90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, September 1, 2022

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #624

Why Gen. Mark Milley should be court-martialed

The most egregious examples of treasonous subversion by a commissioned officer since Benedict Arnold

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be subject to an Article 32 Hearing under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for his conduct and statements as memorialized in the Bob Woodward book “Peril,” and the Aug. 8, 2022, New Yorker magazine excerpt of a forthcoming book by Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker.

An Article 32 Hearing is the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury, and should probable cause of the commission of a crime be established, it would lead to Gen. Milley’s court-martial. The Army has an affirmative duty to maintain good order and discipline, especially with regard to senior leader misconduct.

History provides an example of a senior officer engaged in misconduct. Assistant Chief of the Army Air Service Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for remarks to the press concerning two deadly military aviation accidents.

Mitchell made the following offending statements: “These incidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments,” and “The bodies of my former companions in the air molder under the soil in America, and Asia, Europe and Africa, many, yes a great many, sent there directly by official stupidity.”

On Dec. 17, 1925, Mitchell was found guilty of “conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service.” The court suspended Mitchell from rank, command, and duty, with the forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years. Mitchell resigned from his commission as an Army officer on Feb. 1, 1926. Some would say that history vindicated Mitchell, with the coming of World War II. Nonetheless, Mitchell paid the price for press statements outside the scope of his authority and for his insubordination.

Gen. Milley called his communist Chinese military counterpart in October 2020 and January 2021 with unauthorized promises and assurances of advanced warnings of U.S. military intentions and actions. America learned of these contacts through the book “Peril,” authored by Mr. Woodward and Robert Costa. In the book, Gen. Milley is quoted as saying, “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.” And then, reportedly, Gen. Milley said this: “General Li, you and I have known each other for five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Gen. Milley admitted to making the calls. A spokesman for Gen. Milley stated that Gen. Milley acted within his authority as the senior military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense, yet Gen. Milley failed to consult any civilian authority, a fact confirmed by...

Columnist Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, said colleagues and peers of his — whose judgment he trusts — speculate that the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, FL, was a search for documents related to its “Russiagate” surveillance operation of the 45th president.

“I think the best way to understand this is in the context of a six-year-long operation targeting Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s aides, and Donald Trump’s supporters,” Smith said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak. “I have different colleagues and people whose insight and whose wisdom I trust very much, and they believe that what the FBI was looking for were documents related to … what the FBI called the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, but what most most of the rest of us know as the Russiagate operation meant to target candidate Trump, then President-elect Trump, and then President Donald J. Trump.”

Smith said the people whose speculation he was relaying “have much more insight” and “much more knowledge” about the FBI’s operations than he.

Smith noted that many of the FBI agents organizing the raid on Mar-a-Lago have been involved in the FBI’s ostensible investigation of Trump for years. He recalled a report from RealClearInvestigations titled, “FBI Unit Leading Mar-a-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation.”

He said political observers should view the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago “as part of something that started in the spring and summer of 2016 … or perhaps earlier.” He added, “This was the effort to get Donald Trump.”

The FBI’s surveillance of Trump, Smith maintained, must have been known to former President Barack Obama given its launch during the Obama administration.

“We need to remember these [are] intelligence agencies that Hillary Clinton was using to spy on the Trump campaign and to smear the Trump campaign,” he remarked. “This was in the Obama administration. There is no way that any of this happened without the White House knowing about it.”

Smith said it was “good news” that whistleblowers within the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office about political and partisan internal efforts to suppress information about Hunter Biden.

The existence of whistleblowers within the FBI and DOJ, Smith surmised, could lead to some restraint among the bureaucracies’ worst “anti-Trump” operatives due to fear of exposure.

He remarked, “Thanks to the whistleblowers — and to thanks to Charles Grassley’s letters — now we have anti-Trump operatives at the DOJ and the FBI worried about who they can trust. Under our circumstances at present, that’s very important, and it’s very good news, because we want them looking at each other. We want them fearful of each other. We want them...

Visage à trois #441

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #622

The Psychology of Totalitarianism

From rationalism to mass formation - and towards Truth speech.

At the end of February 2020, the global village began to shake on its foundations. The world was presented with a foreboding crisis, the consequences of which were incalculable. In a matter of weeks, everyone was gripped by the story of a virus—a story that was undoubtedly based on facts. But on which ones? We caught a first glimpse of “the facts” via footage from China. A virus forced the Chinese government to take the most draconian measures. Entire cities were quarantined, new hospitals were built hastily, and individuals in white suits disinfected public spaces. Here and there, rumors emerged that the totalitarian Chinese government was overreacting and that the new virus was no worse than the flu. Opposite opinions were also floating around: that it must be much worse than it looked, because otherwise no government would take such radical measures. At that point, everything still felt far removed from our shores and we assumed that the story did not allow us to gauge the full extent of the facts.

Until the moment that the virus arrived in Europe. We then began recording infections and deaths for ourselves. We saw images of overcrowded emergency rooms in Italy, convoys of army vehicles transporting corpses, morgues full of coffins. The renowned scientists at Imperial College confidently predicted that without the most drastic measures, the virus would claim tens of millions of lives. In Bergamo, sirens blared day and night, silencing any voice in a public space that dared to doubt the emerging narrative. From then on, story and facts seemed to merge and uncertainty gave way to certainty.

The unimaginable became reality: we witnessed the abrupt pivot of nearly every country on earth to follow China’s example and place huge populations of people under de facto house arrest, a situation for which the term “lockdown” was coined. An eerie silence descended—ominous and liberating at the same time. The sky without airplanes, traffic arteries without vehicles; dust settling on the standstill of billions of people’s individual pursuits and desires. In India, the air became so pure that, for the first time in thirty years, in some places the Himalayas became once more visible against the horizon. 2

It didn't stop there. We also saw a remarkable transfer of power. Expert virologists were called upon as Orwell’s pigs—the smartest animals on the farm—to replace the unreliable politicians. They would run the animal farm with accurate (“scientific”) information. But these experts soon turned out to have quite a few common, human flaws. In their statistics and graphs they made mistakes that even “ordinary” people would not easily make. It went so far that, at one point, they counted all deaths as corona deaths, including people who had died of, say, heart attacks.

Nor did they live up to their promises. These experts pledged that the Gates to Freedom would re-open after two doses of the vaccine, but then they contrived the need for a third. Like Orwell's pigs, they changed the rules overnight. First, the animals had to comply with the measures because the number of sick people could not exceed the capacity of...