Media Censorship Runs Amock

 Charlie Nash, "On Greg Greenwald's Resignation from The Intercept"

 The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald resigned from the news outlet, alleging censorship of his articles.

In a lengthy resignation letter on Thursday, Greenwald wrote, “The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.”

My Resignation From The Intercept

The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.https://t.co/dZrlYGfEBf

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 29, 2020

Greenwald says the the outlet refused to publish an article he’d written critical of former Vice President Joe Biden. The Intercept co-founder alleges that the piece — which he plans to self-publish shortly — raises “critical questions about Biden’s conduct.”

“The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,” Greenwald wrote.

He went on to say that the “current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision” of editorial freedom, claiming, “Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties.”

Greenwald also listed several other reasons which led to his decision to resign, including its treatment of reporter Lee Fang, the outlet’s alleged “utter lack of editorial standards,” and its handling of the Reality Winner controversy.

Winner, an intelligence specialist, was arrested in 2017 and subsequently jailed after she leaked classified materials to the Intercept.

The Intercept came under fire for its handling of the materials after it was revealed that it had sent copies to the NSA to prove their legitimacy, which led to Winner being identified by intelligence officials as the source of the leak.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

---

 Greg Greenwald, "Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept"

An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept

I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication:

TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions -- the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election -- journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents' authenticity. One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden's brother Jim were planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in China. And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it.

Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall Street Journal says that it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and that "text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture."

But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated -- so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing.

Beyond that, the Journal's columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documents and "found correspondence corroborates and expands on emails recently published by the New York Post," including ones where Hunter was insisting that it was his connection to his father that was the greatest asset sought by the Chinese conglomerate with whom they were negotiating. The New York Times on Sunday reached a similar conclusion: while no documents prove that such a deal was consummated, "records produced by Mr. Bobulinski show that in 2017, Hunter Biden and James Biden were involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy," and "make clear that Hunter Biden saw the family name as a valuable asset, angrily citing his 'family’s brand' as a reason he is valuable to the proposed venture."

These documents also demonstrate, reported the Times, "that the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president." Strassel noted that "a May 2017 'expectations' document shows Hunter receiving 20% of the equity in the venture and holding another 10% for 'the big guy'—who Mr. Bobulinski attests is Joe Biden." And the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published an article on Sunday with ample documentation suggesting that Biden's attempt to replace a Ukranian prosecutor in 2015 benefited Burisma.

All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them.

The initial documents, claimed the New York Post, were obtained when the laptops containing them were left at a Delaware repair shop with water damage and never picked up, allowing the owner to access its contents and then turn them over to both the FBI and a lawyer for Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani. The repair store owner confirmed this narrative in interviews with news outlets and then (under penalty of prosecution) to a Senate Committee; he also provided the receipt purportedly signed by Hunter. Neither Hunter nor the Biden campaign has denied these claims.

Publication of that initial New York Post story provoked a highly unusual censorship campaign by Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions. And while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for Twitter’s handling of the censorship and reversed the policy that led to the blocking of all links the story, the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, continues to be locked out of its Twitter account, unable to post as the election approaches, for almost two weeks.

After that initial censorship burst from Silicon Valley, whose workforce and oligarchs have donated almost entirely to the Biden campaign, it was the nation's media outlets and former CIA and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with scorn. As usual for the Trump era, the theme that took center stage to accomplish this goal was an unsubstantiated claim about the Kremlin responsibility for the story.

Numerous news outlets, including the Intercept, quickly cited a public letter signed by former CIA officials and other agents of the security state claiming that the documents have the “classic trademarks" of a “Russian disinformation” plot. But, as media outlets and even intelligence agencies are now slowly admitting, no evidence has ever been presented to corroborate this assertion. On Friday, the New York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed -- by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories -- that contained this extraordinary proclamation: "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren't."

Even the letter from the former intelligence officials cited by The Intercept and other outlets to insinuate that this was all part of some “Russian disinformation” scheme explicitly admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” though many media outlets omitted that crucial acknowledgement when citing the letter in order to disparage the story as a Kremlin plot:

Despite this complete lack of evidence, the Biden campaign adopted this phrase used by intelligence officials and media outlets as its mantra for why the materials should not be discussed and why they would not answer basic questions about them. “I think we need to be very, very clear that what he's doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation," said Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield about the possibility that Trump would raise the Biden emails at Thursday night’s debate. Biden’s senior advisor Symone Sanders similarly warned on MSNBC: “if the president decides to amplify these latest smears against the vice president and his only living son, that is Russian disinformation."

The few mainstream journalists who tried merely to discuss these materials have been vilified. For the crime of simply noting it on Twitter that first day, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman had her name trend all morning along with the derogatory nickname “MAGA Haberman.” CBS News’ Bo Erickson was widely attacked even by his some in the media simply for asking Biden what his response to the story was. And Biden himself refused to answer, accusing Erickson of spreading a "smear."

That it is irresponsible and even unethical to mention these documents became a pervasive view in mainstream journalism. The NPR Public Editor, in an anazing statement representative of much of the prevailing media mentality, explicitly justified NPR’s refusal to cover the story on the ground that “we do not want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories . . . [or] waste the readers’ and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Why haven&#39;t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post&#39;s Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week&#39;s newsletter➡️ <a href="https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo">https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo</a> <a href="https://t.co/jAi7PnpbZf">pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf</a></p>&mdash; NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) <a href="https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

NPR Public Editor 

@NPRpubliceditor

Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week's newsletter➡️ 

tinyurl.com/y67vlzj2

October 22nd 2020

7,781 Retweets20,498 Likes 

To justify her own show’s failure to cover the story, 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl resorted to an entirely different justification. “It can’t be verified,” the CBS reporter claimed when confronted by President Trump in an interview about her program’s failure to cover the Hunter Biden documents. When Trump insisted there were multiple ways to verify the materials on the laptop, Stahl simply repeated the same phrase: “it can’t be verified.”

After the final presidential debate on Thursday night, a CNN panel mocked the story as too complex and obscure for anyone to follow -- a self-fulfilling prophecy given that, as the network's media reporter Brian Stelter noted with pride, the story has barely been mentioned either on CNN or MSNBC. As the New York Times noted on Friday: "most viewers of CNN and MSNBC would not have heard much about the unconfirmed Hunter Biden emails.... CNN’s mentions of “Hunter” peaked at 20 seconds and MSNBC’s at 24 seconds one day last week."

On Sunday, CNN's Christiane Amanpour barely pretended to be interested in any journalism surrounding the story, scoffing during an interview at requests from the RNC's Elizabeth Harrington to cover the story and verify the documents by telling her: "We're not going to do your work for you." Watch how the U.S.'s most mainstream journalists are openly announcing their refusal to even consider what these documents might reflect about the Democratic front-runner:

These journalists are desperate not to know. As Taibbi wrote on Sunday about this tawdry press spectacle: " The least curious people in the country right now appear to be the credentialed news media, a situation normally unique to tinpot authoritarian societies."

All of those excuses and pretexts — emanating largely from a national media that is all but explicit in their eagerness for Biden to win — served for the first week or more after the Post story to create a cone of silence around this story and, to this very day, a protective shield for Biden. As a result, the front-running presidential candidate knows that he does not have to answer even the most basic questions about these documents because most of the national press has already signaled that they will not press him to do so; to the contrary, they will concoct defenses on his behalf to avoid discussing it.

The relevant questions for Biden raised by this new reporting are as glaring as they are important. Yet Biden has had to answer very few of them yet because he has not been asked and, when he has, media outlets have justified his refusal to answer rather than demand that he do so. We submitted nine questions to his campaign about these documents that the public has the absolute right to know, including:

whether he claims any the emails or texts are fabricated (and, if so, which specific ones);

whether he knows if Hunter did indeed drop off laptops at the Delaware repair store;

whether Hunter ever asked him to meet with Burisma executives or whether he in fact did so;

whether Biden ever knew about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son and brother in which Biden was a proposed participant and,

how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective.

Though the Biden campaign indicated that they would respond to the Intercept’s questions, they have not done so. A statement they released to other outlets contains no answers to any of these questions except to claim that Biden “has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any business overseas.” To date, even as the Biden campaign echoes the baseless claims of media outlets that anyone discussing this story is “amplifying Russian disinformation,” neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign have even said whether they claim the emails and other documents -- which they and the press continue to label "Russian disinformation" -- are forgeries or whether they are authentic.

The Biden campaign clearly believes it has no need to answer any of these questions by virtue of a panoply of media excuses offered on its behalf that collapse upon the most minimal scrutiny:

First, the claim that the material is of suspect authenticity or cannot be verified -- the excuse used on behalf of Biden by Leslie Stahl and Christiane Amanpour, among others -- is blatantly false for numerous reasons. As someone who has reported similar large archives in partnership with numerous media outlets around the world (including the Snowden archive in 2014 and the Intercept’s Brazil Archive over the last year showing corruption by high-level Bolsonaro officials), and who also covered the reporting of similar archives by other outlets (the Panama Papers, the WikiLeaks war logs of 2010 and DNC/Podesta emails of 2016), it is clear to me that the trove of documents from Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those.

With an archive of this size, one can never independently authenticate every word in every last document unless the subject of the reporting voluntarily confirms it in advance, which they rarely do. What has been done with similar archives is journalists obtain enough verification to create high levels of journalistic confidence in the materials. Some of the materials provided by the source can be independently confirmed, proving genuine access by the source to a hard drive, a telephone, or a database. Other parties in email chains can confirm the authenticity of the email or text conversations in which they participated. One investigates non-public facts contained in the documents to determine that they conform to what the documents reflect. Technology specialists can examine the materials to ensure no signs of forgeries are detected.

This is the process that enabled the largest and most established media outlets around the world to report similar large archives obtained without authorization. In those other cases, no media outlet was able to verify every word of every document prior to publication. There was no way to prove the negative that the source or someone else had not altered or forged some of the material. That level of verification is both unattainable and unnecessary. What is needed is substantial evidence to create high confidence in the authentication process.

The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake.

Why is the failure of the Bidens to claim that these emails are forged so significant? Because when journalists report on a massive archive, they know that the most important event in the reporting's authentication process comes when the subjects of the reporting have an opportunity to deny that the materials are genuine. Of course that is what someone would do if major media outlets were preparing to publish, or in fact were publishing, fabricated or forged materials in their names; they would say so in order to sow doubt about the materials if not kill the credibility of the reporting.

The silence of the Bidens may not be dispositive on the question of the material’s authenticity, but when added to the mountain of other authentication evidence, it is quite convincing: at least equal to the authentication evidence in other reporting on similarly large archives.

Second, the oft-repeated claim from news outlets and CIA operatives that the published emails and texts were “Russian disinformation” was, from the start, obviously baseless and reckless. No evidence — literally none — has been presented to suggest involvement by any Russians in the dissemination of these materials, let alone that it was part of some official plot by Moscow. As always, anything is possible — when one does not know for certain what the provenance of materials is, nothing can be ruled out — but in journalism, evidence is required before news outlets can validly start blaming some foreign government for the release of information. And none has ever been presented. Yet the claim that this was "Russian disinformation" was published in countless news outlets, television broadcasts, and the social media accounts of journalists, typically by pointing to the evidence-free claims of ex-CIA officials.

Worse is the “disinformation” part of the media’s equation. How can these materials constitute “disinformation” if they are authentic emails and texts actually sent to and from Hunter Biden? The ease with which news outlets that are supposed to be skeptical of evidence-free pronouncements by the intelligence community instead printed their assertions about "Russian disinformation" is alarming in the extreme. But they did it because they instinctively wanted to find a reason to justify ignoring the contents of these emails, so claiming that Russia was behind it, and that the materials were "disinformation," became their placeholder until they could figure out what else they should say to justify ignoring these documents.

Third, the media rush to exonerate Biden on the question of whether he engaged in corruption vis-a-vis Ukraine and Burisma rested on what are, at best, factually dubious defenses of the former Vice President. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S., which turned out to be Yuriy Lutsenko. These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid.

But two towering questions have long been prompted by these events, and the recently published emails make them more urgent than ever: 1) was the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor such a high priority for Biden as Vice President of the U.S. because of his son's highly lucrative role on the board of Burisma, and 2) if that was not the motive, why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was?

The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive -- offered both by Biden and his media defenders -- is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption.

“Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as,” wrote the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in what the Post calls a “fact-check.” Kessler also endorsed the key defense of Biden: that the firing of Shokhin was bad for Burima, not good for it. “The United States viewed [Shokhin] as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky,” Kessler claims.

But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies.

Beyond that, if increasing prosecutorial independence and strengthening anti-corruption vigilance were really Biden's goal in working to demand the firing of the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, why would the successor to Shokhin, Yuriy Lutsenko, possibly be acceptable? Lutsenko, after all, had "no legal background as general prosecutor," was principally known only as a lackey of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, was forced in 2009 to "resign as interior minister after being detained by police at Frankfurt airport for being drunk and disorderly," and "was subsequently jailed for embezzlement and abuse of office, though his defenders said the sentence was politically motivated."

Is it remotely convincing to you that Biden would have accepted someone like Lutsenko if his motive really were to fortify anti-corruption prosecutions in Ukraine? Yet that's exactly what Biden did: he personally told Poroshenko that Lutsenko was an acceptable alternative and promptly released the $1 billion after his appointment was announced. Whatever Biden's motive was in using his power as U.S. Vice President to change the prosecutor in Ukraine, his acceptance of someone like Lutsenko strongly suggests that combatting Ukrainian corruption was not it.

As for the other claim on which Biden and his media allies have heavily relied — that firing Shokhin was not a favor for Burisma because Shokhin was not pursuing any investigations against Burisma — the evidence does not justify that assertion.

It is true that no evidence, including these new emails, constitute proof that Biden's motive in demanding Shokhin's termination was to benefit Burisma. But nothing demonstrates that Shokhin was impeding investigations into Burisma. Indeed, the New York Times in 2019 published one of the most comprehensive investigations to date of the claims made in defense of Biden when it comes to Ukraine and the firing of this prosecutor, and, while noting that "no evidence has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal," this is what its reporters concluded about Shokhin and Burisma:

[Biden's] pressure campaign eventually worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was voted out months later by the Ukrainian Parliament.

Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.

The Times added: "Mr. Shokhin’s office had oversight of investigations into [Burisma's billionaire founder] Zlochevsky and his businesses, including Burisma." By contrast, they said, Lutsenko, the replacement approved by Vice President Biden, "initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office."

So whether or not it was Biden's intention to confer benefits on Burisma by demanding Shokhin's firing, it ended up quite favorable for Burisma given that the utterly inexperienced Lutesenko "cleared [Burisma's founder] of all charges within 10 months of taking office."

The new comprehensive report from journalist Taibbi on Sunday also strongly supports the view that there were clear antagonisms between Shokhin and Burisma, such that firing the Ukrainian prosecutor would have been beneficial for Burisma. Taibbi, who reported for many years while based in Russia and remains very well-sourced in the region, detailed:

For all the negative press about Shokhin, there’s no doubt that there were multiple active cases involving Zlochevsky/Burisma during his short tenure. This was even once admitted by American reporters, before it became taboo to describe such cases untethered to words like “dormant.” Here’s how Ken Vogel at the New York Times put it in May of 2019:

"When Mr. Shokhin became prosecutor general in February 2015, he inherited several investigations into the company and Mr. Zlochevsky, including for suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. Mr. Shokin also opened an investigation into the granting of lucrative gas licenses to companies owned by Mr. Zlochevsky when he was the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources."

Ukrainian officials I reached this week confirmed that multiple cases were active during that time.

“There were different numbers, but from 7 to 14,” says Serhii Horbatiuk, former head of the special investigations department for the Prosecutor General’s Office, when asked how many Burisma cases there were.

“There may have been two to three episodes combined, and some have already been closed, so I don't know the exact amount." But, Horbatiuk insists, there were many cases, most of them technically started under Yarema, but at least active under Shokin.

The numbers quoted by Horbatiuk gibe with those offered by more recent General Prosecutor Rulsan Ryaboshapka, who last year said there were at one time or another “13 or 14” cases in existence involving Burisma or Zlochevsky.

Taibbi reviews real-time reporting in both Ukraine and the U.S. to document several other pending investigations against Burisma and Zlochevsky that was overseen by the prosecutor whose firing Biden demanded. He notes that Shokhin himself has repeatedly said he was pursuing several investigations against Zlochevsky at the time Biden demanded his firing. In sum, Taibbi concludes, "one can’t say there’s no evidence of active Burisma cases even during the last days of Shokin, who says that it was the February, 2016 seizure order [against Zlochevsky's assets] that got him fired."

And, Taibbi notes, "the story looks even odder when one wonders why the United States would exercise so much foreign policy muscle to get Shokin fired, only to allow in a replacement — Yuri Lutsenko — who by all accounts was a spectacularly bigger failure in the battle against corruption in general, and Zlochevsky in particular." In sum: "it’s unquestionable that the cases against Burisma were all closed by Shokin’s successor, chosen in consultation with Joe Biden, whose son remained on the board of said company for three more years, earning upwards of $50,000 per month."

The publicly known facts, augmented by the recent emails, texts and on-the-record accounts, suggest serious sleaze by Joe Biden’s son Hunter in trying to peddle his influence with the Vice President for profit. But they also raise real questions about whether Joe Biden knew about and even himself engaged in a form of legalized corruption. Specifically, these newly revealed information suggest Biden was using his power to benefit his son’s business Ukrainian associates, and allowing his name to be traded on while Vice President for his son and brother to pursue business opportunities in China. These are questions which a minimally healthy press would want answered, not buried — regardless of how many similar or worse scandals the Trump family has.

But the real scandal that has been proven is not the former Vice President’s misconduct but that of his supporters and allies in the U.S. media. As Taibbi’s headline put it: “With the Hunter Biden Exposé, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than the Actual Story.”

The reality is the U.S. press has been planning for this moment for four years — cooking up justifications for refusing to report on newsworthy material that might help Donald Trump get re-elected. One major factor is the undeniable truth that journalists with national outlets based in New York, Washington and West Coast cities overwhelmingly not just favor Joe Biden but are desperate to see Donald Trump defeated.

It takes an enormous amount of gullibility to believe that any humans are capable of separating such an intense partisan preference from their journalistic judgment. Many barely even bother to pretend: critiques of Joe Biden are often attacked first not by Biden campaign operatives but by political reporters at national news outlets who make little secret of their eagerness to help Biden win.

But much of this has to do with the fallout from the 2016 election. During that campaign, news outlets, including The Intercept, did their jobs as journalists by reporting on the contents of newsworthy, authentic documents: namely, the emails published by WikiLeaks from the John Podesta and DNC inboxes which, among other things, revealed corruption so severe that it forced the resignation of the top five officials of the DNC. That the materials were hacked, and that intelligence agencies were suggesting Russia was responsible, not negate the newsworthiness of the documents, which is why media outlets across the country repeatedly reported on their contents.

Nonetheless, journalists have spent four years being attacked as Trump enablers in their overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal cultural circles: the cities in which they live are overwhelmingly Democratic, and their demographic — large-city, college-educated professionals — has vanishingly little Trump support. A New York Times survey of campaign data from Monday tells just a part of this story of cultural insularity and homogeniety:

Joe Biden has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump on all but two days in the last two months....It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does.... [U]nder Mr. Trump, Republicans have hemorrhaged support from white voters with college degrees. In ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Mr. Biden smashed Mr. Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million — accounting for almost his entire financial edge....One Upper West Side ZIP code — 10024 — accounted for more than $8 million for Mr. Biden, and New York City in total delivered $85.6 million for him — more than he raised in every state other than California....

The median household in the United States was $68,703 in 2019. In ZIP codes above that level, Mr. Biden outraised Mr. Trump by $389.1 million. Below that level, Mr. Trump was actually ahead by $53.4 million.

Wanting to avoid a repeat of feeling scorn and shunning in their own extremely pro-Democratic, anti-Trump circles, national media outlets have spent four years inventing standards for election-year reporting on hacked materials that never previously existed and that are utterly anathema to the core journalistic function. The Washington Post's Executive Editor Marty Baron, for instance, issued a memo full of cautions about how Post reporters should, or should not, discuss hacked materials even if their authenticity is not in doubt.

That a media outlet should even consider refraining from reporting on materials they know to be authentic and in the public interest because of questions about their provenance is the opposite of how journalism has been practiced. In the days before the 2016 election, for instance, the New York Times received by mail one year of Donald Trump's tax returns and -- despite having no idea who sent it to them or how that person obtained it: was is stolen or hacked by a foreign power? -- the Times reported on its contents.

When asked by NPR why they would report on documents when they do not know the source let alone the source's motives in providing them, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Barstow compellingly explained what had always been the core principle of journalism: namely, a journalist only cares about two questions -- (1) are documents authentic and (2) are they in the public interest? -- but does not care about what motives a source has in providing the documents or how they were obtained when deciding whether to reporting them:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Why NYT&#39;s David Barstow does not care who leaked us Trump&#39;s tax return, or what the motivation was. Listen: <a href="https://t.co/Bm5nGQ1oQM">https://t.co/Bm5nGQ1oQM</a></p>&mdash; Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) <a href="https://twitter.com/mikiebarb/status/783379164409847808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 4, 2016</a></blockquote> 

418 Retweets812 Likes

The U.S. media often laments that people have lost faith in its pronouncements, that they are increasingly viewed as untrustworthy and that many people view Fake News sites are more reliable than established news outlets. They are good at complaining about this, but very bad at asking whether any of their own conduct is responsible for it.

A media outlet that renounces its core function -- pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people -- is one that deserves to lose the public's faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.

As my colleague Lee Fang put it on Sunday: "The partisan double standards in the media are mind boggling this year, and much of the supposedly left independent media is just as cowardly and conformist as the mainstream corporate media. Everyone is reading the room and acting out of fear." Discussing his story from Sunday, Taibbi summed up the most important point this way: "The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it's true."

Get Ready to Vote, Maryland!

Early Voting Starts Monday, October 26, 2020

In Harford County, these are the FOUR Early Voting Centers:

Election Day Voting on Tuesday, November 3, 2020 will be at THE BELOW table listed locations:

If you Need to Drop a Ballot Off, you can do so at the map locations below:

You can find out if you are registered to Vote, see a Sample Ballot, and learn about the Issues HERE

For Voting Locations in other Parts of Maryland, please go HERE or for more Voting info, HERE

Bernie's Warning...

The ANTI-Science COVID-19 Lockdown Fallacy...

Who Should We Believe, The Words of the New Left or Paleo-Left?

 

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

-Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto"

---

Jeff Rubin, "What Divides Us Is Class, Not Race"

Black lives matter. It’s become a rallying cry for those seeking social and racial justice. These three words express the idea, symbolized by the death of George Floyd, that race defines the fault line fracturing our society.

Racism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It always has an economic context. When Brownshirts attacked Jewish shop owners in Nazi Germany, an opening act in one of history’s greatest genocides, they were acting on anti-Semitic propaganda that cast Jews as leeches sucking Germany’s lifeblood. This was an ugly and murderous lie. But it became attractive to those suffering amidst the reparations that had been imposed on Germany after World War I, and whose effects impoverished the country’s workers.

The villains in today’s racism narrative tend to be cast as privileged, white middle-aged men—beneficiaries of a system that everyone can see is unfair. But the idea that the injustice baked into our economic systems can be reduced to race is false. For years, I was chief economist at one of Canada’s biggest banks. Since I stepped down from that position, I’ve written books and think-tank reports that explore the vulnerabilities and inequities that permeate our society. As I write in my newly published Penguin Random House book, The Expendables: How the Middle Class Got Screwed By Globalization, the problem is deeply rooted in decades of outsourcing.

But while international trade agreements tend to operate outside of the world of YouTube and Twitter, racial injustice plays out in dramatic scenes that are widely shared. Moreover, if you look at the likes of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, it’s easy to create a certain kind of racial narrative. The rich guys often seem to be white, and their wealth eclipses that of the old 19th century robber barons. Some 2,000 plutocrats now own more wealth than the four billion poorest people on the planet (who represent more than 60 percent of the world’s population). It’s arguably the most skewed distribution of wealth we have witnessed since the latter days of the Roman Empire. And we all know how that ended.

So if you think the dice are loaded, you’re right. They are. But most middle-aged white American men aren’t named Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk. On average, like all North American workers, regardless of race, that vast majority hasn’t seen a real wage increase in almost fifty years. The middle class, once the dominant majority in American society and the steady flywheel of its economy, is now beleaguered, shrinking, and downwardly mobile. Like everyone else, they’re expressing their fear and insecurity in a political language that is often unhealthy, and sometimes hateful. None of this excuses acts of racism. But the problem isn’t going to be solved with hashtags. As the gilded one percent takes up more economic space, the competition for what remains becomes more bitter. In a way, the message I bring is one of racial harmony: You’re all getting screwed together.

The issue of immigration presents a microcosm of the divergent class-based economic interests at play. Populist demagogues—Donald Trump obviously being their American leader—want border walls to keep migrants out, laws to block refugees, and draconian limits on legal immigration. They also routinely exploit real tragedies in society, from gang violence to COVID-19, as a means to further a xenophobic narrative. But Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who became a darling of the Democratic party’s hard-left faction during the recent primaries, also spent years railing against illegal immigration and its effect on wages. More recently, he’s had to blur his message to accommodate the hyper-progressive nature of modern Democratic politics. But as recently as 2015, Sanders declared that open borders are “a Koch brothers proposal” that “would make everybody in America poorer. You’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world which believes in that.”

As for Trump, his reprehensible posturing may play well to an electoral base of angry white middle-aged men. But it also betrays the interests of his own class. Most plutocrats, now and in the past, have been strongly pro-migration—since a larger work force gives them a larger pool from which to hire armies of low-wage workers (including, say, the waitresses and lawn-care workers who staff Trump’s golf properties). The laws of supply and demand apply to labor as much as to widgets, with price being expressed as wages. Despite decades of automation, labor remains an essential factor of production, especially in low-skill service industries.

At the height of the Great Migration, which saw over 3 -million Europeans head to America in the latter half of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie called migrants “a stream of gold.” In modern times, organizations such as the Business Council of Canada are similarly enthusiastic about immigration, even if they are careful to avoid rhetoric that highlights their own profit motive. Moreover, they can point to the fact that in many OECD countries, natural population growth likely won’t provide us with enough future workers. Some baseline level of immigration is necessary just to make sure our economy continues to grow.

Certainly, the stream of gold remains powered by surging headwaters. Estimates extrapolated from a 2018 Gallup poll suggest there are no fewer than 750 million people around the world who seek to migrate. Most of them live in low-wage countries—what President Trump has obscenely referred to as “shitholes.” Trump’s America may look like a swamp of racism to progressives. But from the outside, it apparently still looks appealing. The Gallup data suggest that 150 million potential migrants would pick the United States as their preferred destination. (Another 46 million picked Canada, while 36 million would move to Australia—both numbers being in excess of these countries’ respective populations.)

Migrants don’t just provide labor. They tend to provide cheap labor. While certain immigration systems (such as Canada’s) are calibrated to attract well-educated immigrants, it’s poor people who have the most incentive to leave, and who are most likely to take employment that native-born workers reject. This is especially true of the illegal migrants living in the United States, many of whom have no legal protection and are paid at rates below minimum wage. The less plutocrats pay their workers, the more they keep for themselves.

Migrants not only tend to sell their own labor cheap. They also bring down the wage demands for native workers in fields with low barriers to entry. Even during the Great Migration, large-scale immigration was associated with domestic wage stagnation. One of the reasons why Jewish workers began fleeing New York’s entry-level clothing-trade positions, for instance, is that every ship that docked at Ellis Island contained new armies of apprentice tailors and seamstresses from Europe. This was a boon to textile manufacturers and consumers; but not for workers, who were selling into a buyer’s market. So those who already had jobs were forced to either accept lower wages, try to find a way to buy into the capital-owning class, or find a new industry altogether.

Of course, not everyone’s wages are threatened by migrants. In many OECD jurisdictions, including Canada, the supply of doctors and other highly specialized professionals is bottlenecked by self-regulating trade bodies. Since the Middle Ages, guilds have protected skilled trades from outsiders who would otherwise undermine the prevailing pay structure. If everyone could become a surgeon, surgeons would make a lot less. And so it’s no surprise that many upper middle-class progressive voters, who see no threat from newcomers whatsoever, are perfectly happy to dismiss concerns about immigration as presumptive racism.

Here in Ontario, where I live, there is a College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a Royal College of Dental Surgeons. There’s no College of Unskilled Labor. So it’s those without education and job security who bear the brunt of migrant workers’ impact on local wages. The job of lobbying the government in this area once fell to unions. For instance, American unions lobbied Congress to pass the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which cut migration to a small fraction of pre-World War I levels. But union power has been dwindling for decades. In fact, many of the lowest paid members of our society aren’t even getting a minimum-wage paycheck. They’re self-employed “business contractors” working low-paid gig-economy jobs as food jockeys or uber drivers.

In America, it’s black men who have often borne the impact that migrant workers have had on the wages of native workers. Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which opened America’s doors to more newcomers, the participation rate of adult black men has fallen steadily. As recently as 1975, it was still almost 80 percent. For the last decade, by contrast, it’s been below 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of the workforce comprised of foreign-born workers has increased from five percent in 1970 to around 20 percent today, a share that exceeds the percentage of foreign-born individuals in the population-at-large. A 2003 Cornell University study found that it’s unskilled black Americans who’ve been most adversely affected by wage competition from immigrants, just as native-born white workers were underbid during the Great Migration. What I am describing here has nothing to do with racism or police brutality.

Something similar played out in Australia, which in 1901 adopted a White Australia policy that persisted into the 1960s. The policy was engineered by racists seeking to keep Asians out of their country. But despite the malign motives, it did prevent workers from being bid down by poorer newcomers. As in the United States, it was organized labor that campaigned for restrictions. And just as the Trump administration has vowed to cut immigration in modern times, so, too, has Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal government in Australia.

Progressives naturally oppose the cuts in both countries. But we have to pick our poison: History shows that surges in immigration are invariably met with suspicion, and often violence, by the native-born labor force. And in any case, as Bernie Sanders understands, high-immigration policies exacerbate the impoverishment of the same poor constituencies that progressives seek to protect.

It should be noted that the backlash against immigration is often expressed within racial categories. Workers from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and other African countries who’ve migrated to South Africa have faced terrible violence from locals who resent their competition in the job market. And in the mid-19th century, it was white Christian Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine who stoked the anger of restive urban workers—as dramatically portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 masterpiece Gangs of New York. Bad economic times tend to push people into tribes—and race is just one way that such tribes self-organize.

A modern-day (and decidedly less violent) version of this intra-racial pattern is represented by London’s so-called Polish Plumbers. Something like a million Poles migrated to Western Europe since their country joined the EU in 2004. A majority settled in the United Kingdom—part of the nearly 17 million “posted workers” in the European Union who live and work in a country other than their own. For the most part, they come from Eastern Europe and seek jobs in the more affluent west.

What drives them is what drives Central American migrants who seek entry into the United States. They’re looking for higher incomes, better schools, a brighter future for their families. These are dreams that everyone shares. The difference is that posted workers are legal, while many Central American migrants who cross the border are not. The idea that whole nations—including their low-paid workers—will someday celebrate the ideal of “open borders” is a fantasy, just as Sanders told us five years ago. And given the crushing effect on the poorest members of our society, it is ironic that it is progressives who embrace this fantasy most fervently. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who campaigned to yank Great Britain from the EU (and hence its acceptance of posted workers), can thank the Polish Plumbers for giving him the greatest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher—as their presence helped him sweep formerly Labour-voting working-class constituencies across northern England.

I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: Taking a knee to Black Lives Matter, or hauling down monuments, isn’t going to change any of this. Nor will corporate diversity policies, many of which are trumpeted on social media by the same conglomerates that are hiring low-cost labor in droves. What we need are policies—including trade and immigration policies—that help us carve up the economic pie in a way that sees all workers get their fair share, no matter what their ethnicity.

---

“You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.” 

“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.” 

“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” 

 “In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

"The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together."

-Karl Marx 

Today's New Left politician to voters, "Call me when you have no class." 

Hunter, Hunter, Hunter...

Kazaks! and Russians!  OH MY!

 

Bevin Cooney's G-MAIL Account e-mails... on the Yelena Baturina/ Rosemont Seneca Partners $Moscow $Millions

Baltimore Elected Officials Charged For Somehow Forgetting To Pay Their Taxes

Now that a new Mayor is on the way to City Hall in Baltimore, Charm City will soon put its unpleasant history of corrupt elected officials behind them and begin a new era of honesty and transparency in politics. Gone will be the days of Mayors and other top municipal officials going to prison for racketeering, embezzlement, and tax evasion. And once that’s accomplished, they’ll be able to focus on quashing their massive gang violence and murder problems. Trust me. It’s going to be glorious.

Oh, wait… there might be a couple of final wrinkles to iron out of this plan. It seems that the city’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, and her husband, incoming City Council President Nick Mosby, have received some unpleasant news from the IRS. The power couple allegedly “forgot” to pay a significant amount of their federal income taxes. For at least three years. And now a lien for nearly $50K against them has been placed by the taxman. But hey… they’re busy people, right? Who among us hasn’t forgotten the odd item on their to-do list from time to time? (Baltimore Sun)

The IRS has placed a $45,000 lien against Marilyn and Nick Mosby — Baltimore’s top prosecutor and its Democratic nominee for City Council president, respectively — for three years worth of unpaid federal taxes, records show.

Notice of the lien seeking to collect unpaid taxes from 2014, 2015 and 2016 was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court in February. The Internal Revenue Service filing shows the couple owes nearly $23,000 for the 2014 tax year, more than $19,000 for 2015 and about $3,000 for 2016.

Marilyn Mosby said she was unaware of the lien and declined to discuss the matter further. Nick Mosby did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time that the couple has run afoul of the IRS. There was a smaller, $5k lien put on their property in 2013 because of unpaid taxes. Ms. Mosby claims that she’s “unaware” of any lien from the IRS, but this can’t have taken her by surprise. The IRS always makes multiple attempts to contact delinquent taxpayers and work out some sort of resolution before they resort to placing liens. And the agency confirmed for the media that they have made “multiple attempts” to obtain payment from Mosby and her husband prior to this action.

The Mosbys have been “rising stars” of the Baltimore Democratic power structure for the past decade, with many people expecting Marilyn Mosby to wind up being the mayor at some point. Those plans may have been put on hold after her disastrous handling of the aftermath of the Freddie Gray riots and her attempts to prosecute multiple police officers involved in the original incident. (Each and every attempt at prosecution failed.) But they also seem to have the same problems staying on the straight and narrow when it comes to their financial affairs as too many other Baltimore officials.

Keep in mind that the last Mayor to be elected before interim Mayor Jack Young took over, Catherine Pugh, was also hit for tax evasion. That was on top of the many hundreds of thousands of dollars she filched from various companies and agencies by “selling” them copies of her Healthy Holly children’s books. She’s currently cooling her heels in federal prison.

Two mayors before her, Sheila Dixon wound up resigning and barely avoiding a stretch in jail via a plea deal after embezzling money from the city in the form of gift/debit cards intended to help impoverished children. And don’t even get me started on the Board of Directors of the University of Maryland Medical System. Two-thirds of them resigned in a single week after the exposure of all the self-dealing and grifting that was going on in the scandal that wound up taking Pugh down.

Baltimore has had a massive corruption problem for years and they don’t seem to be able to shake it. The inability of the city’s top prosecutor and incoming City Council President to simply pay their personal income taxes is yet another symptom of a much larger issue.

Source

Trump 2020

The Idea of Herd Immunity is CRAZY!

Until you DO it.

The fat lady has sung! *CDC Data on Excess Deaths for the United States (above)...

The "curious incident of the dog in the night-time"

 "The Adventure of Silver Blaze", one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 in the cycle collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle ranked "Silver Blaze" 13th in a list of his 19 favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.

One of the most popular Sherlock Holmes short stories, "Silver Blaze" focuses on the disappearance of the eponymous race horse (a famous winner, owned by a Colonel Ross) on the eve of an important race and on the apparent murder of its trainer. The tale is distinguished by its atmospheric Dartmoor setting and late-Victorian sporting milieu. It also features some of Conan Doyle's most effective plotting, hingeing on the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time":

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.

Holmes: That was the curious incident.

---

The Associated Press Finally Talks About The Hunter Biden Emails, But…

Thus far, it’s been a Sisyphean task to get anyone in the mainstream media outside of Fox News to talk about the Hunter Biden email story, but some cracks in the wall that they’ve thrown up to defend Joe Biden are starting to show. That doesn’t mean that America will be getting the full story, however. The latest example of this phenomenon showed up yesterday when the Associated Press finally decided to offer some coverage. It’s a rather short report and you won’t find the word “China” mentioned anywhere in it. Nor will you see any references to Ukraine, Burisma or any suggestions of influence peddling. Russia is mentioned quite a bit, however, but only in reference to whether or not Rudy Giuliani is a peddler of kompromat.

The FBI is investigating whether emails that were published by the New York Post related to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, are connected to a possible Russian influence operation to spread disinformation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The newspaper said in its story Wednesday that it had obtained a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani containing the emails, and that the messages were found on a laptop that had been left last year at a Delaware computer repair shop for service but never retrieved.

The unlikely account of how the emails surfaced raised immediate questions about Russian involvement, particularly because U.S. officials have warned that Russia — which backed Trump’s 2016 campaign through hacking and a covert social media campaign — is interfering again this year.

As you will see, there isn’t a single reference to any of the actual content of the emails or Joe Biden’s involvement in the alleged activities. Without offering any evidence whatsoever, the AP suggests that the material may be part of a Russian influence operation. They describe Giuliani’s story about how the hard drive data was obtained as “unlikely.” They describe the authenticity of the emails as “unclear,” again suggesting without evidence that they might be hacked or possibly forged or both.

All of this ignores several pertinent details that have already been established. First of all, neither the Biden campaign nor Hunter Biden himself has attempted to deny the authenticity of the emails. If they were forged or tampered with, that would be the easiest thing in the world to do, particularly since the FBI is looking into them. Further, Fox News has now confirmed the authenticity of the emails with two different people who were copied on some of the email chains. If you haven’t read John’s full coverage of that story from yesterday, you should do so now.

In addition, it’s also been confirmed that a sweetheart deal for a group of Chinese Communist Party members to tour the White House (with suggestions that a meeting with Joe Biden was included) in 2011 actually took place. Hunter Biden was out of the country at the time, but his business partners were able to set up the arrangement for him after he was asked.

The dominos have been falling for some time now in terms of the authenticity of this material. Is there any other plausible explanation for Hunter Biden’s incredible good fortune in his business dealings in Ukraine and China? How else does a guy who speaks neither language and has zero background or experience in the businesses concerned and spends his time smoking crack with strippers wind up with business opportunities of that magnitude? He had nothing to offer beyond access to his father.

Does this mean that way the laptop’s hard drive wound up in Rudy Giuliani’s hands is 100% on the up and up? That’s yet to be established and there are definitely some questions that the FBI should be seeking to answer about the computer repair shop where they originated. Those details should be sorted out and any required action must be taken. But none of that changes the story about the contents of the emails which, at this point, should at least be close enough to total confirmation for legitimate news outlets to be covering. And yet all they can do is throw suspicions about the laptop’s origin out to muddy the waters. This is nothing short of election interference at the highest level and it’s not being done by the Russians. It’s coming from our own social media giants and mainstream news sources.

Here’s some bonus information for you to chew on in case you missed Tucker Carlson yesterday. In the tweet and video below, it’s noted that Hunter Biden told his family, “Don’t worry, unlike your grandfather, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” Unless he’s just making up lies to trash his own father, surely there must be some financial records if that kind of money was changing hands, don’t you think? And Uncle Joe certainly seems to have done well for himself for a guy living on a government salary, hasn’t he?

"The question remains, how has Joe Biden lived in extravagance all these years on a government salary?" -- Tucker Carlson pic.twitter.com/aFEWXRhewJ

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 16, 2020

False Positives for COVID?

The Hunter Biden E-Mail Scandal Straight from the Horse's Mouth...

The Great Reset...

Views from the Fringe?

Davos Man Seeks To Take Over The US

 For the last few days I've been harping on the role of "Big Money" in the ongoing crisis in our constitutional order. Yesterday witnessed a remarkably brazen attempt by two prime exemplars of Big Money to muscle the rest of the country: Twitter and Facebook are currently attempting to conduct a nearly total blackout of information regarding the Biden Crime Family's dealings in Ukraine, with the obvious goal of foisting their choice of president on the rest of the country by keeping the country in the dark about this important story.

Also yesterday, commenter Tom S. offered a fascinating comment on the means by which Big Money hopes to take over the governance of the US and transform it into something quite different that the constitutional order we were born into. Tom didn't use that term, Big Money, but I think it communicates his thinking. Another term, and one that points to an organization that may well be behind this takeover attempt, is "Davos man."

In fact, Tom started his comment with a series of links to various articles. The first link is to an article at Breitbart that highlights the goals of the World Economic Forum (WEF), best known to the general public for its annual confab at Davos--thus the moniker "Davos Man." Since the goals of the WEF appear to dovetail quite closely with those of the Dem party, it works quite well for our purposes. It designates the collective of hyper wealthy individuals, organizations, and governing officials who control wealth--Big Money--who are on board with the WEF's plan to take over and transform the world.

Here is the beginning to the article at Breitbart. It describes the use that the WEF hopes to make of the Covid pandemic to force on the Western world a "Great Reset". Does that concept seem familiar, does it resonate with the use of Covid to shut down large parts of the US in an attempt to take control of the government and force Trump out? It should.

World Economic Forum Outlines Its ‘Great Reset’ to End Traditional Capitalism

The coronavirus crisis presents an opportunity for a “new kind of capitalism” and “great reset” of global economies, politics, and societies, according to World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab.

In an article published Monday by the WEF, an impatient Schwab claims neo-liberalism is dead and with it traditional notions of economic capitalism.

In their place is a set of “Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics” the WEF says enables the world to progress under one set of overarching rules as drawn up by it, with “social  justice” a key component of this brave new world.

Grandiose enough for you? We're clearly talking about a world government, operating under rules drawn up by Davos Man.

This restructure of the way we do business is the new model for the “great reset” Schwab argues, adding he foresees the coronavirus crisis as too good an opportunity not to “re-evaluate sacred cows of the pre-pandemic system.”

He outlines his argument by pointing to just how serious the epidemic has been to the way we live now: Schwab writes:

The only acceptable response to such a crisis is to pursue a “Great Reset” of our economies, politics, and societies.

Schwab believes that if the Chinese coronavirus crisis has shown us anything, it is “that governments, businesses, or civil-society groups acting alone cannot meet systemic global challenges.”

In their stead, the WEF says the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

Who and what is the WEF? You can read about it at Wikipedia. What you'll notice immediately is that the WEF is an openly elitist organization that is seeking to transform the world over the heads of the subject populations. It hopes to do this by coopting "business, political, academic, and other leaders of society":

The World Economic Forum (WEF), based in Cologny, Geneva Canton, Switzerland, is an international NGO, founded in 1971. The WEF's mission is cited as "committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas".

Who belongs?

The foundation is funded by its 1,000 member companies, typically global enterprises with more than five billion dollars in turnover (varying by industry and region). These enterprises rank among the top companies within their industry and/or country and play a leading role in shaping the future of their industry and/or region. Membership is stratified by the level of engagement with forum activities, with the level of membership fees increasing as participation in meetings, projects, and initiatives rises. In 2011 an annual membership cost $52,000 for an individual member, $263,000 for "Industry Partner" and $527,000 for "Strategic Partner". An admission fee cost $19,000 per person. In 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, bringing the cost for "Strategic Partner" from CHF 500,000 ($523,000) to CHF 600,000 ($628,000).

In other words, membership is composed of precisely those leaders who feel that their ox is being gored by The Donald--and they're also the people in the best positions to steer money to those who are most actively working to influence the US election--by whatever means are available. These are also the people most able to control the flow of information to the subject populations--us.

I'm not arguing that their is a central guiding hand behind the plot to overthrow the US constitutional order. All I want to do here is point out that the concept of Big Money corresponds to actual organizational realities, and that the progressive agenda also corresponds to organizational realities. Davos Man is an excellent example of both.

So, with all that in mind, here's what Tom S. wrote (with some very light editing). What Tom is getting at is the magnitude of the conspiracy and the odds that Trump--and we--are facing:

1) The U.S. has never experienced a full on civil war, with the exception of western Missouri, circa 1860 – 1866.

2) The controlling Agenda has been in progress for a very long time. The sudden balking of the American people, manifested in Trump’s election, has caused a disruption in timeline and procession, but has in no way deterred the Executive Agenda. They have adapted and are nowhere near defeat.

3) “…the 'normies' are underprepared... .“ It isn’t that their unprepared as much as unaware. The Agenda, generally, is to have the gov’t handed over intact. The Antifa/BLM tools in the streets only think that they are part of a movement to throw down the established order when in reality they are being used as leverage to cement the established order. Trump is the only real revolutionary on the field.

My view is that the political establishment that Trump has taken on was, in reality, the globalist order in America--the Uniparty, as sundance likes to say. This explains the bipartisan nature of the opposition Trump has faced. However, given the reality that the US, since WWII, has been transformed for many purposes into a global American Empire, the corruption of our constitutional order has gone correspondingly global. The development of multinational corporations has led to the rise of interest groups with no traditional loyalties but with unprecedent influence and the means to shape and bend to their will governments that are now mostly representative only in theory or in form.

4) Short term there will be a simulacrum of normalcy, but with enough violence and chaos to keep the population on edge and feeling the need for more stability.

5) There will be no civil war, certainly not in the sense that aNanyMouse indicates. The Executive will only allow Antifa/BLM so much leash. An occasional one-on-one shooting perhaps, but nothing that requires or justifies total collapse in trust in gov’t. If some Deplorable leaning militia does something dumb and allows itself to be maneuvered into a mass shooting incident then that will be very very good for the Agenda. Obviously Deplorables must be disarmed and many Deplorables, probably a majority, will agree, depending on how outrageous the media can paint the incident to be. They very nearly got their dream in WI but it turned out to be only one kid, not a discernible militia, and there weren’t enough casualties, particularly women and children, to give the narrative the inertia it required to be self-perpetuating. The FBI may have tried to add fuel to the narrative in MI.

6) I believe what the Antifa orcs are saying. As far as they are concerned there will never be peace, ever.

7) The Executive wants absolute control, not the mess that will ensue if there is complete collapse, much less a civil war. They don’t want to turn things upside-down: they just want to own it all. They will boil the frog until the Deplorables get tired of resisting, forget what they were resisting for, or are marginalized to the point or irrelevance. Once they own it all they will deal with their tools in due course.

Maybe right, maybe wrong; that’s how I see the immediate situation. My long term prognostication is much grimmer.

Tom S.

A longer and more detailed version of this type of speculation appeared yesterday at American Thinker: The Revolution the US is Experiencing – and What if it Succeeds. Again, just some excerpts. The idea is that we're in the midst of a revolution that most people are only vaguely aware of--if at all:

... Virtually all the opinion molding organs of American society are in the hands of the revolutionaries: the entire educational establishment, the media, the law schools, the libraries, big corporation boards, the entertainment industry and the Democratic Party. Moreover, they are winning. The youth of America have been brainwashed for at least the last 50 years. The average youngster has no idea who John Marshall or Edmund Burke or Adam Smith were or what they said, or how their ideas shaped the political, economic and social systems of our country. But he or she can tell you with certainty that capitalist America has polluted the oceans, fouled the atmosphere, oppressed people of color all over the world, demeaned women and hoarded the wealth. Alas, the cultural revolution these folks have engineered is essentially complete; now we are on the cusp of the completion of its political counterpart.

This eventuality represents the success of an idea that is generally attributed to Antonio Gramsci – that is, politics runs downstream from culture. The Progressive Movement began its ongoing revolution 125 years ago with the express goal of destroying the classic American culture and overthrowing the established political system. They have succeeded at the former. But the political revolution has not quite yet come to fruition. There have been times when it looked like it might: the Wilsonian 1910s; the 1930s under Roosevelt’s New Deal; the mid/late 1960s when riots ruled the land and we were catapulted into The Great Society. Now we are apparently in a fourth great upheaval. Will the radicals triumph politically this time? ...

...

... a common and critical reason that the Progressive political revolution did not succeed in any of the three periods discussed is that the cultural revolution was not yet complete. Not anywhere close in 1920 or 1940; advanced, but not far enough in 1965; however, by 2020….

The widely-predicted triumph of the Democratic Party via a newly elected president and control of both houses of Congress may well herald the arrival of the political revolution toward which the children of Gramsci (from Wilson to Sanders) have been driving us.

Perhaps all this is too pessimistic. Nevertheless, the country has come to such a pass that complacency in the face of such scenarios is not an option. Consider this--the military is a center of resistance to Trump and the constitutional order, and a center of loyalty to globalist progressivism: US Army Wants To Make COVID Social Distancing 'Permanent' Even After Pandemic Ends.