March 30, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The “SILENT SAM” Confederate Monument, the Leftist Crazies’ “Long March,” and the Question for Our Political Leaders: When Will You Begin Resisting Them?

Friends,

Most every Thursday I gather with a group of friends for lunch at some restaurant in Raleigh. Among the group are three PhDs in history, and one who holds two masters degrees in history. All of are former employees of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (now Natural and Cultural Resources)…and we all share very similar points of view about politics and the shape of this nation.

This past Thursday while enjoying some great home cooking at Pam’s Farmhouse Restaurant with my friends I picked up a copy Raleigh’s Leftist weekly newspaper, INDYweek (March 27, 2019). I usually only read it for the entertainment reviews and ads. The political content is abhorrent (note: about fifteen years ago the publication attacked me as a reactionary and “racist” when the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in which I’m active, was going through a controversy over its response to attacks on Confederate heritage).

Under the section “IndyMusic” I happened across an article—an interview with the young members of a Durham NC-based punk-rock band called “The Muslims.” The color photograph accompanying the article indicated—if I may do a little racial profiling—that one of them, the female vocalist, was black; the other two appeared to be white and perhaps Hispanic.

The interview struck me—not because of the incessant and repeated use of foul and filthy language, the utilization of which has become normative in our modern American culture—but because of how the members of the group encapsulated succinctly what so many militants on the unhinged Left, the social justice warriors who demonstrate on our campuses and in the streets of our major cities, actually think and what they aspire to achieve, their objectives, both immediate and long range.

Here is what the band vocalist named QADR told the interviewer:

…we’re not going to respectfully put up with the fact that you’ve [white people] been committing very intentional ethnic cleansing of people of color worldwide…. You’re afraid that there’s this race war that’s coming, and you’re out here shooting up Muslims in New Zealand, using horrible acts of religious, ethnic, and political terrorism, because you think we’re out here to attack you. All of those things that have happened, all of the racial slurs, all of the very intentional laws put in place—what if we upped the ante and threw that s--t right back at you? [“The Muslims Wage Punk-Rock War on White Supremacy with Genuine Humor and Rage,” IndyWeek, March 27, 2019: https://indyweek.com/music/features/on-their-new-album-the-muslims-wage-punk-rock-war-on-white-supremacy/ ]

And then a little later in the interview:

That new future [we fight for] is one where [white] supremacy has been thoroughly eradicated and destroyed, based on so many people taking different types of effort. It will require organizing, it will require new people in office, it’s going to require people reclaiming land, reclaiming their indigenous or cultural practices. It’s going to require music and art really helping to contribute to this narrative…. It looks like a world where white supremacy is actually f--king named, and people are attacking it for being the cultural and societal cancer that it is…. That’s what the f--k we’re raging about with the beginning of a new future and narrative.

QADR’s political praxis and goals could not be clearer, and it is a praxis and program that is not limited to simply a few of the more extreme and unhinged elements of the far Left.

Just listen to the current crop of Democrat presidential candidates, including most recently the supposedly “moderate” and probable candidate, Joe Biden, who spent one recent public appearance apologizing for his “whiteness” and condemning “white man’s culture” and demanding that America “change the culture” that “dates back centuries and allows pervasive violence against women….It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.” [“Biden condemns 'white man's culture' as he laments role in Anita Hill hearings,” The Guardian, March 26, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/joe-biden-anita-hill-hearings-race-gender]

Or, watch any of the pundits and program hosts nightly on CNN or MSNBC, and increasingly NBC, ABC, and CBS; or, just read any issue of The New York Times (the supposed “newspaper of record”) or The Washington Post—any day. The message is nearly identical.

This present state of affairs did not happen overnight. It took years—decades—to reach the boiling cauldron of ideological hysteria we now encounter. It required the control of Hollywood and our entertainment industry, a process that actually began in the 1930s and 1940s and became visible for the first time during the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and 1950s and the infamous “Hollywood Ten” and “Blacklist” episodes, and the accusations of serious Communist infiltration into our film industry.  Today Hollywood celebrates those directors and actors, even producing recently a slick and adulatory cinematic salute to Communist movie director Donald Trumbo [Trumbo, 2015:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumbo_(2015_film) ].

And it also took decades of educational indoctrination, some of it almost by stealth and largely unnoticed by most citizens…but there just the same.

Since I studied history in graduate school at the University of Virginia four decades ago, I’ve kept a copy of the course offerings in that department.  A few days ago I searched the offerings in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The comparison was both fascinating—and revealing. It seemed that of the several hundred courses listed, every other one centered on race or feminism, and the implicit “liberation from white privilege” of the impressionable minds of college students, whose parents have to fork over tens of thousands of dollars a year for what, in effect, is most assuredly indoctrination.

Let me give just a few examples [cf.  https://history.unc.edu/courses/]:

HIST 137. Muhammad to Malcolm X: Islam, Politics, Race, and Gender. 3 Credits.

This course provides an introduction to the history of the Islamic world from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to the present day. It seeks to expose students to key themes, individuals, and movements that have represented Islamic thought and practice, and enable students to engage directly with intra-Islamic debates.

HIST 202. Borders and Crossings. 3 Credits.

This course will examine how collective identities have been created, codified, and enforced; and will explore possibilities for building bridges between groups in order to resolve conflicts.

HIST 259. Towards Emancipation? Women in Modern Europe. 3 Credits.

This course examines and compares the situation of women in politics, the work force, society and family from the French Revolution to the new women's movement in the 1970s with a focus on Britain, France and Germany. One major theme is the history of the struggle for women's emancipation.

HIST 331. Sex, Religion, and Violence: Revolutionary Thought in Modern South Asia. 3 Credits.

Which of the following would you consider potentially political issues: celibacy; semen retention; body-building; depiction of gods/goddesses; or bomb making? Well, they all are. This course examines debates over sex, religion, and violence that constituted a key part of revolutionary thought and anti-colonial struggles in modern South Asia.

HIST 348. Population Transfers, Migration, and Displacement in Europe from the 19th to the 21st Century. 3 Credits.

By looking at case studies from the 19th to the 21st century, this seminar will help contribute to a better understanding of the current migrant crises in Europe. This course will deal with factors for migration/forced migration, possible motivations, migration experiences, as well as consequences for the migrants and the communities where they have ended up.

HIST 361. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories in the United States. 3 Credits.

This course investigates the history of people who might today be defined as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) in the United States. Key themes will include identity formation, culture, politics, medical knowledge, discrimination, and community.

HIST 236. Sex and American History. 3 Credits.

Does sex have a history? This course argues that it does. Exploring American history from the earliest encounters of Indians, Europeans, and Africans through the aftermath of the sexual revolution, we will consider diverse perspectives, important dynamics of change, and surprising ways in which the past informs our present--and ourselves.

HIST 475. Feminist Movements in the United States since 1945. 3 Credits.

This course will examine the unprecedented surge of feminist thought and activism in the postwar United States. Course materials and discussions will trace feminists' varied conceptions of empowered womanhood and their expectations of the state, society at large, and each other. Honors version available.

HIST 514. Monuments and Memory. 3 Credits.

Explores the role of monuments in the formation of cultural memory and identity, both nationally and globally. Topics include the construction of identities in and through public spaces, commemoration of both singular individuals and ordinary citizens, and the appearance of new types of post-traumatic monuments in the 20th century.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Of course, this is not to say that the subject matter is not worthy of study or should not be examined. But what impresses is the heavy emphasis on race and gender studies, and the employment of “critical race” and “feminist gender” theory as the media for the study of history…and, thus, the very probable indoctrination of students, not only at UNC, but at almost all our nation’s colleges and universities, certainly the public ones.

And what is evident in the UNC Department of History is equally true in other faculties.

Should it be any wonder, then, that presently in North Carolina (and most other Southern states) there is an effort underway to remove monuments to Confederate veterans and historical figures associated with the Confederacy—identified as “racist” and artifacts of “white supremacy”--and that those efforts are centered on university campuses, in academic departments, and in towns and cities with university presences, and that that influence is increasingly felt in all of our society?

Also, note the course offering on “Monuments and Memory.”

But it is not only Confederate monuments; indeed, they are but a first step. There is a deeper issue, something that our political elites, especially establishment conservatives who would very much like to see such controversy just go away, seem to fail to recognize.

That iconoclastic campaign is part and parcel of a far larger and all-encompassing, multifaceted effort to destroy what folks like QADR—and most Democrat candidates for president--claim is “white supremacy.” The attack on Confederate monuments fits exactly into this template and into the campaign against Western heritage and civilization—into the, as QADR calls it, “new future….where [white] supremacy has been thoroughly eradicated and destroyed, based on so many people taking different types of effort…. and people are attacking it for being the cultural and societal cancer that it is…. That’s what the f--k we’re raging about with the beginning of a new future and narrative.”

The effort to remove those monuments, most notably the toppling of the “Silent Sam” monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last August—the monument memorializing the school’s volunteers who went off to war in the 1860s to defend their state against invasion—cannot be separated from the much broader war against the West. And the attempts by some pusillanimous “conservatives” to do so are foolhardy, attempting to avoid the inevitable. For the social justice warriors have no intention of stopping with Confederate monuments.

Consider two recent instances at two nationally-known universities.

First, at George Washington University in Washington DC, students are demanding that the college mascot, the “Colonials,” be changed, “arguing the nickname may ‘discourage’ students, due to not being ‘inclusive’. Students suggest changing the mascot to a ‘hippo’ or ‘riverhorse’ instead…. as the mascot might make them think about oppression and the hatred of a different race.”   [“Students Demand George Washington University Change ‘Colonials’ Mascot,” February 14, 2019: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/02/14/students-demand-george-washington-university-change-colonials-mascot/ ]

And at Hofstra University in New York, radicalized students are,

“…calling for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from campus near New York City because they say the third American president represents racism and slavery. Students participated Friday in the second annual ‘Jefferson Has Gotta Go!’ event over the statue that has been subject to protests and acts of vandalism in the past, with some previously defacing it with ‘DECOLONIZE’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogans.A petition last year was launched urging to move the Founding Father’s statue to a museum with proper context rather than display it ‘on a college campus, especially not in front of a hub of student life’.” [“Thomas Jefferson statue must go, some Hofstra University students say,” March 30, 2019:  https://www.foxnews.com/us/students-urge-hofstra-university-to-remove-thomas-jefferson-statue-over-racism ]

Sound familiar? That is exactly what the University of North Carolina system Board of Governors originally proposed to do with the “Silent Sam” monument--put it in a museum, and, indeed, may yet try to do later this May. They postponed their original decision on the fate of the monument from March 15 to the end of May 2019 (after most students will have left for summer break), just perhaps to avoid the kind of mob action that was witnessed back on August 20, 2018, when the monument was brought down by demonstrators, composed both of students and local social justice fanatics.

Of course, the administrators of Hofstra do not have a state law that requires them to keep the Jefferson statue on campus; North Carolina does have such a law, the 2015 Monuments Protection Law [G.S. 100-2.1. “Protection of monuments, memorials, and works of art”], which demands that a monument on public property—which the campus of the University of North Carolina certainly is—if taken down, must be put back up. Only physical problems with the monument itself endangering the public or major road construction are exceptions, and, then, in those cases, the monument must be put back in the closest proximity to the original site and “in the same jurisdiction.” Moreover, placement in a museum is strictly prohibited.

In May the Board of Governors of UNC will have a major decision to make. As one board member supposedly said recently, “we are in between a rock and a hard place, between the anger of those students and faculty, and the 2015 law which the Sons of Confederate Veterans threatens to use to sue us and the university.”

No sir: you are not between “the law and the university.” We live in a society of laws, laws enacted by the elected representatives of the citizens of this state, and those laws apply to you and the university. You have but one choice to make: follow the law and put the “Silent Sam” monument back in its place. If you accede to the demands of the revolutionary mob—just one step in what they call their “long march” through our institutions and our history—you will have enabled them and made their continued success possible.

Let me repeat what a local social justice warrior wrote as a comment to an essay I published on March 8 at Reckonin.com: “The removal of the monuments will continue, both thru legal and extra legal means. The protests the other night against you are simply the continuation of the long struggle and march forward against the forces of division and barbarism. Expect more of them. Your time is over. Ours is just beginning.” [see the published essay, March 8:  https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/what-happened-at-confederate-flag-day-2019 ]

It could not be more clear, the divisions more sharp, than that. For the Board of Governors, then, as well as for all the other temporizing establishment conservatives (who wish to avoid addressing the issues involved), the question is: when will you make a stand for what is left of our cultural inheritance and our civilization? Will you?

March 27, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

JUSSIE SMOLLETT and the Perversion of Our Justice System

Friends,

Even some of the left wing mainstream media folks have been forced to take notice. It was so blatant, so—how shall we say it?—outrageous that even Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and his Chicago police chief, both of whom are black and by no stretch of the imagination “conservatives,” were compelled to speak out.

Jussie Smollett—after being charged with at least sixteen provable felonies—after faking an attack on himself and charging that two thugs with MAGA hats did it—after two Nigerian brothers (not likely to be MAGA guys, to say the least) admitted that Smollett paid them $3,500 to fake the supposed attack—after writing a fake “hate letter” to himself (Federal mail fraud?)—after going on national television repeatedly and claiming that this was just the latest episode in “white hate and oppression”—after all that, continues to maintain that what he claimed is true.

And now the Cook County State Prosecutor, Kim Foxx—against overwhelming evidence, confessions by the two brothers, and more than enough to put Smollett away for years—has dropped the case, declaring that Smollett’s sixteen hours of “community service”—stuffing envelopes with Jesse Jackson (done some time ago)—and forfeiting $10,000 in bail was sufficient to completely settle up everything. Case closed.

Ah, but you see, Foxx is closely plugged in to the Obamas, specifically Michelle Obama (who may well have interceded indirectly on Smollett’s behalf), and Smollett continues to enjoy support from highly-placed persons like Democratic presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris of California, plus various Hollywood leftist elites.

Not to mention that Smollett is a millionaire in his own right; while forfeiting $10,000 might be a crushing blow for any of us “deplorables,” it’s only a drop in the bucket for Smollett (who could also count on his wealthy Hollywood friends if need be).

Lord John Acton famously wrote in 1887 that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The Jussie Smolletts of this world, and those like him and his friends and connections, form a new powerful untouchable class, a new elite more authoritarian and ruthless than anything the old pre-revolutionary aristocrats ever dreamed of. And it is far more corrupt.

Smollett is a part of the highest realm and most protected class of that new elite: he is both black and gay. In other words, when it comes to the advancing the leftist template of who are the favored elect, Smollett hits all the right buttons.

Talk about “privilege”! Talk about “equal justice”! 

This is symbolic of the new narrative, the new social order dreamed of and put into place by the fanatical social justice warriors of the left.

It has nothing to do with real distributive justice. It mocks and degrades such a concept.

Its advocates talk incessantly of “equality” and “democracy,” but push a totalitarian straight-jacket social order that is strangling free speech, corrupting all our fundamental institutions, and perverting our very language.

This frenzied ideology is spewed forth by unelected, condescending elites, in academia, in Hollywood, along the Potomac, and in board rooms on Wall Street. It is globalist and bows down in fearful homage to a George Soros, while refusing indignantly to stand for the National Anthem.

Patrick Buchanan, in a series of fundamental books, sketched the existence of this managerial and administrative elite, this Deep State, and their stranglehold on our country back a few years ago; most recently Tucker Carlson, in his eye-opening, Ship of Fools, did the same thing.

Jussie Smollett is their latest “golden boy.” But the outrageously “unequal” treatment he has received even shocked some Leftists who, perhaps, haven’t moved along fast enough to suit the advance Einsatzgruppen units of this madness.

Think about it.

Perhaps, just perhaps I should declare myself to be black (maybe I can find some small percentage  of African-American blood in my nine generations on North Carolina soil—I’ll bet I could do better than Elizabeth Warren and her native Americans!), then perhaps I’d declare I am a transgender person.  Let’s see, I could then walk into a nearby Walmart and maybe spot an older man with a MAGA hat on—he’d have to be white, of course—and loudly accuse him of a “racist attack” (well, at least verbally) on me.

What do you want to bet that the local NBC affiliate hereabouts, WRAL-TV, would give me a sympathetic interview?  What do you bet that the various nutty “anti-racist” and “anti-fascist” groups–“SmashingRacism,” Democratic Socialists of North Carolina, Workers’ World Party—would rally to my side and organize demonstrations on my behalf and against the “implicit racism” of Walmart for allowing that MAGA hat-wearing oppressor to even enter their store?

Maybe I would be interviewed by NBC’s Today program, or, what joy, by Chris Cuomo on CNN? The national outcry would resound….Maybe I’d get invited to meet that ultimate nut case (and notoriously bad) actor Jim Carrey!

Of course, that would be unreal given my history. But is not this the praxis that the vast Army of the Night, our social justice warriors, have employed in so many cases across the land?

Those social justice warriors demand “democracy” and “equality,” and in the name of those vacuous concepts they employ accusations of “racism” and “sexism”—those watchwords of the lunatic left in their continuing revolutionary quest—against the rest of us. In effect, those terms are mere linguistic cudgels used to shut us up, to humiliate us, to suppress us and our views.  In the end, it is power, power over us, power to remake and reconstruct Western society, power to undue two millennia of history and culture, which is the goal.

And that demonic vision possesses a million times more terror and horror in it than Arthur Koestler’s stark dystopian novel about Communist tyranny, Darkness At Noon, ever could evoke.

Jussie Smollett has played his part in this continuing shadow charade—but he may have gone a bit too far, at least for the moment.

But for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, the writing is on the wall all the same.

What we will do to counteract it? Ballots or bullets? Is there another choice?

March 25, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

What Does the Mueller Report REALLY Mean?

The Frenzied Investigations WILL Continue

Friends,

As the old saying goes: “Who are you gonna believe, us or your lying eyes?”  For two years, through 500 called witnesses, over 2800 subpoenas, millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent, a 24/7 drum beat on almost all media, lives ruined financially by spurious court action, thousands upon thousands of assurances that Donald Trump was a “Russian plant” or at the very least “involved in a conspiracy with Vladimir Putin” that managed to “steal” the 2016 presidential election from the divinely-ordained-to-win candidate Hillary Clinton—with all that, we now confirm that this process has been part of  a gigantic attempted silent coup against a sitting president, by unhinged lunatics who simply wanted us not to believe our “lying eyes.”

That process, even with zealous Democrat lawyers employed by the Mueller Commission, came up a virtual dud: no collusion at all with anyone in the Trump campaign, nothing that rises to actionable status on obstruction.

Of course, such conclusions are totally unsatisfactory to those who have invested the past two years assuring us the exact opposite—who have assured us that they have “seen” proof of collusion (e.g., Congressmen Schiff and Swalwell) or that we “know for a fact” that Donald Trump is a Russian agent (e.g., MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, etc.). And the very reason that they are demanding now to see every jot and tittle in the Mueller Report, all the background material, everything, is simple enough: maybe, they think, if they go back and comb through all the “evidence” just one more time, something, anything, might jump out on which they can hang their continuing attacks on the president.

These fanatics spent the past two years solemnly telling us that “our democracy was in peril.” In fact, it was—and is. But not due to President Trump, but because one of America’s two major political parties was literally possessed by an uncontrollably demonic desire to overturn a national election and would do anything, including fabricating fake intelligence, subverting and criminally abusing our intelligence agencies, misusing Congress’s investigatory powers, and employing the “presstitutes” in the media, to achieve that result.

Many of you are old enough to remember the 1973 blockbuster film, The Exorcist, roughly based on a real case of diabolical possession that occurred in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, back in 1949. In a remarkable display, for the past two years we have witnessed, as it were, an entire and not insignificant portion of our nation “possessed”–transfixed like the subject of William Blatty’s screen play—or maybe, more ominously, like the followers of Jim Jones and his suicidal Peoples’ Temple (and we know how that ended).

That is the truly frightening aspect of what we’ve been passing through…. Millions continue to believe, cult-like, that there is something “there,” when we have known all along that there is no “there,” there.

If anything demonstrates beyond rational debate the existence of a veritable and poisonous Deep State—what the late Dr. Sam Francis termed the Managerial State—these past twenty-four months have done so abundantly.

The question now is this: will those, eyes glazed over and minds numbed, wallowing in their cult-like Trump Derangement Syndrome, ever get over it, recover from its infectious and deadening poison? 

Probably not. 

For the vicious manifestation we have witnessed for the past two years is the result of years of conditioning by our ideologically-corrupted educational system and colleges, by our media, and through our entertainment system. And by a debased political class and the managerial elites who have considered themselves to be literally above the laws of the land…and certainly above all of us “deplorables” and Hoi Polloi who live in “fly over” country.

You see, their understanding of “democracy” has no room for us in it.  In the name of those magic talismans—in the name of “democracy” and “equality”—so urgently demanded at home and so vigorously pushed upon the rest of the world, the reality is an all-powerful hegemon, a virtual totalitarianism, a new type of slavery in which most of us are the slaves and our masters are those mostly unelected elites and their pliant politicians who control our destiny.

Such ingrates we are not to appreciate the benefits of this arrangement!

Remember Napoleon, the top pig in Orwell’s dystopian novel, Animal Farm, who famously said: “All animals are equal (but some animals are more equal than others”? It’s enough to make him blush with envy. 

Today I pass on a fascinating essay, heavily researched and revelatory. In a sense it boils down into a few thousand words what various authors have done in book-length accounts (e.g. Greg Jarrett, The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump).

It’s by investigative journalist Paul Sperry. Copy it and send it to your friends, and, if you dare, to those trance-possessed Never Trumpers you may still know….

TRUMP-RUSSIA 2.00: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on “Collusion”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/03/11/trump-russia_20_dossier-tied_firm_sending_dc_journalists_daily_collusion_briefings.html

By Paul Sperry, REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS,  March 20, 2019

Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.

The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while influencing related investigations and reports from Congress.

The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.

TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.

The project’s work has been largely shrouded in mystery. But a months-long examination by RealClearInvestigations, drawn from documents and more than a dozen interviews, found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia collusion theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin.

The group also feeds information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then tells reporters that authorities are investigating those leads. The tactic adds credibility to TDIP’s pitches, luring big media outlets to bite on stories. It mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media to bolster their wiretap requests.

Five days a week, TDIP emails a newsletter to influential Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading “TDIP Research” – which summarizes the latest “collusion” news, and offers “points of interest” to inspire fresh stories regarding President Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.

Recipients of the TDIP reports include staffers at the New York Times and Washington Post and investigative reporters at BuzzFeed, ProPublica and McClatchy [newspapers], as well as news producers at CNN and MSNBC, according to a source familiar with the project's email distribution list. Democratic aides on Capitol Hill also subscribe to the newsletter.

The briefings typically run several pages and include an “Executive Summary” and links to court documents and congressional testimony, letters and memos, as well as new articles and videos.

The Steele dossier and impeachment are common themes in the reports, which generally spin news events against Trump, copies of the newsletter obtained by RCI show. A March 13 TDIP bulletin, for instance, highlighted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s sentencing without informing readers that Special Counsel Robert Mueller closed the case without any collusion accusation against Manafort, who was punished for personal financial crimes.

A Feb. 12 briefing led with an NBC News exclusive report on the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s two-year Russia probe. But it misstated what the news was — that both Democrats and Republicans agreed with the conclusion that there was "no factual evidence of collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia – claiming instead that Democrats “rejected” the conclusion.

“What’s significant about them is they're totally one-sided,” said a veteran reporter with a major newspaper who is plugged into the national security beat in Washington and insisted on anonymity. “It’s really just another way of adding fuel to the fire of the whole Russia collusion thing."

Jones' project doesn’t just spin the news. Its more ambitious goal is to make news by essentially continuing the Clinton-funded investigation into alleged Trump/Russia ties that began in 2016, and then sharing findings with news outlets, congressional investigators and federal agents.

Jones has hired Fusion GPS, the same Washington firm co-founded by former journalist-turned-opposition-researcher Simpson that was paid more than $1 million by lawyers for the Hillary Clinton campaign to collect information damaging to Trump during the 2016 election.

Jones is also paying Steele, another anti-Trump partisan, to continue to dig up dirt on the president. Fusion GPS paid the former British intelligence officer $168,000 to produce a series of anonymously sourced memos for Clinton accusing the Trump campaign of hatching an espionage plot with the Kremlin to hack Clinton campaign emails and steal the election. The memos also claimed that the Kremlin held compromising material on Trump, including video of him carousing with prostitutes in Moscow. Three years of multiple federal investigations have failed to verify the accusations, which were nonetheless used by the FBI to obtain a secret court-approved wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In a letter last year, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that the anti-Trump trio was responsible for spreading “inaccurate” information about the Russia investigation and the Trump campaign. “Mr. Jones stated he planned to push the information he obtained from Fusion and Steele to policymakers on Capitol Hill, the press and the FBI,” Grassley wrote Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, referring to an FBI interview with Jones. 

Simpson and Steele have a history of feeding the FBI and Congress unsubstantiated allegations and rumors, sending investigators down rabbit holes. They have also planted several anti-Trump stories in the media that have proved unverifiable, unfounded, or just plain false.

These include a McClatchy newspapers story asserting that "NRA attorney Cleta Mitchell" warned during the 2016 campaign that Russians had infiltrated the NRA and were using it to launder illegal donations to Trump. Mitchell called the article a "complete fabrication," noting that she hadn’t worked for the NRA in a decade and had no contact with it in 2016. She claims Simpson personally shopped the bogus story to McClatchy. Her allegation was bolstered by senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who revealed in recently released closed-door congressional testimony that Simpson fed him the same rumor after the election and asked him to pass it on to his colleagues at the FBI.

Simpson also appears to have been the source behind another discredited McClatchy story about Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveling to Prague during the campaign to hatch a plot with Kremlin officials to hack Clinton campaign emails.

This account first appeared in the Steele dossier. But after Cohen offered his passport to disprove it, a new twist emerged: allegations that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had evidence that Cohen’s phone pinged a cell tower near Prague at the time. After McClatchy bit on the sketchy tip — which was the lead item in TDIP’s Jan. 2, 2019 newsletter to the Washington press corps – Mueller’s office took the highly unusual step of issuing a statement warning other reporters off the story, an important detail TDIP ignored.

Although the Cohen-in-Prague story is fiction, TDIP keeps pushing it through its bulletins. Neither Simpson nor the two McClatchy reporters who wrote about it responded to requests seeking comment.

Jones has a long history himself of promoting conspiracy theories. He has personally placed anti-Trump news stories with media outlets after feeding related tips to the FBI.

For instance, he was a key source behind the now widely disputed story that Trump and the Russians were secretly communicating through a “back channel" system they allegedly set up between a Trump Tower server and Alfa-Bank, one of Russia's largest banks, which operates branches in New York, according to published reports. The foundation for the rumor was first laid by the Steele dossier, which claimed the bank, which it misspelled “Alpha,” had “illicit” ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Shortly thereafter, in the heat of the 2016 campaign, an attorney for the Clinton campaign law firm that commissioned the dossier research, Perkins Coie, passed the rumor about the server to the FBI, as well as to several media outlets.

“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Hillary Clinton tweeted at the time.

The allegation received wide coverage in the press — until, that is, the New York Times reported that the FBI had checked it out and found it to be false. Alfa-Bank executives are now suing Simpson, who hired Steele, for libel.

Undaunted, Jones hired a larger team of computer scientists after the election to analyze web traffic between the Alfa-Bank and Trump Organization servers. And in a March 2017 meeting, he shared his expert team's findings with his former colleagues at the FBI. That same month, agents visited the offices of the Pennsylvania company that housed the Trump server. But their second investigation proved to be another dead end. It turned out that the sinister communications Jones claimed were flowing between the Trump server and Alfa-Bank were innocuous marketing emails. In other words, spam.

Jones has also communicated with investigators for Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, hoping to spread more Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

In a series of recently leaked March 2017 texts to a lawyer communicating with Warner, Jones boasted that he had planted several anti-Trump news articles, including a Reuters story about Russians allegedly investing more than $100 million in Trump properties in Florida. He took credit for another article published by McClatchy alleging that the FBI was investigating whether Russians had used social media bots to spread stories by Breitbart News and other conservative outlets.

“Our team helped with this,” Jones wrote in one text that linked to the Reuters piece. He also texted a link to the McClatchy article. Other text messages revealed that Jones was in close contact with Sen. Warner himself and acted as the point of contact for Steele with Warner and his staff.

“Jones has been chumming out his own share of garbage stories,” a senior Republican legislative assistant said.

A former Trump campaign adviser blames Jones’ “smear campaign” for his being targeted for investigation by congressional committees and racking up some $125,000 in lawyer's bills.

“Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable — and of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what Fusion GPS and British and Russian spies have found," former Trump aide Michael Caputo said. "Got to keep that Russia story in the news.”

Jones did not return phone calls or messages sent to his company’s email address seeking comment. But supporters, including U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and the late John McCain [!!!], said they have known him to be thoughtful, careful and detail-oriented. Those views appear to be based on his less political work. His defenders often describe him as a human-rights advocate because of his years-long investigation into claims of post-9/11 CIA “torture” of terrorist detainees, and the 6,700-page report he wrote of his findings (still classified) as a staff analyst for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report is said to fault both the Bush and Obama administrations for aiding the CIA in covering up human-rights abuses.

Even as it pushes the collusion theories, TDIP partnered with a cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge, funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, which used social media strategies supposedly employed by Russians to influence the 2016 campaign to defeat GOP candidates for Congress during last year’s midterm elections.

New Knowledge publicly stated it was tracking Russian social-media disinformation networks during the 2018 campaign. In fact, it was secretly involved in its own disinformation campaign to influence the outcome of the 2017 Alabama Senate special election. New Knowledge operatives created thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts programmed to follow GOP candidate Roy Moore to make it appear he was backed by Moscow.

The scheme worked: a number of media stories reported Moore was being supported by Russians. Only, it was a high-tech frame-up. Most elections experts have concluded this fake Russian disinformation campaign did not affect the outcome of the race, which Moore lost largely because of allegations of sexual misconduct.

Hoffman maintains he didn’t know what his money was being used for. In 2016, the Silicon Valley billionaire gave the Hillary Victory Fund more than $500,000, FEC records show.

After media reports exposed the false-flag operation several weeks later, a website set up by TDIP and New Knowledge during the 2018 campaign was taken down. Screenshots of the site – www.Disinfo2018.com – clearly show their relationship, however. The top of the “About Us” page stated, “Midterms Disinformation Dashboard: New Knowledge & TDIP.” About halfway down, the page elaborated: "New Knowledge and The Democracy Integrity Project have created a dashboard containing up-to-the-hour summary statistics from these [supposedly Russian Facebook and Twitter] accounts, so that citizens can be aware of the foreign propaganda efforts aimed at American voters as we approach our midterm elections in November.”

Around the same time, a TDIP daily e-bulletin sang the praises of its partner New Knowledge, noting it had prior experience studying Russian influence operations and linking to a flattering piece about one of its founders.

Jones had personally promoted New Knowledge on his Twitter account. He also worked with the outfit’s director of research, Renee DiResta -- an active Democrat who gave the maximum individual donation amount to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and whose bio says she advised the Obama administration on “hate speech” and “right-wing extremism” and that she has served as a "technical adviser" to Warner, who helped the Senate’s investigation into the 2016 election. (In spite of her bias, DiResta actively polices social media content and "flags" accounts, as well as followers and messages, she suspects are tied to fake Russian "bots" for Facebook and Twitter, which in turn opt to ban the accounts based on her information, according to testimony she gave last year to Warner's committee.)

Jones previously enlisted DiResta, who did not respond to interview requests, along with other cyber experts to examine the Alfa-Bank/Trump Tower data, a project that was coordinated with Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel. Jones used to work for the Democratic side of the committee.

DiResta and New Knowledge also collaborated with Jones on a report on Russian disinformation that was released by the committee in December. The report claimed that a Russian social-media plot allegedly to help elect Trump in 2016 was worse than thought, and it warned that the political trolling never stopped — and may have even influenced Senate voting on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The report even posited that “Russian influence networks” have conspired with “domestic right-wing disinformation networks,” allegedly including Fox News, Breitbart News, The Hill and the Daily Caller, to suppress Democrat voter turnout to help Trump and the GOP candidates he endorses.

Upon its release, Warner billed the report as a “bombshell.” It was widely covered by CNN and other major media. A former colleague of Simpson’s said that Jones “brokered the New Knowledge work" with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Dan Jones does more than just send out these briefs,” said the well-placed source. “He’s working with the FBI and [the] Senate Intelligence [Committee]."

The Democracy Integrity Project can be traced back at least to December 2016, when Simpson and Jones made trips to California to raise money for their joint anti-Trump project. “They started soliciting donors and assembling their team for a post-election operation in December 2016,” said a former Simpson colleague who requested anonymity.

Jones incorporated TDIP just 11 days after Trump took office in January 2017, and registered it as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit several months later. It enjoys that tax-exempt status because the group claimed in its mission statement to the IRS to be “non-partisan” and concerned only with protecting the integrity of elections from interference from foreign adversaries like Russia.

By filing under that tax-exempt status, the organization does not have to publicly disclose its donors. Its latest IRS filing shows reported income of more than $9 million and assets of more than $1.6 million.

In addition to George Soros, who has donated at least $1 million, liberal Hollywood activist Reiner also backs the project, according to the former Simpson colleague with direct knowledge of discussions with Reiner. In 2017, Reiner started the Committee to Investigate Russia with James Clapper and several other former Obama officials. Reiner has called for Trump’s impeachment, arguing repeatedly that the president has committed “treason against the United States.”

Reiner’s office declined a request to discuss the extent of his financial contributions to the project. “Sorry, Rob is not available,” his executive assistant, Tricia Owen, told RCI.

A New York-based nonprofit linked to the family of billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer has donated $2.1 million to TDIP, according to the Daily Caller. Steyer, who has hired Fusion GPS to conduct investigations in the past, has also demanded Trump’s ouster over Russia.

Soros and the Steyer-tied benefactor accounted for roughly a third of TDIP’s total 2017 revenues.

And social media titans including the founders of Facebook, Twitter and Google are indirectly funding the project through donations funneled through a Silicon Valley foundation, the Daily Caller also reported. Advance Democracy Inc., a sister organization founded by Jones sharing the same Northern Virginia address as TDIP, received at least $500,000 from the foundation last year.

In tax filings, Jones lists a McLean, Va., address for TDIP, but a visit to the location reveals the office is occupied by a small independent accounting firm that says it merely handles TDIP’s books. Jones also keeps an office near FBI headquarters in Washington.

The 43-year-old Jones is an enigmatic figure who shies away from TV appearances and plays a largely behind-the-scenes role shaping investigations and influencing Washington politics.

After teaching and recruiting for Clinton’s AmeriCorps program from 1998 to 2001, he worked for the FBI for four years as an analyst providing “strategic guidance and tactical support to complex international investigations,” according to a December 2015 email sent to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta by former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle.

In 2007, Jones joined the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he served as a senior analyst and “led many of the committee’s investigations,” he boasted in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed he wrote with former Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller.

While on the Senate intelligence panel, Jones worked directly for Sen. Feinstein, who chaired the committee at the time and is still a member. Jones and Feinstein apparently developed a close bond over the nine years he worked there. In a rare honor, Feinstein took to the Senate floor to praise her aide the day before he stepped down from the committee in December 2015, citing his “indefatigable work.”

Now the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein last year unilaterally released a 300-page transcript of the closed-door testimony of Jones’ partner, Simpson of Fusion GPS, over the objections of then-chairman Grassley, who accused Feinstein of violating committee precedent and trying to undermine the panel’s investigation of the dossier. Thanks to Feinstein’s leak, which is something Simpson requested, the testimony offered by future witnesses such as Steele may be forever tainted, Republican staffers say.

TDIP sent out a briefing at the time that was quick to note that in his testimony, “Simpson defended the dossier as sound research.”

Feinstein did not notify Grassley before giving the transcript to the media; the chairman was blindsided. In an indication that she coordinated the leak with Simpson, Feinstein redacted the names of all Fusion GPS employees mentioned in the transcript, even though such information is not classified and can be found online. She also did not disclose to her Republican counterparts on the committee that a former top staffer of hers — Jones — was working with Simpson at the time.

Though Jones is reported to have begun his opposition research project after Trump took office, Senate Judiciary Committee investigators suspect he may also have been involved in the Clinton campaign’s 2016 efforts to create the dossier and push its allegations to the FBI and media. The FBI used the unverified political document as a basis for securing secret wiretaps on Trump campaign figures.

Records show Jones founded a private investigative firm, Penn Quarter Group, in April 2016 – the same month the Clinton campaign hired Fusion. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Jones worked for Democratic lobbyist Daschle, who endorsed Clinton and was close to Podesta. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Jones for all communications he and his organizations have had with federal officials at the FBI and the departments of Justice and State from March 2016 to January 2017. Jones was also being eyed as a witness by House investigators before Democrats recently took control of the House.

In early 2017, as he launched TDIP to continue investigating Trump, Jones recruited a former Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Dafna H. Rand, to serve on his board, according to incorporation papers. A Democrat, Rand had also worked as a top aide to former Secretary Clinton at the State Department. Before that, she served in the White House as a national security adviser to President Obama.

Rand is now vice president of Mercy Corps, a humanitarian relief organization that assists Syrian, Yemeni and other Muslim refugees, and lobbies against Trump’s recent restrictions on immigration from those countries. Rand did not respond to requests for an interview.

Another TDIP board member, Adam Kaufmann, is a former New York prosecutor who has worked with Fusion GPS. Also a Democrat, Kaufmann was recently quoted in the New York Times alleging that Trump's financial dealings were criminal.

While Kaufmann did not respond to requests for comment, RealClearInvestigations has learned that he worked on the same FIFA corruption case as dossier author Steele, who in 2010 provided information to the FBI that led to the indictment of officials for the world soccer governing body.

FBI veterans say it is strange for an ex-FBI employee such as Jones to privately run a parallel counterintelligence investigation on any subject, least of all on the president.

“It’s not common that a former FBI analyst and congressional investigator would be doing a private, parallel investigation, but he’s apparently an enterprising guy,” said former FBI agent and lawyer Mark Wauck, who suspects Jones is motivated by partisanship.

Longtime observers of the Washington political scene are curious how Jones has for years been able to escape serious scrutiny while running a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators. With access to a multimillion-dollar war chest, they say he could continue to push the anti-Trump Russia collusion narrative long past the Mueller report or even the 2020 presidential election.

Caputo, the former Trump aide, wants an investigation of Jones: “I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI to the Southern District of New York to the [Special Counsel’s Office] to the Department of Justice, to Congress.”