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.

*  *  *

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

Regional media reports and government statements have confirmed that Israeli naval forces have captured an alleged senior Hezbollah official in a daring raid launched from the Mediterranean sea on Friday.

The man described as a high-ranking Hezbollah operative has been identified as Imad Amhaz. Commandos on speed boats reportedly landed on a Lebanese beach and snatched him from a cabin in the early morning hours. 

“A sizable force, suspected to be Israeli, stealthily touched down on the shores of Batroun in northern Lebanon, roughly 87 miles from the Israeli border, with the intent of snatching a high-ranking terrorist operative from his hideaway in a cabin,” Israel’s YNet news details, adding that the raid involved 25 Israeli elite troops.

Lebanese national broadcaster National News agency separately described that an “unidentified military force” carried out a “sea landing” at a beach at Batroun, south of Tripoli.

The commando group “went with all its weapons and equipment to a chalet near the beach, kidnapping a Lebanese man… and sailing away into the open sea on a speedboat,” NNA added.

Lebanese media is only saying that the man that was nabbed was a “student” of a maritime institute in Lebanon. According to more from eyewitnesses of the strange episode:

He was taken from student housing near the Batroun institute, but was a resident of the Shia-majority town of Qmatiyeh further south, said the acquaintance who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security concerns.

He was completing courses to become a sea captain, the source told AFP, adding that the man was in his thirties and was well known by the teaching staff at the center.

But the IDF has called the man a “significant source of knowledge” for Hezbollah’s naval force. It’s expected that Amhaz will be detained and interrogated in a military prison.

“He was taken to Israel to be questioned by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 — which specializes in HUMINT, or human intelligence — on Hezbollah’s naval operations,” Times of Israel subsequently reported.

UN peacekeeping forces in South Lebanon have entered the controversy, amid conflicting reports they may have prevented the Lebanese armed forces from responding to the raid (which UNIFIL firmly denies) on Lebanon’s sovereign territory and its citizens:

Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik, who first reported on the raid, cited anonymous Lebanese military officials as saying the operation was apparently carried out in coordination with the German Navy operating within UNIFIL forces, to prevent the Lebanese Navy from interfering.

Meanwhile, some Lebanese sources say that the kidnapped man is innocent, and not affiliated with Hezbollah, and that the IDF kidnapped a regular Lebanese citizen. Video also captured the raid:

🚨BREAKING 🚨 An Israeli commando kidnapped a Lebanese licensed boat officer, believing he was a high-ranking Hezbollah official, in a “daring operation” yesterday in Batroun north Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/BraFMuTdmy

— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) November 2, 2024

Israel’s military has further said that “The operative has been transferred to Israeli territory and is currently being investigated.”

The Associated Press has acknowledged that the occupation of the kidnapped man is murky and uncertain, amid continuing speculation: “Three Lebanese judicial officials told AP the incident occurred at dawn Friday, adding that the captain might have links with Hezbollah.” The report added: “The officials said an investigation is looking into the man is linked to Hezbollah or working for an Israeli spy agency and an Israeli force came to rescue him.”

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I had an old friend who used to be a bouncer at one of the bars where I worked in Philadelphia many years ago. We got along decently outside of work because we both had the same mutual interests in our twenties: beer, sports, gambling, and women.

The big differences between us were that he had a much shorter temper than I did, a much tougher time controlling his emotions and a much larger appetite for alcohol. As would happen given those differences, as the years went by, we eventually lost touch, only to bump into each other randomly at the airport one day after we hadn’t seen each other for about ten years.

I was returning from a trip I had taken for my job, and he was on his way outbound to some tropical destination I can’t remember. After the perfunctory catch-up, I asked him why he was taking what seemed like a random vacation during the middle of the week.

He told me that days prior, he had been at the local casino in Philadelphia playing poker and had won $30,000 from the bad beat jackpot, so he was celebrating.

I asked him how it happened and what he did when he found out he’d won.

He told me: “Chris, that place has taken so much money from me that when I finally won, I flipped the f*cking poker table over in the middle of the room, while all eight people were sitting at it, and screamed at the top of my lungs.”

Then, he told me, they paid him out and asked him to leave and never come back.

Anybody else might easily write this story off as someone with a flair for the dramatic, but having seen my friend flip a table once or twice under far less exciting circumstances (or for no reason at all after multiple shots of Jameson), I knew he wasn’t making it up.

Heading into the weekend, I kept thinking about metaphors to make some type of big statement about how important I think Tuesday’s election is for our nation. No matter how many ways I tried to word it, all I could think about as an analogy to a potential Trump victory was my friend, sitting inside a casino he’s probably lost a zillion dollars in, finally scoring a big win against the house—the machine that always has the odds in its favor—flipping that table, with the chips, drinks and cards on it, and then getting kicked out carrying a massive Publisher’s Clearing House-style novelty check.

I don’t like that this is how I think of the government, the Democratic party and the media, conjoined as one unbeatable, dystopian chimera with the odds always in its favor—but I can’t help it. What else could you possibly call a ruling party of elites, using one hand to rig their primary process while using the other to write diatribes about the importance of democracy? What else could you call the party that blankets its deeply flawed policy prescriptions under the cloak of the moral high ground? What do you call the party that used to preach freedom of choice, speech and liberty that now takes its cues from giant pharmaceutical corporations and the military industrial complex? How about the party that outright lied in 2020 to the public about the president’s involvement in a Chinese influence-peddling scam days before the last election?

And then, what can be said about almost all of the major media networks that have enabled, and run cover for, these actions, all while making concerned looking faces like they actually give a shit about the truth and can’t believe how stupid we are?

Just last week, I watched the media arm of the Democratic Party, consisting of all the major news networks with the exception of Fox News, accuse Jewish people at President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally of being Nazis. This week, I’m watching them tell the public that Trump said Liz Cheney should be executed when he said nothing of the sort.

Over the last four years, there have been countless instances like these — the “very fine people” hoax, the never-ending live coverage of the Russia collusion hoax, and CNN putting a yellow filter over Joe Rogan’s face and telling the world he was taking horse medicine when they knew he was not. I wrote it days ago: the media has sacrificed what’s left of its credibility at the altar of an un-elected woman who thinks the PCE deflator is something you sit on at a party that makes a farting noise and that “Strategic Petroleum, Reserve” is a brand of top shelf vodka.

National Review said it pretty well last month:

The media has gotten so much wrong over the last four years that not only is it bleeding viewers to alternative media, but major networks like CNN have been forced to lay off staff and completely rethink their programming. It’s a phenomenon that we saw continue last week, with Jeff Bezos making a point not to endorse a political candidate at the Washington Post because, in his words “Americans don’t trust the news media”.

Among the dead weight purged from CNN some years ago was anchor Brian Stelter. This week, probably without even knowing it, he made a very cogent point when he quoted an anonymous TV executive who said:

“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”

Stelter doesn’t know it, but he’s onto something much bigger than he thinks. He’s presenting that statement out of protest because he believes that mainstream media really is the authority for objective truth and the moral high ground.

Of course, what the last decade has proven to us is that he’s wrong — deadass wrong. He may not know why he’s wrong, but the point he makes still stands: as I wrote days ago, at some point, the bias and outright lying are going to hit such a fever pitch that even independent and center-left viewers and voters are going to take notice.

People are simply not going to stand for one-sided fact-checking at debates, “60 Minutes” deceptively editing interviews, and political anchors injecting their politics into the “news.” In fact, longtime Washington Post contributor Hugh Hewitt walked off the set of one of his live streams and quit the Washington Post just hours ago because of exactly this: Democrats are not even hiding their bias anymore and completely lack finesse in their attempts to sway public opinion, as I have noted in a previous article.

For a glance at how left-wing mainstream media is imploding, watch the entirety of this four minute clip.

Now that we have the miracle of the internet and alternative media, when that moment comes, mainstream media will have officially crossed to the other side of the adoption bell curve and will begin its slow descent into irrelevance. Before that descent can begin, tolerance for the media must hit a zenith where viewer interest peaks, then ever so slightly starts to fade toward alternative media. This election could very well mark that apex officially moving behind us. Here’s how I see it:

A GOP victory on Tuesday not only flips the media’s figurative table over, it flips over the table of government in favor of empowering people. It flips over the table that is addicted to spending and racking up trillions of dollars in debt every year. It flips over the table that spends those trillions of dollars on other countries while increasing taxation on American citizens. It flips over the table that cleans up San Francisco for when China’s president arrives but can’t do so for American citizens. It flips over the table of every lie you’ve been told about Joe Biden’s mental health when you could clearly sit at home and watch with your own two eyes how poor of a state he was in. It flips over the table of identity politics and looking at everybody by their race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality under the guise of fighting discrimination. And most importantly, a victory for the GOP on Tuesday flips over the table of trying to stifle the most important God-given right of them all: our right to free speech.

I’m not going to make some sensationalist claim like if the Democrats win, it’s going to be the end of the world. It won’t. That’s why we have three branches of government and, frankly, there are far too many lazy and incompetent people in government to effectively make too many negative changes quick enough for our nation to deteriorate much quicker over the next four years than it already is. But I bet even the Democrats who are going to vote for Kamala Harris know in the back of their mind that the nation isn’t on the right path right now, and that’s the way we will continue under a Harris administration. Only faster.

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If the GOP wins this election, I believe it will be far more consequential to the nation. It feels as though a dam is about to break in the United States and the magnetic poles of the two parties are about to shift. Joe Rogan alluded to this while interviewing Trump when he said:

“The rebels are Republicans now. You want to be punk rock? You want to buck the system? You are conservative now. The liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They are pro-censorship. They talk about regulating free speech. It’s bananas to watch.”

There’s no question the left is pulling us further and further left and, at some point, the nation will snap back in the other direction, regardless of whether it is this election cycle or not. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like we are right on the doorstep of making a statement that’s bigger than politics by reelecting Donald Trump.

Sure, it’ll be a statement that we want lower taxes, our freedom of speech, less regulation and small government. But most importantly, it would be a rebuke of all of the names that Democrats have called Republicans, all of the blatant lies they’ve told us and then scolded us like children for not believing, and the party and media machine’s assumption it could serve up whatever candidate it wanted, without a primary, and because they have the moral high ground and the media machine backing them, the country will just shut the fuck up and swallow it.

When my friend lost money consistently at the casino for years and years, he just “shut the fuck up and swallowed it” and kept coming back for more. The games were rigged, but hell—he was in there taking his shot. And when he finally had the chance to take the house, big, not only did he take some of that money back, but he made a statement in doing so. And while I don’t usually condone destructive behavior, deep down, I know how good it felt for him, and I’m glad he did it. Now, I wonder if the nation can do the same.

Note from QTR: This will be my last post about politics at least until after Election Day. If you haven’t yet, I urge you desperately to get to the polls on Tuesday and make your voice heard. Just like in 2020, this election may come down to single-digit numbers of votes in many places.

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