Sen. Tom Cotton: “Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: “Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.”
Cotton: “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”
Chew: “No, senator. Again, I’m Singaporean.”
Tom Cotton; Graduate of the Liz Truss School of Geography
Yes, the US is doomed, run by a demented elite and supported by voters just as lunatic in a sort of mass pathological narcissistic psychosis.
Have you heard of Secret Governance in the US?
This is a half-hour interview of Emanuel Pastreich, best known for his brief attempt at running for the presidency of the US on behalf of the Green Party in 2020. You can watch the whole interview, but our video starts at minute 25, almost at the end (so you might need to wait a bit for the whole video to download). That’s when Emanuel Pastreich makes the best, succint description of what is meant by the Secret Governance in the US.
These are the 3 measures imposed on the unsuspecting populace by the governing elites. 1. Rule through classified directives; 2. Rule through secret laws passed by the Congress; and 3. Rule through secret non-disclosure “agreements”.
This is how democracies maintain the facade of the Potemkin village where people believe in the “one man, one vote” democratic outcome. At one point in the interview, Pastreich attempts to bring into discussion the other form of governance – in the so-called authoritarian states – no less undemocratic, but the interviewer, the lovely Oksana Boyko, interrupts him mercilessly and moves the discussion back to the US system of governance.
Pro-Palestine rally in VicenzaOro Fair northern Italy crushed by the police.
via ZeroHedge
With establishment favorite Nikki Haley overtaking long-time runner-up Ron DeSantis in the latest polls, the mainstream media is going wild about the chances of the woman-warmonger toppling Trump somehow.
For context…
However, Trump’s massive lead is not stopping the deep state from doing everything it can to promote Haley, and that prompted Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson to expose some reality behind her sudden success.
Tucker starts by pointing out the dilemma Democratic megadonors face with Joe Biden’s declining popularity and Kamala Harris’s unpopularity, suggesting that these donors might be attempting to subvert the Republican Party by backing a candidate like Nikki Haley.
“Strip away all the outward characteristics, and Nikki Haley is identical in her priorities to Joe Biden and the people who back Joe Biden,” Carlson said.
Haley, whose campaign raised $24 million between October and December, has received recent major endorsements from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and Americans for Prosperity Action, which is backed by billionaire Charles Koch.
Mr. Carlson then shared a video of Ms. Haley during a town hall in Davenport, Iowa, in October.
During the campaign event, the former South Carolina governor claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the Hamas incursion of Israel on Oct. 7 and that Russian intelligence had helped aid the attack, which had simultaneously taken attention off the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict.
Tech entrepreneur Ramaswamy then weighed in on Tucker’s claims, concurring with the former Fox host that Ms. Haley is a “puppet” for the Democratic Party, and branding her a “Trojan horse.”
“I think the true puppet masters, the thing about them, is they’re fundamentally nonpartisan in nature,” the businessman said.
“There are a few things they care about: Keeping the foreign war machine humming is high on the list. Keeping the administrative state’s control of the United States is also high on the list. They found a much more convenient puppet within the Republican Party itself.”
“They have their core objectives, and Nikki makes for a far better Trojan horse to actually accomplish that objective than anybody else.”
Mr. Ramaswamy concluded that it is now “crystal clear” that the “bipartisan system” wants to narrow the GOP presidential race down to just two candidates: former President Trump and Ms. Haley.
“It’s not Biden, and it’s not even Gavin Newsom. It’s Nikki Haley within the Republican Party itself,” he continued.
“And I think that that makes for a very convenient front man because then they actually have absolved themselves from any allegations of partisanship or Democratic partisanship against [former President] Donald Trump.”
Finally, Vivek notes:
“The system is not going to let Trump win, they have their chosen alternative, ready to trot out.”
Watch the abbreviated interview below:Watch the full discussion between Tucker and Vivek here at TCN.
“There shouldn’t be a single Russian who goes to bed without wondering if his throat will be cut in the middle of the night.”
American General Mark Milley, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, made this appeal during a visit to Wiesbaden, Germany, to Ukrainian special forces who were working there with the American Green Berets, “in the hope of inspiring them to conduct operations in enemy-controlled territories.”
“You have to go back there and create a campaign on the home front,” The Washington Post source quoted him as saying.
German police arrested Israeli Jew Iris Hefetz for holding a sign reading “As a Jew and an Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza” in Berlin.
There is freedom in Europe, you can do whatever you want…
(Traces of humor may be present.) As evidence of bribery and corruption by the Biden family continues to mount, Democrat lawmakers in the nation’s capital have expressed heavy skepticism, saying they will need a lot more than just eyewitnesses, financial records, audio and video recordings, and admissions of guilt from parties involved for them to believe any of it.
“Nah, I’m not buying it,” said California Congressman Eric Swalwell.
“If you’re wanting me to believe President Biden and his family have been involved in a far-reaching money-for-favors scheme for years, you’ll need to show me a lot more than rock-solid, irrefutable evidence. If the Biden family was corrupt, I think I would have heard about it from my Chinese spy girlfriend.“
The Biden administration maintains absolute innocence, despite an ever-growing collection of evidence that would indicate otherwise.
“The President and his family have done nothing wrong,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who is a woman and also black and also gay.
“It’s completely normal for families to enrich themselves by selling political influence to foreign corporations and governments. Any assertion to the contrary is simply Republicans grasping at straws. Also, I will not be taking any more questions regarding bribery allegations.”
As rumors swirled that additional audio recordings of President Biden accepting bribes may soon be released, Democrats continued to brush them off.
“I see nothing wrong here,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“So he’s on tape taking bribes. It’s not like it proves he took bribes or something.”
At publishing time, Republicans in Congress said they were waiting on several more truckloads of evidence before beginning impeachment proceedings.
Authored by Eric Felten via RealClear Wire,
It was 100 years ago today – August 2, 1923 – when President Warren G. Harding suddenly died. He was in San Francisco, on the tail end of a cross-country promotional tour that had taken him as far as Alaska. It would have been an exhausting trip even for a younger man without a bum ticker. Then Harding contracted pneumonia along the way and, if that wasn’t enough, was laid low by some tainted seafood.
Any or all of these may have contributed to Harding’s demise. But no one knows exactly why or how Harding died when he did. The New York Times attributed the president’s sudden expiration to a “stroke of apoplexy.” Some have suggested heart failure. Others have joked that – battered by a landslide of scandal and humiliated by the corrupt schemes launched by the old friends he had raised to positions of power – Harding simply died of shame.
An autopsy might have helped quell rumors of foul play, but first lady Florence Harding refused to allow one.
There was one character in the mix who claimed he knew how Harding died. His name was Gaston B. Means and he claimed not only to know that the president was murdered, but also who did it. His assertions, to put it mildly, were suspect. But Means could spin a compelling yarn. And he was at one time credentialed. He not only had the badge of a special agent of the Justice Department, he had an office in the department.
Means persuaded no small number of Americans that Florence Harding was the killer. He claimed that she confided in him, confessing that she had poisoned her husband.
According to Means’ account (and it should be noted he was an inveterate liar), while he was a special agent for the federal government, Florence Harding tasked him with investigating her husband’s dalliances. Means claimed to have compiled a dossier detailing Warren’s affair with Nan Britton, a young Ohio woman. The Hardings had a knock-down, drag-out row over the child the president had fathered with Britton, Means claimed, adding that not long after that, the first lady took charge of giving her husband his meds.
Means would peddle the story for years, claiming the first lady was enraged that Harding fathered a child by a young woman, Nan Britton, smitten with the president. A notorious con-man, hustler and trickster, Means was also a special agent in the investigative agency that would morph into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For those shocked that today’s FBI plays politics and seems to struggle to shoot straight, it’s worth remembering that the agency is in some part a legacy of Gaston B. Means. Which is to say, misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. A fabulist of the first order, Means’ fabrications were interlaced with enough detail drawn from actual events that he managed to convince many that his tales were true. Books such as Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” and H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” were among the best-selling nonfiction books of 1930, but they didn’t come close to selling as many copies as Means’ memoir, “The Strange Death of President Harding.”
While Harding was still alive, Means became his own one-man crime wave. With the help of his badge, Means managed to have a hand in just about every crime common in the era: fraud, theft, blackmail, espionage, bootlegging, bribery, grift, graft, even murder. Gaston indulged in all these moral hazards and others, too. And he did so brazenly, with an indelible smirk on his pudgy face. Late in his epic career of flim-flammery, he even made a cameo in the Crime of the Century, the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Means absconded with $100,000 he promised to use in ransoming the doomed child.
As one writer put it, Gaston B. Means was “the symbol of American criminality and corruption in the gaudiest and most lawless era in the nation’s history.”
According to Means, Mrs. Harding was alone with the president for about ten minutes, at which point “It was time for his medicine.” Gaston claimed the widow confided in him: “I gave it to him … he drank it. He lay back on the pillows a moment,” closed his eyes and rested. But then the president bolted awake and looked straight into his wife’s face. He sighed and was dead.
Gaston asked her if she thought her husband knew in his last fleeting moments that she had poisoned him. “Yes,” Mrs. Harding replied, “I think he knew.” Means said he was the one who advised her to refuse permission for an autopsy on the president’s corpse.
This febrile tale of mariticide was quaint compared to the killing Gaston proved willing to commit himself. One of Gaston’s early scams: He fashioned himself a money manager and got his hands on the fortune of a widow foolish enough to entrust him with investing her fortune. When her money had all been siphoned away and spent, she was nearing the moment when her checks would bounce and Means’ theft would be exposed. He convinced her that some dangerous characters were out to steal her money and would kill her to get it. He had her hide in his hometown in North Carolina. He took her into the woods at twilight one evening, ostensibly to teach her to defend herself with a pistol. Alas, there was an accident. She was shot in the back of the head.
In 1917 Means was tried for the killing. He maintained the wealthy widow had stumbled and shot herself as he was kneeling to get a sip of cool water from a spring. Despite the preposterous story of what happened in the woods, Gaston was acquitted. He went to work for a private detective agency run by William J. Burns, for whom he had done some work before the U.S. finally entered the Great War. Well, the work wasn’t so much for Burns as it was for a German spy ring operating in New York. When Harding won the 1920 presidential election, he made Burns head of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, and Burns brought Gaston along with him. Which is how Means became a special agent.
1921 was a good time to be a grifter. Prohibition was the law of the land, and Means quickly put his position to profitable use, taking payoffs from bootleggers in an elaborate protection racket. He would later say that he kept two adjacent rooms at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York. In one room was a large goldfish bowl. Gaston would sit in the other; he would watch through a peephole as bootleggers delivered their graft, dropping $500 bills in the goldfish bowl, each at an appointed time.
In a scheme worthy of Watergate, Gaston arranged for henchmen to “go through” the office of Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette in search of something that could be used to blackmail him. Asked by a congressional committee what it meant to “go through” an office, Means said they would “find all the mail that comes in, all the papers, anything that he has got lying around.”
Harding’s old cronies had been known as the “Ohio Gang.” In the years after Harding died, their elaborate self-dealing was exposed. Most famous was the “Teapot Dome” scandal in which Harding’s secretary of the interior sold federal oil reserves to petroleum companies at a discount in exchange for kickbacks.
As Means’ schemes were exposed, he tried to protect himself by giving frequent testimony to congressional investigators probing the Ohio Gang. He would then recant his testimony and denounce the hearings as shams. Although these shenanigans didn’t keep him out of jail, they did set dubious precedents.
For example, current FBI director Christopher Wray is hardly the first to stonewall Congress. Mally Daugherty – brother of Harry Daugherty, Harding’s attorney general and a leader of the Ohio Gang – refused to appear before Congress on Capitol Hill even though he had been served with a subpoena. The Supreme Court waded into the controversy and affirmed Congress’ power to command testimony.
As ugly as our politics may be, we do not live in a uniquely deranged age. Political prosecutions and contrived investigations have been all too common in our country’s history.
“The Strange Death of President Harding” was a notorious hoax. Yet it paid handsomely to the hoax artist. That’s what misinformation looks like.
With his death, 100 years ago today, Harding didn’t hide the misdeeds of his administration nor that of his friends. Many of the “Ohio Gang” ended up dead, some perhaps by suicide, some perhaps not.
As for Gaston B. Means, he spent his last years in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth in western Kansas. The crime that finally caught up with him was particularly callous. When the Lindberghs’ infant was kidnapped, Means went to one of Mrs. Lindbergh’s rich friends and told her that he could rescue the baby if only he had $100,000 with which to pay off the kidnappers. She gave him the money and then some. He pocketed it. Convicted of embezzlement and grand larceny, he was sentenced to 15 years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. He served only five years of that time, dying behind bars in 1938, eventually to be forgotten by a nation that fears the depravity of its generation is unique.
Eric Felten is an investigative correspondent for RealClearInvestigations, reporting on government corruption. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and previously a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University. Felten has been published in Washingtonian, People, National Geographic Traveler, The Weekly Standard, Daily Beast, National Review, Spectator USA, and Reader’s Digest.
Macron in 2020 to the Lebanese: the revolution does not happen by anyone’s order; people make it (do it).
Macron in 2023 to the French: Protests are not legal and no one has the right to riot against people’s representatives.
There are reports of “Tactical units driving through the streets of Marseille.”
What the Twitter user is saying above lines up with France 24’s report:
Maybe this is why France needs military vehicles on the streets of Paris.
Is France a third-world country?
* * *
Update (1235ET):
President Emmanuel Macron’s government struggles to contain social unrest across the country.
French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said overnight chaos has resulted in 2,000 cars burned, 500 buildings damaged, hundreds of businesses looted, and violent clashes with police. He said over 800 people were arrested, with nearly 250 officers injured.
Earlier, Macron blamed social media for fueling ‘copycat violence,’ and said state agencies would ask Twitter, Snapchat, and Tiktok to ban the most “sensitive content.”
Riots and vandalism continued throughout the day Friday. Darmanin said buses and trams would be shut down by 9 pm local time nationwide to suppress the overnight unrest.
Here are more scenes of the chaos:
* * *
The police killing of a 17-year-old during a traffic stop on Tuesday has unleashed three consecutive days of social unrest across France.
Bloomberg reports more than 600 people were arrested Thursday night into Friday, with a majority of them between the ages of 14 and 18.
