Archive for the ‘Media Watch’ Category

Mike Lindell’s Absolute Truth Documentary on 2020 Presidential Election Fraud

Sunday, February 7th, 2021

I kept meaning to put up this 2020 Presidential election fraud documentary by Mike Lindell (the MyPillow CEO), but YouTube keeps taking it down, so here’s a BitChute version:

I haven’t watched all of it it yet, but it’s more proof that there’s a lot of evidence out that there the 2002 Presidential election was rigged, and that very powerful people in the Democratic Media Complex want to keep you from examining the evidence for yourself. And I wanted to put up a copy that I don’t think is going to disappear…

The Great GameStop Short Squeeze

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Here’s a Wall Street story that has everything to do with the current political moment.

GameStop is the video game retailer that almost went out of business last year. This year, a whole bunch of powerful hedge funds bet on GameStop stock going by selling the stock short.

Tiny problem:

For those unfamiliar, a short squeeze happens when a rising stock price forces short-sellers out of their position. When panic strikes and those sellers buy back stock, they send shares even higher. Here, you have what InvestorPlace Markets Analyst Tom Yeung calls a powerful feedback loop.

Yeung also sees GME stock as being a particularly relevant candidate for a short squeeze. Right now, 71.2 million of its shares are being sold short. That is even more than its total outstanding share count!

This tweet thread explains what that means:

So the short selling bear hedge funds are totally screwed. The result? Carnage:

Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%.

The funds serving the financial elite are starting to walk away in defeat. Big bets they made that GameStop’s stock would fall went wrong, leaving them facing billions of dollars in collective losses. All the wild action pushed GameStop’s stock as high as $380 on Wednesday, up from $18 just a few weeks ago.

The stunning seizure of power gives some validation to smaller-pocketed investors, many of whom are encouraging each other on Reddit and are trading stocks for the first time thanks to brokerages offering free-trading apps. It’s also left more investors on Wall Street asking if the stock market is in a dangerous bubble about to pop, as AMC Entertainment, Bed Bath & Beyond and other downtrodden stocks suddenly soar as well. The S&P 500 set a record high earlier this week, though it fell Wednesday.

Two investment firms that had placed bets for money-losing GameStop’s stock to fall have essentially thrown in the towel. One, Citron Research, acknowledged Wednesday in a YouTube video that it unwound the majority of its bet and took “a loss, 100%” to do so.

Snip.

Melvin Capital is also exiting GameStop, with manager Gabe Plotkin telling CNBC that the hedge fund was taking a significant loss. He denied rumors that the hedge fund will fail. The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown.

Before its recent explosion, GameStop’s stock had been struggling for a long time. The company has been losing money for years as sales of video games increasingly go online, and its stock fell for six straight years before rebounding in 2020.

That pushed many professional investors to make bets that GameStop’s stock will decline even further. In such bets, called “short sales,” investors borrow a share and sell it in hopes of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference. GameStop is one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street.

But its stock began rising sharply earlier this month after a co-founder of Chewy, the online seller of pet supplies, joined the company’s board. The thought is that he could help in the company’s transformation as it focuses more on digital sales and closes brick-and-mortar stores. Its shares jumped to $19.94 from less than $18 on Jan. 11. At the time, it seemed like a huge move for the stock.

Smaller investors were meanwhile exhorting each other online to keep GameStop’s stock rolling higher.

The raucous discussions are full of sarcasm, self deprecation and emojis of rocket ships signifying belief that GameStop’s stock will fly to the moon.

Snip.

There is no overriding reason why GameStop has attracted this cavalcade of smaller and first-time investors, but there is a distinct component of revenge against Wall Street in communications online.

“The same rich people that caused the market crash in 2007/08 are still in power and continue to manipulate the market to get even richer, we are just taking back our fair share,” one user wrote on Reddit.

“hey mom i can’t come up for dinner,” another user wrote. “i’m bankrupting a 10 figure hedge fund with the boys.”

Beyond personal attacks, the battle has also created big financial losses for Wall Street players who shorted GameStop’s stock.

As GameStop’s gains grew and short sellers scrambled to get out of their bets, they had to buy shares to do so. That accelerated the momentum even more, creating a feedback loop. As of Tuesday, short sellers of GameStop were already down more than $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners.

Much of professional Wall Street remains pessimistic that GameStop’s stock can hold onto its immense gains. The company is unlikely to start making big enough profits to justify its $22.2 billion market valuation anytime soon, analysts say. The stock closed Wednesday at $347.51. Analysts at BofA Global Research raised their price target Wednesday — to $10.

All the mania is raising some concern that investors are taking excessive risks, and reporters asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday whether the Fed’s moves to support markets through the pandemic is helping to push stock prices too high.

In short, the hedge funds suffered a serious bloodletting:

Did the Wall Street titans laid low by retail investors shrug their shoulders over the loss and slink off quietly into the night to lick their wounds? They did not. Instead, our elites staged a fullbore freakout over being beaten at their own game(stop).

Perhaps the most flagrant example was where noted CNN tool Chris Cillizza declared the GameStop short squeeze an example of Trumpism. Because how dare ordinary people think they can beat the elite at their own games?

There was the “white supremacy” canard.

(Babylon Bee: “Merriam-Webster Changes Definition Of ‘White Supremacist’ To ‘Anyone Who Wins In The Stock Market When They’re Not Supposed To’.)

There’s even the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” cliche:

And finally, a Berkeley professor wants you know they’re investing in GameStop because they’re not having sex:

Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin wants a 30-day trading suspension of GameStop, because retail investors can’t be allowed to make money off the mistakes of their betters.

Likewise, NASDAQ head Adena Friedman says that they’ll halt trading in a stock if mere mortals are making money off it.

And trading platforms Robinhood and Ameritrade halted trading in GameStop And AMC.

Here’s Tucker Carlson:

Here’s a Saagar Enjeti clip from The Hill:

There are valid reasons for hedge funds and short sellers to exist. But no one, least of all our corrupt political establishment, should let them get away with the classic “I keep my profits private but force the government to underwrite my losses” con game.

The memes and Tweets are something to behold:

And this morning?

This may all seem extremely irrational. But thanks to the Federal Reserve’s endless money pump, the market has been irrational for a long time. And the biggest irrationality was short-sellers shorting more stock than actually existed.

I should point out that I have no money in GameStop, AMC, or Nokia stock (unless there’s some tucked away in one of my various 401K funds, which I rather doubt). Though honestly, as weird as this year is already going, I’m tempted to put a few hundred dollars in Dogecoin…

Democrats’ Tower Of Self-Reinforcing Bullshit

Tuesday, January 12th, 2021

The left has long had a tendency to push propaganda over truth, but the Trump years have seen a dramatic increase in willfully repeated falsehoods to push the Democratic Media Complex’s favored “narratives” over obvious truths everyone can see with their own two eyes.

First there was the Russian collusion hoax, a self-serving fiction democrats concocted both to jam Trump at the line of scrimmage and give them an excuse for explaining how they managed to lose an election everyone said they had in the bag. There followed more lies to support the initial lie, then the impeachment farce that failed to make a dent.

And all the while, underneath the surface, social justice warriors were spinning out falsehood after falsehood to support their favored narratives. “Hands Up Don’t Shot” was a lie from the git-go. The idea that sex is a social construct was and is a lie, as is the idea that someone can change their sex merely by declaring they have. Not to mention the risible #BlackLivesMatter bullshit that “silence is violence” and the ridiculous idea that everyone who voted for Trump was a “white supremacist.”

Then came to 2020 #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa riots the Democratic Media Complex did their very best to ignore or spin as “mostly peaceful” despite burning down hundreds of businesses and looting thousands.

Then they stole the 2020 Presidential election by massive fraud is six urban counties and got very upset when people tried to point this out.

Finally, the events of January 6 drove them to new heights of hyperbole. Want to call it inadvisable? Absolutely. A mob? Fair enough. A riot? Sure. Criminal? Some of it, by definition.

But what it was not was an “insurrection” or “coup.” Trust me, if a significant fraction of president Trump’s 75+ million supporters wanted to stage an armed coup, you’d know it. Or, more to the point, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and Jack Dorsey wouldn’t know it, because they’d hang lifeless from the ends of gibbets.

For a party that failed to flip a single statehouse chamber in November, Democrats are freebasing dangerous levels of their own bullshit in ratcheting up the rhetorical hysteria.

You don’t get high on your own supply because the moment you start deluding yourself, reality has a nasty way of smacking you upside the head.

And if Democrats think that removing Donald “Emmanuel Goldstein” Trump from the White House means they get to immediately return to their old grifts without consequences (and add a bunch of new woke social justice grifts on top of them to boot), they have another think coming. Kurt Schlichter:

Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.

See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.

It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.

The biggest gap in this country isn’t between enlightened social justice warriors and the backward racist redneck freaks of JesusLand, it’s between those who want to continue sticking their snouts into troughs of taxpayer money, feel their own grifts are sacred birthrights above reproach and have different laws apply to them than the peasants, and those who have been made aware of the scam.

We’re not going back to sleep, no matter how hard you call us deplorables, racists or insurrectionists.

The Great Purge Begins

Sunday, January 10th, 2021

Friday big tech monopolies started their purge of conservative voices at the very top, by banning President Donald Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch and others in a coordinated attempt to silence him at the end of his first term as President.

As Ann Althouse noted, there was nothing about President Trump’s speech (or his tweets, for that matter) that incited violence.

But Trump wasn’t the end of it. As Ed Driscoll noted over on Instapundit, “TODAY, SILICON VALLEY SETTLES ALL FAMILY BUSINESS:”

Google suspends right-wing app ‘Parler’ from Google Play Store.

Earlier: Apple Has Threatened To Ban Parler From The App Store.

UPDATE: Steve Bannon’s podcast shuttered by YouTube over false 2020 election claims.

And by “false voting fraud claims” they mean “mostly true voting fraud claims.”

That’s not all:

Among the people who have been booted:

Salem Media’s Kevin McCullough, who posted questions about the votes moving backwards in the Georgia run-offs and posted Trump’s video from his rally.

The Team Trump account was axed too.

Techno Fog who broke court documents on the Russia hoax.

Tracy Beanz who also did yeoman’s work on Russia hoax.

Influencers on the right suddenly over the last couple of days were also finding their Twitter followers dropping off precipitously. Not just a few people but a lot of influencers, even smaller not well-known people.

Lots of people are having followers purged, including myself, though I’ve only lost some 100-odd. Can;t say whether this is a purge of inactive accounts or not.

Facebook also banned the #WalkAway campaign and Brandon Straka:

There are probably a lot more bannings I’ve missed.

Social media has become a clear and present danger to American freedoms:

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the battle over personal data, free speech and the free flow of information between the American people and the tech giants is heating up. As the Googles and Facebooks of the world take an unconstitutional role in deciding what speech and information should be online, it’s becoming clear much more is at stake than first meets the eye.

It’s also becoming apparent that there are some voices on the Right who are either deeply naïve and ignorant about what is at stake or they are in fact paid collaborators of the tech companies.

Also some discussion of the threat of the singularity, which is still more science fiction than actual at this point. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Tucker Carlson summarizes:

Some conservatives are leaving Twitter in protest.

As for myself, I’m just going to keep talking about the things they don’t want to talk about on Twitter (like Biden family corruption and fraud in the 2020 presidential election) until they kick me off.

Alternatives to Twitter

Saturday, January 9th, 2021

I’ve got a bunch of quarter- or half-formed blog posts about The Recent Unpleasantness I haven’t had time to finish, so let’s use this low-calorie blog post substitute to note that I’m on two separate alternative to Twitter:

  • On Gab I’m @BattleSwarm. Gab was looking moribund for a while, but after this week’s events it seems to be showing some life again.
  • I’m on Parler as @Lawrenceperson.
  • I’ve also added a Social Media section to the sidebar.

    So if you’re on either of those, try to follow me there in addition to my Twitter account, as it seems like only a matter of time until my account gets nuked for #WrongThink. One wonders how profitable Twitter will be once they get around to banning everyone Democrats and Social Justice Warriors think should get banned.

    Also: Open thread.

    China Perfidy Roundup for December 31, 2020

    Thursday, December 31st, 2020

    We started the year with China lying about the deadly virus that was about to sweep the world, so let’s end the year with a China news roundup:

  • There was a major leak of a database containing the names of communist Chinese Party members:

    A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson.

    Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity.

    “It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said.

    “What’s amazing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the communist party, and who are now living and working all over the world, from Australia to the US to the UK,” Ms Markson said.

    “But it’s amazing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping”.

    Ms Markson said the leak demonstrates party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even inside government agencies.

    “Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members – who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said.

    “Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”.

    I’ve poked around a bit to find a copy of that database, but all I could locate was an excerpt featuring the first 5,000 names or so. If anyone knows where I can find the full list, let me know in the comments.

  • Here’s a story so strange I wanted to turn it into a separate post, but details remain too murky: Fabless chip designer Arm Holdings fired the head of its Chinese business unit, but he’s refusing to leave:

    Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that’s becoming a test of Beijing’s willingness to protect foreign investment in the world’s second-largest economy.

    The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated.

    Wu has hired his own security and won’t let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He’s refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named.

    Wu is “propagating false information and creating a culture of fear and confusion among Arm China employees,” the U.K.-based company said in a statement. “Allen’s focus on his own self-preservation has also put China semiconductor innovation at risk as he has attempted to block the critical communication and support our China partners require from Arm for ongoing and future chip designs.”

    Arm China disputed the claims in an emailed response to queries, adding that Wu was open to talks and there have been no disruptions in business engagement between Arm Ltd. and its China clients.China is the largest market for semiconductors and the U.K. firm relies on Arm China to conduct business with local customers, including Huawei Technologies Co. The country accounts for a large proportion of the company’s global revenue and resolving the conflict will be crucial to SoftBank’s reported plans to sell Arm, a lynchpin in the global smartphone and computing industry that the Japanese firm bought for $32 billion in 2016.

    In early June, Arm China’s board – which includes representatives from Arm Ltd. and Chinese investors – ousted Wu for setting up an investing firm that competes with its own businesses there. He refused to accept the decision, saying it was invalid and has remained in control at Arm China’s headquarters in Shenzhen.

    The intricacies of Chinese rules confer an advantage to Wu as the holder of key registration documents. As the legal representative of Arm China, Wu holds the company’s registration documents and the company seal, or stamp. Changing the legal representative requires taking possession of the company stamp — something Wu has refused to give up.

  • Not only has Wu refused to step down, but he’s holding up Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm.
  • It’s time for the west to give up its delusions about China:

    It was once an accepted truth that China’s increased economic trade and participation in international bodies such as the World Trade Organization would benefit everyone.

    China and its citizens would benefit through the jobs and wealth earned from their vast export market. Americans and Europeans would benefit from access to an ever-greater array of ever-cheaper goods. Asian, African, and other American nations would benefit from access to both sides of this market and the incentive to replicate a version of China’s export model. And the world’s democracies, the cornerstones of the post-Cold War international order, would benefit from China’s recognition that it would gain more by abiding the rules of the game than by breaking them.

    To borrow from Shakespeare, “the jest of the truth savors but of shallow wit, now that thousands weep more than did celebrate it.”

    The weeping is real. Each week brings us increasingly horrific stories of the suffering endured by China’s already impoverished Uighur population. More than 2 million of these innocent citizens have been forced into concentration camps over the past decade. They have been indoctrinated to believe that there is no ideology of value save that of the Communist Party and its god-emperor Xi Jinping. Some have been forcibly sterilized, others sent far from their homes and families. As reported just this month, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are forced into annual servitude as cotton pickers.

    There’s a defining lesson here. China was supposed to be a top partner to the liberal international order. Instead, it is now taking inspiration from the Antebellum South’s slave economy, using forced labor in support of an unaccountable elite. Even were it not beholden to China, Hollywood could not invent a better example than the Uighurs’ plight to expose the lie that China’s economic development would usher in a kinder and gentler policy on its part.

    Of course, Hollywood’s pathetic deference to Beijing isn’t a solitary American corporate story. It is the story. Instead of markets leading to more economic and political freedom in China, they have led major U.S. corporations to self-censor in order to gain access to Chinese consumers and their cheap labor. As with the NBA, which rightly cares a great deal about black lives but apparently not one iota about Uighur lives, major corporations such as Disney, Dell, and Walmart deal with China even if they must do so with terrible strings attached.

    Beijing is explicit in its expectation that trade opportunities come with the price of silent acquiescence. Where the Chinese Communist Party signs treaties — whether the rules of the WTO, promises on intellectual property regimes, or carbon emissions targets — its pledges must be greeted only with applause from the West, never with any enforcement or demands that Xi be held to his word.

  • “FCC orders US telecom companies to rip out Huawei equipment“:

    US carriers and telecommunications companies receiving Universal Service funding are now required to remove all Huawei technology, by order of the federal government.

    The US Federal Communications Commission has ordered certain carriers to “rip and replace” all equipment produced by Huawei. It follows continuing investigations into claims that Huawei represents a threat to national security, and Huawei’s application for a review of a similar ruling by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau in June.

    “A laundry list of evidence before us compels this result,” said FCC chairman Ajit Pal in a statement. “But to summarize some of the main points, Huawei has a long and well-documented history of close ties to the Chinese military and intelligence communities, as well as the Chinese Communist Party, at every level of the company— all the way up to its founder.”

    “Huawei is subject to sweeping Chinese intelligence laws compelling Huawei’s assistance and cooperation with Chinese intelligence services and forbidding the disclosure of that assistance,” he continued. “Moreover, the concerns about Huawei aren’t just hypothetical: Independent entities have identified numerous security vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment and found it to be less secure than that of other companies— perhaps deliberately so.”

  • Speaking of crackdowns, President Donald Trump’s administration has added more Chinese companies to the blacklist:

    The Trump administration is poised to add China’s top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, Reuters reported citing a document and sources, curbing their access to U.S. investors and escalating tensions with Beijing.

    The latest crackdown comes after a report from Reuters earlier this month that the Department of Defense (DOD) was planning to designate four more Chinese companies as owned or controlled by the Chinese military, bringing the number of Chinese companies affected to 35. A recent executive order issued by President Donald Trump would prevent U.S. investors from buying securities of the listed firms starting late next year.

    It was not immediately clear when the new tranche, would be published in the Federal Register. But the list comprises China Construction Technology Co Ltd and China International Engineering Consulting Corp, in addition to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Reuters reported.

  • China tries to modernize its very non-modern army.

    On paper the Chinese army looks pretty impressive, with 78 combat brigades and nearly as many specialized brigades. Over the last decade the Chinese army has been converting its divisions to brigades, many of them independent brigades like the American Brigade combat teams. That conversion is still underway, although by now nearly all the regiments that formerly comprised the major subunits of divisions have been converted to brigades.

    The task of turning all those new brigades into well-equipped and trained ones is still underway. There are three types of combat brigades. The most potent is the heavy brigade, each with about a hundred tanks and dozens of tracked IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles) plus detachments of engineers and other specialists. The problem with these heavy brigades is that not all of them have the latest tanks. China has not built enough of its most modern tank to replace all the older models. As more of the latest tank enter service heavy brigades receive them and have to go through months of training to learn how to get the most out of them.

    Snip.

    The major problem with the army is that all the elite units (special operations and airborne) as well as key units stationed in the capital and a few other places have few conscripts. Nearly all the conscripts are assigned to the combat brigades and the support brigades assigned to each of the 13 Group Armies. Units with conscripts spend about half the year training the new ones and if there is a war these units would, half the time, have a large portion of their troops poorly trained and not fully integrated into the unit. This is a major problem for combat units that depend on well-trained troops who have been with their units long enough for commanders to know what they can get out of them.

    (Previously.)

  • “Chinese Increasing Nuclear Submarine Shipyard Capacity.”

    As China pushes to become a blue-water power, nuclear-powered submarines are critically important to Beijing’s plan. Historically the Chinese Navy’s (PLAN) nuclear-powered submarine fleet has been constrained by its limited construction capacity. There is only one shipyard in the country up to the task. But that yard has been undergoing a massive enlargement. And now, recent satellite imagery suggests an additional capacity expansion.

    China’s nuclear-powered submarine fleet was already expected to get much larger in the coming years. This latest development suggests that China could pump out submarines at an even greater rate.

    Just how many nuclear submarines China will build over the next ten years is a hot topic. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) recently forecast China’s submarine fleet to grow by six nuclear-powered attack submarines by 2030. Other observers, such as retired Capt. James Fanell who was Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, place their estimates even higher.

  • “Chinese general says Korean War shows how to defeat America“:

    A senior Chinese People’s Liberation Army officer, Lt. Gen. He Lei, penned an article explaining why China’s Korean War experience should guide its modern military strategy toward the United States.

    The executive officer of the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, He is a known hard-liner on Taiwan and the U.S. In his present assignment, the general is responsible for training PLA officers and strategy development. His words carry weight both for what they say about evolving PLA doctrine and their influence on Beijing’s Central Military Commission. His arguments are certainly forward-leaning, referencing the PLA’s rising expectation that it will have to fight a near-term war with either the U.S., Taiwan, or both.

    Beginning with a creative history of the Korean War, He explains that Mao Zedong’s deployment of the PLA against the U.S. military in North Korea shattered “the myth that U.S. imperialism is invincible.” Here, we see a presentation of the U.S. military as a force that can be both contested and defeated. The centrality of the Korean War to the Chinese military psyche takes on significant importance in the context of three factors. First, the war is seen as a necessary defense of the motherland against a great external threat. Second, the PLA has limited post-Korean War experience of major conflict. Third, China views the outcome of that war as being broadly in its favor. Taken together, He thus uses the Korean War to reinforce the idea that China can take on a more powerful foe and triumph.

    China’s military might be shocked to find America’s military a wee bit more advanced and prepared than it was in 1950…

  • “China forced hundreds of thousands of children in Xinjiang, where the majority of the population belongs to the ethnic Uyghur minority, into ‘boarding schools‘ as they lost their parents to communist concentration camps.”
  • Uighurs aren’t the only ones, with Tibetans also sent to concentration camps:

    More than half a million Tibetan farmers and pastoralists have been placed in military training facilities to be turned into wage workers controlled by the authorities. This model replicates the one used in Xinjiang internment camps where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned and indoctrinated.

    A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows that the Chinese regime runs 380 “concentration camps” in the Xinjiang autonomous region. According to the Chinese Communist Party, Tibetans are a “lazy people” who need to be reprogrammed. To this end, Chinese leaders want to reduce the “negative influence” of the Buddhist religion.

    First of a three-part series. Second Part. Third part.

  • “Uighurs fear deportation as China ratifies extradition treaty with Turkey.”
  • “FBI Warns Law Enforcement That China Is Targeting United States Citizens“:

    The FBI is warning law-enforcement agencies to beware of cooperating with a Chinese government campaign to coerce U.S. residents to return to China to face criminal charges, according to a counterintelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.

    The bulletin comes after eight people, including a former New York Police Department officer, were indicted on charges of acting as illegal agents for Beijing.

    “State and local public safety personnel should be aware that Chinese Government officials, such as diplomats and officials with China’s primary law enforcement agency, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), may seek assistance to obtain sensitive US law enforcement or non-public personally identifiable information on individuals of interest,” which is marked for official use only and was distributed to law enforcement agencies around the country.

    The warning concerns China’s long-standing policy of reaching beyond its borders to target people it accuses of financial crimes, even if they are permanently living abroad. The repatriations, often coerced by blackmail or threats, are part of Beijing’s anti-corruption campaign called Fox Hunt.

    There has been an increasing number of allegations that China has coerced, even kidnapped, its citizens living abroad, and that it targets political dissidents as well as those accused of financial crimes.

  • How Xi Jinping has cloaked himself with the mandate of a modern emperor:

    When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the conventional wisdom seems to be that the emergence of the virus was mishandled and the Communist government has yet to be transparent about it, but that the spread was arrested through aggressive public-health practices and the economy has rebounded.

    As usual with the PRC, the reality is more complex. In fact, recent signs of tension between President Xi Jinping and other leaders, notably Premier Li Keqiang, indicate the additional impact the pandemic had on an underlying soft economy and the country’s growing isolation because of Beijing’s poor handling of the crisis and other factors.

    Snip.

    In the past few years, Xi has centralized his personal authority to a degree not seen in a Chinese leader since Chairman Mao. In 2017, Xi took control of the country’s military and often appears in public in a military uniform. He is, in effect, the head of the National Security Council, the head of the foreign policy apparatus, and of multiple economic commissions. In recent public appearances, the state news agency Xinhua has referred to him as “People’s Leader.” Can “Chairman Xi” be far off? In additional to title inflation, in 2018, he imposed constitutional changes on the National People’s Congress that removed a term limit preventing him from seeking a third term in 2023. Xi’s moves and power consolidation mean he is responsible and accountable for both the good and the bad. And lately, there’s been far more bad than good.

    Starting with the economy: However the government may have controlled the pandemic, the economy remains weak. Economic growth prior to the pandemic — according to China watchers skeptical of government numbers — was probably flat or negative, notwithstanding official statistics that had it closer to 6 percent. Government at every level and households had combined debt of about 300 percent of GDP. U.S. debt/GDP even after trillions in coronavirus relief spending is less than half China’s level, which leaves fewer levers for Beijing to pull to help stimulate the economy.

    While the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have injected more than $6 trillion into the economy through massive purchases across many asset classes, the People’s Bank of China balance sheet has remained flat this year. The U.S. Congress provided about $630 billion in direct support to small businesses, compared with less than one-tenth that amount the PRC made available to small businesses in China. Retail sales in China for each month of 2020 are down compared with the same month the year prior. The real data are certainly worse than what the government discloses. In the U.S., retail sales in July were at all-time highs, eclipsing their pre-pandemic levels. According to economist Carlos Casanove at French insurer Coface, the PRC “recovery narrative has been overplayed.”

    This is contributing to the tension between Xi and Li. At a press conference in May, the prime minister acknowledged that 600 million people in China — about half the population — subsist on 1000 yuan ($140) a month. This number includes the estimates of 80 million who lost work due to the virus who may have no income and no meaningful social safety net in China. Li’s data track with World Bank data which show a vast disparity in income between the urban elite and the mostly poor rural population. Even so, his comments were out of step with other government-touted figures, including a central bank survey in April of 30,000 urban residents who have an average of nearly half a million dollars in household assets. This figure generated so much controversy that the central bank withdrew it.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Chinese and European Union officials have agreed to an economic investment deal agreement despite international outrage over the communist regime’s human rights abuses and President-elect Joe Biden’s desire to coordinate an allied posture toward Beijing.” Also, get this: “‘This agreement will uphold our interests & promotes our core values,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted Wednesday. ‘It provides us a lever to eradicate forced labour.'” Translation: “We know China engages in slave labor and we’re going to do business with it anyway, and just pretend we care about eliminating it.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Nigel Farage: China Is Licking Its Chops at the Thought of President Joe Biden:

    The Guardian newspaper in London had an exclusive story in which Victor Zhang, the vice president of Huawei, stated that in light of Trump’s defeat, Britain should review its decision to ban the telecoms giant from its 5G network. Zhang warned that this decision would have economic repercussions for Britain, adding: “As a global company, we want to work with governments to ensure they have the policies to secure growth. The decision was a political one motivated by U.S. perceptions of Huawei, and not those of the U.K. This is not really motivated by security, but about a trade war between the U.S. and China.”

    Or consider the fact that this year, some British politicians have shown a certain amount of moral grit by expressing concerns about new authoritarian security laws in Hong Kong and China’s persecution of its Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. How have the Chinese reacted? This week, Fang Wenjian, chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the U.K. and the Bank of China’s boss, issued another menacing warning. The Sunday Times and City A.M. have both published stories linking him to the threat that any decline in U.K.-China relations could force some Chinese firms out of the U.K. In other words: “Don’t criticize China’s abysmal human rights record, or you risk losing our business.”

    Alarms bells are also ringing because of Citiking International, a Chinese-backed private equity firm with offices around the world and, it has been reported, possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. It is trying to buy Eclipse Aerospace, a small firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that employs 65 people. According to Defense News, Eclipse Aerospace produces “very light jets” that are used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Defense News states that its planes feature “sophisticated avionics, engines (originally designed for cruise missiles) and a full authority digital engine control system that all contain sensitive national security design information.” Everybody should be deeply worried about the Chinese having access to this sensitive technology, for obvious reasons.

    Snip.

    The fact is, China has ruined the world in 2020 by its reckless handling of COVID-19. For this, it ought to pay very heavy reparations. It will not. Instead, the reverse is happening. China’s economy is powering ahead, and its leaders are bullying weaker Western nations. With Trump all but gone from the White House, and faltering Joe Biden preparing to move in, it now looks as though China’s quest for world domination is back on track. What a calamity.

  • “Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China.” “New documents show Lens Technology, which makes iPhone glass and is owned by China’s richest woman, received Uighur Muslim laborers transferred from Xinjiang.”

    One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China.

    The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with The Washington Post, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. Lens also supplies Amazon and Tesla, according to its annual report.

    Lens Technology is one of at least five companies connected to Apple’s supply chain that have now been linked to alleged forced labor from the Xinjiang region, according to human rights groups. Lens Technology stands out from other Apple component suppliers because of its high-profile founder and long, well-documented history going back to the early days of the iPhone.

  • Newt Gingrich: “Mark Kelly and Hunter Biden are just small (albeit important) examples of the massive effort by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to infiltrate, influence and ultimately dominate the American economy and culture.”
  • “California’s Highest-Paid Govt Employee Worked for Org Tied to Chinese Espionage.”

    Meng Yu, former chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), received more than $1.7 million in total pay and benefits in 2019, according to the latest financial disclosures obtained by Transparent California, a taxpayer watchdog group. Under Meng’s leadership the pension fund, which covers two million members in the retirement system and 1.5 million members under its health program, has been subject to federal inquiries into its investments in Chinese government entities.

    Meng took the lead at the pension fund after China’s Thousand Talents Program recruited him to serve as the deputy CIO of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), a state-controlled entity. The FBI considers the Thousand Talents Program an example of “China’s non-traditional espionage against the United States” that seeks to recruit people to transfer U.S. trade secrets and taxpayer-funded research into the hands of the Chinese government. Meng told the propaganda outlet People’s Daily that he worked for SAFE out of patriotic commitment to “the motherland.”

  • “State Department Begins Xinjiang Genocide Determination Review.” Good.
  • China and Iran start drilling in giant Persian Gulf gas field.
  • “A China-Linked Group Repurposed Hacking Team’s Stealthy Spyware….The tool attacks a device’s UEFI firmware—which makes it especially hard to detect and destroy.”

    When a hacking organization’s secret tools are stolen and dumped online for anyone to pick up and repurpose, the consequences can roil the globe. Now one new discovery shows how long those effects can persist. Five years after the notorious spy contractor Hacking Team had its code leaked online, a customized version of one of its stealthiest spyware samples has shown up in the hands of possibly Chinese-speaking hackers.

    At an online version of the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week, researchers Mark Lechtik and Igor Kuznetsov plan to present their findings about that mysterious malware sample, which they detected on the PCs of two of Kaspersky’s customers earlier this year.1 The malware is particularly unusual—and disturbing—because it’s designed to alter a target computer’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the firmware that is used to load the computer’s operating system. Because the UEFI sits on a chip on the computer’s motherboard outside of its hard drive, infections can persist even if a computer’s entire hard drive is wiped or its operating system is reinstalled, making it far harder to detect or disinfect than normal malware.

    The malware the Kaspersky researchers discovered uses its UEFI foothold to plant a second, more traditional piece of spyware on the computer’s hard drive, a unique piece of code Kaspersky has called MosaicRegressor. But even if that second-stage payload is discovered and wiped, the UEFI remains infected and can simply deploy it again. “Even if you would take the physical disk out and replace it with a new one, the malware will keep reappearing,” says Lechtik, who along with Kuznetsov works as a researcher on Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team. “So I think to date, it’s the most persistent method of having malware on your device, which is why it is so dangerous.”

  • The Minyak Lhagang Lithium Mine poisoned the Lichu River in Tibet.

    On 4 May 2016, a sudden mass death of fish in the Lichu River in Minyak Lhagang, Dartsedo County in Karze Prefecture brought hundreds of local Tibetans out on the street, protesting against a lithium mining company (Ronda Lithium Co Ltd) that released mine waste into the Lichu River, a tributary of Nakchu/Yalong river, the biggest river that merges with Yangtse downstream.

    Yet another case of contaminated mine waste released into Tibetan rivers by a Chinese mining company clearly contradicts Beijing’s call for Green Development in their 13th Five Year plan. In recent years, there have been an increase in the number of cases of environmental degradation caused by Chinese mining companies in Tibet, resulting in more than 20 large scale mining-related protests since 2009.

  • China is also repressing Chinese Jews. I was unaware that Kaifeng, Henan, is home to a Jewish community dating back to the 9th century.
  • Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan sentenced to four years in prison for telling the truth about the Wuhan coronavirus.
  • Speaking of which: “As the World Health Organization and other China puppets struggle to assemble a ‘natural origin’ theory for COVID-19, the CCP has been going to great lengths to quash non-sanctioned investigations that may instead point to a lab escape from research facilities which made international headlines in 2015 for dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ research – by which they were manipulating coronaviruses to better infect humans.”
  • More on the same subject:

    More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.

    The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by the AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.

    As a result, very little has been made public. Authorities are severely limiting information and impeding cooperation with international scientists.

  • “All Major Western Media Outlets Take ‘Private Dinners’, ‘Sponsored Trips’ from Chinese Communist Propaganda Front:

    A host of corporate media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have participated in private dinners and sponsored trips with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Chinese Communist Party-funded group seeking to garner “favorable coverage” and “disseminate positive messages” regarding China, The National Pulse can reveal.

    Other outlets involved in the propaganda operation include Forbes, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, AFP, TIME magazine, LA Times, The Hill, BBC, and The Atlantic.

    The relationship is revealed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings, which reveal a relationship spanning over a decade between establishment media outlets and the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Columbia failed to disclose $1 million in funding from Chinese sources.”
  • In very-much related news: “Columbia president advocates softer China approach amid questions over foreign gifts”:

    The president of Columbia University is asking Joe Biden to end the monitoring of foreign-born students, especially those who are ethnically Chinese.

    He characterized such monitoring as “paranoia.”

    Columbia President Lee Bollinger issued the letter on December 3 as part of a broader statement asking Biden to “End the Trump Administration’s Assault on the International Exchange of Ideas.” In 2019, Bollinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that he would not “start spying” on foreign students.

    Won’t someone please think of the plight Ivy league university presidents desperate to keep sucking China’s teat?

  • Speaking of which: “14 profs busted for China connections in 2020.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “How The Chinese Use Illegal Online Gambling And Tether To Launder Over $1 Trillion Yuan.” ‘Chinese citizens launder as much as $153 billion per year with the help of online gambling and such cryptocurrency as tether, which has long been rumored to be a key driver of upside into bitcoin.”
  • Here’s an interview with “Spengler” AKA David P. Goldman on why you can’t be China’s friend. I think that a lot of his judgments are suspect, but there is a lot of interesting information in it worth chewing over.

    Huawei very much is the spearhead, because in the Chinese model of economic expansion and the development of world economic power, broadband is the opener to everything else.

    It’s a company with a lot of very talented people. Ten years ago – if you asked people, “What Chinese products do you buy?” – you wouldn’t mention a single brand name. But everyone now knows Huawei. They produce the world’s best smartphones. They certainly dominate 5G internet. But Huawei is not a Chinese company. It is an imperial company.

    The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others. Fifty percent of their engineers are foreign. They bankrupted their competition and hired their talent. They have 50,000 foreign employees, and a very disproportionate amount of their research and development (R&D) is conducted by foreign employees.

    I’ve seen this personally. I worked for several years as an investment banker in Hong Kong for a Chinese-owned boutique. During that time, I collaborated with people from Huawei. I introduced them to foreign governments. Huawei was very clear about its objectives. They’d tell, for example, the government of Mexico, “Let us build a national broadband network. Once you get broadband, you get e-commerce and e-finance, and then we’ll supply the logistics and the financing for that, and we’ll integrate you into the world market.”

    They’ve become one of the most connected societies on earth. China has, by far, the highest percentage of e-commerce of any society in the world. Electronic payment systems and electronic banking are much more advanced there than anywhere else.

    Snip.

    China has a set of weak spots. First, they’ve got a very rapidly aging population. Like all countries with aging populations, they need to export capital and employ young people and other countries to pay for the pensions of their own people. Germany does this, too. That’s part of the motivation for China’s strategy. They will have an enormous burden supporting the aged in the future. They’re hoping to deal with that through automation, through more efficient health care.

    Their biggest problem is the ambitions of their young people. The Chinese created a generation of which 10 million people each year take the gaokao (university) exam. A third of them study engineering. They expect opportunities.

    If China loses its edge in technology, if they fall behind the West, if the Communist Party is seen to have failed in competing with the West, I think that will be a significant threat to its power.

    Worth reading, even if you take it with several grains of salt.

  • If I missed any China news, feel free to share in the comments.

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    LinkSwarm for December 25, 2020

    Friday, December 25th, 2020

    Welcome to a special Christmas day LinkSwarm! And by “special,” I mean “because Christmas falls on Friday.”

  • Explosion rocks downtown Nashville. “Around 6:30 a.m., police received a call for a suspicious RV with no tags parked across from the Davidson County courthouse. As officers arrived, the RV exploded, blowing out the windows of nearby buildings and leaving extensive damage.” They’re calling it an “intentional act.” Maybe, especially across the street from a courthouse. But it could still be a meth lab cooking off. As always, remember that much of the early reporting around such events are usually wrong.

    Update: Assuming the message in this video is real, it does appear to be a premeditated act of which authorities were warned:

  • The UK and the EU have reached a Brexit deal:

    The deal comes in just eight days short of the hard-Brexit deadline. Rather than erecting trade barriers to which some had resigned themselves, the two sides are looking toward a more cooperative than contentious relationship, reports the Wall Street Journal:

    Under the terms of the accord, both sides will continue to trade free of tariffs but there will be significant new bureaucracy for importers and exporters. The free flow of workers between the two economies will end and trade in services will be much reduced. London’s vast financial center will no longer have guaranteed access to European markets.

    The deal gives Britain significant freedom to depart from EU regulations and sign free-trade deals with countries like the U.S. But as the price for securing a deal without tariffs, the U.K. agreed that it wouldn’t seriously undercut EU standards on issues such as labor and the environment and would maintain similar constraints on the subsidizing of private industry.

    The agreement must formally be ratified by the European and U.K. parliaments and signed off by EU leaders before the end of the year. Capitals have insisted they need proper time to comb through the text before approving it. Though their approval is likely, France has warned it could veto a deal if some of its key concerns, including access to British waters for its fishing fleet, aren’t met.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • President Donald Trump is right to call the $900 billion stimulus package a disgrace.

    Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.

    As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.

    That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.

    This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Tables Turned: Detroit Sues Black Lives Matter Group for ‘Civil Conspiracy’ to Riot and Attack Police.” The group in question is Black Lives Matter umbrella group Detroit Will Breathe. Discovery should be extremely interesting… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Andrew Cuomo hates ordinary people and non-bankrupt restaurants so much that he’s barred patrons of outdoor dining from using a restaurants restroom. Who does he think he is, Werner Erhard?
  • Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. It would be very difficult indeed for Yang not to be a vast improvement over the burning Porta-Potty stuffed with dead clowns that is the De Blasio administration. As a moderate Democrat, I would expect Yang to be a better mayor than de Blasio or David Dinkins, but not as good as Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. I would expect a Yang mayoralty to be about on par with Bloomberg’s, with maybe more upside if he’s willing to shake up the corrupt status quo and not push his disasterous pet guaranteed income idea.
  • Another thing President Trump disrupted: stale, self-serving conventional wisdom about peace in the Middle East:

    In an address to the UN Security Council on Monday during a monthly session on the Middle East, US Ambassador Kelly Craft asserted that President Donald Trump’s policies had “overturned” long-held views about diplomacy in the region.

    “For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the world would only see normalized international relations with Israel following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” Craft told the virtual meeting. “But we have proven this assumption wrong.”

    She touted the Trump administration’s pursuit of “economic and cultural ties” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which has led to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Similar deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others, could also be in the offing.

    “All of us here should think long and hard about what else we may have missed or misinterpreted over the years.”

  • “UK: Muslim rape gang ringleader released back onto the streets 8 years into his 26-year term.”
  • “Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud:

    The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.

    Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.

    Snip.

    The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.

    The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.

    It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.

    As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.

  • Kurt Schlichter on our stupid establishment:

    The Establishment decided that instead of having a vigorous debate and discussion over the safety and efficacy of these prophylactic potions, they would just short circuit the whole messy truth determination process that Western civilization has relied upon for a millennium – argument, debate, and eventually consensus after everything is fully and freely hashed-out – and move right to the Official Truth. All the smart set decided that the Official Truth would be that these vaccines were all perfect and necessary and that we needed to stamp out any hint of dissent lest people pause and think for themselves and thereby disrupt the plan by raising unapproved notions. And the tech overlords would do their part by ensuring that any info, ideas, or interplay that was not inline with the narrative would be suppressed.

    It’s so much more efficient, you know, to tell people what they think than to take the time to convince them and refute counter-arguments.

    Not everyone was foolish. It was very smart and good leadership for Mike Pence to take the shot in public in front of cameras. That a couple of tentacles didn’t sprout out of his clavicles was reassuring. That’s leadership, and that’s what our leaders should be doing. But most of our ruling class instead thinks that if they lie to us and suppress our debates and call us stupid enough, we’ll fall into line.

    When has that worked for long?

  • A roundup of climate predictions for 2020 that were horribly wrong. Remember how snowfall would be a thing of the past?
  • Israel hits Syria again.
  • “US Army Hits Target 43 Miles Away With Long-Range Cannon.”
  • Rush Limbaugh signs off, possibly for the last time.
  • Austin restaurants and bars under Stage 5 Wuhan coronavirus restrictions again. Thanks a lot, China. And Mayor Adler.
  • Rand Paul presents the airing of the Festivus grievances:

    Among Paul’s instances of waste were several health studies, including more than $36 million spent on studying why stress makes hair turn gray, more than $1 million spent studying whether people will eat ground-up bugs, and more than $3 million spent interviewing San Franciscans about their edible cannabis use.

    As far as taxpayer dollars spent aiding other countries, $8.62 billion was spent in Afghanistan on counternarcotics efforts, more than $37 million was spent helping deal with truant Filipino youth, and more than $3 million was spent on sending Russians to American community colleges for a “gap year.”

    Among funds spent on the environment, energy, and scientific research, more than $1 million was spent walking lizards on a treadmill, nearly $200,000 was spent studying how people cooperate while playing e-sport video games, and more than $2 million on developing a wearable headset to track eating behaviors.

    The military had several particularly high expenditures this year that Paul listed as waste, including repurposing $1 billion in coronavirus response funds for unrelated acquisitions, more than $ 715 million in lost equipment designated for Syrians fighting ISIS, and $174 million on drones that were lost over Afghanistan.

    Other eyebrow-raising expenses included more than $4 million spent on spraying alcoholic rats with bobcat urine, more than $10 million spent on would-be coronavirus test tubes that turned up as used soda bottles, and nearly $6 million spent building three bicycle storage facilities at Washington, D.C. Metro stations.

  • Titania McGrath, prophet of our times.
  • Man of the year: Jeffrey Toobin. “Toobin’s grip on the media was relentless. In 2002 he joined CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst, a cocksure critic of Republicans…” (Hat tip: HashtagGriswold.)
  • Good idea:

  • Heh:

  • “Can I interest you in some propane? Or some propane explosions?”
  • How badly do you want a drink?
  • Oh the weather outside is frightful:

  • Christmas with the Sex Pistols.
  • Merry Christmas, everyone!

    LinkSwarm for December 18, 2020

    Friday, December 18th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! On a personal note, I was just laid off from my Senior Technical Writer job, so if you have any leads in the department (for either Austin or remote work), drop me a line in the comments.

  • Russian hackers penetrated Austin city government:

    State-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have breached the city network of Austin, Texas, The Intercept has learned. The breach, which appears to date from at least mid-October, adds to the stunning array of intrusions attributed to Russia over the past few months.

    The list of reported victims includes the departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; the Pentagon; cybersecurity firm FireEye; IT software company SolarWinds; and assorted airports and local government networks across the United States, among others. The breach in Austin is another apparent victory for Russia’s hackers. By compromising the network of America’s 11th-most populous city, they could theoretically access sensitive information on policing, city governance, and elections, and, with additional effort, burrow inside water, energy, and airport networks. The hacking outfit believed to be behind the Austin breach, Berserk Bear, also appears to have used Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional attacks.

    While the attacks on SolarWinds, FireEye, and U.S. government agencies have been linked to a second Russian group — APT29, also known as Cozy Bear — the Austin breach represents another battlefront in a high-stakes cyber standoff between the United States and Russia. Both Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear are known for quietly lurking in networks, often for months, while they spy on their targets. Berserk Bear — which is also known as Energetic Bear, Dragonfly, TEMP.Isotope, Crouching Yeti, and BROMINE, among other names — is believed to be responsible for a series of breaches of critical U.S. infrastructure over the past year.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Illegal-immigrant caravans back on the way — and Joe Biden ‘invited’ them.” (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calls for Nancy Pelosi’s ouster as Speaker of the House.

    Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) called for new leadership to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), in an interview with The Intercept aired on Wednesday.

    The remarks represent Ocasio-Cortez’s most direct challenge to current Democratic congressional leadership, and come a month after Michigan representative Elissa Slotkin vowed not to support Pelosi for another term as House Speaker. Pelosi is the only candidate for the position, but with Democrats projected to win at most 226 House seats, Pelosi can only lose eight Democratic votes to remain Speaker.

    I wonder: If enough of the hard left defects to keep Pelosi from one more term as speaker, might there be enough Democrats to vote for a moderate Republican as Speaker rather than being ruled by The Squad?

  • Another Obama-era crony green energy boondoggle goes bust:

    Move over, Solyndra. Another green boondoggle from the Obama era has failed, and taxpayers are out as much as $510 million. Late last week Judge Karen Owens approved a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization by Tonopah Solar Energy. Tonopah operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada that received $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama Administration.

    The plan includes a settlement with the Department of Energy that leaves taxpayers liable for as much as $234.68 million in outstanding debt, but the total public cost is even higher. Crescent Dunes also received an investment-tax credit, and the 2009 stimulus legislation allowed it to receive a cash payment in lieu of credit. In 2017 the plant received more than $275.6 million from Treasury under the Section 1603 program, which it used to service its outstanding liabilities. So taxpayers already gave Crescent Dunes cash to pay off its taxpayer-backed loans.

    Snip.

    DOE expected Crescent Dunes to produce up to 482,000 megawatt hours every year, but the plant hasn’t produced that much energy in its lifetime. In 2019 Crescent Dunes’s hot salt tanks suffered what partial owner SolarReserve described as “a catastrophic failure” that has left the plant inoperable.

    Since molten salt is one of the key elements in many next generation nuclear plant designs, I searched online for pictures of what a catastrophic hot salt tank failure looks like, but I couldn’t find any.

  • Portland keeps letting Antifa run wild:

    Last week, Portland law ­enforcers raided a house that had for months been ­illegally occupied by trespassers affiliated with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. At the barricaded property, officers made arrests and found a stockpile of firearms.

    Under normal circumstances, the armed trespassers would be prosecuted, and that would be the end of the story. But in riot-plagued Portland, Oregon, things are very far from normal.

    The city’s “progressive” district attorney immediately dropped the charges against the occupiers, and their comrades soon sent in reinforcements to build a sprawling autonomous zone in the middle of a densely populated residential area.

    The militants called the place the Red House Autonomous Zone — named after the red-painted house occupied at the heart of the zone. In doing so, they took inspiration from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, Washington. During the summer, leftist extremists chased police out of a six-block area of the Emerald City and drew their own “borders,” complete with checkpoints manned by armed “security.” The three-week ­experiment in lawlessness ended in mass vandalism, ­attempted rape, multiple shootings and two homicides.

    Portland’s RHAZ is following in the same footsteps.

    The house at the center of the autonomous zone was occupied by members of the Kinney family and their allies. The Kinneys, who haven’t paid their mortgage since 2017, were evicted after a tortuous legal process. The fact that they own a second house nearby didn’t prevent the mixed-race Kinneys and their allies from claiming victimization by — you guessed it — “racism.”

    Soon after last week’s raid on the occupied house, some 100 Antifa comrades mobilized through social media to retake the space. “There is an active call for numbers, defensive gear and supplies and change of clothes,” tweeted Antifa group Youth Liberation Front.

    Within a few hours, the entire street was blocked off with stolen fencing, wood and junk taken from nearby homes. Some brought in power tools to reinforce the barriers. The militants laid out piles of rocks, metal spikes and glass bottles at strategic points to act as supply points for projectile weapons. They lined the road with impromptu “booby traps” — upward-facing nail strips, caltrops and more.

    Portland police officers tried to shut down the RHAZ early on, but they were attacked and chased away. Their police cruisers were smashed up; they didn’t return.

    “Those present at the barricades should leave it behind, put down your weapons and allow the neighborhood to return to peace and order,” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell asked the militants, who ignored his polite request.

    Portland residents should file federal civil rights lawsuits against Portland officials for equal protection violations. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Plus Portland antifa are still the same scumbags:

    A serial sex offender and Black Lives Matter activist recently released from prison served a titular leadership role at the Antifa autonomous zone in north Portland.

    Micah Isaiah Rhodes, 27, was convicted of three counts of second-degree sexual abuse of minors in 2018. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after violating probation by being near children during an Antifa occupation of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Former [Andrew] Cuomo Aide Lindsey Boylan Alleges Governor Sexually Harassed Her For Years.” Hey, what do you want to bet that #BelieveAllWomen magically doesn’t apply to powerful Democrat yet again? For Reasons.
  • Rhode Island’s Democratic governor Gina Raimondo: “Don’t go out and wear a mask.” Four days later: Goes to a wine bar, doesn’t wear a mask. Laws are for the peasants, not the Democratic Party ruling class. (Hat tip: Andrew Malcolm.)
  • Dem. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard commits heresy against radical transgenderism, sponsers bill that would ban men from women’s sports.
  • Get woke, go broke. “Dismal NFL Ratings Force Networks To Renegotiate With Advertisers.”
  • Things look bad for movie theaters.
  • “Leader Of German Audit Watchdog Caught Trading In Wirecard Shares Before Collapse.”
  • If the MSM didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all:

  • Camille Paglia unloads on academic leftism:

  • Over at Borepatch, there’s a swell story about Air Force Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart.
  • Eating chili peppers can extend your life. I’m going to live forever…
  • Cyberpunk 2077 sucked so bad on PS4 that Sony pulled it from the store and is offering refunds.
  • Zodiac killer cipher broken. Also consider this a reminder that Zodiac is one f David Fincher’s best films.
  • Speaking of great films: Ann Reinking, RIP. She was awesome in All That Jazz, one of the all-time great American movies.
  • Welcome BadBlue (by the same folks behind Director Blue) to the blogroll.
  • A first edition of The Federalist Papers sold at auction for $226,800.
  • The Flu would like a word:

  • Funny dog video:

  • “Chinese Spy Assigned To Date Eric Swalwell Begs To Be Sent To Labor Camp Instead.”
  • Like BattleSwarm? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Joe Rogan Under Attack?

    Monday, November 30th, 2020

    With Joe Rogan’s show about to shift to Spotify, here’s a couple of other podcasters (Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman) noting how Rogan’s close friends are attacked whenever he threatens to upset the desired narrative (i.e., “Biden is suffering from dementia”).

    I hope we still get excerpts from Rogan shows on YouTube, even if we’re no longer getting the full shows.

    (Note: I bet you were expecting another election fraud update today. With getting back to work after my Thanksgiving vacation ended, I didn’t quite have time to put one together for today, but hope to have one up tomorrow.)

    Election Fraud Update for November 23, 2020

    Monday, November 23rd, 2020

    It’s another election fraud update, full of twists and turns. Some of these reports are from sources I’m not familiar with, so use your own judgment.

  • Let’s start off with a transcript of the Rudy Giuliani/Sidney Powell conference laying out the case that election fraud occurred:

    [Rudy Giuliani:] When we began our representation of the president, we certainly were confronted with a very anomalous set of results. The president way ahead on election night, seven or 800,000 in Pennsylvania, somehow he lost Pennsylvania. We have statisticians willing to testify that that’s almost statistically impossible to have happened in the period of time that it happened. But, of course, that’s just speculation.

    As we started investigating, both our investigations and the very patriotic and brave American citizens that have come forward, are extraordinary, extraordinary number of people, extraordinary number of witnesses. And what emerged very quickly is it’s not a single voter fraud in one state. This pattern repeats itself in a number of states. Almost exactly the same pattern, which to any experienced investigator, prosecutor would suggest that there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption. The number of voter fraud cases in Philadelphia could fill a library. Just a few weeks ago, there was a conviction for voter fraud and one two weeks before that. And I’ve often said, I guess, sarcastically, but it’s true, the only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn’t cheated in this election, because, for the last 60 years, they’ve cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit.

    Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do. It means they have a certain degree of control over… certainly control the election board completely. And they control law enforcement. And unfortunately, they have some friendly judges that will issue ridiculously irrational opinions just to come out in their favor.

    So, let’s start with the specifics, Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, the margin of victory now for Biden, which is not a victory, it’s a fraud, is 69,140 votes. The reality is that we are now at a count of 682,770 ballots for which we have affidavits that there was no inspection of that ballot at the time that it was entered in the vote. It was a mail ballot.

    Mail ballots are particularly prone to fraud. We were warned about that by Jimmy Carter, president Jimmy Carter and Secretary Baker in a report about a dozen years ago, in which they said that mail balloting is particularly susceptible of fraud, that we should very carefully consider ever doing it, and that it can be taken advantage of. Justice Souter warned us at the same thing in a comment in an election law case. And even the New York Times wrote articles about how dangerous mail voting, mail-in voting was. And this is the first time we ever did it en masse. And I think we proved that all three are prophets. It’s not only susceptible to fraud, it is easily susceptible to fraud, particularly if you have a plan or scheme, which sounds eerily similar to what Joe Biden told us a few days before the election, that he had the best voter fraud team in the world. But they were good. I don’t know that they were that good because they made significant mistakes, like all crooks do. And we caught them. One of them was pushing out Republican inspectors. Every state… almost every civilized country, even Tanzania and places that you wouldn’t think of, have rules about inspectors, particularly for mail-in ballots. And why particularly for mail-in ballots? Because they can more easily be defrauded and you can’t check on them.

    People who have never done a mail-in ballot, I’m going to show you why it’s so easy. Well, you fill out an envelope like this. You put your… usually in New York, it would be your assembly district and the precinct in which you’re voting. You fill out your name and your address, and you sign it. You then use an inner envelope, and you put the ballot inside the inner envelope. You seal it all, and you send it in.

    When it’s being counted, almost invariably in the United States, up until the mass cheating that went on in this election, a Republican and a Democrat inspector, as well as others, if there are other parties, is allowed to watch the unsealing of this ballot. It used to go on all over America when we conducted honest elections. Because the only time you can ever find out if it’s a fraudulent ballot, is when it is looked at. The minute you approve this, it’s thrown away, gone for eternity. The only thing left is the vote. That could have been Mickey Mouse. That could have been a dead person. That could have been not filled out properly. That could have been the same person 30 times. And all these things have happened, by the way. That could have been nothing filled out. We never know.

    So, for example, the recount being done in Georgia will tell us nothing because these fraudulent ballots will just be counted again because they wouldn’t supply the signatures to match the ballots. So, it means nothing to have counted these ballots, because for example, in Pennsylvania, where we have probably our most precise evidence, 682,770 of these ballots were cast, put in, and they weren’t inspected, which renders them ballots that are null and void, cannot be counted, have to be removed from the vote. Why? For several reasons, not the least of which is, that was basically only one of two places in the state where it was done. So, in the other parts of the state, there was a legitimate inspection of the ballots. So, if you have two different standards in different parts of the state, one favoring one part of the state, the other disfavoring the other part of the state, that’s a classic violation of the equal protection clause of the United States constitution, Bush V Gore being the most recent case that teaches that.

    Bit on “ballot correcting” snipped.

    To give you another example, we have 17,000 provisional ballots cast in Pittsburgh. Do you know what a provisional ballot is? Provisional ballot usually happens this way, and about 15 of the 17,000 happened this way, you walk in and you say, I’m here to vote today. Oh, Mr. Giuliani, you already voted. I did? I don’t remember voting. Oh, yes. Yes. You cast an absentee ballot. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did.

    So, why does that happen 17,000 times in Pittsburgh? People walked in thinking… actually 15,000, to be precise. Why did it happen 15,000 times that people in Pittsburgh walked in to vote and they had already voted, according to the Democrat election machine? Did they forget? That many people with bad memories in Pittsburgh? Or is the following correct, that, as witnesses will testify, they were instructed by the Democrat bosses when they had a ballot in which there was no one registered, just assign it to somebody, just assign it to Rudy Giuliani. So, maybe Rudy Giuliani won’t show up to vote. And, if he does show up to vote, we’ll give him a provisional ballot. That is what we call circumstantial evidence of the fraud.

    The direct evidence of the fraud are the people who will testify that, in fact, that’s what happened to them, as well as the 50 to 60 witnesses we have for the way they were treated and not allowed to inspect the ballots. They weren’t just not allowed to do it. They were pushed. A few cases, they were assaulted. In all cases, they were put in a corral so far away. Probably the closest they got is from here to the back of that room. We could do like a… Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies because he comes from Brooklyn. And when, the nice lady who said she saw, and then he says to her, “How many fingers do I got up?” And she says a three. Well, she was too far away to see it was only two. These people were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing.

    Now, I don’t know. You’re going to tell me that 60 people are lying? They didn’t just tell me this. They swore under penalty of perjury, which is something no Democrat has ever done. You don’t even ask Biden about this. You don’t put them under penalty of perjury. He doesn’t even get asked questions about it. He doesn’t get asked questions about all the evidence of the crimes that he committed. These people are under penalty of perjury, the names that are on our affidavit. They swear that they weren’t allowed to carry out their function as inspectors.

    And it’s not just a technical thing. There’s a reason they did it. Why would you not allow people to carry out the function they’ve been allowed to do for 50 years, 60 years? Why wouldn’t you allow inspections of those ballots? Because you knew you were going to use those ballots to catch Biden up. And you had a big road ahead of you. You had to catch him up for 700,000 to 800,000 votes that he was behind. And the only way you were going to do it were with the mail-in ballots. You couldn’t have a Democrat and Republican inspector around. They don’t even have Democrats watching, because they’d be afraid that they’d be honest Democrats who would say, “You’re cheating.”

    So, that takes us to Michigan where there was an honest Democrat who said they were cheating. And we’ll show you her affidavit because I know you keep reporting falsely that we have no evidence, that we have no specific acts of fraud. That’s because the coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this. You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it. And you are. I mean, you don’t report to them that a citizen of this country, a very fine woman who was willing to allow me to give you her name. I can’t give you all these affidavits. Because, if I do, these people will be harassed. They’ll be threatened. They may lose their job. They will lose their friends. We’ve lost lawyers in this case because they’ve been threatened. We’ve had lawyers that need protection. What’s going on in this country is horrible. And the censorship that you’re imposing is making it worse.

    But Jesse Jacob is an adult citizen and a resident of the state of Michigan. She’s been an employee of the City of Detroit for decades. I know her age, but she can tell you her age. She was assigned to voting duties in September, and she was trained by the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan. She was basically trained to cheat. She said that I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than when they were actually sent in. The supervisor made that announcement for all workers to engage in that fraudulent practice. That’s not me saying that. That’s this American citizens saying that under oath.

    Snip.

    Then she was instructed, “By my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo ID when a person was trying to vote. Don’t ask for identification. Why would you not ask for identification? Because you knew that a lot of people not entitled to vote were going to come in and early vote. Because you knew that illegal immigrants were going to be allowed to vote. You knew, if you lived in Philadelphia, unless you’re [Italian 00:17:56]. That’s an Italian expression for stupid. Unless you’re stupid, you knew that a lot of people were coming over from Camden to vote. They do every year. It happens all the time in Philly. It’s about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagle football game. Happens all the time, all the time.

    And as it allowed to happen because it is a Democrat corrupt city and has been for years, many, many years. And they carried it out in places they could get away with it. They didn’t carry it out in neutral places. They didn’t carry it out in Republican places. They didn’t carry it out where the law is respected. They carried it out in a corrupt city where the district attorney releases criminals on mass, which is why it has so much crime.

    She also said, “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in person, but they had already applied for and submitted an absentee ballot.” So, she observed a lot of people voting twice. Again, this is Jesse Jacob, not me. “I was instructed not to invalidate any ballots and not to look for any deficiency in the ballots. Why would you do that? Because you’re cheating, on purpose cheating, intentionally cheating. You’re cheating as a institution. This is an instruction from the election commissioner or the employer to the worker. “Don’t look for any deficiencies in the ballot.” “I was instructed not to look at any of the signatures on the absentee ballots. “If she was instructed not to look for any of the signatures on the absentee ballots, why the heck do you sign it in the first place? In order to identify it. She was instructed not to do that because many of the absentee ballots were fraudulent, and they knew that, and they didn’t want to have account of that.

    “On November four, 2020, I was in strict structured to improperly predate the absentee ballot when the receipt date was after November 3rd, 2020.” Now, this is really significant because Justice Alito of the Supreme Court instructed Pennsylvania that any ballot that comes in after eight o’clock on November 3rd, 2020 had to be put aside and not opened because there’s a question as to its legality and its constitutionality. What she’s telling you is that they blatantly disregarded that order, that they took ballots that were marked the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, and they marked it down for the third in blatant disregard of the order of the United States Supreme Court.

    Snip.

    There are many more affidavits here. I’d like to read them all to you, but I don’t have the time. You should have had the time and energy to go look for them. That’s your job, like it’s my job to defend the president and to represent the president. It’s your job to read these things and not falsely report that there’s no evidence. Do you know how many affidavits we have in the Michigan case? 220 affidavits. They’re not all public, but eight of them are. Four affiants here, those are people who give affidavits, report an incident that, under any other circumstances, would have been on the front page of all your newspapers if it didn’t involve the hatred that you have, irrational, pathological hatred that you have for the president. What they swear to is that, at 4:30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting.

    A truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting ballots. The people thought it was food, so they all ran to the truck. Wasn’t food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots and the ballots were in garbage cans, they were in paper bags, they were in cardboard boxes, and they were taken into the center. They were put on a number of tables. At that time, they thought all the Republican inspectors had left, all but two had and an employee of Dominion who we will address a little bit later.

    Here’s what they jointly swear to, that every ballot that they could see, everything they could hear, these were ballots for Biden. When they saw a ballot, these were ballots only for Biden, meaning there was no down-ticket. Just Biden. Many of them didn’t have anything on the outer envelope because these ballots were produced very quickly, very swiftly and there are estimated to be a minimum of 50,000, maximum of 100,000. Many of them were triple-counted, which means they were put into the counting machine this way. Once, twice, three times. I didn’t see that. I don’t know that but for the fact that three American citizens are willing to swear to it. We’re not going to let them go to court and do that? We’re going to let this election go by when there are in this case 60 witnesses that can prove what I’m saying to you and other acts of fraud in Michigan? I mean what’s happened to this country if we’re going to let that happen? What happened to this country if we’re going to cover that up? We let Al Gore carry on an election dispute longer than this one has been going on for one state and for chads. This happened in Pennsylvania, it happened in Michigan, Michigan probably right now, if I count up the B, just one case alone, Trump v. Benson, a case that we dismissed today because that case was attempting to get the Wayne County Board of Supervisors to de-certify. Well they did. They de-certified. That case has 100 affidavits and 100 affidavits show essentially what I’ve talked to you about. Counting ballots improperly, counting them three and four times, having people vote three and four times, changing and backdating ballots to the point of at least 300,000 illegitimate ballots that we can specifically identify. The margin in Michigan is 146,121 and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit that Biden won 80-20. So you see it changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County. So it’s a very significant case. That is being raised in the case of Costantino v. The City of Detroit. Not by us, but by an individual plaintiff. We are helping and assisting in that case however and you can find all the affidavits that you want filed in that case. You can find out they’re not just allegations, they’re allegations supported by sworn testimony which is a lot better than Joe Biden has ever done on anything. He doesn’t answer questions, much less give you sworn affidavits.

    On to Wisconsin.

    Wisconsin. Wisconsin had a very small margin, 20,544 last time I looked. In Wisconsin, without going into great detail, very similar plan. Republicans shut out in the City of Milwaukee and also in Madison. Republicans almost uniformly shut out from the absentee process. Not allowed to inspect, not allowed to look at the ballots. We have in Milwaukee and in the state of Wisconsin a much stricter law. Wisconsin doesn’t allow mail-in ballots. They didn’t buy into the big mail-in ballot situation. Wisconsin, when you look at their constitution, almost seems to not like absentee ballots. They state it’s not a right, a privilege, and they have very, very strict procedures and the strict procedure says that you can’t be given an absentee ballot, you have to personally apply for it. It’s illegal basically to solicit a vote and they have actually many reasons for it that probably goes back to their progressive days, when I say progressive, I mean late 19th century early 20th century progressive, when that really meant progressive, not retrogressive.

    So there are 60,000 ballots in Milwaukee County and 40,000 ballots in Madison that as far as we can tell and this is why we are auditing because we have very good information that numbers are going to come out about here that don’t have applications. Under the law of the State of Wisconsin, already decided, if there’s no application for an absentee ballot, the absentee ballot is thrown away. This all happened in two places in Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Northern Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Republican Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in neutral Wisconsin, where there are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, it happened in a place where the vote was 75, 80% for the Democrat. You take away any number of those and that 20,000 lead disappears. In other words, if you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin by a good margin. Indeed, if you count the lawful votes in Pennsylvania, he won it by about 300,000 votes.

    Also in the lawsuit filed in Wisconsin which is really a petition because of their procedures, there were no inspectors provided for the count of the illegal ballots. There were numerous backdated ballots, we’re just counting them now. Run over into the thousands and there were many precincts in which there was an overvote. Now let me explain to you what an overvote is which is something you should have explained to the American people because it’s about the clearest circumstantial evidence of massive fraud that you can have. An overvote is if 200% of the people who are registered in a district vote. Think about that. 200% of the registered voters in a district vote. What does that mean? That means somebody voted twice, that means somebody who’s not entitled to vote voted, an illegal, a person from another city or state, a person who’s not registered, but what it means is that those are illegitimate votes. You don’t have an overvote of 200% or 300%. You don’t have an overvote of 100%. Most precincts don’t have 100% turnout. In fact, classically it’s considered to be an overvote if you go over 80%. Well in Michigan and Wisconsin, we have overvotes in numerous precincts, of 150%, 200%, and 300%.

    One of the reasons why the two Republicans did not certify in Wayne, Michigan, Wayne County, Michigan is because the overvote was so high. Monstrously high in about two-thirds of the precincts in the city of Detroit. Which means magically two and three times the number of registered voters turned out to vote. In fact we have precincts in which two times the number of people who live there, including children, voted. That’s absurd. The frustration of this is, what I’m describing to you is a massive fraud. It isn’t a little teeny one. It isn’t 100 votes switched here or there. Georgia. We’re about to file a major lawsuit in Georgia. That’ll be filed probably tomorrow. I don’t need to go through it. Virtually the same things I’ve told you before. In the City of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside and we have numerous double voters, we have numerous out-of-state voters, and we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of vote. That will all be in the lawsuit that comes out tomorrow.

    He’s also going to look at Arizona. Sidney Powell then makes some extraordinary claims:

    Thank you Rudy. What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here in as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez while … He was being briefed on how it worked, he was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the election came out his way. That was the express purpose for creating this software. He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.

    Now the software itself was created with so many variables and so many back doors that can be hooked up to the internet or a thumbdrive stuck in it or whatever, but one of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in. That’s when they came in the backdoor with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden. Others were shoved in in batches, they’re always put in in a certain number of batches and people would rerun the same batch. This corresponds to our statistical evidence that shows incredible spikes in the vote counts at particular times and that corresponds to eyewitness testimony of numerous people who have come forward and said they saw the ballots come in the backdoor at that time.

    Notably the Dominion executives are nowhere to be found now. They are moving their offices overnight to different places. Their office in Toronto was shared with one of the Soros entities, one of the leaders of the Dominion Project overall is Lord Malloch-Brown, Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K., and part of his organization. There are ties of the Dominion leadership to the Clinton Foundation and to other known politicians in this country. Just to give you a brief description of how this worked, I’m going to quote from a letter that was written and I will read that to make sure I get the quotes right. This person was objecting to the United States acquisition of Sequoia Voting Systems by Smartmatic, a foreign-owned company. I believe this transaction raises exactly the sort of foreign ownership issues that [Siphius 00:42:10] is best positioned to examine for national security purposes. It’s undisputed that Smartmatic is foreign-owned and it has acquired Sequoia, they keep changing the names as they go along. Different times when a problem comes up, they just create another corporation and call it a different name, but it was a voting machine company doing business in the United States.

    Some information about foreign ownership of Smartmatic snipped. All concerning, but probably not anything that will get a judge to prevent certification, throw out fraudulent votes or order a revote.

    We have evidence of different numbers of votes being injected into the system, the same identical unique six digit number multiple times in at least two States that we’ve analyzed so far. I’m talking about like 341,542 votes for Biden and 100,012 for Trump. There’s no explanation, no logical explanation for the same numbers being injected 20 minutes apart into the machine. The software manual itself, you can download it from the internet and I would encourage you all to read it, because it specifically advertises some of these things as features of the system. Why it was ever allowed into this country is beyond my comprehension and why nobody has dealt with it is absolutely appalling.

    The machines were easily accessible to hackers. There’s video on the net that will explain to you how a kid with a cell phone can hack one of these voting machines. There’s been no oversight of Dominion or its software. Workers in each county were trained by Dominion, but there’s no evidence of any monitoring otherwise. We have testimony of different workers admitting that they were trained how to dispose of Trump votes and add to Biden votes. The software has a feature pursuant to which you can drag and drop any number of batches of votes to the candidate of your choice, or simply throw them away. So we have mathematical evidence in a number of states of massive quantities of Trump votes being trashed, just simply put in the trash like you would on your computer with any file and Biden votes being injected. That’s addition to the flipping.

    I mean, it really happens in two ways. There’s an algorithm that runs that automatically flips all the votes, and then each operator has the ability to go in override settings. They can ignore a signature, they could ignore the top line of the ballot. They can go down ballot and select who they want to change the results for. The gentleman who founded Smartmatic, there’s video of him on the internet, explaining that, yes, in at least one occasion, he admits, they changed a million votes with no problem. Many of the jurisdictions that have had this problem might not have known of the issues, but many did. I think a full-scale criminal investigation needs to be undertaken immediately by the Department of Justice and by every state’s equivalent, Attorney General’s Office or State Investigatory Unit, because there’s evidence of different benefits being provided to the people who spent 100 million dollars of taxpayer money at the last minute for their state to get the Dominion voting systems put in, in time for this election in different ways.

    There’s one person that a lawyer told me got, “election insurance”, meaning that he would be able to make sure he was elected. I’m sure they explained that feature in detail to many people who expressed interest in putting this voting system in. Texas denied certification of the Dominion system in 2019, but there are no doubt issues with the software that Texas did use, unbeknownst to Texas, I would imagine, since they went to great trouble to examine the Dominion systems and reject them, but other software, the source code that does the alterations is embedded we have been told in the source code all across the country, in all the voting machines.

    (Hat tip: Regular reader Brandon Byers.)

    I think what Powell means here is the compiled code, which would be a very concerning and shocking thing, if true. Those identical numerical entries (and any other obvious statistical anomalies) need to be investigate and thrown out if found to be fraudulent. But the remote control flipping of votes charge is going to require some evidence to back it up, if true. (For starters, compile the supposed source code and see if the checksum matches the checksum on the compiled code on the machine.) Absent that sort of verification, it’s understandable why even those (like myself) who thinking election fraud occurred think some of the wilder Dominion theories are a distraction from the real issues. Which explains why…

  • Why the Trump campaign is now saying that Powell is no longer a member of their legal team.
  • Tucker Carlson telling Powell to put up or shut up might also have had something to do with it. Powell highlight some real issues, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don’t think she’s produced that.
  • But back to Rudy:

    The media has been claiming since the election ended that President Trump’s claims of voter fraud are ‘baseless’ and ‘without evidence’. That just is not true. The President’s lawyer gave examples of it during today’s press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But everyone is too busy mocking him to pay attention.

    I tried to listen to what Giuliani actually said and not what he looked like or the characterization of him by the rest of the media. The cameras started feverishly clicking the first time he wiped the sweat from his face, all but guaranteeing that would be the focus of the presser.

    Giuliani did in fact present evidence of voter fraud today but many people simply didn’t want to hear it. He cited multiple Americans, one by name, who have signed sworn affidavits stating that they witness some type of fraud, whether it was pro-Trump ballots being thrown out without cause, ballots being backdated to before the election, poll workers being told not to ask voters for identification, and more.

    As Giuliani helpfully pointed out, affidavits are considered ‘evidence’ in a court case. Whether you agree or disagree with them is a different question. And it’s reasonable that not all of the people who signed their names would be willing to go public. If you want to hear more of the evidence that was presented, just watch the first hour or so of the press conference.

    The more difficult — and crucial — question is whether Trump’s legal team has enough witnesses or other evidence to actually overturn the election in court. That is what journalists should be addressing. But it is simply wrong for the media to assert there is NO evidence of fraud.

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”: “Dominion Voting ‘Lawyers Up‘ Before Abruptly Backing Out Of Pennsylvania Fact-Finding Hearing.”

    Pennsylvania lawmakers had scheduled the hearing with the voting machine manufacturer “to help identify and correct any irregularities in the election process,” according to the House Republican Caucus.

    “It is vitally important voters have faith in the machines they use to cast their ballots. On the heels of Gov. Tom Wolf unilaterally decertifying every voting machine in the Commonwealth, we need to know whether these new machines met expectations, whether they are reliable and whether they are not subject to interference,” said Rep. Grove (R-York).

    Dominion had initially agreed to attend the hearing, before it “abruptly canceled,” Grove said.

    “I was impressed at what appeared to be the willingness that Dominion Voting Systems to address accusations and it would have put 1.3. million Pennsylvanians who used their machines at ease—including myself, thinking that Dominion was willing to publicly back up their product which PA taxpayers invested millions to purchase” he noted during the presser.

    “Unfortunately, last evening, Dominion Voting Systems lawyered up, and backed out of their commitment to the people of Pennsylvania to provide their input in a public format.”

    Grove blasted the company for “retreating into the darkness,” rather than appearing at the hearing with “honesty and integrity.”

    The committee chair said he wanted to know why a company with nothing to hide would back out.

  • Reminder: Texas rejected Dominion: “The examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation.”
  • Here’s a statistical analysis from Director Blue that suggests election fraud in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

    Notice the similarities in PA and GA? How the right sides of the graph show virtually no movement for Trump; and very predictable vote movements to Biden. How predictable?

    Below are excerpts of spreadsheets that show what was happening on the right side of each chart. Vote flips in the same-sized bundles (6,000 in PA and 4,800 in GA) were injected into the system to overcome Trump’s lead in both states. You can click either image above to see all of the data.

    The highlighted cells show where the vote counts — stunningly obvious in retrospect — were manipulated to benefit Biden.

    That does look might suspicious. Someone with more statistical analysis expertise than I have will have tell me how meaningful this is.

  • Here’s another data analysis suggesting that Dominion software in Philadelphia regularly transferred votes in exact ratios. The video’s 40 minutes long, I haven’t watched all of it, and, again, someone with more statistical analysis expertise will have to analyze this to tell me how meaningful it is. (Hat tip: Janie Johnson.)
  • Remember the Wayne County flip-flop? Well, it flipped again:

    The two Republicans on Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers claimed in signed affidavits Wednesday that they were bullied into siding with Democrats and have now rescinded their votes to certify.

    The two Republicans — Monica Palmer and William C. Hartmann — were involved in a brief deadlock in the county’s election certification process Tuesday before voting to certify.

    Wayne County, which includes Detroit, is Michigan’s most populous county, with more than 1.7 million residents.

    The Associated Press reported that a person familiar with the matter said Trump himself reached out to the canvassers on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified.”

    And on Thursday, the Trump campaign said it was withdrawing its lawsuit in the state, citing what happened in Wayne County.

    “This morning we are withdrawing our lawsuit in Michigan as a direct result of achieving the relief we sought: to stop the election in Wayne County from being prematurely certified before residents can be assured that every legal vote has been counted and every illegal vote has not been counted,” said Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

    Both Republicans say they were called racists and subjected to threats for raising concerns about ballots that Democrats said were from predominately Black communities, Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for the Trump 2020 Campaign, told Fox News on Tuesday.

    They also said people had threatened members of their family.

  • Speaking of which, watch a Detroit State Rep candidate dox Wayne County canvasser Monica Palmer…and her children:

    (Hat Tip: Brandon Bryers)

  • Alan Dershowitz outline’s Trump’s narrow legal path to victory:

    For example, in Pennsylvania, they have two very strong legal arguments. One, that the courts changed what the legislature did about counting ballots after the end of Election Day. That’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court. I don’t necessarily support it, but it’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court,” Dershowitz told Fox Business on Sunday. The team, meanwhile, has “a winning issue in the Supreme Court on equal protection, that some counties flawed ballots to be cured while others didn’t. Bush v. Gore suggests that an Equal Protection argument can prevail.”

    Dershowitz, who helped defend Trump during the Senate impeachment trial earlier this year, said that due to Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s lead over the president, Trump’s team may not be able to contest enough ballots in Pennsylvania.

    “The other legal theory they have, which is a potentially strong one, is that the computers, either fraudulently or by glitches, changed hundreds of thousands of votes. There, there are enough votes to make a difference, but I haven’t seen the evidence to support that,” he elaborated. “So, in one case, they don’t have the numbers. In another case, they don’t seem yet to have the evidence, maybe they do. I haven’t seen it. But the legal theory is there to support them if they have the numbers and they have the evidence.”

  • Trey Trainor, the Chairman of the federal Election Commission says Trump has a case. “The massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place.”

    Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots, met the first level of legal scrutiny under what’s known as motion to dismiss or “Rule 12(b)(6)” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.

    Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a “motion to dismiss” is the “summary judgment phase,” Trainor said that under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another “Hmmmm”: “Floyd County [Georgia] terminates election director after state audit uncovers uncounted votes.” Over 2,600 votes not counted.
  • Related:

  • Given those revelations, the Trump campaign asks for another recount in Georgia.

    The news comes after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) certified the election results. Although Kemp certified the results, he called for an additional hand recount, citing major errors in Floyd, Douglas and Walton Counties.

    “I would just say I’m formalizing the certification,” Kemp said at the time. “Now that Secretary Raffensperger certified, it triggers the ability of the Trump campaign to ask for the recount. If something were to happen, I’m still part of that process. So my take on all this is: I’m following the law and the rules.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another data point:

  • Another Dominion “Hmmmm”:

  • And another: “Dominion Engineer Told Antifa He’d ‘Made Sure’ Trump Wouldn’t Win, Report Says.”
  • NotSureIfSerious.jpg:

  • The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected a Trump lawsuit complaint about counting observers. “It’s inexplicable that five justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would conclude that watchers observing from distances up to 100 feet away is reasonable.”
  • Also: “US District Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Matthew Brann, a Barack Obama appointee on Saturday dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.” Both of those lawsuits may be headed for the Supreme Court.
  • “The moment when Michigan counted 149,772 votes in 5 seconds and less than 6,000 of them were for Trump.”
  • Screwjob in Wisconsin?

  • “The Greatest Electoral Heist in American History“:

    The pieces are finally coming together, and they reveal a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.

    The 2020 election was stolen because leftists were able to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to weaken, alter, and eliminate laws that were put in place over the course of decades to preserve the integrity of the ballot box. But just as importantly, it was stolen because those same leftists had a thoroughly-crafted plan, and because they were rigorous in its implementation and ruthless in its execution.

    Let’s not forget that liberals have been consumed by a fixation with removing Donald Trump from office for longer than he’s actually been in office. The sordid story of the 2020 election heist begins all the way back in January 2017, when Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior advisor, David Plouffe, took a job leading the policy and advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “charitable” organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

    Earlier this year, just as it was becoming clear that Joe Biden would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Plouffe published a book outlining his vision for the Democrats’ roadmap to victory in 2020, which involved a “block by block” effort to turn out voters in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis.

    The book was titled, A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump, and it turned out that the citizen Plouffe had in mind was none other than his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Although Plouffe no longer officially managed Zuckerberg’s policy and advocacy efforts at that point, the political operative’s influence evidently remained a powerful force.

    Thanks to the extensive efforts of investigators and attorneys for the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, who have been following Zuckerberg’s money for the past 18 months, it is still possible to expose the inner workings of this heist in time to stop it.

    Snip.

    Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct “safe and secure” elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg donated $400 million — as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose — to nonprofit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg’s donations, CTCL’s annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. How was Zuckerberg even aware of such a small-potatoes operation, and why did he entrust it with ⅞ of the money he was pouring into this election cycle, despite the fact that it had no prior experience handling such a massive amount of money?

    Predictably, given the partisan background of its leading officers, CTCL proceeded to distribute Zuckerberg’s funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states. The vast majority of the money handed out by CTCL — especially in the early days of its largesse — went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some of the biggest recipients, in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020.

    Zuckerberg and CTCL left nothing to chance, however, writing detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.

    Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges were forced to put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered “concrete harm” in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because the left’s lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Vegas Oddsmaker Says, “The Fix Was In, Trump Was Robbed, This Election Was Stolen.”

    Trump entered the night a 2 to 1 underdog. As soon as the polls started to close and the picture became clear, Trump’s odds quickly moved to even money. Then Trump became the slight favorite. Then a moderate favorite. Then a 2-to-1 favorite.

    Then 3 to 1. 4 to 1. 5 to 1. 6 to 1. 7 to 1. Finally, Trump moved to 8 to 1 favorite.

    What does all this mean? Bettors putting their money on the line during Election Night have always proven to be deadly accurate. Smart bettors can clearly see what direction a race is taking. Bettors around the world clearly saw what I saw, when they stared at the electoral map- Trump was headed for an electoral landslide.

    But something wasn’t quite right. Fox News wouldn’t call Florida for Trump- even though he was ahead by a mile. They wouldn’t call Ohio- even though Trump was ahead by a mile, They wouldn’t call Texas- even though Trump was ahead by a mile. I sat there screaming at my television.

    More strange calls. Fox News had called Virginia for Biden at the start of the night- with Trump well ahead in Virginia. Trump would remain ahead in Virginia for three long hours after Fox awarded the electoral votes to Biden. Why would they do that? What was the rush? It made no sense.

    Biden was awarded Virginia with Trump ahead. But Trump was ahead by a mile in Florida, Ohio and Texas, yet Fox News refused to award him the electoral votes. I knew at that moment, something was wrong. Something smelled fishy. Something was rotten in the DC Swamp.

    Bettors witnessed Trump dominating. He clearly won not only those key states of Florida, Ohio and Texas, but Trump also enjoyed large leads in the entire Midwest- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. It was all but over. Trump had an electoral landslide. Hence the massive 8 to 1 odds in favor of Trump.

    And then it happened. It was the most bizarre call in Election Night history. Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Why? It wasn’t even close to over. There was no reason on earth to make that call. Arizona is STILL not over 8 days later. CNN still hasn’t awarded Arizona. ABC pulled it back from Biden only 24 hours ago.

    Why would Fox News be in such a rush to call Arizona for Biden? At that moment, Trump’s odds crashed almost instantly from 8 to 1, back down to 2 to 1. That drop set off alarm bells. My friend who is one of the biggest bookmakers in the country called me to say, “Wayne, something is wrong. I’ve never seen a drop like that, let alone a drop that fast. How can Trump go from 8 to 1, to 2 to 1. Someone knows something. We’ve got a problem.”

    It was as if someone had decided in advance to give Arizona to Biden- whether he won it, or not. It was as if the secret code was known to only a few billionaire gamblers, “Fox News awards Arizona to Biden.” Six magic words. Someone was ready for that call. Someone waited until Trump was a prohibitive 8 to 1 favorite, then knew to bet millions of dollars on Biden at the longest odds of the night. Someone knew the fix was in. Someone made a fortune.

    There’s more to the story. First, by awarding both Virginia and Arizona to Biden way too early in the evening and also going super slow awarding states to Trump where he led by a mile, Fox News made sure Biden had the electoral lead all night. That’s another big part of the story.

    (Hat tip: The Samizdat Herald.)

  • The Democratic Media Complex reaps what it sows:

    A prominent liberal legal academic who spent the last four years pushing outrageous, discredited, and debunked conspiracy theories about Donald Trump stealing the 2016 election said on Fox News Sunday that refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election threatens the country.

    Snip.

    No conspiracy theories of recent vintage have damaged the country as much as the ones [Laurence] Tribe (and many other anti-Trump media figures) trafficked in each and every day of the last four years from prominent perches in politics, media, and the academy. If taking claims to court undermines democracy, how to defend Tribe’s vociferous and repeated claims that Trump stole the election in 2016 with the help of Russia?

  • More on the same theme:

    There have been a number of frustrating things to deal with during the past couple of weeks. In victory or defeat, the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media are insufferable. We’ve all known that for a very long time but — and we have said this a lot lately — they’re getting even worse.

    They are complaining about President Trump’s legal right to make sure that the election to decide the leader of the free world wasn’t compromised in any way. It seems a reasonable thing to do, but we are dealing with liberals here, so reasonable doesn’t factor into the equation much.

    The painstaking, necessary scrutiny of ballots in key states continues, much to the chagrin of the Democrats. If they are so certain of victory, this delay shouldn’t mean much to them. They’re acting as if they’re terrified of what may be found out.

    Snip.

    After what the Democrats put this president and the country through with the Russia collusion hoax, the impeachment charade, and four years of flat-out saying that the 2016 election wasn’t legitimate, I don’t care if the Left has to suffer frustration forever. Put simply: they’ve brought this on themselves.

    If they had, for even a moment at any time in the last four years, not been thoroughly awful then maybe we might all be able to search for some common ground.

    Now, as I recently said on Facebook, I’ve spent every day since the election looking all over my house and I can’t find the kumbaya anywhere.

    Karma has entered the building, and will be staying awhile.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Another data point in Pennsylvania:

  • And here are thousands of data points: “Two California men were indicted on 41 counts of voter fraud after allegedly submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to NBC Los Angeles.”
  • Is a bombshell lawsuit coming in Georgia?
  • More on Georgia:

  • We need to end mail in vote fraud. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Philly Bans All Indoor Gatherings Unless You’re Still Counting Biden Votes.” And for the reader who complained I shouldn’t include Babylon Bee links in these roundups:

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