Opinion
By Jeff Childers
04-25-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your special-edition roundup today includes: new multiplier orders; the next lawfare lawsuit drops in Arizona and this one doesn’t even include President Trump; totally organic not fake campus protests break out simultaneously all over the country; NPR boss’s shady past suggests revolutionary things to come; and more Biden gaffes are nothing to worry about.
🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞
🪖🪖 MULTIPLIER ORDERS: Today’s emergency multiplier orders begin with a news story. The newfangled, 21st-century, two-tiered, weaponized lawfare against President Trump metastasized again yesterday into the another criminal prosecution against Trump-supporting lawyers, which this time doesn’t include or even need the former president. Phoenix local affiliate ABC-15 ran the story yesterday headlined, “11 Arizona Republicans, 7 others indicted in 2020 Trump ‘fake electors’ scheme.”
It’s eighteen more Republican political indictments. Short-sighted, oxygen-deprived maskaholic liberals unable to imagine how these lawfare tactics could ever be used against them expressed ecstasy over the news:
As if the Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada prosecutions weren’t already enough, yesterday Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) indicted seven attorneys and aides who worked on Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, plus 11 local Arizona Republicans on felony charges for fraud and forgery (and conspiring to do those things).
“I will not allow American democracy to be undermined,” the corpselike Mayes bravely announced on Twitter yesterday afternoon.
“The scheme, had it succeeded, would have deprived Arizona’s voters of their right to have their votes counted for their chosen president. It would effectively have made their votes meaningless,” Mayes intoned in a skull-penetratingly high octave.
Rather than charge the Republican citizens with any elections crimes, Mayes indicted them with broad common law charges stretched to the legal breaking point. For instance, the heart of the complaint is a common-law claim that the charged citizen conspirators attempted to defraud people by “depriving Arizona voters of their right to vote.”
Specifically, what happened was the Arizona GOP believed widespread cheating occurred during the 2020 election. I realize that is probably hard to believe, since the same people who lie about everything else insist Arizona’s was the fairest election ever held.
Anyway, national Republicans told the state GOP to stand by, they were filing elections lawsuits, but the problem was Arizona’s Secretary of State was already sending in the democrat electors’ votes.
So in Arizona (along with several other states where cheating was rampant), the GOP hastily assembled an alternative slate of Republican electors, so they would be ready to go in case one of the legal challenges succeeded. But DA Mayes disbelieves the electors were actually waiting for the legal green light.
DA Mayes accused the defendants of a switcheroo — trying to trick, or defraud, the Congress into mistaking the Republican alternate electors for the proper ones, and trying to trick Congress into thinking the official electors nominated by the Secretary of State were the fakes instead.
The Arizona indictment stretches the definition of fraud further than pulled taffy. “Defendants,” the indictment explained, “deceived the public by arguing the scheme to have Republican electors vote for Trump-Pence in Arizona and six other states was legal.” (Apparently, defending yourself by arguing whatever you did was legal is now fraud.) Another example of “fraud” was the form that the Republican alternative electors had to fill out, to be ready in case of a favorable court ruling. The form language stated they were “duly elected and qualified.”
Exactly whom the unused alternative electors form actually defrauded remains an unanswered question. We are now so far past the legal requirements for pleading fraud that courts have collapsed the whole claim into a single element: intent. These days, if a prosecutor or plaintiff merely alleges somebody had a fraudulent intent, then virtually any basket of facts, however thinly-woven or leaky, seems enough to hold the fraud claim together in certain states.
It’s getting risky for lawyers to represent conservatives in elections. Since 2020, I’ve litigated five local election-related cases representing conservative candidates (not the Trump election; it was after that). In three cases I won, I was personally sued for bringing or winning the case. I am blessed to work in Florida and ultimately prevailed in all three lawsuits. But in one case, where my unlikely co-defendant is Governor DeSantis, we had to win all the way up through the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Now the democrats are seeking an appeal at the Supreme Court.
Toting the numbers, I’ve been sued personally as the lawyer by democrats in three elections cases out of five. I can’t deny it makes me think harder about taking any future elections cases. It’s like a bad BOGO; buy one election case, and get one expensive civil lawsuit for free.
It’s a problem. Every good lawyer who might consider taking a case later this year must carefully consider the risk of eventually becoming a criminal defendant under some warped DA’s thinly-sliced legal theory, not to mention the possibility of being fired from your firm, disbarred, and blacklisted.
Which is exactly what happened to Trump lawyer John Eastman, one of the 18 new Arizona defendants, and one of the Fulton County (Fani Willis) defendants. John was recently recommended for disbarment in California. He was forced to resign from his professorship at Chapman Law School, and his visiting professorship at the University of Colorado. He’s been de-banked twice, and is described by other lawyers as existing in “a state of felonious infamy.”
Let’s multiply him.
🪖🪖 Ready for orders? Today we multiply John Eastman, one of the 18 Arizona defendants and perhaps the most-persecuted conservative lawyer alive. For veterans, here’s the link, donate any affordable amount ending in $2: GiveSendGo for John Eastman.
For recruits — which includes everyone else — here’s how it works. None of us can afford to make large donations, even though we’d love to. But working together, we can move the needle and rapidly support people who desperately need support. Doing so also directs a booming message toward the reprehensible halfwits who think persecuting conservative counsel is a good idea.
The multiplier works because everybody pitches in. It only takes a second of minimal effort, and then you’ll feel terrific afterwards. It’s like the opposite of a vaccine injection. You can’t buy this great of a feeling anywhere else.
Just click the link and donate any easily-affordable amount ending in a $2 (so that John can tell it came from our multiplier). If you can only afford $12, give that. (If you can’t afford $12, sit this one out). If you can comfortably afford $22, or $42, or $102, give one of those amounts.
If you are trying to stay off the grid, you can also mail John a check: PO Box 32654, Santa Fe, NM 87594.
Here’s the link again: GiveSendGo for John Eastman. Do it now! Celebrate it in the comments. And then get right back and read the rest of today’s terrific, thought-provoking post.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 Things this week seem especially chaotic and out-of-control, but things may not be what they seem. The New York Times ran a swelling story yesterday headlined, “Campus Protests Over Gaza Intensify Amid Pushback by Universities and Police.” You’ve probably been waiting impatiently for this development; and now, your waiting is over, the summer of protest finally begins! At least the kids are doing something, you know, productive.
And it’s spreading faster than gonorrhea during Spring Break. “Patient Zero” was Columbia University, which was taken in the rear, by surprise, and has now been occupied so fully and so intensely that the school recently canceled all in-person classes through year’s end.
Columbia’s massive pro-Palestine protest is well-organized and well-funded. At Columbia, and at most of the subsequent occupations, the protestors arrived on campus outfitted with expensive tents and camping supplies, since they clearly intend to hang for around a long time:
It’s so bad Speaker Mike Johnson — on his reputation-rehabilitation tour— visited Columbia yesterday arguing persuasively the school’s President should be fired for incompetence if she can’t get her campus under control.
This protest season sort of blends Occupy Wall Street with Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP, and a stationary version of George Floyd’s “covid-immune” parades and protests during 2020’s Summer of Love. Masks appear optional this time and the dress code is grunge chic. Riots TBA.
Not all states are rolling over like pleasant pussycats this time. Some learned their lessons last election season. Texas quickly cleared University of Austin’s campus, with jackbooted anti-protestors cracking a few skulls full of mush, and de-squatting the tent-bearing occupiers who were dashing toward the school’s commons area. At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the police moved in just before lunchtime yesterday to shove off an expanding encampment of about 100 protesters preparing to squat amidst the formerly-peaceful center of campus, which USC apparently required for other, non-protest purposes.
Whomever is behind this national rampage hasn’t yet tried setting up any tent cities in Florida, and I suspect it won’t go well for them if they are dumb enough to try it.
But in all the predictable locales, stinky protestor tent cities are cropping up like diseased daisies after a nuclear meltdown. At Harvard, woke school administrators pretended to stop it, but quickly raised their flabby, pale, limp arms in useless surrender—what, after all, can they really do at the end of the long protest day?
Administrators at Harvard University sought to head off a similar scene by shuttering Harvard Yard, a central gathering place on campus. But students flooded the yard’s grassy patches anyway on Wednesday, rapidly erecting tents as part of an “emergency rally” against the suspension a pro-Palestinian campus group.
At Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, slow-witted administrators shuttered the campus through the weekend after protesters occupied — or “chazzed” — two school buildings. The Ukrainians could learn a thing or two from them. At Brown University in Rhode Island, scores of sweaty student glampers pitched their brand-new tents on the campus’s Main Green.
Prepare yourselves for the dark underbelly of ‘Summer Camp.’
🔥🔥 At the risk of offending folks who may think they sympathize with this week’s campus campers and their silly protest tents, hummus s’mores, and schwarma roasts, I would like to offer an alternative working hypothesis. To set the table, allow me to show you just how far we’ve come: you can now rent protestors right on the Internet. Behold “Crowds on Demand:”
It’s not bad work, if you can get it. How else do you expect kids with degrees in feminist themes in filmmaking to pay off their student loans? The team at Crowds on Demand promises all you need is money and a goal, and they’re ready to meet all your astroturf needs. They’ll even provide the ideas:
Crowds on Demand “delivers phenomenal experiences” including “even the most logistically challenging events.” Logistically challenging events? You mean, like CHAZ-style tent cities-on-the-green?
I’m not saying this was procured by Crowds on Demand. Who knows? The point is, if you can now one-click protests on the Internet, just imagine the kinds of resources to which the intelligence agencies and the political parties have access.
My best guess would be businesses like Crowds On Demand were formed by veterans of shady government-adjacent enterprises doing the exact same thing.
And don’t forget our foreign enemies.
🔥🔥 Which brings us to Chris Rufo’s latest article, published in City Journal yesterday under the headline “Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution.” The sub-headline added, “The NPR boss is a symbol of regime change—foreign and domestic.” Ms. Maher is in her late thirties and childless. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The problem here is much worse.
Ms. Maher has occupied the news this week for other reasons than her unsurprising infecundity. Yesterday, the Hill ran a story about her headlined, “NPR chief knocks ‘bad faith distortion’ of social media posts.” Maher took over as CEO at NPR last month, arriving at the public broadcaster from her last narrative-shaping job: heading Wikimedia.
Katie Maher’s public interest arose after a longtime NPR editor, Uri Berliner, himself a left-leaning liberal, published an op-ed criticizing NPR’s wildly out-of-control liberal bias. As you might expect, gloating conservative “I told you so’s” and angry liberal hand-wringing followed.
Predictably, Berliner was forced out of NPR last week. But the attention drawn by his op-ed shined the krieglights on NPR’s newest CEO, Katherine Maher. Her vast archive of social media posts framed her profound familiarity with woke left buzzwords and phrases like, “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” and “folx,” whatever those things are. Katie enthusiastically supported Black Lives Matter from day one (and still does). She has compared driving cars with smoking cigarettes. And she frets deeply over “toxic masculinity.”
And, she calls Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.”
Katherine’s crazy woke vocabulary became a minor scandal, as NPR pitifully tried to defend itself from Uri Berliner’s claims that it went too woke. But as Rufo kept picking at the scabs of Katherine’s man-hating feminist claptrap, he found another political layer. A deeper, darker layer. A very scary, troubling layer.
It now looks like Katherine Maher is nothing less than a deep state regime-toppling tool on the order of regime-change-queen Victoria Nuland, except younger and under deeper cover. Here’s part of how Rufo described what his research uncovered, which was a pretty bizarre resume for the CEO of what should be a public news agency. Maher’s career involved world travel while working for political nonprofits, and she managed to hit all the color-revolutionary hotspots like they were nightclubs along a bar-crawling gal’s trip:
That’s not all. It’s no wonder she’s had no time for romance. Katie has been a very busy girl. Rufo found her resume jam-packed with surprising security-state connections, connections dripping with portent, because when did the CEO of a government-funded public news agency start needing intelligence agency background?
As ominously as a surprise visit from the State Department’s Top Color Revolution Engineer Victoria Nuland, Katie Maher’s repatriation from the Middle East and her nesting at Wikipedia and NPR is a very bad sign for the United States:
One possibly for what she’s doing at NPR might be described in one of her now-deleted blog posts from 2010, in which a very young and very idealistic Katie Maher mused about the role of media in terms of political control. In the scrubbed article, she described how gaining control of African media — in that case, radio — could ultimately provide “control over the state.”
According to Katie, one important key to state control is a “closed society.” It is unsurprising therefore that Maher is also an active and enthusiastic proponent of clamping down on “disinformation.”
🔥🔥 What I humbly suggest is that the highly-organized, well-funded campus protests might not actually be a totally organic movement of compassionate students hoping for change. Or at least, the change they are hoping for might not actually be improving the plight of the Gazans.
Instead, the organizers of this national protest movement may be hoping for change closer to home.
To me — and to Chris Rufo — it seems self-evident that the U.S. deep state is running a covert color revolution against us, the U.S. citizens. The most vexing part is that we are paying those nitwits’ salaries, directly or through government grants to the vast, countless constellation of corporate NGO’s and charitable, tax-exempt nonprofits lobbying governments ‘for change’ all over the world.
It needn’t even be the deep state. We are currently poking the eyeballs of world’s largest, most well-armed and well-funded countries. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all spring to mind. We have supported similar protests and fomented similar color revolutions in those countries, who are probably at this point feeling like payback is a moral imperative.
The most troubling thing is how difficult it is to tell whether the enemy action arises from our own intelligence agencies or from foreign ones. But either way, spy tactics only work in the dark. The best way to defang or disinfect whatever the spooks are cooking up is by shining a light on them.
In other words, before assuming these well funded, cookie-cutter campus protests are legitimate, consider first whether they might instead be fake, astroturfed, political protests-on-demand. Especially when you consider the proximate election, the stealth World War currently in progress, and the woke occupation of our intelligence services.
So what do you think? It’s a big idea. Let’s air this thing out in the comments.
🔥🔥 Oh, Joe. In case you missed it, the leader of the free world got confused and angrily shouted the teleprompter’s stage notes out loud again:
CLIP: BIDEN, reading from his teleprompter: “Four more years? Pause?” (0:11).
He’s getting worse. Can he possibly make it to November? What do you think?
Have a tremendous Thursday! Laggards, here’s your last chance, multiple John Eastman now: GiveSendGo for John Eastman. Everyone assemble for duty back here again tomorrow as we wrap up this exciting post-pandemic, pre-election week.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
