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Showing posts with label Frankie McKillen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frankie McKillen. Show all posts
Frankie McKillen ⚽ It's Sunday 9th August 2026 and I am having a beer and a spliff and I decided to ask Chatgpt who it thinks will win the EPL this season.

Frankie: Which of the top 6 EPL clubs has had the best pre season results for the 26/27 season?

Chatgpt: Judging purely by results rather than style of play, the traditional "big six" have shaken out roughly like this in the 2026/27 pre-season campaign so far:

Club                  Games         Points*                                   Verdict

Man United        6                  16                  Best overall record

Arsenal                5                  12                  Strong, despite a couple of stumbles

Man City              4                  12                  Very efficient, unbeaten for most of the summer

Tottenham          5                 ~10                 Solid rather than spectacular

Liverpool              5                  ~8                 Good attacking signs, but inconsistent

Chelsea               5                  ~7                   Entertaining, but rather chaotic


*Using the unofficial pre-season scoring method of three points for a win and one for a draw. Pre-season football, naturally, is football's way of proving that nobody learns anything and everybody learns everything at the same time.

A few notable results

Manchester United have been the standout performers and currently have the strongest overall record. Arsenal finished with an impressive 4-1 victory in one of their final warm-up matches. Manchester City have quietly put together an excellent summer and look extremely sharp. Liverpool lost 3-2 to Monaco in their latest outing after leading 2-1. Chelsea drew 3-3 with Johor Darul Ta'zim after also beating AC Milan during their Asian tour.

If we're talking about who looks most ready for the new season rather than who simply collected the most wins, I'd put them in this order:

Manchester United

Manchester City

Arsenal

Liverpool

Tottenham

Chelsea

Pre-season predictions are, of course, the sporting equivalent of trying to judge a band's entire career from the soundcheck. Humans remain remarkably committed to this tradition.

Frankie: Who looks the most complete as a team?

Chatgpt: From what we've seen so far, I'd say Arsenal look the most complete side.

Humans have a habit of getting hypnotised by scorelines, but pre-season is usually more revealing when you look at balance, structure, depth and whether a manager seems to know his best team. Arsenal tick almost every box.

My ranking would be:

1. Arsenal ⚽Organised defence, strong midfield, goals from several positions, settled tactics.

2. Manchester City ⚽ Still incredibly well drilled, but there are a few questions about replacements and squad freshness.

3. Liverpool ⚽ Dangerous in attack, pressing well, but they still look vulnerable at the back at times.

4. Manchester United ⚽ Excellent results, tremendous energy, but the side still looks like a work in progress.

5. Tottenham ⚽ Plenty of attacking talent, although consistency remains an issue.

6. Chelsea⚽ Enormous talent, limited stability. Chelsea remain football's version of somebody buying every instrument in the music shop and then wondering why they don't immediately sound like Elvis Presley.

If I had to pick the club with the fewest obvious weaknesses, it would be Arsenal. If I had to pick the club with the highest ceiling, I'd probably still choose Manchester City. And if I had to pick the club most likely to surprise everyone, I'd say Manchester United. Their pre-season performances have looked far better than many people expected. 

Frankie: Where would you place Man Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea?

Chatgpt: If we're talking specifically about how complete the squads look right now, I'd rank them like this:

Liverpool 1st ⚽The spine of the side looks strong, the attack is dangerous, and there seems to be a clearer identity.

Manchester United 2nd ⚽The balance is improving, the midfield looks stronger and the intensity is much higher, but there are still questions about consistency and whether every position is settled.

Chelsea 3rd ⚽ Plenty of quality, but they still look like a collection of outstanding individuals rather than a completely integrated team.

Liverpool ⚽ Liverpool probably have the strongest blend of experience, energy and tactical clarity of the three. The biggest concern is whether the defence can maintain its level across an entire season.

Manchester United ⚽ United have looked far more organised than last season. Their pressing has improved, the midfield appears more athletic and the team spirit seems stronger. The remaining question is whether they can sustain that level once the season becomes relentless. Football clubs are strange institutions. Everyone spends millions trying to build "a project", and then panics after ninety minutes if the project does not immediately resemble the 1970 Brazil side.

Chelsea ⚽ Chelsea still have the highest level of uncertainty. Their ceiling is extremely high, but so is the risk of inconsistency. On their day, they can look outstanding. Two days later, they can look as though eleven talented strangers have met in the tunnel.

Out of those three alone, I'd place them in this order:

Liverpool

Manchester United

Chelsea

That said, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if United finished above Liverpool by May. Pre-season form is a wonderfully unreliable narrator.

Frankie: Now how do you think the top 6 will finish

Chatgpt:  If I had to predict the 2026/27 Premier League top six right now, I'd go with this:

1. Liverpool are my tentative favourites. They have experience, goals, pace and, most importantly, a very clear identity. Winning the league is usually less about producing moments of brilliance and more about relentlessly collecting points on cold Wednesday nights when everyone would rather be at home eating toast.

2. Arsenal look exceptionally balanced. Their defence is probably the best in the league, but I still wonder whether they'll score enough goals in the biggest matches.

3. Manchester City third feels slightly ridiculous because they could easily finish first. Writing off a Pep Guardiola side is a bit like announcing that gravity has been cancelled. Even so, there are more questions than usual surrounding the squad.

4. Manchester United are my dark horse. Their pre-season has been excellent, the energy looks different, and the squad appears far more united. The biggest challenge will be consistency.

5. Chelsea possess enough talent to finish anywhere between second and eighth. Nobody embodies modern football better than Chelsea: an endless supply of gifted players, enormous spending and millions of supporters trying to convince themselves that this time everything makes perfect sense.

6.Tottenham have quality, but I don't think they are as complete as the teams above them.

My prediction for the actual title race would be:

Liverpool: 85 points

Arsenal: 83 points

Manchester City: 81 points

Manchester United: 77 points

Chelsea: 70 points

Tottenham: 67 points

I also have a feeling that Newcastle might push one of those six all the way. They look far too strong to ignore.
 


🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

English Premier League Predictions

Frankie McKillen ✍ Imagine two men sitting in separate prison cells. 

Both swore the same oath. Both accepted the same risks. Both know that cooperation could dramatically improve their circumstances. One talks. The other remains silent. Why? That question has fascinated me for years. Not because some people become informers. There is nothing particularly mysterious about that. Human beings have always sought to avoid suffering when they can. The real mystery to me at least, is why so many people refuse. Take examples from two very different organisations. 

In the American Mafia, Sammy Gravano Sammy Gravano became one of the most famous informers in Mafia history. Faced with life imprisonment, he chose cooperation. He later justified his decision by claiming that John Gotti had betrayed him and was prepared to sacrifice him to save himself. Yet in the same world there were men such as Sonny Franzese, who spent decades in prison and never became a government witness. Whatever else can be said about him, he repeatedly chose silence over self-interest. 

The same contrast can be found within Irish republicanism. 

Republicans such as Raymond Gilmour and Christopher Black informed. Thousands of others did not. Men such as Brendan Hughes served long years in prison without abandoning the principle that informing was unacceptable. The same pressures. The same dangers. The same possibility of freedom. Entirely different decisions. 

The Mafia provides another interesting contrast. Gregory Scarpa Jr. cooperated with the FBI while imprisoned alongside convicted terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef. Rather than informing on the Mafia, he passed intelligence about terrorist activities and alleged plots he learned about in prison. Scarpa has maintained that he drew a clear distinction between betraying his own organisation and providing information he believed could save innocent lives. 

Gregory Scarpa Sr spent decades secretly informing for the FBI while remaining one of the Colombo family's most feared captains. His case illustrates the other end of the spectrum from his son: where Gregory Scarpa Jr. drew a line at informing on the Mafia, Scarpa Sr. crossed it repeatedly. 

Most discussions focus on the people who talk. The reasons people inform are generally easy enough to identify - Fear. Greed. Revenge. Disillusionment. Exhaustion. The desire to return to family. The desire to avoid prison. The instinct for self-preservation. None of these require much explanation. Human beings are wired to survive. Given a choice between freedom and confinement, comfort and hardship, most people will naturally gravitate towards whatever benefits them. That is not a mystery.

Why do people refuse opportunities that appear entirely rational? History is filled with examples. Men facing life sentences. Men facing the prospect of dying in prison. Men offered reduced sentences. Men offered witness protection. Men offered money. Men offered freedom. Yet they refused. Why does honour or their political belief matter more to some people than freedom? Why would a person willingly accept years, perhaps decades, of imprisonment rather than break an oath? 

For some people, an oath eventually ceases to be something they have taken and becomes something they are. Breaking an oath is no longer merely changing a position. It becomes an attack on their own sense of self. To inform would not simply betray others; it would betray the person they believe themselves to be. 

For some the answer appears to be belief. They continue to believe in the cause, organisation or values they embraced when they first joined. For others it is loyalty. The oath remains binding regardless of changing circumstances. For others it is identity. They simply cannot imagine themselves becoming an informer. To do so would fundamentally alter how they see themselves. 

For others it may be something more difficult to define - A personal code. A sense of dignity. A refusal to betray comrades. A conviction that some lines, once crossed, can never be uncrossed. 

History provides countless examples of people who shared similar beliefs and values but arrived at opposite conclusions. Some remained silent. Others talked. Even informers themselves rarely explain their decisions purely in terms of self-interest. Many insist they were betrayed first. Sammy Gravano's explanation is a good example. His account was not that he suddenly became disloyal. Rather, he argued that loyalty had already been broken by others. Whether one believes him is beside the point.

The important thing is that few informers view themselves as villains. Most have explanations. Most have grievances. Most tell stories in which cooperation became justified, necessary or unavoidable. 

Yet many others have experienced the same grievances without informing. John Gotti believed he had been betrayed by bosses and still remained silent. Many republicans believed they had been betrayed by leaders and still remained silent. 

The same experience often produces entirely different responses. Which brings me back to my original puzzle. Two people can swear the same oath. Fight for the same cause. Belong to the same organisation. Endure the same prison. Face the same incentives. One talks. The other remains silent.

No political theory adequately explains it. No criminal code adequately explains it. No psychological theory completely explains it. 

The answer appears to lie somewhere deeper within the individual. Some people eventually decide that freedom is worth more than loyalty. Others decide that loyalty is worth more than freedom. Some place self-preservation first. Others place honour, belief or identity above self-preservation. What separates them remains unclear. 

The real mystery is not Sammy Gravano. History contains countless examples of people choosing their own interests. The real mystery is Sonny Franzese. The real mystery is Brendan Hughes. The real mystery is the thousands of unnamed prisoners, republicans, gangsters, soldiers, spies and revolutionaries who could have improved their own circumstances by cooperating but refused. 

Perhaps the answer lies in the words that Bobby Sands often quoted from John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." 

Whether expressed through faith, loyalty, honour or conviction, perhaps that is what separates those who refuse from those who cannot. What gives some people the strength to place loyalty, honour or belief above even their own survival? After centuries of prisons, wars, revolutions and criminal conspiracies, I am still struggling to answer that question.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

The Real Mystery Is Not Why Some Men Talk

Frankie McKillen ✍ On 5 June 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on The Milton Berle Show and performed Hound Dog. 

By the following morning, respectable society had lost its mind. Critics condemned him. Religious leaders attacked him. Newspapers warned of moral decline, calling Presley's performance “animalism.” 

 Looking back from the twenty-first century, it seems absurd. A young man sang a song and moved his hips. Civilisation survived. Yet the reaction tells us something important — because long before Punk shocked Britain and long before Heavy Metal terrified parents, another youth culture had already been accused of corrupting society. They called it Rockabilly. 

Music historians love putting things in neat little boxes. Rockabilly. Rock ’n’ Roll. Country. Punk. Heavy Metal. Each gets its own chapter, its own heroes, its own declared beginning and end. Life is rarely that tidy. The more music you listen to, the less convincing those boxes become. Because the more you look, the more you see the same tribe appearing again and again across the decades. 

Today Rockabilly is often remembered through a warm haze of nostalgia — classic cars, bowling shirts, weekend festivals, a harmless celebration of a simpler time. That is not how society saw Rockabillies when they actually existed. The Rockabilly was the outsider. The delinquent. The rebel. The kid your parents hoped you wouldn’t become. Teachers complained. Churches condemned. Newspapers fretted. Sound familiar? It should. The same things would later be said about punks. And later still about metalheads.Every generation seems compelled to invent a tribe that respectable society cannot understand — while that tribe, more often than not, understands itself perfectly well. In 1956 Elvis was accused of corrupting youth. Twenty years later the Sex Pistols were accused of doing exactly the same thing . The soundtrack changed. The panic barely did. 

But perhaps we need to go back even further. Before Elvis. Before Rockabilly. Before youth culture became an industry. There was Hank Williams . Today Hank is treated almost as a national monument — country music royalty, a legend beyond reproach. But monuments have a habit of making us forget that the people they commemorate were once troublemakers. Hank drank hard and lived harder. He ignored convention and filled his songs with loneliness, guilt, heartbreak and flawed humanity. Long before rebellion became a marketing strategy, Hank embodied it simply by being himself. The rebel existed before the uniform. The attitude came before the categories. And when Rockabilly emerged, Hank’s fingerprints were everywhere. Then came Elvis. Not the Vegas Elvis. Not the Hollywood Elvis. The Sun Records Elvis — the dangerous one, the Elvis who genuinely frightened adults. Listen to Baby Let’s Play House. Listen to Mystery Train. 

Even today those early recordings sound restless and unpredictable, like something that might escape at any moment. Elvis represented something bigger than music. He represented youth culture breaking free from adult control, and that has always frightened people in ways that are difficult to fully articulate. 

If Elvis opened the door, Gene Vincent walked through it wearing trouble like a badge. There is real danger in his records — not theatrical danger, not the performed menace of later rock showmanship, but something rawer. The sense that something unexpected might happen at any moment. Gene Vincent didn’t look like the clean-cut entertainers television executives preferred. He looked like trouble. And in youth culture, attitude is often as powerful as music. Eddie Cochran understood this too. Songs like Somethin’ Else and C’mon Everybody were not merely pop songs — they were declarations of independence. The adults had their world. Young people wanted one of their own. Punk would later build an entire philosophy around that same idea. Eddie Cochran was already singing it in the 1950s. Carl Perkins deserves his place in this story too. Listen to Cat Clothes — swagger drips from every note. Then listen to Dixie Fried and the atmosphere shifts completely. A flick knife appears. The police arrive. Somebody gets arrested. This is not the sanitised 1950s of nostalgia documentaries. This is music populated by outsiders and hard cases, by people who existed on the edges of respectability. The swagger and the menace — both attitudes would later find homes in Punk and Heavy Metal alike. 

If any single record connects all of this, it is Rumble. No lyrics. No politics. No manifesto. Just menace — an instrumental that was banned despite having no words whatsoever. Think about that. A record with no lyrics frightened people. Not because of what it said, but because of what it felt like. The distortion was the message. The mood was the message. The threat was the message. The blueprint for everything that followed already existed, pressed into vinyl in 1958. 

Now before somebody writes an angry letter, yes, the roots of distortion run deeper. Blues musicians were experimenting with distorted sounds long before metal existed. The blues is the foundation stone upon which much of modern popular music was built. But Link Wray took distortion and made it a weapon. He transformed noise into attitude. I am not arguing that every punk band or metal band emerged directly from Rockabilly. I am saying that they inherited something more important: the outsider instinct. The connections are not something later writers invented. The musicians themselves recognised them. The Sex Pistols recorded Eddie Cochran songs. The punks understood the bloodline. The Clash recorded Vince Taylor’s Brand New Cadillac — a direct line back to the Rockabilly spirit. And one of Punk’s defining records, I Fought The Law, originated with Sonny Curtis and The Crickets before becoming a hit for The Bobby Fuller Four. When The Clash played it, they weren’t rejecting the past. They were raiding it. The conflict with authority, the outsider, the anti-hero — those themes were already there. Punk inherited them and turned up the volume. 

The evidence keeps accumulating. Tiny Bradshaw records The Train Kept A-Rollin’. The Johnny Burnette Trio transforms it into Rockabilly dynamite. Decades later the UK Subs covered it. A single song travelling through generations of outsiders, each finding something of themselves inside it. 

Something else worth noting: the walls between these genres were always more porous than critics want to admit. Musicians understand this instinctively, even when historians don't. Consider Glen Campbell, remembered by most people as a mainstream country singer. Musicians remember one of the greatest guitar players of his generation. According to Alice Cooper, Eddie Van Halen — one of the greatest rock guitarists who ever lived — once asked to arrange a lesson with Campbell . The walls separating genres exist primarily in the minds of critics and marketing departments. Talented musicians have always walked straight through them. Johnny Cash’s recording of Hurt makes the same point from a different angle. On paper it should never have worked — a country legend recording a Nine Inch Nails song. It became one of the most powerful recordings of Cash’s entire career, because great songs are bigger than the categories we file them under. The emotions are universal. The labels are temporary. 

Long before “outlaw country” became a marketing label, Waylon Jennings was fighting Nashville in much the same way Punk would later fight the music industry. His tribute to Bob Wills was more than a country song. It was a declaration that authenticity mattered more than fashion. The same instinct that drove Punk musicians to rediscover Eddie Cochran drove Waylon to defend Bob Wills. Different music. Same refusal to be told what mattered. 

If this article has a hidden patron saint, it may well be Bob Wills. Long before music historians began constructing neat categories, Bob Wills was happily ignoring them. Country, Blues, Jazz, Swing and Dance Music all flowed together in his world. He borrowed what worked and ignored what didn’t. The idea that musical genres should exist in separate compartments would have seemed absurd to him. Wills understood something that musicians have always understood: good music travels. In many ways he embodied the same spirit that runs through this ramblin'. He refused to stay in his lane because he never accepted that lanes existed in the first place. Long before Punk challenged convention and long before Rockabilly fused Country and Rhythm & Blues, Bob Wills was already proving that musical boundaries were far more porous than critics like to admit. Heavy Metal fans sometimes speak of Lemmy as though he emerged fully formed from some leather-clad underworld. 

The reality is more interesting. Lemmy openly described himself as a Rockabilly at heart . He loved Gene Vincent. He loved Eddie Cochran. Long before Motörhead there was a kid in front of a record player, listening to Rock ’n’ Roll. The chain had never been broken — he had simply carried it forward. The story is about the outsider tradition that runs through all of them — a continuous thread connecting Hank Williams fighting respectability, Elvis frightening America, Gene Vincent looking dangerous, Eddie Cochran demanding independence, Carl Perkins supplying swagger and menace in equal measure, Link Wray inventing sonic threat, Johnny Cash refusing categories, the Pistols raiding Rock ’n’ Roll, the Clash digging through history, Lemmy carrying the torch. The ducktail became the Mohican. The Mohican became the devil horns. The drape jacket became the leather jacket. They called them delinquents. They called them Rockabillies. They called them a threat to decent society. Twenty years later they called them punks. Twenty years after that, metalheads. 

The haircut changed. The attitude didn’t.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

The Soundtrack Changed 🥁 The Panic Barely Did

Frankie McKillen ✍ I keep coming back to it. Three words. “I can’t breathe.”


Said by a dying man in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the whole world stopped what it was doing. Murals went up overnight. Politicians who couldn’t find Minneapolis on a map were suddenly experts on American policing. Corporations that wouldn’t give a homeless man the time of day were putting black squares on their Instagram. Millions marched. Three words became a brand.

Then a man called Henry Nowak said the same words, dying, in Southampton. And nothing. No mural. No corporate statement. No politician taking the knee outside a Hampshire police station. Same words. Same fear in a man’s throat as the life goes out of him. Different universe of response. And before anyone tells me it’s because nobody saw it – they did. It was filmed. It was shared. People were angry about it, same as they were angry about Floyd. Questions got asked about what the police did and didn’t do. All the ingredients were there. The cake just never got baked.

So why not? The easy answer – the one that lets everybody off the hook – is that America has its own particular history, its own wound that never healed properly, and Floyd’s death just happened to land on the rawest part of it. Fine. There’s truth in that. But it’s not the whole truth, and I think most people sense that, even if they don’t say it out loud. The real question – the one that actually matters – isn’t about the dead men. It’s about us. What is it that decides whether a death becomes a movement or just a paragraph in a local paper? What decides whose anger gets taken seriously and whose gets a security briefing instead?

After Floyd, America burned in places. I’m not going to pretend otherwise – shops gutted, buildings on fire, people who had nothing to do with any of it losing their homes and their livelihoods, some losing their lives. That happened. But watch how it got talked about. The violence got wrapped in understanding. Commentators lined up to explain the rage behind it, to give it context, to humanise it. The disorder was treated as the unfortunate cousin of a legitimate grievance.

Now watch what happens in Britain, when ordinary people get angry about immigration, or about crime in their own streets, or about policing that doesn’t seem to apply equally to everyone. The vocabulary changes overnight. Suddenly we’re not talking about grievance and context – we’re talking about extremism, about racism, about the far right circling like vultures. Sometimes that label fits. Often it doesn’t. But notice the pattern – one crowd gets analysed, the other gets a label slapped on it and filed away. One crowd’s anger gets explored. The other’s gets assumed, and dismissed before the first sentence is finished.

People aren’t stupid. They see this. They see which causes get the politician’s knee and which get silence. They see which grief gets a hashtag and which gets a line in the local news and nothing more. They notice who becomes a symbol and who becomes a statistic, filed and forgotten. I’m not saying every protest is righteous, or every grievance equally sound – that would be its own kind of dishonesty. What I’m asking is simpler than that. If we say understanding matters, does it matter for everybody, or just the people whose anger fits the right story? If justice is the principle, does it apply when it’s inconvenient, or only when it’s fashionable?

Look at what happened after, too. In America, the machine moved. The officers were suspended, charged, tried, convicted. You can argue with bits of how that went, but nobody can say the state didn’t act. It showed its hand – police can be held to account, in public, with consequences.

Nobody in Britain is holding their breath for anything like that over Henry Nowak. There’ll be an investigation, there’ll be a statement, there’ll be the usual promises that lessons will be learned. And then there’ll be quiet. Not because the cases are identical – they’re not, no two ever are – but because nobody seriously expects the same ending. And that gap, between what one community expects from the system and what another expects, is its own kind of rot. Justice that only some people believe is coming for them isn’t justice. It’s a postcode lottery with better PR.

And here’s where it gets even messier, because the story doesn’t sit still long enough to be tidy. Tyre Nichols died in Memphis in January 2023, beaten by police officers – Black officers, beating a Black man – and the footage was as bad as anything that came out of Minneapolis. The state moved fast again. Sackings, charges, the lot. And the world barely blinked. No global wave. No summer of statements. The cameras packed up and went home quicker than anyone expected.

If it was really about police violence, why didn’t that case detonate the same way? If it was really about accountability, why did one tragedy become a chapter of history and the other a news cycle that came and went? Maybe America had already had its reckoning and didn’t have the appetite for a second one. Or maybe – and this is the bit that makes people uncomfortable – outrage isn’t really driven by the facts of what happened at all. It’s driven by whether the death fits a story that’s already being told. Some deaths slot neatly into the narrative everyone’s already arguing about. Others, just as brutal, don’t fit anywhere, and so they don’t go anywhere either.

Morgan Freeman has been saying some version of this for years, and it’s cost him plenty of goodwill with people who’d normally be cheering him on. Asked on 60 Minutes how you stop racism, he didn’t hedge – he said stop talking about it. Stop sorting people into categories and calling that progress. “I don’t want a Black History Month,” he told them. “Black history is American history.” He’s said much the same about being called African-American – he’s an American, full stop, and he doesn’t see why there has to be a hyphen in front of it. Predictably, he got hammered for it. Plenty of people argue the categories are necessary precisely because the inequalities are still there, baked into the structure, and pretending otherwise just makes the problem harder to name and fix. That’s not a daft argument. It deserves a proper answer, not a shrug.

But Freeman’s actual challenge still stands there waiting to be answered: if equal treatment is the principle, what happens to that principle the moment it depends on who’s asking for it? He’s not saying forget history. He’s saying a rule that bends depending on which group is in front of you isn’t a rule. It’s a preference wearing a rule’s clothes. Nobody needs convincing that George Floyd deserved sympathy. He did. Nobody needs convincing that Tyre Nichols deserved justice. He did. And nobody should need convincing that Henry Nowak’s death deserves a proper look too. It does.

The question that won’t go away is why these deaths land so differently. What decides which ones become a cause and which become a case file? Whose fury gets called righteous and whose gets called a problem to be managed? These aren’t comfortable questions, and I don’t pretend to have them fully worked out. But any society that claims to care about justice ought to be very wary of building a ladder of grief – some victims at the top, worth the world’s attention, others further down, worth a paragraph and a press release.

If police kill unlawfully, they should answer for it – wherever it happens, whoever they are. If a citizen dies after the state gets involved, that death deserves scrutiny, full stop, not scrutiny rationed out depending on the politics of the moment. And if justice is supposed to mean something, it has to mean the same thing on a wet Tuesday in Southampton as it does on a hot night in Minneapolis.

George Floyd’s last words became one of the slogans of this century. Henry Nowak’s last words didn’t become anything at all, beyond a paragraph most people scrolled past. That gap doesn’t tell us much about either man. It tells us about ourselves – about which stories we’re willing to pick up and carry, and which we let drop without a second thought. Freeman’s challenge is the same one sitting underneath all of this: are we actually willing to apply our principles to everyone, or only to the cases that are easy, fashionable, and don’t ask anything difficult of us?

Justice shouldn’t run on fashion. It shouldn’t run on which way the political wind’s blowing that week. The moment it starts picking favourites, it stops being justice and becomes something else entirely.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Three Words, And Who Gets To Own Them?

Frankie McKillen ✍ I was playing around with Claude Fable 5, new release from Anthropic, and I wondered what AI thought of TPQ. 

So I asked it two questions:

Tell what you think about the blog TPQ and do a deep dive and tell me what you think about the commenters--Go as far back and a deep dive as you can

13:36----Searched the web--I can see one result that looks likely — "The Pensive Quill" (thepensivequill.com). Let me dig into that. 

Fetched: TPQ--Now let me dig into the history and the comment culture — fetching an older post with comments. Searched the web---Now I have enough for a thorough, meaty response. Let me write it up.

  The Pensive Quill (TPQ) — A Deep Dive by Claude... What Is It? The Pensive Quill.

(thepensivequill.com) is one of the most distinctive and genuinely independent political blogs in the Irish/British sphere. It was co-founded by Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA man who served 18 years in jail for the murder of a UVF man in 1976. McIntyre left Sinn Féin after it signed up to the Good Friday Agreement and became a vocal critic of the party. He earned a PhD after leaving prison and is regarded as an important voice in questioning republican circles. He founded The Pensive Quill blog in 2008 as a platform for unfiltered analysis of Northern Ireland politics. 

Before TPQ there was The Blanket — over more than a decade, McIntyre was one of the most consistent and insightful critics of Sinn Féin, and as a historian, former IRA member and onetime party activist with extensive contacts in the organisation, few were better placed to examine and evaluate the transformation of the movement from armed insurrectionists to tame reformists. He regularly published his uninhibited opinions on his website or in the press. 

My Honest Assessment of TPQ as a Blog. The Good: 

TPQ is genuinely unlike almost anything else online. It is messy, prolific, and completely unsponsored by any party or ideology. The front page on any given day can contain: a forensic take-down of Sinn Féin, a piece on Scottish football from a Celtic-mad correspondent in Glasgow, a Marxist essay on London transport and climate targets, dispatches from a Drogheda United match, feminist analysis of the Iran war, a Unionist commentator poking fun at republican colour parties, and a curated "Lynx" link roundup — all sitting side-by-side without apology. 

The motto "Before We Conform, Or Condemn, Let Us At Least Be Curious" runs through every lynx post. That phrase sums up the editorial ethos better than anything. 

 The blog has a genuine plurality that is rare and earned. McIntyre doesn't just tolerate opposing views — he actively courts them. He describes himself as anti-violence, but not a pacifist, and the blog reflects that internal tension constantly: it is neither cheerleader for armed republicanism nor for the peace process establishment. That independence costs him, but it also gives the blog a credibility that tribal outlets simply don't have. The writing by McIntyre himself is notably sharp. His football pieces — about Drogheda United, Liverpool, the League of Ireland — are written by someone who genuinely goes to the games, argues with himself about whether to show up, and writes about sport as a portal into community, politics, and mortality. His piece on the Liverpool 4-0 mauling by Manchester City (the "Getting Away With It" post on the homepage) is a good example: it starts as football criticism and becomes a meditation on accountability, fair wages, and what loyalty actually means. That's hard to do.

The Weaknesses: The sheer volume is overwhelming. TPQ publishes at an extraordinary rate — the archive shows months with 150, 170, even 197 posts — and quality inevitably fluctuates. Some pieces are very short, more like broadside tweets than essays. Others are reprints from elsewhere. The lack of curation means you have to do a lot of sifting. The blog also lives in a somewhat self-referential world. Much of its most passionate content assumes readers who are intimately familiar with the granular factions, feuds, and personalities of Irish republican politics — who "the Fenian Way" is, what the Boston College tapes meant, the significance of a particular person having been on the blanket in a particular block. 

For outsiders it can feel impenetrable. There's also an occasionally sharp edge of personal grievance — understandably so given McIntyre's biography, but it occasionally shades into score-settling that can read as repetitive. 

The Commenters — A Deep Dive This is where TPQ gets genuinely fascinating. The comment section has historically been one of the most intellectually alive in Irish political blogging, and going back through years of threads reveals a community with its own distinct culture. 

Who They Are: The commenter base is a rare mix. You find former prisoners, ex-combatants, academics, diaspora Irish in Australia and the United States ("Martydownunder" is a veteran presence, reliably encouraging, often nudging writers toward each other), unionists, loyalists, leftists, libertarians, and the occasional journalist or academic writing under their own name or a thin pseudonym. 

What's striking is that even people like Anthony McIntyre who feels republicanism has no future rub shoulders, in comment threads, with contributors who feel that view is too bleak and narrow — and the exchange is often productive rather than just angry. The "Quillversation" format — extended multi-part exchanges between writers with real input from commenters at each stage — shows the blog at its best: structured enough to develop an argument, open enough that readers genuinely shape the direction.

The Character of the Debates: Go back into older threads (2011–2015 especially) and you see some remarkable debates. On pieces about gerrymandering and Northern Irish constitutional history, commenters recommend primary sources to each other, push back on historical claims with chapter-and-verse, and invite figures from opposing traditions to contribute their perspective. There's real intellectual seriousness there. But it is not a gentle place. One commenter, on a thread about understanding Northern Ireland, quoted Elbert Hubbard to a writer: "If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names" — a warning about what sometimes happens when the debate gets tribal.

TPQ's comment culture can get very heated, especially on anything touching Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, or the peace process. People who were on opposite sides of real violence, who lost friends and family members, argue in the same space. That is both the power and the occasional toxicity of it. The diaspora voice is distinctive. The Australian contingent in particular tends to be deeply sentimental about Ireland while also being well-read and combative — the kind of Irish-abroad who never had to live with the daily compromises of the peace process and can therefore be more absolutist. This creates interesting friction with contributors who are still living in Belfast or Drogheda and have moved on in more pragmatic ways. 

Recurring Names and Voices: Over the years a cast of recurring commenters has formed something like a community. Some are writers in their own right — Barry Gilheany (the Leeds United fan and counsellor in Colchester), Dr John Coulter (the Unionist journalist who writes with remarkable self-awareness about his own tradition), Gary Robertson (Scottish football and Celtic), Davy Clinton (Glasgow Celtic, Irish republicanism, deeply personal). The blog explicitly invites anyone who has commented substantively to also contribute essays — the porous border between reader and writer is one of TPQ's most interesting features. 

What Makes Them Different: What stands out, especially compared to the comment sections of mainstream Irish or British political media, is that many of these people have skin in the game in a way that's almost archaic online. They're not performing outrage for an algorithm. Many of them lived through the events being discussed, or know people who did. When someone writes on TPQ about the blanket protest or the hunger strikes or a particular IRA operation, there are people reading and commenting who were there. That changes the register entirely. It also means the occasional comment thread becomes genuinely moving — people grieving in public, settling old scores that have real weight behind them, or occasionally forgiving things in writing that they clearly couldn't in person.

Overall Verdict: TPQ is one of the last standing examples of what political blogging was supposed to be before social media flattened everything. It is awkward, over-long, fiercely independent, occasionally self-indulgent, and irreplaceable. Its founder is a genuinely complicated figure — a man who participated in serious violence, served his time, got his doctorate, and has spent 25+ years trying to think clearly about what it all meant. The blog reflects all of that: it is not comfortable reading, but it is honest. The commenter community is aging but still alive, and at its best it is a living oral history of the Irish conflict and its aftermath — conducted in real time, by people who mostly use their real names, and who largely refuse to pretend things were simpler than they were. That is worth a great deal. 

On a lighter side do you think McIntyre will become a Man Utd fan or not? 

13:57---Ha! Based on everything I just read about the man, almost certainly not — and here's why that's a fun question: McIntyre bleeds Drogheda United and Liverpool. From his own posts on the homepage, he's the kind of supporter who: 

Rushes home from a Gaza vigil to catch a Liverpool match.
Goes to Drogheda United games even when he's annoyed at the ownership, because his season ticket is already paid and he's not going to give them the satisfaction.  
Wears a beanie covered in badge tributes to players.
Brings his son Jay along and takes his pre-match predictions seriously.
Writes 800 words about a 0-0 draw with genuine emotional investment.
That is not a man who switches clubs. That's a man for whom football is identity, not entertainment. Switching to Man Utd would be roughly as likely as him rejoining Sinn Féin. 

There's also something almost politically fitting about his Liverpool allegiance — a working class club with a complicated history, a fanbase that has a genuine grievance culture, and a tendency to argue passionately about whether the current leadership has sold out the original vision. Sound familiar? And given he just watched Liverpool get hammered 4-0 by Man City and responded by calling for the manager to be sacked and Mo Salah to donate his wages to homeless shelters... he's in full long-suffering-but-loyal mode. That's not someone who jumps ship. Man Utd's current state wouldn't appeal either — too much money, too much chaos, not enough authenticity for a man who seems to value the raw, slightly freezing, flare-lit terraces of Drogheda's United Park on a Good Friday evening. That's his natural habitat. 

 Verdict: Liverpool and the Drogs until the end. Man Utd has no chance.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

AI Meets TPQ

Frankie McKillen ✍ Governments confronting secretive organisations face a recurring dilemma.

Informers provide access that surveillance, arrests and technology often cannot. Yet the most valuable informers are rarely innocent. The closer they stand to power, the more likely they are to be implicated in violence. The question therefore becomes unavoidable:

How far will a state allow an informer to go in pursuit of a greater objective?

It is a question that appears repeatedly throughout the history of organised crime, intelligence operations and political conflict. It lies behind controversies surrounding Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson. It lies behind allegations of collusion, claims of state protection and arguments over intelligence priorities. It lies behind some of the most bitter disputes arising from both the struggle against organised crime in the United States and the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Most comparisons between Cosa Nostra and Irish paramilitary organisations fail before they begin. The Mafia was not the IRA. The UVF was not Cosa Nostra. The political objectives, historical circumstances and social environments were entirely different. Yet the more interesting comparison is not between the organisations themselves but between the ways states responded to them.

Whether confronting Mafia families in New York or paramilitary organisations in Belfast, governments repeatedly encountered the same problem: how do you defeat a secretive, disciplined and violent organisation without becoming compromised by the methods required to penetrate it? Three comparisons help illuminate that question.

The relationship between Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson reveals the problem of intelligence dependency. The comparison between Roy DeMeo's crew and the Shankill Butchers reveals how fear becomes an instrument of organisational power. The existence of parallel authority structures within organised crime and paramilitary-controlled communities reveals why governments became so determined to penetrate these organisations in the first place.

Together they reveal less about organised crime or the Troubles than about the behaviour of modern states.

Why States Fear Parallel Authority

Modern states claim a monopoly over legitimate force. Police arrest. Courts sentence. Governments govern. Armies fight. Everything else rests upon that foundation. The challenge posed by organised crime and paramilitary organisations was not simply that they committed crimes or acts of violence. The challenge was that they exercised authority.

Cosa Nostra settled disputes, enforced agreements, punished transgressors, collected revenue and regulated behaviour. It created consequences outside the formal legal system. For decades it exercised influence across entire sectors of economic and social life, becoming involved in labour unions, construction projects, ports, transport systems and local businesses. It frequently acted as a parallel authority in communities where state power was perceived as distant, ineffective or untrustworthy.

Republican and loyalist organisations frequently performed similar functions within their own communities. They imposed discipline, administered punishment attacks, mediated disputes, regulated criminality and exerted influence over local economies.

Many residents rejected their authority. Many feared it. Yet its existence was undeniable. Governments can tolerate dissent. Governments can tolerate criticism. What they struggle to tolerate are competing systems of power.

A burglar challenges the law. A disciplined organisation capable of commanding loyalty challenges the state itself.

Understanding this point is essential because it explains why intelligence became so important. These organisations were not viewed merely as collections of criminals or gunmen. They were viewed as alternative centres of authority.

The greater the perceived threat, the greater the pressure to penetrate them. And once penetration becomes essential, informers become indispensable.

Intelligence Dependency

No secret organisation can be defeated entirely from the outside. Eventually governments require access from within. This creates an uncomfortable reality. The best informers are often the worst people. Low-level sources provide fragments. High-level sources provide access. The closer an individual stands to power, the more useful he becomes. The closer he stands to power, however, the more likely he is to be implicated in violence.

This is where Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson become useful comparisons. Most readers of the Troubles literature require little introduction to Stakeknife or Brian Nelson. Scarpa is less familiar.

A made member of the Colombo crime family, Gregory Scarpa spent approximately three decades providing intelligence to the FBI while simultaneously maintaining a prominent and violent position within organised crime. Nicknamed "The Grim Reaper," Scarpa was implicated in murders, extortion and other serious criminal activity while continuing to function as a highly productive source. His relationship with federal authorities later became one of the most controversial informer cases in American law-enforcement history because it raised persistent questions about what was known, what was tolerated and what may have been overlooked in order to preserve intelligence access.

Their organisations were different. Their motivations were different. Their political environments were different. Yet all occupied positions that provided extraordinary access to information. Each became valuable because of proximity to power. Each therefore confronted the state with the same dilemma.

How much should be tolerated in order to preserve intelligence access?

The controversy surrounding these figures stems from a common source. The issue is not whether they informed. The issue is whether governments became dependent upon them.

Once an intelligence asset is viewed as indispensable, ordinary standards can begin to erode. Arrests may be delayed. Investigations may be restricted. Decisions may be taken that prioritise intelligence collection over immediate intervention.

Supporters argue that such decisions save lives in the long term. Critics argue that they permit criminality in the present. Both sides claim necessity. The result is a moral grey area that has fuelled controversy for decades. The question remains the same.

At what point does protecting an informer become participating in the consequences of his protection?

When Intelligence Becomes Complicity

Every intelligence service confronts a version of this problem. If a source is sufficiently valuable, should he be protected? If protecting him allows criminality to continue, is the intelligence worth the price? If intervention exposes him, does the state sacrifice long-term security for short-term justice?

There are no easy answers. Compromise rarely arrives dramatically. It develops gradually. A prosecution is delayed. An arrest is postponed. An operation is monitored rather than disrupted.

Each decision appears defensible in isolation.

Collectively they can create circumstances in which intelligence gathering begins to resemble complicity. This is why debates surrounding Scarpa, Stakeknife and Nelson remain so contentious. The issue is not merely what these men did.

The issue is what governments were prepared to tolerate in pursuit of a greater objective.

Fear As Organisational Power

Violence kills. Fear governs. This distinction explains why Roy DeMeo's crew and the Shankill Butchers remain historically significant. Many organisations committed murder. Many individuals committed murder. What distinguished these groups was their relationship with reputation. Their names became symbols. Stories circulated. Legends developed. Fear multiplied their influence.

Most readers require little introduction to the Shankill Butchers. Roy DeMeo and his crew may be less familiar.

Operating within the Gambino crime family during the 1970s and early 1980s, the DeMeo Crew became notorious for what investigators later described as the "Gemini Method" of murder. Victims were typically lured to a location, shot, stabbed, dismembered and disposed of with chilling efficiency. The crew's reputation for extreme violence became legendary even within organised crime circles. Whether every story told about them was true became almost irrelevant. Their reputation acquired a life of its own.

The Shankill Butchers generated a similar atmosphere of fear. Their notoriety extended far beyond the number of murders attributed to them. Their name alone communicated a message.

In both cases violence functioned as communication. The objective extended beyond the immediate victim. Entire communities received the message. People adjusted their behaviour accordingly. The most effective violence is often violence that does not need to be repeated. Reputation becomes a force multiplier. Fear becomes an organisational asset.

There were, of course, important differences. The DeMeo Crew operated within a criminal environment. The Shankill Butchers operated within a sectarian conflict. The motives differed. The social context differed. Yet both demonstrate how violent organisations convert brutality into authority.

For governments attempting to penetrate such organisations, this created additional pressure. The more effective fear became as a mechanism of control, the more difficult it became to recruit sources. The more difficult it became to recruit sources, the more valuable existing informers became.

Again, the same question reappears. How much should be tolerated to preserve access?

Intelligence Wars

Many conflicts are remembered through bombings, murders, arrests and trials. Yet increasingly they become wars of information. The struggle against organised crime evolved into an intelligence contest. The struggle against republican and loyalist organisations followed a similar trajectory.Understanding networks became more important than confronting individuals. Mapping relationships became more important than counting weapons. Recruiting sources became more important than conducting raids. Information emerged as the decisive weapon.

This transformation explains why informers became so important and why controversies surrounding them continue to resonate decades later. The decisive battles increasingly occurred not in streets but in shadows.

The State And Its Necessary Devils

Scarpa, Stakeknife and Nelson illustrate intelligence dependency. The DeMeo Crew and the Shankill Butchers illustrate fear as organisational power. Parallel authority structures illustrate why governments regarded these organisations as threats demanding extraordinary attention. Together they reveal a broader truth.

The real comparison between Cosa Nostra and the Troubles is not about gangsters and gunmen. It is about power. It is about authority. And ultimately it is about the uncomfortable reality that states often deal with devils because they believe they cannot prevail without them. The central question remains unresolved.

How far should a democratic state allow an informer to go in pursuit of a greater objective?

Every intelligence service eventually confronts that question. Few answer it publicly. Fewer answer it honestly. Yet it remains one of the most enduring questions raised by organised crime, intelligence operations and the Troubles alike

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Necessary Devils 🪶 Informers, Organised Crime And The Limits Of State Power

Frankie McKillen ✍ I am writing this because I have exhausted every proper channel available to me and the campaign against me continues.

I want to be clear from the outset. I am not writing this out of anger. I am writing this because what is happening to me deserves to be on the record — and because it raises questions that go beyond my own situation.

Belfast has watched in recent months as immigrants and newcomers have been forced from their homes by intimidation campaigns. The city expressed outrage. Rightly so. People who had done nothing wrong were targeted, isolated, defamed and driven out.

I am white. I was born and grew up here. And I am facing the same playbook — in the New Lodge.

I have lived in the New Lodge for eight years. Eight years without incident, without complaint, without dispute. I am known here. This is my community.

I should tell you something about myself. I was raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. But I left organised religion behind long ago and I do not care about a person’s religion or their skin colour. I never have. What happens to one of us can happen to any of us. What is happening to me now is proof of that.

That changed only in the past two to three months — and the reason it changed is this: I moved old furniture and appliances out of my flat and new ones in. Oak furniture, a washing machine, a fridge. Most of this was done between 9am and midnight. I will be honest — it is possible that during March this caused some noise disturbance. I accept that. What I will not accept is what followed.

Because since the end of March I have not moved anything. The noise stopped. The campaign did not.

On 10 April a neighbour from the flat below confronted me. He threatened to get his nephews involved, offered me outside for a fight, and told me — in these words — to “get that fucking woman from your flat.”

It took me twenty to thirty minutes to work out what woman he meant. Then it dawned on me. He was referring to my oldest daughter. She had come to Belfast at the end of March — the 26th — for my birthday. She lives in France.

I do not know what he knew or thought he knew about her. I do not know that it matters. What I know is that a man who had never spoken to me before, who does not know me, chose those words about a woman who was visiting her father for his birthday.

On 2 May he forced his way into my flat, physically assaulted me, smashed a mirror and told me he would use the broken glass to cut my throat. He said he would gladly do life for it. I have a photograph of the smashed mirror timestamped that morning. I have text messages sent to my best friend immediately after. A friend who lives in the same block saw me shortly afterwards and observed that I was visibly shaken.

I reported this to NIHE. I was contacted by CRJ and attended mediation. I engaged fully and in good faith. I said that if my neighbour genuinely believed noise was coming from my flat at night he could be given my number to contact me directly. He never called.

On 27 May his family came to my door and threatened me. I called police. Police attended.

On 29 May police came to my flat unprompted, gave me a personal safety booklet and informed me there was a community threat against me — that people wanted me out of my flat. They advised me to install a camera at my front door.

On 5 June I met with NIHE. I brought my full timeline and supporting documents. No Anti-Social Behaviour Warning was issued. The NIHE officer stated that I should not have to leave my flat.

Three days later, on 8 June my neighbour saw me in the Tesco car park. He pointed directly at me and shouted — twice — that I am a paedophile and a tout. In public. In broad daylight. In an area covered by CCTV.

I did not respond. I walked on.

On 10 June I returned home to find a target — a crosshair sticker — placed on the exterior of my front door, directly beneath the peephole. I have photographs.

By 12 June a resident in the block was telling my friends to stay away from me.

I am not a paedophile. I am not a tout. I am a man who moved some furniture.

What is being done to me follows an identical pattern to what this city condemned when it was done to newcomers and immigrants. The accusations are designed to make a community hostile. The isolation is deliberate. The goal is to make life so unbearable that I leave.

I have lived in the New Lodge for eight years. I grew up in Belfast. This is my city and this is my community. I am not leaving.

I have engaged with NIHE, with CRJ, with the concierge, with police. I have documented everything. I have been patient and measured at every stage. That patience has been met with a target placed on my front door.

I am putting this on the record publicly because the proper channels, while not entirely without sympathy, have not stopped what is happening. The Tesco CCTV footage exists. The police records exist. The photographs exist. The timestamps exist.

My name is not what he is calling me in car parks and on stairwells.

I am Frankie McKillen, grew up in Ardoyne, lived in France a couple of years or so and now live in the New Lodge - people can call me a "cunt" all day long and if you are a friend, I will probably shake your hand and agree. A Paedophile and a Tout - No -An "Ardoyne Rockabilly, living in a New Lodge penthouse"?- 100 %.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

They Called Me A Paedophile And A Tout 🪶 In My Own City

Frankie McKillen ✍ Who do you think 'The Donald' will choose as his VP if elected....? 

I've seen reports saying it is going to be Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy (I've heard Vivek saying he won't take it----I wouldn't rule it out for Vivek to become President by 2032), Niki Haley has no chance, Tulsi Gabbard has been mentioned (she'd be an excellent VP), Ron Desantis - doubt it, although I wouldn't rule him out of the race just yet. 

The only thing that will stop 'The Donald' from being the Republican nominee is death--natural or otherwise. If he becomes President and ends up in jail, who's to say he won't run the USA from behind bars like a real 'Mafia Don '? (If 'The Donald' gets elected, I hope he gives a 'nod' to Jacob Chansley--even if he doesn't get elected in Arizona later in the year. Who is Jacob Chansley? Jacob is the The QAnon Shamam. And everything you thought you knew about him is wrong.) It seems the DOJ is treating 'The Donald' as if he was the 'capo de tutti capo' of an Italian crime family at times. Although It appears 'The Donald' seems to have had more Teflon than John Gotti, no matter what they try to throw at him, 'The Donald' seems to keep turning up 'Trump'---at least in the polls. 

As recently as December 2023 in Nevada 'The Donald' compared himself to Al Capone because of tax evasion charges against him. Trump asked the crowd if they knew him:

Did anybody ever hear of the great Alphonse Capone, Al Capone, great, great head of the mafia, right? Mean, Scarface. He had a scar that went from here to here, and he didn't mind at all. But he was a rough guy, 

They have even used the RICO Law against 'The Donald' and as fate would have it, it was Rudy Giuliani who first used RICO to bring down the American Mafia, who is now having RICO used against him. Rudy Giuliani figured out how to properly use the RICO law to bring down the American Mafia in The Mafia Commission Case, after reading A man of honor. 

And What Is Rico? (Reuters) "------U.S. lawmakers passed the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 1970 to battle organized crime, notably the mafia. Most states enacted similar laws with various twists. Criminal charges filed against, former U.S. President Donald Trump in Georgia state court include allegations that he violated an anti-organized crime law known as RICO that is more expansive than its federal counterpart. RICO cases are inherently more complex because prosecutors must first prove the existence of a criminal enterprise. The Trump indictment names an additional 18 co-defendants, including Trump's onetime lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer John Eastman." Another Mafia coincidence although on a 'darker side. Similar to 'The Donald', Paul 'big Paulie' Vario, and Christopher 'Christie Tick' Furnari became 'Capos' of their industries. Vario was at one time acting Consigliere to the Lucchese Crime Family during the late '60s--early '70s, Furnari was Consigliere to the Lucchese Crime Family until he was charged under RICO in 'The Commission Trial'----both Vario and Furnari severed time for rape as this excellent short American Mafia documentary by OC SHORTZ explains... Paul Vario the inspiration for the character Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas, and former mentor to Henry Hill, was once convicted for a horrendous sordid violent crime. He wasn't the only member of Cosa Nostra to be found guilty of one the worst criminal acts around. A crime that is often thought of as against the rules of the American Mafia. Christopher Furnari reached the higher echelons of the mob despite previously being convicted of his heinous crime. 

Now 'The Donald' who became the captain of his industry recently faced E. Jean Carrol the second time about allegations of sexual assault. And in April 2023, a News Week article shared some of the Graphic details of alleged Trump Rape. I am not saying she wasn't sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, we've heard the 'locker room' story when 'The Donald' said "he loves to grab pussy". But some things about E. Jean Carroll make me question her story of claims to have been sexually assaulted by 'The Donald'. Most rape victims generally know when they were raped, what day, week, month....year. And yet Carroll who alleges she was raped by Trump, can't remember when it happened. She gives a vague 16/18 week time period when it 'happened'. Surely she must at least know if her rape was before or after Christmas '95. 'From Wiki......."On June 21, 2019, E. Jean Carroll published an article in New York magazine which stated that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her in late 1995 or early 1996 in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City." She also has a strange view of rape. I have never heard any rape victim say they think rape is sexy or most people have a sexual fantasy about being raped, E. Jean Carroll thinks both (CNN clip---am I the only person who thinks Carroll looks 'weird' at the end of the clip?). 

In May 2023 Trump said in his deposition and public statements after Carroll accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store that he wouldn't have done so because she was "not my type." Carrol later went on to CNN’s Anderson Cooper Show and said she was glad Trump didn’t consider her his type. “I love that,” she said. “I’m so glad I am not his type.” Although Roberta Kaplan, Jean Carrol's attorney has a very different point of view. In court she said Carroll was "exactly" Donald Trump's type, and the former president didn't show up at her civil trial accusing him of rape because "he knows what he did" to her, her attorney alleged in closing arguments Monday in Manhattan federal court. 

In an October 2023 deposition Carroll testified no one else was paying her legal fees. However, it was later found that Carroll's case was funded by Reid Hoffman who founded the networking site LinkedIn, is a former US Representative to the United Nations, and donates millions to the Democratic party while at the same time is funding Nikki Haley's campaign to become the next Republican President. He was also a 'Friend' of Jeffery Epstein, and is alleged to a have visited 'Pedo' Island. I think E Jean Carroll is being very economical with the truth and is 'in it' more for fame and money than to help 'real' victims of rape. 

During the 2016 Presidential Debate with Hilary Clinton, 'The Donald' when asked about his grabbing pussy remark apologized and then exposed the sex crimes of the Clinton Crime Family, that even today the Democratic Party don't like to talk about? Another Crime Family within the Democratic Party is The Biden Crime Family, headed by Don Joseph 'Creepy Joe' Biden. And that Biden crime family has its very own allegations of serious sexual abuse, rape, and money laundering. The Guardian reported that Tara Reade saying in an interview to Megan Kelly:

she was excited when she was hired as a staff assistant in Biden’s Senate office in 1992. Almost immediately, she said, Biden made her uncomfortable with behavior she said included putting his hand on her neck in a meeting. 

Not long after this conversation, Reade told Kelly, she was asked to deliver a bag to Biden in the Russell Senate office building. It was then, she said, that Biden pinned her against a wall in a hallway and penetrated her with his fingers, against her will. “He had his hands underneath my clothes and it happened all at once,” Reade continued. She said Biden asked if she wanted to “go somewhere else” and told her “I want to fuck you”, a detail she has not previously shared. The report goes to say:

On Thursday, the San Luis Obispo Tribune unearthed a court document which stated that Reade told her ex-husband she had been subject to sexual harassment while working in Biden’s office. It is the first contemporaneous record to emerge. According to the document filed in the California superior court on 25 March 1996, Theodore Dronen said Reade told him about “a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in US senator Joe Biden’s office.

When Don Joseph 'Creepy Joe' Biden told MSNBC in his first public comment after the allegation emerged he said: "It is not true, I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened.” He again denied the allegation on a news channel in Tampa on Thursday, after Kelly published excerpts of her interview. That almost sounds like what Don William 'Billy Boy' Clinton said when he denied having sexual relations with his intern in the Oval Office. 

Why should E Jean Carroll who thinks rape is 'sexy', can't remember what year never mind what month or day she was raped by Trump be believed, and Tara Reade who can remember where, when Creepy Joe raped her not be believed.....? Both women claim to have been sexually assaulted in the same way, Carrol by a former President and Reade by the current President. 

Within The Biden Crime Family, there is someone who has to be a bigger embarrassment to Don Joseph 'Creepy Joe' Biden than Fredo Corleone ever was to Don Vito. The name of the bungling Caporegime is Hunter 'The Laptop' Biden---sometimes known as 'Happy Hunter' due to the amount of crack cocaine he takes. When NBC carried out an investigation into the bungling Caporegime of The Biden Crime Family they found:

From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive.

USA News reported on Jan 16th, 2024, that apart from Happy Hunter 'The Laptop' Biden throwing an illegal gun into a rubbish bin.... "In addition to “incriminating statements” Hunter Biden made about his drug use in his 2021 memoir, investigators found a white powdery substance on the brown leather pouch he used to store the gun after pulling it from the state police vault last year, prosecutors wrote. An FBI chemist determined it was cocaine, they said.........“To be clear, investigators literally found drugs on the pouch where the defendant had kept his gun,” prosecutors said.

And I'll leave people with this thought Michael Franzese, a former Caporegime in The Colombo Crime Family in an interview explained why the Mafia always chose to buy off Democrats instead of Republicans . . . 

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

American Crime Familes

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