More on the MAL raid and the affidavit: the persistent influence of propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

From Margot Cleveland at The Federalist:

The search warrant affidavit unsealed on Friday confirms the Department of Justice used a bait-and-switch tactic to justify the FBI’s unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s home. The unredacted portions of the affidavit further expose the Biden administration’s manipulative and tenuous basis for the search and its reliance on inapplicable federal criminal code provisions to justify the targeting of a political enemy.

Yes, but…half of America already knows Trump violated the Espionage Act – ergo, he’s a spy – and was planning to give nuclear secrets to somebody-or-other, anybody, perhaps the highest bidder because he’s all about the money.

Or something like that. I believe this raid had two main purposes, and the first was to plant propaganda in people’s heads, with the fervent cooperation of the MSM. The second was the fishing expedition part, with the goal of finding some technicality on which to criminally indict Trump, or perhaps to cover their own tracks by seizing Russiagate documents (or perhaps both).

More from Cleveland:

While the next nearly eight pages of the search warrant affidavit remained redacted, the disclosures that followed exposed the affidavit’s focus on “classified records” as a sham. “On or about May 6, 2021, NARA made a request for the missing PRA records and continued to make requests until approximately late December 2021 when NARA was informed twelve boxes were found and ready for retrieval at the [Mar-a-Lago],” the affidavit continued, with the abbreviation “PRA” previously noted to stand for the Presidential Records Act.

As I explained previously, to fully comprehend the Biden administration’s weaponizing of the DOJ and FBI, it is necessary to understand the Presidential Records Act, the concept of “presidential records,” and the NARA’s role, and the search warrant affidavit’s references to those concepts confirm that point…

The public (understandably) may wish to sidestep the minutia of the mandates of the Presidential Records Act, but three top-line takeaways prove imperative to understanding the scandal of the Mar-a-Lago search. First, the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute, and violations of that federal law do not constitute a crime. Second, the Presidential Records Act does not reach broad swathes of documents retained by a former president, including “official records of an agency,” “personal records,” and convenience copies of presidential records. And third, the courts have refused to question a former president’s conclusion that a record constitutes a “personal record” and not a “presidential record.”

I believe that Cleveland is correct when she writes that the public (or at least half the public) “may wish to sidestep the minutia of the mandates of the Presidential Records Act.” But it’s not just because it’s boring and technical and picayune, as many statutes are. It’s because the majority of Trump haters don’t care what the law is, as long as the feds finally get the Great Orange Whale.

This post adds some other thoughts:

When [in the affadavit] they refer to what was found in the 15 boxes, they refer to documents with “classification markings.” That leaves open the possibility that they aren’t classified any longer — that they may have been declassified. The affidavit says the documents “appear” to contain National Defense Information, but Sperry asks if they “triaged” the boxes, wouldn’t they know if it did or not?

There’s a line in there about “probable cause to believe evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises.” But as Sperry explains, there’s no heading about that “obstruction” or anything in the unredacted parts that justify this random sentence. The agent behind the affidavit says he believed the storage room and other spaces at Mar-a-Lago weren’t “currently” authorized for storage of classified information. Either they were or they weren’t, didn’t he know? And were they in the past and not now?

Then in the affidavit, there’s a letter dated June 8 mentioned, from the DOJ to Trump’s counsel, telling the Trump team that they have to keep the documents in the storage room until further notice…

So, they seem to think it wasn’t a secure location, but then they tell them to keep the documents there? They don’t take them immediately. They wait two months until the raid on August 8? Why not take them all when they took the original boxes? That seems to blow apart the claim that there was any urgency going on here.

Then of course they knew what was there because they told the Trump team to keep it there. Sperry interprets that as potentially trying to entrap Trump with what the DOJ told them to do.

Whatever ends up happening with this, the narrative is permanently set for a great many people. The same thing happened with the utterly debunked (to use a favorite word of theirs, although they don’t apply it to Russiagate) Russigate story and the infamous Steele dossier.

And then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop and the January 6th “insurrection.” The following clip on those subjects is very recent; it features Bill Maher talking to Rob Reiner and Amy Klobuchar. It’s been viewed and talked about quite a bit in the context of Rob Reiner’s not seeming to know much about the Hunter laptop coverup. But I note a couple of other things about it as well.

Maher starts with a reference to the Sam Harris remarks (I wrote about them in this post) in which Harris basically said that anything was justified in order to stop Trump, and Maher is asking Reiner whether the Hunter laptop coverup by the media was justified. Interesting, though, that Maher doesn’t reference Zuckerberg’s recent remarks that the social media coverup of the laptop story was requested by the partisan FBI. Note also how Reiner counters by changing the subject to January 6th, and that he says that it was a case of “armed violence to try to kill people in the Capitol.” Wrong – and Maher doens’t correct him. The only people who tried to kill anyone were the Capitol police, and they were successful. At the end of the clip, Klobuchar chimes in with the idea that Trump “literally tried to lead an armed insurrection.” Those things have become truths for half of America, and Reiner (who may not know any better) and Klobuchar (who almost certainly does) are perpetuating the myths.

Here’s the clip:

You Stepped Into My Life

The New Neo Posted on by

I think we could all use a dose of joy, right?

Of course, those of you who hate the Bee Gees and especially the Bee Gees’ falsetto singing mode may find listening to this the opposite of joyful. It’s a fairly obscure song by the Bee Gees I recently discovered, and I just love it. You may say “oh, neo, you are tiresomely indiscriminate about the Bee Gees; you love all their stuff.” But no, I merely like some of it – and even among the many songs I love, there are degrees of love.

This particular song may not have caught on when it was released on their 1976 album “Children of the World,” but it’s so upbeat, so expressive of the bubbly happiness a person can feel when in the grip of the first blush of love, that it never fails to put a smile on my face. That smile becomes especially broad when I hear the keyboard (synth?) that begins at around 0:16, and then Barry’s musical yelp at 0:18-0:23. And I especially like the passage from 1:33 to 1:53. Is the song disco? Is it funk? Who cares? Enjoy:

It was a somewhat bigger hit in 1978 for Melba Moore, who turned it into what I hear as a more strictly disco version with more instrumental parts, a faster tempo, and the same relentlessly happy vibe. I like this one very much, too, although the Bee Gees edge it out slightly for me, in part because that synth bit is lacking here. They each have their substantial charms, though. Do we really have to choose? Let’s just dance:

I can’t think of another song that so perfectly captures the experience of sudden love, meeting someone out of the blue and feeling that energizing rush where all’s right with the world when a minute before things seemed so wrong. I fell in love almost instantaneously with my ex-husband. I was twenty-one years old, and although I’d had quite a few serious relationships up to that time, I knew instantly this was The Real Thing. The course of my very lengthy marriage didn’t run at all smooth, and ultimately we divorced, but both of us knew and know that what we felt was very very real despite its suddenness.

I find the phrase “stepped into my life” so interesting. The unusual thing about it is that word “stepped” – the lyric doesn’t say the more conventional “came in my life.” “Stepped” gives that feeling of “suddenly, suddenly” – at one moment the stage is empty, and then the main actor comes on to applause and happy relief. And the way Barry sings “suddenly, suddenly” is just effervescent.

A lot of people think the Bee Gees’ lyrics are ho-hum, but although I think I understand why they say that, I don’t agree. They’re not deep poets like Leonard Cohen, whom I also love. They’re not Bob Dylan, whose lyrics are more obscure and complex, whom I don’t especially love. I like the Beatles but I don’t love them, and many of their early lyrics are just bubblegum stuff and many of their later ones are rather nonsensical to me. The Bee Gees’ lyrics often seem simple and mundane till you think about them more; sometimes a word such as “stepped” is very telling. “You Stepped Into My Life” is one of their more simple lyrics, except that in a way it’s brilliant. And the music isn’t simple at all, although it’s catchy as all get-out.

VDH on why the “masses” detest the “elites”

The New Neo Posted on by

They have good reason:

…[T]here was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.

In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book related to that topic quite some time ago, entitled Intellectuals and Society.

The pending Iran deal and the Biden administration’s “weakness”

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s more on the new Iran Deal here, in particular what the Iranian leaders are saying about their plans for Israel. The article mentions the Biden administration’s weakness several times as one of the factors leading to all of this:

As the Biden administration seems to be moving closer to reaching a new nuclear deal with Iran, the mullahs in Tehran are encouraging their Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist proxies to prepare for waging war on Israel…

The mullahs are not oblivious to the growing voices in the Arab world that complain about the weakness of the US and how the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement towards Iran is undermining the Americans’ credibility and jeopardizing the security and stability of Arab and Islamic countries.

Iran’s mullahs appear to be so confident that the Biden administration has turned its back on its Arab allies in the Middle East that they are issuing direct threats not only against Israel, but also against any Arab country that dares to cooperate with the Israelis.

It may be a minor quibble, but although the article says the Biden administration is weak, that’s not the way I’d describe it. This particular deal is what the administration intends to do, and I’m puzzled by the somewhat constant assertion that this administration is weak, a statement hardly limited to that article. Yes, it’s weak in the traditional sense of not opposing a tyrannical regime such as Iran’s, and failing to project the strength, resolve, and ability to do so successfully. But that presupposes that the Biden administration has that goal and is trying to do those things. I see no indication that is the case.

Nor do I think that the Arab nations who oppose Iran are suffering from the delusion that they can count on the US to help them. That is one of the reasons they have allied somewhat with Israel in the first place – to try to stop Iran, realizing that the US is no longer a reliable player.

Please see also this.

Oh, and Lapid of Israel seems to be changing his tune, at least somewhat:

Bennett, Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz often spoke of the weaknesses of the Iran nuclear deal, which has been negotiated mostly in Vienna over the past 16 months. They repeatedly said Israel would not be obligated to it, but they made sure not to openly criticize US President Joe Biden.

On Thursday, however, Lapid came very close to crossing that line.

“In our eyes, [the Iran deal] does not meet the standards set by President Biden himself: preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state,” he said in a briefing to the foreign press.

In other words, if Biden agrees to rejoin the Iran deal as it stands, which all indications point to him doing, then he will be breaking a promise.

No doubt Biden and company are shaking in their shoes at that accusation from the extremely weak Lapid. The change in Lapid probably comes from two factors. The first is that he may actually realize this deal is on course to bring great peril to Israel in the truly – not just metaphorically – “existential” sense. The second is that he can feel Netanyahu’s hot breath on his neck.

The corporate retreat from wokeness?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a number of articles indicating that some companies are trying to leave extreme wokeness behind. For example, there’s this one about recent developments at Warner’s in that direction.

That doesn’t surprise me much – after all, cutting off so much of your potential audience wouldn’t seem like a good business move, and so a return to a more representative message would seem to make sense. What surprised me was the tremendous swing to wokeness in the first place. One would think it glaringly obvious that this would affect the bottom line negatively, and yet it was commonplace. My question is: why did they do it? It might have been an okay or even a good idea for some sort of niche company, but not for those whose business model was built on broad appeal.

My questions, in no particular order:

(1) Was it a case of competitive virtue signaling gone mad?
(2) Were the people making the decisions untethered from the reality of the need to make money?
(3) Did they think they were so creative and so clever that people would flock to their products anyway?
(4) Did they figure it was worth a little dropoff in business to demonstrate such virtue, but the dropoff was a lot more than they had bargained for?
(5) Was it merely a reflection of the fact that the personnel at such companies had become a woke echo chamber themselves and couldn’t even judge the extremity of what they were doing?
(6) Is this return to the center going to catch on and be real, or is it just a weak and sporadic thing?

Cellphone wrangling

The New Neo Posted on by

I spent hours today – literally hours – on the phone, attempting to cancel a certain cellphone service I have been paying for and wasn’t using. I’m not going to spend hours writing about it, only to bore myself and you silly with the details. I merely have a question: why do they purposely make it so hard to reach a human being?

It’s a rhetorical question, though, because I believe I know the answer. It’s both cost-saving to have everything automated, and an effort to discourage you and make you give up trying to drop something. The prompts made it relatively easy to add something, but dropping something was simply not an option.

I finally accomplished the task, however.

I think. We’ll see when the next bill either comes or doesn’t come.

The MAL search affidavit adds essentially nothing

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected.

Prior to its release, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that it would actually change anything, given that it was the DOJ doing the redactions and the very same magistrate approving them. However, it will be used in the ongoing political propaganda war.

You can find links to the documents here.

From Jonathan “not a Trump fan” Turley:

And from Joel Pollak of Breitbart News:

I doubt they’re upset about the content of the warrant, deeply or otherwise. They have a plan and they will stick to it, and they think it will help them politically. Even the redactions serve a purpose, and that purpose is to indicate Trump-doings so nefarious that even to mention them would risk US security.

ADDENDUM: Interesting takes can be found here, as well as here and here.

Biden the uniter president speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Sounds like he’s been reading the comments in the WaPo.

Or perhaps commenting there himself.

Speaking in Maryland to supporters, Biden said [emphasis mine in all the quotes from his speech]:

“It’s not hyperbole – now you need to vote to literally save democracy again,” Biden told an above-capacity crowd of several thousand at a Democratic National Committee event at Richard Montgomery High School in a Maryland suburb of Washington…

“Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice – to go backwards full of anger, violence, hate and division,” he said, warning they “refuse to accept the will of the people.”…

“We’re seeing now either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA agenda,” Biden said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “It’s not just Trump. … It’s almost semi-fascism,” he said.

Why, those divisive, hateful, almost semi-facist extremist Trump voters – not just Trump himself, but his voters and supporters – hatefully burning down our cities , causing all those January 6th deaths! Why prove it when you have rhetoric supported by the mendacious MSM to fall back on?

Save our democracy, “fortify” our elections – like, just to take one small example, the FBI did when they suppressed all investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 in order to help Joe Biden…

You get the drill.

Then there’s also this:

“I respect conservative Republicans,” Biden said later. “I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”

MAGA Repulicans are just not conservative Republicans, it seems. And who are those conservative Republicans? I assume Biden means Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, as well as Adam Kinzinger.

It’s not only a hateful speech by Biden, it’s by nature an Orwellian speech in which he accuses the right of doing what the left actually does.

In 2020, you and 81 million Americans voted to save our democracy…

…[W]e’ve chosen a different path forward. The future. Unity, hope, and optimism…

…while giving the most hateful, angry, divisive speech I can recall from a president in my lifetime.

More (and more “our democracy” – who is this “our,” kimosabe?):

The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security. They’re a threat to our very democracy.They refused to accept the will of the people, they embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy. This is why in this moment, those of you who love this country, Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans, we must be stronger, more committed, and more determined to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.

As I said, Orwellian. And this is the kind of speech I predict we will be hearing over and over – with the demonization of not just Trump but of all Trump-supporting voters, complete with Orwellian mischaracterizations while Democrats and Biden don the mantle of a false “unity.” The sad thing is that half of America will buy it, having been primed by the press and the Democrats ever since Trump entered the political fray – and even before that, although the trend has picked up considerably since Trump became a political force.

I find it mindboggling that Biden was ever considered a nice guy.

I find it interesting also that so many things Trump predicted have come true, for example something he claimed after his 2019 impeachment [emphasis mine]:

With a likeness to the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster, the disrupter-in-chief reaffirms in 14 words the belief of Trump Nation that the political establishment, the media, the permanent bureaucracy and yes, the deep state are trying to crush him and them.

Of course, because Twitter not only suspended his account but seems to have erased all his old tweets a la Nineteen Eighty-Four, you can no longer find it there. But here’s the image:

Protect the Biden diary, suppress the Biden laptop

The New Neo Posted on by

The DOJ strikes again:

…[T]wo people allegedly found Ashley Biden’s diary at a rehab facility. They took it and then attempted to sell it to various entities. The Trump campaign did the smart thing, given the corruption at the DOJ, and said no to their offer. Ultimately Project Veritas got involved, and for many months, the FBI has been pursuing them, including executing search raids of the organization’s journalists. According to these latest reports, the two people who originally came in possession of the diary have now pleaded guilty to federal crimes…

Ultimately, they got these two people by charging them with trafficking in “stolen goods” across state lines. That sounds like quite the stretch given what we know. And since when does the FBI get involved with “stolen” diaries?…

So what’s in the diary? Allegedly, there are entries in it accusing Biden of taking inappropriate showers with his daughter. Whether those allegations are true, only Joe and Ashley Biden know, and I’m not making a judgment here. But the mere existence of a documented claim like that would be a non-stop story for the press if it involved any Republican, much less someone like Donald Trump. Instead, the press has ignored this story, first claiming it was Russian disinformation before now just flatly pretending it doesn’t exist.

It’s nice to know the DOJ has its priorities straight.

I keep being reminded of the old expression, “Hey, don’t make a federal case out of it.” The following was written in 2004:

A federal criminal code that covers everything essentially delegates to prosecutors and police the power to pick targets they think they should get rather than offenses that need to be prosecuted — leaving everyone at risk. That is unacceptable in a country that still considers itself a government of laws and not of men.

And in other news, we have more whistleblowers coming forward to describe how the FBI protected Hunter Biden’s laptop and therefore Joe Biden. They’re still doing it, actually.