Donald Trump
‘A Nationalist Uprising’: Islamophobia and the Bannonisation of British Politics
For how much longer is the former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica going to be allowed to subvert our politics and stoke division in our communities?
Sharing a platform with Liz Truss at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last week, and talking about the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Steve Bannon described Tommy Robinson as a “hero” and Truss – the shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history – appeared to agree with him. “That is correct,” she said.
This is not the first time Bannon has praised the founder of the English Defence League, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Four years ago, while Robinson was serving a 13-month prison sentence for contempt of court, Bannon called him “the backbone” of the UK. But it is the first time such a senior Conservative has endorsed him.
Deputy Conservative Prime Minister Oliver Dowden attempted to make excuses for Truss this weekend, saying she might not have heard Bannon correctly. But even if Truss, who is still a Conservative MP, didn’t understand she was supporting a multiply-convicted British criminal and subversive activist, she should have known that she was sharing a stage with a multiply-convicted American criminal and subversive activist – Steve Bannon himself.
Bannon, as Grant Stern first revealed in this newspaper five years ago, was investigated and indicted for fraudulently using funds raised for his ‘Build the Wall’ US-Mexico barrier project in 2020. Outgoing President Donald Trump granted a last-minute pardon for his federal offences in 2021, but Bannon still faces state-level charges in a trial in New York later this year. He was also found guilty of two charges of criminal contempt for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
This is where Bannon’s role in both American and US democracy really matters: his vociferous attempts to destroy it on both sides of the Atlantic.
At CPAC, sharing a stage with right-wing activist Jack Posobiec, Bannon agreed that he wanted to “overthrow” democracy because they “didn’t get all the way on January 6”.
Bannon also revealed that he has similar designs on the UK. He urged Truss to join forces with the Reform Party, headed by Richard Tice, and told a Mirror reporter that his old friend Nigel Farage would be installed as prime minister as a part of a “nationalist uprising”.
While this intervention may have taken some by surprise, it is merely the culmination of over a decade during which Bannon has attempted to subvert British politics. Given that history, what can we expect next?
‘My Weapons’
A large part of Steve Bannon’s impact on politics on both sides of the Atlantic is his use of social media and digital campaigning to change the culture of debate – the very frame of reference and facts we use to debate politics. He has referred to this ‘information warfare’ as “flooding the zone with shit”, and the combination of disinformation and digital targeting as “his weapons”.
Cultivating these tactics goes back to 2013, when Bannon allied with the billionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer to run the Breitbart publications and co-found the now-defunct data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica involved in the great Facebook hack and micro-targeting scandal. The company was a spin-off of a strategic military outfit, SCL, which was used to deradicalise civilians and insurgents in combat zones.
The British element in Bannon’s campaign can be traced to his long friendship with Farage – although the ‘Cambridge’ in Cambridge Analytica has more specific roots.
In 2013, Bannon attended the 10th anniversary conference of the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF) at Churchill College, Cambridge University, just as he was setting up his new company.
Churchill College, Cambridge, December 2013. The YBF 10th anniversary conference with (left to right) Raheem Kassam, Steve Bannon and Harry Cole. Photo: Facebook
An offshoot of the Young America’s Foundation, the YBF was founded by lawyer Donal Blaney (currently in a legal dispute with this newspaper acting on behalf of GB News presenter Dan Wootton). Both the YBF, and its American counterpart, appear to have been funded by the Mercer Family – which also backed Cambridge Analytica and Bannon’s Breitbart.
By this point, the YBF had become a centre of right-wing US-style Republican thinking and antipathy towards the EU. Its co-founder was (the now ennobled) Daniel Hannan, a leading Brexiter and Conservative MEP. On its advisory board was Matthew Elliott, who helped set up the Tufton Street network of opaquely funded libertarian think tanks, and was the chief executive of the official Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit Referendum (he has also been elevated to the House of Lords).
Speakers at the YBF’s 10th anniversary event included Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes site; and Douglas Murray who spoke on jihad, Islamism, Israel, and the ‘War on Terror’. Bannon shared a platform with Harry Cole, then head of news at Guido Fawkes, and Raheem Kassam to discuss digital campaigning. Kassam went on to both edit the London edition of Breitbart and act as Farage’s aide for the next few years (he went on to co-host Bannon’s War Room podcast).
Also present was the then executive director of the YBF, Matthew Richardson, who was also reported to be Mercer’s legal representative in the UK at the time. He went on to become the secretary of Farage’s UKIP and signed a deal with Bannon in the run-up to the EU Referendum so that Cambridge Analytica could process UKIP data for the targeting of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, fronted by Farage. (Richardson now works with Rebekah Mercer and helped set up their social media site, Parler).
Email released by former Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser on the UKIP data handed over to Leave EU's Andy Wigmore by former YBF Chief Executive Matthew Richardson.
The YBF would be closed two years later, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying around the suicide of the young activist Elliott Johnson.
Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t last much longer. According to its former head of research, Chris Wylie, the company set up a temporary office in the English university town around the time of the YBF conference at Churchill College. Soon, it was working with Cambridge academics to establish a research project to psychologically profile voters – which would end up illegally harvesting the personal data (and even personal messages) of up to 87 million Facebook users to be used for political targeting.
Though many argue about the impact of psychometric targeting and online messaging, both the Brexit and Trump votes were swung by small margins. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix boasted that digital targeting was the key to the success in both results. Though it did not use Cambridge Analytica directly, the Vote Leave campaign used the company’s Canadian offshoot, AIQ, and its Project Ripon database to target swing voters with billions of online ads – often unlawfully paid for – in the last days before the EU Referendum.
When Carole Cadwalladr revealed the Facebook hack and Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit and Trump in the Observer in 2018, it wiped billions off the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, and Cambridge Analytica was closed and its offices raided by law enforcement.
But Steve Bannon had already left Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica by then – and had even bigger fish to fry.
Russia and Islamophobia
Like his friend, Nigel Farage, Bannon is keen to talk of the need to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian’ culture (as if that had not been one of pogroms and the Holocaust), while marginalising or monstering the third branch of the three great Abrahamic religions: Islam.
His embracing of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy – that Europe is being overrun by Muslim ‘invaders’ – has infected the worldview of many right-wing parties across the continent. This includes elements of the UK’s Conservative Party, which have been unafraid to advance these fearmongering narratives.
The latest example is the former Conservative vice-chair Lee Anderson’s recent comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan handing the city to “Islamists”, echoed by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in the wake of public protests in London over the Israel-Hamas War.
Activating xenophobia, particularly around Islam, was one of the key themes used by both leave campaigns during the EU Referendum in 2016 when, triggered by Russian military activity in war-torn Syria, hundreds of thousands of refugees started fleeing to Europe. Then Prime Minister David Cameron accused Vladimir Putin of deliberately “weaponising” refugees to destabilise Europe.
Farage’s Leave.EU campaign used its notorious ‘Breaking Point’ poster to spread fear about ‘invading’ Muslim migrants, while recycling Russian fake news about Muslim violence in its online ads. Meanwhile, the Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, wasn’t much better, falsely suggesting that 80 million Turks were about to swamp Britain and the EU.
Johnson also deployed Islamophobic tropes to set the tone for his ousting of Theresa May and taking over the leadership of the Conservatives in the summer of 2019 – inspired by Steve Bannon.
Appointed Foreign Secretary after failing to beat May for the leadership, Johnson first struck up a personal relationship with Bannon in late 2016, when Trump’s campaign manager was made his head of staff in the White House. In early 2017, Johnson’s Foreign Office invited Cambridge Analytica executives to election briefings on its use of data in Trump’s successful campaign.
Both men were reported to have been in regular contact throughout the next two years, during which Bannon also advised Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
When Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in 2018, Bannon claimed to have consulted him on moves to oust Theresa May. One of Johnson’s first was to write a Telegraph column comparing Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letter-boxes” – a provocation very much in line with Bannon’s Breitbart strategy of sectarian division to activate a hard-right racist base.
Around the time he was commending Tommy Robinson as the “backbone” of Britain, Bannon also claimed that Johnson would be “a great prime minister”.
Soon, Johnson picked up another one of Bannon’s favourite Breitbart themes saying, in a rare intervention in Parliament in 2019, that there was “a plot by the deep state to frustrate Brexit”. The ‘deep state’ catch-all conspiracy also chimes with the ‘Great Replacement’ – that elites are deliberately using migration as a weapon (it was echoed by Liz Truss in her appearance at CPAC last week).
But working in the shadows behind all of this is a genuine deep state – one which has weaponised migrants to fuel fear and division: the security system of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
During both the Brexit Referendum and Trump’s election campaign, Russian intelligence agencies were funding and promoting the same causes as Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that there was an element of collusion between them.
Cambridge Analytica had many links to the Russian state-controlled Lukoil company. It worked extensively with St Petersburg University, around the corner from the notorious Internet Research Agency, owned by the late oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which spent $50 million targeting US and UK voters. One of Cambridge Analytica’s consultants, Sam Patten, set up a company with a Russian intelligence agent. And crucial voter data on US swing states was passed on to the GRU, the same Russian military intelligence agency that supported Prigozhin.
Though Cambridge Analytica has now been shut down, and Prigozhin died in a plane crash after defying Putin last year, there is little doubt that these propaganda practices and Russian support for them live on in new forms.
Though Putin’s imperial expansionist intent has been revealed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he is now able to weaponise the conflict in Gaza for much the same purposes as he did with Syria – to promote xenophobia and the recurrent racist trope of the ‘Muslim hordes’ taking over Europe.
Unlike Syria a decade ago, there is no direct evidence of Russian involvement in Hamas’ horrific assault on Israel on 7 October last year – though the Kremlin does have close ties with Hamas’ main backers in Iran. But there is little doubt that the distraction from his invasion of Ukraine suits Putin’s purposes.
Given Bannon’s reliance on figures like Tommy Robinson, and the use of hate and Islamophobia to achieve a desired ‘nationalist uprising’, it should be no surprise, even if it is a shock, that unscrupulous senior Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss will go along with him not only to promote Trump in the forthcoming US elections, but also again to stoke division and mistrust in Britain.
If he succeeds in any way, this will foster a darker, dangerous form of right-wing Conservatism in this country – a tragic, toxic legacy for us all.
David Tennant Jabs Donald Trump During BAFTA Film Awards Monologue
David Tennant couldn't resist getting in a dig at disgraced ex-U.S. POTUS Donald Trump during Sunday's BAFTA Film Awards opening monologue.
Latest Book on Evangelical ‘Extremism’ Reflects Pervasive Tendency to Beat Up on Judaism to Save Jesus
Perhaps you’re in the crowd that’s baffled by the behavior of American evangelicals. How could...
The Memory Hole
An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, they yet cling on doggedly until time does its work, their owners depart for good, and new people move in and take them to the dump.
But this particular jumble of detritus has been rescued from oblivion and given a new home in the eternal archives of US history. For it included another item: a damaged box containing classified documents relating to America’s failed war in Afghanistan. That box, like Pandora’s, contained a whole world of trouble. From it has emerged the reality that the Democrats have been trying to evade—the vulnerability created by Joe Biden’s senescence.
In the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes, there is a photograph taken in the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, by an FBI agent in December 2022. It shows a familiar chaos of discarded objects: the console of a treadmill, red drain rods and a blue ladder, dried white flowers drooping disconsolately from a basket—kept, presumably, because they once meant something. Among them is the open brown cardboard box, its left side tattered and dented, from which peep the blue and white tops of documents Biden used when he was vice-president and then forgot to return after he left office.
US Department of Justice
A photograph of Joe Biden’s Delaware garage reproduced in the special counsel’s report, December 21, 2022
Seen differently, it might all be a conceptual art installation, a mordant commentary on the way America’s longest war has already been consigned to the national garage as just another dust-gathering discard. Instead, it dramatizes a much more literal question of memory and forgetting. Hur used the opportunity of his report to characterize Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” In his disastrous press conference of January 8, responding to Hur’s report, Biden in turn made a verbal slip that seemed to contradict his insistence that “my memory is fine,” describing the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi.”
The irony here is that Hur uses the location of the box of Afghanistan-related papers in the garage in Wilmington as evidence of Biden’s likely innocence of any crime:
A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.
Hur, in the body of his report, is actually quite good on the subject of forgetfulness. He recognizes that Biden, after he left office as vice-president, had such long experience of reading official documents that they might not be especially memorable to him: “Mr. Biden, after all, had seen classified documents nearly every day for the previous eight years.” In relation to the contentious documents that Biden retained, including a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama opposing a “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, Hur suggests that some members of a putative jury might “conclude that if Mr. Biden found the classified Afghanistan documents in the Virginia home, he forgot about them rather than willfully retaining them.” In other words, Biden’s forgetfulness was not pathological—it was merely the mundane operation of the human mind, which a jury would accept as normal and understandable.
This is surely right. It’s not just that the evidence related to the classified documents does not support any accusation that Biden deliberately withheld them from the archives. It’s also that it does not support the much more politically charged implication that the poor treatment of these documents is evidence of senility. Biden had these papers in his homes quite legitimately while he was vice-president. Some of them got shunted into the memory hole of an ordinary suburban garage. That he forgot about them is emphatically not evidence of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
The plain fact is that memory is always somewhat hazy, at any age. Indeed, as the White House noted in its rebuttal to the report, Hur references other instances of imprecise recall. Biden’s counsel Patrick Moore had the job of sorting Biden’s archives and searching for potentially missing documents that Biden should have handed over. Moore found documents in a small closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hur reports that “When interviewed by FBI agents, Moore believed the small closet was initially locked and that a Penn Biden Center staff member provided a key to unlock it, but his memory was fuzzy on that point.” Equally, Hur reports of another of Biden’s lawyers, John McGrail, that his memory of certain events was inconsistent with contemporary written records but concedes sensibly that “McGrail’s memory of these events could well have faded over the course of more than six years.” Does this mean that Moore and McGrail had diminished faculties? Of course not—people forget things.
*
The politically explosive part of Hur’s report, however, relates to a much more concentrated period of time: what Biden identified in his press conference as a five-hour grilling by the special counsel’s team over two days on October 8 and 9, 2023. This was in the immediate aftermath of the shock of Hamas’s atrocious assault on civilians in Israel. As Biden put it in his press conference, “it was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” In its rebuttal, appended to Hur’s report, the White House says that “in the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” If Biden’s mind was elsewhere during the interviews with Hur, most of the world would surely agree that that’s exactly where it should have been.
Hur’s account of this meeting is nonetheless worrying:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
These lapses of memory are significant and they do provide a troubling glimpse of how Biden may sometimes function in private meetings in the White House. But Hur also performs a sleight-of-hand. He turns the evidence from these two meetings in October into a much more sweeping insinuation about Biden’s mental capacities by linking it back to his unremarkable amnesia about the storage of the documents. He does this by projecting himself into the minds of putative jury members who would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
How does he reach this surmise? He tells us explicitly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him” (my emphasis). What Hur does here is to fuse the events that would be the subject of such a trial—Biden’s failure to remember where some documents were stored, a failure Hur accepts as perfectly normal—with his own characterization of Biden’s demeanor at the two meetings in October. Thus the perfectly mundane imperfections of memory become part of an accusation of near-senility, the only evidence for which is in those two meetings on especially fraught days in October.
This is grossly unfair. Insofar as Hur has a legitimate concern with the operation of Biden’s memory, it relates to the actual subject of his investigation: the storage of the documents. He provides no evidence at all that there was anything remarkable about Biden’s forgetfulness in this regard. Instead of sticking to his brief, however, Hur then shapes a politically lethal phrase out of a judgment he is not qualified to make—the lawyer appointing himself both as a doctor making a cognitive assessment and as a dramatist inventing a scenario for how twelve members of an imaginary jury might perceive Biden’s imaginary appearance in a witness box. It would be naive to think that Hur was unaware of the potentially historic consequences of this leap from evidence to conjecture.
*
This unfairness creates in turn a natural reaction among Democrats. If Biden is being treated so badly, the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.
The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.
Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.
It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.
Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.
The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Donald Dutton Warns Australia To Be Wary Of Taylor Swift
Australian Opposition leader, Donald Dutton, has warned the nation to be wary of American singer Taylor Swift, after Donald’s news station of choice, Sky News Australia, ran a story on the singer somehow being linked to a plot to destroy Donald Trump.
”I’m always wary of any celebrity that comes out here and draws a crowd but does not pay tribute to the Nation’s traditional owners, Rupert and Gina,” said Opposition leader Dutton. ”Who is this Taylor Swift person?”
”What does she stand for? I need more details.”
When asked if he was serious about believing a tin-foil hat conspiracy about Taylor Swift, Donald Dutton said: ”I take everything Sky News Australia says seriously, as do their other 5 viewers.”
”People are always so quick to attack fine news sources like Sky News Australia with accusations like, where’s the proof, that doesn’t make sense and isn’t that slander?”
”Not me though, when Sky says jump I say who do I land on?”
Mark Williamson
@MWChatShow
You can follow The (un)Australian on twitter @TheUnOz or like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/theunoz.
We’re also on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theunoz
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As Far-Right Surges in US and Germany Debate Rages Over Disqualification of Those Who Would Destroy Democracy
“This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” Despite the bitter...
Trump’s Chaos Agenda Donald Trump wants you to be...
Trump’s Chaos Agenda
Donald Trump wants you to be disgusted. He wants you to be cynical. And he definitely doesn’t want you to watch this video. Why? Because that’s how he wins in 2024. Let me explain.
The Republicans’ election strategy is built on chaos. The more chaos they create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democracy to govern the nation. So we give up on democracy and turn to a so-called strongman.
Trump has been pushing his party to deny the 2020 election result, shut down the government, pardon insurrectionists, impeach President Biden, investigate Hunter Biden, stop funding Ukraine, and obstruct the criminal prosecutions Trump is facing. He’s stoking hatred, using fascist language by labeling his opponents “vermin” and claiming immigration is destroying the nation.
Trump wants voters to believe America is ungovernable, and that the only solution is an authoritarian like him taking over.
And he wants those who don’t support him to be so disgusted that they tune out — and not even bother to vote.
Trump’s chaos agenda is also drowning out news about how well we’re actually being governed under President Biden.
Rarely do we hear about how the economy continues to generate a record number of new jobs.
Not to mention billions of dollars being invested to fix the nation’s infrastructure and combat climate change. Medicare on the way to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled, in spite of rulings from the right-wing Supreme Court. Corporate monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended.
Trump and his allies don’t want you to know about any of this. And sadly the media plays along by focusing mostly on chaos and dysfunction, with an inclination to blame both sides in the name of “balanced coverage.”
Folks, the political struggle of our time is no longer Left versus Right, Democrats versus Republicans. It’s now democracy versus fascism.
Be warned. And help spread the word about Trump’s chaos agenda by sharing this video.
Avatar: The Last Airbender, WWE/Netflix & More: BCTV Daily Dispatch
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: WWE/Netflix, Dwayne Johnson, Squid Game, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Trek: Discovery, Doctor Who & more!
Why Is Boris Johnson Endorsing a Second Trump Presidency in the Name of Ukraine?
In his lucrative column for the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson backed the return of Donald Trump to the White House, primarily because he expects the former US President to be the man to stand up to Vladimir Putin by enabling a Ukrainian victory in the war Russia has been waging against it. “My thoughts, of course, go first to Ukraine,” Johnson wrote.
The former Prime Minister observed that it was under the Trump Administration that Ukraine received Javelin anti-tank weapons that proved to be invaluable in fending off the Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv. This is partially true. Ukraine did get those weapons but not because of Trump, who actually attempted to withhold this congressionally-mandated military assistance package.
Ukraine had already been fighting against the Russian invasion of its eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, by the time President Trump attempted to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into doing him political favours before sending the weapons. That resulted in Trump's first impeachment.
But it was not the first time Trump wanted to hobble military support to help Ukraine thwart President Putin’s violent aims. In July 2016, when Trump was formally designated the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential election that year, language that had called for the United States to provide “lethal weapons” to Ukraine was deleted. The Trump campaign was being managed by Paul Manafort, who tried to use his involvement to “get whole” on a debt owed to a major Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
Manafort was also involved in another aspect of the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election – one that culminated in an infamous meeting at New York's Trump Tower with a delegation of Russians. The meeting came about after a series of email exchanges between Donald Trump Junior and a music promoter working for the pop star son of another Russian oligarch, Aras Agalarov. The ties between the Trump and Agalarov families go back some years, with their most prominent interaction happening when Trump took his Miss Universe pageant on the road to Moscow.
When the representative from the Agalarov family reached out to Donald Trump Jr on 3 June 2016, the contact was very deliberately worded. The email explicitly stated that what was being offered was “very high level and sensitive... part of Russia and its Government’s support for Mr Trump”. The appropriate reaction would have been to contact the FBI, but Trump Junior replied: “I love it!”
On 7 June 2016, another email stated that there was a “Russian Government attorney who is flying over from Moscow” for the subsequent meeting attended by Manafort alongside Trump Junior and Jared Kushner.
While in office, Trump flew to Helsinki for a summit with Putin. The two men sat behind closed doors for a period of time, after which Trump ordered the translator to destroy her notes. The press conference did not go well. A leading Russian expert in Trump’s administration, Fiona Hill, described it as “mortifying”, with Trump publicly taking Putin’s words over those of his own security agencies.
These examples are evidence enough that Donald Trump has not stood up to Vladimir Putin. That he will not stand up to Putin if he returns to the White House. It is not unlikely that the Russian President has kompromat on Trump, which means the businessman cannot stand up to Putin.
Though Trump claims that the multiple court cases he faces are a political witch-hunt, they are nothing of the sort. One current legal proceeding against him is determining the degree of damages to be awarded for defamation and sexual assault. In another case, Trump and his children are accused of a series of financial crimes spanning decades.
Then there are the multiple cases that are linked to the events of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The most significant legal battle here is whether having incited insurrection, Trump is banned from holding office again in line with the Constitution.
So why did Boris Johnson feel the need to endorse Trump on the basis of Ukraine?
Both men share one characteristic: they are both liars. Perhaps Johnson's endorsement is, as usual, in his own self-serving interests. Because it is certainly not in the interests of the United States, Ukraine or the world.
Five Biggest Border Lies Debunked Republicans are lying about...
Five Biggest Border Lies Debunked
Republicans are lying about immigrants and the border. Here are five of their biggest doozies.
1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to secure the border
Well, that’s rubbish. Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border security.
Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106 billion national security supplemental that includes border funding.
2. They blame the drug crisis on immigration
That’s more rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the U.S. from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl in 2021 were U.S. citizens.
3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.
Baloney. For almost a half century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.
4. They say immigrants are stealing American jobs.
Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want. And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: unemployment has been below 4% for roughly two years.
5. They blame crime on immigrants
More baloney. This has been debunked by numerous studies over the years. In fact, a 2020 study found that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.
Notwithstanding the recent migrant surge, America’s homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 — the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.
Who’s really behind these lies?
Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.
Now leaning into full neo-fascism and using the actual language of Hitler to attack immigrants.
Trump wants us to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
Know the truth and spread it.