Arizona GOP Chairwoman, Kelli Ward, provides an update on the status of the Maricopa ballot audit that is ongoing. As noted by Mrs. Ward, there is a Lawfare battle taking place in/around the politics and judicial branch. There is also a narrative war ongoing with spin, lies and disinformation from the Democrats who oppose the county ballot audit.
“What the mainstream media isn’t telling you… Legal action imminent. Audit side benefit: questions of election office irregularities, breach of Voter ID information AZGOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward reports“:
The Veterans Memorial Coliseum CCTV system remains active [SEE HERE] as a public security and integrity issue.
Additionally, THIS is the official page of the Arizona Senate Liaison for the Maricopa County Election audit. “Under the direction of The Honorable Ken Bennett, former Arizona Secretary of State, an audit is underway to ensure transparency and integrity in the Maricopa County, AZ 2020 election audit.”
How the Left Plans To Put Boots on the Ground to Subdue Middle America
It
was said during our Mideast military adventures, and has been
considered a truism of war, that you can’t really win a conflict without
“boots on the ground.” For it’s difficult to completely subdue a people
from afar. It may not be too different with battles for civilization.
I
stated in 2012, addressing a long-developing reality, that the culture
war was over as the Left had achieved social dominance. “What is
occurring now is a pacification effort,” I wrote — one designed to stamp out the “conservative” guerrilla-group diehards.
Other
than its intensification, the only thing that has changed about this
effort in the last decade is that it has a new name: “cancel culture.”
With GoogTwitFace (Big Tech) having upped its bias and dropped its mask
and corporate America joining academia, the media and entertainment on
the Dark Side, these entities act as a malevolent monolith silencing
dissident voices from Maine to Maui. But it would be naïve to think the
Left, which craves power and wants total control, will be satisfied with
its current soft authoritarianism.
This
brings us to two developments that could cause the raising of eyebrows
if not militias. Consider: If you heard about a Third World country in
which the leadership was purging the military of political opponents,
would you assume it was just an exercise in ideological nepotism? Or
would you suppose the leaders wanted a military of devoted fellow
travelers who would, when asked, unflinchingly turn their guns on
domestic opponents of the regime who couldn’t be cowed by other methods?
Now, should the assumption be different just because the military purge occurs in a developed country?
Just such an event has been taking place in the U.S. for at least a decade. It began under Barack Obama, who not only tried to socially re-engineer the military but also engaged in a widely noted purge of top military brass.
President
Trump didn’t (couldn’t?) do enough to reverse this process, and now it
has been kicked into high gear. Having largely corrupted the armed
forces’ upper echelons, the Left now aims for rank-and-file ideological
conformity. Thus do we hear about how we must stamp out the imaginary
boogeyman du jour, “white supremacy,” from the military.
Preposterously, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin even issued, in early
February, a 60-day stand-down order to address the alleged internal threat it poses.
Of
course, white supremacists are about as common as straight, happily
married women at a NOW convention; why, I’m well into middle age and I
don’t know that I’ve ever met one. This isn’t to say there aren’t
liberals delusional enough to believe the threat is real; that they’re
detached from reality is partially why leftists are so dangerous.
Yet
it’s clear there’s a different motivation among the Machiavellian
leftists. It hasn’t escaped the Left’s notice that the military
traditionally leaned Republican. Moreover, even if this has changed
somewhat, having armed forces that are obedient to the ruling party to
the point of wickedness isn’t possible with dissidents in the ranks.
(Besides, “fragging” is a real thing.)
So
you need a purge. You do this by conjuring up a boogeyman — in our case
“white supremacy” — and then characterizing it as a widespread,
existential threat. This now means defining Trump support, patriotism,
opposition to illegal migration and, really, any deviation from the
Left’s agenda at all as reflecting white supremacy.
It’s
an old tactic: Portray already persecuted minorities or political
opponents as the persecutors so you can leverage even more control over
them. It’s how you create your own Enabling Act moment.
Pre-election polls showing
that military members favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump indicate how
the armed forces have already been partially transformed (this is true
even if the polls were manipulated, and some of what they reflect is
general societal “leftward” drift). Yet controlling the military is only
part of the equation. You must also own the other boots on the ground:
the police.
As
soon as the talk of dismantling/defunding/“re-imagining” law
enforcement began last year, I pointed out that while much of the
movement was driven by blind passion, there’s only one rational reason
to want to nix the police. “Certain leftists want to eliminate the
police,” I wrote June 7, “because they want to become the police.”
Power-mongers
attack those whose power they crave. Leftists want centralized control
over local police just as they now have control over the intelligence
agencies. They especially want this because law enforcement is
generally, it appears, even more conservative than the military (its
members are older, for one thing).
In
this vein, it hasn’t eluded leftists that certain sheriffs are engaging
in nullification efforts, having vowed not to enforce some new anti-gun
and/or COVID-related laws. Remember that sheriffs are elected by an
area’s local population and, with most counties being conservative
(Trump won 83 percent
of counties, or about 2,600, in 2016), such nullification isn’t
surprising; moreover, expect more resistance to radical leftism in a
good portion of this 83 percent of the nation.
So
while the Left is quickly gaining monolithic federal control by virtue
of large population centers that vote (and steal votes) heavily for
Democrats, controlling Middle America with its more patriotic police is a
different matter.
That is, unless the Left can institute federal police. Ergo, the “re-imagining” of law enforcement.
Once
your sheriff is an Antifa/BLM-sympathizing ideologue installed by D.C.
(District of Communism) and hailing from 1,000 miles away — with no
local community ties — he’ll happily “discipline” the white supremacists
lurking around every corner.
If
the Left can co-opt the military and police, it will have seized our
country’s last two remaining (relatively) “conservative” institutions.
It will also have what’s necessary to quash that impediment to total
coast-to-coast hegemony: America’s framework and tradition of state and
local control.
Leftists
know that the Left-Right divide is intensifying and that more
“conservative” states — such as Florida, South Dakota and South Carolina
— are increasingly beating their own path. They know that increased
nullification of federal dictates lies ahead (heck, leftists wrote the
book on it with their violation of federal immigration and drug laws).
And they know that as their philosophical soulmate Mao put it,
“Power grows out the barrel of a gun.”
There’s
no question that certain leftists have thought about using boots on the
ground to conclude their pacification effort. Remember that Bill
Clinton might have once said: “I loathe the military” back when leftist
protesters were calling Vietnam-era soldiers “baby killers” and that
today’s socialist rabble spew venom at police. But they don’t in principle hate either institution.
And
just as they’ve flipped from hating to liking the intelligence services
because they now control them, so would they love the military and
police — and use them with zeal — upon seizing them.
Also note that so-called “leftism” is not an ideology (how could it be? Its “principles” change continually). Rather, it currently represents movement toward moral disorder.
And leftists are morally disordered people, the worst of them being
vice-ridden, amoral and driven by base appetites such as power lust. As I
wrote in “The Time for Talking with the Left is Long, Long Past,” perhaps the best way to prepare yourself for contending with them is to “pretend you’re dealing with Satan.”
Vanguard
leftists are above nothing and beneath contempt. If you read the worst
possible intentions into whatever they do, you won’t too often go wrong.
The American public still doesn’t know exactly what happened on January 6—and it’s clear the government will use any means necessary to keep it that way.
Joe Biden calls it the worst attack since the Civil War. Attorney General Merrick Garland compares it to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI is breaking down the doors of Iraq War veterans and small business owners who have no criminal records, and some are hauled off to rot in solitary confinement in a fetid D.C. jail, for their involvement in the alleged travesty.
The event, of course, is the roughly four-hour-long disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. As mostly nonviolent Americans dared to protest Congress’ certification of a clearly fraudulent presidential election in a place that once was considered “The People’s House,” lawmakers scurried for cover as reporters and photographers captured part of the ruckus on video and still shots to wield as political ammunition against Donald Trump and his supporters.
But have we seen a full and fair depiction of exactly what happened that day? The answer, as evidenced by an ongoing coverup by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Justice Department, clearly is no.
Almost all the January 6 video seen by the public isn’t from official government sources but by social media users and journalists on the scene. For example, the widely viewed footage of protestors occupying the Senate chamber was recorded by a New Yorker journalist.
But thousands of hours of real-time footage is in the hands of the Capitol Police—and that agency, along with government lawyers and federal judges, is using every legal trick possible to keep the trove hidden from the public even as clips are presented in court as evidence against hundreds of January 6 defendants.
According to an affidavit filed in March by Thomas DiBiase, the Capitol Police department’s general counsel, the building is monitored 24/7 by an “extensive system of cameras” positioned both inside and outside the building as well as near other congressional offices on the grounds.
The system captured more than 14,000 hours of footage between noon and 8 p.m. on January 6; the archive was made available to two Democratic-controlled congressional committees, the FBI, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. (After a request by Congress, the agency reportedly handed over footage from the entire 24-hour period.)
Capitol Police also produced selective clips for Democratic House impeachment managers to use in the trial against Donald Trump.
But Capitol Police argue that making all the tapes available to defense attorneys —let alone to the American public—could provoke future violence. “The Department has significant concerns with the release of any of its footage to defendants in the Capitol attack cases unless there are safeguards in place to prevent its copying and dissemination,” DiBiase wrote March 17. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again.”
The Justice Department, in numerous cases, is seeking protective orders to rigorously limit how surveillance video is handled by defense attorneys. Recordings have been deemed “highly sensitive” government material subject to onerous rules; the accused only have access to the evidence in a supervised setting. Clips cannot be copied, downloaded, shared, or reproduced in any fashion.
“Defense counsel may not provide a copy of Highly Sensitive materials to Defendant or permit Defendant to view such materials unsupervised by defense counsel or an attorney, investigator, paralegal, or support staff person employed by defense counsel,” Judge Amit Mehta wrote in a protective order related to the conspiracy case against members of the Oath Keepers. “The parties agree that defense counsel or an attorney, investigator, paralegal, or support staff person employed by defense counsel, may supervise Defendant by allowing access to Highly Sensitive materials through a cloud-based delivery system that permits Defendant to view the materials but does not permit Defendant the ability to download.”
Sounds legit.
Fighting Back Against the Blackout
But defense attorneys and the media now are fighting the video blackout. During a detention hearing last month for the two men accused of spraying officer Brian Sicknick—both have been behind bars and denied bail since their arrests in March—defense lawyers objected to the government’s use of “cherry-picked” video they couldn’t see in its full context which, if examined, might contain exculpatory evidence.
Under pressure from a group of media outlets, the government finally released what it claims is the incriminating video showing the chemical spray “attack” against Sicknick. (It didn’t.) The choppy video included recordings from several surveillance cameras, a few D.C. police officers, and a bystander.
Journalists continue to be frustrated by the Justice Department’s suppression tactics. In a plea last week to Beryl Howell, chief judge of the D.C. District Court handling all the January 6 cases, 14 news organizations asked for better access to video evidence presented in court. (Virtual court proceedings further help prosecutors keep the clips under wraps.)
“[T]he press and public have not been able to access these videos on the Court’s electronic dockets,” lawyers representing CNN, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal and others wrote in a May 3 letter. “Delayed access to these historic records shuts the public out of an important part of the administration of justice.” The government, the lawyers told Howell, refuses to give a “substantive answer” as to why the video evidence isn’t publicly available and listed several cases where surveillance footage was played in court but not otherwise accessible.
The secret video archive of January 6 isn’t the only recording under scrutiny. It’s also unclear whether Capitol Police kept the footage from January 5. DiBiase said surveillance video is routinely deleted after 30 days; only a “very limited” number of clips from January 5 were given to the U.S. Attorney in D.C., the office handling the massive investigation.
It would be very convenient for the Capitol Police—no objective party in this saga since it launched the lie about Sicknick’s death—to purge footage from January 5 so defense attorneys and the public cannot see what sort of activity took place the day before the “insurrection.”
So what, exactly, is the government trying to hide? How can activity inside and outside a public building be considered “highly sensitive?” In response to a Freedom of Information Act filing by Judicial Watch, Capitol Police told the group the recordings are not “public records.” But of course they are. A security system controlled by a federal agency in a public building paid for by taxpayers to conduct the public business of public officials is most certainly a public record.
Even if legal loopholes allow for such an exemption, the greater public interest should supersede any technicalities. Major parts of the original narrative already have fallen apart, including the story that officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters and the myth it was an “armed insurrection”; the full account of what prompted the killing of Ashli Babbitt by an unidentified Capitol cop is still unknown.
Further, the Biden regime is weaponizing January 6 to hunt down and destroy the lives of people—many of whom committed no violent crimes—anywhere near the building that day. The Justice Department is promising to build sedition cases; Biden’s intelligence chiefs are operating outside their authorization in their effort to portray regular Americans as domestic terrorists.
A president was impeached for his alleged role. Republican lawmakers continue to face threats for objecting to the election results in swing states. And millions of Trump voters, by extension, are considered conspiracy theorists and wannabe “insurrectionists.”
There’s only one reason why the Justice Department wants to keep the footage under seal: it contradicts most if not all of the claims advanced by Democrats and the media over the past four months.
Republicans, to the extent they can or will, and the media should demand the release of all the footage. Ditto for families of the defendants. The American public still doesn’t know exactly what happened on January 6—and it’s clear the government will use any means necessary to keep it that way.
Populist leader Marine Le Pen has echoed the sentiments of a
letter written by active duty military personnel by warning President
Macron that there’s a danger of “civil war” unless he solves the
country’s Islamist problem.
Le Pen made the comments following the publication of the letter,
which outlined how the soldiers had been “fighting Islamism” in
dangerous countries abroad only for the French government to “(make)
concessions on our soil.”
“If a civil war breaks out, the military will maintain order on its soil because it will be asked to do so,” stated the letter.
While much of the French establishment dismissed the letter as the
work of a political faction of right-wing extremists within the
military, Le Pen took the side of the dissenters.
The National Rally leader asserted that the letter offered a “clear”
assessment of the identity crisis facing France and the Islamist
problem.
“There is always the danger of civil war,” she added.
As we previously highlighted, Socialist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reaction was somewhat different. He vowed to “purge” the military of the individuals responsible for the letter.
As we previously highlighted, Socialist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reaction was somewhat different. He vowed to “purge” the military of the individuals responsible for the letter.
France is home to innumerable notorious ghettos where immigrant
populations have concentrated themselves while refusing to integrate
into French society.
Many of these areas are so dangerous that police, ambulance workers and firefighters are attacked if they venture into them.
Such ghettos have also been exploited by terrorists, including Salah
Abdeslam, one of the Paris massacre jihadists, who hopped over the
border to Brussels, Belgium and was able to hide out in the Islamic
ghetto of Molenbeek for 4 months before being caught.
The problem is also exacerbated by far-left “anti-racist” activists who denigrate France’s national standing while greasing the skids for jihadists to enter Europe under the guise of “refugee” status.
Joe Biden is the luckiest man to ever assume the presidency.
He succeeded an unpopular figure. He was
inaugurated just two weeks after the dramatic storming of the U.S.
Capitol by extremist Donald Trump supporters seeking to stop the
certification of the 2020 election, which was also the beginning of the
year after widespread race riots. He inherited COVID-19 vaccines and a
vaccine rollout plan, and could rightly expect to ride the tsunami of
natural economic recovery that was predicted for the aftermath of the
COVID-19 pandemic; he inherited a series of historic Middle Eastern
peace deals.
In other words, President Biden had it easy. All he had to do was nothing.
He could expect a new era of good feelings emerging from a tumultuous
time. He could expect a booming economy, a more peaceful Middle East, a
solution to the pandemic. All he had to do was calm the waters.
This, after all, was what Americans voted
for: not a transformational figure or a figure of radical change but a
stodgy, supposedly empathetic grandfather figure who could barely be
bothered to leave his basement for the entirety of the presidential
campaign. Normalcy could be restored by installing a nearly inanimate
object as president.
Instead, Biden has served as a facade for
the most radical administration in modern American history. And America
is already paying the price.
In his first few months in office, Biden
rammed through a $1.9 trillion spending package that completely rewrote
the bargain between individuals and the state, shifting the incentive
structure for people to go back to work. He simultaneously proposed
another $4 trillion in spending — to go along with the annual $4
trillion budget. The result: skyrocketing inflation in commodities,
along with dramatic labor shortages resulting in an April shortfall of
three-quarters of a million new jobs.
Simultaneously, he downplayed the
efficacy of a vaccine he insisted was the key to ending the pandemic.
His Food and Drug Administration pressed pause on a highly successful
vaccine based on six cases of blood clots; his Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention rewrote its school reopening guidelines,
apparently with input from the teachers unions. He wore a mask publicly
despite being vaccinated, despite being outdoors, despite being indoors
with others who had been vaccinated — and declared such activity
"patriotic." The result: widespread vaccine hesitancy and a tremendously
uneven national reopening, with red states going back to normal and
blue states continuing nonsensical shutdowns.
He ramped up the rhetoric with regard to
racial polarization, injecting the terms "anti-racist" and "equity" into
every element of federal policy, supplanting meritocracy and individual
rights with equality of outcome and outright discrimination. The
result: undercutting police forces nationally, resulting in a continuing
crime wave in America's biggest cities.
And he abandoned the Trump
administration's Middle East policy, refunding the Palestinians with
money that will obviously go to terrorist groups and defy the Taylor
Force Act; making concessions to the Iranian terror regime; and
pressuring Israel. The result: riots in Jerusalem, chaos on the Temple
Mount and an increase in regional Iranian aggression.
We're only four months into Biden's
presidency. He's going for broke: He wants his legacy, and if that
legacy comes at the cost of the economy, the polis and international
stability, so be it. If the conflagration we've seen thus far is any
indicator, Biden won't leave a lot standing when he's done.
Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
Matt Taibbi
Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he’s media himself.
What a difference a decade makes.
Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies.
The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the “Arab Spring.”
There was an attempt at a response — companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a “denial of service” attack — but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.
The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden’s archive of leaked secrets, and its first storydescribed how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, “We kill people based on metadata.”
Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who’ve flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI’s Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA’s John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.
Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of “extremists.” This time, they’re on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump.
Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 , New Knowledge, and especially Bellingcat, a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in Russia, Syria, and Iran — less so the United States and its allies. The CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group’s work, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this.”
After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to “smoke ‘em out of their holes.” The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network “that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves.”
Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Vergeand Vice and The New York Timeslistening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News.
Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”:
The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral, and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action…? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence… the FBI’s bureaucracy isn’t necessarily designed to keep organized.
The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, “focus on other editorial priorities” — parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with “PassionFlix,” whose motto is, “Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series.” Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:
Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn’t be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there’s a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there’s a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is “person with a job has abhorrent private opinions,” but it’s not like it’s impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.
But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn’t always (or even often) been the case.
Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones “violent white supremacists” — they’re a lot of things, but “violent white supremacists”? In the first piece about “extremists” on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man’s attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction. When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he “certainly wouldn't want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists.” When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he’d be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, “Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs.”
Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the “disinformation issue” in a piece about Hunter Biden’s laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had “the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept’s history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.
“The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one,” says Greenwald, “and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, TheIntercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it.”
In a separate mailer, the Intercept — owned by Omidyar, whose net worth has risen from $11 billionjust a few years ago to $22 billion now — complained that “while the right wing’s culture warriors will always be able to turn to the super-rich for financial resources, progressive organizations and independent news outlets are struggling for support.” As The Columbia Journalism Review reported a few years ago, the company has long struggled to attract enough outside funding to maintain its 501(c)3 status as a public charity, which may explain why an outlet owned by the world’s 81st richest personcomplains about a lack of access to “the super-rich” as it solicits donations from individuals.
When asked about the company’s public charity status, Intercepteditor Betsy Reed said that because these and other questions were “filled with errors and more bad-faith distortions,” she would not be commenting.
It hasn’t escaped the notice of some current and former Intercept staffers that combing through the hacked private communications of ordinary people in an FBI-like hunt for “extremists” is more or less the exact opposite of the company’s original mission, which focused on the institutional abuses of the very counterintelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies they now seem anxious to aid.
“What a turnaround,” one former Intercept employee, who was there for the company’s early years, said last week. “The answer to white supremacy is not to bring the War on Terror home.”
“That a media outlet founded in order to battle mass surveillance of ordinary citizens and to safeguard privacy rights is now trolling through stolen digital data of private citizens in order to expose and punish them for thought crimes and ideological dissent is as grotesque as it is ironic,” says Greenwald.
The giveaway that these deviance hunts have little to do with holding the powerful to account is that they’re taking place as news outlets have given up even the pretense of interest in spy agency abuses.
Just last week, CNN explainedthat the Department of Homeland Security was thinking of pairing with non-governmental entities to conduct more aggressive surveillance of “potential domestic terrorists” than they would be legally allowed, by themselves:
The Department of Homeland Security is limited in how it can monitor citizens online without justification and is banned from activities like assuming false identities to gain access to private messaging apps used by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers…
The plan being discussed inside DHS, according to multiple sources, would, in effect, allow the department to circumvent those limits.
CNN added that if the public-private surveillance partnership went through, the “DHS could produce information that would likely be beneficial to both it and the FBI, which can't monitor US citizens in this way without first getting a warrant or having the pretext of an ongoing investigation.” They added: “The CIA and NSA are also limited on collecting intelligence domestically.”
News that the government is considering using private citizens to help it conduct what amount to vigilante intelligence operations for the DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA — an end-run around once-cherished liberal values like the exclusionary rule — inspired almost no reaction in the op-ed pages of ostensibly liberal outlets. The perceived targets are white supremacists, as unsympathetic as al-Qaeda once was. Who cares?
Just last week it was announced the FBI had been caught, again, in abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Also censured by the FISA court in 2011, 2016, and 2018, the Bureau was busted for “widespread” use of an NSA-managed surveillance tool meant for foreign cases only, using FISA to investigate “health care fraud, transnational organized crime, violent gangs, domestic terrorism, public corruption, and bribery.” The declassified report also worried the NSA might be passing to the FBI intercepts of attorney-client conversations, not that anyone in the press cares about that principle anymore, either. Except for one Fox story about Jim Jordan complaining, editorialists mostly took a pass on the FISC news.
All of this is taking place as a slew of War on Terror programs are being retooled for domestic use. A month ago, the New York Times casually reported that “The White House is also discussing… executive orders to update the criteria of terrorism watch lists to potentially include more homegrown extremists.”
Politico also reported the DHS was considering “analyzing the travel patterns” of right-wing suspects, expanding the No Fly List to include “domestic extremists,” and stopping such targets at customs, where officials may “search their phones and laptops” before allowing them back in-country (I know of at least one not-at-all-conservative African-American to whom this has already happened).
Vigilante press efforts at outing “domestic extremists” will function as an auxiliary watch list. Do we need help remembering how the last version worked out? Over 1.1 million names were entered on a list that was shared with 1,400 private groups, from hospitals to universities to prospective employers, resulting in people losing jobs, being denied banking services, having travel restricted, and experiencing all sorts of other difficulties.
The related No-Fly List, Kill List, and other suspect databases were fraught with similar problems, all stemming from the same issue: a lack of procedural oversight, combined with the absence of any requirement that targets commit a crime or be reasonably suspected of planning a crime before they were put on lists.
It turned out that was needed to get most of the press off the case was a little partisan catnip. Issues like mass surveillance and drone bombing were already more or less non-starters in media once the intel agencies started feeding reporters sensational (and often bogus) stories about the Russian-Republican conspiracy to conquer our precious bodily fluids, but in the later Trump years, and especially since January 6th, the FBI-CIA-media partnership has been cozier than a Swedish porn shoot.
Buzzwords cooked up by security agencies have for years now become media talking points instantaneously. Whether it’s “an attack on our democracy” or the “sowing of discord,” media outlets are happy to re-transmit propaganda constructions verbatim.
Two more recent security-agency talking points are now gospel. First, the greatest threat to America is no longer al-Qaeda but homegrown extremists, whom the FBI defined as being almost, but not quite, foreign, i.e. “inspired by, but not receiving individualized direction from, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).” Second, the security agencies are held back in their ability to combat such folks by “weak laws” and encryption. As FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last year, the FBI has “a decline in its ability to gain access to the content of both domestic and international terrorist communications.”
Since the January 6th riots, we’ve been hearing perfect media echoes of this. “Domestic Terrorism: A More Urgent Threat, but Weaker Laws,” was ProPublica’s formulation. “Domestic terrorism is a national problem. It should also be a federal crime,” wrote a Washington Post editorialist. On MSNBC, one recent guest said of al-Qaeda, “They got nothing on what this Republican Party is doing.”
A portion of blue-state voters, and a larger percentage of people working in media, are likely to be fine with media projects undertaken to track and identify dangerous elements. What could be wrong with “hunting sedition”? Are journalists not citizens? Why shouldn’t news outlets help plug the investigatory gaps for law enforcement officials held back by outdated civil rights laws?
If you have to ask, you missed the last War on Terror, where we learned the hard way that even the most unsympathetic surveillance targets will never come close to posing as big of a threat to democracy as the security agencies themselves can be, especially when they’re encouraged to operate without meaningful oversight.
They proved this through decades of droning, kidnapping, torture, warrantless detention, illegal surveillance, and blacklisting, and demonstrate it now through their treatment of whistleblowers like Snowden, Assange, and Chelsea Manning. A lot of these abuses start from a place of genuine concern about security threats, but unchecked, the agencies drift into extralegal solutions that become irreversible and a bigger threat to the rule of law than the original problems. The total inability to prevent misuse of FISA — the public has forgotten that even the Obama administration reached into that cookie jar to spy on congressional opponents of its Iran deal, and misuse has only grown worse since — is an example of extreme War on Terror abuses normalized by media indifference.
In the first War on Terror, at the exact moment when the public was at its most fearful, politicians convinced Americans to accept sweeping changes to how they understood citizenship. People stopped demanding presidents ask permission to go to war, gave up the expectation that everything from library records to medical histories remain private, were gradually disabused of the idea the state needed warrants to wiretap them, and came to accept the idea that the U.S. had the right to assassinate or detain without trial anyone from any country.
In the domestic sequel, the aim will be getting Americans to lose attachment to concepts like legal guilt or innocence. It won’t matter if you’ve actually committed or planned to commit a crime: if you check enough boxes, you may not be able to post on Internet platforms, fly a plane, use credit services, buy advertising, go on dating apps, work in your chosen profession (or at all), or do any of a dozen other things. A person’s quality of life might hang on whether or not someone — perhaps in the press — decides to publicly attach a name to a term like “white supremacist” or “domestic terrorist.” This is Hayden’s wet dream: “We ruin based on metadata.” There are dangerous racially-motivated extremists in America to be sure, but all of them combined don’t approach the threat of making the entire population subject to the logic of the Watch List.
Rather than take on those issues, the press is taking the easy way out, pinning deputy badges to their chests and diving into the lives of ordinary people in search of secret sins. That’s not journalism, it’s a Crowdsourced Inquisition, and by the time reporters realize what they’ve signed themselves up for, it will be too late. People like Brennan and Clapper must laugh themselves hoarse, to think they ever had anything to fear from thispress corps.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly used the term “pushed out” to describe the departure of Laura Poitras from The Intercept.
As I type this, an all-out war on the streets of Israel has broken out. The Mayor of Lod is comparing what’s happening to Kristallnacht, the night Nazis smashed Jewish businesses and destroyed synagogues in the lead up to the Holocaust.
RedState has reported extensively on what’s going on. Earlier, video and pictures were released showing cars burning and what looked to be the ransacked interior of a synagogue.
Meanwhile, on this side of the ocean, a cyberattack has taken down a major pipeline that supplies gasoline to the East Coast. That has led to gas shortages, even further exacerbating the skyrocketing energy costs Americans are already enduring.
Couple those two events with the recent, floundering economic news, the ever-growing crisis at the border (we reached a two-decade high in apprehensions last month), and a COVID vaccine distribution program that’s cratering due to the Johnson and Johnson pause, and you’ve got one of the most chaotic weeks in years on tap for the country.
So where exactly is Joe Biden, the man who is ostensibly the President of the United States?
No one can seem to figure that out. He’s given no public statements about the two major crises of the last 24 hours. His surrogates have sent mixed messages, with Jen Psaki chastising Israel for being attacked by Palestinian terrorists today. In regards to the pipeline, the administration claimed that it was a “private sector” matter in one of the more surreal moments of Biden’s presidency. I guess there weren’t enough fake nooses hung to get the FBI to jump into action?
Regardless, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that we don’t have a president, at least not in any traditional sense. Sure, we have a man who holds the office while his handlers make all the decisions and craft all the narratives, but we don’t have a president who can stand up and provide guidance on the tough issues. Biden is a coward anyway. He won’t stand up to those pulling the strings around him nor will he stand up to despots around the world.
The Palestinians had not fired a rocket at Jerusalem since 2014 until this week. What changed, exactly? Well, Biden’s handlers decided to reinstate “aid” payments to the Palestinians. They are emboldened, knowing that Donald Trump isn’t there to push back anymore while Biden is happy to play into his own weakness, coddling the terrorists who are currently killing Jews in the streets.
And speaking of Trump, could you imagine the gnashing of teeth that would occur if he just disappeared the day Israel basically went to war and hackers shut down gasoline distribution to the Southeast and East Coast? He’d be accused of being derelict in his duty. Yet, no one in the media seems to even be concerned that Biden is MIA during one of the most consequential, complicated weeks the country has seen in quite some time. In fact, they seem to be far more obsessed with fluffing Liz Cheney than the fact that the jobs market is stagnating while inflation remains out of control.
There are consequences to electing a senile old man to a job that requires at least some level of coherence. The country is receiving those consequences good and hard right now. Voters should take note because this isn’t going to get better. The only way to turn this around is to stop voting with your emotions and start paying attention to the things that really matter.
