Newsbusters.

There is no confirmation that CNN staffers have put out a request for smelling salts.

Which is another way of saying that the American media is undergoing change. Big time.

For seemingly forever, the American Left has had an iron grip on control of the bulk of the American media. Recall that this control was once so solid that there were gasps of angry disbelief when the conservative Rupert Murdoch arrived on the American media scene. Murdoch, fresh from his native Australia where he had begun building his media empire by turning his father’s ownership of an Australian newspaper into a global empire, slowly expanded into the American media.

…

This time around the Big Change in the American media is coming courtesy of Elon Musk. And Musk’s presence with his investment in Skydance, which just acquired CNN, has liberals freaking out.

It’s worth recalling that CNN was, in its original form, the creation of Atlanta businessman Ted Turner. When he began CNN, by stitching together a couple TV stations, people laughed. But Turner was one smart guy, and built what was in the day the very first 24-hour cable news network Note: CNN took its name from being a Cable News Network.

Eventually it became known as ‘Clinton News Network’ and then ‘Communist News Network’.

Notably, Turner was a young conservative, in his father’s footsteps. But by 1988, his TBS network aired a preposterous seven-hour documentary called Portrait of the Soviet Union, which became the first big crusade for Brent Bozell’s new group called the Media Research Center. It was so bad that even Washington Post television critic Tom Shales characterized the series as “a postcard from Binky and Biff at Camp Whitewash.”

Read it.

A new study from a conservative media watchdog group has found that nearly 60 percent of Americans get their news from at least one of the Big Four news aggregators: Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News and Microsoft’s MSN.

Just the News reports that, according to MRC’s tracking and research data, these four applications sit on nearly every smartphone in America and serve as a dominant news window for an estimated 58 percent of Americans.

According to the MRC’s special report, released earlier this month, all four aggregators exhibit a heavy left-wing bias by overwhelmingly surfacing mainstream and left-leaning publications while filtering out conservative outlets.

Wall Street Journal.

Democrats pulled a dirty trick by enlisting a decoy, Daniel J. Sullivan, to run against Republican Alaska Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. Now they are indignant that the Trump Administration on Thursday filed a lawsuit that calls attention to their subterfuge. Please spare us the lectures about election interference.

The Justice Department lawsuit seeks to block certification of Alaska’s Senate election results if they “may be impacted by voter confusion.” “Daniel J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot threatens to mislead Alaskan citizens who want to vote for Senator Sullivan,” the lawsuit says. That’s the Democratic hope.

Democrats deny they are behind the ruse, but their fingerprints are all over it. Daniel J. Sullivan voted for Democrats in the prior three presidential elections and for Democratic nominee Mary Peltola when she ran for the House. There’s evidence that a Democratic consultant also helped launch his campaign.

Read it.

Colorado and Washington are reliably Democratic states where elected officials have rejected moves to ban transgender women and girls from female sports competitions. Now activists have gone around lawmakers to put proposed bans on both states’ ballots.

No, they aren’t ‘democratic’ states; they are Democrat states, which is quite a different thing. ‘Democratic Party’ is one of the great oxymorons of American history—from slavery to thinly-disguised socialism, Democrats are the very opposite of ‘democratic’.

Newsbusters.

MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart joined PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett and National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru on Friday to react to the news that the DOJ is suing to prevent certification in Alaska’s Senate race should the margin end up being small enough where it could be argued that Imposter Dan Sullivan denied Sen. Dan Sullivan a victory. Capehart continued his new hobby of claiming the federal government has “nothing to do with elections, period, anywhere,” despite him previously being a big fan of federal involvement.

Bennett began by wondering, “The Justice Department is now suing to potentially block certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican, Dan Sullivan, loses. We have not had an election yet, to be clear. Jonathan, what do you make of this president directing his DOJ? He said that he’s the one who told him to do it, to lay the legal groundwork to challenge a possible defeat.”

Capehart began by freaking out, “This disrupts, breaks, whatever word you want to use, all sorts of precedent, all sorts of new ground. One, the president of the United States should not be directing the Department of Justice to do anything.”

Of course, if the President were a Democrat, the tune would be entirely different.

Read it.

Oxfam paid its white staff a median of 33% less than colleagues who described themselves as black or a person of colour last year, according to the charity’s own annual report. Cancer Research UK and the British Red Cross reported similar negative ethnicity pay gaps in favour of ethnic minority staff.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

MS NOW, a Voice of the Woke.

Hillary Clinton may no longer be the most influential voice in the Democratic Party, but she remains a member in good standing of the party establishment. So when she expresses support for expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, it tells us that what was once a radical idea has gone mainstream.

Ignorance of history seems to be a primary qualification for work as a Narrative Media ‘journalist’. Packing the Supreme Court has been a constant idea with those who don’t like the decisions handed down by the current incumbents; did the Court have a dependable majority of Katenji Browns there would be no talk of expanding it, by Hillary or any other Democrat. I was taught in elementary school about FDR’s Court Packing Scheme, and that was only the most prominent instance of it in the mid-20th century.

Babylon Bee.

Good luck with that.

Not the Bee.

It’s almost like the foreign-born mayor of New York cares more about people illegally in the U.S. than he does about American citizens and New Yorkers who are having their jobs stolen and safety infringed upon by illegal foreigners.

Read it.

Back in September we told you the Navy was putting a nuclear reactor on a weapons base in southern Indiana, and that the Pentagon wouldn’t say who was building it. Well, now it has. On October 20 the Department of the Navy picked Radiant Industries, a startup out of El Segundo, California, to design, build and deliver what the release calls a prototype Microreactor Power Plant at Naval Weapons Station Crane.

The machine is Radiant’s Kaleidos, and you can picture it pretty easily. It’s a 1-megawatt reactor that ships inside a 35-foot container, weighs about 70 tons by the company’s own figures, and is supposed to run for five years before anyone has to touch the fuel. That’s the pitch, anyway.

So is the Navy buying a reactor? Not exactly. The September announcement from the Department of War described the Crane unit as commercially owned and operated, which means Radiant builds it, Radiant runs it, and the base buys the power. The company is one of five the Army signed up in August under its Janus Program, and the Navy is basically borrowing the Army’s contract rather than running its own competition. The Navy says that’s faster. From the looks of things it’s also a lot less paperwork.

New York Post.

“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree,” is how a US senator once described ideal tax policy.

In California and elsewhere, the most unpopular taxes are the ones most people see, like the gas tax and property taxes. The only popular taxes are the ones paid by someone else.

So Proposition 40 — the “billionaire tax” — and its first-in-the-country wealth tax should be very popular, since only 200 people would pay it. But the polling has it struggling.

…

Another reason California voters should be wary of Proposition 40 is because it will lose in court. Here are six reasons why, and this list isn’t even exhaustive.

Read it.

A massive genetic study offers one of the clearest pictures yet of how DNA contributes to personality, identifying genetic variants associated with five major personality traits. However, rather than uncovering a handful of “personality genes,” the findings show that 1,260 different variants are associated with aspects of personality, which are influenced by thousands of genetic differences, each with a tiny effect.

The Telegraph (UK).

Dr Sarah Redvers said she felt “silenced” after she passed on complaints doctors had brought to her about whether another GP was appropriately assessing the needs of young people who were questioning their gender identity.

Dr Redvers claimed that when she had made complaints about Dr Sam Hall, a transgender doctor whose care quality had prompted colleagues to raise concerns, she had been accused of transphobia and harassed out of her job.

Dr Redvers told an employment tribunal hearing that she had been put under investigation after raising issues about the quality of treatment and the prescription of puberty blockers at WellBN clinic in Brighton.

In June, nearly six years after she raised her concerns, a separate NHS investigation found that dozens of children aged 13 and above had been inappropriately prescribed drugs at the clinic, with 78 children having potentially been harmed by being prescribed puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones without proper checks.

The New Neo.

I haven’t written about this yet because I consider it something that’s essentially been going on for many many years. A not-dissimilar group was ready, waiting, and prepared in 2016 as the Trump administration was about to begin. What was Russiagate, if not an attempt to overthrow (or at least hamper) the duly-elected government?

I also recall seeing a piece online (after the 2016 election but prior to the inauguration) written by someone in government which referred to a large group of government employees already designating itself as The Resistance. You remember the term, but you may not recall how early it was operating.

I haven’t been able to locate the piece for years, but I recall it fairly clearly. The idea was not to quit a government job but to stay at it and sabotage and undermine everything the administration did, and the article indicated there was a huge number of government employees organized and ready to do just that.

And then there was all the lawfare against Trump during the Biden years. Biden’s involvement wasn’t necessary – although in his better-functioning years he may have approved it. The debanking, the blocking of opinions on the right including but not limited to the Hunter laptop content, the multiple impeachments, all of it was part of a similar effort. I am nearly certain that there were plans for bigger efforts, as well, plans that dovetailed with the current ones.

Read it.

Of course they are.

J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, joins Rob Bluey on “Midterm Report” to examine noncitizens on voter rolls, weaknesses in state election systems, and what election officials can do before the 2026 midterms.

Adams discusses cases in California involving noncitizens who were registered despite indicating they weren’t U.S. citizens. He also explains why the true scope of the problem is difficult to measure, how states can use federal citizenship data to improve voter-roll accuracy, and why even a small number of illegal votes could matter in a razor-thin election.

Plus, Adams weighs in on voter ID, California’s election laws, early voting, and the states he believes deserve greater scrutiny heading into Election Day.

Not the Bee.

Bernie, a millionaire communist with multiple homes (his net worth is at least $2.5 million), thanked his fellow communists for supporting the Muslim communist.

El-Sayed is apparently hard-up for cash, having only ONE multi-million-dollar vacation home in the United Arab Emirates.

El-Sayed and his wife earned $686,000 in 2025 and also own vacation rentals in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Bangalore, India. They are worth up to $2.1 million.

El-Sayed says he needs the money to help him defeat another millionaire named Mike Rogers who is wealthier than him.

The difference between Mike Rogers, Bernie, and Abdulrahman El-Sayed is that Mike Rogers is a Republican and loves America.

SCORECARD! GETCHER SCORECARD HERE! Can’t tell the millionaires without a SCORECARD!

Read it.

How has immigration policy affected Black workers over the past 200 years? Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, joins the Center for Immigration Studies’ Parsing Immigration Policy podcast to discuss the expanded second edition of his book, Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias and Depression of Black Wealth.

The revised edition builds on Beck’s 2021 book, expanding its examination of how immigration-driven labor competition has affected wages, working conditions, and economic opportunity for Black Americans. The new edition also reflects the response to the original book, including interest from Black Americans seeking a deeper understanding of immigration’s role in the history of American labor.

Beck examines the views of Frederick Douglass and labor leader A. Philip Randolph on immigration and the interests of American workers. He discusses how their ideological commitments shaped their positions as immigration levels and labor-market conditions changed. The conversation also explores the historical role of employers’ demand for low-cost labor.

The Telegraph (UK).

Iran has “substantially increased” attempts to kill American diplomats and officials in the Middle East, US intelligence has found.

An unclassified memo from Jay Clayton, the US director of national intelligence, to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warned that some of the “lethal plotting efforts” had reached “advanced stages”.

US officials told Axios, which first obtained the one-page memo, that the intelligence spurred the US to withdraw non-essential staff and their families from its embassy and several consulates in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Citing the threats from Iran and the Houthis, the US state department announced it would also reduce staffing at embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, but unlike in Saudi Arabia, diplomats would not be required to leave.

“Melting Wax-Faced Goblin” Calls For “Pistols Firing At All Times” At Vance

The Woolly Mammoth Billionaire’s New Startup Is Genetically Engineering War Dogs For The Military (Forbes)  Dunh dunh DUNHHHHHHH….

Kushner Denies Bombshell Book Claims Of Secret Gulf-Funded Accounts  Surprise! It’s October!

Trump Is Already Building His Excuse for Losing the Midterms (Amanda Carpenter/The Bulwark)  Amanda Carpenter loses her shit.

Trump’s Repudiation Is at Hand, Right? (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)

Trump Calls for Omar’s Resignation Over Name Dispute  Good luck with that.

Trump administration stopped sharing evidence in Good and Pretti killings, Minnesota officials say (Hannah Schoenbaum/Associated Press)

“High Likelihood Of Error”: Judge Halts DHS Voter-Fraud Door-Knocks In Nine States

Trump Administration Asks Appeals Court to Intervene in California Ballot Suit (Zach Montague/New York Times)

More Democrats are voting in person after Trump’s threats about mail ballots (Washington Post)

CBS Pushes Voter Intimidation Fears Over Trump Voter Fraud Crackdown

Trump’s Battle With the Media Ramps Up (Ayah Ali-Ahmad/The Washington Sun)

Kushner Phone Hack Reveals How Middle East Dictators Bought Him Off (Edith Olmsted/New Republic)

Democratic socialist set to become D.C. mayor — and face Trump’s pushback (Irit Skulnik/CNBC)

Poll: Trump is mobilizing more Democrats against him than Republicans for him (Politico)  Pushing the Narrative ahead of the election.

Poll: Low-information voters have turned hardest against Trump and the GOP (G. Elliott Morris/Strength In Numbers)  Of course they are.

In the Wisconsin Governor’s Race, Another Case of Trump Avoidance Syndrome (Robert Draper/New York Times)

Animus on the left; Trump fatigue on the right

Trump’s ‘Immigration Crackdown’ Driving Jobless Claims Down to 57-Year Low, Economists Say

Democrats ask judge to fast track lawsuit to block Trump admin’s midterm threats (Jim Saksa/Democracy Docket)

Everything Hegseth Touches Breaks (William Kristol/The Bulwark)  Everything Kristol touches stinks.

The Trump Administration May Have Just Lied to Judge About an ICE flight to Equatorial Guinea (Gillian Brockell/American Prospect)  ‘May have’ means ‘we don’t have any evidence but we’re going to publish a smear anyway’.

Here’s What Democrats Plan to Do With Their Power if They Win Back Congress (Annie Karni/New York Times)

Trump’s immigration crackdown disrupts U.S. food supply, agriculture leaders say (Lauren Kaori Gurley/Washington Post)  Agricultural leaders! That proves it!

Democrats Demand “Unredacted Log” of Attendees at $TRUMP Meme Coin Dinner (Russ Choma/Mother Jones)

The Trump-Putin love story’s next chapter: selling out Ukraine (Sidney Blumenthal/The Guardian)  Sid Vicious finds a home at the Guardian.

The DOJ Just Telegraphed Trump’s Biggest Election Target (Richard L. Hasen/Slate)

Appeals court rules Trump unlawfully deployed National Guard to California (Zach Schonfeld/The Hill)

House Democrats Target Hegseth for Impeachment Push (Maya Davis/Wall Street Journal)

Democrats Will Impeach Trump Again, But It’ll Help His Popularity, Politico Poll Finds

Sen. Padilla questions U.S. attorney over threat to ‘hunt down’ Texas voters (Jen Rice/Democracy Docket)

THUD: NPR Host A Martinez Gets an ‘F’ on Trump’s Popularity In Israel

Appeals Court Backs Trump on Constitutionality of Detentions (Mattathias Schwartz/New York Times)

Read it.

Finishing a data center in America has become a logistical nightmare. Now just starting one is turning into a problem too, even in the one county that was supposed to say yes to everything.

Back in April, when we reported that “Half Of US Data Centers Scheduled To Start In 2026, Will Be Canceled Or Delayed,” the blame was spread across the usual suspects: power, transformers, permitting and a vague, growing sense that the locals were getting restless. Two months later, Blackstone sold its stake in three Northern Virginia data centers amid grassroot outrage, cashing out of a bet it made less than three years earlier, in the heart of what is known, with zero irony, as “Data Center Alley.”

And now the restless locals have claimed their biggest scalp yet.

According to the Washington Post, Amazon has scrapped a plan to build data centers on the site of George Washington University’s former campus in Ashburn, Northern Virginia, after reaching an agreement with local officials amid widespread opposition from residents. Under the deal announced Tuesday by Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis J. Randall, Amazon will repurpose the majority of the 122-acre campus for mixed-use and residential development, and commit to never building data centers on the land. It will also donate 25 acres to the county for a community arts center and recreational facility, and hand $5 million to the county’s housing fund.

Read it.

“The Left has always preferred the ashes of its own making to the inheritance of better men.” – Celina101 on X

By now, everybody and his uncle interested in public matters has probably read that a claque of current-and-former agency officials, ex-USAID busybodies, military officers, activist academics, Democratic Party paladins, and freelance communist jihadis has been exposed plotting the overthrow of the US government. The plot was reported by the diligent “X” blogger Jennica Pounds under her nom-de-plume “Data Republican,” who lately received an enormous document-and-recording dump courtesy of careless color revolutionaries who recorded themselves and saved doc files against orders, the dumb bunnies.

Ms. Pounds, an experienced software engineer turned political detective, came to public attention early in 2025 when she assisted Elon Musk’s DOGE operation in building a database of NGO money trails emanating from the colossal USAID grant matrix – after which her identity was “doxed” by Rolling Stone and she underwent a harassment campaign.

Of course, USAID was abolished early in the Trump 2.0 admin, and a lot of the “activists” defenestrated from it moved into scores of NGOs, with their salaries switched from taxpayer funding to the bank accounts of George Soros-connected orgs and sundry other shady characters like Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham. These are the NGOs forever puling about “our democracy,” meaning their drive to punish, persecute, and push around Americans who demur from a communist future. Data Republican says her reporting so far is “only the beginning” of much more detailed and alarming disclosures.

The Foundry.

Sen. Jon Ossoff has railed against wealthy elites, billionaires, and “corruption” dozens of times out on the campaign trail, but the Democrat seems to keep quiet about the nearly 50 out-of-state billionaires who have funded his race for Senate.

Back in July, the Washington Free Beacon reported on 39 billionaires who have donated to Ossoff in his race against Rep. Mike Collins. Between July and September, campaign filings show he has added at least eight new billionaire donors, with each one giving the maximum contribution.

“The vast sums of corporate and billionaire money in our political system, with or without [President Donald] Trump, are why ordinary people are so ill-served by elected officials and by Congress,” Ossoff said on the “Pod Save America” podcast a little more than a year ago.

Jonathan Turley

Harvard University is facing another controversy after its medical school held an event on “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” The most surprising part is that it was not a reference to the Harvard faculty itself. Rather, a panel composed of non-medical experts was railing against anti-obesity drugs as part of “indoctrination” to support the ills of “empire and imperialism.” Welcome to the state of higher education in America.

The panel was devoid of actual medical experts. It was dressed up in medical terms with the use of the word “pathology.” It could have easily been billed as “GLP-1 Anti-Body.” The panel included such experts as Da’Shaun L Harrison, who recently drew notoriety for claiming at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago that GLP-1 medications constitute “genocide” against fat people.

Another headliner was Roxane Gay, the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and the artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School. Professor Gay (the cousin of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay) had called for the release of Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, two years ago.

Not the Bee.

You can’t make this shit up.

A commie named Da’Shaun L. Harrison, who is not a scientist or medical expert, claimed that weight loss drugs are a plot by “imperialistic” forces to get people ready for military service.

You may recall that the same Da’Shaun took the stage at Socialism 2026 and claimed weight-loss drugs are a plot to “genocide fat people.”

Didn’t know that ‘fat people’ were a genos.

Da’Shaun is truly the peak of woke, describing xemself as “a queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist.” Jonathan Turley refers to Da’Shaun as a “she,” and I honestly have no idea if Da’Shaun is a man or a woman.

If you are confused by all of this, let me explain.

This new breed of commies thinks being unhealthy is the way they fight the tyrannical systems of oppression. The “fascists” want to use your body for service to the government, whether that be paying taxes or serving in the military.

Therefore, the “good guys” must become as fat and lazy and ugly as possible in order to fight against tyranny.

I’ve gotta say, judging from the video, they’ve got a handle on it….

Read it.

As they do.

Read it.

Maybe they ought to require the defense to use competent lawyers.

This seems an obvious stalling tactic, presumably so that people will forget about it.

Read it.

If you merely paid attention to the legacy media in recent weeks, you’d think that the French riots were only a bit of a scuffle between students and police, with perhaps a few “ultra-left” agitators, and that the only negative takeaway from the whole thing is that—horror of horrors—this could help the Right.

Let’s get this out of the way. What’s happening in France has been quite remarkable. These aren’t your usual French union-led protests that seemingly break out every summer in Paris and maybe lead to a car or two being overturned.

These are large-scale violent riots taking place across the country. Historic buildings have been torched. Statues have been defaced. And the country is dealing with the existential problem of mass agitation by leftist groups supercharged by the large numbers of mostly unassimilated Muslims who have little investment in France as a French country.

When you combine cultural disintegration with a stagnant economy and buckling social welfare system, this is what you get. The globalist order peddled and propped up by EU elites is simply going up in flames as its torn apart by its own contradictions.

And that’s why the media have gone into spin mode.

Read it.

A publicly funded advert from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s We-Consent campaign shows grandparents arriving at the front door. One grandchild rushes in for a hug. The other winces and recoils as the older couple lean in. The voiceover declares: “Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them. Awkward? Maybe. Important? Absolutely.”

The Telegraph (UK).

A Scottish museum has removed its Egyptian mummy exhibition because it does not have “consent from the deceased individual”.

Visitors to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow found signs explaining that managers had “removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect”.

The items removed include a coffin with the remains of Nekht, a priest, a mummified right hand recovered from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, and a mummified male head and right foot.

The Daily Mail reported that Glasgow Life, a charitable organisation funded by the SNP-led Glasgow city council, said it planned to remove further human remains from Kelvingrove as well as from St Mungo Museum.

Read it.

If you want to know the deepest and darkest dreams of the feminist cult, you don’t have to look very hard. All you have to do is watch their movies and read their books, which put their mental illness and hypocrisy on full display for the world to see.

A now infamous example of this is a romance novel called “Morning Glory Milking Farm”, a feminist inspired sex fantasy book about a broke woman trying to pay off her student loans who takes on the job of “milking” a Minotaur to collect sperm to be used for pharmaceutical products. In other words, she’s a whore working for Big Pharma in a world where monsters exist at the same time as student loans.

But her favorite Minotaur respects her agency and treats her like a queen, so they fall in love.

Newsbusters.

Far-left Democrat, Resistance hero, Virginia State Senate pro tempore Louis Lucas and her family were hit with a bevy of charges — including drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering — Thursday morning as part of a years-long criminal investigation into their family’s marijuana businesses.

Far-left Democrat, Resistance hero, Virginia State Senate pro tempore Louis Lucas and her family were hit with a bevy of charges — including drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering — Thursday morning as part of a years-long criminal investigation into their family’s marijuana businesses.

Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil even had the Lucas indictment in the opening teases: “An 82-year-old state senator hit with criminal charges linked to a family-run marijuana business. What she is saying.”

The two-minute-and-two-second segment began with Dokoupil saying the “state senator is facing criminal charges, federal criminal charges tied to racketeering, drug trafficking, and money laundering, among other offenses,” and “accused of using her political power to protect a marijuana ring run by her own family.”

Read it.

A California county sent duplicate mail-in ballots to thousands of voters in what officials have characterized as a printing error, raising questions about election security amid heightened federal scrunity.

Tulare County, which includes part of Sequoia National Park, acknowledged the “error” in a statement posted on its website, blaming a government vendor for security lapse.

“As a result of a printer vendor error during the ballot replacement procedure, some Tulare County voters received duplicate vote-by-mail packets,” county officials wrote.

The California officials said that the issue affected a portion of voters centered in the City of Tulare. According to ABC 30, nearly 7,800 voters were sent the duplicate ballots.

Sure, I believe that.

Read it.

In an unsigned order, the justices paused Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 orders by U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee, that prevented the state from enforcing its restrictions on student IDs as a valid form of voter identification.

Justices cited past precedent, noting, “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

They added, “Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, writing, “Consequently, here, the District Court’s injunction was reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law.”

The Foundry.

Voters are angry about the cost of living, and they have every right to be. With Republicans in full control of Washington, they expect a fast reversal of the Biden years.

But voters’ anger should not be mistaken for amnesia. Americans clearly remember who started the affordability fire burning through families’ wallets.

My new League of American Workers poll of likely Arizona voters, conducted earlier this month, captures the mood. A 44% plurality of voters say their personal finances got worse over the past year, while just 17% say they improved. Among independents, it’s 48% worse versus 16% better.

Yet here is the key caveat the corporate media keeps missing or deliberately ignoring. Despite their frustrations, only 38% of voters say they would be better off with Kamala Harris as president. Ten percent say it would make no difference and 44% believe they would be worse off with a Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. Moreover, Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, sit at a dismal 34% approval against 64% disapproval.

The Biden-Harris record was truly awful, which is why Democrats are counting on short memories at the ballot box this Nov. 3.

Read it.

A legal fight over election integrity is playing out in Los Angeles courts this week, with LA officials admitting that they have no way to check citizenship beyond what voters write on the form.

Monica Flores, an assistant registrar-recorder at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, told a federal court Tuesday that their citizenship check stops at whatever a voter writes on the form. That admission came just a day after the Department of Justice charged 28 people with lying on that exact form to register and vote.

“The Registrar has no authority under state or federal law to withhold or set aside the ballot of a registered voter on the basis of a third party’s assertion that the voter may not be a citizen, has no information beyond the voter’s own attestation with which to determine citizenship, and has no lawful means of obtaining such information,” the filing states.

“Finally, I do not believe the Registrar has authority to or can comply with either the government’s proposed injunction that it ‘confirm the citizenship of [each] person who sent a segregated vote-by-mail ballot’ or that it do so beyond relying on a ‘person’s registration-related attestation’ of citizenship as designated in state and federal law,” the filing adds.

The admission leaves the county with a simple problem. Just last week the DOJ delivered a list of over 20,000 names to the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, claiming the individuals on the list were likely noncitizens who are registered to vote in the state. The county declined to set those ballots aside, arguing it has no authority to act on a third party’s assertion and no independent way to check the names itself.

And he’s watchin’ them close.

Read it.

Ilhan Omar is not the “real name” of the Minnesota congresswoman, Fox News Digital has learned.

Her real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, according to two people familiar with the ongoing investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman, including a law enforcement source.

And if proven in court that Omar has lived her “entire life under an alias,” a former Minnesota federal immigration judge tells Fox News Digital that every single form she ever filled out could be “called into question.”

This seems like something of a stretch.

“Before the Court are three Applications to unseal ex parte materials and proceedings related to a federal search warrant for the personal residence in the District of Columbia of Congresswoman Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar…” the motion begins.

“That’s not her real name,” one source said when asked why the motion used the “a/k/a Ilhan Adbullahi Omar” language.

What is a ‘real name’? By this standard they would have to arrest every other person in Hollywood.

Read it.

October Surprise Season is back, right on schedule. The phenomenon is simple and well documented. Basically in the final weeks before a high-stakes election, an event, leak, crisis, or carefully timed disclosure appears that is meant to shift momentum, freeze the narrative, or force voters to reassess. The classic modern example remains 1980, when the Iran hostage crisis and the fear of a last minute Carter breakthrough gave the phrase its name. Bill Casey, running Reagan’s campaign, used the term explicitly.

Decades later the pattern repeats with variations:

• · George W. Bush’s 1976 DUI surfacing days before the 2000 election
• · The Trump Access Hollywood tape and the late Clinton email revelations in 2016
• · Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 and Obama’s response was positive for his campaign
• · Assorted foreign policy or scandal drops that dominate cable and social media for 72 hours

The common thread is timing. With early voting, mail-in ballots, and compressed news cycles, an October event has maximum leverage and minimal time for full scrutiny or counter narratives. Whether organic or engineered, the incentives favor dramatic movement right before ballots are finalized.

Read it.

Each deep state participant has a footprint and the only way to make sense of their assembly is to track their former and current pathways – that takes a lot of time to assemble.

Erica Chenoweth, Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith (Ret.), Danielle M. Reiff, Dr. Paul Zeitz, Maria J. Stephan, Julia Roig, Walt Roberts, Brendan Halloran, Laura Adams and Zoe Marks appear to represent the core leftist group. These interests appear to be the ones defended by The Washington Post.

Former CIA operatives who entered congress in 2018 and 2020, ex. U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin – part of the IC freshman class, also seem to represent the action group, executing the agenda of the planners.

Former ODNI Chief of Staff to Tulsi Gabbard, Alexa Henning, has a good name for the group overall, “The USAID Alumni Network.” That representation is the best encapsulation, as the motives and intents of the group seem to center around former USAID funding, NGO’s and direct finance.

This USAID commonality appears to be the central component that triggered the leftist opposition toward a more forward stance on action against the Trump administration, and by consequence toward the 2026 midterm election. Factually, if you want to determine the motives of people within any organized system, track their finance component.

Quillette.

“They want to read Sex and the City.”

That’s what a friend, a famous New York City literary agent, told me a few weeks ago when we were on the phone talking about editors at the five biggest publishing houses in the world: Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Macmillan. These are the editors who determine what books end up at Barnes & Noble and what books remain unpublished PDFs.

Right now, it looks like a masculine novel he represents will never see the light of day. It’s a novel that is praised by a National Book Award winner, a famous war veteran, and other giants. It’s a novel that would have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a competitive bidding war in the 1990s. But a lot has changed since then.

Today, the Big Five publishers are staffed almost entirely by women. According to the most recent data, more than 70 percent of staffers are women. More than 70 percent of editors are women. Even 70 percent of all interns are women. At the executive level, more than 60 percent of leaders are women. In 2026, American publishing looks like lululemon.

The single biggest transformation in the history of American publishing has been its utter takeover by women. How did we get here?

Quillette.

The author is dead, the French philosopher Roland Barthes famously declared in 1967. Now it seems the book is, too. Surveys from across the world show an ever-decreasing appetite for literature. In the US, the percentage of thirteen-year-olds who claimed to never or hardly ever read for pleasure rose from 8 per cent to 29 per cent over the four decades between 1984 and 2020. In the UK, the percentage of children who said they enjoy reading in their free time fell 36 per cent between 2005 and 2025. The stats are not much more encouraging for older generations, with nearly half of all adults in the UK and a quarter in the US claiming to have read no books at all in the past year.

This is not a new or sudden development. As early as 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman was writing about how the rise of television had relegated reading to a distant second place on the podium of recreational entertainment. But the decline of the book has, until recently, remained steady, not to mention masked by the fact that literacy rates have continued to improve across the globe. Text is, after all, everywhere: on our social media sites, on our subtitled TV shows, on the countless placards and signposts and advertisements that have saturated the modern world. If reading is good because it stimulates the mind, as the advocates of literature often say, then our brains are more engaged than ever before.

Quillette.

A Belgian entity called Unia (The Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Discrimination) is preparing a criminal case against the philosopher Nathan Cofnas. If successful, a jail term of between six months and three years is possible under a new criminal code that came into force on 1 September 2026. Articles 250 and 251 of that code deal, respectively, with “incitement to discrimination or racial hatred (including denial of genocides)” and “dissemination of racial ideas.”

It is uncommon for a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy to be threatened with prison. What has Cofnas done?

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

I’m astonished that they actually printed this.

The Telegraph (UK).

The leader of an activist group behind pro-Palestine protests in the UK met with two individuals later sanctioned over their links to Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.

In 2014, Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of anti-war organisation Code Pink, was in contact with men later identified by US officials as facilitators for the Islamic Republic’s foreign intelligence. They were sanctioned by the US treasury five years later.

An intelligence source claimed Ms Benjamin had been viewed by Iran as an “asset” to the regime by pushing “Iran’s influence and narratives” in both the US and UK.

The Telegraph (UK).

Piddington village is suing the Home Office, alleging it acted unlawfully by failing to consider the threat a new asylum camp could pose to wildlife.

The community campaign group Wrong Plan, Wrong Site is seeking a judicial review of the plan to turn the disused Bicester Garrison in Oxfordshire into a camp for up to 1,256 asylum seekers.

In papers filed at the High Court, the village claims the Government failed to consider endangered wildlife around the site, including some of Britain’s rarest bats, great crested newts and badgers.

In its submission, it claims that the Home Office “erred in law” by concluding that the camp was unlikely to damage the environment without carrying out a full wildlife assessment.

Hoist with their own proglodyte petard.

The Telegraph (UK).

The secretary-general of the Commonwealth has suggested that the King should apologise for slavery.

Speaking before the King’s visit to the Caribbean, which begins next week, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey said that an apology for slavery “wouldn’t hurt” and that the “time has come” for a discussion about reparations.

Asked whether the monarch should apologise, the Commonwealth chief told Sky News: “That’s what the countries have asked for… It wouldn’t hurt to have that. Not at all.”

Perhaps the nations of West Africa, who sold the slaves to the Europeans on the coast, or the Arab countries, who enslaved more Africans than the Europeans did, might go first.

“Us as countries sit around the table to discuss, as difficult a subject as it is, I believe that countries will come to some conclusions. So whether it takes the form of financial reparations or reparations in kind, that is for the countries to decide on.”

When pushed on what she meant by “reparations in kind”, Mrs Ayorkor Botchwey said it could involve “concessional financing”, “return of artefacts” and “climate issues”.

In other words, GIVE US FREE STUFF.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Church of England is “heading for financial disaster” because of net-zero targets and slavery reparations, a report has warned.

Academics believe “significant costs” from “extravagant” social-justice projects are contributing to the Church’s financial malaise, with 37 of its 42 dioceses operating with budget deficits.

Most people shoot themselves in the foot. These guys decided to go for the kneecap.

The Church has been told to slash bureaucracy, make parishes its “first priority” and cut the number of diocesan bishops by almost a third to give “deeply dispirited” parishioners and clergy hope for the future.

The report, written by Canon Robin Gill and Prof John Craven, says the “crisis” of declining attendance, donations and ordinations can be halted only through “ruthless” reforms. It cites net zero and Project Spire as “costly” initiatives viewed by churchgoers as “unrealistic, extravagant, unsustainable and deeply depressing”.

Perhaps they ought to try returning to Christianity.  Just sayin’….