Masks Off, part 3: Castles Built on Bullshit
The history books will shine on those brave souls who tore back the curtains to reveal the world that we actually live in
Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash
Money, war, religion, markets, geopolitics, social dynamics, the human condition, and societal implications. As everyone with a platform spends their time hyperfocused on single issues that draw you in, this is my attempt to step back to show the larger picture (and potential implications or concerns).
The ever-changing media cycle seems built to give us the attention spans of fruit flies - but there are issues that we should take the time to focus on and understand.
These are those issues.
Topics covered in this edition:
Introduction: the coup of the flying monkeys
Foreign policy
The surveillance state
The (global) Censorship Industrial Complex
Trump is merely an archetype
Introduction
Now-proven lies that pulled US soldiers into multiple wars (The Lusitania as a civilian vessel, Gulf of Tonkin, Kuwaiti incubator babies, unprovoked Russian aggression, etc). US Senators caught with foreign bribery-earned gold bars, fancy watches, and new cars, without even being taken off of committees.
The son of a prosecuted Russian influence agent sitting in the US Congress, without his family history ever being mentioned at the height of the Russia Russia Russia nonsense. Mark Milley promising to violate his oath, commit treason, and directly violate a command from his Commander-in-Chief if it were one he didn’t agree with, personally.
Former ST6 commander and Admiral McRaven penning an NYT op-ed calling for a coup against a sitting US President. Former Delta and CENTCOM commander McChrystal working for The Transition Integrity Project, a group that laughably calls itself non-partisan while taking a lot of money for extremely partisan electoral ends.
Former FBI 2ICs being fired for lying and then hired by CNN. An admitted communist party voter rising to head the CIA, getting caught spying on SCOTUS, Congress, the Senate, newsrooms, and others with ne’er a hint of legal accountability and himself going on to take a contributor role at MSNBC.
Another who led both the NSA and CIA also landed himself a propaganda gig with the MSM, despite being perhaps the one most responsible for the modern Orwellian surveillance state that the US has become.
The reality coming to public light that the “journalist” most noted for taking down the US President who won by the largest vote margin in history (making him the most popular POTUS in history) being a former Navy intelligence officer and newbie reporter who “just happened” to get the (likely contrived) story of the century directly from someone at the top of the FBI - an organization he had worked with in his previous job (not that long before Deepthroat came calling) - and every one of “the plumbers” behind that Watergate break-in being either a direct employee, contractor, or otherwise connected to the CIA - looking for blackmail evidence of the prostitution ring that was being run out of the DNC office in the Watergate Hotel.
It didn’t have to be this way, and it hasn’t always been this way.
Somewhere along the line, our country allowed the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys to take the wheel.
Incompetents, ass-kissers, bureaucrats, commies, Marxists, and Trotskyites (aka NeoCons) will always surround themselves with “fellow travelers.”
These people have neither shame, nor souls, nor competence, and they will hire others around them with a surety that those underlings will never outshine them by being slightly competent, moralistic, or decent human beings.
It’s no great secret that Mao’s cultural revolution needed his Four Olds Campaign to destroy the culture of China which may have allowed people to remember how good it was before the incompetents and bureaucrats took over.
Likewise, BLM - an organization founded by admitted trained Marxists and which had “the destruction of the nuclear family” as a stated goal on its early website (until the “wrong people” started to take notice) - utilized the mass propaganda, gaslighting, lies, and astroturfing that surrounded the death of St. George of Fentanyl to wage a Western-society wide Four Olds Campaign of their own toppling statues, institutions, and any memory of the way things were before unscrupulous incompetents were put into positions of power and authority.
The downward trajectory of our institutions is not new, it’s just become noticeable for those who weren’t paying much attention previously.
Italian Marxist Gramsci’s Long March Through the Institutions (which was, as previously noted, translated into English by Mayor Pete’s dad while he was at Notre Dame) has been moving forward for decades - but the rot and crumbling facade is now out in the open to the point of being impossible to deny except for the most zealous of useful idiots.
So how do we fix it? That’s a discussion for another time. It is possible, and defenders of the Faith and initiates of the flame are standing by, prepared to do so.
To understand why such drastic and society-wide changes must be made to fix the damage that has been done, however, we first must first understand how we got here, and how pervasive these problems are across our society.
A functioning Republic requires an enlightened populace, and we’ve allowed too many systems to be built which have kept our people ignorant and unwilling to face reality. To solve any true root cause issue, however, you must be willing and able to name and identify it.
So let’s do that.
Foreign policy
In our current state of affairs, if any US politician or public figure suggests that we put America first and not send our nation’s blood and treasure to fight in wars that do not affect us, they are often rebuked by being called an isolationist by those who are at least pretending to offer a good faith argument, or Putin apologists or some other slur by the bad faith propagandists and/or useful idiots.
Many mistakenly refer to the Founding Fathers as isolationists, given the many warnings they gave of what happens to a Republic that puts all of her focus on external empire-building rather than caring for her own people.
Take note of this subtle sleight of hand used when they push these falsities. Refusing to take part in empire-building or non-national interest foreign wars to provide cover for money laundering does not make one an isolationist.
And neither were the Founding Fathers isolationists, either.
Take note of the first two lines from the song above, The Marine’s Hymn.
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
Mike Cernovich put out a post on X in June that these lines should be included in a citizenship test question. I’ll admit that I had to do a little research to freshen up on the details but I knew that they gave away the goose on that bad-faith argument that putting American interests first and foremost makes one an isolationist.
The First Barbary War (to the shores of Tripoli)
At the time when the USA first became a country, The Barbary States of North Africa (Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco) were the launching point for a significant amount of state-backed piracy. These Barbary States would demand tribute from nations who didn’t want their ships attacked within the Mediterranean.
They were essentially running an extortion racket. And despite what BLM and the useful idiots in the Ivy Leagues told you, these North African ships would both sack your maritime vessels for the trade goods and sell the crews (who weren’t murdered) into slavery if you or your nation didn’t pay tribute.
Mediterranean trade and trade routes were a vital part of early America’s business, so at first, the nation paid those tributes. Before long, the Pasha of Tripoli demanded an increase in those tributes, but Jefferson (who took office in 1801) refused. The Pasha then declared war on the US, cutting down the flagstaff in front of the US consulate as his declaration.
Jefferson sent the US Navy (and the early Marines) to battle in order to (directly) protect US interests against the Barbary pirates. “The Halls of Tripoli” refers to, well, the Marines taking part in that war that lasted from 1801-1805, when America was still a very young nation (and under President Thomas Jefferson).
The Mexican-American War (from the halls of Montezuma)
“From the Halls of Montezuma” refers to the Battle of Chapultepec during the Mexican-American War in 1847. The "Halls of Montezuma" symbolize the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, which the Marines stormed and captured. This battle was crucial in the U.S. forces' campaign, leading to the eventual capture of Mexico City and contributing to the end of the war. *(note: this part was taken directly from ChatGPT, which gave a better explanation than Grok, IMO).
Consider both of these examples for a moment, in the context of what a ludicrous slur it is to consider the above battles to have taken place under “isolationists.”
While most don’t know the history of our own nation very well, these are examples of what it means to have a foreign policy that is willing to protect its own national interests but not engage in wars of empire or money laundering.
The First Barbary War was directly to maintain our trade, shipping routes, and citizens (preventing the African Barbary Pirates from selling them into slavery). The Mexican-American War was to prevent Mexico from taking US land.
The Ukraine War, I would like to note in that context, neither protects American interests (outside of DC corrupticrats, that is) nor does it do anything to protect American citizens or the homeland.
Moving on.
Tucker Carlson has taken to noting lately in both interviews and public speeches that he marks the beginning of the US decline - or at least, no longer being a Representative Republic form of government - as when we dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima during WWII.
That may be an accurate line of demarcation for the loss of God in Western society and putting narcissists and sociopaths into positions of power, but I don’t think it’s a starting point if we’re tracking how things got so bad.
We’ve discussed the ludicrous nature of NATO and its existence previously, from both a geopolitical and financial vantage point. It’s also a good point to show how the people in charge for the past several decades are either historically ignorant or don’t care about setting into motion the same grievous mistakes of the past that have led to massive amounts of (unnecessary) death and destruction.
I’m talking, of course, about the same setup that led to WWI, WWII and is priming us for WWIII at present.
The Alliances That Led to WWI
Let’s allow ChatGPT to give a good and succinct reminder of how the European continent was quickly pulled into a World War that many only became involved in due to alliances:
The agreement that pulled European nations into World War I was primarily a series of alliances and ententes formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The two main alliances were:
1. The Triple Alliance (1882):
- Members: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy
- Purpose: This was a defensive alliance intended to provide mutual support if any member was attacked by France or Russia. However, Italy would later join the Allies in 1915 after declaring neutrality at the war's onset.
2. The Triple Entente (1907):
- Members: France, Russia, and the United Kingdom
- Purpose: This was more of an understanding than a formal alliance, created to counterbalance the power of the Triple Alliance. It linked the three countries in a series of treaties and agreements that sought to provide mutual support and cooperation.
How the Alliances Pulled Nations into WWI:
- Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914): The immediate spark for the war was the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. This led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia.
- Activation of Alliances:
- Austria-Hungary and Germany: Austria-Hungary sought and received assurances from Germany (the so-called "blank check") of support in case of Russian intervention.
- Russia: In support of Serbia, Russia began to mobilize against Austria-Hungary.
- Germany: Germany declared war on Russia and, subsequently, on Russia's ally, France.
- France: Bound by the Triple Entente, France was drawn into the conflict.
- United Kingdom: The UK was initially hesitant, but Germany's invasion of Belgium, which violated Belgian neutrality (guaranteed by the Treaty of London, 1839), led the UK to declare war on Germany.
These alliances created a domino effect, where the activation of one alliance led to the involvement of others, eventually dragging much of Europe into a full-scale war.
The Guns of August, a Pulitzer Prize-winning recounting of what led to the outset of WWI and the nations (many led by direct, blood relatives) who didn’t want to take part but were bound by said alliances, is one that has likely been read by all if not most of the people who today pretend that NATO is nothing like what led to WWI and WWII.
If you prefer to listen, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series called Blueprint for Armageddon is a great rendition that goes deeply into the destruction and soul-crushing battles of World War 1.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/
So did humanity learn its lesson about alliances drawing the world into continent-destroying wars?
Let’s again ask ChatGPT about the next time this happened:
The Alliances That Led to WWII
The alliances that drew the world into World War II were formed around two major blocs: the Axis Powers and the Allied Powers. These alliances, and the events leading up to the war, were shaped by political, military, and ideological factors.
Axis Powers
-Germany: Led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Germany aimed to expand its territory and overturn the Treaty of Versailles.
-Italy: Led by Benito Mussolini, Italy sought to create a new Roman Empire and expand its influence in the Mediterranean and Africa.
-Japan: Governed by militarists and pursuing expansion in Asia, Japan aimed to dominate East Asia and the Pacific.
These three main Axis powers were later joined by other countries, including Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland (which co-belligerated against the Soviet Union).
Allied Powers
-United Kingdom: Led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the UK opposed German aggression and expansion in Europe.
-Soviet Union: Led by Joseph Stalin, the USSR initially signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany but joined the Allies after Germany's invasion in June 1941.
-United States: Initially neutral, the U.S. joined the Allies following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
-China: Already engaged in a prolonged conflict with Japan since 1937, China joined the Allies officially after the Pearl Harbor attack.
-France: Although quickly defeated by Germany in 1940, Free French forces continued to fight alongside the Allies under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle.
Key Events and Agreements Leading to the War
1. Treaty of Versailles (1919): The treaty that ended World War I imposed harsh penalties on Germany, leading to economic hardship and political instability, which contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
2. Non-Aggression Pacts and Alliances:
-Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939): A non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, which included secret protocols for the division of Eastern Europe.
-Anti-Comintern Pact (1936-1937): Initially between Germany and Japan, and later including Italy, it was aimed against the Communist International (Comintern) led by the Soviet Union.
3. Invasions and Annexations:
-Germany's expansion: Including the reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936), the annexation of Austria (Anschluss, 1938), and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1938-1939).
-Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935) and Albania (1939).
-Japan's invasions in Asia: Including Manchuria (1931) and China (1937).
These alliances and actions set the stage for a global conflict, with nations joining either the Axis or the Allies as the war progressed. The aggressive expansionism of the Axis Powers and their invasions of neighboring countries ultimately led to a worldwide conflict as the Allies mobilized to counter these threats.
Now, it’s no secret that it was Ukraine itself that chose to violate The Minsk Accords, which is just one of a handful of reasons why the narrative that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked” has always been garbage.
I’m not by any means saying it was the best, correct, or only option for Russia…but it certainly was not “unprovoked.”
We’ve discussed many times previously that it has been a known quantity in the US foreign policy establishment and professional class that Ukraine entering NATO would be seen as the “reddest of red lines” by Russia and would lead directly to an invasion.
The word Ukraine means “borderlands,” and Russia sees it as a buffer zone between its borders and NATO.
Despite that, the US pressured former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to tell Ukraine not to sign a peace deal with Russia to prevent the invasion, and sent Kamela Harris to the Aspen Security Conference to announce to the world that Ukraine would become a part of NATO in 2022.
In the sharpest sense of changing political winds, as I’m writing this, NATO has just publicly admitted that Ukraine’s high levels of corruption make it non-admissible to NATO.
The former mayor of Athens (of one of the “political dynasty” families of Greece) just said today at a UN conference that, “Ukraine should have been counseled to abide by the Minsk Accords.”
This has been known for a very long time, but they are only willing to say it out loud right now.
But I’m sure the recent sound political defeat of the G7 leaders who have been pushing for the war and sending their own troops has nothing to do with that backtracking.
Nothing at all, I’m sure.
The Duran likes to call this “The Alinsky Curse” (they call Zelensky by Alinsky, for reasons I’m sure some of you will be able to understand immediately). That curse is something like 5/5 so far, in that Western leaders who physically hug Zelensky to preen for the cameras are not long for office.
I told our listeners of the Shitshow Macro weekly prep and wrapup podcast that just a few weeks ago Europe began buying more of its natural gas from Russia than the US, which makes this whole war and the excuses for us funding it moot to logical observers.
Let’s drive that point home just a little more: the US is funding Ukraine, to the tune of hundreds of billions of untracked spending, to defend itself and greater Europe against Russia, from which greater Europe is buying most of its gas.
Yes, there are still people who will tell you with a straight face that makes perfect logical sense and doesn’t give away the bullshit nature of the entire affair.
The deeper that you go down these duplicitous rabbit holes of history and wars, the grosser it gets.
Remember, we’ve covered previously that Western bankers and financiers were financing Germany and Hitler during World War 2 while American boys were being sent to die in trenches in Europe. Prescott Bush (of the Bush family political dynasty) was one, but he was only one of many.
IBM reportedly helped to build the data capabilities for the Nazi’s “final solution.” Chemical companies, finance, data, manufacturing - there were people and American industries making money off of and doing business with the enemy that our grandfathers were fighting.
For those with no direct or one generation removal from combat experience, this may not mean a lot. For those of us who know the reality of war firsthand or even directly from family recountings, or who lost family members, it is revolting.
We’ve gone through how foreign policy dingbats with no intellectual firepower or historical understanding lacked the ability to “read the room” and grossly miscalculated the long histories of China, Russia, and Iran in previous posts and podcasts.
Now you have a better understanding of how NATO is basically just a v4.0 of a system that has pulled us into World War in nearly every iteration of its prior treaty-based existence.
If this were a private enterprise, the wankers in charge would have long ago been sacked for pretending that, “this time, it will be different.”
But it’s not a private enterprise, it’s government, and the people who make these decisions no longer fight on the front lines as they did in the time of kings, nor do they usually send their children to those front lines (even those who do serve typically do so in a capacity far, far away from any actual danger or combat).
I’ve often half-jokingly mused that changing laws so that any world leader, political appointee, lobbyist, or activist who advocates for war must be part of the vanguard on the front lines of what they propose.
I imagine it’s a pretty safe bet that with the “adults in the room” political class that we have today, that would lead to a significant reduction in the number of quick-tempered warmongers that we see so often in the MSM.
Here’s the thing: it’s not difficult for a rational person to understand where so many “conspiracy theories” come from when people keep getting put into positions of power within the nation with the strongest military in man’s existence who:
Either don’t or pretend they don’t understand they are simply replicating past mistakes
Having proven themselves untrustworthy or undeserving of power
Ex: Austin led the Iraq withdrawal, which was a shitshow, and was put in charge of the Afghanistan debacle
Ex: Donald Rumsfeld, who advised Bush and the Iraq war, cut his teeth in defense & foreign policy during the Vietnam War
Ex: the flag officers currently advising US defense & intelligence policy re: Ukraine cut their teeth in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars
You fail upwards in the U.S. political, foreign policy, military, and intelligence worlds…and so it shouldn’t be a mystery that people have to find reasons why those who are proven undeserving of power are constantly given more of it.
That, and of course, that the “conspiracy theorists” have a far, far higher batting average than the corporate media and “mainstream narratives” for the past several decades.
The Surveillance State
The US Congress and Senate recently reapproved both FISA and 702 authorizations, thereby shredding the 4th Amendment and authorizing the Intelligence Community and US law enforcement to spy on its own citizens.
They even added in a “topper” that allows them to now demand the data from any business that hosts a wifi router, and they’ve been long known to get virtually any private information they request from telecom companies without the need for a warrant.
This means that if you log onto the wifi at a coffee shop, and the Eye of Sauron wants to dig up dirt on you, they can demand that said coffee shop turn over your data, browsing, call, email, and text history from your time on their wifi.
While the narratives often given when they support these extra-Constitutional authorities being given by the IC and law enforcement are to “protect the homeland,” we’ve seen far too often that they are abused and used for political ends.
Sometimes this is against politicians, but far too often we’ve also seen it weaponized against innocent citizens and civilians when “The Machine” needs to construct a boogeyman or rationalize its own desire for more power (and funding to grow itself to gain more power).
In their defense, some say they were given super-duper scary briefings within Secretive Compartmentalized Information Facilities (SCIFs) about threats to the homeland.
To our chagrin, those briefings were given by the same organizations who lied about/covered up:
-Jeffrey Epstein and “lost” all of the CD ROMs and information from his surveillance-filled homes
-The Anthony Weiner laptop
-The Finders Cult
-The Seth Rich laptop (which the FBI is still fighting against a judge’s orders to release)
-WMDs in Iraq
-Operation Northwoods
-Syria gassing its own people (when in reality it was proven to be rebels)
-Putin killing Navalny
-The Color Revolution of Kyiv (The Maidan Revolution) led by the US State Department and its proxies
-Spying on a US Presidential candidate
-Spying on and framing a US President
-The Russian Bounties Hoax
-The Suckers and Losers Hoax
-COVID, the Wuhan Lab, and the US funding behind both
-The vaccine’s testing and reliability (DARPA had its own internal testing & knew it was shite before the DoD mandated it for US troops)
-The coup against Nixon (and how all “the plumbers” either worked for or were connected to CIA)
-The DNC hack hoax (James Comey (FBI) had the opportunity presented to him for evidence of how that data was transmitted to WikiLeaks; he instead chose to cover it up)
-Multiple domestic mass shooters who were “known” to the FBI in advance
-The FBI’s funding, planning, and organizing of Nazis, Nazi groups, and Nazi rallies in the US (as recently disclosed documents and interviews from Ken Silva/Headline USA have shown)
-The 9/11 hijackers who lived with an FBI informant
-Saudi Arabia’s involvement in funding 9/11 (the hijackers were not Afghans, and many of them were Saudis)
This list is nowhere near exhaustive…but I think you get it.
We’re supposed to believe that politicians in DC, on both sides of the aisle…believed the organizations who lied about or covered up all of the above?
Really? That’s what they went with?
Many of the “conspiracy theories” lately have been bringing up a likely DoD, Pentagon, and USMIL connection to many of the PSYOPs, hoaxes, coups, and political hit jobs that we’ve been seeing over the past several years.
I won’t pretend to know if there is truth behind that - but I will remind you that the NSA is a part of the DoD as is the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which is larger than the CIA. While it’s supposed to be focused primarily on defense-related intelligence collection, we all know the stark difference these days in the way things are supposed to work versus the way they actually work.
It doesn’t help that James Baker of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments (different from the FBI general counsel James Baker who was hired by Twitter 1.0 after his role in Spygate and the Russian Collusion hoaxes) was caught paying Stefan “The Walrus” Halper, one of the spies used to spy on the Trump campaign and entrap people in satellite positions like Dr. Carter Page and George Papadopolous.
And that a British military intelligence group was caught running COVID PSYOPs against their own populace.
As we will get into, many of the FVEYE nations use each others’ intel agencies to spy on each others’ populaces to skirt around those pesky domestic surveillance laws that Western nations pretend protect their people from an out-of-control government.
The Patriot Act was supposed to be sunset but never did
When elected US officials were trying to pretend like they were acting in good faith whilst voting to shred the 4th amendment rights of American citizens, many of them and their media lapdogs began running with the Information Operation (IO) that FISA authorizations have been around for many decades.
Yes, that’s true, but it also leaves out an enormous amount of details and specifics of the monster that the US surveillance state has become, as IOs out of DC are typically designed to do.
Yes, the US has been spying on its own citizens for a very long time.
If you’ve not heard of COINTELPRO, PATCON, or other ways that Bob Mueller and previous iterations of FBI leadership concocted “legal authorities” to spy on Americans, even setting up schemes to entrap them (often), you should look into the history of just how long they’ve been doing it.
Here are some links for you to dive deeper into this so that you don’t have to take my word for it:
https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/1971/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/01/cointelpro-fbi-burglary-church-committee/
Far fewer have heard of Bob Mueller’s FBI plan to infiltrate (and fund, create, entrap, and build a reason for the FBI to get increased budgeting to target their concocted boogeymen) right-wing groups called PATCON.
Here is a brief explanation of what that abomination was from Grok (the X platform’s AI research assistant):
Oh, PATCON! That was the FBI's secret plan to infiltrate and spy on right-wing groups back in the early 90s. It was like a secret agent movie but with more paperwork and fewer cool gadgets. The FBI had undercover agents pose as members of a fictional right-wing extremist group, trying to gather intelligence on the so-called "Patriot" movement. It was like a big game of "Who's the mole?" but with more conspiracy theories and fewer exploding pens.
And links so that you don’t have to take my word for it:
From the Epoch Times:
And a series by Ken Silva on Robert Mueller’s Right Wing Terror Factory:
https://headlineusa.com/exclusive-the-hidden-history-of-robert-muellers-right-wing-terror-factory-part-1/
Here’s an interview where Ken Silva talks about it with one of the FBI’s former PATCON undercover assets:
While a large number of progressive groups began to make noises when it was learned post-9/11 that the US intel and law enforcement communities had been finding young developmentally disabled Muslim teens in America to radicalize, entrap, and arrest to justify their ever-increasing budgets & power grabs, this had already been going on for decades underneath the surface.
Randy Weaver and his family were killed by the ATF at Ruby Ridge for sawing off the barrel of a shotgun at the request of an undercover ATF agent.
The Branch Davidian compound was burned to the ground and all of its inhabitants were killed by various federal law enforcement agencies despite a local sheriff being friends with David Koresh and offering to bring him directly into their custody with no need for death or destruction.
Reporting in the years after Waco began to shine light on the fact that the ATF at the time was under intense scrutiny for whether it should exist and continue to be funded. There are many who saw their dramatic overreaction in Waco as the ATF’s attempt to justify its own existence.
The Patriot Act capitalized on the post-9/11 fear and fury that many Americans had after the Twin Towers fell, and was the embodiment of Ari Emanuel’s oft-quoted comment, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
It allowed the agencies and people who had already been driving this growing surveillance state to peek its head above the surface and, of course, be able to receive direct, white-side (publicly disclosed) funding. Previously they’d been forced to create “novel” ways of naming and funding these programs, keeping them well below the surface to pretend that they were abiding by the laws and Constitution of the United States.
For whatever reason, even in its initial passing it was judged that this vast overreach of Constitutional authority may be a political “bridge too far,” so the initial Patriot Act had a “sunset provision” built into it. This was supposed to be designed for the Constitution's shredding to be a “temporary” extra-Constitutional action, and after the danger was passed we would “go back to normal.”
Wanna guess if we were allowed to ever get back to normal?
The sunset provision was of course passed right up, and to get around that pesky Constitution, US intel and federal law enforcement agencies among all of the FVEY nations (the English-speaking nations that share the highest level of intelligence with each other) began to use each others’ intelligence agencies to spy on the other’s citizens.
You see, in their eyes, spying on their own citizens was against each of their Constitutions, but Aussies spying on Kiwis and sharing what they collected with the Aussies, and Brits doing it to Americans, Americans doing it to everyone, and so on and so forth was, in their minds, totally above board - or at least something they could get away with.
If you followed the Spygate illegality that led to the Russian Collusion hoax, you already know much of this.
Britain played a major role in spying on the candidate and then President Trump and Australia & Italy even provided quite a bit of help (as did others).
FISA vs 702
FISA
As the Russia Gate Hoax began to unravel and more became known about the Spygate illegality that led to it, those Americans who were paying attention to it first learned of a downright Orwellian secret court system that had been running in the USA called the FISA court.
Despite the protections that are supposed to be afforded to Americans to be able to face their accusers, defend themselves in court, and be afforded some modicum of privacy against government intrusion, these secret courts had been created by the intelligence and law enforcement community to bypass all of that.
Essentially, the courts were held in secret, those being tried in said courts weren’t even notified that they were being tried in those courts, that evidence was being presented against them, and that the entire purpose of the courts were for judges to determine if all rights to privacy should be refused and the US IC and law enforcement apparatus should be granted the ability to access any and all information about the target of an intelligence-gathering operation.
But these secret courts didn’t just afford that shredding of privacy against the target. They afforded a “3 hop rule” that allowed them to not only dive as deeply as they wanted into the target themselves, but also anyone they talked to, and anyone that those people talked to.
The Spygate fiasco showed that the FBI not only lied to and hid exculpatory information from these courts to get FISA authorizations to spy on a US presidential candidate and then President (Trump), but that the 3 hop rule had allowed them to target low-level Trump campaign members (Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and others) to then get access to every private email, phone call, text message, and other communications of virtually anyone inside the campaign and then presidency.
Just take a moment to consider this for yourself mentally: think about everyone that you’ve spoken with in the past month. That is one hop of your network circle. Then make a mental picture of everyone that each of those people have spoken with. That is 2 hops. Then make another mental image of everyone who that extended circle has spoken with. That is 3 hops.
We’re likely all familiar with the “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, but most of us don’t want to apply that to our own lives.
Add in the knowledge about the NSA’s massive data centers that collect virtually every phone call and digital communication that is made within, to, or from America’s borders and on its telecom networks. This gives these FISA authorizations the ability to go back into one’s past communications as far as they’d like looking for something.
Most people mistakenly still think of spying in the context of the Cold War, when the Stasi, KGB, or FBI would have to assign teams and switchboards to actively listen in on the targets of their investigations, listening for something incriminating in real-time.
It doesn’t work like that anymore. Now everything is saved in perpetuity, and machine learning + AI have been trained to seek out specific “red flag” words, patterns, or other indicators that those doing the searching may be looking for.
When people say that Trump is the most heavily vetted politician who has ever lived, they are not being hyperbolic. Teams of investigators who had a mandate to find anything at all that they could use or even misconstrue to destroy his campaign or get him impeached came up with nothing.
The FBI lied (this is a proven fact, not hyperbole) to the FISA court to get those authorizations.
And after being given legal carte blanche to find anything that could even be misconstrued as illegal or treasonous, the best that they could come up with were hoaxes and lawfare that we’ve been watching fall apart in spectacular fashion.
The media didn’t tell you that the FBI got caught lying to the secret FISA court to get its authorizations against low-level staff members, and I don’t want you to take my word for it.
Here is an article that includes the letter that one of the FISA judges (Judge Rosemary Collyer) wrote expressing her anger, in the way that judges must do, that the FBI had hidden exculpatory evidence and presented false “evidence” to gain the authorizations to spy on a Presidential campaign and then POTUS:
Here’s an article outlining how both the DOJ and Inspector General found and admitted that the DOJ lacked probable cause to apply for the FISA authorizations that never should have been granted in the first place:
And here’s the DOJ’s announcement that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith had altered an email from the CIA to get FISA renewals. In reality, Page had helped the CIA take down a cell of Russian spies in NYC. That didn’t quite fit the FBI’s narrative that Page and the Trump campaign were in bed with the Russians, so they lied and altered an email to bolster their lies:
Three different inspectors general (Horowitz, Atkison, and Durham) each spent years trying to unravel various aspects of the malfeasance and illegality that were Spygate and the Russia Collusion Hoax. Each finished their search with lengthy reports detailing just how off the rails things had gone, yet Clinesmith was the only person to ever face any type of prosecution.
He already has his law license back and is practicing law again.
The FBI super-duper pinky swear promised to enact internal changes and controls to prevent this from happening again.
Neither the public nor Congress (who is supposed to have oversight over the bureau) is allowed to know exactly what those reforms or changes were, nor look into them at any level of depth.
But they promise they were done - trust us, they say.
Like taxes and the Patriot Act, however, once the USGOV is allowed to get its hooks into a new grab for power, revenue, or control mechanism, it is rarely (if ever) relinquished.
702 Authorizations and FISC
While it’s supposed to be difficult for the USGOV to get FISA permission to spy on its own citizens (which, as we showed above, they can still find ways to lie about when they really want to), it doesn’t need that step to spy on foreigners or foreign agents.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been in place since 1978 and was created to allow for the surveillance of foreign powers and agents of foreign powers suspected of espionage or terrorism. It was supposed to focus on obtaining warrants to conduct surveillance on specific targets within the United States.
Section 702 of FISA was added in 2008, which allows for the collection of foreign intelligence information from non-U.S. persons located outside the United States and is supposed to focus on targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information.
Section 702 doesn’t even require a warrant or authorization. Rather than going to a secret FISA court to get a warrant and permission to spy, 702 has the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). These are more of a “housekeeping exercise,” where the agencies submit annual reports to verify that they are following the rules about how they conduct surveillance on foreigners.
While that sounds obvious - the US has intel agencies whose sole purpose is supposed to be the collection of intelligence on foreign adversaries - what happens when US citizens get caught up in collection that is supposed to be targeted at foreigners or adversaries?
Do we have any examples of 702 being used for nefarious purposes?
Why, yes we do. A very public one, in fact.
Before we dive into the most public example of 702 being violated, there’s something else that people need to understand: the FBI now considers itself an intel agency more than a law enforcement agency.
Your mental image of the FBI may be suit-wearing gumshoes focused on hunting down federal criminals like murderers or child traffickers, but the bureau resituated post-9/11 with new funding, tasking, authorization, and powers.
In fact, several of the current FBI whistleblowers have said the bureau was taking agents off of child trafficking and pedophile cases to spy on and send SWAT teams after people whose only crimes were walking on the lawn of the Capitol on January 6th.
In some cases, like this couple in Alaska, the SWAT teams kicked down the doors, handcuffed, and interrogated the wrong people for multiple hours because the wife’s hair looked kind of similar to someone else.
So what was the very public example of the former law enforcement agency-turned domestic intelligence agency going off the rails and violating Section 702 that I mentioned above?
There are elements of the Western media, pundits, and Blue Anon crazies who will swear to you up and down that General Michael Flynn, former USMIL general, head of the DIA, and Trump National Security Advisor was working with the Russians, a traitor to the USA, and all other sorts of nefarious (bullshit) claims.
They will jump from one lunatic fringe conspiracy theory to another to convince their readers, listeners, and followers of these claims, but they never discuss what started it all - because the initial attack vectors were proven not only to be a total hoax but also another instance in which Federal employees, agencies, and bureaus violated spying laws for political means.
In this case, FISA section 702, specifically.
If we go back in the Wayback machine to the very early days of the first Trump presidency, we may remember one of the first lines of attack against him. Like the others, it was found to be a contrived hoax, but like the others, those who created and promulgated the hoax never apologized for the damage they did, nor were they held legally accountable.
But nobody is above the law, amirite?
It should be added that there were multiple attack vectors enacted against Flynn, each of which proven to be hoaxes, but since we’re discussing 702 and how it has been weaponized against Americans, we will stick to that one.
Spygate aficionados may be upset that we aren’t going into the vector led by a former head of British intelligence which destroyed the life of an innocent Russian-born female translator who was invited to a dinner only to be used as a subterfuge pawn in another politically-driven hoax and attempt to take out Flynn.
I truly hope that God and the universe allow Svetlana Lokhova to have the last laugh and enjoy karmic retribution against those scumbags who did that to her, but that discussion is for another time and place.
The main attack vector was the most contrived and laughable to anyone who knows anything about FISA and FISC, yet it was the one that Mike Pence used to fire the only person in the Trump cabinet who could have alerted him to the dirty Intelligence Community tricks that had been and were still being used against him.
It should be noted that one of Pence’s direct staffers was the significant other of an FBI agent involved in the Spygate fiasco and illegality - but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about Mike Pence.
The attack vector came via a conversation that Flynn - again, the incoming National Security Advisor - had with the Russian ambassador while Flynn was on vacation in Puerto Rico. Everything in that sentence is important, as we will go through.
As Obama was preparing to leave office, he expelled a large number of Russian diplomats from the US, creating a bit of a diplomatic crisis. The long arm of history has shown us that not only was this done “without evidence,” as the media loves to say when they can attack a conservative, but they will never say about their fellow travelers.
Obama’s reasoning for doing this was the beginning of what would become the Russia Collusion Hoax, when they were still claiming that Russia had hacked the DNC’s emails and given them to WikiLeaks. Take note, although few do, that nobody in the DNC or media ever claimed that the WikiLeaks posts of Podesta’s emails were fake or fraudulent.
If you’ve read the content of what WikiLeaks posted, that part is extremely important.
As the media and political establishment's sleight of hand so often goes, they diverted the public’s attention away from the content of the emails by placing all attention instead on the (now proven false) claims that Russia had hacked them.
Using that false claim to expel diplomats, Obama created a crisis.
He was a lame-duck POTUS on his way out of office at that point, so the Russian ambassador wanted to talk to the incoming administration to try to figure out if the next steps needed to be a tit-for-tat escalation and expulsion of American diplomats from Russia, or if cooler heads and diplomacy could prevail.
Again, a bit of a trip in the Wayback machine is required to remember that, at that time, the USA had gone through the Obama and Hillary Clinton policy of a “Russian reset” in which his administration had been attempting to establish a true detente post-Cold War with Russia.
If you remember Obama’s comments during his debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, his approach was that “the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back” when Mitt cited Russia as a threat to the USA.
The media quickly forgot about the political gag of Hillary’s big red “reset” button that she physically handed to the Russian ambassador at a press conference, her Uranium 1 scandal selling US uranium to Russia, Bill Clinton being paid $500k speaking fees by a Moscow bank, and the Obama administration delivering US military technology to Russia via the Skolkovo Project.
As the WikiLeaks emails showed, John Podesta and others in the Hillary camp had polling showing that Americans viewed her as “weak on Russia” due to all of the things listed in the previous paragraph.
Like true scumbag politicians, their preferred way to deal with it was to project their own Russian ties onto Donald Trump with the Russian Collusion Hoax.
There are quite a few aspects of politics that had been the standard “way things are done” for decades prior to Donald Trump winning the election in 2016 that immediately became “Literally Hitler and treason and treasonous Hitler” according to the Western media.
One such standard policy-turned treason was that a new incoming Presidential administration would reach out to world leaders to establish contact and begin to set the pace for a new leader of the USA.
The National Security Advisor is one of those positions that needs to talk to both allies and adversaries, obviously, and Flynn was about to walk into that role when he took his family vacation to Puerto Rico.
And remember, despite the current, “Russia bad” stance from DC, the Obama/Hillary administration had been running the policy of a “Russia reset” prior to Trump winning.
Remember Obama’s hot mic comment to Russian Prime Minister Medvedev in the runup to 2012?
“Tell Vladimir I’ll have more "flexibility" to negotiate [on missile defense] after the November election.”
https://www.wsj.com/video/obama-medvedev-hot-mic-gaffe/5F7CF09D-CFD5-4805-A72C-3378D5F8371E
How does all of this tie in with the IC and DC breaking the law and violating 702 for political motives?
When Obama orchestrated a contrived political crisis by expelling Russian diplomats for something we know a DNC staffer and Bernie Bro who was mad about what they did to Bernie Sanders in the primary did, the Russian ambassador reached out to the incoming NSA rather than the one from the lame duck administration that was in office at the time.
Because it was the Russian ambassador, FISC/702 applied, meaning the US IC was monitoring his communications.
Because General Flynn was on a family vacation in Puerto Rico (not within the domestic US), those communications took place outside of the US for all intents and purposes, meaning that 702 also applied to the conversation.
In situations like these when a US citizen’s communications are scooped up by 702 monitoring, there are actually policies in place that are supposed to prevent that citizen’s rights from being trampled.
Without even getting into the fact that Flynn was a former intel General and incoming NSA, all of his information should have been “masked,” or unidentifiable to anyone looking at a readout of the communications.
The process to discover what US citizen is speaking with a foreigner is a process called, “unmasking,” and is supposed to be an extremely carefully controlled process that requires a very high-level signoff and a lot of oversight to do.
It is supposed to be a very difficult process, and one that is only done in extreme circumstances.
Was that the case with Flynn’s call?
Of course not.
Now, here’s the weird thing.
Devin Nunes was the one to blow the lid off of this whole thing when he released The Nunes Memo that detailed how the US Intelligence Community had spied on the Trump campaign. When he did, the media attacked him mercilessly, and Adam Schiff wrote his own rebuttal often called The Schiff Memo basically refuting everything that Nunes said in his.
It certainly bears mentioning that both Nunes and Schiff sat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), meaning they both had access to the same exact records, intelligence, and people.
Over the years that followed, The Nunes Memo was proven 100% accurate, while The Schiff Memo was proven absolutely false.
Here is The Nunes Memo for you to read and judge for yourself, given the benefit of all that we’ve learned since its release:
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/memo_and_white_house_letter.pdf
It’s interesting that I could find a direct copy of The Nunes Memo on Congress’ website (linked above), but none for The Schiff Memo. If I were them, I wouldn’t want that to exist anymore, either.
The best that I could find were articles on it that include parts and takeaways:
https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-follies-schiff-memo-edition
When Nunes began to hold hearings on the matter (after a slew of fake ethics complaints were launched against him to slow the whole process down), you may remember that the term “unmasking” became suddenly everywhere.
There were dozens of people in the Obama administration, from Joe Biden to the UN ambassador to many others who had no reason to request that 702-caught surveillance would have the US citizens involved “unmasked” or have their names directly identified.
Many at the time thought that these unmaskings were being done to discover that Flynn was on the call.
Sundance from The Conservative Treehouse, who I’ve mentioned and linked to before, has another (well-educated and now proven) theory:
Based on what is now open source but is still not well known, it wasn’t Flynn who was being unmasked, because Flynn had already been under active FISA surveillance along with the other members of the Trump campaign.
The unmaskings were being done of everyone who Flynn communicated with, i.e. “the 3 hop rule.”
And, as we’ve already covered, that FISA authorization was only given due to the FBI lying to the FISA court to get it.
To put it bluntly, the FBI knew every word that had been spoken in Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, because they already had and had read the transcript of their call, that had been captured under FISA 702 surveillance.
Someone from the FBI, and that person is believed by Sundance and many others to have been (now CNN contributor) Andy McCabe who leaked that call to the media.
You know all of the “sources and methods” claims that the IC hides behind when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and don’t want to have to provide evidence of their own wrongdoing?
Leaking something like an incoming NSA’s calls with a Russian ambassador would be the real version of “sources and methods” that should not be leaked to the press or divulged. This would be leaking highly sensitive and classified material, which is extremely illegal and felonious.
Still, nobody was ever held accountable for those leaks.
Even worse…the transcripts have now been declassified and open source for years, and it turns out *SURPRISE* that they say something very different from what the media, DOJ, Democrat politicians, Mike Pence, and even DC Judge Emmet Sullivan claimed for years.
When that call was leaked to the press, the narrative that was run was that Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak had discussed Flynn saying that Trump could do Russia a favor by removing sanctions that Obama had added.
This was the narrative-setting exercise that people still, to this day, use to label Flynn a traitor.
Remember, the Obama/Hillary machine had been running their “Russian Reset” program for years, but the media flipped immediately when it could be used for their “Orange Man Bad” political attacks to help the DNC and establishment GOP Never Trumpers.
Wise students of geopolitics may believe that this sudden switch from Russia Reset to a totally adversarial stance towards Russia has a direct, solid (not dotted) line to our current antagonistic relationship with Russia, and that the current fast lane that DC has put us in towards WWIII agitation.
But let’s get back to the FBI & IC violating US law for political ends…
The FBI sent agents to ambush Flynn in the early days of the Trump admin about his call.
This is not disputed, and James Comey bragged about how they should have gone through the White House legal counsel to arrange a meeting with Flynn, but Comey used the turmoil of a new incoming administration to skip and circumvent that process.
Despite the FBI agents having transcripts of the call, they played dumb and asked Flynn about what was discussed.
He told them. The agents’ reports after the meeting said they felt he was being truthful and candid with them.
Yet the higher-ups at the FBI recommended charges against Flynn, the DOJ brought prosecutions against Flynn, and when someone decent from DOJ was put in charge and wanted to drop those charges, the DC Judge overseeing the case (Emmet Sullivan) refused to drop the charges - although judges don’t have the power to do that (co-equal branches of government, or so we’re told).
While you won’t hear about it from the media, and what is certainly the most important aspect of the whole ordeal, is that it was all a hoax.
Those transcripts have been open source and declassified now for years. Dan Bongino talks about this in great detail in his book Spygate.
The actual transcripts, which the FBI, DOJ, and everyone else knew, showed that Flynn and Kislyak never discussed sanctions.
Despite that vicious black eye on the FBI, DOJ, intelligence community and media, they simply moved on from that hoax and continue to contrive reasons to call Flynn a traitor to this day.
To put a bow on this and summarize it, they used FISA to spy on Flynn, 702 to get a transcript of the call, Comey used the turmoil of an incoming administration to do an ambush interview, the agents said he was truthful, FBI leadership lied and DOJ charged him anyway with hoax charges, and FBI leaked the hoax narrative to the media.
And both the US Congress and Senate, to many Americans’ chagrin and disgust, voted this year to fully renew those FISA and 702 authorizations for the FBI and IC, based solely on the promise that they super duper pinky swear that they made internal changes to ensure it never happens again.
*Note: in the years between the Spygate and Flynn hoaxes, the IC was found to have violated the rules of unmasking and 702 collection many millions of times. Yet Congress and the Senate still allowed them to plow ahead at full steam.
While these mechanisms have been built to allow the collection of Americans’ conversations, and provided the ability to be used by bad-faith political actors, there is an opposite mechanism of the Intel Community that is gaining the same amount of funding, power, and abilities.
While FISA and 702 allow spying on American citizens, it’s now time to dive into how the Censorship Industrial Complex allows the Intel Community to silence the voices of (dissenting) Americans.
Yes, we’re supposed to have a 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
Like the 4th Amendment shredding outlined above, they don’t care.
The (Global) Censorship Industrial Complex
The right to freedom of speech (the 1st Amendment) used to be a major issue of support, especially among the democrats and progressive activists. One of the most famous cases in which liberals were willing to put their personal beliefs aside to defend free speech was when the ACLU went to bat for a Neo Nazi group’s right to host a march in Skokie, Illinois.
The ACLU was largely staffed by lawyers and people of Jewish descent, and the Neo Nazis had chosen Skokie specifically because it had a large Jewish population and many Holocaust survivors.
The ACLU went to bat and supported a legal battle to allow the march to happen. It angered many donors and supporters of the organization, but the organization felt its charter and 1st Amendment mission were more important than personal histories or feelings.
While plainly written - much like the 2nd Amendment - and with its reasoning backed up explicitly in the Federalist Papers by some of the authors of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, legal maneuvering and interpretations over the decades have allowed some to see the right to free speech of a US citizen in very obscure and, in my own personal opinion, nonsensical ways.
Here is the 1st Amendment as it is written:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
And a quote from former SCOTUS Justice Hugo Black regarding the 1st Amendment indicates what previous generations saw as the reasoning behind the Founder’s intent:
"The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands."
-Associate Justice Hugo L. Black
In the Citizens United ruling, the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations enjoy the right of free speech, and that political donations are covered under the 1st Amendment, which led to a massive influx of corporate-funded political machinations.
Many media organizations and journalists today will use 1st Amendment claims or protections to give them carte blanche to write hit pieces, wrap up smear articles, or blatant attacks, even if there is no basis in fact and their endeavors can be seen to have obvious political, financial, or other types of motives.
The SCOTUS has held that defamation is specifically not covered under 1st Amendment protections, but the hurdles to even bring such cases after the precedent set by the Sullivan v New York Times case can sometimes be incredibly costly, burdensome, and time-consuming to overcome.
Most notably, the media organizations that are quick to claim 1st Amendment protection when they defame or slander someone are nowhere to be found when the USGOV, either directly or by proxy, sets its sights on censoring and removing the free speech rights & abilities from US citizens.
As with the previous incarnation of the ACLU mentioned at the start of this section, free speech used to be a major issue for American liberals. Some may see this as a byproduct of the 1960s and 1970s, when various parts of The Machine, The Establishment, or whatever you want to call it tried very hard to crack down on dissenting anti-war and anti-establishment voices.
Now that those 60s and 70s flower children and disco kids have grown up to become The Establishment, however, neither the liberal stalwarts nor prior free speech advocates are very concerned about it.
To the contrary, many of the largest (liberal-run and dominated) MainStream Media outlets have run multiple pieces insinuating or downright coming out and saying that the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech may be a bad thing after all.
Why the change?
Many of the youthful liberals who worked their way into positions of power ended up really liking the thing that they most railed against in their youth. Like Bernie Sanders who railed against millionaires until he himself became one, the flower children realized that they really liked being able to boss people around and have their bidding done once they got to sit in the big boy seats.
And they really, really don’t like dissent or anyone bringing up their hypocrisy or shining light on the lies they tell to grab or maintain power.
One of the reasons that you could tell the Trump win in 2016 was such a surprise to The Establishment was the immediate placing of blame that was thrown around on all sides.
As an aside, I have a group of 5 guys who I’ve been best friends with since elementary and middle school. We run the gamut of political leanings, with 2 liberals, 2 who skew more conservative, and 1 who totally abstains from any politics of any form.
We all got together 2 years ago, and while we often don’t talk politics together, one of them made a comment about Mark Zuckerberg being a Republican who helped Donald Trump get elected.
Yes, people who consume liberal media actually believe this.
They don’t know that Zuck gave $400mm to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) which placed political activists directly within the voting mechanisms in each of the swing states in November of 2020.
In some places, the public servants duly and legally appointed to run voting were forced out by CTCL activists, some of whom had private ballrooms in hotels where they were allowed to sequester votes with none of the actual elections staff allowed to enter, participate, or maintain chain of custody.
My friend believed that Zuck helped get Trump elected because that was one of the DNC and media’s narratives post-November 2016.
To explain this, there is one important thing that many people don’t understand about technology products (like social media and apps):
If it’s free for you to use, it isn’t the product, you are the product.
More specifically, your data is the product. Data is a big business, and social media companies lure you into sharing as much private data, networks, connections, and information as possible. They then sell that data to advertisers and 3rd-party data brokers and companies.
Leading up to the 2016 election, a data firm called Cambridge Analytica was a part of that ecosystem that harvested Facebook data to use for its own means. The Trump campaign used this to its advantage and quite effectively, so to explain Hillary’s loss that became one of the narratives that was sold.
They didn’t mention that Obama’s 2012 campaign had done the same thing (but less effectively), or that Hillary was one of the most unliked candidates of all time.
The narrative that was set was that Zuck and Facebook helped Trump get elected, and Orange Man Bad.
After the election, we saw a sudden about face by social media and tech executives swearing fealty to the DNC and publicly promising to do their part to prevent such a thing from happening again.
Our Democracy™ can’t abide a popular but non-establishment candidate winning an election, apparently.
Here’s Google co-founder Sergey Brin giving a speech to Googlers post-2016 election for some understanding of how they viewed it, and giving a premonition of what was about to happen in Silicon Valley:
Conservatives and center-right folks began feeling the various platforms starting to diminish their reach, voices, and outright censoring them pretty quickly.
“Fact checkers” suddenly began to pop up, and it took several years for the public consciousness to realize that most of those “fact checkers” were in fact disinformation agents finding unique ways to hide true but uncomfortable (for the anti-Trumpers) facts.
These censorship operations against conservatives and centrists were the most heavy on the largest platforms, especially Twitter (v1.0 under Jack Dorsey), Facebook, and YouTube.
Free speech platforms to provide safe havens for conservatives to communicate began to pop up like Parler, but The Machine quickly found ways to take them down.
“Conservative purges” became a regular occurance on these social media platforms, where overnight millions of accounts would suddenly be shut down, locked, or simply disappear.
Tim Pool was asked to go on Joe Rogan’s show to debate Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde about these censorship operations. While Dorsey and Gadde tried to pretend they weren’t happening, Pool caught them in quite a few bald-faced lies:
https://www.youtube.com/live/DZCBRHOg3PQ?si=8WBZ7ykkEQ1iCVUJ
Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley held hearings and hauled the social media CEOs into DC. While Cruz and Hawley talked a big game, others would find enormous donations to various GOP politicians from the very social media platforms that they railed against in sound bytes and on Fox news hits.
Many of the former Spygate researchers had catalyzed around this conservative censorship on social media, as they had been one of the groups that was harshly deboosted and censored. Many from this group were debunking and proving outright lies by the social CEOs in their testimony before Cruz and Hawley in real time, yet nothing ever happened.
The Twitter Files releases that would come just a few years later would prove that the Cruz and Hawley hearings were likely either purely toothless and masturbatory preening for the cameras at best, or nefarious shakedown attempts for increased donations from the platforms at worst.
With censorship mechanisms and processes having been built, put into place, and enacted in the post-2016 Trump years, they were tested, online, and ready to go when it was time for the 2020 “Summer of Love” BLM/George Floyd riots and the lockdowns and faux-pandemic.
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, by no means a conservative or even centrist, began asking questions and was kicked off of Twitter for doing so. He filed a lawsuit, and in discovery found that the USGOV had directly intervened to get the platform to kick him off:
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_21-cv-09818
I’ve mentioned the Missouri v Biden (now renamed Murthy v Missouri) lawsuit that outlined all of the White House and USGOV members who used those censorship tools (and many others) to censor anyone who had questions about lockdowns, vaccines, or COVID.
Berenson’s lawsuit against Twitter is the first that I know of that began to find the evidence that would then lead to the Missouri v Biden lawsuit, which would be followed by the Twitter Files.
If you really want to understand just how gross all of it was, UncoverDC has been the only media outlet to cover Missouri v Biden in its entirety.
The case itself includes black-and-white evidence via emails, transcripts, memos, and others of the USGOV outright censoring anyone who asked questions, and demanding that social media platforms do the same.
If you would like to see that evidence, UncoverDC is the best place to find it:
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/05/24/the-lead-up-to-the-hearing-missouri-v-biden/
After the Missouri v Biden case had been going, word began to get out to the public that Elon Musk, a heavy Twitter user and the world’s richest man, was looking to buy the Twitter platform. He began to make public comments about his own noticing that “something was off” with the platform, and cited Twitter banning the satirical website/account The Babylon Bee as his “final straw.”
There was a lot of public back and forth, backroom dealings and machinations, and a ton of corporate espionage-level propaganda that made its way into the media and public sphere about whether or not Musk would be able to buy Twitter, but he eventually pulled it off.
Not long after taking control, Musk invited a group of journalists - also not conservative by any rational stretch of the imagination - to come to the Twitter HQ to take on a secretive project.
That project would, for the first time ever, truly blow the lid off of what had become a massive USGOV and proxy third-party (USGOV-funded) ecosystem of censorship across the social media platforms. The journalists (Matt Taibbi, Matthew Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss) were given no-holds-barred access to all of the internal corporate files and communications from Twitter.
What they uncovered was earth-shattering, despite the US media’s total unwillingness to report it much or accurately.
Again, the US media, in its current state, is quick to use the 1st Amendment when it can be a defensive mechanism to protect them, but refuses to say anything when their friends in power are shredding the 1st Amendment to maintain their grip on power and narrative control.
By this point we all know about the “51 Spies Who Lie,” the former intel officers (and, as we now know, 5 former CIA heads and even active CIA contractors) who lied about the provenance of the Hunter Biden laptop in the leadup to the 2020 election.
One of the many things that the Twitter Files revealed was that the FBI had a specific agent named Elvis Chan who was tasked to work directly with the social media platforms in Silicon Valley for censorship operations.
Chan shows up in both the Missouri v Biden exhibits and Twitter Files, and not only got platforms to censor during the lockdowns and vax rollout, but reportedly also had a hand in their censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop when it first began to be publicly reported by the NY Post and others.
If you remember, the oldest newspaper outlet in the US, founded by one of America’s Founding Fathers, had their Twitter account locked because they dared to publish a story about the Hunter Biden laptop before the 2020 election.
If you’ve never read or don’t know much about the Twitter Files, here’s Matt Taibbi’s first thread that started it all in December of 2022:
https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
In the years since they first went public with their findings, an entire world of US taxpayer-funded censorship has been uncovered.
It includes intelligence community cutouts and proxies like the Stanford Internet Observatory, former CISA head Chris Krebs and his censorious buddy Alex Stamos, Kate Starbird at the University of Washington, and an entire world of DHS-funded and many Atlantic Council-connected NGOs focused solely on censoring American’s voices if they run contrary to the narratives that they want the public to believe.
A perfect example of this alignment was Hamilton 68, a censorship group that used a hoax to get thousands of Americans kicked off of Twitter by labeling them as Russian agents, which was also outed by the Twitter Files.
Funded by the eBay founder (Omidiyar) and run by former US intelligence agents, Hamilton 68 created a “dashboard” of Twitter users who it labeled as Russian disinformation agents. Hamilton 68 sent this dashboard to Twitter, and the Twitter Files showed that even the censorship-prone Twitter staff balked because their investigations showed it was a total hoax.
As the people running Twitter, they had the ability to look deeply into the accounts that Hamilton 68 had labeled as Russian agents. They found the claims to be totally ludicrous, and quickly understood that it was nothing more than a politically-driven Information Operation.
The Twitter Files internal communications showed that Yoel Roth and the Twitter leadership pushed back, but were met with so much force by the media and White House that they opted to do what Hamilton 68 demanded (kicking those innocent Americans who were smeared off of Twitter).
This allowed the Information Operation to proceed, as the “dashboard” was published publicly and used by the media as “proof” that Russian agents had infiltrated Twitter to influence Americans.
Yet as the title of this post states, it was always built on bullshit.
How We Got Here
In the previous section, I outlined how the social media censorship machine was built and allowed by the platforms as their “apology” for 2016, but the surveillance, political dirty tricks, and censorship mechanisms were being put into place years before that.
While our current foreign policy blunders and machine run by the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys can be traced back decades, the police and surveillance state that is starting to be understood can be traced back to Obama.
I know quite a few people who have begun to awaken to all of the bullshit but who still aren’t quite ready to face the facts about what Obama really was, and what he really used his presidency to do.
Yes, he promised to “transform” America. No, he did not mean in the way that most of you thought that he meant.
This predilection of using Executive Orders to bypass the co-equal branches of government and get “laws” on the books without Congressional and Senate votes started with Obama. The porkulus “Continuing Resolution” budgets that use the previous year’s spending as the “baseline” and always increase started with Obama.
The massive growth of the Senior Executive Service (SES), Iran-friendly operatives working within the US intelligence apparatus, the declining relations with Israel & Saudi Arabia in favor of Iran started under Obama.
And the reformation of the US media, Intelligence Community, and law enforcement apparati to turn inward against any domestic political enemies or dissenters started under Obama, with the help of “wingman” Eric Holder.
There is a lot that we can delve into here, but I read an article by Sundance this week that outlines it in great detail with receipts, news clips, memos, and articles that show how it happened, who allowed it to happen, and who made it happen every step of the way.
It was a truly bi-partisan effort to get to this point, which should disgust every American who still believes the lessons that we learned in civics class or through Schoolhouse Rock as a kid.
Bipartisanship is supposed to be a good thing, and stress within the system that is created by opposing views is why we have a tripartite political system (executive, legislative, and judicial branches) of co equal bodies.
When that bipartisanship is focused instead on creating a 4th, unelected branch of government that is given the power to control them all and subvert the Constitution at will with no accountability or oversight…that’s not such a good thing.
Click the link below to be given a deep history of the DC machinations (uniparty and bipartisan, of course) that have, since 2007, changed the way the USGOV operates, and who (really) controls the levers of power:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/07/09/big-picture-question-big-picture-answer/
Trump is Merely an Archetype
I’ve said more than a few times through the Shitshow Macro posts and podcasts that Trump is not so much a man as he is an archetype, and that’s worth elucidating a bit given all that we’ve gone through.
As many have said before me, Trump is not a product of The System, but a symptom of it.
As outlined by Victor Davis Hanson at the end of the interview linked above (starting around 55 minutes), he outlines his case for Trump as an archetype. This interview is 5 years old, but it’s as pertinent today as it ever was.
In Hanson’s words:
Western consensual societies (those that are democratic or have democratic characteristics) have a tendency to come into a crisis that the established order cannot deal with or fix. Within these societies, there are people who would never be turned to in times of leisure, affluence, or non-crisis.
When those crises come to a breaking point, that type of personality comes to the fore.
General George Patton was not the type of guy who would be well-accepted at DC cocktail parties today. Neither would Air Force General Curtis Lamay.
Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry from the so-named series of movies could not be seen as the face of the San Francisco police department because he was too uncouth and his methods were too unconventional (and, as named, “dirty”) but he was the only one that could stop the serial killer Serpico.
These men and character archetypes are needed to bring a solution and end to a crisis, but along with them comes an uncouthness, an uncivilized nature, a breaking of the norms that brought about yet could not fix the crisis in the first place.
The media and DC establishment constantly harangued Trump for his “unpresidential” behavior, but a quick look at those who would be deemed “presidential” reveals an unspoken yet glaring fact: the most “presidential” and buttoned-up of our past presidents were also often the most unremarkable ones who lacked any real leadership skills.
Jimmy Carter was likely one who had the media and establishment’s so-loved “presidential” qualities, as did Gerald Ford.
John F. Kennedy, as much as we like to remember the positive light of his time, was known to be a serial philanderer with a penchant for hanging out with mob types.
Teddy Roosevelt was an avid outdoorsman and pugilist who would have boxing matches in the White House.
LBJ was a flaming racist.
Lincoln jailed many members of the media because he thought they were standing in the way of his objectives.
George Washington was a great general who didn’t want to be President or King and only agreed after a lot of urging for him to step in as the first POTUS.
As for those who the media and establishment would like you to believe are “presidential…”
Hillary Clinton and Obama would both alter their speaking, dialects and even dress depending on what crowd they were speaking to.
Hillary’s infamous “I carry hot sauce in my pocket” comments to a black radio station host during an interview in Atlanta should have laid her fraudulent political personality to bare for all to see, but many didn’t want to admit it (out loud) that her personality was downright fake and pandering.
“Scranton Joe” Biden had to have the many videos of his outright racist comments, even those made on the floor of the Senate and captured on C-Span, censored from social media in the runup to the 2020 election lest the DNC lose their stranglehold on the black vote and ability to call Trump the racist.
The same goes for Biden's prior 2 attempts at runs for the presidency, each of which he had to drop out of when caught lying or plagiarizing.
How very presidential of him.
When Biden is talking to union members, he’s “Scranton Joe.” When he’s talking to a black church as organized by his buddy Clyburn, he “grew up in the black church.” When he’s talking in heavily Hispanic areas, he “grew up in the Hispanic part of his neighborhood.”
Notably, the part of Delaware where he actually grew up doesn’t really have a Hispanic neighborhood.
AOC panders as “Jenny from the Bronx” and a former bartender, when she actually grew up in one of the wealthiest zip codes on the East Coast and went to private prep school. Pictures that have surfaced of her in Africa working for (frequent CIA front) USAID opens up even more questions about her actual past.
Americans had grown up with and become entirely familiar with the lying and pandering chameleon-like politicians who wear jeans when speaking in the midwest, suddenly have a drawl when in the south, an urban slang when in the urban areas, and put on an entire (temporary, fake) image depending on who they are pandering to.
Before they slither back to DC and the comforts of lobbyist-funded high society and cocktail parties, that is.
And then came Trump.
No matter where he went or who he was speaking to, he wore a suit and tie. The Brooklyn accent never changed no matter which crowd he was speaking to. In debates, he was willing to go where the “polite society” and “presidential decor” politicians of either side of the aisle were unwilling to venture.
He was willing to both attack the “sacred cows” that people saw as destroying the fabric of our nation (unfettered illegal immigration, trade imbalances, funding and policing the rest of the world, offshoring American manufacturing and jobs) that the other politicians weren’t willing to even whisper about.
Once he got into office, he did things that had already been duly-passed laws that nobody else had bothered to actually do (move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem), try to find detente and common ground with our adversaries (walking across the DMZ in North Korea), and scare the living daylights out of our adversaries who had been emboldened by Obama’s weakness (Iran, ISIS).
What the “polite society” of the media and DC never understood is that the archetype that Trump represents (Dirty Harry, Ajax of Sophocles, Patton, Lamay, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday a la Tombstone) is not supposed to be polite, or couth, or soft.
They are, by their nature, outsiders who ramble in to fix a society (or town) that has been beset by crisis, which has often been mismanaged, overlooked, or assisted by those who are supposed to be in charge.
The outsider and problem solver is the only one willing to do what “must be done” to fix an untenable situation.
The townspeople (or population) don’t care that he uses unconventional means, because the conventional means are what led to or allowed the crisis in the first place.
They don’t care that he has a dark or sordid past, a la Clint Eastwood’s character in The Unforgiven.
The people have put up with the decline or lawlessness for long enough, and they’re willing to abide by the ruthlessness required to fix a problem that the polite society types could not (or would not) fix.
This is why 95% of Washington DC voted for Hillary in 2016, and those there who still call themselves Republicans in DC skew towards Nikki Haley now.
The people who caused the problems, or allowed the problems to fester, or worse helped it get to this point (or those who got very rich in the process of offshoring US jobs) don’t see a problem that needs to be fixed.
Many of them are Never Trumpers because they want things to remain just the way they are.
Inflation? Who cares about inflation when you have drivers who fill the tank and staff who do your grocery shopping?
For others, across many demographics, they see the need for an unconventional fix when the conventional has only made things steadily worse for them and their loved ones.
This is why the constant stream of media cawing about porn stars, lawfare, and media hoaxes don’t even leave a mark on Trump.
In the inverse, they make him more popular.
Because Americans, those who are actually suffering from and under the “status quo,” understand that it will take someone rough around the edges, willing to take a few shots to the chin, and unfearing of the consequences to step in and fix what the “polite society and presidential” establishment has been unwilling or unable to do.
And what they absolutely refuse to come to terms with, but is a fact with plenty of historical analogs, is that if they do what they did to the Tea Party and find a way to deep-six Trump now, the American populace will look for another archetype that is much closer to what the media pretends that Trump is.
That, my friends, is where we actually can get into ugly territory a la Franco or Pinochet.
I’m terrible at asking others for things, but…
It’s my intention to keep this platform free to read, but with the ability for people to donate if they are so inclined and feel the content here is worth their hard-earned dollars. These posts take quite a bit of time and research, but as I work it into my routine the flash-to-bang on new posts should reduce dramatically.
If you are so inclined and feel this is worth your time to subscribe for updates, share with others, or become a paid member, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Regardless, we’re all in this shitshow together. I’m going to do what I can to help you see the bigger picture and keep your eyes on the things that matter.
Until next time,
RPL