Articles from THE BLOT REPORT

Political parties need to run election campaigns and they need to pay for all the advertising they throw at us. All those flyers you get in your letterbox, the ads on television, radio and online, and those in newspapers, cost huge amounts of money to print, format and produce. So, to raise the money for this, political parties always tout for donations from the wealthy, or from businesses or other organisations.

The epithet ‘useful idiot’ has often been attributed to Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution of 19171, but there is no indication that any of Lenin’s works contain the epithet. Indeed, the Russian equivalent is translated as ‘useful fool’. The latter was in common use during the early part of the Second World War and usually refers to a naïve person that can be cynically manipulated towards an end of which they are either unaware or only partly aware2.

Hundreds of the people involved in the January 6th, 2021, attack on the capitol building in Washington have already been charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. One of the most recent, is a bloke called Zach Rehl, 37, who is the former president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys, and who on Thursday, August 31st, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for his role. It is the third longest prison term imposed on one of the insurrectionists.