Kamala Harris is going to represent the Democrats in the race for U.S. president for the same reason Joe Biden did. Just like Joe, she is a puppet for her donors, who want to rule the world.
by Edward Ring July 31/24
If you have ever confronted the astonishing hatred that San Francisco Bay Area Democrats have for anything Republican, much less MAGA Republican, then you understand why Kamala Harris may become the next president of the United States.
This isn’t a hate that is grounded in reality. It is nurtured by decades of propaganda, backed by trillions of dollars in big tech wealth, and, lately, the most powerful tools of mass hypnosis and Pavlovian conditioning the world has ever seen. If you question any of their pieties—climate, race, gender, Trump—you are instantly and permanently dehumanized. It is impossible to change their minds. There is no room for nuance. There is no tolerance for alternative perspectives. You are hated. You are garbage. Give up. Die.
This is Kamala Harris’s core constituency.
If you haven’t experienced the withering rebukes of San Francisco progressives or been the target of their white-hot rage, you might think Harris’s Portlandian drivel actually indicates a benevolent, if somewhat intellectually middling, soul. Her bird-brained new-age prognostications are certainly more humorous than fearsome: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”
“The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
It’s hard to ascribe malevolence to phrases like this. They’re the words of a vapid airhead, not a tyrant. On the other hand, Harris’s penchant for nodding her head in the affirmative as a way to punctuate literally everything she says is more than slightly ominous. It is a condescending, passive-aggressive way to telegraph what is actually a terrifying arrogance. I am right. You will agree. Nod your head with me. This is how it is.
Yikes.
Here’s what Kamala Harris is really about, and here’s what we are up against:
California is ruled by a coalition of extreme environmentalists, opportunistic business interests, the “renewables” lobby, the Homeless Industrial Complex, the DEI Industrial Complex, public sector unions, including the rabidly partisan and woke teachers union, and Hollywood, all backed by tech billionaires who wield stupefying wealth and influence.
At its roots, this is a coalition of lunatics, crooks, and amoral pragmatists. A prominent Democrat who was working on some genuine reforms once told me, “We had the Republicans at hello.” A businessman who supports Democrats once shared with me a similar sentiment. “Why should we back Republicans?” he said, “we’ve already got them.” And yet the Republicans, especially the “MAGA Republicans,” are the threat. Go figure.
This is a machine, and Harris is just a cog. Meanwhile, California is broken. People can’t afford homes or any other essentials, including gasoline, electricity, water, food, tuition, or health care. And the reason California is broken is because the economy is dominated by leeches who profit from inefficiency and failure and hide behind pessimistic narratives—climate doom, race and gender resentment.
Not every Democrat in California has bought the progressive narrative. Not every one of them has become usefully terrified of climate catastrophes, pervasive white bigotry, and MAGA fascists. Not every one of them has succumbed to apocalyptic fear and hence yielded to blinding hatred of the alleged deniers, bigots, Nazis and MAGA storm troopers on the brink of destroying the world.
No. Some of them are just practical. Do you want to do business in California? Play ball with the Democratic machine. Do you want to make incremental change? Maybe find some nonpartisan island of common sense and work towards at least one useful reform? Be a Democrat. To have credibility in California, that’s the price of admission. Which is to say, there are some Democrats in California trying to do some good.
The problem with this otherwise sound reasoning is that even Democrats with mostly good ideas are bound to have at least one issue where they are insanely, fatally flawed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a perfect example. On many critical issues, he is a breath of fresh air, a voice of honesty and courage. But on the issue of climate change, his positions are just as fascist, delusional and obedient to the doom narrative as the worst machine politician the Democrats can offer.
Which brings us back to Kamala Harris. She is going to represent the Democrats in the race for U.S. president for the same reason Joe Biden did. Just like Joe, she is a puppet. A cog in the machine. But make no mistake about the motivations of her donors. They want to rule the world. And make no mistake about her grassroots supporters. They have been manipulated into thinking of themselves as embattled warriors, fueled by a hatred they believe is righteous and justified.
The irony is deep and tragic. They are the Nazis they hate. They are the haters they hate. They are the puppets of the authoritarian machine they think they’re fighting.
As Kamala Harris spouts her goofy aphorisms, in between stoking her acolytes with fear and loathing, this machine is one election away from consolidating its power across America. If it wins, it will do to the entire country what it’s done to California.
Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel early Wednesday morning in the heart of the Iranian capital hours after attending President Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration. The details remain unclear, but it’s widely thought that he was killed by a precision drone strike at his residence. The world is watching to see whether Iran and/or its Resistance Axis allies will respond, what form it could take if so, and whether that would escalate tensions to a wider war.
Here are five takeaways thus far:
1. Israel’s Intelligence & Tactics Are Top-Notch
Israel somehow or another obtained accurate intelligence about Haniyeh’s location despite it being top-secret and was then able to successfully assassinate him. Whatever air defenses (including electronic warfare ones) that Iran had deployed in its capital as part of the security measures to protect its high-profile guests failed to thwart this attack. This is a major embarrassment for the Islamic Republic and prompts speculation about whether it was due to utter incompetence or was partially an inside job.
2. Iran Is Caught In A Dilemma Over How To Respond
It’s unimaginable that Iran won’t respond to its Israeli enemy assassinating a high-profile allied guest in Tehran during the new president’s inauguration, but the dilemma is over the form that this response will take. Launching another drone and missile salvo against Israel like it did in the spring after the bombing of its consulate in Damascus is possible, though Israel could spin that as a failure if many of them are shot down like last time, the on-the-ground damage is minimal, and no high-profile targets are killed.
3. Mutually Assured Destruction Hangs Heavy Over Everyone’s Head
The response that Iran resorts to will be determined by its leadership’s understanding of how far they can go without triggering the “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) scenario, which both Israel and the Resistance Axis fear and is why they’ve thus far restrained themselves from waging all-out war. A repeat of spring’s salvo could remain below that threshold, but Iran might also respond in a different way that’s interpreted by Israel as an escalation, thus prompting its own escalation that could then lead to MAD.
4. A Choreographed Response Might Therefore Be The Most “Rational”…
Duma member Dmitry Belik, whose claim to fame was helping Sevastopol reunify with Russia when he briefly served as the region’s acting head in spring 2014, described spring’s salvo as a “beautiful theatrical production”. If there’s any truth to his innuendo that Iran choreographed its response with the US and/or Israel to Israel’s bombing of its consulate in Syria, then it might also do the same after Haniyeh’s assassination, which could help Iran “save face” while averting an escalation towards MAD.
5. …But There’s No Guarantee That Iran’s Allies Will “Stand Down”
Hamas and Hezbollah are Iran’s allies but operate independently of it despite their close ties. There’s accordingly no guarantee that they’ll “stand down” and not respond in their own way if Iran sends another salvo to Israel regardless of whether or not it’s choreographed. After all, Hamas’ political chief was just killed, while one of Hezbollah’s top commanders was assassinated by Israel in Beirut the day prior. This makes the MAD risk even less manageable since those two might not share Iran’s calculations.
Haniyeh’s assassination is a watershed event in the latest Israeli-Hamas War, which is now a regional Israeli-Iranian proxy war, since it greatly spikes the risk of everything spiraling into MAD.
Iran’s response will be crucial in determining whether or not that happens, but so too will Hamas and Hezbollah’s.
They’ll either “stand down” as Iran responds regardless of whether or not it’s choreographed, participate in a joint response that remains below the MAD threshold, or decide to cross that red line on their own.
Many Americans feel that the country has become unrecognizable due to decades of globalization and a technological revolution that has eroded middle-class livelihoods and deepened social divides.
by Victor Davis Hanson July 29/24
Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.
Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?
Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?
A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?
Once beautiful downtowns (now) resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?
Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?
In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.
We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.
By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.
Americans of the twentiethcentury had never quite seen anything like the mega-global celebrities from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, or a Bezos fortune of $170 billion, or the sorts who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley, and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward muscular classes and to plot their noblesse oblige salvation for them.
Indeed, for those reliant on muscular jobs and the production of the material essentials of life—agriculture, fuels, construction, assembly, timber, mining, and services—their livelihoods were often xeroxed abroad. Millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor, abundant natural resources, and less overhead that made investment “wiser” and more profitable.
Anointed Americans in the “soft” or informational economy achieved levels of wealth never seen before in history. Meanwhile, Americans in the “hard” or concrete sectors saw stagnation in wages, job losses, and the erosion of middle-class life itself.
That the universities, the media, the administrative state, entertainment, high tech, and the federal government were mostly on the coasts became a geographical force multiplier of the growing economic and cultural divide—perhaps in the manner that the Civil War became not just an ideological conflict but one of definable geography as well.
Red-state and blue-state cultures followed these radical displacements in the global economy. Urban bicoastal America created an ethos and an accompanying narrative that it was blessed, rich, and all-knowing because it had been rightfully rewarded for supposedly being innately smarter, better credentialed, more worldly and—given its wealth—more moral than the losers who fell behind. The new multibillionaires reinvented the Democrat Party into a concord of the hyper-rich and subsidized poor, abandoning the now caricatured working and losing middle classes.
Indeed, a sort of atheistic, reverse-Calvinism arose. The elite left-wing, monied classes were left-wing and monied precisely because of some sort of fated reward for their obvious innate superior virtue and wisdom—even as millions fled from failing blue states to their freer and more prosperous red counterparts.
An entire moral vocabulary of condemnation followed to stigmatize those who supposedly lacked the know-how or morality to appreciate their elite benefactors—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, hobbits, chumps, dregs, and “crazies,” to use the parlance of Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Their targets were the relics of a vanishing America who did quirky things like salute the flag, go to church, believe there were still only two sexes, honor America as always far better than the alternative, and believe they were the muscles that kept the nation fed, fueled, and housed for one more day.
The chief characteristic of the twenty-first century American revolution’s vast re-calibrations in wealth was not just the transition from the muscular to the supposedly cerebral, but from right to left. Look at the Fortune 400. There is a pattern in the rankings—mostly progressives and rich—and the winners’ wealth is usually not created from old sources like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, or construction.
The real multi-billion-dollar fortunes in America are now in tech and investment. The hierarchies that own and manage Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Chase, Microsoft, or Morgan Stanley are now decidedly left-wing Democrats. That twenty-firstcentury reality marked a radical change from the past. Democrats now typically vastly out-raise Republicans in most national campaigns. Their philanthropic foundations dwarf those of their right-wing rivals.
Elite hard-left universities are flush with multi-billion-dollar endowments in a manner unimaginable just 40 years ago. And they are no longer merely liberal but overwhelmingly woke and uncompromisingly hard left—with millions of dollars to waste on their unicorn chases of mandated equality and racist “anti-racism.” Hollywood, the media, new and old, and Wall Street are not just far wealthier than ever but far more intolerant and sanctimonious as well.
It was not just money that gave the new left-wing oligarchy such clout in the administrative state, Wall Street, tech, the media, the corporate world, and the university. It was the accompanying assurance that, unlike other Americans, the lab rats of the mostly rural or interior parts of the country were exempt. They were to be free to apply their bankrupt agendas—open borders, DEI, globalism, climate change gospels, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory, critical race theory—to distant others. They assumed correctly that they were never really to be subject to the concrete and real-life disasters arising from the implementation of their ideology.
Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our twenty-first century secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain this overweening left-wing new zealotry to change the world, but largely at others’ expense. They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same superstitions and fanaticism to punish all who doubt their purity and wisdom.
So arose the idea among elites of a border-less America, where yearly 2-3 million poor and downtrodden of Latin America, and soon the world at large, could surge into a humane and progressive America—without the ossified and illiberal idea of background checks, or legal “technicalities.”
The arrivals’ abject poverty would remind the bigoted American middle classes of the need to expand their welfare state—as if a lifelong victim of the institutional oppression of Oaxaca, Mexico became a legitimate victim of white capitalist America the very moment he set foot across a now mythical border. Importing massive poverty would remind the middle classes that racism and inequality were still on the rise.
The locus classicus of this self-righteousness and contrition was emblemized when a few dozen illegal aliens were redirected toward tony Martha’s Vineyard. The locals immediately rushed to reveal to us two realities: 1) shower the illegals with food, upscale clothing, and other essentials to virtue signal their universal concern for the downtrodden; and 2) bus them out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible to where they “belonged”—either among the inner-city poor or struggling rural Hispanic communities of the American southwest.
In the abstract, open borders were what any progressive nation should aspire to; in the concrete among the architects of such idealism—not in their backyard.
Following the death of George Floyd, corporations, universities, and administrative state agencies rushed to compete to “level the playing field” by eroding meritocratic criteria such as calcified SAT tests, background checks, resumes, etc., and began hiring by race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Tens of thousands of DEI commissars and their henchmen have now spread far beyond their birthplaces in the university (where elite schools routinely restrict so-called whites [ca. 65–70 percent of the population] to 20–40 percent of incoming classes). At some Ivy League schools and their kindred elite campuses, grades are “adjusted” to ensure 60-80 percent are A’s.
Almost everything in revolutionary America has “evolved” beyond silly notions like “meritocracy” and “standards” and has instead become DEI hot-wired—from the hiring and promotion of airline pilots, selection of actors, management of the Secret Service, and the rank and file of FBI and CIA operatives to admissions to medical school, corporate boardrooms, and advertising.
In response, a dangerous underground cynicism grows commensurately. As in the old Soviet Union, so too here arises our official “truth” beside the subterranean truth that most rely on when an incompetent Secret Service hierarchy allows a shooter to take pot shots at a president’s head, or there is a sharp rise in passenger jet near misses and go-arounds, or students in mass demand exemptions from final schedules or expect amnesties when they storm campus buildings, or major corporations—like Disney, Target, Anheuser Busch, and John Deere—ostentatiously virtue signal.
In sum, we are knee-deep in an authoritarian commissariat that we do not even dare formally acknowledge. DEI, like open borders, was predicated on the idea that the good one percent who ran the country was too good to experience the trickle-down from the commissar system it imposed on others.
Ditto the top-down green revolution. We are to assume that sweaty truckers should have no problem juicing up their battery engines every 300 miles. Hispanics in Bakersfield should appreciate turning down their air conditioning when it hits 115. Lower-middle-class moms should learn the advantages of high-cost electric stoves and ovens once they are forcibly weaned off their cheap but too-hot natural gas appliances.
Meanwhile, the sales of designer Italian cooking platforms, 10,000-square-foot air-conditioned second homes (the Obamas own three), private jets, yachts, and huge limo SUVs have reached record levels. The model is John Kerryism—or the rationale that to help the uneducated, dumber, and less moral people survive global warming, the enlightened need the tools to do it. So, they must avoid messy airports, 9-hour delays due to missed connections, and the stuffy, cramped middle seat on modern commercial jets.
Again, what we got in the last quarter century was a shrill elite that subjects their Jacobin theories upon a distant other but has absolutely no intention of ever getting near the very disasters they wrought, much less suffering the collateral damage that was inevitable from their social engineering.
Or, to put it another way, they were to be our few genius white-coated researchers while we were their many expendable lab rats.
In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.
Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina.
Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply evaporated.
The fear of a front-runner Sanders’ socialist victory and nomination—and thus an enviable landslide loss to incumbent Donald Trump in the general election—had prompted the donor class and shadowy political insiders to act.
And they did so by choosing a perceived moderate, old Joe Biden from Scranton. That required the coerced departures of all his far-left rivals, who had hitherto performed much better than Biden in the primaries.
Now front-runner Biden still displayed obvious symptoms of serious cognitive decline that had only seemed to mount through the 2020 campaign. And his dementia continued to accelerate during his first three years as president.
Biden had deceitfully promised to conduct a healing campaign and a unifying presidency. But once in the White House, his extreme agendas proved the most divisive and far-left in nearly a century.
Rumors of that prior March 2020 Faustian bargain emerged. The Bidens got to serve as useful moderate veneers. So, they enjoyed the ceremonial functions of the presidency while outsourcing the real operations to former Obama officials, consultants, and advisors.
Indeed, Obama did not, as most ex-presidents do, exit Washington upon leaving the White House. Instead, he bought a mansion and stayed close by.
Democrats demonized anyone critical of Biden’s obvious mental decline. Their smearing crested during Biden’s now-aborted 2024 reelection bid, even as Biden could no longer display even a veneer of mental and physical engagement.
Polls revealed an impending Trump landslide victory in November—and a massive Democratic loss of Congress.
So suddenly on a Sunday, July 21—just days left before state ballots were formalized with the names of the parties’ official nominees, and on the eve of the Democratic convention—party bosses, mega-donors, and Obama puppeteers went into action for yet a third time.
They reportedly threatened candidate Biden with a complete loss of any further campaign funding and raised the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment to end his presidency—should he not suddenly withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his surrogate on the ticket.
In one moment, the choices of nearly 15 million Biden primary voters were vitiated. No delegates were consulted. No other alternative Democrat candidates were even considered.
Biden was dethroned; Harris was coronated—without much public input or even knowledge of how or why.
Democrat grandees stopped smearing Biden’s conservative critics, who had worried over his dementia. Instead, they now trumped opposition criticism of Biden’s decline.
Yet Biden most certainly did not resign his presidency. Instead, he promised to serve out his remaining six months in office.
So Democrat insiders not only removed their leading candidate, who for the prior six months had won all the 2024 primaries and almost all the delegates, but insisted that Biden keep Democrats and himself in power—but only if he agreed to quit the race.
In sum, at the 11th hour of a two-year reelection effort, a cabal arbitrarily decided that Joe Biden might well lose the Democrats the White House and the Congress.
So, they reversed course, now claiming his dementia was so acute as to destroy their November prospects. But mysteriously, his decline was not severe enough to imperil the American people, whom Biden must continue to lead until January 20, 2025.
Furthermore, the bosses’ replacement choice, Vice President Kamala Harris, had entered no primary. She never won a single delegate. Harris also never captured a single delegate in her first and only presidential run back in 2020. She then dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.
We have now witnessed three left-wing veritable coups.
In 2020, covert actors decided to ossify the Democratic primary races. Next, they conferred the nomination on a clearly cognitively challenged Joe Biden. He was now tasked with serving as a useful moderate vessel for a virtual, even more radical, Obama third term.
The same operators next assumed virtual control of Biden’s presidential agenda, given his accelerating cognitive decline.
When that charade could no longer be sustained, for a third time, they circumvented the normal transparent democratic process.
So, they removed the once useful but now a liability Biden—while insisting that he was still fit enough to keep the left in power—until the anticipated Harris victory in November.
And all of this was the shadow work of those who sanctimoniously lectured America that “democracy dies in darkness.”
Tech mogul Elon Musk took aim at the “woke mind virus” taking over the West in a long-awaited interview with Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson.
Peterson told Musk in the interview, which was livestreamed on X Monday afternoon, that woke politics have made his hometown of Toronto more divided and racist despite the ideology’s stated tenets of “anti-racism” and “inclusivity.”
Musk said the diversity, equity and inclusion policies the Democratic party in America have been championing are “fundamentally anti-meritocratic” and “really just another form of racism and sexism.”
“This group identity nonsense has made things much more (divided.) It insists on dividing people by groups as a primary conceptual distinction between individuals, race, ethnicity and sex,” Peterson said. “I can see it in Toronto. When my kids grew up in Toronto, downtown, they were race-, ethnicity- and gender-blind. They had an unbelievably diverse range of friends. And no one cared.”
He said that woke politics have caused division all over the Western world, even in Toronto, a city known for its multiculturalism and many coexisting ethnicities.
“That started to shift around with this emphasis on group division. It’s a really ugly thing to see,” Peterson said.
The two spoke about cultural Marxism and the “woke mind virus’” effect on children’s identity, including Musk’s son.
“I’m particularly unhappy with what my colleagues in the psychological field have done with regard to gender-affirming care,” Peterson began. “I think they are a pack of contemptible cowards, and everyone who’s been involved in this relationship with minors should go to prison.”
Musk agreed.
“The so-called ‘gender-affirming care,’ which is a terrible euphemism – it’s child mutilation and sterilization,” Musk said.
“Under the guise of gender-affirming care and compassion,” Peterson added.
Musk was particularly upset about minors “far below the age of consent” who are enabled to undergo permanent life-altering treatments such as puberty blockers, double mastectomies and genital reassignment surgeries.
“The reality is that almost every child goes through some kind of identity crisis. It’s just part of growing up,” he said. “It’s very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender.”
Musk thinks puberty blockers are deceptively named, saying they are sterilizing drugs which ensure that many who take them will never be able to have children.
“We have an age of consent for a reason,” Musk said. “There are ages in which you could do things (drive, drink, get tattoos) because if we allow children to take permanent actions when they’re ten, 12, and 14 years old, they will do things that they subsequently greatly regret.”
Musk said that he was tricked into signing off on his son Xavier’s transition and that his son is now dead, killed by the “woke mind virus.” Musk’s child is still alive but now living as a woman named Vivian Jenna Wilson following a legal name change in 2022.
“I was told Xavier might commit suicide if he (didn’t get the treatment,)” he said. “I was tricked into doing this. And it wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs.”
Peterson added that he believes clinicians knowingly lie to parents about the necessity of gender-changing treatments and surgery to save their children.
“If there’s a higher suicide rate, the reason is because of the underlying depression and anxiety, not because of the gender dysphoria and every goddamn clinician knows that too and they’re too cowardly to come out and say it,” Peterson said.
Musk feels like he lost his son because of transgender ideology.
“They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead,” Musk said. “My son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.”
Peterson said the woke ideology characterized by an emphasis on group identities and victimhood has led to many “demolished kids.”
Musk has vowed to “destroy the woke mind virus” ever since his son Xavier’s transition.
I am careful about my words. I don’t throw around accusations, and, for the legal record, I am not here making an accusation. This essay is deliberately written so as to not be an act of defamation or of libel.
Here is my immediate response on Saturday July 13, to the assassination attempt. As I warned you all in my recent essay “What Time It is”, about the incarceration of Stephen K Bannon, the attempt on President Trump’s life on Saturday July 13 was sadly predictable, as we are in the period, foreseeable per the historical record in a declining democracy, of the “physical mopping-up of the opposition.”
Subsequent to the assassination attempt against President Trump last Saturday in Butler, PA, I need to talk about Dr Jill Biden and her office.
I believe Dr Jill Biden and Hunter Biden and Dr Jill Biden’s staff need to be investigated subsequent to (my awkward grammar is to avoid the legal repercussions of saying, “in relation to”) the assassination attempt against President Trump.
We all know by now that President Trump’s Secret Service detail left around him gaping vulnerabilities. My husband Brian O’Shea (@brianosheaSPI), who spent a career in military intelligence, in intelligence, and then in private security, including in “close protection,” — indeed, that was how I met him, as he had to secure me and my home, after I had received death threats — examined, at my request, videos of President Trump’s speech in Butler PA on July 13, 2024, assessing the shot that struck Pres Trump’s right ear, and the shots that killed heroic fire chief Corey Comperatore.
Brian identified at least ten major security practice anomalies.
These ranged from a missing third counter-sniper team — meaning that a “fan” of a given area is left unprotected — to the fact, noted by many, that several of the Secret Service agents were too short to cover President Trump, thus leaving his head and neck fully exposed after shots were fired, to the fact that neither building from which the alleged assailant, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired his shot or shots, nor the parking lot in front of it, was secured, to the fact that one of the Secret Service agents fumbled so obviously with her weapon, not succeeding in replacing it in its holster, that this revealed, in Brian’s view, a lack of familiarity with the weapon, as well as inadequate training.
Capping the many anomalies is the statement that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle made to ABC News, explaining that no Secret Service snipers were placed on the roof of the building from which Crooks allegedly fired, because it had a “sloped roof.” Four days after the assassination attempt, as I write, it’s clear, and not a “conspiracy theory,” that this event was not a simple tragedy — some random disgruntled kid somehow successfully firing at a President, in spite of all the efforts of what are suppose to be the best security forces in the world — but that other forces are at play.
I need to explain some important things about this story, based on my long experience around decision-makers in comparable contexts.
The first is that: at an event such as this, nothing happens by accident.
I was the wife of a Clinton White House speechwriter; my then-husband spent his days traveling to events such as the one in Butler PA, or to the one at which FLOTUS spoke at the same time, in North Pittsburgh, PA, or to other similar White House events. So our household was familiar with the mechanics of the events that Presidents and First Ladies attend.
I later became an advisor to Dick Morris, President Clinton’s chief campaign advisor for his re-election campaign in 1996. Still later, I was a formal campaign advisor to Vice President Gore’s campaign for the Presidency. In all of these contexts, which spanned years, I witnessed closely the process by which a President’s staff, and a First Lady’s staff, and then a Vice President and his staff, work alongside (and in very prescribed ways, with) a campaign, and I saw how staffers manage the day to day of the “Principals’’ jobs.
People need to understand this process of how decisions are made during campaigns, in order to avoid the mistakes in interpreting of the events in Pennsylvania, that many are now making; and in order to avoid being spun by the spin to which Americans are now being subjected.
I wish to stress that NOTHING AT THAT LEVEL HAPPENS SPONTANEOUSLY OR CASUALLY.
While certainly there can be a specific staffer who is incompetent and who may make a specific mistake in event planning, that staffer will be quickly fired. Repeated sequential mistakes, let alone multiple mistakes at the same venue and time, simply cannot happen.
Every event you see that is attended by the President or the First Lady, has had, as a routine, daily, SOP-rigid process, from which there is never any deviation – -from which no deviation is possible — layers and layers of scrupulous vetting by multiple senior staffers and by multiple agencies.
Every detail is cleared by many layers of officials with various forms of authority, long in advance.
The current media and White House spin is that the First Lady “spontaneously” decided to speak at an event promoted for at least a week in advance: a Sons and Daughters of Italy event for 200, at the Rivers Casino in North Pittsburgh. I state — and anyone who has worked in or with a White House can confirm or else challenge this — that there can be no such thing as a “spontaneous” addition to the schedule on the campaign trail. FLOTUS or POTUS can’t “spontaneously” change the schedule.
An event is proposed, during a campaign, by the Campaign Manager. Julie Chavez Rodriguez is Pres. Biden’s Campaign Manager. Interestingly, she formerly worked for him in the White House, as “Senior advisor and White House director of intergovernmental affairs, Joe Biden presidential administration.” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon is Pres. Biden Campaign Chairwoman. She too was shifted over from the White House: as she was “Senior advisor and White House director of intergovernmental affairs, Joe Biden presidential administration”.
It’s notable for several reasons to have White House staff transfer to serve as campaign staffers – in part because FEC law means careful separations between the two teams. The point here is, all the senior people in both the White House and on the Campaign, know very well how secure vetting for an event works.
A proposed event has to be signed off by the Campaign Director. It also has to be signed off by the Chief of Staff at the White House. Since the resignation of Ron Klain, Jeff Zientz has been the White House Chief of Staff. (He also joined the Facebook Board of Directors in 2018). He would also be very familiar with secure planning, as in November 2020, “he became a member of three agency review teams for the Biden Transition: Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Homeland Security.[4]”
Both the Campaign Director and the Chief of Staff are reacting to requests (which are nonstop) from donors, grassroots groups, other politicians, etc, for the “principal” – meaning POTUS or FLOTUS. These requests go to the scheduler for both the White House team and for the Campaign (two different people). The top White House staffers meet daily with the Chief of Staff to review the set of proposals and events for POTUS and FLOTUS, and to refine the schedule. The same process takes place with the campaign team. The campaign team puts their requests formally to the White House chief of staff and scheduler. Lawyers review each request, and indeed any contact between the Campaign and the White House, to avoid the campaign violating FEC law.
Each request goes to all senior staffers, including the Chief of Staff, before it is put by the scheduler (a very important, influential person) onto the all-important schedule. The process of clearing an event to put on the schedule is multifaceted and iron-clad.
The speech that will be given at the event has to be checked by the relevant departments: State Department and Pentagon if it involves foreign or military affairs. HUD if it mentions housing, and so on. If there is anything in the speech that is wrong or that causes political blowback, it has to be revised and resubmitted until it is cleared. And so on.
The people onstage with “the principal”, introducing “the principal”, near “the principal” at any time (all of which is carefully choreographed), and/or in photos with him or her, must all be vetted well in advance. The backgrounds of everyone must be checked, both in law enforcement databases and by opposition researchers in-house; did they say something racist in 2004, or harass an employee, in 1998? It all has to be examined in advance, in order to protect the reputation of “the principal” from unexpected risk, blowback or bad press.
The physical venue has to be thoroughly, I mean thoroughly, checked, for every event. Physical plans of the venue, including, to my knowledge, architectural plans, are sent to the White House and to campaign staff, and are available to both the advance team and to the security team. (Again, this process is recalled from my experience 24 years ago. It may have changed). The route from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the venue, from the venue to the hotel, from the hotel to the airport, is checked by multiple layers of the staff of this daily meeting as well as by security services. Ingress and egress to and from the venue must be similarly checked by the Secret Service; roofs and basements are checked; perimeters and parking lots are checked. A security plan, which includes what to do in an emergency, is devised by the Secret Service for that specific venue, and then signed off by the Secret Service in advance, and only then can the event be placed on the schedule.
If the venue is not easy enough fully to secure, the Secret Service will say so. That is a crucial, central part of the Secret Service’s job: informing the White House staff and the campaign staff when something they hope to plan is not safe. If that happens, the staff cannot overrule the Secret Service, to my knowledge. Even POTUS or FLOTUS, to my knowledge, cannot overrule the Secret Service. If an event or venue is not safe, and if the Secret Service says so, this is not an informal, easily-misunderstood verbal back and forth, but it is quite formalized — the scheduler cannot okay an unsafe venue for final placement on the schedule.
This requirement — to vet all attendees near “the principal,” and to clear the safety of a venue or event — can cause a lot of friction at the daily meetings. Everyone at that daily meeting has an agenda and wants his or her own event, or an event serving his or her own donors or constituents, or one showcasing his or her policy goals, to be placed on the all-important POTUS or FLOTUS schedule.
The venue and surroundings will also be physically checked by the security team in advance of the event. The “advance” team — a separate group — also checks it in advance. (Hence the name “advance team.”) This happens days before. If there is a problem, that previous “advance” trip is intended to surface and remedy it.
All this protocol means that the perimeter, the parking lot, the rooftop, the basements, the stage, the bleachers, even the security fence that videos show, in Butler PA, prevented police from detaining Crooks in advance of his weapon being fired — should all have been physically checked and okayed in advance, all the way up the chain of command for the Secret Service. Standard SOP in this way prevents any Keystone Cops-type scrambling around impediments such as barrier fences, any confusion, and any plaintive cries of “What do we do now?” – all of which we saw and heard in Butler, PA. Evidence of this prior planning is the diamond-sharp, thoroughly-drilled, hyper-certain coordinated reaction of Secret Service in 1981, to the shooting of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. This earlier Secret Service response took President Reagan out of the shooter’s range in seconds, not, as in this recent case, many long minutes. See the difference for yourself.
The assertion now by Secret Service that local police in Butler PA were in charge of securing any part of the venue, is baffling to anyone who has worked in or with a White House advance team. That is not how anything related to Secret Security operates, to my knowledge. If the SOP has changed in the last 20 years, then US Secret Service procedures have dramatically deteriorated. Or else — someone who does not want to secure US “principals” to the traditional standard, or at least not consistently, is now in charge.
Having seen how closely an event is scrutinized in advance, and how many layers of staffers in both the White House and the campaign need to sign off on it, let us look at the First Lady.
FLOTUS chose to speak at 5 pm on July 13, 2024, at North Pittsburgh, at a closed event of 200, at a casino. 5 PM was the exact time of President Trump’s speech in Butler PA. FLOTUS’ event was 54 minutes away from President Trump’s.
(Vice President Kamala Harris also spoke in Pennsylvania that day, at an event broadcast from 1-5 pm, at the Philadelphia Convention Center, at an APIAVotes (“Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote” Town Hall. Press around this event describes VP Harris as “our nation’s first Asian American Vice President.”)
The point is, both “surrogates” for Pres. Biden were speaking at closed, secure venues with limited entry points. Did FLOTUS’ event, and Harris’, require dozens of top Secret Service operatives, leaving Pres Trump exposed? Did these two events require all of the tall Secret Service operatives, or all of the Secret Service operatives that were actually well-trained in use of their weapons?
How did the Secret Service operatives who were with First Lady Jill Biden, react, when it was clear that a gunman had fired at and injured a President less than an hour away? Was FLOTUS whisked out of her casino event, as is standard when there is a heightened security context in the country? Or did she calmly finish her event?
Where did she go after that?
Did Secret Service get her to a more secure location than the one that was initially planned for her? That heightened response would have been standard under normal circumstances. At that point it would not have been known if the attack was on Pres. Trump alone or perhaps an attack by a foreign enemy, on multiple US “principals”.
What communications did FLOTUS’ office have with the White House Chief of Staff, with the Secret Service, with the campaign? It would be normal for there to be coordination related to security.
Here is why I ask all of this.
I see the First Lady as Suspect Number One — hypothetically speaking of course, lawyers — in my concern about who it was who may have put President Trump in danger.
I see, from the outside, a White House in chaos. I see clearly that there is a civil war inside the White House. The DNC, the Chief of Staff probably, certainly the donors, are furious that President Biden, with his obvious dementia, is not gracefully stepping aside, following his disastrous performance in the last Presidential debate.
In any other context, the pressure would be on the President to do so: he would be both bribed and (nonviolently) threatened or badgered by the DNC, by donors, by staff, etc, and he would eventually get the message and elegantly step out of the way.
That obviously is not happening.
Reports – and these are leaked no doubt by furious donors and DNC operatives – are that the family, and specifically that Mrs Biden and Hunter Biden, are unmoved, and preventing this graceful exit.
This is a really Shakespearean situation. There may well be a last, feverish, embattled holdout situation, with a demented principal essentially held hostage by his family; a power-crazed First Lady “in charge”; and a drug-addicted Hunter standing at her side, all of them hanging on for dear life, resisting at all costs the encirclement, relentless pressure, and rage, of the mafia-like powers of the DNC and Democratic donors. They may be resisting even the advice of their uneasy staffers (notice that you barely know the names of Biden White House or campaign staffers; they want to protect their reputations in this debacle).
I certainly see this overall scenario in the organizing of legacy media into creating situations that embarrass and expose President Biden’s dementia — situations that would have to be engineered and signed off on by Biden’s own team.
You have to ask yourself thus: who is running the United States of America?
There are a thousand decisions a day that a President needs to make. President Biden’s mind is gone; he cannot make them. Lobbyists from both parties describe a White House that they enjoy greatly because they say that you can put anything in front of this President, and he will sign it.
Who is running the United States? Is it, as with First Lady Edith Wilson, who secretly ran the country for two years after 1919 when President Wilson suffered a stroke that left him impaired, Mrs Biden?
When President Biden is on camera, you see that it is First Lady Dr Jill Biden who directs his glance, his words, his movement; in those thousand Presidential decisions a day, is she also directing his pen? If not she, then who?
It is not a trivial question.
Whoever is actually running America, it is clear that Mrs Biden does not wish to leave the Oval Office or the White House.
She and her husband, certainly her son, are all at risk of investigation, or worse, under a new Trump administration. She, more than anyone who is fully sentient in her family, needs President Trump to go away.
So in my calculus, President Trump’s rival is not the impaired President Biden.
It is the First Lady.
I have seen up close how the unlimited power of the Presidency, and the nearness to unlimited power of the Vice Presidency, can destabilize the wisest judgement and seduce the strongest mind. This level of power has an addictive quality. People cannot stand to give it up. They will do almost anything to keep it.
The weird lapses at Butler, PA; the weird messaging after the assassination attempt from Director Cheatle —- who is, nota bene, a Jill Biden-advocated hire — have a ragged, improvised quality.
A destabilized, desperate First Lady could — theoretically could, don’t sue me — imagine that she might, via her staff, direct all of the able, experienced Secret Service agents; all the tall secret service agents; to her own event, and to the Vice President’s; and that she could thus leave her rival physically exposed in Butler PA; and that she could get away with it.
In a POTUS or FLOTUS office, everything is about “deniability”. Directions are put on paper as rarely as possible. No one would ever say directly, in 2001, in a Bush Jr. White House, “Don’t follow up on warnings about a terrorist attack”; just as no one would ever say directly, in a Biden White House, “Hey, leave a security vulnerability open for President Trump’s event in Butler PA.”
The outcome that leadership wishes, if it is a bad one, is usually inferred by those around “the Principal”, by reading between the lines. The communication tenor is much more like England’s King Henry II’s line: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
“[S}everal knights […] took Henry II’s outburst—”Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”—to mean that the king wanted Becket dead. They murdered Becket near the altar of Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170.”
There has been historic reluctance to challenge any First Lady.
But someone made the decision to surround President Trump with tiny female Secret Service agents, at least one of whom cowered behind him while he was being shot at, and who appeared later not to know how to manage her holster.
All this happened when who knows how many tall, strong, experienced Secret Service agents were just 54 minutes away.
Someone made sure to arrange to be short of a third counter-sniper team; someone made sure to fail to secure a building 130 meters away from the speaker. Someone is directing SS director Cheatle to give nonsensical answers (this is itself a message, about impunity). Most chillingly, to me, is that someone directed a guard in military uniform to point his rifle directly at the van with a wounded Pres. Trump in it, before raising it again.
I think all of this is meant, if not to murder, certainly to seek to intimidate Pres. Trump into abandoning the campaign trail.
I think FLOTUS and her staff need to answer questions. I think that they need to yield records about the staff’s comms, if any, with Director Cheatle.
I am sorry, but I do.
*****
Still —- still. What a time in which we are living.
Maybe something beyond politics, even beyond fascist politics — which, as I keep trying to warn you, tries to intimidate the opposition, imprison it, or worse — is at work.
It’s kind of amazing that the bullet intended to kill him, just grazed a man who happened to turn his head.
It’s kind of amazing that his family hosted a national convention three days later. It’s kind of amazing that they are all not fully traumatized.
This whole event calls to mind that aphorism:
Man proposes, God disposes.
The veils are falling away.
Americans see clearly that someone in power wanted President Trump dead. They see clearly that this fight is not over.
Americans are reasoning accordingly. They will make their choices accordingly.
