- US Expands Nord Stream 2 Sanctions As Germany Vows Pipeline Completion "Not If, But When"
US Expands Nord Stream 2 Sanctions As Germany Vows Pipeline Completion “Not If, But When”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/21/2020 – 02:45Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long vowed he’ll “do everything” to stop Nord Stream 2, last month indicating the US is building a coalition of countries to fight against it, given Washington sees it as a massive compromise to Russia, giving it leverage over Europe as well as Ukraine.
“From the US point of view, Nord Stream 2 endangers Europe because it makes it dependent on Russian gas and endangers Ukraine – which in my opinion worries many Germans,” Pompeo said weeks ago.
On Tuesday the State Department expanded US sanctions targeting companies working on the Russia to Germany gas pipeline. While sanctions already target the specific European companies and their executives directly at work on the project, they’ve now been extended to include sanctions even on firms upgrading, servicing, or installing equipment on the ships laying the pipeline.
Image via DW/DPA Here’s the relevant section on the State Department’s updated NS2 sanctions webpage:
“Such activities subject to sanctions pursuant to PEESA (the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act of 2019) or other authorities may include, but are not limited to, providing services or facilities for upgrades or installation of equipment for those vessels, or funding for upgrades or installation of equipment for those vessels.”
There remain some exceptions, however, out of environmental concerns. The State Department says the sanctions “will not apply to persons providing provisions to a relevant vessel if such provisions are intended for the safety and care of the crew aboard the vessel, the protection of human life aboard the vessel, or the maintenance of the vessel to avoid any environmental or other significant damage.”
Likely this would be the loophole any such company put on notice over the new sanctions will use to evade punishment, given any repair or upgrade to a ship could be argued necessary over future “safety” and “environmental” concerns.
Though Washington in a sense has won particular “battles” on the NS2 front, Russia and Germany have indicated the US will not win the “war” given that by all appearances the pipeline will be pursued to completion.
One major victory for US sanctions was that Swiss pipelay company Allseas had abandoned its central roll in the project in December 2019 under threat of US punitive action. Russian gas giant Gazprom then outfitted its own ships to lay the last 100 miles of the pipeline.
Swiss-Dutch offshore company Allseas pulled out of the project in Dec. 2019. Image source: EPA/EFE Just days ago, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas reaffirmed that the pipeline will indeed be completed. He said at this point project completion is essentially not if but when. He emphasized in comments the only question that remains is precisely “when this will happen”.
He underscored in an indirect shot at the Trump administration: “We make decisions about our energy policy and energy supply here – in Europe.”
- Armenian Forces Use Their Last Chance To Turn Tide Of War With Azerbaijan
Armenian Forces Use Their Last Chance To Turn Tide Of War With Azerbaijan
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/21/2020 – 02:00Submitted by SouthFront,
The Azerbaijani Armed Forces have been developing their advance on Armenian positions in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. On October 19, they captured 13 more villages in the Jabrayil district. The capturing of Soltanli, Amirvarli, Mashanli, Hasanli, Alikeykhanli, Gumlag, Hajili, Goyarchinveysalli, Niyazgullar, Kechal Mammadli, Shahvalli, Haji Ismayilli and Isagli was personally announced by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Early on October 20, Azerbaijani forces also reached the town of Tumas and engaged Armenian units deployed there. Pro-Azerbaijani sources insist that the town already fell into the hands of Baku.
The country’s defense ministry claims that in the recent clashes Azerbaijani forces destroyed a number of enemy troops, at least 2 T-72 tanks, 2 BM-21 “Grad” MLRS, 1 D-30, 1 D-20 gun-howitzers, and 11 auto vehicles.
On October 19, pro-Armenian sources for the first time provided video evidence that they had shot down at least one of the Bayraktar TB2 combat drones operated by the Azerbaijani military and Turkish specialists. Meanwhile, the Armenian Defense Ministry claimed that 5 unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down during the evening of that day only.
According to the Armenian side, the total number of Azerbaijani casualties in the war reached 6,259. 195 UAVs, 16 helicopters, 22 military planes, 566 armoured vehicles and 4 multiple rocket launchers of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan were allegedly destroyed. Yerevan claims that the Armenian forces have repelled two powerful attacks in the northern part of Karabakh, while intense fighting has been ongoing in the south. Nonetheless, Armenian military officials avoid confirming the recent Azerbaijani advances and insist that the recent developments are just a part of modern maneuver warfare. By these claims, the political leadership of Armenia tries to hide that the Azerbaijani advance along the Iranian border faced little resistance.
The Azerbaijani progress was mostly complicated by a limited number of mobile Armenian units, which were avoiding a direct confrontation and focusing on ambushes and mine warfare. According to reports, the Armenian side is now reinforcing its positions in the area of the Akari River seeking to prevent the further Azerbaijani advance towards the Armenian state border and the Lachin corridor.
On the other hand, the goal of the Azerbaijani-Turkish bloc is to overcome this resistance and to develop the current momentum to reach the Lachin mountain pass thus threatening to cut off the shortest route between Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh. In the event of success, this would predetermine the Azerbaijani victory in the war. Military hostilities are ongoing amid another round of international diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation and return the sides to the negotiating table.President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that they are ready to meet in Moscow. The Azerbaijani leader even said that his country is ready to halt the operation if Armenia demonstrates a constructive approach. Nonetheless, the ‘constructive approach of Armenia’ in the view of Azerbaijan is the full and public surrender of Karabakh. Such an agreement will mark the collapse of the current political leadership of Armenia and is unlikely to be accepted.Therefore, the war will likely continue until the military victory of one of the sides and that side would likely be Azerbaijan.
Baku has already achieved an impressive breakthrough on the frontline if one compares the current situation with local military escalations in the previous years. As to Armenia, it will not likely be able to turn the tide of the conflict if it continues limiting its response to indirect support of forces of the Republic of Artsakh instead of a direct military action to repel the Azerbaijani-Turkish bloc. Clashes of the previous weeks already demonstrated that Baku has an upper hand in the current format of the military standoff in Karabakh. Therefore, if Yerevan really wants to change something, it should change the rules of the game even if this would create additional risks for Armenia itself.
- Former MI6 Spy Alastair Crooke: "The Two Undersides To Geo-Politics"
Former MI6 Spy Alastair Crooke: “The Two Undersides To Geo-Politics”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/21/2020 – 00:05Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
At the explicit level, today’s geo-political struggle is about the U.S. maintaining its primacy of power – with financial power being a subset to this political power. Carl Schmitt, whose thoughts had such influence on Leo Strauss and U.S. thinking generally, advocated that those who have power should ‘use it, or lose it’. The prime object of politics therefore being to preserve one’s ‘social existence’.
But at the underside, Tech de-coupling from China is one implicit aspect to such a strategy (camouflaged beneath the catch-phrase of recovering ‘stolen’ U.S. jobs and intellectual property): The prize that America truly seeks is to seize for itself over the coming decades, all global standards in leading-edge technology, and to deny them to China.
Such standards might seem obscure, but they are a crucial element of modern technology. If the cold war was dominated by a race to build the most nuclear weapons, today’s contest between the U.S. and China — as well as vis à vis the EU — will at least partly be played out through a struggle to control the bureaucratic rule-setting that lies behind the most important industries of the age. And those standards are up for grabs.
China Central Television (CCTV) building in the Beijing Central Business District China has long been strategically positioning itself to fight this ‘war’ of tech standards (i.e. China Standards 2035, a blueprint for cyber and data governance).
The same argument is true for supply-chains which are now at the center of a tug-of-war that has major implications for geopolitics. Dis-entangling the rhizome of supply chains built-up through decades of globalism is difficult and onerous: The multinational companies which sell into the Chinese market may have little choice but to try to stay put. However, if de-coupling as a key U.S. foreign policy persists, then products ranging from computer servers, to Apple iPhones, could end up having two separate supply chains — one for the Chinese market, and one for much of the rest of the world. It will be more costly and less efficient, but this is the way that politics is pushing (at least for now).
So where are we in this de-coupling struggle? Until now, it is a mixed bag. The U.S. has focused on de-coupling in certain leading-edge technologies (that also have dual civil-defence potential). But Washington and Beijing have stayed clear of financial de-coupling (so far) – as Wall Street does not want to lose a $5 trillion two-way financial trade.
Some years back, when travelling across Europe, passengers commonly had to exit one train on reaching the frontier, and cross to a different train and carriages, beyond the border. This still exists. The railways were operating on entirely different gauge rail tracks. We have not reached that point in Tech. But the future is likely to become more complex – and costly – should Europe, the U.S. and China adopt different protocols for 5G. The latter, with its low latency, enables diverse strands of data to be mined, and modelled, in near real time (a game-changing factor for missile targeting and aerial defense systems, where every millisecond counts).
It is possible then, that 5G may be divided into two competing stacks to reflect different U.S. and Chinese standards? For outsiders to compete, they may find it necessary to manufacture separate equipment for these different protocols. Some measure of division is also possible in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other areas where U.S.-China rivalry is intense. For now, Russia and Iranian infrastructure is fully compatible with China. The West is not yet a ‘separate gauge’; it can still work with Iran and Russia, but dual-functionality in the tech sphere nevertheless will cost — and probably require careful legal workabouts, to avoid legal or regulatory sanction.
And just to be clear, the battle for influence over Tech standards is separate to the ‘Regulatory War’ in which the Data, AI and the Regulatory eco-spheres are being ‘Balkanised’. Europe is almost non-existent in the Cloud analytics sphere, but is trying to catch-up quick. It must. China is so far ahead that Europe has little choice but to bulldoze (strong arm) its way into this space i.e. by ‘regulating’ U.S. Cloud business (already under U.S. anti-trust threat), toward Europe.
Cloud companies provide their clients with data storage, but also with sophisticated tools for analyzing, modelling, and understanding the vast data sets found in the cloud. The sheer size of modern data sets has sparked an explosion of new techniques for extracting information from them. These new techniques are made possible by ongoing advances in computer processing power and speed, as well as by aggregating computer power to improve performance (known as High-Performance Computing, or HPC).
Many of these techniques (‘data mining’, ‘machine learning’, or AI) refer to the process of extracting information from raw data. Machine learning refers to the use of specific algorithms to identify patterns in raw data and represent the data as a model. Such models can then be used to make inferences about new data sets or guide decision-making. The term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) usually refers to a network of connected computing and physical devices that can automatically generate and transmit data about physical systems. The ‘nervous system’ serving such ‘body messaging’ will be 5G.
The EU is already regulating Big Data; it intends to regulate the U.S. Cloud platforms; and is looking at setting EU protocols for algorithms (to reflect EU social objectives and ‘liberal values’).
All those companies that are dependent on Cloud analytics and machine training, therefore, will be affected by this Regulatory fragmentation into distinct spheres. Companies, of course, need these capabilities to run robotics and complex mechanical systems effectively – and to reduce costs. Analytics has been responsible for huge productivity gains. Accenture estimate that analytics alone could generate as much as $425 billion in added-value, by 2025, for the oil and gas industry.
It was the U.S. that triggered this round of de-coupling, but the consequence to that initial decision is that it has prompted China to respond with its own de-coupling from the U.S. at the leading-edge of Tech. China’s intent now is not simply to refine and improve on existing technology, but to leapfrog existing knowledge into a new tech realm (such as by discovering and using new materials that overcome present limits to microprocessor evolution).
They may just succeed – over next the three years or so – given the huge resources China is diverting to this task (i.e. with microprocessors). This could alter the whole tech calculus – awarding China primacy over most key areas of cutting-edge technology. States will not easily be able ignore this fact – whether or not they profess to ‘like’ China, or not.
Which brings us to the second ‘underside’ to this geopolitical struggle. So far, both the U.S. and China have kept finance largely separate to the main de-coupling. But a substantive change may be underway: The U.S. and several other states are toying with Central Bank digital currencies, and FinTech internet platforms are beginning to displace traditional banking institutions. Pepe Escobar notes:
Donald Trump is mulling restrictions on Ant’s Alipay and other Chinese digital payment platforms like Tencent Holdings…and, as with Huawei, Trump’s team is alleging Ant’s digital payment platforms threaten U.S. national security. More likely is that Trump is concerned Ant threatens the global banking advantage the U.S. has long taken for granted.
Team Trump is not alone. U.S. hedge fund manager Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital argues Ant and Tencent are “clear and present dangers to U.S. national security that now threaten us more than any other issue.”
Bass estimates that the Chinese Communist Party is pushing its yuan digital payment system on an estimated 62% of the world’s population in ways that threaten Washington’s influence. What started as a mere online payment service has since veered sharply into a financial services juggernaut. It’s becoming a powerhouse in loans, insurance policies, mutual funds, travel booking and all the cross-platform synergies for sales and economies of scale.
At the moment, well over 90% of Alipay users are using the app for more than just payments. This is “effectively creating a closed-loop ecosystem where there is no need for money to leave the wallet ecosystem,” says analyst Harshita Rawat of Bernstein Research.
Rawat notes that Ant has “used its payment service as a user acquisition engine for building broader financial services features.” That includes finding ways to cross-pollinate Ant’s ambitions to be China’s financial services mall with Alibaba’s dominant online bazaar…
Given that many Chinese already downloaded the Alipay app, CEO Eric Jing is angling to export its model overseas. It’s collaborating with nine start-ups around the region, including GCash in the Philippines and Paytm in India. Ant plans to use the proceeds from its share listing to accelerate the pivot overseas.
The point here is two-fold: China is setting the scene to challenge a fiat dollar, at a sensitive moment of dollar weakness. And secondly, China is placing ‘facts on the ground’ — shaping standards from the bottom up, through widespread overseas adoption of its technology.
Just as Alipay has made huge inroads across Asia, China’s ‘Smart Cities’ project diffuses Chinese standards, precisely because they incorporate so many technologies: Facial recognition systems, big data analysis, 5G telecoms and AI cameras. All represent technologies for which standards remain up for grabs. Thus ‘smart cities’, which automate multiple municipal functions, additionally helps China’s standards drive.
According to research by RWR Advisory, a Washington-based consultancy, Chinese companies have done 116 deals to install ‘smart city’ and ‘safe city’ packages around the world since 2013, with 70 of these taking place in countries that also participate in the Belt and Road Initiative. The main difference between ‘smart’ and ‘safe’ city equipment is that the latter is intended primarily to survey and monitor the population, while the former is primarily aimed at automating municipal functions while also incorporating surveillance functions. Cities in western and southern Europe together have signed up to a total of 25 such ‘smart’ and ‘safe’ projects.
Mark Warner, Democratic Vice-Chair of the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, sees the threat from China in stark terms: Beijing intends to control the next generation of digital infrastructure, he says, and, as it does so, to impose principles ‘that are antithetical to U.S. values’. “Over the last 10 to 15 years, [the U.S.] leadership role has eroded and our leverage to establish standards and protocols reflecting our values has diminished,” Warner laments: “As a result others, but mostly China, have stepped into the void to advance standards and values that advantage the Chinese Communist party”.
All signs point to China wielding more influence over global technological standards. Yet equally certain is that the backlash from Washington is building. Should the U.S. become more confrontational, it could lead China to accelerate a move towards parallel alternatives. This could ultimately result in a bifurcated arena on industrial standards.
- Fire Experts Say Western States Need To Clear Out Mismanaged Forests
Fire Experts Say Western States Need To Clear Out Mismanaged Forests
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 23:45As the West Coast approaches the tail-end of what have been increasingly destructive fire seasons, experts say it’s time to “shift the focus back to managing healthy forests that can better withstand fire,” in what would be a sharp reversal from decades of federal, state and local agencies prioritizing fire suppression over prevention, according to NBC News.
“Fires have always been part of our ecosystem,” said Mike Rogers, a former Angeles National Forest supervisor and board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. “Forest management is a lot like gardening. You have to keep the forest open and thin.”
Federal forest management dates back to the 1870s, when Congress created an office within the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with assessing the quality and conditions of forests. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the birth of the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of public land across the country.
In California, forest management also falls under the purview of the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire. –NBC News
CalFire has spent over $600 million on fire prevention efforts in in less than 10 years, and has ‘removed or felled nearly 2 million dead trees.’ The agency has made efforts to mitigate future fires – setting a goal to treat 500,000 acres of wildland per year using techniques that include slashing, burning, sawing or thinning of trees. Unfortunately, CalFire remains far from meeting their goal.
“It’s an ongoing process,” said spokeswoman Christine McMorrow. “There is always going to be more work.”
“Is it enough? Well, it’s enough for what we’re doing right now, but is that enough to get all the work that needs to be done in one year or five years or 10 years? It’s going to a take lot,” she added.
Cal Fire is steadily receiving injections of money to do what it can to reduce wildfire risk, including better land management and training a new generation of foresters. In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allocate $1 billion over five years to Cal Fire to be used on fire prevention measures. But experts warn that more money is needed.
Long before the country’s founding, Spanish explorers documented wildland fires in California. In 1542, conquistador Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the coast and noticed smoke billowing up from what is now known as the Los Angeles Basin. He called it “la baya de los fumos,” or “the bay of smoke.” –NBC News
The history of fire suppression vs. forest management dates back to at least 1910, when “The Big Burn” destroyed 3 million acres across Idaho, Washington and Montana – killing 85 people in an event which would reshape fire policy in the United States for decades to come.
Now, the US Forest Service has ordered that all wildland fires are to be extinguished as soon as possible, emphasizing suppressing fires by the morning after they begin in what is known as the ‘10 a.m. policy.’
“We have more large trees per acre than we’ve ever had because they have continued to grow, and underneath these large trees are young shrubs that fuel fires in the crown of the trees,” said Mike Rogers. “When a fire starts in there, it’s unstoppable.“
Read the rest of the report here.
- Liberal Education And The Recovery Of Culture
Liberal Education And The Recovery Of Culture
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 23:25Submitted by Roger Kimball of RealClearPolitics,
Politics, as the late Andrew Breitbart once observed, is downstream from culture. In the United States, a primary engine of culture is the educational establishment. Since the late 1960s, it has been anything but an ivory tower, a quiet, semi-cloistered redoubt deliberately subsisting at one remove from partisan passions. On the contrary, the educational establishment—and this goes for primary and secondary education as well as for colleges—has incorporated those partisan passions as part of its raison d’être.
The chief issue is this: should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens—or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question “‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.” Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture” of intellectuals. The goal was rejection, not reflection.
The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics per se but rather the subordinating of intellectual life to non-intellectual—that is, political—imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What Are Universities For?” “is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. . . . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.”
Indeed, it is this failure—a failure to check the colonization of intellectual life by politics—that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is less about the presence of bad politics than about the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.
What has happened to the educational establishment cannot be understood apart from its cultural context—the “long march through the institutions” that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended and whose American lineaments I chronicled in my 2000 book, “The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.” “The Age of Aquarius,” I wrote in the book’s introduction, “did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.”
We have been seeing the results of this dissemination everywhere: in the media; in corporate boardrooms where resolutions deploring “systemic racism” are touted by quivering, virtue-signaling bureaucrats; throughout the federal government, where “workshops” on critical race theory catechize government workers about the evils of “whiteness” and glories of “trans” culture; and nightly on our city streets, where Antifa and the “trained Marxists” of Black Lives Matter rampage under the protection of the First Amendment while endeavoring to destroy the political culture that underwrites such protections.
The stakes are high. Just how high was articulated by the open letter “in defense of American institutions” and published in several internet venues. I was proud to be a signatory of this letter. “Over the next several years,” it began, “the noble sentiments and ideas that gave birth to the United States will either be repudiated or reaffirmed. The fateful choice before us will result either in the death of a grand hope or a recommitment to an extraordinary political experiment whose full flowering we have yet to realize.”
The bottom line is this: Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Undertaking that task is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good. Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do.
We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is candidness and courage, moral virtues in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant.
A welcome example of such candidness and courage was President Trump’s announcement of a 1776 Commission that will seek to “clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms” and “defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character.” Also welcome were his recent executive orders combatting the “malign ideology” of critical race theory, which is “now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country.”
As the president acknowledged, the choice facing us today is not between a “repressive” or “systematically racist” American culture and a multicultural paradise. It is between culture and barbarism. Civilization is not a gift; it is an achievement—a fragile one that needs constantly to be shored up and defended from besiegers inside and out. These are facts that do not easily penetrate the cozy and coddled purlieus of the academy any more than they penetrate the self-satisfied barricades of woke corporate culture. But they are part of the permanent challenge that any civilization must face. We ignore them at our peril.
- South Korea To Acquire 'Suicide Drones' As Tensions In East Asia Surge
South Korea To Acquire ‘Suicide Drones’ As Tensions In East Asia Surge
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 23:05The Second Cold War between the US and China has significant consequences across East Asia, especially on the Korean Peninsula. As a result of the escalating tensions, South Korea announced plans Monday to acquire advanced military hardware to better prepare for future conflict.
Yonhap News Agency, citing South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), said under the second round of the “rapid acquisition” project, it would procure 12 state-of-the-art weapons, worth $22.75 million, such as suicide drones and drones with guns.
“They include light-weight suicide UAVs, drones that fire guns at ground targets, advanced surveillance plus attack drones, multipurpose unmanned vehicles, intelligent anti-jamming censors and a smartphone-based combat command system,” according to DAPA.
Agency officials said they issued a tender notice Monday and will choose the defense companies within the next couple of months to complete the orders; deliveries are expected sometime in the first half of 2021.
DAPA launched the rapid acquisition project in May to better prepare its forces for conflict as the modern battlefield continually changes with new technology.
In the first round of the project, the arms procurement agency ordered four kinds of advanced military hardware: two surveillance drones, small unmanned aircraft and portable anti-drone guns.
“We will continue to improve arms procurement procedures to cut red tape and boost efficiency,” DAPA chief Wang Jung-hong said.
South Korea must continue procuring advanced weaponry because President Trump swung a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and has since triggered a Cold War between the US and China.
This also means that US allies, such as Japan and Taiwan, must also modernize their armies – as we’ve seen in recent years, Washington has placed stealth fighter jets in these countries.
- The Rise Of The Corporate Censors: How America Is Drifting Toward The Chinese Model Of Media
The Rise Of The Corporate Censors: How America Is Drifting Toward The Chinese Model Of Media
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 22:45Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the censorship of the Hunter Biden controversy by Facebook and Twitter. The response of the Biden campaign and figures like Rep. Adam Schiff has been to dismiss the story as the likely product of Russian intelligence. Notably however they do not address the underlying emails.
As many of us have written, there is ample reason to suspect foreign intelligence and the FBI is reportedly investigating that possibility. However, that does not mean that the emails are not authentic. Hillary Clinton was hacked by Russia but the emails were still real. It is possible to investigate both those responsible for the laptop’s disclosure and what has been disclosed on the laptop. The censorship by these companies however has magnified concerns in the controversy, particularly with the disclosure of close connections between some company officials and the Biden campaign.
Chinese citizens watched President Xi Jinping deliver an important speech this week not far from Hong Kong. Well, not the whole speech: Xi apparently is ill, and every time he went into coughing spasms, China’s state media cut away so that he would be shown only in perfect health.
Xi’s coughs came to mind as Twitter and Facebook prevented Americans from being able to read the New York Post’s explosive allegations of influence-peddling by Hunter Biden through their sites. The articles cited material reportedly recovered from a laptop; it purportedly showed requests for Hunter Biden to use his influence on his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, as well as embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden.
Many of us have questioned the sketchy details of how the laptop reportedly was left by Hunter Biden with a nearly blind computer repairman and then revealed just weeks before the presidential election. There are ample reasons to question whether this material was the product of a foreign intelligence operation, which the FBI apparently is investigating.
Yet the funny thing about kompromat – a Russian term for compromising information — is that often it is true. Indeed, it is most damaging and most useful when it is true; otherwise, you deny the allegations and expose the lie. Hunter Biden has yet to deny these were his laptop, his emails, his images. If thousands of emails and images were fabricated, then serious crimes were committed. But if the emails and images are genuine, then the Bidens appear to have lied for years as a raw influence-peddling scheme worth millions stretched from China to Ukraine to Russia. Moreover, these countries likely have had the compromising information all along while the Bidens — and the media — were denying reports of illicit activities.
Either way, this was major news.
The response of Twitter and Facebook, however, was to shut it all down. Major media companies also imposed a virtual blackout on the allegations. It didn’t matter that thousands of emails were available for review or that the Bidens did not directly address the material. It was all declared to be fake news.
The tech companies’ actions are an outrageous example of open censorship and bias. It shows how private companies effectively can become state media working for one party. This, of course, was more serious than deleting coughs, but it was based on the same excuse of “protecting” the public from distractions or distortions. Indeed, it was the realization of political and academic calls that have been building for years.
Democratic leaders from Hillary Clinton to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) have long demanded such private censorship from social media companies, despite objections from some of us in the free speech community; Joe Biden himself demanded that those companies remove President Trump’s statements about voting fraud as fake news. Academics have lined up to support calls for censorship, too. Recently, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods called for Chinese-style internet censorship and declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”
It turns out traditional notions of journalism and a free press are outdated, too, and China again appears to be the model for the future. Recently, Stanford communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser publicly denounced the notion of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters seeking “social justice.” In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He said reporters must embrace the role of “activists” and that it is “hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” Problem solved.
Such views make Twitter and Facebook’s censorship of the Post not simply justified but commendable — regardless of whether the alleged Biden material proves to be authentic. As Twitter buckled under criticism of its actions, it shifted its rationale from combating fake news to barring hacked or stolen information. (Putting aside that the information allegedly came from a laptop, not hacking, this rule would block the public from reviewing any story based on, say, whistleblowers revealing nonpublic information, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. Moreover, Twitter seemingly had no qualms about publishing thousands of stories based on the same type of information about the Trump family or campaign.) Twitter now says it will allow hacked information if not posted by the hacker.
Social media companies have long enjoyed protection, under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, from liability over what users post or share. The reason is that those companies are viewed as neutral platforms, a means for people to sign up to read the views or thoughts of other people. Under Section 230, a company such as Twitter was treated as merely providing the means, not the content. Yet for Twitter to tag tweets with warnings or block tweets altogether is akin to the telephone company cutting into a line to say it doesn’t like what two callers are discussing.
Facebook and Twitter have now made the case against themselves for stripping social media companies of immunity. That would be a huge loss not only to these companies but to free speech as well. We would lose the greatest single advance in free speech via an unregulated internet.
At the same time, we are seeing a rejection of journalistic objectivity in favor of activism. The New York Times apologized for publishing a column by a conservative U.S. senator on using national guardsmen to quell rioting — yet it later published a column by a Chinese official called “Beijing’s enforcer” who is crushing protests in Hong Kong. The media spent years publishing every wacky theory of alleged Trump-Russia collusion; thousands of articles detailed allegations from the Steele dossier, which has been not only discredited but also shown to be based on material from a known Russian agent.
When the Steele dossier was revealed, many of us agreed on the need to investigate because, even if it was the work of foreign intelligence, the underlying kompromat could be true. Today, in contrast, the media is not only dismissing the need to investigate the Biden emails, but ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos didn’t ask Biden about the allegations during a two-hour town hall event on Thursday.
This leaves us with a Zen-like question: If social media giants prevent the sharing of a scandal and the media refuses to cover it, did a scandal ever occur? After all, an allegation is a scandal only if it is damaging. No coverage, no damage, no scandal. Just deleted coughs lost in the ether of a controlled media and internet.
- Showtime At Apollo: Leon Black's Ties With Epstein Reviewed By Private Equity Giant
Showtime At Apollo: Leon Black’s Ties With Epstein Reviewed By Private Equity Giant
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 22:25One week ago, we asked a simple question in response to a NYT report that billionaire Leon Black, one of the brightest financial minds of this generation who is surrounded 24/7 by experts and specialists – and more importantly, his own paid employees – in absolutely every area of finance, paid “suicided” child molester and longtime pal Jeffrey Epstein $50 million after the deceased financier got out of prison for pedophilia.
Why?
Because the provided answer was ridiculous: according to Bloomberg, “For decades billionaire Leon Black turned to Jeffrey Epstein for financial advice.” But why would a billionaire financier need Epstein, who was through and through clueless about any sophisticated areas of finance, need to pay Epstein tens of millions for advice?
Neither did the answer given by Black’s spokeswoman make any sense: Black received “personal trusts and estates planning advice as well as family office philanthropy and investment services” from Epstein between 2012 and 2017. Wait… Black couldn’t get all of that for free from the the world’s biggest private equity company which just so happens he co-founded? Instead, he just had to pay Jeffrey $50 million.
“It is true that I paid Mr Epstein millions of dollars annually for his work,” said Black in a letter responding to the Times report. “It also is worth noting that all of Mr Epstein’s advice was vetted by leading auditors, law firms and other professional advisors” Black added in the process throwing virtually everyone under the bus, and adding that he had ‘once’ picnicked on Epstein’s private island with his family, and that he visited the dead pedophile ‘from time to time’ at his Manhattan townhouse.
Black’s spokeswoman claims the two stopped communicating after a “fee dispute” in 2018, and that Black “deeply regrets having any involvement with him.”
“There has never been an allegation by anyone, including The New York Times, that Mr Black engaged in any wrongdoing or inappropriate conduct,” she added.
That may change very soon, though, because in what may soon become the first major domino to tumble as a result of last year’s Epstein suicide, the WSJ reported that a group of Apollo Global Management independent board members will review Chief Executive Leon Black’s relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
At a regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday morning, Mr. Black requested that the board’s conflict-committee members, which include Michael E. Ducey, A.B. Krongard and Pauline Richards, hire a law firm to examine his business dealings with Mr. Epstein, the people said. The committee interviewed a number of firms and selected Dechert LLP Tuesday afternoon.
Black’s motive is clear: an publicity “effort” to put to rest renewed speculation into the nature of his ties to Epstein. And while that may work, a truly objective committee will ask numerous questions, starting with the one we suggested above: why did Black pay Epstein $50 million? And not only that, but why the various layers of cover – the NYT cited an internal report by Deutsche Bank that showed payments from entities controlled by the private-equity magnate to ones controlled by Mr. Epstein.
We doubt there is a simple answer.
Although the answer may be forthcoming once we get discovery from the pending discovery into what really happened: Black is among those who have received subpoenas in a civil investigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands into Mr. Epstein’s businesses. He has said he intends to cooperate with the inquiry.
And while we are confident the board members will be sympathetic toward Black – the same way that Twitter and Facebook are sympathetic to Hunter Biden – they may want to be careful: private-equity funds are structured in such a way that investors can only vote to pull their money under very specific circumstances, such as if a manager is convicted of a crime. But, as the WSJ notes, some of Apollo’s public-pension-fund investors have expressed concern that the issue may continue to produce negative headlines, the people familiar with the matter said.
In an Oct. 12 letter to Apollo’s investors that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Black said Mr. Epstein served as an adviser to him between 2012 and 2017 and that he was “completely unaware” of Mr. Epstein’s “reprehensible” conduct.
“I deeply regret having had any involvement with him,” Black wrote. This, we do not doubt at all.
- Biden, Corruption, And Ukraine's Election Interference Against Trump
Biden, Corruption, And Ukraine’s Election Interference Against Trump
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 22:05Authored by Thomas Farnan via TheNationalPulse.com,
In 2014, the Obama administration assigned Joe Biden to oversee Ukraine policy. From that position he likely received a portion of the payola his son Hunter extracted from Burisma, one of the country’s largest energy companies, for firing an unfriendly prosecutor.
The political operation, though, was bigger than just a few million dollars funneled to the Biden family. In 2016 Ukraine interfered against Donald Trump in the American presidential election. It did so by launching a false Russian flag operation against the Trump campaign through Fusion GPS, CrowdStrike, and Alexandra Chalupa.
Ukraine later admitted the interference and apologized for it.
After a telephone conversation in which President Trump thanked Ukraine’s leader for investigating this corruption, the head of Obama’s Ukraine policy at the NSC (who had overseen the Chalupa part of the political dirty trick) filed a whistleblower complaint, leading to Trump’s impeachment.
The following is an excerpt from the short ebook, The Russia Lie, that details Ukraine’s election interference against Trump at the behest of the Obama administration.
* * *
Smack dab in the middle of this soupy mix of money, lobbying, and insanity is the country of Ukraine, which sits geographically between Europe and Russia.
The cold-war view was that without Ukraine Russia is an Eastern power, but with Ukraine it challenges Western interests.
Since the 1990s, Ukraine has bounced back and forth between alignment with Russia and the West. Like a child in a bitter divorce, it has become a proxy in the battle between two mismatched parents: the parochial, nationalistic, religious preferences of Putin’s Russia; and the globalism of the EU.
In 2010, pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine, in part due to the services of an American political consultant, Paul Manafort. Politico has called Manafort’s relationship to Yanukovych “a political love connection.”
Powerful forces in the West suspected that Vladimir Putin was putting anti-EU ideas into peoples’ heads – with Manafort’s help.
Therein lies the chewy center of The Russia Lie: Western-intellectuals have a condescending view of the hoi polloi who vote against their globalist projects, regarding the huddled masses as easily manipulated, Pygmalion-like, by smarter people. They assume Putin is playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who reject the EU, because that’s how they see the world.
In 2014, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union. John McCain flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU. McCain reported to the Atlantic Council about his trip. There followed a successful coup d’état, that replaced the pro-Russia government with a Western puppet.
President Obama later told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he had “brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.” The word “brokered” suggests that the Obama administration successfully replaced a government half a world away at the behest of Washington’s smart people.
Under Joe Biden’s oversight, the Obama administration started to work with Ukraine to create disinformation falsely linking Trump to Russia.
Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative, began doing opposition research for the DNC about Trump and Russia in late 2015. The Ukrainian embassy representing the government whose rule President Obama had “brokered” worked closely with Chalupa.
Chalupa’s efforts were so successful in creating a phony Russian cloud around Trump that on October 24, 2016, reporter Michael Isikoff portrayed her work as pivotal in a premature victory lap for the Clinton campaign at Yahoo News.
On January 16, 2016, The Atlantic Council issued a dispatch under the banner headline: “US Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Russia’s Infiltration of European Political Parties.” The lede was concise: “American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed.”
There followed a series of pull quotes from an article that appeared in the The Telegraph, including that “James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence” was investigating whether right wing political movements in Europe were sourced in “Russian meddling.”
The dispatch spoke of “A dossier” that revealed “Russian influence operations” in Europe. This was the first time trippy words like “Russian meddling” and “dossier” would appear together in the American lexicon.
One of the international men of mystery spying on European political parties was none other than the ubiquitous Christopher Steele. A March 5, 2018 piece in The New Yorker about Steele describes the connection:
Even before Steele became involved in the U.S. Presidential campaign, he was convinced that the Kremlin was interfering in Western elections. In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report…. suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and the U.S. had imposed on Russia after its 2014 political and military interference in Ukraine.
At roughly the same time Steele worked on Project Charlemagne, he hired Fusion GPS to do research on Paul Manafort. Glenn Simpson detailed this in his book: “Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort.”
Steele was investigating Putin’s influence in European politics. Manafort had been helpful in electing the pro-Putin candidate in Ukraine, and he started to work for Trump. Steele hired Fusion GPS to investigate Manafort. Then Fusion GPS hired Steele to help them. Cozy, huh?
With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads led to Ukraine. The Atlantic Council’s list of significant contributors includes Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk.
The Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions to an entity that was funneling large amounts to Hunter Biden months after he was discharged from the US Navy for drug use, Burisma, also appears prominently on the Atlantic Council’s donor list.
NY POST STORIES HAVE RECENTLY SHED MORE LIKE ON BIDEN AND UKRAINE
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Western puppet installed in Ukraine, visited the Atlantic Council’s Washington offices to make a speech weeks after the coup.
Pinchuk was also a big donor (between $10 million and $20 million) to the Clinton Foundation. Back in ’15, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative piece, “Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends.” The piece was about how Ukraine was attempting to influence Clinton by making huge donations through Pinchuk. Foreign interference, anyone?
In a piece first published on January 11, 2017, headlined “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico reported that Ukraine tried to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election: “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
Ukraine has apologized and admitted its interference.
In the end, Trump was falsely linked to Russia by three distinct items of DNC opposition research, all connected to the Western puppet government in Ukraine: (1) dirt on Paul Manafort; (2) the Steele dossier; and (3) the supposed hack of the DNC computers.
In emails that Fusion GPS’s Nellie Ohr forwarded to her husband Bruce Ohr, Ukrainian officials informed the FBI of the “black ledger” registering off-the-book payments to Manafort. It turned out to be a complete fabrication, but it did serve the purpose of disrupting the Trump campaign within weeks of the election, causing the campaign chairman to resign.
It is plausible to conclude the Steele dossier, like Nellie Ohr’s report about Manafort, was based on disinformation provided by Ukrainians that was passed to Steele by his Fusion GPS researchers. The only source Nellie Ohr has identified in testimony is Ukrainian. An FBI spreadsheet has confirmed that the “Trump orgy” story was sourced to Alexandra Chalupa’s sister.
President Trump would eventually mention “CrowdStrike” (a company connected to Ukraine) and the number they did on the DNC servers to the next President of Ukraine, a comedian who was elected by Ukrainians in 2019 partly as a protest to Western meddling in their country.
Trump was impeached for discussing the Obama administration’s corruption in Ukraine based on a “whistleblower complaint” from a bureaucrat who ran the Ukraine desk at the NSC and, as reported by Paul Sperry, “worked on Ukrainian policy issues for Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama’s ‘point man’ for Ukraine.”
A less biased media would have identified the impeachment for what it was: A brazen attempt to bury Joe Biden’s Ukraine corruption.
In the final analysis, the 2016 election was not influenced by Russian disinformation no matter how the FBI continues to cover for the plotters by shrouding embarrassing revelations with phony Russian intrigue.
No, it was Ukrainian disinformation (as Politico reported in 2017 and Ukraine has admitted) conducted under the tutelage of the Obama administration and its overseer for the country, Joe Biden.
* * *
Read the rest of the story in the short ebook, The Russia Lie, available for purchase here for $5.
- Watch: Atlanta Police Use Drone To Arrest Murder Suspect
Watch: Atlanta Police Use Drone To Arrest Murder Suspect
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 21:45Detectives with the Atlanta Police Department’s (APD) homicide unit used a drone to arrest a man suspected in the shooting death of Thomas Jefferson Byrd, an actor who appeared in several flicks directed by Spike Lee. The video of the incident, filmed from the drone’s point of view, is dystopic and outlines law enforcement’s increasing use of drones.
APD published the dramatic video footage on Facebook on Friday (Oct. 16). The law enforcement’s Facebook page wrote that homicide detectives used “Crime Stoppers tips and drone technology” to arrest Byrd.”
Homicide detectives, following up on evidence and tips from citizens, identified a suspect in the shooting death of Thomas Jefferson Byrd, who was killed on Oct. 3.
On Oct. 14, 2020, warrants for the arrest of 30-year-old Antonio Demetrice Rhynes of Atlanta for Felony Murder were issued and investigators from the APD Fugitive Unit began working to arrest Rhynes. In the early morning of Friday, Oct. 16, 2020, the Fugitive Unit, in coordination with APD SWAT Officers, arrested Rhynes at Royal Oaks Apartments 3540 North Camp Creek Parkway. The suspect was taken to the Fulton County Jail. -Facebook
Here’s the video of the incident, showing the drone entering the suspect’s apartment after the entrance door appeared to be forcibly opened. About 30 seconds after the drone surveils the apartment’s common area and kitchen, Byrd appears from a back bedroom with his hands in the air.
“The Atlanta Police Department is proud of the diligent efforts of the Homicide Unit in identifying the suspect in this case and for the skilled and professional work done by the Fugitive and SWAT Units to take Rhynes into custody without incident,” APD continued to say in the Facebook post. “This arrest reflects highly on the men and women of the Atlanta Police Department and represents the highest standards of policing.”
Spike Lee recently announced the death of Byrd, writing on his Instagram:
“I’m So Sad To Announce The Tragic Murder Of Our Beloved Brother Thomas Jefferson Byrd Last Night In Atlanta, Georgia … May We All Wish Condolences And Blessings To His Family. Rest In Peace Brother Byrd.”
While APD’s drone appears to be for surveillance purposes only, it’s only a matter of time before drones like these become weaponized.
- IMF Promotes A New 'Bretton Woods Moment' With Gender Equality
IMF Promotes A New ‘Bretton Woods Moment’ With Gender Equality
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 21:25Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
The economic illiterates at the IMF are back at with another nonsensical idea…
A New Bretton Woods Moment
The IMF has a new goal: a ‘Sisterhood and Brotherhood of Humanity’ to save the world.
At the conclusion of the conference John Maynard Keynes captured the significance of international cooperation as hope for the world. “If we can continue…The brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase”, he said.
The work of the IMF is testament to the values of cooperation and solidarity on which a sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity is built.
Key Ideas of IMF Managing Director
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Today we face a new Bretton Woods “moment. ”We should move towards greater debt transparency and enhanced creditor coordination.
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And policies must be for people —my second imperative.
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Rising inequality and rapid technological change demand strong education and training systems—to increase opportunity and reduce disparities.
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Accelerating gender equality can be a global game-changer. For the most unequal countries, closing the gender gap could increase GDP by an average of 35 percent.
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We can no longer afford to ignore climate change—my third imperative.
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Our research shows that, with the right mix of green investment and higher carbon prices, we can steer toward zero emissions by 2050 and help create millions of new jobs.
Alternate Idea
The current strategies have done nothing but promote wage and income inequality.
The middle class is shrinking and housing is less and less affordable despite interest rates manipulated lower.
These trends accelerated with Nixon ended convertibility of the dollar.
We do not need another “Bretton Woods”. Nor do we need a useless “I favor mom, apple pie, global peace, and sisterhood equality” speech.
We need sound monetary ideas, free trade, the end of fiat currencies, and an end fraudulent fractional reserve lending.
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- Rudy Giuliani Turns Over Alleged Photos Of Underage Girls From Hunter's Hard Drive To Delaware Police
Rudy Giuliani Turns Over Alleged Photos Of Underage Girls From Hunter’s Hard Drive To Delaware Police
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 21:10Things just took a very dark turn in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
While the alleged crack, cronyism, corruption was enough to spark the biggest media suppression in history, and no denials whatsoever from the Biden camp, the bombshell that Rudy Giuliani just dropped, if true, is egregious to say the least (not just with regard Hunter Biden but the law enforcement authorities who have allegedly had this information since before Trump’s impeachment but done nothing about it).
In an interview this evening with Newsmax TV, former NYC Mayor and current attorney to President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani announces he has turned over Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive to Delaware State Police due to pictures of underage girls and inappropriate text messages.
In one of the texts, Hunter Biden allegedly says to his sister-in-law (also his lover) that he face-timed a 14-year-old girl while naked and doing crack – “she told my therapist that I was sexually inappropriate.”
Giuliani adds, “this would be with regard an unnamed 14 year old girl,” adding that “this is supported by numerous pictures of underage girls.”
Watch the full interview below (the above exchange begins around 5:20):
Furthermore, JustTheNews’ John Solomon reports that former New York Police Department commissioner Bernard Kerik joined him when he delivered photographs and text messages to the New Castle County Police Department.
“I told them other details about what appears to be an inappropriate sexual relationship,” he said in an interview. “They told me it would be investigated.”
Law enforcement officials in Delaware told Just the News that Giuliani’s concerns have been forwarded to the state Department of Justice.
“The FBI has had this for a long time,” Giuliani said.
“No indication they did anything about this, so I went to the local police and said, ‘What are you going to do about this?'”
Perhaps the most damning statement from Giuliani, with regard the election, was the former mayor alleging that:
“I will tell you the evidence I gave them states it was reported to Joe Biden. What did he do about it?”
Before this is wholly dismissed as yet more Russian disinformation or ‘Giuliani’ lies, we remind readers that we previously reported that Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop contents included a curious piece of evidence – a photograph of an FBI subpoena which bears the signature of the agency’s top child porn investigator, special agent Joshua Wilson.
FBI agent Wilson’s identity was confirmed by both Western Journal and Business Insider, the latter of which compared his signature to a 2012 criminal complaint and concluded that it “clearly matches the unreversed signature on the subpoena published by the New York Post.”
As BI notes:
It’s unclear whether the FBI employs more than one agent named Joshua Wilson. But the available evidence seems to show **the Joshua Wilson who signed the subpoena for Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the Joshua Wilson who investigates child pornography for the FBI, are the same person**. This raises the possibility, not explored by the Post, that the FBI issued the subpoena for reasons unrelated to Hunter Biden’s role in Ukraine and Burisma.
So why is the FBI’s top child porn lawyer involved in the Hunter Biden laptop case? OANN‘s Chanel Rion says she’s seen the contents of the hard drive, which includes “Drugs, underage obsessions, power deals,” which make “Anthony Weiner’s down under selfie addiction look normal.“
Just saw for myself a behind the scenes look at the #HunterBiden hard drive:
Drugs, underage obsessions, power deals…
Druggie Hunter makes Anthony Weiner’s down under selfie addiction look normal.#BidenCrimeFamily has a lot of apologizing to do.
So does Big Tech. @OANN
— Chanel Rion OAN (@ChanelRion) October 15, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
All of which now makes some sense, given Giuliani’s alleged findings, and raises a stunning question: if there is/was incriminating child porn on Hunter’s computer, what has the FBI been doing about it?
- San Fran's New Normal: Third Walgreens In A Year Is Closing Due To "Rampant Shoplifting"
San Fran’s New Normal: Third Walgreens In A Year Is Closing Due To “Rampant Shoplifting”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 21:05The effects of allowing chaos to prevail in liberal run cities across America might not be obvious to liberals now, but when their cities empty out completely, it’s going to become crystal clear.
Such is the case in San Francisco, where the city’s new normal of shoplifting and chaos has driven another Walgreens pharmacy out of the city.
The move to close the Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy came after “months of seeing its shelves repeatedly cleaned out by brazen shoplifters”, according to the SF Chronicle. The location served “many older people” who lived in the area.
One customer told the paper: “All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters.”
The same customer photographed someone in the store, days prior, “clearing a couple shelves and placing the goods into a backpack”. Because when there’s no police and politicians are afraid to enforce the law – why not?
The penalty for shoplifting is a “nonviolent misdemeanor” that carries a maximum sentence of 6 months. But in most cases, for simple shoplifting, the criminal is simply released with conditions.
The customer, who lives a block away, said: “I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted. The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”
- Mark Zuckerberg Donates Hundreds Of Millions To Increase Voter Turnout In Democratic Strongholds
Mark Zuckerberg Donates Hundreds Of Millions To Increase Voter Turnout In Democratic Strongholds
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 20:45While Facebook has come under fire recently for its algorithm ‘favoring conservatives‘ – which the company says is due to right-wing figures being ‘more engaging,’ founder Mark Zuckerberg has donated millions of dollars in nonprofit grant money to “quadruple the number of voting places and massively grow the number of ballots cast in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia,” according to Just the News‘ John Solomon.
The donations were revealed in documents produced by the city under a federal court order amid a lawsuit brought by the conservative Thomas More Society. According to the documents, city election officials filed an August grant request to the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) in exchange for opening 800 polling locations which could add as many as 800,000 ballots cast in the general election.
The number of promised polling places is more than four times the 190 polling places opened during the city’s pandemic-affected primary earlier this year, and the promised turnout is estimated to be as many as 120,000 voters larger than the 2016 presidential election, which drew about 680,000 voters. About 80% of the vote went to Democrats in 2016 in the city. –Just the News
“The Office of the City Commissioners understands CTCL’s interest in maximizing the number of polling locations and will work to identify over 800 locations,” reads the city’s application seeking $10 million.
Notably, Zuckerberg donated $250 million to CTCL to help local governments cope with the logistics surrounding the November election during the pandemic – and has added another $100 million in recent days.
Thomas More Society lead counsel Phill Kline has raised the question of election interference – arguing that the grant money is wrongly privatizing a civic election function using grants that are targeting mostly Democratic strongholds.
Kline told Just the News that just $289,000 out of $63 million included in CTCL’s top 20 grants have gone to a county Trump won in 2016.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania recently ordered Philadelphia officials to produce records on how it applied for and won its $10 million grant, and the first records produced indicate the city is using the Zuckerberg money to compensate poll workers with “hazard pay,” including election judges who decide ballot integrity issues.
More than $5 million of the grant is allowing the city to buy equipment to process increased mail-in and absentee ballots due to COVID-19, while $3.6 million is being used to open extra “satellite election offices” for early voting and in-person voting on Election Day. –Just the News
“A voter can go to any satellite office and register to vote, if needed, request a mail-in ballot in-person, receive it, vote, and return it all at the same location,” reads the grant application, which includes drop boxes for early voting because “installing at least 15 secure, 24-hour drop boxes at each early vote location will help ensure that voters have some opportunity to return their ballots if it may be too late to send via” mail.
Read the rest of the report here.
- 'I Refuse To Work For This Socialist City Council': Seattle Cops Go Scorched Earth In Exit Interviews
‘I Refuse To Work For This Socialist City Council’: Seattle Cops Go Scorched Earth In Exit Interviews
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 20:25Seattle Police officers leaving the department after a summer of chaos are lashing out at city leadership in their exit interviews, according to KOMO news.
“I refuse to work for this socialist city council and their political agenda. This agenda sacrifices the health and well-being of the officers and ultimately will destroy the fabric of this once fine city,” said one retiring patrol sergeant who had been with the force for over 20 years.
Another officer whose job is ‘up in the air’ said “The council wanting to defund us and gaining ground doing it. Rioters not being charged even when they assault officers.“
Another patrol officer from the East Precinct who was resigning after 6-10 years of service offered this explanation for leaving the department: “Current hostile work environment. In a precinct that is under civil unrest by a small group that is constantly committing multiple felonies and attempting to murder peace officers.”
When followed up with the question: “What did you enjoy least about working at SPD?”
The officer said, “I enjoyed almost every aspect of working with Seattle PD itself. The one thing that I enjoyed the least was the handling of the last three months of riots.” –KOMO news
“It’s ridiculous” said Crimestoppers Director of Law Enforcement, Jim Fuda, who works with SPD. “Just when you think it can’t get more inane, it does.”
When outgoing officers were asked “Would you like to work for SPD again in the future?” some said they would, but only if things change “drastically.”
Another officer said “I highly doubt it. You could pay me twice what you’re paying me now and I would not work for Seattle under this current political mayhem, Marxist collaborations and lack of government and police leadership.”
“It’s an absolute joke and a travesty for the rest of the citizens here in this city, this once beautiful city,” according to Fuda. “Our police department is there to protect all of us and because of the cutbacks and the retirements, who’s going to protect our public safety?”
In July we reported on a mass exodus of police officers from the Seattle PD.
Seattle Police Officer’s Guild VP Rich O’Neill told Q13 FOX that local officials “are allowing certain crimes to go on without accountability.”
“Worker bees on the street, they don’t feel appreciated. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” another source within the Seattle PD told Q13 Fox.
And in August, Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best announced her resignation after the City Council crippled her ability to respond to rioters by banning tear gas, pepper spray and flash bangs. She was also excluded from meetings regarding budget cuts.
- Not All Anarchy Is Created Equal…
Not All Anarchy Is Created Equal…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 20:05Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
About Two Years…
There’s an old joke that runs through hard core libertarian circles that goes something like this.
An overly earnest newbie at a Libertarian Party meeting one night during a lull in a heated discussion of comma placement in a new rule change proposal asks, “What’s the difference between an anarchist and a minarchist?”
The grizzled party chair looks up from his copy of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty and replies, “About two years.”
And I can tell you that that joke, like all good jokes has a nugget of deep truth in it. Embracing Minarchism is the toe-dip into the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). It’s your step tentative step into the scarier world of imagining a world without a state.
And it’s comforting. But it is also rife with contradictions. Those contradictions weigh on a person who is trying to live up to the ideal of the NAP.
If you are truly on an honest journey with yourself to find the right path for your own personal behavior, then rigorously applying the NAP to all facets of your life where you can leads you to shedding the precepts of the necessity of the coercive state to shape and hold society together.
Anarchy in the You ‘Kay?
Because you begin to see the break points, the fault lines of our society in NAP terms. For me, I quickly no longer gave credence to the idea that in order for my individual rights to express themselves I have to submit to a human authority with a granted monopoly power on the use of aggressive force, which the NAP itself stands in opposition to.
At the core of all collectivist thinking is this basic tautology that your rights stem from the negotiation of what others define them as. Only by submitting to a higher human authority over you can you have a hope of retaining any of them, so you need to negotiate them down from the ideal.
Sound complicated? That’s because it is and it’s also insane.
A far simpler interpretation is to state. I have a right to life. I have a claim of ownership of myself. Any abrogation of that claim of ownership and right to it by an aggressor is wrong.
Clear, concise, powerful.
Once you come to that conclusion and are willing to apply it consistently then you can become comfortable with freeing your mind of the need for the state.
But it also comes with responsibility. How do you defend those rights? Will you defend every assault on them no matter how minor?
But here’s better questions, ones Marxist will always throw at you to trip you up…
If you don’t defend yourself against a minor theft, say a pen or a coffee mug, was your right to property taken from you? Do you still have it in practical terms if you can’t defend against it?
The answers are, in order, No and Yes. Just because the property was taken, you always reserve the right to express the right to defend it.
That you choose not to is… wait for it…
… also your right.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
NEIL PEART – FREE WILL
That leads to basic economic questions like: Should you always do so? When is forgiveness or acceptance better than retribution?
Is it worth my precious time to chase down a guy who sold me a fake watch rather than chalk it up to experience and go about my other business?
These are basic questions that form the filter on which to view the world around you and are the basic seeds of the growth from being mired in the inconsistencies of Minarchism and blossoming into the flower of Anarchism.
The Right Stuff
It leads you to conclusions about how to find ways to minimize, not eliminate, coercive forces on your life. That we live in a world circumscribed by tyrants constantly climbing over each other for the power to tyrannize is irrelevant. They may in real terms suppress the expression of your right to life but it most certainly doesn’t negate it.
You can always choose to say, “No.”
Notice to this point I haven’t spent one word talking about implementation or politics. Because implementing these ideas isn’t a system to be imposed. That, itself, is a violation of the NAP, the idea of imposing Anarchy is a Collectivist perversion of the process.
We’re seeing this in the hyper-violent rioting of Antifa and BLM wanting to impose their new system that they call anarchy at the point of a gun and an open-ended wrench.
Anarcho-Capitalism isn’t a political system, it is a behavioral model and a filter with which to view the world. It is a philosophy whose name implies an internal vision of the world we want rather than the world we have.
And that filter is an incredibly powerful tool to analyze the world – especially economics and politics as both are the intersection of behavioral dissonance within a given population.
(I talked with Jay Fratt, The Conservative Hippie, about Anarchism on his podcast over the weekend.)
It is also a personal goal most people share — the best versions of ourselves possible. Where the differences take along the political landscape is the extent to which taking on the responsibility of fixing problems which are not ours leads to violence, i.e. the State and before that revolution.
And that leads to the next two year process, the one of realizing that there is no Utopia where sin is expunged, theft conquered and sociopathy eliminated.
There is only the minimization of these things because people are capable of tremendous generosity and tremendous violence. All of us. At all times.
Sometimes simultaneously.
And the real struggle is coming to terms with that fear. Fear drives Communists to overreach and hubris. AnCaps are driven by the acceptance of their limitations.
Only a culture which reinforces this idea of personal responsibility for one’s actions rather than glorifying thieves as winners will put us back on the right path rather than the wrong one.
Given where we are right now, that’s going to take a heckuva lot more than two years.
* * *
Join my Patreon to help guide you through the next two years. Install the Brave Browser to help build a better information space.
- Feds Confirm Biden Emails Are "Authentic"; '50 Former Intel Officials' Wrong On Russian Disinfo
Feds Confirm Biden Emails Are “Authentic”; ’50 Former Intel Officials’ Wrong On Russian Disinfo
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 20:00Update (1930ET): In yet another death blow to Adam Schiff and the ’50 former senior intelligence officers’ “Russia, Russia, Russia” claims, the FBI and DOJ have told a Fox News producer that they do not believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents are part of a Russian disinformation campaign, confirming that the ‘current’ intelligence community agrees with DNI Ratcliffe’s comments yesterday.
#BREAKING: A senior federal law enforcement official tells @JakeBGibson
1) FBI & DOJ concur w/ Ratcliffe that Hunter Biden’s laptop & the emails in question weren’t part of a Russian disinformation campaign.2) The FBI DOES have possession of the Hunter Biden laptop in question.
— Sean Langille (@SeanLangille) October 20, 2020
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Additionally, a Federal Law Enforcement Official also confirmed to Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that the emails are “authentic”.
MORE: @marthamaccallum is told by a Federal Law Enforcement Official that the emails are “authentic.”
And that the laptop may have not been looked at right away when it was received.— Sean Langille (@SeanLangille) October 20, 2020
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All of which leaves on big gaping unanswered question (that we all know the answer to)…
If the FBI had the laptop all along why did they let Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats impeach @realDonaldTrump for literally being 100% right about Joe Biden?
FBI leadership is corrupted.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 20, 2020
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We look forward to the reporting from other mainstream media news agencies now that federal law enforcement has confirmed this is not a ‘hoax’ and we assume that the NYPost will once again be allowed to tweet since this is now as ‘factual’ as anything thrown at Trump for the last five years.
* * *
Hours before Politico reported the existence of a letter signed by ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ who say the Hunter Biden laptop scandal “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” – providing “no new evidence,” while they remain “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal) conspiracy theory.
According to the Fox News host, he’s seen ‘nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter’s laptop,‘ adding “No one but Hunter could’ve known about or replicated this information.”
“This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating.”
Watch:
TUCKER: “This afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter’s laptop. No one but Hunter could’ve known about or replicated this information. This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating.” pic.twitter.com/cl2ktdmdVc
— August Takala (@AugustTakala) October 17, 2020
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Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter’s signature. When compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than the other, they are a match.
Going back to the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ and their latest Russia fixation, one has to wonder – do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden’s former business associate, Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer his gmail password – revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama administration?
Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese delegation with ties to the CCP – arranged by Hunter’s group, two years they secured a massive investment of Chinese money?
The implications boggle the mind.
Here’s the clarifying sentences from the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ that exposes the utter farce of it all:
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
It would appear these former intel officials are not aware of the current intel official views, confirmed by DNI Ratcliffe yesterday that:
“Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
And then there’s the fact that no one from the Biden campaign has yet to deny any of the ‘facts’ in the emails.
I’ve read a lot of stories about the process through which the Hunter Biden story has been handled inside newsrooms and not one yet that has said these critical words: “they are not true”
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) October 19, 2020
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Perhaps the real question is; what does Chuck Schumer know about this?
We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017
- Trump Abruptly Ends Interview With Leslie Stahl: "You'll Have To Watch What We Do To 60 Minutes"
Trump Abruptly Ends Interview With Leslie Stahl: “You’ll Have To Watch What We Do To 60 Minutes”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 19:42President Trump abruptly ended an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” Tuesday and did not return for an appearance he was supposed to tape with Vice President Mike Pence, various sources reported.
After camera crews set up at the White House on Monday, Trump sat down with host Lesley Stahl for about 45 minutes on Tuesday before he abruptly ended the interview and told the network he believed they had enough material to use.Shortly after the news broke, Donald Trump said he may release the CBS interview ahead of its airtime on Sunday, saying it would show bias by the reporter, Lesley Stahl and added that “everyone should compare this terrible Electoral Intrusion with the recent interviews of Sleepy Joe Biden!”
…Everyone should compare this terrible Electoral Intrusion with the recent interviews of Sleepy Joe Biden!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 20, 2020
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In an earlier tweet, Trump criticized Stahl for not wearing a face mask after their interview, hinting that the conversation was “contentious.”
Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes not wearing a mask in the White House after her interview with me. Much more to come. pic.twitter.com/0plZG6a4fH
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 20, 2020
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Bloomberg quoted a person familiar with the matter who said that Stahl exceeded a time limit for the interview agreed to with the White House, angering Trump who refused to record a “walk-and-talk” segment with Stahl.
This is not the first time Trump has had a contentious interview with Stahl: his previously interviewed her in 2018 in a wide-ranging conversation featuring testy back and forth moments. During the interview Stahl attempted to change the subject after Trump made a comment about media dishonesty, but the president clearly wanted to make a point about the media criticizing his administration for its child separation policy that had also taken place under former President Obama.
“I’m gonna change the subject again,” Stahl said.
“Well, no, even the way you asked me a question, like, about separation,” Trump insisted. “When I say Obama did it, you don’t wanna talk about it.”
After Stahl told the president they would run his answer, Trump continued: “When I say I did it, let’s make a big deal of it.”
Lesley Stahl: I’m gonna run your answer, but you did it four times, so.
President Trump: I’m just telling you that you treated me much differently on the subject.
Lesley Stahl: I disagree, but I don’t wanna have that fight with you.
President Trump: Hey, it’s okay–
Lesley Stahl: All right, I’ll get in another fight with you–
At which point the president ended the discussion: “Lesley, it’s okay. In the meantime, I’m president and you’re not.”
Hinting at what’s coming next, during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania late on Tuesday, Trump told the crowd “You’ll have to watch what we do to 60 Minutes.”
“You’ll have to watch what we do to 60 Minutes,” says @POTUS about his interview earlier today. pic.twitter.com/Gor7JCoYle
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 20, 2020
- What Happens If No One Wins?
What Happens If No One Wins?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/20/2020 – 19:25Authored by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty via AmericanMind.org,
Conservatives and liberals agree on few things, but one of them is that the country may well see an election crisis this year. All of the ingredients seem to be present: a closely and bitterly divided electorate; the threat of violence and disruption on Election Day or after; and the unusual circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this essay we provide a short roadmap through the main legal and constitutional issues that could arise if Election Day fails to result in a clear winner of the presidency, identify opportunities for political mischief, and explain why the weight of the constitutional structure favors President Donald Trump in a contested election.
Unusual Circumstances
A crucial fact in this year’s election is that, largely because of COVID, an unprecedented number of voters will vote by mail. According to the Washington Post, 84% of the electorate, or 198 million eligible voters, will be able to vote by mail this year. In the 2016 election, roughly 25% of the votes were cast by mail. This year, as many of half the ballots may be mailed in.
Republicans tend to prefer voting in person while Democrats tend to prefer absentee balloting. In the swing state of North Carolina, Democrats requested 53% of the absentee ballots and Republicans 15%. A July poll reported that 60% of the Democrats in Georgia, but only 28% of the Republicans, are likely to vote by mail.
Counting mailed votes could make a decisive difference on Election Day. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama bolstered his winning margins substantially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania through overtime votes. Hillary Clinton picked up tens of thousands of overtime votes in 2016, though not enough to win. Last April, over 79,000 Wisconsin ballots arrived after election day (and were counted by court order) in a state that Trump carried in 2016 by about 23,000 votes. In Michigan’s August primary, 6,405 ballots missed the deadline and were not counted; Trump carried that state by 10,000 votes.
In one plausible scenario, Trump appears to be the winner on the morning after Election Day, but a “blue wave” begins in the days and weeks after, and Biden claims a belated, overtime victory.
Both Democrats and Republicans have sought either to enlarge or restrict the opportunities for absentee voting. A massive amount of litigation is already taking place. At last count, 279 Covid-related election cases are currently underway in 45 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico—and that tally does not include other litigation over other election issues.
Vote-counting problems—and the litigation they will generate—do not end once deadlines are decided. States must match signatures on ballots to those on voter rolls and verify that each ballot is valid. Although some key states permit pre-Election Day verification, others do not. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were among the latter. “Real problems will emerge here,” Karl Rove has warned, “especially when there’s a big increase in mail-in ballots over 2016.”
In Pennsylvania, for example, 84,000 people voted by mail in the 2016 primaries; in 2020, 1.5 million did. In the best of circumstances, matching signatures on mail-in ballots to those on file with the state (from voter registration, ballot applications, or the DMV) is not, to the untrained eye, an easy task. Repeated and time-consuming challenges to the verification process will delay a final, official count.
The Electoral Count
Delayed election results could mean much more than the inconvenience of waking up on November 4 and not knowing who is President. They could trigger a constitutional crisis that would shake the country to its foundations.
An old federal statute, the Electoral Count Act of 1887, establishes deadlines for the states to report their official results and for the 538 members of the Electoral College to meet. The latter date this year is December 14, or 41 days after Election Day. The state deadline this year is December 8. The date is a safe harbor: if a state reports in time, Congress will accept its electors. The Act provides that if “any controversy or contest” remains after December 8, Congress will decide which electors—if any—may cast their state’s votes in the Electoral College.
Delays in counting the votes could well encroach on the December 8 deadline. State legislators and governors might come under mounting pressure to designate electors on their own if the popular vote remains incomplete, especially if there are allegations of fraud or abuse. Article II of the Constitution provides that “each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” The time when state legislatures directly appointed electors themselves are long gone: since the 19th century, states have delegated that power to their voters. But as the Supreme Court noted in Bush v. Gore, a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.”
The constitutional question is not whether but how a state legislature could reclaim the appointment of electors. States have provided by statute for the selection of their electors by their voters; therefore it one might argue they may only resume that power with a second, superseding statute. On the other hand, the Constitution specifically designates state legislatures, rather than the executives or a combination of the two, to choose the electors. A state legislature might argue that a past legislature-and-governor cannot constrain its discretion to choose electors today. Is it likely that state legislatures in battleground states could reclaim their constitutional power before the December 8 deadline looms? Probably not.
While Republicans control the state legislatures in six key battleground states, only two of those states also have Republican governors (Arizona and Florida). In four other contested states Republicans control the legislature, but Democrats control the executive: Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Only if the Constitution allows state legislatures, acting without the governor, to choose the electors, could those states cast electoral votes in a disputed popular election.
But there is another scenario in which the state legislatures could designate electors if litigation held up a definitive accounting of the popular vote. This requires a closer look at the Electoral Count Act.
The Act contemplates a post-election period in which states have the opportunity to resolve any “controversy or contest” in accordance with their pre-election law through “judicial or other methods or procedures.” Once this process has reached a definitive conclusion or “final ascertainment,” the governor is then to certify the electors. But the Act presupposes that all such controversies or contests have run their course before the governor submits the certified list of electors. What if December 8 is at hand and the controversies are still going on?
Another provision of the Act could come into play. If a State has held an election on November 3 “and has failed to make a choice” by the December 8 deadline, the Act declares that “the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day [after Nov. 3] in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” That failure could arise from fraud, uncertainty, ongoing recounts or litigation. In those circumstances, a state could be said to have “failed” to make a choice, and its legislature could pick the electors.
That analysis presumes, however, that the Act is constitutional. The founders anticipated the possibility that the Electoral College would fail. In fact, they may not have foreseen political parties that would present the same presidential candidates in every state. Instead, several Founders seem to have thought that the states would often propose local favorites, that the Electoral College would reach no majority in the face of multiple candidates, and that the election would have to go to a backup procedure.
No candidate may win in the Electoral College for less noble reasons as well. Suppose states send electoral votes that—even if certified by the governor—remain under question, whether because of fraud in the vote, inability to count the ballots accurately under neutral rules, or a dispute between branches of a state government.
While the Electoral Count Act appears to create safe harbors for a state’s report of its Electoral College votes, the Act itself might prove unconstitutional. Under the 12th Amendment, “the President of the Senate [i.e., the Vice President] shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates [of the electoral votes of the states] and the votes shall then be counted.” Left unclear is who is to “count” the electors’ votes and how their validity is to be determined.
Over the decades, political figures and legal scholars have offered different answers to these constitutional questions. We suggest that the Vice President’s role is not the merely ministerial one of opening the ballots and then handing them over (to whom?) to be counted. Though the 12th Amendment describes the counting in the passive voice, the language seems to envisage a single, continuous process in which the Vice President both opens and counts the votes.
The check on error or fraud in the count is that the Vice President’s activities are to be done publicly, “in the presence” of Congress. And if “counting” the electors’ votes is the Vice President’s responsibility, then the inextricably intertwined responsibility for judging the validity of those votes must also be his.
If that reading is correct, then the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional. Congress cannot use legislation to dictate how any individual branch of government is to perform its unique duties: Congress could not prescribe how future Senates should conduct an impeachment trial, for example. Similarly, we think the better reading is that Vice President Pence would decide between competing slates of electors chosen by state legislators and governors, or decide whether to count votes that remain in litigation.
The Role of the House
If the electoral count remains uncertain enough to deprive either Trump or Biden of a majority in the Electoral College, then the 12th Amendment orders that “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.” Our nation barely avoided that outcome 20 years ago in the 2000 Florida recount and has only used twice it in our history (in 1800 and 1824). So if the disasters described above occur, then the Constitution gives the power to choose the President to the House.
So it seems like Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats would get to pick the winner. But not so fast, said the framers, who feared congressional control of the executive. Rather than allow a simple majority vote, the Constitution requires that the House choose the President by voting as state delegations. If the House decides the Presidency, Delaware would have the same number of votes as California.
This unusual process makes sense in light of the larger constitutional structure. The Framers rejected the idea that Congress should pick the President, which they believed would rob the Chief Executive of independence, responsibility, and energy. They wanted the people to have the primary hand in choosing the President, but mediated through the states, because they also feared direct democracy.
Thanks to Republican advantages among the states (rather than the cities) the current balance of state delegations in Congress favors Republicans by 26-23 (with Pennsylvania tied). If today’s House chose the president, voting by state delegations, Trump would win handily.
But there is another twist. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution seats a new Congress on January 3, but does not begin the term of a new president until noon on January 20. The new Congress chosen in the 2020 elections, rather than the current Congress, would choose the President. Even though Republicans currently have a majority of delegations, Democrats have narrowed the gap—after the 2016 elections, Republicans had held a 32-17 advantage in state congressional delegations. If Democrats can win one more congressional seat in Pennsylvania and then flip one more delegation, they could achieve a 25-25 tie in the House. Then the election would require political bargaining of the most extreme kind for the House to resolve a disputed presidential election.
First Constitutional Backup
Suppose the House cannot agree, which could well happen given the polarization of our politics. The Constitution even provides for this. If the House splits 25-25 between Trump and Biden, then the 20th Amendment elevates the Vice President-elect to the Presidency.
Under the 12th Amendment, when the Electoral College fails, the Senate chooses the Vice President. Unlike the House procedure, the Senators each have one vote, meaning that under the current balance in the upper chamber, 53 Republicans would choose Mike Pence to effectively become the next President. But, as with the House, it is the Senate chosen by the 2020 elections, rather than the 2018 elections, that will choose the Vice President. On November 4, we may well learn who will win the Presidency—because control of the Senate is also at stake.
Suppose that this November, Democrats take three Senate seats—those in Arizona, Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina, while losing Alabama—and the Senate divides 50-50. Could Pence, as the sitting President of the Senate on January 3, break a tie in the Senate in his favor to make him Vice President on January 20, 2021, and hence President due to the inability of the House to break its own deadlock? It appears that this is the case; Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution says the Vice President “shall have no Vote, unless [Senators] be equally divided.” It does not restrict the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote to some functions of the Senate but not others. In those extreme circumstances, Pence might recuse himself, but the Constitution would not require it.
Second Constitutional Backup
Suppose then the House, Senate, sitting President, and even Vice President Pence decide that he should not use that tie-breaking power. Then the Constitution’s backup system for the Electoral College will have failed.
That still leaves a second backup system. Article II of the Constitution states that in “the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability” of both the President and Vice President, Congress can declare “what Officer shall then act as President” until the disability ends or a new President is elected. Don’t forget that word, “Officer,” because it may make all the difference.
Under the current federal succession statute, Congress decided that congressional leaders should assume the Presidency. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sits first in line, followed by the President pro tem of the Senate, currently Chuck Grassley. From there, the line of succession continues to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and then the other cabinet members.
But, as Yale law professor Akhil Amar persuasively argued in 1995 (at the prospect of Newt Gingrich becoming President should Congress impeach Bill Clinton!), this part of the federal succession statute likely violates the Constitution. Notice that Article II requires that the Presidency pass down to an “Officer.” The Constitution generally—but not always—refers to “Officers” as members of the Executive Branch. Further, the Incompatibility Clause of the Constitution prohibits Members of Congress to hold executive office. Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Chuck Grassley can become President. Mike Pompeo would become President—an outcome so unusual, so unexpected, it just might fit our bizarre times.
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