***
Now, I’m not saying Twitter is inherently a bad thing. Without Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, we might very well have ended up with Hillary Clinton as president of the United States. During the 2016 election, the mainstream media were so slanted in one direction, so hell bent on twisting my father’s words and making him out to be the worst person who’s ever lived, that there was really nowhere else for him to go but Twitter. If it hadn’t been for the direct person-to-person communication that social media provided, my father might never have been able to break through the mainstream media and the Hollywood propaganda machine and reach as many voters as he needed to reach. So we should give these platforms their due, at the very least.
But as soon as my father was elected, the tide turned. Twitter and Facebook decided to use all their power against him and any conservatives who support him. Now, we as a country have allowed Twitter, Facebook, and other tech giants, whose staffs are almost entirely liberal, to censor the opinions of conservatives without consequence. These days it isn’t just wild mobs of Twitter users who coordinate to take down conservatives; it’s the heads of the social media companies themselves. They ban the accounts of conservatives for fraudulent charges of hate speech, hide our posts via algorithms that no one understands, and write their terms and conditions to excuse the casual racism and violence of the left. In this day and age, when social media are the new public square, this “shadow banning” amounts to a complete suppression of freedom of speech. It can’t be allowed to continue.
I wish it weren’t this way, where nearly all our public discourse happens on social media platforms. I really do. But sadly, that’s where we’ve ended up. When news breaks, Twitter is the first place I go to get real-time updates. When I have an opinion that I want to get out into the world and I don’t want the spinmasters at CNN or the New York Times to chop it up and rearrange it first, I post it on Twitter. There’s a reason why, when the Times thought it had caught me red-handed trying to fix the election with Russia, I posted all my emails (which, according to Robert Mueller and anyone else whose eyes are connected to their brains, completely exonerate me) on Twitter. Once they were posted, no one could alter them. Everything went right from me to my followers, and no one else got in on the transaction.
At least that was how I thought it worked.
I am now aware that with every day that goes by, Twitter and Instagram are removing more and more of my posts from people’s timelines. They’re doing the same thing to other people who speak out in support of conservative values. People who have liked or shared my posts have been reporting sudden problems with their accounts or temporary lockouts from their devices. People have even been suspended for things they tweeted years ago but that have only recently been highlighted.
Here’s an example from my own Instagram account. As you will see, I followed the infamous Jussie Smollett story pretty closely on social. When CBS first reported that Jussie had actually paid his “attackers” (who supposedly wore MAGA hats) to attack him, I posted this:
Shocked, I really thought MAGA folks (who are all over downtown Chicago) were waiting with a rope/bottle of bleach to ambush a [rich] guy at 2am in minus 4 degrees because those are conditions where all people go out for Subway rather than order Seamless. Seemed so real.
Instagram took the post down, citing violations and saying I was “putting people in danger.” I mean, seriously. Go look it up. Was anyone put in danger by that? When it was thought that Jussie’s attackers were real, Instagram didn’t touch the most vile, crazy, violent protests in his favor. But one conservative voice reposts a news story from the mainstream media that the attack was faked, and it removes the post.
I was one of the first ones to call out shadow banning. About two years ago, I was looking at my analytics and I noticed something weird. I’d been posting with my usual frequency, and receiving my usual impressions, maybe 35 million impressions for the time period, and my new follower account registered zero. That’s impossible. You can’t have that many millions of impressions and have no new followers. So, after the usual spew of hate crap: “Nobody’s looking at your feed anymore!”, I put up a post calling-out Instagram for manipulating the account. Within a week, I was magically back up to where I was, about twelve thousand new followers. Amazing how that can happen, right?
So, fast-forward to the Smollett post. After I reposted it, and called them out for taking it down, I received an outpouring of thousands of comments and DMs, some even showing videos, of how Instagram was interfering with my following. Some weren’t allowed to like my posts or my father’s. The little heart would light-up, and then it would f lash back off. Some commented, “Hey Don, I had to follow you three times this week and I never unfollowed you.” With others, it was, “Don, I was blocked-out of my account for twenty-four hours for liking one of your feeds.” What made it even crazier was, it didn’t have to be a political tweet! It could’ve been a photo of my kids with my dad! So, it was then that I realized the scale of Instagram’s interference censorship, and could only imagine what they were doing to my father. Take a minute and think about this: if they can do it to me with millions of followers, if they can do it to the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!, do you think you’re safe from their biased influence? I didn’t think so. And, you know something, I can’t think of a single time of this happening to a liberal. Not once.
After the damage was done, Instagram said it was a mistake. Funny how these mistakes happen only to conservative posts.
"Our entire crony capitalist system,
Democrat and
Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-
world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan
Opinion: Trump’s
emoluments transgressions don’t stop with the Doral fiasco
By NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN
When the
White House announced that Donald Trump would host the 2020 Group of Seven
meeting at his Doral golf resort in Florida — an in-your-face bit of self-dealing and a blatant violation of the Constitution’s foreign
emoluments clause — Republicans and Democrats howled. Reporters had only just
begun to tally the ways awarding himself a government contract could enrich
Trump and the Trump Organization when the president backed down, but not before
he publicly decried the “phony” emoluments clause.
The Doral
reversal dimmed the spotlight on emoluments, but that should not lead us to
drop the focus on the rest of Trump’s self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
For strategic reasons, the House of Representatives may not include emoluments
transgressions among potential impeachment charges. Nonetheless, the number of
Trump’s violations are staggering, and growing by the day.
There are two
separate emoluments sections in the Constitution ; neither are phony, and both reflect the deep concern the Framers
had about possible corruption in the highest offices in the land.
“Emoluments”
are anything of value. The first constitutional clause, forbidding any officer
of the United States from taking “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of
any kind whatever” from a foreign government, is in Article I. It has no
loopholes; the Framers feared that a rich foreign government could influence or
sway American policy by giving something of value to a policy-maker. It is not
limited to the president or vice president, but to all holding an office of
trust in the U.S. government.
The second
emoluments clause is in Article II and is limited to the president. It reads,
“The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation,
which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he
shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other
Emolument from the United States, or any of them. ” Here, the fear was
that Congress could shake down the president by withholding his salary or bribe
him by increasing it, and that a president could use the leverage of his office
with states or the federal government to enrich himself.
We have never
had occasion in our history to be deeply concerned about violations of these
constitutional clauses. Most previous presidents have scrupulously adhered to
them in spirit and letter. Jimmy Carter, to pick one example, put his peanut
farm in a blind trust to avoid any appearance of conflict or attempt to profit
via his office.
Trump, whose
chief of staff on Sunday said the president still thought of himself as an
innkeeper, has kept ownership of all his properties and has lied about not
participating in their operations. He pushed officials at the General Services
Administration to allow him to keep his federal lease for his Washington hotel
while pressuring the District of Columbia to lower his property taxes. Trump’s
daughter, Ivanka, holding an office in his administration, has taken valuable
trademarks, including, staggeringly, one on voting machines, from China.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, holding an office of trust in the
administration, has promoted Trump and Kushner properties and solicited loans
from foreign governments.
In other
words, the president is unique in his corruption in American history. The watchdog group Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has regularly compiled a tally of
Trump’s conflicts of interest and violations of the emoluments clauses. The
latest numbers are stark: 1,493 trips to Trump properties by government
officials, usually spending taxpayer money that will enrich the president; 292
promotions of Trump properties by White House officials; 63 foreign trademarks
awarded to Trump brands, mostly from China and Brazil, while he has been
president.
The president
himself had made 387 trips to his properties, 240 of them to play golf. He
regularly does semi-official infomercials for his properties, and he’s told
couples considering staging a wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago in Florida or the
Trump country club in Bedminster, N.H., that, if they do, he might be available
for a photo op. He famously doubled the initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, to $200,000, when he became president,
enabling foreign figures (and others) to gain entrée to the president for a
price his businesses collect.
The message
has been received: Foreign governments, including Romania, Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, moved events from other venues to Trump properties, and foreign
countries or other foreign-connected entities have held 13 events at his
properties, surely enriching him along the way. (He claims profits from
foreigners are repaid to the Treasury; without his tax records, this can’t be
checked). One hundred and twenty-one foreign officials from 71 foreign
governments have visited his properties; lobbyists of all stripes have
scheduled events there. Trump has openly talked about his ventures in places
like Saudi Arabia and Turkey even as he has bent American foreign policy in
ways that benefit those countries’ autocrats.
The president
likes to pretend that there is no such thing as a conflict of interest, that
his actions are ”perfect” and “innocent.” But we should not let his lies
obscure what are ongoing, direct and outrageous abuses of the Constitution for
financial gain by the president and his cronies. The House impeachment hearings
are concentrating on other abuses of power, but there is no doubt our Framers
would see the emoluments violations as a long series of impeachable and
unconscionable offenses.
Norman
J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His
latest book, with Thomas E. Mann and E.J. Dionne Jr., is “One Nation After
Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the
Not-Yet-Deported.”
SECRET EMPIRES: HOW THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CLASS HIDES CORRUPTION AND ENRICHES FAMILY AND FRIENDS
11 Oct 201910
1:18
Scarborough then launched
into his own conspiracy theory:
But I think we all will be absolutely fascinated
when we finally
figure out what Vladimir Putin
has on Donald Trump and why Donald Trump
has surrendered the Middle East,
helped
ISIS, helped Iran, helped Russia, helped
Turkey, helped all of our
enemies and
betrayed all of our allies. You know, a lot of
people think that it’s – he has
compromising
pictures or something happened in a hotel in
Russia years ago. No.
It goes back to money.
It’s always about money.
GET THIS BOOK!
BULLSHIT! TRUMP AND HIS PARASITE
CHILDREN
HAVE SCREWED EVERY CONTRACTOR AND
PERSON
THEY’VE DONE BUSINESS WITH FROM DAY ONE!
Eric
Trump on paying contractors: We
pay
‘people when they do great jobs’
The Trump Organization has been criticized for stiffing
contractors. Contractors have filed hundreds of
complaints, which date back to the 1980s, alleging that the real estate company
did not pay them.
“We
believe in paying people when they do great jobs. And we get people paid
incredibly quickly. And we pay contractors,” said Eric Trump, executive vice
president of The Trump Organization at Yahoo Finance’s All Market
Summit , adding that the organization only refuses to pay contractors
who fail to complete a job.
“Yeah,
well, they [the unpaid contractors] didn't finish a job. And they didn't do a
good job. And they flaked out. And they were two months behind schedule. And so
you had to let go of them. And you had to bring somebody else in to do the job
that they otherwise would have. And it's called the real world,” he said,
referring to the allegations. “People like to take cheap shots at us.”
Eric Trump’s defense echoes his father’s status quo response.
During the
2016 presidential debate ,
President Donald Trump said something very similar. “Maybe he didn’t do a good
job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” he said in response to nonpayment
accusations.
Eric Trump
also noted to Yahoo Finance that The Trump Organization has developed
institutional knowledge about getting the best deals with contractors. “In New
York, we know what contractors are going to be incredible, what contractors are
going to — I won't use a word, but — take advantage of you,” he said. “And, you
know, you have that institutional knowledge. You know your way around. You know
the language. You know the laws. You know how things are built. You know what
kind of foundations work in the ground.”
ANN COULTER
TRUMP’S PARASITIC FAMILY
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ),
refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him
that he had Jared “in my pocket.”
Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over
their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin
Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration
were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.”
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross
Immoral Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
Trump's sister quits as a federal judge 10
days into formal probe of her possible role in massive family tax scam that
could have ended in her impeachment
· Trump's older sister resigned as an appellate court judge shortly
after a probe opened into her involvement in a family tax scheme
·
· 10 days ago an investigation into whether Maryanne Trump Barry violated
judicial conduct rules launched
·
· The case was closed after Barry resigned because retired judges are not
subject to the rules
·
· Barry had not heard a case in two years after transitioning to inactive
shortly after Trump's inauguration
·
· The Trump siblings were probed after an investigation found they were
involved in a tax scheme related to the transfer of their father's real estate
empire
President Donald Trump ’s older sister
Maryanne Trump Barry, 82, retired as a federal judge just days after an
investigation opened into her possible role in family tax fraud scheme.
Barry was a federal appellate judge in the third district, which
includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the investigation could
have led to her impeachment.
She had not presided over a case in more than two years, but was still
listed as an inactive senior judge in the third district – usually the step
taken before full retirement.
Barry did not give any reasons for her retirement.
The probe into the Trumps was first opened last fall, after a New York
Times investigation found the Trump siblings engaged in tax schemes in the
1990s, including fraud, that increased their inherited wealth.
+4
Maryanne Trump Barry resigned as a federal appellate judge 10 days into
an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules
An investigation into the Trump siblings opened after the New York Times
reported that they transferred their father's real estate assets improperly in
the 1990s
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological liar,
swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster, tax
evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in
penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other
charities.”
WHO IS
FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE
MONEY!
"I
doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending.
Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his
patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money. In
the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht so that the
then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off personal
bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel, one of
Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of his
landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001."
“The Wahhabis
finance thousands of madrassahs
throughout the
world where young boys are
brainwashed
into becoming fanatical foot-soldiers
for the petrodollar-flush
Saudis and other emirs of
the Persian
Gulf.” AMIL IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond Ibrahim's outstanding
book Sword and Scimitar , which
contains accounts of dynastic succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle
East, where standard operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his
father was to strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's
awful. But it has been happening for a very long
time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter how outraged
we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter
of the special counsel’s charter. He’s released the document. What I’m
looking for is relief and understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting
likelihood that the President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel
comfortable, and no evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re
still in the process of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say,
if [Attornery General William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
Morning Joe: Trump Is ‘Owned by Putin,’ Head of ‘Criminal
Organization’
Listen to
the Article!
Following a discussion of President
Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, on Thursday, MSNBC’s Morning
Joe went far beyond standard criticism of the controversial foreign
policy move and wildly claimed it was proof that Trump was “owned by Putin” and
heading up a “criminal organization” that had been “laundering money” for the
Russian autocrat for decades.
As the 6:00 a.m. ET hour segment about
Syria was wrapping up and co-host Mika Brzezinski was starting to go to a
commercial break, left-wing pundit Donny Deutsch interrupted to squeeze in an
unfounded conspiratorial rant in which he accused the President of multiple
crimes: “Let’s not forget it. This is all about failed casinos. He is
owned by Putin because he’s been laundering money, Russian money for the last
20, 30 years. He’s owned by him. That’s what this is.”
Brzezinski voiced her agreement with
irresponsible and unsubstantiated attack: “Oh, my lord....Yeah.”
Deutsch continued his tirade
unchallenged:
You talk to any banker in New York,
any business person in New York, any real estate person in New York, we
have a president that’s selling out our military, that’s costing lives because he
is owned by our geopolitical enemy because he’s been laundering money for him
as a criminal organization for the last 30 years. That will come out in time.
Co-host Joe Scarborough seemed to
offer a small dose of sanity in response: “That is – that is speculation and
only speculation right now.” However, he quickly added: “I will say that it is
speculation among New York bankers who have loaned Donald Trump money in the
past and who have been following his business career for 30, 40 years.”
Brzezinski chimed in: “Who know a lot.”
Scarborough then launched into his
own conspiracy theory:
But I think we all will be absolutely
fascinated when we finally figure out what Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump and why Donald Trump has
surrendered the Middle East, helped ISIS, helped Iran, helped Russia, helped
Turkey, helped all of our enemies and betrayed all of our allies. You
know, a lot of people think that it’s – he has compromising pictures or
something happened in a hotel in Russia years ago. No. It goes back to money.
It’s always about money.
He concluded the unhinged discussion
by asserting: “And this president is selling not only America, but its
most important allies, down the river for money he wants to make either while
in office or when he leaves office, period, end of story.”
It’s never enough for the liberal
media to simply express a policy disagreement with Trump and say that the U.S.
abandoning its Kurdish allies in northern Syria would have a negative outcome.
Instead, journalists and pundits must always try to outdo each other to make
the most outrageous declarations imaginable to prove their bona fides as
members of the resistance.
Here is a full transcript of the
October 24 exchange:
6:48 AM ET
DONNY DEUTSCH: Make no mistake,
because it’s easy to forget. Let’s not forget it. This is all about failed
casinos. He is owned by Putin...
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country . Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that . The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector , for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley
detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study
released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .