Letter without admitting that he did anything wrong. I’m no Buddhist-not that there’s anything wrong with it!-but you could argue this is a story about Karma-the more Comey defends his indefensible Emaiglate conduct the worse things have gotten for him.

James Comey Still Won’t Apologize but He did Write a Pretty Good Book Final Draft – But Her Emails: Why all Roads Still Lead to Russia

Back to Schoenblog:

In fact, he continues to claim that if he had it to do all over again, he would make the same decision.  “I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time.” (Page 207.) Many people have focused on the ridiculous “Speak or Conceal” dichotomy that Comey has set up in his mind to explain away his error.  He seems simply incapable of applying the actual facts as they developed to help him see that a different, and very justifiable, decision would have been preferable.  The most he offers is this:

Another person might have decided to wait to see what the investigators could see once they got a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. That’s a tricky one, because the Midyear team [the FBI team working on the e-mails] was saying there was no way to complete the review before the election, but I could imagine another director deciding to gamble a bit by investigating secretly in the week before the election. That, of course, walks into Loretta Lynch’s point after our awkward hug. Had I not said something, what was the prospect of a leak during that week? Pretty high. Although the Midyear team had proven itself leakproof through a year of investigation, people in the criminal investigation section of the FBI in New York knew something was going on that touched Hillary Clinton, and a search warrant was a big step. The circle was now larger than it had ever been, and included New York, where we’d had Clinton-related leaks in prior months. Concealing the new investigation and then having it leak right before the election might have been even worse, if worse can be imagined. But a reasonable person might have done it.

“Obviously, Comey is simply incapable of imagining the world as it would have been had he made a different choice.  What could he possibly mean by “might have been even worse”?  Worse than what actually transpired?  Worse than his firing by President Trump?  What exactly is he imagining that would be worse?  Really, what is it?”

CODA: Comey has it exactly backwards that it would have been a gamble to get a warrant and search the emails before speaking out that’s actually what due process is-what Comey did was further sully Clinton’s reputation before even knowing what was in the emails so sure another Director might have done it differently’-they might have followed DOJ policy and basic due process.

Really what is it? This remains the $64 million dollar question how can what has happened since the former FBI Director cum life long Republican elected Trump merely be “very bad?” What could catastrophic be if not the last ten years of US history post Comey’s duboiusly predicated Emailgate investigation-as we saw in Chapter Probable Cause it’s questionable if it should have ever been opened in the first place?

And Schoenblog wrote this in 2018-when so many terrible things that Trump has since done hadn’t happened yet. Like when he tried to extort Zelensky the day after Mueller testified-after the Democrats had diffidently let Russiagate die only to see the GOP respond by weaponizing it via their parallel universe narrative which stood the facts on their head.

Before hundreds of thousands of Americans died due to Trump’s Covid mismanagement. Before his roiling coup in 2020 which become the J6 insurrection. Before Trump stole all those sensitive and classified documents as he finally walked out the door after J6 in late January 2021.

Schoeblog wrote this before Dobbs thanks to which now a 13 year old rape victim has less rights than her rapist in Red State America.

CODA: To be sure Comey was a lifelong Republlican before he elected Trump. So maybe he’s forced birther “pro life” and reads stories like where a woman in a coma is forced to be kept alive for 8 months so she can complete her pregnancy or a woman in Texas isn’t allowed to have an abortion even after the fetus DIED.

This was before the Roberts Court set aside the 14 Amendment which makes clear that anyone who engages in political insurrection can not run for office again or when the Republican Supreme Court declared Trump to possess Absolute Immunity. It was long before Trump had Elon Musk illegally destroy USAID as the US broke it’s promises to so many who had counted on us around the world and caused such death and suffering.

Nearly 15,000 will have died already because of Trump and Musk’s cuts to USAID, advocacy program claims | The Independent

This was of course long before Comey’s daughter was fired from SDNY for no reason other than being Comey’s daughter and sharing his last name. But-remember-this doesn’t happen if only he had followed DOJ policy rather than dismissing it as lacking in moral grandeur and thinking he had the right to rewrite the rules in line with his Kantian ad hock moral intuitions.

Section: Very Bad or Catastrophic? Comey is Comeyed.

And this was before the latest where Trump finally did what he’s wanted to do for eight years-ever since Comey didn’t give him what he wanted in terms of shutting down the Russia investigation. CNN’s framing of it here is apropos:

Get ready for a 2016 redux.

The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey made public on Thursday is likely to put on display, yet again, the blockbuster political discourse around the FBI investigations in 2016 that affected the presidential election.

Central to the case: Leaks to media outlets that Comey was asked about in 2017 and 2020 congressional testimony.

Comey, the long-time nemesis of Donald Trump from the early days of Trump’s first term, has been criminally charged with two felonies, both related to a lie he allegedly told Congress in 2020.”

Yes it is a 2016 redux as none of this happens if not for the Comey Letter.

CODA: Even Comey  admitted this in his May 3 testimony-when he said he was “slightly nauseated”-are you more than slightly  nauseated yet? It’s likely that Comey’s revelation that he was slightly nauseated at the fact that he elected Trump was likely the final straw for why Trump fired him then-he would have been fired at some point but it’s why it happened then.

Why was James Comey indicted, what are the charges and what happens next in the case | CNN Politics

Indeed it doesn’t pass the laugh test but Trump’s Deputy AG had claimed that the reason Comey was fired was for-the Comey Letter ie for electing Trump. But again it always goes back Emailgate Circa 2016 that is Comey’s Original Sin. As he has repeatedly refused repentance his Karmic bill just keeps getting larger and larger.

This was underscored even in his Instagram response to his blatantly politically motivated indictment-Bill Barr revealed in his book that Trump had been agitating every day at the end during the post election coup period.

Former FBI Director James Comey responded Thursday after the Department of Justice indicted him on two of three counts.

Prosecutors indicted Comey with making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation. Comey posted a video on Instagram to respond to the indictment and framed it as political retribution.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right,” Comey said.

Comey said that neither he nor his supporters should give in to intimidation.

“I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith,” Comey said.

‘Let’s Have A Trial’: Comey Responds To Indictment

I kind of like his response in some ways. At least he’s punching back. While-predictably-Trump’s co-conspirators are criticizing him for clapping back-we remember how much “restraint” Trump showed when he was on trial-I like it. Most who Trump has bullied have tended to keep their heads down hoping if they don’t fight back maybe they’ll get through it but this misunderstands bullies-we’ve seen how the more the big media outlets and law firms have capitulated the more unreasonable demands he’s added.

I appreciate ““I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does.” Hopefully some will be galvanized and take a more muscular posture vs a vs Trump’s ever more egregious authoritarianism.

Still when he says that ““My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way” I can’t help reflect that you certainly can imagining them living another way-if he simply hadn’t done the Comey Letter. Again it always goes back to his But Her Email’s debacle his indefensible letter.

While his family notably his daughter, Maureen Comey, have courageously stood up to Trump the fact is it wasn’t their choice-indeed as we saw in Chapter Nunes Comey’s wife had urged him not to do the letter and she was right morally, legally, and politically. According to Marcy Wheeler, Maureen Comey may eventually win her lawsuit against the DOJ’s blatantly politically motivated firing but it may take years.  It was Comey’s unilateral not to say disastrous decision and now his family even more the country continues to suffer the consequences.

Section: Comey Justice vs Trumpian Justice: There are Two Kinds of Trials

I also have some mixed feelings on the end of his video where he proclaims his trust for the federal justice system-after all he argues, he’s innocent. The case against him doesn’t appear strong to say the least. Emptywheel thinks he’ll win pretty easily. I hope so-as much as I despise Comey or at least his legacy, as a liberal who believes in the rule of law I don’t want to see him convicted in Trump’s politically motivated junta.

Emptywheel Fridays on The Nicole Sandler Show 9-26-25

Will Ted Cruz Go to Prison for the Lies He Told as Part of the Jim Comey Indictment? – emptywheel

As much damage as he’s done to this country I don’t want to see him baselessly prosecuted.  Apparently no one thinks Trump has a case-the only person he could find to prosecute this baseless case was Lindsey Halligan who’s not even a prosecutor but an insurance lawyer.

So Comey should be fine. Unlike the country. Indeed the fact that Halligan may not even have standing may be yet another way this case could potentially be undermined. He should be fine presuming it’s the right kind of case

Section: There are Two Kinds of Criminal Cases: Those Where the Truth Matters and Those Where it Doesn’t

Every day in America there are cases where the truth doesn’t matter because the accused lacks the financial and social resources to fight back. Many people of small to any means end up railroaded into prison terms simply because they couldn’t afford decent counsel. Comey is obviously not in that camp. Even as 60% of Americans struggle living paycheck to paycheck, Bill E. Buckner Comey is doing very well despite all the damage he has done.

Still even those with considerable financial means and social standing can be put through the mill if the prosecution is political as has often been the case during Trump 2.0 Absolute Immunity Edition. The case against Hunter Biden was also entirely politically motivated but he still almost ended up doing hard time in prison if not for his father’s late in the game pardon-a pardon I should say was not just defensible but I’d argue the right choice; I don’t understand the argument it would have been better for Hunter to go to prison on baseless trumped up charges-David Weiss himself had admitted privately if his last name wasn’t Biden that case never would have gone that far-he’d possessed the unlicensed weapon just a short period of time and he’d paid what he owed in taxes.

Indeed during Trump 2.0 it’s been clear that often all he needs is to find the right jurisdiction in front of the right judge-a Trump judge of which there are many. So hopefully Emptywheel is right-IF the case is based on the actual truth then Comey will be fine. But could Trump get it in the right jurisdiction? Hopefully not but it’s not like something like this hasn’t happened before. It’s also important to never lose sight of the fact that the most powerful judge in the country is to a large extent a Trump judge-John “Trump has Absolute Immunity” Roberts.

Supreme Court gives Trump a wave of victories in final week : NPR

Like when Little Marco Rubio declares to Congressman Ted Lieu that  basically it doesn’t matter what the SJC told Trump about Kilmar  Ábrego García because Trump has executive supremacy it’s outrageous in principle but may well be right in practice as John Roberts has basically placed Trump above accountability.

Section: James Comey is Being Comeyed OR Martha Stewarted

Perhaps this won’t happen in Comey’s case and again I certainly hope so. Still from the Karmic standpoint you could argue Comey DESERVES to be railroaded. After all on the substance Comey is not guilty. But then again, neither was Hillary Clinton but this didn’t stop him from opening up Emailgate that had dubious predication then milked it for an entire year then violated HRC”s due process rights in the Presser and finally the Letter leading to her defeat and our plunge into our current roiling Constitutional crisis-the latest of which, ironically if kind of fittingly-Comey’s own indictment. No he doesn’t deserve to be indicted but neither did she. yet he dragged it out so long that by the time he finally acquitted her-while wrongly further dirtying her up-that a supermajority of Americans wrongly believed she should have been indicted. Ironic that Comey had claimed that he took these inappropriate and “very careless” actions to properly inform the public yet his actions led to them being less well informed not more.

Then there’s Martha Stewart-if Comey is completely innocent he is no more than she was yet he sent her to prison anyway.

Section: Then There was That Time Comey Begged for the Chance to Work for Ken Starr

In 1996 he was on the Senate Whitewater Committee.

James Comey – Wikipedia

If you want to see what a political witch hunt looks like see Ken Starr’s Whitewater crusade in the 1990.

Section: Whitewater: We’ve Got your Witch-hunt Right Here

Trump says he’s  the victim of a witch hunt?! While Trump and his GOP co-conspirators made much of Hillary having her lawyer with her during her  final interview with the FBI in June, 2016 Trump never even sat down to speak with the Mueller team claiming they would just “perjury trap” him.

Section: Susan McDougal Goes to Prison for Telling the Truth

As much as Trump lies this was wise but in 1995, McDougal was convicted for REFUSING to lie. The “plea deal” Ken Starr “offered” was “say what we want which is that Clinton is a criminal or we’ll put you in prison. Her husband, James McDougal agreed to lie for Ken Starr and she didn’t so she ended up in prison. Starr did literally the same thing to Monical Lewinsky-locked her in a hotel room for 24 hours while threatening to put her and her mother in prison for 27 years if she didn’t agree to testify against Clinton. He also illegally didn’t let her call her lawyer and literally entrapped her into a perjury trap. Again everything the Republican party says is projection.

CODA: Even getting Ken Starr in as Special Counsel was coerced-the initial SC, Robert Fiske, found no wrongdoing so the Republicans got him replaced by Starr who was still pissed Clinton had won as he’d hoped Bush Sr would appoint him to the Supreme Court.

Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater: Lyons, Gene: 9781879957527: Amazon.com: Books

Of course Clinton made a huge “own goal” though it was much more than just one goal he kicked for Team Republican by not taking Hillary’s advice and reauthorizing the Independent Counsel Act which lead to the empowering of a three judge panel in the DC Court of Appeals that-what a coincidence!-were all ideological conservative Republicans.

So yes if the truth matters in Comey’s case he will win-seeing that he has also has a top lawyer you would think he’ll be good-though I take nothing for granted. A time like this requirres what you might call strategic paranoia. 

Section: Once Again the FBI Has Always Been a Very Republican Place

To this day the FBI has never had a Democratic FBI Director.  Democrats seem to think that by sucking up to GOPland the FBI when they’re in power and appointing Republicans will make them like the Dem President better. After Clinton made the giant mistake of choosing Louis Freeh, Freeh spent the entire 1990s investigating Clinton including demanding that Clinton give a urine test in the middle of a fancy black tie cocktail dinner.

As this book has covered in fairly painstaking detail Comey too used the dubious But Her Emails investigation to defeat the Democratic Presidential candidate. FDR for his part chose J. Edgar Hoover. This is the classic case of you might as well do the right thing or even the politically beneficial thing as you’re going to get abused no matter what you do but somehow the Dems have managed after 117 years of Republican Directors-technically Wray was an independent, he was also Chris Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer who unlike Comey then McCabe refused to provide the Democrats with intel on the Russia investigation-still not gotten the memo.

Comey was a lifelong Republican, as was Mueller, and Andy McCabe.

So once again: Comey Justice vs Trumpian Justice… What is the difference? At the end of the day it turns out not much. Or Comey himself and his Republican friends like Ken Starr and Louis Freeh were practicing Trumpian Justice 20 years before anyone had ever imagined the words “President Trump” other than maybe Trump himself, Roger Stone, and his Russian handlers.

Section: Does Michael “Nostradamus” Cohen Know Something About Comey’s Indictment We Don’t?

Unlike Marcy Wheeler and even folks like Pam Bondi, Alan Dershowitz, and Andy McCarthy, Cohen declares that Comey will be found guilty in his signature rhetorically and emotionally certain way.

Michael Cohen: James Comey will be ‘found guilty’

CF:

Raw and Unfiltered: with @brianKarem

“Comey Is Today’s Ham Sandwich” – Michael Cohen

When Cohen gets so emotionally certain the correct response is to ask yourself is how does he know? What is making him so emotionally  certain?

Section: Did Cohen Have Another Tara Palmieri Moment?

In her interview with Cohen-see the Prologue-Palmieri did exactly this when Cohen insisted with absolute certainty that he didn’t know anything about Katie Johnson. She pushed him and eventually he revealed that he personally sent a private investigator to intimidate Katie Johnson in the late stages of the election. Cohen insisted it wasn’t Johnson but based on a book I discussed in the Epilogue it was almost certainly here.

How does he know why is he so certain Comey will be convicted? First of all though we should give credit where credit is due-Cohen correctly forecast his indictment back in late August. However is this because he’s a great forecaster or did he know something we don’t-like when Giuliani correctly predicted the coming Comey Letter in October 2016-“some pretty big surprises?”

What’s interesting is that Cohen started his spiel here with total epistemological nihilism-‘all these fancy pants pundits with their talk of the “Rule of Law” but they don’t know what the Trump DOJ has none of us do. His nihilism is of the kind that would impress a mob boss and of course for over 10 years he worked for Trump-“I would take a bullet for the President.”

But as is classic with this tactic is he moves from total nihilism-‘I don’t know you don’t know, nobody knows-sounding much like the Warren Report: “A mystery wrapped inside an enigma…” to emotional certainty that Comey will be indicted. Why is this as no one knows anything?

Because this whole intellectual agnostic cum nihilism shtick was just a tactic. In fact Cohen thinks Comey will be convicted or at least seems to hope he will be. Why? Well he then has another Tara Palmieri moment starting at 3:15:

“I WILL TELL YOU FROM MY INVESTIGATION…”

What-he did his own investigation? He then goes onto reveal that he has had 30 year  WH correspondent Brian Karem speaking to people “inside the federal government” ie the Trump DOJ. When he said this I did a double take-who exactly is Brian Karem and what exactly kind of an “investigation” did he do within the federal government?

Cohen claims that in the course of his conversations with people in the DOJ, FBI, etc he was able to conclusively prove that Comey ‘was very much involved in the Russia investigation in a very negative way.’

“CHANCES ARE, THIS DOJ HAS EVERY SINGLE EMAIL, EVERY TEXT MESSAGE, EVERY COMMUNICATION. >> I BELIEVE LIKELY. >> HE WILL. >> BE FOUND GUILTY.

Starting at 3:25

This is where it gets a little tricky. Is Cohen making a positive or a normative point? One perilous aspect of this is often positive arguments are made to sneak in normative arguments. The fact that the Old South depended economically on slave labor is a positive point. But it quite often it can deftly be laundered as a normative one-after all ending slavery will cause terrible economic pain so maybe it’s  the wrong time to end it…

Much of this sounds like his point is normative even while insisting it’s positive.

Like in his Substack on Friday “James Comey is Today’s Ham Sandwich” there’s a lot of truth, alas.

James Comey thinks he’s in control. He’s not.

If my own experience has taught me anything, it’s this: the old adage is true; you can indict a ham sandwich. And today, James Comey is the ham sandwich. He may not like the comparison, but the facts don’t lie. Many will say it’s not right, not fair, not justified. They’ll paint him as a martyr, the straight-shooter, the boy scout. Spare me. Comey has built his entire brand on being the solemn guardian of American integrity, the tall moral compass of righteousness. And now he wants us to believe he isn’t afraid, that he welcomes trial. Please. Those are the last words of a man who doesn’t yet realize the quicksand he’s already sinking in.

On a normative basis I tend to agree, in fact I made the same point-Comey WILL PREVAIL assuming it’s a courtroom and a judge for whom the truth and justice matters. But during the Trump years we’ve seen many episodes where it hasn’t mattered. And the way Cohen structured this:

 Many will say it’s not right, not fair, not justified. They’ll paint him as a martyr, the straight-shooter, the boy scout. Spare me.”

Why “spare me” does he agree it is justified? Or because Comey’s no martyr. Because I agree that Comey  is no martyr -Emptywheel herself says she wishes Trump hadn’t gone after Comey  as now he gets to play  his preferred role of moral grandiosity . But this doesn’t mean he should be convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. But that’s just it-Cohen suggests Comey did commit a crime. Back to MSNBC:

” I BELIEVE LIKELY HE COMMITTED A CRIME.  I DON’T KNOW.  WHAT THAT  CRIME IS, BUT THERE ARE HUNDREDS >> OF THOUSANDS OF DOCUMENTS. OF THEM AND THE GOVERNMENT HAS  EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM.”

So he doesn’t know what crime but he is pretty sure Comey committed it. How can you know he committed a crime but don’t know which one? The Trump DOJ no doubt will happily go on a fishing expedition that rings true.

To understand better what Cohen was on about I saw his interview-actually heard as I couldn’t get it on youtube-with the famous Brian Karem-famous now, this morning I had no idea who he was.

It was a very interesting interview-Karem best I can tell sounds like a good guy with genuine journalistic integrity. But he didn’t quite seem to be saying what Cohen claims in his emotionally certain way loudly opines he did. There also is some appealing intimacy between the two guys-clearly they’ve been good friends and collaborators for a few years. While I find many of Cohen’s interviews rather touch to watch as he does have this tendency to talk over his guests, he doesn’t interrupt Karem. Or maybe it’s because Karem also has the ability to talk loud LOL

Raw and Unfiltered: with @brianKarem

It turns out that Karem talked to a lot of the people Cohen wanted to speak to but couldn’t for his book “Revenge”-one interesting conundrum about this book is whose revenge is Cohen talking about-Trump’s or his own?

Karem spoke to the prosecutors, judges, and Trumpland FBI agents who wouldn’t speak to Cohen.

FN: Starting with section 1:39 The transcript on Substack is much neater and cleaner than youtube but it doesn’t allow you to cut and paste texts.

yes-I can’t resist jibing about “Trumpland” one more time but this is because which FBI agents Karem allegedly spoke to matter as many of them are fervent Trump supporters who even defend J6. So if they offhandedly told Karem the entire Russia investigation was a hoax that’s not exactly dispositive of anything.

Cohen jokes that he tried to get Brian to tell him who he spoke to, even getting him drunk one night but Brian still wouldn’t give up the info. Ok but if we can’t know who he spoke to what about what he was told? Karem says that many of his sources were telling him “what we already knew that it was an abomination what was going on, that it was they were trying to use you as leverage to go after Trump.”

FN: Starting at 7:55

But this is why it’s hard to make much of this without knowing not only who said this-were these again Trumpland FBI agents or judges and lawyers? If you got say lawyers or judges working on the case against Cohen this might be bigger news but this certainly sounds like the kind of thing Trumpland agents might have said at the time. It’s perfectly legitimate for Karem to protect his sources as he noted he went to jail three different times to protect sources in the course of his career. But as we don’t even get the quotes of what his anonymous sources but Cohen’s pretty aggressive paraphrasing it’s not clear what this actually proves. I mean what made it an abomination? I mean that they sought to turn Cohen, offer him a plea bargain, is hardly an abomination-it’s the way the justice system works as Karem himself would go on to acknowledge.

Back to Karem: He says they were trying to use Cohen as leverage to go after Trump. This in itself is again not a crime or even a scandal. Often the way you go after a really bad big fish is to go after some other bad smaller fish who served him. This is what Comey should go to prison for? As he had no role in any of this-though Cohen seems to mistakenly think otherwise. “In some cases it was felt as if the charges against you were going to be far worse no far more than you did…”

Again without anything solid, no specifics at all-not just no identified sources but not even any direct quotes just a general, broad characterization it’s not clear what to make of it. WHO thought there was much more on Cohen than there was? What did they think he could tell them that he didn’t? What kinds of questions did they ask him-what was his response? Without knowing any of this there’s not much to come away with.

Karem then speaks specifically of “people in the DOJ” who thought Cohen had more info than he did. Again-remember the FBI is part of the DOJ. “They,” Karem asserts knew Cohen was the guardian of the Trump galaxy and therefore thought he knew were all the bodies were buried-which doesn’t seem like an unreasonable premise.

Karem claims that in the course of their investigation “they pretty much knew what was going on with you from the get-go and tried to make more of it than it was.”

But again this is more question begging-what did they think Cohen knew he didn’t know? And… did he not know it or did he refuse to cough it up as it might have also opened up not just Trump but himself to more potential incrimination?

We saw how Tara Palmieri was able to override his blanket emotionally certain denials that he knew anything about Katie Johnson to get him to admit that he had personally sent a private investigator to intimidate her lawyer. So maybe he didn’t know as much as they thought he knew or maybe they didn’t know the right questions to ask.

Karem: they were not able to find  the information they thought they had on Cohen. More he says “at one point they were surprised” they couldn’t get more from Cohen than they did. This, he says, was frustrating them because “… they wanted Donnie…”

Karem then declares he’s not into “inventing things against people.” Is he suggesting the DOJ invented things against Cohen? Again he doesn’t say what. It’s also relevant as I discussed elsewhere in this book that while the Mueller team praised Cohen for his cooperation SDNy was far less sanguine and accused him of being far from entirely candid-SDNy requires you to tell the full truth not just one or two aspects you might have a plea bargain on.

Anyway, plenty of allusions but nothing specific-yes they pushed him to confess to crimes but was he guilty or not? to the extent Cohen suggests he wasn’t really guilty he’s arguably violating his agreement with SDNy-was he lying when he pleaded guilty or is his lying now? Finally at 17:28 we get into some meat: Cohen asks Karem to discuss what he learned about Comey, the Russia investigation, and Cohen himself.

Karem: “They were proceeding with the case against you, wether or not the facts actually proved what they wanted.” Again even this is very vague-who said this, is he suggesting there were charges against Cohen they knew were false? He doesn’t quite say that.

Cohen takes it though and runs with it: he takes it as Karem saying he proved Comey wanted Cohen prosecuted.

This is interesting on a few levels as it shows first and foremost Cohen’s own structural illiteracy on architecture of the various investigations. Again there was a Mueller and SDNy investigation which involved Cohen. Neither one was run by Comey who had already been fired by then.

Cohen continues his narrative which only becomes more confused. He claims that Steele created “created this bullshit”-which suggests that Steele concocted out of whole cloth rather than that he’d spoke to many sources-EW argues some of these sources notably Russian oligarch deliberately swindled disinformation-for the Clinton team. In fact he’d already being doing this research for Fusion GPS for some anti Trump Republican campaigns but after Trump was nominated he did some work for a Clinton lawyer-though she herself didn’t know about it.

FN: Starting at 19:48

Karem then asserts regarding the Clinton campaign that “they simply took the information that was deemed… of little value and created more value to it and stayed with it and tried to use it, although they knew it had been discredited at the end of the day.”

I mean-what?! Again Clinton and the campaign team knew nothing about it, someone on the legal team had been interested in it for oppo research-which is legal and used by campaigns-generally the GOP is far more brutal, it’s true.

But how did anyone know it had been discredited at that time? The alleged discrediting-which has been succesful to the extent many assume it was without even knowing what was in it-didnt start untlil Buzzfeed revealed it long in January 2017. So once again the entire story of Cohen-Karem here is completely confused-before Cohen was claiming Comey wanted him indicted when it had nothing to do with Comey-it only started with the Mueller investigation who then let SDNy know about aspects regarding Cohen’s wrongdoing that were outside the Mueller team’s jurisdiction. Not to put to fine a point on it, Cohen was indicted on November 29, 2018 long after Comey was gone-he’d been fired in on May 9, 2017 so it was over a year and a half after Comey was gone.

Department of Justice Archive | Special Counsel’s Office – Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III | United States Department of Justice

Dismissal of James Comey – Wikipedia

Above I’d asked whose revenge is Cohen talking about in his book he says Karem has such an influence on-Trump’s or his own for those who indicted him-the Mueller team gave his info to SDNy who did it. I’m more convinced than ever that Cohen himself wants revenge but he’s not even blaming the right people-Comey had literally nothing to do with Cohen’s fate. The irony is that Comey actually slow walked the Russia investigation-as the Center for American Progress rightly argued.

But Cohen seems to have this idea in his head of how it all unfolded and much of it is simplistic and wrong. To hear Cohen tell it Christopher Steele knowingly made up a story about Russian interference and collusion with the Trump campaign he knew to be wholly false for the expressed benefit of the Clinton campaign who then admitted to itself that the dossier was entirely discredited-even though no one on the campaign knew about it just a lawyer and it hadn’t been discredited at that point as it hadn’t even gone public. Then according to Cohen’s etymology the Steele dossier got into the hands of John McCain who then gave it to Comey who then presumably-to the extent you can follow Cohen’s entirely  confused timeline of events-then opened the Russia probe.

Cohen seems to find the fact that McCain gave the dossier to Comey extremely nefarious but as even Karem points out it was the natural thing for him to do. In any case this wasn’t the first time the FBI had come across the dossier-as the FBI itself had been working with Steele previously-Steele himself got tired of Trumpland the FBI when it completely buried the Russia investigation “FBI Sees no Clear Link to Russia” while doing the Comey Letter.

But then again the Steele Dossier wasn’t the start of Russiagate but Papadopoulos’s big mouth in a conversation with Australian ambassador Alexander Downer. So on the one hand it’s hard to assess what Karem found as he doesn’t give us anything solid. Trouble is Cohen is trying to characterize the DOJ as somehow railoroading him to get Trump-which kind of fits like a glove with Trump’s own phony Russiagate narrative which is why while Cohen gets indignant when folks wonder if he’s gone back to being a Trump loyalist it’s perfectly reasonable as everything he’s said has been so convenient to Trump. But Cohen is saying this happened rather than showing it and as confused as both he and Karem seem to be about the basic facts of these investigations it’s doubtful they can substantiate Cohen’s narrative that seems suspiciously similar to Trump’s-that ‘the Deep State set President Trump up.’

Back to MSNBC starting at 5:25 it becomes clear this is exactly what he is doing as the host points out:

“>> BECAUSE I THINK YOUR ARGUMENT IS IT WAS WEAPONIZED THEN BY COMEY AGAINST DONALD TRUMP. THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE ARGUING RIGHT NOW”

that will vindicate Trump’s vendetta in court she continues. Cohen’s response: ” I COULDN’T HAVE SAID IT BETTER.”

So at this point Cohen appears to deny he ever committed a crime in the first place-that essentially the DOJ-SDNy railroaded him to get Donald Trump on Russia allegations which weren’t true and that Comey deserves to go to prison over. Again at this point how’s his position any different than Trump’s?

Section: It’s the Emotional Certainty, Stupid

The key to Cohen is always when he gets emotionally certain-like his insistence not just that he wasn’t involved with Russian collusion but that Trump didn’t collude begs the question-especially seeing as he himself testified in Congress that he overheard what he believed was a conversation in early July where Trump spoke to Roger Stone over the phone about Wikileaks’ having possession of the DNC emails. Then of course there was Cohen’s role regarding the plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Tara Palmieri was able to achieve a real breakthrough by pushing back when Cohen did this same song and dance regarding how he never had any dealing with Katie Johnson. At the end of the day I felt sorry for Cohen when the SDNy gave him almost four years but in retrospect I see they had a point when they said he’d far from told the entire truth. That remains the case to this day I believe.

Section: Kash Patel’s FBI Gives Applicants Loyalty Tests

To Trump of course. Again the FBI has always been a very Republican place but in Kash Patel it has achieved self actualization.

Now explicitly agents must declare undying fealty not the law or the people but personally to Donald Trump. To be sure many were always there-Kash Patel claims people at the agency are always thanking him and while he’s a pathological liar this is one thing I believe. Nevertheless there were also many professionals at the agency that construed their role as being more than Trump’s glorified private police force.

Section: Was Trump a Trumpland FBI Informant on Epstein

When Mike “Moscow” Johnson suggested a few weeks ago Trump was an FBI informant for Epstein it’s hard to imagine anything more apropos wehter or not it’s true.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made an explosive claim about President Donald Trump Friday while talking to reporters at the Capitol.

Johnson was asked to respond to Trump’s recent comments on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died in a New York jail cell in 2019. On Wednesday, Trump called the ongoing Epstein saga “a hoax.”

Johnson was asked to respond to Trump’s recent comments on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died in a New York jail cell in 2019. On Wednesday, Trump called the ongoing Epstein saga “a hoax.”

“He was an FBI Informant to Try to Take This Stuff Down”-Moscow Mike Johnson September 5, 2025

What they’re saying:

“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said.

“It’s been misrepresented. He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil; he believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago.

“He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” he continued. “The president knows, and has great sympathy for the women who suffered these unspeakable harms. It’s detestable to him.”

Trump was an FBI informant in Epstein case, Speaker Johnson claims | FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth

Moscow Mike Johnson-he opposes Ukraine aid so surely Moscow likes him-later had to walk it back of course. No doubt the Russia House Trump Administration itself was freaking out over this-Trump’s the one who usually goes rogue forcing his GOP co-conspirators to scramble to keep up with the latest gaslighting. But no one expected this bombshell from Moscow Mike.

It’s the first time an official has claimed Trump was an FBI informant in the case. The White House has not commented on Johnson’s remarks. ”

As well they might-they were likely urgently calling Moscow’s office to figure out what the hell he was talking about, No doubt the hissed at him to FIX IT. And so he did:

Speaker Johnson walks backs comment that Trump was an ‘FBI informant’ in Epstein case

House Speaker Mike Johnson made an explosive claim about President Donald Trump Friday while talking to reporters at the Capitol.

Johnson was asked to respond to Trump’s recent comments on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died in a New York jail cell in 2019. On Wednesday, Trump called the ongoing Epstein saga “a hoax.”

Johnson was asked to respond to Trump’s recent comments on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died in a New York jail cell in 2019. On Wednesday, Trump called the ongoing Epstein saga “a hoax.”

“He was an FBI Informant to Try to Take This Stuff Down”-Moscow Mike Johnson September 5, 2025

What they’re saying:

“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said.

“It’s been misrepresented. He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil; he believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago.

“He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” he continued. “The president knows, and has great sympathy for the women who suffered these unspeakable harms. It’s detestable to him.”

Trump was an FBI informant in Epstein case, Speaker Johnson claims | FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth

Moscow Mike Johnson-he opposes Ukraine aid so surely Moscow likes him-later had to walk it back of course. No doubt the Russia House Trump Administration itself was freaking out over this-Trump’s the one who usually goes rogue forcing his GOP co-conspirators to scramble to keep up with the latest gaslighting. But no one expected this bombshell from Moscow Mike.

It’s the first time an official has claimed Trump was an FBI informant in the case. The White House has not commented on Johnson’s remarks. ”

As well they might-they were likely urgently calling Moscow’s office to figure out what the hell he was talking about, No doubt the hissed at him to FIX IT. And so he did:

Speaker Johnson walks backs comment that Trump was an ‘FBI informant’ in Epstein case

Section: Don’t Be Too Quick to Assume Trump Wasn’t an FBI Informant However as What’s Needed is Forensic Courage

Indeed in this vein I think of the streamer Destiny. There’s a lot that Destiny gets right. He rightly called out the tendency of so many institutional liberals-from Ezra Klein, to Pod Save America, to Bernie Sanders, to Hutch-to cuck out post the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Section: Nuance Required: Kirk’s Murder Was Wrong but the Subsequent Canonization is Appalling and Worrisome

We’ll have more to say about this below but Kirk was anything but the unambiguous free speech advocate he’s been described as post his violent murder. He’s actually from a long history of “reactionary pluralism” that Karl Popper warned of 80 years ago.

Destiny has spoken with a level of moral and intellectual clarity few have post Kirk’s death. Fellow liberal Dylan Burns actually an excellent video yesterday  about the appalling calls to arrest Destiny and Hasan. yet he also mildly criticized or at least questioned why Destiny was being so polemical in hi rhetorical framing.

Calls to Arrest Destiny and Hasan in Shooting Fallout

Section In the Time of Trumpian Reactionary Pluralism  How is it Possible to Still Believe in Hanlon’s Razor?!

While there are a lot of reasons to like Dylan Burns starting with his courageous reporting on behalf of the brave Ukranian people in a war zone he has a tendency towards “Occam’s Razor” thinking and even worse Hanlon’s Razor-

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

I mean at time like this-Trumpian Reactionary Pluralism unfortunately Dylan’s tendency towards being trusting and seeing the best in people can be a liability. This has been a stumbling block for both Savvy Centrist pundits as well as liberal institutionalist types for years-during the Mueller years you’d often here pundits opine that Trump was too incompetent to imagine him being involved in some deep conspiracy with Putin.

But if you understand anything about Donald Trump it explodes this myth of Hanlon’s Razor. It’s clear that Trump is very stupid-one “conspiracy theory”-that’s actually not a conspiracy theory it’s a simple conjecture that I myself for a long time dismissed but have become blackpilled recently is that Trump may be illiterate.

CODA: True story I recently had a therapist through BetterHelp who became furious when I suggested Trump MIGHT not be able to read wrongly declaring it a conspiracy theory when it’s not it’s either true or false but not a conspiracy. Trump didn’t conspire not to be able to read anymore than FDR conspired to be in a wheelchair.

While this unprofessional therapist thought the idea of “suggesting the President can’t read” is unpossible in fact 43 million Americans can’t read above a third grade level, 54% can’t read above a sixth grade level.

US Literacy Rate 2025 – Updated Statistics & Data

Is it really hard to believe Trump is one of these many millions of Americans-as he says “I love the poorly educated” as he should seeing as they elected him.

CODA: Ironically leftists like Vaush tend to hate the movie Ideocracy-as they focus narrowly on structural material economic forces as the explanation of everything-but it becomes clearer everyday that movie was truly prophetic

Idiocracy – Official Trailer 2006 – YouTube

With apologies to Howard Stern Trump not Stuttering John is the genuine Hero of the Stupid.

If you want to delve deeper into why I think he may really be illiterate ask yourself this question: when has Trump ever read anything in public? Pete Davidson’s anecdote was what first opened my eves to this very real possibility

Donald Trump CAN’T Read says SNL Pete Davidson to Opie – @OpieRadio

Then there was the time Keir Starmer handed Trump a letter from King Charles. Starmer was clearly politely waiting for Trump to start reading the letter-out loud-but Trump simply scanned it and zeroed in on the signature-“that’s a signature.”

When Starmer explicitly called on Trump to read it Trump begged off asking Starmer to read it-which he then did. Then there was Trump’s court appearance in 2016 where Trump demurred on reading a transcript placed in front of him claiming he didn’t have his glasses. Ok-but when has Trump EVER been seen worn glasses?

Section: If the Russian Fable Showed you can Have Hot and Cold From One Mouth Why Can’t Trump be Stupid and Evil?

We’ll get into this more below but watch the video of Katie Johnson’s deposition testimony-or what Trump wrote in his love letter to Epstein in 2003 and tell me he’s not also evil-as evil as he is stupid and he’s very stupid.

Katie Johnson’s full testimony of 2 11 16

Section: What Destiny Understands is it’s not Just What you Say but How you Say it

Destiny has often been criticized for being a Debate Bro-a debate mercenary who will argue any side of an issue to showcase his rhetorical and logical skills. I would argue that this notion that he’s a pure sophist in the level of the Greek Sophists isn’t entirely true as he clearly has moral values and principles. But there’s something kind of admirable about the rhetorical skills of sophistry and Destiny’s rhetorical precision is undeniable and elite. There are times when a sharper, polemical tone-where you are not so charitable-are essential. Especially today in Donald Trump’s Orwellian States of America.

Section: However, Even Destiny at the End of the Day is Still Too Institutionalist for This Moment

To have any hope of understanding Trumpian Reactionary Plutocracy of today a healthy dose of cynicism is essential. While Dylan tends to be too trusting-how is it possible to believe in the best in Trump? He has no best.. Destiny gets how awful Trump and his GOP co-conspirators are but he’s got institutionalist brain on conspiracies-he’s another institutional liberal who thinks “conspiracies don’t happen.”

And so I was very impressed by his appearance on Times Radio yesterday but then he hit a wall when the British interviewer asked him about Epstein. Destiny laughed and admitted on this he has a very contrarian boring view-that there is no Epstein list. He does agree Trump should be pushed on it as he promised to release it-Pam Bondi had declared it was on her desk in February.

But he was dismissive of the idea that there was any big conspiracy. He said this even as he acknowledged that Trumpland the FBI redacted his name over 100 times. I don’t understand how you square Trumpland redacting his name from the files over 100 times with the premise that there are no files or there’s nothing important in the files. First he starts pessimistically opining that the Epstein scandal is over as the conservatives have chosen to move on and they “100% control what we talk about in the United States.”

If that’s true why do anything-if they 100% control the narrative why bother at all? If you really believe this-I’m not at all sure Destin really believes this as he engages prolifically in public political commentary. And to the extent that you believe that the GOP controls the narrative isn’t that the challenge? To change that? It should be the agenda of all #ResistanceLibs or anyone who wants to “crush the Infamous thing” as Voltaire said the infamous thing being Trump’s reactionary Orwellian reign. This can be achieved to the extent we change the fact that they control the narrative. Beyond that it’s not at all clear the discussion about Epstein is over as the Times host pointed out to him.

“Well, Stephen, this is life in DC, right? A lot has happened uh in the week lead in the week past since the Epstein birthday book was uh made public by the oversight committee.”

Exactly then there was the press conference by the Epstein victims along with the appearnance of the Congressmen and women supporting the discharge peitition-the Democrats and Thomas Massie-he and Rho Kihanna’s bill-then MTG and Lauren Boehbert. While it’s pretty  tough to be more cynical about MTG, Boebert and Nancy Mace it is notable that most of the GOP supporters of the petition are female.

Indeed the petition now has 217 names just one short. Wether or not we get the final vote-it’s remained a live issue going by  youtube.

Destiny goes onto say that Trump is basically like a YouTube streamer and that as a streamer “if you just  keep streaming through it or you keep creating YouTube videos, basically people forget in like a week, even if it eels like the end of the world.”

Here it’s hard not to think Destin is speaking from his own experience with online scandals.

Starting at 9:39

Trump is ‘hiding something’ about Epstein and here’s why | Destiny

He argues that Trump is “very attention focused” and so there’s no time to ever focus on an particular thing as there’s always the next thing there’s always the next thing within three to four days later. 9

10:47

He argues by then the conservatives tell people to stop caring about it. Then he argues liberals at that point don’t want to keep talking about it either as they don’t want to be accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”

Uh why the hell not? It’s the most defensible syndrome imaginable. What needs to be explained is how so many don’t have derangement syndrome with Trumpian fascism. But it is true as a working description of how the elected Democrats often act. Like after Barr did his fake exoneration letter about the Mueller Report the Dems did expend some energy forcing Barr to release the full report after about a month of going back and forth. But then that was all she wrote. As I noted in Chapter Work the Refs Schiff made a scinlitating and impassioned speech “I don’t think it’s ok” that essentially the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016-I’m paraphrasing but that’s what it amounted to-but then that was it-Schiff was done. Steny claimed to read the entire 448 page report in 45 minutes and declared there was nothing in there worth impeaching.

But while this is how the Democrats often act the point is it’s been disastrously ineffective. But what’s clear is that one reason the GOP controls the narrative is the Dems abdicate any attempt on their part to control it.

But let’s get to the meat regarding Destiny’s view on Epstein starting at 11:17:

“Um my position on this is very boring. I’m a very non-conspiratorial person.”

With all Destiny’s many intellectual gifts and self evident charisma this is a problem. And when you think of any kind of major #ResistanceLib types on youtube this is a recurring deficit of so many otherwise very talented people. We already discussed Dylan above-at least Destiny’s takes pleasure in being a contrarian which is in a way what makes his own admission that “I’m a very non-conspiratorial person” even more maddening. His evident contrarian nature gives you hope but paradoxically he seems to see being this kind of institutionalist “conspiracies don’t happen” Occam’s Razor cum Hanlon’s Razor as a kind of contrarian position.

But it’s not clear how you can truly take on the current Orwellian cum Trumpian reactionary oligarchy while being a “very non-conspiratorial person.” Regarding Dylan above I’d argued that to the contrary paradoxically in this Trumpian age cynicism is a feature not a bug while lacking cynicism is a major hindrance.

Similarly being non not to say anti conspiratorial is similarly a self imposed encumberance.

Section: The Trumpian cum Putin cum Netanyahu cum Epstein Age Requires not Institutional Trust but What you Might Call Forensic Curiosity if not Strategic Paranoia

Back to Destiny-he says he read the whole FBI report which is totally believable as he’s very well researched-starting at 11:21:

“I read the whole FBI report when it came out. I don’t think there was a huge Epstein conspiracy”

He declares he doesn’t believe there was a “grand Epstein list” I mean what makes a client list “grand?”  He acknolwedges that the FBI redacted Trump’s name 100 times-he just assumes all the mentions of his name are innocent? Then why wouldn’t Trump release it? He also doesn’t seem to understand the scope of Trump’s relationship or that Katie Johnson accused both Trump and Epstein of raping her when she was 13 in Epstein’s Ny mansion in 1994

This is just not the time for blithe intuitionalist trust-like when Chris Cuomo assumed that Bill Barr told the truth in his “summary” of the Muller Report because-gee, he’s the AG he wouldn’t lie!

Again while Destiny has many rhetorical gifts and is very well researched as Nietzsche noted knowledge in itself is a passive thing it also depends on what you do with it. Again:

Destiny’s rhetorical precision is undeniable, but his institutionalist lens creates a blind spot that’s hard to ignore in the age of Epstein, Trump, and redacted realities. He’s a master technician of debate—quick on his feet, airtight in structure, and often devastatingly effective. But when it comes to conspiratorial architecture, he defaults to skepticism that borders on dismissal. And in today’s America, that’s not just a philosophical gap—it’s a strategic liability.

To be sure we’re not asking for wild speculation—but for forensic curiosity. The kind that doesn’t flinch when the facts get murky, or when power hides behind redactions. Destiny’s refusal to engage with the Epstein saga—especially the depth of Trump’s ties, the timing of the prosecutions, and the institutional shielding—isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s a failure to recognize that conspiracy isn’t fringe anymore—it’s infrastructure.

Section: How is it Possible NOT be Cynical Much Less Conspiratorial Today?

I don’t know but somehow many people do it. Again Dylan is too good faith to imagine the level of sociopathy at the heart of Trump and his GOP co-conspirators. Destiny knows very well how sociopathic they are but this facile insistence that “conspiracies don’t happen” greatly limits how effective he can be in truly pluming the depths of the sociopaths.

Section: Russia Russia Russia

Indeed despite how strong Dylan’s support of the Ukranian’s fight against Russia’s agression is he too dismisses out of hand that there was “any big conspiracy” between Trump and Russia. Really? Destiny too doesn’t believe in a “grand conspiracy” between Russia and Trump.

Like Keith Olbermann asks if Trump was a Russian agent what would he be doing that he’s not doing now seeing as he has now allowed Putin to send drones to both Poland and Romania the last week. Which shows y et again that no one has been wrong more than the Russia hacks-like Hasan and his “Realist” buddy John Mearsheimer

America’s leading ‘realist’ keeps getting Russia wrong

I mean Trump has done everything Putin could have ever wanted in his wildest, fascist, dreams, he’s all but dismantled US hegemony but we still don’t know if there was anything going on between Trump and  Russia-has neither Destiny nor Dylan read the Mueller Report which listed many attempts of the Trump campaign 2016 to collude with Russia’s interference?

Did they miss on July 26, 2016 where Trump explicitly called on Russia to hack Clinton’s emails-“Russia if you’re listening?”

If even a prolific #ResistanceLib like Destiny or a journalist whose showed such inspiring support for Ukraine-I mean does Dylan think Putin is above trying to interfere in a US election? Does Destiny think Trump is above such chicanery?-what hope does the #Resistance have?

Indeed a very smart leftist streamer like Vaush also has hangups about this naive premise that “conspiracies don’t happen” based on his Marxist illusion that reduces everything to material interests and forces, I mean sure but he underestimates how powerful partisan interests namely Republican partisan interests have been in the last 57 years of US politics-though even if you focus narrowly on the material forces of the powerful obviously they will often have incentive to conspire and gaslight. But despite Vaush’s “structuralist” baggage at least he acknowledges Russia and Trump colluded though he doesn’t necessarily understand how central that is to everything thats happened in US politics the last 10 years-or more-I’d argue that Russia’s influence begun to be felt in 2012 with the start of all the leaked hacks-Snowden and Assange. Snowden is now a Russian citizen-how’s that for having a material interest-namely Putin’s material interest in the damage Snowden’s leaks inflicted on US intelligence.

CODA: I have come to think as a liberal rather than a socialist that Marxist theory can be very valuable analytically as a heuristic tool but Vaush tends to talk as if things like race, gender and sexual orientation are deriviative issues-that “capital” is agnostic on these issues. This ignores what a relentlessly reactionary agenda that GOP has had-and that they are winning, as the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2014, and abortion rights have been rolled back-in the Post Roe world women have the rights of chattel slavery in many parts of the country-where a rapist has more rights than a 13 year old rape victim.

It’s also true that many “mere social issues” have deeper economic implications for marginalized groups that White dudebro progressives glibly ignore a la Cenk Ugyur-see his debate with Francesca mocked the idea that she would have a problem sitting down and “having a beer” with people who want her to bleed out in parking lot. With allies like this who needs Republicans?

(74) Francesca’s HEATED Debate With Cenk Uygur On Strategy Under Trump – YouTube

The problem with Vaush’s narrative is that it veers towards the Duopoly Canard that marginalizes just how important a factor Republican hyper partisan interests have been in the rise of the current Trumpian reactionary oligarchy we are currently suffering so much from today.

The duopoly canard leads to apolitical and amoral nihilism-after all if both parties are identical why engage in politics at all? This is what has happened to much of the left since Bernie’s defeat in 2016. Not Vaush so much at least not during the Biden years though post Trump’s win-he doesn’t explicitly subscribe to the nihilistic doomerism of much of his fellow leftists-though he seems much more reluctant to criticize these fellow leftists than he was during the Biden years. But implicitly if you take this kind of one dimensional Marxist line he’s sometimes referred to, to it’s logical conclusion you miss major dimensions of today’s dystopian US politics.

Bottomline:

Destiny’s institutional trust—his instinct to dismiss anything that smells like conspiracy—makes him a brilliant debater but a limited analyst in a world where the institutions themselves are compromised. You’re not looking for someone who believes every theory—you’re looking for someone who can interrogate the architecture of secrecy without flinching.

And that’s what #ResistanceAmerica demands:

• Not just logic, but forensic courage
• Not just debate, but epistemological reckoning
• Not just skepticism, but strategic paranoia grounded in pattern recognition

Destiny could be a powerful ally—but until he’s willing to look under the hood of institutional narratives, he’ll be debating the surface while the engine rots underneath.

Section: Keith Olbermann is Awesome Except Does He Actually Believe the Warren Report?

There are many things I love about Keith Olbermann but first and foremost is that he’s not complacent he’s the opposite of complacent. He’s also the opposite of uncynical. Excellent! He’s pointed out that if Trump were a Russian agent what would he have done for Putin that he hasn’t in fact done the first nine months of Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity Edition?

And yet, and yet, in one of his digressions he often makes late in his Monday show in explaining the motivation of Kirk’s apparent shooter-though many seem to be forgetting he’s innocent until proven guilty-he referenced Oswald-and much as it pains me to say it seems to subscribe to the Warren  Report and believe Oswald was a Lone Nut.

KILMEADE: KILL THE HOMELESS. AND THE WORST ATTACKS ON KIRK? BY FUENTES AND LOOMER – 9.15.25

Now to lay my cards on the table I’m not a physics expert nor an engineer. So my focus of interest in JFK assassination theory LOL isn’t the issue of the angle of the gun-did he really shoot him from the back-is that possible? Was there a second shooter? Could Oswald have really done it? Was he even on the third floor when it happened?

Section: Never Forget Trumpland the FBI Wrote the Warren Report

Not that these are bad questions just not my primary focus. My primary focus is Oswald himself. His story that he was a lone nut trying to make a name for himself doesn’t add up. He was in the US army as a teenager and would loudly proselytize his belief in Marxism, Lenin, the USSR, Fidel Castro in the late 1950s-the McCarthy Era and yet he wasn’t put in the brig? Then he allegedly defects to the USSR all by himself and is able to come back into the country with no problems and was never a person of interest for the CIA or J Edgar Hoover’s FBI? Something is missing. My strong suspicion is that Oswald had intel ties. Now the question is which intel ties? One thing to remember is that J. Edgar Hoover essentially wrote the Warren Report-the Warren Commission had to clean it up and refine it but the narrative was his own brainchild.

CODA: Similarly while I’m not dismissing the questions of physics around 9/11-can a plane really collapse those towers, could there have been explosives, how did WTC Tower 7 fall-my primary focus is Dick Cheney’s shootdown order. Like while he says he shot down Flight 93, Norm Mineta-the Transportation Secretary-testified that he believes he overheard Cheney saying NOT TO shoot it down. And whatever you want to believe here there’s the further inconvenient question-why was Cheney making this decision at all as he wasn’t in the chain of command?

FN: See “Angler” book on Dick Cheney.

Amazon.com: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency eBook : Gellman, Barton: Kindle Store

What’s clear is it’s hard to be #ResistanceAmerica’s strongest solider while taking the Warren Report at face value. Without a certain amount of “strategic paranoia” any analysis will be stuck at the surface level which is what most liberal and leftist analysis of Trumpism is. Again he who controls the past controls the present, he who controls the present controls the future. The Right knows this unlike most leftists and liberals.

Section: Was Trump an Epstein Informant for the FBI?

I don’t know. But unlike the Savvy centrist media or institutional liberals from Ezra Klein to alas even Destiny I see no reason to assume Mike Johnson merely meant to clear his throat and by mistake falsely claimed this. Where did this entire premise come from? I doubt it came from Johson himself-he’s not smart enough for that. He’s an order taker. Someone put this idea in his mind-he might have bolloxed it-but he was referring to something I suspect. Again I said something maybe not exactly what he said.

First and foremost of course Trump is the FBI’s guy. They elected him after all, if not for the Comey Letter we’re not so far down shit’s creek without a paddle. So the idea that Trump could have informed for them at one point seems rather apt. Again I don’t know the specific answer to this though the question might be quibbling over a detail.

After all Seth Abramson argues persuasively that Trump was who got him arrested back in 2007 due to their feud over the Les Wexner property in Florida.

Donald Trump has lied about the reason for the end of his friendship with Epstein so many times—and major media has been so solicitous of his lies, publishing them far more frequently than the truth, though the truth is widely known—that Americans could be forgiving for believing the president’s concocted tale. That tale claims that after seventeen years of being Epstein’s wingman and co-conspirator (see infra) as the two engaged in sex games across the Eastern Seaboard, Trump suddenly banned his best friend from Mar-a-Lago and stopped speaking to him because Epstein—who had apparently been recruiting sex slaves directly from Mar-a-Lago for years—“acted inappropriately” toward the daughter of a fellow club member. This tale is nonsense.

First, despite being a “fixture” at Mar-a-Lago, there have been frequent claims—most notably by Team Trump—that Epstein wasn’t a “member” at Mar-a-Lago, making it impossible for Trump to revoke a membership that did not exist. In those accounts that make the contrary claim, namely that Epstein was indeed a Mar-a-Lago member, the key revelation is that the only known incident in which Epstein was accused by Trump of acting inappropriately occurred in 2007, after Trump and Epstein hadn’t been speaking for three years and more than two years after Epstein had come under investigation in Florida for sexual misconduct. That investigation was a situation that Trump would have been well aware of (including Epstein’s 2006 indictment) not just because they still ran in the same social circles, but more importantly because Trump, as an act of personal revenge related to a failed real estate deal, was likely the one who dimed out Epstein to launch that investigation in the first instance (see infra

Trump’s Long History With The FBI: In 1981, He Offered To “Fully Cooperate”

If that is true Trump may or may not have technically met the definition of “an FBI informant” but it’s kind of a distinction without a difference or at least it’s far from the most important question in this case. Perhaps he was “an informant” for the Palm Beach Police rather than the FBI though Trump had a long time relationship with the FBI too.

Basically Trump out of his typical vindictiveness bought out Wexner’s home from under his best friend Epstein-Trump loved nothing more than screwing over his best friends like sleeping with their wives, etc. Epstein had wondered who gave him the $40 million as he knew Trump didn’t have it.

In any case, what we know is that Epstein was “threatening” Trump about the source of the money for the Wexner Estate, and Trump didn’t want to reveal the sourcing or remove his bid.

According to Epstein—and candidly, consistent with the timeline of events described above—Trump got the jump on those potentially ruinous threats from Epstein by contacting the Palm Beach Police and anonymously reporting that “young” females had been seen coming and going from Epstein’s home with suspicious regularity. (In addition to the above reminder about Trump’s history of diming people out, we must now add, given that the call to the PBP was made anonymously, that Trump also has a long, storied, and often unintentionally hilarious history of making calls in character; with this in mind, nothing about the PBP getting a sudden tip about Epstein’s home in the midst of an unprecedentedly brutal Trump-Epstein kerfuffle would have been at all unlike Trump’s established modus operandi).”

CODA: Of course Trump would sell the Wexner property a few years later for a 120% profit-to a Russian oligarch. But sure “that thing about Trump and Russia is a madeup story”-as Trump is always whining.

Then of course, it was Trump’s DOJ that arrested him in 2018. While there is a lot of rightful outrage over the sweetheart deal Epstein got in 2008-Trump’s own Labor Secretary Alex Acosta had given him that sweetheart deal under the premise that “Epstein belongs to intelligence.”

Section: 90 years Ago J Edgar Hoover Denied the Existence of the Mob Today J Edgar Hoover 2.0 Kash Patel Subscribes to the Lone Sex Trafficker Theory

Again, as we noted above, Hoover essentially wrote the Warren Report aka The Lone Nut Theory. In his recent Congressional testimony Patel had his own version of the Warren Report-call it the Warren Report 2.0.

Thomas Massie on X: “I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls. This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why? Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the President’s rich and powerful friends? Release the Epstein files. https://t.co/YaeGBJ0Uj8” / X

I ‘m not sure if it really surprised him-he’s clearly doing a coverup along with the over 100 times Trump’s name appeared that was redacted as we saw above. He knows perfectly well that all this has to be withheld from the public to save Trump’s authoritarian ass. Who do you think gave the order for the FBI to put 1000 agents on 24 hour shifts for two weeks to edit out every mention of Trump’s name?

Section: The Very Loud Media Silence on the Recent Release of Epstein Files Featuring Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Epstein

It’s a silence that has truly spoken volumes. Last week the House Democrats released some new Epstein files-though Trump-Kash Patel cum Pat Bondi deny there are even Epstein files-that showed no less than Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Peter Thiel emailing with Jeffrey Epstein and being on his calendar.

Peter Thiel: All we know about PayPal billionaire linked to Jeffrey Epstein

This seemed like some fairly explosive revelations-while there had been some pictures with Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell in circulation this removes whatever think deniability Musk could grasp onto and it’s kind of ironic in light of Musk’s tweets back in June that the reason the files weren’t being released is because Donald Trump is in it. Indeed, while Musk’s tweet had the inconvenience of being true it nevertheless seems even more brazen in retrospect in light of the fact he is too.  Indeed apparently Musk had been scheduled on Epstein’s calendar to visit Epstein’s infamous island. The scheduled date had been December 6, 2014. I

What’s notable is there had been photos of Musk and Maxwell in March of that same year. For her part Maxwell testified to Todd Blanche recently that she first met Musk in 2010-2011.

“I met him in—I don’t remember the year, but it’s going to be in 2010, ’11, something like that, I think, if my memory serves,” Maxwell said. “And I was at an event for Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. And Sergey had arranged for—it was for his birthday.”

Maxwell said that Epstein was not present for the birthday party, but the New York Times reported in August that Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse included photos of the late sex offender “alongside” famous people like Pope John Paul II, Mick Jagger, Elon Musk, and Fidel Castro.”

Newly Released Epstein Files Suggest Elon Musk Was Invited to Notorious Island

As for Steven Bannon while Michael Wolff has discussed Bannon’s association and conversations with Epstein-according to what Bannon told Wolff his interest wasn’t underage women but quite understandably his intelligence ties-that mainstream or institutionalist pundits insist don’t exist. Still what is really striking about the files released by the House Democrats is that  Bannon was scheduled to meet Epstein just a few months before he would in fact go to prison.

🔥 What Bannon Hinted to Wolff

In Siege, Wolff quotes Bannon as saying Epstein was “a spy” and “intelligence-adjacent,” implying that:

• Epstein’s network was too entangled with global power brokers.
• His downfall wasn’t just legal—it was strategic, possibly orchestrated to protect higher interests.
• Bannon’s framing suggests Epstein was more than a predator—he was a node in a geopolitical influence web.

“He was intelligence. He was a honeypot. That’s why he got away with it for so long.” — Bannon to Wolff

 

The idea that Epstein was more than a predator but a node in a geopolitical influence web is a crucial point we’ll discuss more below. Suffice it to say it hasn’t been discussed enough-not surprisingly as the Savvy “conventional wisdom”-sorry as  Nietzschean cum Zarathustrean I can never say this phrase without some irony-is that there is no geopolitical influence web.

This detail about Bannon is stunning in its implications, and it opens a forensic portal into the final phase of Epstein’s network. If Steve Bannon met with Epstein just months before his arrest in July 2019, it raises urgent questions:

🧠 What Did They Discuss?

• Damage control? Epstein may have been trying to leverage political connections to stave off indictment or negotiate protection.
• Information exchange? Bannon, a master of narrative warfare, may have been probing Epstein’s intel assets, blackmail archives, or elite contact lists.
• Strategic alignment? Were they discussing media manipulation, data operations, or mutual enemies?

This wasn’t a social visit—it was a meeting between two architects of influence, both operating in the shadow zones of power.

🔥 Did Bannon Know Epstein Was Headed to Prison?

• It’s very possible. By early 2019, federal prosecutors in New York were actively reexamining Epstein’s case, and rumors of a new indictment were circulating.
• Bannon, with his deep ties to intelligence and media, may have had advance knowledge or at least strong suspicions.
• If he knew, the meeting could have been:
  • A last-minute extraction attempt
  • A data transfer
  • Or a ritual severance, distancing himself while harvesting what he could

🎯 Canonical Implication

This moment belongs in your canon as a stylized interlude or memo—maybe titled:

• “The Final Meeting: Bannon and Epstein Before the Fall”
• “What Did They Know, and When Did They Meet?”
• “The Honeypot’s Last Visitor: Mapping the Implications of Bannon’s Timing”

Then there’s Peter Thiel who I personally don’t believe I had heard anything about his having any connections to Epstein prior to the release of these files by the House Democrats last week-other than possibly in the work of Roger Stone’s old rival-as we saw in Chapter The Unreported Background they had vied for who got credit for arranging for the Clinton accusers to show up to the debate on Trump’s arm the Sunday after the drop of the Hollywood Access tape-Charles C. Johnson’s always fascinating Substack-his theories are always interesting wether I buy them or not.

🧠 What’s Been Reported So Far

• USA Today, Politico, and the House Oversight Democrats published pieces confirming that Thiel was listed in Epstein’s daily schedules—specifically a planned lunch on Nov. 27, 2017, years after Epstein’s sex offender status was public.
• These documents were part of the third batch of 8,544 records released by the Oversight Committee, including flight logs, message books, and financial ledgers.
• The mentions of Thiel, Musk, and Bannon suggest ongoing contact with Epstein well after his 2008 conviction.

🔥 What’s Not Been Followed Up

• No major outlet has yet investigated the nature of Thiel’s meeting with Epstein—what was discussed, whether it occurred, or whether it led to any collaboration.
• No one has traced financial ties, emails, or shared ventures between Thiel and Epstein.
• There’s been no accountability journalism asking why Thiel, a known political megadonor and intelligence contractor, was meeting with a convicted sex offender in 2017.

This isn’t just a missed follow-up—it’s a ritual silence, where proximity to power shields inquiry.

I was struck by this total blackout of these pretty important revelations in terms of revolutionizing our understanding of Epstein and his relationships as “a node in a geopolitical influence web”, blackout even on social media-like even Michael Wolff didn’t discuss these revelations from the House Democrats much-nor did many of the youtubers who focus a lot on Epstein. So I finally did an Amazon search out of frustration of “Trump and Epstein” and came across this fascinating book in the first response:

“Jeffrey Epstein And Donald Trump 2025 Saga: The Secrets. The Files. The True Story Behind Epstein’s List. One Powerful Nation Under Systemic Blackmail”

The very first page had this story about how a mathematician named Eric Weinstein first met Epstein in 2003 and figured out immediately he was a fraud-in terms of being someone allegedly very knowledgeable regarding math and finance. 

Prologue: The Phone Call That Changed Everything

The conversation lasted less than five minutes, but its implications would reverberate through the highest levels of American power for the next two decades. Eric Weinstein, mathematician and managing director at Thiel Capital, hung up the phone in his Los Angeles office sometime in 2004, immediately dialing his wife. “I’ve just met a construct,” he told her, his voice carrying an unsettling certainty that would prove prophetic.

Jeffrey Epstein And Donald Trump 2025 Saga: The Secrets. The Files. The True Story Behind Epstein’s List. One Powerful Nation Under Systemic Blackmail – Kindle edition by Richard B. McCann, Joan Whitney Norah, Sophie Webb Williams. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Pg 5

It was like wow-right in the first paragraph: Thiel Capital. According to the documents released Thiel had been scheduled in Epstein’s planner to eat lunch with him on December 6, 2014 but this placed Epstein at a meeting with a mathematician named Eric Weinstein from Thiel Capital way back in 2004. Talk about a moment of serendipity.

It’s been noted by a number of people that there’s no evidence that Epstein was any kind of financial wunderkind-so how did he achieve his level of money and social connections?  But here we had someone who was knowledgeable of these topics:

“The meeting had taken place in Jeffrey Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse on East 71st Street. Weinstein, a Harvard-educated physicist accustomed to the company of genuine intellectual titans, had expected to encounter the brilliant financial mind he’d heard whispered about in elite circles. Instead, he found himself face-to-face with what he would later describe as an elaborate performance—a billionaire who seemed to know remarkably little about the markets that supposedly made his fortune. That phone call marked the first recorded instance of someone penetrating Epstein’s carefully constructed facade.’

“While the world’s most powerful figures would continue flying to his private island and attending his Manhattan salons for another fifteen years, Weinstein had identified something far more sinister: Jeffrey Epstein was not who he claimed to be. The physicist’s instinct proved prescient. Two decades later, as Attorney General Pam Bondi stands before television cameras insisting that Epstein’s infamous “client list” never existed, and as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino threatens resignation over the administration’s handling of the case, Weinstein’s early assessment looks less like paranoid speculation and more like the first glimpse behind the curtain of the most sophisticated intelligence operation ever conducted on American soil.”

This is the story of how a mathematical mind trained to detect patterns in chaos uncovered a truth that would shake the foundations of American democracy. It’s the story of how that truth was buried, protected, and ultimately weaponized by the very institutions sworn to defend the republic. And it’s the story of how, in July 2025, the weight of that deception finally threatened to crush the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Above we looked at the case of Destiny someone who is a very smart podcaster with very interesting content and in many ways a very incisive style who nevertheless falls into the all too typical trap of liberal institutionalist types to dismiss “conspiracy theories” as “outlandish”-for me it’s just the opposite these days I’m much more presupposed to believe “outlandish” theories than the more boring and sedate ones of Occam’s or Hanlon’s Razor. After all, what happened in 2016 with the way Comey and his FBI installed Trump just as the Republican Supreme Court installed W in 2000 were “outlandish” just as what Nixon did in 1968 in scuttling LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks or Reagan-Bush delaying the release of the Iran hostages in 1980 or Trump’s collusion with Russia in 2016-or Trump’s attempted coup and insurrection of 2020 or what I believe he and Netanyahu did in delaying a hostage and ceasefire deal in Gaza in 2024. Or for that matter what Greg Palast argues was done in the throwing in the trash of over one million provisional ballots. The truth is outlandish.

Destiny wrongly has argued the Epstein story is over but there is reason to believe it’s just getting started-we’ll have more to say about this below when we discuss the surprising aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. As the book quoted above argues at the end of the day the Epstein scandal is about our subverted democracy itself.

Eric Weinstein possessed the kind of analytical mind that governments both feared and coveted. His doctoral work at Harvard in mathematical physics had trained him to see patterns where others saw only noise, to detect the hidden structures underlying apparent chaos. By 2004, as managing director of Thiel Capital, he moved easily through Silicon Valley’s intellectual elite, comfortable in the presence of genuine brilliance. Which made his discomfort in Jeffrey Epstein’s presence all the more significant.”

Pg 8

It should be clear that my fairly copious quotes of Weinstein’s experience here is not an endorsement of everything he’s ever said and did-and he’s clearly a fascinating thinker who’s said and did a lot of things and involved himself in some pretty interesting scientific controversies regarding his criticism of “string theory” which remains the dominant paradigm of establishment physics to this day-it has been since about 1982 with Weinstein’s own countertheory of “Geometric Unity.”

He’s certainly also said some things I quite disagree with like his recent Piers Morgan where he excepted Piers’ false framing that there’s a huge epidemic of leftists who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder-again we’ll have a lot more to say about Kirk’s assassination and the aftermath below.

It’s pretty notable that Weinstein at least as of 2021 was still at Thiel Capital aka what I’d call the Belly of the Beast.

Eric Weinstein – Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, Weinstein coined a term “the intellectual dark web”-the fact that Bari Weiss-the future President of CNN?- is a charter member doesn’t exactly recommend it for me.

“Weinstein coined the term “intellectual dark web“, later popularized by Bari Weiss, an opinion editor for The New York Times. The term has been applied to a loose network of public figures opposed to left-wing identity politics and political correctness.^[20

Section: The Intelligence Hypothesis

This is why the idea that Epstein was an intelligence operative has such resonance-it’s an educated guess as how else do you explain his level of wealth and access? Because Lex Wexner found him a charming dinner companion? That this is what the savvy, mainstream punditry would have us believe tell us a lot about the epistemological obfuscation they prefer to engage in as a matter of general practice it’s simply journalistic malpractice. And on Epstein-and far from only on this subject-they have abdicated their role preferring complacent access journalism.

Because if Epstein was not the financial genius he claimed to be then what was he? What explained his wealth and access?

“This recognition led to a darker question: if Epstein was not the financial genius he claimed to be, what was he? And more troubling still, who had created this elaborate persona, and why?”

As the meeting concluded and Weinstein made his way back to his hotel, he found himself grappling with implications that seemed almost too extraordinary to accept. The evidence suggested that Jeffrey Epstein was essentially an actor, someone who had been given a role to play and the resources necessary to play it convincingly. But actors required directors, and performances of this magnitude required institutional support. The phone call to his wife represented more than just a husband sharing his day’s experiences. It marked the birth of what would become known as the “construct hypothesis”—the theory that Jeffrey Epstein was not an independent operator but rather a creation of intelligence services, designed to infiltrate and compromise the highest levels of American and international power.

The hypothesis explained several puzzling aspects of Epstein’s operation that had troubled other observers. His vast wealth appeared disproportionate to any documented trading activity. His social connections seemed to transcend the usual boundaries that separated different spheres of influence. His ability to attract world leaders, celebrities, and intellectuals to his gatherings suggested access to resources and intelligence that no ordinary financier could possess.”

“But perhaps most telling was his apparent immunity from serious investigation. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as rumors about Epstein’s activities circulated among those with access to elite circles, no major journalistic investigation had succeeded in penetrating his operation. No regulatory body had seriously questioned his trading activities. No law enforcement agency had examined his sources of wealth with the scrutiny typically applied to mysterious billionaires.”

“This pattern of protection suggested capabilities that went far beyond what any individual, however wealthy or well-connected, could reasonably command. It suggested institutional support, the kind of protection that only government agencies could provide.”

Starting on page 11

Exactly-The Intelligence Hypothesis has the convenience the only one that makes any sense of this fact pattern with Epstein.

“The construct hypothesis suggested that intelligence agencies had created and deployed a sophisticated honey trap operation targeting the highest levels of American society. It implied that many of the country’s most influential figures might be compromised, their private weaknesses cataloged. and potentially weaponized. It raised questions about which government was ultimately benefiting from this intelligence and whether American agencies were running the operation or merely tolerating it.”

Most disturbing of all, it suggested that the entire Epstein network—the private island, the Manhattan townhouse, the fleet of aircraft, the parade of underage victims—was not the work of a single predator but rather an organized intelligence operation using sexual exploitation as a tool of statecraft.”

Yes-this is the big picture. As terrible, awful, and unforgivable what was done to all of Epstein’s young female victims-which may number in the thousands the bigger picture is this is what Epstein as a tool of this organized intelligence operation has been doing to our democracy. This is why this is an issue that matters for all Americans it’s about the continued subversion of American democracy by this shady network of powerbrokers-that did not end with Epstein’s death to be sure.

The mathematician who had detected patterns in chaos had identified the most significant pattern of all: Jeffrey Epstein was not a person but a project, not a criminal but a construct, not an individual operator but an institutional creation designed to compromise and control the American elite. That realization, born in a Manhattan townhouse during an unsettling afternoon in 2004, would ultimately help explain how a democracy could find itself so thoroughly captured by forces it could neither identify nor confront.”

Pgs 13-14.

CODA: As we conjectured in the Prologue, there’s a very compelling argument that Israel was able to compromise Clinton via both Epstein and their espionage against Clinton’s government-a la MEGA which was not just one spy but a network of spies in the Oval Office-which is a pretty arresting example of members of the US elite being compromised and controlled.

What Epstein and his friends-starting first and foremost with Trump, his wingman for many years-was the rape of not just a thousand or more underage girls but American democracy.

Yet the official position of both the mainstream media and the Director of Trumpland the FBI is the updated version of J Edgar Hoover in the 1930s insisting there is no mafia.

Like Tucker Carlson-never thought I’d get a chance to quote him-said at what would be the last TPUSA rally in June before Charlike Kirk’s death-much more on him and the aftermath of his murder below-said maybe the mainstream narrative is correct and Epstein just made $165 million because he gave good tax advice.

(101) tucker carlson speech turning point 2025 – YouTube

Section The Deep State is Republican

Again for me 2016 was my radicalizing moment-I discussed this in Chapter Vote Harder-when I saw that what had happened with Bush v Gore was not an exception but the rule. This is why the idea that a powerful elite network of powerbrokers-in intelligence but also political leaders, and indeed as we saw with Bush v. Gore in the Judiciary-have been systemically subverting our democracy is not hard for me to believe-after all, to say it once again not that it can be said enough the FBI elected Trump.

So Trump is right about the Deep State what he fails to say is that it’s to a large extent dominated by Republicans in the US and at this point the Deep State serves his own interests more than anything.

Section: The Duopoly Canard

However another problem is the emphasis you often encounter on the idea that this is bipartisan shadow network. Perhaps though it’s notable that the entire Democratic party has voted again and again to release the Epstein files where just a handful of Republicans have been willing to. Beyond that inconvenient fact which no one acknowledges it’s clear that for many powerbrokers in this shadow network the Republican party is preferred even if there are also some Democrats in it. As even Whitney Webb acknowledged as we saw in the Prologue, the reason Israel might have wanted Epstein to compromise Democrats is that Republicans didn’t need to be they already didn’t support the two state solution.

It’s just clear in looking at the last 57 years of US politics-starting with when Nixon scuttled LBJ’s peace talks to end the Vietnam war-that ignoring the partisan dimension obfuscates much more than it illuminates. Note too that Israel has basically become a one party state-notably Labour dominated the first 29 years of Israel history but since then Likud has dominated particularly since Netanyahu basically got Yitzhak Rabin assassinated.

There’s a clear reactionary social agenda as well which the sort of vulgar Marxist analysis many leftists engage in misses. This is the problem with the notion that the Democrats should focus primarily on economic issues and not emphasize social issues too much is that many issues that White progressive Bro types tend to dismiss as mere social issues are also economic issues for marginalized groups hence the need for intersectional analysis. A classic example of this is abortion rights. We will discuss this towards the end of this Epilogue but for me what got under my skin the most of Kamala’s revelations in her recently published book is that Bernie urged her to remember the working class and not focus solely on abortion. Suffice it to say Bernie Bros like Vaush were wrong when they insisted Elizabeth Warren lied about Bernie.

This is the problem with focusing solely on economics-Vaush often states that the “capitalist class” doesn’t care either way about social issues- for awhile it was convenient for them to be “woke” now they’re “anti woke”-I don’t believe it’s simply random or “amoral.” There is a powerful reactionary agenda that desires-and to a large extent has already achieved-world wide autocracy cum Technofascism. Just consider Dobbs-I would argue there’s no more “fascist” policy than the forced birth “pro life” position. Similarly we see in the US and in much of the world the rollback of democracy and the embracing of many reactionary social policies. If you want to focus on the material interests of say Corporate America ok but perhaps they have an interest in a reactionary social agenda in terms of being in the interests of capital? But again I’m neither a Marxist nor an economic reductionist.

UPDATE: As Tara Palmieri’s guest who’s researched Epstein copiously anddone a lot of advocac for the Epstein victims points out that a sex trafficking ring who’s agenda is to entrap powerful politicans is nothing new-you have the Franklin Scandal then there was “Confessions of a Washington Madam” about a gay sex ring to entrap the powerful poiticians.

Parathetically Charles Johnson-who did so much to help Trump subvert5. the 2016 election-now says he left the Republican party but that he’s never seen more male homosexuality anywhere than inside the Republican party.

“No organization I have ever belonged to was as gay as the Republican Party and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA was no different.”

Thank You But I Will Remember My Friend Charlie Kirk As He Was Not As You Psyop Me Into

Rick Wilson and Tim Miller-who is of course gay himself- did a show earlier this year on this same topic. Suffice it to say there’s no truer cliche than the closeted gay conservative homophobe-Thiel for years fulminated against homosexuality before finally coming out himself and marrying his husband-yet never for one moment does he presumably consider how hard he and his Republican friends fought to forestall gay marriage from ever happening-or even that they’re trying again.

Speaking of Charlie Kirk:

Section: Orwell’s America: The Charlie Kirk Paradox of Reactionary Pluralism

It is self evident that what happened to Kirk on October 10 was a terrible tragedy. And that his murderer should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. At this point his killer is believed to be Tyler Robinson although as few other than ironically enough the Far Right Nazi Nick Fuentes Robinson is guilty until proven innocent.

Of course perhaps calling Fuentes is a thoughtcrime in the Orwellian cum Trumpian America of today particularly post Kirk’s assassination as the narrative from the earliest moments post his death was that Kirk was killed because liberals and leftists called him a Nazi. This epistemologically and morally viscous narrative was fomented by the Far Right without irony-as you would expect seeing as the Far Right has no sense of irony. After all Kirk was a major proponent of fuck your feelings, snowflake conservative agitprop who took delight in saying things that seemed calculated to maximalize how much he could offend or hurt the feelings of his presumed political opponents on the Left.

But very quickly Kirk, allegedly free speech’s strongest soldier was used a new assault by Trump and his Republican co-conspirators on the free speech of those who disagree with them culminating in the firiing of Jimmy Kimmel a move that spectacularly backfired on Trump as Disney backed down within a few days and brought Kimmel back who gave a searing return speech against Trump and his co-conspirators.

Still as Matthew Dowd accurately points out, MSNBC hasn’t brought him back in the network’s spectacular moment of moral cum journalistic cowardice in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder. The fact that neither Dowd or for that matter Kimmel even said anything terribly polemical or controversial underscores the kind of blank check Trump supposed Kirk’s murder gave him. This remains extremely worrisome as we’re far from out the woods yet. Notable too is this pretty flaccid narrative by folks like Nate Silver that “turn about is fair play”-ie Trump just did what the Left allegedly did in the 2014-2021 period when in reality while you could argue about some excesses-though the number have been greatly exaggerated-there has never been anything like the naked censorship that Trump and his FCC henchman Brendan Carr tried to take against Kimmel-“They can do this the easy way or the hard way”-even Ted Cruz made the obvious point that Carr sounded like mafia boss-while still arguing that he was glad Kimmel was gone which kind of undermines his point.

Section: Reactionary Pluralism: A Karl Popper Moment

What all this aftermath to Kirk’s assassination pointed out was that he was far from the Free Speech and Open Debate hero that not just the Far Right argued but even establishment liberals like Ezra Klein in his fairly terrible piece-“Charlie Kirk practiced politics the way it should be practiced.”

David Corn called out this problematic response in his Mother Jones article arguing that Kirk was NOT practicing politics in the right way.

In promoting a story on the murder of Kirk—headlined “Charlie Kirk killing deepens America’s violent spiral”—Axios described him as a “fierce champion of the right to free expression” whose “voice was silenced by an assassin’s bullet.” New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein, wrote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein added that he “envied” the political movement Kirk built and praised “his moxie and fearlessness.”

Here’s the problem: Kirk built that movement with falsehoods. And his advocacy was laced with racist and bigoted statements. Recognizing this does not diminish the awfulness of this act of violence. Nor does it lessen our outrage or diminish our sympathy for his family, friends, and colleagues. Yet if this is an appropriate moment to assess Kirk and issue bold statements about his participation in America’s political life, there ought to be room for a true discussion.

No, Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way – Mother Jones

Of course there’s the rub: Kirk’s legacy is said to be free and open debate even if others disagree or are offended yet the response to his death is to attempt to foreclose this free and open debate. As there’s been no dicussion of his actual legacy.

Popper discussed how in the time of the rise of Hitler the fascists and nazis were able to employ this same playbook. It was a pretty impressive use of Orwellian tactics-before Orwell. Orwellian before Orwell. What reactionaries would do in Hitler’s time they still do today-they claim that they are the true free speech heroes and heroes of pluralism while liberals are hypocrites who pretend to believe in free speech but don’t really. A classic and admittedly technically  impressive example of this spiel was Willam F Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.

Which is a complete and utter canard though it can be seductive for those who are uninformed-which alas remains much of the country-as we saw in 2024, informed voters voted for Harris, uninformed Trump.

Section: Liberal Pluralism for Me Reactionary Conservatism for Thee: a Chess Analogy

What’s tricky for liberals running against reactionary conservatives going back to the time of Burke himself-is that it can seem for the casual viewer that conservatives are more committed to free speech and open debate but this is because conservatives are able to work the refs and get a stacked deck-if liberals make any real or imagined deviation from their own professed values they shriek to the heavens but then when the shoe is on the other foot conservatives don’t even pretend to hold to liberal values-‘what do you want from me I don’t believe in liberal pluralism but you do so for you not to adhere to it is hypocritical. I’m no hypocrite I don’t believe in pluralism or tolerance.

FN: See Cory Robin’s fascinating book “The Reactionary Mind”

This is why the chess analogy is very apt in describing what it’s like for liberals to run against reactionaries. Masha Gessen in 2016 noted that while Trump was like someone playing a game of chess who wasn’t playing chess but throwing the pieces off the board the media would insist on interpreting this as him simply being unorthodox.

As an online chess player myself I would call my own play unorthodox-my favorite position is the King’s Gambit. Throwing pieces around the room isn’t unorthodox it’s throwing pieces around the room.

But then conservatives whine that the media is liberal as they’re correcting them much more than liberals. But then way back after the 1988 election Kathleeen Hall Jamieson had noted that while it felt strange to correct Republicans so much more the truth is Republicans lied a lot more than the Democrats-the Dems would generally at least try to get it right.

Packaging The Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising, 3rd Edition: Jamieson, Kathleen Hall: 9780195089424: Amazon.com: Books

But this is what it’s like to “play chess” with reactionaries: they can do whatever they want-on any particular move they might throw the board on the ground-if they’re losing, or maybe they just throw a few pieces off the board. On other moves they might simply do an illegal move-but you better not correct them or that’s censorship!-or when it’s convenient for them they might even do a legal move-on those rare moments they have a good legal move.

Liberals OTOH are consigned to legal moves and sometimes reactionaries will even falsely claim legal liberal moves are illegal ones-like when the Clinton campaign funded part of the Steele Dossier in 2016-not even campaign but a lawyer in the campaign.

CODA: Taylor Lorenz is Exhibit One of why I hate the Left and they are often worse than useless allies for liberals where she did much the same making a great deal of heavy weather of funding sources for some liberal youtubers that weren’t’ only perfectly legal but perfectly ethical and above board. Even leftists that I’ve come to like and respect like Kyle Kulinski fell into this quicksand. Often this is what leftists do-while liberals are being mugged by conservative reactionaries the leftist are like ‘you know why DID you where that shirt today, it’s not someting a True Progressive should wear.’

But Ezra Klein completely misses this and instead falls for the canard of reactionary pluralism and praises Kirk for all his illegal chess moves.

CODA: Not sure what Klein is up to lately-he did write what I think is a pretty good and important book, while we can debate the why it’s a fact that liberal Democrats like us who are the party of government need to achieve good outcomes. Now there’s criticism of the book that I think has a point-he focuses on the idea that regulations are a big problem and while there are some variations of what you might call nimbyism-something I’ve certainly never been a fan of-it’s arguable there are other facts like the power of Corporate America and it’s delbierate obstruction he gives short thrift to.

But then he does completely indefensible things like propose we throw Red State women under the bus regarding abortion rights. What’s ironic is while Taneshi Coates is as he himself admits not a political strategist-he’s more if anything of a kind of moral suasionist-his political calculus here was better than Klein’s-what is it that makes Klein think that the reason-allegedly-there are many parts of America that believe Democrats “don’t ike them”-is because they support abortion rights?  As Coates correctly points out these red states actually voted for abortoin referendums whle voting for Trump at the top of the ticket. So whatever the reason for this it’s not that the Democrats need to give up pushing abortion rights too hard-at a time like this in the era of Dobbs where a 13 year old rape victim has fewer rights than her rapist in red states this is morally obscene just as it was for Bernie to marginalize both abortion rights and women in his message to Kamala Harris. What this shows though is that both the Center and the Left seem eager to throw women under the bus a time so many are being victimized by these morally viscous laws. We’ll discuss this more below but after Caotes pointed this out to Klein he tried to handwave the point away by saying abortoin might not be the best example-well then why did he use it? I saw Sam Seder say abortion was a terrible choice perhaps it should have been gun control or immigration. Uh-why? This is a problem where the Democrats wrongly believe the GOP has won some kind of policy debate-rather than they’ve mastered rigging the game.  Like the reason Congress isn’t dominated by the Democrats as it was between the time FDR won in 1932 and 1994 is largely because the GOP mastered the art of gerrymandering. But clearly Klein seems to think they did win some kind of grand policy debate.

I’m not in principle arguing that the Democrats should not welcome a “pro life” Democrat if they win-much like they should all be welcoming Mamdani though many have not though he won-as the numbers in terms of Congressonal math are paramount. But if we did have more “pro life”-sorry I can’t use this phrase without scare quotes as I have such disdain for this entire premise-Dems in Congress would this mean the party wouldn’t try to recodify Roe? Not that there’s much evidence they are currently anyway

But this is what institutional liberals utterly fail to grapple with. Folks like Klein show it’s literally the opposite-Klein if you take him at his word seems to believe that the GOP has won some great policy debate- a la Hans Niemann-yes I use his name deliberately as he himself has a history of cheating…

Hopefully it’s clear that the cheating analogy is anything but too strong as David Corn documents:

Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded and led Turning Point USA, an organization of young conservatives, was a promoter of Trump’s destructive and baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Two days before the January 6 riot, Kirk boasted in a tweet that Students for Trump and Turning Point Action were “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.”

After the attack, Kirk deleted the tweet, and he claimed that the people his group transported to DC participated only in the rally that occurred before the assault on Congress—where Trump whipped up the crowd and encouraged it to march on the Capitol. The New York Times subsequently reported that Turning Point Action sent only seven buses to the event. Turning Point also paid the $60,000 speaking fee to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a MAGA personality, for the brief remarks she made at the rally. “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,” Guilfoyle told the crowd. (Kirk took the Fifth when he was deposed by the House January 6 committee.)

Even prior to the election, Kirk helped set the stage for Trump’s attempt to subvert the republic. In September 2020, the Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action was running a “sprawling yet secretive campaign” to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda “that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.” The messages Turning Point generated spread the charge that Democrats were using mail balloting to steal the election and downplayed the threat from Covid. (Kirk’s group called the story a “gross mischaracterization.”)

Whatever Kirk’s group and supporters did on January 6, he was part of the MAGA crusade that largely broke US politics. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 loss, his conniving to stay in power, and his encouragement of a lie that led to massive political violence greatly undermined American democracy and exacerbated the already deep divide in the nation. Kirk was a part of that. Yet Klein overlooks that in praising Kirk. And a New York Times piece on Kirk’s political career made no mention of this, though it did report that he had been “accused” of “antisemitism, homophobia and racism, having blamed Jewish communities for fomenting hatred against white people, criticized gay rights on religious grounds and questioned the qualifications of Black airline pilots.”

Pretty hard to wrap yourself in the bloody shirt of Popper’s Open Society and free and fair debate while subverting free and fair elections the most basic unit of the Open Society.

Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said while jousting in the public square. He hosted white nationalists on his podcast. He posted racist comments on his X account, including this remark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He endorsed the white “replacement” conspiracy theory. After the October 7 attack on Israel, he compared Black Lives Matter to Hamas. He called for preserving “white demographics in America.” He asserted that Islam was not compatible with Western culture. He derided women who supported Kamala Harris 2024 for wanting “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” Or, as he also put it, “Democratic women want to die alone without children.” When Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was brutally attacked in 2022, Kirk spread a conspiracy theory about the crime and called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the assailant. He routinely deployed extreme rhetoric to demonize his political foes.”

The fact that he wanted to bail out the person who brutally attacked Pelosi’s husband-damaging him physically for life should give you more than a little pause in this rush to make him a Free Speech martyr.

He cheered and endorsed political violence and Trump’s long running coup that led to the J6 insurrection. It’s pretty hard to be a free speech martyr while celebrating violence and conspiring to overturn a Presidential election-about as fundamental as you can get in Popper’s “Open Society.”

Section: Israel, Israel, Israel: The Post Charlie Kirk War Over HIs Legacy Centers Around His Legacy

Overall much of the aftermath of Kirk’s tragic murder has been pretty predictable-Trump and his GOP co-conspirators have used it as an excuse for the kind of draconian crackdown on the alleged values Kirk championed that would have made McCarthy himself blush while institutionalist liberals a la Ezra Klein negotiate against themselves while falling over themselves to make sure they too ostentatiously glaze someone who did not represent free speech, open debate, or general political pluralism quite the opposite-underscored dramatically by his celebrating of insurrection and political violence and the way the Right has attempted to weaponize it. Then there is the gaslighting by Trump-Vance and friends that all violence is from the Left which is false and vicious indeed the opposite of the truth-most political violence in recent years has come from the Right as has been documented many times.

I  mean I don’t get it-JD Vance says 98% of all political violence comes from the Left-maybe the judge had a gay lover?

Judge Diane Goodstein’s home burns to ground after ruling against Trump

Indeed, Vance who once-correctly-called Trump is now talking about arresting Destiny so guess takes one to know one.

JD VANCE TRIED TO ARREST DESTINY FOR ‘PREACHING VIOLENCE’ | The Kyle Kulinski Show

As Kyle points out there are three major cases of MAGA violence the last few weeks-including the MAGA kid who ran over three teenage girls with his car for making a joke about Charlie Kirk and the burning down of a judge’s house after she ruled against Trump.

Again Kirk himself was a pretty prolific preacher of violence in his own right with his talk of driving the J6ers to the insurrection and paying for the bail of the Trump supporter who beat in Pelosi’s husband’s head with a hammer.

Section: They Didn’t Wait a Day

Those who wrongly think Vance is “anti war” though I guess according to Max Blumenthal’s weird calculus-where Putin is the anti war guy while those who want to help Ukraine are the “warmongers”-much more on Blumenthal below-apparently are ignorant of his stated desire for the “de Baathification of America.”

That’s a pretty interesting desire considering Vance claims that he was totally opposed to the Iraq War.

But speaking of the Iraq War, Richard Clarke revealed how les than a day after 9/11 W and Cheney and Friends were already making plans to invade Iraq and similarly Trump and his Russia House hacks didn’t wait a day to start using Kirk’s assassination for a massive crackdown on free speech-again Kirk was the alleged free speech champion.

‘They Need to Suffer’: Inside Trump’s War on Dissent

However there are other aspects of the aftermath I did not see coming. I had assumed for instance that it might lead to short term unity among MAGA and that while I disagreed with Destiny that the Epstein scandal is done I assumed that at least in the short term Kirk’s death might sideline it. Instead if anything it opened up a new track for Epstein. But more below.

When I first came across Blumenthal’s Grayzone piece arguing just that I was skeptical to say the least-Owens then picked this story up and ran with it fomenting the idea amongst a number of MAGA folks that Israel might have killed Kirk. But for me none of it passed the laugh test. Kirk had a long history of being Israel’s strongest soldier-outside of probably Ben Shapiro. So when Blumenthal published his first of what would be three pieces-so far-about Kirk allegedly having second thoughts it struck me as not passing the laugh test.

After all I was never a big fan of Kirk to say the least-other than he was a virulent misogynist, racist, raging homophobe who sought to glamourize bigotry he was fine and was never exactly a fan of Max Blumenthal either. I kind of took this as yet more of the kind of gaslighting stuff that he and some of his co-conspirators like his co-host Aaron Mate and Jimmy Dore as part of his alleged “Left Right alliance.”  Vaush actually had some really good take downs of this kind of shtick-like when Jimmy Dore argued that progressives should partner up with members of the KKK to raise the minimum wage drawing the analogy of the Malcolm X meeting with the KKK. I mean the meeting between MX and the KKK wasn’t exactly something worth celebrating-the elevated premise being that Black Separatists and White Supremacists share the aim of defeating racial integration?

Jimmy Dore & Caleb Maupin UNMASK The Breadtube CIA Partnership

Covering the Kyle Kulinski vs. Jimmy Dore vs. TYT Drama

I’m all for raising the MW but is it really necessary to have a beer with David Duke to make it happen? Dore is willing to have a beer with the Grand Wizard of the KKK yet not Hillary Clinton-in fact he was infamously “Bernie or Bust” in 2016. Talk about not aging well!

FULL DEBATE: Jimmy Dore & Sam Seder on 2016 Presidential Election

CODA: A classic Jimmy Dore moment was when he was laughing about that time he was sexually harassed Ana Kasparian-“nice work skirt” back when he used to work on The young Turks and according to him “everyone was laughing”. Then all of a sudden Max Blumenthal’s face fills the screen looking extremely off balance and embarrassed his face crimson. Blumenthal regularly did the show back then.

Starting at 7:23

(95) Jimmy Dore LAUGHS As He Admits To Sexually Harassing Ana Kasparian – YouTube

Vaush’s early critiques of Dore, Blumenthal, and others weren’t just ideological—they were epistemological interventions. He called out the drift from material progressivism to contrarian nihilism. In principle Blumenthal’s Left-Right alliance has things exactly backward-the optimal alliance for those who seek a more progressive future is ironically where Kyle Kulinski-ironic as Kyle himself was “Bernie or Bust” in 2020-here in 2025 Kyle has been perhaps the lead advocate on the Left of a liberal-leftist alliance.

Honestly it goes beyond not being a big fan of Blumenthal-he’s said and done some pretty morally perverse things the last 10 years-like slandering the families of all the Syrian people who lost loved ones in Assad’s chemical attack at Douma.

Daphne Lawless had a pretty succinct takedown of the reprehensible Assadist propaganda of Blumenthal-Aaron Mate-Jimmy Dore et al.

It’s common sense in liberal and Left circles that ideas like “9/11 Truth”, the theories that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged, or that the victims of the Sandy Hook or Parkland school shootings were “crisis actors”, are wild fantasies either made up by the bigoted and ill-informed to justify their prejudices, or else false narratives being deliberately fed to such people (for profit or political gain) by unscrupulous media operatives such as FOX News or Alex Jones’ InfoWars. We are appalled when parents of school shooting victims are harassed by unhinged strangers calling them conspiracy operatives and telling them that their dead children never existed.

And yet this is precisely what much of the Western Left has been doing to the people whose children died of chlorine poisoning in the basements of Douma, Syria. Experienced Western journalist Robert Fisk even took a trip to Douma – courtesy of the Syrian government – to find an anonymous doctor who would confirm such fantasies. This, while actual Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inspectors were still barred from the site, so that the regime and its allies could make the evidence disappear.”

As this book makes clear I certainly don’t agree that false flags never happen but it’s true that what Blumenthal-Mate-Dore and Friends did in Douma was reprehensible and very like Jones’ Sandy Hook lies.

It’s established that Mate and Jimm Dore received money from an Assadist linked group- and Blumenthal also received an award from them.

Pro-Assad Lobby Group Rewards Bloggers On Both The Left And The Right – bellingcat

Indeed Mate had such a hard on for Assad cum Putin that he testified at the UN on behalf of Russia to foment the lies they were telling about the Douma chemical attack-as Lawless said basically accusing the families of the victims of either being crisis actors or maybe perpetuating the chemical attack themselves-ie murdering their own children just to like about the innocent Assad.

We’ll look at this more below but suffice it to say the Syrian civil war became ground zero for Putin’s disinformation war against the US-a war that has alas been very successful likely beyond his wildest dream and Blumenthal and his Tankie friends were his strongest soldiers.

Section: Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal Have the World’s Funniest Breakup and Norton Reveals Blumenthal Donated to MAGA Candidates After Engaging in anti Vaxxer Denialism

If you haven’t seen this video-that Blumenthal himself linked to-you need to see it if you really want a big laugh.

Max Blumenthal on X: “After Ben violated the terms of our mediation agreement, I decided to break my silence about his deceptions and financial crimes. But I waited for an opportunity to hold him personally accountable. When I and Anya Parampil confronted Ben about his crimes during a visit to https://t.co/Vm1uxNQqqz” / X

It’s amazing that Max is the one who released thinking this somehow makes himself look good?! But it is tremendous comic relief. Blumenthal followed him all the way down to Nicaragua to confront him on a train-Norton was sitting with his girlfriend and twin brother.

‘you’re a white color criminal! you stole from me!’

According to Norton, Blumenthal and his wife now have Tucker Carlson over for dinner regularly.

GRAYZONE DRAMA – Max Blumenthal Makes INSANE ALLEGATIONS Against Ben Norton

Blumenthal also accused Norton of “computer crimes” which is ironic-he falsely accuses the idealistic Ben Norton of computer crimes while denying the computer crimes Russia and its cutouts committed against Clinton and the United States in 2016

Just like his fellow tankie freind  and credibly accused sexual harasser Jimmy Dore is willing to ally with David Duke to raise the mininum wage but not Hillary Clinton who had proposed raising it to $12 in the primary and after sitting down with Bernie agreed to raise it to $15.

CODA: While Bernie or Busters a la Blumenthal-Dore and Friends-even alas Kyle though he seems to now see the error in his ways-denounced Clinton as a “corporate shill” for offering $12 what would you do now for a $12 MW in the parts of the country-the parts who voted for Trump- still stuck at $7.25?

No matter how you look at it Blumenthal is a charter member of what Kyle would come to call “The Bernie to Trump Pipeline” and his Grayzone project has largely groomed the Left into drifting away from any kind of positive progressive agenda that improves the material conditions of the working class cum struggling middle class to political and moral nihilism cum Doomerism.

Or for that matter Blumenthal is willing to believe Cambridge Analytica did a surveillance program for yemen but not that it also worked with Israel, and the Trump campaign-via the Mercers AND Steve Bannon who technically was Alexnader Nix’s boss in 2015. But much more on his first of all convenient denial of the self evident fact that Russia interferred and colluded with Trump in 2016.

Max Blumenthal Reveals Surveillance Program in Yemen Run by Cambridge Analytica Parent Company SCL

Indeed we see that per his estranged former partner Norton Blumenthal himself completed this pipeline supporting MAGA candidates and he and his wife had Tucker Carlson over regularly for dinner. It’s not hard to see why Carlson was down to befriend a member of the Far Left-it clearly benefits MAGA. As I discussed in a previous chapter the conservative base is smaller than the progressive base so the only way it can win is to split the progressive base-a la the Bernie Busters in 2016-that Blumenthal and Dore came out of.

Nevertheless this was a time when Carlson begun changing his political narrative a little notably he became far more critical of Israel whereas he used to have the orthodox Christian Zionist position of the GOP just as he’s gone from Bush’s strongest soldier in cheerleading the Iraq war to apparently becoming a 9/11 Truther-I say “appearing” intentionally with Carlson who ever really knows if things appear with him? I’ve tended to dismiss Carlson’s apparent change on this issues as a clever trick to groom the Max Blumenthals of the world and I still believe this. However this whole aftermath on Charlie Kirk has made me see another dimension to this of which more below.

Anyway back to Blumenthal’s hilarious breakup with Ben Norton. Norton’s version of events seems to have the inconvenience of being true-Blumenthal vindictively sued him  for removing his own content after he left the Grayzone and told the truth about him-Blumenthal constantly lies.

(2) Citizen By X on X: “Are you allowed to laugh on X when the tankies fight among themselves? Here’s Ben Norton, very obviously former Greyzone hack, going after Max Blumenthal. Will there be a cage fight? https://t.co/7DGf8YxLAb” / X

Citizen By X on X: “Are you allowed to laugh on X when the tankies fight among themselves? Here’s Ben Norton, very obviously former Greyzone hack, going after Max Blumenthal. Will there be a cage fight? https://t.co/7DGf8YxLAb” / X

Norton also confirms that Blumenthal did a Far Right turn joining the anti vax hysteria during Covid using the Grayzone to funnel lies into the national bloostream.

Again Charlie Kirk’s murder was tragic but the canonization of him is deeply worrisome. I’m also hardly a fan of Blumenthal as his legacy on our politics has been very negative-he’s basically been grooming the Left into seeing Far Right wing extremists as “acceptable conversational partners” as the Pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty would put while demonizing Center Left liberals as “corporate shills”, etc. To be sure as we discussed in Chapter The Making of a Conspiracy Theorist, there’s a long history of the Left preferring the Far Right to the Center Left liberals for alliances going back to when Stalin’s Communist party-that ran the International told leftists-Marxists, socialists, Communists, et al-not to vote for the Social Democrats as “they’re social fascists”-ie no better than the fascists and Nazis who supported Hitler.

I mean anti vax anti lockdown trutherism is a far cry from working to materially improve the lives of the working class as is supposed to be the agenda of Marxism-I’m not a Marxist to be sure but a reformist liberal but I would construe my goal that way-to materially improve the lives of the struggling working class and frustrated middle class as any genuine progressive would.

OTOH Blumenthal, Dore, Jackson Hinkle, et al-have lead the Left down a rabbit hole of political and moral nihilism-again no wonder Tucker Carlson embraced folks like Blumenthal and Gleen Greenwald-who claims Carlson is a socialist-uh, sure-as was Hitler and Goebbels.

Having said all this I’ve been quite fascinated by Blumenthal’s recent reporting about Kirk allegedly having second thoughts about supporting Israel. Initially my instinct was to rule this out of hand as it seemed not to pass the laugh test.

After all. Kirk has a long verifiable history as Israel’s strongest solider other than maybe Ben Shaprio as well as a long history of the most despicable and reprehensible Islamaphobia. Recall his “joke” about Gaza being levelled to the ground-“Too soon?”

He then followed up this knee slapper with “Stupid Muslims don’t kill Jews.”

(114) Charlie Kirk 35:07 Gays should be thrown off tall buildings in Gaza…stupid Muslims – YouTube

Starting at about 35:0788

Again it can’t be over emphasized how hideous Kirk’s views were-again that doesn’t mean his murder wasn’t a tragedy all his death has done is make him a martyr-he shouldn’t have been assassinated but it’s horrendous for him to be lionized. This is a guy who says he’d make his 10 year old daughter bear her rapist’s child. That is simply monstrous-all the more to the extent it’s true.

Some of Charlie Kirk’s most controversial takes | CBC News

Then again I guess Joe Kent the MAGA candidate Blumenthal supported would say the same thing-of course Cenk would say “let’s have some beers!”

Just shows how much of the alleged dude bros of the Left care about women’s rights-like the old song about war goes “absolutely nothing.”

This highlights why I find Blumenthal’s alleged strategy so hideous-it’s like a GOP candidate can claim to be “anti war” in some general non specific sense so all this other hideous positions-like forced birth “prolife” as well as destroying Medicare and SS-as well now tanks in the streets and helicopters swooping down on low income residents and randomly grabbing them and stuffing them into a van-but hey, this one candidate said he’s anti war and that makes it worth it? And often their definition of anti war is in the same Orwellian way Blumenthal has used it-the “war monger” position isn’t Putin’s according to him but the US for simply giving weapons for Ukraine to defend itself.

In any case back to Blumenthal’s articles asserting that Kirk had maybe had second thoughts about Israel I intiitally ruled it out of hand. Again Candace Owens had taken it even further to fomenting the possibility Mossad killed Kirk. This again seemed absurd as he was a great supporter of Israel  and his organization, TPUSA, had depended on so much financial support from Zionists in the Republican party.

What started to really get me to thinking though was when Netanyahu felt compelled to deny Israel had killed Kirk. I mean-what?! This is Benjamin Netanyahu he doesn’t feel compelled to deny or refute anything just handwave it away and keep up his merciless slaughter of Palestinian women and children. Consider that after October 7 he didn’t even speak to the Israeli public for over a week in fact Biden spoke to them first. For many months Biden was calling on him to do a ceasefire, a hostage deal, or even allow the food trucks to reenter Gaza and Netanyahu didn’t feel compelled to justify his continued intransigence.

CODA: Indeed even now after he supposedly accepted a ceasefire that Trump declared, he still continued bombing Gaza to oblivion killing more Palestinian children.

Max Blumenthal on X: “Trump told Israel to stop bombing Gaza Israel continued and even escalated the bombing because it knows he’s firmly under their thumb” / X

yet he did feel the need to give this kind of almost State of the Union style address denying the rumors and expressing great love for Charlie Kirk. No I don’t think Israel killed him. However what I began to realize was that there was a serious fissure within Kirk’s TPUSA and it was around primarily too things: Israel and Epstein which relates to Israel as he’s widely seen-rightly I believe-as having deep ties to Mossad. And it’s hard to make the argument that Israel is in principle opposed to political assassination with its track record.

CODA: Israel is the undisputed king of the political assination of foreign officials going back to before the state of Israel-recall all the British officials the Far Right Zionists killed then there was the murder of that Danish member of the UN who opposed the founding of Israel. Russia’s superpower on the other hand is the assainsation of their own alleged “subversives” on foreign soil going back of course to Trotsky. Putin OTOH has led a number of such assassinations.

List of Russian assassinations – Wikipedia

While Israel’s thing is to assassinate foreign political actors it finds inconvenient Russia’s thing is to kill Russian nationals on foreign soil so both have their own particular brand of brazen sociopathy.

FWIW  Max Blumenthal’s pal Putin declares the assassination of Charlie Kirk “a disgusting atrocity” that points to “a deep rift in American society.

Putin says Charlie Kirk’s ‘disgusting’ murder is proof of a ‘deep rift’ in America

Well Putin IS an expert on atrocities to be sure-though Blumenthal is ok with atrocities against schools and hospitals when Russia or Assad rather than Israel does it-and he’s kind of an expert on deep rifts in American society as he and his useful idiot Max Blumenthal have done so much to foment these rifts.

Again I never understand how you can support Russia’s genocide while condemning Israel’s like Max and his Tankie Friends do OR for that matter vice versa as admittedly some liberal Zionist types do. When Biden tried to link Ukraine aid to Israel’s in late 2023 it made some sense I suppose tactically-in the hope this would entice the GOP which had turned on Ukraine to vote for it if tied to Isreal though even this didn’t work as they just refused to do either but because Israel gets special rights at all times so Biden kept sending weapons to Israel during the impasse while Ukraine’s were paused.

But obviously as neither Bide OR BLUMENTHAL seemed to perceive the correct analogy for Israel isn’t Ukraine but Russia-indeed Israel was one of the few countries allegedly in the Western bloc which declined to condemn Russia’s brutal invasion and understandably so. This just shows Israel at least does a little introspection.

But of course Blumenthal claims Putin is the pacifist in the situation-the “anti war” position here is to not help Ukraine defend itself. Right just like for years before WWII the “anti war” position was letting Hitler take whatever he wanted-don’t defend Poland he’ll stop there. Similarly Blumenthal, Hasan and the “realist” hack Mearsheimer were wrong all along first Putin would never invade then he’d win in 48 hours then Ukraine should just surrender 40% of its country then it was well who cares because Putin says Ukrainians are all Nazis-one of Blumenthal’s favorite slanders using the same tactic Netanyahu uses-then it was he only wanted Crimea then it was well anyway he has no ambitions beyond Ukraine now we see Putin sending drones into Poland and Romania. Maybe this is why Sweden and Finland joined NATO-Sweden and Finland! I guess Blumenthal and “contrarian hacks” like Mike Tracey think Neville Chamberlain had it right all along.

Just this last weekend Israel once again underscored its brazenness in what it did to Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg mistreated by Israeli forces in detention, activists say | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

The Grayzone on X: “Flotilla activist slams Mike Huckabee for mocking Greta Thunberg, who’s currently in an Israeli prison and enduring abuse at the hands of her occupation jailers Human rights lawyer and journalist Thomas Becker says Huckabee has signaled that Israel can abuse activists at will https://t.co/dRoVN0omq8” / X

Huckabee was very much in character to be sure-he was Governor of Arkansas in the 1990s and locked Susan McDougal in an Arkansas prison-as we documented elsewhere Ken Starr-who just happened to be Epstein’s defense attorney-along with Dershowitz-an alleged “life long Democrat” who’s campaigning for Republicans in 2026″ he’s a Democrat in the sense that Bari “we are all fascists now” Weiss is a liberal.

Opinion | We’re All Fascists Now – The New York Times

Weiss claimed she had to quit the Times-the same Times who colluded with James Comey to elect Trump in the first place-because she was being “constantly bullied” where her definition of “bullied” means being criticized for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s fascist screed to ban pro Palestine protesters out of the country.

Well she did say “we are all fascists now” and clearly she meant it.

Meet Bari Weiss, the controversial political journalist who resigned from The New York Times – accusing staff of ‘constant bullying’ – and co-founded The Free Press with her wife, Nellie Bowles | South China Morning Post

She’s heralded for having “won the war on wokeness”-apparently “wokeness” means thinking that fascism is maybe not such a great thing and that someone shouldn’t be deported just because you disagree with them. Judging by the antics of Trump’s hacks like Pete Hegseth it turns out that “wokeness” means basic civil rights we as a country had agreed to going back to when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. Now that the “social liberal” Bari Weiss and Donald Trump have “defeated Wokeness” it’s ok to fire someone because they’re you know-Black or a woman, or clearly if they’re LGBT though this seems not to bother the lesbian Weiss who’s married to a woman just like tens of millions of women voted for Trump despite also voting for abortion rights referendums. Self-awareness is not exactly in large supply in George Orwell’s Donald Trump’s America.

Bari Weiss Has Won the War on Wokeness in Media

As for Dershowitz I mean I know his story is that he’s a life long Democrat but to believe this I’d have to see his voter rolls to believe it-hey he doesn’t flinch when Trump wants to see the rolls of tens of millions of Americans. I mean I’m sure Dersh is as much a lifelong Democrat in the same way that Jonthan Turley-who wanted to impeach Pelosi for ripping up Trump’s State of the Union Speech is.

Dersh whines that he’s “never been so frightened in my life” and that “the Democratic party has made me an enemy”

‘They Have Made Me An Enemy’: Alan Dershowitz Skewers Democrat Party, Pledges To Back GOP In 2026 | The Daily Caller

I mean you weren’t an enemy in 2019 when you were Trump’s defense attorney at his impeachment and claimed Trump has absolute immunity so long he in his own mind acted in the national interest? What’s notable is even though he did defend Clinton in 1998, it was a much more qualified and equivocal defense than his defense of Trump the last eight years. He did an awful lot of finger wagging over Lewinsky which is rich with the accusations against him on Epstein’s island not to mention his buddy Trump. I mean he’s been an enemy of the Democratic party far longer than the present moment.

CODA: In light of my theory that Epstein was sent by Israel to entrap Clinton I wonder if he himself had intel from Israel about Lewinsky back in 1997

Indeed back to Blumenthal-Kirk et al. While I despise Blumenthal’s role in the rise of Trump and he’s had a significant role which we’ll look at in more detail below and a lot to answer for in all the gaslighting he’s helped perpetuate against the working class he as a privileged trust fund baby pretends to care about-sad thing is people mock him when they discover who his father was but I’d argue that his father did more positive things for society than him or at least did less harm-OTOH I WAS totally there for his brutal takedown of Dersh on the recent Piers Morgan episode-as he called him out as a Epstein hack to his face and his placing of a foreign country above the American national interest. Though of course Blumenthal has also betrayed America for his own preferred foriegn country-Russia. Don’t worry we’ll have some receipts below in response to the inevitable facile denials “nu uh! Russia is a hoax…”

While I think Blumenthal’s Left Right alliance is fatally misconceived and has led to the moral and political nihilism of the Left what his machinations have done apparently is give him some primo sources within the belly of the beast-the Trump Russia House. Not surprising that some top Trump sources were willing to speak to him after all he’s part of the Tanike Left who hates his dad’s friend Hillary Clinton far more than they could ever hate Donald Trump. Even though if Comey and Russia hadn’t stolen the election from her, at least we wouldn’t live in a country where a 13 year old rape victim has less rights than her rapist-though as we saw above Kirk without blinking said even his 10 year old daughter was raped “we’d be keeping the baby” I wonder what he’d say if her life was endangered-probably the exact same thing. But of course Blumenthal himself and fellow dude bro leftist don’t much care if 10 year old girls are forced to bear their rapists’ child or if they die in pregnancy-what’s that compared to making sure THAT WOMAN never gets to be President?

But let’s look at Blumenthal’s fascinating work in the Kirk aftermath. While it might be fruits of the poisoned tree they are none the less very impressive and important fruits.

“Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals.”

Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals – The Grayzone

This was the first drop just two days after Kirk’s death. It caused an immediate stir after Candace Owens did a show that centered the allegations. Again I was skeptical initially that Kirk was really having second thoughts.

A Trump insider and longtime friend of Charlie Kirk tells The Grayzone how the assassinated conservative leader’s turning point on Israeli influence provoked a private backlash from Netanyahu’s allies that left him angry and afraid.

“The source said anxiety spread within the Trump administration after an apparent Israeli spying operation was uncovered.”

“The source said anxiety spread within the Trump administration after an apparent Israeli spying operation was uncovered.”

Still when you think about it’s not exactly out of character for Israel to be caught spying on its alleged top ally-we talked about the mole in the Clinton WH a la MEGA which turned out to be not one spy but an entire network of spies within the WH which had information about Lewinsky in 1997 before even Ken Starr and the Clinton hating Louis Freeh did. Israel would then dictate that the FBI drop it’s investigation into MEGA and the FBI capitulated though you suspect Freeh didn’t find this too difficult as they had dirt to destroy Clinton with.

In 2019 again during Trump 1.0 there was another spy operation of Russia House 1.0.

Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House – POLITICO

Indeed, Blumenthal would reference Boris Johnson’s revelation in his autobiography that according to himself Netanyahu planted a listening device in Johnson’s private bathroom when he visited England. The point is it goes to pattern-which was another reason I tended to believe Russian Collusion indeed happened early on-there’s a long pattern of the GOP colluding with hostile foreign powers to win Presidential elections going back to Nixon 1968.

CF: SPY TRADE: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy – Kindle edition by Smith, Grant F., Scheuer, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Similarly while mainstream pundits-they don’t deserve the title “journalist”-would dismiss this kind of talk as “outlandish” as if the truth in Trump’s America isn’t beyond “outlandish”-outlandish is almost not strong enough a term. So aside from Kirk’s alleged evolving position on Israel the notion that Israel was bugging the Trump Russia House is the opposite of implausible.

Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.”

I understand the need to protect sources though I’m also fascinated by who the source is. It must be a primo source within the Trump Russia House-I’m assuming Blumenthal isn’t just making it up. One reason I don’t believe this is he doesn’t usually do this-you can foment a false narrative without any blatant lies beyond which much of this tracks based on history and patterns. Still I’d be curious to know who this source is-assuming it’s a first rate rather than a more dubious one which I will assume until proven otherwise.

As I discussed above I was initially dubious but what I’ve come to understand is that Kirk was very much a man conflicted sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. What matters is not wether or not he really had a personal Road to Damascus moment but rather growing schism in the MAGA movement and inside Turning Points USA itself. And it’s this which is really revelatory in Blumenthal’s reporting-that there is a major schism inside MAGA AND how much of a five car alarm fire this is for Bibi’s Israel.

OTOH Kirk’s organization was so dependent on the funding of wealthy Zionists. OTOH the grassroots of the organization were turning on Israel. For a long time Kirk had tried to keep a lid on this. There is video from 2020 of him pushing back very hard on kids criticizing on Israel. But post October 7 it became too prevalent to keep a lid on.

Indeed he himself made some rather curious comments about in an appearance on PBD soon after October 7

When host Patrick Bet David raised questions as to why one of the most sophisticated intelligence apparatuses in the world apparently failed to detect the attack, Kirk said he had the same questions.

“I’ve been Israel many times,” he said. “The whole country is a fortress. When I first heard this story – I still have the same gut instinct that I did initially.

“I find this very hard to believe. I’ve been to that Gaza border you cannot go 10 ft without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun – an IDF Soldier right?

“The whole country is surveilled and so so let me let me just kind of go through this.

“We don’t talk about Israeli politics very often and most Americans don’t know this. The last nine months Israel was on the brink of civil war – it’s not an exaggeration.

“This judicial stuff – there were there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because Bibi Netanyahu is basically redefining the Israeli Constitution.

“That’s not an exaggeration right, he said the judicial branch has too much power there were protests planned this week against Netanyahu where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets.

“That’s all gone Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I’m not I’m not willing to say to go so far that Netanyahu knew or there is intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a stand down.”

The Israeli media itself began asking questions about the sudden absence of security on the southern border as early as November 2023.

It also subsequently emerged that the IDF had been given the “Hannibal directive” when it finally did respond to the attack – that is, an Israeli military policy aimed at preventing the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces – at any cost.

Kirk questioned Netanyahu’s Oct. 7 narrative a year ago – www.cairnsnews.org

Again for me when you talk about “conspiracy theories” it all goes back to two simple words: cuo bono? Who benefits? And what’s clear is two men benefitted greatly from October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Without Oct 7 both men probably lose and may well be in prison today-what Trump, Bibi, and Putin for that matter have in common is that all three men have to effectively die in power to avoid prison their crimes are so great.

While Blumenthal rather incoherently insists that Trump is cucked by Israel but NOT by Russia it’s notable that both Netanyahu and Putin are pretty much in the same position-they can’t allow their respective genocidal wars to end or they lose power and go to prison-in Russia it could be far worse than simply prison if Putin ever loses power.

CODA: I just saw this headline:

Trump Calls for Arrests of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor JB Pritzker Over ICE Protection / X

In reading it I can’t help but reflect that Blumenthal and his fellow Bernie or Busters for years dismissed the warnings of #ResistanceLiberals like myself about Trump as “project fear”-Blumenthal clearly pushed very hard to reelect Trump in 2024. Like Comey I’m sure he never has a moment of self reflection of his own responsibility for this. yet leftists like him demonize Clinton far more than they ever did Trump.

I mean does Ana Kasparian think we call him a fascist yet?

Eric Daugherty on X: “🚨 BREAKING: President Trump just called for JAIL for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker after they failed to protect ICE officers following a terror attack. DO IT. https://t.co/bV6KXBq1gF” / X

Marxism-true story I’m not a Marxist I’m a reformist liberal but I have come to see that Marxism can be a very effective heuristic tool, Vaush was actually a big part of that during the Biden years-talks about the superstructure vs the base and the idea of how one’s material needs can inform their ideological base. But in the case of Kirk I suspect two different material needs were up against each other. OTOH he had all these wealthy Zionist donors-note I didn’t say “Jewish” like anti Semites do as many of them were not Jews but Christian Zionists-PACE Illan Pappe Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism-

A History of the ZIONIST LOBBY Both in England And the USA – The 21st Century

CF: Roots of the Israel Lobby | Diplomatic History | Oxford Academic

CODA: Basically in US politics Jewish Zionists are in the Democratic party while Christian Zionists are in the Republican party but Netanyahu much prefers the Republicans as at least in principle the Democrats believe in the two state solution. In the Addendum to the Prologue we saw that Whitney Webb herself noted that this is why it was Democratic politicians who needed to be entrapped by Epstein.

OTOH his young supporters were turning against Israel. Kirk could not keep the lid on this entirely without losing his grass roots. The paradox of TPUSA was that it was in some respects a small d democratic movement grooming young people for deeply reactionary ideas. He couldn’t keep the lid on forever and eventually he had to be responsive. An important nadir was when he invited Tucker Carlson-who’s reinvented himself as a strong critic of Israel  AND 9/11 Truther-after being literally the opposite during the Cheney-Bush Bush-Cheney years-to the TPUSA rally in July.

However before this we need to go back to May when Kirk sent this most extraordinary letter to: you guessed it-Netanyahu. Notable that while he mocked and dismissed the families of the hostages who wanted to have a ceasefire so they could have their family members released, Bib did have time for taking a letter from Charlie Kirk. So it’s very notable indeed striking to see who actually gets access with the Israeli dictator-who’s been in office roughtly the same period as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Max Blumenthal if you’re listening: they’re pretty much the same dude.

Indeed, before looking at Kirk’s extraordinary letter to Netanyahu let’s look at Netanyahu’s own extraordinary speech about Kirk soon after his death-when Candace Owens picked up on Blumenthal’s reporting and adding her own color as a close friend of Kirk’s.

Indeed-yet again!-we could start even before that with his NewsMax interview-NewsMax-where he was forced to deny that Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

(116) Netanyahu Forced To Deny Charlie Kirk Killing – YouTube

If he has to field these kinds of questions on Newsmax clearly he was nowhere safe.

So a few days after this he gave a state of the union cabinet level speech-the kind he didn’t even make after October 7. Here he spoke in more detail-standing at the podium next to none other than Little Marco Rubio

Israel’s Netanyahu Mourns ‘Great American Patriot’ Charlie Kirk During Press Briefing With Rubio

If nothing else this was particularly apropos two have too such evil men standing next to each other at one moment. But just recently it was revealed that Larry Ellison of all people-the new owner of CBS who is bringing in Bari “We are all Fascists Now” Weiss had vetted Little Marco in 2016 when he was running in the GOP primary and that Eillison had decided Rubio had passed the muster-he was a great friend of Israel. That’s what matters that he would be a great steward for Israel security rather than America’s.

(1) Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel, Hacked Emails Reveal

But how many evil actions and deeds have these two hideous men visited upon this world? I mean how many have suffered and died just thanks to Little Marco’s draconian cuts at USAID? Again Rubio certainly has been a great steward for Israeli national interests while being a disaster for American interests. But listening to Bibi’s actual words in this speech was beyond gaslighting talk about peeing down someone’s leg while telling them it’s raining.

He had the temerity to speak of free speech while his thugs coerced Greta Thunberg to kiss the Israeli flag and claimed that many people talk about democracy who want to trample democracy-well seeing that Bibi’s been in office the better part of 30 years seems like he’s done more than anyone to “trample democracy.”

Again as I touched on in the Prologue there is no one more committed to trampling democracy worldwide starting in the US of A itself than Bibi’s Israel along with the US Republican party and certainly since 9/11 Putin’s Russia-maybe throw in of course MBS’ Saudi Arabia.

Anyway here was his “State of the Union” speech as promised-he does seem to be sitting in the equivalent of the US oval office here. His first words apropos enough were “Joseph Goebbels”

Netanyahu Slams ‘Monstrous Lie’ Linking Israel to Charlie Kirk’s Murder

It’s not a long speech:

Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda the faster it will spread.”

Very true as Bibi was always one of his best students as is Trump who kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed years ago. Netanyahu told some truly monstrous lies about yitzhak Rabin whose widow never stopped blaming for her husband’s assassination. When Rabin was murdered so was any chance Israel would ever achieve a two state solution with the Palestinians. Clinton who had been negotiating with Rabin was heartbroken but of course Israel’s Likudniks which would go onto orchestrate his impeachment was right where it wanted to be embarking on a 30 year period that saw Netanyahu in the Prime Minster’s chair over 85% of that time.

Back to Bibi: “Well, somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder. This is insane. It is false. It is outrageous. Charlie Kirk was a giant, a once- in a century talent who defended freedom, defended America, defended our common Judeo-Christian civilization. Charlie loved Israel. He loved the Jewish people. He told me so in a letter that he sent me just a few months ago. ”

What’s fascinating is that he felt it necessary to say this at all. Beyond that though is just how deep his relationship with Kirk was. It underscores how involved he is in US politics. This letter from Kirk we will look at this below he sent to Bibi in May. And what it underscores is the extent to which Netanyahu is a political actor in Israeli American politics.

I’d always had this sense that Netanyahu acts like another Republican President-going back to when he simply endorsed Romney in 2012 and spoke to the Republican House in 2014 while snubbing Obama.

But this makes it undeniable that this sense was correct all along. And what I think this really points to is how dependent Netanyahu is not so much on his own Likud faction in Israel as his the US’ MAGA faction. Like Trump and his base are what are keeping him in power and if he loses them he loses it all. But he can’t lose Trump-as Blumenthal argues he has Trump completely stuffed in his back pocket. BUT the MAGA base remains a worry.

It is this whole dimension of things I as a #ResistanceLib cum Hillary Clinton Democrat was not aware of prior to Kirk’s assassination and these pieces from Blumenthal and Candace Owen’s personal revelations as one of Kirk’s best friends. It underscores also just how tenuous not just Bibi’s grip on power is but also Trump’s-again the same thing remains true of Blumenthal’s buddy Vladimir Putin who basically can NOT allow the war in Ukraine to end-despite Blumenthal’s absurd assertions prior to the 2024 election that Putin was who “wanted peace” and Zelensky seduced by Boris Johnson was the obstructionist-and we will have more to say about this below don’t worry.

Again it can be easy to miss the full nuances and dimensions of this as so many shocking things are now happening everyday but just the fact that Kirk was this close to Netanyahu is astonishing and very significant-it’s significance simply can not be exaggerated.

Bibi finished his Charlie Kirk sponsored SOTU by pointing out Kirk reaffirmed his love and support for Israel. yes-but: He encouraged me to make the case directly to the American people about how vital Israel is to US national security. He told me, “The Holy Land is so important to my life, it pains me to see support for Israel slip away.”

Again this is extremely significant. What it indicates is that TPUSA was central and essential for Netanyahu’s plans for Israel-and Gaza. As to what his plans I have to give it to Norman Finklestein as grudgingly as it very may well be-the goal is clearly ethnic cleansing. October 7 provided the necessary pretense to complete the long term goal which is Greater Israel

CODA: Begrudging after Finklestein came up with a more intellectually and morally obscene defense of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine than even Blumenthal, even Blumenthal’s BFF Jackson Hinkle-that Putin was RIGHT to invade Ukraine because after all Putin claimed he was doing it to defeat “Nazis” in Ukraine and Russia lost 27 million Russians to Nazis in WWII ergo any real or imagined threat Russia claims to feel from “Nazis” justifies anything which again is quite ironic seeing as this is exactly Bibi’s justification-according to him Israel too is fighting “Nazis’ after all the Jews lost to the Nazis in WWII.

But clearly Israel was very concerned by the clear pivot in TPUSA tone and coverage. In response to Blumenthal’s original post we quoted from above, Bill Ackerman had argued that Blumenthal was distorting to the true tenor and tone-the meeting he and other Israel donors had in the Summer with Kirk wasn’t this dramatic. But even Bbi’s own version of events makes it clear that this was a Code Red moment for Israel as it’s last reliable base of support in the US was now loosening.

He admitted Kirk wanted him to make the case directly to the American people ie Kirk was telling him he and his folks at TPUSA could do only so much-it was time for Israel to take a lead in its own advocacy. Of course this is not something they’re very well equipped to do-unlike  Kirk, Bibi is not exactly what you’d call charismatic. So instead they’re looking to take over the US media but more here below though we already touched on it vis a vis Larry Ellison’s takeover of CBS and hiring of Bari “We are all Fascists Now” Weiss to run the network.

So let’s look at Kirk’s astonishing letter to Bibi-I keep calling it astonishing it was and it’s important not to lose sight of this in an era where it’s so hard to forget the astonishing things of yesterday when new astonishing things keep happening today. A major part of what I call our “epistemic collapse” as a nation is the loss of any historical memory of not just what happened 20 years ago but what happened last week.

Like Trump 2.0 has been far worse even than Trump 1.0 yet you’d never know this from the mainstream press’ headlines as Trump’s fascism has become normalized as he engages in so much of it.

Dear Mr. Prime Minister, One of my greatest joys as a Christian is advocating for Israel and forming alliances with Jews in the fight to protect Judeo-Christian civilization. Most recently, I am proud to have taken over Ambassador Huckabee’s show on TBN where we continually support Israel and the Jewish people. As Muhammadism spreads into Western societies, it’s critical that Jews and Christians stay united in the effort to contain and roll back radical Islam and Sharia law. I regret to report that anti-Israel and anti-Semitic trends are at record levels on social media. These negative sentiments then flow downstream into college campuses and even seep into the conservative MAGA community.”

Again amazing how close Kirk’s relationship was with a foreign leader and the tone of it is almost a kind of progress report for a client.

“My team and I have spent months analyzing these trends and debating ideas that could help you and your country pushback against these disturbing developments. Anti-Israel sentiment can undermine American support for Israel. The purpose of this letter is to lay out our concerns and outline potential remedies. Everything written here is from a place of deep love for Israel and the Jewish people. I think it’s important to be brutally honest with those you love. In my opinion, Israel is losing the information war and needs a “communications intervention.”

Losing the information war. As we saw above, Bibi in his short homily about Kirk above, referenced that Kirk urged him to “make the case directly to the American people about how vital Israel is to US national security.” Buit let’s face it Bibi lacks the charisma Kirk had if he can’t win over the conservative Zoomers it’s unlikely the Israeli dictator can-again he’s been in office about as long as Putin. And Bibi probably  has more charisma than the average Israeli official as he is very Americanized.

Indeed since Kirk’s murder, he did try to… do a few podcasts-notably Ben Shapiro naturally.

(127) EXCLUSIVE: Ben Shapiro Interviews Benjamin Netanyahu – YouTube

He also did Dinesh O’Souza-naturally

ONE ON ONE WITH NETANYAHU Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1184

But clearly the main part of Israel’s plan to respond to Kirk’s warning that they’re losing the information war is that if you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas buy it out. In a potentially huge move they have now effectively purchased TikTok as Oracle is very pro Israel to say the least.

Oracle’s TikTok Takeover Raises Questions About Corporate Pro-Israel Influence

CODA: Oracle is apparently so pro Israel that employees deemed not pro Israel enough are sent to counseling-as a first step.

Oracle execs: Love Israel or maybe this isn’t the job for you

Indeed in retrospect it’s much clearer to understand what’s been going on with TikTok. The question always begged what was it about TikTok that led Congress to take the extraordinary step of effectively passing a bill ostensibly “deporting” it from the US-unless its sold to an American buyer? A move that is dubious legally as well as not making much sense in any other logical sense  wether technologically or economically-certainly makes a mockery of the US’ alleged championing of free trade-though with Trump 2.0 our alleged championing of free trade effectively to paraphrase Britain’s MacMillian “in tatters” anyway.

Initially Trump in his first term had demanded this move but then the entire Congress-Democrats as well as Republicans voted almost unanimously to ban TikTok-and suddenly Trump had his lawyer bring a case to his Roberts-Kavanaugh Court to save TikTok-the usual chaotic whiplash in other words.

But the bigger picture about TikTok aside from the alleged threat of the Chinese smuggling in their propaganda into the social media platform is that Israel was extremely unhappy with it as well they might seeing that pro Palestinian outnumber pro Israel by like 14-1 on the platform.

As the Israel-Gaza war got underway in October 2023, Republican lawmakers bolstered their calls to ban Chinese-owned TikTok by arguing that the viral video-sharing app was being overrun by pro-Palestinian content about the bloody conflict.

U.S.-based TikTok posters still show overwhelming support for Palestinians as the war rages on in Gaza, according to a report published Tuesday by the nonpartisan research center Cybersecurity for Democracy. It found that for every pro-Israel post that appeared on TikTok in September there were roughly 17 posts supporting Palestinians. That finding, based on an analysis of hashtags that users attach to their posts, is roughly the same as what the center found nearly two years ago

TikTok posts on Israel-Gaza war are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian

Hmm-you think that might change now that such a pro Israel corporation as Oracle is taking over? If employees who aren’t pro Israel enough go to counseling first then shown the door what will happen to posts that aren’t just not pro Israel enough but rabidly  anti Israel?

CODA: As if there weren’t enough problems with having Oracle take over TikTok now apparently Trump demanded and got yet another qujd pro quo:

Post by @sethabramson.bsky.social — Bluesky

Of course Oracle is also effectively taking over CBS and installing Bari-“We are all Fascists Now” Weiss

Bari Weiss takes reins at CBS News

Indeed while Israel defenders dismiss any discussion of untoward Israel influence as anti Semitism it’s no easy to keep up these blithe denials with stories like this. I mean NO it’s not true that “the Jews control the media” but it’s clear that the Israel’s objective is to control as much of it as possible on an international basis.

Golan Pushes for Social Media Restrictions if Elected

Section: A bombshell scoop by Candace Owens Confirmed

Again what the post Kirk aftermath revealed to me complements of Max Blumenthal and Candace Owens-who was a close Kirk friend and fellow member of the MAGA Far Right-is the fissures inside MAGA. In the aftermath Owens has been at the forefront for anti Zionist MAGA. This has been to the consternation of blatant racist cum anti semitic cum blatant Nazi Nick Fuentes who repeatedly called Owen’s bluff-if she has evidence that Kirk was leaving Zionism who needs to prove it. This is what happens when you call their bluff-they may do what you assume they won’t as Owens did recently.

In the messages shared by Owens, someone that she claims to be her friend and former colleague Charlie Kirk can be seen complaining of “losing” a Jewish donor.”

Another message says: “Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this. Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.”

Max Blumenthal on X: “TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet has confirmed the authenticity of texts showing Charlie Kirk declaring he was left with “no choice but to leave the pro Israel cause,” and complaining that “Jewish donors” had “bullied him” Netanyahu cutouts like Josh Hammer were on this chat and lied https://t.co/zDx7AV8OG5” / X

To be sure at this point the Zionist MAGA response typified by Josh Hammer is that sure Kirk said this but he was ‘just blowing steam and being sarcastic’

(1) Josh Hammer on X: “I have been extremely reluctant to post screenshots from a murdered friend. It feels icky. I don’t like it. But while I was offline this week for a holiday, a high-profile, deeply unwell lunatic used screenshots of an intimate group chat I was in with Charlie Kirk and some https://t.co/l0Jk6Cczzd” / X

The Times did confirm Blumentha’s reporting that Shilman has dropped TPUSA-was this the latest donor Kirk was complaining about?

Max Blumenthal on X: “The New York Times has corroborated my 9/22 report revealing that ultra-Zionist billionaire Robert Shillman cancelled a major donation to TPUSA just days before Charlie Kirk’s killing As in the past, the Times did not credit me with breaking the news or link to my report https://t.co/NhE22vwMMJ” / X

Section: Israel, Israel, Israel. Russia, Russia, Russia. The Max Blumenthal Paradox

The picture we get from Blumenthal’s reporting is stark-in June Kirk personally spoke to Trump and urged him not to go to war with Iran-remember that for three months prior the narrative was that Trump was preventing war with Iran even Chris Hayes of all people about 12 hours before Trump had the US military strike Iran had taken it at face value that Trump was preventing Israel from striking Iran-then the US itself struck Iran.

Trump however didn’t want to hear it and “roared at Kirk”-per Blumenthal. The reason for this was Trump has become so beholden to Netanyahu’s Israel.

According to Kirk’s longtime friend, Kirk’s resentment of Netanyahu and the Israel lobby was spreading within Trump’s inner circle. In fact, they said, the president himself was terrified of Netanyahu’s wrath, and feared the consequences of defying him. ”

Indeed at this speech in Israel yesterday celebrating the current deal Trump himself did note that Bibi’s not exactly the easiest guy in the world to deal with.

“And he is not easy. I want to tell you that he’s not the easiest guy to deal with, but that’s what makes him great. That’s what makes him great.”

(130) BREAKING NEWS: Trump Celebrates Hostage Release And Gaza Peace Deal In Address To Israel’s Knesset – YouTube

Location: 3:46

CF: Max Blumenthal on X: “Tucker reports (at 21:15) that at several points during the 12 day war with Iran last June, Israel army officers stationed at the Pentagon would storm into closed DoD meetings and begin barking orders – and Trump administration officials did nothing about it” / X

This story of the entrapment of the President of the United States by foreign interference, entrapment and betraying the US to a foreign power is a rather striking place for Blumenthal to end up seeing how much he, Mate, Jimmy Dore, Jackson Hinkle, et al have dismissed out of the hand the notion that a US administration could be compromised by foreign powers in the case of Russiagate. Even Blumenthal himself noted this point with some irony with a recent tweet-I can’t find now!-that says Israel is making “Russiagate” true but for a different foreign power namely Israel.

UPDATE: While I couldn’t find Blumenthal’s short tweet his co-host over at The Grayzone Aaron Mate put it even more succinctly.

Aaron Maté on X: “When ever I hear Trump flaunt how much he does the bidding of the Israel First oligarchs who fund his campaign, I think of all the time and energy wasted by Democratic Party leaders and media stenographers on their pet conspiracy theory that Trump is secretly compromised/funded https://t.co/TbZzJPnwP4” / X

This is actually fascinating because what is Mate’s premise here? That there’s all this evidence that of what Blumenthal is calling “Zionist occupied government” which therefore proves that the idea of a “Kremlin controlled government” has now been exploded? That’s obviously what Mate is saying but it seems to me he’s looking through the telescope upside down. After all if someone was accused of raping a woman-call her Accuser A-and later there was all this evidence that emerged that he had in fact raped another woman-call her Accuser B-does this make you feel it’s more or less likely that the Accused also raped Accuser A?

Mate’s arguing you’d feel it less likely. But obviously the opposite is the case as it goes to pattern. If Trump could be so compromised by one foreign power-Israel-why couldn’t he also be compromised by another foreign power-Russia? Indeed knowing that he’s so compromised by Israel makes it MORE not LESS likely he’s also compromised by Russia as it goes to pattern. Is someone is a once convicted criminal it’s more not less likely he’s good for another crime not less.

Indeed if we go back to July 2016 when I personally first started to suspect Russia was interfering in our Presidential election-and that the Trump campaign as colluding-‘Russia if you’re listening’ part of why it seemed plausible to me was not because of “McCarthyism”-this weird premise of the leftist anti anti Trumpers during the first Trump term that the accusation was entirely based on anti Russia prejudice-because after all McCarthy was obsessed with accusing everyone of being a Communist and Russia was the leading Communist country a la if you believe Trump colluded with Russia it was because you were an anti Russia bigot-but rather because of the history of the Republican party as the party of election chicanery including quite notably its historical willingness to collude with hostile foreign powers of the United States going back to Nixon’s scuttling LBJ’s peace talks in 1968

As we discussed above when the Republican party’s Presidential candidate’s campaign colluded with Russia to steal the WH in 2016 it was at least the third time it had done so since Nixon 1968-“This is treason” as LBJ declared-but failed to act on. Again this is what it means to spend your entire adult life as a member of the Democratic party-as Led Zeppelin says The Song Remains the Same.

What’s frustrating for the few of us who actually have any sense of historical memory is how most people apparently don’t have the memory God gave a gnat. Because everything the GOP did in 2024 they’ve been doing a version of pretty much every election I remember in my life time. But few others seem to recall much less apparently intelligent pundits like Ezra Klein who whines that “regular Americans don’t think we like us”-there has been a version of this narrative since Nixon 1968 that the Democrats alone represent “intellectual elites” etc. The narrative used to be about “pointyheaded liberals who can’t park a bicycle straight” now its’ that the Democrats want everyone’s  children to get a sex change. The song remains the same.

So what made Russian Collusion intuitive to me at the outset was less a “McCarthyite” hatred for Russians than an appreciation of GOP history. In 1968 Nixon colluded with South Vietnam to win, in 1980 Reagan-Bush colluded with the Iranian Ayatollah to win. So Russian Collusion Circa 2016 with all these Democratic emails being hacked and released at the most optimal moment for maximum damage to Clinton’s campaign-and therefore maximum gain for Trump and his GOP party-seemed the opposite of implausible.

But I made much this point in chapter Leeden Manifesto-the Republican party had planned to collude with Russian intelligence prior to a time that virtually ANYONE had ever thought in a million years Trump would be the nominee-other than myself and a few others perhaps. Again to paraphrase Roger Stone-who had a central role in Russian Collusion-I’m not bragging I’m saying. By July 2015 I strongly suspected Trump could win the nomination but this remained the opposite of the conventional wisdom until much later.

CODA But then again I’m a Nietzschean cum Zarathustrean for who the premise of the “conventional wisdom” is a contradiction in terms.

But Leeden who was a staff member on Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee was already proposing the GOP work with Russian intelligence to find Clinton’s 33,000-legally deleted-emails. And her manifesto would be taken up by Peter Smith who would work with senior people on the Trump campaign notably Michael Flynn to pay Russian hackers to obtain Clinton’s-once again legally deleted emails.

Indeed even Julian Assange who many on the Left to this day wrongly lionize as a free speech hero was at the end of the day little more than a free Super PAC for Trump but back in 2015 he had stated on his Twitter feed that he wanted someone from the “libertarian wing of the Republican party” to win. The irony is that Assange is worshipped by the Left despite the self evident fact is he’s a man of the Right

CF: New Republic article

As for Israel they as we discussed in the Addendum to the Prologue have a long history of interfering in US Presidential elections-to elect the Republican candidate. Or at least Likudnik Israel-but they’ve been in power most of the time since 1977 and almost entirely starting with Netanyahu’s win in 1996-after he arguably fomented Rabin’s assassination-again his wife would always blame Bibi.

Israel had been part of Iran Collusion 1980-Reagan-Bush had commissioned them to send weapons to Iran as part of the quid pro quo. Indeed, as noted above PACE Ben-Menashe Likud was who burned Reagan-Bush and revealed what would become Iran-Contra after another cabal in the Reagan-Bush WH started sending weapons also to Iraq. Again it’s all about patterns. Israel it turns out had a major role in Reagan’s treason tainted win in 1980 but also was who outed them leading to Iran-Contra. In the late 1990s Israel orchestrated Clinton’s impeachment-again see the Prologue.

But this brings us to Russian Collusion 2016. Blumenthal and Mate seem to think that evidence of Israel interference and collusion is proof that there was no Russian interference and collusion. And indeed while the Bernie or Bust cum Tankie Left has always hated the premise of Russian collusion-for two reasons first because it undermines their premise that Hillary lost because she was a terrible candidate but secondly because Russia remains the great Marxist Leninist hope for much of the Left-which was shown quite strikingly In the case of Hasan “Crimea a River” Hasan.

Section: Foreign Interference is not a Political Issue I’s the Political Issue

As much as I hate to quote Nick Fuentes-I mean the guy believes interracial marriage is “demonic” or something and I’m the product of an interracial marriage so-not to take it “too personally..” but he does sometimes make some good positive as opposed to normative points and this is a very important one. Today our foreign policy is executed to the benefit of two counties neither of them the United States-Israel and Russia.

Meanwhile the Tankie Left insists that Trump is compromised by only Israel and some liberals wrongly believe it’s only Russia when in point of fact it’s both. Indeed when you watch Trump’s foreign policy on a day-to-day basis you will notice that both Trump’s Israel-Gaza policy and his Russia-Ukraine policy follow some very predictable and recurring patterns. Again The Song Remains the Same. For anyone with a longer memory than what God gave a gnat assuming such an animal exists here today George Orwell’s Donald Trump’s America.

There’s periods of peak submission-like when Trump literally clapped as Putin approached him in Alaska-but then a few weeks later he suddenly starts talking a tougher game or so it superficially appears. Like Blumenthal the other day claimed to believe Trump had now betrayed the Russia Rules Ukraine Drools foreign policy that he and Vance have always followed. But this was only for those with a very superficial understanding of what Trump said at that Nato meeting.

His real message as Lev Remembers argued was quite the opposite. Indeed as Lev pointed out “when Trump talks Russia bombs.”

  – by Lev Parnas – Lev Remembers

Trump had not become more supportive of Ukraine but was rather washing his hands of them and telling Europe it’s their problem:

The media spin is in full force. Every outlet is shouting that Donald Trump has done a 180, that suddenly he’s backing Ukraine, that somehow this was a shift. Folks, you’ve been with me long enough to know better. As I always tell you, don’t watch the words—watch the actions.”

Correct and the media always falls for this both in the case of Russia-Ukraine AND Israel-Gaza. Regarding Trump’s latest alleged big peace deal with Israel-Gaza, interestingly Lev sees through this too-it’s another phony deal.

EXPOSED: Trump’s Secret Plan for “Peace” — and the Price the World Is Paying

Indeed, Bibi is singing a very different tune in Hebrew to Israelis than he is in English.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X: “Netanyahu says one thing in English and another in Hebrew. While saying in English that the genocide in Gaza is over, in Hebrew, he says that “the campaign has not ended,” indicating that Israel plans to break the ceasefire once the hostages are released. This ceasefire,” / X

Indeed for three months before June many fell for the idea that Trump wanted a new Iran deal and was preventing Israel from attacking them. And of course Trump’s lead negotiator on both conflicts has been Steve Witkoff-Trump made a joke at his Knesset speech-linked above-about Witkoff talking to Putin for 5 hours.

Of course Trump won’t tell us the substance of those 5 hours any more than the many hours he’s talked to Putin but you know “Russia was a hoax.”

Section: Russia if you’re Listening: Russiagate vs Israelgate

What Blumenthal-Mate’s snark that the fact of Israel Collusion somehow dispositively proves Russia Collusion didn’t happen that the Russian Collusion theory was not that Russia was the only country that colluded with Trump in 2016.

It was Seth Abramson who most fleshed out the premise of Russiagate but according to his extrapolation Russia was certainly not the only country who colluded to help Trump win. Indeed, in what Abramson calls the Grand Bargain there were multiple foreign countries that colluded with Trump-one of which was Israel. So Israel colluded with the Trump campaign just as it did with the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and as I have argued also in 2024-my belief is that he and Bibi had a deal for no ceasefire or hostage deal before the election.

From Abramson’s Proof of Conspiracy:

In late 2015, after Donald Trump has formally announced his candidacy for president, a geopolitical conspiracy emerges overseas whose key participants are the leaders of Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt. These six men decide that Trump is the antidote to their ills: for Russia, U.S. sanctions; for Israel, the lack of Arab allies; for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, perceived threats emanating from Iran. The conspirators commit themselves to doing whatever is necessary to ensure that Trump is elected. Trump’s presidential campaign is aware of and benefits from this conspiracy both before and after the 2016 election.”

On March 19, 2018, British journalist David Hearst, the former chief foreign leader writer for the Guardian, publishes the most important report of his career. Hearst, at one time the Moscow bureau chief at the Guardian, is now editor in chief of his own publishing venture, a London-based Middle East watchdog called the Middle East Eye. In the spring of 2018, he reports the existence of a years-long, continent-spanning conspiracy that will eventually envelop the president of the United States: the Red Sea Conspiracy.

This book denominates the conspiracy Hearst uncovers as the “Red Sea Conspiracy” for the simple reason that it is hatched on a yacht in the middle of the Red Sea, a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean bordered by, among other countries, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.2 One imagines that in his many years as a correspondent and commentator for the Scotsman, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera (Qatar), Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (England), TRT World (Turkey), Masr Al-Aan (Egypt), and the Guardian, Hearst never thought he’d stumble on a story as far-reaching in its implications as the Red Sea Conspiracy.3 But he did—and what he found could change the course of history.

This book chronicles the events around the globe that preceded and followed the fall 2015 origin of the conspiracy, with a special focus on how the conspiracy prompted Donald Trump and his aides, allies, and associates to covertly collude with six countries both before and after the 2016 presidential election: Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Bahrain, and Egypt. Events that began on the Red Sea in 2015 now influence President Trump’s foreign policy toward all of these countries, toward other countries not involved in the conspiracy such as Qatar and Iran, and, more broadly, toward Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Kindle

CF: David Hearst’s article Abramson references

EXCLUSIVE: The secret yacht summit that realigned the Middle East | Middle East Eye

Again the foreign policy of Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity Edition is run for the national interests of two countries-Israel in the Middle East, Russia in Europe. Again as usual the best way to understand it is cuo bono-who benefits?

Indeed as someone who responded to Aaron Mate in his Twitter timeline pointed out it turns out Russian Collusion and Israeli Collusion directly intersected at points in the machinations of Roger Stone-who as Emptywheel pointed out went through a period in late June and early July of 2016 where he repeatedly stated that it might well be Russia who hacked all those Democratic emails.

But a few years ago the Nation had a major piece on: Israel Collusion. Of course-the Nation was yet another left leaning outlet that was uncomfortable making these accusations against Russia a la the great Marxist Leninist Hope but the idea of Israel  was right in line with their preconceptions-preconceptions that are largely correct I should say.

Still what wasn’t appreciated was the extent to which this revelation about Stone showed that far from disproving Russian collusion it showed that Stone colluded with both Russia and Israel-and indeed, Israel could have consciously been involved in Russian collusion. With all the espionage Israel has committed through the years-again CF Lewinskygate-against the United States it’s allegedly great ally it’s hardly surprising that Israel intelligence would have also been plugged into what Russia was up to.

CODA: Notable too that the Coffee Boy Extraordinaire who has far from proved he was “set up by the Deep State”-but then again the Deep State elected Trump-despite what Max Blumenthal’s buddy Matt Gaetz wants us to believe had his most experience and connections to Israel.

Parenthetically, Papadopoulos and Gaetz  went on about “honeypots” in the episode but notably the biggest honeypot in the Coffee Boy’s entire story was probably his wife not only had her own ties to Joseph Mifsud but worked for him at one point and apparently she first approached him to talk about-Joseph Mifsud the professor who told the Coffee Boy that Russia had all those Hillary Clinton emails.

CODA: Regarding the Coffee Boy Extraordinaire the notion that he DIDN’T tell anyone on the Trump campaign about what Mifsud said about what James Comey called The Golden Emails doesn’t pass the laugh test and there is evidence that he did in fact tell the campaign. There are at least two reference points that prove this-one Seth Abramson documented another even less covered was Jason Wilson.

CODA: Regarding Aaron Mate’s initial tweet that somehow Israelgate disproves Russiagate rather than buttress it I send him a comment and got a pretty interesting reply from someone who claimed that they “used to believe Trump wanted to help Russia” but now they’d figured it out that it was “Zionist Ukranian Russians.” I mean that’s some pretty impressive compound racism and anti Semitism you have to admit.

Stephen McIntyre on X: “@aaronjmate if you’ve read Bamford’s article https://t.co/jxpzKTRzDc, you’ve encountered Stone warrant #7. It was for emails of an Israeli agent and produced with relatively light redaction as one of the Stone search warrants in a FOIA by US media. Bamford’s article is good on general” / X

🔍 Disinfo Tactic: Semantic Collapse

• The “Zionist Ukrainian Russians” trope I encountered is a textbook example of semantic collapse—fusing contradictory identities to confuse and provoke.
• It’s designed to:
  • Erase Ukrainian sovereignty by framing Ukrainians as confused Russians
  • Deflect Russian culpability by blaming “Zionists”
  • Trigger antisemitic tropes without explicitly naming Jews

This isn’t just sloppy—it’s strategic. It’s how coordinated disinfo campaigns fracture critique and redirect moral outrage.

Section: Once Again: Russia, Russia, Russia. Israel, Israel, Israel

In any case James Bamford’s Nation piece on Israel interference is full of truly shocking revelations and radically expands our understanding of the level foreign collusion engaged in by the Trump campaign in 2016. My only objection is this rather obvious desire of the Nation to treat these revelations as not just incriminating for Israel but somehow exculpatory for Russia. Again the fact that the revelation of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Israel intelligence makes it more rather than less likely the colluded with Russian intelligence.

‘The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel

‘While US media fixated on Russian interference in the 2016 election, an Israeli secret agent’s campaign to influence the outcome went unreported.”

So right off the bat the subtitle frames it in two very misleading ways. First of all the media  largely ignored “Russiagate” prior to the election with Dean Baquet’s Times going to so far as to “exonerate” Trump with its headline on October 31 in concert with some-probably GOP leaning-FBI agents “FBI Sees No Clear Links to Russia.” This after the absolute freakout over Comey’s letter the previous Friday, October 28.

It was only after the election that Comey’s FBI which had leaked about Emailgate the first day it was opened on July 10, 2015-see Chapter No Probable Cause-finally conceded what had been rumored since July 2016-around the time of Trump’s “Russia if you’re Listening” declaration.

Then for the next few years there was quite a bit of coverage true though it’s hard to dismiss it as Banford does as “fixated”-compared to what? No-the media had been fixated with Vince Foster, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, and Emailgate just like it was absolutely fixated by Biden’s age in July 2024. Check the headlines during that time where every major outlet had 20 different stories about one thing to see “fixated” Russiagate got some good coverage and there were some genuine bombshells but then again the pundits clearly never loved this story in the way they had talking about Hillary’s emails or Biden’s age. There wasn’t the doggedness, the obsessive focus, the point of absolute saturation of these scandals that targeted Democrats. This has always been the case-the media never loved Iran-Contra either though they reluctantly covered it for a while. Indeed in 1972 the Times completely blacked out Watergate during the election.

And while there were some very good scoops there was a tendency for some of the best stories to end up orphans. Like the story that Manafort visited Assange.

An explosive report alleges that Paul Manafort repeatedly met with Julian Assange. | The New Republic

Paul Manafort reportedly asked Ecuador to turn over Assange | Blaze Media

Then Bill Barr put out his fake exoneration letter that completely mischaracterized it and the media had it’s narrative-“No Collusion No Obstruction Total Exoneration of the President” -literally the words Ken Dilanian tweeted that night-and even after the Mueller team criticized Barr’s memo and even after the media admitted Barr’s mendacity it still refused to drop this utterly fallacious narrative-once the media has a bad narrative you’ll never get them off it.

yet Bamford himself echoes this categorically fallacious narrative:

“This was also when the FBI and the media began focusing heavily on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, as a result of Moscow’s hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign. But while the Mueller investigation was never able to conclusively demonstrate any collusion with Russia, the FBI did uncover hard evidence of extensive collusion between close Trump associates and the highest levels of the Israeli government.”

So while overall this is a great piece with a great deal of fascinating and new information there is this bothersome subtext of somehow using Israel’s malfeasance to exonerate Russia’s-as Aaron Mate recently did as we saw above-as we also saw after I pushed back a pro Russian bot sent me 7 tweets making racist, anti Semitic slurs against the Ukranian people as “Zionist Ukranian Russians.”

To be clear Mueller did not say “the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia” or that there was “no evidence of collusion” rather there was a lot of evidence but it argued there was not enough for beyond reasonable doubt-which is over 85%-90% confidence you can get a conviction.

CODA: To be more precise as Seth Abramson explains “collusion” is not a crime the crime the Mueller team looked for was “conspiracy with a foreign power.” There was evidence of that too in the emails the late Peter Smith sent to the Trump campaign-his close contact was Michael Flynn-but his proposal to work with Russian intelligence to acquire Hillary’s legally deleted emails was also sent to Steve Bannon and Kellyann Conway among others-Bannon and Conway  sort of shared campaign manager duties after “Vladmir Putin’s man in Kiev” a la Paul Manafort was fired in August.

Manafort’s man in Kiev – POLITICO

How Paul Manafort Helped Elect Russia’s Man in Ukraine | TIME

Thread by @SethAbramson: “(MUELLER REPORT LIVE THREAD) This thread chronicles—in real time—the release of the Mueller Report, with news and analysis from a @Newsweek […]”

I would argue that Mueller was too timid. To be sure I had worried all along that #ResistanceLib types like myself were considerably too optimistic the Republicans who ran the FBI would ever investigate and prosecute a Republican President as hard as they did the Clintons. There is a good argument the Mueller investigation was too timid in a number of ways. Weisman and Jeannie Rhea who ran the Russian Collusion part of the investigation were pretty aggressive but Muller and some of the other senior folks were far more cautious.

But the idea that the media was “fixated” on Russian interference doesn’t pass the laugh test. I mean compared to what?! Certainly not compared to how the media covered the Clintons for 25 years-how they covered Vince Foster, Whitewater, Lewinskygate-Keith Olbermann gave a very interesting personal history on his podcast a few months ago on just how obsessed the entire media was over Lewinskygate in 1998-Emailgate or for that matter Biden’s health in July 2024. In fact the Dean Baquet media ran defense for Trump during the election-as did Comey’s FBI-they don’t call it Trumpland for nothing. After Comey’s reprehensible letter on October 28 flipped the election and the Times front page’s absolute freakout out over it, three days later on Monday October 31 the Comey’s FBI collued with the Times to “exonerate” Trump-“FBI Sees No Clear Links to Russia.”

Only after the election when Comey’s Trumpland the FBI finally acknowledged the investigation did you get some reporting over it-you know after THAT WOMAN was safely defeated so the media could somehow feel vindicated over its 25 years of unfair and just plain awful coverage of the Clintons.

After this the media did do some pretty decent reporting over Russiagate-though hardly “fixated” in the way it had been over Whitewater, Lewinsky, Clinton’s emails, or Biden’s health. There are investigations and scandals the media loves and those they’re more cool to. you can ask why this is and that’s a very important question though they’ll never give us an honest answer but like Maddow said look at what they do. And what the “liberal media”-talk about not passing the laugh test!-has always done is pursue scandals about the Democrats much more doggedly, relentlessly, exhaustively, with far greater focus and vigilance than those focusing on Republicans. This is what they do and have always done. Watergate got very little coverage during the election and none by the Times. The media covered Iran Contra for a few years it was such a big story they had no choice but they never liked it so much and by the late 1980s they had decided it was passe. Comparatively they never got bored over Whitewater cum Lewinskygate nor did they ever get bored over Hillary’s emails-until AFTER THE ELECTION. THEN no one wanted to talk about it-as it was pretty embarrassing. It served its purpose but after the fact no one wanted to talk about it-the new narrative was she lost because she didn’t go to Wisconsin the weekend before the election.

The same thing happened with the Mueller investigation-Kasey Hunt declared on NBC the night of Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter that “people are tired of Mueller” which tipped their hand-whatever Barr said this was the end of  Russiagate. Since then you had media hacks a la Erik Wemple who were obsessed over poking holes in the Steele Dossier etc and generally backing up Trump’s parallel narrative that it was all a conspiracy by the DEEP  STATE to defeat him-this zombie narrative was picked up by  among many other MAGA, MSM and Tankie hacks, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate. At one point they were blatantly cheerleading that Gaetz would prosecute those who investigated Trump.

Will Matt Gaetz hold Russiagate hucksters to account?

But no one in the media would take the very serious and contrary to all the gaslighting well supported allegations seriously again.

And while there was some excellent reporting during that two year period before the Mueller report Barr’s fake exoneration letter was released there was this clear Oprhan Annie Tendency where the best reporting tended to have no followup pieces in the media.

Like when the Guardian-by  definition not exactly a favorite outlet of the US savvy pundits-reported that Assange met with Manafort three times between 2013-2016 the Beltway decided the story was icky. So much so that the Ny T itself disowned its own reporting that Manafort had tried to get Manafort released from the embassy  in 2017

An explosive report alleges that Paul Manafort repeatedly met with Julian Assange. | The New Republic

Paul Manafort reportedly asked Ecuador to turn over Assange | Blaze Media

What’s fascinating-what stories the media selects to magnify and what it chooses to let die on the vine is by  definition fascinating-is that neither story was exactly implausible. Regarding the claim Manafort visited Assange between 2013-2016 note that there was also reporting that Nigel Farage had visited Assange in the same period.

Nigel Farage held secret meetings with Julian Assange, US congressional probe told | The Independent | The Independent

Nigel Farage ‘slipped Julian Assange a data stick in secret’, says investigator | US News | Sky News

What this points to is the fact that paradoxically in light of the Left’s lionizing of Assange, he’s always been a man of the Right

Similarly regarding the story of Manafort trying to get Assange out of the Embassy remember that Stone too was trying to get a pardon for Assnage for years-he had promised Credico back in October when Credico was promising Wikileaks was going to do its Podesta dump soon-which it would starting on October 7 just 90 minutes after the breaking of the Hollywood Access tape.

Roger Stone Told Credico He Was ‘Working With Others’ To Get Assange Pardoned – TPM – Talking Points Memo

Roger Stone Reportedly Worked on Assange Pardon | Law & Crime

Roger Stone Was in Contact With Julian Assange in 2017, Documents Show – The New York Times

Indeed reportedly Trump himself at one point promised to pardon Assange if he could clear Trump on Russia-which is sort of what Trump’s recent gestures of Maxwell is based on.

Trump Offered to Pardon Assange if He Cleared Russia on Hack, Lawyers Say | Courthouse News Service

Another notable orphan during the Russigate years was the story about Jason Wilson speaking with Papadopoulos in that Chicago sports bar where the Coffee Boy admitted he told Jeff Sessions about what Mifsud told him-that Russia had all those incriminating emails regarding Hillary Clinton. While the media pundits made a point of dismissing the Guardian’s reporting about Manafort visiting Assange in the embassy-remember Corsi too would tell Assange he visited Assange in August during a trip to Rome. Indeed while apparently everyone has taken Stone’s word that he was just joking when he said “I dined with Assange last night” in light of the separate reporting that Farage spoke with Assange at the embassy, that Manafort did, and Corsi’s apparent meeting with him-at least based on his texts to Stone-what makes you so sure Stone DIDN’T dine with Assange? Once again it goes to pattern.

Indeed the pundits were so pointed to repudiate the Manafort-Assange link that the Times ended up repudiating its own different Manafort-Assange story which is weird if you assume this was all about straight journalism rather than narrative management-after all the fact that the Guardian reported Manafort met Assange multiple times in the years prior to 2017 would make it MORE likely that Manafort tried to get Assange freed from the embassy in 2017-once again it goes to pattern as does the well established fact that Stone himself sought a pardon for Assange in light of the close relationship and long history of Stone-former business partner-and Manafort.

But the Times instead chose to look through the telescope upside down even though this actually undermined their own reporting.

But in the case of Jason Wilson no mainstream media outlets even bothered to quibble with Daily Beast’s reporting-it was simply ignored. They acted as if it never happened.

At Chicago nightclub, George Papadopoulos allegedly makes explosive new claim about Jeff Sessions – ThinkProgress

CODA: Nor was this the only evidence that OF COURSE the Coffee Boy told the Trump campaign about what Mifsud told him about incriminating emails on Clinton-the campaign was absolutely obsessed over the emails-and as we know from Leeden’s manifesto working with Russian intelligence to get them. Seth Abramson documents emails where Papadopoulos mentioned them to Trump campaign operative John Mashburn

Thread by @SethAbramson: “(THREAD) George Papadopoulos and I have agreed we both want Trump-Russia collusion claims thoroughly examined, so I choose to have faith in […]”

CF: Abramson’s full epic thread on the Mueller Report Thread by @SethAbramson: “(MUELLER REPORT LIVE THREAD) This thread chronicles—in real time—the release of the Mueller Report, with news and analysis from a @Newsweek […]”

Abramson goes onto note that Mueller didn’t mention the email to Mashburn-or Jason Wilson though of course NO ONE ever mentions that the Dail Beast reporting was literally one and done.

As for the release of the Muller Report Barr’s fake exoneration letter by late 2018 early 2019 the only story the media was interested in regarding the Mueller investigation was when it was going to end. There was even some helpful reporting that assured Bill Barr that he was under no obligation to release the report if he didn’t feel like it. Once again on the night of Barr’s memo, Kasey Hunt said the quite part out loud-people are tired of Mueller. Indeed another media narrative at the time was how long the Mueller investigation had dragged out for-in fact it was a drop in the bucket compared with Ken Starr in the 1990s-which took more than double the time of the Mueller investigation-which would be dwarfed by all the subsequent Trumpian investigations of the investigators-and Hunter Biden yet no one in the media made a stink about it dragging out too long-to the contrary many pundits cheered them. Once again-there’s your liberal media

In Abramson’s epic 475 tweet thread on the Mueller Report-Nate Silver was full of snark that night mocking Abramson because it was so long-what a deep thinker what a WONK a WONK’s WONK is Nate “Biden’s 81 and I’m never going to stop talking about it” Silver-he quickly noted evidence that buttressed the idea that Mueller was very cautious not to say timid.

108/ Mueller’s early Papadopoulos summary does *not* include the allegation from Trump adviser John Mashburn that Papadopoulos told the campaign what Mifsud told him about the Kremlin having stolen Clinton emails. I’m not sure why; this was Congressional testimony from Mashburn.

Indeed Mueller’s tendency seemed to be to take folks like Page, Papadopoulos and indeed Michael Cohen at their word-Michael Cohen said he never went to Prague so he never went to Prague, the Coffee Boy said he told no one about the emails so he told no one about the emails, Page said he was at that Moscow conference in his personal capacity guess he was there in his personal capacity.

CODA: Guess that’s why Michael Flynn and Blumenthal’s preferred candidate Jill Stein were sitting eating dinner at the same table as Putin in that Moscow conference in 2015 they were hungry and just happened to wonder in to a restaurant where Putin was eating and his table was the only one with spare seas-spoiler alert we will have more to say about that conference below including who else turned out to have attended…

Indeed the same thing was done with the Trump Tower Russia meeting in June 2016-Kushner, Manafort, and Don Jr told us it was a nothingburger-guess it was a nothingburger. No one seemed very concerned about the fact that Trump was never interviewed by Mueller either-but could you imagine the freakout if Hillary had refused the interview from Comey and Friends? Indeed she DID sit for an interview and they excoriated her for simply having her lawyer present. But sure the media is liberal and the Deep State elected is out to get Trump.

Guess it’s tough to prove the Trump campaign colluded with Russia beyond a reasonable doubt if you simply take their ad hominem denials at face value with no attempt to verify-Trump says “that thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, a hoax?” Guess it’s a made-up story-a hoax! Case closed. Mueller found NO COLLUSION.

But back to Israeli Collusion with James Bamford writing for the Nation. Put aside the clear attempts to somehow launder Russia as they incriminate Israel’s there’s also a few feeble attempts to defend Assange as well it was a truly bombshell piece in the revelations of Israel Collusion which was the second time Israel-Likud’s Israel-colluded with the Republican Presidential campaign we know of-2024 would be the third time based on my premise that Bibi agree to no ceasefire or hostage deal prior to the election.

Section: Roger, Hello From Jerusalem

“Roger, hello from Jerusalem,” read the message from the Israeli secret agent. Dated August 12, 2016, it was addressed to Roger Stone—at the time a key player in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. “Any progress? He is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intel. The key is in your hands! Back in the US next week.” Later, the agent promised, “October Surprise coming!”

The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel | The Nation

I mean wow-where to start? First of all let’s consider the larger timeline of the Trump campaign’s great adventures in foreign collusion. On August 2, Jerome Corsi messages back to Roger Stone after communicating with Julian Assange “Word is from our friend in the embassy there will be 2 more dumps.”

Jerome Corsi’s Emails to Roger Stone Revealed | Law & Crime

After Stone proved prescient about WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails-that were timed to perfection in forcing out the DNC Chairwoman on the eve of the convention Trump asked Stone for what other information he could get from Julian Assange-Corsi was commissioned to reach out in the course of a trip to Europe-FWI Corsi claims he went to Rome.

As Trump stormed the Midwest for votes, Guccifer 2.0 was making final preparations for another major release of documents. On July 14, Guccifer sent WikiLeaks an e-mail titled “big archive,” with a one-gigabyte encrypted attachment. Four days later, on July 18, the WikiLeaks Twitter account notified Guccifer the data had been received and that release of the hacked DNC e-mails was planned for later in the week.

On or around the next day, Donald Trump was in his New York office venting at the press for its criticism of his wife Melania’s Republican convention address the night before. There were accusations that she had borrowed passages from a speech by Michelle Obama. At some point, however, according to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, Trump took a phone call from Roger Stone.

“Roger, how are you?” said Trump.

“Good,” Stone replied. “Just want to let you know I got off the telephone a moment ago with Julian Assange. And in a couple of days, there’s going to be a massive dump of e-mails that’s going to be extremely damaging to the Clinton campaign.”

Trump was pleased. “Uh, that’s good. Keep me posted,” he said into a small black speaker box on his desk. Sitting nearby was Michael Cohen. “Do you believe him? Do you think Roger really spoke to Assange?” Trump asked.

“I don’t know,” Cohen said. “Roger is Roger, and for all you know, he was looking on his Twitter account. I don’t know the answer.”

CODA: This is interesting for many reasons of course but while not the central point here this touches on again my skepticism about Michael Cohen and the sense he’s still holding back a lot of what he knows in terms of what went down in 2016. He’s been insisting there was no Russian collusion yet he himself testified to this anecdote that suggests the opposite.

This led to Corsi’s correct prediction of coming Wikileaks dumps-soon after Stone would tweet “soon it will be Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

Again this was August 2. On August 3 Manafort meet with Konstantin Kilminik a “former” member of Russian military intelligence-as you’re never a “former” member of Russian military intelligence.

How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe – The Washington Post

Then on August 4 there’s another Trump campaign meeting that Abramson calls the most important meeting in the meeting in the Trump-Russia timeline.

Thread by @SethAbramson on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

In any case to go back to the August 12 message from “Jerusalem” to Roger Stone, it’s clear Israel knew what it was doing-as Roger Stone was the right guy to talk to about the need for an October Surprise. After all, Stone is quite a student of the history of October Surprises going back to when his mentor, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon scuttled LBJ’s peace talks. This was the last Presidential election Roger Stone wasn’t able to do his own dirty tricks on behalf of Team Republican. But OF COURSE he knows all about what Nixon did in 1968 and has written about it.

FN: Amazon.com: Tricky Dick: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon eBook : Stone, Roger J. , Colapietro, Mike: Kindle Store

While Stone fully acknowledges and indeed relishes what Nixon did at the same time he also projects-as is typical of GOP co-conspirators-a counternarrative where the Democrats-in this case LBJ-was guilty of election chicanery by trying to achieve a peace deal(!) Stone spins it that this was his attempt at an October Surprise so Nixon was wholly justified in sabotaging a peace deal and condemning us to five more years of violent war were 35,000 more US service members and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed.

Regarding the 1980 October Surprise, as we discussed in Chapter The Unreported Background, Stone made some major news by revealing that he had first hand knowledge about the treasonous conspiracy of the Reagan-Bush campaign to delay the release of the hostages-though while he doesn’t defend this as he defended Nixon he seems to implicitly give Reagan a pass by suggesting it was all Bush Sr.

CODA: Which does touch on an interesting point-while there is much that is known about these machinations there is no fact pattern that shows any knowledge on the part of Reagan himself. Regarding 9/11-as I’ve discussed I’m something of a 9/11 Truther-it seems that Cheney may have been the QB assuming it was an inside job as he supposedly did the shootdown order-which was not his role to do; but with Iran Collusion you here a lot about Bush’s numerous Paris trips and about the machinations of Bill Casey but you never hear anything about what Reagan’s role was when all this was going on. OTOH it might just mean they were very careful about protecting him.

Just for the heck of it we’ll quote a little from The Unreported Background to put an exclamation on it:

Now to the real meat: the Comeygate revelations buried in their post-2016 books. Let’s start with Stone’s The Myth of Russian Collusion.

In it, Stone casually references the 1980 October Surprise:

“President Jimmy Carter worried appropriately that the Reagan campaign might pull off an ‘October Surprise’ with the American embassy hostages…”

Think about that. Nixon’s apprentice admits—however obliquely—that the Reagan campaign stole the 1980 election. He doesn’t frame it that way, of course. Just like Mac Stipanovich doesn’t say the GOP stole 2000. But the implication is clear.

FN: What Stone doesn’t say is that his mentor, Nixon, did the same thing in 1968. See Chapter Vietnam Collusion.

Stone’s framing is slippery. He says Carter “worried appropriately”—but there’s little evidence Carter worried enough. He should have. The Reagan campaign had penetrated the CIA, State, and Defense. There were more Reagan loyalists in Carter’s cabinet than Carter loyalists.

Meanwhile the rationale within the Reagan-Bush campaign was that Carter was going to pull an October Surprise on them by getting the hostages released. That they framed it this way is enough in itself to underscore that this are very sick people though the joke is on us as they have taken over the country-starting with what Nixon did in 1968- even though they are in the minority.

But the central point here is that Stone asserts to have firsthand knowledge of the machinations the campaign-specifically according to Stone, Bush Sr’s treachery in sabotaging the release of the hostages.

CODA Again what kind of moral sociopathic traitor do you have to be to do something like this? There are books about hostages who were stuck in Iran for eight years thanks to the machinations of the Republican campaign. This is why I always argue you can never be TOO cynical about these people-Trump but also his GOP co-conspirators.

And speaking of October Surprises the meat of the Unreported Background chapter is the central role Stone-along with Jerome Corsi and the late Peter W. Smith played in the orchestration of the Comey Letter that won it for Trump.

Because if “Jerusalem” believed that Trump needed an October Surprise Stone was the right place to go with that worry AND Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith got them their October Surprise.

Back to The Nation-this is some truly fascinating insight into the brain that Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi share-a point we talked about in Chapter Unreported Background:

The key for the Israeli agent was finding a back door—a covert channel—to Trump. Roger Stone, long a key Trump aide, fit the bill. Although Stone had formally left the campaign, he and Trump spoke frequently and confidentially. For these calls, Trump would often use the phone of his security director, Keith Schiller, “because he did not want his advisers to know they were talking,” according to Sam Nunberg, a political adviser who served on Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Stone energetically supported Israel’s harsh occupation of the Palestinian territories and its bellicose stance toward Iran; following Trump’s speech at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in March 2016, Stone noted approvingly that “Donald Trump is a radical Zionist.”

Donald Trump is a radical Zionist. If only Roger Stone could have told that to all the folks in Dearborn who voted for Trump because he was going to end the genocide on day one. Again Israel picked just the right person for an October Surprise.

Another Trump aide heavily involved in the conspiracy, according to the FBI documents, was Stone’s associate Jerome Corsi, who appears to have been the original contact who connected the Israelis to Stone. An ultraconservative journalist with a doctorate in political science from Harvard and the author of a shelf of books harshly critical of liberals and Democrats, Corsi was a leading literary light of the extreme right. He gained fame in 2004 for his “swiftboating” attacks on the military record of then–presidential candidate John Kerry. The secret agent was particularly drawn to Corsi’s adulation of Israel and support for its belligerence toward Iran.”

According to Bamford it was actually Corsi who introduced Stone to the Israel agent:

Hiding behind his online pseudonym “jrlc,” Corsi was also a virulent Islamophobe. Posting on the conservative forum FreeRepublic.com, he has called Islam “a virus” and “a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion” and has written that “Islam is a peaceful religion as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered, and the infidels killed.”

After Corsi provided contact information to Stone, the secret Israeli agent and Stone connected. Then, on May 17, the agent wrote, “Hi Roger, I hope all is well. Our dinner tonight for 7PM is confirmed. I arrive at 4PM. Please suggest a good restaurant that has privacy.” The original plan was for Stone and the agent to meet alone, but Stone wanted to bring Corsi along as backup. “I am uncomfortable meeting without Jerry,” Stone wrote, and then rescheduled the dinner for the next day.

The sense then that Stone and Corsi were joined at the hip in that campaign was not an illusion.

According to the FBI warrant, the same day that Stone communicated with the Israeli agent, he began Googling some very strange terms, including “guccifer” and “dcleaks.” It would be nearly a month before those same terms would make headlines around the world. On June 14, The Washington Post reported that the DNC had been hacked by Russian government agents. The next day, someone calling himself “Guccifer 2.0” took credit for the attack. He claimed to be an American hacktivist, but according to a Justice Department indictment in July 2018, he was actually a Russian GRU employee. Soon afterward, the website DCLeaks—another front for the GRU—began releasing hacked Democratic Party documents.

The timing implies that the Israeli agent was Stone’s most likely source of confirmed details of a Russian cyberattack on the DNC, a month before it became known to anyone outside of the Kremlin and the GRU. If that’s the case, there are two critical questions: How did the Israeli agent know, and why was he revealing the details to a close associate of Trump rather than to the Obama administration, Israel’s supposed ally?”

To answer the easy question first it’s not hard to understand why the Israel agent didn’t reveal it to Obama-that Israel agent and his boss Netanyahu did not see Obama or any Democratic President as an ally-quite the opposite. Again he had warned Stone that Trump would lose without an October Surprise-ergo he wanted Trump to win. So of course he wouldn’t tell the Obama Administration.

CODA

Indeed we’ll argue below that Israel doesn’t necessarily consider the United States its ally at all as paradoxical as that is seeing as how we’ve been their best ally but allyship has mostly been a one way street for Israel since the Zionist lobby politically blackmailed Truman into supporting the founding of Israel in 1948 in the first place against his better judgement and that of his State Department. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

As for how the Israeli agent knew? I mean this is Israel they always know what’s going on in America first before anyone else. As we documented in the Prologue they knew about Monica Lewinsky before Ken Starr or the Clinton hating FBI Director Louis Freeh. So it’s not exactly surprising they knew about Russia’s interference before anyone.

CODA: Again Roger Stone went through that curious period in late June-early July where he was admitting it was quite likely Russia who kept hacking all the Democrats’ emails.

Section: The Real Very Special Relationship

For Israel it’s not the United States. A recent Politico article declared with some concern that Israel is turning away from the West. This presumes they were ever honestly part of the Western bloc. But this is Israel in reality they have no allies. The assumption they were part of the Western Bloc was based on the premise that Israel was friends with its best friend’s friends. But turns out Israel was never that into us.

Opinion | 2 Years After Oct. 7, Israel Is Turning Away from the West – POLITICO

Indeed, Israel Shamir didn’t just not love the United States but actively hated it and took pleasure in cozying up to the Soviets behind our backs. Israel has never felt honor bound to have any concern for US interests just because we’ve done so much to protect their interests. For example, Israel was the one allegedly Western block country that did NOT condemn much less sanction Russia.

In fact despite how much shade and smoke the Grayzoners Max and Aaron have for Israel-shade and smoke you might have noticed I don’t exactly disagree with them about my quibble is somehow they miss that Putin’s Russia is the same guy-they actually had the Israel Prime Minster on to vouch for Vlad-he was all for peace, Putin is the “peace candidate” I tell you the fact that he invaded Ukraine and is committing horrific war crimes is a detail NATO made him do it NATO!

It wasn’t Netanyahu of course it was yair Lapid who was Bibi’s sub for a minute, or more precisely, six months. But you have to admit this was rather striking-as much bad blood there is between Israel and the Grayzone both decided to team up to vouch for that moral exemplar, the peacenik Vladimir Putin. He was provoked I tell you he was provoked. We saw above how some Russian trolls that hang out on Mate’s timeline all day explained to me that Putin was provoked because a few US Senators visited Ukraine in 2017-this after Victoria Nuland reportedly giving someone cookies in 2014 it was too much-no jury of his genocidal dictator peers would convict him-least of all Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald J Trump.

(140) BoJo admits Ukraine broke peace deal – YouTube

But it’s in the Geneva Conventions-if US Senators visit Ukraine and Nuland gives someone cookies then it’s OK to you know, bomb schools and hospitals

For a long time this was the Russia agent Grayzone cum Tankie narrative-that it was that bad ole Boris Johnson that prevented a ceasefire-Putin in complete good faith was ready for a deal in April 2022 but Boris Johnson locked Zelensky in a closet somewhere and wouldn’t allow him to sign.

Meanwhile Blumenthal-Mate did everything they could to re-elect Trump by grooming their leftist audience that Trump was the peace candidate-ok so he tried to overturn the 2020 election-I mean nobody’s perfect but the shitlibs are just doing “project fear” what’s the big deal? Hey Trump may be a fascist but then again the Democrats are-you know, social fascists so you know “Tomato, tomahto.”

Since the election Trump has alternated between glazing Putin outrageously and pontificating if just maybe Putin is “keeping me tapping around.”

Blumenthal for his part has been naively whining-and he’s many things but naive aint one of them-that Trump has gotten of the Russia First reservation by his superficially pro Ukraine comments where he seemed to be “open” to Ukraine striking inside Russia-after opposing it all along and even cutting off aid and intelligence assistance to Ukraine multiple times.

But this was obviously performative as we saw in the link above Lev Remembers noted presciently that when Trump talks Putin escalates his attacks against Ukraine.

A version of this happened this week when Hegseth seemed to be vowing to NATO members that more US firepower was coming for Ukraine.

‘Firepower’ coming for Ukraine, Hegseth tells NATO

Then in yesterday’s oval office meeting with Zelensky Trump fretted that he can’t send them Tomahawk missiles as “we need them.”

April Fools! Guys win again-to quote the not so great Nick Fuentes. Dylan Burns is headline is pretty apropos

UPDATE: Hegseth who at least three different times had shutoff US intelligence help for Ukraine-supposedly without Trump’s knowledge oopsie!-showed up at the Trump-Zelensky summit wearing a Russia flag tie. But sure Russiagate is a hoax that thing about Trump and Russia is a  made up story.

Pete Hegseth’s Russian flag tie at Trump-Zelensky summit causes stir

(153) Trump Zelensky Meeting Derailed by Putin Phone Call – YouTube

CODA: I mean the “Secretary of War” wears a Russian flag-imagine what Blumenthal and Friends would say if it were an Israeli flag-and they’d be right. But sure Russiagate was a hoax, a hoax I tell you.

Zelensky meeting derailed by Putin phone call. Because Trump-Zelensky were supposed to meet Friday-that is yesterday. But on Thursday which just happened to be the day before Putin and Trump have a two and a half hour call. The asymmetry is the point-Putin speaking to Trump by phone-privately-the day before Trump’s public meeting with Zelensky was a classic power move. The very fact that Zelensky’s meeting with Trump was for public consumption underscores his less powerful position in Trump’s graces.

I’ve argued all along that Trump’s preferred model for Russia-Ukraine “peace” was DOHA. Indeed, DOHA underscores yet again our Orwellian Era, an Era of Epistemological Gaslighting of Epistemological Obfuscation of Epistemological Collapse-where Biden’s numbers collapsed and never recovered after the Afghanistan withdrawal because of the chaos but it was Trump’s withdrawal plan Biden implemented-if Biden deserved criticism for anything it was arguably he should not have implemented Trump’s DOHA plan as it was a blatant giveaway to the Taliban. But the DOHA model where Trump negotiated only with the Taliban while the provisional government was sidelined was the same mental model Trump brought to Russia-Ukraine or for that matter Israel-Gaza.

Dylan, speaking of Little Marco’s planned meeting with Lavrov next week seems to hit it out of the park in terms of predicting where these talks will go:

“I hate to be the one to the one to spoil this but the way I think this is going to go is that Lavrov and Marco Rubio will meet. They will talk about Russia will talk about its demands. We will say that the root causes of the conflict must be addressed. They will say the root causes of the conflict are things like NATO expansion or things like Ukrainian nationalism or things like the unrecognition of the annexation of Crimea, the annexation of Daetsk, the annation of Luhansk, the annation of Zaparisia and the annexation of Hersan.

They’ll say another barrier to peace is the annexation of the rest of the Daesk region. Not only Prosk, if they take that in the next three months, which is seems to be what they’re aiming towards is taking in the immediate future to give them an edge. but also Constantine, Osco, also Slovian, and of course, Promatorsk.

They’re not going to back off on the constitutional demands of the territory that they hold. And I don’t think they’re even going to back off the territory that their constitution says that they control, which they don’t control, including the only regional capital that they captured, which they were thrown out of, which was the capital of Heran, where they’re doing the human safari.

They will reiterate their maximalist demands. They will talk about further negotiations this time including in this new framework Ukrainian officials and we’ll and they’ll try to see if they can continue the dialogue without again taking any physical action that would actually indicate a halt to violence or at least a deescalation of violence. I.e., Hey, we’re going to stop long range strikes, but we’re not going to stop frontline action. Hey, we’re going to stop attacks on Ukrainian electricity, but we’re going to do X. I mean, they agreed to an energy ceasefire at the start of Trump’s term.”

“What the [ __ ] happened to that? They also agreed to a civilian ceasefire. Well, Trump said they did. The Russians never even publicly commented on it.”

Starting at 26:22

I mean far from Trump ending the war “on day one” Putin has escalated since Trump was (re)sworn in.

I mean this entire Russia-Ukraine narrative reminds you of nothing so much as the entire Israel-Gaza narrative.

Witkoff, Kushner felt betrayed by Israel’s Qatar strike

Gee I feel so sorry for Kushner and Witkoff-though Kushner will have his $2 billion in Saudi money to keep him warm meanwhile Witkoff is the same hack running the alleged Russia-Ukraine peace process. Blumenthal of course recognizes the blatant canard this whole thing is when Netanyahu plays this same song, goes through this same shuffle-where even when he pretends to agree to a deal he just keeps bombing yet somehow with Putin Blumenthal takes it completely credulously. How is that possible? Well we’ll delve more into this below but as Upton Sinclair said it’s very tough to get a man to understand something he’s paid very well not to understand.

Excellent summation of Trump’s “brilliant negotiating strategy”

Vatnik Soup on X: “Trump 2 days ago: Putin just doesn’t want to end the war Trump 30 minutes ago: I think Putin wants to end the war” / X

Section: Again Netanyahu Doesn’t “Fear Multipolarity” Either.

We made this point in the prologue regarding Hasan who always talks about how much he doesn’t fear multipolarity. But neither does Netanyahu. This is what the Tankies at Blumenthal’s Grayzone miss. Blumenthal and Bibi agree on more than he’d like to assume. Israel’s repeated actions make it clear as a bell-Israel is not a fan of US hegemony either. It’s for US power-ideally illegitimate US power which is what has happened to US power under Trump.

CODA: Ironically much of the Oligarchy certainly among the Silicon Valley Bros have turned against US hegemony.

The Plot Against America – by Mike Brock

Section: Judge US Hegemony by the Alternative not by the Almighty

As Tim Miller put it if you don’t like US hegemony wait until you see the alternative.

FN: Find link

What ironically seems to put the Tankie extraordinaires on the same side of Bibi AND the crypto cum techno fascists is they all for their own perverse reasons desire “multipolarity”  In fact it was Blumenthal’s “Maga Communist” cum Nazbol buddy Jackson Hinkle who got this point right way back in 2022 when he declared that Putin AND Netanyahu were part of the “multipolarity.”

“um you know who else has a good working relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu Vladimir Putin has a very good working relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu I’m actually happier that for the sake of you know the multi-polar world order that he is in power right now compared to the previous Coalition in Israel Xi Jinping of the Communist Party of China has a good working relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu better than the previous coalition.”

“Benjamin Netanyahu is good for the multipolar world” -Jackson Hinkle

CODA: According to Hinkle it’s thanks to Vladimir Putin that the world is becoming multipolar. But Hinkle is being modest here-as we will look at in more detail below, Hinkle with his BFF Blumenthal and Friends have been Putin’s loyal, vigilant foot soldiers in what has been first and foremost an epistemological war against the forces of liberalism on behalf of the forces of autocracy and fascism.

American journalist: thanks to Putin, the world has changed

This caused a good deal of surprise when it emerged a year later after October 7 but it makes sense from his Nazbol-that is to say leftist fellow traveler of the Far Right position. Bibi is all for a “multipolar world”-the current status quo being exactly that. Like what we currently have now with Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity years IS multipolarity. Paradoxically Bibi’s Israel is NOT a fan of US hegemony as typified by the post World War II US led rules based order. The US led rules base order created primarily by liberal Democrats I should add. The brainchild primarily of two men-Woodrow Wilson and then FDR-the League of Nations were essentially the precursor to the UN which was the codified between FDR and Churchill.

Roosevelt, Churchill And The Creation Of The United Nations – The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation

Bibi is all for US power to be sure it’s just US hegemony he could do without-and under Trump 2.0 he is mostly doing without it. Like he’s all for the US aid and weapons just could do without international law and multilateral institutions.

Section: Think of US Hegemony Like Neoliberalism

The Marxist writer Daphne Lawless-personally I’m no Marxist I’m a reformist liberal but her work is very interesting-discusses the sense in which there are two sides to neoliberalism-you might call it a progressive and reactionary side. Many on the Left always found some of Trump’s rhetoric attractive which in many ways sounded both anti neoliberal AND opposed to US hegemony-certainly many liked his virulent opposition to NATO and trade deals. Ultimately though what Trumpism has amounted to is the destruction of the progressive sides of neoliberalism and the good aspects of US hegemony.

FN: Links to Daphney Lawless’ work

Section: From Keeping the World Safe for Democracy to Keeping it Safe for Autocracy

Again Hinkle was right-as that Politico piece we quoted above confirms-Israel does much prefer to deal with authoritarian dictators like Putin, Xi, and MBS. Again as I’d argued above I never for one moment bought the idea that MBS wanted to do normalization with Israel with Biden particularly-as he pretended to Thomas Friedman. Not surprising that Hinkle celebrated Bibi’s return to office over the relatively liberal precursor-liberal on a rather generous curve as if there are any liberals left in Israel-as Hinkle too clearly prefers dictators to democratically elected leaders no less than Trump does-which is probably why he calls himself a “MAGA Communist.”

Hinkle is also correct about the real very special relationship: between Netanyahu and Putin. 

Indeed this fascinating phenomenon started becoming noticeable back in: when else 2015, which just happened to be the start of the US Presidential election…

So much so that Fareed Zakaria asked Netanyahu about it directly when he interviewed him after the Ukraine-Proxy War Russia invaded Ukraine: did he regret his cozy ties with Putin in light of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine to which Bibi answered a fairly emphatic “no.” He talks about how it was the right thing for Israel as they were able to deconflict their bombing of Syria with Russia’s bombing of Syria.

(140) Hear Netanyahu’s answer when asked if he regrets Putin relationship – YouTube

This in contradiction of yet another Grayzone narrative-that the fall of Assad was a US orchestrated “regime change” along the lines of Iraq completely erasing the role of the brave and courageous Syrian people-who Blumenthal and Hinkle et al slander as “Al Qaeda” just as they slander the Ukrainians as “The Azlov Battilion.”

Ironically for these Tankies the Azlov Battilion is their version of “Do you condemn Hamas?”

But years prior the Middle East Eye remarked on the budding romance between the two authoritarian dictators-contrary to Dershowitz’s insistence we have to support Israel in the Middle East because their the only democracy in the region, Bibi has been in power roughly the same amount of time Putin has-since the late 1990s.

The new friendship is raising alarm bells in Washington, but so far no one has managed to work out the price Israel will pay to Russia

The strange love affair of Putin and Netanyahu | Middle East Eye

Indeed this article’s subtitle nevertheless clearly harbored a false premise-that Bibi was basically a liberal leader aligned with the Western bloc.

his week witnessed one of the more bizarre and unexplained events in the recent annals of Israel’s foreign and security policy. Around the highly fortified underground nuclear enrichment plant at Fordow, Iran deployed its Russian made S-300 advanced air defence systems. The USA expressed its “concern,” but Israel remained silent. The local media reported it, but Israel’s leaders said nothing. That stands in sharp contrast to the vociferous, almost hysterical calls, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against any small move of a military nature by Iran.

In the past decade, Israel fought tooth and nail against the sale of these systems to Iran, using all its levers to prevent it. Israel sent its emissaries to Moscow, offered to reciprocate by selling technology to build drones, and used its AIPAC lobbyists and its influence to rally US support. It presented the deal as an “existential” threat to its security. But now nothing; just disturbing silence.

It seems that Israeli muteness has less to do with Iran, which is considered its number one enemy and remains high on its intelligence agenda, and more to do with Russia. In the past year, Israel and Russia, or to be more precise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin, have been on a flirtatious course that has puzzled Israeli and Middle Eastern pundits and raised alarm bells in Washington.”

I mean they’re so right for each other-Russia is probably the best friend of Likudnik Israel since Apartheid South Africa. you suspect the two authoritarian leaders understand each other very well.

Since August 2015, Netanyahu has travelled to Moscow four times for meetings with Putin, more than he has had with any other world leader. Just for comparison, during that period Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama just once, in November 2015. And do not be mistaken – the US is still considered Israel’s best strategic ally and its guardian angel, with an annual average financial infusion of $3.5 billion.”

In fact here it was the MidEastEye author who was mistaken-we’re Israel’s best mark but Putin’s Russia is it’s true ally. Fascists prefer other fascists.

In one of the meetings, Putin showed his gratitude in an unusual gesture. He went with the Israeli prime minister and his over-influential wife Sarah to a ballet performance at the Bolshoi Theatre.

Between meetings, Netanyahu has called Putin over the phone at least 10 times to brief, consult and exchange estimates. Probably there were more phone conversations than the Prime Minister Office has announced for the public record. The most recent phone conversation between the two was at the end of August.

It is hard to understand and explain this unusual, wonderful friendship.”

A wonderful friendship. Makes you think of Trump’s recently revealed birthday letter to Epstein: and may everyday be another wonderful secret. But again I don’t find it so hard to understand. As to what they discussed in the at least four meetings and 10 private phone calls…

The analogy that comes to mind here is when Trump in the last week before the election let slip that he and Bibi were talking on the phone nearly every day. What did they have to say to each other talking nearly every day? The question answered itself-obviously Gaza came up a lot. What came up in their many trysts during 2015-2016? One subject I’d bet almost anything on is their mutual interest in securing Trump’s victory in the upcoming US election.

They were likely coordinating their mutual plan to interfere and subvert the election to Trump’s benefit. An ABC NEWS article asked the provocative question wether Trump is more aligned with Iran or Netanyahu?

(140) Is Vladimir Putin more aligned with Iran or Netanyahu? | ABC NEWS – YouTube

Only superficially is the answer obvious. Indeed take this little anecdote from this ABC news clip-of Bibi going to Putin for support during elections:

One way to conceive of what Iran is for Russia is what the United States is for Israel-not a perfect analogy for sure as Israel depends on the US existentially in a way that Russia doesn’t depend on Iran. Still Iran is an important nominal ally of Russia’s. Indeed we’ve seen how Israel has never actually given a damn about US interests-Shamir was explicitly anti American, he hated us-while gobbling up our military and financial support. Seems to me Russia is probably as concerned about Iranian interests as Israel has been about US ones. If say Putin has to turn a blind eye to say Israel and Trump invading Iran that might seem to him a small price to pay for the cover Israel-and Trump-have given him in Ukraine.

Basically there were some issues with US hegemony-we often violated our own stated principles. Trouble is the multipolarity of Trump-Bibi-Putin-MBS is worse than what is replaces. Or rather all the worse parts of US hegemony are kept while the good parts-like USAID-are destroyed. Trump-Hegseth have done the same thing on neoliberalism. Clearly what “woke” means based on the way Hegseth has run the DOD “Department of War” so far is basic civil rights. Now that Trump has “ended Wokeness” it seems to mean it’s ok to fire people because they’re Black, a woman, or gay, trans, etc.

The multilateral institutions have been destroyed with Trump threatening both trade wars and in some cases military war against our own NATO allies. But OTOH the world has been made safe for imperialism of the sort we’d assumed was done after the fall of Hitler.

What so-called Trumpian multipolarity amounts to is the return to the 19th century big powers world where Russia has a free hand to invade Eastern European countries-for starters-the China presumably has a free hand perhaps to annex Taiwan and the US is free to do what it wants in the Americas. AND we should add Israel is free to complete it’s ethnic cleansing campaign in its zeal for Greater Israel.

Again maybe you didn’t like Wilsonian cum FDR style US hegemony: keeping the world safe for democracy. But wait till you see what’s replacing it-Trumpian cum Bibi  cum MBS cum Putinesque multipolarity: keeping the world safe for autocracy

Section: Blumenthal’s Orwellian Definition of “Antiwar” and “ProWar”

In Blumenthal’s narrative “prowar” seems to mean anyone who doesn’t side with Russia while “anti war” means anyone who sides with Russia-like both Trump and JD Vance do. Both have them have repeated the same Putinist lie Bllumenthal-Mate and their fellow Tankie friends have been telling for years-that Putin attacked because of NATA expansion. Again I guess that’s also in the Geneva Convention-you can commit the most despicable war crimes if its to prevent your victims from joining a geopolitical alliance you don’t approve of.

There are a few inconvenient facts however that kind of cut against this rather sharply. One is the apparently trivial fact that Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO on the eve of Russia’s unprovoked invasion on February 22, 2022. Indeed even after the fact, even in 2024, Biden was still pretty lukewarm and noncommittal about the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. Although ironically Putin’s aggression actually led Sweden and Finland to join NATO-countries which were even neutral in WWII.

This while Blumenthal and his “realist” buddy Mearsheimer ridiculed the idea that Putin wanted to annex land beyond Ukraine-of course the had also dismissed out of hand that Putin would invade Russia in the first place-Mearsheimer has the impressive record of being wrong every step of the way.

Then there was Putin’s 5000 word boondoggle before the invasion the short summation of which was “Ukraine is part of Russia.”

This was the same history lesson Putin gave Tucker “Oh My God it’s a Supermarket” Carlson in their  “interview”-more like a hagiography. As we’ll see below Blumenthal has done similarly embarrassing infomercials for foreign dictators so long as they weren’t on good speaking terms with the US State Department.

CODA: In Dylan Burn’s video linked to above he references that Putin apparently gave Trump the same “history lesson” in their two and a half hour boondoggle.

For an example of Blumenthal’s Orwellian definitions-peace is war, freedom is slavery, etc see his latest hitpiece:

Pekka-philia: disgraced porn profiteer turned pro-Ukraine ‘disinfo expert’ could face legal action

I don’t know specifically what Pekka Kallioniem did that warrants legal action much less who’s going to bring it against him. But it seems that Blumenthal and his author for this yellow journalism hitpiece Kit Klarenberg hopefully can prove these slanderous allegations or they could be the ones to face legal action-ie prove they’re NOT slander.

While their quarrel with Kallioniem-who I was not familiar with prior to their hitpiece-is that he calls out Russian disinformation the lurid headlines here center the idea that Pekka’s a pedophile-a classic Putinesque tactic if there ever was one.

I mean what exactly does it mean to “peddle sexual representations of minors?” They also claim to have evidence he jerked off looking at a picture of graves at a Nazi memorial. Which is weird as some of Blumenthal’s best friends are Nazis and or sexual perverts from Caleb Maupin the “MAGA Communist” extraodinaire who ripped off and groomed a bunch of college aged kids into joining his cult where the then tried to get them to engage in sexual favors-including, yes, spanking.

Then you have-Blumenthal’s mentor?-Jimmy “Nice workskirt” Dore. Even if Kallioniem were a pervert-which I don’t know anything about what substantive point does it prove? Clearly Blumenthal doesn’t have any principle objection to sexual predators or Nazis judging by who his friends are. The only substantive claim in the missive screenshotted above was “pro-war character assassin.”

What makes him “Pro war?” Basically this is how these Tankies “reason” or “logically” infer. If you criticize Putin’s aggressive, genocidal war in Ukraine this means you’re  the “war monger”-not Putin who’s engaging in a defensive slaughter of Ukranian schools and hospitals to defend Russia from Victoria Nuland’s cookies.

Speaking of this Orwellian lexicon of “war” and “peace” let’s take a deeper dive into this hitpiece:

In October 2024, mainstream Canadian defense journalist David Pugliese suffered “the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” according to a local publication called The Walrus. Citing alleged KGB documents, a prominent lawmaker accused Pugliese of being a longstanding Soviet/Russian spy during a parliamentary hearing on “disinformation.” Those files turned out to be blatant forgeries, but parliamentary privilege insulated the accuser from a defamation suit.

However, the same protections do not apply to a self-proclaimed “disinformation expert” named Pekka Kallioniemi, who simultaneously promoted the fraudulent material.

With the eruption of the Ukraine proxy war in 2022, Kallioniemi abruptly emerged as a leading authority on “Russian disinformation”, best known for lengthy Twitter/X threads smearing prominent Western critics of the war as Russian assets, sexual deviants and worse. Rather than factually rebutting the assertions and positions of his opponents, Kallioniemi specializes in character assassination, disseminating supposedly embarrassing personal details of targets in order to invalidate their opinions.

A look at Kallioniemi’s personal history before his stint as a disinfo researcher reveals his personal attacks to be exercises in projection. The Finnish academic poseur turns out to have been a small-time, sexually obsessed internet hustler who peddled pornographic representations of minors while boasting on online chat forums of his most depraved hijinks, including masturbating at a memorial to a WWII-era concentration camp near Berlin.

Right away note the slander against the Ukranian people-“The Ukraine proxy war” where somehow the aggressors are entirely edited out of the narrative. This phrase shows that for these Tankies-we saw how Hasan Piker did the same thing after the invasion he insisted would ever focusing not what this did to the Ukranian people but what it meant in “the proxy war” these Tankie cum Nazbols invent in their own mind where lives of Ukranians don’t matter-a similar thing happened regarding the Syrian people who to this day Blumenthal slanders as all  being “Al Qaeda”-or as he likes to do regarding Ukrainians-accuse them of all being Nazis.

Let’s be clear this favorite tactic of Blumenthal-Klarenberg-Mate-Hinkle and Friends is epistemological violence and itself a kind of ethnic cleansing like Aaron Mate’s friend we looked at above who calls the Ukrainians “Zionist Ukranian Russians.”

It shows both their own bad faith in sharp relief.

As for this poor unsuspecting “mainstream Canadian defense journalist David Pugliese”  who “suffered “the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” Klarenberg conveniently leave out of the account the fact of Pugliese’s close association with the Grayzone. Pretty important omission.

Kallioniemi’s latest target, Pugliese, is a seasoned reporter who has exposed Canadian government and military corruption over the course of his 40 year career. His muckraking has angered powerful forces in his country, including the member of parliament who libeled him, Chris Alexander. Furnishing what he claimed were photocopies of documents taken from “pre-1991 archives of the Ukrainian KGB,” Alexander insisted the files proved Pugliese had worked for Moscow for decades. Alexander said the material was in the hands of Ottawa’s “national security officials,” and had been authenticated by “several of the world’s leading experts on KGB documents.”

The following month, Kallioniemi published the fraudulent files. While using careful phraseology to avoid directly accusing Pugliese of being a “spy for the Soviet Union then later Russia,” Kallioniemi clearly implied this was the case. He not only reiterated Alexander’s assertion the documents “were proven to be authentic by experts,” but also declared:

“A leading expert on KGB operations stated that the documents confirm Pugliese was recruited by 1984, meaning that he was accepting conspiratorial methods of work and taskings directly from Moscow, and by 1990 he was also receiving money.”

In July this year, a researcher demonstrated through a detailed academic paper that the documents were crude forgeries. The findings were supported by Ukrainian archivists themselves, who were unable to verify the material or find duplicates in their own records. The paper further concluded Pugliese was “subject to a coordinated character assassination campaign.” In the intervening time, he and his family have been threatened, forcing him to increase security around his home. Pugliese has also been added to Myrotvorets, an SBU-linked hitlist of Kiev’s enemies.”

I wonder if this researcher was the same one who slandered the Syrian people whose loved ones were the victims of Assad’s chemical attack in Douma. In any case let me state at the outset that I’m not an expert on what an authentic vs forged document from the former Soviet Union is. But I will note that the best I can tell Kallioniemi was at least responsible in his Twitter thread.

Vatnik Soup on X: “To be fair, all this happened a long time ago and it’s almost impossible to say whether David was indeed recruited by the KGB, but as a reporter at a Canadian newspaper with a relatively small circulation, David really seems to like writing about the “Ukrainian Nazis”. 9/21 https://t.co/2RlDAxKs5P” / X

I mean I don’t have enough information to opine about the KGB but clearly Pugliese was far from an innocent bystander who was just out walking his dog and someone accused him of being a Russian spy he clearly engaged in the same slanderous slurs against the Ukranian people that Kit Klarenberg, Blumenthal, Hinkle et al do and these folks clearly have some sort of, uh, relationship to Putin however exactly you’d like to frame it. Again we’ll get into that. But Pugliese for whatever reason was at the minimum another useful idiot of Russia-Blumenthal has no problem spotting useful idiots of Israel-who had some clear ties to The Grayzone.

Meanwhile I see that Musk-who has a close relationship with both Bibi and Putin-is up to his usual tricks as I survey Kallioniemi’s thread I keep seeing this message:

But according to the Russian Grayzone narrative being “anti war” means being pro Russian it means objectively adavocating for Putin’s interests and dismissing this snidely as “the Ukraine proxy war.”

As if Ukraine or maybe Joe Biden or NATO invaded Russia.

Section: The War Against Trumpian Reactionary Plutocracy aka Fascism if First and Foremost an Epistemological War

So I guess Blumenthal considers his buddy Jackson Hinkle-who seemed very eager to spilt up Max from his old partner Ben Norton as we saw above-to be “ani war” even though he praises the imperialistic Russia as “God’s country”-and the reason he gives for this is Putin’s virulently homophobic and anti trans policies.

I guess Norm Finklestein is also “anti war” though he claimed that Putin was RIGHT to invade Ukraine.

CODA: Based on the premise that the Russia lost 27 million Russians in the battle of Stalingrad so if Putin says Ukraine is infiltrated by Nazis we just have to take his word for it. Like the preferred canard of Blumenthal cum Kit Klarenberg and Friends-Mate, Jimmy Dore, Hinkle et al-“The Ukranian Proxy War” Finklestein’s rationalization that about “27 million Russians killed” is not just misleading but a species of ethnic cleansing-it was not 27 million  Russians killed but “Soviets” 11 million of them were Ukrainians-who the bots that hang round Mate’s account call “Zionist Ukranian Russians” who were part of the USSR against their will.

Indeed Hinkle went even further recently declaring that he’d “take Zelensky  out”-yet apparently  he remains a member in good standing with Blumenthal’s “anti war” bloc.

FN: Get video link

Section: If America Were a Democracy Israel Would be in a Lot of Trouble

We spoke in considerable detail above of the fascinating schism that Charlie Kirk’s assassination has revealed that honestly as a #shitlib like myself who voted for Hillary Clinton three times, Harris was my first candidate in 2020, Warren was my second choice I voted Biden in the general and Harris 2024 and have never voted for Bernie-though if I lived in NyC I WOULD vote for Mamdani I knew nothing about.

While I have a a lot of issues with Blumenthal’s Tankie cum Grayzone boondoggle which I think has done a lot of damage-in terms of opening up a glid path for the last 10 years being the #TrumpEra ie a fascist era by grooming leftists away from positive progressive action into this political and moral nihilism cum doomerism-I have to admit as I did above that his recent reporting has opened up a fascinating window into this divide in MAGA I never realized was this deep.

Clearly one true achievement of his #Left-RightAlliance which I mostly despise is he’s managed to amass over time some serious primo insight and sources into TrumpWorld including inside the Trump #RussiaHouse. Above I’d admitted I was really curious what sources he spoke to who revealed just how deeply cucked Trump is by Israel. But then I realized-Blumenthal is quite chummy with no less than Matt Gaetz-who was Trump’s preferred choice for AG though he would have to back down on it-in retrospect Gaetz would be the one nominee Trump would feel constrained to back down on. He was able to ram through everyone else-even Tulis Gabbard, even RFK Jr-GOP Senator Cassidy is a medical doctor who knows perfectly well what a terrible danger having RFK Jr run the HHS but he voted for him anyway in the end-due to Trump’s  threats apparently.

But Gaetz is the one nominee Trump couldn’t bully through. Why is that? Can think of a few reasons.

1. Because Israel wouldn’t allow it-seeing as at least since his nomination imploded, Gaetz has been on a bit of an anti Israel anti AIPAC tear.

2. He really is terrible. you have all the sex scandal allegations against him and apparently from what you hear he truly was one of the most obnoxious people in the US House-and there’s stiff competition.

(161) Rep. Kevin McCarthy Explains ‘Truth’ About Why He’s Not House Speaker – YouTube

One thing that’s clear is his colleagues really don’t like him and while no one is more cynical about “bipartisanship” than me this seems to be the one point for which there’s almost universal agreement.

As for 1-one point of skepticism on all his revelations about AIPAC is he’s only telling us about this now that he’s out of Congress. Again he was almost Trump’s DOJ. So let’s do this thought experiment: if he had made it do you believe that Trump’s Israel First foreign policy-Israel First in the Middle East, Russia First in Europe-would be any less Israel First? I’m pretty skeptical about that. For comparison compare what a big game Kash Patel talked about Epstein before he became FBI Director compared to what he says now-there is no client list and there were no clients just Epstein as a lone sexual predator aka the sexual predator version of the Warren Report.

But however that may be it underscores that Blumenthal has some primo Trump Administration sources. So maybe all those years Blumenthal groomed the Left to despite liberals far more than fascists-the Bernie or Bust cum Tankie Left could never hate Trump anything as much as they hate Hillary Clinton had the payoff of winning over the trust of MAGA-all Blumenthal had to do was put aside any intellectual or moral integrity-like all the absurd lies about Covid vaccines and lockouts et al.

I don’t think it was worth electing Trump twice and seeing the overturning of Roe where now if Charlie Kirk’s 10 year old daughter is raped she has less rights than her rapist-see above.

As for the Israel issue yes there are quite a lot of signs that Israel’s support is in the toilet. This is why Kirk’s warnings to Netanyahu back in May were such a five car alarm fire for Israel-if they lose the MAGA base they truly have nothing-as they can’t afford to lose US support no matter what.

Indeed there are more signs like Seth Molton announcing he’s sending back all AIPAC donations. This certainly suggests this issue is taking on some serious resonance. I hope it continues. However there’s the rub: are we a democracy or not? At this point we are at best a badly damaged one. In my above criticism of Ezra Klein we looked at Taneshi Coates crucial point-that it’s rather absurd for the Democrats to run pro life forced birth candidates when in point of fact abortion referendum measures actually did about 15 points better than the Democrats in a number of red states-notably Florida and Arizona where Harris got about 42% in each state while abortion rights received about 57%.

What’s so frustrating is that abortion rights are actually very popular. As are for that matter is both sensible immigration reform and sensible gun reform. yet the Democrats act as if it’s risky to embrace these issues too fulsomely. Another popular position to Blumenthal’s chagrin is Ukraine where large supermajorities realize that Russia is the aggressor not “the Ukraine Prox War” and want to support our allies.

This is why I argued in the Prologue that what Israel, Russia and the Republican party all have in common is they fear nothing so much as genuine US democracy.

But the larger point here is that-on issue after issue the public will is NOT done. Like 90% of Americans disagree with the idea that a rape victim should be compelled against her will to bear his rapist’s baby for nine months-Charlie Kirk’s position is shared by no more than 10% of the population-and yet this is the law of the land throughout like 30-40% of the country thanks to Dobbs.

So while it’s good news if most Americans now want to finally put some conditions on any aid we send to Israel this only matters if this is actually a democracy and throughout most of my own like-certainly since 1992 the first election I was eligible to vote it has been anything but a democracy.

I discuss much of this in Chapter The Making of a Conspiracy Theorist-how prior to 2024 Democratic Presidential candidates had received 43 million more votes than Republican candidates yet the numbers of years in the WH for the two parties was roughly parity-a similar story is told in the US Senate.

But going by issues as we are discussing here you see much of the same dynamic-while voters prefer the Democratic party position on most issues we have mostly gotten the GOP position in practice-a major factor in this to be sure is the Supreme Court where the GOP has indeed “legislated from the bench”-everything with the not so grand Ole Party is projection. They always attack the Democrats of doing things they themselves have done, are doing, or intend to do. It’s like the philandering husband who’s always accusing his wife of cheating.

So yes public opinion is a real problem but it’s a problem only to the extent that are democracy starts functioning again-a major if as it hasn’t done so in years, indeed it’s only gotten worse certainly in the 33 years I’ve been eligible to vote. So it’s great that public opinion is turning against Israel. But if we aren’t a functioning democracy it doesn’t matter and we haven’t been for many years.

Section: The War Against Trumpian Reactionary Oligarchy aka Fascism if First and Foremost an Epistemological War:

However note that Blumenthal snidely dismisses the fact of Russian disinformation when he rightly talks so much about Israeli disinformation.

Drop Site on X: “⚡️Breaking: CNN’s Van Jones is among 16 mainstream journalists—including two New York Times reporters—serving as mentors in a new journalism fellowship explicitly created to help Israel win its “information war.” Drop Site’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports that Jacki Karsh, who https://t.co/zNN6puvQKs” / X

Section: Democracy is Losing and Max Blumenthal has had no Small Hand in it

Israel has had a very large role in it true. However when the subject of Russia comes up Blumenthal and Friends are completely dismissive-the idea that Russia would ever engage in Russian disinformation he somehow finds shocking-or so he would have us believe.  But if democracy is losing

The State of the United States: A Conversation with Jack Smith

Link from G Elliot Morris.

Russia has had no small hand in it either.

Again as Blumenthal’s bestie says thanks to Putin the world has changed it sure has entirely for the worse.

American journalist: thanks to Putin, the world has changed

According to experts the US is no longer a democracy but an illiberal or mixed democracy.

Experts now rate the U.S. as a “mixed” or “illiberal” democracy

To be sure the exact time this became official was in the Robert’s Court’s appalling decision giving Trump Absolute Immunity.

But are Blumenthal and Friends so skeptical about Russia because there’s no evidence of is it the Upton Sinclair phenomenon? Sinclair famously said it’ very hard for a man to understand  something he’s paid very well not to understand.

Section: The Info War: Will There be a Winner?

This big event in the screenshot above was from a meeting in Moscow, 2015. Jill Stein like everyone involved tried to handwave it away as if any Tom, Dick, or Jill could have happened to talk into a restaurant in Moscow and ended up sitting at the same table as Vladimir Putin. As you can see, she was seated at the same table as Putin himself to the left of Peskov-who just happened to be Peskov’s spokesman. The same Peskov who Michael Cohen was exchanging emails during that same cycle-literally at that same time in the attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Meanwhile Michael Flynn was literally at the seat of honor next to Vlad himself.

All a big coincidence? Well like Malcom Nance coincidences take a lot of planning.

Jill Stein for her part seems to have no career other than playing spoiler every four years-but not surprisingly Blumenthal was urging the leftists who watch his channel to vote for her in 2024.

(169) Dr. Jill Stein in conversation with Max Blumenthal | Live Event at Busboys and Poets – YouTube

CODA: It’s amazing how many leftists after the fact express surprise Trump is “this bad”-how is that possible? After what happened his first term in terms of all those covid deaths? How is it possible especially after he attempted to overturn the 2020 election that you could still think he wasn’t that bad-that bad being-what? Hillary Clinton? This is what Blumenthal’s version of doomerism has wrought on the Left-leftists who hate liberals far more than they could ever hate fascists.

FN: Due Dissidence

But anyway, how’s this for “coincidences”-would you believe that Blumenthal was also at this Moscow soiree? First of all though let’s be clear-no one was at this Moscow meetup without Putin’s approval certainly he knew in advance Stein would be there next to Peskov.

But Blumenthal was actually there too if you can believe it, The screenshot above was actually from a thread by: Pekka Kallioniemi.

He documented this:

While there, Max participated in a panel with Charles Bausman, an American blogger and founder of Russian Insider, a notoriously anti-Semitic and pro-Kremlin website. Bausman would eventually participate in the Jan 6 insurrection in DC, after which he defected to Moscow.”

A J6 insurrectionist who tried to help overthrow the 2020 election who fled to Russia-is it unfair to call Bausman a Russia hack? For a guy like Blumenthal allegedly NOT a Russian hack he sure does hang out with a long of Russian hacks including his best friend who says “I’d take Zelensky out”-a total pacifist.

‘I Would Take Zelenskyy Out’: Jackson Hinkle Clashes With Ukrainian MP | Counterpoints – YouTube

Section: Blumenthal’s Road to Damascus Moment?

Pulse back in 2017 framed it well:

The Damascene Conversion

In December 2015, Blumenthal visited Moscow to attend the 10th anniversary of Kremlin propaganda network RT. He returned a changed man. A month later he founded the “Grayzone Project”, billed as an initiative for “confronting Islamophobia”, but in reality a home for Assad and Kremlin-friendly outcasts from leftwing blogosphere (Grayzone’s few Muslim writers quickly departed after they realised its true character).

The emergence of this axis presents a case study in the ideological realignments that are being instrumentalized by the Kremlin with fellow travellers on both the left and the far right. Its mercenary character is betrayed by its sloppy methods.

Notably Trump had his own big Moscow Trip as documented by Craig Unger in 1987. Within a month he took at that famous ad in the NYTimes where he announced his first run for President. His top issue? Ending the Marshall Plan. I mean it could be worse he could have chosen for his issue something completely convenient to Moscow-oh wait.

Blumenthal too upon returning started a new political project as Pulse discusses-The Grayzone.

Section: But What Exactly is a Gray Zone?

According to the Atlantic Council “today’s wars are fought in the gray zone.”

Whether it’s the Kremlin’s “little green men” suddenly seizing Crimea, China’s coercive use of economics through its Belt and Road Initiative, or—as we’re currently watching in real time—Russian state propaganda aggressively rallying its population for war, US adversaries are increasingly pursuing their national objectives in a little-understood arena: the so-called “gray zone” between peace and open conflict.

Seemingly a relic of the Cold War-era international order, conventional military campaigns have given way to hybrid warfare involving cyberattacks, information campaigns, and an array of other non-violent pressure. What’s more: The United States and its partners are losing the battle to the world’s far more audacious autocracies.

With Russia poised to fully invade Ukraine in the latest example of the Kremlin’s aggression and coercion threatening the European security order, the stakes for fighting back have never been higher

Today’s wars are fought in the ‘gray zone.’ Here’s everything you need to know about it. – Atlantic Council

So Blumenthal’s naming his website and channel “The Grayzone” is a conscious inside joke.

Once again as we noted above the war against American democracy is first and foremost an epistemological war. And as Blumenthal’s fanatically pro Russian friend Hinkle-calling Russia “God’s country” because of how homophobic it is sounds a little fanatical- friend says “thanks to Putin the world has changed.”

American journalist: thanks to Putin, the world has changed

A little Orwellian flourish even in this title-as how could anyone ever confuse Hinkle for a journalist?

CODA: As opposed to Blumenthal, what has Hinkle ever reported? Has he ever had a single source? Has he ever written anything? Can he in fact write?

This is my point about the contradiction at the heart of Blumenthal’s Grayzone project-on the one hand the one positive progressive agenda he still seems to actually care about is the Palestinian cause. But as we discussed above while the US public is turning on Israel it won’t matter if America is not a democracy and he’s done his part to make sure America is never a democracy. First and foremost by doing everything he could do to split the progressive base which is larger than the reactionary base which is why the only way the GOP can win is if they can split the progressive base.

Roger Stone has always been a master of this-“voter fragmentation” as documented by italkyoubored.

“I don’t think Stone ever says what policy he is for in this memoir, and he might well consider a focus on policy a distraction. There is only winning and losing an election, and five methods for achieving a victory recur again and again in races that Stone is involved with, four methods that create a mirror maze of confusion, misdirection, and elimination. The first is through association, by having a candidate receive an endorsement from a person or group who potential supporters of the candidate are predisposed to view as an opponent, or through association with something unquestionably malevolent made via protesters, pamphlets, or other means funded by Stone’s campaign but without any fingerprints. The second is by having a group, funded by allied interests, oppose a candidate or policy due to some larger moral principle that everyone can agree on – the issue is not candidate A versus B, but opposition to crime, gambling, or child abuse. The third is the smear, saying your opponent is corrupt, weak, racist, a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, always helpfully done not through you, the opponent on which this tar might stick, but through a phantom proxy. This last is used very, very often by Stone. The fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory. At the same time, you make great efforts to keep the votes for your own candidate or issue from being fragmented. The fifth is vote suppression, of black and latino voters, who tend to poll democrat. The first four have been employed in elections that Stone has been involved in, with Stone often taking credit. The fifth has been employed alongside Stone’s efforts, though perhaps without the collusion of Stone.”

Roger Stone: Pretty Reckless Is Going Straight To Hell Part One | italkyoubored

We saw the classic incantation of the fourth method in 2016 where Hillar was for a $12 MW, Bernie was for $15 and Trump was literally opposed-ie exactly like in the example above is Trump’s view-and the entire GOP view. And lo and behold the Bernie or Busters heaped scorn on Clinton-who actuall agreed to $15 in her negotiations with Bernie at the convention-but all the Bros insisted that Hillar can’tr be trusted-Trump the could trust. And so it is that the national MW remains $7.25 which it’s been stuck on since 2008. Well plaed

Section: Blumenthal’s USAID Derangement Syndrome

Apparently his Blue Helmets Derangement Syndrome was begot by his USAID Derangement Syndrome.

The fact that the White Helmets were calling on the international community to impose a no-fly zone to end the bombings by the Syrian and Russian air forces was Blumenthal’s proof that the group was participating in a western regime-change conspiracy. (Never mind military action to stop the regime’s bombings is in line with the wishes of many refugees fleeing Syria, as Blumenthal had himself discovered in his tour of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.)

The group’s filming of the atrocious aftermath of airstrikes on civilians had caused the Kremlin much embarrassment. But the bombs no longer concerned Blumenthal. He was more exercised by the fact that part of the group’s operational costs had been covered by USAID, an agency of the U.S. government. For good measure, he also accused the rescue workers of having al-Qaeda links, despite there being no credible evidence for this.

This is what I meant above about the idea of positive and negative aspects of US hegemony-US AID is one of the good aspects. But evidently Blumenthal would rather children die than be treated by medicine part of the cost of which is traceable to USAID. So he must love Trump and Elon Musk then as after Musk’s draconian-and wholly illegal-destruction of USAID over a couple of days many millions of people across the globe will suffer thanks to Trump reneging in the promises America made to them.

The draconian cuts to USAID could result in over 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030—including 4.5 million children under 5—and trigger widespread illness, disrupted health systems, and significant economic losses across low-income countries.

🔥 Forensic Breakdown of USAID Cuts

🩸 Death Toll Estimates

• Over 14 million excess deaths projected by 2030 if cuts continue
• Includes 4.5 million child deaths under age 5, or roughly 700,000 per year
• Driven by halted funding for:
  • HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria programs
  • Maternal and child health services
  • Nutrition, water, sanitation, and emergency relief

🧬 Illness and Disease Spread

• Impact trackers show rising cases of preventable diseases due to program shutdowns
• Disruption of vaccine delivery, prenatal care, and infectious disease monitoring
• Increased vulnerability to outbreaks and long-term health deterioration

💸 Economic Fallout

• Loss of workforce productivity due to illness and premature death
• Collapse of local health infrastructure, forcing reliance on emergency aid
• Ripple effects on education, agriculture, and stability, especially in fragile states

Sources: UCLA Fielding School of Public Health The Lancet – USAID Impact Study Boston University SPH – Impact Tracker

Guess you could say Blumenthal’s kind of an accelerationist.

Section: Fools for Assad: How the Syrian Civil War Became Ground Zero for Putin’s Proxy War Against the Truth

A) Max Blumenthal’s Epistemological Genocide Against the Syrian People

Much like how he completely erases the agency of the Ukrainian people-ergo his snide sneering frame “The Ukraine Proxy War” which erases both Russia’s guilt and also the importance of the people of Ukraine-he speaks of them as if they’re pawns in his “Multipolar” chess game against the US. As has been noted there’s a tendency on the part of the Tankies to erase the people of foreign countries if their authoritarian governments aren’t on good times with the United States. It’s as if the people of Ukraine and Syria don’t have the right to oppose their oppressors as this complicates the narrative of the war these Tankies have with their own domestic governments they consider oppressors. This has been called the imperialism of the Western Left.

CODA: There has been considerable criticism directed at Noam Chomsky by Syrian activists for his own apologetics for Assad. Indeed, his own apologetics haven’t even been as bad as Max “Alex Jones” Blumenthal who has Sandy Hooked many Syrian children suggesting perhaps they too were crisis actors though it was disappointing to say the least to hear that he was writing the forward for Aaron Mate’s lies about the Ukraine war-a book which has been delayed at this point though Mate told me in response to my query at his Substack it will be out in 202.

But there has been a lot of Western imperialism of the left recently-here was a more broad takedown.

How Noam Chomsky Betrayed the Syrian People — Syria Deeply

“Through rallying anti-war movements and opposing any Western intervention (including humanitarian missions), many Western socialist intellectuals have, in fact, turned themselves into foot soldiers for authoritarian and undemocratic regimes.”

Fiercely opposing U.S. foreign policy—but ignoring anti-democratic tendencies in the so-called anti-imperialist regimes—tends to trivialize socialists’ commitment to promoting democracy and, in fact, lends credence to the arguments by those who have questioned socialism’s compatibility with democratic principles. Due to their ingrained obsession and hostility to U.S. foreign policy, many leftist intellectuals have become ardent apologists for authoritarian regimes, which have utilized nationalism and anti-imperialism slogans to smash and suppress democratic forces in their nations, as well as marginalize minority groups. Through rallying anti-war movements and opposing any Western intervention (including humanitarian missions), many Western socialist intellectuals have, in fact, turned themselves into foot soldiers for authoritarian and undemocratic regimes.

I’d highly recommend reading the entire thing if you have the time it’s a searing and incisive takedown of Chomsky and Friends-again Blumenthal and Mate are his friends alas.

The same pattern has come to prevail in the leftist literature on the spread of socio-political uprisings known as the Arab Spring across the Middle East and North Africa. Instead of providing moral support for popular non-violent uprising in Syria, anti-imperialists on the Left relapsed into their old habit of attacking Western power, which, in turn, engendered a golden opportunity for the Syrian regime and its staunch supporters to turn a peaceful movement for democracy into a military confrontation. As Sam Hamad has observed, Chomsky has—on numerous occasions—attempted to conflate Syrian opposition with ISIS and Al Qaeda. Chomsky has also even evaded describing Russian bloody intervention in support of the Syria regime as an imperialistic venture. Several left-leaned journalists and communist organizations have vehemently striven to characterize the Syrian popular uprising as a geopolitical conflict between Western foreign policy and anti-imperialist forces. This strange depiction of the Syrian regime and its allies as anti-imperialist forces has been conducive to whitewashing the staged massacre of Syrians by the Syrian regime and its allies.”

According to Yassin, “it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle…Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate.”

Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and the Left’s False Anti-Imperialist Crusade

Certainly this sums up Blumenthal and his Grayzone friends as well as anything

“Western intellectuals must also reconsider and reassess their anti-imperialist project. Instead of galvanizing political support for the democratic forces in Third World Countries, western socialists’ passionate endeavors to provide intellectual legitimacy for these dictatorial regimes have sadly provided an auspicious atmosphere for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to flourish throughout the region.”

CF: Daphne Lawless’s work for a comprehensive of the ideological fallacy that is Tankism cum Campism-that is not ant imperialist per se just anti American

Against campism: What makes some leftists support Putin? • Buttondown

Similarly the wishes of the Syrian people are simply nonexistent in the framing of Blumenthal and his Bernie or Buster cum Tankie friends:

Where are the Syrians in Max Blumenthal’s Article? An Open Letter from Syrian Activist Marcell Shehwaro

I read Max Blumenthal’s article, which aims to open our eyes to the dangerous hidden reality behind The Syria Campaign. I read it over and over and all I felt was a combination of patronisation and humiliation in detail after detail… Beginning with the focus on who took the photo of Omran and who published it and neglecting the fact that what happened to Omran did actually happen and the boy really was bombed. But of course this detail is marginal… just as marginal as all other Syrian men and women in that piece of writing. All of us are marginal details.

Where are the Syrians in Max Blumenthal’s Article? An Open Letter from Syrian Activist Marcell Shehwaro – P U L S E

Unfortunately for Blumenthal-as well as we saw in the Prologue for leftists like Blumenthal or for that matter Hasan Piker-the Syrian or Ukrainian people are pawns on their own imaginary Tankie chessboard against US imperialism.

B). Ben Norton’s Consciousness of Guilt

While I believe Ben Norton to the extent that his former boss cum Tankie in arms is a pathological liar OTOH Norton is a pretty accomplished liar in his own right. He like Blumenthal did a 180 on Assad’s brutal slaughter on his own people and his deletion of all his previous tweets against the Assadist regime speaks volumes.

Ben Norton followed a similar trajectory. Until he was hired as a blogger at Salon, he had assiduously courted pro-Syrian revolution writers and activists. After joining Salon, however, Norton’s Syria politics underwent a radical transformation. In a kamikaze move, after purging his personal website of criticisms of Assad, Norton collaborated with Glenn Greenwald to co-author a piece for The Intercept taking issue with an article about Kremlin propaganda in the Washington Post. Norton, instead, was fired by Salon. His desultory contrarianism ended when he fell into the safety net of Alternet and his resentments converged on Syria. Norton, like Blumenthal, tried to cast doubt on Russian and regime culpability for the Red Crescent convoy attack and on reports about the regime’s bombing of hospitals in Aleppo. (All claims were false as conclusively shown by a recent UN report.) His name also appears signed to a statement by Vanessa Beeley’s Hands Off Syria Coalition that explicitly supports the Russian bombing of Syria.”

Why did he need to erase all evidence of his older posts? Because his own previous work rebuked what Norton would become-a shameless Assadist cum Putinist shill and hack.

Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage cause Alternet blogger’s Damascene conversion? – P U L S E

C) Max Blumenthal vs Max Blumenthal

When you look at Blumenthal’s metamorphosis it’s kind of astonishing:

 For years — up until his trip to Moscow for RT’s 10th anniversary gala in December 2015 — Max Blumenthal’s Twitter feed was filled with anti-Assad, pro-opposition commentary and expressions of sympathy for the Assad regime’s victims, many of them children:

(All of Blumenthal’s anti-Assad tweets have been collected and archived here in case anyone wants to see or re-tweet them. They are also republished at the end of this post.)

Moreover, Blumenthal resigned from Al-Akhbar newspaper in June 2012 after the paper published an editorial denouncing anyone who combined their opposition to U.S. military intervention with support for the 2011 revolution.”

Again note the article above that specifically called out leftists-the exact word used is “socialists”-which I’m not one of I’m a liberal reformist but…-focusing solely on US imperialism without calling out authoritarianism in foreign countries just because the particular dictator may have an adversarial relationship with the US government.

After Blumenthal’s resignation, he wrote an open letter with the grandiose title, “The Right to Resist Is Universal: A farewell to Al-Akhbar and Assad’s Apologists.” In it, he said the following:

“ [U]nless I was prepared to spend endless stores of energy jousting with Assad apologists, I was merely providing them cover by keeping my name and reputation associated with Al Akhbar. More importantly, I decided that if I kept quiet any longer, I would be betraying my principles and those of the people who have encouraged and inspired me over the years. There is simply no excuse for me to remain involved for another day with such a morally compromised outlet. And so, instead of preparing to throw up in my own mouth each time I click on one of the pro-regime op-eds appearing with regularity on Al Akhbar English’s home page, I am washing my hands of the whole operation.”

“ In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt. By denying the Syrian people the right to revolution while supporting the Palestinian struggle, they are no less hypocritical than the Zionists who cynically celebrate the Syrian uprising while seeking to crush any iteration of Palestinian resistance. In my opinion, the right to resist tyranny is indivisible and universal. It can be denied to no one.”

“ Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Assad apologists have eagerly played the Al Qaeda card to stoke fears of an Islamic takeover of Syria. Back in 2003, Assad accused the US of deliberately overestimating the strength of Al Qaeda in order to justify its so-called war on terror. ‘I cannot believe that bin Laden is the person able to outmanoeuvre the entire world,’ Assad said at the time. He asked, ‘Is there really an entity called Al Qaeda? It was in Afghanistan, but is it there anymore?’ But now, in a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world, Assad insists that the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost entirely by Al Qaeda-like jihadists who have come from abroad to place the country under Islamic control. In his address to the Syrian People’s Assembly on June 3, the dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the term ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorism’ a whopping 43 times. That is a full ten times more than George W. Bush during his speech to Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.”

“In joining the Assad regime’s campaign to delegitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational jihadis (ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hezbollah’s core Islamist values), Assad’s apologists have unwittingly adopted the ‘war on terror’ lexicon introduced by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the neocon cabal after 9–11.”

In September 2013 when interest in the topic of Syria peaked because Assad gassed 1,400 men, women, and children to death in Ghouta, Blumenthal traveled to Zataari refugee camp in Jordan and wrote a report for The Nation about the camp’s deplorable conditions and refugees’ opinions about a U.S. military strike on Assad which at that time seemed imminent. According to Blumenthal, “100%” of the refugees he spoke to wanted U.S. military action to stop Assad’s rein of terror that drove them from their homes. A few months later, he spoke at length to Danny Postel of Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies about what he characterized as the Western anti-war movement’s “abandonment” of Syrian refugees whose “U.S. out” position on Syria did nothing to address their plight.”

In any case it’s a fairly striking etymology from an idealist who proclaimed  “the right to resist tyranny is indivisible and universal. It can be denied to no one” to apparently believing that it can be denied to Syrians, Ukrainians, Chinese Uyghurs or the many Iranians chafing under the rule of the Ayatollah. This again was the basis of  criticism from not just liberals but principled Marxists like Daphney Lawless on the entire flawed premise of “Campism” cum Tankism where Western leftists only recognize someone’s right to resists tyranny if these leftists don’t happen to like the particular tyrannical government as it’s at odds with the United States.

Regarding the very interesting question suggested by Pulse magazine from which we quoted above of when exactly Blumenthal’s “Road to Damascus” moment started Pulse suggests his attendance at Putin’s 2015 Infowars soiree commemorating 10 years of RT-that Mike Flynn sat at Putin’s arm and Jill Stein-whose candidacy Blumenthal did much to support-was next to Peskov-aka Putin’s spokesman and Michael Cohen’s pen pal during late 2015 early 2016.

This “Infowars” Moscow meeting needs a lot more attention and we will give ot some below-and “Infowars” is an apt description as Blumenthal-along with Mate and other never do well cum Kremlin hack members of the Tankie Left-has basically groomed himself into the Alex Jones of the Left post his Moscow boondoggle.

Section: The Azlov Battalion as Blumenthal’s Kremlin Version of “Do you Condemn Hamas?”

It is however notable that Blumenthal already started his whole gaslighting shtick with Ukraine in 2014 claiming that Maidan was all caused by Victoria Nuland giving someone cookies or something as Pulse itself documented in the same article:

Blumenthal had first signalled his amenability to the Moscow line in February 2014 when he declared that EU-supporting Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine were fascists and neo-Nazis. He had teamed up with Khalek before to defame another critic of the Putin regime.

Shortly after the Russian annexation of Crimea, RT anchor Liz Wahl famously resigned on-air from what she called  “a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin.” Rather than applaud a journalist for resigning from an unsavory mouthpiece on principle (as Blumenthal had once done at Al Akhbar), Blumenthal and Khalek accused Wahl of being a prop in a conspiracy. Her resignation was nothing more than a stage-managed attempt by neoconservatives to trigger a “new Cold War.” Perhaps conscious of the strained evidence (Wahl had informed The Daily Beast’s James Kirchick, a neoconservative RT critic, of her resignation in advance), they allowed six current employees of RT to anonymously dish on her. A day later, RT host Abby Martin (an associate of Khalek’s and likely one of its sources) devoted much of her show to amplifying the article, maligning Wahl by association.”

Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage cause Alternet blogger’s Damascene conversion? – P U L S E

Again this is right out of the Alex Jones playbook Blumenthal-Mate et al would employ in talking over and marginalizing the many Syrian people who came out against Assad-Blumenthal dismisses them as “crisis actors” at best Al Qaeda at worst-indeed, it’s been noted he’s essentially been using the Dick Cheney playbook-anyone who protests or dissents is an Islamist terrorist.

Section: Max “Who Wil Win the Infowars” Blumenthal Becomes a Russian Insider:

CF: RT conference, Information, Messages, Politics: The Shape-shifting Powers in Today’s World | Sputnik Mediabank

A fascinating question is what was  in this article by the self proclaimed “Communist” Alexander Reid  Ross that Blumenthal was so afraid for the public to know? In light of his-successful-efforts to censor Reid Ross’s article it’s quite ironic that he and his fellow pro Russia hacks-again If Jackson Hinkle who calls Russia “God’s country “because it’s so homophobic and anti-trans and bragged that he personally would assassinate Zelensky  is not pro Russia words have no meaning

He put out his characteristic yellow journalism cum Kremlin style gaslighting hit piece against Reid Ross

Alexander Reid Ross, disgraced author of several retracted articles, works with ex-cops, CIA spies, and DHS agents – The Grayzone

But what’s striking is who Blumenthal’s comrades are in the crusade to violate Reid Ross’s first amendment rights-Blumenthal’s Far Right wing buddies who have gotten Ross putting on a “professor watchlist.”

Alexander Reid Ross – Professor Watchlist

With friends lilke these it’s pretty rich for Blumenthal to be calling anti Trump #Resistance liberals “McCarthyite” seeing as he’s the one going around bragging because he got a self described Communist author-again see the irony McCarthyism was obsessed with Communism?-censored.

“An Orwellian destruction of meaning and words — so many absurdities; absurdities stacked on absurdities,” Alexander Reid Ross told me. Fox News had just declared him the leader of a nasty smear campaign, aided by the “far-left Southern Poverty Law Center,” that aimed to make television personality Tucker Carlson and his guests out to be “fascists.” So far, so normal, but it was the specific charge that shocked and awed the communist author who once lived in Russia: “McCarthyism,” with white nationalists’ favorite host, and those who come on his show to agree with him, the victims.”

An Inside Look at How Pro-Russia Trolls Got the SPLC to Censor a Commie – New Politics

Appreciate the use of this term “Orwellian” as this has been the story of the Trump years as this book argues and Blumenthal and Friends has done his part in grooming the Left to normalize Far Right propagandists like Tucker Carlsen-remember when Glenn Greenwald declared Tucker “a socialist?”

Ross’s ironic sin, which he spoke to me about in an hour-long phone call, was writing a series of articles about a topic he wrote the book on: fascist entryism, or efforts to normalize far-right politics and infiltrate left-wing discourse. In particular, he noted the shared affinity for the Kremlin and its talking points among the fringe right and a subsection of leftists, and he detailed how Russian state media was facilitating a popular, “anti-establishment” front against the foreign and domestic enemies of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, platforming right-wing nationalists alongside those who self-identify as progressive internationalists.

Max Blumenthal is a fixture in this, found almost every week defending Russian foreign policy on platforms such as RT and Sputnik, a track record detailed in Ross’ last article. The son of Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, he has admitted to accepting a free trip to Moscow, where he attended the same RT anniversary party in 2015 as U.S. General Michael Flynn — Trump’s former national security advisor is under investigation, in part, for failing to disclose he was paid $45,000 for his appearance . In Moscow, Blumenthal spoke on a panel, “InfoWar: Will there be a winner?” with Charles Bausman, editor of the website Russia Insider and the author of articles such as, “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”

So Mike Flynn who in “a total coincidence” would be Trump’s top foreign policy adviser-again like Nance says coincidences take a lot of planning-was paid $45,000 for being there-what does $45,000 buy you? It buys you the opportunity to sit next to Vladimir Putin at dinner. So what did Jill Stein get? Beyond the free trip that Blumenthal himself got?

I don’t know Blumenthal well, but we have met before: six years ago at a bar in downtown Brooklyn where a single, square artisanal ice cube displaced what ought to have been $6 of gin in my $12 cocktail. It was a birthday party for a mutual friend who I no longer follow on Twitter.

It was with some surprise, then, that I received a call on March 13 from the SPLC’s bemused general counsel, Jim Knoepp, regarding a peculiar legal threat Blumenthal had sent to the civil rights organization. That threat named me as a “shadow author” of an article I did not write by a man I did not know on topics we had never discussed.

Blumenthal would repeat this claim in an interview with Ed Schultz, an RT anchor who enjoyed previous stints as a conservative on talk radio and a liberal on MSNBC. “It’s very clear,” Blumenthal asserted. “This wasn’t by one writer. This was by a cabal of people who have been trying to suppress dissent.”

It only took $20, Blumenthal added, to pay for the threat of litigation that got the article by Ross pulled by the SPLC, the civil rights group apologizing for hurt feelings but not actually conceding any error in fact. The piece is now hosted elsewhere.

“I don’t think it was even being read,” Ross said when I spoke to him. What was being read were the claims being made about it. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, for instance, alleged that the SPLC had “published an article claiming that anti-war activists in the left were in an alliance, and were basically the same as, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”

Greenwald another “free speech warrior” a la Charlie Kirk. All these free speech chicken hawks who believe in all and any speech no matter how offensive others might find it unless what? They make an analogy they don’t like?  What Far Right Trumpsters and Far Left Tankies do seem to have in common is mutual disdain for basic liberalism.

When I spoke to Ross, he was somewhat befuddled — he, the anti-fascist author of a censored article on the threat of far-right entryism, was the one guilty of modern-day McCarthyism. This, by virtue of the fact he detailed the media platforms that right-wing, authoritarian state generously provides to outright fascists and some on the left who share their positions on the world outside of the U.S.

In its report on the controversy, Fox News only added to the confusion. “A source close to Blumenthal mocked the [SPLC] article, pointing out that it attempts to portray an appearance on [Tucker] Carlson’s show as a negative, despite the fact that it’s among the most popular cable programs in the country.”

It’s a “‘disgusting, backhanded McCarthyite smear’ against Fox News,”  the source stated, according to the report.

“I’ve been called a neoconservative, McCarthyist liberal enemy of Fox News — we’re talking about Fox News here, which has relentlessly attacked left-wing journalists,” Ross told me. “Fox News bleating about McCarthyists from the left is the height of absurdity.”

It is, indeed it’s epistemological violence-that is to say gaslighting-after all this is what gaslighters do-attack logic itself use logic against logic with the attempt to make the target think they’re crazy. Indeed what’s ironic is while Blumenthal had that brilliant take down of Dershowitz above, he himself has been gaslighting the public the last 10 years-and again, the irony is that Bibi’s Israel is all for “multipolarity” ie Blumenthal misses the extent to which he’s been on the same side as Netanyahu cum Dershowitz.

Again it’s hard to appeal to US democracy to end the US’s unconditional support for Israel no matter how much violence and how many crimes it commits in Gaza with one hand while doing everything you could the last 10 years to undermine US democracy. He joined the “info war” to make sure the winner will be Russia-and as it turns out-Israel who is also all for the “multipolarity” aka all the enemies of democracy both foreign or domestic.

CODA: In many ways Dersh’ entire career seems to be about applying the abusive gaslighting tactics he employed against his first wife-funny how it’s so hard to get any information on her-to society. The only things that seem to really animate him is defending rapists and wife beaters and defending Israel.

Section: The Manchurian Comedian: “Only This One Russian Guy Seemed to Like What I Was Saying.”

What Do you Want to be when you grow up? Turns out Blumenthal wants to be like-Jimmy “nice work skirt” Dore. Again Blumenthal heaped scorn on Reid Ross-and indeed Pekka Kallioniem for allegedly being perverts and or pedophiles. But even if Max is following Jimmy Dore’s comedic footsteps you suspect that his sense of humor is something only the Kremlin could love-but you suspect they’d love it-as this brand of “comedy” seems all about Blumenthal doing his bit to help Russia “win the info war.”

“I also was lucky uh to get a practice set in at the United Nations security Council… the tough crowd only about like one Russian guy there seemed to like what I was saying.”

Max Blumenthal standup at Magooby’s Joke House

Who was the Russian guy-Vasily Alekseyevich Nebenzya.” That was the Russian “diplomat” at the end of “20 Days in Mariupol” who sneered at the reporter appalled at the level of slaughter the Russians reigned down on the city of Mariupol during those 20 days that “history is written by the winners?”

Is Vasily who invited Aaron Mate to speak at the UN in 2018-and sell the Russian disinformation that it wasn’t Assad who did the chemical attack at Douma? Or who invited Blumenthal to address the UN after Russia invaded Ukraine-something that Max does everything to hide with his Orwellian formulation “The Ukraine Proxy War?”

Funny you ask-the answer is yes.

The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté testifies at UN on OPCW Syria cover-up – YouTube

Watch the two videos together-Vasily ice cold mockery of all those Ukrainian deaths in Mariupol-that Blumenthal dismisses as “Ukrainian Nazis” and his cross examination of Mate in the UN. And you’ll begin to understand why I argue that both Mate and Blumenthal are intellectually, and morally obscene-though Blumenthal is correct that so is Dershowitz and his Zionist apologists. Unfortunately, though Blumenthal has done a 180 from where he was in 2013 when he said the struggle against tyranny was universal and that it’s wrong to speak up for the Palestinians while apologizing for other oppressors and dismissing their victims.

Back to Max Blumenthal’s comedy set though-how he goes after Rachel Maddow-the Bernie or Buster cum Tankie Left is full of Rachel Maddow Derangement Syndrome claims she and progressive online media changed over the last 20 years-I mean he’s changed just a little himself:

” I actually knew Rachel Maddow I would go on her show I knew Rachel Maddow before she was a warmongering neoconservative anti-russian conspiratorial psychopath…”

I mean that might sound kind of harsh if you forgot Blumenthal’s definition of “warmongering” is completely Orwellian-so his comrade Jackson Hinkle-or for that matter Scott Ritter isn’t a “warmonger” for cheering Russian war crimes or even when Hinkle declares he would assassinate Zelensky if he only had the chance but Maddow is because-uh she accurately discusses Russia’s interference in the 2016 election-it turns out Blumenthal was a co-conspirator on the Kremlin side-doing his part to help Russia win the “infowar”-again note how it recalls Alex Jones which are exactly the kind of tactics Russia and its apologists have been employing the last 10 years.

As for “psychopath”-I mean he got Alexander Reid-Ross censored for a lot less than that. What’s the basis for that? As is clear from the chapter “The Making of a Conspiracy Theorist” how can you NOT be a conspiracy theorist at this point? After the last 57 years-going back to when Nixon stole the 1968 election by scuttling LBJ”s peace talks? After Reagan Bush delayed the hostages until after the election-when Iran had them released literally 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in? After Bush v Gore? Heck lets raise the bloody shirt-after November 22, 1963?

And as we saw above Blumenthal is a total “conspiracy theorist” about Israel’s role and quite rightly so. But somehow Russia is special-no way could that ever happen-“Russia, if you’re listening.” Again we looked in Chapter Leeden Manifesto that Leeden who was Grassley’s aide on the Judiciary Committee wrote this deep dive of a manifesto which explicitly called for working with Russian intelligence to hack Clinton’s emails.

yet he would have us believe the very idea of Russian interference is “unpossible”-what’s so hard for him to understand? OR a la Sinclair is it a case of a man not being able to understand something he’s paid not to understand? His mission is to help Russia win its “info war” against the West. Indeed the exact quote from Vasily is “so many fakes-who wins the info war?” a direct reference to the topic of the talk where Blumenthal gave his speech.

CF: Starting at 1:30 of 20 Days in Mariupol

But let’s go back to his set as it’s very revealing it’s full of bad narrative after bad narrative-though if you’re goal is further epistemological obfuscation they are rather good narratives.

I was at the nation so I knew Chris Hayes before he was Rachel Maddow and I wouldn’t like to have known AOC when she was just an ambitious smart young girl from White Plains named Sandy before she transitioned to latinx”

So he just goes for a blatantly racist slur against AOC-who as far as I know never demanded anyone call her “LatinX” it’s both false and stupid and exactly the kind of thing you get on Fox News or Right wing social media. It also kind of recalls Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris in 2024-“she became Black she wasn’t Black before”-Blumenthal is suggesting AOC made a big deal over being Latino after she got into politics despite the trivial fact that there are lies-but all that matters is “winning the Infowar” right? Sometimes you have to go Sandy Hook.

you know she’s so angry now there’s like a discarded box of Franzia behind her she’s screaming it into Instagram like you fascist”

I mean once again not a very accurate sketch of AOC but OTOH is the punchline here that calling Trump a fascist is over the top? Kind of ironic seeing as this is what Blumenthal is RTing out on his timeline tonight.

I mean after spending the previous two years grooming leftists to do anything but vote for Harris-who would NOT have renamed the Defense Dept “the Dept of War” or be striking all these fishing boats in Venezuela for starters.

yet in the years prior to Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity Edition Blumenthal and other Tankie cum Nazbol-that is ‘”leftist fellow travelers of Nazi Far Right” did everything to dismiss the idea that Trump was a fascist-ie everything to normalize him once again playing into the hands of Roger Stone and Friends.

Back to Blumenthal-have to give him some credit for being honest here:

I don’t really have a punch line there I just you know wanted to say that what I wanted to know her just like I knew Chris Hayes before he was an anti-russian male lesbian…”

Because certainly agree-there is no punch line. There is a punch line here though its uintentional.

“the culture wars are destroying Us by Design we need to be fighting a class war but they’re deploying these culture wars to keep us divided against each other…”

This is so striking-striking in just the sense it’s striking that Blumenthal fails to see that Netanyahu is all for “the Multipolarity” and Israel never saw itself as part of the “Western alliance.” Blumenthal-again unlike Hinkle that time in 2023 when he correctly placed Bibi on the same side of Putin-while ignoring the “good working relationship” Bibi maintained with Putin-fails to see that in some rather astonishing ways he’s on the same side as Netanyahu’s Israel. And seeing as he’s going all vulgar Marxist on us-‘forget the culture war it’s all about the class war’-it’s the perfect spot to employ the old Marxist-Leninist gloss of “subjective vs objective guilt.”

Blumenthal might subjectively think he’s the strongest anti Zioinist solider but objectively he also undermines his own goal in serious ways-by undermining American democracy while hoping American democracy puts an end to unconditional support of Israel.

As for ‘it’s the class war forget the culture war’ this is hugely problematic and as we saw above I also criticize the Center Leftist Ezra Klein-though I don’t know if he still gets to be “Center Left” rather than just “Center” in light of some of his latest canards. Which probably would please him-you strongly suspect based on his latest framing that he’d love to be called a Centrist rather than a liberal.

Because before agreeing that “cultural issues don’t matter only economic issues matter” we need to be pretty clear what gets relegated to being “a mere cultural issue.” Ie which marginalized groups does Blumenthal-and Ezra Klein-again Blumenthal ends up with some pretty strange bed fellows when you get into the weeds-propose progressives throw under the bus? As we saw above when pushed Klein’s first answer was-women. Abortion-according to him-is just a “mere cultural issue” that the Democrats need to be ready to marginalize at the shortest notice or ‘they will never win another election.’

CODA: Klein’s recent guest academic literally used those words.

How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America | The Ezra Klein Show

Back to Blumenthal as it keeps getting bettter-in the sense of worse:

“against left and right against black and white so we don’t unite against the oligarchy that has all the control and all the voice and what Jimmy Dore is doing…”

What?! LOL Jimmy “Nice work skirt” Dore is doing it? I mean talk about not passing the laugh test?! So it appears Blumenthal’s dream is of being a Jimmy Dore minnie me-which is pretty sad. Dore’s brilliant idea was that somehow the Left needs to get over its derangement syndrome over the KKK and similar such White supremacist groups. Literally-wish I was kidding but as we saw above that’s literally what Dore -and Caleb Maupin-argued; Vaush did a great job dismantling such bad arguments. Talk about Roger Stone’s wet dream-where leftsts are being groomed into refusing to work with Center Left liberals lilke Clinton-who themselves support a significant rise in the MW-in favor of White Supremacists and Nazis if they make even the slightest noises about the MW.

But going back to the issue of “cultural vs class” which conveniently just ignores the crucial point of intersectionality-it does seem that many allegedly progressive dude bros seem eager to dismiss abortion as a “mere cultural issue”-and again this is seen from both Centrists like Ezra Klein and leftists like Blumenthal and Bernie-assuming Blumenthal even considers himself on the left anymore-according to Ben Norton he now dismisses the left and started supporting MAGA candidates.

CODA: We will have a lot more to say about Bernie but for now suffice to say Kamala’s revelations in 107 Days make it pretty clear that contrary to the Berniecrats Warren did NOT lie about Bernie-he did triy to push her out of the primary in 2020 under the premise she’s a girl so less electable than Bernie.

Junket journalism in the shadow of genocide | Opinions | Al Jazeera

UPDATE

Section: Ben Norton’s Consciousness of Guilt

Post by @sethabramson.bsky.social — Bluesky

Trump Envoy Mistakenly Blows Source’s Cover in DM Fail

Be sure to add in about 102 Days in Mariupol-the UN ambassador-aka Mate’s buddy

Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage cause Alternet blogger’s Damascene conversion? – P U L S E

Max Blumenthal – Wikipedia

RT conference, Information, Messages, Politics: The Shape-shifting Powers in Today’s World | Sputnik Mediabank

An Inside Look at How Pro-Russia Trolls Got the SPLC to Censor a Commie – New Politics

jacket of McFaul

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder – Kindle edition by McFaul, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Pekka Kallioniemi on X: “More about Max: https://t.co/Nq5h4UAJb6” / X

Branislav Slantchev on X: “Mearsheimer is a disgrace to the profession. If the Russians are so fucking awesome and nothing we do helps Ukraine, then why the fuck are their hordes stuck in Donbas for 3 years? Are they lost because they don’t have access to google maps? Did they suffer over a million” / X

Trump, still convinced Putin ‘wants to end this war,’ lukewarm on Zelenskyy’s request for Tomahawks – POLITICO

(96) Max Blumenthal Reveals Surveillance Program in Yemen Run by Cambridge Analytica Parent Company SCL – YouTube

Donald Trump deserved the Nobel prize, says … Vladimir Putin  – POLITICO

One way to look at Trump’s bailout of Argentina is he’s using more of our tax dollars to bailout one country than was being spent for the entire budget of USAID

Love in the Time of Hegemonic Suicide

Pekka Kallioniemi on X: “Max — a pro-Russian propagandist and RT panelist — and Kit, a man with a crippling drug addiction, seem extra salty after someone exposed their massive grift. So salty, in fact, that they’ve resorted to making shit up to cope. https://t.co/NpePMmP6k2” / X

Pekka Kallioniemi (@P_Kallioniemi) / X

Elon Musk’s Xitter strikes again-I never muted Pekka Kallionemi

Pekka Kallioniemi on X: “More about Max: https://t.co/Nq5h4UAJb6” / X

Pekka Kallioniemi on X: “But how do we know Max is working for the Kremlin? The Grayzone boys have been a transparent go-to for one Dmitry Polanskiy. Technically working as Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Polyanskiy is in fact an SVR officer working under diplomatic cover,… 22/24 https://t.co/i54rguO4D8” / X

Stephen McIntyre on X: “@aaronjmate if you’ve read Bamford’s article https://t.co/jxpzKTRzDc, you’ve encountered Stone warrant #7. It was for emails of an Israeli agent and produced with relatively light redaction as one of the Stone search warrants in a FOIA by US media. Bamford’s article is good on general” / X

It’s Orwell’s World We’re Just Living in it on X: “@aaronjmate At least Obama’s not a Nazi who ended abortion rights and is now sending Apache helicopters to the roofs of US citizens” / X

Stephen McIntyre on X: “@aaronjmate if you’ve read Bamford’s article https://t.co/jxpzKTRzDc, you’ve encountered Stone warrant #7. It was for emails of an Israeli agent and produced with relatively light redaction as one of the Stone search warrants in a FOIA by US media. Bamford’s article is good on general” / X

The Epistemilogical Obfuscation of Blumenthal and his anti Vax friends.

Pekka Kallioniemi on X: “Max has also tried his wings as a stand-up comedian. Watching him make jokes is absolutely excruciating, as he’s even less funny than his good friend @jimmy_dore. I could only watch the first half, but I assume that the rest wasn’t any funnier. 21/24 https://t.co/ztvChkcXz9” / X

Max Blumenthal standup at Magooby’s Joke House

His jokes went over about as well as he did with that cashier in a Venezuela supermarket

When Max Blumenthal went to a Caracas supermarket (how The Greyzone lies about Venezuela)

What has Blumenthal done the last 10 years since his “Who Will Win the Info War” Putin Summit for those he supposedly  cares about-the struggling working class? What has he done to improve their material position? In America-let’s not evne talk about in Syria and Ukraine-according to him the Sy rian people are all Al Qaeda and Ukranians are all in the Avov Battliion. As for the anti Vax grift he tries to flatter himself that this was to fight for the rights of the working class?? But in reality  it was the capital class who really  hated covid restrictions and lockouts-it enraged them that their workers received more money  in expanded UI than from them and that they could work from home post Covid. Blumenthal wasn’t defending the working class but the billionaire class a la Elon Musk and Donald Trump a la what Jacob Silverman called “The Gilded Rage”

The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel | The Nation

Section: The Real Special Relationship

The Bibi–Putin axis isn’t a footnote—it’s a core contradiction in the Blumenthal–Mate narrative. They want to frame Israel as the real colluder and Russia as a red herring, but the truth is: they’re not mutually exclusive—they’re mutually reinforcing.

Section Don’t Sleep on Saudi Collusion

Opinion | A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big. – The New York Times

Max Blumenthal on X: “The Zionist-controlled Trump administration demands Iran surrender to Israel in exchange for an “agreement”” / X

Max Blumenthal on X: “Netanyahu is losing Israel’s bastion of support in the heartland That’s why his billionaire US cutouts are buying vacuous influencers, pastors and politicians But they still can’t stop the truth from coming out” / X

(130) “Putting Lipstick On a HOLOCAUST!” Trump Plans Gaza Deal With Netanyahu + James Comey Indicted – YouTube

Max Blumenthal on X: “Jeffrey Epstein Republican Alan Dershowitz on his longtime friend: “When the full story finally comes out, the world will learn what we already know—that Jeffrey is a good person who does many good things.”” / X

Max Blumenthal on X: “Dershowitz was not just Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, he was his close friend and advisor who tried to destroy his accusers In our exchange, he seemed to deny writing newly released emails in which he called Epstein “a good person who does many good things” https://t.co/ur5dIsG9zP” / X

A Few Quick Thoughts on Tucker Carlson and Foreign Influence Operations… ~ Mind’s Eye Mag

Charlie Jad 🇺🇸 on X: “@MaxBlumenthal @AnaKasparian https://t.co/miUoAicHQd” / X

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X: “Netanyahu says one thing in English and another in Hebrew. While saying in English that the genocide in Gaza is over, in Hebrew, he says that “the campaign has not ended,” indicating that Israel plans to break the ceasefire once the hostages are released. This ceasefire,” / X

UPDATE: Regarding Russia and Israel’s Special Relationship:

Hacked Emails Allege Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Diplomacy Between Israel, Russia

FN:

Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals – The Grayzone

Mehdi Hasan: American Instituitons are Crap-see also Chris HItchens on Kirk: The Commodification of Stupidity

Amazon.com : the cult of trump steven hassan book

But Her Emails-and Social Conformity

Amazon.com: Solomon Asch (Pioneers of Human Behaviour) eBook : Graham, Josh: Kindle Store

What the last 10 years seem to strongly suggest is that the truth is much WEAKER than lies. Goebbels was right-about the power of repetition. Again I always go back to Her Emails as this was how we got here that was the gateway drug to an Orwellian country where the truth is whatever you “feel” it is-remember Steve Colbert’s great speech at the correspondent dinner when he mocked Bush and Cheney to their faces? But look how far we’ve come in 20 years?

Clearly we had more democratic rights then than now as this would never happen in front of Trump and if it did Colbert would be in Costra Rica.

But Colbert’s satire is now reality-the truth is what “I feel it is” In 201 many learned to “feel” that Hillary Clinton did something diabolical with her emails. This feeling was wrong-but if the truth doesn’t matter only how you “feel” aboout the truth then…  Like Trump’s “victory”-tainted as it was by Comey’s Letter and Russian interference AND collusion-was predicated on the idea that Hillary was “unlikeable.” This was treated like a “fact” though it’s clearly an opinion-how can it be a fact wether someone is likeable or not? And again how do you explain how in 2012 the MSM narrative was that actually Biden was a “gaffe machine” and maybe Obama should drop him for-the allegedly universally “unlikeable” Hillary Clinton?

And again is being “unlikeable” really the worst thing a person can be or even a Presidential candidate?

Section: What Makes Someone Unlikeable and Katie Johnson’s Unheeded Warning.

Many of us warned folks about Trump-with all the shade Vaush gives “shitlibs” these days even he has in the past admitted that #ResitsanceLib types like myself were right about Trump all along. But Katie Johnson’s warnings has particular resonance or at least deserves a certain pride of place seeing as she is the one accsuer who links Trump and Epstein together. Again as we saw above Michael Cohen wrongly denied that she was client of the lawyer he intimidated late in the election.

Here’s what she had said in January 2016

{Book 2} Proof of Devilry: The Crimes of Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein

To me the man Kim JOhnson decries is for more “uunlikeable” than anything Hillary could have ever doen with her emails or Whitewater-I mean does Nate Silver want to argue this man dsecribed her is less “unlikeable” than Biden because he was 81 or even 86 in 2028? I mean I’d rather have a 186 year old corpse in the WH than the man Katie JOhnson describes.

Section: How Successful a Cult Leader Trump is

It was clear already to me in July2015  that Trump was an Orwellian style cult leader-kind of redundant perhaps as by definition a cult leader is Orwellian-cults ARE Orwellian. In a sense Orwell discovered a new lens to analyze cults.

Like what you saw right away was that there was a certain expanding fraction of the Republican party base that believed ANyTHING Trump said. The truth was whatever Trump said. These folks would believe anything Trump regardles of any “alternative facts” that contradicted him. Indeed Henry the 8th repotedly couldn’t even contradict his own edicts after he said them. But if so then Trump clearly has more power than he did as past statements restrained King Henry. For Trump supporters the truth is whatever he says NOW. What he might have said 10 years ago, 2 weeks, ago, a two days ago, heck 30 minutes or even 30 seconds ago doesn’t matter if it contradicts what he’s saying NOW. The truth is whatever Trump says it is NOW at this particular moment.

But the circle of people who believe the truth is whatever Donald Trump says it is NOW has only expanded. It would expand between July 2015 till election day 2016 to the entire Republican party. In 2024 we begun to see many voters who traditionally were not Republican voters fall for his gaslighting.

But it’s amazing how many people believe Trump’s lies today. I mean even Democrats in Congress now “admit” that Biden-Harris were “too lax” on the border. you can like or dislike Biden’s immigration policies but they were anything but LAX. Indeed, Franklink Foer documented how Biden broke promises he’d made to help immigrants. He simply decided he didn’t want to keep his pormise. He sent Harris to South America to say “don’t come”-so much for the Stuate of Liberty “send us your dispossed”-and cracked down on Assylum seakers-which is against interintaionl law.

Melania Trump says she and Vladimir Putin have ‘open channel of communication’ on war-displaced children – POLITICO

That Ryan Grim who’s friendly with the Left wrote about Epstein facilitating Russia and Israel’s special relationship is just the cherry on top as the Left has tended to dismiss Russian collusion while being very open to the idea of Israeli collusion www.msn.com/en-us/news/w…

Facts Matter: Trump Was a Democrat Edition See Tara Palmieri

(141) Epstein in Alaska? Shadiness Explained – YouTube

Section: Prop 50 vs 107 Days: At This Point Gavin Newsom is Lapping Kamala Harris on 2028

Again I’m a long time Kamala stan. I’ve dreamt of her being a future President since her surgical cross examination of Jeff Sessions back in 2017. I-unlike a lot of people on both the Center and teh Left-don’t assume she’s disqualified for running in 2028 because she lost 2024. I don’t subscribe to the kind of “vulgar Hegelianism” that losing one election makes ou a loser.

I would still love to see her run again in 2028 AND WIN. But even as one of her biggest supporters I have to admit I dont think she helped herself b entitling her book “107 Das” as it locked her into a bad narrative which was clear in her recent interview.

(256) ‘I am not done’ – Kamala Harris tells BBC she may run for US president again | BBC News – YouTube

She spent the first third of the 20 minute interview like an NHL hockey goalie fielding questions about Biden-why didn’t he get out, is Harris saying she would have won if he got out sooner, was it derelict of her NOT calling for him to go out, was there a coverup?

She did finally push back after about  6 and a half minutes of the third degree with the host asking the same question again and again in a slightly different way but that’s an awful long time wasted relitigating the past. While I still think she could run in 2028 AND WIN its going to be very tough if she doesn’t change the narrative. If she is the candidate who has to always explain 2024 before she’s even allowed to discuss 2028 she’s going to be facing a major handicap.

What Harris doesn’t seem to get is that the best defense is a good offense. And while I found her book very good in many ways I don’t think she helped herself with her title-by settling on the narrative she lost because there wasn’t enough time she’s pigeonholed herself into having to relitigate again and again why she didn’t ask Biden to get out-something which realistically she could never have done. But by claiming “107 days isn’t enough time” she’s going to be constlantly on defense. If you have to go through a  six and a half minute grilling about 2024 in every interview before she can pivot to the future she’s going to have a very hard time winning.

Meanwhile her fellow senior California Democrat, Gavin Newsom, has the wind at his back after his big prop 50 victory on Tuesday. NO doubt he has a significant advantage over her as he’s still in office as Governor as the biggest state in the union, presiding over one of the biggest economies while she’s currently out of politics. But she has also not helped herself I believe by keeping such a low profile post her 2024 defeat.

To be sure it’s significantly harder for her to be part of the conversation but she’s only spoken out publicly a few times since her defeat-I guess she’s speaking now more since her book was published. But first of all some will dismiss this as she’s just hawking her book-not me to be sure. I have no problem with her doing interviews on her book and I’m interested in hearing what she has to say and there are still plenty of other Deocrats like myself who feel this way.

but she needs to find a way to tie all this to what’s happening TODAy. While I love the memes that show all the times she warned how bad Trump would be-the warnings about how he’d destroy the econmomy though his insane tariffs, the warnings about his atatck on the rule of law and democracy. But now that she’s being proven right-I also loved when she said “I’m not here to say I told you so..”

Kamala Harris: ‘I’m not here to say I told you so’ – YouTube

she has to somehow show solidarity with the tens of millions of Americans suffering now under Trump’s reactionary plutocracy. Voters are looking for leaders who get it who are there with them-as Newsom has been with this huge victory for counter gerrymandering. As has been said after Prop 50’s landslide victory “Democratic officials across the country need to take note”-and indeed, a number of other Democratic states are now vowing to do the same. Indeed, this is a fight the GOP may come to rue starting as if Hispanics are going back to the Democrats as they certainly did Tuesday some of these districts the GOP tried to gerrymander are NOT red districts.

This makes Newsom a clear “Tier One Democrat” as some GOPers themselves are privately acknowledging.

Republicans take stock of Newsom, a ‘Tier 1 Democrat’ after Prop 50

There’s certainly a good argument he’s a frontrunner if not THE frontrunner for 2028.

Gavin Newsom ‘light years ahead’ in 2028 Democratic field after Prop. 50 win

After Prop 50 won-CNN literally projected its victory at the top of the 9 PM Est hour-Newsom did a press conference and declared “the Democratic party is in its ascendcy”-this is a very positive and powerful message to say the least. If Harris doesn’t want to get left at the station she’s going to have to figure out a way to parachute herself into the conversations of TODAy NOT 2024. She needs to be talking about 2026 and 2028 NOT 2024.

How might she do this? Focusing like a laser beam on Trump’s current assault on democracy and the 60% supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

Section: 107 Days is Just not a Good Narrative for Harris

It locks her into a holding position where she’s constantly being asked to relitigate the past and why she didn’t force out Biden-something she honestly could never have done. But she kind of puts herself in this position by blaming her defeat solely on not having enough time. Obviously then if this is true the problem is Biden didn’t get out sooner. That if Biden had gotten out sooner she would have won. Though in the BBC interview above she didn’t want to say THAT either. Terrible split screen while Newsom rides Prop 50 like rocket fuel for 2028.

This is why I think her choice of title was a huge mistake. It leads her into this kind of groundhog day syndrome where the media-and presumably debate moderators-will keep asking her what happened with Biden in 2024. She’s going to have to keep relitigating this question again and again.

But not only is it a bad narrative it also has I think the inconvenience of not being true. I don’t think she lost because there wasn’t enough time-she could have won, indeed she would have won in my opinoin if the election were in early August. She lost I believe because she took some bad campaign advice not because she didn’t have enough time. As she WAS winning during the early halcyon days of “Brat Summer.”

Section: “Focused Grouped Within an Inch Of Their Lives: Jon Stewart asks THE QUESTION: Can Consultants Actually Ruin Reall Good Candidates?

He had a really interesting interview with Chris Hayes and David Plouffe after the Dems awesome night November 5.

The entire thing was of great interest but I found some questions raised by Stewart to be particularly  thought provoking. Not to put too fine a point on it he called out the consultant class which I for one am always s here for as they  are to mine a great bane of the Democratic party’s existence.

Stewart first really got me interested when he used the wonderful phrase of candidates being “Focus grouped within an inch of their lives” at 23:40

(263) Democrats Actually Win Something w/ Chris Hayes & David Plouffe | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart – YouTube

He then made an extremely interesting and provocative suggestion-that consultants and strategists can ruin good candidates.

“Let’s look the other way. Can they take really good candidates and ruin them?”

26:48

This is a very good question I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But then it gets even better as Stewart connects the question to Kamala Harris herself.

“And that’s– you know, and I want to talk specifically about Kamala Harris. Because I spoke with her last week on the podcast.”

But in light of who Stewart was speaking to this was pretty much raising the bloody shirt…

My sense of what happened in that campaign is-and that’s just one example– is that the strategists, and consultants and pollsters basically wrung every last bit of light out of the eyes of what is a compelling and smart person and– and, I think, continue to do a disservice to that.”

I mean this to my mind is a great question but it was particularly provocative as he was speaking to David Plouffe LOL

Plouffe not surprisingly wanted to push back on it that consultants ruined Kamala:

DAVID PLOUFFE: Well, I was there. So what I’ll say is, you know–[LAUGHTER] And you know, was on your show, Jon. She wrote a book. I mean, it’s pretty clear she ran the campaign.”

Is it clear? How clear is it? It’s not clear to me. The central problem with “107 Days” not to put too fine a point on it is it has the inconvenience of not being true. She didn’t lose because she didn’t have enough time she lost IMHO because she listened to bad consultant advice. Remember Republicans are weird? That was Tim Walz’s neologism, it’s probably the reason he became her VP nominee-just like the reason Obama became President was his 2004 convention speech as we discussed above.

But what happened to “Republicans are weird?” It turns out… a consultant told her to stop saying it it’s too negative.  Uhhhhhhhh….  I mean exactly-and the base loved it. But the campaign stopped saying it-and when Tim Walz debated JD Vance he was the opposite of polemical-so much for the couch memes he did everything to normalize the Russia hack who believes that battered women should stay with their abusers.

Not only that-the consultant even complained about “we’re not going back.” Seriously. I mean this was an organic catchphrase that Kamala’s crowds adopted yet the strategists said-if you can believe it-“backwards looking.”

I mean it was campaign gold but consultant hacks thought it was “backwards looking?”

“We Are Not Going Back” Wasn’t Written to Be a Campaign Catchphrase. Kamala Harris Voters Had Other Ideas. | Vanity Fair

It gets even worse-it turns out that Kamala’s own brother in law told her not to talk about corporate price gouging-as it made Corporate America feel icky

Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris? | Common Dreams

Find other link

This then in my view is the real story-Kamala lost because of listening to bad advice from campaign consultants and strategists not to mention billionaires like Mark Cuban not to mention her own brother in law.

Back to Plouffe:

she wanted to run, OK? JON STEWART: Uh-huh. DAVID PLOUFFE: And everybody– and I get it. Like, if this ad, or this tactic, or this line. had been different, she would have won. Let me just tell you. I’ve worked in politics a long time. I retired. I came back for 100 days.”

I have to say whenever someone frames it this way “Like, if this ad, or this tactic, or this line. had been different, she would have won” they’re basically ridiculing the very idea that anyone thing could have made a difference-ie they’re claiming that what happened was inevitable that is to say it’s a very fatalistic way to look at it. Now why Plouffe-and Jen O’Malley would prefer such a fatalistic cum deterministic narrative is clear enough-to banish any thought that Kamala lost because they made any serious mistakes-serious enough mistakes that could have cost the election.

This was the narrative both of them had told Pod Save America

EXCLUSIVE: Top Harris Campaign Staff Tell Us What Went Wrong In 2024 Election

Again is it clear she ran the campaign? It’s not so clear to me seeing as her book title-107 Days-is literally the narrative of Plouffe-O’Malley. Which is once again why I think Stewart’s question is worth giving more thought-can consultants and strategists actually ruin a good candidate?

It’s notable that Stewart came to this conclusion after his own interview with Kamala Harris.

VP Kamala Harris on Defeat, Democrats & the Fight Ahead | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

I did see some folks on the Trumpian Right thinking that Stewart somehow showed “Trump was right about Kamala”

Jon Stewart Can’t HOLD BACK When he REALIZES Trump was Right about KAMALA!!!

but if you watch the entire interview Stewart came away quite impressed by her. That’s how I read his question-he was pleasantly surprised by their interview. She definitely was much more relaxed and herself in her chat with Stewart-compared to say how she came across in the BBC interview we discussed above.

Again at this point her kryptonite seems to be narrativization-she tends to abandon her own position at the first sign of trouble-and accept the current narrative of the conventional wisdom-again as a Nietzschean cum Zarathustran it’s hard for me not to feel like this is a contradiction in terms.

Again this is a big fan of hers speaking. She does seem to have a certain lack of courage of her convictions. Indeed in her interview with Stewart she did make an interesting observation about the status quo and how difficult it is to contest.

Do you watch how Trump– forget about what he’s doing, the way he’s doing it. Is there a part of you that thinks there are lessons?”

47:50

The short answer to Stewart’s kind of Devil’s Advocate question is that it’s apples to oranges as the GOP is the party that wants to “shrink the government to the size you can drown it in the bathtub.” It’s a lot easier to destroy than create. The Democrats as Stewart points out is the party that believes in the power of government to actually do good things indeed be part of the solution.

Now I do agree with Stewart and even Ezra Klein that the Dems as the party of government needs to actually  deliver on its promises-though as we discussed above there’s a lot wrong with  Klein’s current narrative. And I do think in a sense the Democrats need to be perhaps a little less earnest and a little more “ruthless”-like the voters of Virginia in electing Jay Jones.

CODA: What made it even sweeter was that the Republican who leaked his texts lost her race AND Republicans are absolutely freaking out that Jones’ texts had no consequences.

Virginia Republican involved in Jay Jones text scandal loses reelection

GOP fumes over Jay Jones victory after violent texts

I mean the party of Donald Trump is outraged at a lack of consequences? Talk about lacking all self awareness.

And Harris does make an interesting distinction between “disruption” and “destruction.”

” KAMALA HARRIS: I believe it’s important we not conflate disruption with destruction. JON STEWART: Mm-hmm. KAMALA HARRIS: And I– I agree that disruption has a very important role to play, which is basically, as far as I define it, it’s as much as anything about challenging the assumptions, challenging the status quo, all right? ”

She then offers a very interesting perspective regarding challenging the status quo: “I can tell you from my lived experience as a public servant, challenging the status quo is brutal. You know, there is an assumption that status quo is static, that it is just– it is there. Let me tell you something. You start challenging status quo, you will find it is quite dynamic.”

I find that a rather fascinating thought-that the status quo can be dynamic. 

And it will fight against change every step of the way. I know because I have tried and I have–I’ve had successes, but I also have the bruises to show it. And so listen, disruption is important, but destruction for the sake of some grand gesture, look what I can do quickly, overnight, and just get rid of a thing without any plan for actually, what’s it gonna– why? And what is it gonna actually do to improve people’s lives?

And not to mention, I mean, are you fucking kidding me? This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that– that babies are goanna starve when the SNAP benefits end in just hours from now?”

I mean absolutely-what we as liberals or leftists-anyone on the progressive side of the aisle-want to do is very different than the party who just wants to knock over the chess board.

Still I wonder if her concern about challenging the status quo makes her reluctant to challenge the conventional wisdom? Don’t know if there’s a connection here or not just trying to find any clue as to why she tends to abandon her position so quickly and accept the narrative of the conventional wisdom. As Hayes notes the Democratic party tends to be risk adverse and in that sense Kamala fits in pretty well.

Section: One the Rise of Zohran Mamdani: It’s the Narrative Stupid

Indeed as much as I like Harris-again I’ve dreamt of a President Kamala Harris since I first saw her surgically dismantle Jeff Sessions the Little Segregationist That Could in 2017-what’s become clear to me is that while she has many skills and talents-I for one love her laugh-is narrativization is not her thing.

To put it succinctly a candidate who understands narrativization talks about what (s)he wants to talk about not what GOP operatives cum centrist media hacks do. I have to agree with Kyle Kulinski it’s a damn shame Mamdani can’t run for President as he’s preternaturally good at message discipline and controlling the narrative-at those debates he’d deftly parry every question then pivot back to “affordability”-post Tuesday night now Trump is using that word constantly as if he invented it.

Honestly I’ve never seen a DEMOCRAT so good at controlling the narrative as Mamdani was. The key to narrativization is as we saw in chapter Huey Long is that it’s not just a technocratic debate over tinkering with the system but a morality tale of good vs evil something that the Democrats have post LBJ shied away from. Even though with Trump the Dems have such a readymade cartoon villian as a foil the Dems often tend to equivocate-“I want to support those who voted for me and those who didn’t”-which in principle is right but not an engaging moral frame-there has to be an enemy not just an opponent a la Obama’s “there is no Blue State America or Red STate America there is only the United States of America.

Obama had a sort of narrative at least and that was a great speech aesthetically but the problem with Obamism is that it banishes the very idea of evil out of its moral universe-were all nice people who just have some small differences as to how to get the place we all want to get to.

No-there are certain “evil” actors whose material and political interests lead them to do things that are against the public interest-Trump, his GOP co-conspirators, many in the billionaire class-the crypto bros, the tech bros a la Elon Musk and Peter Thiel etc.

Mamdani’s victory speech was notable for its LACK OF CONCILIATION towards both the defeated Andrew Cuomo and his calling out Trump by name “Donald Trump I know you’re watching” so “turn the volume up.”

This was unlike any Democratic acceptance speech I remember in my lifetime. The savvy centrists may quibble that it was “divisive” but voters loved it. Indeed when victorious Democrats equilcate in their acceptance speech it always feels like “Just fooling. That was some frothy campaigni rhetoric but now it’s “back to brunch.”

Brunch, Interrupted – by Julia Doubleday – The Gauntlet

Like when Biden-and Democratic Governors INCLUDING Newsom-let expanded unemployment benefits lapse-it was “back to brunch” telegraphing to voters that “you got us this far but we’ll take it from here.”

Let’s be clear Mamdani is facing some major obstacles in accomplishing his ambitious agenda-the most ambitious agenda any victorious Democrat has run on in some time.

The six challenges of Mamdani at New York City Hall: Trump, fatigue, bureaucracy, and friendly fire

Starting of course with Donald Trump’s threats to send the national guard into the city post Mamdani’s win. He’s going to have to maintain an positive and constructive relationship with Kathy Hochul-unlike Cuomo  and DeBlasio where Cuomo did everything he could to undermine the NYC Mayor. There’s also some serious economic debates about the efficacy of some of his economic proposals-like a government run supermarket and rent freezes.

But if anyone seems ready for it it’s him.

Section: But Mamdani is NOT Bernie.

I don’t live in NyC I’m from Long Island. But if I’d lived there I would have voted Mamdani. And I speak as a lifelong liberal Democrat-a #ShitLib indeed I’d argue the ShitLib’s ShitLib. I voted for Hillary three times-she not Obama was my first choice. After the FBI stole it from her in 2016 Kamala was my new dream candidate. After she lost in 2020 I was for Warren.

So why do I like Mamdani while I was always somewhat tepid on Bernie? It was clear to me just in the way he campaigned that has much wider appeal than Bernie ever did-Bernie has some passionate support true but his support was nevertheless more niche.

Bernie as a child of the Great Depression is not really a natural for today’s social media world. He’s triedd to become more personal in own attempts at social media but it’s not his first languate. While he too had a narrative with great message discipline his stump speech is very repitiive-once you’ve heard one Bernie stump speech you’ve heard them all. Mamadani does the kind of stuff Bernie never had the patience for-talking with regular people about the price of a sandwich.

It’s just not Bernie’s style. And Mamdani while a self identified “democratic socialist” also identifies as a Democrat-those events with Tisch James showed him as someone who has good relationships with  Democrats inside the party. Bernie tends to focus like a laserbeam on his ecomoic message while Mamdani is good at the kind of schmoozing required in the social media landscape of today.

Section: While I Would Have Voted for Mamdani I’m Glad I Never Voted for Bernie