US Presidential Election 2024

[Belligerent Savant]

Adding this one in here as a brief drive-by:

@JeffWellsRigInt

While it lasts I think the Kennedy campaign deserves support.

I don't think the author of The Real Anthony Fauci is going to do a heel turn now and walk back his life's work. That doesn't mean he won't adapt his tone and try to broaden his appeal, but IMO he's earned some trust.

----

@JeniferHamilton
·
There is no "perfect" candidate...and I agree. However, it's moot given the corrupt voting system. There is NO getting around that "inconvenient truth."

----

@JeffWellsRigInt

Institutional corruption means his chances are essentially zero and even his survival is at risk. But he has a decent chance to change the conversation and influence opinion on the only issues that matter and have no other advocate on that stage.

----

@ApertaAria
·
What's his recent position on "climate change" & lockdowns? in 2020 he spun lockdowns as a good thing 'for the climate' (paraphrasing). Since climate 'alarm' is the next form of social control (using same similar tactics as covid measures), his position would be informative.

----

@JeffWellsRigInt
·
I think very early on he realized the agenda and harms of lockdown and corrected his position. He made it central to his declaration. I haven't heard him on climate lately, but his environmentalism comes from a different place than technocratic greenwash.

@upholdreality
·
Apr 19
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "There's been a systematic attack on our middle class and the coup de grâce was the lockdowns. The lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history... We shifted $4 trillion from the middle class in this country to the super rich."

----

@ApertaAria
·
That's been my read on it as well (hopeful, perhaps). I expect the months ahead will offer clarity. That said, I believe we all know the Dem Party would never permit a legit threat to their agendas/status quo into their coven of mutants. Same goes for the other U.S. party, natch

https://twitter.com/JeniferHamilton/sta ... 01380?s=20

[Harvey]

Looks pretty much like we all read it the same way.

[Grizzly]

^^^

Yep, yep... The system is Methodical, Systemic and Goddamned Clinical. Corrupt beyond repair. And likely to stay that way, until they fully implement the reset. As of now, nothing is back, nothing this built, and absolutely nothing is better. Spill some beans, Bobby!

truly

[Grizzly]

“The national Democratic Party has said it will support Biden’s reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates.
The Democrat Party doesn't plan on holding any primary Debates in 2024???
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217852856

https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1650322529213349888?t=t4WevWM4gNrrfDai1ijHUQ&s=19



Pffft! Why Even Bother With Pretending To Have Another Election?

[Grizzly]

This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve

[Grizzly]

Is there more to this than meets the eye? Interesting choice of song. “The three men I admire most: the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost/Caught the last train for the coast the day the music died” was thought to be a reference to JFK, MLK, and RFK.

Is this a subtle reminder to RFK, Jr.?

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1651573016810119168?s=46&t=NpeyDq_h2xfefzvQEs0Mqg

[Belligerent Savant]

This clip can go here as well:

.

...

Later in his life his routine focused a bit more on a specific category of humans. Those in the "big club". As I indicated upthread:

the biggest threat to humans is humans with power, unchecked.

This bit is particularly prescient, except it's become global -- not merely tied to the U.S.:

However: if we collectively opt-out, or collectively Do Not Comply (Civil Disobedience), they are rendered impotent. They can only succeed so long as the majority subscribe.

Hence the ungodly investments in propaganda in all its forms (social media, TV, movies, music, online, etc.), along with various forms of targeted and broad-scale priming, conditioning, suggestive programming, "nudges", etc.

[Belligerent Savant]

@gnocchiwizard
·
biden will be the democratic nominee in 2024. the party has repeatedly shown that its nomination process is pure theater and that the favored candidate of the party establishment will emerge victorious. hrc in 2016 and biden in 2020 weren't even incumbents. don't get sucked in.

i like what rfk is saying as much as anyone but get a fucking grip people. he's running against a sitting president in a fake contest. it doesn't matter what his poll numbers are, it doesn't matter what happens in iowa or new hampshire. it only matters what the leadership wants.

a key feature of the last few contests has been that bernie roped a bunch of credulous idealists (like me) into caring about the democratic party's staged nomination process. when the establishment candidate inevitably wins, the naive idealists fall in line for the general.

the party gets much more out of these firebrand campaigns than you do. your participation is their victory. whether or not the firebrand candidate is aware of the arrangement does not matter. it's fake. don't get sucked in.

https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/statu ... 73480?s=20

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Putting aside the above likely reality, irrespective of the true motives of RFK Jr (or the intent of the DNC), if nothing else his campaign is a positive development as it allows his positions/massaging to have a wider platform, to reach more people.

This alone is good, regardless of whatever limited hangout/long-term objectives are in play, as they will never be able to manipulate all people at all times, and I suspect there is creeping desperation among the Prime Movers.

[Joe Hillshoist]

[Grizzly]

Ex-CIA Director Reveals SECRET ORIGINS of the 51 Spies Who Signed ‘Disinformation’ Letter

[Harvey]

Excerpt from an article and interview with Kennedy here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts ... id-samuels

Who Killed JFK?

You never heard your father speculate or imagine any kind of connection between Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, and Jack’s death?

Well, no.

My father’s first reaction to the day, I do remember.

I got picked up at my school, at Sidwell Friends, and then brought home when Jack was shot. He had not died yet or been pronounced dead. We were brought home. So I was at home with my father when [J. Edgar] Hoover called my father and told him that my uncle was dead.

When I got home, my father was walking in our yard, which was a six-acre farm. He was walking with [CIA Director] John McCone, who I knew because the CIA was less than a mile from my house, and McCone would come over every day. After the office closed every day, he would come and swim in our pool and do laps before he went home. He would say hi to my mom and dad. Sometimes, they’d have cocktails.

My father was walking with him, and my father asked McCone, “Did our people do this?”

My father made three calls. One, he called the CIA, and he asked a desk officer, “Did you guys do this?” He got McCone on the phone. McCone came over, and he asked McCone directly, “Did the CIA do this?” Then he asked Enrique Ruiz Williams.

Harry Ruiz Williams was very, very close to my family. He came on ski trips with us. He was eating dinner at our house all the time. He was the liaison between my dad and a lot of the other community who had a very complex relationship with my family. Early on, we were heroes. Later on, a lot—

You left them to die.

Right.

But he called him at his hotel. He was there with a journalist, I forget that guy’s name, who wrote the official chronicle of the Bay of Pigs, which is called The Bay of Pigs, and he was a friend of my dad’s, and I grew up knowing him. He and Harry Ruiz Williams were both staying at a hotel in Washington, D.C., at that time. He called them and he said, “Did your guys do this?”

So my father’s first instinct was the CIA had done it.

But what happened with my dad is, first of all, he was shattered and just did not pursue it. He was in darkness and, at that point, he didn’t care who killed my uncle. He was just—

Gone.

He was gone, and there was nothing bringing him back. My dad was just trying to survive.

At that point, immediately after Jack’s death, my father also lost 100% of the investigative capacity of the Justice Department, because Hoover no longer was reporting to the attorney general. He was reporting to Johnson. So my father didn’t have an investigative arm anymore. So even if he wanted to quietly look into my uncle’s death, he didn’t feel he had a way to do it.

Then as he came out of that darkness and depression, he began turning to the war and to politics, and he went into the Senate in ’64.

A couple of years later, like I guess ’66 or ’67, he was walking through the National Airport with Frank Mankiewicz and Walter Sheridan. And he said there was a magazine stand there that had a lot of magazines with James Garrison on the cover. And he pointed to Garrison, who was then investigating my uncle’s death and thinking that the CIA was involved.

And he said to them, “What do you think about him? Does he have anything?”

And they said, “We think he does.”

And Daddy said to them, “Will you look into it quietly?”

So they went down, or Sheridan went down there. And what he came back with is that he got a look at Jack Ruby’s telephone records right before the assassination. And he was struck that virtually everybody that my dad had subpoenaed and convicted who was in the Mafia had been in touch with Ruby a month before.

And at that time, you have to remember that nobody knew at that time, the link between the Mafia and the CIA, that there was really just one organization, when it came to certain types of operations.

So my father, I think, at that point, was thinking, “Well, maybe it wasn’t the CIA. Maybe it was the mob. And maybe they did it because I was prosecuting him,” which was really, I think, hurtful to him.

But then a week before he was killed, about a week before he was killed, he was campaigning here in California and he spoke at a community college in Los Angeles.

And up to that time, when anybody asked him about the Warren Commission, he would kind of mumble.

He wasn’t going to say it was right and he wasn’t going to go against it.

Right. Because if he started questioning it, he would marginalize himself and he would lose his capacity to talk about the war and about what was happening in the cities, which are the two things he wanted to be effective on. And he would’ve looked nutty.

So whenever anybody asked him about it, he would mumble something that was noncommittal. And he said privately to his aides that it was a shoddy piece of work. And my father knew more about investigations than anybody. He had already investigated the mob. A devastating investigation. He had been attorney general. He knew how the CIA operated. He knew how the FBI operated.

And you did pick up from him, when you were a kid, a hostility towards the CIA?

Yes, absolutely.

So he was at a community college here in Los Angeles. And a student said to him, and this is a week before the primary, he knew he was going to win California. And if he won California, he was going to win the convention, in his head. Because the two guys who stood between him and the White House, he had already beat both of them. He beat Humphrey in ’60, and he had beat Nixon at ’60. He knew how to beat them, and he was not scared of it.

And one thing, the night of a primary, something happened he knew was going to happen, which was Richard Daley called him and said, “I’m going to grease the skids for you in Chicago.”

So at that point, I think my father knew that he was going to be president. He believed, anyway, that he would be president.

So a week before, he already sees California’s going his way.

And a student said to him, “If you become president, will you reopen the Warren Commission?”

And if you listen to the tape, there’s a long silence. And then he says, “Yes.” And that’s it.

I think that would’ve scared a lot of people because he knew how to do an investigation and he would not have been steamrollered.

He showed that card.



Who Killed RFK?

Do you remember your father telling you that he was going to run for president?

I remember that whole time, yeah. I remember him staying up all night, writing the speech.

And then I went to the announcement with him, in the Senate caucus room.

And there was a lot of excitement. There were people in the house, all of his aides, and Adam Walinsky and Dick Goodwin, were all there typing the speech all night. Arthur Schlesinger. So yeah, we knew that he was going to run.

Were you guys scared? As his kids?

No.

You didn’t think someone could kill him the way they killed your uncle?

You know what? I don’t think that’s the way any of us thought. We all thought, they’re involved in a war. And it’s like war, where you take your risks.

There was no one among the kids who said—

There’s a lot worse things than dying, by the way.

Well, that’s a thing that either your parents teach you, or they don’t.

Yeah. So I think that was the way that everybody looked at it.

The person who ostensibly shot your father here in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan, was ostensibly motivated by the fact that your father was pro-Israel, wanted to sell U.S. fighter planes to Israel. He shot your father on what for him was the first anniversary of the Six-Day War, the ’67 war. Or do you understand that event differently?

Well, at this point, I think Sirhan was part of that ambush of my father. I do not believe that Sirhan actually killed my father.

But for many years, my understanding of it was the conventional understanding, which was that Sirhan had killed my father because my father had committed to defending Israel in the presidential debates.

My understanding of what happened, of the assassination, is more complex now. I do not believe Sirhan actually fired the bullets that killed my father.

Were you persuaded by the evidence of the tape, where you can hear many more shots than Sirhan Sirhan fired from his gun?

No, the thing that persuaded me, that first persuaded me was Paul Schrade, who was standing beside my father—he was the vice president of the UAW and a very close friend who had discovered Cesar Chavez and introduced him to my father. But he was also shot that night. Five or six years ago, he basically forced me to come over to his house and sit at his kitchen table and read Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report. And once you read that, it’s impossible to believe that Sirhan had killed my father.

Because Sirhan fired two shots at my father. He had a revolver with eight shots in the chamber. And he fired two shots. One of them hit the door jamb behind my father and was later removed by the police. The other one hit Paul Schrade. And then his gun was turned. He was pounced on by ultimately six people. A big dog pile, who pinned him on a steam table, and forced the gun away from my father.

Rafer Johnson [who helped subdue Sirhan] talks about how this little man, he had superhuman strength. And they could not wrest the gun from his hand. And he fired off six more shots. All of those shots hit people. We know who they hit. One person got hit twice, through his clothing once, but the shots were going away from my father.

According to Noguchi’s autopsy, my father was killed by four shots fired from behind him.

Sirhan never got behind him. Sirhan was in front of him. And those shots were all contact shots. So they left carbon tattoos on his body, which means the barrel of the gun could never not have been more than an inch from his body, and in some cases were clearly touching his body. And they were fired upward, at upward angle, suggesting the person who fired them was holding the gun close to his body and concealing it while firing it upward.

The fatal shot was the one from behind his ear.

Sirhan never got that near. There were 77 eyewitnesses, and everybody placed Sirhan five feet in front of my father.

So who do you think did fire the shots that killed your father?

I think the person who did it was [Thane] Eugene Cesar, who was the security guard who had just got the job two nights before. And who was holding my father’s elbow. He hated my father, and he—

Why?

He was very racist. And he thought my father was handing the country over to Blacks.

And he was also a CIA asset. He had top security clearance at the Lockheed plant. And he had just gotten the job as security. And he’s the one who steered my father into the ambush. He grabbed my father’s elbow.

My father was not supposed to go into the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.

Don’t they usually say that was Fred Dutton who brought your dad into the kitchen?

But Cesar picked him up at the doorway and guided them into Sirhan’s ambush.

And then he pulled his gun.

There were 12 people who saw him pull his gun. My father clearly knew he was being shot from behind because he rotated and pulled off Cesar’s tie, his clip-on tie. And as he fell, he had the tie in his hand.

He fell on Cesar and Cesar then pushed my father off of him and stood up with his gun drawn.

When he was asked later, “Why did you have your gun drawn?” He said, “I was firing at Sirhan,” but that didn’t happen.

And then he lied about what he did with the gun.

His gun was ultimately recovered. There’s people here in Los Angeles who are testing it right now, but it made a long, bizarre sojourn, where it was stolen by teenagers, it was thrown into a lake, and it was sold to another guy. A month after my father’s death, Cesar sold it to another guy from the Lockheed plant who was retiring and went to Arkansas.

And he told the police he had sold that gun and he told the guy, “This was used in a crime. Don’t ever show it to anybody.”

He told the police he had sold that gun in May before my father’s death, but the guy from Arkansas said, “No, he sold it to me in July of ’68.”

Then a bunch of things happened with that gun, that ended up now with a collector here in Los Angeles.

And then the ballistics do not match. And there were more shots fired than Sirhan had. There are too many conundrums to explain that it was Sirhan Sirhan. It doesn’t make any sense, when you start looking, at even a cursory examination of what happened that night.

The LAPD brought in a special team to do the investigation. It was called the Special Units Center. And that team were all LAPD officers who had been trained at the farm in Virginia at CIA’s headquarters, and then dispatched to duty in Los Angeles, in Latin America for the CIA. And then were brought back to this investigation. Prior to Sirhan’s trial, there were 2,800 photographs destroyed by the police and incinerators. And a lot of the material evidence was also destroyed. It was a very bizarre case.

Any lawyer could have gotten Sirhan off anyway, because the ballistics didn’t match. But unfortunately, Sirhan was given a lawyer who was also the lawyer for [famous American gangsters] Mickey Cohen and Johnny Roselli, who had their own involvement in the JFK assassination. And they provided him with the lawyer who told him to plead guilty.

What do you remember about the months after your father being killed?

Well, I mean, it was just a wasteland. It was a twilight zone in our house. The older kids were all sent away for the summer. My brother David was sent away. Because my mother had all these kids at a home, and she was trying to figure out how to manage this family.

The horrible story about David was that he had actually seen the murder live on TV, right?

Yeah. He was in Los Angeles and watched it on TV. And then nobody remembered him for several hours. So he was sitting in a room, alone, watching reruns of my dad being shot. And he kind of never recovered from that.

My brother David went that summer to Delano, to work for Cesar Chavez.

My sister went up to Alaska to work for the Inuit.

My brother Joe was sent to Seattle to work as a guide on Mount Rainier for Jim Whitaker.

I got sent to Africa, with Lem Billings. I spent a lot of the summer with Tom Mboya, who was a Kenyan labor leader who loved my father. He was in line to be the successor to Jomo Kenyatta. And he was then assassinated.

I remember one of your cousins once told me about going to your house, I guess it would’ve been in the early ’70s. And they remembered it as being quite literally a zoo. I remember them saying, “Bobby had animals everywhere. And then kids were climbing out onto the roof from the windows. And my mom was like, ‘No more visits because it’s fucking out of control.’” Was that the way it was?

I think my mom liked that chaos and she endorsed risk-taking, and there were a lot of emergency room visits. And then she liked the animals, too. I mean, we had a seal living in our pool for a long time. We had a lot of other animals. We had a full farm yard of cows and coats and geese and ducks and pigeons. We had nine horses. I had a basement filled with possums and raccoons and coatimundis. Then I had all my hawks.

So what did you need heroin for?

Listen, I was 16 years old. I would say I was out of control. At that point, drugs did not have the same kind of stigma that they have today. We’re talking about—

I had 15 years where I was high every day, so I am not judging you or your 27-year-old self.

I was what I’d call an addict for 14 years. I was using drugs for 14 years before I got sober.

I became an addict the same reason most people do, which is they have a big empty hole inside, and that was the one thing that would fill it.

[stickdog99]

[Belligerent Savant]

https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status ... 17634?s=20

[Harvey]

Despite being banned from commenting on Craig's website while he was in jail, along with many other long time supporters of his work (I believe Craig is or has been surrounded by some enemies who may ostensibly have helped him manage his website etc) I am helping fund his appeal to the UN with regard to his political prosecution by the Sturgeon regime for the simple reason that despite disagreeing with him on some things from time to time, over time, Craig often arrives at the same place by different means, largely, I think, because he values truth over illusion. Mostly he gets there sooner. On rare occasions he gets there a little later.

He has great knowledge and experience, excellent instincts and intelligence, and the extraordinary level of his commitment to his ideals (which I share entirely) is a matter of record.

Find out more about that appeal here: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... committee/

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/05/the-usa-what-democracy/

The USA – What Democracy?

May 3, 2023, by Craig Murray

Joe Biden will very probably be re-elected. No incumbent President has ever lost a primary (though it should be remembered the current primary system is younger than me). Only one sitting President has ever not been selected by their party to stand again, and that was knocking on two hundred years ago.

Both Biden’s main primary challenger, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, are less than enthusiastic about promoting massive war in Europe and risking nuclear obliteration. (I hope everyone in the UK enjoyed the nationwide new alert test the other day and spent a few moments contemplating whether they would die instantly or slowly in agony).

The military industrial complex simply cannot permit a non-hawkish President. The sums of money at stake are enormous.

Trump, for all his many faults, was the only President in recent memory not to have started any wars. I know he continued some, but his entire Presidency needs to be seen as a dialectic between Trump and the intelligence service/military power base, in which to his credit Trump was never captured as completely as Obama. (Clinton and the Bush family did not need to be captured, they were always true believers).

Thirteen months ago, I wrote this:

The Biden laptop was leaked on 14 October 2020, three weeks before voting day in the Presidential election. Its suppression by the mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook, at the behest of the security services, is the biggest illegitimate interference in an election in modern western history.

The evidence has piled up since. It is truly astounding that incalculable volumes of media coverage have been given to largely groundless accusations of Russian interference in US Presidential elections, when this actual, entirely proven interference in a US Presidential Election, which arguably was key to Biden’s election, has in itself been largely suppressed.

The letter released by 51 former US intelligence officials, telling what we now know to be the outright lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation”, was initiated by the Biden campaign, according to sworn testimony from former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell – who was willingly a part of it with the declared aim of wanting Biden to win.

If you are not fully up to speed with this, this Wall Street Journal podcast is excellent.

It should be recalled that, apart from all the sex and drugs, the laptop contained emails showing plainly Hunter Biden leveraging his father’s influence to obtain lucrative business deals with, inter alia, Ukraine and China.

Three weeks before a close election, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could undoubtedly have swayed it, if it had not been massively and falsely derided as a Russian hoax by almost the entire mainstream media, and censored to death by Twitter and Facebook.

Since Elon Musk released Twitter files, we have known for certain that the FBI orchestrated the suppression of the story on social media. This Twitter thread is five months old but remains a must read.

It is, I think, the epitome of the corruption of modern mainstream media that, if you go to the CNN website you can still find a “fact check” item from CNN which states that Donald Trump was promoting Russian disinformation by referring to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Google searches differ depending on the person making them. But try this. Google for the exposure of the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian hoax” as itself misinformation. How many stories come up for you from the “liberal” media, from the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Guaridan etc?

I get nothing on from them on the front page of my google search except the old CNN misinformation. That says a great deal both about the legacy media – and about Google.

So we have conclusive evidence from the Hunter Biden laptop story that the security services, corporate media and corporate internet gatekeepers were in cahoots to ensure the election of Joe Biden. What we see now is the same forces working to ensure that he is re-elected.

Now read this from Robert F Kennedy’s campaign website:

In the long term, a nation’s strength does not come from its armies. America spends as much on weaponry as the next nine nations combined, yet the country has grown weaker, not stronger, over the last 30 years. Even as its military technology has reigned supreme, America has been hollowing out from the inside. We cannot be a strong or secure nation when our infrastructure, industry, society, and economy are infirm.

A high priority of a Kennedy administration will be to make America strong again. When a body is sick, it withdraws its energy from the extremities in order to nourish the vital organs. It is time to end the imperial project and attend to all that has been neglected: the crumbling cities, the antiquated railways, the failing water systems, the decaying infrastructure, the ailing economy. Annual defense-related spending is close to one trillion dollars. We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed. Now we have another chance.

As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s time to come home and restore this country.

In Ukraine, the most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first. He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine and brings our resources back where they belong. We will offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia’s borders. Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine and guarantee its freedom and independence. UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions. We will put an end to this war. We will put an end to the suffering of the Ukranian people. That will be the start of a broader program of demilitarization of all countries.

This is astonishing stuff to be put before the American people from the scion of one of the great American political dynasties.

(I am aware of his chequered past, his support for Hillary over Bernie, and his Covid vaccine scepticism, though the latter appears to be more based on his long term commitment to tackling the profiteering and corrupt influence of big Pharma than an actual anti-vaccine stance).

I did not predict that the USA would become a gerontocracy. Biden shows signs of the mental decay that is a natural part of the human condition. He will not have to face Kennedy in any Primary debates – the NDC could be relied on to stitch up that potentially huge hurdle for him – but the risk of Biden detariorating further mentally in a way that is impossible to hide must exist for anyone of his age. So the Kennedy challenge is not without a slim hope.

A slim hope for a declared opponent of the military industrial complex is one hope too many, therefore the twin agencies of social media suppression and corporate media ridicule have already swung in to action against Kennedy.

The challenge must be choked at birth. The range of acceptable opinion to the US Establishment is now extremely narrow.

Trump remains an enigma. He is a mixture of far right prejudice and serious outbursts of commonsense. I do not doubt that he does have interests beyond the personal advancement of Donald J Trump, but only in an incidental way.

In Ukraine we are either going to see death and destruction on a scale well beyond the terrible horrors already inflicted, or there is ultimately going to be a deal involving the ceding of some territory to Russia (Crimea+, as my FCO sources tell me it is currently called in Beijing based diplomacy).

Trump says this. It is the kind of thing that makes the US military-industrial-security service complex hate him, as they are seeing super profits, massive resources and political influence stretching ahead for at least another five years. They don’t care at all how many Eastern Europeans die.

Trump is a much greater threat to Biden, and the full weight of the state is therefore being thrown into stopping him through lawfare. Some of this is very dubious, and subject to the perfectly true response that Bill Clinton was never prosecuted for remarkably identical behaviours.

Watching the agencies of the state find a way to stop Trump is going to be fascinating.

Russiagate was a hoax. There is however a real interference with what the public are allowed to know which makes the notion of “democracy” in the USA meaningless, and that is the interference of the security state of the USA itself.

Those interests got Biden into power, and will do everything and literally anything to help him stay there.

The British security state is of course complicit. A final thought.

It is fast approaching a year since Julian Assange submitted his High Court appeal against extradition, and still the High Court has not even decided if it will hear the appeal or not. We had initially hoped the actual hearing might be before last Christmas.

The Assange prosecution is not popular in the USA, where even the mainstream media have come out against charging a journalist with espionage. In addition everybody can now see the parallel with Evan Gershkovich and potential impact of Assange’s treatment on Gershkovich.

Assange’s arrival in Washington would be a free speech cause celebre with the potential to alienate some liberal support from Biden in a close election. The US security services therefore still very much want Julian imprisoned for life – but they do not want him extradited until after Biden is safely re-elected.

The British government therefore need to keep Julian in maximum security in Belmarsh for another two years, to keep the Biden campaign and its security service backers happy.

This can only be done by introducing lengthy and unnecessary delays into the judicial process. We see that happening, or rather we see it “inexplicably” not happening, before our very eyes.

The senior British judiciary do what the security services tell them to do. Discreetly suggested, in the club.