Clusterfuck Nation

It was supposed to be an election, but the event we’re in is actually an attempt to overthrow the government. The coup is underway. It’s a turnstile into the next phase of this Fourth Turning. We know who the perps are. They have outed themselves. They have declared war on the republic on video. Is there any other remedy except to arrest the bums, take them off the game board, and stuff them into a courtroom?

And how might that happen? First of all, who are they? At the operational level, a gang of a thousand or so bureaucrats, retired bureaucrats, current and ex-military officers, politicians, lawfare artists and their accomplice judges, billionaire activists, and not a few non-citizen hostiles working through a constellation of well-funded NGOs and lesser groups, partnered-up with the Democratic Party to give them the aura of legitimacy.

Their plan is to cheat like hell in the election tomorrow, rendering the outcome inconclusive and contestable in order to foment enough civil unrest to force the president to declare an emergency — triggering a sequence of actions to, in turn, declare the president and his administration illegitimate and pass off authority to a select handful of state governors such as Newsom (CA), Pritzker (IL), Spanberger (VA), Whitmer (MI), Polis (CO), and Hochul (NY), and then hold a new constitutional convention to radically change the structure of the government to establish permanent one-party rule.

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One big reason for staging the coup is that many of the plotters’ heroes and leaders have already committed many crimes against the nation and the people, and are afraid of finally being held accountable for them. They don’t want to lose their fortunes, their power, their status, and end up in prison. These would be former presidents Obama and Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Comey and many many other familiar names. Some of these may still be active in the current shenanigans.

The lower level operational plotters only became known very recently: Danielle Reiff (former USAID, the Democracy Renewal Group); Paul Zeitz (Renew to Thrive); Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mike Smith (National Security Leaders for America); Erica Chenoweth (Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the United Democracy Alliance); Julia Roig (The Horizon’s Project and Partners Global); her husband, Enrique Roig (former USAID / State Department official (Renew American Democracy, RAD); Ezra Levin, Leah Greenberg, and Matt Traldi (Indivisible).

Who elected them the bosses of our outfit? In fact, they are wannabe commissars, eager to push the rest of us around. They came up through a bureaucratic ecosystem of commissars. They are creatures of it. It’s all they know. We have seen their like before in the governments of the old Soviet Union and its spinoffs.

They are in company with another layer of better-known coup plotters outside and above the NGO orbit. Norm Eisen, head lawfare ninja who has been involved in every Deep State hoax of the past decade, including RussiaGate, the Ukraine Impeachment, the J-6 op and the House Committee that pretended to investigate it, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and most of the frivolous lawsuits engineered through the two years of Trump 2.0. Marc Elias is the election lawfare ninja who has engineered and organized much of the ballot fraud in at least four recent national elections. Mary McCord is a former FBI and DOJ executive officer, also involved in every hoax and attempted subversion since 2016. Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) are also active plotters.

Senator Elissa Slotkin, involved in the setup for Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014, when she worked for Veep Joe Biden, happened to be in Poland about a month ago. You might have noticed over the weekend that an attempted coup was staged there by forces seeking to bring Poland under tighter EU control — to give up their currency (the Zloty) for the Euro, and to open up their border to “migrants.” The coup in Poland has apparently failed. But, at the same time that France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium are exploding in riots starring their migrants. Is the coup in America an extension of what looks like an international effort to overthrow Western Civ? Kinda smells like it.

So, these birds are daring President Trump to exercise his maximum executive power. Seems to me that Mr. Trump has the will to take them on. Let them make their move. Let them attempt to foment riots here post-election. The president and his agency heads at the DOJ, FBI, and Homeland Security already have probable cause (reasonable, fact-based belief) that a crime is being committed, or is about to be committed, by certain persons in a particular place. The plotters have laid it all out in Zoom calls that they foolishly believed were not recorded and email memoranda that were not supposed to get loose. And keep in mind that the President also happens to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, in case things get spicy.

Arrest these plotters for seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 2384), insurrection (18 U.S.C. § 2383), advocating overthrow of the government (18 U.S.C. § 2385), and conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 2385). If they have done any of this plotting in concert with persons associated with foreign governments, charge them with treason (18 U.S.C. § 2381) and misprision of treason (knowing of it and failing to report it) (18 U.S.C. § 2382).

That ought to take the starch out of them. To this point, President Trump has been notably scrupulous in dealing with his political enemies, while they have employed every conceivable underhanded tactic, including attempted assassination. Their effrontery is monumental. The battlespace is prepared. Better believe the Gray Champion is moving to meet them there.

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The garish stunt pulled by the Democratic Party in Alaska’s US Senate race has been known for months — a florid, festering carbuncle on the election’s face — and The New York Times finally reported it this week, mainly to get ahead of an accelerating DOJ probe, spin the story, and soften its sharp edges for public consumption. And a day later, the newspaper is now straining to say that it’s just normal politics.

Here’s what happened: Rep. Mary Peltola is running against sitting US Senator Dan Sullivan (Dan S.). Somehow, a second Dan Sullivan (Dan J.), a retired nobody in a remote fishing village, was induced to jump on the ranked-choice ballot. (The ranked-choice method is another layer of trickery.) So, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. Do you suppose this might confuse voters and siphon off votes from the real Sullivan to push a Peltola victory?

Peltola fired her campaign manager, Elisa Rios, in August, for reasons not yet disclosed. Rios then filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Peltola and sometime along in there Rios went to The Times with the story of how two Dan Sullivans ended up on the Alaska ballot. Turns out that the campaign ran a “ballot composition project.” Also involved were the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Marc Elias law firm, which represents both the DSCC and Rep. Peltola’s campaign. Marc Elias was previously the Perkins Coie lawyer who represented the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and helped arrange the Steele Dossier facet of the RussiaGate prank. Elias has since then been working tirelessly to engineer election procedures that favor Democrats, enable voting by non-citizens, block election reform, and file lawsuits to prevent states from turning over voter rolls to the DOJ, as they have demanded.

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A pro-Peltola political action committee (49th State PAC) paid $87,000 to an Ohio consulting company run by one Jerid Kurtz (operating under the name “Zane”) to compile a list of all the Dan Sullivans in Alaska and recruit one to run for Dan S. Sullivan’s Senate seat. They succeeded, finding Dan J., age 69, a retired US Forest Service employee and schoolteacher, in Petersburg, AK, who had never run for anything before. In late May 2026, he filed as a Senate candidate without a party label, then received about 2.5% in the top-four primary, and advanced to the general election ballot.

The Alt Dan Sullivan was assisted with all the filing paperwork by one Amber Lee, an Anchorage-based political consultant. A super PAC, Right for Alaska (meaning good for, not right wing, and based in Hudson, Wisconsin, by the way), has spent $1.15 million on Alt Dan, with $990,000 of that funneled in from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Washington DC-based Lefty-left pass-through operation — a 501(c)(4), not required to disclose its dark money donors — that has handled hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years. The org is associated with Arabella Advisors, which is funded by George Soros’s Open Society grants.

Former campaign manager Rios had told The Times that, “Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the Two Dan Sullivans project, but she was ‘definitely aware.’” Two days ago, just before publication of The Times report, Rios attempted to retract her story, declaring to the newspaper, “As discussed on our call earlier today, I am confirming that I have retracted all statements made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race in connection with any article you may or may not be writing. I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.” Nice try. Explain that to a grand jury.

The DOJ opened criminal and civil investigations in the Two Dan Sullivans matter last summer but bumped up its activities with the publication of The Times report. A grand jury was convened in August. On the criminal side, prosecutors have now issued thirty to forty grand jury subpoenas targeting Democratic officials, the Peltola campaign, and others linked to the Alt Dan recruitment effort. No one has been charged yet. At issue is whether this was a conspiracy to mislead voters or interfere with a fair election. Potential charges could include 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242, conspiracy against rights / deprivation of rights under color of law and wire fraud.

On the civil side, a DOJ lawsuit filed October 23, seeks to block certification of the vote if Senator Dan S. Sullivan happens to lose the election in a way that could be attributed to voter confusion.

Yesterday, Governor Mike Dunleavy directed the Alaska Bureau of Investigation to determine whether the prank violated Alaska law and whether criminal charges or civil action are warranted. The governor said the state’s actions were based on “Alaskans’ right to vote for the candidate they actually intend to support” and described deliberately confusing voters as “striking at election integrity.” The Alaska Supreme Court previously ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan (Alt Dan) met the constitutional requirements to appear on the ballot and that officials could not exclude him based on alleged motives. How that happened remains a mystery.

From a public sentiment point of view, the Two Dan Sullivans case underscores how desperately filthy Democratic Party tactics are in the service of preserving their longstanding racketeering operations. As a practical matter, the outcome could affect which of the two parties gets control of the US Senate. A vote for Democratic Party candidates is a vote to wreck our country. Think hard on that when you go to the polls.

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Elizabeth Nickson is a Canadian writer and journalist who trained at the London bureau of Time Magazine and later served as European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s… She has contributed to many publications including Harper’s Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine,The Toronto Globe and Mail, etc. Elizabeth is the author of the 1994 novel The Monkey Puzzle Tree, which examines the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments in Montreal, and the 2012 nonfiction book Eco-Fascists: How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage.She writes the popular Substack newsletter Welcome to Absurdistan, offering sharp critiques of progressive policies, environmental regulation, media narratives, and contemporary political culture.

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They put it on the form, though, cuz somebody screwed up. Oopsie. . . .

Get this: the reason that a color revolution is underway at all in America is not really political anymore — if it ever even was. It’s because a whole lot of people have committed crimes against this country. And with each wave of attempted sedition, they have compounded their crimes with more seditious acts, arrant hoaxes, lawfare, election fraud, censorship, and wholesale looting of taxpayer dollars to keep themselves out of prison.

That’s what USAID was all about, and why it was taken down early in Trump 2.0. It was a nexus of racketeering and the home-base of the Deep State’s foot soldiers, bureaucrats who actually managed the money streams to NGOs that ran everything from election rigging operations to vast social services fraud in blue states, in concert with a Democratic Party that had nothing but rackets to keep it going.

That’s how the USAID’s defunct office of Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) has morphed into the new Democracy Renewal Group (DRG). This new DRG operates under another project called Branch-4 — as in a fourth branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy — and Branch-4 operates under an NGO called the Action Center on Race and the Economy Institute (ACRE Institute), a 501(c)(3) public charity based in Chicago (EIN 82-1199695). Note, the ACRE Institute’s primary funders include the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. You see how byzantine this is, echoing exactly the hyper-complex administrative workings of government bureaucracy itself?

And so, that’s why, for instance, one Eric Manton, a former USAID employee now working with DRG said, “. . . we are also starting to consult federal workers on how to do some blocking inside the govt agencies during emergency situations.” Blocking? What they mean by that is federal employees lodged in the official agencies should “help run out the clock. . . develop selective hearing. . . forgetfulness. . . or blame your workload” for whatever it takes to block enforcement of any executive action proposed by the Trump administration.

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Those tactics are explicitly proposed by another org, the Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD formerly known as Federal Workers Against DOGE), which is affiliated with DRG primarily as a partner in the Renew American Democracy (RAD) strategy and through the broader Branch-4 ecosystem. Confused yet? You should be. The flak-storm of acronyms is beloved by Lefty-leftists for exactly that purpose.

RAD is run by Danielle Reiff, a 20-year veteran of USAID color revolution programs in Europe and Africa. Her co-coordinator at RAD is one Paul Zeitz, an osteopath and rabbi who worked previously for USAID in Africa and for the State Department as Director of the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, whatever that was. FWAD is led by one Beverly Schreiber

You might ask: why has the FBI not paid a visit to Beverley Schreiber to assess how she is organizing her members to “block” actions that the chief executive orders agencies to carry out? The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy must have a membership list. If their mission is to block the work of their agencies, as explicitly directed by FWAD, shouldn’t they be fired from their jobs?

And let’s not leave out a few other sketchy orgs and their leaders: Erica Chenoweth, who operates the United Democracy Alliance (UAD) out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which likewise operates under the “umbrella” of the Horizon Project, led by Maria J. Stephan and Julia Roig. Stephan was lead foreign affairs officer in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (whatever that means), roughly 2009–2014. She was also co-director the Future of Authoritarianism Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which is funded by George Soros’s Open Society org. Julia Roig was President and CEO of PartnersGlobal, funded by USAID, the State Dept., the Ford Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

What you see is a concoction of intertwined subversive endeavors with more gears and escapements than a Schwarzwald cuckoo clock, all operating under the banner of “Our Democracy,” by which they really mean their prerogative to run your world (and punish you for objecting). This includes running a coup against the current chief executive of the USA. Much of this information has been uncovered by the tireless and diligent researcher Jennica Pounds, known as Data Republican on X. She remarked Monday morning: “What makes 2026 different is that it’s the first time we know of that we found an operational, short-term plan to actually do a coup.”

Coincidentally, weird, coup-ish events played out yesterday in the Brazilian election. A judge who had been President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s personal lawyer ordered the polls to stay open an additional two hours until enough votes were “found” to haul Lula across the victory line over his opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. Chalk one up for the Globalists. Call it a DoorDash color revolution. Bolsonaro has refused to concede and is officially contesting the election. Expect street demonstrations by Bolsonaro supporters over this caper. Perhaps riots. Maybe Lula getting strung up Mussolini-style.

American coupsters will point to that as evidence that Trump supporters will riot after the US midterms. It’s all a giant mindfuck. Meanwhile, our coupsters have been outed. We know who they are and what they’re up to. And we are all waiting to see what federal law enforcement aims to do about it.

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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.

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Coincidentally this week, their cover was also blown by Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI and former CIA analyst), who told an audience at the U. of Chicago that the Democrats intend to go after and wreck any young person who might think about working in the current administration. Ms. Slotkin, you might recall, was in that video put out a year ago — with five other US lawmakers — telling military officers they should-and-must refuse “illegal” orders. Sedition-lite, it looked like at the time.

Before we get into the meat of their playbook for us, and what might happen in response, let’s just dox a few of the characters involved. You should know who they are (and maybe the DOJ should, too). They are not necessarily the usual suspects you’ve read about before like the omnipresent lawfare ninjas, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Mary McCord, et al., so busy filing frivolous lawsuits in the federal courts.

For instance (as reported by one Eric Schwalm on “X”), there’s Erica Chenoweth, the transvestite professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of government who acts as chief strategist and hub for the “color revolution” planned by the United Democracy Alliance cabal she is associated with. Ms. (or Mr.?) Chenoweth’s big contribution to Jacobin thought is “the 3.5 rule” which says that if you can get that percentage of people out on the streets making a ruckus, you can successfully overthrow a government.

Then there’s Danielle Reiff, former USAID, now co-founder of the Democracy Renewal Group, Renew American Democracy, and Renew to Thrive orgs. . . very verbal on video laying out the exact procedures for the US color revolution. And there’s Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith (Ret.) who runs a network of over a thousand retired military officers called National Security Leaders for America. He’s in charge of “role-playing” exercises in preparation for post-election hijinks. Then there’s Julia Roig, founder of the Horizons Project who is responsible for “building relational infrastructure so that disparate groups can act in concert without a single hierarchical command.” Then there’s Maria Stephan, co-author, with Erica Chenoweth, of the sedition tract Why Civil Resistance Works. Then there’s Brenden Halloran, former USAID, now with the Renew to Thrive org, responsible for “accountability ecosystems, overcoming fragmentation among groups, and long-term sequencing of reforms.” Then there’s Walt Roberts, also on the Renew to Thrive team, plus the Mediators Foundation and the Inter-Movement Impact Project. Then there’s Laura Adams, also former USAID, now in Renew to Thrive and PACT, whose mission is to turn strategy papers into operational plans. Then there’s Zoe Marks, also in Harvard’s Kennedy School, a “scenario-planner” for Horizons and United Democracy Alliance. Then there’s “cohesion” strategist Paul Zeitz, co-founder of UnifyUSA, partner with Danielle Reiff on Renew to Thrive, and active in NGOs Renew to Thrive and National Security Leaders for America. There’s the bunch. Now you know.

As to the coup playbook, here goes: The idea is to turn out massive street actions (protests and riots) in the blue cities, based on rumors that President Trump has somehow “interfered” in the election, and create enough chaos so that Mr. Trump would be tempted to invoke the Insurrection Act or some-such national emergency measure. The coupsters mentioned above, and their cohorts and underlings, have been quietly confabbing with blue state attorneys general and governors. These officials would unite to declare that Mr. Trump’s actions make him illegitimate, and would set in-motion procedures for said governors to declare the president a tyrant and an outlaw and themselves as the “new governing authority.” They would move from that to a new constitutional convention and bring about all the heralded revolutionary changes chattered about for months such as abolishing the electoral college and Senate, changing-up the Supreme Court, etc. Voila! Trump and his government are out! The Democratic Party (and their new DSA commissars) would take over and the punishments would begin. . . .

But. . . what if President Trump doesn’t play along? What if he insists that the blue state governors must ask (or beg) for federal troops to be sent in to control the street violence in their cities before he commits to anything? Then the onus would be theirs, wouldn’t it? They will have asked for help? Mr. Trump will have obliged. How does that make him a tyrant? (It doesn’t, of course.) Or. . . the blue state governors might not ask for federal help and Mr. Trump could just watch their cities burn down. That would kind of be on the blue governors, too, wouldn’t it — hey, they didn’t ask for federal troops and their own feckless police couldn’t get the job done because: previous “de-funding” and all that nonsense.

Then, how about Mr. Trump moves to arrest said blue state governors for sedition and treason (especially if they entertained any collusion with foreign operators, such as CCP-connected Neville Roy Singham’s NGO network or any of Soros’s overseas outfits)? And how about arresting and likewise charging many of those aforementioned NGO strategists, along with the governors? (And while you’re at it, throw in the lawfare ninjas who have assisted in all this mischief.) And how about after accomplishing that, the president then and only then declares the Insurrection Act, sends in federal troops to quell the street chaos, and moves to indict and try said seditionists and traitors in the military tribunal apparatus? There it is! Just some suggestions. . . .

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Looks like the punishments will continue across the pond until morale improves. France on fire in the “mostly peaceful” riots — according to the BBC — this past weekend could yet ignite a final, furious, Globalist-Jacobin bid to wreck Western Civ as populist nationalism looms ever larger to defeat them. That is, whatever the demonic coalition of desperate Euro elites backed by the Soros NGO empire, the WEF, the UN bureaucracy, possibly the British Crown, and the EU, can induce their Lefty-left useful idiots to act out intifada-style against the people and their culture.

President Macron stepped up Sunday to ask, “How can French people do this to France?” as the ancient tower of the Limoges city hall collapsed in flames. Somebody please inform him that the parties responsible for all the fiery chaos are not necessarily French people. Any way you cut it, this has got to be the end-of-pretend that flooding Europe with jihadis for two decades was a grand and noble idea. Where’s that whiff of grapeshot when you really need it?

You also must wonder whether the American Lefty-left has riot-envy. Their handlers in the Democratic Party and its dark entourage of “resistance” foundations, billionaire NGO-funders, and Deep State seditionists must be itching to unleash similar punishments across the USA, as they managed to do in 2020 to honor the saintly George Floyd. Of course, they don’t have the same resources they enjoyed back then. The US president — know who that is? — has choked off a good deal of their money-laundered cash-flow.

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The main question seems to be: will any street-fighting commence here before or after the mid-term election? Before Nov. 3, let’s face it, would not be such a good look for the Dems. Flash mobs of “teens” looting the sneaker stores and burning down 7-Eleven shops might only prompt the Trump-weary Republican hold-outs to show up at the polls bigly in swing states. Certainly, big, violent street demonstrations full of jihadi and communist iconography won’t reflect well on Mamdani wannabe Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who assisted Tim Walz in covering-up the Somali fraud operations for years and years, and ran the Signal comms network during the Minneapolis ICE riots of last winter.

Of course, if the Euroland riots keep going, the American Lefties just might bust out anyway. “Solidarity,” and all that. Comically, the “No Kings” demos of Saturday were hamstrung when Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company (formerly Facebook) suspended the No Kings Instagram account around the peak time of scheduled events around the country (starting at 1:30 p.m. ET) and for nearly two hours after. Meta later explained something about an automated security system triggered by a high volume of bot postings linked to an Anthropic AI tool. The No Kings organizers lost their action coordination platform. Fizzle fizzle. . . Boo-hoo.

After the election, however, you might consider that the same Lefty-left minions in America will take to the streets whether they win or lose the big contest over who gets to run Congress. For one thing, do not underestimate the degree of scrutiny that the federal government will give to balloting in previously sketchy corners of the land such as Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota, California, and many other places.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent letters to fifty states last summer warning officials they could face criminal liability for allowing or enabling non-citizens to vote. This ain’t no fool’ around. The DOJ is also sending attorneys by the hundreds to “observe” election proceedings. The Department of Homeland Security announced and is taking multiple actions framed as “protecting election integrity and addressing voter fraud.”

The Democratic Party is already royally pissed-off at the prospect that their manifold cheating operations might be stifled this time around. You can bet that a failure to win the House and Senate will produce a vigorous reaction, easily turning violent, along with a massive effort led by lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen and Marc Elias to foul up all efforts at certifying the vote in a thousand frivolous lawsuits. Is it not time to recognize that as a form of seditious conspiracy and prosecute it accordingly?

The last big question, then, is how the president might respond to post-election shenanigans. Well, for one thing, and whatever the outcome, Mr. Trump will no longer be constrained by the need to avoid the appearance of election interference. My guess is that he will finally go medieval on these vile seditionists, even if it requires declaring some sort of national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act. He is not going to allow a replay of anything like the 2020 mayhem.

Whatever the Europeans choose to do, it would be a shame if they lose their countries. We won’t lose ours, and we are not coming to rescue them this time.

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I remind you once again: history is a trickster. Sometimes things turn out, and sometimes they just turn, and these days they’re turning hard. Get this: Russia is not our mortal enemy anymore. This is not 1956 or even 1986. It is no longer the so-called Free World against the wicked Hammer and Sickle.

Russia is no longer a weird political science experiment acting in defiance of human nature — that is, of people striving to make good lives for their families. No more sacrificing everyone’s happiness to prove Karl Marx’s cockamamie theories. No more trying to foist all that on the rest of the world. Russia gave up on that project and opted to become a normal nation, with the full kit of normality: commerce, shopping, banks, enterprise. Things have changed.

Things have gotten strange, too. You see every indication that, for now, Europe has become something of an adversary, if not exactly our enemy, yet. Europe has lost its mind. Now, it is Europe’s turn to destroy itself in pursuit of idiotic theories — such as: nations don’t matter. . . you can have a high standard of living without productive industry. . . carbon is destroying the world.

Europe is now tyrannized by the unelected EU commission, much as the old Soviet Union was tyrannized by its politburo. An Orwellian switcheroo has occurred. When history plays tricks, it plays doozies. So, now you’ve got the grandmotherly Ursula von der Leyen dictating what all the countries in Europe may do and not do with their farms and factories and the daily lives of their people, just like Joseph Stalin in 1937. And you have the grotesquely weak leaders of France, Germany, and the rest submitting to this.

And outside the EU — which it voted to exit in 2016 — you have our so-called “mother country,” Great Britain (the United Kingdom) committing suicide in the most extravagant way, turning over prime ministers like they were jacks in a game of whist, jailing their own people for impure thoughts, while allowing the wholesale rape of its womenfolk by foreign invaders. Most extraordinary, as Dr. Watson might have observed to old Sherlock. Meanwhile, they have the ragged remnant of their old empire to defend, and it’s not going so well.

That remnant is all that’s left of Britain’s economy: its banks, its Wall Street, which they call The City of London, a square mile of hideous skyscrapers by which Britain desperately seeks to maintain financial flows into an economy that increasingly produces nothing. Which is to say, all that’s left of Britain’s vast imperial power is a matrix of nefarious financial rackets — just as, in the USA, all that’s left of the old Democratic Party is its matrix of rackets.

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These days, Britain’s political apparatus is working hard to scare-up a war with Russia as a last-ditch attempt to salvage its hopelessly wasted economy. Britain’s leadership apparently thinks it can summon a war economy and even draft an army of foot-soldiers as if this were 1914 or 1939. It’s an insane project, based on an age-old wish to capture the vast natural resources of Russia. They’ve been at it, like, forever. (France and Germany tried it, too. Didn’t work.)

Now we, here in the USA, in our own hemisphere of the globe, far across the salty seas from Europe, had been enlisted in this project to mess with Russia since 1991, and that’s not working so well anymore, either. First of all, there is the NATO problem. We’re still entangled in that anachronistic treaty, despite Russia having opted to be normal thirty-five years ago. So, you see, the way to get Russia was to stir up a war between it and Ukraine.

And they used us to do it — because the EU+ NATO lacked the mojo for the job. They got our Anglified State department and its NeoCon errand boys, along with our intel cowboys and their “Five-Eye” pardners, to stage the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Kiev, kick out the Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych and, after running through a couple of puppet presidents, installed the former comedian Zelenskyy in the job (who had played a buffoonish Ukrainian president on TV previously, another great prank by our friend, history).

The next gambit was to try to shoe-horn Ukraine into NATO, which everybody knew would provoke Russia to move against Ukraine, which it did in 2022. Russia did not want NATO military bases on its border. That, Mr. Putin declared, loudly enough to be heard in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels, was a “red line.” Voila, war! And the USA being the backbone and the bank account for NATO, got dragged into backing Ukraine by the feckless “Joe Biden” — years on Ukraine’s bribery payroll, and too out-of-it to not be punked into playing along. Yeah, he said, you can join NATO. The blue and yellow flags busted out all over our land. Slava Ukraini, the useful idiots shrieked.

President Donald Trump, having survived the Ukraine phone call impeachment gambit and many other attempts to put him out of business, was wise to the game, and one of the first things he did returning to power in 2025 was to confab with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Against all odds, Mr. Trump has maintained that working relationship despite having to pretend to support NATO. He apparently realizes that the tricks of history have placed the USA in greater alignment with Russia than with our former World War Two allies, most particularly a desire to avoid the World War Three that NATO is now pushing for.

The President has made it clear that he is done with the weaselly Zelenskyy and all his machinations — his visits to suck-up with King Charles, his nefarious dealings with NATO, his monstrous money-laundering. If Mr. Trump has not yet secretly withdrawn America’s remaining support for Ukraine via NATO, he will do so soon, explicitly, and in a way that is liable to be an end to NATO, which trickster-history has managed to turn into a warmonger. The EU and NATO do not have the money to keep that war going. It’s as simple as that.

Now, Iran. Americans are badly exercised by this operation, which has so far claimed around twenty lives. Well, there’s an election on, and you can be sure that a lot of this discontent is being generated by 1) the desperate Democratic Party and 2) the various characters in what’s being called “Woke MAGA.” The peeved apostates, such as Tucker, Candace, MTG, and company, might be acting under, shall we say, foreign influence, but they also seem plumb crazy. In the case of Tucker and Candace, of course, the ideas they’ve been retailing seem garishly insane. Tucker babbles about literal infestations of Satan-sent demons, and sneers Goebbels-like against the Jews, while Candace follows her cuckoo Charlie Kirk vengeance project.

Get this: Iran has lost this war, and badly. And for a good reason: being that they were determined to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them, and President Trump made the reasonable decision that it better not happen. Iran, being run by a lunatic Jihad faction, the IRGC, refuses to come to reasonable terms. The few weeks left before the US midterm election make this an especially delicate period. The Iranians well know this, and are playing it for all it’s worth in hopes that a flip of the US Congress will improve their position. It’s a bad bet.

The president has made it pretty clear, and consistently so for months. The Iranians can either agree to become a normal nation, even a prosperous, happy one, but with no nukes and no more jihad, or we are going to put them out of business — whichever way the midterm election goes. In other words, what you’re seeing now in that corner of the globe is not the final disposition of things.

The Europeans apparently have an incentive to do whatever they can do to keep feeding the flames in Ukraine and Iran, though they are not advertising it overtly. Our interests have diverged. The Europeans are maneuvering in such a way as to make themselves an adversary to the USA, a very unwise move. It also happens that their countries are going up in flames at the moment. Their citizens are not happy, and they are further belabored by a large force of invading savages. The leaders in charge of those countries might not be in charge a whole lot longer. Think about recalibrating your expectations about where all this is going. And don’t be so glum. The odds are in our country’s favor, and these wars can be resolved favorably.

JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Edward Tenner’s new book is Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge, a witty and erudite followup to his bestseller, Why Things Bite Back about the peculiar intersection between technology, human nature, and the revenge of unintended consequences. He has had a distinguished academic career in history at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Chicago and was science acquisition editor at Princeton University Press, where he published, among other books, Richard Feynman’s best-seller, QED. Many of his fine essays can be found at EdwardTenner.com.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.

Let’s just say you were running for a US Senate seat in one of our country’s biggest states. . . and it was roughly one month to election day. . . and, goshdarnit, you caught the flu. According to the CDC, a normal course of the illness in an otherwise healthy, non-elderly adult goes like this: days 1-3, abrupt onset of chills, fever, body aches, sore throat; days 4-7, symptoms fade; afterward, symptoms go away, reduced energy may linger another week.

Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas came down with the flu around September 26, vanished from the campaign scene altogether Sept. 30, and reappeared ten days later at an Austin City Limits music fair. Ten days is a long time to be off the campaign circuit in a supposedly super-tight race in the climactic month of the contest, don’tcha think?

And wouldn’t you suppose that by day 4 or 5 the candidate could bestir himself to pick up a phone and record something like, “Hi voters. JT here. I’ve been down with an awful case of the flu. Please bear with me. Will return ASAP.” Could have done it in a bathrobe, dignified enough, propped up in bed or in a comfortable chair, maybe not looking his best, but. . . .

But, no, he did no such thing. By day 7 or 8, feeling better, he might have been doing Zoom calls from his home office with news media, donors, reminding voters why it was important to vote for him. No, that didn’t happen, either. During the period of his illness, his Twitter feed put up a few posts that could have been written by anyone, and probably were, taunting his opponent, AG Ken Paxton. He did not post anything about being sick or returning to the public arena, and then on Friday, October 9, he popped up at the ACL Fest with no prior notice, “meeting with voters,” his campaign said — 75,000 attendees in 95-degree heat — for about fifteen minutes before he left. Okay. . . .

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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com

On Saturday, Oct. 10, the candidate held a meeting with his campaign workers by day and that evening he was seen at a Kacey Musgraves concert at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, just kicking back, enjoying himself. On Sunday, Oct. 11, he did a brief interview with NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth and MS NOW to dismiss “conspiracy theories” about his absence from the scene (more on that anon). That evening, he was supposed to show up at a Dallas fundraiser, but there is no record in the news media that he actually appeared.

Let’s step back to late September and recap. James Talarico’s last public event in Texas that month was at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, Sept. 26. He did not mention feeling ill then. On Monday, Sept. 28, he flew to New York for a joint fundraiser for himself and for Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, hosted by actor Robert DeNiro. It was held at Capitale, an event venue at 130 Bowery, in a magnificent old bank building. Tickets ranged from $500 to $27,000 a seat. Earlier, he’d stopped at a much smaller fundraiser thrown by former DNC finance director Maureen White.

The following evening, Tue, Sept. 29, he attended a fundraiser in Greenwich Village put on by the Human Rights Campaign. Sometime after that, he flew back to Texas. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Talarico did a “virtual appearance” with the US Hispanic Business Council in which he was coughing and blowing his nose, and told the group, “I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago [that is, while he was in New York], and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas, and I was diagnosed with the flu.” Yet after he reappeared in public, on Sunday, Oct 11, he told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reporter Phil Prazan, “I just went to my primary care physician.” There was no mention of his drop-in at an urgent care facility.

The reason we entertain all these details is because a rumor erupted over the weekend that candidate James Talarico actually spent a week or so at a mental health clinic called the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, recovering from some sort of “stress” event — the “conspiracy theory” he averred to with News-5 and MSNOW. Independent Reporter Nick Sorter posted a phone call supposedly with an employee of the Lindner Center who said that James Talarico had been “discharged” the previous evening.

The Lindner Center later issued a flat denial that Talarico had ever been a patient there, and Talarico himself issued a denial on his “X” account, saying, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” We’ll see if he files any libel suit against Nick Sorter and others who reported on the mystery of his whereabouts. Or, if he files a case against the Lindner Center for violation of his HIPAA rights for disclosing information about his discharge.

Anyway, there is a registry for private jets and we’ll know soon enough whether James Talarico was on a Cessna Citation X (Serial No. 750-0271) owned by the Austin Aviation Group out of Wimberly, Texas, that departed from Butler County Regional Airport near Cincinnati on Oct 9 at 9:19 a.m. landing in Austin, TX, at 10:24 a.m.

It’s beginning to look like maybe James Talarico was not the best candidate the party could come up with. But then, look at who he beat in the primary election: Jasmine Crockett.

I’ll be speaking at the Prospects for American Renewal Summit in Bozeman, Montana, November 13, 14. The theme of the meeting is: What has America lost? What remains worth preserving? And what must be rebuilt if a healthy common life is to endure?

For info: https://www.arcata.live/2026-summit#register

JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)