'You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?'

Harris has also become associated with coconuts -- with supporters talking about falling "out of a coconut tree" or declaring themselves "coconutpilled" -- due to a speech she gave in May 2023 at a swearing-in ceremony for the President's Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.

"My mother used to ... say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you," she remarked.

The clip first gained prominence after the Republican National Committee posted it on X, prompting ridicule from conservatives, particularly for her boisterous laugh. Even Trump has dubbed her "Laffin' Kamala" -- a nickname the meme-literate on the left have reclaimed, editing her chuckle into a whole slew of pop songs.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kamala-harris-campaign-brat-memes-charli-xcx/story?id=112168508

 

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Political assassinations are not just an American problem – they have been all too frequent throughout history

 

BY Matt Fitzpatrick

 

By the time Julius Caesar died with the words “Et tu, Brute?” on his lips, political assassinations were already a common occurrence. 

But have they become rarer in modern times? Was the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump an outlier event in modern democracies? 

The short answer is no. 

The United States, of course, has a long history of assassinations and assassination attempts that includes Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and more recently Ronald Reagan.

But assassinations are relatively common outside the US, as well. And only rarely do they bring about the radical changes the killer desires. 

What counts as an assassination?

An assassination is the murder of a prominent, powerful individual, particularly a political figure. Rarely random attacks, assassinations are an extreme form of protest based on the assumption that removing a single individual will change the political landscape. 

Yet, not all political killings are assassinations. 

For instance, states frequently order extrajudicial targeted killings, something that is regrettably on the rise. 

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the state has orchestrated a large number of fatal poisonings, shootings, plane crashes and defenestrations. GUSNOTE: VLADIMIR MAY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS... MEANWHILE THE CIA HAS BEEN BUSY TRYING TO KILL HIM.... LIKE CASTRO....

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently accused India of ordering a hit on a Sikh separatist in Canada. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul – an execution that US intelligence agencies allege the Saudi crown prince approved.

For its part, the US has repeatedly used extrajudicial targeted killings against high-profile targets, such as September 11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. Israel also regularly uses lethal violence against targets outside its borders. 

Assassinations, however, are often seen as acts of “unofficial” violence committed by those outside the structures of the state. 

Usually committed by individuals who oppose the direction taken by political leaders, assassinations reject the notion that states alone have the right to use or authorise physical force. This is often referred to as “a state monopoly on violence.” 

The evolution of political assassinations

In the heyday of Europe’s powerful monarchies prior to the 20th century, revolutionary groups used assassinations to make clear to the people that, for all of their power, the rulers of the day were mortal, too. 

According to one historian, revolutionaries tried to kill “nearly every major European ruler and head of state” in the late 1800s. 

For example, in an act of what some anarchists called “propaganda by deed”, Tsar Alexander II was murdered by the Russian revolutionary group People’s Will in 1881. Their Italian comrades then successfully killed Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1898.

Other assassins of the time were fervent nationalists. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Serbian Gavrilo Princip, whose murder of the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to the first world war.

After the war, fascist and proto-fascist paramilitaries in Italy and Germany also used political assassinations as a part of their terror. 

The socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, for example, were murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in Berlin in 1919. Before Italy slipped entirely into fascist dictatorship, the prominent socialist Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated by Benito Mussolini’s goons in Rome. 

During the second world war, resistance groups also used assassinations against the Nazis. The killing of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS chief who played a key role in carrying out the Holocaust, in Prague in May 1942 is still celebrated today in the Czech Republic. 

In the decades that followed the war, ultra-left revolutionary vanguardist groups began to embrace the political tactic of assassinations enthusiastically.

In Germany, for instance, the Red Army Faction assassinated leading bankers, industrialists, politicians and others from the 1970s to 1990s in the hope of fomenting revolution. 

A similar group in Italy, the Red Brigades, murdered Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. 

In the US, Sara Jane Moore also sought to spark a revolution with her attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, just two weeks after the Manson family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had tried to do the same thing.

Killing for the nation

While these revolutionaries resorted to violence to achieve their goals, assassinations by ultra-nationalists have also continued unabated.

Just a few months after India gained independence from Britain, the resistance leader Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindutva extremist who felt Gandhi had promoted Muslim-Hindu unity. 

More high-profile political killings followed in India: 

• Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 after she ordered military action against Sikh separatists 

• and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, who was assassinated while electioneering in 1991 by a Tamil Tigersuicide bomber after relations between the separatist movement and the Indian government soured.

In 2007, Benazir Bhutto, the former prime Minister of Pakistan, survived one assassination attempt (a bombing that killed 180 people) before being killed in another. 

The reasons for the assassination remain murky. Some believe she was targeted by Islamists angry at her closeness to the West; others believe then-President Pervez Musharraf wanted to be rid of an inconvenient rival. Musharraf was later charged in her killing; he denies any responsibility.

Elsewhere, ultra-nationalism was the motivation for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing ultra-Zionist in 1995. Rabin was killed (as Anwar Sadat of Egypt had been before him) for attempting to move towards a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. 

For the effect his killing had on the shape of the contemporary Middle East, some have labelled it “the most successful assassination in history”. 

Sadly, assassinations remain all too common in Africa today. One report estimated there were 185 assassinations on the continent in 2019 and 2020 alone, mostly of politicians, civil society and community leaders, and journalists. It’s estimated that 80% of assassinations in Africa are politically motivated.

Latin America is also frequently rocked by assassinations. In recent years, the anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was murdered in Ecuador, apparently by figures linked to powerful drug cartels. 

And then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed during a rally in Brazil – an attack believed to have helped him win the 2018 election.

Assassinations in the West

Assassinations also continue to be a common occurrence in liberal democracies, despite having more stable governments overall. The reasons for these vary, though in recent years, many politicians have been targeted by right-wing extremists. 

In Japan, Shinzo Abe was assassinated in 2022 by a lone gunman who had a grudge against a church he believed the ex-prime minister had supported.

In Germany, a conservative politician, Walter Lübcke, was murdered in 2019 by a right-wing extremist violently opposed to his pro-migration policies. A far-right extremist was also behind the killing of British MP Jo Cox in 2016. 

Earlier this year, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was seriously wounded by a gunman with connections to right-wing groups.

Conversely, it was a far-right politician, Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in the Netherlands by a fellow citizen outraged at the way Fortuyn had scapegoated Dutch Muslims for political purposes. 

An end to assassinations?

As long as disgruntled people outside the political process feel that something can be gained by killing a prominent individual, assassinations will continue to be a macabre part of the political landscape. State-sanctioned extrajudicial killings seem likely to continue, as well. 

But as the bomb-throwing anarchists of the early 20th century came to realise, killing an individual political figure rarely brings about the widespread change the act desires. GUSNOTE: MIND YOU, THIS WAS USED AS A PRETEXT TO START WW1, WITH MILLIONS OF PEOPLE KILLED... WHICH INDUCED THE RISE OF NASCISM AND FASCISM (WHICH THE PRESENT AMERICAN CAPITALIST EMPIRE HAS ADOPTED).... 

It is impossible to assassinate a system, a structure, a movement or an idea. Real political change requires more complex forms of engagement than the shortcut of the assassin’s bullet.

https://theconversation.com/political-assassinations-are-not-just-an-american-problem-they-have-been-all-too-frequent-throughout-history-234683

 

GUSNOTE: THE COMMUNIST DID MANAGE TO KILL OFF THE SYSTEM IN RUSSIA, WITH POLITICAL MURDERS, 1917....

 

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Buy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect

 

       by James Bovard

 

Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning that anything that arrestees say can be used against them in a court of law. But the Biden administration secretly created a new tripwire: Anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn’t want to be categorized as a “lone wolf” potential terrorist, you never should have bought that Bass Pro hat.

Federal agencies have long kept an eye on suspicious purchases by Americans considered potential troublemakers. Flash back 50 years, and the feds likely tracked buyers of The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), a book chockful of bad advice that caused boneheaded hippie bomb makers to blow themselves up.

But the federal surveillance net has vastly increased since the 1970s. Nowadays, the feds are flagging people who purchase Bibles and “other media containing extremist views,” according to a report by the House Judiciary Committee.

Technology is propelling new threats to freedom. A March 2024 report by the House Judiciary Committee noted that “the decline of cash and the rise of digital payments and e-commerce platforms….As a result, these financial institutions often act as arms of federal law enforcement as they work in coordination with federal law enforcement to identify what transactions and other information is ‘suspicious’ enough to be reported.” Greater computer resources make it vastly cheaper to store dirt on practically any private citizen.

The January 6 protests

After the January 6 Capitol clash in 2021, the Biden administration targeted average Americans as if they were would-be terrorists. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bloated its definitions of “suspicious behavior,” warning banks to track  “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts),” the House Judiciary Committee announced in a January report. As Fox News reported, FinCEN “distributed materials to financial institutions that outlined ‘typologies’ of ‘various persons of interest’ and provided the banks with ‘suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.”

If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, Team Biden bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” Or maybe your purchases triggered “Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators.” Are people who majored in theater in college but never got starring roles more likely to be classified as “lone actors?” The feds also warn of “Lone Wolves.” How does a “Lone Actor” become a “Lone Wolve?” [sic] Is this only a problem during full moons, or what?

FinCEN encouraged banks to use terms such as “TRUMP” and “MAGA” for “identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement,” according to the House Judiciary Committee. Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained: “This kind of pervasive financial surveillance … raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties.” The House Committee is therefore demanding information on “federal law enforcement’s mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process; FinCEN’s protocols, if any, to safeguard Americans’ privacy and constitutional rights in the receipt and use of such information.”

Defining ‘Extremism‘

Much of the absurdity begins with entitling bureaucrats to arbitrarily define “extremism.” In Washington, anyone who doesn’t worship government is considered an extremist. Why else would the official list of potential alarm signals include people who shopped at Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods? The Treasury Department formally admitted in February that FinCEN “began shortly after January 6” to track suspicious activity that “included terms such as ‘antifa,’ ‘MAGA,’ ‘Trump,’ ‘Biden,’ ‘Kamala,’ ‘Schumer,’ and ‘Pelosi.’”

Jordan’s committee learned that FBI officials “made contact with and provided Bank of America with specific search query terms, indicating that it was ‘interested in all financial relationships’ of BoA customers transacting in Washington D.C. and customers who had made ‘ANY historical purchase’ of a firearm, or who had purchased a hotel, Airbnb, or airline travel within a given date range.” Buy a gun, go to Washington 10 years later, get a federal dossier for the rest of your life! Jordan complained that the federal government “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

As a March 2024 follow-up report from the House Judiciary Committee noted, FinCEN carried out similar meetings with Barclays, Charles Schwab, HSBC, Paypal, Western Union, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan, and Chase “geared toward discussing options for financial institutions to share customer information voluntarily with federal law enforcement outside of normal legal processes.”

The FBI shared one report with financial institutions that asserted that Americans “who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists.” Federal agencies used that report “to commandeer financial institutions’ databases and ask the financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of individuals not suspected of committing any crimes. Federal law enforcement agencies warned that “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,” could be evidence of “Homegrown Violent Extremism.” The committee declared that the evidence from federal agencies “show a pattern of financial surveillance aimed at millions of Americans who hold conservative viewpoints or simply exercise their Second Amendment rights.”

The House Judiciary Committee is also probing the FBI’s role in vacuuming up information on private citizens beyond targeting banks. Rep. Jordan complained that the FBI “prepared an official report that broadly characterized certain political beliefs as indicative of domestic violent extremism.” Will Team Biden seek to make scoffing at politicians a federal offense? Jordan is seeking sworn testimony about the FBI’s “mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process.”

Financial surveillance

The latest revelations are another leap toward total financial surveillance. Prudent citizens should react to this news as if they saw a convicted burglar prowling outside their house taking too many photographs. Federal financial agencies have a record of secretly conspiring to cripple or destroy individuals or industries they despise. Federal regulations confer vast discretion to bureaucrats which they have not hesitated to abuse in the past.

During the Obama administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Justice Department launched Operation Choke Point, supposedly to “choke” illegal businesses’ access to financial services. But the target list was stretched to include attempts to destroy financial access for porn stars, coin dealers, online tobacco companies, and other targets.

Federal threats swayed banks to blindside thousands of their business customers. Cigar sellers and manufacturers were clobbered as collateral victims. A Daily Beast story headlined “The Banks’ War on Porn” reported that “hundreds of current and former porn stars” received “curt letters of account termination without further explanation” from their banks. A top FDIC official insisted that the agency’s letters to Congress on the crackdown “always mention pornography when discussing payday lenders and other industries, in an effort to convey a ‘good picture regarding the unsavory nature of the businesses at issue,’” according to a 2014 congressional report.

For some federal regulators and prosecutors, guns were even worse than smut. The FDIC notified banks to “‘prohibit’ payment processing for firearms merchants” and described “loans to firearms dealers as ‘undesirable,’” according to the congressional report. Banks were advised by one private regulatory compliance service: “Arms and Ammunition Dealers are identified as higher risk businesses because they have a higher risk of being associated with terrorism and terrorist acts.” The National Rifle Association complained that banks were “refusing to do business with legitimate law-abiding companies in the firearm industry … without regard to the specific company’s credit, criminal or financial history.” Hundreds of firearms and ammo companies saw their bank accounts frozen or terminated. Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI) complained that federal officials were “weaponizing government to meet their ideological beliefs.” Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) declared, “Unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Justice, the FDIC and other agencies set out to kill legal businesses by starving them of access to financial institutions.”

Emails from FDIC officials showed they were “scheming to influence banks’ decisions on who to do business … [to ensure] banks ‘get the message’ about the businesses the regulators don’t like, and pressuring banks to cut credit or close those accounts, effectively discouraging entire industries,” according to an analysis published by the Daily Signal. Former FDIC chief William Isaac declared: “Operating without legal authority and guided by a political agenda, unelected officials at the DOJ are discouraging banks from providing basic banking services — deposit accounts, payments processing services, and payroll accounts — to lawful businesses simply because they don’t like them. Bankers are being cowed into submission by an oppressive regulatory regime.” American Bankers Association president Frank Keating complained: “The government is compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties.” Operation Choke Point was terminated by the Trump administration, but legions of laws and regulations that could permit federal agencies to deny due process to politically disfavored businesses remain on the books.

Canada exemplifies how quickly a democracy can exploit financial tools to become authoritarian. The Canadian government used emergency decrees to freeze the bank accounts of anyone suspected of being tied to COVID “Freedom Convoy” protests in 2022. Politicians used financial levers to seek to cripple any opposition from truckers or anyone else. A Canadian court later ruled that the Trudeau regime had illegally abused emergency powers, but that did not repair the damage the decrees inflicted.

An American kleptocracy

The latest revelations bolster suspicions that the United States is becoming a kleptocracy.  Ten million dollars in wire transfers arrive in Biden family bank accounts from squirrely foreigners, and nobody is permitted to raise an eyebrow. Busloads of members of Congress have gotten rich from crooked insider trading in the stock market. Federal investigators ignore those scandals and instead hound hapless individuals suspected of buying too many boxes of .22 ammo for target practice. While FinCEN fretted about sales of Goretex camouflage vests, the feds slow-walked investigations of alleged bribes (including gold bars) received by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).

U.S. money-laundering regulations are designed to shroud crimes by American politicians. Federal agencies require banks to take far more precautions when handling financial transactions involving “politically exposed persons” — which includes almost all foreign politicians, their family members, friends, associates, and anyone else likely to take the money and run. But as a 2020 federal regulatory notice declared, federal banking agencies “do not interpret the term ‘politically exposed persons’ to include U.S. public officials.”

At the same time that federal agencies are acting as if they have a divine right to know how every citizen spends every dollar, don’t expect Uncle Sam to come clean on where your tax dollars go. Are you concerned about the $100 billion in U.S. government money that has been sent to the Ukraine government? Don’t worry — Congress decided there is no need to audit your tax dollars after they are forwarded to Kyiv. Are you concerned whether your tax payments are financing Deep State surveillance operations targeting yourself, your neighbors, and even your in-laws? Congress signed off on dropping an Iron Curtain around the budgets of federal intelligence agencies long ago. The only thing that citizens are entitled to is a rote assertion that any government expenditures are “for your own good.”

The biggest folly is to expect the government to be reasonable after it launches crazy surveillance schemes. Will we ever we learn how far Team Biden has gone in playing Trivial Pursuit by stockpiling vast amounts of data on American citizens? Citizens cannot submit to endless illicit intrusions without forfeiting their right to any remaining privacy.

Reprinted from Future of Freedom Foundation.

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/buy-a-bible-become-a-terror-suspect/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/40358

Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump has made $300,000 from ‘Greenwood Bible’ sales and owns up to $5 million worth of cryptocurrency, according to his personal financial disclosures.

The Federal Election Commission made the 250-page disclosure form public on Friday. It reveals that the Mar-a-Lago club and resort in Florida earned almost $57 million in income since his previous disclosure, while the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey drew over $37 million in “golf-related revenue.”

A line that caught the eye of NBC News was that the former – and potentially future – American president has earned $300,000 from sales of “The Greenwood Bible,” a customized edition retailing for $59.99 that includes a handwritten chorus of ‘God Bless the USA’ by country singer Lee Greenwood. A limited edition of the Bible bearing Trump’s personal signature sells for $1,000 apiece.

Trump valued his cryptocurrency wallet and “virtual ethereum key” holdings at between $1 million and $5 million. Although he initially considered crypto a “scam,” he has recently argued that if the US doesn’t lead in the industry, China will. 

I know a lot of very good people that are really into that world and into that market. They’re smart, they’re good people, and they think it’s going to be very beneficial,”Trump said earlier this month, in a live stream with internet personality Adin Ross.

Legal troubles in New York, which Trump has called a politically motivated witch hunt, have resulted in over $100 million in liabilities, according to the disclosure.

Trump’s wife Melania has earned over $330,000 from a licensing agreement to sell NFTs, while getting paid over $237,000 for a speaking engagement to Log Cabin Republicans in Florida in 2024.

Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, filed her 2023 disclosures in May. It revealed that her investment portfolio consisted of mostly passively managed index funds, according to CNBC. One member of the outlet’s Financial Advisor Council called it “the cleanest portfolio you’ll see in a politician” and insisted there was “no way that she can game the system.”

The Harris disclosure also revealed she earned over $8,000 in royalties from a 2019 children’s picture book she authored, as well as a “smaller sum” from her memoir, ‘The Truths We Hold.’ She also reported receiving tickets to a Beyonce concert, valued at more than $1,600, as a gift from “Beyoncé Knowles-Carter” herself.

https://www.rt.com/news/602690-trump-bibles-crypto-election/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.