Robert Bonomo on how 9-11 Truthers defeated Hillary |336|

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Robert Bonomo on how 9-11 Truthers defeated Hillary |336|
by Alex Tsakiris | Dec 21 | Skepticism

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Robert Bonomo is a Gnostic 9-11 Truther who reads Tarot and writes for “deplorable” websites — my kind of alt-media journalist.
photo by: Skeptiko
Alex Tsakiris:
Today’s guest is a blogger, novelist, a anarcho-capitalist—we’ll have to ask him about that one— and a part-time Tarot reader with a Gnostic bent… sounds like a great Skeptiko guest already, hey?

Now, if you visit Robert Bonomo’s excellent website, The Cactus Land, you’ll be introduced to the wide ranging interest he has and a lot of his writings, which we’re going to talk about today, but you won’t quite be prepared for today’s interview because we are going to take it in a slightly different direction….

Alex Tsakiris: …I mean, for people who weren’t following it, or are outside the United States, this was not an election of Donald Trump, this was a repudiation of Hillary Clinton and The Establishment…

Robert Bonomo: Oh, yeah. I think totally, it was a vote against mainstream media. It was a vote for a lot of skeptical views, even conspiracy views.

Alex Tsakiris: Exactly.

Robert Bonomo: How many Trump voters do you think are skeptical of the official version of 9/11, for example? Something nobody talks about. Nobody talks about that.
 
"Did the 2016 US presidential election represent the kind of dramatic shift we're talking about here, or is it more just business as usual?"

Are you asking about what the voters said, or what will happen over the next four years?

If you are asking about the voters, then it is a dramatic shift.

"Donald Trump is the only person in history to be elected president of the United States without having held a prominent public office or military command, the only one to have paid for his own campaign for the nomination, the only one to have run successfully against the leadership and all the principal factions of both parties, the oldest and wealthiest person to be elected, and the first of a business background. He ran against the system, both parties, and almost all the media and the polls, to “drain the swamp,” against the OBushtons: all the Clintons and Obamas and Bushes"

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443011/donald-trump-revolution


Lights Out for the Old Order

Trump has wrought a revolution.

...

Yet this election in 2016 is producing a much more profound transition .. Though the losing candidate won the popular vote by over a million votes, it was, as the president-elect has called it, a landslide. Donald Trump is the only person in history to be elected president of the United States without having held a prominent public office or military command, the only one to have paid for his own campaign for the nomination, the only one to have run successfully against the leadership and all the principal factions of both parties, the oldest and wealthiest person to be elected, and the first of a business background. He ran against the system, both parties, and almost all the media and the polls, to “drain the swamp,” against the OBushtons: all the Clintons and Obamas and Bushes and the Republican and Democratic lookalike also-rans (Carter, Dukakis, Quayle, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney). The only alumnus of that latter school still in good odor is the 93-year old Robert Dole, vice-presidential candidate in 1976 and presidential candidate in 1996. Trump is not a new broom sweeping clean; this was the big wolf blowing the house down into rubble and splinters and shards.

...
Each major domestic-policy department of government is being entrusted to people dedicated to radical change, ...
...
This is a revolution: There has not been such a transition since Roosevelt in 1932, if not Jackson in 1828,

...


"Trump’s positions follow the contours not of movement conservatism but of American folk nationalism, often known as Jacksonianism....Jacksonians characteristically emphasize anti-elitism and egalitarianism while drawing a sharp distinction between members of the folk group and those outside it....Jacksonians don’t fit easily into either the liberal or the conservative camp; they are the “radical middle.”...When Jacksonians take up politics, they do so with a vengeance, and Jacksonian uprisings have overturned the American political order more than once. But Jacksonians tend to be quiet politically when things are going well. Much of the time, it’s easy for elites to misread them as supporters of other movements, forget them, or take them for granted."

http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...-andrew-jackson-nationalist-politics-are-back

Trump’s Appeal to the Radical Middle Is a Wake-Up Call to Conservatives

...
Conservatives must find a way to make common cause with Andrew Jackson’s nationalist heirs.
....

Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination by exploiting vulnerabilities few were aware existed. When the 2016 race began, almost no one seemed to have understood that a plurality of the Republican party had a fundamentally different set of policy preferences from those of doctrinaire conservatism. Trump saw this opening and took full advantage.

Trump’s positions follow the contours not of movement conservatism but of American folk nationalism, often known as Jacksonianism. As Walter Russell Mead, my boss over at The American Interest, has noted, Jacksonians characteristically emphasize anti-elitism and egalitarianism while drawing a sharp distinction between members of the folk group and those outside it. In domestic policy, this translates to tough-on-crime stances and stubborn adherence to traditional views on social issues (and, historically, opposition to civil rights), and to advocacy of government assistance for “deserving” members of the folk group. Looking abroad, they are uninterested in Wilsonian nation-building projects or promoting global order, but if they feel the nation is threatened, they are willing to fight back by whatever means are necessary. Sound familiar yet?

Jacksonians don’t fit easily into either the liberal or the conservative camp; they are the “radical middle.” They also don’t comport with regional stereotypes. Jacksonians are not synonymous with southerners or rednecks: Trump has performed best in northeastern states and prospered in cities. And while Trump is supported by racists (especially by the ugly little band of Twitter trolls known as the alt-right), Jacksonians cannot be dismissed as such en masse. In the past, Jacksonians have been found at the heart of the Confederacy, but they also formed the core of the Union Army, and later the one that defeated Hitler. Their motivations and history are too complex — and they comprise too wide a swath of the American public — to be rightly considered atavistic or a sectional rump.

When Jacksonians take up politics, they do so with a vengeance, and Jacksonian uprisings have overturned the American political order more than once. But Jacksonians tend to be quiet politically when things are going well. Much of the time, it’s easy for elites to misread them as supporters of other movements, forget them, or take them for granted.
...

"the gender card doesn’t work any more either. Trump is a feminist’s worst nightmare. He won anyway. He came close enough to winning the entire female vote to trigger bitter post-election denunciations of American women in general by feminists"

...
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268
...

the gender card doesn’t work any more either. Trump is a feminist’s worst nightmare. He won anyway. He came close enough to winning the entire female vote to trigger bitter post-election denunciations of American women in general by feminists
...
Here’s a hot tip: people you dismiss as retrograde scum will not, in general, vote for you.

...
For the first time since records have been kept, U.S. life expectancy went down during the Obama years, led by a disturbing rise in suicides and opiate addiction among discouraged unemployed in flyover country. A Democratic Party that fails to address that while it screws around with bathroom-law boycotts is willfully consigning itself to irrelevance.

...
Right now, you have nothing. You have less than nothing, because your instinctive solution repels the Trump plurality. They don’t want welfare, they want jobs and dignity and a modicum of respect. (And, just as a reminder, not to be dismissed as retrograde racists and sexists.)
...
Donald Trump’s victory reads to me like a realignment election, a historic break with the way interest and demographic groups have behaved in the U.S. in my lifetime.
I think it will take a few more election cycles to see if Trump's victory is really a sign of a permanent realignment. The republican dominance at the state levels might be evidence of it while Obama may have obscured it to some extent because of his peronal popularity ... but Trump might be unique in his own way too. After Bush won they said the republicans will keep power because of demographics. After Obama won they said the same thing. It seems to me there is too much misinformation going around and too few voters take the time to really investigate the issues to make elections predictable.


"Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better."

https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
...
Harvard Business Review
...
Joan C. Williams
November 10, 2016
...
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “ can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.
...
The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree.
...
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
...
So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
...
“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.
If you are asking about the next four years, I think we have to wait and see, and it depends on what you think business as usual is, what you think the "swamp" is.
The never seen before level of effort to derail and delegitimize the results of the election, the efforts to disenfranchise Trump voters, to the point where more democrat electors changed their votes than Trump electors, means someone thinks this was more than business as usual.

"If you want to go against established interests, huge government bureaucracies, multinational corporations, and investment banks, you need people who know how they work from the inside.
"

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/the-donald-trump-thread.3146/page-123#post-103883

But some of his [Trump's] cabinet nominees seem to be against the very existence or purpose of the agencies they are nominated to run.
  • His nominee for dept of labor is a fast food mogul, an industry known for low wages.
  • His nominee for the EPA is a global warming skeptic.
  • His nominee for department of energy was a candidate in the republican primaries during which he vowed to eliminate that department if elected president.
  • His nominee for department of education is a strong proponent of charter schools that are run by private, not government, organizations.
  • Trump himself has taken a phone call from Taiwan, something no other president has done in decades.
  • His ambassador to Israel wants to move the embassy to Jerusalem.
  • Trump's nominee for homeland security is a retired general, someone who should know something about defending borders. Trump a wants to end illegal immigration and H1-B visa abuse, which is the opposite of what the corporate establishment wants because they benefit from cheap labor, and the opposite of what democrat politicians want.
Trump's tweets about airforce one and the F35 indicate he is going to run military procurement programs like a businessman not like a government (establishment) employee looking for a job at a defense contractor (establishment). He plans to use the same negotiation skills for his infrastructure spending to get the most value for taxpayers instead using them as boondoggles for senators and corporations.

Trump, a billionaire who spent much of his own money on his campaign, is much less dependent on corporate and special interest donation than other candidates.

... I do think Trump wants to take the status quo and turn it upside down and shake it until the government does not resemble anything we have seen before in this country.

Furthermore I think we have to wait and see what happens when Trump is in office. If you want to go against established interests, huge government bureaucracies, multinational corporations, and investment banks, you need people who know how they work from the inside.
 
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Unfortunately, I don't think that most Americans really care about 9/11 anymore, the majority seems perfectly content with the official narrative. For that matter, a lot of groups claim to have defeated Hilary, but for the most part, she defeated herself by being hyper-establishment friendly. Although I'm sure that bringing in a bunch of SJWs as key figures in her campaign accelerated that as well, since a lot people feel that political correctness became way too intrusive during the last few years.
 
There was a lot for me to disagree with in this episode.

For one thing, I don't know how anyone can characterize Trump's "victory" as somehow being a blow against the establishment. Trump is more establishment than Clinton could ever hope to be, and he's filling his prospective cabinet with plutocrats and generals, several of whom are actively opposed to the very existence of the departments they'll be leading if they're confirmed. I also don't understand how Alex and Robert could talk about this election being some kind of statement from the people, when the fact is that the people voted for Clinton. Clinton got nearly three million more votes. In any sane election system, she'd be the president-elect. Trump only "won" by squeaking by in a few swing states. The only reason Trump is president-elect is that our system (unfairly and undemocratically) makes one vote from a Montana resident worth more than a thousand votes from California residents. This is the second time in less than twenty years that our system has handed the White House to a dangerous buffoon who lost the election.

I was also quite surprised that Alex and Robert, who both seem to have an interest in various conspiracy theories, didn't say one word about Russia's involvement in this election, and the fact that the Russians' intention was specifically to install Trump. And then once Trump is "elected", he chooses Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, as Secretary of State - a man who was given a Medal of Friendship from Vladimir Putin himself, and whose half-trillion dollar oil deal with the Russians, which went against both US interests and environmental concerns, was stopped by US sanctions on Russia that Trump will now conveniently have the power to rescind. The US government knew what the Russians were doing before the election, and wanted to tell the public, but they insisted on making sure the Republicans were on board so it wouldn't look like Obama was using the CIA to help Clinton win. Of course, the effort to release the information was stopped by Mitch McConnell, whose wife is now slated to become Trump's Secretary of Transportation. How convenient.

As for the libertarian/AnCap stuff? I have no idea why anyone would think corporate rule would be better than government rule. At least governments are theoretically supposed to answer to the people, and occasionally do. Not so for corporations.

Now for Alex's question at the end: Does this election represent some kind of big shift, or will it just be business as usual?
It'll be business as usual, only even worse, because the horrendously unqualified president-elect is planning to fill the government with more horrendously unqualified people directly under him. It would appear that he only wants to drain the swamp so he can turn it into a cesspool instead. The Tweeter-In-Chief will run things into the ground, a Democratic president will be elected to clean up his mess, and then, after the Democrat has had some moderate success fixing things despite Republican resistance, the country will turn stupid again and put another Republican in office for some reason, and the cycle will repeat itself once more. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case scenario is that he gets us all killed by starting a nuclear war.
 
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Perhaps, but he was not carrying the burden of actually cheating a distinctly anti-establishment candidate out of the race. Besides that, it's all about perception, and he played his cards well by defying the old GOP heads at every turn.
 
"Did the 2016 US presidential election represent the kind of dramatic shift we're talking about here, or is it more just business as usual?"

Alex's question at the end of the show is an interesting one, which I've been pondering for a while. Although I'm a Brit, I stayed up to watch the US presidential election because I had stayed up on a previous occasion to watch the results of the Brexit vote, which I could hardly believe, and wondered if this would be another case of the same kind of thing.

What kind of thing? Maybe we've reached a tipping point in the West where the influence of the Internet has finally become more prevalent than that of the legacy media. It only seems like a shock, but it's been brewing for quite some time. People like Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi can be seen discussing their lives and works in 1995:


They mention here that they had ceased being political-party-based, and, of course, discussed Future Shock and The Third Wave. They didn't get all their predictions right, naturally, but I think it's fair to say they got a fair number right.

One question is, will the elites try to control upcoming changes? They can't stop them, so that would be a logical thing for them to try (and maybe the "fake news" thing is just an opening salvo). Maybe we'll face, 32 years after the originally floated date, the prospect of George Orwell's 1984. Maybe perpetual war is on the horizon; maybe it's already started, who knows. Or maybe some sort of mass revolution, hardly less destructive, will occur.

Whatever, the world is likely in for interesting times; still, the Chinese word for crisis comprises two characters, one for danger and the other for opportunity, and so eventually some good might come of it, but it's hard to see us avoiding at least some of the danger component.

The thing quietly simmering away in the background is the thought of nuclear war/terrorism, which we forgot for a while after the fall of the Berlin wall. If some dumbass Islamic terrorist were to get hold of a nuclear bomb and blow it up in his favoured Kuffar location, the lord only knows what would happen, but my guess is, it'd make Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lybia and all the rest look like a kindergarten.

What I'm worrying, I suppose, is that maybe while we're all agonising over things like whether or not the elites will try to control and to further the "new world order", whether there are any number of paradigm shifts about to materialise, and so on, events will take over and we'll all have different fish to fry.
 
There was a lot for me to disagree with in this episode.

I also don't understand how Alex and Robert could talk about this election being some kind of statement from the people, when the fact is that the people voted for Clinton. Clinton got nearly three million more votes. In any sane election system, she'd be the president-elect. Trump only "won" by squeaking by in a few swing states. The only reason Trump is president-elect is that our system (unfairly and undemocratically) makes one vote from a Montana resident worth more than a thousand votes from California residents. This is the second time in less than twenty years that our system has handed the White House to a dangerous buffoon who lost the election.

I'm no great fan of Trump, but frankly, as I've said before, if you live in California or some other coastal states, you knew that under the electoral college system, your vote for Trump wouldn't count, because of the majority Democrat vote there. Hence you quite likely wouldn't have turned out to vote.

On the other hand, if election of the president by popular vote were to be the system in operation, Trump voters could have voted for him secure in the knowledge that their vote would count. Who knows? There could have been millions extra who would have turned out to vote for him and maybe he'd have won anyway. You're trying to compare apples to oranges, and a move by Democrats to alter the electoral system could end up biting them in the backside.

You just watch: the Democrats won't seek to change the electoral system because they know they tend to predominate in the Coastal states. They won't want to throw that away.
 
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When the US was founded, the colonies came together freely to form a federal republic. In order to get the smaller colonies to agree to join with the larger ones, the constitution had to offer protections that would make it hard for the more populous states to impose their will on smaller states that might have different interests. Since that time, many more states joined the union under the same contract.

Are the people who want to eliminate the electoral college willing to dissolve the US and negotiate a new constitution? Or do they just want to change the contract unilaterally and impose their will on the less populous states, reneging on the agreements that were made when those states joined the union?

What about eliminating the US senate where each state, large or small, has exactly two representatives? How is that democratic? You don't hear them advocating that because the republicans have a huge majority in the house of representatives where states are represented in proportion to their population, while in the senate the republicans only have a 52 - 48 seat majority. You don't hear them complaining about the senate because they are not really interested in democracy, they are interested in power. Their arguments advocating the elimination of the electoral college in the interest of fairness and democracy are cynical not sincere.
 
http://theweek.com/articles/668508/electoral-college-actually-awesome

Unlike governors, whose state governments have total sovereignty within their borders, the presidency governs over states with their own sovereignty under the Constitution. The role of the presidency is at least somewhat limited to foreign policy and questions that are at least loosely connected to interstate issues and enforcement of other provisions of the Constitution. For that reason, the framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that the president would have the greatest consensus among the sovereign states themselves, while still including representation based on population.

That is why each state gets the same number of electors as they have seats in the House and the Senate. It reduces the advantage that larger states have, but hardly eliminates it entirely; California has 55 electors while Wyoming has only three, to use the Times' comparison. Rather than being an "antiquated system," as they write, it's an elegant system that helps balance power between sovereign states with national popular intent, and it forces presidential contenders to appeal to a broader range of populations.

 
Alex,

I am just listening to that great interview, but I had to make two immediately comments.

I can understand why you thought the establishment would manage to win regardless, but I think what everyone forgot was that the media lulled the Clinton campaign into complacency.

I live outside the US, of course, but make no mistake, we were all watching this - because we could all see that this election might be make or break world peace.

David
 
Alex,

I am just listening to that great interview, but I had to make two immediately comments.

I can understand why you thought the establishment would manage to win regardless, but I think what everyone forgot was that the media lulled the Clinton campaign into complacency.

I live outside the US, of course, but make no mistake, we were all watching this - because we could all see that this election might be make or break world peace.

David
yeah, it's a strange paradox... as the MSM (which was shown by Wikileaks to be totally biased and ethically compromised) actually undermined their corrupt purposes.
 
The thing quietly simmering away in the background is the thought of nuclear war/terrorism, which we forgot for a while after the fall of the Berlin wall. If some dumbass Islamic terrorist were to get hold of a nuclear bomb and blow it up in his favoured Kuffar location, the lord only knows what would happen, but my guess is, it'd make Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lybia and all the rest look like a kindergarten.
I'm not saying this can't happen, but one interesting fact is that nuclear weapons (at least use to) need refurbishing at regular intervals. The radiation from the fissile material warps the metal components (and probably fouls up the electronics) so they distort out of shape so you don't get the required spherical implosion. I do wonder if stolen warheads would actually work by the time they were used.

David
 
Business as usual. Economic interest influencing elections, pundits and internet-personalities like "911 truthers who defeated Hilary Clinton" misread this as some kind of important message about their own relevance or as a barometer of where the country is at.

Obama won in 2008 for the same reason Trump won in 2012. "It's the economy, stupid" remains as valid as ever.

And if predictions of a recession are correct it's why Trump will lose - regardless of his own policies/merits, or lack thereof - in 2020.
 
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