Mostly Monday Reads: News of the Weird

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Today’s news reflects the natural and manmade disasters lurking in today’s headlines.  It’s difficult to know where to start, but I do want to recognize the 22nd Anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center Towers. This includes the news from The Hill that  “Two new 9/11 victims identified by New York officials” and a Hindustan Times article on “5 bizarre 9/11 conspiracy theories that refuse to die out.”   I hope the day is remembered for more than this from The Guardian. “How 9/11 influenced the way conspiracy theories spread today” by Andrew Griffin.

The theories themselves are so well-worn that they have progressed all the way to memes: the common refrain that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”, once an earnestly communicated part of conspiracy lore, has now become so hackneyed that it is almost meaningless. But there are many others, which either tend to suggest that the US could have intervened but decided not to, or that it actually orchestrated the attacks itself.

At the same time, however, they borrowed from tropes and ideas that had existed for centuries before, and which have continued to prove popular in the decades since. For the most part, 9/11 conspiracy theories are the same as those that went before, and those that followed, with the nouns swapped.

Perhaps the most distinct facet about the 9/11 conspiracy theories is the way they were pushed through formats that are familiar now in everything from advertising to the arts. In 2005, as the early viral internet we know today was finding its feet – it was the year of the first Pepe the Frog drawing, the beginnings of “Chuck Norris facts” and the “Million Dollar Homepage” – there appeared a video known as Loose Change, a documentary that presented the central ideas of the 9/11 conspiracy theory in a way that sent it swiftly across the internet.

Korey Rowe, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who made the film with friend Dylan Avery after returning from those wars confused and disillusioned, has drawn a straight line from the film to the various conspiracy theories that surround us today.

“Look at where it’s gone: you have people storming the Capitol because they believe the election was a fraud. You have people who won’t get vaccinated and they’re dying in hospitals,” he told the Associated Press. “We’ve gotten to the point where information is actually killing people.”

Today’s headlines also include a heavily armored train carrying the North Korean Dictator on its way to a meeting with Russia’s  Putin.  It’s like a 2fer day in Bond villains.  This is from the AP. “North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia, setting the stage for a meeting with Putin.”  Putin needs ammunition. Un has a surplus.  What does this mean for Ukraine?  Will they be Comrades-in-Arms?

 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia, both countries said Monday, and he is expected to hold a highly anticipated meeting with President Vladimir Putin that has sparked Western concerns about a potential arms deal for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

A brief statement on the Kremlin’s website said the visit is at Putin’s invitation and would take place “in the coming days.” It also was reported by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, which said the leaders would meet — without specifying when and where.

“The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un will meet and have a talk with Comrade Putin during the visit,” it said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin and Kim will lead their delegations in talks and could also meet “one-on-one if necessary.”

Speaking of Bond Villians, CNN reports that the “Justice Department drops Mueller-era case against Michael Flynn ex-lobbying partner Bijan Kian.”  Are they still after Flynn? This is reported by Katelyn Polantz.

The Justice Department is dropping its five-year-old criminal case against Bijan Kian, the former lobbying partner of Michael Flynn whom prosecutors had accused of illicit lobbying for Turkey during the 2016 US presidential election.

The move wraps up a long-running tangent of the Mueller-era Russia investigation that originally had been used as leverage to pressure Flynn. Investigators had looked into the Trump ally’s unregistered work for Turkey before becoming the US national security adviser, charged him with false statements and sought his testimony against Kian, then allowed his guilty plea and cooperation to unravel.

Kian’s case has wound through the courts for years. After his indictment in 2018, the Iranian-American businessman went to trial, with prosecutors planning on calling Flynn to testify against him to solidify their evidence of a connection between Flynn’s lobbying group and the government of Turkey.

But Flynn was already working on contesting own case with prosecutors—which he ultimately achieved with the agreement of then-Attorney General Bill Barr – and avoided being called to testify.

A jury in the Eastern District of Virginia voted to convict Kian on charges of conspiring to hide lobbying work for Turkey from the Justice Department and acting as an illegal foreign agent. Yet Judge Anthony Trenga threw out the verdict, citing insufficient evidence and other issues related to Flynn’s role in the lobbying effort. The judge found there wasn’t evidence that Kian agreed to act as a foreign agent for Turkey. The case then went into appeals, hanging in the criminal justice system for years.

In a court filing on Monday, the Justice Department told Trenga it sought to dismiss the charges against Kian, who is also known as Bijan Rafiekian.

“After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further,” prosecutors wrote.

The judge hasn’t yet formally dismissed the case but is expected to.

Other Bond Villians in the news include the vile Ex-President Trump. Judd Legum from Popular Information writes this analysis. “The key to understanding Donald Trump’s enduring appeal is Vince McMahon.”

To better understand Trump’s enduring appeal, Popular Information spoke with Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Why talk to the biographer of a wrestling executive to understand Trump? McMahon is one of Trump’s closest associates and, Riesman reports, one of the few people whose calls Trump takes in private. McMahon, who inducted Trump into the WWE Hall of Fame, could be serving as something of a role model to Trump right now. How many other people beat federal felony charges in court, weathered multiple sex scandals (so far), and emerged wealthier and more powerful?

Perhaps more importantly, McMahon is the creator of neo-kayfabe, the blending of fact and fiction — and good and evil — until it is all impossible to distinguish. McMahon himself became the most popular character on WWE shows, assuming the character of the arch-villain Mr. McMahon. There is now little distinction between McMahon and his WWE persona.

In her book, Riesman makes the case that Trump’s political strategy is shaped directly and indirectly by McMahon. “For more than three decades, Trump has watched and admired Vince’s product,” Riesman writes. “He has been both host and performer at many of Vince’s wrestling extravaganzas, honing his abilities as a rabble-rouser. Through Trump, Vince’s wrestling-infused mentality has reached the highest levels of the American system.”

Popular Information spoke to Riesman about what McMahon and WWE wrestling can teach us about Trump’s continued popularity, Trump’s response to federal indictments, and whether Trump believes his lies about the 2020 election. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

On how some people on the left misunderstand Trump’s appeal:

What we have with Trump is a guy who a lot of people on the left misunderstand as being just loved by the people who vote for him. And I think the feeling is not just, “Oh, Trump is good and strong and loves people and is a good Christian.” Very often, people will approach Trump in the way that they approach what they call in wrestling a “tweener.” Somebody who’s not exactly good or not exactly evil, where they go, “Yeah, I don’t approve of all of his methods or the things he says, but he’s cool, and he gets the job done.” I think thinking in terms of face [a “good guy” in wrestling] and heel [a “bad guy” in wrestling] for Trump is too binary, because it’s too much in the old way of doing things. The old kayfabe, not the neo-kayfabe. Trump is not perceived just as a good guy or a bad guy.

On the wrestler who is most similar to Trump:

Stone Cold Steve Austin is the person who, more than anyone else, altered the way the wrestling public uses their protagonists. Because Steve Austin was billed as a heel. He was introduced as a bad guy. And they were pushing him hard as a bad guy. But the crowd was seeing all these evil acts and just eating them up. They were obsessed, and cheering for this horrible character who was doing awful things. And that’s a real sea change for wrestling that, and then it ends up being a sea change for the culture.

On how WWE primed a generation for Trump:

You can’t deny that millennial boys grew up watching Stone Cold Steve Austin, and then the Rock and Triple H, and all these other people in that mold. These are people who are not quite face, not quite heel, but beloved by the crowd, despite their evil acts. Millennial boys shaped their whole worldviews when they’re 11 to 15 around that sense of morality. Not: Is it good, or is it evil? Just: Is it exciting? Is it cool? That’s what the premium is placed on. And that’s true now in politics, too. Maybe it’s always been true in politics to a certain extent. But right now, the thing that grabs people to vote is very often just: Do I find this person entertaining, recognizable, iconic, or funny? As opposed to: Will this person do a good job in the elected office that I’m voting for them for? And wrestling turned that into a science.

Well, it’s one possible hypothesis. Trump has another extravaganza ready for your TV viewing. The Daily Beast Reports that  “Donald Trump Challenges Rupert Murdoch to a Mental Acuity Test.”   Please tell me all channels will be ignoring this. The fun news is that Trump’s trip to a classic Iowa match-up football game was met with the Middle Finger Salute.  Ah, that’s the Iowa I grew up in! This is from HuffPo. “Some Football Fans Hit Trump With Harsh 1-Finger Salute During Iowa vs. Iowa State Game.” 

Several college football fans flipped the bird to former President Donald Trump as he waved to a crowd from a private suite at the Iowa vs. Iowa State game on Saturday.

Trump, who received a sea of cheers during a visit to a fraternity house before the game, got the one-finger salute from a number of fans as he and other GOP presidential candidates were on hand to check out the state’s intense college football rivalry.

The real interesting news from HuffPo is this. “Jamie Raskin Says Republicans Have ‘Conclusively Disproven’ Their Own Biden Corruption Allegations. Republicans are acting out of “humiliating subservience” to Donald Trump, according to the Maryland Democrat.  Who is James Bond in this scenario?

In his quest to uncover evidence of corruption by President Joe Biden, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has only managed to undermine his key allegations against the president, according to the committee’s top Democrat.

“Chairman Comer’s investigation has conclusively disproven the Republican allegations against President Biden,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday in a statement accompanying a report summarizing the committee’s work so far this year.

It’s a scathing document that portrays the Republican investigation as a transparent effort to create a false equivalence between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who faces four criminal trials for conduct during and after his presidency.

The main corruption allegations against Biden are that he participated in his son’s business deals with foreign nationals and that as vice president he twisted U.S. foreign policy to benefit a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son as board member. House Republicans have said they may launch an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden based on the Oversight Committee’s material.

“Mounting evidence reveals that then-Vice President Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens,” a spokesperson for Comer said Monday. “Then-Vice President Biden spoke over 20 times by speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, dined with corrupt oligarchs who funneled millions to Hunter Biden, had coffee with one of his son’s associates in Beijing, and may have engaged in a bribery scheme.”

Earlier this year, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) uncovered an FBI file indicating that a trusted source spoke to a Ukrainian oligarch who claimed to have bribed Joe and Hunter Biden. The source said the claim was characteristic of braggadocio among post-Soviet businessmen; Raskin has said FBI officials told him they assessed the material and found it not credible enough for a full investigation. (The bureau has declined to publicize its assessment.)

Oooooo. Real Russians.  Now, for real Communists? Alright, this is from Red State, so I doubt it, but sheesh. What is with these people?  “Communists Burn Flags Outside Jason Aldean Concert, but the Response Shuts Them Down.”

Some don’t wish us well today. They would like to see us taken down and defeated as a nation. There are those who despise the very principles upon which this nation was built.  Over the weekend, the Revolutionary Communists showed up outside a Jason Aldean concert in Tinley Park, a suburb of Chicago, not only to bash him over his viral hit song but to slam America, burn the flag, and call for a Communist revolution. You can see a video of them burning American flags here. 

So, I see no evidence of anything other than folks burning the US Flag in protest. Again, these folks love an excellent Conspiracy Plotline.

Okay.  One more for the road. “JFK assassination witness questions whether shooter acted alone. Paul Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s slaying is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president.”  This is from The Guardian.

An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.

In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.

But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”

Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.

Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.

As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.

Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.

Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.

“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”

And they say yellow journalism is dead.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?