Biden election interference, 2020: the Hunter laptop disinformation campaign by the left

The New Neo Posted on by

At the same time the intelligence community was spreading the word that the Hunter Biden laptop was likely to be disinformation, it knew full well that the laptop was Hunter’s and everything on it was real and not “Russian disinformation” at all. It was an Orwellian full court press by the left, the media, and the intelligence community to lie about all of this and pull Biden across the finish line. And it worked.

I repeat – not only does the intelligence community and the FBI now know that the laptop is authentic, but they knew it back then. They did not want Trump re-elected, and so they smeared him, and the MSM dutifully followed.

Later, the plan was to settle Hunter’s gun application case and give him immunity for all crimes, but an alert judge in Delaware noticed the unusual global immunity deal and wouldn’t let that stand. That mean the case went forward, and in court the prosecutors have said the laptop is real, is Hunter’s, and is admissible evidence and not “Russian disinformation” at all – just as Trump and Giuliani always said.

Most Americans probably aren’t aware of this history. They might know now that the laptop is real, but they may not know that the intelligence community knew it was real while peddling the idea that it was false. To refresh your memory, from last July:

On July 17, 2023, the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government conducted a transcribed interview of Laura Dehmlow, the Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). During her transcribed interview, Dehmlow revealed that the same FBI personnel who were warning social media companies about a potential Russian “hack and leak” operation in the run-up to the 2020 election knew that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was not Russian disinformation. After the New York Post broke a story based on the contents of the laptop about Biden family influence peddling, the FBI made the institutional decision to refuse to answer direct questions from social media companies about the laptop’s authenticity—despite months of constant information sharing up to that time. Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation. …

The FBI made this decision despite being in possession of the laptop and having confirmed its authenticity. According to Dehmlow, multiple personnel on FITF knew that the laptop was real. …

The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look for a “hack and dump” operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election. Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’ suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election.

It wasn’t difficult to authenticate the laptop. It was easy.

So, here’s another video you might call to the attention of your friends:

NOTE: More on the sordid stories coming out during the Hunter Biden trial can be found here.

Portland, Oregon does its bit to globalize the intifada

The New Neo Posted on by

Who needs UNRWA when you have the Portland school system? From Chris Rufo:

The lesson plans [from the Portland Association of Teachers, a state teachers’ union affiliate] (The union did not respond to a request for comment.) are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Please read the whole thing.

Do the people of Portland know about this? And of the residents who do, how many approve? Perhaps it’s very very popular; it’s Portland, after all. But perhaps not.

On the legal system and its political inequities

The New Neo Posted on by

I went to law school a long long time ago. I wasn’t quite sure why I went, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had taken the LSAT, which is the equivalent of College Boards for law school, and got a score so high I could basically write my own ticket to any law school I preferred. I had vague notions of becoming a defense attorney. But while in law school I realized I didn’t have the temperament for it, and much – not all, but much – of law bored me almost to tears.

But although I never practiced law, I never regretted going to law school. The entire experience was valuable because law is so much a part of one’s later life that it’s good to know more than most people do about the way it functions and the thinking behind it. My favorite course was jurisprudence, which is the philosophy of law. Even that had a surprising and helpful amount of application to everyday life, and it helped me give free – you get what you pay for – legal advice to my friends.

But one thing I never anticipated was that I would become a blogger (that designation didn’t even exist back then) and that law would become so absolutely central to our politics. For a long time now I’ve been struck by how often I must learn more about law in order to write about law for this blog, because law has occupied an even more central place in politics in recent years. It’s not just the usual SCOTUS cases, either, which were always so important. It’s law as a tool of politics by the left against political opponents on the right.

It’s long been apparent that, although our legal system aspires to being even-handed and objective no matter who the defendant might be, that there are many exceptions. However, over the years since I was in law school, legal education has changed markedly, and that change is part of the Gramscian march through the institutions. My professors didn’t speak about politics and so I never knew their affiliations, but I would wager that many of them were on the right. Nowadays such a political affiliation in a law professor is far more rare, and what’s more, the ones on the left are on the far left. An overt “ends justify the means” philosophy has taken over, and the very basic idea that everyone deserves to have competent defense – even, for example, Donald Trump – has nearly disappeared.

That’s how our present state of lawfare – an apt moniker – has come to be. Two dubious civil cases against Trump in NYC with ridiculously high awards, and four criminal cases originally timed to be decided prior to the 2024 election and brought by Democrats. The goals are transparent; they’re not hiding what they’re doing, although the MSM keeps trying to tell us otherwise.

But three of the cases have hit legal snags. The strangest and weakest of them all, the so-called “hush money” case, is probably the only one that will have been decided prior to the election. This wasn’t the original plan, but I believe it was certainly part of the reason so many cases were launched at once, as insurance against some of them not going through in time. But the fact that the extremely weak case brought by Bragg may be the only one that goes through prior to November of 2024 leaves the Democrats open to widespread (and correct) perceptions of bias and persecution of a political rival.

The fact that the Hunter Biden case is following on the heels of the Trump case also threatens to point out our two-tiered justice system, because Hunter is being tried in a state that’s not only deep blue but that has been dominated by the political power of his family for many decades. If he gets off entirely, or gets off with a wrist slap, it will highlight the injustice of the system. His trial has also highlighted something else, although I’m not sure how many people who aren’t already on the right will take notice: the obvious and undoubted authenticity of his laptop, which is being used as evidence. The coverup just prior to the 2020 election was blatant and just another example of the election interference that continues today.

The various cases against Trump that have been halted are described by Ace in this post, including distorted and biased coverage by the MSM. The same outlets praising someone like Bragg and the extremely rogue legal process against Trump there excoriate Judge Cannon in Florida and use lies of omission to make her behavior in slowing down the classified documents case seem highly unusual when it is not. And at Legal Insurrection you can read this post about why the Georgia Court of Appeals has paused the Trump case there.

It all must make the left’s blood boil, at least temporarily. But they can console themselves with the knowledge that at least they’ve imprisoned several peaceful anti-abortion grandparents who blocked abortion clinic entrances, including a woman in poor health. Blogger Ward Clark asks:

Where are the two-year prison sentences for the people who are blocking streets, taking over college campuses, and invading public buildings in the latest leftist outrage du jour over the Israel-Hamas war? Where is the sentence for Raz Simone, who led the takeover of an entire section of the city of Seattle in 2020, setting himself up as a de facto warlord and ruler?

The key is that the feds are not interested in Draconian penalties for them, and because most of those activities occurred in blue cities and/or blue states, there is no will to do very much against them at the state level, either. Arrests without prosecution, or suspended sentences, have been the rule and a great contrast to the ways that people on the right are treated. Duly noted.

D-Day, 80 years later

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a slightly-edited version of a previous D-Day post.]

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII that led to Western Europe’s liberation.

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And although until few years ago I still thought that our armed forces probably would be up to the task, I now have my doubts. Our current government and especially our press would fail us.

About forty-five years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

.

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (at least, while under the aegis of a Republican administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred – fortunately for all of us.

The ANC loses a South Africa election …

The New Neo Posted on by

… for the first time in three decades.

The ANC was Mandela’s party.

Let’s see:

With more than 99 percent of votes counted, the once-dominant ANC had received just over 40% in Wednesday’s election, well short of the majority it had held since the famed all-race vote of 1994 that ended apartheid and brought it to power under Nelson Mandela. …

While opposition parties have hailed the result as a momentous breakthrough for a country struggling with deep poverty and inequality, the ANC remained the biggest party by some way. However, it will now likely need to look for a coalition partner or partners to remain in the government and reelect South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for a second and final term. …

Steenhuisen’s Democratic Alliance party was on around 21% of the vote. The new MK Party of former president Jacob Zuma, who has turned against the ANC he once led, was third with just over 14% of the vote in the first election it has contested. The Economic Freedom Fighters was in fourth with just over 9%. …

MK and the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters have called for parts of the economy to be nationalized. The Democratic Alliance is viewed as a business-friendly party and analysts say an ANC-DA coalition would be more welcomed by foreign investors, although there are questions over whether it is politically viable considering the DA has been the most critical opposition party for years.

Steenhuisen is white; his party is more to the center than the others.

The Economist has a pretty good headline: “South Africa stands on the brink of salvation—or catastrophe.” The sub-headline is “To prevent a coalition of chaos, Cyril Ramaphosa and the Democratic Alliance must do a deal.” Well, yes; but will they?:

Given the anc’s record of corruption, rotten governance, economic stagnation and rising unemployment, the country should be celebrating. Instead it is anxiously awaiting the results of backroom negotiations that will determine what path South Africa takes. The stakes could not be higher. One fork leads to the certain prospect of reckless populism, venality and economic crisis. The other leads to pragmatism and the hope of renewal.

Also, the article mentions that the ANC sustained a 17-point drop since the last election in 2019. Apparently it was young people who turned on the ANC:

The ANC was once a revered liberation movement etched in the hearts of South Africans, but after three decades in power it has become synonymous with corruption and bad governance.

As a result it was punished in Wednesday’s election, especially by young people who came out in large numbers to vote against the party – something they never did in previous elections.

“They are fed up with corruption, and are worst affected by unemployment.”

The leader of the leftist MK has been attacking the leader of the ANC, and that appears to mean that a coalition with the MK is unlikely to happen. Good.

The leader of the DA, Steenhuisen, has said:

Mr Steenhuisen also told the BBC he would have to consult pre-election coalition partners before considering any negotiations.

But he ruled out the EFF and the MK party as potential coalition partners.

“I think instability is not in the best interest of the country. A coalition with the radical left in South Africa of the MK party and the EFF will produce the same policies that destroyed Zimbabwe, destroyed Venezuela,” he said.

Good luck.

WaPo shakeup

The New Neo Posted on by

Long overdue:

Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee has stepped down in a sign that things are not going well for the media institution. Despite the fact that it’s an election year and there is no shortage of news, the paper’s readership is down.

It’s been known for months now that the Post has a cash flow problem, but this is the first high-level management change to be made public.

It seems to be a case of “get woke, go broke.” They’re trying to stop the bleeding:

According to FOX News, the paper’s publisher and CEO, Matt Lewis, recently had a meeting with staffers that involved some tough love:

… “Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis had a blunt message for his staff during a tense meeting following the sudden ouster of executive editor Sally Buzbee, according to the paper’s own reporting.

“‘We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,’ Lewis told the paper. ‘We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.'”

My guess is that they’ll move only ever-so-slightly to the right.

Let’s make this video go viral: about the NY Trump trial

The New Neo Posted on by

This guy – Jed Rubenfeld – calmly and objectively dissects the constitutional issues in the Trump trial. They were by no means the only issues. But constitutional law is his specialty, and that’s what he sticks to; he’s a law professor at Yale. As such, I think his message would be more difficult for Democrats to refute – although of course, where there’s a will there’s a way.

But I think that a certain significant percentage of Democrats are simply ignorant of the major flaws in the Trump prosecution that made it a travesty, and I believe that at least some of them would be at least somewhat disturbed to learn of them. But they wouldn’t take the word of someone on the right. That’s why this guy is important, and that’s why I think it would be a good idea if you could send it to any friends and relatives who might still have even slightly open minds.

You might ask, what about videos of Dershowitz talking about the trial? The problem with Dershowitz is that a while back he spoke up for Trump in one of his impeachment trials. That has already de-legitimized Dershowitz in the eyes of many Trump-haters. Dershowitz also gets very energized and slightly angry when he talks about the NY Trump trial. This guy, on the other hand, is a very calm character:

The Trump riddle for the 2024 election

The New Neo Posted on by

As commenter “Karmi” writes:

Trump has a lot of raw hatred against him—which brings out a lot of voters who will be voting against him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.

Trump definitely has a great many voters energized against him by their hatred of him. Most of them are Democrats who would never vote for a Republican anyway, but quite a few are Independents and even NeverTrumper Republicans. However, are they ordinarily non-voters who are only energized to vote in order to vote against him? I think that’s a very small set.

What’s more, you can flip it around and say that “Trump brings out a lot of voters who will be voting for him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.” I happen to think that group is much greater than the “only vote in order to cast a vote against him” group.

However, I have no way to know how big any of these groups are and have never even seen a poll that attempts to measure it. And I am firmly convinced that someone like DeSantis – whom I very much like – would not necessarily do better than Trump if the former were running this year against Biden.

There are many reasons for this. The first is that most people voting for Biden don’t just hate Trump, they hate Republicans. They hated Republicans even before Trump was elected, although his tenure in office and the propaganda around it may have deepened their hatred. But they hated Romney, too – a point brought home to me quite vividly during a book group meeting I attended in 2012 after the “binders of women” flap occurred. My fellow attendees were all dutifully mouthing the “Romney hates women” mantra as a result.

The second is that I’ve already seen DeSantis smeared as a homophobe and worse, so I have no doubt whatsoever that the smear machine would be cranked up to destroy a DeSantis or any other GOP candidate. The only questions are (1) how successful it would be, and (2) whether the most Trump-devoted voters would support that person, or whether a significant number of them would stay home if Trump weren’t running (I think, for example, that if Nikki Haley had been the GOP nominee, a significant number of Trump supporters would have stayed home).

It’s a conundrum, a riddle for which I have no answer. But it’s moot – at least, barring a flock of black swans – because Trump will be the nominee in 2024.

More evidence of the depressing increase in political polarization and hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

I had a friend about fifteen years ago, we’ll call her Marjorie. We were fairly good friends for about seven years, and then we both moved away and ended up living over an hour from each other and the friendship slowly faded. We haven’t communicated now in a couple of years, but I still have access to her Facebook page even though I’m not active on Facebook.

When we were friends, I knew that she was a liberal Democrat (I wouldn’t ever have called her a leftist) and she knew I was on the right. It was never an issue between us, and although we sometimes discussed politics we didn’t do so often, and we never argued. It was one of those “agree to disagree” things, for the most part. Our friendship was based on other commonalities.

To the best of my recollection, we still were in touch during the Trump years, although not often. But it was just the natural attrition caused by time and distance. Every now and then I’d check her Facebook page and see what she was doing: her kids and grandkids and travels and garden and that sort of innocuous, pleasant stuff. Did she ever post anything political? I don’t recall seeing anything at all, but if I did it was of a mild sort.

But a little while ago I saw that she’d recently posted the following text, which apparently first started circulating back in 2022. I reproduce the whole thing here for you; the original had a different last sentence (which you can find at the link):

Dear Republican Party: You sold your soul. You used to stand for patriotism but sold your soul to a traitor who conspired with an enemy to destroy our democracy.

You used to stand for our armed forces but sold your soul to a draft dodger who mocked their courage and sacrifice.

You used to stand for hardworking Americans but sold your soul to a con man who made his fortune by cheating them.

You used to stand for the American dream but sold your soul to a racist who traded the Statue of Liberty for walls and cages while praising the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

You used to stand for family values but sold your soul to a predator who betrayed all three of his wives.

You used to stand for Jesus but sold your soul to a wolf in sheep’s clothing who has made a mockery of Christianity.

Currently under investigation for tax fraud, voter fraud, insurrection and violation of the Espionage Act, you continue to defend his lies. Whatever he paid you for your soul, I hope it was worth it. But knowing him, you’re probably still waiting for your check.

I’m not even going to bother fisking the supposed facts in the message; the falsehood of so many of them isn’t why I’m spotlighting this. I am more amazed at the fact that this previously mild-mannered and non-vitriolic person saw fit to post it with approval, as though excoriating half her fellow Americans for losing their souls to what amounts to a devil seemed an appropriate thing for her to do. I assume that she has no current friends on the right (I wouldn’t count, since we haven’t been in touch at all for four years or so).

It’s chilling because she used to be tolerant of other points of view, and it wasn’t all that long ago, and to the best of my recollection even included some of the Trump years. Her posting this makes me very sad, because it means either that she knows no one anymore who is a Republican and/or that she has no problem publicly insulting her Republican friends and acquaintances and relatives.

This behavior is very different from that of the person I used to know. But this post is not really about Marjorie. It’s that I think she’s emblematic of a great many other people. Something – and I believe it’s been the unremitting propaganda from the left, mostly based on lies but apparently very persuasive – has accomplished the transformative task.