Nov 05

Today’s News 5th November 2024

  • Netanyahu Aide Arrested Over Intel Leak Which Damaged Ceasefire Talks
    Netanyahu Aide Arrested Over Intel Leak Which Damaged Ceasefire Talks

    Via The Cradle

    Israeli police have arrested a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and four others for allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media, court documents released on Sunday revealed. The intelligence allegedly claimed Hamas was planning to smuggle Israeli captives from Gaza to Egypt.

    Opposition leaders say the intelligence was leaked to take pressure off Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas that would bring home the roughly 100 Israeli captives still held by the Palestinian resistance movement. It is estimated that roughly 70 remain alive.

    Source: Flash90

    Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged ceasefire talks with Hamas since the start of the war on October 7 last year, despite heavy pressure from the families of the captives to reach a deal.

    Court documents released on Sunday identified Eliezer Feldstein, an aide to Netanyahu, as one of several people being detained and interrogated over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information.” The names of the other four detained persons have not been cleared for publication by Israel’s military censors.

    The intelligence was leaked to two foreign media outlets, the Jewish Chronicle in the UK and Bild in Germany, both of which published stories about the leaked intelligence. The Jewish Chronicle later retracted its story.

    The court documents said that information taken from the Israeli military’s systems and “illegally issued” may have damaged Israel’s ability to free the captives held by Hamas in Gaza.

    Opposition leader Yair Lapid on Sunday accused the prime minister’s office of leaking “faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal – to shape a public opinion influence operation against the hostages’ families.”

    By claiming that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning to flee to Egypt with the captives, the leaked documents appeared to promote Netanyahu’s claim in the minds of the Israeli public that any ceasefire deal must allow Israel to keep its forces on the Philadelphia Corridor, which runs along the Gaza-Egypt border. 

    Otherwise, the captives could end up in Egypt’s Sinai or “pop up in Iran or Yemen,” Netanyahu claimed.

    Netanyahu added the demand that Israel be allowed to continue occupying the Philadelphia Corridor in the 11th hour of negotiations for a ceasefire this summer. The demand torpedoed the talks, as Hamas has long insisted on a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of any ceasefire deal.

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    Members of the Likud, Religious Zionism, and Jewish Power parties, which comprise Netanyahu’s governing coalition, have stated it is their priority to continue the war. They hope to ethnically cleanse Gaza and annex it, ideally to build Jewish settlements atop destroyed Palestinian cities. 

    Israeli soldiers have stated the army is currently carrying out the so-called “Generals’ Plan” to forcibly expel the remaining 300,000 residents in northern Gaza and move them to the south of the strip. The plan calls for starving or killing any militants or Palestinian civilians who refuse or are unable to leave. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 23:00

  • Election 2024: The Day Before
    Election 2024: The Day Before

    Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

    We’re just a day away from the 2024 Presidential election and if you’re feeling a little on edge, let us offer a little consolation: the Democrats are wracked with worry.

    We have documented the polling trends for the last couple of months. The movement from September 10, 2024 to the present day, November 1, has Republicans feeling confident. Victory isn’t guaranteed, but it’s safe to say that leadership is cautiously optimistic.

    Back in September, based on the aggregate polls, Vice President Kamala Harris enjoyed slim leads in the majority of swing states – Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania – and was essentially tied with Trump in Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.

    September 2024 Aggregates:

    But things have changed. Momentum shifted. In a race with a number of close states, the last ~60 days have been very good for Donald Trump. Per the New York Times aggregates, Trump has secured slim leads in Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. He has gained 3 points in Arizona. Kamala’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk and she is now fighting to not lose Michigan.

    November 2024 Aggregates:

    Nate Silver was kind enough to post this chart showing shifts for the last week and month. While there are some changes from last week benefiting Democrats, they have been insufficient to cut into Republican gains this past month. If polling can be believed.

    Contrary to much of the polling relied upon by The New York Times, AtlasIntel, which had some of the most accurate polls of the 2020 election, has Trump ahead in every swing state. (Their November 1-2 poll is available here.)

    Theoretically, Trump could have a clean sweep of all the swing states. But don’t get too confident just yet – the race for independents is tight. According to the latest Atlas polls, Trump is winning independents in Arizona (45.4 to 44.9); Nevada (51 to 41.6); and North Carolina (49.4 to 44.7). He’s lagging behind Kamala in the independent vote in Georgia (38.2 to 50); Michigan (45.7 to 47.9); Pennsylvania (41.9 to 45.6); and Wisconsin (45.6 to 47.9). Georgia seems like the outlier – but even with that large margin, Atlas has Kamala behind Trump in Georgia by 2.5%.

    For what it’s worth, here’s Karoline Leavitt (Trump’s Press Secretary) discussing their internal polling: “Our internal polls have President Trump leading in every single key battleground state.”

    You expect a campaign to say that – but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. In fact, early voting results indicate motivated Republicans and suggest potential problems with Democrat turnout. There’s an enthusiasm gap.

    Early Results – Nevada

    In Nevada, as of yesterday, Republicans have a lead of approximately 43,000 votes – equaling 4 percent – over Democrats (not counting independents, which may skew Trump). Jon Ralston – who abhors Trump – at The Nevada Independent observed that Republicans “have a substantial turnout advantage of a whopping 8 percent statewide (57-49) and approaching 10 percent (57-47) in Clark County [Las Vegas]”.

    Nevada is trending in the right direction for Trump and other Republicans – it seems Nevada Republicans and rural counties are highly motivated this year – but it’s too early to celebrate, as Clark County continues to cut into the Republican lead and the Nevada Democrat machine is strong. Ralston believes Harris edges Trump by 0.3 percent based on a “feeling”, but concedes the election is “really a coin flip” and that “It’s going to be very, very close.” The winner may not be clear on election night. We’ll see.

    Early Results – Pennsylvania

    In 2020, Pennsylvania Democrats had a firewall of nearly 1.1 million early votes.

    The latest numbers show a dramatic decrease. The Democrat early voting lead is approximately 400,000. That’s 700,000 less than the 2020 lead, the result of 700,000 fewer Democrat mail-in voters. (Republicans stayed fairly even.) Again, indications of a Democrat enthusiasm problem.

    Spelling more trouble for Democrats in Pennsylvania is the fact that “there are now more registered Republican voters in Pennsylvania than ever before.” Democrats still hold the registration lead with 286,291 more registered Democrats than Republicans, but this is a dramatic decrease from 2020, where the Democrat margin was 685,818.

    Early Results – Arizona

    Republicans currently lead the Arizona mail-in ballots by 182,681 votes.

    By comparison, in 2020, Democrats had a slight lead of nearly 10,000 votes. As of November 1, 2024, there have been approximately 200,000 fewer Democrats voting by mail.

    More Numbers and More Democrat Issues

    The Trump campaign has gone into more detail on lagging Democrat turnout – something Democrats have voiced concern about – particularly in the swing states. Here are the numbers:

    Arizona:

    • Urban turnout is down -385,285 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -170,011 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +14,124 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Georgia:

    • Urban turnout is down -153,846 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -46,732 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +171,837 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Michigan:

    • Urban turnout is down -321,523 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -204,856 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +55,951 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    North Carolina:

    • Urban turnout is down -175,470 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -154,459 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +26,911 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Nevada:

    • Urban turnout is down -191,199 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -126,112 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Pennsylvania:

    • Urban turnout is down -381,519 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -450,802 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Wisconsin:

    • Urban turnout is down -100,733 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -238,452 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Will we see an urban/female turnaround, and has the GOP vote been frontloaded? It’s possible, but it may not be likely. We’ll find out soon enough.

    But if it’s any indication, the Democrats are admitting that “the early vote numbers are a little scary.” And that’s probably an understatement.

    Zero Hedge
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 22:35

  • Rogan Endorses Trump After Wild Musk Interview
    Rogan Endorses Trump After Wild Musk Interview

    Following an awesome 2.5 hour podcast with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.

    In a post on X dropping the podcast, Rogan said of Musk “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsTrump thanked Rogan:

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    Nuggets from the interview:

    Musk and Rogan discussed how an influx of illegal migrants to swing states followed by some sort of amnesty program would turn the country into a one-party state.

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    They slammed Democrats for constantly spreading hoaxes:

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    They discussed the killing of Peanut the squirrel:

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    Musk was at the White House correspondents dinner where the elites shit-talked Trump over Obama-birther comments and he got so pissed he ran for president.

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    John McAfee was discussed:

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    Musk and Rogan talked video games – noting a study in which surgeons who also game are more effective at their jobs.

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    So there you have it – at the 11th hour, Rogan goes for Trump after yet another interesting interview with Elon Musk.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 22:05

  • Read The Opponent, Not The Polls
    Read The Opponent, Not The Polls

    Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via American Greatness,

    For recovering politicians, this is the most dangerous time for a relapse, especially those living in a swing state. Their televisions, radios, and social media are chock with political news and ads. This can spark a recrudescence of old vices, such as arguing at the top of one’s lungs at an offending ad or slanted news story, and, worse, then conjuring a way to counter it and win the election for their side. It may even spur them to contact old friends still in the political arena and urge them to incorporate their “unexpectedly” inspired idea into their campaign. Such a loss of realistic expectations and understanding of what others are going through constitutes sure signs the poor creature is reverting to a politician’s solipsistic mindset.

    Further exacerbating the risk of their relapsing, interested friends from across the country send recovering politicians’ links to ads, news, or tweets to get their reaction. This can further trigger bouts of the ex-pol shouting to the heavens—or elsewhere—and reengaging the sordid political world they had renounced.

    Yet, by far the most frequent temptation occurs when friends from across the country contact the recovering politician to see if he or she has any insight into how their swing state and/or the nation will ultimately choose for president (and often who will control both chambers of Congress). These contacts are usually precipitated by the inquirer seeing a poll and asking if the recovering politician believes it is “accurate.” Tragically, the recovering politician may immediately commence addressing the merits of the poll’s methodology; the voting history of various constituencies vis-à-vis the poll results; and sundry other micro- and macro-critiques and speculations regarding the election—including their view of “what they need to do to win!”

    When the relapsed pol hits rock bottom, it “ain’t that pretty at all….”

    Of course, the friends of an ex-pol do not want to be the reason he or she goes cannonballing back into the political cesspool. So, for their sake and that of my fellow recovering politicians, I offer this bit of advice to avoid the temptation to relapse posed by “the polls say” query: Watch the opponent, not the polls.

    The virtue of this approach is to allow the inquirer to refrain from dragging the recovering politician back into the electoral fray for a simple reason: the inquirer can figure it out on their own. Granted, it isn’t foolproof, since fools will be too benighted to interpret an opponent’s political machinations. Still, it can help reduce the number of “the polls say” questions and, ergo, the near occasion of temptation for the ex-pol to reengage.

    Presently, the Democrat nominee’s presidential bid exemplifies why understanding what a campaign is doing is the best barometer of how a candidate is performing with the electorate—not a poll.

    On the micro-level, one can view the Harris campaign’s targeting of individual constituencies, which have traditionally comprised integral parts of the Democrat coalition. From young African-American men to Hispanics to Arab-Americans to Jewish-Americans, the Harris campaign’s assumed, almost unanimous, and necessary support has been lacking. As a result, we see not only an increase in her campaign’s messaging to these constituencies, we see the surreal hectoring of young black males—and males, in general—by surrogates, such as the Obamas. Asking voters to support your candidate indicates your campaign is okay; urging voters to support your candidate indicates your campaign is troubled; criticizing voters as not being “man” enough to vote for your candidate indicates your campaign is cooked. Other targeted messages abound within the Harris campaigns, including the emphasis on increased federal spending within the African-American community (in one of the most patronizingly racist appeals imaginable); abortion (though it is hard to imagine those who believe abortion is the overriding issue not already voting for the vice president); and the big lie about “Project 2025” being Donald Trump’s post-election agenda—all of which are designed to unite and rally a presently eroding and unenthusiastic Democrat voter base.

    On the macro-level, be one a political junkie or a well-adjusted person, the Harris campaign’s desperation is patent for all to see, notably by those Democrat candidates’ running from the radical leftist Ms. Harris and racing toward the middle:

    August’s “politics of joy” has devolved into October’s “Trump is Hitler.”

    Now, do you really need to risk a recovering politician’s relapse to recognize the Harris campaign is circling the drain?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 21:45

  • This Pennsylvania County Built America, And May Decide The Next President
    This Pennsylvania County Built America, And May Decide The Next President

    Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    BETHLEHEM, Pa.—Nestled in the heart of eastern Pennsylvania is one of two state counties that has been a bellwether in the last four presidential elections, and may decide who controls the White House next year.

    View from the Bethlehem Steel Plant in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    Northampton County, home of the former Bethlehem Steel plant—once the world’s largest producer of steel—is one of two once-blue counties in the Keystone State, along with Erie County, that then-candidate Donald Trump flipped in 2016 before moving back to the Democrats in 2020.

    Now considered a swing county in the largest battleground state, Northampton is seeing significant attention this year. Democrats visited the county in September, Trump stopped repeatedly in the larger Lehigh Valley area, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been to Bethlehem twice recently.

    The attention underscores how important the county will be in determining the winning presidential candidate in Pennsylvania and, by extension, the White House.

    “These fluctuations between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Barack Obama, I think, are indicative of the fact that we truly are a true bellwether,” Northampton County GOP Chair Glenn Geissinger told The Epoch Times.

    “We reflect the national feel as well as that of the Commonwealth pretty well, because our demographics accurately reflect the cross-section of everybody. We [also] have a good, solid portion of independents.”

    Part of that political diversity comes from the region’s decades-long evolution.

    Industrialization “was a sort of a slam dunk for the Democrats,” Tony Iannelli, president and CEO of the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, told The Epoch Times. “There’s still a fair amount of labor here.”

    When manufacturing went offshore in the mid-1990s, Iannelli says the area “hit a wall “ but has since bounced back.

    “The bad times literally set us up for the good times,” he said. Health care, life sciences, sports, and other industries are flooding into the area, building a bustling tourism industry.

    Residents in neighboring New York City and Philadelphia—both a 90-minute drive away—are moving into Northampton County, leading to a 5.1 percent population growth from 2010 to 2020, according to U.S. census data.

    Now “softer R” or moderate Republicans are moving into the area from neighboring New York and New Jersey, Geissinger said, adding to the area’s political diversity.

    That growth has also allowed the GOP to shave off the Democrats’ voter registration advantage in Northampton County. In 2008, there were over 30,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the county, but by September, that margin was roughly 12,000.

    “We’ve cut the margin significantly over time … and we’ve also seen an increase in the number of independent voters,” Geissinger said.

    “What Donald Trump did is he brought a populist message to the Republican Party, and that populist message has paid off for him,” he added, especially in appealing to working-class voters.

    President Joe Biden, in Geissinger’s view, won over older blue-collar voters in 2020 because of his connections to Scranton, where he was born and raised.

    “We’re not going to experience that this time around with Kamala Harris. It’s just not going to happen,” he said.

    The chairman acknowledged that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has advantages with younger, college-educated groups, but is confident of Trump’s chances this year.

    People walk on the Lehigh University campus in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “[Trump has] made inroads with blue-collar … Democrats, and that’s going to pull him over significantly in Northampton County,” Geissinger said.

    The Epoch Times contacted the Northampton County Democratic Party but did not receive a response by press time.

    “This race is a toss-up. So it tells me that we’re still kind of a purple state in the sense the urban areas … tend to be more Democratic, and then our outlying regions tend to be Republican,” Iannelli said.

    County Demographics

    The cities of Bethlehem and Easton toward the south near Bucks County have been traditionally blue but Pennsylvania’s rural, agricultural areas to the north are largely Republican, Geissinger said.

    “Certainly, we would have the traditional Democrat base that will still be there in the cities, just as we have the traditional Republican base that will be in the rural areas,” he added.

    Some of the locals are drawn to the county’s diversity.

    “There’s a lot of diversity out here, and not even just in terms of culture or ethnicity, but just in terms of like different groups,” Francisco Santana, 25, told The Epoch Times.

    “You have seniors, you have middle-aged people, and there’s a lot of colleges here.”

    While the county is 85.1 percent white, according to the U.S. census, 8.3 percent of residents are black, and 15.9 percent are Hispanic or Latino.

    Trump’s support among Hispanic voters has increased in 8 years, but Harris has leaned into the controversial remarks said at his Madison Square Garden rally last month about Puerto Rico, where a comedian called the territory a “floating island of garbage.” Those with Puerto Rican heritage make up 56.4 percent of Northampton County’s Hispanic population.

    Bethlehem Voter Vibes

    Modern-day Bethlehem sits like a crown jewel beneath the hills of the Appalachian Highlands, and is a central hub of Northampton County.

    Like much of industrial Pennsylvania, Bethlehem was a victim of the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing, which led to the demise of its once-mighty Bethlehem Steel plant—formerly the world’s largest producer of steel, fabricating structures like the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.

    Nestled along the Lehigh River, the sprawling site’s towering buildings are now weathered, rusted, and decayed from decades of neglect. Windows are cracked or shattered, with crumbling bricks exposing the entrails of what used to be a mighty industrial giant.

    Bethlehem Steel Plant in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “When so much went overseas [in] steel making, they just weren’t ready for it. And that was the end of their demise,” Iannelli said.

    Some in the area still have connections to the plant.

    “For some families, it took a huge toll,” Amanda Holi, 36, whose father, uncle, and grandfather once worked at Bethlehem Steel, told The Epoch Times. When part of the site became the Sands Casino, she worked there as well.

    However, she sees a resurgence in the area,with new developments and businesses feeding the local economy.

    “There’s tons of traditions that I feel make it cute and quaint,” she said, describing the local sports rivalries and the new restaurants opening locally.

    Downtown Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/ The Epoch Times

    Along the winding streets of Bethlehem’s residential borrows, rows of houses sport Harris-Walz yard signs. But for every four homes backing the Democratic nominee, one will see a Trump-Vance sign—a reminder of the support for Republicans in a county that was once solidly blue, and now has only a tiny majority of registered Democrats.

    Voters of all ages, including students at Lehigh University, spoke about their desire for political unity, access to healthcare, reproductive rights, the economy, and their fears about the 2024 election.

    Some were aware of the significance of their vote as residents of a bellwether county in the largest U.S. battleground state.

    “It makes me feel a little responsible to try to convince people to vote the way I think is important, because I think we’re in a crucial time here,” Norah Hooper, a retiree who moved to the area two years ago, told The Epoch Times.

    “It’s made me try to talk to people about it, and to work towards Harris to make sure that she wins,” she said. Hooper feels “scared to death” about the election and wants a president who empathizes with all Americans.

    Northampton’s diversity gives many different voter groups a chance to make their mark on the nation, Santana said.

    “Even if it is a battleground state, I think it’s nice to see that a lot of demographics are here and are having their voice heard,” he said.

    Ben Cohen, 43, said he would vote regardless. His support for Harris this year is a “very simple, binary choice” as he does not think Trump is a good leader for the country, calling him a wild card. Cohen says he supports an economic agenda that focuses on the middle class.

    Others downplayed the state and county’s significance in the election, pointing out that every ballot nationwide contains many local and statewide races.

    “I think every vote counts regardless of where you are,” a man who declined to give his name told The Epoch Times. “Every vote counts in some way.”

    Concerns About Election Results

    Some expressed deep concerns about what could play out on election day.

    “I already voted by mail, and I’m kind of scared that [Trump] might win,” Mary Jean Langman, a retired teacher who moved to Northampton County from Scranton, told The Epoch Times.

    Mary Jean Langman in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    She’s worried about the former president cutting Social Security, which, along with Langman’s teacher’s pension, is her lifeline. While Trump has said this year he would not make any changes to Social Security, he has discussed making cuts to it in the past, including in 2020, during the last year of his administration.

    The economy is often named as one of the top issues on voters’ minds in most polls, although some expressed optimism about the country’s trajectory.

    “All these years that I’ve been here, it was always the economy; that was the issue” that mattered in most elections, Babak Kamyab told The Epoch Times. He owns a gift shop in downtown Bethlehem and immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1977.

    Despite economic woes since COVID, Kamyab says his business is thriving.

    “The economy is like an ocean, if it’s turning whether up or down, it’s going to make a huge circle, very slowly, to come back up or go down. That’s the way [the] economy works,” he said.

    Kamyab’s shop is one of the only along Main Street with a Harris-Walz sign at its entrance. Given how close the race seems in recent polling, he expressed concerns about Trump’s chances but said he thinks Harris will prevail if she stays the course.

    Babak Kamyab in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    “I mean, the international situation is a terrible situation,” Kamyab said, referring to the escalating military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. “But at least I know with [Trump], the Ukraine situation is going to get worse.”

    Frankie Lozada, 37, and Timear Haley, 30, both moved to the Lehigh Valley to join Hogar Crea, an international drug rehabilitation program that has a location in nearby Allentown. While Lozada doesn’t pay much attention to politics, Haley is inspired by Harris’s messaging.

    “[Her slogan] ‘When we fight, we win,’ it kind of caught me, because I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to give up, and I just didn’t want to live life anymore,” Haley said.

    “When she said that, it kind of took to me, and I was just like, I would keep going with her with that slogan, so fight and win. So far, so good, I’ve been a month clean,” he said. Haley hopes to start a business when he gets back on his feet.

    Timear Haley (L) and Frankie Lozada (R) in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    The College Vote

    Many of the students at Bethlehem’s Lehigh University are deeply engaged in the 2024 election. For some, it is the first time they’re old enough to cast a ballot.

    “I just want younger candidates” and smaller generational gaps between them, Raquel Romero, 19, told The Epoch Times.

    “Our financial state right now is absolutely horrible with the fact that living expenses are almost that height of this generation, at least mine,” she said. Bodily autonomy as a woman is also a central issue on her mind this election.

    “It’s definitely difficult because it’s almost choosing between two evils. I definitely understand how difficult it could be for the candidates themselves,” Romero said. She sees no quick and easy solutions for inflation, as raising salaries could also increase the prices of goods.

    Raquel Romero after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “At the end of the day, we’ve had so many experiences where one candidate says one thing, and then they just never do it,” she added. Romero knows who she’s voting for, but declined to say.

    Even though Haksheel Alleck, 23, an international student from Mauritius Island, can’t vote in this election, he’s concerned about illegal immigration and the nation’s geopolitical tension with other countries.

    Haksheel Alleck after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    He’s also worried about how both candidates could affect visas for international students like himself.

    “It’s always on my mind, would my visa still be relevant in the next few years? Would my status change [as] the political landscape changes here?” Alleck added.

    Other students, acknowledging the voting enthusiasm among their social circles, expressed frustration with the choices of candidates.

    “It’s really sad,” Max Denbow, 20, told The Epoch Times. “It’s also tough because … each candidate has aspects that appeal to me, but I can’t get myself to vote for either of them.”

    Max Denbow after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    Denbow is writing in his own name on his ballot this year.

    When asked what kind of message or agenda he’d like to hear from a future presidential candidate—either Republican or Democrat—to win his vote, Denbow was quick to respond.

    “Someone that prioritizes unity. We need to be unified.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:55

  • NBC Airs Trump Message After Harris Saturday Night Live Appearance
    NBC Airs Trump Message After Harris Saturday Night Live Appearance

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    NBC aired a message from former President Donald Trump one day after Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL).

    Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign event in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 30, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Trump spoke for about one minute during the message, which was prerecorded and broadcast during a NASCAR race on Nov. 3. It was aired again during an NFL game.

    Trump, after greeting fans of sports, noted that the presidential election is slated for Nov. 5.

    “We’re two days away from the most important election in the history of our country. We’ve got to save our country, and it needs saving. It’s in very bad shape,” Trump said.

    “We’re going to end up in a depression based on what’s been happening,” he added later.

    “We have to straighten out our country, we have to close our borders, we have to lower our taxes, we have to get rid of inflation. I’ll fix it.“

    NBC declined to provide a comment on the development.

    Harris appeared live during Saturday’s SNL. She participated in a skit that portrayed her speaking to another version of herself ahead of the election.

    “It is nice to see you, Kamala, and I’m just here to remind you, you got this. You can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors,“ Harris told Maya Rudolph, who was playing the vice president and had said she wished she could talk to someone ”who’s been in my shoes; a black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area.”

    Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brandon Carr wrote in a Nov.3 post on social media platform X that the Democratic presidential nominee’s appearance may have violated an FCC rule against licensed broadcasters using public airwaves to influence an election in favor of a candidate unless the other candidate is offered equal time by the same broadcasters.

    The rule in question “generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates,” according to an FCC fact sheet.

    The regulator gives an example of a qualified candidate appearing on a station. In that scenario, the station “will be required to entertain requests for Equal Opportunities by opposing legally qualified candidates for the same office,” the FCC states. “However, the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities.”

    The FCC grants licenses to some broadcasters. The agency can revoke licenses, although its chairwoman said in October that revocation would not happen “for political reasons.”

    Over the weekend, NBC lodged a notice with the FCC that said Harris appeared on its network for one minute and 30 seconds. The broadcaster said the appearance came “without charge.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:20

  • Losing Power? The Elites And The Leftist Mob Would Rather Burn It All To The Ground
    Losing Power? The Elites And The Leftist Mob Would Rather Burn It All To The Ground

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a significant positive evolution within American society. In the early days of the Ron Paul movement I remember the hopeful groundswell of support for a new conservative epoch that adopted a little Libertarianism and a recognition that most “conspiracy theories” are actually conspiracy realities. It was the kind of catalyst that was needed to break the long running false paradigm of Neo-Cons vs Democrats; it was the beginning of the conservative rebellion we see happening today.

    How do I know things have changed? For one, Neo-Cons are almost universally hated by real conservatives. So much so that it has forced those politicians to show their true colors and come out in favor of Democrat/globalist candidates like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The mask is truly off and the act is over. You’re not going to see people like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney or Lindsay Graham taken very seriously by anyone anymore.

    The return to a true conservative philosophy has been initiated and this time it doesn’t look like it will be snuffed out like the Barry Goldwater era of the early 1960s. The concept of limited government, an end to debt spending, sound money, the removal of elitist NGOs from political influence, a hard-line stance against globalism, legit border security, meritocracy, a rejection of progressive deconstruction and moral relativism, all of these things are prime conservative principles.

    Such ideas have been treated as “archaic” and “barbaric” for decades because they threaten the structures that keep the establishment elites in power. Today, they are making a comeback.

    Some will say that it’s all because of Donald Trump, but this is not the case. This movement was growing into a Juggernaut long before Trump, though he is certainly riding the wave as it comes to fruition. The question is, will Trump do it justice if he gets the gold this week?    I predicted a Trump win in 2016 for months leading up to the election despite the army of naysayers (I also predict he will win in 2024).  But, for me, his first term left a lot to be desired; the biggest problem being the elitist creepers filling his cabinet.

    But hey, at least he wasn’t promoting transsexual procedures for children or trying to start World War III with Russia like the Democrats have been doing.  I’ll also admit that Trump’s coalition of allies is looking FAR better this time around. Talk of Ron Paul joining the team is surprising and gives me some hope.

    During the Ron Paul movement in 2012 I was once invited to a conservative dinner with some liberty bigwigs at the time (most of them are long out of the picture now, either retired or dead) and some were arguing about the presidential election. The position was presented that voting for Romney over Ron Paul would at least get Obama out of the White House. Others suggested that this was simply choosing the lesser of two evils.

    I and others argued that there was no lesser evil. They were both equally demonic. One man in the group said “Well Jesus isn’t running for office.”

    I doubt that man would defend Mitt Romney today. That said, I don’t view the election of 2024 the same way I did in 2012. Jesus isn’t running, that’s for certain, but the Devil definitely is in the form of the extreme political left. They are evil incarnate. Maybe Trump turns out to be a disappointment, but he’s no devil.  And if he doesn’t follow through on his campaign promises then conservative can hold him accountable and it won’t be treated as an insurrection, just a correction.

    There’s already millions of conservatives putting the candidate under a microscope and we don’t function the way Democrats do. The party is meaningless to us, it’s the policies and the follow through that matter. You can’t mention Trump around a group of conservatives without half of them noting his shortcomings. His mistakes are tallied regularly by the very people who originally voted for him.

    Leftists don’t dare do that within their own circles. They don’t care about policy, they only care about power.

    No conservative is going to change his or her mind about securing the border, deporting the illegals, shrinking government, ending American participation in the Ukraine War and ending the transing of kids on a federal level (to start with). These things are going to happen eventually with or without Trump.

    And I can’t help but notice how much the establishment seems to be breaking down in a panic over the idea of a new conservative renaissance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the new world order elites look as worried and despondent as they do right now.  (I’m thinking specifically of Lynn de Rothchild at the beginning of this year pouting over the public exposure of ESG and talking about how the globalists would have to abandon it in favor of a more discreet program. Or, John Kerry this month at the climate talks in New York bitterly admonishing free speech on the web and how it was sabotaging the globalist agenda).

    When was the last time you saw WEF globalists taking center stage in the media? What happened to the Council For Inclusive Capitalism? ESG controls and lending have been crushed. DEI is quickly dying, as it should. Gen Z men are reportedly the most conservative group of young men in generations. There is a sea change happening right now, and if you’ve been paying attention from within the alternative sphere for a decade or more then you have probably noticed it.

    This is not a momentary flash of cultural awareness. This is a permanent societal shift. Unfortunately, when this sort of thing happens engineered calamity usually follows.

    Globalists and their leftist puppets can’t conceive of losing. They can’t fathom the idea that their ideology is failing and that the public isn’t buying what they’re selling. They will council themselves and suggest that the populace is simply “too stupid” to understand the necessity of the globalist vision. They’ll say that the rise of the conservative right is a “great step backwards” and a “dark age”. They’ll claim that this will lead to an epic disaster on a planetary scale.

    Then…those same people take action to CREATE that disaster.

    My original prediction for 2024 was that another presidential election would not happen; that there would be an event that disrupts the election and sends the country into chaos. We almost had that happen with two separate assassination attempts on Donald Trump. However, by sheer luck it appears that I was wrong and the election is moving forward.  What does this mean for the future?

    I think most of us in the alternative economic field understand well that if Trump reenters the White House the complex manipulation of financial data and jobs data by the Biden/Harris Administration will suddenly end. Meaning, the real data will come out, it will look very bad, and the media will immediately accuse Trump and conservatives of destroying the economy.

    On top of that, conservatives will be inheriting two separate proxy wars from Democrats – The war with Russia through Ukraine and the war with Iran through Israel. Both of these scenarios have the potential to escalate into a world war. I would argue that at this point a world war is inevitable (the first stage has already begun) and Trump will not be able to keep America out of it even if he wants to. Too many dominoes have been set in motion.

    Then you have the potential domestic fallout from a Trump win with leftists rioting across the country (as soon as the weather warms up enough enough for their dainty little hands to throw bricks and Molotovs). The goal of the leftist mob is to force conservatives to act like the very “fascists” the activists accuse us of being. Of course, if that happened they would be dead, but they will have destroyed the conservative moral ideal in the process.

    These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with. They aren’t going to sit back and let us prove the country can function far better without progressive influence and woke social engineering. They would rather burn the whole thing to the ground first.

    My point is, always be on guard in the moments when you think you’re winning. That’s when the people that mean you harm will be most angry, when they will be most unhinged, and when they will be most inclined to strike.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:05

  • Philly Judge Allows Musk's Million-Dollar Giveaway To Continue
    Philly Judge Allows Musk’s Million-Dollar Giveaway To Continue

    Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

    A judge has denied Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s request to block the $1 million giveaway program that billionaire Elon Musk and America PAC have been operating in the lead-up to the Nov. 5 election.

    Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Judge Angelo Foglietta issued the denial after a Nov. 4 hearing that was prompted by Krasner’s civil lawsuit against Musk and America PAC.

    Krasner had accused Musk and America PAC of running an illegal lottery, which he said created a public nuisance, and violating a state consumer protection law.

    The program is set to conclude on Election Day, Nov. 5.

    The two sides had a brief hearing on Oct. 31, but Foglietta decided that he had been divested of jurisdiction after Musk filed to move the case to federal court. A federal judge sent the case back to state court the following day, and Foglietta quickly responded by scheduling a hearing for Nov. 4.

    Foglietta said at the beginning of the hearing that because another day remained for the program, he didn’t think the case was moot.

    Musk was not in the courtroom, located within Philadelphia City Hall.

    America PAC attorney Chris Gober argued that despite Musk’s description of the giveaway as random, the program was not random.

    Gober said the program involved a contractual relationship in which participants served as spokespeople for the political action committee after being selected by a predetermined pool of people.

    So far, several individuals from Pennsylvania have won as part of the giveaway. Krasner’s complaint cited a post on X in which America PAC said more than 280,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania had signed the petition, which makes them eligible for the giveaway.

    Gober said that 6,661 of 18,000 payments—of differing amounts—owed to the residents of Philadelphia County had already been mailed. Around 3,000 were in process and slated to be mailed on Nov. 4 while the remaining—around 7,000—were slated to be mailed on Nov. 5.

    John Summers, an attorney representing Krasner’s office, said the PAC is relatively opaque about details surrounding the giveaways and terms for the PAC’s relationship with participants.

    Summers pointed to Musk’s giveaway statement and argued that the fact that the giveaway wasn’t actually random was not a valid defense. He also noted the testimony from America PAC Director Chris Young stating that he was surprised to hear Musk call the giveaway random.

    During his closing argument, Summers alleged the defendants’ lack of transparency cheated thousands of Philadelphians.

    Andy Taylor, another attorney for the defense, basing his closing argument on the First Amendment, said Krasner was asking for a violation of core political speech by stopping people from signing the PAC’s petition.

    Taylor said that the giveaway was by design rather than by chance. The winner selection process, he said, should be likened to a job application rather than a lottery.

    Summers responded to Taylor in part by stating that the case had nothing to do with freedom of speech and should instead be viewed as fraud.

    “No one’s First Amendment rights are being smothered,” Summers said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 19:15

  • How To… Rig Your Rigged Elections
    How To… Rig Your Rigged Elections

    Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

    Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?

    Well then, welcome to the first of our “How to…” series.

    A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of  freedom.

    Here we’ll go into the finer points of how it’s possible to have “elections” that mean almost nothing.

    What we talk about when we talk about rigging an election

    First things first, we need to establish what we mean when we talk about “election rigging”.

    Controlling the outcome of an election is a comparatively simple, even vulgar, process. All you need to do is manipulate the count and/or simply lie about the result.

    However doing this efficiently  – rigging an election with as little effort as possible and disguising that fact is more difficult.

    In short, if your rigged election is entirely reliant on simply forging ballots you have done something wrong. If you want to reliably and consistently control the results of your “elections” you need to be more creative than that.

    The vast majority of your work pre-election will be dedicated to laying the groundwork, building infrastructure, and lubricating the public.

    The vote itself is the final destination in a long journey that starts with…

    1. The System

    The CIA is a perfect example of the kind of institution which is not answerable to the electorate. You’ll need to create your own version of this.

    “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    Your first priority when constructing your system should be establishing an infrastructure that is not significantly impacted by elections.

    Unelected civil servants,  intelligence agencies, military officers, judges, NGOs, corporate interests and lobby groups should form the permanent foundations of the power structure, while “elected officials” should ideally be mere window dressing and wall-paper, with zero opportunity to act independently.

    Having by this means established a covert power structure that effectively guarantees an election will never be able to change anything meaningful – what we can call your “Deep State” – you need to set about creating a “democracy” that camouflages this fact.

    The design of your “democracy” can make or break an efficiently controlled election. Following our advice on the voting system you employ can make controlling the outcome of your “elections” relatively hassle-free.

    For starters, you should be aiming to make as little work for your Deep State as possible. A country is a big and complex entity,  and effectively micro-managing millions upon millions of individual votes is demanding of man-hours and man-power.

    That’s where your “voting system” comes into play, and it should work, not by falsifying and manipulating every single vote, but by making the vast majority of those votes mutually-canceling.

    Using your fully controlled “two-party system” (point 2), you should try to achieve a status quo in which the voting intentions of the majority will always split fairly evenly between two meaningless “choices”.

    You can do this with class or race or gender messaging, it doesn’t matter, just so long as their minds are made up at an early stage and tend to stay that way.

    Essentially you need a situation in which roughly 49% of your populace will vote for Team Red and 49% will vote for Team Blue.

    This then creates your mythical “election deciders” – the remaining 2% of the electorate whose votes you will need to care about. You can call them “swing states” or “floating voters” or some terminology of your own.

    What you’re aiming for by this means is an “election” that is decided by as few votes as possible.

    Once you have the system in place you need to start thinking about your political parties.

    2. The Parties

    “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.”

    An essential part of your control mechanism is, as referenced above, the  “Two-Party System”. Ideally this would be a perfect but meaningless binary, but this method can absorb  a few token “third party” options provided they remain purely minority choices.

    In fact permitting a few “independents” or “wild cards” to proliferate can even be beneficial  for a few reasons –

    a) it reinforces your appearance of genuine democracy, while remaining largely meaningless since the aforementioned entrenchment means they will never gain any serious traction.

    b) because sandwiching your Big Two parties between the “kill the rich and eat their babies” party on the Left and the “set fire to everyone darker than taupe on the Dulux paint scale” party on the Right only makes your two “REAL” parties look more sensible and “safe”.

    c) Hopeless minority third parties can act as good anger-sponges  and safety-valves for people who may be beginning to see through your rigged system.

    Of course, if you are doing this thoroughly you will probably be controlling the third parties as well. But that isn’t essential and in the main, you’ll want to focus on The Big Two.

    Establishing your Big Two is relatively easy, after all, you have money and power and (thanks to your candidate filtering processes, point 3) you have an entire political class dedicated to the pursuit of those things.

    Bringing both Big Two parties under your banner is easy.  The hard part is refining the skill of taking two near-identical things and somehow making them appear not just different but diametrically opposed.

    Your press will play an important role here. They must report only on the minor points of difference, and completely ignore or elide the obvious fact that the two parties agree on every single major issue.

    IMPORTANT – The unquestioned assumptions holding your system in place only work if they remain unquestioned, and they only remain unquestioned if people don’t realise they are there.

    This is the primary purpose of the Big Two parties, limit choice and control public discourse – while appearing to do the exact opposite.

    When the press discuss the Big Two parties they should talk about ill-defined concepts instead of facts. Use words like “progressive”, “liberal”, “traditional” and “common sense”. Words with relative qualitative meaning as opposed to objective quantitative value.

    Focus on aesthetic, surface-level differences. Contrast colours and iconography. Make sure they aim at different bases and demographics to encourage that 50/50 entrenchment we discussed in point 1.

    Sidenote: One of the additional benefits of these two near-identical parties that constantly pretend to be polar opposites is that when you really need to sell something to everyone you can unite the parties in “bi-partisan support”, and the press can sell the issue as “so important that even Red and Blue agree”.

    3. The Candidates

    “If you own everyone on the ballot, you don’t have to rig anything.”

    So, you have a power structure in place that works independently of any and all “elected” officials, you have a voting system that is easy to sway in either direction, and you have two parties as near-identical as makes no difference.

    But you still need actual – for want of a better word – “people”, to fill the role of “leader”. These are your candidates, the pool of potential puppets from which you pick.

    The good news here is that this process is partly automated via self-selection. The kind of shallow narcissists who seek positions of power are exactly the kinds of people you want on your roster.

    It is essential for the maintenance of the status quo that ANY candidates for high political office must be passed through levels of filtration before any ordinary person has the opportunity to put a check next to their name on a ballot paper. 

    a) Money. Your system needs to ensure no one can run for high office without a LOT of money behind them. Since you and your class allies control all the money worth controlling, this essentially means no one can run for office without your approval.

    b) Education and training.  As part of your power structure you should have invested resources in your education system. You should be selecting potential “leaders” at an early stage and directing their development through internships and “excellence programs” etc.

    As people progress through this system, you need to offer them opportunities to compromise themselves – morally and financially. Anyone who does not avail themselves of those opportunities must be rejected immediately and their career stalled or curtailed.

    Only those candidates willing to compromise themselves will progress to the next level.

    This both de-selects inappropriate applicants and provides important kompromat for future utility. Your intelligence agencies should maintain up to date dossiers on prospective candidates. Records used for what might be vulgarly described as “bribery” and/or “blackmail”.

    We prefer the term “carrot and stick”.

    4. The Press

    It’s nearly election day. The longterm planning is done. You have a political system immune to change, a voting system where most votes are irrelevant, near identical political parties advocating your selected agenda in slightly different words, and a shortlist of candidates who you handpicked and can easily control with carrots or sticks.

    But, when the actual voting is about to happen, all of that is of secondary importance to the press.

    A cooperative press is one of the fundamental pillars of your political system (point 1), and we won’t be going into creating that here, that’s another lesson for another time.

    For the sake of this lesson, we’ll be assuming your “Deep State” assets own and operate the vast majority of mainstream social media, print media, and audio-visual media outlets.

    At that point, The Press is your first and best tool for effectively disguising the nature of your “democracy”.

    Your press will tell the story of the election, and an efficiently controlled election is nothing but a story. A candidate only says what the press say he says. A candidate only does what the press say she does. Intrigues, scandals, highs-and-lows are the meat and lifeblood that make this show feel “relevant” –  a wave of “incident” painting a picture of a dynamic fluid situation with an uncertain outcome, even as it steadily steers the result in your chosen direction.

    Remember this isn’t about convincing people how to vote – the locked-in two-party system already renders that self-canceling and meaningless in all but those vital  “swing states” (or whatever your chosen terminology).  This is simply about making people pay attention, care about the outcome, feel as if vital life-changing choices are at stake, and that you are invested in those choices.

    Further, this is a type of propaganda that needs to exist on the meta-level to maintain the facade of choice. The very act of attempted persuasion reinforces the idea that people need to be persuaded and, as such, that their votes matter.

    This is the most vital task of your captive press –  not controlling the result, but making your chosen result believable.

    If you want a landslide polls can predict a landslide, if you want it to be close polls can predict it will be close. By making your carefully curated future what people expect to happen they will be more accepting of it when it happens.

    Sidenote: Control of the press was simpler for the generations that came before. Unfortunately, while some aspects of your job have been made easier by technology, some others have been made far more difficult. The modern tyrant must concern themselves with the independent media, but that’s another article in this series.

    5. The Votes

    “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

    You might be wondering, if you control both sides of the election, handpick the candidates, puppeteer the press and have a system in place which means your interests are on both tickets and can literally never lose, do you need to actually rig the votes?

    Well, of course you do.

    While all your candidates are under your control and promoting the same basic agenda, you will still have a preferred story you want to tell at any given time and a puppet best suited to promoting that story.

    For example, you might have a future psy-op planned which only works if Team Red is at the helm.

    Or it might be that there is a lot of ill-feeling in the populace that you want to either a) focus on a new hate figure or b) dissipate with an apparent regime change.

    It might be you owe some favours to a powerful ally and getting their relative/spouse/son into office is a pay-off.

    It might be that you’ve realised, too late,  your chosen puppet is so mentally unbalanced he/she might become essentially uncontrollable through your usual methods, and a last minute switch is needed.

    These are circumstances where actual vote rigging becomes essential.

    Thankfully, as we discussed in point one, you’ve designed a system where an election with millions of votes can be decided by a few thousand,  and you have a press that will always obediently lay the groundwork by “predicting” your planned result, however improbable it might seem and even if it requires a last minute change of direction that defies all reason and sense.

    You also have “tame” political parties you can unite in bi-partisan acceptance of the result and you have candidates who will always do what they are told, which makes concealing the rigging relatively easy.

    So – how do we do the actual rigging?

    Surprisingly, in our experience, the traditional in-person hand-written ballots are actually the hardest to manipulate, especially when there is infrastructure in place to confirm IDs and count quickly and efficiently.

    This method should therefore be discouraged.

    Have your captive Press refer to it as “old-fashioned” and “outdated”. Claim it benefits one side or is “racist”. The specifics don’t matter.

    At the same time, you need to be promoting more “modern”, “efficient” and “fairer” methods of voting – postal voting, drop boxes, electronic voting machines and online voting.

    All these methods allow for extra votes to be added quite easily via mail fraud or algorithm, or taken away via “lost ballots” or “technical glitches”. They put space – real or metaphorical – between the voter and the people who count the votes.

    You can slide into that space and get to work.

    And since your system means only a few thousand votes in a relatively small area will likely decide the election you don’t need to go too crazy.

    Just a thumb on the scales and you get the result you want.

    No one will notice  – unless you happen to encounter a situation where your chosen puppet proves to be vastly more unpopular than you anticipated.

    This may require last-minute “adjustments” overt enough to raise some comment.  However, just make sure your tame press dismiss all such comment as “conspiracy theory”  and there will be no significant long-term damage.

    Sidenote: To finesse this even further, have the press report on some “glitches” and “lost ballots”. Create a background white noise of chaos but ensure BOTH SIDES are seen to both suffer and benefit, and underline that this is just the way huge modern elections work, and the margin wasn’t impacted. Then, after the fact, issue apologies, censure those  “responsible” and promise to improve.

    We call this “incompetence camouflage”.

    Conclusion

    Congratulations, with the completion of this guide you are now one step closer to a perfectly controlled dictatorship in the guise of  a democracy.

    You should have in place:

    1. A system where your elected officials have very little power, and most votes don’t count.

    2. Political parties that agree on everything of importance whilst constantly squabbling over matters of very little import.

    3. A roster of candidates that are either morally or financially compromised and have been trained to do as they are told.

    4. A captive press which will report only what you tell it to report.

    5. Measures which make actually rigging the vote simple.

    Remember, with all these safeguards and plans in place, it is easy to control the outcome of the election without anyone ever revealing the level of corruption.

    …unless, for some reason, you want to make it obvious, perhaps to discredit democracy or start a civil war.

    But that’s advanced-level narrative management, which we will cover in a future lesson.

    You need to remember – Public belief is the reason we’re doing all of this. The illusion of choice is the lifeblood of your system. Once you reveal it’s fixed and voting doesn’t matter, they will stop voting and lose all investment.

    From there your power base can quickly crumble.

    Only aim for this if you have a better system already set up to replace it.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 18:25

  • RFK Jr Says Trump Plans To Remove Fluoride From American Drinking Water
    RFK Jr Says Trump Plans To Remove Fluoride From American Drinking Water

    The debate over the forced medication of the American population by the government is a long standing conflict.  Today it is more important than ever after the draconian efforts of Democrats to create a path to forced covid vaccinations using economic coercion.  The fight over experimental mRNA vaccines and vaccine passports has had an interesting side effect – The public is now motivated to question many other medical mandates and FDA standards with suspicious origins. 

    Water fluoridation is one of those standards.

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now part of Donald Trump’s campaign dream team, is to be put in charge of US health initiatives should Trump win the election this week.  Kennedy’s secondary career focus (beyond politics) has been exposing faulty medical establishment practices and food industry corruption.  He was a stalwart opponent of covid mandates and forced vaccination attempts and it’s fair to say he is widely hated by the government funded medical elite and the media.     

    Kennedy announced this week that he has turned his sights on water fluoridation, and says Donald Trump plans to set policies in motion to end fluoridation if he returns to office. 

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

    Fluoridation of the US water supply has been a key battleground since it began in 1945.  The practice was not widely accepted by the scientific community or the dental community back then, but that was before government manipulation of medical and scientific research through subsidies became a standard.

    After a few decades of indoctrination in universities and the growing habit of the medical community to police its own when it comes to investigating certain subjects, very few researchers had the courage to publish evidence contrary to the narrative that fluoride in the water supply was anything other safe.

    To question fluoride treatment is almost as taboo as questioning climate change if you are a scientist.  It’s just not done, but that attitude is completely contrary to the scientific method.  Try to study the subject online and most search engines will bury you in hundreds of “Fact Check” articles claiming that questioning fluoridation is pure conspiracy theory.

    The early days of mass fluoride medication are as shady as any conspiracy could possibly be.  Rumors of fluoride testing on unwilling subjects by the Third Reich and the Soviets abound, but there is little concrete evidence to confirm the claims that this was done to “control the population.”  The Soviets did in fact pass a directive in the 1960s for mass fluoridation of the water supply, and this ended in the 1990s.  The reason why is not officially admitted.

    The theory was that the chemical caused docile behavior and reduced IQ, making the population easier for the elites to manage. 

    Here are the facts:

    1)  Fluoride (or sodium fluoride) is a toxic chemical byproduct of the aluminum and fertilizer industry often used in rat poison.  It is also a cumulative agent, which means it continues to collect in the human body over time when ingested. 

    2)  Initially, these industries pumped fluoride gases into the air, causing health concerns and lawsuits.  This forced the manufacturers to capture the gases and reduce them down to a chemical sludge.  This is then distilled into a powder which makes it easier to contain and transport.  The problem was, the chemical was expensive to dispose of safely under environmental protocols.

    3)  Trace elements of natural fluoride already exist in many water supplies.  In some places with higher fluoride content in ground water in the early 1900s, residents were found to suffer from a condition called “brown teeth”.  Scientists found that people with brown teeth also had lower instances of cavities.  Eventually a correlation to fluoride was established by a man named Trendley H. Dean. 

    4)  Dean, a dentist and scientist, ultimately led the charge for mass fluoridation in US cities.  Another entity also lobbied the government for mass fluoridation:  Aluminum giant Alcoa.

    5)  And here’s where it gets shady – Trendley Dean worked for the NIH and the Public Health Service, which was run by Andrew Mellon.

    6)  Wealthy elitist Andrew Mellon, a founder of ALCOA and one of its major stockholders, was the U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1921-1932, when the PHS was still a division of the Treasury Department.  It was therefore Mellon’s PHS that ordered Dean to study fluoride in the first place.  In other words, Mellon and Alcoa had Dean conjure up the very studies that would change fluoride from a toxic waste into a public health miracle. 

    7) This is yet another example of the revolving door between corporations and government health agencies. 

    8)  Not only did industry magnates no longer have to pay for expensive chemical disposal for fluoride, they stood to make millions selling the poison to the government for water treatment.  After that, the medical community (under Mellon) hyped up fluoridation as a magical cure for bad teeth.  

    9)  Dozens of recent studies now confirm what many people suspected decades ago:  Fluoride does in fact decrease IQ.  Children are especially vulnerable.  It is also proven to cause weaker bones, thyroid problems and a host of neurological issues.  Several published articles have postulated that fluoride could be producing alterations in mitochondrial DNA; mitochondrial DNA has many implications in various mental disorders.

    10)  Federal Courts have ruled against the EPA in the forced fluoridation of water.  They have ordered officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply.

    11)  Trendley Dean claimed that tooth decay was reduced by 60% in his studies on fluoride.  More recent studies claim a more modest 15% to 25% reduction. 

    12)  Around 70% of US communities fluoridate.  Communities that have stopped fluoridation have not experienced a significant increase in dental decay.

    Even if fluoride does have legitimate value as a treatment for tooth decay, this is ultimately irrelevant.  The dangers involved in using the toxic chemical in public water far outweigh the potential benefits.  The suspicious history of the practice also needs to be investigated.  It is better to err on the side of caution and not lace our water supply with an industrial waste product.

    Plenty of alternatives exist in our modern era for healthy teeth.  Beyond that, the government should not be given authority to mass medicate the population.  Politicians are not qualified enough or trustworthy enough to make such decisions.  Ask yourself, is the government really that concerned about your teeth, or is something else going on?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 18:00

  • Philly Shipyard's Transformation: How Hanwha's Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness
    Philly Shipyard’s Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

    By Wilson Beaver of Heritage.org

    Earlier this year, Hanwha Ocean Company bought Philly Shipyard for $100 million. Though it was met with little fanfare from the public at the time, the investment was a big deal in the Navy.

    The Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Mobile (LCS 26) comes alongside the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) for a fueling-at-sea, Oct. 1, 2024

    It came after requests from American defense experts and government officials for shipbuilders from allied countries to invest into the worn down, depleted, and inefficient mess that is the US shipbuilding industry. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro even called the deal, “a game-changing milestone” for America’s “Maritime Statecraft.”

    Now, the new partnership is paying dividends, for Hanwha, Philadelphia, and the United States. In late August, Hanwha secured an annual Navy maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) contract. That contract and the new work at Philly Shipyard will go a long ways towards fixing the Navy’s current maintenance backlog, which is currently contributing to both shipbuilding delays and cost overruns.

    According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, the Navy’s current maintenance backlog amounted to $1.8 billion. This inefficiency has a major impact on America’s combat readiness has contributed to the Navy’s decision to decommission 9 ships before their expected service life.

    Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the Biden-Harris administration. Misguided spending priorities and a lack of urgency have set back America’s ability to keep up with and deter China, which is the world’s largest Navy numerically and whose fleet is still growing fast.

    Hanwha could help turn the tide in that fight, though. With the purchase of the Philly Shipyard, it is now positioned to compete for contracts for building new ships, which could be an enormous windfall not only for Philadelphia workers, but also our naval power.

    Specifically, the Philly Shipyard is well positioned to compete for contracts to construct Constellation-class frigates. Currently, these ships are only being built at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, with the first ship set to set sail in 2029 following production delay. But Navy leadership has already called for an increase in the construction of new missile-guided frigates, and the Philly Shipyard is now well-positioned to compete for building these additional frigates.

    The new investment in the Philly Shipyard is a refreshing step in the right direction. It is also a reminder that our efforts to reshore industry and rebuild our defense industrial base will benefit American workers first and foremost, like the new workers who will need to be hired as Philly Shipyards expands.

    If we want to win, however, we need to build on this positive momentum. Policymakers should work to create maritime prosperity zones, implement programs to solve labor shortages, and cut down on overregulation in order continue to promote further investments in and expansion of our naval infrastructure, especially at Philly Shipyards.

    As our Navy works to meet the challenges of tomorrow, Hanwha’s new investment means Philadelphia will be playing a leading role in the fight. By fixing the maintenance glut and building new ships, Philly Shipyard will be vital to preserving the security of the American people.

    Why? Because the first battle of the next great power competition will not take place in the far-off seas of the Pacific; it will be fought in places like Philly Shipyard on the Delaware as we set out to defeat our own deficiencies. And this is a battle we can’t afford to lose.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:40

  • The Closest Election In History?
    The Closest Election In History?

    According to RealClearPolitics, the current US Presidential polling averages have Trump at 48.5% and Harris at 48.5%, literally a tie.

    On this measure the two candidates have been within two percentage points of each other since mid-August. So in terms of the popular vote, this is officially the closest election on record.

    Today’s Chart of the Day from DB’s Henry Allen (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), looks at the gap between the candidate declared President and the runner up in percentage terms in every election since 1868 after the US Civil War.

    Those in red mark the times where the eventual President didn’t win the popular vote. Allen has also annotated all those with less than a 3 percentage point differential.

    There have been six elections with less than a percentage point between the candidates.

    1. 1880 Garfield beat Hancock by 0.1pp
    2. 1884 Cleveland beat Blaine by 0.5pp
    3. 1888 Harrison was elected although he lost the popular vote to Cleveland by -0.8pp
    4. 1960 Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.2pp
    5. 1968 Nixon beat Humphrey by 0.7pp
    6. 2000 Bush won even though he lost the popular vote to Gore by -0.5pp. See Henry Allen’s piece here this morning that looked at the market reaction after each election since and including this contested one.

    So if current polls are correct then this could be the closest of any US election in popular vote terms. Of course in reality, polls are subject to a margin of error, so you’d expect some variation, but one thing is certain: in just a few days, the avalanche of lawsuits will begin.

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

    Shortly we will publish a comprehensive Election Day guide, providing a comprehensive overview of the “swing states” that will decide the election, a list of bellwether counties to pay attention to within those states, as well as a precise recap of the time line for vote reporting and media projections of the winner in 2020.

    It will also cover the rules for challenging the voting results in the swing states as well as rule changes at the federal level adopted in the wake of the last election.

    Finally, we caution that while a winner is likely to be declared in MI, AZ, WI and NV within the first 24 hours of the polls closing on Tuesday, PA and GA are likely to take longer to assess – potentially 3-4 days or longer if there are recounts.

    So if it is close, stand by for a long few days/weeks/months.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:20

  • From 'Clingers' To 'Garbage' – Why The 16 Years Of Vilification?
    From ‘Clingers’ To ‘Garbage’ – Why The 16 Years Of Vilification?

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

    Who actually are the “garbage” people?

    Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?”

    Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?”

    Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?”

    Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?”

    Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly?

    Who are these people that leftwing politicians have so vehemently derided—and why?

    They include Trump supporters, of course, or what Biden also dubbed “ultra-MAGAs” and Tim Walz called “fascists,” now without the prior qualifying prefix “semi.”

    In general, these adjectives of disdain denote about half the country according to the results of what will soon be the last three presidential elections.

    This half is more rural than urban, characterized by larger than smaller families, more high-schooled diplomaed than college degreed, and more conventional and traditional than vanguard and trend-setting.

    Statisticians tell us that the new non-clinging Democratic Party finds its greatest support from those who earn less than $50,000 and those who make considerably more than $100,000. These are the rich/poor bookends that surround the reformed Republican party in between.

    So, in terms of generalized income and earnings, the left is now the party of the well-to-do professional and credential class and the rich, along with the subsidized poor. The Republicans, by contrast, are increasingly represented by the middle classes.

    The Democratic top dogs are most likely to embrace agendas that never garner 51 percent of public support—vast reductions in gas and oil to lessen “climate change,” open borders to welcome in the world’s needy, the government promotion of a third, transgendered sex, abortion on demand without restrictions, the reifications of various critical (race/legal/penal/modern monetary) “theories,” and radical changes in the current system (ending the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the 50-state union, etc.).

    Two truisms stand out about the elite boutique agenda: one, when these theories are implemented – often by the courts, and the permanent and unelected administrative and bureaucratic state – the architects of such experimentation do not really feel the inevitable deleterious consequences.

    Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Silicon Valley masters of the universe, the professors of law, the corporate CEOs, and the Bill Gates of the world really don’t care much whether gas is at $3 a gallon or $6, or Romex wire is $39 a spool or $150.

    Illegal aliens do not go to their children’s schools or crowd the offices of their concierge cardiologists and oncologists, much less dump trash on their streets and curbs.

    They are strong supporters of teachers’ unions, despising the very idea of charter schools and homeschooling. And yet they send their children more often to private schools where students are not the lab rats of the public school system.

    Their ideology is the fruit of their privilege and so is often more utopian and abstract. Given that if it results in economic, social, and cultural damage to millions, they will certainly avoid the ensuing flotsam and jetsam.

    The fallout from defunding the police falls upon the inner city, not the privately patrolled Presidio Heights or the secluded sorts in Martha’s Vineyard.

    Given their income and status, the new Democratic credentialed and moneyed classes do not care about the struggle of others to live one more day, clinging to the middle-class vestiges of their parents’ era. Instead, for the anointed who have transcended the fear of not filling up their tank or coming up short on monthly rent and power bills, it is not hard to mandate job-killing EVs or to chuckle over biological boys in girls’ locker rooms and pride flags flying from the abandoned American embassy in Kabul.

    By the same token, the poor count on the left’s largesse to cushion themselves from the damage of their own party’s dreams turned into nightmares. Various food, housing, medical, legal, and educational subsidies to the poor are testaments that the left’s own agendas stagnant upward mobility and confine the poor to permanent poverty.

    In a cynical sense, left-wing elites square the circle of the guilt over their privilege through government subsidies for those whom they’d rather not necessarily live next to or have their children attend school with. In other words, they find them useful rather than empathetic. They welcome in millions of illegal aliens—as long as they don’t camp out at Yale, the Hamptons, or Malibu Beach.

    Not so the struggling middle classes. Modern theories can result in hyperinflation that can ruin them or easily send them into the ranks of the government-subsidized poor. They are conservative in wanting a secure border, legal-only immigration, affordable food and energy, safe streets, and equality of opportunity rather than of result, because they have no margin of error, lacking the wherewithal of secure home zip codes, or the perks of gargantuan grocery bills at Whole Foods, or a new foreign car every two years.

    Such conservatism is reflected in the worldview of the clingers and irredeemables. They accept not cosmopolitism but 2,500 years of nationhood that remind them there can be no nation without borders.

    There can be no modern comforts and security without access to affordable food and energy. There can be no public society without safe streets—and indeed, not even public places without sanitation and common decency.

    So, the great middle class is wary about falling at the hands of others into government dependency and even more fearful of destroying what has worked over the ages. They resist experimenting with the unknown, especially when thought up and designed by those who will easily ride out the ensuing disasters when such harebrained schemes inevitably fail.

    These chumps, fascists, and garbage people know that their advantages in numbers are outweighed by the Eloi’s absorption of institutional and government power. So, in depression, they often shrug and drop out. They assume wisely that the network news, the New York Times and Washington Post, Hollywood, and the corporate boardroom are mere extensions of the utopian and cultural left, who despise them for ignoring their supposed betters.

    They pass on watching the Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys. They are deaf to the top-down sermons from an Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons, the Obamas, or Joe Biden, which assume the grubby majority is either too ignorant or amoral or both to know what is good for them and so must be shamed, smeared, and slurred rather than won over by argumentations and persuasion. Is not the 2024 election about just that—the haughty who sermonize and those weary of being lectured?

    The dregs could care less who is president of Harvard or how many letters and titles follow a professional’s name—except to confirm to themselves when watching or hearing such people that our elites increasingly have neither common sense nor integrity. A high school history teacher could have answered congressional questioning on race, anti-Semitism, and bias far more effectively and adroitly than a deer-in-the-headlights, clueless Harvard president Claudine Gay.

    Yes, the semi-fascists are lectured that they are racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They are damned by the credentialed as “white privileged” who “rage,” as they dutifully go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die in combat at double their numbers in our demographics.

    They are advised of their toxic illiberality and bigotry, even as their children lack the race, gender, and ethnicity advantage accorded to the so-called Other and the inside edge that money, influence, and status provide for the elite.

    What has recently brought this great divide to a head and exposed the fury of the elite is resurgent anger at the newfound impudence of the deplorable class, or the notion that they would dare call the dishonest media the “fake news” or suggest that “fit-as-fiddle,” “smart-as-a-tack,” cognitively challenged Joe Biden is the proverbial emperor with no clothes.

    Who are these arrogant who pack the 20,000 seats of Madison Square Garden even after the good people have warned that they were mindlessly reenacting Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will?

    The left believes that either racial victimization or money should guarantee privilege and so despises those qualifying for neither. In the elite’s view, the working class so often lacks the romance of the poor and non-white, but worse still, the culture and pretensions of the progressive Übermenschen.

    Finally, the unspoken irony of this divide is that the self-professed elite know that they are not the elite by any definable standard or meritocracy. Yale gives a higher percentage of A’s on spec to its students than do trade schools and junior colleges.

    Today’s supposedly brilliant Columbia student would likely struggle to earn an objectively graded C on a state college’s standardized, multi-choice history exam.

    Those who run the Washington Post or NPR are less competent, worldly, and knowledgeable than the chumpy and dregsy sexagenarian who publishes a small town’s weekly newspaper.

    The average salesman and electrician can far better spot fraud and deceit than an Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak. And the tractor driver is more likely not to lie under oath than a John Brennan, James Clapper, or Andrew McCabe. The lineman working with high voltage is far more likely to err on the side of safety with the lives of others than the executives of Pfizer or Moderna.

    In a wider sense, the deplorable class believes it can still build reliable pipelines, frack, truck our nation’s goods, and clean up after a hurricane. But it has utterly lost confidence that the best and the brightest at the Pentagon can win a war, at Boeing can craft a safe jet, or at NASA can send astronauts safely into space and back in the fashion of their grandfathers more than half a century ago.

    This election is about many things—left/right issues, of course, and the peculiar personalities of Trump and Harris perhaps.

    But it will likely be defined by those who are not just tired of being smeared as the underbelly of America but, far more unforgivably, are beginning to enjoy and mock the disparagement from those who have never earned the right to smear anyone but themselves.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:00

  • "Coma In A Bottle": Miami Doc Charged With Trafficking Date Rape Drug
    “Coma In A Bottle”: Miami Doc Charged With Trafficking Date Rape Drug

    As if there weren’t enough problems in academia right now, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s medical school has just been charged with trafficking a date rape drug, according to the NY Post.

    On Friday, Dr. Dairon Garcia was charged with trafficking the drug. Authorities say they connected him to a package intercepted at Miami International Airport containing 15 pounds of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

    Miami-Dade Judge Mindy Glazer said at the arraignment: “He should be so embarrassed being here. He’s a medical doctor, going through all those years of education and committing his life to helping people and to get arrested for this.

    She added: “That’s between you, your lawyer and the criminal justice system. Good luck to you, sir.”

    Photo: Miami-Dade Corrections

    The NY Post article says that Garcia, an assistant professor of clinical radiology at the UM Miller School of Medicine, is facing charges linked to a package from Paris addressed to his rental property, intercepted by customs at Miami Airport on Aug. 29.

    Miami police, alerted by Homeland Security, monitored the address as the package was delivered on Sept. 12 and collected by a woman. After a search, her daughter reported Garcia had informed them of the delivery, asking them to accept it.

    Another tenant reported receiving a separate package for Garcia on Sept. 7, and customs intercepted yet another on Sept. 25, addressed to his registered company, DG Diagnostics MD LLC, the report says. 

    He pleaded not guilty at Friday’s arraignment, was held on $15,000 bail, and posted it that evening.

    The DEA says gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), often called “grievous bodily harm” or “coma in a bottle,” is colorless and can be slipped into drinks, causing sedation without the victim’s knowledge.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:40

  • Escape From Psychopathocracy
    Escape From Psychopathocracy

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

    “Most people do not get a clear opportunity to vote against Communism and prevent a historical evil from taking hold. We have that opportunity. Vote Trump.”

    – James Lindsay

    You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

    Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos.

    Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.

    Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power?

    I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us.

    It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.

    In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life.

    Who failed to notice that candidate Kamala Harris was unable to articulate any coherent notion about how her government might manage its business beyond some empty nostrums about “joy,” and “turning the page?” Because the party’s actual purpose, which it hides and lies about, is just to push you around, tell you what to do and what to think, and to punish you if you don’t comply — in other words, to exercise despotic power. It can’t do anything else with that power.

    It lacks the competence to manage an economy from the top down, and it certainly won’t allow the countless volitional transactions of people at liberty to produce and sell things of value on their own. It will go to war against anything to steal more money: some pitiful foreign kleptocracy of country. . . the liberty-minded people of our own country. . . against sound ideas, proven principles, standards of decency, and, not unusually, against reality itself.

    And now you and I face the ordeal of an election that, by design, will be nearly impossible to audit, will remain inconclusive for weeks, and subject to endless dispute. Why, because it serves the purpose of the Party of Chaos, which is. . . chaos! The scheme was to introduce so many devices of uncertainty as to guarantee political paralysis. Why else would you use batteries of hugely expensive computerized vote-counting machines that can be easily hacked, untraceable mail-in ballots with no chains of custody, the automatic registration of non-citizens, and laws (as in California) to literally forbid the requirement of voter-ID?

    This was the work of lawfare terrorist Marc Elias — with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, some from the government itself, a bunch from the party, and some from rogue billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, and then disbursed surreptitiously through hundreds of NGOs — to elect officials such as Secretaries of State and district attorneys who will ignore or bend the law, to pay off state legislators around the country to change voting rules, to hire brigades of ballot “harvesters,” and to file ruinous lawsuits against anyone who objects to these pranks. It is an enormous, dastardly machine designed to deprive you of your consent to be governed. It is the work of political psychopaths.

    You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.

    But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election – with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair.

    This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.

    The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place.

    Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”

    One way or another, looks like we’re in for a hard, anxious winter.

    Threats galore loom concerning possible blob / Party of Chaos mischief ahead, designed to disorder our national life: false flags prompting the imposition of martial law. . . aggressive censorship and cancellation of free-speaking regime opponents. . . deployment of Antifa mobs against civil order, with violence, looting, arson.

    This symbiotic enemy of the people is desperate to evade accountability for the crimes they’ve already committed as officials running institutions: abuse of power, conspiracy to deprive many citizens of their civil rights, perhaps even treason. They’re capable of anything. They must be defeated.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:20

  • Bonds Bid, Bitcoin Skids As Traders Take Profits On 'Trump' Bets
    Bonds Bid, Bitcoin Skids As Traders Take Profits On ‘Trump’ Bets

    The equity market was mixed today with The Dow lagging and Small Caps leading (S&P/Nasdaq modestly lower) ahead of tomorrow’s big day. NOTE the drop in the morning was reportedly triggered by WSJ HLs that Russia is suspected of a plot to send incendiary devices on US-bound planes, citing Western security officials, but that was quickly BTFD back…

    The bigger theme of the day was profit-taking on the so-called “Trump Trade” after extreme outpereformance of the Kamala basket in recent weeks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    VIX ended the day notably elevated with the vol term structure extremely inverted ahead of this week’s extreme event risks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    …in fact this is the VIX’s longest stretch above its 200dma since 2019…

    Source: Bloomberg

    For the first time since early 2019, VIX Specs are net long futures…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Maybe this is more than an election-uncertainty trade… maybe it’s structural…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Mega-Cap Tech fell once again today but has found support for now…

    Source: Bloomberg

    After Friday’s utter chaos in bond land, reality set in that piss poor payrolls means lower yields and Treasury yields tumbled across the board with the long-end outperforming (2Y -3bps, 30Y -8bps). Yields are still marginally higher from Thursday’s close…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The 10Y yield ended back at pre-payrolls levels…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The dollar continued to drift lower (ignoring the manic buying after payrolls)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Arguably another “Trump Trade” continues to build as the Mexican Peso plunges to its weakest since Sept 2022

    Source: Bloomberg

    Despite the dollar weakness, gold trod water today, holding just above support around $2730…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin fell again after tagging record highs last week. BTC is finding support in the $67-68k region for now

    Source: Bloomberg

    Oil prices rallied (with WTI back up near $72), erasing last week’s plunge on Israel-Iran optics…

    Source: Bloomberg

    With oil prices rising again, we wouldn’t question you for being surprised that pump-prices are testing multi-year lows (right ahead of the election)… probably nothing, right?

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, what happens to USA Sovereign Risk tomorrow?

    Source: Bloomberg

    From 12-month highs – will a divided govt soothe the pain?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:00

  • Leaked NBC Election Night Rehearsal Shows Trump Winning Swing States
    Leaked NBC Election Night Rehearsal Shows Trump Winning Swing States

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Footage has leaked online of an NBC News dry run of election night, and interestingly it shows president Trump winning the swing states.

    The mock election night scenario is accompanied by a chyron stating “THIS IS A TEST,” and has NBC anchors covering wins for Trump in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

    “Right now, it looks like there’s a big crack in Michigan,” one of the anchors is heard saying.

    “Saginaw, Michigan, this is really big for Donald Trump. Joe Biden won it in 2020, but this time it’s going to Trump. If he does that in Michigan, it’s a good sign for him,” one of them says in the clip.

    Pointing to a map showing Trump heading to victory, an anchor comments, “Kamala Harris only has a couple of ways to get there,” pointing particularly to Pennsylvania.

    The footage shows that even with Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota and Virginia voting blue, Kamala falls short with 247 electoral votes.

    The leaked footage also suggests Republican gains in both the Senate and House.

    Watch:

    As we highlighted last week, a news station in Pennsylvania was forced to apologize for flashing up the US presidential election results in the state as part of a “test” that wasn’t supposed to be seen by viewers.

    The ‘results’ showed Kamala beating Trump by 52 per cent to 47 per cent of the vote.

    Most final polls are calling it for Trump. A fresh AtlasIntel swing state poll shows Trump leading in all seven states.

    In 2020 they were the most accurate pollster, and now they also have Trump leading nationally by 2 points.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 15:45

  • The Biden-Harris' Economic Time-Bomb: A Warning To Trump & Musk
    The Biden-Harris’ Economic Time-Bomb: A Warning To Trump & Musk

    Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

    The insane neo-Keynesian policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration have created persistent inflation and record levels of debt with two objectives: to bloat Gross Domestic Product and jobs with public spending and government jobs.

    The United States’ insane inflation is solely due to out-of-control spending and currency printing. Corporations, wars, or supply chains cannot cause aggregate prices to rise, nor can they consolidate the increase even at a slower pace. Although this can have an impact on individual prices, the only factor that causes aggregate prices to rise year after year is the decline in the value of the US dollar that the government issues.

    Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers. The latest jobs figure is so poor it seems disingenuous to blame it on hurricanes and strikes, as if economists and forecasters had not considered those two factors in their estimates. Furthermore, the only factor that continued to increase uncontrollably was the number of government jobs, adding 40,000 new positions to an overall total of just 12,000 jobs. No wonder the labor participation rate and employment-to-population ratios remain below 2019 levels. Furthermore, in the latest GDP figure, government spending accounted for 30% of the annualized growth, while investment was basically stagnant. In the past nine quarters, government spending has been one of the top drivers of GDP growth, and its contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2024 was the largest in a year.

    This is upside-down economics in full swing. Private sector investment weakness, higher taxes for the productive economy and government spending and debt driving the economy. Of course, this never ends well.

    The Harris-Biden administration arrived in January 2021, when the economy was bouncing back strongly. Instead of allowing the private sector to thrive, it embarked on a strategy of out-of-control spending and tax increases with two objectives: increase the size of government in the economy so much that the next administration would be unable to reduce it enough in four years. The second objective was to bloat growth and job figures so aggressively that the next administration will see a recession if it reduces public sector growth. You may ask yourself why they would do it if Harris intended to win the elections. If Kamala Harris wins, she will continue to expand the size of government, inflate prices through spending and printing, and blame companies and stores for these actions.

    The Biden-Harris administration has left a massive time bomb for Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency office if they win. It will be almost impossible to avoid a recession if they cut discretionary spending and eliminate duplicate jobs. It is the same strategy that the socialists followed in Greece, Spain, and France, by the way.

    However, the socialist strategy may backfire. The evidence is that citizens do not value Biden’s policies and the state of the economy. The approval rate regarding the economy is atrociously low, 39.8%, according to RCP. United States citizens do not believe that they are better off than in January 2021. Inflation, immigration, and rising taxes have crippled small businesses and families. Furthermore, a strong pro-growth strategy and lower taxes will likely boost the dormant investment figure, create jobs in the private sector, and help small businesses achieve critical mass and grow. In Argentina, Milei recognized the necessary actions and cautioned the citizens about the inevitable reduction of the bloated state. The Kirchner socialists left a more significant time bomb legacy than what Trump might inherit. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Lower inflation led to lower taxation, an eight-month budget surplus, and rapidly improving public finances.

    The biggest risk for the United States economy and the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is out-of-control public spending and constant currency printing added to tax hikes. Healing public finances and reducing government jobs may have a temporary negative impact on GDP, but higher exports, investment, and private sector jobs will likely compensate for it, and the result will be better for the US dollar and American citizens.

    More government is always poorer citizens. The potential of the United States economy’s private sector is much greater than the short-term negative impact of efficiency and budget control on headline GDP.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 15:05

  • Gold – Best Asset In 2000s, But You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!
    Gold – Best Asset In 2000s, But You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!

    Authored by Egon von Greyerz via VonGreyerz.gold,

    There is a fine line between happiness and misery, as Dickens describes in David Copperfield. Copperfield’s landlord, Mr Micawber, was just on the wrong side of happiness by six pence. 

    In a recent article called THE END OF THE US ECONOMIC AND MILITARY EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF GOLD, I stated: “Unsustainable deficits and galloping debt levels, combined with a crumbling military, are the perfect recipe for the end of an Empire.”

    So, we are obviously not talking about a six-pence deficit in the case of the virtually bankrupt US empire but instead about a debt that is growing exponentially, now by several trillions of dollars annually.

    History doesn’t just rhyme, but it repeats itself over and over and over again. 

    Let’s just look at the final stages of a debt crisis. 

    The table below shows the disastrous result of irresponsible governments during the last 54 years.

    Governments never tell their people that they consistently destroy the value of the people’s money. 

    In 1971, when Nixon took away the dollar’s gold backing, he said: “YOUR DOLLAR WILL BE WORTH AS MUCH TOMORROW”.

    If Tricky Dick was still alive today, he can, of course, argue that he didn’t lie.

    Because a dollar today is still worth a dollar, he would argue. But he wouldn’t tell anyone that the dollar 53 years later has lost 99% of its purchasing power.

    Gold is up 78X since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. The next phase will be acceleration.

    As I explain in this article, gold will rise by multiples in the coming years (obviously with corrections).

    The Roman emperors who ruled the Roman Empire from 190 to 290 AD could argue the same, although the Denarius silver coin went from almost 100% silver content to zero. 

    The same was true for Friedrich Ebert, the president of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s. He would have argued that a Mark is always a Mark, even when it has lost 100% of its purchasing power. 

    But gold doesn’t lie. Measured in real money, an ounce of gold in 1923, was worth 87 trillion Marks.

    Until a currency totally dies in a hyperinflationary collapse, the deceit of the leaders is never revealed to public.

    But we must never forget what Voltaire said in 1729 – “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – ZERO.”

    When have we ever heard of a leader telling us that we must protect ourselves against the fraudulent destruction of our wealth by constantly debasing the value of money?

    As Alan Greenspan said in 1967:

    “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value…The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

    Have a look at the tables above again.

    These are but a few examples of thousands of currencies having been destroyed throughout history.

    Governments create inflation by printing money and by allowing the financial system to create unlimited amounts of credit in the fractional reserve banking system. 

    In short, it means that banks and other financial institutions receive a deposit of, say, $100 and can lend 10 to 50X or $1,000 to $5,000 against that. Add derivatives, which allows the system to create trillions of dollars out of thin air. 

    This immoral and totally undisciplined financial model doesn’t just create unlimited leverage for financial players, whether they do it in banks, hedge funds, private equity, or any part of the shadow banking system. 

    This is how the total global debt of $350 trillion probably is in the quadrillions of dollars if we include all these creative “financial weapons of mass destruction”, as Warren Buffett called them. See the debt pyramid below.

    Until now, conventional investment assets like stocks and property have been excellent \protection as they have gone up substantially as a result of the constant growth of credit and money supply.

    So, this massive liquidity injection has created colossal paper fortunes for most investors.

    WHEN WILL IT END

    That party is now coming to an end. Valuations of these bubble assets are now at perilous levels. History tells us that manias always end badly. 

    But history doesn’t tell us when they will end. Will it be tomorrow, in six months or several years? 

    So, can we forecast the end?

    Well, the most exact of all sciences is hindsight. With the benefit of this very accurate method, many people will tell us afterwards that the crash was bound to happen. 

    Sadly, no one realises that this time, dip buying will fail. Still, investors will buy dip after dip until they are exhausted. So when the market has fallen further than anyone expects most investors will sit tight based on greed and FOMO (fear of missing out). And just at that point, the biggest wealth destruction in history will take place. 

    Very few will think of alternative investments like gold to preserve wealth until it is too late.

    And at that point, gold will have gone up so much in value with very few participating. Everyone will find gold too expensive. Very few will realise that gold isn’t going up, but paper money is down.

    A FASCINATING JOURNEY LEADING TO A POT OF GOLD

    I was born in Sweden and have dual Swedish / Swiss citizenship. I started my career in banking in Switzerland and then in corporate life in the UK. 

    In 1972, I was offered a job by a bank client, a small listed retail company called Dixons. I became Finance Director in 1974 at the age of 29. I was thereafter appointed Vice-Chairman. 

    We made the company to be the biggest electric and consumer electronic retailer in the UK and a FTSE 100 company. 

    It was an incredibly stimulating time building a dynamic business both organically and by acquisition. As business leaders we experienced adversity as a positive challenge. We sold electrical goods including televisions by candle light in 1974 when there was only electricity for 3 days per week due to a major coal miners’ strike. And we grew by contested takeovers of companies much bigger than ourselves.

    Corporate life in a dynamic business is extremely exciting. But since I started that career in my late 20s, I felt it was time to do my own thing in my early 40s. 

    So, in the 1990s, I started investing my own funds as well as the capital of some wealthy friends. 

    I have always been interested in understanding risk and protecting the downside, both in banking and in corporate life. 

    In the 90s I started to be concerned about the growth of debt and derivatives. So I was looking at the best ways of preserving wealth. 

    Having experienced Nixon closing the gold window and the subsequent 24X growth of the gold price from $35 in 1971 to $850 in 1980, I had always been fascinated by gold. 

    Seeing debt and especially derivatives growing with no shackles and especially tech stocks becoming a massive bubble in the late 1990s, I was convinced that gold par excellence was the best asset to preserve wealth.

    Having experienced gold go from $35 in 1971 and then correct from $850 in 1980 to $250 in 1999, I was closely watching the gold price for confirmation of a bottom. So in early 2002 we invested heavily into physical gold at $300 for ourselves and a group of co-investors that we were advising. 

    We haven’t looked back since and only increased our investment in gold over the years. Since we had created a superb system for buying and storing physical gold based on our stringent wealth preservation principles, people around the world started to ask for help.  That led to the creation of Matterhorn Asset Management / GoldSwitzerland. The name was changed at the beginning of this year to VON GREYERZ AG. 

    Today we have clients in over 90 countries and are probably the biggest company in the world outside the banking system for HNWIs acquiring and storing gold. 

    We have been actively involved in gold for soon a quarter of a century and experienced almost 10X growth in the gold price since we started the business. 

    Still, we believe that the gold journey is only starting now.

    Why, you may ask. 

    Well, gold is the best-performing asset class in this century, better than the S&P including reinvested dividends and still NOBODY OWNS GOLD.

    Only 0.5% of global financial assets are invested in gold. 

    It is totally incomprehensible that gold has gone up 9.5X. This century, investors are not even looking at it. 

    So why is gold still so unloved?

    Gold held in the investor’s name in safe vaults and jurisdictions outside the financial system is the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

    But asset managers and banks dislike gold since they can’t churn commission with an asset that can’t be turned over at regular intervals. So no commission and no performance fees. Also, very few people understand gold. 

    In my view, gold is now ready to explode, measured in paper money. 

    I have explained the reason for gold’s coming explosion in many articles, including this recent one.

    But remember that gold never goes up. All it does is to reflect governments’ and central banks’ destruction of fiat money.

    Gold is just stable purchasing power in a world where goods and services go up exponentially in price because the money you buy it with always goes to ZERO. 

    Having said that, I do expect gold to do better than just keeping pace with purchasing power in the next few years.

    Again let me make it clear – no paper money has ever, ever, ever survived in history (in its original form). 

    With such a perfect record of destroying money, why should we believe that the FED, ECB, BoE (Bank of England) or BoJ (Bank of Japan) or any other central bank will stand a chance to save the global financial system with $2-3 quadrillion of toxic exposure?

    Well, I can personally guarantee that they won’t. 

    Remember that destroying the value of money by printing quadrillions is a technical default, although no central bank will call it that. 

    And creating digital money for the central bank is just a technical diversion. 

    Debt can never be written off without totally destroying the value of the assets it supports. That is how a balance sheet or double-entry accounting works. 

    So, this global financial system will collapse, as they all have. But this is the first time it has been global. 

    BRICS countries will also suffer, but not as much as the West. 

    The coming era will be commodity-based. Take Russia, for example, with $85 trillion of natural reserves. They will be one of the major winners in the coming commodity era. They also have low debts. 

    So, let’s look at the risks.

    WAR RISK 

    There are today two major wars that could lead to global conflicts and potentially nuclear war. 

    The US is directly involved in both conflicts with weapons and money, although US territory is not threatened. The best chance for the world to avoid a global conflict is for Trump to be elected. He has both proven and stated that he will stop the war, especially in Ukraine. Harris will not change the direction of Biden and the neocons, which means a much higher risk of global conflict.

    COLLAPSE OF GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM

    As outlined above, this collapse is inevitable. The only question is when and to what extent. I strongly believe that most of the BRICS countries will suffer less from the collapse and emerge from it much faster. 

    The West, with its massive debt bubble and moral decadence, has already started a major secular decline that could last for centuries.

    WEALTH PRESERVATION 

    Gold is not the panacea for the problems outlined above. However, history proves that in any period of crisis, gold has always stood as a protector, both financially and for personal safety.

    But what is more important than anything else is protecting and helping family and friends. 

    Strong family ties and a group of close friends are more important than all gold in the world. 

    As Dickens said:

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 14:25

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