Trump has now said "the temperature has to be brought down" following the raid at Mar-A-Largo.
In a word: No.
Calls for calm? After being assaulted by what amounts to the goon squad the man calls for calm?
What was this, scripted "reality" TV?
Look, jackass (Trump), either you were assaulted and this raid was entirely unlawful and the work of a corrupt process and government, or it was not.
Trump himself has alleged that it was.
If the government is no longer a guardian of Constitutional Rights and due process of law then fuck 'em -- all of 'em. If the temperature is to be turned down it properly happens only after every one of the people who were involved in this is outed publicly, indicted, arrested and jailed.
THEN the temperature should be brought down but not one second before.
If, on the other hand, there is a there there and this raid was proper in that Trump actually broke the law, did so with intent and now got caught then there's no temperature to raise.
But -- we know that in the not-so-distant past, with the exact same target (Trump) the government did in fact do the former with so-called "Russiagate", claiming that Trump was a Russian stooge (or even an agent of Putin!) and in fact every bit of that, including the so-called "pee tape", was a knowing, intentional lie. Said lie resulted in an actual IMPEACHMENT and not one single person was thrown in prison for doing it.
Impeachment is a political process and thus there is no criminal punishment if it gets rough. Corrupting the judicial process for political advantage, on the other hand, which was proved in the case of "Russiagate", is another matter. That's a felony and yet the number of indictments and prosecutions numbered zero.
There are plenty of people who say this is "unprecedented" and such. Well, among a former President perhaps. But the irony of the name of the FBI building in DC ("Hoover") lays clear the fact that oh no it isn't in the general sense. The FBI has repeatedly been the tool of corrupt assholes in Washington DC who have turned it on political opponents with MLK being one of them.
Now we can argue over the political ramifications of this, and they're likely to be severe one way or the other. At this point the FBI and DOJ all the way up to Garland are in a serious box of their own making. Either Trump has done something they can indict him for or he hasn't, and if the latter then not only is this "raid" inappropriate the only acceptable resolution is to dissolve the agency entirely as this is twice that they have deliberately, with malice aforethought, been pointed at a single US Citizen for no valid reason and with the singular intent to destroy said person's peaceful political access to office.
Never mind that this isn't the only example targeting one person. There's also the Whitmer fraud. Yes, fraud. The FBI invented the alleged "kidnapping" plot after trying to actively goad people into killing her and failing. I remind you that this isn't an "allegation"; it was proved in open court and the result was acquittals for the accused yet not one criminal indictment was issued against any of the FBI and DOJ people involved in it, all of whom broke serious felony laws soliciting the assassination and then kidnapping of a sitting governor in their attempt to manufacture a non-existent "terrorist" threat.
That's actual cause for a civil war folks and the only way to stop it is to destroy the capacity to do it again and to do so conclusively in a way that cannot be reconstructed because it is no longer open to question is that there is no shame and even being caught repeatedly is no inhibition on doing so again. This is not some trivial thing; once can be dismissed as a "mistake" or prodding by underlings that had a wild stick up their ass but a second time aimed at the same person is proof of institutional corruption equivalent to Pol Pot, Stalin or any one of a number of other jackbooted assholes through history and said corruptions is proved to run all the way to the top of the organizational chart. Unless it is met with immediate sanction including the permanent inability to do it again, which can only come about one way, the entire premise of a Constitutional Republic where we settle our differences at the ballot box via the representative process is void and until and unless said Constitutional Republic is restored utterly nothing is off the table.
That's the declaration the FBI and DOJ have publicly made all the way to the top so you can cry me a river if they get it.
Further, lying to the FBI is a criminal offense and so is lying to a judge. Therefore either the affidavit and warrant are legitimately produced within the boundaries of the Constitution of the United States or they're not and, if the latter, prison is the only acceptable outcome for everyone involved and if it is not immediately forthcoming once again all of the institutions involved, which unfortunately now encompass the entire judicial and DOJ process are demonstrably and irretrievably corrupt and thus our Constitutional Republic is dead.
As I've noted over the last decade and a half on these pages a wider perspective is called for and in fact those who want to crank the temperature up to 5000 degrees for political purposes are just as guilty as those who want to raid Trump's residence every third day.
Both are jackbooted assholes and both should be ejected from the public stage.
The other day I was sent a longish Youtube video. The gist of the argument was that housing was the root of basically all the evils, and that we had gone from treating housing as a commodity in the 1950s-ish timeframe (and before) to treating it as an asset, and this, at its root, was problematic. It posited a view that "The housing crisis is the everything crisis" and had a lot of focus on British data, although its similar almost-everywhere else.
I watched it and again it struck me as someone who had a decent amount of time on their hands (it was 40-odd minutes) but was using a lens to view the problem through that was too narrow in scope. Simply put the problem isn't that housing is treated as an asset: It is that financialization plus corruption eats at the margins of the common people until productivity is destroyed and so is the economy.
Do recall that in 2000 the market did not collapse. Oh, it looked like it, but it didn't. What actually happened was that prices were wildly accelerated over a 2+ year timeframe by outrageous and systemic fraud. The "mavens" of Wall Street jumped on with various schemes to front-run and otherwise screw the public but it all looked good when your brokerage statement was showing big green numbers. The fraud problem was obvious all the way back to 1998, which I noted to a number of people: These firms had all claimed on a collective basis forward "earnings" and "revenue" that was several multiples of GDP! This was obviously not going to happen and exactly nothing made any of those claims reasonable despite alleged laws that said you couldn't do this. Yes, you can speculate, but you certainly can't claim more than 100% of anything without it being fraud at some level.
Essentially nobody went to prison for that.
Then 2007 happened. Once again, it was widespread and outrageous fraud. Issuing loans to people who you know cannot pay as agreed while creating a fictional amortization schedule that not one person in a thousand can possibly meet is not a mistake, its fraud. Basing a "business" and "lending decisions" on this false schedule when the intent is to force the person back into your office to take yet another loan with negative amortization is an asset-stripping scheme and a serious felony on several levels; when it is undertaken in concert across investment houses, banks, the housing industry generally and others it is arguably racketeering, price-fixing and monopolization, all of which are decade-long felony crimes. The harms are myriad and nearly universal in that the price distortions in housing hit everyone, whether an owner or renter, both directly and indirectly via ad-valorem taxation. This was one of the largest financial scams ever in history and yet basically nobody went to prison for it.
Corrupting the chain of land titles in the process of doing it by deliberately destroying the origination documents thereby making it impossible to figure out exactly who suborned what act of perjury and bank fraud where is a further serious felony called "obstruction of justice." Never mind back-dating deposits at IndyMac and other places, and in that specific case the so-called "bank examiner" who let it happen did it previously during the S&L crisis and didn't go to prison for either incident.
Now we're here again.
This time, like last, two years+ of open and outrageous fraud were the backdrop. This time it related to a viral pathogen which, the evidence shows, was deliberately created via an illegal program that our own DARPA folks turned down and attempted to stop. But it didn't stop, did it? Nope. To this very day the fraud continues; as just one example I challenge anyone to show me one actual vial of Comirnaty, the alleged "approved" Covid-19 vaccine, with a lot number on the side of it which is being offered to the public in the United States. I've asked for this since the time of approval and yet as far as I can tell no such product exists in the marketplace and in fact it is reported that Pfizer itself has said they have no intention to produce or ship any of it. Instead the government, your doctor, the entire "public health" system and countless private actors are and have insisted you take an experimental drug and to add insult to injury they are claiming you are receiving a fully licensed and approved product when no such product in fact exists. That's fraud.
But it neither began or ended there. Said original fraud has infested virtually everything over the previous 20 years. How about so-called "cryptocurrencies"? I've written on this before several times but the fraud begins with the fact that they're not currencies. Calling something a thing does not make it so, any more than calling a failed prophylaxis a "vaccine" makes it one. Indeed now data out of Iceland shows that the shots failed exactly as have all other attempts to vaccinate against coronaviruses yet you do not hear this anywhere in the mainstream media. Those of us who pointed to the historical record and evidence in the current "trials" and data that these jabs also did not work were censored, run out of the town square and called all sorts of pejorative names such as "anti-vaxxer" along with being threatened with arrest, being fired from their jobs and excluded from our basic personal human right to be left the fuck alone and make our own medical decisions.
We were right and those on the other side were not only wrong they were deliberately running bullshit, which we now know because Birx has admitted that it was bullshit and she knew it. Now top it off with one of the major jab-pushing CEOs, never mind our President and First Wench, getting Covid despite being not just dosed but boosted, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the jabs have utterly failed to do their job because they can't stop either transmission or contracting the virus and, it is now proved, those in so-called "public health" along with many others knew it before the jab campaign started.
May I remind you that if a particular jab works nobody cares if anyone else took it because if you take it you're safe. I have zero fear of polio or measles, to name two specific examples, because both of those jabs do work and I've received both. Nobody has to mandate anything that actually works so long as it is commonly and easily available at low or no cost; those who choose not to avail themselves of same are free to make that choice and take the consequence -- for good or bad.
Where are the indictments? Yes, indictments. The damage to our economy alone as a result of this scam is in the trillions, never mind the human cost of abusing people like pincushions when you know the damned thing doesn't work.
So pardon me while I say meh to the screaming from all sides on this latest Trump thing. We're way past the point where "remain calm, turn down the temperature" is appropriate. To the contrary; the last couple of decades makes clear that all such calls and claims are nothing more than those who have been doing the scamming and stealing up and down the line trying to protect their ability to steal some more.
We tried it their way over the last 20+ years and every time we've allowed it a bigger, nastier scam has arisen next.
We're on the cusp of a foldback event in our economy folks, as recent productivity and cost figures show. Between the scams of "green energy", the scams of so-called "ESG" being enforced by what I argue is an illegal monopolist and price-fixing mechanism exerting horizontal pressure across industries and companies (that's wildly illegal under anti-trust law) to two decades of outright fraud in medical "trials" and claims the people have decided to give up and not engage in entrepreneurship or even make their best effort as employees as every time you do it the odds are extremely high you will be ripped off and screwed to within an inch of your life.
Sooner or later you run out of the capacity to screw the public on a repeated, institutional basis; if you don't get a violent uprising out of it you still lose because when productivity folds back you get not just recession but economic depression and revolution -- whether violent or otherwise. The old saw "You pretend to work and I'll pretend to pay you" has played out time and time again through history and whether it ultimately turns into guillotines and guns or simply the collapse of society and privation the end result is the same; you cannot get blood or water from a stone and if you wish to have people innovate the rule of law must matter.
When the next big scam is all you have to propel alleged "asset" valuations you're in the end stage of what was a civil society.
We're there and thus only reversal, which means prosecution and imprisonment, stops what is otherwise an inevitable collapse.
Here's reality, like it or not: Somewhere around 3-4% of the population, if they actively resist and protest, collapse governments. Repeatedly and reliably. The government and their "pals" including those who run "social media" know this; history on this point is clear, convincing, and it occurs almost without exception. Violence is not required but active participation is, not merely screaming on some "social media" site. Indeed contrary to the many scolds out there violence does work (otherwise why would anyone ever wage war?) but the probability of a bad outcome goes up with its use, so in terms of "preference" when it comes to tactics it fails the test of the "best reasonable effort", never mind that being dead makes you unable to continue being a part of that 3-4%. How far are we, given the productivity numbers, from that threshold?
Closer than you may think, and in fact quite-possibly very, very close.
