Government Agents Try to Stir Up Fear of Russian Election Interference a Third Presidential Election in a Row
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | November 1, 2024
For a third United States presidential election in a row, US agents are out warning of Russian election interference.
In the previous two elections the warnings were spurious. Still, the government agents succeeded in raising worry in people’s minds regarding candidate Donald Trump. And they suppressed consideration of information damaging to Trump’s opponents, including through indicating the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation.”
This election, the government agents are at it again. Their latest spurt of relating supposed Russian election interference arrived in a Friday joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). This joint statement is one among a series of updates concerning what the press release calls “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans.”
Yeah, whatever, guys. Have you ever read the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Tricks of the Trade: How the White House and Legacy Media Concoct Pro-Democrat Narratives
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 01.11.2024
Donald Trump recently announced his intention to sue CBS News for $10 billion, claiming that the network’s editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes constituted “election interference.”
In a parallel move, House Republicans are contemplating an investigation into how the White House edited President Joe Biden’s controversial “garbage” comment. They argue this might violate the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
The GOP contends that both the White House and the media are engaged in efforts to portray Biden and Harris more favorably as Election Day approaches. This appears to be part of a larger trend of collaboration between the press and White House staff that has been ongoing for some time.
In mid-August, The National Interest lambasted the US mainstream media for what it referred to as Kamala Harris’s “rebranding.” The publication pointed out that Harris received “glamorous cover profiles” and positive coverage, despite her historically low approval ratings as vice president and her inability to address the border crisis after being appointed by Biden as “border czar.”
In mid-October, Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted Harris with a series of challenging questions regarding migration, her economic agenda, and her vice-presidential record. This line of questioning led Harris’s aides to cut the interview short after less than 30 minutes.
Earlier, the White House repeatedly downplayed and sugar-coated Joe Biden’s “gaffes”, including the one concerning US “military defense” of Taiwan.
In July, Civic Media, a radio station in Milwaukee, acknowledged that it had made two edits to a July 3 recording of an interview with Biden that aired later, following a request from his campaign. This interview came on the heels of Biden’s poor performance in his June 27 debate against Trump.
- The first edit concerned Biden’s claim that his administration included more Black officials than “all other presidents combined.”
- The second edit removed his comments about Trump’s call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five teens, who were later exonerated. “I don’t know if they even called for their hanging or not, but he–but they said […] convicted of murder,” Biden asserted.
In early July, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, a host on Philadelphia’s WURD radio, conducted a separate interview with Biden and later admitted that she had asked four out of the eight questions that had been drafted for her by Biden’s aides. Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for First Lady Jill Biden, commented to Axios that the practice of “pre-submitting questions” for interviewees has long been a strategy of the Biden team.
In February 2024, the White House pressured Fox News to revise its coverage of corruption allegations against President Biden, arguing that the claims were based on misleading data provided by FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who allegedly fabricated the accusations against the president. Fox News declined the request, citing broader corruption allegations put forth by House investigators concerning the Biden family.
Dumpster fire: White House Press Office faced internal criticism over the rewriting of Biden’s garbage comments
By Jonathan Turley | November 1, 2024
Since the “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident, the media has been repeatedly accused of reframing news or rewriting words to benefit the President or the Biden-Harris Administration. This week, the White House Press Office and various media outlets like Politico and MSNBC have been ridiculed for denying that President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” It has created a weird dissonance as Democratic politicians denounced what the White House and many in the press denied was said. Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands. The White House stenographers objected to the rewriting of the transcript by the Biden White House staff to suggest that the President was condemning Trump’s rhetoric, not his supporters.
The President’s attack on Trump supporters was nothing new. Leaders like Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and Biden himself has described their views as a return of the confederacy and the rise of fascism. Democrats have called the movement a modern form of Nazism and an effort to destroy democracy, round up homosexuals, and create internment camps.
The problem was the timing. As Harris was denouncing Trump for name-calling and insisting that Democrats are bringing the country together (while condemning Trump as a modern version of Hitler), Biden was literally behind her in the White House, calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.”
Fox News reportedly obtained an email in which the supervisor sounded the alarm on the White House press office’s “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” Sands went on to say that
“if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently. Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff… After last night’s process, our team would like to reiterate that rush drafts/excerpts the Stenography Office sends to assist the Press Office are not intended for public distribution or as the final version of the transcript. Please avoid sharing rush drafts/excerpts, which are subject to review and might create confusion among staff, media, and the public while our Stenography Office completes a thorough review process.”
The White House was criticized for adding an apostrophe to the President’s comments to change the meaning of the key line.
After the statement, there was an immediate clean-up effort by Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, who was accused of changing the language by saying that “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.”
Lemire was widely ridiculed. For many, it sounded like another “Let’s Go Brandon” moment. He later turned to the apostrophe spin: “The full Biden quote from the Zoom tonight, which is being taken out of context.” Accompanying the text is a screenshot of a transcript that has Biden saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The spin would have been more convincing if many of these pundits were not at the same time insisting that a line from a comedian delivered at a Trump event should be attributed to Trump (despite his later condemnation of any such view). It would also be more credible if Biden had not spent much of the last four years portraying the Trump movement as a new confederacy (before it was reframed as the new Third Reich).
When asked about the internal objections, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates only repeated the prior statement: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”
However, Fox noted that it remains “unclear … whether the transcript the White House cites is the one that was altered and released to the press or the final transcript that was sent to the National Archives.”
Other reporters now admit that Biden said what he said but describe it, as did CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, as “a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage.” The “inadvertent gaffe” ignores years of portraying Trump supporters as seeking to return the United States to the Jim Crowe period or pursuing a neo-Nazi future.
While various Democratic politicians have denounced Biden’s statements and Harris has said that she strongly disagrees with them, diehards like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell mocked those who were critical as “some of the worst” or just ungrammatical journalists:
“To do so, they had to refuse to listen to the actual sentence Joe Biden spoke. They had to refuse to look at the written words of that sentence. They had to refuse to understand English grammar. They had to refuse to understand what a singular possessive is. They had to refuse to understand what apostrophe ‘s’ means. They had to refuse to remember what they learned in elementary school about the English language.”
It appears that the non-partisan, career stenographers who recorded the interview contemporaneously are also on that “worst” list of ungrammatical morons.
The mainstream media is now dismissing the entire matter as just the placement of an apostrophe. Yet, many of these same voices were supporting a full-fledged investigation into the transcript of the Ukraine call during the Trump Administration over “the use of ellipses.”
I was critical of that call and supported calls for an accurate transcript, particularly on such a weighty issue. However, back then, the accuracy of such transcripts was accepted as of paramount importance. Whether it is a matter of foreign or domestic policy (or an apostrophe or ellipses), the public should be confident on the accuracy of White House transcripts, as stressed by Sands in her internal objections to the White House Press Office.
One of those objecting to the use of the ellipses was Lawrence O’Donnell.
It appears that one person’s punctuation is another person’s punch line.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
In Bryansk, the West once again shows its terrorist face
By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 1, 2024
On October 28, 2024, in the Bryansk region, an undisputed territory of the Russian Federation, military personnel and border guards prevented an attempted ground invasion led by a foreign sabotage and reconnaissance group consisting of approximately 20 people.
As a result of the clash, four foreign saboteurs from the USA, Canada and Poland were eliminated by Russian soldiers. The other members of the group were hit by rocket and artillery fire while trying to evade, suffering even greater losses. Militarily, the enemy operation was an absolute failure, with no practical results on the battlefield and a high number of casualties.
It is surprising that, despite the fact that the conflict is, for the Western media, “between Russia and Ukraine”, not a single Ukrainian military personnel was identified in the group. It was discovered that the destroyed saboteurs had foreign weapons, uniforms and communications equipment, as well as personal items indicating their belonging to other countries that are not legally involved in the conflict in Ukraine. For example, according to some reports circulating on military channels (and confirmed by me with local sources), a Canadian flag, a prayer book in Polish, and a notebook with notes on tactical training in English were found with the dead enemies.
In addition, a rather interesting fact drew the attention of the Russian military to the case. A tattoo of the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, Parachute Reconnaissance Regiment of the U.S. Army Special Forces, was found on the body of one of the dead militants. It is practically impossible that such a tattoo was made “by chance”. Surely, the eliminated enemy was a veteran of such a military unit, and therefore a member of one of the most qualified commando groups in the West.
It must be remembered that the 75th Parachute Reconnaissance Regiment of the United States Army (75th Ranger Regiment), also known simply as the “Rangers”, is an amphibious reconnaissance paratrooper regiment. Like all American military units, the regiment is directly subordinate to the U.S. Department of Defense – and is, of course, part of the American war apparatus. The headquarters and main units of the Army’s special forces are stationed on the territory of the U.S. Army unit at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The regiment is designed to perform special combat missions, including reconnaissance and sabotage behind enemy lines, capture of airfields and reconnaissance in the interests of advancing units of the Ground Forces. Units of the 75th Parachute Regiment are troops prepared for helicopter landing or amphibious assault, being highly qualified groups with broad operational capabilities for the most diverse environments of military activity.
Officially, by decision of the U.S. Army leadership, the parachute battalions of the 75th Airborne Division must be on combat readiness to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. This only reinforces how the group is part of what is most advanced, special and sophisticated in the American military.
Despite the special nature of the American unit, the Western media simply ignored Russian reports of a Ranger in the Bryansk raid. There was no explanation from U.S. authorities as to why members of their most highly skilled military personnel were fighting in a land invasion on another continent.
In theory, the Rangers should be under the full control of U.S. authorities. Like any special forces unit, the group must be on combat readiness so that it can be called into a real operational situation at any time – if Washington deems it necessary to use such forces on the battlefield. Given such conditions, it would not be an exaggeration if the Russian Federation viewed the involvement of such special forces in Ukraine as an open declaration of war, prompting an appropriate military response.
In practice, once again, it is only Russia’s diplomatic goodwill and its desire for de-escalation that prevent Moscow from taking decisive action against Western countries. NATO is making it increasingly clear that it is at war with Moscow and will not stop its efforts to harm Russia, using ever more terrorism and even its most skilled troops.
As long as this Western war effort is limited to low-level impacts, such as the useless and shameful invasion of Bryansk, Russian patience will prevent a reaction. But it is unwise for the West to continue betting on the constant violation of Russian red lines, since once patience runs out, there will be no turning back.
NATO plotting against its own members to ‘help’ Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | November 1, 2024
NATO seems to be starting to plot against its own members. In a recent case, it was revealed that the NATO alliance launched a sabotage attempt against Hungary to circumvent the country’s authorities and try to send weapons to Ukraine. This situation clearly shows how Western countries are not safe within NATO itself, having their sovereignty threatened by the bloc’s war plans.
Viktor Orban’s presidential administration recently announced that the country’s intelligence service had thwarted a foreign operation to deliver Hungarian weapons to Kiev. According to the head of the presidential cabinet, Gergely Gulyas, there was an illegal deal between members of military companies in Hungary and foreign agents directly involved in financing Ukraine. The objective of such a criminal network would be to make Hungary finally “help” the Kiev neo-Nazi regime.
“Indeed, there were attempts to use the Hungarian military industry to send weapons to Ukraine, but our counterintelligence discovered and stopped them (…) Hungary will not deliver any of its weapons or ammunition to Ukraine,” Gulyas said.
As a reaction to Orban’s resistance, Westerners have attempted to use the Hungarian military-industrial complex as a platform for producing weapons for Ukraine. According to reports, these weapons, once manufactured in Hungary, would be purchased by NATO intermediaries as part of the aid program for Kiev. Then, upon receiving these weapons, the agents would ship them to the Ukrainian frontlines or to terrorists in Africa – thus serving Western interests in both cases.
Details of how Hungarian counterintelligence identified this threat and acted to neutralize it have not yet been shared. However, it seems clear that Budapest took tough measures against its own alleged Western “allies,” preventing them from establishing a black market for weapons in the country to supply Ukraine.
As well known, Viktor Orban’s stance has been in favor of peace and diplomacy since the beginning of the conflict. Instead of fomenting war and chaos by creating useless hostilities, the Hungarian government made the right decision: it ignored Russophobic policies, prioritized sovereignty and national interests, and refused to continue depending on NATO’s political, ideological and economic stance. Orban has repeatedly said that Hungary is in favor of a ceasefire and does not share any of the West’s most liberal agendas – both in geopolitical and cultural topics.
Orban is clearly not a “pro-Russian” politician. His goal has never been to align Hungary fully with Moscow, nor does he have any anti-Western goals. Orban simply does not want his country to suffer because of the anti-Russian madness of sending weapons to the Ukrainians, prolonging a war that is obviously damaging Europe. In the end, Orban is working to establish a new position among NATO countries, trying to remain in the alliance but without participating in the war with Russia.
However, NATO clearly has no respect for the sovereignty of any of its members. The Western alliance demands absolute alignment and political subservience as requirements for establishing cooperation projects. Western main powers, the US and the UK, do not seem interested in allowing any political freedom to their allies, demanding from them a stance of absolute support for anti-Russian military initiatives.
In fact, Orban is often criticized in the Western mainstream media for his efforts to end the war. Unfortunately, however, the Western siege against Budapest goes beyond propaganda. The alliance is beginning to mobilize its security apparatus to target its own members in a desperate attempt to dissuade them and ensure they are following the pro-Ukrainian war plans. Hungary has actually suffered an action that would be expected for NATO against any external, non-member country, but not against a European state integrated into the bloc, despite its distinct views on foreign policy.
Just as there was a plot to circumvent national norms, there is also a possibility of a plot to cause real damage or even eliminate Orban and other key figures in the Hungarian government. NATO has simply shown that Budapest is not immune to becoming a target of sabotage, ending once and for all any kind of trust between Hungarians and their other Western “partners.”
Without trust, there is no unity in a military alliance. Perhaps NATO is contributing to its own decline by promoting such acts of sabotage, since it is destroying the alliance’s credibility and image among the public.
Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Associations, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies and military expert.
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
By Jeffrey A Tucker and Debbie Lerman | Brownstone Institute | October 30, 2024
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Georgian president refuses to back up election theft claims
RT | October 30, 2024
Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has refused to be interviewed by the prosecutor general’s office about her claims of election fraud, arguing that investigators should look for evidence themselves.
Zourabichvili has joined several pro-Western opposition parties in accusing the ruling Georgian Dream party of “stealing” Saturday’s parliamentary vote, without providing specific examples.
The Prosecution Service of Georgia subsequently launched an investigation into the alleged falsification of the election and summoned Zourabichvili to appear on Thursday and provide evidence on the matter.
“I don’t intend to go to the prosecutor,” Zourabichvili said at a press conference in Tbilisi.
“It’s not up to the president to provide the proof,” she argued, adding that NGOs, election monitors and ordinary citizens have been providing “huge amounts” of evidence of election rigging. She said that more than 1,100 complaints have been filed regarding the conduct of the election.
“In any standard investigation, it’s the investigative body’s duty to gather proof, not the other way around. I’ve never seen an investigative authority ask a president for election-related evidence,” the president wrote on X.
“What we’re witnessing is an attempt to fuel tension and fear amid frustration over stolen votes. There’s psychological pressure directed at both you and me,” she added.
Mamuka Mdinaradze, executive secretary of Georgian Dream, advised the president to cooperate with the prosecutors. “President Zourabichvili must answer what her accusations are based on,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We are ready, as part of the investigation in the prosecutor’s office, to open any polling station to prove that the elections were held fairly.”
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that Zourabichvili and the opposition “have no evidence of election fraud, and if they do not go to the prosecutor’s office, this will be the clearest evidence that they made false statements about the elections.”
Kobakhidze previously stated that the election was “absolutely clean, democratic and fair.”
Zurab Japaridze, leader of the Girchi – More Freedom party said the critics of the government “do not trust” the prosecutor’s office and would advise the president not to meet with them.
Official tallies showed Georgian Dream received nearly 54% of the vote, winning a convincing parliamentary majority. The French-born Zourabichvili has rejected the results, describing the election as a “Russian special operation.” Along with the opposition leaders, she has demanded a new election, organized under international supervision.
Georgian election officials complained about Zourabichvili’s rhetoric on Tuesday, urging the prosecutors to investigate “unfounded attacks” on the central election commission. They noted that international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have “positively assessed the elections” and found no significant violations. The US and the EU, however, expressed their concerns and urged the Georgian authorities to investigate the reports of irregularities.
Will Tuesday’s Vote Counts Be Another Sham Biden-Harris Statistic?
By James Bovard – Mises Wire – October 30, 2024
If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election on Tuesday, Americans will be told that the final vote count is a sacred number that was practically handed down from Mt. Sinai engraved on a stone tablet. Any American who casts doubt on Harris’s victory will be vilified like one of those January 6, 2021 protestors sent to prison for “parading without a permit” in the US Capitol. Actually, anyone who doubted the 2020 election results was being prominently denounced as “traitors” even before the Capitol Clash.
But is there any reason to expect the final vote count in next week’s presidential election to be more honest than any other number that the Biden-Harris administration jiggered in the last four years?
Biden, Harris, and their media allies endlessly assured Americans that the national crime rate had fallen sharply since Biden took office. That statistical scam was produced by the equivalent of disregarding all the votes in California and New York. FBI crime data simply excluded many of the nation’s largest cities until a revision earlier this month revealed that violent crime had risen nationwide.
Deceitful national crime data helped cover-up the disastrous impact of open border policies. The Biden-Harris administration did backflips to avoid disclosing the true size of the surge of illegal immigrants from early 2021 onwards. Kamala Harris did zombie-like face plants in recent interviews when elbowed for honest answers.
In the same way that another surge of unverified mail-in ballots may determine the 2024 election, Biden manipulated the number of illegal aliens by using his presidential parole power to entitle more than a million people from Haiti, Venezuela, Cubans, and other countries to legally enter and stay in America on his own decree. The Biden administration even provided a vast secretive program to fly favored foreign nationals into select airports late at night where their arrival would occur under the radar.
Some states will officially count mail-in ballots that arrive well after Election Day even if the envelopes have no postmark. This is the same “late doesn’t matter” standard that Biden used to vindicate the $42 billion provided by his 2021 infrastructure law to boost broadband access in rural America—which Uncle Joe said was “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.” Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority, Biden’s broadband program has nothing to show since it delivered faster internet access to almost no one. The same default occurred with the Inflation Reduction Act’s alleged showpiece achievement—42,000 new charging stations around the nation for electric vehicles. But that program produced more presidential applause lines than EV refills. As of March, $7.5 billion in federal spending had only produced seven new charging stations nationwide.
How many votes will Harris lose on Tuesday because Americans remain outraged at the inflation that has slashed the dollar’s value by more than 20 percent since Biden took office? There would be far more popular fury if the feds had not deceived Americans about the full financial damage that Washington inflicted. The official inflation statistic doesn’t count soaring mortgage and housing costs—which is akin to excluding any state south of the Mason-Dixon Line from the national vote tally. Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, said that if the feds today used the same inflation gauges used in the 1970s, Biden’s peak inflation would have been 18 percent, twice as high as the reported number.
Tens of millions of voters will not be obliged to show any identification before voting in this election: they are presumed trustworthy regardless of zero verification. But this is the same standard that the Biden-Harris administration uses for not disclosing its most controversial policies to American citizens. People will vote next week without knowing the facts behind whistleblower allegations on Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, to Secret Service failures to prevent Trump assassination attempts, and the brazen details of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
In Washington, politicians feel entitled to applause for any grandiose promise—regardless of their failure to deliver. Similarly, politicians and election officials promising that the presidential vote count will be accurate and reflect “the will of the people” is far more important than tabulating the actual ballots. Will the unmanned ballot boxes in big cities be stuffed with bogus ballots the same way a politician jams endless balderdash into his campaign speeches? As pundit Stephen Kruiser quipped, “the clothing donation boxes that were all over my old neighborhood in Los Angeles were probably more secure than the ballot drop boxes.”
Of course, if Trump wins, then all the forces of decency must instantly shift to the other side of the barricades. Any electoral victory by Trump will be illegitimate because of politically incorrect comments made by speakers at Trump campaign rallies. As in 2017, if Trump wins, every “true patriot”—or at least every true progressive—will be honor-bound to join The Resistance™.
FBI ran ‘honeypot’ operation on 2016 Trump campaign – whistleblower
RT | October 30, 2024
Former FBI Director James Comey personally ordered “honeypot” spies to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to an agency whistleblower. The off-the-books operation was described by the agency insider as a “fishing expedition” to find wrongdoing among Trump’s team.
The operation was “personally directed” by Comey and launched in June 2015 without any case file being created in the FBI’s database, according to a whistleblower report handed to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seen by the Washington Times.
At the time, Trump had just announced his first presidential campaign and neither he nor anyone on his campaign team was suspected of any crimes. Nevertheless, Comey ordered two “honeypot” agents to infiltrate Trump’s team on the campaign trail with the aim of extracting damning information from adviser George Papadopoulos, the report claimed.
A “honeypot” agent refers to an attractive woman who uses a sexual or romantic relationship to gather intelligence from a target.
Comey’s operation took place a year before the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged contacts with Russia, which later morphed into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year ‘Russiagate’ probe. According to the whistleblower, the honeypot operation was kept “off the books” to conceal it from the US Justice Department’s inspector general, who later determined that Comey knowingly lied when submitting evidence to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump’s campaign.
Papadopoulos was eventually questioned by the FBI and in 2017 pled guilty to making false statements to agents regarding his alleged contacts with Russia the year before. He served 12 days in federal prison in 2018, and has claimed ever since that he was entrapped by FBI agents posing as Russians with damaging information on Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
He complained about sloppy FBI agents “dropping information in my lap that I did not want regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails in the hands of the Russians” during the Crossfire Hurricane probe, and claimed to have been targeted by at least one “honeypot” beforehand. However, Papadopoulos thought that the woman was working for the CIA and “affiliated with Turkish intelligence,” he said in 2019.
The operation was canceled when a newspaper obtained a photograph of one of the agents and was about to publish it, the whistleblower claimed. The FBI allegedly contacted the newspaper claiming that the woman in question was an informant, and not an agent, and would be killed if the photo was released, successfully preventing its publication. One of the agents was then allegedly transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness.
“The FBI employee personally observed one or more employees in the FBI being directed to never discuss the operation with anyone ever again, which included talking with other people involved in the operation,” the report states.
The Judiciary Committee told the Washington Times that it “plans to look into” the report. Trump fired Comey in 2017, describing him as a “liar” and a “slimeball.”
How the West rigged Moldova’s referendum on the European Union
By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 30, 2024
On October 20, a referendum was held on the Moldovan public’s interest in a constitutional reform to enable entry into the European Union. The “yes” vote won with 50.39%, a numerical margin of about 12,000 votes.
This result was well below expectations, considering all the government’s preparation and mobilization in support of the referendum.
Since Maia Sandu came to power, the goal has been to transform Moldova into a platform and tool for provocation and attack against Russia, similar to how Georgia and Ukraine were positioned in the past.
This had already begun even before Sandu’s election in 2020, with the free operation of Western or pro-Western NGOs in the country. According to various studies, there are around 14,000 NGOs registered in Moldova, a ratio of 1:200, with USAID having a strong direct presence in the country and indirect influence (as a funder of other NGOs).
USAID alone has invested more than $500 million in Moldova over the past 10 years. In terms of general funding, the West supports NGO activities in Moldova with $110 million annually. Besides USAID itself, other main NGO funders include the Open Society Foundation, the governments of Germany and the Netherlands, the NED, and Chatham House.
Among these “Moldovan” NGOs are Promo-LEX, IDIS Viitorul, the EEF (East Europe Foundation), WatchDog.MD, and the EBA (European Business Association), among others. All these groups work in areas like “promoting democracy and human rights” and “countering Russian disinformation.”
In recent years, these and many other NGOs have been actively shaping public opinion through social engineering techniques, aiming to “Ukrainize” Moldovans; that is, to turn Moldovans into Russophobic bots and compliant followers of Washington and Brussels.
With Sandu’s victory, Moldova’s automatic alignment with the West began. To achieve this, the nationalist sentiments of the population are naturally utilized, as the population historically identifies with Romania. However, this connection is manipulated not to foster a Romanian ethno-cultural identity but as a vehicle for the Westernization of Moldova.
When Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began, Sandu seized the moment to formally apply for EU membership, despite Moldova’s constitution mandating geopolitical non-alignment. Shortly thereafter, the government started imposing censorship on the use of the Russian language in the country, as well as restricting Russian media and symbols, and even arrested her political rival, Igor Dodon. Predictably, Sandu quickly began indebting her country with multi-million euro loans from the European Union.
In the Moldovan narrative, Transnistria, a tiny strip of land with a Russian majority, poses a major threat to “Moldovan sovereignty.” Thus, Sandu decided to sacrifice Moldovan sovereignty in order to defend it. It makes no sense, but that’s how the minds of politicians who have been brainwashed by Western influence work.
Meanwhile, NATO stationed nearly 10,000 troops along the Moldovan border (even though foreign troops are prohibited on its territory), and the country faces frequent anti-government protests from citizens worried that the West might try to turn Moldova into another Ukraine.
This brings us to the referendum on constitutional reform aimed at EU integration. The result, although “victorious,” was disappointing, considering all the money spent promoting the EU, the imprisonment of opposition members, media censorship, and social engineering efforts by NGOs. Even this victory was only achieved through fraud. If you look closely at the referendum maps, you get the impression that the “no” vote won over the “yes.” And that’s exactly what happened: only 46% of Moldova’s residents voted for the reform. The majority of the country’s population voted against EU integration. In all of Gagauzia and the northern regions, opposition to the EU was nearly unanimous, and even in the center of the country, a significant portion of the population voted against joining the EU.
That’s when the “expatriate” population came into play—those who don’t live in the country, don’t share its fate, yet feel entitled to decide on its future. Out of 235,000 diaspora votes, 180,000 supported EU membership. The trick was simple: they increased the number of polling stations in Western countries while in Russia, where 500,000 Moldovans live (half the diaspora and one-sixth of all Moldovans worldwide), they reduced polling stations from 17 to 2, with only 10,000 ballots available.
The conclusion, therefore, is that under democratic rules, the Eurocrats and globalists would be soundly defeated at the polls. But since they don’t really care about democracy, they ensured that only the “right people” could vote.
TGA hides from questions about sudden infant deaths after vaccination
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | October 28, 2024
Sudden unexpected death in infancy (SUDI) and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are names for the sudden and unexpected death of a baby when there is no apparent cause of death.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has gone to ground after being confronted with questions about a series of sudden deaths in infants who received the Infanrix-Hexa® vaccine.
The “hexavalent” vaccine protects against six diseases (diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, hepatitis B and Hib) and is administered to infants at 2, 4 and 6 months of age.
Approved by the TGA in 2006, the vaccine lies at the heart of the National Immunisation Program, and has been administered to millions of babies across the country [Australia].
FOI request
A freedom of information (FOI) request for the number of deaths reported after use of the Infanrix-Hexa® vaccine has revealed some worrying data.
The Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN) shows 17 reported deaths in infants.
A further 26 reported deaths exist in the TGA’s ‘internal’ database, the Adverse Event Management System (AEMS), according to a recent FOI report.
Overall, 43 sudden unexpected deaths have been reported in babies mostly under 12 months of age, which have occurred within a day or two of vaccination.
Now, after many weeks of enquiries, the TGA has gone into hiding and refuses to confirm whether it has made any attempt to investigate the deaths.
Warnings from Europe
Infanrix-Hexa® was first authorised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in 2000, and the public has never been alerted to any safety issues.
EMA says it monitors pharmacovigilance data in the form of Periodic Safety Update Reports (PSURs), which are submitted by the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Essentially, PSURs describe the worldwide safety experience of the vaccine over a defined period, and are not usually available to the public for independent scrutiny.
However, a major lawsuit in Italy involving GSK, resulted in the Judge ordering the drug company to publicly release its PSURs for the Infanrix Hexa® vaccine.
Those documents were sent to Jacob Puliyel, a paediatrician and Head of the Department of Paediatrics, St Stephen’s Hospital, Delhi, who carried out an independent review.
The analysis revealed a cluster of sudden deaths among infants less than 12 months of age — 54 deaths (93%) occurred within the first 10 days of vaccination, and 4 deaths (7%) occurred within the next 10 days of vaccination.
Further, when he compared the rate of ‘expected’ sudden deaths, to the ‘actual’ rate of sudden deaths post-vaccination, there was a statistically significant increased risk of death in the first four days after vaccination, compared to the expected deaths.
The report concluded, “The clustering of deaths soon after immunisation suggests that the deaths were caused by the vaccine.”
Puliyel published the findings in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics in 2018.

The report also showed that infant deaths, which were reported in the safety report (PSUR 16) were deleted in the PSUR 19, effectively underreporting the number of observed deaths in the final report seen by EMA.
I contacted Puliyel to ask why EMA had not raised the alarm regarding the PSUR data, and he said he thought the data were misleadingly presented to EMA.
“I wouldn’t go as far as saying that EMA colluded with GSK in the subterfuge, but I think EMA was negligent and accepted the manufacturers’ deceptive data and interpretations unquestioningly,” he said.
Puliyel criticised EMA for its lax monitoring of post-marketing adverse events and has been urging all regulators to do better.
After the publication of his findings, Puliyel said there was no excuse for EMA to ignore the data discrepancies.
“The silence suggests EMA has no defence,” he remarked.
“I think nowadays, surveillance methods are designed to protect vaccine company profits rather than the public,” he added.
When I contacted EMA, the agency denied that deaths were “deleted” from the report as Puliyel claims.
Instead, EMA said the deaths were “reclassified” after it was determined the babies died of underlying diseases, such as “viral meningitis, an inborn error of metabolism congenital hydrocephalus and congenital heart disease.”
Puliyel rejected EMA’s explanation, calling it “singularly unconvincing.”
“Viral meningitis, congenital hydrocephalus and congenital heart disease would have been obvious at the time of vaccination when the children died – not discovered many years later,” explained Puliyel.
“EMA has to explain why these obvious underlying causes were not considered causes of death when the 16thPSUR report was published and why it had to be ‘reclassified’ years later,” remarked Puliyel.
‘When the number of sudden deaths exceeded deaths expected as per the calculations in the 19th PSUR – there was this urge to ‘reclassify’ three sudden unexplained deaths as ‘deaths due to underlying causes,’” he said.
TGA enquiries continue
Efforts to compel a response from the TGA will continue, but the latest data on Infanrix-Hexa® have raised broader questions about the safety of the newer generation of vaccines designed to protect against multiple diseases within a single shot.
I will explore this in a forthcoming investigation.
NIH Spending $2.2 Million to ‘Nudge’ Elderly to Get More Vaccines
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 29, 2024
Using U.S. taxpayer dollars, researchers at two universities are identifying older people behind on their recommended vaccines and testing personalized “nudges” to coax them into getting more shots. nih-nudge-more-vaccines-feature.jpg
According to grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the $2.2 million “BE IMMUNE” clinical trial, which began in 2020 and will run through 2025.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington are using Electronic Health Records (EHR) data — the electronic records from doctors’ offices containing patients’ detailed health and demographic data — to target African American, Hispanic and Asian people with lower flu, pneumococcal and herpes zoster vaccination rates.
The ongoing study blames the “poor vaccination rates” on patients’ and clinicians’ “widespread decision-making biases.” The trial is testing strategies drawn from behavioral economics, which uses insights from psychology to understand — and in this case to “nudge” or direct — people’s decision-making behavior.
The randomized controlled study is headed up by Dr. Shivan Mehta and a team of healthcare management experts who combine medical and business-based strategies to run studies like these.
The trials often are based in Penn Medicine’s in-house “Nudge Unit,” where behavioral design teams are dedicated to figuring out how to influence patient choices.
The grant is part of a massive initiative by the NIH to increase vaccine uptake by changing how people make decisions. The initiative has included hundreds of millions of dollars in grants since 2020 to create “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines.
It also included more than 50 grants worth $40 million designed to increase HPV vaccine uptake.
Testing the ‘ladder’ of behavioral interventions
The study is testing different “nudges” at more than 100 primary care practices at Penn Medicine, University of Washington Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Health System, one of the world’s largest EHR vendors in the world.
Over 1,000 primary care physicians and thousands of eligible patients at those practices are involved in the trial.
The range of tested interventions is scaled on a ladder.
Nudges lower on the ladder try presenting people with information so they can make their own decisions about vaccines —- methods that typically are not very effective for increasing vaccine uptake, the researchers said.
Nudges higher on the ladder either prompt people to make decisions, or simply plan their decisions for them.
For example, one nudge automatically sets up vaccination appointments for people, compelling them to go to their appointment and get vaccinated unless they intentionally opt out.

The “opt-out” framework has been effective in other areas of healthcare, such as colorectal cancer screening or persuading more people to take their flu shots, the researchers reported.
Netflix uses prompts to encourage binge-watching — healthcare should prompt people to get more shots
Penn’s “Nudge Unit,” which bills itself as the “world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system,” houses the study, which is also being conducted in a similar unit at the University of Washington.
Economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein popularized nudging in their 2008 book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” as a method to create a “choice architecture” designed to influence people’s behavior in a predictable way “but without restricting choice” — particularly for policies or measures that might otherwise be unpopular.
Penn launched its Nudge Unit in 2016, inspired by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Nudge Unit, established in 2010 to shape citizen behavior in the United Kingdom — a strategy the Penn researchers thought should also be applied to healthcare.
Penn’s Nudge Unit founders argued in a 2018 New England Journal of Medicine article that healthcare should use the same strategies businesses use to influence consumer behavior.
For example, they said, airlines require consumers to actively choose whether to purchase trip insurance before they can buy a plane ticket. Netflix changed its default settings to automatically play the next episode in a TV series to encourage binge watching.
“Similar opportunities exist to direct clinicians and patients toward better health care in situations where there’s consensus about desired behaviors,” they wrote, citing effective drugs, vaccines and targeted therapies as examples.
The strategy is being implemented globally — management consulting firm McKinsey reported that about 400 “nudge units” had been established globally by 2021.
However, even the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed Gavi concedes, “the theory has its critics — detractors argue that nudges can be paternalistic, invasive, ideological, and coercive in ways that erode public trust.”
The researchers behind this study also found that often the nudge approach doesn’t work.
In those cases, they argue “a stronger intervention—a ‘shove’—may be needed.”
EHR — an opportunity to scale up the nudge
The researchers celebrated EHR for offering a unique opportunity to develop and rapidly scale up personalized nudges.
The records increasingly are used for research and clinical trial recruitment because they contain a wealth of data. And new technological tools now allow researchers to “mine, assimilate, analyze, link, reproduce and transmit information” gleaned from that data.
Twila Brase, a registered nurse and author of “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth about Electronic Health Records,” told The Defender most people think the privacy of their EHR is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPPA — but that’s not the case.
HIPPA only guarantees your data will be secure as it is passed among the various entities that have access to it, including researchers, Brase said. And that access can be provided without your consent.
“Nowhere in the law does HIPPA give you control over your medical records,” she said.
Because the records contain massive amounts of personal information that can be used and linked in many different ways, researchers studying EHR-based research argue that the use of EHR also raises “pressing questions concerning privacy, confidentiality, and patient awareness.”
They say that the use of one’s EHR data for research reasons can be confusing or even impossible to opt out of because often the provision of healthcare is linked to accepting a policy allowing researchers to use EHRs.
And EHR research often operates on the same logic as the nudge — an “opt-out” approach where permission is assumed unless a patient explicitly indicates they want to revoke it.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
