Better in their words…

New York Times describes Trump’s Shadow Presidency; California denies SpaceX permits over Elon politics; popular liberal podcaster mugged by reality.

Source: POKED AND PRODDED ☙ Sunday, October 13, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥🔥 On Friday, the New York Times ran an eyebrow-raising piece headlined, “Inside Donald Trump’s Shadow Presidency.” The QAnon folks might be onto something after all. The remarkable sub-headline added, “In the years since he left the White House, former President Donald J. Trump has remained a force in international politics, meeting with a number of foreign leaders and operating out of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.”

The article was a long-form teaser for Bob Woodard’s predictable October surprise, a new tell-all book titled “War” and intended to assassinate Trump’s character. (Woodward unsurprisingly concludes that Trump is ten times worse than Richard Nixon.)

In the Washington Post’s similar Woodward-promoting story, that far-left paper expressed outrage over Trump sending Putin some free covid test kits. But the Times was more interested in Trump’s calendar.

According to Bob Woodward, for the last four years, Mar-a-Lago has been more crowded than a racetrack snack bar, with Trump meeting a streaming succession of world leaders who practically have to take tickets to get an appointment.

Legions of leaders sought audiences with the former President, including from Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Britain, Hungary, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and more. The meetings often closely resemble official diplomatic events. For instance, July’s meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago looked a lot like a formal State Department confab:

Beyond the leaders respecting Trump with formal in-person visits, the Times reported that President Trump has also spoken with even more leaders by phone, like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, who apparently calls Trump on his cell phone.

But the Times saved its most inflammatory reveal for last.

According to Bob Woodward, an unnamed “aide” told him that Trump has had at least seven calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This unsourced rumor has badly triggered some Democrats who are now crying treason and who have already drafted the next Trump prosecution for FARA violations or something.

But Trump can talk to whoever he wants. The Times grudgingly admitted that “many former presidents maintain contacts with foreign leaders after leaving the White House.” Former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro explained, “As a former president, he has the contacts and the relationships.”

Never forget: Trump’s top-selling book was titled, “The Art of the Deal.” What makes anyone think Trump stopped dealmaking when he stepped off the White House grounds?

Back in June, I described my “Lizard People Doctrine,” which posits that some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories are actually true but in an allegorical sense. In other words, globalists aren’t really shape-shifting lizards, but they might as well be for all intents and purposes. Metaphorically, they are cold-blooded aliens, nothing like regular folks, and in a legal sense, they want to eat us for breakfast. I.e., lizards.

The Lizard People Theory is pretty wild. But ‘QAnon’ must be one of the wildest conspiracy theories imaginable. Q proponents claim that, before Trump left office, he executed a series of intriguing executive orders. Combined, the orders invoked a special state of emergency, designed to handle the alarming contingency of a US government occupation by a foreign power.

Under the Q theory, Trump secretly remained the real President, and Joe Biden is long dead, replaced by an actor wearing a high-tech rubber mask. (In a slightly different version, Trump’s special orders split the jobs of President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump stayed CIC and controls the military, while Biden is “just” the President.)

In sum, according to Q supporters, while Joe Biden (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) pretends to be the public President, Trump remains the actual shadow president, working from his “Winter White House” in Mar-a-Lago. Everything we can see, like Biden’s gaffe-filled mumbling and stumbling around, is actually an eleborate charade, setting up a long-awaited day of reckoning.

The QAnon theory is catnip for conservatives who’ve been horrified at how quickly America’s social, economic, and political infrastructure has devolved over the last four years. It’s quite comforting to think the good guys are just there, actually running things right behind the scenes, and will soon return to take the wheel of power.

At the end of the day, Q is one of the wildest conspiracy theories going; perhaps it is also one of the most seductive ones.

Let’s return to that remarkable New York Times headline: “Inside Donald Trump’s Shadow Presidency.” It sounds like even the Times has swallowed the QAnon pill. At one point, the story even referred to the “complicated diplomacy of dual … presidents” — a Q theme.

Paragraphs after reporting the seven alleged calls to Putin as a fact, the Times finally admitted it was just a rumor, a BlueAnon fantasy featuring Trump using special Get Smart-style communications equipment to evade CIA surveillance:

Maybe it was the shoe phone. While Trump’s contacts with Putin could be more imaginary than actual, it is undeniable that, unlike any former president in living memory, Trump remains fully engaged in the international scene. Other leaders act like he’s still the President.

If we see Trump as Shadow President through the lens of the Lizard People Doctrine, it appears the Q folks may have a legitimate point. Trump may not be the de jure President, but he may be more of a de facto behind-the-scenes mover than anyone ever realized. To be fair, Trump’s formal competitor, the non-shadow President Biden, lacks the energy and focus to be any real competition.

The New York Times finally sees things very similarly to how Q people do, in essence joining the ranks of Q conspiracy fanatics. Is Trump’s Shadow Presidency a conspiracy, or something real? As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

🔥🔥 Politico ran a sobering story Thursday headlined, “California officials cite Elon Musk’s politics in rejecting SpaceX launches.” At least you can’t accuse them of being overly intellectual. These are the same self-destructive public servants who drove Tesla out of California during the pandemic. They just can’t help themselves.

On Thursday, California’s Coastal Commission rejected a Space Force request for increasing SpaceX launches to 50 rockets a year at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. The Commissioners thoughtfully rejected Space Force’s request. Not because of the environmental impact, the risk of crashes, or the noise.

They rejected the proposal, at least in part, because they don’t like Elon. They weren’t particularly clever about it, either. They didn’t use some cover story or smarter-sounding pretense. They just said it right out loud.

“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation) said during the San Diego meeting.

“I really appreciate the work of the Space Force,” said Commission Chair Caryl Hart. “But here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that I find to be very disturbing.”

Needless to say, declining launch permits over someone’s political speech is probably a classic violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. So SpaceX could fight the Commmission over this, if it wants another lawsuit.

We predicted Elon’s support for Donald Trump would cost the space billionaire. It arrived almost immediately; this might be the first approval hearing after Elon took the stage with Trump last week. So here it comes, delivered by bevies of bureaucratic insects, all aiming to hollow out the substance of Elon’s companies one permit at a time.

But note the darkly funny part. They’re hurting themselves at the same time they seek to hurt Musk. If they keep this up, California could make it so difficult for SpaceX to operate that the space company finally moves its entireoperation to Texas and Florida, leaving nothing for the Golden State.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, I blogged about one of the top lefty podcasts, Pod Save America. Today, another top Democrat podcast made the news. The UK Daily Mail ran the story under the entertaining headline, “Glamorous journalist reveals she ditched Dems after they sympathized with homeless pervert who molested her.” She was literally mugged by reality.

CLIP: Far-left podcaster leaves Democrats after groupthinkers shame her near-rape experience (2:24).

The Young Turks —‘TYT’ to fans— started in 2002 and grew into one of the country’s largest leftist media franchises, sort of like a liberal version of the Daily Wire. Ana Kasparian, 38, has been a producer and performer on The Young Turks since she was 21 (starting in 2007). Ana lives and works in LA, is a passionate progressive activist, and is a celebrity to lots of liberals.

There are two parts to the story of Ana’s red-pilling. First, in 2022 Ana was molested by two manic, drug-addled homeless men while she was out walking her dog and briefly bent over for poop retrieval. One of the men surprised her from behind. It wasn’t a banana in his pocket.

Ana delved into the details in her clip. Fortunately things didn’t progress beyond some manhandling and mocking, but suffice to say Ana and her little doggie endured a harrowing interactive experience with the unhoused that she’ll probably never forget.

But that was only the first part of Ana’s journey. The next thing that happened was this year, when she finally got brave enough to talk about her humiliating harassment on several podcasts. She said she’s now suffering from PTSD and often afraid to leave her house. But it backfired badly.

Ana’s problem is that Democrats have no permission structure for criticizing illegal vagrants. It’s against the rules.

Just for telling her story, Ana started getting hate mail. Lots of it. From liberals. Bad hate mail. They called her anti-homeless. How dare she! Has she ever been homeless (and horny)? They called her racist. Despite the fact Ana never called the cops or disclosed her molesters’ race. She just complained about it.

The gist seems to be, if you’re a Democrat woman who’s been sexually molested by migrants, you’d better just shut up about it. Otherwise, you know what happens: shunned and canceled. Even if you’re a lifelong liberal celebrity activist on a hit, far-left podcast network.

Ana said, “Once I finally felt comfortable to raise concerns about how the left talks about crime, I felt as if they couldn’t wait to purge me.” She now believes in Democrats’ ideological purity test. “I’m not pure enough, I’m not good enough,” she recalled feeling.

Ana said she’s shocked. For her whole life, she believed she belonged to the party of tolerance. But she’s learned the party of tolerance won’t tolerate a woman testifying about her harassment. As a white woman, Ana is further down the victim hierarchy than homeless illegals.

To remain a Democrat in good standing, Ana must tolerate crimes against her person. It’s restorative justice.

The former liberal activist is now homeless herself; at least, politically speaking. Ana explained, “Everything has become dogmatic, and if you don’t buy into the entirety of the dogma you open yourself up to backlash.”

“It’s not a fun experience,” she added, as if that weren’t sufficiently obvious.

Who knows how many other disaffected Democrats the Young Turks producer might also persuade to look for a new political home? The Democrats’ permission structures may be getting too rigid and brittle. Maybe they’ll shatter at some point, under the stress of real life.

Ana’s story is progress. She’s waking up now, and telling everybody who’ll listen. Who knows how many else might wake up with her?

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you profoundly for your loyal support. C&C shall return tomorrow morning to kick the week off right. See you then.

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