Tag: trump derangement syndrome

Moderator For 2nd Trump-Biden Debate Worked As Intern For Biden, Staff Assistant For Ted Kennedy

The second presidential debate, scheduled for October 15, will be moderated by Steve Scully, the political editor at C-SPAN and host of Washington Journal, who once worked as an intern for Senator Joe Biden in college, later working as a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s communication office.

“While attending college, he served as an intern in the office of Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden, and later a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s media affairs office,” Utah Valley University noted.

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Yale Prof Calls Trump’s COVID Plan, “A Lazy Man’s Ethnic Cleansing”

Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, took to Twitter in early September to claim that COVID-19 is a “lazy man’s” ethnic cleansing.

In the Twitter thread, Snyder first tweeted, “Coronavirus in America: A lazy man’s ethnic cleansing #OurMalady #TrumpGenocide #TrumpLiedPeopleDied #TrumpKilledAmericans Kushner’s team: “because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.”

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University Sets Up “Support Spaces” For Students Traumatized By Presidential Debate

Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the site of last night’s Presidential debate has set up dedicated ‘support spaces’ for students who have been triggered by the tense exchange.

For any poor snowflake babies who couldn’t handle the nasty orange man telling Joe Biden “There’s nothing smart about you,” CWRU is providing a “confidential safe space” where they can talk and cry about it.

The University says “students can discuss the impact of recent national events, including the presidential debate and upcoming election.”

There are eight “presidential debate support spaces” available for students to attend, according to the university which asks that everybody use “respectful dialogue.”

The spaces will remain active from Monday through to next Friday, for ‘virtual counselling sessions’.

The university announced that the “Support Space is not a substitute for psychotherapy and does not constitute mental health treatment.”

The spaces are a throwback to 2016 when education centers offered counseling after Trump won the election.

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DNI Letter Supports Allegation That Hillary Clinton Created ‘Russiagate’

Where the allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential elections made up by the Clinton campaign?

A letter sent by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe seems to suggest so:

On Tuesday, Ratcliffe, a loyalist whom Trump placed atop U.S. intelligence in the spring, sent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a letter claiming that in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence acquired “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis. That analysis, Ratcliffe summarized in his letter, claimed that Clinton had a plan to attack Trump by tying him to the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.
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Ratcliffe stated that the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or to the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

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Facebook Will Restrict Certain Users If US Election Gets “Extremely Chaotic Or Violent”

Earlier this week, Facebook gave us a welcome break from the virtue-signaling by threatened to pull its business from Europe should courts uphold an EU-wide ban on transfering European user data to US-based servers (something Washington is desperately trying to stop TikTok from doing, in a sense).

But that didn’t last long. On Tuesday, the social media giant’s head of global communications, former deputy PM Nick Clegg, told the Financial Times that the company is developing contingency plans should the US election lead to an outbreak of chaos and uncertainty. Though he didn’t go into too much detail, the implication is clear: Facebook is planning to significantly curtail speech on its platform, echoing the Internet blackouts utilized by authoritarian regimes including Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere.

Clegg preferred to call them the “break-the-glass” options, and assured readers that they probably wouldn’t happen anyway.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs, said it had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or “the political dilemmas” of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, which will play a larger role in this election due to the coronavirus pandemic. “There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances,” Mr Clegg said, though he stopped short of elaborating further on what measures were on the table. The proposed actions, which would probably go further than any previously taken by a US platform, come as the social media group is under increasing pressure to lay out how it plans to combat election-related misinformation, voter suppression and the incitement of violence on the November 3 election day and during the post-election period.

Of course, post-election day indecision is nothing new in American politics, though it will be the first time we’ve seen one since Facebook was founded in 2004. It also comes – as the FT none-too-subtly points out – as “conerns mount that even US president Donald Trump himself could take to social media to contest the result or call for violent protest, potentially triggering a constitutional crisis.”

But don’t worry: Because as Clegg explains, Facebook has done this before in “other parts of the world.”

“We have acted aggressively in other parts of the world where we think that there is real civic instability and we obviously have the tools to do that [again],” Mr Clegg added, citing the previous use of “pretty exceptional measures to significantly restrict the circulation of content on our platform”.

Facebook has also taken several steps to immediately step up and address any harmful activity that might emerge on its platform during the election. Citing unnamed sources, the FT says Facebook has planned for more than 70 scenarios, and that any high-stakes decisions will fall to a team of executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company is employing a range of experts, including military planners, to help the company’s leadership make the best decisions possible.

“We’ve slightly reorganised things such that we have a fairly tight arrangement by which decisions are taken at different levels [depending on] the gravity of the controversy attached,” Mr Clegg said. The executive also said that “the amount of resources we are throwing at this is very considerable”. Facebook will have a virtual war room – dubbed its “Election Operations Centre” – for monitoring for suspicious activity and updating its “voter information hub”, which will showcase verified results to users, he said.

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New Documents Further Unveil Obama’s Anti-Trump Campaign

A number of recent document releases shine new lights on ‘Russiagate’. That conspiracy theory, peddled by the Obama administration, the Democratic Party aligned media and ‘deep state’ actors opposed to President Trump, alleged that Trump was in cahoots with Russia. The disinformation campaign had the purpose of sabotaging his presidency.

To some extend it has worked as intended. But due to the legal investigation of the whole affair much more is now known about those who conspired against Trump. Some of them are likely to end up in legal jeopardy.

Some of those are the agents under FBI director Comey who used the easily debunked Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic party, to gain a FISA court warrants that allowed them to spy on the Trump campaign. It now turns out that the main source for the dossier they used was a shady actor who the FBI had earlier investigated for an alleged connection to Russian intelligence:

The primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was the subject of an earlier counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, and those facts were known to the Crossfire Hurricane team as early as December 2016, according to newly released records from the Justice Department that were first reported by CBS News.

The timing matters because the dossier was first used two months earlier, in October 2016, to help secure a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and then used in three subsequent surveillance renewals.

“Between May 2009 and March 2011, the FBI maintained an investigation into the individual who later would be identified as Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-source,” the two page FBI memo states. “The FBI commenced this investigation based on information by the FBI indicating that the Primary Sub-source may be a threat to national security.”

That the Steele dossier was potentially based on the words of a Russian spy should have been a red flag against its use. It seems that the FBI had not informed the FISA court about the dubious sourcing of the dossier allegations.

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Glenn Greenwald Shocks With Explanation On Why Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Assange Trial

Greenwald started with a tweet acknowledging that Assange’s plight, which includes the possibility of being extradited to the United States where he faces certain life in prison, has received “little media attention” ultimately because it doesn’t have an easy partisan angle.

“But another is that many liberals believe their political adversaries deserve to be in prison,” Greenwald stated, going on the offensive.

And that’s where the most famous founding journalist at The Intercept began going off on liberals’ exaggeration of what Trump represents and how he came to power:

“If you start from the premise that Trump is a fascist dictator who has brought Nazi tyranny to the US, then it isn’t that irrational to believe that anyone who helped empower Trump (which is how they see Assange) deserves to be imprisoned, hence the lack of concern about it,” Greenwald said.

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