Okay, first things first.  We shall not play the pretending game or structure the discussion of the special counsel appointment through the prism of MSM references.  Instead, we shall stick to the facts as they are presented, explain the events as they are factually reflected within the actual documents, and avoid the pretending constructs.

DATA Links:  (1) Merrick Garland DOJ Statement on Appointment of Special Counsel ~ (2) pdf of Legal Appointment ~ (3) Statement of Jack Smith upon Appointment ~ (4) Transcript of AG Merrick Garland Public Announcement.

The overarching Lawfare framework has been transparently created by President Obama’s former White House Legal Counsel and current U.S. Asst Attorney General Lisa Monaco.  To wit, earlier this afternoon Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of DOJ Attorney Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate two specific areas:

♦ First, to investigate current republican members of congress (House and Senate), former President and current candidate Donald J Trump, former Trump administration officials, former White House staff, and other individuals, groups and organizations for their role in supporting an insurrection on January 6, 2021, against the incoming administration of President-Elect Joe Biden.  In essence, the J6 investigation – with an emphasis on congress – transfers to Special Counsel Jack Smith:

The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021, as well as any matters that arose or might arise directly from this investigation or that are within the scope of [Special Counsel Regulations 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)]. (pdf)

This is an extension of the January 6th Committee special investigation that transfers the committee’s investigative findings, ie phone records, text messages, transcripts, emails, prior testimony and all evidentiary records, into the newly appointed Special Counsel.

However, all prior and current DOJ prosecutions against citizen individuals will remain within the control and direction of Main Justice.  This structure frees up Jack Smith to target the new republican controlled congressional members, their staff, families and/or communication network.   Main Justice keeps focus on the citizen insurrectionists, Jack Smith now appointed to go after the public officials.

J6 Committee staff, committee investigators, FBI agents and DOJ lawyers will now transfer from the committee to the special counsel office. Watch. (More on why later)

♦ Second – and this is ancillary to the first priority – DAG Lisa Monaco has written, and AG Garland has appointed, Jack Smith to target Donald Trump with the same special counsel process previously used by Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann.

The Special Counsel is further authorized to conduct the ongoing investigation referenced and described in the United States’ Response to Motion for Judicial Oversight and Additional Relief, Donald J Trump v. United States, No. 9:22-CV-81294-AMC (S.D. Fla. Aug. 30, 2022) (ECF No. 48 at 5- 13), as well as any matters that arose or may arise directly from this investigation or that are within the scope of [Special Counsel Regulation 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)].

The Trump Mar-a-Lago document investigation (the proverbial nothingburger – just like Trump/Russia) transfers to the Special Counsel office, along with an intended angle to look for an obstruction of justice charge (just like Mueller).   This is Robert Mueller 2.0 using Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The Trump-centric part of the special counsel appointment, the part that everyone is focusing on, is ancillary to the real purpose of the appointment.  However, that said, all investigative resources from Main Justice and the FBI will transfer to Jack Smith as they did when Crossfire Hurricane transferred to Robert Mueller.  The investigative people will transfer along with the investigative evidence.

Duplicating history, all of the DC elements of the UniParty, both Democrats and Republicans, will sing the praises of Jack Smith as an honorable man, beyond reproach, blah, blah, blah.   If you want to stop playing the pretending game, just pay attention to the people praising him, and THOSE voices are the bad guys.

As you can see from the simple (non-pretending) explanation of what is being done, the Lawfare process become clear.   Everything congress now begins to question falls under the protective blanket of an “ongoing investigation,” exactly as we predicted.  Plus, you get the additional Lawfare elements of congressional leadership under investigation which provides an entirely new ‘conflict of interest dynamic’ to the political equation.

They didn’t just think this up overnight.

This is why the January 6 committee never ended.  They are using J6 as a weapon against their losing the House to Republicans.  The Democrats are now structurally targeting Republicans with the appointment of Jack Smith.  It’s actually a brilliant move.  The executive is now investigating the legislative branch; the legal structure of this eliminates the separation of powers issue.

The DOJ is not investigating republicans, they are investigating defined criminals; insurrectionists that are national security threats, that happen to be republicans. See how that works?

This also explains why Nancy Pelosi did not resign from congress, but only stepped down from her leadership role.  The timing of mid-November (today) gives Smith time to get all his midterm counter-offensive ducks in a row before his republican targets take office in January.

All of the congressional J6 and DOJ main justice teams will now assemble in new DC offices to set up the 2023 targeting operation.  The announcement was made today, but the planning of the construct has been in place for months, contingent upon the number of actual House seats that could flip.  The Lawfare design is transparent when you stop looking at the obfuscation reporting from mainstream media.

Primary goal, create enough of a legal mess as to obstruct any Republican legislative effort against the Biden White House.  Additionally, if Smith’s DC team can pick-off a few Republican House members under charges of “supporting an insurrection“, the political power will revert back to the Democrats in office.

Jack Smith’s curriculum vitae as a lawyer experienced in international government law, think about tribunals for overthrowing government, then becomes a clarifying skillset.

Think of it like the legal ideology of the United Nations (democracy as defined by progressives) prosecuting members of the United States government for acts of rebellion under the framework of a constitutional republican form of government they abhor.  That’s Jack Smith.

In addition, the same ideological Lawfare elements will be targeting the threat represented by U.S. nationalist politician Donald J Trump.   It’s like The Great Reset crew inserting an operative inside a corrupt and friendly United States Dept of Justice, with the intent to remove the threat Donald J Trump represents to their interests.

On the multinational corporate side, while all this is special counsel stuff is taking place, the Wall Street billionaires and multinationals will be providing the illusion of choice for the American electorate.

Things making sense now? (read more)

The discount retailer told reporters on a call to discuss its third quarter earnings results that inventory shrinkage — or the disappearance of merchandise — has reduced its gross profit margin by $400 million so far in 2022 compared to 2021.

"At Target, year-to-date, incremental shortage has already reduced our gross margin by more than $400 million vs. last year," Target CFO Michael Fiddelke said on the earnings call, "and we expect it will reduce our gross margin by more than $600 million for the full year."

Fiddelke detailed how there are "a handful of things that can drive shrink in our business and theft is certainly a key driver. We know we're not alone across retail in seeing a trend that I think has gotten increasingly worse over the last 12 to 18 months. So we're taking the right actions in our stores to help curb that trend where we can, but that becomes an increasing headwind on our business and we know the business of others."

A Target spokesperson told Yahoo Finance via email after the call the shrinkage was mostly specifically attributed to "organized retail crime."

Organized retail crime is not just a Target issue as it has impacted other big name retailers such as Best Buy and Rite-Aid. From Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer earlier this year:

But crypto-land has seen this before. In 2014, a highly popular but poorly run Bitcoin exchange called Mt. GOX—an acronym for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange—similarly failed in spectacular fashion. Many early bitcoin adopters were effectively robbed of their funds, and Bitcoin slumped into a protracted bear market for several years. Just this year, in fact, the crypto market has seen collapse after collapse. The Terra Luna crash and Celsius implosion, for example, saw major sell-offs and a rapid (largely unsuccessful) scramble by users to secure the cryptocurrency they held with these organizations. 

The FTX scandal sweeps more broadly than any prior industry collapse because its investors comprised many elite players from the traditional finance and political classes. FTX was seen as a safe way to gain exposure to cryptocurrency without having to invest in the volatile market directly. And these beliefs were uncritically confirmed by a fawning media that spent much of the last year knighting FTX’s now-disgraced founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.

As someone who has been in the Bitcoin space for quite a while now, the mainstream obsession with SBF, as Bankman-Fried is commonly known, never made much sense. In July, responding to Anthony Scaramucci’s praise of a New York Times puff piece on SBF, I noted the probable demise of such a seemingly astroturfed campaign to elevate this unproven kid to godlike status (forgive the salty language, it’s Twitter).

100% agree. And the elite media obsession with SBF is cringe and will only end badly

— Bryan Jacoutot (@BryanJacoutot) July 19, 2022

As best as we can tell so far, here’s what happened. 

SBF catapulted to prominence by inventing a trading algorithm that essentially arbitraged the price of Bitcoin (and presumably other cryptocurrencies) across domestic and foreign exchanges. As one (now remarkably embarrassing) YouTube expose on SBF put it: If Bitcoin were priced at $10,000 on a U.S. exchange and $11,000 on a Japanese exchange, SBF’s algorithm would essentially buy the $10,000 Bitcoin in the U.S., then sell it for $11,000 in Japan and pocket the difference.

Arbitraging is nothing new, but apparently, the margins were quite good for SBF, who would go on to found a quantitative trading firm Alameda Research, in 2017 using these tactics. But that was not enough for SBF, the self-described “effective altruist,” who wanted to make billions purportedly so he could just “give it away.” So in 2019, he decided to spin off his own cryptocurrency exchange, which he would call FTX. Importantly, this exchange created its own cryptocurrency token, FTT, which could be used to secure discounts on trades and grant access to other incentives unique to the FTX trading experience. It also traded on the secondary market, and people would buy and sell FTT in hopes that its value would rise along with FTX.

The creation of FTT and the subsequent reliance of Alameda Research on the token would prove crucial to SBF’s downfall.  But before we get to the fall, let’s explore the rise.

In 2021, amid an incredible cryptocurrency bull market, FTX started raising money. A lot of it.

That July, FTX raised $900 million at a valuation of $18 Billion. And more capital raises occurred throughout the year, with FTX’s valuation eventually ballooning to $25 Billion.

Despite the cooling off of the market in 2022, the first half of the year was no different. In January, FTX raised an additional $400 million from SoftBank at a valuation of $32 Billion. (SoftBank, you may recall, was an early investor in WeWork, which also spectacularly crashed before an IPO listing in no small part because of the founder’s extravagant spending and investments).

Things appeared to be going great for FTX as it inked a $135 million sponsorship deal for naming rights of the Miami Heat’s home court. But the fragile cryptocurrency market was faltering. As prices started falling, many companies built around these currencies were going defunct. First, it was the Terra Network, which took Three Arrows Capital, a hedge fund giant, down with it. Then crypto bank Celsius experienced a bank run and could not cover its obligations. It is now in bankruptcy proceedings.

Amidst all this turmoil, FTX and Alameda Research– fresh off years of capital raises amounting to billions of dollars — appeared poised to pick through the wreckage. On July 22, 2022, FTX executed a partial bailout of Voyager Digital, a publicly traded company steeped in the cryptocurrency space. It also spent $250 million to prop up crypto lender BlockFi, which promises above-market APY returns if you park your cryptocurrency with them.

Perpetually incorrect investment analyst, Jim Cramer, summed up the general belief of Traditional Finance players that SBF was crypto’s white knight:

Sam Bankman-Fried doles out credit lines to save crypto institutions. He's the new JP Morgan!

— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer) June 22, 2022

And while SBF was consolidating his market share in crypto with one hand, he used the other to acquire political capital. As Alex Berenson points out, SBF spent roughly $50 million donating to Democrats in 2020 and 2022, apparently making him the second largest donor to Democrats behind only George Soros.

2/ Fun fact 4: This may be the biggest loss investors in a fund/broker suffer since the Bernie Madoff collapse, but outside the financial media it has received almost no attention.

Fun fact 5: SBF’s ties to the Democratic Party have received even LESS scrutiny…

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) November 12, 2022

SBF didn’t want to quit there. In fact, he had aspirations of donating up to $1 Billion to political causes over the next few years. But the gravy train would soon run out.

On November 2, 2022, nearly one year from the cryptocurrency market’s high water mark, a copy of Alameda Research’s balance sheet leaked. And despite all the dollars raised by SBF over the preceding 22 months, much of Alameda’s purported “assets” were in the form of FTT, the crypto token created by FTX. CoinDesk reported at the time:

Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire is officially broken into two main parts: FTX (his exchange) and Alameda Research (his trading firm), both giants in their respective industries.

But even though they are two separate businesses, the division breaks down in a key place: on Alameda’s balance sheet, according to a private financial document reviewed by CoinDesk. (It is conceivable the document represents just part of Alameda.)

That balance sheet is full of FTX – specifically, the FTT token issued by the exchange that grants holders a discount on trading fees on its marketplace. While there is nothing per se untoward or wrong about that, it shows Bankman-Fried’s trading giant Alameda rests on a foundation largely made up of a coin that a sister company invented, not an independent asset like a fiat currency or another crypto. The situation adds to evidence that the ties between FTX and Alameda are unusually close.

The financials make concrete what industry-watchers already suspect: Alameda is big. As of June 30, the company’s assets amounted to $14.6 billion. Its single biggest asset: $3.66 billion of “unlocked FTT.” The third-largest entry on the assets side of the accounting ledger? A $2.16 billion pile of “FTT collateral.”

There are more FTX tokens among its $8 billion of liabilities: $292 million of “locked FTT.” (The liabilities are dominated by $7.4 billion of loans.)

“It’s fascinating to see that the majority of the net equity in the Alameda business is actually FTX’s own centrally controlled and printed-out-of-thin-air token,” said Cory Klippsten, CEO of investment platform Swan Bitcoin, who is known for his critical views of altcoins, which refer to cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin (BTC).

And with that revelation, a chain reaction was set off. As news of the leak spread, holders of large sums of FTT began wondering why they had exposure to a cryptocurrency that essentially acted as a bridge loan for SBF’s trading fund. One player in particular executed the death knell for SBF: Chengpeng Zhao (or CZ as he is commonly called).

As part of Binance’s exit from FTX equity last year, Binance received roughly $2.1 billion USD equivalent in cash (BUSD and FTT). Due to recent revelations that have came to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books. 1/4

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) November 6, 2022

CZ is the CEO of Binance, the world’s largest crypto platform. And reports of his rapid liquidation of FTT precipitated a generalized market sell-off of the token. What’s worse, the Wall Street Journal reported that SBF was using customer deposits on FTX for loans to cover Alameda Research’s risky bets. With FTT having lost roughly 95% of its value in just over a week, it is likely that most customer deposits will never be returned.

As of now, SBF has resigned, and FTX has entered bankruptcy proceedings. The WSJ reported this morning that SBF is now “in the crosshairs” of U.S. prosecutors.

The situation is a stark reminder of the fragility of the cryptocurrency space and the risk associated with entering it. It also offers a lesson: the world’s recent obsession with knighting these quirky kids and holding them up as standard bearers simply because what they do seems complex is not wise. And worse, it’s directly contradictory to the original ethos of the space.

Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency (and the only viable one to my mind), was created on the premise that users should corroborate for themselves the state of the protocol. As it is often put in Bitcoin circles, “don’t trust, verify.” That’s why the Bitcoin blockchain is public. And that’s why if you take the responsibility of controlling your accounts (instead of handing that responsibility to these fragile exchanges), you are able to send value all over the world instantly and without permission.

This culture is embedded in Bitcoin’s creation. Just after publicly releasing the code for Bitcoin, pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto put its purpose squarely into view.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

For its part, Bitcoin has–through much discipline and more than a few internal fights–retained all the attributes that Satoshi found lacking in traditional currencies. But the cryptocurrency space at-large has spent year after year rediscovering all the problems associated with traditional currencies. It appears almost entirely based on trust, and it’s increasingly clear that untrustworthy people largely lead it.

If Bitcoin was designed to avoid the problems of legacy finance, crypto appears equally designed to readopt them.

In the first bitcoin block ever mined, known as the Genesis Block, Satoshi placed a coded reference to the problem of trust in currencies and the requirement of bailouts that inevitably follow when such trust is abused. Because it was a newspaper headline, the message partially operates as a timestamp to indicate that the chain kicked off on that particular date. But it was also perhaps an effort to communicate that Bitcoin would work differently than the system that led us to that crisis.

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Nevertheless, CZ just revealed a possible rescue package for future faltering crypto companies and banks

To reduce further cascading negative effects of FTX, Binance is forming an industry recovery fund, to help projects who are otherwise strong, but in a liquidity crisis. More details to come soon. In the meantime, please contact Binance Labs if you think you qualify. 1/2

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) November 14, 2022

What could go wrong? In the immortal words of The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” (read more)

Case in point, Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Wednesday alongside several of his colleagues, declared the election “over” and insinuated Senate Democrats now had the mandate to ram their amnesty agenda through because Americans “rejected” the supposedly “deeply anti-immigrant message of the MAGA Republicans”:

Senate Democrats and recipients and advocates of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, held a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol stressing that December is their best chance in the foreseeable future to protect, and even save, the decade-old program.

[…]

“The election is over,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Now let’s do the right thing. Now let’s roll up our sleeves and get this done. Americans sent a clear message [in the midterms]. They rejected the deeply anti-immigrant message of the MAGA Republicans.”

During the same presser, Schumer suggested that a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants must be established ASAP, imploring ten GOP Senators to come on board in the lame-duck session because our country is allegedly “short of workers” and is not “reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to”:

“Now more than ever we’re short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants — the DREAMers and all of them — because our ultimate goal is to help the DREAMers — but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented, there are here.”

Watch:

Chuck Schumer says Democrats want to pass an immigration bill because "we have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to."

Schumer then calls for amnesty for "all 11 million or however many" illegal immigrants in the U.S. pic.twitter.com/Ws3thMaEbw

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 16, 2022

Undoubtedly, Schumer’s version of a pathway to citizenship for illegals includes the right to vote because instantly creating millions more potentially new Democrat voters is at the heart of any Democratic open borders/amnesty policy related to the southern border.

That said, others were quick to point out that maybe had Democrats not been such staunch proponents of abortion on demand and put such a deemphasis on the traditional family unit, then perhaps Americans might actually be reproducing more or something:

Americans aren’t reproducing the way they should, so instead of encouraging natural marriage and discouraging abortion, Democrats do the opposite then claim the only solution to a low birth rate is amnesty for illegal immigrants. https://t.co/xXnkEJU6w2

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) November 16, 2022

Left wing ghouls promote abortion as a civic duty of every women alive But we have a population that's not reproducing like it used to. hmmm

Here's a thought, stop slaughtering preborn children.

Every time a dem speaks, my IQ drops 5 pts….and I honestly can't afford that. https://t.co/1skSoOXwW3

— Scott Johnson (@ruffedge) November 16, 2022

**Destroys marriage, also makes it nearly impossible for people to have a family on a single income**

“Oh wow, look at that, people aren’t having kids” https://t.co/a8CaLQFqew

— HRSTY (@Hrstyyy) November 16, 2022

Flashback:

Kamala Harris: “Women are Getting Pregnant Every Day and This is a Real Issue” https://t.co/pYkeWQEX20 pic.twitter.com/BNQrNxa1fe

— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) July 25, 2022

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh and others suggested that Schumer was advocating for “The Great Replacement Theory” out loud:

This is literally the Great Replacement, clearly outlined by Chuck Schumer https://t.co/zLCnGtImmg

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 16, 2022

The idea that it is US policy to deliberately replace white people through immigration and demographically transform the country is a racist conspiracy theory

Schumer: we are going to demographically replace white people through immigration as a matter of policy https://t.co/0MB2OF0987

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) November 16, 2022

I suspect popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who The Usual Suspects, including Chuck Schumer, have accused of racism over his alleged peddling of such hotly-debated theories, is going to have a field day once he gets a hold of Schumer’s comments.

To prevent any threat of honest elections in Michigan’s future, Michigan Democrats came up Proposal 2, amending Michigan’s Constitution to mandate drop boxes, allow unlimited third-party funding of ballot harvesting, prohibit election audits except as conducted under the supervision of the secretary of state, and ban effective voter ID laws. 

Drop boxes and ballot harvesting means that canvassers can cajole, bribe, or scare you into voting their way and then drop off the ballot anonymously. The prohibition on legislative or independent election audits means that there is no effective check on any fraud scheme to which the secretary of state is a party. The ban on effective voter ID laws means that all anybody has to do to vote as somebody else is to sign in as them at the polling place. 

Until it was too late, until after Election Day, I heard nothing about Proposal 2. Its proponents outraised its opponents three to one, with almost half of the contributions laundered through the Democrats’ national dark money slush fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund. 

Why should those of us beyond Michigan have been alarmed before it was too late? Michigan now joins Pennsylvania, which prohibits signature verification of completed mail-in ballots, the only even theoretically effective way to prevent mail-in voter impersonation, in the Blue Wall of Fraud. That is my name for a set of states which as recently as 2016 went Republican in statewide and presidential elections, but (in part during the darkest days of the COVID panic) erected voting laws that made their procedures untrustworthy and unreviewable. How Republicans can recapture the presidency while the Blue Wall of Fraud stands is frankly beyond me.

By constitutionalizing a ban on honest elections, Michigan has gone even further than Pennsylvania, because the Michigan legislature cannot roll back any of this wickedness without first getting statewide voter approval under these utterly dishonest rules. Legislative elections, which in the United States are always local, are less vulnerable to fraud and force than statewide elections, in part for the cynical reason that if you can steal an election in a legislative district, you probably have the local organizational muscle to win it more or less honestly. But a statewide election can be stolen by a single locality stuffing a ballot box, with the active complicity or willful blindness of partisan state executive officials.

What can be done now? Beyond Michigan, be on guard against similar steals. 

But in Michigan, not much. Election theft is so easy in Michigan after Proposal 2 that it hardly counts as a crime and I cannot see any state-based legal strategy that would work to fight it.  True, such manifestly dishonest ways of running elections are clear civil rights violations, subject to congressional policing and federal executive action, and the Feds can trump the Michigan Constitution if they have the will to do so. 

But without honest elections in every state in the Rust Belt can Republicans even win the presidency to enforce civil rights in Michigan? The 2024 map looks pretty bleak to me. 

The only way I can see to apply nationwide pressure from below against these corruptions of the electoral process is for actual partisans of democracy to boycott the states that offend against it. Forget Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler, patriots: buy a Tesla from Texas, or a Toyota from Kentucky—and remind at every opportunity your relatives and former friends from Michigan that under their new constitution they are either slaves or fools of the fraudsters and their billionaire funders. (read more)

Nevada appears to have gone down on the Senate side, which means the game's over in terms of real obstruction of Biden's agenda, particularly when it comes to judges.  That could be quite important although those who are at least somewhat-likely to leave the USSC in the next two years aren't in the group that would produce a shift.  That's the only good news, however.

As I write this the House remains undecided with a real possibility that Pelosi remains speaker!  So much for a red wave; as I said a couple of days ago it's more like blood-tinged piss at this point.

It is looking increasingly-likely that the FTX story is going to be both pivotal and wildly illegal, reaching not just into financial crimes but actual control of the government via monetary kickback from foreigners, specifically Ukraine.  It is already known as factual that FTX donated very heavily to Democrats,  including Biden's 2020 election and affiliated races.  This standing alone is not illegal because we have made "Super PACs" and other similar games a legal exercise, but what is now known is that FTX didn't actually have the money on an "earned" basis and, it appears, stole from their customers, which is definitely not legal and since you must first have funds to spend them on political campaigns as that stands they stole funds and involuntarily, from the standpoint of their customers, funded Democrat races with that money.  It is illegal to do that.

The worse part is that it is alleged a very material amount of the cash that went over to Ukraine from the US Government was recycled by the Ukraine Government and officials through FTX and then into those Democrat campaigns.  This is wild-eyed illegal in that foreign entities are absolutely forbidden from giving anything of value to any political campaign in the United States no matter how it is done.  It is just as illegal for a foreign entity to donate to a SuperPAC as it is to donate directly to a candidate; it does not matter how you funnel it into the United States, its illegal.

If this occurred -- and again, right now the Ukraine angle is an allegation but that FTX was Biden's second-largest donor in 2020 is fact, along with the donations this cycle -- then we have a true Constitutional question as to whether the House and Senate are in fact legitimate at all or whether Ukraine effectively bought them, in which case neither body of Congress has any legitimacy as a US legislative fixture whatsoever and it might be the case that such extends back to the 2020 elections as well.

The risks here cannot be overstated.  It would be entirely rational for all of the GOP-led states and areas to declare Congress and all of its acts, and those of Joe Biden over the next two years void if in fact control of the House and Senate can plausibly be tied to funds that flowed through Ukraine, into FTX and then back into US election campaigns.

Let's hope this is bullshit because if its not it would be hard to argue against the "Red" states deciding to form a compact and do exactly that in response.  I remind you of the political color that is in control of basically all food and energy production in the United States.  If you think these GOP areas do not hold the "nuts" hand in such a circumstance, should they decide to act in concert, you're dead wrong.

Leaving that ball of string aside, however, there are two other issues that the GOP refuses to face and these are of their own making.  The GOP's "leaders" are all throwing shade at someone else with exactly nobody in the GOP taking ownership of their own head-shooting and yes, it was a literal gun-in-own-mouth circumstance across the board.

The first is the jabs and the catastrophic outcome on-balance, much of which is yet to be suffered.  Trump pushed them hard along with the original lockdowns.  While the latter were eventually dropped those who dropped them first are still lying in that they have not repudiated what they did nor done anything to prevent a second occurrence and the jab advocacy remains an unapologetic "feature" of every single Republican Governor, Senator and House Candidate.  Exactly none have smacked Trump over the head with a 2x6 for pushing that crap and ignoring the protocols for safety that were put into US law for good cause after either close calls or outright disasters, Thalidomide being one of them.

Now we have this -- even the "mainstream" media is unable to ignore the safety signal of myocarditis caused by the jabs.  Historically speaking a diagnosis of myocarditis has carried upwards of a twenty percent heart failure rate within the next five years necessitating a transplant and, if there isn't one available, you die.  And despite the short term appearance of everything being ok it frequently isn't.

Equally, the evolution of myocarditis largely varies: albeit short-term prognosis is usually good, with complete or partial recovery, dilated cardiomyopathy with chronic heart failure is the major long-term consequence of myocarditis, developing often several years after the acute onset. 

What's much worse is that only some of these cases get identified; when you see systemic injury indications in a population that all undergoes some act the curve makes clear you're only seeing the immediate impact.  In this case since it is known and has been for a long time that the potential for serious harms including death often occurs several years down the road after what appears to be a complete recovery we have no idea if this time will be typical or if, being induced by the Covid jabs, it is different.

Never mind that we now have conclusive scientific data on myocarditis related to Covid itself.  The virus doesn't cause it; the rate of people who have not been vaccinated but have had Covid getting myocarditis is statistically identical to the historical background average.  In other words the claims of those that "well it might be the virus, not the vaccine" are now scientifically disproved; Covid does not, statistically-speaking, impact your risk at all.  It is now known, in other words, that the myocarditis risk is entirely the result of the jabs and not the disease itself.

If this risk proves up to be typical with historical averages for this condition tens of thousands of young people are going to die as a direct result of these jabs and only a few of those who are going to die are in those who we have already seen fall over from "suddenly."  This will not be over for years and the feedstock for it won't stop until the use of these jabs does and every time I go into a grocery store I am assaulted with advertising to "go get another one."

For a virus that has a less than 0.1% risk of killing you in the first place taking this risk and shoving it on the population was and remains stupid, and to do so unapologetically is criminally stupid and nobody -- whether in health care of the political side of things should get away with that crap.  I warned of exactly this sort of risk but the exact character of it at the time was unknown -- and in fact unknowable, which is why for other than those at very highly-elevated risk from Covid itself there never was an argument for these jabs on the risk:reward merits since it was known prior to their introduction that they never intended to, and did not, perform trials to determine if they were sterilizing.  They not only have proved not to be sterilizing but worse their effectiveness, whatever it might be, is fleeting and in fact the data says it becomes negative within weeks; that is, you're more-likely rather than less to get the virus a few weeks after you get jabbed.

It was especially stupid to "recommend" (say much less require) these jabs for anyone healthy before roughly the age of 50.  That was easy to determine from the NY corner's data within a couple of months of Covid starting, and I pointed it out -- unless you had one or more of a specific set of morbid factors you were nuts to consider it.  Indeed of those 80+ you literally could count the people who didn't have one or more of those factors yet were killed by Covid on your fingers.  In such a case any risk from a jab in such a person is terminally-stupid to accept unless it is proved that the shot interrupts acquiring and transmitting the disease.

However in many areas of the nation the vast majority of the population took the jabs -- while in others, such as this county, roughly half of all eligible have refused.  Some took them willingly and enthusiastically despite knowing the risks were a black box but others were either coerced or conned with statements that were knowingly false and spread all over the media, both ordinary and social, including by "influencers".  Whether they knew they were talking crap is unknown but that doesn't matter; the people who originated the falsehoods knew they were lying and deliberately spread it.  Trump and the other GOP members, along with the Democrats all spread those lies and none have admitted they were full of crap despite every one of them claiming to be either an expert or informed by expert opinion.

Not one has owned up to any of it.

What do you say to the parents of the dead teen who died of suddenly after you said the jab was both safe and effective?  How many tens of thousands either have or will die as a consequence?  You can't take any of this back and yet nobody is taking responsibility for any of what happened -- or what may be yet to come.

"Vote for me -- after I talked you into killing your son?"  Go fuck a goat, asshole, even though not one parent in a hundred who did this to their kid will admit the truth of it openly.

I'd point out inflation but here the Republican attempt to pin that on Biden fails because in point of fact it was Trump that initiated all of the programs that led to the problem and while Biden piled on in point of fact he never would have gotten anywhere without all of Trump's wild money-printing spree in 2020.  You can ignore this if you like but the fiscal year ended September 30th 2020 so nearly all of 2021 was in fact running on Trump's budget and spending as Biden's first fiscal hadn't started yet.  Since that's a 100% bipartisan-caused issue while both sides would love to throw it on the other its a dead-letter election wise, I suspect most of the nation saw it that way and thus it swayed fewer votes than you'd think because there was no faith the Republicans would fix it if elected after they in large part caused it in the first place.

Then there's the demographic shift.  The GOP utterly failed to account for this and that was stupid.  It has long been talked about people from NY or California who move to Florida and then try to impose their left-leaning ideas on where they move to.  That happens when the moves are entirely economic, and frequently they have been -- until 2020.  This was different: The Republican voter was much more likely to abandon Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, New York or California than the Democrat because they disagreed with the lockdowns, masks and other policy decisions while the Democrat voters were more-likely to agree and thus stay rather than pick up and move to a "dangerous" place.  The problem with this from a federal election standpoint is that every vote beyond 50%+1 that moves into an already-Red jurisdiction can harm the GOP's chances in the place where the person moved FROM but has NO benefit in the place they move TO.

Republicans moving from California to Florida doesn't add to Florida's already strong GOP majority at the federal level but it might well cost the GOP a red seat in the House in California's delegation.  Worse, in places like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania it might have cost the GOP Senate seats.  Rather than take out the trash in those states the common GOP chestnut "pick up and move" further balkanizes the nation and adds to the risk of a hard schism down the road, but in the immediate term it helps the Democrats.

That brings me to what I believe was the salient issue that I wrote on the other day:  Abortion.

Oh, I know, "that wasn't the real deal" so say many of you.

Bullshit, especially at the Federal and Governor levels.

Lindsey Graham tried to codify a federal abortion ban post the USSC tossing of Roe.  He knew damn well it had zero chance of passage, of course, with a Democrat House and 50/50 Senate but he introduced it anyway.  Time and circumstance guaranteed that the Dobbs decision at the USSC would produce at least one stupid outcome before the election and it did when Louisiana's "trigger law", which banned basically all abortions, came into play with a woman carrying a fetus discovered to have no functional cerebral development.  Said fetus had no chance of anything other than, if forced to be born, a nasty and extremely short life guaranteed to both lead to death and the impoverishment of the parents via the costs of medical care during that time.  It wasn't anyone's "fault" that this fetal abnormality occurred and this is exactly the sort of corner case that turns what sounds a like "reasonable" bill into a draconian monster that keeps women, in particular, up at night.  Its agonizing enough for a couple to face the fact that their conceived child (assuming they wanted and intended same) will die and there's nothing they can do about it.  Its even worse to then insist on top of that the parents' financial and personal destruction along with the loss of their kid.

Anyone trying to mandate that deserves the absolute worst things that can be done to them and yet this is exactly what the idiotic legislatures of several states have tried to force on people smug in the knowledge that there was no immediate blowback possible because Roe blocked the imposition of the trigger law.  Then Roe goes away and.... oops.  The Democrats and their sycophants in the media amplified this sort of situation with good cause; it is perfectly legitimate to capitalize on your opponent's stupidity.

What the Republicans at a national level could have immediately said when Dobbs surfaced, neutering their argument, was something like this:

We stand for the sanctity of life.  However, we also recognize that there are rare circumstances that do arise in which there are no good choices, only ones that are bad and worse than bad.  We also recognize that it is for this very reason that the Constitution delegates nearly all questions to the States. We are long beyond the point where we, claiming to be the party of personal responsibility and freedom, must move in that direction rather than the opposite.  The more possible resolutions exist within the 50 states when such circumstances arise the more-likely the better options for the inevitable corner cases will filter up to the top over time and the poor options will be discarded.  In this case the woman in question used exactly that process and pointed to a distinct but fixable flaw in the Louisiana Law while avoiding the personal destruction of both her and her family; she traveled to New York.

We, as Federal lawmakers, recognize that it is absolutely unacceptable for us to attempt to tell a woman, or couple, that finds themselves in this situation they have no choice but to take upon themselves both personal and financial destruction along with the inevitable death of their child.  We vow that we not only shall not do so, we will take all necessary acts to prevent a lunatic fringe from enacting such a requirement, even if said action comes at the cost of our lives.  Indeed our nation exists, and has continued to exist, precisely because the Founders recognized that one size does not fit everyone.  No man or woman, despite their intelligence, can foresee all circumstances and yet law, when passed, must be construed against whatever circumstance may arise in the future.

We trust that in the coming years the States will tune their own legal codes in response to these circumstances, and that those who find themselves on the wrong side of same through no fault of their own will still have a means of avoiding that personal disaster and remain able to bring appropriate pressure on said State Legislatures.

This is in fact how a Federal Republic is supposed to work since we are all imperfect in our design and execution of the law within the United States.  In the final analysis federalism worked and protected the rights of all involved in a difficult situation neither foreseen or addressed in the original legislation.  We recognize what happened here, our responsibility for part of it, and will enhance, rather than try to destroy or damage, that process going forward.

In short we trust the wisdom of the Founders who devised many state laboratories against which to test that which governments claim to know over the process of time, filtering through the democratic process of elections that which works and that which does not.  We declare as Republicans that we will not tamper with this at the Federal level and we additionally vow to prevent anyone else, irrespective of their political party, from doing so -- so help us God.

Of course they didn't.  None of them did.

I challenge you to find one Republican running who said anything approaching the above.  You can't and yet it only would take one or two Senators to lock up the Senate on all abortion-related legislation for the next two years.  That is if just one or two of the Republican candidates had said exactly this and convinced voters they meant it in the close states they would have won since you only had to persuade a few thousand people, and out of a few million that's easy.

I'm willing to bet that there was not one race with a less than 5% margin that wasn't winnable on this statement alone.

That's all it took.  In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia.  More than enough to have the majority and in the House such a statement would have produced a blowout to the GOP side.

We got neither, and none of the so-called "Standard Bearers" on the GOP side, whether it be DeSantis or Trump said anything like this.  Add to that the backdrop of one of the sitting Senators, Graham, introducing a bill aimed directly at the wrong side of this issue and if you think that didn't wind up moving a lot of votes, especially unmarried women or those not intending children irrespective of their marital status yet of child-bearing age you're nuts.  Exit polling said abortion was indeed #2 behind the economy on most voter's minds which means it was almost-certainly good for at least a 5% swing in the vote outcome in virtually every contest.

Now go down the list of races and show me which ones were lost to the Democrats by 5% or less.  Other than in places where the Democrat could run against God himself and win (the same districts, of course, exist on the other side) every one of those races was intentionally forfeit as a result of the GOP's failure to do this.

It is the leadership of the party that owns this -- McConnell, McCarthy, DeSantis and Trump, to name four, along with Graham who is of course one of the "party elders."  They knew damn well that it would produce this sort of shift in the vote and believed they didn't need it or even worse that it wasn't the right thing to do.

That was both wrong and stupid so now the decision, if you don't like Biden, is whether you're going to allow the existing GOP to be the minority party or you will force them ALL out here and now without fear or favor, putting into the GOP the clear responsibility to take a rational position on a national basis, to ensconce it in the platform and make it a pass:fail test that admits no exceptions for anyone running for national office under that banner under pain of being primaried, recalled, personally and politically buried and destroyed.

If you don't the GOP is finished as a party that can hold either house of Congress or the Presidency in the future as this point of attack is both true and will be relentlessly used to shift votes to the Democrats from here forward.  It worked, it was stupid for the GOP to allow this to happen and unless the GOP changes here and now as a national force they're finished as like it or not women are half the voting population and they will NOT vote for their own personal and financial destruction.

Neither Trump nor DeSantis can win in 2024, never mind anyone else, without addressing this point. (read more)

Now, contrast that feeling of deep assurance and Main Street economic stability against the reality of a current, conniving, self-interested Wall Street political class as the reference, and ask yourself what is that feeling of assurance worth?  It’s priceless.

You see, back in 2015 when Donald Trump first announced his intention to run for the presidency the following year, the assembly on these pages had spent years fighting against the corrupt republican political establishment while most just strolled by oblivious to it.  We assembled as The Last Refuge, and we immediately spotted the possibility Donald J Trump represented.

I felt that way because I could see the cancerous rot that was destroying the working class and simultaneously infecting the Republican party.

Severe measures would be needed to counteract this Machiavellian political construct in DC that was only getting worse.  We needed a major disruption and Donald Trump was ideal for that role.

As I look at the 2024 landscape, what I see different is what I see better.  Just about everyone now sees the level of corruption that exists in the apparatus of government, thanks to President Trump’s first term in office.

Additionally, President Trump purged the conniving DeceptiCons, the duplicitous Republicans who existed to maintain the UniParty, by forcing the GOPe liars to expose themselves in his opposition.   No longer is a conversation needed to convince people that most politicians are part of one DC UniParty apparatus.  Two wings of the same corrupt vulture feeding on the carcass of our republic.  Everyone can see that now, thanks to Donald Trump.

Despite their refusal to accept reality, the Bush, Cheney, McConnell, McCain, Romney Republican Party is gone.  Donald Trump destroyed it.  The Republican Party will never again be the Bush-Romney Republican Party.  Donald Trump opened the door, and the working-class has moved in to take control.  The Republican party is not going back to the Bush/Romney outlook, regardless of how much Mitch McConnell tries to scheme its return.

We need a Big Ugly wrecking ball to unseat the corrupt power structures that Trump alone made visible. There is no other person in this era of our nation’s history with the capacity to do that.  Only Donald J Trump has the energy and fortitude to carry out this fight.

President Trump is the people’s response to The Great Reset by saying, “like hell you will.”

I would not miss this opportunity for anything.

I’m all in. (read more)

The same people who have always, deep down, despised Trump simply cannot resist the latest opportunity to pull out their knives and stab him yet again. They interpret the results of the midterms without any regard to the events of the last seven years. These midwits act as if the 2020 election fiasco simply did not happen. 

Utterly moronic. Donald Trump is the moderate big-tent conservative the “smart people” in the GOP said we needed. He had enormous broad-based appeal in 2016—winning first time voters and Obama voters by the millions. Donald Trump’s platform centered on bipartisan consensus issues like immigration, trade, and war.

The 2020 Election

No other sitting president has won, numerically, more voters than Donald Trump did in 2020. You cannot drive anywhere in rural America without running into an endless parade of Trump flags and signs. The Make America Great Again agenda is enormously popular with white middle class and blue-collar voters as evidenced by the massive crowds that Trump garners everywhere he goes in the nation’s heartland. 

Between 2016 and 2020 Donald Trump massively increased his vote total from 62.9 million to 74.2 million. Despite everything the media, corporations, and D.C. ruling class threw at him, Trump massively increased his support across the country. 

That Trump lost in 2020 is the single most bizarre and unprecedented election result in American history [if we pretend the election was not stolen]. It simply does not make sense [if one refuses to believe widespread fraud occurred]. Without acknowledging that fact, no political analyst will be able to make sense of the political landscape after that watershed moment. 

Trump is the first incumbent president since Martin Van Buren in 1840 (!) to have increased his popular vote total but then lost reelection. Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush all lost reelection after losing substantial popular support. In each case, the raw vote totals for each of these presidents went down in their attempts to regain office.

Even Van Buren is not a useful comparison. In 1836, he won against a field of five serious candidates. In 1840, he faced only a single opponent. 

Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection effort defies all political common sense, just as the Democratic Party’s unusually strong midterm showing in 2022 makes a mockery of our traditional understanding of political fundamentals. Since 1922 there have been only three previous instances—1934, 1962, and 2002—in which the president’s party gained (or did not lose) Senate seats and lost fewer than 10 House seats in the president’s first midterms.  

And all this happened while Joe Biden remains underwater in popularity, inflation is at historic levels, and voters overwhelmingly believe the country is on the wrong track. Brushing aside the Republican failure as simply a result of poor candidate quality and a national love of abortion is idiotic. 

Democrats ran a literal stroke victim and a dead guy this cycle and both candidates won. This is not politics as usual. Trying to fit the 2022 or 2020 elections into our traditional understanding of the American electorate simply won’t work. That’s because the establishment altered the rules of the game post-Trump.

Donald Trump broke with the liberal consensus. He didn’t start new wars, he tried to get along with establishment boogeymen like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and he called for a wall on the southern border. The oligarchy that runs the country simply could not countenance a second term by this traitor to their class. Trump abandoned the ruling establishment in order to become a champion of the people. That alliance posed (and still poses) a deadly threat to the hegemony of our ruling class. 

White middle-class Americans, in the rulers’ view, are subjects and not citizens. The aim of every election after 1945 and before 2016 was to give the rubes the illusion of political choice while maintaining a consensus in favor of globalist liberalism. Trump smashed that old understanding and ushered in the possibility of a new kind of politics. 

For that sin, the oligarchs banded together to destroy Trump. In February 2020, Trump was riding high. It seemed clear he was going to cruise toward an utterly crushing reelection victory. Soleimani was dead. Gas prices were under $3 a gallon nationwide. The stock market was at all time highs. Russiagate had fallen apart. The Democratic primaries were a mess: Joe Biden had lost primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. 

Donald Trump literally took a victory lap at the Daytona 500. 

And then, all of a sudden, the entire world lost its mind over COVID. None of this was an accident. The ensuing changes to the American electoral process that dramatically expanded mail-in voting were designed intentionally to make a Trump victory impossible. Despite barely campaigning and an utter lack of voter enthusiasm or personal likeability, we are expected to believe that career politician and twice-failed presidential candidate Joe Biden won a crushing and completely legitimate victory in November 2020 after the implementation of these radical changes in election law. 

The Real Character of the Regime

Anyone who takes this proposition seriously does not understand the real character of our regime. The Left utterly dominates every institution of American political life. We are not a republic governed by a constitution but a despotism ruled by an elite class. American elections are neither secure nor legitimate. They no longer represent the rational and deliberate will of the nation’s citizens. The millions of mail-in ballots that get injected into the process now during every election cycle make such secure deliberation impossible. The massive party machinery erected by the Democrats, backed by billions of dollars in activist, corporate, and media support, can spew out desired results with little regard to the actual will of the people. 

This is all a farce. Republicans watching this unfolding crisis are often tempted to despair: “What can we possibly do now.” Plenty, but the Right needs to grasp the true nature of its situation.  

The old constitutional order is dead. The 2020 election made that perfectly clear. In many places, winning elections is no longer a feasible option for the Right, no matter how popular its message is among middle class and blue-collar Americans that make up the backbone of the nation’s might. 

But victory at the ballot box is not the only way to seize power. Instead of despairing at the unfairness of it all, the Right needs to get tougher, stronger, and more focused.

Donald Trump prevailed by embracing a platform of national survival. His heirs should do the same. Republican candidates at every level should never open their mouths to speak about political matters without mentioning reducing immigration, ending unfair trade, and putting an end to foolish American involvement in foreign wars. 

There is little sense in committing to fighting a culture war when we don’t even have a country. Without a platform of national survival, the Republican Party will not win on issues of the family, marriage, and abortion. Defeating the radical gender apologists will only be possible once we address deeper existential issues.

Open borders, a limitless flow of cheap Chinese goods into the country, and endless overseas wars sap the blood and treasure of the American heartland. These poisons enervate us as a nation and as a people. Mass immigration is the greatest scheme of voter fraud in American history. Democrats will let democracy choose the nation’s rulers . . .  just as long as they get to choose the demos (or people) doing the voting! 

The modern Democratic Party has become a vehicle for communism. This is not to say that modern liberals are fervent believers in the Marxist materialist dialectic. Rather, they are motivated by the fundamental impulse behind Marxism—resentment of the strong, beautiful, and excellent. Communism is a movement of biological and spiritual losers against the continued existence of western civilization. 

The vicious and racist character of the modern Left is perfectly understandable within this framework. These radicals hate America, hate its heroes, and, most of all, hate its people. The fact that America was once (and still remains) a white majority country is enough to drive the Left to madness. The 2020 riots and critical race theory are just two expressions of this ethnic narcissism, resentment, and anger.

How the Right Can Get Tough

The Right isn’t going to triumph in this spiritual war for the future of mankind by adopting the One Weird Trick mentality of midwit conservative commentators with their credentials, policy proposals, and 10,000-word essays. What is needed now is the inculcation of toughness, a gritting of the teeth. The Right needs to get strong and not only in a metaphorical sense.

The partisans of the Right need to lift weights, buy guns, and find comrades. The future of the fight against the latest iteration of global communism requires that young men especially take up the cause of liberty and moral righteousness. They are needed now more than ever. The Boomers, whatever their virtues and vices, do not represent the future. 

The Right needs to inspire and motivate the people in ways that only Donald Trump has touched on. It needs to be able to mobilize millions. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing protest are the most promising political weapons of the future Right. 

This movement must cultivate extra-legal sources of power. The Left dominates the institutions. It is not possible right now to take back those sources of power. The Right must attack them instead. It must cultivate distrust toward the entire liberal project and make the illegitimacy of all institutional authorities clear. The same doctors mandating that you get the jab believe that mutilating a child’s genitals is “affirming” and just, and that a baby in the womb is not a human being. Their authority and “expertise” is fundamentally worthless.

It seems doubtful whether the Right can win national elections going forward. The oligarchy has made clear it will not brook this kind of dissent. But that does not make voting or attempts at seizing power through these avenues wholly useless. Republicans in red states should tamp down on election misbehavior. Voting should be done in line with the Constitution—on a single day, not over the course of weeks, months, or seasons. Voting should be done on paper ballots, in-person, and with valid identification. 

Voters should be required to re-register for each and every election in order to ensure that voter rolls are as clean as possible. Requiring even the most basic effort from citizens in order to vote will dramatically reduce liberal success at the polls. The more secure the election, the less likely it is that Democrats will win. Funny how that works.

But these measures to save republican and constitutional government are unlikely to be enough. They will, however, make crystal clear to every observer the radical differences that result from secure and insecure elections. This will help further delegitimize the authority of the elites.

The Right is down but it is not out. It does not need massive institutional support, financial backing, or propaganda to win. It has the truth on its side. The Mujahideen fighters who brought the Soviets to their knees in Afghanistan were outmanned and outgunned. And yet they removed the godless occupiers from their land. The modern American Right should take the same attitude. We are not bound to the four-year election cycle. We fight on God’s time. We will fight for our country, our faith, and our children until we win. God is on our side. Glory be to God. (read more)

On Election Day 2020, we went to bed with Trump as the obvious victor—he had to win only one of the several states still in play. We woke up with Trump as the likely loser. I had a feeling we’d been cheated.

Of course it was only a feeling, but I noticed it was shared by a surprising number of people in “deep blue” Connecticut: Enthusiasm for Trump 2020 had run higher than for any presidential candidate people could remember. Higher than it had for Obama the first time around. And it was all just a mirage?

I was—still am—a full-stack software developer. I got a call from a voter integrity nonprofit who’d been in business long before I’d considered voter fraud a serious problem. They asked me to put together an emergency team to analyze the 2020 election results.  

My team focused on statistical analyses—studies of the very unlikely. Trying to find explanations for why certain late-reporting precincts were three standard deviations from their neighbors (think 1-in-1,000 shot) in areas like ballot-splitting. We found state databases where votes that had already been counted were subsequently deleted, or where thousands of mail-in ballots were received back by the government before they’d even been mailed out (Pennsylvania).  

Other parts of this nonprofit were doing on-the-ground detective work: The confessions of dropbox stuffers in Georgia led us to track and identify hundreds of individual ballot carriers, as well as the organizations that paid them to drive all over the state, delivering the fraudulent votes that changed the outcome.

In Arizona, the most corrupt state in the nation, where dropboxes are unnecessary because it’s legal for one voter to deliver up to 10 ballots, we had video footage of Democratic Party poll workers paying voters to take a stack of 10 ballots and vote them. That video footage led to indictments—but only of the people actually caught on film. The people paying for and organizing the fraud remain at liberty. We know who they are. The FBI knows too, but it’s hard to tell whether they’re interested.

My guys were working day and night on this—we took leaves of absence from our other jobs. There was no time: We had to furnish conclusive evidence before the election was certified. But we worked with patriotic fervor and a sense of service, even of sacrifice, knowing that what we found might prevent our votes—the nation’s votes—from being chucked in the trash can.

But of course we were wasting our time. Because the national-level Republicans, all those prominent persons who had expressed outrage and said they looked forward to seeing what we found, disappeared. When it came time to act, they just melted away (with very few exceptions, of whom Doug Mastriano—a genuinely good man who just “lost” his election in Pennsylvania—was one).  

Mind you, this shouldn’t have been too surprising, given that we had plenty of evidence of Republican complicity. We even had a source in Arizona who fingered the late John McCain (“the worst senator Arizona ever had”) as a recipient of the services of the biggest fraud organizer in the state (a Democrat).  

Right before my eyes, the uniparty emerged like some swamp monster. I’d made fun of all those tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists for years, and now I was wearing the hat myself. But I’d seen it with my own eyes. I didn’t have the luxury of pretending that Trump lost.

It wasn’t the Democrats who stole the election in 2020. It was the politicians. The Democrats couldn’t have gotten away with it without the Republicans handing it to them and looking the other way.

I won’t be analyzing this election too, because I already know how it’s done. I’ve seen how the sausage is made. And I know there were no real election integrity reforms between 2020 and 2022 except in Florida—which is why, by total coincidence, Florida is the only state in which the “red tsunami” actually happened. But that’s also why I moved to Florida: I want the politicians we elect, not the politicians the politicians elect. 

And while this whole exercise may have fatally crippled my faith in our system, it did teach me a few lessons, and it has allowed me to answer this important question about election fraud: People want to know how election fraud efforts are coordinated at a national level. The answer is, they’re really not.

Election fraud is not about ideology. It’s about money. There is no ideological component to voter fraud whatsoever. Political corruption is simply one variety—the most powerful—of organized crime. It happens on local and state levels: The big cheese in a small town manipulates the election so he can control the school board, so he can get the government’s construction contracts. Even in a small town, that’s hundreds of thousands or millions in patronage. It’s real money—your money. And he takes it.

If you add up these local and state elections, you end up with a stolen national election. But with no coordination, and with no ideology behind it. Leftist politicians “believe” in big government because big government steals your money and transfers it to them. The Marxist university professors who endorse the results are just useful idiots.

The machine didn’t hate Trump because he wrote mean tweets or because he was a right-winger or a populist—they hated him because he’s not part of the machine. He has his own money. 

But this is all up to you now. I can’t pretend that Pennsylvania actually preferred a severely disabled stroke victim to a Trump-endorsed candidate. I can’t pretend that, while incumbent presidents lose seats in the midterms, Biden is so much more popular than Obama was that he escaped a similar “shellacking.” I can’t pretend that abortion was a bigger issue for the young voters than taxes, lost jobs, inflation and war. I can’t pretend this election wasn’t stolen. But you can. (read more)

Conservative Treehouse, November 2022

When election day became election month, mail-in ballots replaced in-person voters, the electoral world changed forever.  It is not changing back.

Democrats, expert in anything government-related, drove states to change laws, increase voting days, and loosen voter standards.  Republican leadership dozed.

Democrats, leftist non-governmental organizations, Big Tech invented every conceivable way to manipulate the ballot process: collect ballots, drop into streetside bins, fill them out if the voter doesn’t.

That is a ballot-gathering strategy.  It works!

Republicans remained stuck in the same “voter strategy” for the last decade: yard signs, fund raising, obscure websites, TV ads.

The raw material of the ballot-gathering strategy is the phantom voter or address.  Every ballot needs to tie to someone – even if only a name on a list.

Live, votable ballots accumulate at addresses where the indicated voter does not reside.  Those ballots gathered, are the inventory of electoral victory.  He who gathers them can vote them.

The ballot-gathering system was frictionless until 2020.  Thousands of phantom addresses inhabited every state’s voter list.

Clever Leftists built a national system, ERIC, now used by about 30 states, to make sure voter rolls protected phantoms.  Using in-your-face messaging, ERIC claimed it was a resource to keep voter rolls clean.

No friction, no challenge.

After 2020, everything changed.

The once frictionless ballot gathering apparatus was challenged in every state as voter integrity teams, citizens at kitchen tables, picked apart voter rolls.  They quickly found tens of thousands of dead or moved voters.  There were innumerable addresses where no voter could possibly live.

For the first time, there was pushback against ballot gathering.  Citizens demanded voter rolls be cleaned, and addresses be real.  In too many cases, affidavits with photographs of an empty lot where several voters claimed to live, failed to convince a judge to action.

Again, from the Conservative Treehouse:

“Wisconsin tried essentially the same thing as PA and MI, except there was already residual election roll cleanup (hurts the ballot team) and strong election day turn our (helps vote team).  

Conservative Treehouse,November 2022

A Wisconsin voter integrity team found, after reviewing scores of counties and localities, the number of ballots and votes cast lined up.

Democrats know how many votes they need and cast them during the forever campaign time in the name of phantoms.  Their ballot inventory comes from real ballots sent to fake addresses, then collected by someone – never a Republican – and voted.

When evaluating any system, one asks: is there an inherent contradiction?  Is there something in the system, that when pushed to scale will make it fail or blow up or both?

Quiet, anonymous Wisconsin heroes, working in a small office, virtually unfunded – proved how to collapse the Democrat ballot gathering apparatus.

For the ballot-gathering strategy to work, Democrats need tens of thousands of phantom addresses and voters.  A few is not enough.  Without thousands of loose ballots tied to phantoms, the edifice comes crashing down.

They also need Republicans to do nothing.

The Wisconsin team proved, in this election, adding even a small amount of friction – removing thousands of phantom names and identifying several hundred thousand incorrect addresses, has a massive impact on the ballot-gathering system.

Our Wisconsin election heroes applied Fractal Programming technology, funded by Mike Lindell, at scale to find and challenge phantoms.  The process is explained at www.Omega4America.com.

They went to scores of county registrars and challenged thousands of phantoms – proof in hand.  Quietly, below the radar, they showed registrars, whose job it is, that Bill Jones was not a real person.  They helped clean up addresses that were wrong – either typos or fake.

On election day, the Wisconsin Democrats did not have enough phantoms or mail-in ballots to go around.  A Republican senator might have been saved by these actions.

The good news of the now permanent ballot gathering strategy is that the Democrats need to keep voter rolls fat with the dead, people living in U.P.S. boxes and RV Parks.  They need to physically gather all those floating ballots and vote them.

Republicans have a different, less steep hill to climb – keep voter rolls as clean as possible.  Identify in advance where ballots will be mailed to addresses where nobody lives – and shut those ballots down.

For the Republicans, any friction injected into the ballot-gathering system has disproportionate benefits – so they have asymmetric advantages.

“Votes require people, ballots require systems.  Republican officials, Republican politicians and the Republican voters need to switch the emphasis from people (votes and poll watchers) to systems in these states.”

Conservative Treehouse, November 2022

Using Fractal Programming, the Wisconsin team showed the impact of introducing friction into the ballot-gathering system.  Even a little friction and everything breaks down.  That is leverage, and that leverage is with the good guys.

The Fractal team is working in about 20 states with a rollout to all states for 2024.  Right now, Fractal analysis is provided by Mike Lindell and the Fractal team.  It needs to go national – injecting gravel into the Democrat ballot-gathering apparatus.

“Organized voter ballot distribution, voter ballot delivery and ballot pickup systems need to be in place by the spring of 2023.  There should be no other priority for any Republican Party or politician in any state where ballot collection, mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes, or ballot harvesting is permitted by law.

Stop campaigning for votes and immediately switch the entire political operation to electioneering for ballots.” 

Conservative Treehouse, November 2022

There may well be a Republican senate in 2023.

Let us all remember how anonymous electoral streetfighters, with few resources, showed how even a little gravel tossed into the Democrat’s ballot gathering apparatus can disrupt a frictionless system in place for 30 years.

Let’s go get more gravel.

Jay Valentine can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com.  The Fractal election microsite is www.Omega4America.com