Majorityrights News > Category: U.S. Politics

                  Michael Flynn seated with Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein right.

ITV News, “Trump administration ‘will be having restless nights over Flynn testimony offer”, 31 March 2017:

Flynn was famously pictured sitting next to Vladimir Putin at a gala in Moscow in December 2015 and it was his conversations with Russian officials that ultimately led to his downfall.

President Trump and his administration will have endured a “restless night’s sleep” following Michael Flynn’s offer to testify about possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Barack Obama’s former press secretary has told ITV News.

Flynn, ousted as national security adviser in February following an onslaught of damaging headlines about his ties to the Kremlin, has told the FBI and Congress that he “has a story to tell” but wants assurances “against unfair prosecution”.

Josh Earnest, who served as the former president’s top spokesman for three years, said Flynn’s offer “is an indication that he is concerned about the information he may reveal”.

“My guess is that there were a lot of restless night’s sleep last night after that Wall Street Journal story posted,” Earnest told ITV News.

“Because everybody who thought they were having a private conversation with Mike Flynn in the last two years or anybody who sent an email over the last two years or anybody who has been responsible for publicly defending him over the last two months is now in a position where that information could be revealed to the FBI or congressional investigators.

“That has to be a little disconcerting to everybody - including the president of the United States.”

Trump’s young presidency has so far been blighted by the ongoing suspicion that his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to sway the election in his favour.

Flynn is one of a number of Trump associates under investigation by the FBI as part of the probe into Russian meddling.

Earnest said Trump’s decision to appoint Flynn to a role “so crucial” to America’s national security would again come under scrutiny.

“Appointing someone like General Flynn to be his national security adviser and have him resign after 24 days because he was being dishonest and now potentially has some criminal liability - it’s concerning and does raise questions about the president’s judgement in putting somebody like General Flynn into a position that is so crucial to our national security.”

Earnest, who now works as a political analyst for NBC, urged observers not to jump to conclusions over Flynn’s offer to testify, saying it was too early to say whether the retired three-star Army general would provide the “smoking gun” which directly links the president to Russia’s aggressive operation to meddle in the election process.

“He’s got a story he wants to tell - we’ll see what happens.”

Flynn was one of Trump’s closest confidantes on the campaign trail, gaining prominence for his raucous attacks on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server.

In comments likely to come back to haunt him, Flynn told NBC last September: “When you are given immunity, that means you have probably committed a crime.”

After Trump’s victory, Flynn was appointed as the new administration’s top security adviser despite concerns over his desire to forge closer ties to the Russian government.

He was famously pictured sitting next to Vladimir Putin at a gala in Moscow in December 2015 and it was his conversations with Russian officials that ultimately led to his downfall.

       
Michael Flynn, pictured above left with Donald Trump, was ousted as national security adviser in February following an onslaught of damaging headlines about his ties to the Kremlin Credit: AP

Flynn was forced to quit after a less than a month in the role when it emerged that he had discussed sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on the Kremlin with the Russian ambassador - conversations which he then subsequently lied about to the Vice-President Mike Pence.

It is one of a number of scandals to have engulfed the president since he took office on January 20.

“Everyday seems to be a day of new drama in this White House and it is part of the leadership style that we’ve seen from President Trump - he likes to preside over chaos and keeping people off balance,” Earnest said.

“It’s the way he ran his campaign and it worked; But I think we are seeing that running a campaign is a lot different to running a country. When you are running a country people expect you to be a source of stability, not chaos.”

Illustrations by Sophia den Breems

”Why Trump’s ties to Russia would be way worse than Watergate”

- Sarah Kendzior, Flyover Country Correspondent, 30 March 2017:

At 5:25 am on Monday, March 20, Donald J. Trump logged onto Twitter and wrote: “James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it!”

Hours later, at a congressional hearing assembled to investigate foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, FBI director James Comey confirmed the FBI probe into Trump’s ties to Russia that same day. Comey confirmed that Trump and “individuals associated with the Trump campaign” had been under investigation for Russian collusion since late July, and that the investigation was still ongoing.

Contrary to Trump’s assertion, this statement was not “fake news,” nor was it news at all to those who had followed the Russian interference story since it broke last summer.

In August 2016, former Democratic Senator Harry Reid implored Comey to reveal information about Russian interference that he said “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results,” adding that the public had the right to know before the November election. Comey responded, notoriously, not by revealing that Trump was under FBI investigation, but by implying that Hillary Clinton was, in an “October surprise” faux email scandal that was retracted only after the rumor had damaged her campaign.

Reid wrote to Comey again in late October and reemphasized the Russian threat: “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity… and yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.”

After Trump won, calls for an investigation into Russian interference began in late November, led by Republicans like John McCain and Lindsay Graham as well as Democrats like Elijah Cummings, Maxine Waters, and Adam Schiff, the latter of whom led the interrogation of Comey and NSA head Michael Rogers at the March 20 hearings. Though it has falsely been portrayed by both the Trump administration and some media outlets as a Democrat-led witchhunt, Russian interference in the election was always a bipartisan concern. Any threat to both national security and sovereignty is a bipartisan concern, and the reluctance of the Trump administration to cooperate with the investigation has long been an ominous indication of his limitations and loyalties.

Instead of watchdogs, we have lapdogs

If you were the president of the United States, sworn under oath to protect and serve the public, wouldn’t you want foreign interference in your campaign to be investigated – at the very least, to prevent the recurrence of similar actions?

Or would you try to impede the investigation, by smearing those who seek it (among them intelligence officials, legislators, and reporters) and by installing officials who either benefit from the Russian relationship (like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson), seem selected in order to obfuscate the Russian relationship (like Attorney General Jeff Sessions), or both?

Trump chose to assemble an administration designed to cover up and aid his shady dealings with the Kremlin, leading to an administration so spectacularly corrupt and inept it has no corollary in US history.

Here’s where it currently stands:

The President is under investigation for colluding with a foreign power. He is being investigated by an oversight committee, the head of which, Republican representative Devin Nunes, has functioned less as a watchdog than a lapdog, providing information about the investigation of Trump to Trump in a breach of protocol. And this was not Nunes’ only misdeed: he was also present at a January meeting between Turkish officials and Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, who in February resigned in disgrace after being revealed to be working secretly for the Turkish and Russian governments for millions of dollars.

In short, the US has employed a president suspected of treason, an oversight committee head who refuses to do oversight, and a national security advisor who undermined US national security.

The Trump clan and the Russian spy recruiter

Unfortunately, that’s only the beginning. There is also attorney general Jeff Sessions, who has had to recuse himself from the Russia interference investigation because he is implicated due to multiple meetings with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the campaign. (Sessions is not alone; Kislyak, rumored to moonlight as a spy recruiter, also met with Flynn, Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, and Trump, though all have mysteriously foggy memories of these encounters.)

Then there’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recipient of an “Order of Friendship” medal from Vladimir Putin, who does not seem to know why he is even in office, admitting this week, “I didn’t want this job, my wife told me to do this.” Unfortunately, Tillerson came to that revelation only after inflaming military tensions with North Korea.

On top of that, the Trump administration contains a burgeoning and possibly illegal nepotistic dynasty (Jared and Ivanka, currently getting security clearances and White House office space despite no experience in government)....

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Classical liberals make a two-paragraph declaration of obsolescence

No one ever thought that classical liberals would ever get around to actually acknowledging that they are fine with getting you and your family killed by roving bands of Islamic ‘migrants’ who are permanently conducting hijra for the past 1400 years and are always looking for a new location to park their reactionary socio-economic caravan of rampant misogyny, homophobia, mestizaje and genocide, but here it is:

Charles Johnson / FEE.org, ‘Why Free Immigration is a Right’, 30 Mar 2017:

Well good God, of course it is morally wrong for nations to pursue their “self-interest” in anything, and especially in border control policies. People have self-interests that matter, morally; nations do not. Nations are toxic hellholes of false identity and purveyors of monstrous political violence.

Nations are not rational people; they are not free associations or contractual agreements; they are unchosen, coercively assembled collectives, whose interests are typically an abortion of, if not an outright war against, the moral interests of individual people which actually deserve to be cultivated, practiced and respected. For anyone committed to individual liberty, a nations’ “interests” deserve no notice at all except to trample them underfoot.

So, there is that. That happened. A classical liberal man actually wrote those paragraphs, and he was not intoxicated when he wrote them.

That excerpt really is basically a two-paragraph declaration of ideological obsolescence on the part of classical liberalism.

Apparently if you pre-emptively use force so as to prevent your enemies from pillaging your lands and killing your family, that makes you ‘a bad person’ or something. Crucially though, it also happens to make you a winner, which I think is the most important thing.

Separately, Charles Johnson is indeed correct when he says that nations are ‘coercively assembled collectives’ which wage ‘outright war’ against ‘the moral interests of individual people’. The process of state formation is indeed an inherently violent array of actions from which all other actions of the state cannot be extricated, and the law itself is essentially an opinion with guns and detention facilities behind it. That is completely true.

With that said, though. Does anyone actually care?

Literally nobody even cares, so whatever

When asked to choose between the ‘liberty’ to have some individuals make moral choices in complete chaos and uncertainty, versus the ‘monstrous political violence’ of the state which creates stability and guarantees the safe existence of the people from which actual prosperity flows, the people should always choose the state.

Liberty has to be properly understood as not ‘freedom from’, but rather ‘freedom to’. The task of the state is to steer a course that allows for the flourishing of prosperity without undermining the social-economic position of the dominant class which creates and reproduces state power, and without significantly undermining the ethnic composition of the people within the jurisdiction of the state’s territory, as genes are a productive force and as such are a factor in the creation of the prosperity atop which the state subsists.

Talking to the invaders is useless

If someone virtue-signalled to Arabs through enacting lax border policies and then framed it as an act of kindness in the social media domain in the hopes that this would somehow smooth integration (still a stupid idea, of course, as integration is a stupid idea), it would actually be just liberals signalling to other liberals in a de facto echo chamber, because Arabs actually barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less finding time to read English language in the social media domain. This is a fact that is known among most security consultants and among almost anyone who has ever been involved in Information Operations in Mesopotamia after 2003. ‘The Arab man in the street’ does not read. The Arab guy in the street has a political understanding gleaned from the oral pronouncements of his local Imam, a surface level understanding of current events from Arab language television, and a tangle of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories shared orally or across social media. In the case where social media is used, engagement-rates among Arabs are low, which is to say, they do not actually click links.

Almost 100% of the hearts and minds ‘messaging’ that classical liberal thinktanks who are trying to ‘defend values’ have engaged in, has actually been sent into an echo chamber of Europeans and Americans congratulating each other for crafting increasingly sophisticated narratives which all point toward strategically stupid conclusions which undermine European security.

Meanwhile, the mostly male Arab Muslim migrant wave has been ignoring it all while sitting in an ideological trash dumpster of misogyny and homophobia, as they despise all the progressive gains that have been made in regions of the world other than theirs. They have no respect for any other ethnic group and they believe that it is their mission to demographically infest the whole planet.

Safe beneath the watchful eyes

Without security there can be no real freedom. Most people know this almost instinctively, and that is for example why the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union delivered up a ‘Leave’ result.

The British people have displayed a revealed preference for the untrammelled full spectrum dominance of the British security state led by Theresa May and Amber Rudd, rather than a European Union which has fallen under the de facto control of Angela Merkel.

We can conclude from this that the British people enjoy actually winning at counter-terrorism more than they enjoy virtue-signalling to a foaming tide of Arab Muslim ‘migrants’ who can barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less reading English in the social media domain.

The British people don’t actually believe in classical liberalism. They believe in being real people. And that is a reason for optimism.

Classical liberal ‘freedom’ supposes that individuals can be abstracted from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where they exercise their choices, that is to say, abstracted from everything that makes them who they are specifically, and not someone else. It supposes that the individual is always prior to her ends. However, there is nothing that can prove that the individual can apprehend herself as a subject completely free of any allegiance, free of any form of determinism. There is no reason why she would prefer that form of ‘freedom’ over any other social good. Such a conception ignores commitments and attachments to clans or spiritual sects, bonds of blood and soil, long-term economic class interests, and the fact that nations are the deepest and most enduring source of political experience. Classical liberal ‘freedom’ is a purely formal conception, which is completely incapable of capturing the rich tapestry of what a real person is.

The real person seeks ‘love’ and ‘eternity’. ‘Love’ is the wish that someone or something should continue to flourish forever, or at least, that they should ‘get the last word’ in the world before the story of humanity ends. In that sense, love is a desire to pursue victory and create a meaning where there was originally none. When standing alone, the individual is always defeated and approaching death alone is the most final of all defeats. But while death is a threshold which must be crossed and can only be crossed alone, it does not have to be approached alone. If the individual can pool her identity with the group, so that she becomes one with the will of the group as it solves the historical tasks which have been placed before it, then she is all-seeing and all-knowing forever and ever—capable of knowing what she is, and what she can become. She is really free and has attained ‘eternity’. 

Victory becomes attainable. We become the gendarmes who protect the actualisation of eternal love so that others can become part of it. We never die because this empire never dies, as it is constructed not only in the physical domain, but is also fortified in the domain of the mind. As such, we are expected to fight eternally for it. 

We are not afraid of the conflicts that lie ahead and we are not sorry about anything. 

Because love will emerge victorious over terror.

*Important editorial note: Though in this review Alexander Baron refers to Leo Frank as “white” in a few places, Majorityrights does not categorize Jews as “white.”

The Lynching Of A Guilty Man reviewed by Alexander Baron

The Leo Frank Case subtitled The Lynching Of A Guilty Man is the third volume in a massive study The Secret Relationship Between Blacks And Jews. The first volume was published in 1991, so this is no rush job. It is also clearly a book written with an agenda, but even vested interest can speak the truth. And the obvious vested interest of the Nation Of Islam comes as a welcome counterpoint to the concealed vested interest of the rest of the American media which unthinkingly points the finger at a black suspect in spite of the conviction of a white* one.

For those not au fait with this notorious case, it began when the body of Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the Atlanta Pencil Factory on April 26, 1913. The young worker had been murdered quite brutally for no apparent reason. The Negro security man who found the body quickly became a suspect - something that is more or less taken for granted nowadays unless the person who finds a body clearly has no connection with the victim, eg a hiker happening upon a skeleton.

Newt Lee aside, there was no shortage of more promising suspects, and two soon emerged: the factory manager/part owner Leo Frank, and his gofer Jim Conley. Although Conley was linked to the killing by forensic evidence, in particular two ludicrous notes written from the perspective of the victim, the authorities went with the prosecution of the white* man while Conley testified as an accessory after the fact. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but after extensive failed appeals his sentence was commuted. This led to outraged prominent citizens kidnapping him from the State Penitentiary, driving him back to Atlanta, and stringing him from a tree by his neck.

A century and more on there remain two competing narratives; the official and accepted narrative is that Leo Frank was innocent and Jim Conley the villain of the piece. Some might find that surprising as Conley was never indicted for the crime and Frank was never cleared officially in spite of enormous posthumous lobbying by especially the misnamed Anti-Defamation League. This book adheres to the second narrative, that ridiculous as Conley’s tale may have been, he was in fact totally innocent, an accessory only after the fact, having found himself in a truly invidious position, a man of humble estate - in effect a third class citizen - who was told he must follow the orders of his boss or else.

In the past quarter to half century, quite a few authors have come out in support of this narrative, but none more impressively than the dedicated Leo Frank website and now this minutely documented book.

If anyone believes the fact that the forensic evidence pointing to Conley should have indicted him and him alone, here are two cases from the 1980s that show how wrong this kind of reasoning can be. In March 1984, the black American Sylvester Smith was accused of violating two young girls, cousins. As all the parties involved in this case were black, there was no racial angle. The girls had clearly been interfered with sexually, and unsurprisingly, Smith was convicted. Twenty years later he was cleared on appeal, the shocking truth was that the real perpetrator was a 9 year old boy (who went on as an adult to commit a murder). The girls had been coached by their grandmother to point the finger at Smith to protect him. After her death, they recanted.

An equally shocking case that made international headlines was that of Lindy Chamberlain. In 1980 while camping at Ayers Rock, Australia, her baby daughter Azaria was snatched by a dingo. She was convicted of the murder based largely on forensic evidence, but nearly six years later, more reliable forensic evidence was found - the girl’s matinee jacket near a dingo lair.

In the Mary Phagan case, the forensic evidence against Jim Conley (the notes) was outweighed by the forensic and other evidence against his boss, in particular there was evidence that the girl has been murdered upstairs. Almost all the other evidence pointed to Frank, everything from his demeanour to his willingness to point the finger at everyone else including at first Newt Lee. Conley on the other hand remained cool as a cucumber, so either he was a psychopath and a potential future Oscar winner, or he really was telling the truth, however outrageous or crazy his story may have sounded. But when the facts are all in, it wasn’t that outrageous, it wasn’t that crazy, and justice was done in the Deep South, both for Mary Phagan and for a black man whose word many of Frank’s supporters believed should carry no weight at all.

A few criticisms are in order:

In the Preface, the claim is made that an “unknown posse” lynched Frank, and that he was and remains the only Jew ever lynched in America. The posse was hardly unknown, its members did not bother to hide their faces, and indeed appeared proud of their work. Later in the book it is made clear that their identities were in no way secret. The doubtful honour of being the first Jew lynched in America appears to belong to Samuel Bierfield in 1868, but neither he nor Frank were lynched because they were Jews.

Frank was hardly the most important Jew in the Deep South as claimed; he was certainly far from the wealthiest, and was the New York Times the world’s most important newspaper? The most important in America maybe, but not more important than the London Times. And was World War One raging in 1913?

The reason the crime was committed and how it was committed are both laid out in impressive detail, as are the attempts by Leo Frank to point the finger of suspicion initially at Newt Lee, and then at anyone else without mentioning the fact that Conley was at the pencil factory at the material time. Why would he not do that? The only logical reason is that he didn’t want Conley to open his mouth, and once Conley did, he too had to be accused. The book raises too the interesting speculation that Frank was considering murdering Conley – the only direct witness – as well.

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Jewish Daily Forward, ‘Epshteyn To Leave Trump TV’, 25 Mar 2017:

Boris Epshteyn, a prominent Trump surrogate during the election campaign, is expected to quit his post at Trump TV, Politico is reporting from many sources close to the administration.

The Trump TV project was widely seen as a post-election project if the Republican candidate had failed to win and needed to build yet another alternative to news that would outflank Fox and Breitbart on the right, and give Trump an ongoing political platform.

Epshteyn, a 35-year old attorney from a Russian-Jewish family and a college friend of Eric Trump, is expected to join the administration in an official capacity.

It’s rapidly becoming the case that The Forward is one of the most authoritative mainstream news sources on what is happening inside the Trump administration, because so many of the Trump administration’s most prominent and influential figures are Jewish.

The FBI is now investigating a story that almost everyone intuitively knew was true from the start:

The Hill, ‘FBI probing far-right news sites: report’, 20 Mar 2017:

The FBI is investigating whether far-right news websites contributed to Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new report.

The probe is focused on discovering whether Russian operatives used conservative outlets to help spread stories favoring now-President Trump, McClatchy said Monday.

McClatchy confirmed with two people familiar with the inquiry that the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division is driving the investigation.

The sources said Russian operatives seemingly strategically timed computer commands called “bots” to blitz social media with pro-Trump stories.  

The bots were used at times when Trump appeared struggling with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, they continued.

McClatchy’s sources said the bots mainly created millions of Facebook and Twitter posts linking to articles on far-right websites including Breitbart News, InfoWars and the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News.

The sources added that some of the stories were false or contained a mixture of fact and fiction.

Federal investigators are now examining whether the far-right news organizations took any actions aiding Russian operatives, they said.

The bots could have amplified pro-Trump news on Facebook and Twitter, regardless of the outlets’ knowledge or involvement, the pair of sources noted.

“This may be one of the most impactful information operations in the history of intelligence,” one former U.S. intelligence official told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the matter’s sensitivity.

FBI Director James Comey earlier Monday confirmed the Department of Justice (DOJ) is scrutinizing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 race, including any possible ties between Moscow and officials from Trump’s election campaign.

“As you know our practice is not to confirm the existence of an ongoing investigation,” he said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“But in unusual circumstances where it is in the public interest, it may be appropriate to do so,” Comey added, noting the DOJ had authorized him to break bureau policy and publicly disclose the probe.

“This is one of those circumstances. I can promise you we will follow the facts wherever they lead.”

Comey added the FBI’s investigation began in late July and will include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.

During the campaign itself, Louise Mensch had reported on basically the same thing. You can revisit that at Heatstreet, and I’ll just give you an exerpt from that:

Heatstreet, ‘How Russia’s Twitter Bots And Trolls Work With Donald Trump Campaign Accounts’, 20 Oct 2016:

If you’ve been following the Twitter fiasco that is the Donald Trump campaign, you will be aware of his association with the Alt-right and with Russia bot accounts.
 
Broadly speaking, Trump has two categories of support on Twitter. Alt-right trolls, and Russian bot accounts pretending to be patriotic Americans.*
 
In many cases, these two groups cross over. The altright contains actual humans, such as @prisonplanet, and many, many bots.
 
In this article I shall however examine the way in which Russian bots are created and used to follow and boost Trump online.
 
It is not that Donald Trump does not have widespread support. He does; even at his current polling lows, his support includes millions of Americans. It is, rather, that Trump’s supporters are incredibly unlikely to use Twitter.
 
Broadly speaking ,Trump’s real supporters aren’t on Twitter – and Trump’s Twitter supporters aren’t real.

[...]

Three such bots that I videoed in the act of using this method were @Commander6080, @Sbragusa, and @jamesdgriffin. All have profiles that pretend to be Americans and to live in the USA.
 
How might this affect a twitter trend? What is the point of it? One scientist theorized as follows. It is a “fake trend” theory called “A Handoff”:

Let’s say you had a hashtag you wanted to get trending. You have a thousand bots (or Russian Trolls) and a popular account like Ricky Vaughn. You have the bots start using the hashtag, they start flooding twitter until it gets a high count (but not in the top 20 trends) then have a real person,  Ricky Vaughn, start pitching the hashtag to his followers. Here is where the window of timing kicks in: within minutes, Ricky Vaughn can have something trending, but before he gets the hashtag to the top 15 you have almost all of the bots automatically delete their tweets with the hashtags. You‘ve now started “a trend” quickly and have had it associated with “Ricky Vaughn” and not a 1,000 odd bots or Russian trolls.

[...]

This whole arrangement of social media manipulation is part of the communication operations side of the modern form of Russian Active Measures. The most remarkable thing about this arrangement is how it is tactically innovative and well-timed to exploit a particular weakness in American society specifically, but it is strategically unsophisticated because Russian commanders have also permanently ruined their own country’s reputation among the international journalist community and among most people on social media.

It’s highly abnormal for an entire country to transparently do something like that. Why would they choose to so carelessly and openly abandon even the appearance of any kind of ‘normality’ on national level?

There are a few reasons as to why they would have chosen to behave this way, but all of them seem to be capable of being summarised like this: Russian commanders may have been willing to sacrifice their country’s perceived journalistic integrity in the eyes of most of the world, because they’ve already given up on the idea that they could ever create a narrative that could appeal to a broad audience. Instead, Russia is seeking to cultivate a very particular audience in Europe and North America (excluding the United Kingdom which they seem to be abandoning). They are seeking to cultivate that roughly 20% of the population which is somewhere vaguely in the nationalistic spectrum and is disillusioned about the political situation in their country, but also lacks grounding and experience in how the world actually works. Russian commanders want to shape the media experience through which those people will come to terms with the world around them, and thus, create a long-term ‘following’, even if those followers are not necessarily aware of what it is that they are following.

The utility of this is clear. 20% of a population is enough to seriously impact the operation of political institutions in western democracies which operate in a pluralistic mode. Russian journalism is not seeking to be liked by everyone, or even trusted. Russia just wants 20% of any given European population to be responsive to their input because that is the bare minimum that they need.

The arrest of a second Jewish man for the wave of “anti-Jewish hate crimes” against Jewish Community Centers (JCC) in the U.S. has left Jewish supremacist organizations and individuals scrambling to explain why the single greatest spree of “anti-Semitic” incidents in recent history originated in Israel.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, the second arrest is that of the father of the 18-year-old Jew arrested earlier for over 100 bomb threats to JCCs in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The father’s detention was extended until March 30, on charges that he was “involved in most of the same crimes and many of the threatening telephone calls.”

The suspect’s mother was also questioned, as the unusually large antenna and other extraordinary hardware used by her husband and son in the conspiracy were so unusual that it is extremely unlikely that she would not have been aware of what was going on.

According to a report by the Religion News Service’s Lauren Markoe, as published in the Colorado Gazette, “Jews worldwide uttered a collective gasp” when they found out that the threats to “more than 135 Jewish institutions across North America is Jewish himself.”

The “collective gasp” turned out, however, to be just another outburst of anti-Gentile hatred, as summed up by the article’s quote from Deborah Lipstadt, “who studies anti-Semitism at Emory University,” who said that she didn’t “know if it would be better if we found out if it was a right-wing white Supremacist, Neo Nazi, or follower of ISIS.”

The Gazette report went on to say that “now many worry that the suspect’s identity will lend credence to anti-Semites’ common claim that Jews exaggerate threats and crimes against them.”

This is of course a very valid “worry”—especially because there is a long record of fake hate crimes being perpetrated by Jews.

Fake Jewish hate crimes go back decades: For example, as early as 1963, five Jews were arrested in New York City while painting swastikas on the front of the Israeli Consulate-General building, a building which also housed the Israeli mission to the United Nations.

Source: TNO, 24 March 2017

Reveal News, “White nationalist gets his money from cotton fields – and the government”, By Lance Williams 17 March 2017:

Topics: Accountability

Two weeks after last year’s presidential election, white nationalist Richard Spencer held forth on a cable news show about how white people built America.

“White people ultimately don’t need other races in order to succeed,” he told the audience of the black-oriented program, “NewsOne Now.”

The exchange grew heated as host Roland Martin questioned Spencer’s rhetoric: Didn’t slaves help build America? Wasn’t the nation’s 19th-century economic boom propelled by the slave labor that produced the world’s cotton on Southern plantations?

America’s rise was “not through black people” and “has nothing to do with slavery,” Spencer retorted. “White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton,” he said. “We do it now.”

He is in a position to know. Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel sold for $4.3 million in 2012.

The Spencer family’s farms also are subsidized heavily by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.

USDA farm subsidy payments to Spencer family companies, 2008-2015

Farm Payments

Dickenhorst Farms $1,014,558
Spencer Farms $524,655
Dickenhorst Trust $201,460
Sher-Di-Je Land $165,029
Poor Richard Partnership $98,878
A-Renee Partnership $78,016
Total $2,082,596

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group

Although Spencer has attracted extensive media attention as a leader of the so-called alt-right movement – particularly after he drew Nazi salutes at an event celebrating Donald Trump’s election – he never has explained publicly how he supports himself while actively promoting his agenda via conferences and media appearances. The finances of his nonprofit think tank, the National Policy Institute, are a mystery; the organization hasn’t filed a public report since 2013. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the IRS revoked the institute’s tax-exempt status.

Spencer, 38, is a dropout from a Duke University Ph.D. history program who emerged during the Trump campaign as one of the nation’s most visible white separatist agitators. In his writing, speeches and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate creating a whites-only “ethno state” in North America. While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the United States.

But the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history suggest a different possible lineage for Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era.

Spencer family land holdings in Louisiana
Farming company Parish Acreage
Dickenhorst Farms Tensas 1,888
Dickenhorst Farms East Carroll 967
Sher-Di-Je Land Tensas 1,186
A-Renee Partners Madison 753
Poor Richard Partnership Franklin 400
Spencer, Sherry Madison 90
Total   5,284

Sources: Louisiana Tax Commission parish tax rolls; parish assessment records

Spencer declined in an interview this week to discuss how much money he personally receives from cotton farming and government subsidies and whether that income funds his political activities.

“I’m not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business,” he said, later adding: “I’m going to navigate the world as it is, and I’m not going to be a pauper.”

One Spencer family farming company, which holds title to 400 acres of land, is called the Poor Richard Partnership.

In the interview, Spencer also downplayed his family’s influence on his political views, saying, “My parents are very mainstream Episcopalian Republicans in Dallas.”

Although Spencer grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Dallas and now splits his time between Montana and Washington, D.C., his family lived in the South for generations. Records show his mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small northeast Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, Spencer’s mother inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. Today, her two children are her business partners.

Spencer’s mother did not respond to an email and voicemails seeking comment for this story. In the past, she has said she does not share her son’s views. In an open letter sent to their local newspaper in December, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism.”

The region that is home to the Spencers’ farms has a history of slavery and racism. Through the civil rights era, the Klan targeted black residents there with lynchings, cross burnings and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3,000 acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until 1964, according to Elvadus Fields Jr., mayor of the town of St. Joseph.

White supremacist views typically run in the family, said writer and race relations expert Cleo Scott Brown. Feelings of racial superiority often are passed “from generation to generation, because that’s what they believe,” said Brown, whose father – a civil rights leader in East Carroll Parish, where the Spencers own 900 acres of farmland – was shot and wounded during a 1962 voter registration drive, allegedly by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Agribusiness in the region today is heavily mechanized and provides few jobs. In 2013, CNN reported that East Carroll Parish suffers from the worst income inequality in the nation: The richest 5 percent of residents earned an average of $611,000 per year, 90 times what the poorest 20 percent earned. The parish’s population is 67 percent black.

Ownership of Spencer family farming companies

Farming company

Owners
Dickenhorst Farms Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister
Dickenhorst Trust Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Sher-Di-Je Land Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Spencer Farms Sherry Spencer
Poor Richard Partnership Sherry Spencer*
A-Renee Partners Sherry Spencer and daughter

*Records show that Richard Spencer has received subsidy income from the partnership but don’t identify him as an owner.

Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group; Louisiana secretary of state filings

Race relations have improved significantly in recent decades. But after Trump’s election, some white residents celebrated by draping their pickup trucks with Confederate flags and driving through the region’s towns, according to the Rev. Roosevelt Grant, head of the NAACP branch in Winnsboro, Franklin Parish, near another of the Spencers’ farms.

The Trump presidency, he said, “has caused people to pray more.”

Spencer’s maternal grandfather, Dr. R.W. Dickenhorst, established the family farming business. He was a radiologist who started a medical practice in Monroe in 1952 and became wealthy and socially prominent, according to local newspaper obituaries.

Racial segregation was a given in Monroe then. Blacks were barred from housing, schools and public facilities used by whites. White superiority “was the way of life; that was the way it was, and anyone challenging it was challenging God’s will,” said the Rev. Roosevelt Wright Jr., a local historian in Monroe.

Dickenhorst’s daughter, Sherry, who would grow up to be Richard Spencer’s mother, enrolled in all-white Neville High School in 1962, according to district records. In 1964, at the start of her junior year, integration of the school began, with a single African American student enrolling.

As Dickenhorst’s medical practice prospered, he bought farmland in northeast Louisiana on the Mississippi River’s west bank. He died decades later, in 2002, and his wife died the following year. By then, their only daughter was the wife of a wealthy Dallas eye surgeon and the mother of two grown children: Richard Spencer and his sister, who did not respond to an email and phone calls seeking comment.

Today, through Dickenhorst Farms and several related companies, Sherry Spencer, 68, and her two children jointly own most of the family farmland, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Sherry Spencer is general partner of Dickenhorst Farms, and Richard Spencer and his sister are part owners, according to state and federal records. The family contracts out crop production to local farmers, a common practice in a region where corporations and absentee owners control much of the land.

The Spencer family’s farms are headquartered at a $3 million home in the ski town of Whitefish, Montana, where Sherry Spencer now lives. Also headquartered there: Richard Spencer’s think tank, his AltRight.com website and other white nationalist-related enterprises he controls, including a book publisher and web design outfit. Spencer also has lived in Whitefish in recent years ­– sometimes in his mother’s home, sometimes in a condominium she owns, according to documents and interviews.

The Spencers have received payments from two federal farm programs. One is the commodity subsidy program, intended to guarantee income for farmers who are helping to maintain supplies of certain crops deemed important by the government. The other is the conservation reserve program, which pays farmers for environmentally sound farming practices. Most of the $2 million paid to the Spencers has been in commodity subsidy payments for growing cotton.

Yet, Spencer has been bitterly critical of America and its government.

“This is a sick, disgusting society,” he declared in his speech at an alt-right gathering in Washington after the election, “run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy.”

Note: I have no necessary qualms with Spencer’s wealth (though ultimately, something like Bowery’s/ William Jennings Bryan’s progressive land taxation based on site value might be in order) nor do I have anything against his family’s alleged history of wanting to live separately from blacks. - DanielS