Taking Down Trump, Taking Out Fox News, With Lawfare

From E. Jean Carroll to Nina Jankowicz

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The jury in the civil case filed by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump handed down its verdict a little over a week ago. Trump, they said, was guilty of “sexually abusing” her, but not “raping” her. He then “defamed” her, the jury agreed, by saying she made the whole thing up to get attention and sell a book. They then demanded Trump pony up $5 million for her.

What rational sense does this verdict make? How did Trump “sexually abuse” her but not “rape” her, given her lurid account of what she claims went on between the two of them in that dressing room? Why is the first credible but not the second? What makes anything she said credible? Some women are very good storytellers (I’ve met a few!).

The judge advised jury members to stay anonymous. Perhaps he was trying to save them from public embarrassment and humiliation.

Carroll now threatens further action because of Trump’s comments on the CNN town meeting the other evening. Trump called her a “whack job” and described her case as “a rigged deal.”

She has the backing of the very influential Roberta Kaplan (the same attorney who prosecuted Unite the Right in the Sines v Kessler case), who as a married lesbian is also both an ardent Alphabet Soup Mafia activist and — obviously — a Democrat.

The witnesses against Trump: all Democrats.

I probably don’t need to list the pending dogpile of suits against Trump: the one out of Georgia, the Mar-a-Lago case, the case involving January 6, and a couple of lesser civil suits, one brought by a family member.  

This is how lawfare operates. Its purpose is not justice but taking the opponent out, to shut him or her up, by whatever means necessary.

Lawfare is what we’ve been seeing against Fox News, which settled with Dominion for $787.5 million, but faces a similar suit from Smartmatic for $2.7 billion.

Although Tucker Carlson is gone, Fox is also facing a suit from one Abby Grossberg, who claims she faced a “hostile work environment” and endured “antisemitic remarks” during her time on Carlson’s show. She also charges that she was coerced into giving a misleading deposition in the Dominion case.

I’ve no idea, of course. I wasn’t there, any more than any of us were in that dressing room back in … whatever year it was (Carroll doesn’t remember!).

Now Nina Jankowicz is also suing Fox for defamation. If anyone remembers, she is the woman DHS put in charge of the Bidenista disinformation governance board. Numerous observers of varying degrees of visibility saw this as an open attempt to create a real world Ministry of Truth. The avalanche of criticism quickly left the board paralyzed. Jankowicz resigned as DHS “paused” the effort. Soon after, it was shut down.

Jankowicz, 34, author of two books (I’ve not read them) and billed as a cybersecurity expert, says she’s faced a torrent of both public and online harassment including threats, and that her career has been “irrevocably damaged.”

She told Politico, “I didn’t intend for my entire career to be lit on fire before my eyes by taking this job.”

She blames Fox News for spearheading the campaign against her.

Yes, some conservatives may have gotten carried away. It happens. We’re not perfect. Especially in online environments that allow anonymous strangers using screennames to go into attack mode without consequence.

But we’re subsisting under conditions which makes me wonder if left-liberals who speak of a “hostile work environment” would know one if they saw it.  

I left the U.S. just short of 11 years ago. I’m not sure I’d be able to write what I write and still live there, especially given how the cost of living in the U.S. has skyrocketed. Given my criticisms of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” religion that now controls higher education and a great deal of corporate America, and given my rejection of the increasingly militant transgenderism movement, I’d never be able to teach at a university! Probably I’d not be safe on an urban campus. I was once doxed by a leftist troll after taking to a forum to defend a conservative Christian ally from scurrilous, lawfare-type attacks before they were called that (a court case was in progress; the troll was actively and possibly illegally interfering with it). That was in 2006-07. In 2008 my apartment was broken into. Money and a few valuables were stolen. I didn’t pursue it beyond a standard police report, because obviously I had no proof that the troll had anything to do with it. But as other apartments around mine weren’t touched, it was clear, I’d been the intended target.

Not saying I’ve been singled out. This is the situation truth-tellers are in. I don’t know a single such writer who doesn’t receive hate email and occasional online attacks verging on threats.

But how did we get into this predicament? Truth-tellers have all been ostracized — or have left their places of employ on their own because they couldn’t stand them any longer. Some, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi, have retained substantial audiences from those who long ago tuned out CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and all the rest.

The plain truth is, trust has collapsed. And as yet another independent author, Charles Hugh Smith, recently observed: once trust collapses, it’s gone. There’s no going back.

This is not simply conservatives versus left-liberals. Are all of the people in the above list conservatives?

It isn’t simply about “left” versus “right,” nor Democrats versus Republicans.

The struggle of our lifetimes is between those who have gained and seek to maintain power, typically through accumulating immense wealth and are distributing it through their vast networks and control grids, versus the rest of us: the peasantry. The primary way those in power have sought to keep it and extend it, is to present in front of us a consistent parade of lies and then, when we question the lies, gaslight us by calling us “conspiracy theorists,” “right-wing nut jobs,” “fascists,” and “antisemites.”

This includes the upside-down presentation by the fully-owned corporate media of the handful of leaders struggling against globalist power as “authoritarians,” while portraying themselves as “defenders of democracy.”

The problem, as I’ve noted previously: the latter do not like anyone standing up to them. They believe that we the peasants ought to sit down, shut up, listen to their designated “experts” and do as we’re told.

If their “experts” tell us to take a certain vaccine, then we should get the shot and not ask for proof of its safety and effectiveness, nor wonder why over a thousand athletes under the age of 50 have dropped dead from heart attacks since the start of 2021.

Nothing to see here! Move on, move on….

Only we don’t. Because we don’t trust their “experts,” nor those behind them.

This collapse of trust isn’t the result of anything Trump said or Fox News did. They’re symptoms, not causes.

In my humble opinion, the Establishment — a term covering the prevailing political economy including all the alphabet soup federal agencies, the military and its appendages, corporate media, Big Tech and Big Pharma — did this to itself.

These institutions, or their spokespersons, have been lying, sometimes by omission and sometimes by commission, longer than most of us have been alive.  

Let’s review:

Back in the 1950s, branding a populist leader who stood up to corporate power as a “communist” was sufficient to destroy him. It happened with Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. From that unhappy episode came the term banana republic. Similar events brought down Muhammed Mosadegh’s democratically-elected presidency in Iran during that same period, instilling the Shah, Reza Pahlavi. (To note: democracy is only legitimate when it serves the interests of the globalist ruling class.)

In the 1960s, the Establishment lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and about that decade’s political assassinations. There are still over a thousand documents related to the JFK assassination that remain classified, the magic phrase “national security” still invoked. No, we can’t prove that they contain information pointing directly to the CIA, or to CIA/FBI collusion, but if there is nothing damning in that material, then why won’t the federal government declassify it and make it public?  

I have copies of documents sent to me by a younger relative of someone who was in the LAPD and on the scene at the time of the RFK assassination, where forensics basically showed that Sirhan Sirhan’s gun did not fire the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy was shot from behind; Sirhan was in front of him the entire time.

The real killer got away.

To this day, the federal government and controlled corporate media maintain the lies that Oswald and Sirhan were “lone gunman” killers who acted alone.

Yes, sometimes Republicans are as guilty of lying as Democrats. Nixon lied about Watergate. But Johnson preceded him. Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start with Watergate (1977) proves this. Nixon got caught.

Jimmy Carter campaigned for president as an outsider. This was a lie. He was backed by, and staffed his administration with, members of the recently formed Trilateral Commission (the brain abortion of David Rockefeller Sr., Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger).

The Reagan Administration tried to hide Iran-Contra. Reagan likely also hid his campaigns behind-the-scenes dealings with the Iranian students who had taken over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. He wanted to ensure that they kept the hostages until after the election and up to the start of his presidency, so that Carter would lose and see his legacy permanently damaged.  

Then Reagan staffed his cabinet with Trilateralists.

The first George Bush gave a pass to that ludicrous story of Iraqi soldiers, having invaded Kuwait and triggering the Gulf War, removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die.

Never happened.

The Clinton Team Presidency then lied about nearly everything. Clinton wanted credit for the “economic boom” of the era which was actually the work of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s easy money policies which inflated the tech bubble (burst in 2000). These had far greater consequences than Clinton’s dalliances with an intern, although naturally corporate media fixated on the latter.

The second George Bush sent troops into Iraq launching one of the most disastrous wars in U.S. history on the basis of “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist. The result was to create enemies like ISIS and destabilize the entire region.

Barack Obama told us that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” and that Obamacare would bring down health care costs. Did it?

The Establishments of both political parties and most “economists” kept up a parade of lies about globalization (so called), that it would make us all rich and prosperous — as opposed to laying waste to countless communities as the country was de-industrialized, low paying “service sector” jobs replaced productive work, and the middle class started to pinwheel over the economic cliff.

Financialization, which began when Nixon “closed the gold window” in 1971 but really got underway during the Reagan-Bush years assisted by the Federal Reserve money printing press, has funneled billions upward into the hands of the now-dominant billionaire class. Greed and speculation have replaced honest work, which has become a fool’s errand.

Equality — not to be confused with the Woke pseudo-concept “equity” — is desirable at least as a regulative ideal, because obvious, massive, and growing inequalities, eventually destabilize countries.

It is mathematically impossible to earn a billion dollars in a year doing real, honest work that serves others. This isn’t especially hard to show. But today, according to Oxfam, 26 people now own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the entire world’s population!

Today’s brand of left-liberal seems okay with this. He/she is too busy defending gender fluidity to care.

The utter absurdity of all this signifies narrative collapse.

Clearly we saw extensive narrative collapse after the near-collapse of the financial system 2008-09, and with the ensuing years witnessing the re-inflation of what became known as the Everything Bubble. Coastal elites prospered somewhat (nowhere near what billionaires were gaining, obviously, but enough to live with a modicum of comfort when they went along in order to get along). The rural working and former middle class suffered, especially those who are white. They were told their sufferings were “their own fault.” (Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the term for this was “victim blaming.”)

With this legacy of misleading information, open lies, general deceit, and an utter lack of empathy — all from government and legacy media — is it any wonder that an outsider like Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in 2016 and then the presidency despite never having held public office before?

And given how Trump was (and remains) uncontrollable, is it any wonder he spent the next two years battling bogus allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian government?

The same people that spent all that time and billions of taxpayer dollars trying to delegitimize Election 2016 now expect us to trust them about Election 2020, which they belligerently insist Biden won “democratically”; no doubts or “election denialism” allowed!

These same kinds of “experts” (e.g., Fauci) want our trust about the mRNA “vaccines”; no “vaccine hesitancy” allowed!  

They want us to trust their good intentions in sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, supporting what is probably the most corrupt regime in Europe, with a legacy of persecuting and sometimes murdering the ethnic Russians living in the breakaway regions. None of it reported in Western corporate media.

Today, mass resistance to globalist-driven EU policies in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, is completely blacked out on our side of the Atlantic.  

There is no basis for trust in any of this!

Doubtless there are more official lies I didn’t think to list. So are there still any questions about why many of us, not all of us conservatives, were loudly suspicious of a “disinformation board” formed by one of the most powerful federal entities, one formed in the aftermath of a dramatic event (9/11) that raised a lot of questions that have never been given satisfactory answers?

This is the political-economic and cultural ambiance entered by those who believe they can grapple with never-defined “disinformation” and do it on the federal payroll.

I’m rather sorry Nina Jankowitz has had to go to GoFundMe to raise money for legal expenses. Maybe this is part of the prevailing theater; maybe it isn’t. I’ve never met her nor had an online exchange with her. I know no more of her situation beyond what she’s stated publicly than I do what went on in that dressing room (if anything) back in whatever year it was. But given this ambiance, is it not clear why so many of us thought the DHS might want a real life Ministry of Truth, from which it backed down only in the face of outrage and public ridicule?  

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Truth, Freedom and Validation Newsletter #6 (posted May 11) is now available here. Please consider supporting my work by becoming a Patron.

ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, on stages of civilization, on the quest to build free communities in the face of encroaching globalism and technocracy, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.

Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.

While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published later this year.