To All,
Good Sunday morning January 8, 2023.
I hope that you are all having a great weekend.
Sorry for being a bit late today a bug got me yesterday and I needed some sleep and got almost 12 hours. That may be a new record for me.
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This day in Naval and Marine Corps History
January. 8
1863—During the Civil War, the screw steam gunboats Sagamore and Tahoma capture blockade running ships with cargo of salt and cotton in Florida.
1945—Task Group 17.21, led by Cmdr. Charles E. Loughlin coordinates a submarine attack against a Japanese convoy off northwest coast of Formosa, sinking two freighters and a tanker and damaging three other ships.
1945—During the continuing Japanese aerial kamikaze attacks on the Lingayen Gulf invasion force, escort carriers Kitkun Bay (CVE 71) and Kadashan Bay (CVE 76) are damaged, as well as USS Callaway (APA-35).
1963—Destroyer Benjamin Stoddert (DDG 22) is launched. A veteran of the Vietnam War, she is decommissioned in Dec. 1991.
1983—Fast Attack Submarine USS City of Corpus Christi (SSN 705) is commissioned.
1994—Fast Attack Submarine USS Santa Fe (SSN 763) is commissioned.
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Today in History January 8
1681 The Treaty of Radzin ends a five year war between the Turks and the allied countries of Russia and Poland.
1745 England, Austria, Saxony and the Netherlands form an alliance against Russia.
1815 A rag-tag army under Andrew Jackson defeats the British on the fields of Chalmette in the Battle of New Orleans.
1871 Prussian troops begin to bombard Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
1892 A coal mine explosion kills 100 in McAlister, Oklahoma.
1900 The Boers attack the British in Ladysmith, South Africa, but are turned back.
1908 A subway line opens linking the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
1940 Great Britain begins rationing sugar, meat and butter.
1946 President Harry S. Truman vows to stand by the Yalta accord on self-determination for the Balkans.
1954 President Dwight Eisenhower proposes stripping convicted Communists of their U.S. citizenship.
1963 President John F. Kennedy attends the unveiling of the Mona Lisa.
1975 Ella T. Grasso becomes Governor of Connecticut, the first female governor in the US who did not come into office by succeeding her husband.
1979 The United States advises the Shah to leave Iran.
1982 AT&T agrees to divest 22 subdivisions as part of an antitrust agreement.
1994 Valeri Polyakov, a Russian cosmonaut leaves earth, bound for the Mir space station; he will spend a record 437 days in space.
2002 US President George W. Bush signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act, intended to improve America's educational system.
2004 The largest passenger ship in history, the RMS Queen Mary 2, is christened by Queen Elizabeth II, granddaughter of Queen Mary.
2011 An attempted assassination of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords is part of a shooting spree in which Jared Lee Loughner kills 6 and wounds 13.
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ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED Thanks to the Bear
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
… For The List for Sunday, 8 January 2023… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 8 January 1968… A visit with the wisest of the wise… drinking buddy, Sun Tzu…
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip
Vietnam Air Losses
Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
This is a list of all Helicopter Pilots Who Died in the Vietnam War . Listed by last name and has other info https://www.vhpa.org/KIA/KIAINDEX.HTM
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Interesting Facts
Spider silk is stronger than steel.
Despite being thinner than human hair and lighter than cotton, spider silk is stronger than steel — and it isn't even close. According to Science magazine, the insect-trapping, egg-protecting material is a full five times stronger than steel of the same diameter. It's also highly elastic and can hold its strength at extreme temperatures, making it one of the most versatile substances in the world.
Only about half of all spiders spin webs, but all of them produce silk — which is as lucky for us as it is for them, considering how many uses it has. Ancient Greek soldiers used cobwebs to reduce bleeding, and it's even been used in body armor developed for the U.S. military. So the next time you get scared after seeing a spider, just think: Its silk may one day save a life.
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Thanks to Cowboy who found the url
Cashier of the year !! Clone her!!
https://twitter.com/doogernorth/status/1183088413328760832
Nice kick punch combination
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Here's a great N Korean defection story from Spot.
Cowboy
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gary Specht <Gary.A.Specht@gmail.com>
Date: January 7, 2023 at 8:34:36 PM CST
Subject: Kenneth Rowe, Who Defected From North Korea With His Jet, Dies at 90
Begin forwarded message:
Thanks to former ACC Vice Commander and Fellow Daedalian Brett Dula for this story
Kenneth Rowe
Two months after the Korean War armistice, he handed America an intelligence bonanza with his headline-making flight in a Soviet-made MIG.
By Richard Goldstein
Jan. 5, 2023, 5:53 p.m. ET
Two months after the Korean War armistice, Lt. No Kum-Sok of the North Korean Air Force broke away from his 16-plane patrol near the nation's capital, Pyongyang; streaked undetected into South Korea in his Soviet-built MIG jet fighter; and landed at a military airfield manned by the United States Air Force and airmen from allied nations.
A veteran of more than 100 combat flights, the 21-year-old pilot climbed out of his silver swept-wing plane, which was emblazoned with a red star and bristling with machine guns, as astonished airmen surrounded him. He had fulfilled his dream of fleeing Communism, and he brought a gift for the United States Air Force: — the first intact MIG to fall into its hands.
A year later, he had a new name — Kenneth Rowe — and a new country, having begun life in America as a college student.
When Mr. Rowe died at 90 on Dec. 26 at his home in Daytona Beach, Fla., he was remembered for having handed America an intelligence bonanza with his headline-making flight in a MIG-15bis, a late-model version of the fighters that dueled with American F-86 Sabre jets in the Korean War.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Bonnie Rowe.
Mr. Rowe had become a member of North Korea's Communist Party and "played the Communist zealot," as he put it, while serving in the Korean War. But he had been influenced by his anti-Communist father and his mother's Roman Catholic upbringing to yearn for life in a democracy. He had been thinking of a way to get to America since Korea was divided after World War II and the Soviet-backed Kim Il-sung imposed Communist rule over what became North Korea.
When he landed at the Kimpo airport on the morning of Sept. 21, 1953, he had seemingly pulled off a flawless escape. But disaster almost struck. As his wheels hit the runway, an F-86 that had just landed came roaring toward him from the opposite end. The two pilots brushed past each other, barely avoiding a collision.
"I unfastened my oxygen mask and breathed free air for the first time in my life," he remembered in his memoir, "A MiG-15 to Freedom" (1996), written with J. Roger Osterholm.
He parked amid a cluster of American warplanes, tore a framed photograph of Kim Il-sung from his instrument panel, jumped out of his cockpit and threw the picture to the ground.
And then, as he remembered it, "all hell broke loose around the air base." Dozens of airmen scrambled to reach him, and the commander of the Fifth Air Force, Lt. Gen. Samuel E. Anderson, rushed to the base.
"Nobody seemed to know what to do," Mr. Rowe recalled. "I shouted 'Motorcar, motorcar, motorcar,' which was about the only English I remembered from high school, hoping that someone would bring an automobile to drive me to headquarters."
Two pilots put him into a jeep; told him to turn over his semiautomatic pistol, which he gladly did; and brought him to a building for interrogation. The incident became a major news story.
"Red Lands MIG Near Seoul and Surrenders to the Allies," The New York Times reported in a Page 1 headline.
Seeking to determine the MIG's strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of future conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies, the Air Force dispatched some of its most accomplished test pilots — including Maj. Chuck Yeager, who had gained fame in 1947 as the first flier to break the sound barrier — to put the MIG-15 through strenuous maneuvers. Their verdict: The F-86 was the superior warplane.
Kenneth Hill Rowe, as he came to be known, was born on Jan. 10, 1932, in a town of 10,000 in the northern part of the Japanese-occupied Korean Peninsula. His father, No Zae, was an administrator for a Japanese industrial conglomerate in Korea. His mother, Veronica Ko, was a homemaker.
He became a naval cadet in 1949 as an avenue to completing a free college education — and perhaps one day getting a chance to defect at a foreign port. He was later transferred to the Air Force and received jet-fighter training from Soviet airmen in Manchuria. He got his wings at 19.
Eight weeks after the Korean armistice, he peeled off from his patrol, reached an altitude of 23,000 feet and turned south for a 13-minute flight across the Demilitarized Zone to Kimpo.
Luck was with him. The American air defense radar just north of Kimpo had been shut down for routine maintenance, and neither American planes aloft nor antiaircraft crews had spotted him.
During the late stages of the Korean War, the Air Force had dropped leaflets over North Korea offering a $100,000 reward to the first North Korean pilot to defect with a MIG. Mr. Rowe maintained that he knew nothing of that reward and said he had simply wanted to live a free life. But he accepted it.
He came to the United States in May 1954 and was something of a celebrity. He was introduced to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, was interviewed by Dave Garroway on NBC's "Today" program and appeared on broadcasts for the Voice of America. He received an engineering degree from the University of Delaware, became an American citizen in 1962 and worked as an engineer for major defense and aerospace companies. He was later a professor of engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Rowe is survived by his wife, Clara (Kim) Rowe; his son, Raymond; and a grandson.
When Mr. Rowe arrived in the United States, his MIG-15bis was brought over as well, for additional flight testing by the Air Force.
Seven decades later, that plane still exists, and resides at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.
Its red star repainted, it is on display alongside an American F-86 Sabre jet, a remembrance of the dogfights of the Korean War in the swath of sky known as MIG Alley.
Alex Traub contributed reporting
Cheers,
Flight 9
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Thanks to Mike from the List archives
Thanks to Mike
FREE SCIENCE LESSON: Global Warming
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published 130 scientific papers, six books, and edited the Encyclopedia of Geology.
Where Does the Carbon Dioxide Really Come From?
Professor Ian Plimer's book in a brief summary:
PLIMER : "Okay, here's the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland. Since its first spewing of volcanic ash, it has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet - all of you.
Of course, you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress - it's that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life.
I know....it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kids "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs.....well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days!
The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just four days - yes, FOUR DAYS - by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time - EVERY DAY.
I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.
Yes, folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over one year - think about it.
Of course, I shouldn't spoil this 'touchy-feely tree-hugging' moment and mention the effect of natural solar and cosmic activity, and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change.
And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the wildfire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year.
Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you on the basis of the BOGUS 'human-caused' climate-change scenario.
Hey, isn't it interesting how they don't mention 'Global Warming' anymore, but just 'Climate Change'.
It's because the planet has only COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming advocates got caught with their pants down.
And, just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme - that whopping new tax - imposed on you by your government, that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer.
It won't stop any volcanoes from erupting, that's for sure.
But, hey, go give the world a hug and have a nice day. Oh, and yes, Greta Thunberg, chime in any time you feel you have useless information to share...
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This Day in U S Military History
1815 – U.S. forces led by Gen. Andrew Jackson and French pirate Jean Lafitte led 4,000 backwoodsmen to victory, defending against 8,000 British veterans on the fields of Chalmette in the Battle of New Orleans – the closing engagement of the War of 1812. Two weeks after the War of 1812 officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, U.S. General Andrew Jackson achieves the greatest American victory of the war at the Battle of New Orleans. In September 1814, an impressive American naval victory on Lake Champlain forced invading British forces back into Canada and led to the conclusion of peace negotiations in Ghent, Belgium. Although the peace agreement was signed on December 24, word did not reach the British forces assailing the Gulf coast in time to halt a major attack. On January 8, 1815, the British marched against New Orleans, hoping that by capturing the city they could separate Louisiana from the rest of the United States. Pirate Jean Lafitte, however, had warned the Americans of the attack, and the arriving British found militiamen under General Andrew Jackson strongly entrenched at the Rodriquez Canal. In two separate assaults, the 7,500 British soldiers under Sir Edward Pakenham were unable to penetrate the U.S. defenses, and Jackson's 4,500 troops, many of them expert marksmen from Kentucky and Tennessee, decimated the British lines. In half an hour, the British had retreated, General Pakenham was dead, and nearly 2,000 of his men were killed, wounded, or missing. U.S. forces suffered only eight killed and 13 wounded. Although the battle had no bearing on the outcome of the war, Jackson's overwhelming victory elevated national pride, which had suffered a number of setbacks during the War of 1812. The Battle of New Orleans was also the last armed engagement between the United States and Britain.
1835 – The United States national debt is zero for the only time. Except for about a year during 1835–1836, the United States has continuously held a public debt since the US Constitution legally went into effect on March 4, 1789. The payments of the debt were accomplished by the sale of federally owned land in the West by the Jackson administration.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
WALLACE, WILLIAM
Rank and organization: Sergeant, Company C, 5th U.S. Infantry. Place and date: At Cedar Creek, etc., Mont., 21 October 1876 to 8 January 1877. Entered service at: – – – . Birth: Ireland. Date of issue: 27 April 1877. Citation: Gallantry in action.
WHITEHEAD, PATTON G.
Rank and organization: Private, Company C, 5th U.S. Infantry. Place and date: At Cedar Creek, etc., Mont., 21 October 1876 to 8 January 1877. Entered service at: – – – . Birth: Russell County, Va. Date of issue: 27 April 1877. Citation: Gallantry in action.
WILSON, CHARLES
Rank and organization: Corporal, Company H, 5th U.S. Infantry. Place and date: At Cedar Creek, etc., Mont., 21 October 1876 to 8 January 1877. Entered service at: Beardstown, Ill. Birth: Petersburg, Ill Date of issue: 27 April 1877. Citation: Gallantry in action.
SCHILT, CHRISTIAN FRANK
Rank and organization: First Lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps. Place and date: Quilali, Nicaragua, 6, 7 and 8 January 1928. Entered service at: Illinois. Born: 1 March 1895, Richland County, Ill. Other Navy awards: Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Distinguished FlyingCross with 1 gold star. Citation: During the progress of an insurrection at Quilali, Nicaragua, 6, 7, and 8 January 1928, 1st Lt. Schilt, then a member of a marine expedition which had suffered severe losses in killed and wounded, volunteered under almost impossible conditions to evacuate the wounded by air and transport a relief commanding officer to assume charge of a very serious situation. 1st Lt. Schilt bravely undertook this dangerous and important task and, by taking off a total of 10 times in the rough, rolling street of a partially burning village, under hostile infantry fire on each occasion, succeeded in accomplishing his mission, thereby actually saving 3 lives and bringing supplies and aid to others in desperate need.
DUNHAM, RUSSELL E.
Rank and organization: Technical Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company I, 30th Infantry, 3d Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Kayserberg, France, 8 January 1945. Entered service at: Brighton Ill. Born: 23 February 1920, East Carondelet, Ill. G.O. No.: 37, 11 May 1945. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. At about 1430 hours on 8 January 1945, during an attack on Hill 616, near Kayserberg, France, T/Sgt. Dunham single-handedly assaulted 3 enemy machineguns. Wearing a white robe made of a mattress cover, carrying 12 carbine magazines and with a dozen hand grenades snagged in his belt, suspenders, and buttonholes, T/Sgt. Dunham advanced in the attack up a snow-covered hill under fire from 2 machineguns and supporting riflemen. His platoon 35 yards behind him, T/Sgt. Dunham crawled 75 yards under heavy direct fire toward the timbered emplacement shielding the left machinegun. As he jumped to his feet 10 yards from the gun and charged forward, machinegun fire tore through his camouflage robe and a rifle bllet seared a 10-inch gash across his back sending him spinning 15 yards down hill into the snow. When the indomitable sergeant sprang to his feet to renew his 1-man assault, a German egg grenade landed beside him. He kicked it aside, and as it exploded 5 yards away, shot and killed the German machinegunner and assistant gunner. His carbine empty, he jumped into the emplacement and hauled out the third member of the gun crew by the collar. Although his back wound was causing him excruciating pain and blood was seeping through his white coat, T/Sgt. Dunham proceeded 50 yards through a storm of automatic and rifle fire to attack the second machinegun. Twenty-five yards from the emplacement he hurled 2 grenades, destroying the gun and its crew; then fired down into the supporting foxholes with his carbine dispatching and dispersing the enemy riflemen. Although his coat was so thoroughly blood-soaked that he was a conspicuous target against the white landscape, T/Sgt. Dunham again advanced ahead of his platoon in an assault on enemy positions farther up the hill. Coming under machinegun fire from 65 yards to his front, while rifle grenades exploded 10 yards from his position, he hit the ground and crawled forward. At 15 yards range, he jumped to his feet, staggered a few paces toward the timbered machinegun emplacement and killed the crew with hand grenades. An enemy rifleman fired at pointblank range, but missed him. After killing the rifleman, T/Sgt. Dunham drove others from their foxholes with grenades and carbine fire. Killing 9 Germans – wounding 7 and capturing 2 – firing about 175 rounds of carbine ammunition, and expending 11 grenades, T/Sgt. Dunham, despite a painful wound, spearheaded a spectacular and successful diversionary attack.
*TURNER, DAY G.
Rank and organization: Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company B, 319th Infantry, 80th Infantry Division. Place and date: At Dahl, Luxembourg, 8 January 1945. Entered service at. Nescopek, Pa. Birth: Berwick, Pa. G.O. No.: 49, 28 June 1945. Citation: He commanded a 9-man squad with the mission of holding a critical flank position. When overwhelming numbers of the enemy attacked under cover of withering artillery, mortar, and rocket fire, he withdrew his squad into a nearby house, determined to defend it to the last man. The enemy attacked again and again and were repulsed with heavy losses. Supported by direct tank fire, they finally gained entrance, but the intrepid sergeant refused to surrender although 5 of his men were wounded and 1 was killed. He boldly flung a can of flaming oil at the first wave of attackers, dispersing them, and fought doggedly from room to room, closing with the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand encounters. He hurled handgrenade for handgrenade, bayoneted 2 fanatical Germans who rushed a doorway he was defending and fought on with the enemy's weapons when his own ammunition was expended. The savage fight raged for 4 hours, and finally, when only 3 men of the defending squad were left unwounded, the enemy surrendered. Twenty-five prisoners were taken, 11 enemy dead and a great number of wounded were counted. Sgt. Turner's valiant stand will live on as a constant inspiration to his comrades His heroic, inspiring leadership, his determination and courageous devotion to duty exemplify the highest tradition of the military service .
WETZEL, GARY GEORGE
Rank and organization: Specialist Fourth Class (then Pfc.), U.S. Army, 173d Assault Helicopter Company. Place and date: Near Ap Dong An, Republic of Vietnam, 8 January 1968. Entered service at: Milwaukee, Wis. Born: 29 September 1947, South Milwaukee, Wis. Citation. Sp4c. Wetzel, 173d Assault Helicopter Company, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life. Above and beyond the call of duty. Sp4c. Wetzel was serving as door gunner aboard a helicopter which was part of an insertion force trapped in a landing zone by intense and deadly hostile fire. Sp4c. Wetzel was going to the aid of his aircraft commander when he was blown into a rice paddy and critically wounded by 2 enemy rockets that exploded just inches from his location. Although bleeding profusely due to the loss of his left arm and severe wounds in his right arm, chest, and left leg, Sp4c. Wetzel staggered back to his original position in his gun-well and took the enemy forces under fire. His machinegun was the only weapon placing effective fire on the enemy at that time. Through a resolve that overcame the shock and intolerable pain of his injuries, Sp4c. Wetzel remained at his position until he had eliminated the automatic weapons emplacement that had been inflicting heavy casualties on the American troops and preventing them from moving against this strong enemy force. Refusing to attend his own extensive wounds, he attempted to return to the aid of his aircraft commander but passed out from loss of blood. Regaining consciousness, he persisted in his efforts to drag himself to the aid of his fellow crewman. After an agonizing effort, he came to the side of the crew chief who was attempting to drag the wounded aircraft commander to the safety of a nearby dike. Unswerving in his devotion to his fellow man, Sp4c. Wetzel assisted his crew chief even though he lost consciousness once again during this action. Sp4c. Wetzel displayed extraordinary heroism in his efforts to aid his fellow crewmen. His gallant actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for January 8, 2021 FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS. THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
8 January
1944: Milo Burcham flew the Bell/Lockheed XP-80 Shooting Star, named the "Lulu Belle," for the first time at Muroc Field, Calif. This field became Edwards AFB on 5 December 1949. (12)
1951: KOREAN WAR. Fifth Air Force flew more missions when blizzards forced U. S. Navy Task Force 77 carriers to stop close air support missions for X Corps. B-29 Superfortresses cratered Kimpo Airfield to prevent its use by enemy aircraft. (28)
1952: EXERCISE SNOWFALL: Through 13 January, the 516th Troop Carrier Wing used nearly 100 planes to move 8,623 11th Airborne Division troops from Fort Campbell, Ky., to WheelerSack Army Air Field, N.Y. This exercise tested military capabilities using winter tactics, techniques, and doctrines. Some 10,000 Army personnel were airlifted and 6,400 paratroops were dropped. The exercise saw the first use of Sikorsky H-19 helicopter in tactical air maneuvers. (11) (24)
1959: Through 16 January, two ski-equipped C-130s from the Tactical Air Command recovered equipment and people from Ice Island Charlie, after it began to break up 450 miles northwest of Point Barrow, Alaska. (11) The National Air and Space Administration asked the Army for eight Redstone-type launch vehicles for the Project Mercury development flights. (20)
1964: The USAF received its last F-105D aircraft. (5) 1965: The Strategic Air Command's last test Atlas F launched from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. (6)
1970: Col Douglas H. Frost set flight endurance record for A-7D Corsair IIs. He made a 10-hour flight from Edwards AFB, Calif., with two round trips to New Mexico and covered 5,000 miles with one air refueling. (5) A Space and Missile Systems Organization crew from Air Force Systems Command launched and inserted the Skynet communications satellite into orbit. (26)
1971: The Strategic Air Command completed the first Minuteman III squadron at Minot AFB, N. Dak. (12)
1973: The Tactical Air Command flew its first Weapon System Evaluation Program mission under the program name Combat Echo. (Msg, ACC/DO to AWFC/CC, R081245Z JAN 98) LAST AERIAL VICTORY. In their F-4D Phantom, Capt Paul D. Howman and 1Lt Lawrence W. Kullman shot down a MiG southwest of Hanoi with a radar-guided AIM-7 missile. This shootdown was the last aerial victory before the North Vietnamese signed the ceasefire agreement, which went into effect on 29 January. (16) (21)
1977: First YC-141B, a C-141A Starlifter stretched 23.3 feet and equipped for inflight refueling, rolled out at Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Ga. (2)
1986: The Military Airlift Command accepted its first C-5B Galaxy for the 443rd Military Airlift Wing at Altus AFB, Okla. (16) (18)
1988: The USAF let a $4.9 million contract to develop a new close air support and interdiction plane to replace the A-10. (5)
1998: After originating Combat Echo in 1973, the Tactical Air Command combined this program in July 1984 with the Air Defense Command's Combat Pike to form the Combat Archer Weapon System Evaluation Program. This program reached its 25th anniversary in a continuing effort to develop and validate USAF weapons systems. (Msg, ACC/DO to AWFC/CC, R081245Z JAN 98)
2001: At Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif., Boeing's X-32B Joint Strike Fighter concept demonstrator completed its initial low- and medium-speed taxi tests at 30 and 60 knots, respectively, to verify function and integration of crucial aircraft systems. It was the short-takeoff and vertical-landing (STOVL) version of the Joint Strike Fighter. (3)
2007: Air Force AC-130 gunships attacked a terror training base in a heavily forested area called Ras Kamboni in Somalia near the Kenyan border. The gunships targeted al Qaeda terrorists who planned the 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (AFNEWS, "Aircraft Attack Al Queda Haven in Somalia," 9 Jan 2007.)
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Long… But everybody should read this; incredible! It's worse than we thought! We have met the enemy and they is us.
Shadow
Sent from my iPad
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gerald Collins <gmc@gmcpi.com>
Date: January 7, 2023 at 6:16:23 PM EST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: How the FBI Hacked Twitter, The answer begins with Russiagate - BY LEE SMITH, JANUARY 05, 2023
How the FBI Hacked Twitter
The answer begins with Russiagate
BY LEE SMITH, JANUARY 05, 2023
Tablet
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smithAfter journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company's deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.
"The news that Baker was reviewing the 'Twitter files' surprised everyone involved," Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter's new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.
Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service's use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.
In fact, the FBI's penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world's most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.
Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform's work censoring "dangerous" content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That "dangerous" content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family's foreign corruption for decades.
The Twitter files have to date focused on FBI and, to a lesser extent, CIA election interference. However a lesser-known U.S. government agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also played a significant role in shaping the 2020 vote. "CISA is a sub-agency at DHS that was set up to protect real physical infrastructure, like servers, malware and hacking threats," said former State Department official Mike Benz, now the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. "But they expanded 'infrastructure' to mean us, the U.S. electorate. So 'disinformation' threatened infrastructure and that's how cybersecurity became cyber-censorship. CISA's mandate went from stopping threats of Russian malware to stopping tweets from accounts that questioned the integrity of mail-in voting."
We have some insight into CISA's de facto censorship of Twitter because their private-sector partners boasted about such activities in promotional material. One such public-private partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a D.C.-based private company founded by former national security officials. According to a document from the Twitter files release, Graphika is employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for "narrative analysis and investigations." For CISA, Graphika and its EIP partners served as an intermediary to censor social media during the 2020 election cycle.
CISA targeted posts questioning the election procedures introduced into the election process on account of COVID-19, like mass mail-in ballots, early voting drop boxes, and lack of voter ID requirements. But instead of going to the platforms directly, CISA filed tickets with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies. In "after-action" reports, the Election Integrity Partnership bragged about censoring Fox News, the New York Post, Breitbart, and other right-leaning publications for social media posts and online links concerning the integrity of the 2020 election.
The censorship industry is based on a "whole of society model," said Benz. "It unifies the government and the private sector, as well as civil society in the form of academia and NGOs and news organizations, including fact-checking organizations. All these projects with catchphrases like building resilience, media literacy, cognitive security, etc., are all part of a broad partnership to help censor opponents of the Biden administration."
Notably, Baker was enlisted in one of the civil-society organizations at the same time he joined Twitter as deputy general counsel. According to Benz, the National Task Force on Election Crises is something like a sister organization to the Transition Integrity Project, the group founded by former Democratic Party officials and Never Trump publicists who war-gamed post-2020-election scenarios. "The outfit Baker was part of," said Benz, "effectively handled the public messaging for an organization that threatened street violence and counseled violating the constitution to thwart a Trump victory."
Baker's presence at Twitter, then, and his review of the Twitter files, was deeply disconcerting. "This is who is inside Twitter," the journalist and filmmaker Mike Cernovich tweeted at Elon Musk this spring. "He facilitated fraud."Musk replied: "Sounds pretty bad."
In fact, Musk has done more in two months to bring to light crimes committed by U.S. officials than William Barr and John Durham did during their three-year investigation of the FBI's election interference activities during the 2016 election. Musk now owns what became a crucial component of the national security apparatus that, seen in this light, is worth many times more than the $44 billion he paid for it.
The FBI prepared America's new public-private censorship regime for the 2020 election by falsely telling Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, press outlets, lawmakers, and staff members of the White House, that Russians were readying a hack and leak operation to dirty the Democratic candidate. Accordingly, when reports of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden and giving evidence of his family's financial ties with foreign officials were published in October 2020, Twitter blocked them.
In the week before the election, the FBI field office in charge of investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter. The FBI has "some folks in the Baltimore field office and at [FBI headquarters] that are just doing keyword searches for violations," a company lawyer wrote in a Nov. 3, 2020, email.
The documents also show that Twitter banished Trump after misrepresenting his posts as incitement to violence. With U.S. intelligence services reportedly using informants to provoke violence during the January 6th protest at the Capitol, the trap closed on Trump. Twitter and Facebook then moved to silence the outgoing president by denying him access to the global communications infrastructure.
The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election cycle was the Foreign Influence Task Force. It was set up in the fall of 2017 "to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations" through, "strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies." During the election cycle, according to the Twitter files, the unit "swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds."
The FBI's chief liaison with Twitter was Elvis Chan, an agent from its Cyber Branch. Based in the San Francisco field office, Chan was also in communication with Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Reddit and LinkedIn. Chan demanded user information that Twitter said it could not release outside of a "legal process." In exchange, Chan promised to secure temporary security clearances for 30 Twitter employees a month before the election, presumably to give staff the same briefings on alleged Russian information operations provided to U.S. officials in classified settings.
But Twitter executives claimed they found little evidence of Russian activity on the site. So Chan badgered former head of site security Yoel Roth to produce evidence the FBI was serving its advertised mission of combating foreign influence operations when in fact it was focused on violating the First Amendment rights of Americans.
Chan briefed Twitter extensively on an alleged Russian hacking unit, APT28, or Fancy Bear, which was the same outfit that was claimed by Hillary Clinton campaign contractors to have hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. According to Roth, the FBI had "primed" him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden's laptop to an APT28 hack-and-leak operation. Needless to say, the FBI's reports—and subsequent "disinformation" claims—were themselves blatant disinformation, invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year.
The FBI's penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector."
Twitter was more than a one-way mirror: The FBI also seems to have embedded its own spy structure within the social media company to siphon off the personal data and behavior of users. Dozens of former intelligence officials were installed within Twitter after the election of Donald Trump. Some had active top secret security clearances. Twitter's director of strategy was Dawn Burton, former FBI Director James Comey's deputy chief of staff. Perhaps most significant was Baker himself, who appears to have led the FBI's internal organization at the platform. Efforts to reach Baker for comment on this story were unsuccessful.
Baker left the FBI in 2018 under a cloud of suspicion. In 2017, the Justice Department investigated him for leaking to the press, and the Republican-led House of Representatives later investigated him for his role in Russiagate. Former congressional officials say that as part of the bureau's 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign, Baker authored the warrant to spy on Trump's inner circle.
After he departed the law enforcement agency, CNN rewarded him for his "resistance" activities—which boosted the network's ratings to record levels—by hiring him as a legal analyst. The Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution brought Baker on board to contribute to its collusion-conspiracy website "Lawfare." DOJ again investigated him in 2019 for leaking to the media while at the FBI. In June 2020, Baker joined Twitter as deputy general counsel. With his security clearances still active, he was Twitter's liaison with U.S. intelligence agencies, where he reinforced the FBI's external pressure from inside Twitter to censor the Biden laptop story.
Under Baker, Twitter became more than just an instrument to censor the opposition; it also spied on them. Newly released court documents show that Twitter coordinated with the DOJ to intercept the communications of users potentially dangerous to the Biden campaign, like Tara Reade, the former Biden Senate staffer who alleged that Biden had sexually assaulted her decades earlier. The DOJ subpoenaed her Twitter account, likely with the purpose of giving the company cover for finding out which journalists had contacted her about her allegations.
The cozy two-way relationship between the government and the social media company, which Baker helped oversee and ultimately used to interfere in the 2020 election, was years in the making. In 2014, Twitter filed suit against the DOJ and the FBI, Twitter v. Holder. The San Francisco-based social media platform had been served Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to collect the electronic communications of some of its users, and Twitter said that in the interests of transparency, it wanted to release a public report with the precise numbers of warrants it had been served. FBI General Counsel James Baker refused. Twitter could disclose the number of warrants in broad, inexact ranges, for instance between 0-249, but not the exact number, even if it was zero.
To press its case, Twitter hired Perkins Coie, a prominent Democratic Party-aligned firm that had represented several presidential campaigns—John Kerry's, Barack Obama's and eventually Hillary Clinton's 2016 run, during which the law firm would hire Fusion GPS to produce the discredited dossier of Trump-Russia reports under the byline of British ex-spy Christopher Steele that became the center of Russiagate.
The firm's lead attorney for Twitter v. Holder was former DOJ cybersecurity expert Michael Sussmann. He and Baker were friends. The FBI lawyer thanked him in a September 2014 letter for a recent meeting that included Twitter's top lawyer Vijaya Gadde and others, but affirmed that giving specific numbers would reveal "properly classified information." Why that would endanger sources and methods, as the government claimed, Baker never explained. But no one at DOJ knew more than Baker about FISA, the most intrusive surveillance program that U.S. intelligence services have in their arsenal.
Even during his time in the private sector Baker had worked on FISA issues. In 2008, he'd taken a job at Verizon, where George H.W. Bush's former Attorney General William Barr was general counsel. Baker was assistant general counsel for national security, and thus an entry point for his former DOJ colleagues, facilitating their access to material obtained through FISA and other surveillance programs. It wouldn't have occurred to him or Barr to want to publish, as Twitter said it did, the number of FISA warrants that law enforcement served their private-sector employer. They were DOJ men, and FISAs are highly classified. Few outside the intelligence community had ever seen one, until the Trump era.
An April 2017 story in The Washington Post disclosed that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign volunteer, Carter Page, making FISA part of the national lexicon. The Post story, sourced to law enforcement and other U.S. officials, far exceeded what Twitter was prevented from publishing for national security reasons. It named the subject of a FISA warrant, and revealed that the warrant targeted a presidential candidate's circle.
"Baker authored the Page FISA and signed off on all of it," Kash Patel, a member of President Trump's National Security Council, told me. Patel also served as Devin Nunes' lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee's probe of FBI crimes and abuses committed during the bureau's Trump-Russia investigation. Recently, reports have also surfaced that the DOJ was spying on Patel and other Nunes staffers while they were investigating the FBI and DOJ.
Patel continued. "When I was at DOJ," he said, "Baker had a reputation of being a FISA guru. The Page FISA was crafted by someone who knew what questions not to ask, and how to use language to get it past a FISA court judge without fully disclosing facts they knew would have disqualified the warrant."
Baker told congress that he didn't normally work on FISAs in his job as the FBI's top lawyer, but this FISA was especially sensitive: It allowed the bureau to sweep up a presidential campaign's electronic communications, including those of a certain Republican candidate. So, Baker said, he "wanted to make sure that we were filing something that would adhere to the law."
But the Page FISA was unlawful. The FBI had simply laundered the Clinton campaign's anti-Trump dirt into a surveillance warrant so it could justify spying on the candidate in support of her Democratic rival. "The FBI wanted the warrant, so they wrote it in a way to get it even though they knew it was a fraud, as our investigation would expose," said Patel. But with Baker squaring away the package, who was going to question the FISA guru?
By fall 2016, Baker had become the preferred drop box for the Clinton team to push anti-Trump dirt into the FBI. His friend, the journalist David Corn, passed him more Steele reports, which he handed off to FBI colleagues investigating the GOP candidate. Baker also agreed to a meeting with a former associate who wanted to pass on research from cyber experts about a supposed secret computer channel between a Russian bank and Trump. That was Michael Sussmann.
Five years later, the special counsel appointed to investigate the FBI's Trump-Russia probe would charge Sussmann with lying to the FBI. Specifically, he'd lied to his friend Jim Baker: When Sussmann met with him in September 2016 to pass on Trump-Russia information, he told Baker he wasn't representing a client when in fact he was working for the Clinton campaign.
Given what we know now, it's clear that special counsel John Durham's case against Sussmann was even more troubled than it first seemed. His star witness, Baker, wasn't a hero in the story but a co-conspirator, to whom Durham gave a pass so he could charge Sussmann with a process crime.
Obviously, Baker knew his friend was representing the Clinton campaign—that's what Perkins Coie lawyers do: represent Democratic Party presidential campaigns. But the two would want to cover their tracks, so before their September 2016 meeting, the Clinton lawyer sent Baker a text saying that he had information to share, and he wasn't representing a client. This would have proven Durham's case about Sussman lying to his friend Baker at the FBI, except Baker never told the prosecutor about the text. Neither did the DOJ's inspector general, who had Baker's phones, until it was too late to use the evidence in court.
What few understood was that the issue wasn't just the 2016 election but the 2020 vote, too. Baker had to tread carefully or else risk exposing the job for which Sussmann had helped plant him at Twitter. It was one of the spy service's most sensitive operations—infiltrating social media platforms to fix a presidential race. So Sussmann was acquitted—and the FBI's hack of Twitter continued.
The Twitter files' disclosures about the coordination between the company and spy agencies to fix presidential elections sheds light on the nature of Twitter v. Holder, which was eventually decided in the government's favor shortly before Baker joined the company. Twitter filed the suit because it believed in transparency—and to reassure users that the platform wasn't being used to spy on them, or not most of them. But something else was going on behind the scenes: Social media platforms were already being assimilated into the intelligence services.
Documents leaked in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden showed that the NSA was mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans. Previously, the NSA was required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a U.S. citizen, but a 2010 change in policy allowed the intelligence services to trace the contacts of Americans so long as there was a "foreign intelligence" purpose. That is, even at the dawn of the social media revolution, the spy services saw social media as a surveillance tool, like FISA.
In response to Snowden's disclosures, then-President Barack Obama gave high-minded speeches about balancing civil rights and national security. But by the time Twitter filed its 2014 suit, the White House had already chosen to turn surveillance programs against its domestic opponents. Obama's intelligence chiefs spied on U.S. legislators and pro-Israel activists opposed to Obama's signature foreign policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama administration also realized that it could lean hard on monopoly social media platforms in order to gain political advantages—and it could make companies that weren't compliant pay a price. First strike got you a dressing down from the White House: Weeks after the 2016 vote, for instance, Obama pulled Mark Zuckerberg aside at a conference in Peru and read him out about not doing more to keep Russian disinformation off Facebook. The reality is that Russia spent around $135,000 on Facebook ads, a small percentage of what presidential campaigns typically spend on a single day before lunch. But Obama wasn't worried about Russia—he struck deals with Vladimir Putin to advance his own idiosyncratic foreign policy goals, like the nuclear agreement with Russia's ally Iran. Obama's problem was Trump.
As he was leaving office, Obama stamped the U.S. government's seal of approval on Russiagate, ordering his spy chiefs to draft an official assessment claiming Putin helped put Trump in the White House. Since then, in Deep State parlance, "Russia" equals Trump and stopping "Russian disinformation" means censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the national security apparatus's takeover of the public communications infrastructure. Since Zuckerberg didn't keep Trump off Facebook in 2016, he had to put up $400 million to drive votes to Democrats in 2020—and even that wasn't enough. In 2021, Democratic Party insiders working together with Zuckerberg's Big Tech competitor, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, sent a fake whistleblower after him to testify before congress that Facebook was bad for teenage girls.
The censorship regime would regulate out of existence anyone who resists it. To make the case for the hegemony of government censors, it found an eminent pitchman: Barack Obama.
In April, as Musk first said he wanted to buy Twitter and save free speech, Obama embarked on a "disinformation" tour, which took him to several college campuses to promote the un-American virtues of censorship. He first visited his hometown to speak at a University of Chicago conference, "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy." Other guests included Anne Applebaum, an early advocate of the collusion conspiracy theory who pushed the spy-service fiction in dozens of her Washington Post columns. Also in attendance was former CISA head Chris Krebs, now famous for congressional testimony in which he claimed the 2020 election was the most secure ever.
EIP principals from the Stanford Internet Observatory were featured speakers at the daylong seminar at the Palo Alto university where Obama made the second stop on his April "disinformation" tour. Regulation, Obama told the Stanford audience, has to be part of the answer to solve the disinformation crisis. In other words, he went to Silicon Valley to threaten his listeners that he would ruin their financial model by stripping away social media's liability exemptions.
The purpose of Obama's speech was to present a choice to his audience: Either you impose a scorched-earth policy against the establishment's opponents, or else you will face the kind of regulation that every company knows will be its death knell. Moreover, if they made the right choice, Obama showed, there was money in it for them.
"In effect, Obama announced that the funding channels are open for people who want to do disinformation work," said Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. "It's like what happened with climate change. If you were an academic who wanted federal funding for anything, you made sure you made reference to climate to get grants. Same now with disinformation. Obama was saying, 'here's where the puck is moving, so skate here if you want federal funding.'"
To reward EIP for greasing its path to the White House, the Biden administration awarded all four consortium partners with grant money. The Stanford and Washington units received $3 million from the National Science Foundation "to study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation." Graphika won nearly $5 million from the Pentagon after the 2020 election for "research on cross-platform detection to counter malign influence," and another $2 million in 2021. Since 2021, the Atlantic Council received $4.7 million in federal grants, mostly from the State Department, a total far exceeding its previous awards.
In retrospect, the failure of the Russiagate conspiracy theory accelerated the spy service's takeover of social media. Though no one is likely to be held accountable anytime soon, or ever, it was enough that the details of the operation were exposed by Patel and Nunes. In response, the spy agencies moved much of their operations out of the federal government and into the private sector, where even if congressional investigators found it, there wasn't much they could do. Republicans could threaten to regulate social media, but their threats were empty. They might even find themselves—and their campaign ads—banned from Twitter.
The public-private sector merger worked only because, as a unifying myth for the U.S. elite, if not as a legal or political maneuver, Russiagate was a great success. If there were any fears of how news of the FBI's spying operation on a presidential campaign might be received by the press, civil rights activists, and the left, the reception to Russiagate dispelled those concerns. The media offered itself up as a platform for information operations and published illegal leaks of classified information while the rest of the ruling class promoted a conspiracy theory and celebrated the assault on the constitutional rights of their fellow Americans as a success story.
The Republican attorney general of the United States, William Barr—the ultimate DOJ insider—knew the FBI was working to fix the 2020 election and did nothing to stop it. His Justice Department had the laptop in its possession and Barr knew it was authentic. He told reporters this spring that he was "shocked" Biden lied about his son's computer in the Oct. 22, 2020, debate with Trump. "He's squarely confronted with the laptop, and he suggested that it was Russian disinformation," said Barr, "which he knew was a lie." Yet agents under Barr's authority were briefing that lie to social media platforms, the press, Congress, and even the Trump White House.
"There were 80 FBI agents in the unit working on foreign disinformation," Patel told me. "It was about a presidential election, so it would require authorization from the FBI director and the attorney general. Barr knew."
Barr resigned from the administration a month after the election, outraged that Trump kept pushing him to investigate election fraud when, according to Barr, there was no evidence of it. And yet on his watch, law enforcement agencies under his authority ran the biggest election interference operation in U.S. history. William Barr did not respond to a request for comment.
It seems Barr's contempt for the president he served blinded him—along with the class of people to which he belongs, Democrats and Republicans alike—to an essential fact: A whole-of-society industry designed to shape elections and censor, propagandize, and spy on Americans was never simply a weapon to harm Donald Trump. It was designed to replace the republic.
Lee Smith is the author of The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President (2020).
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