…in covering up an FBI frame-up.
An old one.
The big news today is the weather
It’s a relatively slow news day in the USA.
The big news is the midwest big chill. It’s really really really cold—although as a person who’s been in the midwest in winter for extended periods of time, I have to say that far-below-zero temperatures aren’t unusual there. But this is record-setting cold even for that region, and it extends over a large area:
Records are being shattered and communities are enduring the harshest cold in years as the polar vortex tightens its grip on the midwestern United States.
After the polar vortex plunged southward, temperatures plummeted under 20 below zero F from North Dakota to northern Illinois on Wednesday morning.
Biting winds made the extreme cold more life-threatening as AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperatures dropped under 50 below zero. Frostbite can occur in mere minutes on exposed skin in these conditions.
Not here in sunny New England. We’ve had what I consider a pretty mild winter so far.
How about you?
Another hate crime hoax?
The incendiary story of an alleged hate crime attack targeting Empire actor Jussie Smollett immediately went viral yesterday, with media reporting the attackers made racial and anti-gay comments while using President Trump’s “MAGA” slogan during the 2 a.m. assault in downtown Chicago.
But conflicting versions of the incident from Smollett himself, and details reported by the media being outright contradicted by Chicago Police have raised questions about what actually happened.
Debra Heine noted on the PJ Media last night that police had found surveillance video of Smollett, but had not been able to find video of the alleged assailants.
Many more details of the shifting stories at the link.
If it is a hoax, or at least partly a hoax, those MAGA-hatted perps would be the tell. After all, we now know—thanks to the uproar created by a smiling Catholic teenager wearing one—that a MAGA hat is the new KKK hood. So of course they’re going to be assaulting Smollet while wearing the emblems of their hateful creed.
I had never heard of Jussie Smollet before this incident, which tells you how out of touch I am. I had barely read about this incident before today. And I have no idea what actually happened. But Smollet’s story is appearing fishier by the moment.
One thing I do know is that Smollet hates President Trump (although I think “hate” may be way too weak a word to describe Smollet’s sentiment):
Shut the hell up you bitch ass nigga. You will continue to run this country further into the ground and risk lives every time you breathe. You’re not the president. Just a dumpster full of hate. FOH. Sick to my stomach that literal shit currently represents America to the world. https://t.co/qoNWllmZIm
— Jussie Smollett (@JussieSmollett) January 12, 2018
A plea to keep Kamala Harris’s sex life off-limits
That plea certainly isn’t being made by me. It’s being made by Monica Hesse, who is something called a “style reporter” at the WaPo.
The reason?:
Our collective consciousness has been raised and so we’ll begin by … excavating one of the candidate’s decades-old love life?
Sigh.
The candidate in question is Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), whose past relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was confirmed for the national media when Brown published an op-ed: Yes, they’d dated. And, yes, he “may have influenced her career” by appointing her to two commissions…
We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.
“Maybe we should stop accusing women of ‘sleeping their way’ to the top,” Erin Gloria Ryan wrote in the Daily Beast in 2017. “Maybe because men have been the ones sleeping women to the middle and bottom.”
Ryan was talking specifically about women in the entertainment industry whose reputations were stained by Harvey Weinstein’s predation. But the application is more general, and the pattern is often the same: a talented woman dates a powerful man. And from then on, whether the relationship lasted two decades or two months, her success will be traced back to that man. As if her own hard work were less important than his cameo appearance in her life — as if she were actually the cameo in her own story.
Actually, among the reasons we talk about such things is because they tend to reflect on the person’s morality and ruthlessness, as well as the use they make of their own attractiveness and sexuality to achieve power. In Harris’s case, it is also relevant that Brown was 60 at the time and she was 30, and it becomes difficult if not impossible to imagine that his power—and what he could do for her career—was not the biggest part of any attraction she might have felt for him at the time.
And “dated” is a coy euphemism, by the way, one used by Brown himself but then seconded by Hesse.
Oh, and Brown was married at the time—or, as Hesse coyly writes, “technically still-married.”
She also writes this:
Does it help your career, to date someone powerful? I’d assume so. Does it also help to play golf with someone powerful, or smoke cigars with someone powerful, or belong to Skull and Bones? I’d assume that, too. But for decades we’ve accepted those relationships — many of which benefited only men — as standard procedure for how executives and politicians get ahead.
She only assumes it helps a woman’s career to “date” someone powerful? And does Hesse really mean to equate—on the moral, personal, philosophical scale—playing golf with someone in order to get ahead with having sex with them in order to get ahead? I believe so—at least, if it could help the female candidate most people see as one of the strongest in the 2020 Democratic field. I have a hunch that were Harris a conservative who’d slept with a powerful guy to get some political favors, Hesse would be singing another tune.
By my calculations, Hesse is thirty-six years old (I base that on some information in this article). I would guess that her attitude about sex and women is shared by a large number of her age cohorts, who have learned not only to excuse anything a Democratic candidate does but who also have learned that sex is about as deep an exchange as smoking cigars, and that on any moral plane, smoking a cigar is far worse (especially around other people who might get the stinky secondhand smoke) than loveless sex for mutual exploitation.
Now, Kamala Harris may have genuinely been attracted to Brown. Stranger things have happened, and in fact I ascribe to the idea that—as no less a personage than Kissinger has observed—“power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Now, that’s an interesting conversation to have. But so is the one about Kamala Harris’s career. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the bedroom—and politics.
Ah, but Hesse is worried:
…[T]he only way a woman is ever going to be elected to the top of anything is if we stop making insinuations about how she got there.
So, we cannot judge women for what they do, sexually or otherwise. Even if they’re running for the highest office in the land. Because—well, because if we did discuss them as we discuss men, no woman would be elected to high office. That contention seems to sell women rather short, doesn’t it? But of course what Hesse means is that women are held back from “the top” by unfair discrimination, and they need to receive special dispensation from criticism as a sort of compensation.
And the sad thing is that this sort of reasoning is probably persuasive for a lot of people desperate to get a Democrat elected to the presidency in 2020.
[ADDENDUM: See this.]
Cancer cure: can this be possible?
I have no idea whether this is stunning, wonderful news that will come true, or something that will fizzle. It would be tremendously wonderful if it was the former:
A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.
“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.
Please read the whole thing.
The parents who came in from the cold
This is a very chilling story on a lot of levels:
Tim Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, but for the past decade the family had lived in the US. The boys’ father, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior role at a consultancy firm based in Boston. Their mother, Tracey Foley, had spent many years focused on raising her children, before taking a job as a real estate agent. To those who knew them, they seemed a very ordinary American family, albeit with Canadian roots and a penchant for foreign travel…
After a buffet lunch, the four returned home… There came a knock at the door, and Tim’s mother called up that his friends must have come early, as a surprise.
At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back…
The two brothers watched, stunned, as their parents were put in handcuffs and driven away in separate black cars. Tim and Alex were left behind with a number of agents, who said they needed to begin a 24-hour forensic search of the home; they had prepared a hotel room for the brothers. One of the men told them their parents had been arrested on suspicion of being “unlawful agents of a foreign government”.
Alex presumed there had been some mistake – the wrong house, or a mix-up over his father’s consultancy work…
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Well worth reading the whole thing.
The story—which appeared in the Guardian—labels the truth as “outlandish” and “defying comprehension.” But I don’t find it the least bit outlandish, although of course (thankfully) most people’s parents don’t lead double lives as ordinary citizens and spies. But that’s what spies do—they deceive. They lie, even (or perhaps especially) to their children (although there’s a tentative indication in the story of at least a possibility that the children did in fact know, and that they themselves are now lying).
A larger question is why this couple had children in the first place. Was it part of their cover as a normal family? Or did they just want children for the usual reasons? They seemed to have loved them, at least according to their sons.
The story makes me wonder whether most spies have children. Of course, some spies decide to go into the spying business after they’ve already had kids (the Rosenbergs might qualify, for example, although I’m not sure at what point they made that decision). But that wasn’t true for this couple; they were already spies when they had their first child.
Well, lo and behold, an article appeared in Psychology Today back in 2010 when this spy story first came out, discussing that very issue:
In this case, there are eight kids whose lives were impacted by dangerously crafted games played by their parents. While the details seem to come directly out of a 1960s Ian Fleming or John le Carre Cold War novel, the reality is it’s 2010 and these kids live in a fast-paced technological world where their faces are spread around the globe in an instant (their names are all over the Internet; I will not use their names). Not like the pre-Web Rosenberg boys, who were eventually lost to obscurity.
All children, at some point, ask the question, “Who am I?” Not only do these kids of Russian spies have to deal with the crimes their parents are charged with, they have to figure out who their parents really are, and in some cases, who they themselves really are. They grew up as all-American kids for the most part with moms making Statue of Liberty cupcakes, picnics with hamburgers and hotdogs, PTA events, “Suburbia 101” as one neighbor described the spy family next door. The painted shutters, the refrigerator magnets and the hydrangeas have now crumbled for these kids like a house of cards.
The article goes on to say that most of the kids are “overachievers” and all the parents seem to have been good parents—except for this one little detail of the magnitude of the deception. Kids can be pretty resilient; I hope these are, but I have little doubt that there will be scars.
[NOTE: This TV series was based at least partly on this incident. I’ve never seen the show.]
The enduring appeal of extreme leftism
[NOTE: We had a discussion here the other day on why leftism, despite its failures, remains so appealing to so many people. I thought it might be time to revisit this post from 2014 on that topic. So here it is, with a tiny bit of editing.]
Communism/Socialism is an idea whose time has always come, ever-fresh and ever-new. It keeps rearing its ugly head wearing a new mask, like some vampire returning in a new guise. But can’t we finally drive a stake through its wretched heart?
In 2014 (but still quite relevant today, if not more so), Robert Stacy McCain wrote an essay describing the latest renaissance of the idea that persists in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary, and which was correctly critiqued by the economist Ludwig von Mises not long after the Soviets came to power:
In his classic work Socialism, Mises explained that the attempt to replace the market system with central economic planning could not succeed, because the planners could not possibly have the information necessary to make all the decisions which, in a market economy, are made by individuals whose needs and desires are reflected in prices: “The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism.”
“Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years,” Mises wrote in 1922, “in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable. …. Socialist writers may continue to publish books about the decay of Capitalism and the coming of the socialist millennium; they may paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours and contrast with them an enticing picture of the blessings of a socialist society; their writings may continue to impress the thoughtless — but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea.”
The rest of the McCain article is worth reading. My response is that this persistence of the idea of socialism/Communism despite evidence of its awfulness when put into practice in the real world should not be at all surprising. And I don’t think we’ll ever find the proper stake to drive into its still-beating heart, because the nature of this beast is that it represents an idea with strong appeal to a vast number of human beings. No amount of empirical or historical evidence can permanently teach enough people otherwise.
The rhetoric of Socialism/Communism has intrinsic appeal to certain groups of people and some members of each group are always likely to fall under its spell: the guilt-ridden wealthy and/or their even-more-guilt-ridden spawn, the poor who feel they’ve been screwed by society, the politically and economically naive intelligentsia who feel they know better than others, the religious and/or idealistic who want everyone to be loving and good and selfless, and those who just like the idea of power and control over others and plan to be the ones in charge.
Combine all that natural appeal with the undeniable propagandist skill of the left—including their willingness to lie in the most brazen manner—and you have an even greater effect. And then combine all of that with ignorance of history and economics, our culture’s reluctance to teach the young our good points and its eagerness to harp on our bad ones, and the fact that people only tend to really learn something through bitter and personal experience.
The wonder is that more people don’t believe that socialism/Commmunism is the answer to the world’s prayers, not that so many succumb to it in the first place. Never imagine that the fight, especially in the intellectual and educational and propaganda spheres, can be over. It would be too bad if each generation had to learn the lesson through personal suffering rather than in the realm of ideas.
I know you may be sick of hearing about the Covington affair, but please read what VDH has to say about it
Victor Davis Hanson sums up what we now know about the Covington Lie, as he terms it [emphasis mine]:
The entire psychodrama boiled down not to what the facts on the ground showed, but rather who each party was perceived innately to be…
Progressives, NeverTrumpers, identity politics activists and associated social justice warriors all rivaled each other to see who might be the first and the most venomous to indict, try, and metaphorically execute the cookie-cutter whites and privileged…
The key in these Internet lynchings is to get in first and worst—and keep at it. Yet, in French Revolutionary street style, the initial outraged tweeters and posters were almost automatically seen as passe in a nanosecond: Dox the boys. No, write their school to abort their careers. No, go to their schools and protest at their homes. No, punch them. No, burn them alive. No, stuff them into wood chippers…
We have been here before, from the Tawana Brawley farce and the Duke Lacrosse myth to the Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” and the University of Virginia fraternity rape yarns—and dozens of staged truth-to-power race and gender mythologies in between. And we know that past purveyors of those lies, whether Al Sharpton, or the Duke faculty, or Rolling Stone, were hardly contrite, but rightly assumed that because such fantasies could be true in a racist society, then they should have been true–and damn the bothersome facts.
Hanson writes that defamation suits for this sort of thing are few and far between, and mostly ineffective. They certainly haven’t stopped this sort of behavior so far, that’s for sure, although I do believe that in this case the suits will be filed and have at least a chance of being found for the plaintiffs. But even so, I doubt it will stop the next similar campaign by the Twitter mob.
Hanson is correct in identifying this m.o. as being of some antiquity; just say the words “Al Sharpton pushes the Tawana Brawley accusations.” It’s all part of the long slow grind by the Alinskyite left, which has—as Hanson later points out—been quite effective:
The progressive cause feels it is close to victory. Big money is now hard left…Universities, the media, Hollywood, professional sports—they are all now progressive. The 2016 election is seen as an aberration, a road bump on the path to utopia. From now on the Left feels it has the material resources and informational clout to construct any reality it wishes. We can see that clear enough, from Phillips’ apologists who never backed down, but instead insisted that the kids’ faces and “attitude” nonetheless exuded privilege and thus culpability.
I hate to be so pessimistic, but that is my strong sense as well. The left smells conservative blood everywhere, and they are in a feeding frenzy. Gaining the House in the 2018 election has been part of what has engendered such a heady feeling on their part, and the ongoing sequential arrests in the Mueller investigation feed the beast as well.
One necessary development for all of this to succeed was the work of academics (including many feminists both inside and outside of academia) who made sure to drive home the message that objective evidence-based logic is an oppressive ploy by white male patriarchy, and that it can be discarded in favor of emotional perceptions combined with racial and gender identity claims [see NOTE below].
Or, as Hanson puts it:
Higher truth is fact free and deals with cosmic justice: people of color confronting whites. End of story.
[NOTE: I noticed some of this elevation of personal feelings over objectivity back when I was in graduate school during the early 90s, as I described here. I didn’t know exactly where it would lead, and at the time I was still a liberal Democrat, but it shocked me and I felt it was a very ominous sign. Here’s the story:
…[T]he young women in an undergraduate class I was required to take for my Master’s—–a class which, being in the social sciences, consisted almost entirely of women—–were virtually all in favor of a definition of actionably offensive speech that went something like this: “speech that offends any person in the subjective sense, rather than speech that is in fact objectively offensive.” In vain I stood up in front of the 100-or-so students, most of them around twenty years younger than I, to ask what the limits of this might be, to suggest that it was wrong to allow the most sensitive among us to dictate what was unacceptable, and to speak up for free speech in general. I was met with uncomprehending stares and impatient dismissal, a fossil in my own time.
I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Not one person appeared to agree with me, or if they did they weren’t saying so publicly or privately. And the professor, a woman just a couple of years younger than I, was clearly on their side. I have never forgotten it, and although at the time I didn’t put it in a political left/right context (that came later), I realized it was a frightening development and it made me feel very, very uneasy and quite alone.
That happened over 25 years ago.]
[ADDENDUM: And the #MeToo movement is part of the elevation of emotion over facts; see this.]
Prosecutor malfeasance rewarded: Weissmann and company
I don’t usually watch cable news on TV, but for some reason last night I happened across Mark Levin’s show on Fox, and saw an interview with Sidney Powell, an attorney who wrote Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.
Please note her book’s date of publication: May 1, 2014. Therefore, it had to have been written some time before that—and certainly long before the FBI and the DOJ were engaged in investigating Donald Trump and his aides and acquaintances.
Powell herself immediately got my attention in a way that few speakers do. She was calm and logical, and presented a case so distressing—in particular about Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s right-hand man, but hardly limited to him—that I was riveted for the entire interview, which I now present here. It may make your blood run cold, if you hadn’t reached that state already:
Powell’s been talking about this for quite some time, too. But don’t sit on a hot stove till the major organs of the MSM spotlight what she’s been saying. An excerpt from that article I just linked, from October of 2017, goes like this [the site interviewing Powell spells Weissmann’s name wrong multiple times, which I’ve corrected]:
“I was holding out hope on Mueller, but as soon as he picked Weissmann, I knew what direction Mueller was going.”
Weissmann was the federal prosecutor in charge of the Enron investigation until complaints about his practices led to his resignation from the case…
Typical of Weissman’s tactics was his pre-dawn July 26 SWAT raid on the home of Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign.
“Mueller knows what Weissmann is about and how he likes to work,” she said.
“I no longer trust Mueller,” she said. “Look at Weissmann’s cases, why choose him to do anything? He should have been disbarred.”
Roger Stone’s pre-dawn arrest is also how Weissmann “likes to work.”
Powell is hardly alone in pointing this out; here’s another person similarly concerned [emphasis mine] [there were more misspellings of Weissmann’s name in this excerpt, too, which I’ve corrected]:
“The integrity of the “investigation” and of the “investigators” must be a paramount priority in our criminal justice system at all times,” said David Schoen, a civil rights and defense attorney, who has been outspoken on the special counsel investigation. “Certainly this fundamental guiding principle must be followed when it comes to an investigation of the duly elected President of the United States. The outcome potentially affects every one of us in very real terms…There were many alternatives to Mr. Mueller and his team and all of their very troubling baggage.”
“(Mueller and Weissmann) were both connected to two of the biggest scandals in FBI history,” Schoen added…
Weissmann, described by the New York Times as Mueller’s ‘pit bull’ was Mueller’s legal advisor for national security in 2005 and later was selected by Mueller to be his General Counsel at the FBI….Weissmann, was a specialist in tracking financing and corruption, was at the time head of the Department of Justice’s criminal fraud section. Mueller saw nobody better than Weissmann to help navigate the murky waters of the investigation and Weissmann was lauded by some and criticized by others, for doing whatever it took to win a case, as reported.
Mueller was also aware of critical issues with Weissmann’s handling of the Enron and Arthur Anderson cases, as well as his involvement in the Eastern District of New York’s case against the Colombo crime family.
Weissmann’s involvement in the Colombo case in the 1990s was the first of many cases that would draw criticism from his peers but this case, in particular, would be one of the FBI’s biggest blunders. As I outlined last month, Judge Charles P. Sifton reprimanded Weissmann for withholding evidence from the defense, as previously reported. Weissmann allowed a corrupt FBI agent to testify against the defendants in the case despite having knowledge that the agent was under investigation. The agent had a nefarious relationship with a reputed underboss of the Colombo crime family, who was accused later of numerous murders, court records reveal…
There would be no one better than Weissmann to do what needs to be done, if your goal is to get Trump and/or those under him, the better to squeeze them. I will close with a movie clip you’ve probably seen before. But it continues to be relevant:
The thing is, plenty of people cut down the law and still do stand upright in the winds that blow. Weissmann certainly has, so far.
And I don’t see anything in his way right now, with the sole exception (perhaps, if we’re very very lucky) of William Barr.
Nathan Phillips, character assassin: what even his critics seem to be ignoring about him
Nathan Phillips is fast wearing out his more-than-15-minutes of fame. But before he goes off our radar screen—and the next ramped-up Twitter brouhaha comes our way—I must point out something I think is important but which has been almost totally ignored even by the right and by the defenders of the Covington students.
I’ve read an awful lot about the Covington incident and Phillips’ role in it. Left and right are in profound disagreement, of course, about most of it. But there is one “narrative” about which many on both left and right seem to agree, and that is that people initially came to conclusions based on the first short video, and that the left hated Sandmann and the other boys based on people’s perceptions of that video, amplified by discussions on social media and in the press.
So even if you think the Covington teens were innocent and the rage against them obscene, you tend to think that rage was a reaction to the first video and the press and all the other viewers and tweeters who were similarly rage-filled.
The role of Phillips himself was (and still is) felt by the right to be the following: that he purposely stirred up the initial face-to-face confrontation, that he lied about his military service, lied when he stated the boys had said “build the wall,” lied when he said they had approached and surrounded him, and that he also omitted the details of the racial and other slurs the boys (and the Native Americans) had endured coming from the Black Israelites. And the media gave Phillips a forum for repeating those influential lies.
However, what’s being almost completely ignored even on the right (the NY Post is just about alone in mentioning it, and they don’t emphasize it much at all) are Phillips’ most vicious lies, told quite early in the game (I’ll get to what they were in a minute). These particular lies probably had a big role in shaping people’s perceptions of the boys and helped to spur their widespread demonization.
It was Phillips himself who quite early on, during his Saturday interview with CNN that set the original tone and was widely disseminated, gave the following description of the Covington boys:
It looked like these young men were going to attack [the Black Israelites]. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln — Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality.
That is not some disagreement about who went up to whom, or whether the wall was mentioned by the boys, or what caps some of them wore. This is an extremely defamatory statement by a political agitator, designed to shape perceptions that the boys were vicious racists with a killer instinct. The language is purposefully inflammatory and of the harshest variety.
It is a lie, and unless Phillips is clinically insane and out of touch with reality (something I don’t believe is the case), it is a knowing and purposeful lie about a bunch of teenagers who were minding their own business. It is a lie so egregious, so foul, that I really lack words to describe the depth and depravity of that lie.
And as far as I can see, just about everyone is ignoring it now.
The lie wasn’t a one-off, either. This incredibly misleading article in Rolling Stone (written that same Saturday) is typical of reactions to the incident as well as to another statement by Phillips that he gave (in an interview with the Detroit Free Press) on Saturday [emphasis mine]:
“There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey,” Phillips told the Detroit Free-Press. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals [the Black Israelites] was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”
So that saintly elder Nathan Phillips, casting himself as peacemaker, defames the boys once again, in terms designed to inflame the left into a frenzy of hatred against them as beasts preying on innocent black people. And the left (and some on the right) bought his peacemaker-against-beasts story, perhaps because of his Native American status and because his demeanor while telling the story fed into some other stereotypes that he, as an activist, was well aware they held.
Note also the literary reference (although I’m not sure how conscious it was on Phillips’ part) in speaking of “their pounds of flesh,” which is an old anti-Semitic trope from “The Merchant of Venice” that has passed into the common vernacular for describing a vengeful, bloodthirsty (and also money-hungry) person.
Why is practically no one highlighting these words of Phillips? He certainly did his bit, and then some, to set the story and release the howling Twitter dogs. Of course, people on Twitter—and especially the newspeople who pushed all of this further into the spotlight, never questioning Phillips’ statements but simply broadcasting them—were fully responsible for what they themselves did and said. My point is that Nathan Phillips was a very active and involved leader in setting the extreme tone of the demonization “narrative.”
If not for that long video that finally emerged (ironically, as a result of the Black Israelites taking it and posting it), Phillips’ pernicious and poisonous narrative would have carried the day. As it is, his narrative continues to override reality for many many people. And that is also with the assistance of the MSM, including Savannah Guthrie’s gentle, respectful later interview of him (a contrast to her challenging one of Sandmann) that failed to question Phillips on a single one of his lies. Rather, she let him continue to spread his narrative as he wished.
The evidence indicates that Phillips is an activist hatemonger who should be sued, but unfortunately he has shallow pockets and is therefore probably safe from lawsuit. I also believe it likely that someone and/or some activist group is guiding and financing him, and I hope the truth about that will be revealed as time goes on.
But my question remains: why is this portion of the story not being emphasized, even by those on the right who are highly critical of Phillips? Are they afraid of being demonized themselves for pointing out the obvious, if it reflects even more poorly on a man who’s been lionized by the left and the media? Or have they just forgotten those quotes of his because they’ve been buried in a sea of other verbiage?
The capture of Roger Stone, Public Enemy #2
You can rest easy in your beds, folks, because the intrepid FBI has captured fearsome process criminal Roger Stone:
A swarm of agents in tactical gear shouting “FBI! Open the door!” outside Roger Stone’s Florida home just before dawn Friday was over the top but intended to send a chilling message to anyone else being eyed in the Mueller investigation — you’re next, former FBI agents told the Herald.
The SWAT-style raid on a white-collar suspect in pajamas went viral Friday, with CNN cameras rolling.
“It was absolutely ridiculous,” said ex-FBI agent Peter Yachmetz. “Doing it at 6 o’clock is extremely early. They were trying to get a point across and it was leaked to CNN. Why?
“It was inappropriate and improper,” added Yachmetz, an agent for three decades. “I cannot recall banging on anyone’s door at 6 a.m. for a white-collar crime. I did do it once in a kidnapping and extortion case.”
Yachmetz said the pre-dawn arrest was likely orchestrated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office working in tandem with the Mueller team.
“It’s a message for everyone else connected to the investigation,” said retired FBI supervisory special agent Todd Hulsey. “They are saying, ‘If you think we have something on you, we are going to get you.’ And it’s going to be an unpleasant arrest.
Every single decision Mueller has made seems to have one goal: to get Trump’s aides and former aides to implicate him, much as you pressure a petty drug dealer to implicate the higher-up drug czars.
So far, nada. And it has a high potential for a false confession in order to get leniency. But hey, that won’t stop Mueller. His motivation to do this sort of thing is no doubt increasing, too. The longer it goes on without him getting the goods on Trump, the more embarrassed he must feel. Thus, the screws must be turned up for those watching the arrest of Stone, and for Stone himself.
Here’s what Stone is saying:
There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself…I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated.
Time will tell.
And here’s my favorite liberal lawyer, Alan Dershowitz:
“This is typical of Mueller. He has found almost no crimes that occurred before he was appointed special counsel,” Dershowitz explained, adding that Mueller was appointed to find Russian collusion and has “virtually failed in that respect in every regard.”
…”In this indictment, [Mueller] tells stories about alleged collusion, stories about WikiLeaks, but that’s not the basis for the indictment. The basis for the indictment are all events that occurred after [Mueller] was appointed. That’s very significant.”
Dershowitz said the president should be nervous because although he is not implicated in the indictment, the point of the indictment appears to be to squeeze Stone into testifying against him because the real target is Trump.
Ya think?
And my favorite lawyer on the right, Andrew C. McCarthy:
The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy [between the Trump campaign and Russia]. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency — over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern — heedless of the damage to the country.
They haven’t just allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover—they’ve made sure it hovers. And that’s what McCarthy also goes on to state:
Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage — nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that.
Yet investigators were not just content to let the country believe there was a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy; they affirmatively encouraged the public to believe it was true. Even as they indicted people for providing misleading information and then failing to correct the record, they never themselves corrected the misimpression they had gratuitously created in public statements…
And what do we learn? That the Trump campaign did not know what WikiLeaks had. That is, in addition to being uninvolved in Russia’s espionage, the Trump campaign was uninvolved in Julian Assange’s acquisition of what Russia stole.
The Stone indictment reads like an episode of The Three Stooges. Stone and two associates — conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerry Corsi, and left-wing-comedian-turned-radio-host Randy Credico, respectively denominated “Person 1” and “Person 2” — are on a quest to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton and when Assange is going to publicize it. But that does not suit Stone, who has cultivated an image of political dirty trickster and plugged-in soothsayer. In public, then, Stone pretends to know more than he knows and to have an insider’s view of Assange’s operation; behind the scenes, he scrounges around for clues about what Assange is up to, hoping some insider will tell him…
Plainly, the campaign was not involved in the hacking, so it did not know what the Russians gave Assange. And it had no involvement with WikiLeaks’ operations, so it turned to Stone, who had held himself out as a knowledgeable source. But Stone, too, was unsure.
Much much more at the link.
[NOTE: Why did I write that Roger Stone was Public Enemy #2? Who is Public Enemy #1? Why, President Trump, of course!]
And about that election fraud that doesn’t exist
This:
Texas Secretary of State David Whitley said a year-long evaluation found about 95,000 people described as “non-U.S. citizens” who are registered to vote in Texas. About 58,000 of them voted in Texas elections between 1996 and 2018, Whitley said.
As John Sexton points out:
Naturally, there are voter advocacy groups already claiming that voter fraud doesn’t happen and questioning the validity of the Secretary of State’s data…
It seems to me what’s really at stake here is the presumption that large-scale voter fraud doesn’t happen. If Texas can substantiate even a fraction of this list it would change the dynamic of future conversations about non-citizen voting.
I disagree with that last sentence. The evidence is never enough, or good enough, to drown out the voices of the left insisting that the numbers are too small and too insignificant to matter, and that it’s all a screen for GOP racism.
Oh, and failing that argument (which so far has never failed), they can (and almost certainly will) say that these people should be allowed to vote anyway. They are just undocumented voters.