What Does a Leftist SPECTATOR Spectate?

CNN Admits to Being a Propaganda Operation

In its response to the Trump lawsuit, “the most trusted name in news” no longer seeks to hide its true nature from its viewers.

by CARSON HOLLOWAY

December 20, 2022, 10:13 PM

SPECTATOR A.M.

Cocaine Mitch Makes It Rain on Ukraine by DANIEL J. FLYNN

by R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

Recently, CNN filed its response to former President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit. It is not surprising that CNN’s attorneys seem to have the stronger legal argument. After all, the controlling precedents make it notoriously difficult for a public figure to prevail in a defamation action. It is surprising, however, and more than a little revealing, that CNN’s filing nevertheless tends to support the political complaint that animates Trump’s suit: namely, that CNN, contrary to its branding, is not exactly a beacon of journalistic objectivity and honesty.

Before coming to his specific defamation claims, Trump’s own submission sets the stage by claiming that CNN has a history of smearing him in order to advance its own anti-Trump political agenda. Thus, for example, Trump alleges that CNN broadcast an interview with a psychiatrist, Allen Frances, who stated — outlandishly — that “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.” On another occasion, Trump claims, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Linda Ronstadt — yes, that Linda Ronstadt, the pop singer — about her views on Trump’s similarities to Hitler. Finally, Trump asserts that a CNN producer — filmed undercover by Project Veritas — admitted that the network’s coverage of Trump’s presidency was a kind of “propaganda” designed to get him “out” of office.

CNN does not even deny Trump’s general complaint that its negative coverage of him is motivated by political animus.

Given how damaging these claims would be to the reputation of a serious news network, you might expect CNN to launch a defamation suit of its own against Trump. CNN has not done so, however, and does not even dispute these claims — no doubt for the simple reason that they are all absolutely true and easily verifiable. CNN’s legal filing thus tacitly admits that these ridiculous and humiliating examples are accurate descriptions of the network that bills itself as “the most trusted name in news.”

Indeed, CNN does not even deny Trump’s general complaint that its negative coverage of him is motivated by political animus. It merely notes that, under the prevailing legal standards, evidence of political animus is not sufficient to establish the “actual malice” necessary for a public figure to win a defamation case. “Actual malice” is a legal term of art. It means that the person or entity being accused of defamation made defamatory claims knowing that they were false, or with reckless disregard for whether they were true. CNN’s lawyers are no doubt correct that political animus does not establish actual malice. But it would also be nice if “the most trusted name in news” could credibly deny that its reporting is motivated and shaped by political animus. Alas, it cannot do so.

Trump’s specific defamation claims center on CNN’s repeated use of the term “Big Lie” to characterize Trump’s complaints about the 2020 election. According to Trump, this term is deliberately deployed by CNN to link him to the propaganda techniques of the Nazi Party and thus to discredit him in the eyes of CNN viewers. Trump cites several instances of this characterization, including the assertion by a news anchor (not an opinion commentator) that Trump went to Arizona in 2020 to “disenfranchise the state’s voters based on all of his deranged election lies.”

Here again, CNN’s response is legally sound but politically damaging. Its filing correctly observes that defamation must be based on a statement of fact that is verifiably false. But CNN says that its endless claims that Trump is propagating a “Big Lie” are not intended to be factual assertions. What are they, then? According to CNN, they fit into a variety of categories that American courts have held are privileged expression that cannot be subject to a defamation action. They are “pure opinion,” “rhetorical hyperbole,” “exaggeration,” and “political invective” that are “used for dramatic effect.” All perfectly legal, but not what you would expect from a “news” organization that aims to inform its viewers and facilitate sober public deliberation.

READ MORE from Carson Holloway: Trump’s CNN Lawsuit Shows Freedom of Press Does Not Include Right to Libel

Along the way, CNN notes that courts have treated as protected speech terms that are even more loaded and derogatory than the “Big Lie” — terms such as “fascist,” “Neo-Nazi,” and “racist.” CNN even quotes from one ruling that held that “the term ‘racist’ is hurled about so indiscriminately that it is no more than a verbal slap in the face.” Anyone who follows the news knows that CNN — like so many outlets of the “mainstream media” — is more than willing to use the term “racist” to describe people it views as politically undesirable. On the air, such accusations are always presented seriously, as if they capture some important and alarming reality. But in court, CNN admits that when it calls people “racist,” it may not be saying anything factual about them at all. It may just be heaping abuse on them for political reasons.

CNN’s legal filing is an able defense by its lawyers against the claim that the network defamed Donald Trump in a legally actionable way. But that filing is at the same time a tacit plea of guilty to Trump’s political complaint: that CNN is as much a propaganda operation as it is a news organization. All citizens should be aware of this and take CNN’s news coverage with the appropriate grain — or ton — of salt.

Carson Holloway is Washington Fellow in the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

Which Is America’s Greater Danger….the FBI OR A FATHER AND SON?

Latest ‘Twitter Files’ Bombshell Shows FBI Neck-Deep In Russian Disinformation Lie To Kill Hunter Biden Laptop Story

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND at the Federalist:

DECEMBER 20, 2022

New materials released Monday as part of the ‘Twitter Files’ suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

The night before the New York Post published emails recovered from an abandoned Hunter Biden laptop that established Joe Biden’s connections with his son’s business dealings, the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive.

While those documents and others remain cloistered at Twitter headquarters — likely because they are designated as classified — additional materials released Monday as part of the “Twitter Files,” part seven, suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The Latest

“Heads up,” FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan opened an Oct. 13, 2020 late-evening email to Yoel Roth, the then-head of site integrity for Twitter. Chan’s email alerted him to a “Teleporter link” that would allow Roth to download 10 documents. “It is not spam!” Chan stressed, asking Roth to confirm receipt of the link. Two minutes later, at 6:24 p.m., California time, Roth acknowledged he had received the message and downloaded the files.

Chan’s Oct. 13, 2020, email was one of several internal communications published Monday by Michael Shellenberger in his thread on part seven of the “Twitter Files.” While the email contained no further details about the content of the 10 documents provided to the top Twitter executive, that Chan sent the email the evening before the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop hit and mere hours after a lawyer for the Biden son had contacted John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had abandoned his laptop, proves suggestive.

That the email came after normal business hours, via the private one-way communications channel used by the FBI, and included an alert to Roth to watch for the communication all also indicate that the message and the attached 10 documents concerned a matter of urgency. And what could be more urgent than the laptop October surprise?

By 9-something in the morning of Oct. 14, 2020, Jim Baker, the now-former deputy general counsel of Twitter, had already “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails,” as he told Roth and 11 other colleagues in an email. “The formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications,” Baker explained. Another email also showed Baker had arranged a phone conversation with Matthew Perry in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel for that same day.

For his part, by 10:00 a.m., Roth wrote some 15-plus colleagues that they had decided to block the Post’s Hunter Biden story as hacked material, explaining that a “key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak that learned from the 2016 Wikileaks approach and our policy changes.”

“The suggestion from experts — which rings true,” Roth continued, “is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware (and was coincidentally reviewed in a very invasive way by someone who coincidentally then handed the materials to Rudy Giuliani).” 

Those “reliable cybersecurity folks” and “experts monitoring election security and disinformation,” of which Baker and Roth spoke, might not have been connected to the FBI, or the documents Chan sent the prior evening. But if they are, which seems possible — if not likely — the evidence implicating the FBI in lying to interfere in the 2020 election just multiplied exponentially.

Prior to Monday’s “Twitter Files” dump, Roth acknowledged in a statement to the Federal Election Commission that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said. Roth further explained that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg likewise confirmed during an interview with Joe Rogan that the tech giant’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story stemmed from the FBI basically telling his team, “Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert.” “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” Zuckerberg recalled the FBI warning his tech company, adding that the agency told them, “We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”

“So, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020,” Zuckerberg noted, “Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”

Of course, the Hunter Biden laptop story was not false and was not part of a “hack-and-leak” operation, and the FBI knew it, having seized the laptop from Mac Isaac in December of 2019. Thus, these statements from Roth and Zuckerberg establish the FBI lied to the tech giants, prompting them to censor the New York Post’s reporting and thereby interfere in the election.

Roth and Zuckerberg’s statements should be enough to cement the FBI’s peddling of false intel to interfere in a presidential election as one of our nation’s worst political scandals. But if the FBI’s Oct. 13, 2020 Teleporter message and documents provide further concrete evidence that the FBI fed Twitter the opinion of supposed experts that the laptop was hacked or fake, it will be difficult for even the propaganda press to keep ignoring the story.

It’s Classified

Unfortunately, Shellenberger references neither the underlying Teleporter message from Oct. 13, 2020, nor the content of the 10 documents. Matt Taibbi — who in his coverage of part six of the “Twitter Files” on Friday also referenced a Chan email from Oct. 16, 2020, directing two high-level Twitter executives to monitor their Teleporter messages for two important documents — likewise did not make any mention of the content of the Teleporter message or the two important documents attached. Why is that?

Another email released in Shellenberger’s thread on Monday provides a clue. 

On July 15, 2020, Chan wrote to Roth and another individual at Twitter whose identity was redacted. In that email, Chan proposed “30 days out from the election,” providing Twitter temporary clearances, with Roth and his colleague picking who would receive clearances. And by Sept. 15, 2020, the FBI was adamant that “no impediments to information sharing exist,” including of classified information. 

Given that Taibbi and Shellenberger make no mention of the content of the Teleporter messages and attachments, and given that Teleporter served as a one-way communications system from the FBI, it seems likely the FBI used Teleporter to transmit classified materials to the select Twitter employees provided temporary security clearance. That possibility would also account for the cryptic way Baker and Roth describe the supposed experts’ view of the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop to other Twitter employees who likely lacked clearance. 

So, once again, it appears the FBI will hide behind classification markings, just as it did to mask its malfeasance in obtaining four FISA surveillance warrants for Carter Page. But Republicans now hold the majority in the House, meaning there is a chance for the country to learn what Elon Musk can’t tell us. 

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

“We can prove that someone hacked the election, and no Court seems interested”.

December 21, 2022

In Elections, It’s Not The Votes That Count, It’s The Ballots That Count

By Ted Noel at American Thinker:

Politics may be a blood sport, but frankly, when the stupid party (Republicans) insists on “issues,” the evil party (Democrats) quietly laughs. When you’re at war, you must overwhelm the enemy, and that’s what Dems do. With ballots, not votes. Ballots are the lifeblood of politics, while graft is the mother’s milk. Get enough ballots, and you win. It’s just that simple. Until the Republican Party understands this, it will always lose, and America can’t survive much more losing.

Mail in ballots. In-person early vote ballots. Election Day in-person ballots. Ballots that arrive days after the election is “over.” Those are what get counted, and that’s not what should be counted. The audit of the Maricopa County election in 2020 recounted all those ballots, and came up with…

Bupkis. The machines did a good job of counting ballots. They couldn’t identify bad ballots because that’s not what they’re built to do. Is the problem that Republicans have “bad candidates?” That’s what Cocaine Mitch says. But he’s mostly wrong.

Theories about machine errors are a lost cause. We can prove that someone hacked the election, and no Court seems interested. As Ben Franklin supposedly said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Or in legal terms, we are better off preventing a legal conflict than trying to resolve one in court.

Republicans try to get voters to the polls, while Democrats really don’t care about voters. (You can take that any way you like, and you’d be correct.) They want to get ballots to the polls. Which again proves that Democrats are the evil party while Republicans are the stupid party. You don’t fix food poisoning after you’re sick. You use good food and cook it properly. The same applies to elections. Therefore, we must start with a definition that Trump attorney Jenna Ellis thought was actually important.

“An election is the counting of preferences expressed by eligible, properly registered voters in the time place and manner prescribed by the legislature.”

The first step must be to clean the voter rolls. One tool is databases that list change-of-address, utility service, driver’s license changes, and so on. Unfortunately, there’s a delay between those events and the time the information shows up. If you want to look a year later, you may get good data, but the election is long past. You can’t mount a defense after the enemy has already overrun your position.

Image: Stacks of ballots in 2016 all addressed to people living in one elderly person’s apartment.

One method was used in Wisconsin. Using those databases—again less than timely, but working long before ballots are mailed—they identified 12,555 vacant addresses with registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Another 29,000 were in the NCOA database. Another 22,500 address errors were found. That’s about 60,000 excess voters in just two counties. Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by 20,682 “votes”—about one-third of just these excess “voters.” Curiously, after these counties were cleaned up, Republican Ron Johnson was re-elected by 26,718 votes. Did the Dems lose the ammunition they needed to win that battle?

This problem is widespread. Judicial Watch has identified 353 US counties with more registered voters than voting-age adults. Los Angeles County has 12% more voters than adult citizens. California has 101% of its adults registered. Judicial Watch had to sue to get the rolls cleaned up.

Typical voter registration is about 75% of eligible adults, and about 60-70% of them actually vote in a general election. With 30 million adults in California, these numbers indicate almost ten million excess ballots floating around. There’s no surprise that Democrats win most elections there. The real surprise is that Republicans win any.

There are simple techniques to pare down the number of phony ballots available. Ground-level surveys can identify non-residential locations where “voters” are registered. Many of these empty lots and businesses actually voted early and often.

Cutting out these fraudulent ballots would reduce the amount of ammunition available for the Dems to steal elections. But there’s more. We Are Speech has done yeoman research on high tech fraud methods. In one county, just before time to mail ballots out, zip codes for 31,500 voters were changed in the voter database. Voters still got all of their other mail but not their ballots. A couple of days later, all the zips zipped back to their original number.

In theory, an undeliverable ballot should be returned to the elections office unopened. But are we stupid enough to believe that that’s what really happens? Perhaps Democrats had a crew ready before making that zip code switch?

Someone at the local post office for that incorrect zip code was expecting those undeliverable ballots. Maybe, instead of returning them to the voting office as undeliverable, they got put in a box that was picked up and taken to a Democrat party office. Then, suppose that each of them was opened, “voted,” and posted back to the elections office. Presto! Thousands of new Democrat votes appear, and no one knows because the same guy who switched the zip codes switched them back the day after the ballots were mailed out. No one was the wiser, and there were no breadcrumbs to follow to find the fraud. Every ballot was “from” a voter on the rolls.

It might be the perfect crime, but We Are Speech has people smart enough to look in the right places at the right time. It’s quite simple to use computers to compare yesterday’s database with today’s, looking for changes. This sort of wholesale change is easy to spot, but you must be willing to look. The RNC hasn’t bothered to look, and that’s criminally negligent. When you compare the millions being spent on advertising, the cost of buying the database every day is chump change. And the Dems are doing it to make sure that they get every available ballot and every Dem voter on their side.

As you can now see, the fix is fairly simple. First, fire Ronna McDaniel. Either Mike Lindell or Harmeet Dillon would immediately start the intervention. Daily database comparisons would uncover this fraud almost everywhere, and local officials would start to see their malfeasance presented in court. The data is incontrovertible, and the scam would dry up as fraudsters find their address changing to the crossbar hotel.

You don’t win a war on the front lines. You win it by wiping out the enemy’s supply lines. Ukraine has prevailed so far by being able to strike Russian supply depots, preventing its soldiers from having adequate fuel, food, and munitions. We won World War II by obliterating Germany’s industrial base with the Eighth Air Force. In the Pacific, our submarines strangled Japan by sinking oil tankers.

In elections, we must wipe out the Democrat supply of loose ballots so that the polls only record legitimate votes. If this happens, there will be a lot of surprise Republican wins, because Democrats won’t be able to dump enough extra ballots to overwhelm legitimate votes. This process should begin immediately with the Republican National Committee. Other organizations such as True the Vote will assist. Ideally, the Secretary of State for every state will begin doing this as a function of proper state oversight. The SoS won’t even need legislation. He (or she) can “Just Do It!”

Every time the Dems invent a new scam, we need to identify it soonest. Then we need to employ countermeasures just as quickly. We must win this war by starving the enemy. And make no mistake, the Democrat party is our enemy, not our opponent. They want to destroy us and America. It’s time to stop being the stupid party.

Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.

IS AMERICA’S GREATEST ENEMY A INSIDER GOPer?

GOP Can’t Be Successful Until Mitch McConnell Is Gone

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

Comments Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made on Tuesday show why he has become the single biggest obstacle to GOP success.

The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.

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The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.

A large coalition of conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute, publicly opposed ramming through more Ukraine support during the lame-duck session before Republicans take over control of the House on Jan. 3, 2023. Strong pluralities and majorities of Republicans have told pollsters they want decreases, not increases, in foreign spending and global military involvement.

Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim. It ranked higher as a priority before American taxpayers gave Ukraine more than was given to their war effort by nearly every other country in the world combined. But even at the height of support for the effort, before it turned into a massive proxy war with an unclear relationship to the U.S. national interest, it was not the top issue for Republicans, coming behind the economy and the U.S. border.

A majority of Americans polled a few months ago said more money should be given to Ukraine only after wealthy European countries match what Americans have already sent — something nowhere near happening.

Republicans care deeply about borders and national sovereignty, but they rank the protection of their own open border far above the protection of the borders of other countries. It is worth remembering that the longest government shutdown in U.S. history occurred in 2019 over a fight between Congress and President Donald Trump over whether to commit a relatively paltry $5 billion to protect our country’s southern border, which Congress had refused to fund.

About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package

Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.

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The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.

Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.

The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.

It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.

Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals

What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.

It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.

McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.

However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.

The politically toxic McConnell has continuously ranked as the country’s least popular politician, well behind Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is so disliked by Americans that he is underwater by an average of 35.3 points in polls gauging his favorability.

Unfortunately for Republicans, he has been the top elected Republican in the country for the last two years, a period marked mostly by inexcusable impotence, fecklessness, and muddled messaging from the GOP.

Rather than present a coherent and persuasive vision of what Republican control of the Senate might look like, or even demonstrating consistent opposition to Democrat policies, too often McConnell overtly or covertly helped Democrats pass their signature policy goals. He had his deputy Sen. John Cornyn negotiate a bill to restrict Second Amendment rights. He notoriously and embarrassingly caved on a promise to help Democrats get huge numbers to pass their CHIPS subsidy, giving Biden a huge win he could celebrate with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo two weeks before the midterm elections.

McConnell also famously trashed Republican candidates and the voters who selected them, refused to advocate strenuously for the candidates, and failed to develop or pursue a persuasive message to Americans for voting to give Republicans control of the Senate.

When Democrats poured $75 million — not even counting the outside spending — into defending Mark Kelly’s Senate seat in Arizona, McConnell left Republican challenger Blake Masters high and dry. Masters had only $9 million. Instead, McConnell interfered in Alaska’s Senate race even though the top two contenders were both Republican. He gave his valuable cash to weak Republican Lisa Murkowski, the candidate who did not even win the Alaska Republican Party’s endorsement! Murkowski is known for not voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, among other notable decisions.

After the disappointing midterm loss, McConnell blamed others. He also allowed a dozen Republican senators to vote for a bill that would enable assaults on Republican voters who, on religious grounds, oppose redefining marriage.

So long as Mitch McConnell is the top elected Republican in D.C., eagerly trashing Republican voters, vociferously advocating for Democrat policy goals, pushing $1.7 trillion Democrat spending packages, and weakly fighting for whatever Republican goals he can be bothered to pursue, Republicans have a major problem. This is beyond obvious.

Everyone outside D.C. knows this even if few inside D.C. are willing to acknowledge it. Until they do, the Republican Party will continue to suffer.

“YES, INDEED THESE CROOKS ARE DIPPED!”

Are FBI And CIA Agents ‘Sheep Dipped’ At Twitter And Other Tech Companies?

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY at the Federalist:

DECEMBER 20, 2022

That so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech should be a national scandal.

MARK HEMINGWAY

According to the latest drop of “Twitter Files” from Michael Shellenberger, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” It appears that Twitter still has 14 employees on the payroll who worked at the FBI and CIA.

The problem isn’t just confined to Twitter. My colleague and Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten recently wrote an article for the New York Post, “Inside revolving door between Democrat Deep State and Big Tech.”

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In addition to covering what was happening at Twitter, Weingarten details a broader number of suspicious links between Silicon Valley and U.S. intelligence agencies. Given the near-constant string of deep-state scandals and social media censorship we’ve endured in recent years, a big question we should all be trying to answer right now is, “What exactly are all these spooks doing at tech companies?”

So far, the answer appears to be: “They’re almost certainly up to no good.” After the first batch of “Twitter Files” dropped, it was revealed that Elon Musk fired Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker. Prior to going to work at Twitter, Baker was a top lawyer at the FBI from 2014 to 2017. In that capacity, he played a significant role in shepherding FBI’s baseless and illegal Russiagate investigation.

In fact, it’s probably safe to assume one of the reasons Baker exited the FBI was to dodge any accountability for the FBI’s reckless and politically motivated attempt to investigate the president of the United States. Twitter was a pretty soft landing.

Or at least it was, until it was revealed that Baker, who was still employed at Twitter as of a few weeks ago, got fired after he intercepted the internal company communications Musk was giving to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to expose the censorship and misdeeds of the company’s previous management. Nobody has quite figured out what he was doing, but there’s widespread speculation Baker may have removed Twitter communications with the FBI or other damning info before it could become public.

Yes, large global corporations need high-level, discreet corporate security, and potentially for benign purposes the particular skillsets that former law enforcement and intelligence personnel provide. However, the situation with Baker makes the problem plenty obvious. If you’re inclined to automatically trust the professionalism and integrity of the FBI and CIA, please have your head examined.

I want to know how many of these FBI and CIA agents are “sheep dipped.” In the intelligence world, “sheep dipping” is a term of art. It describes a tactic whereby a member of the military is “officially discharged from service” to do covert work. In secret, they are still eligible for rank promotions and military benefits.

I first learned the term from my father, because he was “sheep dipped.” He worked for the CIA in Laos in the early 1960s lead-up to the Vietnam War. He was a young Marine officer. During his year in Laos, his normal service records were replaced with records saying he was separated from the Marine Corps, to allow the government to deny any responsibility if anything happened to him. When he returned from Laos, they swapped out the files saying he’d left the Marine Corps with his regular service record, all as if nothing unusual had happened.

Suffice it to say, during this episode, dad witnessed the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling and other unsavory behavior. The whole episode left a very bad taste in his mouth.

Fun fact I learned earlier this year: The man in charge of CIA operations in Laos when my father was there was the legendary spymaster Ray Cline. One Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory relates that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was still serving in the Marines when he briefly defected to the Soviet Union, didn’t really defect. He was sheep dipped and working for the CIA on an intelligence-gathering mission inside the Soviet Union.

The whole crazy escapade, according to the tale, was possibly organized by Cline, the local CIA station chief at the same time and place as one of Oswald’s previous overseas deployments. For what it’s worth, Cline also happens to be the former father-in-law of Stefan Halper, the dubious paid informant who was the FBI’s source for much of their bogus Trump-Russia investigation.

In case, you’re keeping track, why yes, I did just draw a line, albeit not a particularly straight one, that connects the Kennedy assassination and the Russiagate scandal. (It would have been too digressive to mention Cline and Halper’s connections to Watergate and Iran Contra, but I think you get the drift.)

Now, as clarification, I should say that “sheep dipping” seems to apply mostly to the intel community’s use of military personnel and isn’t necessarily an all-purpose phrase for CIA or FBI undercover work. One of the most annoying things about being subjected to years of completely credulous Russiagate and Steele dossier coverage was every pundit suddenly becoming an armchair expert on espionage and throwing around phrases such as “SIGINT” when we all know they just learned what signals intelligence was 15 minutes ago.

But the point here isn’t to offer up conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination. It’s to make the point that one reason conspiracy theories are so easy to believe is that it’s well-known the Deep-State Industrial Complex employs a lot of tactics such as sheep dipping that are expressly about manipulation and deception.

Combined with so many official denials over the years that turned out to be lies, this makes it impossible to believe intel agencies when they say they aren’t doing something. It was very much denied that American soldiers were in Southeast Asia when my dad was in the jungle learning how to eat soup with chopsticks. More recently, we have very dishonest denials about domestic spying by Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper that in a just society should have led to criminal charges.

The FBI response to “Twitter Files” revelations that they were working behind the scenes with the social media network and encouraging censorship is about the furthest thing from reassuring. “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” an FBI spokesman told journalist Jon Nicosia. “Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

Based on what we know, there’s absolutely no reason not to assume that, of the numerous former FBI and CIA employees at Twitter, some weren’t either informally or directly working for intel agencies. Further, it is incredibly alarming that the watchdogs that are supposed to protect us from rogue government agencies eroding our rights can’t be bothered to investigate this.

For most of my life, the corporate media, and the activist left in particular, treated these agencies with extreme skepticism. Revelations such as these would formerly have set off klaxons in newsrooms.

But now? “People’s brains are so drowning in partisan muck that the Bernie/AOC left — which still pretends to find the CIA and FBI nefarious if you force them to take a stance — refuses to care about the grave dangers in what [Matt Taibbi] reported about FBI’s role [at Twitter],” says Glenn Greenwald. Worse, Greenwald observes that their shared partisan obsessions mean that the left has completely surrendered to the corporatist imperatives of liberal institutions such as the media. “The only real enemies they see are the Trump movement and GOP. That’s why I use ‘left-liberal’: their core worldviews have merged,” he further observes.

With the exception of an under-resourced conservative media and a few independent lefty journalists such as Taibbi and Greenwald — who have dared to stay true to ideals that most of the journalists now trying to discredit them claimed to hold six years ago — no one is interested in solid evidence suggesting intel agencies have been secretly curbing Americans’ First Amendment rights, and possibly doing so to explicitly influence elections.

The fact that so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech, even when the evidence is staring them in the face, should be a national scandal. Americans deserve to know the truth about whether our intel agencies are being used against citizens. We should be concerned that the full extent of what they’ve done — and what they likely continue to do — to us will never be known.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

“Without disease or disaster, and despite the declared end of the pandemic, these altered voting practices have all continued by judicial fiat”.

December 20, 2022

Not Your Grandfather’s Election Day

By Rick Fuentes at American Thinker:

Republicans are still recovering from the midterms hangover after suffering a stiff dose of how probabilistic mathematics, statistics, blood-red election maps, armchair predictions, and century-long historical trends are collectively no match for the underhanded ground game of one’s opponent.  Giddy Democrats have again put one over on the American people, somehow dodging retribution for a miserable economy and two years of demonizing half the electorate.

Even with majorities in both houses, the Dems faced stiff political and public resistance in their failure to pass H.R. 1, For the Peoples Act, a misnamed Democrat effort to federalize state elections.  Undeterred, state Democrat parties have teamed up with Democrat national campaigns to achieve a permanent, quasi-legal destruction of the election process and institutionalized fraud through the pursuit of early mail-in voting and extended ballot deadlines in states that prohibit or curtail these practices.  This campaign is virtue-signaled through baseless and easily refuted claims of voter suppression, racism, and vintage pandemic concerns.  Nonetheless, aggressive Democrat state court challenges have been effective, bringing us to witness the last vestiges of Election Day, a 250-year old lesson in democracy that has surrendered to a prolonged bout of ballot collection and counting that predominantly gifts high office and power to Democrats.

The Cook Political Report, priding itself on a nonpartisan analysis of elections, pointed out that the 2022 Republican midterm turnout outnumbered Democrats and put five percentage points more votes on the scoreboard.  They reasoned that such a numerical advantage had the probability of creating a twenty to thirty seat majority in the House.  Instead, the GOP lost seats in congressional races while down-ballot Republican candidates were victorious.  Cook analysts reasoned that “clearly something or someone intervened, affecting the outcome of the election in the places that mattered.” At a loss for an explanation, the report took the popular default of blaming Donald J. Trump and his supporters as a greater perceived threat to voters than the policies and actions of an administration destroying America in plain view.

In 2020, the onset of COVID upended state voting procedures.  Blue state governors tested the limits of constitutionally corrosive regulatory powers and the shift in election protocols and practices was tectonic.  In-person voting was discouraged, as polling centers were seen as super-spreaders.  Online voting registration was sold as the only healthy alternative to a fearful electorate.  Vintage, inaccurate voter registration rolls were resurrected to send unrequested ballots to every voter.  Polling locations were opened to in-person voting weeks before Election Day.  Rogue Democrat secretaries of state changed state law without legislative approval, blessing late counts for ballots arriving days or weeks after Election Day.  Mailed-in ballots went from thousands to millions, with little scalability on the part of county and state election officials to handle that capacity or to guarantee proper chain of custody.  Extended ballot deadlines made Election Day results irrelevant and consistently put more and more votes on the Democrat scoreboard.  As the dust settled on the 2020 presidential election, Democrat power brokers realized that a litigious assault on state voting practices had given them a playbook to win future elections, even when running unpopular candidates in predominantly red states.

Without disease or disaster, and despite the declared end of the pandemic, these altered voting practices have all continued by judicial fiat.  Resting their legal arguments on straw groups of victims — racial minorities, the elderly, disabled, or indigent — Democrat coalitions funded by liberal individuals and philanthropies, to include George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Democracy Fund, Open Society, Tides Foundation, and the Arnold and Hewlett foundations, sought relief from traditional voting practices in red and purple states.  In all, 160 voting rights cases were on the dockets before the 2020 election, with the ACLU filing twenty lawsuits in sixteen states expanding mail-in voting.

Court decisions sanctioned the very practices known to breed fraud, preventing voter identification, witness requirements on absentee ballots and signature matching, and allowing weeks of early, mail-in voting, curbside and drive-up voting, the use of inaccurate voter registration lists, ballot harvesting, and the acceptance and counting of ballots beyond Election Day.

Republican candidates and campaigns found themselves consistently on defense as the Democrat machine invested tens of millions to push progressive state ballot initiatives, such as ranked-choice voting, that overhauled the election laws in majority Republican states.  Republicans filed eighty-two challenges to the 2020 presidential election, to no effect on the outcome.  In 2022, Democrat midterm efforts to quell resistance to election outcomes became more malicious, with ethical complaints against Republican lawyers threatening their disbarment and partisan judges censuring attempts at election audits.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, if the 2020 general election didn’t exactly repeat itself in the 2022 midterms, it certainly rhymed.  Two general election cycles have since proven the effectiveness of Democrat legal efforts to revolutionize or replace state voting practices in order to expand the collection, dumping, and counting of ballots.  Meanwhile, Republican party strategy is still stuck on pushing Election Day turnouts while shoo-in Republican candidates with double-digit leads watched their in-person voters fall prey to power outages, water main breaks, voting machine crashes, and printers with no ink.

Because of their nascent influence in state elections, Democrats are now convinced that they can impose an unpopular economic and social justice agenda upon an unwilling citizenry without suffering consequences at the polls.  Despite the loss of the lower chamber, Biden has treated the midterms as a public endorsement of his party and policies.  At the recent COP27 United Nations summit in Egypt, he promised more “transformational changes” to America.  Republican bigwigs seem eager to help.  Rather than put the road to fiscal recovery in the hands of an incoming Republican House, Mitch McConnell is standing with Democrats to pass a lame duck trillion-plus Omnibus Bill with more pork than a slaughterhouse that will gut the power of the 118^th Congress to rein in federal spending.  

For well over two centuries, voting has required a certain desire and effort on the part of the citizen to participate, whether in person or through application for an absentee ballot.  Voting was carried out on Election Day as a right, not a mandate wherein, lacking the justification of natural disaster or disease, every registered voter had to be sent an unsolicited ballot.  In assigning governance, the Constitution did not guarantee the right to early voting by ballot, nor were state governors given the power of deciding when and how voting occurs.

In a blitz of pre-election lawsuits, it has taken the Democrat Party just two years to fundamentally transform the election process in America, with the prospect of recurring rigged elections.  There may come a breaking point when Americans will rise up against the loss of their voting rights, but that may not transpire before Democrats complete the metamorphosis of America into a utopia of corporate megadonors propping up a morbidly obese socialist government to meet the third-world needs of a single welfare class.  Our forebears would not willingly have gone to war in defense of such a society.

TRUST HAS BEEN DESTROYED!

DECEMBER 20, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

SORRY ABOUT THOSE JOBS

Joe Biden’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that over a million jobs were created in the second quarter, a heartening statistic that no doubt helped the Democrats in November. But now, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve says that those million jobs were almost entirely fictitious:

The Biden administration vastly overstated its estimate that employers created more than 1 million jobs in the second quarter of this year, claiming historic job growth when in fact hiring had stalled, according to a new estimate.

Job growth was “essentially flat” in the second quarter with only 10,500 jobs added, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said.

Could the Bureau of Labor Statistics be a politicized agency, faking numbers to help the Democratic Party? Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have believed it, but given what we know about the FBI and the CIA, it is easy to believe that the BLS, which I suspect is staffed overwhelmingly by Democrats, may be corruptible. Republicans are not amused by today’s news:

Republicans are accusing the administration of lying about the employment data in an election year and are demanding answers.
***
Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida called the development “outrageous.”

“Wrong by a million jobs,” Mr. Scott tweeted Friday. “@JoeBiden’s admin has been lying to the American people about our economy to prop up his failed agenda & I won’t stand for it. I’m requesting an immediate meeting with the head of @BLS_gov. WE NEED ANSWERS NOW!”

President Biden had boasted about the second-quarter job numbers in the heat of the midterm election campaign, using the BLS report as proof that the nation wasn’t headed for a recession.

“In the second quarter of this year, we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic,” Mr. Biden said on July 8.

One of the problems with perverting the federal bureaucracy, as the Democrats have done, is that pretty much everyone loses faith in the integrity of government. At this point, there is no reason to assume that government numbers are accurate and unfudged. We have been lied to, too many times.

It is sad, but that is where we find ourselves. Trust has been destroyed.