Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk again, talking a lot about AI and his DOGE work. I haven’t remoptely seen all of it yet, but a lot of the DOGE stuff is interesting.
Watch the whole thing.
Posts Tagged ‘deep state’
Elon Musk Talks DOGE With Joe Rogan
Saturday, March 1st, 2025LinkSwarm For January 24, 2025
Friday, January 24th, 2025Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
FISA abuse was, of course, was a key tool in the deep state’s war against Trump.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
More from Open AI.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
I have a contract position but it may be ending soon, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
Dave Smith on Rogan: The Deep State vs. Trump
Tuesday, August 29th, 2023If you’ve been following this blog for a a while, very little in this Joe Rogan interview with Dave Smith will be new to you. But this is a nice explanation of how the early part of the Russiagate hoax developed if you weren’t paying attention to the blow-by-blow revelations at the time.
It was determined by the powers that be, you know, with the corporate media, the Deep State, all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable. And that’s not new to Donald Trump. There were a lot of candidates who have been determined to be unacceptable. Ron Paul was was unacceptable. Bernie Sanders was unacceptable. Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable. And you saw the machine weaponized against all of them to keep them out. But Trump beat the machine. The difference is Trump won… the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning. And part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the illusion of inevitability that I think progressives rely on.
Indeed.
(Previously.)
The Permanent Coup and Its Media Enablers
Saturday, November 9th, 2019Lovers of irony got a double dish this week when the Washington Post mused aloud whether Republicans would accept political outcomes they didn’t like:
.@washingtonpost asking if Republicans can accept political outcomes they don't like is like @BillClinton asking @Mike_Pence if he's learned to accept married fidelity yet.
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) November 8, 2019
It takes a lot of damn gall for the Washington Post, one of the Democratic Media Complex’s premier peddlers of the Russian collusion fantasy and the Ukraine impeachment farce, to talk about “accepting the results of an election they don’t like,” since they’re at the tip of a the spear of what Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, neither a conservative nor a fan of President Donald Trump, call a permanent coup:
We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.
The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.
Snip.
It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.
The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:
February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence. March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing. March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.” April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.” December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.” November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians. To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.
A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.
Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of “approved” leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets.
These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. It’s the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert.
The sidelined “intel chiefs” are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says “we may now be at a point” where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is “no longer a democracy.” Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is “one of the most credible” he’s seen.
As a reporter covering the 2015–2016 presidential race, I thought Trump’s campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate. He also clearly catered to racist fears, and to the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office.
Trump’s campaign antagonism toward the military and intelligence world was at best a millimeter thick. Like almost everything else he said as a candidate, it was a gimmick, designed to get votes. That he was insincere and full of it and irresponsible, at first at least, when he attacked the “deep state” and the “fake news media,” doesn’t change the reality of what’s happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald “Deep State” Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community.
Snip.
Trump, at least insofar as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasn’t deployed human counterintelligence “informants” to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasn’t maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats.
And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.
Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.
That piece also spawned a very interesting comments thread, including this comment from a Chuck McClenon:
We’ve long whispered about the Deep State, assuming that the Intelligence Community should have counter-intelligence responsibilities, out of sight, protecting the Executive branch from moles planted by foreign foes, and that our secret agents would, if necessary, quietly dispatch a Manchurian Candidate. But we assume that he deep state are protecting us from foreign foes, and that the less said beyond that, the better. And we assume they operate out of some sub-basement of the CIA in Langley.
But what we appear to have here is an alternative version in which the Deep State protects the Domestic interests of the Elite — that group of financial powers of whom nobody went to jail for any misdeeds leading to the 2008 crisis, that group which also happen to control the media which control the boundary lines of permissible political discussion, as Matt has documented in his precious book. Let us suppose that the Washington Swamp works for that elite, serve it and profit from it. And let us suppose that the Deep State are not there to protect the constitutionally designated Executive branch, but to guard and protect the Swamp.
And so for a candidate from outside of those boundaries to be elected president, that’s not merely a threat to the power of the institutional media, it’s an existential threat to the security of all the swamp creatures. Alligators are usually solitary and don’t usually work in teams, but we suppose they are wired to respond with the same instincts and to swarm and attack the intruder.
And since you and I understand that the alligators in the moat, or in the swamp, are there to protect against invaders, and we see them attack, we are conditioned to cheer for the alligators. They are doing their job. And if they are promoting the story that they are protecting us from Russians, all the better.
But who do the alligators serve? Who can protect us against them? That’s the context in which Matt has framed the question, which is the worse choice to lead the country, Donald Trump, with all his known flaws and evils? Or the swamp gators? I heard Rudy Giuliani last week say something to the effect that Trump was elected on the promise of draining the swamp, but none of us has a clue how bad the swamp was. Say it ain’t so.
Too extreme? Only if you believe that every CIA operative and MSM reporter are in on the scam. But when you see that vast swathes of our theoretically neutral elites have signed on to undo President Trump election because it hurts the interlocking interests of the permanent ruling class and the Democratic Party, it doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.