⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

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Since President Trump is accepting Tuesday’s results, I’ll cap off my series Astonishing Election Miracles and then move on, having done our part for the ongoing analysis. But I will keep you posted if and when any real election news appears. To wrap things up for now, here are a few final examples that I dredged up from Tuesday’s election swamp.

🎉 Charles Glover (D), Charleston County Council District 8, SC. A true election miracle! Charles’ financial disclosures showed he spent zero dollars ($0). He did almost no campaigning, and his campaign platform consisted only of saying that he’d work out his policies once he’s in office. Charles beat the incumbent Republican council chairman 11,837 to 11,358. Ouch. Good luck, Charlestonians!

🎉 LaKesha Womack (D), NC-14 (U.S. House). Axios called the outcome a “stunning upset.” Like many of the others, LaKesha has never held office. She only raised about $56K against Tim Moore’s $1.9M. This is even more shocking since, according to Axios, Tim Moore is “one of North Carolina’s most prominent Republicans and its longest-serving House Speaker.” For her part, LaKesha is one of North Carolina’s most prominent unknowns. Oh! I almost forgot: She is also currently fighting a pending felony charge (over an ‘unreturned’ rental car), with her next court date coming up on November 10th.

Once again, this race is hard to explain. “Few considered District 14, covering six western counties, including part of Mecklenburg, as a potential flip,” Axios marveled. No kidding! Having never held office, she was outspent 35 to 1, ran against a popular, experienced Republican incumbent, and still won 147,388 to 140,973 in a Trump +15 district that Moore had handily won two years ago by 65,000 votes.

🎉 Victoria Broderick (D), TN-4 (U.S. House). She’d never been elected to any office. But Victoria just became Tennessee’s first gay Congresswoman in history. Victoria is a tech-support worker and openly queer progressive who raised less than $100K and still beat eight-term Scott DesJarlais 95,585 to 95,305. It was a repeat: They ran against each other two years ago, when DesJarlais trounced her by 43 percent. She was such a longshot that the Democratic Congressional Committee completely ignored her. “I’m not angry that I didn’t get support,” Broderick said, “because I got to just pull off a complete upset. Nobody expected it.” That’s putting it mildly. WPLN’s headline:

🎉 Leticia Gutierrez (D), TX-9 (U.S. House). An “environmental advocate,” Leticia is another first-timer, elected to the U.S. Congress with only about $150K— against Trump-endorsed Alex Mealer’s $2M-plus, in one of Texas’s newly gerrymandered seats, drawn to win at nearly Trump +20, in the Houston “oil and gas” region. Leticia won easily, it wasn’t even close: 98,079 to 72,340.

To be clear: weird stuff happens every cycle. You can find the odd story about a recently deceased candidate winning here or there. But a whole series of these types of wins —all going the same way— seems pretty unlikely if conventional election theory means anything. Oh well. First time for everything. Never say never again. Miracles never cease. Et cetera.

Don’t expect to read about these kinds of anomalous results in corporate media, since they don’t advance the media narrative; they only increase election hesitation; and trying to explain them gives the Grey Lady the ick.

Meanwhile, life goes on. So our only rational choice is to burn down some Prius dealerships, light police cars on fire, have a massive looting spree, and occupy state capitals with bullhorn brigades. Of course, since many of us have jobs, productive hobbies, and social engagements, we’ll have to work the protests around everyone’s schedule. Stand by. I’ll get back to you.

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Call me a “last word junkie” if you want, but I have one more point to add about the elections, and the New York Times helpfully teed it up this morning. Its headline asked, “Southern Democrats Now Have a Chance to Lead. What Will They Do With It?” The subheadline added, “Sweeping midterm successes have given the party an opportunity, and a test, to lay out a vision for governing in the South.”

“Democrats,” the Times explained, “will have to navigate differing instincts on whether to build alliances with Republicans or punish them.” You would not be blamed if you wondered where the Times found an instinct to build alliances with Republicans. But I digress. The point: “The opportunity comes with enormous stakes.”

Before you laugh hyena-like at the idea that Democrats would take an opportunity to build alliances, just wait. This is a bigger story than even the Times framed. There’s a narrow path open to Democrats just now; a generational chance. It will be their greatest trial. And they know it, which is why the Times called it “an opportunity and a test.”

See if you can detect a theme.

David Crowley, Wisconsin’s new governor-elect, told WPR, “As Democrats, this is an opportunity to really prove that we can not just win, but that we can govern.” He added, “we can’t be stupid, or we’re not going to have these majorities in two years.” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, often included in lists of Democrat presidential hopefuls, said, “we’ve got to celebrate today, but we’ve got to govern tomorrow. It’s now on us. So no getting cocky, no getting arrogant.”

True. Don’t get cocky. Nobody likes an arrogant cocky.

In last year’s New York Times bestseller Abundance, progressive darlings Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson made the point that, “Democrats have to show Americans that voting for liberals actually works.” Klein and Thompson noted the growing list of recent big-blue government failures: California’s stillborn high-speed rail project and Biden’s rural broadband and national EV charging networks.

Democrats may lack the ability to build anything. But the party of “saving democracy” can do mandates to beat the band. Of course, mandates are easy. But I’m digressing again.

Though it makes me chuckle and spit up coffee whenever I type the words “moderate Democrats,” we now have them thanks to the rise of the DSA and the socialist wing. And some of them are already fretting. They are terrified by the specter of far-left lunacy, which is right now rising out of the blue foam like a bearded trans woman on a crusted seashell.

🪖 A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed penned by Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) headlined, “Democrats Won—Now Don’t Blow It.” Don’t blow it is not particularly sage, since as advice it applies to basically anyone in any situation, and invites unwanted mental images, but you get the point. “We must resist a third impeachment,” Suozzi warned, “and focus on governing.” There’s that word again.

“Running headlong into impeachment would be politically self-destructive,” Suozzi cautioned. He wrote, “I will oppose any impeachment process based on political anger, revenge or retribution,” and “Americans didn’t vote for another two years of political warfare.”

As a theme, “Don’t blow it” is elongating. Yesterday, NPR’s Firing Line interviewed progressive icon, former Chicago mayor, and Democrat presidential possibility Rahm Emanuel. He warned, “This was a repudiation (of Trumpism), not a vindication (of Democrats).”

“Our brand is bad,” Rahm explained, “because people think we’re too extreme. What we do in 2027 will determine whether we have won.” NPR reported, “His prescription: Deliver results—and fast—or risk squandering a historic opportunity.” There’s that word opportunity again, too. In his own inimitable style and cajun accent, antique Democrat strategist James Carville said, “They tried DEI. The country hated it. Just hated it. It cost us seats.” He warned, “if we bring this bulls--- language back, we’re going to pay for it.”

Other liberals agreed. On Thursday, for example, BabyBoomer.org published an editorial by Bob Gatty headlined, “A Stern Warning to Democrats, My Preferred Party.” Gatty doesn’t want revenge. He wants governance. “Hear the political machinery warming up? Investigations! Hearings! Subpoenas! Impeachment! Retribution! Stop. Please.” (Italics and bold in the original.) “You have two years to prove that government can work,” he warned. “Use them.”

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal ran an Editorial Board op-ed wondering, “Will Democrats Misread Their Victory?” (Probably. Next question.) The Editors offered Dems a suggestion: “If Hakeem Jeffries and likely Senate leader Chuck Schumer want a better path, they could seek compromise with Republicans to benefit the country.” (Breath-holding not suggested.)

“The political danger,” the Editors warned, donning their Captain Obvious cap, “is that Democrats won’t be able to control themselves.” You think? As the Editors immediately pointed out, “They didn’t control themselves in Mr. Trump’s first term, and it cost them politically.” I’d add that Democrats also did not control themselves during Biden’s term, at all, and it cost them even more dearly.

They risk re-encountering the Biden Backlash. Dems face two Choose Your Own Adventure paths. Both offer hope for us.

🪖 The first path is the easiest one for them, their real instinct, which pretty much everyone expects: revenge, in the form of impeachments, investigations, subpoenas, chaos, and general dimwittery. This seems most likely. It will be a difficult two years, but Republicans could then sail into 2028 on the hurricane winds of the restless, frustrated electorate that just blew Democrats’ way, and would be primed to blow back.

The second path is cooperation. Unlikely, but possible. If Democrats seize the opportunity, they can work with President Trump instead of against him, patch a fractured nation back together, and finally land the role they’ve been auditioning for: proving they can govern. The President has opened the door. “I can work with them on many things,” Trump said on Wednesday, “many more things than people understand.”

Voters expect lower gas prices. Trump has no reason to prioritize gas prices now, absent Democrats working with him. (Iran: take note.)

Either path, revenge or cooperation, whichever the Democrats choose, offers hope for the GOP, which will enjoy two years in political purgatory, which will sharpen its consideration of what might’ve been different had Congress been more productive when it had the chance.

Currently, they are leaning toward chaos. Democrats on the Hill were easily provoked into fury yesterday when President Trump hired Stephen Miller as his new Chief of Staff. Which brings us to our first breaking story.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday’s biggest news, which many of you have already heard, was headlined atop the New York Times’ website like this: “In Elevating Stephen Miller, Trump Doubles Down on Hard-Line Agenda.” It only took four days to whipsaw from euphoric triumphalism back to complaining about President Trump.

Trump’s promotion of MAGA favorite Stephen Miller to chief of staff produced the predictable corporate media diagnosis: he isn’t surrendering enough. Miller replaced Susie Wiles, who stepped down after Tuesday’s shellacking and a breast cancer diagnosis earlier this year. President Trump called Miller an “MVP every year.”

Cue instantaneous Democrat disgruntlement. “Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) fumed. “Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.” The Times wrote, “instead of ceding to the clear evidence of voter displeasure, Mr. Trump pivoted to a familiar move: more MAGA.”

The Times seemed to think the right response to losing Congress was hiring a grief counselor instead of a popular fighter.

“Mr. Miller has been the driver of the president’s most muscular actions,” the Times explained, “including the use of increasingly hostile tactics to capture immigrants across the country and the bombing of small boats in the Caribbean Sea.”

The Times warned its readers that Miller “knows how the levers of government function.” His “top priority,” the Times said, “is rebuilding the fractured MAGA coalition and pursuing policies that will energize the voters who elected Mr. Trump in 2024.” Let’s hope the Times is right for a change. Its angst is our encouragement.

🔥 But the most encouraging reaction to the news came neither from Chuck Schumer nor the greasy pages of the New York Times. It came from HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy, who in a few short words managed to both signal who’s actually been stymying him and simultaneously invoke the ghost of 2020’s stolen election.

Kennedy tweeted, “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken.”

That was a somewhat different personnel assessment than the Times provided. There is only one way to read this. Kennedy indirectly blamed former Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for holding back the MAHA agenda, as many folks have long suspected.

For medical-freedom readers, this is not a minor footnote. Miller’s America First Legal joined the MAHA coalition that took Biden’s private-employer vaccine mandate to the Supreme Court and separately challenged the federal-worker mandate. Back in January 2022, Miller said, “America First Legal is proud to stand in the breach fighting unconstitutional medical mandates that violate the fundamental rights of our people.” So.

In other words, Miller’s and Kennedy’s bonds predate the fashionable discovery that a majority of Americans dislike being medically bossed around. They share goals and objectives. (The ones we like the most.)

Thus, Kennedy’s strongest White House ally, by Kennedy’s own account, is moving into the office that runs the whole machinery. It doesn’t guarantee any particular reform. But there is a massive difference when we have a sympathetic Cabinet secretary and a sympathetic chief of staff deciding which problems reach the President’s desk.

The other clue is that the staffing change wasn’t a hasty improvisation after Tuesday’s electoral root canal. Reuters reported before the election that Miller, Russ Vought, and White House lawyers had spent months identifying actions Trump can take without any help from a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Here’s my read: Miller’s hiring means Trump is preparing to negotiate with Democrats— with leverage.

That makes Miller’s promotion less contradictory to Trump’s offers of cooperation than Chuck Schumer assumed. On Friday, discussing working with Democrats on immigration, taxes, and economic development, Trump said, “I’m very much open to it.” Before the election, he put the expected sequence more plainly: “I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto. And then at some point, we’ll probably make deals.”

The invitation is open. There is no surrender option. (Sorry, Times.) Trump intends to negotiate from strength with a muscular MAHA lawyer.

Democrats must now choose their next adventure: cooperate on legislation and share the credit, or turn the next two years into a streaming subpoena subscription service. Miller’s appointment signaled that the White House intends to keep moving under either scenario, subject of course to the statutes and the courts, an orchestra that lawyer Miller has so far played masterfully.

And for the medical-freedom coalition, Kennedy just supplied the buried lede. He’s ready to move, Kraken-style. Unleash it already.

Have a wonderful weekend! Monday’s post may run late, since we’re getting back on a morning plane to return to Florida HQ. But hang in there. More essential news and caffeinated commentary is out for delivery.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

We begin with a warning: a great trial will soon begin. As the details from Tuesday’s Great Shellacking continue bubbling up through the peaty swamp, folks are understandably (and correctly) asking questions and —also understandably— wondering about election fraud. Not quite obsession, it is burning white-hot— almost like “election integrity” has been a daily mantra since 2020 or something.

You can be sure that the enemies of civilization have noticed. So we all must review the first play in the post-social-media election psyop playbook: the rumor mill. It’s a simple and effective strategy. They spread over-the-top conspiracy claims that are easy to defeat. This is called black propaganda, or an information-side agent provocateur. Soviet spymasters, who coined the colorful term ‘kompromat,’ called this strategy provocatsiya.

The Brits call it deadcatting. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson described it in the Telegraph in 2013: when the facts are against you, “your best bet” is “throwing a dead cat on the table,” because then “they will be talking about the dead cat… and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

In a nutshell: throw the dead cat, wait for the screaming, then marshal three experts to explain that the cat wasn’t dead; he was just sleeping. It wasn’t even a cat! It was just a throw pillow. And, how dare you.

Here’s how it works in 2026’s digital world. Remember the Times published two exposé stories this year, one about “armies of small social media influencers” and another about how big-name influencers can easily be paid for organic-looking posts. Campaigns are available for same-day launch right on websites.

When those fake claims are loudly echoing through social media and the time is ripe to spring the trap, the New York Times runs a “fact check” article— but only on the kooky claims. Media calls this “nutpicking.” Corporate media painstakingly debunks the noise— only the most extreme claims, which it paints as patently ridiculous, all while studiously ignoring the real problems.

The only way to defeat this gambit is painful and requires patience: hold your fire.

Let me show you, via a little fable I just made up.

🪖 Say a disgruntled ex-employee accuses LeBron James High School Principal Quinitious Rogers, 53, of faking student SAT scores, through a complicated scheme of timing reporting across different cycles, shifting reporting categories, and in some cases, shaving points from high-scoring students and adding them to low-scoring minority students, which helps DEI goals and gets the school more federal funding. (Yesterday, an Arkansas story rhymed with this hypothetical.)

Rumors begin swirling. So Principal Rogers consults a Democrat “secret ballot maneuver specialist.” They concoct a plan.

Soon, more rumors begin to circulate. One claims Principal Rogers embezzled hundreds of thousands from the school’s widows and orphans funds. Another claims a torrid, years-long affair with his secretary, and secret first-class trips to Cancún, Mexico, where the pair engaged in obscene acts with a Lucha Libre micro-wrestling team called the Dos Rios.

Furious ‘parents’ begin to show up at school board meetings demanding Principal Rogers be promptly fired. Many weren’t even parents in the school district, which one guy pointed out on Facebook but was promptly ignored. Things go as you’d expect as the pressure on Rogers to resign increased.

Then, two weeks later, Rogers holds a dramatic press conference. He tearfully explains how the rumors are destroying his career, marriage, and his Hollywood acting aspirations. He says he tried to ignore all the horrible slander at first, but now he feels he has no choice but to respond. Then he turns the podium over to two CPAs from an independent accounting firm.

They report a full investigation. The accountants push their glasses up on their noses, clear their throats, and solemnly explain that the “widows and orphans fund” is just a small savings account that has never held more than $736 at the most. Never anything close to hundreds of thousands. And it has only ever paid for funeral flowers. They found no evidence of embezzlement.

Then, even more dramatically, his secretary Delores takes the stage. Everyone immediately notices she is 83. Delores, sobbing into her handkerchief, says the rumors got her kicked out of the ladies’ book club. She says she hasn’t been with a man since before the war. (The Civil War.) She doesn’t even know what Lucha Libre is, and has never even met a micro-wrestler.

Finally, they bring in a box, and a short but colorfully masked Mexican wrestler steps up. In broken English, he explains the team is not called “Dos Rios,” it’s “Dios Rios” —rivers of god— and the team is a group of undersized monks who’ve all taken vows of chastity. They only wrestle for charity events supporting disabled youth. They can’t believe they’ve had to come to Manhattan to deal with this, but felt a spiritual duty to affirm the truth— which is that they’ve never even met Principal Rogers until that day.

Then Rogers comes back up. He blows his nose and tells reporters that he hopes that has cleared everything up and the school can move on with the important mission of improving children’s lives through high-quality education. He asks whether there are any final questions. A moment of dramatic silence follows.

Then, suddenly, a voice in the back cries out, “but what about the SAT scores?” The entire room gasps in horror. Like a giant Lazy Susan, they swivel to face the final accuser. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” they demand in unison. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” In a distant echo from the McCarthy hearings, they shake their heads ruefully and say, “Let us not assassinate this lad further. You’ve done enough.”

That afternoon, the local papers run stories about moral panics and conspiracy theories and how parents can’t be trusted with their children’s education, and thank goodness for selfless, upright, and upstanding bureaucrats like Principal Rogers, whose livelihood was nearly destroyed by social media misinformation.

The SAT scores are long forgotten. It will be years before anybody is brave enough to question Principal Rogers’ veracity. Even though, all along, it was Rogers who quietly paid social media influencers to spread the noisy rumors about embezzling orphans’ money and orgies with short wrestlers.

See how it works? Dead cats. Provocatsiya.

🪖 We can see the same fake vultures already circling the “election fraud” issue. It’s happening right on schedule. Wild claims are fluttering around social media like flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. It’s not that the viral claims are true or false. The only thing we know to be true is that it is too soon to be sure about anything.

Skepticism is healthy and well justified. But let’s not make the rumor gambit easy for them. I’m not saying we must wait for a court to decide; we are still waiting for a decision on 2020. But three days after an election is not nearly sufficient to crawl out on any branches, not while Times reporters are standing right below, holding saws.

Be patient. Hold fire. There’s no hurry. Let’s see what happens.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Welcome to the third installment in our “things that make you go hmm” series. Yesterday, The Associated Press reported, “Iowa Democrat wins state House race despite suspending campaign in September.” Prepare for another electoral miracle.

Yesterday we learned about Ericka in Fort Worth, the unqualified felon who dropped out, was outspent 75-to-1, and still won twice. Today the blue wave washed up her Iowa cousin. His name is Eric Armstrong. Eric, Ericka. You can’t make it up.

Eric Armstrong won an open Iowa House seat in Council Bluffs and Carter Lake —just across the river from Omaha— by a comfortable 865 votes. Eric got 4,602; his Republican opponent, Keith Jones, got 3,737. That’s about 55% to 45%. It wasn’t a photo finish or a fluke.

House District 20 is not some deep-blue campus ward. In 2024, Trump carried it 6,226 to 5,270, or 53 percent to 45 percent. Democrats had held the seat on a shoestring: Josh Turek first won it in 2022 by only six votes (he survived a GOP targeting operation in 2024). This year Turek left the seat open because he was busy flipping Joni Ernst’s U.S. Senate seat, beating Ashley Hinson statewide. The Iowa GOP smelled a pickup. They kept spending after Eric quit.

Two months ago on September 7th, Eric posted on Facebook, “Because I must prioritize my health and recovery at this time, I am stepping down from my campaign, effective immediately.” Republicans still lost. In a Trump district. To a Democrat with no prior experience who had dropped out and stopped campaigning months ago.

🔥 Eric, a retired railroad executive and another first-time candidate, announced on September 7th that he was done. “Running a successful campaign requires immense physical and mental energy,” he wrote on Facebook. “Recently, I have been facing some personal health issues that require my full attention and immediate care.” The district, he said, “deserves a representative who can give 100 percent of their energy to this race.” Right now, he added, “I must focus on healing so that I can continue to serve our community in other ways in the future.”

He’s never said what the illness was.

Iowa’s deadline to pull a primary nominee off the general-election ballot was August 14th. Eric quit three weeks late, so his name stayed on. The Republican, Jones, a Pottawattamie County supervisor and former police lieutenant, didn’t take anything for granted. He kept campaigning. The Republican Party of Iowa kept writing checks. Eric had raised about $41,000. Jones only raised about $12,000 in cash, but the state GOP poured in roughly $126,000 more in advertised in-kind support —TV, digital, mail— much of it in mid-to-late October, after Eric withdrew on Facebook.

The GOP outspent a first-timer dropout by at least three to one in a district Trump carried. And still lost.

It doesn’t prove anything. But you have to admit it’s weird.

🔥 On Thursday, after winning in what can only be described as another electoral miracle, Eric posted that he was “proud to announce that we won Iowa House District 20.” Proud? How about surprised, shocked, or gobsmacked? He thanked supporters for “listening at more than 17,000 doorsteps” and promised that “the voters of District 20 sent a clear message about the direction they want for Iowa, and I will make sure that message is carried to the Capitol in January.”

Eric told the New York Times, “I’m going to do my best to represent” the district. He’ll do his best! He’s not promising anything: “But I still have health issues. That’s what I’m struggling with.” Be sympathetic. “It” is a struggle. “It” is health issues. “Issues” are usually gross things that come out of oneself and are best left undescribed in polite company.

So: in September, according to Eric himself, the district deserved someone who could give 100 percent, and he would serve in other ways. But in November, he won anyway, fondly reminisced about 17,000 doors, and promised to see them in Des Moines in January. He did not say he was feeling better.

The loser, Jones, isn’t happy, and I don’t blame him. Showing admirable restraint, he told Fox News, “I think we deserve to know more,” and asked whether Eric had “lied about being sick to cover a damaging personal story.” It’s a fair question. Who should we believe? September Eric or November Eric?

The district numbers are also weird. Not quite as inexplicably strange as Ericka’s were, since Iowa HD-20 is less lopsidedly red than Ericka’s Fort Worth district. But it still makes little sense.

🔥 On Tuesday, Eric ran a little behind Harris-2024 (668 fewer votes). But compared to 2022’s midterms, Tuesday was a blowout. Eric just got 1,200 more Democrat votes in this small county than Turek did in 2022— and Turek hadn’t dropped out. He was actually running. Meanwhile, compared to 2024, about 2,500 Trump voters simply vanished like the crew of the Marie Celeste. Where did they go? The Bermuda Triangle?

2,500 registered Republicans are not a lot of voters. Somebody should get out there and ask them. We badly need a wellness check on Iowa HD-20.

Like Texas Ericka, Iowa Eric’s successful campaign strategy was quitting. Calling himself unable to perform the office made zero difference. There’s no evidence his confession of an inability to serve affected Democrat turnout at all. Being outspent three-to-one and not-campaigning didn’t move the needle at all.

I can believe that some Democrats are so low-information that they didn’t even know Eric dropped out. Maybe even many of them. But all of them? Every one? Are all Democrats mindless robots? They all vote on autopilot? Vote blue no matter who— even if they are out of the race? Does that pass your smell test?

After Biden’s basement, Talarico’s three-week flu holiday, yesterday’s convicted felon in Fort Worth with no website, and now this, somebody needs to explain to me why any Democrat candidate should ever campaign or spend any money. Why text anyone? Why pay for mailers? Why buy social media influencers?

If these numbers are right, it means blue voters don’t care who’s running their own county. None of them check whether the candidate is available to take the office. They only care about the letter beside the name. Even if they are convicted felons who can’t serve or drop out with sketchy claims of unnamed illnesses.

It’s possible. But it would be a miracle. The third one in our series. The dead cats are piling up.

🔥 Still— hold your fire. There are a lot of people digging into the results. The Trump Administration has been uncharacteristically quiet. Silence isn’t proof, but it can be a signal. Trump has spoken, but his comments about the elections have been brief and uncontroversial. Apart from one quip about Decoy Dan in Alaska, where Peltola currently leads the real Dan Sullivan by about 640 votes, he hasn’t deployed the word “fraud.” It’s a complete contrast to 2020. The UK Independent’s headline said Trump was rambling:

Wednesday’s published schedule listed no public events, just executive time and closed-door meetings. Then the press pool was hastily called to the unfinished White House ballroom, where the President chatted about construction for more than 15 minutes, signed a steel beam (writing “Love!” above his name), and never mentioned Tuesday’s losses until asked.

Governor DeSantis called the night “the political equivalent of a meteor strike,” and “as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.” But Trump told reporters, “This is the safest place in Washington. It’s good for me. It’s relaxing.” He added, “Our country is more successful now than at any time in its history — watch that beam go up.” His first morning-after Truth Social post was days-old glowing New York Post coverage of the “Donroe Doctrine,” not an election postmortem.

Yesterday morning, the press pool was closed again. Around 4 p.m. he brought the pool into the Oval —a Veto hat carefully staged on a stack of White House history books— and signed a proclamation declaring the Oval Office, the Outer Oval, and the Cabinet Room to be the “Oval Office National Monument.” Today’s schedule matches the pattern: a closed-press morning (executive time, a pre-tape interview, policy meetings, a Diwali celebration), then remarks around 6:00 p.m. during NASA’s MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center, then on to Palm Beach for the weekend.

All quiet on the Western Front.

Compared to the frantic flurry of lawfare leading up to Tuesday, the DOJ also seems to have stood down. Remember— it had 1,000 election monitors deployed across the US in all 50 states. What happened? The only new lawsuit it’s filed since Tuesday was a DEI lawsuit against Penn State for giving non-citizens in-state tuition. Unspoken is the vast apparatus of the federal government and its election integrity machinery.

Trump could be dazed and confused, like the media’s narrative. If so, that would be the first time. But he is giving the media nothing to work with in terms of soundbites. He’s been humble and distracted. That’s new and different. Corporate media expected a Trump blowout of threats and stolen election quotes. They must be chewing the carpets.

It could be nothing. But it feels like dramatic tension. All we can do for now is stay tuned. And don’t pet that kitty.

Have a fantastic Friday! Tomorrow we will get back to some non-election essential news and caffeinated commentary, including the new peer-reviewed study finding Pfizer jab deaths beating Moderna. See you then.

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By the way, I’m en route to the lovely city of Chattanooga, where I’m attending the Brownstone Institute’s sixth annual conference, “The Challenge Ahead.” For two days, a crowd of doctors, scientists, journalists, and assorted heretics of various sizes and descriptions will compare notes on how to unwind the capture of our institutions, preferably before the next “two weeks to flatten the curve” arrives.

On Saturday morning I’m speaking on the Law and Legal Issues panel with Bobbie Anne Cox, the New York attorney who beat Governor Hochul’s quarantine-camp rule. The inimitable Jeffrey Tucker will be moderating. Other speakers include Robert Malone, Aaron Kheriaty, Bret Weinstein, Joel Salatin and Walter Kirn, so the hallway conversations alone should be worth the trip. I’ll report back on whatever I can repeat in polite company. The blog keeps running; delivery schedules may vary.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, in the wake of their tsunami of midterm victories, Democrats continued vibrating in excitement like struck tuning forks, and corporate media kept dishing up servings. The Times topped its triumphant web page with a photo-packed, multimedia-rich, magazine-style super-article dramatically headlined, “‘I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse.” The subheadline teased, “How an unpopular president and an unpopular war provided an opening for Democrats to make sweeping gains in the midterms.” It’s all perfect nonsense, of course, but man up— it’s going to be like this for a while.

I considered listing the slew of triumphalist headlines festooning the Times’ home page today. They are so over-the-top it’s hilarious. They heaped praise on clever Democrat strategists and mocked Republicans as fumbling incompetents. According to corporate media, the nation has just experienced the most consequential political earthquake in world history, at least since Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman Senate.

I’m only slightly exaggerating. The word “Watergate” appears so often in the various NYT stories that we should make it into a drinking game.

Since there was nothing new or interesting in any of these stories, I won’t bore you with a full recap. Observing social media yesterday, I was encouraged by how many conservative influencers avoided circular firing squads and offered optimism; or, if not exactly optimism, less pessimistic takes. Florida’s Governor DeSantis in particular had a lot to say, and I’ll point out his most insightful comments in a moment.

So, let’s set up the next story with the unintentional heart of the Times’s overlong article. For the first time, so far as I know, the Grey Lady admitted what we’ve noticed since last year: the Democrats’ strategy boiled down to two things: running white guys who can act straight, wear flannel, and fake their blue-collar bona fides. Then those guys stuck like glue to gas prices, a poorly disguised style of socialism-lite wearing a Carhartt jacket. Here’s how the Times described it:

Not that long ago, saying minority candidates might be “immediately off-putting” would have gotten Mike Smith thrown off the Times’ executive floor balcony. Now, apparently, it’s just politics. (Minorities: take note.) Anyway, that’s what the Democrats did; they ditched the blacks, women, and gays and marched out “affordability” like it was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

That’s part of the narrative, and it’s not far from the truth, to the extent that was the blue strategy. The other part is the whole “rebuke” thing, that voters “punished an unpopular president and war.”

But is that really what energized Democrat voters and depressed Republican turnout? Testosterone, flannel, and Iran?

🔥🔥🔥

Will I keep this up as a daily feature? Who knows. But for now, I’m still finding examples. Yesterday we saw a gender-bending political novice who somehow beat the Republican incumbent for a state house seat in Alabama. It was a metaphor for the national election results. Today delivers another colorful red district upset: Ericka Lomick. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “This Democrat won Fort Worth House seat after dropping out. Can she take office?” Wait till you hear this story.

Defying the Times’ template, yesterday’s trans state rep could hardly be “perceived as moderate,” especially in Huntsville. He was no Tejano smokejumper. As for his testosterone levels, well, he is probably taking blockers. Ericka Lomack is not quite as shocking, not right off, but she still breaks the Times’ “success formula.”

It only gets weirder from here. A lot weirder.

Her demographics are not the story. Ericka won a state house seat in a safe red Texas district by a narrow but conclusive margin of 810 votes. The number of votes was one of the first things that seemed off. Ericka got 38,972; her Republican opponent, Alan Blaylock, got 38,162. It wasn’t an accident. She won twice on Tuesday, since, due to a weird overlap of two different terms, the same seat appeared twice on the ballot in two different races.

Ericka won two times on the same ballot. So it wasn’t a fluke.

With me so far? Now consider this: Ericka’s district is all red. It went for Trump +19 in 2024. Tuesday’s numbers are wildly inconsistent with that.

Two years ago, 53,728 Fort Worth Republicans voted for Trump, and 36,253 Democrats voted for Kamala Harris. In other words, Ericka got 2,719 more votes than Kamala Harris did two years ago. At the same time, some 15,500 Texas Republicans disappeared or sat home. When you hear the rest of Ericka’s story, you’ll understand why I cannot believe a single Republican crossed over and protest-voted for her.

You won’t believe it either. Let us count the ways.

🔥 Like Alison, yesterday’s gender-twisted example, Ericka, a UT law student (she says) who works at Walmart’s operations center, was a first-time candidate with no prior political experience. She also lacked connections because she’d only moved to Texas less than four years ago. Her opponent, Alan Blaylock, was a Fort Worth City Commissioner and a born-and-bred Texan.

According to campaign disclosures, Ericka raised less than $8,000 for the entire campaign, which also proves she had no party support. She had no organizational support. It sounds like she didn’t even really campaign. Meanwhile, Blaylock raised six hundred thousand ($600,650). He outspent her 75 to 1.

Money isn’t everything. But come on. Sometimes money is a proxy for other factors, like how much popular support a candidate does or doesn’t have, or it says something about their political skills.

Now let’s peek at the really weird part.

🔥 When Ericka won this week, her campaign website was down, and it has probably been down since the beginning of September— because she probably took it down, and fast. She probably took it down because someone found some North Carolina federal court records showing that she pleaded guilty in 2011 to mortgage fraud, bank fraud, and money-laundering conspiracy. She got 63 months in prison.

In Texas, convicted felons cannot hold office.

The candidate form even has a box requiring candidates to check off whether they’d ever been convicted. Ericka checked “no.” (Which itself created a new crime.) In late September, after being confronted with her 2011 fraud and money-laundering conviction and five-year prison sentence, Ericka suspended her campaign and dropped out— before early voting began. Headline from the Texas Scorecard:

Ericka can’t legally hold office. She was always a non-viable candidate. It was obvious and it was public. But since in September’s final week it was too late to change the ballots, Ericka’s name stayed on both races. And on Tuesday, despite being a convicted felon, despite suspending her campaign, despite having been outspent 75 to 1, despite her lack of political experience or any roots in Texas, Ericka still got more votes than Kamala Harris got, in a +19 Trump district.

Somebody explain to me how this could have happened. Her campaign strategy was to quit. It was the most effective Democrat platform since Biden’s basement or Talarico’s three-week flu holiday.

Take any of the hot-take theories you like. But if you want to argue that thousands of disgruntled Republicans in Fort Worth were so mad about the Iran War they’d protest vote for a convicted felon with a suspended campaign, then where are they? Folks that angry should stick out like a thumb so sore it was trying to self-amputate.

It’s weird! It’s another twisted example of yesterday’s distorted results. According to the reported numbers, Republican turnout was undoubtedly weak, about 30% under 2024 levels. But in their defense, that’s not a weird drop-off for a midterm election compared to presidential numbers.

The Democrat turnout over 2024 numbers is what’s hard to explain. I can believe some sore Republicans stayed home. I can’t believe they went to the polls and voted for this.

This is our second metaphor for Tuesday’s blue wave.

I’m not the only one asking questions. Also in Texas, Democrats somehow managed to increase their turnout from 2022’s midterms by nearly 2 million votes:

The unknown Democrat Gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, who has never held a statewide office, slaughtered Greg Abbott, who has held the Texas governor’s mansion through thick and thin. Until now. Though Republicans turned out in numbers above 2022 (and only slightly below 2018 midterm turnout), Democrats somehow surged +1.68 million votes —more than any gubernatorial candidate of any party in modern history— even more than 2022’s nationally-known Beto O’Rourke.

Abbott outspent Gina 8 to 1— $281M to her roughly $37M. Even Polymarket predicted an Abbott win (64%). The shocking last-minute surge came from nowhere. No reports of Democrats blowing out polling places. Early voting and mail-in ballots only showed a tie: 30% to 30%. Democrats were ahead in early voting by only 26,000 votes. Again— it’s weird. Some folks are scratching their heads. For example:

To be clear: I am certainly not claiming fraud. It is far too early for that. Texas GOP voters were in a minor civil war, with disaffected John Cornyn supporters angry that the Senator was primaried by Ken Paxton. Nationally, the “blue wave” was so ubiquitous it makes a coordinated scheme hard to picture. done. But it’s all strange enough that I hope somebody is taking a look. Just to be sure.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2028 presidential run has unofficially begun. It appears he was just waiting for the midterms to finish before blowing up social media. Yesterday, Florida Politics reported, “Ron DeSantis says Amendment 3 saved Florida from the blue wave.”

“It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States — blue states, red states, everything in between — and the one state that was able to hold the line and withstand that is right here in the free state of Florida,” DeSantis told reporters in Tallahassee.

Yesterday, the nation’s best governor explained how Florida managed to hold the line. He said that, after anticipating a blue wave, he successfully helped get the homestead property tax bill on Florida’s ballot— to encourage turnout. (It worked. The amendment passed the 60% threshold, and the ‘controversy’ filled the papers for months leading to the election as local governments encouraged residents to vote against the bill.

“Had Amendment 3 not been on the ballot, I don’t know that we turn out the voters that we ended up turning out. People wanted to vote ‘yes’ on that, and then many of them ended up voting Republican later on down the ballot,” DeSantis said.

It was bigger than that. It broke the blue wave. He rope-a-doped them. DeSantis turned every city hall that campaigned against Amendment 3 into a free GOTV operation. Brilliant.

As I have, Governor DeSantis also noticed the record-smashing Democrat turnout. “Democrats had their best turnout they’ve ever had in the modern history of Florida,” he said, “with 68% turnout of their registered voters.” It was literally unprecedented. “They’ve never gotten that high in a Midterm,” DeSantis explained. “They’ve never beaten us in turnout as a percentage in a Midterm.”

Weird, huh? There’s some kind of electoral Twilight Zone movie being scripted. But is it going anywhere?

“The only thing that saved us is we just have so many more Republicans than they do.” Of course, Florida’s advantage came from three things: DeSantis and his policies, new election integrity laws including a Florida SAVE Act, and President Joe Biden, for accidentally creating the Great Pandemic Migration. (One wonders what Biden’s Uncle Bosey would have thought, had he not become a cannibal’s breakfast.)

DeSantis, a lame-duck governor with less than two months left in his final term, is still working. “His priorities,” FlaPol said, “are setting a schedule for further homestead expansion and limiting local governments from doing an end run around the amendment.” Not only that. “A taxpayers’ bill of rights also could be on the table, he said, as well as a ‘pool of funding’ for ‘core needs’ of local governments, including rural ones.”

🔥 Yesterday, in related news, Florida’s Tallahassee-Democrat reported, “Muslim group shutting down in Florida amid ‘terror’ designation.” Buh bye!

“The Florida chapter of the country’s largest Muslim advocacy group will be shutting down indefinitely,” the paper reported, “after state officials stamped foreign and domestic terror labels on the group under a law approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year.”

Among other things, CAIR —the Council on American-Islamic Relations— was once named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in America’s largest Hamas-linked terror-financing case.

There are two lawsuits. In the first, Judge Mark Walker (Obama appointee) blocked DeSantis’s executive order in March. The state appealed, and Walker later recused himself after Florida accused him of bias. In the second, Chief Judge Allen Winsor (Trump appointee) declined to block the new law before it took effect. So as of today, CAIR is officially a terrorist organization in Florida, which puts the group somewhere between ISIS, the Taliban, and a surprise nest of silverfish.

The move —a combo of an executive order, agency action, and a law passed through Florida’s legislature— restricted over 90 groups besides CAIR, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa groups. (Governor Abbott also designated CAIR a foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organization under Texas law.)

Attorney General James Uthmeier explained the effect: “Supporting these groups is a felony. Your tax dollars will not fund them. No contracts, no foothold on our campuses. Students who promote them are expelled.”

Florida also passed a law prohibiting Sharia law from being used as an authority in any Florida court. In the Sunshine State, radical Muslims are being twisted around an axle.

Given how concerned voters are about the Muslim takeover in places like Texas and Michigan, DeSantis is leading another high-visibility 2028 issue.

The Governor, who ran against Trump in the primary, has famously feuded with Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and is banned from the inner circle, is thus unencumbered by any Trump connection, and won’t be in the limelight of the Democrats’ wild-eyed investigations for the next two years, so he can run on his strong Florida record as an outsider. He is also unencumbered by public employment, with two full years to run for president.

Let me know what you think about a DeSantis run in the comments.

Have a terrific Thursday! Apologies for the delay. I’ll be hotel blogging in the morning tomorrow and Saturday, so you can expect something closer to a normal schedule. I’ll see you soon with another roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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I will not try to round this up yet. It’s too soon. I won’t promise anything especially smart, since yesterday I was busy lauding Republican strengths and mocking the polls, which —though in fairness, even the Times was questioning its own polls— is a plate of crow pie that somebody will have to eat.

Daily blogging isn’t easy. You should try it sometime. In November 2020, the morning after President Trump lost, after going to bed secure he’d been re-elected, I did not want to blog. But I knew I had to do it anyway, for lots of reasons. Duty called. There was other important news to discuss. The same is true this morning— but this is nowhere near as awful.

Welp, let’s rip off the band-aid. Here’s one of about a million giddy headlines in the New York Times this morning:

It was bad. Texas now has a Democrat governor and a clown-like “god is nonbinary” Senator. But let’s get one thing straight: this is not the apocalypse.

We're grieving for our dashed hopes. It’s annoying and painful and the Times will be impossible to live with for months. I’d rather have had covid twice. But remember what everyone has been saying all year: since the Civil War, the president’s party has shed House seats in every midterm but three (1934, 1998 and 2002). The pendulum keeps swinging.

“Rebuke” is obviously media’s vocabulary word of the day. It rhymes with “puke.” But something that almost always happens can’t be a “rebuke” to anybody. It would have been a rebuke had Republicans defied the trend.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

To be fair, yesterday the GOP got walloped, shellacked, and beaten like a drum. But let’s begin with the odd bits of good news. Alabama readers, for example, can take pride in a momentous political achievement. (‘Pride’ as in the pride movement.) 1819 News reported, “Dem transgender candidate defeats Republican incumbent in HD25 race, the first in Alabama’s history.”

Alison, born male, is a first-timer. He’s never held an elected office before, not even codes enforcement or animal control. But Alison easily manhandled his Republican incumbent— earning himself a muscular four-year term in the Alabama House of Representatives (base salary $66,659). Four years will allow Huntsville Republicans time to reflect on how this happened in Alabama. (We have a clue! Alison got 12,456 votes; the Republican incumbent got only 10,929. We’ll return to this ‘mathematical’ point soon. Believe me.)

I started today’s roundup with Alison because the handsome new lawmaker is a perfect metaphor for last night’s Great Shellacking. It’s grotesque, cuckoo, inherently deceptive, and gives you acid indigestion and a headache if you think about it for too long.

Reading this morning’s news was like finding out a neighbor who hates you and your RV was just elected as HOA president while you were on vacation. Or hearing that your ex just got their law degree. Or maybe it’s like when the dentist says, “this might take a few visits.” You suddenly have a sinking feeling that you are in for two years of constant irritation and probably some expensive bills. Trans Alison also reminds us that “Woke 1.0” is still right there, sitting on the bench and winking at the children in a disquieting, sinister way.

But mostly, and this is Alison’s important lesson, it seems impossible that any Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for a trans candidate because they were upset about gas prices, the Iran war, or anything else. I simply don’t believe it.

No, what caused last night’s shellacking was shockingly simpler.

🪖 At 3am this morning, in a spasm of creativity, the Washington Post celebrated with a headline almost word-for-word identical to the Times: “Voters punish Trump with historic swing to Democrats.”

WaPo’s article contained everything we need to understand what just happened. It was expressed in a single sentence. As I have urged all year, Republicans needed to do only one thing to beat the “normal” midterm result. They didn’t do it. It’s that simple. Here’s the single line you can copy and paste on social media, if you like.

President Trump reached the same conclusion. Yesterday, he explained to CBS that too many Republicans “stayed back.”

Ta-da! Behold, the magnificent majesty of math. I don’t want to be that guy, but a “collapse in turnout” is the opposite of what the GOP needed to do to prevent this from happening. Avoid the temptation to carelessly assign blame. Republicans did whatever they could think of to get out the vote. They redistricted. They held a midterm convention. They outspent Democrats. The President held daily rallies for the last month. The DOJ pursued illegal votes in every imaginable way— far beyond anything any previous Administration has ever done. No electoral stone was left unturned.

It wasn’t enough to prevent a “collapse” in Republican turnout. We didn’t even match 2022 numbers. So we definitely failed to make it too big to rig.

We expected Democrats to turn out big, since that’s the midterm baseline. Plus, they’ve been exceptionally furious about losing their DEI benefits and pride flags outside federal buildings and SNAP giveaways and learing centers and everything else. We needed to beat that surge of Democrat ire, but too many Republicans stayed home. Consequences naturally follow.

If anyone deserves blame for this, it’s the blackpill brigades, who suppressed turnout and right now are drunk and doing undeserved victory donuts on the front lawn. Congressional Republicans also deserve a share of the blame.

But maybe there’s a pony somewhere in this pile of manure.

🪖 You know what would’ve been a terrific sales pitch? Save Congress because it’s been so important and effective. But this lazy and unproductive GOP Congress gave the base nothing to show up for. If anything, they constantly aggravated us.

The SAVE Act, the simplest idea in politics (prove you’re a citizen before you vote), passed the House not once but twice, then died in a Senate that wouldn’t touch the filibuster to save it. “We don’t have the votes,” shrugged Majority Leader John Thune. What can we do? The rest of the agenda went the same way.

For comparison, by midterm Election Day, Biden’s Congress, also a one-party trifecta and working with a 50-50 Senate, had passed 214 laws. Our flaccid group passed only 121, the second-thinnest record in 40 years, per Pew. (The Wednesday after Trump’s 2020 loss, I noted that Election Day shares initials with Erectile Dysfunction.)

Meanwhile, the House stayed out for nearly eight weeks during last fall’s shutdown, took a five-week August vacation, then canceled two more weeks in September to go campaign.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can’t cry about how the republic is on the line and then take a recess. Voters noticed. They didn’t switch sides or rebuke anybody. They just stayed home. Why save this Congress? I did everything I could to prop them up, but the One Big Beautiful Bill was too long ago and not nearly enough.

Now it’s their last chance. They’ve got less than two lame-duck months to impress us with something. Well? I’m not holding my breath. Let’s see how well the filibuster works now.

So, as we hold our noses and plow into the muck, we find a thin pony leg. A long overdue shakeup of Republican leadership just started, thanks to voters. Wash it off, and we find the first silver lining.

Like people in Huntsville, Republicans now get two painful years to reflect and revise.

🪖 We should not overlook the few bright spots. The Blue Wave washed out at the Georgia border. In sunny Florida, where the largest group of C&C readers is located (just saying), we held the line. Headline from the Daytona Beach News-Journal:

It came too close for comfort. But ultimately, Democrats won no major races in the Sunshine State. Bryon Donalds became the first black governor in Florida history— a Republican. I guess Floridians aren’t white supremacists after all. Ashley Moody fended off DSA-backed Angie Nixon and held her Senate seat. James Uthmeier clung to the State Attorney General job.

Vox called Florida “a bright spot for Republicans.” We Floridians humbly accept the nation’s thanks.

There were two other curious Florida bits worth a mention. First, Democrats won all three newly gerrymandered districts, raising a perplexing question about whether the redistricting juice was worth the political squeeze, given how much that raw bit of politics energized blue voters. And then, a supermajority of voters passed a historic homestead tax-break amendment, meaning a bunch of Democrats defied their party and voted for it along with Republicans.

Thank you, Governor DeSantis.

Similarly, in California, where Xavier Becerra handily won the governorship and a voter ID initiative is losing badly, the so-called “billionaire tax” is failing. And a counter-initiative banning state taxes on assets is passing. We won’t know for two weeks, since the silly Golden State keeps counting late-arriving ballots.

Between Florida and California, we learn that Democrats like tax cuts. Who could’ve predicted that? Make of it what you will, but another little piece of pony might’ve become visible in the feces.

🪖 We’ve already discussed why a Democrat Congress won’t enjoy the same free rein it held during the second two years of Trump 1.0. And we will have plenty of time to analyze it in real time as we repent in leisure. But a couple of thoughts stand out.

Ironically, the new Democrat-led Congress might be more productive than our outgoing one was. In Trump’s second two years during Trump 1.0, the divided Congress under Nancy Pelosi was impeaching Trump but still passed 193 laws, substantially more than Trump 2.0’s Congress did (121). It is time for Trump the dealmaker to take the stage. And he knows it.

“I know a lot of Democrats. I think they’re gonna want to work with me,” he told CBS in a remarkably conciliatory call. “Otherwise I’d just veto everything, and they’re not gonna want that.” On Fox, he told Brett Baier, “They’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them. And after a couple of months of vetoes, they’ll go out, and they’ll say, ‘How do we get this stuff done?’ And we’ll work together.”

Yesterday, incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rule out working with Trump. When asked, he said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” He waffled on impeachment 3.0, saying, “We haven’t ruled anything out… And we haven’t ruled anything in.”

It’s time for the Art of the Deal. Nobody can make deals like President Trump. And decent legislation might not be unimaginable. Trump holds leverage now that he lacked last time. For instance, visualize a bill outlawing weaponized government. We need that law. Democrats might be motivated to deliver it.

Finally, Trump’s agenda has mostly operated independently of Congress. Yesterday, for one terrific example, Greenland’s parliament ratified the new deal that Trump negotiated completely apart from Congress. It’s done.

The next two years will be different from what we’d hoped. But different isn’t automatically worse— it’s just different. We soldier on. We toughen up. Tough soldiers don’t surrender after losing a battle. History is replete with victories following difficult defeats. Take, for example, the greatest victory of all in 30 AD.

Everything happens for a reason. Usually the reason doesn’t become obvious without hindsight. Trump’s 2020 loss is one example; the incredible victories of the last two years would have been impossible without the excruciating excesses under Brainpan Biden. Trump was on the ropes, arrested, under trial, fined, struggling in the primaries, and getting shot at. Now he’s in the White House— because we never gave up. Never surrender.

It’s time to follow Florida’s example and hold the line. Keep digging for the pony. Stay optimistic. Cough up the black pills. Take a social media break. I promise: just as we did during the pandemic years, we’ll work through this together. And our time will come ‘round again. Maybe sooner than you think.

In spite of everything, have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning, for a brand-new dose of optimistic essential news and snarky, caffeinated commentary.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

Somewhere along the line, shrinks and spooks concluded that fear motivates the masses more than desire. It’s been non-stop doom-and-gloom ever since. Except for the pandemic, the American public has not been subject to such intense media manipulation as during this election cycle. All sides have been winding us up emotionally, till social media has reached a fever pitch, a shrill alarm that won’t stop pinging even if we take the batteries out.

But remember: None of this fearmongering is real. It’s all fake, top to bottom, but many of us have still fallen for it. Even Governor DeSantis has been fretting about “skyrocketing” gas prices. Headline from yesterday’s Huffington Post:

This is a psyop, people. It’s a good one. Even super smart conservatives like Ron DeSantis are taking the bait. But the trickery should be so obvious. Come on— gas? Like methane? Like what squeaks out of a teenager after he ate too many nachos? It’s too perfect.

So let’s take some Beano.

The national average price of gas is currently around $4.17 a gallon. Meanwhile, back in June 2022 —approaching Biden’s midterms— the price of gasoline passed $5 a gallon. Then it stayed near $4 a gallon through that election. Yesterday, the Washington Post even described Biden’s 2022 price as “the previous record for an Election Day.”

Yet in 2022, despite the “record high” gas price, corporate media sang the Biden economy’s praises. Four years ago, inflated gas prices —basically the same price as they are now— were unremarkable. Pollsters did not design models around them. Governors did not wring their hands about it. And it wasn’t even like nobody’d thought of it: MAGA was happily pasting “I did that!” stickers to gasoline pumps, while the media studiously ignored the entire controversy.

It’s true that Democrats then lost the House— but only barely, by 9 seats, and they clung on to the Senate (by a single seat). Remember: that was during the pandemic. People were fired up. Biden officials were practically chasing us around CVS parking lots with giant needles and holding eye-bleaching drag shows on the White House lawn on Easter.

The point is, nobody was crying about gas prices four years ago. But today, the same gas price has literally become the Democrats’ strongest election argument. Here’s the ridiculous headline from yesterday’s WaPo story that I mentioned above:

“Recent polls show voters blame Republicans for the elevated costs,” the subheadline blared. Polls! Polls show. Oh, please. Shove those stupid polls up Jeff Bezos’s ample assets. And WaPo’s cover picture —included above— was of a BP station offering gas at $3.85. Moronically, the story’s cover photo showed a price only five cents above Biden’s figure.

This type of psychological manipulation is how the polls and the models have manufactured a blue tsunami, as Axios trumpeted in its overheated headline of just yesterday:

Even that wild-eyed forecast came with caveats. “Expectations for the midterms have soared so high that some Democrats fear disappointment is inevitable,” Axios conceded. “Even the pollsters forecasting a Democratic landslide are haunted by the possibility that they’re still missing Trump voters.” As for the prediction markets, which currently favor Democrats by a lopsided 73% chance to take both chambers, Axios pointed out that they’ve failed before.

Just this summer, in Wisconsin, the markets gave DSA-backed Francesca Hong a stunning 96% chance of winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary the day before the August election. She lost anyway to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who’d dropped out and then got back in. (Polymarket shamefully deleted its post describing Hong as a “near-lock.”) In Brazil, Kalshi gave Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro an 84% chance of beating President Lula last week. Lula won.

So much for the ‘wisdom of the market.’

Sounding just like a C&C column, House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday, “They’re trying to create this idea of a blue wave, and they’re using the poll numbers to do it.” Indeed. The polls cite the markets, which follow the polls, which add them to the models. Round and round it goes.

Don’t buy this ridiculous “gas price” psyop. Not for a minute. It is all psyops, all the way down the stack of turtles.

🪖 Don’t get me wrong. If Republicans hold the House, we’ll enjoy a historic chance to lock in a giant list of conservative wins that we can enjoy for decades instead of just the next few years. It’s like the difference between renting and owning. And if we can keep Congress today, we’ll avoid an immeasurable amount of painful annoyance. It’d be like arranging a fault-finding mother-in-law a better place to stay for the next two years.

So vote! And encourage every other Republican in your orbit to vote, too. We have no time for blackpilled whining today. Secure that stuff, Hudson.

🔥 As I’ve argued several times now, even if the worst-case scenario manifests in all its deplorable inglory, we shall persevere. Rather than reheat my argumentative leftovers, I first offer you yesterday’s terrific column from conservative intellectual Victor Davis Hanson of the Daily Wire, who wrote in American Greatness: “Midterm Election Incoherences, Misadventures, and Paradoxes.”

In 2014, Barack Hussein Obama coined one of history’s most famous (infamous) presidential quotes after a stinging loss earlier in his term. Here is his defiant promise, straight from a CBS headline:

And guess what? He did just that. He signed 276 executive orders in eight years. (Trump has already signed 292 since January 2025. Imagine if Obama had an Autopen.) Democrats lost an eye-watering 63 House seats in 2010, the worst midterm shellacking since World War II, and then lost 54 in 1994— and then got impeached. Both men still won re-election after their House losses.

Nobody is talking about Republicans taking a loss in the 50-60 seat range, though you’d never know it from the overheated rhetoric flowing out of prestige papers like effluent from a broken sewer main. The last three Democrat presidents lost their Houses and nobody’s citing them as comparisons to what might happen to Trump.

🪖 Why not? Probably because it doesn’t help their argument. “In some ways,” VDH explained in his column, “Obama became even more radical—and more emboldened—once he lost Congress.” Remember that line. “He became defiant, acted unilaterally, and committed to the Paris Agreement, the Iran deal, and normalization of relations with Cuba.” He also passed DACA —his appalling immigration package— through a DHS memo.

Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the Grand Staircase–Escalante, 1.7 million acres in Utah, without even asking Congress. “Stroke of the pen,” Paul Begala, a senior Clinton aide, said in summarizing his approach. “Law of the land. Kind of cool.” In 1996, Clinton passed his signature welfare reform bill.

Not only that, but both Clinton and Obama became more popular after they lost their Houses. “Were they done for, for the next two years?”, VDH asked. “No. Bill Clinton had at one point been at a 39% approval rating. He left office over 60%. Obama had been down to 37% at one point. He left office at near 60%.”

Even during Trump 1.0, after Democrats took over the House in 2019, President Trump declared a border emergency that moved about $8 billion toward the wall. The House also passed his trade deal with Mexico and Canada 385 to 41 the day after it impeached him. 234 federal judges were confirmed to lifetime appointments in Trump’s first term, including three Supreme Court justices and 54 circuit judges. Most were confirmed by the Republican Senate after the House flipped.

Absent a global pandemic and the mail-in disaster, Trump would have crushed Basement Joe in a landslide.

🪖 But what do we hear about in the prestige media? Any of this helpful history? No. Just polls and gas prices and Trump rallies. Nor do the nation’s biggest papers report that the Administration is not just sitting around wishcasting. It is planning. Carefully and meticulously. Two days ago, the Spokesman-Review (Reuters) ran this headline:

Since April, Stephen Miller and budget director Russell Vought have been charting planned executive actions on tariffs, visas, housing and spending. “Trump has been briefed on the preparations and has taken part in discussions about them,” an anonymous official said. On Sunday, Trump said, “I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto... And then at some point, we’ll probably make deals.”

In short, very little will change from the first half of his term. “President Trump in the last two years has basically ignored Congress and tried to do as much as possible through executive orders and executive power,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor at Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political think tank. “I think ⁠he will only continue if there are Democratic majorities.”

AFP ran a similar story this morning. Here’s the headline:

“Trump as a lame duck president,” AFP reported, “could be the most vengeful Trump of all.” Peter Loge, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, told AFP, “I’m skeptical that President Trump will go quiet into that good night… Every time Trump has been backed into a corner, he has shouted more and come out fighting.” True.

“If we don’t win, I veto everything,” Trump promised the New York Post. “They’ll probably go after me, and I’ll go after them,” he warned Time. “We have a lot of great things planned for Washington,” he said yesterday in a speech at the Reflecting Pool.

Compare the Trump Team’s careful planning to the Democrats, who are practically already leading with pre-emptive excuses. Yesterday, the Hill reported Democrats in disarray:

Democrats, the Hill reported, have “little consensus over what to prioritize, according to Democratic strategists and aides.” They can’t even agree on whether to go for Impeachment 3.0. Some say yes, some say no. “Senators and leaders in the House are generally opposed to advancing a third impeachment of Trump that has virtually no chance of picking up 67 votes in the Senate — the number of votes needed to convict.”

What then can we expect? Nobody’s sure. The Hill listed a long series of nuisances. Pressing Trump to end the Iran war, delving into withheld Epstein documents, investigating awards to companies related to Trump’s family, his pardons of a Hong Kong crypto financier and a Venezuelan banker, and “a lower-key strategy to hamstring the Trump administration by tying up Cabinet and other senior officials in oversight hearings.”

It sounds like a bunch of Lilliputians scheming about how many places they should stab Gulliver in the ankles. It’s hardly revolutionary.

🪖 Losing the House is not my first choice. Like me, VDH allowed that if Trump does lose the House, things will get sticky. But that was also true for Clinton and Obama, and “it didn’t bother them a bit.”

VDH projects a 70% chance that Republicans will hold the Senate, mostly because to win, Democrats must hold all their seats and flip four Republican ones. I think the chance of holding is higher than that, but there’s no point in sharpening the forecast pencil now, since we’ll soon know for sure. (I think we’ll also hold the House, but that’s harder to argue coherently since there are so many races to handicap.)

“In 2026,” VDH wrote, “the media have lectured us for months that the impending blue wave is the inevitable electoral payback for Trump’s crippling inflation, soaring gas prices, and war abroad—despite the fact that similar conditions did relatively little electoral damage to Democrats in 2022.”

Victor’s point is that Republicans are hardly this year’s Bad News Bears. Even if the Cook Report’s overheated predictions of Democrat gains of +15 House seats come true —which I doubt— that would be less of a loss than either Obama or Clinton suffered. And neither president was stymied.

So this is hardly a “blue wave,” even though that’s all we’d be hearing for the next two years.

🪖 I’ll leave you with this— the part nobody is talking about. Let’s say the House does go blue. President Trump will continue reindustrializing and reviving the country through executive orders, memos, and agency action. The risk, of course, is that Democrats would vacate all his orders in January 2029, as Biden did in January 2021, and they’d probably reopen USAID and tear down the border wall for good measure. But that’s not even close to guaranteed.

They have to win the White House first.

In other words, we’ll get another bite at the political apple. If Marco Rubio, JD Vance, or even Ron DeSantis wins the presidency in 2028, then we get another four or eight years to lock in the Trump revolution. Four or eight more years of final agency rules that went through notice and comment cannot be undone by a pen and a phone.

Even without Congress turning Trump’s executive orders into laws, the next president will get to run a whole new round of rulemaking and defend those rules in court, which takes years to do— and years to unwind. Add more judges confirmed, more contracts, more manufacturing plants, nuclear reactors and data centers, and more jobs on the ground —more stakeholders— and it all becomes very difficult to unravel.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ 2028 prospects will suffer even more from new USPS ballot rules and two more years of election litigation, which the DOJ has now teed up in ways the courts can’t easily dismiss. Their finances will continue struggling, what with ActBlue and SPLC under continuing investigation and the corpse of USAID rotting in its grave. Nor will Trump be on the 2028 ballot to run against, so they will have to come up with something.

Good luck!

With those encouraging words uttered, go vote! Today is the day we’ve been waiting for. Forget about invisible gas. This election depends on nothing more complicated than turnout. Winning is easy; it might cost each of us an hour (or less). If your polling place does have a ‘hiccup,’ wait or ask for a provisional ballot. Call your local GOP and report any ‘irregularities.’ We turned out and beat the polls in 2024, and we can do it again. Voting in even moderately decent numbers will eliminate having to down a nasty jug of two years’ frustration and aggravation. Trust me. Then thank me later.

Tomorrow we’ll take a realistic but optimistic survey of whatever we have wrought and muse about what it means for the next two years. There will be ups and downs. Lawsuits will probably be flying like fur in a blender— but we also expected that in 2024, and the lawsuits weren’t necessary because turnout made them unnecessary. It’s going to be entertaining either way.

Have a terrific Election Day Tuesday! We’ll return tomorrow with another special edition rounding up one of the nation’s most dramatic election seasons— since the last one. Now go vote, and let us all know how it went in the comments.

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🛩️🛩️🛩️

Our timeline couldn’t possibly get any weirder. This wild and tragic crash story has only just entered its dramatic hot takes period, so today we’ll cover the basics while waiting for more reliable information to bubble up from the La Brea Tar Pits of X. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Desperate Mayday as Small Plane Plummets to Ground in Florida, Killing 9.” Nearly a full day later, despite massive media focus, the nine victims remain unidentified. There is probably a good reason, but that was just the first oddity in this bizarre story.

Yesterday —just days after mobile anti-aircraft missile systems were installed all around the Southern Residence— a Learjet 60 dove straight into the ground at top speed next to a trailer park in Palm Beach, Florida. It disappeared into a fiery crater eight miles from Mar-a-Lago.

Consciously or not, Governor DeSantis said what everyone was thinking when he described the scene as, “it looked like a missile going down.” The crash was captured —in full— from only about a block away on someone’s Tesla’s rear-facing camera (promptly triggering claims it was AI/SI created. Welcome to the age of no video is good enough.)

Thankfully, and miraculously, there were no casualties on the ground, even though there seem to have been plenty of folks around.

Obviously, just the crash’s proximity to the Residence was enough to put an anxious public on high alert. But there’s more. Trump was home at the time; he’d just left 50 minutes prior, heading for a Kansas rally. All of that air-defense hardware had just arrived. And the plane had just changed directions to avoid bad weather, which put it on a collision course with the FAA’s no-fly zone around Mar-a-Lago (though there is some debate over whether the NOTAM restriction had ended minutes before the plane would have entered).

On social media, people were busily analyzing the crash video frame-by-frame and questioning everything imaginable. They’ve offered many fascinating theories, but remember: the truth always takes time.

A few facts trickled out. The FAA said nine people had been on board, including two pilots. The tail number was identified and traced to an ambiguous LLC, which several networks described as a charter service. The plane was en route from Austin, Texas to Eleuthera, Bahamas. A gruesome radio call between the terrified female pilot and the ground suggested she’d lost all control and crashed in seconds. (Warning: The audio is one of those things that sears your brain on both sides. Consider not listening if it scrolls across your feed.)

By this morning, unofficial but widespread claims had identified one of the pilots as a winsome young Floridian who was in the news in 2023 for getting her pilot’s license in high school. She was in high school in 2023— so she was an extremely young airwoman. If it was her, her usual co-pilot has been described in unrelated articles as her boyfriend, and some say a male voice can be heard in the background reciting the Lord’s Prayer. None of this is confirmed.

Flying enthusiasts who analyzed the radio intercept first seemed to have widely concluded the crash was caused by ice building up on the wings due to inclement weather. MyRadar reported a thunderstorm top shooting from about 33,000 to 48,300 feet in 25 minutes, right under the jet.

Supporting the “ice” theory, at 35,000 ft, the male pilot can be heard telling Miami Center, “We have light, clear ice that is manageable and moderate turbulence.” He reported an outside temperature of −47°C and asked to climb to 37,000. Moments later he declared a mayday: “overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute.” ABC, citing the FAA, said the jet dropped from 35,250 to 8,750 ft in just over a minute.

The last lines Fox 13 reported were of the female pilot: “We’re gonna crash into the ground!”, “banking 60 degrees!” and a horrifying finale: screaming and then only, “Look outside!”

That’s a ride nobody wants to go on. It is painful to even try imagining what it must have been like. (Don’t try.)

🛩️ But the ice explanation was ultimately unsatisfying. Minus 47°C sounds cold, all right, but at that temperature there’s little liquid water to freeze on the wings, and the male pilot had just called the ice “manageable.” So other experts began pointing to weather ambiguity: storm turbulence, an upset and overspeed, or maybe ice crystals affecting the engines. (This puzzle is not particularly strange; it hasn’t even been a day, so nobody should expect a cause to be determined yet.)

Commenters highlighted other weird, as-yet unresolved facts. Why did the missile-like Learjet crash without bringing down all the nearby power cables clearly visible in the video? In other words, where were its wings? No obvious wreckage is visible in any of the photos. Others pointed out the fact that, since 1992, no Learjet 60 has ever crashed during flight (as opposed to during takeoffs and landings), and never from ice accumulation.

Two groups of theories are boiling in the conspiracy community. The first group suggests the plane was an attack on the President involving hackers and remote control takeovers. The second group thinks that the plane, perhaps trying to avoid bad weather, might have accidentally triggered freshly activated space-based air defenses that zapped its control system before it could reach the air over the Residence. Expect these theories to evolve as more tangible information emerges.

The NTSB will hold its first briefing later today. Until then, the only real answer is the least satisfying one: we don’t know yet. Expect updates tomorrow.

🔥🔥🔥

The Alaska fake-candidate story is warming up. Yesterday, the Alaska Beacon reported, “Federal judge rejects Trump administration attempt to pause Alaska’s US Senate election.” The DOJ appealed two hours later. The subheadline ominously added, “criminal investigations are continuing.” And President Trump posted that Decoy Dan is missing.

This morning, the Associated Press reported that “nobody has seen Dan J. Sullivan for weeks” and “his rustic home stood dark.” Weird! FBI agents are knocking on Alaskan doors and interviewing donors, asking whether they knew which Dan Sullivan they were giving to.

Oddly, most candidates spend their last week begging for airtime. Not only that, but it seems like a candidate plastered all over the international news might want to say something about all this. But Dan J. Sullivan spent his last week before the election AWOL. One thing is for sure: That’s not a legit campaign. Silver alert! If you have seen this man, please alert officials. Answers to “Dan” or “Decoy:”

Naturally, some alert readers speculated that Dan might be cooperating with the feds and is secreted away in witness protection. It’s an intriguing thought, but there’s no evidence. We might, for example, have expected to see an affidavit from him filed in the DOJ’s lawsuit. On the other hand, that could open him up to depositions by the Democrats, and DOJ prosecutors might want to keep him under wraps for now.

The funniest development was that the New York Times felt forced to run an apology article, gingerly defending its Alaska exposé and responding to furious Democrat readers complaining that it had helped Republicans. Headline, yesterday:

The pressure grew too strong. Unlike Dan J. Sullivan, the Times felt compelled to respond. “Since our article was published on Wednesday, readers have asked why we devoted a long investigation to this instance of ‘ballot-stacking,’” an embarrassed Times said, and “about the timing of our article, published less than a week before Election Day.”

Only at the New York Times does landing an exposé scoop require a hostage video explaining to subscribers why you committed journalism.

The Times, clearly feeling defensive, stuck to its guns. “I’m much more comfortable letting readers assess and judge for themselves rather than deciding for them that they shouldn’t see it,” reporter Kellen Browning explained. This seems sensible. Like what reporters were taught in college.

But the Times’s progressive commenters were lit. They aren’t buying the Times’ explanation. They complained about Republicans doing the same thing and sloshed buckets of Trump derangement everywhere. “You just gave the anti-democratic movement a smoking gun to claim that (all) the midterm elections are rigged,” one fumed, apparently either unaware of the irony or possibly employing an extremely flexible definition of the word “democratic.”

Another commenter, “Jimbo,” said “so what?” and called it an “October surprise,” and nearly a thousand other readers agreed:

🔥 Alaska might have been an October surprise, but it was unsurprising that the Times has begun reeling back its “Blue Wave” predictions. Behold this extraordinary headline yesterday, in which the Times —in a story reporting its own polls— went so far as to question the truthworthiness of its own polls:

Thus, the Times can have it both ways. They can run the unbelievable polls but question them at the same time in case reality disagrees. Here they are, you guys figure it out. And you have to hand it to the pollsters. They have their Blue Wave story and they are sticking to it. Their “polls” still predict that every single contested Senate race will go blue, bar none.

Pollsters even called the Michigan race —where Muslim Brotherhood candidate El Sayed seems to be going down in flames— as a 53% to 42% washout.

This didn’t pass the ‘haha’ test. Winning every single contested Senate race could barely convince the Times’s own reporter. “In today’s polarized era, there’s no precedent for a party to fare this well in so many states that are generally safe wins for the other side,” he marveled. “The only plausible comparisons are the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, but the recent polls outpace even those.”

“It’s reasonable to wonder whether the polls might be overestimating Democratic strength yet again,” the story continued. “This is a real possibility,” the reporter mused. (You think?) He explained why this might be happening: “This cycle, Democrats are again responding to Times/Siena polls at a much higher rate than Republicans.” The result: “Registered white Democrats were about 30 percent likelier to take the poll than registered white Republicans.”

The story did not at all mention the four fly-by-night polling companies exposed as frauds, two of whom conceded they completely made up their pro-Democrat results “as an experiment” in seeing how gullible prestige media platforms like the Times were. Apparently, very gullible.

🔥 Which brings us to our final chapter in the midterm news roundup. Behold, the party of “diversity” and “democracy,” whose presidential candidates are selected and whose deluded members rail in the comments against “the anti-democratic movement” without the least hint of self-awareness. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Rep. Haley Stevens is no longer a Michigan Democratic Party member, chair says.” You’re out! Just like that.

Her crime? On Sunday, the Democrat congresswoman endorsed Republican Mike Rogers for Senate over Abdul El-Sayed. About an hour later, Michigan Democratic Party chair Curtis Hertel Jr. posted, “Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”

The state party also took her off its elected-officials page. Her chief of staff of eight years and several other staffers quit. Most ironically, she was promptly disinvited from Sunday’s Detroit “Souls to the Polls” unity event with Jim Clyburn.

Got that? She was disinvited from a unity event. Irony! They threw the congresswoman out with the bathwater. The Democrat purity spiral swept Stevens away just like Ms. Gulch in The Wizard of Oz pedaling off on her bicycle in the tornado. Then Democrats dropped the house on her. Squish.

Earlier this year, Representative Stevens (D), who has loyally served in the House for eight years, ran in the Democrat primary for Senate. Stevens gave up her House seat to run for Senate. She then lost the primary against Sayed after all the polls showed her losing badly, with El-Sayed supposedly up +13.

But, despite the polls, on voting day Stevens only lost by 13,800 votes out of 1.54 million— less than 1%. El-Sayed got 48.45%, and Stevens got 47.55%. In other words, and this will shock you: the polls lied. They probably even tipped the outcome to El-Sayed.

It would be fair to imagine that Rep. Stevens is now feeling less than ideally happy about how it went down.

Corporate media doesn’t believe the polls had anything to do with her discontent. It thinks the real problem is Israel. Rep. Stevens is engaged to a Jewish man whose grandparents were Holocaust refugees. Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed is, to put it mildly, not an Israel fan. He has accused Israel of “genocide.” His influencer ally, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and vowed, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action.” Yikes.

So maybe it’s the Israel thing. But I’m not so sure. All this anti-Israel stuff was well known even back when Stevens was still endorsing El-Sayed.

Anyway, once again we see the Democrats’ purity spiral in action. Stevens is out even after insisting she remains a loyal Democrat and is voting blue down the rest of the ticket. But that wasn’t good enough in 2026.

💉💉💉

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Sen. Chris Murphy Hospitalized After Stroke.” Fortunately, the subheadline added, “The Connecticut Democrat is awake and alert, his staff says.” Senator Murphy, described in the article as a “rising star in the Democratic Party,” is only 53, healthy, fit, and was a pro-mandate maniac during the pandemic.

He joins a whole roster of jab-taking Senators who’ve had strokes “in recent years.” The shocking list includes: John Fetterman (D-PA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM). (The Journal scrupulously added Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who had a stroke back in 2012. All the rest are post-jab.) The Journal’s list omitted other senators like Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell, who both acted like they had strokes. It also left off Senator Lindsey Graham, who this year died suddenly, right after returning from Kiev, of an aortic dissection— a catastrophic arterial event that is close cousins with a stroke.

This is just the list of senator strokes. By itself, it is getting to be a pretty big club. If I didn’t know better, I would say Senators should probably start receiving hazard pay.

Like the others, Chris Murphy —often floated as a potential 2028 presidential candidate— was an early and active jab pusher. He tweeted about getting the jabs, got covid several times anyway, and is a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Kennedy, especially over vaccines.

To be clear, we are pleased that Senator Murphy is reportedly doing well, and pray he enjoys a full recovery, which the various articles said was expected.

Having said that, it is also important to note that Murphy loudly pushed vaccine mandates every time he had the chance. In June, 2021, he demanded that colleges make jabs mandatory. In September, 2021, he tweeted, “Reporter asked me today if a vaccine mandate would make it harder for employers to hire. It’s exactly the opposite. People don’t feel safe going back to work.” In December, 2021, he defended Biden’s OSHA mandate and said, “Republicans know that when they come down to the floor and attack the vaccine mandate day after day after day, they are giving fuel to the fire of the anti-vaccine campaign.”

In 2025, a Yale study reported, “Typically spike protein can be detected for a few days after vaccination, but some participants with post-vaccination syndrome had detectable levels more than 700 days after their last vaccination.” Akiko Iwasaki, who led the study, called it “surprising, to find spike protein in circulation at such a late time point.” Some of us were not surprised.

As for any specifics about Senator Murphy’s condition, we are left to guess. The only symptom his office reported was “numbness in his arm while at his son’s hockey game” on Halloween. Medical Daily observed that “His office has not disclosed what type of stroke he had, what caused it, how quickly he reached care or when he may be discharged.” Nor did they explain why Murphy was transferred from “a local hospital” to Johns Hopkins, a top stroke center. That usually means one of three things: specialist care, a procedure like a clot-busting drug or clot removal, or a workup the first hospital couldn’t do.

Establishment medicine offers us two main explanations for strokes in working-aged people, now a growth industry, but which used to be a shocking rarity.

Doctors’ reflexive go-to is the carefully established scientific conclusion that it’s the patients’ own fault— for being too lazy, too fat, and smoking too much. But when the patient is a healthy, marathon-running nonsmoker, they deploy the equally scientific and equally untestable diagnosis of genetic factors. They never consider environmental causes, like experimental injections, even if those injections are known to cause blood-related problems, clots, cardiac damage, persistent spike protein, post-vaccination syndrome, Trump derangement, and an irresistible craving for more shots.

We don’t know whether Senator Murphy’s stroke was related to his experimental, clot-causing injections. And we never will, for the straightforward reason that they aren’t going to check. So why bring it up? Because after what we endured during the pandemic era, I intend never to let them forget about it. I will remind them every chance I get. Forever.

Which brings us to today’s final thought. Democrats have never backed down. They did not apologize. They didn’t admit any mistakes. So if you want more mandates for masked faces, uninvestigated strokes, and new experimental injections, then skip voting tomorrow. Avoid the polls if you like the idea of segregating citizens into “essential” and “non-essential.” Stay home, if you’d like to see children lose more learning years while teachers’ union officials vacation in Cabo. If Democrats get back in the driver’s seat, they will reopen the borders, put men back in women’s bathrooms, and cut the DOJ’s funding for investigating welfare fraud.

Otherwise, you know what to do. We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put Democrats out of power for a generation, and that chance is tomorrow. Get to the polls. Drive as many souls to the polls as you can. Cram them into your minivan like it was a clown car. Make it into a party. Let’s show them a red wave whose currents will still be circulating twenty years from now.

Have a magnificent Monday! Come back tomorrow, Election Day itself, for more encouragement and advice as we navigate this off-the-chain 2026 timeline together. Remember, our strength is in our numbers. Stick together or we fall apart. See you in the morning.

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🔥🔥🔥

You know me; I am a glutton for punishment. I once again dove into corporate media’s septic tank to find the submerged good news. On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a ridiculously long news piece (allegedly) headlined, “Trump fired him. The ‘DEI Watchlist’ shamed him. Then came 500 job rejections.” The website estimated the 7,400+ words as a “31-minute” read. Ugh.

The story is one of the best (worst) examples of journalistic malpractice we’ve seen this year. Written in an omniscient authorial voice, it constantly described Dia Harris’ inner voice, his thoughts, and his feelings. Not “Harris reported thinking...” It tells readers, “Harris thought …” It tells us about his Keurig coffee maker, his preferred brand of granola, and dwells lovingly on his “maroon polo.”

Here’s the story WaPo desperately wanted to tell. Mr. Harris was a diligent federal employee chasing his lifelong dream of helping poor black children get free breakfast at public school. His job: “the first chief equity officer for the Administration for Children and Families.” (The first. It was a made-up job.)

But then, mean President Trump fired him for no reason. A conservative website (correctly) included him on a “DEI Watchlist” of 93 senior Biden-era DEI officials. This, WaPo said, made him unemployable. He’s been rejected by over 500 employers. Since getting fired in August 2025, the scrappy 53-year-old Penn grad has worked as a bartender, a bagger at Harris Teeter grocery, and is now trying to land a gig as a $16/hr food service worker. His mom has had to keep her part-time job at a Hallmark store to “help with the bills.”

Sad!

🔥 Only the most diligent WaPo readers who bravely persisted to the last few thousand words learned a little more context about Mr. Harris. His extensive federal career —his life ambition, cut short by the biased Trump Administration— spanned the heroic period of seventeen months. That’s it. Then he got eight months of paid leave with full benefits— nearly half his entire federal service, which WaPo described as “he got no severance.”

Right before Trump was inaugurated, Harris conspired with his boss to retitle his position as “senior advisor,” hoping nobody in the new Administration would notice he was a DEI manager. Resistance! After he was fired anyway, he got a lawyer and filed a complaint against the government for racism (he lost) and threatened to sue.

Before his year-and-a-half career in the federal workforce, Harris had a 30-year career in HR at Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, Northrop, and Amazon. One wonders where all his contacts went. He ‘designed’ a custom two-story home in a “wealthy Maryland suburb,” and his mortgage is $4,000 a month. His last private-sector job paid more than his federal one. His 71-year-old mother lives with him, and the story conspicuously omits any mention of a wife or kids.

He proudly wears an Alpha Phi Alpha wristband. That’s a black fraternity whose members included MLK, Thurgood Marshall, and Andrew Young. Call it a signal that he is intentionally leading with.

He also scrubbed all his social media— another red flag for new employers. WaPo described that as a normal reaction to finding out he was on the “DEI Watchlist,” but between the lines we see he was suddenly concerned about what his social media held. The watchlist included a clip of Harris’s 2024 webinar called the “National Call to Action on Equity.” In it, he called himself “unapologetically a Black man” and vowed to “embed equity into every aspect of our lives.”

Yikes. That sounds like a threat.

The Post blamed the watchlist for 500 rejections (including the ACLU). But picture the résumé from the other side of the desk: fired after a short term of employment, suing the last employer, social media wiped, racial activism, unmarried, and so on. Dia Harris, of all people, knows exactly how that screening looks. He ran it for Boeing.

Now let’s look at all the great news buried in the WaPo’s tear-jerking novella.

🔥 “Since President Donald Trump returned to office,” WaPo sadly intoned, “nearly 426,000 of the nation’s 2.2 million civilian federal employees have left the government.” That terrific news earns a mention on my Trump Accomplishments list. I’m just a lawyer, not a mathematician, but that sounds like a savings of around $65 billion a year with benefits.

Most of those who left took a generous voluntary separation deal— 85%, according to the story. But Harris didn’t. He waited and made them fire him, which explains how the reporter characterized it as “no severance.”

“Trump campaigned on trimming federal bureaucracy, which he declared was bloated with wasteful, lazy and incompetent workers,” the article complained. Then came DOGE. “Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service slashed across the government, cutting spending and eliminating jobs,” the article explained, as if that were a bad thing rather than President Trump delivering on his promises.

“The mass embrace of DEI programs felt to Harris like the capstone of his professional life,” WaPo explained. In other words, Harris was a victim, of sorts. He was the victim of the DEI movement. He was sold a bill of goods, a trendy, race-baited career with a short expiration date. Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, it said, “triggered a rapid retreat from DEI policies throughout government and the corporate world — and, Harris feared, devastating the field in which he built his career.”

If that thesis is correct, then WaPo just admitted that President Trump and DOGE single-handedly dismantled DEI across the federal workforce and corporate America in one fell blow. The prestige paper considers that a crime. But this is an astonishing accomplishment that would have defied any rational prediction. Nobody expected DEI to collapse like a house of race cards.

The story WaPo wanted to tell came out exactly backwards. It hoped readers would pine for Mr. Harris, languishing in his custom Maryland home waiting for word from his lawyers. It wanted us to be outraged by some conservative website’s blacklist (sorry), which makes it impossible for Mr. Harris to fully erase all his racist rants on social media.

Instead, it came out as a historic success story. Not even WaPo, in its thousands of words of omniscient prose, tried to defend DEI. Nowhere in nearly 8,000 words did the Post ever argue that DEI worked, helped anyone, or was worth having. It quoted critics calling DEI “reverse racism” that “undermines merit”— and let that stand unanswered.

The funniest lines came from the guy who set up the DEI Watchlist website, who happily agreed to be interviewed. Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, the group that runs the watchlist, did not try to hide, like Ilhan Omar or Dan S. Sullivan. He promptly emailed the WaPo a statement and answered its reporter’s questions. Here’s Tom’s initial, hilarious, unapologetic response:

The reporter emailed back, trying to trap Jones by asking why he thought black workers on the watchlist are struggling to find new employment more than white ones. “Sounds like hiring managers are racist, that’s very disappointing,” Jones shot back.

It was pure jiu-jitsu. Tom turned it right back around on them. If it’s absurd when Tom Jones says it, it was absurd when the DEI officers said it too.

That’s how far DEI has fallen. Nobody fears it anymore. The sting of the “r” word (Portlanders: racist) has become a laugh-provoking tickle, the setup for an easy punchline. Must be racism!

Honestly, it baffles me how black pillers keep crying about how “nothing has changed.” What on Earth are they babbling about? Everything has changed. And fast— in less than two years. This silly WaPo story just proved it beyond argument.

And now you don’t have to read 8,000 ridiculous words, since I took one for the team. You’re welcome.

🔥🔥🔥

Here we go again. You would not be blamed for a sneaking suspicion that the left is up to something on a global scale. Deep staters conspiring in the US. Black bloc protestors without demands burning French town halls. Brazil stealing an election and its candidate fleeing across a bridge to Argentina on foot after midnight. Missile defense trucks deployed to chic Palm Beach around Mar-a-Lago. Now this. Headline from Fox, this morning: “Polish president turns plane around after ‘coup’ at nation’s top court.”

Poland has a Constitutional Tribunal, which works roughly like our Supreme Court. Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-EU government called the court illegitimate because the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) packed it with conservatives back in 2015. So his government simply stopped publishing the court’s rulings, even though Polish law requires it.

This year, parliament elected new leftwing judges. President Karol Nawrocki, a PiS ally who holds the veto, refused to swear five of them in. Without the president’s oath, Polish law says they aren’t judges yet.

Last night, while President Nawrocki was out of the country, Donald Tusk’s justice minister, Waldemar Żurek, moved to criminally charge the court’s conservative chief justice, Bogdan Święczkowski, by lifting his official immunity. Seven of the not-yet-sworn judges walked into the Tribunal under government security escort, and the court’s own guards were told to leave.

One of the new judges, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, declared herself the court’s most senior judge, by counting her years from 1995 in the ordinary courts, not from any time on the Tribunal. On that basis, she suspended the chief justice and his deputy for a month. Riot police ringed the building and the new judges took over the court’s website. The court’s X account, still run by the old leadership, posted that everyone involved was “committing the crime of a coup d’état.”

When it all went down, President Nawrocki was flying to Senegal. He posted, “At such a moment, the President must be in Poland. I’m interrupting my flight,” and flew back. Just after midnight, he went to the Tribunal with the head of the Supreme Court, cut a padlock on the Tribunal’s front fence with a power saw, pushed through the police at the door, and told the new judges, “You are not judges.” Before dawn, he called it a “forcible takeover of a constitutional organ of the state” and convened emergency security talks for today.

The US ambassador, Tom Rose, called it “an unprecedented confrontation” over state power and the court’s independence.

But what is it? A coup or just a court snafu? We have an historic example. Let’s return to our friends in Brazil, and where that benighted country’s problems started.

🔥 It looks like Poland’s left is speed-running the Brazil experience. Starting all the way back in 2003, President Lula began packing Brazil’s Supreme Court with cronies. In 2009, he appointed Dias Toffoli, the lawyer for Lula’s Workers’ Party and then his solicitor general. Toffoli handpicked the now infamous law professor Alexandre de Moraes, who was installed in 2017. In 2023, Lula appointed Cristiano Zanin, Lula’s personal criminal defense lawyer, and the man who got Lula’s convictions thrown out. And in 2024, Lula appointed Flávio Dino, who was Lula’s sitting justice minister (like our attorney general), and before that, a Communist Party politician.

As alert readers know, among other authoritarian excesses, this week Brazil’s Supreme Court intervened in its elections minutes after polls closed, with the effect of keeping polls in Lula areas open until the result changed. They’ve also ordered the arrests of opposition politicians for making X posts, jailed the former President for a “coup” (irony), prosecuted Brazilian influencers for anti-court speech, shut down X for a time and fined users $9,000 a day, and generally done whatever they like, with the coincidental result that the communists are enjoying May Day every day down there.

The world has been appalled. In April, 2024, independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said, “De Moraes has acted unilaterally to invent entirely new laws. He is thus interfering and taking over the role of Congress and of the president. That means he is behaving like a dictator.” Later that year, Elon Musk was more blunt: “Alexandre de Moraes is an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.”

In short, the communists found a way to capture a country by occupying its Supreme Court. This took years to accomplish in Brazil. It looks like the globalists just tried to do the same thing in one night in Poland while the President was out of town. This week, pro-EU Donald Tusk complained about the conservative government and its judicial appointments in 2015, and warned of ”a difficult, sometimes painful process that requires decisive action. There is no other way.”

Pray for the Polish people; they are about to endure a serious bout of turbulence.

🔥 On Wednesday, the Palm Beach Post reported, “Surface-to-air missile systems added at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.”

“A pair of Avenger Air Defense Systems are now positioned on a floating barge in the Lake Worth Lagoon,” the Post reported, “on the west side of the seawall next to Trump’s historic 17-acre oceanfront property.” The Avenger is a type of mobile short-range air defense system. “The Avenger’s targets could include cruise missiles, drones, helicopters, and low-flying and high-speed fixed-wing aircraft,” the Post explained, quoting the US Army.

That’s not all. The War Zone reported two more Avengers staged at Trump International Airport (newly renamed), about three miles west from Mar-a-Lago. The Palm Beach Post reported a “bank of Avengers” in a field on the airport’s southern side, near where Air Force One parks. Stinger missiles, fired by the Avenger systems, cost $400,000 each. CBS-12 reported that Northern Command is supplying counter-drone “Fly-Away Kits.” Those are portable sets of radar, cameras, and possibly jamming gear.

The explanation for these sudden preparations is, unsurprisingly, murky. “The U.S. Secret Service continues to operate in a heightened threat environment,” the Secret Service told reporters, explaining nothing that isn’t already obvious. “The airborne threat vector at Mar-a-Lago is persistent and substantial,” wrote Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew C. Quinn in an affidavit filed along with the agency’s request for a permanent no-fly zone over Mar-a-Lago.

As you can imagine, the social media hot takes are firing off like Stinger missiles.

🔥 There’s a lot more kindling. Data professionals have dubbed this month “Black October” due to a global rash of cyberattacks. (It is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so.) Two days ago, the Military Times reported that the Pentagon is treating a string of freezer failures at US military commissaries, the on-base grocery stores, as a suspected Iranian hack. Fort Huachuca’s Facebook page said its freezer “went into defrost mode where it heated up all the food.” In a copycat attack on French grocery freezers at around the same time, some units got so hot they caught fire.

How produce offended the Iranians is anybody’s guess. But the lettuce has learned its lesson.

Early this week, OpenAI announced a new exploit, claiming it affected 70% of all websites on the Internet, and much doomcrying ensued. A viral list on X called it “the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history.” Rob Joyce, who used to run the NSA’s cyber division, posted that the “transition from vulpocalypse to breachpocalypse is here.” The head of Japan’s cyber agency called it “a state of emergency in cyberspace.”

Then nothing really happened. Never mind. Until next time.

🔥 The global unrest is due to everyone being more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. A couple of days ago, Newsweek ran this alarming headline:

Map shows. Much of the list is long-standing civil-defense guidance, and the U.S. has said the same thing on Ready.gov for years. What’s new is that France and the UK just joined, which set off this latest round of breathless coverage. France’s official kit includes six liters of water per person, cash, copies of your ID, a spare set of keys (they still use keys?), and “jeux pour occuper le temps”— games to pass the time. The UK Guardian’s roundup headline suggested “tinned mackerel, hand-crank radios and” —terrifyingly— “bags for poo.” Um. I’m not sure which sounds more horrifying, tinned mackerel snacks or poo bags.

“Such advice,” the Guardian noted, “once dismissed as the preserve of preppers, has become more common in government circles as climate breakdown worsens weather extremes and geopolitical tensions turn cyber-attacks and sabotage into a regular occurrence.”

I guess we can chalk another one up for the conspiracy theorists. Good job, preppers. You’re mainstream now.

But what everyone is really thinking is that the U.S. midterm elections are now just three days away. Even here, in my usually placid blue Alachua County, where progressives run everything and normally don’t bother, things are heating up. Local WCJB reported, “Alachua County Republicans report vandalism ahead of election.” I would have called it widespread vandalism, but okay.

What do we make of all this? Pessimists on X are predicting a coordinated global attack. Their theory is that globalist forces that lost their USAID grants see Tuesday as the last chance to stop the counter-revolution before the money never comes back. They have plenty of silliness to work with. Democrats are promising chaos.

The No Kings brigades have been ominously quiet this summer and election season. But the No Kings website wants activists to be ready for “mass nonviolent action in rapid response” if officials “refuse to certify valid results.” In South Carolina this week, California’s oily governor slid into election denial even before the ballots, saying, “Trump is not screwing around. This guy’s trying to rig the election before a single vote is cast. The only way he can win is if he rigs the election.”

The LA Times reported that more than 20 Democratic attorneys general have already drafted “emergency lawsuits and temporary restraining orders” ready to file “at a moment’s notice.” Colorado’s Phil Weiser said, “We’re not going to be reacting in real time… We are going to be following through on plans we’ve made.”

Earlier this month, the Hill headlined, “Inside the Democratic effort to fight any Trump disruption of midterms.” According to the story, House Democrats have wargamed “roughly 150 different scenarios” and held more than 15 “shadow hearings,” which sounds totally democratic. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson offered county auditors plainclothes National Guard members to “inconspicuously monitor ballot drop boxes.” (Armed ICE agents near a polling place are intimidation, but undercover troops at the drop box are just neighborly.)

This week, The Nation ran a drama-filled story headlined, “What Are Democrats Prepared to Do if Trump Rigs the Election?” And alert readers will recall this week’s astonishing Washington Post story prompted by DataRepublican’s exposé, headlined, “U.S. officials privately advise states fearing Trump election meddling.” One of the members of the group of “former US officials” said, “The outcome that we hope for is that states would be prepared for any contingencies should they arise.”

None of this sounds like people confident of their blue wave. Democrats say they’re going to win in a landslide. They’ve also pre-drafted 150 lawsuits, just in case they do.

So what do we make of it all?

🔥 In spite of the scary images of rocket launchers decorating Mar-a-Lago for Halloween, this rhetorically overheated cycle is much less violent than the 2024 election cycle was. Missing this year are two assassination attempts. The Antifa brigades have, apparently, relocated to Paris. They sure aren’t attacking Cop Cities in Atlanta. (We don’t miss them.) Even No Kings, as I pointed out, have mostly confined their anti-monarchical protests to angry words on a website.

What is different is elected Democrats’ rhetoric. In 2024, they expected a Kamala landslide. This year they (supposedly) expect a blue tsunami. But this year they have also suddenly become election deniers in advance. This is partly explainable by the DOJ’s election integrity push. They don’t like Trump calling blue states Empires of Fraud. (Which is not, however, particularly novel. At least he didn’t call them s-hole states.)

What, though, do Democrats actually hope to achieve if they do, in fact, take control of the House?

That is far from clear. Impeachment will never happen. Insider leaks suggest they will try to defund (“melt”) ICE and the Iran war, and force Republicans to vote against a mind-numbing series of terrible ideas that will help Democrats in the 2028 presidential cycle. One California House candidate said forcing the votes is “really key for 2028 and 2029.” They also plan to investigate President Trump’s family, again with the goal of generating more campaign ads for the 2028 election. (Where was all this zeal when the Biden Crime Family was milking Ukraine? Oh, never mind.)

In other words, they plan to slow the Trump Revolution and prepare the 2028 battlespace. That is all fine, and predictable, but it doesn’t really explain the apocalyptic rhetoric, lawfare wargames, and pre-drafted lawsuits. We might not need 30 days of hoarded toilet paper (definitely no poo bags), but we should be prepared for a certain degree of post-election chaos.

In short, don’t count on knowing who won the House on election night. It might not be the kind of painful interlude that Polish folks are facing, but they aren’t going to keep all those lawsuits in a drawer. The courts should plan to cancel all their scheduled vacations, stock up on energy drinks, and maybe pre-order Costco Thanksgiving meals.

The French are packing board games. Americans should pack patience.

The best thing we can do right now to head as much of this off as possible is GO VOTE. The fewer close races there are, the fewer lawsuits will have to be worked through. Once again, we are called to make the outcome too big to rig. Today is the last day of early voting in most places. Get going, and text all the conservatives you know. Let’s roll.

Have a wonderful weekend. Then come back on Monday for your election eve roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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There’s been a major update to yesterday’s Alaska story. The New York Times has now reported, “Republicans Ramp Up Investigation Into Democratic Plan to Pack Alaska’s Ballot.” By “ramp up,” it meant that in 24 hours, over 40 DOJ subpoenas went out, a House committee investigation began, and Alaska launched a state criminal matter. All in one day. All thanks to the Times’s own terrific article.

“Most if not all of the subpoenas were issued to Democrats,” the Times marveled. (Where else would they go? Haiti? One wonders which Republicans the Times thinks might have documentary evidence about the Democrat conspiracy.) As we thought likely, “lawyers for the federal government accused Democrats of having lied to the court.”

This is not to say the Times is helping any. The Times’s article heaped up a giant analysis of the legality of what it called “ballot stacking,” “an age-old practice used by both parties for decades” a term nobody ever heard of before yesterday, and which I think the Times just made up. (Internally, Mary Peltola’s campaign team called it “the ballot composition project.”) It cited “Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg,” who opined that he couldn’t see any crimes here. (We still don’t know if he took the bucket off his head to look.)

The article did not remind readers that “Republican lawyer” Ginsberg is a Never-Trumper who is often quoted in articles as the Republican lawyer who doesn’t agree that the 2020 election was stolen. Thanks a lot, Times.

Finally, the Times itself cleared the Democrats of guilt. “The Times did not uncover evidence of illegal activity,” it sniffed. Thank goodness it isn’t in charge of prosecutions. I wonder what the Times thinks the 40+ subpoenas are for. Practice?

🔥 Anyway, back in 2021, the Times had no problem finding a crime when a Republican state senator in Miami was accused of running a sham candidate against a Democrat back in 2021. Here’s the headline then:

As you can see from the subheadline, in 2021 the state senator who recruited him and the sham candidate “were both arrested.” (Both were later convicted.) The Times failed to mention this very similar 2021 case in its several thoughtful paragraphs analyzing how its experts cannot seem to find any crimes in 2026. Nor, back in 2021, did the Grey Lady deploy its gentle term “ballot stacking” or call it an “age-old practice.” Times, apparently, change.

And, as you can see with your own eyes, the very descriptive phrase “sham candidate” appeared right in the Times’ 2021 headline— but nowhere in its article published yesterday. Whoops! The reporters forgot their own vocabulary. By Monday they’ll probably be calling ‘ballot stacking’ a protected constitutional technique essential to democracy.

Anyway— the point is, in 2021, Florida was able to find crimes when somebody ran a sham candidate. Now the State of Alaska is looking. Plus, usually federal laws are much more flexible for charging these kinds of crimes. But the Times’ hypocrisy between its own stories wasn’t even the most entertaining part.

The most fun was what the DOJ’s 40 subpoenas imply. Let me explain.

🔥 Before this year, it would have been impossible for federal prosecutors to turn around 40 subpoenas within two days of a breaking Times story. But now they have help from superintelligence, which drafts subpoenas in seconds. And both CNN and Reuters called them “grand jury subpoenas,” which means the DOJ already has a criminal grand jury spun up and hearing evidence. (Before yesterday, we only knew about the DOJ’s civil lawsuit.)

So that’s fun. But wait. It gets richer.

Recall the Times original exposé story, which we covered yesterday. That article said it was “based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit, dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort, and extensive interviews” with Peltola’s former campaign manager. Those texts, the Times said, “show officials with the D.S.C.C. and the Peltola campaign communicating for months about the project.” It also cited Federal Election Commission records showing $87,000 from a Peltola super PAC to the special ballot maneuver operative’s firm, Wingspan Strategies, and messages involving the national party and the Elias Law Group about creating a fake “MAGA Party.”

That long list wasn’t just a scoop. It was a road map to a treasure trove of witnesses and documents. That’s how the DOJ got more than 40 subpoenas out the door before the paper’s ink was dry. Thanks to the Times’ story, the DOJ knows exactly what to ask for, who to request it from, and will point directly at the article when the judge asks whether “all this is just a fishing expedition.”

The Times made it so easy for them. This almost never happens.

As a lawyer, I’ve occasionally experienced this kind of rare pleasure. You can’t beat this kind of help from the other side. I had a case where a local official demanded my client pay his agency’s legal bills, which was ridiculous, but never mind. To prove the outstanding balance, he attached dozens of pages of unredacted attorney invoices. The line items drew a treasure map: references to emails, drafts, Zooms, meetings, letters— all with specific dates and names of the people who were involved.

Our public-records request went out practically before we finished reading it. The Times just did the same favor for DOJ, except it delivered the treasure map on page one. Ahoy, mateys! Practically overnight, the Alaskan Senate race has become a massive migraine for Democrats, and it is only going to get worse.

🔥🔥🔥

The Times has really been outdoing itself this week. How about another one? Yesterday it reported, “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” Welcome to Minneapolis, the City of Brotherly Love. Get this: the sub-headline admitted, “an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother.” Ouch.

Some evidence. This is the fallback position when, at long last, they can no longer say “no evidence.” They can’t bring themselves to concede there is “evidence,” so they deploy a rhetorical sleight of hand. The truth is, evidence is binary. There’s either “evidence” or there is “no evidence.” The phrase “some evidence” is meaninglessly redundant. It’s like saying someone is “partly pregnant.” Some evidence means the same thing as “evidence.” They’re hoping our brains will subconsciously interpret the qualifying word “some” to mean that the evidence is thin or inconclusive or scribbled on a crumpled cocktail napkin.

But it really just means one thing: there’s evidence. For whatever reason —a reason it never explains in the story— the Times is finally being forced to admit something it has steadfastly denied since the Obama era: the claim that Representative Ilhan Omar married her own brother is not just a conspiracy theory after all. There’s evidence.

🔥 Now let’s see what the Times called “some evidence” of a sham marriage. Read further and the “some” evaporated faster than a Somalian daycare center that just got a subpoena. The Times itself said it was “based on interviews with three current and former officials familiar with the present-day investigation and six current and former officials with knowledge of the 2016 investigation.” Sounds like more than “some” evidence.

Not only that. “Although Ms. Omar is an observant Muslim,” the Times explained, “the couple’s marriage certificate was signed by a Christian pastor rather than an imam.” And when immigration officials asked the husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to prove his marriage was real, he fled. He left the country and has never returned. I’m leaving, on a jet plane; don’t know when I’ll be back again. Ironically, he provided no evidence their marriage was legit.

Still, the Times hedged. Nine officials, a bizarre marriage certificate, and a fleeing husband are, apparently, only “some evidence.” What do they want? One supposes a written confession would only provoke the Times to engage more experts opining about statements made under duress.

Agents, the article explained, “found evidence suggesting” they were siblings, dropping the “some.” The Obama-era case died on the vine, “chiefly” because prosecutors concluded the statute of limitations clock had run out, not because the “some evidence” did.

The “official exoneration” letter Omar waved around for ten years? Its author, a former US Attorney under Obama, now tells the Times the letter “was never meant to say anything about the substance.” He wants us to know he didn’t mean it to be taken that way. He just never said anything to anyone or corrected the record with a clarifying letter. The article also allowed, briefly, in classic drive-by fashion, that the brother-marrying claims first arose in 2016 not from Republicans but from Somali message boards.

But as recently as January, the Times was still calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory.” Its fact-checkers rated the claim “flatly false.” I suppose apologies would be expecting too much, but the Times didn’t even issue a correction for its years of misreporting Omar’s fratrimony as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

“Rep. Omar has repeatedly and unequivocally denied this baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory,” Jackie Rogers, Omar’s spokeswoman, said in a statement, echoing the Times’ own words. Rogers will never face consequences when this turns out to be a lie, but she should.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, and maybe best of all, the good ship Southern Poverty Law Center is listing to starboard and starting to sink. On Wednesday, DNYUZ reported, “Justice Dept. Turns Civil Rights Group’s Informant Against It” Ruh roh! In other words: DOJ prosecutors are doing their jobs.

Alert readers will recall that in April, the DOJ charged the progressive law firm and fundraising behemoth SPLC with fraud. Federal prosecutors alleged the group was actually funding the very hate groups it claimed to be investigating so that it could keep the donor gravy train moving. This surprised no one except corporate media reporters and national Democrats.

According to the indictment, one SPLC informant had no extremist background at all until he applied to SPLC for a job. Then, on SPLC’s instructions, he joined the planning chat for Charlottesville, posted racist content under SPLC supervision, and arranged rides to the rally. SPLC paid him over $300,000 in donor money.

The nation’s leading ‘hate-watchers’ weren’t just watching.

🔥 This week, the SPLC’s lawyers filed an overwrought motion claiming that the DOJ has turned one of its own informants against it. Irony alert. Flipping witnesses is totally normal in criminal cases. But SPLC’s lawyers don’t like it when the DOJ does exactly what they insist they were doing: paying neo-nazi informants to provide evidence against other bad actors.

The trained informant, known only as “F-9,” was not only a paid neo-Nazi infiltrator for years, but his benefits extended well beyond the $1.2 million the SPLC paid him over 16 years. He also lived with the SPLC’s undercover program director, Heidi “Ho” Beirich, in a close romantic relationship. It’s hard to imagine how the SPLC could be more intertwined with the fascist movement it was forever claiming to be deconstructing. They were literally sleeping together. (It’s also another form of fratrimony, if you think about it.)

Now, informant F-9 is doing what he was trained to do, by informing to the feds. In exchange for immunity, he has delivered a treasure trove of “some evidence.” It included over 1,800 text messages, 1.2 terabytes of documents on seven hard drives, 35-40 pounds of paper, and at least four Powerpointed “intelligence briefings.” He kept everything. Including, according to SPLC’s own motion, confidential SPLC records and “privileged information.”

The government is learning a whole lot about how the SPLC actually works. Sorry; how it worked.

Most of all, it was terrible news for the SPLC, which doesn’t like turncoat informers a bit, and wants the judge to shut the whole thing down.

🔥 Now, ironically, the SPLC must discredit its own informant. The 20-year relationship is over. Hurt feelings have ensued. The SPLC’s 29-page motion described its informant of two decades as a broke, tax-dodging, payment-hungry opportunist.

Oddly, that’s exactly what the government said the SPLC’s informant program was. Weird!

In other words, for nearly 20 years, the SPLC assured the FBI that their guy was reliable enough to go after anybody the SPLC called a hate group. Well, not perhaps anybody. Now that he’s going after the SPLC, nobody should listen to him. Suddenly, according to the same lawyers, he’s just a tax cheat with ‘extreme biases’ and ‘self-serving motives’ who only wants to get paid. You cannot make this stuff up.

Technically, from a legal perspective, all their motion asked for was an order requiring F-9 to preserve his documents. That unremarkable request should have taken about one page. Instead, they filed twenty-nine pages arguing why nobody should believe a word their own informant says. So it wasn’t really a discovery motion. It’s a brief for the media and the future jury pool.

As a PR strategy, it makes sense. The SPLC’s lawyers are earning their hourly rates. They are spinning as well as they can. But it revealed terrible news for the progressive juggernaut. They can make F-9 look like a self-serving mercenary, but they can’t make his drives and filing cabinets disappear. Cue the “everything is fine” meme.

This motion really says they’re in deep legal trouble and they know it. First, the DOJ is obviously mounting a massive case. Prosecutors don’t meet with a single witness 30+ times unless they are investing heavily in the prosecution. Second, lawyers don’t spend 29 public pages trying to wreck a witness who doesn’t matter. They do it when the case depends on him. Read that way, F-9 isn’t just some side witness. He’s the star: a twenty-year insider, he kept the documents, and he’s exposing the very payment structure the government calls fraudulent.

Mark this down: The SPLC is finished. Even if they somehow avoid criminal prosecution, their “hate group” business model is no longer viable. They can no longer sneak money to the groups that they use to support their fundraising. That is over. No more $300,000 in sketchy Cash App texts to coordinate turning out Nazis for a Charlottesville rally. And without the ever-present threat of looming fascism that they lovingly sustained like a mother robin feeding her chicks, why should donors give them any more money?

🔥 This, my friends, is not an October surprise. It’s an October tsunami. The hits just keep coming. For instance, four days ago, two new charges against former FBI Director James Comey were unsealed. Yesterday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army Lt. General Brett Sylvia, the head of strategy, plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for leaking classified information to reporters. One suspects that serious charges will follow.

This is all in a single news cycle. Now add Senatorial candidate Mary Peltola — Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — the Southern Poverty Law Center. In each case, the lies the left told for years fell apart, on the record, in one week. None of it came from Fox News or X. The Alaska decoy burst out in the Times’ own reporting. Omar’s fratrimonious “conspiracy theory” suddenly became “some brotherly evidence” in the Times’ own pages. And the SPLC’s informant program was undermined by its own lawyers, who were trying to bury a mountain of inconvenient evidence.

Some evidence? How about a lot of evidence? Are you ready to call it “The Storm” yet? Just asking.

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🔥🔥🔥

Occasionally, for one reason or another, the New York Times finds itself forced to run a story that it hates. Over the years, we’ve seen stories about covid vaccine injuries, about 26 years of wasted Alzheimer’s research, about the network of underground CIA bases in Ukraine, how Ukraine blew up the Nordstream pipeline, and even one on the uselessness of outdoor masking. These stories promptly become orphans; the Times abandons them on the doorstep and never looks back. Yesterday, we received the most recent delivery in this strange series: “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Midterm Ballot With Another Dan Sullivan.”

Whatever her reason, yesterday the Grey Lady delivered an exposé alleging that Democrats pulled a fast one Alaska. Though the Times didn’t connect the next dots, it didn’t need to. This immediately validated a long series of things the Times normally opposes, including President Trump’s complaints. It fuels a DOJ lawsuit. And it proves that Democrats in Alaska have been telling things that aren’t true … five Pinocchios… and for some, might prove they lied under oath.

In short, the story is a disaster for Democrats broadly and especially for Alaskan Democrats. This October Surprise was most surprising because of where it came from.

Alert readers know about the Democrats’ dirty tricks in Alaska. But since we haven’t covered the story yet, let me quickly brief unfamiliar C&C family members. In 2020, Alaskan voters barely approved a citizen ballot initiative funded by out-of-state liberal activists that installed ranked-choice voting. The initiative passed by a razor-thin one percent— 50.5% to 49.5%. In November 2024, a repeal attempt failed by a few hundred votes, and the “keep it” campaign was again heavily funded by out-of-state groups. (One suspects that after this revolting spectacle, Alaskans might have finally learned their lesson. It’s back on next Tuesday’s ballot for repeal again. You know what to do.)

Dan S. Sullivan is one of Alaska’s two Republican Senators, and he is running for re-election this year against crunchy granola candidate Mary Peltola, who is running on a ‘radical transparency’ platform. On May 29th, a retired Petersburg schoolteacher named Dan Sullivan announced he was running for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Dan Sullivan. He had quietly lived in the tiny fishing town (accessible only by air and sea) for nearly 50 years. He’d never run for anything, and he filed as a Republican. In an extremely unlikely coincidence, Mary Peltola happened to be in insignificant Petersburg a few days before. He originally asked the state to list him as “Dan S. Sullivan.” S is the senator’s middle initial. This Dan’s middle initial is J.

From this point forward, purely for clarity, I shall refer to the two men as Senator Dan and Decoy Dan. I’m not implying anything. (I’m saying it.)

When asked whether he was a plant, Decoy Dan simply said: “It’s just a simple no. I have not been in contact with her (Peltola) or her campaign.” Later he would add: “Zero, none, zilch.” And what’s become his signature line: “My name is my name. The ballot belongs to the people and not to the incumbent.” Peltola’s campaign swore it “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.”

Senator Dan and the state GOP complained. So Lt. Governor Dahlstrom opened an investigation. She sent Decoy Dan questions and warned that false answers could mean perjury. He denied coordinating with anyone. He was so obviously fake that it gave everyone a headache just talking about it, but everyone had to go along and pretend like Decoy Dan was a real Republican candidate and not a Democrat dirty trick.

On June 15th, the state elections director removed Decoy Dan as a “sham candidate” for filing “with a purpose to confuse or mislead,” and added, “Indeed, you yourself appeared to be confused.” Everyone breathed a sigh of deep relief. But then, within two weeks, a judge reversed her, holding she had “invented” a “good-faith” test. The Alaska Supreme Court agreed in three hours, without giving reasons. So Decoy Dan survived the August primary and slid into the top four on Alaska’s ranked-choice ballot for November.

Last week, on October 22nd, the DOJ provoked national Democrats to kick like enraged mules about “election interference” by suing to block certification if Senator Dan loses by less than Decoy Dan’s vote total. Trump admitted, “I’m the one that said to do it.” Mary Peltola —note this for our upcoming irony alert— called the suit “the corruption AK is fed up with.” Corporate media framed it as a powerful incumbent bullying a humble, honest, retired schoolteacher who accidentally happens to share the same name.

That was the status quo prior to yesterday’s Times story, which launched all the fireworks.

🔥 “This article,” the Times reported, “is based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit, dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort, and extensive interviews with (former Peltola campaign manager) Ms. Rios, who shared details of the operation.”

There are four candidates for Senate on Alaska’s November ballot. Two are Senator Dan and Mary Peltola. The other two —Decoy Dan and an “independent” candidate, drywall contractor Gerald Heikes— were both recruited to run by the Peltola campaign, the Times said.

Most people would consider that cheating. The Times said there’s no law against it.

Now meet Jerid Kurtz, whom the Times described as a “veteran Democratic operative” and “a specialist in secret ballot maneuvers.” The Times cited Federal Election Commission records showing a Peltola super PAC paying Kurtz’s firm, Wingspan Strategies, $87,000. Then it drily noted that the PAC “said in a statement this week it had ‘never hired or paid Jerid Kurtz for performing any services.’” (Which was technically true. It paid Wingspan, Kurtz’s company.)

The story explained that the Peltola campaign and the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hired Kurtz a year ago last summer (2025) to begin looking for people to run against Senator Dan, including those with similar names to the Republican incumbent. The story said Kurtz “used pseudonyms and cover stories to keep his activities under wraps.”

Kurtz found Decoy Dan. He told the Peltola campaign that the new Mr. Sullivan “said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary. He didn’t have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help.” Text messages viewed by The Times “show officials with the D.S.C.C. and the Peltola campaign communicating for months about the project.”

The Times found other Alaskans the team sought to recruit as spoilers. One, Matthew Salisbury —who once ran for Congress— was aggressively courted by a man using only the name “Zane.” (Salisbury later ID’d him as Kurtz from a photo.) ‘Zane’ promised to fund Salisbury’s campaign, but refused to say which party he was affiliated with or who would be paying. Salisbury eventually passed. “I’m not naïve,” he said.

In one eye-opening exchange from the text messages, the Times found Peltola campaign officials watching a focus group and mocking dumb voters who were likely to fall for their plot. After watching how easily focus group participants became confused by the identical names, one delighted advisor wrote, “Do we have a scheme for you.”

Meanwhile, the secret ballot maneuver specialist has gone to ground. “Mr. Kurtz,” the Times said, “did not respond to repeated requests for comment. “In recent days, he removed his LinkedIn profile from public view and made his X account private.”

The Times apparently enjoyed a treasure trove of internal messages to review. It found all sorts of Democrat dirty tricks, not just the Decoy Dan and Drywall Gerald fake candidates. In one series of messages, for example, which included the national Democrat party and the Marc Elias Law Group, the campaign strategized about creating a “MAGA Party” to split the Republican vote, a yearlong effort that “fizzled out in May.”

🔥 The response to all this has been swift and fierce. Yesterday, Fairbanks political writer Dermot Cole, a Peltola supporter, wrote online, “What Peltola and her backers did was juvenile and stupid. The Peltola campaign lied to Alaskans about this and should come clean. There’s no excuse for how Peltola has handled this.”

President Trump, of course, called for Mary Peltola to be criminally prosecuted.

Alert readers will recall that one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges against President Trump was “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” since Trump used “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to “obstruct” the electoral process. He also charged a “conspiracy against Americans’ rights” to vote and have their votes counted.

People are mocking Peltola’s various campaign promises, and who can blame them? She ran as an “outsider” who would eschew politics-as-normal, promising voters she would “fix the rigged system in DC.” She vowed, “I’m focusing on ending their back room self-dealing.” She promised PBS she would “not get involved in partisan pettiness.” She lauded ranked-choice voting as enhancing “civility” and said “it shows that it’s not any kind of conspiracy.”

She is a big, fat liar. Petty. Partisan. And not very civil.

Yesterday, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered a criminal investigation. Headline from this morning’s Juneau Independent:

On October 23, Peltola’s lawyers signed a federal pleading insisting that they had no idea why the other Dan Sullivan was running. Five days later, the Times reported that Peltola’s staff helped recruit him. Ruh roh! Most federal judges are not amused by that kind of clever wordplay. Rule 11 requires lawyers to tell the truth in anything they file, under penalty of harsh sanctions. The only escape is if the client lied to them.

But the Times said the Elias Law Group lawyers, who represent both the Peltola campaign and the DSCC, were on the calls.

Behold— the party that promises to “save democracy.” Terrific. Nothing says “saving democracy” like aliases and code names, secret ballot maneuver operatives, campaign officials mocking voters, and fake decoy candidates gaming ranked-choice ballots.

If the “blue wave” were real, why did the DSCC need a second Dan Sullivan?

🔥🔥🔥

After Monday’s election debacle in Brazil, I told you Marco Rubio would have a lot to say. He just said it behind the scenes. Now we have a made-for-streaming-series story of international intrigue, governments in exile, and midnight flights across borders, and the New York Times —which had blanketed its home page with Brazil stories earlier this week— couldn’t make room on the website for the followup. Yesterday, Reuters reported, “Flavio Bolsonaro declares himself rightful president-elect of Brazil.”

Lula’s win was mathematically confirmed at 9:09 p.m. Sunday. Seven minutes later, at 9:16, Brazil’s Federal Police filed a 16-page request to seize the loser’s passports, which was plainly already drafted and waiting for the result. Demonic Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted it that same night, without even first consulting the prosecutor general’s office. He officiously canceled Senator Flávio Bolsonaro’s Brazilian passports and gave him 24 hours to surrender any foreign ones. Police cited the “risk of flight,” helped along by Flávio’s brother Eduardo, who had said on a podcast two days earlier, “If my brother doesn’t win, I’m in favor of him leaving the country.”

On Monday, Flávio posted a video promising to comply and waving off talk that he’d run. That same evening, according to the Wall Street Journal, he vanished into a convoy of four dark cars that pulled away from his Brasília home and split in four directions, leaving reporters and police guessing which one held the senator. By Tuesday afternoon, his allies were telling reporters he’d already landed in Florida. He hadn’t. He was still in Brazil, riding a van roughly a thousand miles to the Argentine border.

Then he ran. Tuesday’s 11 a.m. deadline came and went. His Brazilian passports were already canceled, but Flávio wisely kept his Italian one. At 10:50 that night, he, his wife Fernanda, and their two daughters crossed the Tancredo Neves Bridge into Argentina on foot. Argentina said they entered “without any legal impediment.” Argentine airport police escorted their car straight to immigration, and the Journal reports that President Milei’s top aide, Santiago Caputo, was monitoring things from Puerto Iguazú and coordinating directly with Eduardo.

Waiting on the runway was a private Gulfstream G400, tail number LV-JQW, which had flown in from Buenos Aires the day before. Trump adviser Jason Miller helped line up the charter. The flight manifest listed Flávio on his Italian passport.

Just after midnight, the jet took off, looped around Brazil through Paraguayan, Bolivian and Peruvian airspace, refueled in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and made for Miami. By then the secret escape was the most-watched flight on Earth: 927,367 people tracked it on FlightRadar24. Three TV news helicopters were circling Opa-locka Executive Airport before it touched down around 9:30 Wednesday morning. Flávio stepped off in a navy polo and a backpack, and uniformed officers tried to hide the family under umbrellas, which is a lot like holding a napkin over a parade float.

Washington had already thrown out the welcome mat. Hours before he landed, a senior State Department official said visas were waiting for the whole family. According to the Journal’s reporting, Trump personally approved the family’s entry on Tuesday, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio then moved to issue the visas. The family reportedly came in on one-year humanitarian parole. “We gave him a pass to come into the country,” Trump said. “I thought they were treated very unfairly… But I won’t get involved — it was a very strange election, that’s for sure.”

Who arranged it? Simón Levy, a Mexican lawyer and Trump ally, posted that “The mastermind behind this operation is U.S. Secretary of State @SecRubio,” and described “a US protective operation.” Folha’s sources say Marco Rubio “played an active role.” The State Department is still not commenting.

Once he was safely in Florida, Flávio declared himself the real winner. “I did not flee Brazil; I left for Brazil’s sake,” he said. He promised to lead the opposition from America, and his allies are already calling it a government in exile. President Lula, celebrating his 81st birthday, sneered: “A citizen who secretly flees his country does so because he must have something to hide.”

It’s becoming a family tradition. In December 2022, after losing to Lula and refusing to concede, Flávio’s father Jair flew to Orlando and stayed about three months. He went home and was later convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to 27 years.

Lula might be the one with something to hide. A judge extended voting a minute after the polls closed, the police filed 16 pre-written pages seven minutes after the result, and the loser’s passports were stripped before breakfast. Whether you think the charges are trumped up —an expression that now has fuller flavor— Flávio clearly didn’t believe he’d get a fair hearing, and I doubt the State Department did either. This story is far from over, and the corporate media have celebrated too early.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, a terrific story that will make our non-Florida readers jealous. Yesterday, Polk County’s storied sheriff, Grady Judd, posted one of his traditional and widely beloved arrest updates. A Colombian illegal immigrant held up a Dollar General with a knife, threatening shoppers and staff. Two alert Polk County residents pulled their concealed firearms and held her at gunpoint till police arrived.

CLIP: Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd describes citizen participation (2:17).

I am the type of person who goes into a Dollar General in an emergency for one thing —say, paper towels— and comes out 23 minutes later with a plastic pumpkin, two dented cans of off-brand beans, and a profound uncertainty about what happened to the paper towels. I have never, even at my most Dollar General-disoriented, considered stabbing the merchandise.

Colombian citizen Natalia Gaviria apparently had a different shopping plan.

Sheriff Grady Judd introduced her in his Wednesday morning briefing. Polk County’s caption for the whole episode was, “It doesn’t get much more Polk County than this” — and Judd, in the great Florida sheriff tradition, did not ease into the story.

Gaviria is 36, resides in Kissimmee. According to Judd, she got, in his words, really intoxicated, went into a Dollar General in Polk County, pulled out a knife, and started waving it around and threatening customers.

A manager, showing the kind of decisive retail leadership you cannot teach in a seminar, started running customers out the back door, because —and here the story leaves ordinary shoplifting behind and enters the Florida Woman record books— Gaviria stabbed a soda bottle with her knife, presumably to teach it a lesson.

We do not know the soda’s motive. We do not know whether the bottle provoked her, or was simply in the wrong aisle at the wrong time, next to the marked-down Halloween candy. We know only that the bottle, alone among the victims, actually took the blade, and that this one act would later blossom into its very own criminal charge: theft of the soda bottle that she stabbed.

That is perfect Polk County paperwork. Aggravated assault is serious; disorderly intoxication is also serious. Theft of the soda bottle that she stabbed sounds like a line item written by a deputy who had already used up all his patience and decided the report was going to be accurate down to the last carbonated detail.

Meanwhile, people were calling 911. Deal-seeking patrons were streaming out. Gaviria was still threatening people with a knife in a store where everything costs roughly a dollar and change, which means the entire inventory at risk in any given aisle is worth about $14.75.

And that’s when local shoppers intervened.

“Well, this is Polk County,” Sheriff Judd said, before explaining that two alert residents held her at gunpoint. Both, he said, had concealed firearms. One had a permit. The other, under Florida law, did not need one. They drew, they held her there, and they kept everybody safe until deputies arrived.

By the time cops got there, Judd said, the caper was over. The caper. As if this were a jewel heist in Monte Carlo, rather than a drunk woman declaring war on Pepsi products in a Dollar General. That, my friends, is how seriously we treat retail abuse in Florida. Don’t mess with us.

“Congratulations, citizens,” Judd told the two unnamed shoppers. “You did what was right.”

He added that they had intervened while a violent felony was occurring and kept everyone safe until the Sheriff’s Office could arrive. No injuries to customers were reported in the briefing. The only confirmed casualty remains the soda.

Gaviria was taken into custody and, per the Sheriff, charged with disorderly intoxication and theft of that doomed soda bottle. She was thrown in jail for two counts of aggravated assault. He explained Gaviria is here illegally from Colombia. He said “maybe you act that way in Colombia, but you don’t act that way in Florida, and you certainly don’t act that way in Polk County,” where the other shoppers will pull their guns on you. And he said that once Florida is done with her, she will be on her way back to Colombia.

You can already picture the coverage this would get in a different zip code. A woman waves a knife at terrified customers, a manager evacuates the store out the back like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon, and by tomorrow morning highly concerned ‘experts’ would be on CNN explaining the root causes of soda-bottle violence and why the armed citizens who stopped it without firing a shot raise troubling questions about community safety and a call for stricter gun control.

But in Polk County, the troubling question was much simpler: who is going to clean up Aisle 3?

Because that is the whole story in one store security photo Judd held up for the camera — two ordinary shoppers, outside a Dollar General, with firearms drawn, having ended a knife incident before it became a stabbing incident involving actual humans. No press release poetry. No task forces. Just two men who happened to be armed, happened to be there, and happened to decide that the Colombian woman with the knife did not get to run the store that morning.

We can learn three important lessons from this.

1. Florida’s permitless carry law is not an abstract debate topic in Polk County. It is two shoppers in a parking lot making sure the deputies have somebody left to arrest. Criminals should keep that in mind.

2. If you are going to commit crimes in a Dollar General, do not pick the one in the county where the sheriff does his own comedy briefing afterward, holding your photo, using the word “caper.”

3. People, please. Leave the soda alone. The soda has done nothing to anybody. The soda is $1.25, it is minding its own business, and stabbing it adds a theft charge while converting your arrest report into a story that a blogging lawyer in the next county over does not even need to exaggerate.

Sheriff Judd ended his update the way he always ends, as if he had just given the weather. “Have a good day.” Well, everyone except the bottle.

Have a terrific Thursday! Return tomorrow morning for your Friday edition roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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💉💉💉

This morning’s roundup begins with a quick good-news story as an appetizer. Late last week, the Daily Beltway reported, “Hegseth Reinstates Air Force General Forced Out Over Vaccine Mandate.” Air Force Brigadier General Melissa Cunningham just made history by becoming the highest ranking U.S. military officer to be reinstated after forced jab retirement. It took four years.

As many of us did, in 2022, Gen. Cunningham faced a decision no one should ever have to make: set fire to her successful, lifelong military career— or accept an unproven, experimental injection that would quickly develop a track record making it the greatest failed medical product of all time.

She sucked it up. She surrendered her career. She prioritized her Christian faith above her worldly considerations. Though it seems clearly correct in hindsight, nobody who faced that decision in 2021-2022 had that knowledge. It was a leap of faith for each of us; one by one we wrestled with our unique facts and circumstances. I remember it well.

During those two bizarro-world years, I often offered advice in C&C about how to draft religious exemption requests that could tiptoe through the tricky HR minefield. For a while, I held twice-daily group Zooms of up to 50 folks at a time —I lost count of how many I did in total— advising them and answering questions in batches. Of my various life regrets, one stings badly: lacking any background in U.S. military code, I could do but little to help our brave servicepeople at the time.

But immediately in January, 2025 —during his first week back into office— President Trump signed Executive Order 14184, which ordered U.S. military leaders to reinstate any jab-separated soldier willing to return. The agencies cooperated with the military precision, enthusiasm, and speed of a geriatric tortoise who just took a Tylenol PM by mistake. “Those of you that have been here,” War Secretary Hegseth said, “know the reinstatement process has not been an easy one, and it’s not been a smooth one.”

Melissa will be reinstated at the rank of brigadier general, and —this is the part that must drive the military’s Branch Covidians crazy— provided “full back pay, credit for missed service time, corrected records, an extended mandatory retirement date, and consideration for promotion to major general.” Truly, she is not bitter; just the opposite. “I am so fired up to be back,” Melissa said. Secretary Hegseth praised her as a courageous warrior of conscience, and said she was “exactly, precisely, the kind of person we want to be bringing back.”

Which leaves open the uncomfortable question of what should happen to the cowardly, inept bureaucratic slaves who forced out courageous warriors of conscience like Gen. Cunningham?

Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, of around 8,700 soldiers who were involuntarily discharged or separated for not taking the jabs, only about 230 have so far accepted the invitation to return, with 600 more expressing interest. General Cunningham encouraged others to follow her example: “We need leaders, those courageous warriors of moral conscience, to return,” she said.

Well, one more leader is now back in post. And another historical mark can be carved onto the twisted covid totem pole, which will become a memorial for future generations.

🔥🔥🔥

Every once in a while, when they think nobody’s paying attention, they tell the truth. Yesterday, ABC-7 Redding reported, “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says the DSA will be a major force in the 2028 election.”

CLIP: Townhall’s undercover reporter fools Gov. Newsom into praising the Democratic Socialists (0:50).

Remember the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax? Corporate media took a comment from one part of Trump’s 2017 speech in the aftermath of the tragedy. They snipped out his explicit condemnation of neo-nazis, and used the stitched-together result to “prove” he called white supremacists “very fine people.” It has now been widely debunked and turned into a laugh line about moronic mass media, but that took years. (Even more ironically, it turns out the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center was the one actually supporting the white supremacists. But never mind, since corporate media has never-minded it.)

The point is, that’s how hard the corporate media worked in 2017 to transform an otherwise unremarkable presidential comment into a literally unbelievable claim —a claim only the most TDS-afflicted victims would possibly believe— that the president of the United States publicly praised shaved-skull neo-nazis. I mean, what the heck. But that’s the rotten garbage media tried selling as fresh, all based on a single twisted sentence.

Here’s just one awful example from the New York Times, 2017:

“President Trump buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations,” the Times gushed, “equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.”

So imagine my surprise as I’ve waited several days to see whether corporate media would pick up Townhall’s undercover video of California’s oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom praising the Democratic Socialists of America. I waited expectantly for the Grey Lady’s headline, “Newsom Gives Radical Socialists an Unequivocal Boost.” After all, this time there was no need to stitch it together from parts of a speech. He said plainly the DSA would be the “mainstream” part of Democrats’ 2028 movement.

Alas. No headlines.

Instead, unlike the faked Charlottesville Trump quote, the corporate media has completely ignored Newsom’s praise for revolutionary socialists who want to close prisons, defund police, delete the Senate, and generally overthrow the U.S.’s constitutional system of government. Sad!

🔥 On Monday, Townhall ran its exposé under the headline, “Gavin Newsom Calls DSA ‘Mainstream Democratic Movement’ Heading Into 2028 Presidential Election.”

On October 17th, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire where Newsom was stumping for congressional candidate Stefany Shaheen, Townhall’s undercover journalist was able to ask the governor some questions one-on-one. “I am a younger voter, and a lot of us, we want to see the Democrat Party move forward,” the undercover journalist said. “We don’t want Kamala Harris. We want, you know, more, I guess, democratic socialist policies. Where do you see the Democratic Party going?”

Newsom didn’t equivocate. He enthusiastically called the DSA energetic and bold and said it was “going to be dominant … going to be a mainstream democratic movement:”

Imagine if the roles had been reversed. Suppose Trump had not just called Nazis “very fine people,” as media falsely claimed, but had actually praised them as “bold, energetic, and going to be mainstream in the Republican Party. Absolutely. No question about it.”

Wait— that’s too much. Just try imagining energetic Nazis. Imagine them goose-stepping so high they keep accidentally kicking themselves in the face.

This goes far beyond “very fine people.” If Trump had said anything about far-right radicals that Newsom just did about far-left radicals, the media would’ve gone more berserk than a whole parade of energetic, goose-stepping Nazis. But for Newsom— crickets. 🦗

Mark my words: they are trying to normalize and mainstream the DSA. Don’t believe me? Consider this hopium-infused Herald-Tribune/USA Today headline, October 26:

“The energy in the room belonged entirely to state Rep. Angie Nixon – a member of the Democratic Socialists of America,” the Herald-Tribune enthused, “now within striking distance of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate.” They praised Nixon’s “syrupy Southern drawl” —Ebonics— and lauded her bookstore, which is named “Cafe Resistance.” (No sane Floridian expects her to come within a hen’s tooth of winning.)

Do not worry. We can and will shut this DSA-normalization down.

Finally, let’s take a moment here to recognize flamboyant James O’Keefe, who single-handedly dug the withered corpse of conservative journalism out of a deep grave and labored alone in the trenches since the dreary Obama days; he pursued the kind of long-lost undercover reporting mainstream journalists seemed to regard as professionally radioactive. (Full disclosure: I represented O’Keefe in the lawsuit from and against Project Veritas’s board.)

However you feel about him, James O’Keefe made history by raising up a new generation of bold and energetic young journalists who understand online hookup culture and how to pull off undercover thirst traps and honeypots. The corporate media has collective amnesia about how to do this.

Just this year, undercover conservatives in O’Keefe’s orbit have gotten DOD employees fired and have exposed actual street-level election fraud. Not to mention the Pfizer exposé, where its gay Director of mRNA R&D admitted genetic manipulation, which prompted Congressional letters and which the pharma shills and their media allies pretend never happened. Meanwhile, O’Keefe battled and survived years of fruitless lawfare and failed criminal prosecutions.

Kudos to Townhall for exposing the Democrats’ stealthy embrace of radical socialism and its reprehensible communist underpinnings— straight from the lips of their leading 2028 presidential contender. Don’t let anyone tell you they aren’t communists. Communism is the only political ideology that must wear camouflage. It has to pretend to offer something else in order to survive.

Now, thanks to Townhall and Governor Hairdo, behold the secrecy at the withered black heart of the Democrat Party and draw your own conclusions.

🔥🔥🔥

Since we’re on the subject of Townhall, a conservative blog-slash-news site, I would also like to recognize its recent, optimistic submission, “Our Worst-Case Scenario Is We Got Rid of a Bunch of Losers.”

“I don’t know how the midterm elections will turn out,” columnist Kurt Schlichter began. “I think Republicans will do better than expected, but who knows?” Then he got to the bright side. “Yet there’s one thing I’m entirely sure of. This election cycle has, at least, allowed us Republicans to rid ourselves of some of the biggest hacks any political party has ever had the misfortune to be saddled with.”

He listed them: “When this is over, we will be rid of that fraud Thomas Massie, the insipid Thom Tillis, the tiresome Bill Cassidy, and the Kinzingeresque Ukrainian fetishizer Don Bacon. Also past his sell-by date is that Bushesque phony John Cornyn, whose absolutely disgraceful post-primary defeat conduct has utterly vindicated the Texas Republicans who rejected him, whether Ken Paxton beats the blasphemous homunculus or not.”

This, my friends, is the way. Not pessimism, which enervates and depletes our will to resist. Optimism is the answer. And Kurt is right. Even if Republicans lose the House —which I am confident is not at all certain— it will not be the end of the world. It will be painful, to be sure, and constantly annoying, but it will not stop the show.

It might actually be devastating for Democrats to take the House. Does that sound surprising? It’s simple. They’ve hyped their base’s expectations to a fever pitch. The base expects impeachments, January 6th-style roundups and hearings, Trump family arrests, re-opened borders, ICE shut down, a trans free-for-all, the East Wing construction demolished, and everything bad from Trump 2.0 to come undone.

Consider this Rasmussen headline from just last month:

They think it will be like when Democrats took the House in 2018, when the Russiagate free-for-all stepped into high gear. But that will never ever happen, and their crushing disappointment will provoke a wild backlash that could shred Democrats’ 2028 aspirations into confetti.

Be careful what you wish for.

This is not difficult to understand, except for the special-ed brigades in corporate media. 2027’s landscape looks nothing like 2018, when it happened the last time. Why not? For one thing, the Deep State has been castrated, neutered, and emasculated. Not just the capital-D Deep State, but also the bigger army of permanent bureaucrats in the hashtag-Resistance that populated Trump 1.0’s agencies like the Department of Justice.

Through what can only be described as a political miracle, the hashtag-Resistance is a remnant, a largely spent force. Oh, it’s still there, as the military’s slow-walk of restoration proves. Nearly 400,000 federal employees have been shown the door, bought out, or retired out. The federal workforce has shrunk an eye-watering 12%, approaching something close to pre-Obama levels.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have allowed the President to fire commissioners and boards that, during Trump 1.0, openly worked against him. He now has Schedule F, which lets him fast-track firings of federal workers involved in policy matters. He’s closed entire agencies like USAID, shuttered “independent” outfits like the badly named Institute for Peace, gutted groups like the DOJ’s equally badly named “Public Integrity Group,” and left whole committees unassigned, like the CDC’s vaccine review group.

In less than two years, the Chief Executive has gained firm control of the Executive Branch, which the Democrats need to give life to their wild fantasies of prosecutions, lawfare, and impeachment.

In 2019 Democrats had Mueller, the inspectors general, and a CIA whistleblower with a hall pass. In 2027 they’ll have a subpoena, a stamp, and a DOJ that mails it back marked ‘return to sender.’ Eighty-one percent of the Democratic base believes Trump committed impeachable offenses. But convicting him takes 67 senators. The forecasts give Democrats 51 or 52, in their best-case scenario. They won’t get any help from the GOP. Nearly all the never-Trumpers will have been purged by January, which was Kurt’s point.

DataRepublican’s recent exposés show us the deep state is no longer working in the building. They won’t get back in, not even if Democrats win the House.

The lack of Deep State support is not the Democrats’ only problem. They are all under the microscope, and DOJ prosecutors are peering through the eyehole.

🔥 The prosecutorial pressure has already forced out a bunch of Democrats, like Minnesota’s Tim Walz, who we should never forget was their 2024 vice-presidential hopeful. You know about Ilhan Omar’s legal troubles. And, of course, Fang-Fang banging Eric Swalwell, who in April dropped out of both Congress and the California gubernatorial race to replace Gavin Newsom— while Swalwell was leading.

Which brings us to our last and most wonderful story of the morning. Yesterday, the California Globe reported, “FBI Raids Billionaire’s Beverly Hills Mansion in Connection With Eric Swalwell Case.” Oh frabjous day! Take that, black-pillers. The arrests will continue until morale improves.

Yesterday, the FBI searched the Beverly Hills mansion of billionaire Stephen Cloobeck, a major donor to Swalwell’s gubernatorial and congressional campaigns. “I am no longer associated with a man that takes advantage of women,” Cloobeck told the New York Post. “I support women’s rights.” (His helpfulness might be explained by the fact that Cloobeck was arrested in May with witness intimidation in “an unrelated case” of his own unsavory “Me Too” scandal.)

By resigning from Congress and pulling out of the Governor’s race, Swalwell probably hoped he’d fall off DOJ’s radar. Nope. In August, federal agents seized “electronic devices” (his phone and tablet) from Swalwell at the San Francisco airport and searched his Washington home. Now this.

Every House Democrat thinking of climbing on to a lazy-Susan of new impeachments will need to weigh whether they have anything to hide, any Me Too scandals, any excessive covid loans, any mortgage fraud, foreign donations, Russiagate involvement, or any dirty-work-at-the-crossroads of any kind or description. The gloves are off.

So even if the Democrats’ blue trickle appears and they snag a bare majority in the House, don’t expect anything like the wild excesses of 2018-2020. If that happens, and they are limited to performative antics —not anything meaningful to stop Trump— expect the Democrat base to be furious, a fury rocket-fueled by DSA angst.

Don’t misunderstand me. It would be far better to keep the House and the Senate and avoid whatever mischief they can manage to get up to even without a deep state and under intense DOJ scrutiny. That’s why it is so important to go vote. There’s only about a week left, and time is getting short. Do it today.

Turnout is all we need to win.

Even though losing won’t even be close to fatal, an hour or two invested today or during the next few days means avoiding months of aggravation. And we might even get another terrific package like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which you can forget about if the Democrats take the House. Either way, it’s worth taking the time to grab a pumpkin spice latte and pull the lever.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Return here tomorrow for your daily dose of essential news and caffeinated commentary. It’s all a body needs.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

An armed invasion is underway a few hundred miles off Florida’s coast— right on the cruise ship itinerary. Corporate media is reporting this astonishing story with the same delicate enthusiasm they normally reserve for illegal alien rapists and transgender shooters. Their problem is that a lot of dramatic stuff is happening, but the rules require them to avoid reporting anything that even hints Haiti is an “s-hole country,” because that might make people think the Orange Man was right, and of course, because racism. Yesterday, the Miami Herald reported, “El Salvador continues to deploy soldiers, equipment to Haiti as gangs threaten violence.”

It’s fair to be mystified by that Miami Herald headline, since it tells us nothing and you probably haven’t heard much about this amazing tale. The Times has sprinkled a few Haiti stories deep in its interior, a region seen only by retired New Yorkers in Boca condos who masochistically read the awful rag cover to cover.

This underreporting is not because Haiti and El Salvador are distant lands with which scrolling-addicted Americans can’t be bothered. Contrast this tepid reporting with the Grey Lady’s enthralled Brazil election coverage, for one recent example.

Alert readers may recall how progressives lost their minds when, in January 2018, President Trump reportedly asked, in a private, closed-door immigration meeting, why America takes so many people from “sh-thole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations. It was a perfectly reasonable question, even if unsuitable for the Cartoon Network. (Oh, wait. Never mind.)

Though Trump and two GOP senators didn’t recall his saying it, Dick Durbin swore he heard it (and was happy to repeat it), and that was good enough for corporate media to run months of overheated stories about the president’s dangerous xenophobia.

Predictably, Hollywood horned in. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Bill Maher rushed to social media sporting their supportive T-shirts that bragged, “Haiti is Great Already.” Conan O’Brien packed a camera crew and flew to Port-au-Prince to film a one-hour TBS special. Arcade Fire’s Win Butler assured Rolling Stone that Haiti was “one of the most special and amazing places I’ve been on this earth.” Ben Stiller praised the “dignified, resilient and wonderful Haitian people.”

Eight years later, Conan hasn’t booked the sequel.

The UN says violent gangs now control about 70% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Some 1.5 million Haitians have fled their homes, and nearly six million don’t have reliable food. Between July and October of this year, gangs murdered 1,123 people. In July and August, 689 women and girls reported being raped by gangs, most of them by groups of men. (That’s just the reported figures. But the Times has been obsessed with one quasi-consensual drug-fueled frat party encounter. Whatever. Thanks, Times, for keeping us informed.)

On a single day in August, in the hillside town of Kenscoff, gangs slew at least 47 people and dragged off 52 more as hostages. In December 2024, a gang boss who human rights groups call “a devout Voodoo practitioner” decided his son’s illness was caused by sorcerers and witches. So, understandably, his men executed at least 207 people in the Wharf Jérémie slum, mostly elderly Haitians accused of practicing Voodoo, then burned or dismembered the bodies and dumped them into the sea. (The ghastly details were clinically recorded in a UN report.)

The gang boss might actually have been right to worry about the voodoo. Actual headline from the LA Times, May, 2024— seven months before the atrocity:

Media fact-checkers insist that widespread rumors of gang-initiated cannibalism were “without evidence.” (Who’s volunteering to go get it?) Then again, the country’s most infamous gang leader goes by the nom de guerre, “Barbecue.” (He swears it’s because his mother sold fried chicken. I am not making that up.)

Haiti may or may not be an s-hole country, but it is undoubtedly a failed state. It has no elected president, no parliament, and indefinitely postponed elections. Its economy has shrunk seven years in a row. Even Royal Caribbean has given up. For years it docked megaships at Labadee, its private beach on Haiti’s north coast, behind walls topped with razor wire, guarded by men with shotguns, and laughably described it in excursion offers as “Hispaniola” so nobody would notice which half of the island they’d landed on.

Now the cruiser has suspended calls through at least June 2027, “out of an abundance of caution,” which is cruise-line patois for “the guests kept asking what those popping sounds were.” When a company that will happily sail you into a Norovirus outbreak won’t stop at your country, you have a branding problem.

Royal’s marketing brochure for its Haitian private retreat excursion included —how could I make this up— visits to “Adrenaline Beach.” It featured the “Dragon’s Breath” zipline, which lets you fly over Haiti at 50 miles an hour. That’s still the recommended best way to see the country, except now the State Department recommends traveling faster and a lot higher up.

Which brings us to this week’s dramatic news. The official story goes that last week, four Salvadoran aviation techs ran out for groceries and disappeared into a gang ambush. El Salvador’s gang-fighting president Nayib Bukele allegedly said no mas. US C-130s landed 450 Salvadoran special forces on Conan’s beach. Some X reports suggest they are engaged in fierce firefights with technically advanced weapons against thousands of gang members. A UN “gang suppression” force of 5,500 more is en route.

But this wild story started the moment President Trump returned to office last year. The payoff is incredible.

🔥 President Trump never forgets. With apologies to Hollywood celebrities and voodoo witches, s-hole countries are no longer allowed in the Western Hemisphere. (Reader quiz! Who would you prefer babysit your kids: Hollywood celebrities or voodoo sorcerers?)

Sure, it didn’t look like much at first. On May 2, 2025, the State Department unceremoniously designated Haiti’s two biggest gangs, Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif, as foreign terrorist organizations. That’s the same legal category as ISIS, which is a big promotion for guys who, according to the media, mostly specialize in blocking roads and setting them on fire. A month later, Haiti landed on Trump’s travel-ban list.

This time, bewitched Hollywood celebrities did not organize any protests. No “Haiti is Great Already” T-shirts.

Then, on September 30, 2025, the United States co-wrote a UN Security Council resolution creating something called the “Gang Suppression Force,” a name that sounds like an OG Saturday-morning cartoon but is in fact an international army. The Security Council’s vote was basically unanimous, 12 to 0, with China, Russia and Pakistan abstaining, which is diplomatic code for “we’d love to say no but can’t think of a reason.”

Washington then became chair of the group steering the GSF force and, per a State Department report to Congress, raised $100 million in “voluntary contributions” to pay for it. Other people’s money. The stated goal, in writing, was “to prevent the establishment of a narco-state and illegal mass migration to the United States.” So nobody was hiding the ball. They just didn’t draw reporters a picture with crayons, which is pretty much the same thing as making it invisible.

The stackes grew more serious as we approached 2026. In December, the White House had already added its “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which is like the original Monroe Doctrine except that this time we really mean it. On January 3rd, US forces snatched Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and Trump announced that “ Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

On January 25th, State slapped visa bans on members of Haiti’s unelected ruling council “for supporting gangs and other criminal organizations,” which is a sentence you would not expect to read about a sovereign government. On February 3rd, a US Navy destroyer and two Coast Guard cutters parked in Port-au-Prince Bay, “at the direction of the Secretary of War,” which in hemispheric etiquette is the equivalent of pulling into someone’s driveway, leaving the engine running, and watching them from the car.

Four days later, the unelected council’s mandate suddenly “expired,” and the US immediately backed Prime Minister Fils-Aimé as Haiti’s sole leader.

🔥 In March, the pieces started snapping together. At Trump’s Doral resort, a dozen Latin American leaders signed up for the “Shield of the Americas,” a counter-cartel coalition. (Also a good name for a cartoon hero squad.) Trump said, “Just as we formed a coalition to eradicate ISIS in the Middle East, we now need a coalition to eradicate the cartels at home.” Ironically, one of the Shield’s founding members was El Salvador, the very same country Trump had reportedly once lumped in with Haiti in 2018. (Haiti wasn’t invited.)

The new envoy for the Shield was Kristi Noem, freshly relocated from running Homeland Security, who in April met Haiti’s prime minister to discuss “security and credible elections.” As DHS secretary, Noem had signed the order ending Haiti’s protected immigration status. Talk about range.

In August, Southern Command stood up a joint task force to “synchronize U.S. military operations with allies and partners” across the Western Hemisphere. And on September 22nd, fifteen governments signed a joint statement listing 24 “narco-terrorist” groups for asset freezes and visa bans— numbers 9 and 10 on the list were Gran Grif and Viv Ansanm, the same Haitian gangs Trump had declared as foreign terrorist organizations.

🔥 So when four Salvadoran airmen vanished on a grocery run on October 18, the machinery was already oiled. The day after the incident, Trump’s UN ambassador, Mike Waltz, told the Security Council that “America stands shoulder to shoulder” with El Salvador. “We will bring you home,” Waltz added. Within a week, a Pentagon C-130 was flying Salvadoran troops into Port-au-Prince “at the request of the U.S. State Department.” Did Washington order the surge? Nobody on the record says so.

The Miami Herald’s sources say US officials spent the week negotiating with Bukele over his insistence on sending special forces, which raises the delightful question of who’s walking whom. But you don’t need a secret memo to see the outline. You just need a calendar.

On October 21st, El Salvador dispatched 450 special forces to Haiti to fight gangs. They were delivered in an American C-130 transport plane.

The conflict could be framed as biblical. “Haiti’s gangs are satanic, and it’s common knowledge they perform human sacrifices,” President Bukele tweeted four days ago. “God will grant us victory,” he promised.

That should have been the headline.

🔥 Regardless of whether the four Salvadoran technicians were a pretext or not, one thing is clear: President Bukele is not going into Haiti alone. Not even close. UN Ambassador Mike Waltz said El Salvador has “the full support of the U.S. government,” including the US military and Foggy Bottom. This is what, in the latest wild display of journalistic malpractice, the corporate media is studiously ignoring.

Here’s the dot that nobody in media is connecting. In March 2024, long before any technicians were kidnapped, President Bukele offered to solve Haiti, with conditions. “We can fix it,” he said. “But we’ll need a UNSC resolution, the consent of the host country, and all the mission expenses to be covered.” Got that? Now check the list.

A UN Security Council resolution: done, co-written by the United States in September 2025. Consent of the host country: Haiti’s sole remaining leader is a prime minister Washington backed when his council’s mandate ran out. All expenses covered: the State Department lined up about $100 million in other people’s money. Bukele submitted a bid two years ago, and the US found the cash. Think this is a coincidence? Maybe. But it’s the kind of coincidence that comes with a C-130 and warships parked off Port-au-Prince.

Look at what the money bought. The last Haiti mission, a limp Kenyan-led one, staggered along underfunded and undermanned, and the gangs just got stronger. State’s own report said the new force “was intentionally designed to fix each of these flaws while substantially decreasing the financial burden on the United States.”

Translation: America draws the plans, chairs the meetings, flies the planes and passes the hat, and somebody else’s soldiers kick in the doors. It’s the hemisphere’s first franchise model of foreign policy. Washington owns the brand, and the local operators supply the muscle.

That’s the Donroe Doctrine in one picture. In the old Monroe Doctrine, America told Europe to keep out of the neighborhood. In the new one, America organizes the neighborhood watch, and the neighbors walk the beat.

🔥 Speaking of neighbors, the Dominican Republic already had about 11,000 troops on its Haitian border, and on Sunday President Luis Abinader sent two more battalions, plus heavy equipment and artillery. He says he’s in “permanent session,” talking with Bukele and with the Gang Suppression Force.

Consider this: the Dominican Republic is a founding member of Trump’s Shield of the Americas group. Kristi Noem met with Dominican President Abinader on March 22nd, shortly after meeting with President Bukele on March 5th. Just saying.

Here are President Bukele and President Abinader standing together beside President Trump at the signing of the Shield of the Americas agreement earlier this year:

Venezuela got the hard version. Haiti is getting the outsourced version, run by a president who made his name emptying El Salvador’s streets of MS-13 and who now promises Haiti’s gangs, in Creole, “We already finished the gangs in El Salvador, and we can finish you too.”

The same policy also explains the part progressives find so confusing. The administration that ended Haitians’ protected status and put Haiti on the travel-ban list is the same one organizing an army to rescue Haiti. It’s not a contradiction; it’s a strategy. The State Department summarized the goal in a single sentence that even a Times reporter could have understood: prevent “a narco-state and illegal mass migration to the United States.”

In other words: fix Haiti so Haitians can stay in Haiti. You can call it xenophobia, but you can’t call it hidden. It’s right on the State Department’s website, and in its report to Congress.

So the real story —the story corporate media isn’t interested in— is not the four kidnapped Salvadoran techs, as sad as that is. It’s that a world-realigning doctrine that started in an unremarkable State Department Terrorist Designation in May 2025 now has a coalition, a task force, a target list, a UN force, a paymaster, and, as of this week, boots on the ground that aren’t American. No new wars.

Corporate media has every dot: the ambush, the C-130, the troops, the “Shield of the Americas,” the $100 million “voluntary” war chest, and all the official records. What it hasn’t done is connect them in the same article.

Either the zombified reporters can’t see the pattern or, more likely, they’d rather avoid explaining why the Donroe Doctrine looks like it’s working. Call it journalistic voodoo.

🔥🔥🔥

And finally, more good news for the “when will anyone be arrested” people. Former FBI Director James Comey, the Russiagate mastermind who enjoyed leaking memos to the New York Times, has been charged with leaking to the New York Times. Again! It’s his third criminal prosecution, and the drip-drip-drip is starting to sound like Chinese water torture, except with extra-hot espresso drops.

Monday, a federal court unsealed a two-count charge under the Espionage Act accusing Comey of transmitting national defense information and conspiracy. The alleged secret was a 2016 Times story about Yahoo adapting its spam filter to help the government scan emails. So Comey’s legacy may come down to an Espionage Act case about a spam filter, which is like doing hard time over a junk-mail folder.

Even the timing is a drip. Prosecutors filed the charge under seal on October 5th, exactly ten years after the Times story ran, which is the last day before the statute of limitations ran out. Comey’s lawyers argued the ten-year deadline required a grand-jury indictment, not a prosecutor’s filing, and they’ve already moved to dismiss.

DOJ tweeted that filing a criminal information to stop the clock is “a widely recognized practice in federal court” that “has been approved by multiple Circuit Courts of Appeals.” Comey’s lawyers say a prosecutor can’t beat a ten-year deadline just by slipping a document into a sealed envelope without a grand jury. Translation: the clock may have stopped, but the dripping hasn’t.

Here’s the scorecard. The first case, for obstruction and lying to Congress, was tossed last November because the prosecutor who brought it had been ‘improperly appointed.’ The second, in North Carolina, over his “86 47” seashell photo, is still pending. Now there’s a third. “Well, they’re back — again,” Comey complained in a social media video yesterday. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse.”

He’s half right. It’s not almost funny. It’s too funny for words.

One more thing, in fairness: also yesterday, a federal judge ruled that DOJ had fired Comey’s federal prosecutor daughter, Maurene, unlawfully, since Congress protected assistant US attorneys. Judge Furman said DOJ’s theory of presidential power “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.”

So the Comey crime family went one for two on Monday. But appeals will follow. Maurene’s problem is that this Supreme Court has spent the last two years explaining in multiple cases that the Constitution puts the executive branch under the President, not Congress, and an assistant U.S. attorney is about as executive branch as it gets.

Drip!

Have a terrific Tuesday! We’ll be back tomorrow with more weird, wild, essential news and a full serving of caffeinated commentary. See you then.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📉📉📉

Sometimes the most important news is what the corporate media isn’t covering. The “critical” midterm elections are now eight days away. But this morning, the New York Times’ website was dominated —a full quarter of the top of the page— by a suite of election news and interactive graphics about Brazil’s elections. As its top entry in an extended list, the Grey Lady reported, “Lula Defeats Bolsonaro for Brazil Presidency, in Blow to Latin America’s Right.”

I get it; the New York Times is feeling fizzy on hopium because this must seem like some kind of commie turnaround. Progressives have been mourning a long series of left-wing losses in Central and South America, and a win for “Brazil’s progressive president” and “most influential statesman” must be welcome news for them, even though it’s just one (albeit large) country, and even though on every conservative platform the big election news from Brazil is about the last-minute Supreme Court interference there, which may have swung the election for the leftist leader.

As ever, corporate media is flocking together. Here’s the morning headline from the Washington Post, with the same over-the-top, gushing enthusiasm— and a nearly identical headline:

But at least the WaPo, at the tail of its subheadline, referenced the controversy when it admitted that “Bolsonaro called for the election to be annulled.” Late last night, candidate Flávio Bolsonaro told reporters in Brasília, “It is impossible to recognize the election results given the circumstances under which things unfolded. We’re not here to play games.” (And I don’t think he meant the World Cup.)

This story is more convoluted than a Mexican telenovela. The conservative candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was himself defeated in a sketchy election in 2022 and then tossed in jail by his dwarf-like successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. For his part, da Silva is the incumbent, has served something like four terms now, and plays a kooky Latin American communist on TV but has a thick capitalist streak when it comes to his personal finances.

It is inarguable that da Silva looks just like a sinister garden gnome who lost his hat. Corporate media lovingly calls him “Lula.” Which is a girl’s name, but never mind.

But be cautious; we are just entering the hot-takes phase. The elections finished mere hours ago. There is no reason to think anyone yet has reliable or meaningful information from Brazil about yesterday’s election— except, of course, we know that a country of 214 million people managed to finish counting its votes overnight. Unlike California. (What are you doing, California?)

The vacuum of reportable information means there’s not much point yet in analyzing anything. This is an unassailable fact that obviously did not stop the Times and the Washington Post from drawing massive political conclusions. “The result,” the WaPo article confidently announced, “showed voters in Brazil, Latin America’s largest democracy, declining to join the region’s marked rightward shift in which a wave of conservative candidates won office and built alliances with Trump.”

A Lula victory was not widely expected. One Bloomberg headline yesterday used the word “improbable,” which is the closest that magazine will ever get to calling a leftist election fake.

As near as anybody can figure out, three minutes before polls closed at 5 pm Brazil time —while Bolsonaro was leading— a Supreme Court judge (who is reportedly Lula’s former personal lawyer) issued an order keeping the polls open because of “transportation issues,” which could have described a Waymo getting stuck in a puddle somewhere. Some local media reports described detailed problems with São Paulo buses that either failed to pick up voters or did not show up in sufficient numbers. Who knows. Unhelpfully, late in the afternoon (while he was losing), Lula babbled, “We will not allow robbery, banditry and bandit mayors.”

Bandit mayors? Nobody’s sure exactly what he meant. It’s something he imagined about a local mayor suppressing buses in one city someplace.

But the apparent result of the Supreme Court’s order was —and this is far from clear— that, with inconsistent notice of the order in that critical three minutes, Bolsonaro districts closed, while Lula districts stayed open for two more hours, and a communist rabbit popped out of the gnome’s hat. Abracadabra!

Regardless of what happened on the ground, nothing says Election Integrity like the previous personal lawyer of the losing candidate suddenly changing the election rules at the last minute.

📉 In other words, welcome back to our dear old friend: election-day chaos. Yesterday’s headline from the South China Morning Post:

Obviously, Bolsonaro supporters smell a giant rat that looks like a magical lawn ornament. And who can blame them? Sources variously reported things like: Brazil’s Supreme Court had never issued such an order before; Brazil has a special Elections Court with sole jurisdiction and the Supreme Court never should have been involved; and of course, everyone is jumping up and down and pointing at the direct personal relationship between President Lula and the Supreme Court judge who issued the order. Who, it should be added, Lula appointed.

This is all perfectly fascinating. It rhymes with our own 2020 election. As I said, it would make a gripping telenovela. Next week: the generalissimo takes his revenge! But we have our own elections in eight days, lots and lots of them, with what they confidently assure us (as always) are the highest stakes in human history.

Yet the Times devoted most of the viewable area on its home page to Brazil’s fake election story. Not ours. Why?

📉 Glance back at the screenshot of the multi-story treatment the Times lavished on this morning’s Brazil election story. You should immediately notice that not one of its many articles leads with the stolen election chaos. (You have to dig into the stories to find any reference to that somewhat important fact.) Times readers —who must be the most uninformed group in the world— will confidently assume everything went swimmingly and wonder why the younger Bolsonaro stubbornly refuses to concede.

As for me, I am unsurprised. This is not news. Lula got into office in a sketchy election, and then threw the elder Bolsonaro into prison in a purge just like the Democrats tried to do here. Lula has been in office —in control of the election infrastructure— for four years. Why anyone expected this year to be different is beyond my ability to understand.

If anything, Brazil’s conservatives crushed it by getting so close the communists had to whip the old “extend the elections” out of the bag of tricks at the last minute. Now they must sit down for dinner and begin eating fallout stew. I expect Secretary of State Marco Rubio will have a lot to say about all this, once the facts are better understood.

Setting all those unknowables aside, there remains a solid media malpractice story. The Times is so high on its Brazilian “blue wave” narrative that it is trying to shrink the “stolen election” story down into a “sore loser” story. The media shenanigans are a good story, but there’s a better one, one closer to home.

The real story is why The Times is suddenly so fascinated with talking about other countries’ elections.

📉 Obviously, the Times isn’t saying why it prefers talking about Brazil’s elections and not our own. But we can draw some safe assumptions. And the biggest one is that, if the Democrat Blue Wave were playing out the way the Times has been predicting since last fall, we can assume we’d be hearing all about that.

The polling stories that, until recently, decorated the Times’ home page like Target holiday accessories are now in a funk and a depression, mired in a gloomy Eeyore moment. On the entire Times home page, only a single sidebar story included the word “poll.” Eight days out! And even that was an op-ed titled, “Opinion — Is a Blue Wave Coming? 6 Pollsters and Pundits Offer Their Best Guesses.”

Best guesses! My goodness! Where did the Democrats’ confidence go? It’s a bad sign when the headline doesn’t ask how big the wave will be, but rather asks, “is a blue wave coming?” To be fair, all six pundits predicted a Democrat pickup of either the House or Senate. But not fulsomely. New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon offered, “I’ll go with the heart and predict a solid Democratic win — but not an epic blowout.”

Ruh roh.

When asked to opine about the current state of the polls, which still claim a Blue Tsunami, the six got even more cautious. “What polls offer is perspective, not prophecy. They have taken us as far as they can,” Equis Research founder Carlos Odio carefully explained. “I believe the polls are broadly correct,” election newsletter author Charlotte Swasey hedged, but added, “I’m expecting the polls to be slightly too optimistic for Democrats.”

“I could absolutely see the polls being wrong again,” mega-forecaster Nate Silver conceded outright, “especially in the Midwest, where they have overestimated Democrats in the past.” That is one way of putting it.

Given the dramatic implosion of three or even four fake polling firms (depending on how you define ‘fake’) within the last 60 days, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Times and its op-editors were not offering full-throated endorsements. (If you missed those stories, check the last couple C&C editions.)

📉 Now for the Coffee & Covid forecast. The truth is that nobody knows. Weekend scrollers will have seen even reliable conservative influencers express concern and, at times, pessimism. Democrats almost always lead in early voting, and this is a midterm election, after all. Concern and pessimism are unwarranted at this point.

I offer you a much simpler model. We’ll call it Espresso. In the Espresso model, Democrats start with a caffeinated ten-point advantage, since the out-of-power party consistently —but not always— picks up at least one chamber in midterm elections. The reason is not occult. Unlike presidential cycles, midterms are low-turnout elections, which gives angry partisans a major advantage. That’s it.

So Espresso begins as follows: Democrats +10 shots of Brazilian coffee, GOP 0.

Now we begin deducting shots of espresso due to the Democrat polycrisis. We won’t even try to weigh the issues. We’ll just lop one shotglass off for each problem.

Democrats, -1 shot: the money disadvantage. ActBlue is under criminal scrutiny. USAID is gone. Mega-fundraiser Southern Poverty Law Center is under indictment. The GOP has eight times DNC’s cash on hand. Money isn’t everything, but it obviously counts.

Democrats, -1 shot: the socialist infection. DSA candidates are proving just as toxic as everyone thought they would. In Michigan, for example, Democrats are even defecting from the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed and some —the “Democrats for Rogers”— are even voting for the Republican’s senatorial candidate, Mike Rogers. Headline from Deadline Detroit, October 18th:

Democrats, -1 shot: Trump’s GOTV strategy. The GOP is doing everything it can to treat this like a presidential cycle. It held a midterm convention (a GOP first). Trump is holding a month of daily rallies. Media has sneered that the numbers of MAGA voters are too small to make a difference, but this underestimates the power of motivated groups in low-turnout scenarios.

Democrats, -1 shot: Despite Democrats’ best efforts with their black pill brigades, early signs of depressed Republican turnout are not appearing. Republicans have overtaken Democrats in Texas and are closing fast in Florida. (Note: Texas doesn’t track party registrations, so these are modeled estimates. But still.)

In Florida, Democrats led by +54,739 (including mailed ballots) as of Thursday, but that lead shrank to around 6,000 as of this morning. Republicans are surging in in-person voting. WLT Report, four days ago:

Democrats, -1 shot: Their brain-damaged “brand.” The Democrats’ brand problem is so bad that its candidates have been running against their own party. That is an understandable self-preservation instinct, but it ironically makes the branding problem even worse. Headline from Axios, September 25:

It hasn’t gotten any better since late September.

Democrats, -1 shot: the polling implosion. Democrats’ top strategy is polling, but thanks to an untreatable rash of fake polling company stories, the entire strategy has been rendered useless, to the point that major pollsters who make their living are now saying they ‘could absolutely see the polls being wrong again.’

I could continue, but let’s not beat a dead donkey. Quickly, as a few more examples, additional shots were deducted as follows:

• -1 for the Republican redistricting advantage.

• -1 for mass deportations.

• -1 for the election crimes enforcement surge.

• -1 for the federal poll watchers dispatched to problematic districts.

• -1 for GOP/DOJ proactive lawfare, such as in California and Alaska.

Altogether, the C&C Espresso model deducted -11 shots from Democrats in total, leaving them at negative one compared to the GOP baseline. Not espresso. Decaf.

Here’s the thing: none of the polycrisis factors included in the Espresso model are a normal part of anyone else’s midterm analysis. This is not a “normal” midterm election. We are off the map and the in-car GPS is on the fritz.

Predictions might be social media catnip, but they aren’t actually predicting anything. (Including, for the record, mine.)

Eight days out, the game remains anyone’s to win. It all depends on sustained Republican turnout. GO VOTE. Encourage your friends and relatives to get to the polling booth. Give them a voting guide. Offer to drive. Bake them fancy cupcakes with too much icing. Use your masculine or feminine wiles, as appropriate. Vote early. Vote often.

We have this. Let’s roll.

Have a magnificent Monday! Come back here tomorrow morning, when we’ll cover the badly ignored story of the dramatic events in Haiti. You won’t want to miss it. Plus even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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📈📈📈

The polling industry is either shattering apart or a long-hidden problem is being exposed. We aren’t sure yet. Though corporate media knows all about it —even the New York Times scrambled this week to repair its polling systems— readers were hard-pressed to find much coverage. But exceptions appeared. On Thursday, local ABC-13 Asheville reported, “Polling firm disappears amid media questioning surveys, employees.” A new one.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that we want polling companies to be transparent, unbiased, and, whenever we need backup data from them, to immediately disappear in a puff of smoke.

Before we talk about fake polls again, let’s make one thing clear: the stakes. By now, we all know that the worst crime ever to appear in the dark catalog of human malfeasance is election interference. Worst of all, this crime is so easy. You can practically do it without even knowing.

Believe it or not, a single fake Instagram can threaten to overthrow the foundations of democracy, even if only three people see it and two of them were high. Just ask the Russians, whom Democrats have basically convicted of election interference for nothing beyond some TikToks and Facebook posts.

In 2019, former president Jimmy Carter (probably intoxicated from peanut oil fumes) even called Trump an illegitimate president because of Russian social media posts. Headline from CNN:

But what about polls? Polls are far more influential than TikToks. They thunder through corporate media’s echo chamber. Polls grow charts on television like weeds sprouting in a garden. Polls cause donors to give more generously or to withdraw their support. Polls create or erode momentum. Polls increase or suppress turnout.

Polls are intended to persuade voters.

If a fake poll reported by the New York Times actually makes a leading candidate drop out of a Senate primary— isn’t that the worst kind of election interference? If not, then what is?

So you would think fake polls should alarm corporate media, since they represent a clear and present danger to democracy, a threat of the first order and the most immediate and dangerous kind of election interference imaginable?

But nah.

📈 On Thursday, polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne —the same outfit that torpedoed Wedgewood Polls earlier this week— announced it had received an anonymous tip raising questions about another sketchy polling provider— this one called SoCal Strategies. After FiftyPlusOne’s suspicions were aroused, it emailed SoCal a few basic questions.

SoCal went dark.

Twenty-four hours later, SoCal’s website was taken down, its X account closed, and its email accounts went offline. Bye, suckers!

When FiftyPlusOne, trying to figure out how to contact the owner, pulled up SoCal’s Florida business registration, the investigation found that SoCal had told the State of Florida it was out of business in May— even though it kept producing polls through October. They also noticed a bizarre note on SoCal’s Division of Corporations entry, which sounded less like a business status and more like a hostage note:

Normally, when business owners tell the State of Florida they are closing a company, one of the prompts is “describe the occurrence that resulted in the limited liability company’s dissolution.” Whoever closed SoCal wrote (in all caps), “ITS TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.”

Yikes.

But even though it dissolved itself in May, SoCal mysteriously kept submitting polls to newspapers and aggregators— well past “TIME TO END.” Now, suddenly, it is just as mysteriously gone, flown by night. As regular readers will recall, this makes two polling implosions in one week, and three in the last two months.

On Wednesday, the Times reported the Wedgewood story: “Discovery of New Fake Polls Puts a Spotlight on Trust in Surveys.” You don’t say. (It has not yet reported the SoCal story.) This provided the President of the United States a chance to chime in, and he took the obvious jab at the Times.

📉 Corporate media is flummoxed. It has no idea what to make of all this. One laughable entry appeared in yesterday’s USA Today, which reported, “Fake polls: Should America be worried about survey integrity?” (What do I always tell you about headlines that pose questions? Don’t hold your breath for an answer.)

You’ll love this— USA Today, an integral cog in the most pessimistic media machine in human history, found a silver lining. It repeated those words three times in the story, including in a section header. Here’s the quote from its optimistic expert:

You have to admire this heroic effort to find the bright side. “Paradoxically” —terrific!— “the more fraud is prevalent, the more people are realizing the value of the scientific method.” Haha! It was like saying that, paradoxically, the more useless counterfeit $100s the ATM spits out, the more people realize the value of the banking system.

When it comes to the economy, Iran, Trump, germs, AI —you name it— the media is more consistently pessimistic than that depressed donkey who followed Winnie the Pooh around. But when it comes to undeniable proof of widespread fake news spread around by corporate media like toxic peanut butter, poisonous fake polls undermining elections and democracy itself— well, look at the silver lining! Paradoxically!

They’re still doing it! On Thursday, MS NOW reported a +11 point “blue wave” for Democrats based on a New York Times poll:

There’s a compelling theory floating around that all these fake pollsters are winking out right before it’s time to pay the piper, when the midterm results once again fail to show the Democrats’ blue wave and a bunch of disappointed Polymarket bettors are looking for someone to blame. I can’t say one way or the other, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it?

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday I promised more October arrest stories, and I intend to deliver. We’ll shift to arrests of mostly (but not all) Democrats who, unlike yesterday’s crop, are not elected officials. We’ll start with what was arguably the best news: the deep staters. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden laptop inquiry.”

Yesterday, the DOJ “charged two former FBI officials with making false statements to Congress,” WaPo reported, “that allegedly hindered a House committee as it was investigating President Biden’s son Hunter.” The pair aren’t just any old random FBI officials. Nikki Floris led the intelligence division in the FBI’s Washington field office. Bradley Benavides was the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence.

Deep state termites.

Floris and Benavides were released on Friday morning after self-surrendering in lieu of arrest and making their initial appearance before a federal magistrate. They each face up to five years for lying to Congress.

The DOJ has been doing a lot of work, a surprising new development that many of us believed was only possible when tracking down January 6th tourists. It filed a 27-page statement of facts against the two former FBI officials. It was damning. It carefully listed statements from their sworn congressional testimony right next to source documents where they said the exact opposite.

For instance, Floris told House investigators in 2023 she’d never seen a Grassley-Johnson report about Hunter’s laptop. But over two years earlier, she’d emailed that report to Benavides under the subject “Ukraine report,” with the note “Just dropped this am.” She also attached a summary of the alleged $7 million Burisma bribe she later said she knew nothing about.

In a separate declassified September 2020 chat, Floris wrote, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.” Around then, she helped kill an FBI Albany report about China making fake driver’s licenses for Biden mail-in votes. Her reason for squashing the report: it “will contradict Director Wray’s testimony.” Ruh roh.

In 2023, Benavides told House investigators that the first time he’d heard about the laptop was two days earlier when preparing to testify, from Wikipedia. But on October 22, 2020, Benavides sent a calendar invite titled “To Discuss Laptop” to the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden point man, and then met him in person at FBI headquarters.

His FBI successor, Laura Dehmlow, said she “would certainly say that Brad Benavides was aware” the laptop was real. His Clintonesque 2023 reply: “I don’t know what ‘real’ means.”

Both were promoted after Biden’s election. Benavides became deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, and later left for a “Senior Risk Manager” job at Amazon.

Prosecutors had until 2028, so charging them 10 days before the midterms was obviously a choice. I would call it a good choice, for the sake of irony if for no other reason. Corporate media headlines framed the pair as victims of retaliation. NBC called them “frequent targets of Trump allies.” The AP called the charges the latest “splashy and politically charged” actions. Politico’s lede swerved into the 2020 election, “which Trump has falsely claimed was stolen.”

If you’ve been trying to follow the RussiaGate scandal, both Floris and Benavides were front and center in the FBI’s scandalous skunkworks. Floris and Benavides, for example, were among the eight officials who approved the “Round River” report that collected informant reports on Hunter Biden and labeled them Russian disinformation. Round River was the FBI operation that compiled a giant spreadsheet of Republicans it labeled “conduits of disinformation.”

One of the group’s planning emails suggested using the Hunter informants “to send information of our choosing back upstream.” It’s not disinformation when we do it. Floris enthusiastically replied, “Looking forward to the conversation!”

I’ll bet she’s not looking forward to these conversations. The hunters have become the hunted.

🔥 Just in October, DOJ arrested or charged around a half-dozen more government employees and insiders. Here’s what I found:

🔥 DOJ did an even wider sweep from just October —roughly three weeks— of healthcare and covid fraudsters. This is where a few Republican donors popped up, a fact I note for perfect fairness, and which eliminates the media’s “revenge” narrative. These, by the way, are only a sample. The DOJ said it charged over 40 in its SNAP sweep, and 15 in its Southern California healthcare roundup.

I suspect that most of the “unknown” party affiliations were Democrats, but I lacked time to run them all down. For fairness, I left them ambiguous.

🔥 But the biggest group of DOJ (and state) charges and arrests were of illegal alien voters and election fraudsters. According to NPR, DOJ charged 113 noncitizens this month. Here’s the partial table:

To give you an idea, here are the six names charged on Thursday in Ocala, Florida, which is a short drive south on I-75 from where I live. All are green-card holders:

• Jamie Sosa Sardina, Cuba

• Luis Manuel Perez, Cuba

• Martha Haydee Desantis, 81, Ecuador (no relation to the governor)

• Lise Marie Johnson, Canada

• Diane Curley, Canada

• Pedro Franco, Brazil

A few of the names from yesterday’s charges in Pennsylvania:

• Artur Kopacz, Poland

• Osmal Loy, Cuba

• Yehuda Peer, Israel

• Alfredo Santiesteban, Cuba

• Joyce Donovan, Kenya

• Inna Henry, Russia

• Nourten Kuruju, Greece

• Nina Nyawara, 21, Kenya

• Joyce Pitts, 80, Netherlands

🔥 The Massachusetts case earned a little more description. On Thursday, the Times of India reported, “$38,000 to $40,000 per fake marriage: Massive fraud ring for facilitating Green Card busted in Massachusetts. US citizen was selling ‘American Dream’ and investing money in Dominican Republic.”

In Fall River, Massachusetts, romance never died. It was just billed by the half-hour. Federal prosecutors said 43-year-old Jennifer Gonzalez ran a matrimonial assembly line for more than a decade, cranking out 18 to 20 sham marriages a year at about $40,000 a pop, for a total of more than $6 million.

Call it a destination wedding. Brides and grooms who had never met walked into a Massachusetts courthouse as strangers and walked out with a fast lane to a green card. (Ms. Gonzalez kept the gift registry.) On October 21st, as part of a nationwide marriage-fraud sting, the DOJ charged six people and arrested five. (The sixth, Jaylin Hill, was easy to find, since he’s already in state prison on an unrelated gun charge.)

Since her multi-million romantic hustle wasn’t quite good enough, prosecutors said Gonzalez also collected more than $120,000 in food stamps. Isn’t our American charitable impulse nice? She invested all the money into real estate in the Dominican Republic, which the DOJ’s press release called “her country,” even though the Times of India called her a “US citizen.” I’ll leave that discrepancy up to you.

The best part was the FBI’s wiretapped recording, in which Gonzalez explained her business model better than any economist could. She said she “stopped doing weddings at the end of 2024… that’s when Trump was becoming a president.” Whoops!

So for ten years the fraud ran as smoothly as a Dominican cigar factory. Then one man won an election, and the industry temporarily closed for renovations. What can I tell you? Elections have consequences.

When an FBI informant offered that “Massachusetts is the best place,” Ms. Gonzalez agreed, explaining, “this state is a sanctuary, you get health insurance, you get a lot of help as an immigrant here.” Thanks, suckers! I mean taxpayers!

“Trump doesn’t like this state,” she added, unnecessarily.

Democrats have spent decades insisting that border enforcement doesn’t deter anybody. It turns out they never asked the people being deterred, and one of them just explained the whole scheme to the FBI on a wiretap.

So what do you think? Yesterday I said the “where are the arrests” black pillers owed the class an apology. Or at least a statement of regret. Well? We’re still waiting.

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C shall return on Monday morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🔥🔥🔥

The whirlwind of arrests continues spinning and climbing the Democrat ladder. You know about Ilhan Omar (or whatever her real name is). Yesterday, Democrats took another big hit. The Washington Post reported, “Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas indicted in connection with marijuana business.” Louise isn’t just any old state senator. The subheadline explained, “Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, is one of the state’s most powerful Democrats.” At least a dozen current or former Democrat officials have been charged, indicted, or arrested so far this month.

Louise Lucas is practically an institution unto herself. After a career in local politics, she was first elected to the state Senate in 1991, has been its president since 2020, and is currently the Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, which handles the state budget, tax policy, and state expenditures— the money. She personally led Virginia’s mad-dash redistricting legislation earlier this year (which Virginia’s Supreme Court later struck down, thankfully).

In other words, she’s one of Virginia’s most politically connected Democrats, as WaPo repeatedly pointed out. The state’s top Democrat, a high-school dropout, is a “longtime community activist” who is “known for her stylish dress and sharp tongue,” the WaPo enthused.

She stylishly thought she was untouchable. On a wiretapped March 11, 2026 conference call with another Virginia legislator and her daughter Lisa Lucas-Burke, Louise said, “The whole police department protected us.” She had good reason to say that. In June, 2020, Portsmouth’s chief of police charged Louise with drug-related crimes during a Summer of Love monument-tearing-down protest. She was fired the next day. The charges were dropped. Message received.

The Post described her as a “sharp-tongued, brash-talking grandmother,” which is a nice way of saying Louise has a potty mouth and is known neither for her wit nor her command of basic English grammar. The paper called her arrest “a staggering turn” for Democrats, among whom she “has amassed considerable influence.”

When it noted that Louise “frequently uses social media to taunt and lambaste Republicans,” I suspect WaPo was hinting that Louise’s drug trafficking and money laundering prosecution is somehow political payback; an ugly insinuation that she would have gotten away with it if only she’d been a little less critical of President Trump on X.

If that was WaPo’s implication, it backfired. It came across as irony bordering on hilarity.

The 45-page indictment includes plenty of salty color. One of Louise’s shell companies involved in the scheme was named Mama’s Chicken, LLC. She once sold a state pot-growing license to an FBI informant for $100,000. “Yes, we can make a lot of money,” she told him, “but how about we begin with you sending at least a good faith payment of the money you owe me.”

The state’s most powerful Democrat and her family made illegal pot deals out of her legislative offices on County Street in Portsmouth.

The charges, unsealed yesterday, describe a years-long scheme where Louise and her co-defendants gamed the state’s 2020 marijuana laws like a miniature Biden crime family arriving in Kiev for the first time and warming up to the locals. In essence, starting in 2019 or so, knowing that legalization laws were coming to Virginia —she would soon take charge of advancing those same laws in the state Senate— Louise and her crime family invested early and often in pot dispensaries. That was the “legal” side of the operation.

Then, WaPo said, Louise “used her political influence to enact legislation and regulations that would help her cannabis business.” DOJ also alleged that she sold political favors to help others grab dope cash, which some people might call bribes. Then, with the legal side of the operation apparently not sufficiently lucrative, Louise’s group allegedly trafficked in illegal marijuana too, hundreds of pounds of it. (She sold it to recreational users though the laws she’d helped pass limited sales to medical use— a restriction the state lifted this year.)

On February 9th, on a call with the man she’d allegedly paid $750K for the Mama’s Chicken shell company (they’d worked a different deal for him to pay her back under the table and he is named as an unindicted co-conspirator), Louise said, “This is our last chance at generational wealth. I’ve got too old to not be greedy.”

She’s also got too old to be brash-talking on social media, but that never stopped her. She’s not got too old for jail, though. Louise forgot that pigs get fat, but greedy hogs get slaughtered. (That’s not a fat joke.)

Publicly, Democrats are mostly whining that the DOJ broke its “norms and customs” of not prosecuting public officials within 60 days of an election. A DOJ spokesperson drily reminded reporters that Louise is not currently running for anything and is not on the November ballot. Narrative fail.

And —just saying— back in March, 2023, after the former president’s arrest, Louise triumphantly tweeted, “Donald Trump just learned no one is above the law!” I think a honky grandma just learned no one is above the law, too.

🔥 The article reported that Louise turned herself in and was promptly released, for now, under her own steam. “Lucas left the courthouse without speaking,” WaPo said without further comment. Her business partner, her three adult children, and at least one grandson were also arrested and released. (They seem to be trying to make the Bidens look like underachievers.)

This is a pretty big bucket of chicken. The DOJ drew direct rebukes yesterday from Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and other top state Democrats. Both FBI Director Kash Patel and US Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared at a special press conference to announce the arrests, and were not complimentary about the brash-talking grandma.

“During her time as Virginia state senator, she was actually using her position of power and public trust to deflect and defend against her own criminal enterprise,” Patel said. Brash! “Truly the epitome of hypocrisy for a public official.”

It was the epitome of something, all right, and it tastes like chicken. Yum.

🔥 A few more Democrat officials who appeared in this month’s true crime roundup include:

1. Jackie Espinosa (D), the mayor of Kissimmee, FL (pop. 86,500). She was arrested for grand theft and an organized scheme to defraud— over covid-era emergency grants. On Wednesday, Florida law enforcement arrested Mayor Espinosa and she appeared in court for first appearance. Orange is the new black!

1. Nick Mimms (D), the former Fort Pierce, FL city manager. On October 8th, Mimms was convicted by a Florida jury of a felony count of official misconduct in office related to a $500,000 grant that went to a nonprofit for a community center that was never built.

2. Ari Espinal (D), former NY Assembly member (Queens). Grand larceny, for charging $33,245 in personal purchases to her union employer’s American Express card. She was arraigned on October 7th.

3. Elijah Manley (D), a congressional candidate from Broward, Florida. He surrendered to authorities on October 16 for threatening to “cut the heads off” anyone who didn’t vote Democrat. Referring to Democrat DSA Senate candidate Angie Nixon, Manley posted, “I swear to god, take me to war over this black woman, and I promise y’all I will burn y’all (expletive) castle to the ground and anyone else in my way.”

4. LaMar Cook (D), 46, is the former Governor Healey-appointed Western Massachusetts deputy director. Clearly, a Democrat. He was arrested on October 14 for SNAP and wire fraud, even while under a separate prosecution for crack cocaine trafficking —18 pounds of it, delivered to his Springfield offices— and firearm violations. His state salary: $137,000 a year, not including SNAP benefits.

1. Reuben Taylor (D), the Boston Municipal Protective Services director (obviously a Democrat). He was charged with pandemic loan wire fraud —the gift that keeps on giving— and agreed to plead guilty on October 8th. ✅ IRS-CI

2. Dennis Bradley (D), 42, former CT state senator. This was the guy who was videotaped by a woman’s kitchen cam going around browbeating people into changing their mail-in ballots. He was charged on October 6th.

3. Michael Rivers (D), 67, a South Carolina state representative. He was charged with pointing and presenting a firearm at his political opponent on October 9th.

4. Brian DePeña (D), Lawrence, Massachusetts mayor (D). He faces up to 150 years for various federal covid loan fraud charges, wiretapping, and witness intimidation under an August indictment. DePeña needed a translator at his arraignment this month, since he does not speak English.

5. Francisco Paulino (D), Massachusetts state representative. His district included Lawrence, Mass., where Mayor DePeña is also being prosecuted. He was indicted in August for pandemic-era covid relief fraud and money laundering— he got over $700K in small-business loans for fake companies.

1. Sylvia Luke (D), Hawaii’s Lt. Governor, and the highest-ranking official in the DOJ’s fall lineup. It’s part of a large and complicated bribery conspiracy tied to millions in covid-testing money that I’ve reported on before, and that prosecution involves even more current and former Hawaii state officials. All dems.

It is tempting to conclude that this Fall 2026 crackdown evidences a dramatic new crime wave. But the data demonstrates an uglier truth. Many of these crimes go back years. Some were even under slow-motion investigation during the Autopen era. But it is only now that they are being aggressively prosecuted.

So the truth is that the Fall 2026 crackdown evidences a dramatic new willingness to prosecute political officials.

In other words, this country has suffered badly, for a long time, from a permissive blue culture that allowed a cesspool of political corruption to flourish due to lack of enforcement, in the same way bacteria flourish due to lack of cleaning. Think of the most horrible gas-station bathroom you’ve ever seen, one where a bright yellow hazmat suit is mandatory equipment for entry. Now multiply that by 1,000.

The above list does not omit Republicans due to favoritism. I honestly couldn’t find one dated this month. That is not to say criminals never sneak into the Republican fold. But it’s Democrats who have a permissive culture that demands strict compliance with ideological rules— but is much more flexible when it comes to following actual laws.

In other words, as long as you say the right things and vote for the right issues, then it seems like you can pretty much do whatever you want as a Democrat. This, it seems, is the inevitable result of vote blue no matter who. No high school degree? No problem. Fake chicken companies and fired police chiefs? No worries. Fraudulent covid loans and selling state growing licenses? No trouble at all. Just vote blue.

As evidence for this bold proposition, just notice how Democrats act when a high-school dropout like Louise Lucas —who became the state’s most influential politician— is arrested for an 8-year, intergenerational crime spree ranging from illegal drug trafficking out of her district offices to bribery and enriching herself by passing horrible legalization laws that destroy her state’s culture in the process of making a profit.

Can you hear a single Democrat condemning Ms. Lucas, or —even if judgment must be momentarily withheld under the presumption of innocence— making it clear as a general rule that the party will not tolerate lawbreakers? Or any Democrat stressing (this year) that no one is above the law, or that anyone in Ms. Lucas’s position must be held to a high standard?

No, you don’t hear that. Because it isn’t there. The phrase “no one is above the law” is a distant echo from times not so long past. That rule only applies to Republicans, anyway. Now the universal refrain has become, “no one this close to an election.”

But consider this: It would be completely different had Ms. Lucas merely tweeted her support for biological women on basketball teams. If she had, even in lukewarm terms, there would be no high-minded presumption of innocence. They wouldn’t demand everyone wait to pounce till after the election. She’d immediately be on political probation, and Democrats would race to demand that she quickly recant.

Behold: politics über alles, the promotion of ideology over every other consideration, the politicization of being, of everything, everywhere, all at once. Mussolini once said, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.” In short: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

That is how communism works, purely and simply. But be encouraged! A great purge is under way, a vomitous reflex where the nation’s body is at long last spewing up the poison that was slowly killing it.

Finally, let’s soak in the beauty inherent in this tragi-comic arc. I made sarcastic boomerang jokes about “no one is above the law.” That is a great story. Hubris, meet Nemesis, and so forth. But don’t miss the greater story. This tsunami of Democrat arrests would have been politically impossible had President Trump not himself been arrested first.

It travels far beyond irony. It borders on the miraculous. The real fruit of President Trump’s long-suffering sacrifices has become evident only now, in hindsight.

For the last eighteen months, black-pillers have polluted social media with their memes demanding to know where are the arrests? Well? Where are the black pillers? They have something they need to say to the rest of the class.

Have a fantastic Friday! Wheel back here tomorrow morning for your weekend edition roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Teaser: ANOTHER polling company just imploded after being unmasked as fake. That makes three in two months. We’ll also round up October’s OTHER dramatic arrests of fraudsters and non-officials. Get the full story in the a.m. edition.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

It all sounds too crazy to be true. But the tinfoil crowd appears to be enjoying yet another massive vindication moment. Sunday evening disclosures —once again provided to the public through influencers— produced video evidence of what can be described, fairly and without exaggeration, as a well-funded group of current and former government officials conspiring to overthrow the federal government. Within 36 hours, the Washington Post tried to smother the story by printing a remarkable “this is fine!” story headlined, “U.S. officials privately advise states fearing Trump election meddling.” In conservative media, the story is experiencing a kind of journalistic Big Bang event. Laura Ingraham covered it last night:

CLIP: Laura Ingraham — “The left’s plan to overthrow the US government” (1:43).

Laura explained that, in the videos we have seen so far and in what the Washington Post actually admitted, a good-sized group of former Obama and Biden staffers, ex-USAID employees, retired military officers, activists, and ‘community organizers’ are covertly discussing a plan to end the U.S. federal government as we know it. As Laura Ingraham put it, this would work by “flooding the streets nationwide until Trump invokes the Insurrection Act. Claim the military is committing abuses. Get the press to amplify every clip. Then blue state governors unite to override federal authority and rewrite the Constitution.”

These current and former officials —who think they are meticulously standing just inside sedition laws— told the Washington Post they are already ‘working with’ governors, Congressmen, and election officials from at least ten states. This is alarming.

Although one can readily imagine some benefits of overthrowing the federal government —no more income taxes, mask mandates on airplanes, or Congresspersons— one suspects that whatever Democrats have in mind for after the revolution is probably a whole lot worse. So, we’ll keep the Constitution, thanks.

If you haven’t been following this story, at this point you are probably thinking I’m overreacting. I’ll back up a little.

🔥 You may be familiar with popular conservative influencer and ‘independent data researcher’ DataRepublican. Thanks to liberal doxxers, we also know her as Jennica Pounds, a deaf software engineer originally from Utah who worked at Amazon, eBay, and Snap. She earned her influencer slot when, in early 2025, she did something Washington had spent decades claiming was impossible: she built a searchable database of federal grant money, tracing who got paid, by whom, and through which nonprofits.

Elon Musk quoted Data at least 24 times in three weeks. When she flagged “a quick billion for you to cut!” in January 2025, Musk replied “Noted,” and within two weeks DOGE announced it was shutting off payments to one of the groups on her list. Rolling Stone responded by doxxing her. The Deseret News reported that her family’s distillery got review-bombed. Her kids had to leave school for a while.

In other words, she courageously followed the money sloshing around inside government while corporate media tried to destroy her and her family.

Now she says she’s found where the money trickled off to.

Last Sunday evening, Data dropped what she teased as the big one. “The past few days, I got my hands on thousands of new transcripts and hundreds of recordings,” she wrote. “Patience. I know I’ve hyped this more than anything else. It’s genuinely the biggest discovery I’ve had. This is an enormous archive. This is only the beginning.”

Two million people read her announcement. Over the next few hours and days, she started posting the tapes in installments she called, “The Democracy Files.” They turned out to be recordings of private strategy calls among former USAID “democracy promotion” officials, the people who used to run our government’s programs for coaching opposition movements in other countries.

In other words: former State Department color revolutionaries.

🔥 The tapes are pretty hard to explain away as harmless political organizing.

In Data’s Part 1, for example, an unidentified speaker says, “We have to be the ones who are creating an organization that is explicitly anti-constitutional,” and asks, “what happens if we need to go extra-constitutional?”

Remember, these aren’t internet randos. The Post collectively called them “current and former officials with experience in the State Department.” In Data’s Part 1, at about 0:07, a speaker says he’s “teamed up with the leaders of the Democracy Renewal Group. That’s 300 people who used to be… USAID people… doing democracy work and authoritarian pushback all over the globe.”

Then he says he’s a DSA member in its Marxist Unity Group caucus. USAID people … DSA activists … Marxists. Getting the idea yet?

So these are people who, until they got fired last year, were embedded in the US government, whom the media loves to call “patriotic, non-partisan career staff.” They were trained by our government in how to use “soft power” to “non-violently” overthrow other governments. They have actual experience in doing just that. And three hundred of them are now working with US Marxists.

You can’t just dismiss this as ordinary TDS chatter.

🔥 In Data’s Part 2, which was titled “When and How to Declare the Federal Government Illegitimate,” activists describe pre-written “red lines” for deciding when our elected government has become “illegitimate,” which one speaker called a “refounding moment,” plus an “options memo” for Democrat governors to become “the leading governing authority.”

The only way to interpret a call for governors to become the “leading governing authority” is that they would separate from and become independent from the rest of America.

The speakers were extremely careful not to say that, though, for obvious reasons.

Here are the five parts DataRepublican has published so far:

• Part 1: “The Plan”, Oct. 19 at 8:22 AM. This is the “anti-constitutional” and “extra constitutional” clip.

• Part 2: “When and how to declare the federal government illegitimate”, Oct. 19 at 10:05 PM, with 2.6M views. It covers the governors memo, the “not secession” line, and Massachusetts, California and Illinois. The redlines criteria doc is also attached to it.

• Part 3: “Foreign-intervention treatment”, Oct. 20 at 9:34 PM. This includes the ex-USAID officer saying, “we used to be the ones with a lot of money” (see below).

• Part 4: “Yes, many are aware of the goals”, Oct. 21 at 1:50 PM. This covers the three “emergency” scenarios: militarization, the “election meltdown,” and members of Congress not seated fast enough.

🔥 There were some revealing admissions. In another clip, one retired USAID officer complained about how much harder his work is now, outside of government, instead of from the cushy environs within USAID headquarters.

“We used to be the ones with a lot of money,” he said, “and sharing our model and our guidance and our support.” Fortunately, though, other private funding sources have stepped in to help during this difficult period. “We are really grateful for those of you who are stepping up to provide a similar level of guidance and support for us as we traverse a difficult period here in the U.S.”

The reference to “here in the U.S.” suggested he was speaking for foreign donors. That might become a problem later. But bookmark that.

This raises so many questions. Like, who collected these fired USAID officials when that agency was shut down and tasked them with continuing? Did they work on US-related resistance while they were at the agency as federal employees? In other words, were these people weapons aimed back at us, when they were supposed to be focused on deploying ‘soft power’ against foreign countries? And who exactly is “stepping up to provide a similar level of (financial) support?”

Employing three hundred soft-power color revolutionaries sounds like it needs a whole lot of money.

DataRepublican said that she got the recordings from a tip. According to Data, one of the group’s leaders ran an AI note-taker that, apparently, saved everything to a public Google link. “I’ve got a bunch of ‘Chatham House rules, no recordings’ recordings,” Data posted. “Their stupidity is our saving grace.”

Ruh roh, Scooby.

🔥 About 36 hours after the first tapes dropped, the Washington Post ran the story I linked above. It was basically the same story. WaPo essentially confirmed everything DataRepublican had claimed. Except, of course, WaPo told it from the conspirators’ point of view, in which they see themselves as noble resistance fighters struggling to hang on to the last remaining shreds of democracy in a world teetering on global right-wing fascism.

Here’s how WaPo described them: “A small group of U.S. national security officials has been discreetly advising state governments and congressional lawmakers on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections,” the Post reported. It described the core group as “about 10 current and former officials with experience in the Defense Department, some of whom have previously focused on countering authoritarianism abroad.” Meaning, more color revolutionaries.

The Post named zero of them. It said they all wished to remain anonymous due to “fear of retaliation.” Uh huh. DataRepublican’s response: “This is how you know my recordings are real and they’re scared. Washington Post already doing counter-messaging.” Others noticed too.

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out that the Post’s story “is apparently based on the anonymous accounts of two people,” and quoted the Post’s own admission that the officials’ claims were “based on personal analysis of the administration’s activities and public statements… not access to specific government intelligence.”

🔥 So … what is their plan? They say it’s not secession. Not actually. “This is not a concept for a secession,” one speaker argued. “No one is talking about leaving the United States.” They say they don’t want out; they just want the steering wheel. But the details suggest something different. It sounds a whole lot like the same kind of talk preceding the 1860s Civil War secession.

For example, one speaker explained that, after a triggering event that “disqualifies” the federal government, making it “illegitimate,” governors would “keep on trying to run the country or at least parts of the country,” “coordinate with each other,” make “outreach to foreign governments,” and “wall off these illegitimate individuals”— meaning, presumably, Republicans.

That sounds like a decent description of the Confederate States of America, doesn’t it?

Let’s consider some similarities. Georgia’s 1850 Platform said the state would stay in the Union, but then listed federal acts that would justify leaving, like repealing the Fugitive Slave Act or abolishing slavery in D.C. That was a written list of triggers. The “red lines” memo mentioned in Data’s video clips —supposedly given to governors— sounds like the same thing.

In what we’ve gotten so far, the activists never say precisely what the red lines are. One speaker said they are still “being refined in terms of indicators and metrics.” But they did mention a couple of examples.

One “red line” they suggested was Trump using the Insurrection Act or seizing voting machines after an election. Another was a legal election, but one where some people don’t like the outcome: “We could have a clean election,” one speaker said, “and then half the country or 25% of the country doesn’t trust the results.”

It reminds us of when President Lincoln was lawfully elected, and some Southern States —“half the country”— didn’t like it.

Like revolutionary parrots, they kept repeating how they don’t want secession. But everything they proposed screamed secession. At one point, a speaker called for a third Continental Congress and a “declaration.” Alert readers will recall that the first two Continental Congresses produced a revolution and a declaration of independence from Great Britain.

What did they mean by saying we need a third Continental Congress? Well, in July 1775, three months after Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress issued its Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, which insisted, “We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain.” Maybe that wasn’t the ambitious design. But one year later, we were out.

1776 began with reassurances and ended with the business part of a bayonet. Let’s take them at their own word. That is what they meant.

None of this, of course, says anything about whether these nitwits actually have the capability of organizing a brown bag luncheon at a Chipotle, never mind organizing a third Constitutional Convention. So we’d normally ignore them as TDS idiots, except for the troubling reality that they are working with 300 disgruntled ex-USAID color revolutionaries.

DataRepublican, whose specialty is dot-connecting, has connected the USAID organizers and the activists with even bigger groups of former government officials, including one headed by retired Rear Admiral Mike Smith called National Security Leaders for America (until the election, “for Biden”), which boasts 1,600 former military members.

🔥 There’s much more. But you get the idea. Now, amidst all this highly troubling information, there were some encouraging points.

Democrats and corporate media allies have long curled their lips at the very idea of a deep state. They’ve labeled it one of the most durable Trump/MAGA conspiracy theories of all. I believe the New York Times stylebook requires sneer quotes whenever a reporter types “deep state.” Here, for example, is the Grey Lady, right out of the gate in 2017, declaring to the masses from its tall building headquarters that there is no such thing as a deep state.

Well, if federal employees can be fired but then seamlessly continue doing their geopolitical work anyway, with progressive foundations and donor sponsors stepping right into the funding gaps, what else would you call it, if not a ‘deep state’?

Whatever you decide to call it, it persists even after separation from the host. It’s like a parasite or a bad STD.

Fire any normal career bureaucrat, and you’d expect him to update his LinkedIn and take up golf. Instead, these USAID folks got a fiscal sponsor, a foundation grant, and a Zoom link, and kept right on running regime-change ops. Only now the target regime is ours.

If that isn’t a deep state, it’s at least a deep state alumni association, with dues paid by Arabella and the Ford Foundation.

Here’s the good news. By their own sad complaints — “We used to be the ones with a lot of money”— they are now operating outside the government, which is a vast improvement. The parasites are still alive, but at least they’ve been surgically removed from the victim. And now they must use private money, so we no longer experience the insult of them using our own money to injure us.

DOGE did, in fact, hurt them. Probably badly. Hopefully fatally.

Beyond that, well, thanks to DataRepublican, their conspiracy just got outed before they were ready. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “Sunlight is the best of disinfectants.” (Along with liberal amounts of Clorox.) Their plan depended on secrecy, as evidenced by their repeated comments like, “while we’re in the safe space here,” “we’re not publicizing this,” and switching off the recording for the Q&A.

But now the whole thing is out in the open. It’s subject to the harsh gaze of public scrutiny, two weeks before the midterms. The blue state governors will be asked about it. FOIAs will ensue. And it landed in October. By surprise. (Just saying.)

Any secret ‘contingency plan’ that’s been exposed before any of the contingencies happen is a lot harder to use effectively. And best of all: it opens up their potential criminal liability before they were ready.

🔥 Their exposure is much worse than they think. True, the conspirators have been very careful. As though coached by lawyers, every few minutes, while describing inevitable violence and secession, they kept insisting they aren’t advocating for violence or calling for secession.

And then they go right back to doing it. But there’s a reason for all their plaintive denials. They think it immunizes them.

Seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 2384) requires a plan to use force against the government, and the First Amendment, under Brandenburg v. Ohio, protects even radical activism unless it’s aimed at imminent lawless action. Daydreaming on Zoom about a Third Continental Congress is not a crime. These are careful people, and they built their plan to stay right inside the legal part. Sure, they conspire to overthrow the government, talk about the ‘red lines,’ and write the memos, but they let someone else do the actual crossing.

That’s how color revolutions work. But prepare for irony. The left already rewrote the rulebook. Here comes the boomerang again. Duck! You are going to love this part.

🔥 Remember special counsel Jack Smith, the weird-looking lawyer leftists love? When he went after Trump, he faced the same problem: alleged insurrectionary behavior without violence. So Smith helpfully indicted the former president under 18 U.S.C. § 241 (conspiracy against rights) and § 371 (conspiracy to defraud the United States). Neither statute requires a single act of violence.

Smith was thrown out for being unconstitutionally appointed before his legal theory could be tested. But the theory was that coordinating a plan to declare an election illegitimate and encouraging state officials to act on it was itself the crime of insurrection— even though Trump was never involved in or encouraged any violence. (He actually discouraged it.)

I’m sure the Democracy Renewal Group’s members remember this theory well, since at the time they cheered prosecutor Smith on till they were hoarse. Not just them. Behold! In August, 2023, the New York Times platformed Smith’s creative legal theory as so smart:

The op-editors crisply deemed it “smart lawyering,” and even described the way Smith charged Trump as beautiful:

There was more. Virtually all of corporate media swooned over Jack Smith’s cleverness. No adjective was spared! Here’s Slate’s August 2023 headline, calling Smith’s charges a “masterstroke”:

And finally, MS NOW (then MSNBC) surpassed those with the “incredibly savvy simplicity of Jack Smith’s latest Trump indictment.” Not just savvy. Incredibly savvy. This embarrassing effort was penned by none less than Norm Eisen himself, who served as the House Democrat’s special counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, and currently runs a giant lawfare shop boasting more than 250 legal cases against the Trump Administration.

So it’s going to be very hard for them to complain if the DOJ deploys the “smart,” “beautiful,” and “savvy” Jack Smith standard against all the folks involved in the group that just admitted it is getting up to stuff ten times worse than whatever Trump was accused of doing.

In other words, DataRepublican has exposed a network that drafts an “options memo” for governors to “wall off” a lawfully elected federal government, pitches it to at least three identified governors, and stands up a “war room” for election night.

It all looks remarkably like what Jack Smith called a seditious conspiracy when he charged a former president.

Beyond Jack Smith’s “smart” theory, the Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C. § 253) doesn’t require any actual riots either. It covers any “unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that obstructs federal law, which is a fair description of governors refusing federal authority and making treaties with foreign governments. This reminds us of the Constitution’s Article I, Section 10, which bars states from making “any Agreement or Compact… with a foreign Power” without Congress’s consent, and the plan’s “outreach to foreign governments” looks more like sedition than suggestion.

Now, I am a lawyer. But I’m only a commercial litigator. I’m not a DOJ prosecutor who has to bring a case. I could be missing something. But it is beyond my ability to understand how President Trump could be charged as an insurrectionist for holding a rally, but not these conspirators. And the former military members, who remain subject to military justice, might have even bigger problems (I’m looking at you, Admiral Smith, and your googly Sanpaku eyes).

In short: they might want to lawyer up.

Thus, while all this is undoubtedly a wake-up call that demands close attention, it is also a massive success to celebrate. It proves Trump and DOGE badly damaged the deep state and its progressive allies— and removed them from their much more dangerous position inside government.

In one fell blow, DataRepublican has sent the conspirators back to their electronic drawing boards.

It almost seems unfair. One deaf software engineer from Utah spoiled the careful plans of 300 ex-USAID color revolutionaries, a 1,600-member flag-officer network, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Washington Post’s anonymous sources— all in under a week. And consider this— Data now says she has thousands more transcripts and videos. I wonder what else could be buried in there.

Finally, and as a nifty segue from yesterday’s post, in classic Scooby-Doo fashion, DataRepublican just tore the mask off the villain, showing the audience that Admiral Smith (Ret.) isn’t actually a terrifying monster. He’s just an angry old man with a bad spray tan and weird eyeballs.

Right in time for Halloween, too.

Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow, with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

In most places, early voting has already begun (or will begin soon). And, just as I’ve been reassuring you since last year, corporate media’s overexcited predictions of an anti-Trump ‘blue wave’ have failed to appear. It’s even hard to see a blue ripple. As we thought it would, it looks exactly like a traditional midterm election— and it will be decided based on turnout.

We need another round of “beat the cheat,” “too big to rig,” and getting our souls to the polls. I have something to help us boost turnout.

This year, Republicans are being encouraged to vote early if possible, because in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 cycles, we learned about election-day ‘glitches’ that somehow only hit red counties. This prevented some people from voting at all or required them to wait around for hours. Apparently, all sorts of things can go wrong (for Republicans).

For example, in my bright blue county of Alachua, during the 2022 primaries, they flat ran out of Republican ballots in the rural areas and smaller red cities. Headline from the liberal Gainesville Sun:

So this year, especially in precincts under Democrat control, Republicans are advised to vote early in order to avoid last-minute accidents.

🪖 Let’s be honest. There are lots of reasons people avoid voting, especially in midterm elections. First, there’s the constant fear of using the wrong kind of pen to bubble in the ballot form. But the absolute worst part of voting is feeling stupid.

We are asked to figure out whether to pick Scott Schofleheiser or Ingrid Popplefield for tax collector, or decide on the spot whether the state constitution should be amended to allow tangible property taxes to increase no more than 1.5% per agricultural administrative review period during each biennial 10-year cycle, at which point you stop reading and start Christmas-treeing faster than a high school student realizing he was running out of time to finish the SAT.

But now we have AI. (Or SI.) So I made you a prompt to create a very nifty, personalized voter guide for your specific precinct. (Note that, based on my tests, some AIs will snootily refuse to make a voting recommendation at all, in which case just switch to a different AI. But even among those who deign to help, quality varies. Grok, for instance, did a great job. ChatGPT, not so much. Gab failed by pretending to misunderstand what I was asking for. Perplexity made a solid effort.)

The voter guide this prompt builds includes a 1-pager that you can hand to busy people who say things like “I just need somebody to tell me who to vote for.” These folks are willing to do their duty, and can vote “R”, but they don’t know where to start with all the rest. They feel understandably reluctant to inflict their guesses on everyone else.

But with the 1-page cheat sheet this prompt will help you make for them, they can walk into the polling place with confidence. Which makes them likelier to go.

You need only change one thing in the prompt: put your (or someone else’s) address in the first line, so the “superintelligent” agent can super-intelligently find your specific voting precinct. (Feel free to edit the ideological descriptions to match your own preferences. I included it only as a guide. But you only need to put in the address.)

Look up my precinct from my street address: [ADDRESS, CITY, STATE, ZIP].

Draft me an attractive, easy-to-use, personalized voter guide for the November 3rd election. Begin by finding a sample ballot from my local supervisor of elections. End with a printable 1-page cheat sheet laid out like the ballot that I can take with me when voting.

List my early voting locations, dates, and hours (closest first), my Election Day polling place, and the mail-ballot request deadline.

Flag the candidates and issues I am likely to vote for, using what you already know about me plus: I am a pro-Christian, pro-border-enforcement, pro-capitalism, pro-medical-freedom, pro-life, pro-Trump, pro-merit, anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-globalism, anti-woke, anti-DEI, Rush Limbaugh-style small-government conservative.

For each candidate/issue, tell me what the state/local GOP recommends. If a candidate or issue is endorsed or recommended by state/local Democratic party, mark it with a red warning label to that effect.

For candidates: Who has endorsed each recommended candidate?

For issues/amendments/initiatives: Quote reliable conservative organizations (e.g. Heritage, Federalist, or state-level conservative groups) that issued voter guides. Highlight if there are disagreements or “pro/con” choices.

For appointed judges (retention votes): identify who appointed them. Check news reports from decisions and evaluate whether the judge’s rulings have displayed a liberal/progressive character. Let me know if any reliable conservative organization is for/against retention.

For incumbent elected judges: check news reports and let me know if any partisan leaning is apparent, or if the judge has any history of releasing violent criminals who reoffended. Give me whatever statistics are available (age, length of service, political registration).
For new judicial candidates: check public sources (donation records, voting history, news) and the candidate’s website and list or guess at their political party.

If a section doesn’t apply to my ballot, say so and skip it. Link a source for every recommendation. If you cannot verify a fact (a candidate’s party, an endorsement, a ruling), say so. Do not guess.
Ask me questions if necessary to make recommendations on particular candidates or issues.

If you try it, let everyone know in the comments whether it worked well. If you tinker with it, tell us what you tweaked or improved.

NOTE: Floridians whose ballots include “Retain Judge Joseph Lewis Jr?” should vote NO. Do not retain Judge Lewis. He was the lone appellate judge (fortunately outvoted) to dissent in my successful mask lawsuit, Green v. Alachua County. In other words, Judge Lewis favors medical mandates. So.

Judge Lewis wanted everyone to keep their masks on. Wait till you see how ironic that is.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Alert C&C readers already distrust election polls, as they should. But wait. It’s so much worse than we thought. Today we discover a sordid, unbelievable story that corporate media is trying to sweep under the rug. The New York Times ran only an editor’s note. Newsweek reported, “Fake polling firm duped media in ‘social experiment’” They were duped!

Wedgewood Polls is a new 2026 polling service included in corporate media’s aggregated results and relied on by the major parties and candidates. Newsweek reported that Mallory McMorrow quit the Michigan Senate primary over a Wedgewood poll, allowing Abdul El Sayed to win the Democrat primary by a nose.

Yesterday at 6:19 pm (note that time), after publishing results all midterm season, Wedgewood debunked itself in a dramatic social media post:

“We wanted to test a simple hypothesis,” Wedgewood’s press release innocently began. “How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction and be taken seriously?” It answered its own question: “Far too easy.”

“Despite having no history,” it explained, “no formal credentials, or real data, Wedgewood’s fabricated numbers were added to major polling aggregators like the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, were given instant credibility on air and by outlets such as MS NOW, and were repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.” (Note also its reference to FiftyPlusOne, which will be important in a moment.)

This presented an obvious problem. “The ease with which unverified figures” —meaning fake— “were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.” If you suspected media blindly accepts anything from any source, so long as it says what reporters want to hear, you were right.

“If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations,” the announcement mused, “then the standards for how polling data is vetted and reported must change.” At minimum.

Apparently, the media and polling aggregators check their sources the same way California checks citizenship before registering voters: with a bucket on their head.

Perhaps sensing that its announcement sounded sketchy, Wedgewood raced to reassure everybody that it never meant to mislead anybody. Not really. It was purely a science experiment. “Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election,” it purred —but don’t ask Mallory McMorrow— “or permanently mislead the public. It was designed as a wake-up call.”

Brrrrrriiiinnnngg!! Wake up, sheeple! Well, we’re slowly waking up. So that worked.

Already we see a whole tray of scrambled eggs dumped over the faces of New York Times reporters (of course) and the rest of corporate media. And it condemns the entire industry; if it’s this easy to publish fake poll numbers, what good is any polling data? So.

But the biggest question of all remained: Has Wedgewood stopped lying? In other words, it admits to lying about being a legit polling company. So it’s fair to ask whether it is now telling the truth about running a legit media experiment. Or— was it always a psyop?

You know me. I never take this kind of thing at face value. I had to start digging. Did Wedgewood come clean two weeks before the election to avoid skewing the results any more than it already has? Or was there another reason?

You’ll never guess what I discovered next.

🔥 The first thing I checked was what kinds of poll results Wedgewood made up. This was a test. If, as they claimed, they were legitimately trying not to influence elections, they would want to keep their fake results as even-handed as possible, sometimes skewing toward one party, other times leaning the other way, and never showing big shifts that could alter the composition of early and mail-in voters.

Shocker. What I found instead was that Wedgewood always reported favorably for Democrats and DSA candidates. Strange!

Wedgewood’s polls consistently made the most ludicrous predictions, like showing James “Where’s Waldo” Talarico in red Texas somehow running +3 over beloved State Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Mohammed Abdul “Intifada Joe” El-Sayed (or whatever his name is) leading in Michigan by +6.

All the big media reporters gobbled up Wedgewood’s calorie-free data like it was all-you-can-eat shrimp night at Red Lobster. For instance, even “super pollster” Nate Silver relied on Wedgewood’s fake figures:

A week ago on October 14th, with early voting primed to begin, Wedgewood even claimed its polling showed a blue wave washing over deep-red Mississippi, with the Democrats’ longshot Senate candidate closing within 4 points. The Democrat, Scott Colom, trumpeted the poll as “tied.” (Rounding to zero, apparently.)

You know, in hindsight, one wonders whether this proves they really were trolling the media. Nobody could believe this kind of thing, right?

Welp, media ran with it. And Democrats believed it. Hilariously, Wedgewood’s fake poll showing a non-existent blue wave in a red state caused the “nonpartisan” aggregator Cook Political Report to shift Mississippi from “solid Republican” to “leans Republican,” which in turn caused Democrats to dump $1.2 million into the race. Headline from the Hill, yesterday:

Ironically, Wedgewood’s fake polls showing Democrat blue waves could be hurting Democrats more than helping, by head-faking them into pouring badly needed cash into Mississippi.

So that was the first discovery: Wedgewood’s results seemed always to ‘prove’ that the blue wave that does not exist actually existed. But then I found the smoking gun.

🔥 FiftyPlusOne is an influential new (2025) polling aggregator that was spun off by veterans of Nate Silver’s ‘538’ group and some former ABC political reporters. FiftyPlusOne is widely cited by major media platforms like the New York Times. This morning, I discovered FiftyPlusOne’s Substack blog entry yesterday, which appeared to be related:

Ironically, Wedgewood’s insane Mississippi poll did perhaps go too far. It made FiftyPlusOne’s veteran pollsters suspicious. It was too good to be true. So FiftyPlusOne quietly ordered up its own Mississippi poll, to double-check. (Retail value, $900). That poll did not detect a blue wave, and did not match Wedgewood’s raw data, either. Whoops.

So, FiftyPlusOne said, it planned to expose Wedgewood today, the 21st. Being professionals (and probably under advice of counsel), yesterday they sent a copy of their exposé, asked Wedgewood for a comment before publishing, and set a midnight deadline.

That request apparently prompted Wedgewood to run its mea culpa before FiftyPlusOne could publish. Here is the story, in FiftyPlusOne’s own words:

FiftyPlusOne brought receipts. It screen-capped Wedgewood’s obscene reply, delivered via an X direct message:

Remember the time stamp from the top of this segment? Wedgewood posted its announcement that it was an “experiment” at 6:19 pm. As the screen grab above shows, two minutes before that —at 6:17 pm— in an abundance of polling professionalism gave FiftyPlusOne the bird: “Our official response to your article: F-ck you.” (It was even more personal than that; FiftyPlusOne redacted the person’s name who the invective had been aimed at.)

At 6:17, in private, it was “F-ck you.” Two minutes later at 6:19, in public, it was, “we hope this experiment sparks a necessary conversation about data integrity.”

Goodness! Who knew this polling business could get so … intimate?

Whatever else it proves, Wedgewood’s intemperate response does not sound like a firm delighted to be caught— even though their 6:19 public “experiment” announcement complained that no one noticed their fake polls. Nor did its announcement mention FiftyPlusOne’s exposé (or the F-bomb). Instead, it seems like Wedgewood would have preferred to keep on reporting fake polls right through the election.

Try to follow me here. If Wedgewood, as it insisted, was running an experiment to test whether anyone noticed, it should have been happy that FiftyPlusOne did notice. Haha, you finally got us! What took so long? Instead, they slid into FiftyPlusOne’s DMs and shouted obscenities. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

Think about it. If Wedgewood hadn’t gotten greedy and stretched to grasp a Mississippi blue wave, no one would have noticed.

🔥 There’s one more dot to connect. Progressives will inevitably cry this proves nothing; it’s ultra-rare! Just because one of a dozen or so polling groups was totally fake doesn’t prove there’s any wider problem with polling data, right? That’s only like 8%. Or is it?

Behold the headline from the UK Guardian, just over a month ago. Another pollster, penetrating the ecosystem:

So, LOL, Wedgewood’s “experiment” excuse isn’t even new. They copied it from a 21-year-old. Everybody is running the same experiment! Here is how the Guardian described the earlier fake-polling story, back on August 20th:

The downfall began when Rahil Prakash’s fake polling company, Median Strategies, published a “poll” showing LA Mayor Karen Bass leading DSA candidate Nithya “Noodle” Ramen by +11 points. Mayor Bass immediately trumpeted the results:

At least now we know what Democrats mean when they say, “doing the work.”

But the unbelievable poll results drew the ire of democratic socialists who, unlike Republicans, won’t let sleeping polls lie. Like Wedgewood, Mr. Prakash got greedy. He was unmasked by the Guardian, which checked his website’s domain registration, and then deployed the “experiment” excuse.

So, that’s two fake polling companies that imploded in disgrace in the same election cycle. Both pro-Democrat. The unanswered question is: how many more Wedgewoods are there?

We need to be fair. Both fake pollsters were (eventually) caught. It’s legitimate to consider whether this means the system is actually working. Is self-policing effectively enforcing professional norms and standards? The equally honest answer is nobody can say.

Again, had they not advanced guffaw-producing polling results and tangled with the DSA, neither Wedgewood nor Median Strategies would have been caught. If they had been a little cleverer, they could have kept on faking polls until the actual election results once again showed the polls overestimating Democrat performance.

Never has a poll-weary nation needed the heroic Scooby Doo team like it does now. Who else is under the mask?

🔥 That’s all we have time for today. But I wish to assure alert readers that I have not overlooked the even more disgraceful and disgusting exposé story washing across social media yesterday. Independent conservative investigator DataRepublican’s exposé terrified the Washington Post so badly it ran a cover story within hours. I’m not sure anything like it has ever happened before.

We’ll get to that insidious Deep State story tomorrow.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Do not miss tomorrow’s blockbuster post. In the meantime, ignore the fake polls and GET OUT THE VOTE. Meet me back here tomorrow morning for another serving of astonishing, essential news and extra-caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Great news! Especially for anyone worried about the integrity of our sacred democratic process. The State of California wishes you to know that, despite a few bumps in the ballot, its elections are completely secure, perfectly pristine, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dangerous conspiracy theorist who does not possess a master’s degree in Public Administration. Just ask Attorney General Rob Bonta (but don’t ask the FBI). Yesterday the South China Post reported, “US charges 28 in California sweep targeting alleged non-citizen voting.”

Yesterday, federal prosecutors announced charges against 28 more foreign nationals across California in an operation dubbed “Protect the Vote.” The suspects, all legal permanent residents (not citizens), were indicted for things like falsely swearing on naturalization documents and submitting fraudulent voter registrations.

Naturally, this caused immediate, high-grade panic among the credentialed classes who manage our nation’s narrative infrastructure. The corporate media instantly rushed out its boilerplate talking points, enthusiastically explaining that non-citizen voting is statistically non-existent.

Cue the arrival of California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, who practically sprinted to the nearest microphone to assure humanity that ‘only’ 28 illegal voters in a state of 39 million people is —direct quote— “just a drop in the bucket numerically. It’s 0.0001% of all the registered voters.” This is a neat metaphor that could also describe Bonta’s functioning brainpower, but which has become the cornerstone of modern administrative wisdom. Call it the “Bucket Defense.”

The brilliant thing about the Bucket Defense is its unscientific but majestic versatility. If, by diligently not looking, officials discover zero instances of non-citizen voting, the experts confidently say, “See? It never happens! Stop asking questions, you paranoid peasants.”

You’ll recall the Bucket Defense from the jab days. Say we find a cluster of ten teens who all died on the same football team and it’s confirmed to be myocarditis from the shots. Progressives sneered and asked, Do you know how many people got the shots? Ten is just a DROP IN THE BUCKET.

I guess that was intended to be comforting to the twenty parents. It’s the same thing when another small local election in California flips by six votes in favor of the candidate who promised sanctuary laws and free stuff for illegal aliens, and then they arrest some illegals for fraudulent voting. Liberals quickly say: sure, it sucks for YOU, but it’s just a DROP IN THE BUCKET.

But when they actually assign investigators, conduct interviews, check paperwork, track down suspects, and scoop up nearly thirty people doing the exact thing the experts insisted was physically impossible, the experts just adjust their tortoiseshell glasses and declare, “See? It’s just a drop in the bucket! Why are you obsessing over buckets? Put the bucket down.”

Of course, the primary reason the fraud bucket appears so empty is that California election officials have spent the last decade wearing the bucket as a hat.

🔥 It is a proven scientific fact that you cannot see fraudulent ballots if a five-gallon galvanized pail covers your eye sockets. If someone wanders down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, hands over a foreign passport, and the state’s automated voter registration system quietly slips them onto the rolls like an overeager waiter pushing the bread pudding, then nobody checks. (The Golden State forbids local clerks from even asking for proof of citizenship.)

Then, when federal agents actually look at the rolls and pluck out dozens of illegal voters, Sacramento throws its hands up and cries, “Look at these extremists, throwing drops into our lovely bucket!”

I selected the South China Post to headline today’s post because, unlike most U.S. platforms, it included this commonsense explanation from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter:

You cannot argue with McCotter’s logic, which is why nearly every U.S. corporate media platform led with Bonta’s dumb “bucket” comment and ignored the undeniable fact that small numbers of fraudulent votes do matter. Which is why Democrats lean away from facts and into logical fallacies.

Democrats and their media allies rely on four main fallacies. Let’s quickly review them.

🔥 First up is the mythical Rational Criminal. Here, the credentialed classes argue that non-citizens would never risk their immigration status, deportation, or a prison sentence just to cast a single ballot.

This is the classic “argument from incredulity” fallacy. It assumes that every human being on the planet operates according to a woke, mid-level bureaucrat’s cost-benefit analysis. They presume that if they wouldn’t trade a Green Card for a ballot, then no one would. For example, in one 2024 “Fact Check,” ABC News quoted Brennan Center attorney Sean Morales-Doyle saying it was “mind-boggling to think” someone would risk their freedom and presence in the country “to cast one ballot in one election.”

That presumes the illegal fully understands the potential consequences. But even within a rational, fully informed cost-benefit calculus, the severity of punishment is not the same thing as the person’s perceived likelihood of being caught.

Progressive experts conveniently ignore the fact that many non-citizens are not acting as calculated criminal masterminds; they are being constantly pressed by politicians, NGOs, activists, and automated government systems that they should register, that it is their “civic duty,” or that they are already ‘entitled’ to do so. But it isn’t always a heist. It’s often a bureaucratic ‘error’ cultivated by a system that prioritizes registration volume over eligibility verification.

The ‘errors’ keep happening, illegals keep getting registered when they get or renew driver’s licenses, and they —the illegals— are somehow expected to know that when the government hands them a receipt saying “Congratulations! You are now registered to vote!”, it actually means “do not vote.”

There are more than a few drops in the “erroneously registered” bucket. Here’s just one example from last month, headline from Reuters:

I’m not saying some illegal immigrants who can’t even speak English are nearly as dumb as Rob Bonta and don’t understand that being registered to vote by the government was the government’s mistake— for which they still remain responsible. Implying they aren’t smart or well-informed enough to understand would be mean.

I’m just saying that, in the glorious panoply of human existence, we each have more or fewer drops in our intellectual buckets, if you follow me. Some of us lack enough water to fully comprehend the ins and outs of federal law providing that voter registration is not the same as voter permission.

🔥 I call the second fallacy the Integrity Threshold. Rob Bonta’s “it’s rare” argument assumes that we should be okay with a certain “acceptable level” of corruption, like telling CVS it should just lock up the deodorant sticks because prosecuting shoplifting under $950 isn’t worth the cops’ effort.

But election law isn’t a retail pharmacy operating in the ‘hood. It is the absolute foundation of self-government. Once you concede that it is acceptable for non-citizens to vote —provided there aren’t too many of them— then you have destroyed the franchise’s foundations. You have turned the American citizen from a stakeholder with a unique, protected, Constitutional right into one additional statistical data point in an administrative database.

If the government’s response to a security breach is “don’t worry, only a few hackers got in,” that isn’t reassuring. It’s an admission that they aren’t trying very hard to keep the doors locked.

🔥 Third, the most condescending part of the “it’s rare” argument is the implication that voters are being paranoid for wanting an accurate count. This is the Systematic Denial of Agency fallacy.

Whenever the Trump Administration or independent watchdogs push for things like voter ID or citizenship verification, they aren’t just looking for “widespread“ fraud; they are trying to restore the sovereignty of the citizen. The elite classes hate this, because a sovereign citizen is much harder to manage than a passive, registered data point. If a citizen can’t be sure that their neighbor —who might have jumped the border yesterday— has the exact same say in the future of the republic as they do, the social contract begins dissolving.

The experts believe the numbers are small. But they also know that the precedent is huge. If they admit that the registration process is flawed, they have to fix it. And if they fix it, they lose the ability to keep the “bucket” of the electorate as large and porous as possible.

They don’t want a secure, accurate election. They want a “legitimate” one— which, in their lexicon, is just a synonym for an election that results in the people they like staying in power. If that requires a few thousand “drops” in the bucket to get the job done, well, they’ve already decided that the drops are nobody’s business but their own. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few buckets.

🔥 Fourth and finally is the ultimate Credentialed Class parlor trick. It is the Fallacy of the Proactive Audit, or, put simply, the “If the Police Aren’t There, Did the Crime Even Happen?” delusion.

The experts love to hold up the number of prosecutions as the gold standard for total fraud in the same way a burglar might argue he’s innocent because the police only managed to catch him that one time he tripped over the cat while carrying the plasma TV down the stairs.

This particular fallacy is wonderfully useful for people who prefer their elections a little murky. The logic goes like this: “We only have X number of prosecutions for voter fraud per year, therefore the level of fraud is X.” This is like saying that because there were only three arrests for speeding in a town of 50,000, nobody in that town ever drives over 25 miles per hour.

In reality, voter fraud is a “low-probability, high-consequence” crime. It is notoriously difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to investigate because it’s usually buried in piles of classified paper, and, more importantly, nobody is looking. If you put on the bucket and don’t audit the rolls, and you don’t cross-reference against immigration databases, and you don’t investigate the “clerical errors” at the DMV, your prosecution rate will always be near zero. The experts then point to that zero and say, “Look! A perfect, fraud-free system!”

This is not a system of electoral integrity; it’s a system of uninvestigated inconvenience.

The worst part of this fallacy is the claim that “limited resources” prevent us from investigating every ballot. The experts assure us, “We simply don’t have the manpower to cross-reference every registration against every immigration file.”

This is fascinating, given that the same government has the technical capability to track your location through your phone, monitor your bank transactions for suspicious activity, and send you a tax bill the nanosecond you forget to report a $50 Etsy hustle. They have the resources to find us when they want to. The fact that they can’t seem to find the resources to verify that the people voting are actually citizens is a choice.

It is a policy preference, not any real logistical limitation. The “Prosecution Fallacy” is just the “Bucket” argument with a bowtie.

They insist that we should measure the size of the storm by counting the number of people standing in the rain with umbrellas. The experts aren’t interested in measuring the storm; they’re interested in convincing us that the rain is actually just a pleasant, refreshing mist, and that if we get wet, it’s only because we weren’t standing under their very special, very secure, and very empty bucket.

🔥🔥🔥

Where in the world is Ilhan “Carmen Sandiego” Omar? Over the weekend, the Congresswoman —currently running for re-election— apparently failed to show up at a Minnesota CAIR rally in her support.

CLIP: Bizarre Omar rally lacks a candidate (2:11).

As alert readers know, Ilhan Omar is under an active investigation, probably for immigration fraud. On Monday, supporters held a “Stand with Ilhan” rally at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, her home district.

Multiple outlets (AP, Star Tribune, FOX 9, CBS Minnesota, and others) reported that Omar did not attend. Instead, rally organizer Wintana Melekin read a message from her to the crowd. The message thanked supporters for showing up, calling her office, and posting on social media; said she and her family were okay and would not be silenced; and stated she would “be home soon to get out the vote.”

“Soon” is a relative term. She has not been seen in public in the eight days since her DC residence was raided.

Her husband was seen outside the couple’s D.C. home (e.g., walking the dog) and pushed back on reporters asking about rumors that she had left the country, did not confirm or deny any travel. He said only, “You guys are annoying the hell out of all the neighbors around here, man.”

Seizure of her passport should have restricted international travel, assuming she does not have a second Somalian passport. Omar has posted on X only three times since the raid, with the most recent being four days ago.

She’s not completely invisible. On Saturday, the UK Guardian reported that Omar’s attorneys sent the DOJ a letter demanding her property be returned. Headline: “Ilhan Omar’s attorneys say federal search of her home was ‘neither justified nor lawful.’”

According to various media reports, the DOJ has issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including of Omar’s relatives, and seized records, her passport, and her phone in its ongoing investigation. “There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said her lawyer’s letter, which was leaked to the Associated Press.

Fueling speculation over the grounds for the investigation, this weekend on Fox, House Oversight Chair James Comer discussed Omar’s so-called ‘winery’ and said, “They were apparently selling investors barrels of wine to be aged, but there was nothing in the barrels.”

Whoops. If true, this raises a few pointed questions. Why would ‘investors’ buy empty wine barrels? Who were these investors, and why were they ‘investing’ in empty wine barrels? If the barrels were empty, why didn’t the investors complain? Were they paying for empty barrels on purpose?

Of course, on the other hand, we shouldn’t pre-judge anything. Empty might mean it was just a drop in the barrel.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow, when we’ll return to full C&C strength back at HQ, with a normal roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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Travel Update: I spent the weekend in Anaheim, Calfornia, as a guest of the Pacific Justice Institute, which very kindly gave me its Standing for Justice Award at the annual Celebration of Justice on Saturday night. If you don’t know PJI, you should.

When the pandemic lockdowns first came, and most institutions were busy finding reasons to comply, PJI was one of the few public interest law firms that stood up for pastors, churches, parents, and workers who refused to treat their constitutional rights as optional. They took the cases nobody else wanted, usually for free, and they took them when it cost something. Though headquartered in the pressure cooker of California, they ultimately spread their roots into 30+ states.

Brad Dacus and his team were wonderful hosts, warm and generous and gracious down to the last detail, and it was humbling to be honored by folks who did the hard work when it counted. On a personal note, the highlight of my evening was sitting next to Ray Comfort at the VIP table and doing a little ‘bro bonding.’ (Look him up on YouTube if you don’t recognize the name.)

🔥🔥🔥

Today’s top story is both exciting and hilarious. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Musk Vows to Give Each U.S. Child a SpaceX Share.” That was the exciting part. The hilarious part appeared just below that, in the article’s subheadline: “Pledge comes after Anthropic promised to commit 5% of its shares to a new ‘public benefit fund.’” Behold: the philosophical battle of the T-Rexes— the showdown between the individual freedom of capitalism and the collective shackles of progressivism.

Before I begin, may I just say: One so looks forward to articles about charity from the Wall Street Journal, which has the philanthropic instincts of an underfed tiger shark that has just watched its tourist climb back on the tour boat. That said, the story began by quoting Musk’s electrifying tweet.

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk tweeted early this morning. He hinted at even more.

This was terrific. And it was conveyed in a short, declarative sentence that seemed pretty clear to normal human ears, and thousands of Twitterers got the gist just fine. But, you see, our ears were not trained by four years of Ivy League journalism schools.

So Musk’s tweet baffled the highly credentialed Journal editors. What exactly did he mean by, ‘in America’? Does Palm Beach count? What about the Corn Belt?

“It wasn’t immediately clear,” the Journal complained, like an autistic compliance officer, “how the shares would be distributed, who would receive them and when it might start.”

Gosh. The Journal’s many questions provoked questions of my own— but not about Musk’s promise. About the Journal’s sanity.

Did it really ask, “Who would receive them?” What, pray tell, was so hard to understand about the words, “every kid in America?” And, When it might start? Did the words “next year” give the Journal any clues? As for how the shares would be distributed, it seems obvious to me that Musk will do it through Trump Accounts. How this possibility failed to occur to the writers was beyond my ability to understand, since the article mentioned Trump Accounts two paragraphs later.

Maybe the reporter imagined Musk might drop the stock certificates onto kids out of the back of a flying car, or possibly have Optimus robots in tuxedos personally deliver them by hand. (Or if not delivered ‘by hand,’ then ‘by gripper,’ or however we are saying it these days).

Anyway, after scratching its head in confusion over those insoluble enigmas, the Journal did some math. It explained to readers that, with about 73 million children under 18 in the US, Musk’s gift would come to roughly $10 billion at today’s stock price.

🔥 After trying to manufacture as much ‘news’ about Musk’s one-line tweet as it could, the Journal then turned to the competing ‘gift.’ It was from AI giant Anthropic, whose progressive CEO Dario Amodei is lately begging the federal government to regulate his industry. Anthropic’s board includes lefty heavyweights like Democrat megadonor Reed Hastings, and its governing trust includes the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which you can be sure has nothing to do with health.

Over the weekend, Anthropic announced that when (if) it goes public, it “plans” to pledge 5% of its shares, and I am not making this liberal gobbledygook up, to a “public benefit fund” with the “flexibility to make charitable donations” or to give money directly to “specific populations.” The company said details were forthcoming, but it would be a wholly-owned, for-profit LLC— providing a level of flexibility approaching that of an Olympic gymnast.

In other words, Anthropic distrusts ordinary Americans with its generosity. It doesn’t even want to be bound by 501c3 rules. Even after ‘giving’ it, Anthropic will keep control of the money, and decide who gets it and what they can use it for. And when it says “charitable donations,” it means NGOs. When it says “specific populations,” it means progressive victim groups. (One presumes, for example, that pro-life groups need not apply.)

But Anthropic won’t tell us who it will “gift” the money to, not yet; it will let us know later. Trust us.

Influencer DataRepublican was even more cynical than me. She thinks Anthropic’s “public benefit fund” is meant to replace USAID’s lost revenues by standing up dozens of little “George Soros clones”:

She may be onto something.

🔥 If it weren’t for double standards, the WSJ would have no standards at all. Unlike its suspicious scrutiny of Musk’s simple promise, the article did not probe all the inexplicable parts of Anthropic’s fuzzy pledge or call them “not immediately clear.” The Journal did not, for instance, ask “how the shares would be distributed, who would receive them,” or “when it might start.”

In Anthropic’s case, those are all fair questions. Unlike Musk’s clear promise, Anthropic’s announcement was chock full of complexity and dripping with lawyer weasel words. So it was telling that the Journal described Musk’s announcement as “not immediately clear.”

But the Journal implicitly noticed Anthropic’s fine print— by quoting the Space Billionaire. “Musk suggested Anthropic should give the shares directly to the public,” the Journal noted without additional comment. This, at last, was the real crux: Whether progressives and the government will keep their lucrative roles as charitable intermediaries, or whether the new Trump economy will delete the middleman.

A secondary point, also skipped by the Journal, was that Musk has no need to gift any part of his wealth away, much less an eye-watering $10 billion worth. Note that a gift is something freely given, without strings attached. Any transfer that comes with strings cannot properly be called a ‘gift,’ no matter how generous its intent.

Strings are how you control people.

Under the progressive model, charitable transfers come with strings of control, with legions of government bureaucrats administering the transfer programs and selectively enforcing complicated rules against various groups, creating a fierce competition between the interest groups to capture the bureaucracies.

All that charitable infrastructure disappears when donors can give stock directly to Americans and bypass the middlemen. Once the model takes off, it will spread. It could change everything.

That loud cracking noise is the sound of hundreds of federal agencies being bulldozed into the landfill of history. For the first time in our lives, we can see a possible future of individual empowerment, without a nanny state government micromanaging an increasingly helpless populace.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll be back in Gainesville HQ this evening, and installed in my familiar writer’s chair for tomorrow morning’s roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. We’ll catch up soon.

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