Matches burning

America’s Maastricht Moment

Matches burningSo, it looks like Joe Biden’s Democratic Party have won everything. Despite innumerable questions over the integrity of the US election, he’s safely been confirmed as the 46th President of the United States. There are also the Georgia runoff elections where the Democrats seem to have squeaked by.

What a difference four years of populism makes. Back in 2016, the last vote had barely been counted before the steady media drumbeat of Russian collusion began rumbling across the airwaves. The whispering campaign eventually bore fruit in the form of not one, but four investigations to confirm whether the duly elected President of the United States was in fact beholden to a foreign and possibly hostile power.

The Mueller Report, the House Intelligence Committee, The Senate Intelligence Committee and the FBI all concluded there was no evidence supporting the claim that Donald Trump was compromised by the Russians or anyone else. We’ll leave Biden’s well documented links to Beijing for another time.

The scenes in Washington yesterday were not dissimilar to the outpouring of anger and disbelief that accompanied the 2016 result, except that the establishment is foursquare behind the successful candidate this time round. Therefore, it follows that anyone questioning sleepy Joe’s fitness for office has suddenly become a dangerous conspiracy theorist. Does anyone remember Gorilla TV from the Trump days? That was totally believable, apparently.

At the moment there are tens of millions of Americans who are extremely suspicious about the results of the 2020 election, and with the huge number of unanswered questions around electronic tallying, executive overreach and late night ballot dumps, we can hardly blame them.

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TV Interference

America’s Media Massacre

TV InterferenceThis is my first blog post in quite a while, for two main reasons. Firstly, because I’ve had some personal stuff to deal with; and secondly, because I’ve been waiting for the dust to settle around the US presidential election.

Despite what CNN or Fox News might say, it’s not at all clear who the rightful victor in the 2020 presidential election actually is. One thing we do know for sure is that anyone who still advocates voting by mail and electronic counting after this embarrassing goat rodeo is not to be trusted. With anything. Ever.

This situation is disturbing and depressing enough by itself, but the corporate media’s rigid denials that anything could possibly be amiss is nothing less than establishment propaganda. I wish I could say I was surprised about this startling lack of journalistic curiosity, but I’m not. Is anyone?

Despite the agreed media mantra of “no evidence”, the list of sworn affidavits, video footage, statistical anomalies and their resulting investigations is growing by the day. Something’s rotten in swing-state America and we all know it.

Corporate media’s refusal to even ask about this growing litany of electoral strangeness will not help it repair its already shredded reputation. I’m not sure if anything can do that now, but a good place to start would surely be debunking the outlandish conspiracy theories tweeted hourly by President Orange Man and his fascistic enablers. You’d think that CNN et al would be falling over themselves to make literally the worst person in the world look incredibly stupid, yet there is virtual silence from corporate America’s news rooms. Why is that, I wonder?

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Empty Chairs

Will Biden Really Share a Stage with Trump?

Empty ChairsI don’t think he will.

With less than a week to go before the first presidential debate, speculation as to how it will turn out is rising to a fever pitch. This isn’t especially unusual as the debates have been the centrepiece of US campaigns for many decades. What makes this debate unusual is that the conversation isn’t about who might win, it’s all about whether Joe Biden can remain coherent throughout, or whether he’ll even turn up at all.

Although the Biden camp dismisses claims of his cognitive decline as conspiracy theories, the instances of verbal fumbles and garbled, meaningless sentences continue to stack up.

Whilst it’s true that a lack of eloquence alone is not evidence of dementia, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion when the Joe Biden from 2012 is compared with the version we have today. This is especially ironic as one of the early manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome was a whispering campaign surrounding the 25th Amendment and Trump’s mental fitness for office. It’s hard not to feel a frisson of schadenfreude as Biden’s problems pile up.

Any objective observation of Biden’s behaviour must lead to concerns over his mental health. The former Vice President is showing signs of dementia and everybody knows it, especially his campaign staff. Thus, it doesn’t take a tactical genius to figure out that he’ll be extremely vulnerable in a high-pressure debate environment. Why else would expectations about his performance be so low?

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Kanye West for President? Seriously?

clownOnce again Kanye West has put himself firmly in the spotlight with his unexpected and some would say bizarre announcement that he will run for president of the United States. To be clear, both his much discussed Twitter announcement and his #2020VISION hashtag leave enough ambiguity for a run in 2024 or perhaps even later. He’s still relatively young and he has plenty of time.

The only question that matters right now is whether he’s serious about challenging Donald Trump for the presidency come November. To be honest, it’s difficult to imagine him putting forward a viable presidential run this late in the day, but at the same time it would be foolish to dismiss West’s announcement as the empty daydreams of a vainglorious clown.

Kanye West has a plan, and it doesn’t involve becoming president of the United States in 2020. He’s a smart boy and he understands the media, just like the current occupant of the Oval Office.

In truth, Kanye is probably still figuring out whether he really has any interest in public office. In the meantime he’s got plenty of ground to break and money to make, so we won’t know where he really stands until sometime after 2030.

So why do it?

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Donald Trump

Did Twitter Just Re-elect Trump?

Donald TrumpIt’s finally happened.

President Trump has finally issued the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. This hasn’t come a moment too soon and by the looks of this very detailed document, Trump’s had it ready in his desk for some time. All he had to do was wait patiently for someone to cock up massively like Twitter just did.

At this early stage it’s not clear whether the social media giants will respond by feigning shock and ignorance, loudly protesting their innocence or just carrying on like nothing’s actually happened. None of those responses would surprise me but if I had to guess, I’d say they’ll just carry on, while maybe announcing some kind of internal review which is far too little and way too late. Nobody would believe the findings of such an enquiry anyway. Not now.

Whilst this isn’t an actual change in the law, the executive order does explicitly state what everyone in the world, and his dog, has known for many years; namely that the tech giants have been wantonly abusing Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act with impunity for decades. Worse than that, they’ve been using the legal protections of Section 230(c) to censor law abiding platform users for no good reason other than their will to dominate discourse and control information.

“Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.”

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