We officially opened up our embassy in Jerusalem – naturally, the Palestinian leadership decided that it was time for some Palestinians to die, and so sent a bunch of them to the border to cause enough ruckus to force the IDF to open fire. This is par for the course – but I don’t think it matters much, except to the poor people forced to die for Hamas. For the larger issue, it shows that Trump really does keep his promises.
Trump has shut down a NASA program to track greenhouse gasses. This is great – if Gore, et al really believe in it, let them pony up the money to prove it. As for me, I want NASA working on space exploration…manned and unmanned missions in deep space (I figure the private companies can take the load on communications launches and low Earth orbit stuff). We should be working, in my view, for a manned mission to Mars no later than 2024. Let’s go!
Millions of dollars are being shipped out of our country – and a lot of it appears to be the proceeds of welfare fraud. It has long been my belief that our slackness in all areas of government social spending has produced massive fraud. My guess – I don’t know – is that one in three dollars (at least) is fraud. This has to be stopped.
Mueller’s absurd Russian indictment – could it be his undoing?
We’re getting more and more of these reports which indicate Comey was not exactly forthcoming about the Flynn case. My thinking has always been that Flynn plead guilty to a minor process crime in order to spare himself a horrible ordeal with bankruptcy tacked on to the end of it. This, as an aside, means we simply must reform our criminal justice system – it isn’t fair that the whole power of government can be brought to bear and even if you’re innocent, you lose. But outside of that, I’m pretty confident that everything out of the FBI and the SC regarding Trump and his people is likely false.
Blogs For Victory 
The Palestinians didn’t just congregate along the border to “cause a ruckus. Some attempted to cross the border with explosives or hurl explosives over the border wall, while others attempted to drop bombs and Molotov cocktails into Israel using kites and balloons. The U.S. media, with the interesting exception of the New York Times, seems to be oblivious to these acts of aggression.
The NYT does its part to support the narrative that the Palestinians were merely “protesting”. Fully the first half of the article is packed with statements such as these.
More than 2,700 Palestinian demonstrators were injured…..
The latest protests took place…….
Protests on Gaza border turn bloody….
Tens of thousands of Palestinians took part in the Gaza protests……
Protests also took place on the West Bank…..
snipers used barrages of tear gas as well as live gunfire to keep protesters from entering Israeli territory…..
By midafternoon, the protest nearest to Gaza City……
Emergency workers with stretchers carried off a stream of injured protesters…..
Demonstrations coincide with U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem……
Urging demonstrators forward, despite the risks…..
Only much later in the article did some actual facts fight their way to the surface,
…at least three separate squads of armed Hamas fighters “tried to use the commotion and smoke and dynamics of the riots as concealment, and then launched an attack on the fence,” said Colonel Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces.
…he said the Palestinian fighters were carrying firearms….
Israeli security forces have said that some of the Palestinians who were killed had been armed with semiautomatic rifles….
We have to remember that the Left was behind the shameful Smithsonian exhibit identifying the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor as “defensive”. The Times kind of tries to establish an aura of objectivity and actual, real, journalism, but you can tell it is a struggle.
What a coincidence!!!!!
In January 2018, Michael Avenatti got an unidentified source of income that allowed him to pay $4.85M to his law firm employees he defrauded, close to $2M in back taxes for payroll taxes on his law firm, and near another $1M to other creditors. Same time as new client Stormy Daniels was brought on board.
Sure would like to know who filled the coffers of Avenatti. George Soros? Tom Steyer?
You’re not surprised by those revelations, are you? Stormy Daniels certainly couldn’t stuff enough $100 bills in her g-string to pay him that much. Hand them another shovel, or maybe a backhoe.
I think the Trump haters have over played their hand …… it may not end well for many of them
…as long as enough people work hard enough to connect the dots. In the past, I have seen Libs dismiss things by merely saying they weren’t relevant, or were mere conspiracy theories. We need to keep hammering clear-cut connections that don’t allow people to ignore the “this, then that, then that” sequence or just pretend that things don’t matter. I think the Right is doing a pretty good job at shifting attention from one shady lawyer to another, and hope they keep it up.
I am loving this new conservative “backbone” that seems to be strengthening by the day:
Dear Mr. Avenatti,
In addition to my role as co-founder and president, I serve as in-house counsel for The Daily Caller News Foundation. I have reviewed the allegations in your May 14 note to Peter Hasson, alleging “hit pieces that are full of lies and defamatory statements.”
Factual accuracy is essential to our trade, so in light of your note, we took a day to review every fact alleged in Peter and Joe Simonson’s article. We are confident that Peter and Joe did an excellent job of reporting on some of your previous business interactions, as well as allegations and actions brought against you by past associates.
Please let me know specifically what is incorrect in their reporting. If you bring something real to my attention, we will update the piece immediately. My strong suspicion is we will not hear from you because we know as well as you know that the piece was done well, and we know as well as you know that your note was just an attempt to silence reporting you don’t like.
Sincerely,
Neil Patel
President
The Daily Caller News Foundation
Nice!
Trump has shut down a NASA program to track greenhouse gasses. This is great – if Gore, et al really believe in it, let them pony up the money to prove it.
The Green House theory doesn’t need to be proved. The biggest problem, from everything I’ve read, is that it can’t be replicated in a laboratory, so a given effect based on a given level of greenhouse gases is not much more than an educated guess, and those guesstimates have constantly been revised downward over the last couple decades as the models failed to predict reality. In the past, the effects of trace gases like CO2 (.04% of the atmosphere) and CH4 (Methane 0 .00018%) have been overstated, while water vapor (95%) has been understated, and many climate scientists admit that they don’t really understand the role of clouds as a moderating influence on weather, temperature and climate. Since it’s inception in the early 80’s the global warming/man-made climate change movement has relied primarily on questionable data, manipulated data, falsified data, subversion of the peer review process, scare tactics and a complicit media and entertainment industry to keep the issue in the news.
There are just so many variables: that is why I’ve always had my doubts about the various climate theories. The various elements which make up the atmosphere are so varied that to try and peg one as the main driver seems to be a stretch…add in things like the effects of solar radiation; the effects of gravity; the effects of the Earth’s magnetic field…cosmic radiation. Just so much. I’m fully willing to have us switch over to a non-carbon power system…but it’s going to take a century or two to do that, under the best of conditions.
The existence of those other factors is a strong indicator of something other than AGW. What is just as significant, though in a slightly different way, is that the AGW fanatics dismiss them all. They dismiss all climate change prior to the last couple of centuries as irrelevant. They dismiss proximity to that giant furnace in the sky as irrelevant, as well as the impact of solar flares. They dismiss the fact that greenhouse gases were much more elevated millions of years ago, due to extensive vegetation, yet we plunged into an Ice Age. They dismiss Ice Ages. To me, any theory based on a combination of lying and fake data and dismissal of any information that doesn’t support it means it is bogus.
The latest meme from the climate alarmists is that the Arctic is warmer than it’s been in 1,500 YEARS. Let that sink in for a second. But before you ask what conditions caused the arctic melt 1,500 years ago, let’s just go back 96 years when SUV’s and coal burning power plants were becoming popular……..oh wait.
Let’s not forget that Hamas is well funded now vis a vie Iran, thanks to Obama and the Democrats flying in palettes full of cash in the last days of the boy wonders Presidency. I wonder how many American dollars are being used to attack Israel?
Maybe it me but is Sessions doing ANYTHING in his position of considerable authority to enforce our laws and prosecute those who abuse those laws especially those in positions of power? This picture sure looks like a deer in the headlight moment.
One more time.
There are two theories about Sessions:
1. He’s an Establishment nitwit who is letting the Deep State get away with it.
2. He’s actually carefully building an airtight case and we’ve just got to be patient.
A few Establishment nitwits did work their way into Trump’s Administration and they are now for the most part gone…I suspect that if Sessions was Establishment nitwit, Trump would have gotten rid of him by now. So, I do lean towards the latter…and I’m expecting, if right, to see things come late August or early September.
I’ve been kind of hoping and wishing for theory #2 as well. The fact that Sessions is still there makes #1 seem implausible. I don’t purposely follow conspiracy sites, nor do I give them a lot of credence, but the side ads on normal sites like Accuweather, MarketWatch, etc. make it impossible not to see headlines. There has been a conspiracy theme for several months that revolves around thousands of sealed indictments of Deep State bad actors being held until the optimum time to unseal them. I would think the optimum time, if they even exist, would be either right before or right after the election. Either way, we don’t have long to wait, but it could make for a long summer.
The Iran nuclear deal just gets interestinger and interestinger.
I am trying to figure out what I am missing. My take on this is that Ansari thinks he can pressure President Trump by threatening to give Trump ammunition to use to defeat Democrats in the next election and maybe drain a little more of the GOP swamp. It’s kind of like “If you don’t do what I demand, I am going to give you ten million dollars.”
As the Trump administration has few if any who could have influenced the Iranian deal, as it was promoted by Obama and the Dems and is still supported by them, and as any Republicans who defended it should be kicked out anyway, I am just not understanding what leverage Ansari thinks he has.
Can you imagine President Trump saying “I’ll do what you want, just don’t reveal the names of the people who were bribed to vote for a deal I, and most Republicans, didn’t want”?
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats delivered a major victory to President Obama when they blocked a Republican resolution to reject a six-nation nuclear accord with Iran on Thursday, ensuring the landmark deal will take effect without a veto showdown between Congress and the White House.
“I’ve never been more disappointed in the body than I am today,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has long protested the deal. “You won’t let us have a vote. You won’t let us have a debate. And please stop saying this deal makes Israel safer. That’s cruel.”
Kurt Schlichter continues on his recent roll. Excellent combination of wit, humor, sarcasm and truth.
Love the LOGAN ACT WAIT NOT LOGAN ACT comment. I’ve been waiting for someone to compare the actions of a former cabinet member acting overtly and illegally to influence international relations with those of a couple of businessmen with no status, no power, chatting with people from another country.
BTW, in one Leftist media narrative (sorry for the redundancy) about the downright inexcusable awfulness of self defense in Israel, a Palestinian was quoted as being outraged at the moving of the embassy because it was “illegal”.
The article did not say if he was a member of #RESIST or just got the memo and the vocabulary.
BTW2, when we talk about a list of acceptable vocabulary words, can we still say “bullet points” or is that a dog whistle meaning “kill all black people”? It is so hard to keep up…………….
Love the LOGAN ACT WAIT NOT LOGAN ACT comment.
I don’t know any writer who does a better job of picking up on and ridiculing Leftist hypocrisy that Kurt Schlichter does.
Derek Hunter doesn’t have Schlichter’s wit, but he has no less a grasp of the truth.
Given the Leftist leanings of both Starbucks and Amazon, it is unlikely that either will do the obvious and simply pull out of Seattle, but it would be wonderful to see this happen. It would require taking a stand against Leftist confiscation of property for redistribution by the State, which is a key tenet of the Left, but perhaps reason will prevail, along with attention to the bottom line, and one or both will move to a city more hospitable to business.
(Sometime this weekend I read a manifesto written for some university, which referred to the “tenants” of the school, and the person commenting on the effort rightly noticed that using “tenants” instead of “tenets” showed the poor education students were getting there.)
Amazon, of course, is trying to finesse the issue, saying ”…it would continue to build in the city despite a previous halt in construction.
Amazon said in a statement: “While we have resumed construction … we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here.”
This seems to have prompted a knee-jerk spasm of overt totalitarianism, sometimes cloaked a little more effectively but now out in the open.
”The labor group Working Washington called for criminal prosecution of businesses that threaten to leave the city. They argued that this constituted an illegal threat against public officials, a felony.
As libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh noted, such an expansive view of the law would also criminalize activities such as union strikes and boycotts.
This method of intimidating businesses into accepting predatory government action may not have been well considered, but it does reveal the impulses of the hard left.
If you aren’t willing to accept the left’s measures willingly, you will be forced to accept them through punitive government action. There will be no escape.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/17/the-lefts-war-against-prosperity-in-seattle
When the Left openly declares that refusal to allow it to take over private business would be a felony, they have staked out their territory, which is State control of production, Even the conflation of the people who are public officials with the State—-claiming that anything that diminishes the power of the State or at least slows its march toward totalitarianism is the same thing as a personal threat against individuals working for the State —shows the agenda of merging the individual with the State.
This is not an “expansive view” of the law”, it is a complete invention of a new law, without bothering with the annoying need for actual legislation. There is nothing in the law saying that if a company makes a decision about where to relocate its headquarters this constitutes a personal threat against individuals who work for the city. It’s not only not a threat against persons, it is not a threat against the city.
It makes more sense to claim that the new law is a felony because it constitutes a threat against the ownership of Amazon and Starbucks.
Nothing upsets the Left more than the combination of capitalism and private ownership of property, and in Seattle they have decided to, in the words of the mayor of NYC and other Lefties, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT
A brief but excellent analysis of Net Neutrality.
Congratulations to new CIA Director, Gina Haspel. It’s amazing how much the party that professes to be pro-woman hates the first ever female CIA director. A bit of hypocrisy in there somewhere. I hope, should this scenario become a reality, she tells those sanctimonious senators that she’s sorry, but she promised not to bring back enhanced interrogations (and then retreats to her nuclear-proof bunker, locking the door behind her.)
The poor Left just can’t keep its messages straight.
It is “torture” to tell a captive terrorist he might be injured if he doesn’t give us information, but it is perfectly fine to threaten any Republican or his family with rape, torture and murder, simply for having an opposing political opinion.
https://www.glennbeck.com/2013/10/29/chilling-threats-sent-to-wi-gov-scott-walker-and-family/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/democrats-threaten-walker-assassination.php
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/21/republicans-face-violence-death-threats-left-wing-activists/
Republicans going home to talk to their constituents are facing violence and death threats, with some lawmakers upping security at town hall events — a consequence of a culture of violence being fostered by left-wing activists and their allies in the liberal media.
Convicted sadistic murderers should not be put to death, but innocent babies entitled to protection of the females whose actions caused them to be conceived can be —–and some argued should be—-poisoned, or even dismembered while able to feel the pain, for the convenience of the gestational female.
I once asked a family member who is a hard-core Lib, who really loved his little dog Greta—-
“If Greta were to be taken out of your yard and you heard of a gang that was stealing little dogs to use as bait dogs for dog fighters, to be thrown into a cage to be torn apart by a fighting dog, would you torture one of that gang to find out where she was, to save her?” The answer was “Hell, yeah.”
When I reminded him of this a few years later, in front of a couple of other Libs, he denied it, but this happened with witnesses. Any Lib would waterboard anyone to find out who was holding Barack Obama hostage and threatening to kill him. In a heartbeat.
It’s Identity Politics taken to a vicious level, as the outrage about alleged torture is based exclusively on who is in office when it happens. It has nothing to do with saving lives. A typical Leftist mantra, heard in defense of every limitation on personal liberty, is “But if it saves just one life, isn’t it worth it?” But when it comes to saving millions of lives, if the “it” happens to be under a Republican president, the calculation would to let millions die.
At least if they were in Omaha or Sioux Falls or Nashville, some place where the people don’t matter.
Hillarious.
What can I say — TownHall had a bunch of great posts today.
I’ve been saying for years that we need to start making fun of these people. When we get angry we are in their wheelhouse—rage is their thing and suddenly we are playing their game. But they can’t fight ridicule, can’t fight humor.
For one thing, they HAVE no sense of humor on their own. Look at their “comedians”—they are absolutely stunningly UNfunny, and get their laughs by being vicious and hateful. True humor is in short supply on the Left, so they are unarmed when it comes to dealing with being ridiculed. The Right has had some really funny political cartoons, while on the Left they had a caricature of Condoleeza Rice as a very ugly Aunt Jemima.
I wish that Matt Walsh video on white Santas in the mall had gotten millions of views. “The Jews were weeping…” it was priceless. But then, most on the Left wouldn’t have understood they were being mercilessly mocked.
National Review has a good article about a study of the psychology of school shootings, but it references a study about the psychology of riots, which ties in with our observations of the paid activists getting the ball rolling in a riot and then taking off to let those they lured into the riot take the knocks, get arrested, etc.
But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-do-mass-shootings-happen-best-explanation/
We see this basic mentality at work on the Left all the time. First, the Left foments a mob mentality, making being part of a mob a normal thing, even a desirable thing. It is fueled by the Internet, which encourages abstract participation in mobs, but the psychological effect is much the same as that of being physically present in an actual mob. By this time, the threshold for violence is very very low. Online, it is verbal violence, abuse and threats, but in person it is too often rock-throwing, extreme vandalism, looting, even beating of people.
My point is that the Left has long understood this threshold-of-violence concept and used it, very effectively. They provide the venue, by organizing “protests” which attract people pre-primed to be open to being part of a mob, and they provide the spark that nudges the lowest-threshold people over that threshold by sending in paid activists to start the physical violence. Once the more susceptible are throwing rocks and breaking windows, the activists slip away as more and more in the mob reach their personal thresholds and join in.
I think law enforcement should focus on the instigators. I would, as a mob starts to form, send in drones to spray the crowd with a permanent invisible odorless substance that can be tracked, by black light or some other sensor, and I would send people out to mark the roofs of all cars parked within a certain radius of the “protest”. Once the violence starts, I would spray over the now-rioting crowd a substance that either has a permanent foul odor or a permanent dye, or even both—-having one’s North Face jacket permanently ruined will chill a lot of Social Justice ardor—–but more to the point I would have air surveillance tracking every car leaving the area within a short time of the violence starting. If the instigators are picked up, this way or at departure points at airports and train and bus stations, arrested, jailed during investigation, and at the very least fined, the money men behind them will start to find their efforts very expensive and it might be harder to recruit professional agitators.
I think most who end up rioting don’t go to the scene planning to throw rocks, beat people up and loot stores, but go because it is interesting, has a hint of danger and rebellion, and it’s a chance to express that rage that has been so carefully planted and nourished by their teachers and the media. Without the paid agitators to spark violence and nudge the more susceptible over their thresholds, perhaps a lot of violence could be avoided.
As for 1st Amendment issues, I would simply announce, very publicly, that peaceful demonstrations are fine but as soon as any violence takes place containment measures will be taken. I believe it was the Israelis who used stink spray very effectively to disburse mobs. Tear gas is fine, but not permanent—-I think participants in a riot should have their clothes permanently marked, even ruined, and even have very long-lasting dye (think bank bags) on their skin and hair, as well.
It’s just a simple matter of consequences—you can do whatever you want, but if you participate in an illegal activity you will pay a price even if you avoid jail.
The fact that none of the common sense things you suggest have been implemented tells me that the people and organizations within the government who would implement them don’t wish to stop demonstrations that turn violent. So far, at least to my knowledge, the only death has been the woman in Charlotte who was run down by a car or truck driven by a white supremacist. But generally violent protests have just done a lot of property damage. Sooner or later that will change when the present tactics don’t gain any ground for the Left. When your motto is “whatever it takes” or “by any means necessary,” violence is almost guaranteed to eventually be part of the equation. Maybe the organizers and money behind Leftist protests aren’t yet ready for dead bodies of OPSAD (other people’s sons and daughters) lying in the street in pools of blood. I know I’m not.
I was reading comments from different readers on various Daily Signal articles and interviews, and ran across this. I had to go back and read it several times. I think it speaks not just for itself but for the mindset that allows judicial activism and legislating from the bench.
Or am I missing something?
Judge William Young says “democracy means policymakers—not courts—are best suited to regulate weapons.” With that statement, the judge demonstrates that he doesn’t even know the purpose of the judicial branch of government.—Jerome Waldemar
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/20/we-hear-you-ben-carson-cory-booker-california-and-gun-control
I’d go a step farther and say that a great many people who hold elected and appointed positions in our government don’t know the purpose or limitations of any of the branches of government as established by the Constitution. I suppose some of them know, or at least knew at some point in the past, but decided that rules for for schmucks. Our government has become so hopelessly corrupted that it tends to attract corrupt people or easily corruptible people. The corruption kind of feeds on itself. On the rare occasion that honest individuals run for public office and get elected, they often quit in disgust after one or two terms. I keep coming back to Jefferson’s famous words, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Absent a massive sea change in human nature, I don’t seen any other remedy.
I am a little less skeptical of a need for a dramatic solution—-I think the Right could do a lot, if it only had the focus. For example, the Right should be EXPLAINING judicial overreach when it happens, not just tossing out few words like “judicial activism” without any foundation or background. To an ignorant person, having a judge be an activist for a sympathetic cause sounds perfectly fine, a good idea in fact. To get back to the current Lefty meme, in a slightly different vein, somebody’s got to do it. “IT” and “SOMETHING” are the new “Hope and Change” the dimiwitted chant in hopes of sounding thoughtful.
We as conservatives need to up our game. I have called in to “conservative” radio shows a couple of times and the hosts or guests haven’t been able to sum up conservatism any better than believing in “small government”—-but they can’t DEFINE “small government” and they can’t articulate the most important part of Constitutional governance, which is that a less powerful federal government does not mean giving up cherished issues, it just shifts the authority for dealing with them from the feds to the states.
In a similar vein, we toss out “judicial activism” without any reference to what is wrong with it. The Left has been very successful in un-educating the American public by giving support, overt or complicit, to horrible distortions of Constitutional governance, and we never have a coherent voice to counter this with facts and information. The Daily Signal printed this comment as if it is legitimate, in a series of comments about prior articles, and should have used it to illustrate its inherent wrongness. The comment should have been held up as an illustration of two basic misunderstandings of American Constitutional law—the first being that we are a democracy and the second being the ignorance of the role of the judicial branch of government. But they just printed it, in a series of comments that supported those prior articles. Arrrgghhh!
Jared Polis,hard-Left Colorado Congressman running for governor, is also running against Trump for the governor’s seat. He is the third Dem to toss his hat in the ring, and all of them are running against Trump. Really stupidly running against Trump, as in “We’ve got to stop Trump from ruining our country….” or doing some other reprehensible things, like “destroying the environment”. As if the governor of Colorado could do anything, even if the wild-eyed claims of Trump-caused disaster had any basis in fact. So far I haven’t heard a single policy idea.
Oh, and one of them is also running against the NRA. His TV spot says he “took on the NRA three times—and won”. What happened was that, when he was in the statehouse, he was one of those who argued for small capacity magazines, when the NRA said that was stupid. Colorado passed the law, lost a nice manufacturing company when Magpul left the state with its employees, and now this is recast as a battle between Doofus and the NRA, with Doofus vanquishing the NRA single-handedly. But he is also running against Trump.
I wonder if this is a nationwide trend. If it is, the national GOP should step up. To echo the anguished pleas of Lefties about guns, they should DO SOMETHING !!!
I just finished reading Act of Treason, the 9th book in the Vince Flynn/Mitch Rapp spy series. It was written in 2006, but the parallels with the present day are stunning. Irene Kennedy, the Director of the CIA was just confirmed in the previous book after vehement opposition, largely from members of the Democrat President’s own party. Kennedy came up through the ranks, going from Director of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Division to the top spot. (sound familiar?) The bad guy (well, one of several bad guys) in the book is a former senator who was plucked from the position of Director of National Intelligence to be the running mate of the Democrat presidential nominee. It’s tragic that Vince Flynn died in 2013 after writing 13 of the Mitch Rapp novels, because he was a marvelous story teller, and had a tremendous grasp of the spy business as well as politics in general.
BTW, if I sometimes come across as a conspiracy theorist, books like this have undoubtedly had at least a bit of influence. Having been in the intelligence collection business and interviewed with the CIA after active duty in the Navy, I don’t have much difficulty believing that a lot of Vince Flynn’s stories contain more truth than most people could imagine.