“The stupidest conspiracy theory of all time” is back! Russiagate, the craze that swept the nation in 2016 that we naively dreamt had gone away after nine years of mind-numbing accusations of Russian bots, Putin puppets, and stolen elections, has now expanded to include a certain New York financier.

Sure, there are countless proven pieces of evidence that Jeffrey Epstein actually was tied to a foreign government: he had intimate communications with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was a Mossad asset, his lawyer was leading Israel defender Alan Dershowitz, and several of the newly released files show connections to Israel.

But in the same way that Democrats, when searching for anything they could use to attack Donald Trump, completely ignored his widespread and well-documented payments and influence from Israeli donors, corporate media is following the playbook and claiming that Jeffrey Epstein was not an Israeli agent but a Russian one.

Does it get any stupider?

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: Donald Trump showed a hint of empathy for the first time, but in the worst way possible, Chuck Schumer gives basically no pushback to the murderous ICE and admits it’s okay for them to wear masks, and US leaders taunt Iran about destroying their economy and threaten to strike them, all while claiming that Iran is the real aggressor.

Everything’s a mess! Watch with Katie and Aaron to laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

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While the DHS is sending masked ICE agents into cities, rounding up immigrants and citizens alike, killing protesters, and creating chaos, Democrats are making a big show of being anti-ICE. They’re calling for reforms, body cams, accountability, and training.

This sounds great, but civil rights attorney and Copaganda author Alec Karakatsanis reveals it’s actually “extremely dangerous.” Under the guise of reform, the Democrats are playing a key role in a centuries-old strategy of building an oppressive, high-surveillance police state used to target the most vulnerable communities in the country.

And it’s all a plot.

Useful Idiots: What are the most dangerous reforms being pushed by the Democrats and why are they dangerous?

Alec Karakatsanis: One of the most important ones that you hear constantly from Democratic Party leadership right now is body cameras. Now, aside from how silly that is in this context, the officer who shot and killed Renee Goode literally filmed himself doing it, it’s actually much deeper.

The evidence is overwhelming that body cameras do not make police less violent and they do not reduce police misconduct. So you have to ask yourself, why are Democrats proposing something that everybody agrees does not make police more accountable? And the history of this is that police agencies wanted body cameras for many, many years, but they couldn’t get the billions of dollars of funding for them.

What they wanted is to link all this new footage and data into algorithms that train AI into massive databases. That’s why you see ICE with cameras. They scan people’s faces. Prosecutors also wanted body cameras so they could get guilty pleas really quickly, like trespassing charges against unhoused people and drug possession cases.

So they had this problem: the industry wanted to make billions of dollars in contracts. The police wanted them for surveillance and to connect people to AI. But they couldn’t afford it.

And then what happened was after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, the Obama administration worked with local Democratic Party officials and the policing surveillance industry to just remarket body cams, not as police surveillance but as accountability and transparency for well-meaning liberals who were desperate for something to be done.

That resulted in the greatest expansion of policing surveillance technology in modern history.

Useful Idiots: So the Democrats’ current stance is that they’re threatening to block the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, where ICE is a component, unless there are certain reforms?

Alec Karakatsanis: What the Democrats are basically saying is ICE needs to spend even more money on surveillance technology like body cameras and on so-called training.

Anybody who knows what the police and military training industry is in the United States would not support more money going to that. It’s one of the most dark, violent, and fascist corners of our society.

These training programs are where they learn to do the stuff that you’re seeing in these videos. That’s why in 2020 there were thousands of videos of police committing intentional, brutal crimes and violence, and it looked the same in hundreds and hundreds of cities. It wasn’t some one off mistake. This is what police are trained to do.

The Democrats are saying, ‘if you do those reforms,’ which the police want anyway, because there’s huge industries behind them, ‘we will then give you this entire budget.’

The main leverage Democrats actually have is reducing the ICE budget, but they’re starting the negotiation by saying we’ll give you everything you want. It’s really, really insidious.

Subscribe to watch the full interview with Alec on why AOC and other Dems calling for the National Guard and police agencies to stop ICE is exactly what the police state wants, and why those videos of police playing basketball or handing out donuts evolve from colonialist tactics used by the French against Algerians.

Plus, catch this week’s Friday Free-For-All: Smug Man Accidentally Admits He’s MAGA Now

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Bill Maher awards the next Nobel Peace Prize to……… Donald Trump!

The smuggest man on TV, used for years by conservatives as the token “liberal” to bash on the left (like: when you’ve even lost Bill Maher, you know you’re too far left), has now officially come out as MAGA.

“If [Trump’s attack against] Venezuela causes Cuba to fall,” he says on Real Time, “if he somehow gets Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran… he should get a Nobel Peace Prize!” What does it say about a person if they believe causing more destruction, more war, more people to suffer on top of the many people suffering already due to Trump’s policies, should get you the Nobel Peace Prize?

It’s straight-up neocon behavior that puts Maher to the right of most Republicans.

We really do try to avoid showing clips of this slimy man on Useful Idiots: it’s low-hanging fruit and it causes our viewers nausea, but this one was too mucilaginous (a word I just learned when searching ‘Bill Maher synonyms’) not to mock.

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: CNN trips over itself in a crazy contradiction while trying to defend Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, Mike Pompeo claims that what the Iranian government did to it’s protesters in two days is somehow worse than Israel destroying all of Gaza over two and a half years, and Trump admits that he no longer cares about affordability for young people.

Trying to stay warm in the freezing weather? This Free-For-All will make your blood boil. Subscribe to watch all the craziest news clips of the week with Katie and Aaron: