Today’s News 23rd April 2024

• NATO's Never-Ending War: The 75-Year-Old Bully Is Faltering
  NATO’s Never-Ending War: The 75-Year-Old Bully Is Faltering

  Authored by Ramzy Baroud via Counterpunch.org,

  The western discourse on the circumstances behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 75 years ago, is hardly convincing.

  

  Yet, that over-simplified discourse must be examined in order for the current decline of the organization to be appreciated beyond the self-serving politics of NATO’s members.

  The history records page of the US State Department speaks of the invention of NATO in a language suitable for a US high school history book.

  “After the destruction of the Second World War, the nations of Europe struggled to rebuild their economies and ensure their security,” it reads, which compelled the US to take action: “(integrating) Europe as vital to the prevention of communist expansion across the continent.”

  This is the typical logic of NATO’s early doctrine. It can be gleaned from most of the statements made by Western countries that established and continue to dominate the organization.

  The language oscillates between a friendly discourse – for example, Harry Truman’s reference to NATO as a ‘neighborly act’ – and a threatening one, also Truman’s tough language against “those who might foster the criminal idea of having recourse to war.”

  The reality, however, remains vastly different.

  Indeed, the US did emerge much stronger, militarily and economically after WWII. That was reflected in the Marshall Plan, an ‘Economic Recovery Plan’, which was a strategic, not a charitable act. It engineered the economic recovery of selected countries who would become the US’ global allies for decades to come.

  Upon its establishment, then Canadian Secretary of State Lester Pearson referred to the NATO ‘community’ as part of the ‘world community’, linking the strength of the former to “preserving the peace” for the latter.

  As innocuous as such language may seem, it introduced a paternal relationship between the US-dominated NATO and the rest of the world. Thus, it allowed the powerful members of the organization to define, on behalf of the rest of the world – and often outside the umbrella of the United Nations – such notions as ‘peace’, ‘security’, ‘threat’, and, ultimately, ‘terrorism’.

  A case in point is that the first major conflict instigated by NATO did not target external threats to Europe or US territories, but took place thousands of miles away, on the Korean Peninsula.

  The west’s political discourse wanted to view the civil war in the Peninsula, prior to NATO’s intervention as an example of “communist aggression”. This ‘aggression’ supposedly forced NATO’s hands to react. Needless to say, the Korean War (1950-53) was a destructive one.

  The 75 years since then proved the flimsiness of that argument. The Soviet Union has long been dismantled, and North Korea has been desperately fighting to break out of its isolation. Yet, a fractious state of no war-no peace remains in place. It could turn into an outright war at any time.

  However, what the war has achieved is something entirely different. The constant state of non-peace provides a justification for the permanent US military presence in the region.

  Similar outcomes followed most of NATO’s other interventions: Iraq (1991 and 2003), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011) and so on.

  Yet, the ability to start or exacerbate conflicts, and the inability, or perhaps unwillingness to permanently end wars, is not the real crisis at NATO, 75 years after its establishment.

  In an article marking the anniversary, UK Secretary of Defense, Grant Shapps wrote in the Daily Telegraph that NATO must accept that it is now in a “pre-war world”.

  He lashed out at those NATO members who were “still failing” to meet the minimally required spending on defense, which equals to two percent of total national GDPs. “We cannot afford to play Russian roulette with our future,” he wrote.

  Shapps’ anxieties are often expressed by other top NATO leaders and officials, who are either warning of an imminent war with Russia or criticizing each other for the dwindling influence of the once-powerful organization.

  Much of that blame was placed on former US President Donald Trump, who outright threatened to leave NATO during his only term in office.

  Trump’s disparaging comments and threats, however, were hardly the instigator of the crisis.

  They were symptoms of growing problems, which have continued for years after Trump’s dramatic exit from the White House.

  NATO’s crisis can be summarized as this:

  • First, the geopolitical formations that existed following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact no longer exist.

  • Second, the main aspect of the new global competition cannot be reduced to military terms. Rather, it is economic.

  • Third, Europe is now largely dependent on energy sources, trade and even technological integration with countries that the US perceives as enemies: China, Russia and others. Therefore, if Europe allows itself to subscribe to the US polarized language on what constitutes enemies and allies it will pay a heavy price, especially as EU economies are already struggling under the weight of continued wars and constant disruption of energy supplies.

  • Fourth, fixing all of these challenges and more through the dropping of bombs is no longer an option. The ‘enemy’ is far too strong, and the changing nature of warfare makes traditional war largely ineffectual.

  Though the world has greatly changed, NATO remains committed to a political doctrine from a bygone era. And even if the two percent threshold is met, the problem will not go away.

  It is time for NATO to re-examine its 75-year-old legacy, and be courageous enough to change directions altogether – instead of opting for a state of non-peace, actually seeking real peace.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 04/23/2024 – 02:00

• "What Kind Of American Are You?"
  “What Kind Of American Are You?”

  Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

  War, What’s It Good For?

  We have only seen a handful of movies in a theater over the last decade. Ever since the kids grew up, there hasn’t been a reason to spend too much for too little. Regal Cinemas in Oaks was the place to go in the old days. It had 24 theaters and was always packed. You could never get a parking spot close to the venue. The restaurant near the theater always had a line and you usually had to wait 30 minutes to get a seat.

  

  We decided to go and see Civil War on Friday night, and boy times have changed. Regal Cinemas went bankrupt a few years ago after Covid, and the theater was taken over by some local businessmen. They now play four or five movies, but $10 per ticket is pretty reasonable compared to the chains. Instead of hundreds of cars in the parking lot, there were about 30 cars. We expected a long wait time at the PJ Whelihans, but there were dozens of seats at the bar and booths.

  When we ventured over to the cinema, there was no one checking that we had tickets, and it was like a ghost town. A Friday night at the movies a decade ago was a big deal. The place would have been bustling. I can’t see this place making it over the long haul.

  There were eight people there to see Civil War. The previews were so loud, we thought we were going to need ear plugs. The sound became more reasonable once the movie started.

  I had read a few reviews of Civil War and they leaned negative, for a myriad of reasons. Some people seemed disappointed and angry that the director did not pick a side, or even make a single political statement.

  My interest in this movie stemmed from the snippet shown in previews, where a guy holding some journalists at gunpoint asks them who they are, they respond “Americans”, and he asks them:

  

  I think that is a profound question, as this country has already split into at least two enemy camps, with the leftists already fighting the war using any means necessary.

  Laws and morality no longer matter during this time of coming conflict. Knowing we are in the back end of this Fourth Turning, there is a high likelihood of civil and/or global war in the next few years. Whenever I point this out, many scorn the possibility of civil war. Some think keyboard warriors will never actually have the guts to get into a shooting war with the government and/ or leftist fanatics.

  I was hoping the movie would provide some thought provoking fodder giving me an inkling of what might be on the near term horizon. The movie is more about the journalist characters traveling from NYC to Washington DC in order to get an interview with the embattled president. There was no background regarding what started the civil war, who were the good guys, and whether the entire country was involved. The entire movie took place in the eastern U.S.

  My observations are as follows:

  • The conflict was between the Western Forces versus the existing U.S. government forces. The Western Forces constituted Texas and California, with Florida leaning in their direction. It was not clear whether all the states chose a side. Since both sides had high tech military weapons, the assumption is the U.S. military split its allegiance. That means rogue generals did what southern generals did in 1860.

  • For most of the movie, you can’t tell who is fighting who. That seems realistic in a civil war scenario. The scene where the journalists are asked “What kind of American are you?” captures how confusing and chaotic it would be. I don’t think the guy dressed in military garb is on either side. They were dumping bodies into a hole. Without anyone to enforce laws, warlords will rise up and execute retribution on locals they consider enemies. Every local community will become a battleground. Neighbors versus neighbors, families versus families. With 300 million guns, there will be blood.

  • Two characters let it be known that their parents have stayed on their farms in Missouri and Colorado, pretending their is no civil war. They seemed dismayed that they wouldn’t choose sides. That made me wonder whether those who choose to not participate in the coming civil war will be able to work their farms in peace. Since modern society will come to a grinding halt, with shortages of fuel and food, I’m afraid small farmers will come under attack by the hungry masses. It will be essential for small communities of like minded folk to form militias to protect their farms and communities.

  • We all know our existing uni-party government is corrupt, evil and hates us. Whether we call it the Deep State, corrupt oligarchy, or corporate fascist totalitarians, it is clear they are our enemy. They are continuing to implement their Great Reset/Great Taking scheme, and will only be stopped through violent means. This movie did not take sides, but did imply the existing government will be defeated. The question is who or what takes their place. Sadly, it is unlikely that a republic will be reborn from the ashes of this empire of debt, delusion and decay.

  Civil War was a sobering and depressing movie. I think it is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead.

  Innocent people will die. Senseless slaughter will be the norm. The boundaries between good and evil will blur. Right and wrong will become meaningless. It will be unclear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Conflict is upon us. Will the cessation of our Constitution before the upcoming election be the spark that starts this civil war? Where and when will our Fort Sumter moment happen? I don’t know, but I fear it is close upon us.

  

  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” – Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams

  *  *  *

  To donate to Jim’s blog via Stripe, click here.
   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 23:40

• US & Philippines Kick Off Largest Ever Joint Drills On 'China's Doorstep'
  US & Philippines Kick Off Largest Ever Joint Drills On ‘China’s Doorstep’

  Tensions are soaring in waters off China as the US and its close regional ally the Philippines launched expansive joint war drills Monday, not far from hotly disputed maritime areas.

  At over 16,000 troops, the exercises called the “Balikatan” drills (or “shoulder to shoulder”) mark the largest ever conducted between the two allies. “The 2024 iteration is not only the largest but the most complex,” Newsweek confirmed of the annual exercise.

  

  The joint exercises will focus on “seizing maritime terrain, HIMARS infiltrations, and coastal defense and maritime strike operations among others” — and are taking place around the the Philippine provinces of Palawan and Batanes, geographically near disputed China Sea areas as well as Taiwan.

  A US Marine Corps statement described Balikatan as a “cornerstone event between the US and the Philippines, directly supporting the refinement and understanding of our shared Mutual Defense Treaty obligations.”

  To be expected, Beijing has blasted the war games as a provocation, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian warning against the placement and deployment of US weapons systems “at China’s doorstep.” He further put the Philippines on notice, saying there will be “serious consequences of pandering to the United States.”

  He further said Manilla “should understand that drawing in countries outside the South China Sea to flex their muscles and stoke confrontation in the region will only intensify tensions and undermine regional stability.” 

  Russia’s Sputnik has the following details on the scope of the new drills:

  • Some of the drills will also involve other countries, such as Australia and France, in secondary roles.
  • 14 nations will reportedly act as observers, including India, Japan, as well as some ASEAN and European Union countries.
  • In a first, six Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) vessels will participate in the drills in an active role.
  • The drills will simulate seizing islands in the vicinity of Taiwan and South China Sea.
  • For the first time, the exercises will be held at multiple Philippine locations, 12 nautical miles offshore, outside of the country’s territorial waters, near the disputed South China Sea – waters that are claimed by both China and the Philippines.
  • The maiden deployment by the US military of the Mid-Range Capability missile system in the Philippines has been denounced as contributing to a regional arms race.

  

  Recently, rival Chinese and Philippine coast guard patrols have directly clashed over maritime territory and fishing rights. Often these involve the firing of water canons well as dangerous ramming situations.

  Washington and Manillas are defense treaty partners – meaning that if Philippine forces ever come under direct military attack, the United States is ‘obligated’ to intervene on their behalf.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 23:20

• Supreme Court Denies Bid To Expand No-Excuse Mail-In Ballots In Texas
  Supreme Court Denies Bid To Expand No-Excuse Mail-In Ballots In Texas

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a legal challenge to a Texas law that requires voters under the age of 65 to provide justification to vote by mail, meaning that the Democrat-aligned attempt to sharply expand “no-excuse” mail-in ballots in the Lone Star state has failed, with implications for other states.

  

  According to an April 22 order list, the high court denied petition for a writ of cetriorari in a case that stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of the Texas Democratic Party and several voters who requested that Texas lift its age-based limitations on no-excuse mail-in voting.

  Texas law only allows individuals to vote by mail without a qualifying excuse, like sickness, if they are 65 years or older. In their original complaint, which made its way through a number of lower courts before ending up before the Supreme Court, the petitioners alleged that the Texas voting law violates the 26th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits denying the right to vote due to age.

  The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal means that the Texas law stays in place, delivering a win to election integrity advocates who argue that no-excuse mail-in voting is prone to fraud and makes elections less secure.

  At the same time, the high court’s decision to deny certiorari is a setback for groups who see laws like Texas’s age-based limits on no-excuse mail-in ballots as “voter suppression” or an unfair attempt to impose barriers to voting for certain groups, in this case younger voters.

  The high court’s decision not to hear the appeal has broader implications, however, since six other states–Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee–have similar laws on the books that let older voters to request absentee ballot without having to provide any justification.

  Public opinion in Texas over the issue of no-excuse mail-in voting is split, according to some polls.

  More Details

  In their initial petition filed in 2020 on behalf of the Texas Democratic Party and a group of voters amids the COVID-19 pandemic, the plaintiffs requested that Texas lift its age-based restrictions to no-excuse mail-in voting, citing public health risks related to the outbreak.

  A district court judge sided with the plaintiffs in May 2020, temporarily blocking the Texas law.

  Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas officials then filed an appeal with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which paused the district court’s ruling while the appeal played out.

  The plaintiffs then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reimpose the district court’s decision to freeze enforcement of the age-based limits to no-excuse mail-in voting, or to take the case up for review, but the high court rejected both requests.

  Ultimately, the 5th Circuit voided the lower court’s May 2020 order in full. This led the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint in the district court, this time asserting other claims, including ones of racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and arguing that the age limitations on mail-in ballots violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th and 26th Amendments.

  In a July 2022 order, the district court judge dismissed all of the plaintiffs’ claims, leading to another appeal before the 5th Circuit, which ultimately affirmed the district court’s decision to dismiss.

  The plaintiffs filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2023, asking the high court to declare Texas’s age-based voting law unconstitutional.

  The court declined to review the plaintiffs’ appeal, leaving Texas’s age restrictions in place and denying a bid to expand no-excuse mail-in voting in the Lone Star state.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to counsel for both petitioners and respondents with a request for comment on the high court’s decision.

  Election Integrity or Voter Suppression?

  The Supreme Court ruling comes amid a broader fight between those who see election integrity efforts as “voter suppression” and those who believe that the security of U.S. elections is too lax and should be tightened.

  According to a running tally by the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, expansive voting laws far outpaced restrictive ones in 2023.

  At least 53 expansive voting laws were introduced last year in at least 23 states, compared to 17 restrictive laws being passed in 14 states, suggesting that the election integrity movement is falling behind.

  Amid concerns over voter fraud, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently suggested that to win the presidential election in November, Republicans need to outvote Democrats by a significant margin.

  “Everybody who wants an honest election should know that in the long run, we need the French model: Everybody votes on the same day, everybody has a photo ID, everybody’s accounted as a person,” Mr. Gingrich said in a February interview on Fox News.

  “But until we get to that, if Republicans want to win this year, under the rules that exist this year, they need to outvote the Democrats by about 5 percent, which is a margin big enough that it can’t be stolen,” he said.

  Elsewhere, an election integrity monitor laid out over a dozen “critical” reforms that it believes are necessary in order to secure voter integrity in the 2024 election, including outlawing ranked choice voting and non-citizen voting, consolidating election dates, requiring voter ID, and safeguarding vulnerable mail ballots.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 23:00

• On Earth Day, Biden Administration Backs Rooftop Solar With $7 Billion Grant
  On Earth Day, Biden Administration Backs Rooftop Solar With $7 Billion Grant

  By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

  U.S. President Joe Biden is announcing on Monday $7 billion in grants to help more than 900,000 low-income households install residential solar power, the White House said.

  

  President Biden will mark today’s Earth Day by traveling to Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia, and is expected to highlight the Administration’s progress “in tackling the climate crisis, cutting costs for everyday Americans, and creating good-paying jobs,” the White House said.

  The $7 billion in grants will come from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar for All grant competition, a key component of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.  

  The selectees under the competition are expected to deliver residential power to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, saving households more than $350 million in electricity costs annually, or about $400 per household, according to the White House.

  The rooftop solar program will also help avoid more than 30 million metric tons of carbon pollution over the next 25 years.

  EPA has received 150 applications, and 60 applicants were selected through a robust multistage review, Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe said in a call with reporters.

  U.S. solar installations surged in 2023, as solar accounted for over 50% of new electricity capacity added to the grid, for the first time in history, the annual solar market review of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie showed earlier this year.

  However…

  …the biggest residential solar market in the U.S., California, has seen major policy changes in the way the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) will compensate rooftop solar customers for the excess energy they generate.

  This decision moved the state from retail rate “net metering” to a new “net billing” structure that cuts the value of rooftop solar credits by about 75%.  

  This, according to SEIA and WoodMac, is expected to crash California’s residential solar market in 2024, contributing to a projected 36% decline across all segments in the state.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 22:20

• BlackRock Triples Larry Fink's Home Security As Anti-Woke Backlash Accelerates
  BlackRock Triples Larry Fink’s Home Security As Anti-Woke Backlash Accelerates

  BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink’s efforts to push ‘wokesim’ or environmental, social, and governance policies across corporate America have been in reverse in recent years amid the backlash from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and 19 state attorneys general in conservative states, including Arizona and Texas, who have been fed up with ESG-related policies hurting the economy. 

  Supposedly, the backlash by anti-woke activists has forced BlackRock to triple Fink’s home security spending. Financial Times says the CEO has become “a target for anti-woke activists and conspiracy theorists.” 

  According to FT’s numbers, the $10.5 trillion money manager spent $563,513 to “upgrade the home security systems” at Fink’s residences during 2023, on top of $216,837 for bodyguards. 

  

  The ESG movement has been highly politicized. Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the Republican party’s presidential candidates before Donald Trump was nominated, called Fink “the king of the woke industrial complex [and] the ESG movement.”

  In December, Fink said his firm was unfairly targeted by candidates in the fourth Republican presidential debate, calling it a “sad commentary on the state of American politics.”

  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has called BlackRock the “economic power” to instill a “left-wing agenda.” 

  Besides conservative lawmakers revolting against the world’s largest woke money manager at the state level and on Capitol Hill, UBS bankers on Wall Street are becoming increasingly frustrated with unrealistic climate goals. Here’s the note, “ESG Frustration And Backlash In The Banking Sector Continues.”

  It should be no surprise to our readers: we have been pointing out the demise of ESG for more than a year now. Earlier in March, we wrote how Exxon’s CEO had all but declared victory over the “woke” ESG lobby. 

   We noted that CEOs were ditching ESG lingo on conference calls in February. For some context, peak ESG and related synonyms, such as “climate change” and “clean energy” and green energy” and net zero,” among other terms, peaked at 28,000 mentions in the first quarter of 2022. Ever since, the number of mentions has plunged. 

  

  Fink’s beefing up security is a sign that the political ideology pushed by the asset manager does not align with actual investors and most Americans. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 22:00

• "Not About Freedom Of Expression": Aussie Politicians Unite Against Elon Musk's X
  “Not About Freedom Of Expression”: Aussie Politicians Unite Against Elon Musk’s X

  Authored by Monica O’Shea via The Epoch Times,

  Elon Musk’s X is facing strong criticism from both the centre-left Labor Party and the centre-right Liberal-National Coalition in Australia amid a legal challenge against the country’s online content tsar.

  

  Mr. Musk labelled Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant (a former Twitter employee), the “Australian censorship commissar,” after she issued an order to X to take down videos related to the alleged stabbing of a Christian bishop.

  X says it had removed all posts domestically, but the commissioner’s order calls for the removal of content around the world.

  X is planning to challenge this in court, and said the posts did not violate its rules on “violent speech” – content that incites or glorifies violence.

  Shadow Minister Says Musk Being ‘Irresponsible’

  However, the Liberal Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister Simon Birmingham called X’s contention a “completely ridiculous and preposterous argument.”

  “The type of standards that we expect in everyday life that we expect in other forms of media should be able to be applied to the online world as well,” Mr. Birmingham said on ABC News Breakfast on April 22.

  “The idea that it is censorship to say that imagery of a terrorist attack, of a stabbing incident should not be able to be broadcast in an unfiltered way for all to see—children to access and otherwise—is an insulting and offensive argument.”

  The senator also argued Mr. Musk’s argument was “irresponsible” given the impact of the social media posts on potential terrorists.

  “It is also an irresponsible one when you consider the implications that can have for inspiring potentially future terrorists, for creating discord and disharmony in communities, and driving people further apart when such images are manipulated or used with propaganda or other information,” he said.

  The Australian censorship commissar is demanding *global* content bans! https://t.co/CRLglUYYIG

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Labor Government Paints Musk As ‘Bully’

  This comes after Labor’s Health Minister Mark Butler said the government would not be “bullied” by Mr. Musk.

  “And can I say this: Australia is not going to be bullied by Elon Musk, or any other tech billionaire, in our commitment to making sure that social media is a safe space,” Mr. Butler said during a press conference.

  Mr. Butler said if Mr. Musk wanted to fight the fine in court, the government was up for it because they were determined to keep “social media safe.”

  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he found it “extraordinary X chose not to comply.”

  “We know, I think overwhelmingly, Australians want misinformation and disinformation to stop. This isn’t about freedom of expression,” he told reporters.

  “This is about the dangerous implications that can occur when things that are simply not true, that everyone knows is not true, are replicated and weaponised in order to cause division, and in this case, to promote negative statements.”

  Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek called Mr. Musk an “egotistical billionaire.”

  “It’s more important for him to have his way than to respect the victims of the crimes that are being shown on social media and to protect our Australian community from the harmful impact of showing this terrible stuff on social media,” she said on Sunrise.

  “We need to keep Australians safe from this terrible stuff on social media. And Elon Musk doesn’t dictate to the Australian government what we are doing here domestically with our laws.”

  I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one https://t.co/EM0lF6n7SC

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Opposition Switches Gears, Will Back ‘Misinformation’ Laws

  Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton agreed there was a case for “tougher action” against social media companies during an interview with ABC Insiders on April 22.

  “No question at all, and I think there’s a bipartisan position in relation to this. We know that the companies—and we’ve seen some of the comments from Elon Musk overnight—they see themselves above the law,” Mr. Dutton claimed.

  “The Australian law here should apply equally in the real world as it does online.”

  Mr. Dutton pointed out social media companies turnover billions of dollars of revenue in the Australian economy and indicated the laws should apply to them within the country.

  “I think there’s a red herring in a sense here. When Elon Musk says that there’s not extraterritorial reach—that is the Australian law can’t apply to other parts of the world—I’m sure that’s the case. But in terms of the content, which is displayed here, or broadcast here, well the Australian law does apply,” Mr. Dutton said.

  Mr. Dutton also indicated the Opposition would support Labor’s misinformation and disinformation laws, despite the Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman being very critical of the law in September.

  “Yeah, we are, and happy to have a look at anything the government puts forward, as we’ve said over the last week, with the horrendous scenes that we’ve seen.”

  Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM! pic.twitter.com/ZJBKrstStQ

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  What Did X Do?

  X received a global takedown order from Australia’s eSafety commissioner to remove posts following the knife attack on a Christian bishop during a livestream service.

  However, X says the posts did not violate the platform’s rules on “violent speech,” and revealed it had received a demand from the eSafety commissioner to remove all posts globally—or face a daily fine of $785,000 (US$506,000).

  “X believes that eSafety’s order was not within the scope of Australian law and we complied with the directive pending a legal challenge,” the platform posted.

  “While X respects the right of a country to enforce its laws within its jurisdiction, the eSafety commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”

  The recent attacks in Australia are a horrific assault on free society. Our condolences go out to those who have been affected, and we stand with the Australian people in calling for those responsible to be brought to justice.

  Following these events, the Australian eSafety…

  — Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) April 19, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  On April 16, the eSafety commissioner confirmed it had issued legal notices to X and Meta to remove material within 24 hours.

  The commissioner said notices related to material that depicted “gratuitous or offence violence with a high degree of impact or detail.”

  “While the majority of mainstream social media platforms have engaged with us, I am not satisfied enough is being done to protect Australians from this most extreme and gratuitous violent material circulating online,” Ms. Inman Grant said.

  “That is why I am exercising my powers under the Online Safety Act to formally compel them to remove it.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 21:40

• AI Crusades: San Fran Lunatic Goes 'Donkey Kong' On Waymo Robotaxi
  AI Crusades: San Fran Lunatic Goes ‘Donkey Kong’ On Waymo Robotaxi

  A viral video on X shows a person going full ‘Donkey Kong’ on an autonomous Waymo vehicle in the crime-ridden downtown area of San Francisco over the weekend. This plays into a much larger trend of people lashing out against self-driving cars. 

  Local media outlet KRON4 said the fully autonomous Jaguar I-Pace was near Market and Dolores streets when a person jumped on the hood and started “stomping the front windshield in an attempt to break it open.” 

  Californian vs Waymo…

  Another Day, Another Crimepic.twitter.com/jnNgxKswfs

  — Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 22, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This isn’t the first time driverless vehicles have been targeted. A video from earlier this year shows a crowd in Chinatown torching a Waymo Jaguar on Jackson Street, between Stockton and Grant. 

  BREAKING: An autonomous Waymo vehicle is intentionally set on fire in Chinatown, according to SF Fire. Firefighters said they got reports around 10 people were involved.

  Waymo said “a crowd surrounded and vandalized the vehicle, breaking the window and throwing a firework … pic.twitter.com/6QN2jTppRu

  — Gia Vang (@Gia_Vang) February 11, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  A video late last year shows another robotaxi being attacked by a person with a hammer. 

  Someone seen destroying a RoboTaxi in San Francisco this weekend.

  What do you think, hero or villain?

  🎥: @caterywta on IG pic.twitter.com/KTdwGKrgWF

  — (((BrokeAssStuart))) (@BrokeAssStuart) September 11, 2023

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  Last summer, we pointed out that members of Safe Street Rebels, a group that says these cars are “polluting, dangerous & murderous,” were coning driverless cars across the city. 

  Week of Cone – Night One was a hit! Keep sending in your coning submissions 🦄 pic.twitter.com/c4KZLbFvhy

  — Safe Street Rebel (@SafeStreetRebel) July 6, 2023

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  We have cited some X users who believe “The AI crusades have begun.” 

   Why would people rise up against machines? As Goldman explained a little over a year ago, “AI Will Lead To 300 Million Layoffs In The US And Europe.“

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 21:20

• Syria's President Assad Confirms Rare Direct Talks With Washington
  Syria’s President Assad Confirms Rare Direct Talks With Washington

  Via The Cradle

  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Foreign Minister of the south Caucasus republic Abkhazia during an interview published on 21 April that Damascus holds dialogue with Washington “from time to time.” In response to a question from Abkhazian Foreign Minister Inal Ardzinba on whether there has been an opportunity for Syria to “restore dialogue with the collective west,” Assad said: “America is currently illegally occupying part of our land, financing terrorism, and supporting Israel, which also occupies our land.”

  “But we meet with them from time to time, although these meetings do not lead us to anything,” the Syrian president said, adding, however, that “everything will change.”

  

  As part of regime change efforts against Damascus in 2011, Washington, along with Turkey, Gulf states, and several other countries, sponsored extremist groups with the aim of overthrowing the Syrian government. 

  With the help of Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Damascus has regained control over large swathes of Syria, which were under the control of ISIS and other US-backed groups. 

  Under the pretext of fighting ISIS, the US army occupied Syrian oilfields in the north of the country in 2015 in coordination with its Kurdish proxy, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – one year after the launching of an international military coalition in Iraq and Syria. 

  In May 2023, a senior diplomatic official in the Arab League revealed exclusively to The Cradle that Washington and Damascus were holding secret, direct negotiations in the Omani capital of Muscat. 

  During the talks, Syrian officials mainly pressed for the complete withdrawal of US occupation troops from the country.

  The diplomat added that “secret talks took place in previous years between Damascus and Washington, but most of them were through mediators, such as the former director general of the Lebanese General Security, Abbas Ibrahim. Direct meetings also took place between the two countries, one of which was in the Syrian capital, Damascus.” However, the number of direct meetings remained limited.

  The secret talks in Muscat also touched on Austin Tice, a US citizen who entered Syria illegally via the Turkish border in 2012. Not long after, Tice disappeared in the territory of armed opposition groups that were fighting the Syrian government.

  “There is always hope: even when we know there will be no results we must try,” he said when asked about the possibility of mending ties with the West. — Times of Israel

  In response to the question about the possibility of mending ties with the West, Syrian President Assad said in a meeting, “There is always hope. Even when we know there will be no results, we must try”https://t.co/lCiAcGqhiC

  — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 22, 2024

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  During the Muscat talks, the source stressed that “the American envoy repeatedly confirmed that he has information that Austin Tice is alive and in a Syrian army detention center. However, the Syrian delegation insisted that it had no information about Tice, with Damascus expressing its readiness to make all possible efforts to reveal his fate.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 21:00

• Kolanovic Says "Correction Has Further To Go" While JPM's Trading Desk Remains "Bullish"
  Kolanovic Says “Correction Has Further To Go” While JPM’s Trading Desk Remains “Bullish”

  On one hand, the technical storm appears to have subsided: as we predicted last night, just days after the biggest CTA shake-out in over a year (thanks to the fake Iran-Israel war, which on Thursday shook out all the sell stops thanks to the latest brutal bear trap, and thus paradoxically removed any residual selling pressure), other systematic funds finally stepped in to buy the dip, with vol control and Risk-Parity strategies both starting to add leverage back after a sharper unwind last week.

  

  Add to that our reminder that the stock buyback blackout ends on Friday, which the algos immediately rushed to frontrun…

  

  … and in retrospect it’s almost surprising stocks soared more than 1% at their highs.

  

  But after the biggest slide in stocks since the bank crisis last March, has the threat to markets faded away and is it safe to BTFD? At least according to one reformer permabear, the answer is a resounding no.

  Having incorrectly called the market in both 2022 and 2023, when he was first bullish during an epic rout, only to turn bearish at the lows and stay bearish during the biggest market rally in recent history, JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic – who has remained bearish in 2024 in hopes that a crash magically emerges out of nowhere even as the government is injecting $1 trillion in fiscal stimmies every 100 days in an election year, and finally validates his stubborn pessimism even though most of his clients have long ago seen their short positions stopped out – wrote a piece this afternoon titled “The correction likely has further to go” (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), in which he writes that, as one may expect, “we think the sell-off has further to go” and warns that he remains “concerned about continued complacency in equity valuations, inflation staying too hot, further Fed repricing, and a profit outlook where the implied acceleration this year might end up too optimistic.” 

  According to the Croat, who since October 2022 hasn’t seen a dip that wasn’t a guaranteed harbinger to a great depressionary collapse (and then when it proved to be just another dip-buying opportunity, would promptly provide a polysyllabic, extensive, if petulant analysis of why the market surged even as he never explained why he failed to predict it in the first place… again… and again… and again), “the current market narrative and patterns are increasingly resembling those of last summer, when upside inflation surprises and hawkish Fed revisions drove a correction in risk assets, but investor positioning now appears more elevated.”

  Fully elevated, eh? Funny he should say that, because just a few pages later in his own analysis, Kolanovic publishes this recurring chart showing how JPM clients see their positioning, and according to which just 35% plan to increase their equity exposure, which is tied for the lowest since last summer.

  

  And if that wasn’t enough, a chart showing how clients view their own equity positioning/sentiment in historical terms, reveals a perfectly balanced, if somewhat bearish distribution.

  

  Needless to say, both charts clearly refute Marko’s baseless contention that “investor positioning now appears more elevated” than it was a year ago, but then again, we would be the last to accuse the Croat of objectively analyzing data and interpreting facts without bias or a tendency to goalseek a predetermined bearish outcome (at least until the JPM trading desk has had its fill of purchasing all the stocks that JPM’s clients have to sell, after listening to Marko of course).

  Anyway, for those who are curious, here is what else Kolanovic had to say about the market’s “problematic backdrop.”

  USD, bond yields, oil and concentration all showing elevated risks remains a problematic backdrop. The multiple expansion seen in past months, extremely low volatility metrics up to recently, tightest credit spreads since 2007, and the general inability by market participants earlier in the year to identify any potential negative catalysts for stocks are starting to shift. We remain concerned about continued complacency in equity valuations, inflation staying too hot, further Fed repricing, rates moving higher for the “wrong reasons”, and a profit outlook where the implied acceleration this year might end up too optimistic.

  Market concentration has been very high, and positioning extended, which are typically red flags, at risk of a reversal. The combination of these macro factors increases the downside risks, and suggests that more Defensive trading should be appropriate

  Alas, none of that is accurate, relevant or actionable: in fact, concentration in the largest stocks has been far higher late in 2023 and earlier this year, and the result has already been felt following the recent Nasdaq drubbing, which hammered not only the Mag 7s but everything else too.

  

  In fact, one could argue that the recent selloff provided just the breather these extremely popular stocks needed to resume their vapid meltup, which will continue until one of two things happen: i) Trump wins the election and the government stops injecting trillions in fiscal stimmies or ii) the thing that we have said since February 2023 as the only necessary and sufficient  condition for stocks to crash, happens and Marko turns bullish.

  Rally won’t end until Wilson and Marko turn bullish

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 7, 2023

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  Considering the S&P was at 4000 when we said that, one can argue that the simplest condition to trigger a market rally has also been the most accurate one, and since Kolanovic has refused to turn bullish in over a year, the S&P has soared more than 30% since the JPM strategist turned bearish.

  Bottom line: fade this latest in a long series  of bearish calls – if for no other reason than this one: those who really matter at JPM – the bank’s trading desk – remains thoroughly bullish.

  

  In fact, one can argue that JPM’s giant trading platform continues to perform admirably… if not for the bank’s clients, then for JPM itself, whose equity sales and trading desk had another phenomenal quarter.

  

  Why? Because all those stocks that JPM clients sold to the bank’s flow desk – in hopes that Marko Kolanovic would be right at least once in the past two years – have served to propel the bank’s own P&L gains into the stratosphere.

  Then again, while Marko’s relentless bearishness remains a source of comfort for all bulls, there is one looming risk: while we previously noted that both vol-control and risk parity funds are again buying, the same can not be said for CTAs, and as Goldman trader Cullen Morgan writes in his weekly Equity Positioning and Key Levels note (available to pro subs in the usual place), CTAs are sellers under almost all market conditions, and should the selling resume, CTAs have as much as $237BN in total global selling (and $58BN in S&P futs) over the next month. The only loophole: should the tape push higher over the next month, only then would CTAs buy some $46BN in global stocks, and $12BN in the US.

  CTA Flows:

  Over the next 1 week…

  • Flat tape: -$36bn to sell (-$9.5bn SPX to sell)
  • Up tape: -$23bn to sell (-$10bn SPX to sell)
  • Down tape: -$70bn to sell (-$24bn SPX to sell)

  Over the next 1 month…

  • Flat tape: -$43bn to sell (-$9bn SPX to sell)
  • Up tape: +$46bn to buy (+$12m SPX to buy)
  • Down tape: -$237bn to sell (-$58bn SPX to sell)

  

  

  On the other hand, after today’s powerful bounce, we are now closer to tripping the short-term pivot level to the upside, rather than the all-important medium-term pivot level to the downside, to wit:

  Key pivot levels for SPX:

  • Short term: 5116
  • Med term: 4888
  • Long term: 4625

  Anyway, while stock may swoon over the next few days and weeks, practically and pragmatically speaking the odds of a full-blown selloff (let alone crash), in an election year when the Fed is injecting $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days, are nil… unless of course Marko gets the tap on the shoulder that it is time for JPM’s desk to liquidate all its holdings. At which point he will of course turn bullish, and all bets are off.

  More in the full JPM and Goldman notes, both available to pro subscribers.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 20:30

• 'The Most Secure Election In American History': John Eastman
  ‘The Most Secure Election In American History’: John Eastman

  Authored by John Eastman via The Gatestone Institute,

  I would like to discuss some of the illegalities that occurred in the 2020 election and the proposed constitutional remedies that we thought we could advance.

  

  I would also like to discuss the lawfare that is sweeping across the country and destroying not just the people that were involved in those efforts, but the very notion of our adversarial system of justice.

  This fight and the dangers from it are much bigger than what I am dealing with personally, or what the hundred or so Trump lawyers who have been targeted in this new lawfare effort are dealing with. It seems that there is something similar going on here, albeit to a much less lethal degree, than what we are seeing with the October 7^th attack on Israel, as that, too, was an attack on the rule of law.

  The international community that will condemn Israel’s just response to these unjust attacks demonstrates a bias in the application of the rule of law that is very similar to what we are dealing with here.

  These are not isolated instances. They go to the root of the rejection of the rule of law. One of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech, the Lyceum Address, in 1838 talking about the importance of the rule of law.

  When there are unjust laws, you have to be careful about refusing to comply with them because what you may lose in the process – the rule of law itself — is of greater consequence. He was not categorical about that, however, because the example he gave was of our nation’s founders and their commitment to the rule of law.

  But think about that for a minute. What did our founders do? They committed an act of treason by signing the Declaration of Independence. They recognized at some point you have to take on the established regime when it is not only unjust, but when there is no lawful way to get it back on track. These matters frame our own nation in our own time.

  Let us start with the 2020 election. What do we see and how did I get involved in this?

  When President Trump, then candidate Trump, walked down that famous escalator at Trump Tower, one of the planks in his campaign platform was that we need to fix this problem of birthright citizenship. People who are just visiting here or are here illegally ought not to be able to provide automatic citizenship to their children. People laughed at him for not understanding the Constitution.

  In his next press conference, he waved a law review article, and said there is a very serious argument that our Constitution does not mandate birthright citizenship for people who are only here temporarily or who are here illegally. That happened to be my law review article on birthright citizenship.

  Then, during the Mueller investigation, I appeared for an hour on Mark Levin’s television show and said the whole Russia collusion story (which Trump rightly called the Russia “hoax”) was illegitimate – completely made up. President Trump thought that my analysis was pretty good, and invited me to the White House for a visit.

  When the major law firms were backing out of taking on any of the election challenges, President Trump called me and asked if I would be interested. Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.

  Two days later, I filed the motion to intervene in the Supreme Court in that action. The Supreme Court rules require the lawyer on the brief to have their name, address, email address and phone number.

  Nobody in the country at that point really knew who Trump’s legal team was, but all of a sudden people had a lawyer and an email address. I became the recipient of every claim, every allegation, crazy or not, that existed anywhere in the world about what had happened in the election. It was like drinking from a fire hose.

  I received communications from some of the best statisticians in the world who were working with election data and who told me there was something very wrong with the reported election results, according to multiple statistical analyses.

  One group decided to do a counter-statistical analysis. They said the statisticians had misapplied Stan Young’s path-breaking work. Unbeknownst to them, one of the statisticians I was relying on was Stan Young himself.

  Did you ever see the movie Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School”? He has to write an essay for English class, the essay has to be on Kurt Vonnegut’s thinking, so he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the essay for him.

  The professor fails him. Not because it was not his own work – the professor hadn’t figured that out — but because, in the professor’s view, the work that Dangerfield turned in was not what Kurt Vonnegut would ever say. That is what I felt like with this supposed critique of the statistical work my experts were conducting.

  Those were the kinds of things we were dealing with. I became something of a focal point for all this information. The allegations of illegality were particularly significant. I’ll just go through a couple of states and a couple of examples:

  In Georgia, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, signed a settlement agreement in March of 2020 in a suit that was filed by the Democratic Committee that essentially obliterated the signature verification process in Georgia. It made it virtually impossible to disqualify any ballots no matter how unlike the signature on the ballot was to the signature in the registration file.

  The most troubling aspect of it, to me, was that the law required that the signature match the registration signature. Secretary Raffensperger’s settlement agreement required three people to unanimously agree that the signature did not match, and it had to be a Democrat, a Republican and somebody else, so you were never going to get the unanimous agreement. That means no signature was ever going to get disqualified – and in Fulton County, election officials did not even bother conducting signature verification

  Even more important than the difficulty of disqualifying obviously falsified signatures was that, under the settlement agreement, the signature would be deemed valid if it matched either the registration signature or the signature on the ballot application itself. That means that if someone fraudulently signed and submitted an application for an absentee ballot and then voted that ballot after fraudulently directing it to a different address than the real voter’s address, the signature on the ballot would match the signature on the absentee ballot application and, voila, the fraudulent ballot would be deemed legal..

  How do we know that went on? Well, we had anecdotal stories. A co-ed at Georgia Tech University, if I recall correctly, testified before Senator Ligon’s Committee in the Georgia Senate. She said she went to vote in person with her 18-year-old sister. They were going to make a big deal about going to vote in person because the 18-year-old sister was voting for the first time. They did not want to vote by mail. They wanted to make an event out of it, get a sticker, “I voted,” and all that stuff. They get down to the precinct and the 22-year-old is told that she has already voted. They said she had applied for an absentee ballot.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “Oh, Deary,” they said, “you must have forgotten.” Very patronizing. “No, I didn’t forget.,” she said. “We have been looking forward to this for months. I know I did not apply for an absentee ballot.”

  They subsequently found out that somebody had applied for an absentee ballot in her name, had it mailed to a third-party address, not an address she knew. She never recognized it, didn’t understand it, and then she testified that she later learned that the fraudulent ballot was voted.

  We had that kind of anecdotal evidence to prove that this change in the signature rules that Secretary Brad Raffensperger signed on to had actually resulted in fraud. The disqualification rates statewide, because of this change in the law, went down by about 46%.

  Why is the change in the rules through a settlement agreement a problem? Article II of our Constitution, the Federal Constitution, quite clearly gives the sole power to direct the manner for choosing presidential electors to the legislature of the State.

  When Brad Raffensperger, who is not part of the legislature, unilaterally changed the rule from what the legislature had adopted by statute, that change was unconstitutional, not just illegal.

  Another alteration of the rules set out by the legislature occurred in Fulton County. Election officials there ran portable voting machines in heavily Democrat areas of Atlanta, which was contrary to state law.

  Pennsylvania. One of my favorite cases comes out of Pennsylvania. The League of Women Voters, which claims to be non-partisan but is clearly anything but, filed what I believe was a collusive lawsuit against the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, in August of 2020.

  The premise of the suit was that the signature verification requirement that election officials had been applying in Pennsylvania for a century violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment because voters whose ballots were disqualified were not given notice of the disqualification and an opportunity to cure the problem.

  The premise of the lawsuit was that there was a signature verification process but that it violated federal Due Process rights. The remedy the League of Women Voters sought was to have the court mandate a notice and opportunity to cure requirement.

  The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to resolve the lawsuit by providing something the League had not even requested. She decided, on her own, that Pennsylvania did not really have a signature verification requirement at all, so the request relief – notice and opportunity to cure – would not be necessary.

  Unilaterally, she got rid of a statute that election officials in Pennsylvania had been applying for 100 years to require signature verification. She then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to approve what she had done.

  She filed what was called a Petition for a King’s Bench Warrant to ratify what she had done. If I ever bump into her, I’m going to say, “You know, you have not had a king in Pennsylvania since 1776, maybe you ought to change the name of that.”

  The partisan elected Pennsylvania Supreme Court obliged. Not only is there no signature verification requirement in Pennsylvania, the Court held, but all those statutes that describe how election officials are supposed to do signature verification are just relics; they really do not have any meaning. So the Democrat majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, at the urging of the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth, just got rid of the whole signature verification process.

  Then the court went on to say: And since there is no signature verification requirement, there is no basis on which anybody would be able to challenge ballots, so we are going to get rid of the challenge parts of the election statutes as well, and since there is no basis to challenge, the statute that requires people to be in the room while things are being counted, that really does not matter. It does not have to be meaningful observation. Being at the front door of the football field-sized Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient even though it was impossible to actually observe the counting of ballots.

  The statute actually requires that observers be “in the room,” but it was written at a time when canvassing of ballots would occur in small settings, like the common room of the local library, where being “in the room” meant meaningful observation of the ballot counting process. Obliterating the very purpose of the statute, the court held that being “in the room” at the entrance of the Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient.

  In other words, all of the statutory provisions that were designed to protect against fraud were obliterated in Pennsylvania. We ought not to be surprised if fraud walked through the door left open by the unconstitutional elimination of these statutes.

  To this day, there are 120,000 more votes that were cast in Pennsylvania than their records show voters who have cast votes. Think about that: 120,000 more votes than voters who cast votes. The margin in Pennsylvania was 80,000.

  Wisconsin. One of the people who has testified for me in my California bar proceedings was Justice Mike Gableman, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He was hired by the Wisconsin legislature to conduct an investigation.

  His investigation efforts were thwarted at every turn, with the Secretary of State and others refusing to comply with subpoenas, etc. Nevertheless, he uncovered an amazing amount of illegality and fraud in the election. For example, the county clerks in Milwaukee and Madison had directed people that they could claim “indefinitely confined” status if they were merely afraid of COVID.

  That is clearly not permitted under the statute, but voters who followed the county clerks’ directive and falsely claimed they were “indefinitely confined” did not have to submit an ID with their absentee ballot as the law required — again, opening the door for fraud.

  Although the Wisconsin courts held that the advice was illegal and ordered it to be withdrawn, the number of people claiming they were indefinitely confined went from about 50,000 in 2016 to more than a quarter of million in 2020. The illegal advice provided by those two county clerks in heavily Democrat counties clearly had impact.

  Election officials in heavily Democrat counties also set up drop boxes. They even set up what they called “human drop boxes” in Madison, which is the home of the University of Wisconsin. For two or three consecutive Saturdays before the election, they basically ran a ballot harvesting scheme at taxpayer expense with volunteers – whom I suspect were actually supporters of the Biden campaign — working as “deputized” county clerks to go collect all these ballots, in violation of state law.

  How do I know it is a violation of the state law? The Wisconsin Supreme Court after the fact agreed with us that it was a violation of state law.

  One last piece. Wisconsin law is very clear. If you’re going to vote absentee, you have to have a witness sign a separate under-oath certification that the person who is voting that ballot is who they say they are.

  The witness has to fill out their name and address and sign it, under penalty of perjury. A lot of these came in with the witness signatures, but the address not filled in. The county clerks were directed by the Secretary of State to fill the information in on their own. In other words, they were doctoring the evidence.

  They were doing Google searches to get the name, to fill in an address to validate ballots that were clearly illegal under Wisconsin law. All told, those couple of things combined, more than 200,000 ballots were affected in a state where the margin victory was just over 20,000.

  Then in Michigan, we had similar things going on. We probably all saw the video of election officials boarding up the canvassing center at TCF Center in Detroit so that people could not observe what was going on. There were hundreds of sworn affidavits about illegality in the conduct of that process in Detroit.

  Then there was one affidavit on the other side submitted by an election official who was responsible for legally managing the election. He said, basically, that everything was fine, it was all perfect.

  The judge, without holding a hearing on a motion to dismiss, at which the allegations of the complaint are supposed to be taken as true, rejected all the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses who actually observed the illegality, and instead credited the government affidavit – without the government witness evening being subject to questioning on cross-examination.

  This is a manifestation of what I have described as the increasingly Orwellian tendency of our government. “We’re the government and when we’ve spoken, you’re just supposed to bend the knee and listen.”

  That was just some of the evidence we had. In those four states, and in Arizona and Nevada as well, there is no question that the illegality that occurred affected way more ballots than the certified margin of Joe Biden’s victory in all of those states.

  It only took three of those six states — any combination of three — for Trump to have won the election.

  When I was coming out of the Georgia jailhouse after surrendering myself for the indictment down in Georgia, one of the reporters threw a question at me. He said, “Do you still believe the election was stolen?”

  I said, “Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind,” because of things like this and because of the Gableman report, because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book on 2000 Mules — that stuff is true.

  People say, “Well, it’s not true. It’s been debunked.” No, it has not been debunked. In fact, there have been criminal convictions down in Pima County, Arizona, from the 2018 election, where people finally got caught doing the same thing that Dinesh D’Souza said they were doing.

  Dinesh’s documentary was based on the investigative work conducted by Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Her team obtained, at great expense, commercially-available cell phone location data and identified hundreds of people who visited multiple ballot drop boxes, oftentimes in the wee hours of the morning, 10 or more different drop boxes. Then they got the video surveillance from those drop boxes (those that were actually working, that is), confirming that the people were dropping in 8, 10, 12 ballots at a time.

  In Georgia, you are allowed to drop off ballots for immediate family members, but I think it is fairly clear that these folks – “mules” is what the documentary called them – were not family members. They were taking selfies of themselves in front of the ballot boxes because, as the whistleblower noted to Engelbrecht, they were getting paid for each ballot they delivered. In other words, this certainly looks like an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.

  What has happened since then? Well, there is a group in DC, largely hard-liner partisan Democrats, Hillary and Bill Clinton crowd, but joined by a couple of hard-line never-Trump Republicans, or one, so they can claim they are bipartisan. The group is called The 65 Project, and it is named after the 65 cases brought by Trump’s team that supposedly all ruled against Trump.

  Well, first of all, that mantra, how many have heard it?: “All the cases, all the courts ruled against Trump.” First of all, that is not true. Most of the cases were rejected on very technical jurisdictional grounds, like a case brought by a voter, rather than the candidate himself.

  Individual voters do not have standing because they lack a particularized injury. Those were dismissed. There is no basis for claiming that there was anything wrong with the claims on the merits. It is just that the cases were not brought by the right people.

  There was one case where one of these illegal guidances from the Secretary of State was challenged before the election. The judge ruled that it was just a guidance, and that until we get to election day to find out if the law was actually violated, the case was not ripe — and it got dismissed.

  Then the day after the election, when election officials actually violated the law, the case gets filed again, and the court says, “You can’t wait until your guy loses and then bring the election challenge. It’s barred by a doctrine called laches. This is the kind of stuff that the Trump legal team was dealing with in those 65 cases.

  Of the cases that actually reached the merits –there were fewer than a dozen of them, if I recall correctly — Trump won three-fourths of them. You have never heard that in the “New York Times.” And the Courts simply refused to hear some clearly meritorious cases, such as one filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The majority in that case simply noted that it did not see any need to hear the case, over a vigorous dissent that basically said, “Are you nuts? This was illegal, and we have a duty to hear the challenge.”

  Two years later, that same Court took up the issues that had been presented to it in December 2020, and it held that what happened was illegal. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

  The 65 Project was formed — I think I’ve seen reported that they received a grant from a couple of George Soros-related organizations of $100 million — to bring disbarment actions against all of the lawyers who were involved in any of those cases.

  The head of the organization gave an interview to Axios, kind of a left-leaning Internet news outlet, and he said in his interview to Axios that the group’s goal with respect to the Trump election lawyers is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” “in order to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections.

  Think about that. Our system works, in part, because we have an adversarial system of justice that supports it. If groups like the 65 Project succeed in scaring off one side of these intense policy disputes or legal disputes, then we will not have an adversarial system of justice.

  We will not have elections that we can have any faith in, because if you do not have that kind of judicial check on illegality in the election, then bad actors will just do the illegality whenever they want, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

  They are not the group that brought the bar charges against me in California, but they did file a complaint against me in the Supreme Court of the United States. A parallel group called the States United Democracy Center is the one that filed the bar complaint against me in California. Nearly every single paragraph of the complaint had false statements in it.

  The bar lawyers publicly announced back in March of 2022 that they were taking on the investigation. Under California law, investigations before charges are filed publicly are supposed to be confidential. But there is an exception if the bar deems that the lawyer being investigated is a threat to the public.

  So the head of the California Bar had a press conference announcing that I was a threat to the public, and therefore they could disclose that they were conducting an investigation. Now, what is the threat to the public that I pose? What is the old line? Telling truth in an era of universal deceit is a revolutionary act? I guess that is the threat to the public they’re asserting.

  That is the threat to the public. Telling the truth about what went on in the 2020 election. They gave me the most extraordinary demand. They basically said we want to know every bit of information you had at your disposal for every statement you made on the radio, for every article you published, for every line in every brief you filed. It took us four months.

  I said, “We’re going to respond to this very comprehensively.” They say I have no evidence of election illegality and fraud. We gave them roughly 100,000 pages of evidence. 100,000 pages we disclosed to them. They went ahead and filed the bar charges anyway against us in January of 2023.

  My wife and I, since 2021, have been on quite a roller coaster.

  We came to the realization that my whole career, my education in Claremont, my PhD, my teaching constitutional law for 20 years, my being a dean, my being a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, probably equipped me better than almost anybody else in the country to be able to confront, stand up against this lawfare that we’re dealing with.

  This is our mission now. This is what we do. This is what I do around the clock, is deal with this.

  I was teaching our summer seminar at the Claremont Institute. We do a series of summer seminars, one for recent college grads called the Publius Fellowship Program.

  You may recognize some of the names of people that have gone through Publius. I was a Publius Fellow in 1984. Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Tom Cotton, Kate Mizelle (the judge who blocked the vaccine mandates down in Florida). We’ve had some pretty good folks.

  We also conduct a program for recent law school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship. We were conducting a seminar on the Constitution’s religion clauses when the news of the Georgia indictment naming me as an indicted co-conspirator came down. We kept going on with the seminar. At the end of the program, the fellows always roast each other and make fun of each other, missteps they’d made during the week and things like that.

  Well, this year, they roasted me a bit. One of the students noted that as FBI agents were rappelling down from the rooftop, Eastman kept talking about the Constitution’s religion clauses.

  He recounted that, prior to the program, the students didn’t know what to expect when they accepted the fellowship offer to study with me (among others), given all that was going on. Then he said that what they witnessed on that night, when the indictment came down, was a demonstration of courage they had not seen before, and that it was contagious. He then recited a line from our national anthem – the one asking whether the flag was still flying. And he noted, with great insight, that if you listen carefully to the words, the question is not so much whether the flag still flies, but what kind of land it flies over? Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the coward and the home of the slave?

  I find more and more, as more Americans are waking up to what is going on, that courage is indeed contagious. People are looking for ways to help fight back. When they see somebody standing up with that kind of courage, it gives them courage to join.

  There are people in every county in the country, with eyes on the local clerk’s office and verifying that, “When it says 28 people are living and voting in an efficiency apartment, we know that is not true and we’re going to get that cleaned up.”

  I remain optimistic as people are awakening to the threat to our way of life. This is one of the cornerstones of our Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal. There are certain corollaries that flow from that.

  This means that nobody has the right to govern others without their consent. The consent of the governed is one of the cornerstones of our system of government. Our forefathers exercised it in 1776 by choosing to declare independence, and 10 years later by choosing to ratify a constitution, and we exercise that consent of the governed principle in an ongoing way by how we conduct our elections.

  Ultimately, we are the sovereign authority that tells the government which direction we want it to go, not the other way around.

  Regularly, we are instead being given the following message: “We’re the government. We have spoken. How dare you stand up and offer a different view.” That has turned us from being sovereign citizens in charge of the government to subjects being owned by or run by the government.

  That is not the kind of country I intend to live in. It is not the kind of country I want my kids and now my grandchildren to grow up in. This is a fight worth everything you’ve got. That’s why we’re going to do as much as we can to win this fight. Thank you for your support and prayers.

  * * *

  Question: What happened after the 2020 election with Justices Thomas and Alito. They wanted the Supreme Court at least to hear the evidence, but were turned down. Why?

  Dr. Eastman: One of the cases that was up there was one of the other illegalities that occurred in Pennsylvania. The Secretary of State unilaterally altered the statutory deadline for the return of ballots.

  Pennsylvania, like most states, says, “If you’re going to mail in your ballot, it’s got to be received by the close of the poll so we’re not having this gamesmanship of being able to get ballots in after the fact.” She said, “Oh, we’re going to give an extra week.” The court said, “No, we’ll give an extra four days.”

  That case was brought to the Supreme Court to block that clearly illegal action by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, agreed to by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They asked for an emergency stay of that decision so the rule that had been in place would still be followed.

  Ruth Ginsburg had died, there were eight people, and the court split four to four, which means the stay was denied. You had to have a majority. It was Thomas, it was Alito, it was Gorsuch, and it was Kavanaugh. John Roberts voted with the three liberals. Then when Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, I thought, “OK, we’ll get to five.”

  When a motion to expedite in my case was filed in mid-December, we filed a cert petition from three of the erroneous Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases, we filed a motion to expedite, and that was denied. They didn’t even act on it.

  Then February 12th of 2021, they denied the cert petition and the motion to expedite. The vote there was six to three on the ground that it had become moot. That meant Barrett and Roberts and Kavanaugh all voted to deny the cert petition. But it had not become moot.

  The issue of whether non-legislative actors in the state can alter election law consistent with the Constitution remains an open issue. It should not be an open issue. The Constitution is quite clear, but there was a news account at one point reporting that John Roberts had yelled at Alito and Thomas, who had insisted they needed to take these cases. They were just like Bush versus Gore.

  Roberts was reported to have said, “They’re not like Bush versus Gore. If we do anything, they will burn down our cities.” Which means the impact of what had gone on in the summer of 2020 in Portland and Kenosha and all these other places, had an impact on the Supreme Court declining to take these cases.

  By the way, a little aside on that story to show you how distorted the January 6th committee, and particularly Liz Cheney was on the evidence.

  At some point during the course of all this, the legislator in Pennsylvania who was conducting hearings on the election illegality in Pennsylvania wanted my advice on what the legislative authority was if they found that there was outcome determinative illegality or fraud in the election.

  He sent an email to me at my email address at the University of Colorado, where my wife and I were teaching at the time.

  I responded, “If there is clear evidence of illegality, that’s unconstitutional, and so you have the legal right, the legal constitutional authority to do something about it. If you think it altered the effect of the election, you should name your own electors.”

  University of Colorado, contrary to their policy, disclosed that email publicly. Liz Cheney announced the email, said Eastman was pressuring the Pennsylvanian legislature to overturn the election, even though it was quite clear that my statement about legislative authority was specifically conditioned on a finding of illegality and fraud sufficient to have affected the outcome of the election.

  The other gross distortion that came out of the J6 Committee involved an email exchange I had about whether to appeal the Wisconsin case to the Supreme Court. The campaign staff, money guys in the campaign said, “We’re trying to be good stewards of the funds we have. What are the chances that they’re going to take these cases? Is it worth filing these cert petitions?”

  I wrote in the email, “The legal issues are rock solid. It therefore doesn’t turn on the merits of the case. It turns on whether the justices have the spine to take this on. Then I said, “And I understand that there is a heated fight underway and whether they should take these cases. We ought to give the good guys the ammunition they need to wage that fight.”

  Liz Cheney or someone on the J6 Committee puts out a portion of this email. They ignore that I say the legal issues are rock solid. They say instead that Eastman, knowing his case had no merit, was pressuring the Supreme Court to take the case and obviously had inside information from Ginni Thomas, because three weeks earlier, Ginni had sent me a note saying, “I heard you on Larry O’Connor’s show giving an update on the election litigation. Can you give that same update to my Zoom call group? By the way, what’s your home address? I need it for the Christmas card.”

  That was the email. All of a sudden, Liz Cheney and the J6 Committee puts those two things together as if there was something nefarious about it.

  My understanding that there is an intense fight underway at the Court was based exclusively on the news accounts in The New York Times about Roberts yelling at Alito for insisting that the Court needed to take these cases. The dishonesty, the combination of the dishonesty, the whole thing, this narrative is out there and it is the government narrative.

  No matter how false the narrative is, we are supposed to just accept it or bend the knees. “It’s like, the government says, ‘We’ve increased your funds this year from four to three,'” and we’re just all supposed to accept it. This is lawfare, but it is support of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism.

  The government has spoken, and we are all supposed to accept it as true, no matter how obviously false it is. I’m sorry, free people should not and never have and never will if they continue to be a free people tolerate that kind of thing.

  Q: I have two questions. One, when Raffensperger did that in Georgia, was it expressly to defeat Donald Trump? Do you think he knew what the ramification of that ruling was going to be? The second thing is, in this upcoming trial, is there an opportunity to lay out publicly for a jury?

  Is this a jury situation, the talk you just gave us? Because there has to be a moment where people pay attention to this, and so far it has not happened.

  Dr. Eastman: So far it has not come, I agree. I mean, it has come, but in ways that are immediately shut down. We are laying out the case now in my California bar trial, which next week enters its eighth week. My defense of my California bar license will have cost us a half million dollars before all is said and done.

  Being a full trial team for eight weeks, it’s gone on. It is insane, but we are laying out the case to the extent the judge permits. She has already blocked about a dozen of my witnesses, but I’ll tell you some of the stories. We have a guy named Joseph Freed, retired CPA, professional auditor, auditing Fortune 500 companies his whole career.

  He said something doesn’t smell right here, and so he applied his tools of the trade to look at the elections and wrote a book called “Debunked.” It’s a brilliant book. I told my wife, “This is the book I would have written if I hadn’t been on my heels playing defense the last year.”

  The book was written and published in January of 2023, so the judge ruled it was not relevant because even though it discusses all the evidence I had before me, the analysis he did was after the fact and I could not have relied on it, therefore it was not relevant.

  Two days later, the government offers a witness to introduce into evidence government reports that were done in September 2022. My lawyer objected, “It’s not relevant on your prior ruling.” The lawyer for the bar actually said, “Well, these are government reports. They are different.” So the judge let them in.

  Part of the problem is, trying to prevent the story from getting out, even in a trial where the rules of evidence are supposed to come to play. I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with that in the Georgia criminal litigation.

  This full story probably will come out more clearly there and it will have a bigger viewership there than my California bar trial has had because Trump is one of the defendants. The California bar trial is exposing a lot of this.

  A reporter for the “Arizona Sun,” Rachel Alexander, is doing a terrific job covering the case in daily articles in Arizona Sun, but she also she has a Twitter account.

  What I’ve seen this far from the state trial judge down in Georgia is that he is going to hold the line on what the law is and what the law requires. That is a very good thing and we’ll be able to see it. Fingers crossed.

  About Raffensperger, look, I don’t know what his motives are, all I can see is the consequences of them. There are the consequences of that, which should have been obvious on its face. More importantly, there is the continued falsity claims in his public statements, and I’ll give you one example.

  One of the expert reports on the election challenge that was filed — which never got a judge appointed, by the way, for nearly a month, and by then it was too late.

  One of the allegations based on an expert analysis was that 66,247 people had voted who were underage when they registered to vote.

  Now, he goes out and does a press conference and says, “We checked, nobody voted when they were underage,” but that was not the allegation made by the expert. The allegation was that they registered to vote when they were 16. You have to be 17 and a half before you can register.

  If they had not re-registered, that meant they were not legally registered and not legally allowed to vote. He routinely mischaracterizes the actual allegation in the case, deliberately lying. Whatever his motives were with whether he’s anti-Trump or not, he is clearly lying, and we ought not to give him any credence whatsoever.

  Q: You had said before that President Trump had won three quarters of the real cases. I’m wondering what that means to win, what are the implications of that and what is correct, if anything. What, then, then is the way forward?

  Dr. Eastman: The way forward is a legal system. Now, the Trump cases that were won only involved small components like the statutory right in Pennsylvania to be there to observe the counting. They were blocking even minimum observation. The court ordered, “Yeah, you’ve got to let them into the room and observe.”

  That was not one that was the grand enchilada on the outcome determinative issues, but he won the case. We won ultimately on the indefinitely confined ruling up in Wisconsin. They said that, “Just being fearful of COVID does not mean you’re indefinitely confined under the statute.”

  It’s not as if the Wisconsin legislature didn’t have an opportunity to alter that. If they wanted, they determined, they considered alterations in the law as a result of COVID, made some, but this was not one of them.

  What I have seen, and it pains me to say this, is that the level of corruption in our institutions, including our judicial institutions, is so pervasive now that it is troubling. Because many of these cases end up in the DC courts, I cannot imagine a stronger case for change of venue than those January 6th criminal defendants.

  Yet their motions for change of venue were uniformly denied because they wanted this in the DC jury pool, which is like 95% hostile to Trump. This is not a jury of peers. This is not a jury that is likely to lead to a just and true result. This is a partisan political act, a loaded dice system in DC.

  The same thing I think they were gambling on being true in Georgia, in Fulton County. But I don’t think the dice is as loaded there as it is in DC.

  It will cost a million, a million and a half to defend against those charges. The poor guy who entered a plea agreement and pleaded guilty last week, one of the 19 defendants in Georgia, he is a bail bondsman for a living.

  If he gets a felony, he is not only in jail for a while, but he cannot do his trade, so they offer him a misdemeanor conviction and no jail time. He took it in a heartbeat. Otherwise, he is looking at a million to two million dollars in legal fees tied up in this internationally televised drama for nothing, and he was not in the position to undertake that.

  We have raised over a half million on my legal defense fund site. It’s probably going to end up being three million total that we need, but he did not have the ability to do a hundredth of that.

  In international news: “Oh, one of Trump’s co-defendants is turning the tables on Trump. This is bad news for Trump.” No, it’s not. The guy made the most sensible decision he could.

  My lawyer got a call from ABC, they said, “Have they reached out to you to offer a plea agreement?” I told him to say “No, I suspect they’re not going to, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a suggestion to them. I will agree to a plea agreement that says they drop all the charges, and I will agree to testify truthfully on their behalf. In exchange, I agree not to file a lawsuit for malicious prosecution against them.”

  I thought that was a pretty good offer.

  Q: You’re paying with your money. They’re paying with the…

  Dr. Eastman: Yeah, they’re paying with my money too, taxpayer money.

  Q: What about the ability to manipulate electronic voting machines? It was on every single broadcast for weeks.

  Dr. Eastman: I quickly became a triage nurse. Once I filed that brief on behalf of Trump and everything started coming in. I had to try and make the best judgment I could about what kind of allegations were credible and what allegations were not credible. What things that would appear credible that we could prove versus the one that seem credible, but we cannot prove them. I’ll give you one example.

  Early in January, Mike Lindell from MyPillow said he had a list of the Chinese intrusions. He has got 50 pages of spreadsheets purporting to show IP addresses in Beijing connecting with IP addresses in county election offices all over the country, and then altering Trump down 45 votes in this precinct or altering the totals as they are getting transmitted to the secretaries of state that then become part of the reported vote totals.

  I had the first 10 lines of that spreadsheet on January 2nd, and I had some of the best security experts in the world that I was working with, and I said, “Can we verify this?” — because they commonly describe how many Trump votes were lost, but obviously just typed in. I said, “I need to see the data, I need to see the packet that you say is sending instructions to make these alterations.”

  They wanted me to go to the president with this stuff and I said, “If in fact this is true this is an act of war by the number one other superpower in the world against the United States.” Taking that information into the president without confirming it would be an imprudent thing to do.

  I wanted to confirm it and my experts, who had access to IP address registries, said none of the IP addresses were valid. This is made-up stuff. So, I was not able to confirm it. Now, maybe this occurred, but the data I was looking at was not the silver bullet of evidence that we needed to be able to take it.

  Other stuff, do you know…how many saw the vote spike charts? Some entrepreneur started making T-shirts out of them. Those big vote spikes, you saw that chart over the Internet.

  Well, think about that for a moment. Atlanta, which is about 90% Democrat, if they are not reporting partial returns all night long the way the rest of the state is, and then they report all of their returns all at once, you are going to see a vote spike for the Democrat.

  If they are reporting partial returns all night long, the way the rest of the state is, and then you see that kind of vote spike, that is pretty good evidence of fraud. I asked, “The data we are looking at that gives us that vote spike chart, that famous Internet graph that everybody saw is based on state-wide aggregate time-series data. I need to know whether Atlanta is reporting what we would expect or whether it’s fraud.” How do I get that information? I need the county level time series. Let’s see what was going on in Fulton County alone.”

  I’m told that Georgia officials locked access to the county level time-series data that would have helped me determine whether it was evidence of fraud or evidence of something that we should have expected. To this day, I do not know, but those are the things I was trying to do to get to the bottom of this information.

  About electronic voting machines? There have been three audits. Antrim County, Michigan, and one of the leading critics of voting machines and their software is a guy named J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

  He testified as the expert in litigation down in Georgia in 2018 saying these machines are not secure. They sealed his testimony and it was only released in June. It just says, “These things are susceptible to fraud by all sorts of bad actors.”

  He was the government witness in Antrim County, and he demonstrated that, in his opinion, what really happened in Antrim County was that some of the local clerks had done an update. One of the cities in the county had omitted one of the school board races, and so they had to redo the ballot.

  Unbeknownst to the county clerks, every line in the machine code was consecutively ordered throughout the whole county. If you add one line in Bailey Township, it doesn’t affect the cities in the county that began with A, but it affected everything else.

  All the votes for Jorgensen were cast for Trump, all the votes for Trump were cast for Biden. All the votes for Biden were cast for the line marked “President” and didn’t count. When they unraveled that error and counted the actual ballots, it looked like this was an update in the software error and it was explainable.

  Halderman goes out of his way, however, not to distance himself from his prior concerns about the vulnerability of election.

  One of the things we discover in that Antrim audits is that in fact, the vote logs that are supposed to be there had been deleted for 2020, not 2016, not 2012, they’re still there, but 2020 had been deleted.

  We also found that the password for access to the machine, that give you, the administrator, rights that would allow you to delete logs, was the same password that everybody had access to anywhere — from county clerk to anybody — they had the same password. 123456 or something simple like that was the password. It had been that way since 2008.

  The audit uncovered huge vulnerabilities, but because the logs had been deleted, no proof. A second audit was done in Mesa County, Colorado. A woman by the name of Tina Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado.

  The Secretary of State in Colorado, a radical advocate named Jena Griswold, had ordered an update to all the machines in the county shortly after the election. The update destroys all the election evidence, and that is a violation of federal law.

  All election information is supposed to be kept for 22 months, and the people that are on the hook for the violation of that federal law –and it is a felony — are the county clerks. Tina Peters said, “I’m not going to allow them to put me in way of a felony indictment of letting this information be destroyed.”

  She made a mirror-image copy of all the data so that when they did the upgrade, she could say, “I haven’t violated federal law. I’ve got it.” She had the mirror image, and she hired forensic analysts to look at.

  They are now charging her with nine felonies for illegally accessing the information, but what they discovered in that audit, they actually identified computer code that was changing votes. Now, Jeff O’Donnell was the guy that did it. He published three reports, the three Mesa County reports. I called Jeff O’Donnell as one of the witnesses of my California bar trial. The judge has barred him from testimony. We had not identified him up-front because this was going to be rebuttal to their claims that everything was fine. The third audit has occurred down in Georgia. There’s one case still pending from all of these things from three years ago. The case is called Favorito vs. Raffensperger.

  Garland Favorito runs an organization called Voter GA, which has been doing election integrity oversight stuff in Georgia for 20 years. He is neither Democrat nor Republican. He is a Constitution Party guy, sorry.

  There was a judge down there. Apparently this judge did not get the memo that we are not supposed to look at any of this stuff, and he authorized Garland and his team of forensic experts to access one of the machines in Fulton County, and he gave them forensic audit access.

  They had it for about a week before somebody came down on the judge and said, “Oh, we’re not supposed to do that,” and the judge revoked the order. In that week, they discovered something very stunning. Think about how this works:

  At first in our history, it used to be that you would go to both of your local precincts, and maybe the local library, and absentee ballots would get mailed in and delivered to that precinct, so that the absentee people who had voted from the same neighborhood were counted with the in-person votes.

  This year in all the big cities, they had big central balloting and counting facilities: State Farm Arena in Atlanta, the Philadelphia Convention Center, or the TCS Center in Detroit.

  This meant that absentee ballots are in from all 490 precincts in Atlanta, in Fulton County. They are randomly put through, they do not come all “in batches,” such as, these are all the ballots from precinct number one, or whatever. They are random.

  They get put in, they get opened, and they get stacked into piles of a hundred, and then they get scanned. Now think about that. That means you have 490 different ballots being scanned. Every ballot, every precinct, has different races on it, different school board races, different things.

  The ballot has a code to tell the machine which key to look to in order to know how to count those dots on the ballot box. Every 100 with that randomized listing of precincts creates a unique digital signature for that hundred. For mathematicians, that is 100 to the 490^th power, because there are 490 precincts.

  The odds that you have a duplicate batch of a hundred are zero. 0.0000001. Infinitely small chance that they would have anything. In their one week on one machine, they discovered 5,000 ballots with identical digital signatures in batches of a hundred.

  The margin in Georgia was 11,779. They did this on just one machine, looking at it only a partial bit of time for one week. These are the three audits we had. We know the machines either have been hacked or are open to bad actors with access to the machines, either put in a thumb chip. Halderman’s the guy.

  They had a convention in Las Vegas, hired a bunch of geeks, computer geeks from around the country, to come to this convention and see who could hack into the machines and alter the vote codes quickest. It took people about 15 minutes.

  Halderman is also the guy. What is one of the big rivalries in the country, Michigan versus Ohio State? He had his Michigan students vote on who had the better football program, Michigan or Ohio State.

  Now, anybody that knows anything about football knows there’s no way anybody in Michigan is ever going to vote for Ohio State, but he programmed it so that Ohio State won by 80 percent. It took him five minutes.

  Michigan students voting on one of his Dominion machines, when this was the issue, the ballot initiative, voted for Ohio State. The notion that these things cannot be hacked is laughable. They have to be able to be opened if they need to be repaired. [I heard that from an MIT graduate at the time.]

  The question is, how to prove that they were hacked in this particular instance when they are destroying the evidence, and that is where we are.

  Q: Do the Republicans do this too?

  Dr. Eastman: I don’t know. There was a story that was floated that the former Secretary of State in Arizona and former governor, who was running a distant fifth in the primary election for governor before he signed the $100 million contract with an electronic voting machine company, and all of a sudden he won the election, or the same thing that happened with Kemp in Georgia.

  Those speculations have been floating out there that their bribery was not cash into their bank account but votes in their upcoming primary elections. I do not know whether that is true or not. Those allegations have been floated. It would not surprise me .

  Stacey Abrams certainly thought Kemp stole the election. There was a whole litigation on it. That is why Halderman was doing his expert reports in that case.

  More troubling, though, are the people that knew that there was something amiss and refused to do anything about it because they did not like Trump, or they do not like the Trump populist uprising movement that Trump is leading.

  Remember, Trump did not create this movement. We need to date it back to the Tea Party movement in 2010 after Obamacare comes down. The Republicans in charge in Congress thought that was a bigger threat to them than the Democrats were.

  They wanted to do everything they could to shut down that movement. The movement just took on a new guise when a new leader stepped up to get ahead of it, and it is the MAGA movement now.

  Either they do not like those people in flyover country — that may be part of it from our release in DC — or they do not like anybody questioning the utter corruption that is making them all multimillionaires with having government jobs or some combination of both.

  What was most discouraging was finding people saying, “Oh, I wish we could do something about this election illegality,” and then, on the back side, doing everything they could to stop it.

  Former Attorney General William Barr is the primary example of this. Barr goes out on December 1st, and said, “We’ve been investigating, and we found no evidence of significant enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.”

  One of the charges against me in California is, “You continue to insist there was illegality even after Bill Barr made that statement. Why didn’t you bow to him?” Well, we subsequently learned that despite Barr’s public statement that US attorneys could investigate election illegality, anytime somebody did, he called him on the phone and order them not to.

  In Pennsylvania, the US attorney in Pennsylvania, McSwain, was looking at the truck driver incident. Barr told him, “You hand all that over to the attorney general of the state” — a Democrat who was part of the problem.

  One of the FBI investigators who was actually getting to the bottom of this got a call that said, “Stand down.”

  The investigation of the ballots coming out from under the table and being counted after everybody was sent home down in Atlanta, the FBI did investigate that. Guess what the purpose of their investigation was. To determine that the statement that there were suitcases of ballots rather than bins of ballots was false. They did not do any other investigation about whether in fact people had been sent home.

  You have people out there saying, “Oh, we’re investigating. Everything’s fine,” while behind the scenes ordering people not to do the investigation that would actually get to the bottom of it.

  I call it the uniparty. You can call it the deep state. You can call it the administrative state. You can call it the corrupt state, but it sees the MAGA movement as the biggest threat to its syndicators. It is going to do everything it can to destroy the people who are going to try and publicize what is going on.

  That is what we are dealing with, and we are $2 million in. One of the lawsuits that was filed against me by this guy down in North Carolina, I don’t know why he picked me as the lead defendant, but other defendants are all billionaire oligarchs who are using their own wealth. That is the kind of nonsense I’m dealing with.

  This article is based on a briefing from John Eastman to Gatestone Institute.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 20:20

• SCOTUS Will Hear Lawsuit Challenging Biden's ATF "Ghost Gun" Rule Before Elections 
  SCOTUS Will Hear Lawsuit Challenging Biden’s ATF “Ghost Gun” Rule Before Elections 

  On Monday, the Supreme Court said it would review a lawsuit filed by the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) and FPC Action Foundation (FPCAF) challenging President Biden’s “frame or receiver” rule, which was enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The nation’s highest court plans to decide if certain gun parts that complete ‘ghost guns’ fall under the definition of a “firearm” under the federal Gun Control Act.

  Ghost gun rules require kit manufacturers and sellers to obtain licenses to sell the parts kit, apply serial numbers to frames and receivers, and conduct FBI background checks.

  Last year, the Fifth Circuit struck down the ghost gun rule, but the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court. Biden’s DoJ desperately claimed that 80% lower kits were considered “firearms” under the Gun Control Act of 1968 because it included “any weapon…which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive,” as well as “the frame or receiver of any such weapon.”

  

  FPC founder and President Brandon Combs called Biden’s ATF war on the Second Amendment through the ghost gun rule “unconstitutional and abusive.” 

  “We are delighted that the Supreme Court will hear our case and decide this important issue once and for all,” Combs said, adding, “The Fifth Circuit’s decision in our case was correct and now that victory can be applied to the entire country.”

  FPC Action Foundation President Cody J. Wisniewski, counsel for Plaintiffs, said, “This is an important day for the entire liberty movement. By agreeing to hear our case, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to put ATF firmly in its place and stop the agency from unconstitutionally expanding its gun control agenda. We look forward to addressing this unlawful rule in the Court’s next term.” 

  One of the leading plaintiffs, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, the maker of Ghost Gunner, told us, “We’re pleased the Court decided to take up this important question concerning the proper definition of a firearm.” 

  Wilson added, “The Biden ATF had tried to illegally rewrite the legal definition of the word to discourage homemade firearms.” 

  Meanwhile, ABC News is calling ghost guns “a firearm” despite the Supreme Court having yet ruled on the case. This misinformation and disinformation 

  

  ABC News is saying the quiet part out loud: The government wants to label all gun parts firearms to restrict the Second Amendment. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 20:00

• 'Threat Facing Our Country Is From The Far Left' And Socialistic Thugs, Not Trump: Bill Barr
  ‘Threat Facing Our Country Is From The Far Left’ And Socialistic Thugs, Not Trump: Bill Barr

  Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Former Attorney General Bill Barr dismissed the idea that former President Donald Trump is a power-hungry “right-wing dictator,” noting that the real threat facing the United States is the intolerant “far left” ideologues.

  

  President Trump will “probably put a premium on people who he feels would be more subservient to him. And that’s an area of concern. But at the end of the day, you have to remember, serving in his administration, I was fine with his policies. I think his policies were good policies,” Mr. Barr said in an April 20 interview with Fox. “My problems came with his behavior, which I found very troubling after the election. And I think the idea that he’s going to be an autocrat and take over power like some right-wing dictator is not the threat facing our country.”

  “The threat facing our country is from the far left. And the drift that’s been occurring toward really a socialistic system and one that brooks no opposition, one that cancels people, that has only one viewpoint taught in colleges, that tries to push parents out of the picture when it comes to the education of their children. It’s a heavy-handed bunch of thugs, in my opinion. And that’s where the threat is.”

  Mr. Barr pointed out that while there is a lot of “babble” about the Trump administration being lawless, it was the Biden administration that’s been breaking the law consistently.

  President Biden is “not enforcing the law on the border. He’s forgiving tens of billions of dollars of money owed to the United States that puts this onus on the back of hardworking taxpayers, people who are not getting these breaks. And the court’s already said that they didn’t have the power to do this. And he’s trying to do it before the election to buy votes. This is, to me, lawless and crass behavior,” he said.

  Mr. Barr thinks neither President Biden nor President Trump should be “near the Oval Office.” However, if he has to pick one, “there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s better for the country for the Republicans to win the election.”

  “At the end of the day, we have to select between two different individuals. And I’ve said all along, and I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think will do the least harm to the country. And I think that to me, that’s clearly Trump and the Republican administration, which I think is important,” he said.

  Key priorities for the United States’s leaders must be to take control over the border, stop lawlessness in cities, build up the country’s strength, and prevent excessive regulation that suffocates the business and tech sector. Mr. Barr believes these goals will be fulfilled “under a Trump administration.”

  “At the same time, I think the Biden administration is, in fact, the greater threat to democracy. I think they have a totalitarian temper. They have bought into the progressive movement, and they’re trying to squelch opposition and freedom of speech,” he warned.

  Trump-Biden Re-Match

  Mr. Barr’s comments on the two presidents come as the presidential election is only a few months ahead. Multiple polls show President Trump having a lead or being tied to President Biden.

  An April 18 update by Morning Consult showed both presidents tied in the race, with each garnering 42 percent support of U.S. voters. Even among Independents, both were tied, with 34 percent support each.

  However, more Republicans were seen to back President Trump than Democrats supporting President Biden. While 88 percent of Republicans said they’ll vote for President Trump, only 85 percent of Democrats said they intend to vote for President Biden.

  “Trump has a slight popularity edge,” Morning Consult said. “Trump maintains a net favorability advantage over Biden, though the bulk of the electorate is still more likely to hold negative views about both major party contenders.”

  According to an April 18 Emerson College poll, 46 percent of voters support President Trump, a three-point lead over President Biden with 43 percent support.

  “Since Emerson’s last national poll in early April, support for Biden lowered by two points, while Trump maintained 46 percent. When undecided voters are asked which candidate they lean toward, Trump’s overall support increases to 51 percent, and Biden to 48 percent,” the pollster said.

  Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, pointed out that “voters who think the cost of living is rising support Trump over Biden, 56 percent to 32 percent.” Meanwhile, “those who feel the cost of living is easing or staying the same support Biden over Trump.”

  Meanwhile, President Trump is battling multiple legal battles as he campaigns for a second term in the White House. He is currently involved in four criminal cases.

  The opening arguments for President Trump’s “hush-money” trial are set to begin this Monday. He is facing 34 charges in the case, with each count carrying a maximum jail time of four years.

  President Trump has slammed the legal challenges facing him as political targeting. “We are under Political Attack from Biden’s D.C. Thugs, working closely with the D.A.’s Office, in order to help Re-Elect Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in History. MAGA2024!” he wrote in an April 19 Truth Social post.

  According to federal disclosures made by three groups associated with the Trump campaign, they have collectively spent over $16.1 million so far this year to meet the former president’s legal bills.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 19:40

• "Our Cities Turn Into War Zones Every Night"
  “Our Cities Turn Into War Zones Every Night”

  From coast to coast, radical prosecutors and progressive politicians have been pushing illogical criminal justice policies that not only have backfired but transformed many once-safe Democrat-controlled cities into crime-ridden hellholes.

  Go down the list of cities. Whether it’s New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Chicago, or San Francisco, and the list goes on and on – these metros are plagued with violent crime, out-of-control youth, carjackings, murders, drug crises, the homelessness crisis, theft waves, and unvetted migrants.

  

  The latest sign some of the bluest American cities continue their transformation into ‘war zone’-like conditions while progressive lawmakers ignore law and order is an illegal “teen takeover” event in Democratic-controlled Memphis, Tennessee. 

  

  On Saturday evening, Memphis police initially reported 16 people were shot during a block party in the 2400 block of Carnes Avenue in the Orange Mound neighborhood. It was later reported that five victims had gunshot wounds – two males were pronounced dead at the scene, and three others were taken to the hospital in critical condition. 

  X video shows the moment when a Chevrolet Corvette was burning out in the middle of the street. Gunfire erupted, and everyone ducked for cover. 

  🇺🇸🚨 Sixteen people just got shot at a “teen takeover” in Memphis! pic.twitter.com/YOxh8uwCQE

  — Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) April 21, 2024

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  “Our cities turn into war zones every night and weekend, but the media refuses to even talk about it,” X user End Wokeness said. 

  

  X user SaltyGoat said, “I’m willing to bet if there was a red MAGA hat anywhere in the crowd, it’d be all over the news.” 

  The explosion of illegal teen takeover events nationwide is happening at a time when the youth is not respecting the law – thank Democrats for this phenomenon. 

  According to Bloomberg data, there has been a surge in “teen takeover” news stories in corporate media since the start of 2023. 

  

  Last night, Elon Musk said on X, “My politics are (I think) fairly moderate anyway.” 

  He told X users he just wants safer cities and secured borders, among other common-sense points that Democrats are failing to deliver. 

  My politics are (I think) fairly moderate anyway.

  – Safe cities
  – Secure borders
  – Neutral judiciary
  – Sensible spending
  – Pro environment

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2024

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  Most Americans agree that safer cities and secured borders are critical to the nation. However, Democrats are oddly failing on this – and one has to wonder if there’s a secret agenda at play. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 19:20

• Planned Parenthood Abortions Among 'Top Four Leading Causes Of Death' In America
  Planned Parenthood Abortions Among ‘Top Four Leading Causes Of Death’ In America

  Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Abortions conducted by Planned Parenthood are a leading cause of death in the United States, with the organization recommending the procedure to pregnant clients 97 percent of the time, according to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group.

  

  Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider, released its 2022–2023 annual report revealing the organization conducted 392,715 abortions during the period. “This puts abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in the top four leading causes of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group.

  According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 695,000 Americans died from heart disease in 2021, with 605,000 dying from cancer, 416,000 from COVID-19, and nearly 225,000 from accidents.

  “Once again, pregnant women who walk into Planned Parenthood are sold an abortion 97 percent of the time, rather than helped to keep their child or make an adoption plan. Meanwhile, they saw 80,000 fewer patients, provided 60,000 fewer pap tests and breast exams, and even gave out less contraception, she said.

  Ms. Dannenfelser blamed Democrats in Washington and several other states for backing Planned Parenthood abortions by sending them almost $700 million in taxpayer funds. This amount made up a third of the organization’s revenue, with Planned Parenthood ending the fiscal year with $2.5 billion in net assets, she noted.

  Around 60 percent of women who have had an abortion “would rather have kept their babies if they just had more emotional or financial support,” Ms. Dannenfelser stated. “Democrats’ response? They demonize and strip funding from pregnancy resource centers that serve women and their children.”

  Michael New, a social scientist and senior associate scholar at Charlotte Lozier Institute, pointed out that Planned Parenthood’s abortion number was a record for the organization, representing around 40 percent of total abortions performed in the United States.

  While boosting its abortion numbers, Planned Parenthood also “continues to cut back on several health services,” he said. “Between 2022 and 2023, preventive-care visits fell by 31.0 percent, pap tests fell by 13.5 percent, cancer screenings fell by 1.4 percent, and adoption referrals fell by 4.5 percent.”

  “In the past ten years, the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood has increased by 20 percent. Meanwhile, cancer screenings fell by more than 58 percent, and prenatal services declined by more than 67 percent.”

  Despite cutting back on several healthcare services in 2022, Planned Parenthood continues to see an increase in government funding, Mr. New noted.

  Funding, Election Issue

  Republican lawmakers have been trying to cut back government funding for Planned Parenthood. In January last year, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) proposed a draft bill to defund the organization by instituting a one-year moratorium on federal funding for the organization.

  “The nation’s largest abortion provider has no business receiving taxpayer dollars,” she said at the time. “Planned Parenthood claims these funds go to healthcare for women, but last year, Planned Parenthood performed a record number of abortions while also reducing the number of well-woman exams and breast cancer screenings it performed.”

  In a Dec. 12 press release, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) questioned the funding provided to Planned Parenthood, citing a report by the U.S. Government Accountability (GAO) to point out that the organization received $1.78 billion in federal taxpayer funding in fiscal years 2019–2021.

  The amount included $90.4 million the group allegedly “illegally siphoned” from the Paycheck Protection Program, a COVID-19 loan program aimed at assisting small businesses affected by the pandemic.

  “While small businesses struggled to make ends meet during the pandemic, Planned Parenthood illegally siphoned over $90 million from the Paycheck Protection Program, specifically designed to help our mom-and-pop shops keep their doors open,” Ms. Blackburn said.

  Commenting on the report, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, said that federal taxpayer funds “should not be funneled to big abortion corporations like Planned Parenthood, which has killed over 9.3 million unborn children since 1970, including 1.11 million between 2019-2021.”

  The Planned Parenthood annual report comes as abortion is one of the key themes in the upcoming presidential race. Democrats are pushing abortion as a central issue, running ballot initiatives in battleground states.

  In Arizona, a ballot measure seeks to amend the state’s constitution to ensure that abortion is a “fundamental right,” even up to the point where a baby can survive outside the womb, which typically happens around 24 weeks. Nevada, Colorado, and Maryland also have abortion amendments planned out.

  “The Democrats’ strategy heading into this election cycle was to put these measures on the ballot in every big swing state,” Republican strategist Marcus Dell’Artino told The Epoch Times.

  Former President Donald Trump, who is running for his second term in the 2024 elections, has stopped short of echoing other Republicans’ calls for a national abortion ban, saying that the matter is best left to the states.

  “My view is now that we have abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state,” he said in a recent video posted on Truth Social.

  “Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 19:00

• Iran-Linked Iraq Militia Says It Is Resuming Attacks On US Forces
  Iran-Linked Iraq Militia Says It Is Resuming Attacks On US Forces

  The prior period of constant attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria which corresponded with the opening first half of Israel’s operations in Gaza could soon resume, after a Sunday incident saw at least five rockets fired on an American base in northeastern Syria. 

  The Iraqi militant group Kataib Hezbollah – which has close ties with Iran claimed responsibility, and more importantly announced that it is resuming attacks on US bases in the region.

  

  Reuters described that “Two security sources and a senior army officer said a rocket launcher fixed on the back of a small truck had been parked in Zummar border town with Syria.” 

  “The military official said the truck caught fire with an explosion from unfired rockets at the same time as warplanes were in the sky,” the report continued. There were no casualties, according to regional correspondents.

  The military official subsequently said: “We can’t confirm that the truck was bombed by US warplanes unless we investigate it”—strongly suggesting the Pentagon’s response was almost immediate, and that air power was deployed.

  Crucially, Sunday’s incident marked the first such attack on a US base since early February. At that time Iranian militia leaders ordered their fighters to temporarily stand down. That order held, given there hasn’t been any notable attack in two months before this weekend.

  NEW: Following reports of a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Syria a U.S. official tells Fox News 5+ rockets were fired from Iraq into Syria near a U.S. base. No U.S. service members were killed or injured & there was no damage to the base. It is unclear if the base was the target

  — Liz Friden (@Liz_Friden) April 21, 2024

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  The Guardian notes further of the timing of this fresh attack:

  It comes one day after Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, returned from a visit to the United States and met with Joe Biden at the White House.

  Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah said Iraqi armed groups had decided to resume attacks on the US presence in the country after seeing little progress on talks to achieve the exit of American troops during al-Sudani’s visit to Washington.

  “What happened a short while ago is the beginning,” the group said.

  On Monday, following Sunday’s brief rocket attack on the US base near the Iraq-Syria border, there was another assault – on the Iraqi side of the border.

  “Another attack on US forces in the region in the last hours, now on Al Assad base in Iraq,” according to Walla News, as cited in news wires. There are unverified reports of US military helicopters airborne over the area and that a response is ongoing.

  

  During the three to four months following the Oct.7 Hamas terror attack, there were an estimated over 150 drone and rocket attacks against US bases in Iraq and Syria. Among these was the attack which killed three Americans and wounded 40 others at an outpost along the Jordan-Syria border.

  President Biden had in the wake of the Jordan outpost attack ordered airstrikes on Iran-linked militia positions, and following the tit-for-tat, Kataib Hezbollah’s stood down. However, events of this weekend strongly suggest things are about to ramp up again, also as Iraqi and Syrian government officials have long sought to see Pentagon troops finally expelled from their sovereign territories.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 18:40

• If You’re A Criminal, This Is the County To Avoid
  If You’re A Criminal, This Is the County To Avoid

  Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Across a six-decade career, beginning as a 16-year-old ambulance driver to his ascension as America’s most renowned lawman, Grady Judd has made one thing clear.

  

  He’s that guy, that old-school sheriff whose tough-talking press conferences garner national attention, but he’s also a lifelong student of integrating new-school techniques with emerging technologies, a pioneering innovator in administration, and a conscientious mentor who lives as he leads.

  And so, on this April afternoon, Mr. Judd, 70, is looking back on 54 years in public service by doing what he’s always done, looking forward.

  He’s prioritizing goals for his sixth term as sheriff of Polk County, a 2,000-square-mile sprawl of Central Florida sawgrass savannah between Orlando and Tampa that’s doubled in population in a decade.

  His new term officially begins in January but it actually began the February day he filed to run, instantly clinching his third-straight unopposed re-election.

  There’s plenty of time to talk about the past but, right now, he told The Epoch Times, “There’s plenty of work to do over the next four years in keeping crime down.”

  Mr. Judd said the 1,800-employee Polk County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO), which includes 1,100 deputies, 1,330 vehicles, and a 2,500-bed jail with a $236 million budget, will be busy doing just that every day, all day, while taking on two initiatives.

  He is launching a program to help keep the mentally ill out of jail, a chronic national urgency that defies easy solutions, while training a unit to combat the next great global crime challenge: artificial intelligence (AI).

  “Right now, AI is capable of emulating voices. Right? So we’re going to have to protect the community from false AI allegations and keep evil parasites from attacking us from within as well as internationally,” he said, noting it’s the first such unit created by a local law enforcement agency in the United States.

  A pressing focus everywhere, he said, is to “reduce the need” for first-responders to be roadside therapists in protecting the mentally ill from themselves and others, and to find alternatives to using jails as primary—and often only—sources of medication for many with mental health issues.

  As a newly-minted deputy in 1974, he recalls, those arrested exhibiting mental problems were housed in a regional hospital where inmate patients were treated.

  “Fast-forward to today” and his deputies don’t have that option, Mr. Judd said.

  “The state and federal government did away with mental hospitals. So where did those mentally ill end up? They ended up in prison, in county jail lockups. They ended up underneath overpasses, sleeping behind buildings, out in the woods.”

  

  Institutional options narrowed as pharmaceutical solutions expanded, he said. Advocates for the mentally ill argued, “They have a constitutional right not to be incarcerated’ and, ‘Oh, we have these new medicines. They just have to take the medicines.’”

  Good concept, Mr. Judd said, bad plan.

  “Where do we find them to give them their medicines? And, oh, you’re not going to provide medicines? How’re they going to afford it? It’s very expensive” especially for mentally ill people living “out in the woods,” he said.

  So he has a plan—and $1 million in seed money from Polk County commissioners to provide court-mandated medications for itinerant offenders.

  “We’re in the infant stages of that. We’ve gotten total cooperation from everyone,” Mr. Judd said of a coalescing coalition that includes providers, the courts, state attorney’s office, public defenders, and advocates for the mentally ill. “That’s pretty remarkable that everybody says, ‘Yes, let’s do this.’ It’s a win-win for everyone.”

  In an age of polarity, a “win-win for everyone” is a rare air that Grady Judd exudes.

  He’s doing what he’s wanted to do since he was 4, what he believes God put him here to do, to protect the place where he was born, raised, and lived his whole life, where he married his high school sweetheart and raised two sons, where he pioneered crime-fighting tactics in a changing world while never wavering from fundamental truths such as right from wrong, good from bad.

  In exchange, Polk County got the right sheriff at the right time, a leader to meet the challenges posed by growth as it evolved into an urbanizing I-4 corridor where 100,000 new people have arrived each of the last three years.

  And yet, unincorporated Polk County’s 2023 crime rate of 1.06—one per 100 residents—is less than half the state’s rate and lowest since the metric was created in 1971, lower than when it had three times fewer people and 88 percent less than when it had half as many people.

  A “win-win” for all—except criminals.

  “I’m blessed to live God’s mission for me,” Mr. Judd said. ”All I’ve ever wanted to be was sheriff—the sheriff of Polk County.”

  Sheriff-in-Waiting

  Raised in a Lakeland subdivision of cinder block homes without air conditioning, Mr. Judd shows office visitors a black-and-white 1954 photo of him sitting on an uncle’s lap. His uncle was White County, Tenn., Sheriff Joe McCoy, but it was Grady Judd wearing the sheriff’s star.

  

  He was the cop when playing ‘cops and robbers’ with childhood friends, grew up watching TV shows such as ‘Dragnet’ and ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ and was scanning police radio frequencies and mastering codes at 12.

  As he told The Epoch Times in November 2023, his father, a Cadillac dealership service-manager, was a church deacon. “I was raised in the church,” he said. “We were sometimes the first to arrive and the last to leave.”

  Faith, his “guiding light,” compelled him to be a relentless teenager in informing the sheriffs office he’d be joining them soon and someday be the boss.

  As a high school junior in 1970, he was hired as a $1.65-an-hour ambulance attendant in Winter Haven. He helped deliver a baby at 16 and at 17, convinced the notoriously recalcitrant musician George Jones, in a drunken rage, to get into his ambulance, later admitting he had no idea who the world-famous country star was.

  After going to high school by day, finishing his ambulance shift at night, Mr. Judd hung out at the sheriff’s office, effectively forcing them to hire him two months after graduation as a dispatcher despite a minimum-age requirement of 21.

  He remembers July 21, 1972, a humid, storm-stirred Friday night, his first shift at Bartow’s Hall of Justice, which “housed the entire justice system” and “one teletype computer.”

  Richard Nixon was president, Reuben Askew was governor of Florida, gas was 34 cents a gallon, ‘The Godfather’ was a box office hit, Bill Withers’ ‘Lean On Me’ topped the charts.

  Two months later, Mr. Judd married his fiancé, Marisa, also 18 and also newly hired at a municipal finance department. They lived on combined salaries of $550 a month. They’ve been together since.

  When legislators waived the 21-year-old requirement to be a law enforcement officer. Mr. Judd convinced Sheriff Brannen—the icon of his youth—to send him to the state’s police academy. Just before he turned 20, he was sworn in as the first-ever PCSO deputy under 21.

  He hit the road as a 19-year-old deputy in February 1974 in a green-and-white Ford Galaxy and a pistol his father had to buy because state law precluded him from doing so. Nevertheless, as Mr. Judd says, “The rest is history.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 18:20

• Congress Passes New Iran Oil Sanctions But Biden Unlikely To Enforce Them
  Congress Passes New Iran Oil Sanctions But Biden Unlikely To Enforce Them

  Over the weekend, as part of the $95 billion package providing funding for aiding Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan which passed by a vote of 360-58 on Saturday, the US House also passed new sanctions on Iran’s oil sector set to become part of a foreign-aid package, putting the measure on track to pass the Senate within days.

  The legislation, as Bloomberg reports, would broaden sanctions against Iran to include foreign ports, vessels, and refineries that knowingly process or ship Iranian crude in violation of existing US sanctions. It would also would expand so-called secondary sanctions to cover all transactions between Chinese financial institutions and sanctioned Iranian banks used to purchase petroleum and oil-derived products.

  About 80% of Iran’s roughly 1.5 million barrels of daily oil exports are shipped to independent refineries in China known as “teapots,” according to a summary of similar legislation.

  Yet while the sanctions could impact Iranian petroleum exports – and add as much as $8.40 to the price of a barrel of crude – they also include presidential waiver authorities, according to ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm.

  “President Joe Biden might opt to invoke these authorities, vitiating the sanctions’ price impact; a second Trump Administration might not,” ClearView wrote in a note to clients.

  Amrita Sen, founder and research director of Energy Aspects, agreed and told Bloomberg Television in an interview that Biden’s Administration is unlikely to “strongly enforce” the restrictions in an election year.

  “I think all sanctions are sanctions on paper, with anything that remotely causes oil prices to go up, I don’t believe they will enforce it strongly,” the research analyst told Bloomberg.   

  “What I really want to highlight is this is a US election year, so let’s not kid ourselves,” the analyst noted.

  By not kidding ourselves, he meant that when it comes to democratic, liberal ideals, it’s all bullshit when they conflict with self-serving interests of the demented deep state puppet roaming the halls of the White House.

  Moreover, China is buying most of Iran’s crude oil exports, and the majority of buyers in the world’s top crude oil importer are the independent refiners, the so-called ‘teapots’ in the Shandong province, which are not connected with the U.S. financial system in any way.

  Therefore, the U.S. doesn’t have any means to enforce sanctions on China’s independent refiners for buying Iranian crude oil, Sen told Bloomberg. The teapots will continue to import Iran’s crude, while any new restrictions could take up to 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian oil off the market, she added.

  Crude oil exports from Iran hit the highest level in six years during the first quarter of the year, data from Goldman recently showed.

  Iran is producing record amounts of oil, enabling it to pay for missiles, drones and whatnot, as Biden refuses to enforce Trump’s sanctions against Iran oil exports afraid an oil price spike would further crush his approval rating pic.twitter.com/eeX0OnwYBA

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 15, 2024

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  The daily average over the period stood at 1.56 million barrels, almost all of which was sent to China, earning the Islamic Republic some $35 billion.

  “The Iranians have mastered the art of sanctions circumvention,” Fernando Ferreira, head of geopolitical risk service at Rapidan Energy Group, told the FT. “If the Biden administration is really going to have an impact, it has to shift the focus to China.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 18:00

• Markets Can Absorb Geopolitic Risks, To A Point
  Markets Can Absorb Geopolitic Risks, To A Point

  By Michael Msika and Jan-Patrick Barnert, Bloomberg Markets Live reporters and strategists

  Geopolitics is having an impact on investment decisions again, and risks are rising as well as equity volatility. Yet under the hood, the stock market is absorbing the shock relatively well so far.

  Stress levels have had a steep surge as tensions in the Middle East show no sign of abating. Systematic funds are reducing exposure, technicals are showing some cracks, but the big picture for markets hasn’t changed much. In fact, price action on Friday almost seems mild, with a rise in oil prices reversing. Market breadth has cooled, both at a stock and index level, with just a 3% drop this month.

  “This seat has been very busy, but hasn’t seen signs of panic,” says Carl Dooley, head of EMEA trading at TD Cowen. “While optically we see indicators such as the VIX print at similar levels to last October when markets were lower and realized volatility was higher, other indicators we track, such as the demand for crash protection, haven’t moved. It has all felt very orderly and technical.”

  

  After the market was focused on chasing the upside, there is a more balanced approach to volatility. The pressure from funds selling options is now being matched by options demand from investors hedging positioning. This is “keeping the risk environment far more two-way than anytime in recent history,” says Nomura’s Charlie McElligott.

  US stocks are down about 4.5% over six trading days. That’s a relatively chilled decline given the severity of headlines coming from the Middle East, especially compared to some of the sudden, more elevator-like moves in 2022 and in the summer of 2020. Even Nvidia, the biggest bullish bet in this market, is just down 20% after a 600% gain.

  There’s no talk about emergency meetings to reduce risk and no signs of hasty investment decisions. Commentary from trading desks about hedge funds and other buy-side flows is still carrying a notion of dip buying and is far from a sell everything market. Granted, risk taking is getting a bit of a re-think, positioning is being adjusted along with other thematic indexes that soared in 2024 but now show big 5-day declines.

  

  Trend followers such as CTAs are a potential wild card, with their still elevated exposure. But their reaction depends on stop-loss levels being breached, and so far both the market reaction and the impact on prices have been reassuring.

  “Leverage concerns about CTAs are easing,” say Societe Generale Sandrine Ungari, adding that positioning has been reduced, while breakpoints, the percentage move needed on the asset for CTAs to reduce exposure, are now less negative. In addition, CTAs are diversified across asset classes, so losses in equities would have been offset by gains in commodities and FX. “A portfolio that allocates equally across asset classes is flat to slightly up,” she says.

  The VIX curve has flipped into concern levels as previously mentioned in this column, and the steep rise is similar to early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet the very low base line of stress is keeping markets well below panic levels at this point.

  

  “Further developments in the Middle East remain subject to increased uncertainty,” says Deka Investment CIO Christoph Witzke. “As a fund manager, I am paying particular attention to the reaction of the oil price and the US dollar. So far, the movement has been muted. If this remains the case, we are currently more likely to see a recovery in equities over the next few days/weeks than the emergence of a new downtrend. The longer-term framework remains quite constructive.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/22/2024 – 17:40

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