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When the Panzers rolled in, Germans in France were outnumbered by Frenchman by over 100 to 1.

This will work some welcome damage on rising right wing media troll Yiannopoulos.

Quote:

The American Conservative Union disinvited Breitbart editor and lifetime Twitter exile Milo Yiannopoulos on Monday from speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference over past comments he made "condoning pedophilia."

...Yiannopoulos is a figurehead of the so-called "alt-right" white nationalist movement. He was permanently banned from Twitter for leading a targeted harassment campaign against black actress Leslie Jones.

TPM
We'll note first off that the video on question was released by a right wing organization, The Reagan Batallion.

CPAC clearly had no option here because of the subject and context. Yiannopoulos is already claim "edited video" and a version of "don't trust your lying eyes". As this incredible jerk was on a rising media trajectory, this event is going to work real damage on his abilities to monetize his trolling. Such a pity. It's going to be interesting to see how Breitbart tries to spin this one (not a peep I can find right now).

A note for idiots (UPDATED):

I do not support pedophilia. Period. It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a co-ordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.

If it somehow comes across (through my own sloppy phrasing or through deceptive editing) that I meant any of the ugly things alleged, let me set the record straight: I am completely disgusted by the abuse of children.

Some facts to consider:

1. I have outed THREE pedophiles in my career as a journalist. That's three more than any of my critics and a peculiar strategy for a supposed pedophile apologist.

(a) Luke Bozier, former business partner of Louise Mensch
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/…/menshn-co-founder-embroile…/
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/…/…/3746/luke-bozier-arrested/

(b) Nicholas Nyberg, anti-GamerGate activist who self-described as a pedophile and white nationalist
http://www.breitbart.com/…/leading-gamergate-critic-sarah-…/

(c) Chris Leydon, a London photographer who has a rape trial starting March 13 thanks to my reporting.
http://www.breitbart.com/…/tech-city-darling-chris-leydon-…/

2. I have repeatedly expressed disgust at pedophiles in my journalism.
http://www.breitbart.com/…/heres-why-the-progressive-left-…/

3. I have never defended and would never defend child abusers, as my reporting history shows. The world is messy and complicated, and I recognize it as such, as this furore demonstrates. But that is a red line for any decent person.

4. The videos do not show what people say they show. I *did* joke about giving better head as a result of clerical sexual abuse committed against me when I was a teen. If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that's my prerogative. It's no different to gallows humor from AIDS sufferers.

5. National Review, whose journalists are tweeting about this, published an article defending Salon for giving a pedophile a platform.

6. I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That's perfectly true and every gay man knows it. But I was not talking about anything illegal and I was not referring to pre-pubescent boys.

7. I said in the same "Drunken Peasants" podcast from which the footage is taken that I agree with the current age of consent.

8. I shouldn't have used the word "boy" when I talked about those relationships between older men and younger gay men. (I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29. The age of consent in the UK is 16.) That was a mistake. Gay men often use the word "boy" when they refer to consenting adults. I understand that heterosexual people might not know that, so it was a sloppy choice of words that I regret.

9. This rush to judgment from establishment conservatives who hate Trump as much as they hate me, before I have had any chance to provide context or a response, is one of the big reasons gays vote Democrat.

10. In case there is any lingering doubt, here's me, in the same interview the other footage is taken from, affirming that the current legal age of consent is about right: "And I think the law is probably about right. It's probably roughly the right age. I think it's probably about ok. But there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age. I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who were sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world, by the way."

layman wrote:

When the Panzers rolled in, Germans in France were outnumbered by Frenchman by over 100 to 1.

Even the Nazis didn't claim such nonsense.

I suggest you send Yiannopoulos' defense of himself to CPAC rather than to me. But he's certainly the proper source to cite on the matter.

You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.

As I noted in my previous post, I've been keenly interested in Donald Trump's association with Felix Sater going back to last Spring. I also knew he had been an FBI informant and leveraged that status to dramatically reduce his sentence in a major financial crime. I didn't realize until this evening that there were more details about this part of the story in the public domain than I'd realized. It's rather mind-blowing.

First, let's review a bit about Felix Sater. Sater was born in the Soviet Union in 1966 and emigrated to the US with his parents at the age of 8. He is an American citizen. He dropped out of college and began working as a stock broker. But in his late 20s he got into bar fight where he stabbed a fellow broker in the face with a shattered glass. He did time in prison for this attack. After he got out he got involved in a major securities fraud scheme (basically a 'pump and dump' operation) tied to the Genovese and Colombo crime families. He got caught. And that's where things get interesting.

After Sater got busted, somehow he managed to offer his services to the FBI and supposedly the CIA to work on their behalf purchasing stinger missiles and other weapons on the then wild and free-wheeling Russian black market. Whatever Sater was doing for the CIA in the black market arms smuggling world seems to have become much more important after 9/11 - thus Sater's high value to the US government.

Vice President Mike Pence affirmed the White House’s support for a “free and independent press” during a news conference in Brussels on Monday, just days after President Donald Trump called the media “the enemy of the American people.”

Lincoln. Half the country hated Lincoln so bad that they started a war. With that many of them, you KNOW they had to be right, eh?

Really? What was the population of France at the time, eh, Walt? What was the size of the invading force?

Some have pointed out that Trump may have got the dates mixed up but he was, in fact, right. There was a recent terrorist attack in Sweden, which took in more refugees per capita than any other European country in 2016 – but it was by neo-Nazis on a refugee centre:

I know that sounds all but incredible. The details of Sater's alleged work for the CIA are contained in this September 2012 article in The Miami Herald.
The Miami Herald article I'm referring to is no longer online. But I've read it in the Nexis news database; it's legit.

As I said, we don't know for certain whether the story of arms smuggling work for the CIA is true. In various articles I'm linking here there are clues in federal court transcripts which make it seem highly likely that Sater was doing something for the US government of that level of seriousness.

He clearly did something for the US government which the feds found highly valuable. It seems likely, though not certain, that it involved working with the CIA on something tied to the post-Soviet criminal underworld.

Sater's stint as a "Senior Advisor" to Donald Trump at the Trump Organization began in January of January 2010 and lasted roughly a year. What significance that has in all of this I'm not sure.

What does this all mean? I wish I knew, frankly.

It seems highly likely that Sater has deep and longstanding ties to at least certain elements of US law enforcement and intelligence. One could definitely argue that his work in that role - basically being a US operative, in some sense - runs counter to any theory that Sater is some agent of the Russian government or in any way a conduit for Russia capital or advancing Russian interests with Trump. If nothing else, the CIA/arms smuggling story, if true, would suggest he was quite plugged in with the Russian and post-Soviet criminal underworld. So there are many possibilities.

All we can be certain of at the moment is that we should know much more

So, basically, Josh Marshall knows absolutely nothing but how to get an article published and then read by liberal conspiracy nuts.

We’ve never had a president who was this obsessed with the news media, and that obsession is going to continue to shape his presidency. Cable news in particular seems to be a far more important influence on Trump’s thinking than any intelligence briefing or government economic data. And that means we’d better get used to the chaos of Trump’s first month in office, because it’s going to last for four years.

Trump’s fixation on the media is hardly new. In fact, it has characterized his entire adult life. Throughout his real estate career he crafted his own celebrity as the central pillar of his business strategy; becoming a reality TV star was the logical extension of that strategy. But it was more than just business. Trump has always been obsessed with his image in the media to an almost pathological degree. His office in Trump Tower was plastered with framed magazine covers on which he appeared, and every day aides would deliver to his desk a printout of every news story that mentioned him. He often took news articles, marked them up with comments explaining where the story had been insufficiently flattering toward him, and mailed them to the offending reporter. He used to call up reporters and pretend to be his own spokesperson (alternatively named “John Barron” or “John Miller”) and extol his business acumen and success with the ladies, in the hopes that the descriptions would turn up in future news stories.