RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/satfbi-state-officials-aware-early-steele-made-major

Shortly before the FBI used his dossier to secure a surveillance warrant targeting the Trump campaign, Christopher Steele met with State Department officials and relayed information suggesting Moscow was running an operation out of the Russian consulate in Miami.

There was just one problem with his intelligence: The Russians didn’t have a consulate in Florida’s largest city.

The anecdote, captured in contemporaneous memos and newly released testimony, illustrates just how bad some of Steele’s intelligence reporting was and how widely that was known inside the FBI, even as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was being assured by the bureau that Steele was deemed credible and there was no derogatory information about his work.

Kenneth Laycock, the FBI’s current Executive Assistant Director, was a section chief for Eurasian intelligence in fall 2016 when Steele made a visit to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec at the State Department.

During the October 2016 meeting, Steele admitted he was leaking to the news media while working as an FBI informant, a violation of his confidential human source agreement. (He later was terminated for it.) And he also relayed the anecdote about the Russian operation out of the Miami consulate, which officials immediately flagged as false, according to Kavalec’s own notes of the meeting.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-new-corporate-tyranny

“Oh, and one more thing. If you thought this essay was worth reading, you might wish to print out a paper copy before it vanishes from the Internet.”

The American political and legal systems are working just fine, despite a few hiccups. Meanwhile, American corporations are depriving citizens of basic rights and freedoms and destroying our democracy.

Imagine that you are a resident in a low-population county in 1950. You run afoul of the small group of families who are effectively in charge. Your political and legal rights are unimpaired. You are free to vote and you are free to sue in municipal and county and state courts. The police treat you with unfailing courtesy and respect.

But strange things start to happen. The only newspaper in the county refuses to take ads for your business. The only bank in the county announces that it is closing your account and calling in your mortgage. Your car breaks down and the only garage and service shop in the county refuses to repair it. The only general store in the county refuses your patronage and the few restaurants in the county turn you away at the door. After you lose your business to the newspaper advertising boycott, you try to get a job, but discover that you have been blacklisted by all of the employers in the county. Nobody will hire you.

Are you free, in this scenario, just because there is no official interference with your voting rights and your civil rights? Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by the police or military in a dictatorship.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/01/14/refuse-to-be-silenced-n2583120

Parler’s gone for now, the victim of a conspiracy to silence, but it will return. The fascists can try, but they can’t shut us up forever. Truth flows like water around obstacles. The Twitbookgram decided to start playing whack-a-prole to bonk unapproved ideas on the noggin and pretty soon too many heads will be popping up out of too many new holes. They will pop up on Gab, or Clouthub, or Dave Rubin’s Locals.com. People will find a way to be heard.

Once you leave their personal domains, the tech overlords become…irrelevant, and powerless.

Now, they can conspire, collaborate, and likely violate antitrust laws, though it is hilarious to assume that a Biden* DoJ will find anything out of sorts about that. The Democrat Party, and far too many Fredocon hacks in the GOP, are bought and paid for. They are happy to auction themselves off in a bidding war between Silicon Valley and Beijing. And there are a few remaining Muh Free Enterprisers who confuse capitalism and monopoly corporatism, and who are happy to surrender their sovereignty if their twisted principles so demand. But there is only so much the silicon villains can do. Eventually, some enterprising entrepreneur in Latvia is going to have a server farm no one in Cupertino can switch off.

They are shooting their wad, as far as the corporate tech censorship goes. It’s a hassle right now, but we will not be gagged.

And we have some plays too. The feds are all on the side of censorship, sure, but what about our red states? Every single state that has a GOP majority has the chance to pass its own laws to protect freedom of thought and speech. And they should. They should do it yesterday.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/01/14/oh-so-the-capitol-hill-riot-was-a-planned-attack-n2583122

How Could Trump ‘Incite’ a Pre-Planned Attack?

President Trump was impeached yesterday by a mostly party-line vote. Ten House Republicans did cross the picket line to back the Democratic Party’s unhealthy fetish with impeaching this president. They did it using the Ukrainian quid pro quo sham which was pretty much was an offshoot of the wider Russian collusion hoax. Both were tied to a similar narrative. Both had next to nothing in terms of hard evidence. Now, with this riot that erupted on Capitol Hill last week, we’re back to this urge to remove Trump days before he’s set to leave office. 

The chaos occurred on January 6 when Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College results. Pro-Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Five people died. It renewed an impeachment push from Democrats. More Republicans were going to back it. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell reportedly is not all that upset over the move and did not rule out convicting the president. Did Trump mean to urge his supporters to storm the Hill? No. But it doesn’t take much after a contentious election with mountains of voter fraud allegations and years of populist rage to create a situation for things to boil over.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/its-not-censorship-its-a-coordinated-effort_3651971

Big Tech, social media, and the press used the violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 as a pretext to purge their platforms of conservative figures and Republican officials, most notably President Donald Trump. Amazon, Apple, and Google conspired to deplatform Parler, regarded as a conservative, or free-speech, alternative to Twitter.

Critics of the sweeping actions argue, rightly, that censorship violates not only First Amendment freedoms but also the spirit of the law protecting internet service providers from liability.

But this isn’t censorship. Rather, it’s part of the strategic logic of mass conflict. The leadership of the political, corporate, and cultural establishment that today rules America shut down the communications of those against whom they are waging war.

The moves fully expose the architecture of the American oligarchy—Big Tech is a Democratic Party-funding mechanism and part of its operational arm, with social media and the prestige press serving as information-warfare platforms disseminating propaganda and blocking information damaging to the regime. For instance, Simon and Schuster canceled Sen. Josh Hawley’s book with the timely title of “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” claiming that Hawley played a dangerous role in events at the Capitol.

Jan. 6 was indeed a big deal, but not for the reasons the regime gives publicly. From its perspective, what Hawley did was much more dangerous when he officially questioned the integrity of the 2020 vote, i.e., the regime’s legitimacy.

In fact, the communication lockdowns began long before the election. Most famously, social media blocked allegations of Biden family corruption and financial ties to Chinese Communist Party proxies. Given Big Tech’s relationship with the CCP, concerns that a foreign power played a role in the decisions made by tech executives to silence Trump, Beijing’s most outspoken and still most powerful critic, can hardly be dismissed. In any case, the corruption of the American regime is now a matter of record, and that’s why its vanguard moved so quickly after the events of Jan. 6.

They were spooked.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/01/15/breaking-graham-releases-transcripts-from-russia-probe-investigation-n2583223

 Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham has released eleven transcripts of interviews conducted during his investigation of the origins of Crossfire Hurricane and FISA abuse. “As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have decided to release all transcripts of depositions involving the committee’s oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. We have released as much material as possible, but some classified material has still been withheld.

I appreciate all those who participated in the depositions and their candor. They have charted a path to allow us to reform the system,” Graham released in a statement. “I believe that Crossfire Hurricane was one of the most incompetent and corrupt investigations in the history of the FBI and DOJ.” “The FISA court was lied to. Exculpatory information was withheld on those being investigated. The investigators, with some notable exceptions, were incredibly biased and used the powers of law enforcement for political purposes.

The subjects of the investigation had their lives turned upside down. It is my hope that counterintelligence investigations will be reined in and this never happens again in America,” he continued. “I hope that the media will look closely at what happened and examine these documents, but I am not holding my breath…I will be pursuing reforms of counterintelligence investigations and warrant applications, and hope that my Democratic and Republican colleagues can find common ground on these matters. I also hope and expect that FBI Director Wray will continue the reforms he has started.