From Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand and Kristen Holmes' 11-15-24 CNN article entitled "Trump’s Team Skips FBI Background Checks for Some Cabinet Picks":
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.
Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.
The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
Ultimately, the president has the final authority on who he nominates and decides to share intelligence with, regardless of the established protocol set in the wake of World War II to make sure those selections don’t have unknown foreign ties or other issues that could raise national security concerns.
But circumventing background checks would be bucking a long-established norm in Washington. It also reflects Trump’s deep mistrust of the national security establishment, which he derides as the Deep State. Sources say he has privately questioned the need for law enforcement background checks.
Dan Meyer, a national security attorney in Washington, DC, said the incoming Trump administration “doesn’t want harmony.” They “don’t want the FBI to coordinate a norm; they want to hammer the norm,” he said.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Luke Broadwater's 11-15-24 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Johnson Says He Will Object to Release of Ethics Report on Gaetz":
Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday said he planned to object to the release of a damaging bipartisan investigative report on the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican whom President-elect Donald J. Trump wants to be attorney general.
Mr. Johnson said it would be a “terrible breach of protocol” for the House Ethics Committee, which investigated Mr. Gaetz over sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other allegations, to make public its findings because Mr. Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress.
Mr. Gaetz abruptly resigned this week after being tapped by Mr. Trump, effectively ending the investigation just days before the committee had planned to vote on releasing its conclusions.
“I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report,” Mr. Johnson told reporters on Friday at the Capitol, adding that he would contact the chairman of the panel, Representative Michael Guest, Republican of Mississippi, to make his wishes known.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Richard Rubenstein's 11-15-24 COUNTERPUNCH article entitled "'It’s the System, Stupid!' The Underlying Causes of Trump's Victory":
In 2016 Steve Bannon told Donald Trump that if he played his cards right, he could become “the Roosevelt of the Right.” That is, he could create a coalition of ultra-wealthy capitalists, small entrepreneurs, and discontented workers and bind them together under the flag of cultural nationalism. The key to doing this was to campaign against “the System” – not the system of capitalist oligarchy, of course, but the structures of administrative regulation, relatively free trade, and military commitments abroad that defined what Trump and Bannon called the “Deep State.” The key to their electoral success was to cast MAGA as the movement of systemic change and the Democrats as the party of the status quo – a trap into which the supporters of Biden and Harris easily fell [...].
[T]he problem is not that liberals fight for the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups. It is that, by accepting the zero-sum rules of the existing oligarchical system, they declare less oppressed groups to be “privileged” and lump them in with elite oppressors. Not surprisingly, this threatens and alienates groups that are only relatively privileged, and who are actually potential allies against the oligarchy and its political camp followers [...].
[T]o be white rather than Black, male rather than female, straight rather than gay, gives straight white males only relative advantages over the members of more oppressed groups. It clearly does not relieve them of oppression by far more powerful elites. In fact, their relative superiority over other groups is part of a sleazy divide-and-conquer game used by those with oligarchical power to keep them in line [...].
What is vicious about this is not merely that elite power makes a farce of democracy, but also that it continually generates solution-less problems. Thus, we export weapons of destruction as if there were no possibility of converting military production into a program to produce goods and services to satisfy basic human needs. We fight over immigration as if there were no such thing as a planned economy capable of remedying our labor shortage without lowering wage rates and bankrupting social services. And we choose sides in disputes between relatively oppressed and less oppressed identity groups as if there were no way to reduce competition between them for unnecessarily scarce resources and economic opportunities.What James Carville might say, if he understood the situation better, is “It’s the system, stupid!” If we do not recognize that it is the system of capitalist oligarchy and its political servants that limit the possibilities of conflict resolution and generate most of this discontent, we will keep fighting unnecessary battles that Democrats are unlikely to win against a movement that claims (however falsely) to be anti-system.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Mark Daniell's 11-15-24 TORONTO SUN article entitled "Sylvester Stallone Hails Donald Trump as 'Second George Washington,' Compares President to Rocky":
Sylvester Stallone praised President-elect Donald Trump and hailed him as the “second George Washington” at a speech Thursday night in Palm Beach, Fla. [...].
“We’re in the presence of a really mythical character,” Stallone said to a roomful of cheers in a video shared on X by C-SPAN. “I love mythology. And this individual does not exist on this planet. Nobody in the world could have pulled off what he pulled off, so I’m in awe.”
He also likened Trump to Jesus and his boxer character Rocky telling the crowd his screen creation was “a chosen person … Something was going to happen. This man was going to go through a metamorphosis and change lives, just like President Trump.”
He continued on by celebrating Trump as a commander-in-chief akin to America’s first president George Washington, whose leadership altered the course of U.S. history.
“When George Washington defended his country, he had no idea that he was gonna change the world. Because without him, you could imagine what the world would look like. Guess what? We got the second George Washington” [...].
Back in 2021, Stallone shut down QAnon followers, after some of the adherents believed the actor was signaling the group when he posted a photo of himself sporting a cap with the letter “Q” alongside the caption: “Heading into the Storm…”
“For those incredibly inquisitive individuals, let me state unequivocally that the Q on this hat stands for Quantum of Solace, the name of the boat I was on, not anything else, OK?” he wrote on Instagram.
“Relax…So folks, the moral of the story is…enjoy your lives and let other people enjoy theirs…So keep punching.”
One of the central beliefs of the followers of the anonymous prophet named “Q” is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against Trump during his term in office.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Colleen Long and Dan Merica's 11-12-24 PBS article entitled "What Trump Has Said He Will Do on Day 1":
Donald Trump has said he wouldn’t be a dictator — “except for Day 1.” According to his own statements, he’s got a lot to do on that first day in the White House.
His list includes starting up the mass deportation of migrants, rolling back Biden administration policies on education, reshaping the federal government by firing potentially thousands of federal employees he believes are secretly working against him, and pardoning people who were arrested for their role in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he said of his Day 1 plans.
When he took office in 2017, he had a long list, too, including immediately renegotiating trade deals, deporting migrants and putting in place measures to root out government corruption. Those things didn’t happen all at once.
How many executive orders in the first week? “There will be tens of them. I can assure you of that,” Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News on Sunday.
Here’s a look at what Trump has said he will do in his second term and whether he can do it the moment he steps into the White House...
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Peter Savodnik's 11-6-24 FREE PRESS article entitled "'We Blew It, Joe!'":
[I]n the midst of shedding its loyalty to the working and middle classes, the [Democratic Party] has transformed itself into a corporatized, single-cell organism. It no longer appears to represent a true coalition of interest groups—the way parties normally do. It is made up of platform surfers building their social media audiences on the backs of the very people they claim to bleed for: marginalized peoples, birthing people, Gazans, whoever.
They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ very honest, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Leo Sands' 11-5-24 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "Elon Musk Promotes Video Referencing QAnon in Support of Trump":
Elon Musk shared a video in support of Donald Trump that appeared to include references to the extremist QAnon ideology and footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, elevating the radicalized movement on the evening before millions of American voters cast their ballots on Election Day.
The billionaire owner of X has become one of Trump’s most vocal backers in the closing weeks of the campaign, and he has shared a blizzard of misinformation about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Musk has frequently appeared at campaign rallies alongside the Republican nominee, while giving over $118.5 million to his own pro-Trump group.
The one-minute video, a mashup of campaign footage and archival video set to audio of Donald Trump speaking, features the letters “PATRIQTS” flickering on-screen and phrases used online by QAnon devotees [...].
The video, which was already circulating online before Musk amplified it on the eve of Election Day, also included what appeared to be imagery from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when pro-Trump rioters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in support of his baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
According to X’s own metrics, the video had garnered more than 23 million views by the early hours of Election Day [...].
Musk has boosted far-right memes and bogus theories in the past, winking to QAnon prophesies [...].
Far-right activists and conspiracy theorists have spent the years since the last presidential election shoring up an online infrastructure to spread false claims about election fraud — an effort supported by Musk in the run-up to Election Day.
In that period, American voters have grappled with an avalanche of misleading claims about nearly every aspect of their lives — from health care and education to immigration and the weather.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From 10-28-24 DAILY DOT article entitled "QAnon Crowd Explodes After Trump Says He and Matt Gaetz Have a ‘Little Secret’ That Will Swing the Election":
QAnon supporters are convinced that their wildest fantasies will soon come true after former President Donald Trump alluded to a “little secret” during his rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
Shadow of Ezra, a prominent QAnon promoter on X, highlighted the remark the following day before asking his more than 543,000 followers to guess what the secret was.
“Donald Trump teased that he and Matt Gaetz share a ‘little secret’ that’s set to give Republicans an edge, saying, ‘Our secret is making waves… We’ll reveal it once the race is won.’ What’s the secret?” wrote Shadow of Ezra.
Conspiracy theories flooded the replies, many revolving around the core QAnon belief that Trump will jail and execute all of his political enemies once power has been regained.
“They’ve been running a sting operation for the last 8 years and the hammer comes down after Trump wins,” the user RedPillPatriot said.
“The reveal is going to be filled with perp walks,” another added.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Molly Olmstead's 7-29-24 SLATE article entitled "QAnon’s Victims":
According to some estimates, tens of millions of Americans have bought into QAnon, whether they know it or not: A 2021 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that roughly 30 million Americans believed “a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” control “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S.” That number grew slightly in 2022, making QAnon as popular as some religions.
We are still in the process of understanding just how much the movement has poisoned our politics. We are still learning the ways in which the beliefs born from an internet movement have reshaped the ways Americans interact with the information they encounter. We are still struggling to understand the disastrous repercussions this movement had in contributing to a mass death event in a global pandemic. But there’s another legacy of QAnon that can be equally hard to account for: the countless private tragedies of loved ones becoming paranoid, obsessive, cruel, and unrecognizable [...].
SLATE: After Trump lost the 2020 election and the promises of a “Storm” didn’t materialize, Q got a lot quieter. There haven’t been any Q drops in a couple years now. You wrote a book about the grip of QAnon on people’s lives—what about now? How do you still see it as relevant?
COOK: Honestly, these days, QAnon has really just blended into the mainstream. I wouldn’t even think of it as a specific movement, or as just people who identify as QAnon followers. It’s a broader populace that subscribes to these views, even without using the label. The QAnon fixation on pedophilia and child trafficking is a serious and very real issue: We’ve seen it distorted and weaponized into something where calling someone a pedophile has become a go-to political attack for some of our elected leaders.
And with the election around the corner, and especially with all the unprecedented events that have occurred in the past month, disinformation is just blowing up, out of control. Q may be gone for now. And while QAnon, officially, as a movement, has gone underground, the damage is done. We see it every single day. I mean, even just on Twitter last night, I opened the app, and one of the main curated stories by the platform was about how Biden was on his deathbed. There was one suggesting that he had been cloned, or Kamala had killed him. It’s no wonder this stuff has become so widely embraced. It’s so normalized.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
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