Despite his frequent votes against defense bills, Senator Bernie Sanders has collected more presidential campaign contributions from defense industry sources than any other candidate, including Donald Trump. That’s according to data on 2020 funding at the OpenSecrets.org website, which is sponsored by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Links to “Amy Klobuchar”, not “Bernie Sanders”?! According to OpenSecrets, Joe Biden received the most from the MIC. Donald Trump came in second, with Bernie Sanders in third place. OpenSecrets doesn’t distinguish between employers and employees!?*
Information published on social media and reviewed by Hatewatch show that RAIR’s president is Chris Gaubatz, a well-known anti-Muslim figure previously affiliated with the hate group Understanding the Threat. …
Though not the most outspoken anti-Muslim figure, Gaubatz has presented Islam as a violent religion and subscribes to a variety of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. In 2016, he joined up with former FBI agent turned anti-Muslim conspiracist John Guandolo. Up until April of this year, Gaubatz served as vice-president of Guandolo’s consulting firm Understanding the Threat (UTT). During that time, Guandolo and Gaubatz traveled the country providing training seminars about the “jihadi threat” to law enforcement and civilians. …
Siino, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles to launch a doomed internet media startup called WeMash with Quincy Jones III, son of the famous music producer. …
Mekelburg had also been trying to make inroads into what Ibrahim Hooper calls “the cottage-industry of Islam haters,” which is run by bigots such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Brigitte Gabriel and Frank Gaffney — several of whom have close ties to the Republican establishment and the Trump administration. Their efforts can be remunerative, thanks to generous funding from conservative and libertarian foundations such as the Donors Capital Fund.
Mekelburg’s best connection to this world was through Anni Cyrus, who produces The Glazov Gang, an Islamophobic talk show that can be found on YouTube. Host Jamie Glazov is the editor of one of Horowitz’s anti-Muslim publications. Mekelburg asked for Cyrus’ help in launching her own anti-Muslim organization. Cyrus, who did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment, greeted Mekelburg’s overture with enthusiasm. …
Mekelburg named her organization Resistance Against Islamic Radicals (RAIR). She created a website, set up a Facebook page and a Twitter handle, and recruited Cortez to design artwork from behind bars, according to Galasso. RAIR’s mission would be “to stop the Jihadi infiltration in our American communities.” Mekelburg didn’t mention herself anywhere on the organization’s website. Under an “accomplices” section, however, she posted the names, photos and contact information for people and groups she believed were collaborating with jihadi terrorists. That could mean anyone with a connection to Islam.
Americans for Prosperity Action is wading into a Republican presidential primary for the first time, and waiting to see which candidate it will get behind for 2024.
The Russian Defense Ministry has asserted that the United States has recommenced its contentious biological laboratories (biolab) initiative within the territory of Ukraine, with a primary focus on the construction of secretive new facilities and the training of personnel.
We talk to legendary Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh about his latest bombshell scoop: the United States, on President Biden’s orders, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were foundational to Germany’s export economy until last year.
While Facebook’s parent company, Meta, agreed in December to pay $725 million to settle the Cambridge Analytica privacy lawsuit, a judge on Thursday decided that wasn’t quite enough to ensure the social media giant had learned its lesson for sharing user data without permission.
For several decades the American public has been instilled with an intrinsic fear of and hatred for China.
No singular event in this seemingly inevitable march to war is more emblematic of the American public’s warped psyche than the “Chinese Spy Balloon” narrative—perhaps due, in part, to its facial absurdity. The happening eclipses even similarly nonsensical yarns such as widespread TikTok paranoia (see the NSA’s PRISM program), China’s American farmland purchases (Chinese firms account for <.5% of all foreign-owned land in the U.S.), and the “invasion” of Chinese fentanyl through the Southern border (fentanyl trafficking is illegal in China).
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While some populist Republicans have bravely departed from the establishment’s support for Ukraine, many led the chorus of voices urging escalation—and not diplomacy.
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The banner narrative favored by mainline Republicans and the populist Right alike—that Joe Biden is weak—is insidious, because it implies that Biden should be more aggressive. Furthermore, it excuses Biden’s objectively ultra-hawkish policy against China.
Just in the last few weeks, the Biden administration continued its redoubling of the Asia Pivot launched by Barack Obama and furthered by Donald Trump: the U.S. Marine Corps opened a new base in Guam as the U.S. opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands, furthered diplomatic measures meant to militarize Japan, announced the opening of new military installations in the Philippines and Palau, and furthered a deal that would secure it exclusive military access to Micronesia, an area of the Pacific Ocean as large as the continental U.S.—all with the express and stated aim of confronting China.
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Unfortunately, the prevailing narrative won the day—while Americans’ heads were in the clouds, imagining a biowarfare attack, or falsely reporting the balloon carried explosives, Sino-American relations deteriorated even further. Distressingly, the American public exhibited its eagerness to rush to just about any conclusion concerning China.
The bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea was a covert operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the CIA, a report by a veteran investigative journalist claims.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that much of what you hear about in the press is specifically cultivated by one party or another to generate headlines and outrage for the purposes of votes and campaign contributions.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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