Update (1128ET): With all eyes now on Mike Rogers, who’s been floated to lead Trump’s DoD…

Absolutely not. Mike Rogers is a CIA-owned, Deep State clown who could not care less about putting America First. He will stab Trump and all of his supporters in the back at the very first opportunity in order to push America Last neocon foreign policy. https://t.co/jDuJE5cU0g

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 8, 2024

Donald Trump Jr. told comedian Dave Smith on Sunday “I’m on it” in response to keeping “all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration.”

Agreed💯💯💯!!! I’m on it. https://t.co/wJga8VyIG2

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 10, 2024

So about Mike Rogers, Don…

*  *  *

The new conservative era is off to a good start and so far it appears that Trump Admin 2.0 is not messing around.  Perhaps the biggest complaint about the 2016 Trump Administration was how quickly a nest of Neo-Con swamp creatures slithered their way into his cabinet.  In interviews with podcasters like Joe Rogan, Trump would later regret his reliance on establishment GOP advisers who helped him to fill the thousands of cabinet positions required for a presidential transition. 

It was this same cabal of advisers that would help to sabotage his efforts to institute federal reforms, secure the border, clear out corruption and ultimately some of them tried to help the Democrats destroy him.  As the saying goes, in a revolution always be sure to save a magazine for your so-called “allies”.  

By some miracle Donald Trump has received a second chance to make things right and it looks as though he learned some valuable lessons from the internal sabotage that took place during his first term.  There’s little chance we will be seeing ghouls like John Bolton, Anthony Fauci or Mike Pence haunting the halls of the White House in 2025.  In fact, Trump recently put swirling rumors to rest that he might be including Neo-Cons like Mike Pompeo and NIkki Haley in his newest administration. 

He made the announcement on November 9th on his Truth Social account, rejecting any notions that they would be working with him for his second term.

BREAKING: President Trump clarifies that he will not be inviting Amb Nikki Haley and Sec Mike Pompeo into his next administration. pic.twitter.com/ZypWqhGr5v

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 9, 2024

“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump posted on social media. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.”

It’s a surprisingly cordial message that sets a much needed standard. 

This is welcome news for a lot of conservatives and independents looking for a true break from the Deep State and a fresh start for America.  The announcement helps to put to rest public concerns that the policies Trump campaigned on would be diluted by establishment cronies the moment he entered the Oval Office.  For those unaware, Pompeo has a nasty reputation as an anti-liberty bureaucrat and a warhawk.  To illustrate the Pompeo problem, Tucker Carlson relates his own encounter with the office of the former CIA Director and Secretary of State:

Remember what Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan about Mike Pompeo? pic.twitter.com/oQD0zbO32t

— An0maly (@LegendaryEnergy) November 7, 2024

To be sure, Pompeo plays the game and says what conservatives want to hear when it’s necessary, and his policies tend to run concurrent to his predecessors, but that’s the issue; the old Neo-Con guard is a dinosaur that needs to go.  Republican strategist Roger Stone issued a stark warning to President-elect Donald Trump on Friday: Trump should not trust the former cabinet member. 

“Now that Trump is back on top, it becomes far more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Stone wrote on his website.  Stone went on to single out Pompeo and Trump’s former UN ambassador—and onetime 2024 Republican rival—Nikki Haley. 

These “neocons have positioned themselves to get highly influential roles within the second Trump administration,” Stone wrote, “and this sinister fifth column has the potential to be more harmful to Trump’s America First agenda than his leftist opinion within the Democrat Party.”

Some may recall that Nikki Haley was thoroughly raked over the coals by Vivek Ramaswamy for her neo-con tendencies during the Republican Primaries.

Vivek destroys what’s left of Nikki Haley’s failed campaign by pointing out that she is corrupt and owned by the uniparty RINOs. 👇🏽
pic.twitter.com/8fcW223juB

— Glockford Files (@GlockfordFiles) December 7, 2023

These are not the kinds of people that should be allowed anywhere near the next Trump presidency.  Luckily, the voices of reason have the floor this time and Trump seems to be listening. 

Authored by Larry Sand via American Greatness,

An essential mission for many educators throughout the country is the indoctrination of their students. The newest arrival on the propaganda front is Israel. In August, one of the topics of a United Teachers of Los Angeles meeting was “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired.”

History teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating his students. He talked about transporting busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally—during the school day—without arousing suspicion.

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now, I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez further explained, “It’s like tomorrow I go to church, and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The unionistas then burst into approving laughter.

John Adams Middle School teacher and UTLA panelist William Shattuc agreed. Wearing a keffiyeh around his neck, he said, “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.”

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles, who received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching, insists that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?”

In Portland, OR, the Intifada begins in kindergarten. For example, the teachers union suggests that kindergarteners be gathered into a circle and taught the history of Palestine: “Seventy-five years ago, a lot of decision-makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with white skin. There’s a BIG word for when indigenous land gets taken away to make a country; that’s called settler colonialism.”

The brainwashing is hardly limited to Israel.

In the San Diego Unified School District, students must confront and examine their “white privilege” and acknowledge when they “feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy” in their work.

Courtesy of the 520-page Black Studies Curriculum, public school students in New York City now receive lessons on the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement and that Black Americans should receive reparations. Students also learn about the evils of capitalism, that student loans are equivalent to “debt peonage,” and the difference between defunding, reforming, and abolishing the police.

At an unspecified school in California, a parent confronted a teacher who told students that “only those who voted for Kamala Harris in their mock election will get a pizza party.”

The educator explained that there were five periods and only one would not get the party. “The Democrats are more for feeding the hungry, free medical care, more services—just pay higher taxes, so I would be willing to buy pizza for the class,” the teacher told the parent.

The teacher confirmed that the class that voted for Trump would not get free pizza, explaining “They just do what the conservatives do—which is pay for yourself.”

And then there is the transgender obsession, which shows no sign of abating. The invaluable Parents Defending Education lists the school districts that have policies that openly state district personnel can or should keep a student’s transgender status hidden from parents. As of Oct. 30, there were 12,222,924 students in 20,951 schools across the country affected by this protocol.

Not only is indoctrination a moral disgrace, it is also very expensive. A recent report surveying 467 superintendents in 46 states reveals that culturally divisive conflict in schools costs public K-12 schools, i.e., taxpayers, about $3.2 billion during the 2023-24 school year.

The cost of school-based culture wars includes “additional security, communications, and legal expenses. Schools incurred indirect costs from using staff time to address misinformation, social media threats, media inquiries about book bans, and growing demands for public information requests.”

John Rogers, a UCLA education professor, and lead researcher for the poll, claimed in a media release, “This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress, and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them. Sadly, as superintendents have told us, the cost of these conflicts not only has a financial impact but is also eroding teaching and learning and undermining the trust between schools and the communities so essential to our democracy and civic life.”

Notably, according to many of the superintendents interviewed for the report, members of Moms for Liberty and those speaking out about such controversial topics shouldn’t get a platform.

Tiffany Justice, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, responded that the report’s findings are “ridiculous” and a “gaslighting tactic” to make it look like the parents are the problem for opposing sensitive topics being taught to their children without their consent.

Justice adds, “This is more obfuscation, this is more deflection by school districts for not liking the fact that parents are calling out a failing system, and we will not be silenced to protect a failing system.”

“What would be the better thing?” Justice asked. “We just shut up and go along with the indoctrination and the demoralization of our children so we don’t cause a problem and cost the school district money? If they weren’t doing so much nonsense, they wouldn’t have to deal with the ire of parents.”

Fortunately, many adults are indeed catching on to the problems with our wayward schools. According to the results of a Gallup poll released in August, only 43% of American adults indicated they are somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of education students receive in kindergarten through grade 12 in the United States today.

Additionally, the EdChoice Schooling in America Survey asked respondents about the trajectory of K–12 education in the United States. The responses to this question were red flags for both parents and the broader public. Fully 70% of the public and 64% of parents of school-age children think K–12 education is on the wrong track.

A Pew Research Center poll found that only 16% of Americans were willing to say things are going in the right direction in education.

The 2022 NAEP, or “Nation’s Report Card” shows that Americans’ concerns are valid. The test revealed that nationwide, 29% of the nation’s 8th-graders are proficient in reading, while just 26% are proficient in math.

Clearly, all parents need to be aware of the massive indoctrination going on in the nation’s government-run schools and act accordingly. They have options, which I will delve into in a future post.

Several media reports and sources have been claiming that the government of Qatar has ordered the leaders of Hamas to leave the country, following pressure from Washington.

Financial Times is among those major outlets who are reporting that “The request was made around 10 days ago after intense discussions with US officials, according to one person familiar with the matter.” Wall Street Journal and others have said the same on Saturday.

Hamas leadership has been present in the capital of Doha since 2012. Prior to that it had long been based out of Damascus. But the Assad government booted Hamas after it sided against him and allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda forces during the decade long proxy war in Syria.

The tiny oil and gas-rich Gulf nation of Qatar has been central to on-and-off ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, but these talks have of late been declared completely off. 

Given that these negotiations have been cut off, and as fighting continues in the Gaza Strip, Washington believes it’s time for Qatar to no longer play ‘neutral’ host nation to the group widely designated as a terror organization by the US and its allies. FT details:

But the talks have since been deadlocked, and Doha was told that after the failure of “repeated proposals to release hostages, [Hamas’s] leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner”, said a senior Biden administration official. “We made that clear to Qatar following Hamas’s rejection weeks ago of another hostage release proposal,” the official said.

The official added that while Qatar had played a key role in trying to negotiate a ceasefire and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by the militant group over the past year, “following Hamas’s repeated refusal to release even a small number of hostages, including most recently during meetings in Cairo, their continued presence in Doha is no longer viable or acceptable”.

Hamas leaders being in Doha has remained an awkward and contradictory arrangement as Qatar is also host to the largest US troop presence in the Middle East. US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) Forward Headquarters is located at Al Udeid Air Base, which can house more than 10,000 American troops.

There is growing frustration among Qatari mediators about statements made regarding the intentions of officials in Doha, I’m told. With some western officials publicly attacking Qatar while privately asking for diplomatic assistance.

This was communicated to the Americans.

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) November 9, 2024

While Qatar’s foreign ministry has confirmed that efforts “to mediate between Hamas and Israel are currently stalled” it also doesn’t appear happy with the pressure campaign coming from Washington to boot Hamas leaders.

There has also been some confusion, despite all the current international reports, over whether Qatar is actually complying with the US demand:

Hamas has not been informed they are unwelcome in Doha, the Qatari Al-Araby news outlet reports, citing informed sources. Al-Araby says that information reported by media outlets, including The Times of Israel, is inaccurate.

However, an Arab official tells The Times of Israel that the Al-Araby report is false, calling it a “smokescreen” put on by sources who do not support the decision to oust Hamas.

How to read Qatar’s bombshell to oust Hamas:
1- Qatar pivoting to Gulf fold
2- Terminating mediation efforts: slap to all (Israel, US, Hamas)
3- Adjusting to Republican Congress, less so to Trump

Outsource the nightmare to someone else (Turkey, Iran) https://t.co/UPjkVKyh9n

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) November 9, 2024

But if and when Hamas does relocate its political headquarters, Turkey or even Iran would be likely fits as the next host countries.

In the case of Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been vocal in his support of the group all while fiercely condemning Israel for what Ankara and others have said is genocide being conducted against Palestinians.

Authored by Jonthan Turley,

The president of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has declared that the lesson of the blowout 2024 election is not a need for greater inclusivity and balance at the school but, you guessed it, the express abandonment of nonpartisanship going forward. While many would argue that the school left neutrality behind years ago, Pratyush Mallick is calling in an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson for an official change. It would align the Institute with the building “resistance” and reject not just nonpartisanship but neutrality in its programs and grants.

After the election, I wrote that people hoping for a moment of introspection after the Trump victory will likely be disappointed, and “the rage in the media and academia will only likely increase.” That has unfortunately proven to be the case. The meltdown after the presidential election appears to be building rather than subsiding with attacks from the left on male, female, and minority voters as racists, misogynists, or despotic dupes.

The call for partisanship at Harvard is not unique. Before the election, I criticized Wesleyan University President Michael Roth for urging universities to abandon neutrality and work openly for the election of Kamala Harris. Immediately after the election, Roth doubled down and promised to join the “resistance” against Trump’s “authoritarian” regime.

A few weeks before the election, I participated in a debate at Harvard Law School over the lack of free speech protections and intellectual diversity at Harvard.

This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges.

The Harvard Crimson has documented how the school’s departments have virtually eliminated Republicans. In one study of multiple departments last year, they found that more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.”

Only  5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”

According to Gallup, the U.S. population is roughly equally divided among conservatives (36%), moderates (35%), and liberals (26%).

So Harvard has three times the number of liberals as the nation at large, and less than three percent identify as “conservative” rather than 35 percent nationally.

Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats.

While Professor Randall Kennedy, in the debate, dismissed the notion that Harvard should look more like America, the problem is that it does not even look like Massachusetts. Even as one of the most liberal states in the country, roughly one third of the voters still identify as Republican.

The student body shows the same bias of selection. Harvard Crimson previously found that only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative.

Yet, the Institute of Politics student executive committee president wants it to be more official.

”Today, Harvard’s Institute of Politics has a choice to make too. Nonpartisanship — a founding principle of the IOP — is no longer a tenable position in today’s political environment. Donald Trump’s imminent return to power underscores the importance of the IOP finally breaking from our long-standing commitment to it.”

So, rather than considering the implications of a majority of voters rejecting the narrative of the media and political establishment, the idea is to move even further toward orthodoxy and intolerance.

Mallick wrote that as the Trump administration moves forward, “we must resist platforming anti-democratic voices in the guise of nonpartisanship.” Those “anti-democratic voices” are likely to be found on one end of the political spectrum.

In a truly Orwellian twist, Mallick added, “In fact, we must strive to defend principles of democracy, due process, and justice precisely to ensure that we can continue carrying out our age-old mission of nonpartisanship.”

So, the Institute would become partisan in order to fulfill its mission of nonpartisanship.

As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, we have seen the same abandonment of neutrality in the media with disastrous results.

Students in “J Schools” today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “all journalism is activism.”

After a series of interviews with over 75 media leaders,  Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.”

The result has been the increasing rejection of mainstream media in favor of new media. The falling revenue and readership have not produced any more introspection among leading figures in the media. After the election, various figures such as MSNBC host Mika Brezinski did not acknowledge how media bias has led to the decline but instead blamed the election in part on the availability of opposing views as “massive disinformation.” Others called for free speech to be curtailed to prevent such contrary information from affecting another election.

Ironically, the Harvard Institute has a number of advisory board members accused of such bias in the past, including CNN’s Abby Philip. While there are a couple of Republicans, it has a majority of current and former Democratic politicians and advisers, including Michael Nutter, David Axelrod, LaTosha Brown, William D. Delahunt, and Joseph Kennedy III.

In the end, the Institute’s formal commitment to partisanship is unlikely to matter. While Mallick insists that “nonpartisanship—a founding principle of the IOP—is no longer a tenable position in today’s political environment,” it has long been out of vogue at Harvard.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

The new conservative era is off to a good start and so far it appears that Trump Admin 2.0 is not messing around.  Perhaps the biggest complaint about the 2016 Trump Administration was how quickly a nest of Neo-Con swamp creatures slithered their way into his cabinet.  In interviews with podcasters like Joe Rogan, Trump would later regret his reliance on establishment GOP advisers who helped him to fill the thousands of cabinet positions required for a presidential transition. 

It was this same cabal of advisers that would help to sabotage his efforts to institute federal reforms, secure the border, clear out corruption and ultimately some of them tried to help the Democrats destroy him.  As the saying goes, in a revolution always be sure to save a magazine for your so-called “allies”.  

By some miracle Donald Trump has received a second chance to make things right and it looks as though he learned some valuable lessons from the internal sabotage that took place during his first term.  There’s little chance we will be seeing ghouls like John Bolton, Anthony Fauci or Mike Pence haunting the halls of the White House in 2025.  In fact, Trump recently put swirling rumors to rest that he might be including Neo-Cons like Mike Pompeo and NIkki Haley in his newest administration. 

He made the announcement on November 9th on his Truth Social account, rejecting any notions that they would be working with him for his second term.

BREAKING: President Trump clarifies that he will not be inviting Amb Nikki Haley and Sec Mike Pompeo into his next administration. pic.twitter.com/ZypWqhGr5v

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 9, 2024

“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump posted on social media. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.”

It’s a surprisingly cordial message that sets a much needed standard. 

This is welcome news for a lot of conservatives and independents looking for a true break from the Deep State and a fresh start for America.  The announcement helps to put to rest public concerns that the policies Trump campaigned on would be diluted by establishment cronies the moment he entered the Oval Office.  For those unaware, Pompeo has a nasty reputation as an anti-liberty bureaucrat and a warhawk.  To illustrate the Pompeo problem, Tucker Carlson relates his own encounter with the office of the former CIA Director and Secretary of State:

Remember what Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan about Mike Pompeo? pic.twitter.com/oQD0zbO32t

— An0maly (@LegendaryEnergy) November 7, 2024

To be sure, Pompeo plays the game and says what conservatives want to hear when it’s necessary, and his policies tend to run concurrent to his predecessors, but that’s the issue; the old Neo-Con guard is a dinosaur that needs to go.  Republican strategist Roger Stone issued a stark warning to President-elect Donald Trump on Friday: Trump should not trust the former cabinet member. 

“Now that Trump is back on top, it becomes far more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Stone wrote on his website.  Stone went on to single out Pompeo and Trump’s former UN ambassador—and onetime 2024 Republican rival—Nikki Haley. 

These “neocons have positioned themselves to get highly influential roles within the second Trump administration,” Stone wrote, “and this sinister fifth column has the potential to be more harmful to Trump’s America First agenda than his leftist opinion within the Democrat Party.”

Some may recall that Nikki Haley was thoroughly raked over the coals by Vivek Ramaswamy for her neo-con tendencies during the Republican Primaries.

Vivek destroys what’s left of Nikki Haley’s failed campaign by pointing out that she is corrupt and owned by the uniparty RINOs. 👇🏽
pic.twitter.com/8fcW223juB

— Glockford Files (@GlockfordFiles) December 7, 2023

These are not the kinds of people that should be allowed anywhere near the next Trump presidency.  Luckily, the voices of reason have the floor this time and Trump seems to be listening. 

By Liz Helin of Remix News

A 33-year-old woman was returning home to Germany from Iran on Oct. 28 when she ran into some trouble with customs officers at Hamburg airport. When asked whether she had brought any goods that required declaration from her five-week trip, she denied having any, reports Bild. 

However, it turns out that was not the case.

“During the inspection, the customs officers discovered a total of 18 pieces of gold jewelry, 16 of which were stored in a shoulder bag with a lock in the backpack,” reports Maurice Douce, press spokesman for the Itzehoe main customs office. 

The woman then tried to say that some of the jewelry was for a friend.

“What matters when importing goods is not who the goods are intended for, but who is importing them,” Douce clarified.

The total value of the items was some €15,000, with the woman facing a charge of €3,400 in customs duties for her undeclared souvenirs.

Officials also discovered that the woman receives a citizen’s allowance in Germany. This means that she is only allowed to go on holiday for a maximum of 21 days and only if the trip is approved by her benefit provider. Otherwise, her social benefits can be reclaimed.

Germany has been struggling with the welfare demands of its open borders policy. In its 2025 budget draft, the country outlined standard rates and accommodation costs expected to total €45.6 billion, a far cry from the €36 billion set in the 2025 citizen’s allowance budget.

Continued reading on Remix News.

President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona, completing a sweep of all seven battleground in the 2024 election.

The Associated Press called the race at 9:21 p.m. ET on Nov. 9. With this win, Trump’s total electoral college count moves to 312 to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.

Trump was projected to win the election on the morning of Nov. 6. Harris conceded the race later the same day.

As The Epoch Times’ John Haughey reports, Trump’s Arizona victory follows candidate Joe Biden’s upset win in the state in 2020, a 0.3-percent squeaker that marked the first time since Bill Clinton’s 1996 win that The Grand Canyon State had voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2016, Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points.

Polls presaged the former president’s Arizona win. The FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate had Trump leading by 2.2 percentage points on Nov. 4.

Maricopa County, where 62 percent of the state’s 7.4 million residents, and more than half its 4.367 million voters, live, proved pivotal. Trump won the Phoenix-area vote CC to CC percent, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department.

Trump fared better in the key county than in 2016 when he won it with less than 48 percent and in 2020 when he lost it with 47.65 percent, becoming the first GOP presidential candidate to lose Maricopa County in 72 years.

As in Nevada, winning the Latino vote drives Arizona campaigns, especially in Maricopa County where one-third of voters are Hispanic, compared to less than 19 percent nationally.

While many media declared Trump the winner of Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes in the preceding days, the AP withheld doing so until all mail-in ballots had been counted. Reported results had not changed much for more than a day by late-afternoon Nov. 8.

On Nov. 7, the Arizona Secretary of State’s office added tens of thousands of votes to the tally, but said there were hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count, including nearly 500,000 in Maricopa County. Therefore, the presidential race and the U.S. Senate contest between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Kari Lake remained too close to call by late afternoon Nov. 8.

At 5 p.m. EST—2 p.m. PST—on Nov. 8, those numbers, largely frozen for more than a day, had Trump with 1.4 million votes, 52.5 percent of the total tally, to Harris’s 1.2 million votes, or 46.5 percent.

Despite the president-elect’s 161,000 vote lead, a significant 6 percentage point advantage, since most Arizona voters cast ballots by mail, and counting typically takes days. the AP withheld the call until it was mathematically impossible for Harris to overcome Trump’s lead.

Trump also dominated Harris in the popular vote with the vice president receiving around 10 million less votes than Biden did in 2020…

Additionally, as Modernity.news’ Steve Watson reports, CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten did a deep dive into the gains president Trump made with specific demographics in the election, highlighting how crushing they were for Democrats.

The numbers are truly astounding, and incredibly bad for the party of ‘joy.’

Enter pointed out that Trump made the greatest improvements over a previous presidential election performance from the same party since 1992.

“When was the last time a party gained in so many different places?” Enten asked, explaining that “You have to go all the way to back to 1992 when Bill Clinton improved on Michael Dukakis’ performance in 49 states, plus the District of Columbia.”

“Donald Trump’s performance on Tuesday was the best for a Republican presidential candidate in exit poll history,” Enten further urged, adding “He literally goes all the way back through history and breaks history.” 

Enten pointed to how Trump improved his party’s election performance in 49 states and Washington, D.C. over the 2020 election, with Washington state the single one where he didn’t do better.

“You know, I think the breadth of the improvement that Donald Trump had – Holy Toledo!” Enten declared.

Trump’s mandate:

1. More states (49 + DC) swung in his direction vs. last election than anyone since 1992.
2. Best GOP showing w/ age 18-29 in 20 yrs, Black voters in 48 yrs, Hispanics in 52+ yrs.
3. Coattails: best GOP showing in House popular vote in prez year since 1928. pic.twitter.com/xDEjHVJFAm

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) November 8, 2024

Trump has the biggest mandate imaginable.

If there was ever a mandate, this looks like it. Trump’s coalition is clearly reshaping the political map.

— Marie Jett (@Marie_Jett1) November 8, 2024

The party of joy failed to instil anyone with any.

The political landscape has completely changed forever.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Trump’s reported plan for a Western/NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine places Russia in the dilemma of either preempting this with another large-scale nationwide offensive, targeting those forces after they enter at the risk of sparking World War III, or tacitly accepting this endgame.

The Wall Street Journal’s report that Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine envisages the creation of an 800-mile demilitarized zone that would be patrolled by Europeans adds a lot of urgency to Russia’s nearly 1000-day-long struggle to achieve its maximum goals in this conflict. The potential entrance of conventional Western/NATO forces into Ukraine as peacekeepers places Russia in the dilemma of accepting yet another “red line” being crossed or risking World War III by targeting them.

To refresh everyone’s memory since it’s been so long since the special operation started, Russia officially aims to: 1) demilitarize Ukraine; 2) denazify it; and 3) restore its constitutional neutrality, among other supplementary and informal goals. September 2022’s referenda then added the official goal of removing Ukrainian forces from the entirety of the four regions that Russia now claims as its own, including the areas of Kherson and Zaporozhye on the other side of the Dnieper, which will be challenge.

At the same time, Putin has repeatedly refused to reciprocally escalate in response to egregious Ukrainian provocations like its bombing of the Kremlin, early warning systems, strategic airfields, oil refineries, and residential buildings, et al, all due to him not wanting the conflict to spiral out of control. For as responsible of an approach as this is, the drawback is that it created the perception that he might accept the crossing of even more “red lines”, including conventional Western/NATO forces in Ukraine.

Putin’s aversion to escalation might therefore be exploited by Trump, who was reportedly handed a plan in June advising him to give Ukraine whatever it wants if Russia refuses whatever peace deal he proposes, ergo the high likelihood of a conventional Western/NATO intervention to decisively freeze the conflict. Trump’s track record of “escalating to de-escalate” with North Korea and Iran suggests that he’d also go through with this plan against Russia, hence why it should take this scenario seriously.

Provided that Putin lacks the political will to risk an unprecedented escalation by targeting those conventional Western/NATO forces, and his behavior thus far in response to other provocations suggests that this is indeed the case, then he’ll have to race against the clock to achieve his maximum goals. It’ll still take some time for the US to get key stakeholders like Poland on board, where 69% of the public is against dispatching troops to Ukraine in any capacity, so this likely won’t happen by mid-January.

In any case, Russia no longer has a hypothetically indefinite amount of time like before to: 1) demilitarize Ukraine; 2) denazify it; 3) restore its constitutional neutrality; and 4) remove Ukrainian forces from the entirety of the four regions that Russia now claims as its own, including those areas across the Dnieper. Even though the military-strategic dynamics of the conflict favor it, and capturing Pokrovsk could lead to huge gains in Donetsk, it’ll be very difficult to achieve all these goals by the time an intervention occurs.

To explain in the order that they were mentioned, Ukraine was initially supposed to be demilitarized upon the swift success of the special operation in its early phase, but the UK and Poland (whose role most observers aren’t aware of) convinced Zelensky to rubbish spring 2022’s draft peace treaty. That document would have greatly slashed its military capabilities, but it’s no longer realistic to imagine that he’d agree to this, especially after being given tens of billions of dollars’ worth of NATO arms.

NATO is also unlikely to agree to ask for them back due to the perception (regardless of its veracity) that Ukraine must be able to “deter” Russia from supposedly recommencing the conflict after it finally ends. The Taliban’s swift capture of Afghanistan after Biden’s bungled withdrawal from there was viciously lambasted by Trump, who’d go down in history as an even bigger loser if he agreed to “demilitarize” Ukraine and was then played for a fool by Putin if Russia steamrolls through it sometime later.

The only viable way in which Russia could implement Ukraine’s demilitarization in today’s context is to control as much of its territory as possible in order to ensure that no threatening weapons are deployed there. The problem though is that Russia is unlikely to obtain military control over all of Ukraine, or even just significant parts of its territory east of the Dnieper in proximity to the internationally recognized border across which Kiev’s shells still regularly fly, by the time of a Western/NATO intervention.

One of the reasons why the special operation’s opening phase didn’t result in ending the conflict on Russia’s terms is because the West informed Zelensky about how overextended its military logistics had become and thus encouraged him to exploit that to push it back like he ultimately did. Given how cautious of a leader Putin is, he’s unlikely to act out of character once more by ordering a repeat of this same risky strategy even if the frontlines collapse and Russia is able to roll into other regions.   

Another unforeseen challenge that Russia experienced during the special operation’s opening phase was actually holding the broad swaths territory that it nominally controlled. Ukraine’s hidden Javelin and Stinger stockpiles inflicted enough losses behind Russia’s lines to engender the large-scale pullback that coincided with the failure of spring 2022’s peace talks. There’s also the obvious difficulty of swiftly capturing large cities like Kharkov, Sumy, and Zaporozhye, which hasn’t yet happened.

Moving along to Russia’s second maximum goal of denazifying Ukraine after explaining how tough it’ll be to achieve the first one of militarizing it, this too can’t succeed without a political agreement that’s no longer realistic in today’s context after such a chance slipped away in spring 2022. What Russia has in mind is Ukraine promulgating legislation that aligns with these goals, such as banning the glorification of World War II-era fascists and rescinding restrictions on ethnic Russians’ rights.

Zelensky has no reason to go along with this anymore like he flirted with doing in early 2022 and Trump’s team doesn’t seem to care all that much about this issue anyhow. It’s therefore unclear how Russia can achieve this before a Western/NATO intervention except in the unlikely scenario of a Russian-friendly Color Revolution and/or military coup, neither of which the US would accept, and both of which would probably thus prompt the aforesaid intervention out of desperation to salvage “Project Ukraine”.

The third maximum goal of restoring Ukraine’s constitutional neutrality is comparatively more likely but nevertheless moot at this point given that the raft of security guarantees that it already clinched with NATO states since the start of this year de facto amount to continued Article 5 support. Contrary to popular perceptions, this clause doesn’t obligate the dispatch of troops, but only for each country to do whatever it deems fit to help allies under attack. Their existing military aid to Ukraine aligns with this.

Coercing Ukraine to rescind 2019’s constitutional amendment making NATO membership a strategic objective would therefore be a superficial concession to Russia on the US’ part to make Trump’s peace plan a little less bitter for Putin to swallow. As with the previous two maximum goals, Zelensky has no reason to comply with Putin’s demands in this regard since the latter’s forces aren’t in a position to impose this upon him, thus meaning that it can only realistically be done if Trump orders him to.

As the reader probably already picked up on, the common theme is that Russia’s inability to militarily coerce Zelensky into complying with its maximum goals greatly reduces the possibility that they’ll be achieved, which also holds true for the final one of obtaining control over all its new regions’ land. It’s unimaginable that Zelensky will voluntarily cede Zaporozhye with its over 700,000 population, for example, or that Trump will accept the Western opprobrium that would follow coercing him to do so.

The same goes for letting Russia cross the Dnieper to obtain control over that region’s and Kherson’s areas on the other side, thus creating the opportunity for it to build up its forces there in the future for a lightning strike across Ukraine’s western plains in the event that the conflict ever rekindles after it ends. There’s no way that Trump would ever give Putin such an invaluable military-strategic gift so Russia’s supporters shouldn’t deceive themselves by getting their hopes up thinking that this will happen.

The only way in which Russia can achieve its maximum goals before the entrance of Western/NATO troops into Ukraine as peacekeepers is through military means, which would require another large-scale multi-pronged offensive of the sort that characterized the special operation’s early days. Even then, however, the high risk of once again overextending its military logistics, being ambushed by Stingers/Javelins, and thus risking reputational costs and even on-the-ground losses, will remain.

As such, there are really only three options left for Russia:

1) escalate now before Western/NATO troops enter Ukraine and either coerce Zelensky into agreeing to these demands or capture and hold enough land in order to demilitarize as much of the country as possible;

2) escalate after they enter at the risk of sparking a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis that could spiral into World War III; or

3) accept the fait accompli of freezing the conflict along the Line of Contact and begin preparing the public accordingly.

It’s unclear which option Putin will choose since he hasn’t yet signaled a preference for any of them. Nevertheless, it’s timely to quote 19th-century Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov, who famously said that “Russia is not sulking; she is composing herself.” Russia knows that the clock is ticking for achieving its maximum goals before Trump likely orders Western/NATO peacekeepers to enter Ukraine. The Kremlin is quiet for now precisely because policymakers have yet to decide what to do.

By Thomas Brooke of Remix News

Germany’s collapsing government has responded to Elon Musk calling Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool” by claiming that the tech billionaire’s X platform has become a place for extremists.

Musk commented on the news that the traffic light coalition in Berlin was faltering following the dismissal of Christian Lindner, leader of the co-governing FDP, from the finance ministry, by writing in German, “Olaf ist ein Narr” (Olaf is a Fool).

Olaf ist ein Narr https://t.co/Yye3DIeA17

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2024

Deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann attempted to brush off Musk’s comment, claiming, “There is freedom for fools on X.”

She, however, justified the federal government’s continued presence on the social media site despite claiming it is “increasingly offering extremists a platform,” by claiming that social media is “an important means for the federal government to explain and communicate its work.”

Her response, though, has only drawn more attention to the government’s unsuccessful approach to Germany’s severe economic challenges.

Scholz is facing a wave of criticism over his handling of the economy and mounting government gridlock. His abrupt firing of FinMin Lindner signaled the collapse of a coalition already struggling to manage, with all three parties plummeting in the national polls to the benefit of the center-right CDU/CSU and nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

And yet, while the coalition government seems intent on squabbling among themselves, Musk’s blunt appraisal of Scholz’s leadership echoes the frustration of a growing number of Germans.

Berlin’s inability to stabilize Europe’s largest economy has resulted in soaring energy costs, stagnant growth, and a considerable decline in its competitiveness with the likes of China.

The German automotive sector is in the process of cutting thousands of jobs as it grapples with a global shift toward electric vehicles — a transformation Musk himself has been at the forefront of.

The economic crisis is having a knock-on effect throughout the country, with Remix News reporting this week that bankruptcies have soared to their highest level in 20 years.

A total of 1,530 individuals and corporations filed for bankruptcies in October, 17 percent more than last month, according to research from the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle (IWH).

Similarly, German industrial orders fell 5.8 percent in August compared to July, it was reported last month. The slump is far higher than the 2 percent drop anticipated, with economists now warning of a recession and doubting a quick recovery.

In September, a survey by the Ifo Institute revealed that the German economy is expected to shrink by 0.1 percent in 2024, following a 0.3 percent contraction last year, while business sentiment worsened for the fourth consecutive month and business activity contracted at its fastest rate in seven months.

Despite the political chaos, Scholz appears reluctant to act immediately with reports suggesting he could call a vote of no confidence in the new year paving the way for new elections possibly by March, a time when Donald Trump will already be back in the White House and implementing his ‘America First’ policies many believe will be to the further detriment of the German economy.

Opposition politicians in Germany are demanding decisive action with the AfD’s Bernd Baumann calling for “immediate new elections,” citing the latest results of the Politbarometer which revealed that 84 percent of Germans support this move.

Continue reading at Remix News.