Oct 18

Today’s News 18th October 2022

  • Escobar: Russia Courts Muslim Countries As Strategic Eurasian Partners
    Escobar: Russia Courts Muslim Countries As Strategic Eurasian Partners

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    Everything that matters in the complex process of Eurasia integration was once again at play in Astana, as the – renamed – Kazakh capital hosted the 6th Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

    The roll call was a Eurasian thing of beauty – featuring the leaders of Russia and Belarus (EAEU), West Asia (Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Palestine) and Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan).

    China and Vietnam (East and Southeast Asia) attended at the level of vice presidents.

    CICA is a multinational forum focused on cooperation toward peace, security, and stability across Asia.,Kazakh President Tokayev revealed that CICA has just adopted a declaration to turn the forum into an international organization.

    CICA has already established a partnership with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). So in practice, it will soon be working together side-by-side with the SCO, the EAEU and certainly BRICS+.

    The Russia-Iran strategic partnership was prominently featured at CICA, especially after Iran being welcomed to the SCO as a full member.

    President Raeisi, addressing the forum, stressed the crucial notion of an emerging  “new Asia”, where “convergence and security” are “not compatible with the interests of hegemonic countries and any attempt to destabilize independent nations has goals and consequences beyond national geographies, and in fact, aims to target the stability and prosperity of regional countries.”

    For Tehran, being a partner in the integration of CICA, within a maze of pan-Asia institutions, is essential after all these decades of”maximum pressure” unleashed by the Hegemon.

    Moreover, it opens an opportunity, as Raeisi noted, for Iran to profit from “Asia’s economic infrastructure.”

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, predictably, was the star of the show in Astana. It’s essential to note that Putin is supported by “all”nations represented at CICA.

    High-level bilaterals with Putin included the Emir of Qatar: everyone that matters in West Asia wants to talk to “isolated” Russia.

    Putin called for “compensation for the damage caused to the Afghans during the years of occupation” (we all know the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder will refuse it), and emphasized the key role of the SCO to develop Afghanistan.

    He stated that Asia, “where new centers of power are growing stronger, plays a big role in the transition to a multipolar world order”.

    He warned, “there is a real threat of famine and large-scale shocks against the backdrop of volatility in energy and food prices in the world.”

    Hefurther called for the end of a financial system that benefits the “Golden billion” – who “live at the expense of others” (there’s nothing “golden” about this “billion”: at best such definition of wealth applies to 10 million.)

    And he stressed that Russia is doing everything to “form a system of equal and indivisible security”. Exactly what drives the hegemonic imperial elites completely berserk.

    “Offer you can’t refuse” bites the dust

    The imminent juxtaposition between CICA and the SCO and EAEU is yet another instance of how the pieces of the complex Eurasia jigsaw puzzle are coming together.

    Turkey and Saudi Arabia – in theory, staunch imperial military allies – are itching to join the SCO, which has recently welcomed Iran as a full member.

    That spells out Ankara and Riyadh’s geopolitical choice of forcefully eschewing the imperial Russophobia cum Sinophobia offensive.

    Erdogan, as an observer at the recent SCO summit in Samarkand, sent out exactly this message. The SCO is fast reaching the point where we may have, sitting at the same table, and taking important consensual decisions, not only the “RICs” (Russia, India, China) in BRICS (soon to be expanded to BRICS+) but arguably the top players inMuslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar.

    This evolving process, not without its serious challenges, testifies to the concerted Russia-China drive to incorporate the lands of Islam as essential strategic partners in forging the post-Western multipolar world. Call it a soft Islamization of multipolarity.

    No wonder the Anglo-American axis is absolutely petrified.

    Now cut to a graphic illustration of all of the above – the way it’s being played in the energy markets: the already legendary Opec+ meeting in Vienna a week ago.

    A tectonic geopolitical shift was inbuilt in the – collective – decision to slash oil production by 2 million barrels a day.

    The Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a very diplomatic note with a stunning piece of information for those equipped to read between the lines.

    For all practical purposes, the combo behind the teleprompter reader in Washington had issued a trademark Mafia threat to stop “protection” to Riyadh if the decision on the oil cuts was taken before the US mid-term elections.

    Only this time the “offer you can’t refuse” didn’t bite. OPEC+ made a collective decision, led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

    Following Putin and MBS famously getting along, it was up to Putin to host UAE President Sheikh Zayed – or MBZ, MBS’s mentor – at the stunning Konstantinovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, which datesback to Peter the Great.

    That was a sort of informal celebration of how OPEC+ had provoked, with a single move, a superpower strategic debacle when it comes to the geopolitics of oil, which the Empire had controlled for a century.

    Everyone remembers, after the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, how US neo-cons bragged, “we are the new OPEC”.

    Well, not anymore. And the move had to come from the Russians and US Persian Gulf “allies” when everyone expected that would happen the day a Chinese delegation lands in Riyadh and asks for payment of all the energy they need in yuan.

    OPEC+ called the American bluff and left the superpower high’n dry. So what are they going to do to “punish” Riyadh and Abu Dhabi? Call CENTCOM in Qatar and Bahrain to mobilize their aircraft carriers and unleash regime change?

    What’s certain is that the Straussian/neocon psychos in charge in Washington will double down on hybrid war.

    The art of “spreading instability”

    In St. Petersburg, as he addressed MBZ, Putin made it clear that it’s OPEC+ – led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that is now setting the pace to “stabilize global energy markets” so consumers and suppliers would “feel calm, stable and confident” and supply and demand “would be balanced”.

    On the gas front, at Russian Energy Week, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller made it clear that Russia may still “save” Europe from an energy black hole.

    Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) may become operational: but all political roadblocks must be removed before any repairing work starts on the pipelines.

    And on West Asia, Miller said additions to Turk Stream have already been planned, much to the delight of Ankara, keen to become a key energy hub.

    In a parallel track, it’s absolutely clear that the G7’s desperate gambit of imposing an oil price cap – which translates as the weaponization of sanctions extended to the global energy market – is a losing proposition.

    Slightly over a month before hosting the G20 in Bali, Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati could not make it clearer:

    “When the United States is imposing sanctions using economic instruments, that creates a precedent for everything”, spreading instability “not only for Indonesia but for all other countries.”

    Meanwhile, all Muslim-majority countries are paying very close attention to Russia. The Russia-Iran strategic partnership is now advancing in parallel to the Russia-Saudi-UAE entente as crucial vectors of multipolarity.

    In the near future, all these vectors are bound to unite in what ideally should be a supra-organization capable of managing the top story of the 21st century: Eurasia integration.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/18/2022 – 02:00

  • The Long Game: An Uphill Battle To Restore Gun Rights
    The Long Game: An Uphill Battle To Restore Gun Rights

    Submitted by Alex Madajian of Gun Owners of America.

    Sometimes, when a good legislator introduces a strong piece of legislation while in the minority, the reaction of some is to scoff. This begs the question: Should advocates push for strong legislation when we know it does not have the votes to pass Congress, let alone override a president’s veto? In questions of statecraft, one should defer to the adage attributed to Robert Harris: “if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight.”

    Realistically, any half-decent legislation which would restore Americans’ gun rights would not get the votes to pass either chamber – and that’s in the unlikely case the leadership for the House and Senate even allowed such legislation to see the light of day for an actual floor vote.

    Members of Congress usually are the most vocal and aggressive in the minority, in part because they know their bills won’t pass. In short, they can talk the talk without having to walk the walk. However, once they secure real power and get in the majority, their legislative priorities can change to maintaining control instead of rocking the boat. Rather than legislating how the highly informed parts of their base that elected them desire, they become fearful of offending independent and swing voters, who typically attach themselves to strong leaders making compelling cases.

    Because so few members of Congress are genuine leaders, they abandon the Second Amendment advocates who helped them secure office just as soon as they face push-back from the those who voted the other way. These legislators much prefer to be cheerleaders from the backbench, rather than fighters on the frontlines.

    This reality, however, is exactly why there’s never a bad time to introduce a good bill. In our case, if you get more members to introduce or cosponsor solid Second Amendment legislation while in the minority, that forces the squishes to get on the record. In turn, when back in the majority with the ability to pass pro-gun legislation, Second Amendment advocates can then hold them accountable for any inconsistency. If they really support pro-gun bills, then they should certainly support them when they have the ability to pass them.

    Another reason we encourage members to introduce pro-gun legislation now, is so they have a chance to rehearse their defense of it. They need to learn who the allies and enemies are – who has their back, or who wants to put a knife in it. That’s why it’s so important for you to tell your Senators and Representatives how much you appreciate them when they sign-on to pro-gun legislation.

    The great news is it doesn’t take much to make a difference in a congressman’s day. They understand that for each email you send, several other constituents feel the same way. If you call in, that’s even better. And if you happen to meet them in person, that likely counts for dozens, if not hundreds, of others who weren’t able to. So, when you contact your representative and tell them to vote pro-gun, you’re not just doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for others, as well. If they want to reelection, they need to have their finger on the pulse of all their constituents, not just swing voters and those championed by anti-gun media.

    Now on the other hand, let’s imagine members only introduced good bills every ten years when self-proclaimed pro-gun politicians had control over both chambers of Congress and the White House. We know it probably won’t be that great of a bill because they only gave lip service for the ten years while they were out of power. They’re so used to compromising with the majority party to get crumbs, they have no idea what a clean piece of legislation would look like.

    Were it not for Gun Owners of America pushing our “No Compromise” approach on the only Constitutional right that explicitly says “shall not be infringed,” politicians would be more than happy to throw bones to the anti-gun crowd, introduce half-measures that don’t solve any problems, and in turn create dozens of new problems instead.

    Establishment D.C. swamp-monsters are exclusively obsessed with what can pass in a divided Congress, meaning they’re hyper focused on either meaningless change to the law, comparable to re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or completely capitulating to what the other side wants. They don’t operate on solving problems, only on how to appease their political opponents so they don’t get attacked as much.

    At the end of the day, politicians are people too – believe it or not. We need to allow them time to mess-up and find their footing when the consequences are not as dire. Once they have power, there is little margin for error. If we think strategically over the long-run, it doesn’t matter if a bill doesn’t currently have the votes in Congress or the support of the president. As long as the legislation is well-written and support is growing, things are moving in the right direction.

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    Don’t get me wrong, the correct time to vote for good legislation was yesterday, but recall Rome wasn’t built in a day. GOA has been leading the fight to repeal the National Firearms Act for decades. Back in the day, we were the only major pro-gun group, working with Rep. Ron Paul to sponsor this sort of legislation with maybe one or two cosponsors in the House. Now, we are working directly alongside a sitting U.S. Senator (Roger Marshall-KS), with several of his colleagues joining in the effort to go on the record to gut major parts of the NFA. That’s in addition to getting over 80 unique members of the House to sign on to repealing different parts of the NFA.

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    Good legislating takes years of effort to build real support, and GOA is proud to stand alongside Senator Marshall and his fantastic bill to remove Short Barrel Rifles, Short Barrel Shotguns, and Any Other Weapons from the jurisdiction of the NFA. The fact that he introduced it while in the minority shows this is a priority other Senators need to recognize. Remember, there’s never a bad time to start to pushing. 

    We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 23:40

  • Florida To Revoke Licenses Of K-3 Teachers Who Discuss Gender Identity, Sexuality
    Florida To Revoke Licenses Of K-3 Teachers Who Discuss Gender Identity, Sexuality

    The Florida Department of Education is planning to revoke or suspend the teaching licenses of K-3 teachers who discuss gender identity or sexuality with their students, according to the Washington Post, citing a new rule published by the department.

    The rule, proposed in September by Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., would enforce a 2021 state law that prohibits instruction on gender identity and sexuality for children in kindergarten through third grade – the Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known by opponents as the “don’t say gay” law.

    According to the rule, any teacher who “intentionally provide[s] classroom instruction” to K-3 students on those topics will face “revocation or suspension of the individual educator’s certificate, or the other penalties as provided by law.”

    The 2021 law already requires schools to create a system via which parents can report teacher noncompliance with the law. If a school system does not address a parent’s concerns, the law makes it easy for parents to sue and says the Florida Department of Education can launch an investigation of the district.

    The rule on teachers’ licenses drew immediate condemnation from some teacher groups and LGBTQ advocates. Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of LGBTQ rights group GLSEN, said in a statement Thursday that the Florida rule “will harm LGBTQ+ students, who we know benefit by having supportive teachers and inclusive curriculum in the classroom.” -WaPo

    The Dept. of Education rule was published as Hurricane Ian hit, and was first reported last Tuesday by the Progress Report.

    A spokesman for the department said on Thursday evening that “it should not be surprising that educators are at risk of having their certificates sanctioned if they violate state law. The proposed amendment will change nothing for teachers who follow the law and are focused on providing high-quality classroom instruction aligned to state academic standards.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 23:20

  • Doug Casey On The Likelihood Of Nuclear War With Russia
    Doug Casey On The Likelihood Of Nuclear War With Russia

    Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

    International Man: Recently, we’ve seen what appears to be an escalation in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

    There is an excellent chance the US government was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, Russia has annexed four regions of Ukraine, and President Zelensky announced an accelerated bid to join NATO.

    What do you make of this?

    Doug Casey: I’d say that the odds are extremely high, approaching certainty, that the US was complicit in the sabotage. It certainly had the Motive, Means, and Opportunity—the three elements necessary to warrant suspicion in a criminal investigation.

    The US has unique capabilities for this kind of mischief—an air-launched drone torpedo or a submarine aren’t available to just any terror group. It was a major operation, not something that a few scuba divers could pull off. Apparently, tons of explosives were used to blow these things up.

    Biden and other US officials previously said they didn’t want the Nord Stream to go through and planned to prevent it. A boldly idiotic thing to say since the pipeline is neither its property or business.

    The narrative that the Russians did it is completely insane. Putin could simply turn off the gas until it was convenient to be turned back on; now that option is gone. The Russians wouldn’t limit their own options.

    If it’s proven that the US did it, then the Russians and/or the Germans will have to engage in a tit-for-tat retaliation to punish the US for this sabotage. That may be tantamount to an act of war, but once the culprit is proven, they have to take action. This thing isn’t over. The culprit will be found.

    As far as Russia annexing Crimea and the regions of the Ukraine in question, it seems to me—from a historical point of view—that would be par for the course. Remember that borders have been flowing and ethnic groups moving for a thousand years in that part of the world. In any event, it makes no sense to take sides in disputes between nation-states. In this case, it amounts to the US sticking its nose into a border war between two shit-hole countries.

    That said, being as objective as possible, I’d say that the Russians have a certain amount of right on their side. They’ve been mightily provoked since the Maidan Revolution of 2014 and the attack by the Ukrainian Army on the Donbas. It’s too bad that this is spinning out of control—largely because of US intervention. In a rational world, it would basically be worth a couple of columns on the sixth page of the New York Times and then forgotten.

    As for Zelensky accelerating the bid to join NATO, it’s insanely stupid. Zelensky is a corrupt nothing/nobody puppet who’s being manufactured into a hero. The strutting little megalomaniac has apparently been paid at least half a billion dollars to be an authoritarian, jailing opposition leaders, closing down dissident newspapers, and building a secret police force. Ukraine joining NATO at this point would be asking for World War 3. Of course, NATO should have been abolished after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991. But now it’s become an institution, almost impossible to get rid of.

    The chances of a war between NATO and Russia are extremely high. Instead of talking about getting rid of Putin, the world would be better off if they got rid of Zelensky.

    International Man: Vladimir Putin recently gave a speech in which he said:

    “The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation. This is why total de-sovereignization is in their interest. This explains their aggression towards independent states, traditional values and authentic cultures, their attempts to undermine international and integration processes, new global currencies and technological development centers they cannot control. It is critically important for them to force all countries to surrender their sovereignty to the United States.”

    What’s your take on this?

    Doug Casey: I’ve listened to a number of Putin’s speeches.

    It’s fashionable to make him out as being not only the devil incarnate but irrational and somebody that wants to conquer Europe and perhaps destroy the world in the process. But in fact, compared to all of the other European leaders, he’s the most cool-headed, the most thoughtful, and the one with the most perspective.

    He is absolutely right when he says that the West is acting as a hegemon. In particular, the US has been exporting dollars for decades—which have allowed it to live way above its means—and control the world by controlling the world’s monetary system. With the dollar accepted as the international reserve currency, backed up by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, and a giant military with bases in over 100 countries, the US can basically call the shots for other cultures and countries.

    Let me explain. I like American culture. Despite the fact the US is rapidly devolving into a police state, it’s still by far the most individualistic, liberty-oriented, and freewheeling culture the world has ever seen. But at the same time, I understand his resentment.

    The world is covered with McDonald’s and Pizza Huts, Hollywood movies, Coca-Cola, mass consumer advertising, and a thousand other trends, ideas, and artifacts generated in the US. Call them “good” or “bad,” but they have absolutely acted to destroy local cultures. T-shirts, blue jeans, and rock music assault your eyes and ears everywhere, from the biggest cities to the upper reaches of the Amazon and the Congo.

    I think they’re mostly good things in themselves. But it’s easy to see how a traditionalist, someone who values cultural stability and diversity, could view them as aggressive threats, as cultural imperialism. In fact, we’ve destroyed the local culture everywhere. I understand his unhappiness with aspects of this.

    Vlad makes some valid points.

    I know you’re not supposed to say that since he’s been designated the new enemy, in the mold of Saddam, Qadhafi, Assad, Noriega, and a dozen others in recent history. Unfortunately, though, Americans’ opinions are products of what they’re fed by the media, not actual facts. If they were well-informed and thought about it, they’d realize their real enemies weren’t foreign nonentities but the Bidens, Bushes, Obamas, and the US Deep State in general.

    International Man: It seems tensions with Russia are reaching a crescendo.

    What do you think is the likelihood of the US or NATO becoming directly involved in combat?

    Doug Casey: As I said, there’s no reason for any conflict between Russia and the US. In fact, there are now fewer communists in Russia than there are in US universities.

    Russia under Putin has tried to reach a rapprochement with Western Europe and the US numerous times, and they’ve been rejected.

    It makes me think that our leaders are more psychopathic than Russia’s.

    Will the US become directly involved in combat? I don’t think so. The US has already pissed away $60 billion, or who knows how much, supporting the terminally corrupt Zelensky regime. More and more Americans are coming to the conclusion that it’s against our interests. I doubt there’s any support to send American soldiers over there, and it greatly increases the chances of nuclear blasts leveling most US cities.

    Direct involvement seems unlikely at this point, even though we’re dealing with sociopaths and, worse, who control the world’s major governments. So don’t accuse me of being a permabear… I’m an optimist.

    International Man: There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media about whether Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. David Petraeus and other Deep Staters have suggested the US and NATO would directly attack Russian forces in Ukraine as a response.

    Could the media and Deep State be laying the groundwork for some sort of incident, staged or otherwise?

    What are the implications of people like Petraeus openly talking about directly attacking Russian forces?

    Doug Casey: Again, once people reach a high level in any government, it’s proof—ipso facto—that they’re sociopaths. Many are narcissistic and power-hungry psychopaths. You don’t get the “best and brightest” walking the halls of Mordor or the Deathstar.

    That certainly includes generals or ex-generals like Petraeus. In today’s world, once a soldier reaches a general’s rank, he’s a self-promoting bureaucrat first and foremost.

    I’ll draw your attention to the movie Dr. Strangelove. Once someone gets enough stars on their shoulders, they start thinking like George C. Scott’s General Buck E. Turgidson or Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.

    It’s actually a type of psychosis that overtakes people once they have too much power. Anything’s possible with these people.

    I don’t support either Washington or Moscow. At the moment—let me shock some readers—Washington is much more dangerous than Moscow, with the current administration totally controlled by Jacobins and other strident ideologues. Americans should be terrified that one of their politicians could push the wrong button and destroy the world, whether with nuclear, cyber, or biological weapons. 

    International Man: Is there such a thing as a limited nuclear war between the US and Russia? If not, what does full-scale nuclear war look like, and what is the likelihood of it happening?

    Is it worth risking this outcome over a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map?

    Doug Casey: As you know, my belief is that a government—if you’re going to have government at all—should have nothing but police to protect citizens from violence within a country, a court system to allow them to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force, and a strictly defensive military, kept within our borders. Our current government, however, has a life of its own, detached from the country it rules.

    Seeing the kind of people that we have in Washington, with actual Jacobins in charge, it’s understandable how the Russians could be paranoid of the US military machine and the US government.

    Could we have limited nuclear war?

    It’s possible. Perhaps the Russians will, if pushed up against the wall and invaded, set off a couple of small tactical nukes just as a warning to show they’re serious.

    But if it goes to a global thermonuclear war, it’s going to set civilization back hundreds of years.

    The people that are in back of fomenting and promoting the Ukraine war should be hauled out of office and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. These fools are toying with what could soon be the biggest disaster in world history.

    *  *  *

    The US government is overextending itself by interfering in every corner of the globe. It’s all financed by massive amounts of money printing. However, the next financial crisis could end the whole charade soon. The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a global economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 23:00

  • Mexican National Gets 9 Years In Prison For Smuggling 9 Tons Of Meth, Fentanyl
    Mexican National Gets 9 Years In Prison For Smuggling 9 Tons Of Meth, Fentanyl

    A Mexican national who admitted to driving a drug-laden tractor-trailer into the United States through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, CA has been sentenced to 9 years in prison.

    Seizure of more than 3,000 pounds of methamphetamine, fentanyl powder, fentanyl pills, and heroin as part of the second largest methamphetamine bust along the southwest border in the history of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in Otay Mesa, San Diego, on Oct. 9, 2020. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

    The man, Carlos Martin Quintana-Arias, was busted with a record-breaking 17,684 pounds of meth and 389 pounds of fentanyl on November 18, 2021, and was declared the nation’s largest confiscation in each drug category for 2021 and 2022 so far, according to US Customs and Border Protection. 

    Just two-milligrams of fentanyl can prove fatal.

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    Quintana-Arias – who applied to enter the US with a manifest claiming he was carrying automotive body parts, only for an X-ray machine to reveal otherwise – was sentenced to 108 months on Oct. 14.

    “This massive seizure prevented a huge quantity of deadly drugs from saturating our community,” said U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman. “Because of the vigilance of border officials, this fentanyl did not kill anyone, and this meth did not destroy even one life.”

    Chad Plantz, special agent in charge, HSI San Diego, said that “This was a brazen attempt to smuggle a record amount of deadly narcotics into our country,” adding that smugglers “looking to make a quick profit from narcotics smuggling will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”

    The San Diego and Imperial Valley ports of entry account for about “61 percent of all the fentanyl CBP seizes nationwide,” said Acting Director of Field Operations Anne Maricich.

    Deploying K-9 teams and imaging systems, CBP officers in the San Diego Field Office made drug busts “totaling over $4.1 million worth at its ports of entry” during the week of Sept. 18–24, according to a CBP statement. -Epoch Times

    Quintana-Arias faced a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and a $5 million fine under Title 21, U.S.C., Sections 952 and 960 Importation of a Controlled Substance.

    The primary source of Fentanyl found in the United States can be traced back to chemicals imported from China and mixed by Mexican cartels.

    As the Epoch Times notes, the synthetic opioid is pressed into pills or mixed with other narcotics to increase potency. Law enforcement confiscated 1,232 pounds (559 kilograms) of fentanyl—which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine—from 2016–2018 and 7,710 pounds (3,497 kilograms) from 2019–2021.

    Illicit fentanyl accounted for 64 percent of all drug-related deaths in the United States in 2021, according to nonprofit group Families Against Fentanyl. It is the top cause of death among adults aged 18–45, overtaking COVID-19, suicide, and car accidents.

    Deaths from fentanyl among teens tripled in just two years. Black teens were affected the most with a five-fold increase of deaths from the substance. Based on the data, 175 deaths occur every day from illegal fentanyl with the drug responsible for killing more than 200,000 Americans since 2015.

    The organization has been calling for the categorization of illicit fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. This would elicit a government response targeting the top of the supply chain while holding international criminal organizations responsible.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 22:40

  • China Pursuing 'Strategic Military' Interests In The Arctic: Pompeo
    China Pursuing ‘Strategic Military’ Interests In The Arctic: Pompeo

    Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times,

    China’s ruling communist regime seeks to expand into the Arctic region to exploit natural resources, secure trade routes, and garner a military advantage against the United States, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader, Xi Jinping, are putting China on a path toward confrontation with the United States by pursuing strategic objectives in the region, Pompeo said in an interview with the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank where Pompeo is a distinguished fellow.

    “Xi Jinping has made very clear that he wants to rule forever and that his rule should be over everything,” Pompeo said.

    “I think we should take that seriously.”

    “Make no mistake about it, the CCP has deep, strategic military intentions in the Arctic.”

    Pompeo said that the CCP is encroaching on the Arctic region as part of a wider effort to secure military and economic security against the West. That effort goes back a number of years but reached new highs in 2017 when the CCP attempted to purchase a decommissioned naval base in Greenland.

    The Arctic region is critical to U.S. defense and national security, Pompeo said, not just because of the resources located there, but also because ballistic missiles launched by China or Russia at the United States would need to pass over the region.

    “America’s national security depends on this region,” Pompeo said.

    “Every single Chinese land-based ICBM must fly through the Arctic region to hit its targets here in the United States and Canada.”

    “Our missile defense against such ICBMs, whether they come from Russia or China, are deployed primarily in the Arctic, in Greenland, and Alaska.”

    Pompeo said that the eight nations of the Arctic Council should ban military presence in the Arctic by non-Arctic countries.

    The eight nations that exercise sovereignty over land within the Arctic region are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.

    The CCP has dubbed China a “near-Arctic state” to legitimize its move into the region, but the designation has no legal authority and is not recognized outside of China.

    “The Chinese Communist Party lacks any legitimate claim to sovereignty [in the region] even though it has made … this idea of it being a ‘near-Arctic nation,’” Pompeo said.

    “The CCP should never be permitted to be part of any organization, including the Arctic Council, that is trying to deliver outcomes for this special space.”

    To that end, however, Pompeo warned that the CCP and Kremlin were closely aligned and that the United States might reasonably expect to see Sino-Russian cooperation in the region as the two powers work to undermine the U.S.-led West.

    “I don’t think there’s any chance China’s going to do much independently,” Pompeo said of Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    “I think these two are now locked in.”

    “The Arctic will be another place where we will find the two of them working together.”

    Pompeo said that the recent decision by Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership was a “good outcome” and hoped that the admission of the two into the defensive alliance would increase security cooperation in the Arctic.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 22:20

  • Watch: Smash-And-Grab Hits Jewelry Shop On NYC's Billionaires' Row
    Watch: Smash-And-Grab Hits Jewelry Shop On NYC’s Billionaires’ Row

    A wild video shows thieves targeting a jewelry store on New York City’s Billionaires’ Row, an area along the southern end of Central Park in Manhattan. The area is home to ultra-luxury residential skyscrapers and some of the world’s wealthiest people. 

    NYPD Crime Stoppers tweeted a video showing the wild smash-and-grab at Cellini Jewelers (460 Park). The three thieves used a sledgehammer to blast through the front door. Within minutes, they stole more than half a million dollars of jewelry. 

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    “A full inventory of the stolen items is pending, but police say the estimated value is more than $500,000,” NBC New York said. 

    A Twitter user pointed out the smash-and-grab was “across the street from this ….” 

    We’ll explain more about the building. So it’s 432 Park Avenue, a residential skyscraper that is part of Billionaires’ Row and has some of the most expensive condos in the city. The median unit sells for tens of millions of dollars. 

    The fact that smash-and-grabs are happening feet away from one of the most expensive and luxurious residential buildings should concern the area’s residents because Mayor Eric Adams and progressive city officials have yet to get a handle on soaring violent crime. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 22:00

  • "We Got Weights In Fish!": Two Anglers Charged With Cheating After Video Goes Viral
    “We Got Weights In Fish!”: Two Anglers Charged With Cheating After Video Goes Viral

    Two fisherman have been indicted on felony charges of attempted grand theft, cheating, possession of criminal tools and unlawful ownership of wild animals after they were appear to have been caught cheating at an Ohio fishing tournament last month.

    Photo: Dave Leska, Yough Lake News

    Jacob Runyan, 42, and Chase Cominsky, 35 were the focus of a viral video in which they appear to have stuffed weights and frozen fish inside their ‘winning’ haul described by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley as “not only dishonorable but also criminal.”

     The ‘criminal tools’ used refers to Cominsky’s boat, which authorities seized on Tuesday along with its trailer.

    The men were looking at a $28,760 payout from the Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 tournament in Cleveland.

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 21:20

  • Woke War III – The Deadly Neocon-Left Alliance
    Woke War III – The Deadly Neocon-Left Alliance

    Authored by David Sacks, op-ed via Newsweek.com,

    Elon Musk got in hot water again on Twitter—for proposing peace. On Monday, Musk proposed a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, for which he was denounced as a pro-Putin puppet by the Twitter mob that has formed to police the discourse on all things related to Ukraine.

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    The president of Ukraine himself, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Musk of supporting Russia—even though Musk’s company SpaceX donated Starlink to Ukraine’s war effort at an out-of-pocket cost of $80 million. (Full disclosure: Musk is a friend and I am an investor in SpaceX.) Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrj Melnyk was less subtle, telling Elon to “f***k off,” while David Frum tweeted without evidence that “Russian sources” had used Elon to float a “trial balloon” of a peace proposal because they’re afraid of losing Crimea. Scores of blue-checks on Twitter followed their lead, ordering Musk to stay in his lane.

    What matters in this story is not that Musk was told off, but rather, that a Twitter hive mind is using the same intolerant cancellation tactics that they use to shut down debate on domestic political issues in order to shape U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

    They are doing so by demonizing dissent, defaming opponents, and closing off as ideologically unacceptable any path to peace or even deescalation.

    The online mob has decided that any support for a negotiated settlement—even proposals that Zelensky himself appeared to support at the beginning of the war—is tantamount to taking Russia’s side, denouncing voices of compromise and restraint as Putin apologists. This removes them from acceptable discourse and shrinks the Overton window to those advocating the total defeat of Russia and an end to Putin’s regime—even if it risks WWIII.

    We’ve seen this before: “Woke mobs” on Twitter routinely demonize and defame their political opponents, impugn the motives of anyone who questions their goals or tactics, and squelch dissent even in their own ranks by declaring the debate on certain topics over.

    What makes the “I stand with Ukraine” version of the Twitter mob unique is that it brings together two forces that used to be sworn enemies of one another—the woke Left and the neoconservative Right. It turns out they share many of the same loathsome ideological and personality traits, and have a similar “slash and burn” approach to political engagement. It’s a new political marriage.

    A BM-21 ‘Grad’ multiple rocket launcher fires at Russian positions in Kharkiv region on October 4, 2022.YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

    Just over a decade ago, former President Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary to become president due in no small part to his opposition to the Iraq War. At the time, the Left despised neocon hawks for pushing the Bush-Cheney administration’s disastrous Forever Wars in the Middle East. Moreover, the Left supported Obama in his policy toward Ukraine when he refused to escalate with Russia over Crimea, pointing out that America has no vital security interests in Ukraine, though Russia does. As a result, Russia would always be able to maintain “escalatory dominance,” Obama said. “This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”

    But since neoconservatives largely walked out of the Republican Party over Trump and disavowed all of their conservative domestic policy views to become commentators on MSNBC, the Left has discovered a new love for interventionist foreign policy, as long as it serves “democracy” and opposes “autocracy”—an increasingly malleable term that both the wokes and the neocons now use to define not just Putin but also democratically elected leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Donald Trump in the United States.

    Despite voting for Obama because he promised to break with neoconservative foreign policy, the Left has now joined with neocons to oppose Obama’s restrained foreign policy in Ukraine.

    This shift is disorienting, but on a purely tactical level, it makes a certain amount of sense. Neocons invented the cancellation game before there was even a Twitter board on which to play it. Neocons arrogantly dismiss the other side’s point of view as argued in bad faith and not worth considering, and label anyone who dares question the cause as a heretic or traitor.

    David Frum set the neocon standard for this tactic when he branded the small number of pundits on the Right who opposed the Iraq War as “Unpatriotic Conservatives” at the outset of that strategic disaster. Fast forward to today and anyone who suggests that NATO expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current Ukraine crisis, or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon-to-be-shivering Europe, or even that the U.S. must prioritize avoiding a world war with a nuclear-armed Russia, is denounced as a Putin stooge.

    Warping the debate in this way allows delusional and contradictory thinking to go unchallenged. Thus, we get the argument that Putin is a madman who will kill indiscriminately to achieve his aims—but he is also somehow definitely bluffing about using nuclear weapons. And he’s only using that bluff because he’s losing the war—but if he’s not stopped in Ukraine, he will go on to conquer the rest of Europe. Putin’s regime must fall because he has killed or jailed all the liberal reformers and yoked himself to a hardline Far Right, but somehow he will be replaced by a liberal reformer when his regime collapses.

    It’s nonsensical, and a real debate would expose some of the delusions in this thinking. But we aren’t allowed to have one.

    As long as this woke-neocon alliance is allowed to set the terms of the debate, we will continue to see a one-way ratchet toward greater and more dangerous escalation of this conflict.

    There will be no peaceful resolution to this conflict that America doesn’t at least have a hand in negotiating, and we should be leading the effort. Instead, we’ve been deferring to the Ukrainians and their maximalist demands, upping the sanctions on Russia as Putin ups his rhetoric against the West. Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipeline just in case another key nation such as Germany had any thoughts about coming to the bargaining table. And now we are playing a game of nuclear “chicken” with a Russian leader who, if his unhinged “War against the West” speech last Friday is any indication, has thrown away his steering wheel.

    A regional war turned into the First World War because all parties made maximalist demands and assumed others were bluffing. It can happen again, especially if the media, social media, and foreign policy elite join forces and use woke cancellation tactics to preclude discussion of any alternatives. Right now, we are locked on an escalatory path, and the destination ahead is Woke War III.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 21:00

  • Virginia Democrat Wants To Criminalize Parents Who "Misgender" Their Children
    Virginia Democrat Wants To Criminalize Parents Who “Misgender” Their Children

    Making laws surrounding transgender “rights” is disturbingly a lot like the concept of spectral evidence taken from the days of the Salem witch trials.  Trans identity is a purely subjective concept with zero concrete proof to support it – All a person has to do is simply say they are now whatever made-up gender they announce at the moment and the rest of the world is supposed to revolve around them.

    During witch trials witnesses could say that ghosts or spirits were telling them that a defendant was guilty of devilry, and the court was supposed to take these unfounded accusations as evidence.  Similarly, under gender identity laws a person could say that they are trans and accuse other people of violating their “right” to be referred to in the pronouns they prefer.    

    But it goes beyond the issue of personal feelings.  Maybe a biological man suddenly decides he is a woman that wants to use a public woman’s bathroom because there is an underage girl in there he has targeted, but he’s not required to provide proof of being a woman and we are not allowed to stop him.  We are required to accept his identity at face value based on his subjective claims.  Otherwise, we are “assuming that person’s gender.”  We become the bad guys for applying common sense.

    Subjective law is the beginning of the end of a free society because it places the preponderance of evidence into the hands of lunatics and dictators that can fabricate their own proof at will.  

    Virginia Democrat and delegate Elizabeth Guzman believes the opposite, though.  She plans to introduce a bill in Virginia’s upcoming fall session that would expand the definition of child abuse to include parents who refuse to use gender identify in the manner their children demand.  In other words, if you are a parent in Virginia, your kids have the power in the household.  All they have to do is say they are trans and if you do not obey then Child Protective Services can get involved.

    The bill would make misgendering of children a misdemeanor or possible felony.  Guzman clarifies:  

    “If the child shares with those mandated reporters, what they are going through, we are talking about not only physical abuse or mental abuse, what the job of that mandated reporter is to inform Child Protective Services (CPS)…That’s how everybody gets involved. There’s also an investigation in place that is not only from a social worker but there’s also a police investigation before we make the decision that there is going to be a CPS charge.”  

    When asked by the local reporters whether she isn’t “criminalizing parents” as many Republicans argue, Guzman answered:

    “No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts…So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.”

    When countered with arguments from people who call for religious freedom, Guzman makes the typical leftist response:

    “The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are. So that’s what I tell them when they asked me that question, and that’s what I will continue to tell people.”

    First, in terms of legal definitions, there is no scientific indicators of what makes a child or anyone else “trans.”  Thus, there is no way to prove in a court of law that a parent “abused” a “trans child” because there is no way to prove a child is trans.  Beyond the extremely tiny percentage of people that have the mental illness known as Gender Dysphoria, which requires years of psychological therapy to designate, objective proof of trans identity does not exist.

    Second, a child’s hurt feelings are not grounds for CPS to intervene in parental rights.  

    Third, the trans identity movement is not a civil liberties movement, it’s a political movement.  LGBT people have the same exact legal rights as everyone else.  What the trans movement wants is extraordinary powers and special treatment.  They want the ability to dictate other people’s speech and behavior according to their whims.  This is unacceptable.

    Fourth, it is not the purpose of the law to “educate parents.” It’s not the job of the government to educate parents.  The government and the bureaucrats that infest it are not qualified to give parenting advice.  It is the job of government only to protect the rights of citizens as outlined in the Constitution.  Gender pronouns and personal feelings are not constitutionally protected.  

    Free speech is protected, though.  

    Fourth, Guzman appears to be unfamiliar with the Bible, because there is a list of behaviors in that book that are prohibited.  We might not all agree with every item on that list, but “accepting everyone” is absolutely not a religious requirement.  Some people and behaviors should not be accepted, because they lead to the decline and downfall of civilization.  Thousands of years of observation have taught us this, but leftists believe they know better. Children dictating to their parents is on that list, along with enabling the mentally ill and putting them in positions of authority.  

    One would hope that Elizabeth Guzman and ideological zealots like her will be swiftly removed from office as soon as possible, but it is likely that America will have to suffer through more of their insanity before people are finally fully fed up.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 20:40

  • Central Bank Digital Currencies Would Let Governments Control What People Spend Money On: IMF Official Admits
    Central Bank Digital Currencies Would Let Governments Control What People Spend Money On: IMF Official Admits

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

    The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could potentially allow a government to control what people spend their hard-earned cash on.

    Speaking at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting on Oct. 15, Deputy Managing Director Bo Li said that a CBDC could improve “financial inclusion” through programmability.

    “A CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program, to create smart contracts, to allow targeted policy functions,” Li explained.

    “For example, welfare payments, for example, consumption coupons, for example, food stamps.”

    “By programming CBDC, that money can be precisely targeted for what kind of people can own [CBDC] and for what kind of use this money can be utilized, for example for food.”

    Li, who stepped into the role of deputy managing director at the IMF on Aug. 23, 2021, added that by allowing the government to precisely target what people need, this will enable said government to “improve financial inclusion.”

    However, his comments were quick to garner a reaction from experts, including Nick Anthony, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.

    Anthony wrote on Twitter that the IMF executive’s comments revealed how a CBDC would “allow the government to precisely control what people can and cannot spend their money on.”

    Prior to joining the IMF, Li worked for many years at the People’s Bank of China, according to the IMF’s official website.

    A staff member counts renminbi (yuan) at a bank in Haian, Nantong city, East China’s Jiangsu Province, on May 15, 2022. (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

    ‘I Don’t See How Americans Would Want This’

    In a follow-up post on Twitter, Anthony quoted a comment made by Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, writing:

    “I can see how China is for this. I don’t see how Americans would want this.”

    Anthony also noted that “governments have a historical pattern of misusing these tools,” citing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s move to freeze the bank accounts of anti-COVID-19 vaccine mandate protesters earlier this year.

    A May report (pdf) from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) found that almost 90 percent of national central banks are planning to launch their own CBDC for release to the general public.

    That includes the United States, where Washington is currently looking into the possibilities for issuing such a digital currency, with officials citing an array of alleged benefits, such as efficient and low-cost transactions, boosting economic growth, and improved access to the financial system.

    However, critics fear CBDCs will increase government control over money that could be used as a tool for financial discrimination while simultaneously tracking purchases, and restricting access to funds, thereby working against decentralization, which is one of the main advantages of adopting cryptocurrencies.

    Agustin Carstens, general manager of the BIS, noted in 2021 that central banks would have “absolute control over the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and then will also have the technology to enforce that.”

    Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell last month also stated that a CBDC would not be anonymous and would be identity-verified, meaning details regarding transactions of a CBDC would be public.

    The European Central Bank (ECB) reiterated Powell’s remarks at the same Banque de France event on Sept. 27, with ECB President Christine Lagarde stating: “There would not be complete anonymity as there is with … bank notes.”

    Lagarde did, though, add that “there would be a limited level of disclosure and certainly not at the central bank level.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 20:20

  • Will James Comey & Robert Mueller Be Prosecuted For Lies John Durham Uncovered?
    Will James Comey & Robert Mueller Be Prosecuted For Lies John Durham Uncovered?

    Authored by Hans Mahncke via The Epoch Times,

    While special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko appears to be headed toward acquittal, Durham has used the trial to make public a number of revelations that cast the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative in a fresh light.

    Most prominently, Durham revealed that on Oct. 3, 2016, the FBI had offered dossier author Christopher Steele up to $1 million to provide any information, physical evidence, or documentary evidence that could back up the claims in his dossier. But despite the huge reward on offer, Steele did not provide any such information.

    Crucially, despite Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, a mere 18 days later the FBI proceeded to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page. In its application to the FISA court, the FBI used the Steele dossier—specifically, its claim that Page was acting as an agent of Russia—as evidence.

    Then, after Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community, which included the FBI, began drafting an intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the election. The ICA was issued in early January 2017, claiming that Russia had helped Trump win the election.

    The assessment included a summary of the dossier, claiming that it had been partly corroborated. The inclusion of Steele’s dossier in an official U.S. intelligence community product gave the dossier the credibility it had lacked up until that point.

    It also gave the media, which had held back from reporting on the dossier between July 2016 and January 2017, the excuse it needed to start doing so. For the next several years, the dossier and its lurid claims became the centerpiece of the media’s campaign against Trump. As Durham has now made public, the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA was based on a lie.

    Danchenko on FBI’s Payroll

    Another major revelation exposed by Durham in a pre-trial motion was that Danchenko had been on the FBI’s payroll between March 2017 and October 2020 as a confidential human source (CHS). By bestowing this coveted status on Danchenko, the FBI was able to conceal the existence of Danchenko from congressional and other investigators. This was crucial, as Danchenko had told FBI investigators in January 2017 that the dossier was based on rumors and gossip made in jest. The admission that the Steele dossier was nothing more than bar talk needed to be concealed if the FBI was to continue its investigation of Trump.

    Appointing Danchenko as a CHS had another benefit for the FBI. As Danchenko’s handler, FBI agent Kevin Helson, confirmed in court last week, because he was an incoming CHS, Danchenko was directed to scrub his phone. Conveniently, that also meant scrubbing evidence of Danchenko’s alleged lies to the FBI, evidence that Durham now lacks.

    Comey’s Lies

    In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed congressional leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, on his investigation of the Trump campaign. As Comey’s briefing notes reveal, members of Congress were not told about Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, despite the huge reward on offer, nor were they told that Danchenko had disavowed the dossier.

    Additionally, Comey told congressional leaders that the dossier was “derived primarily from a Russian-based Sub-Source” and that the “FBI has no control over the Russian-based Sub-Source.” The same wording was also used by the FBI in the Page FISA warrant application. And it was entirely false. Danchenko was not “Russian-based,” he was a former Brookings Institution analyst based in Virginia. And not only did the FBI have control over him, but he was working for them.

    Comey’s lies successfully ratcheted up the pressure and in May 2017, acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

    Mueller’s Lies

    Mueller has denied having investigated the Steele dossier. In congressional testimony on July 24, 2019, Mueller repeatedly stated that the dossier was outside his purview. However, evidence elicited by Durham last week from two counterintelligence agents, Brittany Hertzog and Amy Anderson, paints a very different picture.

    Hertzog and Anderson were assigned to Mueller’s special counsel office in the summer of 2017. Hertzog testified last week that she was assigned the task of investigating the Steele dossier, a task that Mueller claimed was outside the purview of his investigation. According to Anderson’s testimony, Mueller’s dossier team comprised at least five agents.

    As part of their assignment, Hertzog and Anderson investigated two of Danchenko’s alleged sub-sources, Olga Glakina, a Russian national living in Cyprus, and Charles Dolan, a public relations executive with decades-long ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Illustrating the depths to which Mueller’s team went to investigate the dossier, Anderson flew to Cyprus to personally interview Galkina.

    According to Anderson’s testimony last week, Galkina admitted that Dolan was a source for the dossier. Given Dolan’s longstanding ties to the Clintons, this presented a huge problem for Mueller’s team. When Anderson additionally found out that Dolan was well connected in the higher echelons of the Russian government, she recommended that an investigation into Dolan be opened. However, according to her testimony, Mueller’s team blocked the investigation from going forward and destroyed her memo on the matter.

    Mueller’s false statements do not end there. A central alleged figure to the dossier, Sergei Millian, now claims on Twitter that he was in touch with Mueller’s office from 2017 to 2019. Mueller’s report claims that Millian refused to meet with investigators. Millian claims that he offered to meet Mueller’s team in various locations, including in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Mueller’s team could easily have arranged such a meeting if it had wanted to, as illustrated by the fact it was willing and able to interview Galkina in Cyprus.

    It appears that the reason Mueller did not want to talk to Millian—and later lied about this fact—is that Millian is central to the dossier. According to Steele, Millian was the originator of the dossier’s key allegations, including that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, the infamous pee tape story, and that Russia had helped Trump by passing hacked Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell (R-Ky.) (C) walks to a press conference with fellow Republicans following the weekly Republican policy luncheon in Washington on July 30, 2019. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

    However, there was a snag. Millian never spoke to Steele or Danchenko. Danchenko later admitted to the FBI that he had told Steele otherwise. This was not only a problem for Danchenko, but also for Mueller and the FBI. Without Millian, the dossier’s main allegations would have collapsed. That is why Mueller could not afford to talk to Millian.

    While Durham’s revelations explain crucial aspects of the false witch hunt against Trump, they do not amount to much unless those responsible are held to account.

    Durham himself has shown a marked disinterest in pursuing key government actors such as Comey or Mueller, focusing instead on private actors. A possible reason for this may be that Durham’s hands were tied by Biden’s Department of Justice. If that is the case, Durham’s final report, which will likely be issued in the next few months, should detail instances of such obstruction.

    Whatever the reasons for Durham’s failure to pursue FBI leadership and Mueller’s team, he has now left a trail of evidence for others to pursue.

    For instance, Mueller’s untrue statement that he did not investigate the Steele dossier is still within the statute of limitations until 2024 for charges to be brought. The concealment of Danchenko behind CHS status carried on until 2020, meaning that the statute of limitations on related charges does not expire until 2025. Durham may be nearing the end of his work, but there is plenty left for others to pick up.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 19:40

  • 'They Will Come After You': GOP Attack Ads Warn Of Weaponized IRS
    ‘They Will Come After You’: GOP Attack Ads Warn Of Weaponized IRS

    Midterm election ads from two conservative groups are attacking Democrats over their $80 million investment in supercharging the IRS, with congressional Republicans amplifying claims that the tax-collection agency will target the middle class, Fox News reports.

    “I think it’s insane that Joe Biden and Patty Murray are sending a stadium full of new IRS agents to force families making less than $75,000 to pay for someone else’s law degree,” says one ad from WA Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley, who was filmed standing in front of a football stadium.

    Ads published by the Senate Leadership Fund and Our American Century PACs, as well as ads from candidates themselves, say the IRS’ 80,000 new hires will dig into the pockets of everyday Americans. The ads have popped up in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada Ohio and elsewhere in recent weeks. -Fox News

    In a Georgia ad against Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), it’s argued that the Democrats gave the IRS “$46 billion to hire IRS agents to extract $20 billion from people who make less than $400,000” – citing a preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) regarding how much the IRS funding boost – part of the Inflation Reduction Act – is expected to impact those making less than $400K per year.

    “Much of that money will come from cracking down on people who get paid with cash, tips or phone apps. If you do real work — waiting tables, serving drinks, driving Ubers or other jobs, Biden and Warnock’s new IRS agents may knock on your door soon.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe Biden Treasury Department insists that the majority of new agents will be tasked with looking into the finances of those making over $400,000 per year, and that many of the new hires will replace an expected wave of retirements and departures.

    As Fox News points out, however, “An amendment from Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, would have prohibited the IRS from using any of its new funding to target Americans below the $400,000 threshold, but it failed in Congress.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 19:20

  • US Backs Sending 'Multinational Rapid Action Force’ To Haiti
    US Backs Sending ‘Multinational Rapid Action Force’ To Haiti

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    The US has drafted a UN Security Council resolution calling for the deployment of an international force to help the Haitian government quell protests and unrest, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

    The Post obtained a copy of the resolution, which calls for “the immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force.” The draft doesn’t identify specific countries that would take part or detail what their role would be, but it is the clearest sign yet that the US favors some sort of military intervention in Haiti.

    Political unrest and destabilization has been ongoing for years. Image: AFP/Getty

    The draft proposal, which could be formally proposed as soon as Monday, came after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for the creation of an international force to help the Haitian National Police as they deal with an uprising led by armed groups the Haitian government considers gangs.

    According to the draft resolution, the US is “encouraging the immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force to support the [Haitian National Police], as recommended in the Secretary General’s letter.”

    The US resolution singles out Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, who leads a group known as G9 Family and Allies. Cherizier has blockaded a key fuel terminal in Port-au-Prince and has called for the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who has led the Haitian government since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

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    Moïse was gunned down in his home by a group of mostly Colombian mercenaries, some of whom were former members of Colombia’s military and had been previously trained by the Pentagon. But who ordered the killing has not been solved as the investigation has been stalled.

    Protests have also broken out in Haiti’s major cities, where demonstrators have blocked roads and are calling for Henry’s resignation. The protests were sparked by the government announcing that it would stop subsidizing fuel.

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    Henry’s government has appealed for the deployment of an international force to help deal with the situation. The US and Canada on Saturday sent armored vehicles and other supplies to help police quell the unrest.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 19:00

  • Watch: 'Real Life Grand Theft Auto' On Chicago Highway As Man With Rifle Hijacks Car
    Watch: ‘Real Life Grand Theft Auto’ On Chicago Highway As Man With Rifle Hijacks Car

    Violent crime in Chicago is out of control and has skyrocketed since the Black Lives Matter riots and progressive city officials calling to defund the police after the death of George Floyd in 2020. People are fleeing the liberal-run metro area, and there’s also a surging corporate exodus. 

    The latest episode of violent crime isn’t the weekly occurrence of dozens of people shot over the weekend but a video that surfaced on social media of a real-life scene that looks like one from the video game “Grand Theft Auto” on a Chicago highway where a man in a ski mask with a rifle hijacks a car.  

    Video emerged on social media this weekend of a man carjacking a driver while armed with a rifle on an expressway near downtown Chicago.

    The footage shows three people running out of a car that was apparently involved in an auto accident along the outbound Dan Ryan Expressway just north of the Stevenson Expressway. Then one of them, wearing a black ski mask and toting a large weapon, tries to carjack passing vehicles. — CWB Chicago

    The video went viral on Twitter and was also uploaded on YouTube. The man who captured the footage can be heard saying, “Look at that rifle! Look at that rifle!”

    None of this is surprising as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s city is in the terminal phase as progressive social justice reform policies backfire, forcing companies, such as Citadel Securities, to relocate to South Florida. When companies and people exit, the tax base will shrink. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 18:40

  • Hiding Hunter's Laptop: "Right Out Of The Soviet Playbook"
    Hiding Hunter’s Laptop: “Right Out Of The Soviet Playbook”

    Authored by Jim Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

    This is the tale of the epic conspiracy and effort the political Left and their Trump-hating friends on the Right put into hiding Hunter’s laptop…

    Near the end of the 2020 presidential campaign there was an October Surprise. A shocking and provocative story that could potentially alter the outcome. That was, of course, Hunter Biden’s laptop.

    This report shows the full extent of a successful censorship and disinformation campaign by the Left that directly influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

    In the final months of the 2020 race an amazing revelation of corruption and actual crimes by Hunter and Joe Biden came to light. The New York Post ran an exposé of emails from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop. They showed evidence the Bidens were involved in taking money from foreign entities and providing access to the U.S. government.

    At a minimum, these are likely felony violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and perhaps also the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). 

    Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate and the entire country was about to decide whether he was suitable to serve as president. This story was highly relevant for citizens trying to make an informed voting decision. Voters were denied the opportunity to see and evaluate this information. Worse yet, they were subjected to a calculated disinformation campaign designed to discredit it. 

    This project has identified the conspirators, their strategy, their actions, and the chilling effect they had on our representative democracy. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. It is a perfect example of the tilted playing field for ideas the Left has created. Our goal is to shine so bright a light on their actions they will not be able to do this again.

    The Usual Suspects

    This operation was run by the same people who control information flow to the vast majority of the American people.

    The conspirators were:

    • Corporate Media

    • Tech Tyrants

    • The deep state

    • The political Left

    These groups wanted to save a weak candidate from the probable defeat to which the evidence contained on that laptop would lead. They had zero regard for the truth, ethics, or the law. They were going to stop Trump by any means necessary, and they did.

    Uncle Joe was supposed to be the antidote for Trumpism, the smiling storyteller who wouldn’t cause any trouble. But that carefully crafted fiction would crumble if his involvement in selling out his country to enrich his own family was exposed. 

    That meant the story had to be covered up, and the Left jumped into action to do so in the fashion Dave Burge noted on Twitter.

    And smother it they did.

    We must change the overwhelmingly biased information landscape in this country. One side of the political spectrum controls the narrative so completely they successfully censored a story and ran a disinformation campaign of immense magnitude. The first step in changing that information landscape is exposing the organizations, networks, actors and funders who operate it. 

    The Censorship and Disinformation Campaign

    Their strategy had two major components:

    • Censorship—Blocking the distribution of this story so voters could not see it

    • Disinformation—False or misleading narratives to discredit the information

    There was an unprecedented operation in October of 2020 to censor the story of Biden family corruption revealed in the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a potential death blow to Biden’s already creaky campaign and the combined organs of the Left could not afford to let it see the light of day.

    Censorship in America is supposed to be forbidden. The First Amendment means politicians are not permitted to use state power to silence political opponents. That protection has been tested in recent years, as the Left has attempted to brand conservatism as extremism, fascism, and even terrorism. But in this case Biden and his allies could not use the government directly to shut the story down.

    Fortunately for them, the bulk of America’s information space is dominated by their allies who are happy to act as co-conspirators. Corporate media, social media, popular culture, academia, and most governmental entities are all solidly on the Left. They all saw the danger posed to them if the public learned how Joe and Hunter had traveled the world selling access to the U.S. levers of power. Hunter took the cash and Joe took the meetings with his foreign clients. 

    The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper and when they broke the story of this influence-peddling it was a blockbuster. But the crisis response groupthink of the corporate media kicked in immediately to minimize the damage. 

    They claimed it had already been “debunked” or that it had been hacked or stolen or was “unverified.” They threw every smear they had at the wall, just hoping something would stick. Nothing they said about the story was based on facts or evidence; It was just a flurry of attempts to bury it before it buried Joe Biden.

    The major media outlets wanted to hide or ignore the story, but that wasn’t really possible. The Post was their hated enemy as one of a tiny number of right-of-center outlets, but it was too big to just ignore. And they didn’t have the power to stop the Post from distributing its story.

    But social media operates in a completely different fashion and they not only could shut it down— they actually made it disappear.

    As you see in the headline above, they tried to play this off as “making sure our elections are secure.” But they had no evidence at all of any foreign involvement or any other threat beyond the danger of American voters learning about Biden corruption. It was a credible story produced by a major U.S. newspaper about information they received from known American sources. Taking these “unusual steps” was partisan bias not “election preparedness.”

    Tech Tyrants 

    Censorship is an ugly thing, especially when it is done to influence the outcome of a presidential election. The tech companies that own and operate our shared information space collectively and individually hated President Trump.

    They are led and staffed by an overwhelmingly activist workforce. They are the shock troops in the woke revolution and see themselves as tasked with bringing about the “fundamental transformation” Barack Obama talked about.

    Twitter brags about its role on their website:

    Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right—but freedom to have that speech amplified by Twitter is not. Our rules exist to promote healthy conversations.

    It is fair to note Twitter is not the government and is free to censor speech if it wishes to do so. But when they control the most influential platform for influencing ideas in the world, they can be held to account if they abuse that. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted this is a problem.

    We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is . . . is more left-leaning.

    They have failed miserably in keeping their bias at bay. It infects every aspect of their business model even if it is not written into their policies. Their woke workforce interprets the policies in ways that greatly advantage Democratic politicians and liberal ideas. They simultaneously punish and throttle conservative ones.

    This was on full display when the Post article came out and Twitter shut down the Post’s Twitter account, as well as the ability for anyone to share the article. 

    In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Post in a statement.

    Their reasons were unconvincing and illogical:

    Twitter is still demanding The Post delete six posts linking to our reporting (tweets that don’t violate their rules!) before restoring our account

    Twitter users who attempted to retweet the Post article received an error message and eventually were informed that the article had been identified as “potentially harmful.” 

    Ironically, they were right for the wrong reason. It was “potentially harmful”. . .  not because it was a foreign influence operation, but because it could be deadly to the presidential ambitions of Joe Biden.

    Facebook chose a different, but no less improper and biased form of censorship. Their spokesperson Andy Stone, a long time Democratic operative, announced their rationale.

    Facebook did not require fact-checking or limit distribution on thousands of stories claiming President Trump colluded with Russia. 

    Trump-Russia smear stories were a mainstay of Facebook’s curated news content throughout the entire Trump Administration and the 2020 campaign. This was a direct reaction to the unwanted success conservative media had on the platform.

    Facebook’s leadership and staff were just as reliably doctrinaire leftists as were Twitter’s. They believed their mission was to bring the world into the woke paradise we all need. But something was going wrong. People kept engaging with conservative content at alarming rates. They had identified this as a problem after Trump’s win in the 2016 election. They couldn’t understand it, but they knew they needed to stop it.

    Facebook’s problem was their platform actually worked the way they built it. It allowed people to see content they were likely to enjoy and then engage with. The unintended consequence for the activists at Facebook was that people really liked conservative content. 

    For one thing, they couldn’t get it elsewhere. When Facebook let them find and share it, they did . . . a lot. 

    Unlike Twitter, which had actively gamed algorithms and rule enforcement to squash conservatives, Facebook had a basically democratic platform. Popular content ruled and sadly for the Left that meant conservatives had a voice. After the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments phase over the result of the 2016 election had passed, the true believers at Facebook set out to ensure it would never happen again. This actually led to a precursor disinformation campaign related to the ones we are discussing here, which began the use of the chosen narrative, Russian disinformation.

    After the 2016 election the existence of a small number of ads on Facebook tied to overseas troll farms was discovered. This became a cause célèbre in the effort to discredit the evil Trump’s victory over the chosen Hillary.

    It was not possible for them to fathom Americans could have chosen a vulgarian right-winger in a fair contest, so they needed an external enemy. Russian propaganda was a perfect target. In other words, they employed a technique common to both propaganda and advertising called “An Appeal to Fear.” In this case it is the fear of an external enemy which is a necessary component for those who want to increase the power of government.

    Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people! — are said to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats.

    The American Left was looking at Hillary to finish the fundamental transformation begun under Obama and bring benevolent statism to America. It was not possible that both she and the quasi-socialism she represented could have been spurned. No! It was those damn Russians. And thus Russian disinformation became the external threat that had unduly empowered the troglodytes of the Right.

    The truth was Russian-linked entities had spent around $150,000 on Facebook ads during the campaign. This was during a campaign into which both candidates were putting close to $1 billion.

    That is not to say Russian propaganda was never a real problem. It was a major problem during the Soviet era and it had grown and evolved in the modern age.

    The Rand Corporation’s study on Russian propaganda, Firehose of Falsehood, reveals:

    Russia has taken advantage of technology and available media in ways that would have been inconceivable during the Cold War. Its tools and channels now include the Internet, social media, and the evolving landscape of professional and amateur journalism and media outlets.

    Even though it was nowhere near the threat they hyped it to be, the Left had found their demon. They would use this as the rationale for a censorship campaign to limit the spread and effectiveness of all messages deemed damaging to the cause. This enabled them to attack their political opponents but to wrap it in the patriotic propaganda of “election integrity.”

    Starting in 2017 Facebook made a massive push to publicize their newfound zeal to stop anyone from influencing U.S. Elections.

    As it turned out, Facebook had its own election meddling plan: stop anyone from influencing elections, except fellow leftists. What they touted as the answer to Russian interference soon morphed into a chance to build and deploy a thought police to shut down ideas they disliked. They had the aircover of election integrity so who could argue with that?

    In the intervening time between presidential elections they began to systematically push back not just on foreign influence efforts, but on conservative content they deemed misinformation. This allowed them to limit, or eliminate, the ability for all of those people who had been choosing to engage with conservative content to do so. 

    The Biden team still wanted more actual election and information interference from Facebook. Campaign Digital Director Rob Flaherty attacked them for suggesting that an even playing field was the right answer.

    Everyone works the refs, but the shocking thing here is the appeal to reasonableness. As if it was unchallenged that the Left was fundamentally honest and the Right fundamentally fallacious. Many at Facebook shared that view and their bias became policy.

    The collection of bad actors we are discussing here worked together to tilt the playing field in the information space on a daily basis. Any information you get without purposely going directly to a known conservative outlet is filtered through their leftist lens. This control is pervasive and does tremendous damage to having an informed electorate.

    All of this culminated in a well-oiled machine ready for action when the damaging information on Hunter’s laptop came to light. They had a plan, they had chosen enemies to blame and they were not about to let the Right use their platforms to tell any truths.

    Excuses about the information being hacked or stolen were simply invented to obscure the facts. The tech tyrants did not want the public to know how corrupt Joe Biden was so they served as surrogates for the Biden campaign. Their censorship operations were successful and denied a large number of people the opportunity to judge for themselves.

    We can’t know for sure what the impact of this story would have been had it been propagated freely. But it would have been very damaging to a candidate packaged and marketed as kinder, gentler, and more honest than Trump. Now that more is known about the story, recent polling shows people consider that it would have been a highly influential story.

    Nearly two-thirds of voters say the story of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop is important and believe President Joe Biden was probably involved in his son’s foreign business deals.

    Would that have changed the outcome? Sadly, we’ll never know. But we can make sure it never happens again.

    Disinformation—These Are Not the Incriminating Emails You Are Looking For

    The definitive book on Cold War era information warfare from our Communist foes is Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy. In that book, disinformation is defined as “false, incomplete, or misleading information that is passed, fed, or confirmed to a targeted individual, group, or country.”

    The American public was subjected to a campaign right out of the Soviet playbook designed to obfuscate the Biden family corruption. It was concocted and deployed by a loosely connected conspiracy of the media, current and former government officials, the Biden campaign, and the social media tech companies.

    As soon as the story broke October 19, 2020 virtually every major and subsidiary media outlet reported on it with negative sentiment using one of two major themes:

    First they argued that it was stolen. The immediate response was to deny the provenance of the laptop which was that Hunter Biden had abandoned it at a repair shop. They began questioning that story and throwing out the completely unfounded speculation that it may be stolen. 

    This smear hit directly at John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the repair shop. He provided the contents of the laptop first to law enforcement and when they took no action, to Rudy Giuliani who eventually gave it to the New York Post. 

    The bulk of the media accounts discussing the story in the next 24 hours included a reference to the “stolen” theme.

    The second argument offered was that the laptop was not verified. This was the most defensible part of the smoke screen. Most of the media outlets did not have the hard drive so they could say they had not verified it themselves. However, the New York Post showed numerous items in their reporting that would lead any reasonable person to understand the laptop most likely belonged to Hunter Biden.

    During the taping of an interview with President Trump soon after the story broke, Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” ran with this narrative.

    Stahl denied that the Delaware computer suspected of belonging to Hunter Biden’s was even a story at all after claiming it has been “investigated and discredited.”

    “It can’t be verified,” Stahl said of the laptop. “It can’t be verified.”

    “What can’t be verified?” Trump said.

    “The laptop!”

    It had been investigated, but unlike Stahl’s false claim to the contrary the laptop was not discredited. All of the investigations and verification measures showed the same thing: This was Hunter’s laptop, the information was his and it was devastating.

    One of the truly amazing things is the longevity of the media’s willingness to continue to ignore and suppress this story. It was not until March of 2022 that the New York Times and Washington Post both admitted the long-known fact that Hunter’s laptop was Hunter’s laptop.

    Their admissions were not because of some ethical epiphany. They were merely part of a new aspect of the disinformation campaign about the likely charges coming from the ongoing investigation into Biden family corruption. They are based on the disinformation tactic popularized by John Ehrlichman, an aide to President Richard Nixon during Watergate. It’s called the modified limited hangout. In other words, mixing partial admissions with additional misinformation in order to confuse people.

    There has been an obvious attempt by the same collection of operators to steer coverage of this corruption away from Joe Biden and away from the felony violations of FARA and FCPA. But they know there is too much information publicly available to make the whole thing entirely disappear. The recent stories and admissions that it was true all along are designed to deflect the inevitable revelations of crimes and possible indictments.

    That is the regime media’s role, and they played it with vigor. To them the possibility of Trump winning reelection justified any and all possible propagandizing. So they ran with the narrative that the laptop was unverified all the way through the election and beyond until it collapsed under the weight of the truth.

    The Deep State/Permanent Bureaucracy 

    After avoiding any investigation into the details of Biden family corruption on the laptop for months, the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore. But they are still trying to avoid the fact it was a full-on business of selling access to the U.S. government. They want to turn it into simply a matter of Hunter not paying the proper taxes. A Hollywood lawyer paid more than $2 million in delinquent taxes for Hunter and this makes that angle their most likely attempt to sweep the rest under the rug.

    The IRS can simply state that there were some minor violations and maybe even slap Hunter with a charge or two. Then they can give him a fine and all the same propaganda outlets can claim the government “dealt with the issue.” This helps them avoid the unmistakable conclusion that Joe Biden is deeply implicated in this and likely guilty of multiple felonies. They can chalk it up to Hunter’s taxes and move on. 

    This is unacceptable—and even if Joe Biden avoids charges or a possible impeachment, we must expose the conspiracy to conceal information from the American people.

    Democratic Political Operatives 

    Political machines and the tools they employ exist to kill this kind of story. The October surprise from one side faces the censorship and disinformation campaign of the other. Sometimes the October surprise is a fake and the efforts to discredit it are completely justified. That was not the case here. There was zero evidence this was fake and considerable proof it was real.

    That put the smear mongers into frenzied overdrive, but as we have outlined they had plenty of willing allies to help spin their tales. This whole effort to discredit the laptop is one of the most successful political warfare operations in U.S. history. And almost every aspect of it was absolute fiction.

    The political operatives knew there was something brewing. Steve Bannon had bragged about having the hard drive from Hunter’s laptop. The plans to smear and obfuscate the purveyors of the information and its provenance were ready to drop, as the Daily Beast did immediately:

    When the journalist asked Bannon what’s on it and whether he’d release it before the presidential debate, Bannon replied, ‘You’ll see, standby.’ The Post disclosed that Bannon and Rudy Giuliani gave the hard drive to the newspaper, and included an unlikely story about them obtaining it from a computer repairman who copied it.

    As The Daily Beast reported today, a network run by Chinese fugitive Guo Wengui, who is Bannon’s business partner, was hyping damaging hard drives obtained by Chinese officials around the same time as Bannon’s Dutch interview.

    “An unlikely source” and an insinuation that this may be Chinese in origin were floated. They joined a vast array of stories using the chosen narratives hacked and disinformation.

    There were three main propaganda attacks on the story: first that it was hacked, and then two separate attempts to label it a product of Russian disinformation.  

    Hacked—October 14-15, 2020

    As soon as the story broke the initial disinformation campaign was to say the information was hacked. Hearing the word “hacked” creates an instant distaste for the information in most people as the word is associated with stolen credit cards and other criminal activity. It also implies the information is untrustworthy or even fake. 

    Corporate media and social media outlets were still stinging from the 2016 revelation of Hillary Clinton campaign emails, which damaged her campaign greatly. They took immediate action to censor the story of Hunter’s laptop as soon as it dropped.

    The social media companies led off with the chosen crisis message of hacked. For example, Twitter announced:

    In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter.

    This was despite exactly zero evidence that the material was actually hacked. It was just exceptionally dangerous—to the Biden campaign—so it had to be hidden.

    This led the major media organs to cheer for any and all censorship and to cast aspersions on the material before it could gain traction.

    After years of inaction, Facebook and Twitter are finally starting to clean up their messes. And in the process, they’re enraging the powerful people who have thrived under the old system.

    They rightly believed the emails played a definitive role in Hillary’s defeat.

    The alleged Biden laptop situation calls to mind the notorious Wikileaks dump of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails in October 2016. The press went wild with those materials, which were later determined to have been given to Wikileaks by state-backed Russian hackers. The air of controversy the emails generated likely contributed to Clinton’s loss to Trump.

    They were bound and determined not to let that happen again, and they were far too successful for anyone who believes in free speech. 

    The problem with the hacked narrative was not just that it was an invented falsehood, but that in the end it didn’t actually discredit the actual information. Hillary’s campaign emails were hacked and they were real and they were damaging. The Left needed something more convincing with which they could smear those reporting the facts about the laptop.

    Russian Disinformation Round One—October 16-17, 2020

    The Left had spent the entire time from Hillary’s defeat in 2016 up through the 2020 election trying (and failing) to pin a charge of Russian collusion on Donald Trump. It went well beyond normal political smears to an unhealthy obsession that distorted all media coverage of Trump’s presidency.

    When the laptop story broke it was impossible for them to resist taking another bite of that poisoned apple and Russian disinformation, ironically, became the second major disinformation campaign about the laptop.

    This effort was launched using one of the Left’s biggest purveyors of leaks and propaganda: Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

    Anywhere lies about Russian influence operations are being told, you can be sure to find Adam Schiff. This operation was no different and, as always, he led the charge with accusations there was absolutely no evidence to support.

    Schiff spent most of the Trump Administration telling everyone who would listen that Trump was Putin’s puppet. He would claim to have evidence he could not share and which never materialized. When he made the statement that “we know” the info came from the Kremlin he had nothing to back that up.

    He had been pushing the Trump-Russia attack for years and the Wall Street Journal showed he knew it was a lie.

    Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice. Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.

    The House Intelligence Committee last week released 57 transcripts of interviews it conducted in its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The committee probe started in January 2017 under then-Chair Devin Nunes and concluded in March 2018 with a report finding no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Most of the transcripts were ready for release long ago, but Mr. Schiff oddly refused to release them after he became chairman in 2019. He only released them last week when the White House threatened to do it first.

    He was the perfect member of the usual suspects to bring the Russian disinformation tale into play. He launched it with the assistance of Wolf Blitzer on CNN.

    This led to a lawsuit from the computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, who did not take kindly to being defamed.

    It was pretty quick out of the gate that I was labeled a hacker and then, after Adam Schiff and 51 intelligence experts decided to pen a letter and tell the rest of the American people I was a Russian asset, things have gone downhill from there.

    Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe immediately debunked Schiff’s tale.

    “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe said. “Let me be clear: The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress,” he said.

    That only brought Schiff’s deep state allies in the intelligence community into the game. They tried to undercut their boss Ratcliffe by saying there was an investigation into whether the laptop was tied to efforts of any foreign intelligence services. To get their information out they went to one of their favorite palace scribes: Ken Dilanian of NBC.

    Dilanian was well known as a tool for the IC who would ensure their leaks and undermining of their official leadership got the attention they wanted to receive. In this case they fed him a line that there was an investigation into Hunter’s laptop.

    Dilanian promptly parroted the propaganda. There actually was an investigation. It would have been malfeasance if there wasn’t.

    But there was no link to foreign intelligence operations because it actually was Hunter’s laptop and the IC already knew that. But they had the ability, using helpful media lap dog Dilanian, to get massive coverage of their fiction.

     The combination of Schiff lying on CNN and Dilanian putting it out via NBC gave the disinformation campaign using the Russian disinformation narrative its first major bump.

    The deep state had already been involved in influencing the election from the executive offices of our security organs in September. 

    Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray told lawmakers that Russia is primarily interfering through ‘malign foreign influence in an effort to hurt Biden’s campaign’—echoing the intelligence community’s public assessment on Moscow’s meddling efforts issued last month.

    Wray’s comments come as President Donald Trump and several other top administration officials have recently attempted to play up the theory that China is meddling to get Biden elected, while downplaying well-founded reports that Russia is trying to help Trump win again, like it did in 2016.

    The Department of Justice, including Wray and others, were complicit in putting the fictional Steele dossier into play. This attempt to smear then candidate Trump during the 2016 election was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and propagated by the same crew now attempting to hide the Hunter story.

    There is a painful irony in creating a disinformation campaign about a fantasy of Russian disinformation to discredit a story when it is directed by people who invented a previous fake tale of Russian collusion with Trump to smear him in 2016. They failed in 2016, although not for lack of effort. The Mueller investigation into non-existent Russian collusion acted as a drag on the Trump Administration for more than two years.

    They never let go of that failure to take down Trump and now they trotted Russia out again to try and save the endangered Biden campaign.

    Russian Disinformation Round Two—October 19-20, 2020

    The first round of attempts to call the laptop story Russian disinformation fall into the crisis communications category of propaganda efforts. The real planned and coordinated campaign launched when a group of former U.S. Intelligence officials wrote an open letter claiming the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

    Note the use of the weasel wording “all the classic earmarks.” They lawyered this letter very hard because they knew there was not an ounce of evidence that Russia had anything at all to do with the laptop But they also knew that if they abused their credibility as former members and leaders of our intelligence agencies, they would achieve the desired effect of Laptop story=Russian disinformation.

    They broke the story with a back channel from former CIA Director John Brennan to another willing palace scribe, Natasha Bertrand, then working at Politico. She was a reliable conduit for the deep state to get its messaging out, as was Politico. 

    Her story on October 19, 2020 was highly effective in launching the official deep state disinformation campaign that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

    Again, the irony is so thick here it is hard even to fathom the unmitigated gall of these people. They purposely misled the American people by running the exact type of campaign they were busy falsely creating the impression the Russians were doing.

    Bertrand was an easy choice for the job of launching this, as she had been a lead member of the Trump-Russia cabal for years. She pushed every angle, trying vainly to midwife that nonexistent narrative into an actual scandal. All of that was fed by an ongoing collection of leaks from many of the same people who now signed this letter.

    The leader of this effort was John Brennan who had become so unhinged with Trump hatred he had lost the ability to pretend otherwise.

    At the same time, he was organizing this bipartisan group of supposedly unbiased “professionals,” he was giving statements like this bashing Trump regularly.

    “He’s just going to continue along this trajectory of incompetence, ineptitude, corruption, malfeasance, deceit, lying, and fueling polarization at home,” Brennan said, adding alienating allies and cozying up to dictators to the list. “And that’s just the start.”

    Former CIA operations officer Charles Faddis noted Brennan’s pivotal anti-Trump role: “Mr. Brennan is at the heart of the efforts to prevent Donald Trump from ever being president.”

    Brennan minion Nick Shapiro tried to spin the letter, saying  “the whole point was that the Russians most likely spread the information, whether it was disinformation or accurate information,” except there was zero Russian involvement of any kind. The most likely reason to call the information Russian-based was simply to discredit it.

    Not all were willing to prostitute themselves and join Brennan’s anti-Trump crusade

    A former national security official who was asked to sign the letter but declined to do so told the Washington Examiner that Brennan’s involvement with the letter was problematic because of his anti-Trump commentary and repeated claims of Trump-Russia collusion, and Brennan’s name on the letter made it look like he was running a ‘rear guard action’ as a favor to Biden.

    As a private citizen John Brennan has every right to publicly air his political preference and grievances. But he used the prestige of his previous role as CIA director to recruit fellow travelers and operate a blatant attempt to mislead the public for transparently political purposes. That is a bridge too far. 

    It enabled Joe Biden himself to make this statement at the final debate:

    Biden campaign officials also participated in the disinformation campaign, lying directly to the American public. Even the letter from the former intelligence community partisans did not state the laptop story was definitively Russian disinformation. They knew there was not a single piece of evidence showing that, and they rightly feared legal consequences.

    But members of Biden’s crew were scared enough to risk pushing lies and made definitive statements that are completely indefensible.

    Many members of the Biden campaign and future members of his administration echoed the IC letter, but Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield went further and outright claimed the invented tale of Russian disinformation was true, insisting whenever Trump brought the topic up:

    I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation.

    The others hedged their bets by simply parroting the propaganda of the IC letter. Bedingfield made this declarative statement on a conference call with reporters and cited no proof it was true or a single piece of evidence beyond the baseless speculation that it “has all the hallmarks of Russian information operation.” 

    She clearly had nothing to justify using the language she did and it served to purposely misinform the American public.

    In a Washington Post “news” story on October 24, 2020 just after the final debate, two members of their crack journalistic crew decided to go all-in as well.

    In their story, they accused the Trump team of running a disinformation campaign.

    Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe’s statement that the story was not Russian disinformation was interpreted broadly in the media as a partisan gesture designed to bolster a disinformation campaign launched directly by Trump’s allies, rather than a formal assessment from the U.S. intelligence community.

    The unmitigated gall to actually invent a second disinformation campaign accusation inside the existing Russian disinformation creation, when in fact they were part of the only actual disinformation campaign against the American people . . . is gobsmacking.

     They also got Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates to step out well past the facts and claim:

    We know who is behind this, and it is the same hostile foreign power whose assistance Donald Trump has repeatedly courted

    He did in fact “know who is behind this,” except it was not the Russians but the merry band of domestic propagandists of which he was a member. This was direct collusion between the Biden campaign and two Washington Post reporters to create an even bigger lie. According to them not only was the laptop story a Russian operation, but Trump’s allies were also part of the disinformation campaign as well. 

    The Washington Post also brought in a supposed expert on disinformation to bolster the fact-less nature of their own disinformation campaign. 

    In a piece on October 24, 2020 Thomas Rid said “we must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation—even if they probably aren’t.” That is an amazing statement, akin to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” They didn’t need the story to be true, they just needed the rest of the media to treat it that way. 

    The Damage

    We will never know exactly how large an effect this unprecedented operation had on the 2020 election. But it was likely the broadest election influence conspiracy conducted by domestic entities in U.S. history.

    John Sipher, a member of the former intelligence community disinformation effort, even bragged about flipping the election in a Twitter scrap with Ric Grenell.

    Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was called to testify to Congress shortly after the election.

    While Dorsey did admit it was a mistake, he still tried to deflect from the completely obvious political bias in the case. “It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

    That would be hard to believe in the best of circumstances. After four years of participating in the effort to smear President Trump for collusion with Russia, Twitter has zero credibility on the topic. Add to that the numerous instances of selective enforcement of their rules to disadvantage conservative voices and his spin falls flat.

    Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson blasted the disinformation campaign:

    My main point is that the mainstream media, their bias, their corruption, their complicity in the Russian collusion hoax, interfered with our elections. Had a far greater impact on our elections than anything Russia or China ever could hope to accomplish. But they’re never held accountable because they have to hold themselves accountable, and they are not going to do that.

    The only lesson the political Left learned was that it worked. They figured out that as long as they are the deciders of what is disinformation, they have a license to censor. 

    Multiple whistleblowers have informed Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that an FBI agent named Timothy Thibault intervened to stop any investigation into the laptop story until after the election.

    “In October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault,” Grassley wrote six weeks ago in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

    More whistleblowers have surfaced and they all tell a tale of a politicized FBI and other state security organs being abused to attack political opponents of the Left.

    It didn’t take long for the Biden Administration to start institutionalizing this game plan with a public/private partnership. They took the election integrity banner and added the idea of domestic terrorism, then had the Department of Homeland Security include a call for thought police at the social media companies in their National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

    These efforts speak to a broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.

    Translation: Your ideas are dangerous to our ability to aggregate state power, and we are going to shut you down. Social media companies have been censoring conservative speech very happily, and Americans have been told that’s just fine because they’re private companies. But this was a bald-faced announcement of a public-private partnership to create a national thought police.

    The Biden crew continued to expand pressure on social media. 

    In July 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argued that social media platforms should combat health “misinformation.” Murthy said, “We’re saying we expect more from our technology companies . . . . We’re asking them to consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.” At the same press conference, Psaki said, “We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team . . . We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” 

    This eventually led to the announcement of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board. This ill-fated attempt to actually establish a “Ministry of Truth” was a shocking—and yes, Orwellian—attempt to give the thought police official status.

    Nina Jankowicz was chosen to run the operation. Like most of the chosen disinformation specialists her actual expertise was in the creation and propagation. She has a long history of pushing the fabricated tale of Trump Russia collusion. 

    She stated: “Trump had not one, but two secret email servers to communicate with influential Russian bank. Unbelievable.”

    Fact was he had zero servers and this was pure disinformation.

    The outcry was immediate—and for once, effective—delaying the launch and finally trashing the whole idea. In a case of multilevel propaganda and gobsmacking irony, Jankowicz tried to claim the demise of her role as Big Sister before it even began was itself due to disinformation.

    We’re not just talking about speech that happens to be inconvenient for someone’s political viewpoint. Disinformation is false or misleading information spread with malign intent. In this case, the intent would be to hurt or harm the American people. That’s the type of stuff that we were looking at: where disinformation had a nexus with offline action. So violence or making people unsafe in some way.

    The idea is to help people understand how these techniques of manipulation look when they encounter them online. To help people recognize when they’re being manipulated or when they’re being scammed.

    We can’t for a second think that they have abandoned their efforts to control our information space. They will simply conduct the same operations in existing parts of our security apparatus. It is up to us to find and dismantle those as well.

    The Counterattack

    This was perhaps the most complete conspiracy to conduct a disinformation campaign designed to influence a U.S. election, ever. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) must promulgate rules that require companies that control a large enough amount of our shared information space to operate with a presumption of free speech.

    Yes, this is government intervention into the operations of private corporations, but we have just laid out how dangerous they can be without some oversight. 

    We would not let the power company refuse service to customers based on political orientation, and the major information operators should have no right to do so, either. Google and Facebook control a majority of the online advertising market. That gives them outsized power and they use it to strangle competitors. They also use it to put their left-leaning filter on all information they provide.

    The legal avenues to change this are challenging, but not impossible. The first thing we have to do is file as many lawsuits in as many venues as possible and make the Left defend them. We can make it too damaging to the corporate boards and investors to allow these woke corporations to run rampant.

    There are also increasing opportunities to file consumer-based suits based on breach of contract and failure of the tech firms to fairly apply their own rules. Giving users some ownership over content they create can be done at the state level as well.

    The lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden Administration is a great example of lawfare. They allege collusion between tech and government actors to have the tech tyrants act to censor things the government cannot. This abridges the free speech of the citizens of their states. This suit survived a challenge on standing and was awarded expedited discovery for a potential injunction.

    Conclusion

    The conspiracy to hide Hunter’s laptop was the largest censorship and disinformation campaign ever conducted to influence a U.S. election. All elements of the political Left combined to stop this story and mislead the American public. They censored the facts about Biden family corruption, then created and propagated a disinformation campaign to falsely convince the American public the laptop was Russian disinformation.

    This shameless operation was successful.

    After they achieved their goal, most of the major media outlets have been forced to admit the truth about the laptop. Not because some new information came out, but because their lies and obfuscation were about to be revealed, as we have shown here. 

    Many on the political Right worked tirelessly to expose this corruption, which would have otherwise been swept under the rug. But we must also work just as hard to ensure the Left can never mount this type of propaganda effort again. The American people cannot safely operate our republic if they have an information space that is controlled by malign forces.

    The challenge now is to expose and dismantle this control and establish an information space based on free speech. We must have a marketplace of ideas and let the best ones win. 

    *  *  *

    For more on this developing story, check out the embedded video below:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 18:20

  • Xi-Biden Meeting At G20 Reported To Be In Peril As Beijing 'Stonewalling' Preparation
    Xi-Biden Meeting At G20 Reported To Be In Peril As Beijing ‘Stonewalling’ Preparation

    The Biden White House has been looking for openings toward maintaining ways to cooperate productively with China, particularly on key issues such as climate change, despite ongoing tensions in the South China Sea and over the simmering Taiwan issue. 

    But these efforts appear to be in peril, Politico has reported, as the Chinese side is said to be stonewalling preparations for a crucial upcoming face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali set for mid-November.

    “Beijing won’t engage with U.S. officials trying to draft an agenda for the meeting, according to a person familiar with the planning — a move that could prevent it from happening at all,” Politico wrote in the recent report.

    Image: Associated Press

    The latest US statements and actions regarding trade, on China’s human rights record, as well as Taiwan – including continuing preparations for major weapons packages – has reportedly frustrated and outraged Beijing officials to the point that China might back out of the G20 Xi-Biden meeting altogether.

    The latest salvo from early last month was an announced $1.1 billion arms sale package for Taiwan approved by the Biden administration, marking no less than the sixth major defense package under Biden. The New York Times soon after the massive new arms package was announced observed that the US is seeking to turn Taiwan into a “giant weapons depot”.

    While neither China’s foreign ministry nor its embassy in Washington has given official comment, one diplomat privy to the behind-the-scene signaling explained the following: 

    “Normally, when you have a presidential bilat you start working out the agenda quite a while in advance, but Chinese diplomats are saying, ‘You guys whack us every other day — if that is the environment, how can we expect a positive outcome from a Xi-Biden meeting?‘” a person briefed by Chinese officials on the planning told POLITICO.

    “If they can’t have a positive outcome, their view is ‘should we even have the meeting?‘” the person said. The individual was granted anonymity to prevent possible reprisals for speaking publicly about the bilateral spat.

    However, the US side did respond to growing rumors and reports that Beijing is stonewalling…

    “This story is 100 percent false,” a National Security Council’s top spokesperson, was quoted by Politico as saying. “We’ve already said the two presidents tasked out their teams to look into a meeting. I won’t get beyond that though in terms of timing and location as of now.” And yet at least one diplomat involved in the planning admitted under anonymity that a G20 meeting between Biden and Xi is “still not confirmed”. 

    Related to diplomatic uncertainty at the G20 is also Russia and the plans of Vladimir Putin. His attendance is still entirely unclear despite positive signals from months ago that he’s set on going. But Moscow’s growing isolation on the world stage due to its unpopular war in Ukraine means Putin is unlikely to want to face potentially embarrassing situations such as being shunned by other world leaders, or the likelihood that he’d be continually put on the spot by the international press corps during the summit.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 18:00

  • States Seek To Depose Fauci, Other Top Officials In Big Tech–Government Censorship Case
    States Seek To Depose Fauci, Other Top Officials In Big Tech–Government Censorship Case

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Plaintiffs in the high-profile case that’s uncovered evidence of big tech companies and government officials colluding to censor users are seeking to depose 10 top officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

    The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and other plaintiffs asked a U.S. court in a recent motion to allow them to depose Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser; FBI special agent Elvis Chan, former White House press secretary and current MSNBC pundit Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, deputy assistant to the president.

    They also want to question five other officials, including Carol Crawford, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Digital Media Branch.

    While emails and other documents uncovered in discovery have revealed an “enormous and far-reaching” censorship enterprise, the discovery “makes very clear that federal officials have frequently engaged in their most telling and probative communications with social media companies orally, not in writing,” plaintiffs said in a joint statement with defendants.

    “Perhaps not surprisingly, the more senior the federal official involved, the more likely they appear to have been to rely on oral, rather than written, communications to pressure social-media platforms to censor,” the statement also said.

    Fauci, for instance, communicated in a long-shielded phone call with some scientists who went on to write a paper castigating others who were open to the theory that the COVID-19 virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected.

    Fauci was also in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but the content of oral communications between the two “is yet to be revealed,” the new filing, dated Oct. 14, says.

    Fauci has not made any statements under oath about his communications with big tech firms like Facebook, despite the judge overseeing the case ordering the government to provide answers from Fauci to questions, plaintiffs said.

    Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lead plaintiffs and both Republicans, announced recently they planned to seek depositions but had not identified any officials who they would seek to depose.

    Proposed Schedule

    Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, to greenlight the 10 requested depositions. If Doughty agrees, the depositions would take place during a 30-day window.

    Doughty already agreed to the plaintiff’s request to expedite discovery. That led to the production of hundreds of pages of documents, which bolstered plaintiff claims of Big Tech–government collusion.

    In that order, Doughty said plaintiffs could alert defendants to any depositions plaintiffs wished to take, and that the parties would then meet to confer on any deposition requests.

    If the parties did not agree on the depositions, then they were to file a joint statement outlining their differences.

    Doughty has seven days to rule on the new filing, which included objections from the government.

    …

    Plaintiffs said the arguments in opposition were meritless and should be rejected.

    The descriptions of some officials as too “high-level” to be deposed is outweighed by the fact that the officials all have firsthand knowledge of the matter and the information they hold cannot be obtained elsewhere, plaintiffs said, referring to a ruling in a separate case, United States v. Newman.

    …

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 17:40

  • Crypto Adoption Continues: Mastercard To Debut Product To Help Buy Digital Assets Through Bank Accounts
    Crypto Adoption Continues: Mastercard To Debut Product To Help Buy Digital Assets Through Bank Accounts

    Dare we say the adoption of crypto looks like it is…accelerating?

    Mastercard is now joining the ranks of a number of other major institutions now playing a role in helping plug crypto into the mainstream, announcing this week that they are debuting a service that is going to allow consumers to buy and sell digital assets through their bank accounts.

    Banks had traditionally been hesitant to offer such services to their retail customers, as much of the crypto world remains in a state of regulatory limbo. Mastercard could wind up speeding up adoption, as they have “thousands of bank partners”. 

    The service, called “Crypto Source”, is going to be offered as part of a partnership with Paxos, according to a Bloomberg report. The report says the service could pave the way for “thousands of finance firms to offer crypto trading for the first time”. 

    Paxos’ role will be to “provide virtual currency trading and custody services on behalf of the banks”, according to the report. It’ll debut in the US, Israel and Brazil, according to Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence.

    MasterCard already has a history of crypto adoption, announcing earlier this year that it would be bringing on 500 new people to expand staff that are tied to crypto. It also partnered with Bakkt earlier this year to help banks offer crypto rewards on their credit and debt cards. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/17/2022 – 17:20

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