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[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (12 children)

Excerpt:

With the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges brought under the Espionage Act, America’s cold civil war pitting blue cities against red regions has gotten considerably hotter. But that’s inevitable when you manipulate the nation’s laws to designate the leader of a movement representing one half of the country a traitor.

...But to others, the 37-count indictment looks like a reboot of the 2020 letter signed by 51 former U.S. spies claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The package is so big it’s got to be real, when in fact it’s just Bubble Wrap all the way down.

Debating the indictment’s details—the DOJ’s legal theory, which documents do and do not belong to Trump under the Presidential Records Act, etc.—is a ritualized expression of faith that the law is still impartial and the justice system is in the hands of serious men and women, devoted law enforcement officials who even when it looked most hopeless over the last seven years never once veered from their mission and now finally got their man. But it’s just playacting, for the stark fact is this: The never-ending campaign to get Trump is evidence the country has gone mad.

Enacted in 1917 to criminalize antiwar activism, the statute is a political weapon designed to bypass the Constitution and prosecute the ruling party’s domestic opponents. The fact that Trump has been charged with crimes under the Espionage Act is evidence that the world’s oldest democracy has fallen into the hands of a corrupt and pathological ruling faction that has turned federal law enforcement into a people’s commissariat serving a cohort of performative elites who still harbor the fantasy that a former American president is a Russian spy.

The appropriate legal framework through which to view the indictment is election interference—it’s the latest leg in the Department of Justice’s ongoing effort to bar Trump from the White House that began in 2016.

For the 2020 election cycle, federal law enforcement used the same plot points for the same purpose: to shield the Democratic candidate from revelations of corruption that might thwart his chances. The FBI was especially concerned about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which it had taken into its possession in 2019. To prevent the voting public from learning of the evidence of Biden family corruption sourced to the laptop, the bureau set up a censorship task force and labeled reports about it “Russian disinformation”...

So the Trump indictment is a cover-up for Biden as well as an early effort to tilt the 2024 vote away from Trump. But it’s part of a second storyline, too, and though it intersects in places with the DOJ thread, it represents something significantly more dangerous than one political faction turning the spy services against the other faction. After all, that’s a standard feature of all third-world security regimes, but few caudillos risk setting the stage for domestic conflict.

Charging Trump under the Espionage Act plays on a theme first developed by Barack Obama when he ordered CIA Director John Brennan to produce an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Published just before Obama’s term ended, the January 2017 report concluded, without evidence, that Putin had sought to help Trump win the election. Sourced to the brazen fabrication known as the Steele dossier, the ICA anchored the collusion narrative and served as the foundation for Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of Trump and his aides.

Obama’s strategy worked: The Russian collusion narrative crippled Trump’s presidency. More importantly, he used the authority of the executive branch to declare Trump’s presidency, and by extension the political movement that supported it, illegitimate.

Thus the Espionage Act charges are crucial to advancing the traitor narrative. Obama tipped you off more than six years ago that Trump wasn’t really American and here are the charges to prove it: He betrayed U.S. secrets because he’s working on behalf of a foreign power.

That narrative is due to be reinforced when the special counsel charges Trump, as seems nearly certain, with offenses related to January 6. After all, the point of referring to the raucous and sometimes violent three-hour-long demonstration at the Capitol as an insurrection more dangerous to our domestic peace than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War wasn’t just to drive news coverage. And charging January 6 defendants with seditious conspiracy wasn’t just to enhance their prison sentences. No, the purpose was to bulk out the narrative that Trump and the voters who favor him are in a fundamental way not American.

[–]bootylicious 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

The Way - or Way Of The Bern - is that criminals (like Trump) should not be in political office.

[–]MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

The Way - or Way Of The Bern - is that criminals (like Trump) should not be in political office.

"Should not be?" How absolute is that statement? Because the MIC/SS agrees with you and adds: "even if they're elected, and even if we have no legitimate means to contest or oppose their authority, and therefore we will use illegitimate means to undermine their goals, and expel them from power by any means necessary."

Is that your position? Jim Jeffrey openly admitted to deceiving the commander-in-chief about military deployments. Is this something you cheer? If not, why not?

[–]bootylicious 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

OK: The Way - or Way Of The Bern - is that criminals (like Trump) must not be in political office.

[–]MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

How do you imagine this clarifies your position?

[–]bootylicious 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Don't support criminals

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

the MIC/SS agrees with you

This person has been wrong so many times since he first set foot in here not too very long ago, that I would suggest double-checking any reporting of his concerning the color of the sky.

[Edit for clarification: not you, the person you replied to]

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Guess it's one of those YMMV things. I dislike Trump but what I dislike even more is the weaponization of our federal law enforcement and judiciary against political opponents, because as a leftist I'm one of them.

Everyone has personal biases but it's really stupid in my view to be so blinkered by them that you (generically speaking) can't see the broader implications: that today it's your enemy but tomorrow it could be your friend or even you unless you're a sycophant to those currently wielding power.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. - MLK Jr.

[–]BerryBoy1969It's not red vs. blue - It's capital vs. you 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

This is a great article, and it speaks to the desperation of our ruling class in the lengths they're willing to go, in order to maintain their bloody grasp on the power owning a government provides.

They must know, to the extent their narrow minds allow, that they won't emerge unscathed from the horrors they've heaped upon the planet in their gluttonous quest for personal wealth and power. That so many will perish in the process is the ultimate crime.

Some may be tempted to see the current indictment as Obama turning the tables on Trump—you pushed the idea I didn’t have a U.S. birth certificate and now look who’s laughing, foreign spy. Except it was Clinton whisperer Sidney Blumenthal who invented the birther hoax. And then there’s the fact that all of us will pay for the plot to set Americans at each other’s throats.

The fallout from the permanent bureaucracy’s war on Trump has turned millions of Americans into combatants in a conflict started by Democratic Party bosses and spy masters. Trump’s followers aren’t brainwashed cultists for believing attacks on him are assaults against them, too—the political and legal establishment describes them as domestic terrorists to designate them as targets of counterinsurgency warfare tactics developed during the global war on terror. It seems that Washington is breeding at home what it nurtured in the Middle East—civil war. That it strikes our political class as a good idea to renew hostilities between Americans after more than 150 years of peace is further evidence that the current regime is pathological.

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Even more broadly, it's a war on dissent, a shutting down of acceptable debate and of a piece with what we've seen with the Censorship Industrial Complex not just here but throughout the Western world.

What these power grabbers are doing is unprecedented, witness what the UK Parliament Committee of Privileges just did in a move eerily similar to what is happening to Trump in the US in terms of what the apparent goal is. But it has even broader implications, as Alexander explains:

Every MP now knows that if they step out of line, say the wrong thing, they're not just going to face their electors, who might choose to vote them out, which is democracy, but they might face allegations of contempt of Parliament because they've somehow infringed against the privileges committee. It starts with the privileges committee but then extends to every single part of the governmental machine connected in some way to the H of C, you're not allowed to criticize what they do or how they go about their business or their findings. It's a very sinister step.

[–]BerryBoy1969It's not red vs. blue - It's capital vs. you 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

What these power grabbers are doing is unprecedented,

Are they really "grabbing" it, or are they just wielding the power they've enjoyed for decades as they see fit?

From an article written by Stephan Cohen: "For decades, the CFR’s primary functional role has been, through its journal, website, featured events, and multiple weekly membership sessions, to define the accepted, legitimate, orthodox parameters of discussion about US foreign policy and related issues." It's only natural that the vassal states organized under the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission would follow suit.

Foreign policy needs a complacent, well trained populace to be successful. We fall under the category of 'related issues' to the CFR. If our owners learned anything from Joseph Goebbels, it was how to play the people for their own benefit.

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Are they really "grabbing" it, or are they just wielding the power they've enjoyed for decades as they see fit?

Well, that's a good point. But I'd characterize it as power they've accrued to themselves in stealth so the public didn't realize what they were doing - not that they'd quibble with it as long as it was their Team doing it.

how to play the people for their own benefit.

And a complacent public has no idea it's being manipulated and led to ruin, that's the saddest part of all.

[–]BerryBoy1969It's not red vs. blue - It's capital vs. you 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Well, that's a good point. But I'd characterize it as power they've accrued to themselves in stealth so the public didn't realize what they were doing - not that they'd quibble with it as long as it was their Team doing it.

That's why they spend so much money election theater. If people no longer believe in the myth that their vote is their voice in our owners demockracy, they might start investigating why that is.

And a complacent public has no idea it's being manipulated and led to ruin, that's the saddest part of all.

That's why it's so important that our national day care system ensures that no child is left behind... If the bar's set low enough, everybody gets a high jump participation trophy.