Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones’s Infowars — both have earned praise from President Trump or those close to him in the recent past — promoted a conspiracy theory all day Thursday that blamed the U.S. deep state for a suspected nerve agent attack Tuesday in Syria, and not the Assad regime. Infowars called the attack a “false flag” meant to force the United States into a war.
.. There’s plenty of evidence that Trump reads and values conspiracy-theory sites like Infowars, and Cernovich himself appears to have some readers in the Trump administration.
Terry Glavin: Enter the Freeland-Nazi conspiracy — and the amping-up of Russia’s mischief in Canada
Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s ambitious young foreign affairs minister, is secretly itching to draw Canada into a showdown with Russia because of the seething hatreds she inherited from her Ukrainian grandfather, a Nazi collaborator and war profiteer she never told us about. She’s been lying about her family’s sordid past all along, and she’s been lying to Canadians about what’s really going on in Ukraine. She’s dangerous.
.. The Monday announcement was overshadowed by the gathering pace of the Freeland conspiracy theory, however, and by Freeland’s own chilling caution that Canada should expect to be targeted by the same mischief of Russian disinformation that the Kremlin has used to target the United States and Europe.
.. You see how it works? Instead of headlines about Canada’s response to Russia’s brutal violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and the 10,000 lives lost to Vladimir Putin’s thuggish belligerence, we’re being entertained by salacious innuendo about Chrystia Freeland and encouraged to question whether it is only because of that scheming harridan’s Russophobic impetuousness that we’re being so beastly to the Russians in the first place.
.. Kremlin-friendly smear campaigns
.. a Moscow-based freelancer, John Helmer. Back in the 1980s, in Washington, D.C., Helmer found himself at the centre of a maelstrom of allegations that he was a KGB asset. He left for Russia almost immediately thereafter, and has worked in Moscow ever since.
The other man is the notorious far-right Luxembourg-based Polish “analyst” Stanislas Balcerac.
My country had its own Trump. Here’s how we beat him.
Having first secured control of public broadcasting and other media outlets, Meciar was extremely effective in keeping his core group of supporters energized, but not much else. For other voters his frequent outbursts became increasingly off-putting. Even apathetic segments of the electorate were alarmed when, under Meciar’s watch, the secret service cameunder suspicion for kidnapping and nonfatally electrocuting the son of the Slovak president, Michal Kovac, who was Meciar’s political nemesis. The key witness in the case was later killed in a car bombing. These crimes were later amnestied by Meciar during his brief stint as acting president in 1998.
.. Second, Meciar’s demise was precipitated by the emergence of an effective opposition that coalesced around the questions that mattered the most: rule of law and Slovakia’s place among European democracies. Like Trump, Meciar first rose to power by sidelining rivals in his own party and staging a flurry of media stunts that left his opponents paralyzed and divided.
.. if Trumpism is to be defeated, it will require politicians on the center-right and the center-left to get organized around questions that matter — most importantly, the defense of the liberal democratic character of the U.S. government.
.. In defending himself, he tried to sell his voters a grotesque idea of an international conspiracy directed against Slovakia. His domestic critics, too, were smeared as paid agents of anti-Slovak forces abroad. That message resonated with Meciar’s core supporters, but more and more Slovaks saw that their country’s growing isolation was purely of their own government’s making.
.. Corruption, which reached gigantic proportions under Meciar, has never gone away. Meciar took pride in his crony privatization, which created what he called a “Slovak capital-owning class,” loyal to him. Today, politically connected businesses are enriched through overpriced procurement tenders or tax fraud.
.. Meciar’s infamous amnesties for what were widely believed to be acts of political violence have left a traumatic legacy too, creating an ominous sense of impunity for those in power. His years also entrenched a generation of communist-era judges, many of them in cahoots with the political class. According to a recent survey, only a third of Slovaks trust the court system.
.. nurturing the institutions of liberal democracy requires much more work than simply keeping aspiring authoritarians at bay. It requires ensuring that liberal democratic governments are seen as legitimate and effective at delivering key public goods, including justice and security.
Whistle-Blower: ‘Global Warming’ Data Manipulated Before Paris Conference
A high-level whistleblower at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has revealed that the organization published manipulated data in a major 2015 report on climate change in order to maximize impact on world leaders at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
According to a report in The Mail on Sunday, NOAA scientist Dr. John Bates has produced “irrefutable evidence” that the NOAA study denying the “pause” in global warming in the period since 1998 was based on false and misleading data.
.. “Government actions have corrupted science, which has been flooded by money to produce politically correct results,” said Dr. William Happer, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It is time for governments to finally admit the truth about global warming. Warming is not the problem. Government action is the problem,” he said.
NOAA, the world’s leading source of climate data, not only produced a severely flawed study for political motives, it also mounted a cover-up when challenged over its data.