If the election outcome is as I expected, it should cause the large minority of the country who supported @KamalaHarris and predicted her victory to begin to question their sources of truth.
Half the country has believed that @X is filled with mis- and disinformation, and that they could only therefore rely on The NY Times, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream media for their news. And they did.
If, however, you have been active on @X for the last year, you have known the truth days, weeks and often months before the facts appear in the MSM.
The MSM excerpted, clipped and cut to defame @realDonaldTrump while claiming that @JoeBiden was fit as a fiddle. Then when Biden’s polls collapsed, @KamalaHarris was anointed the candidate and her hagiography was written with glowing acclaim from the press. But this could not hold as she ducked the media and held fast to the teleprompter.
Citizen journalists with their phone cameras in hand captured the real Kamala forcing her to defend her record and her plans in more media appearances. It did not go well and the public demanded to learn more so @KamalaHarris had to risk more unscripted media.
The doom loop was underway with perhaps 60 Minutes as one of the more dramatic examples, even after CBS tried to save her, most glaringly by excerpting one answer to replace a word salad response to another. But the citizen journalists on @X quickly caught and outed this fraud and demanded a transcript.
As many who supported Kamala began to realize that they have been misled, they became open to Trump as an alternative, but they didn’t want to rely on the media to understand him because they did not want to be misled again.
They wanted to hear the candidate in his own words and that is where @lexfridman and @joeroganhq long form podcasts came to the rescue. When Kamala was offered the same opportunities to explain herself, she rejected them. And the voting public could only draw a negative inference.
When the story of this election is written, I expect it will be as much about how half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information. It will push more people to @X, to podcasts and other empirical sources, and it will lead to a more informed public.
The other outcome I hope happens is the implosion of the Democratic Party. The Party lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president. It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate. The Party and the administration used lawfare in an attempt to imprison, bankrupt or otherwise kill off Trump as a candidate. These acts are collectively grave threats to our democracy. With the highest irony in order to hide these acts, the Party accused the opposition candidate of being the grave threat to democracy.
The Democratic Party proved itself to be fundamentally undemocratic. It needs a complete reboot. The leadership should be thrown out and those responsible should apologize to the American people.
Honest Abe said it best:
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.
I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.
This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent.
President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.” The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.
Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind. As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.
Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north. It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.
Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong. There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.
After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned. Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.
I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.
But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.
This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city. The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together.
The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight.
More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers.
And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.
CO2 does increase temperatures. This is empirically true, meaning you can run a small-scale experiment yourself to prove it.
The question is simply one of magnitude vs time.
However, climate activists have overplayed their hand, making dire predictions that turned out to be overly pessimistic, rightfully diminishing their credibility.
That said, we should bias towards a sustainable energy economy, since that is where we will end up anyway and there is no need to run extreme climate experiments.
In the meantime, we should not vilify the oil & gas industry that is working hard to keep civilization going. And we should leave the farmers alone.