Exactly 4 weeks before the US Presidential election looks like a good point in time to address the state of the Automatic Earth. Not in the least because the news we cover will be heavily influenced by that election. And not just for those 4 weeks, says my gut feeling. Neither party seems likely to take a loss in stride.
First, about the state of the Automatic Earth. What I wrote ten months ago, in The State of TAE, is still true to a large extent. I have to hope that my readers continue to understand why we largely moved to the Debt Rattle format that’s focused on accumulating news from other sources.
That is, after the MSM nonsense, exacerbated by various forms of censorship, as we saw from 2015 onwards in the coverage of Trump, Covid, Ukraine and now Gaza and again Trump, I felt a great need to balance out that “news”. And not just by writing about it -that only goes so far-, but by providing (parts of) actual articles. Like those from RT and Sputnik.
And what do we see today? More calls for censorship. The Democrats want to protect your precious little innocent minds from opinions that are not theirs. For instance, there are -again- major calls to ban Russian sources even more than now. Because they’re “propaganda”. And CNN, MSNBC et al are not. No sirree.
On the financial front, I have no choice but to keep calling on your donations. It doesn’t look like we will ever get our ads back, not while Google monopolizes that field. And what an insane monopoly that is. Is there anything more UnAmerican? And ads should be one third of our revenues. Donations via Paypal and Patreon have to make up for that loss. And I am very stubborn in not wanting to put up a paywall. There’s far too many of them already.
I know a lot of people don’t want to use Paypal. The same may be true of Patreon. A suggestion that was made is to add Revolut to the mixture. If you think that is a good idea, please let me know in the comments. Also, ten months ago, I said if our core group of readers, 5,000 – 7,000 or so, all donate $1 per month, we would be fine, and then some. TAE is not a for-profit business, but it does have to stay alive. I work 12 hours a day on TAE, $12 a year should match that.
So much for the somewhat negative stuff. I have to say I’ve been feeling quite optimistic lately. Because Donald Trump has gathered a remarkable team of people around him. Sometimes you feel it’s despite himself, but it’s starting to look like he’s really learned from his first go at the White House. He appears to be delegating tasks now, to people he knows he can trust.
Elon Musk is a brilliant brain, who, other than his plan to go to Mars – think of it what you will-, and huge companies to run, has signed up to help streamline the government and bureaucracy. We know how he did that at Twitter. Robert Kennedy Jr. is a great brain in his own right. Very few if any people know more about the environment, drugs, chemicals and health than he does. Like Musk, he could revolutionize Washington. MAHA. Like Musk, RFK will have demanded a lot of room to move before signing up to endorse Trump. Who then allotted them that room. That there is where my optimism comes in.
And it’s not just those two guys. Vivek Ramaswamy is a great brain in his own right. It’s not clear in what role he would fit in, but he’s a great asset. If only to keep Trump honest. Tucker Carlson will be a great publicity “manager”, in one shape or another. Don’t let’s forget JD Vance, who’s done a good job so far as VP-to-be. And Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, etc etc.
Now imagine them not just as individuals, but as one force. It is formidable. And that makes me feel optimistic.
Here’s me doing a copy and paste from last year again:
Most of you will know the drill of this by now: any (Paypal) donations ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the Monastiraki kitchen, while other donations go to the Automatic Earth -which also badly needs them, especially for Christmas-.
I dislike few things more than asking people for money, even though the Automatic Earth now runs primarily on donations, and there’s some sweet justice in that as well, in depending on people’s appreciation of what we do, instead of ad revenues.
But I cannot do this on my own right now. To get through the winter in one piece, the Monastiraki kitchen will realistically need about €1,000 per month. I don’t have that to spare. So I’m calling on you. [..]
So let’s see where we can get today, shall we? I want to write the perfect article with the perfect plea, but there is of course no such thing. Therefore, I will be back in a few weeks time with a reminder -and updates-, hoping that y’all have gotten the message.
I love all you people so much, and I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually who have supported -and still do- the Monastiraki kitchen and the Automatic Earth all this time, and I ask you to keep on doing just that. The details for donations on Paypal and Patreon, for both causes, are in the top of the two sidebars of this site. Could not be much easier.
Love you. Thank you.
NOTE: The address for Checks and Money Orders is under “Store and Donations” in the menu (where else can you put it?):
Daniel Jarvis
494 Hamilton St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30316
USA
Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.
BREAKING: The Paramedic who took care of Trump at the Butler Memorial Hospital just gave the most beautiful description of the events of that day, saying she witnessed a version of Trump the media has never shown
Just listen to this and tell me this isn't the greatest ending of any of Trump's rallies ever recorded as we are treated to the heavenly sounds of Hallelujah, Nessun Dorma, and America by the Beautiful by the voice of a literal angel. I could listen to this all day. 9 minutes… pic.twitter.com/PSOcmohyuH
As Trump pauses his speech to allow doctors to check on an attendee in need of medical attention, the crowd spontaneously begins singing the Star Spangled Banner.
I just got back from North Carolina and Georgia. It’s hard to put into words the complete devastation of so many towns that literally washed away when a wall of water swept thru their town. Unfortunately, there are still many people who are not getting the assistance they need.… pic.twitter.com/yFSf0wg3u7
Tim Walz cracks under the most basic pushback to his radical abortion extremism — and gets called out for his disgusting lies: "To be clear, the Minnesota law is FAR beyond Roe v. Wade." pic.twitter.com/o88IXhyOxU
Shah
https://twitter.com/i/status/1842829985754521677
“We’re gonna win, and he’s gonna reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing, before China, before anybody. My money’s on that guy [Musk].”
Former US President Donald Trump has pledged to “reach Mars” before the end of his term in office, should he defeat Vice President Kamala Harris next month. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will lead the mission, Trump declared. Musk joined Trump for a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. During the event, which took place at the site of Trump’s attempted assassination in July, the 45th president issued a series of familiar campaign promises – vowing to close the US southern border, end the Ukraine conflict, and lower energy prices and inflation – as well as a pledge to reach the Red Planet before 2028. ”We will lead the world in space exploration,” he told the audience. “We will reach Mars before the end of my term.” “Elon promised me that he was going to do that,” Trump continued, before turning to Musk and asking “I don’t know, can you do that?”
“We’re gonna win, and he’s gonna reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing, before China, before anybody. My money’s on that guy [Musk].” During his first term in office, Trump issued a series of space-related executive orders and policy directives. He tasked NASA in 2017 with leading “the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations,” and in 2019 established the US Space Force as the sixth branch of the country’s military, leading opponents to accuse him of militarizing space. Musk, who endorsed Trump’s campaign earlier this summer, has promised for years to make humanity a “multiplanetary” civilization. However, he blames excessive government regulation for delaying his planned colonization of Mars.
Last month, Musk claimed that his SpaceX reusable ‘Starship’ rocket would be ready for uncrewed flights to Mars within two years, and crewed flights two years later. After the Federal Aviation Administration denied SpaceX permission to test the rocket before November due to environmental concerns, Musk took to his X platform to complain that “we will never get humanity to Mars if this continues.” “Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” SpaceX wrote in a statement at the time. “This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.” During his first term, Trump pushed the idea of cutting two government regulations for every new one enacted. If elected again, he has promised to go further, telling the New York Economic Club last month that he would “eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every one regulation” imposed.
Former President Barack Obama is stepping in to save the day, as he’ll start hitting the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris starting October 10, according to ABC News. Obama will help Harris in her campaign through election day, his speeches are planned in key swing states, the first of which will be Pennsylvania, a senior member of Harris’ campaign told the broadcaster. Earlier, NBC News reported that some Democrats, including a few of Harris’ staff, were concerned that the vice president was not holding enough campaign events, which could cost her the election. The US presidential election will take place on November 5. The Democratic Party will be represented by Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Republican Party by former President Donald Trump.
“Milton has intensified into a category 1 hurricane. [..] ..expected to make landfall on Wednesday on the Gulf Coast of Florida as a Category 3 major hurricane..”
Milton has intensified into a category 1 hurricane. According to the 2 p.m. ET advisory from the National Hurricane Center on Sunday, Milton was about 815 miles west-southwest of Tampa, Florida. It is expected to make landfall on Wednesday on the Gulf Coast of Florida as a Category 3 major hurricane. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier on Sunday that the state is preparing for the storm and that the top priority is round-the-clock debris cleanup from Hurricane Helene, which hit only 10 days ago. “This is all hands on deck to get that debris where it needs to be,” he said during a press conference at the state’s emergency operations center on Oct. 6. A tropical storm warning has been issued for Mexico’s Celestún to the Caribbean’s Cabo Catoche, while a tropical storm watch is in effect for east of Cabo Catoche to Cancún. Hurricane and storm surge watches could be required for for portions of Florida later Sunday.
When DeSantis gave his briefing, the tracks predicted landfall on Madeira Beach in Pinellas County, and he warned that along with the intense winds, storm surge damage could exceed that of Helene. “Most of the Big Bend is uninhabited,” he said. “When you’re talking about Tampa Bay, and you talk about what even 10 feet of storm surge would do in an area that has, I mean, the Greater Tampa Bay Area has millions of people. “That is just a level of damage, I think, that would far exceed the damage that was done in the Big Bend.” DeSantis and Kevin Guthrie, executive director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, announced plans underway to stage resources in the Tampa Bay area. They said they are prepared for the possibility of Tampa Bay landfall and a storm track that runs along the I-4 corridor across the state, causing debris, significant power outages, and infrastructure damage.
“The State Emergency Response Team planning section has been working this particular scenario, as well as other scenarios, for at least two weeks now,” Guthrie said. “So that’s what’s making us very effective in the response before hurricane season ever began. Our team knew to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.” High-water vehicles have been sent to Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties. A Hillsborough County fire station received 400 feet of flood protection systems, and another 1,800 feet will be distributed to wastewater facilities, pump stations, and a hospital in Hillsborough and Manatee counties. DeSantis also recalled members of Florida’s State Guard, National Guard, Fish and Wildlife, Highway Patrol, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who were deployed to help North Carolina and Tennessee recover from Helene, along with all necessary equipment to respond to Milton.
“I have the State Emergency Response Team preparing for the largest evacuation that we have seen, most likely since 2017 hurricane Irma,” Guthrie said, urging Floridians to finalize their hurricane plans as soon as possible. Guthrie added that the Florida Department of Emergency Management has “thought through a lot of contingencies,” including providing emergency fuel and EV charging along evacuation routes, as well as identifying every potential housing location, which his division calls “a refuge of last resort.” Meanwhile, debris cleanup remains a top priority across the Gulf Coast before tropical storm conditions return. In his Oct. 5 executive order declaring a state of emergency for 35 counties—now amended to 51—the governor ordered all disaster debris management sites and landfills in all Helene-impacted counties to remain open for 24-hour operations.
Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens. Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free peope to give up their freedom.
That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans. She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech. Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.
Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech: “Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.” Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.
Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it. If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.
Rescue the Republic rally in Washington on Sept. 29, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu.
As the dust settles on his White House bid, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is focusing on his initiative, Make America Healthy Again, with the goal to turn around what he calls a chronic disease epidemic in the United States. Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign on Aug. 23 and threw his support behind former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee. Trump has promised to appoint Kennedy to a health-related role in a potential second term. Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that ending his presidential campaign was a difficult decision, but it was a “necessary step” to achieving his mission. “I prayed to God every day for the past 19 years that America’s health crisis would be solved for the next generation,“ he said. ”That is a major reason why I ran for president.” Kennedy’s campaign platform focused on fighting “corporate capture of government agencies” and ending the chronic disease epidemic.
An environmental lawyer and founder of Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy believes one issue impacts the other. U.S. corporations, Kennedy said, have made America the sickest country in the world. “We enriched these corporations and their captive agencies. And now they want to go and commoditize all of the things we value in our lives,” he said on a soggy afternoon on Sept. 30. Kennedy was among the keynote speakers at Rescue the Republic, a day-long rally that brought 6,500 supporters of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement to the National Mall in Washington. Little will change until the corporate capture of government agencies is removed, he said. “The FDA, USDA, and CDC are all controlled by giant or private corporations. Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans. Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets,” he said at the event.
At an earlier address in Washington, Kennedy said the state of health care should be measured by patient outcomes, including chronic illness, childhood obesity, and life expectancy. He pointed out that the United States is significantly behind other countries with smaller economies, such as Italy, which has a higher life expectancy and spends less on health care. “Today, we are an average of six years behind our European neighbors. Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians or is there a problem with our system? Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food?” Kennedy said. He said the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, has contributed to the nation’s health care crisis by driving up insurance premiums and “making health care the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.” Since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy has been an outspoken critic of how elected officials and public health leaders managed the crisis.
The United States had one of the worst COVID outcomes in the world with deaths, he said. “Our health leaders said that COVID was a pharmaceutical deficiency. This was a lie. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth.” Two-thirds of U.S. adults suffer from chronic health issues, Kennedy noted, and 74 percent are overweight or obese. “When my uncle was president [1961-63], about 1 percent of the children in this country had a chronic disease. That number may be as high as 60 percent in America today,” he said. He sees the chronic disease epidemic among American children as a form of abuse. “Children are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the most exemplary democracy in the world, if we are treating our children like this?” He said diseases that once mostly impacted the elderly are now increasingly common among children.
“About 18 percent of American teens now have fatty liver disease,” Kennedy stated. “When I was a boy, this only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and old. Young adult cancers are up 79 percent, and 1 in 4 American women is on antidepressant medication. Forty percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis; 15 percent of high schoolers are on Adderall. No other country has anything like this.” Ultra-processed foods are a primary culprit in the medical crisis impacting the young, he said. “Seventy percent of American children’s diet is now ultra-processed, which means industrial, manufactured in a factory.” He said these ultra-processed foods have chemicals that didn’t exist a century ago and are partly responsible for the rise in diseases in all ages.
President Joe Biden urged Congress on Friday to expedite funding for the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) disaster loan program, warning that it will run out of money within weeks amid ongoing recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. In a letter to Congress on Oct. 4, Biden warned that the SBA’s disaster loan program will run out of funding “in a matter of weeks and well before the Congress is planning to reconvene.” “I warned the Congress of this potential shortfall even before Hurricane Helene landed on America’s shores,” the president stated, adding that he had requested more funding for SBA “multiple times” in the past months. “Small businesses and individuals in affected areas depend on disaster loans as a critical lifeline during difficult times,” he said. “The Congress must act to restore this funding.” The president did not specify the amount needed to replenish the disaster loan program.
The SBA offers low-interest loans to businesses, homeowners, and renters affected by declared disasters. Its loan program provides affected homeowners with up to $500,000 to repair their primary residence, and up to $2 million for businesses to cover disaster-related losses. In his letter, Biden stated that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund has sufficient resources to meet its immediate needs for Hurricane Helene response efforts, it could face a shortfall by the end of the year. FEMA and the Department of Defense have been carrying out “critical life-saving and life-sustaining missions” due to impacts from Hurricane Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 26. Biden said that FEMA will continue to perform its missions “within present funding levels” but urged Congress to provide additional resources. “Without additional funding, FEMA would be required to forego longer-term recovery activities in favor of meeting urgent needs,” the president stated.
Biden traveled to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia this week to tour areas severely impacted by the storm, which caused heavy flooding and widespread power outages. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Oct. 2 that FEMA does not have enough money to make it through the hurricane season. “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told reporters aboard Air Force One on Oct. 2. Hurricane Helene barreled through the Southeast last week, making landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region. The storm hammered Florida’s Gulf Coast with record storm surges and brutal winds before pommeling the rest of the region with historic flooding, wiping out entire towns. More than 150,000 households have registered for FEMA assistance, according to Frank Matranga, an agency representative. That number is expected to climb as rescue and recovery efforts continue.
FEMA Blew Their Budget Importing Illegal Migrants Now Americans Who Lost Their Homes Get Nothing
This woman’s father just had his home loss appraised by FEMA representatives
Her farher lost his home and everything he owns to Hurricane Helene. FEMA came and did their inspection,… pic.twitter.com/oXN0by4U7I
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has said that his country would not allow Ukraine to join NATO as long as he stays in power. Admitting Kiev into the US-led military alliance would trigger a new world war, he warned in an interview with the broadcaster STVR on Sunday. “As long as I am the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, I will lead the legislators, whom I have control over as a party chairman, to never agree to Ukraine’s membership in NATO,” Fico said. “Ukraine’s entry into NATO would serve as a good basis for a third world war.” Fico, a longtime critic of Western military and financial aid to Ukraine, has insisted that the conflict must be resolved through diplomatic means. He repeatedly warned against further escalation with Moscow. The accession of new countries must be approved by all of NATO’s 32 existing members, with national parliaments voting in favor or against new candidates.
Kiev formally applied to join NATO in September 2022, citing the ongoing conflict with Russia. While many Western states publicly backed Ukraine’s aspirations, they have refused to provide a concrete roadmap or a timetable for accession. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zenesky acknowledged in July that “we will not be in NATO until the war is over in Ukraine.” Russia views NATO’s expansion eastward as a security threat and has cited Ukraine’s cooperation with the alliance as one of the main reasons behind the conflict. President Vladimir Putin warned last month that using Western-supplied longer-range weapons for strikes deep inside Russia would be tantamount to “direct involvement” of NATO in the fighting.
Kiev has no plans to cede any territories to achieve peace in the conflict with Russia, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has said, following media reports that the West is considering a settlement with Moscow in which it retains “de-facto” control over some areas formerly controlled by Kiev. In a video address on Saturday, the Zelensky announced that Ukrainian officials would discuss Kiev’s so-called ‘victory plan’ with Western backers next week, claiming it would help strengthen the country, especially in the military sphere. Kiev has yet to release the much-hyped roadmap to the public, though it has promised to do so, at least with regard to the essential points. Several media reports, however, claim that the plan includes NATO-like Western security guarantees for Ukraine, the continuation of Kiev’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region to serve as a territorial bargaining chip, deliveries of “specific” Western-made advanced weapons, and international financial aid for Ukraine.
The plan was presented by Zelensky in the US last month, and was reportedly met with skepticism by officials who suggested that it contains no “real surprises” and largely amounts to a “wish list,” according to Bloomberg. Discussions with Kiev’s Western backers will enable it to move closer to ending the conflict in line with Zelensky’s ‘peace formula’, the Ukrainian leader said, referring to his plan which demands that Russia withdraw troops from territories claimed by Ukraine. This has been rejected by Moscow as a non-starter for talks. “This is our goal – to guarantee Ukraine reliable peace and security. This is possible only based on international law and without any bargaining over sovereignty or trading territories,” he stated.
His remarks come after the Financial Times reported that Western diplomats and some Ukrainian officials “have come round to the view that meaningful security guarantees could form the basis of a negotiated settlement in which Russia retains de facto, but not de jure, control of all or part of the Ukrainian territory.” The outlet noted that this approach implies “tacit acceptance that those lands should be regained through diplomatic means in the future,” adding, however, that this remains a “taboo” for Kiev, at least in public. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is ready to immediately declare a ceasefire and start peace negotiations as soon as Ukraine starts withdrawing troops from the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye. In August, however, he ruled out any engagement with Kiev as long as Ukrainian troops are occupying parts of Kursk Region.
Friday’s commemoration of Hezbollah’s late leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in Iran was no ordinary event and provides an indication of how far Tehran is willing to go to preserve the Axis of Resistance in the face of Israeli escalation. Thousands reportedly turned out for the commemoration ceremony, in which Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei led Friday prayers before addressing the gathered masses. Khamenei’s public appearance can itself be seen as both an act of defiance directed at the Axis’ enemies and a message of reassurance to its supporters, who are no doubt looking to Iran for leadership following Nasrallah’s assassination. The Iranian leader’s public appearance comes after foreign media reports that he had been moved to an undisclosed location for safety reasons in the immediate aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination.
Perhaps more importantly, it comes on the heels of Operation True Promise 2, in which Iran launched a heavy barrage of missiles on Israel, which, according to the Iranians, hit 90 percent of their intended targets. That operation was notably heavier-handed than the first True Promise, which came in response to Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus last April and marked the first direct military action by Tehran on Israel. In an article for Foreign Policy, Vali Nasr notes how Iran’s second direct attack on Israel was carried out with far less advanced warning compared to the April operation. Nasr – considered an authoritative voice in Washington on issues related to West Asia – also explained how the latest missile salvo “signaled Iran’s will and ability to attack Israel – and penetrate its defense systems in potentially damaging ways.”
True Promise 2 came in response to the assassination of Nasrallah, Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismael Haniyeh, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Abbas Nilforushan, conveying a clear message that Iran, contrary to many assessments, was ready to escalate. This message was reinforced by Khamenei on Friday, as he delivered some fiery remarks with a rifle by his side. “What our armed forces did was the minimum punishment for the crimes of the usurping Zionist regime,” said Khamenei in reference to Iran’s latest offensive, while warning that Tehran was ready to conduct more direct military action against Israel should the need arise.
These warnings come amid much speculation on Israel’s likely response to True Promise 2, as senior officials in Tel Aviv have pledged that Iran’s attack will not go unanswered, and the Israeli military appears to be readying a large-scale operation against Iran, with US support. In turn, senior Iranian military officials have warned that any Israeli operations targeting Iranian soil would be met with devastating blows, far exceeding the strikes Tehran has conducted in both its previous operations. As IRGC Deputy Commander Ali Fadavi said in a statement published by Iranian state-affiliated media: “If the occupiers make such a mistake [attack Iran], we will target all their energy sources, installations, and all refineries and gas fields.”
That Iran has upped the ante dramatically in the aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination speaks to how determined it is to demonstrate that this setback will not weaken the Axis of Resistance. Perhaps even more importantly, these latest developments speak to the special relationship between the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah. This is reflected in the fact that Khamenei’s speech was the first time in which Iran’s supreme leader publicly addressed a mass crowd since the US assassination of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in early 2020, further highlighting the special status of Nasrallah throughout Iran, and with Khamenei, at a personal level.
The surprise attack on Israel launched by Hamas last year was a “logical and legal” step towards defeating the “malicious and cowardly” Zionist regime, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said. On Friday, in his first public sermon in nearly five years, Khamenei defended the actions against Israel by the ‘axis of resistance’, which includes the Lebanese-based Hezbollah and Palestinian group Hamas. Monday marks one year since the start of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, which came in response to Hamas’ surprise attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which around 1,100 people were killed and more than 200 people were taken hostage. Israel’s campaign in the enclave, following years of a de-facto blockade of Gaza, has resulted in the deaths of over 41,000 Palestinians, Gaza’s Health Ministry said earlier this week.
Tensions between Israel and neighboring Muslim countries have soared during the Gaza operation, with both Iran and Hezbollah supporting Hamas and Palestine. Earlier this month, the conflict entered a new stage as Israel launched a ground operation in Lebanon. In retaliation, Iran launched a massive missile attack on Israel this week. Khamenei said in his sermon that the Palestinians, like “every people,” have “the right to defend their land, their home, their country, and their interests against aggressors,” and this “logic is supported by international law.” He added that “those who help” the Palestinians and support them are merely “doing their duty.” “This is the rule of Islam, the rule of reason, and international and global logic. The Palestinians are defending their land; their defense is legitimate, and helping them is also logical and legal,” he stated. He defended Iran’s recent missile attack on Israel, saying it was “the minimum punishment for the usurping and bloodthirsty Zionist regime… whose only achievement has been to bomb homes, schools, hospitals and civilian gathering centers” in Gaza.
Khamenei went on to say that Iran “will perform any duty required” to see Israel defeated, claiming that West Jerusalem has only managed to “survive” for so long due to the assistance of its allies in the West. “This regime acts like rabid wolves and raging dogs of America in the region. This malicious and cowardly entity has barely kept itself afloat thanks to America’s support, and it will not last long,” he said. Khamenei stressed that the main problem in the Middle East is foreign interference, as “the countries of the region are capable of establishing security and peace” if left alone. He criticized America’s involvement and support for West Jerusalem, saying the US has never wanted peace in the Middle East, but has instead been pursuing the goal “of turning Israel into a tool to seize all the natural resources of the region and invest them in major global conflicts.”
“..the use of AI-assisted “kill-lists” known as Lavender – allowing 15, 20, or 100 or more civilians to be killed to eliminate one suspected Hamas operative..”
At least two dozen people were killed and nearly 100 injured in an airstrike on a mosque sheltering displaced persons in the city of Deir al Balah, central Gaza early Sunday. The IDF confirmed responsibility for the strike, alleging that the mosque and a nearby school were used by Hamas as a command post. Some 814 of 1,245 mosques in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, another 148 partially damaged, and all three of the strip’s churches ravaged. Those are the stark conclusions reached by Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Affairs on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Gaza war, which has become the deadliest chapter in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 1948. According to the ministry, 19 of 60 cemeteries in its care have been targeted, eight destroyed, and 11 damaged, and grave sites and remains have been exhumed, desecrated, plundered, and mutilated in areas where Israeli troops have operated.
The campaign of Israeli airstrikes is estimated to have destroyed some 79% of all religious sites in the enclave, causing some $350 million in damage. Eleven of 14 administrative and educational facilities under the Ministry of Religious Affairs’ care have also been targeted, with nine of them razed, the ministry said. Targeted sites included the ministry’s headquarters, the Holy Quran Radio building, the Khan Yunis Endowments Directorate, the Antiquities and Manuscripts Center, the Endowments Sharia School for Boys and the College of Islamic Propagation’s northern branch. Nine of the ministry’s vehicles have also been destroyed. Over the past year, 238 Religious Affairs Ministry employees have been killed and 19 others detained by Israeli forces, according to the figures. The ministry called on the international community and Islamic organizations to intervene to stop what it characterized as an “ongoing war of extermination.”
The Gaza conflict has now claimed the lives of over 43,000 people, mostly Palestinian civilians, and maimed nearly 97,000 others – collectively accounting for over 6% of the strip’s prewar population of 2.1-2.3 million people. An estimated 99% of Gaza’s population is Sunni Muslim, with Christians, Shia, and Ahmadi Muslim communities making up less than 1% of residents. Before the war, Christians were tightly packed into Gaza City, worshiping at the Gaza Baptist Church, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, and the Catholic Holy Family Church. All three have been targeted by Israeli aerial bombardments. The severity of Israel’s operations in Gaza, which have reportedly included the use of AI-assisted “kill-lists” known as Lavender – allowing 15, 20, or 100 or more civilians to be killed to eliminate one suspected Hamas operative – has sparked international outrage and condemnation. Over a dozen countries have signed onto South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel accusing the nation of “genocide” in Gaza. Israeli officials have rejected the allegations.
The Houthis’ escalating conflict with Israel is nearing its one-year anniversary, having started on October 19, 2023 with the launch of missiles and drones toward Tel Aviv, and expanding in November of that year into a partial blockade of the Red and Arabian Seas which the US and its allies have proven unable to effectively challenge. “America is a partner and financier of all the crimes of the Zionist enemy. It is killing the Palestinian nation and has brought suffering and misery to this nation,” Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said in a televised address Sunday on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Gaza War. Pointing to the US provision of large amounts of armaments to Israel in decades past, al-Houthi said Washington had delivered the “devil of wars” in Tel Aviv “the deadliest weapons” over the past year, including hundreds of transport planeloads and over 100 shiploads, (among this 240 planes and 20 ships worth in the first three months of the conflict alone).
“The Israeli enemy has used about 100,000 tons of explosives, including bombs, missiles and rockets, which were provided by the United States,” the militia leader asserted, adding that this includes an estimated 10,000 tons of unexploded ordonnance currently littering the Gaza Strip today, and US-made bombs prohibited under international law. “The enemy has mobilized all its resources to attack Gaza, and America, Britain and the West have supported this regime through the Gaza War. The Israeli enemy attacked Gaza with an army of over 350,000 soldiers and reserve forces…sending five formations under the cover of fire from the land, sea and air. This has been the most violent and brutal attack in the history of wars,” al-Houthi said. Listing off a series of “murders and massacres” he said had targeted Gaza’s residents over the past year, al-Houthi warned that a “curse” would “fall on the Zionist enemy,” and the “global conscience” sure to remember its “crimes.”
Al-Houthi went on to blast the US over what he characterized as Washington’s “obstruction” of efforts at the United Nations to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, including the blocking of five ceasefire resolutions, while its officials visited Israel. Characterizing ‘Al-Aqsa Storm’ – the Hamas surprise attack into southern Israel on October 7, 2023 which kicked off the present war, as a “very big and very hard blow to the Israeli enemy,” al-Houthi asserted that “no matter how much the Israeli enemy continues with its genocide, killing and terrorism, it will not achieve the result it wants.
No matter how many genocidal crimes it commits, it will not bring about any result other than the downfall and destruction of this regime.” “The [Axis of Resistance] fronts of support in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen are one of the most important features of this round of the conflict with the Israeli enemy…and this situation is unprecedented and has never been seen before in the past 75 years,” al-Houthi said. As for the Houthis, “one of the most important results of the Yemen operation has been preventing the movement of the Israeli enemy in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Arabian Sea,” al-Houthi said.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council and former president, has suggested ‘sinking Great Britain’ as a way to solve the country’s problems with London. The former president was responding to a statement made late last month by renowned Russian skiing champion Elena Vyalbe. In an exclusive interview with NEWS.ru outlet, the three-time Olympic champion and head of Russia’s Cross-Country Skiing Federation slammed the West for banning the country’s athletes from most international sports tournaments in response to the Ukraine conflict. Vyalbe claimed that “if we had dropped a serious bomb in the center of London, it would have all been over by now and we would have been allowed everywhere.”
Medvedev, who has become known for his sharp language in social media posts, argued that there are more effective ways to deal with the problem than bombing. “Our famous skier Elena Vyalbe suggested dropping a bomb on London. She’s right, of course, but we need to solve the problem radically and just sink the damned island of Anglo-Saxon dogs,” Medvedev said. He did not elaborate on whether ‘the problem’ refers to sports or the state of Russia’s relations with the UK in general. The UK and its NATO partners have sided with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, providing Kiev with financial and military aid and placing sanctions on Moscow. London was among 30 nations that urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to uphold a ban it had placed on Russian and Belarusian athletes when it proposed allowing them to compete in the Summer Olympics this year.
Most Western-based sports bodies banned Russia and Belarus from taking part in international sports tournaments shortly after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, including the IOC, FIFA, FIDE, and others. Moscow has repeatedly criticized the restrictions. In her interview, Vyalbe slammed the IOC, calling it a “trash heap” that is “engaged in who knows what, but certainly not honest sport.” She added that while “sports has always been tied with politics,” the sweeping bans on athletes for political reasons “no longer resemble sport at all.”
Julian Assange’s Address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on October 1, 2024, with Comment by Paul Craig Roberts.
(Assange address is under the link, this is PCR’s commenst)
After reading Assange’s address I realized that all of this was just the tip of the iceberg. What the United States government did to Assange is worse than can be found in any dystopian novel. Read Assange’s speech, and then ask yourself how you can possibly believe you are a free person living in a free democratic country with accountable government where there is justice, mercy, integrity, morality, and the rule of law. Also notice that it was the Obama Justice Department that dropped all attempts to indict Assange as there are no legal grounds for his indictment, and that it was the Trump Justice Department that reopened the case under CIA pressure. If memory serves, the whores who comprise Western journalism came out against Assange, that is, the dumbshits came out against their own profession, and conservative pundits accused Assange of being a Russian spy. Get the traitor, get the traitor, screamed the presstitutes and conservative pundits.
It was pressure from the Council of Europe and funding of Assange’s lawyers by donations from individuals that caused the CIA to settle for Assange’s plea that he was “guilty of practicing journalism.” We might laugh, but what the CIA has accomplished is a possible precedent for the criminalization of truthful, objective journalism, and its replacement with enforcement of official narratives. Assange himself says he “pled guilty to being a journalist.” The guilty plea implies that journalism is a crime. How many people will be bothered to understand Assange’s treatment by the “great free democracy, the light of the world”? Hardly any, just as hardly any understand that Washington has provoked Russia to the point of nuclear war, and a majority of Americans, it seems, support Israel’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians redefined by Israel as “Muslim terrorists.” Suppose people were able to free themselves from insouciance and gain access to truth and understanding, what can they do without political leaders?
Where are their leaders? I can only think of two who have recognizable names: Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. How have the ruling establishments reacted to these two representatives of the people? Trump has been served by the “freedom and democracy” US government with four criminal indictments for which he is on trial. Le Pen is on trial for representing French ethnicity. The official charge is embezzlement of funds, but her defense of a French ethnic nation makes her a racist under the ruling DEI ideology, and that is the real charge against her. How good are these two leaders? Le Pen must be pretty good. She has stood the heat for many years, and the party has grown. Possibly it is the largest of the French political parties, but the Establishment has been successful keeping it out of office. It seems Le Pen is on trial on an annual basis.
Trump is a neophyte, He defeated himself in his first term by stupidly surrounding himself with the representatives of the ruling establishment that he thought he was going to overthrow. Instead they overthrew him. Trump claims he has learned Washington since appointing Gestapo operatives such as Pompano and Barr and refusing to defend General Flynn, his only sensible appointment. But what has he learned? Did he learn that the Establishment is more powerful than the President and that second time around he had best get along with the Establishment? Leaders are rare. Even if one appears, he cannot count on the people’s support. Cicero, Quaestor, Procounsel, and Counsel of Rome, tried to rally the Roman people from their self-destruction and paid for it with his life. Trump tried to give power back to the American people and was punished for it with four criminal indictments. Le Pen tries to represent French ethnicity and is constantly legally harassed.
When the people themselves lose interest in their rights and cannot bring themselves to fight to regain them, they lose their freedom. In the United States today, and I think throughout the Western world, law has been weaponized against all who openly dissent from the Ruling Establishment’s narratives and agendas. As law is now a weapon in the hands of the state, why would Democrats, whose hand is on this weapon, permit an election to take it away from them? A sinking ship cannot change its course. If the Democrats steal a third national election, and the American people again accept it, there will not be another election. Americans will have crossed the Rubicon into tyranny. Older Americans will be slow to realize it, and new generations, having been born into tyranny will not know what has been lost, having never experienced freedom. This is the way liberty dies.
WATCH: RFK Jr. reveals corruption behind modern media; "The role of the media in a democracy is to maintain a fierce posture of skepticism toward government authorities——But in the last decade—the media has become the mouthpiece for government policies."pic.twitter.com/nJkkobl5Ig
Ukame successfully returned back to the wild in 2021, after her human family (our Keepers) spent years raising her from rescue. In a successful sign of her rewilding, she’s been given the covetous position of being one of Chapa’s adoring new nannies. Go Ukame! Watch her shepherd… pic.twitter.com/kVq9CCjsTh
— Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (@SheldrickTrust) October 6, 2024
Barcelona
https://twitter.com/i/status/1842963176545235161
If Trump trounces Kamala at the debate, get ready for some very strange things to happen before November. They’ve already sued him, prosecuted him, tried to kick him off the ballot, and swapped out his opponent. All of it could be just a preview of what’s to come. pic.twitter.com/XfSjyErEXY
Every time they’ve alleged “pro-Trump Russian election interference,” it’s actually been Democrat-led U.S. election interference laundered through allegations against Russia. The Steele Dossier in 2016. The Hunter Biden laptop in 2020. So now when we hear Biden’s DOJ prosecute… pic.twitter.com/zmVWDEilLs
The election of 2024 will be epochal for the United States. It will be as impactful on the course of the nation as the election of 1860 and the ensuing Civil War. This November’s election will determine whether the U.S. remains a viable constitutional republic or becomes a one-party state. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the result will be the realization of President Obama’s intent, voiced in his famous 2008 remark, to “fundamentally transform” the United States. Thus, the election is important for all Americans, particularly the voting public, to be aware that should Harris win, then 2024 is likely to be the last free, fair, and competitive election in the U.S. If she does win, then the U.S. by 2028 will be a one-party country, with the Democrats in permanent control, as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or Hawaii are at the state level today. In the wake of her 2024 election, Harris, by her own words, is certain to take the following actions in pursuit of the agenda of the one-party government.
Harris will target the Supreme Court, as that is the most potent source of resistance to Democratic rule. To defeat the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the Harris administration will push to pack the Court so that it may nominate justices who support judicial activism and oppose originalism—that the constitution, or subsequent laws, be interpreted by their original meanings. A Harris administration that packed the Court, with new Justices confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate, would usher in the one-party state that would never give up power. Additionally, a Harris administration would seek to add states to the Electoral College. Specifically, the Harris administration supports the push to add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states, adding four Senators and at least two Representatives to the House of Representatives. The addition of these states to the Union would give the Democrat Party permanent control over the presidency.
Again, another example of a one-party state, something that is anathema to freedom and liberty and has always resulted in death and destruction to the citizens of the people of other countries. Given the decisions by the Biden-Harris administration to open America’s border, illegal immigration will continue and be accelerated. Although no one knows the total numbers, at least 10-12 million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. during the Biden-Harris presidency. These illegal aliens will be placed on an immediate path to citizenship so that they may vote legally. Conceivably, at least 12 million more illegal aliens can be expected to enter the U.S. during a Harris presidency, and this will only accelerate a permanent pathway for illegal aliens to become citizens. This will open the doors to many more scores of millions of people to enter the U.S. in numbers that are certain to destabilize American society, economy, and politics and forever change the country.
Regarding the economy, Americans can expect a Harris administration to make good on their pledges to institute federally mandated price controls and dramatically increase tax burdens on average Americans, including taxes on unrealized income, also known as wealth taxes. These actions will culminate in even worse hyperinflation, devaluation of the dollar, and the essential establishment of a state-run economy like that run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the PRC—the disastrous results notwithstanding. Her Department of Justice will build on Biden’s efforts to decapitate the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement by imprisoning President Trump, senior Trump officials, attorneys, and prospective Republican rivals whose support is rooted in the MAGA movement. Lindsay Graham and other RINOs will be safe, at least in the near term, but not J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley. Censorship in all forms will worsen. Government interference in social media will tighten so that all media, including social media, are de facto state-controlled. Orwell’s “thought police” would become a reality.
Policies to destroy American culture, including the nuclear family, and Western civilization will be expanded to bring America to a “Year Zero” moment, where American society, culture, and family life may be remade in accord with Marxism-Leninism. A Harris administration’s policy towards the People’s Republic of China will continue President Biden’s swath of Engagement policies. The consequence of this will be that the dictatorship of the illegitimate CCP is saved from the crises that they themselves created due to many decades of their political tyranny over the Chinese people. In turn, this will result in Taiwan’s fall to the PRC and introduce tremendous strain on U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Americans will find that the world will be very different, very quickly, and for a very long time.
The Beijing-Moscow axis will be emboldened to commit additional aggression in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Philip Gordon have been rumored to receive major positions, Sullivan as Secretary of State and Gordon as National Security Adviser. This will ensure the deepening of Biden’s disastrous Engagement policies. The rapidity with which a Harris administration will be able to advance this agenda will depend to some degree on its control of Congress. Much will depend on whether the House stays in the Republican hands with a sufficient majority to guarantee that weak Republicans do not cross the aisle. If the House does not remain in effective Republican control, the Democrats’ ambitions will be realized immediately. But if it does in 2024, the principal aim of the Democrats will be to ensure its capture in 2026.
In the meantime, Harris will work through executive orders, pressure, and workarounds to achieve these aims. Harris, who is now 59 years old, will run for reelection in 2028, further solidifying what she achieved since 2024 so that the 2032 election will be decided in the Democratic primary as the Republican party will no longer be a national party, just as it is not a true state-wide party in states like California and New York. At the time that they occur, elections are very difficult to perceive as having a historical impact. For instance, the voters of 1860 did not know that a Civil War was coming. Those voting for Woodrow Wilson in 1916 on his campaign of staying out of World War I did not know that he would take them into World War I. Americans should understand how important this choice is, despite Harris-Walz doing their best to minimize how radical they are by not giving interviews, not being honest about what their policies are, and how radical they would be.
Their campaign is one of profound deceit. Their expectation is that supportive media, pollsters, popular culture, and donors will carry them through the election. In that expectation, they certainly are correct. Their deception reveals that they have nothing but contempt for the Declaration and Constitution and, thus, the American people. Americans must consider why Harris and Walz are so contemptuous of them, whether it is wise to vote for them, and whether they will be better off in 2028 than they are now, or whether that future might be a far worse one—one from which they may never recover. The American people have a choice at the polling booth. 2024 is everything for the future of the American Republic. It is a fork in the road for the U.S. and the American people to choose to continue the path our Founders established in 1776 or a radically different one that will take the U.S. into the ever-worsening tyrannical rule of a one-party state.
Historian Allan Lichtman, widely acclaimed as the ‘Nostradamus’ of US presidential elections, has predicted that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will beat her Republican rival Donald Trump in November. The history professor at American University says his method shuns polls altogether, and is instead based on a set of 13 true-or-false questions that supposedly hold the “keys” to the White House. Originally, the anticipated GOP candidate was supposed to run against incumbent president Joe Biden. However, following the veteran politician’s dismal showing during a televised debate in late June, the Democrats replaced him with Vice President Harris as their nominee. Speaking to The New York Times on Thursday, Lichtman said: “Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States – at least that’s my prediction for the outcome of this race.” He explained that of the 13 so-called ‘keys,’ eight favored the Democratic nominee.
He claimed that Harris has gained from the absence of a strong third-party candidate after Robert F Kennedy Jr. pulled out of the race last month. He also cited positive short- and long-term economic indicators, supposed legislative achievements enacted by the Biden administration, and a perceived absence of social unrest or scandal attached to the White House, as stacking the odds in the Democratic candidate’s favor. In addition, Lichtman says, the fact that Harris did not have to undergo a party nomination process, with all the other candidates rallying behind her, is also a plus for the vice president. Speaking to Fox News Digital on Saturday, the renowned election forecaster stood by his prediction, saying that, following the “unprecedented” withdrawal of Biden from the race, the “Democrats finally got smart and united behind Harris.”
Lichtman says he has correctly predicted the outcomes of nine out of ten presidential elections since 1984. The only time he failed was during the contested faceoff between George W Bush and Al Gore back in 2000, the historian insists. That election was decided after the US supreme court ruled in Bush’s favor following weeks of legal wrangling over disputed ballots. Meanwhile, another influential American election analyst, Nate Silver, claimed on Wednesday that Trump’s chances of beating Harris were higher than at any point since the vice president entered the race in July. His prediction stood in stark contrast with several polls over the past few weeks that have consistently shown Harris slightly ahead of Trump.
The entrenched authorities are bent on inserting Kamala Harris into office using lawfare, despite her resounding unpopularity and anti-populism. On September 4th, 2024, the United States Department of Justice issued a press release from its Office of Public Affairs, detailing and making public a sealed indictment against two Russian nationals, who are said to be employees of RT, for ‘funneling’ US $10mln to various high-profile social media content creators. What strikes us immediately is that this is not a crime, even though the word ‘funneling’ is a strongly loaded term in the sense of neuro-linguistic programming, and so the DOJ’s approach to geopolitical lawfare as an extended form of political warfare in the information sphere, has been to find a legal theory that would support ‘finding’ and ‘creating’ charges on the basis of the two accused having conspired to fail to register as foreign agents.
The opening paragraphs of the DOJ press release read: “An indictment charging Russian nationals Kostiantyn [for some reason DOJ uses the Ukrainian version of the Russian name Konstantin – SCF] Kalashnikov, 31, also known as Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, also known as Lena, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering was unsealed today in the Southern District of New York. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are at large. “The Justice Department has charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing.” “Our approach to combating foreign malign influence is actor-driven, exposing the hidden hand of adversaries pulling strings of influence from behind the curtain,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “As alleged in today’s indictment, Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, including the charged defendants, co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences. The Department will not tolerate foreign efforts to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”
Based on the language of the charges, it would appear that the foreign nationals were physically in the United States for the duration, or at least the initiation, of the project. That they are ‘at large’ and have not been taken into custody would seem to imply that this arrest will happen imminently, or that the two accused are no longer in the US. It is important to keep in mind that it is not illegal for Russians to spend money in the US, and it is not illegal for Russians or any other foreign nationals to start a business, or engage in protected 1st Amendment activities such as blogging and news or opinion writing or broadcasting. Assuming that some parts of the described predicate are true, (that a Russian citizen’s money was spent in the US), provided that the individual is not an a US Treasury Department sanctions list, the relevant Executive Order, or legislation, has not obviously been violated.
There are some limitations to speech in the US for foreign nationals, and while there is some nuance here, generally 1st Amendment activities are protected unless there is either a reasonable or articulable risk (which standard may depend on the circumstances) to national security that could reasonably lead to a grand jury indictment – think insider whistle-blowing or releasing government/corporate secrets. ‘Funneling’ moneys to individual content creators – YouTuber Tim Pool is believed to be prominent among these – may or may not have influenced the content they were creating – another important part of the nuanced questions that arise. And if the opinions of said content creators (on the subjects they are known for) had not changed after the influx of private party backing, it is more difficult to make the whole claim that the DOJ is now making.
Garland, for his part, also adds a proviso – the messages are “hidden”. At face value, this would seem to give the accuseds’ lawyers an additional challenge. To the contrary, the opposite would be true: making a charge in which no method of falsifiability can be established, is a baseless charge. It is not a ‘hidden crime’, but an activity indistinguishable from lawful behavior. More to the point, the subjects being discussed, whether influenced by the alleged money or not, were matters already in the public domain, expressing views and sharing information which is already readily available everywhere, and which were commonplace beliefs among an already significant part of the American population. We are not talking state or corporate secrets, calls for violence or other seditious activity, which rise to the level of a national security risk.
Tucker interviewed Darryl Cooper whose view of World War II appears to be based in the 50-year research of historian David Irving. It is not the official view established by court historians. Consequently, the “White House condemns Tucker Carlson’s ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview as ‘disgusting and sadistic insult.’” In his well researched books, World War II historian David Irving reported that whereas he found evidence that Jews were murdered in the hundreds of thousands, he cannot find evidence of an organized Holocaust. He said that from all the documents he could find and force out of sealed archives, the crimes against the Jews resulted from decisions unrelated to an organized plan of extermination. No historian has ever found a Nazi plan for Jewish extermination. Such a massive undertaking as a Holocaust could not be undertaken without a bureaucratic organization and an organized plan, but there is no evidence of any such organization and plan.
Hitler repeatedly said that the Jewish question would be settled after the war. He spoke of relocating Jews to Madagascar. Later with the initial success of his invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler spoke of relocating Jews to the eastern part of the Soviet Union that he would leave to Stalin. Reporting Irving’s findings does not make Irving or me or anyone an anti-semite or holocaust denier. Irving simply reported what he found, and I merely reported what Irving found. It sounds like that is what Darryl Cooper is doing on Carlson’s program. Ron Unz, himself a Jew, has raised his own questions about Holocaust evidence in the Unz Review. Western civilization works by raising questions, not by imposing dogmas. If all research results are denounced by those who don’t like the findings, how is truth established? It seems to me that Jews hurt their case by shouting down with name-calling and threats against reputations and careers every time they hear something that they don’t like or that doesn’t fit the narrative.
If the Holocaust story is accurate, it will stand on its own feet without name-calling and enemies lists. The indoctrinated notion of the unparalleled evil of Nazi Germany rests more on war propaganda than in fact. Irving’s books, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War are the most researched and most honest books about the war. On the basis of an honest rendition of the record, Churchill comes across as a worse war criminal than Hitler. Read the two books, and make your own decision. Why rely on ancient war propaganda? The widespread view that Hitler started World War II and intended to conquer the world is total ignorance kept alive by court historians. World War II was started by the British and French when they declared war on Germany. What Hitler was doing in Poland was the same as Putin is doing in Ukraine. What Putin is doing is protecting Russian people, who found themselves included in a foreign country by the political decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution and slaughter by Ukrainians.
In Poland Hitler was protecting German people, who were stuck into Poland by decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution, dispossession, and death by the Polish. Hitler’s protection of German people was no business of the British any more than Putin’s protection of Russians is any business of the US. No one has answered David Irving’s findings. They just call him names. That tells you where the stronger case resides. I am not a WW II historian and neither is Tucker Carlson, but we both wonder why views are suppressed if they can be factually disproved. The propagandistic way in which WW II has been presented for 83 years has had major harmful effects on countries, their populations, foreign affairs and world history. Those who bring balance to the story should be celebrated, not demonized.
If you will notice, during the 21st century in every country in the Western world what can be discussed or even mentioned has been massively narrowed. We have reached the point where almost anything said or written is hate speech, racist, misogynist, a threat to democracy, offensive, insensitive, anti-semitic, or Russian propaganda. The great writings in the English language, such as Shakespeare, cannot be read in schools because they violate strictures that have been imposed on language. Bigots now dictate our use of language. Official narratives dictate our understanding of history and current events. A world is being created for us in which facts and truth are objectionable.
“Harris has done nothing to distance herself from Biden’s policies on Israel and Palestine. Her official campaign site doesn’t spell out any stance on the conflict — or any other issue, for that matter.”
Hoping to further estrange Michigan’s Muslim voters from Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a Republican political action committee has launched a clever ad campaign that praises Harris for supporting the State of Israel and for putting “supporters of a free Palestine…in their place.” The ads are the work of the Future Coalition PAC. Launched in July, its treasurer is Pennsylvania Republican Ray Zaborney, according to Huffington Post’s Kevin Robillard, who was first to report the campaign. Distributed via digital platforms, the videos feature a female narrator speaking approvingly of Harris: “Vice President Harris has chosen a side — the right side. Harris has made herself clear: She stands with Israel and the Jewish people. She has, again and again. She understands the unbreakable bond between the U.S. and Israel. So when Netanyahu came to DC, Harris hosted the [Israeli] prime minister at the White House.
And when supporters of a free Palestine stood up for Gaza, Harris put them in their place. And supporters of free Palestine? They hate her…because Kamala Harris gets it. You can trust she’ll always support Israel.” While it would be difficult to dispute the general accuracy of the messaging, the ads have Michigan Democrats fuming, such as an anonymous operative who vented to Robillard: “Clearly, this ad is designed to get low-information and low-engagement Arab-American and left-leaning voters to oppose Harris…a classic ratfucking operation by a PAC that is helping a former president that uses ‘Palestinian’ as a slur.” Along with Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Michigan is one of seven battleground states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential election. It’s also home to one of America’s largest Muslim populations, whose presidential preference could prove decisive in the state.
In the current RealClearPolitics polling average, Harris leads in Michigan by only 1.5% — less than half the 3.3% lead Biden held at the same time in 2020. He officially won by 2.8%. In this year’s Michigan Democratic primary, more than 100,000 Dems voted “uncommitted” to protest the Biden-Harris administration’s lopsided support for the State of Israel in its war in Gaza. Since that protest vote was more than 9 times Donald Trump’s 10,704-vote margin in his 2016 Michigan win over Hillary Clinton, it alarmed Democratic strategists. The Biden-Harris campaign has since struggled to walk a political tight-rope, attempting to give Muslims an audience on the issue while still reiterating unwavering support for Israel. Muslims have generally favored the Democratic Party. However, a poll released in August by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that Harris is the choice of only 29% of Muslims — putting her in a tie with Green Party candidate Jill Stein; 11% back Trump.
The sneaky GOP ad’s line about Harris putting vocal supporters of a free Palestine “in their place” refers to an Aug. 7 incident at a Harris rally in Detroit, in which pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted her speech with chants of “Kamala, Kamala you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide.” Harris reflexively resorted to her trusty two-word debate line that exhilarates low-IQ leftists with its sheen of phony feminism, stating, “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say, that, otherwise I’m speaking.” Harris proceeded to stare down the protesters as if they were wearing MAGA hats and waving Confederate flags, rather than advocating for millions of civilians being subjected to devastation, disease and malnutrition. According to Palestinian authorities, the confirmed death toll from Israel’s 11-month-long attack on Gaza exceeds 40,000.
However, researchers writing in the medical journal Lancet estimate the eventual tally of dead could surpass 186,000, after factoring in the removal of undiscovered bodies in rubble, and the long-term effects from starvation, disease and destroyed housing and sanitation facilities. While Harris’ “I’m speaking” routine left the likes of vacuous New York Times columnists positively starry-eyed, Harris’ directive that pro-Palestinian protesters should be silent so as to assure Democratic control of the White House left many Michigan Muslims incensed, including one of the protesters at the rally. “Harris belittled us and used her event as a platform to say, ‘You are stuck with me and there is nothing we will do to help Palestinians’,” Salma Hamamy told Foreign Policy.
Joe Biden has long been a zealous backer of Israel. In 1986, he infamously — and bewilderingly — declared from the Senate floor, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” In the wake of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Biden White House has poured weapons into the Israeli Defense Forces arsenal, while providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations — to the detriment of America’s reputation in much of the world. Meanwhile, Harris has done nothing to distance herself from Biden’s policies on Israel and Palestine. Her official campaign site doesn’t spell out any stance on the conflict — or any other issue, for that matter.
“Musk has co-founded six companies [..] Tesla, which has a market capitalization of $669.28 billion, is expected to hit the trillion dollar mark next year..”
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, according to an estimate by the global education company Informa Connect Academy. The projection published on Friday is based on Musk’s average annual wealth growth rate which stands at 109.88%. The owner of X (formerly Twitter) is the richest man in the world with a fortune of $237 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk has co-founded six companies, including electric car maker Tesla and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX. Tesla, which has a market capitalization of $669.28 billion, is expected to hit the trillion dollar mark next year. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, renaming the platform X and promising more fairness and transparency.
Other multi-billionaires who are likely to join the Trillionaires Club in the near future are India’s richest man Gautam Adani, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Indonesian magnate Prajogo Pangestu. All three are expected to become trillionaires by 2028, Informa Connect Academy said. French businessman Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the world’s largest luxury conglomerate LVMH, is likely to become a trillionaire by 2030. Musk first appeared on the Forbes Billionaire list in 2012 with a net worth of $2 billion. In 2021, he became the world’s wealthiest man, displacing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Musk lost this status in December 2022 to Arnault when Tesla stock tumbled, but topped the list once again six months later.
SpaceX will launch its first crewed flights to Mars in four years if its unmanned landings go well, CEO Elon Musk has said. The first uncrewed Starships to the Red Planet are expected to be launched in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens, the billionaire announced on social media on Saturday.“These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” Musk explained in a post on X. He expressed hope that if those landings go well, his space company will launch its first crewed flights to Mars in four years. The idea of building a sustainable human settlement on Mars within two decades is not out of reach, the billionaire pledged. “Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years,” Musk said, stressing that being multi-planetary will “vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness.”
“We will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” the SpaceX founder explained. In another post, he said SpaceX had created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the launch process economically viable. Making life multi-planetary is “fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem,” Musk said. “It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible,” he concluded. In June, a Starship rocket returned from space and successfully landed in the Indian Ocean, completing a full mission around the globe on its fourth test flight.
The entrepreneur is counting on Starship, the largest rocket ever made, to help him achieve his goal of building a spacecraft capable of sending humans and cargo to the moon later this decade and eventually to Mars. The Starship spacecraft is designed to carry “both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond,” SpaceX’s website notes.Mars is one of Earth’s “closest habitable neighbors,” and has “decent sunlight,” the site continues. “It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.” Gravity on Mars is about 38% that of Earth, “making it possible to lift heavy things and bound around,” SpaceX noted. “Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.”In February, Musk said that he wants to take one million people to Mars, claiming that he is working on a “game plan” to achieve this. “Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars, and be out there among the stars,” he said.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening that the Starship mega rocket will begin flying Mars missions in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. The mission will be uncrewed and aim to test the rocket’s ability to land intact on Mars, as Musk’s dreams of occupying the Red Planet could become a reality within the next two decades. “The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens,” Musk wrote on X. He explained, “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” adding, “Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.”
Musk’s post quoted his post about making life multi-planetary while quoting billionaire Bill Ackman’s post about ‘Making America Healthy Again.’ Here’s the new Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ ad…
How occupying Mars overlaps with the dire need to reverse America’s imploding health trends could be explained by attorney and activist Tom Renz: “Perhaps NASA funding would be better used working on projects like this rather than wasting time on nonsense like DEI and climate change. A settlement on mars would be an incredible step forward for humanity… DEI is a step backwards towards the racism and sexism of the past.”
Kids now versus kids in the 1960s… We’re sure there has never been morbidity obese astronauts. Spacecrafts have weight limits after all.
One of the emerging themes from the Trump-RFK Jr.-Musk team could be the unification of America around proper health and the pursuit of becoming a multi-planetary species. Fix America’s health first before Starship makes life multi-planetary.
RFK MAHA
WATCH: RFK Jr. just launched a super emotional ad to all his followers, saying his decision to join forces with Trump is a spiritual thing
"For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. This is a spiritual journey for me. I… pic.twitter.com/PbJEHl8fyz
In April last year protestors in Paris swarmed BlackRock’s office to protest Macron’s pension reforms. A spokesperson for a French union told reporters at the time that they were there to let the world’s largest asset manager know they were taking workers’ pensions. President Emmanuel Macron appointed Michel Barnier, a right-wing politician who played a major role in the 2016 Brexit Task Force, as the new prime minister of France Thursday. In July Macron accepted the resignation of Gabriel Attal following the president’s electoral defeat. Attal was the country’s youngest ever prime minister and held the position for eight months. Macron’s decision is his effort to break a political stalemate that has grasped France since snap legislative elections which were held in July. In a statement which came from Macron’s office the president said that “the new prime minister and his government will create the conditions for the greatest stability.”
Macron, 46, had failed to appoint a new prime minister for a record period of time following a narrow victory for the leftwing New Popular Front in July. Over 80 lawmakers called for Macron to step down in the following weeks after Macron decided to reject the New Popular Front’s candidacy of Lucie Castets for prime minister, despite the coalition winning the most seats in July’s elections. Castets had voiced her desire to create a political alliance that would allow roll backs on pension reforms and tax hikes for the “ultra rich”. “They are all very worried. Nobody understands what Emmanuel Macron is doing, even the Macronists. He is not giving us [political parties] the chance to work together. If you ask me of course I will say I want our program to be the priority, but if you ask what can we change, what can we compromise on, I say we can compromise,” Castets told The Guardian. In March of last year France’s Senate passed a controversial reform bill to raise the retirement age for French citizens by two years. The Senate passed the bill by 195 votes to 112.
Macron’s decision to push through a bill that is extremely unpopular among voters for the alleged sake of the economy clearly went unforgiven during July’s election. “Macron says the problem is the [New Popular Front] program. He feels threatened because he thinks we’re going to change everything he did and it’s true that is our intention. But we’re not saying we will be able to change everything because we will need to find an agreement on every issue and we are fully aware of this,” Castets added. A study conducted by the French Observatory of Economic Conditions in 2020 found that those who have an unfavorable view of Macron believe him to be the “president of the rich”. The author of the report said the losers of Macron’s economic policy are among the “poorest, the unemployed, and the retired.”
The global order is under threat from a number of state actors, the heads of the American and British foreign intelligence agencies – the CIA and MI6 – claimed in a joint op-ed published by the Financial Times on Saturday. In the piece, Bill Burns and Richard Moore pledged that Washington and London would work in lockstep to retain the status quo in a world where technology has considerably accelerated geo-political trends. Following the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, and the sharp downturn in ties with the West, senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly proclaimed the end of US hegemony and a global shift to multipolarity. In the op-ed, Burns and Moore observed that “there is no question that the international world order – the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity – is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war.”
“Today, we co-operate in a contested international system where our two countries face an unprecedented array of threats,” the top spies wrote. The piece singles out an “assertive Russia” in the context of the Ukraine conflict, which both the CIA and MI6 “saw… coming.” The spy agencies’ chiefs noted that the hostilities have demonstrated the increased role of technology in modern warfare, in particular unmanned systems and satellite reconnaissance. In addition, Burns and Moore accused Moscow of waging a “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe” as well as spreading “lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us.” However, according to the op-ed, in the eyes of the CIA and MI6 “the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century” is the “rise of China.” Both agencies have already reorganized their processes to “reflect that priority.”
Speaking at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in early June, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated: “We are talking about polycentrism, a departure from previous norms, and we see the desperate resistance of the collective West… They see the norm differently, as their own dominance, as a world order based on one rule, that they must dominate as before, and everyone must do only what the dominant power allows them to do.” The diplomat insisted that Western narratives are, however, not shared by the global majority, which has embraced the concept of multipolarity. “We should not forget that the collective West are a minority,” Zakharova stressed at the time.
“..2,530 soldiers died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, while more than one-third took their own lives..”
Long ago, the U.S. wanted to give itself the image of a true democracy, the defender of human rights, the policeman of the world, the defender of justice and humanity. Perhaps the “founding fathers” of the American Republic had this in mind, but the ideal was never realized and has been in ruins since the so-called “War on Terror” was launched in 2001. Before this episode, there were already countless wars by the U.S., like the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The Americans tried to justify all that by claiming they had liberated Europe from Hitler’s fascism, and subsequently, they were purportedly freeing the world from “evil communism”. However, a fateful turning point emerged, heralding the demise of the American empire. The terror attack of 9/11 was allegedly by radicalized Muslims. But there are too many questions and above all lies. The U.S. has become an empire of lies about what happened, and who did it.
The biggest lies were told about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After all the alleged attackers almost all came from Saudi Arabia. That their leader, Osama bin Laden, would have hidden in the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan might be possible, but there was still no justification for the war and bombing of that country back to the Stone Age. As with Iraq, a country which mainly consists of 80 percent Shia, not radical Sunnis typical of Al Qaeda. The Americans then under President George Bush Sr. left these Shia in 1991 to die at the end of the First Gulf War against Iraq. His son President George W Bush Jr. started it again in 2003, reportedly as revenge for the failed assassination plan on his father, justifying it by the so-called 9/11 attack. As Nick Turse details in this article, Suicide Squad, the War on Terror is not over yet and the majority of victims these days are American soldiers and servicemen who commit suicide in large numbers.
The United States, which now spends more on its military than the other top 10 countries combined, has failed to win a single war that matters. It lost the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It lost the never-ending Global War on Terror, and it spent 20 years losing in Afghanistan and Iraq. About 7,000 American soldiers lost their lives in combat during the War on Terror since 2001, but the real epidemic of deaths can be found in the U.S. itself. Approximately 2,530 soldiers died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, while more than one-third took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same five years. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Many countries are seeking membership in BRICS because they are tired of the “hidden” and “sometimes open aggression” of the US and are looking for new forms of cooperation, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on Sunday. Earlier this week, Moscow said that Türkiye had officially applied to join BRICS, becoming the first NATO state to seek membership in the non-Western economic alliance. Over 30 countries have so far applied to become part of the group, which currently incorporates ten, including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Commenting to TASS news agency on why various nations are willing to join BRICS, Zakharova said that “the world is tired of American attacks” and “is voting for a different form of relationship.”
Nations would like to keep building ties on the principles of international law, “but since Washington, like some kind of maniac from its own Hollywood movie, destroys everything with a lawn mower, a saw, or some kind of an ax, the world is forced to look for new forms of interaction,” she explained. And these forms are the likes of BRICS, but not NATO, according to the Russian diplomat. On Wednesday, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov confirmed earlier media reports that Türkiye has officially applied to join BRICS and added that the group’s member states will consider the bid. According to the official, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also accepted Moscow’s invitation to attend the BRICS summit next month in the Russian city of Kazan. Russia is currently chairing the organization. BRICS was founded in 2006 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2011. The group expanded this year when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became full members.
BRICS may receive a new addition in the near future as Turkiye lodged an application for a full-fledged membership with the economic bloc this week. Turkiye’s membership may be welcome news for BRICS as the Turkish economy was rated by the IMF in 2023 as the 17th largest in the world, with the country’s GPD last year being appraised at a little over $1 trillion. According to the World Bank, Turkiye displayed a steady real GDP growth rate (averaged 5.4%) from 2002 till 2022, as well as a decrease in poverty that dropped from over 20% in 2007 to 7.6% in 2021. Turkiye’s geographical location, right on the boundary between Europe and Asia, along with its control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, make the country a natural logistical hub for moving goods between the Global South and Global North.
Ankara’s considerable clout in the Middle Eastern affairs, where it has long been one of the top players, and its influence on the African continent may also benefit Turkiye’s future fellow members in the BRICS. At the same time, better access to the BRICS members’ markets may help Turkiye deal with its own economic problems such as, for example, rampant inflation that remains a concern for Ankara today. Ironically, the World Bank notes that the reliance of Turkish industries on “carbon-intensive processes and fossil fuels” presents a challenge in Turkiye’s cooperation with the EU in light of the latter’s focus on “green” technologies and climate change. Meanwhile, BRICS members are not so fixated on destroying their economies for the sake of an environmental agenda and thus might make much better business partners for Turkiye.
On Saturday Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a blistering speech at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul once again condemning Israel. But this time he ratcheted the rhetoric as the remarks came a day after a Turkish-American woman was shot during a protest by Israeli troops in the West Bank. Erdogan essentially called for an Islamic uprising against the Jewish state, saying that a Muslim alliance of countries and populations is needed against what he called “the growing threat of expansionism” from Israel. “The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said.
And in a very rare positive reference to Assad of Syria, he described that recent steps by Turkey to advance ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed fundamentally at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism.” Interestingly, this would bring NATO’s number two largest miliary into an indirect alliance with Iran. But improvement of Turkish ties with the Syrian state also has a lot to do with squeezing out the Kurds in northern Syria. Both Ankara and Damascus have long wanted to see US troops, who are supporting local Kurdish militias, kicked out of the region. This week Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi met with Erdogan in Turkey, and heavily focused their discussions on the Gaza crisis. Egypt-Israel tensions have been evident over accusations from Tel Aviv that Egyptian border troops have turned a blind eye to smuggling and underground tunnels.
Erdogan’s threats against Israel have grown of late, sending Turkey’s relations with Israel spiraling, and with trade embargos on a list of export items to boot. In late July Erdogan had threatened that his country could intervene militarily in Gaza to defend Palestinians against the Israelis. “We need to be very strong so that Israel cannot do these ridiculous things to Palestine. Just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we can do something similar to them,” Erdogan had said in a speech to his ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party. But now given Turkish citizen (and American dual national) Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed Friday in the West Bank, such rhetoric from Turkish leaders is set to ratchet further.
The capital of Iran should be transferred from Tehran to a city closer to the country’s south coast, President Masoud Pezeshkian has said.In a speech on Saturday, Pezeshkian, who took office in July, suggested that it is pointless to keep developing Tehran due to the numerous difficulties faced by the city. The capital is currently plagued by “water shortages, land subsidence and air pollution,” among other things, he said, as cited by the news outlet Javan Online. “Tehran as the capital of the country is facing problems to which we have no solution,” the president acknowledged, suggesting that the best way out would be to “relocate the political and economic center of the country.” Simply telling residents that they should move out of Tehran will not work, and the government “must first go ourselves so that the people would follow us,” Pezeshkian argued.
There are also economic reasons for finding a new capital closer to the Persian Gulf, through which key trading routes pass, he stressed. “Further development of the country is impossible with the continuation of the current trend, when we bring the resources from the south of the country and the sea to the center, turn them into products there and send them back to the south for export,” the president argued. Such a state of affairs “severely depreciates and reduces our competitiveness, and we have no other choice but to transfer the economic and political center of the country to the south and closer to the sea,” he insisted. Gholamhossein Karbaschi, who served as Tehran’s mayor in the 1990s, has disputed Pezeshkian’s idea, arguing that there is no suitable substitute for Tehran. “Where do you want to go?” he said in an interview with the Asr Iran outlet. The former mayor warned that some countries that previously decided to relocate their capitals have ended up losing money and getting two problematic cites instead of one.
Tehran, which has been the Iranian capital since 1786, is located in the north of the country, 100km (63 miles) from the Caspian Sea. The city is home to 9.4 million people, nearly 17 million in its greater metropolitan area, making Tehran the biggest city in Iran and Western Asia, and the second-largest metropolitan area in the Middle East, after Cairo. It is not the first time that the Iranian authorities have suggesting moving the capital out of Tehran. Similar proposals were made during the term of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad between 2005 and 2013. At the time, parliament voted to set up a special council to seek a replacement. However, a final decision on transferring the capital was never made. Pezeshkian was inaugurated as Iranian president in late July after beating his rival Saeed Jalili by 53.7% to 44.3% in the second round of the election earlier that month. The snap poll was called after the death of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May.
China has officially shut down its international adoption program, the Foreign Ministry has announced. The move comes at a time when hundreds of American families have pending applications to adopt Chinese children, according to the Associated Press. “Apart from the adoption…from one’s collateral relatives by blood of the same generation…China will not send children abroad for adoption. This is also in line with the spirit of relevant international covenants,” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the ministry, said in a first official announcement of the rule change. AP reported that in a phone call with American diplomats in China, government officials said they “will not continue to process cases at any stage” other than special cases covered by an exemption clause. Over the last three decades the US has been the most common destination for overseas adoptions of Chinese children.
“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoption, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said.Back in 2007, Beijing toughened the vetting process for foreign adopters, with an emphasis on family lifestyle and age, and only accepting applications from heterosexual married couples. Beijing temporarily suspended foreign adoptions during the coronavirus pandemic, but later resumed for them couples who had travel authorizations prior to 2020. China’s ban follows similar steps from other countries. In January, Denmark’s only overseas adoption agency ceased operations, after concerns were raised over irregularities and fabricated documents. In June, Norway tightened controls over foreign adoptions and is now conducting an investigation into whether past adoptions were legal and ethical.
Citizens of several countries are already prohibited from adopting Russian children. The 2013 ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’ banned adoptions by Americans, after a Russian orphan adopted by a Virginia couple was left in a car for nine hours and died of heat stroke. In August 2022, a proposal was put to the State Duma to expand the adoption ban to all “unfriendly countries.” Sending Russian children there would be a “blow to the future of the nation,” they argued, since the West “destroys traditional values.” President Vladimir Putin objected, however, saying that the way it was drafted, the bill would infringe on the rights of Ukrainians living on Russian territory. Russia banned same-sex couples from adopting children in 2013. The Russian Orthodox Church has since proposed banning international adoptions by couples from countries that allow “gender reassignment” procedures, an idea that was then backed by lawmakers.
When Google first started, it was a high-quality search engine, and its founders believed that advertising presented an inherent conflict of interest for any such product. “Advertising funded search engines,” they wrote, “will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.” Nevertheless, in 2000, the venture funded company, after failing to build a technology licensing business, started an advertising arm, quickly building up a large number of advertising customers who liked the ability to put text ads next to relevant search results. In the early 2000s, Google started a third party advertising business, cutting deals with publishers that let them put Google Ads on their web pages and take a slice of the ad money. In this way, publishers began accessing the ad demand that Google had control over. But this new line of business introduced another conflict of interest, since Google was now edging closer to controlling both the buyers of ads and the sellers of them, and all the user data advertising and publishing tracked.
In 2007, Google bought YouTube, a source of ad inventory, giving it more power over the selling of ads. In 2008, Google purchased an adtech company called DoubleClick, which had been the leading provider of software to allow publishers to manage their ad inventory, as well as a large repository of data. Slowly, subtly, Google was intermediating as both the buyer and seller in the ad market, an obvious set of conflicts. Before its purchase, Google had tried to enter DoubleClick’s business, but failed, because it’s hard to move from one software platform to another. DoubleClick’s former CEO had observed, “Nothing has such high switching costs. . . .Takes an act of God to do it.” That same year, Google also bought an ad exchange (AdX), where buyers of advertising could match with sellers of ad inventory, in a quasi-financial market.
After buying DoubleClick, Google tied its control over advertising demand to publisher use of its software. As the DOJ put it in the complaint, “If publishers wanted access to exclusive Google Ads’ advertising demand, they had to use Google’s publisher ad server (DFP) and ad exchange (AdX), rather than equivalent tools offered by Google’s rivals.” The result is that it acquired a monopoly across the entire industry, in the software publishers use and the matching engine for advertisers. It also built a ubiquitous service Google Analytics that measured web traffic for publishers, so it did all the measurement as well. One consequences was that Google charged high prices, keeping between 30-50% of every advertising dollar that went through its system. That take rate was bad enough. But Google also acquired surveillance capacity over every publisher and advertiser.
It was as if every night Google could break into the offices of the Wall Street Journal and take its subscriber list, and then go to its own advertising clients and tell them that it could sell them access to Wall Street Journal readers for much cheaper rates when those readers opened Google owned and operated properties, like Gmail, YouTube, search, and so forth. In doing so, Google gained the ability to direct ad revenue away from third party publishers to itself. To buttress its ability to target, in 2016 Google violated a promise it made when it bought DoubleClick. It had told enforcers it would guard user privacy and segment data. Instead, it decided to combine all data across all its different services, from Gmail to YouTube to search, into detailed dossiers of each user. Google now had a machine, where it could spy on users across the open web, and then use that data to manipulate ad auctions, both charging high prices when display ads went on third party sites, and simply moving broad ad demand to its own properties instead of third party sites.
The same template repeated over the next ten to fifteen years. Publishers or ad entrepreneurs would try to find a way into auctions for ads to take some of Google’s margin and protect their data, and Google would respond by either buying their rival, locking out their rival with some sort of tying of its products, or both. There were a host of code words and programs to engage in these kinds of tactics, like “Project Nernanke,” “Project Narnia,” and “Jedi Blue.” And since publishers and adtech startups needed the huge amount of advertising buying power that Google controlled, and advertisers needed Google search and YouTube, it was a chicken and egg problem. You couldn’t get into either market without Google’s permission.
Media is the biggest threat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1832127702662324409
Eva DSA
Freedom of speech is under rampant attack. The UK is locking up its own citizens for “hate speech”, Pavel Durov has been arrested and @X has been banned in Brazil.
But did you know there’s already a law in place that would allow the globalists to ban @X in the EU as well?
— Marjorie Taylor Greene Press Release (Parody) (@MTGrepp) August 31, 2024
Sacks
.@DavidSacks: "I don't see how it's the rule of law when you have a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who's elected on a promise to get Trump, he then takes what is, at most, a bookkeeping misdemeanor that's passed the statute of limitations.
Vice President Kamala Harris has become the subject of an ongoing joke in political circles because her speech writers insist on burdening her with trite aphorisms aimed at highlighting her inspirational wisdom, but instead miss the mark so severely that the word ‘backfire’ is more appropriate. In part one, we established that the coup against Biden did not establish the overthrow of his regime of war and dementia, because he was not the central character or mover of the plot which his administration had been (and still is) executing. But in the wake of the failed assassination of Trump – which the FBI has still been silent about (or not; the mach speed cremation of Thomas Crooks’ body speaks quite loudly) – provided the true predicate that led to Biden’s decision to step down.
Had the assassination succeeded, it’s far more likely that Biden would have remained the candidate, and any transfer of nominal authority to Harris would have concluded sometime in 2025 after the presumed victory. But the notion that Harris provides a solution or even a bearable trade-off in the deep-state’s electoral ambitions is furthermore questionable. This attempt has backfired, and it is hard not to connect the near-miracle which was Trump somehow turning his head at just the right time, to the panic which swept across the DNC in the aftermath. Initial MSM headlines sought to question whether an attempt was even made. The subsequent endorsements by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard have turned the panic into a hysteria.
Harris has a knack for mixing metaphors and results in some incomprehensible word salad which had been intended to inspire us. Unlike Trump, Bill Clinton, or Obama, all who could effortlessly speak in a conversational tone, Harris seems unable to communicate plainly. We should also add that even if these failed attempts at profundity had succeeded in the sense of basic syntax and normal human speech, they would still evoke a high degree of relative cosmological cringe equivalent to their vacuity.
We may arrive at the equation that cringe (C) is equal to the value of vacuity (vac) multiplied by the insincerity (i), squared. Or C = vac(i)2. And who said political science was a soft one? But jokes aside, (or not) this has put her handlers in a difficult position. They must choose between two unappealing options: allowing her to struggle with reading the teleprompter or attempting to memorize lines with little success, or letting her ad-lib and risk a complete flop. The coming debate between Harris and Trump – should there still be one coming – will no doubt highlight Harris’ inability across multiple vectors.
Ukraine attacking Russia using long-range weapons provided by the US “might be interpreted by Russia as a direct attack by the US, by NATO, on Russian territory,” former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter tells Sputnik. Such an attack, Ritter explains, might be regarded as a prelude to a “larger military incursion” meant to accomplish the US’ ultimate goal, “the strategic defeat of Russia.” “Russia has made it clear that as a nuclear power, it not only will not, but cannot be defeated strategically – because if such a possibility manifested itself, Russia would be required to use its nuclear arsenal to ensure that outcome would never, never occur. This means general nuclear war,” he says. Ritter also recalls the warnings made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who questioned the US’ apparent belief that a Russia-NATO conflict would be limited to Europe and who said that a Russian retaliatory strike against the United States is possible if such a conflict were to break out.
“This is a very dangerous escalation, one that could rapidly create the conditions conducive for not limited nuclear conflict, but a general nuclear war, a global-ending global disaster, the destruction of the US, the destruction of Russia, the destruction of Europe, the destruction of the world. Why? Because the US and NATO will not be honest about the state of affairs in Ukraine today,” laments Ritter. Ukraine has already “lost the war,” he adds, and nothing that Kiev might do to try and “tip the scales” in its favor is going to change that. “All it will do is provoke Russia into enlarging this conflict so that it’s not just Ukraine that pays the price, but Europe, the US, and the rest of the world,” Ritter says. “Hopefully, the Ukrainian Defense Minister Andrei Yermak will be received by the US, and have their recommendations regarding using long-range weapons to strike deep inside Russia rejected. Because there’s only one outcome if the US greenlights this escalation, and that is total nuclear war.”
Engaging and “getting along” with Russia and North Korea would be a “good thing,” former US President Donald Trump has argued. Speaking at an election rally in Pennsylvania on Friday, the Republican nominee touted his diplomatic efforts to fix Washington’s ties with Pyongyang, referring to his 2019 meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. “I got along with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Remember I walked over… the first person to ever walk over from this country,” Trump claimed. “We also looked at his nuclear capability. It’s very substantial,” he added. “You know, getting along is a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.”
“Getting along” with Moscow is also not “a bad thing,” Trump said. He went on to harshly criticize the incumbent administration, claiming President Joe Biden has a very low IQ “and maybe now it’s nonexistent,” as he has “completely lost his mind.” The Republican nominee repeated his claim that “what is happening now in relations with Russia would not have happened” if he were still in office. Trump’s remarks came in response to accusations from his election rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. In her Democratic nomination acceptance speech in Chicago last week, she criticized the former president for his relations with the North Korean leader – claiming she would not “cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un who are rooting for Trump.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned those who are trying to hinder peace talks between Russia and Ukraine that negotiations would become tougher as time passed. “Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned potential negotiations a year and a half ago. He said we had nothing against them… Opponents must understand that the longer they take, the harder it will be to agree on anything. It was easy to agree in Istanbul, less than a month after the start of our special military operation. But Ukraine did not want it,” Lavrov said in an interview to the RT broadcaster for the documentary Bridges to the East.
The top Russian diplomat stressed that Ukraine’s joining NATO was non-negotiable. Turkiye hosted several rounds of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in Istanbul in March 2022, which ultimately failed. It also helped mediate the UN-backed Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2022, which provided for safe maritime exports of Ukrainian food until it expired the following summer. Russian President Putin said in June that Russia would cease fire and start talks with Ukraine as soon as Kiev withdrew troops from regions that Russia saw as its own and abandoned plans to join NATO.
Both Ukraine and Israel are trying to spark major regional wars to solve their own problems at the expense of others, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. The country’s senior diplomat made the remarks in an exclusive interview with RT’s Anna Knishenko, aired on Saturday. Asked about the prospects of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East devolving into a major regional war, Lavrov suggested Israel was effectively the only party seeking such conflict. “It seems that the only one who wants such a development is Israel. Probably the Israeli government, which is rather hard politics-wise, and they do not even hide that,” Lavrov stated. “Probably, they want to take advantage of this situation to once and for all try to solve all their problems with Hamas and with Hezbollah, and with pro-Iranian groups in Syria and Iraq,” the minister suggested, adding that Tehran seems to be avoiding such a conflict and “does not want to get involved in any large-scale military actions.”
Israel’s behavior shares striking similarities to Ukraine’s, with Kiev apparently seeking to drag its Western backers into a direct conflict with Moscow, Lavrov pointed out. “I’m seeing an interesting parallel there, [Vladimir] Zelensky too, who is fully controlled by the US as well, he wants roughly the same thing, only around Ukraine – to unleash a major war here, and to step aside himself, so that the Americans and other NATO members would start fighting for him,” the minister added. These are very similar situations when they want to provoke a big war in the Middle East and on the territory that is directly adjacent to us, and now part of [Russia’s] Kursk Region is under the control of Zelensky’s Nazi regime, with weapons supplied to him by NATO.
The ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Region, launched by Kiev early this month, was likely approved by its Western handlers, Lavrov suggested. A “large number of Nazi units” as well as foreign mercenaries – who might actually be “regular troops” – are taking part in the hostilities, he noted. “It is difficult for me to tell what the idea was behind this situation, because our Western colleagues have very convoluted minds, they sometimes bend everything in their own way, and then nothing comes of it,” Lavrov stated, invoking questionable results the collective West has achieved in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
They are dead set on changing the country beyond recognition. Maybe that should be Trump’s no. 1 focus: They want to take your country away. How many democrat voters want that?
The southern border invasion, fueled by the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open border policies, has been a devastating blow to this nation. Our borders have been flooded with millions of unvetted, unvaccinated illegal aliens (remember, ‘trust the science’ Democrats wanted to jail people for not being Covid vaccinated just a few years ago…), including ISIS terrorists. Iranian assassins are roaming freely, hunting ex-Trump admin officials, while cartel criminals and the Chinese Communist Party wage ‘reverse opium wars’ with fentanyl that has sent the drug death overdose catastrophe just north of 100,000 Americans per year.
In Colorado, armed Venezuelan prison gangs have seized control of entire apartment complexes, and the overwhelming number of illegal aliens across the country has pushed some local governments to the brink of chaos. What’s evident is that Democrats have abandoned the American people (hence why former Democrats, such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., jumped ship and now support Trump). Their top priority is to give amnesty to more than ten million illegal aliens. This amnesty program allows illegal aliens to get citizenship and vote in future elections. It potentially ensures Democrats can fulfill their Marxist agenda of pushing forward with a socialist reconstruction of America.
Not happy with the first-world conditions, Democrats have imported the third world to neighborhoods across America – much of which was done against the wishes of their political constituents. Don’t believe the misinformation VP Kamala Harris spews about securing the border. She had 3.5 years to do so (or at least care) under the Biden admin. On the contrary, Democrats want more illegal aliens and offer mass amnesty. On Friday, elderly Nancy Pelosi said the quiet part out loud on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” openly stating her desire to turn all ‘undocumented’ migrants into ‘documented’ ones. She also supported the idea of providing subsidized housing for illegal aliens.
Nancy Pelosi states that the goal of the Democrat party is to convert undocumented immigrants (illegals) into documented immigrants: Bill Maher: "The CA lawmakers giving government assistance to undocumented immigrants to buy houses. That's kind of a different place than the… pic.twitter.com/pfeG9ngZUE
So what changed in the last 16 years with some folks in the Democratic Party that support communist price controls, nation-killing open borders, anti-American rhetoric, and mass censorship? Well, the number of high-profile Democrats jumping ship to support Trump is evident that this party is no longer the Democratic Party your parents voted for.
It is time for Switzerland, which has been neutral since 1515, to redefine its non-alignment status, a group of Swiss experts have said, in a report ordered by the defense ministry in Bern. Critics, in response, have accused the panel behind the paper of bias and insist that neutrality is forever enshrined in the country’s constitution. The study committee, which was set up a year ago, presented a paper on Thursday with 100 recommendations on how to boost the Alpine nation’s security. “The neutrality policy needs to be revised, more focused on its security function and applied more flexibly,” the members of the panel, which is said to include politicians, economists and scientists representing different age groups and regions, suggest in the report. Another key recommendation in it is that Switzerland’s “cooperation with NATO and the EU must continue to be deepened with a view to achieving a common defense capability and becoming a genuine defense cooperation.”
Among other things, the commission urged that the country’s defense budget be increased from 0.75% of GDP to 1% by 2030. It also said that the majority of the members of the panel spoke in favor of lifting the 1998 ban on the re-export of arms to countries that are at war. This legislation previously caused complications for EU states looking to supply Kiev in its conflict with Moscow with weapons that had Swiss-made parts in them. The changes to Swiss neutrality policy are needed due to a “sharp deterioration in the situation in Europe, marked by power politics, increasingly destabilized crisis regions and, above all, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine,” the paper claims.
The recommendations by the commission are going to be taken into account during work on Switzerland’s new security policy, to be unveiled in 2025. The expert group’s paper had caused controversy even before it came out, with critics claiming that the head of the Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS), Viola Amherd, had deliberately formed the panel using experts who are against neutrality. On Thursday, the opposition Swiss People’s Party (SVP) again slammed the report, saying that the “politically one-sided” commission behind it has shown “disregard of the constitutionally guaranteed perpetual… neutrality of our country.” “It is an open secret that… Amherd wants to destroy Swiss neutrality and throw herself into the arms of NATO and the EU,” the statement by the SVP read.
Despite not being a member of the EU or NATO, Switzerland has joined nearly all of the Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine conflict and has frozen billions of dollars worth of Moscow’s assets. In early 2024, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that, because of this, Moscow does not consider Switzerland to be a neutral country anymore. In June, the Swiss authorities hosted the so-called Ukraine peace conference, to which Russia was not invited. Moscow described the summit, which focused solely on Kiev’s proposals to settle the conflict, as a “parody of negotiations” and insisted that it would not have attended the event if Bern had asked for a Russian delegation to come.
“The Biden administration has not ruled out sending US contractors to Ukraine completely, but it is not going to happen any time soon, the report read.”
The administration of US President Joe Biden has rejected a Pentagon plan to send American contractors to Ukraine to maintain Western hardware, including F-16 fighter jets, the Wall Street journal has reported, citing officials in Washington. The longstanding debate about deploying US civilians to Ukraine to service the hardware supplied to Kiev by its foreign backers has intensified since the delivery of the first batch of six F-16s to Ukraine in late July, the outlet said in an article on Friday. The White House National Security Council looked into the proposal coming from the military, but deemed it to be too risky, officials familiar with the discussion told the WSJ. “The intelligence community raised concerns over the prospect of Russia targeting American contractors in Ukraine,” one of the sources told the outlet. The Biden administration has not ruled out sending US contractors to Ukraine completely, but it is not going to happen any time soon, the report read.
For now, Washington expects its NATO allies in Europe to take responsibility for servicing the US-designed jets, it added. The Netherlands, which together with Norway, Denmark and Belgium promised to supply Kiev with more than 80 F-16s, has already announced that it will fund a private contract between a civilian maintenance company and the Ukrainian Air Force. “We support the Ukrainian government financially to make those contracts with private partners to see if they can hold the aircraft up and running in the future,” General Onno Eichelsheim, the Dutch chief of defense, said on Wednesday. The WSJ noted that Ukraine had previously struggled to maintain other US-supplied weapons, such as the Abrams M1 tank, which had to be shipped outside the country for repairs. The outlet pointed out that an F-16 requires “hours of service for every hour of flight time,” with dozens of support personnel usually working on each plane.
Earlier this week, Kiev confirmed the loss of its first F-16, which reportedly crashed on Monday, killing its pilot. The Ukrainian media said the investigators were looking into technical problems and pilot error as the possible reasons for the accident. However, MP Mariana Bezuglaya claimed that the jet was shot down as a result of “friendly fire” from one of Ukraine’s US-donated Patriot air defense systems. Russian reports said that the F-16 could have been destroyed on the ground by an Iskander missile during a strike on an airfield in western Ukraine. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the use of F-16s in the conflict will make them “a legitimate target” for Russian forces, warning that the planes will be struck even at airfields inside NATO countries if they operate from there.
In late June 2024, U.S. media reported that American military contractors would be sent to Ukraine, just weeks before the Kursk attack on August 6, 2024. After the attack on the Kursk region of the pre-war Russian Federation, the U.S. and its NATO proxies claimed that the incursion was a surprise offensive by Ukraine alone. The Forward Observation Group, the private U.S. paramilitary company that posted photos of its fighters involved in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ offensive against the Kursk region, refused to comment on its involvement in the attack on August 6. “The Biden administration is moving toward lifting a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine,” four U.S. officials familiar with the matter told CNN, “to help the country’s military maintain and repair U.S.-provided weapons systems.”
According to CNN, “The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the U.S. looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia.” CNN and other U.S. and European news outlets reported in late June about the possible deployment of this private military group. The U.S. has a long history of using mercenaries as cover for official American military troops. Think of Blackwater and the mercenaries in Syria and Iraq, the White Helmets (trained in Jordan), and I even go so far as to say that ISIS (Daesh in Arabic) is a private mercenary army, trained by the CIA and Mossad in Camp Bucca, Iraq. The Foreign Observation Group (ironically, the acronym is FOG) is said to be a private group that claims to have traveled to Ukraine, Iraq and Syria to contact local fighters (jihadists) and take photos and videos of what they and the West call the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Syrian “civil war”.
All those conflicts are in reality proxy wars incited by the West, which is now resulting in a “hot war” between Russia and the U.S. and its criminal NATO partners. Even before Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) began in February 2022, Western media published photos sourced from the likes of FOG from the Donbass region of then-eastern Ukraine. The images attracted limited criticism for interviewing (extolling) members of the NeoNazi Azov Battalion. The Nazi insignia of the Azov troops were blatantly displayed and their Nazi affiliation was irrefutable. Western media association with the NeoNazi paramilitaries raised questions at the time about whether they were so-called documentary journalists or a party to the conflict. After the start of the SMO, the Western media whitewashed the NeoNazi image of the Azov Battalion and labeled them as the “good guys” fighting for the liberation of Ukraine.
The FOG group and other NATO private contractors are also active in obtaining medical supplies, equipment and money for Ukrainian fighters and foreign volunteers who have joined the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine. To be sure, we heard from the Kremlin that many red lines have been crossed. Think of the recent attack with American ATACMS missiles on the beach in Crimea. The day that the U.S. announced that it would give private contractors a free hand, there was the attack on Crimea. Coincidence? No, I don’t think so! Since the attack on Kursk, the battlefield has an extra dimension and we can accurately talk about a tangible confrontation or war between America, its NATO proxies and Russia. One could even argue that the proxy war is over and there is a new phase of direct confrontation going on.
The U.S. government has so far gradually increased its military support to Ukraine. The purpose of this approach is to test the Russian red lines, to see how Moscow reacts to the deployment of each new weapons system or each new Western sanction and, most recently, of course, the donation of frozen Russian assets, mainly in Europe, to Ukraine. The situation has come to a head, in my humble opinion. Regarding Kursk, there has actually been an attack on Russia; Russian people have been killed, and slaughtered whereby civilians have been taken from their homes in trucks and executed. There is even footage of Ukrainian soldiers with SS helmets and with the detachment of Adolf Hitler’s Leibstandarte Regiment on their sleeves, harassing an old man, who was later killed.
The West is trying to push Russia to the limit, knowing that the Second World War is an extremely sensitive subject for Russian society where every family is related to a victim, a fallen soldier, a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin, or aunt who was killed during the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, in which more than 26 million people died. The recent action in the Kursk region, where most Russians perceive that the U.S. and its NATO accomplices are involved, is a brazen provocation. Indeed, more than a provocation, it has violated the Russian soul and there we have landed in a totally different dimension. Perhaps one might say, the “road of no return.”
“Ritter’s case is a clear example that there is no democracy on American soil, as Washington is very close to revealing an open fascist face – similar to that of its Ukrainian proxy.”
According to recent rumors spread by Western media, the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing a series of investigations and legal measures against American citizens who have cooperation ties with Russian TV channels. Like Ritter, several other American analysts have a dissenting opinion on the conflict in Ukraine and other world events, and are constantly invited by the Russian press to speak to the public and present arguments that would be easily censored in mainstream newspapers. Apparently, from now on, all these analysts will be targeted by the American “Justice”. The Justice Department’s decision to initiate criminal proceedings against American collaborators of Russian media outlets is yet another authoritarian move amid a recent wave of dictatorial actions in the U.S. and several Western countries.
The myth of Western democracy, which would be based on liberal principles and individual freedoms, is crumbling, with the authoritarian nature of the American regime becoming clear to the entire global public. Censorship has always been a common practice in Western countries. However, this reality was constantly disguised through the irresponsible actions of big propaganda newspapers. In the era of social networks, alternative media and citizen journalism, it is no longer possible to disguise the criminal actions of the authorities, as various critics emerge willing to show the reality and contradict the semi-state propaganda services provided by the hegemonic media.
However, it is precisely this reality of multiple sources of information that makes Western actions even more aggressive – especially in the American case. The U.S. is extremely reactive to all forms of dissenting opinion, toughening persecutory measures whenever opposing individuals and groups begin to gain ground in public opinion. Social platforms have made the work of people like Scott Ritter even more relevant, reaching an audience that would have been impossible until years ago – when the mainstream media held a monopoly on information (and thus on “truth”). This broad space for informational dissent is causing despair among American authorities, who are reacting with censorship and persecution.
The role of the Russian media in this scenario is extremely important. After being censored in the West, the Russian press began to attract even more attention from the Western public – who understood the censorship as what it really is: a failed attempt to hide the truth. More than that, the Western public began to understand that Russians, unlike the American and European authorities, do not use their media to unilaterally express opinions previously authorized by the state. On the contrary, the Russian press gives space to American and European citizens to express opinions that are censored in the liberal “democracies” of the West. All of this further increased the desperation of the anti-Russian authorities, leading to the current scenario of persecution.
Amid the currently tense domestic political scene, Washington is using the rhetorical excuse of preventing alleged “Russian influence” on the election result. As expected, U.S. officials are claiming that American analysts cooperating with Russian TV could have a negative impact on the elections – favoring Russian interests in the U.S. (as if such interests actually existed). Unfortunately, the persecution is only expected to increase. No American citizen who holds critical views on U.S. foreign policy is truly safe in his or her own homeland. Ritter’s case is a clear example that there is no democracy on American soil, as Washington is very close to revealing an open fascist face – similar to that of its Ukrainian proxy.
US billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said on Saturday he would expose the alleged crimes of Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes, who had ordered the nationwide suspension of the X social media network. “We will begin publishing the long list of [de Moraes’] crimes, along with the specific Brazilian laws that he broke tomorrow. Obviously, he does not need to abide by US law, but he does need to abide by his own country’s laws,” Musk wrote on X. Judge Alexandre de Moraes told internet providers in the nation of 200 million to block access to X, saying the platform lacked a “necessary legal representative” in Brazil — a key requirement tied to the suspension of accounts, which X had refused to comply with. In mid-August, X published a letter from de Moraes with demands for censorship and user account information that it said could affect users not only in Brazil, but also in the United States and Argentina.
X is the #1 news app on the AppStore in Brazil, leading both the free and grossing categories. Despite this, the Supreme Court has ordered the AppStore to remove X within 5 days.
Gold recently hit $2,500 marking an all time record high. The reality is, there’s a very good case to be made that gold is still quite cheap compared to its trajectory. It’s possible that in a few years, $2,500 gold could look remarkably inexpensive. Not to be overly dramatic, but Kamala Harris is a big reason why. I’m not a D or R kind of guy, but it’s impossible to ignore the impact of the upcoming election on the future of the US. At a press conference a few weeks ago, reporters asked Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, about the upcoming Presidential election and whether or not the Fed was modeling any potential policy changes depending on the outcome. But the Fed Chairman was almost proud of the fact that the election outcome didn’t factor into their planning at all.
The Fed considers itself apolitical. Powell seemed to think it was somehow wholesome and responsible to completely ignore perhaps the single most important factor that could drive the economy in the coming years—the outcome of the Presidential election. Two people with diametrically opposed views will clearly make a massive difference on the economy. I saw a report yesterday that, since she stole the nomination exactly one month ago, Kamala has raised $500 million. That brings her total campaign war chest to a massive $1 billion. It’s funny because I seem to remember Rep. AOC saying that, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.” In this case, I’m inclined to agree with AOC.
Kamala took a half billion from Biden— the legitimate nominee— and raised another half billion by making the most outrageous claims and lying her ass off, without even bothering to sit for basic interviews or take legitimate questions. She’s been coronated without scrutiny, and only now are we starting to see how she views the economy. She seems to understand that a lot of people are suffering, and she at least partially diagnoses it accurately as the result of inflation. But she has no understanding of where the inflation comes from. There’s no discussion of the government’s role in running multi-trillion dollar deficits, the unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, and continuing to rack up trillions of dollars in debt every year, even though there’s no longer a national emergency.
Her plans will undoubtedly cause higher deficits and more inflation. For example, subsidizing housing is obviously only going to make everything cost more. Giving new home buyers a free $25,000 just means houses will become $25,000 more expensive. It’s exactly what happened during the pandemic when they started handing out stimmy checks— there was no increase in goods and services, just more money floating around, so prices went up. The same thing will happen with housing and everything else the government pours “free money” into. But they have no understanding of this. None of that factors into her thinking. To her, inflation is always and everywhere the result of corporate greed. And her solutions to inflation involve essentially criminalizing “greed” and throwing the full force and weight of the federal government into attacking the private business sector.
Now she’s talking about using the government and the legal system to go after private businesses. She’s attacking grocery store chains, accusing them of being greedy when their profit margins are a measly 2-3%. Apparently, that’s greedy. The Biden Administration has gone out of its way to destroy competition, even though competition is one of the most important factors in keeping prices low. They attack oil companies and prevent the expansion of US energy production. Of course that makes energy prices higher, which in turn makes the price of everything else higher. This is why it’s ultimately very difficult to see the dollar surviving as the global reserve currency through a single term of a Kamala administration. Her policies will create higher deficits, balloon the national debt, and drive up inflation.
[..] central banks outside of the US centric system, China, India, Brazil, to an extent, Turkey etc, are trying to effectively grow their gold reserves again. Why are they trying to grow their gold reserves again? Because they’re looking at any way possible to diversify against the supremacy of the dollar in order to have that autonomy within the global system. It used to be the US, yes, and now China’s saying, Look, we’re developing more quickly the United States, we’re have more technological patents in the United States. We have more nuclear energy and advanced power plants and other forms of energy, and they’ve got negatives on cleanliness, but also are developing, and we’re just moving more quickly in terms of just the general move forward, and we’re going to do that with partners.
And what’s happened is the alliance of nations that needed the US and needed the dollar to trade don’t need it anymore. Saudi Arabia doesn’t need to value petroleum in dollars anymore. They can value it in a block that is continuing to strengthen. I was in Brazil in April, and I’ve done a lot of I did my page down the triangle between Brazil being in the middle of China in the US, and how that’s moving more towards China with, of course, diplomacy with the US still intact, but still from the standpoint of production, of workers, of partnerships. And I was in the capital actually talking about the g20 which is going to be happening in Rio in November. And what was going to be discussed at the g20 it’s going to be big on energy. It’s going to be big on digital platform, currency.
Why? Because it wants to create a digital way of of de dollarization and of creating more, whether it’s a world currency or what’s the currency amongst BRICS and other nations, as simply a method of payment, of securing flows of funds for products and services and trade across these nations. And what was interesting to me, just on a real sort of like basis, is, you know, you take Ubers, we do everywhere, and in the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, the only car that that Uber drivers were driving was a BYD and an EV BYD. It’s called Build. You build your dream. It’s a Chinese company. They’re manufacturing now in the center of or trying to build a plant in the center of Brazil, and Teslas are nowhere to be found. And while I was there, Elon Musk was having a pretty strident argument with Lula, the president of Brazil, about the fact that he was favoring, in his opinion, a Chinese car company. And then you sort of flash back out of that. And the reality is these cars are not just going into Brazil, they’re going into Italy, they’re going into France, they’re going into Germany.
They’re outpacing in trade. Some of what’s happening with with a key new development, key new product that the United States is also competing on through Tesla, and it doesn’t need to have the United States market in order to be successful, and that has been a significant development in de dollarization as well, is that trade and movement and currency has all been shifting, but also there isn’t as much of a need, because the economies are growing so quickly, the alliances are growing so quickly for the United States, and that just diminishes the United States power from from a trade and currency perspective, perhaps not a military perspective, but it, but just it just eat away at that power base.
The left-wing France Unbowed party moved on Saturday to initiate the the impeachment of French President Emmanuel Macron after he rejected the candidacy of the New Popular Front’s Lucie Castets for prime minister. “The draft resolution to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the Republic, in accordance with Article 68 of the Constitution, was sent to the members of Parliament today for joint signature,” Mathilde Panot, the leader of the France Unbowed group in the parliament, said on X. The party lashed back at Macron for turning down its pick for prime minister despite the leftist coalition winning the most seats in the parliamentary runoff in July.
Under Article 68, the president can only be removed from office over a breach of duties that is clearly incompatible with the exercise of the presidential mandate. France Unbowed has enough seats to initiate the procedure, but it needs the approval of a two-thirds majority in both chambers of parliament. Macron met with parliamentary factions and party leaders in August in a bid to negotiate a new government after the election resulted in a hung parliament. He excluded the New Popular Front, which secured 182 out of 577 seats, from the talks citing concerns about “institutional stability.”
Dr. Sabine Hazan: "Ivermectin, we gave it to babies with scabies. There was a combination of drugs, ivermectin, doxycycline, zinc. Ivermectin is given to babies with scabies and doxycycline is given to young kids with acne for a year almost. All of a sudden that's dangerous, like… pic.twitter.com/Ce9BCnk3It
In 2019, Kamala Harris laughed like a hyena at the idea of a border wall, dismissing it as "the president's vanity project."
She then ranted about how "powerful voices" were sowing hate and division to distract us from the Mueller investigation—the CIA-DNC-media-backed hoax that… pic.twitter.com/gB6QgMmU1U
Kamala is now campaigning on, “Trump is right and I’m wrong.” She’s stealing all his policies. That’s because @KamalaHarris pretends to be someone she’s not, and doesn’t know what she wants to do until her campaign tells her. When world leaders sit across the poker table from… pic.twitter.com/ngvIu3xjJO
We’ve found out—only from the help of whistleblowers—that the Secret Service attempted to withhold resources for Trump's Butler rally where he was nearly assassinated.
And now Secret Service is trying to cover their tracks.
“The investigation against Durov began in February, the court statement noted. This detail contradicts a statement released by prosecutors on Monday, which described the probe as beginning last month..”
A French court has formally indicted Telegram founder Pavel Durov, accusing him of complicity in a litany of offenses and barring him from leaving France until the case against him concludes. Durov appeared before a magistrates’ court in Paris on Wednesday, four days after he was arrested upon arrival in the French capital from Azerbaijan. In a statement released on Wednesday night, the court said that Durov had been formally charged with a dozen offenses, including complicity in “administering an online platform” used by a criminal gang to conduct an illicit transaction, a charge that the court noted carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. The rest of the charges, which were announced by prosecutors on Monday, include facilitating fraud, money laundering, and the distribution of narcotics and child pornography, as well as refusal to turn over user data to law enforcement investigations.
The Russian entrepreneur, who also holds the citizenship of France, the UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis, was released on a €5 million ($5.55 million) bond. He was ordered to remain in France until the investigation against him concludes, and to report to a police station twice a week. Criminal investigations in France are run by special magistrates – judges granted wide-ranging investigative powers. Charges like those leveled against Durov are typically announced before investigators have finished gathering evidence, and can be dropped at any time if they cannot be substantiated. The investigation against Durov began in February, the court statement noted. This detail contradicts a statement released by prosecutors on Monday, which described the probe as beginning last month. It is being led by OFMIN, a French agency tasked with investigating crimes against minors. Telegram, which has almost a billion monthly users, generally refuses to hand over user data or chat records to law enforcement.
However, the company said on Sunday that it complies with local laws, and called it “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.” Anti-censorship activists have described Durov’s arrest as part of a wider campaign against free speech waged by Western governments, with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accusing France of taking the entrepreneur “hostage” in order to access private communications on Telegram. In a social media post on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that Durov’s arrest “is in no way a political decision,” and that France “is more than anything attached to freedom of expression and communication.” It is unclear whether Durov has been pressed to hand over user data since his arrest on Saturday. Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said on Tuesday that the billionaire would likely be coerced into giving up this data. “I really hope that he will not allow this,” Naryshkin told Russia’s TASS news agency.
French authorities have launched an investigation into claims that Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov committed “serious acts of violence” against his own son, AFP reported on Wednesday. The investigation is separate from an ongoing probe into his alleged complicity in a wide range of crimes. The 39-year-old Russian, who also holds the citizenship of France, the UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis, appeared before a Paris court on Wednesday. Though he has not been formally indicted in either French case a decision is expected overnight on Wednesday. Durov could be charged with 12 criminal offenses, including facilitating narcotics distribution, money laundering, and organized crime, and aiding in the distribution of child pornography. According to Paris prosecutors, a “person unnamed” used Durov’s app to commit multiple offenses. Durov’s refusal to turn over the user’s data to law enforcement led to him being investigated, Politico reported on Wednesday.
Shortly after Durov arrived at the court, France’s AFP news agency reported that the entrepreneur was also being investigated on suspicion of “serious acts of violence” against his six-year-old son. Citing “a source close to the case,” AFP claimed that the probe was recently opened by France’s child welfare office. Durov’s son was born in Russia and now resides in Switzerland with his mother, Irina Bolgar. It is unclear whether the investigation is linked to a criminal complaint filed against Durov by Bolgar in Switzerland last year. According to court documents seen by Forbes magazine, Bolgar accused her ex-partner of five instances of violence against his son, before filing a child custody case. Both cases were filed shortly after Durov allegedly stopped paying Bolgar €150,000 ($167,500) in child support per month, Forbes noted. Durov has also claimed to have fathered over 100 children in 12 countries through sperm donation.
In a statement on Sunday, Telegram called it “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.” Telegram complies with local laws, including the EU’s Digital Rights Act (DSA) and anti-Russian sanctions, the company added. Neither Durov nor Telegram have commented on the alleged child abuse case. Anti-censorship activists have described Durov’s arrest as part of a wider campaign against free speech waged by Western governments, with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accusing France of taking the entrepreneur “hostage” in order to access private communications on Telegram. X Owner Elon Musk, American journalist Tucker Carlson, and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks have all condemned Durov’s arrest as an attack on free speech.
It appears that Paris has tried to trap Telegram founder Pavel Durov for quite a while, Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik, not ruling out that granting of the French citizenship to the Russian tech prodigy was part of the plan. “It looks very much like a trap,” Ortel said. He also referred to the claim by the French newspaper, Le Canard Enchaine, that the Telegram founder came to Paris to dine with President Emmanuel Macron. The claim was rejected by the Elysee Palace. This apparent plot to entrap Durov could have been initiated by Macron either at the behest of the US “deep state,” or as the French president’s attempt to “curry favor” with American deep state figures, according to the Wall Street analyst. “The essence of the problem is simple: Deep State ‘globalism’ is a fundamentally flawed construct that enriches a tiny minority of connected insiders, and impoverishes the balance of the world,” Ortel told Sputnik.
“Those who play along pretending that unregulated, chaotic globalist plans are actually working are celebrated including the Clintons, Soros, Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch and people like Macron, Blair and Obama. Those who wish to punish corrupt globalist actors are targeted. According to the Wall Street analyst, Macron is “a purveyor of trash talk”. The analyst notes that platforms like Telegram are educating “the deluded mass audience,” which could hold corrupt actors— including those within the deep state— accountable. Consequently, the deep state and its allies are targeting Durov’s Telegram and other independent platforms, the analyst maintains. On August 28, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, had at least one dinner with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, during which the possibility of relocating Telegram’s headquarters to France was discussed. Macron also allegedly put forward the offer of granting French citizenship to the Russian tech mogul.
According to the WSJ, this conversation took place in 2018. Interestingly, a year earlier, Durov had become the target of a French-Emirati intelligence operation code-named “Purple Music.” Sources familiar with the situation revealed that Durov’s iPhone was reportedly hacked by spies at that time. In August 2021, Durov was granted French citizenship through “an exceptional and highly political procedure,” as the French press described it in June 2023, calling it “a surprising choice on the part of the authorities.” That being said, it does not appear that the Russian national urgently required another foreign citizenship. Before obtaining a French passport, Durov became a citizen of the UAE. Additionally, he has held citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis since 2013. Likewise, there were no announcements that he planned to move the Telegram headquarters anywhere from Dubai where he has resided since 2017.
The Telegram CEO was arrested on August 24, immediately after his private jet landed at Paris’ Le Bourget airport. When the Russian Embassy in France sent a note to the French authorities, requesting consular access to the detained Telegram founder, Paris made it clear that they arrested Durov as a French citizen. This is how the trap for Durov snapped shut, according to Russian diplomats. “The problem is that… Pavel Durov has French citizenship. Accordingly, for Paris, for France, he is, first and foremost, a citizen of their country,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a press briefing on August 25. The German press cited an unnamed investigator as saying that Durov had apparently been aware he was a wanted man in France which makes his flight to Paris “something of a surprise”.
Le Canard Enchaine, however, cites Durov as saying that he was invited by the French president. If the Russian businessman believed he was invited by Macron there is nothing surprising in his decision to go to Paris. According to Ortel, this situation speaks volumes about the French government. The Macron cabinet was lambasted by French politician and head of the Patriot Party, Florian Philippot: “Macron is perfectly capable of this kind of trickery, in order to fulfill the mission demanded by his masters: to jail all those who defend freedom of expression!”
The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable, former Trump administration official and free speech activist Mike Benz has said. These statements were made during an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on his show Wednesday. Benz, a State Department official under the Trump administration, now runs the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online. Carlson asked Benz about a potential US role in the arrest of Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov in France last week. A court in Paris charged Durov on Wednesday with complicity in several crimes perpetrated through his app, as well as failing to cooperate with French authorities. While the former diplomat did not speculate, he noted that Durov’s detention aligns with the pattern of “soft power” tactics the US has pursued in the past.
The US has championed free speech globally for decades, “in large part” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or paramilitary movements “in countries where the US State Department seeks political control,” the former official said. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort, Benz claimed. The reason “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 was that “the US State Department was using Telegram,” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” the former State Department official stated. The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” he added.
Benz asserted that Telegram was the “main channel” when the US was “effectively orchestrating a color revolution in Belarus” in 2020. “The National Endowment for Democracy NED was actually paying the main administrators of the Telegram channels that orchestrated those riots,” he noted, calling the NED “one of the most prolific CIA cutouts in the arsenal.” This practice is part of a long-running campaign by the US, UK, and other NATO partners to gain political control over the territories of the former Soviet Union and their resources, according to Benz. He concluded that Telegram has been “the darling of the CIA, the State Department, and USAID” for political operations worldwide, due to its billion users and the ease with which they can be directed to necessary channels for recruitment.
Was the Biden administration involved in the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov? Mike Benz explains.
(1:20) Who Was Involved in Pavel Durov’s Arrest? (15:50) How Telegram Is Used by the CIA (27:22) Domestic Policy Doesn’t Exist (34:19) The Redefining of Democracy (39:21) The… pic.twitter.com/cmgWWCIIpw
The founder of the Megaupload file sharing service, Kim Schmitz, more commonly known as Kim Dotcom, has called for a boycott of France over the recent arrest of Telegram creator and CEO Pavel Durov in Paris. Writing on X on Wednesday, Dotcom urged people to “boycott France until Pavel Durov is released” and called on people to stop spending money on French products and refrain from traveling to the country. “If you want to fight for free speech, this is the way,” Dotcom wrote. The 39-year-old Russian entrepreneur was arrested on Saturday upon arriving at the Paris-Le Bourget Airport on a private jet. The Paris public prosecutor’s office has stated that Durov was arrested as part of a broader criminal inquiry against an unnamed person and a French judge has already twice extended his detention.
According to prosecutors, Durov, who also holds French, Emirati, and St Kitts and Nevis citizenship, could face charges ranging from complicity in drug dealing and money laundering, to facilitating the distribution of child pornography. The possible charges reportedly stem from what prosecutors believe to be insufficient moderation of Telegram and Durov’s failure to prevent misuse of the messenger app by bad actors. French President Emmanuel Macron has also claimed that the Telegram founder’s detention was part of “an ongoing judicial investigation” and was “in no way a political decision.” Telegram, meanwhile, has stressed that the app “abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act” and has called it “absurd” to claim that the company or its owner are responsible for the misuse of the platform.
Durov’s sudden arrest has sparked a wave of backlash against French authorities from across the globe. Many, including billionaire Elon Musk, American journalist Tucker Carlson, and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, have described the move as a direct attack on free speech. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has also accused France of holding Durov “hostage” in order to gain access to the private communications of Telegram users. The app currently has approximately one billion active monthly users around the world. Durov previously stated in an interview with Carlson that he had consistently refused to provide user data to any authorities, including US intelligence services, or to install a surveillance “backdoor” in the app.
“Like the hippo, the U.S. started out small and vulnerable to aggressors like England, which re-invaded in 1812. But things have changed for both the hippo and us. Can’t we be smarter than a hippo?”
Because effective lawmaking requires bipartisanship and members of Congress are, like their constituents, at their most ideologically divided point in a half century, cooperation is in increasingly short supply. As a result or, more precisely non-result, the U.S. Congress passes fewer bills every year. There is, however, one consistent area of agreement on Capitol Hill: defense spending. Each year for the past six decades, the massive National Defense Authorization Act—Washington-speak for the federal defense spending bill has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Defense appropriations are so sacrosanct that the press often describes the NDAA as “must pass”; it is routine for Congress to add in hundreds of millions of dollars of extraneous spending that the Pentagon does not want or request.
In the U.S. Congress, even “antiwar” voices support the military. Obama’s 2008 campaign was primarily predicated on his opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yet even his GOP opponent John McCain didn’t care call out Obama on the fact that when he had six chances to vote on the Iraq War—he wasn’t in the Senate yet when it voted on the measure authorizing President George W. Bush to attack the government of Saddam Hussein—he voted to send the cash each time. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly voted to fund the military and sending weapons for wars being waged by U.S. proxies like Israel and Ukraine. Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Republicans describe as Marxist, socialist and communist, is thoroughly committed to the cult of American militarism. “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said in Thursday’s nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
The idea that military expenditures are “must pass” relies on the assumption that the U.S. faces existential threats to its safety and/or sovereignty. This is crap. As Statfor’s classic 2011 assessment of the United States and its geopolitical position noted: “The American geography is an impressive one.” Consider Russia. It has thousands of miles of land borders, most of it without significant natural barriers like mountain ranges or large bodies of water to deter a potential invader, millions of square miles of fairly flat lands that can quickly and easily be traversed, with numerous neighbors that are hostile and have posed a historical threat. Given its situation, Russia’s rulers have traditionally relied on friendly buffer and vassal states around its perimeter.
“The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined,” Stratfor observed. “Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin.” Canada and Mexico are friendly vassal states. “Red Dawn” was just a movie. Gun nuts who think they’ll need AR-15s to arm a Resistance against alien invaders are deluded. No one wants to invade us. No one wants to take away our freedoms. No one can.
We are acting like the hippopotamus. Hippos are the most dangerous land animal on the planet, killing 500 human beings every year. They’re nervous and high-strung because they rapidly evolved from a much smaller creature that made easy prey. Poor things! They don’t realize that they’ve become huge, grown fearsome teeth and no longer need to be aggressive and territorial. Like the hippo, the U.S. started out small and vulnerable to aggressors like England, which re-invaded in 1812. But things have changed for both the hippo and us. Can’t we be smarter than a hippo?
“..an interview from Dana Bash on CNN this Thursday — but it’ll be with Tim Walz by her side, ready to step in should she put her foot in her mouth. It’ll also likely be pre-recorded and edited.”
While Donald Trump spent last week continuing to advocate for the same policies he ran on the first time he was president, Kamala Harris was advocating for the opposite of what her administration has done for the last 3.5 years and was adopting another one of Trump’s policies she previously railed against: building a border wall. Axios reported on Tuesday morning that Harris was now considering spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a wall on the southern border. The report said: If she’s elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called “un-American” during the Trump administration. Harris had also previously called a wall ““a medieval vanity project”, as well as repeatedly calling it “racist”, “useless”, a “stupid use of money”, “a complete waste of taxpayer money” and “wasteful”.
“On the subject of transnational gangs, let’s be perfectly clear, the President’s medieval vanity project is not going to stop them,” she said in 2019, talking about Donald Trump’s wall-building ambitions. This humiliating and hypocritical change of stance by Kamala Harris marks the second major Trump policy she’s stolen from her Republican competitor since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee barely 40 days ago. As my readers know, just days ago I wrote about how Harris, whose IRS during the Biden administration was actively trying to crack down on taxing tipped employees, miraculously changed her mind and adopted Donald Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy that he had been advocating for, with success, over the last few months. Further, economist Peter Schiff skewered her ideas as “socialism” in a wide ranging interview I held with him just days ago about Harris’ economic plan.
And while Harris may have been able to write off the “no tax on tips” policy theft as a one-off in the name of adopting common sense, her repeated railing against the idea of a border wall, combined with the fact that she has allowed millions of illegal immigrants to cross the border during her tenure as Vice President and “Border Czar”, makes this policy change look like pure desperation. It is an appalling, unfathomable stance to take all of a sudden — after 3.5 years of the Biden-Harris administration willingly allowing millions of illegals through the southern border and even actively fighting against the state of Texas to prevent it from sealing its border. If people didn’t catch on that Harris has no good ideas when she stole Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy, they’re going to catch on now.
To try to wave another massive policy flip-flop in the face of the voters that matter—swing state independents and centrists—is just going to look ridiculous at this point. The pivot is so stark and stands in such contrast to Harris’s past rhetoric that even the most uninformed voters are going to have to take notice. Compounding the idiocy of running her campaign on an increasing number of Donald Trump’s policies (to boot, Harris also said Tuesday she wouldn’t mandate electric vehicles), Kamala Harris still refuses to do a live, solo in-person interview or press conference. On Tuesday night it was announced she’d sit down for an interview from Dana Bash on CNN this Thursday — but it’ll be with Tim Walz by her side, ready to step in should she put her foot in her mouth. It’ll also likely be pre-recorded and edited.
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the presidential race last week and threw his support behind former President Trump, several states have refused to remove his name from the ballot after he announced he would do so in about 10 swing states. “Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues,” Kennedy said just before endorsing Trump, Insider reports. Three key states have dug in and are refusing to remove his name; Michigan – a key battleground state, said it was too late for Kennedy to withdraw as the nominee of the Natural Law Party. Wisconsin – whose Elections Commission voted 5-1 on Tuesday against removing his name, citing a law which says “any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot may not decline nomination.” Colorado – which, while less competitive for Trump than Michigan or Wisconsin, also refused to remove Kennedy’s name.
“Minor party candidates cannot withdraw, so his name will remain on the ballot in the November election,” said Cheri Hardmon, a spokesperson for Michigan Secretary of State in a statement to the Detroit News. “The Natural Law Party held their convention to select electors for Robert Kennedy Jr. They cannot meet at this point to select new electors since it’s past the primary,” she added. Nevada notably allowed RFK Jr. to remove his name after his legal team came to an agreement with DNC lawyers who were suing to keep him off the ballot. As The Conservative Treehouse notes; “RFK Jr is gone from ballots in the battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania and now Nevada. Not Michigan and Wisconsin. Florida, Texas and Ohio have also removed Kennedy, but those are generally Red. The state to watch is now North Carolina, where ballots would have to be reprinted quickly if the RFK Jr intent is to withdraw. The Kennedy team have not requested to remove their candidate from North Carolina.
(VIA NPR) – “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated by the We The People Party as that party’s presidential candidate to be listed on the ballot,” North Carolina State Board of Elections public information officer Patrick Gannon said. “That party has not informed the State Board of any plans to change its nomination.” Gannon said that if We The People withdrew Kennedy’s nomination, state officials would have to consider if it would be practical to reprint ballots. As of Friday, nearly a third of North Carolina’s 100 counties had started the printing process.
Former President Donald Trump has lashed out at the US administration and the Department of Justice over their latest attempt to prosecute him for alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election. The Republican candidate in this year’s race for the White House has described the legal campaign targeting him as “a direct assault on democracy” and a case of actual election interference. Trump’s statements follow a new indictment filed against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accusing the former head of state of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The new document is a stripped-down version of last year’s criminal case against Trump, which alleged that he “spread lies” of “outcome-determinative fraud” in the election by insisting that he had won the race at the time instead of Joe Biden. Trump launched an appeal in that case, claiming immunity from prosecution as president, and the initial indictment was dismissed last month by the Supreme Court.
The revised document, which is shorter and lacking part of the original that had accused Trump of trying to force the Justice Department to overturn his election loss, still lays out the same four charges that prosecutors initially brought against the former president. Among them are conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy against the voting rights of citizens, and charges relating to the disruption of Congress’ certification of the electoral vote by a mob of Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021. Trump, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to power, slammed the new indictment in a slew of posts on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, calling it a “resurrection of a dead witch hunt.”
What they are doing now is the single greatest sabotage of our Democracy in History…. This is for Third World Countries and Banana Republics, not for the USA! Trump claimed that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling should have seen the entire case being dismissed, and lambasted the “deranged” Jack Smith for bringing it up again “in an act of desperation, and in order to save face.” “This is merely an attempt to interfere with the election, and distract the American people from the catastrophes [Vice President] Kamala Harris has inflicted on our nation,” Trump wrote. He also accused the Department of Justice of breaking its own 60-days policy, which prohibits it from taking any action that could influence the race in the two months preceding the presidential election.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that his Democratic rival and current vice president, Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden are partly responsible for the assassination attempt against him last month. The GOP firebrand alleged that the pair had been making it more difficult for the Secret Service to protect him, while pedaling the kind of rhetoric that could have encouraged the shooter. Trump narrowly escaped death when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. The would-be assassin had taken position on a nearby rooftop that gave him an unobstructed view of the Republican candidate. One of the bullets grazed the former president’s right ear, with one attendee killed and two others injured as a result of the shooting. The shooter was subsequently killed by Secret Service agents.
In an interview on Tuesday with Phil McGraw, better known as Dr Phil, Trump said: “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’s fault.” He accused the pair of “weaponizing government” against him and bringing in the “whole DOJ to try and get me.” “They weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” the Republican nominee added, claiming that Biden and Harris “were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service.” According to the former president, Harris and Biden portrayed him as a “threat to democracy,” which “can get assassins or potential assassins going.” “Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric,” Trump suggested.
In late July, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives unanimously voted in favor of creating a bipartisan task force to probe the attempted assassination of Trump. Made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats, its intended goal is to examine potential security lapses on federal, state and local levels of law enforcement that led up to the incident. Several days prior, Kimberly Cheatle stepped down as director of the Secret Service. Her resignation was preceded by an acrimonious congressional hearing that saw lawmakers accuse her of withholding information and refusing to take responsibility for security failures at the rally. She was forced to acknowledge that “on July 13, we failed” in a manner not seen in decades.
BREAKING: Donald Trump directly blames President Joe Biden for nearly getting assas*inated last month, says Biden knew he needed more protection.
Trump said the Biden-Harris administration decided his safety wasn't important.
Ukraine has demanded that no conditions be attached to a $50 billion loan by G7 members to the country which is reportedly backed by seized Russian assets. Speaking at the ‘Ukraine 2024. Independence’ forum on Tuesday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal stated that while G7 leaders agreed to lend $50 billion in June, Kiev insists on a certain “political framework” related to the funds. “Ukraine should receive them by the end of this year at the latest. These funds should be provided to Ukraine without any conditions,” he insisted. This loan also “should be interest-free and not affect an increase in the state debt,” Shmigal went on, adding that Kiev must be able to use the funds for any of its needs, primarily to compensate for the damage the country has suffered during the conflict.
The prime minister noted that Kiev and the G7 had reached an agreement on this point, but said he wants Ukraine to be able to use the funds to finance the budget and the military. Shmigal conceded that providing Ukraine with this loan “is a difficult task.” “The G7 countries and the EU must find a consensus on how to provide this money. These funds will be compensated for our partners by revenues from frozen Russian assets, the total amount of which is $300 billion,” he said, adding that the annual interest on this sum is $3-4 billion annually. The prime minister acknowledged that Ukraine remains in dire financial straits, pointing to a $35 billion deficit in next year’s budget, $15 billion of which still has to be covered in some way.
“Our goal is to get all $300 billion which is frozen,” Shmigal stressed. He added, however, that for the time being, Ukraine also intends to raise funds by increasing internal borrowing and taxation. While Western nations have discussed outright confiscation of the $300 billion in sovereign Russian assets, mostly stashed in Belgium, they have so far refrained from doing so due to legal and public image concerns. However, G7 members have agreed to use the profits from these assets to finance Ukraine. Moscow has denounced the asset freeze as “theft.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the West’s decision to use profits from Russian money to help Ukraine is “criminal, cynical, and another blow to international law.”
Recently, Ukraine finally passed a total ban on the Orthodox Church, making the faith of more than 80% of the Ukrainian people illegal. The decision did not surprise anyone, as several laws restricting the Church’s activities had already been approved in the country since 2022 – in addition to the de facto persecution of Orthodoxy taking place since the Maidan coup in 2014. However, even so, the Western media continues trying to soften the crimes of its proxy regime. The current main narrative in the Western media is that Ukraine has banned the “Russian Orthodox Church”. By calling the Orthodox Church on Ukrainian soil “Russian”, the media induces public opinion to believe that the ban only affects a specific religious group linked to Moscow, and does not harm the Orthodox faithful as a whole. However, this is an easily refutable lie.
Unlike the Catholic Church, Orthodoxy does not have a “universal bishop” – like a “Pope” – and its administration is therefore divided into regional jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction of the Church is absolutely sovereign, with Orthodoxy being a Communion of Faith between different Autocephalous Churches. Each Autocephalous Church administers a canonical territory, with no Church being authorized to interfere in the internal affairs of another’s territory. The canonical territory of an Autocephalous Church is not necessarily restricted to the borders of nation states. Canonical territorial delimitation concerns the historical development of Orthodoxy in a region. State borders are much more unstable than canonical borders – which, although they can change, require much more time to develop such reconfigurations. In the case of the canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate, Russian jurisdiction extends to almost the entire post-Soviet space, in addition to some regions of Far Asia, such as China and Japan.
Ukraine, for obvious reasons, has always been part of the canonical jurisdiction of Moscow and never wanted to stop being so. There are even reports that canonical autocephaly was already offered to Ukrainians by the Russians, being rejected. In the case of very large canonical territories, such as Russia’s, it is common for there to be division into local “sub-jurisdictions”. These sub-jurisdictions sometimes correspond to the specific territories of some nation states. This is precisely the case with the Orthodox Church of Japan and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, for example – both sub-jurisdictions subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate. These regional churches have broad administrative autonomy, but do not have canonical sovereignty (autocephaly). It is important to emphasize how these divisions are purely administrative in nature, although they correspond to historical, cultural and political factors.
There is no such a thing as an “ethnic division” of Orthodoxy, being this type of segregationist mentality – known as “phyletism” – banned as a heresy in the Orthodox Communion. So, it must be said very clearly that by banning the canonical Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) on Ukrainian soil, the Kiev regime simply banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church itself. In other words, the faith of 80% of the Ukrainian people has become illegal in the country. Zelensky did not simply banish the Church. He also called the Orthodox Christians of the Moscow Patriarchate “Muscovite demons” in his speech on Ukraine’s “independence day.” Furthermore, Artyom Dmitruk, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who voted against the Church ban, is being persecuted by the regime, having even suffered attacks on members of his family. The police are also reacting with violence against all demonstrators protesting against the ban on the Church, having then an official situation of religious persecution in the neo-Nazi regime.
It is also interesting to mention that there are efforts by the Western media to promote an ultranationalist Ukrainian schismatic sect – the so-called “Kiev Patriarchate”. The group was created by some former Ukrainian ultranationalist clerics in the 1990s following unsuccessful minority demands of autocephaly for Kiev. Since 2014, the sect has become a kind of Ukrainian “state church”, receiving strong support from the Maidan Junta – including the handover of canonical Church assets confiscated by the Ukrainian state. This sect is known for venerating as saints the so-called “national heroes” of Ukraine, such as SS member and Holocaust collaborator Stepan Bandera. Furthermore, the group carries out several blasphemous acts against Orthodox Christianity, preaching a kind of Russophobic “anti-Orthodoxy”.
Unfortunately, however, political interference in religion has been strong in Ukraine, mainly from external actors. The “Kiev Patriarchate” was recently “recognized” by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in an illegal intervention maneuver in the canonical territory of Moscow. Constantinople is fortunately isolated in its decision, being supported only by the Autocephalous Churches of Athens and Alexandria.
With each passing day, the Middle East inches closer to a full-scale, devastating war. Multiple regional powers are involved, each being pushed by its own internal and external pressures further away from peace. The situation intensified following the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israel, prompting a fierce response from the Israeli military. Palestinians continue to insist on a return to the 1967 borders and the establishment of their own state with East Jerusalem as its capital, while Israel refuses to make these concessions. Tensions remain high, severely complicating any attempts at a diplomatic resolution. Some Western officials, however, particularly in the US, claim that a ceasefire agreement is imminent, and optimism about these statements is buoyed by Iran’s restraint in not yet retaliating for the assassination of Hamas Politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, 2024. Iran seems to be holding back, perhaps in hopes of stabilizing the region.
However, there are forces within and beyond the region that continue to exert a destructive influence, seemingly unaware that their actions could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of several states, and disastrous consequences for the entire world. This is precisely what Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed during a press conference on August 27. He expressed the view that some parties involved in the Middle Eastern conflict are not interested in a resolution. According to him, these parties prefer to continue the hostilities, betting on potential changes in the global political landscape. Lavrov noted that it appears some of these actors are deliberately maintaining violence to achieve their political goals. Lavrov also highlighted the connection between the situation in the Middle East and political processes in other countries, particularly the upcoming election in the US.
He suggested that the Israeli leadership might be hoping for changes in American policy that would reduce international pressure on Israel concerning its military operation in Gaza. The foreign minister expressed concern that these expectations could delay a resolution of the conflict. Furthermore, Lavrov stressed that Russia, like many other countries, condemned the terrorist attacks that occurred on October 7. However, he pointed out that a response involving collective punishment of the civilian population violates international humanitarian law. He criticized approaches that cause suffering to innocent people and exacerbate the humanitarian catastrophe. Lavrov paid special attention to statements by Israeli military officials who claim there are no civilians in Gaza, suggesting that all its residents are terrorists. He called this rhetoric dangerous, noting that it further inflames tensions.
In recent weeks, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas have failed to produce any concrete agreements on a ceasefire. While the talks in Cairo were described as constructive, no agreements were reached. This situation illustrates that, despite the efforts of the international community, the parties to the conflict are not yet ready for peace. The recent assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, a prominent leader of Hamas, has raised numerous questions about Iran’s response, given its longstanding support for Palestinian resistance groups and the fact that the man was killed in Tehran. Iran has yet to strike back against Israel, which at first glance might seem surprising. The reasons for this restraint lie in Iran’s strategic interests and its desire to avoid a large-scale conflict.
First and foremost, the Iranian leadership understands that a war with Israel could have catastrophic consequences. The situation in the Middle East is already highly volatile, and an open conflict involving Iran would only exacerbate the crisis. Furthermore, Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a representative of the reformist bloc, is focused on normalizing relations with the West. The primary reason for this is Iran’s dire economic situation. In 2024, the Iranian economy continues to face significant challenges: Inflation has reached 40%, unemployment has risen to 15%, and the national currency continues to depreciate. Under these conditions, Iran is not interested in a war that could further undermine its economy and increase social tensions within the country.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly expressed a willingness to negotiate a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal) under fair terms. These statements indicate that Iran is pursuing diplomatic solutions and recognizes the need for international cooperation. Tehran is aware that the outcome of a war with Israel, backed by NATO, is unpredictable. Thus, the delay in responding to Israel’s actions is more of a political tool than a sign of weakness. Iran seeks to use this pause to exert diplomatic and political pressure on Israel and the US to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.
As readers know, I admire Russian President Putin, but the reasons I admire him make him a failed war leader. Putin is a product of an old conception of foreign affairs as a rational enterprise conducted by gentlemen who relied on agreement rather than on the imposition of power. Consequently, when faced with non-gentlemen, Putin finds he played his cards wrong and lacks power. By this I mean conventional power. He went to war in Donbas without an army, and he still doesn’t have one. Therefore, the defense of Russia now resides in tactical nuclear weapons. Once they are used, it goes full scale. Putin failed to understand that the conflict in Ukraine provoked by Washington had to be quickly won. He has failed to comprehend reality since 2014 when Washington overthrew, while Putin did nothing, the Ukrainian government.
He still hasn’t built the massive Russian Army that would cause second thoughts among Washington’s NATO puppets. How a leader of Putin’s quality fails in this way is beyond my understanding. Perhaps Putin is a Western liberal created by decades of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe propaganda beamed into the Soviet Union. So many Russian intellectuals, known as Atlanticist Integrationists, are a product of Washington propaganda and thus a threat to Russia. Putin has never enforced any of his red lines. Consequently, every one has been crossed with zero consequences to the West. The latest Western audacity was the American led invasion of Kursk. Putin said the attackers would be held accountable, but the very limited strikes on some Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure hardly count as acts of war.
We Are On The Edge, On The Edge Of The Abyss.
We Are Closer To Nuclear War Than We Have Ever Been.
Scott Ritter: I hope everybody heard what Lavrov said, that if there's a nuclear war, the United States will be hit. I'll say it one more time just so your audience understands… pic.twitter.com/vzyUYTvh5B
— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) August 28, 2024
If we turn to the Middle East, we see the same inability to recognize reality. Israel used the moronic George W. Bush (really Dick Cheney) Regime to eliminate the countries opposing Israel’s expansion in the Middle East–Iraq, Syria, Iran. Washington knocked off Iraq for Israel, pretending it was a “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and the dumbshit Americans fell for it. But before the Obama Regime could deliver its attack on Syria, Russia was there, thus saving the country. Now Israel has Washington focused on Iran. Why? Because Iran finances and arms the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, which has successfully defeated two Israeli invasions. If Israel can get Washington to get rid of Iran, Israel can grab southern Lebanon and perhaps the entire country. Once Israel’s forces were committed to Gaza, it was a perfect time for Syria to retake the Golan Heights and for Hezbollah to overrun northern Israel.
Iran could have knocked out the Iron Dome and destroyed Israeli air bases and military sites. But nothing happened. Seeing nothing but indecision and weakness, Israel began a campaign of attacking Syria, Hezbollah, and assassinating people in Iran. Following an assassination in the Iranian capital, the Iranian leader said he was going to teach Israel a lesson. But he didn’t. All Iran did was to reveal to Israel that it had the capability to breach the Iron Dome and bring destruction to Israel, but Iran brought no destruction. Instead, Iran stupidly revealed its capability, thus in an act of total stupidity put Israel on alert. Syria, allegedly, has the Russian S-300 air defense system. Either it doesn’t work or the Russians won’t let Syria use it to deter Israeli and US air attacks on Syria, which continue unabated. Makes one wonder why Russia bothered to intervene..
One can’t help but wonder if Putin and the almost equally unrealistic Chinese leader are sitting on Iran and Hezbollah, thinking that they are preventing an outbreak of a larger war. To the contrary, they are contributing to the outbreak of wider war. From all indications, neither the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments have sufficient awareness of the situation to understand that a lack of effective response to aggression leads to more and worse aggression. There are on the Iranian scene two of Washington’s carrier task force groups, US soldiers, and US jet fighters. Why are they there? Certainly not to rescue Israel from Gazans. What does this tell us? There are no Russian or Chinese forces in the area. What does this tell us? Just as there is no effective response to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, there is no effective response to Washington’s aggression against Russia, China, and Iran.
It would be so easy to stop this dangerous aggression. Only one simple thing is needed–a public statement by Russia, China, and Iran that the three countries have signed a mutual defense treaty, and an attack on one is an attack on all. That would end the Middle East conflict, and it would end the otherwise certain increase of NATO attacks, if only with long range missiles, on mother Russia that, unless Putin surrenders, will result in nuclear World War 3. Where is the necessary treaty that will stop the road to nuclear Armageddon? Why are the leaders of Russia, China, and Iran unable to act?
Elvis
https://twitter.com/i/status/1828689517210968437
RFK 30 min
https://twitter.com/i/status/1828517649875189949
MAHA
This country is made up of a hundred different kinds of people and a hundred different ways of talking and a hundred different ways of going to church, but they are all American ways. pic.twitter.com/8E8NzU3EeI
How on earth can the polls be so close if most people Lemon talks to don’t know who Kamala is? I’m not buying it. It takes time to build name and face recognition. But Kamala just spent her first 40 days hiding from the press. Those polls are lying.
Lemon
WATCH: MSNBC's Jen Psaki was visibly upset after Don Lemon revealed to her that most of the voters he spoke to didn't even know who Kamala Harris was and that many black voters are flocking to Trump
"For the most part in Pittsburgh, or the Jersey Shore, in Ohio, many people did… pic.twitter.com/d7J8S27p9S
1. RFK Jr. says he would say yes if asked to run the CIA, but… 2. The Senate would never confirm him because the CIA is protected by powerful committees that are “read in.” 3. He says he’d be “very very dangerous to these committees.” 4.… pic.twitter.com/olaCjzjYmD
RFK Jr. tells Tucker how difficult it was for him to ultimately endorse President Trump before revealing that the Democrat Party has been hiring private detectives to surveil him and everyone he’s ever known for 70 years to dig up dirt on him and discredit his candidacy. pic.twitter.com/KtEXJnYJs2
When Bobby Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump last week, he burned his boats. There’s no turning back for him, or for American politics. Here’s his first interview since that happened.
(0:42) RFK Jr. Endorsing Donald Trump (11:26) Censorship and Pavel Durov’s Arrest (34:56) America’s… pic.twitter.com/AOQULEvZeX
Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who was detained in France, may be banned from leaving the country if charged, the Financial Times newspaper reported, citing an informed Paris-based lawyer. Investigators may try to obtain additional information from Durov for the investigation or put pressure on him by extending his detention, the report said on Tuesday. If Durov is charged “it will be interesting to see what measures a judge imposes, as he lives abroad,” the lawyer was quoted as saying by the newspaper, adding that house arrest or a ban on leaving the country could be imposed. Durov may be in custody at the National Anti-Fraud Unit in the suburbs of Paris, a source told RIA Novosti.
“Considering that the investigation of his case has been entrusted to the National Anti-Fraud Unit, Durov may be there,” the source said. Russian-born Durov, who is a citizen of multiple countries, including France, was detained at an airport north of Paris on Saturday on charges linked to criminal uses of his Telegram app, including terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud.
French President Emmanuel Macron invited Telegram founder Pavel Durov to move the app’s headquarters from Dubai to Paris in 2018, but he declined, US media reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Macron made the proposal during a lunch, which had not been previously reported, the people said. The French leader also discussed granting French citizenship to Durov at the time, the newspaper reported. Russian-born Durov, who holds citizenship in several countries including France, was detained at a Paris airport on Saturday on charges related to the criminal use of his Telegram app, including terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud, which could land the 39-year-old billionaire in prison for up to 20 years. Macron has said that Durov’s arrest was not a political decision and promised that the decision on the businessman’s case will be made by judges.
It seems that over two hundred years after the Revolution, in France the Liberté part of its celebrated slogan has not really stuck. On Saturday 24 August, Russian social media platform entrepreneur Pavel Durov was arrested by the French police at La Bourget airport near Paris on trumped-up charges. The French authorities went about it in a sneaky third-world manner that does them no honour. They waited for Durov’s plane to enter French air space before issuing the arrest warrant. In it Durov was charged with a slew of “ham sandwich” offences, including such absurdities as “promotion of terrorism, paedophilia, fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, and cyberbullying”. As soon as Durov departed the plane, he was surrounded and led off by police agents. The actual reasons for this arrest have nothing to do with the allegation in the charge sheet and they are bound to resonate with partisans of freedom everywhere.
Firstly, it is Durov’s resolute and principled refusal to share on demand with security agencies information that would compromise the privacy of Telegram users. Durov’s firm position in this regard collided directly with legislation which obligates social platforms operating on European Union territory to do precisely that. Secondly, the same legislation requires social media platforms to institute a humiliating system of what euphemistically is called “monitoring.” This amounts to directed censorship of opinions expressed by users in their Telegram posts. Durov wanted none of it. But in the EU, platform management is under orders to engage in this odious practice on behalf of and according to the directives of the totalitarian EU political elite. The firm rejection by Durov of that invasive demand, as we just saw, had dire consequences for his personal liberty.
All collective West based social platforms have willingly succumbed to these unethical demands and have more or less meekly agreed to act as extensions for their countries’ security services, to the detriment of users’ privacy. Attentive readers will easily connect the dots and recall that far from being an isolated occurrence this arrest follows a pattern of repression targeting non-systemic public figures in all major collective West “democracies.” Tucker Carlson a few months ago performed a huge public service by broadcasting an immensely informative interview with the thirty nine year-old Russian Wunderkind, recorded at Durov’s office in the United Arab Emirates.
The fascinating interview unveils the portrait of an enormously gifted, focused, eloquent, engagingly modest, and above all supremely principled person. Durov and his equally accomplished brother were the driving force behind VK, the Russian version of Facebook characterised by a much greater degree of sophistication, and later on of the Telegram social media platform which, at last count, had a global following of over nine hundred million users. But the key takeaway that emerged from Tucker Carlson’s interview, and it was with providential timing to counteract the deluge of media calumnies that is sure to follow Durov’s arrest, is something entirely different. It is the glaring contrast between the Russian genius, unmoved by the temptations of wealth and fame, and the avarice, vanity and emptiness of his Western counterparts who have been trying to compete with him in the same line of work.
With all that being said, like many members of the Russian intelligentsia, from A. Herzen in the 19th century on to the present day, Pavel Durov fell pray to his compatriots’ standard infantile misperception of where the grass is greener. At an earlier stage of his career he sadly failed to strike a reasonable balance between his passionate and laudable commitment to freedom and privacy and the conscientious fulfilment of his patriotic duties which, in their broad sweep, override fidelity to narrower principles, no matter how fundamental in their significance. Had he acted more flexibly then, and in the interview with Tucker Carlson the circumstances of that episode are fully revealed, he would not have turned into a stateless global nomad and most likely would not have fallen into the trap so treacherously sprung on him in Paris.
The legal situation arising from the detention of Pavel Durov, with the preposterous charges concocted against him and the harrowing possibility of twenty years’ imprisonment, is tailor made for maître Jacques Vergès but, unfortunately, he is no longer with us. One hopes that Durov will secure competent and uncorrupted representation and that his legal counsel shall grasp the self-evident fact that the case against him in its entirety is political, with criminal elements maliciously contrived and grafted on for propaganda effect.
The Assange case now having been settled, Pavel Durov is certain to become the new global privacy and freedom of expression icon. Freedom loving people world-wide will mobilise to show support in order to extract him from the clutches of the pathetic Macron regime and its overseas “partners” who, from the background, are undoubtedly pulling the strings. That is well and good. But one simply wishes that once and for all liberty would triumph. Icons are uplifting, but we could easily do with one fewer if that were the price that we should have to pay in order to secure the freedom to which Pavel so admirably dedicated his passionate idealism and irrepressible creativity.
The Pavel Durov saga is a gift that will keep on giving for a long time to come. This is what hot information war is all about. So let’s attempt to connect several loose ends. A high-level Russian analyst makes the case that Durov’s arrest is connected with “anti-French protests in its former colonies, withdrawal from its traditional ‘sphere of influence’ where Telegram infrastructure was used to push anti-colonial and anti-Macronist narratives”. Add to it an “attempt to influence narratives on Ukraine both in Russian and the international media field, which is highly dependent on Telegram infrastructure.” Paris is indeed desperate to make itself relevant when it comes to psy ops and influencing/special warfare in Ukraine. However, as the analyst notes, the French don’t have the tech means to accomplish it.
So this may have led to Macron deciding to “exercise a personal pressure campaign against Durov himself. French authorities must be rather desperate in trying to keep their heads in the game of global politics. And Telegram today is global politics.” Paris was just waiting for a big break. When the pilot of Durov’s Embraer private jet submitted his flight plan, there was no warrant for his arrest in France. Only when the jet was on its way to Le Bourget, Paris filed the warrant in haste. Durov was clueless all along. In a nutshell: Paris got a fateful heads up he was flying into France – could have been via Durov’s Dubai-based, post-obsessive, social climbing girlfriend – and laid out the trap in a flash. There’s a myth that the FSB in the past asked Durov for Telegram’s encryption keys. False. The FSB wanted Telegram to provide top access on investigations of serious crimes, on a case-by-case basis.
That’s an enormous difference compared to what the US Government does with Meta or Twitter/X via their totally open backdoors. Durov though got drunk on NATOstan’s “freedom and democracy” propaganda, rebuffed Russia, and left. And that brings us to President Putin. Putin had better things to do than to meet Durov in Baku, and the Kremlin has gone on the record to deny the meeting. Durov was doing a tour of Central Asia and the Caucasus, they happened to cross their paths in Azerbaijan. There’s one thing that Putin never tolerates: betrayal of Russia. And that applies to the letter to Durov. When Durov went to the US, the Americans, predictably, demanded Telegram’s backdoors to surveil everybody. So he set up shop in Dubai and later applied for French citizenship.
US tech mogul Elon Musk has asked French President Emmanuel Macron to shed light on the reasons behind the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. The Russian entrepreneur was detained last week upon arriving at Paris-Le Bourget Airport. The French judicial authorities have twice extended Durov’s detention. The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office has stated that he was arrested as part of a broad criminal inquiry against an unnamed person. “It would be helpful to the global public to understand more details about why he was arrested,” Musk wrote in a comment under Macron’s post on X (formerly Twitter). On Sunday, the French leader took to X to deny having any political motive for detaining Durov. He insisted that the arrest is part of “an ongoing judicial investigation” in which the courts will decide the entrepreneur’s fate.
Durov has said he has faced pressure from the US. In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in April, he claimed that he received “too much attention” from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies while on US soil. According to the prosecutors, Durov could face charges ranging from complicity in drug dealing and money laundering, to facilitating the distribution of child pornography. French media had previously reported that the arrest of the 39-year-old Russian citizen, who also holds French, UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship, was related to alleged offenses regarding Telegram. Reports suggest that the authorities believe Durov is complicit in a range of crimes allegedly committed via the social media app due to insufficient moderation.
Born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1984, Durov left Russia in the mid-2010s and has since mainly lived in the UAE. In 2021, he was granted French citizenship. In July, Durov wrote on his Telegram channel that the number of active monthly users of the messaging platform had grown to 950 million. Durov’s arrest has been denounced as an infringement upon rights enjoyed in both the EU and the US. Carlson, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, former CIA and NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks have spoken out in support of the entrepreneur. Shortly after the arrest, Musk, who launched the hashtag #FreePavel, suggested that the pressure on freedom of speech could worsen.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France, along with the US administration’s encouragement of it, bear “the hallmark of dictatorship,” American journalist Tucker Carlson has said. The comments were made during an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has recently announced the suspension of his campaign as an independent candidate for US president. Durov was arrested in Paris last week, and is being held for questioning in connection to a broader cybercrime probe into illicit activities on the billionaire’s end-to-end encrypted social media platform, the French authorities have said. Telegram generally refuses to share user data and chat logs with law enforcement, and Durov has claimed that this privacy-first approach has drawn attention from intelligence agencies around the world.
In the interview on Monday, Kennedy said the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects the right to freedom of expression from government interference, should also protect “misinformation,” as well as information that “no one wants to hear.” Carlson replied that the administration of US President Joe Biden currently views anything that criticizes the “job that they’re doing” as misinformation. “With that in mind, you see the Biden administration encouraging France, [French President Emmanuel] Macron to arrest the owner and founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, who is, as of now, in a French prison,” Carlson said, adding: “that’s the hallmark of dictatorship.” “We’ve lost Europe,” Kennedy replied. “Europe now does not have free speech.”
He went on to draw a comparison between Durov and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, blasting the Democratic Party for its lack of actual democratic values. “Elon Musk should be the hero of the Democratic Party,” Kennedy said. “He was actually the only one that would allow free speech on his platform, and he’s now become a villain because of it.” Russia’s top human rights official, Tatyana Moskalkova, said Durov’s arrest is a blow against free speech, claiming it is “an attempt to shut down Telegram, the platform where you can find the truth about world affairs.” Telegram’s official statement on the arrest of its CEO noted that the platform complies with EU laws, and that its content-moderation policies are in line with industry standards.
The arrest of Pavel Durov marks a new low point on the scumline of the side of the bath – the tub being western democracies and the line being their desperation to stay in power at the costs of controlling social media. Durov, who owns Telegram and lives in Dubai, could be in jail for months and possibly years on the trumped-up charges which the French state has conjured up simply because he refuses to allow any government to have a back door into Telegram. He has fought this tooth and nail for years with the west, in particular the U.S., playing every dirty trick in the book to get access to the platform for its own nefarious purposes – to destroy opposition figures, their strategies etc. – rather than what it is dressed up to be, identifying terrorists and international criminals.
As the UK ponders how its own state has sunk to a new totalitarian level in recent days with the arrest of its citizens who merely like a posting on a social media platform, the West has arrested this French Russian dual national genius who is charged with the crimes of those criminals active on Telegram. And so charges of terrorism and trafficking in minors, drugs and whatever else they can find on the platform will be made against him as someone abetting in the crimes. Of course, the same rules will not be levelled against Elon Musk who surely has criminals on his platform or for that matter any of the other social media platforms.
But how many of these platforms are also taking the same stand as Durov? We are led to believe that most of them aren’t but in light of his arrest we should assume that many of them have already allowed some sort of access to them for the deep state. Elon Musk likes to brag about his refusal to comply with the EU’s demands that he “moderates” who he allows onto X, adding that other social media platforms accepted the deal offered to him by Brussels: comply with our requests and we grant you some leniency on future antitrust fines. This offer, which he claims was happily accepted by other platforms is a close as you can get to the EU offering a brown envelope stuffed full of cash to a man in a pub. It’s a bribe and gives a clue as to how anti-democratic the EU is and how it operates in the shadows.
The French arrest however goes deeper in that we can assume that it was not France operating alone to nab Durov. We can assume that the FBI and CIA had probably pushed Macron to do this appalling dirty work but perhaps also Israel had a hand in it. Just recently, Netanyahu complained that data which was stolen from the government was being exchanged on Telegram and asked Durov to step in and retrieve it. He got not reply. Did Mossad have a hand in the arrest of Telegram’s boss? It seems credible given that it is hard to believe the Durov would fly into French airspace eyes wide open. Was it a kidnapping operation to get his plane and his pilot to land in Paris? French TV channel TF1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Saturday 24th of August but did not state whether the plane’s ultimate destination had been France.
The details around the arrest are very sketchy, but according to Reuters, Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”. Another question which arises from the arrest is whether it is an international effort by western countries led by the U.S. – with Israel very much part of it – to test the waters for other arrests. Pundits have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists for weeks now suggesting Elon Musk will be arrested at some point, or charged in his absence, by UK authorities for some of the more controversial posts he has made about the political situation in the UK, or even by the EU which appears to have started a legal battle with him after he refused to respond to two letters sent to him by a French European Commissioner.
Perhaps even the Democrats in the U.S. might play the same card given that Musk has lost all credibility as this neutral player in U.S. politics after he has so openly supported Trump who has promised him a position in a new government if he were to enter the Oval Office. There is no such thing really as free speech. It comes at a very high price for those who want to protect and cherish it and now France will test the political landscape to see how the arrest of Durov will affect Macron’s ratings. The French president has made outstandingly poor judgment in the past in calling for parliamentary elections immediately after EU ones which gave so much power to far-right groups, so he seems to be good at falling on his own sword. He may well have factored that Durov does not have the popularity of say Assange who didn’t stir so much political anger when he was banged up for years in a filthy, dank cell in the UK on trumped up charges from the U.S.
What is especially worrying is that locking up powerful people who have huge followings on the internet is becoming a trend which people are getting used to. The war between those who want to control the perceived truth and those who hold the actual one is hotting up. Scott Ritter, Andrew Tate, Richard Medhurst all arrested within days of one another, while Musk himself shuts down Egyptian comedian Bassem Youseff who had 10m followers on X. What we are witnessing is a new level of desperation that western elites are more afraid than ever that after wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine and starting a world war in the Middle East that voters have no confidence any more in their decision-making, as they, the public, struggle more and more to pay for groceries or even heat their houses. It’s a new milestone in the blind dogma of elites to resort to tactics which we would have scorned China or North Korea for using just a few years ago. It’s a new level of panic which we haven’t seen before.
Former US President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have agreed to a set of rules for their upcoming presidential debate, Trump announced on Tuesday. Harris allegedly wanted to use a “cheat sheet” during the ABC-hosted showdown, but was apparently denied. The debate will take place on September 10 in Philadelphia, and will be hosted by ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. “The rules will be the same as the last CNN debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone except, perhaps, Crooked Joe Biden” Trump wrote in a post to his Truth Social platform. “The debate will be ‘stand up’, and candidates cannot bring notes, or ‘cheat sheets’. We have also been given assurance by ABC that this will be a ‘fair and equitable’ debate, and that neither side will be given the questions in advance,” he continued, adding “no Donna Brazile!”
Before the 2016 presidential election, CNN contributor and Democratic National Committee (DNC) vice-chair Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton a list of questions ahead of her town hall event with the network. Trump has long maintained that CNN and other mainstream media outlets openly favor Democrats. However, he praised the objectivity of CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash after they moderated a debate between him and President Joe Biden in June. The debate was an unmitigated disaster for Biden, who appeared frail and confused throughout, and ended his reelection campaign three weeks later.
Trump pulled out of the September 10 debate after Biden withdrew from the race, calling on Harris to face him in a September 4 head-to-head on Fox News instead. However, Harris insisted on September 10, and Trump agreed, before calling on the vice president to accept a total of three debates, including the Fox News date and a third showdown hosted by NBC News. Harris has only agreed to the ABC News debate. The Trump and Harris campaigns argued this week over rules and technical details governing the debate, with Trump’s team pushing for each candidate’s microphone to be muted while the other speaks, and Harris’ staff lobbying for open mics.
Harris “is ready to deal with Trump’s constant lies and interruptions in real time. Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button,” a spokesman for the vice president said on Monday. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller replied that the Republican candidate had “accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” before claiming that Harris asked for “a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements.” Before announcing that he had reached an agreement with Harris’ team, Trump said on Sunday that he was considering backing out of the debate entirely due to ABC’s “ridiculous and biased” coverage of him. “Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that ABC’s journalists “have a lot to answer for.”
O’Leary
NEW: Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary rips Kamala Harris for being afraid to talk to the press, tells her to "come out come out wherever you are."
"There is no scenario where the president of the United States can't head up a press conference."
After presiding over the worst illegal immigration crisis in US history, failed ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris has now pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a wall at the southern US border – a plan she called “un-American” during the Trump administration. According to Axios, which calls it the “latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions,” Harris is now embracing a ‘more hawkish’ immigration policy while the Trump campaign spends tens of millions of dollars on attack ads over the Biden-Harris administration’s failed border policies. Last week, Harris told the Democratic National Convention that she would sign a recent bipartisan border security bill negotiated by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), which calls for hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue Trump’s wall.
“It requires the Trump border wall,” Lankford told Axios. “It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.” In 2017, then-Senator Harris called Trump’s border wall project a “stupid use of money,” and committed to blocking funding for it. Then, under her watch as the so-called “Border Czar,” illegal crossings on the southern border spiked (at least) 140% compared to numbers seen during the Trump administration, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security.
After Democrats gained control of the House in 2019, they opposed the large-scale funding Trump requested for the wall – leading to a government shutdown. Eventually, some funding was approved – but was far less than what Trump had requested. In response, Trump declared a national emergency in February 2019 to divert funds from other federal projects to the wall’s construction, which led to various legal challenges. Last week Harris came under fire for a campaign video which prominently featured images of Trump’s partially built US-Mexico border wall, boasting that her credentials as a “border-state prosecutor” would allow her to get the job done.
Update (1153ET): The Trump campaign has responded to Axios reporting that Kamala Harris now supports a border wall. “How much longer will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf? It’s DAY 37 of ZERO interviews and Kamala’s anonymous campaign sources are now claiming she supports President Trump’s border wall – this is a preposterous and false claim.” “Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind.”
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign got the boost it desperately needed when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined forces with the former president in an effort to ensure the defeat of Kamala Harris. It was undoubtedly a painful sight for millions of diehard Democrats to behold: On Friday, the estranged Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared the stage with former President Donald Trump at a sprawling rally in Arizona, hours after he’d suspended his independent presidential campaign and announced that he was endorsing the rabble-rousing Republican. The 70-year-old independent, showing that he has not completely lost his presidential ambitions, emphasized that he is suspending his campaign — “not ending it.” “I am not terminating my campaign, I am simply suspending it and not ending it. My name will remain on the ballot in most states,” he said.
Importantly for Trump in his grueling showdown with Kamala Harris, Kennedy said he would drop his name from the ballot in 10 battleground states where his presence could have stolen electoral college votes from the former president. Will the entrance of Kennedy into the equation make a profound difference for the Trump campaign come November? It’s difficult to say. When the campaign was down to a contest between two elderly white men, many voters seemed happy to consider a third voice, as reflected in Kennedy’s relatively high poll numbers earlier in the year. However, once Joe Biden was sent back to the basement and Kamala Harris was catapulted to the political forefront amid heavily scripted, media-generated enthusiasm (the same media, by the way, which Harris stubbornly refuses to talk to), Kennedy’s popularity began to wane.
While Kennedy’s performance in the polls has been steadily declining – a recent CBS News poll measured his support at just 2% – even this limited number could spell the difference between victory and defeat in a race that promises to be razor-close. However, with regard to the critical swing states, the picture improves dramatically for Kennedy. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed him with 6% support in Arizona and Nevada and 5% in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. And let’s not forget that Arizona and Georgia were decided by fewer than 12,000 votes each in 2020. Wisconsin has been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes in the last two presidential elections.
So now the question for the Republicans is: how best to utilize a scion from one of the most famous political dynasties of modern American history? How about as the future CIA Director or District Attorney? Trump tossed out juicy bait to the conspiracy theorists when he said Kennedy could be granted access to “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” as part of a proposed executive commission on presidential assassination attempts, including the one that nearly killed him last month in Butler, Pennsylvania. RFK Jr. has made it clear that he believes that the CIA and associated actors of the ‘deep state’ were directly involved in the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy. A recent poll by Gallup showed that over 60 percent of Americans believe that JFK was killed as the result of a well-planned government conspiracy. The CIA has repeatedly denied that it had any involvement in the murder.
Another Kennedy talking point that could help herd voters into the Republican camp is his extreme skepticism of Covid vaccines, mask mandates, lockdowns and the individuals who pushed these controversial measures on the public in the first place, namely Anthony Fauci and company. Trump teaming up with the anti-vaxxer Kennedy seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. After all, it was Donald J. Trump who was initially responsible for delivering – right or wrong, the jury is still out on the matter – the Covid-19 vaccine to an unsuspecting public through “Operation Warp Speed.” However, Trump’s unbridled enthusiasm for the Covid vaccine failed to trickle down to his army of conservative constituents, who are intrinsically wary of any government overreach in their lives. In other words, Trump drastically misread his base, which is loaded with vaccine skeptics.
On one memorable occasion at the height of the Covid pandemic, Republicans admonished Trump during a rally with rare boos and heckling when he encouraged members of the audience to get their shots. So here is another area – government enforced medical interventions – where Kennedy’s presence on Team Trump could lend some much-needed balance to the worn-out narrative, although it does have the potential to attract more “weird” accusations from the left.At the same time, Kennedy, much like Trump, has spoken out fiercely against the “media organs” that have severely throttled his message on the campaign trail, while engineering the rise of Kamala Harris based upon “nothing.” “No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.”
This is a concern that will resonate with those voters who remember how intensely unpopular Harris was before pulling out of the 2020 presidential race with her opinion poll numbers in the lower single digits. And here is the crux of the matter: do they remember Harris’ intense unlikability and lack of presidential qualities, or has the media successfully brainwashed the entire Democratic camp into believing that the vice president is the ‘second coming of Abraham Lincoln,’ as JD Vance feared? While we may never know to what degree RFK Jr. will influence the outcome of the election, it seems undeniable that he will attract many disaffected voters from across the political spectrum who now understand what a controlled and pathetic sham the entire US political process has become, largely due to overwhelming leftist control of the media machinery. That may give Donald Trump just enough of a grudge vote to enter the White House a second time.
Special counsel Jack Smith filed an updated indictment against former President Donald Trump in Washington on Aug. 27 following the Supreme Court’s ruling that he enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. “Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” an Aug. 27 filing from the special counsel’s office reads. “The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.” The new indictment narrows the allegations against the former president by removing allegations involving his interactions with the Justice Department.
It no longer lists as a co-conspirator former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means. Smith’s superseding indictment still contains four charges against the former president, including those from the financial reform law the Supreme Court addressed in Fischer v. United States. In Trump v. United States, a majority of the Supreme Court held that presidents enjoyed several tiers of immunity from prosecution: absolute immunity for acts that fall within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” a presumption of immunity for their official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion grouped the allegations into three categories: those surrounding Trump’s work with the Department of Justice (DOJ); those involving his communication with state electors and his communications on Jan. 6, 2021; and his urging Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the election results in the Senate.
Trump received absolute immunity from prosecution of the first category. For the second, the Court remanded the issue to the district court to determine whether his actions were official. His communications with Pence are “presumptively immune,” but the DOJ can rebut that presumption in court. It’s unclear how much of the superseding indictment will survive. D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan will likely receive briefings from both the special counsel and former Trump’s legal team advocating their view of which charges should be dropped or maintained in the indictment. The Supreme Court has left her with the task of parsing former Trump’s actions and determining which were official and which were unofficial. Judge Chutkan has scheduled a status conference for Sept. 5.
Experts have told The Epoch Times that the prosecution will extend past the election. If Trump wins the presidency, he’s expected to withdraw the case. Even if he loses, however, the case could face additional appeal and potentially make its way back to the Supreme Court. Last year, Trump’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss on statutory grounds and alleging that the initial indictment failed to “state an offense.” More specifically, it alleged the indictment failed to allege the type of deceit or trickery needed for the first count, which focused in both indictments on an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States. On Aug. 3, Judge Chutkan denied the motion without prejudice and stated that Trump “may file a renewed motion once all issues of immunity have been resolved.”
The superseding indictment came just a day after Smith asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to affirm the legitimacy of his office. Florida Judge Aileen Cannon had dismissed his classified documents case against Trump on the grounds that Smith’s appointment violated the constitution. That case too could reach the Supreme Court where at least one justice — Justice Clarence Thomas — expressed concern about Smith’s office. That came in his concurrence for Trump v. United States. None of the other justices joined that opinion, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern about the special counsel’s power during oral argument on April 25. Cannon limited her decision to the documents case, although it raised questions about the legitimacy of his other prosecutions.
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday submitted a court filing against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in the Georgia Court of Appeals, arguing that she should be removed from the case for committing a “severe violation” of the state’s legal guidelines. In a reply brief, the former president’s team wrote that Trump was “aggrieved by Willis’ church speech,” referring to comments she made in January that suggested there was a racial animus at play when a co-defendant filed a motion to have her disqualified over a relationship she had with her then-special prosecutor. The legal team said that her speech was “a severe violation of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct,” claiming that her comments at the church were allegedly designed to increase public condemnation of Trump and the other co-defendants in the eyes of potential jurors. On those grounds, according to the lawyers, Willis should be removed from the case.
“Pretermitting fairness, President Trump was injured by Willis’ … speech because national and local media outlets broadcast and reported Willis’ claim as an attack against the defense,” the filing said. Willis, it added, also asserted that “allegations against her stemmed from racism,” which his legal team said were unfounded. The Georgia appeals court will hear an appeal by Trump and several co-defendants on Dec. 5, it previously ruled, over whether Willis should be disqualified from the case due to her relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Earlier this year, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled that either Wade or Willis must leave the case, prompting Wade to leave and allowing Willis to stay on board. Trump and the other defendants quickly sought to appeal the case.
In his March ruling, McAfee chided Willis for her church speech but said it is not grounds for her disqualification. He also said there wasn’t enough evidence to remove her based on the Wade relationship, although he signaled that an “odor of mendacity” was permeating the case. Fulton County prosecutors had said that her speech at the church was vague, and she was not speaking about anyone in particular. “Isn’t it them who’s playing the race card when they only question one?” Willis said during her speech, in part. “Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?”
Her office filed a motion to dismiss the appeal in August, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to back up their claims that she had a conflict of interest due to her prior relationship with Wade. “Unsatisfied, the Appellants now seize upon the trial court’s criticisms of the District Attorney to distort its actual findings and overstate their case,” the district attorney’s office wrote. “They ask this Court to second guess the trial court’s factual conclusions and apply standards of disqualification that no Georgia court has ever authorized or employed.” The conflict started in January when co-defendant Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign aide, alleged in court papers that the pair were in a relationship, a claim that the two later confirmed during a contentious hearing before McAfee in February.
However, they disputed key allegations made by lawyers for Roman and his co-defendants, including that they improperly benefitted financially from their arrangement. They also refuted claims made by a witness that their relationship started much earlier than they had said. The case was brought by Willis against Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants, accusing them of conspiring to overturn the election results in the county after the 2020 election. In part, her office’s indictment focused on a Trump phone call in January 2021 with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the president asked him about votes and ballots. Trump and the majority of the other co-defendants, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have pleaded not guilty, although several have entered guilty pleas as part of deals with the prosecution. Due to the appeals process, the case likely will not proceed to trial before the November election.
War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself. The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality. So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media. This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality. The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment.
The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality. The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’. Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war into Russia’. Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas. And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.
Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength”. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid). Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course. In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.
Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’. This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour. It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.
‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army. Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did. Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.
French President Emmanuel Macron has refused to accept the left-wing New Popular Front’s candidate for prime minister, saying it would be a threat to “institutional stability,” according to a communique released by the Elysee Palace on Monday. The parliamentary election in July gave the left-wing alliance more seats in the National Assembly than the competitors, but not enough to govern, forcing the president to conduct successive rounds of talks to appoint a new prime minister and form a new government. As president, Macron is responsible for confirming the new head of the government. However, he dismissed the idea of allowing the left-wing coalition to hold the office of prime minister, leaving the nation in a political deadlock.
“My responsibility is that the country is not blocked nor weakened,” Macron said in a statement, claiming that a left-wing government “would be immediately censored by all the other groups represented in the National Assembly” and “the institutional stability of our country therefore requires us not to choose this option.” The parliamentary election in July left 577 seats in the National Assembly divided between the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) alliance with over 188 seats, followed by Macron’s centrist alliance at around 161, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally at 142. The Republicans received 48 seats, while the remaining 38 were divided between minor parties.
Launched in June as a broad left-wing alliance, the NPF comprises France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist Party, the Greens, the French Communist Party, and other political parties, composing the majority of the left wing in France. The alliance has put forward Lucie Castets, a 37-year-old economist and director of financial affairs at Paris City Hall, as its candidate for prime minister. After Macron’s announcement, Jean-Luc Melenchon, the LFI leader, accused the president of creating an “exceptionally serious situation.” Commenting on the move, the secretary-general of the Greens, Marine Tondelier, said the decision is “a disgrace” and “dangerous democratic irresponsibility,” adding that Macron is ignoring the election results. LFI also called for protests to urge Macron to “respect democracy,” and said it would present a motion of impeachment of the president.
Poland has slipped into a state of “hybrid war” amid soaring tensions with Russia and its key ally Belarus, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk has said. Tomczyk made the remarks on Monday while speaking at a high-level panel on Poland’s security situation, suggesting that his country had already entered a state just below the level of actual war. “What we are facing in Poland today is de facto hybrid warfare. And we can say directly that Poland is in a state of war today, but in a state of hybrid warfare,” he stated, as quoted by PAP news agency. He pointed to the situation on the border with Belarus, as well as incidents where weather balloons appeared in Polish airspace. Warsaw has for years accused Minsk of trying to pressure it by sending illegal migrants across the border.
Belarus has denied the allegations while accusing Polish authorities of brutal treatment of the migrants. In recent months, Polish authorities also reported several cases of Russian balloons straying into national airspace. Officials in Warsaw investigated the incidents, but concluded that the craft posed no threat to national security. One of the most recent cases occurred in late June, when Poland reported that they had been warned by their Russian counterparts that they had lost control of one of their balloons protecting airspace in the exclave of Kaliningrad. The aircraft strayed into Polish airspace for four and a half hours. Polish authorities said they deliberately did not shoot it down because of “possible negative consequences.”
Tomczyk, however, suggested that the balloon incidents are still intended to promote Russia’s political agenda. “It is de facto a tool for a few hundred dollars, which can be used to influence all of us in a very simple way… It is enough to put a few words in Cyrillic on them, and all portals in Poland will write about it.” He added that the purpose of such tactics is to trigger discussions in Polish society and undermine public trust in the government. The deputy minister said cyberattacks are another facet of the hybrid warfare, which he estimated at about 5,000 a year.
Refurbishing the decades-old missile silos will cost billions of dollars more than originally thought and may not start for five years, the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing Pentagon officials. The US Department of Defense decided last month to press on with the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, even though its estimated cost has almost doubled from the original $78 billion. Replacing the aging Minuteman III missiles has no alternative, the Pentagon said. It could be “five years or more before work starts” on modernizing some 450 existing silos for the new missiles, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing a recent town meeting in Kimball, Nebraska. The community of less than 3,000 residents is surrounded by “one of the biggest missile fields” in the world. “There are a lot of unknowns here, and I understand the frustration,” Brigadier-General Colin Connor told residents earlier this month.
Minuteman III missiles entered service in the early 1970s and were supposed to be replaced after a decade. Washington finally greenlit the Sentinel program in 2020, awarding the initial $13.3 billion contract to Northrop Grumman, after Boeing dropped out. The Sentinel project manager, Colonel Charles Clegg, was sacked in June for unspecified reasons. Along with the new missiles, which are still on the drawing board, the project envisions modernizing the 50-year-old silos and command centers. Construction involves, among other things, laying down thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic cables. However, shutting down the silos or the command facilities is impossible, because the nuclear doctrine requires them to be available at a moment’s notice. Some silos may also need to be rebuilt from scratch.
The scale, scope and complexity of the Sentinel project is “something we haven’t attempted as a nation for over 60 years,” Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante told reporters last month, insisting that it had to be done nonetheless. The US Air Force is looking for ways to reduce the project’s complexity, but it might take up to 18 months to decide on the changes, LaPlante said, hoping for sometime in early 2025. Such delays may cause problems of another kind for the Pentagon, according to the WSJ. The US government has already negotiated about a third of the real-estate deals needed for laying down thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic cables. But some of them may need to be redone in light of the new timeline. Meanwhile, the rising costs of construction and raw materials have made early cost estimates “be unreliable and unrealistic,” Pentagon officials have said.
BREAKING: RFK Jr. just told Dr. Phil that his team discovered that 57% of his voters would've switched to Trump if he dropped out. That realization made him take his name off the swing state ballots so he could help Trump DESTROY Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris is asked what would happen if Donald Trump becomes president and rolls back all the DEI programs. She waffles. Endlessly. While nervously scratching her face. It's incredible. pic.twitter.com/t72RDffoKT
BREAKING: In a cowardly statement, Donald Trump admits he is trying to back out of the debate. Retweet so all Americans see Donald Trump for the coward he really is. pic.twitter.com/wKZnA9z6wU
.@jake__traylor: "Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking?"
Donald Trump: "We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, doesn't matter to me. … The agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted." pic.twitter.com/l7d7Odd7cb
Almost everything you see and hear with the Lying Legacy Media and the government is a lie. Just this past week, the Biden Administration backtracked about employment as it was widely reported, “US economy added 818,000 fewer jobs than first reported in year that ended in March.” A huge miss or a huge lie–take your pick. Other big lies we have been told in recent years: “Trump is colluding with Russia,” “Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, and the “CV19 vax injections are “safe and effective.” That is just scratching the surface of the lies we are told on a daily basis. The lies, which people realize are becoming preposterous, are adding to the public’s lack of confidence in everything, including the economy. Martin Armstrong says, “We are in a period of great uncertainty. . .. When people are uncertain, they don’t spend. They save. That’s what happens in a depression and a recession. . ..
So, if you have no confidence in the future because of all this crazy stuff going on, what do you do? You don’t borrow, and you pull back and say let me see what is going to happen.” Armstrong says another big lie told to the public is the approval rating of Kamala Harris. The so-called polls say Harris is running neck and neck with Donald Trump in the presidential race. Don’t believe it. Armstrong says a recent data dive on his Socratees computer program shows, “Kamala’s approval rating came in around 10.5 %. (A second confidential source says Kamala’s approval rating is 8.5%.) Confidence in government is 7%. So, how can Kamala possibly be 40%, 50% and 60%? It’s illogical. . .. The polls are really propaganda at this point. They were propaganda back in 2016. They all said Hillary would win, and she would sweep Trump under the carpet.”
On news RFK Jr. suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump, Armstrong says, “I was always pushing RFK Jr. to be Attorney General. I think I got his eyes to light up when I said if you take the Attorney General job, you could even indict Pfizer.” Armstrong says the Trump camp is seriously considering RFK Jr. for AG, and Armstrong says he has been in contact with top Trump advisors. We will see, but we do know RFK Jr. is going to be a part of Trump’s Administration. On Trump winning in November, Armstrong says, “Look, the computer says Trump should win. I don’t know how the hell they allow that to happen.
They have to trap Trump into a war or they kill him, one or the other. These people are unconscionable. . .. We are looking at serious civil unrest regardless of who wins in November. Neither side is going to accept it.” On gold at $2,500 an ounce, Armstrong says it’s not about inflation, it is about the fear of a US debt default. This is why central banks are buying. Armstrong says, “If there is a big war, the US will default on it’s debt. . .. I am very concerned they will start WWIII before the end of the year and maybe by September.”
The judicial authorities in France confirmed on Sunday the arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of the Telegram messaging app, extending the detention of the Russian tech entrepreneur, AFP has reported, citing a source close to the investigation. The detention of the 39-year-old dual Russian-French national was reportedly extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating magistrate who is handling the case. The detention period for initial interrogation is limited to 96 hours in France; however, it can be extended to 144 hours for serious offences such as drug trafficking and terrorism. During the detention phase, the judge must either press charges and remand in further custody, or release the detainee.
Officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the news agency that the arrest warrant was issued by France’s OFMIN, the agency tasked with combating violence against minors, to conduct a preliminary probe into alleged fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, and promotion of terrorism. Reuters reports, citing unnamed sources, that a cybersecurity gendarmerie unit and the national anti-fraud police are leading the investigation. The Paris prosecutor’s office told RT that a press release concerning the case will be issued later on Monday. French media had previously reported that Durov’s detention at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday was related to alleged offenses regarding Telegram.
The reports indicated that the authorities believe he is complicit in a range of crimes allegedly committed via the social media app due to insufficient moderation. Telegram, which has nearly reached 1 billion active monthly users, was created by Durov and his brother in 2013 in Russia. The entrepreneur, who is also a citizen of the UAE and St. Kitts and Nevis, left Russia in the mid-2010s and settled in Dubai. He was granted French citizenship in 2021. Commenting on Durov’s arrest, Telegram said the platform “abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards,” adding that claims that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse committed by users are “absurd.”
France has crossed all boundaries by arresting Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of video-sharing platform Rumble, has said, adding that he left Europe after the news broke. Durov was taken into custody at a Paris airport on Saturday evening after arriving from Azerbaijan by private jet. While the French authorities have yet to publicly announce the reason for detaining the Russian tech mogul, reports indicate that the charges are related to his alleged complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, fraud, as well as failure to address criminal activity on the messenger. Telegram has denied any wrongdoing, adding that it is “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Pavlovski said he had “safely departed from Europe” in the aftermath of Durov’s arrest. He slammed the move by France, saying it “crossed a red line,” while noting that the country had already threatened Rumble. ”Rumble will not stand for this behavior and will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right. We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov’s immediate release,” he added.
Pavlovski’s platform, which has positioned itself as a free speech alternative to YouTube, has been embroiled in its own legal battle with the French authorities. It began in November 2022 after officials in Paris banned Rumble over its refusal to comply with a request to remove Russian media accounts blocked in the EU due to sanctions over the Ukraine conflict. Though Durov’s arrest occurred in France, a number of opinion leaders, including American entrepreneur David Sacks, have suggested that the US was behind the move. In April, Sacks also predicted that Washington could go after Telegram, X, and eventually Rumble, given that the US passed a law that would ban the video-sharing platform TikTok if its Chinese-based developer, ByteDance, refused to sell it within 12 months.
Elon Musk put it simply: “#FreePavel.” For many, a hashtag of one billionaire calling for the release of another billionaire is hardly a compelling cause. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, 39, is neither a familiar nor sympathetic figure for most Americans. However, for free speech advocates, Durov’s arrest is a chilling escalation of global censors in using European laws to control speech on the Internet. The press and pundits heralded the arrest and played up the allegations that Durov is under investigation for fraud and child abuse. Some might think from the headlines that Durov is himself being investigated for committing such crimes. While we have not seen anything akin to a charging sheet, reports indicate that French authorities took the action because of his refusal to yield to their demands to censor content on his messaging app.
Others have been ecstatic that censors could soon come for Musk. Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the Trump impeachment proceedings, declared “There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.” Social media is now the dominant form of communication between people. It surpasses telephones. There is, however, a major difference in how such communications are protected. There would be an outcry if AT&T broke into a telephone call to object to the views of the parties and cut off access to the telephone lines until they moderated their views. The Europeans have been threatening to hold executives liable for how others use their sites. Imagine if a mobster used a telephone to do business and the FBI arrested the CEO of AT&T.
The implication of this case goes far beyond Durov. Social media sites allow large numbers of people to communicate and to associate. They share values or viewpoints, including some that most of us find offensive or repulsive. However, free speech should protect the right of people to associate so long as they do not commit crimes. Under free speech principles, those crimes should not include viewpoints or ideology. If individuals are engaging in child pornography or human trafficking, they should be arrested. That is conduct, not just speech. While the media emphasizes the allegations that there are people engaged in fraud or child porn, officials add that Durov has failed to remove viewpoints that they consider extreme or offensive. French officials have cited the failure to engage in greater “content moderation,” the euphemism of censorship.
We have been discussing how countries like France and the United Kingdom have been ramping up anti-free speech crackdowns. Recently, the European Union threatened Musk that he could be charged if he did not censor political speech in this election, including any information deemed by the EU to be false in his interview with Donald Trump. European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”
The law behind these threats is the Digital Services Act. The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.” In addition to Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr. has denounced the arrest. This action is not due to the encryption capacity or child porn rationales. European officials have been making the same threats against other sites over the failure to censor views that they deem unacceptable. Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski wrote “France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.”
French officials have sprung into action with an arrest warrant that seemed to have been scribbled on the back of a napkin when they realized that the founder of the globally-popular online chat app, Telegram, was about to make the colossal mistake of landing in France, despite his company being based well out of the EU’s reach in Dubai. Russian Pavel Durov mysteriously managed to get French citizenship in 2021 without ever even living in the country. Normally, French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency, and seemingly more importantly to French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France. Instead, Durov managed to get fast-tracked citizenship through a French Foreign Ministry initiative that awards naturalization based on some kind of action that contributes to the image, prosperity, and international relations of France.
No one has been able to actually articulate what exactly Durov has contributed to France beyond badmouthing Russia, or having created the chat app that French media have long qualified as the top choice of French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage since at least 2016. Just as equally puzzling is the fact that just three years later, the judicial branch of the same French government that gifted him with a highly political shortcut to citizenship is now suddenly accusing him of taking an overly laid-back approach to his platform’s content. French press reports have been citing anonymous judicial sources close to the case, alleging that the app has turned into a giant free-for-all for assorted scum of the earth (in addition the aforementioned elites): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles.
No explicit mention of people who happen to just have opinions that the establishment doesn’t particularly like, and whose online proliferation European officials are always whining about and threatening these platform operators about publicly – the most recent being X platform owner Elon Musk. TikTok, owned by China? National security threat that the West wants to ban – unless they hand over data management and access to the US. Huawei? National security threat, mostly for honing in on the turf of Western competitors who struggled to compete. RT and other Russia-linked platforms? National security threat offering alternative views and information to the EU’s official narrative on Ukraine. Now we’re down to French media outlets like C8 and CNews being threatened like they were Russian – because they haven’t fallen in line with the French regulator’s content demands.
Durov’s arrest was apparently enough to incite the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Rumble’s Chris Pavlovski, to grab his go-bag and get the heck out of dodge. “I’m a little late to this, but for good reason – I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Pavlovski wrote on the X Platform.”France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.” Pavlovski previously opted to outright geoblock Rumble across France rather than censor content that the French government had asked him to – like RT for example. But Durov was singing a tune that the West really liked for a while, about how he was pressured by the Russian government over content control and backdoor access and how he basically just flipped them off heroically.
His persecution by Russia was such that he was never actually arrested or charged with anything there, and Telegram is still operational in Russia while Durov is free to go around the world promoting himself as a professional victim of his homeland. Durov even fell right in line with top-down EU demands to censor RT and other Russian media. But there has been a significant shift recently. He had started to change his tune to one that probably wasn’t such a crowd pleaser for the Western establishment, suggesting a few months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the FBI tried to convince one of his engineers to basically start installing Western-friendly backdoors that would allow intelligence services easy access to encrypted Telegram content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups that opposed Covid mandates and jabs.
Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said in the wake of Durov’s arrest that he previously warned him that he’d have problems in virtually any country where he didn’t want to cooperate with the authorities on major crimes. Not that people denouncing Covid mandates are committing major crimes, which makes you wonder how much of this is really just France playing up the major crime element in order to tackle much lesser things that they consider a threat to their own power rather than to society. Durov may now be on the verge of learning that despite his anti-Russian rhetoric, Russia could actually start looking not too bad by comparison the minute that his new pals decide that they’re fed up with him – and your app goes from being the toast of the Elysee to the trash bin.
“For the first time since 1968, the Democratic nominee will win the nomination without winning a single primary vote… it would be a culmination of the elite-oriented trends that have shaped the nominating process since 1984, in which party elites have played an increasingly large role in shaping the presidential nomination,” [Beth] Daley warned. “If Democrats truly want to make this election about democracy, they might start by looking at the recent trends in their own house.” Analyst Richard Morgan considered America’s democratic deficit as demonstrated during previous presidential administrations, such as that of Gerald Ford in the 1970s. Ford was selected to be Richard Nixon’s vice president after the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973 then became president the following year when Nixon stepped down amid the sprawling Watergate scandal. He is notable for having served as both president and vice president of the United States without winning a single vote.
Harris has also come under scrutiny for her political track record, with critics accusing her of opportunism. “Her record as a [San Francisco District Attorney]… sounds spotty, with her embracing two different extremes at different times – from strong against drugs and crime to weak,” said former US Justice Department prosecutor Ronald Sievert in an interview with Sputnik. Harris has received criticism from some in the Democratic Party who accuse her of running as a self-styled “tough on crime” politician in the years before Black Lives Matter and a string of high-profile police shootings brought a renewed focus to criminal justice reform. She was famously criticized by former Democratic Party Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a primary debate in 2020 for her record as District Attorney and California’s attorney general during which she enforced heavy penalties for drug possession.
“When you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives you did not, and worse yet in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to [turn it over],” said Gabbard during an exchange often credited with ending Harris’s previous run for president. “There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.” Harris’s acceptance speech during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago has been slammed by many within the party for its hawkish tone. The Democratic candidate signaled strong support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza and the Western proxy war in Ukraine while also receiving an endorsement from controversial former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Panetta delivered a speech praising Harris during which he claimed he was “proud” to have served in the US Army and as head of the CIA. US military aggression throughout the Middle East during the so-called “War on Terror” is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people while the CIA has been implicated in numerous coups and human rights violations. “In her speech [Harris] was talking about how [former US President Donald] Trump supposedly coddled [foreign leaders] like Putin, and that’s totally false,” said CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program recently. “Trump had a pretty hardline policy toward Russia. He pulled out of the INF Treaty. He ramped up weapons supplies to Ukraine. So that’s just like an extreme right-wing position that they’re adopting.”
“They’re celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that. So that’s where they are.” The 2024 presidential campaign cycle represents the third in a row during which Democratic Party leaders have intervened heavily to boost their favored candidate. Leaked DNC emails revealed the extent to which party officials sought to subvert Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during 2016’s party primary while former President Barack Obama intervened to once again undermine Sanders in 2020. 2024 marks the first year in decades that a major US political party’s presidential candidate has been chosen without a democratic primary process, and observers worry about the precedent set by the Democrat Party’s end run around its own voters.
Former President Donald Trump suggested on the evening of Aug. 25 that he may skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris amid dueling statements issued by both campaigns about whether the microphone should be muted. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he did not like how the network’s Jonathan Karl handled an interview with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Aug. 25, questioning ABC’s capacity to be impartial. Trump then wrote, “Why would I do the debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” On Aug. 26, Trump told reporters inside a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, why he didn’t like how the network handled the Cotton interview. “When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network,’” the former president said. “I want to do it.”
When asked directly whether he will participate in the September ABC debate, he said, “We’re thinking about it. We’re thinking about it. They also want to change the rules. You know, the deal was we keep the same rules. Now, all of a sudden, they want to make a change in the rules.” He did not elaborate on the proposed rule changes but said he wants to have a fair debate and is seeking “tough questions.” He argued that the Disney-owned channel should not be holding the debate. “I‘d much rather do it on NBC. I’d much rather do it on CBS. … And certainly, I‘d do it on Fox. I’d even do it on CNN. I thought CNN treated us very fairly the last time,” Trump said. Statements issued by both campaigns on Aug. 26 indicated that there was an impasse over microphones and whether they should be turned on or off. Trump told reporters in the Virginia press conference that he would prefer to have his microphone switched on.
During his CNN-hosted debate with President Joe Biden, his microphone was muted much of the time. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it, probably, on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time,” the former president said. “I’m not spending a lot of time on it. I think my whole life I’ve been preparing for a debate. “You can’t cram knowledge into your head, for, you know, 30 years of knowledge in one week. So, you know, there’s a little debate prep, but I’ve always done it more or less the same way.” In response to Trump campaign comments and his Truth Social post, Harris spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement that their campaign wanted ABC News to keep their microphones on for the full event and not be muted. “The Vice President is ready to deal with Trump … in real time,” Fallon said. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”
Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said in a statement that the team already agreed to the same terms as the debate hosted by CNN in June. “We said no changes to the agreed-upon rules,” he said. Harris obtained the Democratic Party’s nomination after Biden stepped aside last month, and she had said that she would do the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News previously agreed to by Biden and Trump. Trump had floated another debate hosted by Fox News on Sept. 4, which he said would become a televised town hall with just himself and host Sean Hannity if Harris didn’t accept. The Harris campaign said it was not interested. The vice presidential candidates, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are scheduled to debate on Oct. 1 on CBS News.
The raptures of “joy” tend to obscure the idea that there is a future to be concerned about. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He explained his view of the situation and his role in it with unsurpassed clarity last Friday in a powerful and moving speech outlining a decision that must have been very painful for him. As I averred he would do last Friday morning, he denounced the party of his ancestors in unequivocal terms for coming to militate against its own traditional principles — opposing war, fighting for free speech, helping poor working people, and against weaponizing government agencies. He threw his support to Mr. Trump because it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump’s aims and ideas are more in-tune with those forsaken principles of Mr. Kennedy’s father and his uncle, JFK.
And now he’ll campaign on behalf of Mr. Trump, with the expectation that he will play an important, well-defined role in the next Trump administration — in charge of a range of public health issues that he is deeply familiar with from decades of litigation and researching the books about pharmaceutical racketeering actually written by himself. It’s Monday after the convention. What’s on the candidates’ campaign schedule today. CNNs “Campaign Latest” page says that Mr. Trump will give a speech in Detroit today to the National Guard Association where he is expected to greet the endorsement of former Rep. (and Lt. Col. In the National Guard) Tulsi Gabbard. Kamala Harris has no public appearances scheduled, but CNN reports that she has raised a fabulous $540-million since her launch a few weeks ago. Isn’t that nice? Boolah boolah, lotsa moolah. On Wednesday, Ms. Harris and her veep sidekick, Tim Walz, embark on a bus tour around Georgia. Bus tours will be the signature of their campaign.
Let me tell you what that means: instead of flying expeditiously between campaign stops where they might have to state some positions on public issues, Harris & Walz will eat up many hours on long bus rides from Point-A to Point-B, hiding from the public and the press. Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile, is cramming as many media appearances as possible into his schedule, submitting to questions about everything, including the latest barrage of accusations about his fully-disclosed personal history. Fox has had him on several programs, though the other cable news stations are ignoring him, as are The New York Times and the WashPo, except to publish scurrilous stories from his mindfucked siblings and cousins — the latest being that he cut the head off a dead whale on the beach at Cape Cod with a chainsaw. Readers are supposed to construe that to mean he murdered a whale with a chainsaw.
Alex Jones: "Obviously they're gonna try to kill Trump again then, do you agree with that A, B how do we stop that. Elon Musk, I told Elon Musk 2 months ago, I said: You better get more security, he responded: I think you're right, I'm gonna increase my security. I think Elon is… pic.twitter.com/Kl33cBjHwD
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will no longer receive Secret Service protection after he announced on Aug. 23 that he was suspending his campaign in 10 battleground states and urging voters in those states to support former President Donald Trump instead. “Mr. Kennedy no longer has USSS protection,” Kennedy’s press secretary, Stefanie Spear, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 25. Anthony Guglielmi, Secret Service chief of communications, confirmed that Kennedy “is no longer a protectee given he suspended his campaign,” in an Aug. 25 statement to The Epoch Times. Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection five times before the Department of Homeland Security granted it shortly after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13.
Thomas Michael Crooks was identified by authorities as the gunman. Trump’s ear was grazed by the gunfire, former fire chief Corey Comperatore was killed, and two others were injured. Following the attack, Trump said that Kennedy should “immediately” get Secret Service protection. “In light of what is going on in the world today, I believe it is imperative that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receive Secret Service protection—immediately,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Given the history of the Kennedy Family, this is the obvious right thing to do!” On July 15, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas authorized Kennedy’s Secret Service protection.
“We are in a heightened and very dynamic threat environment. The United States’ Secret Service, we—including the FBI and our other partners across the federal government—take the threats very seriously and adjust security measures as warranted, maintaining the safety and security of the president, the former president in their campaign events is one our most vital priorities,” Mayorkas said. “In light of the weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection for Robert Kennedy Jr.” It’s standard procedure for the Secret Service to end protection when a presidential candidate drops out of the race. Kennedy said that he has suspended his campaign in 10 battleground states but will be on the ballot in the other 40 states during his Aug. 23 address. He encouraged voters to support him in states where he would not be considered a “spoiler” and detract backing for their Trump or Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.
Dear American, this is your next presidential administration: It will be anti-white, anti-family, pro-open borders, pro-legalization of sexual perversity, pro-sexualization of young children, and pro-war. It cannot be deterred by your votes, because the election will be stolen. In the swing states the methods used by Democrats to steal the 2020 and 2022 elections have been legalized. Moreover, if news reports are correct, in some, perhaps all, of the swing states it is now illegal to challenge election outcomes. If you will remember, when Kamala Harris competed for the presidential nomination in 2020, she was immediately eliminated. She had zero support. If you will remember, she has been an unpopular vice president. Yet today the media presents her as leading Trump, who continues to turn out massive attendance at his appearances, as the likely next president.
The media uses rigged polls and positive coverage of Kamala and negative coverage of Trump to create in the voting public’s mind the expectation of a Kamala victory. The polls are rigged by overweighting Democrats in the polled population. Google Kamala and you will find 90% of the information is favorable. Google Trump and 90% is unfavorable. By creating the expectation of a Kamala victory, the ground is laid for stealing the election. It is not possible to steal an election unless the election is close or the person for whom the election is stolen is presented as the leading candidate. Ask yourselves, how did Kamala go from zero support among Democrats to the leading presidential contender? She did not win the primary election as there was no primary. She has not had any debates, much less triumphed in one.
She represents everything but white Americans, families, sexual morality, peace, law as a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government, nationhood instead of a tower of babel, truth instead of lies, the Constitution instead of a woke agenda- based rule. The media have made it completely obvious that the election is going to be stolen. Why else the rigged polls and biased coverage? The public is being prepared to accept a stolen election. And Republicans are silent. If Trump raises the issue, the media will say that Trump has already admitted that he is going to lose and is already raising the theft issue prior to the election. Obviously, Trump cannot be the one who raises the obvious issue in front of our eyes that the Democrats are going to steal the election. The theft has to be raised by Republican governors, US Senators, US Representatives, and that small part of social media where free speech is still possible.
Try to imagine Republican wimps raising a real issue. Republicans are incapable of fighting. As they have never done it, they don’t know how. Moreover, even if they were capable of fight, they wouldn’t, because it would cast aspersion on the purity and sanctity of “American democracy.” Republicans regard any effective self-defense as a reflection on the American myth. The “USA USA USA” crowd would get upset. Americans need to try to understand what life is going to be like under a Kamala regime. Federal marshals and FBI SWAT teams are going to be sent house to house in red states seizing firearms. Once disarmed, legions of immigrant-invaders will be sent to throw you out of your homes and move in. It will be treated as a rental issue and be decided in favor of the tenant, the underdog favored by the Democrat regime. Your unrealized capital gains, which you were relying on for your retirement, will be taxed. You will have to sell retirement funds in order to pay the tax. When the market falls, you will not be compensated for the disappeared capital gains that you paid taxes on.
You will lose all control over your children, who will be groomed in public schools for pedophiles and gender change. Not too far into this process of “transformation to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive society,” white people, as in The Camp of the Saints which we are now living, will not be permitted to marry and to procreate. The white people you see in the video of the DNC convention are so utterly stupid, or brainwashed, or insouciant that they cannot realize that they are supporting their own elimination. They signify the inability of white Americans to recognize their peril and to defend themselves. Defense is impossible, because not even the Republican Party will say a word about the election theft that has so obviously been set in place. The border remains wide open.
Critical race theory continues to be taught in public schools. Transgender promoters are gaining parental authority over children. The attempted assassination of Trump remains non-investigated and has disappeared from the media. Free speech has been labeled “a threat to democracy.” My advice to young white heterosexual Americans stands: Get out of the country. You have no future here. White women who remain can expect to be used for the sexual comfort for the immigrant-invaders, just as they are in Sweden, Norway, UK, Germany, France, and the rest of what was once Western civilization. What the Russians will end up destroying is a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel. No one will miss it.
Former Democratic lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, describing the ex-president as the only candidate who can walk the US back from “the brink of nuclear war.” Trump brought Gabbard on stage during a speech at the National Guard Association’s annual conference in Detroit on Monday, introducing the former Hawaii congresswoman as a “true American patriot” with “great common sense” and “great spirit.” Gabbard, a 17-year National Guard veteran who served two combat tours in the Middle East, praised Trump’s isolationist brand of foreign policy. “We saw this through his first term in the presidency when he not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars,” she said, adding that Trump had “the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace.”
“The same can not be said about Kamala Harris,” Gabbard continued. “In fact the opposite is true, and we’re living through this reality today as this administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world, and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.” “This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House,” she told the crowd. “Because I am confident that his first task will be to…walk us back from the brink of war.” Gabbard left the Democratic Party in 2022, arguing that it had fallen “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers” and social-justice ideologues. Three years earlier, Gabbard was widely credited with ending Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign with a single debate performance.
In the 2019 Democratic primary showdown, Gabbard slammed Harris’ record as California’s attorney general, criticizing her for jailing thousands of marijuana offenders “and then laughing about it,” for her use of prison labor, and for blocking evidence that would have freed innocent men on death row. “There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology,” Gabbard said, leaving Harris unable to respond. Gabbard has long opposed US involvement in and funding of foreign conflicts. During her four terms in office from 2013 to 2021, she advocated dialogue with America’s rival superpowers, coupled with a hardline policy on Islamic terrorism. Like Trump, she has faced accusations of being a “Russian asset,” most notably from failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Gabbard responded to Clinton’s 2019 jab – likely a reference to her past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fight against terrorism in Syria – by calling Clinton “queen of the warmongers” and suing her for defamation. Gabbard is the second high-profile former Democrat to endorse Trump in recent days, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his third-party campaign and backed the former president on Friday. Gabbard and Kennedy have both cited President Joe Biden’s funding of the Ukrainian military and “weaponization” of the justice system and intelligence agencies against Trump as key factors behind their decision.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk would likely be too busy to serve in his cabinet but suggested that the entrepreneur could play a consulting role in his administration if he wins the November election. “He wants to be involved. Now look, he’s running big businesses and all that, so he can’t, really, I don’t think he could be cabinet… He can sort of, as the expression goes, consult with the country and give you some very good ideas,” Trump told The Shawn Ryan Show, as quoted by US media. Trump emphasized that he had an excellent relationship with Musk, who stated earlier that he was willing to take up a position in the White House. The entrepreneur also posted an image of himself behind a podium, with the caption “Department of Government Efficiency.”
The Supreme Court had multiple opportunities during the last term to end the censorship of conservatives by social media. It chose a different path. Now, Democrats are free to double down on the Biden-Harris administration’s massive censorship enterprise. There is every indication they intend to do so. The bedrock of American democracy, the First Amendment, prohibits Congress from making laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The prohibition also applies to executive actions and state governments. Until recently, there was bipartisan agreement on the centrality of free speech to American liberties. Today, nearly a third of Americans believe free speech rights go too far. When Donald Trump was elected president, Democrats in Congress threatened social media platforms with antitrust actions and repeal of the libel protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if they failed to rein in conservative speech.
When Joe Biden took office, the federal government institutionalized a censorship enterprise that coerced and collaborated with social media platforms to censor, suppress, and demonetize disfavored views. The New York Times acknowledges the left has long sought to limit “unfettered speech.” Former president Barak Obama told a Stanford University conference that government controls must be imposed to stop so-called “disinformation.” Vice President Kamala Harris announced a White House task force to block disinformation involving women’s issues. Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz told MSNBC, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” In fact, both are generally protected by the First Amendment. The Democrat platform sees controlling disinformation as a priority.
By contrast, in July, the Republicans adopted a platform that states: “We will ban the Federal Government from colluding with anyone to censor Lawful Speech, defund institutions engaged in censorship, and hold accountable all bureaucrats involved with illegal censoring. We will protect Free Speech online.” In Murthy v. Missouri, healthcare professionals, Missouri, and Louisiana sued to block the Biden-Harris censorship regime. During discovery, officials testified that they knowingly sought to end-run the prohibitions on government interference in free speech by working with and through third parties, including Stanford, non-profit associations, and social media companies. After reviewing extensive discovery, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty found that the Biden-Harris administration had engaged in “a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government” and issued an injunction to stop it.
A unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the findings but tailored the injunction to eliminate ambiguities and exclude some agencies. Florida and Texas then passed laws to make it more difficult for social media platforms to ban political speech. The 11th Circuit struck down Florida’s law, finding that it impermissibly limited editorial discretion, while the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’ law, concluding that content moderation activities are not speech.
Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed admiration for the Russian military’s warfighting skills and vowed to end the Ukraine conflict before the end of the year, if elected. Trump addressed the Russia-Ukraine conflict as part of an hour-long interview, posted on Monday. Advertised as “unfiltered stories of heroic events and current world issues,” the show is hosted by the former US Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan. “Russia’s a great winter fighter,” Trump told Ryan. “They beat Germany and they beat Napoleon. They’re not easy to beat. And they are a massive military, and Ukraine isn’t. But Ukraine has us giving them a lot of money.”
The US and its allies have channeled more than $400 billion in aid to Kiev since the conflict began in 2022, including over $120 billion in direct military aid, according to estimates from the Kiel Institute, a German think-tank tracking the contributions. Without going into the details, Trump objected to the US accounting for the lion’s share of the military aid, arguing the European members of NATO needed to “equalize” their contribution. “That war is much more devastating than people understand,” Trump said in the interview. He also promised to have it “settled” as president-elect and not wait for the January inauguration. Trump has repeatedly argued that the conflict would not have broken out had he stayed in the White House, instead of being replaced by Joe Biden in 2021. He has also claimed he would end the fighting within 24 hours.
The Shawn Ryan show was not the first time Trump has praised the Russian “war machine,” either. He first brought it up during a Fox News town hall in February, then again in July, recounting a phone call with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. Asked by Ryan what he would spend the $175 billion that the US Congress has appropriated for Ukraine aid, Trump pointed out that the US has over $30 trillion in national debt. The former president also lamented the fact that the Pentagon has managed to empty the stockpile he had worked so hard to replenish during his time in office. “These guys gave it all to Ukraine,” Trump told Ryan. “Now we have no ammunition again.”
Why would the Uniparty inflict this damage on the American People? The Uniparty knows that, without common identity or kinship, democracy is replaced with tribal anarchy, a societal condition that leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality, and worse. The goal is painfully obvious. It is the denationalization of the United States, the fundamental destruction of national identity and the social cohesion that supports it. The process involves the conversion of Americans into an amorphous mass of sedated consumers. The transformation of the U. S. Armed Forces into mercenary military formations staffed by illegal migrants is an enormously important step in the direction of denationalization. After all, before Americans won their independence, their national identity rested on the shoulders of the Continental Army.
If General Washington could hold the Continental Army together despite fearful odds, our country and its governing body—congress—existed. The Continental Army was, and today’s Armed Forces still are, the repository of American national Identity. The Uniparty rejects these charges. Instead, the Uniparty tells us how fortunate we are to welcome tens of millions of foreigners into our country where they will enhance our culture, society and way of life. Really, how many “Rs” are there in “fat chance?” Meanwhile, the Uniparty promotes the sexualization of children in our public school systems. Naturally, the Uniparty pretends to care for the workingman or woman, and it promises everything to everyone for nothing in perpetuity—tuition-free college, free health care, free housing, free everything. The Uniparty is giving non-paying, illegal immigrants access to our healthcare system.
How the Uniparty will pay for these things is a question no one answers. Servicing the national debt on an annual basis already involves a sum larger than the defense budget. Are the presidential candidates aware? Do they care? For the Uniparty, none of these concerns matters. The daily life of the Uniparty is about self-enrichment, sensual pleasure, and social prestige. The Uniparty motto is “When in doubt, print more money.” Equally troubling is the Uniparty’s enthusiasm for war. In fact, the Uniparty sees enormous benefit to war, even to the point of turning over control of the U.S. Armed Forces to the direction of a foreign power for use in a major war that will escalate to involve other nuclear-armed powers.
But Americans are not stupid. Americans know that open borders are not a net benefit, and they know that modern war is not a game or an event that occurs only on foreign soil. The new, emerging constellation of potential adversaries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is no longer a loose collection of hapless opponents without armies, air forces, navies, air defenses, or persistent surveillance from seabed to space. President Abraham Lincoln was right: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The time for Americans to halt the destruction is upon us. The question is whether Americans will remain bystanders or intervene to save the Republic.
“Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU..”
Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me. In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost. But for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff. The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forego the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian territory between Kiev and the Polish border, and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk.
Call those terms Istanbul-II. As with the draft terms initialled in Istanbul at the end of March 2022, Istanbul-II amounts to an exchange of dominant Russian military power for US and Ukrainian signatures on paper with false intention and temporary duration. The US administration says it believes Putin will concede. It also believes that by staging its war of pinpricks — that’s the drone, artillery and missile barrages fired by the Ukrainian military, directed by the US and UK – in the Black Sea and Russia’s western border regions, Putin’s red lines and threats of retaliation are exposed as empty bluff. The same interpretation of Putin, and confidence that he will accept US terms, are the foundation of the Ukraine “peace plan” of Donald Trump’s advisors. The Trump plan’s offer of “some limited sanctions relief” reflects the conviction in Washington that Putin’s oligarch constituency can be bribed to push Putin into the same “frozen war” concessions as Roman Abramovich got Putin to accept at Istanbul-I – until the General Staff stopped them both.
Putin’s restrictions on the General Staff’s proposals for neutralizing the US and British air surveillance and electronic warfare operations; and his orders to stand by while the Ukrainians have assembled several thousand forces, first to cross into Kursk, and then into Bryansk and Belgorod, are now as visible in Moscow as they have been in Washington. Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. They understood the battlefield intelligence as it was coming in and requested Putin’s agreement to respond. In retrospect, they say “we told you so”; they imply their hands were tied by the Kremlin orders.
“My understanding for now,” says one of the sources, “is that these are pinpricks that feel painful but they are not life threatening. Russia will not take any land, for now, other than the four regions. It should be the eight regions but it’s obvious Putin doesn’t have the will and the military does not have the capacity to hold. So we will see Ukrainians inside Kursk for a while. But it should be downplayed because it should not be allowed to be a bargain chip in negotiations the other side is aiming at.” Putin said this himself, the source points out at his meeting on August 12 with the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and others. “These [Kursk] actions clearly aim to achieve a primary military objective: to halt the advance of our forces in their effort to fully liberate the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, the Novorossiya region.”
Putin also said: “It is now becoming increasingly clear why the Kiev regime rejected our proposals for a peaceful settlement, as well as those from interested and neutral mediators…. It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future. However, what kind of negotiations can we have with those who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, or pose threats to nuclear power facilities? What is there to discuss with such parties?” “It’s obvious at this point,” comments a military source, “that the Americans and Ukrainians have decided that Putin will come to terms if they snatch enough Russian territory and keep up their strikes behind the Russian lines…The Ukrainians are going for broke in the north while the centre collapses. But they know, no matter how expensive it is, the longer they remain on the attack, the worse it looks for the Russian leadership. They also have the measure of Putin who gives orders for half measures.”
This is also obvious in the Security Council in Moscow. The Council’s deputy secretary, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev, made the point explicitly in his Telegram account declaration on August 21, implying that until he had said it, no one else dared: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences.” Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I. “After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”
Tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have boiled over amid a series of increasingly powerful back-and-forth attacks. But neither side, nor their allies truly want a full-scale war, since it would end any semblance of normal life in Israel, sink Tehran’s hopes on the diplomatic front, and stretch US resources to a breaking point, observers say. Major airlines began canceling and diverting flights to and from Beirut and Tel Aviv over the weekend amid fears of all all-out war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel. The cancellations came in the wake of large-scale preemptive aerial attacks by as many as 100 Israeli warplanes against suspected Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon, with the militia launching a barrage of hundreds of drones and rockets at 5 am Sunday morning in retaliation to Tel Aviv’s assassination of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut last month.
Smaller follow-up targeted back-and-forth air-drone and rocket attacks have been reported, with scores Hezbollah fighters, Israeli soldiers and civilians killed or injured in the latest escalation. In a televised speech Sunday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah cited the militia’s successful targeting of Israeli military and intelligence sites. Nasrallah said the delay in the militia’s response to Shukr’s July 30 murder was meant to provide time for the Gaza ceasefire talks to bear fruit – a chance he said was squandered by Prime Minister Netanyahu and the United States. “Our goal…is to end the aggression on Gaza, so we gave it [the ceasefire process, ed.] enough of an opportunity, but after all this time, it is clear that Netanyahu is putting in new conditions and the Americans are working with him and this is all a waste of time, so there was no reason to delay any longer,” Nasrallah said.
“Regional and international actors indirectly involved in this war such as the US and Iran have no intention to directly be involved,” American University of Beirut Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy international affairs section coordinator Yeghia Tashjian told Sputnik, commenting on the escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Israeli. Pointing to the factors of the upcoming US presidential election, plus Iran’s attempts at diplomatic rapprochement with Western countries following July’s elections, Tashjian said he believes the recent back-and-forth strikes, serious as they are, remain “managed clashes,” signaling that neither side is “ready to shift the current status into a major war.” There are other reasons Israel and the US in particular don’t truly want a full scale conflict, says Furkan Halit Yolcu, an academic and Middle East Institute faculty member at Turkiye’s Sakarya University.
Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, isn’t “a small-scale non-state actor,” but a force to be reckoned with approaching national armies in terms of its ground strength, and has missile and air defense power that can do great “harm and hurt” to any army attacking it, the observer told Sputnik. Hezbollah has the “will and the ground resources it needs [to] have a very, very, very large impact on Israeli soil,” Yolcu warned, noting that ordinary Israelis may literally be driven into underground bomb shelters their government has prepared for them, and see their day-to-day lives disrupted completely thanks to Hezbollah’s ability to saturate Israeli air and missile defenses.
The Democrats have betrayed their own values & have been completely taken over by neocons & have morphed into the party of Bush/Cheney & become warmongering corporatists serving Wallst/MIC/Big Pharma/Big Oil/Insurance companies/Silicon Valley/The Deep…
Just got booted from the @MarioNawfal space so I’m gonna speak my peace here: what’s behind today’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov pic.twitter.com/FexLvJZK92
“Pavel Durov was put on the wanted list literally minutes before landing in Paris and an arrest warrant was issued.” Durov reportedly used to get along fine with Macron. Why he became a French citizen.
“..complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, and fraud..”
Telegram founder Pavel Durov wouldn’t have “disregarded his own safety” and landed in Paris if he thought the French authorities were serious about arresting him, his former press secretary Georgy Loboushkin has told RT. Loboushkin believes that the order to detain Durov likely came from Washington. Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday, immediately after arriving from Azerbaijan by private jet. According to French media, prosecutors in Paris plan to charge the 39-year-old with complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, and fraud, arguing that Telegram’s insufficient content moderation, its strong encryption tools, and its alleged lack of cooperation with police allow criminals to flourish on the app. “It’s a big mystery why he disregarded his own safety and decided to land in Paris,” Loboushkin told RT on Sunday.
“He has shown throughout his history that he is a pretty cautious person in that sense. He has said many times that there is no point in going to jail.” According to Loboushkin, the Russian-born businessman must have been unaware that a warrant was being prepared for his arrest, or thought – given Telegram’s compliance with local laws and sanctions – that he wouldn’t be in serious trouble. “I think the attack is coming neither from the EU nor from France,” Loboushkin said. “It’s most likely an attack from the United States, which has been after Pavel Durov for a long time, and Durov has always talked about it.”
“He said, for example in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that he and his employees are under pressure, or at least there’s some kind of surveillance conducted by the FBI,” the former spokesman continued. “I think the root causes are there, so it doesn’t make any sense to discuss the intentions of the French authorities who arrested him, because they don’t play any role here at all.” In an interview with Carlson in April, Durov said that he drew “too much attention” from law enforcement any time he visited the US, and claimed that American intelligence agents had attempted to recruit one of his employees to install a backdoor in the app that would have allowed them to spy on Telegram users.
Loboushkin is not the only commentator to suggest that the US was behind Durov’s arrest. “The Americans are behind the situation as a whole,” Ekaterina Mizulina, the head of Russia’s Safe Internet League, said on Sunday, alleging that Washington wanted both to restrict the free flow of information and attack TON, a blockchain platform originally developed by Telegram’s creators. With major Russian companies investing in TON, the arrest is essentially “a continuation of the US’ sanctions policy,” Mizulina wrote on Telegram. American investor David Sacks claimed on Sunday that Durov’s commitment to free speech and user privacy made him a target in Washington. Writing on X, Sacks declared that “using allied countries to circumvent First Amendment protections is the new Rendition,” referring to the US’ use of foreign airports and military bases to transport terror suspects in the years following the September 11 attacks.
“..Telegram’s insufficient content moderation, its strong encryption tools, and its alleged lack of cooperation with police allow criminals to flourish on the app..”
The arrest in France of Telegram founder Pavel Durov is the latest escalation in an EU-wide campaign against the Russian entrepreneur and his privacy-focused messaging app. After limited bans in some member states, officials in Brussels announced earlier this year that they would bend their own laws to force censorship rules onto the platform. Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday, immediately after arriving from Azerbaijan by private jet. According to French media, prosecutors in Paris plan to accuse the 39-year-old of complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, and fraud, arguing that Telegram’s insufficient content moderation, its strong encryption tools, and its alleged lack of cooperation with police allow criminals to flourish on the app. In the years leading up to Durov’s arrest, EU officials and individual member states have targeted Telegram with bans, regulations, and threats of legal action.
2021: Germany calls for action
After a group of radical anti-vaxxers were arrested for allegedly plotting on Telegram to kill the governor of the state of Saxony in 2021, German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann called for an EU-wide effort to restrict the platform. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, governors and regional interior ministers in Germany had expressed displeasure with Telegram’s refusal to ban anti-lockdown protesters, and Buschmann argued that common EU action would “make a bigger impression” on Telegram than “each country trying to do that on its own.” Telegram was and still is headquartered in Dubai, and Durov reportedly refused to communicate with the German authorities. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned at the time that Berlin was “not going to put up with” Durov’s refusal to cooperate.
2022-2024: Bans and restrictions
The Ukraine conflict gave national and local governments across the West an excuse to throttle Telegram, with the Norwegian Justice Ministry citing the platform’s “Russian origins” when it forbade government employees from installing the app on their work devices last year. Amsterdam’s municipal government also invoked the alleged threat of “foreign espionage” when it issued a similar ban for employees of the Dutch city last week, while France last year ordered civil servants to switch from Telegram and other messaging apps to locally-developed alternatives over security fears. In March of this year, Spain’s high court ordered the country’s mobile providers to block access to Telegram, while claims of copyright violations could be investigated. Although the ruling was overturned within days, the investigation is ongoing.
2024: Censorship crackdown
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force earlier this year, lists platforms with more than 45 million monthly users as ‘Very Large Online Platforms’, requiring them to comply with a host of data protection and advertising-related rules. Such platforms are also required to “address the spread of disinformation,” a term that the DSA mentions more than a dozen times without providing a definition. While Telegram claims to have 41 million monthly users in the EU, European Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova told Bloomberg in May that the platform is a “special case,” and would be investigated and potentially placed on the list anyway.
Jourova accused Telegram of enabling the spread of Russian “disinformation,” and called it “an issue” that the platform is “especially active in the eastern member states where we have a Russian-speaking minority.” Ahead of this potential regulation, Telegram has appointed a Brussels-based company as its legal representative in the EU, meaning that Belgian authorities will be responsible for enforcing EU law against Durov’s company. Last week, the Belgian Institute of Post and Telecommunications (BIPT) announced that it still could not prove that Telegram had more than 41 million monthly users. The DSA allows the EU to fine platforms as much as 6% of their global annual turnover if they break its rules. The law also allows repeat offenders to be banned from operating in the bloc.
The arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France is in line with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which stipulates that service providers are responsible for the content shared on their platforms, TASS reported on Sunday, citing a source in the bloc’s legal system. The Russian tech entrepreneur – who is also a citizen of France, the UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis – was detained upon landing in Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday. He is reportedly being accused of failing to curb criminal activities on his platform. Durov’s arrest is “fully in line with the spirit and the principles” of DSA, the TASS source said. “If the operator wants to avoid penalties, it must automatically take down the content banned by the European regulator. The source added, however, that the DSA “does not contain personal or criminal liability, which means that the prosecution in France went much further.”
The source added that Durov’s legal team would face “additional difficulties,” since the allegations against him could be tied to the issue of French national security and that it would be harder to arrange a public campaign in his support given his Russian origin. Durov left Russia in the mid-2010s over a disagreement with the government and has since mostly lived in the UAE. In 2021, he acquired French and Emirati citizenship. He insisted that it is his “principled position” to keep user data private and that he “would rather be free than take orders from anyone.” In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in April, Durov said he faced pressure from the US government to install a surveillance “backdoor,” which he refused to do.
Telegram issued a statement on Sunday, saying its content-moderation policies were “within industry standards.” Multiple public figures in Russia and abroad have condemned Durov’s arrest, describing it as an attack on freedom of speech and the free flow of information. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the consulate in Paris has demanded access to Durov.
Russia is demanding answers following the arrest Pavel Durov, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram. He was detained by French authorities at the Bourget airport outside of Paris Saturday evening after arriving in his private jet. The Russian embassy in Paris has demanded that the French government explain itself, and has so far said that French authorities are being uncooperative. The latest reports say Durov is expected to appear before a judge Sunday evening. The embassy said of the 39-year-old Russian-born billionaire that “as soon as the news of Durov’s arrest broke, we immediately addressed the French authorities for clarification on the reasons for it and demanded that they ensure the protection of his rights and provide consular access to him.” He not only has Russian citizenship by virtue of his birth there, but also holds dual citizenship in France and the UAE.
Russian diplomats say there has been no reply from Paris: “The French side has so far been avoiding cooperation on this issue,” a statement said. Russian lawmakers have gone so far as to say he is now a “political prisoner”. Russian member of parliament Maria Butina said on Sunday, “Pavel Durov is a political prisoner – a victim of a witch-hunt by the West. “The arrest of Pavel Durov means there is no freedom of speech – it means that freedom of speech in Europe is dead,” she continued. “Now basically they have a hostage and they will try to blackmail Russia, they will try to blackmail all the users of Telegram and not only try to get control but also try to block the network here in Russia.” Additionally, deputy speaker of Russian parliament, Vladislav Davankov, described that the tech entrepreneur’s arrest “could be politically motivated and used to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users.”
And Dmitry Medvedev, who is the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, said Durov is being targeted because he’s Russian. “He miscalculated,” Medvedev said. “For all our common enemies now, he is Russian – and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.” Medvedev asserted, “Durov should finally realize that one cannot chose one’s the fatherland.” One interesting angle is that the app, well-known for being highly secure as it provides end-to-end encryption, is widely used among the Russian military, as well as the common population. Durov was detained by the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONAF), over the alleged facilitation of various crimes including terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and fraud. “On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offences and crimes to be committed, for which he did nothing to moderate or cooperate,” a source told TF1 TV.
The arrest was characterized by Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom as part of the “crackdown against free speech.” Other prominent figures have voiced alarm over what this means for free speech, or even the question of who is next to be targeted by Western governments… And Elon Musk has been highlighting the implications of Durov’s arrest through Sunday… “Liberté Liberté! Liberté?” Musk added in another post. “Dangerous times.” Musk added a “FreePavel” hashtag when he shared a video of Durov praising Musk and his pro-free-speech outlook during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year. “It is vital to the support of free speech that you forward X posts to people you know, especially in censorship-heavy countries,” Musk wrote on X on Sunday. And in case you wondered, none other than deep state bagman Alexander Vindman makes it clear who the real target is…
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be& https://t.co/GyPMquKtKV
The US has violated its own constitutional freedoms by forcing its NATO ally France to arrest Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, American investor David Sacks has suggested. Writing on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Sacks slammed the detention of Durov at a Paris airport, reportedly on charges related to his alleged complicity in fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, and promoting terrorism. In an apparent nod to the rumored US role in the arrest, Sacks wrote: “Using allied countries to circumvent First Amendment protections is the new Rendition.” The US Constitution expressly protects freedom of speech and makes no distinction between citizens and people from other countries. In April, Sacks denounced a US law that would ban the video-sharing platform TikTok if its China-based developer ByteDance refused to sell it within 12 months. At the time, the investor suggested that after the crackdown on TikTok, Telegram, X and the video platform Rumble could end up in Washington’s crosshairs.
Meanwhile, the French move to arrest Durov was also criticized by Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk, who launched the hashtag #FreePavel, suggesting that the pressure on freedom of speech could worsen. “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” he quipped. He also agreed with a user who wondered if X could be the next to come under fire. In an interview with conservative American journalist Tucker Carlson which was released several months ago, Durov recalled that he had been getting “too much attention” from US law enforcement agencies while he was in the country. He said that while he was not under any legal scrutiny, he had to regularly deal with US authorities eager to get more insight into how Telegram worked. The tech entrepreneur also claimed that law enforcement had attempted to recruit one of his employees to install a backdoor in the messenger that would allow them, or any other government, to spy on Telegram users.
Florian Philippot, the leader of France’s Patriots (Les Patriotes) party, has slammed the government of French President Emmanuel Macron as “lunatics” over the detention of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. According to French media, the Russian entrepreneur, who also has French and UAE citizenship, was detained at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday and is set to appear in court on Sunday evening. The French authorities had reportedly issued an arrest warrant for Durov, arguing that insufficient moderation allows for Telegram to be widely used by criminals. “France offers its tyrannical face to the world,” Philippot said of Durov’s arrest in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “We must free ourselves from these lunatics,” he added, referring to Macron’s government.
The politician also wondered if X owner and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX “Elon Musk is [also] thrown in jail if he sets foot in France, for disobeying the European DSA (Digital Services Act) censorship regulations.” The head of Russia’s Safe Internet League, Ekaterina Mizulina, suggested earlier that the French authorities hadn’t acted independently in their decision to detain Durov. “It is obvious that the arrest is an attack on TON (a blockchain-based platform originally developed by Telegram’s creators) in which major Russian companies have invested. That is, in part, a continuation of the US sanctions policy” against Russia, she said. Also on Sunday, the deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, Vladislav Davankov, called upon the French authorities to release Durov. The tech entrepreneur’s arrest “could be politically motivated and used to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users,” which Moscow cannot allow, he warned in a post on Telegram.
“Moscow has sent an official note to Paris with a demand for consular access to Telegram’s founder. “But he [Durov] has French citizenship, which France perceives as precedential..”
The Russian embassy in Paris swiftly demanded that French authorities explain the reasons for the arrest of Telegram messaging app founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, a senior diplomat has said. According to French media, the Russian tech entrepreneur, who also has citizenship of France, the UAE, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, was detained after landing at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday and is set to appear before a judge on Sunday evening. The French authorities had reportedly issued an arrest warrant for Durov, arguing that insufficient moderation on his platform allows for Telegram to be widely used by criminals. The Russian embassy said in a statement on Sunday that “as soon as the news of Durov’s arrest broke, we immediately addressed the French authorities for clarification on the reasons for it and demanded that they ensure the protection of his rights and provide consular access to him.”
However, there has been no reply from Paris yet, according to the diplomats. “The French side has so far been avoiding cooperation on this issue,” they stressed. The embassy also said that it remains in contact with Durov’s lawyer. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said later that Moscow has sent an official note to Paris with a demand for consular access to Telegram’s founder. “But he [Durov] has French citizenship, which France perceives as precedential,” she told RIA-Novosti news agency. Also on Sunday, Zakharova called upon international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to stand up for free speech and put pressure on France to release the Telegram founder.
The deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, Vladislav Davankov, also urged Paris to release Durov. The tech entrepreneur’s arrest “could be politically motivated and used to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users,” which Moscow cannot allow, he warned. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that the clampdown on Telegram’s founder could cost the French authorities dearly. “[French President Emmanuel] Macron, get out of France now! Durov’s army is out to get you,” he said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
The withdrawal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the presidential race and his endorsement of former President Donald Trump was yet another extraordinary moment in an election that has been anything but predictable. Only a year ago, it would have been unthinkable that a sitting president would be effectively forced off a ticket and replaced by a candidate who did not secure a single vote for president. Now, the nephew of John F. Kennedy and son of the Robert F. Kennedy has not just withdrawn from the Democratic Party but endorsed the Republican nominee. Amidst all of the claimed “joy” of the Democratic National Convention, there is a sobering reality that is being ignored by the ecstatic press and pundits: this is how Democrats make Republicans. There is an old expression that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” Irving Kristol explained the neoconservative movement was built by Democrats “mugged by reality.”
Kennedy has not become a Republican but rather joined the roughly half of Americans now identifying as independents. While this country is solidly under the hold of a duopoly of power in the two main parties, only 25% of the country identify as Democrats, and 25% as Republicans. Kennedy’s departure from the Democrats has been mocked in the press. However, when he spoke on his withdrawal, many of us who have been lifetime members of the party identified with his remarks. I come from a politically active liberal Democratic family in Chicago. I spent much of my life working for liberals since I first came to Washington as a Democratic House page in the 1970s. I did stints on the Hill or on campaigns with Democrats ranging from Rep. Sid Yates (Ill.) to Sen. William Proxmire (Wis.) to Mo Udall (Arz.). I even worked on the campaign and ran for delegate for RFK Jr.’s uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Then the party changed. Where once they defended free speech, Democrats have rallied behind censorship and blacklisting of those with opposing views. They have sought to block dozens of Republicans from ballots, including former President Trump. To make matters worse, they have done so in the supposed name of democracy. Those actions were raised by Kennedy in his powerful and poignant withdrawal speech. He detailed how the Democratic party moved to stop him from running against President Biden in the primary, including efforts to block him from ballots. It was an ironic moment. After harassing candidates like RFK and Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the Democratic leadership then simply installed their choice at the convention in an unprecedented bait-and-switch. There could have been a substantive primary that exposed the diminished mental state of Biden and allowed for a democratic choice on the best nominee.
Instead, the Democrats prevented such choices from being made and selected a leader with all of the transparency and deliberation of a party Congress in China. Kennedy said that the Democratic Party has virtually shoved him and other voters into the arms of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Kennedy observed that “I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.” He said that his party was the one that championed free speech, government transparency, and opposed unjust wars. “True to its name, it was the party of democracy.” He said that the party has turned its back on all of the values that once defined it. For former Democrats like Kennedy, running on “joy” is no substitute for these profound changes in the party.
“If you’re pro-Israel, great! So is she! And if you’re pro-Palestinian, great! So is she!”
“..their vacuous battle cry “We won’t go back!” With all due respect, what the hell does that mean? Kamala Harris already works in the West Wing! If she doesn’t want to go back, then why is she running for the job?”
Kamala Harris might not be as boring as a bookshelf, but until Biden dropped out a few weeks ago, nobody viewed her as a dynamic, engaging communicator. Even in a political party that cares mightily about personal identification, she was long on bio and short on charm. Thus, the entire Democratic National Convention was a protracted sales pitch — the launch of a new marketing campaign — where they reworked their messaging. They primarily relied on mirroring, which is a technique common in dating circles. We unconsciously mimic the people we admire and find sexually attractive. When she tilts her head, you tilt your head; your voice, tone, and even how often you breathe and blink will parallel the other person. It’s a psychological tool for establishing empathy and building trust.
Whoever you are and whatever you are, Kamala Harris is your mirror: When you look at her, she wants you to see yourself. If you’re pro-Israel, great! So is she! And if you’re pro-Palestinian, great! So is she! Salesmen love mirroring because it’s a cheat code for quickly cultivating a strong sense of intimacy. “Hey, you can trust me — I’m just like you! In fact, it’s really us against them, isn’t it? So yeah, you should definitely buy this beautiful Dodge Dart. Woo, what a ride!” But not just salesmen: Mirroring is a favorite tool of narcissists. There’s been a lot of literature about the linkage between the two. Among the highlights: “Mirroring is a tactic many narcissists and other manipulative people often employ to ingratiate themselves. They reflect idealized versions of their targets back to them. In a way, they get you to fall in love with a simulacrum of the best version of yourself.”
“Mirroring is how people learn to connect with others. …Narcissists are excellent at control and manipulation. While they lack a strong sense of self, one strength they do have is the ability to watch others closely and use this information in their favor. A narcissist seems to always know what you like, and they give this to you.” “Narcissistic mirroring is a manipulation tactic used by narcissistic individuals to create a false sense of connection with another person by mimicking their thoughts, feelings, interests, or behaviors.” Watch Kamala Harris and her messaging closely. She’s not making policy-based arguments. She has no ideological center. She’s not even attempting to campaign on anything substantial. Instead, she’s the ultimate Rorschach candidate: When you look at her, you can see whatever or whoever you want — just as long as you still see yourself. For the Harris campaign, policy positions only get in the way of their marketing.
In 2016, Donald Trump ran on big ideas: Drain the swamp! Build the wall! Free the economy! Make America great again! Agree or disagree, Trump’s shortcomings certainly weren’t a lack of ambition. In 2024, Kamala Harris is running on a platform of platitudes, identification, and empty sentiments. It’s the political version of Apple’s “I’m a Mac!” “And I’m a PC” campaign from nearly 20 years ago. In the Apple version, being a Mac was cool and awesome, whereas being a PC was for dorks in an uncomfortable business suit. Kamala ripped a page from the Apple playbook, but this time, the PC is an evil, scary, Hitlerish Orange Man. And the Mac is… you. The utter unseriousness of their platform is revealed in their vacuous battle cry, “We won’t go back!” With all due respect, what the hell does that mean? Kamala Harris already works in the West Wing! If she doesn’t want to go back, then why is she running for the job?
The Democrats have projected an image of unity at the national convention in Chicago this week, going all-in on spectacle and positive vibes while avoiding real policy issues in order to win voters. However, it is unclear whether they will be able to maintain this momentum until November, experts interviewed by Sputnik believe. The US presidential election is scheduled for November 5. In July, President Joe Biden said he was withdrawing from the race in the best interest of the Democratic Party and the nation. On Tuesday, delegates at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) officially made Harris their nominee following a ceremonial vote. “The DNC accomplished its main objective — nominate the Presidential candidate and present a united front. But, there remain deep divisions in the party. The party is now under the control of the Progressive wing and there are many Americans who reject that agenda. They hope is that those who object don’t look too closely at the details,” Robert Weissberg, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said.
Political analyst Keith Preston suggested that the Democrats are planning to sway voters with positive energy as US elections are often decided by independent and non-ideological voters who are often motivated by personalities, appearances and vibes, rather than deeply held opinions on issues. “The Democrats are shrewdly turning their campaign into a hybrid of the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, and Coachella. Likewise, they are trying to present an aura of positivity and optimism instead of the negative campaigning and personal attacks of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Strategically, this is a very wise move on the part of the Democrats … The question is whether they can maintain this energy for the next few months before the election,” Preston said. Wilfred Reilly, political science professor at Kentucky State University, noted that it featured very little in terms of actual policy, with Harris talking a great deal about her family and background, giving the floor to her sister, calling the Republicans “weird” and other things of that sort.
“I do think that this will be typical of of the party’s focus until the election. Powerful Dem. figures have already said things like “you have to elect her – then we see the full platform.” My actual take here is that the Kamala Harris position on immigration, policing, abortion, and much else is very likely to be unpalatable to the median voter in (say) Iowa, and her staffers know that. I would expect as little detail as she can get away with until Election Day,” Reilly explained. Thousands of protesters demonstrated outside the DNC during the week to call for an end to US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, creating analogies with the last time the party held its national convention in the Windy City, when protests against the Vietnam War turned violent. When asked if the Democrats are more unified now than back in the late 60’s, Preston observed that many of the protesters are political outsiders, usually way to the left of the Democratic Party, which possess a high level of internal discipline.
[..] When Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, some questioned whether Harris will be a good replacement, citing her poor performance during the previous Democratic primaries as well as abysmal ratings during her vice presidency. However, recent polls show Harris doing well against Trump, meaning that the race is far from decided. “I think she is a fairly competent candidate. She is better than Joe Biden, who — as the U.S. joke goes — has been ‘dead for two years’ … Her DNC speech was good — B+. But, she is famously not all that impressive. She ran for President before, polled at 2%, and was lucky to be rescued even as VP by Biden – and that had a racial element to it. The media sensationalism around her is a new phenomenon based around hate of Trump,” Reilly said, adding that “if the honeymoon can last two months and a half, Harris will likely be President.”
Democrats are in damage control mode after Kamala Harris’ communist price control scheme received a harsh rebuke – including from the Washington Post, which characterized it as “populist gimmicks.” Facing pressure to defend the plan, Democratic lawmakers are downplaying it as a pipe dream that has no chance of passing Congress, Politico reports. The plan, unveiled as part of Harris’ first big economic policy speech, has become a focal talking point for Donald Trump and allies, who continue to frame it as “communist price controls.” Meanwhile, food industry officials and some left-of-center economists have warned that price controls could be detrimental, according to the report. Central to the plan is a call for congress to pass the first-ever federal price gouging ban on food and grocery stores – mirroring legislation reintroduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) earlier this year, for which Warren was taken to task by CNBC’s Joe Kernen.
Now, six Congressional Democrats and five Democratic aides tell Politico that they’ve been privately telling critics that the plan isn’t viable – and is instead a messaging tactic to to divert blame over inflation from the Biden-Harris administration. Even many Democrats remain skeptical, or at least uncertain about how Harris would carry out her proposal, if elected. They’re still working on getting details, but many have left that for after the DNC. -Politico. “It’s clear to me these are very general, very lofty goals,” said one of the Democratic lawmakers. “I honestly still don’t know how this would work,” said a second Democratic lawmaker. According to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, “I think people are reading too much into what has been put out there,” adding that the proposal was intended to address the issue in “broad strokes.”
Harris has been under pressure to provide more detail on her policy priorities, after four years largely toeing the line set by President Joe Biden and his aides. The rollout of her plan to combat food inflation, however, has sparked concerns among business leaders over which economic advisers are driving her policy decisions. Pieces of her plan, like increasing competition in the meat sector, are straight from the Biden playbook under his former top economic adviser Brian Deese — who is now advising Harris’ campaign. But the broad price gouging language that’s triggered so much backlash signals a more progressive agenda. That backlash has tempered Harris allies’ initial push to paint the proposal as a bold, progressive idea.
Since introducing the price gouging plan, her advisers have sought to soften criticism of the proposal by downplaying its overall impact on the market — and emphasizing that the goal is simply to target a small cohort of potential “bad actors,” rather than generate the kind of sweeping overhaul suggested by the plan’s initial rollout. -Politico Harris’ plan does have its defenders, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Top Harris economic adviser Brian Nelson told reporters at the DNC in Chicago that the plan was ‘simply’ aimed at matching federal standards with so-called price gouging guardrails that already exist in 37 states – something Warren attempted to argue with Kernen. That said, the existing rules only apply during emergencies such as the COVID pandemic. “She’s going to work with Congress to ensure that it is directed at bad actors, bad activity,” said Nelson.
“It’s not meant to set prices or price levels or anything like that. And that is not the way current state laws around price gouging are.” When pressed during a Bloomberg News roundtable to elaborate, Nelson failed to provide any specific examples of price gouging – and deflected by describing Harris as simply trying to outline her own principles on the issue. “One of the principles is really to make sure that the federal legislation aligns with those state laws,” he said. Meanwhile, the National Grocers Association – an industry group that represents the independent supermarket sector, called Harris’ plans “a solution in search of a problem.” “Rather than proposing new legislation far-off in the future,” the government should focus on enforcing antitrust laws already on the books, the group said. “I’m sure it polls well,” said one food industry official granted anonymity. “But it’s an obvious effort to deflect blame from her administration on inflation.”
[..] in America truth no longer matters. The narrative, not truth, is in control, and the narrative was that a hot job market driven by 818,000 non-existent jobs was driving inflation. I pointed out that shortages cannot be rectified by high interest rates. High interest rates simply raise the cost of production. High interest rates contribute to inflation when businesses are destroyed and supply chains are disrupted and destroyed by lockdowns. Supply reductions cannot be immediately rectified, and high interest rates are the last thing that helps. Economists should understand this, but they also understand that going against the official narrative is bad for their career.
Now that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has erased 818,000 jobs from its data list, thus deleting the excuse for high interest rates, the Federal Reserve says that in the US employment and inflation depict a changing situation in the economy, which the Fed says indicates that “the time has come for Fed policy to adjust.” Fed chairman Powell and Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank president Raphael Bostic announce interest rates cut as our future. Suddenly the job market is “no longer overheated,” and the Fed is concerned about unemployment. What is the stock market’s response to the Fed’s concern that the economy is weakening and the job market is worsening? The market goes up. Why? Not from the prospect of a good economy, but from the injection of liquidity that makes lower interest rates possible. In other words, it is liquidity, not reality, not performance, that drives the stock market. Or to put it differently, liquidity is reality.
Liquidity is the reason price/earning ratios rise, because where else can money go except into stocks and real estate. So the main result of Fed liquidity is to drive up stock prices and home prices. This is great for those who own these assets, but it prices non-homeowners out of the market, because house prices rise faster than their service sector incomes. Policymakers, principally the Federal Reserve and the Jews on Wall Street who imposed offshoring of manufacturing jobs, have destroyed the ladders of upward mobility in the US economy–small businesses and manufacturing jobs. While the ladders that permitted people to rise were destroyed, the Democrats’ Open Borders Policy imports yearly a minimum of 3.6 million illegal immigrant-invaders whose job prospects do not extend beyond the chicken and cattle slaughter houses, and these jobs will disappear when we are restricted to a diet of bugs.
The Democrats’ DEI policy tries to elevate them, but there just aren’t that many who speak English and are sufficiently educated to be cabinet secretaries and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. This is a prescription for a Third World Economy, not for a superpower. If you try to find the American economy, it is not here. It has been moved to China and other parts of Asia. Years ago I explained how to get it back, and no one payed the slightest attention. As time passes America loses a disciplined work force that knows how to get up in the morning, report to work on time, and perform competently the expected tasks. Supply chains, such as local machine shops disappear from lack of manufacturing customers. The ability to produce is lost, and the country becomes Third World.
The European Commission (EC) is behind the stoppage of flows of Russian crude oil to Hungary and Slovakia through Ukraine, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Saturday, citing Brussels’ refusal to mediate in their dispute with Kiev over the blockage as proof that the EC wants the stoppage. In June, Ukraine halted the transit of crude supplied by Russian energy giant Lukoil via the Druzhba pipeline, citing its own sanctions on the company. The measure has directly hit landlocked Hungary and Slovakia, depriving them of oil previously exported by the company through Ukrainian territory. I think that the fact that the EC has declared its unwillingness to help Hungary and Slovakia to resolve the issue of securing energy supply proves the fact that Brussels instructed Kiev to cause challenges and problems in the energy sector for the two nations, Szijjarto said, during an address at the political festival Tranzit, held in Hungary.
On Friday, the Commission declined Hungary and Slovakia’s request to intervene in the dispute between Budapest/Bratislava and Kiev, saying that Brussels had no indication that Ukraine’s sanctions had caused a risk to the security of Europe’s energy supply. “Commission services have preliminarily concluded that urgent consultations do not appear to be warranted,” the spokesperson said, adding that Russian oil was still flowing through the Druzhba pipeline that connects Russia with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary via the territory of Ukraine. “It appears that the sanctions imposed by Ukraine on Lukoil do not affect ongoing oil transit operations via Druzhba carried out by trading companies, as long as Lukoil is not the formal owner of the oil,” the spokesperson said. Last week, Politico reported that Budapest proposed a solution for the restoration of halted Russian oil flow by rebranding Lukoil’s products.
That way the crude shipped via Ukraine could be officially sold to Hungarian energy giant MOL before it crosses the border. The arrangement could reportedly mean paying an additional $1.50 per barrel to secure transit outside of previous agreements. Brussels prohibited transport of Russian crude oil by sea in December 2022 as part of the EU large-scale sanction campaign against Moscow. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been granted exemptions by Brussels as they source alternative supplies. Slovakia and Hungary are the only EU member states that have rejected the bloc’s policies on supplying Kiev with military aid amid the ongoing conflict with Moscow. Both states have repeatedly called for the crisis to be solved through diplomacy.
Last month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow is unsurprised that the EU has failed to resolve the issue for its member states surrounding Russian oil supplies to them, claiming that Brussels is using energy resources to blackmail Bratislava and Budapest.
Pope Francis has condemned the Ukrainian government’s move to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) which maintains communion with the Moscow Patriarchate. His Sunday remarks emphasized that “churches are not to be touched” and come the day after President Volodymyr Zelensky signed parliament’s newly passed bill into law identified as Bill 8371. “In thinking of the law recently adopted in Ukraine, I fear for the liberty of those who pray,” the pope said. He explained that the state must not be involved in religion. “One does not commit evil by praying. If someone commits harm against their people, they will be guilty of that, but they cannot have done harm because they prayed,” Pope Francis said following a Sunday service. “Let those who wish to pray in what they consider their Church be allowed to do so,” Francis added.
Throughout the war Pope Francis has consistently called for the two sides to immediately enter peace negotiations, while saying that ultimately the winners are the arms manufacturers and those who don’t care about the suffering of innocent people. He has come under criticism, including from Kiev officials, for not just condemning one side (the Russians) like the West does. As for Christianity in Ukriane, Orthodox clergy members have seen jail time or have been placed under house arrest, or else harassment by mobs of far-right Ukrainian nationalists, for merely calling for peace between the two countries. According to Ukrainian media: Over 100 UOC-MP clergy members have come under criminal investigation since the outbreak of the full-scale war, the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) press service told the Kyiv Independent. Almost 50 of them have been charged, and sentences have been issued in 26 cases, the SBU said.
Likely these numbers are about to be a lot higher, as the new law targeting the UOC is expected to enter force 30 days after its publication. The UOC is being pressured (and now forced) to join a state-sponsored church approved by Zelensky, despite the fact that the majority of the population is loyal to the UOC. Even a remote or potential ‘Russian connection’ – be it related to culture, music, language, or religion – has put ordinary Ukrainians under the suspicion of the state and the military of late. This despite that some one-third of the country has always spoken Russian as their first language, especially in the east and parts of the south. All of this has also gone hand in hand with the Zelensky government’s efforts to eliminate the Russian language altogether from public life.
Bret Weinstein Reacts to RFK Jr & Trump Joining Forces: 'This is Absolutely Monumental'
"This was not a simple endorsement of Trump. This was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the Republic to its proper course…I think the modern… pic.twitter.com/ORkmb3RRoC
This is the most extraordinary political moment I have ever witnessed.
Chants of "USA" and "Bobby" break out as leaders from both the Democratic and Republican sides have united to challenge the oligarchy that has suppressed Americans for generations.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s highly anticipated speech on Friday was much more than the third-party candidate bowing out of the race and endorsing Trump. Kennedy laid waste to the deep state, big pharma, big food, the military-industrial complex, Democrat censorship, and how most, if not all, of these institutions may be working together for sinister reasons. Kennedy apologized for taking the stage 40 minutes late and then immediately jumped into action. “I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of 6 in 1960, and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights,” Kennedy stated. “The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment.
Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with.” That was the nicest thing Kennedy would say of his former party. “It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big AG, and big money. When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an Independent.” Kennedy then spoke of how the Democratic Party and the mockingbird media mudpuppies unitedly turned on him to chase him out of the 2024 election. After thanking the people who worked on his campaign, RFK Jr. took out his Zippo and went to work. “Now, in an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election, in a system that my father and my uncles thrived in.
A system with open debates with fair primaries… and with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different,” Kennedy declared. “I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, and for our government, and most sadly of all for me, the Democratic Party.” “In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate that, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.” He spoke of “DNC-aligned judges” whose job was to throw Kennedy and “other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.”
Kennedy railed over what he called a “primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden” and the now infamous Trump-Biden debate, which he suggested was a “predictably bungled debate performance,” which resulted in “the palace coup against President Biden.” He then blamed “shadowy DNC operatives” for appointing Kamala Harris without a primary election. He lashed out at Harris for going 35 days without an unscripted interview. Kennedy then set his sights on Biden’s censorship campaign. When a US president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression and that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest. President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.
RFK lawfare
The DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. pic.twitter.com/LitsoUxmvj
But even his critics agree that Trump is a master showman, an indefatigable fighter, and certainly not one to let inept campaign management derail his reelection. By getting in front of the cameras, by doing the hostile interviews, on a near daily basis, Trump has slowly but steadily blunted Harris’s momentum by the simple fact that people see him and they don’t see her. Trump is effectively regaining control of the narrative. Since Kamala refuses to outline her policy positions, Trump went ahead and outlined her policy positions for her online. He is defining her because she won’t define herself. Trump is regaining control of the narrative. While Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists has been criticized, the fact is that people will remember not so much the pissing match he got into with “moderator” Rachel Scott.
They’ll remember he had the courage to face a tough audience and a lying, prejudiced interviewer. He did the same thing with the Libertarians. Kamala will never, ever agree to speak to, much less sit down for an interview for, a gathering of the Federalist Society or the NRA. Trump is regaining control of the narrative. While Harris picked up endorsements of this union boss or that celebrity pop star, Trump picked up the endorsement of Robert Kennedy Jr., who just suspended his campaign to throw his support behind him. The optics of a Kennedy supporting a Republican presidential nominee are worth a hundred Cheneys and a thousand Hutchinsons supporting the Democrats. The strategic timing of the announcement, meant to disperse any lingering euphoria from the DNC, has Trump’s style written all over it. Trump is regaining control of the narrative.
When Trump controls the narrative, he’s unstoppable. And it looks like, as of now, he is at least partially successful in wresting it back from the Democrat media machine. To this end, Trump should rightly continue trying to win over traditionally Democrat minorities rather than waste too much time with independents. As I’ve previously pointed out in these pages, “independents” are mostly closet liberals, and the lowest informed ones at that. Wasting precious time and resources trying to make them see reason is like wasting a division trying to claw across a quarter mile of no-mans-land on the fields of Flanders. By appealing to Democrat minorities, Trump is bypassing this futile war of attrition and hitting them right in the trenches. To this day, Democrats still don’t know how to counter Trump’s inexplicable (to them) rise in popularity among minorities other than to scream “RACIST!” ever louder and to accuse these minorities of being race traitors.
You’ll always have your Oprah Winfreys, the billionaire sellout who spoke to the field workers from the loftiest porch on the DNC plantation, warning them against “the old tricks and tropes that are designed to distract us from what actually matters” by talking about…segregation in the 1950s. You’ll always have your John Shapiros, the almost-VP pick turned kapos guard, passed over solely because he is Jewish, who nonetheless stood before a frothing crowd of antisemites in Chicago and told them to vote for the pro-Hamas candidate. But, as evidenced by Trump’s rising popularity among minorities, their rank-and-file is slowly but surely souring on the empty promises of racist, divisive identity politics. If Trump can continue to (1) drive the narrative, (2) keep making inroads with minorities, and (3) maintain the same discipline that he showed in his debate against Biden in his upcoming debate(s) against Harris, he might be able to not only hold onto his slim lead, but to expand it beyond the margin of cheat.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades as an environmental lawyer fighting polluters and supported ‘green’ organizations for environmental justice. He is now setting his crosshairs on the pharmaceutical industry and cleaning up the nation’s food supply chain of ultra-processed foods and seed oils that poison consumers. He has determined that suspending his presidential campaign to team up with former President Trump will be necessary for the strongest success rate in making Americans healthier again, not through big pharma’s Ozempic shots but instead revitalizing small farms and shaking up corrupted federal agencies. Lifelong liberals like RFK Jr. backing Trump is one of the strongest indicators of just how extreme the ticket, unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats have become. Harris’ team recently announced their first proposed economic policy, which was rooted in communism and included disastrous price controls. It appears the far-left ticket is being advised and heavily influenced by Marxists.
Between RFK Jr’s special announcement earlier Friday and his speech at Trump’s packed campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, the liberal with millions of supporters nationwide appears to have made a deal with Trump to join the campaign with a shot at waging war against corrupt federal health and food agencies, resetting the nation’s poisonous food supply chain, and launch a crusade against big pharma if the Trump team wins in November. RFK Jr. informed journalists at his special press conference in the early afternoon of Friday that America’s health crisis stems from ultra-processed foods pushed by giant food/pharma companies that have corrupted various federal agencies: “Autism rates were about one in 10,000 in my generation – in my kids Generation 1 in 34. I’ll repeat in California 1 and 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country, how can we let this happen to them.
This is the most important 3 minutes you'll watch today about America's health crisis.
RFK explains how ultra processed food, seed oils, pesticides, and food additives are messing up kids.
About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease, that’s like one out of every five – that disease when I was a kid only affected late stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the Young and the old young. Adult cancers are up 70 79%. One in four American women is on anti-depressant medication. About 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis and 15% of high schoolers are on Aderall, and half a million children on SSRIs. So what’s causing this suffering? I’ll name two culprits first and the worst is ultra-processed food. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed that means industrial manufacturing – these Foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Scientists who, for many of them, formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and 80s, deployed thousands of scientists to figure out chemicals new chemicals to make the food more addictive, and these ingredients didn’t exist a 100 years ago.
Humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe but ubiquitous in American processed foods. The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food and our medicine and our environment pesticides food additives pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The Assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting – name just one problem many of these chemicals increase estrogen – because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900 our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the Earth and no this isn’t because of better nutrition – this is not normal – breast cancer is also estrogen-driven and it now strikes one in eight women. We are mass poisoning all of our children.”
RFK Jr. then touched on the processed food industry lobbyists who have corrupted Washington, resulting in a food supply chain filled with poison that is killing Americans. He said several federal agencies that are supposed to protect consumers have also been corrupted. He pointed out that the processed food industry has been “destroying small farms, and they’re destroying our soils.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused US President Joe Biden of disrupting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, because Washington “wanted the war.” Kennedy made the statement on Friday during a speech in Arizona, where he announced the suspension of his third-party campaign for the White House in the swing state and endorsed Republican Donald Trump. According to Kennedy, Washington had deliberately drawn Moscow into the Ukraine war with the objective of regime change in Russia. “President Biden sent [then-UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Vladimir] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were already withdrawing troops,” said the son of the 1960s-era Democratic US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Moscow has previously blamed London for blocking the Ukraine peace deal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in April that Kiev abandoned a proposed peace treaty with Russia, approved by negotiators in Istanbul, in 2022 under British pressure. Boris Johnson visited Kiev in April of that year, and reportedly told Zelensky to “just fight,” prompting the latter to pull out of the discussions. The former prime minister has since denied derailing the peace talks. Kennedy also accused the US government of staging a coup against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and rejecting the Minsk Agreements, a series of peace protocols negotiated between Ukraine, Russia and the European nations in 2019, pushing Kiev into a conflict with Moscow. “The Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offers to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy claimed.
The US has sought to exhaust the Russian Army and degrade its capacity to fight, he added, arguing that the objectives of the US government “had nothing to do” with protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Kennedy has described Ukraine as a “victim of the West” and “a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony.” He went on to explain that Trump’s promise to reopen negotiations with Russia and end the war as soon as he takes office were among the reasons for him to endorse the former president’s campaign. Kennedy made clear that he wasn’t formally ending his bid for the White House and called on his supporters to continue to back him in other states where their votes are unlikely to sway the outcome.
During his August 23 speech in Arizona Robert F Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump and accused the Biden administration and the US foreign policy establishment of provoking the Ukraine conflict. “Tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony,” Kennedy said. “In April 2022, we wanted the war. President Biden sent [then-British prime minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed,” he added. “That peace agreement would have brought peace to the region.” Kennedy noted that Donald Trump’s decision to reopen peace negotiations with President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine “alone would justify my support for [Trump’s] campaign.”
Kennedy “stated correctly the neocons are in control of [US] foreign policy,” Earl Rasmussen, a retired lieutenant colonel with over 20 years in the US Army and international consultant, told Sputnik. “We basically are looking for confrontation.” The commentatior said Kennedy has a real grasp on the ongoing situation and the historical background of the unfolding conflict. “Biden is not interested in peace,” Rasmussen said. “They’re not interested in democracy. They don’t care about Ukraine. And Georgia, for that matter, has always been looked at as a mechanism to further encircle and weaken Russia,” the expert said. Washington made preparations for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine for years, the retired lieutenant colonel argued. He said the scheme probably originated in the 1990s, when the infamous ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’, aimed at retaining Washington’s sole superpower status, was formulated. The US-backed 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev was the continuation of this policy, the expert said.
“Now that we know that Minsk agreements were never meant to be implemented based on statements made by [former German chancellor Angela] Merkel and [former French president François] Hollande,” Rasmussen said. “We also know up to 50,000 Ukrainian troops were trained by NATO during that eight year period,” he added. “So this is a planned thing.” Anti-Russia sanctions, intended to halt Moscow’s energy cooperation with Western Europe, and the Nord Stream sabotage were not formulated overnight, the pundit said. The end goal was to foment regime change in Moscow and then “balkanize Russia,” he believes. “I think Putin saw that,” Rasmussen said, adding that the West completely underestimated Russia. “They didn’t understand the Russian people and the Russian culture and how the Russian would react to the situation. I think they thought Putin would just back down.” Rasmussen condemned the arrogance of US foreign policy: “They feel that they’re in the position they were 30 years ago. And the world has changed.”
President Vladimir Putin has decided on how to respond to Kiev’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region and everyone responsible will undoubtedly be punished, Moscow’s Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov told journalists on Thursday. Earlier this month, Kiev launched its largest cross-border attack to date on Russia, sending in some of its best-equipped and most experienced soldiers in to Kursk Region in an attempt to seize Russian territory. The Ukrainian government has expressed hope that the operation will relieve pressure on its forces elsewhere on the front line, and strengthen Kiev’s position at eventual peace talks with Moscow. However, Russia’s Defense Ministry has reported that the incursion has effectively been halted and, while Kiev’s troops still hold a number of territories in the region, they have been experiencing heavy casualties throughout the fighting.
Moscow has estimated Ukrainian losses at some 4,700 servicemen as well as hundreds of pieces of heavy weaponry, including 68 tanks, since the start of the incursion. Commenting on Moscow’s future steps in response to the invasion, the ambassador stated that president Putin has already “made a decision.” He also said that he is “firmly convinced that everyone will be severely punished for what happened in Kursk Region.” Kiev has stated that it intends to create a “buffer zone” through its incursion into Russian territory. These plans have also been confirmed by Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. Antonov, however, insisted that the Ukrainian operation will fail in establishing this zone. “This is impossible. There will be no buffer zone on the territory of Russia,” the envoy stressed.
He also claimed that Washington could put an end to Kiev’s incursion into Kursk Region with “a snap of the fingers” but that it apparently doesn’t deem such a move “expedient or necessary.” “I am firmly convinced that Kiev does nothing without an okay from its [Western] masters,” Antonov told TASS. “Given how many advisers are around Zelensky, and what power is given to Zelensky’s regime, to say that [Washington] does not know about anything… [Kiev] simply would not dare to lift a finger, to point a machine gun in our direction without Washington’s consent! Or at least they wouldn’t be sure that any of their actions would be supported by Western countries,” the ambassador added.
Washington’s latest round of sanctions against Moscow is aimed at underscoring US Vice President Kamala Harris’ “anti-Russian essence,” Ambassador Anatoly Antonov has said, dismissing the “fruitless” measures as ineffectual. On Friday, the US State and Treasury departments announced additional restrictions against 400 individuals and companies in Russia, Asia, Europe and the Middle East which Washington accuses of supporting Moscow’s military-industrial supply chains. “The administration [of US President Joe Biden] is in agony. The fruitless Russophobic ‘salvos’ are multiplying,” Antonov wrote in a Telegram post on Saturday. By introducing the new sanctions, the White House is trying to underline its “anti-Russian essence against the backdrop of the boiling election campaign,” he stressed.
“The negative aspects of US actions are obvious to everyone. The administration’s reckless steps lead to a crisis, but not to something creative,” the ambassador said. The restrictions “are harming not only domestic consumers, but also America’s partners in third countries,” he added. “It is obvious that in order to achieve true independence in the economic sphere, it is high time to abandon the hegemony of the dollar in the international monetary and financial system,” Antonov stressed. The US and its allies have imposed a record 22,000 sanctions on Moscow since 2014, when Crimea rejoined Russia and a conflict between Ukraine and the Donbass republics broke out as the result of a Western-backed coup in Kiev. Moscow deemed the curbs illegal, responding with travel bans on Western officials and other moves.
“Sanctions against Russia have been so multifaceted that we essentially don’t care what else the administration comes up with to ‘punish the Russian people’,” the ambassador pointed out. According to Antonov, the Russian authorities will act “to ensure that our citizens feel at ease and do not look back at American attacks.” Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal said that the “biggest ever sanctions” have failed to stop Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. Western officials have been forced to acknowledge that the restrictions “hit more slowly than they hoped,” the outlet stressed.
The US government has sanctioned almost 400 individuals and companies in Russia and around the world, including Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov’s son and his wife. Departments of State and Treasury announced the measure on Friday, on the eve of Ukraine’s independence day, to signal Washington’s ongoing support to Kiev in the conflict with Moscow. The sanctions also extended to entities and individuals in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In keeping with the practice of sanctioning family members of Russian officials, the US has blacklisted Pavel Belousov and his wife Yevgenya, as well as a consulting company in their ownership. Belousov’s father Andrey became the Russian defense minister in May.
“Companies, financial institutions, and governments around the world need to ensure they are not supporting Russia’s military-industrial supply chains,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement. According to the Treasury, there are “almost a dozen distinct networks” consisting of over 100 individuals and entities across 16 jurisdictions, including China, Switzerland, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates. Notably, 18 companies based in Hong Kong have been accused of ties to the Russian military industry. Treasury and State also warned financial institutions in other countries to “be cautious about any dealings with overseas branches or subsidiaries of Russian financial institutions,” including those that have not yet been sanctioned.
Friday’s designations mean that any property or interests in property of the listed individuals, directly or indirectly, have been blocked and must be reported to the government. Any transactions between US citizens – or foreign nationals within the US – are forbidden. Washington and its allies have placed over 22,000 sanctions on Russia since 2014, when Moscow responded to the US-backed coup in Kiev by welcoming Crimea’s reunification. Russia has called the blacklist illegitimate and responded with travel bans for Western officials and activists.
Former US President Donald Trump has been linked to a gala event aimed at raising funds for a group of January 6 Capitol rioters who are currently on trial. The ‘J6 Awards Gala’ at Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club will be held on September 5 to “honor and celebrate” the defendants, with ticket options starting at $1,500. A crowd of Trump’s supporters descended on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying what they believed to be Joe Biden’s fraudulent victory in the presidential election the previous November. The demonstration quickly devolved into a riot, with US Capitol Police taking hours to restore order. Biden and his fellow Democrats characterized the events as an “insurrection.” The authorities arrested and charged 1,358 participants, most of whom received misdemeanor trespassing offenses, although 127 have faced more serious charges.
The gala announcement appeared on the website of ‘The America Project’ political group, and invited people to “join us for an unforgettable evening as we honor and celebrate the twenty defendants who contributed to the powerful ‘Justice For All’ song.” The latter was recorded last year by a group of defendants comprising the so-called ‘January 6th Prison Choir.’ The track features them singing the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Spangled Banner, overlaid with excerpts of Trump’s speeches. The event is meant as a “night of recognition, solidarity, and support” as well as a “crucial fundraiser to provide much-needed assistance to the January 6th defendants who continue to face significant challenges,” the organizers explained. While the announcement lists Trump as an “invited guest speaker,” the former president will not attend the event in person, the New York Times reported, citing an unnamed person familiar with the politician’s plans.
In a post on his Truth Social platform in March, Trump vowed: “My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” The Republican has repeatedly referred to the rioters as “political prisoners” and “hostages.” At a CNN town hall event last year, Trump revealed that he was “inclined to pardon many of them.” “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control,” he added. The Republican presidential nominee himself is facing federal charges for allegedly instigating the riot by urging his supporters to “fight like hell” against congressional certification of Biden’s victory. Trump’s lawyers insist that he was well within his rights to make such a statement, noting that he also encouraged his supporters to act “peacefully and patriotically.”
America’s political class is unable to address or even speak to voters’ most pressing needs. “The political class, Washington, DC, people inside the Beltway – they’ve grown more and more estranged from everyday people like you and me,” claimed journalist Jon Jeter on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Friday. The author joined hosts Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon to break down Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech on the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which she advocated a hawkish foreign policy to the exclusion of focus on the material needs of working-class Americans. “I thought that speech was ridiculous and if I were a betting man I would say that it lost the election for the Democrats in November,” said Jeter.
“I don’t know who she thinks her audience was when she attacks Vladimir Putin. If I may paraphrase Muhammad Ali, Vladimir Putin ain’t never called me the N-word.” “Most people, particularly in the states and particularly the people who she’s depending on to win this election, Blacks and particularly Black men, particularly in Philadelphia and Detroit and Milwaukee – I don’t think they care so much about Kim Jong Un, about Vladimir Putin, about the threat from China,” he continued. “I think they care a lot about jobs, wages, debt reduction, things like that. So I thought that speech was almost odd and that it seemed to lack self-awareness about exactly who the Democrats are and who they need.” The analyst claimed the Democratic party is in the habit of abusing its voters, constantly attacking its activist base.
“I think people are ultimately going to feel like they’re being gaslit,” said Nixon, claiming voters are more likely to be concerned with inflation and the cost of living. The media outlet Bloomberg calculated the rise in the cost of basic goods and services in 2023, finding that the cost of natural gas has risen by 29% while the costs of groceries and electricity have risen by 25%. “I have to admit, I have very, very low expectations of our political class,” said Jeter. “This was a stunning speech for its lack of self-awareness. The Democrats’ problem is that they are unresponsive, wholly unresponsive to their base, to labor unions.” “It’s almost like we’ve wandered into a Tower of Babble and come out on the other side babbling. We don’t even speak the same language anymore. This is just a bewildering turn of affairs which I can only attribute to the end of empire.”
President Joe Biden’s administration is not convinced by Ukraine’s strategy in Kursk Region and fears a possible escalation with Moscow, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing sources. Kiev launched its largest incursion to date into internationally-recognized Russian territory on August 6. The Russian Defense Ministry said the advance into Kursk Region had been halted; however, Kiev’s forces continue to occupy a number of settlements there. Kiev has said it intends to establish a “buffer zone” on Russian soil and has touted the land it occupies as a potential bargaining chip for future peace talks. Moscow, however, ruled out negotiations with Kiev following the incursion, citing “indiscriminate” attacks on civilians by Ukrainian troops. The US remains unsure whether to help Kiev hold and perhaps even add to the land it now occupies, an unnamed diplomat told the Washington Post.
The Pentagon has, however asked the Ukrainians what they need to make their offensive a success, US officials have claimed, adding that no concrete decisions have been made. The Ukrainian Armed Forces has lost over 5,000 soldiers since the start of the incursion, as well as 69 tanks, 27 infantry fighting vehicles, 55 APCs, 350 armored combat vehicles, 34 artillery units, five anti-aircraft missile systems, and 11 MLRS launchers (including three US-made HIMARS), among other pieces of heavy equipment, the Defense Ministry reported in an update on Friday. The US announced the same day that $125 million worth of supplies, including howitzer and artillery ammunition, TOW antitank missiles, and unmanned aerial systems and ammunition would be provided to Ukraine.
As discussions continue over new aid amid the Kursk offensive, however, Washington reportedly says it’s uncertain of Ukraine’s goals in seizing territory inside Russia, and has no idea if it intends to hold or expand upon the territory it has seized. “They may have a plan, but they’re not sharing it with us,” the paper wrote, citing an anonymous US official. Washington is still assessing how Kiev’s offensive “fits into their strategic objectives on the battlefield itself,” Pentagon deputy spokesperson Sabrina Singh said on Thursday. “We’re still working and still have some questions,” she added.
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said earlier this week that Washington’s ammunition stockpiles are now “empty” due to aid provided to Ukraine. In June, Trump also made it clear that he would stop donating tens of billions of dollars’ worth of handouts to Ukraine. While US and Ukrainian officials “publicly tout a strong relationship”, the paper wrote, their ties have been “repeatedly tested by frustrations and fundamental disagreements about strategy and the level of support the West should provide.” Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov claimed earlier this week that Washington could put an end to Kiev’s incursion with “a snap of the fingers” but that it apparently hasn’t deemed such a move “expedient or necessary.”
Hungary does not approve of Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region because the government in Budapest remains “pro-peace,” Gergely Gulyas, the head of the Hungarian prime minister’s office, has said. Gulyas became the most high-ranking Hungarian official to date to comment on the ongoing Ukrainian attack when asked about the issue during a briefing on Thursday. “Ukraine is not only defending, but also attacking. We want a ceasefire and peace,” Gulyas stated. Anything that stands in the way of a diplomatic settlement of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev is “wrong,” including a “spillover of the hostilities into Russian territory,” he added. Gulyas’ statement on the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Region is in stark contrast to those from other officials in the EU and NATO.
The bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he had “reiterated the EU’s full support to the [Ukrainian] people’s fight” when he met with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba last week. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo has insisted that “Ukraine has the right to self-defense and it is clear that they can do their operation in Kursk,” while Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal has wished luck to the Ukrainian troops involved in the attack. Hungary has taken a neutral stance since the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. It has provided Kiev with humanitarian aid, but has refused to send weapons, allow other EU states to ship military supplies through its territory, or to train Ukrainian troops, despite strong pressure from Washington and Brussels. The government of Viktor Orban has also criticized EU’s sanctions, arguing that they hurt the bloc more than Russia.
Moscow has repeatedly voiced readiness for dialogue with Kiev throughout the conflict. However, shortly after the launch of the incursion into Kursk Region, Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that there can be no talk about negotiations with Ukraine. Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that Ukraine has already lost more than 4,700 troops and several hundred units of military equipment, including 68 tanks and 53 armored personnel carriers, since the start of the incursion in Kursk Region on August 6.
“We should find an agreement as soon as possible because we wouldn’t like to pay large amounts on a daily basis,” Gulyas said. “But if Brussels wants to take in migrants, we can help.”
Several years ago, Texas had a brilliant idea: take the millions of illegal immigrant that were flooding its territory as a result of policies adopted in faraway places like DC, and bus them to places like New York and DC, other so-called sanctuary cities and, best of all, Martha’s Vineyard where those who run New York and DC tend to go on vacation. The result was an immediate revulsion by the false virtue-signaling NIMBY crowd, which cried foul at having to suffer the consequences of its actions. Turns out Texas’ idea was so good it is now being adopted across the Atlantic, where another illegal alien invasion has been taking place for the past decade, slowly replacing the indigenous population with millions of immigrants from northern Africa and the middle east.
Now, one European country has decided it also has had enough: Hungary suggested that it might – like Texas – start transporting migrants who show up at its border straight to Brussels, unless it can resolve a dispute with the European Union on penalties for its asylum policies, Bloomberg reported. The European Court of Justice has slapped a €200 million ($223 million) penalty, plus an extra €1 million daily fine, on the country for Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s non-compliance with the court’s earlier judgment on the protection of asylum seekers. Orban already promised retaliation in June for the ruling, one of several issues clouding the start of his stint in the rotating presidency of the EU in the second half of 2024. Negotiations with the European Commission will start in September, Gergely Gulyas, the minister in charge of the prime minister’s office, told reporters in Budapest Thursday.
Should those talks fail, Hungary will start handing migrants “one-way tickets to Brussels,” Gulyas said. “We should find an agreement as soon as possible because we wouldn’t like to pay large amounts on a daily basis,” Gulyas said. “But if Brussels wants to take in migrants, we can help.” Though Gulyas provided no details on how such a scheme would work, the idea echoes disputes not only among US states over migrants – like those being bused to New York from the Texas border – but also elsewhere in Europe. In the UK, socialist Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed his new Labour government would scrap predecessor Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
Separately, Hungary was criticized by human rights groups this week for withdrawing state-funded shelter from Ukrainian refugees arriving from regions not directly affected by the fighting on the frontlines with Russia. A group of Hungarians from Ukraine’s western Transcarpathia region temporarily became homeless after the move, though Gulyas said aid groups helped provide accommodations for them. The EU’s executive arm is looking into the decree, according to a spokesperson but said the EU is united in providing protections, including accommodation, for those fleeing the conflict.
NASA said it has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring home the US astronauts who were forced to extend their stay at the International Space Station because of the latest debacle plaguing the woke DEI disaster that is Boeing, whose space capsule suffered major technical issues. Boeing’s spacecraft will return without people on board, the US space agency said during a Saturday news conference announcing its decision, in which it said that it was too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months. The contingency plan means that NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s rival Crew Dragon capsule during a mission slated to launch in late September. That would put them back on US soil in February, when that capsule is slated to return and months later than originally planned.
Their empty Starliner capsule will undock in a week or two and attempt to return on autopilot. The seasoned pilots have been stuck at the International Space Station since the beginning of June. A cascade of vexing thruster failures and helium leaks in the new capsule marred their trip to the space station, and they ended up in a holding pattern as engineers conducted tests and debated what to do about the trip back. As Starliner’s test pilots, the pair should have overseen this critical last leg of the journey, with touchdown in the U.S. desert. It was a blow to Boeing, adding to the safety concerns plaguing the company on its airplane side. Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.
Retired Navy captains with previous long-duration spaceflight experience, Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, anticipated surprises when they accepted the shakedown cruise of a new spacecraft, although not quite to this extent. Before their June 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, they said their families bought into the uncertainty and stress of their professional careers decades ago. During their lone orbital news conference last month, they said they had trust in the thruster testing being conducted. They had no complaints, they added, and enjoyed pitching in with space station work. Wilmore’s wife, Deanna, was equally stoic in an interview earlier this month with WVLT-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, their home state. She was already bracing for a delay until next February: “You just sort of have to roll with it.” There were no other options.
The SpaceX capsule currently parked at the space station is reserved for the four residents who have been there since March. They will return in late September, their stay extended a month by the Starliner dilemma. NASA said it would be unsafe to squeeze two more into the capsule, except in an emergency. The docked Russian Soyuz capsule is even tighter, capable of flying only three — two of them Russians wrapping up a yearlong stint. So Wilmore and Williams will wait for SpaceX’s next taxi flight. It’s due to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four for a routine six-month stay. NASA yanked two to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return flight in late February. NASA said no serious consideration was given to asking SpaceX for a quick stand-alone rescue. Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original craft was damaged by space junk. The switch pushed their mission beyond a year, a U.S. space endurance record still held by Frank Rubio.
Starliner’s woes began long before its latest flight. Bad software fouled the first test flight without a crew in 2019, prompting a do-over in 2022. Then parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that nixed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks sprouted following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed. All but one of those small thrusters restarted in flight. But engineers remain perplexed as to why some thruster seals appear to swell, obstructing the propellant lines, then revert to their normal size.These 28 thrusters are vital. Besides needed for space station rendezvous, they keep the capsule pointed in the right direction at flight’s end as bigger engines steer the craft out of orbit. Coming in crooked could result in catastrophe.
The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France is a warning to platforms that stand up to censorship, American journalist and political commentator Tucker Carlson has said. According to French media, the Russian-born entrepreneur was detained at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday and will appear in court on Sunday evening. The French authorities had reportedly issued an arrest warrant, arguing that insufficient moderation allows for Telegram to be widely used by criminals. The news of Durov’s apparent prosecution has raised concerns online, including suggestions that it could be politically motivated.
“Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech,” Carlson wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. “It was a Western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away.” Durov’s arrest is “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies,” Carlson argued. “Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.”
Ep. 94 The social media app Telegram has over 900 million users around the world. Its founder Pavel Durov sat down with us at his offices in Dubai for his first on-camera interview in almost a decade. pic.twitter.com/NEb3KzWOg8
Carlson recorded a rare interview with Durov in April, in which the Telegram owner spoke about his disagreements with the Russian government, as well as the pressure he faced in the US. He said that the American government had wanted him to set up a surveillance “backdoor” on his messaging service, and he refused. X owner Elon Musk also condemned the reported arrest. “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” he wrote in a comment to the news story. Telegram was launched in 2013 and currently has more than 950 million active monthly users. Durov is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, but has been mostly been living in the UAE since the mid-2010s. He became a French and an Emirati citizen in 2021.
Trump tells reporter, "They don't want me standing here. They don't want you standing here either," before quickly leaving in what seems to have been another threat to President Trump's life.
REPORTER: “There’s a manhunt going on in this county… Somebody made death threats to you… It’s dangerous for you to be here”
TRUMP: “I heard it’s very dangerous but I also have a job to do… They probably wanna keep it from me, thank you for telling me”pic.twitter.com/DduD3a0NwG
“My one ask of Kamala Harris is you may not agree with Donald Trump’s policies but he’s at least told you what they are. Tell us what your policies are.”🔥 pic.twitter.com/5eaLcZD2Hh
Today I’m going to set the record straight by explaining my exact posture, point-by-point, on what is probably the most controversial issue of my campaign—a medical safety issue that impacts every one of us. If you take a few minutes to listen, I think you might be surprised to… pic.twitter.com/FJucMmUexF
.@RobertKennedyJr: "The DNC is in Chicago talking about their commitment to voting rights, while they're spending tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to keep me off the ballot."
"There's a million people in this country who have signed petitions trying to get me on the… pic.twitter.com/qCeBui3tI0
“Democrats have become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money wanting to abandon democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president. I left the party to run as an independent… The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for VP Harris based upon nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors.””A Chicago circus that is based on NOTHING. Who needs a policy if you hate Donald Trump?” “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?” Kennedy asked. “We know the answer: They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.
What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies.” Kennedy refuses to be a spoiler… “Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler… In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control.” “I am simply suspending it and not ending it. My name will remain on the ballot in most states. I encourage you to vote for me. In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election. After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates. In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name.”
[..] I throw my support behind Donald Trump.” Kennedy said that in a series of meetings with Trump and his team, he realized he shared more in common with the former president than he thought. He compared their potential partnership to President Lincoln’s famous “Team of Rivals,” which saw him stock his Cabinet with former foes. “In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely if need be on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.” “I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences.”
“But we are aligned with each other on other key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the US intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections.” “Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I’m convinced that it’s the best hope or ending the Ukraine War and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for finally protecting free speech.” “I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children above all things.” Most notably, RFK Jr. admitted in front of the nation that he attempted to contact VP Harris first and that she neither wanted to talk or meet with him is a strong message to Independent voters:
“Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.” “Democrats want nothing to do with you, Republicans will at least give you a seat at the table.” RFK addressed details on the Russia-Ukraine war (via Kyle Becker): “We have pushed Russia closer to China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. And the Neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all.” “Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles. And the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.” “This is a first class calamity for our country.” “Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic for this and other Neocon military adventures.”
“President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president.” “This alone would justify my support for his campaign.” “Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine War, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government or to defy the Neocons on their agenda of endless military adventurism.” “But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration.” “I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.”
Objectively, if prediction sites can be trusted in any way (perhaps more so than biased polls), the last four days of speeches, musical performances, and delegate celebrations were a ‘failure’ of sorts for the Democratic Party as during the DNC, Kamala Harris odds of success in November dropped while Trump’s improved (though we note the incumbent VP remains a favorite)… Perhaps, ‘we the people’ realized that the goal of the whole week was for party lawmakers, community leaders, past presidents, and cultural figures to convince Americans that Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden… and has not been in The White House for the last almost-four-years… is the not the lowest-approval-rated VP in history… and is not in any way responsible, or tied to any of the policies that left the vast majority of Americans questioning the direction of the country just a week or two before the mainstream media anointed her ‘Mamala’
Most directed pointed attacks at former President Donald Trump, tying his candidacy and campaign to the controversial Project 2025, which Trump has disavowed, while illustrating differences between a potential second Trump term and a Harris White House. While light on specific domestic and foreign policy discussions, the convention highlighted the Democratic Party’s commitment to ensuring abortion access after the 2022 Dobbs decision overthrew Roe v. Wade. For four straight days, protesters rallied in the streets against the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel during the Israel–Hamas war, pushing for a Palestinian speaker at the Chicago convention. As Jacob Burg and Nathan Worcester detail below via The Epoch Times, here are the key takeaways from the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
After securing enough delegate support to become the party’s presidential nominee earlier this month, the convention served as a coronation ceremony for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. With a little more than 70 days remaining in the election, Harris is moving fast to define herself, her platform, and her vision for America. Speaking about her family and their impact on her life, she said it was those who loved and believed in her the most that “told us we could be anything and do anything.” In her acceptance speech, Harris described her parents meeting at a civil rights gathering and attorneys like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, who inspired her to become a lawyer. When Harris’ best friend revealed sexual abuse by a parent, Harris set out to be a prosecutor.
“And every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge, and I said five words, ‘Kamala Harris, for the people.’” She added, “And to be clear, my entire career. I’ve only had one client, the people.” “On behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks … I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America,” Harris said. In a coalition-building effort as her campaign inches closer to election day, Harris vowed to unite a divided country. “Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”
While Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann point out that RFK Jr. was never a serious candidate, he had a famous name (to those of us old enough to remember), a tinge of legitimacy, and a wealthy billionaire running mate to keep the train going. It wasn’t enough to reach office but it got his foot in the door after RFK Jr. was shunned by Democrat Party insiders in their initial effort to prop up husk of a president, Joe Biden. Now they are stuck with Biden’s insurance policy, Kamala Harris. It terrified the Dems to have RFK Jr. in the running, so they rigged the rules, banned him from state ballots, and vilified him as extreme. And to dampen his impact on the Harris-Walz ticket, after trying to deny him ballot access and remove RFK Jr. from the state ballots he made his way to, Democrats will now attempt to keep him on ballots to hurt Trump. Such hypocrites.
He’s an environmental attorney, about as Lefty Democrat as you can get! He was expected to capitulate, kiss the crown, and get in line with everyone else. Instead, he went rogue. He showed them by unexpectedly running as an Independent. In exchange for his potential endorsement, what can Trump promise? A cabinet post? Being named director of the FBI to clean up that mess? Or ironically, heading up the CIA? Maybe after six decades, we’ll find out exactly what was the role of the agency in assassinating his uncle and if it had any role in his own father’s assassination. He’s now rumored to be ready to endorse Trump and is expected to announce his campaign suspension in Phoenix, where Trump is scheduled to hold a rally nearby. Coincidence? Unlikely. If this happens, it will take much of the post-DNC momentum away from Harris-Walz and focus attention on the PR value of RFK Jr.’s endorsement.
Imagine the son of RFK and the nephew of JFK, endorsing a Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump no less. It will be a net positive gain for Trump, although not much and only for so long. But it could make all the difference in a race that’s expected to be tight in the all-important swing states—especially Pennsylvania. After spending millions to keep him off the ballot, the Democratic National Committee released a memo Friday dismissing the potential impact Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump will have on the presidential race. The DNC claimed, without evidence, that the only reason Kennedy was in the race was to be a spoiler candidate to help former President Trump, but derided him as “a near-negligible factor” with “no meaningful base of support.” The DNC memo purported, again without evidence, that Trump was “at a low point and acting out of desperation.”
“Embracing RFK Jr. now —when he has nothing to offer but months of disqualifying revelations—is not a decision a campaign makes when they’re acting from a position of strength.” The memo went on to accuse RFK Jr. as having an “unsavory and reckless past, ties to MAGA donors, and MAGA-lite positions on abortion bans and January 6th pardons,” and assert that “his support has dwindled to make him a near-negligible factor.” “The little support that remains is soft, split across ideologies, and disproportionately among lower propensity voters. With no meaningful base of support and sky-high negatives among Democrats, RFK Jr.’s threat to VP Harris was neutralized,” the DNC memo stated. The DNC memo argued Kennedy could actually hurt Trump because of his allegedly “controversial” positions on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Sept. 11 attacks and vaccines. Right now, in their post-DNC euphoria, Democrats believe that they have positioned Harris to win.
The US media has once and for all proven that it is in the pocket of the Democratic Party. It continues to fawn over the greatly flawed Kamala Harris while the presidential candidate has steadfastly refused to do interviews or press conferences for weeks. Taking the lead in this media-backed coup d’état is Time magazine, whose latest issue features a powerful portrait of Kamala Harris on the cover bearing the glowing caption “Her Moment.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t ‘her moment’ for a little chat with the media, although it was certainly the perfect opportunity. In one of the only lines of criticism against Harris in the 3,000-word puff piece, Time writer Charlotte Alter admitted that “Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts.” Shockingly, Harris even refused a single comment to Time, despite offering gratuitous promotion of the vice president.
That speaks volumes about Harris, who refuses to speak to a publication that is absolutely committed to providing kid-glove treatment to the Democrats. Alter’s description of Harris provided little substance on the vice president’s track record and oceans of ink spewing vacuous allusions to the carnivalesque atmosphere that now accompanies Harris’ political rallies. Many have suggested that this is the only way she is able to fill stadiums and inject a feeling of enthusiasm. “The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert,” Alter opened in the very first paragraph of her article titled ‘The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris’. “The light-up bracelets evoked the Eras Tour. And the exuberant crowd – more than 14,000 strong, lining up in the rain – resembled the early days of Barack Obama.” The name Taylor Swift, certainly no political scientist, popped up several paragraphs later: “More than 38,000 people registered on Vote.org in the 48 hours after she became the presumptive nominee, eclipsing the voter-registration surge encouraged by Taylor Swift last year.”
And if that wasn’t enough, Alter came up with this ridiculous allusion to Hollywood starlets in an effort to explain Harris’ inexplicable rise: “Mass enthusiasm for a woman is nothing new: Harris’s run comes just a year after the blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Swift.” Finally, Time provided an absurd quote from Senator Cory Booker, who invoked Star Wars imagery to argue that Harris has “mastered the art of ‘arm twisting’ required to pass major legislation” for Democrats. “She has gone,” he said, “from being a Padawan to a Jedi master.” Too bad the force was not with Harris when it came to securing the southern border, or helping working class Americans survive some of the worst inflation the US has experienced in decades. Compare all of that mindless puffery to Donald Trump, who Time interviewed for a cover story in April that was an 83-minute read, while the nitpicking factchecking following the piece took over 20 minutes to digest.
Eric Cortellessa, the journalist who conducted the interview, asked Trump a dozen questions about the Trump prosecutions, five questions about the January 6 ‘insurrection’, four on battling the ‘deep state’, three on his “dictator for a day” joke, two about the possibility of right-wing violence if Trump loses the election, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment to serve a third term in office. It seems that the only reason Trump agrees to sit through these tortuous liberal inquisitions is to have the ability to say he is doing what Kamala Harris conspicuously refuses to do – talk to the media. Whether this strategy will work in his favor is highly debatable given the overwhelming support Harris receives regardless of what she does or doesn’t do. Yet even the Democrats must understand that the media are the gatekeepers to our aspiring politicians. Without the ability of journalists to sit down and grill officials on policy matters, the American people will remain in the dark.
Moreover, sitting in the media hot seat allows the audience to determine if a person has the mettle required for leadership. Many believe that Harris, who has demonstrated an inability to convey complex ideas – ‘word salads’, as they’ve been called – without the assistance of a teleprompter, is perfectly aware of her personal shortcomings, and that is why she is content to remain in the shadows while the media pumps her up into a political tour de force. This could also explain why the Democrats waited until the 11th hour to replace feebleminded Joe Biden with Harris on the presidential ticket – the less time the American people have to listen to Harris’ convoluted arguments (and grating cackle), the better. The rise of Harris from basement-level popularity ratings just four years ago to some sort of political genius proves the undeniable power of the corporate media complex to turn the greatest mediocrity into anyone they like.
“The way the US corporate media transformed Kamala Harris from a national embarrassment to a transformative pioneer overnight – without even pretending to care about anything that she thinks or believes – is a powerful testament to how potent the science of propaganda is,” journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X (formerly Twitter). [..] Trump and Harris are set to debate on ABC on September 10, an event that the former president, barring some unforeseen disaster, has essentially already won. The final result, however, will depend on whether the audience will side with the snake-oil media and ‘believe their lying ears’, or will they be able to think past their media mind controllers and make an honest judgement of Harris’ performance. The future of the United States hinges on that question.
Get this: there is one thing, one lurking terror, behind every fake and desperate move the Democratic Party has made this dire election cycle: the fear that hundreds of high officials might have to pay for their crimes of recent years if they lose on November 5. That’s why they lie about everything, and work so hard to construct false narratives, and struggle to obliterate the memory of Joe Biden’s ruinous term in power. Of course, they can’t talk about it. It’s like the darkest secret in a wrecked human soul that has lost itself in mental illness, some abscess of shame and guilt sealed off in the mind’s attempt to protect itself — like the memory of an incest or an unsolved family murder — which explains the rich show of various derangements actually highlighted at this year’s Democratic Convention, their Cluster-B personality disorder freak show. It is an anguished, guilt-ridden collective mind leaking clues to its own disordered debasement.
So, the deed is done now. The odious “Joe Biden,” fake president, is dumped in the ditch of history, and a mighty operation is mounted to put over Veep Kamala Harris, who ignored “JB’s” incapacity to head the US government for four years, carrying out no duties meanwhile, hiding from the public, answering nothing, going nowhere, abetted by a treasonous news media bent on hiding her as she drank away the months in the old Naval Observatory. The conventions are over and the contest is on. Have you heard enough of their fake war-cry: “defending our democracy?” From a party that has tortured the law to jail and silence its critics and scrape its challengers off every ballot. The pretense is perfect. Their “democracy” is actually a colossal “spoils” system — to the victor goes the spoils! — a grotesque political machine funneling trillions of federal dollars to their client voter groups, and especially to the non-profit orgs and NGOs that form a sinister secondary bureaucracy accountable to nobody.
And all done with direct connivance of the federal intel blob at war with everyone outside this matrix of turpitude. And, by the way, the money is gone. Trillions. And nothing to show for it. This is what Mr. Trump opposes, and has been fighting against since 2016. No wonder it wants to stuff him in prison or kill him. It is a mighty enemy because it holds the levers of official power, especially the federal prosecutors and the state and county prosecutors put in place by the Democrats’ chief “influencer,” the George and Alex Soros NGO empire. And the big picture includes the monumental crime against our country — against all the countries of Western Civ, really — which was the Covid-19 operation that left millions disabled or dead from a phony, poisonous “vaccine.”
And now we hear — as I write early this Friday morning, hours before any official announcement — that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is about to suspend his campaign, kneecapped by the Democratic Party so busy “defending our democracy,” and perhaps throw his support to Donald Trump in order to defeat this mafia of the mentally ill. I hope he does that. And I hope he denounces the party of his ancestors in the most vividly opprobrious terms so that no one can misunderstand the gravity of what has been going on. I’d also look forward to Mr. Kennedy playing an important role in the second Trump government. Mr. Kennedy knows probably better than anyone in America exactly how the gigantic racketeering operation was constructed that grafted pharma onto the US public health agencies, the FDA, CDC, NIAID, and others.
This monster that has left so many Americans dead and injured, and wrecked the health of the nation’s young people especially, must be slayed. It must be disassembled and its pieces reconstructed into institutions that actually serve the public. This includes the hospital holding companies, the private equity pirates out to asset-strip medicine, the insurance-driven, overgrown doctors’ practices, and the mendacious medical boards, professional orgs, and journals that unjustly punished dissident doctors and nurses who tried to oppose the extralegal Covid-19 vaxx mandates. If it happens that Mr. Kennedy joins forces with Mr. Trump, it could be a momentous turn in an election so far marred by Democratic Party hoaxes, coups, and lawfare ops. Naturally, The New York Times played the story this morning in a tiny headline below-the-fold, saying nothing about the rumored stunning alliance between the Kennedy and Trump campaigns.
A former chief of the controversial intelligence agency voiced his support for the vice president at the Democratic National Convention Thursday. US Vice President Kamala Harris signaled she would continue her predecessor’s hawkish foreign policy in Gaza and Ukraine Thursday as an ex-CIA director publicly endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate. “As president I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies,” Harris declared during her acceptance speech, voicing strong support for Kiev’s US-backed proxy war against Russia. Former intelligence chief Leon Panetta also delivered a speech praising Harris during which the controversial figure claimed he was “proud” to have served in the US Army and CIA director. US military aggression throughout the Middle East during the so-called “War on Terror” is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people while the CIA has been implicated in numerous human rights violations.
“The Democrats really showed that this is a hawkish party and really neoconservatives are in charge of the party,” noted CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program. “I mean, they brought out Leon Panetta earlier tonight. He’s a former CIA director who was a key mastermind of the drone war and a key figure behind Russiagate and a key supporter of Hillary Clinton and chief of staff in the Bill Clinton White House.” “In her speech [Harris] was talking about how [former US President Donald] Trump supposedly coddled [foreign leaders] like Putin, and that’s totally false,” he continued. “Trump had a pretty hardline policy toward Russia. He pulled out of the INF Treaty. He ramped up weapons supplies to Ukraine. So that’s just like an extreme right-wing position that they’re adopting.”
“They’re celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that. So that’s where they are.” Corruption has long been recognized as endemic in Ukraine, which experts have noted is “the most corrupt nation in Europe.” Earlier this year, a massive corruption scandal was uncovered that saw almost $40 million in US aid stolen by officials in the country’s defense ministry. In June, it was revealed that Western military-grade weapons supplied to Ukraine have been sold on the black market, ending up in the hands of terrorists and European drug cartels. Various neoconservative figures such as Iraq War architect Bill Kristol have shifted allegiances to the Democratic Party in recent years as Republicans have become increasingly critical of foreign intervention under the banner of Trump’s “America First” ethos. Recent polling shows increasing numbers of Americans believe the US has spent too much money funding Ukraine’s quixotic proxy war on Russia.
The US military is running out of ammunition as President Joe Biden’s administration has bled stockpiles dry to arm Ukraine and other nations, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has claimed. The GOP firebrand pledged to turn the tide and make a “historic investment in rebuilding” the American military, if elected. Speaking by phone to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky last month, Trump reiterated his long-standing promise to swiftly end the conflict between Kiev and Moscow if elected in November. Back in June, the former US president also made it clear that he would stop donating tens of billions of dollars’ worth of handouts to Ukraine. Addressing his supporters, along with his vice presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance, in Asheboro, North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump lamented: “They released a report talking about all of the vulnerable areas… we’re weak here, we’re weak there.”
“That’s like saying: ‘We have no ammunition,’” he said. “You know why. We gave it all up to Ukraine and various other places. We gave them everything.” According to the former president, billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunition has been donated free of charge. While it is not clear what report exactly Trump was referring to, experts on the congressional Commission on the National Defense Strategy released a 312-page assessment in late July, warning that the US military “lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.” According to the report, in a hypothetical future conflict with China, the latter would likely be aided, at least economically and possibly also militarily, by the likes of Russia, Iran, or North Korea. This would make the odds of a US victory increasingly slim, military experts predicted.
“Unclassified public wargames suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g. anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days,” the document concluded. Experts on the commission attributed the current state of affairs to serious inadequacies in America’s defense industry that they said would require significant investment to rectify.
Claims by Washington that it has banned Ukraine from using US-supplied long-range weapons for strikes deep inside Russian territory cannot be trusted, Moscow’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has said. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has resumed his calls for the country’s Western backers to allow long-range strikes on Russian territory during Kiev’s ongoing incursion into Kursk Region. The Pentagon stated last week that its stance remains unchanged, and that Ukraine is still banned from using US-supplied ATACMS missiles, which have a range of up to 300km (186 miles), for attacks deep inside Russia. Speaking to journalists on Friday, Antonov claimed that the US authorities “seem to be constantly teasing us by saying that today it is allegedly not allowed to use long-range systems to strike at Russian territory.” “But in reality, they are essentially preparing the ground to simply remove all existing restrictions, at a certain point,” the Russian envoy added.
Judging by Washington’s previous assistance to Kiev, including its training of pilots to fly F-16 jets, it is almost certain that Ukraine will “fight with US-made [long-range] weapons against us,” the ambassador said, as cited by TASS. “Where exactly will it happen? We cannot say or foretell,” he stressed. According to Antonov, the administration of US President Joe Biden is becoming increasingly unpredictable. “There is no guarantee that the whole world will not change tomorrow when you and I wake up. How the Americans will behave in this situation is very hard to tell,” he said. Russia must therefore “act decisively, increasing our military-industrial potential, because only our army and navy will protect our country,” the ambassador insisted.
Antonov also made a live appearance on Russia’s Channel One on Thursday, where he rejected claims by the US authorities that they had been unaware of the Ukrainian plans to attack Kursk Region.“I am firmly convinced that in Kiev they do nothing without the go-ahead from their masters… They wouldn’t have dared to move a finger… in our direction without consent from Washington,” he said. Commenting on the fate of Ukrainian troops who have entered Russian territory, the ambassador insisted that “no one has any doubts that they will be destroyed, not pushed back, but destroyed.” Russia’s Defense Ministry estimated on Thursday that Ukraine has lost more than 4,700 troops and several hundred units of military equipment, including 68 tanks and 53 armored personnel carriers, since the start of the incursion in Kursk Region on August 6.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Kiev on Friday, marking the first visit by an Indian premier to the country. During a meeting with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, Modi stated that India has not been “neutral or an indifferent bystander” as the Russia-Ukraine conflict persists, and has always been “on the side of peace.” The joint communique issued by the two sides after the leaders’ meeting noted that Modi reiterated its “principled position and focus on peaceful resolution through dialogue and diplomacy.” According to Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, who briefed the media in Kiev, Modi and Zelensky had a detailed and open discussion and New Delhi promised it was ready to make proactive contributions towards efforts for peace. The joint statement noted that India had attended the ‘peace summit’ hosted by Switzerland in June this year as part of this commitment.
However, New Delhi stopped short of signing the joint communiqué emerging from the Swiss-hosted event, as the event didn’t include Russia. On Friday, Jaishankar noted that Modi called for “practical engagement” between all stakeholders” to work out “innovative solutions” that could lead to peace. “President Zelensky knows we mean well by Ukraine, we want this conflict to come to an end. If there is anything we can do in any way in sort of upfront, behind or supporting anybody, we are willing to do whatever we can. This conflict must end, we believe,” Jaishankar said. Modi’s visit was the first-ever visit by an Indian premier to Ukraine since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Upon his arrival in Kiev, he was greeted by members of the Indian diaspora there. Later, he and Zelensky honored the memory of children who died in the conflict in a visit to the Martyrologist Exposition tribute, and paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in the ‘Oasis of Peace’ park in the capital.
Modi’s Ukraine visit comes nearly six weeks after he traveled to Russia for a bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since the beginning of the conflict, India has abstained from condemning Moscow over the conflict or from downgrading trade and diplomatic ties with it, despite pressure from the West. New Delhi has maintained robust ties with Russia despite the West’s scrutiny of the relationship. Bilateral trade crossed $60 billion last year, largely bolstered by Indian imports of discounted Russian coal and oil. The premier’s visit to Moscow in July came under intense scrutiny from Washington and other global capitals. Biden administration officials were uncomfortable with the optics of the visit, which coincided with a crucial NATO summit that featured Zelensky. Ukraine’s leader himself termed Modi’s meeting with Putin a “huge disappointment” and a “blow” to peace efforts, prompting New Delhi to summon the Ukrainian envoy over the remark.
Kiev’s Western backers are supporting its “satanic” crackdown on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev claimed on Friday. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that prohibits “Russia-linked” religious organizations. The self-governed UOC, which has historical and spiritual ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), is understood to be the primary target of the legislation. Medvedev, who serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, said he holds Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky accountable for the crackdown. Pyotr Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor, caused a major religious schism in Ukraine when he orchestrated the creation of the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine in late 2018 as part of his failed reelection campaign, Medvedev pointed out.
Under Zelensky, however, “the destruction of the Orthodox faith in Ukraine and the persecution of Christians for their faith started,” culminating in the new law, the former Russian leader argued. Zelensky “has no religious identity” and the crackdown is “full-fledged satanism” supported by people in his government, Medvedev alleged. “The civilized West” backed both Poroshenko’s ploy and the ongoing persecution “to inflict maximum damage to Russia and its citizens,” he added. Ukraine “will be destroyed, like Sodom and Gomorrah were, and the demons will inevitably fall,” Medvedev said, referring to the Old Testament story of two cities obliterated by divine intervention for their wickedness. He added a biblical quote describing the Jewish conquest of Canaan and the punishment that Joshua exacted on the leaders of conquered tribes.
Viktor Elensky, the head of the Ukrainian service for ethnic policy and freedom of conscience, claimed on Thursday that the new law “has the legitimate goal of stopping the subversive activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.” Kiev has no intention of forcing clerics and the faithful to join any other denomination, but if the UOC wishes to exist, it has to abide by the new rules and disavow any ties with Moscow, the official added. Clement, the UOC bishop who serves as the spokesman for the church, wondered if schismatic leaders would have to overcome bureaucratic barriers to prove their loyalty. Among other things, the law demands public affirmation by Ukrainian clerics that they have cut all ties with the Russian church. The UOC will “keep living as a true church recognized by the majority of practicing Ukrainian believers and the world’s independent Orthodox churches,” he told the media. Any attempt to ban it will merely tarnish the reputation of the people pushing for it, Clement argued.
The Kiev regime tends to view its common religious heritage with Russia as exclusively Ukrainian and sells to the West invaluable Christian artifacts, religion expert Roman Lunkin told Sputnik. Historical and cultural artifacts, including Orthodox icons, are taken out of Ukraine and transferred to Western countries where some of them are sold, according to Roman Lunkin, head of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). “It is not rational and not at all ethical to treat the heritage this way,” Lunkin told Sputnik. Last year, the rarest 6th and 7th-century Byzantine icons were secretly transferred from the territory of Ukraine to France under the pretext of safety issues, and then displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris. All in all,16 invaluable artifacts were brought to France through Poland and Germany.
Still, the crux of the matter is that these Christian Orthodox icons were gifted to the head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem by the Sinai Monastery of St. Catherine in the mid-19th century, according to Bishop Porfiry, a Russian theologian and byzantinologist. In 1940, the Soviet government transferred the icons to the Kiev Museum of Western and Oriental Art (now known as the Khanenko Museum of Art), where they were kept after the Great Patriotic War. It is unclear whether and when the icons will be returned. On June 26, 2023, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) reported on Kiev’s plans to remove Christian valuables and relics from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, and send them to Europe under the pretext of “saving them from Russian missile attacks”, despite the fact Russian forces are not targeting civilian facilities, let alone Orthodox holy places.
Still, there is more to the Kiev regime’s readiness to squander its heritage, and the West’s eagerness to keep Ukraine’s Christian valuables under the auspices of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), chaired and overseen by US billionaires. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova last year linked the alleged plot, described by the SVR, as well as the secret removal of Byzantine icons from the Kiev museum, to the old Western colonial trend: “Western countries have stolen national valuables throughout the world, and their museums can be described as the ‘safekeepers’ of valuables stolen from their colonies, as you can see in the Ancient Egypt exhibit in the Louvre or the British Museum… The West has always plundered its colonies. Ukraine is no exception. There is no doubt that no one was going to return the valuables they had taken away from other countries,” Zakharova stressed.
The problem is that the Kiev regime considers this historical and cultural heritage “exclusively Ukrainian”, regardless of its true origin, Lunkin underscored. “Icons that are kept in the [Kiev-Pechersk] Lavra and other museums, including cultural monuments in Ukraine, are the common property of Russian culture and the culture of Kievan Rus, which was created from the moment of the Baptism of Russia more than 1000 years ago. Accordingly, this is the common and inseparable heritage of our countries because it was created at a time when Rus existed, before Ukrainians and Ukraine did. Therefore, it is wrong to call these icons exclusively Ukrainian,” the pundit said. The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra was founded in 1051, during the rule of the Russian Duke Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned in Rostov, Novgorod, and later in Kiev. The Lavra has always been considered part of the common historical and religious heritage of Russians and Ukrainians.
However, in the aftermath of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which illegitimately brought to power Western-backed nationalist authorities, the Kiev regime doubled down on creating a separate “Ukrainian history” to “appropriate” the Kievan Rus history. In May 2017, then President Petro Poroshenko claimed that Duke Yaroslav and his daughter, Anna, who became Queen of France in 1051 upon marrying King Henry I, were “Ukrainians”, regardless of the fact that this East Slavic ethnic group had not been formed at that time. Volodymyr Zelensky has gone even further, according to Lunkin. In addition to creating a myth about a separate Ukrainian history and a separate Ukrainian Orthodoxy, “the Ukrainian authorities and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which they created [in 2018], are trying to separate the saints, who were born on the territory of modern Russia,” the pundit pointed out.
New documents released Thursday reveal that ‘confusion and chaos’ reigned in the company’s Renton factory that built two 737 MAX planes that later crashed, killing 346 people in 2018 and 2019, the Seattle Times reports. According to a prominent whistleblower Ed Pierson, production issues from back then still affect MAX planes flying today. The new documents reveal multiple electrical issues that were discovered as Boeing assembled the Ethiopian Airlines jet that crashed in 2019. The Times notes that in 2018, the FAA found that employees in another Boeing facility in Everett, WA – where electrical components for integration – had been pushed to move to fast, and produced defective pieces. Communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines show the plane that later crashed experienced an in-flight safety incident months before the fatal accident. Boeing told the airline that the December 2018 incident was likely the result of an electrical error, the records show.
The whistleblower, Pierson, said the records and the earlier safety incident bolster his view that the deadly crash of the Ethiopian jet may have been initiated by an electrical problem. That problem traces back to production issues with electrical wire bundles that Pierson has highlighted. Pierson, who worked at Boeing for more than a decade and served as a senior manager coordinating fixes for assembly problems on the 737 program, released the new documents through an advocacy group he formed after the crashes, the Foundation for Aviation Safety – and said that Boeing withheld the documents from regulatory investigators looking into the two deadly crashes. Following the deadly incidents, he repeatedly alleged that manufacturing defects played a role. The FAA, NTSB, and international regulators are in disagreement over the cause.
In both crashes, an error with then-new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or MCAS — caused the plane to nosedive. Boeing recently pleaded guilty to misleading safety regulators about MCAS and how much training pilots would need to fly safely. In the case of the Ethiopian crash, the NTSB and its French counterpart concluded that it wasn’t an electrical error but a bird strike damaging a sensor that likely triggered the MCAS software. The U.S. agency disputed a report from Ethiopian authorities that said the sensor was triggered by “production quality defects.” Pierson sent the newly disclosed records to the NTSB, the FAA and the Department of Justice in July, he said. Meanwhile, the FAA and NTSB are playing hot potato over the new documents, and have suggested that questions should be directed to Ethiopian authorities.
Boeing, in a statement, said that it “fully cooperated and provided relevant information to the investigation” regarding the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash, adding “We defer to the investigative agencies for further information.” The new documents also reveal that from communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines, in December 2018, the airline’s 737 MAX experienced an “uncommanded roll”—a situation where the plane rolls unexpectedly, potentially disorienting the pilot and risking loss of control. This incident occurred just weeks after Ethiopian Airlines took delivery of the aircraft, and only a few months before it tragically crashed, killing all onboard.
Boeing’s communication with the airline at the time indicated that the uncommanded roll was likely caused by an electrical fault. The company advised Ethiopian Airlines to inspect the plane’s wiring for issues, raising questions about the broader electrical integrity of the 737 MAX fleet. Further complicating matters, the Foundation for Aviation Safety released a copy of Boeing’s Shipside Action Tracker from the 2018 production of the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines plane. This internal database, used by Boeing to document and resolve issues during aircraft assembly, revealed a series of misinstalled and mislabeled electrical components. The records also pointed to significant miscommunication among Boeing employees regarding the work performed on the aircraft.
The Power of Siberia pipelines transporting natural gas from Russia to China were back in the news this week, as was the ill-fated Nord Stream pipeline, the Russian-European counterpart. First, it was announced the Power of Siberia 2 was on track for completion this year. When operational, the new pipeline will augment existing trans-Siberian delivery to China, bringing the total gas supply from Russia to 100 billion cubic meters per year. That awesome gas supply figure is significant. For not too long it was projected that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines would have a combined capacity to deliver 100 bcm to Europe. Alas, that energy project was sabotaged in September 2022 when the gas pipes were blown up on the Baltic seabed.
Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and other writers have provided the most compelling account of the sabotage. It was carried out by American military and CIA operatives with the approval of President Joe Biden. See our weekly editorial published on September 30, 2022, days after the incident in which we outlined strong evidence inculpating Washington. It was an audacious act of international state terrorism carried out by the Americans to destroy the decades-old energy trade between Russia and Europe. In particular, Germany’s postwar economic prowess was powered by relatively cheap and abundant Russian hydrocarbons. Now, the United States has stepped in as a supplier of much more expensive Liquefied Natural Gas to Europe. Incredibly, no serious investigation has been carried out by European states to find the culprit.
Russia, which was the main owner of the multi-billion euro project, has offered to cooperate with European states to investigate the blast, but all of Moscow’s offers have been rebuffed. You could hardly make this criminal farce up. For years, the Americans enviously griped about Russia being the strategic energy supplier to Europe. With the escalation of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, the Americans and their European NATO lackeys had a convenient pretext for blowing up the Nord Stream pipes. The net result is that Germany’s economy – once the powerhouse of the European Union – has been dragged to its knees from the loss of its vital energy input from Russia. Germany is teetering on recession and its famed export-led industries are no longer competitive.
Yet despite this blatant crime, the political establishments in Germany and other countries directly affected by the Nord Stream vandalism – Sweden and Denmark – remain pathetically beholden to Washington. Two years after a huge transgression against Europe and Russia by the obvious culprit, the European authorities have dissembled and procrastinated. Last week, Germany issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diver whom it claims was involved in the undersea attack. This is a variant of previous claims in the American media that the Nord Stream sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives. This narrative is absurd and an obvious distraction from the real story. There is no way that such a difficult operation could have been achieved by a bunch of amateurs. The Nord Stream sabotage required state-level expertise. The Americans also had an imperative motive – to force their way into the lucrative European energy market.
All of this is a tragicomedy. Russia’s fair and advantageous services have been perversely spurned by Europeans under the malign spell of American overseers. The European governments and media can’t even muster the courage or independence to conduct a proper investigation into the wanton destruction of their economies. However, Russia has not been deterred or undermined. Far from it, unlike Germany and other recession-hit European states, Russia is growing at a robust rate. A large part of the benefit stems from the Russian energy trade now being directed to Asia. China is gaining where Europe lost. The expanding Power of Siberia projects represent the loss of Nord Stream.
US House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent a letter on Friday to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief David Pekoske regarding whistleblower allegations that the agency placed former US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on a terror watchlist. A whistleblower from the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) disclosed to Congress that the TSA allegedly targeted Gabbard under its Quiet Skies program, which is designed to mitigate threats posed by higher risk passengers, the letter said. The TSA added Gabbard to the Quiet Skies program on July 23, 2024 – one day after she criticized the Biden administration in an interview, the letter said. A whistleblower also disclosed that his wife was targeted with “special mission coverage” because she attended former US President Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech in Washington, but was “nowhere near” the US Capitol that day, the letter said.
Moreover, the whistleblower claims that the TSA classified the protected disclosures as a leak and initiated a retaliatory investigation. “It is alarming that TSA is wasting its resources to surveil an air marshal’s wife and Ms. Gabbard – a high-profile, American public figure – when the threat of terrorist attacks on the United States is high,” the letter said. The letter requests information from TSA on actions taken with respect to employees linked to the disclosures regarding Gabbard and the air marshal’s wife, as well as all information related to Gabbard and the Quiet Skies program. The letter also requests a briefing for committee staff no later than August 30.
We have previously discussed the cancel campaigns targeting JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling was not only the greatest selling author of all time but a wildly popular writer until she publicly opposed certain transgender policies as inimical to the advances in feminism. Now, she is the target of a lawsuit by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the gold-medal winning athlete who had previously failed a gender test to confirm that she is a female fighter. We previously discussed that global debate, but Khelif is now accusing Rowling out of many thousands of critics of being a cyberbully. X owner Elon Musk has also been named in the lawsuit. Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign.
Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns. She held her ground after Scotland passed a draconian law, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. The new crime under the law covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.” Rowling previously posted various responses to the controversy on her X account on August 7, including: “For the record, bombarding me with pictures of athletic women to ‘teach’ me that women don’t all look like Barbie is like spamming me with pics of differently-shaped potatoes to prove rocks are edible. I can still see the difference and you look frankly bonkers.”
She later also posted: “Commentators pretending critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw-manning. I don’t claim Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.” She further wrote on X how she was concerned over both boxers challenged over their gender at the Olympics: “What will it take to end this insanity? A female boxer left with life-altering injuries? A female boxer killed?” France has eviscerated free speech protections over the last few decades with speech criminalization laws. There is some question whether the French laws would apply to tweets made outside of the country. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar.
At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism. In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.” The question of the extraterritorial application of such laws is the question. Conversely, the United Kingdom and the European Union are asserting the right to regulate speech in any country, including political speech in American presidential elections. Rowling has every right to be heard on the Olympic boxing controversy. This debate raises core issues that touch on a wide array of political speech. Khelif has the ability to refute these claims through the exercise of her own free speech. As in the past battles fought by Rowley, her effort to advocate for women’s rights is also a major test over free speech in Europe.
How can she produce such beautiful tone at that speed? Wonderful tone! What an incredible performance!🌷🌷🌷 🩵 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗡𝗼. 𝟮𝟰 – 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘂𝗻𝗮 𝗠𝗶𝘆𝗮𝗴𝗮𝘄𝗮 pic.twitter.com/vKsAvt5djk
