22 Feb, 2025 20:08

News

Ukraine will be a ‘buffer’ state – Orban

The Hungarian PM has said that instead of being admitted into NATO, Kiev will remain a partition between the bloc and Russia

Ukraine will not be granted NATO membership, but rather will serve as a “buffer” between the US-led military bloc and Russia, once the conflict with Moscow is over, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has predicted.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022,Budapest has consistently criticized the EU’s weapons deliveries to Ukraine. The Hungarian government has long advocated engaging Moscow in dialogue instead, with Orban repeatedly calling for sanctions imposed on Russia to be lifted.

Delivering his annual state of the nation address in Budapest on Saturday, the prime minister said that the conflict, which “is on its way to its end,”is about “bringing the territory called Ukraine, which until then was a buffer zone, a buffer state between NATO and Russia, under NATO control.”

“Ukraine, or what remains of it, will once again be a buffer zone. It will not be a NATO member,”Orban predicted.

“Why European and American liberals thought that the Russians would stand idly by is still a mystery,” the official remarked, claiming that the “experiment has failed.”

Admitting Kiev into the EU will hinge on Budapest’s acquiescence, he added, hinting that Hungary would block Ukraine’s accession, should it deem it to be in its own national interests.

Speaking in late December, Orban claimed that EU leaders “are living in a self-created bubble, refusing to acknowledge that this war cannot be won in the way they imagine.”

The official reiterated that the bloc’s sanctions, “instead of crippling Russia… have weakened Europe.”

“Ukraine’s defeat is not just possible but increasingly likely,” the Hungarian prime minister warned at the time.

Earlier that month, Orban pointed the finger at former US President Joe Biden for the escalation of hostilities in 2022.

Russia has consistently cited Ukraine’s aspirations of joining NATO and the prospect of the bloc’s military infrastructure appearing in the neighboring nation as one of the main reasons behind the conflict. Moscow has also repeatedly described the conflict as a “proxy war” against Russia being waged by the West via Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump has recently ruled out Kiev’s accession to NATO, acknowledging that Washington ignoring Moscow’s objections on the issue was among the things that caused the conflict to flare up.

https://www.rt.com/news/613163-orban-ukraine-buffer-between-nato-russia/

What’s weird is the EU told Trump he has to get in line with EU’s liberals policyThe war with EU is not over. Guess their threats didn’t work. Don’t expect to live off of America’s economic power and give mandates to a leader that is never threatened by liberals.,

22 Feb, 2025 14:55

US supermarket giant sued over DEI

Florida has filed a lawsuit against Target, claiming the company misled investors by promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives

The US state of Florida has sued supermarket giant Target, accusing it of misleading investors andcausing financial lossesby promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed the lawsuit in federal court in Fort Myers on Thursday, claiming that Target failed to disclose the potential financial risks associated with its DEI policies, thereby misleading investors.

The lawsuit also alleges that Target’s DEI efforts, including its 2023 Pride Month campaign, contributed to consumer backlash and boycotts. It claims that this reaction led to a decline in the company’s stock value and a loss of more than $25 billion in market capitalization.

“Corporations that push radical leftist ideology at the expense of financial returns jeopardize the retirement security of Florida’s first responders and teachers,” Uthmeier said. He stressed that his office will pursue corporate reform so that “companies get back to the business of doing business – not offensive political theatre.”

Target has faced at least three similar lawsuits in Florida, all accusing the company of violating securities laws by not informing investors about the potential financial impact of its DEI initiatives. The company announced in January that it would scale back several DEI programs, including those supporting black employees and black-owned businesses.

However, Target has not explicitly linked the decision to the lawsuits, and the move follows a broader trend of major US companies, including Walmart and McDonald’s, reducing their DEI commitments in response to political and social pushback.

US President Donald Trump has taken action against DEI programs since returning to office last month. On his first day back in office, Trump signed executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI initiatives in federal agencies and among government contractors, arguing that such programs promote discrimination.

Target has not commented on the latest lawsuit.

(I guess the corporation choosing the name Target, was a prophecy to be fulfilled. They didn’t lose enough money the first time around. KEK)

https://www.rt.com/news/613152-florida-target-lawsuit-dei/

>>22633750, >>22633765 Papi Trumpo - RAZIN CAINE IS IN!!! 😎 🇺🇸⚡️⚡️⚡️ — LOVE THAT NAME!!!PN

RAZIN CAINE IS IN!!!😎🇺🇸

0:23

https://rumble.com/embed/v6lsqqr/?pub=4

STOP THE PRESSES 5:00 A.M.1/2

The Media Is Now Part of Trump’s War Against the Deep State2/22/25

Inside the campaign to expose “collusion” between journalists and government officials. (Kek, now this is panic in DC, NY and many others WW)

Jim McCarthy is a 57-year-old public-relations boss known for being unusually combative with the press.=As the head of the boutique firm CounterPoint Strategies, which has offices in New York and Washington, D.C., he is a spokesperson for big seafood (he helped “the shrimp industry to go hard at the AP just a few weeks ago”) and big vape (“my poor little vaping guys,” as he describes the industry to me,referring to its alleged persecution by the FDA). He speaks in a mannered drawl in keeping with his role as the flack who represented Augusta National Golf Club in its fight to refuse female members, and he has long seen negative media coverage of his clients aspart of a conspiracy among the government, activist groups, and journalists. “The collusion and the coziness is as strong as can be,” he says. “And, of course, they all share the same ideological outlook.”

McCarthy is now part of an army of consultants, lawyers, and think-tank apparatchiksswarming over Donald Trump’s Washington to both advance their respective interests and give the administration a helping hand. For McCarthy, Trump’s apparent willingness toweaponize vast troves of government data is a watershed moment. “One of my colleagues likened it to the end of the Soviet Union, when academics had access to the KGB files,” he says. “We want to get in there and dive through it and zero in on the important stuff before that window closes.”

The Trump administration’s war against the media has so far involved bullying the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America,claiming that outlets such as Politico have received payoffs from the governmentin the form of subscriptions, and threatening to use the FCC to punish broadcasters like PBS for their supposed bias. McCarthy’s small role in this war represents a different front: establishing that the media has been doing the bidding of the “deep state.”

McCarthy’s firm is drawing up road maps to help members of the administration identifycorrespondence between journalists and agency officials over the past four years in an effort to expose what he anticipates to havebeen “unholy collusion.” He says, “There’s an opportunity to try to uncover just what’s been going on behind closed doors at these agencies. Maybe it’ll turn out everyone had a clean haircut and was reading the Gospels, but I doubt it.”

Drawing on his expertise with Freedom of Information Act requestsand his familiarity with the ways reporters source stories,he is helping allies of the administration sift through mountains of databy targeting specific reporters and submitting key dates around policy shifts and press coverage that will supposedly show coordination between government agencies and the national media.

In some cases, he is providing this information to conservative and libertarian think tanks and policy shops;in others, he is giving it to personnel who worked in and around the Trump campaign. “In a sense,it’s a crowdsourced effortbecause all sorts of different watchdogs are zeroing in on various areas where they have particular expertise and thenchanneling that guidance to the incoming teams across the whole federal bureaucracy,” McCarthy says. “For us, that’s knowing the outlets and journalists that have been carrying water for the government to drive hostility toward our clients and their industries.”…

https://archive.is/EAzbx

>>22635480

2/2

“There’s a huge group of stakeholders who really care and who areinterested to know if the New York Timeshas been putting a thumb on the scale in the way the issues have been described and reported to the public,” McCarthy adds.“If it turns out that they were actually taking marching orders from the agenciesor sending their articles in advance or promising a certain kind of coverage, the credibility of that coverage will be demolished.”

Once the data is harvested, it will be made public in one of two ways, McCarthy expects. The first would be on an individual basis via a formal FOIA request. “In the past, you had to make the FOIA so surgically precise; otherwise, you’d never get results or it’d take years and years,” he says. “In this case, you’ll be able to open the aperture much wider to say, ‘We’d like to request all of the email and text interaction between senior FDA leadershipand these two dozen news outlets,’ and there would be a huge tranche that would result from that” — potentially giving interested parties unprecedented access to the workings of journalists. The second method, which McCarthy is hoping for,is to open-source the documentationas Elon Musk did with the Twitter Files.

=How much of the correspondence between journalists and agency officials turns out to just be run-of-the-millsourcing remains to be seen, though Trump officials will likely claim evidence of a conspiracy no matter what is uncovered, potentially exposing individual journalists to threats and vitriol from Trump’s supporters and the right-wing media.

“I don’t know for sure, but I would bet a bottle of Irish whiskey that it’s going to be jaw-dropping coziness and coordination,” McCarthy tells me. In any case, he won’t waste what he sees as the opportunity of a lifetime. Hereminds me about “the old Pat Buchanan line” from his ’96 campaign: “Do not wait for orders from headquarters, mount up everybody, and ride to the sound of the guns!”

https://archive.is/EAzbx

PS: they already know all of it, the NSA might have helped is my guess

>>22635489

If the NYTs can buy Trump’s taxes and reveal the President’s confidential and private info, the government can investigate collusion to destroy America and the current President.

Will they find all the info of the two shooters?And why did every TV and print media outlet in America (and maybe foreign press) show up to Butler, PA, the day he was shot, when none of them showed up to any other rally?

That one event proved everything, they are proving in other ways.

MSM can call it a conspiracy theory all they want, McCarthy wouldn’t be talking about if all wasn’t already proven, imo.

(I kid you not, New York Mag writes an 8-9 page article on Kash, will post 3 pages, link included)

How Kash Patel Became Trump’s Ideal FBI Director

Andrew Rice5:00 A.M.

Vengeance Is His The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel. 1/8 or 9

On January 30, Kash Patel, the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, went to Capitol Hill to attend to the formality of his Senate confirmation hearing. It’s a measure of how tightly Donald Trump now grips Washington that the author of the book Government Gangsters, which posits the FBI has been controlled by criminals, met with only token resistance. One of the 12 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, Mike Lee, later posted a video of Patel’s entry into the hearing room scored to the badass opening riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The committee’s ten Democrats flailed at him to little effect. Patel dodged and dissembled and occasionally flashed some irritation. When pressed on whether he’d fire agents involved in investigating Trump or open investigations of the president’s opponents, he gave guileless-sounding answers. “I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backward,” he said in response to a series of pointed questions from Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat. “There will be no politicization at the FBI; there will be no retributive actions taken.”

Even as Patel spoke, a purge of the FBI was underway. The bureau’s acting director and deputy director, Brian Driscoll and Robert Kissane, respectively, had been given their orders by Emil Bove, one of Trump’s former criminal-defense attorneys and acting deputy attorney general. According to notes later leaked to Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, Bove conveyed to them, “KP wants movement.” That afternoon, according to a former FBI official who was told about the events by participants, Driscoll and Kissane walked around the secure suite on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building where the bureau’s top leaders work. They entered offices along the corridor and delivered word from above: Retire or be fired.

Michael Nordwall, the executive assistant director in charge of the criminal branch: Axed. Robert Wells, in charge of the national-security branch: Axed. Ryan Young, the chief of intelligence: Axed. Timothy Dunham, head of HR and acting associate deputy director: Axed. Jacqueline Maguire, who had just taken over the science-and-technology branch: Axed. “They were shocked. Someone walked into their office and said, ‘You’re on the list,’” said the former official, whose account was echoed by two bureau alums who talked with those who were terminated. Bove’s list also included the assistant director in charge of the D.C. field office and two officials accused of retaliation by a group of ousted agents that had testified as whistleblowers before Jim Jordan’s House subcommittee on weaponization. (Patel’s nonprofit had given the ex-agents financial support.) The nation’s internal security service had been effectively decapitated — and a message delivered — while Patel was playing innocent in front of the Senate. “Who are you going to rely on if you whack the whole leadership?” the former official wondered aloud.

During Trump’s first term, Patel, who turns 45 on February 25, worked in a variety of staff roles, distinguishing himself as one of the president’s most energetic knife-fighters inside the national-security bureaucracy. He spent the past four years in Trump’s service as a member of his shadow government, auditioning for his next role by savaging the FBI in books, film, rally speeches, and hundreds of hours of podcast interviews. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but he has already made his intentions very clear, if you were listening. “We’re demolishing the deep state,” Patel told the podcaster Benny Johnson outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.“And we are rebuilding this constitutional republic behind Donald Trump.”

Patel will now take control of an institution with the capacity to surveil, interrogate, and arrest. He will sit in a building named for Hoover, the bureau’s complicated patriarch, who put its powers to political (and sometimes illegal) uses for presidents from Coolidge to Nixon. Since the revelation of Hoover’s abuses in the 1970s, each subsequent director kept a deliberate distance from the presidents he served. But the next FBI director and Trump could not be more closely aligned in their plans, which Patel was more than happy to spell out back when he was just talking to his friends. Government Gangsters includes a now-notorious appendix that names 60 individuals as agents of the “deep state.” “It’s not an enemies list,” Patel said at his confirmation hearing, claiming the appendix was merely meant to be a “glossary.”

https://archive.is/t5lK1

>>22635826

2/8 or 9

But that’s not how he spoke when he was promoting the book and campaigning for Trump. “I’m going on a government-gangsters manhunt,” he said in a speech last year at CPAC. “Who’s coming with me?” Trump went so far as to blurb Government Gangsters and called it his “blueprint” for taking back the government.

In an inversion of his party’s traditional reverence of law enforcement, Trump has labeled the bureau a threat to freedom and, maybe more relevantly, his personal liberty. It was the FBI that served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago related to classified documents. It was the FBI that mounted the largest operation in its history to investigate January 6, one prong of which resulted in the indictment of Trump himself. It was the FBI that investigated Trump much of his first term, beginning with the “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence probe of his 2016 campaign. In Patel’s interpretation of history, it was Trump’s inability to subdue a rebellious government that doomed him in 2020. He “was kneecapped by deep-state rogue actors,” Patel said in an interview for former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s show War Room last year. “That’s the one thing we’ve got to get rid of when President Trump returns to the Oval Office.”

Patel assured his listeners that Trump, once restored, would have a plan to “make sure the government gangsters bend the knee to the Constitution and our way of life in the United States of America.” Patel said the purge at the FBI would start at the top with Director Christopher Wray, the first-term Trump appointee Patel called the “ultimate swamp creature,” and would then chew its way down through the ranks. “You have to remove every person who has violated their oath of office, who has acted unethically, who has discharged their duties in a political fashion,” Patel told Benny Johnson in an interview after the Mar-a-Lago search.

“Maybe it’s time we start raiding these people,” Johnson replied.

So far, the first weeks of the second Trump administration have proceeded very much as Patel said they would. Wray is gone, as is his deputy, who resigned under pressure the day of Trump’s inauguration. The new leadership of the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has been clear-cutting its own upper echelon of career officials through terminations, punitive reassignments, and shows of intimidation. Bove’s decision to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams without even a suggestion of legal justification prompted mass resignations — departures he said he was more than happy to accept. Prosecutors who worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s team and on the prosecutions of the January 6 defendants have been fired or forced out. The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, has formed a Weaponization Working Group to reexamine actions her department and the FBI took under Biden. Bove demanded, and ultimately received, an itemized list of the more than 5,000 FBI agents who worked the January 6 cases.

Since so much so far has gone according to plan, it’s fair to consider seriously whether Patel might do what he has often said he would do if Trump put him in charge. “My top priority would be to investigate the criminality within the government,” he told a podcaster named Mike Adams back in 2022. “I want to know who was involved with that, and I want to prosecute each and every one of those people.” Patel has claimed there was rampant misconduct in the prosecutions of Trump. “Jack Smith,” Patel declared on Johnson’s show this past May, “you should go to prison.”

When confronted with some of his many similarly incendiary statements at his confirmation hearing, Patel snapped that the quotes were “taken out of grotesque context,” and some of his advocates say he should not be judged for things he said back when he was selling books and merch and building his brand as a MAGA crusader. One of Patel’s former superiors in government, the first-term Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien, told me, “I think Kash is going to be much more of a traditionalist as FBI director than you’d expect.”

The FBI’s tradition, though, includes Hoover, whose example shows how far a director can go. Even after the reforms of the 1970s, the FBI has the capacity to exercise immense coercive power. In addition to enforcing laws, the bureau is also in charge of collecting domestic intelligence — in less polite terms, spying. It sweeps up an enormous amount of private information in the course of its operations, much of which has nothing to do with criminal activity or the people it’s watching. Such secrets can be intoxicating to a certain kind of mind; they can also be used as weapons.

https://archive.is/t5lK1

>>22635835

3/8 or 9(read the rest at the link)

Even the most malicious prosecutor can’t invent crimes out of nothing, but it does not take much underlying evidence to open an FBI investigation, and once that happens, a director can order many steps be taken without even asking for a warrant, including the use of surveillance and undercover informants. Those who’ve had their lives turned over by criminal investigations know that, even if charges are never brought, simply becoming a target is enough to destroy your life. Defense lawyers have a saying: The process is the punishment. And the FBI director controls that process.

“I think he’s dangerous in that role,” another former FBI official says. “It’s a uniquely powerful role in our constellation of government. The culture of the bureau is very director-driven and paramilitary. You have access to all kinds of secret information. If you have someone who is willing to leak, willing to say things with a gloss that isn’t true, to open investigations because directed, to close investigations when hinted at or directed to, that is the road to authoritarianism.”

Of course, Patel says that the G-man has it all backward. “They are the criminals,” he wrote in Government Gangsters, “we are the ones who are persecuted.”

He claims he has been fighting his battle against the “deep state” in one way or another since 2017, when he first barged onto the scene as a pugnacious aide to Congressman Devin Nunesduring special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “More than anyone in Trump’s first term, Kash came from nowhere,” says Bannon, who talked with Patel continually over the past four years on War Room. Patel shared character traits with many of the people who ascended during the first Trump administration and who are now running the second. He considered himself an outsider. “He was a grinder,” Bannon says. And he was also a climber, even by the standards of Washington, eager to advertise his proximity — and loyalty — to the boss. He says he grew so comfortable in the Oval Office that he was once awakened from a nap there by Trump.

“To have a first-generation Indian American … fall asleep on the couch in the Oval Office — that’s the American Dream, people!” Patel said on the 2022 Fourth of July episode of Johnson’s podcast. Sitting in Johnson’s home studio in Tampa, he cracked open a can of Freedom, a Budweiser special-edition beer, and jammed it into a koozie imprinted with the Punisher logo, the emblem of SEAL Team 6. Bearded and fit, his fatigue-green T-shirt stretched the logo of his personal brand, K$H, tightly across his pecs. His red hat read MAGA in tribute to the big man. “I had to one-up you,” Patel said, taking off the hat to display a familiar Sharpie scrawl on the brim. “Played golf with the boss; got the MAGA hat signed on the 18th green.”

Patel’s father, Pramod, was a refugee, one of the tens of thousands of Ugandans of Indian descent who were labeled “noncitizens” and expelled by the demagogic dictator Idi Amin in 1972. He settled in Garden City, Long Island, where young Kash — whose given name is Kashyap — grew up playing hockey. (He still skates for Washington club team the Dons, which he says is not named for Trump.)

He earned his law degree at Pace University, where he competed with a partner in moot-court tournaments, often surprising teams from more prestigious law schools. After a nine-year stint as a public defender in Miami, where he gathered trial experience while representing drug traffickers and violent criminals and developed what he describes as an enduring suspicion of the games prosecutors can play, he joined the Justice Department in Washington, taking a job as a trial attorney in the National Security Division. Patel worked on terrorism cases, but the highlight of his tenure at the Justice Department, at least as he tells the story, came when he was assigned to work as a legal liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command at the Department of Defense, vetting operations that often involved lethal force.

“Started targeting and killing bad guys with SEAL Team 6,” Patel told Johnson, holding up his koozie. “That was the greatest job: kill, TV, live.” He explained that he would watch on a livestream as the military carried out operations. “The higher-ups would make the calls based on the intelligence, and you would see the chain of command work. And then you’d be like, ‘Oh, that guy’s gone next.’” Someone who collaborated with Patel on terrorism cases says that while he made real contributions, his subsequent descriptions of his work are “somewhat of a fantasy.”

By all accounts, Patel came to feel unwelcome at the Justice Department. He got into scrapes, including a dustup with a cantankerous Texas judge that, though not his fault, ended up being reported in the Washington Post. By 2017, he was ready to go.

https://archive.is/t5lK1