In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done. But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis. Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone havin...

It looks like the story of multiple FBI informants within the Proud Boys isn't going away. The New York Times interviewed Agent CHS-SA, Jennilyn Salinas AKA "Jen Loh", on Friday -- this version seems to be the same as the Times story , which is behind a paywall. However, I'm posting excerpts out of order. The first is nearly at the end of the story: Ms. Loh said that she began working with the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio, Texas in 2018 or 2019 after falling victim to an attack from what she described as activists from the leftist movement antifa. At first, she said, she gave the bureau what she believed was “useful information” on leftist protesters. Soon, however, she began getting paid for her work. At that point, Ms. Loh, who once served as a top official in an organization called Latinos for Trump, started providing information to the F.B.I. on “any type of domestic terrorism — on the right or the left,” she said. So OK, as far back as five years a...

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit quotes a James Taranto piece at the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall: In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. [Gov Brian] Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.” The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20. That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows: “Look, t...

Whatever else they may be, Trump supporters aren't dumb, and in some cases, they're quite a bit smarter than Trump himself. I noted in Thursday's post that hardly anyone believed the characters shown in a viral video from the "protest" at the Manhattan courthouse were actual Trump supporters, certainly in large part because actual Trump supporters knew well enough to stay home. But that leaves aside the fact that the stars of the vignette looked like, one, an Antifa, and two, a Jacob Chansley wannabe, neither of whom struck anyone as a solid-citizen Republican type. It turns out the skeptics were right : During Tuesday’s protest in support of President Trump against his impending arrest by the radical Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Antifa members disguised as Trump supporters had apparently already infiltrated the demonstration. Independent reporter Rebecca Brannon uncovered these fake “Trump supporters” in Manhattan, who appeared to stand out like ...

The photo above is of a real Stasi informant taken from German press stories, but she may as well have been sent by Central Casting, so I'll use her for this post. Yesterday I linked to a story about the Proud Boys trial, in which on Wednesday the prosecution revealed at the last minute that a witness (so far unidentified) whom the defense planned to call as part of its case was an FBI informant. Yet again, this brought the trial to a screeching halt when the defense moved for a mistrial, and Judge Kelly scheduled a hearing for yesterday afternoon. I followed the story with great interest yesterday, but although the hearing yesterday afternoon was public, there's been little reporting. The best story I could find was this one: As revelations that a defense witness was also an FBI informant roil the already contentious Capitol riot trial of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, prosecutors said Thursday that the informant was never told to gather information abou...

The scene above is a screen shot from a video that's been going atound the web -- you can see more of it at this post on YouTube . It was taken at a protest in New York earlier this week, ostensibly to support Donald Trump as the district attorney there cogitates indicting and arresting him. However, Republicans were nearly unanimous in urging supporters to stay home, and there seems to have been a general recognition that over half those in attendance at such a rally would be informants, provocateurs, or dupes. This appears to have been the main lesson of January 6 for Trump supporters, and it looks like it was well learned. Anthony Brian Logan, the YouTube commentator at the link, thinks the QAnon Shaman clone on the right was certainly a provocateur, but his interlocutor on the left was quite possibly one as well. I certainly don't think Mr Logan is crazy to speculate about that. The QAnon Shaman clone is copying Jacob Chansley's January 6 outfit so closely -- just wi...

In this morning's headlines at The Hill: DeSantis sees lowest level of support since December in new poll, trails Trump by 28 points : Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) received just 26 percent support in the latest GOP presidential poll from Morning Consult — the lowest number he’s hit in the survey since December. DeSantis, who has not entered the GOP primary but is expected to do so, trailed former President Trump, who won 54 percent, by 28 percentage points in the new poll published on Tuesday. It's worth pointing out that predsidential polls this far out from an election year are meaningless. A quick web search brings this from NBC News in June 2015 : A brand-new national NBC/WSJ poll finds Jeb Bush leading the crowded Republican presidential field, with 22% of GOP primary voters saying he’s their first choice. He’s followed by Scott Walker at 17%, Marco Rubio at 14%, and Ben Carson at 11%. While Jeb had a similar five-point lead in our April NBC/WSJ poll, you see hi...