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Glenn Simpson, Conspiracy Theorist, Finds a Place for the Jews in his Trump-Russia Fantasia Lee Smith

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Glenn Simpson, founder of the D.C.-based news-for-hire firm Fusion GPS, is a conspiracy theorist. He says so himself. On page 126 of a transcript released last week from Simpson’s Nov. 14 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, here’s how the ex-reporter describes his own state of mind: “As sort of cynical and conspiracy-minded as I am,” Simpson told committee members and staff investigating issues related to Russia and the 2016 elections, “I am still shocked by all kinds of things that have happened here.”

For more than a year now, the opposition research that the former Wall Street Journal reporter prepared for his paying customers at the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign has dominated the news cycle. The Steele dossier, produced by Fusion GPS and named after the former British spy Christopher Steele, who allegedly authored it, is the foundation of the grand speculation that Donald Trump won the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.

The collusion narrative has kicked off three congressional inquiries plus Robert Mueller’s special investigation. Far-flung conspiracy theories about Russia, Trump, Putin, Facebook and whoever else are treated as normal “news” every day of the week, with the result that Russiaphobia has swept through Democratic-leaning metropolitan strongholds, which now believe Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are equally responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss last November.

In some sense, none of this should be surprising. Before he left the practice of journalism in 2009, Glenn Simpson was an investigative reporter. As every journalist knows, the investigative reporter is a special breed, valued because of his or her ability to see connections that are likely lost on others—often because there is no connection. What newspaper editors will never admit when they are scooping up prizes won by their ace investigative reporters, but every professional who has been around the block in the news business knows, is that nine of every 10 stories pitched by an investigative reporter are indelibly riddled with speculative lunacy. The one good lead needs to be carefully managed for months by at least one sub-editor before it ever reaches the desk of the top editor, whose publication, and professional reputation, requires excising every trace of madness before the story sees print. If you doubt this, here’s a sample of what a legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning ace investigative reporter like Seymour Hersh sounds like unplugged, i.e. pretty much like every other investigative reporter I have ever met.

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The Stench at Obama’s DOJ and FBI By Charles Lipson

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

For a brief, shining moment, CNN paused in its nonstop coverage of everything it loathes about President Trump for some actual “breaking news.” One of the network’s reporters had noticed that Congress was looking into malfeasance and political corruption at the Obama-era Department of Justice, FBI, and intelligence agencies. This is still news to most mainstream outlets.

There are now three major congressional investigations, peeling away layers of political bias, unequal application of the law, and, perhaps even felonies by senior officials who may have leaked classified documents, obstructed justice, and violated Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure.

These probes center on credible allegations that the FBI and DOJ fixed the investigation of Hillary Clinton to clear her and her top associates, and then launched an investigation of Donald Trump for partisan political reasons. If these allegations are true—and they have not yet been proven—this is the biggest American political scandal since Watergate. It would mean that the executive branch agency tasked with enforcing the law, instead subverted the law to protect its favored presidential candidate and damage the opposition party’s. Then, it tried to cover it all up.

If true, this would be a very deep pool of corruption, but CNN dove head-first into the shallow end. What most concerned the network was that Rep. Devin Nunes would not give the FBI his classified memo detailing the evidence uncovered so far. The CNN on-air panel discussing this topic featured a former Obama-era intelligence official, and he was shocked, shocked at Nunes and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. The FBI should get that memo immediately, he said, because it is the lead law enforcement agency in such matters. The CNN panel could only think of one reason Nunes was being so secretive: He was just trying to distract from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Trump-Russia collusion. For its part, CNN wasn’t distracted at all. It was entirely focused on Trump.

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“I Am Sick of Hijab, Sharia Law, Sharia Police” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

“The regime wants you to think that either there are no protests, or that the protests are solely about the economy. But I am not protesting the economy. Women are protesting the repressive Islamist laws. I am sick of Hijab, Sharia law and Sharia police. Women are sick of the Sharia police monitoring them constantly for what they wear, what they say, what they drink, where they go, and what kind of relationships they have”. – Leila, a young Iranian woman.

What now is the fate of these women? The history of the Islamist Republic of Iran shows us that arrested women are faced with atrocities such as rape, torture or execution. Some die in detention surreptitiously.

Feminists claim to be champions of women rights around the world. They argue that “universality” is a key component of their cause.

Perhaps it is worthwhile, though, to examine their nice slogans against reality.

Women took to the street recently in the front lines of protests in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The demands of the women were clear: Remove Sharia law, eliminate the obligatory hijab, improve the rights of women, and not to treat women as slaves and second-class citizens. Simple.

Many women demonstrated their resistance by bravely removing their hijab, thereby violating the Islamist law of the land. One photograph that has become a symbol of the protests on social media, is of an Iranian woman raising her fist in the air while she goes walks through tear gas. A video and pictures that also have become a symbol of the protests, show an unidentified woman removing her hijab, placing it on a stick and waving it. She was reportedly arrested shortly after her act of defiance.

In a video, a woman protesting in the streets is seen saying, “You raised your fists and ruined our lives. Now we raise our fists. Be men, join us. I, as a woman, will stand in front and protect you. Come represent your country.” Another woman, in a crime punishable by death, courageously chanted against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Her chants encouraged and prompted men behind her to chant also. These women can be labeled true heroes.

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How to Manipulate Migration Data? Take Belgium… by Alain Destexhe

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Alain Destexhe is a Senator in Belgium, Former Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières and Former President of the International Crisis Group.

An honest report for this demographic forecasting should be called, “We shall soon be a million more, most of whom will be Muslims”. But this kind of headline would invariably create a public debate on demography, population density and Muslim integration — and that would be out of the question for European elites: that would make people super-anxious and worried.

Tricky surveys are only used for migration numbers; never for unemployment rates, literacy rates or GDP growth.

Unless there is rapid awareness about the exponential consequences of chain migration and arrivals from across the Mediterranean, mass migration will continue. Concealing this fact is pursued everywhere in Europe.

It should probably not come as a shock that statistics can be, and often are, presented and manipulated by elites. In Belgium — and in all of Western Europe except Austria — they form an informal multiculturalist lobby, which dominates universities, NGOs, public institutions and the media, in order to promote a pro-migration agenda.

In a relatively short time, Belgium has changed dramatically. Without any public debate, it has become a massive migration state. In just 15 years, Belgium has seen an increase of one million in its population — from 10.2 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2015. These numbers represent a 10% rise over a very short period.

From 2000 to 2010, net immigration was nine times greater than in the Netherlands; four times greater than in France or Germany and even greater than in the United States, a country historically open to immigration.

Yet, this statistical reality has been hidden from the Belgian population. The elites and the media decide what people can talk about and what should be hidden. To force people to accept immigration as a given, data has to be hidden to avoid worrying the citizenry.

This is no grand conspiracy, no “Big Brother” masterpiece, but — at best — an honest enthusiasm for the multiculturalist ideology, or — at worst — the strong defensive mechanisms of Freudian psychology such as sublimation, denial or repression.
Information on flow but not on stock

Migration statistics are presented as annual flow. If this number goes down compared to the preceding year, it will be greatly emphasized; otherwise, it will be downplayed. A 10- or 20-year statistic would never be used. In looking at the scale of a country, annual flows are rarely subject to concern; but over a 10-year period, they could be alarming. We usually, for instance, talk about 40,000 naturalizations a year but none of these would remind us that there were also 200,000 naturalizations in three years and 608,322 in 12 years.

Those numbers represent 6% of Belgium’s population. Additionally, no one writes that in just a few years, a million migrants arrived in a country of ten million, from 10.2 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2015.
Europeans move back to their country of origin, the others stay

In Belgium, a small country, open to its neighbors and host to the “capital of Europe,” always has a procession of lobbyists and bureaucrats who have migrated from within Europe. This number is always larger, in terms of flow, than those arriving from other continents. The French and Dutch have the largest number of yearly migrants to Belgium, but after a few years they move back to their countries of origin. Turks, Moroccans and newcomers from other continents, do not.

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Why Do Western Gays Abandon Their Islamic Brothers? by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

The LGBT establishment has, it seems, been hijacked by a politicized elite that cares little about the rights of their brethren in the Islamic world.
LGBT activists and celebrities have never once promoted a boycott of the Islamic regimes that stone, execute and jail their homosexual citizens. Why do they not orchestrate a campaign to boycott Iranian, Indonesian, Palestinian and Turkish goods?

Whenever Islamic radicalism has been defeated after its reign of horror and fear, what follows among ordinary citizens are scenes of hope and liberation.

Syrian women burned the burqas the Islamic State forced them to wear, after the militants were being driven out from the city of Manbij. “Damn this stupid invention that they made us wear,” one woman said as she set fire to the garment. “We’re humans, we have our freedom”.

When the Taliban tyranny in Afghanistan ended, women’s faces also began to reappear on the streets; and men, forced by the Taliban to grow beards, flocked to buy razors.

Why hasn’t the West raised the question of gay rights under Islam? Go ask the LGBT establishment.

“Fight the nationalism that invokes walls and borders”. This was the platform in 2017 of Rome Pride, the annual event of Italy’s LGBT movement; it called for “resistance” against “populism” and yelled slogans such as “Make Italy Gay Again”. But as the English magazine The Spectator noted, “the battle for gay rights stops at the borders of Islam”. The Islamic State knows this well and, borrowing the slogan used by President Obama after the Supreme Court declared same-gender marriage legal, ISIS took to using the hashtag #LoveWins. Islamic supremacists laugh at our weakness.

During the summer, in cities across the West, the LGBT movement celebrated two weeks of marches and parades for “Rainbow Pride.” At Chicago’s “Dyke March,” the organizers ejected marchers who carried rainbow flags with the Jewish Star of David. They were labelled “offensive” for this “inclusive” event, despite the fact that hundreds of gay Palestinians have found refuge in Israel.

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The Final Year Reveals the Obama Administration’s Naïvety and Arrogance It sought to avoid conflict but left a bloody trail. By Kyle Smith —

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

In a moment of woeful irony in the Obama-administration documentary The Final Year, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power travels to Cameroon to offer photo-op comfort to families terrorized by Boko Haram — only to have her motorcade kill a seven-year-old boy. The boy had run out into the road to gape at a helicopter pulling security for Power’s team of VIPs. Greg Barker, the director of this fan film, does not depict the horrifying accident and does his best to downplay it: It is discussed while we watch a clip of Power’s convoy moving at a crawl when in fact it was reportedly traveling at over 60 miles an hour when it struck the boy. Despite Barker’s intentions, the handiwork of the Road to Hell Paving Company is obvious. Team Obama, with its let’s-hug-it-out attitude to world conflict, left a bloody trail.

The Final Year, which is playing on a few screens ahead of its debut on HBO in May, has drawn some notice for a five-minute scene set in Power’s apartment on Election Night 2016. She invited the camera crew to film her party with the world’s 37 female ambassadors to toast the inevitable Hillary Clinton landslide, which she feared would happen so quickly that she wouldn’t have time “to milk the soft power dividend of this moment,” as she later told Politico. Power’s fist-pumping as she watches the election returns turns to blanching, but it’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes who has the most amusing reaction to Donald Trump’s victory.

Rhodes twice reassures us that Clinton will win. “I’m sure,” he says with a smirk on a trip to Southeast Asia. Asked later whether a Trump administration might endanger his accomplishments, he says, “I’ve never really considered that he has any opportunity to win the election.” So what does the speechwriter and former aspiring novelist have to say when Trump does in fact win? “I mean, uh, I can’t even [long pause] I can’t, I ca— [long pause] I mean I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words. I don’t know what the words are.”

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ELECTIONS ARE COMING :Trump’s Midterm Known Unknowns ‘Shy’ Trump voters, a booming economy, consumer confidence, looming investigations, anti-Trump frenzy — all add up to uncertainty in the 2018 elections. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Conventional wisdom and media hopes are now combining to warn us of what is shaping up as a Trump wipeout in the 2018 midterms.

Certainly, presidents with an approval rating below 50 percent usually lose more than 30 seats in the House. That crash would be more than enough to produce a Democratic majority and thus would ensure an impeachment proceeding designed to paralyze the remainder of Trump’s first term.

In the Senate, the Democrats have three times as many seats to defend (and lots of them in Trump-won states). Yet recently they are gaining confidence that they can flip enough races to deadlock or even win the Senate. The now-orthodox narrative about the midterm elections is increasingly hyped by the media as a “blowout” or “tsunami.”

Yet the dilemma is not just that we are ten months out from the election and relative party popularity is already gyrating, but that there are lots of landmark developments in play that we usually do not experience in any midterm election.

The first, of course, is Trump and the polls. No one knows whether the “Trump phenomenon” of 3–5 percent underreporting in the polls is still valid. The Rasmussen poll has Trump at 45 percent, about 5 percent higher than the gold-standard RealClearPolitics average of 40 percent — analogous to the Election Day outlier and often-scoffed-at polls by USC/Los Angeles Times and Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP. Anecdotally, most can attest that colleagues and friends still usually look both ways before whispering, “Wow, Trump is doing great.” It may be a mass phenomenon that, for some, expressing hesitation about Trump or even virtue-signaling about his excesses serves as psychological penance for voting for him.

Conventional wisdom trusts the 40 percent average; by 2016 unorthodox thinking, however, one might argue for the 45 percent outlier. But remember again, we are in surreal, even revolutionary, times when what is certain is now suspect, and what is absolutely impossible is feasible.

No one ever imagined that the take-the-knee NFL protests would have tanked viewership and attendance by over 10 percent and shaken the very foundations of a multibillion-dollar industry. No one ever dreamed that many in the illustrious liberal aparat would be attrited in just days by long-known but suddenly disclosed creepy behavior — John Conyers, Al Franken, Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Ryan Lizza, Charlie Rose, Jann Wenner, and Leon Wieseltier. We had never seen late-night television turn into nonstop political ranting. We have no idea whether comedians’ spiked ratings represent the new normal or have earned a quiet but simmering backlash.

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Clinton–Obama Emails: The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted New FBI texts highlight a motive to conceal the president’s involvement. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen. The latest jaw-dropping disclosures of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, illustrate this point.

For the moment, I want to put aside the latest controversy — the FBI’s failure to retain five months of text messages between Strzok and Page, those chattiest of star-crossed lovers. Yes, this “glitch” closes our window on a critical time in the Trump-Russia investigation: mid December 2016 through mid May 2017. That is when the bureau and Justice Department were reportedly conducting and renewing (in 90-day intervals) court-approved FISA surveillance that may well have focused on the newly sworn-in president of the United States. (Remember: The bureau’s then-director, James Comey, testified at a March 20 House Intelligence Committee hearing that the investigation was probing possible coordination with Trump’s campaign and Kremlin interference in the election.)

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The Party of Saul Alinsky & Its War on Trump Everything the Democrats now do or say is guided by Alinsky’s radical teachings. John Perazzo

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

When Senator Cory Booker delivered his fuming diatribe last week, blasting the “ignorance and bigotry” of President Trump’s “vile and vulgar” reference to “s***hole countries,” it was merely the latest installment in the interminable series of assaults against Trump by Congressional Democrats and virtually every member of the mainstream news media. From the day Trump was elected, the Left’s principal objective has been to ridicule him variously as a deranged buffoon, a demented menace, a traitorous collaborator with the Kremlin, a congenital racist, a fascist, an Islamophobe, a xenophobe, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, and a misogynist. Every day, every hour, brings a new charge.

Not one iota of this has occurred randomly. Every single fragment of this assault against Trump has been meticulously orchestrated and carried out by the Left with undiluted fidelity to the famous blueprint for political warfare that was first laid out several decades ago by the late Saul Alinsky, who posthumously has re-emerged as the Democratic Party’s guiding intellectual light.

Known as the godfather of “community organizing” – a term that serves as a euphemism for fomenting public anger, political hatred, and in some cases, violence – Alinsky was a communist fellow-traveler whose monumental importance to the Democrats is underscored by the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama became devoted disciples of his political creed. He laid out a set of basic tactics designed to help radical activists and politicians destroy their enemies while gaining power for themselves.

Such radicals, said Alinsky, “must first rub raw the resentments of the people”[1] by selecting a particular political adversary and “publicly attack[ing]” him as a “dangerous enemy” of the people.[2] This foe, Alinsky explained, must be a clearly identifiable individual – “a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[3] The chief “personification” in the Left’s cross hairs today is Donald Trump; there isn’t even a close second.

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Watching Human Rights Watch The organization has long since ceased to have anything to do with human rights. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.

The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.

The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.

In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.