More on the ‘real’ Sir Keir Starmer

Yesterday’s post took a somewhat forensic view of Sir Keir Starmer’s background, from his childhood through his career.

Today’s post looks at a new book that is coming out next week, Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin (William Collins, £25).

On Wednesday, February 21, Tom Baldwin, an ex-Labour adviser, wrote a first hand account for The Guardian of what it was like to interview his subject for the book, briefly excerpted below:

Starmer is complicated, as most people are, and filled with paradoxes. He’s the most working-class leader of the Labour party for a generation and also the first in its history to have the prefix “Sir” attached to his name before he got the job. He is a private and cautious man who has chosen to place himself in the white light of public scrutiny while taking some gigantic political risks, including one that ended the Labour career of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. He likes to think decisions through and sometimes changes his mind, but he has also been breathtakingly ruthless in overcoming more polished or popular opponents in the Tory party and his own.

None of that’s dull; it’s just very difficult to define. And part of him still instinctively resists any effort to do so. He didn’t always relish the process of me writing a biography about him. Over the course of the past couple of years and dozens of conversations, I’ve had to prod or cajole him into talking about things that middle-aged Englishmen are not always comfortable discussing: an intensely difficult relationship with his father; a sense of separation from his brother and the sisters he left behind as he pursued a career in London; the source of a hard-driving ambition that one of his ex-girlfriends remembers as involving “not much reflection and no stopping … which can make life difficult for others around him because there really aren’t many people made of that kind of stuff”.

For most of Starmer’s life, he hasn’t had to talk or even think too hard about all of this. His identity was built around the three decades he spent as a successful human rights barrister and then director of public prosecutions. He never won a case on the basis that he grew up in a “pebbledash semi”, while the now well-worn phrase “My dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse” did not cross his lips until he was in his late 50s.

At one stage, I wanted to call my biography of him The Unpolitician because he doesn’t fit the template of political leaders. His backstory is messy and flawed, and he has neither a grandiose vision that can be summed up in a three-word slogan nor the kind of charisma that for so long made so many think Boris Johnson was unbeatable. However, even if “unpolitician” had been a real word, it still wouldn’t have been a fair description of Starmer who, for all his misgivings about this profession, has learned how to become pretty good at it.

On Monday, February 19, The Times published Patrick Maguire’s review of the book, ‘Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin review — this biography should be called Nightmares from My Father’:

He went to the pub — where else? — with Tom Baldwin, a former Times journalist and recovering spin doctor for Ed Miliband, who was doing the ghostwriting. He put the memoir out of its misery without ceremony (see also: the flute he played as a teenager; the pledges from his leadership campaign; Jeremy Corbyn). In its place comes the first serious and consistently readable biography of Starmer, written with the Labour leader’s cooperation. It tells us much we need to know about the man who will be prime minister. One of its few shortcomings, though, is the title, Keir Starmer: The Biography. Much like the man, it is functional and businesslike but unrevealing. It ought to have been called Nightmares From My Father instead.

Anybody who reads this book will be struck by three things. The first is just how close Starmer has got to Downing Street without revealing almost anything of note about his 62 years on earth.

The second is how traumatic much of that life has been — the mother who spent much of the young Keir’s childhood in debilitating pain, sometimes close to death; the cold, distant, irascible dad; the hospitalised brother with learning difficulties, far away from Westminster, visited in secret by the protective Keir; the niece beaten black and blue in a homophobic attack.

Well, while what happened to his niece qualifies as traumatic, I am not sure the rest of that content does. Perhaps Maguire is under 50 and doesn’t understand how many unemotional fathers there were until recently.

Rodney Starmer

Of course, Rodney Starmer appears early on in the review. He is a man who dearly loved his disabled wife, stricken with Still’s disease. Not surprisingly, she was his primary consideration:

Rodney Starmer — the toolmaker now so often invoked in his eldest son’s speeches — was, Keir tells his biographer, “not an easy man to live with”. That is an understatement. In the Starmer house, television was banned for years and the radio played only Beethoven or Shostakovich if dad was home. Life revolved around Jo, the mother debilitated by arthritis brought on by a severe autoimmune condition, to whom Rod was devoted to the exclusion of all else — including, it seems, his children. She never complained. She was always “all right”. Rod welded her a special wheelchair for their trips up the Lakeland fells, where they befriended the enigmatic walker and author Alfred Wainwright. When the Starmers called in to see him, the kids were left at home.

The enduring obsession with football for which Starmer is now known — and mocked — partly began as a schoolboy defence mechanism, to “avoid the conversations that everyone else was having about what they had watched the night before” … On rare family trips for meals beyond the exposed plaster walls of 23 Tanhouse Road, Oxted [Surrey], Rodney “just sat there, behind his beard”. Behind the boy with the Bay City Rollers haircut loomed this big, complicated, foreboding figure.

… Visiting schoolfriends were barracked and bullied by the argumentative socialist, who “detested Thatcher” and “devoured the Guardian every morning” …

‘Superboy’

Starmer’s siblings called him Superboy at home:

Growing up, his three siblings had a nickname for Keir, the only child to go to university: “Superboy.” Rod never gave him special treatment but he idolised Superboy too. Keir did not know that until it was too late.

While Superboy was fully into his legal career, Rodney languished at home, a lonely widower. However, Superboy’s achievements fascinated him:

When Jo died, Rod turned to drink. By then, his son was the MP for Holborn and St Pancras. His father spent long, lonely hours watching BBC Parliament, hoping to catch a glimpse of Keir. In 2018, Rod died. Hidden in his wardrobe was discovered a scrapbook of every newspaper story about his son, the human rights lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions then politician, annotated painstakingly in a “craftsman’s hand”.

Their final encounter took place in hospital:

Parting from his father for the last time, Keir did not hug him. He walked away without saying I love you. “I thought about trying to put my arms around him in that hospital room but — no — it wasn’t what we did. I knew he was dying and I didn’t turn around, to go back and tell him what I thought. And I should have done.”

Family life high priority

Baldwin discovered that Sir Keir’s family is his highest priority:

The father who, given the choice, would sooner be with his wife, who emerges here as his most important adviser, than anywhere else …

Not for him long hours of gossip in the Commons tearoom or backslapping in parliamentary bars. “When he finishes for the day, he goes home to his family or see his old friends,” Chris Ward, Starmer’s former chief of staff, tells Baldwin. “He’s just not a normal politician.”

A blank slate with relentless focus

Starmer’s acquaintances say there is much about him that they don’t even know. That said, most have noted his relentless focus:

“He’s nobody’s-ite,” says [former boss Ed] Miliband. While there is plenty of detail here about Starmer’s youthful flirtations with an obscure leftist doctrine called Pabloism, even the story of the twentysomething radical is punctuated with complaints from contemporaries that he was stiff and technocratic. What colleagues and voters who read this biography will really want to know is how and why he went from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet to fireside chats with Tony Blair. Why he exiled Corbyn, the predecessor he called a friend, and jettisoned the leftish manifesto upon which he was elected. Why he wanted to be Labour leader — secretly practising responses to budgets from almost the moment he was elected an MP — when no policy now seems too important to abandon. Or, to borrow a lyric from the Wedding Present, the indie band he befriended at Leeds University: to ask him if the ends was worth the means … was there really no in-between?

“Keir’s like a ratchet,” one friend says. “He relentlessly moves in only one direction, he never goes backwards.” For now, the ratchet is cranking rightwards. Starmer is surrounded by conviction Blairites and weary warriors of the party’s right who do like politics: their own. This “ordinary-looking man in a hurry to get somewhere” — to use Baldwin’s nicely epigrammatic phrase — has chosen a route to power that the people he has left behind fear has made him a prisoner of the factionalism he professes to dislike.

Obama

As I wrote yesterday, there are shades of Obama in the Starmer story. Obama was the big blank slate on which we could impose any impression or feeling.

Are we surprised to find that the two spoke on Zoom calls during lockdown? Sir Keir gets everywhere:

Discussing his parents, he breaks down. Between deep breaths, he says: “I’m just — sort of — piecing this together.” For that we have Obama to thank. It was on a series of lockdown Zoom calls with the former president that Starmer first began to understand the power of his own story. It is one that most people in the Labour Party and Britain are still to learn.

Oh, my. Imagine having Obama among Starmer’s coterie of advisers along with Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. Dear, oh dear.

C’mon, Rishi, pull a rabbit out of a hat — and sharpish.

Who is the real Sir Keir Starmer?

How much do we actually know about the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer?

This year, we are likely to see books and documentaries about him. How much will we find out? Whereas Conservatives Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were filleted by the media, will this be the case with Starmer?

Paucity of information

Last Friday, I wrote about Labour and Lib Dem politicians involved with the Post Office Horizon scandal. Starmer appeared as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a position he held between 2008 and 2013, during the latter Labour years of government into the Coalition (Conservative/Lib Dem) years. In my post, I mentioned that on January 11, The Telegraph reported that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecuted more subpostmasters than previously thought. Yet, Sir Keir maintains that none of the cases ever arrived on his desk during his tenure. In a brief discussion with the press, he maintained that he had no awareness of any of these cases.

Interesting.

You can imagine if a Conservative Party leader were in the same situation and said the same thing, the media would have hounded him for more information.

As far as policies are concerned, Starmer has become known on Conservative benches as Mr Flip-Flop for adopting one policy and ditching it days later. This has happened time and time again.

I had an interesting exchange in the comments section with one of my regular readers, dearieme, who pointed out that something odd has happened to the Sir Jimmy Savile files. Those supposedly crossed Starmer’s desk during his time as DPP. Nothing happened to Savile before or after his death.

Savile’s case, which has interested many Britons who remember him presenting BBC favourites such as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, for the allegations that he pursued teens for his own pleasure. Top of the Pops offered a perfect hunting ground, particularly backstage.

Dearieme commented (emphases mine):

But who is in charge of deciding what should reach the desk of the DPP but the DPP himself?

Consider too: “Mr Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when the decision not to prosecute Savile was made on the grounds of “insufficient evidence”. The allegations against Savile were dealt with by local police and a reviewing lawyer for the CPS.

… the CPS said that records relating to the decision not to charge Savile were not kept, which the service said is in line with its data retention policy.”

And who is responsible for the CPS’s data retention policy? The DPP, surely?

He doesn’t seem much to like the idea that “the buck stops here”.

Again, if that were a Conservative, the story would recur time and time again.

‘Son of a toolmaker’

I started digging around Starmer’s past for another reason. He continually refers to himself as the ‘son of a toolmaker’, yet his father was a self-employed toolmaker.

I found a fascinating article on Paul Knaggs’s Labour Heartlands, ‘Keir Starmer: “My Dad Was A Toolmaker” And Other Little Grifts’.

This is what he has to say about ‘son of a toolmaker’:

To court working class voters, Starmer touts his background as the son of a factory floor toolmaker. But peek behind the veil and cracks emerge in this narrative. Turns out his father owned an independent toolmaking firm, devoid of managers lording over factory workers. Already Starmer’s tale feels more scripted than authentic.

One might be tempted to let it slide if it weren’t for the fact that Starmer leans so heavily on this fabricated image. Moreover, it is rather insulting to suggest that a toolmaker would be looked down upon, which Starmer does…

During his speech at the TUC, Keir Starmer recounted an anecdote about his father, a skilled toolmaker who allegedly felt looked down upon for working on the factory floor.

During a speech at the TUC, Starmer claimed:

“Despite being a skilled toolmaker throughout his working life, my dad thought people looked down on him because he worked on the factory floor. He was right about that.”

His vivid anecdote about others scorning his dad for manual labour exposes Starmer’s upper middle class disconnect. In all blue collar communities, skilled tradespeople enjoy tremendous respect, their expertise honed over years. Starmer betrays ignorance by implying contempt for the dignity of craft and graft.

It exposes a revealing slip that sheds light on Starmer’s true background, contrasting with the official version he peddles.

At that moment, an instinctual feeling arises, suggesting something amiss, a lack of authenticity in Starmer’s words.

Starmer’s father, in reality, operated the Oxted Tool Co. His own independent toolmaking enterprise until the 1990s. By all accounts, he was a proficient self-employed tradesman, devoid of superiors or overseers, operating from a rented workshop on an industrial estate rather than a conventional factory setting.

In an ideal political landscape focused on substantive policies rather than theatrical portrayals of “the worker,” the specifics of Starmer’s father’s profession should hold little relevance. Alas, the current state of affairs has brought us to a point where such details seem to take centre stage, overshadowing more crucial matters.

It turns out that Keir worked for his father for a short time:

While Starmer has made frequent references to his toolmaker father, Dad Rodney once boasted that he ran his own factory. Reflecting on his son’s knighthood in 2014, Rodney Starmer wrote in Oxted’s theatre newsletter that his son had spent six months before university working ‘in my factory operating a production machine’.

That sort of gives the game away.

None of this would matter in any way, of course, but for the fact that Keir Starmer has not been totally explicit about it when asked.

Dearieme left a comment on this:

My father’s company had several dozen employees: he didn’t incorporate it until late in life i.e. for nearly all his time it wasn’t a “Ltd”.

So I see no reason to suppose, on the evidence presented, that Pa Starmer’s company was tiny e.g. just the boss and a boy.

Is Starmer ashamed of not being proletarian or ashamed of being only petit bourgeois?

Why not say proudly “Dad got his instrument maker’s ticket and went on to found and run his own small instrument-making company”?

Good for Dad; boo for “Sir” Kneel.

Shades of Obama

There is something about this media narrative that has sent my spidey-senses tingling, to borrow an American expression.

A few months ago, it seemed as if the media are trying to craft another Obama, this time for Britain.

Paul Knaggs senses it, too:

Grifters come in various guises. The archetypal grifter is the smooth-talking con artist accumulating riches through scams and deception. But the political grifter also flourishes – cunning operators leveraging positions of public trust for entry into elite circles of influence and affluence.

Rather than pickpocket the vulnerable, these grifters target the body politic itself. They sing seductive songs of change to gain power, later shedding populist skins when opportunity beckons …

Followers of Noam Chomsky will recall how he spotlighted Obama’s grift in real-time during his presidency. Obama swept into office on a wave of populist rage after the 2007/2008 financial crisis. His platitudes promised hope and change for an angry public stripped of economic security.

Yet Chomsky called out Obama as an establishment Trojan Horse from day one. His meteoric rise and messiah-like image aroused suspicion. Lo and behold, Obama’s tenure protected status quo interests. His administration engineered the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history – redistributing billions from public hands into the pockets of private banks and financial institutions.

Obama won accolades for “stabilizing markets,” while ordinary citizens faced job losses, austerity cutbacks, and Predatory crisis exploitation. Chomsky points out the cynical ploy of offering false prophets to absorb revolutionary steam when public anger threatens prevailing power structures.

Obama’s primary function was quelling class tensions through his cult of personality. He achieved record banker bailouts while placating calls for pitchforks. The masses gratefully accepted meagre crumbs while financiers feasted, saved from accountability by their political guardian angel. In Chomsky’s eyes, Obama was a manufactured release valve to ease pressure for root and branch reform after the economy exposed its glaring cruelties.

We have something similar with the media narrative surrounding Starmer, with no questions asked. Starmer is allowed to flip flop weekly without criticism, and no one delves into his career achievements or otherwise, particularly as DPP. Jimmy Savile? Get over it!

Knaggs says:

What receives less scrutiny is the meticulous orchestration surrounding Corbyn’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer. The establishment press provides fawning coverage, granting their darling levels of puffery beyond even Boris Johnson’s cult of personality. Starmer has become the system’s Manchurian candidate …

Starmer increasingly resembles a David Cameron tribute act, devoid of conviction politics or concrete vision. His new working class posturing follows years of loyalty serving institutional powers deeply invested in preventing fundamental change.

For an establishment desperate to regain tight control, Starmer offers familiar and reassuring stewardship. But his links and records invite scepticism from those seeking transformative left agendas …

When examining Starmer’s personal history, a stark disparity emerges between truth and reality. It feels off-sync, contrived, resembling the plot of the Manchurian Candidate. One must question the extent to which the establishment is determined to prop him up.

Why, indeed, does a mediocre politician like Starmer, whose stagecraft resembles that of a man impersonating Rumpole of the Bailey, garner unwavering support from the establishment? And why is the media so firmly in his corner? Each time he delivers a major speech, we are left questioning the authenticity of his words, as they resemble nothing more than empty closing statements devoid of genuine conviction. After all, his promises and pledges hold as much substance as a bucket riddled with holes, then again, why should he even believe what he says? As things are going he will see office not on merit but simply because the Tories are so bad we have no other choice.

Beyond these dubious background claims swirl deeper queries. Why does such a mediocre politician gain backing from every pillar of the establishment?

Prefers Davos to Parliament

I was shocked when Starmer said in an interview in January 2023 that he would rather be part of Davos than the Mother of All Parliaments. How could he?

He told former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis:

Westminster is too constrained… Once you get out of Westminster, whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.

Knaggs tells us:

Perhaps answers lie in Starmer’s membership of the elitist Trilateral Commission, rubbing shoulders with the world’s wealthiest figures. Their agenda is preserving commerce unhindered by civil rights meddling from unions or protesters. Starmer appears a willing custodian of vested interests rather than an advocate for working people.

Not ‘a man of the people’

Michael Ashcroft wrote a biography of Starmer, Red Knight. Knaggs excerpts parts that examine the man behind the mask:

‘One of Keir’s faults, which has come out from time to time, is his wanting to insist how working class he is when he’s absolutely, plainly not,’ says Professor Bill Bowring, who teaches law at Birkbeck College, University of London.

‘If you’re a QC and former Director of Public Prosecutions, you’ve left your working-class roots far behind. That’s a weakness of his, to go on about it. He’s become very middle class.’

Ashcroft says:

Sir Keir did not want this story to be written. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he actively obstructed it …

By having such a prickly reaction to my decision to write his story, Sir Keir has arguably shown more of himself than he perhaps realised.

Given that most of his career has been spent outside elected politics – he was a barrister from 1987 until 2008; the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 2008 to 2013; and only became a Labour parliamentary candidate in December 2014 – some probing is justified. So who is the man who would be Britain’s leader?

Starmer’s education was thoroughly middle-middle class, which has its own privileges. Parents can afford to pay for them, musical instruments being one such luxury:

In 1974, Keir won a place at Reigate Grammar School, which would become independent during his time there. Those who were already pupils were allowed to continue, with their fees paid by the local council.

Starmer’s friends there included Quentin Cook, subsequently known as Norman and by his DJ name Fatboy Slim. They took violin lessons together, though Cook left Reigate Grammar aged 16.

Music remained a very important part of the life of Starmer, who also played the flute, piano and recorder. He was a good enough flute player to secure a place at the prestigious Junior Guildhall School of Music.

Every Saturday morning, at the insistence of his parents, he would travel to London for lessons by staff who played in professional orchestras.

It is noteworthy that when the Daily Mail discovered in September 2009 that Starmer had omitted to mention Reigate Grammar School in his Who’s Who entry, it concluded that this was a piece of chicanery which reflected badly on his character. By then, he was the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Apparently, at university, he was known as the King of the Middle Class Radicals.

Years later, he mixed with a notable bunch of lawyers:

In March 2002, Starmer became a QC at the relatively early age of 39. A few months later he was mentioned in an Observer profile piece headlined The New Legal Crusaders, which focused on a group of ambitious young lawyers.

This article is noteworthy for the following sentence: ‘Among them was Ben Emmerson, the dashing young advocate and colleague of Cherie Booth at the fashionable Matrix Chambers …’

Starmer finds fault with his patriarchal home life as a youngster, because his father Rodney wasn’t emotionally open. Yet Rodney was intensely proud of his son:

Keir Starmer is often described as being intensely ambitious, yet it is arguable that this trait is at least in part a consequence of the hopes and dreams of his family.

The evidence for this comes from a round-robin letter written in December 2014 by Starmer’s father, Rodney. In it, he expressed to friends his delight that his son had just been chosen as Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate in the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras.

‘We are very pleased and wish him well,’ Rodney wrote. ‘My dad, Bert, said many years ago that one of the Starmer’s should be an MP.’

Who can say why Starmer’s mechanic grandfather seemed fixed upon a family member making it to the House of Commons? But Keir will no doubt have known about this comment.

It was a huge personal tragedy for Starmer that his mother did not live to see him become an MP in the General Election of May 2015. Very sadly, she died less than two weeks before polling day.

Unexpressive fathers are a generational thing. I had one myself, and I couldn’t always get the measure of the man. However, just a few weeks before he died, he sent me a long, handwritten letter telling me how much he loved me.

I would say that Rodney had plenty of love for Keir if he took all manner of music lessons and went to law school.

Letting a flattering rumour live for ten years

Between 2002 and 2012, Starmer never denied a well-circulated media rumour that he was the inspiration for Helen Fielding’s Mark Darcy, the dashing lawyer in the Bridget Jones series.

It appears that the aforementioned 2002 Observer article kicked things off:

What appears to have happened is that in April 2012, a decade after the Observer article, a Sunday Times journalist interviewed Starmer.

‘Just before my interview with Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), someone tells me that the chisel-jawed former human rights lawyer was the inspiration for Mark Darcy,’ she wrote at the time.

‘I am not sure if this is true.’ From that point on, other journalists decided that it was true and the myth held. Starmer never denied it, no doubt relishing the touch of glamour it gave him.

For example, during the Labour leadership contest, when ITV News asked him if the Darcy character was based on him, he answered: ‘Everybody asks me this question when they should be asking [Fielding] the question because she knows the answer and I don’t.’

Finally, it was Fielding herself who explained on Desert Island Discs last July that Starmer played no part in her thinking up Mark Darcy.

While this may seem to be a trivial matter, one friend of Starmer says it is rather revealing.

The Starmer whom this person knows apparently paid attention when members of the opposite sex said he was good-looking.

‘What’s interesting is he knows full well he wasn’t the model for Mark Darcy,’ says the friend. ‘His answers tended to leave the impression that it was true.’

Policies

The big question is, ‘What sort of policies can we expect from Keir Starmer should he become Prime Minister?’

A February 16 article in The Daily Sceptic warns, ‘Keir Starmer’s Coming Revolution Is More Radical Than His Opponents Realise’:

… If it could only be definitively shown that Starmer is simply a politician like the rest, then his public brand would fall away …

Those who invoke it live in hope that if Starmer is merely grasping and cynical, then he can be assimilated; he can be dealt with. This steady rubbing off of the varnish relies, above all, on the assumption that there is in fact something basically familiar underneath.

But there isn’t. This is the great trick that has been missed about Britain’s likely next Prime Minister. The stately manner is not a conceit to be rubbed away, but is an irreducible part of Keir Starmer’s whole idea of life and politics. Starmer simply isn’t someone that can be digested into the ordinary rigmarole of Westminster, however much his opponents might wish it.

Starmer is used to being in charge by applying the law to great effect:

Run the gamut of Keir Starmer’s career and you’ll find a man who has traded not in deals, appeals and backroom manoeuvre – but in moral black-and-white, in iron legalisms and in hard executive power. Starmer’s time at the bar was spent entirely within the domain of human rights law; that is to say, the enforcement of the particular moral dogmas established in 1997 against secular and democratic authority. As Director of Public Prosecutions – an office that is beginning to resemble a kind of parallel Home Secretary – Starmer had broad personal discretion over how the laws of England were enforced, and against whom. This basic tenor held in Westminster, too. Starmer’s only role in ordinary retail politics was Shadow Immigration Minister, which he soon left. His tenure as Shadow Brexit Secretary – his biggest job in Westminster before winning the Labour leadership – was legalistic rather than political: it was Keir Starmer, more than anyone else, who pioneered the idea that Brexit was not even wrong, but simply “unlawful“. His defeat of the Corbynites was similarly litigious; it did not rely so much on any avowed criticism of their ideas (he endorsed most of them during the leadership campaign), but a simple recourse to the party rulebook to purge their ranks.

Everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project – the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 – can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it …

What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo. It’s no surprise, then, that the cause has taken for its instruments two figures from outside electoral politics: Keir Starmer and Sue Gray. It is, further, no surprise that both of these individuals had a spell in Northern Ireland (the latter, most likely, as some sort of police spy), which, through the Good Friday Agreement, was an early testing ground for the methods of ‘stakeholder’ governance. Under Starmerism, the rule of the judge, of the quango and of the bureaucrat – long implicit – will at last declare itself openly. This is why questions about whether Starmer best resembles Tony Blair in 1997 or Neil Kinnock in 1992 are misleading. He really is something new. What the British establishment wants is an inquisitor, and in Keir Starmer they have found one.

Never mind the flip-flops; those are inconsequential:

Starmerism is a policy of vengeance against the Enemies of Society; its precise position on taxation, disposable vapes or Israel-Palestine is of no moment. For those who wish to oppose Keir Starmer and what he represents, the charge of inconsistency may be a useful one. But it’s an illusion. It does not reckon with the baroque strangeness of Starmer and his project. For his opponents, the salient danger is not that Keir Starmer feigns outrage for opportunistic reasons. The danger is that he really means it.

Scary.

Don’t forget that there are still radical Corbynistas within Labour’s Parliamentary ranks. He will have to placate them, too. And there is just enough common ground between them — i.e. agreeing on ‘the Enemies of Society’ — that Starmer could do very well as PM for the first six months to a year.

However, for me, the fundamental problem is that the Corbynistas will still want to prevail. I do think there will be a coup after the first year of his premiership. Now, he might use the law — Labour Party rules — against them as he did a few years ago. However, there could also be a lot of in-fighting going on between a ‘moderate’ Labour agenda and a more radical one. Who would win?

We will have to wait and see.

I will have more on Sir Keir Starmer tomorrow.

The Queen’s politics and protocol

On May 6, 2023, Queen Consort Camilla will be crowned as Queen.

With that in mind, my weekday posts until then will be a retrospective of Queen Elizabeth II.

Family history

It is useful and interesting to look back on how the British had a succession of German monarchs dating back to George I.

On June 24, 2015, The Telegraph featured an article, ‘How German is the Queen?’

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Many Britons say we have a German monarchy, but our ties with that part of Europe and others date back to the Dark Ages:

It is, in fact, worth remembering that the word “English” is derived from the Angles, of Anglo-Saxon fame. When the Romans cleared out of Britain in AD 410, a range of German, Danish, and Dutch tribes that we sloppily call the Anglo-Saxons moved in from across the Whale Road. That’s not forgetting the Vikings either, who brought Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish blood to swathes of Britain. So, to be honest, if we scrutinise the Royal Family’s connections with the Fatherland, we should take a long look at our own, too, and acknowledge that this country has had the most profound and close genetic and cultural ties with the people of Germany and Scandinavia for over 1,500 years.

In 1701:

The Protestant King William III has no direct heirs, and his crown could soon pass to a Catholic. To prevent this, Parliament passes the Act of Settlement, locking them out of the succession.

In 1714:

William’s sister-in-law Queen Anne dies without children. The crown skips over 56 of her close Catholic relations to rest on George Ludwig, ruler of the German state of Hanover. He speaks very little English and relies on his ministers to run Britain for him.

In 1761:

George III takes the throne. He is still a Hanoverian, but unlike his father and grandfather he was born in London and speaks English as a first language.

In 1819:

A succession crisis prompts George III’s fourth son Edward to marry the princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Their daughter, Victoria, will end up Queen – and marry her German cousin Albert.

In 1917:

Victoria’s line continues as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But the First World War – and the Russian revolution – call for a royal rebrand. George V renames it the House of Windsor.

Here’s how it happened:

When World War One bred increasing anti-German sentiment in Britain, astute observers noted that Kaiser Bill was Queen Victoria’s grandson and our King George V’s first cousin. In recognition of the delicacy of the position, George V changed the name of his royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, after the castle. At the same time, he also took the modern step of adopting Windsor as a surname for his family.

Thirty years later, in 1947, the future Queen married Prince Philip:

Philip is a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. But, with the Second World War fresh in Britain’s memory, he abandons these titles before his marriage.

When she acceded the throne in 1952:

Queen Elizabeth II chose to keep the name Windsor, and in 1960 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh announced that they wanted their descendants who do not have an HRH title to be Mountbatten-Windsor. (Mountbatten is the Duke of Edinburgh’s adopted name. His German-Danish-Greek royal lines are Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glūcksburg on his father’s side, and Battenberg on his mother’s.)

The Royal Family still follow German customs at Christmas:

The Royal Family still opens its presents on Christmas Eve, following the German tradition, which Prince Albert was particularly keen on following.

However, it is also important to point out that the Queen was also a direct descendant of Britain’s royal houses:

… there’s no point overstating it. The Queen is also directly descended from over a thousand years worth of Britain’s royal houses, including the Stuarts, Tudors, Plantagenets, Angevins, Normans, and Wessex. 

That means King Charles is, too.

Politics

The Queen was acquainted with 15 Prime Ministers during her reign. Liz Truss was the last.

A 2019 Tatler retrospective shows her pictured with several of them, beginning with Sir Winston Churchill. You won’t want to miss the photographs, which end with Boris Johnson. How time changed through the decades.

Here is a video of the Queen and other members of the Royal Family at a G7 drinks reception in 1991. At that time, John Major was Prime Minister and George H W Bush was president. However, other former Prime Ministers also attended:

The video is known for a quip that the Queen made to Sir Edward ‘Ted’ Heath (1970-1974), who is not held in the highest esteem among Britons who were around in the 1970s:

Queen Tells Heath he’s “Expendable” in Resurfaced G7 Footage https://t.co/lKLSRLNGNN pic.twitter.com/VKFG6zaHrt

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) July 23, 2021

Guido Fawkes gives us the quote (emphasis his):

One of the highlights of the clip is the Queen saying what we all knew directly to Ted Heath’s face; when the former PM mentioned he’d been to Baghdad the Queen jokingly responds, “I know you did, you’re expendable”. The Queen of diplomacy…

The Queen was also astute in other political matters, such as economic crises. The monarch goes through a red box every day with updates on national and world affairs.

On April 13, 2020, The Express told us about her consternation at the 2008 banking crisis:

… unearthed reports shed light on how Queen Elizabeth II reacted to the turmoil on the international markets twelve years ago.

According to a 2008 report by the Telegraph, during a briefing by academics at the London School of Economics (LSE), Her Majesty asked: “Why did nobody notice it?”

Professor Luis Garicano, director of research at the LSE’s management department, had explained the origins and effects of the credit crisis when she opened the £71 million New Academic Building.

The Queen then described the turbulence on the markets as “awful”.

Prof Garicano said: “She was asking me if these things were so large how come everyone missed it.”

He told the Queen: “At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing” …

The Queen’s investments, largely in British blue chip companies, broadly tracked the market, resulting in a 25 percent fall in her portfolio’s value.

Philip Beresford, compiler of The Rich List, told the publication: “I would think she will have taken an enormous hit.

“Though maybe not as much as people who did racy investments in shares.”

On April 21, 2019, the Queen celebrated her 93rd birthday and became the longest reigning British monarch and longest-serving current head of state in the world at the time:

HM The Queen, who is 93 today, holds the records for the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch, and is also the oldest and longest-reigning current monarch & oldest and longest-serving current head of state in the world

— Mr Memory (@AmIRightSir) April 21, 2019

No, there are a number historically who exceed her on either of those grounds

— Mr Memory (@AmIRightSir) April 21, 2019

At the beginning of the month, the Conservative government was having an exceedingly difficult time getting Brexit legislation through Parliament.

Lord James of Blackheath CBE wanted the Queen to step in and resolve the issue (emphases in the original):

The way forward from this is to:-

1. Make an immediate appeal to the United Nations making reference to a potential breach of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaty Making 1969 under Article 46.1, with a view to seeking an adjudication that the EU is attempting to force us to agree a treaty based upon fundamentally unconstitutional arrangements unacceptable to the British Crown …

2. If the application could be supported by Her Majesty, it would add significant force. This application to the UN could surely be assembled by a Government legal team within a single working day and be ready to be presented by the UK’s Ambassador to the UN on behalf of Her Majesty within 48 hours …

4 The dire constitutional consequences of remaining will very likely force an abdication by the Monarch. She would either have to accept a state of perjury or maintain the Crown’s honour by abdication. Her oaths of office will have become entirely corrupted such that no successor could undertake them, thus the total demise of the Crown is a very real and inherent risk in remaining.

Failure to terminate the membership of the European Union will continue to lead us all deeper into a treasonous liability arising from placing our governance subject to a foreign Potentate. That Potentate is unelected by the UK’s electorate, is unaccountable to them and irremovable by them.

This is an absolute affront to the Dignity and Majesty of the Crown. It could foreshadow the total demise of the Monarchy.

When Brexit is finally done, Parliament must be shown to have discharged its absolute responsibility not to have reduced its own omnipotence.

However, a spokesman for Her Majesty said that she would not become involved in the Brexit rows:

NEW The Queen will not be dragged into the #Brexit crisis, the PM's official spokesman has said.
Asked if Theresa May could prorogue Parliament to stop the UK leaving the EU on Apri 12, the spokesman said: "We don’t have any intention of involving the Queen in the process."

— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) April 1, 2019

One year later, on the evening of Sunday, April 5, 2020, the Queen made the rare move of addressing the nation outside of her Christmas speech. She spoke to us about the pandemic:

Her Majesty The Queen addresses the UK and the Commonwealth in a special broadcast recorded at Windsor Castle. pic.twitter.com/HjO1uiV1Tm

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 5, 2020

The nation was in its first-ever lockdown and Her Majesty gave us a short televised message about keeping our chins up, telling us that we would meet again, echoing Dame Vera’s Second World War hit song:

"We will succeed and that success will belong to every one of us"

The Queen delivers a rallying message to the UK in its fight against coronavirus, thanking healthcare workers as well as people for staying at home and following government ruleshttps://t.co/Ku4DOhcotY pic.twitter.com/wdBsaFQjeQ

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) April 5, 2020

The ratings were massive:

24m across all 7 TV channels (BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky 1, Sky News and BBC News)

— Maserv (@maserv) April 6, 2020

Her address even made the main French news channel BFMTV:

Elizabeth II: "Je tiens à remercier tous ceux qui sont en première ligne et ceux qui restent chez eux"" pic.twitter.com/LoiYUl1W2t

— BFMTV (@BFMTV) April 5, 2020

That evening, just after the Queen’s broadcast ended, Boris Johnson entered St Thomas’ Hospital with coronavirus:

Good Luck Boris – the country is supporting you. Get well soon 💪

— WILL (@KRTN_Will) April 5, 2020

Buckingham Palace spokesman says the Queen is being been kept informed by Downing Street about Boris Johnson’s condition after he was admitted to intensive carehttps://t.co/dJegtHXI4r pic.twitter.com/S1BEfZbDb4

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) April 6, 2020

Admiration for the Queen went up by 30%. The Government’s ratings went up by 29%:

No surprise that the Fake News Party is down -29% in the polls after its handling of the COVID-19 crisis, as public support for the government, Her Majesty The Queen and our NHS skyrockets!

Oh dear, @KayBurley @adamboultonSKY @BethRigby @Peston @bbclaurak @jonsnowC4

— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) April 10, 2020

The Queen also entertained American presidents.

She welcomed the Obamas twice, once in 2011 and again in 2016.

On April 22, 2016, The Mail reported:

Barack Obama paid a heartfelt tribute to the Queen today, calling her ‘a real jewel to the world’ and ‘one of my favourite people’ after he and his wife Michelle had an intimate lunch with Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Speaking alongside David Cameron at a Press conference in London, the US President took the opportunity to praise the Queen on the occasion of her 90th birthday – and also joked about the ‘smooth ride’ he and Mrs Obama had when Prince Philip drove them in his Range Rover.

Mr Obama, who is making his last trip to Britain as President, shared a meal with the Queen at Windsor Castle before his summit with the Prime Minister.

He came equipped with a gift – an album of photos showing the Queen meeting various Presidents – which he handed over shortly after the Duke took the role of his chauffeur, driving both couples 400 yards from their helicopter landing site to the door of the castle. 

Three years later, it was Donald Trump’s turn for a State Visit:

Big news: @realDonaldTrump and @MELANIATRUMP will be hosted by Her Majesty The Queen for their first State Visit to the United Kingdom in June. The transatlantic relationship has been the foundation of global peace and prosperity for many years – and great things are yet to come!

— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) April 23, 2019

The Express reported:

The Buckingham Palace event will be held as Britain and the US mark 75 years since D-Day.

US President Trump and his wife Melania will be guests of the Queen during a three-day visit, beginning on June 3.

Here is a photo of President Trump inspecting the troops at Windsor Castle with the Queen following behind:

pic.twitter.com/KdvPI0RWYi

— Divine Sophia, M.Msc. 🇺🇸🌍💫 (@SpiritServicesL) April 23, 2019

Protocol

Although the Queen was a stickler for protocol, there were times when she relented.

Once was when Prince Charles insisted that Princess Diana’s body be flown home on the Royal jet.

In 2021, the story emerged of the Queen’s reason for denying it — they were divorced — then giving in to her son on August 31, 1997. The Express reported:

After Diana’s death in Paris, the Prince of Wales reportedly had an argument with the Queen about how his ex-wife’s body should be brought back to the UK. It has been reported that Prince Charles wanted to travel to Paris on the royal plane to bring Diana’s body home but the Queen initially disagreed. Richard Kay, a friend of Princess Diana, told the Channel 5 documentary, Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors: “This was a surprising and brave move.

“He had no right to be there other than as the father of her sons.

“Charles wanted to take the royal flight to Paris but the Queen wouldn’t allow it.

“Charles fought harder for Diana than he had ever fought for her in her lifetime.”

His request to travel to Paris was initially refused.

However, Prince Charles did not want to back down and eventually, the Queen gave him permission to use the royal plane to bring back Diana.

When Prince Charles arrived in Paris Princess Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, was in the hospital.

Speaking on the Channel 5 documentary he said: “He was devastated.

“This was a woman he had loved in his own way.”

Princess Diana’s coffin was taken to the royal plane, which was waiting at an airport in Paris.

This was just 16 hours after she had died.

The royal plane then landed at RAF Northolt just outside of London.

In 2011, the Queen came up with a plan to entertain the Obamas, who were not invited to Prince William’s wedding. This was another story that did not see the light of day until several years later.

On April 14, 2020, The Express reported:

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge walked down the aisle more than eight years ago. It was April 29, 2011, and Kate Middleton made history when she said “I do” to Prince William at Westminster Abbey. The day was declared a public holiday in the UK, but because the Duke of Cambridge is not the first-in-line to the throne, the wedding was not a full state occasion, which meant many details of the big day were left down to the couple …

The guest list included more than 1,900 people and had its fair share of celebrities – including the Beckhams, Sir Elton John, the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and David Cameron.

However, there were two people missing from the guest list, who had been widely expected to attend.

The Queen personally invited 40 heads of state, who received gold-embossed invitations.

Former US President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, however, were not among them.

According to a 2011 report by the Daily Mail, the Government organised a state visit the following month – the first for a US President since 2002 – in return for Mr Obama not coming to the wedding.

The couple did not receive the invitation, the report claims, because of the added security costs involved with protecting the former President.

French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni also missed out and Prince Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson – the Duchess of York – was also snubbed.

The Queen had a wonderful way of working quietly with the utmost discretion. In her reign, no one dared leak anything from her office.

One hopes that will continue to be true with King Charles.

British journo admits: ‘Trump was right on Russia’

No Briton in any position of influence likes President Donald Trump.

That outlook extends to 99% of the British middle classes.

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I couldn’t help but think that, were President Trump still in the White House, Putin never would have dared to try it.

Finally, a British journalist has spoken up, saying the same thing.

Enter The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley, a never-Trumper, who wrote ‘Trump was right on Russia. He could have been its deterrent’, published on Monday, March 7.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

Donald Trump is like one of those Roman emperors who everyone hated at the time but historians later admit was prophetic …

… Putin took Crimea in 2014, under Obama, and invaded Ukraine in 2022, under Biden, so it’s reasonable to guess that this invasion wouldn’t have happened under Trump because it didn’t.

Trump says this is because he told Putin he was ready to drop a bomb on Moscow (“he sort of believed me like 5 per cent or 10 per cent – that’s all you need”), which is embarrassing if a lie and terrifying if true, but it does fit with the substantive record of his administration.

This is a good contrast between the Obama and Trump administrations:

Obama resisted sending lethal aid to Ukraine; Trump did so. From 2017-19, the Trump administration carried out 52 policy actions against Russia, ranging from sanctions to military action against Putin’s client Bashar al-Assad. When Assad used chemical weapons under Obama, America did not reply with force. When he tried the same trick under Trump, Trump hit a Syrian airbase with 59 tomahawk missiles. Separately, US commandos engaged directly with Syrian soldiers and Russian mercenaries. The details were classified but the President bragged about it at a fundraiser.

Trump was also right about NATO:

Trump called out the bad; he mocked the pretensions of the good. At the 2018 Nato summit, he demanded that his allies spend more on the military and pointed out that they were buying energy from the very country, Russia, that they expected America to protect them from. The West wasn’t just sanctimonious, it was cheap and greedy, and its decadence was sapping its deterrence.

Contrary to what Trump haters say, he wanted NATO members to stump up their fair share of cash to keep it going. The US was — and still is — overwhelmingly funding NATO, although Germany has been doing better. Britain is in second place, after the US.

Although labelled as an isolationist, Trump went to the troubled areas and leaders of the world no other US president wanted to get involved with. He attempted to broker a deal with North Korea. He succeeded in the Middle East, with influential Arab countries and Israel. For all of his bellicosity, which these leaders respected, he was a man of peace, not war.

Stanley says:

Trump, despite being labelled an isolationist, stood in a long line of Republicans who asserted the best way to avoid a fight is to signal to your opponent that if they lay one finger on you, you’ll break their nose.

Stanley mentions the parlous state of affairs with Biden and other Western leaders:

… does anyone doubt that Biden’s incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan encouraged Russia to try its luck? Weakness escalates tensions; politicians typically try to extricate themselves from the resulting crises through over-reaction – to bomb North Vietnam or surge troops in Iraq – and now there is talk of imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. If we don’t do it, says Zelensky, we are complicit in the murder of citizens. His anger is righteous. But the same Westerners who tell us Putin is insane and desperate can’t then advise us to risk nuclear war with him. When a house is on fire, we try to put it out: we don’t show our solidarity by burning down the whole street.

Stanley points out that Trump did not have time for idealism:

Another common notion is that the Ukrainians are defending the universal principle of “democracy”, when what they’re really fighting for is their homes. That’s a noble cause and we’re right to back them, but Trump regarded such ideological abstractions as artificial, expensive and best avoided. All nations are in competition, he would argue, regardless of political system, and their goals are shaped by history and geography. Russia wants, and will always want, a buffer zone to the West. Trump had no problem with that, in theory, and it was a mistake to needle Moscow with the threat of Nato extension.

On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Stanley rightly concludes:

Given the obvious blow to Pax Americana that the invasion has inflicted, it’s hard to imagine that a second-term Trump would have tolerated it.

Too right!

Personally, I doubt that Trump will run again in 2024, although he might.

If he doesn’t, I hope that the Republican candidate adopts a similar position of toughness.

It’s the only language some world leaders understand.

Afghanistan: a global geo-political disaster area

How could Joe Biden end US involvement in Afghanistan so disastrously?

He made the decision unilaterally, leaving the nation in peril over the weekend, with horrific images unfolding across world media.

That said, by the time the US and UK entered Afghanistan in 2001 to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and terror, everyone knew that any operation there would be futile. The Soviets even pulled out in 1989.

In fact, Afghanistan was always an intractable place, a law unto itself throughout history.

Alexander the Great’s tenuous hold

Military historian Jamie Hayes wrote a gripping history of an ancient and weak conquest of Afghanistan, ‘Unwilling To Stop And Unwilling To Go On: Alexander the Great’s Afghan Campaign’.

Until his invasion of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great believed himself invincible (emphases mine):

Alexander the Great was undeniably the greatest military commander in history. He took over his father’s throne at just 20 years old and immediately began a campaign the likes of which the world has never seen. He fought battle after battle, forging the largest empire on earth—all without losing even once. As he rampaged across Western and Central Asia, he founded countless cities that stand to this day. Millennia after his death, military geniuses like Napoleon painstakingly studied his battles to learn from his success. He unquestionably earned his moniker—Alexander was Great.

With such a spotless military record, Alexander’s conquests seem almost like they were…easy. With his elite troops and unmatched tactical genius, he started from the unassuming Macedon in Northern Greece and wrought the largest empire the world had ever seen, spanning from Greece in the West all the way to India in the East. But while his remarkable conquests in Persia and his far-reaching campaign to India take center stage in the history books, there’s an often-forgotten chapter of Alexander’s legacy that was anything but easy.

Alexander’s campaign in Afghanistan has become a mere footnote in his legacy—perhaps because it was the region where the great warlord saw the least success. Like many other military superpowers would after him, from the British Empire to Russia to NATO, Alexander waltzed into Afghanistan with all the confidence in the world, but he left battered and bruised, with very little to show for it. The region chewed him up and spat him out, and while he never explicitly “lost” any battles in his time there, it’s hard to so he won much of anything either. In fact, historians have claimed that the brutal Afghan campaign marked a shift in Alexander—from infallible Golden Boy to a cruel, paranoid shell of what he once was.

Alexander the Great wanted to topple a man named Bessus, the only obstacle preventing the military commander from becoming king of the Persian Empire. Bessus had toppled Darius III (Darius the Great), the self-styled King of Kings of the Persian Empire. Bessus gave himself a new name, Artaxerxes V.

Incensed, Alexander believed that Artaxarxes V was a usurper and set about to right that perceived wrong. For that, he had to follow the new king into Bactria, which is part of modern-day Afghanistan.

Bactria proved to be highly difficult with regard to the terrain and the men who lived there:

… the conflict here was slow and brutal—guerrilla warfare and sieges that left Alexander and his men exhausted and disillusioned. The frozen mountains and blazing deserts of the region were a far cry from the battlefields they were used to, and “glorious battle” seemed to be a thing of the past.

Alexander spent two agonizing years in Afghanistan, a major chunk of his historic campaign across western and central Asia. Granted, he didn’t leave the brutal landscape empty-handed: His primary goal in Bactria was to capture the traitorous Bessus, and he accomplished that. The rival claimant to the throne of the Persian Empire was dealt with, and Alexander could rightfully call himself the King of Kings. But the price he paid for that luxury was extreme.

Alexander’s most successful enemy in Afghanistan was the land itself. He lost far more men to the frigid peaks of the Hindu Kush or the scorching Northern Afghan desert than to any military resistance he faced. And when he did try to engage enemy forces, he found himself playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.

Once he left, his victory was short-lived:

Fighting in Afghanistan was a Sisyphean task, and Alexander’s grip on the region started slipping the moment that he left. While it was considered a part of the enormous Empire that he left after his death, control of the territory was tenuous at best. Revolts began almost the moment that Alexander dropped dead, and they seemingly never truly stopped. Rebellion was simply a reality for any foreign state that attempted to claim sovereignty over the unforgiving landscape.

Nonetheless, he left a legacy with the foundation of several cities, including Kandahar. He also found a wife there:

He founded many cities as he chased Bessus across the region, some of which still exist today. The most notable is the city of Kandahar, which he named Alexandria Arachosia (in fact, it’s believed that the name Kandahar itself is derived from the Persian name for Alexander, Iskandar). He also found his famous bride, the beautiful Roxana, whom he loved above all others, in the region. But while Alexander left his mark on Afghanistan, Afghanistan also left its mark on him.

Centuries later, the British tried to control the country as did the Soviets. Both failed.

That would not stop another British foray nor did it stop the Americans.

The Americans tried their best

I have only a few bookmarks on the Americans’ long-term mission in Afghanistan.

In October 2009, Michelle Malkin found two reports about a deadly attack on US troops. She wrote (emphasis in the original):

An incredible account from ABC News reporter Karen Russo, who notes that wounded troops refused to leave the battlefield this weekend during the deadly siege at Kamdeysh:

Flying into the besieged Afghan base during a nighttime firefight this weekend is a harrowing mix of overwhelming noise, stomach dropping maneuvers and shadows hurrying through the gloom.

When the chopper lifted off moments later with three wounded soldiers, it left behind others who were wounded but refused to be MEDEVACED out of the combat zone so they could return to fight with their buddies.

As fighting at two U.S. outposts raged on the ground this weekend, the MEDEVAC team at a nearby base waited – with both patience and frustration.

Eight soldiers, all from Fort Carson, were killed that night. Malkin cited another report (emphases mine):

In the deadliest day for Fort Carson since Vietnam, eight soldiers from the post’s 4th Brigade Combat Team died in Afghanistan on Saturday when insurgents attacked a pair of remote outposts in Nuristan province …

“My heart goes out to the families of those we have lost and to their fellow Soldiers who remained to finish this fight,” Col. Randy George, the brigade’s commander, said in a statement late Saturday. “This was a complex attack in a difficult area. Both the U.S. and Afghan Soldiers fought bravely together; I am extremely proud of their professionalism and bravery.”

Later that month, when Obama had been in the White House for less than a year, Global Research published ‘America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan’, which posited that the real reasons for being in Afghanistan were far removed from terror. Controlling the opium supply there was one real objective. The second was to maintain a bulwark against Russia and China.

Excerpts follow:

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.

It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.

The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they did in the 1980’s against the Russians.

The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it …

Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end of the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.

As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.

Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.

Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.

Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.

By the time the article was posted, there was allegedly little terrorism threat left:

… the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…

If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, terror remained a by-product of the American presence in Afghanistan. One Afghan-American visitor was so affected by his time there that he returned to launch terror attacks of his own in the Chelsea district of Manhattan as well as in a shore town in New Jersey. He was from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

On September 19, 2016, the Boston Herald reported that a friend of the suspect said that the visit to Afghanistan was ‘life-changing’:

A man who described himself as a childhood friend of the 28-year-old busted today in connection with this weekend’s New York-area bombings told the Herald the suspect made a life-changing trip to Afghanistan two years ago. 

“At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious,” friend Flee Jones, 27, said of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. “And it was shocking. I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve never seen him like this.”

Police this morning released a photo of Rahami, an Afghan immigrant and U.S. citizen, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. Rahami was taken into custody after a gunfight in nearby Linden today at 11:20 a.m. (See that story here…)

The terror suspect’s arrest came after investigators this morning swarmed a chicken restaurant and apartment here in connection with the hunt for Rahami, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage told the Herald …

Bollwage told the Herald the search began after five people were pulled over on the Belt Parkway last night in connection with the bombing in Chelsea. That led to the search of First American Fried Chicken and the apartment above it in Elizabeth, Bollwage said, but it was unclear how the people detained were connected to the restaurant.

In addition to the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday that injured dozens, a pipe bomb exploded in a New Jersey shore town before a charity 5K race and an unexploded pressure cooker device was found blocks away from the explosion site in Chelsea. Yesterday, five explosive devices were discovered at an Elizabeth train station.

FBI agents as well as state and local police were in the eatery and the apartment upstairs, which are cordoned off by yellow crime tape. Investigators towed a black Toyota sedan away from the street in front of the restaurant this morning …

According to an Elizabeth resident, Rahami worked the register at the restaurant and was in charge when his father was gone.

A few months earlier, in June, the father of mass shooter Omar Raheem allegedly supported the Taliban and wanted to become president of Afghanistan. The Daily Mail reported:

Mass shooter Omar Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen recently visited Congress, the State Department and met political leaders during a trip to Washington, DC.

Mateen, who made the trip in April, is seen in social media posts posing in front of the State Department and Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices.

The Afghanistan native, who also regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, has expressed gratitude [to the] Afghan Taliban who hosts the Durand Jirga Show on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California … 

Dozens of videos are posted under Mateen’s name on YouTube, where he speaks on a range of political subjects in the Dari language.

One video shows him declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency.

Posts include topics such as ‘Rise Afghan people against Pakistan’ and ‘Intelligent service and Military of Pakistan real Enemy of the USA (sic)’.

In one video the elder Mateen holds up a sign that reads: ‘ISI Pakistan and Military is Destroying 14 years of US work in Afghanistan to cut AID to killers’.

Meanwhile, the Taliban were still terrorising children, revealing the fact that local government was superior to that from the nation’s capital, Kabul. On June 12, 2010, the Taliban hanged a seven-year-old boy in order to punish his family. The Telegraph reported:

Del Awar, aged seven, was taken at sunset and found hanging in an orchard at sunrise the following day.

Bruises and scratches around the young boy’s neck suggested his murder had been neither quick, nor easy, according to those who saw his slight body after it was cut down.

His death is widely believed to have been punishment for the stand taken by his family against the Taliban in their remote Helmand village.

Reports from the village of Heratiyan in Sangin district said Del Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, and grandfather, Abdel Satar, had grown tired of Taliban intimidation and the violence the militants attracted.

The family had either demanded rebel fighters stop using village compounds to stage ambushes or had refused a demand of £400 for machine guns, villagers reported.

The two men had been angrily denounced as Nato or US spies and unknown to them, Del Awar’s cruel fate was sealed.

The Taliban have denied the killing, but in Heratiyan where villagers must live under the reality of complete militant control, many privately doubt their protestations.

Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, was a poor man who could not send his children to school and did not have a feud with anyone, explained Maulawi Shamsullah Sahrai, a 50-year-old elder from the village …

For those accused of collaboration with the Nato-led forces or with Mr Karzai’s weak government, Taliban control often means rapid summary execution.

Afghanistan brought other peculiarities involving alliances through sexual relations. In 2014, an American couple sued the United States Marines for allegedly covering up the circumstances of their son’s death in 2012. The New York Post reported:

The shattered family of a Long Island Marine murdered by an Afghan rebel on an American military base in 2012 is suing the corps and top brass for allegedly covering up details of the incident, The Post has learned.

Relatives of Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr., 21, of Oceanside, say his killer served as a “tea boy” for an infamous Afghan police chief who was allowed to operate out of the Helmand province compound despite his perverse reputation, according to the Brooklyn federal suit filed Wednesday.

Ainuddin Khudairaham walked into a gym on the base and shot dead Buckley, Cpl. Richard Rivera and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson. He proclaimed himself a jihadist before being arrested.

Khudairaham was employed on the base by Sarwar Jan, a notorious Afghan police chief with a taste for young boys, drug dealing, and trading arms with the Taliban, the suit states.

He had already been ejected from another village for his unsavory activities and the US military compiled a dossier of his ugly exploits long before he arrived at Buckley’s base, court papers state.

Afghan women continued to be terrorised, as the Daily Mail reported on December 28, 2016, after Donald Trump had been elected president:

A woman has reportedly been beheaded by a group of armed men in Afghanistan after she entered a city without her husband.

The horrific act took place in the remote village of Latti in Sar-e-Pul province, which is under Taliban control.

Provincial Governor spokesman Zabiullah Amani told the Nation that the 30-year-old woman was targeted because she went out alone without her husband, who is in Iran.

The Middle East Press reported the woman had gone to the market to shop.

Under Taliban rule women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative.

They are also banned from working or education and are forced to wear the burqa.

The Taliban have rejected any involvement in this latest incident …

Gateway Pundit carried the story and said that Trump would bring better days:

There is hope, however because Donald Trump has publicly stated that ‘things will be different after January 20th’.

Terrorism persisted in Afghanistan. On April 13, 2017, Trump retaliated with a MOAB, Mother of All Bombs:

MORE: Weapon used is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, which was nicknamed the "Mother of All Bombs" and had never been used before

— BNO News (@BNONews) April 13, 2017

Here is a video of the MOAB:

A Fox News article from that time stated that the MOAB had been tested for deployment as early as 2003:

It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used in combat before Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan “some time ago” for potential use. The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.

“As [ISIS’] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS].”

President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that “this was another successful mission” and he gave the military total authorization.

Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.

“North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of,” said Trump.

It was thought that the MOAB was launched in retaliation for the death of a Green Beret soldier. The Daily Mail reported that the Pentagon denied any revenge:

The blast killed 36 militants as it destroyed three underground tunnels as well as weapons and ammunition, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense said.

No civilians were hurt, he added.

U.S. forces used a 30-foot long, GPS-guided GBU-43 bomb, at around 7.30pm local time in the Nangarhar Province …

A crater left by the blast is believed to be more than 300 meters (1,000 feet) wide after it exploded six feet above the ground. Anyone at the blast site was vaporized …

The Pentagon is denying that the attack was a revenge strike despite the fact that it came in the same area of Afghanistan where a Green Beret soldier was killed on Saturday.

Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar of the 7th Special Forces Group was cut down by enemy small arms fire while his unit was conducting counter-ISIS operations. 

A WikiLeaks document, quoting a New York Times article, says that the CIA had built those tunnels with the help of their then-ally, Osama bin Laden, who had a degree in civil engineering. He tapped into his family’s construction equipment. They owned the Saudi Binladin Group:

Those tunnels the U.S is bombing in Afghanistan? They were built by the CIA https://t.co/u66ScoiNpX (via @GabiElenaDohm) pic.twitter.com/mAaUrQ0yLk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 14, 2017

From the White House, Sean Spicer confirmed the MOAB hit. Nearly two-thirds of registered American voters approved.

Weeks later, on May 7, the US confirmed they had taken out Afghanistan’s head of ISIS at the end of April. Reuters reported:

The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdul Hasib, was killed in an operation on April 27 conducted jointly by Afghan and U.S. Special Forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, U.S. and Afghan officials said on Sunday.

Hasib, appointed last year after his predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a U.S. drone strike, is believed to have ordered a series of high profile attacks including one in March 8 on the main military hospital in Kabul, a statement said.

Last month, a Pentagon spokesman said Hasib had probably been killed during the raid by U.S. and Afghan special forces in Nangarhar during which two U.S. army Rangers were killed, but prior to Sunday’s announcement there had been no confirmation.

“This successful joint operation is another important step in our relentless campaign to defeat ISIS-K in 2017,” the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson said in a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul.

Late that summer, on August 21, Trump gave a speech on the future of Afghanistan, stating that he was weary of the American presence. He said that the country would need to sort its own governance out. He told the terrorists that America was keeping a close eye on them. He threatened to withdraw funding for Pakistan if they continued to support terrorists. He requested help and support from India. The short version is here, but beware of the language from the person summarising it.

The full transcript of Trump’s speech is here. It is too long to excerpt. He delivered it before the first lady, Mike Pence and a group of American troops.

By October 13, Pakistan was helping the United States. That day, Trump tweeted:

Starting to develop a much better relationship with Pakistan and its leaders. I want to thank them for their cooperation on many fronts.

Nearly one year later, on September 3, 2018 — Labor Day — an American soldier serving in Operation Resolute Support was killed in an attack on NATO forces. He was the sixth American to fall in Afghanistan that year.

Two days earlier, news emerged that China was encroaching on Afghanistan, specifically into the Wakhan Corridor, which connects China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan. This is a thin tongue-shaped area of land, which you can see in a map here.

On September 1, Lawrence Sellin, a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve, wrote an article for the Indian Center for Diplomatic Studies, ‘China Moves into Afghanistan As Part of Its Global Expansion Mission’.

He wrote that China was seeking to end the Afghan conflict and enhance their own strategic standing:

For many, it was a stunning development. China will build a brigade-size military training facility in the strategic Wakhan Corridor, the land bridge between Tajikistan and Pakistan, which is located in Afghanistan’s northeast Badakhshan province and borders China.

Although Beijing denied the claim that hundreds of Chinese soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, a source close to the Chinese military stated, “Construction of the base has started, and China will send at least one battalion of troops, along with weapons and equipment, to be stationed there and provide training to their Afghan counterparts.”

For those who have been closely following growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, the above report comes as no surprise.

A year earlier on August 14, 2017, Spogmai radio quoted the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense (translation): “A brigade base will be built to maintain the security of Badakhshan, which will be funded by China.”

The spokesman stated that China has steadily increased its military cooperation with Afghanistan and had, at that point, already provided $73 million in military aid.

Beyond the enormous geopolitical implications of a Chinese military base inside Afghanistan, the Badakhshan installation is the final security link between Tajikistan, vital to China’s commercial interests in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China’s “all-weather” ally in South Asia.

It was largely unreported that China financed border outposts and deployed troops to Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which borders Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province and is part of the Wakhan Corridor.

Consolidating a Chinese presence in Badakhshan province, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Technology has discussed signing a contract with China Telecom for a fiber optic network connecting China to the Wakhan Corridor. No doubt, the intention is to couple that system to the larger network linking China with Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.

China is already Afghanistan’s biggest investor. In 2007 it took a $3 billion, 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine. China and Pakistan have offered to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan. Some have concluded that the CPEC invitation is a prelude to positioning China as a mediator to end the Afghan conflict.

I will stop there and continue tomorrow.

Involvement in Afghanistan is an unholy mess, aided and abetted by China and its allies.

Short must-see video about individuals and ‘sovereign’ control

There’s time only for a short post today.

Here is a powerful, must-see video that is only just over a minute long:

'Ordinary People Are Too Small Minded To Govern Their Own Affairs'

This WON'T End Well. pic.twitter.com/bhxvTCJ4tg

— Red Walrus (@_RedWalrus_) July 26, 2021

Who said, ‘Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs’?

It was not George Soros, from whom we get a short soundbite at the beginning of the video. He cannily said that global governance might or could happen, acting as if he did not know one way or the other.

The next person to appear is Obama. It was he who said:

Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs.

In fact, he says it not once, but twice.

He says that ‘order and progress’ (his words) will come only when:

individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.

But the real kicker comes in starting at the 45-second point with a man reading from a Communist book outlining how to discredit opposition: build up verbal attacks, then label person(s) ‘fascist’ or ‘anti-Semitic’, followed by open discreditation by leftist organisations. That part of the video was filmed in the 1950s or 1960s. The book from which he read was published in the United States.

Please circulate the tweet.

Rest in peace, Jackie Mason: 1928-2021

It was with sadness that I read of Jackie Mason’s death at the weekend.

Still, he had a good innings. He was 93 years old.

The Daily Mail had an excellent obituary of one of the world’s most consistently funny comics. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Life before comedy

I did not know that he was born in Wisconsin:

Mason was born in 1928 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as Yacov Moshe Maza to immigrant parents from Belarus.

In the early 1930s, the family moved to New York’s Lower East Side. All the male relatives were rabbis and young Yacov was expected to follow in their footsteps:

‘It was unheard-of to think of anything else,’ Mason said. ‘But I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this, because this is not my calling.’

However, there was no way out for many years. Mason earned a degree in English and Sociology at City College of New York then completed rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University, after which he became a practising rabbi. 

He served several congregations, including those in Weldon, North Carolina, and Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Sometime in the 1950s, he began working summers in the Catskills, a mountain range in New York State, known for its resorts which attracted Jewish clientele. It is known as the Borscht Belt.

He wrote his own material, put comedy sets together and accustomed himself to being on stage.

Comedy career

It was only in 1959, after his father died, that the rabbi pursued a stand-up career full time and changed his name to Jackie Mason.

However, he did not leave his theological training behind. In 1988, he described his style of comedy to the New York Times:

‘My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you,’ 

‘He’s not better than you, he’s just another guy,’ he added. ‘I see life with love — I’m your brother up there — but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.’      

From the Catskills, he branched out into the big time, playing clubs in Miami and New York in 1960 after two television appearances on the iconic Steve Allen Show.

I am old enough to remember that Jackie Mason was on television a lot in the early 1960s.

In 1964, he appeared on another iconic programme, The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on Sunday nights. I remember my mother got very worked up about what happened in one of his appearances, as she was a huge Ed Sullivan fan. We never missed a show. After this appearance she turned against Jackie Mason:

… after a terrible misunderstanding in 1964 between Sullivan and Mason involving a perceived obscene middle finger gesture, Jackie’s career hit a major slump.

Sullivan canceled Mason’s six-show contract, refusing to pay him for the performance. 

Mason eventually filed a lawsuit, and won.

Mason’s career did not recover until the late 1970s:

… it would take him many years to find his momentum once again, with his comeback punctuated by well-received performances in 1979’s Steve Martin film The Jerk, and Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I two years later.

‘People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,’ Mr. Mason told Look. ‘It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.’

My mother would definitely have agreed with the ‘sick maniac’ description, unfounded though it was.

He hired a new manager Jyll Rosenfeld, whom he later married. She convinced him that there was an appetite for Borscht Belt humour beyond the Catskills. He launched a long-running show on Broadway in 1986:

Mason decided to bring his one-man comic shows The World According to Me!, to the Broadway stage in 1986.

The hit show ran for two years, and earned him a special Tony Award in 1987, followed by an Emmy for writing when HBO aired a version of the show.

From there, the legendary comedian put close to a dozen other one-man shows on Broadway, with the last being The Ultimate Jew in 2008.

Here is one of his performances from 1986:

Mason also enjoyed an on-screen appearance in Caddyshack II in 1988 and a voice-over as Rabbi Krustofsky in an early episode of The Simpsons in 1992, for which he won a second Primetime Emmy Award, for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.

In the aforementioned New York Times interview from 1988, he was philosophical in the way only a rabbi can be:

‘I’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years, but it’s like I was born last Thursday,’ Mr. Mason told The New York Times in 1988. 

‘They see me as today’s comedian. Thank God I stunk for such a long time and was invisible, so I could be discovered.’

London appearances

For several years, Jackie Mason used to come to London once a year for a stand-up show that was often televised.

I was in stitches.

Guido Fawkes tweeted Mason’s 2002 appearance, which was or was close to being his last over here:

Such a funny man. A one off.

— Viv Jones (@vivjones10) July 25, 2021

Here’s the video, which is just over 90 minutes long:

The next video is his 1999 performance at the London Palladium. It is just under 40 minutes long:

However, in 1992, Mason did a half-hour set at Oxford University, where he ribbed the students for their total lack of sartorial elegance and fondness of political correctness. He also made fun of the Jewish lifestyle which encompasses self-denial of Jewishness as well as certain material aspirations. The University asked him to do the set for free, something at which he also cavilled, in a humorous way:

This is his description of the video:

This is a clip from a lecture I gave at Oxford University back in 1992. They gave me an award and a fellowship in the Oxford Union Society. The first American comedian to receive such an honor. That’s how they got me to work for nothing. Enjoy!

Here’s the second part, which was a Q&A session:

He talked about his years as a rabbi where people didn’t want the sermon and hoped for a few jokes. He said that Oxford students were very polite and he hadn’t heard one four-letter word yet: ‘I’m waiting, I’m waiting’.

Near the end, he said that England is the most polite society in the Western world with all the ubiquitous apologies one hears. The only exception, he noted, is in Parliament, where the raucous tone reminded him of a ‘sanitarium’.

Politics and talk radio

In 1998, Mason’s biography was published and he began a career in talk radio:

he published an autobiography, ‘Jackie, Oy!’ (written with Ken Gross), and discovered a new venture as an opinionated political commentator on talk radio.

Twenty years later, he issued a series of vlogs against then-candidate Barack Obama. I watched most of them. This one discusses the first presidential debate in September 2008:

His description of the Obama v McCain debate reads as follows:

Here are my thoughts on the first presidential debate. Although neither candidate had a clear victory Friday night, the media is saying Obama won because he didn’t lose. He looked poised and presidential. Well he did look poised as he made no sense! And if looking Presidential is telling bold lies, the Hail to the Chief!

In 2016, Mason was an unabashed Trump supporter:

He was among the few well-known entertainers to support former President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.

In October 2016, he appeared on Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, which airs in New York City and Philadelphia. Mason contrasted Trump’s words about women to Bill Clinton’s actual violence against his victims.

Breitbart had the story, reporting that Mason said:

What Trump ever did to women is that he called them a name because she gained too much weight so he said she got too fat and he called her a pig. Imagine if the worst thing Bill Clinton ever did was call a girl a name. He called them names after he raped them.

When he got through with them, Juanita Broaddrick wound up with a cut lip. And he had advised her to please go see a doctor. He was very compassionate about sending them to doctors. But he wasn’t too concerned about beating them up in the first place. He was so busy punching them around that nobody knows if he made love to them or he just wanted to beat them up a little bit.

As for Hillary, he said:

He was really a violent, insane character. Now his wife, she had a job. Her job was to make sure that these women were never heard about it. Every time somebody threatened to talk about it she immediately went to work on destroying them. First he punched them around. Then it was her job to wipe them out altogether.

… And she’s calling Trump a person who can’t be trusted because of the way he treats women? This is like somebody who crossed a red light being compared to a murderer.

After Trump’s election, Mason turned his attention towards the RINOs, especially the then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan:

Jackie Mason to Paul Ryan: If You Want to Save the Country, 'Get Another Job' https://t.co/Q9zxcUNlXq #MAGA @realDonaldTrump #TrumpTrain

— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) August 7, 2017

In March 2017, Breitbart reported:

In this week’s exclusive clip for Breitbart News, Jackie weighs in on the GOP’s failed healthcare bill, explaining that Republicans in Washington were focused on “repealing and replacing” the wrong thing.

“When they were talking about ‘repeal and replace,’ they were stupid,” Jackie says. “They were talking about healthcare, they should have been talking about [House Speaker Paul] Ryan. If Ryan was repealed and replaced we would have had no problem today.”

Jackie — who was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in Ryan’s home state — says he finds it odd that a Speaker of the House who is supposed to be some kind of “genius” can’t count correctly.

“You know what Ryan should do if he wanted to save this whole country? Get another job,” he says. “Find out something that you actually know. If there’s nothing like that, sit in the House and don’t bother anybody. Mind your own business, you’ll save the country.”

My deepest sympathies go to his widow and former manager Jyll Rosenfeld and his daughter Sheba Mason, from a former union with Ginger Reiter in the 1970s and 1980s.

For more Jackie Mason shows and interviews, visit TheUltimateJew channel on YouTube.

US election: the Kraken released — videos, Flynn transcript — developing

This is my longest post to date, but it is informative. You might need a cuppa and a snack.

At the weekend, I read a few articles on the mid-November raid on the CIA server farm in Frankfurt, Germany.

It sounds like something out of a blockbuster film, but when I saw two retired generals’ names in the mix, I began to pay closer attention.

First, my thanks to reader john cheshire who sent me the link to a Bill Still video on this topic from Saturday, November 28.

Unlike the usual Bill Still videos, this one is only seven minutes long and well worth watching, especially for the night-time footage of Ospreys flying over the server farm:

Still is reserving comment until more information comes out to authenticate everything.

Secondly, consider everything developing, although we do have the recently-pardoned General Michael Flynn’s word that the election was stolen. More on that later in this post.

Before proceeding, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) brought news of the raid on Friday, November 13:

https://twitter.com/familyman20181/status/1327318370878951424

On Sunday, November 29, Andrea Widburg wrote another considered article for American Thinker: ‘New reports about election manipulation read like a Tom Clancy novel’. They certainly do.

First of all, for those who want to know what the Kraken is in US military intelligence parlance, it is (emphases mine):

the nickname of the 305th military intelligence battalion; that The Kraken identified China, Iran, and Russia as being involved in using the Hammer & Scorecard system to manipulate American votes; that the servers used for this were in a CIA facility in Frankfurt; that special forces raided the facility; and that there were casualties …

However, Kraken — especially as top lawyer Sidney Powell refers to it — also encompasses the US Department of Defense’s:

cyber warfare weapons (“Kraken”) …

Widburg did a good job of summarising what allegedly happened:

On Friday, a retired top Air Force intelligence analyst stated with certainty during an interview that special forces had secured a CIA-run facility in Germany that had computers showing election manipulation. If this report is real, we are witnessing the biggest coup attempt, sabotage, and treason in American history. No matter what, though, because this report is out there and comes from serious people, it deserves serious investigation.

I have no idea whether this raid happened. Its having taken place, however, is consistent with my ruminations about Trump’s peculiarly-timed shake-up at the Pentagon: Firing defense secretary Mark Esper and replace him with Christopher Miller, a special forces man; moving special forces into their own command, rather than having them function as subsets of other military branches; and firing potentially disloyal members of the civilian Defense Policy Board. These actions indicated that Trump was clearing the decks for something big.

In this post, I’ll sum up the most recent reports about events in Germany, although without taking any stand as to their veracity because I can’t take a stand. I don’t know enough.

For several days, rumors have swirled that there was a “military” raid in Germany, either against Scytl (the Spanish company that processes American voting data in a facility in Frankfurt, Germany) or against a CIA station that is also located in Germany. On Friday, those rumors coalesced into an affirmative report about the CIA station in Germany.

Widburg then cited an article from Friday, November 27 from Dr Mike Adams, AKA Healthranger: ‘Situation Update — Nov. 27th — DoD vs. CIA firefight in Frankfurt as covert war against the deep state RAGES across the globe’.

Excerpts follow, emphases in the original. Mine are in purple:

At this very minute, a covert war is raging across the globe, pitting Trump’s DoD and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) against black hat deep state factions running the CIA.

The good news is: Trump is winning.

As you know by now, the DoD launched a raid on a CIA-run server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, to secure servers that contain proof of CIA interference with the 2020 election (i.e. backdoor manipulations of election results via Dominion voting machines). But new information is now surfacing that indicates there was a firefight at the server farm facility, involving US Army Special Forces units, engaging with CIA-trained paramilitary units that were flown in from Afghanistan in an emergency effort to defend the facility.

One CIA officer was killed during the firefight, and he is now being reported across the mainstream media as being “killed in Somalia.” Five US Army soldiers were also killed, and they are being explained away as dying in a “helicopter crash” in Egypt.

Despite the deaths, the servers were successfully acquired by the DoD, and those servers were turned over to President Trump’s private intelligence group, which is now once again led by Gen. Michael Flynn, recently pardoned and now allowed to process top secret information, since his security clearance has been restored.

Enter the fearless Sidney Powell:

Sidney Powell is about to roll out expert witnesses in the Georgia and Michigan lawsuits. One of these witnesses has been handed details of the vote theft which were acquired through two means: 1) The “Kraken” cyberwarfare program run by the DoD, and 2) Information found in the servers which were acquired during the multiple raids. (There were also server farm raids in Bercelona and Toronto, we are told.)

One of these witnesses is Dr. Keshavarz-Nia, a well-known cybercrimes investigator, who has a long history of working with U.S. military counterintelligence, as well as the NSA and CIA.

He has now offered sworn statements to Sidney Powell, which can be viewed at this link.

Dr Adams shares a portion of Dr Keshavarz-Nia’s testimony:

I have previously discovered major exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS and ES&S that permit a nefarious operator to perform sensitive functions via its built-in covert backdoor. The backdoor enables an operator to access to perform system updates and testing via the Internet without detection. However, it can also be used to conduct illicit activities such as shifting votes, deleting votes, or adding votes in real-time… I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in a hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden.

I really hope Mike Adams is correct:

And so the circle is complete: DoD forces deploy cyber warfare weapons (“Kraken”) as well as kinetic troops (Special Forces, under the US Army) to acquire physical servers, all the information derived from these operations is extracted by DIA forensic analysts, it is then handed over to various expert witnesses who are prepared to testify under oath, resulting in the courts nullifying the fraudulent vote manipulations in the swing states.

This is how Trump gets to 300+ electoral votes and secures his second term as President. If successful, these revelations will also utterly destroy the Democrat party and result in thousands of treasonous actors going to prison for their roles in this attempted cyber warfare election theft to overthrow the United States government.

Wow. You could not make this up.

Some of us are familiar with a retired US military officer who writes under the pseudonym of Turcopolier.

On November 15, two days after Louis Gohmert’s news of the raid emerged, Turcopolier posted an article by former long-time CIA analyst Larry Johnson, ‘Unraveling the Deep State Coup’. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

I have been reading Larry Johnson since 2008. He has never been wrong.

Johnson explains why many of us doubted not Gohmert as much as the information he received:

When I saw this it did not make sense. Let me explain. I spent four years working at State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (now it is the Bureau of Counter Terrorism). I was one of two officers who dealt directly with the FBI in the investigation of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103. I learned through this experience that US law enforcement cannot operate in other countries without the permission of those countries.

I also spent 22 years scripting terrorism exercises for U.S. military special operations. My job was to replicate State Department and Embassy communications that would occur during a terrorist crisis. So, I have a lot of experience in working real world with US law enforcement, US military and our Embassies in sorting out the issues that arise when the United States wants to pursue a law enforcement or military operation in a foreign country.

The U.S. Army did not conduct a raid in Germany on either Sctyl or Dominion offices or servers. They are foreign nationals and we must operate in accordance with German law. Moreover, the U.S. Army does not have law enforcement powers with respect to such entities.

However, there is a group who can bypass these restrictions:

So what happened? I am reliably informed that a unit under the command of USEUCOM (i.e., United States European Command) did in fact conduct an operation to take control of computer servers. But these servers belong to the CIA, not Dominion or Sctyl. The U.S. military has full authority to do this because any CIA activity in the European theater is being conducted using military cover. In other words, CIA officers would be identified to the German government (and anyone else asking) as military employees or consultants.

Such an operation would have been carried out with U.S. law enforcement present to take custody of the evidence. That means that the evidence will be under the control of the Department of Justice through US Attorneys and can be used in court or other judicial proceedings.

This is not the first time that a military unit attached to EUCOM has compelled a CIA computer facility to hand over evidence. A dear friend of mine (a retired DEA officer) told me about an incident where he entered a CIA facility in Frankfurt backed up by the US Army to get info the CIA was withholding (this took place in the 1980s).

Johnson surmises that the CIA and FBI directors were unaware of the raid at the time:

I also have confirmed what Jim Hoft reported the other night–the CIA’s Gina Haspel was not informed in advance of this operation. Based on this fact, I think it is correct that action was taken in Germany on territory under U.S. control and that a CIA facility was targeted.

I also have learned that FBI Director Christopher Wray was excluded from this operation. Wray, more than Haspel, has been working aggressively to undermine and sabotage Donald Trump. This means that some other U.S. law enforcement agency (e.g., US Marshals, DEA, Secret Service, etc) had the lead in collecting the evidence.

But there’s more.

On Saturday, November 28, retired US Army Generals Michael Flynn and Thomas McInerney, an expert in cyber warfare, gave an interview to WorldViewWeekend.com on Brannon Howse’s show, World View Report. Mary Fanning also participated. She is the author of the book: THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup “The Political Crime of the Century”: How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn … and everyone else.

Healthranger kindly provided a full transcript of the interview. Excerpts follow. I have divided the text into paragraphs for easier reading.

Healthranger provided a useful summary before going into the transcript:

• HAMMER and various cyber weapons were previously used by the USA against other countries, now the weapons are being deployed against us. Obama is behind everything.
• Creator of HAMMER and Scorecard is Den[n]is Montgomery, former CIA analyst.
• Fox flipped against America, deep state coup coordinators recruited the entire U.S. media and Big Tech to defeat the Republic and overthrow the U.S. Constitution.
• The Dec. 14th deadline doesn’t matter. President Trump should not leave office until all the facts surrounding election theft are analyzed, including vote count distributions “caused by fraudulent electronic manipulation of targeted voting machines.”
• The fact that all 5 battleground states stopped counting at the same time, “Demonstrates prior coordination by election officials in five battleground states.” Then they used HAMMER and Scorecard, plus Dominion, to move Joe Biden into the lead. It is a “mathematical impossibility” the way the votes came in. An algorithm was used.
• In PA, 1.8 million ballots mailed out to people. 2.5 million came back in. Someone had a printing press and was printing them out.
• The 305th Battalion military intelligence is “Kraken.”
• China, Iran, Russia were all involved in manipulating votes.
• Confirmed that US Special Forces Command seized servers from the CIA server farm in Frankfurt.
• Confirmed there were US soldiers killed during the raid on the CIA server farm in Frankfurt. (As we reported in yesterday’s Situation Update.)
• Chris Miller is Secretary of Defense because of the 305th Battalion. Consider why…
• Chris Krebs at CISA committed treason and is part of the coup.
• What went down during the election is TREASON at the highest level, not just politics.
• Trump can maintain control over the White House, under oath, until a full investigation is complete, and there are no artificial deadlines that can stop him.
• The President took an oath that obliges him to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This is why he cannot turn over the White House to political puppets (Biden) controlled by America’s enemies (China, Iran).
• The big evidence from the seized servers is going to come out at SCOTUS, not before.
• Once caught, mid-level treasonous actors will point fingers at Biden and Obama, saying they were ordered to carry out the treasonous acts.
• Georgia’s runoff election is already stolen by the Democrats unless we stop the vote theft. It’s just a digital theft for them. This means the Senate will be lost to the Democrats unless this vote fraud infrastructure is exposed and defeated.
• A lot of instability is coming if we allow the government to be seized by communists.
• All this goes up to the very top, implicating Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Barack Obama and others.
• Trump knew all this was going to happen and had planned for it.

This was Gen Flynn’s first interview after President Trump pardoned him.

Brannon Howse invited him to speak first.

Flynn said:

… I would tell you what’s happening in this country should never happen, and we are going through, there’s no doubt in my mind, we’re going through a crucible of history.

If we don’t correct what it is that’s happening right now over the next couple of weeks, then I really hate to even think about what will happen in our country going forward into the latter part in December and certainly into the next month. I do not believe for a second that the country will accept Vice-President Biden as the next president, based on what we know to be probably the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history.

What we’re seeing, what I’m in right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the President has clear paths to victory. They have clear paths to victory, and they actually don’t require a lot of courtroom action. What they require is they require a lot of honesty out of elected officials and frankly, a lot of Americans who are coming forward and telling us their stories. The hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country in different states, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down on affidavits as witnesses.

We had probably 10 or 12 affidavits come in from one particular state today, and because there’s been a number of threats to people, these particular Patriots, they sent their photos in with their affidavits and said, “Put mine up at the top of the list because I want people to know that I’m not going to be afraid of these people that are threatening our country and our way of life.”

I say all that and on one hand and the other hand as I just described, we have clear paths to victory for this President. Frankly, he’s going win Pennsylvania. He’s going to win Arizona. He’s going to win Georgia. He’s going to win Nevada. He’s going to win Michigan. The other one that he’s probably going to pull in is Wisconsin too, because there’s a discrepancy in Wisconsin of 130,000 … ballots that they just found, they just discovered. There’s a lot of things happening and it’s all, to me, it’s all positive.

I was asked today on a scale of 1 to 10, who will be the next President, and I said, 10 it’ll be Donald Trump. It’ll be president Trump. There’s no doubt in my mind that he won this election hands down in a landslide, probably somewhere between 350 and 400 electoral college votes.

What we have seen is over, and I know this, over the last probably two decades and probably longer, I can give you a little bit of a history lesson in that, but I won’t. But over the last couple of decades, what we have seen is a complete shift in how fast I believe that communist China in their long-term plan decided that to sort of move up their plans to become the global superpower, sole global superpower on the planet.

Their sort of plan was by about the middle of this century that we’re in right now, and I believe when during the last 2016 election, when they didn’t get the candidate that they needed and the kind of ideology that they saw America moving towards, they were not going to allow 2020 to happen, and so now what we have is this theft with mail in ballots.

The theft with this software, Smartmatic software and Dominion, these Dominion systems. These are systems that are not owned by this country. They’re owned by other — they were introduced into this country. How can we say as the United States of America, how can we say that we accept a system that is not made in this country and in many cases, the ballots aren’t even tallied in this country? …

They weren’t in 2012, either. I remember reading that the Obama-Romney votes were counted in … Spain. Romney was ahead until the very end, when the votes flipped. I could not believe my eyes as I watched a major US network’s coverage.

Flynn continued:

We probably, in fact, we know we have evidence of previous elections where this happened as well, but we’re now focused on this one. I’m going to tell you, we’re not in this to lose. We are not in this to lose these battles, we’re in this to win these battles and I believe we’re going to. I believe we’re going to win, and I’m confident we are because we have the right people, we have the right plan and strategy, and it’s a little bit of direct and a little bit of indirect that we’re taking, and people are talking all the time to each other. I’m anxious and you probably hear it in my voice that I’m a little anxious because I just cannot believe the media and the censorship that is going on. Just look at what they do to the President of the United States of America. Look what Twitter is doing to the President of the United States of America. This is, it’s infuriating to me … It’s an abomination of the first amendment, our freedom of speech. Frankly, for the President of United States of America, the only means that he really has to be able to communicate is when he walks outside, or he goes in front of a group of people, or he walks outside and talks to the press, or he uses social media to communicate because the media is not going to allow him to get his message out there.

He cited the case of a retired military officer, now a state senator, who gave a closing speech at the hearing in Pennsylvania last Wednesday. Twitter removed the man’s account:

It was an extraordinary hearing with politicians from Pennsylvania centers on a panel, and the one Senator that ran the panel for the state of Pennsylvania, that listened to the hearing, listen to a bunch of witnesses, listen to Rudy, listened to Jenna Ellis, and others on their team. The individual that ran it was a retired Military Colonel, and he’s now a state senator in Pennsylvania, and he gave, at the very end of it, he gave a really good short summary speech, and it was heartwarming because it was sort of a mom and apple pie that, “Hey, we can’t allow this to happen in our country. We cannot portray ourselves to the world as a third world nation”. It was a really, really good closing speech, and what did Twitter do? Twitter took him offline immediately. They completely removed his Twitter account so people couldn’t follow this guy. It’s just outrageous, it’s outrageous. That’s a social media company that is a part of the public square. They are taken advantage of what they have been given, which is a real privilege and they’re abusing it. I could go on and on, I’m going to stop and just see if you have any questions on anything or you want to jump in on anything I said, but I, I’m upset, I am determined, I’m going to be resilient, and I believe that I reflect millions and millions of millions of people across this country who feel the exact same way that I do.

Howse asked Flynn about his use of the word ‘coup’ in his thank you speech to President Trump.

Flynn gave a long reply, the nub of which follows:

This COVID situation that we we’re having to deal with now. That’s the first phase if you will. That’s something that’s been going on for years. Now, we’re moving into something different. Not different in terms of it, this is still a coup in progress, but now it’s a little bit different and it’s actually — it’s sort of they upped their game when they lost in 2016. I think that there was a decision and I believe this, but there was some type of decision to say, “We’re not going to allow this to happen again”.

All you got to do is go back and listen to some of the comments this past summer from some of the senior people that are part of this, this democratic party, right? I mean, Hillary Clinton, I think it was back in July or certainly mid-summer timeframe where she said, no matter what Joe Biden should not concede. What are we talking about there? I mean, why would she say that in the middle of the summer, three, maybe four months before an election?

One of the things that I do know from my experience in the military and in different places around the world, is when your enemy tells you that they’re going to do something, you better pay attention to what they said, and you better have some plans, and you better have some ideas about how to deal with that if in fact that does come to fruition.

Well, in this case, we have opposing camps and in our opposing camps of our political parties, and we know that the political party on the left is really way, way over on the left. I have a hard time calling it or calling someone a Democrat or the democratic party. That’s a name only folks, because it’s really the democratic socialist party of America that has usurp to taken over that element, and they are a very loud voice. So, they sort of [do a] ‘Katy, bar the door’ assault on us, on our country and our way of life, and they’re doing anything they can right now to try to pretend like, okay, nothing to see here, and Joe is going to be our next president here.

Flynn said that Democrats are also filing affadavits about what they saw during the election:

People who have stood up and said, “I’m sick of it”. These are Democrats and Republicans. We just got another piece tonight in another part of the country from a Democrat, a woman who’s just absolutely sick and tired of what she saw, and she just wasn’t sure what to do, and she finally said, “I got to go forward, and I got to report this. I can’t live with myself”. That is what’s happening with people who are feeling in their heart that sense of patriotism to still say, “Look, I don’t want my country to turn into something else because that’s what these people want” … People want to live the life that they have with the liberties and freedoms that we have under this great constitutional republic that we have. That’s sort of where we are and that’s what I mean by that. This is an ongoing effort.

Flynn said that the media have been an essential element to the Democrats’ efforts:

The only way you can do that in a country our size, with all of the ways that we communicate is you got to basically get the media on your side. That’s taken some number of years, but I can’t stand here and tell you that that’s not the case because it is, everybody knows. Everybody knows the, “mainstream media”, which is a pretty robust group of organizations and that includes the tech companies, right? I say tech companies, the social media tech companies, everything from Facebook to Instagram, of course, Twitter I mentioned. All of these things, they are trying to control a narrative and tell the American people what they should know instead of allowing the American people information and letting each of us decide what’s important or not.

Brannon Howse asked if this was a form of information warfare.

Flynn replied, mentioning China:

It’s more than that but yes, it’s kind of the type of warfare.

In fact, if you study Chinese doctrine, Chinese doctrine has six phases. The first five phases all have to do with information. The last part of it would be if those failed or if you needed an additional “umph” so to speak, you go to the gates I say. That’s when you may see something kinetic. We’re in this sort of period of information warfare that it’s unprecedented.

I’m going to stand on my box here and say the President of the United States of America is being censored by US companies. Think about that, I’m at a loss sometimes when I talk about it and I talk about it a couple of times a day to different people in different groups, and I’m trying to say, “Okay, at a certain point in time, that has to stop being allowed”.

He brought up the woeful Thanksgiving Day press conference from November 26:

Look at the interview that he did yesterday, where we had, somebody is talking to the President of United States in his office there, and he had to counsel the person. “Don’t talk to them. Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t talk to the President of United States like that”. It’s like a bunch of school punks in a school yard. We can’t have that in this country. Debate and sharp questions but not totally, totally disrespect, to not just the President.

You may not like him and that’s fine, but he represents the Presidency of the United States of America. He represents our flag, our constitution, our country.

Everything that we’re experiencing right now actually is more than just an assault on President Trump. This is an assault on the American Republic, on this great country that we have and people around the country.

I know they’re fed up with it and they’re not going to put up with it. What they’re waiting to see is they’re waiting to see the outcome of their own elected officials in the states do their job. Just because CNN or Fox News or a governor or a secretary of state certify an election, if the state legislature has not certified the election then it’s not certified in a particular state. If there’s a challenge and there’s a legitimate legal challenge then they can’t sit there and certify it while there’s a legal challenge ongoing, it’s just not the way it works.

The media is not going to cover any of that for you. The big media, they’re just not going to cover it, and it’s sad because they’re trying to shove it down our throat, and the American public, they see right through it.

While Flynn gave Sidney Powell credit for ‘some really good filings’, he did not want to discuss her work.

However, he did include her in the group of lawyers working hard for Trump. He concluded:

With people like Sidney Powell, like Rudy Giuliani and his team, like people like Lin Wood, who’s fighting tooth and nail. Most people don’t even know, his case that he’s got going on in Georgia just got picked up by the 11th circuit, down in Georgia, and that’s a good sign, because that means that the one judge down there that thought he was going to dismiss his case, the 11th circuit pulled it out of him and brought it up to their level, to an appeals level because they saw that there was enough evidence. So, I believe we’re going to see some momentum changing here. There are already is an undercurrent of momentum shifting for the president, and I believe that at the end of the day, we’re going to find out that he won by a massive landslide, and he’ll be inaugurated this January.

Howse segued to the part of the interview with Gen McInerney.

Flynn said:

Great friend, and Tom, thank you for giving me the invite. God bless America. Thank you. Thank you.

Gen McInerney spoke:

Well, it is absolutely vital because this was the first time that I believe that General Flynn has been able to speak publicly and in such environment, and so I want to thank you for setting this up, and I know Mary talked to you and it’s very important what you have are doing tonight because it is a fast moving train, and that’s why I wanted you to do it because we are seeing the most unprecedented situation in the history of America.

This is the most dangerous situation since the Civil War of keeping this nation united, and why do I say that? The Civil War, it was just warfare, the day you and General Flynn talked about cyber warfare. Cyber warfare is hidden … You don’t see it coming, it happens. All of a sudden, 138,000 votes or 150,000 votes, all of a sudden they show up, and because we’re looking at computers, we assume they’re all legitimate, but in this particular case, they are not legitimate, and because of what Sidney Powell has been doing with General Flynn’s lawyer and what she submitted in the state of Georgia and Michigan on a Wednesday night, the night before Thanksgiving, we got a document in that log, in those lawsuits from a doctor.

Navid Keshavarez-Nia, who is a 59-year-old resident of California, who spent 40 years almost in the DC metropolitan as a career intelligence community expert. I won’t go into his background very much, but because of this declaration that he made in which I am quoted and independently confirming he uses my name. Kurt Weeby, who was a former NSA official, a good friend of ours, and working with Mary and I, and Dennis Montgomery, a former CIA analyst who was really the creator, inventor of the Hammer and Scorecard capabilities, and that we broke, and we broke it on Sunday and Monday before the election saying that this was going to be an action that will happen, and what transpired did in fact transpire.

Mary was very instrumental in informing me of this information, and all of a sudden, two days before, two and a half days before the voting started on the 3rd of November, this was the 1st of November, I became involved in the Voting gate. My background is a military analyst, and for 16 and a half years I was on Fox News as a military analyst. I have been the number three man in the air staff in the Air Force, and so I had a great background, but what made this so easy for me, Brannon, is I run a cloud company, an edge cloud company. I am intimately familiar with this kind of technology and what it’s doing and live by it in my military days.

Everybody remembers when we attacked Tripoli in 1986. I was the commander and they launched from my bases in England. Now, I got that information from the British and other sources, but my whole life has been based on this, and what I’m seeing now is those technologies now are used against the American people. They are trying to seize control of this nation through technology and through cyber warfare. They have enlisted to include Fox News who flipped on us. They have enlisted the mainstream media and the First Amendment to try to get on their side and General Flynn talked about the censorship.

For instance, Twitter does and determines what president Trump can say. That is ridiculous. It must stop, but because of all these assets and they are using and misusing the constitution of the United States, they have put us in a position that our forefathers were not aware of cyber warfare, and so when they set out in the constitution, the process of our election and going through the electoral college, the voters meeting on 14 December, announcing who the president will be, and then going through in the 20th of November, the inauguration, that was not based upon cyber warfare, and so we have a time clock and I bring this up to our listeners.

We have a time clock, and we have to go through the legal system. This was not designed to operate in the cyber world, and so we had many judges turning down and not recognizing what has happened. That is the challenge that we are facing and what my point I wanted to get across tonight. It doesn’t matter if we have locked and sealed this decision process by the 14th of December, the president should not leave office until it is adequately heard.

We, the American people will demand that these facts be analyzed and looked at, and I’m going to cover some of those facts that have made it so compelling to me that there is no question about it. Let’s start with the vote count distribution in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia are not based on normal system operation. They are caused by fraudulent electronic manipulation of the targeted voting machines. For instance, at 2:30 AM of the 4th of November, TV broadcast reported that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada and Georgia have decided to seize vote counting operations and will continue the following day. This unanimous decision to initially and intentionally stopped counting by all five battleground states is highly unusual.

As a matter of fact, it is unprecedented, and it demonstrates prior coordination by election officials in battleground states. Those five states that General Flynn mentioned, and because of this big flashing light to anybody that understands the voting process, it immediately flagged this. We start looking at each one of those states because they didn’t stop counting. All of a sudden in Michigan at four o’clock in the morning, 138,000 votes show up, all for, guess who: Biden. He was behind in all those States where they decided to cease voting, and that’s where they employed cyber warfare, the Hammer and Scorecard, the Dominion voting machines and the software in them. That’s where they put these applications on, like your iPhone and they got a smooth voting.

Now, when the numbers came, started coming back in those five states, they were different numbers. 138,000 in Michigan, 90,000 in Arizona, this is notional. The different one in Nevada and Georgia and Pennsylvania. The important point was they were exactly at the same percentage.

This is a mathematical impossibility that this could have happened, and it means that algorithm was used, and this algorithm was designed to stay within the bounds, and when the assembled numbers were put together, it wouldn’t be obvious that these numbers of votes were inserted. This is a huge flashing red light, and it’s important that people understand what this kind of data that we’re seeing.

Sidney pointed out in Georgia, that they’re 96,000 absentee votes that were disregarded in Fulton County, they had a water leak. Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania mailed out 1.8 million votes to their citizens. The state did, these are not absentee ballots. These were balanced that had no chain of custody, lo and behold Brannon, 2.5 million came back.

If someone had to have a printing press and we’re cranking them out, that is just the pure sniff test. It doesn’t require a genius to understand if you mail out 1.8 and get 2.5 million ballots, something is wrong.

Now, Sidney and the president’s crew, I believe General Flynn, got the crack in the organization. The 305 military intelligence battalion working with them because in all of this, we have not seen any footprints of the DOJ or the FBI, nor the CIA on the friendly side.

Howse asked about the Kraken.

McInerney replied:

Sidney got the term Kraken. It was actually the nickname of the 305th military intelligence battalion, and that has been her source along with other sources that Mary and I know about, but we don’t want to talk about.

We’re getting the different sources that are relaying this, but the important thing is they identified, now get this, they identified China, Iran and Russia as being involved in this and manipulating the vote.

In addition, the US special forces command seized a server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, because they were sending this data from those six states through the internet to Spain and then into Frankfurt, Germany. Special operation forces seized those from that facility so they have those servers and they know all this data they are providing.

Howse asked if the raid went down ‘without incident’.

McInerney answered:

Well, I’ve heard it didn’t go down without incident, and I haven’t been able to verify it. I want to be careful in that. It’s just coming out, but I understand my initial report is that there were US soldiers killed in that operation.

Now, that was a CIA operation, and so that’s the very worrisome thing. Did that occur because of what Mary and I and Allen were notifying on the Sunday and the Monday in different networks that this was going to happen, that they were using Hammer and Scorecard, and so they decided to bounce it overseas, so the server farms and the Hammer and Scorecard we’re using in the continental United States, couldn’t be used? I don’t know that.

In any case, it makes it more vulnerable because when you start moving that kind of data overseas, other people look at it.

Howse asked for confirmation that the server farm was a CIA operation located in Germany.

McInerney responded:

That’s correct. Frankfurt, Germany.

We have all this information, General Flynn of course, people most realized, was the senior military intelligence officer in the US commands as a defense intelligence agency. He’s a career intelligence officer, knows this stuff, backwards and forwards.

From my experience in the cloud business, this was a trivial operation, relatively speaking, but the magnitude, because so many people, Brannon, were involved. So many people like General Flynn mentioned, the Democratic persons who saw this are coming forward, but what we are doing, we are competing with the Constitution and the 14th December date for the electoral college. Why? Because we have this information and we know that not only did we have the deep state and the executive that President Trump had to fight, we also had it in the legislature where you have Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, all of those people were involved in this.

They were involved in the Russian hoax. They were involved in this coup d’état, but we also had the judiciary, Judge Sullivan, who was General Flynn’s judge, outdid himself on this. You had the compromise there, and that’s why the 305th, the Krakens were targeted and selected, I believe, because the President could trust them. That’s why Chris Miller, who is now the acting secretary of defense and a former special operations hero …

Howse asked:

What about his speech that’s gone viral of him directing all special operations forces to answer directly to him?

McInerney replied:

Well, that tells you something. It tells you that we had that tighten-up because there are people that are a part of this conspiracy. This is treason what we’re talking about. Some people may just think, “Oh, it’s just politics”. No … So, President Obama used it in 2012 to win, Biden used it to win Florida. The Democrats used it during the primary so Bernie Sanders would lose, and Biden would win. You know that’s politics, we’ve been cheating. No, it’s not politics, this is treason … We haven’t seen treason this magnitude ever in our history, and those politicians, those people like Chris Krebs, who was the head of the cyber warfare infrastructure security agency. He was until he was fired a couple of weeks ago by the President because this was a perfect election. He is guilty of treason. He had to be complicit, and people must understand that. You people that have done this are guilty of treason against the United States, and we are going to demand this President, insist this president not leave office until the American people have had a full disclosure of what’s going on.

Howse asked if Trump needed to fulfil the oath he took at his inauguration.

McInerney said that he must do so:

That is exactly what you heard me say, Brannon. The president has in his oath to the constitution to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and we shouldn’t let a schedule that we know is so blatantly flawed that anybody can understand that with just the items I’ve given our listeners tonight. When you have hundreds of thousands of votes that were falsified, and we know they’re falsified. I believe those servers are going to show that, and I believe that he is going to show that. It’ll probably have to be done at the Supreme Court because you have judges like some of it in that that are going to try to protect themselves because the fingers are going to start pointing to everybody. “Well, I didn’t know this, I didn’t know that”, they’re going to use the Nuremberg trial. “Well, the fear told me to do this”. They’re going to say, “Well, President Obama knew what I was doing because he told me to do it”, or vice-president Biden. “Biden was the runner here. He told me to do it”. They’re going to point fingers. When you have people that are driving up in cars with carloads of ballots, some not even folded, and they’re driving them into these five or six battleground states, they’re going to talk. They don’t want to be involved in treason …

Howse said that the intelligence community wanted him to be quiet:

In general, I received three phone calls from three different people, tied to the intelligence arena a couple of weeks ago, trying to tell me that I was going to be embarrassing myself. If I didn’t quit talking about this, that it was all conspiracy and fake, and it’s now being revealed that those I guess, were calls to try to get me to stop using our network, our platform, to inform the American people, because now we just are starting to figure out what a lot of these words like Kraken and other things mean. It is all coming out. There are those inside the intelligence arena that were trying to shut this down. Now, I think there’s some inside of the intelligence arena that are trying out to take the story and control it. Are they not?

McInerney replied:

Yes, and they are guilty of treason.

Mary Fanning spoke next, very much to the point:

I will tell you that bad actors, both foreign and domestic use these man in the middle proxies to cover their tracks. There was an attempt not just to steal the election, but to steal America. The founding fathers may not have known about cyber warfare, but they certainly recognized tyranny … President Trump cannot leave office. When we have China and Iran having access to our elections, we cannot let them steal America through their illegal acts of treason and act of war against this country.

McInerney said something interesting, not about Democrats — about whom we knew — but two people working for Trump — John Durham and Bill Barr:

Now we’ve got to know if John Durham, what is the status of John Durham and the attorney general? What is the status of their work? What have they done?

Mary Fanning brought up a rather recent quote from Joe Biden:

Well, there’s an abundance of evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Trump on behalf of Joe Biden, with Joe Biden’s assistance, because Joe Biden said he had the greatest voter fraud group in history put together. We cannot let this stand. It will be the theft of America. The American people must stand up.

The interviews concluded with an interesting exchange between Fanning and Howse.

Fanning said that this ‘treasonous activity’ had gone on ‘far too long’:

This came directly out of the Obama administration when John Brennan and James Clapper illegally commandeered the foreign surveillance tool known as the Hammer.

Then Dennis Montgomery’s name, as well as Robert Mueller’s, entered the conversation.

Brannon Howse asked about the Hammer:

It was designed by Genesis Montgomery in 2003, to keep America safe, as you write. Commandeered by them about two weeks after Obama was sworn into office and put on servers. You write of the FBI honor … director … Mueller, correct?

Fanning replied:

That’s correct. According to Dennis Montgomery, Robert Mueller provided the computers for the Hammer.

Wow.

Early in Trump’s tenure, Dennis Montgomery appeared on a few programmes — few to none on the big networks — to warn about the depth of what goes on behind the scenes in intelligence. I always found him credible. However, his name was dragged through the mud by some commentators.

Howse said:

And of course, they tried to discredit Dennis Montgomery because you can see why now, but as we’ve discussed in past programs, you got two immunity deals after being interviewed and recorded. So apparently, he didn’t lie, or he’d be in jail. He kept it; he got his immunity deals kept some of his security clearances is not in jail, so that should tell us a lot to the people trying to smear the guy.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Howse dropped this bombshell from his own shows and from Fanning’s book:

Not to mention Mary, as you report in your excellent report, the perfect storm, the Jafar family, the Gulftainer family, Doctor Jafar, as you guys report, used to be the head of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, making the nuclear beach ball as miniaturized nuclear device.

I think he was on the kill list during the war, and then his family and his business get a contract running Port Canaveral in Florida and in Wilmington, Delaware [Joe Biden’s hometown], cargo containers, and yet there is some kind of business deals back with the 100% Russian owned export of the Club K Cargo that has four cruise missile silos that pop up and can deliver cruise missiles, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and it could easily be planted down here in the US as you have translated Russian Manuals for Pearl Harbor 2.0 into English, they call for a Russian strategy of doing just that.

As you know, live on our show a few years ago, Phil Haney, former Department of Homeland Security whistle blower, revealed right on this show, “Hey, Brannon, you want another piece of interesting information to go with that?” Look at Citgo owned by Venezuela, they’re in financial crisis with massive inflation. Guess who’s come in and bought up a big chunk of their company? Russia. Look at all their oil terminals, up and down the Eastern seaboard. Now, Russia can bring in through the oil terminals, the cargo terminals can bring in the Club K Cargo missile launching system into this relationship with Dr. Jafar and Gulftainer, have caused now to move them into the US and plop them down at all refiners up and down the East Coast is a Trojan horse, and that’s your perfect Pearl Harbor 2.0 that you’ve been warning about, and Phil Haney dropped that right on the news desk of our show live, and you happen to be watching that night.

So, there’s way more to this than just the election. We’re talking about them being inside the wire and a lot of these people, the Bidens, the Obamas, Hillary tied to some of these actors, correct?

Fanning replied in the affirmative:

Well, that’s correct. Beyond which the Jafars were put on the Pentagon’s blacklist meant that they were wanted for capture or [to] kill Dr. Jafar, and he’s the nuclear mastermind or Saddam Hussein. In order to take back our country, we must take back this election that Donald Trump won fair and square before they started cheating with foreign actors, Russia, China, Iran, that their hand is in here for the theft of this election. That’s why the American people must stand up, and that is … President Donald Trump must abide by his oath to protect this country. He cannot step down until this election is fairly, legally settled.

General McInerney had the final word:

Now this is going directly to those that want to seize this country because they’ve hacked my cell phone, and so everything I say on this particular open channel, they are coming. They mean business. They are deeply into this, and they now know that because of what you’ve done and what we’ve done tonight, that they are in even more trouble. We are coming against after you and the American people are going to come after you and this President won this election, and he was going to be the president for the next four years, but we’re after you. You will not seize this country because this would be the last re-election we ever had, and I’m in agreement with you and Mary, that Joe Biden should step down right now.

Well, there you have it.

The coup continues — with no let up in sight.

Good grief.

This is unbelievable.

October 24, 2020: Biden praises ‘most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organisation’

On October 24, 2020, Joe Biden said two interesting things about the most recent US presidential elections:

Joe Biden really did thank everyone "the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics".

Not joking. I've got to say, folks…

There are more than a few whispers about easily forcing him out and installing Kamala Harris, quickly. https://t.co/u6vZFJlViT

— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) October 25, 2020

Please play the video, which is only 24 seconds long.

First, he thanked everyone for putting together:

the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.

Secondly, he began by referring to his and Obama’s two elections:

and you guys did it for our — President Obama’s — administration before this …

Biden’s whole statement is as follows (emphases mine):

Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together, and you guys did it for our — President Obama’s — administration before this, we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.

I thought back to the 2008 election. John McCain was in a good position to stave off the Democrats, then, a week before the election he told a lady at one of his rallies:

Don’t worry, Senator Obama will make a very good president.

I saw that on ITV’s morning news between 5:30 and 6:00 and about spat out my coffee.

So, when he lost, I thought that he threw the election.

In 2012, things were much different. A lot of Americans were leaning towards Mitt Romney. The queues on Election Day that year began early. I watched coverage live on an American network and everything looked brilliant for Romney until around 6 a.m. GMT. Suddenly, the votes flipped in seconds. Obama had clearly won.

I wrote about it at the time, including a number of links to related commentary and news stories:

Final words on the US election — vote flipping and debunking the media

Two short excerpts from that long post follow:

I have read in several places that Obama had no acceptance speech planned. Romney had no concession speech. This opens up the possibility that people behind the scenes had a vote flipping operation put into place. Of course, one name always pops up in the picture, although there are no doubt more who would like to see the United States reduced to serfdom by a bunch of feral neo-Bolsheviks …

To clarify my hypothesis of vote flipping, only a few people in the background could know about it. Otherwise, the secret risked exposure. I do not believe that Obama knew, because he appeared as surprised as Mitt Romney did. This action was done independently of Obama and most of his water carriers, even though they had hoped for this result. I believe that what people saw on the ground with voter irregularity and intimidation was but a small part of the hypothetical vote flipping …

Here we are today, eight years later.

Suddenly, Joe Biden, a man who stayed home most of the time during the campaign, is on track to win the presidency. Most of his rallies attracted a handful of people. The most I ever saw were fewer than a hundred attendees. By contrast, President Trump’s rallies attracted tens of thousands most of the time, depending on local regulations.

By law, poll watchers from both parties — Republican and Democrat — must be present when votes are being counted. Unfortunately, in some cases, Republican watchers have been told to watch from a long distance away or have been denied entry to places where votes are being tabulated. Senator Josh Hawley explains:

The American people, whatever their party, deserve total transparency in the election vote. Allow poll watchers to be present as ballots counted. Full accounting of all ballots. Ban ballot harvesting pic.twitter.com/SvnO5NN8Ep

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 6, 2020

President Trump has filed lawsuits in the states where votes are still being counted or the results are in dispute:

All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud. Plenty of proof – just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2020

President Trump alleging massive election fraud so here we go. The vote will be legally challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court. Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada are flash points.

— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) November 6, 2020

Trump is right. Look at the list of states below. So far, all except Georgia have more votes than registered voters:

Damn

— BrexitBill (@BillyBolter) November 6, 2020

Newt Gingrich is being censored. pic.twitter.com/k2WTq9k15n

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 6, 2020

Trump’s campaign needs additional funds to help fight this apparent fraud:

Please donate NOW to fund the Trump ballot litigation effort! https://t.co/Ki18gisbGY

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) November 5, 2020

I am glad to see Senator Lindsey Graham is helping:

Lindsey Graham is donating $500,000 of his own money to Trump's legal defense fund. He came through. https://t.co/jagwPewleb

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 6, 2020

Below are snapshots of what has been happening on the ground.

Arizona

Arizona’s results show Biden has won. Hmm.

Arizona voting instructions specify that Sharpie pens should not be used because they can bleed through the ballot paper, thereby rendering that vote invalid. The instructions can be seen in the Gateway Pundit article below.

Gateway Pundit reported on a Steven Crowder discussion whereby some Arizona voters were given Sharpie pens by voting officials, who insisted they use them to mark their ballots (emphasis in the original). The video is ready to play at the designated point:

As the corrupt county officials across Arizona scramble to downplay Sharpiegate, with the help of a complicit media running cover, it appears as though they are being outsmarted by their own ballot instructions. Their own voters’ guides specify “Do NOT use a sharpie type pen as it will bleed through.”

Steven Crowder brought this to light on his live stream yesterday, around the 3 hour, 20 minute, 7 second mark:

Election observers are not being allowed in to do their job:

Maricopa County election officials are blocking entrance of Official House Election Observers, as authorized by the Speaker, to execute constitutional responsibilities of overseeing administration of congressional elections. This is an essential part of ensuring fair elections. pic.twitter.com/AYFEPPrmDW

— House Admin. Committee GOP (@HouseAdmin) November 5, 2020

Trump supporters are not meekly retreating to the background. Arizona is one of the states holding peaceful protests about the vote results:

Voting rights rally in Arizona. Happening now. pic.twitter.com/BNX6mx6473

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) November 6, 2020

Here’s the full video:

Michigan

Michigan raised the dead so that they could vote:

Alarming: 120 year-old Michigan voters. One right after the other. Verified on the official state election website. https://t.co/RLTMfoGh4E

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 5, 2020

https://twitter.com/PhocaeanD/status/1324531466404044801

Last night, Trump supporters held a peaceful protest in Detroit near the convention centre where the votes were being counted:

Protesters calling for transparency with vote counting in Detroit, Michigan #Detroit #DetroitProtests pic.twitter.com/LgSUO9SG0b

— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) November 6, 2020

Nevada

This is why Trump was suspicious of the US Postal Service. If true, this is really something:

BREAKING: Nevada @USPS Carrier Caught On Tape Pledging Voter Fraud To Remove @realDonaldTrump From Office

“I’m gonna see if I can get you some(ballots), like a nice little handful…”

“What’s your unit number? Let me see what I can do…”#MailFraud pic.twitter.com/FvzQlTPnep

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 5, 2020

Nevada’s Republican Party chapter noticed an irregularity involving votes by people who had earlier moved out of the state. They have notified US Attorney General Bill Barr:

Our lawyers just sent a criminal referral to AG Barr regarding at least 3,062 instances of voter fraud. We expect that number to grow substantially. Thousands of individuals have been identified who appear to have violated the law by casting ballots after they moved from NV.

— Nevada GOP (@NVGOP) November 6, 2020

Pennsylvania

On November 5, Tucker Carlson interviewed a poll worker who was not allowed back in a polling centre to oversee the count on the second day of vote counting. The video begins with Corey Lewandowski (Trump’s first campaign manager from 2016) in Philadelphia. Brian McCafferty is the poll watcher who has video evidence he has submitted to Fox News of what was going on inside the convention centre. He says, ‘You know something’s wrong’:

Poll watcher blows the whistle on corruption in Philadelphia!!pic.twitter.com/rFzoSSEcD3

— 🇺🇸 Pismo 🇺🇸 (@Pismo_B) November 6, 2020

That day, two days after the election, Philadelphia was allegedly still collecting ballots.

Gateway Pundit picked up on a Trump campaign official’s tweet (emphases in the original):

President Donald Trump’s director of election day operations has posted a video of a suburban Philadelphia post office continuing to collect ballots long after election day.

Trump’s 2020 EDO Director Mike Roman posted the shocking video on Thursday evening, tweeting “a post office in suburban Philly is STILL COLLECTING BALLOTS!”

🚨 A post office in suburban Philly is STILL COLLECTING BALLOTS!
“It’s gonna be a big lawsuit blah blah blah blah blah” pic.twitter.com/82C4Umw20L

— Mike Roman (@mikeroman) November 6, 2020

The same thing is allegedly happening across the state in the city of Erie. James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, posted the story yesterday:

https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1324554873095000064

This is interesting:

Hi there, Twitter!

Here's video pulled from the Delaware County, PA live stream of a ballot worker filling out ballots. pic.twitter.com/2ki358m3X0

— Jon Del Arroz (@jondelarroz) November 6, 2020

Hmm:

https://twitter.com/ArthurSchwartz/status/1323328437940064256

https://twitter.com/ArthurSchwartz/status/1323330467349889025

Trump’s press conference

On Thursday, November 5, major television networks cut Trump’s press conference short — and I am sorry to see Michael DeLauzon’s Twitter account suspended once again:

So NBC cut off President Trump’s news conference while the President was speaking. pic.twitter.com/dFvddqUJz1

— The TRUMP PAGE 🇺🇸 (@MichaelDeLauzon) November 6, 2020

President Trump just spoke at the White House, as key states continue to count votes.
Shep has the facts: “What the President of the United States is saying, in large part, is absolutely untrue.” #Election2020 https://t.co/E6DBt6OodD pic.twitter.com/HVa87qUCzB

— Last Call (@LastCallCNBC) November 6, 2020

Here is the president’s press conference in full:

In closing, Twitter has been quick off the mark to announce that, as of January 20, 2021, it will not hesitate to censor Trump’s tweets. They figure he will be out of office.

Gateway Pundit reports:

Twitter has confirmed that President Donald Trump will no longer receive “special protections” beginning on January 20th at 12:01 p.m. if he does not win the election.

The platform has already been censoring the president and his supporters for years, but is now promising even more censorship if he does not fall in line …

Since the polls closed on election night, Twitter has censored eight tweets from the president for “violating the company’s rules.”

I’m shaking my head in frustration. However, I pray that this fraud will finally be brought to light and that someone or something will put an end to it.

Joe Biden’s odd behaviour with the opposite sex — and a Tucker Carlson update

Before I get to Joe Biden’s behaviour around the opposite sex, I have an update on Tony Bobulinski’s interview with Tucker Carlson.

I featured half of it in yesterday’s post, but here is the full interview:

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway tweeted a summary of it. I’ll begin with her commentary where I left off:

Bobulinski talking about Biden family business in Oman, Luxembourg, Romania, and how they used family name to get business from foreign agents hoping to garner favor with Biden. That in terms of business acumen, Hunter and Jim's "only qualification they had was family name."

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

"I think Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised." Says in security training, you understand what being compromised means. "As a citizen and taxpayer, I'm very, very concerned."

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

Director at CEFC told Bobulinski that $10M funding would come in $5M loan to Biden family and $5M contribution to Sinohawk. Wasn't coming in and Bobulinski got worried when it leaked that Rosneft stake might be sold to CEFC. Then that director's U.S. visa was denied.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

Says he asked Hunter if he went around SinoHawk to get the money from CEFC and Hunter said he hadn't, but that he was acting as the personal attorney to Chairman Ye. Bobulinski says it made him angry/frustrated, realizing he had been circumvented and that the Russia connection

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

The man the Biden family approached to run their business in China, who met with Joe Biden twice as part of that role, who has been attacked as an agent of Russia by Biden surrogates, just gave one hell of a riveting interview on Tucker.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

oh. pic.twitter.com/61wwoPo0I2

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2020

On last night’s show, Tucker said that he asked one of his staff members to send some Hunter Biden-related documents to him in Los Angeles, where he has been filming. The staff member, based in New York, sent them through a well-known, reputable courier service. Unfortunately, an empty package reached Carlson. (I hope they have a copy in New York.)

When notified of the empty envelope, the courier company investigated every step of the way but came up empty-handed.

En route, the package was opened and contents removed. The company interviewed every possible person who could have handled it. They also searched a van and plane, but nothing showed up. The company is not only deeply apologetic, but also deeply disturbed that this could have happened:

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

https://twitter.com/Matts_Hot_Takes/status/1321609004657922048

I agree. Someone is watching.

Here’s Tucker’s full show from Wednesday, October 28. I’m not sure how long it will be up, so watch it while you can. The last five minutes are about how to pronounce Kamala, as in Harris. Some say KAM-a-la, others say KAHM-a-la. The vice presidential candidate herself pronounces it halfway between the two.

Now on to the main topic.

Gropin’ Joe

During his vice presidency, Joe Biden swore in US Senators. Watch Biden caress Senator Christopher Coons’s daughter Maggie:

#WomenWhoVoteTrump wonder why Joe Biden gets a pass on "inapropriate touching." Yikes!⤵If this was Trump, imagine the MSM headlines . #MAGA pic.twitter.com/gtk64X3tXH

— Trump The Hill🏛 #ShadowBanned (@TrumpTheHill) October 15, 2016

That video went viral:

.@Cernovich @Chiro11Peter world wide….. pic.twitter.com/ZPjsVsdqRn

— TedS (@FLBigBass) November 24, 2016

Maybe he’s just a tactile person? It looks as if Hillary wants him to get off. Outside of Maggie Coons, the rest are likely to be married women. Even if they weren’t, it looks highly inappropriate — and weird:

I wonder when the woman will come out and tell their stories #HillaryGropedMe pic.twitter.com/9GwmerJ2ZE

— Daisy 🦋🇺🇸 (@Daisy22Diaz) October 16, 2016

The woman on the left in the photo collage above is a reporter, Amie Parnes:

#HellNo #BackUpOffTheLadyLumps -Photo of Joe #Biden w/#WH correspondent Amie Parnes goes viral http://t.co/NyqvkPKEpU pic.twitter.com/PO8vuD3d1r

— Ash-hole (@TheTechn0sexual) December 17, 2013

Four years ago, the lefty media buzzed with anti-Trump groping stories, but the real groper was Biden. A Daily Mail article from October 18, 2016, has more on Biden, including photos.

The article features a photo of Stephanie Carter, the wife of the then-defense secretary Ash Carter. She and Biden were standing behind the podium as Ash Carter was speaking! Biden had his hands firmly on her shoulders and looked as if he were kissing her hair. (Also see The Daily Caller‘s take.)

Carter was not bothered:

‘Oh, I laughed. I laughed. I laughed,’ Carter said after the fact. He told the ‘Today’ show, ‘They know each other extremely well, and we’re great friends with the Bidens.’

Returning to Maggie Coons above, the article says:

Biden placed his hands on the shoulder of Coons’ daughter and whispered in Maggie Coons’ ear during the ceremony, attracting enough chatter in DC that Senator Coons got asked about it during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

‘I have to ask, ’cause a lot of people have been speculating about it, does she think the vice president is creepy?’ host Chris Wallace asked point-blank.

‘No, Chris,’ Coons responded. ‘She doesn’t think the vice president is creepy.’

Senator Coons also vouched for what Biden said at the time. ”I could hear him. He was leaning forward and whispering some encouragement to her about how when he was sworn in his own daughter Ashley was 13 and she felt awkward and uncomfortable.’

Biden feels at liberty to touch women, regardless of age. There is another photo of him caressing an older lady’s chin with this accompanying caption:

Biden has also been known to flash his charm on mature women during swearing in ceremonies, including chatting up Sen. John Barrasso’s mom.

The article carried this short video compilation of Biden’s ‘greatest hits’, as it were. Hillary features in this too, in another scene at an airport. She’s patting his arm rather insistently — as in ‘get off’ — while smiling:

Here’s the Hillary sequence all on its own:

https://twitter.com/Redtowel4/status/1121963870036340737

Here is the full swearing in of Sen. Kelly Ayotte. This one has audio. He asks Kelly Ayotte’s daughter how old she is. After the swearing in, he can’t keep his hands off her. I don’t particularly agree with the title of this video — others do — but Biden shouldn’t be touching children like that:

In 2018, Biden campaigned for Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and the gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers. He said Tony had met his future wife when both of them were in kindergarten:

The Daily Caller has the story (emphases mine):

“By the way, running for governor is a team sport! No way out,” Biden said. “He met Kathy in kindergarten. In kindergarten. She was too young to resist. She should’ve known better but she did it anyway.”

Biden did not explain what he meant by the joke, instead planting a kiss on Kathy’s forehead. The audience laughed and smiled along with Biden’s joke.

Here is a strange photo, dating from Joe’s earlier days as US Senator for Delaware:

👀 pic.twitter.com/kGm9I7Hh5J

— Cari Kelemen (@KelemenCari) March 13, 2019

Obama

He and Obama had a somewhat unusual friendship.

On June 28, 2016, People reported that Obama made a friendship bracelet for his vice president:

“That stuff’s hard,” Obama concluded in the video for BuzzFeed, which has partnered with a nonprofit, nonpartisan app called TurboVote to help make the voter registration process smooth sailing. “But you know what isn’t? Registering to vote. I hope you all understand that you have the power to shape our country’s course. Don’t take that for granted.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting with my vice president,” Obama added, proudly holding up a friendship bracelet with the name “Joe” on it.

Biden returned the favour on Obama’s birthday that year:

Happy 55th, Barack! A brother to me, a best friend forever. pic.twitter.com/uNsxouTKOO

— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) August 4, 2016

This next tweet is just a bit of fun:

https://twitter.com/calidhd/status/936033198416498692

Republicans react differently

Not everyone has been as understanding of Joe Biden’s behaviour as establishment Democrats are.

In the next video, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions bats Biden’s hand away from his granddaughter. Before that, however, Biden rests his hand on a teen’s waist and is tempted to reach further:

Secret Service agents’ stories

In 2014, veteran journalist Ronald Kessler wrote a book about Secret Service agents’ experiences, The First Family Detail.

On August 1 that year, a few days before its release, US News & World Report received an advance copy. Regarding Joe Biden, their article says:

“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.

“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.

“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”

In addition to the alleged skinny-dipping, agents are reportedly irritated by frequent last-minute trips to Delaware.

A Biden spokeswoman would not address the claims on the record. A spokesperson for the Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf thought that criticising skinny dipping was out of date:

… let me tell you that virtually no one in the Washington, D.C., political press is scandalized by skinny dipping. But every time it emerges that someone in public life has swam naked, there is widespread, disingenuous playacting on the question. You’d suddenly think that Maude Flanders was managing the newsroom. While I have no idea if the reporting in the new book on the Secret Service is credible, outlets treating it as credible enough to report have been distracted by skinny-dipping from what is indisputably more important news.

He forgets that the press corps weren’t there; female Secret Service agents were the ones guarding him. They had every right to be offended.

In 2017, Gateway Pundit reported that Secret Service agents were relieved that Biden was no longer vice president because his behaviour towards women was so raunchy.

A former Secret Service agent described it as ‘Weinstein-level stuff’, it was so bad (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that,  “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.

“He would mess with every single woman or teen. It was horrible,” the agent said.

According to the source, a Secret Service agent once got suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him. The situation got so heated, the source told Cassandra Fairbanks, that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President.

Additionally, the agent claims that Biden would walk around the VP residence naked at night. “I mean, stark naked… Weinstein level stuff,” he added.

He said that the men on duty would frequently stand in front of female agents and Navy women that were present “like a damn guardian.” On some occasions, they would make up reasons to get the women away from where he was.

The agent said he was specifically concerned about women in the Navy.

“They weren’t allowed to disobey him at all, but we’d take them away under pretend auspices,” the agent stated.

The official Vice Presidential residence is the Queen Anne style house at One Observatory Circle in Washington, DC, which is located on the northeast grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The property is maintained and cared for by the service branch.

As for skinny dipping at his home in Delaware:

Our source confirmed this sentiment, adding that “it was especially an issue at his Delaware house that he would go to every weekend.”

“He would only get naked when Jill was absent,” he added.

Biden has also long been criticized for his contact with women and girls in photos and videos, and was even referred to as “Creepy Uncle Joe Biden” by the Washington Post.

The agent said that this type of thing did not go on when Republicans were in charge:

The agent also worked under the Bush administration, and added that Vice President Dick Cheney “never grabbed any butts or breasts.”

Lucy Flores, 2014 Democrat candidate

In 2019, Lucy Flores, recounted her encounter with Biden while she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada in 2014. She wrote a first-person article for The Cut: ‘An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden’. (Breitbart‘s John Nolte wrote about this story shortly after her article appeared.)

Excerpts follow (emphases mine):

… when my campaign heard from Vice-President Joe Biden’s office that he was looking to help me and other Democrats in the state, I was grateful and flattered. His team offered to bring him to a campaign rally in an effort to help boost voter turnout. We set the date for November 1, just three days before election day …

I found my way to the holding room for the speakers, where everyone was chatting, taking photos, and getting ready to speak to the hundreds of voters in the audience. Just before the speeches, we were ushered to the side of the stage where we were lined up by order of introduction. As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”

I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience …

Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

She then wrote about some of the material I have posted above, which has been making the rounds for the past four years, and more:

Time passed and pictures started to surface of Vice-President Biden getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls. Biden nuzzling the neck of the Defense secretary’s wife; Biden kissing a senator’s wife on the lips; Biden whispering in women’s ears; Biden snuggling female constituents. I saw obvious discomfort in the women’s faces, and Biden, I’m sure, never thought twice about how it made them feel. I knew I couldn’t say anything publicly about what those pictures surfaced for me; my anger and my resentment grew.

Had I never seen those pictures, I may have been able to give Biden the benefit of the doubt. Had there not been multiple articles written over the years about the exact same thing — calling his creepy behavior an “open secret” — perhaps it would feel less offensive. And yet despite the steady stream of pictures and the occasional article, Biden retained his title of America’s Favorite Uncle. On occasion that title was downgraded to America’s Creepy Uncle but that in and of itself implied a certain level of acceptance. After all, how many families just tolerate or keep their young children away from the creepy uncle without ever acknowledging that there should be zero tolerance for a man who persistently invades others’ personal space and makes people feel uneasy and gross? In this case, it shows a lack of empathy for the women and young girls whose space he is invading, and ignores the power imbalance that exists between Biden and the women he chooses to get cozy with.

A male friend told Flores not to say anything about her encounter:

When I spoke to a male friend who is also a political operative in Biden’s orbit — the first man who had heard the story outside of my staff and close friends years ago — he did what no one else had and made me question myself and wonder if I was doing the right thing. He reminded me that Biden has significant resources and argued points that made me question my memory, even though I’ve replayed that scene in my mind a thousand times. He reminded me that my credibility would be attacked and that I should be prepared for the type of “back and forth” that could occur. (When reached by New York Magazine, a representative for Vice-President Joe Biden declined to comment.)

I’m not suggesting that Biden broke any laws, but the transgressions that society deems minor (or doesn’t even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end. That imbalance of power and attention is the whole point — and the whole problem.

In the end, Lucy Flores did speak up and out:

https://twitter.com/EddieZipperer/status/1112426299308625920

Trump’s winning campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted:

.@KellyannePolls on @JoeBiden: If anybody just types in “Creepy Uncle Joe Videos” you come up with a treasure trove…I think Joe Biden has a big problem here because he calls it affection and handshakes, his party calls it completely inappropriate.

— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) March 31, 2019

No one can dispute this:

https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1111783813649186817

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take Joe’s groping seriously.

You can find more photos and GIFs of Joe Biden in action here.

Democratic primary campaign videos

He was still at it on the campaign trail before winning the nomination this year.

These are incidents from 2019:

In a somewhat odd moment at tonight's AFT town hall, Biden tells a 10-year-old girl, “I’ll bet you’re as bright as you are good-looking." He takes her over to the assembled reporters, then stands behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders while he's talking.

— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) May 28, 2019

Biden’s campaign declined to comment.

— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) May 29, 2019

Gateway Pundit wrote about another:

https://twitter.com/lizcgoodwin/status/1138817493064138752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1138817493064138752%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2019%2F06%2Fo-d-b-ol-dirty-biden-still-sexualizing-girls-on-campaign-trail-makes-remark-to-13-year-old-at-iowa-coffee-shop%2F

Their article says, in part:

No video has been posted yet, but it fits a pattern seen on numerous videos of Biden making sexual comments to pre-teen and adolescent girls about staying away from boys, or keeping boys away or not dating until they are thirty. That is in addition to the numerous videotaped incidents of Biden groping young girls.

Here’s one where he held onto a woman’s hands:

https://twitter.com/TCPigott/status/1170026008969383937

Poor woman:

Wow Joey boy, what's wrong with you? pic.twitter.com/wkXnu8odg3

— Joel Fischer 🇺🇸 (@realJoelFischer) May 19, 2019

This is the last set of videos from 2019. The one with the kids is from Wilmington, Delaware:

Biden: "I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun. The kids used to come up and reach in the pool & rub my leg down so it was straight & watch the hair come back up again. So I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap…" pic.twitter.com/GXSgRVSti6

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) December 1, 2019

He told them the story of Cornpop:

Better, longer version of Biden’s cornpop, rusty razor blades & rain barrels yarn. An infinitely less disturbing tale than the hairy legs & roaches story.
Reminder: he’s currently the Democrat frontrunner.https://t.co/jAQXXEyluk

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) December 1, 2019

This video from Texas is where he can’t remember ‘God’:

They’re not sending their best. pic.twitter.com/RgElhP2Dse

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) March 2, 2020

Hillary Clinton told People magazine that year that we have to ‘get over it’. Joe’s gropes are no biggie.

Lucy Flores nailed it: Joe Biden he thinks he’s so powerful that he can get away with anything. And does.