The truth will set you free - 2

Musk, Biden and Brazil

The Twitter Files

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I have called the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk the biggest Black Swan event of my lifetime. Others would argue that the collapse of the housing finance market in 2008 was a bigger event. I don’t think so. Mr. Musk is allowing curtains to be pulled back that expose the machinations of the US government and we have seen enough to conclude that this is not Toto exposing the Wizard of Oz.

Mr. Musk says he doesn’t care as much about corporate profitability because he is all about freedom of speech. Maybe. When he allows Twitter users to discuss the reported actions taken against the Falun Gong, Christian and Uyghur minorities by the Chinese Communist Party then perhaps, he will be “all about free speech”. Nevertheless, he has certainly put the cat among the pigeons in terms of domestic free speech and First Amendment violations. And good for him.

Experienced journalists Bari Weiss (ex New York Times), Matt Taibbi (ex Rolling Stone), Lee Fang (The Nation and Intercept), Michael Schellenburger (writer and environmental activist), Alex Berenson (ex New York Times), and David Zweig (independent reporter) have been given unrestricted access to internal Twitter files and correspondence to report on what they find. Their reporting has become known generically as the “Twitter Files”. You are encouraged to read their reports. You are also encouraged to sign up for their professional Substack journalism.

All of them, in investigating the Twitter Files, have found that the US government (through various three letter agencies - FBI, DOJ, CIA etc) colluded with Twitter employees to suppress and silence users who did not follow the government argument regarding a host of issues including aspects of the covid 19 pandemic. This government censorship through proxy corporations started during the Trump administration and ramped up significantly during the current administration. As more voices regain their audiences on Twitter, will there be additional cuts to government sponsored lies?

The Hunter Biden laptop

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One of the most infamous cases of censorship uncovered by these journalists was the banning of the New York Post Twitter account over its aggressive reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 US election. Polls have shown that, if this news had not been suppressed, then Mr. Biden would have lost the presidential election. Suppression of First Amendment rights has real world consequences. But was the “laptop from Hell”, as it is often described, Russian psy-ops or does it incriminate President Biden in the “pay-to-play” grift of his son Hunter? We may soon find out. In stating this I need to explain last week’s shenanigans on Capitol Hill - another totally unexpected Black Swan event, in my view.

The “official” view is that the Republican Party is so fractured and dysfunctional that it could not elect a Speaker of the House in less than fifteen votes. The other, “heroic”, view is that the populist will of more than fifty percent of the American voters as expressed in the 2010 Tea Party revolt and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 finally found twenty-one congressmen and women to use their power and extract meaningful reforms of Congress (Rules changes). Although the rules changes seem like arcane procedural minutia, they are a significant shift back to an originalist view of the governance of “We, the People”. Among other items, it includes a commitment to a ten year budget cycle that returns the US to a balanced budget prior to raising the debt ceiling. (Intercept re debt ceiling)

Whichever perspective one might take on the events surrounding the election of Speaker McCarthy, it cannot be denied that the twenty-one Freedom Caucus holdouts used their leverage to win significant concessions from the House leadership. Another of those concessions is to examine, among other things, the Hunter Biden laptop and the suppression of news regarding it. Firebrand Congressman, Jim Jordan, will chair the committee and subcommittee charged with the investigation. The subcommittee is unambiguously named the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”. Given that Jordan refused to stand for election as Speaker in order to take on this role, we can conclude that he will be “attentive to the task”.

Mr. Jordan says that he is interested in knowing whether Hunter Biden is a pawn of Ukrainian and Chinese interests due to the millions of dollars he made from influence peddling. More importantly, he wants to know who is the “Mr. Big” allegedly referenced throughout the laptop. Two years ago, a Mr. Bobulinski, claiming to be a partner to Hunter Biden, asserted that “Mr. Big” was Joe Biden himself while he was Vice President of the United States. Perhaps Mr. Bobulinski and others will be subpeonaed to give their testimony under oath.

On January 10, 2023, following the election of Mr. McCarthy, the passage of the new Congressional Rules, and the elevation of Mr. Jordan to chair the relevant committees, it was announced that segregated, top-secret documents were found in the University of Pennsylvania offices of the Biden Vice Presidential Library - a library that was apparently financed with $70 million from the communist government of China. Since then, two more classified document caches have been found. Interestingly, Mr. Biden’s classified documents (VPs can not declassify documents) were found on November 2 and on November 18 a special counsel was created to investigate the Trump declassified documents (Presidents can declassify documents). There is something strange about the timing. Is Mr. Biden being thrown under the bus? Who knows. Mr. Jordan is going to be busy and perhaps his cuts will destroy lies about classified documents, the Hunter Biden laptop, and related issues.

2020 Election Fraud

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The 2020 US presidential election is a hotly contested issue and polls show that almost fifty percent of Americans think that there was enough election fraud to cast doubt on the result. Elections for which it takes weeks to tabulate ballots that have no chain of custody and are fed into machines that do not give a receipt have that effect. Videos that clearly show ballot stuffing will amplify that effect.

In December 2022 the Supreme Court of Georgia decided that an election fraud case brought in 2021 does, in fact, have standing and will be heard. A similar result was decided by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. What took them so long you might ask? For the record, I believe that the judicial branch must be shown overwhelming evidence of election fraud before it involves itself in a contested election claim. Such evidence is rarely provided and so, correctly in my view, US judges have been very loathe to take cases involving allegations of election fraud. That state Supreme Courts are now willing to hear such cases is significant.

But so what? No one believes that election results from over two years ago will be overturned. But is it possible that states will tighten their election laws and remove from their election rolls those “voters” who are either deceased or live in a different state? And if election fraud is proven in these Supreme Court cases, will this make President Trump’s insistent statements correct? Will those hundreds of people who have been held without bail for over two years in a Washington jail due to their actions on January 6, 2021 finally get their day in court? They would, no doubt, like to get on with their lives.

Mr. Greenwald is a left-leaning American lawyer-turned-journalist who lives in Brazil. He left the New York Times to start The Intercept and then quit over editorial disputes. He now writes a popular and highly recommended substack. (Glenn Greenwald substack). Here is his view of the journalistic treatment of the events of January 6, 2021.

“January 6 has become a high holy day for most of liberal America. From the start, they refuse to describe it as what it was: a protest-turned-riot that was predictably subdued in 3 hours by the most powerful and militarized government in human history. Instead, they needed it to be something far more dramatic and terrifying, something that would empower the incoming Biden administration with virtually limitless power to act against their political enemies.

…there is literally no limit to [the nation's largest media corporations] willingness to lie, fabricate and invent stories when doing so advances their deeply ideological and partisan interests.”

Do I know what happened in the election of 2020 and, subsequently, on January 6, 2021? I know very little except that there are widely varying views about the existence of voter fraud, the activities of January 6, who orchestrated them, and what was the involvement of President Trump and Speaker Pelosi. Let’s hope that the next Congressional inquiry into the events of this date allow the minority Democrats to appoint their own accredited members with legal representation with the ability to cross examine the witnesses; things that were missing in the just completed Democrat inquiry. If so, then will there be more lies that die from the thousandth cut?

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Brazil Election Protests

The riotous events in Brasilia over the past weekend have been endlessly compared to the US events of January 6, 2021, and that comparison is the subject of Mr. Greenwald’s substack article referenced above. What do we know about the election?

On October 30, 2022, Mr. Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva (Lula) won in a run-off against Mr. Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent president, setting off massive and ongoing street protests across the country. The Brazilian elections were conducted entirely by machine voting and allegations of election fraud were widespread. Many of the protests numbered in the millions of participants and the legacy media mostly ignored them. The protesters held up signs saying “No to Communism” believing Lula to be a communist in league with the Chinese Communist Party. Who knows. I found it noteworthy that the elderly Mr. Wang Qishan, reportedly the second ranked member of the CCP, attended the inauguration of Brazil’s president.

The Brazilian constitution requires the armed forces of Brazil to audit the results of elections that are contested. Most of the early protests were in front of military facilities calling for that audit. When the audit took place the final report concluded with no result because necessary information from the election machines was not provided. The events of the weekend of January 7/8 were protests for, among other things, the machine data to be provided so that the military could finish the audit.

For the record I follow two news sources that I trust and they are on opposite sides of the Brazilian election issue. I have no clue what happened. But it does seem strange that Lula would not request the Brazilian Supreme Court to force the Electoral Court to release the machine information, complete the audit, confirm his presidency, and put an end to the protests. He likely has reasons for not doing so.

We will have to see whether the Brazilian protestors continue to demand the full audit of the election. Having watched their enormous protests for the past two months I am inclined to think that threats of jail will not dissuade them. Perhaps there will be an unanticipated resolution to this standoff in the next year.

Interesting times ahead.