Reader’s Links for February 8th, 2023

Here is a link to the VladTepesBlog social media Mastodon Pod. Please feel free to check it out and sign up for an account if you are sufficiently annoyed with Twitter and Facebook to try something new.

Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.

This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.

So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.

This is the new Samizdat. We must use it while we can.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

80 Replies to “Reader’s Links for February 8th, 2023”

    • Oh to be a fly on the wall listening to Kamala and Chrystia. He he he smarmy whine, cackle cackle I am not fearful, but imagine these two in charge of your life.

      • Don’t forget the Downs Syndrome Prophet from Sweden, the “How Dare You” psycho. She also does the mindless laughing.

        Its clearly a tactic. Just mindlessly laugh to avoid any actual content.

  1. Iran Threatens to Turn New York City into “Hellish Ruins” – Have They Seen NY Lately?
    By Richard Abelson
    Published February 8, 2023 at 8:00am
    0 Comments

    While Joe Biden ignored the revolutionary protest in Iran and continuesx to seek a billion-dollar deal with the radical Islamic regime, Telegram channels linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threaten to attack US cities, claiming that Iran may build nuclear weapons “in the shortest possible time” if attacked by the US or Israel.

    Revolutionary Guard-linked Bisimchi Media Telegram channel published a video titled “When Will Iran’s Sleeping Nuclear Warheads Awaken”. The videos claimed Iran can transform its “peaceful nuclear program to a nuclear weapons program”.

    According to Iran International, the video also claims Iran’s ballistic missles have the capability to turn New York City into “hellish ruins”. The Iranian video said the nuclear facilities at Natanz may be vulnerable to a possible attack by Western powers and Israel.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/iran-threatens-turn-new-york-city-hellish-ruins-seen-ny-lately/

  2. Seymour Hersh – How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

    The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

    NORD STREAM

    The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

    The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

    Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

    Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

    Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

    Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

    There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Forces Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

    President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

    The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

    From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

    America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

    Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

    Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

    Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

    A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

    There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”

    The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.

    Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”

    The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

    It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

    All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

    PLANNING

    In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

    It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

    What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

    Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

    At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

    Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

    A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.

    The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.

    That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s intentions and planning.

    Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.

    Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

    Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

    What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

    Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

    Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

    “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

    Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

    The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

    The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”

    THE OPERATION

    Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.

    In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.

    A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

    In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

    Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.

    Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)

    Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

    The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

    After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.

    At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.

    “The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.

    The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.

    Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.

    The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)

    The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.

    The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.

    The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.

    It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

    The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

    And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

    Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”

    Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.

    Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.

    The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.

    The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

    Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.

    In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.

    The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?

    The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

    On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

    FALLOUT

    In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

    While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.

    Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:

    “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”

    More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “?Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

    The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

    Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

    “It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

    “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

    • ‘We’ve intensified efforts’ | Rishi Sunak on UK training Ukrainian forces

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk4UqLKpjVU

      ==========================

      DAILY MAIL – Did Biden give the order to destroy Putin’s Nord Stream pipeline after Ukraine invasion? Bombshell report claims Navy divers carried out mission to kill Russia’s gas stranglehold on Europe in audacious mission overseen by president

      U.S. Navy divers planted C4 explosives that caused $500 million damage to Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany, sensational report claims

      Report by Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh details plot in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s dependence on gas from Moscow

      The White House and the CIA have denied claims the attack was carried out after nine months of secret planning overseen by President Joe Biden

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11727691/U-S-carried-Nord-Stream-bomb-attack-secret-plan-led-Joe-Biden-report-claims.html

      =============================

      zero hedge – Nord Stream Sabotage Was CIA, US Navy Covert Op: Seymour Hersh Bombshell Prompts White House Response

      […] Hersh has concluded the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.

      […] The report says planning was in the works all the way back to December 2021, with a special task force formed under the aegis of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

      “The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,”

      https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nord-stream-sabotage-was-cia-us-navy-covert-op-seymour-hersh-bombshell-prompts-white

      • Many of us, here and other places, figured out within a few hours that Norway was part and parcel of the operation.

        What really gets to me is Biden and his State Dept were willing to deprive many millions of people of heating during the upcoming cold weather.

    • reuters – White House says blog post on Nord Stream explosion ‘utterly false’

      WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as “utterly false and complete fiction.”

      Reuters has not corroborated the report, published by U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, which said an attack was carried out last September at the direction of President Joe Biden.

      “This is utterly false and complete fiction,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.

      The pipelines are multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects designed to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

      Sweden and Denmark, in whose exclusive economic zones the blasts occurred, have both concluded the pipelines were blown up deliberately, but have not said who might be responsible.

      The United States and NATO have called the incident “an act of sabotage.” Moscow has blamed the West for the unexplained explosions that caused the ruptures. Neither side has provided evidence.

      On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry said the United States had questions to answer over its role in explosions on the pipelines.

      Construction of Nord Stream 2, designed to double the volume of gas that Russia could send directly to Germany under the sea, was completed in September 2021, but was never put into operation after Berlin shelved certification just days before Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine last February.

      Hersh is a former New York Times and New Yorker reporter who won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including about the Vietnam War and the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

      More recently, he ignited controversy with a report disputing the Obama administration’s version of the 2011 killing of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in a U.S. special forces operation, and another accusing Syrian rebels of staging an August 2013 sarin nerve agent attack on a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of civilians.

      https://www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-says-blog-post-nord-stream-explosion-is-utterly-false-2023-02-08/

    • This morning, I was listening to a respected Youtuber. He mentioned and showed the text of the Ukrainian Minister (or whatever it’s called) of some Culture ministry.

      She’s enacting a new law to destroy any books written in Russian. There are at least 12 million books left in the country. Also, any book in Ukrainian that speaks of the Russian culture in Ukraine.

      Now, where have we seen this before?

    • I am not saying that the US didn’t sabatoge the pipelines. I am saying that it didn’t require a large professional military to commit the sabatoge. The depth is shallow enough that all professional divers and most sport divers could have carried out the attack. The hardest parts would be getting the explosive and delivering it to the pipelines. I wouldn’t want to be around untrained people assembling any bomb but most amateurs don’t kill themselves.

      I doubt Biden has guts enough to order the attack, and when he left office Obama was friends with both Putin and Xi.

      • Comments on Moon of Alabama’s article ask that question and more.
        (And they’re all virulent anti-American enemies.)

      • Discover the Networks on Seymour Hersh, Intro:

        * Investigative reporter for The New Yorker Magazine

        * Won Pulitzer Prize for My Lai Massacre reporting during Vietnam War

        * First published his My Lai story in leftwing Dispatch News Service

        * In 1968 worked as Press Secretary for anti-Vietnam War Democratic presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy

        * Nicknamed “my little commie” by Executive Editor of _The New York Times_ when he worked there

        * Protégé and friend of radical journalist I.F. Stone

        * Typically bases his reporting, which tends to be highly critical of the United States, on unnamed sources that are difficult for others to verify

        https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/seymour-hersh/

      • the gateway pundit –The Purge: Wikipedia Slanders Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh

        […]Instead of trying to verify or question Hersh’s minutely researched report based on an inside source familiar with the alleged CIA attack on the Nord Stream pipeline Sept. 26, 2022, the floundering Fake News instead took to attacking the 85-year-old prize-winning former hero of the left, who exposed the My Lai massacre, Watergate and Abu Ghraib.

        Leading the way for the character assassination campaign, Reuters labeled Hersh “no stranger to controversy”, as if that were a bad thing for an investigative journalist. “The White House dismissed Hersh’s report, which relied on a single source to support its claim about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Reuters was unable to corroborate Hersh’s self-published article”, the WEF and Pfizer-tied “Reuters” wrote.

        It was not clear what Reuters had done to try and “corroborate” the story.

        […]In classic Stalinist style, Hersh’s Wikipedia entry was retconned to label Hersh a “conspiracy theorist”.

        […]So-called “journalists” from UK-based fake news spigot Bellingcat labeled Hersh “senile, corrupt and obsessively lying”.

        […]Tucker Carlson was the only mainstream media source to take Hersh’s allegations seriously:

        https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/purge-wikipedia-slanders-pulitzer-prize-winner-seymour-hersh-giving-kremlin-field-day/

      • twitter @ggreenwald

        Sy Hersh is one of the most accomplished and important journalists of his generation.

        Someone who works for “Business Insider,” @miajankowicz , has never broken a story of note in her life.

        This is how she and that site describes Hersh’s report on the US blowing up Nord Stream:

        The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin

        https://www.businessinsider.nl/the-claim-by-a-discredited-journalist-that-the-us-secretly-blew-up-the-nord-stream-pipeline-is-proving-a-gift-to-putin/

        —————————————————-
        Who gives a shit if a news report is a “gift to Putin”? What a dumb and childish mindset. The only question an actual journalist asks: is this story true? Propagandists are concerned with “who does this story help or hurt?”

        As for Hersh’s expulsion from corporate journalism:

        —————————————————–
        Oh, Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre and many of the abuses of Abu Ghraib? Is that all? Granted, it can’t match the journalistic giants of Business Insider, but who among us can?

        And yes, he’s now “discredited” because some US-Government-funded propaganda outlet attacked him.

        https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1624106848029757440

        =================================

        Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh’s Pipe Dream

        On the surface Seymour Hersh’s story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.

        https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe

        ================================
        Can we have 50 current and ex intelligence folks issuing a statement in the NYT that Sy Hersh story is false …?

    • the gateway pundit – Independent Evidence Video Confirms Key Part of Sy Hersh’s Report on the Attack on Nord Stream 2

      Ever heard of Monkey Werx? He hosts a You Tube channel that focuses on tracking U.S. civilian and military flights. Sounds pretty innocuous and boring. No more. Turns out that Monkey Werx provided a video report last September (September 30th to be precise) that confirms part of Sy Hersh’s account of the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

      […]And here is the Monkey Werx report from September 30th (relevant info starts at the 2 minute mark) tracking that P8 Poseidon:

      There still are some people in the intelligence community who are patriots and are alarmed by Biden’s lawless behavior. I imagine that the Biden Administration will launch a witch hunt for the intelligence officers who alerted Sy Hersh to this story.

      According to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war on another country. Joe Biden has usurped that authority and carried out an act of war against a NATO ally (Germany). The potential ramifications of this act include the heightened risk of the U.S. starting a shooting war with Russia.

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/independent-evidence-video-confirms-key-part-sy-hershs-report-attack-nord-stream-2/

    • Moon of Alabama got it close to right from the start. Bernard is a German communist with a military background. His hatred of America – and everything in the U.S. sphere of influence – is breathtaking.

      I hate him but read his posts everyday anyway.[*]

      His work is just that important. Of course it’s bent, but it’s solid analysis from an enemy perspective. Often dead-on accurate.

      It also helps me identify friend from foe in the conservative blogosphere. Surprising how commentators posing as rah-rah conservative Americans reveal themselves.

      [*]Thanks, Wrath of Kahn! NOW I get it.
      ………………..
      Hersh: “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”

      https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/hersh-how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream-pipeline.html#comments

  3. europravda -More tanks for Ukraine: Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands make new pledge

    Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands plan to provide Ukraine with at least 100 refurbished Leopard 1 battle tanks in the coming months.

  4. europravda – How are EU households and businesses coping with the energy crisis?

    The EU has introduced measures to help shield citizens from the impacts of exorbitant energy bills and global energy market disruption.


    • World Economic Forum’s Justine Trudeau and the whiner WEF trustee, Freeland are all in on the population replacement.

      • She’s not some silly bimbo – she makes the decisions, writes his scripts. She’s collaborating with Enemies to ruin Canada. She may go on to positions of greater reach, like Sec. General of NATO or something like it.

        It’s dangerous to underestimate the capabilities of your enemies.

  5. BOOM! GOP Rep Nancy Mace RIPS INTO Fired Twitter Officials Over COVID Censorship – Admits She Has DEVASTATING Side Effects from COVID Vaccine (VIDEO)
    By Jim Hoft
    Published February 8, 2023 at 10:30am
    15 Comments

    The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday is holding a full committee hearing on government suppression of speech in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop report. The icommittee called in fired top Twitter officials James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, and Yoel Roth to the hearing.

    Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) took the microphone early into the hearing and RIPPED INTO the fired Twitter officials who censored free speech on COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

    Rep. Nancy Mace said she now suffers from asthma and tremors following her second COVID shot

    The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday is holding a full committee hearing on government suppression of speech in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop report. The icommittee called in fired top Twitter officials James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, and Yoel Roth to the hearing.

    Rep. Nancy Mace: I along with many Americans have long term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine. It wasn’t the first shot but it was the second shot. I have now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pains that no doctor can explain. And I’ve had a battery of tests. I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s suppression spread into medical fields.

    Then she blasted Vijaya for not being a doctor

    So good!

    What a powerful testimony!

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/boom-gop-rep-nancy-mace-rips-fired-twitter-officials-covid-censorship-admits-devastating-side-effects-covid-vaccine-video/

  6. Reporter Confronts Bill Gates on His Hypocrisy on Climate Activism as He Continues to Fly Private All Over the World (VIDEO)
    By Jim Hoft
    Published February 8, 2023 at 10:45am
    Comment

    Practice what you preach.”

    Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has maintained that his activism on the issue of climate change does not conflict with his usage of private jets all around the world.

    According to Britannica, hypocrisy is the behavior of people who do things that they tell other people not to do: behavior that does not agree with what someone claims to believe or feel.

    During an interview with the BBC aired last Friday, British broadcaster Amol Rajan confronted Bill Gates about why his climate activism should be taken seriously given that he continues to fly private all over the world

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/reporter-confronts-bill-gates-hypocrisy-climate-activism-continues-fly-private-world-video/

  7. national post – Multiple children injured after bus crashes into Quebec daycare

    […]The crash occurred at 8:30 a.m., just as parents were dropping off their children. The daycare is at the end of a driveway, and the bus driver would have had to leave the road and drive down the driveway to hit the building. Images from the scene show a bus firmly embedded in the front of the building, identified as the Garderie Éducative Ste-Rose.

    Hamdi Ben Chaabane, who said he lives near the daycare, said he and several other people tried to subdue the bus driver.

    Ben Chaabane said he believed the driver deliberately drove into the building.

    “It wasn’t an accident from what I saw,” Ben Chaabane told reporters.

    He said after the crash, the bus driver, screaming, opened the bus door and started taking all off his clothes.

    “We had to hit him to subdue him, and we got him on the ground, and then the police put the handcuffs on him,” Ben Chaabane said.

    He said they helped get one child out from underneath the bus and then firefighters arrived and took over. Benchaabane said children were inside the daycare at the time of the crash and parents were still arriving to drop their kids off.

    […]Laval Mayor Stéphane Boyer said he was shocked by news of the event and that the city’s heart is with parents. He told reporters the driver of the bus has worked for the Société de transport de Laval for 10 years.

    […]

    https://nationalpost.com/news/local-news/stl-bus-crashes-into-laval-daycare-centre-multiple-injuries-reported/wcm/bdcf5f22-1809-4780-8a7f-27351d8638b8

    ==============================
    at least 2 dead

    https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-faits-divers/2023-02-08/drame-a-laval/un-autobus-fonce-sur-une-garderie-au-moins-deux-morts-et-cinq-blesses.php

    ========================
    What we know about the bus crash into a daycare in Quebec

    Genevieve Beauchemin reports from the scene in Laval, Que. after a bus crashed into a daycare leaving multiple people seriously injured.

    • CBC –
      The driver, a 51-year-old man who was employed with the Société de transport de Laval (STL), was arrested and is facing reckless driving and homicide charges. Several sources told Radio-Canada that the suspect is Pierre Ny St-Amand.

      […]After the bus struck the daycare, the driver emerged and began acting erratically.

      “He opened the door. He took off all his clothes. He was totally naked,” Ben Chaabane said. “We don’t know why he did that. We dove on him. We tried to subdue him.”

      He described the driver as being “in another world.”

      “It was a nightmare. It’s horrible. He didn’t stop yelling. He wasn’t saying words,” Ben Chaabane said.

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bus-hit-daycare-laval-1.6740987

      =======================
      Pierre Ny St-Amand

      https://www.noovo.info/nouvelle/drame-a-laval-lidentite-du-chauffeur-devoilee.html

  8. (Richard: TGP has a link to the scribed copy of the email thread)

    SMOKING GUN – HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP EXCLUSIVE: Burisma Asked Hunter to End Ukraine Investigation on Company – Then Joe Biden Threatened Ukraine and Had Investigator Fired
    By Joe Hoft
    Published February 8, 2023 at 11:00am
    38 Comments

    We have the smoking gun!
    Who can forget Joe Biden’s presentation in front of the Council on Foreign Relations event after the 2016 Election?

    In his own words, with cameras rolling, Joe Biden described how he threatened the Ukrainian President and said that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if Ukraine didn’t immediately fire the prosecutor investigating Burmisa Holdings.

    Joe’s son Hunter was on the Board of Burisma making tens of thousands a month for doing nothing but “fixing things

    Biden said:

    I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion dollars. I said you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: We’re leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money

    Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

    Sitting to Biden’s right is Michael Carpenter who would later go on to run the Biden Center at UPenn where classified and top-secret documents were recently found. To Biden’s left is Council on Foreign Relations President, Richard Haass.

    Here is Biden admitting his crimes as Vice President.

    We have now uncovered an email thread on Hunter’s laptop where Burisma asked Hunter to use his influence to end the Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation into the company.

    We have now uncovered an email thread on Hunter’s laptop where Burisma asked Hunter to use his influence to end the Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation into the company.

    In the email thread below on page 3, Burisma requests Hunter to stop an investigation in the Ukraine of Burisma. This email was sent in 2014.

    We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc .to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions…”

    A short time later in early 2016 Joe Biden had Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor investigating Burisma fired.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/smoking-gun-hunter-laptop-email-uncovered-burisma-asks-hunter-end-ukraine-investigation-burisma-joe-biden-threatens-ukraine-gets-investigator-fired/

    (Richard: This is why the FBI stalled things for so long. I doubt if we can get Biden removed from office, or that he will ever be prosecuted. [Diminished Capacity] What I am hoping for is for the Dems to be damaged enough that we can get people elected that have enough courage (or desperation) to remove a lot of the filth that is in DC.

    It is unlikely that we will remove all of the corruption but with luck we can return the Federal Government to something close to what the Founding Fathers wanted.

    Don’t get your hopes up for a quick victory, this will be a long fight that will test the courage and honor of the people that are fighting for freedom.)

    • Lights Suddenly Go Out During House Oversight Committee Hearing

      During Rep. Gary Palmer’s (R-AL) questioning of Twitter executives in the House Oversight Committee hearing, the lights suddenly went out


    • James Comer Details ‘Coordinated Cover-Up’ Of Hunter Biden Laptop As Major Hearing Starts

      Rep. James Comer (R-KY) detailed a cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop by Twitter, the intelligence community, and the media.

    • Byron Donalds Confronts Ex-Twitter Execs With Email From Biden Team Calling For Tweet Removals

    • Rep. Mace Speaks at Oversight Hearing on Twitter Censorship

      “I have great regrets about get the shots because of the health issues that I now have that I don’t think are ever going to go away.”

    • GOP Rep. Clay Higgins threatens Twitter executives with jail for ‘interfering’ in 2020 elections.

    • Hunter Biden Laptop Takes Center Stage In House Hearing One Day After State Of The Union Address

    • ‘Unbelievable To Me I Am Quoting Elon Musk!’: Katie Porter Mocks GOP’s Hunter Biden-Twitter Hearing

    • ‘Mr. Roth, I’m Going To Refresh Your Memory For You’: Luna Confronts Ex-Twitter Executive

  9. Rep. Duncan Questions CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on COVID at Subcommittee Hearing

  10. FIREWORKS! GOP Congressman Warns Twitter Execs They May be Arrested For Interfering in 2020 Presidential Election (VIDEO)
    By Cristina Laila
    Published February 8, 2023 at 3:05pm
    53 Comments

    The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday held a full committee hearing on government suppression of speech in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop report.

    Here is the witness list:

    Vijaya Gadde

    Former Chief Legal Officer
    Twitter

    James Baker

    Former Deputy General Counsel
    Twitter

    Yoel Roth

    Former Global Head of Trust & Safety
    Twitter

    Annika Collier Navaroli

    Congressman Clay Higgins warned the Twitter execs that they may be arrested for interfering with the 2020 presidential election

    The bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden Crime Family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They knew it would hurt the Biden family. So the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence from being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 election,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) said.

    “You, ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election! Knowingly and willingly!” he said.

    “That’s the bad news! It’s gonna get worse! Because this is the investigation part! Later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.. I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come,” the Congressman said.

    WATCH:

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/fireworks-gop-congressman-warns-twitter-execs-may-arrested-interfering-2020-presidential-election-video/

    • WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Lauren Boebert GOES OFF On Former Twitter Officials For Silencing Americans – Yoel Roth Gets Caught in Possible Lie (VIDEO)
      By Cullen Linebarger
      Published February 8, 2023 at 4:23pm
      21 Comments

      The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday held a committee hearing on the government silencing of free speech related to the Hunter Biden’s laptop report.

      Here is the witness list courtesy of TGP’s Cristina Laila:

      Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) delivered the brutal truth exposing how Twitter colluded with the Deep State to silence millions of ordinary American citizens and patriotic government officials like her.

      VIDEO:

      Boebert focused most of her ire on Baker and Roth. She told Baker to his face that he was the collusion between Twitter and the corrupt FBI.

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/think-lauren-boebert-goes-off-former-twitter-officials-silencing-americans-yoel-roth-gets-caught-possible-lie-video/

  11. Mexico in Chaos after First Month of Biden’s ‘CBP One’ Work Permit Giveaway Program
    Spanish-language media: U.S. online admission-work-permit reservation app and Mexican cities buckling under global surge, lengthening queues

    AUSTIN, Texas — Whatever inducements President Biden promised his Mexican counterpart in exchange for supporting a major shift in U.S. border immigration policy during a January 9 state visit, it wasn’t nearly enough.

    Mexico is reeling under the American president’s expanded scheme to re-channel hundreds of thousands of Cuban, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, and Haitian immigrants this year from their planned illegal border-crossings instead through official ports of entry on pre-approved “humanitarian parole” that comes with highly lucrative two-year U.S. work permits. In a kind of “silver or lead” choice, the administration cajoled those four nationalities by threatening to mark them permanently ineligible for the high-value work permit admissions if they were caught crossing illegally instead of using the parole program

    The “CBP One” admission reservation app’s January 12 publicly announced expansion to the four nationalities (it already had been secretively admitting all nationalities through almost all land border ports since at least May 2022, with no major U.S. media coverage) quickly led to the overwhelming of even the expanded shelter capacity in cities throughout Mexico. The number of applicants appears to have far outpaced the American ability to admit them, although all will eventually make it in just the same as if they had crossed illegally.

    https://cis.org/Bensman/Mexico-Chaos-after-First-Month-Bidens-CBP-One-Work-Permit-Giveaway-Program

  12. https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/02/08/the-fbi-doubles-down-on-christians-and-white-supremacy-in-2023/

    The FBI Doubles Down on Christians and White Supremacy in 2023
    By Kyle Seraphin -February 8, 2023

    The FBI’s Richmond Division would like to protect Virginians from the threat of “white supremacy,” which it believes has found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. An intelligence analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released in a new finished intelligence product dated January 23, 2023, on Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE) and their interests in “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” or RTCs. The document assesses with “high confidence” the FBI can mitigate the threat of Radical-Traditionalist Catholics by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church

    The acronym, new to many in the Domestic Counterterrorism field, comes with a footnote by the writer explaining RTCs are “typically characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council.” The writer makes an unsubstantiated leap that a preference for the Catholic Mass in Latin instead of the vernacular and a number of more traditional views on other world religions can amount to an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” This writer draws the important distinction between “traditional Catholics,” who simply prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings, and RTCs, who espouse “more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

    A discerning reader may wonder why the writer believes such divisions exist and if there is evidence of the extremist and violent rhetoric within the Catholic church. The analyst’s note doesn’t provide specifics. When the FBI generates an intelligence product, it is important to note the analyzed sources. Typically, strict source vetting removes partisanship and bias, so a product is both consistent with federal law and can add value to the FBI’s overall mission. Of note, this document was reviewed and approved for release by the FBI Richmond Chief Division Counsel, who is the office’s top lawyer.

    The attached appendices refer to a number of articles and the out-of-FBI-policy Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) at the end of the document. For example, Appendix D is a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” including the web address accessed. The SPLC appears to be a source for the intelligence analyst’s beliefs that RTCs exist and that they are anti-Semitic. The SPLC description for this “hate group” states RTCs “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-semites in America.” Often in the intelligence world, this type of statement without any established evidence is often followed by the acronym “NFI” or “No Further Information” to indicate it is an unsubstantiated opinion. Additionally, SPLC states RTCs “embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Nothing reported by the SPLC indicates the number of adherents to this alleged ideology nor any instances of violence. This lack of evidence and blatant partisan blindness is one of many reasons the FBI has distanced itself from the SPLC as a source in the past 10 years.The intelligence product includes endnote citations from two other sources: the far-Left online magazine Salon and the equally left-leaning The Atlantic. The Salon articles cited are typical of partisan click-bait writing: “Traditional Catholics and White Nationalist Groypers Forge a new Far-Right Youth Movement” and “White Nationalists Get Religion: On the Far-Right Fringe, Catholics and Racists Forge a movement.” These articles were released a day apart as a series but include substantially the same information. The articles offer only circumstantial suggestions of affiliations between inflammatory figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes and a man pictured standing on the steps of a Catholic church in New York after the Dobbs decision. The Salon writer makes the wild leap that using a photo of someone at a church indicates the pictured individual or his beliefs are relevant within a religious institution with 70 million adherents in the United States alone and over 2000 years of tradition and history.

    The writer determines that the “threat picture” involving RMVE, again in this case, referring to white supremacists, will increase, but that the “RTC Community is likely to remain relatively stable or show modest growth” over the next one to two years. The basis for this assessment is not annotated and appears to be speculative. The speculative increase in RMVE interactions with RTC leads the writer to suggest mitigation strategies, including recruiting Confidential Human Sources (“source development”), tripwire, and liaison contacts. Tripwires and liaisons are overt contacts with trusted members of a community or an industry. They can advise law enforcement about potentially illegal activity. Due to the fact that “white supremacy” is itself a First Amendment-protected belief, to say nothing of proponents of the most established Christian denomination in the world, the Bureau tries to cover documents like these with a caveat excusing their intrusion into the sacrosanct grounds of free exercise of religion and free association. In another typical intrusion into First Amendment concerns, the document implies a strategy of monitoring social media for RTC ideology in online posts.

    The impetus of the writer can be assessed by the fixation on abortion and the repeated use of the phrase “abortion rights.” Documents like these can be used to drive the FBI’s priorities in specific regions and boost the visibility of non-existent threats. There is a reason the writer refers to the document as a “first of its kind” Domain Perspective: it is generally out of bounds. However, intelligence products like this help focus on alleged “hostility towards the abortion-rights advocates,” which the FBI has used to justify significant enforcement actions tied to the FACE Act (18 USC 248). Americans will remember a flood of conservative news outlets covering arrests of numerous pro-life protesters at the end of 2022, which are coming back into focus after the January 30, 2023 acquittal of defendant Mark Houck. While over 100 instances of attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers occurred in 2022, the SPLC reported an unsubstantiated 200 “bombings or arson attacks” on abortion clinics in the past 20 years.

    This tremendous statistical mismatch usually would have led federal law enforcement to focus on the highest threat, but the increasingly Leftist bend of FBI enforcement actions appears to have ignored this trend. It also appears the writer is simply assuming RMVEs share common cause with Conservatives, including practicing Catholics, on issues about abortion, immigration, affirmative action, and LGBTQ protections. This editorial bias should give the reader of this document a medium to high confidence the intelligence analyst is the product of left-leaning higher education and leftist values.

    The piece concludes with the incredible leap that RMVEs or white supremacists pose a threat to use “RTC social media sites” (no examples) or “places of worship as facilitation platforms to promote violence.” This intelligence product is indicative of a permissive tolerance within the FBI for Left-leaning ideological actors who use academic-sounding rhetoric to cover a dearth of personal experience. The weaponization of the FBI against conservative Americans can be seen in the way documents like this are published and distributed. Poorly sourced and highly speculative intelligence products lead to opening badly articulated predicate investigations into Americans in violation of their God-given, First Amendment-protected civil liberties.

    While most Americans are familiar with criminal investigations, which explore the allegation or information that a crime has been committed, many are not familiar with intelligence investigations. In contrast to the linear nature of a criminal case, counterintelligence and counterterrorism cases follow a circular path that can continue indefinitely without any articulated goal. Indeed, information is the goal of these types of cases. Many counterterrorism cases never articulate or uncover a single criminal act. Yet, they continue in order to develop more understanding of the “threat landscape” or “threat pictures,” as quoted in this document. Intelligence investigations often beget more investigations. The relevance of this product should not be lost on the reader.

    Products like this can be used to support the opening of information-only cases, and there is no reason to expect Radical-Traditionalist Catholics are the end point of this train track – they will be the beginning. Opening the door to associating white supremacists with traditional religious practices based on common Christian positions on abortion and the LGBTQ political agendas is a dangerous step. Such investigations can easily lead to the same analysis of Radical Traditional Baptists, Radical Traditional Lutherans, and Radical Traditional Evangelicals. The FBI is forbidden from opening cases or publishing products based solely on First Amendment-protected activities. By tolerating the publishing of intelligence products as shoddy as this, they are crossing a line many Americans will find themselves on the wrong side of for the first time in history. This is what a politicalized FBI looks like; it should not be tolerated if Americans expect to enjoy the protections of our Bill of Rights.

    • Meanwhile, according to the FBI’s own report the Jews are subjected to more violent hate-crime attacks than all other minority groups – combined. While they constitute just 2% of the population.

      83% of the attackers are Black, Hispanic, +/- Moslem.

  13. You’re braindead, so we’re using your womb to birth children’…
    Posted by Kane on February 8, 2023 12:41 pm

    AbsoluteWithE
    ·
    Follow
    A Norwegian professor thinks women that are declared brain dead should be used as surrogates–without their consent.

    @AnnaPerezDC joined @EmeraldRobinson to discuss this new fad of using women’s bodies to create designer babies

    The globalists attending the World Economic Forum in Davos were reportedly exempt from paying Swiss taxes.

    Swiss taxpayer are now being told to cough up some of the expenses that came with hosting the WEF in Davos.

    @ganaha_masako joined @EmeraldRobinson with her

    https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/youre-braindead-so-were-using-your-womb-to-birth-children/

  14. OUCH! Marjorie Taylor Greene SHAMES Former Twitter Censorship Boss For Banning Her Campaign Account But Allowing Child Porn…Claims Roth Once Wrote Minor Boys Should Be Allowed on “gay, adult male hookup site” [VIDEO]
    By Patty McMurray
    Published February 8, 2023 at 3:25pm
    106 Comments

    100 Percent Fed Up – Twitter’s top former censors have been on the hot seat all afternoon as they appear before a Republican-led House Oversight Committee to answer questions about their outrageous and targeted censorship of conservatives, including Republican members of Congress like badass Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who destroyed top Twitter official Yoel Roth after he used his position to harm conservatives, whom he openly despised on his personal account, where he called Trump and his administration “actual Nazis.”
    Watch Oversight Committee Chair James Comer share a poster showing Roth’s stunning tweet to members of the committee

    Benny Johnson
    @bennyjohnson
    ·
    Follow
    Top Oversight Republican James Comer makes Former Twitter head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth PANIC after he pulls out MASSIVE poster with Roth’s tweet calling Trump and his supporters “actual Nazis

    One of the most heated moments of the congressional hearing occurred when the outspoken firebrand from Georgia accused Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, of election interference when her campaign Twitter account was shut down amid her 2022 campaign.

    In November, following Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files, Roth whined about having to flee his San Francisco home, claiming he and his family were placed in danger after the damning evidence of how top Twitter officials used their positions to control the narrative about COVID, and Hunter’s laptop while silencing conservatives and colluding with Democrats and officials in our intelligence agencies.

    Unfortunately, for several top Twitter officials, millions of Americans were outraged when they discovered how they used unacceptable and abhorrent tactics to silence anti-COVID vaccine advocates and medical professionals who called for the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-infected patients and shut down or suspended users who tried to share the stunning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Rep. Taylor Greene also reminded the disgraced former Twitter official that Twitter shut down users who questioned the accuracy of voting machines or the results of the 2020 election but allowed Democrats who questioned the 2016 election results to remain on Twitteer

    Rep. Taylor Greene ripped into Roth for election interference when he allowed her account to be suspended during her campaign while allowing child pornography to flourish on Twitter. The Georgia lawmaker dropped a MOAB bomb on the censorship weasel when she shared an example from Roth’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Gay Data,” where he allegedly argued that minors should have access to the adult, male gay “hookup” site Grindr.

    Rep Taylor Greene blasted the disgusting Roth, “You permanently banned my account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter!”

    Watch:

    Taylor Greene showed tweets she posted before she was banned, including tweets about COVID vaccine injuries and her opposition to forced vaccinations on our US military members. When she was told her time was expired, she landed one last blow to Roth, telling him that his “time was expired

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/ouch-marjorie-taylor-greene-shames-former-twitter-censorship-boss-banning-campaign-account-allowing-child-porn-claims-roth-wrote-minor-boys-allowed-gay-adult-male-h/

  15. SMOKING GUN – HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP EXCLUSIVE: Burisma Asked Hunter to End Ukraine Investigation on Company – Then Joe Biden Threatened Ukraine and Had Investigator Fired
    By Joe Hoft
    Published February 8, 2023 at 11:00am
    709 Comments

    We have the smoking gun!
    Who can forget Joe Biden’s presentation in front of the Council on Foreign Relations event after the 2016 Election?

    In his own words, with cameras rolling, Joe Biden described how he threatened the Ukrainian President and said that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if Ukraine didn’t immediately fire the prosecutor investigating Burmisa Holdings.

    Joe’s son Hunter was on the Board of Burisma making tens of thousands a month for doing nothing but “fixing things”.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/smoking-gun-hunter-laptop-email-uncovered-burisma-asks-hunter-end-ukraine-investigation-burisma-joe-biden-threatens-ukraine-gets-investigator-fired/

    ================================

    Attorney on First Trump Impeachment Sham Says It’s a Lie that Joe Biden Pressured Ukraine to Fire Prosecutor – WTH – Emails and Joe Biden Prove Otherwise
    By Joe Hoft
    Published February 8, 2023 at 3:45pm
    44 Comments

    Rep. Daniel Goldman, who was the lead counsel on the first Trump sham impeachment, lies and claims that Joe Biden didn’t get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired while ignoring what Joe Biden said and our report today on emails that prove otherwise.

    In today’s hearing new Rep. Daniel Goldman lied and claimed that Joe Biden didn’t have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating his son’s company.

    Goldman said today:

    Hunter Biden introduced his father at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company. That is false. 100% false.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/attorney-first-trump-impeachment-sham-says-lie-joe-biden-pressured-ukraine-fire-prosecutor-wth-emails-joe-biden-prove-otherwise/

  16. A school board wouldn’t let parents read from books with dirty or profane words at school board meetings, even though those books were found in the school system’s own libraries. In essence, it considered dirty words to be fine for kids but not for adults. So it was sued by Mama Bears of Forsyth County, represented by the Institute for Free Speech.

    That lawsuit has now resulted in the court issuing a consent decree prohibiting the Forsyth County school board from silencing the parents who read from school library books. If the board wants to subject children to such books, it will have to be subject to them itself. The decree says,

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2023/02/07/court-school-board-must-allow-parents-to-read-from-vulgar-school-library-books-at-school-board-meeting/

  17. Katie Hopkins: The truth about GB News — I have been keeping this to myself…until now.

    • Historians … maaaaybe.
      But with such limited reference sources, they’d never get tenure at a top tier university. (Ok, boomer. When Sovietology was a thing.) Soviet dissidents were experts at shaping intelligence fit for service.

      They’re certainly not qualified to comment as experts on current affairs. They know nothing about Russia and its people today. With ideology so rigid, a time warp is their only safe space.

      RE: China.
      Just regurgitating Better-Dead-Than-Red dogma from days of yore. Talk with Russian veterans who were stationed there. Or with people who do business with them _today_. A huge pool of ANTI-commie Russian-Israelis. All sorts of experience, seldom agree on anything, and not at all reticent.

      – – Has the huge trove recently released Soviet archives confirmed previous positions? For example…?
      – – Revised any opinions over the last 30 years? For example…?

      Do they read or speak Russian?
      Or do they just hate everything Russian?

  18. China Knows Exactly What the Deal is With Us” – Biden When Asked if His Handling of China Spy Balloon Was a “Dereliction of Duty” (VIDEO)
    By Cristina Laila
    Published February 8, 2023 at 8:35pm
    1 Comment

    Did Biden just say the quiet part out loud?

    Joe Biden on Wednesday sat down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with PBS special correspondent Judy Woodruff.

    This is Joe Biden’s first interview in MONTHS.

    Joe Biden was asked about his classified documents scandal.

    TRENDING

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/china-knows-exactly-deal-us-biden-asked-handling-china-spy-balloon-dereliction-duty-video/

  19. yahoo –James O’Keefe ‘Outright Cruel’ to Project Veritas Employees, Internal Memo Reveals

    The undercover video operation run by right-wing operative James O’Keefe is in turmoil, wracked by unhappy donors and O’Keefe’s “outright cruel” behavior towards his staff, according to an internal memo signed by a third of its employees.

    Working for O’Keefe at Project Veritas can mean being “publicly humiliated” by him in what amounts to “public crucifixions,” and even being required to take lie detector tests, his unhappy employees write in the memo.

    “I would describe Project Veritas’ current environment with this saying: ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves,’” one disgruntled staffer wrote in the memo.

    On Monday, Project Veritas staffers presented the nonprofit’s board with the document covering his behavior, saying they were “troubled and frustrated” by O’Keefe’s management style. Later that day, the board voted to reinstate two executives O’Keefe had fired a week earlier, while O’Keefe went on paid leave.

    “James will be taking a few weeks of well-deserved [paid time off],” Project Veritas executive director Daniel Strack wrote Monday in an internal Project Veritas group chat obtained by The Daily Beast.

    Even though O’Keefe is synonymous with the group he founded, his fate at the nonprofit remains unclear. New York Magazine first reported on the internal dissension and O’Keefe’s leave.

    O’Keefe didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Strack told The Daily Beast the board is “constantly evaluating what the best path forward is for the organization.”

    The internal dissension comes as Project Veritas faces a number of threats, including an FBI investigation and an ex-employee’s lawsuit alleging O’Keefe oversaw a raucous, sexually charged workplace complete with at least one drug overdose. Project Veritas has denied breaking any laws in the FBI investigation, and is fighting the lawsuit. In December, the group laid off several staffers.

    The memo, which was obtained by The Daily Beast, covers its founder’s demanding and allegedly abusive treatment of his staff, even laying out concerns that Project Veritas will soon collapse entirely as donors and employees flee. Sixteen staffers signed their names to the memo, according to the document.

    “James has become a power drunk tyrant,” one staffer complained in the memo.

    While employees signed their names to the memo, they didn’t reveal who wrote individual accounts, and The Daily Beast was not able to independently confirm the anecdotes. Still, they offer a glimpse into the internal debate within Project Veritas before O’Keefe went on leave and saw his decisions reversed by the board.

    The memo details a series of bizarre incidents. In one, during a Sept. 2022 trial against a Democratic consulting firm that O’Keefe later lost, an employee complained that O’Keefe berated them in front of jurors because he needed something to eat. Ultimately, the employee alleged, O’Keefe took a sandwich from a heavily pregnant woman to sate his hunger.

    “I was yelled at in front of jurors because he was hungry and then he took the 8-month pregnant woman’s sandwich,” the account reads.

    In another apparent reference to O’Keefe, a staffer complains about employees at Project Veritas getting spat upon.

    “Rule #1: You can’t spit in an employee’s face over a tweet,” the message reads. “True story.”

    The memo’s authors describe O’Keefe as a paranoiac so fearful of leakers within his organization that he set up at least one “mole hunt” complete with private investigators and a lie detector test. Most staffers were purportedly required to return to the group’s New York headquarters for an interview with the investigators.

    In another incident, a top O’Keefe lieutenant was required to take a polygraph as part of a leak investigation.

    “If you can’t trust your own team let alone your own team leaders, what kind of trust do you claim to have?” one employee complained in the memo, describing the lie-detector test.

    Rogue Project Veritas Ex-Employee Claims to Reveal Names of Undercover Operatives

    The employees also complained more broadly about O’Keefe’s allegedly widespread use of “verbal abuse,” claiming they could be “publicly humiliated” or face “public crucifixions” at O’Keefe’s hands in front of donors or other employees. Throughout the memo, O’Keefe is described as “berating” various employees so strongly that people who witnessed the alleged abuse apologized to O’Keefe’s targets later.

    In one instance, the employees claim O’Keefe called Project Veritas staffer Spencer Meads — a staffer so prominent in the group that the FBI raided his home — a “pussy.”

    “They were raided and James still called Spencer that name,” the memo reads.

    In another anecdote, staffers were “so severely verbally attacked by James that the staff morale dropped to an all-time low.”

    The memo’s authors also raised concerns about O’Keefe’s use of Project Veritas money to promote his own theatrical ambitions. Project Veritas is best known for its undercover stings against Democratic groups and other Republican targets. But O’Keefe, who performed in high-school musicals, has added a series of musical productions to the group’s repertoire, including an elaborate “Project Veritas” experience that involves O’Keefe dancing while wearing a bulletproof vest.

    In December, Project Veritas acknowledged improperly giving O’Keefe $20,500 in “excess benefits” to pay for Project Veritas staff to accompany him to Virginia as he performed a lead role in a production of the musical Oklahoma!.

    In the memo, one employee worried that all of the money spent on musicals risked alienating donors.

    “All the theatre stuff and how that is handled makes me very uneasy,” the memo reads, adding later, “In the end, we are in a deficit now, our fans and potential fans beyond do not respond positively to all of that stuff.”

    But musicals weren’t the only thing irritating donors, according to the petition. O’Keefe is portrayed throughout the document as badgering uncomfortable donors for five- and six-figure checks. Other donors didn’t like his treatment of his employees, the employees say.

    When a woman O’Keefe had asked for a $75,000 check requested a picture with him, according to the memo, he “very rudely” refused.

    “She was humiliated to the point of tears,” the memo reads.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/james-o-keefe-outright-cruel-020743887.html
    =========================================
    daily beast:

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/james-okeefe-outright-cruel-to-project-veritas-employees-internal-memo?source=articles

    ================================================
    the gateway pundit – Report: James O’Keefe Placed on Paid Leave from Project Veritas

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/report-james-okeefe-placed-paid-leave-project-veritas/