North Korea Battles Record Heat By Prescribing Dog Soup And Propaganda
In “that’s enough internet for today” news…
North Korea has apparently found the answer to record-breaking summer heat: dog-meat soup, chicken broth and stories about how hard Kim Jong Un sweats, according to Reuters.
Pyongyang hit 98 degrees, on Thursday, which state media said was the highest temperature recorded in the capital. With tropical nights piling up, the regime has rolled out an unusually enthusiastic summer survival guide.
Some advice is straightforward: watermelon, cucumbers, mung beans and plenty of fluids. Then things get considerably more North Korean.
A doctor quoted by the ruling party’s Rodong Sinmun recommended “nutritious foods” including fish porridge, red-bean porridge and dog-meat soup, traditionally believed to help people endure summer heat.
The newspaper even published a separate feature celebrating dog-meat soup, reviving an old saying that soup spilled on your foot during the summer dog days “becomes medicine.” North Korea also held a national dog-meat cooking competition earlier this year, because apparently it’s important there that someone determines who is the best at cooking dog.
For less adventurous diners, state media promoted samgyetang, a chicken soup stuffed with ginseng, rice and jujubes. Television broadcasts also offered advice on hydration, swimming and outdoor exercise.
According to Reuters no North Korean weather emergency would be complete without reminding everyone that Kim Jong Un is also very hot, possibly hotter than you.
State media recycled stories of Kim heroically sweating through previous summers, including a 2013 construction-site inspection where his clothes supposedly became soaked. Other reports recalled him trudging through mountains and rain in 2018 and inspecting a seafood factory in temperatures reportedly reaching 39°C.
What Kim is actually doing during this heat wave was conspicuously absent. North Korea has disclosed no heat-related death figures, while neighboring South Korea has reported more than 20.
So the official North Korean summer survival plan appears simple: drink water, eat some soup and, if things get unbearable, remember that the Supreme Leader once perspired at a construction site.
The order recommends administering the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in three shots in separate visits.
“The Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations also recognize that the combined measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine should be administered in three separate single-disease shots once such products are domestically available and that, to the maximum extent feasible, all childhood immunizations should be administered at separate medical visits,” the order states.
The executive order calls for the attorney general to take “appropriate measures to further meritorious legal actions challenging state laws that conflict with states’ constitutional and Federal statutory obligations related to parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law, including, to the extent applicable under Federal law, States’ obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”
Public health experts say that vaccination delays could increase the chances that children are infected with diseases that vaccines can prevent before they return for their next appointment.
States, not the federal government, have the authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren – even though the order calls for revised vaccine recommendations.
Polls show that most Americans support school vaccine requirements, but Republicans are less likely than Democrats to view them as important.
Amid speculation that vaccines may be linked to autism, Trump has recently increased pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to determine what causes autism, a goal Kennedy previously vowed to pursue through new research announced last year. During a Cabinet meeting last month, Trump asked Kennedy for an update on the research.
“How are you doing on the autism research?” Trump asked.
“We will have an answer for you,” Kennedy said.
Decades of scientific research have found that vaccines do not cause autism. Childhood vaccines are thoroughly researched, and safety tracking has continued as long as the shots have been given.
Trump’s executive order comes as kids return or are about to return to school.
The order also directs the Department of Justice, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services to “take appropriate action to ensure that their contractors and grantees, including States and localities, are compliant with their constitutional and federal statutory obligations.”
The executive order is a win for the Make America Healthy Again movement, which has expressed skepticism of mandatory vaccines.
During the signing, Trump criticized what he called “72 jabs for … beautiful, healthy, lovely delicate little children.”
Trump called for only 11 key vaccines. He said spreading out the shots was critical and said children should get their shots in one year with five separate visits.
Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the “peak wokeness” that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.
Most of these successful candidates are quite young for elected officials: they are now in their 30s or even late 20s. That means that most of them were indoctrinated and – since they were on the left – essentially forced to spout all the new “woke” jargon and convictions that were manufactured overnight by frenzied mobs.
One such candidate is Francesca Hong, a Democrat with a significant polling lead in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race. It is hard to overstate how much of a woke fanatic she was. Not even the most cringe and manifestly deranged views from that era evaded her advocacy. They are all there.
The one the national media has latched onto was various tweets and Zoom meetings where she seems to have expressed opposition to the beloved American holiday Thanksgiving, because it “makes some folks very uncomfortable.” (Just as a side note, one of the most abominable linguistic aberrations imposed by woke warriors is the seemingly amiable but in fact grating and aggressively ideological use of the word “folks” or “folx” to replace “people.”) That most of these movements were driven by legitimate or at least reasonable policy concerns does not excuse the resulting fanaticism, excesses, and authoritarian posture used to punish those who questioned them.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one of this populist-left movement’s senior leaders, and she was also a driving force behind some of the worst woke excesses. She’s the one whom most of that movement wants to see run for president, and Kalshi’s predictive market consistently ranks her as a leading candidate:
AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC’s morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong’s statements, including her call for “abolishing prisons” and “[defunding] the police,” policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of “craziness” that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond:
WATCH: ABC’s Jon Karl lobs a Francesca Hong softball at AOC. AOC dances around the question, asserts that “Woke One was crazy”- brought about by Covid causing a “huge opening of the Overtone Window.”
It is, I suppose, a net positive that those who imposed extremist woke dogma are now too embarrassed to defend it. When they hear what they were saying and demanding at the time, it now sounds to them as unhinged and insane as it did to many of us back when they were earnestly and angrily spouting it.
But when AOC tries to giggle her way out of her behavior and the behavior of her allies, it actually is more offensive and cowardly than anything else. By invoking the lighthearted and playful terminology of the New York City Councilman whom she quotes – “Woke 1 was crazy!” – she seeks to depict this dark period as just a few oddball, zany moments that never really hurt anyone and thus need not be dwelled on or taken seriously.
But the woke extremism that AOC and her friends imposed on everyone else was anything but playful or frivolous. It was deeply authoritarian, mob-driven, sinister, coercive, and bloodthirsty. It sought to destroy anyone and everyone who did not immediately submit to and recite all of its new jargon and dictates. As was true for the similar hive-mind excesses of the #MeToo movement, the woke warriors – without batting an eye – destroyed careers, reputations, and institutions upon even the slightest transgression of their new dictates.
There are far too many examples of this to chronicle comprehensively. I will thus ask you to recall one particularly ugly and venomous event, which I am selecting in part because I had a front-row seat to witness it and thus recall it as if it were yesterday, and also because it so compellingly illustrates why this historical revisionism – dismissing “Woke 1” as if it were some trivial, harmless fun that went a bit awry – is so repellent.
When nationwide protests broke out over the killing of George Floyd, my long-time colleague at The Intercept, Lee Fang, did what journalists are supposed to do: he went to cover his local protests and interview multiple protesters about what motivated them. He then uploaded the interviews he conducted online.
Most of the ones he uploaded were ignored. But one was most definitely not ignored. The interviewee was a young, black protester. He told Lee that while he broadly supported the Black Lives Matter movement and believed that race-based police brutality was real and widespread, he did not understand why there was so little anger or concern when black lives were taken – murdered – by other black people. If, he asked, “black lives matter,” then why are there protests against only one type of killing while there is steadfast silence about the far more common way that black people in the U.S. die: at the hands of other black people?
Note that it was not Lee who was saying any of this. These words came from one of about a dozen people he interviewed who were participating in the protest. Lee offered no editorial comment on them at all. He simply uploaded the interview alongside all the others he conducted.
Because the view expressed by this young man was so off-key to the compelled consensus that had emerged in the wake of Floyd’s death, his mere posting of this interview sparked widespread and indescribably intense rage. And into that rage stepped a young Intercept reporter who – much to the surprise of many of her colleagues – apparently identified as black.
In response to Lee’s crime of posting that interview, she took to Twitter to denounce Lee as the single worst thing someone could be, especially at that moment: “a racist.” Within hours, tens of thousands of people had retweeted and liked her accusation, instantly branding Lee as a racist. Huge numbers of media cowards from the largest newspapers and TV outlets – ones who never knew anything about Lee or his work – quickly jumped on board, signaling to the mob demanding Lee’s head on a spike that they were on their side. That is always how mob justice works.
Virtually nobody with any sizable media platform was brave enough to stand up and even question the merits of these accusations, let alone defend Lee. Perhaps there were others, but the only one I can recall vehemently doing so was Michael Tracey in his characteristically elegant and restrained manner, prompting all sorts of media personalities to line up and denounce Michael for having the gall to question Lee’s black accuser. That included many of Lee’s own journalistic colleagues, who actually joined in the public denunciations against him.
Along with a couple of Lee’s allies, I spent countless hours inside The Intercept trying to save Lee’s job, knowing that if he got fired for “racism,” it would end not only his work there but possibly his career altogether. It is difficult to overstate what a climate of terror was ushered into every workplace, institution, and society in general.
Lee was ultimately forced to apologize. That gave The Intercept‘s always-cowardly editors an excuse not to fire him. To this day, I feel a great deal of doubt about the role I played: not publicly defending him so that I would have more weight defending him internally; counseling him that a fake and unjustified apology would, at the very least, prevent him from being fired with a gigantic black mark on his name; not waging a more aggressive war on his behalf, etc.
But the climate that was created and imposed as a result of what AOC and her allies now want to laughingly wave away as “crazy” was no joke. Jobs, reputations, and careers were at stake. Many people unjustly had all of those things taken away from them – destroyed – based solely on the whims of mob justice. People were genuinely terrified of thought crimes, no matter how trivial or well-intentioned. I watched countless 45- to 55-year-old journalists and editors adopt a completely new way of speaking and thinking overnight, out of fear that they would attract the woke mob and lose their jobs with even one false step. People watched their every word, knowing – correctly – that a bloodthirsty mob was on the hunt for even the most unintentional deviations from the newly imposed norm.
It should be noted that AOC was not some bystander during all of this. As she has done for every similar moral panic of the left – the incalculably deranged Russiagate conspiracy theories, the life-destroying and due-process-free #MeToo persecutions, COVID censorship – AOC supported and participated in the most extreme woke excesses because she does not have an iota of courage to resist social and political pressures.
In June 2020, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the growing demands of “Defund the Police” by slashing $1 billion, or about one-sixth of its overall resources, from the NYPD budget. AOC was having none of it. “Defunding the police means defunding the police,” she insisted. That does not mean reducing budgets or shifting around resources, she argued. She wanted the NYPD defunded in full, and nothing short of that would be sufficient.
If AOC has now changed her mind about all of the brand-new woke dogma she vehemently defended and sought to impose, that would be welcome. But actual regret for past mistakes means taking responsibility for them and explaining what went wrong: whether it be support for the Iraq War, the policies that caused the 2008 financial crisis, Russiagate, COVID, etc. At the very least, it requires acknowledging the damage done to people and their lives, rather than minimizing it as just a benign and noble quest for justice that went a little too far.
If someone wants to stand up and say that they went along with and advocated a bunch of “crazy” ideas and demands because they simply got swept up in the hysteria of the moment – as AOC and her allies are now attempting to suggest – then that is a rather serious self-indictment. I can hardly think of a worse trait in a political leader, or a human being of any kind, than a lack of internal fortitude or personal courage to resist moral panics and accompanying demands for full submission by a gathered mob.
Trump Golfs Under Missile Shield As Avenger Guards Bedminster Fairway
President Trump was spotted over the weekend at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, under a notably elevated air-defense posture. An AN/TWQ-1 Avenger positioned near the fairway provided last-line missile defense, indicating that security planners considered a low-altitude airborne attack plausible.
The Avenger’s presence indicates a planned, layered air-defense posture around the president, complemented by F-16 fighter jets overhead and temporary flight restrictions over the course.
The X account POPULAR FRONT posted an image of the Avenger mounted on the back of a Humvee, with President Trump swinging what appears to be an iron.
President Donald Trump was seen golfing at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club with a missile-defense system deployed nearby as F-16s were scrambled to intercept civilian aircraft that entered the temporarily restricted airspace over the area. NORAD said two general aviation aircraft were intercepted and escorted out of the restricted zone while Trump was attending the LIV Golf tournament.
🇺🇸 #US: President Donald Trump was seen golfing at his Bedminster, New Jersey club with a missile-defense system deployed nearby, as F-16s were scrambled to intercept civilian aircraft that entered the temporary restricted airspace over the area.
The Avenger provided terminal point defense over the course should a low-flying aircraft, helicopter, larger drone, or potentially a cruise missile penetrate the restricted airspace before fighters could respond.
The deployment supports the view that President Trump’s security team was taking precautions in response to a constantly evolving threat environment, but it should not be taken as evidence that officials had warning of a particular attack.
Wildfires Continue To Rage Across Western US And Canada As Tens Of Thousands Evacuated
Wildfires burning across the western United States and Canada continued to threaten communities Sunday, leaving thousands of residents displaced and others watching closely for possible evacuation orders. While some evacuees waited anxiously to learn whether their homes had survived, firefighters worked to contain several major blazes across the region.
In western Canada, more than 20,000 people were forced to flee communities along Okanagan Lake in British Columbia over the weekend as a fast-moving wildfire destroyed homes and prompted dramatic aircraft rescues. Farther south, crews in eastern Washington continued cleanup and containment work on three wildfires that have burned in the Spokane area for more than a week.
Laurie Allen evacuated her home in Nine Mile Falls, a community north of Spokane, the previous weekend as flames burned nearby. She fled with her husband, dog and two kittens. Although roads into her neighborhood remained closed Sunday, Allen said a friend had told her that her home and several others nearby were still standing, though covered in ash.
“I’ve been here 65 years. It’s never happened,” Allen said. “We didn’t think about anything but grabbing our animals and leaving. But now it’s affected so many of our friends and family around. So it’s pretty dang devastating.”
More Than 20,000 Flee Wildfires in British Columbia
In Canada, residents across the Okanagan Lake region faced rapidly changing conditions as wildfires forced large-scale evacuations, APreports.
Anette Boulet was among those who fled Summerland, a community of about 12,000 people along Okanagan Lake. She and her family left around 4:30 a.m. Saturday as thick smoke surrounded their home and flames approached nearby ridges.
“You couldn’t see barely. It was, it was just dark, and the ridge, the ridge of fire just coming towards you,” Boulet said after evacuating to a center in Penticton.
“There’s no words to express it,” she added. “The fear.”
Later Sunday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said an 80-year-old woman died while attempting to escape the wildfire that prompted evacuations throughout the Okanagan Lake region.
🔥 BRITISH COLUMBIA IS ON FIRE — 20,000+ PEOPLE FORCED TO FLEE
British Columbia has declared a state of emergency as the Bald Range wildfire explodes across southern B.C., forcing more than 20,000 people to evacuate.
In addition to the evacuations in Summerland, the Bald Range fire, first reported Friday evening, forced roughly 8,000 people to leave their homes in and around nearby Peachland. British Columbia declared a state of emergency Saturday as officials mobilized additional resources to respond to the worsening fire conditions.
Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management and community resilience, said Sunday that she had approved British Columbia’s request for federal assistance, including support for shelter and temporary accommodations for displaced residents.
Spokane-Area Fires Leave Communities on Alert
Across the border in Washington state, firefighters continued “mop-up operations” Sunday along containment lines surrounding three wildfires in the Spokane area. None of the fires were expanding, according to the team managing the response, offering some relief after more than a week of destructive fire activity.
Together, the fires have damaged or destroyed about 920 structures, leaving a significant recovery effort ahead for affected communities.
Earlier in the week, a man was arrested and charged with intentionally setting the largest of the three Spokane-area fires.
Residents of Malden, a small rural town about 35 miles south of Spokane, were urged Saturday to evacuate immediately as conditions worsened. By Sunday, however, officials had lowered the evacuation level, telling residents to remain prepared to leave quickly if conditions changed.
“The wind is fairly calm. The fire is not progressing,” said John Goyke, whose company operates Malden’s water system under contract. “But we’re using social media and Facebook to keep in contact with everyone.”
Goyke, who also serves as mayor of nearby Rosalia, said Malden residents had been asked to conserve water so supplies would remain available for firefighting operations. Malden’s fire department has also been trucking additional water in from Rosalia.
The renewed wildfire threat carries particular significance for Malden. In 2020, a wildfire destroyed much of the town, including its fire station, post office, city hall and library.
Two Pilots Killed in Utah Wildfire Helicopter Crash
Elsewhere in the West, the wildfire response turned deadly in Utah, where two helicopter pilots were killed when their aircraft crashed Friday morning while they were fighting a fire in Fishlake National Forest. Emergency crews were unable to reach the crash site until Saturday because of active fire conditions and the steep, rugged terrain. Officials confirmed the pilots’ deaths after reaching the area.
Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis said responders encountered both the burning wreckage and an advancing wildfire when they arrived.
“When we first got there we could see two different plumes of smoke, one from the crash site, one from an active fire coming towards us,” Curtis said.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the helicopter crash.
As firefighters across the U.S. and Canada continue working to contain the blazes, displaced residents face an uncertain return home and communities already scarred by previous wildfires are once again confronting the growing dangers posed by fast-moving fires.
One of the great ironies of American politics is that every movement swears it’s against censorship – right up until it has enough power to do some censoring of its own. It’s almost adorable.
For years, conservatives rightly criticized Big Tech, universities, corporate America, and legacy media for suppressing dissenting viewpoints. We argued that free speech wasn’t merely a constitutional protection; it was a moral principle. We insisted that bad ideas should be defeated in the marketplace of ideas rather than buried beneath bureaucratic decrees or algorithmic exile.
I agreed then. I still do. Which is why I’m beginning to ask a question that makes some people on my own side a little uncomfortable.
What happens when conservatives become just as tempted to use institutional power to silence people they don’t like? As a Black conservative, I’ve learned that free speech is one of those principles everybody loves until somebody they can’t stand starts talking. Then suddenly the Constitution comes with an asterisk.
Let’s be honest. Every political tribe has its favorite form of censorship.
The Left often dresses it up in the language of safety, inclusion, misinformation, or protecting vulnerable communities. The Right is increasingly tempted to justify it in the language of patriotism, protecting children, combating ideological indoctrination, or preserving public morality. Different vocabulary. Same temptation.
Power has an uncanny ability to convince us that our restrictions are simply common sense while everyone else’s are authoritarian. History suggests otherwise.
Free speech has never been tested by agreeable people saying agreeable things. It has always been tested by offensive people saying offensive things. Defending speech you already like requires no courage whatsoever. Defending speech you find irritating, misguided, or even insulting is where constitutional principles stop being bumper stickers and become convictions.
That’s why I find myself increasingly skeptical whenever anyone begins a sentence with, “I’m all for free speech, but…” I’ve learned that whatever follows “but” usually involves someone deciding which opinions deserve oxygen and which should be quietly escorted out the back door.
The First Amendment doesn’t ask whether an idea is popular. It doesn’t ask whether it polls well. It certainly doesn’t ask whether it might ruin someone’s afternoon on social media.
It simply assumes that a free people are capable of hearing competing ideas without requiring the government – or increasingly, private institutions acting under political pressure – to function as national hall monitors.
Some readers will immediately object. “But George, some speech really is dangerous.” Of course it can be.
Threats, criminal conspiracies, defamation, and direct incitement have long occupied well-established legal categories. That’s not the debate. The debate is whether we have quietly expanded the definition of “harm” until it now includes disagreement itself.
Somewhere along the way, Americans stopped saying, “I think you’re wrong.” Instead, we started saying, “You shouldn’t be allowed to say that.” Those are radically different civilizations.
One believes truth emerges through debate. The other believes truth must be protected from debate.
As conservatives, we should be especially careful here. For decades, we were the ones demanding viewpoint diversity on college campuses. We objected when bureaucrats decided which speakers were acceptable. We criticized technology companies for selectively enforcing their rules. We warned that concentrated cultural power eventually becomes political power.
Were we making a timeless argument? Or were we merely complaining because we happened to be losing? That’s the question history will eventually answer.
Winning elections should never cause us to abandon the principles that helped us win the argument in the first place.
One of the blessings – and frustrations – of being a Black conservative is that I don’t fit comfortably inside anyone’s political script. I’ve been called a sellout by people who think race should determine ideology. I’ve also occasionally been viewed with suspicion by people who assume conservatism requires intellectual conformity.
Both misunderstand what attracted me to conservatism. It wasn’t tribalism. It was liberty.
Liberty means accepting that people will often say things that offend us. Liberty means resisting the seductive belief that if we could only silence enough bad opinions, society would finally become peaceful. It never works that way.
Every censorship regime begins by promising to target only the truly dangerous voices. Eventually the definition of “dangerous” expands to include inconvenient voices, unpopular voices, and finally independent voices. That’s not a partisan observation. That’s human nature.
Politics changes. Power changes hands. The precedents you create today will almost certainly be used by your opponents tomorrow. Conservatives above all people should understand that.
Social media has only accelerated the problem. Every controversy now comes with an online firing squad. We don’t simply disagree anymore – we organize campaigns, demand apologies, contact employers, and measure victory by whether someone’s life has been sufficiently detonated before dinner.
Apparently we’ve replaced “I disagree” with “unsubscribe from his existence.” That’s not justice. That’s vengeance wearing business casual.
The Founders understood something we often forget. Freedom is messy. A republic is noisy. Open societies produce arguments, uncomfortable conversations, and occasionally spectacularly bad opinions.
The alternative isn’t harmony. It’s permission. Permission for whoever happens to hold power to decide which ideas deserve daylight. That bargain has never ended well.
Conservatives don’t strengthen their case by becoming more efficient censors than progressives. We strengthen it by demonstrating that our commitment to liberty survives even when liberty protects people we profoundly disagree with.
Otherwise, we’re not defending free speech. We’re simply negotiating whose turn it is to do the censoring. And that’s not conservatism. That’s just tribalism with better branding.
Dramatic Footage: Chinese Long March-7A Rocket Explodes Shortly After Liftoff
In the intensifying race to dominate the next frontier, the space economy, China’s gap with the US may have widened after one of Beijing’s new-generation Long March rockets exploded shortly after launch earlier today. This is great news for America’s commercial and national-security space ambitions.
The South China Morning Post reports that the 60-meter rocket, which launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island late Monday, erupted into a fireball less than 90 seconds into the flight.
SCMP noted:
Space observers suggested a major anomaly may have triggered the rocket’s flight-termination system, destroying the vehicle. Both the rocket and satellite were lost over the South China Sea.
State news agency Xinhua confirmed the failure about three hours after the launch, saying the rocket had experienced an “anomaly during flight” and that the mission had failed. It said the cause was under investigation.
Here’s the footage:
The Long March 7A suffered its second launch failure a few hours ago when it explosively concluded its mission from Wenchang, reportedly carrying ChinaSat-4B
China recently landed the first-stage booster of its Long March 10B rocket on a floating barge for the first time, a major milestone for Beijing. But SpaceX accomplished the same feat a decade ago, highlighting just how much catching up China still has to do.
SpaceX dominated global rocket launches during the first quarter, extending America’s lead in the space economy while outperforming not only rival companies but also entire nation-states.
The FBI worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on the recent disclosure by President Donald Trump on foreign influence on U.S. elections, agency director Kash Patel said.
During an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” aired on Aug. 8, Patel said the three agencies worked as partners, but the FBI played a smaller role, while DHS and ODNI had the technical capabilities and a remit focused more on overseas incidents involving U.S. election infrastructure.
“We shared our information. We made a lot of our information public through President Trump’s speech the other week,” Patel said.
Patel said the three agencies acted at Trump’s direction.
“I think the president was right to go to the nation and the world and put forth this information, but it was only possible because the president directed us to declassify and divulge this information to the American public and the world,” Patel said.
In a primetime address on July 16, Trump announced the declassification of documents that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information.
“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare,” Trump said during the address.
Trump did not explicitly claim that China altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
China began targeting him in an operation in 2018, Trump said, citing a CIA report that described an effort to “reduce [his] votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.”
The CIA report found “China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself,” according to Trump.
In 2019, China had a strategy focusing on “undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president,” Trump added.
“They wanted to just make [it] sound like your president wasn’t so hot when actually your president has done a great job,” he said.
That strategy included influencing U.S. business leaders to turn against him, Trump said.
“The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could,” he said.
The declassified documents included a CIA wire memo from July 2000, which included information from the FBI, showing that the Chinese Communist Party was targeting “personal e-mail accounts of senior US leadership, including officials in the Executive Office of the President and high-ranking officials in multiple Executive Branch organizations, Congress, and the federal judiciary.”
Separately, a National Intelligence Council report found that “Beijing has expanded its cyber collection of data related to the 2020 US elections by carrying out opportunistic intrusions against US private-sector entities in efforts to collect information on US political candidates, campaigns, donors, and voter data.”
Trump’s claim on China’s election interference by targeting American voter registration data was backed by the heads of the ODNI, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a White House fact sheet released on July 30.
In September 2025, Patel discussed China’s threats extensively during a hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary.
China “presents the greatest and most sophisticated cyber threat to U.S. public safety and national security,” Patel said, according to written testimony.
He singled out one particular Chinese threat group, “Salt Typhoon,” which had breached the networks of multiple telecommunications companies in the United States and elsewhere.
Patel also noted in his written testimony that all 55 of his agency’s field offices had active Chinese counterintelligence investigations.
“This calendar year alone, as I was mentioning, our counterintelligence operations and cases brought against the Chinese are up by something like 40 percent,” Patel told House lawmakers at the hearing.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has deliberately created an environment that abuses global interconnectedness and encourages intellectual property theft, using human intelligence officers, corrupt corporate insiders, and reckless and indiscriminate cyber intrusions,” Patel stated in his written testimony.
Watch the full ‘American Thought Leaders’ interview below, covering a great deal more than election integrity:
00:00 Intro
1:31 World Cup Security
4:17 Scam Centers & Operation Blackout
6:55 Pig Butchering Scams
11:25 Slaves in Scam Compounds
13:19 Why’s the FBI Working with China’s MPS?
19:00 How Does the FBI Get the Money Back?
23:41 Advice to Viewers on Scams
26:00 Chinese Interference in 2020 Election
28:26 Removal of Spies
31:42 CCP Targeting Americans with Security Clearances
35:26 Tackling Transnational Repression
38:40 Terrorist Attacks Thwarted
41:26 What is the Director’s Strategic Information Center (DSIC)?
44:33 Major Reforms at the FBI
Trump Shares Hillary Clinton Op-Ed Backing His Gaza Plan In Face Of Bibi Rejection
President Trump is currently experiencing a rare moment of his plans for the Mideast region being rejected on multiple fronts – even among allies, apparently. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over weekend rejected a US-backed 15-point peace plan for Gaza, which marks a rare and very glaring public break with Trump.
Netanyahu was surprisingly up front in acknowledging the complete break in policy vision from the White House. “Contrary to all those who preach to us, we do what must be done for Israel’s security and we can and will stand our ground even against our best friends when necessary,” he stated.
He said he was confronting a “wave of rumors about Israeli weakness and Israeli withdrawals on all fronts” and made clear that Israel won’t succumb to ongoing US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran – unless Israel decides it is in its security interest.
Netanyahu was explicit on rejecting Trump’s Board of Peace plan which was presented in July:
“Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday, speaking in Hebrew. “The IDF will not make any withdrawal until Hamas is truly disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and citizens.”
A Hamas statement in the meantime stood by the plan. It said the group “affirms its commitment” to Trump’s 15-point plan for the second phase of the ceasefire agreement with Israel, “and establishing a clear timetable for their implementation.”
“We call upon the mediators, guarantors, and the Peace Council to assume their responsibilities, ensure the commitment of all parties to what has been agreed upon, and prevent any violations or breaches that could disrupt the implementation process or undermine the ceasefire agreement,” the Hamas statement added.
Even CNN has picked up on the fact that Netanyahu – whose government receives literally billions of dollars in US funds and arms each year – has been unusually blunt in his rejection of Trump’s big initiative:
On tricky issues, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s preference is to kick the can down the road. If he must take a position, he likes to include a twist of ambiguity, some wiggle room, just in case things get hairy later. Not this time, though, on the subject of US President Donald Trump’s roadmap for progressing the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
While the Israeli leader risks facing the wrath of Trump, it has been about a full day since reports of the glaring Israeli rebuff have emerged, and yet there’s been no immediate Truth Social diatribe or statement calling out Bibi.
And now the Middle East strategy “Ls” are piling up, the same outlet observes:
The US president – more desperate than ever for a win, as his Iran folly looks increasingly like handing him an L – reinvested in Gaza 10 days ago, declaring that his Board of Peace had reached a “historic agreement” with Hamas for its complete disarmament. The board’s top envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, went on to explain carefully on X that decommissioning would need to take place “in lockstep” with Israeli troop withdrawal, suggesting a phased process by which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would pull back in stages from positions inside Gaza, as Hamas turned in its arms.
It could be that Netanyahu too sees Trump up against the ropes when it comes to the Middle East, and views this as an opportunity to assert Israel’s ‘least-bad option’.
Again, Trump has remained quiet on the Netanyahu issue, but surprisingly presented‘validation’ from an unlikely source – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said she supported his Gaza plan.
She argued in an op-ed that there is no alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan, and that she’s still able to acknowledge this despite being an “implacable opponent of the president”.
Perhaps Trump might be telling himself that Netanyahu’s public betrayal is just an “election thing” and so he must speak primarily to domestic voters, given the country’s general election is just under 12 weeks away.
“Kill them. Murder them. Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.”
– Hasan Piker
You can’t overstate the power of ideas, especially bad ideas, and super-especially bad ideas that are really just manifestations of emotional states such as envy, vengefulness, enmity, sloth, and greed. Did somebody say communism? A lot of people are saying it lately. This garbage barge of management nostrums for the ills of advanced industrial society has steamed back into New York Harbor and is busy now dispatching its agents across the land.
It’s yet another youth movement in an America which cultivates them at regular intervals associated with Fourth Turnings. I happened to be in college during the last one, the hippie rebellion of the late 1960s. It was mostly adolescent sexual energy tinged with resentment over the military draft and the war that went with it, plus a lot of marketing opportunities for music and clothing.
The US economy back then was still a roaring industrial engine. The comforts of that bygone time are legendary. You could easily support a family on an assembly-line job. College was cheap as hell — my State U charged about $500-a-year for tuition and room-and-board. (Imagine that!) You could hide-out from the draft there, too. The new birth-control pill turned campus life into a non-stop orgy with classes for R & R. Is it any wonder that the hippies morphed so easily into hedge funders?
This time around it’s pretty ugly for the youth demographic. College for them turned out to be a life-altering swindle, burdening the young with unpayable loans that can’t even be escaped via bankruptcy. Even the sex angle was ruined by vindictive feminism and the trans fad. Work is scarce and it’s nearly impossible to make a living at it, that is, pay for food and a roof over your head (and, ugh, those loan repayments!). Plus, work is mostly found only in meaningless service to despotic corporations. The most enterprising might land a job in an NGO, but the work there is “activism,” which is pretend work, productive of nothing but the acting-out of grievances.
These grievances, it has been noted by many high-toned observers like VDH, are real enough to provoke a desperate reach for remedies, and communism is a ready-made portfolio for all that. In the 1960s, we still had the reverberations of the civil rights crusade setting a basic moral tone for hippiedom. But fifty years later, that has all mutated into a race-and-gender hustle that adds so much piquancy to the recycled communist agenda. (Note that a hustle is a low-grade racket, and a racket is an effort to get something for nothing.)
So, today’s communist program is not just a war against the injustices of capital, but a jihad against the Western Civ horse that capital rode in on, and most particularly the white horseman up in the saddle.
Kotkin’s explanation of why socialism is attractive to the young and the intellectuals feels very accurate, especially what he says about the young in the first thirty seconds. https://t.co/JvuDLE2pwS
Hasan Piker, the present guru and demigod of the movement, put it pretty plainly in a Twitch-stream a few years back when he was rising to stardom on Uncle Cenk Uygur’s Young Turk Network.
“We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna fuck your sisters and then your daughters — we’re here to destroy the White race, bitch.”
Piker is also a leading amplifier of Jew-hatred and other calumnies such as the USA “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. Apropos of our action in Iran, Piker quipped, American soldiers should be shot at like cattle (link).
Piker is rumored to have earned over $6-million on Twitch. He’s quite tall (6’4”) ripped, and a snappy dresser, often sporting old-fashioned sport-jackets with a necktie (dress for success?) and is probably catnip to the cat ladies of Gen Z, who comprise the bulk of the activist corps of the rising Gen Z Democratic Socialists – as the communists have styled themselves to avoid stimulating any action around the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844), which categorizes the Communist Party per se as “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”
The dapper Hasan Piker, dressed for success
Altogether, Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists pose quite a vexing problem for the pathetic, old, square, bloviating chuds in the Democratic Party of the Chuck Schumer / Cory Booker ilk. Other bloggers (e.g., Jeff Childers at Coffee & Covid) have observed that Democratic Socialism is the monster that the Dems have been working on sedulously for more than a decade in their Frankenstein lab of Gramscian cultural overthrow. The monster has escaped and is now out on the highways and in the hedges terrorizing the public.
You are surely aware that the entire regular agenda of the Democratic Party has for some time been patently insane. They are still wasting the nation’s patience with debates over the self-evident idiocy of men in women’s sports, resistance to the deportation of illegal immigrants, and their obviously evil opposition to voter ID. Communism is just the icing on that fruitcake. The recent primary election victories of such prodigies as Abdul El-Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, along with the ongoing capers of Mayor Zohran Mamdani pretending to govern New York City, must be giving the old guard the vapors.
And yet, the most pathetic actual commie among them, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Jewish, Israel-hating alte kocker, abides and even thrives in his new role as Godfather to this hatch of larval communist youth. This is Bernie’s revenge on the party that robbed him of two presidential nominations.
He’s doing what all good Jacobins do — what they live for! He has sentenced his old comrades of the DNC to death. He’s stuffing his old enemies into the tumbrel and carting them off to the public square for execution.
They can see it coming and it’s giving them the heebie-jeebies.
And finally, of course, the Mamdanis and El-Sayeds and their spawn will come for Bernie, too, leaving only AOC in the ensanguinated ruins to become America’s Eva Perón.
