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November 2020

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Strategic Disinformation and the 2020 Election The intelligence community is no longer prepared to defend America against foreign deception and disinformation. By J. Michael Waller

By on November 24th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/23/strategic-disinformation-and-the-2020-election/

Foreign manipulation of America’s 2020 vote count to help Joe Biden is crazy talk. At least that’s what a lot of people believe, with even supporters of President Trump attacking the initial evidence and the messengers.

After the debunked Russian collusion narrative, the Ukraine issues that led in part to the president’s impeachment, and the pre-election exposé of Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails showing Chinese Communist Party influence aimed at the former vice president, much of the public is confused, divided, disgusted, and numb.

Add to that what former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell has called “The Kraken”: Evidence that, among other things, is expected to show strategic, organized, computerized electoral fraud through technology developed in, of all places, Venezuela.

Even a lot of the president’s supporters aren’t buying it.

And that’s exactly how regimes that view us as their strategic enemy want it.

Those regimes, running countries large and small—from Russia and China down to Iran, Cuba, and even Venezuela—thrive or at least survive by preventing the United States from understanding their strategic intentions.  

They depend on us not recognizing or comprehending their subversive means of achieving their objectives short of all-out war. They cloak their goals, strategies, capabilities, and operations through “denial” (concealment or denying access to facts) and “deception” (a range of military and civilian techniques that include disinformation). “Denial and deception” is a singular intelligence term.

For generations, the United States has been assaulted constantly by what former Soviet KGB colonel Anatoliy Golitsyn called “strategic disinformation.” Golitsyn warned in 1984 that the United States and its interests were under a permanent strategic disinformation offensive from Moscow.

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Trump Campaign Gets Legal Victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania By Matt Margolis

By on November 24th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/11/23/trump-campaign-gets-legal-victories-in-michigan-and-pennsylvania-n1168673

The Michigan state legislature has agreed to hold a hearing about election irregularities in the state. In addition to this development, a federal appeals court has agreed to an expedited election review in Pennsylvania.

“We are grateful to Michigan House lawmakers for not rushing to certify inaccurate election results,” Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis told Just the News. “We are confident they will share the same concerns once they see the extent of the outright fraud and disregard for the law that happened in Michigan and across the nation. Every American should want to know the truth.”

Ellis also responded to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Trump’s “motion for emergency expedited review is granted at the direction of the court.”

“We are grateful to the Third Circuit for accepting an expedited review,” Jenna Ellis said.

The news comes on the heels of federal judge Matthew W. Brann dismissing the Trump campaign’s lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar on Saturday.

“There was no legal reason to deny our amended complaint, other than pure politics and judicial activism,” Ellis continued. “This was an Obama-appointed judge whose opinion was rife with errors. We hope the appellate court will recognize that and properly give us our day in court. The American people deserve for us be able to bring forward our witnesses and evidence showing election fraud — this is at the heart election integrity and fundamental fairness.”

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COVID-19’s Catastrophic Pandemic Fear Global elites and their botched cures. Andrew Harrod

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/covid-19s-catastrophic-pandemic-fear-andrew-harrod/

“We’ve had severe viral pandemics over the years, but this was the first pandemic of panic” with COVID-19, write the authors of the new book, The Price of Panic:  How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.  This insightful, lucid work carefully exposes how global elites in academia, media, and politics responded to the latest coronavirus outbreak with botched societal cures truly worse than the disease.  

“The global response to COVID-19 vastly exceeded that to any other pandemic in history,” note the trio of Biola University biology professor Douglas Axe, statistician William M. Briggs, and Catholic University professor Jay W. Richards.  They detail the devastation of unprecedented lockdowns worldwide; for example, United Nations World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley has warned that disrupted food supply chains could cause 300,000 deaths daily.  “Never before had scores of countries around the world chosen to perform such economic harakiri in unison,” resulting in epidemic ravaging of wealth and health, like increased suicides.

The initial impetus for these socioeconomic plagues came from academic epidemiological models that “were so wrong they were like shots in the dark,” the authors note.  They focus in particular on studies from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) and the “single, untested, apocalyptic model from Imperial College London” (ICL).  The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) then promoted the Imperial College projections of 40 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide.  

“We’re shocked that anybody believed these astounding numbers,” the authors respond.  The ICL model entailed the “shocking but bogus claim that 3.4 percent of coronavirus infections were fatal,” while the “2018–19 flu had a case mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.”  Accordingly, the Imperial College model predicted that COVID-19 would effectively equal the notorious 1918 Spanish flu, which killed between 18 and 58 million.

In reality, the author’s statistical source, Worldometer, counted 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths on November 12, hardly a historically unprecedented loss given other little-noticed viral outbreaks.  WHO estimates that perhaps 650,000 die annually from flu-linked illness in a bad flu season.  The 1968–1969 Hong Kong flu also killed between 1-2 million people.  

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Politics and the Pulitzers Book awards today are a political game. Bruce Bawer

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/politics-and-pulitzers-bruce-bawer/

Three decades ago, I spent about a year on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. A year was enough. The NBCC’s principal activity was awarding annual prizes, and each member of the board belonged to a committee devoted to choosing that year’s winning book in one category or another. I was on the criticism committee. The job involved reading dozens of books, whole boxfuls of them – although in most cases glancing at a few pages was enough to justify tossing a volume aside and moving on to the next – and, in consultation with the other committee members, picking five finalists for the entire board to vote on.

That year, two books stood out for me as prizeworthy. One was Camille Paglia’s magnum opus Sexual Personae, which impressed me with its quirky brilliance. Almost every page contained a provocative assertion worth pausing over and pondering. When it came to the point in the process at which the entire board crowded around a large table to pronounce on the books selected by the various committees, it was these assertions, these bold statements, that got Paglia in trouble: one member after another, when it came to be his or her turn to comment on Paglia’s book, had already selected a specific sentence, which he or she would read out aloud, outraged at its utter lack of political correctness, and then say something to the effect: “We can’t give a prize to a book that includes that!”

My other favorite that year in the same category was Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character, which brought common sense to the dialogue about race in America. That book drew some flak too, because it challenged decades of received wisdom, but after intense debate, Steele won, and I was honored to present him with his prize at the awards ceremony. Although not everybody on the board was thrilled with Steele’s message, they did welcome the opportunity to give an award to a black person. Being able to do so was considered extremely important. Indeed, when we got around to debating poetry books – a category on which roughly half of the board members simply excused themselves (“pass!”), explaining that they didn’t feel comfortable pronouncing on contemporary poetry – there was one potential finalist with a simple English surname, which meant he was probably either a WASP or black. This was pre-Internet, of course, so it wasn’t easy to find out such things, but it was quickly agreed that we had to determine the author’s race before voting on the nomination.

That experience with the NBCC taught me a few lessons. The main one was that political correctness, even then, made a big, big deal.     

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BOOKS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Flourishing Life of a Privileged Undocumented Immigrant Hating America while it hands you the American Dream. Jason D. Hill

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/flourishing-life-privileged-undocumented-immigrant-jason-d-hill/

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was the first undocumented person to ever be a finalist for the National Book Award in 2020, according to the National Book Foundation. Her book The Undocumented Americans, published this year, is a runaway bestseller. It chronicles the lives of undocumented immigrants as well as Villavicencio’s own life in America. She was brought to the United States of America from Ecuador at age four or five by her parents—also undocumented immigrants.

Villavicencio was also, she believes, the first undocumented immigrant to graduate from Harvard University. She did so in 2011. During her senior year there she penned an anonymous essay for the Daily Beast titled: “I am an illegal immigrant at Harvard.” She was also an Emerson Collective Fellow. At just thirty-one years old, she has written for magazines (while being an undocumented immigrant) such as The Atlantic, Vogue, Glamour, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Elle. She has reviewed jazz albums for a New York monthly magazine. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at in the American Studies Program at Yale University.

Very recently, Villavicencio was a DACA recipient and received a green card. She admits she owns and lives in a huge apartment.

But as far as she is concerned, America is not a nice place. It is a “fucking racist country.” Warning: The profanity and expletives in this book are employed with the ease with which traditional writers utilize commas and semicolons as grammatical tools to communicate effectively.

Her advice to kids who suffer is to go to Harvard and “‘Make hella money.’ Kill the salutatorian. Make it look like an accident, and in your valedictory address, remind your school that cops are pigs, and ICE are ZAZI’s.” She invokes them to believe that they are John at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, and perhaps, his lover.

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Rep.Carolyn Maloney (D-NY 12) Demanded and Investigation of Smartmatic in 2006!

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/nov/15/trumps-legal-team-claims-issues-with-dominion-voti/

In 2005, Smartmatic bought Sequoia, one of the top U.S. companies producing automated voting systems.

U.S. officials began to take notice.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, New York Democrat, wrote in May 2006 to Treasury Secretary John W. Snow demanding an investigation of Venezuelan government influence in U.S. voting systems.

“As you can imagine, having a foreign government invest in or buy a company that services U.S. elections could raise concerns about the integrity of the elections conducted by these machines,” she wrote.

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The Murky Nexus of Smartmatics, Sequoia Voting Systems and the Dominion Voting System

By on November 24th, 2020

https://gnews.org/583150/

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has overtaken President Donald Trump by 290 electoral votes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, despite public opinion overwhelmingly in favor of President Trump. As Joe Biden’s team celebrated, evidence of vote-rigging continued to pour in. The Dominion system used for elections not only made illegal use of CCP-made components, but also Smartmatics Voting Software System leads to cause voting data to be sent abroad. Their servers were eventually seized by the American military forces in Frankfurt, Germany. Public discontent culminated in an outburst in Washington, D.C., Million Mage March on November 14 that people are calling for electoral justice and supporting Donald Trump’s re-election in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States, there have been numerous cases of people using high-tech voting systems to manipulate voting results. The election fraud committed by Dominion is nothing new. The Smartmatics software used by Dominion was one of the top voting systems once in the United States and has a complex background and full of controversy, but this time since it has threatened the National security, it got completely exposed.

Smartmatics Voting System in Venezuela

Smartmatics was founded in Venezuela in 1997 by a team of three engineers, Antonio Mugica, Alfredo Jose Anzola and Roger Pinate, specializing in the design and end-to-end deployment of special-purpose technology solutions. Business areas are: electronic voting systems, intelligent integrated security systems for enterprises and governments, and personnel registration and certification solutions for government applications.

The first Smartmatic’s company in the United States was incorporated in Delaware in April 2000, and it established a headquarters with just seven employees in Boca Raton, Fla in November the same year. Smartmatics took aim at electoral voting systems in the 2000 us presidential election after a controversy erupted over misreading votes involving “hanging Chad” in a Florida ballot card where candidates were found with holes punched.

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Guess who warned about Smartmatic’s Venezuela ties in 2006! By Thomas Lifson

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/guess_who_warned_about_smartmatics_venezuela_ties_in_2006.html

Perhaps the most dogmatic Trump-hating network of all was very concerned about Venezuela corrupting our elections via Smartmatic voting machines.  Yes, CNN!

Watch this report from CNN, hosted by Lou Dobbs in his pre-FBN career, and reported by Kitty Pilgrim, who was always, in my view, a straight shooter.  The report raises the question: why should U.S. elections be subject to manipulation by a foreign country, Venezuela, a country that is totally hostile?

The video is four and a half minutes long, and the picture quality is not good, but it is compelling television in light of claims being made now about Dominion and Smartmatic.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Cabinet: The Return of the Blob By David Harsanyi

By on November 24th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/bidens-cabinet-the-return-of-the-blob/

“Blinken was wrong about Israel, the Palestinians, and the prospects of peace. He was wrong about Iraq. Wrong on Iran. Wrong on Syria. Wrong on Russia. Wrong on Libya. Wrong on China. If you ever failed as much at your job, you wouldn’t have one. In Washington, you get to run the place.”

Biden wants Antony Blinken — an establishment favorite who has been wrong on nearly every foreign-policy issue in the past two decades — to be his secretary of state.

Joe Biden is putting the band back together.

As a Washington Post reporter tweets, the president-elect is “emphatically embracing the foreign policy establishment spurned” by Donald Trump. “Biden foreign policy begins with telling the world: ‘America’s back,’” explains what purports to be a straight-news piece, by another Washington Post writer. Biden, we learn, pledges to rejoin the Paris climate accord, the World Health Organization, the Iran nuclear deal, and to restore U.S. aid to the corrupt Palestinian leadership.

Let’s just say, Biden’s band has some big fans in Washington, D.C., and Brussels. To understand how this dynamic works, here is the Guardian describing Antony Blinken, likely our next secretary of state:

While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.

He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar (he played Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall at graduation) and play football [soccer], and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify. . . .

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EDUCATION, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden’s Student Loan Bailouts: Bad Economics, A Regressive Tax, And A Moral Hazard

By on November 24th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/24/student-debt-bailout-bad-economics-and-a-cynical-giveaway-to-the-wealthiest-americans/

Joe Biden has so many bad ideas that dealing with them all is a little like swatting flies in a molasses factory in July. One bad idea that’s getting media coverage right now is student loan forgiveness, a favorite among progressives. It’s a classic Democratic proposal: It helps the rich and the elites, and then hands the bill to working Americans.

An alliance of 236(!) leftist groups and teachers’ unions — or do we repeat ourselves? — recently urged Biden to erase student debt as one of his first acts as president, assuming of course he wins. Both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thought to have significant clout in Biden’s inner circle, want government to wipe away as much as $50,000 of debt per student.

So-called progressives are no doubt concerned that recent polling shows surprising support among millennials for Republican ideas. What better way to get them back on board than to show your socialist bona fides and win future elections than by forgiving student debt?

As Warren recently tweeted, “Student loan debt is holding back a whole generation from buying homes, starting small businesses, and saving for retirement – all things we rely on to grow our economy. Executive action to #CancelStudentDebt would be a huge economic stimulus during and after this crisis.”

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