15 Comments

I'm really pleased with the audio versions. I sometimes get to hear the piece before I get to read it, though I always go back to read it afterwards.

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Matt, you're wasting your time here, you have much bigger fish to fry. The entire world is in a huge financial bubble, tied to petroleum, neo-imperialism, etc., and yet you're down in the mud with this culture war stuff. You have a platform, use it!

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At its heart, the Steel Dossier/Russiagate was something like an attempted coup. Certain federal bureaucrats felt that Trump was unsuitable to be in charge of their mighty and magnificent imperial apparatus and they tried to derail his campaign to be elected president. Once elected they continued to try to subvert him and get him out of office. That's a big deal and I'm glad we have some journalists including Matt who are following the latest chapter of this story.

All the same I admit that I'm also tired of it and feel there are bigger issues to deal with. Such as in my home town of Glasgow last week, the trusted representatives of our democracies said, interpreting their oracular pronouncements as a whole, that humanity will commit suicide before it does anything that slows the rate of capital accumulation.

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Some of us, including me, spent a lot of time belittling Fox viewers. Because they were being lied to by people telling them what they wanted to hear. And they were too dumb to see it no matter how many times we tried to show them. In a way it makes us worse. We should have seen this for what it was and punished those that lied to us. It’s not too late. But turning your attention to other matters is cowardly

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It's a mugs game. This very conception of 𝙪𝙨 and 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢 is misleading. To categorize 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢 according to what products of the punditry industrial complex someone consumes and 𝙪𝙨 as superior to them is gross. Same thing defining us/them according to voting choice between a shit sandwich and a giant douchebag. And I ask myself, is this kind of thinking is really all that different from categorizing by skin color or other heritable phenotype traits?

I try to consider what purposes this kind of thinking serves for myself? i.e. what use is it to me? And I like to compare it with the commercial and political purposes it serves for others.

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There's an excellent article in the latest Tom Dispatch by Alfred McCoy regarding the transition of global dominance from the US to The People's Republic of China, when sometime before 2030, the PRC will surpass the US and eventually have an economy 50% larger than that of the US, all sped up by first our short term and misguided belief that the US would mold the PRC to its liking by granting them PNTR and then entry into the world trading order(just had a brain fart forgetting the organization's name) and the disastrous, pointless wars of the last 20 years as the PRC used its resources far more wisely, all of this coming to naught as the PRC's reign will be short lived, a couple of decades and will eventually be replaced by some new global order which will end national sovereignty due to the catastrophic effects of global climate change, resulting in mass migrations no nation on its own could control.

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Based on your summary, McCoy doesn't seem serious and I'm guessing he invested in the new cold war. There's a lot of money and power and careers and budgets and org charts and media hangers-on in cold wars.

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Completely wrong. His record is anti US militarism and the empire it is trying, and failing to maintain.

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It's only human nature to want to say "I told you so" after having to listen to the MSM do such a horrible job on the Russia Gate hoax for over four years, making fools of themselves as they went, lemming like, down the same rat hole of conjecture and hoping it's true thinking, only to end in the shit show it became.

Don't these people realize that it was precisely their kind who made the rise of Trump possible and could well result in him being reelected in 2024 precisely because of the fake news they've promoted?

No, they don't; they are incapable of self reflection and will ultimately no more be held accountable for this fiasco than they were for their reporting on free trade, WS bailouts, the surveillance state, Iraqi WMD or the wars of the last 20 years, which, to hear them tell it, were outstanding successes marred only by a poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan.

They are servants of power, well paid transcribers of BS from their masters who are far too polite to ask anything resembling a follow up question lest they lose access to the elites they identify with.

Yes, there are far more important matters than this, but US politics is ultimately no more reality based and serious than pro wrestling. Certainly Trump has proven this; a con man not just to his followers but also to his detractors, who mistook personality and character for policy. In this, Trump is no different than fake rancher/ country boy Bush or Hope and Change/ Constitutional Lawyer Obama.

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People supported and voted for Trump for a lot of reasons besides the existence of a lot commercial pundits that suck.

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I know as many Trump voters as I do establishment Dem or Repub voters. I am neither. Most of them were former Bush supporters who want you to forget that fact and the wars they once supported but turned against once Shock and Awe turned into Just Another Botched War. These same people turned a deaf ear to my warnings for the last 30 years about the danger of outsourcing production to the PRC, blaming instead lazy Americans unable to compete against countries like the PRC, all that conveniently forgotten in a shameless virtue signaling performance of now being against that which they readily accepted for decades when they thought all the consequences were positive; cheaper prices allowing them to buy more crap.

What gave Trump the winning edge in 2016 was the dismal record of the establishment, whose icon was Hillary and whose water was carried by the MSM hacks who spent the years of his presidency doing their Joe McCarthy impersonation over the Russia Gate hoax. Nearly all his critiques of the established order were correct, though his sincerity in some is questionable at best.

He's a con man telling some unpleasant truths; the wrong man saying mostly right things, but for largely personal gain, delivered in a style that is less stilted and coached than his establishment hack opposition.

If he doesn't Super Size himself to death, he should regain the presidency. Not to worry; nothing will fundamentally change.

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same thing happened with WMD and with the same people back in 2002.

‪that’s what happens when 2% of the population owns the media (and social media). you the Zionist PRopaganda Network... ask Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders how it works.‬

interesting how it’s never mentioned.

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Today I sent the following email to family and friends. Some who voted for Biden:

For four years of the Trump Administration we were filled, almost everyday, with stories of Trump's collusion with the Russians. It was non-stop propaganda in an attempt to over throw a duly elected president. Now, however, the truth is coming out. Our FBI has proven to be a corrupt organization filled with unelected career bureacrats who will do anything to protect their power and rich government salaries and perks. Our main newspapers, i.e. Washington Post, New York Times proved to be aiding and abetting the Russiagate hoax. Hell, they even won Pulitzer Prizes for their lies. Below is a long article which will enlighten you if you want the Truth. You can listen and read it at the same time. Worth your time.

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And people are surprised that so many doubt the official COVID narrative. The wonder is how many people (or sheeple) seem to believe it

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It seems odd that so many people pronouncing "pundit" as "pundint" these days.

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