Two Recommended Reads: Election Aftermath And Insurrection--NOT!

Two good articles I wanted to point out. Nothing you won't have thought of yourself, but well expressed and worth a look.

First, Conrad Black--there's a lot of good stuff in this article, but here's a sample paragraph:

The Trump-Hate Coalition Is Crumbling

The wheels are coming off the rickety anti-Trump coalition in all four directions.

...

The FBI and senior echelons of the intelligence services were politically compromised, a massively illegal and fraudulent investigation of the elected president was conducted, two utterly spurious impeachment attempts were thrown at him and the coronavirus pandemic was invoked to produce the most seriously tainted presidential election result in the country’s history. The Supreme Court may have made the correct political decision when it declined to adjudicate the case, given how tempestuous the response would have been if it had overturned the result of the election, but it was still an abdication. They presumably acted as they did to assure that there would be no move to pack the court with Democrats, and they may now be in a position to reassert the Constitution as the controversies generated by the new administration percolate up to it.

It's optimistic, and maybe we need some of that.

An Independent Judiciary?

Since the January 6 Event the Zhou Baiden regime--through its DoJ and media proxies as well as the usual suspects in Congress--has been feverishly seeking to to advance a narrative of a Right Wing extremist (anyone to the Right of ... Karl Marx?) "insurrection". An attempt to overthrow the government. We've been trying to keep an eye on developments in this regard, because the obvious objective of the Zhou regime is to gin up anti-GOP hysteria and keep this narrative going through Election 2022. It hardly needs saying that the continued military occupation of the Imperial City on the Potomac plays directly into the "insurrection" narrative--the Sedition Hoax.

The thing about this effort, however is that, while the Dems control the Legislative and Executive branches of government, to keep this narrative going requires the cooperation of the Judicial Branch. One of President Trump's great achievements was the appointment of an enormous new number of Appellate Court judges--and, yes, credit for this does go to Mitch McConnell. McConnell put priority on Appellate Court judges rather than District Court judges, and it paid dividends, as several Circuits were flipped. 

The one Circuit that remains firmly in Dem hands, however, is the DC Circuit, which was greatly expanded by Obama. For that reason one might assume that the DC Circuit as well as the many District Court judges in DC would prove friendly to the Sedition Hoax narrative. Such has not been the case. DC judges at both District and Appellate levels have, with some exceptions, shown a willingness to apply establish criminal justice standards regardless of the media and DC Eestablishment's dominant Sedition Hoax narrative. Notably, not only have Clinton judges shown this willingness but Obama appointees have also done so. 

In evaluating these developments it's important to remember that each defendant's case--and the FBI's nationwide dragnet has pulled in literally hundreds of people--must be considered on its own factual merits. The DoJ is seeking to bolster the Sedition Hoax by constructing a case for Seditious Conspiracy--please note that in this statute the use of actual force is a necessary element:

More Signs That DoJ's Sedition Hoax Is Faltering

Commenter Anonymous linked to a post at CTH earlier today. The significance of the CTH post is that it links to a Reuters article (dated 3/24/21) that presents some pretty good legal reporting on the status of DoJ's Sedition Hoax. Sundance's take is that the Reuter's reporting indicates that DoJ is "walking back" its Sedition Hoax--admitting to Reuters that their "evidence" isn't what they claimed it was, in spite of Michael Sherwin's outrageous 60 Minutes atttempt to bias the jury pool. Sundance is quite correct, although obviously DoJ isn't about to pack it all in and go home:

Interesting that Reuters would outline the walk-backs.  Even more interesting that the details of the walk-backs seem to prove the DOJ never actually intended to win any of these cases, but rather wanted to advance a political narrative about extremists through their earlier statements.

Again, I would caution that they're not simply giving it up. My own position--which is the same in essentials--has been that this is basically "political theater"--which is why I've dubbed it the Sedition Hoax. The purpose of this hoax narrative or "theater" is not simply to maintain the narrative of "extremism." The purpose is more specific: it's to influence public opinion for Election 2022 and prevent loss of the Dem House, as more details of election fraud in Election 2020 keep coming out. That's why it's necessary to keep the military occupation of the Imperial City running as long as possible, and that's why--despite the evidentiary problems--the Dems will try to keep the Sedition Hoax running as long as possible. That's exactly why they're trying to keep the defendants in jail and to get an indefinite extension of the Speedy Trial Act. They don't want any speedy trials--they want political theater that will last from now until November, 2022. Obviously they'll accept some nickel-dime convictions, but that's not the big picture here.

The problem they're running up against is judges with old fashioned ideas about fair trials even for conservatives. Remarkably, among those judges who are raising pointed questions about what DoJ is up to are Obama judges--as we saw yesterday with Judge Mehta's dressing down of DoJ.

With that in mind, let's take a look at what Reuters has to tell us. First of all, it's worth noting that Reuters makes no bones about the fact that the Sedition Hoax is in trouble--as evidenced in the title of the article:

Amid setbacks, prosecutors abandon some claims in U.S. Capitol riot cases

The article is worth a careful read:

More Sedition Hoax, White Supremacy, Christian Terrorism

A hat tip to commenter Dutchmn007 for pointing out a very nice piece at The Burning Platform:

WHO IS SHAKING THE JAR?

The point of the piece is twofold, and develops the ideas that I tried to present yesterday (The Sedition Hoax):

1. American public life, ruled by a prog class that controls most of the means of societal communication, has been characterized in the 21st century by serial hoaxes.

2. The political class, while deeply involved in perpetrating these hoaxes, is to a significant extent controlled by financial interests--including, of course in the "tech" sector (which now embraces much of public communication as we've come to know it in the digital age).

The author provides the evidence in considerable detail, involving more hoaxes--incontestable hoaxes, involving the dissemination by news and social media of undoubted false narratives--than I got into. The point of these hoaxes has all been to present false narratives of reality in America. Those narratives can be boiled down into a simple binary: America is engaged in a struggle between progressive forces of science and enlightened humanism against the forces of racist white supremacy and anti-science obscurantism. There are numerous sub-memes, but that's good enough for government work--and, indeed, that appears to be the narrative that informs the activities of our federal bureaucracy, including those agencies that control the tools of coercion, such as the FBI.

The correct stance for conservatives who wish to understand what's going on is captured in a quote from the writing of a liberal reporter, Glenn Greenwald:

“If you think the real power centers in the US are the Proud Boys, 4Chan & Boogaloos rather than the CIA, FBI, NSA, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and spend most of your time battling the former while serving the latter as stenographers, your journalism is definitionally shit.” – Glenn Greenwald

Now, obviously Greenwald is addressing the fact that corporate jouralism, as privileged by the SCOTUS line of decisions stemming from NYT v. Sullivan, amounts to scribbling down what the real masters of American tell them to scribble. At the same time, lets be clear about Conservativism Inc.: for most of the 21st century conservatives have generally lionized the Deep State (think, Tom Clancy novels, etc.) and the Tech Giants as embodying the best in America. While progs of the everyday variety remain Benighted for the most part (excepting a few like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald), four years of Trump and the hysterical prog response has led to what appears to be a Great Awakening among conservatives--the scales have fallen from the eyes of many. Evidence for this can be found in the tough sledding that Fox News has faced, and the immediate pushback against Mitch McConnell and other establishment GOP figures to restore their vision of "normality."

Here are excerpts of the Big Picture from the Burning Platform piece linked above (read it all--you won't regret it):

The Sedition Hoax

Today's post is more or less a status update: Where are we, at this point, in the Prog war on America?

Conrad Black sets the stage with his article on HR1. I leave the details of HR1 to others. Black's title sums that up well enough:

H.R. 1 is Emblematic of the Crisis of American Democracy

There is no possibility that properly apprised of the contents of H.R. 1, the American people would approve of it.

HR1 is emblematic--but, bad as it is, it isn't the actual heart of the crisis. It would be bad if perpetrated by conservatives. But, as Progs hope to use it, its intent is to make their transformation of America irrevocable. The real crisis, however, is the hold that Prog ideology has gained over the spirit of America.

We all know that Trump's populist nationalism--a nationalism rooted in our traditional constitutional order and culture--was viewed as an existential threat not for simple partisan reasons, but for deeply held ideological reasons. Black captures this well, the reaction that Trump roused. In the wake of Election 2016, the entire Deep State and Establishment was galvanized to prevent Trump or anything remotely like Trump from ever happening again:

The bipartisan political establishment was so shattered by Trump’s victory, and by the subsequent failure to neutralize or remove him through a series of illegal activities, ..., that they confected an elaborate plan not only to dispose of Trump by whatever means were necessary, but to ensure that no reenactment of his horrifying emergence could be staged by an emulator. 

The "elaborate plan" was actually a succession of hoaxes--the Russia Hoax, the Ukraine Hoax leading to the first hoax impeachment, and finally the Covid Hoax. In fact, none of those hoaxes proved sufficient to stop the Trump juggernaut. It ultimately required internal sabotage (h/t Barr and Durham) and election fraud on an unprecedented scale--a virtual hoax election--to prevent a second Trump term.