The ruling class supports the party that will leave them as much money as possible. There is a reason Peter Thiel et.al. supports Republicans. The whole “election was stolen” stupidity supports the economic elites.
US ruling classes..hey, we having a hard time manufacturing consent for our scam. No problem, we'll just call up the Supremes, they made out corporations super human's who can do anything without repercussions. Scotus, no problem, we just declare money to be speech and open the flood gates of mine control. Yeah but won't the people object? No, Hell no, the sheeple believe in the "rule of law"; haaaa, we da rulers and we makes the laws. Stupid lumpenproletariat sheeple!
Who the fuck is an economic elite? Bezos, Zuckerberg, buffet, Larry fink... CEO 's of damn near every single major corporation.....all democrats. You pick on Peter fuckin thiel?
Like having Nader arrested when he attended a debate (with a ticket) they had excluded him from participating in? Removing Greens from the ballot all over the place, imposing unfair limits on third party ballot access?
This madness only ends when the citizens finally understand the ruling classes are all on the same team. Their tribal conflict serves to divide the country in two. Can you imagine anything scarier than a unified underclass?
Tongue-in-cheek, I hope. Go no further back than 2016 to find Democrats of various sorts in full-denial of the Presidential election, followed by four years of non-stop Russiagate and attempts to undo the election via propaganado, impeachment (twice), salacious stories about Trump that were invented by spies and other amoral people, and so on.
If you’re a member here, you must be aware of much or all of that. So you have to be going into The Onion’s best satirical mode with your comment.
Right, like in 2016 and for the six years since then where they've gone around play-acting as victims so they can round up political dissent, right?
Or 3AM deliveries of suitcases full of ballots and water main leaks and other events to clear everyone out of the area and then start counting.
My best guess is both parties are involved in this kind of scamming, and this Ukraine war is a pretense for culling a bunch of useless slaves and I think Putin is in on it.
See it as a big show and you'll start to appreciate how sophisticated the propaganda is. You may even find your way out of bondage to some fake party.
At least that is how I read it when I clicked the heart. I'm unaware of any legal shenanigans trying to prevent Dems from running, although that doesn't mean there aren't any.
I hesitated to respond thinking you may be joking when you said, “ never deny the legitimacy of a president” because you MUST know that is a lie.
Then I can’t believe 15 followers that up voted you are as stupid as you.
Do you remember the phrase “ not my president” and “illegitimate president “ trending on Twitter?
Do you remember all 54 Dems that boycotted Trump’s SOTU address said he was illegitimate echoing Cummings who said live on air that Trump was an illegitimate president?
Very intelligent comment! It is obvious that Al Gore, John Kerry, Hilary Clinton and Stacey Abrams were and are NOT Democrats. At last we know the truth! Thank you.
Why say “Leftists” when you mean “Democrats”? Or that’s what you should mean. Most people who actually hold leftist views left the Democratic Party some time ago. And they’re not wasting time on the 2000 election.
Yep. Many corporate donors buy politicians from both sides. It’s one of the many reasons I’m a neithersider. I’m more wary of the Republicans now only because of they’re using a bogus stolen election for their particular grift and throwing thousands of honest, dedicated election workers and volunteers under the bus just to make money. But hey, that’s just business.
Read any history or any decent political philosophy book and politics and government are always quite properly the balance of interest groups in a society. The elites can and should have influence - as Alan Ryan notes, they always have been put in a leading position in every successful democracy.
It simply all has to be in balance. But what is not in balance is when we teach pure democracy as the way of the USA or as a good thing. Pure democracy is terrible, and part of our trouble today is a purer democracy because the parties have willingly given up power, the power of nominee selection through caucuses, superdelegates, and now even closed primaries. Instead they let the popular candidate be selected by the people and then the elites spend all of their effort removing the power of the populist candidates by nefarious means.
All these forces just need to be in better balance. The key to today's disruptions is the creation of the greatest platforms for demagoguery ever invented, just after the parties had given themselves over to purer democracy because too many think "democracy" is the highest form of government, when pure democracy has evils all its own and we are much better off as a constitutional republic with properly checked elite power given reasonable weight.
Wait, the DNC has stopped having super delegates?? When I first learned about super delegates and who (I.e. Bill Clinton, big donors) gets to be one , I was flabbergasted... why would any delegate get to cast three “votes”??so in the case of a Tulsi Gabbard running in a primary.... what’s the point when the super duper delegates have the almost equivalent of a veto?? Regarding “a bogus stolen election “.... I think at this point I have read enough anecdotal testimony that I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that there was or was not election “interference” and what impact it might had.
Thumb on the scales, Mr. Substack Commenter 34. We’re always going to have all levels and income differences. What we don’t need to have is ultra-wealthy elites making sure that our laws are written in a way that suits them best.
They know (aka own) the politicians so their companies get the gov contracts (both parties, btw). They get sweetheart deals on buying radio spectrums/frequencies (whatever the correct term is). The green new deals benefit particular elites. Hell, even our wars benefit the elites; oil, armaments, etc.
You’re welcome to believe that is how it should be but I’m not and never will be.
lulz. trump was installed by the same broken "election" facade, as his removal. his service to the globalists, done. now he remains the clownish distraction.
incidentally, he had 4 years to do something about the facade of broken election nonsense, did nothing, but surround himself with the same old same old deep state, but trumpers just put the blinders on, and ignore the facts.
trump is the deep state's toy.
this should be obvious, but clearly, the programming is effective.
I would like to see one time where Google, FB, Twitter, most newspapers, censored anything anti-Trump. From the Dossier, to Russian collusion, to covid, through Ukraine, at no time have the censors ever departed from the script expressed by the Democratic Party. People are currently rotting in jail without trial or due process, under conditions of torture (withholding of medical care, extended periods of solitary confinement, restricted and surveilled contact with legal counsel), after theatrical violent armed raids on their homes for maximum terroristic effect, for opposing narratives trafficked by the Democratic Party. Never has this occurred in support of a Trump policy, or a Trump supporter.
You are correct they had it, but they were writing stories about Russian collusion prior to the election. Crossfire Hurricane was opened in July 2016. All bogus, concocted by the FBI in concert with the Hillary campaign.
In January 2021, Comey notified Trump about it, which provided the greenlight for Buzzfeed to publish it. At that time of course its authors, Christopher Steele and Igor Danchencko had specifically told the FBI it was all lies. nevertheless, five months later it was used to justify the installment of the Mueller witch hunt, the walls-closing-in, etc. An unending media frenzy that has devastated the country.
Google started algorithmically censoring leftwing alternative news sites like alternet around the same time that Alex Jones got purged from youtube, etc.
8G - Exactly. My college-age 60's altruism withered away upon the realization that the people fighting the power were
a. just as much assholes as the people they were protesting against;
b. would have no fucking idea how to run anything once they got in power;
and
c. fuck things up even worse once they got in power.
These people want to talk about blinders? Look at Fetterman. He was addled before he had a stroke. From both sides, candidates and choices become progressively (no pun intended) worse.
You will probably recognize this quote then..."Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..." As stated by Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." It is not about the system, unless it is a system that permits concealment and corruption (like ours). But ultimately in ourselves. There is wisdom in preventing anyone, for any reason, to have too much latitude.
And when the next “Trump” attempts to enter the DC ring... oh wait, will never happen, because the Swamp has shown their true bi partisan unscrupulous rejection of anyone daring to draw the curtain open.... it’s not just the leftists, it’s all of them. Mandatory retirement age has a better chance of slowly abating the corruption. It sure as hell is not going to be exposed by the media.
I agree, but I’m more optimistic that shaming Congress into voting for a mandatory retirement age would be easier than repealing Citizens United…. A ruling I will never understand.
That may we'll be but if it so, why does the Establishment seek to defame and smear those who question it and why do they act as though it is reprehensible to question it? Why do they snarl like a cornered and wounded animal if they have nothing to hide and are totally on the up and up? And why do their supporters attack fellow citizens for asking questions? What the hell has happened to liberalism in this country when it demands conformity in all things? Was liberalism the victim of an alien abduction in the last twenty years so that it cannot now see that it is the very monster it always railed against?
Capital had totally compromised American elected political leadership and has moved on to the world stage. For our purposes the only there there is "..we the people.." In my opinion there is no "left"/"right", Democrat/Republican, conservative/liberal. For Americans the only rational political viewpoint from which to view the grift is our Constitution and the Bill of Rights it contains.
But the fact is that the GOP has seen fit to unconstitutionally nullify rights by selecting conservatives who reject the concept of rights whereas the Democrats have not.
Dobbs is unconstitutional as explained by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist #84. The GOP has made it their focus to unconstitutionally nullify a woman's inalienable and unenumerated right to end a pregnancy since Roe and it has been working to suppress people's right to vote.
Trump lost, period. That is an objective fact, there is no point in questioning it so why deal with their conspiracy theories? MAGA is THE problem and the GOP has created that monster, evolved from the Tea Bag movement, in the hopes of using those movements to make government incapable of doing its job.
Trump lost, semicolon: It is now agreed that Wisconsin was stolen by the Democrats. The audit of nursing home voting shows that. How could 95% of the residents in a nursing home (in 20 cases, 100%) vote in an election? If that fraud had not occurred, Trump would have won Wisconsin.
I live here and I can confirm. Also drop boxes were out prior to ability to drop mail-in ballots, and rallies were held telling people where to put those mail in ballots. Also Such bucks went to the 5 largest voting cities but only to Dems. It was a joke here!
LOL! Nope. Trump lost Wisconsin because enough good people voted against that bloat. Your conspiracy theory is just plain stupid precisely because it has no basis in fact. Such is belief.
You are not answering what I reported. How could 95% of the residents in all of the nursing homes audited have voted? It is not a "conspiracy theory"; it is an entirely factual report of an audit of voting rates.
I'm sorry, because we don't know each other, but your pejoratives tell me otherwise about your own position and what you know about this question. How do you know what you claim with such certainty, and why do you apply smears to your fellow citizens like "MAGA" and "Tea Bag" (this latter one the concoction of a brain-dead celebrity known for venomous bile towards other Americans)? Who do you think you're serving with this talk and if it's your "party", or whatever, why are you so willing to serve the powerful against the powerless? If you would claim to be a "liberal", shouldn't the default, de facto position ALWAYS be an intense, visceral suspicion of power and it's servants? Whose side are you on?
OK, whine, whine. Hey, MAGA are not good people. Trump had no election stolen, period, and yet those freaks believe in the lie. I hope that those "fellow citizens" are marginalized by good people. That is my position and I'm sticking to it.
No, not whining, just pointing out what a monster you appear to be, and what monsters people like you are, and asking why you serve so willingly the insanely powerful instead of trying to understand the hapless people of this country, who so desperately want to believe that they do, or should, have a voice and a say in the affairs of this nation. This nation, which is, by the way, THEIRS, not the oligarchs, not the politicians, not the defense contractors, but the people's. If you had even a sliver of humanity in you, you'd see that about yourself. But you play the fool, serving the ravenous wolves who are prepared to devour this country, its people, and its resources, in an insatiable quest for domination.
I hope that you never describe yourself as a free person, or a lover of democracy, or a friend of the little guy or if you do, that the person you tell that to can see so completely through you and your lies that you are made to feel at least a tiny bit of shame for the horror that you are.
Soros, Gates, Schwab and the rest of the IMF/WEF/CCP Davos crowd shouldn't be taken lightly. Thomas Piketty won the Nobel Prize for CAPITAL which clearly foretold the ascent of a new world feudalism. Thinking international criminal oligarchic billionaires don't have their dirty little fingers in the American pie is naive and fatal. The Epstein/Clinton/Gates debacle was a brief glimpse into a world of corrupt world finance existing beyond our daily consideration of events.
Sure, wealth is a problem. But it can be controlled by making it illegal to give any money to any candidate, to give anything to anyone who served in government other than just compensation as salary or wage, but not for lobbying, etc.
I'm wondering what the difference between elected political leaderships behind the scene surveillance state "blacklisting" and destruction of a life and the Marxist "woke" University/Corporate D.E.I. commissariat is. They both seem to have the same objective. Instill fear, silence free speech, destroy unity and line their pockets. In both cases the process is controlled and implemented in service to avaricious capital.
It was said that Obama beget Trump, and while it hasn't been said as much, I believe Trump beget Biden, who brought with him the worst foreign policy dregs (Powers, Rice, Rhodes, Jerrett) from Obama's admin, as well as incompetents like Blinken, Klain and Sullivan, and I won't even comment on the VP.
Reads a fair bit more like he's lying the blame at Obama's feet.
But then, there are two strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the liberal strain, which holds that Trump is a Russia-controlled fascist who can do no right, and could only ever possibly be defended by hardened Neo-Nazis; and the conservative strain, which holds that he can do no wrong, and that even the mildest criticism of him is a Communist-backed affront worthy of unthinking, mouth-frothing rage.
I have to say that I know a lot of people that voted for Trump ( actually as did I in 2020) and of those, I know not one who is unconditionally supportive or criticism free of him. And most are in my age group and aware that Biden has been a lying empty suit for 50 years and currently is more senile than all of us!! But I’m sure they exist and I’m happy I don’t have to listen to their extremism either! I’m exhausted from the endless political theater.
I think there's a third strain too. The never-Trump Repubs, who think Trump ruined their party. Some are still Repubs (like Mitt Romney, who isn't a Dem or Indy) and then there's the warhawk Bulwark and Dispatch and Atlantic crews, and the Lincoln Project slimeballs.
Yes and holding court in some private dining club in Georgetown no doubt…Will, Bill Kristol, Mort Kondrake… their collective coronary over Trump entering their political arena illustrated the arrogance of DC… I’d rather have Charles Krauthammer alive and telling them to calm down!!
The irony is that Trump is a 2 bit con artist (compared to the multi billion $ çorruption of the establishment.) Whose stupidity and distractions reduce his potential harm.
Donald Trump was the best educated and most intelligent President in this century. He always has been eager to learn from trustworthy people. Read Scott Atlas's book on President Trump's search for information about COVID in 2020 ("A Plague Upon our House). Dr. Atlas was brought in by Trump because none of the people working on COVID policy had any expertise on public health policy, which is Atlas's specialty.
In August Atlas brought in 3 specialists in epidemiology and treatment and got them a 5-minute meet-and-greet with President Trump. He had them sit down and started asking questions and responding to their answers. The meeting lasted 45 minutes because President Trump really wanted the right answers.
I've often thought the same thing. The 20%-30% of the Republican party that got him the victories in the primaries, and then...whatever it is on the Left. Harder to tell, since about 90% of the media has TDS.
Me, I voted for him, but I did it under duress. ;) I can see what he did that was good (yaaay, judges!) and what he did that was ...not so much. And I'm definitely ready for the GOP, the country, the Press, even Trump himself - to move on.
What are you talking about? Outside of the fact that you sound like one of those people with the TDS that afflicts one side or the other.
If you mean that 99% of Republicans voted for Trump - that may or may not be true. If you think they supported a certain idea or another of Trumps, then, sure, again, probably true.
If you want to say that 99% of them would genuflect if he came around, then, sorry, going to have to take a hard pass on that idea. I know that's a favorite concept, particularly of the TDS Right - as if every politician who had to answer to their constituents or who wanted to get anything done while Trump was president had to "bend the knee". I guess it helps them sleep at night.
I'm not sure the pendelum is swinging wider each time.
I overall hated Trump (though he was okay in certain important areas,) but I think he won because Obama sucked and Clinton is awful, and then Biden won because of the pandemic more than anything else tippoing the scales to away from Trump, and then the democratic party, in collusion with the MSM, functionally rigs the democratic primaries to keep the most solidly leftwing candidates off the general ballot for POTUS.
The American people created the condition for awful Trump. The American people voted for "small government", pro-business candidates in their flawed belief that the "market" solves problems when it creates them. Markets require proper regulation to function properly.
Suffering from the failures of libertarian policies, such as trickle-down and laissez-faire economics and the average voter's inability to understand that created this mess. Therefore, Trump, viewed as a disruptor who would act to correct all problems as a savior. He was incompetent and stupid and so failed. However, he was the voters' fault.
And Bush & Cheney begat Savior Obama. You should be terrified. All this political whipsawing is cutting down the tree. Our tree. Leaving us a jagged, dying stump.
The truly amazing thing about Trump losing is how he lost. This is not reported on almost at all. Trump increased his votes among women, and minorites (black and latinos), over what it took for him to beat the Hill Monster. He lost to Biden on the guilt of middle age white men. The now known as Devil demographic. That to me is the real story that is never told.
I do think it is a fair lens to gauge presidential legacy. I’d probably change criteria to smooth it a bit and make the subsequent two administrations a proxy.
LOL! There was NO rigging. Trump LOST! He is a stupid narcissist who failed at business but succeeds at self-promotion. Biden won because he was the better choice.
Biden is far better than Trump. Biden is not responsible for NATO expansion, maintaining NATO as a bulwark against Russia, not acting to help Russia develop a democratic culture, etc. "What comes next" has been the paradigm for most of our history.
National dialogue captured and reduced to a psyop, crisis to crisis, no discussion of sane solutions allowed. Americans live inside a LIE manufactured and maintained in service to international criminal finance. Chaos and the assault on the Western values of liberty, individual freedom, speech and family serves the ascent of the new world oligarchic totalitarian feudalism. Advances in tech and communication world wide made political graft transparent to reality. The perps are terrified and dangerous.
Covering their fear with hubris they openly brag and admit the IMF/WEF/CCP Davos manipulation of political systems across the globe and their placement of ideologues within them. They are assaulting and destroying human lives on a massive scale every day of the week.
Like the "magic bullet", the fear instilling, life destroying ,unaccountable bureaucratic surveillance state blacklist, the D.E.I. commissariat, the "othering" criminalization of the citizen is aimed at free men and women everywhere. The American political landscape is totally compromised.
Capture, control, weaponization and distortion of the narrative around real issues of social concern while obfuscating their complicity in the creation of it.
Matt - FYI: When I clicked on the 'Comment' link in your email about this piece - Norton flagged the link as a 'dangerous' website. You might want to check that out.
One of the enormous problems with not understanding the development level of the Authority-driven mindset is that it has extremely poor consequential thinking. The fact that Blinken obviously did not think this through is scary, considering he is the Secretary of State.
The deep consequence is, though, is that policy reversal then requires reality-based grounding so profound the Authority cannot deny it. Think of what that might mean in the context of Ukraine. It means we have also left the arena of a Learning Society.
Thinking things through is another casualty. Is that not also the purpose of having debates? Funny how we see fewer of those in our election process, and unbiased moderators have gone the way of DB Cooper..
well said - and policy reversal is to be avoided at all costs because that might result in the only consequence they fear....loss of power. So bring on the nukes Vlad!! I dare you!!
Now at least it isn’t a baseless conspiracy that the US might’ve been involved in the Nordstream debacle. You’ve got the guy in the right seat saying exactly what would happen regarding energy dependency if said debacle ever happened.
For once there's no debate that a conspiracy definitely happened. Now we can theorize all we want!
But just for the fun of having an actual baseless conspiracy, I suggest that the pipelines were bombed by the ocean-traveling UFOs the USA government has confirmed.
For a serious, level-headed analysis by a respected and qualified observer of the war and it's reasons, I would suggest listening to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University who was an advisor to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as to the U.N. Secretary General, and was on the ground in Ukraine in 2014 when the U.S. overthrew the Ukrainian leader. Here is a clip where Sachs was on Bloomberg News a week ago:
This from Jeffrey Sachs is for me a stunner, with new fundamental information, despite my reading everything I can get my hands on within time constraints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g57ViSqmRFM.
Now that Trump has come out publicly in support of a peace deal with Russia, I suppose that Democrats are going to attempt some kind of charge of treason against him. Their strategy of defeating Trump as a "Putin puppet" failed before, so they're doubling down again...only this time in the midst of an actual war with Russia.
Big Brother has been here for a while, but when I mentioned that someone wise pointed at an excellent quote:
Chuck Palahniuk "Lullaby" (2002): “Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched.”
Of course we are being watch, and sanctioned, too. Our Matt Taibbi has mentioned blacklists, it is good that they are mentioned, there is a whole industry providing blacklists to private employers.
I have wondered if ‘ Gene Frankie’ is a Google LAMDA chat bot running a sub program of a hybrid Turing test and we are the contestants. Hahahaha. Even if “he” isn’t I have sneaky suspicion that AI is probably more ubiquitous than we are aware on this site. Just sayin’.
It's all projection, accusing the other of what you yourself do. The Rubicon has been passed in the Ukraine. Today Russia decided to give NATO/Ukraine a dose of NATO military doctrine; attack civilian infrastructure which is the US modus operandi since the civil war in the US. No doubt that this was in response to the sabotaging provocation by the west. The Ukrainian Army has left itself exposed on the steppes with the rainy season about to start and the Russian blitzkrieg starting in the winter to come after. Currently both Russian and US nuclear doctrine precludes a nuclear war under forseeable conditions but like the first Queen Elizabeth used to say " I hate war because it's so unpredictable"! The US has proven itself to not be agreement capable and it's ruling classes seem to be as clueless as it's political leadership so I wouldn't count anything out. When the top general David Peteraus makes threats like a teenager I do get worried as he's "supposed to be" an adult.
The irony is that, according to Kiev, there were 11 civilian casualties as a result of today's strikes.
While that is 11 civilian casualties too many, that doesn't suggest a deliberate attempt to target civilians. Kiev's numerous artillery attacks on Donetsk, aimed directly at schools, hospitals and the the main shopping street of Donetsk, have resulted in far worse.
Up to now it's been obvious to anyone not blinded by the omnipresent western propaganda that Russia has been trying to run a limited war with minimal civilian casualties and minimal infrastructure destruction. The NATO proxy Ukraine has been doing the regular NATO program of essentially terrorism as in every American war since the Civil War. Hello, the British invented the concentration camps in South Africa where hundreds of thousands of "Boer "women and children died along with the black people considered sub humans by the British. General Kitchener who was on his way to oppresse the people of the colony of India got a lordship and a city in Canada named after him for that. Anglo-American people are not nice people and I'm one of them and I'm not proud of what we've done.
People are dying and I include the military on both sides. Infrastructure is being destroyed. Capital could be deployed in so many better ways is being squandered. All for no good reasons. Sadness and anger are my impotent emotions on this Thanksgiving day in our vassal state of Canada.
I got some news (second hand) from an acquaintance in Kiev. A lot of people want out of this war at any price, but saying so is a good way to end up in one of the SBU's torture chambers. A lot of propaganda of fighting to the end, but everyone is sick of it.
It would be great if people could say what they want openly and negotiate from there. Of course we can't even do that here. My wife who was 16 years older than me, a Schwartz Meer Deutsche grew up in the Ukraine and was very sympathetic to the long suffering Ukrainian people. Her father shot by the Russians, herself escaping to Germany while siblings wound up in Siberia until the USSR fell. The Ukrainians, Starved by Stalin, screwed by the jews and attacked by the nazis who considered them to be unter mensch. They've gone through more than their share of hell. My wife never hated the Russian or the jews that took her home or the Ukrainians who stole her families food. A better person than me for sure. People here have no clue about war's or oppression and I hope we never do and I wish we'd quit imposing hell on other people.
The Nazis had imbecilic bureaucrats who saw no problem with first blacklisting, socially destroying then murdering people to achieve their ideological aspirations, too.
Lots of people spoke up about the Bush years giving the acronyms free run of the country but the sheep didn't listen. They were afraid of the evil Mooslims just like they were afraid of the deadly virus and confined themselves to their own homes. But hey, they did get a revolutionary iPhone built by slave labor, so all's well that ends well.
i did have reservations about the Patriot Act but muted them because I believed that the Democratic party and the media would hold the Bushies accountable. And they did, mostly. Until they acquired that power. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
Back in the day I was pleasantly surprised but couldn’t quite believe how mainstream Democrats seemed to care about US war crimes under Bush. But it was almost entirely partisan blather, just a talking point. And once Obama brushed it aside and started committing his own war crimes the issue dropped off the radar. Now Democrats love some of the worst Bush era figures so long as they criticize Trump.
Totally blind sided me. I knew useful idiots like Code Pink and Cindy sheehan (remember them?) would be swept to the side in the name of "realism," but i never believed that the security state would be co-opted and redeployed as it has been.
But as I said - it is my fault for believing them. I should have known better.
Code Pink have never been useful idiots. The democratic party apparatus being somewhat more friendly towards them for a short while doesn't make them ones.
Code Pink has been very consistent on their anti-war stance ... pretty much forever, and hasn't stopped or started their advocacy along partisan lines (or any other lines). So in that sense they're not.
But notice they completely disappear from the public eye and their funding dries up whenever Democrats are in power. This is on them for being dependent on the technocratic NGO/media/institutional complex for outreach and promotion of their causes.
This is how you make a useful idiot of a non-partisan, single-issue political organization. You make them entirely dependent on partisan _infrastructure_. Then you can turn them on and off like a tap when it's convenient to your political faction.
This is also true of less desirable or helpful organizations like antifa. Because they rely on media cooperation for visibility and get most of their funding and legal defense through technocrat controlled NGOs and left-wing philanthropy, they vanish into the wind whenever a democratic president is in office and roar back to life when we have a republican. It creates the appearance that democrats restore sanity while republicans create strife, even though antifa would be perfectly happy to burn down buildings and throw things at police any time the weather is good for it.
What makes you think NGOs fund antifa? I'd love to know which NGO funds antifa and how that's known.
Re: Code Pink, they protested Obama as much as they did Bush. It just didn't get coverage outside of the farthest to the left of the leftwing online spaces. The nature of the organization is such that almost no funding is needed.
Well said but I disagree on them being "non-partisan" based, as you said, on their dependence on partisan infrastructure. That wipes out their credibility because they stand down (or are silenced) when their benefactors find them inconvenient.
No doubt they'd be among the first Anifa puts up against the wall if they were able to prevail.
When it concerns the most sensitive matters, our government is run not by its elected officials but by the military-industrial-national-security complex, behind the mask of the media-academic-corporate -party complex,. It operates entirely by the principle of "reasons of state"--secrecy and non-transparency, the mask behind which the most corrupt as well as ideologically delusional motives germinate and grow. Its principle is that that the state and its elites are not themselves subject to the state's own laws. We have returned to absolutism through the triumph of the administrative meta-state. This is the secret state (because it is mostly not visible) that is leading the fight for "democracy versus autocracy" across the world . . .
Fucking jackasses. Yeah go ahead, blacklist, unperson and debank everybody who disagrees with you. Create a whole class of people who have nothing left to lose and know who to blame for it.
Might not be the brightest thing to be sending all your military hardware to pointlessly prolong the war in Ukraine if that's the plan. You won't be collecting the dividends on increased LNG sales for a while. Sure hope you guys bought enough F-15s.
I guess watching a Russian DJ playing New York style break-beats while being spied upon by the CIA could be considered 'support in any way'. Maybe I'll switch to Kanye and piss them off that way.
Stolen elections have consequences. In all countries.
Man, you hit the nail on the head. The sociopathy of our ruling class is without limits.
The ruling class supports the party that will leave them as much money as possible. There is a reason Peter Thiel et.al. supports Republicans. The whole “election was stolen” stupidity supports the economic elites.
US ruling classes..hey, we having a hard time manufacturing consent for our scam. No problem, we'll just call up the Supremes, they made out corporations super human's who can do anything without repercussions. Scotus, no problem, we just declare money to be speech and open the flood gates of mine control. Yeah but won't the people object? No, Hell no, the sheeple believe in the "rule of law"; haaaa, we da rulers and we makes the laws. Stupid lumpenproletariat sheeple!
Who the fuck is an economic elite? Bezos, Zuckerberg, buffet, Larry fink... CEO 's of damn near every single major corporation.....all democrats. You pick on Peter fuckin thiel?
At least the Dems accept the results of elections and never deny the legitimacy of a president.
And of course they would never gin up a legal rationale to keep someone who might beat them from running.
"At least the Dems accept the results of elections and never deny the legitimacy of a president."
You mean like in 2016?
Use your sarcasm detector.
"At least the Dems accept the results of elections and never deny the legitimacy of a president."
You mean like in 2000?
You mean like Stacy Abrams accepting the losing outcome of her gubernatorial race in Georgia in 2018? (NOT)
Like having Nader arrested when he attended a debate (with a ticket) they had excluded him from participating in? Removing Greens from the ballot all over the place, imposing unfair limits on third party ballot access?
In 2000, Dems in the house wanted a recount. If only ONE Dem senator had signed on, the results of 2000 may have changed to Gore with the win.
There isn't really two parties. It's the Republicans and the closet-Republicans.
Again, I think you're taking the comment without an iota of irony. And I'm rather sure it is sarcasm. The last sentence makes that pretty clear.
You ever heard of the Russiagate Hoax? And the Dems in 2016 calling for state electors to change their votes from Trump to Hillary?
It's called sarcasm. Come On Man!
This madness only ends when the citizens finally understand the ruling classes are all on the same team. Their tribal conflict serves to divide the country in two. Can you imagine anything scarier than a unified underclass?
Really? There are literally hundreds of clips of DNC elites saying Trump stole te election via Russia.
And before that they were sewing the seeds of election fraud belief.
Weewy? Is it that obvious?
Then please explain why so many morons in this thread were unable to detect sarcasm and responded with this sort of flatfooted stupidity.
Satire right?
Of course. Although I would go with "sarcasm" since it was so broad and so obvious.
But as is evident from the responses, the IQ level on this thread doesn't make it out of two figures.
And don't come at me with "It's hard to detect sarcasm online."
Not when it's that obvious.
Maybe it's satire....problem is, these days it can be hard to distinguish leftist talking points from satire...
Tongue-in-cheek, I hope. Go no further back than 2016 to find Democrats of various sorts in full-denial of the Presidential election, followed by four years of non-stop Russiagate and attempts to undo the election via propaganado, impeachment (twice), salacious stories about Trump that were invented by spies and other amoral people, and so on.
If you’re a member here, you must be aware of much or all of that. So you have to be going into The Onion’s best satirical mode with your comment.
Right, like in 2016 and for the six years since then where they've gone around play-acting as victims so they can round up political dissent, right?
Or 3AM deliveries of suitcases full of ballots and water main leaks and other events to clear everyone out of the area and then start counting.
My best guess is both parties are involved in this kind of scamming, and this Ukraine war is a pretense for culling a bunch of useless slaves and I think Putin is in on it.
See it as a big show and you'll start to appreciate how sophisticated the propaganda is. You may even find your way out of bondage to some fake party.
Never. 😂😂😂
Demonstrated lack of knowing or intellectual dishonesty. You pick.
Door #3 is sarcasm?
At least that is how I read it when I clicked the heart. I'm unaware of any legal shenanigans trying to prevent Dems from running, although that doesn't mean there aren't any.
I hesitated to respond thinking you may be joking when you said, “ never deny the legitimacy of a president” because you MUST know that is a lie.
Then I can’t believe 15 followers that up voted you are as stupid as you.
Do you remember the phrase “ not my president” and “illegitimate president “ trending on Twitter?
Do you remember all 54 Dems that boycotted Trump’s SOTU address said he was illegitimate echoing Cummings who said live on air that Trump was an illegitimate president?
Never mind him. He’s more pompous than Al Gore himself.
Jeezus, what is wrong with you people?
How could anyone with a functioning brain think that was a serious comment?
I know Matt can be a little jingoballs himself, but I guess Merkins are just plain stupid?
Very intelligent comment! It is obvious that Al Gore, John Kerry, Hilary Clinton and Stacey Abrams were and are NOT Democrats. At last we know the truth! Thank you.
ROTFLMAO!
Why say “Leftists” when you mean “Democrats”? Or that’s what you should mean. Most people who actually hold leftist views left the Democratic Party some time ago. And they’re not wasting time on the 2000 election.
Um......
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/memory-holed-the-election-was-hacked
Yep. Many corporate donors buy politicians from both sides. It’s one of the many reasons I’m a neithersider. I’m more wary of the Republicans now only because of they’re using a bogus stolen election for their particular grift and throwing thousands of honest, dedicated election workers and volunteers under the bus just to make money. But hey, that’s just business.
Read any history or any decent political philosophy book and politics and government are always quite properly the balance of interest groups in a society. The elites can and should have influence - as Alan Ryan notes, they always have been put in a leading position in every successful democracy.
It simply all has to be in balance. But what is not in balance is when we teach pure democracy as the way of the USA or as a good thing. Pure democracy is terrible, and part of our trouble today is a purer democracy because the parties have willingly given up power, the power of nominee selection through caucuses, superdelegates, and now even closed primaries. Instead they let the popular candidate be selected by the people and then the elites spend all of their effort removing the power of the populist candidates by nefarious means.
All these forces just need to be in better balance. The key to today's disruptions is the creation of the greatest platforms for demagoguery ever invented, just after the parties had given themselves over to purer democracy because too many think "democracy" is the highest form of government, when pure democracy has evils all its own and we are much better off as a constitutional republic with properly checked elite power given reasonable weight.
Wait, the DNC has stopped having super delegates?? When I first learned about super delegates and who (I.e. Bill Clinton, big donors) gets to be one , I was flabbergasted... why would any delegate get to cast three “votes”??so in the case of a Tulsi Gabbard running in a primary.... what’s the point when the super duper delegates have the almost equivalent of a veto?? Regarding “a bogus stolen election “.... I think at this point I have read enough anecdotal testimony that I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that there was or was not election “interference” and what impact it might had.
Thumb on the scales, Mr. Substack Commenter 34. We’re always going to have all levels and income differences. What we don’t need to have is ultra-wealthy elites making sure that our laws are written in a way that suits them best.
They know (aka own) the politicians so their companies get the gov contracts (both parties, btw). They get sweetheart deals on buying radio spectrums/frequencies (whatever the correct term is). The green new deals benefit particular elites. Hell, even our wars benefit the elites; oil, armaments, etc.
You’re welcome to believe that is how it should be but I’m not and never will be.
You're an idiot.
"The sociopathy of our ruling class is without limits." That also hits the nail on the head.
lulz. trump was installed by the same broken "election" facade, as his removal. his service to the globalists, done. now he remains the clownish distraction.
incidentally, he had 4 years to do something about the facade of broken election nonsense, did nothing, but surround himself with the same old same old deep state, but trumpers just put the blinders on, and ignore the facts.
trump is the deep state's toy.
this should be obvious, but clearly, the programming is effective.
biden IS trump is Obama IS bush, etc etc
Exactly!!! This is the first post out of thousands that has made this statement. THEY ARE ALL FROM THE SAME SIDE PEOPLE..
I would like to see one time where Google, FB, Twitter, most newspapers, censored anything anti-Trump. From the Dossier, to Russian collusion, to covid, through Ukraine, at no time have the censors ever departed from the script expressed by the Democratic Party. People are currently rotting in jail without trial or due process, under conditions of torture (withholding of medical care, extended periods of solitary confinement, restricted and surveilled contact with legal counsel), after theatrical violent armed raids on their homes for maximum terroristic effect, for opposing narratives trafficked by the Democratic Party. Never has this occurred in support of a Trump policy, or a Trump supporter.
You are correct they had it, but they were writing stories about Russian collusion prior to the election. Crossfire Hurricane was opened in July 2016. All bogus, concocted by the FBI in concert with the Hillary campaign.
In January 2021, Comey notified Trump about it, which provided the greenlight for Buzzfeed to publish it. At that time of course its authors, Christopher Steele and Igor Danchencko had specifically told the FBI it was all lies. nevertheless, five months later it was used to justify the installment of the Mueller witch hunt, the walls-closing-in, etc. An unending media frenzy that has devastated the country.
Google started algorithmically censoring leftwing alternative news sites like alternet around the same time that Alex Jones got purged from youtube, etc.
8G - Exactly. My college-age 60's altruism withered away upon the realization that the people fighting the power were
a. just as much assholes as the people they were protesting against;
b. would have no fucking idea how to run anything once they got in power;
and
c. fuck things up even worse once they got in power.
These people want to talk about blinders? Look at Fetterman. He was addled before he had a stroke. From both sides, candidates and choices become progressively (no pun intended) worse.
You will probably recognize this quote then..."Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..." As stated by Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." It is not about the system, unless it is a system that permits concealment and corruption (like ours). But ultimately in ourselves. There is wisdom in preventing anyone, for any reason, to have too much latitude.
Despite our disagreements Gene, I’m glad you’re here.
And when the next “Trump” attempts to enter the DC ring... oh wait, will never happen, because the Swamp has shown their true bi partisan unscrupulous rejection of anyone daring to draw the curtain open.... it’s not just the leftists, it’s all of them. Mandatory retirement age has a better chance of slowly abating the corruption. It sure as hell is not going to be exposed by the media.
I agree, but I’m more optimistic that shaming Congress into voting for a mandatory retirement age would be easier than repealing Citizens United…. A ruling I will never understand.
Gene, bless his heart, likely has Biden Debrainment Syndrome.
Trump lost.
That may we'll be but if it so, why does the Establishment seek to defame and smear those who question it and why do they act as though it is reprehensible to question it? Why do they snarl like a cornered and wounded animal if they have nothing to hide and are totally on the up and up? And why do their supporters attack fellow citizens for asking questions? What the hell has happened to liberalism in this country when it demands conformity in all things? Was liberalism the victim of an alien abduction in the last twenty years so that it cannot now see that it is the very monster it always railed against?
Check out Matt Orfala’s compilation of Killery being emphatic that Trump was an illegitimate president.
Whah! Whah! What she thinks or said is irrelevant. Trump is a grifter and was one of the worst presidents. Get over it.
tiresome...
Capital had totally compromised American elected political leadership and has moved on to the world stage. For our purposes the only there there is "..we the people.." In my opinion there is no "left"/"right", Democrat/Republican, conservative/liberal. For Americans the only rational political viewpoint from which to view the grift is our Constitution and the Bill of Rights it contains.
But the fact is that the GOP has seen fit to unconstitutionally nullify rights by selecting conservatives who reject the concept of rights whereas the Democrats have not.
Dobbs is unconstitutional as explained by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist #84. The GOP has made it their focus to unconstitutionally nullify a woman's inalienable and unenumerated right to end a pregnancy since Roe and it has been working to suppress people's right to vote.
Trump lost, period. That is an objective fact, there is no point in questioning it so why deal with their conspiracy theories? MAGA is THE problem and the GOP has created that monster, evolved from the Tea Bag movement, in the hopes of using those movements to make government incapable of doing its job.
Trump lost, semicolon: It is now agreed that Wisconsin was stolen by the Democrats. The audit of nursing home voting shows that. How could 95% of the residents in a nursing home (in 20 cases, 100%) vote in an election? If that fraud had not occurred, Trump would have won Wisconsin.
I live here and I can confirm. Also drop boxes were out prior to ability to drop mail-in ballots, and rallies were held telling people where to put those mail in ballots. Also Such bucks went to the 5 largest voting cities but only to Dems. It was a joke here!
You can't confirm what never happened. Your post is just more big lie bullshit.
LOL! Nope. Trump lost Wisconsin because enough good people voted against that bloat. Your conspiracy theory is just plain stupid precisely because it has no basis in fact. Such is belief.
You are not answering what I reported. How could 95% of the residents in all of the nursing homes audited have voted? It is not a "conspiracy theory"; it is an entirely factual report of an audit of voting rates.
I'm sorry, because we don't know each other, but your pejoratives tell me otherwise about your own position and what you know about this question. How do you know what you claim with such certainty, and why do you apply smears to your fellow citizens like "MAGA" and "Tea Bag" (this latter one the concoction of a brain-dead celebrity known for venomous bile towards other Americans)? Who do you think you're serving with this talk and if it's your "party", or whatever, why are you so willing to serve the powerful against the powerless? If you would claim to be a "liberal", shouldn't the default, de facto position ALWAYS be an intense, visceral suspicion of power and it's servants? Whose side are you on?
OK, whine, whine. Hey, MAGA are not good people. Trump had no election stolen, period, and yet those freaks believe in the lie. I hope that those "fellow citizens" are marginalized by good people. That is my position and I'm sticking to it.
No, not whining, just pointing out what a monster you appear to be, and what monsters people like you are, and asking why you serve so willingly the insanely powerful instead of trying to understand the hapless people of this country, who so desperately want to believe that they do, or should, have a voice and a say in the affairs of this nation. This nation, which is, by the way, THEIRS, not the oligarchs, not the politicians, not the defense contractors, but the people's. If you had even a sliver of humanity in you, you'd see that about yourself. But you play the fool, serving the ravenous wolves who are prepared to devour this country, its people, and its resources, in an insatiable quest for domination.
I hope that you never describe yourself as a free person, or a lover of democracy, or a friend of the little guy or if you do, that the person you tell that to can see so completely through you and your lies that you are made to feel at least a tiny bit of shame for the horror that you are.
Ah, I see. Thanks for pointing that out.
OK, incel.
You're a fucking idiot.....objective fact
LOL! Go back to beating off, incel.
LOL! I see that your mom gave you computer privileges again!
Soros, Gates, Schwab and the rest of the IMF/WEF/CCP Davos crowd shouldn't be taken lightly. Thomas Piketty won the Nobel Prize for CAPITAL which clearly foretold the ascent of a new world feudalism. Thinking international criminal oligarchic billionaires don't have their dirty little fingers in the American pie is naive and fatal. The Epstein/Clinton/Gates debacle was a brief glimpse into a world of corrupt world finance existing beyond our daily consideration of events.
Sure, wealth is a problem. But it can be controlled by making it illegal to give any money to any candidate, to give anything to anyone who served in government other than just compensation as salary or wage, but not for lobbying, etc.
You just showed your age. Grab your little wanker jeff and go to bed
LOL! Your mom caught you beating off and now you're all embarrassed. Poor little incel.
Boring....
I'm wondering what the difference between elected political leaderships behind the scene surveillance state "blacklisting" and destruction of a life and the Marxist "woke" University/Corporate D.E.I. commissariat is. They both seem to have the same objective. Instill fear, silence free speech, destroy unity and line their pockets. In both cases the process is controlled and implemented in service to avaricious capital.
Yep. But!! --- We aren't lost yet.
It was said that Obama beget Trump, and while it hasn't been said as much, I believe Trump beget Biden, who brought with him the worst foreign policy dregs (Powers, Rice, Rhodes, Jerrett) from Obama's admin, as well as incompetents like Blinken, Klain and Sullivan, and I won't even comment on the VP.
I'm terrified as to what comes next.
Yes, its always Trump's fault- you fucking idiot.
Reads a fair bit more like he's lying the blame at Obama's feet.
But then, there are two strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the liberal strain, which holds that Trump is a Russia-controlled fascist who can do no right, and could only ever possibly be defended by hardened Neo-Nazis; and the conservative strain, which holds that he can do no wrong, and that even the mildest criticism of him is a Communist-backed affront worthy of unthinking, mouth-frothing rage.
I have to say that I know a lot of people that voted for Trump ( actually as did I in 2020) and of those, I know not one who is unconditionally supportive or criticism free of him. And most are in my age group and aware that Biden has been a lying empty suit for 50 years and currently is more senile than all of us!! But I’m sure they exist and I’m happy I don’t have to listen to their extremism either! I’m exhausted from the endless political theater.
I think there's a third strain too. The never-Trump Repubs, who think Trump ruined their party. Some are still Repubs (like Mitt Romney, who isn't a Dem or Indy) and then there's the warhawk Bulwark and Dispatch and Atlantic crews, and the Lincoln Project slimeballs.
I’d like to personally wipe the arrogant smirk off George Wills face! What an elitist asshat! Donald Trump “offends” his inner core……🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Forgot all about him. Is he even still alive?
Yes and holding court in some private dining club in Georgetown no doubt…Will, Bill Kristol, Mort Kondrake… their collective coronary over Trump entering their political arena illustrated the arrogance of DC… I’d rather have Charles Krauthammer alive and telling them to calm down!!
The irony is that Trump is a 2 bit con artist (compared to the multi billion $ çorruption of the establishment.) Whose stupidity and distractions reduce his potential harm.
Donald Trump was the best educated and most intelligent President in this century. He always has been eager to learn from trustworthy people. Read Scott Atlas's book on President Trump's search for information about COVID in 2020 ("A Plague Upon our House). Dr. Atlas was brought in by Trump because none of the people working on COVID policy had any expertise on public health policy, which is Atlas's specialty.
In August Atlas brought in 3 specialists in epidemiology and treatment and got them a 5-minute meet-and-greet with President Trump. He had them sit down and started asking questions and responding to their answers. The meeting lasted 45 minutes because President Trump really wanted the right answers.
Atlas could have saved us, but by then COVID was purely political.
Trump also tried inviting a Mental Health expert to the briefings to consider the collateral damage of the lockdowns, but she was driven away too.
I've often thought the same thing. The 20%-30% of the Republican party that got him the victories in the primaries, and then...whatever it is on the Left. Harder to tell, since about 90% of the media has TDS.
Me, I voted for him, but I did it under duress. ;) I can see what he did that was good (yaaay, judges!) and what he did that was ...not so much. And I'm definitely ready for the GOP, the country, the Press, even Trump himself - to move on.
What are you talking about? Outside of the fact that you sound like one of those people with the TDS that afflicts one side or the other.
If you mean that 99% of Republicans voted for Trump - that may or may not be true. If you think they supported a certain idea or another of Trumps, then, sure, again, probably true.
If you want to say that 99% of them would genuflect if he came around, then, sorry, going to have to take a hard pass on that idea. I know that's a favorite concept, particularly of the TDS Right - as if every politician who had to answer to their constituents or who wanted to get anything done while Trump was president had to "bend the knee". I guess it helps them sleep at night.
I loved Trump and only included him to illustrate that the pendulum is swinging wilder each time.
I'm not sure the pendelum is swinging wider each time.
I overall hated Trump (though he was okay in certain important areas,) but I think he won because Obama sucked and Clinton is awful, and then Biden won because of the pandemic more than anything else tippoing the scales to away from Trump, and then the democratic party, in collusion with the MSM, functionally rigs the democratic primaries to keep the most solidly leftwing candidates off the general ballot for POTUS.
The American people created the condition for awful Trump. The American people voted for "small government", pro-business candidates in their flawed belief that the "market" solves problems when it creates them. Markets require proper regulation to function properly.
Suffering from the failures of libertarian policies, such as trickle-down and laissez-faire economics and the average voter's inability to understand that created this mess. Therefore, Trump, viewed as a disruptor who would act to correct all problems as a savior. He was incompetent and stupid and so failed. However, he was the voters' fault.
Yes, the Dems have become the war party.
And Bush & Cheney begat Savior Obama. You should be terrified. All this political whipsawing is cutting down the tree. Our tree. Leaving us a jagged, dying stump.
The truly amazing thing about Trump losing is how he lost. This is not reported on almost at all. Trump increased his votes among women, and minorites (black and latinos), over what it took for him to beat the Hill Monster. He lost to Biden on the guilt of middle age white men. The now known as Devil demographic. That to me is the real story that is never told.
I do think it is a fair lens to gauge presidential legacy. I’d probably change criteria to smooth it a bit and make the subsequent two administrations a proxy.
Bush W: Obama Trump
Obama: Trump Biden
Rigging by Democrats in the 2020 election beget Biden - make no mistakes!
LOL! There was NO rigging. Trump LOST! He is a stupid narcissist who failed at business but succeeds at self-promotion. Biden won because he was the better choice.
Biden is far better than Trump. Biden is not responsible for NATO expansion, maintaining NATO as a bulwark against Russia, not acting to help Russia develop a democratic culture, etc. "What comes next" has been the paradigm for most of our history.
And you are an incel with no people skills who can't get a job and have to live in your mom's basement.
National dialogue captured and reduced to a psyop, crisis to crisis, no discussion of sane solutions allowed. Americans live inside a LIE manufactured and maintained in service to international criminal finance. Chaos and the assault on the Western values of liberty, individual freedom, speech and family serves the ascent of the new world oligarchic totalitarian feudalism. Advances in tech and communication world wide made political graft transparent to reality. The perps are terrified and dangerous.
Covering their fear with hubris they openly brag and admit the IMF/WEF/CCP Davos manipulation of political systems across the globe and their placement of ideologues within them. They are assaulting and destroying human lives on a massive scale every day of the week.
Like the "magic bullet", the fear instilling, life destroying ,unaccountable bureaucratic surveillance state blacklist, the D.E.I. commissariat, the "othering" criminalization of the citizen is aimed at free men and women everywhere. The American political landscape is totally compromised.
Capture, control, weaponization and distortion of the narrative around real issues of social concern while obfuscating their complicity in the creation of it.
Matt - FYI: When I clicked on the 'Comment' link in your email about this piece - Norton flagged the link as a 'dangerous' website. You might want to check that out.
Jesus. Is anyone else having that problem?
It's coming from inside the house!!!
But no, didn't happen to me
Me neither, although I don't use Norton.
Am curious if it's all of Substack. Would be very odd to just be your site.
I did find this on their website -(shouldn't be necessary, but... tech companies are stupid!)
https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v20220309171843756
And here's someone else who had this happen to their site:
https://community.norton.com/en/forums/norton-blocked-my-website-known-dangerous-web-page
I use Brave as my web browser and have no issues..
It happened to me once a couple weeks ago. It came from Microsoft.
Link brought me here, no problem.
Nothing from Firefox / iMac.
I'm on a chromebook and haven't had any problems, so you're apparently not actionably on alphabet's shitlist yet.
No. Thank God.
This one was ok but I got one on a recent article.
No issues here.
I've seen that sort of thing mentioned on other's stacks. Not Norton - but Microsoft/Outlook
I clicked on the link inside the email. Then I logged in to make my previous comment.
No. Not at the moment anyway.
Norton used to flag David Sirota's articles. I ditched Norton. I usually can't click any like buttons here though.
Me as well
The only opinion you may hold is the approved opinion.
"The nail that sticks out will be hammered"
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/everybodys-saying-it-guardrails
One of the enormous problems with not understanding the development level of the Authority-driven mindset is that it has extremely poor consequential thinking. The fact that Blinken obviously did not think this through is scary, considering he is the Secretary of State.
The deep consequence is, though, is that policy reversal then requires reality-based grounding so profound the Authority cannot deny it. Think of what that might mean in the context of Ukraine. It means we have also left the arena of a Learning Society.
Thinking things through is another casualty. Is that not also the purpose of having debates? Funny how we see fewer of those in our election process, and unbiased moderators have gone the way of DB Cooper..
well said - and policy reversal is to be avoided at all costs because that might result in the only consequence they fear....loss of power. So bring on the nukes Vlad!! I dare you!!
Eventually, fear of death will take over. I just hope it’s before it’s too late.
Now at least it isn’t a baseless conspiracy that the US might’ve been involved in the Nordstream debacle. You’ve got the guy in the right seat saying exactly what would happen regarding energy dependency if said debacle ever happened.
For once there's no debate that a conspiracy definitely happened. Now we can theorize all we want!
But just for the fun of having an actual baseless conspiracy, I suggest that the pipelines were bombed by the ocean-traveling UFOs the USA government has confirmed.
For a serious, level-headed analysis by a respected and qualified observer of the war and it's reasons, I would suggest listening to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University who was an advisor to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as to the U.N. Secretary General, and was on the ground in Ukraine in 2014 when the U.S. overthrew the Ukrainian leader. Here is a clip where Sachs was on Bloomberg News a week ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5m8m9RNxjw and he was shut down when he said the U.S. is a major suspect in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. For a more comprehensive analysis from Sachs, listen to the first 13 minutes of this video from a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrFPocqaE78&t=1102s
The U.S. media has been providing a narrative that is simply incomplete, if not untrue.
This from Jeffrey Sachs is for me a stunner, with new fundamental information, despite my reading everything I can get my hands on within time constraints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g57ViSqmRFM.
Thank you
Thank you! Very valuable insights.
Thank you, Francis. Hadn't seen that. Will watch it now.
This was also deeply illuminating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOePNsNFw0
Thanks for flagging Sachs to begin with! He's the kind of guide I am most looking for.
Now that Trump has come out publicly in support of a peace deal with Russia, I suppose that Democrats are going to attempt some kind of charge of treason against him. Their strategy of defeating Trump as a "Putin puppet" failed before, so they're doubling down again...only this time in the midst of an actual war with Russia.
I don’t even like Trump—I despise him in fact. But you are probably correct.
Big Brother Is Here.
Big Brother has been here for a while, but when I mentioned that someone wise pointed at an excellent quote:
Chuck Palahniuk "Lullaby" (2002): “Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched.”
Of course we are being watch, and sanctioned, too. Our Matt Taibbi has mentioned blacklists, it is good that they are mentioned, there is a whole industry providing blacklists to private employers.
The spectacle is something else. Like a fun house mirror version of The Truman Show, except it's not clear who is Truman and who is the audience.
Taibbi = The Truth
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out buddy!
Exacty! hahahaha
Please let me know when your subscription runs out so we can have a going-away party.
The day after you leave.
I have wondered if ‘ Gene Frankie’ is a Google LAMDA chat bot running a sub program of a hybrid Turing test and we are the contestants. Hahahaha. Even if “he” isn’t I have sneaky suspicion that AI is probably more ubiquitous than we are aware on this site. Just sayin’.
Please go.
It's all projection, accusing the other of what you yourself do. The Rubicon has been passed in the Ukraine. Today Russia decided to give NATO/Ukraine a dose of NATO military doctrine; attack civilian infrastructure which is the US modus operandi since the civil war in the US. No doubt that this was in response to the sabotaging provocation by the west. The Ukrainian Army has left itself exposed on the steppes with the rainy season about to start and the Russian blitzkrieg starting in the winter to come after. Currently both Russian and US nuclear doctrine precludes a nuclear war under forseeable conditions but like the first Queen Elizabeth used to say " I hate war because it's so unpredictable"! The US has proven itself to not be agreement capable and it's ruling classes seem to be as clueless as it's political leadership so I wouldn't count anything out. When the top general David Peteraus makes threats like a teenager I do get worried as he's "supposed to be" an adult.
The irony is that, according to Kiev, there were 11 civilian casualties as a result of today's strikes.
While that is 11 civilian casualties too many, that doesn't suggest a deliberate attempt to target civilians. Kiev's numerous artillery attacks on Donetsk, aimed directly at schools, hospitals and the the main shopping street of Donetsk, have resulted in far worse.
Up to now it's been obvious to anyone not blinded by the omnipresent western propaganda that Russia has been trying to run a limited war with minimal civilian casualties and minimal infrastructure destruction. The NATO proxy Ukraine has been doing the regular NATO program of essentially terrorism as in every American war since the Civil War. Hello, the British invented the concentration camps in South Africa where hundreds of thousands of "Boer "women and children died along with the black people considered sub humans by the British. General Kitchener who was on his way to oppresse the people of the colony of India got a lordship and a city in Canada named after him for that. Anglo-American people are not nice people and I'm one of them and I'm not proud of what we've done.
To me, the obvious part is that the only language that the United States and its vassals understand is that of force.
People are dying and I include the military on both sides. Infrastructure is being destroyed. Capital could be deployed in so many better ways is being squandered. All for no good reasons. Sadness and anger are my impotent emotions on this Thanksgiving day in our vassal state of Canada.
I got some news (second hand) from an acquaintance in Kiev. A lot of people want out of this war at any price, but saying so is a good way to end up in one of the SBU's torture chambers. A lot of propaganda of fighting to the end, but everyone is sick of it.
It would be great if people could say what they want openly and negotiate from there. Of course we can't even do that here. My wife who was 16 years older than me, a Schwartz Meer Deutsche grew up in the Ukraine and was very sympathetic to the long suffering Ukrainian people. Her father shot by the Russians, herself escaping to Germany while siblings wound up in Siberia until the USSR fell. The Ukrainians, Starved by Stalin, screwed by the jews and attacked by the nazis who considered them to be unter mensch. They've gone through more than their share of hell. My wife never hated the Russian or the jews that took her home or the Ukrainians who stole her families food. A better person than me for sure. People here have no clue about war's or oppression and I hope we never do and I wish we'd quit imposing hell on other people.
Petraeus is a serial failure at all things military and should be rotting in prison for violating multiple state secrets laws.
He’s only allowed in public so long as he parrots the party line.
I agree, highly overrated.
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
and the vaccine was never about preventing infection!!!
The Nazis had imbecilic bureaucrats who saw no problem with first blacklisting, socially destroying then murdering people to achieve their ideological aspirations, too.
Lots of people spoke up about the Bush years giving the acronyms free run of the country but the sheep didn't listen. They were afraid of the evil Mooslims just like they were afraid of the deadly virus and confined themselves to their own homes. But hey, they did get a revolutionary iPhone built by slave labor, so all's well that ends well.
i did have reservations about the Patriot Act but muted them because I believed that the Democratic party and the media would hold the Bushies accountable. And they did, mostly. Until they acquired that power. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
Back in the day I was pleasantly surprised but couldn’t quite believe how mainstream Democrats seemed to care about US war crimes under Bush. But it was almost entirely partisan blather, just a talking point. And once Obama brushed it aside and started committing his own war crimes the issue dropped off the radar. Now Democrats love some of the worst Bush era figures so long as they criticize Trump.
Totally blind sided me. I knew useful idiots like Code Pink and Cindy sheehan (remember them?) would be swept to the side in the name of "realism," but i never believed that the security state would be co-opted and redeployed as it has been.
But as I said - it is my fault for believing them. I should have known better.
Code Pink have never been useful idiots. The democratic party apparatus being somewhat more friendly towards them for a short while doesn't make them ones.
Code Pink has been very consistent on their anti-war stance ... pretty much forever, and hasn't stopped or started their advocacy along partisan lines (or any other lines). So in that sense they're not.
But notice they completely disappear from the public eye and their funding dries up whenever Democrats are in power. This is on them for being dependent on the technocratic NGO/media/institutional complex for outreach and promotion of their causes.
This is how you make a useful idiot of a non-partisan, single-issue political organization. You make them entirely dependent on partisan _infrastructure_. Then you can turn them on and off like a tap when it's convenient to your political faction.
This is also true of less desirable or helpful organizations like antifa. Because they rely on media cooperation for visibility and get most of their funding and legal defense through technocrat controlled NGOs and left-wing philanthropy, they vanish into the wind whenever a democratic president is in office and roar back to life when we have a republican. It creates the appearance that democrats restore sanity while republicans create strife, even though antifa would be perfectly happy to burn down buildings and throw things at police any time the weather is good for it.
What makes you think NGOs fund antifa? I'd love to know which NGO funds antifa and how that's known.
Re: Code Pink, they protested Obama as much as they did Bush. It just didn't get coverage outside of the farthest to the left of the leftwing online spaces. The nature of the organization is such that almost no funding is needed.
Well said but I disagree on them being "non-partisan" based, as you said, on their dependence on partisan infrastructure. That wipes out their credibility because they stand down (or are silenced) when their benefactors find them inconvenient.
No doubt they'd be among the first Anifa puts up against the wall if they were able to prevail.
thats exactly what is done to a useful idiot.
Sure, but useful idiots are defined by their lack of awareness about what is really happening.
When it concerns the most sensitive matters, our government is run not by its elected officials but by the military-industrial-national-security complex, behind the mask of the media-academic-corporate -party complex,. It operates entirely by the principle of "reasons of state"--secrecy and non-transparency, the mask behind which the most corrupt as well as ideologically delusional motives germinate and grow. Its principle is that that the state and its elites are not themselves subject to the state's own laws. We have returned to absolutism through the triumph of the administrative meta-state. This is the secret state (because it is mostly not visible) that is leading the fight for "democracy versus autocracy" across the world . . .
Fucking jackasses. Yeah go ahead, blacklist, unperson and debank everybody who disagrees with you. Create a whole class of people who have nothing left to lose and know who to blame for it.
Might not be the brightest thing to be sending all your military hardware to pointlessly prolong the war in Ukraine if that's the plan. You won't be collecting the dividends on increased LNG sales for a while. Sure hope you guys bought enough F-15s.
"Freedom's just another word...."
or sumpin like that.
I guess watching a Russian DJ playing New York style break-beats while being spied upon by the CIA could be considered 'support in any way'. Maybe I'll switch to Kanye and piss them off that way.
Joke is that Kanye doesn't suck. He used to run a design blog, dude has a real eye for the visual too.
Guess i had best stick with a Ukranian DJ though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg
I like vodka
obviously I am an agent provocateur.
I’m also a vodka fan however I stick to made in Texas Tito’s. I feel safer drinking made in America vodka. 😉