I compose on X with greater facility than here on BackChannels because the urge to explain the state of affairs has been reliable provoked and the publishing, so far, decisive and immediate. The impact, however, feels low, and the site overall appears untrustworthy, more the tool of the bigot from South Africa’s power than representative of the power of responsible and truthful media. Be that as it may, I’m still active on the X platform but very tired of relaying and repeating the truth about Donald, his criminality, and his pirating the state for himself.
DURBIN: So who gave the order to flag records related to President Trump?
BONDI: To flag records for President Trump?
DURBIN: To flag any records which included his name.
BONDI: I’m not going to discuss anything about that with you, Senator.
DURBIN: Eventually, you’re going to have to answer for your conduct in this. You won’t do it today, but eventually you will.
Cover The Tracks
As part of the paranoid-delusional malignant narcissism that motivates his criminality, Donald Trump has been forced to live in a theater of his own, deeply insulated and secretive, while all around him must be made complicit in his covering. For the crime involved and the blackmail or other leverage coming off of it, Trump really cannot divulge the details or rosters to which he was privy in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s enterprise. Every accusation against himself needs must be turned around or diverted, and every ugly truth covered by falsehood.
More recently and along the same tack that would be the White House’s persecution of ordinary Americans for their opinions, Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, said plainly of his boss’s critics and opponents, ““We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Apparently for Stephen Miller, it’s perfectly fine for Americans to live in fear of him and Ill Trumpolini.
Here follow along similar lines a few comments from others.
The burgeoning indictments, arraignments, and pending court dates facing former President Donald Trump are picking up such momentum that it’s easy to overlook a thread that runs through all his legal woes: He’s run so badly afoul of the American justice system not merely thanks to his sense of entitlement and his disregard for any curb on his appetites, but also because he treats the workers in his immediate orbit so poorly – Lehmann, Chris. “Breaking: Donald Trump Is a Terrible Boss.” The Nation, August 1, 2023.
Donald Trump has not been working for the United States of America. He has been working for himself at the least and then possibly for Russia within the company of compromised and narrowed autocrats in NATO who have chosen to treat their nations as fiefs for their families and theaters for their own fragile but grasping personalities.
The massive purges that began shortly after the failed coup has seen hundreds of thousands of civil servants, judges, security officials, and employees of state-run institutions fired. Their positions are being rapidly filled, often by under- or unqualified replacements, via the Turkish patronage system of kadrolasma — literally, the building of loyalist cadres. The military is no exception. NATO’s top commander, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, raised the alarm back in December, when he warned of a “degradation” of the alliance’s command operations following the firing of “talented, capable” senior Turkish military officials.
Behind the scenes: “A leaked report by Intcen, the EU’s joint intelligence service, concluded that Erdogan had planned a purge before July 2016 and an array of soldiers, fearing the upcoming mass firings, hastily launched a coup.”
Viktor Orban’s populism began with a hard knock in the school of political life:
In 2002, Orban committed a rare gaffe that resulted in defeat: playing more forcefully to the emerging middle class than to the much larger pool of older, uneducated, poor, rural voters—those ravaged by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU-driven market reforms. This group either shied from the polls or voted socialist left. It was not a mistake Orban would make twice.
Consider the two, Erdogan and Orban, role models for Donald Trump.
Ignorant, lying, and unconscionable personalities may more easily serve archaic feudal-medieval power than talents valuing their own integrity and schooled in cultures cosmopolitan, modern, and rigorous. In fact, one might suggest archaic power would appear to prefer corrupt or corruptible damaged, greed-ridden, and power hungry sycophants over qualified executives, warriors, and scholars properly equipped with backbones of their own.
Orban’s next move, broadly speaking, as chief of his own family and friends state mafia: extraordinary corruptions and nepotism (Hockenos, op. cit.).
One may expect no less of a bravura attempt at dictatorship from the confirmed felonious Trump.
With financial supplements removed from a body of poor Americans and Trump tariffs raising the cost of living for all Americans but those floating in their own clouds while living in their own compounds, Americans would seem positioned for abuse, exploitation, impoverishment, and a de facto enslavement ramped high by desperation and fear or enforced by related crime, imprisonment, and control–and all of that without meaningful appeal to the hard fought for liberal values of the greater western civilization known today to Canada, most of Europe (minus Hungary), and a Ukraine that has been fighting for its freedom from the Russian mafia state since the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity.
For Trump now attempting to cleave military and police power from fealty to community, state, and nation and channel the same into his own system of private patronage, the challenge appears that of provoking his opposition to violence and claiming for his corrupt and apparently unconscionable and shameless Administration its own casus belli.
One hopes the American Left will not make life that easy for him.
One may hope as well that American military and police will defend the Constitution, the laws of the nation extant, and honor the oath sworn to attend such defense and further choose to refuse the wheedling maneuvers of a deeply delusional and dishonest American criminal and traitor.
Addendum: American Character and Integrity Matter — and Truth Matters Most of All
I may be “suffering” from, oh, let’s call it an “Online Cognitive Battle Fatigue” that has formed from my same day every day round of blogs, newspapers, substacks, and videos sprawling across the world’s conflict and political issues and themes, chief among them the Donald Trump’s transformation of America’s modern secular democratic republic into his own kingdom, a private patronage system built on the back of GOP and other cowards, criminals, sycophants, and traitors.
Art thou not sick of the vile ignoramus?
Out of habit and inertia, I’ll probably continue for a while my political posterbating at https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim but . . . for what? We have each developed our own Internet habits, rounds, routines even while losing, perhaps, our political and social efficacy online.
ICESTAPO – ICE Fishing in America
An outraged “Parkrose Permaculture” defends American laws, principles, and values –>
Note:I’ve normalized the hashtagging of terms for ease of reading as a blog, and I’ve changed the ending of the opinion just a little bit at the end of the copy.
America Under Assault with Criminals in Power
Without any firm and meaningful response to their piracy, it appears the American criminal and traitor Donald John Trump and his enabling coterie of cowards, criminals, cultists, and sycophants have succeeded in taking over the United States of America on lies. The nation has been boarded, commandeered, disarmed bureaucratically from the top, made lawless as well, and prepared for being shaken down and sold off — see American Ethane (Russian capital; American middleman; Chinese customer) on that.
The GOP and Trump Administration will blame the now imminent Federal Government shutdown on the Democratic Party when in fact they themselves have made awful decisions damaging to tens of millions of Americans. The behavior of the Republic Party appears shameful and its covering its ills through denial and accusation appear altogether shameless.
Big picture: the internal fissures in American politics involving Far Left and Far Right fringes expressive of deeply dishonest positions have come to overwhelm #America. For American criminals associated with the delusional, disinformed, and reactionary Far Right, Trump has simply dismissed key investigators at the Federal level in law enforcement and replace them with his own toadying lot.
It’s early morning at Quantico where the nation’s top admirals and generals have gathered for an event prepared for them by Pete Hegseth. Will the Secretary of Defense — err, of the Department of War — ask the assembled to swear an oath to Donald Trump and sign to it as well?
Less than a year ago, MAGA and the MAGAdumb managed to pry into power a politically compromised (see #RussiaRussiaRussia) and compulsively lying criminal narcissist — and now the work of all who have defended and fought for a unified, politically coherent, and politically cohesive United States of America, a secular democratic republic devoted to a timeless humanism and the post-Westphalian liberalism and reason of the west, have been set up for an unbridled assault on their achievement.
Best suggestion: American military and police, all the forces of order foreign and domestic — defend the Constitution of the United States of America and not the pirates in power intent on degrading its meaning and disassembling and perhaps dismissing it altogether.
One more thing: American character and integrity matter and truth matters most of all. For that, courage, curiosity, and honesty needs must be steadfast in their assertion.
Memes Relevant and in the Original X Post
Posted in Comment to the X Post
Related in hashtags: #AmericanDomesticIntelligence #AmericanFreedomOfSpeech #AmericanBrass #AmericanDefense #AmericanNatSec
The term of greater interest in relation to #DonaldTrump and his #MalignantNarcissism: #Gaslighting.
#Criminals and #Dictators for fear of being found out, humiliated, imprisoned, and shamed have to lie their way through their lives. Image matters. Privacy and some secrecy (as with personal matters in general — ain’t nobody’s business but our own!) — are generally understood and considered beneficial to persons, families, and communities.
We all have our private lives.
In politics, the politician who would be a dictator may only control his image through the control of the media.
Trump stepped off by demonizing the majors through his epithet, “Fake News!” Now he’s suing the same at every chance: he just doesn’t like the way he, in fact, makes himself look in the mirroring observations of most of the world’s journalists. So what does he do? He makes things up.
#TrumpLies – to himself first, then to #MAGA, and then to #Americans.
#VladimirPutin, the same kind of person as Trump, does the same thing and now has #Russia dying on the lost and twined causes of medieval conquest and tribute (most of all to himself). He’s a wealthy man with a dead soul, and in that regard, he’s completely worthless.
#AmericanMafiaState : #RussianMafiaState
#Trump : #Putin | #TrumpPutin — The two may be friends or frenemies, but both may be judged by #ModernPeople – #ModernAmericans – as archaic reactionaries and truly feudal-medieval monsters.
The regime’s latest conspiracy theory of a violent “Antifa” laying “siege” to a “War ravaged” Portland is absurd by every reality-test outside the MAGA echo-chamber.
“Trump wants to rewrite history so that the next generation may not know that he incited a violent insurrection, refused to peacefully transfer the power of the presidency after losing an election, stole classified documents and showed them to friends and guests at Mar-a-Lago, and that he was a criminal,” Cobb said.
“He’s a convicted felon. All, anybody involved in those events that offended him, they’re in real danger.”
*
On this exercise, that’s it. That’s all I didn’t write. 🙂
I may (or may not) elaborate on what Americans should be worried about in relation to the nation’s economy – #Enserfment! – its prison systems, private and foreign-contracted – #Gulag! – and Donald Trump’ s damaging and deranged administrative method in its totality – #Sovietization! However, I believe the ideas sufficiently conveyed by the bolding of the words.
Regarding “The Morning Gloss” (have you Glossed yet?) 🙂 , it should be evident that I have been fiddling with how to deal with the earliest portion of each day’s barrage of impressions involving the mediation of reality.
What should one get out of the comparatively isolated experience of sitting at a desktop computer (or other device) absorbing opinion and reportage from around the world?
Where is one to dwell?
In some ways, the shine has come off the Internet with familiarity and the formation of routines involving it. Politics, pizza, porn, and groceries plus unlimited other shopping have not only brought worlds to my eyes but (within the bounds of both law and preference for an honorable existence) to my door.
For all the improvements . . . where has been the improvement?
So with an electronic node on the pulse of the world as well as options for enjoying someone else’s ride through the countryside (virtual drives), I am with age approaching decluttering, downsizing, essentializing — not minimalizing: one may still enjoy having options within every common category of accoutrement, hobby, and tool — and the melancholy but necessary business of cleaning up after one’s own life.
What to do with BackChannels?
Rather than answer, my first inclination is to retreat some from “life online”, return to reading at length for depth and insight as well as the pleasure of it when in the company of accomplished authors and poets.
We are very few of us — analysts, bloggers, researchers — possessed of power beyond our insights and perspectives, and I would guess many prefer as I do a healthy solitude.
BackChannels 