Tag: corruption

Fact Checkers Cover for Democratic Party’s Sordid History With the Ku Klux Klan

During a June 7th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on white supremacy and domestic terrorism, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz stated that:

  • the Ku Klux Klan “was formed by elected Democrats.”
  • Klan “leadership was almost entirely elected Democrats.”
  • today’s Democrats “try very hard to erase the history” of their party’s involvement with the Klan.
  • today’s Democrats “politicize acts of violence.”

Conversely, “fact checkers” like PolitiFact and the Associated Press have repeatedly argued that the Democratic Party did not found the Klan, played a limited role in it, and that racist southerners fled to the Republican Party after 1964.

In reality, Cruz’s statements are a much closer reflection of the facts.

Origins & Leadership

The AP and PolitiFact correctly state that the Klan was started by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee as a non-violent, grassroots social club without political motivations.

What the AP and PolitiFact fail to acknowledge is that the Klan’s 1865–66 founding as a social club does not mark the beginning of the Klan as it is known today. Per the 1971 academic book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, the “real beginning” of the “Ku Klux conspiracy” occurred at an 1867 meeting in Nashville that consolidated the Klan.

As explained by an 1884 book written by a founding member of the Klan, this meeting bound the “isolated dens together” with “unity of purpose and concert of action” to supposedly reign in rogue Klansmen that had turned violent toward black people just a year after the group’s founding. However, White Terror points out that if Klan leaders really wanted to eliminate violence, they would have disbanded altogether. Instead, they sought “tighter organization” and recruited leaders “of far greater prestige and authority whose influence extended throughout the state”—primarily ex-Confederate generals and Democratic politicians.

An investigation published by the Illinois General Assembly in 1976 explains that after the Klan “transformed into a political organization,” violence became more widespread under Democrat leadership. The men that guided the Klan’s reorganization and subsequent growth included:

However, the Illinois investigation also found that “central control over the actions of the various local Klan groups did not really exist,” and some of the figureheads above began “dropping out” to distance themselves from local terrorism. For example, Nathan Bedford Forest ordered the Klan disbanded in 1869 because he claimed a “few disobedient and bad men” had infiltrated the Klan, disgracing its “good name and honorable reputation.”

On the other hand, some prominent Democrats remained loyal to the Klan’s violent activities. For example, Fredrick Strudwick led a Klan attempt to assassinate a Republican state senator and was later elected as a Democrat to the North Carolina state legislature.

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Lightfoot Wants Chicago Drivers Under Constant Surveillance, But Look at What a Camera Caught Her SUV Doing

Chicago drivers are increasingly subjected to speed limit and red-light cameras that automatically send out millions in fines every year, and if they don’t pay, they can lose their driver’s license.

Meanwhile, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s motorcade reportedly has racked up hundreds of dollars in fines that she has refused to pay — without any consequence at all.

According to a review of public records by CWB Chicago, Lightfoot’s police-driven SUVs have been recorded exceeding the speed limit and going through red lights by the city’s traffic camera system several times in the last year — and none of the fines has been paid.

Several other cars registered to her motorcade also have had fines assessed but never paid, the report said.

CWB Chicago even found that one of the vehicles is now eligible for booting and being impounded because the fines are so far in arrears.

Worst of all, two of the speeding incidents occurred while Lightfoot’s SUVs were driving through school zones while exceeding the speed limit.

The report said none of the $658 in fines accumulated by the mayor’s motorcade since May 2021 has been paid.

But this is not just a recent habit. Her motorcade cars have a long history of breaking traffic laws, getting tickets and fines, and never paying them. It has been so bad that the city has gotten in a habit of just forgiving them because they never get paid anyway, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2020.

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FBI Wrongly Labeled ‘Derogatory Information’ on Hunter Biden as Disinformation: Whistleblowers

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed on July 25 that there were “systemic and existential problems” within the Justice Department and the FBI, after “highly credible” whistleblowers informed his office that officials from the bureau labeled evidence against Hunter Biden as disinformation.

“The allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation,” Grassley wrote in a letter (pdf) to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the “volume and consistency” of the whistleblowers’ allegations “substantiate their credibility.”

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The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet — As Usual, Congress Is Complicit

Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.

To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.

Because why not…

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Secret Service finds record of deleted text messages from around January 6 on the phones of at least TEN agents as Department of Homeland Security continues criminal probe of agency

Before it was instructed to halt its investigation last week, the United States Secret Service found records of deleted text messages on or around January 6, 2021, stored on the phones of at least 10 agents.

Secret Service investigators discovered metadata showing that text messages were sent and received on at least 10 agents’ phones in the days surrounding the Capitol riot – but have since been deleted, according to CNN. 

Investigators were then working to determine whether the content of these texts contained information about the attempted  insurrection, and whether they should have been preserved amid an ongoing House investigation into the riot, two unnamed sources told the network.

Among the text records the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General requested were those of the heads of the detail for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence: Bobby Engel and Tim Giebels, respectively.

It’s unclear whether they are included among the 10 personnel whose phones contained metadata showing records of deleted texts.

But among the 24 Secret Service members that were originally under scrutiny by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, sources told CNN, 10 other members had no text messages around that time and three others only had personal messages.

The deletion of the messages has raised the prospect of lost evidence that could shed further light on then-President Donald Trump’s actions during the insurrection, particularly after testimony about his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters at the Capitol. 

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Biden Threatened Ex-Ukraine Prez Poroshenko With Assassination If He Cooperated with Trump, Leaked Audio Reveals

Leaked audio from 2016 shows then-Vice President Joe Biden threatening former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko with assassination should he cooperate with the incoming Trump administration.

A One America News Network (OAN) report of a phone call recorded on November 16, 2016 – two weeks after Donald Trump’s shock electoral victory against Hillary Clinton – revealing Biden’s voice warning Poroshenko about working with Trump began circulating social media on Wednesday.

“This is getting very, very close to what I don’t want to have happen. I don’t want Trump to get in a position where he thinks he’s about to buy onto a policy where the financial system is going to collapse and he’s going to be looked to pour more money into Ukraine,” Biden told the former Ukraine president.

“That’s how he’ll think about it before he gets sophisticated enough to know the detail.”

“So, anything you can do to push the PrivatBank to closure so that the IMF loans comes forward, I would respectfully suggest is critically important to your economic as well as physical security,” Biden warned Poroshenko.

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Billions Continue to Be Laundered Through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to China’s Biowarfare Program

The National Institutes of Health funds China’s biowarfare program in ways similar to shell companies laundering money.

It is now an indisputable scientific fact that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory in China and that work was linked to China’s biowarfare program.

There is also an abundance of evidence that funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), contributed to that effort and U.S. government officials and members of the scientific community attempted to cover-up the laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus and their potential complicity in its creation.

Judicial Watch recently received 1651 pages of records from the NIH revealing an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial funding of bat coronavirus “gain of function” research, experiments that can lead to viruses that are “more transmissible or more virulent than the original organism or those that evade current detection methods and available treatments.”

The records obtained by Judicial Watch include an April 21, 2022 NIH email thread regarding “additional subawardees,” referring to NIH grant R01AI110964 “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” given to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, a long-time institutional collaborator with Chinese scientists.

Ten facilities are listed, three of which are in China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, and East China Normal University in Shanghai. A fourth, the Duke University-National University of Singapore is an institution closely linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology

It is important to note, that Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was the lead investigator on a 2018 research grant application to the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), which, quite literally, reads like a recipe for creating the COVID-19 virus.

Two of the other investigators on that DARPA application were from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Duke University-National University of Singapore facility.

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