Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Regardless of who wins the election, the next president likely will have to deal with an economic slowdown next year, several experts told The Epoch Times. The government may try to intervene, but there’s a risk any remedies will cause harm, they said.

On paper, the U.S. economy is chugging along nicely. Unemployment is low, the markets are up, and the gross domestic product (GDP) came in 3 percent above inflation in the second quarter. Third-quarter GDP is expected to climb 2.6 percent above inflation, and median wages increased by nearly 2.5 percent (adjusted for inflation) over the past two years.

Yet, a large proportion of Americans don’t feel like the economy is working well for them.

Only about 21 percent consider business conditions “good”—a far cry from the nearly 40 percent who thought so five years ago, according to Consumer Confidence Index surveys. Self-reported family financial situation has virtually stagnated for the past year, the survey shows. Meanwhile, credit card debt is up about 16 percent over the past two years.

Economic indicators likely won’t remain as encouraging for long, said Lance Roberts, the chief investment strategist at RIA Advisors.

“I think you’re going to start looking at much lower rates of economic growth somewhere sub-2 percent growth as consumers become challenged by making ends meet,” he said.

Steve Hanke, professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, shared a similar concern.

“The economy is running on fumes and is bound to slow down,” he said via email, pointing to the shrinking of money supply in 2022–2023 that has since only partly reversed.

Since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, “there have only been four such contractions: 1920–21, 1929–33, 1937–38, and 1948–49. Three were associated with recessions, and the 1929–33 contraction resulted in the Great Depression,” Hanke said.

Financial markets should brace for a similar slowdown, according to Adam Taggart, founder of Thoughtful Money, a financial education firm.

In recent weeks, Taggart spoke to more than a dozen market analysts and noticed there’s an unusually wide disagreement on the market direction.

His best suggestion is to follow the global liquidity model produced by Michael Howell, chief executive of CrossBorder Capital, a London-based market research firm.

The model indicates that bull and bear markets in today’s economy trace liquidity: how much money is in the system overall. Howell posits that liquidity waxes and wanes in cycles. Right now, he says the market is in an upward cycle that’s likely to peak next year, signaling a slowdown.

“Just like when you throw a ball up in the air as it gets close to its apex, its speed of rise is declining,” Taggart said.

Market predictions, however, assume that “everything remains status quo next year,” Roberts noted.

As the economy slows down, letting a large number of Americans descend into poverty would be politically indigestible for whoever becomes the president. It would be expected for the administration to intervene, he suggested.

Taggart concurred.

“The system will do everything it can to fight it,” he said.

How that may happen would partly depend on who wins.

If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected and gets Congress on her side, her plan would be to institute a series of government programs, such as to finance public housing and subsidize downpayments for first-home buyers.

“That’s very inflationary,” Roberts said.

The programs would be at least partly financed through increased taxes on higher earners, which could offset the impact on government deficit. But that’s not the main issue, as Roberts explained.

“Once you start providing capital to people to go buy stuff, that massively increases the demand on the available supply,” he said.

Housing construction can’t be increased at will due to a limited number of people skilled to build them.

“You’re trying to solve a housing problem; you’re going to massively create one at that point,” Roberts said.

“If we give $25,000 to three million people to go buy houses, there’s not enough houses to buy, and they can’t build them that fast. So that’s going to be very inflationary.”

Not only would housing prices rise but also construction labor, commodities, and transportation, which all are tied to the housing supply chain, Roberts said.

If former President Donald Trump wins and gets Congress on his side, his plan would be to cut taxes, increase domestic energy production, cut regulations, and impose tariffs on imports.

Cutting taxes and regulations stimulates the economy, as does cheaper energy. Tariffs, on the other hand, could create problems, Roberts said.

Even if the tariffs are calibrated to minimize impact on domestic prices, they would “put pressure on foreign trading partners,” he said.

“It’s certainly going to ramp up a lot of the rhetoric in the market … That’s going to make the markets nervous at that point, depending on how aggressive these tariffs are.”

That has real economic impact as nervous investors are more hesitant to invest.

He also suggested Trump would press the Federal Reserve to “cut rates more aggressively.”

“The Fed’s not going to respond to that, but it’s going to give a lot of rhetoric to the markets,” he said.

“So you potentially get an environment next year where you get a bit stronger growth, but a lot more volatility—both in markets as well as the economic data.”

Taggart was skeptical that either administration would be able to cut deficits on a meaningful scale.

Hanke agreed.

“I think either administration will embrace the newfound economic religion: spend, spend, spend—with Harris pouring even more coals on the fire than Trump,” he said.

Split Congress Scenario

It could easily happen that whichever candidate wins, she or he won’t get majority in both chambers of Congress. In that case, the Congress would likely remain gridlocked, with neither party getting its way. Government spending would stay in an autopilot mode of about 8 percent annual increases, Roberts said.

“That’s the best outcome for the markets. It’s probably the best outcome for the economy, because nothing actually happens that causes a potential unexpected shock to markets.”

Read the rest here…

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)

Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities

Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders

Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction”

The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

How many times have you heard this is the most important election of our lifetimes in the last few weeks? When Strauss & Howe published The Fourth Turning in 1997, the national debt was $5.4 trillion, and the country was running an annual deficit of $22 billion. We now add $22 billion of debt every 4 days, amounting to $2 trillion per year. They postulated the major catalysts for the next Fourth Turning would be debt, civic decay, and global disorder.

As we enter the 17th year of this Crisis, no one can question their prescience in predicting the facilitators which have propelled this ongoing Crisis thus far. The volcanic debt eruption created by the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street cabal owners in 2008 initiated all the chaos, debt creation, crushing inflation, authoritarian measures, social decay, celebration of delusion, delegitimization of the regime media and their corrupt government co-conspirators, and the rise of Trump. This country, and most of the western world, is experiencing extreme economic, social, political and military distress, as this upcoming election is guaranteed to ignite a civil and global conflagration.

No matter the result of this election, the losing side will not accept the outcome. It has been unequivocally evident for several weeks Trump would win this election in a landslide, on par with Reagan’s destruction of Mondale in 1984, if the Democrat cheat machine of fraudulent mail-in ballots, illegal hordes voting, and ever trusty Dominion vote switching algorithms cannot overcome his overwhelming margin.

Those pulling the levers are willing to do anything to retain power, not excluding assassination of Trump, initiating WW3 or some other manufactured crisis to cancel the election, illegal lawfare schemes to convict Trump of fake crimes or prevent his inauguration in January, or releasing their BLM, Antifa, and Illegal terrorist hordes into the streets to wreak havoc and initiate civil war. The treasonous bastards who stole the 2020 election and have committed crimes against the American people fear the retribution and prison sentences which could be inflicted upon them if Trump wins. They will not go silently into the night.

The Deep State skullduggery implemented through election fraud shenanigans, using their captured Soros judges and district attorneys to commit illegal lawfare, will rile the normies (aka deplorables, aka garbage) if they feel another election has been stolen by these treasonous totalitarians. Normal Americans have reached their breaking point. They have seen their bank accounts defunded by the Biden/Harris inflationary tsunami, unleashed by their covid debacle and ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, and their enablers at the Federal Reserve who printed trillions of new fiat, while keeping interest rates at 0% for years.

Anyone living in the real world knows inflation is at least twice as high as the reported government manipulated figures. They gaslight us about GDP growth, number of jobs added (850,000 overestimation last year), unemployment rate (% in labor market hugely underestimated), and every government statistic, in order to portray a false narrative of an economy doing well and raising all boats. The only boats being raised are the yachts of the .1%.

In reality, economic distress is creating psychological trauma on young and old alike. Seniors on fixed incomes and the poor dependent upon welfare, sink further into poverty, as the cost of food, energy, rent, medicine, and most necessities reach all-time highs. No one earning the average income in this country can afford a home. Credit card debt and auto loan debt have reached unpayable levels, and an avalanche of defaults and re-possessions has commenced. Meanwhile, with stock markets and housing markets at all-time highs, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, so the plight of the bottom 90% is of no concern to their day-to-day luxurious existence.

This bifurcation of economic circumstances is evidenced by the populist rage propelling Trump’s campaign. Normal Americans are tired of being screwed over by the system and fed up with politicians, left wing billionaires (Soros, Gates, Bezos, et al), and regime media talking heads demanding they acquiesce to their totalitarian mandates, while being propagandized to believe their provably false narratives about the “great” economy. Biden is president in name only, as proved by his dementia ridden rants and those pulling the strings casting him aside like a piece of trash when he no longer met their needs.

I don’t think Strauss & Howe envisioned the types of social distress which would be ushered in by the ruling oligarchy in a desperate attempt to divide, destroy, and degrade the social fabric of our society, obliterating the common values which helped build this nation. The organized, funded, and promoted invasion of our country by third world bottom feeders with the intent to take the lower paying jobs of native Americans, overwhelm the country’s social welfare system, funnel illegal voters into swing states, and create civil chaos in formerly homogeneous communities, is designed to contribute to the economic collapse of the country, allowing the Great Reseters to implement their new world order machinations.

The race riots, funded by Soros and encouraged by his bought off district attorneys in every shithole Democrat run sanctuary city in America, conducted by his BLM and ANTIFA hired terrorists, were designed to bring down Trump and demoralize the white middle class families who are the backbone of the country. We were supposed to bow down to these race baiters and pretend a drug addict black criminal thug was a saint, while honoring fictitious made-up ridiculous black holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa. The entire narrative has been to make white people take the knee and accept this woke drivel. The goal has been to destroy the community standards we grew up with and replace them with an anything goes mentality of degeneracy and delusion.

The other socially explosive issues designed to divide and conquer have involved pretending mentally ill men are women and vice versa, while mentally ill women encourage the mutilation of their children as a sacrifice to the woke gods. Allowing mentally ill perverted men into women’s restrooms is pure insanity, but corrupt politicians, bought-off government bureaucrats, and woke judges have mandated this dangerously absurd behavior.

Men dominating women’s sports is perfectly fine to these seekers of societal implosion. Allowing and encouraging young girls to cut off their breasts because their batshit crazy mothers suffer from a woke form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a despicable surrender to degeneracy. We are failing our children, resulting in massive levels of depression, drug use, self-mutilation, and suicide among the young.

The most socially distressful act in the history of mankind was our authoritarian government politicians and bureaucrats forcing over 270 million guinea pigs (over 5 billion worldwide), under threat of losing their livelihood and being ostracized from society, to be injected by an experimental gene therapy marketed as a vaccine, that did not prevent people from catching, spreading or dying from the most overhyped flu in history.

The ruling overlords, who planned this fake pandemic (Event 201), successfully created the largest mass formation psychosis among the fearful masses than has ever been achieved through a propaganda of fear campaign. They proved they could force the sheep to willingly lock themselves down and beg to be injected with a toxic concoction designed to kill them suddenly or over time, while reducing fertility and disabling millions, accomplishing a major goal of the Gates depopulation agenda. The pure bloods will never forget or ever forgive those who treated them like trash. The coming civil war will see the dividing lines very much aligned between the jabbed versus the unjabbed.

Political distress has been building in this country since the day Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015, announcing he was running for president. He was able to corral the populist rage of the economically and socially distressed deplorables and achieve the upset of the century against the Deep State chosen one, initiating the Deep State coup against him, which continues to this day. The political system is wrought with fraud, corruption, malfeasance, and a disregard for the proper legal functioning of elections.

The 2020 election was stolen, mainly through fake mail-in ballots supposedly instituted as a one-time covid measure. Now it is a permanent fixture, and systematic fraud is purposely built into the system, as no ID or proof of citizenship is required to vote, illegals are being enabled to vote illegally by the Democrat party, and the judicial system is filled with left-wing activist judges whose sole purpose is to promote criminality and deviancy.

The desperation of the Deep State oligarchs and their hired henchmen within the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and State Department is palpable and exceedingly dangerous, as they are willing to burn down the system to prevent their criminal conspiracy from being revealed. They have tried to imprison and kill Trump already and will continue to do so before his January inauguration. It is probably too late to stop the election from taking place, but nothing they do is too diabolical to exclude at this point. When Trump’s margin of victory exceeds their ability to cheat, they will proceed with plan B and unleash their paid hordes of violent felons in every major city in America, to try and stop Trump from assuming power.

Biden and Harris’ handlers will use every lawfare means at their disposal to prevent the smooth transition of power. The fake January 6 insurrection will seem quaint compared to what these traitors will attempt to pull off. We know they consider us deplorable, garbage, racist Nazis, so that belief allows them to consider us as non-humans and use lethal means to suppress our voices. The Biden-Harris administration updated DOD Directive 5240.01 on Sept. 27 to include provisions authorizing lethal force in certain circumstances when assisting civilian law enforcement. The timing of this change sure seems suspicious, as this volatile election enters the home stretch.

This is where military distress will rear its ugly head. We know the woke military cooperated and conspired with the other Deep State bad actors in the coup against Trump. Milley acted in a treasonous manner behind Trump’s back by communicating with adversaries and planning to override any direct order from the Commander–in-Chief. The military leadership under Biden has proven to be incompetent, committed to diversity & equity, and willing to do the bidding of the forces aligned against Trump.

The possibility of the military participating in violent coup against Trump before he takes office, or shortly thereafter, is not out of the question. When men who know they have committed illegal, treasonous acts feel threatened with exposure and prosecution, they are capable of anything to avoid their fate. Militarily, this is an extremely dangerous period for our nation.

With neocons dominating in Congress, and their regime media partners regurgitating their propaganda talking points about Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, these psychopaths are pushing as hard as possible for WW3. Whether it launches in the Ukraine, Gaza, the Taiwan Straits, or on the border of the two Koreas, their goal is global conflict and obscene profits for the military industrial complex who dole out the bribes. They know Trump is not a war monger and will attempt to broker peace deals in the Ukraine and in the Middle East. Therefore, they are recklessly flailing about trying to initiate a global firestorm before Trump assumes the presidency.

Beware of our “Gulf of Tonkin” false flag incident, which will be used as the basis to go to war with whichever “evil dictator” suits our purposes at that moment. No matter the outcome of this election, there will be blood – whether it be American blood on American soil or American blood on foreign soil, or both simultaneously. Fourth Turnings always accelerate towards a violent denouement, with an unanticipated number of deaths. Over 5% of the male population was killed in the American Civil War Fourth Turning, while 65 million people were killed during the WWII Fourth Turning. With the current level of killing technology, the potential number of casualties in a global conflict would be astronomical and inconceivable to average Americans.

I do not have any misconceptions that the election of Trump can undo the fiscal disaster heading our way. At best, he could delay the timeline for financial catastrophe and possibly keep WW3 from launching during his term.  I even wonder whether the selection of Kackling Kamala and Tampon Tim, the single worst presidential ticket in American history, has been purposely engineered by the Deep State in order to insure the economic and financial implosion happen during Trump’s reign.

Discrediting Trump, as they did by blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression, when it was FDR’s policies that exacerbated the problem, might provide the Democrat Deep State Party with the narrative that Trump’s policies caused the collapse. There is absolute certainty the losers in this election will declare it stolen and refuse to acknowledge the winner. With over 75% of the population expecting post-election violence, there will be violence. Where it leads and what unintended consequences befall the nation are unknown but guaranteed to further split a divided nation.

The core elements of this Fourth Turning Crisis (debt, civic decay, global disorder) were the driving factors at the outset and continue to be the driving factors as we approach the climax of this winter of our discontent in the early 2030s. Between now and then will be the most perilous years of our lifetimes. Panic, chaos, financial disaster, authoritarian measures, civil war, global war, and a myriad of other epic challenges await. They will attempt to abscond with your wealth through their Great Taking plans.

They will attempt to implement their Great Reset though CBDCs, mass surveillance, and totalitarian enforcement of their new world order mandates. They will continue their depopulation efforts through war, vaccines, and starvation of the poor. They will attempt to put a final nail in the coffin of the U.S. Constitution, ushering in their one world government, controlled by billionaire oligarchs, and enforced by their military/police thugs. They are attempting to demoralize the masses, propagandizing them into believing only the government can save them, and forcing them to march into an electronic gulag with no escape routes.

All my ruminations about this Fourth Turning always come down to the potential outcomes laid out by Strauss and Howe twenty-seven years ago, before the turn of the century, and eleven years before the triggering of this Crisis. No matter which channels of distress the volcanic molten lava breaks free from, the next several years will be disconcerting, difficult, destructive, and deathly. There is no escape from the grim reality of what is coming. You cannot be prepped enough to withstand the bitter winter winds which will begin to blow with the outcome of this election.

Nothing will be the same after November 5. Will there ever be another election? Will our country still exist in its current form ten years from now? Strauss and Howe did not predict a specific outcome but provided four realistic possible outcomes. Three out of four are dire, including the end of humanity as a distinct possibility. After reading the recent best-selling book Nuclear War – A Scenario, you realize the world could end in a matter of hours if the weak-minded psychopaths leaders initiate an unstoppable progression of responses.

I know the linear thinking noobs who believe the world always progresses in a straight line will dismiss these warnings as just conspiracy theory doom porn. They have no interest in the cyclical nature of history and will continue to trust the government narrative, enforced by the regime media propaganda mouthpieces, and repeated by the NPCs who make up a major percentage of the population. That’s fine. They can keep their heads in the sand and believe the delusional drivel doled out by those in power, but Fourth Turnings are going to deluge them under a tsunami of reality, pain, death and destruction. That’s just the way it is.

People need to get their heads straight and understand the challenges that lie ahead. I don’t see any easy solutions, and I’m not selling a newsletter with the secret to surviving this Fourth Turning. I’ve been issuing warnings for over a decade, and I’ve seen nothing that has happened or is happening, to make me change my mind.

1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.

2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

I’ve been issuing warnings for over a decade, and I’ve seen nothing that has happened or is happening, to make me change my mind. Befriending like-minded people and summoning all the courage and fortitude you can muster is the best advice I can give.

The best analogy for the next several years is: get prepared to slog many miles through a raging blizzard in sub-zero temperatures with less than 50% chance of survival.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Authored by Patrick Lawrence via Consortium News,

At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either of the two main political parties in the U.S. will do to avoid losing…

Uh-oh. The New York Times is picking up its familiar theme now that the Nov. 5 elections are but a few days out front: Those mal-intended foreigners are again “sowing discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy,” it reported in a piece published Tuesday. 

The Beelzebubs haunting this political season, when everything would otherwise be orderly and altogether copacetic among Americans, are Russia, China and Iran.

Why can’t this year’s version of the old, reliable “Axis of Evil” leave us alone with our “democratic process,” the one the rest of the world envies and resents? Troublemakers, with all their “sowing.” You could probably call them “garbage” and get away with it. 

Uh-oh. We’re already reading of tampered voter-registration forms and forged applications to vote by mail in two districts in Pennsylvania, the populous state where the results in 2020 could not have been blurrier and whose 19 Electoral College votes were decisive in getting Joe Biden into the White House last time around.

But not to worry. In a delightful reprise of one of the truly memorable phrases to come down to us from the 1960s, an election commissioner in one of the districts where officials uncovered the malfeasance tells us, “The system worked.” 

I think I understand.  

I tell you, whenever I read of people in other countries sowing anything, whether it is doubt or chaos or disinformation, and at this point even pumpkin seeds, it always turns out the same. This word “sowing” has been a favorite in the mainstream press since 2016, when we read daily — and of this we were to have no doubt — the Rrrrrussians were “interfering in our elections.”  

Since then, everytime I read of someone sowing something it sows more doubt in my mind — more than I already harbored — that one can take our electoral system, as we have it in the 21st century, the slightest bit seriously.  

This is to say nothing of putting one’s name on it behind a little green curtain in a voting booth.

On the one hand you have the Times, which has diminished itself over the past eight years to little more than the Democrats’ house organ, already preparing to suggest that the malign enemies of American democracy corrupted the elections. Believe me, you will hear this if Kamala Harris loses but not if she wins.  

On the other hand, you have early but clear cases of attempted vote-rigging and local election officials waving these cases off as nothing at all to fret about. It is interesting to consider why said officials profess so cavalier a view.  

I have thought for months that the 2024 elections, discord already in plentiful supply, could easily tip over into a degree of civil chaos beyond anything so far recorded in the American story. Just such a day of reckoning now seems to beckon. 

Neither of the main parties appears prepared to lose. At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either party will do to avoid losing. 

Remnants of Democracy

All by our lonesome selves, it seems to me, we Americans have made a mess of the remnants of our democracy these past eight years.

This is not to suggest American politics has ever been other than, let’s say, in the way of a barnyard. In this, neither of the major parties, whose function since the mid–19th century has been to circumscribe acceptable politics and policy, is free of responsibility. 

But in the matter of responsibility I assign more to the Democrats than to the G.O.P. It was Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump eight Novembers ago that confirmed America’s swift drift into post-democracy.

The Democrats have never recovered from the disruption in 2016 of their dream that history was about to end and their idea of the liberal ethos would eternally prevail, all alternatives withering away the way Marx and Engels thought the communist state would.

Anti-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2016. (Ted Eytan/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

I have long detected that American liberalism has at its core a vein of illiberalism that is essential to its character.

America is simply not, to put this point another way, a tolerant nation. It does not encourage its people to think: It requires them to conform. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming two centuries ago in the two volumes of Democracy in America. 

We are now, post–Clinton, treated to the spectacle of full-dress liberal authoritarianism, and if you do not like the term there are others. De Tocqueville, prescient man, called it “soft despotism.” I’ve always favored “apple-pie authoritarianism.”

Institutional Corruptions

There is a feature of this awful manifestation among NPR–addicted, kale-eating liberals that distinguishes our time as especially discouraging as to the future.

This is their wanton corruption of some of the institutions without which even a semblance of democratic government is impossible. I am thinking particularly of three that figure in the pre-election picture.

One is the judiciary — federal, state, county, local. Beginning with the Mueller investigation, the in-plain-sight corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ridiculous court cases brought against Donald Trump, Attorney–General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the Justice Department to protect President Joe Biden as his son’s influence-mongering schemes came to light — all this in behalf of the Democrats:

Well, as I learned during my days as a correspondent abroad, when the judicial system goes down, the path to failed-state status opens.  

Two is the intelligence apparatus and the military. Intel, from the days of James Clapper and John Brennan, has lined up unequivocally behind the Democrats ever since the brash real-estate man from New York foolishly assumed he could “drain the swamp” — his declaration that he would take on the Deep State.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Feb. 18, 2017. (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

As to the military, the generals thought nothing of declaring eight years ago, at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia and in open letters published in the Times, that they would refuse the commander-in-chief’s orders were Trump to win and attempt a new détente with Russia and an end to “the forever wars.” 

Yes, you’ve got John Kelly, who served in Trump’s cabinet and then as his chief of staff, suddenly calling Trump a fascist — the Democrats’ favorite epithet these past weeks. Doesn’t anyone want to know why Kelly worked closely with a man he considered a fascist? Doesn’t it occur to anyone — it must, surely — that Kelly, a retired Marine general, says these things to serve the party he trusts to keep the wars going and the tax dollars flowing?  

A paradox here, more apparent than real: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and various others like them did not wear uniforms when they served in the Trump administration, but they never took them off. 

If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics. In our post–2016 era, intel and the military are perfectly welcome to operate openly, unabashedly, in the American political process — this because the Democratic Party gives them a wide berth to do so. 

Deep-State Democracy

Now, do you think the Deep State gives a toot about democratic process? Ask the Italians and the Greeks, the Iranians and the Guatemalans, the Japanese, the South Koreans and the Indonesians, the Chileans and the Venezuelans, and… and damn, ask most of humanity at this point. As others have pointed out since the Russiagate days, what the spooks have long done abroad now visits itself upon the American polity. 

The obvious follow-on: Should we be concerned as to whether the Democrats and these institutional allies would let this election go to Trump just by the vote count? 

I am.

As to the third of the institutions that have corrupted themselves in the Democratic Party cause, may I let mainstream media speak for themselves? Apart from independent publications such as the one you are reading, the intent of American media is no longer to inform the public but to protect the institutions they purport to report upon from the public gaze.   

Trump’s “a threat to American democracy,” Harris its savior: It’s a bust at this point. The New York Times has made itself a re-enactment of The New York Times. The Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and this ghastly new chief executive of his, Will Lewis, cannot manage, and doesn’t seem to attempt, even a re-enactment. 

I do not seem to be the only one ill-at-ease at the prospect of mayhem to come after midnight Nov. 5. The Post published a survey Wednesday, conducted in the first half of October, indicating that among voters in the states where the election could go either way, 57 percent are nervous that Trump supporters won’t accept defeat and may resort to violence, while a third of those surveyed think Harris supporters will take it to the street, as they used to say, if the candidate of joy and vibes loses.

Harris campaigning in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 9. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The numbers skewed even more dramatically when The Post asked Democrats about Trump’s people and Trump’s people about Democrats. In a survey The Associated Press published Thursday, you have 70 percent of those polled saying they are “anxious and frustrated.”

Join the party. I cannot, myself, take either candidate seriously. I take seriously the thought that a lot of people will not take the result seriously and a mess will ensue. 

And in this I worry more about Democrats resorting to corrupt conduct than I do the Republicans. Why this, you may ask.

To begin with, I do not at all like the smell of that Times piece quoted at the top of this column. It reeks too strongly of the scene in 2016, when, on either side of the election, the Democrats and all manner of repellent “progressives” conjured of thin air a frenzy of Russophobia from which American has yet to recover. 

Steven Lee Myers, previously of the Times’s Moscow bureau, is now some kind of “disinformation” reporter and led the work on the piece in question. And all is as it was for four years after Clinton’s defeat: no shred of independent reporting or sourcing in anything under his byline. Intel people and other unnamed officials feed this guy like a foie gras farmer feeds his geese. 

This is all you get from our Stevie. And I don’t see anyone trying on this disgraceful stuff in behalf of the Trump campaign. I have suggested my conclusions.

But Jan. 6, Jan. 6, Jan 6! First of all, what happened on Jan. 6 does not rise to “coup” or “insurrection.” It was a protest, with much to suggest the presence of agents provocateurs. And second, there seems to me there was plenty to protest by that point. 

Straight off the top, there was the liberal authoritarians’ perfectly legible collusion to suppress the contents of Hunter Biden’s vastly incriminating laptop computer three weeks before the vote, to the point of blanket censorship of the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America. If this was not open-and-shut election interference someone will have to tell me what constitutes it.

On less certain ground, I have read of many election officials in many states, Pennsylvania high among them, certifying the 2020 results. But a truly convincing, here-are-the-numbers case for these results in states such as Pennsylvania is hard to come by. You never read of Trump’s claims that the Pennsylvania results were rigged. You read only and always of Trump’s “false claims” or “discredited claims” or “disproven claims” to the point you start thinking of Lady Macbeth and how she doth protest too much, methinks.   

Trump addressing The Believers religious group, in July in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

I recall, very imperfectly, seeing research purportedly done by a computer scientist at one of the universities in Philadelphia. Just after the election he or she put out a series of screenshots on social media, time-stamped to the second, that appeared to show the results in a significant number of districts changing all at once and by enough to give Biden a swift come-from-behind victory by a margin of slightly more than 1 percent.  

Genuine or a put-up job, this research? Credible or not credible? I would not dream of judging it, but this is not my point. My point is that there should be no cause to doubt such results as these and, eight years on, as I read it there still is. 

Doubt recreates itself, as you may have noticed, like some organism that regenerates. So we come to the Times’ report Tuesday of attempted voter fraud in Lancaster and York counties, two populous areas of, once again, Pennsylvania.

Campbell Roberston’s piece has just about everything, starting with a headline that has Trump “sowing doubt.” He, Trump, is even “using reports about suspicious voter registrations to cast the election as already flawed.” 

What a cad. What a scoundrel. What a… fascist tyrant. 

It seems that some thousands of forged or otherwise fraudulent voter registration forms and requests to vote by mail arrived recently in the offices of the Lancaster and York election authorities.

So far as one can make out, some official or officials in each county brought these “large batches” of falsified government documents to light. Whereupon other officials in each case smothered this discovery as if suffocating the matter with a pillow. 

Alice Yoder, an election commissioner in Lancaster, put it best, or anyway most preposterously.

“The system worked,” saith Ms. Yoder.

“We caught this.”

I honestly had to read this quotation several times to believe anyone would say this. 

I would like to know a few things about this case that we are not told. 

The batches of forgeries “were submitted by out-of-state canvassing groups,” Robertson reports, groups that remain unidentified.

One, what are canvassing groups and what do they do in whose behalf?

Two, what were such groups doing in Lancaster and York counties if they are not from Pennsylvania

Three, if they are not from Pennsylvania, what were they doing with Pennsylvania election forms that were purportedly genuine?

Just two more questions.

Four, why are the election officials in these two counties not naming the guilty canvassing organizations? This seems to me very troubling. 

And five, what are the party affiliations or otherwise the voting preferences of officials who will not identify the offending organizations and say things such as “The system worked.”

There are no grounds to draw any conclusions whatsoever on this point, given we know absolutely nothing about these people, but I went to the trouble of looking up Ms. Yoder’s c.v. 

There is a bit of the sociologist in all of us, well– or underdeveloped as the case may be. Journalists often make use of their endowments in this line.

Drawing on mine, I would speculate that Ms. Yoder’s c.v., after a careful peruse, is highly suggestive of a Kamala Harris voter, perhaps even of a liberal authoritarian. 

Could be dead right, could be dead wrong. I cannot go beyond more or less idle speculation.

And not more or less idle doubt as Nov. 5 draws close.

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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News or ZeroHedge.