About half the electorate voted in November 2020 for Donald Trump to be president. Most estimates of the number of votes for him range from 74 million to 80 million, the higher number including guesses at the number that were deliberately discarded or changed by machines or human hands.

Even at the lowest estimate, that’s a lot of people – millions more than the entire population of the United Kingdom or France. National leaders who depend on the will of enfranchised citizens to attain power would surely want to win the approval of so large a portion of the electorate. But no. Having wangled a win of the presidency, gained the Senate, and retained  their majority in the House of Representatives, the Democrats immediately stepped up their abusing, blaming, despising, humiliating, suppressing, impoverishing, menacing, and alienating the half of the nation that did not vote for them.

Breitbart reports:

Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight host Tucker Carlson warned [January 29, 2021] about the tactics employed by Democrats and their allies to suppress dissent …

We quote the transcript, slightly abridged.

Carlson said:

Maybe the single biggest mystery … is why Democrats became so vicious after they won.

So, Joe Biden got the White House, his party took the Congress, you’d think they’d be thrilled. That’s what they wanted. You’d think they’d be celebrating. But no. Instead they started a purge.

Within hours, Democrats began crushing even the mildest dissent. They shut down an entire social media company called Parler, not because Parler had done anything wrong, but simply because they couldn’t control it. They couldn’t take the chance that somebody on Parler might criticize them, so they eliminated it.

Then two days ago, they arrested a man and threw him in handcuffs, brought him up on federal charges because he made fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. That man is now facing 10 years in prison.

Democrats then declared war on their rival political party – not, by the way, a metaphorical war but an actual one with soldiers and paramilitary law enforcement and the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. They denounced Republicans, even the moderate establishment figures who pose really no conceivable threat to anyone.

They denounced them as”dangerous terrorists” and likened them to ISIS and al Qaeda!

Those (mostly) all-too-inoffensive, circumspect, passive, milquetoast men and women!

Anyone who complained about this or fought back in any way, was threatened with expulsion from Congress.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what voters decided in November, in the name of “democracy” you can no longer serve in Congress. That’s what they said. Nor are dissidents permitted in the Federal bureaucracy. No one who disagrees with our beliefs, Democrats have announced, can work in the U.S. government.

We’re not overstating it; that all actually happened, and you saw it. Nothing like that has ever taken place in this country before. This is the most sweeping and audacious assault on civil liberties in American history.

So, the question is, what accounts for this? Why are they doing it? It’s worth figuring that out.

On the most basic level, of course, it’s a power grab. We said that from the first day and it remains true. The Democratic Party doesn’t exist to serve some abstract principle, liberty and justice or the Bill of Rights. No. Nor is its primary goal improving the lives of its voters. …

No, the Democratic Party exists to accumulate power, all of it. Some is never enough. The impulse is to control everything. So that’s what they’re trying to do now amidst the chaos and tumult.

But that’s not all that’s going on right now. There’s more. Look around: watch as Democrats erect a permanent steel prison fence around the United States Capitol. Why is that fence there? Well, to protect the people inside, to keep the public out of what we used to call the People’s House. That’s happening tonight as we speak.

Then notice the thousands of armed soldiers and law enforcement agents stationed outside that fence. What’s their purpose? Again, protecting the people inside.

Then ask yourself why are House Democrats planning to use federal committee funds to pay for more personal security for themselves? Why the renewed push to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans who have committed no crime? Why does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem on the verge of tears as she describes as she was almost murdered on January 6 at the Capitol.

She is not entirely putting it on, she seems to mean it.

If you’re sensing a theme here, there is in fact a theme and the theme is panic, fear and it’s real. You are looking at leaders who are genuinely afraid of the people they are supposed to be leading.

Here’s the really interesting thing: they seem much more afraid now that Donald Trump has left office. With Donald Trump gone, they sense that a period of actual populism has begun, real populism, and they may be right.

Look at what happened this week on Wall Street. A group of guys on Reddit trading stocks in their boxer shorts exposed the entire American finance establishment as the corrupt and fraudulent scam that it often is. That’s a pivotal moment in this country.

Once you see something like that, you can’t un-see it. Once someone pulls the mask from your face, he still remembers your face. People’s attitudes about our economy will change forever because of what happened this week. It’s a big deal.

The Biden administration’s response to what happened this week? …

The truth is our leaders don’t have answers. They don’t even have explanations for what’s going on. Worse than that, they themselves are deeply implicated in the systemic problems – in some cases, the crimes – that are dragging the country down. They know all this. They know their guilt. Here’s the thing: they know that you know it, too, and that’s why they’re afraid. They know why populism is rising, and it is.

So, this really is the time to make a decision about how to respond to it. What our leaders do next will define what America looks like going forward.

It wouldn’t even be hard to begin the process of fixing things or bringing actual unity to a country that badly needs unity.

In a democracy, the first step to unifying the country is always the same. Leaders enter into a power-sharing agreement with the people they lead. They do the obvious thing, they stop lying to their own citizens, they stop attacking them, and they respect their culture. They don’t try to control people’s beliefs. That’s not their role.

They treat their own citizens like adults, meaning they treat them fairly. And above all, they cut the public in on some of the fruits of the country’s success. If all the benefits of our economy seem to be accruing to a small number of people, that’s a problem and they try hard to fix it.

Wise leaders know that unequal countries are volatile countries. They know that caste systems are not compatible with democracies. But our leaders don’t seem to know any of that. Instead, they tell us that solar cars and mandatory diversity training are the real solutions to our problems. But no one buys that, those are not real solutions, they are a smokescreen. They’re a diversion tactic.

So if not hard in theory, here and now in actuality “bringing unity” is not just hard but impossible. The two halves of the population are irreconcilable.

Populism starts when people start to figure that out, and they have. And that’s why everything suddenly feels so unstable right now, because once again, real populism is brewing.

In the face of all of that, the people in charge are doing the single stupidest, most counterproductive thing that any leader could do in the face of a populist movement. They’re refusing to admit their role in the decline. They’re refusing to admit their failures, and instead, they are blaming the people they have failed.

They’re literally declaring war on their own population. How’s that going to end?

And if you think we’re overstating it, we’re not. Here’s the former CIA Director describing what the enemy looks like.

John Brennan, former CIA director on videoclip:

And this threat from domestic violence extremists is much more challenging, I believe, than it was in terms of going after foreign terrorists. The domestic violent extremists are much more pervasive, their numbers are much larger. When we’re going after al Qaeda or other types of terrorist group cells in the United States, their numbers were in the single digits of dozens and was finding needles in a haystack. Here, there are a lot of haystacks with a lot of needles in them. They have the wherewithal, they already have the weapons that if they so choose to use them, they can in fact, carry out these deadly attacks.

So many problems in this country, evident to anyone who is paying attention, but John Brennan, the former CIA Director has isolated the real problem. The real problem is you.

According to Brennan, anyone who disagrees with say, Susan Rice is worse than Osama bin Laden and more dangerous. These people, meaning you, “have the weapons”. These “terrorists”. By terrorists, Brennan means tens of millions of American citizens who might have a firearm at home and didn’t vote for Joe Biden. They’re the threat and we need to hunt them as we hunted al Qaeda. …

It is hard to imagine a leader saying something more destructive and more reckless than that on television in a moment as fraught as the one we’re in. It’s terrifying in its stupidity …

This isn’t crying fire in a crowded theater, this is using a flame thrower in a crowded theater. What are the implications of a former CIA Director talking like this? It’s not going to make anyone more moderate. That’s for certain. Just the opposite.

John Brennan is creating more extremists than a Pakistani madrasa. And it’s not just him, all the news channels other than this one right now are repeating this now-official line that the American government is at war with its own population.

Here is CNN’s version.

Don Lemon, CNN anchor on videoclip:

My colleague, Jim Sciutto, he has covered international terrorism for 20 years and says that the parallels to the domestic terror threat are frightening. And he points to and I quote here, “Radicalization online, demonization of the enemy to justify violence, draw to a cause greater than themselves devotion to a cultish leader.”

That said, are we doing enough to combat this threat?

Jim Sciutto, CNN anchor:

This is the way law enforcement looks at the domestic terror threat now is equal or greater than international terrorism. If we compared that to a U.S. politician propagating Islamist terrorist thought, materials, lies, et cetera, imagine the reaction. And yet sadly, there’s still a partisan reaction to this, some denying that the threat is real and that the lie behind the threat is dangerous.

Tens of millions of ordinary Americans who have done nothing more aggressive than cheer and vote for President Donald Trump pose a threat “greater than international terrorism”? 

American citizens are more dangerous than foreign terrorists?  … That is completely untrue and completely reckless. …  The Department of Homeland Security, which has been upping the domestic threat for the past week  … has no actual evidence that Trump voters are planning to hurt anyone, there is no evidence of a plot of any kind, they can see that. Trust us, they would tell you if they found a plot.

But the question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of effect do lies like that have, the ones you just heard, calculated to terrify you? What kind of effect do they have on the country?  …

When you tell people they’re evil because of how they vote or how they look, and our leaders are definitely telling them that every single day – when you train a population to tally every group of Americans by race and ethnicity, first and foremost, keep track of people’s genetic background every time you see a picture –  really, what effect does that have? When you promote group identity, even as you intentionally destroy national identity?

If you do all of those things, what kind of country do you get at the end?

Well, you get a scary divided country, the kind of country where you need steel fencing outside the national legislature.

It’s very obvious where all of this is going. And it’s very, very bad. Part of the solution is to stop talking like this immediately. No more aging spies on cable news declaring war on American citizens.  ” Domestic political enemies more dangerous than al Qaeda”? What?

No more power-mad members of Congress dividing people by race so they can conquer. “White fragility”, “white supremacy”, “white sounds” – those are racial attacks. Let’s stop lying about it. We shouldn’t talk that way in public.

Those attacks are making people crazy. … and dangerous …

Watch this clip and ask yourself what kind of effect this woman is having on the United States right now.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on video clip:

There are legitimate [?] white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. There’s no consequences for racism, no consequences for massaging [?[, no consequences for insurrection, and no consequences means that they condone it. We are now away from acting out of fealty to their President that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool.

… Think about the effect on the people listening … “Fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool“?  What does that even mean? We’re not even sure who she is talking about. Apparently, the Republican Party and its Grand Kleagle, Kevin McCarthy of California!

(In fact, Kevin McCarthy, minority leader of the House, is the very model of a milquetoast Republican.)

It’s a lie. … It’s a fantasy – a very dark fantasy, designed to terrify people and make them easier to command.

Over time, probably not long now, it will have other more insidious effects. Talk like that, from our leaders, from our elected officials, is going to turn some of our citizens very, very radical.

You don’t want to live in a country with very, very radical people.

Whatever Tucker Carlson’s intentions were when he said all that – and he concludes by stating firmly that neither he nor Fox News is radical  – his words predict civil war, real civil war, fought with fire and bullets.

If it comes to that, it will not be the fault of those who want to keep the Republic they inherited, but of those who want to force it to change.

The People are not terrorists. The terrorists are the people in power.

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”.

Right!  President-elect Trump says it as it is. (That’s why he’s been elected president.)

Here’s the story as Cliff Kincaid tells it at GOPUSA, somewhat shortened:

On Tuesday, January 10, … the CIA used CNN to air unsubstantiated …

And completely false … 

… charges against [President-elect] Trump.

CNN didn’t delineate the bizarre sexual nature of those charges; that was left to a left-wing “news” organization by the name of BuzzFeed, which posted 35 pages of scurrilous lies and defamation.

Demonstrating the sad state of ethical standards at CNN, Wolf Blitzer hyped the story into “breaking news”, when the allegations had been circulating for months, and Jake Tapper was brought on the air, “joining me with a major story we’re following right now.” Blitzer emphasized, “We’re breaking this story.” It was the beginning of CNN regurgitating what President-elect Trump called “fake news”. 

What followed was a low point in Tapper’s career, as he willingly participated in a ginned-up controversy using anonymous sources to report on “information” about Trump that started falling apart shortly after CNN aired its “breaking news”.

“That’s right, Wolf, a CNN exclusive,” said Tapper, apparently unaware that he was recycling a document that had been passed around for months. It was CNN, which uses former CIA official Michael Morell as an on-air contributor, that ran with it. Morell has worked for Beacon Global Strategies, a firm founded by former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines, since November 2013.

Trying to distance himself from the controversy, Morell went on CNN to refer to some of the information as “unverified” in the “private document”.

But the damage had already been done, and Morell knew it. CNN had manufactured a controversy over Trump yet again …

Ironically, CNN is a “partner” in an effort known as the First Draft Coalition that is dedicated “to improving practices in the ethical sourcing, verification and reporting of stories that emerge online”.

Sure it is. It’s the ethical way. Same way Saudi Arabia heads a Human Rights agency of the UN.

“CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials gave information to President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump,” said Tapper. “The information was provided as part of last week’s classified intelligence briefings regarding Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections.”

Trying to pump up the “claims”, Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN, said, “To be clear, this has been an enormous team effort by my colleagues here and others at CNN.”

A team effort to verify what? It looks like they were handed a 35-page document from the CIA and decided to publicize it. They failed to reveal the details precisely because they could not verify the document.

Sciutto said, “Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN that classified documents on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election presented last week to President Obama and to President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” …

Later, Tapper said the charges were “uncorroborated as of now”, indicating that they might be confirmed by somebody at some time in the future. There was “no proof” of the claims but “confidence by intelligence officials that the Russians are claiming this”.  …

CNN was reporting “news”, since a two-page CIA summary of this dirt was attached to a classified CIA report on Russian hacking and election influence that was given to Trump … But it was “fake” in the sense that CNN had no way of knowing if the charges had been completely made up.

On this basis, the story could and should have turned against the Intelligence Community, with reporters asking why unverified information had been used against Trump and whether this was retaliation for his criticism [of the “Intelligence Community”]. But this course of action by CNN would make it impossible for CNN reporters to go back to these same sources for scurrilous information and false charges in the future. This fact makes it abundantly clear that the news organization was being used by anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community, most likely the CIA.

Since CNN likes anonymous sources, I will use one of my own. “This is a classic CIA blackmail operation where the CIA under Director John Brennan uses someone else’s dirt for the blackmail, and postures themselves as ‘innocent’ in presenting it to Trump,” one observer of the Intelligence Community told me. This is certainly the real story — that an intelligence agency run by Obama’s CIA director would use an American television network to attack the President-elect with scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges. …

Is America a constitutional republic ruled by the people through their elected representatives? Or do the intelligence agencies rule America and try to blackmail our leaders?

The President-elect said it would be “a tremendous blot” on the record of the Intelligence Community if they did in fact release the document to the media. At another point, he said, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false” get released in that fashion to CNN and BuzzFeed.

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”. 

The intelligence chiefs are being unintelligent. The media people who are continuing to malign and antagonize President-elect Trump are being foolish.

Thing is, “gentlemen” and “ladies” of the fourth estate, if you like your toadying you can keep your toadying – only change the object of it from crushed Clinton to triumphant Trump. It’s the smart thing to do. If you can’t change your nature, change your idol. Serve your own interest. Be nice where the power lies.

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Post Script: Republican Senator John McCain, who has great guts but little brain, has admitted it was he who gave the FBI the fake dossier that smeared Donald Trump.

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Post Post Script: Newsmax reports that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer posted in Britain’s Moscow embassy in 1990, is the author of the controversial dossier on President-elect Donald Trump. He now runs the private Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. in London. He reportedly prepared the dossier on Trump at the request of Republicans running against him in the presidential primaries and later by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was  obtained by a former British ambassador, who forwarded it to Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain last year, who passed it along to the FBI.  Steele, fearing anger over the matter by Russia, has fled his London home. Though he is no longer a British agent and compiled the dossier for his private company, the U.K. government was nonetheless concerned the matter could damage relations with the incoming administration, and British security services attempted to block news agencies from reporting Steele’s name.