(But then we already knew that…i.e., most of us…)

Both parties Lie. Both parties can’t believe how the other party is unable to ‘accept hard evidence’ (that one is too 🙂 in this election year). Both parties seek to use the Government to force their beliefs down the other’s throats.

Anyway, I will be Down-ballot Voting this year since can’t stand either presidential candidate. Don’t know the breakdown mentioned in the following article, but lots of others will be voting for either Harris or Trump…

Staggering $16 BILLION in donations spent on the 2024 election smashes records – and it’s still too close to call:

If the 2024 election cycle is proving one thing, it’s that nothing sells like uncertainty – except maybe chaos.

The election, which in the last three months alone has seen two assassination attempts and an incumbent president forced out by his own party, is polling ‘too close to call’ in every battleground state.
*****
‘Whoever runs against Donald Trump will have endless money,’ said Louis Perron, a political consultant based in Switzerland. He said for many campaign donors, ‘the driver is emotional.’

Article has a chart showing “Federal election spending for 2024” adjuster for inflation. 2024 has like $15,901,068,285 v 2020 @ $15,142,462,235; however, when adjusted for inflation 2020 works out to $18,339,583,484.

Other years are not even close…$16-billion could buy “The NY Yankees, LA Dodgers AND NY Mets” claims the article. “24 Air Force Ones or 160 Trump Force ones.”

Iowahawk’s “skinsuit” analogy is developed at length, including Zuckerbucks in 2020, Biden Inc. enabling non-citizen voting, DNC blocking candidates from the 2024 ballot, and a particularly disquieting example.

Institutional interference and targeted policy, the third line of effort, is the broadest and shares the most with traditional electoral politics. It differs, however, by co-opting institutions and processes whose neutrality is key to civic peace into the realm of partisan politics. The category encompasses actions taken by nominally independent institutions, and by astro-turfed organizations operating under the auspices of neutrality.
…
The “whole-of-society” approach leaves no institution outside the party-state’s reach. Thus, even doctors and hospital patients are being mobilized to drive votes. Records recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal the progressive nonprofit Vot-ER’s role in helping to draft a 2021 White House executive order on “promoting access to voting.” Technically, IRS rules require voter registration groups to be nonpartisan. But, as Park MacDougald writes in The Scroll, Vot-ER “has all the trappings of a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort.” The group was founded in 2021 by “Biden White House fellow Alister Martin with seed funding from Tides and Arabella,” two of the largest donor funds channeling money to party-state causes. In practice, Vot-ER “partners with local federally qualified health centers—which this year received an additional $4.4 billion from the Biden administration—to register low-income Medicare and Medicaid recipients to vote.” Martin, who now sits on a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel responsible for outreach to “minority and underserved communities,” explained Vot-ER’s approach in a 2023 interview with the Aspen Institute. First the group tries to channel federal funds “directly into the pockets of low-income patients,” and “then we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months about voter registration.”

The Washington Free Beacon recently revealed a particularly macabre Vot-ER scheme, in which doctors at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute register their mentally disturbed patients to vote, claiming that voting is “a therapeutic tool.” Schizophrenic and suicidal patients are among those being pushed to register. The effort is not exclusive to psychiatric facilities. The Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports that Vot-ER has provided its voter-registration toolkit to “cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, substance abuse clinics, palliative care departments,” and “neonatal intensive care units.”

I don’t think Republicans can even imagine such an abusive GOTV strategy!

The most elusive of the party-state’s strategies, information operations are also the most characteristic of its distinctive approach to politics. These are the continuous manufacturing of pseudo-events and “current things” that define the contemporary psychic atmosphere and distinguish it from earlier epochs in America’s political life. Using trusted government sources to plant stories in newspapers, injecting tropes online by seeding them into the digital networks of social media influencers (isn’t J. D. Vance, like, so weird), shadow-regulating search-engine algorithms to determine what kinds of stories appear in a person’s feed, pressuring social media firms to amplify certain stories, thereby generating network effects—all fall under the broad banner of information operations.

Information operations are not simply a method of spreading particular messages. The constant stream of narratives also conditions the public to accept an indefinite state of emergency, in which it relies on “trusted sources” to warn it of the latest danger.
…
The party-state’s ability to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris in a matter of weeks, and with the support of Democratic voters (in effect, disenfranchising 15 million primary voters who had overwhelmingly endorsed the president’s reelection bid) and most of the media, signals that it now has the power to make more or less anything seem normal.

Jacob Siegel’s conclusion is generally true, but the last sentence is rather a vapid coda to an otherwise excellent argument:

Is such an approach to politics sustainable? The progressive party-state’s coalition is held together by two binding forces—the distribution of federal largesse, including entitlements and contracts, and the constant manufacturing of crises, victims, and enemy groups—that require extraordinary effort to maintain. The party-state has acquired unprecedented power, in other words, but the system it oversees is fractious and likely to prove brittle.

But the damage the party-state is inflicting to the republic in the meantime is massive and should worry all Americans, regardless of their partisan identifications… Support for the legitimacy of our political institutions is eroding. Neither party retains even the pretense of believing that the other will play fair. … It’s hard to conceive how either side will accept the other’s victory this November.

Still, the race has already undergone two dramatic shifts in less than two months—once after Trump survived the July 13 attempt on his life, and again when Harris revived her party’s flagging fortunes. American voters may yet have their say.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-plot-to-manage-democracy

What has changed in America that brought us here? For most of the past century, the country was governed through a system of distributed rule wielded by local parties, individual voters, civic institutions, independent power centers such as the press, and competing regional elites. Over the past two decades, this system has been replaced by one that is highly centralized and dominated by a party of concentrated wealth, state-corporate collusion, and progressive monoculture. Recognizing the long-term trends in digital technology and economic globalization, President Barack Obama and other progressive leaders built a new kind of vertically integrated, national political organization. The key was unifying America’s professional-managerial class and federal bureaucracies with its progressive billionaires, especially those in Silicon Valley, in the mutually supportive structure of a party-state.

In this new approach, the state initiates “whole of society” campaigns, a term popularized in Obama’s second term. That is, the state enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs, and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree regulative power made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think provide your communal safety net, and perhaps your neighbors. Any group or individual violating those policies faces censorship, social cancellation, and even denial of access to banking, credit, and other essential services.

The might of this system was publicly unveiled in the 2016 whole-of-society attack on Trump. Every aligned institution in America, from the New York Times to the CIA, lent its credibility to unfounded claims that Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin, or a fascist leading an American Nazi movement, or some other heinously disqualifying label. The details were less important than justifying a state of emergency, in which Trump and his supporters could be treated as national security threats and denied constitutional protections. Despite ultimately failing to prevent Trump’s election, the 2016 exercise validated the potential and organizational structure of the whole-of-society playbook. It fueled the funding and growth of a vast network of nonprofits dedicated to “protecting democracy” and “election integrity.”

These organizations now occupy a quasi-permanent space in the U.S. political and electoral infrastructure. Using this network, the party-state seeks to control elections. A comprehensive review of all the groups, techniques, and actions involved in this endeavor would require an encyclopedia-length book. The aim here is to provide an overview of some of the main lines of effort. These roughly fall into four categories: lawfare, censorship, institutional interference and targeted policy, and information operations.

Most of the foundational information is not news to political junkies, but some of their conclusions are worth pondering.
For instance:
They use lawfare because it works.

McCarthy attributes the alleged failure of lawfare to the backlash it engendered “because it violated our instinctive American sense of fairness,” and to the “overzealousness of the prosecutors” that left their cases vulnerable to legal remedies. This assumes that the American political system of 2024 is the one that existed before the rise of the progressive party-state. Whatever the ultimate disposition of the cases against Trump, his opponents have succeeded in branding him a felon, tying him up in the courts (thus hindering his campaign), and demonstrating that they will wield the power of false arrest against their enemies. The correct measure of lawfare’s defeat is not what happens to Trump now but whether progressives continue to utilize it in the future.
…
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C. has an overall conviction rate at trial of about 70 percent, according to William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor now representing many of the J6 defendants; as of August 1, the office is running a 100 percent conviction rate at J6 trials.

Often alluded to in the Twitter Files and by conservative reporters, but not well known by the followers of the Regime Media:

The coordinating hub of the censorship industrial complex was an organization called the Election Integrity Partnership.

The seeds of the EIP were planted on January 6, 2017, when the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, unilaterally placed control over the entire U.S. electoral system, formerly run by 8,000 local election jurisdictions, under the DHS. This extraordinary power grab, little noted at the time, except by state electoral officials who objected to having their authority usurped, applied to more than just voting machines. With just days left in office, amid an atmosphere of Russia-panic, the Obama administration effectively deputized a federal agency to oversee all online speech on national security grounds.

The effects of this takeover are still not widely appreciated, but one result was the establishment in 2018 of a new agency inside the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Its mission: to defend America’s infrastructure from foreign attacks—now including the Internet as a component of its election systems. But having adopted the censorship of disinformation and misinformation as its goal, the agency faced legal obstacles to carrying this out, starting with the First Amendment. To overcome this hurdle, it helped launch the EIP in July 2020 as a consortium of private and nongovernmental groups, empowered to police the Internet for supposed disinformation. In an internal briefing, later leaked to the public, EIP director Alex Stamos noted that the group was created “to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves,” as the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.” The EIP’s officials would repeatedly claim that theirs was an independent body, not a government cutout.
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Less than two weeks after Election Day in 2020, CISA director Christopher Krebs declared the vote “the most secure in American history,” and was promptly fired by President Trump. Just two months later, in January 2021, the EIP’s Stamos partnered with Krebs to open a new cybersecurity consulting firm.
…
Continuous ideological curation is now the norm throughout most of the media and Internet. Sometimes it gets carried out indiscernibly, for instance by filtering search results and artificial intelligence “answer bots.” In other cases, it operates through the guise of nominally objective bodies, such as the modern fact-checking industry. …Traditional fact-checking was typically an entry-level job, paid for from within a publication’s editorial budget. It provided an internal audit to make a publication more reliable, and thus more valuable to readers. Modern fact-checking, by contrast, was constructed over the past decade through centralized institutions like the International Fact Checking Network to police public debate.

Second, the army of fact-checkers now embedded in U.S. news outlets don’t concern themselves with the accuracy of their own publications. Instead, they use a facade of scientific objectivity to play the role of truth cops, arbitrating disputes on politically contentious matters. On matters of significance, their rulings inevitably align with the interests of progressives. With a massive infusion of funding from left-wing billionaires, fact-checking has emerged as one of the only growth fields in a journalism industry that faces cratering revenues.

The record of the modern fact-checkers proves that, for progressives, it has been money well spent.

(continued in next comment)

https://freebeacon.com/israel/the-us-sanctioned-an-anti-israel-group-for-backing-terrorists-months-ago-its-leaders-were-hobnobbing-with-columbia-university-students/

The sanctions, unveiled on Tuesday, describe Samidoun as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.” They mark the most severe action to date against the group, cutting off its ability to fundraise across North America.

All U.S. citizens are now barred from doing business with Samidoun, and the group must forfeit any properties held in the country. That could prove costly for the U.S. activist groups that have embraced it.

Samidoun, for example, has maintained a strong relationship with anti-Israel student groups, most notably Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which invited Samidoun to teach a March lecture on “Palestinian resistance” and the “fight for liberation.” During the event, Samidoun leaders Charlotte Kates and her husband, Khaled Barakat, explicitly endorsed terrorism against Jews. The United States also slapped sanctions on Barakat for engaging in “fundraising and recruitment” efforts for the PFLP’s “terrorist activity against Israel.”

Samidoun, as a legal subsidiary of the left-wing nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice, is also part of an American dark money network funded by progressive billionaires, the Free Beacon reported last year. Liberal dark money behemoths such as the New Venture Fund, the Tides Center, and the Tides Foundation gave the alliance more than $9 million in 2021.

The new sanctions leveled against Samidoun should put those groups on notice, said Anne Herzberg, a human rights lawyer and NGO Monitor legal adviser.

The Samidoun supporters will just start over with a new name.

Does anyone really believe that all of the anti-Israel protests since 10/7 (and before) are some kind of organic expression of legitimate popular sentiment?
Like Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, BLM, the enviro-nuts, Code Pink, most of the Floyd-era riots, and probably every left-wing cause in the US, they are well funded and professionally organized.

If the people participating in the protests are nonetheless often willing believers, well, there’s a reason for the cliche “useful idiots.”

https://freebeacon.com/israel/idf-takes-out-hezbollah-anti-tank-missile-commander-responsible-for-killing-innocent-israelis-in-rocket-attacks/

Israeli forces stationed along the border with Lebanon continue to discover Hezbollah tunnel systems, used to store weapons, medical supplies, and move militants into Israeli territory. Inside these bunkers, Israel has found “new weaponry” from Russian and Chinese sources, suggesting that Iran’s top global allies are helping to fuel Hezbollah’s war, according to the New York Post.

Videos from one of around 700 Hezbollah weapons depots discovered in southern Lebanon also showed items supplied by the United States Agency for International Development and the United Nations World Food Programme.

The appearance of these items indicates that, like Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah is diverting international humanitarian aid to fuel its war effort.

https://freebeacon.com/israel/biden-harris-admin-puts-israel-on-double-secret-probation-until-just-after-the-election/

On the other hand, the Israelis just keep taking care of business.
https://freebeacon.com/israel/idf-takes-out-hezbollah-anti-tank-missile-commander-responsible-for-killing-innocent-israelis-in-rocket-attacks/

I had the opportunity to see that marvelous instrument some 40 years ago (I don’t remember exactly when, sometime in the 1980s I think).
Everything you said is so true.