President Trump pulled no punches about the latest revelations concerning Obama administration associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr.
Trump in an August 12 tweet quoted Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA 49th District) assertion that there is strong evidence of a Department of Justice plot to keep him out of the White House:
“Seems like the Department of Justice (and FBI) had a program to keep Donald Trump from becoming President”. @DarrellIssa @foxandfriends If this had happened to the other side, everybody involved would be in jail. This is a Media coverup of the biggest story of our time.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2018
Issa, appearing on the Fox News program, “Fox & Friends,” said of Ohr:
“What we want to know is, how could somebody, any attorney but particularly a high-ranking deputy in the Department of Justice, how could they ethically not disclose these conflicts and contacts. You know, the word bias gets thrown around all the time, so let’s move past the question of can you prove bias. Can you prove unethical behavior? On its face, that’s what we have.
“Failure to disclose, contacts that shouldn’t have happened, his own conflict because of his wife. But clearly, these contexts that make it seem like the Department of Justice had a program designed to keep Donald Trump from becoming president.”
Just one day earlier, Trump had tweeted:
The big story that the Fake News Media refuses to report is lowlife Christopher Steele’s many meetings with Deputy A.G. Bruce Ohr and his beautiful wife, Nelly. It was Fusion GPS that hired Steele to write the phony & discredited Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary & the DNC….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 11, 2018
Improper contacts
Ohr, the fourth-highest-ranked official in former president Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, met repeatedly with former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled the infamous Trump Dossier, which was produced by Fusion GPS.
Judicial Watch notes of Ohr:
The House Intelligence Committee memo released by Chairman Devin Nunes on February 2 says that [Ohr’s wife] Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump” and that Bruce Ohr passed the results of that research, which was paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign, to the FBI. The “salacious and unverified” dossier was used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrant to spy on [Trump adviser] Carter Page.
In other words, a high-ranking member of Democrat President Obama’s Justice Department was able to use material paid for by a Democratic presidential campaign to get the FBI to spy on the opposing Republican presidential campaign.
Bruce Ohr
Even after the FBI had determined that Steele’s dossier was most likely politically motivated and cut ties with him, Bruce Ohr continued to meet with the paid Clinton operative in his capacity as associate deputy attorney general.
Pushing a Hillary narrative at DOJ
Trump counsel Jay Sekulow said of the Ohr-Steele-Ohr entanglement:
“His wife happens to work for Fusion GPS, who happens to be retained to put together the dossier with Chris Steele. And Chris Steele happens to be talking to the FBI and to Bruce Ohr, the number four at the Justice Department. Christopher Steele gets fired for leaking information. Yet Bruce Ohr continues the ongoing dialogue.”
Former deputy assistant attorney general Robert Driscoll, appearing on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s program, said of this relationship:
“Some people, you know, maintain contact with colleagues even after they’re cut off or something like that, but where his wife had an interest in the Fusion GPS research getting pushed, the fact that Ohr is the one that was involved in this is a little bit disturbing.”
James Trusty, a former Justice Department prosecutor, appearing on the same program, was astonished by Ohr’s actions.
“I was with DOJ 17 years and seven in D.C. And I can’t for the life of me figure out any good explanation for why Bruce, who I know, was sitting down with a decommissioned informant. And then to add to that, that the FBI had people there writing up 302 reports,” Trusty said.
Revealing that “[t]he FBI recently turned over to us 70 pages of heavily redacted records about Christopher Steele,” Judicial Watch declared:
These newly released documents show the shady, cash-based relationship the Obama FBI had with… Steele. The anti-Trump Russia “investigation” had Christopher Steele at its center, and his misconduct was no impediment to using information from his Russia intelligence collaborators to spy on the Trump team. The corruption and abuse is astonishing.
Calling it collusion
Congressional investigators are preparing to give the Ohr revelations a much closer look.
The Hill reports House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte “is preparing subpoenas for Justice Department (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr, his wife Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, according to two congressional sources familiar with the matter.”
Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, appearing on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program, flat-out accused the Hillary Clinton campaign of working hand in glove with Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI against the Trump campaign.
“So here you have information [the Steele dossier] flowing from the Clinton campaign from the Russians, likely I believe was handed directly from Russian propaganda arms to the Clinton campaign, fed into the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice to open up a counter-intelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now colluded [with] nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years.”
In the latest display of “diversity” madness at our nation’s colleges, a Christian student group is suing the University of Iowa after it was kicked off campus by the school for requiring its leaders to actually be… Christian.
Nicole Russell, writing in The Washington Examiner, reports the university will not allow the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to hold meetings on campus because it requires its members to “hold to specific faith standards.”
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has stepped in to support InterVarsity, which had been on campus for 25 years, in its suit against the school.
Practice your religion our way
“Everyone is welcome to attend [InterVarsity meetings],” Becket’s Daniel Blomberg told OneNewsNow in an interview. “They just ask that if someone is going to lead the group that they believe in the God they’re praying to – [and] according to the University of Iowa, that’s now a step too far.”
The university kicked another Christian group off campus in 2017 for similar reasons. Business Leaders in Christ was barred from holding meetings on campus after a homosexual student who was seeking to be vice president of the group filed a complaint with the university saying he was denied the position “due to my being openly gay,” according to a lawsuit the Christian club filed against the school.
The Christian Post reports university dean of students Lyn Redington told the group it had to “revise” its religious beliefs and present an “acceptable plan” for picking leaders in order to be reinstated as an official group on campus.
“This is 2017, not 1984,” Jacob Estell, student president of Business Leaders in Christ, said in a statement, “Our beliefs weren’t made by us, and they can’t be changed by us either – certainly not just to satisfy Orwellian government rules.”
The group won a temporary injunction in its lawsuit in January but U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose said in her ruling this was only because the school did not apply its standards equally to all other student groups, Courthouse News Service reports.
The main contention by the University of Iowa that it had a right to kick a Christian group off campus for holding certain religious beliefs was not challenged by the court.
In fact, a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Christian Legal Society Chapter v. Martinez, specifically allows colleges to act in this reprehensible manner.
“It was a total bait and switch. They told our clients to clarify their beliefs [so that] they would be able to stay on campus,” Becket’s Eric Baxter, who served as the club’s lead counsel in its lawsuit, told The College Fix. “When our clients did that they were totally shocked and surprised a university would penalize them for their beliefs.”
One target only
A couple of points need to be made here.
First, the University of Iowa kicked Business Leaders of Christ off campus in 2017 while doing nothing to challenge the status of a Shia Muslim group that mandated that its members adhere to Shia Muslim beliefs.
“The Islamic organization Imam Mahdi reserves certain membership benefits, including leadership roles, to members who are Shia Muslims,” said the Business Leaders of Christ lawsuit. “The group also requires its leaders to ‘refrain from major sins (kaba’ir) and endeavor to avoid minor sins (saga’ir).'”
A months-long university investigation focused only on a Christian group resulting in its removal from campus and all the while a Muslim group was allowed to continue as an official school student group in good standing without having to bow before the school’s secular altar of “human rights.”
Clearly, the University of Iowa would have loved to stick to this blatantly hypocritical position if the judge did not bring up the equal-standards issue in her ruling.
But because she did, the school went on to decertify Imam Mahdi and 37 other student groups in order to meet the equal-application judicial ruling, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports.
This move freed the school up to kick InterVarsity off campus.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
Funding those who hate you
The second point to be stressed is that the University of Iowa is a state-sponsored university. It received $229.3 million in state funding for the 2018 budget year, according to the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
According to a Pew Research Center study, 77 percent of the residents of the state of Iowa are Christians.
Christian taxpayers are footing the bill for social-engineering academic tyrants to discriminate against their sons and daughters when they attend the University of Iowa. The school receives a large dose of federal funding as well, and a federal judge has ruled that the university has every right to kick a Christian group off campus for wanting to uphold Christian beliefs, just as long as it kicks everyone else out who opposes its “human rights” diktats as well.
There is so much that remains unknown about the Chinese spy who was employed on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s personal staff for 20 years. As details continue to emerge, one thing is certain: this sordid tale has serious implications for U.S. national security and congressional ethics.
The story first broke when Politico Magazine ran an article on spies in Silicon Valley by Zach Dorfman in which the reporter revealed the startling news that “[f]ormer intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics.”
The San Francisco Chronicle followed that up by reporting that Feinstein’s “driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying.”
“Besides driving her around when she was in California, the staffer also served as a gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator,” the Chronicle reported.
Plum target
Ben Weingarten, writing at The Federalist, reports “[a]n unnamed source added that a Chinese MSS [Ministry of State Security] official first approached the staffer during a visit to Asia several years prior. Given his proximity to Feinstein, we have no idea what information he could have gleaned in her employ.”
Weingarten also notes that “Feinstein’s account [of immediately removing the employee as soon as she was notified by the FBI] conflicts with what has been reported regarding the recruitment and activities of the Chinese spy. She conveniently omits that her office employed this individual for almost 20 years in a close capacity, while he represented the senator in interactions with Chinese officials.”
Paul Sperry, in the New York Post, writes that Feinstein was an “easy mark” for Chinese espionage agents:
In June 1996 – after the staffer [spy] had begun working for Feinstein – the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.
Despite this warning, Sperry notes that Feinstein accepted campaign contributions from “Chinese bagman” John Huang.
“After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang,” Sperry writes.
Lucrative dealings
A 1997 Los Angeles Times article is crucial in detailing just how cozy Feinstein had become with Chinese officials at the time.
The article details how Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum began investing in China with “one project worth less than $500,000” in 1992 before suddenly planning on investing $150 million two years later.
At the exact same moment that Blum’s Chinese investment began to skyrocket, “Feinstein’s role on U.S. policy toward China… expanded. In January 1995, she became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China’s trade privileges,” the Times reported.
The 1997 article also reveals that Feinstein made three visits “since 1995” to meet with senior Chinese officials, including President Jiang Zemin, bringing her husband along each time.
Fast-forward to today and Feinstein is the second-wealthiest sitting senator in Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of $94 million, with most of that coming from her husband’s investments.
40 years of close personal ties
A report in the Epoch Times lays out a dizzying array of close Feinstein ties with China dating back some 40 years, to when she was mayor of San Francisco.
Mayor Feinstein hosted future Chinese president Zemin at her home, Zachary Stieber at the Epoch Times reports, and “San Francisco and Shanghai have been sister cities for 38 years, after the agreement was put into place by Feinstein and Jiang, who was then Shanghai’s mayor.”
But that’s not all.
Stieber continues:
To help facilitate the relationship between the U.S. and China, Feinstein asked organizers of the city’s popular Chinese New Year Parade to stop displaying the flag of the Nationalist Chinese government, which ruled in exile in Taiwan after 1949.
Feinstein also defended China, despite its communist policies, insisting that it was merely “socialist.”
“There was originally this kind of anti-communist view of China,” Feinstein told the Washington Post. “That’s changing… China is a socialist country but one that is increasingly becoming capitalistic.”
Stieber also notes that “Feinstein has received awards and recognition from some groups for promoting U.S.-China ties, accepting the California-Asia Business Council’s New Silk Road award in 2005.”
President Jiang Zemin and Dianne Feinstein
Stieber quotes with devastating effect Ross Munro, co-author of “The Coming Conflict with China,” who said, “[t]here is no doubt in my mind that, if Dianne Feinstein had a pattern of taking positions on U.S.-China policy that Chinese officials disliked, Mr. Blum would have a great deal more difficulty doing business in China and probably would find it impossible to do.”
We have no real idea at this moment just how much damaging information Dianne Feinstein’s spy handed over to his Chinese paymasters over the course of 20 years of close proximity to her inner circle.
We do know for an incontrovertible fact that Feinstein is a powerful and hugely influential senator heavily involved in U.S. dealings with China, and that her and her husband are extremely wealthy today due to intimate business dealings with the Chinese transacted over the same time period she was supposed to be representing the United States and her constituents.
From the beginning, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III let special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutorial team on the Paul Manafort trial know that they were on a short leash.
Allowing the case to move forward on June 26, Judge Ellis sternly warned Mueller’s team:
“Although this case will continue, those involved should be sensitive to the danger unleashed when political disagreements are transformed into partisan prosecutions….
“To provide a special counsel with a large budget and to tell him or her to find crimes allows a special counsel to pursue his or her targets without the usual time and budget constraints facing ordinary prosecutors, encouraging substantial elements of the public to conclude that the special counsel is being deployed as a political weapon.”
Not stopping there, the judge got to the heart of the matter.
Judge Ellis
“Even a blind person can see that the true target of the Special Counsel’s investigation is President Trump, not defendant, and that defendant’s prosecution is part of that larger plan,” Judge Ellis wrote. “Although these kinds of high-pressure prosecutorial tactics are neither uncommon nor illegal, they are distasteful.”
The judge is ruining our prosecution
Judge Ellis has shown his frustration with the prosecutors on myriad occasions since then, and, on August 9, Mueller’s team finally had enough, filing a complaint claiming the judge had unfairly scolded them in front of the jury.
Liberal news site Politico’s take on the complaint may show just what Mueller’s team is really up to:
Taken on their own, the individual rebukes [by Judge Ellis] are relatively minor. But some legal experts say that, cumulatively, they could plant doubt in the mind of jurors about the strength of the prosecution’s case. Renato Mariotti, a prominent former federal prosecutor, tweeted Wednesday that Ellis has made “improper statements that have hurt the prosecution.”
Mariotti wasn’t the only critic of the judge.
“[T]he judge’s condescending attitude [could give] the jury the impression that the prosecution’s case is dubious,” Philip Lacovara, a former U.S. deputy solicitor general said.
Always a weak case – against its real target
Of course, the prosecution’s case has always been dubious – as it pertained to President Trump. Even the liberal New Yorker magazine acknowledged as much, with Adam Davidson writing that “[t]he idea that Manafort committed big crimes before he was in Trump’s orbit and minor ones around the time he joined the campaign has inspired some to wonder if Mueller is desperate, himself, grabbing a few lame charges because he can’t find anything more substantive.”
Davidson observes:
Manafort’s earlier schemes, the ones from before 2014, are fairly dramatic, involving tens of millions of dollars and apparently a brazen effort to avoid paying taxes. By contrast, his alleged crimes in 2016 are quite small, by international criminal standards. They amount to misleading a bank to squeeze a few hundred thousand more out of loans. This is not the sort of thing that normally gets prosecuted criminally, certainly not by a special counsel.
Indeed, Judge Ellis expressed limited patience with prosecutors on the 2016 loan inquiries on August 10. When prosecutors asked an official from Citizen’s Bank in New York about a Manafort loan application that was rejected, the judge snapped, “you might want to spend time on a loan that was granted.”
Operation Undermine
By attempting to position the judge in the case as biased, the Mueller team may be seeking an out from the inevitable cries to wrap up the Trump Russia probe that will ring loud if the jury’s verdict reveals yet another fizzle in attempts to sully Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
By setting up an appeal, perhaps Mueller is attempting to fulfill what has been his real mission all along: to keep this political sideshow going for as long as possible.
What if the Trump-Russia probe was not meant to ever reach definitive conclusions? What if it was meant to be one – a more prominent one, to be sure, but merely one – of a thousand pinpricks against the Trump administration, harassing and hopefully slowing its efforts to enact substantial change in Washington, D.C.?
In such an operation, the Mueller probe doesn’t have to discover anything – it merely needs to go on. And on.
And on.
Independent investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, in an op-ed in The Hill, astutely paints the scenario of entrenched D.C. Deep State figures aiming to use any weapon of obstruction they can to run out the clock on the Trump years before he can do any damage to their state within the state.
Attkisson writes:
Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
What exactly might an “insurance policy” against Donald Trump look like?
He would have to be marginalized at every turn. Strategies would encompass politics, the courts, opposition research and the media. He’d have to become mired in lawsuits, distracted by allegations, riddled with calls for impeachment, hounded by investigations. His election must be portrayed as the illegitimate result of a criminal or un-American conspiracy.
Attkisson notes the phrase “insurance policy” was used by anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok and by Brookings Institution Director Benjamin Wittes, who Attkisson reports is “a good friend of fired FBI Director James Comey.”
By appealing a squishy verdict and blaming it all on a “biased” judge, Mueller may be able to do the one thing his Deep State partners most desire: Keep the circus running.
In the latest sign that unhinged California should perhaps be unhinged from the continental U.S. and pushed out to sea, the West Hollywood City Council has voted unanimously to remove President Trump’s star at the town’s Walk of Fame.
“The West Hollywood City Council did not pass the resolution because Donald Trump is a conservative or a Republican,” West Hollywood Mayor Pro Tem John D’Amico said in a statement.
“Earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is an honor. When one belittles and attacks minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities or women — the honor no longer exists.”
Amid the stinging moral outrage, it goes without saying that these two stars continue to shine:
West Hollywood voted to remove Trump's Hollywood star citing his "treatment of illegal immigrants."
So they're more concerned with how Trump treats foreign people that enter the country illegally than our own Hollywood actors that have raped people?
When's their vote on these: pic.twitter.com/Cpee7k9Yt1
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) August 7, 2018
Alas, this latest act of blustering Hollywood hypocrisy is not the only lunacy abounding on our Left Coast these days.
Exit Cal, enter crazy
The vote to remove Trump’s star comes less than a week after Calexit co-founder Marcus Ruiz Evans told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that half of the state should be given to Native Americans after it secedes from the Union.
Uh… what?
Marcus Ruiz Evans
“Why not do something to right some of the wrongs of the past to the Native American people, and give them back their land?” Evans told a bemused Carlson.
“What’s gonna happen to the millions of people who live in this Indian country… who aren’t Indian?” Carlson asked.
“The primary Trump voters who live in that area will have to do what brown-skinned people tell them to do because brown-skinned people will be in charge. And if they don’t like that, they’re welcome to leave California,” Evans calmly replied.
The remarks echo those made by Calexit leader Shankar Singam on the same Fox program one year earlier. Singam told Carlson the exodus of fed-up middle-class residents from the Golden State was a “good thing” because it freed up space for the massive number of immigrants who have flooded into the state.
“We need to open up for the new wave of immigrants to come up,” Singam said.
Why this isn’t funny
It’s easy to laugh at these over-the-top remarks yet the replacement of the ordinary citizenry of California with a “wave” of immigrants, legal or otherwise, is indeed proceeding apace, with or without a Calexit. While liberals daydream about a brave new world of multicultural bliss to come, others see pending disaster.
Demographer Joel Kotkin, writing in City Journal, an urban policy publication of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, forecasts a future of sparse opportunity for minorities in the new California.
Kotkin, who regards himself as a “conservative Democrat,” notes that “[i]n the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.”
The exodus of the middle class that Singam is so happy about will provide no boost to blacks or Latinos, Kotkin writes:
Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market.
Joel Kotkin
The result will be anything but a rainbow paradise.
“California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities,” Kotkin concludes.
The ceaseless growth of increasingly dense urban areas filled with poorly skilled immigrants is not just a threat to “Trump voters” who may stay behind in the Shining New California. It’s a threat to those who would replace them as well.
Pepperdine University’s Carson Bruno observes that “while there is a narrative that the rich are fleeing California, the real flight is among the middle-class.”
Bruno says that as young, aspirational working professionals continue to flee the state, its demographics will skew “older and more retiree-centric.”
“And when coupled with the fact that immigrants – who are helping to drive population growth in California – tend to be, on average, less affluent and educated and also are more likely to need more social services, state, county, and municipal governments could find themselves under serious administrative and financial stress,” Bruno concludes.
Carson Bruno
Take away Trump’s Hollywood star to virtue signal wokeness for “immigrants” and other groups to be found within the leftist victimhood lexicon.
Celebrate the replacement of the working middle class.
The euphoria can be dizzying in the moment.
The crash comes later.
Recurring headlines since the election of President Trump in 2016 have tried to hammer the message home that a wall at the Mexican border would pose serious environmental concerns. Some recent offerings:
- “2,500 Scientists Warn Against the Border Wall’s Huge Environmental Cost,” is the title of an article at Inverse.com.
- “Stanford biologists discuss border barrier’s potential ecological damage,” reads another headline on Stanford University’s website.
- “Border wall would kill natural treasures and change the environment,” The Hill blared in April.
And there have been many more.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
The gist of these articles can be well represented by the purple prose to be found in the Inverse.com article, to wit:
In a move straight out of a science fiction horror film, the US government has ignored scientists concerned about the project’s immeasurable cost to the environment. It has revealed the bleakness in the hearts of some frustrated scientists, but it has also emboldened others to speak up in the name of the plants and animals who can’t speak for themselves.
Less, er, poetic, but just as alarmist is The Hill, declaring that “Wall-building also means consuming materials, deforestation, pollution, increased carbon emissions and noise that disturbs wildlife — all in a unique river ecosystem containing biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth.”
Illegal immigration is green nightmare
What is most galling about these spurious warnings of pending ecological disaster along the Mexican border is the long-standing overwhelming evidence that mass immigration has been an environmental disaster for the entire United States as a whole.
Let’s stay with the border area for a while. The anti-immigration group NumbersUSA reported in 2011 that in the areas heavily trafficked by illegal aliens entering the U.S. (quoting the article directly):
- An estimated more than 2,000 tons of trash is discarded annually in Arizona’s borderlands.
- In 2002 in southern Arizona, illegal aliens were suspected of having caused at least eight major wildfires that burned 68,413 acres (Illegal Immigrants Tied to Costly Wildfires Associated Press, Dateline Tucson, Arizona, September 9, 2002).
- According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, mass illegal immigration is a likely contributing factor in the dramatic 79 percent decline in the U.S. Sonoran pronghorn population between 2000 and 2002.
As for the rest of the country, the massive influx of illegal migrants into the U.S. for decades has led to increased congestion in towns and cities, increased pollution, and increasing urban sprawl.
Another thing that comes with illegal aliens is cheap labor, the most important fuel for some of the biggest polluters in our nation today: factory farms.
The environmental group the Sierra Club reports:
Thirty years ago, there were 22,000 farmers in North Carolina raising 2 million pigs. Most of those were pasture raised, in a state where whole-hog barbecue is sacred. Now, thanks to an industrial takeover that took root in the 1970s and ’80s, there are just over 2,300 farmers raising over 9 million hogs, with 2.3 million in Duplin County alone. Many of those farmers are contract growers working for corporate food companies.
The article goes on to note the extensive damage to local surface water, ground water, air quality and quality of life for local residents since these industrial farming operations took over.
Yet, amazingly, this same Sierra Club fervently endorses open borders for the United States, despite the fact that the industrial farms the organization decries serve as a magnet for illegal labor.
Michael Carolan in his 2014 book “Cheaponomics: The High Cost of Low Prices” reported that “more than six out of every 10 farm workers are undocumented immigrants.”
Carolan states that illegal aliens are ideal workers for these large industrial farms because “by nature of their ‘undocumented’ status, [it is] incredibly easy to socialize costs on to [them] as they lack many of the basic legal protections that come with citizenship.”
Despite all this damage within the interior of our nation, the Sierra Club in June slammed construction of the wall, saying “[t]he human and environmental costs of the border wall and increased militarization are immense.”
Political expediency over principle
Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger reporter Paul Mulshine wrote in 2004 about the takeover of the Sierra Club by open borders advocates. He tells the story of a liberal club member, Ben Zuckerman, who was “a professor at U.C.L.A. and a member of the Sierra Club’s board.”
Ben Zuckerman
Mulshine told how Zuckerman was “fond of noting that just 50 years ago the county in which he lives, Los Angeles, was the leading agricultural producer in the United States. Now it is paved from end to end – and it’s still growing.”
For his work advocating for immigration restraints to thwart this growing sprawl, Zuckerman was branded a “right wing racist” by hostile forces within the club.
Zuckerman learned that with “knee-jerk liberals” principles are used only when they are needed for the moment. When they are not useful, they are discarded.
“The whole environmental movement has been taken over by the environmental justice people,” he sadly lamented.
An interim report in Britain’s House of Commons has called for stern action to be taken against “disinformation” and “fake news” posted online via social media and news websites.
In a move that no doubt would make Jonathan Swift guffaw, Breitbart notes the report calls for satire and parody to be included under the umbrella of “fake news.”
Among other things, Breitbart says the report “demands existing ‘accuracy and impartiality’ rules for television and radio be extended to ‘online content.’ This could mean online news being forced to operate like the BBC, proclaiming to be impartial rather than being open about their political leanings.”
Because, of course, the BBC is a paragon of unbiased news coverage.
One January study found that the BBC’s Brexit coverage was overwhelmingly biased against pro-Brexit viewpoints. The report, titled “The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation?” tracked thousands of hours of radio and television material and found that only a fraction of the organization’s news allowed for pro-Brexit opinions, over the past 18 years:
A report by Citivas, in conjunction with News-Watch, monitored BBC flagship broadcasts since 1999 and found that only 3.2% of the guests had Euroskeptic views, compared to guests with pro-European Union opinions.
Coming to America – Soon
Of course, it’s very easy to see where this is all going, and that it won’t just be confined to the British Isles.
As the hysteria surrounding the Brexit vote showed, elitists are determined to assure that if the great unwashed won’t think and vote how they like, then they must crack down on what informs these people until they can be re-educated to go along as desired.
This eerily similar hysteria surrounding President Trump’s victory in 2016 proves that our elites in America have the same plans in mind.
Send In the Hall Monitors
Here’s a recent headline for you: “Twitter brings in anti-Trump academics to combat intolerance.”
Twitter “announced that it is working with experts to measure ‘healthy conversation’ on the platform. A six-strong-group of academics will analyze ‘echo chambers’ that form around political discussions on Twitter and ‘incivility and intolerance’ on the microblogging site.”
Four of the six academic hall monitors just so happen to have expressed hostile opinions against President Trump, Fox reports.
They’ll be there to keep your thoughts “healthy,” conservative Twitter users. Because, really, that is the crux of the problem. Having the wrong thoughts is not healthy because it does not advance the schemes of those who wish to be our overlords.
Remember, these are the people who believe Russia stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. And how did the Russians do that?
By hacking into our voting machines and changing results?
No.
Rather, they employed bot attacks on social media and nefariously fooled you ignorant peasants into voting for the wrong candidate. Your thoughts were wrong. You are unable to compile information for yourself and reach the proper conclusion. You must be protected from yourself.
The Trump Aftermath
One academic who totally gave this rather transparent game away was one Joshua Benton, who fancies himself “Lab Director” of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, which rather gaudily considers itself a champion of journalistic excellence.
One day after Trump’s election victory, Benton wrote the following:
Joshua Benton
In a column just before the election, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg argued that “the cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good journalism.” I wish that were true, but I think the evidence shows that it’s not. There was an enormous amount of good journalism done on Trump and this entire election cycle, from both old-line giants like the Times and The Washington Post and digital natives like BuzzFeed and The Daily Beast…. For anyone who wanted to take it in, the pickings were rich.
The problem is that not enough people sought it out. And of those who did, not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions. And even for many of those, the good journalism was crowded out by the fragmentary glimpses of nonsense.
Why, oh why, did you conservative peons not thirstily imbibe the journalistic brilliance to be found in The Washington Post and BuzzFeed? All of this could have been avoided, and right think would have won the day.
Captive Audience, Captive Minds
Ultimately, this all goes back to the liberals’ favorite power move: creating the captive audience.
Whether it is dominating the television and movie industry and pumping nonstop propaganda for decades onto people who just wanted to eat some popcorn and be entertained, or co-opting professional sports and turning it into cultural Marxist agitprop for fans who just wanted to watch a ballgame, liberals love having you in their playground and at their mercy.
Joshua Benton
The ultimate example of this is, of course, the schoolroom, where young Americans for decades had to sit in class and absorb left-wing “education,” powerless to leave because the law said kids had to go to school.
They had 3 channels and PBS back in the day. Now there is an internet and they can’t control you. And that will never work and so it must be changed.
Otherwise, you just may think the wrong thing again, and do something stupid like elect the president you want.
Thanks mostly to supporters holding up signs at recent President Trump rallies, the conservative conspiracy-minded group known as QAnon is now making its way through the mainstream media news cycle.
Determining how much actual substance is behind the often feverish, crime novel-esque musings of Q followers is a difficult task, however, because just about any conspiracy theory that has drawn attention in conservative circles in recent years can so easily piggyback on the obscure network.
What Is QAnon?
A Fox News primer on QAnon covers many of the essentials, with the main focus and original raison d’être of the movement centering around the idea that “there is a network of people, including in the U.S. government, that wants to take down Trump and his administration.”
Related to this central theory and the idea that there is a clandestine effort to combat this Deep State apparatus is the belief that special counsel Robert Mueller isn’t really investigating Trump campaign ties to Russia during the 2016 election but is probing Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats for various crimes, including, among other things, participation in a global pedophilia ring.
The latter claim has its origins in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that was red-hot in certain internet circles right after the 2016 election, culminating in a North Carolina man traveling to Washington, D.C. in December of that year armed with an assault rifle to personally investigate claims that children were being trafficked via underground tunnels beneath the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor.
The central pedophilia ring suspect in this theory is John Podesta, a powerful figure in Bill and Hillary Clinton’s political circle who served as White House Chief of Staff during the Bill Clinton presidency and as Counselor to Barack Obama during his presidential tenure.
John Podesta and his brother Tony were friends with Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis. This fact, coupled with Tony’s undeniably bizarre personal art collection, which shows children in various forms of bondage, and cryptic email messages by John Podesta made public when his hacked emails were released by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the 2016 election, fueled the speculation against Democrat officials.
How easy it is to tie this into QAnon can be seen by recent news reports that federal prosecutors are investigating Tony Podesta upon referral from Mueller’s office as part of the Paul Manafort probe.
One-Size-Fits-All For Conspiracies
Liberal news site Newsweek certainly has no love for conservatives but an article it ran earlier this year does give some solid background on the QAnon phenomenon.
According to Newsweek, leading conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the writer Jerome Corsi, who works for Jones’ InfoWars site, are heavily pushing the Q agenda:
In late October, just days before a different InfoWars-inflated conspiracy – about anti-fascist protesters plotting a civil war – was about to fizzle, a user identified as Q on the imageboard website 4chan started posting vague, portentous messages related to an approaching “storm.” The user claimed to be a high-level government operative, and the folks on /pol/, a subsection of 4chan with a history of spreading fake news, took notice – with some even believing it was President Donald Trump himself who was posting the messages on 4chan and on a similar website, 8chan.
As the Newsweek article goes on to mention, those who believe murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was deliberately killed in 2016 by the Hillary Clinton campaign because he helped leak DNC emails have also climbed on the QAnon bandwagon, which, again, is easy to do since the character known as Q, if he truly exists, has never revealed himself and thus no claim can be proven or disproven as to what he is really up to.
The Bigger Picture
More interesting perhaps than this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories is the reason why the media are bringing their knives out against QAnon now, and why Q followers so strongly believe a subterranean battle is being waged against the Deep State in Washington, D.C.
For the mainstream media, it is a matter of further frustration as they struggle to deal with the undeniable fact that they are being tuned out by ever-growing vast swaths of the American public. While it may be easy to mock some of the more outlandish claims made by Q believers, it cannot be denied that more and more Americans believe their own government is up to no good and that media organizations who have made themselves self-appointed watchdogs are either unwilling to report the truth or are an active part of the problem themselves.
Faced with the inability to get real substantial reporting from the mainstream media, these people search for other explanations as to why our federal government in Washington, D.C. has formed a state within a state in which politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and other high officials take care of each other and do nothing for American citizens.
This acute distrust of Washington is not a negative phenomenon. However, the question conservatives may want to ask of QAnon followers is why they so strongly need to believe someone is coming to their rescue, and that highly-placed people in our military or government branches are going to dramatically turn over the table and save the day.
If an oppressive entrenched Elite State is truly operating within our own government (note: it is), isn’t it better for all of us outside the Washington, D.C. Swamp to commit ourselves to unite as a people, rise up, take out the trash, and take back our country?
Let’s see what some of our favorite Republican establishment figures have been up to lately:
- Bill Kristol is thinking of running for president – again.
- Christine Todd Whitman is playing the “my fellow Republicans” and “clearly unfit” cards in calling on President Trump to resign from office in an L.A. Times op-ed.
- House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a pained defense of “classical liberalism,” openly equates nationalism with racism. “That is not conservatism. That is racism. That is nationalism. That is not what we believe in.”
Doesn’t it all sound so familiar?
Having learned exactly nothing from its abject humiliation and total rejection by the American people in the 2016 presidential election, many in the Republican establishment remain tethered like a stone to sad fantasies that it still occupies the moral high ground on the right, that it can still define – and enforce – what conservatism is.
Centrist Republicans
Really now, how can someone like Whitman be so oblivious to her own complete inability to move the needle within today’s Republican voting base that she would write with a straight face that “[w]e must put aside the GOP label, as hard as that may be” and demand Trump “step down”?
Disavowing, scolding and dismissing didn’t work in 2016 yet here they are wagging their fingers like Swamp school marms once again.
The truth of the matter is that these entitled elites have no other options. Having spent their entire careers devoted to serving the donor class that greased the wheels of corruption in our government for decades, they cannot – it is simply not possible – do the only thing that might give them real grassroots support: Commit themselves to policies that put the interests of the American people above the interests of the D.C. Dirty Money.
In an essay posted at Zero Hedge, Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg points out that the centrist posturing of the Kristol crowd “is nothing more than a failed status quo attempting to rebrand itself in the wake of being outed as the corrupt charlatans they are.”
Krieger notes how establishment politicians are eager to position themselves as “the voice of reason, lovers of apple pie and staunch defenders of our constitution and all that’s good and right in the US of A.”
That would, of course, make those who want to topple this imaginary center position dangerous demagogues, or worse.
But, as Krieger correctly observes, “[p]opulism isn’t a response to mythical centrism, it’s a response to robber baron looting. An American pastime aided, abetted and institutionalized by ‘moderate’ Republicans and Democrats for decades. There’s nothing moderate about taking money from billionaires and doing whatever they want. That’s not centrism, that’s the status quo.”
GOP Centrists on Immigration
The fact that Ryan was still pushing an immigration reform bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens as recently as six weeks ago despite the overwhelming support for tough immigration laws and a wall at the Mexico border (77 percent in a recent Quinnipiac poll) in the Republican ranks shows exactly who this “classical liberal” actually serves as House speaker.
Which leads us to the bombastically-titled CNN commentary piece “The myth of the all-powerful Trump” penned by former Eric Cantor deputy chief of staff Douglas Heye in June.
According to Heye, Republican establishment candidates are losing ground not because of the rise of Trump Nation but simply because they run bad campaigns.
Heye calls on mythical-centrist Republicans to “remain focused on the policies affecting their districts” and all will be well.
But the former Cantor staffer fails to acknowledge how hard that is to do when you’re carrying water for the graft machine, as his boss learned to his dismay in 2014.
In his article, Heye blames the sitting House majority leader’s stunning primary defeat to upstart Dave Brat on a failure to take Brat’s challenge seriously and (somewhat contradictorily) the running of too many negative ads against Brat, which boosted his public profile.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
What Heye leaves out is the grotesque attempt by the Cantor campaign to openly lie to the voters the candidate was supposed to be representing by orchestrating false-flag pro-immigration protests in Cantor’s district by a La Raza-type organization carrying signs declaring Cantor to be “The One Man Blocking Immigration Reform” at the same time it was mailing letters with the very same message to Republican voters Cantor knew wanted strong border security.
As David Steinberg at PJ Media reported at the time, notorious open-borders fanatic Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez staged a rally in Cantor’s district to bring home the duplicitous message that Cantor was the main roadblock to immigration reform.
This despite the fact that Cantor and Gutierrez had hit the road together just one year earlier to push… immigration reform.
Oh, and the leader of the La Raza-type organization that staged street protests against Cantor throughout the primary season met with Cantor’s legislative director one month before the canned rallies began taking place.
And he’s reportedly a former communist guerrilla who has publicly said he fought U.S. military personnel in El Salvador in the 1980s.
So much for focusing on the policies that affect your district.
And let us not forget the cynical attack on their own voters that Republican establishment bigwigs perpetrated in Mississippi in 2014. In order to keep dementia-ridden 36-year incumbent Thad Cochran occupying a Senate seat for one more term instead of populist challenger Chris McDaniel, veteran connected GOP Swamp insect Haley Barbour spearheaded a get-out-the-vote campaign for Democrats to cross over and vote in the Republican primary runoff.
Unfit to Run
A main element of Barbour’s appeal to Democrats was declaring that McDaniel wanted to abolish the Department of Education.
This GOTCHA fact was used to paint McDaniel as an extremist who wanted to destroy education in the state of Mississippi.
This is the same Haley Barbour who served in the Reagan White House.
That would be the same Ronald Reagan who made it a platform plank of his 1980 campaign for president to abolish the Department of Education, declaring, “I have never believed in federal control of the schools.”
None of that dissuaded a scare-mongering Barbour from using the issue to entice Democrats to back his creature Cochran in a Republican runoff.
Thanks to that added support, Cochran narrowly won the runoff and went on to be re-elected to a seventh six-year Senate term that he was medically unfit to serve. Cochran resigned for health reasons on April 1 of this year.
How can these Swamp dwellers hope to reach a voting base it so openly despises? It knows it cannot, and so it retreats into comfortable fantasy as its time slips away.
With its usual venom, The Washington Post breathlessly reports “the famously self-centered” President Trump is “brooding,” “anxious” and “has fretted” about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and how it may affect his son, Donald Trump, Jr.
And that’s just the first two paragraphs.
As the story goes on, the bombast continues. Trump’s “indignation” is “boiling over with growing ferocity.” He is “channeling his internal frustration and fear into a ravenous maw of grievance and invective. He is churning out false statements with greater frequency and attacking his perceived enemies with intensifying fury.”
You get the idea.
Mole Hills Into Mountains
In a tweeted reply to this feverish reporting, Trump derided claims that he was worried about his son’s attempt to gain oppositional research during the 2016 presidential campaign as “a complete fabrication,” noting that such meetings are common in the world of politics and “totally legal.”
Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018
Trump Jr. held one meeting in 2016 with a Russian woman with alleged Kremlin ties who apparently had no damaging information on Hillary Clinton at all.
Indeed the president has every right to wonder where this leftist media concern about nefarious “opposition research” meetings with foreigners was when former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was peddling his thoroughly unverified “Trump Dossier” to the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Remember Christopher Steele?
As Breitbart reports, “Steele’s dossier was produced by Fusion GPS, which was paid for its anti-Trump work by Trump’s primary political opponents, namely Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.”
This paid anti-Trump oppositional research was then “reportedly utilized by the FBI in part to conduct its probe into Trump over unsubstantiated claims of collusion with Russia.”
Steele even met with Obama State Department officials to brief them on his outlandish “findings,” which include lurid accounts of Russian moves to acquire kompromat on Trump via the use of prostitutes and an infamous alleged “pee tape.”
Government agents working for a sitting Democrat president using oppositional research acquired from a former foreign intelligence asset in an attempt to attack the opponent of that president’s would-be Dem successor would certainly seem to be a far bigger story than Donald Trump Jr. meeting once with a woman with apparent ties to the Kremlin and gaining zero useful information from that meeting.
Amazingly, despite the clear fact of Steele’s paid-for machinations on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, former Obama administration White House ethics czar Norm Eisen had the temerity to respond to President Trump’s tweet by stating oppositional research meetings similar to Trump Jr.’s effort “never happened on our watch and if [they] had our reaction would have been ‘call the FBI,'” the Hill reports.
Calling the FBI is apparently just what Obama officials did after receiving Steele’s dossier. They called the FBI and said, “see how you can take down Trump with this.”
What’s Not Reported
Perhaps even more disturbing than the arrogant hypocrisy on display here is the way The Washington Post will not stop hyping small beans on the Russia obsession trail at the same time news breaks that a powerful longtime Democratic senator had an actual Chinese communist spy on her personal staff for two decades.
While The Post was scouring its thesaurus for new ways to portray President Trump as foaming at the mouth, it was completely ignoring the news that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s driver of 20 years was a spy who passed information to officials at the Chinese consulate.
Chinese Embassy Washington D.C
Feinstein has strong ties to China going back decades. A 1997 Los Angeles Times article details how Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum started investing in China with “one project worth less than $500,000” in 1992 and suddenly was planning on investing $150 million two years later.
As that was happening, the Times account reported that:
Meanwhile, Feinstein’s role on U.S. policy toward China has expanded. In January 1995, she became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China’s trade privileges.
Since 1995, Feinstein has made three visits to confer with senior government officials in Beijing. Blum has accompanied her each time at his own expense and has attended many of her meetings with President Jiang Zemin and other top Chinese leaders – an unusual degree of access for a private businessman.
Instead of finding synonyms for “bellowed,” one would think The Washington Post would be busy looking up the Chinese word for “kompromat.”
Yet a search of The Post’s site for the past week shows not a single article about the Feinstein spy story. A google search on “Trump” “Washington Post” as this article was being written revealed that the first article displayed was “Trump just made 2 problematic admissions about the Trump Tower meeting.”
A similar google search on “Feinstein” “Washington Post” and the first article displayed was “Dianne Feinstein’s brave act of patriotism.”
Perhaps it’s time for The Post to either rein in its bias or at the very least, prioritize real news over partisan gossip.