I couldn't find an open thread about this trial and since jury selection is currently set to begin on April 15th there will be more and more in the news about it. So rather than get details on this case lumped in with his appeal on the fraud case I thought it would be best to dedicate a separate thread to this upcoming trial.........
Trump's Stormy Daniels hush money trial to start on April 15, judge rules
NEW YORK, March 25 (Reuters) - Donald Trump's criminal trial on charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star will begin on April 15, a judge said on Monday, paving the way for the Republican presidential candidate to either be convicted or cleared before the Nov. 5 election.
The date all but ensures that Trump will become the first-ever former U.S. president to go on trial for criminal charges.
Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said it was unfair for Trump, who held the office from 2017 to 2021, to stand trial while he runs for president.
"He shouldn't have to sit for a trial now because (prosecutors) chose to bring this case a year ago and not three years ago," Blanche said in court after Merchan set the date.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen's $130,000 payment to silence adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says they had a decade earlier - an encounter Trump denies.
Jury selection for the case was initially scheduled to begin on Monday, but Justice Juan Merchan on March 15 delayed it for at least 30 days after Trump's lawyers accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, which brought the charges, of trying to bury documents that could help them challenge Cohen's credibility.
The documents came from the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, which previously investigated the payment but did not charge Trump. Cohen testified that Trump directed him to make the payment and went to prison after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws.
At a court hearing on Monday in a New York state court in Manhattan, Merchan appeared skeptical of Trump lawyer Todd Blanche's argument that Bragg's office engaged in misconduct. The judge questioned Blanche about why he did not request documents from the U.S. Attorney's office sooner.
Blanche said at the hearing that the U.S. Attorney's office said on Sunday that it would be handing over additional documents related to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
The case is one of several legal travails Trump, 77, faces as he ramps up his 2024 campaign to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden.
He faces three other criminal cases, which focus on his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden and his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving office in 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In the hush money case, prosecutors say the Daniels payoff was part of a broader "catch-and-kill" scheme Cohen and Trump hatched to boost his candidacy by buying the silence of people with damaging information. Daniels says she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump denies an encounter.
Trump's lawyers say the payment was meant to spare himself and his family embarrassment, not to benefit his 2016 campaign.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges of violating campaign finance laws through the payment.
Trump's defense lawyers in January subpoenaed the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, which charged Cohen, for Cohen's bank records and phone and email accounts in January. Merchan in December denied their request to get some of those materials from Cohen himself.
The federal prosecutors handed over the material during the first two weeks of March.
In pushing Merchan for a delay, Trump's lawyers said they need more time to review the documents and accused Bragg's office, which brought the charges, of trying to bury material that they could use to undermine Cohen's credibility.
Bragg's office said it asked the federal prosecutors for information from their case against Cohen and turned the materials over to the defense last June. They said no further delay was needed because most of the new documents are irrelevant or duplicates of material Trump already had.
In another case on Monday, Trump won a bid to pause his $454 million civil fraud judgment if he posts a smaller $175 million bond within 10 days, in a victory for Trump that blocks New York state authorities from taking steps to seize his assets.
Judge issues gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting on witnesses, others in hush money case
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge Tuesday issued a gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial, citing the former president’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases.
Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision, echoing a gag order in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case, came a day after he rejected the defense’s push to delay the Manhattan trial until summer and ordered it to begin April 15. If the date holds, it will be the first criminal trial of a former president.
“Given that the eve of trial is upon us, it is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” Merchan wrote in a four-page decision granting the prosecution’s request for what it deemed a “narrowly tailored” gag order.
The judge said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s statements have induced fear and necessitated added security measures to protect his targets and investigate threats.
Trump’s lawyers fought a gag order, warning it would amount to unconstitutional and unlawful prior restraint on his free speech rights. Merchan, who had long resisted imposing a gag order, said his obligation to ensuring the integrity of the trial outweighed First Amendment concerns.
“President Trump’s political opponents have, and will continue to, attack him based on this case,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles said in a recent court filing. “The voters have the right to listen to President Trump’s unfettered responses to those attacks — not just one side of that debate.”
The gag order bars Trump from either making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about potential witnesses and jurors in the hush-money trial. It also prohibits any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.
It does not bar comments about Merchan, whom Trump has referred to after his arraignment last year as “a Trump-hating judge” with a family full of “Trump haters,” or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat. But it puts Trump on notice that attacks on key figures in the case, like his former lawyer-turned-nemesis Michael Cohen or porn star Stormy Daniels, won’t be tolerated.
A violation could result in Trump being held in contempt of court, fined or even jailed.
“I want to thank Judge Merchan for imposing the gag order as I have been under relentless assault from Donald’s MAGA supporters,” said Cohen, a key prosecution witness against Trump. “Nevertheless, knowing Donald as well as I do, he will seek to defy the gag order by employing others within his circle to do his bidding, regardless of consequence.”
Blanche declined to comment. Bragg’s office also declined to comment. A message seeking comment was left for Trump’s presidential campaign.
The gag order adds to existing restrictions that prohibit Trump from using evidence in the case to attack witnesses.
Trump’s hush-money case centers on allegations that he falsely logged payments to Cohen, then his personal lawyer, as legal fees in his company’s books when they were for his work during the 2016 campaign covering up negative stories about Trump. That included $130,000 he had paid Daniels on Trump’s behalf so she wouldn’t publicize her claim of a sexual encounter with him years earlier.
Trump pleaded not guilty last April to 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in jail time. He denies having sex with Daniels and his lawyers have said that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses, not part of any coverup.
At his arraignment, Merchan admonished Trump not to make statements that could incite violence or jeopardize safety, but stopped short of muzzling him. At a subsequent hearing, Merchan noted Trump’s “special” status as a former president and current candidate and said, “I’m bending over backwards and straining to make sure that he is given every opportunity possible to advance his candidacy and to be able to speak in furtherance of his candidacy.”
As jury selection nears, Merchan has been increasingly wary of Trump’s rhetoric disrupting the historic trial. Earlier this month, Merchan ruled to keep the names of jurors from the public. Trump will have access to them, but he risks forfeiting access if he discloses the names publicly or engages in harassing or disruptive conduct that threatens the safety or integrity of jurors, the judge said.
Now, with the gag order, Merchan is declaring scores of people involved in the case off-limits for Trump’s social media venom, courthouse diatribes and campaign rallies. Trump’s grousing to TV cameras as he entered and exited the courtroom became ritual during his New York civil fraud trial last year.
After leaving Monday’s hearing where Merchan set the trial date, Trump tore into prosecutor Matthew Colangelo at a press conference, referring to the ex-Justice Department official as a “radical left from DOJ” sent to run the Trump case “by Biden and his thugs.” The judge cited those remarks in his ruling.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out about the hush-money case. He warned on social media of “potential death & destruction” before his indictment last year and posting a photo on social media of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of Bragg. He has referred to Cohen as a “convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, with zero credibility” and has used a mocking nickname to describe Daniels.
Merchan is just the latest judge to put guardrails around Trump.
A federal appeals court panel in December largely upheld Trump’s gag order in his Washington, D.C., election interference case but narrowed it by freeing him to criticize special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case. The New York gag order echoed that ruling by excluding Bragg.
At the fraud trial, Trump was fined $15,000 for twice violating a gag order imposed after he made a disparaging social media post about the judge’s chief law clerk.
In January, a federal judge threatened Trump with expulsion from court in a civil trial on writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation claims against him after he was heard saying “it is a witch hunt” and “it really is a con job.”
Only Half of Republicans Would Vote for Donald Trump if Convicted: Poll
When broken down further, 51 percent of Republican voters said they would not vote for Trump if he becomes a convicted felon, with a further 25 percent saying they weren't sure.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
I hope everyone remembers to donate all of your life savings to Trump this religious holiday weekend.
No rotten eggs either. They better be golden.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
New York appeals judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to delay his April 15 hush money trial
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York appeals court judge on Monday rejected Donald Trump’s bid to delay his April 15 hush money criminal trial while he mounts a last-minute fight to move the case out of Manhattan, foiling the former president’s latest attempt to put off the historic trial.
Justice Lizbeth González of the state’s mid-level appeals court ruled after an emergency hearing Monday where Trump’s lawyers asked that she postpone the trial indefinitely while they seek a change of venue.
They contended the presumptive Republican nominee faces “real potential prejudice” in heavily Democratic Manhattan and said the jury pool has been polluted by news coverage of Trump’s other recent cases, including his $454 million civil fraud judgment and the $83.3 million he’s been ordered to pay for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. He is appealing both verdicts.
“Jury selection cannot proceed in a fair manner,” Trump lawyer Emil Bove argued, citing the defense’s polling and a review of media coverage.
Trump’s hush money trial is the first of his four criminal indictments slated to go to trial and would be the first criminal trial ever of a former president.
In a separate appellate matter, Trump’s lawyers are challenging a gag order barring him from making comments about jurors, witnesses and others connected to the case. The trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, recently expanded the gag order after Trump lashed out at his daughter, a Democratic political consultant, on social media. The appeals court will hear that matter Tuesday.
Trump, who lived in Manhattan for decades and rose to fame as a real estate developer shaping its iconic skyline, has suggested the trial should be moved to Staten Island, the only New York City borough he won in 2016 and 2020.
Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, noted that Merchan, had already rejected Trump’s requests to move or delay the trial as untimely.
“The question in this case is not whether a random poll of New Yorkers from whatever neighborhood are able to be impartial, it’s about whether a trial court is able to select a jury of 12 impartial jurors,” Wu said.
He blamed Trump for stoking pretrial publicity with “countless media appearances talking about the facts of this case, the witnesses, and so on.”
As the appeals court fight was playing out, Merchan released his plan Monday for conducting jury selection, including what jurors will and won’t be asked about their views on Trump.
In a letter to both sides, Merchan declared that choosing jurors isn’t about whether they like or don’t like anyone in the case but whether prospective jurors can assure they will “set aside any personal feelings or biases and render a decision that is based on the evidence and the law.”
Paperwork relating to Trump’s appeals was placed under seal and not publicly available.
Trump had pledged to appeal after Merchan ruled last month that the trial would begin April 15. His lawyers had pleaded to delay the trial at least until summer to give them more time to review late-arriving evidence from a prior federal investigation into the matter. Merchan, who had already moved the trial from its original March 25 start date, said no further delays were warranted.
Trump’s lawyers filed their appeals Monday on two separate court dockets. One was styled as a lawsuit against Merchan, a legal mechanism allowing them to challenge his rulings.
In New York, judges can be sued over some judicial decisions under a state law known as Article 78. Trump has used the tactic before, including against the judge in his civil fraud case in an unsuccessful last-minute bid to delay that case last fall.
In the hush-money criminal case, he is accused of falsifying his company’s records to hide the nature of payments to his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who helped him bury negative stories during his 2016 campaign. Cohen’s activities included paying porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.
As Trump’s lawyers stressed Monday that he was facing an unprecedented level of damaging publicity in Manhattan, they also referenced a decision issued by the state’s appellate court more than 25 years ago.
In that case, the court agreed to move the trial of four New York City police officers charged with killing Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean student, in the Bronx. Citing the “public clamor” in the city, the court agreed to move the trial to Albany, where the officers were ultimately acquitted.
Trump’s move to the appeals court Monday is the latest escalation in his battles with Merchan.
Last week, Trump renewed his request for the judge to step aside from the case, citing Merchan’s daughter’s work as the head of a firm whose clients have included his rival President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats.
The former president alleges the judge is biased against him and has a conflict of interest because of his daughter’s work. The judge rejected a similar request last August.
If the hush-money trial were to be moved out of Manhattan, it’s unlikely Merchan would go with it. In past cases, like the Diallo matter, a new judge was picked from the county where the trial ended up being held.
Trump has also made numerous other attempts to get the trial postponed, echoing a strategy he’s deployed in his other criminal cases. “We want delays,” Trump proclaimed to TV cameras outside a February pretrial hearing in his hush money case.
Merchan last week rejected his request to delay the trial until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on presidential immunity claims he raised in another of his criminal cases.
Trump also filed an eve-of-trial lawsuit against the judge in his New York civil fraud case, accusing the jurist of repeatedly abusing his authority. Among other issues, Trump’s lawyers in that case complained that Judge Arthur Engoron had refused their request to delay the trial. Their suit was filed about three weeks before the trial was slated to begin.
A state appeals court rejected Trump’s claims, and the trial started as scheduled Oct. 2.
Engoron, who decided that case without a jury, ruled that Trump, his company and key executives defrauded bankers and insurers by overstating his wealth in documents used to get loans and coverage. Trump denied any wrongdoing and is appealing the finding and staggering penalty.
Former President Donald Trump has asked a New York appeals court for emergency relief to stop the criminal hush money trial scheduled to begin on Monday so he can appeal a lower court’s ruling on presidential immunity and have the judge recused from the case.
The court filings on Wednesday are the latest in what has been a blitz of actions by Trump at the appeals court this week to try to stop the trial before its scheduled start.
Earlier this week, Trump’s legal team asked the appeals court to delay the trial so he can challenge a gag order stopping the former president from making statements about witnesses, family members of the judge and prosecutors, and jurors. Trump’s lawyers also argued that the trial can’t take place in Manhattan because of pretrial publicity. Both times, the requests to take emergency steps to delay the trial were swiftly denied.
An appellate panel is set to hear arguments on the request at 4 p.m. Wednesday.
In a brief two-page notice of petition filed earlier in the day, Trump’s lawyers said Judge Juan Merchan overstepped his authority when he issued a ruling denying Trump’s motion to postpone the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on whether the former president may claim immunity in an unrelated criminal case involving the 2020 election. Merchan denied the motion, saying Trump filed it too late.
The notice also says Trump is seeking to challenge the judge’s ability to oversee the trial. Previously, Trump filed a motion asking Merchan to recuse himself from the case saying the judge is conflicted based on work his daughter does for a political consulting firm that has worked for Democrats. The judge has not yet ruled on that motion.
After CNN reviewed the notice of petition on the public docket, the filing was sealed.
I don't see how a change in venue can be logically argued. Trump has been in the national news every day for the past 9 years.
There will be no playoffs. Can’t play with who we have out there and compounding it with garbage playcalling and worse execution. We don’t have good skill players on offense period. Browns 20 - Bears 17.
This is what it sounds like when a man refuses to tell people that every article he is referring to is nothing but editorial comments and opinion pieces. Then there's that "Joe Biden whatabout" which even his own party seems to have given up on. And let's not forget, he's cold.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
Man lights himself on fire outside courthouse during Trump trial: reports
A man appeared to light himself on fire outside a New York City courthouse on Friday where a jury was being chosen for the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, according to multiple reports.
The incident happened as reporters were gathered outside of the courthouse to cover Trump’s trial, CNN reported. On-air, reporter Laura Coates said it appeared that a man had set himself on fire.
Emergency crews rushed the man away on a stretcher, The Associated Press reported. Their condition was not immediately known.
The incident happened a short while after a full panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was chosen to deliberate in Trump’s hush money trial. Opening statements in the case are expected to start on Monday.
"And the gasses escaped and surrounded an unsuspecting man outside the courthouse. Then, when merely trying to enjoy a cigarette, he became engulfed in flames!"
"Yes Sarah, that's correct. And look at those flames! Have you ever seen flames that orange?? I think we all know who the real culprit is here."
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Trump legal team asks state appellate court to intervene in hush money trial
Donald Trump’s legal team has filed another application with a midlevel state appeals court Friday demanding that it intervene in the case. A hearing was scheduled for 3:30 p.m.
The documents weren’t immediately publicly available, but Trump’s lawyers have gone to the appeals court before trying to get the trial delayed or moved out of Manhattan. They have argued that Trump can’t get a fair trial there because of intense publicity. The trial judge had rejected that request.
He was definitely still alive when they put him in the ambulance. Hard to watch, so I won't post it.
Not sure he deserves his 15 minutes, so I'll just leave this here instead of starting a new thread. This is what was on the pamphlets he threw in the air... another madman's manifesto:
I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial.
M. CROSBY APR 19, 2024 My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan.
This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery:
We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup.
These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy. If you investigate this mountain of research, you will prove them too. If you learn a great deal about Ponzi schemes, you will discover that our life is a lie. If you follow this story and the links below, you will discover the rotten truth of ‘post-truth America’. You will learn the scariest and stupidest story in world history. And you will realize that we are all in a desperate state of emergency that requires your action.
To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you. But I assure you it is a drop in the bucket compared to what our government intends to inflict.
Because these words are true, this is an act of revolution.
--
Last March, a billionaire named Peter Thiel started a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank. I knew enough about Thiel that I found this incredibly suspicious: My hunch was that this was intentional, though I couldn’t fathom why.
I began investigating online, and quickly found cryptocurrency’s fingerprints all over it. The bank run occurred just days after Silvergate Bank – which catered almost exclusively to crypto companies – collapsed. Meanwhile, several crypto cheerleaders were all over financial media warning of a regional banking crisis, and nobody in media was addressing the clear crypto connections.
I dug deep into the financials of Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund and eventually uncovered the following, all proven many times over.
Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.
The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.
When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.
It is a Ponzi scheme so large that it created global inflation, which is why the price of Bitcoin has been a remarkable leading indicator for inflation rates. Victims who bought crypto don’t realize their money has already been stolen, so the money gets double-counted by the victims and the criminals who stole it.
As it turns out, our elites are awash in Ponzi schemes. Stanford’s StartX.com investment fund and Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Program for Evolutionary Dynamics’ he ran at Harvard are both fake-science Ponzi factories that these schools have invested billions in: They are filled with fraudulent companies that use smoke and mirrors to promise miraculous new technology, but always collapse while the perpetrators only get richer.
Funneling trillions of dollars in stolen cash through the stock market created the largest stock-market anomaly in history. The stock chart signature of a Ponzi scheme is a massive increase (while they stack up cash) and then a massive fall (as they funnel out the stolen cash). This chart shape appeared in all the companies listed above. In order to explain the massive anomaly, our criminal government unleashed COVID on the world and told us these were the “stay at home stocks.”
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Ponzi schemes are vicious beasts, and cryptocurrency is history’s largest Ponzi by orders of magnitude. It could best be described as an economic doomsday device, intentionally made to shatter the world economy.
The U.S. government is fully involved in this totalitarian con: To illustrate its bipartisan support, I’ll note that nearly every participant of the Clinton Global Initiative has ties to cryptocurrency, while two of the biggest tech VCs who participated are Trump associates Josh Kushner and Anthony Scaramucci.
To better understand our form of government, I will point you to one of the most astonishing pieces of stand-alone evidence I’ve found: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC speech where he nominated Mike Dukakis for president against George H.W. Bush. The speech is a vile, mean-spirited roast of Dukakis that makes no sense whatsoever: For Clinton to ruthlessly attack a member of his own party should have been political suicide, and he repeatedly mocks Dukakis’ noble and earnest qualities.
Notably, actor Rob Lowe, who was supporting Dukakis, was victim of a teen sex blackmail operation at the DNC that year. Since we know Clinton is a close associate with teen sex blackmail artist Jeffrey Epstein, we can suddenly make perfect sense of the nonsensical speech by applying this lens: Bill Clinton is a cocky mob boss who blackmailed Mike Dukakis because Dukakis thought his job was to help the public. He teases out the future public revelation that Kitty Dukakis drank rubbing alcohol, and offers a strange anecdote about the crack epidemic that reveals he is an exceedingly proud drug runner.
What does this revelation tell us? That our government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat vs. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since: Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on. When they present themselves in public, they are acting as characters that are against one another, practicing kayfabe as wrestlers do.
As it turns out, we have a secret kleptocracy: Both parties are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry. They divide the public against itself and blame the other party while everything gets worse and more expensive and handful of people take all the money.
Since it is fully parasitic, a secret kleptocracy is an incredibly unstable form of government – left to its own devices, it can only lead to fascism or failed state.
--
One of the key findings of this research is that Harvard University is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history, which is how they churn out billionaires – it’s a major hub of this sprawling criminal network.
As it turns out, dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard. So I asked myself the question: If The Simpsons served the interests of organized crime, how would it do so?
Well, it offers a dysfunctional family suffering from moral decay, a community incapable of solving its problems, a worker drone who slaves away for an evil billionaire, and cathartic laughs for our poor collective circumstances.
There are some notable specifics as it relates to this research, too: In Marge vs. The Monorail, the townsfolk are too oafish and divided to invest in the town’s needs (fix Main Street) and fall for the charms of a dazzling showman with a bogus monorail Ponzi scheme. When we know that the show is closely linked to an organization that invests billions of dollars in Ponzi factories, this becomes quite damning.
In Lisa the Iconoclast, Lisa discovers that town founder Jebediah Springfield was a secret criminal con artist, and that the townsfolk’s lives are a lie. Realizing this is an important discovery, she desperately tries to get the townsfolk to listen to her. But they meet her with hostility, apathy, disbelief, and partisanship and she fails to get through to them. Ultimately, she realizes the town is so far gone that perhaps it’s better for them to be lied to by con artists, and she keeps the secret to herself.
And here I’ve been, like Lisa Simpson, desperately trying to get friends, family, and the public to believe the proof of a totalitarian con I’m trying to show them, and they’ve turned away with hostility, apathy, disbelief, and partisanship.
And so, we realize the criminal truth of The Simpsons: Our elites are telling us that our eroding collective circumstances are our own fault, and we can’t do anything about it, while they steal the American Dream from us. It is, for lack of a more elegant word, brainwashing.
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Lastly, we string these major discoveries together: Cryptocurrency is an economic doomsday device; our government is a secret kleptocracy; The Simpsons exists to brainwash us. From there, the only research we need is critical thinking and we’re able to piece together the true story of our circumstances.
Consider America since 1988: Institutions like healthcare and universities have become parasitic in their skyrocketing prices. News media tells us to be angry and tribalized. Daytime television warns us of moral decay. Local news tell us to fear our neighbors. The Simpsons tells us we’re too oafish and divided to save the American Dream. Seinfeld tells us to celebrate the assholes and be irritated by all the normal people around us. “Reality” TV tells us that real life is filled with hedonism and strife.
Social media, owned by crypto criminals like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, is flooded with nonsense conspiracy theories and memes reminding us that we are hopeless, helpless, anxious, depressed, ironic, scared, apathetic, escapist, lonely, misguided, and jaded, telling us we can’t do anything but have a laugh at our circumstances.
Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode. The left shouts “All Cops Are Bastards,” which ensures they’ll be hated by the police and the public (and flies in the face of leftist theory). The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.
And with all this, a sharp rise in apocalyptic messaging: Climate change will kill us all; COVID will kill us all; vaccines will kill us all; AI will kill us all – no matter the bubbles we ascribe to, we’re bombarded with existential crises with no solutions. We’ve seen a surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and video games that tell us there is no way out of our poor circumstances but total societal breakdown. Zombies tell us that the public is our enemy. If you go to your nearest convenience store, you can buy a can of water called “Liquid Death.”
This is our rotten farce: For our entire lives, we have been flooded with media designed to slowly steer us into a world where the American Dream was dead, where the public was fully divided against itself, where everybody believed we were powerless to do anything about our worsening circumstances. It is all so they can organize an unprecedented, apocalyptic rug pull on the entire populace as they pivot to fascism, which is perhaps best understood as kleptocracy at the barrel of a gun.
When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.
Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: Climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia.
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Things escalated wildly in 1988 when former CIA Director George H.W. Bush got the White House, but this plan had been in action long prior:
Why is Stanley Kubrick’s comedy about mutually assured destruction called Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Because he was a cocky secret fascist who was getting us to stop worrying and love the bomb. Why did he make A Clockwork Orange? So we’d rejoice at ultra-violence designed to desensitize us to the horrors of the world.
Why were the Manson Family murders crawling with cover-ups and intelligence agents? Because our government wanted to make us fear for our lives and believe that hippies are deranged psychopaths.
Why did Walt Disney produce a fraudulent documentary that told us Lemmings follow each other off cliffs? So we would believe it.
Why did The Beatles tell us to fear the taxman, to scoff at revolution, chase nonsense conspiracy theories, and that happiness is a warm gun? So we would believe it.
Why did Easy Rider tell us that the hippie movement was dead? So we would believe it.
Why did Chinatown end with defeatism in the face of massive corruption? So we would believe it.
Why did George Orwell tell us of a hellish future of totalitarian control that we are powerless to stop? So we would believe it.
Why did Wall Street tell us “greed is good”? So we would believe it.
Why did Do The Right Thing tell us we’re all racially tribalized? So we would believe it.
Why did Simpsons creator Matt Groening make a comic strip called Life in Hell? So we would believe it.
And on, and on, and on, and on. When it comes to any popular media, if you ask yourself the question, “Why would secret doomsday cult kleptocrats want the public to consume this?”, you will find your answers.
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This is obviously very bad news, but the biggest lie we’ve been told is that we are powerless. We’ve got one way out of hellworld, and that’s for the public to realize that we’ve been conned completely so we can build a united movement that shatters every lie they’ve told us, mocks this rotten farce as loudly as it deserves, and aims at nothing short of abolishing our criminal government so we can build one that serves the public.
To understand this story is to see right through the con, to become immune to the endless sea of criminal propaganda, and to feel the great joy and power that comes with freedom.
If a small number of people quickly put on these truth-colored glasses, we are in for an unimaginably bright future. If not, we get an apocalypse.
For more information, I’ve put together this booklet that includes other major findings and a map to a sea of proof, along with all the other essays on this site.
For the true history of America since the end of World War II, see here.
To see this discovery unfold in real-time, along with further explanations, hundreds of pieces of evidence not covered here, advice, inspiration, political theory, and the heart and soul of a man escaping history’s largest doomsday cult, see my Instagram story highlights. I apologize for leaving things so scattered, but this has been an exhausting affair. So long as you understand this (true) ideology, you will be able to learn the whole story.
Here is a federal lawsuit I filed against dozens of perpetrators of the cryptocurrency Ponzi – not for litigation, but just to preserve the information and attach my name to it. I was terrified and hadn’t slept in days and it shows, but it served its purpose of keeping myself alive long enough to keep learning and telling this story.
I no longer have my original research files from the crypto rabbit hole. If you want to see them, you’ll have to get my laptop back from the government. Ask them how they got it - it’s a very fun story.
I hope you know how powerful you are. I wish you a hell of a lot more than luck.
It would be merciful if he dies. He would suffer greatly for a long time if he lived.
I know it's gross to even talk about, but they should have let him burn. All his ligaments in his arms and hands are locked up and he has to be in a tremendous amount of pain. Saving him is almost inhumane.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
FATE you better not reread his manifesto tomorrow. It ain’t the time to be ruining our celebration.
I’m far more interested in the space lasers big Marj was talking about recently.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
![[Linked Image from i.ibb.co]](https://i.ibb.co/fkjZc8B/Bull-Dawg-Sig-smaller.jpg)
