NakedCapitalism.com's Yves Smith summed the situation up perfectly:

"It is remarkable to see the Democrats, in less than a generation, become close-minded, authoritarian bullies. Taibbi makes clear that he’s not only gained political enemies by not toeing the Democrats’ tribal lines, but also lost friends. But in America, what passes for friendship is often shallow"\

Authored by Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies

Matt Taibbi testifies before Congress, March 9, 2023.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.

This may appear to be a piece about Matt Taibbi. It’s really a piece about why the Democratic Party has such a hard time winning against competition as palpably soft as modern Republicans.

Matt Taibbi often takes time on Twitter to answer honest questions from regular people, normal voters and citizens, unlike many journo-celebs who only talk to each other. Sometimes (actually often), other regular people comment on the exchange.
[...]
‘Character Assassination’

The self-styled left (and some of the actual left) is so closed off to Taibbi at this point that he’s fair game for any sort of attack. “Which means Republican,” as in the tweet above, is actually mild.

As Ross Barkin put it in a 2021 New York Magazine profile:

“Few journalists, in polarized 2021, divide the New York-D.C. nexus more. Taibbi is viewed in more liberal quarters with increasing suspicion bordering on outright disdain, a remarkable development for a magazine star once considered Rolling Stone’s successor to Hunter S. Thompson.”

“Outright disdain” indeed. “Brutal” is more accurate.

In an entirely gratuitous and dishonest insult, Democrat Stacy Paskett, the ranking member of the House committee before which Taibbi testified, called him “this so-called journalist.”

That led the way for every Democrat to follow.

The rest of the session was, in the opinion of those not hateful of Taibbi, “character assassination.” This from Democrats, from all of them, his former natural base.

Where is this coming from?

His Former Friends

It got worse outside the committee. In an episode that’s painful to retell, Emma Vigeland of Sam Seder’s Majority Report (a person and a show I’ve long admired) said as part of their coverage of the hearings:

Don’t worry. The hearings will continue with the help of once-venerated reporter Matt Taibbi, who now is a PR person for Elon Musk and Twitter. This is Matt Taibbi’s characterization of his press releases on behalf of Elon Musk, which he calls ‘reporting’.

The tone, the dripping disdain, is a shocking reversal from a show that had hosted him frequently for years.

Vigeland played a clip of Taibbi saying that the Twitter Files was “by far the most serious thing I’ve ever looked at.” Then, discussing his highly praised work on the 2008 financial crisis, Vigeland comments:

I think that’s an interesting tactic because that kind of undercuts his own past work [on the 2008 crisis], right? Which I guess doesn’t really matter to him. He doesn’t give a damn since he’s cashing in. [emphasis mine]

That’s quite an accusation, entirely speculative, against a man Sam Seder has had on his show regularly for years, and a person he may have once considered a friend (though perhaps no more).

To be fair to Vigeland, I’m not sure she means what she says.

She may just be piling on, playing Follow the Democratic Leaders, mimicking their vicious slanders with one of her own. Like when someone in a mob says “Hang the man,” and those around him join in.

(Of now-lost relationships, I’m reminded of this sad statement from an earlier Taibbi piece:

“Allred then went on MSNBC, where my former friend Chris Hayes with a straight face suggested he didn’t see a ‘government angle’ in either the Twitter Files or our testimony — both of which were more or less entirely about that issue.”

My former friend.)

Back to the Majority Report. An off-screen host, picking up on Vigeland’s remarks, then adds this about why Taibbi worked so hard on the 2008 financial crisis:

To be honest I’m not surprised Taibbi has this perspective [on the financial crisis] because…

I’ll pause while you think about what’s about to be said.

Why did Taibbi choose the crash to write about? Journalistic interest? Because corruption mattered to him? Or to set himself up later for Republican love?

You guessed it:

…if you look at it from his perspective, the financial crisis was good for him. He got this great reputation that Republican Congress people can cite about how great of a journalist he is. Made a lot of bones out of that as the Gonzo journalist. And I read all that stuff too. I don’t remember much of it. It doesn’t stick with me. I mean, he called Goldman Sachs the ‘vampire squid’ — I guess that was useful [sic].

I will say like I’m troubled looking back on it, and I would like to get a reassessment of his work on this by someone who’s not a capitalist, because he sums it up August 5th 2013 on Twitter: “My whole argument against modern Wall Street has been that it’s anti-capitalist perverted by incestuous ties to the state.” Sounds like libertarian.

And then he said April 11 2016: “I don’t know many people who would describe what’s gone on with these too-big-to-fail banks since 2008 is capitalism.” So like it’s not a surprise from his perspective because, like I said, [his] whole reputation was made as all these people were being thrown out of their homes. And him being a child of wealth, he has no ties to that. Also the type of people that are paying him now, Elon Musk did really well from the government response to the financial crisis, which was to flood the zone with cash.

He goes on (and on).

Consider the accusations here.

Matt Taibbi, a “once venerated” journalist, only wrote about the financial crisis because it “was good for him” and gave him “this great reputation that Republican Congress people can cite.” He doesn’t care about people who suffered from the crisis since he’s a “child of wealth” and “has no ties to that.”

What a wicked man the man must be!

Yet who thought so at the time? If Vigeland is right, how foolish they must feel now to be so fooled. I’ll bet they’re looking today for signs they missed of Evil Matt Taibbi dressed up as good. Surely his mercenary heart must have shown through then.

Coverage in the mainstream media was no better. Huffington Post:

Matt Taibbi Smirks Through House Committee Grilling About ‘Twitter Files’ The independent journalist refused to confirm he made money from the project, saying instead that he “spent money he didn’t have before.”

The song, it seems, was everywhere the same. Taibbi should be despised. Not disagreed with; not rationally engaged. Despised, even — and especially — by his former friends.

I ask again, where is this coming from?

Where This Is Coming From

To answer that question seriously, consider the following premises.

I think the first four accurately describe the thinking of mainstream Democratic leaders since the humiliating presidential loss of 2016:

1. Modern Republicans (leaders, media, and crucially, their voters as well) represent the worst threat to the American Republic since the Civil War.

a) Or possibly since the Founding. Southern Confederates didn’t wish to institute Hitlerian reforms that would eliminate democracy from the governance of the state.

2. Any act by any individual or organization that advances the overall Republican Project, inadvertently or not, is as dangerous as the Project itself.

3. Because the Republican Project is evil, its supporters are evil — or in the most generous cases, deeply stupid.

4. Stopping the Republican Project means stopping all supporters and adherents, be they willing or not.

5. (Taibbi addendum 1) Matt Taibbi is a supporter, willingly or not, and therefore must be stopped.

6. (Taibbi addendum 2) Because his support is probably not inadvertent — Seder’s hosts and the Democratic committee members are certain his motive is money, a sell-out to advance Elon Musk — destruction of his entire career is a reasonable response. After all, the whole of American democracy is at risk; literally all.

I don’t think any of those statements, stark as they are, misrepresent the Democratic Party position.

Everything I’ve observed since November 2016 confirms them all.

The Problem in a Nutshell

Statement 1 could well be true.

I believe it myself, though about the leadership only. (I have other thoughts about Republican voters.)

But does the rest follow from that?

Does it justify the destruction of free speech, to take one example, in order to preserve it? (If you doubt that’s what’s on offer, click the link.)

And even if it does, even if the means are justified by the end, the problem is that this Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work.

It won’t blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent’s obvious and fatal flaws.

Mainstream Democrats run roughly even with Republicans except in protected districts. They certainly ran roughly even with Donald Trump in the only venue that counts, the Electoral College. And Democratic leaders are the reason that this is so. Will all this vitriol make them more attractive, or less?

Letting Republicans Lead the Revolution

As I wrote elsewhere, in each presidential cycle the voters have only two choices.

It’s the Party of the Status Quo…

…versus the Party of Fake Revolt against the status quo…

If you don’t like the status quo, you have no one to vote for, just people to vote against.

What do you think would happen if Democrats ran a candidate of Real Rebellion, a Bernie Sanders, say, à la 2016, against the candidate of Pretending to Care what happens to suffering voters?

Would real rebellion against predatory rule by the rich “trump” fake rebellion financed by the rich?

Of course it would. Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.

But Democrats, the other party of the rich, won’t take that course.

Which leaves them only one pitch.

In Taibbi’s language from the start of this piece:

It’s always “Vote for us or you’re a right-wing insurrectionist Putin-lover,” which is the opposite of persuasive.

This is the Democrats’ constant closing argument, and the worst they could advance.

It makes them, not just wrong, but ugly as well, the “opposite of persuasive.”

Yet this is all they have, if they can’t themselves attack the people’s real enemy, and this time actually mean it. Sad for us. Sad for them as well.

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.

The FDA can appeal the decision and Kacsmaryk’s order will not go into effect for seven days, giving the Biden administration time to appeal his decision to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considered one of the most conservative courts in the country.

And confirming that the US judicial system is now terminally broken and is no longer blind but divided into left and right "justice", Kacsmaryk’s ruling was almost immediately followed on Friday by a decision by a federal judge in Washington state - US District Judge Thomas Rice, an appointee of President Barack Obama - who granted a request by several Democratic-leaning states for an order affirming FDA approval of mifepristone and blocking the government from further restricting its distribution.

Religious groups and anti-abortion advocates targeted the FDA - whose credibility was already torn to shreds after the whole "covid thing" - in a November lawsuit claiming the agency fast-tracked approval of mifepristone in 2000 without sufficient scientific evidence, something the agency certainly did with various covid "vaccines" meant not to protect the population but to enrich a handful of pharma execs.

Medical groups have defended the medication, arguing that studies show it is safer than Tylenol and Viagra and sends fewer people to the emergency room than those drugs. Abortion rights supporters have decried the lawsuit as politically motivated and not based in science.

Kacsmaryk, who sits in Amarillo, Texas, said it was clear that the FDA overstepped its authority when it first approved mifepristone for use and suggested that the agency “faced significant political pressure” to advance the drug.

“The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly,” Kacsmaryk said in his decision. “But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”

The judge said the FDA’s stance had likely lead to death and injury among women taking the drug. “Whatever the numbers are, they likely would be considerably lower had FDA not acquiesced to the pressure to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety,” Kacsmaryk wrote.

If the ruling is not blocked by the conservative 5th Circuit, women seeking to end pregnancies will be left with two options: surgical abortion or a single pill called misoprostol, which is less effective when not used in combination with mifepristone. The latest data shows that 98% of medication abortions that occur in the US use the two-pill method, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The high-profile Amarillo case has drawn focus from advocates on both sides of the issue, as well as health professionals and medical associations who have been bracing for a ruling on the temporary order for weeks. Dozens of states and advocacy organizations have filed briefs with the court, arguing for or against the order.

As Bloomberg notes, the abortion pill ruling isn’t Kacsmaryk’s final word on the case, with many court filings and a possible trial to come. But the injunction reflects his judgment that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits, among other factors.

Anti-abortion groups expected Kacsmaryk to be favorable to their case. Lawyers for the conservative religious-rights groups suing FDA chose to sue in Amarillo, where they were all but assured to get Kacsmaryk, who is assigned all civil and criminal cases. In December, Kacsmaryk tossed out a federal rule that aimed to expand teen access to birth control. In November, he rejected a federal policy that stopped doctors from discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The conservative group behind the lawsuit argues that the agency didn’t follow the appropriate protocol when it first authorized the use of mifepristone in 2000 and failed to study the safety of the drugs as required, putting “politics over science.”

FDA officials have refuted that characterization in public statements and court filings, arguing that the agency followed procedure when approving the medication and “extensively reviewed” the scientific evidence at hand to determine its safety and efficacy.

Mifepristone was first approved in 2000 for use through the first seven weeks of pregnancy. In 2016, the FDA extended that window to 10 weeks. It is the first pill used in the two-drug regimen most used to terminate a pregnancy and blocks a hormone called progesterone that is needed to support a pregnancy. It is followed by misoprostol, which prompts contractions that expel the contents of the uterus.

Kacsmaryk’s decision comes as the federal government has taken steps to loosen restrictions on abortion pills, allowing authorized pharmacies to dispense the pills instead of limiting their distribution to doctor’s offices. But Republican leaders of states with abortion restrictions have push backed against the new regulations, filing lawsuits and drafting letters to major drugstore chains to ensure the drugs cannot be dispensed at stores in their states or mailed to their residents.

A group of 21 Republican attorneys general urged Kacsmaryk to rescind FDA approval of the abortion pill prior to his decision, writing in a court filing that the agency under President Joe Biden has sought to establish a “mail-order abortion regime” that bypasses state limitations on the procedure.

“The FDA and the administration as a whole have no intention to respect the Constitution,” they wrote.

Outcry against the order was immediate with various leftist politicians and organizations vowing to fight the ruling.

Today’s ruling is another massive step towards Republicans’ goal of a nationwide abortion ban and could throw our country into chaos.

Rightwing activists sought out an extremist judge who is vehement in his desire to take women’s rights away. pic.twitter.com/uI2S0SVs6q

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 7, 2023

Today, an extremist Republican-appointed judge recklessly ruled to block nationwide access to safe and effective abortion medication that has been on the market for decades.

Republicans will never rest in their cruel, tyrannical quest to disrespect a woman’s right to choose.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) April 8, 2023

BREAKING: ADAMS ADMINISTRATION VOWS TO FIGHT FEDERAL COURT RULING POTENTIALLY BANNING MEDICATION ABORTION DRUG NATIONWIDE.

Full statement: pic.twitter.com/sKTVfn6YBR

— City of New York (@nycgov) April 8, 2023

The fact 23 GOP AGs joined suit to ban mifepristone nationwide, not just in their borders, shows again that red states are unlikely to be satisfied restricting #abortion for their own residents, but seek to impose their rules on blue states too. Same on other rights rollbacks https://t.co/YUDGleIq4c

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) April 7, 2023

And, as expected, a few hours after the Texas judge order, the DOJ has filed an appeal of Kacsmaryk's ruling, saying it will also seek a stay.

Today, a federal district judge in Texas ruled that a prescription medication available for over 22 years, approved by the FDA, and used safely by millions of women should no longer be approved in the U.S.

Here's why this matters. And how my Administration is going to fight it.

— President Biden (@POTUS) April 8, 2023

UPDATE: DOJ just filed an appeal of TX fed judge's ruling and AG Garland says they will seek a stay as well. https://t.co/2EmgdPpWGo

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) April 8, 2023

In the middle of the movie an elderly prisoner, Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore), holds another inmate hostage at knifepoint. After Andy defuses the situation it is revealed that, after 50 years in prison, Brooks will be paroled. Brooks had spent his entire adult life in prison, and he didn’t want to leave, so he reasoned that by committing another crime he could remain in prison. While Brooks’ would-be victim surmises that Brooks is simply crazy, Andy’s best friend, “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), has a different explanation: “He’s just . . . just institutionalized.” 

Prison is the only world he knows; it’s the only world that makes sense to him. Red explains that “These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.” Brooks’ fears, and Red’s explanation, prove prescient. Paroled, Brooks is unable to adjust to the world outside prison, and he hangs himself in his apartment.

One doesn’t have to be in prison to be institutionalized, however. Years ago, as a junior faculty member, I helped a young woman write her undergraduate honors thesis. She was a chemistry major, but the honors program required that her topic be interdisciplinary, so she chose to write on government funding of science in America. During this process I tried to impress upon her some of the obvious problems with our current system of government-funded science, and to get her thinking about alternatives. I assumed, as a newer faculty member, I’d find a receptive audience at a place like Hillsdale College.

How naïve I was. She could not fathom a world without government-funded scientific research. It was incomprehensible to her that “science” could happen in the absence of massive government funding and pervasive government supervision. Government funding is how “science” happens. For a scientific researcher, especially an academic one, obtaining a government grant from an entity like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health is critical, both to one’s research agenda and to one’s prestige and career advancement. Universities see it as a marker that one is important and doing important work. 

Medical professionals of all kinds are dependent on state licenses to ply their trades. Doctors and pharmacists are at the mercy of state pharmacy boards, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to prescribing or dispensing pharmaceuticals. These people are practitioners, not academics or intellectuals, so when some government entity tells them that “the science is settled,” they have neither the time nor the inclination nor the resources to challenge the assertion. They’ve been conditioned to accept such assertions as orthodoxy, a conditioning that is reinforced by the possibility of losing their government-issued professional licenses. So your doctor leans on you to get the COVID vaccine, and your pharmacist won’t fill a legal prescription for Ivermectin because the CDC and his state’s board of pharmacy told him it is “horse dewormer.”

The entire modern state in America is one vast engine for institutionalizing its subjects. That state is so huge and so pervasive that essentially everyone is somehow dependent on it, whether they know it or not, whether they’d like to be or not. We depend on the state for everything from government jobs and student loans to occupational licenses and the use of public resources. All of these foster the dependence, and therefore the subservience, of the recipient on the state. A rancher must remain in the good graces of the Bureau of Land Management. Raytheon, and all its employees, are ruined if they don’t get a steady stream of Defense Department contracts. Radio and TV broadcasters need government permission in the form of an FCC license in order to work. To retain my access to federal student aid, my parents had to hand over sensitive tax information to the Department of Education. Failure to comply could result in loss of access to government largesse, with all the attending consequences.

The significance of the pervasiveness of government involvement in the scientific and medical fields goes far beyond the threat of loss of benefits and the promise of more benefits. For those who are enmeshed in it, the government-scientific complex is natural, beneficent, and indispensable. It predisposes them to believe that anyone who is outside the complex is not credible, and anyone who challenges it is a crank, a charlatan, or a conspiracy theorist. It fosters the mentality that any other arrangement is inconceivable. Defending that complex is thus a sine qua non of their very being, even when that complex is exposed as incompetent, corrupt, and even unscientific. The system is science.

Medical and scientific experts have, in the last couple of years, been accused of being stupid, crazy, or downright evil. Whatever is true in individual circumstances (Dr. Fauci, call your office), at the macro level these allegations miss the mark. They’re just . . . just institutionalized. (read more)

Ehh, this could be problematic for the progressive leftists and the orange-man bad persecution efforts.  Sunlight dear friends.  Fear not, no weapon formed against us shall prosper.

Judge Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of President Donald Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan, apparently donated money to Joe Biden and Democrat efforts to remove President Trump from office.  At least that’s what the FEC records say.

NEW YORK – Judge Juan Merchan, the jurist handling former President Donald Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan, donated $35 to Democratic causes in 2020, including $15 to President Biden’s campaign and $10 to a group dedicated to “resisting … Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.”

Federal Election Commission records show Merchan made three small-dollar donations within the span of two days in July 2020 through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s preferred online fundraising platform.

The veteran judge contributed $15 earmarked for the “Biden for President” campaign on July 26, 2020, and then the following day made $10 contributions to the Progressive Turnout Project and Stop Republicans.

The Progressive Turnout Project’s stated mission is to “rally Democrats to vote,” according to the group’s website.

Stop Republicans is a subsidiary of the Progressive Turnout Project and describes itself as “a grassroots-funded effort dedicated to resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” (read more)

Remember folks, we are in a spiritual battle now against the combined elements of evil enterprise.

It’s been obvious to me — well before it was to anyone else — that while not living precisely in the Truman show, we lived in a carefully manufactured reality.

Oh, it’s not a conspiracy, though it contains conspiracies. It’s a prospiracy. Meaning that everyone having been indoctrinated in the same “verities” (which ain’t) and taught to see the world through a Marxist lens (if I had a dime for every journalist whom I heard say their job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted! I’d never worry about money again) they all want to be on the side of those they perceive as angels, and manufacture consensus “truth” like one manufactures sausages.

Oh, they have to maneuver around some hard shoals of truth, because it’s hard to tell the empty belly it’s full, or the unemployed that he has a job. But they come up with excuses for that to protect presidents they love. They couldn’t make Obama’s misrule into a great new beginning or an era of plenty, but they tried. How many “Summers of Recovery” did we have, with even the Wall Street Journal joining into singing hosannas? And how many times did they make excuses, based on the state of the world, and what Bush had done, and this and that and the other thing. And now he’s in the rearview mirror they’re little by little burnishing his memory, talking about how great he was at this and that. In twenty years they’ll have it in the history books that his presidency was a time of joy and plenty, with the country united, and the only hardships were caused by Trump, who of course, knew nothing of management or money. No? Watch them.

If we continue lending them credence, that’s exactly where they’ll have us.

I’ve been aware of it since at least Carter, when I watched not only the press explain away the catastrophically high gas prices he inflicted on the country by saying we were coming to the end of oil, but the science fiction community, even, swing into step, and instead of bright futures of space exploration, start to write of miserable futures of scarcity and rust, where everyone behaved like villains. Because when the president is a miserable failure who shoots cats for sport, the only way to make him look good is to make every Jack and Jill a villain.

And then I watched the burnishing of the Carter years in the rearview mirror, the same as I watched them painting the Reagan years as miserable years of want and struggle and greed.

They lie to us, because they lie to themselves. Because their cult demands they be right, and history must be adjusted to fit.

As they used to say in the Soviet Union, we always know the future, because it’s dictated by the party and it’s the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat, ahem you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. It is the past that keeps changing, to retcon history to make the idiots in control always and forever heroes, instead of the scurrying rat villains that they are.

Their power is diminished now, this is true. The only people still reading the increasingly detached from reality newspapers or watching the official news (and don’t fool yourself that Fox isn’t converged) are people who are very busy or very old and usually the very busy are at least my age.

The cult of the “acceptable source” has diminished. Or at least it has split to acceptable sources on the right and acceptable sources on the left. Oh, and perhaps still acceptable establishment sources, but that’s smaller.

However, it is important to realize all those sources are still influenced by the big megaphone of the mainstream press, and still come through if diluted.

Yesterday at Power Line (Yeah, I know. Note I rarely link them anymore) I found myself reading a baffling article in which they talked of how Chicago and Wisconsin and whatever the other race was had gone left, and analyzing the causes. As if causes beyond “the vote is rigged” made any sense. They immediately fell into line with the big megaphone of the left, and accused those “agitating against abortion” of being guilty for the losses. Which frankly is why the left keeps agitating for abortion. Not because it’s an immensely popular topic or that the right talks about it much, after being quietly glad the national mandate was overturned, but because it gives them coverage for the massive, rank, obvious fraud.

And our side knows there was fraud. Impossible not to know in 2020, and those who paid close attention to important contests in 2022 saw it too, the same impossible numbers cropping up, as the automated fraud kicked in from the machines.

But because the mainstream press keeps treating those elections as legitimate, we eventually fall into treating them as such, and looking for causes for them.

It made me feel like someone watching people look for their glasses with them on their faces. Or carefully ponder what happened to the eggs, and ignoring the frying pan and oil, and the dirty plates.

None of this is unfamiliar to me. I was fortunate, at a very young age, to be present at historical events, and then read them described in the press, and finding no resemblance whatsoever. I’ve also been fortunate to realize that whether I was there or not, and no matter the verisimilitude, people will remember the lie oft told over the truth.

In fact, I will tell you it was easier for my parents to see the lie when reading the press under the national socialist government which fell when I was 11 — because they knew it was a lie and under censorship, and knew to read “pravda” by reading its entrails — than afterwards, under the succession of socialist and one or two outright communist regimes, and the lies became even harder to discern later after 78, under supposed “freedom of the press” where it became a prospiracy as what we have, and the directives from above more or a “Of course we should talk of x to advance y.”

Do you remember when Alaskan cruises were all the rage, because the left wanted to kill the Alaskan pipeline, and so they must go on and on about this pristine wilderness that would be “destroyed” and take as many influential lefties as possible through it, people who never asked how the pipeline would in fact harm this natural environment?

Right now the rage is all in cool electric cars. Because of course, the left wants to push the carbon free bullshit, as though it were possible, and didn’t cause more environmental destruction — unless you don’t count Africa.

And for a while they were trying to push the poor, oppressed illegals, though I think they found it hard going. But these themes will be everywhere at once, startlingly, because all of them rush to be the “good people” the (im)moral crusader no one needs.

The fact that now their big thing is to teach children weird sex is both baffling and a measure of how out of control their message machine is.

At the same time it’s a massive distraction. You should of course be outraged about it. And about the fact they’re trying to careen us into war. And and and

But you shouldn’t lose sight of the important thing: They’re doing all this because they’ve corrupted our voting system.

The only way to fight it that doesn’t involve blood up to our ankles is to fight it on that front. To do everything possible and impossible to restore voting integrity. The big things like repealing that fraud machine, Motor Voter, must be done once in power.

Meanwhile, it behooves us to not use machines. To vote late and on paper. (And raise holy hell on all fronts if someone has already voted for us) and above all to sound the tocsin and remind everyone that there is election theft, and it will continue until made to stop.

At this point no election can be assumed to be clean. To assume so is to give them power and legitimacy they don’t have.

Sound the tocsin. Sometimes it’s all you can do. Refuse to forget the theft.

And when you read the news stay alert for “why is everyone talking of THIS now?” and stay alert to discontinuities in the story, things that made no sense. They will describe x as leading inevitably to y, but there is no connection, either in fact or even — often — in Marxist fables.

Take the current rise in crime. They will tell you it’s because people are poorer and therefore are committing more crime. But that connection only exists in the minds of Marxists. Poor people are not likely to steal because they’re poor. The crime rate is probably the same, rich or poor. It’s only the crimes that are different. However, the left letting murderers, rapists and thieves out of jail (or into the country through the wide open border) has indeed increased the crime.

When they talk of increased automation, and “AI” causing unemployment, remember they used the same excuse under Carter. It is no such thing, but their onerous regulations (Biden signed a boatload last week) and taxes and instability causing the economy to buckle.

Pay attention to those explanations that make no sense, to the events that disappear from the front pages or are never mentioned, to the lacunae and omissions or outright obvious lies.

By remembering the Diamond Princess Covid-19 numbers, I stayed clear-eyed about the rather minor impact of the virus and how out of proportion the response was.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Robert A. Heinlein

There is no truth in pravda, but there is truth in the lacuna, the omissions, the “wait a minute, that ain’t right” in the “it was there, and it was nothing like that.”

Find those. And hold them. No matter how tempting it is to forget and join the consensus. No matter how easy it is to think “I must be wrong, because they all say that–“

Find the facts, and hold them. And steer by them. We need people aware of the truth, as the gaslighting machine that our overculture has become spins us further and further from reality.

Because reality is that which will kill you, even if you deny it. Reality is what you must live with, even if you’re away with the fairies in your mind.

Reality is a stone cold bitch. It never forgives.

But if you live by her, if enough of us lives by her, there is a chance, slim but possible, that we can get through this and emerge on the other side as the free nation we were meant to be.

Again and again, what are the facts? Go find them. (read more)

WASHINGTON DC – A key member of the Federal Election Commission today rejected the Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of former President Donald Trump as a violation of federal election laws.

“It’s not a campaign finance violation. It’s not a reporting violation of any kind,” said FEC Commissioner James E. “Trey” Trainor.  In trying to stretch the law to make it look like a violation, he added, District Attorney Alvin Bragg “is really trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole.”

In a 34-count indictment of Trump, the first criminal case ever against a former president, Bragg charged that a $130,000 payment made by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels, which Cohen went to jail for in a plea deal, violated several campaign finance laws that splashed onto Trump. [T]he FEC and Justice Department already considered the case and tossed it.

First, he said, Cohen took the blame in his plea deal. “At the end of the day, there’s the person who committed the crime, and there’s the person who is behind bars because of it,” Trainor said of Cohen.

Second, the [alleged] paperwork violation in question came well after Trump’s 2016 election, so it couldn’t have been done to help his election.

Third, it is not obvious that the reason for the payment and the reimbursement to Cohen was to influence the election, thus failing the “objective standard” of law. “It has to be something that anybody on the street can look at and say the only reason you did that was to influence the campaign,” said Trainor. “There’s a lot of reasons that he could have done it that aren’t related to him being a candidate for president, and so therefore, it wouldn’t have met the standard as campaign expenditure under federal law,” he added. (read more)

This is the @FEC hearing room. This is where campaign finance violations are tried. pic.twitter.com/OJFxVMiiUl

— Trey Trainor (@TXElectionLaw) April 4, 2023

Oscar Wilde once said “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

With the release of the indictment of former President Donald Trump, Manhattan District Alvin Bragg has revealed himself as a follower of the Wilde school of legal thought. Bragg knew that he had no criminal case against Trump. However, after running on bagging Trump for some crime (any crime), Bragg knew that many would not care if he had a basis for a criminal charge. He would be lionized to be the first person to ever indict a former president in the blind rage against Trump.

After charging Trump with 34 counts, Bragg insisted that he will convict Trump of the “crime to promote a [political] candidacy through unlawful means.” He insists that he will prove “attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”

For months, many have raised objections to the effort of the Manhattan District Attorney to use a flawed legal theory to essentially litigate a federal election violation that the Justice Department opted not to charge. This bootstrap theory has been widely criticized, but many in the media sought to cut off that debate by suggesting that Bragg might be basing his prosecution on some unknown crime. Last week, Michael Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis went as far to “warn all the pundits and everyone speculating…that there are lots of facts, lots of documents, lots of evidence of multiple crimes.”

We now have the indictment, and it is basically what many of us anticipated. It is a series of stacked counts of falsifying business records for the purpose of influencing the election. The indictment seems to address the lack of legal precedent with a lack of specificity on the underlying “secondary” felony. Bragg has done nothing more than replicate the same flawed theory dozens of times. This is where math and the law meet. If you multiply any number by zero, it is still zero.

If the New York bench retains any integrity, this case will be thrown out as legally improper with an admonition to Bragg and his office for politicizing the criminal justice process. That, however, may be asking a lot of state judges who are elected on both the trial and appellate levels. They also may prove to be lawyers on the Wilde side.

The cost, however, to the legal system will be immense. In a single indictment, Alvin Bragg bulldozed any high ground that the Democrats had after January 6th. He has fulfilled the narrative of the Trump campaign by supplying a raw and undeniable example of the politicization of the legal system. What is most shocking is that this attack on the rule of law was met with the rapturous applause of many, including lawyers and legal pundits. They not only will ignore the affront to the integrity of our legal system, but celebrate its demise.

Bragg himself threw a flag on the effort to indict Trump being pushed by a lawyer brought in as a special assistant district attorney for that purpose. Mark F. Pomerantz and his colleague Carey R. Dunne resigned — and their resignation letter was then leaked to an eager media. Pomerantz then took a step that floored many of us: he wrote a tell-all book based on the still ongoing investigation. However, Pomerantz admits that career prosecutors balked at his radical proposals to find a crime — any crime — to nail Trump. That included an entirely bonkers money laundering charge against Trump where he would be the victim of an extortion effort. In his book, Pomerantz admits that “many of the lawyers were relentlessly negative.” Some prosecutors were clearly so upset by his efforts that they “defected” from the team. He also admitted that Bragg told him “that the consensus among the group of prosecutors with whom he had been speaking was not to go forward.”

Despite objections from his colleagues who said he was undermining their efforts, Pomerantz published a book making the case against an individual who was not charged, let alone convicted. It was a grossly unprofessional and improper act. It also worked. Bragg caved to the overwhelming pressure that followed. If figures like Pomerantz was going to yield to temptation, why shouldn’t he?  After all, no one wants to be the last ethical lawyer when everyone else is cashing in.

I remain hopeful that there is still a modicum of judicial integrity in New York to stand against this effort. However, this is a defining moment for many who have rationalized this abuse of the criminal justice system. For those attorneys, they have reached the point described by Robert Oppenheimer after the development of the atomic bomb. He stated “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

The same is true for many in our profession. While some of us have warned that Mar-a-Lago could present a serious threat to Trump, we have warned that the Bragg prosecution is the denial of the core legal principle of blind justice. This expensive, drawn out effort would not have occurred for anyone other than Donald Trump. It is not just selective prosecution, it is exclusive prosecution for Trump and Trump alone.

There is a good-faith debate over whether the President should be charged over conduct related to Mar-a-Lago and possible obstruction of justice. This is not that case. For those lawyers applauding this ignoble moment, this is our sin as a profession, and it is “knowledge which they cannot lose” in the years to come. (read more)

The usual suspects have been thrown their chum — both TDS patients and MAGAtards. The social media war is now in full swing. And, frankly, it couldn’t be more tiresome.

A few get why this is so inane but most are focused (or being focused) on the wrong thing, as always.

Jonathan Turley has a good rundown of the questionable legality of this case. But, again, while he’s not wrong to focus on that and the shady politics, he also misses the larger implications of this indictment.

This is a case so legally tenuous that even the Federal Government, famous for being able to convict a ham sandwich, wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Because indicting Trump for any of these petty things is nothing less than the end of politics and a declaration of civil war.

Davos through the Democrats have been running a culture war for decades to stamp out the past. It is quite Leninist. Turley and others have focused on it’s ‘just not done’ to indict a President, especially something as irrelevant as paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.

But, ‘just not done’ is exactly the thing being indicted here, not Trump. Trump is just the fulcrum on which all of this rests.

This is just the politics of envy taken to its ultimate conclusion. Racism, sexism, ageism, transphobia, LGBTQT+BBQ Sauce rights are all the same political position. They are all about tearing down the old institutional order.

It’s been going on for generations, invading male spaces like Augusta National, forcing female reporters in locker rooms, endlessly arguing the wage gap between men and women.

Of course, these same people can no longer even define the women whose rights they fight for.

Is the latest term ‘people who menstruate,’ or is that just so last week?

I thought I was supposed to still wear my mask in my electric car to fight for the rights of Ukrainian men to get pregnant while fighting for freedumb from Putler!

So forgive me if I’m a little confused.

This is a perspective that reduces society to whatever we did before was wrong. Progress in the minds of religious puritan Progressives is a never-ending battle against sin. Yesterday is forever evil while Tomorrow holds the promise of heaven on earth.

In the South we just call these people Yankees and go back to eating our barbeque and playing with our kids.

That sin is stratification as a result of rewarding merit. But what is merit to people who view all profit as exploitation?

You can answer that however you wish, but by their actions it’s clear they believe merit is stealing.

This is why “you didn’t build that,” you “basket of deplorables.’ Anything you have earned can and should be taken from you for wrongthink.

And that’s what’s at the heart of this Trump indictment. Trump is the distillation of everything they need to tear down to validate their envy. He’s white, male, politically connected, a little corrupt, very cheesy and the antithesis of what middle-class bicoastal midwits believe they should be.

Successful.

They hate Trump not because he’s successful but because our society allowed for him to become successful.

To the progressive midwit, any society that allows a man like Donald Trump to rise like he did needs to be destroyed.

Is it really any different than the teenager who rebels to become an atheist because s/h/ze finally asked how can a god allow such evil in the world to exist if he has the power to stop it?

Did I mention these people have the epistemology of weevils?

Again, in the South we say, “Some people just need killin'” Well, to the puritan mind, “Some societies just need killin’.”

That’s why Trump’s indictment signals the end of politics as we believed it operated. The key word there was ‘believed.’ We are dealing with people who see those that disagree with them as irredeemable.

You voted for Trump? Twice? Burn in hell you fascist!

It’s the only time most of these people want guns to exist.

Civilization rests on the fantasy that there is a shared acceptance of the rules on which it operates. Americans are both immensely cynical and naïve about politics in this sense. We all know politicians are lying when their lips are moving but we also believe in the myth that the American system of justice will get the right answer often enough to keep the lights on.

Today that’s a very big assumption.

The End of Clausewitz

Carl von Clausewitz is very famous for saying that war is politics by other means. He’s so famous for it that he’s become a part of speech, Clausewitzian. It’s a short-hand for this idea.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the greatest writers are ones who achieve this, dare I say it, merit badge. So, today this indictment of Trump is at once, Phildickian, Kafkaesque, Clausewitzian and Hitlerian.

Phildickian because it feels like we live in some alternate America.

Kafkaesque because Trump is being indicted for a crime we can barely define.

Hitlerian because its clearly tyrannical to shut down political opponents

And Clausewitzian because the indictment isn’t about politics but a much broader war.

Davos is at war with humanity through undermining the institutions of civilization itself. They will not be stopped in their quest to secure global control over humanity. They have stoked an animus against Trump in the minds of people like Nancy Pelosi that can only end in fire and violence.

They know that the 2024 election is where all their dreams come together. They need another Davosian quisling in the White House to counter what’s happening with the Federal Reserve’s hawkish policy.

Davos has control over the political and monetary policies of Europe. It lost political control over the UK and got it back and will reverse Brexit. That’s brought the Bank of England back in line. However, it is very clear at this point they do not control the Fed.

So, they have political control until January 2025 in the US, but do not have monetary control over the Fed until 2026, when Powell’s second term is done. This is the window for US patriots to win this civil war before it even begins in earnest.

Powell’s tight monetary policy will be the Democrats’ main talking point for 2024. “The GOP and the Fed are the reason you are broke. They cost you your job, the dream of a new house.” We need more free money to help the poor.

If you think you’re sick of Elizabeth Warren now, just wait.

I have to hand it to these guys, they’ve turned the libertarians into their biggest water carriers by turning “End the Fed” into a strategic asset on the battlefield. With neither monetary nor political control over the US, there can be no 21st century version of V-E Day. It’s bad enough that the Global South has rebelled.

Davos knows this is it for them. 2024 in the US or bust. George Soros said as much at Munich this year. This is why Trump needs to be indicted even though the case is legally illiterate.

Look, the conservative commentators who think that indicting Trump will only improve his chances of winning the election are wrong. It doesn’t matter that he can run for office from jail.

Do you think a GOP run by Cocaine Mitch McConnell will have the balls to defy their Uniparty paymasters and nominate Donald Trump from prison?

Trump will not be allowed to run.

Because of all the words spilled about this so far only Martin Armstrong has come close to the truth of what the real strategy is.

Bragg will most likely seek a Gag Order in addition to a denial of bail, which no matter how ruthless the judge, will probably realize he cannot deny bail to a former President. Still, they will most likely put a Gag Order on Trump, and that way they can throw him in jail even indefinitely as they did to me using Civil Contempt of Court which is not a crime. If they charge him with Criminal Contempt, then he gets a trial by jury. Under Civil Contempt, you have ZERO rights and no right to a trial.

If this was coming from anyone other than Martin Armstrong I would dismiss it out of hand. Maybe Marty is being paranoid. I hope he is.

In your heart of hearts do you really think that? I don’t. Because this is being driven by people who everyday maneuver the world into a potential nuclear exchange with Russia over its right to exist as a country.

Tell me, after everything you’ve seen them do over COVID-19, they wouldn’t relish the opportunity to put a gag order on Trump.

It’s the only thing still animating most of these walking dead in D.C. for fuck’s sake.

Armstrong continues:

They kept me in prison on Civil Contempt from 2000 to 2007. I was released ONLY because I got to the Supreme Court and they ordered the government to explain how I could be held for 7 years without anything on statute 28 USC 1826 which had a maximum of 18 months. To avoid having to answer, they suddenly released me.

So forget the payment to a Porn Star

They can now gag trump, restrict his movements, and harass him to PREVENT him from running in 2024. They will listen to every word he says and are just going to wait to be able to throw him in prison on Civil Contempt indefinitely with ZERO Constitutional Rights. Welcome to the REAL America. They call it a “protective order” to protect the Government and Bragg as you are stripped of ALL your First Amendment rights.

Now, for Trump, if Bragg tried to pull this, his case would be fast-tracked publicly up to the Supreme Court. And then it gets interesting. Do you think Trump would be exonerated with this court? Under these circumstances? The current pressure?

Or do you expect them to do what they did with the election, refuse to hear the case because of ‘a lack of standing’ like they did over the 2020 election, when they clearly had the authority to hear the cases.

Last I checked John Roberts was still in charge up there.

Eighteen months ago I was thankful for all of Davos’ insane over-reactions, pathetic narratives, and unsustainable lies. While I don’t believe Davos is redeemable I still hold out hope that there are enough of in the right positions who are to just say no when the times comes.

With each loss on the battlefield of public opinion and in the policy room Davos has doubled down rather than backed down. Theirs is the Way of the Psychopath not the Warrior.

Their Eurodollar system is dying on the SOFR vine.

So, don’t discount this indictment to Trump. To them this is still their best path to victory.

The fear of a second Trump term is real, not because Trump is so great but because they can’t control him and he’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Florida’s budget surplus.

Marty is right. They will play this all the way out. They have no other choice if they want to win this war they’ve started to validate their view of themselves as gods among mere men.

Regardless of the outcome of Trump’s ‘legal troubles,’ the real victory will be having destroyed what’s left of what was truly beautiful, a government (in theory) subservient to the people.

This is what we have to focus on preserving as their acolytes burn the libraries and erase the memory of our sins they can’t bear to face like adults. (read more)

Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:

1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing reelection to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.

4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.

5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.

6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential presidential conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.

Such asymmetry also raises questions about the equal application of our laws as they apply to all our other officials, current and out-of-office.

Or, to put it another way: what crime did Trump not do that others did with either impunity or without being arrested? Here is a sample of 20.

1) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by destroying federally subpoenaed emails and devices in order to hide evidence.

2) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by sending classified government communications on her own, through an unsecured home-brewed server.

3) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiring—through three paywalls—a foreign national, who is prohibited from working on presidential campaigns, to compile a dossier to smear her presidential opponent.

4) Trump did not violate federal campaign laws, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiding her payments (as “legal services”) to Christopher Steele through bookkeeping deceptions.

5) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, use a crony to search out a high-paying New York job for a paramour in order to influence her testimony before a special counsel.

6) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, receive a $500,000 “honorarium” for speaking in Moscow while his wife, our secretary of state, approved a longstanding and lucrative desire of the Kremlin for North American uranium to be sold to a Russian consortium.

7) Trump did not, as did Barack Obama, promise Vladimir Putin that he would be “flexible” on “missile defense” if during his own reelection bid Putin in return would give him “space”. That quid pro quo arrangement led to the U.S. abandonment of key joint missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic, and, reciprocally, less than two years later a Russia invasion, mostly unopposed by the United States, of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.

8) Trump did not boast publicly, as did Joe Biden, that he used U.S. foreign aid monies as leverage to have the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who may have been looking into the Biden family’s efforts to sell influence to corrupt Ukrainian interests.

9) Trump did not, as the Bidens did, set up a family consortium to leverage monies from Ukraine, Russia, and China, on their shared expectations that he might soon run for and be elected president and become compromised. Trump is not mentioned, as is Joe Biden, in family business communications as a recipient of a 10 percent commission on such payoffs.

10) Trump did not, unlike Joe Biden, remove presidential papers—without any authority to declassify them—and leave them scattered and unsecured in a garage and various residences and offices.

11) Trump did not, as did the FBI, wipe clean subpoenaed mobile phone records.

12) Trump did not, as did interim FBI head Andrew McCabe, admittedly lie under oath on four occasions to federal investigators.

13) Trump did not, as did CIA Director John Brennan, admittedly lie on two occasions while under oath to the U.S. Congress.

14) Trump did not, as did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, admittedly lie on one occasion to the U.S. Congress.

15) Trump did not, as did James Comey, claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times while under oath before the U.S. Congress.

16) Trump did not, as did FBI Director James Comey, summarize a confidential private conversation with a president and then deliberately leak that classified memo to the media for his own agenda of appointing a special counsel to investigate the president—which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.

17) Trump did not, as did Robert Mueller, claim ignorance while under oath when asked about the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, the catalysts for Mueller’s own investigation.

18) Trump did not, as did private citizen and former secretary of state John Kerry, meet clandestinely while out of office with Iranian officials to help them resist  current U.S. policy toward Iran—or what the Boston Globe characterized as “unusual shadow diplomacy” to “apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.”

19) Trump did not, as did the FBI and CIA, pay clandestine money to Twitter to monitor and smother news stories deemed unhelpful to their agendas.

20) Trump did not, as did then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whip up a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court by threatening two sitting justices by name to intimidate them concerning an impending judicial ruling: “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”

In subsequent months, mobs of protestors swarmed the private homes of these two named justices to influence their decisions, a federal crime that was ignored by Attorney General Merrick Garland, but not by a self-confessed, potential assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh who later turned up in the neighborhood.

What are we to make of these radical disparate applications of laws and protocols? The Left repeatedly breaks laws and long-held customs with impunity by weaponizing federal offices and bureaus, whether defined in the legal sphere by mostly exempting 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, mayhem, and lethal violence in the summer of 2020, or procedurally by denying the House minority leader the right to nominate his party members to committees, or ceremonially having the speaker of the House tear up the presidential State-of-the-Union Address on national television.

By any fair application of past tradition and the law, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas should be impeached for their deliberate efforts to subvert U.S. immigration law for political purposes. By any just measure, Joe Biden should be the target of a special counsel’s investigation to ascertain how and why the Biden family received hidden funds from foreign governments and whether Biden himself paid taxes on such large sums.

It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda—one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval—whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing balloting laws and customs to turn elections into a 70 percent no-show of voters on Election Day.

All of the above is predicated on a simple premise: Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic. That fact is well known to the new hard-left Democratic Party. So it has assumed the role of the spoiled teen who feels he has a blank check of lawless behavior that his parents would not dare emulate, given that for adults to do so would destroy the family.

In other words, the Left is saying to America something along the following lines, “We are so morally superior to you that we can and must employ any means necessary to achieve our unpopular political ends. But you cannot respond in kind or deter us by mimicking our own tactics, because should both parties do so, the resulting disorder would undermine the republic. And that is something you won’t dare do.” (read more)

On Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, acting as an agent of Biden’s campaign strategy to eliminate his most likely political opponent, finally unsealed the pretextual indictment being used for just that purpose. Over and over again, the indictment claims Trump, “with the intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” But it fails to identify 1) the false statement, 2) why the statement was supposedly false, 3) the person or entity Trump supposedly intended to defraud, and 4) what crime Trump supposedly tried to cover up. These are nice-to-know details. 

As we’ll see, the available public record strongly indicates these gaps cannot be filled with sufficient facts to support a criminal charge. These aren’t criminal charges. This is a publicity stunt.

This operation to kneecap Trump’s electoral chances would not have been possible without a sweeping and coordinated disinformation campaign by supposedly independent legacy media outlets. It matters not whether one reads the New York Times, NPR, or another supposedly serious legacy media platform. The lack of serious legal analysis in all of them is apparent, as is their preference for innuendo and providing laundry lists of other unproven allegations.

The legacy media have overlooked a long list of weaknesses in the legal case against Trump. Let’s walk through a few key points the get-Trump media and their cult won’t consider.

1) What does the statute in question actually criminalize?

The district attorney is attempting to criminalize the way in which Trump recorded the reimbursement to Michael Cohen for a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels. The statute provides, “A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with intent to defraud, he . . . Makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Media reports gloss over the specific elements of this statute as well as Trump’s actions in the case, because Trump’s actual guilt or innocence is simply irrelevant.

2) Was Trump’s statement false?

Bragg is trying to prosecute Trump because of the way internal bookkeeping recorded payments to Cohen, who was Trump’s attorney at the time. Trump apparently labeled these expenses “legal fees” instead of something more specific detailing a non-disclosure agreement. But these were payments to his then-attorney for expenses. So where’s the falsehood? 

Although the payments to Cohen were understood as a reimbursement for Cohen’s expenses, would a business normally be required to subdivide “legal fees” from “legal expenses?” If there’s a rule prohibiting the labeling of “expenses,” as “fees,” nobody so far has pointed it out. 

3) Did Trump intend to defraud anyone?

In Trump’s FEC filing, he wrote, “In the interest of transparency, while not required to be disclosed as ‘reportable liabilities’ on Part 8, in 2016 expenses were incurred by one of Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be $100,001-$250,000 and the interest rate would be zero.”

The statute requires an intent to defraud. But whom is it alleged Trump intended to defraud? Who is the victim? If the FEC is the supposed victim of this supposed “false business record,” then the prosecutor is going to have a hard time showing that the FEC cared more about Trump’s internal bookkeeping than they seemed to with the FEC disclosure form, which spelled out the expense. Did Trump even disclose his internal record keeping to the FEC? Why would he if he filed a separate disclosure for that purpose? So how can it be said that the internal business record had anything to do with the FEC?

4) How does the Manhattan D.A. get around the two-year statute of limitations?

Nobody disputes the fact that the New York law criminalizing falsification of business records is a misdemeanor with a two-year statute of limitations. The only way, therefore, to drag this 2016 incident into a 2023 courtroom is to recharacterize it as a felony. But, it’s still not clear how the prosecutor can argue the case has not also passed the five-year statute of limitations on “all other felonies.” It’s possible the D.A. will argue that Trump has been, “continuously outside the state,” of New York which conceivably would allow the prosecutor to exclude that time from his calculation. Of all the leaks out of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, none appear to explain this giant roadblock.

5) How can Bragg argue that a misdemeanor should be treated as a felony?

In order to get the longer statute of limitations, the prosecutor appears to be invoking this statute: 

A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second

degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit

another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.

Under this theory, the prosecutor needs to go back to the well to charge Trump for essentially the same “fraud” a second time. To get to the misdemeanor, the D.A. had to argue that Trump recorded the payment as “legal fees” in order to defraud . . . some unspecified person. Who? We aren’t clear on this based on the leaks or the language of the indictment, but the argument appears to be that Trump was attempting to defraud the Federal Election Commission, which regulates campaign finance. 

The problem is the FEC has actually declined to prosecute this very same transaction and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to a suite of crimes, including at least one related to this payment. Bragg’s case, then, requires one to believe Trump was attempting to cover up Cohen’s payment by identifying the reimbursement as “legal fees.” But this is where the case begins to eat its own tail.

If Trump reimbursed Cohen, long-standing precedent provides that Cohen is no longer the one making the contribution for purposes of the FEC reporting. FEC regulations say, “A loan, to the extent it is repaid, is no longer a contribution.” Thus, if Trump reimbursed Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment, it can no longer be considered a contribution on behalf of Cohen. This is devastating to the prosecution’s theory because individuals who are not the candidate (e.g., Cohen, but not Trump) are subject to the $2,700 per individual contribution limit. But Trump could give as much money as he wanted to his own campaign, without limits, so long as he disclosed it—which he did.

So, again, who did Trump supposedly defraud with the “false” business record?

What is the “other crime” Trump supposedly was covering up by recording the expense as “legal fees?” In order to get there, we have to ignore FEC regulations providing that Trump reimbursing Cohen makes it a Trump contribution, not a Cohen contribution. But that is, in fact, the rule. According to Bragg’s theory, Trump attempted to “cover up” Cohen’s crime by recording the expenditure as “legal fees.”

Essentially, the prosecutor is trying to argue it both ways. First, because he wanted to argue that Trump exceeded the $2,700 limit, he argued that Trump didn’t reimburse Cohen for the fees. But Bragg’s office also contends that Trump did reimburse Cohen for purposes of demonstrating a cover-up. The prosecution’s entire theory rests on the proposition that Trump always intended to reimburse Cohen for the payment, making Cohen’s payment a loan. But if Trump paid Cohen back and reported it to the FEC, then it appears he complied with campaign finance law. 

6) The indictment appears to fail to meet New York minimum requirements.

Under New York law, and contrary to the statement made by the prosecutor during his press conference, an indictment must include, “A plain and concise factual statement in each count which, without allegations of an evidentiary nature . . . asserts facts supporting every element of the offense charged and the defendant’s or defendants’ commission thereof with sufficient precision to clearly apprise the defendant or defendants of the conduct which is the subject of the accusation.” Each of these indictment counts fails to identify the supposed false statement, fails to identify the underlying crime Trump is supposedly guilty of covering up, and fails to explain who Trump was supposedly defrauding by entering these “false” business records. About the only thing that differentiates one charge from another is a reference to specific documents which supposedly contain some kind of false statement. 

7) Does the prosecution apply the same rules to Democrats?

Many have pointed to the lenient treatment Hillary Clinton received when the FEC settled with her for mischaracterizing the fees paid by her campaign for the dossier used to frame Trump as “legal expenses.” The fact pattern seems strikingly similar to the one now being used by the Manhattan D.A. to prosecute Trump, yet Clinton escaped with a measly $8,000 fine and, notably, was neither indicted nor arrested. 

But Clinton’s case, in many ways, was much worse. First, she used campaign funds, not her own personal funds. Second, no plausible theory exists for arguing expenses for framing Donald Trump were anything but an effort to gain an advantage in the election. In Trump’s case, he used personal funds to kill a story about an alleged affair. The electoral benefit of this was negligible as the public had already heard many stories about Trump’s philandering. Yet he nevertheless reported the expenses to the FEC while simultaneously disputing that the expense was election related. 

But it seems people have forgotten that Clinton donors also ran a particularly cynical campaign of compensating women for accusing Trump of more philandering. As noted in The Hill: 

A well-known women’s rights lawyer sought to arrange compensation from donors and tabloid media outlets for women who made or considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 presidential race, according to documents and interviews.

California lawyer Lisa Bloom’s efforts included offering to sell alleged victims’ stories to TV outlets in return for a commission for herself, arranging a donor to pay off one Trump accuser’s mortgage and attempting to secure a six-figure payment for another woman who ultimately declined to come forward after being offered as much as $750,000, the clients told The Hill.

The women’s accounts were chronicled in contemporaneous contractual documents, emails and text messages reviewed by The Hill, including an exchange of texts between one woman and Bloom that suggested political action committees supporting Hillary Clinton were contacted during the effort.

Bloom, who has assisted dozens of women in prominent harassment cases and also defended film executive Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, represented four women considering making accusations against Trump last year. Two went public, and two declined.

The selective investigation and prosecution of election laws based on the political orientation of the candidate is a clear violation of international standards of election fairness. Indeed, the United States once condemned Egyptian authorities abusing the criminal process to neutralize potential opposition candidates. In other words, if these trumped up charges were being used to disable a candidate in, say, Egypt or Russia, the U.S. State Department would be condemning these tactics in the strongest possible terms. But since Trump is the politician seeking access to the ballot, our own government seems blind to the election fairness standards we supposedly champion abroad. (read more)