A Deeply Fractured US

[Fishbone Jones]

So long as it doesn't get replaced by 'equity' standards, I also think it's a good thing.

I'm old enough to remember the marches and MLK and AA coming into play. I do believe at the time, it was the right thing to do. We were just on the cusp of equal rights, but many institutions were still the bastions of white males.

Today, while still not perfect, I think we've reached the point in the pendulum swing that it was caught before going to far the other way. Universities were starting to use it as an exclusionary tool instead of inclusion. We have to get back to education and careers based on merit instead of skin colour. It's been 60 years.

I'm still a believer in the melting pot theory as opposed to the diversity one. Diversity promotes different groups. Diverse groups create division, allowing politicians to exploit and open the gap in those divisions. Much as we see happening today.

 

[JLB50]

So long as it doesn't get replaced by 'equity' standards, I also think it's a good thing.

I'm old enough to remember the marches and MLK and AA coming into play. I do believe at the time, it was the right thing to do. We were just on the cusp of equal rights, but many institutions were still the bastions of white males.

Today, while still not perfect, I think we've reached the point in the pendulum swing that it was caught before going to far the other way. Universities were starting to use it as an exclusionary tool instead of inclusion. We have to get back to education and careers based on merit instead of skin colour. It's been 60 years.

I'm still a believer in the melting pot theory as opposed to the diversity one. Diversity promotes different groups. Diverse groups create division, allowing politicians to exploit and open the gap in those divisions. Much as we see happening today.

I couldn’t agree more. Although the U.S. is now going the multicultural route I think it is a monumental mistake and will lead to further division rather than unity.

 

[Eaglelord17]

They aren’t the only ones with a diversity hiring problem. We are at the point were many institutions are over ‘quota’ yet still have preferred hiring practices in place. For example the Public Service in Canada.

Women make up more than 50% of public service, but the senior positions they're taking have lost clout

The proportion of women in the public service is bigger than its share of the broader labour force and all signs are the trend will grow

nationalpost.com

 

[QV]

Can RFK Jr be the great uniter? Definitely has an uphill battle against the corrupt DNC establishment, but the more people hear him the better he is doing.

 

[KevinB]

Can RFK Jr be the great uniter? Definitely has an uphill battle against the corrupt DNC establishment, but the more people hear him the better he is doing.

Dude is a crackpot of the highest order.

 

[QV]

Dude is a crackpot of the highest order.

If one was to take the MSM and Democrats seriously about RFK then yes, it would be easy to smear him like that.

But if you actually listen to him during a long form interview, where he is taking questions etc, he sounds exactly like what your country and mine needs right now.

Suggest listening to his interview on YouTube by Newsnation uploaded recently.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Dude is a crackpot of the highest order.

As opposed to the current options?

 

[QV]

By far, the most entertaining outcome would be Trump vs RFK Jr in 2024. I think RFK would win.

 

[KevinB]

By far, the most entertaining outcome would be Trump vs RFK Jr in 2024. I think RFK would win.

RFK Jr isn’t a Democrat in anything other than name.

There is a subzero chance he would get the Democrat nomination.

 

[QV]

RFK Jr isn’t a Democrat in anything other than name.

There is a subzero chance he would get the Democrat nomination.

Everyone said the same thing about DJT's chances.

I suggest there is a non-zero possibility he gets the nomination, and every day that goes by he looks better and better particularly when he talks about his father's and uncle's vision for America which he wants to revive. My guess is American's are very thirsty for that kind of vision after the last 7 years.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Whether or not RFK Jr is a crank, it's certainly true that he has that reputation among Americans at large.

Biden is well ahead of RFK in primary polling (RFK is second). Trump is well of DeSantis. DeSantis doesn't have a reputation as a crank, so maybe he can win his primary.

It's still the most fertile opportunity I've seen in my lifetime for a Democratic challenger in the primary, and/or a third party candidate in the general (assuming Biden and Trump win their primaries).

 

[QV]

Whether or not RFK Jr is a crank, it's certainly true that he has that reputation among Americans at large.

Biden is well ahead of RFK in primary polling (RFK is second). Trump is well of DeSantis. DeSantis doesn't have a reputation as a crank, so maybe he can win his primary.

It's still the most fertile opportunity I've seen in my lifetime for a Democratic challenger in the primary, and/or a third party candidate in the general (assuming Biden and Trump win their primaries).

If RFK gets the chance to debate Biden this could get real interesting.

 

[Brad Sallows]

If RFK gets the chance to debate Biden this could get real interesting.

Biden's handlers do not want him to debate Kennedy (or anyone else). There's almost no likelihood Biden can advance his prospects, and every likelihood he can damage himself. Ditto minimizing Harris's press exposure.

 

[QV]

Biden's handlers do not want him to debate Kennedy (or anyone else). There's almost no likelihood Biden can advance his prospects, and every likelihood he can damage himself. Ditto minimizing Harris's press exposure.

We have a situation where the more exposure Biden gets the more likely he damages himself, and the more exposure Kennedy gets the more his polling numbers climb.

Expect the onslaught of smears against Kennedy to escalate. Having listened to his answers lately, I think it will be difficult to keep him down.

 

[QV]

This is from the comment section of an article on the NRO website here but I think it largely captures the order of subversive activity at upper levels of the FBI that has been going on:

1. An IRS probe into the Biden’s money laundering payments from hostile nations — the normal outcome of which would have ended his candidacy — was instead given a stand-down order.
2. The FBI and IRS wanted to search Biden’s house in September 2020, but they were given a stand down order.
3. The @FBI authenticated Hunter’s laptop a year before the NY Post first reported on its contents.
4. Rather than use the laptop’s voluminous documentation of myriad felonies to initiate criminal investigations, the FBI hatched a plot to warn social media companies of an imminent “hack & leak” operation aggressively suggesting it was Russian disinformation.
5. The FBI used its 2016 Russia collusion probe — which the Durham probe has since proven was essentially an extension of the Clinton campaign — to rationalize its meddling in the 2020 election.
6. The FBI also conducted an influence operation with various reporters at major newspapers to convince them that forthcoming damaging reporting about Biden that they knew was true was ‘in fact’ not.
7. The FBI was spying on Giuliani when he shared the laptop’s contents with the NY Post
8. When the FBI told Twitter and Facebook a Russian disinformation campaign was coming, they had already concluded Russia wasn’t trying to game the election.
9. In their attempt to corroborate their own rumor of Russian electoral influence, the FBI became aggressive with its demands for user data from Twitter, eventually getting shutdown for seeking users’ private info without a warrant.
10. Nonetheless, in the preceding years, the FBI established a beachhead inside Twitter, with an operations center of former agents who communicated via their own dedicated slack channel. These ex-agents included Jim Baker, the FBI’s former top counsel who played a central role in the FBI’s Trump/Russia scam, as well as Comey’s former chief of staff, Dawn Burton, who started the FBI’s Russia collusion probe.
11. The CIA, in collusion with the Biden campaign, seeded disinformation claiming the laptop was itself Russian disinformation. The major media used this as a pretext to avoid reporting on its contents and instead attack reporters who did.
12. The FBI also arranged a meeting with Senators Grassley and Johnson about supposed Russian disinformation and Hunter Biden.
13. The FBI then used this briefing with the senators to justify quashing their own agents’ probe into the Bidens’ corruption.
14. When the story broke mere weeks before the election — one that polling later indicated would have altered enough Democrat votes to send Trump to a second term — Twitter and Facebook orchestrated an unprecedented and anti-democratic mass censorship campaign.
15. When Twitter initially resisted censoring the story, it was Jim Baker who convinced them to do so (despite the FBI having known for a year the information was true).
16. In December 2020, after the operation’s success and Biden’s “victory,” the FBI agents working at and with Twitter celebrated the outcome.
17. The FBI subsequently paid Twitter $3.5 million for the staff hours expended on their influence operations.
18. At the time Trump was being impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate Biden’s alleged corruption in Ukraine, the FBI and IRS already knew the Bidens had indeed laundered more than $10 million from Burisma, via fake companies/LLCs and dozens of bank accounts, while at the same time VP Biden had used U.S. aid as leverage in getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma fired.”

 

[Fishbone Jones]

RFK Jr isn’t a Democrat in anything other than name.

There is a subzero chance he would get the Democrat nomination.

Much like a number of RINOs, like McConnell and Cheney.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I'm reading zero into this. I don't even know what Reuters was attempting to accomplish. Maybe they found it in one of Freeland's old filing cabinets there. I find the whole thing comical in the extreme. I'm a "You can't visit the sins of the father on the son" type of guy. However, since it's getting airtime, for some reason, I thought I'd post it for your amusement. It is truly UFI. It has been pointed out by more than one media source though, the one living US leader not on the list. See if you can identify which one.

Top U.S. leaders and their unexplored family connections to slavery

Reuters examined how many political elites descend from slaveholders, and asked them what it means to learn the facts behind their own family’s part in slavery.

www.reuters.com

 

[Halifax Tar]

I'm reading zero into this. I don't even know what Reuters was attempting to accomplish. Maybe they found it in one of Freeland's old filing cabinets there. I find the whole thing comical in the extreme. I'm a "You can't visit the sins of the father on the son" type of guy. However, since it's getting airtime, for some reason, I thought I'd post it for your amusement. It is truly UFI. It has been pointed out by more than one media source though, the one living US leader not on the list. See if you can identify which one.

Top U.S. leaders and their unexplored family connections to slavery

Reuters examined how many political elites descend from slaveholders, and asked them what it means to learn the facts behind their own family’s part in slavery.

www.reuters.com

Cursory look... Trump ?

 

[KevinB]

This is from the comment section of an article on the NRO website here but I think it largely captures the order of subversive activity at upper levels of the FBI that has been going on:

1. An IRS probe into the Biden’s money laundering payments from hostile nations — the normal outcome of which would have ended his candidacy — was instead given a stand-down order.

Sorry was that during the Trump administration? Oh wait yes.

2. The FBI and IRS wanted to search Biden’s house in September 2020, but they were given a stand down order.

3. The @FBI authenticated Hunter’s laptop a year before the NY Post first reported on its contents.

The laptop has a very confused chain of custody, and while it is clear there is some exceptionally concerning information on it, how it ended up where it did, doesn’t mean it would necessarily be enough to gain anything of itself.
Yes I agree it’s shady and should have been more thoroughly investigated.

4. Rather than use the laptop’s voluminous documentation of myriad felonies to initiate criminal investigations, the FBI hatched a plot to warn social media companies of an imminent “hack & leak” operation aggressively suggesting it was Russian disinformation.

It wasn’t the FBI as an entity, it was the SAC at a Field Office - that both buried the investigation and minimized the impact by circulating a Russian Disinformation campaign.

5. The FBI used its 2016 Russia collusion probe — which the Durham probe has since proven was essentially an extension of the Clinton campaign — to rationalize its meddling in the 2020 election.

Did any of you actually read the report? It shows that there was Russian interference and disinformation in the election. Just nothing able to tie the Trump campaign to a collusion to that.

6. The FBI also conducted an influence operation with various reporters at major newspapers to convince them that forthcoming damaging reporting about Biden that they knew was true was ‘in fact’ not.

Again a Forest/Tree issue

7. The FBI was spying on Giuliani when he shared the laptop’s contents with the NY Post

Spying or observing and monitoring? Big differences.

8. When the FBI told Twitter and Facebook a Russian disinformation campaign was coming, they had already concluded Russia wasn’t trying to game the election.

Again, I don’t think you actually read the Durham report, as it pointed out that there was Russian disinformation, but that it wasn’t specifically tied to the Trump campaign

9. In their attempt to corroborate their own rumor of Russian electoral influence, the FBI became aggressive with its demands for user data from Twitter, eventually getting shutdown for seeking users’ private info without a warrant.

You keep using the term FBI as opposed to a few field offices who were since sanctioned, and two senior agents fired.

10. Nonetheless, in the preceding years, the FBI established a beachhead inside Twitter, with an operations center of former agents who communicated via their own dedicated slack channel. These ex-agents included Jim Baker, the FBI’s former top counsel who played a central role in the FBI’s Trump/Russia scam, as well as Comey’s former chief of staff, Dawn Burton, who started the FBI’s Russia collusion probe.

11. The CIA, in collusion with the Biden campaign, seeded disinformation claiming the laptop was itself Russian disinformation. The major media used this as a pretext to avoid reporting on its contents and instead attack reporters who did.

Are you for real?

12. The FBI also arranged a meeting with Senators Grassley and Johnson about supposed Russian disinformation and Hunter Biden.

13. The FBI then used this briefing with the senators to justify quashing their own agents’ probe into the Bidens’ corruption.
14. When the story broke mere weeks before the election — one that polling later indicated would have altered enough Democrat votes to send Trump to a second term — Twitter and Facebook orchestrated an unprecedented and anti-democratic mass censorship campaign.

The story had been out much prior to that, at least for those paying attention. But I do agree that there was a significant (criminal even) effort on social media to down play the information in that.
However I’d also like to point out that many of the folks making an issue if this currently are also the same that make nothing of the criminal issues that DJT is facing Now…

15. When Twitter initially resisted censoring the story, it was Jim Baker who convinced them to do so (despite the FBI having known for a year the information was true).

16. In December 2020, after the operation’s success and Biden’s “victory,” the FBI agents working at and with Twitter celebrated the outcome.

17. The FBI subsequently paid Twitter $3.5 million for the staff hours expended on their influence operations.

Source please.

18. At the time Trump was being impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate Biden’s alleged corruption in Ukraine, the FBI and IRS already knew the Bidens had indeed laundered more than $10 million from Burisma, via fake companies/LLCs and dozens of bank accounts, while at the same time VP Biden had used U.S. aid as leverage in getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma fired.”

Your time line is a little off there. Biden wasn’t VP when Trump as POTUS asked then to find info.

While what it appears to have been done was no doubt illegal by the Bidens, it wasn’t done with either the current Ukrainian President, as Zelensky was elected in 2019 and the time frames only appear to have been when President Biden was ‘unemployed ‘ during the Trump Administration.


Neither parties are clean - and both Presidential candidates to me are terrible.

 

[Brad Sallows]

#11 "The CIA, in collusion with the Biden campaign, seeded disinformation..." point looks like a mistaken summation of Michael Morell's role in kickstarting the joint letter that the bunch of (ex-) spooks signed. Morell was by then out of CIA. Morell admitted his motivations were political and that Brennan knew that. If the two of them decided not to so advise the other signatories, that dishonesty is on them. The fact that the letter was immediately and repeatedly inaccurately characterized as alleging "Russian disinformation" (it alleged only the appearance of Russian disinformation) could have been addressed immediately and prominently by any of the signers (if any did, they didn't push very hard); apparently, it is only recently that Brennan pushed back on that detail. Damage done, gosh, golly, gee, oh well.

#17 looks like a mash-up between the FBI paying for requests for information about accounts (users) and various forms of pressure on social media companies to censor/limit communications. The FBI is kind of reputationally screwed on this one because while facially respectable, the tardiness and timing make it look like someone finding a way to launder a payoff.

The facts that won't go away and which are utterly corrosive to rule of law are all the ones in which the FBI knew something that militated against something they wanted to do, and they did it anyways.