Part I of this article showed a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. Part II today will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy to destroy Trump. The facts are not in dispute. We are left only to decide if the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally, or as part of a conspiracy.

The first part of the smoking gun may have been hiding in plain sight for some time now. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI Director Comey’s drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete. In a damning passage, Horowitz found it was “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, is criticized for meeting privately with Bill Clinton as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. “Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem… and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.” Lynch then doubled-down, refusing to recuse herself from the Clinton case, creating “public confusion.”

The report also criticizes FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Another Strzok document stated “we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message,” thought that was never prosecuted.

Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton’s in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as “the President” and in a message told a friend “I’m with her.” The FBI also allowed Clinton’s lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to  possible crimes committed by Clinton.

If that does not add up to a smoking gun that the FBI conspired pre-dossier to help Hillary Clinton, how about this?

Following Hillary’s exoneration over her emails and mishandling of classified information, the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump-Russia, based in whole or large part on the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. The public now knows the dossier was paid for and stocked with falsehoods by the Clinton campaign. The unanswered questions from that investigation themselves comprise a second smoking gun of FBI conspiracy. For example:

— Why did the FBI not inquire into Steele’s sources and methods, which would have quickly revealed the information was wholly false? Why was the FBI unable to discover Steele (and later, Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who gave false info to the FBI about Trump and Alfa Bank) were double agents working for and paid by the Clinton campaign?

— When the FBI found the target of its first FISA warrant out of the dossier, Carter Page, was actually a paid CIA asset, why did they hide this information from the FISA court instead of dropping Page? Why did this not cause them to question the credibility of Steele, a master spy who couldn’t even identify his source was actually a CIA asset? Steele claimed the Russians offered Page an insanely huge bribe, billions of dollars, to end U.S. sanctions if Trump became president. Page clearly could never have played a significant role in ending sanctions. Why did the FBI find those statements credible enough to pursue the warrant?

— Why did the FBI cite an open-source press article by Michael Isikoff claiming Trump had Russian ties as part of its FISA warrant application against Page without finding out who Isikoff’s source was? The source of course was Christopher Steele, who was interviewed in a hotel room booked by Fusion GPS who was paid by Clinton. The FBI nonetheless claimed an article from Yahoo! corroborated the dossier, a cite unlikely to pass muster on an undergrad term paper. Were they really fooled?

— Why did the FBI not discover the dossier’s false claim Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet with Russians? Robert Mueller was able to conclusively dismiss the report. Confirming Cohen in Prague would have been a cornerstone of the FBI’s larger case, but the matter was left open until Mueller.

— Why did the FBI not question Sussmann about the source of his DNS data, some of which came directly from inside the White House? Why would a private citizen have such information?

— When Sussmann, claiming to be a concerned citizen with White House DNS data, first approached the FBI, why was he assigned to meet with the FBI’s General Counsel, its lawyer, and not a case agent? Was something other than his information, such possibly FBI collusion with fraud, being validated?

— Why was the CIA investigation referral saying Hillary was behind Russiagate ignored by the FBI? The memo was addressed to Director James Comey, who claims he has no knowledge of it, and Peter Strzok, who should have been the action officer but did nothing?

— Why did Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief, say “The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign. And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”

— Despite the investigation being run by the FBI, why was it CIA Director John Brennan who briefed (LINK) Obama on the Hillary connection in July 2016 and not Comey?

If any of those questions seem kind of obvious, that is the point. The cover stories only had to hold for a short time, enough to infect the media, enough to make things seem plausible for the FBI. Team Clinton and its co-conspirators were so certain they would win the election they felt none of their tricks needed to stay hidden much past victory. The story is waist-deep rotten.

At this point you can believe the multiple ops paid for and run by Clinton people were uncoordinated events, or that they were part of the broad campaign Hillary was an active participant in, and about which John Brennan warned Barack Obama, and which the CIA warned the FBI, not knowing they were in on it. You can believe the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally (yet consistently, no breaks went Trump’s way), or as part of a conspiracy.

What you cannot do any more is pretend this did not happen, and that the person most involved came close to being elected president because of it. If you worry about democracy, worry about that.

In preparing this article, it was fascinating to review the many shameful articles written in 2016 and 2017, the crazy days when every hinted rumor was worth a Breaking! designator. But one piece stood out, from Forbes in 2017. Hillary denied paying for the dossier, and the truth — the campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie who paid Fusion GPS who paid Orbis who paid Steele — was not known. The Forbes journalist wrote “If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.” The article went on to say how James Comey refused to comment on Fusion GPS and the dossier in May 2017. Comey by then knew the real story and remained silent, even as the press was still running with the idea the dossier had been paid for by anonymous Democratic donors. If only we’d known.

wemeantwell.com

We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Trump. Part II to follow will show the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy.

In summer 2016 Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was the election was Hillary’s to lose, that her opponents in general and especially the Trump clown show, could not stop her. Despite the MSM’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements. The emails nagged at the Clinton campaign — her unsecured server lay exposed during her SecState trips to Russia and China, and the deepest fear was that her internal communications might appear one day on Wikileaks, ending her career.

Clinton fought back. The initial shot was fired on July 24, 2016 by campaign manager Robby Mook, who was the first to claim there was a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. “It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian,” Mook said, referring to a false story from the GOP convention just a few days earlier. The New York Times sent up a warning flare to all MSM media the next day announcing Clinton was making the Trump-Russia allegation a “theme” of the campaign.  As if she knew just what was coming next, Hillary took that as her cue to claim the Russians were trying to destroy her campaign, a theme which soon morphed into the Russians were trying to help Trump. That soon became Trump and Putin were working in collusion to elect Trump as a Manchurian candidate.

A prime driver behind all this was a mysterious “dossier.” The jewel in the crown was a “pee tape,” blackmail, kompromat, Moscow held to control Trump. Word was a former MI-6 intelligence officer named Christopher Steele compiled the dossier, giving the whole thing credibility. America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.

We know now the dossier was fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute. Steele worked as a double-agent, feeding Clinton-paid for fake info to the FBI pretending he was an FBI informant with sources deep inside Mother Russia. The dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign.

We also now know the Clinton campaign, via one of its lawyers, Michael Sussmann, gathered Internet DNS data on Trump and used that to create a fully fictional story about Trump using a secret server connected to the Alfa Bank to communicate with his Russian “handlers.” Sussmann also peddled a false story about Russian smartphones connecting into the Trump White House. We know Sussmann hid his relationship to Clinton from the FBI, pretending to be a “concerned citizen.” Sussmann is under indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, and in his own defense filing does not dispute the basic facts. He only claims his lying was immaterial.

Both the dossier op and the DNS op were funded by Clinton campaign money laundered through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and then contractors Fusion GPS and Orbis. In both instances the false information created was peddled to the FBI (and CIA) by a Clinton-paid stooge pretending not to be affiliated with the campaign, Steele as an FBI informant and Sussmann as a “concerned citizen.” Both ops used a sophisticated information sub-op, feeding the media as if Steele and Sussmann were not the source and then having Steel and Sussmann step in to serve as anonymous confirmers, an inside loop. In both instances the FBI took the bait and opened unprecedented full-spectrum investigations into first Candidate Trump, and then President of the United States Trump.

Four years after all that, on October 6, 2020, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on or about July 28, 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.

The highly-redacted document says “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

Ratcliffe in 2020 also revealed in September 2016 the CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.”

The MSM at the time dismissed these two important disclosures as unverified disinformation. The problem with simply waving away these documents is the very high threshold for information to actually reach the president. Every day a near-infinate amount of information is collected by the CIA. A tiny percentage of that is culled for the standing Agency briefings the president receives. An even tinier subset is seen as important and credible enough to be personally briefed by the CIA Director face-to-face with the president.

Rarely is there near-time “verification” with intelligence. There is however “confidence,” how sure the CIA is the information is true, and the Director would not waste his boss’ time with that of low or medium confidence (and neither would the Agency do the same in sending its referral on to the FBI.) Knowing what we know now about Clinton campaign funding of the ops and Clinton personnel involvement, Brennan’s confidence is better understood. And it is important to remember Brennan openly supported Hillary; he was not the guy to dish dirt on her. He was making sure his boss, Barack Obama, had a heads up if the whole thing was ever exposed.

There is also the matter of Ratcliffe, who hand-selected the documents to declassify, lending them more credibility. Why play high stakes with information Radcliffe knew to be false?

One last concern has been that the CIA source appears to be foreign, and therefore suspect. The CIA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans in America, particularly something as sensitive as a presidential campaign. Even if tipped off by an American, the CIA would need to go overseas and recreate the info with a foreign source. That the information was available through a foreign source also suggests strongly Moscow had eyes on inside the Hillary campaign. Perhaps through her email?

Both ops ran on Clinton’s money and Clinton’s people. The smoking gun of Brennan’s notes ties it all to Hillary herself.

wemeantwell.com

Welcome to President Joe Biden’s America: record-high inflation, an ongoing crisis on the southern border, and the rapid expansion of the national debt, all while giving up on his main campaign promise to shut down Covid-19.

The numbers, whether metrics from the U.S. economy or public polling, don’t bode well for Biden, the soon-to-be octogenarian heading into just the second year of his presidency. I don’t want to get out over my skis, given President Donald Trump seemed to have a clear path to reelection this time just two years ago, but Republicans seem poised to make big gains in this year’s midterms. If a red wave crashes this November, Democrats will try to blame the DINOs, namely Sens. Manchin or Sinema, but the blame falls squarely on Biden’s shoulders for his abysmal record.

Biden’s first year also added about $2 trillion to the national debt, which already sat at a staggering $27.8 trillion when he took office. This increase was thanks primarily to Biden’s misdirected Covid relief and an infrastructure package filled with progressive priorities, rather than the infrastructure improvements the American working class actually needs.

Furthermore, 1.78 million migrants were apprehended at the southern border, and 1 million migrants have been expelled from the U.S. under Title 42, the health regulations put in place by the Trump administration to turn away migrants in March 2020 because of Covid-19, in FY 2021. At first glance, this might seem like a silver lining, but the increased number of expulsions and apprehensions have been caused by the Biden administration’s rhetoric and policies that encouraged a record-breaking number of migrants to seek entrance to the United States. The 1.78 million migrant apprehensions is nearly quadruple that of the 458,000 apprehensions in 2020, and nearly double that of the 977,508 apprehensions in 2019, which saw a migrant crisis of its own.

The migrant surge has contributed to a record-number of pending cases in immigration courts, which now stands at 1.6 million. When Trump left office, the immigration case backlog was 1.3 million cases.

Arguably, Biden’s foremost campaign promise was that he would “shut down” Covid-19, which killed just over 385,000 Americans in 2020. However, less than a year into his presidency, Biden openly admitted his administration would not be able to deliver on that key promise. “There is no federal solution,” to Covid-19, Biden told a group of governors during a late-December phone call. Last year, more than 450,000 Americans died of Covid-19, despite the proliferation of vaccines. It’s astonishing how quickly Biden admitted defeat in the face of Covid-19. For comparison, President George H.W. Bush took nearly two years to renege on his promise of “no new taxes.” That didn’t end well for the 41st president.

Even Biden’s defenders in the corporate media have been forced to admit the first year of Biden’s presidency, which was supposed to deliver the nation from the darkness of the Trump years, has been an unmitigated disaster. “Joe Biden enters the second year of his presidency looking for a reset after a tumultuous first 12 months,” one CNN headline read. A NBC News headline proclaimed, “Biden ends first year as president with ‘bleak, discouraging’ marks from the public,” announcing the findings of a new NBC News poll. Another headline, surely intended to be the most damning of Biden’s first year, from Politico, read, “Biden’s first-year report card: Just like Trump’s.”

Of course, once the 2022 election cycle is in full-swing, Biden’s defenders are sure to fall in line. But Biden’s first year seriously calls into question his viability as candidate for Democrats come 2024. This isn’t a cheap shot at Biden’s mental faculties or age (he’d be 82 at the start of his second term), though those considerations merit serious discussion. No, this is purely based on the president’s performance. Rumors are already circulating that Harris, Buttigieg, or Warren might replace Biden as the Democrats’ frontman (or woman). If Republicans retake the House, and possibly the Senate, could Biden benefit from the low expectations that a divided government brings? It’s possible. But for now, I’m thinking: One year down, three to go.

theamericanconservative.com

In early December Hillary Clinton appeared on the Today show to read aloud her never-used victory speech from 2016. The scene was bizarre, Clinton tearing up as she read in first-person, present tense about becoming the first woman president, something which in real life did not happen. She then layered on another alternate reality, one in which President Hillary travels back in time to tell her dead mother “your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.” She glowed; she was hearing applause that never happened.

The unreality of it all was leavened somewhat by the reveal Hillary is selling a video “masterclass” on resilience and the speech is somehow an example of that. While this may be just another example of a Clinton grift, like selling a Bill and Hillary Bass-o-Matic, the thing that stands out is never before has a Democrat loser been reanimated from the grave like Hillary. Al Gore and Michael Dukakis are two of those people you Google to see if they are still alive, and even an attention hound like John Kerry pretends his own presidential wipe out never even happened. A good political rule of thumb is to usher your losers off stage (or make them ambassadors.) Instead, Hillary was on the flagship Today show, not a late night infomercial where garbage like “masterclasses” in resilience usually is peddled.

But Hillary’s delusional take is not hers alone. After a second White Claw the faithful will insist Hillary did win the popular vote, which counts as actually winning in Clinton Math. They’ll quickly tell you Hillary only lost because Trump cheated or the Russians helped. The Dems and the media so believed that Trump did not actually win-win that they spent his entire term in office trying (unsuccessfully) to negate him, impeach him, prosecute him, or just magically wish him away with a fan-fiction interpretation of the 25th Amendment which presupposed Mike Pence was more evil then they were. The high point of the delusion was Russiagate, a saga entirely made-to-order by the Clinton team and fluffed by the media. It’s one thing to self-righteously say “Not my president” (some MSM pundits would add an asterisk to the word president* when referring to Trump) but it is delusional to say “and he can’t be yours, either.”

With Hillary granted a pass because she is using her defeat delusion to sell merch, one would have hoped the whole thing would have gone away with the election of Joe Biden. Democrats, you won! And you got the House! You can right all wrongs! Instead, the delusions just continue, an entire party seeming in the grip of political Alzheimer’s. One delusion is Trump will be pre-defeated ahead of 2024 by a mythical…  something. This has been kicking around since Trump won in 2016, the idea that he’ll soon go to jail over taxes, property valuations in New York, or one of his lady victims successfully suing him. Sure, the IRS has had Trump’s taxes for decades, there is at worst a civil penalty in property valuation tomfoolery, and all those victims only seem to end up dragging Dems deeper into the mud of hypocrisy as we’re told to believe all women except those who accuse Uncle Joe of getting a little handsy. Dems, if this is your best, your best won’t do.

Nah, that stuff is just chum in the water while the Grand Illusion is tweaked. That one is a dramatic statement democracy is dying in America and only defeating Trump (again, once was not enough) will save it. It is a big ask to a weary voting block because a) it is untrue; b) the only evidence lies in a made-up retelling of the Capitol riot and c) the Democrats won in 2020 in an election, something which strongly suggests democracy did its job. The rebuttal that January 6 was just a rehearsal is fact-free, and after all, real Nazis only needed one crack at burning down the Reichstag.

One can find examples of the delusion almost by throwing darts at the Internet, but a concise one is MSNBC meat puppet Brian Williams’ farewell address. Williams of course earned America’s trust as a journalist by constantly lying throughout his career, usually in ways that suggested he was studlier than the Rock. Williams said “I will wake up tomorrow in the America of the year 2021, a nation unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it, which is what you must do now. They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside… But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods… Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob.”

First of course, an acknowledgement Williams plagiarized the phrase, “darkness on the edge of town,” from Bruce Springsteen, himself given over to the delusion because even as he pals around with Barack Obama all the characters from his songs now vote Republican.

If you haven’t guessed it, Williams is referring to the delusion that the Capitol riot was the seminal event of American democracy. Williams, like others, believes Hillary won in 2016, that the Trump years saw America held prisoner, and that Trump spun up a mob on January 6 to overturn the election and remain in the White House as dictator. That none of that happened, and in fact could never have happened, matters not if you believe in it hard enough.

Williams is far from alone. “Democracy will be on trial in 2024,” the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman writes. “American democracy is tottering,” warns Vox. “Can American democracy escape the doom loop?” says one Salon piece. “If America really surrenders to fascism, then what?” asks another. “If Merrick Garland Doesn’t Charge Trump and His Coup Plotters, Our Democracy Is Toast,” says the Daily Beast.

“Are we doomed?” writes the once sentient George Packer. Packer actually imagines “A blue militia sacks Trump National Golf Club Bedminster; a red militia storms Oberlin College. The new president takes power in a state of siege.” Google up as many examples as you want, they are as common as anti-anxiety meds should be on Brian Williams’ night stand. Even Hillary has weighed in, warning “[2024] is a make-or-break point. Are we going to give in to all these lies and this disinformation and this organized effort to undermine our rule of law and our institutions, or are we going to stand up to it?”

Charles Blow in the NYT seems to take the prize, in an article headlined “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War.” Blow claims “this war won’t be only about the subjugation of black people but also about the subjugation of all who challenge the white racist patriarchy. It will seek to push back against all the ‘others’: black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people and, yes, women, particularly liberal ones.”

So looking ahead to the democracy dies in the darkness delusion which appears to be the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign of 2024, Americans must be tutored to believe the Capitol riot was part of a massive conspiracy involving Trump, hoping to end democracy in the United States by overturning the 2020 election results via some means no one is able to articulate. All that could have happened was Congress delayed its largely ceremonial blessing of the electoral college results for a day, assuming they just did not convene the afternoon of January 6 somewhere else besides the chaotic Capitol. There is no realistic scenario that could have changed anything that mattered, and no evidence of any national-scale conspiracy underlaying the riot. It was just a bunch of angry people who got out of control for a couple of hours then went home to wait on being arrested months later. None of the rioters has been charged with treason or terrorism, mostly just trespassing. None of the arrested claimed they acted under any organized structure set in place by Trump or anyone else. In their trials each basically said the same, things got out of hand.

After selling voters that something that did not happen happened, the Democrats must then explain how after four years in power they have not really done much to bulk up democracy except whine about stuff that’s unfair, such as Republican gerrymandering (but not Democratic gerrymandering) and Republican poll watchers (but not Democratic poll watchers) and Republicans not accepting election results (but not Democrats like Stacey Adams not accepting election results.) Never mind out-and-out garbage like the same court system is racist when it acquits one shooter and on-the-mark when it finds another guilty based on the races of shooter and victim. Voters will also have to buy in to the Democratic delusion all the bad stuff they said Trump was gonna do but did not do — LGBT concentration camps, war with Iran, fascism — will for certain happen the next time.

Elect us to save democracy, say the delusional Democrats, ignoring the reality that democracy is bumbling along pretty much as it was intended to do. The Dem line would all make more sense if Trump had appeared bare chested at the Biden inauguration atop an M1 tank or something, but that is the nature of delusion.

wemeantwell.com

Earlier this month, Representative Adam Schiff was reported to have doctored a text message between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Republican representative Jim Jordan in the ongoing investigations of the House January 6 Committee. This report should hardly come as a surprise.

On the House floor, Schiff was confronted by Republican Congressman Jim Comer for peddling the “Russia hoax.” He responded by launching into a tirade of circumstantial evidence that was supposed to prove Trump-Russia collusion. Given Schiff’s most recent ethically questionable choice in the January 6 Commission, it is worth recounting his central role in the collusion investigations.

Schiff was one of the main proponents of the collusion theory from day one. Throughout the 45th president’s tenure, the congressman continuously assured the Trump-deranged media that there was “plenty of evidence” of collusion with Russia hiding “in plain sight”, and that the proof was “more than circumstantial.” Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, he also continued to maintain the legitimacy of the legally abominable FBI application for surveillance warrants on then-Trump aide Carter Paige, one of the main premises justifying the subsequent Mueller investigation.

Schiff was undeterred when House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes released a memo in 2018 that detailed this corrupt FISA process. Nunes, a Republican congressman also from California, presented damning proof that the entire application was largely predicated on the now-debunked dossier by Christopher Steele—in reality, a political operation funded by the Clinton campaign through research firm Fusion GPS. Nunes’ memo was immediately denounced by the entire Democrat establishment as false, and Schiff subsequently responded with a memo of his own. The latter purported to document the errors of its Republican-derived counterpart.

Naturally, the Schiff memo was the story that stuck for the zealots of the Russia collusion cult in Washington and their media enablers; this, despite the fact that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz would go on to confirm the veracity of the very claims on which Schiff was attempting to cast doubt. The Wall Street Journal previously documented the exact falsehoods in the Schiff memo and the inspector general’s refutations here.

When Schiff was called out by Comer on the House floor, the former launched into a series of “Are you aware?” questions that were ostensibly meant to maintain support for the Trump-Russia thesis (outside of the Steele Dossier). Yet Schiff’s statements are still based on, to use his own words, mere “circumstantial evidence.” It is worth considering Schiff’s reasoning behind each claim:

“Are you aware that the president’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, met with an agent of Russian intelligence and provided Russian intelligence with internal campaign polling data, as well as strategic insights about their intelligence in key battleground states?”

The “agent of Russian intelligence” to whom Schiff is referring here is Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian business associate Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the Washington Times, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s final report on Russian election interference—a more than 900 page report of which Kilimnik and Manafort are central focuses—states that Kilimnik was “a Russian intelligence officer.” Manafort’s lawyer responded to the accusation by claiming that there are classified documents that would, if released, prove this to be false; however, if Kilimnik is indeed a Russian asset as stated by the Senate report, then he “may have been connected to the GRU [Russian state intelligence service]” responsible for hacking into the DNC in 2016.

In the second part of his statement, Schiff refers to Manafort’s providing polling data to Russian intelligence (Kilimnik, on the presumption that he is a Russian agent). The Mueller report had already cast doubt on this being connected to “Russian interference,” however, as the meeting in which this transaction took place is purported to have happened only after the reports of a Russian cyber attack had already been released by the U.S. media. Collusion would thereby be assumed only on the evidence that Manafort had an ongoing relationship with Kilimnik, and must have subsequently known about the latter’s speculative ties with the GRU and its attempt to influence the U.S. election. Circumstantial indeed.

“Are you aware that while the Trump campaign chairman was providing internal polling data, that Kremlin intelligence was leading a clandestine social media campaign to elect Donald Trump?”

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report defending a 2017 intelligence community assessment that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” The report finds that the essential task of the Russian interference was to sow discord in the United States, primarily through social media posts and advertisements that were aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton and undermining trust in U.S. democracy.

This is in part contrary to the 2018 House Intelligence Committee report, which found that the intelligence community’s assessment on “Putin’s strategic intentions” were insufficient. When viewing the various posts, advertisements, and accounts (examples available for download from the House Report here) attributed to Russian intelligence agents, it is evident that there was a clear intention to sow discord; however, the sheer number of social justice posts related to racial equality and police brutality seem to suggest that the Russian influencers may have sought social tension as the goal in itself, rather than a means to get Trump in particular elected.

Regardless, Schiff’s two statements together allude to the notion that Manafort was giving polling data in battleground states to Kilimnik, ostensibly all in an attempt to then have Russian hackers specifically target voters in politically purple areas.

“I am aware of President Trump’s son meeting secretly in Trump Tower New York with a Russian delegation with the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian delegation represented was part of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.… And when asked about that secret meeting, both the president and his son lied about it.”

Donald Trump Jr. did indeed meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting is reported to have been short and fruitless, with then-candidate Trump having had no knowledge of it. Although this is not illegal, it is ethically questionable, even given the fact that politics is indeed a dirty game; however, it also incidentally sheds light on another strange development in the Trump-Russia saga. Veselnitskaya is documented as having met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson just hours before the Trump Tower meeting, and then again after. Recall that Fusion GPS is the Clinton-financed firm responsible for compiling the Steele Dossier, seeking to tie Trump to Russia. While Trump Jr. meeting with Veselnitskaya under the pretenses of getting dirt on a political opponent may not be considered honorable (even though that was the very mechanism working against Trump at that exact moment), the surrounding circumstances raise just as many, if not more, questions about Clinton corruption as they do Trump collusion.

Although not mentioned by Schiff in this specific instance, also consider his maintaining the guilt of Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In another supposed tie between Trump and Russia, Flynn was caught in a carefully set perjury trap arranged by James Comey’s FBI. Comey actually bragged in an open forum about his taking advantage of the hectic Trump transition—which unelected bureaucratic forces and Obama holdovers mobilized to make as difficult as possible—to get agents into the White House and attempt to interrogate various officials, of whom Flynn was foremost.

Schiff is not unique in his views among the Democratic Party or its political allies in relation to the Russia narrative, and no one can question the congressman’s determination in investigating corruption stories related to Trump—regardless of how scant or shoddy the hard evidence that the allegations are based on may be. It is important, however, to consider the circumstances he presents in support of his ongoing belief in collusion, as it is telling of how the congressman treats evidence that is politically inexpedient to his predetermined conclusions. This is relevant given his central position on the House January 6 Committee, and may have very real consequences for the fate of the American citizen’s upon whom the latter’s deliberations are focused.

theamericanconservative.com

How Mark Zuckerberg’s millions and the Center for Technology and Civic Life turned Wisconsin blue in 2020.

By William DOYLE

Democrats seem to know that they cannot win a national election without employing the same tactics that they used to win in 2020. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, said “If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed.”

What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Our research shows that CTCL spending in Wisconsin generated enough votes for Joe Biden to secure him an Electoral College win there in 2020. We estimate that CTCL spending in Wisconsin purchased Joe Biden an additional 65,222votes,without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.

Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as non-partisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research shows that the $419.5 million of CTCL and CEIR spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution, and highly partisan in its effects. Targeted CTCL and CEIR spending played a decisive role in building a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic votes over Republican votes.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. Rather, it had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, concierge-level get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.

The injection of bias into select local election offices through CTCL infiltration introduced structural bias into Wisconsin’s entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others, and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voters and voting methods an outsized impact on the final election results. The outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin is not the outcome that would have occurred if the election had been conducted on the basis of established election laws, equal treatment of voters, and administrative neutrality.

CTCL In Wisconsin: Ground Zero For CTCL’s Nationwide Effort

CTCL’s Safe Elections Project in Wisconsin was not the result of a grass roots clamor for greater election funding among money-starved municipalities desperately seeking additional election funding. It was entirely a top-down endeavor, initiated by CTCL operatives, and funded by a massive inflow of money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who cultivated connections among “Wisconsin Five” mayors and other city officials, incentivized the first grant applications, and provided funds and advice to aid in their completion.

CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election began in Racine. In late May, CTCL issued a $100,000 grant to the southeast Wisconsin city to “recruit other Wisconsin cities to join the ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan.’” Racine Mayor Cory Mason spoke to his fellow liberal mayors in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Kenosha about accepting CTCL’s grants—with the proviso that there would be strings attached.
CTCL authorized the City of Racine to distribute from its initial $100,000 grant, $10,000 to each of the four recruited cities (keeping $10,000 for itself), as an incentive for them to participate with Racine in applying for the larger CTCL conditional grants.

Emails obtained through public records requests show Mason’s office in May 2020 setting up numerous virtual meetings with the four other mayors three months before CTCL publicly announced the first round of grants to the “Wisconsin 5” on July 7, 2020. The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, and CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election was the culmination of a collaborative effort between CTCL’s activist directors and election officials in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. These cities would soon come to be referred to in CTCL inner circles as “The Wisconsin 5.”

At least 10 other cities in areas that were important to Democratic efforts to retake Wisconsin would eventually seek to become part of the plan by applying for and accepting significant CTCL grants considerably in excess of the minimum $5,000 offered to non-urban election offices throughout the state.

CTCL And “The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan” to Infiltrate Wisconsin’s Election System

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan—which would emerge out of a collaboration between high level CTCL Advisors, several representatives of the Pierre Omidyar funded National Vote at Home Institute, and Milwaukee’s City Clerk office during Summer, 2020—was the lynchpin of CTCL’s involvement in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Fulfilling its major objectives was a condition for CTCL funding. City officials among The Wisconsin 5 signed off on “clawback provisions” that allowed CTCL to reclaim their grant money if it was not used to further the objectives contained in the plan.

For example, the CTCL contract that Green Bay approved warns that the grant was to be used “only for” safe and secure election administration, “and for no other purposes,” which means under the ambitious terms they set forth in their portion of the WSVP. The grant’s clawback provision stated that “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met or (b) it must do so to comply with applicable laws or regulations.”

How The Wisconsin 5 Sought to Implement CTCL’s Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan: Bonfire of the Inanities

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan lists CTCL’s four major strategic objectives.

• First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes
• Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
• Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
• A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

CTCL funded election offices in Wisconsin seemed particularly intent on courting a demographic favored by the activists at CTCL—a loosely defined “New American Majority” coalition—to replace the working-class voters who had abandoned the party in droves in 2016, and who formerly made up a significant part of the old Democratic “Blue Wall” in the industrial upper Midwest.

This coalition encompasses people of color, single women, young people, and is often extended to include members of the LGBTQ community. Two of the non-profits most closely affiliated with CTCL, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, are at the forefront of proponents of this electoral strategy. According to Democracy Docket, “In the 2020 election, VPC and CVI overcame unprecedented challenges to help engage voters from the New American Majority.”

Addressing these challenges would involve a large commitment of financial and human resources in Wisconsin. There was therefore considerable anguish expressed in the Wisconsin Safe Voting plan about the “hand holding” level of assistance that such voters required in order to cast valid votes, even under greatly relaxed absentee ballot standards during Covid-19 afflicted 2020. To meet this need, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine together budgeted over $540 thousand of their CTCL grant money toward various forms of “non-partisan voter education” alone.

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan outlined the prodigious efforts that the Wisconsin Five were willing to make in order to bend the election system from within toward these untapped tranches of low-propensity potential Democratic voters, and thereby increase Democratic votes in their cities, and in the statewide totals. Established by officials of the Wisconsin Five in collaboration with CTCL advisors, it would serve as the general template for CTCL’s efforts in other key swing states nationwide. It is an extravagant wish list of far-left Democratic election concerns and priorities.
Some of the highlights:

• Concern was expressed about “voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.”
• Concerns were also expressed that many targeted Democratic voters would have no idea how to cast absentee ballots. WSVP participants lamented the fact that “countless voters” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID “took considerable staff time and resources.”
• Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “Voter Navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.
• Racine wished to create a small corps of “Voter Ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would use their grants to recruit, train and employ paid Voter Ambassadors who would set up at the City’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests, including photo ID compliance.
• Green Bay allocated funds to install secure drop boxes at the city’s libraries, police community buildings, and potentially several other sites including major grocery stores, gas stations, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and Northern Wisconsin Technical College, in addition to the one already in use at their City Hall.
• In Madison city officials planned to install one secure drop box for every 15,000 voters, or 12 drop boxes total. Madison also planned to provide a potential absentee ballot witness at each drop box, utilizing social distancing and equipped with PPE.
• City officials from all of The Wisconsin Five sought additional funds “to accommodate those who [either do not] want to vote by mail, or go to the polls on election day or to early vote.” Funds were therefore sought to enable absentee “curbside” and “drive-thru voting,” particularly for those with health concerns who could “remain in their cars and have a virtually contact-less voting process.” Each of the five cities asked for significant resources to expand drive-through “curbside” voting for four weeks prior to election day.
• Madison officials sought $160,000 to provide 18 in-person absentee voting locations for the four weeks leading up to the November election. Madison officials also proposed the use of carts for their ExpressVote ballot marking devices for curbside voting so that the use of ExpressVote could be “normalized” to help voters with disabilities feel “less segregated” during the voting process.
• Green Bay sought to motivate potential voters through a CTCL-funded multi-prong strategy utilizing “every door direct mail,” targeted mail, geo-fencing, billboards, radio, television, and streaming-service PSAs, digital advertising, and automated calls and texts. The City guaranteed that these efforts would be undertaken in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali. Additional grant funds to fund voter outreach from within Green Bay’s election office would be “distributed in partnership with key community organizations including churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans.” The total amount that Green Bay sought for this initiative alone was $215,000, or about 64 percent of their entire pre-CTCL election budget.
• Milwaukee wanted to develop a broad-based voter outreach strategy that would appeal “to a variety of communities within Milwaukee, including historically underrepresented communities such as LatinX and African Americans, and would include a specific focus on the re-enfranchisement of voters who are no longer on probation or parole for a felony. Additionally, this campaign would include an edgy but nonpartisan and tasteful communications campaign to harness the current [Black Lives Matter] protests’ emphasis on inequity and ties that message to voting.”
• Racine expressed the desire to obtain funds to purchase “a Mobile Voting Precinct so the City can travel around the City to community centers and strategically chosen partner locations and enable people to vote in this accessible (ADA-compliant), secure, and completely portable polling booth on wheels, an investment that the City [would] be able to use for years to come.”
• Madison planned to launch “a robust and strategic poll worker recruitment effort, focusing on people of color, high school students, and college students” to replace older, experienced poll workers.
• Milwaukee promoted a similar plan to increase staffing by launching a recruitment campaign aimed at “a new generation of election workers to sign up and be involved in their democracy.”

Absentee Ballot Chaos Heavily Favors Joe Biden in 2020

CTCL won Wisconsin for Joe Biden, and they did it mainly with absentee ballots. Covid-19 was used as a pretext in many states to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, guidelines and ballot verification procedures that have been long standing and time tested. The result was chaos, especially in states that suddenly moved from very limited absentee voting toward near universal mail-in voting in a very short period of time, such as Wisconsin.

CTCL’s major objective, as set forth in all their internal documents and grant applications, was to promote absentee voting. This involved getting absentee ballots into the hands of reliably Democratic demographics, showing them how to complete them correctly, convincing them to submit them, and providing as many avenues as possible for those ballots to be returned and counted.

CTCL’s involvement in the 2020 election appears exceedingly complex on the surface, at times requiring a program to keep track of the major players, scandals, and institutional relationships that grew out of the CTCL Safe Elections Project. This aspect of CTCL involvement in Wisconsin has been extensively documented by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Spotlight, among others.

But all of the resources devoted toward ballot curing, drop boxes, vote navigators, partisan activists infiltrating local election offices, and other voter outreach efforts funded by CTCL were aimed at one ultimate end: Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.
While Democrats knew that the radical move toward near universal absentee balloting in Wisconsin and the chaos that would ensue would probably work in their favor, they could not be sure. This is where CTCL performed an invaluable function that could not have been performed from outside the election system, and why infiltration and the injection of large amounts of funding into local election offices was of such importance.

As Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center, an expert on mail-in voting, told us:

The surge of mail-in ballots due to Covid-19 was one of the 2020 election’s greatest novelties and the key to how the election was manipulated in favor of Joe Biden.

Democratic leadership came together behind vote-by-mail in early 2020 as their best shot at overcoming voters’ Covid fears and defeating Trump, in large part because of pressure from election activist groups, such as the National Vote At Home Institute.

The resulting tsunami of mail-in ballots created unprecedented security and chain-of-custody problems in states where vote-by-mail has never been tried on this scale. It strained the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots both to voters and vote-counters on-time.

It also stressed the budgets of local elections offices, requiring additional personnel and ballot-counting machines even as Covid-19 restricted working conditions. Without a surefire way to get these mail-in ballots first into voters’ hands, and second into ballot-counters’ hands, the Left could not have been confident the outcome would have significantly helped Biden. This is where CTCL proved essential.

A large part of CTCL’s grants paid for private ballot collection bins outside of USPS’s jurisdiction and with questionable oversight. CTCL also funded additional poll workers and vote-by-mail equipment to count incoming ballots, favoring large, Democratic-leaning cities in battleground states.

How CTCL’s Promotion of Mail-In Voting Favored Democrats in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, absentee ballots can be submitted by mail or “in person.” The majority of absentee ballots in Wisconsin were submitted via mail or deposited in private drop boxes whose contents were then harvested and delivered to the City Clerk. The Wisconsin 5 ended up having the highest rates of mail in voting in the state. All were well above the statewide average of 59.8 percent, with the highest being Dane County (Madison) at 74.4 percent and Milwaukee County at 70.6 percent. This was a major contributor toward increases in Democratic votes among Wisconsin’s CTCL funded counties.

By September 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) had already approved a proposal to fund the mailing of all registered voters absentee ballot request forms, and then assisted further increases in mail-in voting by refusing to intervene in a campaign to convince voters to prevaricate about their absentee ballot status to avoid ID and signature matching requirements.

This campaign veers toward actual election fraud. Clerks in liberal bastions Dane and Milwaukee counties in March 2020 advised voters that anyone could use the threat of Covid-19 as a reason for claiming “indefinitely confined” status for absentee voting, which excuses them from voter ID requirements. This message reached hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters, and spread beyond Dane and Milwaukee counties. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that, while this advice may have been ill advised, it was ultimately up to each voter to determine their status. Ultimately, about 215,000 voters claimed this status, four times more voters than had claimed to be “indefinitely confined” in 2016.

Absentee voting by mail has a well-known partisan bias that favors Democrats. According to the Election Lab at MIT, the partisan differences in voting by mail increased substantially in 2020. The number of Democrats voting by mail increased by more than 200 percent, while the number of Republicans utilizing vote by mail increased by only 50 percent compared to 2016. In total, they estimate that nearly 60 percent Democrats cast their ballots by mail in 2020, compared to just 30 percent for Republicans. Mail-in ballots are therefore twice as likely to be cast by Democratic voters as Republican voters.

This is well known, and is one of the reasons that Democrats advocate so strongly for universal mail-in voting, but it is far more than a matter of tailoring voting practices to their voters’ preferences. What they fear is that a significant portion of their coalition will not vote at all without mail-in ballots.

Table 1 shows the breakdown of absentee voting among the Wisconsin 5 counties and the other five counties that received significant CTCL grant money.

• Prior to 2020, the rate of absentee voting in Wisconsin was 4.6 percent on average in 2016, and 5.5 percent in 2018. Wisconsin had no experience with widespread absentee voting in 2020 when the statewide absentee voting rate suddenly soared to 58.9 percent.
• The vast majority of votes in the top 10 CTCL counties were absentee votes in 2020. Among the Wisconsin 5 counties, 70.6 percent of all ballots were absentee ballots.
• For the top 10 CTCL counties, the average rate of absentee voting was 67.5 percent, considerably above the state average of 59.8 percent.
• There is strong correlation between high absentee voting rates and counties that generated the most excess votes for Joe Biden compared to 2016, which is the hallmark of a successful get-out-the-vote effort.
• Biden’s vote margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties, which each had absentee voting rates above 70 percent, was a staggering 267,652 votes, over 25 times his statewide margin of victory.
• Four out of the five counties that experienced the largest Democratic shift in 2020 were the four counties with the highest absentee voting rates.

Financing Wisconsin’s Shadow Election System: The Myth of Underfunded Local Election Offices

While we cannot attest to the particular strains on election budgets caused by Covid-19, we do know that by July 2020 the federal government had already distributed over $470 million in CARES Act election grants. The state of Wisconsin received $7,362,345 from the Federal Government and provided state matching funds of $1,472,469 for a total of $8,834,814 to deal with Covid related election expenses.Due to Wisconsin election law, CTCL grants were actually made to cities and not to counties, as in many other states. CTCL marketed its Safe Election Project as an attempt to address the needs of underfunded local election offices in the face of Covid-19 related election challenges. CTCL characterized the problem as “A chronic pattern of systemic underfunding of elections – made more acute by a pandemic.”

To give some idea of the scale of CTCL funding of Wisconsin’s election, this is almost exactly equal to the $8.8 million that CTCL ultimately provided to the Wisconsin Five alone, even though those cities contain less than 20 percent of the state’s population. If they were “underfunded” before CTCL appeared, they were certainly not underfunded afterward by any statewide standard.

But an examination of the election budgets published by the state’s most populous cities shows that The Wisconsin 5 already had some of the most generous election funding in the state. After accounting for CTCL grants, an obvious two tier election system – at least in financial terms – emerges in Wisconsin between the Wisconsin 5 plus 1 (the additional city being Janesville in Rock County) and the rest of Wisconsin cities.

• Average per capita election budgets among the six largest CTCL grant recipients was $5.61. Among the next 5 largest Wisconsin cities it was $2.64 per capita. CTCL singled out for its largest grants some of the most well funded election offices in the state.
• After accounting for CTCL grants, average per capita funds available for election spending rose to $15.48 among the Wisconsin 5 while among the next 5 most populous Wisconsin cities, after accounting for their much smaller CTCL grants, average per capita election funding was only about $3.63.
• Not only was CTCL funding not based on any objective criteria of “underfunding” at the state level, but CTCL grants greatly exacerbated existing election funding disparities significantly, even between high grant CTCL cities, and low grant or no grant CTCL cities.
• Approximately 25 percent to 35 percent of Wisconsin’s population benefited considerably from CTCL funding, while the remainder of the state’s population would have to make do with their existing budgets, supplemented perhaps by one of CTCL’s nominal $5,000 grants.

Partisan Bias in The Distribution of CTCL Grants: Why It Matters

In Wisconsin, CTCL grants were awarded to cities and towns, which are in charge of administering elections. Partisan bias in the distribution of CTCL money is important not only because it is unfair, but because it introduces an easily quantifiable structural bias that favors Democrats in the election system in places that are already more inclined to generate more Democratic votes than Republican votes.
Table 3 shows that big CTCL money went to some of the most heavily Democratic cities in the U.S.

• The Wisconsin Institute For Law and Liberty estimates that 216 communities in Wisconsin got CTCL grants totalling about $10.3 million.
• $8.8 million, or 85 percent, went to The Wisconsin 5, all heavily Democratic cities.
• $9.2 million, or about 90 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to the top 15 cities which are distributed among 11 out of 72 of Wisconsin’s counties.
• The top 9 CTCL grants all went to heavily Democratic cities. 80 percent of CTCL’s large grants, which amounted to 90 percent of all CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to reliably Democratic cities.
• CTCL has repeatedly claimed that the distribution of their grants shows no partisan bias. This is because in Wisconsin, over 200 of their small $5,000 grants, which appear to have been handed out indiscriminately, accounted for only 10 percent of their statewide funding. The distribution of CTCL grant funding, on the other hand, shows considerable and systematic partisan bias.
• Between Dane (Madison) and Milwaukee Counties Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 364,372 votes in a state that Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. Taking into account grants to Fitchburg and Sun Prairie in Dane County, and West Allis in Milwaukee County, the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state got $4.79 million in CTCL grants, or 46.5 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin while they make up only 25.6 percent of the state’s population..
• About 85 percent of CTCL’s Wisconsin grants went to the Wisconsin Five cities, whose average partisan bias is D+37 percent.
• 87 percent of cities that got substantial CTCL grants became more heavily Democratic. Even Republican majority cities like Wausau, Waukesha and Brookfield (in Waukesha County) became less Republican in 2020. This is not because of voters switching sides. Donald Trump increased his vote totals throughout these counties over 2016 by over 12 percent. It is because Democrat votes in CTCL cities increased by a larger amount than Republican votes increased.
• By targeting such heavily Democratic cities, even in Republican counties like Brown, Kenosha and Racine, CTCL money could be relied upon to generate the maximum possible vote gains for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Even in CTCL cities where Donald Trump won, he won by fewer votes than he did in 2016 as a result of a greater percentage increase in Biden votes, which is all that matters for statewide vote totals.
• The GOTV multiplier we estimate for these cities shows how a randomly targeted get-out-the-vote effort will affect their net additional Democratic votes. For example, in Madison an additional 1000 votes is expected to generate a net gain for Democrats of 670 votes. In Kenosha, it would be 160 votes.

The Impact of CTCL on Wisconsin’s Election, 2020

Joe Biden won only 14 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In the ten counties Biden won that did not receive substantial CTCL money, the sum of his victory margin was only about 19,600 votes.

In the remaining 4 counties in which Biden won, all of which were CTCL counties, his margin was 380,371 votes. Biden’s margin of victory came almost entirely from CTCL funded counties, so that is where we look to attempt to discover the impact of CTCL funding on Wisconsin’s 2020 election results.
Many counties received more than one CTCL grant that add up to a substantial total, so we include countywide grant totals in our analysis. Our conclusions are based on a binary in group/out group analysis, where the in group consists of counties that were awarded over $50k in CTCL funds. These counties when combined exhibit different statistical characteristics than Wisconsin’s other 62 counties when we focus on CTCL spending as a determining variable. We conceptualize elections in CTCL counties as “Get Out the Vote” machines for Joe Biden based on our GOTV multiplier in Table 3, where a randomly targeted get out vote effort will generate net gains in votes for Joe Biden based on the D+ percentage. Since the get-out-the-vote effort in CTCL counties was not randomly targeted, this methodology gives very conservative estimates.

Using this method, and adjusting for systematic increases in turnout and population growth, we estimate with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL spending in Wisconsin caused: 65,222 Additional Joe Biden votes. Since Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was 20,682 votes, we conclude with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that in the absence of CTCL in Wisconsin: Donald Trump wins Wisconsin by 44,540 votes.

This estimate is closely aligned with our undisputed Texas results, where we were able to employ a more sophisticated methodology because of the greater number of counties that received CTCL grants, and higher and more continuous variability in grant amounts. In the Texas case, using BART analysis, we estimated that additional Biden votes that could be attributed to CTCL was about 200,000 votes, or 3.8 percent of his statewide total. In this case our estimate is 4 percent of Biden’s Wisconsin statewide total, so these results are closely aligned with our Texas results.

CTCL spending had other effects, in addition to increasing Biden’s vote total. With the exception of Fond Du Lac County, all of the counties which comprise our CTCL in-group shifted significantly toward Democrats in 2020, despite the fact that all witnessed significant increases in Donald Trump votes over 2016, usually in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 12 percent. This was not a systematic pattern that we observed in Wisconsin’s other 62 counties, in which Republican to Democratic shifts are far fewer and more randomly distributed.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s reliably red and third most populous county, shifted Democrat by an astonishing 5.85 percent in 2020, while solidly red Marathon County also shifted Democrat. Though they remained Republican counties, they are much less so now.

Extremely blue Dane County became even more blue, with the Democrat vote share increasing by an equally stunning 5.28 percent from an already high level. Unless this is reversed, one of the most significant effects of CTCL’s intervention in Wisconsin was to make its most populous counties significantly more Democratic than they were in 2016. These changes could have a decisive impact on elections in 2022 and 2024, especially if an organization like CTCL attempts to replicate their 2020 effort in the future.

We can assert with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL’s $10.3 million investment in Wisconsin flipped the state from red to blue in 2020. A bill to prevent private funding of Wisconsin’s elections in the future recently passed both houses of the Wisconsin legislature but was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. We doubt he will reconsider his veto after reviewing this report.

theamericanconservative.com

The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, by Geoff Shepard (Bombardier Books, 2021), 384 pages.

There’s an old saying in legal circles: “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” That is, a determined prosecutor can allege a crime, somewhere, thereby securing an indictment against a hapless defendant. And if that’s true, then what can 150 prosecutors do?

That’s the question posed by veteran lawyer Geoff Shepard in his new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. The conspiracy Shepard limns isn’t by Richard Nixon, it’s against Nixon. A conspiracy waged by some 150 Democratic prosecutors and investigators, scattered across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, all aiming to bring down the 37th president—who was, of course, a Republican.

Shepard is fully mindful of the parallels. As he writes, “If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior.” In fact, all the parallels fall into place: zealous prosecutors, a leaky bureaucracy, an avidly supportive media, and pre-primed Democrats in Congress, eager to impeach the miscreant chief executive. (In fact, there’s a third Republican president who found himself in these same crosshairs, and we’ll get to him later.)

During the Watergate investigation, beginning in 1972, Democrats succeeded in doing something seemingly impossible: They overturned one of the most decisive electoral mandates in U.S. presidential history. First elected in 1968, Nixon had been reelected four years later with a massive 60.7 percent of the vote, winning 49 of the 50 states. And yet less than two years later, in August 1974, he was forced to resign.

So how did Democrats accomplish that feat? That’s the subject of Shepard’s book. Let him set the stage: “By the time Nixon took power in 1969, the ‘Deep State’ had held the reins of power for 40 years and wasn’t about to give it up. President Eisenhower had famously warned against the ‘military-industrial complex,’ but the Deep State’s tentacles reached much deeper than just the military and allied industries.”

As for Shepard himself, he worked in the Nixon White House for more than five years, first on domestic policy, and then as part of the Nixon legal defense team. The author doesn’t dispute that crimes were committed in Nixon’s name—most notoriously, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on June 17, 1972. And so he makes no attempt to dismiss or minimize the guilt of such figures as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Indeed, Shepard paints Liddy, who worked for a time at the White House, as a nut, even a psychopath.

We can immediately observe that someone such as Liddy slipping into the White House is not a good sign. And yet the overall Executive Office of the President is a big place, employing thousands of people, and so it’s inevitable that a crazy or two can get past the gatekeepers.

In any case, as Shepard records, Liddy soon moved to Nixon’s campaign operation, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, of course, “CREEP”). And that’s where, Shepard argues, the real criminality was hatched. Campaigns, after all, are much scruffier, since they are focused on, well, defeating the other side. And to defeat the other side, campaigns engage in “opposition research,” which has, at one or time or another, included just about every possible means, fair or foul. Thus campaigns can attract netherworld types, who sometimes feel free to pursue their dark arts by any means they deem necessary. Keeping his eye on the present, as well as the past, Shepard adds, “As the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC showed in the creation of the infamous Steele Dossier, aggressive oppo research can get out of hand.”

There’s little doubt that the 2016 Clinton campaign was up to its eyeballs in the financing and disseminating of the fake-news Steele Dossier, which seems to have been an effort to defraud not only the FBI, but also the American people. In other words, it sure looks like a conspiracy so immense. Yet only now, five years later, have just two figures on the edge of the campaign, lawyer Michael Sussmann and researcher/fabricator Igor Danchenko, been formally charged. Yet it seems at least plausible that important Clinton campaign officials—and perhaps the candidate herself—were at least aware of these duplicities. Will any of them ever be charged? We don’t know.

All we do know is that in the case of Nixon a half-century ago, the legal piranhas were swarming, each set of jaws eager to chomp on the Republican president. And how could they not be ready to take a bite? As Shepard notes, the waters had been chummed by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his chief aide, James Flug, who were preparing what they hoped would be a triumphant Kennedy presidential campaign in 1976.

As Shepard demonstrates, a key weapon in this proto-campaign was the “independent” (sic) legal investigation of the incumbent president, launched in May 1973, under the leadership of Archibald Cox, a former campaign adviser to John F. Kennedy and then solicitor general in his Department of Justice. In fact, the very name of Cox’s investigative body, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF)—signaled its intended teleology. (In later decades, subsequent iterations of the same investigative approach were softened to “independent counsel” and “special counsel.”)

Cox’s WSPF was a murderer’s row of partisan Democrats. As Shepard writes,

Some seventeen DOJ Democrat appointees, who had been removed from power as a result of Nixon’s 1968 election, regained full investigative and prosecutorial authority over a subsequent Republican administration… a special prosecutor and his team represented a handpicked, specially recruited cadre of highly partisan prosecutors brought together to focus on but a single target. This team also asserted jurisdiction over any possible investigations into possible Democrat wrongdoing—never actually investigating, but effectively precluding any such inquiry by others. This partisan targeting flies in the face of any concept of equal justice under law.

This is the heart of Shepard’s argument: From the get-go, WSPF was out to get Nixon. Not just the obvious Watergate criminals, such as Hunt and Liddy, but Nixon himself.

Those who might wish to discount Shepard as a Nixon dead-ender might be more persuaded by George V. Higgins, a Massachusetts-born prosecutor-turned-novelist who in 1975 published a non-fiction book about Watergate, portraying Nixon as a white-collar gangster. With no little bit of admiration, Higgins noted the purpose-driven life of the WSPF; the entire staff, he wrote, was “conditioned… by the Kennedy Justice methodology.” That methodology came from onetime attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who saw the Justice Department as a tool to accomplish pre-determined ends. Hence the DOJ’s “Get Hoffa” team, dedicated to the conviction and and imprisonment of Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa.

Higgins added that out of RFK’s instrumentalist ruthlessness “came targeted law enforcement: upon identification of the bad guy, the suspect may resign himself to merciless investigation, reinvestigation, indictment, and re-indictment, trial and retrial, until at last the Government secures a verdict which ratifies the prosector’s assessment of the defendant as the bad guy.”

And Shepard adduces another close observer, The Boston Globe’s John Aloysius Farrell:

Cox and his zealous staff had gone to work with an obvious aim—to get Richard Nixon—and with an array of prosecutorial tactics that would become so familiar to Americans as a series of “independent” counsels, in collusion with Congress and the media, hounded presidents of both parties over the next twenty-five years. . . . [Cox] chose a suspect first and then used a nigh-unlimited budget, his team of 150 investigators, lawyers, and support personnel and his broad subpoena power to find a crime.

Farrell also took note of WSPF’s extra-legal efforts to unsweeten the Nixon pot: “To generate public support for the process, Cox’s office deftly leaked to the press: over the summer of 1973, the media reported that Cox’s team was examining Nixon campaign fund-raising; corporate favors; the President’s tax returns, and government-financed improvements to Nixon’s homes in Florida and California.”

The result, Shepard says, was a “legal pogrom,” staged by “highly partisan Nixon-haters.” To put that another way, it was the Deep State rising against the Republican president.

In fact, the hating went beyond Nixon and his administration. Shepard documents that WSPF chose to investigate “every single potential GOP presidential candidate going into the upcoming 1976 election.” Quoth the author:

Internal WSPF documents that I uncovered at our National Archives show investigations of John Connally, whom they ultimately indicted in the Milk Producers case; President Gerald Ford; Vice President Nelson Rockefeller; Ford’s vice presidential running mate, Kansas Senator Bob Dole; and even California Governor Ronald Reagan.

And once again, it all leaked: “Somehow, news of each of these investigations leaked to an interested media, requiring each to defend himself against rumored allegations of financial wrongdoing. The initiatives of this task force required the work of eight prosecutors.”

Yet it wasn’t just WSPF pushing the needle past the ethical red line. There was also WSPF’s partner—that’s the right word, according to Shepard—Judge John Sirica. Sirica is typically remembered as a hero of Watergate; he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1973. And yet Shepard begs to differ with this lionization. He documents (in this book, as well as in two previous books on Watergate) that Sirica was in league closely with the persecutors, er, prosecutors all along. Regarding one of Sirica’s many improper ex parte meetings with prosecutors, Shepard writes:

If disclosed at any time during the scandal’s unfolding, [it] would have been sufficient to remove each of the participants—judges and prosecutors alike—from anything further to do with the Watergate prosecutions. Their presence at the meeting might have been sufficient to have them removed from office entirely.

Interestingly, none of these unethical sessions were disclosed at the time. And why not? Because those were the days of a monolithic liberal media, which was devoted to passionate cheerleading for the prosecutors, as opposed to dispassionate reporting on events. Shepard writes of the one-sided media environment, “There was simply no means for the Nixon administration to get its views on various issues before the American people at all.”

And oh yes: WSPF and Sirica had a third partner, in the U.S. Senate. That would be the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities—generally known as the Ervin Committee. Launched in February 1973, it was led by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), a courtly old fellow who looked all of his 76 years. Shepard writes, “In essence, the Ervin Committee was run by its majority counsel, Samuel Dash.” Who, Shepard adds, “conveniently hired many of Senator Kennedy’s staff members from his earlier investigation.”

So Nixon was up against this federal-government-wide legal trifecta: the Ervin Committee representing the legislative branch, Sirica (and, according to Shepard, other judges colluding with him), covering the judicial branch, and WSPF, which was fully in tune with the Deep State elements of the executive branch.

Shepard argues that this combined-arms onslaught swept up the innocent, as well as the guilty. And among the innocent, Shepard maintains, was White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, and…Richard Nixon. The Judas figure, in Shepard’s telling, was White House counsel John Dean, described as “a very accomplished liar.” And so, in Shepard’s account, the top Nixon men, wrongly accused, went to their legal Calvary.

Ah, but what about that famous “smoking gun” conversation of June 23, 1972—less than a week after the break-in—featuring that same put-upon trio: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon? Doesn’t that tape-recorded session prove that they were guilty, guilty, and guilty?

Shepard says “no,” arguing that the conversation has been badly—and deliberately—misinterpreted all these years: It was really about concealing the names of Democratic donors to Nixon’s re-election campaign whose money was being used for the legal defense of the Watergate breaker-inners. Understandably, these donors wished to keep quiet their connection to the dreaded Nixon.

Perhaps the June 23 conversation was improper, Shepard allows, but it was not the crime of the Watergate cover-up: “The only goal was to prevent several major Democrat donors from being embarrassed, and this was in no sense a criminal act.” Indeed, Shepard quotes John Dean, no fan of any of the people involved, writing in 2014: “In short, the smoking gun was shooting blanks.”

We can each listen to the tape or read the transcript and judge for ourselves, and yet for Shepard, the lesson is clear: the “smoking gun” was just the final kill-shot fired into the unfairly vilified president. The real story of Watergate, Shepard concludes, is “how President Nixon, along with a handful of well-meaning staff and supporters, ended up taking the fall for the misdeeds of their underlings.”

So we can see: before Trump was the target of the Democrats’ legal-industrial complex, Nixon was the target.

Indeed, we can now add a third Republican presidential target, Ronald Reagan. It’s less remembered now, but the 40th president faced a similar legal-investigative barrage, beginning in 1986, in the form of the Iran-Contra investigation. Indeed, Democrats winched up all their legal siege machinery: a Congressional select committee, an “independent” investigation filled with Democratic hit-men, and, of course, a collusionist media; in the exultant words of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, a leading enemy of Nixon, “I haven’t had so much fun since Watergate.”

The Iran-Contra investigation was certainly damaging to Reagan, and yet it fell far short of the Nixonian benchmark; in fact, by the end of his presidency, the Gipper was once again flying high.

One fine day, some careful chronicler will outline all the parallels of these three cases across five decades, tallying the score as one clear political kill (Nixon) one partial kill (Trump), and one mere damage to the target (Reagan).

Yet for now, Shepard has written a persuasively contrarian history of the first of these legal assaults on a Republican president. And who knows: By the time someone gets around to connecting the dots on the first three, there will be a fourth.

theamericanconservative.com

Over the past year, the massive upheaval in the United States from workers going on industrial strike and walking off jobs signifies an increasing awareness of class politics. In the following interview, Harriet Fraad says that American workers are overcoming decades of suppression from anti-communist propaganda as well as a betrayal by the two main political parties.

Workers are becoming aware of their rights and their conditions of exploitation under the corporate capitalist system. They are angry and restless for an alternative economic system. For the first time in a long time the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are now entering conscious public discussions. Workers, says Fraad, are well aware of their betrayal by the Democratic Party which has sold out their class cause for the benefit of the party’s leadership from corporate sponsorship.

More than ever, she contends, the working majority of the United States needs the representation and leadership of a new political party that galvanizes their needs and rights under a socialist program.

Historically, Fraad points out, the United States always had a strong movement of working-class politics and socialist parties, for example at the end of the 19th century and during the early 20th century. Unfortunately, much of that tradition was destroyed by the pro-capitalist establishment using Red Scare tactics during the Cold War, including the Democratic Party, the corporate media and official trade union bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the recent acute exploitation of workers during the pandemic period and the grotesque growth in wealth inequality are forcing American workers to question the entire system and to realize their collective political power as a working-class constituency that comprises the vast majority of the 330 million U.S. population.

However, as Harriet Fraad warns, the potential for progressive change in the United States could still be hijacked and destroyed by the rise of right-wing populism under demagogues like Donald Trump. The Republican rightwing and the ineffectual Democratic Party under President Joe Biden are creating the base for fascism which may vanquish the potential for progressive socialism. Thus, America is coming to face an ominous crossroads, in her view, which boils down to this: will the United States embrace socialism or will it descend into fascism?

Dr Harriet Fraad lives in New York City. She has been a practicing psychotherapist and hypnotherapist for nearly four decades. She is also a political activist, a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the United States during the late 1960s and co-founder of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Fraad is co-author of several books, including Class Struggle on the Home Front and Imagine Living in a Socialist USA. She broadcasts a weekly commentary Capitalism Hits Home covering current labor and economic issues as part of the Democracy at Work channel. Fraad is particularly critical of how the Democratic Party in the United States has elevated so-called “identity politics” over the more central issue of class politics, the fight for workers’ rights and the advancement of socialism. That subject of how the CIA and the Democratic Party played the U.S. population into the trivial pursuit of identity politics will be returned to in a future interview for Strategic Culture Foundation.

Interview

Question: Despite a lack of mainstream media coverage, nevertheless there is an unmistakable impression that the United States is undergoing widespread labor strikes and resignations over the past year. Can you give us some figures on this development in worker protests? How significant are these demonstrations in the historical perspective of the American economy, industrial relations and society?

Harriet Fraad: There are over 100,000 people currently on strike in the U.S. At least four million have dropped out of the labor force. There have been over 1,000 separate industrial actions during the past year. These are low estimates. With the exception of Mike Elk’s Payday Report, strikes and labor actions are routinely under-reported by our corporate media. As reported elsewhere, billions of dollars in profits were made by U.S. corporations during the pandemic and the recession that accompanied it. Billionaire wealth surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the same period that saw massive impoverishment of workers and their families; U.S. billionaires are now worth a combined $5 trillion. Meanwhile, wages were not raised.

Question: Do the mass labor strikes across the United States signal an increase in workers becoming more aware of issues of class politics and an increase in militancy to demand their rights as workers?

Harriet Fraad: The class awareness of U.S. workers is, at least up to now, not a conscious class awareness. It is not informed by a socialist media presence, any socialist daily newspapers, television stations, or socialist internet. Historically, class awareness was effectively crushed by a national anti-communist crusade with the public trials of hundreds of people suspected of belonging to the Communist Party or what they considered its fellow travelers in the Socialist Party and the left. The confederation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, expelled the activist left and its communist and socialist organizers. They were the militants that kept the unions vital. Without them, the union movement lost its wider purpose of worker power. In the 1950s, 35 percent of U.S. workers were organized in unions. Now there is barely 10 percent in unions.

However, class consciousness was re-introduced with the Occupy Movement of 2011. There, the idea of the 1 percent super-wealthy and the 99 percent of the rest of society took root in popular perception. It is significant that former President Barack Obama, a supposed “progressive” Democrat, crushed Occupy sites across the nation in 2012. Having said that, class consciousness across the U.S. is just beginning to be revived.

Question: Can it be discerned that America’s workers and their families – who represent a majority of the 330 million population – are becoming: a) more critical of capitalism as an economic system; and b) more receptive to and supportive of an alternative socialist politics?

Harriet Fraad: For the first time since the 1950s, capitalism can be named as a system rather than the implicitly assumed only system for organizing an economy. U.S. grotesque inequality is exposed and becoming increasingly conscious among workers, especially for the young whose future is dire. Young Americans are mired in student debt, deprived of jobs with a future, and may even lose their planet due to capitalism.

Question: Traditionally, in the two-party U.S. political system the Democrats are viewed as being pro-labor and pro-union, but it seems that over recent decades the Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Republican Party as being loyal and pliable servants of Big Business. Can you explain this trend with historical reference?

Harriet Fraad: The big sell-out of the Democratic Party to corporate interests was launched by Bill Clinton in 1993. He had been elected with union energy and union financial support. Yet, he was most instrumental in making the Democratic Party a party serving corporate capitalist interests and taking corporate money.

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he allowed jobs in the United States to be outsourced to Mexico and he gave his blessing to the exodus of millions of U.S. jobs to nations with low wages, terrible working conditions and weak or no ecological protections.

Clinton initiated the Democratic Party’s new corporate strategy of verbally celebrating racial, gender and sexual equality and justice while advancing corporate interests and abandoning the poor and the white working-class. In just one instance, he killed cash assistance for needy families and ripped a huge hole in the American social welfare safety net. He threw millions of poor black and white women and children into bad jobs and terrible poverty while claiming “progressive” treatment for all.

Question: Does this historical background partly explain the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump as a “populist hero”?

Harriet Fraad: Yes. The neglected white working-class gave up on the Democrats that sold them out and they were ripe for Trump’s empty promise to “Make America Great Again”. They were outraged by their perception that the gains made by people of color and women were what took their jobs away. That was a misperception distorted and presented to them by Trump. People of color and women still earn less than white men. It was not people of color and women but rather corporate profiteering that took their better-paid manufacturing jobs to nations like Mexico, China and India with terrible job conditions. It was corporate capitalists like Trump and their servants like Clinton who took their jobs. Trump exploits white working-class rage. In the absence of a powerful present socialist analysis, Trump alone speaks to their outrage. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, had a chance to win as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Sanders was defeated. He was outvoted by traditional African-Americans who chose Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s defeat was aided and abetted by the Democratic Party leadership.

Question: If the modern Democratic Party is a hindrance to the cause of workers, shouldn’t workers then seek to establish a new third party that actually fights for their class interests?

U.S. workers are now beginning to reclaim class consciousness.

America direly needs a unified socialist voice that connects the various movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Extinction, the Feminist Movement, MeToo# and Timesup#, Labor rights, transsexual rights, socialist and communist parties and the movement to transform capitalist business and all other forms of organizations into cooperatives. They need a movement and a party that is against all arbitrary divisions between people. The movement and party should be an umbrella organization. The handle and stem represent class justice. The spokes and their multicolored fabric are all of the movements that are needed to create class, race, gender, and sexual justice for all.

Question: The corporate news media and academia suggest that somehow socialism is antithetical to ordinary Americans. Is a mass movement for socialism possible in the United States? What would that take for it to mobilize and achieve governance?

Harriet Fraad: A mass socialist movement is certainly possible in the United States. In fact, there has been a long history of socialism in America from cooperative communal movements to official socialist and communist parties.

The Socialist Party was a powerful force in the U.S. from the turn of the century until the First World War. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate won a million votes even though he ran from prison in 1920. Socialism and communism are not antithetical to Americans. However, when they actually threatened capitalism as mass movements they were severely repressed by the federal government in the service of corporate capitalism.

Question: The social discontent and political disorientation in the United States seems to have reached unstable levels. If a viable democratic socialist direction is not harnessed by the people, do you fear that a reactionary alternative is a real danger? That is, for fascist politics to fully emerge from the incipient forms we see already in an increasingly rightwing Republican Party?

Harriet Fraad: The U.S. empire, like the USSR, is imploding out of its own corruption. America is polarized. There is far greater acceptance of a socialist alternative to capitalism as well as the danger of a well-financed turn towards fascism. On the socialist side, labor, a mass base, is awakening to the outrage of super-exploitation by the 1 percent. People are politically active on the left as they have not been since the 1960 and 1970s. A majority of young people prefer socialism to capitalism. However, the U.S. left does not have a centrally organized national organization around which to unite. If it did, it could mobilize the majority of Americans.

The Trumpian right in the Republican Party has no positive program except for gun rights and police and military support. Instead, they rage at Democrats, progressives, people of color, immigrants and abortion rights. They have a strong presence in our capitalist media. They are well-funded and have a populist and visible leader.

Germany became fascist because when its capitalism failed and wild inflation wiped out the livelihoods of the mass of workers, although Germany had a powerful Communist Party at the time, the German corporate wealth supported fascism as an alternative to socialism.

The spontaneous labor uprisings in the U.S. are promising. But we do not know how it will turn out in the United States.

The November 4 arrest and indictment of Igor Danchenko, leaves open the question of just how far Special Counsel John Durham‘s US Department of Justice investigation will go, concerning the flaw-ridden Russiagate narrative?

Eli Lake’s November 4 Bloomberg column, suggests that the FBI might’ve been manipulated by the Democratic Party. As a sarcastic aside, Lake will probably not get an FBI knock on the door.

There’s a periodic bipartisan establishment misinformation process which has a reach within government and media. On this particular, some of the US mass media featured commentary regarding Danchenko comes to mind.

On Fox News, former Donald Trump aide, Stephen Miller repeated the (put mildly) dubious claim of a Democratic Party-Russian government collusion against Trump. Appearing on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, said the Steele Dossier hasn’t been conclusively proven or disproven – an overly soft way of side-stepping that report’s clear flaws.

Miller’s claim of a Democratic Party-Russian government collusion against Trump, could be taken to suggest that Danchenko was a Russian Intel mole. If anything, Danchenko’s ties to the Brookings Institution and Fiona Hill, are indicative of a neocon/neolib preferred Russian, who isn’t particularly fond of Trump and Putin.

Whether inside or outside of Russia, Russians come in all sizes, shapes and views. Especially among Russians, those not liking Trump are prone to disliking Putin as well. Like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, there (at least for now) appears to be no conclusive evidence that Danchenko is some kind of a Russian government agent.

Rather interestingly, the indictment against Danchenko refers to his interaction with someone identified as “PR-Executive-1”, who is believed to be Chuck Dolan, a Democratic Party affiliated individual, having professional involvement with the Russian government. Based on what’s so far known, it’s grossly irresponsible to factually conclude that the Russian government gave Dolan misinformation on Trump. Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the USSR didn’t by default mean he collaborated with the Soviet government in the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

Following up on Finian Cunningham’s November 18 Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) interview with Daniel Lazare, Danchenko’s arrest and indictment came on the same day as my receiving an FBI hand delivered letter from the US Treasury Department (USTD), via the same agent who visited me last year. Regarding Danchenko and yours truly, it’s legally tougher to legitimately arrest and indict someone, who hasn’t lied and/or knowingly spread blatant misinformation, while advocating an open exchange of ideas. (Danchenko denies having lied to the FBI. He’s scheduled for a tentative trial this coming April.)

The aforementioned USTD correspondence I received is titled a “CAUTIONARY LETTER”, in dealing with the SCF, which has been targeted by the US government for its content. This letter is pretty much of a repeat of what the USTD previously communicated.

Said correspondence arrived to me shortly after CIA Director William Burns’ November 2-3 visit to Russia.​ He spoke with Nikolai Patrushev, who presently heads the Security Council of the Russian Federation, which handles national security affairs. Burns previously served as America’s ambassador to Russia. Patrushev had Intel experience prior to his current position.

Without any conclusive proof given, the SCF is accused of being linked to the Intel wing of the Russian Foreign Ministry – something that venue denies. Regardless, the SCF’s makeup has no influence whatsoever on my views. Connecting the dots (including comments from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken), it seems like the Burns-Patrushev meeting hasn’t led to a breakthrough in improved US-Russian relations.

Spun however which way, the restrictions put forth towards SCF interaction involve some influential enough US politico/politicos not liking its content. The obvious goal is to eliminate the disliked commentary by dissuading US based American SCF contributors (writers) from receiving a fee.

Those views receiving payment have the incentive to put more time and effort in their work. In Western mass media, there’s an unofficial understanding of what is and isn’t acceptable commentary on Russia related issues.

The US and Russian governments haven’t offered any kind of alternative to the SCF for me. I’m not living in Russia and am not a citizen of that country. Hence, I don’t expect that nation to do as much for me as the US.

I prefer not putting the onus on government to assist in my endeavors. Conversely, it’s quite understandable to loathe any interference in earnest pursuits. On a fee paid basis, it’s highly unlikely to see an article of this kind placed at an outlet considered acceptable within the realm of the US foreign policy establishment.

From this past July 24, I came across an excellent blog post on (among other things) the shortsightedness behind some government instituted sanctions. To my knowledge, no other country has instituted any restrictions on its citizens interacting with the SCF. That venue has contributors from around the world, including the UK and Canada.

Comparatively speaking, the US government has been especially picky towards Americans writing for the SCF. Along with Kiev regime controlled Ukraine, the US was the only nation voting against the most recent UN General Assembly resolution on condemning the promotion of Nazism. Relative to the SCF, the US government’s explanation for its vote is ethically inconsistent. Refer to this excerpt –

“The United States Supreme Court has consistently affirmed the constitutional right to freedom of speech and the rights of peaceful assembly and association, including by avowed Nazis, whose hatred and xenophobia are vile and widely scorned by the American people. We nevertheless firmly defend the constitutional rights of those who exercise their fundamental freedoms to combat intolerance and express strong opposition to the odious Nazi creed and others that espouse similar hatreds.”

By the way, Israel voted for that UN resolution. Within elite US political circles, Israel is characterized as a key US ally.

I’m presently looking into ways of legally getting around the threat of being unfairly penalized for an opportunity to receive added income during these pressing economic times. I sense some possible wiggle room, in counteracting a slick maneuver at an intimidation process, nevertheless having limits. Unofficially, it looks like a pursuit to have the targets fold without a fight. At the same time, I haven’t given up on the notion that not everyone in the US government is blindly committed to knee jerk anti-Russian biases.

Based on what the USTD has communicated, it seems like I might be able to legally receive a gratuity for an SCF article, as long as the sender isn’t named on the sanctions list as specified. There’s also the possibility of having an SCF article fee placed on hold, until the nonsense ends.

For its part, the SCF has expressed a reluctance to run articles from the American US based contributors targeted by the FBI and USTD. The legal definition of a transaction can be stretched out. To date, the USTD has been lax in getting back to me. At the end of their letter, contact information is given for that stated purpose.

My being against neocon, neolib and flat out Russia hating preferences doesn’t make me a threat to the US. I consider myself a loyal American, acting in the best interests of the US. Under civil circumstances and in preferably high profile settings, I welcome direct exchanges with people having different views. Compare that preference to those approvingly seeking the restriction of valid views they disagree with.

I find it somewhat ironic that the former CIA Director John Brennan, voted for Gus Hall, when the latter was a US presidential candidate on the ticket of the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA. Now, Brennan has been at the forefront in stating negative inaccuracies about Russia. In comparison, my upbringing was in an anti-Soviet, pro-American and pro-Russian setting.

In the early 1970s, I was among a choice few students in my school class standing for the pledge of allegiance, as most of the other students sat down. When President Jimmy Carter reinstituted the armed services draft in 1980, I signed up for it, despite my disagreement with that enactment. My father served in the USMC during the Korean War.

Fast forward to the present, some with less of a US patriotic background than myself, are suggestively spinning me as a subversive. My views and intent aren’t illegitimate. A truly free society doesn’t censor valid views. My analytical manner is in the spirit of what’s said to make America a great country.

It’s not easy finding ideal situations for people engaging in the type of analytical work that I’m involved with. Successfully landing such an opportunity pertains to several factors which can include sheer luck, crony connections, preferred political slant and paper credentials.

I feel that compensation for my commentary is warranted given the reported salaries of some of those people doing work on the issues I cover. I’ve had enough behind the scene discussion with the elites to know I’m not intellectually beneath a good number of them.

If I’m such a Russian government asset as some have suggested, why hasn’t the Russian government funded RT offered me paid work? RT gave Liz Wahl and some others pretty decent money before they dissed that outlet to the delight of neocons, neolibs and flat out Russia haters. In terms of viewers, RT has a greater reach than the SCF.

Consider me in the camp of constructively critical pro-Russian leaning advocates, who believe that the Russian government can do better in communicating their country’s image. On the flip side, US mass media venues prefer alternative sources, who they can have an easier time with.

A recent Chris Hedges-Glenn Greenwald exchange could arguably be taken to suggest that the level of freedom difference between Russia and the US might not be as great as some believe. Quoting Mark Sleboda: “Pro-Western Russian liberals have it tough. Then again so do pro-Russian Western dissidents.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel describes the long time Novaya Gazeta Editor Dmitrii Muratov as a courageous journalist and media executive. Some Russian media and political elites congratulated Muratov when he was nominated for a Noble Peace Prize.Muratov doesn’t appear to be economically challenged.

Kudos to those folks who’ve noted the recent discriminatory measures taken against the SCF and its US based American writers.

eurasiareview.com

The Democratic Party will be tempted to blame their recent crash and burn on the monument to national embarrassment that is Joe Biden, but that would be missing the wider picture, which is that most Americans find woke politics absolutely repulsive.

Just one month ago, few people believed that Republican Glenn Youngkin, a former business executive and newcomer to the political jungle, had any chance of beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s high-stakes race for governor. But then McAuliffe laid his woke cards face up on the table and it was game over.

The revelatory moment came last month during the gubernatorial debate when the candidates were asked how much influence parents should have in their children’s education. Before revealing McAuliffe’s rather predictable answer (hint: he’s a woke liberal), it is important to note that school board meetings are no longer the monotonous cures for insomnia they once were. Rather, they have become major social events where parents confidently take the podium to harangue school officials over the progressive perversities now being taught in the classroom.

It is no secret that the U.S. public school system, in cahoots with powerful advocacy groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Open Society Foundation, has been stealthily incorporating teachings on Critical Race Theory, which postulates, in a nutshell, that white people are inherently and irreconcilably racist. And when schoolchildren are not being warned of the pint-sized supremacists in their midst, they are being instructed on more titillating topics, like how the biological differences between the sexes, undisputed since before Cro-Magnon times, is in fact nothing more than a social construct of our lacking imaginations. So instead of learning proper grammar and sentence structure – glaring signs of racism – students are now focused on knowing the correct pronoun for the approximate 75 varieties of gender out there.

Needless to say, the liberal dream weavers pushed the mindf**kery too far and Loudon County, Virginia exploded into a modern day civil war between Republicans and Democrats. In fact, so great was the backlash against the unabashed educators that the National School Boards Association addressed a letter to Joe Biden where they compared the agitated parents to “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” That shows how venal, weak-minded and thin-skinned the limpid left has become: it can’t even handle a dressing down by disgruntled soccer moms without calling in the Feds. The response by the establishment was no less pathetic.

I want to thank the Loudoun County school board. None of this would have been possible without you. Tonight’s result was your handiwork. Congratulations!

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 3, 2021

Instead of telling the teachers union to grow a proverbial pair and face the music, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland fell into full metal jacket mode, directing the FBI to meet with local law enforcement to determine how to open “lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.” Needless to say, that directive didn’t go down well with parents, or with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, especially considering that no acts of violence had been committed.

Here is where Terry McAuliffe put his political ambitions to pasture once and for all. With a degree of tone-deafness typically found only in nursing homes and CNN studios, the gubernatorial wannabe declared at the debates that, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At this point, Glenn Youngkin could have taken a long swig of Jack Daniels from a brown paper bag on stage and he still would have become governor.

On a cautionary side note, Republicans would be wise not to bank too much on Mr. Youngkin, who seems to be cut from the same pricey cloth as his Euro contemporary across the pond, French President Emmanuel Macron. Both of these relative newcomers to the political stage emerged from the murky world of finance – Youngkin from the Washington-based Carlyle Group, where George H.W. Bush Sr. had once served, impeccably, of course, as a senior advisor; Macron hails from Rothschild & Co. where he was an investment banker. I only mention the connection because my faith in the U.S. election system (and those held abroad) has been shaken to the point where it is difficult to imagine fair and honest elections, but rather shady selections in secret retreats – a bit like Eyes Wide Shut meets The Manchurian Candidate. But I digress.

Let’s be clear about something: the small and hugely overpublicized contingency of radical progressives, espousing Cultural Marxist claptrap, has little in common with America; that smack of reality does not seem to have hit the Democratic Party yet only because they have been deluded into believing that Joe Biden’s (still unexplained) victory over Donald Trump somehow legitimized their unhinged, un-American ideals. The fact is these people live in some phony facsimile of the country beamed into their living rooms each evening courtesy of the legacy media dinosaurs. Rather than taking their talking points from the detached talking heads of Lemon, Maddow and Cuomo, for example, the Democrats should have paid heed to time-tested political strategists, like James Carville.

In an interview with PBS NewsHour, the ‘Ragin’ Cajun’ nailed it when he blamed McAuliffe’s defeat on “stupid wokeness.”

“Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey [where the incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy narrowly defeated his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli]. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington,” Carville railed, and not for the first time. “I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean — people see that.”

“Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he added. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

The irony here is that the Democrats never stopped talking about how Donald Trump alienated himself from the ‘suburban woman’ electorate, yet they have gone out of their way to do exactly the same thing with their woke insanity. Instead of trying to appease the progressive prima AOC donnas who have tarnished the Democratic brand name, perhaps irreparably, the Democrats would do well to consider what their radical turn to the left looks like for average Americans –the omnipotent soccer moms and dads. It’s easy to wager that for every lewd book that appears on school library shelves, and every new racist slander hurled at innocent folks, to every violent crime committed by a migrant crossing the border illegally, the Democrats lose considerable ground with their base.

The woke flag may be flying high inside of Democratic headquarters, but in towns and cities across America it looks every bit as ominous as the appearance of a Jolly Roger on the horizon. In short, the Democrats must ditch the woke, or they will, invariably, go broke.