So, now everyone who reads the papers will have learned the name Alvin Bragg. In a nutshell, “Soros-funded Trump-indicting” will do as a starting descriptor. On these occasions, one gets to see behind the curtain and to learn just what people like George get for their money. Mark Steyn calls the American “justice” system a swamp and a cesspit, and he isn’t wrong. One might also ask Mark’s old mate, Conrad Black, what HE thinks of that system.
For the progressive wet dreamers, getting Trump is up there with getting Pell. Or, now, getting Latham. They just wanted this so very much. It makes their clearly miserable lives worth living. Making your political enemies criminals is now simply par for the course. If only American politicians and their hangers-on put as much energy into governing wisely as they do into getting their opponents.
As David Daintree has said, in a recent email to members of the Christopher Dawson Society:
Currently that amorphous group commonly known as The Left holds most of the power in politics and public opinion, and radical reform of society focusing on such areas as race, gender, identity, religion and climate is dear to their hearts. Naturally opponents of their plans are viewed with mistrust; their opinions are often labelled misinformation, and they may risk being silenced.
Being silenced looks a little tame when compared to being indicted. As the late George Pell might have attested. Or Conrad Black. It is one thing to be silenced for just being who you are. It is entirely another to be thrown in prison for the same offence.
Many are already calling out the weaponising of American law enforcement, and its rampant politicisation. This is not remotely new. American politics and American society are hopelessly corrupt, and have been for quite a while. American exceptionalism now has a new meaning. The United States are exceptionally rotten. The nineteenth century hopes of Alexis de Tocqueville have turned to nightmares in the twenty-first. This may yet end up in a hot, civil war. Well, an uncivil war. When the justice system goes to custard, some in society might well feel that all bets are off. That the governed no longer give their consent. That the social contract upon which Lockean American government is based is not worth the paper on which it isn’t written.
"If this can happen to him, it can happen to all of us,” says Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation.
Not quite. Not to all of us. William Jefferson Clinton, who may have paid a little more attention to old lovers and other enemies than simply paying them hush money, still roams free, unindicted. As does his criminal wife. The left’s long march through the institutions has had its advantages.
James Allan, who notes that Clinton’s hush money was over actual rape allegations, saw this week’s news coming, as did many others. On Bragg, he notes, writing at The Spectator Australia:
The district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, received over $1 million dollars in campaign donations from George Soros to help him massively outspend his opponents and win his election to the post. Bragg has proceeded to adopt the core tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement and treat violent crimes as social justice issues. In 2022 Bragg reduced just over half of all felony charges to misdemeanour ones. The violent crime and murder rates in New York City have gone up precipitously.
Nothing to “bragg” about, you might think. On this new indictment, Allan states:
But by all accounts Mr Bragg has seen the light and has decided, at last, to come down hard on crime. In what may be a first for this DA, Bragg looks likely to elevate a five-year-old misdemeanour charge (never in fact charged) to a felony charge. And this is in a case where the Department of Justice and the Feds generally (back in 2018) looked at the facts and refused to prosecute at all. So who could this villain be, we all wonder, to provoke this Damascene conversion in Herr Bragg? Well, if you guessed former president Donald Trump you win. By the time you read this Mr Trump may already have been indicted and arrested. Wherever you are on the political spectrum this is a disgrace. In no democracy do things work out well when the justice system is politicised and political opponents targeted and charged. To say it’s third world stuff is to be unkind to the third world.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/stormys-happy-ending/
My own gripe is that they are indicting Trump, a potentially outstanding President who did many good things and a few great things, but who ultimately blew the big one (Covid), for the wrong crime. Coincidentally, recent days have seen an emergent discussion of why Trump changed his mind about Covid lockdowns in March 2020. Like his fellow liberty-lover on the other side of the Pond, Boris Johnson, he flicked the switch from herd immunity to “flatten the curve” in an instant. And flatten the curve, as we know, became the gift that just kept on giving. We are still doing things to flatten the freakin’ curve.
Two of the true scholars of the Covid period, Jeffrey Tucker and Eugyppius, have been on the case in relation to the change of mind.
First, Tucker. He starts with Trump’s entirely sensible and proportionate 10 March 2020 statement on Twitter.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
He then poses the question:
What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by “trusted advisors” amounting to about 5 or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb). …
Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded … ? He surely had other sources of information – some other scenario or intelligence – that fed into his disastrous decision.
Isolating the date in the trajectory here, it is apparent that whatever happened to change Trump occurred on March 10, 2020, the day after his Tweet saying there should be no shutdowns …
And, so, what happened? Tucker lands on this explanation:
That something very likely revolves around the most substantial discovery we’ve made in three years of investigations. It was Debbie Lerman who first cracked the code: Covid policy was forged not by the public-health bureaucracies but by the national-security sector of the administrative state. She has further explained that this occurred because of two critical features of the response: 1) the belief that this virus came from a lab leak, and 2) the vaccine was the biosecurity countermeasure pushed by the same people as the fix.
Knowing this, we gain greater insight into 1) why Trump changed his mind, 2) why he has never explained this momentous decision and otherwise completely avoids the topic, and 3) why it has been so unbearably difficult to find out any information about these mysterious few days other than the pablum served up in books designed to earn royalties for authors like Birx, Pence, and Kushner.
Based on a number of second-hand reports, all available clues we have assembled, and the context of the times, the following scenario seems most likely. On March 10, and in response to Trump’s dismissive tweet the day before, some trusted sources within and around the National Security Council (Matthew Pottinger and Michael Callahan, for example), and probably involving some from military command and others, came to Trump to let him know a highly classified secret.
… Imagine a scene from Get Smart with the Cone of Silence, for example. These are the events in the life of statecraft that infuse powerful people with a sense of their personal awesomeness. The fate of all of society rests on their shoulders and the decisions they make at this point. Of course they are sworn to intense secrecy following the great reveal.
The revelation was that the virus was not a textbook virus but something far more threatening and terrible. It came from a research lab in Wuhan. It might in fact be a bioweapon. This is why Xi had to do extreme things to protect his people. The US should do the same, they said, and there is a fix available too and it is being carefully guarded by the military.
It seems that the virus had already been mapped in order to make a vaccine to protect the population. Thanks to 20 years of research on mRNA platforms, they told him, this vaccine can be rolled out in months, not years. That means that Trump can lock down and distribute vaccines to save everyone from the China virus, all in time for the election. Doing this would not only assure his reelection but guarantee that he would go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents of all time.
This is fascinating speculation. But more importantly, whatever drove the switch, Tucker is not happy with the outcome, nor should we be:
A month later, Trump said his decision to have “turned off” the economy saved millions of lives, later even claiming to have saved billions. He has yet to admit error.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14461
“Yet to admit error” … No better, then, than all of the others who lied and people died. We had our Andrews and our McGowan. The UK had its Boris and its Hancock and its Ferguson. The Kiwis had you know who. China had Xi. California had Newsom. New York had Cuomo.
We all thought we had Trump. On our side. In Jeffrey Tucker’s telling, it was Scott Atlas, author of A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop Covid from Destroying America (2021), who eventually showed the President he had been conned. I guess it is easier to keep taking credit for something that was foist upon you than to admit you were the victim of scammers. As Ron DeSantis said in May 2021:
They’re never going to admit they were wrong.
Eugyppius builds on Tucker’s argument, and nails a probable culprit, who I admit I had never heard of.
Note, though, that crucial date: Whatever happened to change Trump’s mind, happened on 10 March 2020. This is the precise day that the Italian lockdowns, at first exclusive to Lombardy, were extended to the whole country; and it is also the day that Silicon Valley thinkfluencer and general pandemic cipher Tomás Pueyo posted his first, mysteriously viral Medium essay on Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now (emphasis in original).
It is Pueyo that did it, and his influence, according to Eugyppius, was palpable and not just confined to Trump or the USA. It was also important in Europe.
Whatever the reason for Trump’s capitulation, is indicting the forty-fifth President for Covid crimes too harsh? Not if you believe in the old American adage, “the buck stops here” (in the Oval Office).
President Truman had a no-nonsense approach to decision making. The sign, “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk reflected his belief that he was ultimately responsible for the actions of his administration.
If you accept this, Trump has real charges to face. Yes, he was lied to. By Fauci and Birx. And by Pence and Kushner. But others saw at the time that it was all rubbish. World Health Organisation propaganda. Propaganda that overturned on a whim half a century of settled virology and epidemiology. Just as Boris was lied to, by Neil Ferguson. Boris Johnson should be in jail too. They should have known, if they didn’t.
Trump’s big crimes, not merely political misdemeanours, were:
· His change of mind and the pursuit of lockdowns;
· His naïve failure to see that those driving the Covid scare, from the Chinese Communist Party to the domestic enemies he acquired on an industrial scale, were out to get him, and so walking him into a giant trap that someone with the political smarts would have seen a mile off;
· He seemed not have any idea of the costs of what he had bought;
· Buying the vaccine false binary from the Gates class, that vaccines would be the silver bullet and the only way out;
· Putting the deep state in charge of the vaccine production and rollout process, in cahoots with the spivs and crooks of the vaccine industry;
· Not only did Trump fall for the vaccine bulldust, but he set out to make HIS version of it world’s best practice, hence Operation Warp Speed and his bragging rights associated with the biggest and most deadly medical scam in history;
· His lack of remorse for the above; and
· The worst thing of all – that he still tries to justify his Covid actions. Knowing what we now all know.
In June 2020 Trump claimed, on Twitter:
We did a great job on CoronaVirus, including the very early ban on China, Ventilator production, and Testing, which is by far the most, and best, in the World. We saved millions of U.S. lives.! Yet the Fake News refuses to acknowledge this in a positive way.
Ventilators killed people. The testing was perhaps the biggest Covid con of all, never fit for purpose and causing absolute mayhem as a result. Lockdowns never, ever saved lives. They probably cost plenty. This statement by the then President was, and remains, self-serving rubbish, and all the more crushing when you consider who has been saying it. For Trump was, to many, the ultimate teller of truth to power. The outsider. The disruptor in chief. The friend of the deplorables. A little like Covid’s other great political failure, Benjamin Netanyahu, of whom much better was expected.
If Trump is not indicted for Covid crimes, at least he should be kept right away from any future tilt at public office. Especially when he refuses to apologise for Covid policy, and when he excoriates those who, like the great Ron DeSantis, saw the light in good time and changed course massively, to great effect. While, all the while, DJ Trump still frets over the lost 2020 election. That, of course, was, indeed, a crime, but we have seen far greater crimes since, and Trump was responsible for much of them. Through acts of commission and omission.
So, as far as I am concerned, they can have their trumped-charges (pun intended) about Stormy’s happy ending (to borrow from James Allan). Whatever. Meantime, we all await justice at a far higher level, and appropriate punishments for real crimes. Crimes against humanity. Punishments from which The Donald is, alas, not excluded.
Let us leave the final word to the legendary David Stockman:
The most outrageous breakout of statist excess in US history happened on Donald Trump’s watch with his full complicity.
… The sweeping set of non-pharmaceutical interventions unleashed by the Trump Administration in March 2020 and thereafter constituted a grave affront to constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity. In a just world, those responsible would be exposed, hounded and shamed, and prosecuted where warranted, so that future power-grabbers would forever be reminded that tyranny cannot be imposed with impunity.
Indeed, if some intrepid prosecutors really wanted to bring Trump to justice, they would pursue the grotesque violations of law and the Constitution authorized by the Donald after March 16th rather than the tawdry Stormy Daniels affair for which the Donald has already received the appropriate punishment—a fulsome measure of public ridicule.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-buck-stops-where/
Paul Collits
31 March 2023
Trump, De Santis, Biden (heaven forbid), whoever - Australians have no say in the USA political clown show. What we do have a say in is what we choose to import on a cultural level from the USA (and elsewhere).
Up to date we seem to be remarkably nondiscriminatory in what we import - transgender foolishness, the alphabet sickness, climate change panic, Panic Virus panic, indigenous "rights" etc etc.
Some good things have come out of the USA (and elsewhere) in the past. Not much of late.
There is zero prospect of anything good coming out of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and the like.
As always, we as a nation are on our own. Never forget that fact.
In the end the swamp sucked President Trump and all the leaders of the free world. I am sure we cannot single out President Trump over all the rest. The poisonous people loud him poisoned his view. He had the MSM and the whole establishment against him.