“School shootings are a fact of life.” — J.D. Vance

No it’s not. It’s just not. I hate to go all old man on everyone here, but these things didn’t happen when we were kids. I graduated from high school in 1993. I think there was a famous school shooting at the University of Texas back in the day, but that’s pretty much it. In 1999 Columbine happened. In the last 25 years it is has been like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, maybe logic is the way to go about it. I feel like the conservative response is to point to things we know we can’t fix. It’s a whole generation of kids raised by single parents. It’s the violent video games. It is the lack of God in our culture. It’s the ramping up of hate on social media. It’s the mental health.

These things might be true to a greater or lesser extent and I am not here to discount any of those things. However, school violence is a choice. Gun violence is a choice. Every other industrialized country on the planet has figured this out better than we have. It’s not a fact of life. It is what you have chosen to accept.

One of the things I’ve noticed with a child going into the college process is that I wouldn’t have gotten into the institution I went to with the grades I had. My SAT score wouldn’t have been enough. We are loading up our kids with AP courses, college essays, internships, and part-time jobs. These kids aren’t soft like we are accusing them of. They have a lot more on their plate than any of us had.

Now, what does this have to do with the issue at hand? Someone that shoots up a school, mall, movie theater, or anything else by definition is mentally ill. That by definition is someone in distress and is not exercising good coping skills. Mentally ill doesn’t have to mean being in a straight jacket. It doesn’t mean needing a padded room with no sharp things. It doesn’t mean they need copious amounts of medication and therapy.

It is so much more than that. We are increasingly creating an entire generation of people without coping skills. We heap all of this stuff on them, tell them they will have to pay for college for the rest of their lives, won’t be able to ever afford a house of their own, and we provide them with few ways to manage this stress. We tell them they have to choose a path early in life. They need to spend all of their free time either studying or getting better on that path. What stress relief strategies are we providing?

Guns are not necessary for the survival of 99 percent of us. Your little pea shooter is no match for the military might of the largest and most powerful armed force in the history of the planet. I want people to be able to do what they want in their free time as long as it doesn’t endanger me or my family. You can do that without an AR-15. You can do that by simply waiting a week to make sure you don’t have a history of domestic abuse, mental illness, or criminal behavior. Registering your gun is not going to seriously infringe on your rights. Heck, having a license to carry it won’t either.

That fact rose its ugly head yet again today when Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Donald Trump in the New York hush money fraud case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, several of which were related to his attempt to conceal the payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the presidential election in 2016. 

Reading Judge Merchan’s order is like being in a room with a middle-aged man on his first day in a yoga class, pain leaching from every corpuscle of his body as he contorts himself into making a decision he clearly believes not in the interest of either justice or the wellbeing of the country.  The order begins this way:

“By letter dated August 14, 2024, Defendant requests an adjournment of his sentencing, currently scheduled for September 18, 2024, until after the 2024 presidential election. He argues the adjournment is necessary to provide adequate time to ‘assess and pursue’ appellate options in the event this Court denies his pending Criminal Procedure Law ("CPL') S 330.30 motion and to avoid the potential ‘politically prejudicial’ impact that a public sentencing could have on him and his prospects in the upcoming election.  He attempts to bolster his application by repeating a litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances from previous filings that do not merit this Court’s attention and will not be addressed in this Decision.”

The judge’s quotes from Trump’s letter are proper given the nature of the order, but let me tell you, along with his dismissal of Trump’s “unsubstantiated grievances,” they are included to reflect the contempt Merchan has for Trump, his lawyers, and his request to delay sentencing. 

Take a step back for a moment.  This is the judge that Trump trashed every single day of the trial that concluded by finding him guilty on all counts.  He is the judge who found Trump in contempt of court ten times for various violations of gag orders imposed to prevent the defendant from harassing his clerk and employees and relatives of the prosecutors and other persons associated with the New York court system, including the judge’s own daughter.  The 10^th time Merchan found Trump in contempt, after fining him $1,000, he threatened him with jail time.  Merchan had already fined Trump $9.000 for his previous violations.  Trump had attacked the judge’s daughter as “a rabid Trump hater,” among other slurs, and Merchan sanctioned him for that, as well as forbidding him from discussing any relatives of anyone associated with the case.  Trump had also attacked the make-up of the jury.  He made thinly veiled threats against witnesses in the case that Merchan warned Trump against but did not find contemptuous.

Defendants in criminal trials don’t do this stuff unless the defendant’s name is Donald Trump. 

In his order, Merchan cited the unprecedented nature of criminally sentencing a candidate for president: “This matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this Nation's history,” Merchan wrote.  He also included a statement of impartiality and purpose that you would not ordinarily find in such a judicial order:  “This adjournment request has now been decided in the same way this Court has decided every other issue that has arisen since the origination of this case, applying the facts and the law after carefully considering the issues and respective arguments of the parties to ensure that the integrity of the proceeding is protected, justice is served, and the independence of this judiciary kept firmly intact.”  The statement is, without citing instances of Trump’s continual disruption of his trial with lies, slander, and bluster, a defense of the integrity of the judicial process, which Merchan was caused to do almost daily during the trial.

All of this is unprecedented.  The nature of the crime is unprecedented:  a presidential candidate paying off a porn star to conceal a sexual affair from the voters; the defendant being a candidate for president during his trial; the contemptuous behavior of the defendant during the trial; the contempt of the defendant for the jury and the verdict; and of course, before the defendant was sentenced, the intervention of the Supreme Court that found Trump immune from prosecution for official acts taken while president, at least several of which – the signing of checks to Michael Cohen by Trump in the Oval Office – the defense will contend somehow fit the definition of “official acts.”

Trump wants the sentencing hearing postponed so that voters will not know whether he has been sentenced to jail for his crimes in New York.  That is unprecedented, too, just as was Trump not wanting voters in 2016 to know that he had paid hush-money to a porn star. 

Whether voters would take into consideration the judge’s sentence is almost irrelevant.  At this point, voters are faced daily with face-slaps of Trump’s misbehavior and madness, his jumble of unintelligible remarks and lies about childcare before the Economic Club of New York the other day being one of the most recent.  The Economic Club of New York includes among its membership people Trump wanted so badly to respect him when he was a real estate developer and citizen of Manhattan.  They are the uppermost crust of the upper crust of New York society and business – members of the clubs Trump wanted to belong to such as the Union League and Metropolitan Club and other mahogany-and-brass-fittings temples of the Manhattan elite.

And yet there he was, mumbling and lying and stumbling through a discussion any parent in America could speak about coherently: 

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, childcare is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.”

The phrase, word-salad, is inadequate to describe what he said to that roomful of business executives and economic experts.  What could he have been thinking?

Well, he wasn’t thinking.  He was just flapping his jaws incomprehensibly, because that is what works for him out there among his MAGA faithful.  They don’t have childcare they can afford, and they don’t care that Trump has no plans to get it for them, because that is not what they want from him.  What they want is hate, of which he supplies copious quantities, which is not unprecedented in this country, and that in itself is a problem and has been since our founding as a nation.

Just as Judge Merchan had to take into consideration who the jury found guilty in his courtroom and upon whom he has to deliver sentence, I am afraid that the rest of us are saddled with a similar burden.  We have a monster in our midst.  We are trying to bar the monster from the White House as we did in 2020, but even if we succeed, he will not be gone, not in person, nor in the excretory politics he has encouraged among the citizenry. 

We are not a monstrous country, not yet anyway, but we have always had the tendency to become one.  We avoided such a fate only by Civil War once in our history.  We will find out in November if defeating Trump at the ballot box will enable us to go forward as a nation without resorting to violence. 

We can only vote, and hope.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

You have no doubt heard by now that the Department of Justice has charged two Russian nationals, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with violating U.S. money laundering laws and failing to register as agents of a foreign power.  The indictment lays out a complex web through which $10 million in Russian money was moved into an American bank account controlled by a heretofore little-known American company, Tenet Media, thence into the private bank accounts of several American right-wing “influencers,” chiefly Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and David Rubin.  The three have YouTube accounts with 2.1 million, 2.7 million, and 2.4 million followers, respectively.  The Tennessee company was founded by Liam Donovan and Lauren Chen to act as the “producer” of as many as 2,000 videos that have been distributed through YouTube and X-Twitter.  Pool and Johnson demanded to be paid $100,000 a week each as originators of the largely pro-Russia anti-Democratic Party “content” they produced. In addition, according to the indictment – which does not name them but refers to them only as “Commentor-1” and “Commentor-2.”  The two were paid $100,000 signing bonuses at the beginning of the contract, which according to the DOJ indictment, originated in Moscow.

If today’s indictment sounds like a round-about way to get at Russian efforts to influence the presidential election, it is.  Tim Pool, one of the YouTube “creators” being paid Russian money through Tenet Media, interviewed Donald Trump on his YouTube channel in May when Trump went on a mini-campaign of “influencer” stroking. 

This afternoon, the DOJ filed a second indictment, this one of Dimitri K. Simes, an adviser to Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, both of whom currently reside in Moscow.  Simes was charged with violating sanctions against a Russian media entity, Channel One, for whom he hosts a five-day a week television talk show.  His wife was charged with money laundering involved with being a straw-purchaser of antiques and art for a prominent Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Y. Udodov, which she kept at a home the Simes maintain in Northern Virginia.

Dimitri Simes emigrated from Russia to the U.S. in 1973 and became a prominent “Russia expert” in the world of Washington D.C. think tanks, at one point running a think tank, Center for the National Interest, that Richard Nixon set up after leaving office.  During the 2016 presidential campaign, Simes introduced Donald Trump at the only foreign policy speech he gave during the campaign at a gathering of international affairs experts in Washington, D.C.  Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who along with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was the first foreign visitor to the Oval Office after Trump took office.  On that day, Trump bragged to others about sharing top-secret intelligence about Israel and Iran with the two Russians.

The emigration of Simes from Russia to the U.S. is classic placement of a Russian intelligence agent undercover in a foreign country.

The DOJ indictment spells out the complex journey the $10 million of Russian money took on its way to the Tennessee company that pays Pool and Johnson.  The money went from RT, the Russian television network, through a Canadian front-company to a Czech shell company to an entirely fictional “investor,” Eduard Grigoriann. From there, the money went by wire transfer to three Turkish shell companies, three additional shells in the United Arab Emirates, and one phony company in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles off the coast of East Africa.  From there, the money made its way to a bank in New York controlled by Tenet Media founders Laren Chen and Liam Donovan.  The Washington Post reported that Chen is “affiliated with” the right-wing Republican “youth” group, Turning Point U.S.A, run by Trump’s pal, Charlie Kirk, at whose recent Washington D.C. conference Trump was the keynote speaker. She is a former contributor to the Russian media company RT.  According to CNN, “A Twitter account for Donovan identifies him as the president of Tenet Media and his Instagram account describes Donovan as Chen’s husband.”  The names of both Chen and Donovan appear on Tenet Media business records on file in Tennessee.

A press release from the DOJ accompanying the indictment put it this way about Tenet Media, called “U.S. Company-1”: “U.S. Company-1 never disclosed to its viewers that it was funded and directed by RT. Nor did U.S. Company-1 or its two founders register with the Attorney General as an agent of a foreign principal.”  For those keeping score, the “founders” in the DOJ press release would be Chen and Donovan.

I don’t know about you, but if a great big shoe was about to drop, when it dropped it would sound like the words in the last sentence of the DOJ press release.

The DOJ indictment of the two Russian nationals describes an intelligence influence operation, and it’s a classic one. In the first instance, Russian intelligence sought out several “useful idiots,” as they are referred to by intelligence professionals.  They didn’t have to look very hard.  The right-wing mediasphere is overrun with ambitious jerks sitting in their basements or bedrooms looking into the eye of an internet camera spewing garbage about subjects near and dear to Russian hearts such as the legitimacy of Russia’s war against Ukraine and how the U.S. should not be involved in supporting Ukraine with money and military hardware. 

These are common talking points on the Right.  Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance has been spewing pro-Russian anti-Ukraine garbage in speeches and on X-Twitter for years.

The rest of the right-wing slurry of lies and gutter trash trafficked in by Pool and Johnson and their brethren involved the evils of the Democratic Party, Republican talking points about Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, lies about rising crime rates that in reality are falling, and…well, you fill in the blanks.

Pool and Johnson, contacted by the New York Times, described themselves as “victims” of the Russian scheme and claimed they knew nothing about their company, Tenet Media, being funded wholly and completely by the Russian government.  There are hints, however, that this line of bullshit has a few holes in it.  The indictment describes an exchange on the instant-messaging app Discord between Tenet Media “Founder-1” and “Persona-1,” believed to be one of the RT employed Russians posing as the fictional Grigoriann.  The exchange of messages involved an invoice submitted by Tenet Media for payment.  When “Founder-2” didn’t receive an immediate answer, he did an internet search for “time in Moscow,” later communicating with a Tenet partner saying, “Hey @[Persona-1], just wanted to follow up and see if your finance department has any update on the transfers.”  Founders 1 and 2 are Chen and Donovan.

These would presumably be the wire transfers that flew around the world previously described above.

In another classic exchange laid out in the indictment, one of the “founders” sent a message to one of the “commenters” containing tape of Tucker Carlson in a Moscow supermarket stupidly exclaiming over how much better and cheaper Russian produce and meat are than equivalent American products. The message said, “they want you to post this.”  The YouTube commenter, who appears to have recognized Russian propaganda when he saw it, responded, “but it feels like overt shilling.”  The Tenet Media founder wrote back that his partner “thinks we should put it out there.”  The YouTube commenter, finally acquiesced: “Alright, I’ll put it out tomorrow.”

Here is where we enter the land of the Big Squiggle, currently being engaged in by YouTube commentators Pool and Johnson, as well as Tenet Media founders Chen and Donovan.  Chen and Donovan could not be reached by either CNN or the New York Times for comment.  But Pool and Johnson are squawking like stuck ducks, taking the position that they are “victims” of this dastardly Russian scheme to fool them into thinking they were working for a legitimate “investor” called “Eduard Grigoriann” whom the DOJ identifies as an entirely fictional creation of the two Russians in the indictment.  There is another word for “victim” in the world of intelligence:  It is “useful idiot.”

It’s a very short distance between useful idiot and intentional idiot.  My friend Malcolm Nance, in his absolutely essential Substack column, “Special Intelligence,” where he covers the world of covert intelligence and terrorism, identifies the status of useful idiots as “Unwitting Assets,” and describes this category of fools as “people who financially, or personally benefit from the association with a foreign agent, but really do not know the origin of those benefits.”

But when people running a company incorporated in Tennessee are googling “time in Moscow” trying to figure out why their chats on Discord aren’t being answered immediately by their partners they refer to as “the Russians,” it looks more and more like the people in the indictment who are called “Founders” and “Commentators” 1 and 2 respectively may find themselves in the even more tenuous category of what Malcolm Nance calls a “Witting Asset…an individual, who is well aware that the money comes from a hostile government and accept it for their own benefit.”

Donald Trump’s media empire, Truth Social, is losing tens of millions of dollars and its stock has been dropping precipitously even though its founder is a candidate for President of the United States, which would seem to be a benefit to the company rather than a drag on its earnings.

But little Tenet Media down in Tennessee is healthy and profitable.  According to the indictment, $8.7 million was transferred to the accounts of right-wing commentators Pool and Johnson and Rubin.  The remaining $1.3 million was presumably used to pay Chen and Donovan as founders and managers.

And whoop-dee-doo!  They didn’t have to pay a cent to Eduard Grigoriann because he exists only as a figment of the imagination of the Russian handlers in Moscow who have been running Tenet Media all along.    

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

It must be hard to be a paid campaign staffer on the team trying to pull off a political miracle to re-elect a rapist, a felon, and an overall odious person – especially if that is all one and the same odious person.

LaCivita and Wiles showing leadership

Witness this leaked email message from the two highly paid heads of the TFG team, Chris LaCivita and Susan Wiles, transcribed below:

Team –

Susie and I have always said this is the best team in politics. And each day that passes, we are all reminded how true that is. Everyone has made sacrifices and put in the time and effort to help elect President Trump, Senator Vance, and all Republicans running for office.

Throughout this campaign, we have sent periodic reminders of our communications and press policy when interacting with reporters and media members. Unless you have been authorized by Senior Leadership or have received permission from an authorized member of the Communications Team, you should not be speaking or communicating with any member of the press, on or off record.

We have done a great job of preventing leaks and that has been because everyone knows what the policy is and what we expect from everyone. Information is power – and the press doesn’t give a damn because you lose your job because you spoke out of school.

As this team moves forward with only 61 days left until victory, please do not deviate from this policy. Success requires buy-in from everyone. If just one of us goes off-course, it jeopardizes not only the team but also President Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot.

Onward to victory!

Imagine writing that message to your campaign staff and then seeing that very message posted on the internet one hour later.

I guess someone on the paid staff didn’t take that that very heart-felt communiqué seriously.

Or more likely, maybe they did.

One of our regulars posed a question to me following yesterday’s piece on low information voters. I felt like it deserved an answer. Normally, I might do this in the form of a reply comment, but this answer is a little longer and deserves a little more attention. However, I’m hoping it won’t be my normal 600 word screed either. The question was what we can do about low information voters and dubious media sources that propagate nonsense.

Following Citizens United, it has become more and more clear that money is more powerful than speech. Following 2016, Ms. Carraway and I decided to subscribe to the New York Times and Washington Post. We wanted to support a cause that would fight the coming tyranny and felt that the fourth estate was an important part of that. The tag line “Democracy dies in darkness” was particularly powerful given Trump’s attacks against the media. I am no longer supporting those two particular publications.

The idea of “cancel culture” is quite hilarious to me given that conservatives have mastered the art of cancellation. They do this by withholding money. Sure, there is some sound and fury in there, but companies like Budweiser quickly changed their tune when their bottom line was effected. We must do the same in order to fight back against media sources that either purposefully mislead the public or whitewash the news in order to create a horse race that should never exist.

There is only one reason why anyone would do such a thing and so there is only one way to combat that. If they see that there is a financial risk in not reporting actual news then suddenly they may grow a backbone and report the news. If companies see a risk in supporting a racist jackass then maybe they will stop doing it. They bend to where the money is going and it is high time we use whatever financial muscle we have to exert that pressure.

As far as this is concerned, it is really very simple. We should financially support media sources and companies committed to reporting facts and supporting truth. Is there a script we can use? I suppose that is up to everyone. If you are the kind of person that wants to tell people why they are no longer getting your money then by all means let them have it. Otherwise, the money is the key. So, the Washington Post and New York Times feel it is in their best interest to keep Donald Trump’s political career alive. Let’s show them that its not. Let’s show them that their fiduciary interests and journalistic interests are one and the same. Report the news. All of the news. Report the news or our money goes away. Period. The same goes for any other media source and any other company. If you want to cozy up to MAGA you can do it without my dime.