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Posts posted by Paul Rigby
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3 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:
I agree that this is the proper context in which to view today’s Republican movement, the genesis of it. Having said that, I still think we make a mistake when we conflate the voting public who support Trump and the broader Republican agenda with the Koch brothers and their ilk who are funding this turn to the right. The constituency is broad, and some of it is certainly racist, homophobic, anti - Semitic, Christian fundamentalist. But there’s a huge swath of the public that is reeling from the long term effects of Capitalist driven globalism designed to make the rich richer still. If trickle down economics resulted in a river of support for the working class in their daily lives I’d be all for it. But instead what we see is a continuous attack on them, denying them adequate education, health care, housing, jobs. That’s the fodder that puts the current Republican Party on equal footing with the multi cultural Democratic Party. And to blame these less privileged citizens, to demonize them for supporting Trump, misses the essential point that they have been grievously injured by these long standing policies of favoritism for the rich. It doesn’t matter who caused it, it matters how they feel about it. Today’s Democratic Party is not their hero, despite the rhetoric.
Globalism didn’t have to be so devastating. It’s a good idea in theory. But who benefits? Cheap goods from overseas doesn’t mitigate the loss of quality of life.At last, someone who gets it. Democrats could always try something novel, like, I don't know, listening to working-class Americans. And perhaps, God forbid, mixing with them now and again:
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Biden Taps 'Literal Arms Dealer' Mira Resnick for Top Israel Policy Post
"Genocide Joe's swan song is to institutionally entrench our support for Israel and make it as difficult as possible to disentangle it," lamented one observer.
Aug 23, 2024
Brett Wilkins
Peace advocates on Friday voiced alarm over the Biden administration's selection of a senior official who has worked to speed the shipment of U.S. arms to Israel as the State Department's point person on Israel-Palestine policy.HuffPostreported that Mira Resnick, the deputy assistant secretary of state for regional security in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, has been tapped to oversee Washington's handling of issues related to Israel and Palestine. In her current role, Resnick's office supervises around $40 billion in annual U.S. arms transfers.
Using a critical nickname for U.S. President Joe Biden, journalist and podcast host Emma Vigelandsaid on social media Friday, "Genocide Joe's swan song is to institutionally entrench our support for Israel and make it as difficult as possible to disentangle it, which the old fool views as romantic and righteous."
Over the past 10-plus months, the Biden administration has approved more than 100 arms sales to Israel worth billions of dollars. Earlier this month, the administration greenlighted a new $20 billion arms package for Israel.
The announcement of the package—which includes dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tens of thousands of 120mm mortar shells, over 32,700 tank shells, and 30 advanced missiles—came just days after Israeli forces used at least one U.S. bomb in an airstrike on a Gaza school where forcibly displaced Palestinians were sheltering, killing more than 100 people including women and children.
As criticism mounted over Israel's assault and siege on Gaza—which has left more than 144,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and has flattened most of the coastal enclave while stoking deadly famine and the spread of preventable diseases including polio—Resnick helped expedite the flow of U.S. arms to the key Middle Eastern ally.
She also worked with the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan wants to arrest for alleged war crimes including "extermination," to allow private citizens to donate equipment to the Israel Defense Forces.
Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned earlier this year over Biden's support for Israel amid a war for which the key ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, told HuffPost that Resnick's appointment "reflects a doubling down on the administration's determination to continue to provide unconditional material support for Israel's genocidal campaign against civilians in Gaza."
American University of Beirut history professor Zeead Yaghi decried the Biden administration's appointment of "a literal arms dealer."
Last month, the Biden administration ended a two-month pause on the shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel despite the frequent use of U.S.-supplied weapons by Israeli forces to commit alleged war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Biden has suspended transfers of 500- and 2,000-pound bombs manufactured by aerospace giant Boeing over fears the devastating munitions would be used in airstrikes on Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than a million Palestinians had sought refuge.
Israel has dropped at least hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs—which the U.S. military avoids using in civilian areas because they can destroy entire city blocks—on Gaza, including in an October 31 attack on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp that killed more than 120 civilians.
The U.S. is by far Israel's biggest arms supplier, providing around 70% of Israeli arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
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1 hour ago, Karl Kinaski said:
Maybe they should join BRICS? 😉
Yes, please
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CNN instantly confirms RFK Jr.'s unwelcome truths about the contemporary Democrats and their media accessories:
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2 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:
How did Brexit work out for the British?
Rather better than it did for Germany, the economic heart of the America's EU empire, and the most rapidly de-industrialising country on the continent - all thanks to the US sabotage of Nord Stream, courtesy of the worst case of eco-terrorism in history.
Worse still, we can now hold directly accountable those who make policy in our name, unlike those the US appoints to run the EU in its interests. Some of us still prefer elections to secretive cabals as the basis of electing leaders, which no doubt incurs the displeasure of apologists for the Democrat party, the oligarchs' play-thing.
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Must Watch: RFK Jr Drops 'Reality' Mic On Dems, Suspends Campaign - "Who Needs Policy When There's Trump To Hate?"
by Tyler DurdenFriday, Aug 23, 2024 - 08:05 PMThe 2024 presidential election race is about to take its next unexpected turn...
“Democrats have become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money wanting to abandon democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.
I left the party to run as an independent...
The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for VP Harris based upon nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors.”
"A Chicago circus that is based on NOTHING. Who needs a policy if you hate Donald Trump?"
"How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?" Kennedy asked.
"We know the answer: They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn't how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies."
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21 hours ago, John Cotter said:
So why haven't the federal authorities, which have been so "diligent" in their pursuit of Trump in other matters, instituted a thorough investigation?
Not all rhetorical questions are equal. Occasionally, you meet one that is, in Mendelssohn's description of Kant's work, "der alleszermalmer" (the all-crushing).
Then again, is it fair to criticize the inter-agency for not investigating a matter it has so much covering-up and spinning to perform first?
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Nothing affirms "lone gunman" like multiple encrypted overseas accounts:
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On 2/10/2008 at 1:35 PM, Paul Rigby said:
It is an article of faith among leading anti-alterationists that Mary Muchmore a) definitely did shoot film footage of President Kennedy’s execution (despite her explicit denial to the FBI); and
that this brief film sequence was shown on WNEW-TV, New York, on Tuesday, 26 November 1963.
When asked for both a specific timing and print sources for this certainly, however, said advocates have a marked tendency to become a little vague, or just plain conflicting. Responses for the showing time range from “morning,” to “just after midday,” or “afternoon” – of November 28, according to a recent bizarre contribution from Josiah Thompson – with appropriately imprecise citations of an unnamed New York newspaper report, of unspecified title on an unknown page, which appeared either on the afternoon of 26 November, or a day, possibly two, later. All of which is odd, because there are contemporaneous print sources for the showing of an assassination film by WNEW-TV on Nov. 26. The trouble is, as we shall see, that they don’t quite reinforce the simple-minded story the anti-alterationists would have us believe.
I first came across a dating of and location for the Muchmore film’s debut in Barbie Zeliger’s Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which directed the reader – see p.68 n7 (p.233) - to the December 2, 1963, edition of Broadcasting: The Businessweekly of Television and Radio (Vol 65, No 23), and a piece entitled “A World Listened and Watched.” On p.37, I found the following:
So far, so good for the anti-alterationists.
Better still, the same edition, on p.69, carried a full page advertisement from UPI. Curiously, however, the advert made no mention of the film-taker’s name. Here it is, in full:
This reluctance to name the film-taker, as noted, struck me as curious: It was not without precedent, though, as we shall shortly see.
Further reading unearthed an even earlier print source for the claim that the Muchmore film had debuted on WNEW-TV, New York, on Tuesday, Nov 26. The lengthy report, entitled Pictures of the Assassination Fall to Amateurs on Street, was authored by Rick Friedman, and appeared over three pages in the Editor and Publisher edition dated November 30, 1963. The germane passage ran as follows:
This seemed such unequivocal confirmation of the anti-alterationists’ version of events – I didn’t flatter myself that all of them had missed the item - that I wondered what on earth stopped them from citing this source with cheerful regularity. Then I turned the page.
Friedman’s article was spread over three pages. The passage on Muchmore and WNEW-TV appeared on p.17, the second of them. The third and final page was to be found distantly on p.67. As I read it, I realised at once why Friedman’s article could not be adduced by Thompson, Mack et al: Friedman had proceeded to commit heresy. The Muchmore film was not the only film of the assassination to have made it onto American television on November 26, 1963:
This couldn’t have been the Muchmore film, which, even allowing for changing mores, could not conceivably have been considered “too gruesome,” even in 1963. Nor, to his limited credit, did Friedman seek to pretend it was. But what was this film, and who had taken it? Was there another assassination film in circulation in the US on November 26? Indeed there was, according to the Milwaukee Journal of November 26:
The tale is not quite finished, though. There was, I discovered last year, an even earlier print source for a film shown on WNEW-TV on Tuesday, November 26. Again, note the absence of an attribution to a named film-taker:
As with Friedman’s piece, so, too, with Doan’s report – it didn’t quite tell the tale the anti-alterationists peddle. And begged the question: Was it really the Muchmore film shown on WNEW-TV? Or was it the first public version of the Zapruder, the one seen and twice described by Dan Rather on November 25? Had the films been switched, with the Z film (public version one) hastily withdrawn, and the Muchmore – or merely frames from it - substituted? What there any evidence to support such a hypothesis? To my surprise, there was.
On the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News, 4 star edition, on Tuesday, 26 November 1963, under the headline “Man Who Came to See JFK Makes Tragic Movie,” there is the following blurb above 4 stills, which take up the rest of the page:
Below lay from 4 frames from…the Muchmore film.
Something very interesting was going on with the assassination films on November 25-26, 1963. What it was, and why, offers the potential to shed important light on much more than just the history of the films.
On 2/12/2008 at 2:43 AM, Len Colby said:AP, "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3:
Dallas, Tex.-AP - A strip of color movie film graphically depicting the assassination of President Kennedy was made by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8 millimeter camera.
Several persons in Dallas who have seen the film, which lasts about 15 seconds, say it clearly shows how the president was hit in the head with shattering force by the second of two bullets fired by the assassin.
Life magazine reportedly purchased still picture rights to the material for about $40,000.
("The film also was being distributed by United Press International Newsfilms to subscribing stations. WITI-TV in Milwaukee is a subscriber, but will reserve judgment on whether to show the film until after its officials have viewed it.")
From Broadcasting's edition of 25 August 1958, page 64:
"Contracts for complete UPI broadcast news packages are sealed by officials of TLF Broadcasters Inc., and the wire service. The new contracts for five Time-life radio-tv stations include Movietone News Film, Unifax Facsimile, and Broadcast Newswire. One hand for the signing were (l to r) Howard J. Black, Time Inc. executive vice president, and LeRoy Keller, UPI vice president and general sales manager (standing), Mims Thomason, UPI vice president and general business manager, and Weston C. Puller Jr., Time Inc. vice president for broadcasting. Stations covered are KDYL-KTVT (TV) Salt Lake City; KLZ-AM-TV Denver, WTCN-AM TV Minneapolis; WOOD-AM-TV Grand Rapids and WFBM-AM-TV Indianapolis."
(The relevant photo, for which the above is the accompanying text, was too large to post.)
To confirm how well the combination of Lucepress and UPI-Newsfilm synchronized, consider the proximity of their Chicago centers of operation. All three facilities lay within a security friendly, and distinctly handy, walking distance. How much easier to set up a coordinating office charged with preventing discrepancies and, if necessary, responding to any freshly occurring problems, such as, for wild examples, the necessity to terminate the distribution of the film-as-film; or break the plates in response to a changed selection of images.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04873x/?sp=399&r=0.699,0.147,0.304,0.157,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 KICH through Z
Image 399 (of 480)
United Press International
news & administrative 430 N Mich 467-5050
news pictures 430 N Mich 644-8320
news film div 161 E Grand 644-8890
coml photography div 430 N Mich WH 4-4733
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04873x/?sp=384&r=0.732,0.015,0.304,0.157,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 KICH through Z
Image 399 (of 480)
Time & Life Bldg 540 N Mich DE 7-5860
Time Magazine
advs & editorial ofs 221 NLoSal AN 3-2860
circulation & subscription dept 540 N Mich WH 4-4720
production ofc 330 E Cermak DA 6-1212
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04874x/?sp=208&r=0.475,0.16,0.607,0.314,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 A through KICA
Image 208 (of 418)
Donnelly RR & Sons Co printers
Corporate Hdqtrs 2223 SoPkwy 431-8000
Chicago Mfg Div 350 E Cerkak 431-8000
Did the agency set up a coordinating center in the midst of UPI-Newsfilm, Time and R R Donnelley’s? It may not have been necessary. The four-man Life delegation dispatched from New York to Chicago, ostensibly to provide oversight only for the magazine and its printer, included John Dille, co-author with a 1959 Polish defector, Pawel Monat, of Spy in the US (Harper & Row, 1962), a work designed to both stoke Cold War paranoia, and, perhaps less obviously, bolster the counter-intelligence link between Angleton and Papich. As part of the book’s promotion, it produced one of the more surreal moments of CBS’ 1963 output
530117 Gene Plotnik, The Story Behind Newsreel TV Films (Billboard, 17 & 62)
17: “Movietone maintains four processing centers: New York, Washington…Los Angeles” and Chicago
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9 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:
Your concern about Israel baffles me, Paul, given your support for the most anti-Palestinian president ever.
What do you think of his son-in-laws' ideas for resorts on the beaches of Gaza?
How about Putin pulling out of Ukraine but keeping Crimea?
Trump's policies on Palestine were repulsive and wrong. They likely will be again when he returns to the White House. But the scale of crimes committed by the Biden-fronted administration dwarf those of Trump. US policy under the enlightened ones is fast approaching the size of atrocity undertaken in Indonesia by another, earlier Democrat administration.
Caitlin Johnstone missed this distinction, but nevertheless captured an importantt truth, when she wrote:
'The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans will kill a million Palestinians and say they’re doing it so Jesus will come back, whereas Democrats will kill a million Palestinians while making noises with their mouths like “ceasefire” and “two-state solution”.'
https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone/p-147988126
As for Ukraine, the US has sabotaged every peace negotiation - most recently, that in Qatar, this time in the form of the suicidal Kursk border raid - in pursut of regime change in Moscow, its motivation from the Maidan coup in 2014.
Meanwhile, the world's worst state purveyor of violence claims a new victim:
What’s Behind Regime Change in Bangladesh
Violent regime change in the South Asian country of Bangladesh unfolded rapidly and mostly by stealth as the rest of the world focused on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, growing tensions in the Middle East and a simmering confrontation between the US and China in the Asia-Pacific region.
The implications of the successful putsch, carried out by US-backed opposition groups, stands to impact South and Southeast Asia, as well as create instability along the peripheries of the two most populous nations on Earth, China and India.
Because of Russia’s close relations with both China and India, Russia itself stands to be affected as well.
Who Was Protesting and Who Was Behind Them?
It was US government-funded media, Voice of America, in a 2023 article admitting the role the US ambassador to Bangladesh himself played in backing opposition in the South Asian country.
The article would admit in a photo caption that US Ambassador Peter Haas, “is popular in Bangladesh among pro-democracy and rights activists and critics of the Sheikh Hasina regime.”
The same article would admit to steps the US had already taken to pressure Bangladesh to conduct future elections in such a manner as to produce the desired outcome Washington sought, noting:
…the U.S. government announced that it had started “taking steps to impose visa restrictions” on Bangladeshi individuals who are found complicit in “undermining the democratic electoral process” in Bangladesh.
The article admits that the Awami League (AL) party, which had ruled in Bangladesh up until the recent, violent protests, had accused US Ambassador Haas of interfering in Bangladesh’s internal political affairs and specifically of supporting the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as well as street violence on its behalf.
The “Muscle”
While the Western media portrayed the unrest in Bangladesh as “pro-democracy” demonstrations led by “student protesters,” the BBC in its July 2023 article, “Bangladesh PM blames political foes for violence,” would obliquely admit that the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement, including its student wings, were behind the violence.
Since Bangladesh gained independence, it has banned Jammat-e-Islami on and off for decades, depending who held power, with the organization accused of having committed extensive acts of violence.
Voice of America, republishing an Associated Press article, would note that, “most of the senior leaders of the party have been hanged or jailed since 2013 after courts convicted them of crimes against humanity including killings, abductions and rapes in 1971.”
It should be noted that outside of Bangladesh, other governments have also designated Jammat-e-Islami as a terrorist organization, including the Russian Federation.
The US State Department, for its part, has published a report as recently as 2023 whitewashing the violent history and enduring threat the organization poses to Bangladesh, portraying Jammat-e-Islami instead as the victims of government “abuses.”
While the Western media has reported on the ban of Jammat-e-Islami, none of the reports have attempted to deny its involvement in the most recent protests.
The “Face” of the Protests
Just like other protests organized by the US around the globe, it appears a conglomeration of violent organizations like Jammat-e-Islami along with so-called “civil society” groups funded by the US government as well as supporters of US-backed opposition parties took to the streets, each performing a vital role.
Violent street fronts create violence in a bid to escalate protests, civil society poses as the “face” of the movement both on the streets and across information space, while US-backed political parties use the resulting chaos to maneuver themselves into power.
Fulfilling the role of providing a “face” to the global public were a number of students from Dhaka University’s political science department including Nahid Islam and Nusrat Tabassum, both of whom have their own profile on the US and European government as well as Open Society-funded Front Line Defenders database.
Because many around the world are beginning to understand and look for evidence of US government involvement in regime change around the globe, the US has been more careful about how it supports such activities. While Nahid Islam, Nusrat Tabassum, and other core leaders of the “student” protests have no known, direct connections to the US government, Dhaka University does.
Its department of political science in particular, from which these “leaders” emerged, regularly conducts activities with Western-centric organizations and forums. The department is staffed by professors involved in US government-funded programs, including the so-called “Confronting Misinformation in Bangladesh (CMIB) project”. This includes professors Saima Ahmed and Dr. Kajalei Islam, who both serve as part of the project’s head team alongside US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grantees and US State Department Fulbright scholars.
Considering how thoroughly Dhaka University’s political science department has been infiltrated by the US government through the extensive money and scholarships made available through the NED and Fulbright, the emergence of “students” serving US interests by posing as the face for US-backed regime change in Bangladesh comes as no surprise.
A Familiar Template
The use of violent extremist-led street fronts and so-called “student protesters” to destabilize targeted nations, oust targeted governments, and help install into power US-backed opposition parties fits into a wider global pattern admitted to by the Western media itself.
In 2004, the London Guardian admitted to US-sponsored regime change across Eastern Europe targeting Belarus, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as Georgia in the Caucasus region, stating of the unrest in Ukraine at the time, that:
…the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
The same article would also claim that, “the operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”
The same “template” would be used again across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, according to the New York Times in its article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.”
The NYT would admit:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
The article would mention the NED and its subsidiaries by name, as well as the US State Department and its partners from among US-based tech companies like Google and Facebook (now Meta), all as being involved in applying the same “template” described by the Guardian in 2004.
The 2011 unrest across the Arab World and the finally successful overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 both featured the use of US-backed extremist organizations. In Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda were utilized, while in Ukraine, neo-Nazi militias fulfilled this role. Both networks of violent extremists have since played extensive roles in the resulting wars following US regime change in these respective regions.
With the US openly pressuring Bangladesh to conduct elections according to Washington’s standards while its ambassador in Dhaka openly supported the opposition groups seeking to oust the Bangladeshi government, it is very clear this “template” has now been successfully applied to Bangladesh.
Who Do the US-Backed Protesters Want in Power?
Associated Press (via Time magazine) in its article, Bangladesh Protesters Pitch Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to Lead Interim Government, would report:
A key organizer of Bangladesh’s student protests said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was their choice as head of an interim government, a day after longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned.
It would be the “student leaders” drawn from Dhaka University’s political science department who proposed Yunus’ name, and thus it should come as no surprise that Yunus himself is both a US State Department Fulbright scholar as well as a recipient of various awards furnished by the collective West to build up his credibility.
This includes the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to other US proxies around the globe, including Aung San Suu Kyi in neighboring Myanmar.
Yunus was also awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and the US Congressional Medal in 2013. On the website of Yunus’ organization, the “Yunus Centre,” in a 2013 post titled, “Dr. Muhammad Yunus, first American Muslim recipient of Congressional Gold Medal,” he is bizarrely referred to as an “American Muslim,” despite no indication he has any actual American citizenship.
The Implications of Regime Change in Bangladesh
Despite the obvious backing and affiliations all involved in the protests in Bangladesh have with the United States government, it should also be mentioned that both the BNP and Yunus himself have cultivated ties with American adversaries, including China.
Unfortunately, empty rhetoric about “democracy” and “freedom” has filled global information space regarding Bangladesh’s political crisis rather than any discussion of actual policy, foreign or domestic, the opposition may seek to implement if they take power. However, the deep involvement of the US in removing a sitting government from power in Bangladesh and Washington’s deep infiltration of Bangladesh’s education and political system bodes poorly for both Bangladesh and its neighbors.
The US has obvious motivations in creating chaos along China’s periphery. With a violent conflict already raging in Myanmar, Bangladesh’s neighbor to the east, extending that chaos to Bangladesh itself serves to destabilize the wider region even further. It specifically opens the door to derail joint projects between China and Bangladesh and create another potential chokepoint along China’s so-called “String of Pearls” network of ports supporting its extensive maritime shipping to the Middle East and beyond.
It also places pressure on India. With the prospect of a political crisis on its own border growing, New Delhi may be pressured into concessions to the US regarding its relationship with Russia and its role in buying and selling Russian energy to circumvent Western sanctions.
Whatever transpires in the weeks and months ahead in the fallout of US-backed regime change in Bangladesh, it is important to understand just how deeply involved the US still is all around the globe, even in countries that often are omitted from daily headlines and geopolitical analysis. It is also important to understand the necessity for greater awareness of how the US interferes around the globe and how it can be both exposed and stopped.
Successful US interference anywhere around the globe helps further enable US interference everywhere else.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
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John, Bobby ... and Marilyn
Exploring an Infamous Kennedy Conspiracy
Jul 27, 2024Over the years, it has come to my attention that a very large number of people have embraced the narrative that Bobby Kennedy and his brother conspired to murder Marilyn Monroe, whose body was found naked in her bed on the morning of August 4, 1962, with the official cause of death labelled ‘self-induced barbituate overdose’.
Recent Netflix films like ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes” released in 2022 have added fuel to the fires that have helped cure millions of Americans of their romantic memories of John and Bobby Kennedy, who were featured as the purported organizers of Marilyn’s untimely murder.
Covert Action Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, with an article titled ‘New Evidence Suggests Marilyn Monroe Was Murdered and LAPD Covered Up Murder,’ and even my good buddy Hrvoje Morik recently embraced this narrative.
How should those who may be on the fence regarding this topic deal with the argument that the Kennedy brothers, so long beloved heroes of America, murdered Marilyn Monroe?
How would we know where to start forming a responsible judgement of the actress’s untimely death and the Kennedy role therein, when lies permeate the information landscape with intelligence agencies often supporting contradicting sides of popular narratives to many topics of history?
A Matter of Method: Storytelling
Everyone loves stories.
Storytelling represents a huge power that resonates to the basic needs of the soul. But obviously, this power that awakens our imagination, gives us access to the deep past as well as the deep future, while touching the deepest fabric of existence, is often highly misused by powerful forces which have seen fit to treat storytelling as a form of magic to charm the minds of the masses into controlled cages.
So, as we begin to evaluate the available facts, I advise we begin with the following three basic criteria for judging which facts to discard, which facts to hold tentatively and which facts to embrace during the course of our inquiry:
1) Who are the sources being cited to pass judgement on any topic?
2) What evidence is being brought to the court of my internal judgement? (ie: Is what is being presented as evidence something that can be validated, or based simply based on hearsay, self-referential testimonials and gossip?)
3) Do these facts mesh with a larger contextual dynamic which we can know shapes history, or do these new facts create dissonances… and if they create dissonances, then what form do those dissonances express?
Are those dissonances legitimate (ie: which would mean that their existence demands that we put our entire worldview into question, or are they illegitimate and gossip-based?)
In the case of the popular narratives of "RFK and JFK killed Marilyn”—which have become an industry unto themselves with Netflix documentaries, PBS documentaries and countless books and articles that find themselves on New York Times best sellers lists, I can say that those narratives are fishy as hell, and raise tons of alarm bells.
A few red alarms of note
For one thing, the actual cited evidence that “Bobby killed Marilyn” sits atop:
1) Anecdotal testimonies from a closed array of sources whom we should believe because we can't imagine any personal profit motive to them and
2) The supposed “hard” evidence of tape recordings of Marilyn's bugged house, which no one has seen or heard except the guy who bugged her house (Fred Otash) who was both a contractor for the FBI and CIA, while also working for the Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa.
FBI/CIA contractor and mob advisor Fred Otash
Commenting on the 650 interviews collected by Oxford-trained BBC superstar Anthony Summers (aka: the youngest BBC producer in history,) which were used in the Netflix film ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe’, professor Sarah Churchwell wrote, “the interviews often repeated second or third hand accounts of what someone else said, and neither Summers nor his sources is particularly dispassionate.”
BBC Producer Anthony Summers
Indeed, Summers has a lot to lose by allowing the edifice of Bobby’s murder of Marilyn to fall—especially since he himself has played such a leading role constructing the narrative since his 1985 New York Times best selling book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe”.
Then we have her secret diary entries which no one has seen except for anonymous sources acquired by the strange figure of Mike Rothmiller, of whom much more will be said below.
Neither do we know who this secret source was, nor has anyone but this secret source actually read these supposedly-existent diary pages, but we are expected to believe in their existence, because the storyline for this elegant drama simply doesn’t work without them.
Within her secret diary, a motive is supposedly provided for the question, ‘WHY would the Kennedy brothers want Marilyn Monroe dead in the first place?!’
Marilyn’s Invisible Diary Claims
We consumers of soap opera drama are promised that these supposedly-existent diaries that no one has actually seen PROVE not only the sordid sexual dalliances enjoyed by the Kennedy Brothers with their mutual mistress, BUT that they also contain mind blowing information which the Kennedys revealed to Marilyn amidst their pillow talk.
Some of those claims include, but are not limited to:
1) JFK's plans to topple Castro
2) JFK's drug addiction
3) RFK's controlling hand behind the invasion of Cuba
4) JFK's intention to increase troops into Vietnam
5) JFK's directing role overseeing the assassination of President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and President Diem of South Korea
6) Bobby Kennedy's role overseeing Murder Inc (ie: the global assassination complex that was managed by US intelligence, paramilitary orders, pentagon, and organized crime etc)... oh, yeah, and
7) RFK's plans to oversee an inside job killing American civilians to justify an invasion of Cuba.
Setting the Record Straight
Here, I call bullshit.
These are quite ironic claims, since John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were in fact THE ONLY GUYS who were against the toppling of Castro, and who worked like hell to subvert the Bay of Pigs invasion (which was itself set into motion by the Dulles brothers during President Eisenhower's last weeks in office).
And rather than expanding US engagement in Vietnam, John and Robert Kennedy fought tooth and nail against the entire Deep State of the USA on starting a new forever war outlined in his June 10, 1963 speech, ‘What Kind of Peace Do We Seek? ‘
To this end, Kennedy introduced NSAM 263 in October 1963 to begin a full withdrawal from Southeast Asia; he was assassinated one month later.
As early as 1962, he had been coordinating this extraction with President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam who was murdered on November 2, 1963… only three weeks prior to JFK's own murder.
JFK was pissed when President Diem was murdered by the same CIA that was to oversee his own assassination very soon, and yet, which we are expected to believe was itself controlled by the Kennedys to kill their enemies (as those who promote the Marilyn secret diaries profess)...
On this last point of Bobby Kennedy’s supposed support for a new "Maine incident," (aka: a type false flag to justify the invasion of Cuba akin to what had been done to justify the Spanish American war in the Philippines in 1899)… that was actually Operation Northwoods, which was proposed NOT by the Kennedys, but rather by General Lyman Lemnitzer, and which had the support of the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA.
Horrified at this insidious proposal, JFK rejected Northwoods, and soon fired Lemnitzer.
Operation Northwoods memorandum (13 March 1962)
After General Lemnitzer was flushed by Kennedy for proposing this atrocity, the general found a shiny new position as the head of NATO, working closely with the same unreconstructed Nazis of NATO's secret armies, managing the actual murders of Diem, Trujillo, Lumumba, Mattei AND JFK and RFK and MLK etc.
Gen. Lemnitzer
In ‘Preserving the Presidency’, historian Anton Chaitkin writes,
“Lyman Lemnitzer, defeated in the Cuban Missile Crisis and sacked as Joint Chiefs’ chairman—but not incarcerated—went over to Paris as head of NATO military forces. Lemnitzer inherited a continent-wide covert apparatus of Mafia killers, Hitler Nazis and Mussolini fascists, French colonial diehards, and white mercenaries fuming about the loss of Africa.
This was the “stay-behind” network he had seen constructed after World War II by the British Secret Service, with help from Dulles and logistical support by himself. It was not until October 1990 that Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti rocked the political world by revealing the existence of this covert network, which came to be called after the name for its Italian section, “Gladio.”
Fred Otash’s Invisible Wiretaps
Now we have debunked some of the claims which are supposedly made by those few who have seen Marilyn’s secret diary.
But despite being debunked, many true believers will still assert that this diary must exist, or else why did Bobby Kennedy allegedly go to her home on the day of her murder? After all, according to all of the “Kennedy killed Marilyn” narratives, we are told that Bobby was at her home because her house was bugged by a private investigator. In these recordings that apparently exist, we are told they contain audio of Bobby threatening Marilyn’s life unless she gave up those compromising diaries.
Utilizing the art of circular reasoning at its finest, one non-existent piece of evidence (aka: Marilyn’s diary) is “proven” to exist “because” of another non-existent piece of evidence (aka: the wiretapped recordings of her house).
To restate this fact explicitly: NO ONE has ever heard these supposed wiretaps, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed.
In fact, the ONLY source professing they exist is private investigator Fred Otash. This is the same dirty Hollywood P.I who had been contracted by the CIA, worked for the mafia and famously stated, “I’ll work for anybody but communists. I’ll do anything short of murder.”
Monroe biographer April VeVea noted that Fred Otash had never said a word publicly about bugging Marilyn’s home until Anthony Summers published his own sensational book tying the Kennedys to her murder, twenty-three years later.
“In 1985 Otash first came out with his claims that he had wired Marilyn’s home, had heard her killed, etc. These tapes have never been released…. Only after many people had come out of the woodwork did Otash come out and say that he had bugged her apartment (see Anthony Summer’s Goddess, 1985) as well as her home on 12305 5th Helena Drive. There has never been any bugging equipment found...”
So now let’s shift gears a bit and have a look at another principle minister of this narrative named Mike Rothmiller.
Mike Rothmiller: Spook for Hire
Over the years, Mike Rothmiller has written over 26 books, and is the global pre-eminent authority on this narrative since the early 1980s.
His official biography boasts of having worked for the FBI, CIA, US Secret Service, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence and of course Scotland Yard, Mossad, Interpol and the Canadian RCMP.
Mike Rothmiller
His bio also notes that "he has conceived and directed" global intelligence operations focusing on anti-terrorism.
As I wrote in A Brief History of Domestic Terrorism: From Cointel Pro to 9/11 and Beyond, not a single case of ‘naturally emerging’ terrorism (either domestic or foreign) can be found in any case over the past half century without a coordinating hand of western intelligence agencies managing operations from behind the scenes.
Mike Rothmiller is a New York Times darling whose books are all NY Times best sellers, and he organized and testified at the "secret grand jury" trial of the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, which of course made no mention of MK Ultra, close range bullet holes in the back of RFK's neck, or any higher conspiracy outside of the "Sirhan Sirhan lone gunman" line.
In a recent interview, Bobby Kennedy’s son stated that "the people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father."
He also described Sirhan’s trial as “really a penalty hearing. It wasn't a real trial. At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it's unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.”
Additionally, Mike Rothmiller has been sold as "the Serpico" of LAPD whose exposes of corruption have resulted in shutting down entire sections of LAPD intelligence branches in the early 1990s.
Why am I supposed to believe that this was a good thing? Should I presume that Rothmiller’s thesis that all of the LAPD intelligence agents were corrupt and ignore the fact that men like former LAPD intelligence officer Mike Rupert (who exposed CIA controls of narcotic operations in America) didn’t exist?
I also can't ignore that Rothmiller has been rewarded massively by becoming an executive of three SONY departments, a producer, a host of PBS and ESPN while overseeing dozens of documentaries and television shows, making him a vast influencer of the modern zeitgeist. Rothmiller also played a key role in Netflix films on Marilyn Monroe and other historical topics, and we shouldn't be confused about the nature of Netflix, nor its founder and president, the grand-nephew of Edward Bernays.
NOW, let me say that I positively agree that Marilyn was murdered.
Her psychiatrist and involvement in MK Ultra connecting Monarch operations is a likely reason, and amidst the voluminous ‘Bobby Kennedy killed Marilyn exposes’ illustrated by Otash, Summers Rothmiller or Netflix, I have yet to encounter one reference to MK Ultra or its Tavistockian management, or the broader satanic takeover of Hollywood that was fully underway during the 1960s.
The Battle over the Soul of Hollywood
This combat that Marilyn was enmeshed within is never discussed in any of the gossipy narratives going viral these days. It is no secret that the Kennedys were heavily invested in this fight over the soul of Hollywood during these precarious years, as I outlined in Kirk Douglas, Trumbo and JFK: When Hollywood Patriots Resisted the Deep State.
It is a fact that Bobby Kennedy had communications with Marilyn while Fox Pictures was suing her for breaching her contract and creating a new production studio to give her control over her creative work, but why presume this communication was evidence of a sexual relationship?
Describing Marilyn’s struggle to battle Hollywood studios and her pioneering role creating her own studio, Maureen Lee Lenker writes,
“It [Marilyn Monroe Productions] gave her a nearly unmatched power, allowing a star of her stature to control her own career rather than being at the mercy of a capricious studio and its mogul. Already weakened, the studio system could not withstand losing its hold on its most valuable assets, its stars… Monroe even kickstarted a trend, with stars such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and Barbra Streisand following in her self-determining path in the years to come.”
Bobby and John Kennedy also interfaced closely with director John Frankenheimer, with whom they gave access to White House grounds to film Seven Days in May (documenting the planned military coup in the USA then being led by Lyman Lemnitzer).
Bobby was also close to Judy Garland, who starred in the Oscar winning picture of 1960, Judgement at Nuremburg, which exposed Wall Street bankers behind the rise of Hitler and eugenics prior to World War II.
Yet for some reason, all of this is ignored when we are fed juicy morsels of gossip about the deviant sex lives of both Kennedy brothers and Marilyn Monroe.
Judy Garland and John F. Kennedy at a Democratic National Convention.The Evidence Again
When evaluating the evidence surrounding the lives and deaths of both Kennedy brothers, I can see two brave and cultured young American leaders who were assassinated at the prime of their lives, with high level coordination between the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service. After their mortal bodies were killed, both young men then suffered a second wave of character assassinations, which I can see are clearly tied directly to the FBI, CIA and British intelligence.
The narratives pushed by these agencies utilize a slimy technique of citing evidence and sources that no one has seen or heard, but is assumed to exist by anonymous sources who themselves are tied to the FBI, CIA and British intelligence to varying degrees.
Perhaps someone might read what I have written above and still state: BUT dozens of people wouldn't tell a lie so consistently about Bobby and John Kennedy, would they? And there are so many details to their narratives that no one could make such details up, could they? Why would anyone lie about something like this?
I'm sorry, but that sort of thinking resulted in a lot of people getting killed through false trials during centuries of inquisitions, witch hunts, Jacobin terror trials and McCarthyism, so I now have enough common sense to NOT play any games that demand that I give my convictions over to narratives that have gossip, anonymous sources, or evidence that no one knows exists at their core.
I have already conducted a similar study into the popular claims that “Martin Luther King Jr. was a rapist, sex maniac,” and so far, everything I have read about the “Bobby and John Kennedy sex fiend, imperial murderers of Marilyn Monroe” theories fall apart when I apply a bit of discernment to the thesis.
Supplementary Reading
The World Desperately Needs the Wisdom of Bobby Kennedy Now More Than Ever
For Martin Luther King Day: Let us End his 2nd Assassination
Preserving the Presidency: JFK and the Military Industrial Complex
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Kamala’s National Security Adviser Points to Continuation of Biden’s Russia Policy
What would a President Kamala Harris’ foreign policy look like? She’s already signaled that Israel policy will remain unchanged. How about Russia?
For more insight there we can take a look at Philip Gordon, currently serving as Harris’s national security adviser. He’s been around for decades. He’s a regular at the Munich Security Conference. And he is widely expected to succeed Jake Sullivan as national security adviser should Harris win the presidency.
While it’s highly doubtful that the Kamala team is sitting around a table hashing out foreign policy that they think is in the best interests of all the American people (they likely do precious little in the way of big-picture decisions), their ideological makeup is likely a representation of what US oligarchs want. And judging by Gordon’s track record, it appears the American oligarchy has no intention of using Biden’s exit as an opportunity to change course or give up on Project Ukraine. So who is Philip Gordon?
He started out serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton. He then moved to a senior fellow position at the Brookings Institution from 1999 to 2009 where he founded the Center on the United States and Europe. Gordon was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2013. He then went on to serve as special assistant to then-President Barack Obama and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region until 2015.
Author James Mann writes in “The Obamians” that Gordon and others like him “represented the generation of Democrats who learned how to run foreign policy during the 1990s. They were eager to show that the Democrats were not a bunch of pacifists, that they understood national security issues and were willing to use American force where necessary.”
They just think they’re smarter about it. For example, there was a time when the Obama White House touted NATO’s role in toppling Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as a vindication of the decision to “lead from behind.”
Gordon joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015 as a senior fellow focused on U.S. foreign and national security policy and stayed there until hitching himself to Harris in 2020 — first as foreign policy advisor to her disastrous campaign and then as National Security Advisor to the Vice President.
In a vice president’s office that has churned through staff, Gordon has been a mainstay and is among the select group of national security officials, which includes national security adviser Jake Sullivan and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, to take part in the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
As a longtime survivor in Washington, it’s unsurprising that Gordon is an embodiment of all the violent orthodoxy that oozes out of the Blob, such as unwavering support for Israel and the indisputable belief that China is not only a threat to the US, but the biggest one.
On the issue of Ukraine where there isn’t quite consensus (the diehard Russophobes want to keep escalating while the China hawks want to hand the bag to the Europeans so they can focus on China), Gordon believes the US can do both.
A recent Politico piece describes how European Atlanticists, nervous that they’ll be forgotten if the US focuses too much on China and Asia, love themselves some Philip Gordon. He “speaks four European languages, wrote his thesis on Charles de Gaulle and even translated a book by the notoriously irascible former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.”
Best of all, Gordon loves soccer, writes Politico:
In June 2012, Gordon even took then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to see a UEFA Euro championship semi-finals in a bar filled with Germans, after a dinner in St. Petersburg with Sullivan and then-U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
Quite the entourage. If you dig through all the fluff, though, here’s the real money section of the whole Politico profile piece:
To this day, he’s in regular contact with the European Commission. Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democrat member of the German Bundestag, trusts that Harris’ adviser still thinks “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power” and welcomes that he shares his “criticism” of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for not sending long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
The fact that Gordon is among those pressuring Berlin to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine places him among more hawkish, wreckless war cheerleaders.
Let’s not forget that the Taurus missiles have a range of roughly 500 kilometers, which means that they can hit Moscow. At the same time, they’re reportedly difficult to operate, the Ukrainians wouldn’t be able to do it, so Bundeswehr personnel would be called on to do so. That would mean Germany is openly firing missiles into Russia, and one can imagine all the consequences that would entail. Here’s German opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht lambasting the warmongers in Germany back in March when it looked like those advocating for using the Taurus might carry the day:
So has Gordon lost his mind? You wouldn’t know from the Politico puff piece, which casually mentions his criticism of the German government for not going to war with Russia and moves right along to friendly quotes from former US ambassador to Russia and big advocate for WWIII Michael McFaul. He concludes that if Gordon becomes Harris’ national security adviser in a Harris administration, “Europe will have an ally.”
Here’s probably a better spot than any to insert the old Kissinger quote that is almost obligatory when dealing with US foreign policy these days: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
If we pair Gordon’s time in the Obama White House and its “lead from behind” mantra with regards to Libya with his current insistence that Germany should be launching Taurus missiles into Russia, well, that should be awfully concerning for Germans and Europeans in general. And how ironic is it that this is the person who European diplomats would greet as a major friend in a Harris administration?
While Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken aren’t expected to keep their jobs in a Harris administration, Gordon would be expected to seamlessly take the place of the former. From Politico:
We reported on initial skepticism about Harris earlier this summer, mostly due to Europeans’ unfamiliarity with the current vice president. But her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a running mate and the likelihood that Phil Gordon, a confirmed Europhile, would become her national security adviser, appear to have quelled some jitters.
Back in 2018, Gordon co-authored a Council on Foreign Relations report with the Russia hardliner Republican Robert Blackwill. They called for the kitchen sink to be thrown at Russia, including sanctions, weapons, an undying commitment to Ukraine and Europe — basically what the US has done since. The reason Gordon was calling for such approach wasn’t just the situation in Ukraine, but because “of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
So Gordon is also a purveyor of the misinformation that Russia was behind Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss. [1] He and Blackwill proudly announced that, “If this package of measures sounds like a prescription for a new Cold War with Russia, it is.”
Gordon’s position has not changed. Here he is driving that point home more recently:
Of course, “enduring” could mean a few months in DC, but for now the Harris team — or its benefactors — are sticking to that line.
What about “America’s dad,” vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the other figure Europeans are breathing a sigh of relief over? Maybe he could be a voice of sanity? Keep looking.
Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova says that among American governors, “Walz is definitely one of the leaders of such support and a reliable friend of our country.”
Walz was one of the first US governors to condemn Russia in 2022 and issue an order requiring that state agencies terminate existing contracts with Russian entities and refrain from entering into any such future contracts. He’s been on board ever since.
In conclusion, all signs are that a Harris administration’s Ukraine policy would be a continuation of Biden (as would its Israel policy). In at least one way, it’s even worse because it’s throwing away another opportunity to take an off ramp. We’ve heard a lot about how the Biden team just wanted to drag the whole sorry affair across the election finish line. Now, the money behind Harris is announcing that even with new faces the losing and dangerous strategy will remain unchanged.
Notes
[1] Gordon is also a big believer in dubious chemical weapon allegations against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Not only that, but he is critical of one of Obama’s few successful foreign policy decisions — the one where he chose not to bomb Syria over the cooked intelligence that Assad crossed the chemical weapons red line in 2013. Gordon told The Atlantic in 2016 that “we should have bombed Assad.”
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13 hours ago, John Cotter said:
Thanks for posting these videos, Paul.
I’ve watched the first hour or so of the video of the interview. The gist of it is that it’s literally beyond belief that so many professional security personnel could behave in such a blatantly unprofessional manner regarding the same event. The point that I made in my previous post about Cheatle’s refusal to disclose the number of shells on the roof was also mentioned.
Clearly, there’s a psychological game going on here which is essentially that of the “big lie”:
A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Here's a comic version of this psychological phenomenon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldbIEMys9oA
The manner in which the mainstream media and the establishment generally have “moved on” as if nothing extraordinary happened in Butler Pennsylvania last month seems part of the same psychological operation.
John,
Thinking out loud, this amateur historian instinctively struggles with any notion of the uniqueness of the Trump assassination attempt lies, from scale to rapidity of moving on. Isn't this what we commonly find, from Lincoln to Hinckley?
How did Stanton, for example, get away with announcing rewards for the apprehension of all Lincoln conspirators, only to prosecute merely the low-level operatives, with any number of obvious leads ignored or excised?
Didn't the coup attempt against FDR receive scant media attention (except for a Philadelphian paper and New Masses)?
Was the scrubbing from the post-assassination MSM of JFK's conflicts with CIA, described by many of the same media in the years prior, any different from what we have witnessed following July 13, when not a single MSM outlet has recalled Trump's well-documented battles with the inter-agency?
I fully agree with you about the brazenness of the current lying, and with your analysis of its purpose: It just seems to me that Hitler got his notion of große Lüge from his Wall Street backers, who already had plenty of practice in its implementation.
Trust things are a little better across the Irish Sea than they are on this side of it!
Paul
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On 8/9/2024 at 11:12 AM, Paul Rigby said:
Karl,
I agree! Have you ever seen a more half-hearted attempt by LEO to thwart a crime?
The "inter-agency's" broad reach plainly extended to LEO. Looking at the passivity of the plain-clothes guys, I'm reminded of Mosby's Rangers providing a shield to the fleeing John Wilkes Booth, who was plainly intended to arrive at Richmond, a plan only thwarted by his leg-break.
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One of the great mysteries about the January 6, 2021, events is the lack of curiosity by the FBI about who planted the pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC headquarters. Amid all of the available CCTV video and surveillance technology exploited by the justice department, their transparent unwillingness to identify the pipe bomber has always been a dog that did not bark.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for why DC and federal law enforcement have been incurious, points to law enforcement actually planting the bombs. New CCTV video seems to show exactly that.
Shortly after 12:51pm a DC police SUV appears next to the park bench where the pipe bomb was discovered. [Video Below] A man with a bag exits the SUV, points to the bench, pulls up his right coat collar to obscure his face from the camera located across the street, then walks to the bench with the bag. The “pipe bomb” device allegedly was found at 1:05 p.m. by a plainclothes officer from the Capitol Police.
.
Darren Beattie Reporting HERE – Julie Kelly Reporting HERE
I am not going to repeat the reporting above, the timelines therein, or the granular details painstakingly outlined. The research is solid, informative and accurate. Instead, my focus is about “why” the pipe bombs were planted.
Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy (House) along with Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence (Senate) did not want the January 6th certification of electors challenged. If you suspect the 85 million votes for Joe Biden might have been manufactured (mail-in ballots), then you understand the DC motive to avoid any electoral challenge that might have resulted in state level legislative inquiry and/or vote counting review.
To avoid the challenge to the electoral certification process, a lengthy and very formal process where the Senate must separate from the House as each state is formally questioned/challenged and a debate/vote on each state’s set of electors takes place (minimum 2 hours each state), an EMERGENCY process triggered by the House Speaker (Pelosi) was needed. That’s where the pipe bombs come into play.
♦ We have previously detailed the motives HERE.
The J6 pipe bombs were the insurance policy, in the event the feds (Ray Epps et al) couldn’t get the crowd to comply with the FBI provocations.
In essence, if no one stormed the Capitol, the finding of the two pipe bombs would have then been the emergency needed to stop the electoral process, evacuate congress and trigger the emergency session. Which explains why the FBI had/has no interest in the DC pipe bomb suspects.
As it turned out, the DC crew (Pelosi et al) didn’t need the “pipe bomb emergency” because the manufactured riot (opening the doors to the Capitol building etc.) worked. The J6 emergency need was fulfilled by the “riot” within the Capitol building; the bomb narrative was not needed.
Julie Kelly – […] Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.
The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.
And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.
From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits.
“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
Roughly six hours later, McConnell got his way. Cowed by the crowd of largely peaceful Americans allowed into the building by Capitol police, most Republican senators backed off the audit proposal. McConnell, echoing hyperbolic talking points about an “insurrection” seeded earlier in the day by Democratic lawmakers and the news media, gloated. “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he declared on the Senate floor after Congress reconvened around 8 p.m. “This failed attempt to obstruct Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our Republic.”
Congress officially certified the Electoral College results early the next day. (read more)
That’s how the whole process happened.
Everything around the J6 events was set up by a small group of Marxists within government who are intensely ideological and supported by systems of Law and Order they created, purposefully to control the outcomes of their manipulation.
The group then used the J6 Committee to further the false narrative, manufacture additional false claims, control the information flow and present themselves as victims within an insurrection effort they manufactured out of whole cloth.
The J6 Committee was to the J6 story, as Robert Mueller was to the Trump/Russia collusion story. The system controls the outcomes, hides the activity, and engineers false narratives (lies).
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On 7/23/2024 at 5:35 PM, Paul Rigby said:
Includes Cheatles's unexpected reference to "Continuity of Government."
George Webb fleshes out Cheattle's "Continuity of Government" gaff:
https://georgewebb.substack.com/p/the-cheney-sanction-how-trump-was
Vote Trump for JFKA info?
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
How Democrats Make Republicans: RFK Should Be A Wake Up Call For The Party
Authored by Jonathan Turley,
The withdrawal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the presidential race and his endorsement of former President Donald Trump was yet another extraordinary moment in an election that has been anything but predictable.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-democrats-make-republicans-rfk-should-be-wake-call-party
Only a year ago, it would have been unthinkable that a sitting president would be effectively forced off a ticket and replaced by a candidate who did not secure a single vote for president.
Now, the nephew of John F. Kennedy and son of the Robert F. Kennedy has not just withdrawn from the Democratic Party but endorsed the Republican nominee.
Amidst all of the claimed “joy” of the Democratic National Convention, there is a sobering reality that is being ignored by the ecstatic press and pundits: this is how Democrats make Republicans.
There is an old expression that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”
Irving Kristol explained the neoconservative movement was built by Democrats “mugged by reality.”
Kennedy has not become a Republican but rather joined the roughly half of Americans now identifying as independents. While this country is solidly under the hold of a duopoly of power in the two main parties, only 25% of the country identify as Democrats, and 25% as Republicans.
Kennedy’s departure from the Democrats has been mocked in the press. However, when he spoke on his withdrawal, many of us who have been lifetime members of the party identified with his remarks.
I come from a politically active liberal Democratic family in Chicago.
I spent much of my life working for liberals since I first came to Washington as a Democratic House page in the 1970s. I did stints on the Hill or on campaigns with Democrats ranging from Rep. Sid Yates (Ill.) to Sen. William Proxmire (Wis.) to Mo Udall (Arz.). I even worked on the campaign and ran for delegate for RFK Jr.’s uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Then the party changed.
Where once they defended free speech, Democrats have rallied behind censorship and blacklisting of those with opposing views. They have sought to block dozens of Republicans from ballots, including former President Trump. To make matters worse, they have done so in the supposed name of democracy.
Those actions were raised by Kennedy in his powerful and poignant withdrawal speech. He detailed how the Democratic party moved to stop him from running against President Biden in the primary, including efforts to block him from ballots. It was an ironic moment. After harassing candidates like RFK and Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the Democratic leadership then simply installed their choice at the convention in an unprecedented bait-and-switch.
There could have been a substantive primary that exposed the diminished mental state of Biden and allowed for a democratic choice on the best nominee. Instead, the Democrats prevented such choices from being made and selected a leader with all of the transparency and deliberation of a party Congress in China.
Kennedy said that the Democratic Party has virtually shoved him and other voters into the arms of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Kennedy observed that “I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.”
He said that his party was the one that championed free speech, government transparency, and opposed unjust wars. “True to its name, it was the party of democracy.”
He said that the party has turned its back on all of the values that once defined it. For former Democrats like Kennedy, running on “joy” is no substitute for these profound changes in the party.
Indeed, the DNC bordered on the creepy as speaker after speaker sold the idea that, if voters could just swallow the Harris candidacy, they would immediately experience joy like some political prozac commercial.
It is not clear whether the red pill/blue pill pitch will be enough, or whether Kennedy’s endorsement will turn the critical votes in swing states.
However, the DNC showed how Democrats make Republicans. The unrelenting identity politics and claims of defending democracy (while opposing democratic choice) only reaffirmed for many that there is no longer a big tent in the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy.
There is a serious question whether John F. Kennedy would recognize or support the current Democratic Party. It now rejects many of his core, mainstream values.
His nephew highlighted the irony of how the party not only worked to block the ability of opponents to challenge President Biden but worked to “conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.”
Even the Washington Post recently admitted that “the 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline.”
However, the Post failed to note that Vice President Kamala Harris was part of that inner circle. Indeed, she has been touting her close work with Biden in her campaign.
There is little recognition that, if true, it means that Harris, the White House, and leading Democrats lied to the public about Biden’s mental decline for their own political interests.
For Kennedy, it was all too much “and, most sadly … in the name of saving Democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth.”
There is little “joy” in that.
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Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).