Even in conditions of relative normality, the exercise of the vote is your moral duty, through which you cooperate in the first person in choosing the person who will lead the Nation for the next four years. But in this coming electoral round – just as in 2020 and indeed much more so – you are not simply called to choose between two candidates who happen to be on different political sides but who both nevertheless have the common good at heart in compliance with the Constitution and the Law. No; in this election you must choose between two radically opposed ways of conceiving the government of your Nation: you are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery.

On one side we have candidate Donald J. Trump, who, despite serious problems in his positions – especially in the matter of abortion and assisted procreation – has as his objective the common good and the protection of the fundamental freedoms of citizens. In Donald Trump’s America, every Catholic can practice their Faith and educate their children in it without interference from the State.

On the other side we have a candidate and a party that promotes everything that directly opposes the Faith and Morals of the Catholic Church. In Kamala Harris’ America, Catholics – but also Protestants – are considered fundamentalists to be marginalized and eliminated, and their children are considered the property of the State, which arrogates to itself the right to lead them astray from an early age in both body and soul. Trump’s America can become great and prosperous again. Harris’ America is destined for invasion and for moral, social, and economic destruction: the most ferocious dictatorship.

Look at your country! Your cities have become dumps filled with derelicts and criminals, drug dealers and addicts, prostitutes and robbers. Your schools are dens of indoctrination and corruption from kindergarten onwards. In your courts, criminals are acquitted and innocents are imprisoned: new ideological crimes are prosecuted, while illegality is tolerated and encouraged. In your hospitals, multinational corporations rule, and you are their guinea pigs to be exterminated or made chronically ill so that you will be their perpetual clients. Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen are persecuted and forced to fail, while the land is grabbed by unscrupulous corporations who transform it into endless photovoltaic systems and wind turbines to power their data centers and server farms where they collect all your data, your movements, your purchases, and your political preferences. They have gone so far as to tamper with the climate by means of sophisticated geoengineering operations and devastating arson in order to make the global warming fraud credible and impose the green transition, the increase in the cost of energy, and electric cars and scooters. And all this is done based on evidence that consists of lies without any scientific proof, but which are propagated through the servile collaboration of the regime media, ever ready to label any dissenters as conspiracy theorists. But what until yesterday was dismissed as the result of conspiracy theories is now admitted by the government itself. They takeaway your sunlight; they poison you by seeding the clouds; they overwhelm your villages and your fields with deadly hurricanes; they kill your livestock and dry up your crops with induced droughts and devastating fires. They aim to control the entire food sector, to force you to eat only what they make available to you. This is what the Agenda 2030 calls for, which has been imposed without any vote by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

In these four disastrous years of the Biden-Harris administration, we have had a puppet in the White House and a corrupt and incompetent Vice President who has never stopped lying and deceiving voters about her past and her future. Power is managed by the criminal deep state – whose names and faces we now know – that is responsible for the destruction of your great Nation. And to ensure that the crisis is endless, new war scenarios are continually opening up, in conflicts that no one actually wants, except for those who make enormous profits from them, sacrificing human lives and compromising international stability.

You have seen what the Democrats, that is, the woke far Left, have been capable of in four years. Imagine what they will be able to do if, instead of Biden’s numerous stand-ins, his Vice President is elected – in the most scandalous and unimaginable fraud – with her entourage of LGBTQ+ Ministers, rigorously woke, sold out to China or the World Economic Forum, sponsored by George Soros or Bill Gates, manipulated by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At that point, dear American Catholics, you will not only have to go to a different rally – as Kamala would like – in order to say “Christ is the Lord”, because saying that will be considered hate speech, and praying in front of an abortion clinic an act of terrorism. Do not think that these are remote hypotheses: wherever the woke Left takes power, it establishes the most vicious, anti-human, and anti-Christian dictatorship that humanity has ever known. And we know that every time the Left has come to power, it has never left through democratic means.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: we are not talking about two visions that are a bit different but still part of the normal political back-and-forth. No; we are talking about two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable worlds, in which Trump fights against the deep state and is committed to freeing America from its tentacled grip, while on the opposite side we have a corrupt and blackmailed candidate, an organic part of the deep state, who acts as a puppet in the hands of warmongers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, of self-proclaimed “philanthropists” like the criminals George Soros and Klaus Schwab, or of characters like Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs. Their program is that of the Global Left, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and ultimately the program of Vanguard, BlackRock, and StateStreet. Their agenda is dictated by the financial oligarchy that controls humanity to the detriment of the people: an elite that operates not only in the United States but also in Canada, Australia, Europe, and wherever politics is held hostage by their investment funds and their pseudo-humanitarian organizations dedicated to the obliteration of Western Civilization.

Behind these people – by now we should know this – are people devoted to evil, united by the satanic hatred against Our Lord Jesus Christ and those who believe in Him, mainly against the Catholic faithful. We want Christ to reign, and we proclaim it with pride: Christ is King! They want the Antichrist to reign, whose tyranny is made of chaos, war, disease, famine, and death. And the more emergencies and crises planned and created by the globalist elite increase, the more that elite has a pretext to impose new limitations, new restrictions of fundamental rights, and new social controls.

Joe Biden, the current “President,” is a servant of this subversive elite and widely blackmailable for the scandals and crimes committed by himself personally and also by his family, beginning with his son Hunter. His “Vice President,” Kamala Harris, is equally subservient to the same deep state. And the Democratic Party, to which they both belong, is the expression of the woke ideology that plagues all the parties of the global Left.

Candidate Donald J. Trump, while certainly taking some serious critical positions that a Catholic cannot agree with, represents for us, dear American faithful, in this specific historical moment, the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.

Voting for Donald Trump means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-human vision of society. It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell. And it also means – do not forget – giving him our vote of confidence, so that President Trump knows that the massive vote of Catholics and Christians that brought him back to the White House must become the premise for a more incisive commitment to the defense of life from conception to natural death, the traditional family, the right of parents to educate their children, and to the defense of the Christian Faith and the cultural identity of the Nation.

I repeat: the choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan. For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy.

People around the world are beginning to understand the threat that looms over them and their children’s future, and you Americans have understood it too. But even if this time it will be more difficult for the deep state to repeat the fraud of 2020, you must not think that it will resign itself to defeat so easily. Let us therefore prepare to prevent possible attacks and civil war scenarios from being used to impose martial law and new restrictions, after the attempts on his life from which President Trump providentially escaped.

But let us not forget, dear Faithful, that human energies alone are powerless in the face of this infernal display of forces. We proclaim that Christ is King – this means that Our Lord must return to reign, and the first way to make Him reign is by obeying His holy Law and living in His Grace. Let Christ reign in your hearts, in your families, in your communities, and throughout the entire United States of America: this is the only way to peace, harmony, and prosperity for your Nation.

Think of how many of you Catholics there are in the United States! Vote without hesitation, and pray that Our Lord will enlighten American citizens in making their choice and grant victory to those who, at least, have no problem proclaiming that Christ is Lord. May God bless you all, and may the Virgin of Guadalupe, she who is the Patroness of the United States and all the Americas, and Saint Michael the Archangel, protect you.

Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,
Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

October 22, 2024

The Fed’s Beige Book, released on Oct. 18, revealed a broad contraction in manufacturing across the United States, reflecting weaker demand and sluggish production.

Most of the Fed’s 12 districts reported declining manufacturing activity, exacerbated by difficulties in finding qualified workers and, in some cases, persistently weak sales.

The Fed’s data on the manufacturing slump was echoed by the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index (LEI) report, released on Oct. 21, which recorded a 0.5 percent drop in September—an acceleration from August’s 0.3 percent decline. A significant factor in September’s decline was a sharp decrease in new factory orders, contributing to a 2.6 percent decrease in the index over the past six months.

The LEI, which is designed to forecast economic turning points, points to weak economic growth heading into 2025.

“Weakness in factory new orders continued to be a major drag on the US LEI in September as the global manufacturing slump persists,” Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, a senior manager at the Conference Board, said in a statement. “Overall, the LEI continued to signal uncertainty for economic activity ahead and is consistent with The Conference Board expectation for moderate growth at the close of 2024 and into early 2025.”

The persistent downturn in U.S. manufacturing has become a focal point in the 2024 presidential race.

Meanwhile, economic sentiment has taken a downward turn recently.

Even though inflation has eased since the June 2022 recent peak of 9 percent, the Fed’s Beige Book indicates that many districts reported increasing price sensitivity among inflation-weary consumers. Input costs rose faster than selling prices in September, compressing profit margins and further pressuring U.S. businesses, including manufacturers.

The attacks targeted several villages and sites in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Raqqa, and Hasakah. One of the attacks hit an SDF military outpost in the countryside of the city of Al-Malikiyah, at the Syrian–Turkish–Iraqi tri-border region. Turkish artillery also hit SDF sites in the village of Umm al-Kaif in the countryside of the town of Tal Tamr, northwest of Hasakah.

According to field sources who spoke with Sputnik, Turkish artillery shelling hit the villages of Al-Sayyada, Aoun Al-Dadat, Al-Tukhar, and Al-Daraj.

On Thursday, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that the attacks killed at least “27 members of military formations operating in SDF-controlled areas,” three soldiers from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), and at least four civilians.

For its part, Turkiye’s Ministry of National Defense said 32 targets in Syria and Iraq were “destroyed” in the aerial offensive without providing details on the locations that were hit. Officials added that “all kinds of precautions” were taken to prevent harm to civilians.

The intense attacks were launched hours after armed assailants set off explosives and opened fire at the headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) in Ankara, which designs, manufactures, and assembles civilian and military aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and other defense industry and space systems.

Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya and Defense Minister Yasar Guler accused the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of being behind the attack.

“We give these PKK scoundrels the punishment they deserve every time. But they never come to their senses,” Guler said. “We will pursue them until the last terrorist is eliminated.”

At least five people were killed and 22 injured in the Ankara attack. Two attackers – a man and a woman – were also killed.

Terrorist attack in Ankara Turkiye, numerous dead and injured.

At least one female attacker, amongst several carrying automatic weapons, struck a military aerospace company. pic.twitter.com/ykAJgEpTrk

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) October 23, 2024

Turkey regularly conducts air strikes against the PKK in Iraq and against the SDF in Syria. In 2014, the US military began partnering with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), an offshoot of the PKK. The YPG later changed its name to the SDF.

Together, the US and its Kurdish proxies occupy Syria’s northeast, including Hasakah, Raqqa, and parts of Deir Ezzor, denying Syria access to its oil resources and wheat-producing agricultural land.

Wednesday’s attack in Ankara came as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in the Russian city of Kazan to attend the annual BRICS summit. He condemned the “hateful attack” alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Justice Department sued Virginia after it removed the names of 6,303 aliens and Alabama after it moved 3,251 aliens to an “inactive” list.

Keep in mind that it’s a felony under several federal statutes for an alien to claim fraudulently to be a citizen so he or she may register to vote or vote in U.S. elections, including 18 U.S.C. §§ 611, 911, and 1015(f). The Justice Department has a duty to enforce these statutes, something the agency apparently has no interest in doing under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The federal voter registration form established by the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, not only asks applicants whether they are U.S. citizens, it requires them to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.

The form has a strict warning that if the would-be voter provides false information, he or she may “be fined, imprisoned, or (if not a U.S. citizen) deported from or refused entry to the United States.”

However, the Justice Department claims that Virginia and Alabama violated the law’s 90-day preelection deadline for “systematic” list maintenance programs. This, according to the DOJ led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, prevents all “systematic” removals from a voter registration list within 90 days of an election.

What the Justice Department fails to point out is that the 90-day deadline is in the second part of a section of the National Voter Registration Act that deals only with the removal of the names of registered voters who have moved.

The first part outlines the rule for removing the names of individuals who have moved to a different residence either within the state or another state. The second part then applies the 90-day deadline for such removals.

That section of the law also says that the deadline doesn’t apply to “correction of registration records” or to removal of names of voters who have requested it or who have died or become ineligible due to a criminal conviction or mental incapacity.

The common factor in all of those exceptions is that each deals with individuals who were eligible to vote when they registered but subsequently became ineligible.

The 90-day deadline obviously doesn’t apply to an alien who wasn’t eligible to register to vote in the first place and, in fact, was committing a felony violation of federal criminal law by registering.

Critics, including the Justice Department, have claimed that those exceptions are the “exclusive” reasons that a state may remove the names of registered individuals from the voter rolls.

In 2012, in Arcia v. Detzner, a federal case out of the Southern District of Florida, Judge William Zloch said that claim would “produce an absurd result.”

Zloch ruled that would mean a state couldn’t “remove from its voting rolls minors, fictitious individuals, individuals who misrepresent their residence in the state, and non-citizens.”

The 90-day deadline, the judge decided, “simply does not apply to an improperly registered noncitizen.”

In another 2012 federal case, U.S. v. Florida, Judge Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida concluded that Congress drafted these provisions of the law to deal with the removal of names of registered voters “on grounds that typically arise after an initial proper registration.” The provisions don’t apply to “revocation of an improperly granted registration of a noncitizen,” Hinkle ruled.

In fact, the judge wrote, “the NVRA does not require a state to allow a noncitizen to vote just because the state did not catch the error more than 90 days in advance.”

Moreover, the Justice Department is also wrong in claiming that the law bars all “systematic” removals of voters’ names.

As Hinkle ruled, during the 90-day period “a state may pursue a program to systematically remove registrants on request or based on a criminal conviction, mental incapacity, or death but not based on a change of residence.”

What “matters here,” the federal judge added, “is this: none of this applies to removing noncitizens who were never properly registered in the first place.”

It is true that in a deeply flawed, cursory analysis, a divided panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Southern District of Florida decision and held that the 90-day deadline did apply to the removal of aliens’ names from voter rolls.

But Florida didn’t appeal this obviously wrong decision by two appeals court judges to the entire 11th Circuit or to the Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit panel’s decision not only is wrong based on the text of the statute, but any interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act that would force a state to allow an ineligible alien who violated criminal law by registering to remain registered so he may cast a ballot in an upcoming election likely would render the law unconstitutional.

In 2019, in Bellitto v. Snipes, another case arising out of Florida, a different 11th Circuit panel held that in applying the NVRA, “Congress would not have mandated that the state register” an individual who “is not eligible to vote.”

If the NVRA does not require a state to register an ineligible alien to vote, it cannot be construed to require a state to maintain and continue the registration of an ineligible alien.

Alabama and Virginia should fight the Justice Department and be willing to take these cases all the way to the Supreme Court. Maintaining the security and integrity of the American election process and protecting voters against foreign interference that voids their votes requires no less.

Read Hans von Spakovsky’s complete Legal Memorandum: “The National Voter Registration Act Does Not Prevent States From Removing Aliens from Voter Registration Rolls at Any Time.”

Obama spoke at a Pittsburgh-area campaign office for the vice president Oct. 10, where he urged black men to support Vice President Kamala Harris, while appearing to accuse them of sexism for being hesitant. Chad Fain, host of “The Realest Podcast Ever,” told Wagner he felt Obama was lecturing him and others to “get in line.”

“I was deeply offended,” Fain told Wagner. “And it felt like a moment where it was like, you N-words better get in line and do what we say.”

“The general tone of it was disgusting,” Fain added. “It was abhorrent. I didn’t respect it. I like nothing about it.”

A CNN poll released in late September showed Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 55% among black voters under the age of 60, compared to a 71% margin for President Joe Biden in 2020. A New York Times poll released Oct. 12 shows Harris leading Trump by 63% among black voters, compared to an 81% lead for Biden in 2020.

Trump, who garnered 12% support from black voters in 2020 according to a CNN exit poll, exceeded that level of support in some other general election polls, including August polls by CBS, which showed the former president getting 17% of black voters, and Fox News, which indicated 26% of black voters backed the former president.

Trump leads Harris by 0.8% in polls of Pennsylvania voters from Sept. 28 to Oct. 19, according to the RealClear Polling average. Harris leads Trump by 0.3% when independent candidate Cornel West, Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Libertarian Chase Oliver are included as options in the surveys.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Rumble/MSNBC)

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And so, as legitimate fear seeks the comfort of direction, a new way of talking about medical information appears. Attach a prefix, dis- or mis-, and good ideas shall trump the bad. In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients (though not psychiatric ones) are encouraged to seek a second opinion in matters of life and death.

Human beings, no matter how credentialed, are fallible participants in the mysteries of life, and doctors institutionalized with narrow sets of knowledge can therefore make errors of judgment. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re limited. All of us, and our certainties, are subject to revision.

Given that, the question becomes, who is certain enough of their knowledge that they may damn medical information in prefixes for us all?

Major online content platforms have an answer. They defer to institutions authorized by government bodies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. These elite bodies of experts provide sets of standards that demarcate medical truth from falsity, which a hodgepodge of third-party fact-checking organizations then rely upon to hunt down bad information across the web.

Now, in the old days, censorship meant blacklisting (which still happens), but in an internet age where liabilities for unfairness are more visible to the public square, online companies more often engage in a soft censorship—allow the dissenter to speak, but lessen the chances they’ll be heard. As Facebook puts it, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution so that fewer people see it…and we show strong warning labels and notifications to people who still come across it, try to share it or already have.”

Perhaps you believe that demoting bad medical information during a pandemic is a necessary strategy for saving lives. Surely there’s a compassionate case to be made that the common good is more sacrosanct than an individual’s liberty to vibrate their vocal cords in whatever contortions they want, wherever they want, no matter the ruin. The trouble is, new powers of authority rarely contain themselves. Instead, incrementally, they parasitize new territories.

So I was unfortunately unsurprised to see the New York Times—paper of record—publish an opinion piece titled “Joe Rogan is a Drop in the Ocean of Misinformation.” The authors, who worked on the imperiously–named Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, insist we are living in a manipulated marketplace where specious cures for anything and everything find their way far too easily into ailing bodies. Their solution: the soft censorship of not just pandemic unorthodoxy, but bad information across all medical fields.

We must, they propose, regulate flows of information to ensure that whatever medical advice we encounter online is best for us. Of course, they fail to mention who will lead that discernment, but we can hazard a guess they’d prefer a cosmopolitan run–of–the–mill MD over your village witch, a psychiatrist over their client.

Let us apply these authors’ suggestions to mental health, now that the field has graduated in the public eye into a bonafide hard science worthy of the designation “medical.” How might the downgrading of dissent in mental health impact accessibility to knowledge?

Imagine a Facebook group called “Coming Off Antipsychotics,” thousands of members strong. A commenter claims antipsychotics cause brain damage, maybe coaches another member restrained by a court order on how to quit taking them without getting caught. Now imagine that group in the censorious crosshairs of fact-checkers following standards set by major psychiatric institutions.

Indeed, to a profession that regularly uses coercion and force to keep clients medicated, any information that’s dissuasive against treatment is hazardous. This is why, for instance, a peer support worker in a conventional setting might be eagerly invited to share their recovery process when it follows protocol, but discouraged when it includes non–non-compliance: Saying “I got better when I accepted my illness, went to group, and found the right med” is much preferred by the authorities to “I got better when I ditched Haldol, took up kratom and weed, hooked into poker night at the local bar and joined a cult that worships Bastet the ancient cat Goddess.”

I fear a public health approach to so-called mental illness in the internet age will soon entail demoting online talk of violating treatment. To get rolling, all that’s needed is one incident wherein a member of that aforementioned Facebook group quits medications and acts dangerously in public view, for force–supporting organizations lie in wait ready to capitalize on the public’s fear.

And let’s be honest, when prefixes land on mental health information, they’re going to tag alternative modalities like Reiki, claims against the damage of shock, unconventional theories of causation, criticism of diagnoses as bogus constructs, folksy herbal cures, and so on. Never mind that my own saving grace has been the renegade psychiatric survivor movement, wherein I’ve met others who speak on their own terms, who’ve helped me clarify mine, who’ve never read me through a hospital note but asked that I narrate my reality instead.

“Health misinformation,” such as the kind that challenges psychiatric orthodoxy, “is a serious threat to public health,” proclaims the US Surgeon General. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”

“Limiting the spread.” Apparently, misinformation is now a virus capable of inoculating vulnerable hosts with discursive toxins that “undermine” public health. The task upon us is “moral,” and we do our “civic” duty when ensuring people accept that doctor knows best.

For what it’s worth, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, welcomes prefixes on bad information. As Joseph Bernstein notes in his illuminating article, “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation,” these companies’ bottom line, always cash, is not threatened by framing the problem as one of information itself. Such myopia ensures the trust-busters, who could use anti-monopoly powers to weaken social media’s sway, instead stay at bay, while allowing propaganda-producing algorithms to remain obscure to regulation and consumer control.

More importantly, it strategically obfuscates the structural reasons why people gravitate towards bad information—their economic lives are ruined, their communities have fallen apart, their religions are disintegrating, healthcare is bankrupting their families, drugs are destroying their neighbors, and their traditions are losing meaning. In the midst of such politically-induced rot, people quite reasonably distrust institutions and their sneering spokespeople who lied to them about WMDs, the 2008 financial crisis, the return of good jobs, the addictive nature of opioids, and on and on it goes.

So let me end with an anecdote—the mark of unscientific knowledge—for I’ve tasted my own flavor of rot: that of my body, decaying in autoimmune disease. When my spine was so bitten that I could no longer bend over to pull up socks, I too did something crazy (as pain will have you do). I sat down at my computer, googled “Ankylosing Spondylitis natural pain relief,” and through a series of meandering clicks, headed ever further into an unguarded dungeon where risky potions lie. Eat poop? Get bitten by the Mexican bark scorpion?

Nah, I settled on an industrial solvent, a purely chemical byproduct from large-scale wood manufacturing. Even though the product’s intended use as a skin applicant was deemed dangerous by credentialed sources, I went further. I popped open the cap, recalled my halcyon days with Mr Jack Daniel’s, flipped my head back and gulped down a bitter shot. Like everything else, authorized or not, it didn’t take away the pain. But I felt a tingling sense of pride, maybe a little free. The Surgeon General would’ve been horrified.

About the Author

Steven Morgan has worked in mental health peer support since 2005. Beginning in 2013, he worked for seven years with Intentional Peer Support as an international trainer and Operations Manager.

Those numbers are not surprising to anyone who consumes a lot of political media. Tune into the establishment-friendly press and you’ll be inundated with stories about voter suppression in red states, recaps of the most dramatic skirmishes that happened outside the Capitol on January 6, and warnings about how Trump and his allies could actually take power after losing the upcoming election.

The fear, from the establishment’s perspective, is that after losing, Trump will successfully pressure Republican legislators in battleground states to appoint “alternate” electors that will keep Harris below the 270 electoral votes needed to win, which would send the election to the likely Republican-controlled House.

Without very explicit evidence of decisive voter fraud that the political class outright ignores, it’s hard to see a scheme like this working—considering that Trump isn’t already in power, Democrats have passed laws in recent years making it harder to appoint alternate electors, and many of the Republican legislators Trump would rely on have shown a reluctance to go along with the former president absent strong pressure from their constituents. But that hasn’t stopped the fear-mongering.

On the other side, the Trump-friendly alternative media is full of stories about local and state officials overturning election security laws, deleting drop box surveillance footage, actively registering non-citizens to vote, losing entire trays of mail-in ballots, and other tales of vote manipulation and even outright fraud.

Pair these stories with all the left’s freakouts about “voter suppression” in red states and the various assertions of foreign influence operations and it’s easy to see how so many voters became convinced that a victory by the other side would be illegitimate. Now add the establishment panic about a MAGA plot to overturn the election if they lose and the right’s awareness of the political establishment’s preparations to do the exact same thing had they lost in 2020 and it becomes clear why many are worried about what awaits us after election day.

The collapse of the public’s trust in elections mirrors the collapse in trust in several other institutions, like the federal judicial system, public health authorities, and the news media. While uncomfortable, the public losing trust in untrustworthy institutions is a good thing. It’s a necessary first step if the country is ever going to get on a better path.

The federal justice system has been used to go after the establishment’s political enemies since the beginning, public health authorities demolished any credibility they may have had with their deadly, totalitarian response to COVID-19, and the American news media has been actively misinforming the public in politically-expedient ways for essentially it’s entire history.

In the past decade or so, the American public has developed a much healthier level of skepticism toward these institutions. It is perfectly reasonable for that skepticism to carry over to federal elections.

After all, the political class—which includes politically-connected businesses—is making trillions of dollars in revenue thanks to various wars, innumerable regulations that protect them from competition, easy money from the Fed, and other lucrative government programs. It is not much of a jump to assume that, if able, the very people who have repeatedly lied us into unnecessary wars to line their pockets would be willing to use whatever means necessary to expand and protect their power and profits.

Together with the establishment-friendly media, the political class has placed a very high social cost on questioning the security of our elections in every instance except when it conveniently places the blame on a foreign government that Washington wants to demonize. Questioning the legitimacy of elections is “dangerous” unless you’re accusing Russia or Iran.

And whenever someone with a big enough voice casts doubt on past elections in an “unacceptable” way, the establishment is quick to shout them down with the same meaningless denunciation that there is no evidence of “widespread” election fraud.

Of course, if there were to be a conspiracy to either foment or permit voter fraud in a way that successfully flipped a national election, it would not be “widespread,” it would be targeted. Elections like this one come down to a handful of precincts—most of which are toss-up suburban and rural areas that surround blue cities in swing states. A conspiracy to commit or allow “widespread” voter fraud would be pointless and all but guarantee its discovery.

This is not to say you should accept every claim made about voter fraud or even that there is definitive proof that any previous elections were stolen in this fashion. And it’s certainly not to say that violence is an appropriate or productive response if the upcoming election appears like it was stolen.

Only that it would be healthy for more members of the American public to start questioning whether our system really works the way we learned it did in elementary school—where the president represents our collective will and acts as we would act to address the problems we face at home and abroad.

That simple story is an illusion that conveniently frames whatever the government is doing to us as an embodiment of everyone’s wishes and any opposition as a selfish stand against what everybody else wants. Many Americans are appropriately questioning a lot of what they’ve previously accepted as true. They ought to question this too.

Image Source: Mises Institute. Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Just look at what is happening to home sales.

Last month, sales of previously existing homes fell to the lowest level that we have seen since October 2010.

Of course in October 2010 we were dealing with the aftermath of a global financial crisis.

Overall, we are on pace “for the worst year since 1995” for sales of previously existing homes…

Sales of existing homes in the U.S. are on track for the worst year since 1995—for the second year in a row.

Persistently high home prices and elevated mortgage rates are keeping potential home buyers on the sidelines. Sales of previously owned homes in the first nine months of the year were lower than the same period last year, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.

Existing-home sales in September fell 1% from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.84 million, NAR said, the lowest monthly rate since October 2010.

Let those numbers sink in for a moment.

We haven’t seen anything like this for a long time, and nobody can deny that the market for residential real estate is in a depressed state right now.

And it appears that this month could be even worse than last month, because the number of mortgage applications being submitted is absolutely plummeting…

Mortgage applications decreased 17% from one week earlier as mortgage rates surged, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) weekly application survey for the week ending October 11, 2024.

The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 17% on both a seasonally adjusted and an unadjusted basis from one week earlier.

Meanwhile, our nationwide commercial real estate crisis just continues to intensify.

If you can believe it, an office building in Manhattan that sold for 332 million dollars in 2006 just sold for 8.5 million dollars…

The sale of a nearly 1 million-square-foot Manhattan office building listed on the online auction site Ten-X was completed Tuesday for only $8.5 million.

That’s 97 percent less than the $332.5 million that the seller, Swiss bank UBS, paid for the Midtown property in 2006. The loss on the building at 135 West 50th Street was minimally offset by a $6 million gain UBS realized by buying and selling the ground beneath it in the interim.

UBS and its brokers at JLL listed the 920,000-square-foot building for sale on the online platform. The two-day auction kicked off July 30 with a starting bid of $7.5 million. The sale ended the next day after Ten-X lowered the reserve price. The winning bidder, whose identity has yet to hit property records, closed about 70 days later.

That is insane!

Commercial real estate prices have been crashing all over America, and this crisis is not getting the attention that it deserves from the media.

The banking industry is headed for big trouble as well.  In fact, the government shut down another bank on Friday…

Friday, The First National Bank of Lindsay was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) appointed as receiver. The OCC acted after identifying false and deceptive bank records and other information suggesting fraud that revealed depletion of the bank’s capital. The OCC also found that the bank was in an unsafe or unsound condition to transact business and that the bank’s assets were less than its obligations to its creditors and others.

The OCC is referring the matter to the United States Department of Justice, which has a wide variety of tools to hold individuals accountable for criminal acts and focuses on victims in all of its matters.

Some experts are projecting that hundreds of more banks will soon fail.

If that actually happens, it will be a complete and utter nightmare.

The “restaurant apocalypse” that I have written about so much also continues to roll on.

Sadly, we just learned that Denny’s has decided to shut down 150 locations…

Denny’s is closing 150 restaurants over the next year, and the 71-year-old diner chain is mulling a major change to its 24/7 operating hours.

Fifty locations are set to close by the end of 2024, while the remaining 100 will shutter in 2025, Denny’s announced in an earnings call Tuesday. That amounts to a tenth of its restaurants, leaving 1,375 locations once completed. A specific list of closing restaurants weren’t immediately announced.

Needless to say, lots of other chains are slimming down as well.

Right now, thousands upon thousands of restaurants are being permanently closed from coast to coast.

If the economy was heading in the right direction, this would not be happening.

Speaking of closures, another major retailer has announced that it will be closing all stores…

Buybuy Baby is shuttering all of its stores roughly a year after new owners tried to revive the brand.

The company announced on its website that it is transitioning to an online-only model after recognizing the need for a “a strategic reset.”

“With this shift, we’ve come to the difficult decision of closing our physical stores by the end of this year,” the company wrote. “We understand this may be disappointing news, and we want all our customers to know this wasn’t a choice we took lightly.”

Most retailers that are experiencing difficulties will try to hang on until at least the end of December.

But once we get into 2025, expect a huge wave of new store closures.

As I discussed the other day, U.S. consumers are really hurting at the moment.

You can’t get blood out of a stone, and a staggering percentage of U.S. cardholders have already maxed out at least one credit card…

Nearly 2 in 5 cardholders (37%) have maxed out a credit card or come close since the Fed started raising interest rates, Bankrate’s Credit Utilization Survey found. That includes 20% who have maxed out a credit card and 17% who have come close to maxing one out.

This is what an imploding economy looks like.

Bubbles are bursting all around us, and the outlook for 2025 and beyond is absolutely horrible.

Our leaders kept the game going for a long time by injecting trillions of dollars into the system and by going into unprecedented amounts of debt.

But despite all of their efforts, the economy is coming apart at the seams anyway, and so I hope that you are prepared for a very hard landing.

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Economist Jim O’Neil, who first coined the term BRICS in 2001, told Reuters the idea BRICS being a genuine global club is “out there with the fairies” and “not feasible.”

“The idea that the BRICS can be some genuine global economic club, it’s obviously a bit out there with the fairies in the same way that the G7 can be, and it’s very disturbing that they see themselves as some kind of alternative global thing, because it’s obviously not feasible,” O’Neill said.

BRICS was first formed in 2009 in the wake of the 2008 global recession and originally had four member states – Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It has grown substantially over the past 20 years, adding South Africa in 2010, and since then has grown to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Egypt.

According to O’Neil, BRICS as a group has not achieved much over the past 15 years, and added the alliance is more symbolic than anything.

“It seems to me basically to be a symbolic annual gathering where important emerging countries, particularly noisy ones like Russia, but also China, can basically get together and highlight how good it is to be part of something that doesn’t involve the U.S. and that global governance isn’t good enough,” O’Neil said.

The relationship between China and India – the two economic powerhouses of the group – has been mired with disputes over territory over recent years. O’Neil said he would take the alliance seriously when both countries are actually able to work together effectively.

“I will take the BRICS group seriously when I see signs that the two countries that really matter – China and India – are actually really trying to agree on things, rather than effectively trying to confront each other all the time,” O’Neil said.

Tensions could be beginning to ease between China and India, however, after China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to an agreement over the long-running border disputes on Wednesday.

According to the Associated Press, the two leaders met for the first time in five years and this could spell the end of a four-year standoff between their respective militaries along their shared Himylayan border, which China has laid claim to.

“It’s important for both sides to shoulder our international responsibilities, set an example for boosting the strength and unity of the developing countries, and contribute to promoting multi-polarization and democracy in international relations,” Xi said.

India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told reporters the pact will have a positive impact on regional and global peace and prosperity. However, he did not detail how exactly the border dispute would be resolved, and if the tens of thousands of troops still stationed there would be pulled back.

“The two leaders affirmed that stable, predictable, and amicable bilateral relations between India and China, as two neighbors and the two largest nations on earth, will have a positive impact on regional and global peace and prosperity,” Misri said.

Met President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Kazan BRICS Summit.

India-China relations are important for the people of our countries, and for regional and global peace and stability.

Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity will guide bilateral relations. pic.twitter.com/tXfudhAU4b

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 23, 2024

#WATCH | Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit.

(Source: DD News/ANI) pic.twitter.com/WmGk1AlSwW

— ANI (@ANI) October 23, 2024

#WATCH | Kazan, Russia: During the bilateral meeting with PM Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping says, "It's my great pleasure to meet you in Kazan. It's the first time for us to have a formal meeting in five years time. Both the people in our two countries and the international… pic.twitter.com/NCUm2DVmQY

— ANI (@ANI) October 23, 2024

Russian President Valdimir Putin seemed confident BRICS would continue to expand, and stated on Wednesday there are over 30 countries currently wanting to join BRICS, according to a report from DP International.

“It would undoubtedly be wrong to ignore the unprecedented interest of the countries of the Global South and east in strengthening their contacts with BRICS,” Putin said.

The summit’s agenda is breaking away from Western-led financial institutions, reducing the reliance on the U.S. dollar and the influence of the SWIFT system. Putin reportedly wants stronger financial bonds between the members.

Putin said Wednesday the U.S. dollar is being used as a weapon, adding he does not reject using the dollar but feels forced to look for an alternative, because Russia is not able to work with U.S. dollars.

“The [U.S.] dollar is used as a weapon, it is true and we see that. I think it is a great mistake by those who do it, since the use of the dollar, which is still the most important tool in global finance, and its use as a political tool undermines trust in this currency, thereby reducing its capabilities. We are not the ones who do that. It’s others. We are not rejecting the dollar or fighting against it, but if they don’t let us work with it, what else should we do? We should seek other alternatives and this is exactly what we do,” Putin said.

JUST IN: Russian President Putin says it's a "great mistake" to use the US dollar as a weapon. pic.twitter.com/4J3KU1Z6U7

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) October 23, 2024

Ulrich Schmid, professor of Russian studies at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, told France 24’s Eve Irvine the West should not overestimate the significance of the BRICS summit because the member states have clashing agendas, making any real progress slow.

“We do have very diverging agendas among the member states. So, for instance, Russia and Iran are extremely interested to create alternative trade platforms, alternative payment systems to evade the heavy sanctions they’re under … At the same time we have other countries who are just in favor of multilateral world orders, such as Brazil or India, and they at the same time want to continue to have very good relations also with Western countries, including the United States,” Schmid said.

Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.

The Daily Signal fact-checked many of her claims.

‘Terminate the Constitution’

Harris touted the fact that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., endorsed her against Trump. The vice president said Cheney backed her due to “a legitimate fear, based on Donald Trump‘s words and actions, that he will not obey an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“He himself has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States,” she added.

The claim traces back to a post Trump wrote on Truth Social on Dec. 3, 2022. In that post, the former president wrote of the 2020 presidential election, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

He added, “Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Fellow Republicans criticized his comments, and Trump later clarified that he would not terminate the Constitution.

In a follow-up post, he condemned the legacy media’s interpretation of his post.

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Dec. 5, 2022.

Kamala Harris repeats the claim that Trump would "terminate the Constitution of the United States."

That's an exaggeration. He briefly called for the "termination of rules" in order to reverse what he claimed to have been a fraudulent election, and he later clarified that… pic.twitter.com/8zaFqYZ2eo

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024

Hitler’s Generals

Harris said she believed Trump is a fascist and she repeatedly tied him to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Harris claimed that Trump said to his generals “in essence, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?”

Remember that anonymous-sources Atlantic article claiming Trump didn't want to pay for the funeral of that "f—ing Mexican"? The article that @MarkMeadows denied and @mguilen_ (the sister of the murdered Army private) condemned The Atlantic for? Kamala Harris just referenced… pic.twitter.com/s02qzMfPMD

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024

The vice president was referencing an Atlantic article by Jeffrey Goldberg citing anonymous sources, claiming Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said the claim is “absolutely false,” and that “President Trump never said this.”

That article claimed Trump ordered then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows not to pay for the funeral of 20-year-old Army private Vanessa Guillén, calling her a “f—ing Mexican.” Meadows denied the story and Guillén’s sister accused The Atlantic of “exploiting my sister’s death for politics.”

Wow.
I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today. https://t.co/o8cDrKOKBV

— Mayra Guillen (@mguilen_) October 22, 2024

‘Suckers and Losers’

Harris claimed that Trump referred to members of the military as “suckers and losers,” that “he demeans people who have taken an oath to sacrifice their life for our country.”

The claim that Trump called members of the military “suckers” and “losers” originates from a 2020 article published in The Atlantic relying on anonymous sources. Trump has consistently disputed the reports.

‘Price Gouging’

Harris attributed inflation to “price gouging.” When CNN’s Cooper asked her about whether the Trump administration or the Biden administration was responsible for inflation, she suggested that her experience as attorney general in California would help her fight inflation.

“How I come to it is probably a new approach grounded in a lot of my experiences as a former attorney general, where I took on price gouging and part of my plan is to create a new approach that is the first time that we will have a national ban on price gouging, which is companies taking advantage of the desperation and need of the American consumer and jacking up prices without any consequence or accountability,” she said.

Kamala Harris suggests price gouging is responsible for inflation.

FACT CHECK: Pants on fire

The consumer price index has increased less than the producer price index, which means that companies, on a whole, are taking a loss on prices. They are tightening their belts as… pic.twitter.com/B6rISafDOw

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024

Other Democrats, such as President Joe Biden and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., have attributed inflation to companies’ greed.

As Heritage Foundation Research Fellow EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.

As Antoni noted, “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”

While Americans feel the pain of inflation, so do businesses. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “businesses have gotten the short end of the stick,” Antoni explained. “The producer price index is used to measure inflation on the products and services businesses buy—sometimes called wholesale inflation—and that index has risen 17.5% since Biden took office. Conversely, the consumer price index, the widely cited metric for inflation faced by American families, is up 17.1% over that same time.”

“Businesses have actually been sheltering consumers from some cost increases in an effort to maintain market share and not lose customers,” he wrote. “That also explains why, according to the Biden administration’s Census Bureau, total corporate profits have fallen for the last six quarters after adjusting for inflation.”

“If alleged price gouging were really the cause of inflation, did businessmen magically become greedy when Biden took office?” Antoni asked. “Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government? Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”

If inflation is caused by corporate "greed" then why are producer and consumer prices both up by 19% since Jan '21 w/ consumer price increases only just recently catching up to price increases faced by businesses? Asking for a friend… pic.twitter.com/EBLwxyEEwR

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) April 15, 2024

‘Women Have Died’

When discussing state abortion laws in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade (1973) in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Harris claimed, “Women have died because of these laws.”

She has repeatedly mentioned the name Amber Nicole Thurman, suggesting that she died due to Georgia’s law restricting abortion.

Yet Thurman died after she took the abortion pill, which caused complications and left parts of her twin unborn babies inside her.

Thurman legally obtained abortion pills in North Carolina to end the lives of her unborn twins, but she could not know without an ultrasound (which the FDA had required only a few years beforehand). Five days later, she began to abort the twins, but both babies’ remains remained in her uterus. She began to develop sepsis and went to the hospital.

Doctors hospitalized her, but she died before they could perform a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining parts of her unborn babies.

Harris blamed Thurman’s death on a law restricting abortion, but the law would not prevent the removal of the babies’ remains when they were already dead. The FDA’s loosened restrictions on the abortion pill, not Georgia’s law, is arguably to blame for this tragic death.

'WOMEN HAVE DIED': Kamala Harris claimed that "women have died because of these laws," referencing state laws restricting abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson.

Yet the cases she repeatedly brings up, those of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, actually have more to do with the… pic.twitter.com/sTKIdvYcEp

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024

Prefer to Run on the Problem

Harris repeated her claim that Trump killed a bipartisan border bill earlier this year “because he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Yet critics have warned that the bill would have cemented Biden’s open-border policies into law.

Cooper pressed Harris on why the Biden administration used executive orders to reverse many Trump border policies in January 2021. He noted that illegal aliens crossed the border in large numbers after those orders, and the numbers only decreased when Biden issued other executive orders. He asked her whether she regrets the weaker border policies.

Harris replied that only Congress could solve the ultimate problem. Cooper again pressed her on whether Biden should have issued the 2024 executive orders sooner, and she replied, “I think we did the right thing.”

'I THINK WE DID THE RIGHT THING': Kamala Harris tells Anderson Cooper she does not regret the Biden-Harris administration's executive orders reversing Trump's border policies, even after she acknowledged that later executive actions helped stem the border crisis. pic.twitter.com/UGdXVBIVPv

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024