FTR #945 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

This pro­gram updates and/or intro­duces var­i­ous points of inquiry:

For­mer Oba­ma U.N. Ambas­sador Susan Rice was one of just a hand­ful of main­stream politi­cians who (VERY belat­ed­ly) got things right. Speak­ing of Steve Ban­non’s ele­va­tion to a posi­tion of pri­ma­cy on the NSC, she observed: ” . . . . ‘Trump loves and trusts the mil­i­tary so much he just kicked them out of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil and put a Nazi in their place,’ she said. . . .”

Ban­non’s ascen­sion is note­wor­thy: “ . . . . But the defin­ing moment for Mr. Ban­non came Sat­ur­day night in the form of an exec­u­tive order giv­ing the rum­pled right-wing agi­ta­tor a full seat on the ‘prin­ci­pals com­mit­tee’ of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil — while down­grad­ing the roles of the chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence, who will now attend only when the coun­cil is con­sid­er­ing issues in their direct areas of respon­si­bil­i­ties. It is a star­tling ele­va­tion of a polit­i­cal advis­er, to a sta­tus along­side the sec­re­taries of state and defense, and over the president’s top mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence advis­ers. . . .”

Ban­non’s ascen­sion to the NSC should be ana­lyzed against the back­ground of the mar­tial law con­tin­gency plans drawn up by Oliv­er North and still on the books. This is dis­cussed at length in AFA #32.

One of the key fea­tures of the mar­tial law con­tin­gency plans involved the fed­er­al dep­u­ti­za­tion of para­mil­i­tary right-wingers to main­tain order. The mil­i­tary, even with the assis­tance of the Nation­al Guard, does not have the man­pow­er to main­tain civil­ian order. It is our sus­pi­cion that Ban­non may be involved with the imple­men­ta­tion of such activ­i­ties.

Noto­ri­ous troll, blog­ger and Naz­i/white-suprema­cist fel­low trav­el­er Charles “Chuck” John­son has sub­stan­tive input in Trump’s cab­i­net selec­tions. Worth not­ing is the fact that John­son may be oper­at­ing in tan­dem with Peter Thiel, whose data­base named the “Plum List” bears a strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty to a web­site “ThePlumlist.com,” appar­ent­ly being used by John­son to help staff Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion.

“ . . . . Despite his dis­re­gard for facts and reck­less approach to pub­lish­ing, John­son, who was recent­ly pho­tographed at a din­ner attend­ed by white suprema­cists in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., built a sig­nif­i­cant fol­low­ing among many who self-iden­ti­fied as being a part of the ‘alt-right.’ Trump drew sig­nif­i­cant sup­port from those same fol­low­ers dur­ing the elec­tion. . . . .

” . . . . John­son also helped cre­ate a data­base where poten­tial polit­i­cal appointees could send in their resumes to be con­sid­ered for gov­ern­ment posi­tions. He has access to the web­site ThePlumlist.com, and though the recent­ly cre­at­ed web­site remains dor­mant, can­di­dates have been told to send their infor­ma­tion to an email account asso­ci­at­ed with that domain. In Novem­ber, The Dai­ly Mail report­ed that Thiel main­tains a data­base called the “Plum List” to track poten­tial hires and qual­i­fied appli­cants. Sources famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion described the list as an intake sys­tem for the team, and said it was sep­a­rate from the ver­sion that Thiel and his clos­est asso­ciates use to track final selec­tions that are for­ward­ed to Trump. . . .”

John­son had a very telling obser­va­tion near the end of the fol­low­ing arti­cle: ” . . . John­son attrib­uted much of the work that he and oth­ers have done in sup­port of Trump to being able to tap into vot­ers’ emo­tions through memes, such as the Pepe the Frog car­toon that became an infor­mal mas­cot for Trump sup­port­ers. . . .”

A sign of the times man­i­fest­ed in Ken­tucky, where a group of tan, mil­i­tary style vehi­cles fly­ing a Trump ban­ner was spot­ted. “ . . . . Davis said it would also vio­late reg­u­la­tions to run a mil­i­tary con­voy with no unit mark­ings on the vehi­cles, and said he did not think the vehi­cles belonged to any ser­vice branch. Per the report, he sug­gest­ed that they were mil­i­tary sur­plus. . . . ”

The vehi­cles belonged to an elite SEAL unit. “. . . . ‘The con­voy were ser­vice mem­bers assigned to an East Coast-based Naval Spe­cial War­fare unit dri­ving vehi­cles while tran­sit­ing between two train­ing loca­tions,’ Lieu­tenant Jacqui Maxwell, a spokesper­son for Naval Spe­cial War­fare Group 2, told ABC News. Naval Spe­cial War­fare Units is the offi­cial Navy term for its elite SEAL spe­cial oper­a­tions teams.. . . . ”

The founder of “the artists for­mer­ly known as Black­wa­ter” Erik Prince has been serv­ing as a back chan­nel advis­er on intel­li­gence and secu­ri­ty mat­ters to Trump. “. . . . he may be mak­ing a come­back, this time as a backchan­nel advi­sor on intel­li­gence and secu­ri­ty mat­ters to US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, The Inter­cept report­ed on Tues­day. It’s unclear when Prince made his way into Trump’s inner cir­cle, but he has made siz­able con­tri­bu­tions to the pro-Trump Polit­i­cal Action Com­mit­tee (PAC). The Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion (FEC) fil­ings for the PAC shows he made a con­tri­bu­tion of $100,000 in Sep­tem­ber 2016 to their efforts. His moth­er Elisa Prince also gave $50,000 to the com­mit­tee. Prince’s sis­ter Bet­sy DeVos is Trump’s Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion choice. . . .”

In FTR #‘s 941 and 942, we exam­ined Tul­si Gab­bard (D–HI), usu­al­ly described as a “ris­ing star” in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. Of sub­stan­tive­ly greater inter­est for our pur­pos­es is the fact that she was one of the dri­ving forces behind the Bernie Sanders phe­nom­e­non.

This pro­gram updates that analy­sis, set­ting forth more about Gab­bard’s behav­ior, asso­ciates and fascist/Underground Reich asso­ci­a­tions:

a)Gabbard received kid glove treat­ment from Pierre Omid­yar’s Hon­olu­lu Civ­il Beat.

b)She recent­ly took an unan­nounced, and pos­si­bly ille­gal, trip to Syr­ia, dur­ing which she met with Bashar Assad. This fur­ther dis­rupts an already bad­ly weak­ened Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

c) Her trip was shep­herd­ed by: “. . . . Gabbard’s office claims her trip was fund­ed by the Arab Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic and Social Ser­vices (Aac­cess) – Ohio; how­ev­er, the group has not report­ed any finan­cial rev­enue to the US gov­ern­ment since 2006. Bas­sam Khawam, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Aac­cess who trav­eled with Gab­bard, report­ed­ly belongs to a pro-Assad Lebanese polit­i­cal par­ty, the Syr­i­an Social Nation­al­ist par­ty (SSNP). The par­ty has dis­patched its mem­bers to fight on behalf of the Assad regime dur­ing the near­ly six-year war. . . .”

d) Bas­sam Khawam’s polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion with the Syr­i­an Social Nation­al­ist Par­ty is “inter­est­ing”: ” . . . . They greet their lead­ers with a Hit­ler­ian salute; sing their Ara­bic anthem, “Greet­ings to You, Syr­ia,” to the strains of “Deutsch­land, Deutsch­land über alles”; and throng to the sym­bol of the red hur­ri­cane, a swasti­ka in cir­cu­lar motion. These are the hall­marks of the Syr­i­an Social Nation­al­ist Par­ty (SSNP), the old­est ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion in exis­tence today and one of the most secret and dead­ly. . . .”

e)More about Khawam’s polit­i­cal ally, the SSNP: “. . . . [founder Antun] Saadeh emi­grat­ed again to Brazil in 1938 and after­wards to Argenti­na, only to return to Lebanon in 1947 fol­low­ing the coun­try’s inde­pen­dence from the French in 1943. On his way to Argenti­na, he vis­it­ed Italy and Berlin, which increased the sus­pi­cions of the French that the SSNP might have been enter­tain­ing rela­tions with the Axis. . . . Ree­va Simon writes: “the par­ty’s ‘leader for life’, was an admir­er of Adolf Hitler influ­enced by Nazi and fas­cist ideology”.[55][59] The par­ty adopt­ed a reversed swasti­ka as the par­ty’s sym­bol, sang the par­ty’s anthem to Deutsch­land über alles, and includ­ed devel­op­ing the cult of a leader, advo­cat­ing total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment, and glo­ri­fy­ing an ancient pre-Chris­t­ian past and the organ­ic whole of the Syr­i­an Volk or nation.[52][55] . . . .”
Gab­bard co-spon­sored a bill that would clas­si­fy any­one oppos­ing Ukraine’s entry into the EU as a “ter­ror­ist.”

The pro­gram con­cludes with exam­i­na­tion of anoth­er alleged Russ­ian “hack,” which smells sus­pi­cious­ly like a “cyber-false flag” oper­a­tion: ” . . . . Two new users showed up as reg­is­tered admin­is­tra­tors of the web­site: larisa@steamreal.ru and ewartumba@mail.ru. The ‘.ru’ suf­fix indi­cates a Russ­ian ori­gin, Ben­son said. The pro­file pages of the users had char­ac­ters in the Russ­ian alpha­bet in ‘Address’ and ‘About Me’ fields, she said. . . .She said she can’t say whether Rus­sians were real­ly involved or whether the address­es could have been faked by some­one mim­ic­k­ing a con­nec­tion based on what had been in the news. But it was impor­tant that police and the FBI become involved, to ‘make this infor­ma­tion part of the body of infor­ma­tion police and the FBI are com­pil­ing from the nation­al inves­ti­ga­tion,’ she said. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The inclu­sion of Gab­bard’s asso­ciates in the Hin­du nationalist/fascist RSS in a pres­ti­gious Indi­an lit­er­ary fes­ti­val, symp­to­matic of a phe­nom­e­non sim­i­lar to the rise of Trump: “. . . . ‘We are acknowl­edg­ing that the intel­lec­tu­al nerve cen­ter has shift­ed, and the seat of cul­tur­al pow­er has shift­ed, because no one was inter­est­ed in invit­ing these guys before 2014,’ said Supriya Nair, a writer and edi­tor who has attend­ed the fes­ti­val for the last six years. In any case, she said, the shift right­ward had already tak­en place in the larg­er soci­ety. ‘This is a last bas­tion,’ she said. . . .”; Naren­dra Mod­i’s rise in India, what Supriya Nair described as a shift of “the intel­lec­tu­al nerve cen­ter” has been fueled by “dark mon­ey;” Trump PR man Felix Sater’s role in shep­herd­ing Trump’s trips to Rus­sia; review of Sater’s work for the CIA;
review of Pierre Omid­yar’s role in financ­ing the rise of Naren­dra Modi and the OUN/B fas­cist in Ukraine.

FTR #928 The Trumpenkampfverbande, Part 7: Locker Room Eclipse, Part 2

Con­tin­u­ing analy­sis of aspects of Don­ald Trump’s can­di­da­cy that have been eclipsed by his boor­ish atti­tude and behav­ior toward women, we note Trump’s use of thin­ly-veiled anti-Semit­ic rhetoric inti­mat­ing that Hillary Clin­ton is in bed with an inter­na­tion­al Jew­ish cabal. ” . . . . The speech was hinged to the orig­i­nal pur­pose of his cam­paign: to trade on the resent­ments of a restive rem­nant of white America—angry white men and the women who love them—and set the stage for may­hem in the wake of his like­ly elec­toral defeat. This was not your stan­dard, off-the-cuff Trump rant. This was a script­ed speech, deliv­ered with a teleprompter. It was craft­ed. It fea­tured the key words of right-wing com­plaints: “sov­er­eign,” “glob­al bankers” and “slan­der.” Real­ly, it came right out of a Nazi pro­pa­gan­da play­book. And when one con­sid­ers the themes com­mon between Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films and the films made by top Trump cam­paign staffers Stephen K. Ban­non and David Bossie (as ana­lyzed by Alter­Net), we should hard­ly be sur­prised. . . . The agen­da of the “media estab­lish­ment,” Trump said, was to elect “crooked” Hillary Clin­ton, in the ser­vice of “spe­cial glob­al inter­ests rig­ging the sys­tem.” There are a lot of ways in the land of Wingnut­tia to tele­graph that your tar­get is Jews, and these are two of them. Remem­ber them: You’ll be hear­ing a lot in com­ing days about the “media estab­lish­ment,” “glob­al spe­cial inter­ests,” oh, and “bankers.” . . . .”

Trump is also rhetor­i­cal­ly invok­ing the prospect of turn­ing to vio­lence to right the wrongs of the “rigged” elec­tion he has bruit­ed about. “ . . . . I watched his speech Thurs­day, and if I closed my eyes, I could smell the camp­fire smoke at the Mal­heur refuge and feel the Ore­gon win­ter wind on my face. Here were the con­spir­a­cies, the ref­er­ences to the shad­owy inter­na­tion­al cabals, the whis­pers about the ille­git­i­ma­cy of the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Tri­lat­er­al­ist coopt­ing of the FBI. It was like lis­ten­ing to an immod­est Ammon Bundy. We have to pro­tect our­selves from not just the gov­ern­ment (because it is only a pawn) but from the peo­ple who real­ly run it. We should be watch­ful, resilient, ready—and though he is reluc­tant, he will sac­ri­fice him­self, for he is the only one who can save us from the ter­ror. Don­ald Trump shout­ed out every fevered dystopi­an fan­ta­sy I heard on the refuge . . . . I was out­raged by Trump before. But now I am wor­ried. . . . Thurs­day, Don­ald Trump trav­eled a step fur­ther down the path of mil­i­tant right-wing rev­o­lu­tion. It wasn’t a call to arms, exact­ly. But it was far past the point of com­fort. . . .”

A major point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns Trump’s deputy cam­paign man­ag­er, David Bossie. Even as Trump accus­es Hillary of being a tool of the “elites,” Trump is uti­liz­ing Bossie, who is the head of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. It was a law­suit by Bossie’s orga­ni­za­tion that opened the flood­gates to vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed cam­paign fund­ing by the ultra rich, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. Bossie and Steven K. Ban­non, Trump’s cam­paign man­ag­er, have uti­lized pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques pio­neered by Hitler, Goebbels and com­pa­ny. ” . . . . The late Andrew Bre­it­bart, founder of the web­site Ban­non went on to lead, called Ban­non the “Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty movement”—a ref­er­ence to the infa­mous cre­ator of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films. While insist­ing to a Wall Street Jour­nal reporter in 2011 that his work isn’t pro­pa­gan­da, Ban­non went on to cite Riefen­stahl among his main influ­ences. . . . Ivana Trump, the candidate’s first wife, told Van­i­ty Fair in 1990 that her hus­band kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s My New Order, a col­lec­tion of speech­es that dis­play the Nazi dictator’s excep­tion­al abil­i­ty to manip­u­late real­i­ty, in a cab­i­net near his bed. . . . . The Nazi regime pro­duced a mas­sive amount of pro­pa­gan­da; it had an entire Min­istry of Pub­lic Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da, head­ed by Joseph Goebbels. A cen­tral tech­nique of Nazi pro­pa­gan­dists, accord­ing to the U.S. Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um, was to cast Jews as out­siders and dan­ger­ous ene­mies of the Reich, ‘‘sub­hu­man’ crea­tures infil­trat­ing Aryan soci­ety.’ . . . In her analy­sis of Riefenstahl’s ‘Tri­umph of the Will,’ Price not­ed that ‘per­haps most crit­i­cal­ly, Germany’s come­back is por­trayed as well under­way; the view­er need only jump aboard. What is being said implic­it­ly is that there is no alter­na­tive.’ In ‘Bat­tle for Amer­i­ca,’ Ban­non and Bossie fol­low the same for­mu­la, posit­ing the Tea Par­ty move­ment as the band­wag­on to jump on. But the for­mu­la isn’t the only thing about the film that car­ries echoes of Goebbels: a researcher and coun­sel for the film was white nation­al­ist Robert Van­der­voort. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The arrest of mili­tia mem­bers in Kansas for plot­ting an attack on Soma­li refugees, sched­uled for the day after Elec­tion Day; dis­cus­sion of UK Inde­pen­dence Par­ty leader Nigel Farage’s sup­port for Trump; the sup­port Trump has received from Russ­ian fas­cist Vladimir Zhiri­novsky; Zhiri­novsky’s fund­ing by Ger­man Nazi Ger­hard Frey; Frey’s dis­sem­i­na­tion of the dis­in­for­ma­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald fired at Gen­er­al Edwin Walk­er; Frey’s close asso­ci­a­tion with Rein­hard Gehlen; Trump’s close rela­tion­ship with the Steuben Soci­ety.

FTR #887 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

The ongo­ing occu­pa­tion of an Ore­gon wildlife pre­serve in Ore­gon by para­mil­i­tary forces led by Ammon Bundy (son of Cliv­en Bundy) may seem far removed from the gild­ed realms in which the Koch Broth­ers move. They may also appear to be of an entire­ly dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal stripe from the likes of Edward Snow­den and Julian Assange. That is not the case. In fact, the “Bundy­ists” are real­iz­ing the agen­da of the Wise Use move­ment and the Koch broth­ers, both advo­cates of ced­ing con­trol of fed­er­al lands to local con­trol, in order that cor­po­rate inter­ests such as tim­ber, min­ing and cat­tle ranch­ing can use the ter­ri­to­ry for their own use and prof­it. By the same token, the likes of Edward Snow­den and Julian Assange have arro­gat­ed to them­selves the use, con­trol and dis­sem­i­na­tion of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion that was not theirs to own or dis­trib­ute. David Golum­bia not­ed the atti­tude of “coders” such as Snow­den, Assange and “hack­tivists ” . . . the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it . . . mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role.” Turn­ing to tur­moil in Europe, the recent assaults on women by Mid­dle East­ern immi­grants in Ger­man, Finnish and oth­er cities on the con­ti­nent have fueled the rise of fas­cist groups, mint­ing valu­able polit­i­cal coinage from the assaults. Some observers com­pared a recent ram­page in Leipzig with the 1938 Kristall­nacht pogrom. The broad­cast con­cludes with an overview of P‑2 Lodge grand­mas­ter Licio Gel­li, the recent­ly deceased fas­cist who pro­found­ly influ­enced events on three con­ti­nents. Pro­gram High­lights Include: Fred C. Koch’s con­struc­tion of an oil refin­ery for Hitler; Ex-CIA offi­cer and author Robert Baer’s belief that Hitler escaped Ger­many at the end of the war; review of the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Fox News host Andrew Napoli­tano and Snow­den Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice Ron Paul at a lib­er­tar­i­an stu­dents con­fer­ence; review of the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Edward Snow­den at that same con­fer­ence; review of Carl Lund­strom’s financ­ing of the anti-immi­grant Swe­den Demo­c­rat fas­cist par­ty and his fund­ing of the Pirate Bay web­site that host­ed Wik­iLeaks.

FTR #805 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

As our title indi­cates, this pro­gram brings a num­ber of paths of inquiry up to date, as well as high­light­ing some new points of inter­est. Begin­ning with the onslaught of ISIS–The Islam­ic State of Syr­ia and Iraq–the broad­cast sets forth infor­ma­tion gen­er­al­ly ignored in media cov­er­age of the event. Chief of Sau­di intel­li­gence Prince Bandar–nicknamed “Ban­dar Bush” for his close rela­tion­ship to the Bush family–may well have been the dri­ving force behind the Iraqi and Syr­i­an Sun­ni jihadists com­pris­ing ISIS. Per­haps that occa­sioned Ban­dar’s recent replace­ment as head of Sau­di intel­li­gence. Much of the pro­gram focus­es on the for­ma­tion of lethal right-wing mil­i­tary for­ma­tions in both the Unit­ed States and Ger­many. The recent stand­off between Cliv­en Bundy’s para­mil­i­tary sup­port­ers and fed­er­al agents por­tends a more expand­ed and dead­ly mili­tia and neo-seces­sion­ist land­scape. The Bundyites did not oper­ate in a vac­u­um, with ide­o­log­i­cal and jour­nal­is­tic sup­port from the GOP and its amen cho­rus in the media. A clan­des­tine army in ear­ly 1950’s Ger­many com­posed of Wehrma­cht and Waf­fen SS vet­er­ans enjoyed the sup­port of the Ade­nau­r­er gov­ern­ment and the Gehlen-dom­i­nat­ed BND. It was net­worked with the SS–still clear­ly active in the 1950’s.

Extremism in the defense of stupidity is a vice

There was shootout last week between police offi­cers in Louisiana and what appear to be sev­en indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­at­ed with the sov­er­eign cit­i­zens move­ment. It was a trag­ic reminder of the recent spike in US polit­i­cal vio­lence and extrem­ism as well as a look at the ongo­ing evo­lu­tion in extrem­ist anti-gov­ern­ment move­ments. The past is pro­logue and, in this case, it’s a vio­lent­ly stu­pid pro­logue.