Authored by Cecilie Jilkova via The Brownstone Institute,

The UN committee approved the text of the Convention on Combating Cybercrime. Human rights organizations and information technology experts have called it a threat to democracy and the free world.

“One of the world’s most dangerous surveillance treaties was approved with a standing ovation,” wrote Austrian digital rights group Epicenter Works.

The UN General Assembly is now due to vote on the adoption of the Convention in September.

“It can be assumed that the treaty will be accepted without difficulty at the UN General Assembly in September, and will thus be officially considered a UN convention. After that, it will be available for signature and subsequently it can be ratified,” said political advisor Tanja Fachathalerová.

“It can be assumed that it will not be a big problem to achieve the necessary forty ratifications, which are necessary for the treaty to enter into force.”

Legitimization of Repression against Journalists and Opponents

The proposed international treaty aims to combat cybercrime and improve international cooperation between law enforcement agencies. However, more than a hundred human and civil rights organizations around the world have warned of a serious threat to human rights and criticized the fact that the text of the treaty lacks adequate safeguards. According to them, the planned agreement would oblige UN member states to introduce comprehensive measures for the supervision of a wide range of crimes.

“The contract is really a surveillance agreement with too few provisions on data protection and human rights. In practice, it legitimizes the more repressive measures against political opponents or journalists that we now see in authoritarian states,” writes the netzpolitik.org server.

China and Russia Stood at the Beginning of the Convention

It all started with a UN resolution initiated in 2019 by Russia, China, and other countries (such as Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and Uzbekistan) with 88 votes in favor, 58 against, and 34 abstentions.

European states have proposed changes, but according to experts, the resulting compromise does not even meet the conditions necessary to preserve privacy and protect human rights.

“Unfortunately, a data access treaty has been drawn up that will allow governments around the world to exchange citizens’ personal information in perpetual secrecy in the event of any crime the two governments agree is ‘serious.’ This would include eavesdropping on location and real-time communications around the world, and force IT workers to divulge passwords or other access keys that would compromise the security of global systems that billions of people rely on every day. And it’s not just private sector systems – government systems are also at risk,” said Nick Ashton-Hart, Digital Economy Policy Director at APCO, who is also leading the Cybersecurity Tech Accord delegation to the Convention negotiations.

The Threat of Criminal Prosecution of Journalists and White Hackers

The Ashton-Hart treaty also puts journalists and whistleblowers at risk of prosecution. The International Press Institute was so concerned about this risk that it placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post. Independent security experts around the world also warned in February that they could face criminal prosecution for their work protecting IT systems from cybercriminals under the draft Convention.

Governments Could Prosecute Children for Sexting

“Incredibly, the text expressly allows governments to prosecute children for “sexting” in the same article (14) that is supposed to protect them from sexual predators. The article also puts people working in charities who help bring predators to justice at risk of prosecution because they need access to material created by predators as part of their work. Civil society advocates have repeatedly pointed out this obvious deficiency, but to no avail,” Ashton-Hart said.

Concerns about Freedom of Expression

According to experts, companies that operate internationally will also be exposed to increased legal and reputational risk after the arrest of employees. The private data of individuals and vulnerable communities can be accessed by law enforcement agencies around the world, even in cases where the perpetrators’ actions are not criminal in their place of residence or in cases that raise significant concerns about freedom of expression.

Cooperation between authorities and states can be kept secret without transparency about how governments use the treaty, or without provisions that allow companies to challenge law enforcement requests, even if they are illegal.

Criticizing Leaders as a Crime?

“Facilitating collusion in any ‘serious’ crime opens the door to ‘crimes’ such as criticizing leaders or persecuting minorities,” writes Ashton-Hart in his analysis.

On August 13, the International Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest and most representative representative of the private sector, openly called on the UN not to adopt the convention at the General Assembly in September.

“If governments fail again to protect the international human rights legal framework they so often vociferously support, then new, dangerous norms created in international law will haunt us for decades to come,” Ashton-Hart said.

*  *  *

Republished from the author’s Substack

Authored by Mike Scanlon via RealClearDefense.com,

An ability to win hearts and minds has long been seen by America’s leadership as essential to domestic and international politics and security.  For much of the Pax Americana, our government and intelligentsia have poured time, effort, and money into studying how to persuade everyone from allies to enemies and, conversely, how to counter an opponent’s influence campaigns. 

But something essential has changed since the rise of President Donald Trump as a political force. 

During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke up against censorship and for lay readers in the wake of an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen to eradicate communist books from libraries:

Don’t join the book burners.  Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.  Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . . .

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?  . . .

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people.  They are part of America.  And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.

These days, America’s most educated have grown distrustful of non-experts and their ability to process dangerous ideas. 

Our elites have launched a campaign to protect the undereducated from themselves. 

• The credentialed class pressures book retailers to stop selling “uncritical” translations of sinister foreign texts, meaning those lacking an accepted authority’s “soberly critical framing, complete with detailed footnotes, contextual commentary, or other forms of annotation.”  

• Journalists writing about controversial topics do not link directly to primary sources but instead filter such news “through multiple layers of condemnation by a shrinking pool of academics trusted to read raw material.” 

• Our best and brightest unabashedly seek to silence individuals who disagree with their betters and to regulate (or outright suppress) social media sites that allow free (or free-ish) debate about unsafe thoughts. 

• Opinion makers cheer on activists seeking to deplatform or shout down an ever-growing list of enemies, including those who refused to toe the party line on Russia’s war in the Ukraine. 

• Self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom are rallying to safeguard the right of social media companies to collaborate with state actors to squelch wrongheaded arguments and to wall the incorrigible off from the marketplace of ideas. 

• The Biden Administration tried to establish a governance board to combat disinformation. 

That crusade is not going well. 

As Martin Gurri has pointed out time and time again, America’s thought leaders and information curators are on the ropes.  Academics, think tankers, pundits, and policymakers no longer can hide the fact that they often either have no clue what they are doing or are all too willing to oversell their case—and will purposefully obfuscate or outright lie from time to time to get their way.  

Yet most experts are more than happy to pretend as if nothing were wrong as they claw their way up the professional ladder.  Some insist on singing paeans to themselves while demanding ever-greater protection from open competition and even outside criticism.

Take, for instance, the authorities advocating a muscular foreign policy or demanding robust countermeasures against domestic extremism.  The Global War on Terror was not America’s finest hour.  We lost Afghanistan.  It would be difficult to claim victory in Iraq.  The great hopes of the Arab Spring came to naught. 

But repeated failures did not cause self-doubt to creep into the minds of credentialed militarists of any stripe.  Most continued to insist that the next war would go our way.  Some have even been trying to expand their territory, such as the counterinsurgency specialists who tout their experience in (wildly unsuccessful) campaigns against international extremism and propaganda when marketing themselves as would-be, should-be leaders of the war against domestic extremism and disinformation. 

There was never any reason to assume that the pro-war clique would fare any better if provided yet another opportunity.  And failures have piled on missed opportunities in the Ukraine to the point where security specialists are, once again, scrambling to protect the foreign policy establishment by blaming its most recent fiasco on a lack of American commitment to winning what may always have been an unwinnable war.   

The crisis afflicting much of America’s expert class is less that the internet has made it easier for the public to push back, and more that the elite’s preferred models just don’t work.  For instance, many disinformation experts justify censorship with a model positing that malevolent information drives malevolent acts.  Similarly, some domestic terrorism experts justify increased surveillance with a model positing that terrorists broadcast their “terrorist intent” before engaging in acts of terrorism. 

But, even if most people who commit violent acts were exposed to disinformation or made some announcement of terrorist intent, notably lacking is substantial evidence that a significant percentage of the people exposed to disinformation or of the individuals articulating terrorist intent go on to commit violent acts.  In other words, many of our leading domestic security experts seem unwilling or unable to differentiate between a hypothesis and a theory.  This is suboptimal. 

Worse, the smarter-than-thou crowd continues to push for surveillance and censorship despite the glaring problems with their firmly held beliefs about causality and causation.  The proposition that bad ideas lead to bad acts has been “disproven over and over again.”  And even many of the authorities seeking to elevate their profiles by fearmongering about “stochastic terrorism” must admit that the hateful speech in the establishment’s targets is unregulatable under American law.  Unlike “a call to lynch someone when a mob has gathered nearby,” the “use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable” just isn’t “advocacy . . .  directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and . . . likely to incite or produce such action.”  It can’t meet the standard required for the government to forbid or punish inflammatory speech.

To the extent that America still cares about freedom of speech or other civil liberties, the surveil–and–censor hacks should be laughed off the stage.  Yet the grandees of the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” are overplaying an incredibly weak hand based on what appears to be little more than blind faith that the public isn’t qualified to question the elite.  This is silly; the emperor has no clothes. 

The collected academic expertise of the anti-disinformation movement proved itself worthless in the real world because disinformation specialists were incapable of preventing the Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board from falling victim to—of all things—a disinformation campaign.  Given the anti-disinformation crowd’s admitted inability to effectively contest disinformation with speech and counter-speech in open competition, the public has every right to question whether the Biden Administration’s “Ministry of Truth” was meant to institute a de facto censorship regime where progressive- or establishment-led media and social media companies would collude with like-minded state actors to suppress populist voices.  

The disinformation that touched off the anti-disinformation crusade—propaganda propounded by the Russian government during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections—either appears far too ham-handed to be persuasive or seems all but indistinguishable from arguments and assertions made by America’s most highly esteemed progressive identitarians.  Given the anti-disinformation cult’s penchant for announcing causation rather than proving it, the public has every right to question whether disinformation specialists operate in a fantasy world of just-so stories where fancy academic degrees and enviable job titles can magically transform an “and” (the Russian government tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and Donald Trump won) into a “so” (the Russian government tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, so Donald Trump won). 

The social media-based disinformation campaigns initiated by America’s enemies during the ongoing Trump era seem to be as ineffective as the failed social media-based information campaigns launched by America during the Global War on Terror.  Given how disproportionate the elite’s highly publicized panic over disinformation is to the actual threat from disinformation, the public has every right to question whether our leadership is conjuring up sham crises to exert tighter control over a nation that has grown largely unimpressed by even the shiniest of shiny credentials.

Although the stage has been set for a complete collapse of expert rule, it will be difficult for the current crop of experts to save themselves from—of all things—themselves.  The traditional authority system is almost uniquely unfit to deal with the very public failure of conventional models. 

The incentive structure of America’s credential-granting institutions is out of whack.  Expert careers are advanced by appealing to recognized authorities and representatives of wealthy benefactors  or powerful state actors in a more-or-less closed system, which the establishment zealously protects from outside interference. 

• Freedom from open competition allows diplomas and job titles to trump the substance of arguments and the abilities of individuals in the cloistered world of experts.  Authorities can take the ostrich defense or declare victory when faced with a threat to their position, so experts often decry dissent while studiously avoiding anything resembling critical engagement with critiques of their work advanced by deplorables or members of the great unwashed. 

• The need to appeal to recognized authorities stifles innovation.  Up-and-comers are best advised to avoid heterodox approaches, which are liable to offend a patron, and to adopt whatever orthodox approach happens to be favored by their most powerful backer, regardless of the merit of that approach.  Established experts can use the failed experiment that is peer review to prop up their favorite disproved theory, to advance a fashionable narrative, or to snuff out groundbreaking work capable of challenging the orthodoxies upon which their reputations rest.  

• The authority system even incents experts to exaggerate.  To draw attention in crowded fields or obtain grant money from activist sources, specialists commonly conflate advocacy with analysis, make overly dire predictions, then demand radical measures to avert the impending crises.  And very rarely are experts punished for getting things wrong.  It is therefore reasonable for specialists to stake out the most aggressive position possible, rather than the most accurate or defensible one. 

The expert system has broken down and requires structural reform.  For example, it is as if academia—the crown jewel of the authority system—were designed to be as unfair and inefficient as possible.

• Despite our knowledge that the “Next Big Thing” tends to be hit upon by someone who is young or new to a discipline and often languishes until the then-dominant cohort of scholars loses control over the field, the tenure system concentrates power and authority in exactly the wrong hands—those of established professors. 

• The deference afforded to tenured faculty within the American academy not only makes our colleges and universities incredibly hostile environments for truly innovative ideas, but also creates ideal conditions for alpha-sycophants valiant enough to kowtow their way to the top. 

• Protecting academic authorities from the consequences of their actions over-incents “brave stands” (by rendering them bravery-free) and allows indefensible arguments to overrun the academy and occasionally leak into the wider world—often to the detriment of the very non-elites whom the scholarly elite purports to represent.

In short, despite all the exhortations by the Spencerians in the mainstream media and other establishment outlets about the need for academics to remain a self-regulating profession, the greatest threats to the advance of learning and to academic freedom come from within the academy and are, at minimum, exacerbated by a system that permits faculty self-governance. 

It’s high time for a round of creative destruction.  The non-experts who oversee or fund America’s colleges and universities should consider doing away with tenure and exposing academics to the crucible of competition.  After all, pretty much everyone outside the Ivory Tower realizes that the fairest and most efficient way to deal with the replication crisis in the social sciences is an employment crisis among social scientists. 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Ukraine is still pushing for the US to support long-range strikes inside Russian territory after a meeting between President Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer ended with no announcements about the issue.

Biden and Starmer held talks at the White House on Friday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that if the US allowed and supported long-range strikes inside Russia, it would mean NATO is at war with Russia.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House said the US hasn’t changed its policy regarding long-range strikes. “There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “I would not expect any major announcement in that regard.”

The UK wants the US to sign off on Ukraine’s use of British-provided Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of about 155 miles, inside Russian territory. But there’s no sign that Biden gave that permission during the meeting with Starmer, and according to The New York Times, the US is more concerned about the risk of escalation than the UK.

On Saturday, a high-level NATO official expressed support for long-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. “Every nation that is attacked has the right to defend itself. And that right doesn’t stop at the border of your own nation,” said Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee.

In the days leading up to the Starmer-Biden meeting, multiple media reports said the US was preparing to expand the area where Ukraine could use US and other NATO missiles. Some reports said Biden was ready to lift restrictions on the Storm Shadows, while other reports suggested he would also support the use of US weapons in long-range strikes in Russia, including the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), US-provided missiles with a range of about 190 miles.

The Guardian reported last week that a decision to lift the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the weapons had already been made in private. British government sources told the outlet that it would not be made public in the near future, and that an announcement was not expected after the Biden-Starmer meeting.

Previous escalatory steps that the US has taken in the Ukraine proxy war were not announced publicly. For example, when President Biden gave Ukraine the greenlight to use US-provided weapons in Russian border regions, it was first revealed by media reports and later acknowledged by the administration.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

Maryland parents have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore their right to opt their young children out of having storybooks that promote LGBT lifestyles read to them.

The petition in Mahmoud v. Taylor was filed after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit turned away the parents’ request for an injunction to halt the Montgomery County Board of Education’s policy of promoting the books.

The petition was filed with the Supreme Court on Sept. 12, according to the parents’ attorneys at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit public interest law firm.

The case goes back to November 2022, when the board mandated new “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks for elementary school students that promote gender transitions, Pride parades, and same-sex romance between young children.

The board directed employees responsible for choosing the books to use an “LGBTQ+ Lens” and to question whether “cisnormativity,” “stereotypes,” and “power hierarchies” are “reinforced or disrupted,” according to the petition.

Parents were initially told they could opt out on behalf of their children when the storybooks were read, but in March 2023, the board changed its policy. Starting with the 2023–2024 academic year, the opt-out policy would no longer be in effect.

“If parents did not like what was taught to their elementary school kids, their only choice was to send them to private school or to homeschool,” the petition said.

Hundreds of parents, largely Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims, attended board meetings, according to the petition, and provided testimony that their religion required that young children not be exposed to instruction on gender and sexuality that was inconsistent with their religion.

“The parents emphasized how impressionable young children are and how they lack independent judgment to process such complex and sensitive issues,” the petition said.

Board members responded by accusing parents of promoting “hate” and likening them to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes,” according to the petition.

The parents filed a lawsuit after the board declined to accommodate them, arguing they enjoyed a constitutional right to keep the opt-out policy in place.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman denied the parents’ request for an injunction to halt the cancellation of the opt-out policy on Aug. 24, 2023.

A divided Fourth Circuit panel upheld the decision on May 15 this year, ruling that the parents had failed to demonstrate that an injunction was justified. The panel added that it took no view as to whether the parents would be able to produce enough evidence later in the proceeding to succeed in their case.

The panel also found there was no evidence that the policy change burdened the parents’ right to free exercise of religion.

Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, said the Supreme Court should grant the parents’ appeal.

“Parents shouldn’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to introducing their children to complex and sensitive issues around gender and sexuality,” Baxter said in a statement.

“Nearly every state requires parental consent before high schoolers can attend sex-ed. Parents should have the right to excuse their elementary school children when related instruction is introduced during story hour.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the school board for comment but did not receive a reply by publication time.

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will consider the petition.

While Americans were hyper-fixated on the 20,000 Haitians the Biden-Harris administration dumped into Springfield, Ohio, through an expanded Temporary Protected Status program for migrants from the collapsed Caribbean nation, former President Trump shifted the conversation during a campaign rally last week to Charleroi, Pennsylvania. 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “The small 4,000 person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania has experienced a 2,000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris — the schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak English, costing local… pic.twitter.com/jvlP19ANL0

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 12, 2024

Ahead of Trump spotlighting the Haitian surge in the tiny blue-collar town of Charleroi during a rally last week in Arizona, we cited the think tank America 2100, which first revealed that the town’s population of Haitian migrants exploded by 2,000% over the past two years.

It isn’t just Springfield. It’s happening everywhere.

In Charleroi, Pennsylvania—a low-income town of just 4,000—the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. And it’s almost all Haitians.

Here’s what one Charleroi councilman told us today: pic.twitter.com/Wkwv56Tnw5

— America 2100 (@America_2100) September 11, 2024

Several downtown residents spoke with us about the ongoing migrant surge. They said when the national media began covering the situation in Springfield — they thought, “Wait a minute”—the same migrant influx orchestrated by the Biden-Harris administration was happening across their town. 

We spoke with one employee at a local shop, and we will keep his name anonymous for fear of retribution by local officials or the federal government. He provided us with helpful insight into the Haitian crisis in Charleroi. 

He said at least half of the town’s population is now Haitian, noting the influx began to become noticeable under the Biden-Harris’ first term, adding there was just a recent surge in new Haitians. Many of these migrants are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status. 

As far as what is visible by residents, they explained the primary reason the Haitians were dumped into the town was because of Fourth Street Foods, a food manufacturer that produces quality frozen food products for the processed foods industrial complex. These foods end up being sold in major retail stores throughout the US. 

Let’s remind readers in March, we penned a note titled “How Shadowy Network Of NGOs Supplies Mega-Corporations With Migrants To Exploit Cheap Labor,” which is possibly how this entire scheme is being operated. The federal government alone can’t possibly plan shelter and transportation arrangements for the migrants. 

The consequence of importing third-world migrants to replace blue-collar workers in the town crushes native households. Many residents complained that rents are out of control because the migrants exacerbated a housing shortage. Some have left the town for cheaper housing outside city limits.

The picture being painted in Charleroi is part of a much broader labor theme:

• Great Replacement Job Shock: 1.3 Million Native-Born Americans Just Lost Their Jobs, Replaced By 635,000 Immigrants

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

The individual said Haitians are being shuttled to and from the food packaging plants via a complex network of vans. There must be dozens and dozens of these vans, easily spotted while driving down city streets. Several of the vans had a logo with a sign that read  ‘The Wellington Agency,’ a staffing company. 

Several times during the ride-along with the individual, Haitian drivers nearly hit the vehicle. He noted that one local DMV worker posted on the town’s Facebook page about licenses being handed out to migrants like candy. He said migrants are sparking accidents all over town, which has led to a surge in insurance rates. 

One of the biggest takeaways is that open southern borders and other ways to import migrants from third-world countries have not just been done for election purposes that favor Democrats but as a source of low-cost labor to mega-corporations as the great replacement of native-born workers with foreign-born workers plays out. Basically, the federal gov’t and corporate America are selling out blue-collar workers for cheap migrants.

Residents of Charleroi had no say in their beloved town, sold out by local, state, and federal politicians and possibly a network of taxpayer-funded NGOs who facilitated the migrant invasion. Corporate profits are certainly being prioritized over the native residents. 

There was no mention of the Haitians eating dogs and cats, but there were numerous sightings of goat carcasses on a backroad that many in the town joked in a Facebook group: “Hide your goats.” 

Here’s what the Charleroi residents are talking about on their private Facebook group:

The ride-along in Charleroi occurred on Sunday while factories were shuttered and the town was quiet. 

The biggest takeaway is that great replacement is ravaging American blue-collar households while the federal gov’t and their corporate overlords import the third world to the first world just to make more profits.

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times,

This year’s summer months were characterized by cold outdoor pools that eagerly welcomed guests, concrete that scorched the soles of bare feet, and popsicles that melted in the relentless, blazing heat.

In August, the European Commission’s Copernicus report found that the global average temperature had reached record highs in the past 12 months, an increase of 1.51 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Similarly, using satellite data, Roy Spencer and John Christy of the University of Alabama Huntsville determined that the average temperature in August was 0.88 degrees Celsius higher than the 30-year average from 1991–2020.

Extreme heat is not just an environmental crisis, it’s a serious threat to our public health—and communities across the country are struggling to respond,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a news release.

“What we’re facing today wasn’t what we were experiencing 30 or 40 years ago. This is a different world we are in.”

On Aug. 14, President Joe Biden released the National Heat Strategy for 2024–2030, fulfilling a July promise to take additional action to address increasing temperatures, which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states is primarily caused by human-induced increases in carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas.

“Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions,” Panmao Zhai, a Chinese climatologist, and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I, stated in a press release.

“Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate.”

Ned Nikolov, a physical scientist and researcher affiliated with Colorado State University, told The Epoch Times the IPCC is incorrect regarding CO2.

“The greenhouse theory claims that atmospheric composition is important,” Nikolov said.

“They are arguing that tiny increases of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause global warming and that we must stop burning fossil fuel to avoid dangerous climate change.

“That is completely wrong.”

On Aug. 20, Nikolov and Karl Zeller, a retired U.S. Forest Service meteorologist, published their study that found that recent warming is not the result of increasing CO2.

Instead, after analyzing satellite data, the two researchers concluded that the Earth has warmed because it’s been absorbing more sunlight due to reduced global cloud cover.

Albedo and Climate

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth’s atmosphere is constantly working to balance the planet’s “energy budget”—the amount of energy entering and leaving it. After the Sun’s shortwave radiation—sunshine—reaches the Earth, the energy flows back into space as thermal radiation.

If this balance is disrupted, and more sunlight is absorbed or not enough heat escapes to space, Earth’s temperature will rise. An imbalance in the energy budget is known as radiative forcing, with the incoming radiation being shortwave and the outgoing radiation being longwave (or thermal).

Additionally, Earth’s albedo, the fraction of sunlight reflected back into space, impacts the amount of radiation that reaches the surface.

In its Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC states that, due to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration from human greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s energy budget is out of balance—more thermal energy is being trapped, resulting in elevated temperatures and warmer oceans.

A sign near Strasburg, N.D., on Jan. 11, 2024. Jack Dura/AP Photo

It also notes regarding the Earth’s albedo that, between 1950 and 1980, there was “evidence for a widespread decline of surface solar radiation (or dimming),” followed by “a partial recovery (brightening) at many observational sites thereafter.”

As to the cause, the IPCC states, “Multi-decadal variation in anthropogenic [human-caused] aerosol emissions are thought to be a major contributor (medium confidence), but multi-decadal variability in cloudiness may also have played a role.”

In addition, the IPCC said some studies show that “cloudiness” can play a role in “dimming” and “brightening.” But the contribution of aerosols and clouds to dimming and brightening is still debated, and “the origin of these trends is not fully understood.”

That, according to Nikolov, is where his study comes in.

Challenging the IPCC

“Climate is controlled by the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted to space. These quantities—together with their differences—define Earth’s radiation budget,” NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) website states.

Since March of 2000, the NASA team has been collecting satellite data to examine the energy exchange between the Earth and space.

Using those measurements and a “novel climate-sensitivity model derived from independent NASA planetary data,” Nikolov and Zeller evaluated how Earth’s decreasing albedo impacted global temperature during the 21st century.

“CO2 is an invisible trace gas that does not interfere with sunlight. It’s believed to trap thermal radiation coming from the surface, but that’s a misconception because the absorption of longwave radiation by CO2 and heat-trapping are completely different physical processes. According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, heat-trapping is impossible in an open system such as the atmosphere,” Nikolov said.

He added that while water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, it becomes visible when it condenses and forms clouds. And because clouds “reflect solar radiation back to space,” their impact on the climate is “measurable and significant.”

“Cloud formation is partially controlled by cosmic forces. When clouds decrease, the planetary albedo drops and more radiation reaches the surface, causing warmer temperatures.”

“In our paper, we show, using the best available observations from the [Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System] platform, that the warming of the last 24 years was entirely caused by the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and not by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations as claimed by the IPCC.”

Figure 1. Monthly radiative anomalies derived from the CERES EBAF 4.2 dataset: (a) Earth’s global albedo calculated via dividing the reflected all-sky shortwave anomaly by the globally averaged incident solar flux at the TOA (i.e., the global insolation) and multiplying the resulting fraction by 100 to convert to a percent; (b) Earth’s absorbed solar flux calculated via multiplying the CERES reflected all-sky shortwave anomaly by −1 based on the fact that radiation absorption is opposite (and complimentary) to reflection. Courtesy of Ned Nikolov

Figure 7. Comparison between observed GSAT anomalies and CERES-reported changes in the Earth’s absorbed solar flux. The two data series, representing 13-month running means, are highly correlated with the absorbed SW flux, explaining 78% of the GSAT variation (R2 = 0.78). Also, GSAT lags the absorbed shortwave radiation between 0 and 9 months, which indicates that GSAT is controlled by changes in sunlight absorption. Courtesy of Ned Nikolov

Nikolov said that, in the greenhouse theory, atmospheric composition is “very important” for a planet’s global surface temperature.

By applying dimensional analysis to NASA’s data describing the environments of different planets and moons in the solar system—including Earth—Nikolov and Zeller discovered a new universal relationship across planetary bodies. This revealed that the atmosphere warms the surface not through longwave radiation emitted by greenhouse gases but through total pressure—adiabatically, without the loss or gain of heat—and that atmospheric composition has no effect on global temperature.

“Adiabatic heating (a.k.a. compression heating) is a well-known thermodynamic process. This revolutionary discovery about the physical nature of the atmospheric thermal effect (currently known as greenhouse effect) was published in [our] peer-reviewed literature in 2017,” Nikolov said.

“This is why when you get up in elevation, it gets cooler—either in the mountains or when you’re flying on an airplane—because the pressure drops with height.”

He compared the Moon’s surface temperature, as measured by NASA, compared to Earth’s global temperature to evaluate the thermal effect of the atmosphere.

“The data shows that the Moon is a perfect, airless equivalent of Earth because it orbits the Sun at the same distance as Earth but has no atmosphere. So, the temperature difference between Earth and the Moon gives us the net thermal effect of the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Nikolov found that the Moon was about 88 degrees Kelvin cooler on average than the Earth. That’s significant, he said.

“Currently, the greenhouse theory claims that without an atmosphere, the Earth would only be about 33 degrees colder than it is now. Some estimates even say only 18 degrees cooler.

“So, the present theory grossly underestimates the actual thermal effect of our atmosphere. However, this 88-degree thermal enhancement is due to total pressure.

“And that’s one of the fundamental differences between the greenhouse theory and our new climate concept.”

Through analyzing the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI), “calculated as a difference between absorbed shortwave and outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere,” Nikolov and Zeller discovered that the scientific community had misinterpreted it.

“EEI is not caused by ‘heat-trapping’ resulting from increasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses as currently claimed, but ‘arises from adiabatic dissipation of thermal energy in ascending air parcels in the troposphere due to a decreasing atmospheric pressure with height,’” Nikolov said.

Specifically, using mathematics, Nikolov and Zeller showed that EEI is an “apparent phenomenon” rather than a “real imbalance,” which they said necessarily implies no long-term heat storage in the Earth system by increasing greenhouse gases and no “warming in the pipeline,” as claimed by the latest Report by the IPCC.

Where Are the Clouds?

Nikolov said Earth’s reduced cloud cover could have several causes, including galactic cosmic rays, solar wind, and interactions between the Sun’s and Earth’s magnetic fields.

“We have hypotheses about what’s driving the cloud cover changes, but we don’t have an exact mechanism or a conclusive theory,” Nikolov said.

“This is why we cannot mathematically describe it yet in a model to make predictions. ”

He called for “large-scale interdisciplinary research into the physical mechanisms controlling the Earth’s albedo and cloud physics,” as they are “the real drivers of climate on multi-decadal time scales.”

“The current climate science acknowledges that the clouds have been declining, and the Earth’s albedo has been decreasing, but they attribute it to an internal climate variability. This is incorrect! Changes of cloud cover and albedo are externally forced. Identifying this external forcing is where future research has to focus instead of studying carbon emissions and [greenhouse gas] radiative forcing,” Nikolov said.

Clouds are seen in Western Australia on June 14, 2024. Susan Mortimer/The Epoch Times

If rising global temperature was due to greenhouse gasses, there should have been more warming than observed, he said.

“The simple fact is that the solar forcing alone explains the entire warming of the 21st century and leaves no room for any anthropogenic forcing.

“This inconvenient truth for the UN’s Climate Agenda might explain the absence of discussion in the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report about the decrease of Earth’s albedo since 2000 observed by [NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System] and its impact on recent warming.”

In response to the question “Is the Sun causing global warming?” on its website, NASA states, “No. The Sun can influence Earth’s climate, but it isn’t responsible for the warming trend we’ve seen over recent decades.

“The Sun is a giver of life; it helps keep the planet warm enough for us to survive. We know subtle changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun are responsible for the comings and goings of the ice ages. But the warming we’ve seen in recent decades is too rapid to be linked to changes in Earth’s orbit and too large to be caused by solar activity.”

The IPCC did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment regarding Nikolov’s findings by the time of publication.

Gun manufacturing in the U.S. has been increasing steadily in recent years, with a significant spike during the pandemic.

According to the Violence Policy Center, there are almost five times as many gun manufacturers as there are colleges in the country.

This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes the number of Type 7 Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) in each U.S. state in 2022, and the percentage increase in FFLs from 2017 to 2022. Type 7 FFLs are the basic federal license required to manufacture and sell guns and ammunition in America.

The data comes from the Violence Policy Center and reflects 2022 data.

Which U.S. States Have the Most Gun Manufacturers?

While most production is concentrated in the hands of a few key players, a majority of gun manufacturers actually don’t operate out of big commercial facilities, but instead, out of homes or offices.

Texas, Florida, and Arizona, the three states with the most gun manufacturers in 2022, all have business-friendly policies including low or no income taxes and fewer regulations, as well as strong gun cultures.

Large firearms companies have also increasingly chosen to move their headquarters and production to red states, especially in the South.

Other Southern red states are capitalizing on this trend. In Oklahoma, just north of Texas, Governor Kevin Stitt has promoted the state’s “pro-Second Amendment” stance to attract more firearms manufacturers.

Out of the top five states with the most manufacturers, four (Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Ohio) have constitutional carry laws. These laws allow individuals to carry a firearm without a permit.

Many of these top states also do not require permits for people to carry concealed weapons, such as handguns, in public.

To learn about gun ownership in America, check out this graphic that shows how gun ownership rates in the U.S. have changed over the past decade.

Authored by Jack Phillis via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said Sunday that he stands by claims that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have eaten pets.

During an interview on CNN, Vance was pressed on posts and statements he’s made on X about pet eating in the city, which has seen a surge of up to 20,000 Haitian immigrants in the past few years.

He said that the pet eating claims came “from firsthand accounts from my constituents.”

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told the outlet.

Responding to CNN’s questions about whether the allegations are false, Vance said, “We created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story.”

Over the past week, Vance and some conservative-leaning social media accounts have made memes on the topic including artificial intelligence-generated memes showing pets holding signs endorsing former President Donald Trump, who mentioned the allegations during last week’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The mayor of Springfield and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine have repeatedly denied the reports, while the state’s attorney general said a police call confirmed the reports.

“I’d like to first say Springfield is still beautiful and your pets are safe in Springfield, Ohio. Safe,” Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said on NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo last week, adding that the pet-eating claims has created a “negative light” of the city.

“These claims are, they were just untrue. And we may mention that … we just don’t see reports of those,” Rue said of Trump’s remark.

On Sept. 11, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost wrote in a post on X, “There’s a recorded police call from a witness who saw immigrants capturing geese for food in Springfield.”

He also noted that citizens testified to city council about incidents of Haitian migrants killing geese.

On Sunday, DeWine, who runs a charity in Haiti, defended the Haitians in Springfield by saying that many of them are not in the United States illegally.

“I think it’s unfortunate that this came up. Let me tell you what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal,” DeWine told ABC News. “They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies.”

“What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers,” he added. “They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy. Now, are there problems connected? Well, sure. When you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people onto that, you’re going to have some challenges and some problems. And we’re addressing those.”

DeWine also said there are “legitimate problems” with the U.S. border and reiterated his support for Trump in the 2024 election.

Last week, the Trump campaign sought to highlight a police call made last month to a Clark County dispatcher about alleged geese-hunting in Springfield, although few details were provided. The Epoch Times could not independently verify the claims in the call and has contacted the sheriff’s department for comment.

Claims were also made during multiple Springfield town hall meetings by local residents.

“These Haitians are running into trash cans. They’re running into buildings. They’re flipping cars in the middle of the street, and I don’t know how like, y’all can be comfortable with this,” a resident, Anthony Harris, told city officials last month, although he did not provide any evidence or details. “They’re in the park, grabbing up ducks by the neck and cutting their heads off and eating them.”

Several bomb threats have also been made to various places across Springfield in recent days, including government buildings, hospitals, and schools.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

After the September 10, 2024, presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign became giddy.

And why not?

Pre-debate conventional wisdom had assured the country that underdog Harris would shock the nation with her endless wash/rinse/spin word salads of repeated phrases and memorized sound bites.

She supposedly would prove as shaky as Trump—the veteran of several presidential debates—would prove merciless in eviscerating her.

That did not happen. Post-debate polls of the first 24 hours showed clearly that the public felt Harris had won.

Why?

She stuck religiously to her pre-debate prep.

It was not difficult to anticipate what her tripartite script would be.

Joe Biden’s failed debate with Trump offered a model, along with the need to avoid Harris’s own known linguistic and cognitive liabilities:

One, Harris was told to bait the touchy Trump with smears and slights about his failed rallies, his racism, and his shaky businesses.

That way she could trigger him to lose his cool, go off-topic, rant, and turn off viewers.

And he did just that and often. Trump clearly did not prepare detailed answers, was not ready to be insulted, and was not reminded to relax—and smile, joke, and in Reaganesque fashion sluff off her certain slurs.

Two, she was not supposed to try thinking on her feet, no matter what the question asked.

Instead, Harris was always ordered to plug in her prepped and canned anecdotes, banalities, and bio-stories regardless of the topic or question. And she followed that off-topic boilerplate to spec.

Three, the campaign apparently knew they could rely on the moderators for four givens:

1. they were to fact-check Trump but never Harris. And they did that at least five times;

2. they were to demand follow-up answers from Trump to make him specifically answer the question addressed. And they did that numerous times, but not on a single occasion to Harris;

3. they were to ask Trump provocative questions to force him to deny that he was a racist, an insurrectionist, and an election denialist. But they were never to do so with Harris, whose many past outlandish statements, prevarications, flip-flops, and padded bio would have given the moderators similar rich fodder for cross-examination;

4. they would interrupt Trump to get him off tempo, but never Harris.

The result was that a cool, if not smug, Harris mostly smiled while an irate Trump scowled and raged.

Thus, to the millions who watched the slugfest, Harris seemed more “presidential” and therefore “won” the debate.

When the size of the huge television audience—some 67 million watched the debate—was announced, team Harris naturally assumed her win might bounce her even higher than did her initial July surge after the forced abdication of President Biden from the ticket.

But then strange post-debate developments followed…

Either a Tiny or No Bounce?

Harris did not receive the anticipated large bounce.

In fact, the polls still remain mostly even. She may have arrested Trump’s pre-debate surge a bit, but otherwise, a debate that polled so heavily in her favor oddly still seems to have made little difference in the still up-for-grabs race.

Stranger still, Harris, the supposedly clear winner, almost immediately asked for another debate. Her handlers suggested that this demand displayed newfound confidence from her win—as if an assured, second knockout debate would ensure her permanent pull away.

But Trump and others countered that it might have instead indicated the very opposite: that her pre-debate internal polls had shown the race was even or even had Trump leading and thus she still needed a second shot at derailing him, given her own team was not sure her single and transitory debate favorability would translate into any real lead.

The Debate Reset

Then in a day or two, other and far more significant realities emerged, resetting the debate—like a first date’s favorable first impression beginning to sour a day later upon further reflection.

As the debate clips were endlessly replayed on television, radio, and the blogosphere over the ensuing week, few, if any, favorable Harris soundbites popped up.

Harris, remember, was a veritable political unknown who was running a stealth campaign of media avoidance and running out the clock.

She had never really answered any questions addressed to her in the campaign. And in the debate, she presented her nothingness in confident fashion. But she ignored and snubbed both the toadish moderators and Trump at every turn.

Yet the public had tuned in only to receive just three answers from her that she had never previously offered them since her July anointment:

1. Why are you flipping—temporarily or permanently?—on almost every issue from your past positions?

2. If you are the candidate of change, why did you and President Biden as incumbents not make these changes the last three years—or at least promise now to make them in the next four months of your remaining tenures?

3. And what exactly will be your policies as president and the details of their proposed implementation?

Every time these questions in the debate were either stumbled upon by the moderators or demanded by Trump, Harris evaded by plugging in her memorized, smiley, and stonewalling non-answers.

Even leftist media outlets could not find video clips that would show a dominant Harris mastering any of these questions.

Furthermore, in the recycled visuals of the campaign, when Trump blustered and ranted, viewers now noticed that Harris had deliberately turned to him in scripted posturing. She pantomimed as if she were prepped by Hollywood actors—not just on memorizing canned trivialities but also giving fake moves and poses.

At times, Harris was a Rodin-like “Thinker,” looking contemplative with a strutting chin and propping it up with a closed hand. At times, with a wink-and-nod, she privately communicated to the audience their supposedly shared exasperation at her outrageous opponent. And at times she rolled her eyes, batted her eyelids, raised her eyebrows, and lip-synched her cynical disdain to 67 million viewers.

The net result?

The longer the debate was discussed, the more the far larger audience who had not watched the debate heard about it from friends or saw regurgitated media takes, so all the more the public came away thinking Harris was certainly slick and smooth, but otherwise empty, shallow, and smug.

And the more they saw clips of the scowling, snarling, and raving Trump, all the more they heard him blast an unresponsive Harris for the border, crime, the economy, and foreign policy—precisely the issues about which she was now failing to offer any of studied expertise.

The result was Trump, albeit in sometimes obnoxious fashion, reassured the country he could repeat what he did in 2017-21, while Harris confidently and professionally offered them little but sugary bios and platitudes.

Post Debate Meltdowns

After the debate, a now cocky Harris forgot her directions and thus only confirmed her pre-debate no-no’s. So, at a post-debate rally, the recidivist Harris reverted to what her handlers had told her was taboo: cackling and word salads.

In her first solo media interview in over 50 days with a preselected, left-wing local Philadelphia TV anchorman, Brian Taff, Harris actually plugged in her exact memorized debate riffs from a few nights earlier—even when they had nothing to do with the questions Taff asked.

When Harris realized that she could not answer a single one of his questions in the brief 10-minute softball interview, then, in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she simply smiled, hand gestured, giggled, and sought refuge in her accustomed platitudes and circularities.

The net result was again reminding viewers of her debate inanity a few days earlier.

Yes, Harris has a good memory to recite prepped banalities and to bait and smear opponents while keeping cool with the help of moderators.

But otherwise, she shows no ability to think or speak on her feet—and zero knowledge of the key challenges facing any president.

The Immoderators

It was bad enough that the moderators intervened in the debate—and only on one side—to fact-check. But their fact-checks on at least three of their five occasions themselves needed to be fact-checked for mistakes, especially as the post-debate furor rose.

Moderator Linsey Davis went after Trump for his accurate claim that partial-birth abortions and the killing of a baby as it leaves the birth canal were legal.

Or as Ms. Fact-Checker arrogantly put it, “There is no state where it is legal in this country to kill a baby after it’s born.”

That was not true.

At least six states make no restrictions of any kind on abortion, and thus, admittedly, on rare occasions, infants can be terminated who leave the birth canal.

Protection to ensure that such deaths never happen was vetoed by Democrats in Congress. Worse still, Harris’s own running mate Tim Walz as governor stopped Minnesota state legislation that would have outlawed the killing of an infant delivered viable and alive during or after an abortion procedure.

The moderators also fact-checked Trump’s assertion that crime was higher under Biden Harris than during his tenure and his allegation that many large cities do not fully or timely report crime statistics to federal tabulators.

Yet Trump was right on both counts. And only days later, the nation was reminded of just that when the Biden-Harris Department of Justice released recent crime statistics showing crime is still elevated—and still quite higher than when Biden-Harris took office.

The post-debate outrage further increased. It was further remembered that the two fact-checkers sat mum while Harris spun her own whoppers: that no military personnel were posted abroad in combat zones (just ask those often attacked in bases in Syria and Iraq, in Africa, or on patrol in the Red Sea).

And the two partisans kept silent when Harris repeated the long-ago fact-checked lies about Charlotteville, “bloodbath,” Project 2025, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal abortion ban.

Journalists after the debate tried to rescue Harris by jumping on Trump for other supposed lies, such as alleging Harris had supported government-provided transgendered conversion treatments for illegal aliens and prisoners. But then, post-debate, Harris’s own prior written endorsements for just that appeared.

While Harris’s campaign and liberal influencers were claiming that the moderators were not fact-checkers, one of the two, Linsey Davis, admitted she was not only a proud fact-checker, but along with her co-moderator David Muir had become one.

The reason was because of ABC’s desire to not let Trump supposedly promulgate falsehoods as he had in Joe Biden’s disastrous and career-ending June debate.

ABC apparently felt the earlier CNN moderators on that occasion were seen as too neutral and that being disinterested was a bad thing. Instead, in the Muir/Davis warped view, Biden lost that debate not because of his visible dementia but supposedly due to Trump’s exaggerations (which Biden himself matched if not exceeded).

In other words, Davis inadvertently admitted that after Democratic nominee Biden had crashed his career in a debate with Trump, ABC would now correct CNN’s supposed laxity in being too disinterested.

So, ABC’s moderators would become actively involved in the debate—and did so as the debate postmortem showed in clear partisan fashion.

Translated? One could take the Davis confession to mean the Democratic-Media fusion lost one debate by playing by traditional debate rules of moderator non-interference – and learned from that loss never to be so fair again.

Debate Incest?

The post-debate detritus mounted.

Senior Disney executive Dana Walden—who helps oversee ABC—is known as one of Harris’s “extraordinary friends” and, as reported, has been for at least 30 years. Their respective husbands have been close pals for even longer. Walden has been a steady contributor to Harris’s state and federal campaigns for over twenty years.

And it was disclosed that Harris and moderator Davis were national sorority sisters, a connection that sounded terrible, but after a fair debate, no one would have known what to make of it.

So, in normal times, no one would have noticed these conflicts of interest. After all, in the incestuous corporate/politics/media ecosystem of the bicoastal left, everyone either went to school, knows, does business with and profits from, dates, or is married to everyone else.

But given the clear bias of ABC in the post-debate environment, these relationships only further tainted the debate’s credibility.

Prairie-fire Madness

As the embarrassments of Harris’s debate and her post-debate evasions became better known, the moderators’ bias more fully exposed, the incest of ABC aired, and the lack of a debate “victory” bounce acknowledged, the irate right-wing blogosphere struck back.

On the rationale that if the left-wing network had “rigged” the debate and the moderators tipped the scales, then it too would reply in like kind. The result was a barrage of post-debate rumors, conspiracies, and false revelations—the discredited fact-checkers be damned.

Within days, fables floated by bloggers and often Trump himself that Harris was wearing high-tech receiver-earrings to facilitate stealthy prompts and directions from her off-stage handlers. Other rumors spread that her calmness was only a symptom that she had been given the debate questions in advance, or so an anonymous source claimed. Trump and his supporters then insisted that he was widely recognized by the public as the “winner” of the debate.

No evidence has yet emerged to prove any of these allegations.

Harris was likely wearing earrings that only remotely looked like a brand that doubles as a receiver.

There is no proof, at least yet from ABC or the Harris campaign, that Harris, in Donna Brazile/Hillary Clinton/CNN fashion of old, had received either the topics or the general outlines of the debate questions in advance.

And the polls uniformly really did show that Trump was felt by the public to have lost the debate—even though Harris had not really profited much from it.

But what was missed by the left’s outrage over the swirling rumors of conspiracies was that its own behavior had seeded such hysterias.

When moderators are not just biased but proudly explain why they are biased, and when such favoritism does demonstrably warp a presidential debate, then those on their receiving end naturally fire back with conspiracies of their own.

An interesting question arises over which is worse: the founded and proven conspiracy of the moderators in undisclosed but preplanned determination to hammer only Trump, or the frenzied reaction to believe fables consistent with the demonstrable bias of ABC and its moderators’ intention to warp the debate?

The Way Not Forward?

What is the result of this debate mess?

No sane conservative will or should ever do another national debate on any ABC venue.

If they were wise, Republicans should never agree to any televised debate moderated by ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, PBS, NPR, or CNN again, given the history of liberal moderator bias. The names of Donna Brazile, Candy Crowley, David Muir, and Linsey Davis should serve as sufficient warnings.

If the presidential candidates still insist on debating their opponents, they then should agree only to the classical rules of debating—and with only mute timekeepers present instead of loud-mouth, egocentric moderators in the following fashion:

• An opening 5-minute statement;

• A 3-minute rebuttal of opponent’s similar statement;

• A 2-minute rebuttal of the rebuttal;

• All to be repeated over eight or nine topics in a 90-minute debate, with mouth-shut timekeepers keeping each candidate within his time limits.

So, no more of these televised travesties, even when, as in this case, they boomerang on their fixers.

Tucker Carlson said the quiet part out loud in a brief comment last last week. Uncomfortable truths about the “party of democracy”…

“If they think that there’s a chance that Trump could win decisively enough in November that they can’t steal it, then I think their only option there is to in some way throw the society into chaos as they did during COVID which was the pretext for changing the way we vote and letting people vote anonymously without IDs and drop boxes and a month before the election.”

We all know what happened then (and we, the people, acquiesced so quickly):

“They completely changed everything allowing Mark Zuckerberg to spend $400 million to control the mechanics of the election. That would not have been allowed except under a state of national emergency provided them by the virus they created in a lab in Wuhan, COVID.”

So, given what they have shown themselves capable of, who can really argue they would not do it (or worse) again:

“It’s pretty simple. If they feel like they’re gonna lose we will have some kind of crisis. I think it’s most likely to be a war with Iran which they want anyway, but who knows.”

Watch the full comment by Tucker Carlson below:

Tucker Carlson: “If they think that there’s a chance that Trump could win decisively enough in November that they can’t steal it, then I think their only option there is to in some way throw the society into chaos as they did during COVID which was the pretext for changing the… pic.twitter.com/e3mAkQPo8T

— Camus (@newstart_2024) September 14, 2024