President Donald Trump and 17 Republican-ruled states filed motions this week in support of the Texas’ ‘Hail Mary’ effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn results in four major swing states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where alleged fraud and irregularities catapulted Biden into the White House. The legal challenge comes just days before the Electoral College is scheduled to formally pronounce on the outcome.

Trump’s legal team has experienced multiple setbacks in its efforts to present its case at the state level. Those failures were not wholly unexpected considering that three of the states being sued are Democrat-run; not exactly places where the scales of justice would tip in Trump’s favor. As for Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, proving his credentials in the RINO club (‘Republican In Name Only’) has impeded efforts for a recount every step of the way.

The charges being leveled against the states by Rudy Giuliani, the head of Trump’s legal team, are serious despite being almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. The suit accuses both local voting officials as well as Dominion Voting Systems of potential fraud and “severe irregularities.” Several IT experts testified that the voting systems were not only hooked up to the internet, but the votes were tallied at overseas points.

Giuliani outlined the grievances in Atlanta, Georgia, where an alleged water-pipe break, later determined to be a hoax, halted vote counting at a time when Trump’s lead over Biden was looking insurmountable.

“In the city of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside. We have numerous double voters. We have numerous out-of-state voters. And we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of votes.”

Next time someone tells you the #TexasLawSuit has no standing, no chance of being accepted at #SCOTUS, etc., ask them what was the primary question in Bush v. Gore? (Hint: it was the right of the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes about the Presidential electors clause.) https://t.co/GzDFj8QYgu

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) December 10, 2020

The lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week presents a compelling argument, yet has attracted mockery and disdain from some legal experts who argue that no state has the right to interfere in the affairs i.e. conducting elections of another state. The Texas-led lawsuit, however, makes the fascinating counter-argument that those four states where fraud is alleged to have happened “threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election.” In other words, by not holding fair and transparent elections, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have infringed upon the rights of the citizens of other states.

“States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States,” the amicus brief reads. “When non-legislative actors in other States encroach on the authority of the “Legislature thereof” in that State to administer a Presidential election, they threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election—including the citizens of amici States.”

The legal motion went on to mention the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Courts in each state overriding the legislative branch by codifying mail-in ballots that were not properly managed. To support its claim it cited Anderson v. United States (1974), which ruled that every voter in a federal election “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”

Whether or not the filing on behalf of 17 states, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump ultimately succeeds or fails to be heard by the Supreme Court is not really the main point. What is significant is not only have so many Republican states joined together in defense of the populist leader, something that many people did not believe would happen, but it underscores the level of anger and frustration so many Americans are feeling over the outcome to this election of extreme consequence. Indeed, many believe the outcome of this presidential contest, given the strange winds now blowing through Capitol Hill, may actually mean the difference between the United States becoming more of a socialist country than a capitalist one.

With so much riding on the line, conservative Trump supporters are growing desperate, not only with the implications of a Biden-Harris presidency, but by the absolute lack of media coverage throughout the saga. And when there is media attention devoted to the legal challenges, it is an arrogant and condescending tone, as if fraud and corruption has suddenly become a new thing.

This is where not the media and the Big Tech social media platforms are playing with real fire. If enough Republican voters come around to the conclusion that Trump was not only cheated out of another term in office, but was never given a fair hearing to forward those grievances, then we may be heading for some very rough times in the land of the free. To lose in an election is one thing, but to lose under highly dubious terms while lacking both the legal and media methods of voicing those concerns, is a recipe for disaster.

By Wednesday, the general attorneys from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia have filed motions with the Supreme Court. Should the highest court in the land agree to hear the case, Texas senator Ted Cruz has agreed to argue on Trump’s behalf.

Not only would such a court case make for some epic television, it may very well save the Republic from another civil war.

CIA contacts, a web of lies, and a robust propaganda operation. It’s time to start asking questions about Borat’s methods—and his goals.

Declan LEARY

Ayman Abu Aita is a family man. For years, he was a grocer by trade, running his shop in Bethlehem while serving on the board of the Holy Land Trust, a nonprofit group working for peaceful reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like many Palestinians, he is a Christian, a practicing member of the Greek Orthodox Church.

He must have been as shocked as everybody else to see his face broadcast across the world above the identifier: “ayman abu aita, terrorist group leader, al-aqsa martyrs brigade.”

The interview in question—conducted in character by Sacha Baron Cohen and featured in his movie Bruno—had been held under false pretenses, and deceptively edited to boot. Abu Aita pursued legal action and, in a rare (albeit measured) victory for one of Cohen’s victims, managed to settle out of court. The lawsuit ended in 2012, and the interview had been conducted in 2009, so this all may seem like ancient history. But a few of the episode’s more bizarre details have never been adequately explained, and Borat’s carefully timed return ought to revive our interest.

In addition to his long record of peaceful activism—which had earned Abu Aita two years in an Israeli jail on unsubstantiated charges—Baron Cohen’s fake terrorist just happens to have been a parliamentary candidate in Palestine at the time of the Bruno debacle. Thanks to Cohen’s actions, Abu Aita received death threats and sustained serious damage to his reputation, his business, and his campaign.

While it remains possible that Abu Aita was a random victim, it practically defies belief: why travel halfway across the world to interview a random person who is manifestly not a terrorist? Had the goal here solely been the bit, the same scene could have been shot for a fraction of the cost in a cheap LA motel, with an unknown actor of a reasonably believable ethnic extraction. It is immensely difficult to consider the great lengths to which Cohen went in painting Abu Aita as a terrorist to be somehow independent of who he was, of his years of political activity, and of the damage done to him by the stunt. It is hard to see any of this as accidental.

In Abu Aita’s account, the interview “was set up via Awni Jubran, a journalist for the Palestinian news agency, PNN,” with the supposed purpose of discussing peace efforts and life in Palestine. Cohen, in an interview with David Letterman the week after Bruno‘s premiere, offered a somewhat different account of how he first became interested in Abu Aita. Out of character, clean-shaven, sporting a t-shirt, a blazer, and the Queen’s English, Cohen provided a sometimes-necessary reminder that he is neither a poor Kazakh reporter nor a gay Austrian fashionista, but an obscenely wealthy, Cambridge-educated Brit. This rarely seen, authentic Cohen informed Letterman that he had sought a list of names from a contact at the CIA, and from there did some asking around in the Middle East until he located the “terrorist” he wound up interviewing. The million questions that ought to arise from this admission—Who does Cohen know at the CIA, and why? Why did this CIA contact share any information with him? What was the CIA’s interest in Abu Aita? and countless others—were simply brushed aside, and the conversation continued.

In his answer to Abu Aita’s complaints, Cohen swore, through his lawyers, that the statements in question were “substantially true.” Likewise, Letterman’s answer attested to the substantial truth of the interview while also “admit[ting] Cohen stated that he received information from a contact at the ‘C.I.A.’” While substantial truth in libel and slander law allows for “slight inaccuracies of expression,” any conceivable definition of the term still includes Cohen’s insistence on the sincerity of the CIA claim.

* * *

Fast forward eight years, and Cohen once again has his sights set on a candidate for office. This time it’s the vice president of the United States, in the midst of a heated reelection campaign. (Cohen has never been shy about his Trump/Pence hatred, and has often stated publicly that his sole reason for returning to his trademark brand of activist comedy was to help bring an end to the present administration.)

On Thursday, February 27th, a man dressed as Donald Trump burst into the Potomac Ballroom at the Gaylord in National Harbor, MD, where Vice President Pence was addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). With a woman in a green dress and ripped tights slung over his shoulder, the man shouted something at the vice president in labored and heavily accented English. Ian Walters, communications director of the American Conservative Union which runs CPAC, said that it sounded vaguely obscene (suffice it to say the impersonator bungled the VP’s surname) but he could not make out clearly what the man was saying. Video footage of the incident shows the crowd clearly appalled, and the pair were quickly escorted out by CPAC security, Secret Service agents, and officers of the Prince George’s County Police Department.

Though no charges were pursued, the police report from the incident identifies the man as Sacha Noem Cohen, while the woman identified is a stunt double who has worked extensively in Hollywood. (TAC has been in touch with the woman in question, but she had not responded to our inquiries as of press time.) The PGPD report claims that all information was shared with CPAC security, who then confiscated the pair’s access passes. But CPAC personnel maintain that they were never informed of Cohen’s identity, and did not confiscate any pass that would have tipped them off.

The police department’s claim is hard to square with CPAC personnel’s obvious confusion about the events that followed. Over the next two days, two more Trump impersonators appeared at the convention, both in professional-grade costumes. The third and final Trump impersonator was detained by the Secret Service. His prosthetics were so elaborate that he had to call an associate—a professional makeup artist—to assist in their removal so that the Secret Service could confirm his identity. That wasn’t the only person who came to help him, though: Brian Stolarz, an attorney specializing in white-collar criminal defense, was at the ready.

From there, an hour and a half passed before the big event: somebody ran through a highly trafficked area of the hotel in full Klan robes, while numerous CPAC attendees looked on in horror. Security arrived quickly, and the Klan impersonator was detained as well. Stolarz—the lawyer who had shown up for the Trump impersonator that same day—was on the scene here too, further confirming the link between what otherwise might have passed for unrelated episodes.

Given everything that has occurred in the interim—COVID became the big news just a few days after CPAC—most people seem to have forgotten that the Klansman story took on a life of its own at the time. Because Cohen’s presence was not made public at the time, despite the discovery of his identity on Thursday, speculation ran wild. Clips of a man in Klan robes running through CPAC made the rounds on the internet—often, according to Walters, via accounts that seemed obviously bogus. In addition to the social media buzz, the CPAC incidents were given a good bit of airtime in major news outlets. The ACU fielded calls from, among others, leaders of D.C.’s Black Lives Matter, outraged that one of the largest gatherings of mainstream conservatives in the country would tolerate a Klansman strolling through. (The initial clips that surfaced did not show the horrified reactions of actual CPAC attendees, nor the actor’s detainment by security.) Just as with the Abu Aita interview, what was ostensibly a comedy act apparently doubled as a very real political influence operation.

It was more than six months before what actually happened at CPAC became apparent to the public. With Borat Subsequent Moviefilm‘s hurried release (a week and a half before Election Day), the Trump impersonators and the Klansman were all shown to be part of a massive Cohen stunt—perhaps his biggest to date. But it is worth considering how carefully the film itself glosses over the complexity of this production. Walters estimates that a team of a dozen unauthorized security personnel were operating at CPAC, accompanying a slightly larger, undercover film crew. It came to the attention of CPAC personnel that this group had rented, and were operating out of, a block of rooms at the nearby Westin. All of these personnel had purchased access passes to CPAC (which aren’t cheap) and security also suspected that some registration credentials may have been forged—with top-notch equipment and skill, at that. Walters estimated the cost of the operation to be somewhere around a quarter of a million dollars, if not more.

To an impartial observer, this all would seem to be not a goofy comedy sketch, but a serious information op at a major political event in the midst of an important election year. In a way, it was: all these scenes existed independently, floating around the internet—forming opinions and sparking controversies and stoking hatred—for months before they were folded into the context of the film. First as tragedy and then as farce, right?

* * *

Between the CPAC saga and the movie’s release, another major operation—in some ways more complex than that in February—had been carried out at the end of June. The third annual March for Our Rights rally was set to be a small affair, operated out of one organizer’s flatbed truck, run by a local crew with hardly any budget to speak of.

A few months before the event, though, the rally’s three organizers—Allen Acosta, Matt Marshall, and Tessa Ashley—were contacted by a production company who asked to film at the event for a documentary. Something seemed off, and the organizers declined. Then, just a few weeks out from the rally, they were contacted by a group representing themselves as a PAC based in Southern California. The name they used was “Back-to-Work USA,” and beside a cell phone number—which now goes to voicemail—and one press release, there was little out there to attest to their existence. Again, the organizers were skeptical, but the group seemed eager to offer financial support.

Acosta, who has been the event’s lead organizer in each of the three years it’s occurred, started out slow. He asked the two women from “Back-to-Work”—the names they gave were Tamara Young and Mary Harris—if their group would pay to rent out porta-potties for the event. When they followed through, he took it as a sign that they were legitimate, and that their offer of support was sincere. At breakneck pace, the supposed PAC contracted a professional stage and other equipment, an army of security, and a number of legitimate musical acts, including Larry Gatlin. In all, the expenses—the group virtually paid for the whole event—amounted to tens of thousands of dollars.

The morning of June 27th, Acosta kept close watch over the setup. He directed participants, including Young and Harris, exactly where to park their cars. He gave a security briefing to the team that Back-to-Work USA had hired—about 40 locals hired for the day. Once the event began, he immersed himself in the crowd, making conversation with attendees and making sure everything went smoothly audience-side.

Meanwhile, the Back-to-Work crew claimed they were rushing to get one more act to warm the crowd up for Gatlin. They told Marshall that they had found one at the last minute, and in the middle of the action neither he nor any of the other event organizers had much time to vet the new find.

The first portion of the event, which featured stump speeches from conservative political candidates, was wrapping up, and they were ready to pivot to the entertainment segment, with Gatlin headlining. At this point, organizers noticed a substantial swell in the crowd. Acosta didn’t think anything of it at the time, as he had encouraged people who might not be interested in the political rally to come enjoy the music nonetheless. In retrospect, a number of the new arrivals seem suspect. Notably, a group with Gadsden and Confederate flags were standing off in the back, hesitant to join the main body of people even at Acosta’s urging. Looking back on the moment months later, he said it was “like they were waiting for a cue.”

It was then that Acosta got a call from the police. One woman, upset by some Trump flags at the rally, was causing a scene across the street. A few attendees were engaging with her verbally. Acosta went over to help get a handle on the situation. The lone protestor continued for about 15 minutes, and her outburst escalated until she was eventually arrested. At that point, Acosta crossed back over to rejoin the event.

As soon as he returned, he was met with complaints from worried parents: somebody was walking through the crowd with a backward-facing camera in his backpack, which the parents thought was pointed down to the level of their children. Acosta actually found the man, and was questioning him when a commotion broke out in the area of the stage. Acosta turned in that direction, and in the blink of an eye the man had bolted for the parking lot.

The ruckus that caught Acosta’s attention has been widely publicized, though very little of what actually happened has broken into the mainstream narrative. The second act which “Back-to-Work” had supposedly booked last minute was actually Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat who was in character as “Country Steve.” Country Steve sang a song about injecting various liberals with the Wuhan flu, as well as chopping up journalists “like the Saudis do.” Parts of the song also featured anti-Semitic undertones.

This was hardly met without resistance: one video—distinctly absent from most reporting of the event—shows a young attendee, draped in an Israeli flag, grabbing a bullhorn and rushing to the front of the crowd to confront Cohen. At the same time, Marshall and one other rally participant (who happens to be the son of a Holocaust survivor) managed to get past Cohen’s security—with a good bit of effort—and chase him off the stage. In a late-October interview with Steven Colbert, Cohen claimed that one of the two men reached for his gun while rushing the stage. Marshall, who was carrying an unloaded pistol at the event, denies that this ever happened. Cohen seems to relish the idea that he has placed himself in danger for these stunts: he claimed to Letterman that his interview with Abu Aita was conducted at a secret location, with two hulking bodyguards accompanying the “terrorist,” while in reality it was conducted at a popular hotel under Israeli jurisdiction, with Abu Aita accompanied by a journalist friend and the peace activist who runs the Holy Land Trust.

Country Steve, clearly unwelcome, ran into a staged ambulance that rushed away with the lights on. Acosta hurried to the parking lot and saw that the cars of the Back-to-Work crew had all disappeared as well. In a matter of seconds the scam became apparent. But the spin was quickly applied online: clips of the violent and anti-Semitic song started to pop up on social media, with the confrontation by the young Jewish activist and the moment where Marshall chased Cohen offstage conveniently left out. Special attention was given to the members of the crowd who enthusiastically sang along. But, by and large, these do not seem to be actual attendees of the March for Our Rights. For the most part, they seem to have come from the group of bystanders that Acosta suggests were “waiting for a cue.” Marshall—who is convinced that these were hired extras—points out that these people are dressed in over-the-top, stereotypical MAGA get-ups, complete with straw hats and Rebel flags. He also notes that, given Washington’s history and location, Confederate flags simply aren’t a part of the culture, even in more provocative corners of the right.

Nevertheless, the episode was cast as a classic Borat sting: Cohen, it was assumed, had shown up at this rally, hopped on stage, and easily gotten the right-wingers to show their racist side. Nobody looked into the immense effort that had gone into the scene. That somebody had spent tens of thousands of dollars even to get him there, and apparently planted willing collaborators in the crowd, was hardly considered at all.

Once again, the stunt took on a substantial political character. Reports that right-wing rally-goers had gleefully participated in Country Steve’s act cropped up all over the internet, bolstered by social media buzz—supposedly showing the dark underbelly of MAGA-world right before the election. And once again—as with CPAC, and Abu Aita, and any number of Cohen’s marks—great pains were taken to hide just how orchestrated the whole thing was.

* * *

It’s interesting how Borat—within the plot of the movie—is supposed to have wound up at the rally in Washington. While quarantining with two new friends—Jim Russell and Jerry Holleman, two supposed QAnoners with virtually no online presence—Borat stumbles upon a video of his daughter, Tutar (played by newcomer Maria Bakalova) pretending to be a journalist named Grace. In the clip, Tutar/Grace/Bakalova is interviewing two anti-lockdown activists about the risk COVID emergency measures pose for a long-term slide into authoritarianism.

What’s really interesting here is that this interview actually happened. The two interviewees, Ashley and Adam Smith, are leaders of ReopenNC, a grassroots movement with over 80,000 members in their Facebook group. On April 22nd—long before the March for Our Rights rally in late June—Ashley received an email from someone using the name Charlotte Richardson, claiming to be “a producer for More Than Sports TV, a production company working together with One America News Network on a documentary that explores the horrors of socialism and its corrosive impact on creativity, success and innovation here in America.” More Than Sports TV had a website, registered in November of 2019. Likewise, Held Back, the supposed documentary project in the works, had a website that was just registered on March 9th of this year. (Neither website remains active today.) Given the apparently legitimate websites and the purported connection to OAN, Smith agreed to the interview.

She conducted a 40-minute interview over Zoom with “Grace,” in which the two talked seriously about the subject matter; Bakalova did not break character once, and Smith never suspected a thing. Charlotte even reached out to set up another interview, this time with Ashley’s husband, Adam, participating. It was from this second interview that a brief clip was pulled and posted to The Patriots Report, ostensibly a news site. It is this posting that Borat stumbles upon in the film.

The Patriots Report domain was registered in September of 2019. Like all the other sites in play here, it was registered using an anonymous proxy service, making it impossible to determine who purchased the domain. The bulk of its content is plagiarized from popular sites like The Gateway Pundit—though some portion, notably the Bakalova/Smith interview, is original, fabricated content. As of October 31st, The Patriots Report is still active, still masquerading as a news site, and still posting new content. In these last days before the election, there seems to be a focus on just that. One story, pulled from Politico without attribution, warns that “Most social media users in three key states have seen ads questioning the election.” Another story, ripped straight from Daily Kos, has been pinned to the site’s homepage for days: “It’s not just social media: Election disinformation now spreading through text, emails.” If the site was meant solely as a prop for a comedy film, it’s hard to imagine why it’s being used to spread fears over “election disinformation” a week after the movie opened and mere days before the election itself.

This is particularly interesting given Cohen’s public activism calling for stricter censorship of speech by tech platforms, with a special focus on Facebook, in close association with the Anti-Defamation League. Cohen is fond of talking about “fake news” on the talk show circuit, but he has not offered any explanation as to why he is apparently running a fake news outlet himself.

* * *

Besides the Smith interview and the widely discussed Rudy Giuliani interview, Borat revealed in a tweet on October 24th that Bakalova, posing as an aspiring journalist for The Patriots Report, had been given a brief tour of the White House press room by One America News Network’s chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion. (That a White House correspondent generously offered advice and a tour to a hopeful fellow journalist is somehow meant to be taken as a prank.) On the surface level, he seems to just be suggesting that the current White House is unserious because this actor—who passed a Secret Service background check two days before the tour—was allowed into the press room and onto the north lawn.

But another interesting (and deeply concerning) dimension to Sacha Baron Cohen’s operation—on top of CIA sources connecting with Palestinian activists, small fortunes spent crafting political scenes that spread through the internet like a virus, and online disinformation campaigns undertaken in earnest while publicly pushing for tech censorship—is added by a detail that Rion observed.

The camera crew Bakalova used in her White House stunt were neither amateur pranksters nor Hollywood professionals: they were credentialed members of the press corp. When Rion inquired about this, Bakalova’s producer “shrugged and told [her] he has friends at CBS.” According to Rion, all three members of the crew had congressional press badges, and at least two of the three had White House hard passes. Hard passes are issued to those who have been on the White House grounds at least 180 times within a six month period—suggesting that Bakalova’s accomplices were full-time, long-term members of the White House press.

Plenty has been said about the cheapness of Borat’s humor, and the tiredness of the shtick. Likewise, many have observed that Cohen’s comedy—always heavily political—has crossed the line into blatant politicking, especially with respect to the Giuliani interview. But there is more than enough here to suggest that the politics run much deeper than might be evident at first glance.

If we’re supposed to be so worried about “election disinformation” and foreign election meddling, shouldn’t we be concerned about a British multimillionaire—with unexplained connections to the CIA and the White House press corps, and public affiliation with other institutions clearly hostile to Trump like the ADL—carrying out massive information ops in the lead-up to an election that he has publicly expressed an interest in influencing? Or should we just pretend it’s all okay because the press told us we’re supposed to be laughing?

theamericanconservative.com

The former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, has certainly made better judgment calls in his career than the one he made on July 7 of this year.

Following a spoof interview with Maria Bakalova, a Bulgarian actress who plays a conservative journalist in the latest instalment of Baron Cohen’s ‘Borat’ series, Bakalova uses her feminine charms to lure Giuliani into a hotel room where he is briefly filmed with his hand down his pants while prostrate on a bed. Not the best visuals to say the least. At this point, Borat enters the scene, screaming: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.” (the actress is 24 years old, but never mind). Giuliani, meanwhile, explained that he was merely caught in the act of removing the microphone that he had used to conduct the interview.

The Giuliani scene in Borat is a huge nothing. Those who lied about it should be sued. He was tucking in his shirt. Even if he wasn’t, he’s an unmarried man invited to a grown woman’s bedroom. There is no scandal here at all. You shameless lying scumbags

pic.twitter.com/KVwInfEGPV

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 23, 2020

If Cohen’s comedy routine with Giuliani seemed strangely familiar, it’s because he used a slightly different version of it years earlier on yet another God-fearing conservative, Ron Paul. Cohen, playing the part of a gay Austrian fashion commentator named ‘Bruno,’ tricked the congressman from Texas into an interview he believed would be on economics. In the course of the discussion, however, a planned power outage gives Cohen the opportunity to lead Paul into a backroom while the technicians sort out the ‘glitch’. Here, ‘Bruno’ lights some candles and attempts to make a pass at Paul, who immediately storms out of the room with his team. This is what Sacha Baron Cohen calls ‘humor,’ which almost always comes at the expense of flyover country White folk. Nothing hateful about that, right?

After all, according to many left-wing ‘progressives’, it’s perfectly acceptable to attack Republicans, most of whom are closet White supremacists and bigots anyways. Yet how can that logic be supported when the Ku Klux Klan, for example, America’s premier hate group, got much of its original membership straight from the ranks of the Democratic Party? But I digress.

Just days before the Giuliani set up, Cohen had crashed a right-wing event in the state of Washington while posing as a xenophobic country singer, enticing the crowd to sing along to lyrics about former President Barack Obama, national health expert Anthony Fauci, and other assorted “mask wearers” getting injected with the “Wuhan flu.” When it quickly became apparent to the local organizers of the event that they were the target of an elaborate prank, hired security guards accompanying Baron Cohen reportedly refused to let them pull the plug on the performance. Nothing like being the butt end of a joke practically at gunpoint, right?

In another particular scene, Cohen, once again playing the part of Borat, gets himself invited as a special guest at the Pima County Republican Club. In his speech before the members, Cohen begins by requesting that everyone stand for 10 minutes (not 10 seconds, as the emcee had politely requested) to pay respect to some imaginary massacre that he said occurred in his “native Kazakhstan (for the record, Sacha Baron Cohen was born in Israel and resides in Britain).”

The ‘joke’ may have gone over a bit better had the majority of the standing audience not been of senior citizen age when standing for any length of time can be excruciating. Apparently that never dawned on Cohen, however, who even made the group start over when he said someone “made a noise.” Hilarious! So what exactly was Cohen attempting to prove by this puerile prank, and many others like it? Was it that conservative Americans are so naïve that they would obediently stand to commemorate the death of unknown people killed in some foreign massacre because they were asked to? This sort of gut-wrenching ‘humor’ has a funny way of making Cohen the real butt end of his jokes.

The strange comedic timing behind Cohen’s routines

Beyond the comic value of Cohen’s work, which I would rank as less than negligible, the ‘comic timing’ of his attacks on Republicans seems to go beyond mere coincidence.

Consider the previously mentioned ‘prank’ on Ron Paul, which was filmed in early 2008. Was it just coincidence that Cohen attempted to get Paul involved in a very compromising situation at the very same time the House representative from Texas was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency? Moreover, Paul had authored the 2009 bestselling book entitled, End the Fed, a compassionate argument for terminating America’s complicated relationship with the Federal Reserve System and its “massive role in manipulating money to our economic ruin,” as Paul writes on page one. And who could ever forget the way Paul made former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke squirm under fierce congressional questioning about runaway Fed spending? Clearly, Ron Paul, who was vilified when he was not outright ignored by most media channels, presented a real threat to the establishment, and in that regard it is at least worthy of mentioning that Cohen decided to target such a statesman.

The very same thing could be said about Rudy Giuliani. Here is a major Trump ally being subjected to a Borat stunt in what is arguably the most consequential election cycle in U.S. history. But more importantly, the former mayor of New York City is sitting on a veritable treasure trove of Hunter Biden emails and photographs, which the mainstream media and Big Tech companies are going out of their way to disappear. Once again, incredible comedic timing from Sacha Baron Cohen.

Incidentally, Trump himself in 2003 sat for an interview with Cohen, then in the character of ‘Ali G,’ but the discussion ended very fast.

Asked about the scene, Trump said, “I don’t know what happened. But years ago, you know, he tried to scam me. And I was the only one who said no way. That’s a phony guy. And I don’t find him funny. I don’t know anything about him other than he tried to scam me. He came in as a BBC – British broadcasting anchor.”

Trump concluded, “To me, he was a creep.”

While it is hard to say how many people share Trump’s opinion about the English actor, it would be difficult to argue that Sacha Baron Cohen does not have a big dog in the U.S. political scene. That much was clear during a speech the comedian gave before an assembly of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where, it should be noted, he did not attempt to make a fool of his hosts by asking them to stand for 10 minutes in commemoration of some fictional Kazakh massacre.

Instead, Cohen spoke on the subject of social media freedoms, but not in some valiant effort to make them greater, as one might expect a public person would desire, but rather to crackdown on free speech.

Here is part of Cohen’s speech, delivered on Nov. 21, 2019:

“I’m speaking up today because I believe that our pluralistic democracies are on a precipice and that the next twelve months, and the role of social media, could be determinant. British voters will go to the polls while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of “great replacement” that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants. Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a “Hispanic invasion.” And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a “hoax,” the United States is on track, a year from now, to formally withdraw from the Paris Accords.”

Cohen labeled all of this as a “sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threatens democracy and our planet—this cannot possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.”

Whether coincidental or not, Cohen’s calls to “monitor” the internet from those dastardly people on the other side of the political aisle who propagate the wrong ‘conspiracy theories,’ has come to fruition faster than anyone could have imagined, as the New York Post, which suffered a massive censorship operation at the hands of the ‘Silicon Six’ (who Cohen identified as “Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter”), could certainly testify to.

So who is Sacha Baron Cohen, and why do his comedy sketches always focus on the same group of individuals – the sworn arch-enemies of liberals, the conservatives – and at the most critical moments in U.S. political history?

Last week, the New York Post fired off a bombshell story that exposed emails allegedly belonging to U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The messages – discovered on a laptop that the younger Biden had reportedly dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 – point to a level of corruption and nepotism that is shocking even by modern standards.

The NY Post article has new info. It has a copy of the email from Vadym Pozharskyi, adviser to the board of Burisma, thanking Hunter Biden for giving him the “opportunity to meet your father.” Joe Biden has denied knowledge of his son’s dealings with Burisma. pic.twitter.com/4KytWTcB0F

— Jorge Salcedo (@j_salcedo) October 14, 2020

To briefly summarize the revelations, via the Post exclusive: “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing…Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.”

That’s an awful lot of potential political malfeasance in one paragraph, and even more so when it is remembered that Donald Trump was impeached by the Democrats for merely requesting that Kiev look into Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine while serving in the Obama administration.

But as predictable as vodka flowing during Russian New Years, the usual social media suspects played brilliant defense for the Bidens, blocking not only U.S. government agencies from retweeting the Post story, but blocking the Post from doing so as well. While happy to accommodate the New York Times’ unsubstantiated story on Donald Trump’s tax status just a month earlier, suddenly the virtual house that Jack built was adamant about protecting its users from “hacked material.” This blithering nonsense had the unfortunate effect of placing the question of Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, which grants social media immunity from legal action with regards to third-party postings on their platforms, front and center while the Post story languished.

Twitter censors @JudiciaryGOP. But not the Ayatollah or the Chinese Communist Party?

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 15, 2020

The Streisand Effect quickly kicked in for Republicans, however, as they screamed in one voice that they had found the elusive smoking gun, even as William Barr has gone missing in action. The Democrats, on the other hand, who enjoy almost total support from the media industrial complex, were content to see the news distorted or ignored altogether.

In fact, reading The Washington Post’s report on the story, the Bidens were just innocent bystanders caught up in an act of violence orchestrated by none other than Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and, yes, the Kremlin.

Top-heavy with totally believable “former officials familiar with the matter,” the Bezos-owned publication opened with this bang: “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence…”

The Hunter Biden emails were fabricated by the same Russian operative who beat up Jussie Smollett, wrote homophobic slurs on Joy Reid’s blog, and hacked Steve Scully.

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) October 17, 2020

The article continued, saying Giuliani was “interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence” in the course of a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was said to be collecting evidence to “expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.”

Now before reading the next paragraph, ask yourself where were the famous Silicon Valley fact-checkers when this pulp fiction was being served up hot and spicy to an unsuspecting public? “The warnings to the White House, which have not previously been reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.”

So according to the Post, a phantom figure inside of the White House was somehow privy to a “private conversation” between Trump and O’Brien. In the course of this reputed discussion, which can neither be proved or disproved, O’Brien thought it would be a great idea, at a time when Russiagate had already been dismissed as a grand hoax, to warn his boss that veteran lawyer Giuliani had been hoodwinked by the Russkis. Somehow that all sounds very strange.

The Post article continues: “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted ‘to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,’ particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.”

“But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president,” the article continued. “Trump had ‘shrugged his shoulders’ at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, ‘That’s Rudy.’”

Reading that delightful nonsense makes it easier to understand why so many people today accuse the mainstream media of peddling in ‘fake news’ and misinformation. The Post effectively diverted the attention of millions of readers away from the elephant in the room – which was, of course, the devastating Biden emails – as it accused Trump and Giuliani of being led astray once again by those rascally Russians. Will they never learn?

Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff described the Hunter Biden emails as part of a smear campaign coming “from the Kremlin.”

“We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff told CNN in an interview. “That’s been clear for well over a year now that they’ve been pushing this false narrative about this vice president and his son.”

The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, corrected the record, stating in an op-ed piece that “Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice.” The article went on to show that Schiff “spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.”

Russia keeps its cool

It should be mentioned that the Russians are greatly amused by the never-ending charges, which have provided the fuel for an entire cottage industry of jokes. Vladimir Putin himself could not resist a bit of tongue-in cheek commentary this month when he was asked who he favored more in the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump or Joe Biden. The answer may have shocked the Democrats, portraying as they do Trump as some sort of compromised Kremlin puppet.

After emphasizing for the umpteenth time that Russians “do not interfere” in the internal affairs of foreign countries, Putin went on to say that “the Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to Social Democratic ideas, if compared to Europe. And it was from the Social Democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved.”

Here the Russian leader seems to have been alluding to the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party – driven in no small part by freshman House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which has enjoyed a surge of popularity following the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Putin continued: “After all, I was a member of the Soviet Communist Party for nearly 20 years, or more precisely 18 years. I was a rank-and-file member, but it can be said that I believed in the party’s ideas. I still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them? In fact, they are akin to Christian values. Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless. In other words, this can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the Democratic representative.”

The Russian leader then made what appeared to be a subtle allusion to the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained considerable influence, not to mention hard cash following the tragic death of George Floyd during his arrest by a white police officer: “It is a fact that African Americans constitute a stable electorate, one of the electorates of the Democratic Party. It is a well-known fact, and there is nothing new about this. The Soviet Union also supported the African Americans’ movement for their legitimate rights. Back in the 1930s, Communist International leaders wrote that both black and white workers had a common enemy – imperialism and capitalism. They also wrote that these people could become the most effective group in the future revolutionary battle.”

“So, this is something that can be seen, to a degree, as common values, if not a unifying agent for us,” Putin concluded. “I am not afraid to say so. This is true.”

The world should be grateful that Russia, a nuclear-armed nation and former arch-enemy of the United States, continues to maintain its sense of humor and dignity as a large segment of Washington, D.C. suffers yet another bout of Russophobia. How long the Russian bear will continue to accept such fake news with coolness and composure remains to be seen.

Giuliani replaced John Dowd, a seasoned Washington attorney, as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in March 2018. Dowd resigned after becoming frustrated over Trump’s constant lying, a bugbear for any attorney attempting to prepare a client for a legal proceeding. In Giuliani, however, Trump discovered a fellow dissembler of the truth.

Giuliani was the perfect mayor of New York to preside over interfering with the largest crime scene in American history, namely, the rubble of the World Trade Center complex. Giuliani’s failure to embrace the truth started much earlier in his government career.

In 2007, Giuliani’s presidential campaign released a television ad about the release of American hostages by Iran on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day – January 20, 1981. In the ad, Giuliani said, “I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages, and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing. The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as president of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t back down. I’m Rudy Giuliani, and I approve this message.”

For those who were investigating the roles of George H. W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates, and others engaged in treasonous negotiations with the Iranian mullahs in 1980 to ensure the hostages remained in Tehran until after the November 1980 election between Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, Giuliani's campaign spot had an unexpected side effect.

A March 16, 1981, memo written by then-unconfirmed Associate Attorney General Giuliani to the Acting Criminal Division chief John Keeney, which was titled "CIA Referral – Alleged Foreign Government Interference With 1980 Presidential Election," suggests that the CIA referred to the Justice Department evidence that there was criminal activity involving a foreign power in the 1980 presidential election. That foreign power was the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That criminal activity became known as the Reagan-Bush campaign's "October Surprise." Keeney and Giuliani agree to draft a letter from Deputy Attorney General Edward C. Schmults to the CIA to ask for a full report on the criminal referral that would be available to Justice personnel on a strict need-to-know basis. The Attorney General at the time of the Giuliani memo was William French Smith. His special assistant to handle – read that as bury – the Reagan-Bush campaign’s pre-election conspiracy with Iran was John G. Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Like Trump, Giuliani, had significant connections to organized crime. Giuliani was hailed as the man who took down the five Mafia crime families in New York, while serving as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Just because Giuliani helped break up the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno families, does not mean he had a clean slate when it came to close ties with organized crime. In 2007, The New York Daily News obtained a copy of a 140-page confidential internal Giuliani-for-President dossier that detailed pitfalls foreseen by the campaign. Giuliani merely sold out the Italian crime families and handed protection by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to Jewish mob bosses like Gideon Chern. This syndicate, based mostly in Brooklyn, is officially referred to as the “Eurasian Mafia” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is unofficially called the “Kosher Nostra” by federal agents and New York police financial crime detectives who have probed the syndicate’s significant connections to the Trump Organization.

The 1980s was the heyday for Trump's connections with the mob. Trump admitted to having mob-controlled construction contractors "pour the concrete" for his various buildings. Trump's Atlantic City casino and sporting operations were also heavily influenced by mobsters. By the end of the 1980s Trump was dealing less with the Gambinos and Genoveses and more with Russian-Jewish mobsters, many of whom had recently arrived in New York from Odessa, Leningrad, Kishniev, Kiev, and Moscow. These were the individuals who were afforded protection by Giuliani when he was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

As mayor of New York, Giuliani not only presided over the quick removal of World Trade Center debris from the “ground zero” crime scene, but also interfered in an FBI investigation of five Israeli suspects arrested in New Jersey in the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The Israelis, all connected to Israeli intelligence, were believed by the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency to have been connected with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert interceded twice with his good friend Giuliani to have the Israelis released from detention. It mattered not to Giuliani that the five Israelis were of “high interest” to the government’s terrorism investigation and that they were housed in one of the most highly restrictive prison settings possible, the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit (“ADMAX SHU”) of the Metropolitan Detention Center (“MDC”) in Brooklyn. During their first two weeks of detention, the FBI prohibited the Israeli Consul-General in New York from meeting with the Israelis. Prayer books and a bible given to the Israelis by a rabbi were inspected by FBI agents and prison guards for coded messages. Yet, amid all this U.S. intelligence interest in the Israelis, Giuliani took it upon himself to negotiate with Olmert their eventual exfiltration to Israel.

After 9/11, Giuliani could not speak a single sentence without mentioning 9/11 in some context. After stepping down as mayor of New York and becoming a chief of the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm, Giuliani discovered there was good money in grifting donations meant for the families of victims of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Giuliani became the trustee for the Twin Towers Fund, established to accept philanthropic donations for the families of New York and New York-New Jersey police, fire fighters, and emergency medical workers killed in the 9/11 attacks. Rather than maintain the money in a risk-free account, Giuliani invested much of it in his three favorite companies: Halliburton, General Electric, and the insurance firm Conseco, which came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2003 after being bailed out by GE Capital, a subsidiary of General Electric. Unfortunately for Giuliani, the New York firefighters, who were subjected to insults and pay and benefit cuts from Giuliani as mayor, caught wind of Giuliani's gambling with their money on the stock market.

Upon becoming Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani took a leave of absence from another dodgy law firm, Greenberg-Traurig. The firm had been where convicted Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff once hung his shingle.

On every September 11 anniversary, Giuliani falls into his tedious 9/11 refrain as the besieged “America’s mayor.” After Giuliani spits out “9/11,” just append it with his other comment, “truth isn’t truth.”

I just wanted to give everyone a quick reminder of the fact that the MEK, an Iranian cult of highly suspicious funding which is beloved by Trump insiders like John Bolton and Rudolph Giuliani for its extremely vocal pro-regime change agenda, was removed from the US State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations by none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I point this out because I’ve been butting heads with the pro-Trump faction of my readership quite a bit lately about this administration’s dangerous escalations against Iran, including starvation sanctions explicitly geared toward provoking unrest following America’s withdrawal from the Iran deal, as well as escalated CIA covert ops. There is no legitimate reason to believe that this administration can simultaneously (A) deliberately stir up chaos in Iran while also (B) maintaining so much control of the situation that it can keep things from getting out of hand, while also (C) making sure control of the situation remains in the hands of the Iranian people, as many faithful Trump supporters have confidently assured me. These are nonsensical, intrinsically contradictory beliefs, and I figure my best shot at getting people’s skepticism up to a sane level is to throw a monkey wrench in their partisan loyalties by pointing out that Hillary Clinton helped advance the same agendas.

So here it is. In 2012, despite its having actually killed Americans in acts of terrorism along with thousands of Kurds and Iranians, the bloodthirsty Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) were removed from the list of terrorist groups by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton following the recommendation of stalwart deep state lackeys like ex-CIA directors James Woolsey and Porter J Goss, former FBI director Louis J Freeh, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, Obama National Security Advisor James L Jones, and George W Bush’s homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, as well as current Trump administration employees John Bolton and Rudolph Giuliani.

Whenever I say that the pro-Trump, pro-regime change 8chan phenomenon known as QAnon is an establishment psyop designed to herd the populist right into supporting neoconservative establishment agendas, Q enthusiasts always come at me telling me it’s a purely beneficial and healthy thing.

“How can Q be bad, Caitlin?” they ask. “All he does is ask questions and encourage us to do our own research to expose the deep state for ourselves!”

Well, normally doing your own research and asking questions is a good thing, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with digging up information about the corrupt financial ties of Democrats and Never-Trumpers. But that’s all the anonymous 8chan user ever directs followers to look into: Trump’s political enemies and targets. If they were legitimately interested in exposing the mechanics of the unelected power alliance known as the deep state, it would be an entirely bipartisan ordeal since the deep state controls both parties. And the Trump administration’s ties to the MEK are just the sort of rabbit hole Q enthusiasts would be exploring.

But they don’t. The only rabbit holes they ever explore are ones which strengthen their conviction that all of Trump’s warmongering and his coziness with deep state swamp monsters like John Bolton are actually brilliant strategic maneuvering against the deep state. I’ve been sincerely informed many times by Trusting Q enthusiasts that Julian Assange is no longer at the Ecuadorian embassy, that Trump’s illegal Syria strikes actually took out a secret Iranian nuclear facility, that the deep state controls Iran currently, and that it used to control North Korea and Saudi Arabia as well until Trump liberated them.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Trump is advancing longstanding deep state agendas using longstanding deep state tactics. If I still have any readers left who are QAnon enthusiasts, I challenge you to put the MEK in your research crosshairs for a while and see what you find.

One year ago, the actual, literal psychopath who would soon be named Trump’s National Security Advisor appeared at an MEK rally and declared that the cult was a “a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs.”

“I had said for over 10 years since coming to these events, that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” Bolton proclaimed. “The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change, and therefore the only solution is to change the regime itself. And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”

These sentiments were echoed with remarkable similarity this past weekend by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani at another MEK event in Paris.

“The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go, and they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents,” Giuliani said in reference to MEK cult leader Maryam Rajavi, adding, “Freedom is right around the corner … Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran!”

On the latest protests in Iran, his comments got even creepier:

“Those protests are not happening spontaneously,” Giuliani said. “They are happening because of many of our people in Albania and many of our people here and throughout out the world.”

Again, the lawyer for the President of the United States was addressing the MEK terror cult when he said this, and that terror cult has a training compound in Albania. If it had come out in a WikiLeaks document that this sort of thing had been said by an Obama lawyer to an audience of Al Nusra fighters in Syria, Trump supporters would have shaken the earth about it. But it was said out in the open by the lawyer for the current sitting president, and is going mostly ignored for purely partisan reasons.

In a 12-minute presentation titled “Meet the MEK: Washington’s Favorite Terror Cult”, the phenomenally lucid conspiracy analyst James Corbett said the following:

“Since the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, the strategic value of an Iranian group willing and capable of performing attacks and destabilization efforts has been seen as strategically important to the West, which has been desperate to curb Iran’s quest for Middle Eastern predominance in the post-Saddam power vacuum.”

That about sums it up right there.

As I’ve been saying all year, Plan A for the US-centralized empire is not to do to Iran what was done to Iraq; Plan A is to do to Iran what was done to Libya and Syria. It’s important to be clear on this so we know what to watch for. The modern approach to destroying a noncompliant government is to use sanctions, propaganda, covert ops and alliances with extremist factions to plunge the disobedient nation into chaos, all of which this administration is currently doing. This is far more efficient and media-friendly than a full-scale ground invasion and the regular deliveries of flag-draped coffins which necessarily come with it. The antiwar movement needs to adapt skillfully to opposing a form of warfare which relies more on drones and CIA ops than the traditional forms of conventional warfare, because they are just as deadly and devastating, as a swift glance at Libya and Syria makes evident.

You’d think for all their perfectly justified hatred of Obama’s warmongering, the populist right would do a better job of spotting those exact same patterns re-emerging in the current administration, especially when some of those patterns involve a group Hillary Clinton herself took off the US terrorist list.

What’s up with that, my MAGA brothers and sisters? You guys love Hillary all of a sudden? Is she “based” now?

Let’s get real. The two-headed one-party system has found yet another way to undermine humanity, and Trump is just as much a part of it as his predecessors. Look at the whole truth, so you can fight the whole machine. Half-truths are the same as lies.

medium.com

The MEK was founded in 1965 and it has the unusual distinction of taking action to overthrow both the former government of the Shah of Iran and the Islamic Republic of Iran by relying on terrorist actions. In the early 1970s, the MEK embarked on a program of assassinating Iranian officials and U.S. personnel in Iran. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the MEK's program of bombings and shootings increase in intensity. The MEK is led by the husband-wife team of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, who opponents and ex-members of the MEK describe as leaders of what has become known as the "Rajavi Cult." The Rajavis abhor criticism and have been known to silence former MEK members-turned-critics by having them constantly harassed or worse, assassinated.

The MEK’s most notable terrorist actions included:

• the attempted kidnapping in 1970 of the U.S. ambassador to Iran, Douglas MacArthur II, the nephew of the famed World War II general.

• the attempted assassination in 1972 of U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Harold Price with an improvised explosive device (IED).

• the assassination in 1973 of U.S. Army officer Louis Lee Hawkins in Tehran. That same year, the MEK assassinated U.S. Air Force officers Col. Paul Shaffer and Lt. Col. Jack Turner.

• the 1973 bombings of Pan-American World Airlines and Shell Oil offices in Tehran.

• the assassination in Tehran in 1976 of three American employees of Rockwell International — William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard. U.S. President Gerald Ford said he hoped that “the murderers will be brought to justice.” Instead, they are treated as heroes and the future government of Iran by bi-partisan leaders in Washington.

• MEK threats to kill Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter during their respective May 1972 and December 1977 visits to Iran.

• the 1978 assassination of Texaco oil executive Paul Grimm in Ahwaz, Iran.

• assisting in the 1979 takeover by Iranian militants of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

• the 1979 bombing in Tehran that killed the democratically-elected Iranian President, Mohammad Ali-Rajai, and Prime Minister, Mohammad Javad Bahonar.

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein permitted the MEK, also known as the “People’s Mojahedin,” to establish bases inside Iraq. Saddam armed the MEK and provided them with financial and logistical support to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. In 1988, the MEK, with Saddam’s assistance, launched a ground invasion of Iran.

In Operation Mersad, Iranian forces defeated the MEK, which had hoped to establish control over Iranian territory to establish a rival Iranian government. Had the MEK succeeded, the Middle East would have seen its first genuine terrorist state. Establishment of a terrorist state would have to wait until the Syrian civil war, when ISIL proclaimed an independent caliphate in occupied territory in Syria and Iraq.

After the United States ousted Saddam in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the MEK forces were confined to U.S.-protected compounds in Iraq, the most prominent being Camp Ashraf, the former U.S. military's Camp Liberty. The new Iraqi government demanded the MEK forces leave Iraq. Acceding to Iraqi demands, the United States re-located 3,000 MEK members to the Manez base in Albania, which the MEK calls “Ashraf 3.” The MEK, which reportedly receives support from Israel’s Mossad, is said to be involved in money laundering and sex trafficking through the intensive use of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin.

Not surprisingly, MEK forces joined with ISIL forces in battling against Syrian and Iraqi government forces. The MEK saw ISIL as a natural ally in fighting pro-Iranian governments in Baghdad and Damascus. It was well-known to Western intelligence agencies that the MEK and ISIL had established an alliance, but, nevertheless, the Barack Obama administration removed the MEK from the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list in 2012. From 1997 to 2012, the United States officially designated the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization.

After ISIL forces were routed in Syria and Iraq, the United States pressured Albania to allow the Islamist terrorists to join their MEK allies in Albania. ISIL terrorists and their families have reportedly been housed in buildings in Tirana that were formerly occupied by MEK members prior to their transfer to the Manez base.  From their Albanian base, MEK operatives have easily entered Kosovo, the location of another major NATO military base at Camp Bondsteel, near Ferizaj in eastern Kosovo. MEK terrorists, allied with sympathizers in Albania and Kosovo, have targeted Shi’a and Sufi Islamic institutions. It is also believed by some Albanian journalists, who have been intimidated by the Albanian government and MEK, that Ashraf 3 and Camp Bondsteel are being used to train MEK and other Middle Eastern mercenaries for a war against Iran to effect a NATO-led regime change operation.

The Albanian and Kosovo governments enjoy top-level access to the Trump administration. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, himself a one-time terrorist leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, are represented in Washington by Brian Ballard, a former Trump presidential campaign official who runs Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm based in Tallahassee, Florida.

Thanks to the political influence of the Rajavis, Rama, and Thaci, an unholy troika of the MEK, Albania, and Kosovo has blossomed under NATO’s nose in the Balkans. This troika’s tentacles extend throughout the Balkans and into Western Europe, particularly France, Italy, and Germany.

In June 2003, the Rajavi-operated MEK compound in the Paris suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise was raided by French police on the orders of anti-terrorist magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière. Maryam Rajavi was arrested, along with over 100 other MEK members. Intense political pressure from Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress resulted in criminal charges, including those involving money laundering, being dropped by the French government.

The Office for the Protection of the German Constitution (DPA) has accused the MEK of not only money laundering but receiving charitable donations in return for "assisting" refugees. The Germans charges that the MEK’s charitable donations were spent on terrorist operations.

In 2004, a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation report stated that the MEK financed its operations "through a complex international money laundering operation that uses accounts in Turkey, Germany, France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates."

The MEK enjoys widespread support in the Trump White House, as well as in the U.S. Congress. One of the MEK's biggest boosters is Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton. On April 1, 2017, Bolton addressed an MEK Nowruz (Persian New Year) conference in Albania and declared that the MEK would be celebrating taking power in Tehran before 2019. Bolton added, "I have believed for over a decade now that the declared policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran. And the sooner the better, for the sake of international peace and security." Over many years, Bolton has repeatedly spoken at MEK events in Paris and New York and has reportedly accepted a total of $180,000 in speaker’s fees from the organization. The MEK primarily receives financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Israel. Some of the funds are funneled to Western politicians as honoraria in return for their speeches at MEK events in venues like Paris, Tirana, and New York.

In addition to Bolton, a frequent recipient of MEK speakers’ honoraria is former New York Mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, a person who is so corrupt, the Italian mafia wanted to have him “eliminated.” Two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and Porter Goss, have spoken at MEK events, along with one former FBI director, Louis Freeh, Jr.

The MEK is represented in Washington by the law firm of Joseph diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing. DiGenova almost became Trump's personal attorney. However, diGenova took his name out of consideration due to conflicts of interest and Giuliani accepted the job.

In June 2017, the MEK and ISIL coordinated a terrorist attack on the Iranian parliament in Tehran and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The terrorists were armed with AK-47s, hand grenades, and explosive-laden suicide vests. At least 12 people were killed in the attacks. The Trump White House defended the MEK/ISIL attack in stating, "We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote." Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called the White House statement "repugnant."

The Trump administration’s neocons, notably Bolton and Giuliani, are hell-bent on regime change in Iran. They are ramping up their terrorist army in the Balkans for such a future war.