Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,

The Harris-Walz campaign claims late-deciding voters are breaking their way, and by a lot.

Former Obama campaign manager and current senior advisor to the Harris-Walz campaign made a rather bold claim on X/Twitter on Friday.

It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a Presidential campaign with late deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent.

Close race, turnout and 4 days of hard work will be key. But good mo.

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) November 1, 2024

According to Politico, Plouffe’s comments “echo[ed] those shared by senior campaign officials earlier Friday on a call with reporters.”

“We have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important,” said one of the senior campaign officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the race. “And we are seeing that be the case as we are closing out in the last week.”

The official said that a recent focus group with undecided voters in a battleground state showed that the racist, misogynistic and vulgar language at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York over the weekend isn’t just impacting Puerto Rican and Latino voters, but undecided voters as a whole.

“It really kind of crystallized for them the choice in their minds between the vice president, who they’re seeing talk about being a president for everyone, someone focused on them and solving their problems, and Trump, and these really kind of dark, divisive language and events and activities,” the official said. “We don’t always see, when we’re talking to swing voters, anything that you can really see them kind of finalize their point of view or finalize their opinion.”

According to the Harris campaign, we’re supposed to believe that a comedian’s joke holds more significance than pressing issues like the economy, immigration, and foreign policy.

During a 2WAY livestream, Mark Halperin took aim at the media for uncritically accepting David Plouffe’s claims, saying the assertion “seems questionable on the face.” He argued that proving whether undecided voters were truly swayed by the Madison Square Garden event would require precise analytics, but that hasn’t stopped the media from treating Plouffe’s statements “like it’s a fact” despite lacking hard evidence. Halperin also shared that, based on his conversations with the Trump campaign, they believe undecided voters lean 2-to-1 in Trump’s favor. He may not believe that’s entirely true, but was clearly less convinced by Plouffe’s suggestion, which Halperin believes was intended to create a “bandwagon effect” for Kamala, shifting the narrative to portray her as gaining momentum.

Consider this: if the Access Hollywood tape couldn’t derail Trump’s campaign in 2016, there’s little reason to believe that a comedian’s joke at one of his rallies would, either. Americans recognized Trump’s comments as “locker room talk” back then, just as they understand that a comedian known for crude humor is simply aiming for laughs.

When Halperin asked Trump’s campaign advisor, Chris LaCivita, for his take, LaCivita responded bluntly: “What the hell is he going to say? He’s losing? Fact of the matter is David can’t do anything but bulls**t until Tuesday because we are kicking his a**. The only thing the Harris campaign has functional at this point is a bulls**t machine that is dutifully repeated by the legacy media as if fact.”

In the end, both campaigns believe, or are at least claiming, that they have the edge with late-deciding voters. Ignore it all. Just get out there and vote, and make sure every Trump supporter you know votes.

The majority of official surveys monitoring American and European support for Ukraine are many months old now.  The last time we saw a flurry of polling on the issue was this summer and the media has been rather quiet on the issue since.  Why?  Because public support for the proxy war is in steep decline. 

The last numbers show that 52% of Americans no longer want additional funding for Ukraine.  With Donald Trump increasingly likely to return to the White House in 2025 the Ukrainians are already preparing for steep cuts to military aid (the US provides the vast majority of arms to Ukraine).  This leaves the EU to pick up the slack.

However, Europe simply doesn’t have the capacity to provide enough military aid to make a difference in the war and is currently discussing schemes to transfer frozen Russian assets to the effort while simultaneously scaling back their own funding.  Central EU nations like Germany are already cutting their contributions in half in the coming year.  

The decline in aid follows two important factors:  Public support for the war in America and Europe is waning.  And, Ukraine is clearly losing the conflict with their defensive lines in the east collapsing.

Ukraine has received well over $200 billion in the past two years from NATO nations, which eclipses Ukraine’s annual GDP of around $160 billion.  In other words, the war cannot continue without NATO.  The disconnect between US and European governments vs the desires of the general public could not be more obvious.  Even the Washington Post admits:

“As they signaled enduring support for Ukraine last week, European leaders worried about how long they can sustain it…”

“European leaders promise to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” but they are increasingly threatened by public fatigue, a weakening of the political center and the prospect of Trump’s return…”

“More than 2½ years into Russia’s war, public fatigue risks taking hold in some countries. Some European leaders are now in politically precarious positions and more constrained in what they can do. And across the continent, parties from the hard right to the hard left are pushing narratives against sending cash or arms…”

In the UK and Europe, protests have erupted over a number of problems, most importantly the threat of mass immigration from third world countries and the deliberate agenda to erase traditional European culture.  Some of the unrest has also been related to the Ukraine war and ongoing discussions about “conscription” among government officials. 

The UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is one of many bureaucrats that are trying to lump all civil actions together, labeling them a “threat to democracy.”  The narrative also seeks to tie these events to “Russian disinformation.”  In other words, according to David Lammy the public is being brainwashed by Vladimir Putin into protesting and this is a strategy by the Kremlin to sow discord within Europe.

The Kremlin’s disinformation is a desperate attempt to undermine our democracy.

I’m taking action to tackle it. pic.twitter.com/JvjNp3MEnU

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) October 29, 2024

The U.K. government sanctioned three Russian agencies and their senior executives this month, accusing them of orchestrating disinformation campaigns and seeking to fuel anti-Ukraine protests across Europe. 

The Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technologies, and Ano Dialog, alongside their directors, are accused of spearheading a “vast malign online network” commonly known as “Doppelganger.”  The network used “deceitful tactics… to mask the truth around Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and distract from the true nature of the war,” the U.K. Foreign Office said in a statement Monday.

Lammy and others claim this constitutes a “threat to democracy” and he says he will take action to shut down all sources of disinformation.  To be sure, Russia is involved in psy-ops as any country at war would be.  That said, so is David Lammy and his ilk and they aren’t only at war with Russia, they’re also at war with the UK and EU populace.

It should be noted that Lammy is becoming a regular fixture at The Atlantic Council, which has been deeply involved in the escalation of Ukrainian tensions with Russia for over a decade.  He is also on the advisory board for the European branch of the Council On Foreign Relations.  His relationships with globalist institutions helps to explain his hostility to conservative and anti-progressive movements.  

As Lammy argues in his recent conference with Ukrainian officials, any sense that allies are not united ‘only benefits Putin.’  Clearly this “unity” must also extend to the civilian population (by force if necessary), otherwise Lammy and his cohorts look rather ridiculous.

The tactic of attaching all civil dissent to the schemes of a foreign adversary is a tale as old as oligarchy.  It’s a way for governments to negate or dismiss public opposition to policy without losing face, because they can claim all the dissent is astroturf created by malicious foreign agencies. 

China did this with the Hong Kong protests in 2019, seeking to blame western governments after the citizens of Hong Kong opposed being placed under total control of the CCP.  In this way, the communist regime marginalized millions of people and their right to self determination simply by painting the protests as engineered.  This is exactly what David Lammy is doing with UK and EU citizens that want a reckoning for government trespasses.      

This brand of propaganda has been utilized regularly in the US as well, with Democrats consistently blaming Putin and Russia for the rise in conservative movements and the success of the Trump campaign.  If the elites were to ever admit that public dissent is legitimate, they would lose the illusion that they are the “protectors of the realm.”  Without a foreign enemy to blame, these same officials are exposed as the true enemies of “democracy”, and they certainly don’t want that.

Authored by Stephen Green via PJMedia.com,

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

– George Orwell

We interrupt today’s important election coverage for a story that could have impacts even longer-lasting than President Kamala Harris’s first ten-trillion-dollar budget.

I’ll wash my keyboard out with soap later for typing the phrase “President Kamala Harris.”

When the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was hacked in early October, it looked at first like just another email-and-password smash-and-grab. But that was followed up by repeated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that crippled the service. The Internet Archive was hit again on Oct. 20, “this time with the threat actors gaining access to their Zendesk support email system.”

The Wayback Machine came back but as a read-only service.

What that means is, while you can search archived webpages from before the attacks, “you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive.”

That matters bigly. When the New York Times, Washington Post, or anyone else stealth-edits a news report to hide the truth, you could still find the original on the Wayback Machine. That’s no longer true. “For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time,” the Brownstone Institute reported this week.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

But it gets worse.

Google killed off its cache feature — similar to the Wayback Machine — right around the time the Internet Archive got hacked. Coincidence? Probably. But I’m making a tinfoil hat, just in case.

The White House just got caught altering Presidentish Joe Biden’s “garbage” remarks. “Nothing to see here,” Sean Davis quipped, “just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records.”

They got caught this time, and sources like X still have the original video. But what happens next time, when some politician or MSM editor waits until the furor dies down before making their stealth edit — and there’s no Wayback Machine to catch them?

Wikipedia is the defacto internet encyclopedia but has proven time and again to be biased at best and subject to stealth edits at worst. 

More people are using AI to perform their web searches and summaries for them, but the large language models are scraping data from sources increasingly subject to manipulation. 

Reason’s Nick Gillespie wrote in 2019:

Is Donald Trump’s vision of what is wrong with America and how to fix it true or is Bernie Sanders’? I’d say neither is. But what the internet does (especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter) is enable more of us to directly enter the discussion—the argument over who is right and who is wrong. That’s a great and liberating development.

Indeed, it is. But our ability to have that argument — to sift through the raw data, past articles, news photographs, etc. — depends on having sources that are both shared and reliable. We used to settle arguments by pulling out a dictionary or a volume from the nearest encyclopedia. Or maybe the Guinness Book, which has reportedly settled more bar bets than any other resource.

But now everything has moved online and, despite what people believe, the internet is not forever.

“We can fact-check your a**,” pioneer blogger Ken Layne reminded Big Media back in 2001. We built an entire alternative media based on “navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship,” as Brownstone put it.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is weighing directly providing arms to Ukraine, amid the ongoing reports that North Korea has sent some 10,000 troops to Russia, readying them to fight against the Ukrainian military.

FT has noted of the decision in a fresh report that “Seoul has previously resisted entreaties from western allies to draw on its vast stockpiles of military armaments, preferring to contribute to Kyiv’s war effort through non-lethal aid.” 

Seoul’s “answer” to the north might indeed be to weaponize the other side, by providing badly needed 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine. So far this has only allegedly been done indirectly, by routing the shells to the United States. According to more from FT:

Yoon has vowed not to “sit idle” in response to the North Korean deployment. His office confirmed this week that Seoul intended to send a delegation to Ukraine to monitor the North Korean forces, following a call on Tuesday between Yoon and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But this has been consistently opposed by South Korea’s left opposition, which maintains a parliamentary majority.

Park Chan-dae, floor leader of the Democratic party, declared days ago that “[Arming Ukraine] is an incredibly dangerous idea that treats people’s lives like pawns in a game of chess.”

Yoon “shouldn’t engage South Korea in a proxy war with North Korea . . . in a faraway land,” continued Park. He warned that escalating Seoul’s involvement in any way would “risk starting a military conflict on the Korean peninsula.”

A defense source has pointed out that if Seoul decided to supply Ukraine with artillery shells, significant legal and bureaucratic hurdles would remain in the way:

South Korea’s Defense Procurement Act and Foreign Trade Act currently prohibit the transfer of arms and ammunition to Ukraine, either directly or through third parties. Both laws would need to be amended for the delivery of 155mm shells to be possible.

This development marks another chapter in South Korea’s internal debate on whether to support Ukraine militarily, which was first discussed in July 2023 and again in April 2022. However, despite this consideration, the likelihood of an immediate shift remains unclear as Ukraine continues to await the delivery of K600 mine-clearing tanks, which South Korea had previously pledged.

Zelensky has of late been advancing the idea that the ‘enemies’ of the West have formed an axis to fight in Ukraine and ultimately push back NATO. He’s identified them as Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

So far, the Western alliance is also resisting Ukraine’s demands to greenlight long-range missile strikes deep into Russian territory. Putin has warned that this would cross all ‘red lines’ and unleash major escalation.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

He wanted to dispel whatever doubts some undecided voters might still have about his ties to Russia by reminding them that he imposed sanctions against that megaproject, which debunked the Democrats’ Russiagate claims and were even hypocritically waived by Biden for a nine-month period.

Trump boasted during his live interview with Tucker Carlson at a charity event in Arizona on Thursday night that he was responsible for “killing” Nord Stream II. In his words, “The Democrats] love to say that I was a friend of Russia, I worked for Russia, I was a Russian spy. The biggest job Russia ever had [was] Nord Stream 2. This is the biggest pipeline in the world, [it] goes from Russia to Germany and all over Europe. I killed it. Nobody would kill it but me. I stopped it.” He has a point that’ll now be elaborated on.

For starters, he clearly wasn’t referring to September 2022’s terrorist attack since he wasn’t in office then and therefore couldn’t have had anything to do with it. Rather, what he wanted to convey is that the Democrats’ false claims of him being a Russian puppet are debunked by the fact that he sanctioned Nord Stream II, which was done in an attempt to poach the European energy market from Russia. In an unexpected turn of events, Biden waived those sanctions in May 2021, one month before meeting Putin.

A senior State Department official told CNN that “While we remain opposed to the pipeline, we reached the judgment that sanctions would not stop its construction and risked undermining a critical alliance with Germany, as well as with the EU and other European allies.” At the same time, Biden justified the move by saying that “Nord Stream is 99% finished. The idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.”

The argument can be made, however, that this was just a “goodwill gesture” for facilitating his meeting with Putin in Geneva that June to discuss the gamut of their countries’ bilateral ties after Russia’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border that spring. No breakthrough occurred, which can be attributable in hindsight to anti-Russian hawks in the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) prioritizing Russia’s containment over China’s in the New Cold War.

Reflecting on that lost opportunity, the US seemingly thought that it could lower Russia’s strategic guard by waiving sanctions on that megaproject in the hopes that Moscow would then ignore NATO’s creep towards its borders, including via its clandestine expansion to Ukraine. It was these military moves that set the stage for Putin to then share his security guarantee requests that December, which were rejected and followed by the reimposition of those same sanctions one day before the special operation began.

The reason why this is important to reference is because it proves that Biden hypocritically promulgated a Russian-friendly policy (regardless of the cunning motive behind it) after his party weaponized the Russiagate conspiracy theory to prevent Trump from improving ties with Russia. In particular, Biden waived the same sanctions that Trump imposed and arguably did so as a “goodwill gesture” for facilitating Biden’s meeting with Putin, who met with Trump without any such implied preconditions.

It also can’t be ruled out that Biden’s decision to reimpose sanctions against Nord Stream II one day before the special operation began is what pushed Putin into authorizing that ongoing campaign after the US took back the big carrot that it gave Russia just nine months prior for ignoring NATO’s expansion. From his perspective, there was no longer any reason not to go through with what he’d by then signaled were his possible plans for demilitarizing Ukraine, thus possibly making everything inevitable by then.

Trump sometimes struggles to convey the complexities of International Relations such as when he failed to explain the relevance of why he decided to boast about “killing” Nord Stream II during his interview with Tucker. All that he wanted to do was show how those sanctions debunked the Russiagate conspiracy theory. He could have elaborated more on that like this analysis did, but in any case, it was a valid point to make for dispelling whatever doubts some undecided voters might still have about his ties to Russia.

Authored by Patrick Lawrence via Consortium News,

At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either of the two main political parties in the U.S. will do to avoid losing…

Uh-oh. The New York Times is picking up its familiar theme now that the Nov. 5 elections are but a few days out front: Those mal-intended foreigners are again “sowing discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy,” it reported in a piece published Tuesday. 

The Beelzebubs haunting this political season, when everything would otherwise be orderly and altogether copacetic among Americans, are Russia, China and Iran.

Why can’t this year’s version of the old, reliable “Axis of Evil” leave us alone with our “democratic process,” the one the rest of the world envies and resents? Troublemakers, with all their “sowing.” You could probably call them “garbage” and get away with it. 

Uh-oh. We’re already reading of tampered voter-registration forms and forged applications to vote by mail in two districts in Pennsylvania, the populous state where the results in 2020 could not have been blurrier and whose 19 Electoral College votes were decisive in getting Joe Biden into the White House last time around.

But not to worry. In a delightful reprise of one of the truly memorable phrases to come down to us from the 1960s, an election commissioner in one of the districts where officials uncovered the malfeasance tells us, “The system worked.” 

I think I understand.  

I tell you, whenever I read of people in other countries sowing anything, whether it is doubt or chaos or disinformation, and at this point even pumpkin seeds, it always turns out the same. This word “sowing” has been a favorite in the mainstream press since 2016, when we read daily — and of this we were to have no doubt — the Rrrrrussians were “interfering in our elections.”  

Since then, everytime I read of someone sowing something it sows more doubt in my mind — more than I already harbored — that one can take our electoral system, as we have it in the 21st century, the slightest bit seriously.  

This is to say nothing of putting one’s name on it behind a little green curtain in a voting booth.

On the one hand you have the Times, which has diminished itself over the past eight years to little more than the Democrats’ house organ, already preparing to suggest that the malign enemies of American democracy corrupted the elections. Believe me, you will hear this if Kamala Harris loses but not if she wins.  

On the other hand, you have early but clear cases of attempted vote-rigging and local election officials waving these cases off as nothing at all to fret about. It is interesting to consider why said officials profess so cavalier a view.  

I have thought for months that the 2024 elections, discord already in plentiful supply, could easily tip over into a degree of civil chaos beyond anything so far recorded in the American story. Just such a day of reckoning now seems to beckon. 

Neither of the main parties appears prepared to lose. At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either party will do to avoid losing. 

Remnants of Democracy

All by our lonesome selves, it seems to me, we Americans have made a mess of the remnants of our democracy these past eight years.

This is not to suggest American politics has ever been other than, let’s say, in the way of a barnyard. In this, neither of the major parties, whose function since the mid–19th century has been to circumscribe acceptable politics and policy, is free of responsibility. 

But in the matter of responsibility I assign more to the Democrats than to the G.O.P. It was Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump eight Novembers ago that confirmed America’s swift drift into post-democracy.

The Democrats have never recovered from the disruption in 2016 of their dream that history was about to end and their idea of the liberal ethos would eternally prevail, all alternatives withering away the way Marx and Engels thought the communist state would.

Anti-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2016. (Ted Eytan/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

I have long detected that American liberalism has at its core a vein of illiberalism that is essential to its character.

America is simply not, to put this point another way, a tolerant nation. It does not encourage its people to think: It requires them to conform. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming two centuries ago in the two volumes of Democracy in America. 

We are now, post–Clinton, treated to the spectacle of full-dress liberal authoritarianism, and if you do not like the term there are others. De Tocqueville, prescient man, called it “soft despotism.” I’ve always favored “apple-pie authoritarianism.”

Institutional Corruptions

There is a feature of this awful manifestation among NPR–addicted, kale-eating liberals that distinguishes our time as especially discouraging as to the future.

This is their wanton corruption of some of the institutions without which even a semblance of democratic government is impossible. I am thinking particularly of three that figure in the pre-election picture.

One is the judiciary — federal, state, county, local. Beginning with the Mueller investigation, the in-plain-sight corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ridiculous court cases brought against Donald Trump, Attorney–General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the Justice Department to protect President Joe Biden as his son’s influence-mongering schemes came to light — all this in behalf of the Democrats:

Well, as I learned during my days as a correspondent abroad, when the judicial system goes down, the path to failed-state status opens.  

Two is the intelligence apparatus and the military. Intel, from the days of James Clapper and John Brennan, has lined up unequivocally behind the Democrats ever since the brash real-estate man from New York foolishly assumed he could “drain the swamp” — his declaration that he would take on the Deep State.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Feb. 18, 2017. (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

As to the military, the generals thought nothing of declaring eight years ago, at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia and in open letters published in the Times, that they would refuse the commander-in-chief’s orders were Trump to win and attempt a new détente with Russia and an end to “the forever wars.” 

Yes, you’ve got John Kelly, who served in Trump’s cabinet and then as his chief of staff, suddenly calling Trump a fascist — the Democrats’ favorite epithet these past weeks. Doesn’t anyone want to know why Kelly worked closely with a man he considered a fascist? Doesn’t it occur to anyone — it must, surely — that Kelly, a retired Marine general, says these things to serve the party he trusts to keep the wars going and the tax dollars flowing?  

A paradox here, more apparent than real: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and various others like them did not wear uniforms when they served in the Trump administration, but they never took them off. 

If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics. In our post–2016 era, intel and the military are perfectly welcome to operate openly, unabashedly, in the American political process — this because the Democratic Party gives them a wide berth to do so. 

Deep-State Democracy

Now, do you think the Deep State gives a toot about democratic process? Ask the Italians and the Greeks, the Iranians and the Guatemalans, the Japanese, the South Koreans and the Indonesians, the Chileans and the Venezuelans, and… and damn, ask most of humanity at this point. As others have pointed out since the Russiagate days, what the spooks have long done abroad now visits itself upon the American polity. 

The obvious follow-on: Should we be concerned as to whether the Democrats and these institutional allies would let this election go to Trump just by the vote count? 

I am.

As to the third of the institutions that have corrupted themselves in the Democratic Party cause, may I let mainstream media speak for themselves? Apart from independent publications such as the one you are reading, the intent of American media is no longer to inform the public but to protect the institutions they purport to report upon from the public gaze.   

Trump’s “a threat to American democracy,” Harris its savior: It’s a bust at this point. The New York Times has made itself a re-enactment of The New York Times. The Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and this ghastly new chief executive of his, Will Lewis, cannot manage, and doesn’t seem to attempt, even a re-enactment. 

I do not seem to be the only one ill-at-ease at the prospect of mayhem to come after midnight Nov. 5. The Post published a survey Wednesday, conducted in the first half of October, indicating that among voters in the states where the election could go either way, 57 percent are nervous that Trump supporters won’t accept defeat and may resort to violence, while a third of those surveyed think Harris supporters will take it to the street, as they used to say, if the candidate of joy and vibes loses.

Harris campaigning in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 9. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The numbers skewed even more dramatically when The Post asked Democrats about Trump’s people and Trump’s people about Democrats. In a survey The Associated Press published Thursday, you have 70 percent of those polled saying they are “anxious and frustrated.”

Join the party. I cannot, myself, take either candidate seriously. I take seriously the thought that a lot of people will not take the result seriously and a mess will ensue. 

And in this I worry more about Democrats resorting to corrupt conduct than I do the Republicans. Why this, you may ask.

To begin with, I do not at all like the smell of that Times piece quoted at the top of this column. It reeks too strongly of the scene in 2016, when, on either side of the election, the Democrats and all manner of repellent “progressives” conjured of thin air a frenzy of Russophobia from which American has yet to recover. 

Steven Lee Myers, previously of the Times’s Moscow bureau, is now some kind of “disinformation” reporter and led the work on the piece in question. And all is as it was for four years after Clinton’s defeat: no shred of independent reporting or sourcing in anything under his byline. Intel people and other unnamed officials feed this guy like a foie gras farmer feeds his geese. 

This is all you get from our Stevie. And I don’t see anyone trying on this disgraceful stuff in behalf of the Trump campaign. I have suggested my conclusions.

But Jan. 6, Jan. 6, Jan 6! First of all, what happened on Jan. 6 does not rise to “coup” or “insurrection.” It was a protest, with much to suggest the presence of agents provocateurs. And second, there seems to me there was plenty to protest by that point. 

Straight off the top, there was the liberal authoritarians’ perfectly legible collusion to suppress the contents of Hunter Biden’s vastly incriminating laptop computer three weeks before the vote, to the point of blanket censorship of the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America. If this was not open-and-shut election interference someone will have to tell me what constitutes it.

On less certain ground, I have read of many election officials in many states, Pennsylvania high among them, certifying the 2020 results. But a truly convincing, here-are-the-numbers case for these results in states such as Pennsylvania is hard to come by. You never read of Trump’s claims that the Pennsylvania results were rigged. You read only and always of Trump’s “false claims” or “discredited claims” or “disproven claims” to the point you start thinking of Lady Macbeth and how she doth protest too much, methinks.   

Trump addressing The Believers religious group, in July in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

I recall, very imperfectly, seeing research purportedly done by a computer scientist at one of the universities in Philadelphia. Just after the election he or she put out a series of screenshots on social media, time-stamped to the second, that appeared to show the results in a significant number of districts changing all at once and by enough to give Biden a swift come-from-behind victory by a margin of slightly more than 1 percent.  

Genuine or a put-up job, this research? Credible or not credible? I would not dream of judging it, but this is not my point. My point is that there should be no cause to doubt such results as these and, eight years on, as I read it there still is. 

Doubt recreates itself, as you may have noticed, like some organism that regenerates. So we come to the Times’ report Tuesday of attempted voter fraud in Lancaster and York counties, two populous areas of, once again, Pennsylvania.

Campbell Roberston’s piece has just about everything, starting with a headline that has Trump “sowing doubt.” He, Trump, is even “using reports about suspicious voter registrations to cast the election as already flawed.” 

What a cad. What a scoundrel. What a… fascist tyrant. 

It seems that some thousands of forged or otherwise fraudulent voter registration forms and requests to vote by mail arrived recently in the offices of the Lancaster and York election authorities.

So far as one can make out, some official or officials in each county brought these “large batches” of falsified government documents to light. Whereupon other officials in each case smothered this discovery as if suffocating the matter with a pillow. 

Alice Yoder, an election commissioner in Lancaster, put it best, or anyway most preposterously.

“The system worked,” saith Ms. Yoder.

“We caught this.”

I honestly had to read this quotation several times to believe anyone would say this. 

I would like to know a few things about this case that we are not told. 

The batches of forgeries “were submitted by out-of-state canvassing groups,” Robertson reports, groups that remain unidentified.

One, what are canvassing groups and what do they do in whose behalf?

Two, what were such groups doing in Lancaster and York counties if they are not from Pennsylvania?

Three, if they are not from Pennsylvania, what were they doing with Pennsylvania election forms that were purportedly genuine?

Just two more questions.

Four, why are the election officials in these two counties not naming the guilty canvassing organizations? This seems to me very troubling. 

And five, what are the party affiliations or otherwise the voting preferences of officials who will not identify the offending organizations and say things such as “The system worked.”

There are no grounds to draw any conclusions whatsoever on this point, given we know absolutely nothing about these people, but I went to the trouble of looking up Ms. Yoder’s c.v. 

There is a bit of the sociologist in all of us, well– or underdeveloped as the case may be. Journalists often make use of their endowments in this line.

Drawing on mine, I would speculate that Ms. Yoder’s c.v., after a careful peruse, is highly suggestive of a Kamala Harris voter, perhaps even of a liberal authoritarian. 

Could be dead right, could be dead wrong. I cannot go beyond more or less idle speculation.

And not more or less idle doubt as Nov. 5 draws close.

*  *  *

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News or ZeroHedge.

Regional media reports and government statements have confirmed that Israeli naval forces have captured an alleged senior Hezbollah official in a daring raid launched from the Mediterranean sea on Friday.

The man described as a high-ranking Hezbollah operative has been identified as Imad Amhaz. Commandos on speed boats reportedly landed on a Lebanese beach and snatched him from a cabin in the early morning hours. 

“A sizable force, suspected to be Israeli, stealthily touched down on the shores of Batroun in northern Lebanon, roughly 87 miles from the Israeli border, with the intent of snatching a high-ranking terrorist operative from his hideaway in a cabin,” Israel’s YNet news details, adding that the raid involved 25 Israeli elite troops.

Lebanese national broadcaster National News agency separately described that an “unidentified military force” carried out a “sea landing” at a beach at Batroun, south of Tripoli.

The commando group “went with all its weapons and equipment to a chalet near the beach, kidnapping a Lebanese man… and sailing away into the open sea on a speedboat,” NNA added.

Lebanese media is only saying that the man that was nabbed was a “student” of a maritime institute in Lebanon. According to more from eyewitnesses of the strange episode:

He was taken from student housing near the Batroun institute, but was a resident of the Shia-majority town of Qmatiyeh further south, said the acquaintance who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security concerns.

He was completing courses to become a sea captain, the source told AFP, adding that the man was in his thirties and was well known by the teaching staff at the center.

But the IDF has called the man a “significant source of knowledge” for Hezbollah’s naval force. It’s expected that Amhaz will be detained and interrogated in a military prison.

“He was taken to Israel to be questioned by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 — which specializes in HUMINT, or human intelligence — on Hezbollah’s naval operations,” Times of Israel subsequently reported.

UN peacekeeping forces in South Lebanon have entered the controversy, amid conflicting reports they may have prevented the Lebanese armed forces from responding to the raid (which UNIFIL firmly denies) on Lebanon’s sovereign territory and its citizens:

Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik, who first reported on the raid, cited anonymous Lebanese military officials as saying the operation was apparently carried out in coordination with the German Navy operating within UNIFIL forces, to prevent the Lebanese Navy from interfering.

Meanwhile, some Lebanese sources say that the kidnapped man is innocent, and not affiliated with Hezbollah, and that the IDF kidnapped a regular Lebanese citizen. Video also captured the raid:

🚨BREAKING 🚨 An Israeli commando kidnapped a Lebanese licensed boat officer, believing he was a high-ranking Hezbollah official, in a “daring operation” yesterday in Batroun north Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/BraFMuTdmy

— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) November 2, 2024

Israel’s military has further said that “The operative has been transferred to Israeli territory and is currently being investigated.”

The Associated Press has acknowledged that the occupation of the kidnapped man is murky and uncertain, amid continuing speculation: “Three Lebanese judicial officials told AP the incident occurred at dawn Friday, adding that the captain might have links with Hezbollah.” The report added: “The officials said an investigation is looking into the man is linked to Hezbollah or working for an Israeli spy agency and an Israeli force came to rescue him.”

Authored by Bret Swanson via The Brownstone Institute,

Trump enjoys the momentum.

Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys.

The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point.

We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.

Here are some thoughts:

1. JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory. 

2. Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.

3. Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.

4. How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce. 

5. We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.

6. Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat? 

7. What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans. 

8. How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats. 

9. Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian? 

10. Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war. 

11. Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?

12. Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades. 

13. Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr. 

14. How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?

15. How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular. 

16. Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022. 

17. What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.

18. Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A witness in the ongoing Sean “Diddy” Combs case says that he has several sex tapes that allegedly feature “intoxicated” and “victimized” celebrities, including two who were underage.

During an interview with NewsNation, Courtney Burgess, who testified against Combs before a grand jury in Manhattan, claimed that he has in his possession flash drives featuring videos of eight celebrities with Diddy.

Burgess said the flash drives originally belonged to Kim Porter, an ex-girlfriend of Diddy.

Explaining his relationship with Diddy, Burgess said “I’ve been knowing him for 35 years. I think we probably entered into the music business at the same time.”

Burgess said he is willing to turn over eleven flash drives to the court, claiming that the videos on them feature six well known males and two celebrity females.

Burgess said “I think all, to be honest — all,” those in the tapes seemed “victimized” and “intoxicated.”

Burgess also claimed that the flash drives include a manuscript from Porter that outlines Combs’ alleged crimes.

Burgess’s attorney, Ariel Mitchell, was also featured in the interview, and claimed that the federal government sent U.S. Marshals to serve Burgess a subpoena for the flash drives.

As we have previously highlighted, a former bodyguard of Combs has claimed that the rapper has footage of not only celebrities, but elite politicians and state figures engaging in compromising activities.

The bodyguard, Gene Deal, says the secret footage was captured at Diddy’s various so called “freak off” parties, which are claimed to have involved victims being forced to engage in sex acts while Combs masturbated and recorded the events.

“I don’t think it’s only celebrities gonna be shook. He had politicians in there, he had princes in there. He also had a couple of preachers in there,” said Deal, adding that “he had every room bugged.”

One alleged victim of Combs has filed a lawsuit claiming that the rapper raped her when she was 13 years old while a male and female celebrity pair watched and joined in.

The suit claims that the male celebrity also raped her while the female and Diddy observed.

Combs has been denied bail twice on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.

He remains in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and has repeatedly denied all allegations against him.

* * *

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The secret to understanding the average progressive mind is to first realize that everything they do revolves around a deeply ingrained fantasy world in which they are rebels; righteous underdogs fighting against “the system” or “the patriarchy.”  Leftists cannot function within their collectivist ideology without first creating a fascist bogeyman to revolt against.  If they were to ever realize that they are, in fact, the establishment and the authoritarians, their entire world view would collapse.

This is why you will continue to see content like the election propaganda video below, no matter how ridiculous the premise might be.  Leftist activists create these narratives, not because they are necessarily convincing to most people, but because they need to convince themselves that they are still the good guys. 

This Democrat fearmongering ad is amazing. It depicts JD Vance as President for life and Elon Musk opens up concentration camps for illegal aliens and homeless people before uploading his consciousness into a super AI to become immortal. So based. pic.twitter.com/fHE4o16uX6

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 1, 2024

JD Vance as dictator for life?  Conservatives banning contraception?  Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI?  Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps?  The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid’s Tale.

The video credits cite a handful of progressive NGOs as references for donations (including Vote.org) but little on who specifically made it.  The relevant issue is the insight this gives into the insanity of left activists.  They cling to so many assumptions they have been proven wrong about time after time (global warming), and they also imagine a world in which conservatives are the elites searching for immortality.  They seem to be projecting the habits and hobbies of the very globalists that fund leftist groups today.  

One could argue that perhaps this is gaslighting – They’re accusing conservatives of scheming to rule the world when they are the people that actually want control.  That could be, but the conspiracy theories surrounding “Project 2025” suggest a Q-Anon level of delusion going on that feeds directly into bizarre narratives like those in the video.  Leftists have to believe they’re fighting the good fight, even though they’re actually useful idiots for the establishment. 

This desperate need to take on the role of “freedom fighter” doesn’t mesh very well with reality.  Keep in mind, for nearly two decades progressives have enjoyed expanding political and social power, with nearly every western government, every major NGO, every corporation, every legacy media outlet and every Big Tech platform dominated by woke ideology.  From ESG to DEI to LGBTQ+ and beyond, Americans and much of the west have been endlessly bombarded from every angle by leftist propaganda.  

Their war on conservative principles and individual freedom nearly came to a crescendo during the covid pandemic when they claimed the power to take away people’s access to the economy if they refused to accept an experimental vaccine and follow the mandates to the letter.  Surveys showed a disturbing number of Democrats supported the outright destruction of constitutional freedoms in the name of forcing people to adhere to medical mandates based entirely on lies.

Leftists also supported the widespread censorship of conservative voices on everything from the covid vaccine, to the lockdowns, to climate change, to Hunter Biden’s laptop.  This censorship was spearheaded by the Biden Administration acting in violation of the constitution as they worked closely with Big Tech companies to shut down dissent.

They aren’t fighting “the man”, they are the man.  Ridiculous AI generated political videos like the one above are not going to change that.