Smelling Trump Supporters

Each time I enter Walmart in North Conway, New Hampshire I think about the 2016 text from former FBI agent Peter Strzok to his girlfriend, FBI Attorney Lisa Page: “Just went to a southern Virginia Wal-Mart,” Strzok wrote. “I could SMELL the Trump support.” Both were deeply into what now appears to have been a Machiavellian scheme to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 election.

Walmart draws a different demographic than, say, a Sears Store, but it’s still in business while Sears is bankrupt. It sells almost every kind of item and usually at the lowest prices, so it’s no wonder the poor shop there. Often I hear condescending remarks about Walmart shoppers from people who think themselves elite sophisticates, a large percentage of whom I suspect supported Hillary. Where might Peter Strzok have smelled them? Whole Foods? Bloomingdales?

How many Walmart shoppers voted against Hillary after they heard her remarks about Trump’s supporters delivered shortly after the Strzok text above? “To just be grossly generalist, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call ‘the basket of deplorables,’” Hillary Clinton told donors gathered at a Manhattan restaurant in September, 2016. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.” Many pundits think that remark cost her the election weeks later.

Ken Langone

After shopping at Walmart, I will often go to the nearby Home Depot or Lowe’s for tools and supplies. I think about the shoppers there and wonder about their politics. Mostly they’re tradesmen or do-it-yourselfers looking for the same items I am. They’re purpose-driven, knowing what they need for a particular project. They know how stuff works and know how to fix things when they break down.

Bernie Marcus

In the parking lot are many pickup trucks. I might see a Trump sticker but almost never a Bernie or Hillary sticker. I don’t see very many political stickers because contractors don’t wish to put off clients. Most small businessmen keep their politics private. I suggest Peter Strzok would “smell” more Trump supporters at a Home Depot or Lowe’s than at a Walmart.

Strzok and Page, in concert with many others, did everything they could to prevent Donald Trump from winning. They also worked the Hillary Clinton email investigation that recommended she not be indicted. Then they worked on the “counterintelligence” investigation of Donald Trump that turned into a criminal investigation shortly after his election. Mueller eventually fired them after their caustic, anti-Trump texts went public. According to the Washington Post, some went like this: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok in August 2016. “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

Peter Strzok as he testified before Congress

Well, they didn’t stop it, but the two lovers were soon hired by Mueller to work in his dubious Russian collusion investigation, which they probably thought would lead to Trump’s impeachment. It didn’t, but Democrats are still hoping to impeach Trump for “obstructing justice” during the investigation into a “crime” for which it found zero evidence.

Electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and other tradesmen are called in to solve real-world problems. They diagnose, then figure out the easiest ways to make a repair. If they don’t solve problems they don’t stay in business. Neither politicians nor media operate under those constraints, however. Political problems like crime, terrorism, trade deficits, poverty, illegal immigration, deficit spending, unemployment, and so forth are reported by media. Politicians diagnose causes and propose solutions — but are not held accountable when problems persist or even worsen.

They escape accountability either by mouthing platitudes via teleprompter, by redefining the problems, or by proposing increased spending on heretofore unsuccessful remedies. For decades media assisted by glossing over failed solutions. When Donald Trump came down his escalator in June 2015, spoke plainly about what was causing our problems, and, without a teleprompter, explained what he would do about them, politicians and establishment media laughed.

When his poll numbers rose, media said it was a fluke and wouldn’t last. Months later he was brushing aside sixteen Republican opponents and cruising toward the nomination. A complete outsider with neither political nor military experience, he had it sewn up by June 2016 and the only thing standing between him and the presidency was Hillary Clinton — and she was under FBI investigation.

Together with Director Comey, Attorney General Lynch, and others, they successfully broomed the Hillary investigation, but Trump was elected anyway and Mueller found no collusion. Now the tables have turned and the investigators are themselves subjects of at least two investigations, one by another special prosecutor named John Durham appointed by Attorney General Barr.

Millions of ordinary people like the tradesmen I see at Home Depot have been watching this unfold right along. They know Trump’s solutions have been working in spite of vociferous opposition from Strzok and his ilk — whose chickens are now coming home to roost.

Left & Right December 19, 2018

We begin with a question from the producer about Trump's wall. I favor shutting down government if it's not funded. Gino doesn't.

I read a June 2016 tweet from former Obama campaign manager and advisor David Plouffe which said: "It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again."

I content that this tweet sums up all the shenanigans by the Obama Administration that transpired during the 2016 campaign and continuing to this day by the Deep State: The Democrat campaign to destroy Donald Trump. We then discuss the dodgy dossier compiled by the Hillary campaign and used by the FBI under Obama. It gets contentious. Gino talks over me almost constantly, especially when I'm making points painful to the left.

Gino points out how much turnover there has been in the Trump Administration vs Obama and Bush in their first two years and lists those who have resigned or been fired. He claims Trump isn't draining the swamp so much as he is the swamp.

I bring up unrest in Europe, especially France, but also the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands -- that it started because of French President Macron's measures purported to mitigate climate change according to the Paris Accords, but the spread to encompass other issues. I contend that the EU is threatened because of widespread immigration, legal and illegal, that is unpopular with ordinary Europeans but popular with elites. I point out similarities with issues in America in light of the border wall debate here.

Gino claims I want a more authoritarian country like Russia, like Turkey. I deny that because I'm pointing out the civil unrest in Europe over immigration, etc. that I favor dictatorship. He brings it up again. I deny it again.

We discuss the murder of Khashoggi in Turkey. I point out his association with the Muslim Brotherhood as a reason he was killed and we should continue our alliance with Saudi Arabia against Iran, the bigger threat. Gino defends Iran, while I point out its terrorist activities across the region in response to Gino's question.

Watergate Was Nothing Compared to This

First thing every morning I skipped down two flights of stairs to get the Boston Globe because I couldn’t wait to read the latest developments in the Watergate scandal then bringing down the Nixon Administration. Familiar as I still am with those details, they pale by comparison to abuses of power under the Obama Administration and its collusion with the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign recently coming to light.

President Nixon’s campaign had hired a group called “the plumbers” to plug leaks of information from his administration to the media. Their activities were legal up to the point when they broke into to a rented office of DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien in Washington, DC’s Watergate Hotel, hence the name of the infamous scandal. They were hoping to find embarrassing information to hurt Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon.

During the long investigation into this break-in, other illegal activities came to light including another break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist. Ellsburg had leaked the classified “Pentagon Papers,” which revealed that some of Nixon’s public statements about his conduct of the Vietnam War were erroneous, and the New York Times published them. Nixon was not aware of the Watergate break-in until the Washington Post began publishing stories about it. At that point he began using his executive power to thwart the investigation. That led to credible charges of “obstruction of justice,” for which he resigned to avoid impeachment.

Nixon had contemplated other abuses of his power like using the IRS to harass political enemies of which he had made an infamous list. He never did, but Americans were appalled that he considered it. The Obama Administration, however, did more than consider it. It actually used the IRS to harass political enemies, but The Washington Post and the rest of mainstream media were disinclined to investigate.

Conservative pundits claim most of the 62,979,879 Americans who voted for Trump last year believe Democrats, Republican leadership, and Mainstream Media all cooperate with each other against them. Variously called “Bitter Clingers” by Obama and “Deplorables” by Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters see their man as someone with the temperament necessary to kick all their a**es while he “drains the swamp” in which they all reside.

Denizens of the swamp went into a collective panic when Trump unexpectedly won. After the shock wore off, the lame-duck Obama Administration began laying traps for him using an obscure, never-enforced 1799 law called “The Logan Act” according to columnist Byron York. Using the Logan Act as justification, Obama officials cited the dodgy “Trump Dossier” constructed by an opposition research firm paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee (DNC). FBI agent Peter Strzok, whom Special Counsel Mueller recently dismissed from his investigation, used the dodgy dossier to obtain FISA warrants to wiretap both the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team.

Strzok and Mueller

It was Strzok, presumably under the direction of then-FBI Director Comey, who offered to pay $50,000 of taxpayer money to Christopher Steele, author of the dodgy dossier, to continue his research against Donald Trump during the campaign! Strzok also led the dubious FBI “investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Compared to these revelations, Nixon’s actions during Watergate seem trivial. Why aren’t Washington Post reporters looking into these developments?

Under dubious authority, other Obama officials including Susan Rice and Samantha Power requested hundreds of FISA transcripts including General Flynn’s December, 2016 contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during Trump’s transition. They unmasked Flynn to set him up for FBI interrogation four days after Trump’s inauguration. ABC reporter Brian Ross breathlessly reported last Friday that Trump directed Flynn’s conversations during the campaign! Ross had to retract it hours later and was suspended by ABC, but not before his report caused the stock market to plunge.

Flynn and Kushner

According the Buzzfeed, it was Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who instructed Flynn to contact Kislyak and discuss the then-upcoming UN Security Council vote against Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to Fox News, it was K.T. McFarland. Whoever it was, their instruction was during the transition after Trump had won — not during the campaign — and therefore not within the realm of Mueller’s original charge to investigate alleged Russia/Trump campaign collusion. It’s perfectly reasonable for a transition official like Flynn to contact foreign governments, yet Flynn evidently lied about them to the FBI. Why? We don’t know.

As of this writing, neither Mueller nor anyone else has yet found evidence of Trump/Russia campaign collusion despite a year-and-a-half of investigations by mainstream media and Congressional Democrats. Trump supporters see them all as part of “the swamp” conspiring to bring down the Trump Administration. For that, there’s plenty of evidence.

Watergate was nothing compared to what I’m seeing now.

Keeping Your Head When Others Are Losing Theirs

You probably hadn’t heard because it didn’t get a lot of attention, but David Daoud Wright was convicted in a Boston federal court last Thursday of conspiring to cut Pamela Geller’s head off.

ISIS ordered her killed and Wright was attempting to implement that “fatwa,” or order. As quoted in the Boston Herald: “Acting U.S. Attorney William D. Weinreb called Wright’s conviction a ‘victory in the fight against ISIS and all terror organizations targeting the United States. Wright is a terrorist, an ISIS supporter and recruiter who intended to wage war against the U.S. by beheading people and killing Americans,’ Weinreb said. ‘Together Wright and his uncle planned to murder Americans, and those plans were as real as the long knives Wright’s uncle bought to carry them out.’”

Ten years ago Pam Geller interviewed me in Washington, DC after an exchange I had with Newt Gingrich at National Review’s “Conservative Summit.” I had no idea then who she was, but it was clear that she was an intense person on a mission. Gingrich had just finished a speech in which he predicted that sometime in next ten years radical Muslims would destroy an American city with an atomic device. Happily, that has not yet come to pass.

During the question and answer period following his speech, I went up to the microphone and identified myself as a middle school history teacher. I told Gingrich that my job of explaining to my students why radical Muslims were trying to kill us was getting difficult because the Bush Administration kept denying any connection between Islamic terrorism and fundamental Koranic teachings. My students were hearing one thing from me and another from the president. That put me in an awkward position as a teacher in the public schools. Gingrich basically told me to keep doing what I was doing.

Spencer, Me, Geller

As I returned to my seat I was swamped by media people asking me questions, and the most persistent was Pam Geller. I’ve met her several times since at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) and she’s nearly always accompanied by her sidekick, Robert Spencer. He directs Jihad Watch and is the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.

Even before ISIS condemned her to death, she was surrounded by bodyguards. When once I slid into a booth with Geller and Spencer for a chat at a Washington hotel lounge, I was immediately aware of rugged-looking men in nearby booths scrutinizing me before Geller signaled that I was okay. She’s an extremely courageous American and a Jew who won’t be intimidated by Islamic threats — and she’s willing to pay the price for speaking out. Like her friends the Somali immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, she lives under guard 24-7-365 and will for the rest of her life for daring to publicly criticize radical Islam.

Fatwas are not empty threats. They were issued against a Danish newspaper and a French magazine for publishing pictures of Muhammed and jihadis twice tried to kill the Danish cartoonist. In January, 2015 jihadis murdered fifteen Charlie Hebdo magazine staff people in Paris. American media outlets (except for my web site a few others) self-censored and declined to publish the Muhammed cartoons.They claimed it was out of respect for the religion of Islam, but this writer sees that as a smokescreen for cowardice, because they had no problems publishing images degrading Christianity.

So what did Pamela Geller do after the Charlie Hebdo massacre? She conducted a “Draw Muhammad” contest in which the winner received a check for $12,500. Two jihadis from Arizona showed up with assault rifles at the Garland, Texas facility where the contest was held and opened fire, wounding a security guard. Another guard took them both out with only a pistol. Liberal media outlets like the New York Times who were too cowardly to publish the Muhammed pictures from Europe blamed Geller, accusing her of “hate speech.”

The Winning Picture

Geller later learned that the FBI had an undercover agent at the scene of the “Draw Muhammad Contest” who had been surveilling one of the jihadis. According to TheIntercept.com: “FBI Director James Comey said in a press conference following the shooting that the FBI [agent at the scene] did not have reason to believe Simpson was planning to attack the event, even though the bureau had spent years trying to build a case against him.” 

Might once have been true

Yeah, right. There was a time when I would have had no doubt about the credibility of a statement like that from the Director of the FBI, but those days are long gone.