Special to WorldTribune.com, February 8, 2023
Corporate WATCH
Commentary by Joe SchaefferIt's come to this. We seem to have arrived at a pivot moment in the phony presentation our ruling elites provides to the general public. Bombastic personality is giving way to a dull, wooden statist hue.
It causes one to ponder the nature of the potent forces burrowed within American politics that can bully a man who is supposed to be independently wealthy into degrading himself like this:
What is it like on the ground for an American journalist turned enlisted Ukrainian soldier? After 11 months in a wartorn country what does she want Americans to know about the Ukrainian people? @SarahAshtonLV of Las Vegas joins https://t.co/PjWTwI7FIz with news from the front. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/J9jKrcFelA
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) January 30, 2023
That remarkable clip shows a transparently weary Andrew Yang, the man who initially created a substantial buzz when he ran for the Democrat nomination for president in 2020 on a fiercely anti-big corporate platform, submissively lobbing softball questions at a transgender apparatchik for the military industrial complex and its core brand, endless war.
A biological male named Sarah Ashton-Cirillo has gotten his fair share of big-box media attention, and then some, for another transition, from “war correspondent” to supposed active member of the Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia. Before (supposedly) taking up arms himself, Ashton-Cirillo’s reporting took the ruling elites’ anti-Russia hysteria to new limits of weirdness:
On June 21, in the widely read LGBTQ Nation I wrote an article in which the subheader included a disturbing, almost unbelievable line – “Russian forces are hunting down gay men, raping and castrating them.”
Several days later I repeated this fact on the BBC’s Ukrainecast.
Why is Andrew Yang subjecting himself to this?What has he been promised? What door does he believe is being opened to him if he acts in such a thoroughly embarrassing manner?
It’s easy to dismiss Yang as a no-longer-relevant hanger-on in the world of politics, especially after his disastrous run for New York City mayor in 2021, where he didn’t even finish in the top 3 in the Democrat primary. Granting that this is in fact what is going on, what does it say about America today that the way to publicly sell out to the establishment involves ghoulishly shilling for the Deep State?
How much of a clown has Yang become? Here he is in November gushing over regime Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) squeaking out another six-year term via a ranked-choice voting system that protects incumbent officeholders from being rejected by their own party’s voters in unwelcome primaries. Murkowski and her father Frank before her have held a stranglehold on that Alaska Senate seat for over 40 years.
Yang also raised eyebrows last year by hitching his Forward Party, which he pushes as an alternative to the Democrat-Republican Uniparty, to the senatorial campaign of ex-CIA agent Evan McMullin.
McMullin ran as an “independent” against incumbent Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee, whom Yang dutifully painted as a danger to democracy for having expressed concern about the fraud-riddled 2020 presidential election. “Evan McMullin is a true patriot,” Yang wrote in an April 2022 blog post on his website. “He was a CIA operations officer in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia for 7 years before returning to the States.”
Yang ridiculously tried to portray the former government spook as an agent for change:
Evan McMullin’s candidacy is an historic opportunity on several levels. https://t.co/FdvpDwkWyK
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) April 25, 2022
Just like his transgender soldier comrade on the front lines, McMullin has long been obsessed with painting Russia as a dire world menace.
McMullin may have run as an independent, but Democrats in Utah were quick to get out of his way. This was said to be an exercise in pragmatic politics in a staunchly red state, but it further cemented an unbroken pattern by Democrats since March 2016, when Hillary Clinton captured the party presidential nomination, of fully embracing the Swamp ruling regime.
It’s an easy timeline to follow. For in 2016 a man captured the Republican presidential nomination who was not controlled by that power nexus. Ever since that moment, entrenched military, intelligence and other federal authorities have relentlessly opposed this man and the movement he represents. And ever since that moment, Democrats have wholeheartedly attached themselves to this embedded cadre.
Conspiracy theory? It’s kind of hard to say that when the big-box media propaganda outlets of this ruling establishment openly admit it.
From an NBC News article in Sept. 2018:
They put their lives on the line in foreign war zones, conducted secret missions to collect valuable intelligence and made enormous sacrifices for their country – only to see their former colleagues disrespected by President Donald Trump.
Now, driven by the president's conduct, they're taking matters into their own hands and gearing up for a different challenge: running for Congress as Democrats.
Fed up with what they see as Trump's disdain and distrust of the intelligence community – and his refusal to embrace fully the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election – an unusually large number of former intelligence officers and operatives are campaigning for office as Democrats in this fall's midterm elections, according to experts.
Among the several names cited, the article features two former CIA agents turned candidates for U.S. Congress. Both of them, Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), serve in the House today.Former Defense Intelligence Agency operative Gina Ortiz Jones in 2018 ran against outspoken Never Trump Republican ex-CIA agent Will Hurd for a House seat in Texas, making for a real-life Spy vs. Spy campaign battle. DIA Democrat vs. CIA Republican. Imagine believing there was a real choice involved.
Hurd eked out a victory, then decided not to seek re-election in 2020. Jones made a second run, but again fell short. In 2021, the Biden administration tapped her to be Under Secretary of the Air Force.
NBC noted that even those in the credentialed ranks of academia were surprised by the phenomenon:
Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, said the unusually large number of candidates running caught his eye because "in the intelligence world anonymity is really prized."
"Intel officers aren't typically political," Dallek said. "The surge in them running as Democrats, it's pretty safe to say it's a reaction to Trump's concerted attacks" on the intelligence community.
A Jan. 2019 puff piece in The Washington Post on Spanberger revealed an acknowledged blurring of the lines separating intelligence operative and political animal:“The old Yale guys would say, ‘What the hell is going on? You gotta be secret and anonymous and let the other guys who don’t know what they’re doing play the political game,’” [former CIA director Leon] Panetta said. “But young people at the CIA now are not particularly tied to the long legacies of the intelligence business and recognize that it’s important to get involved in politics because if they do not, others will distort the work of intelligence agencies.”
There you have it: the politicization of U.S. intelligence being openly promoted by leading Democrats.Spanberger is quoted by The Post as saying she was motivated to run for office by the fact that a sitting U.S. president was not accepting what we now know to be an entirely fictitious political narrative:
But more than anything, she is disturbed by Trump’s rejection of the intelligence community’s assessments on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. “I know what goes into collecting intelligence reports,” Spanberger said. “And, for him to take the side of a foreign adversary over our country is appalling to me.”
And this is what makes the otherwise completely uninteresting Yang notable. The way to sell out in American politics today is to toady to this Deep State and its agenda. Expect to see many more examples in the months and years to come.A climate of corruption once filled with the bloated grasping hands of a buffoonish Ted Kennedy or Harry Reid is now going to spit out an endless line of craven faceless statist bootlickers cut out of the Adam Kinzinger and Andrew Yang mold. Somehow, it seems... diminishing.
Action . . . . Intelligence . . . . Publish
