This article is about three types of assassination.

The first, which President Trump has endured nonstop since he first entered the political arena, is character assassination.

The second is legal assassination, sometimes called “lawfare.” The term is appropriate, because it is derived from warfare.

This is the attempt to lawlessly, but under the guise of law, bankrupt, ruin, defame and even imprison a dangerous political opponent.

In extreme cases, this opponent might even face life imprisonment, which is a legal equivalent of the death penalty.

(Murderers are often given the death penalty or life in prison, which some people say is a fate worse than death.)

And finally, when all else fails, there is actual assassination.

These three types of assassination are connected, and typically one leads to another.

Somehow the United States ended up this summer with no engaged president and an absent vice president who avoids the missing president and is frantically repudiating everything she co-owned the last three years.

The world was already confused over how President Joe Biden was apparently declared by unnamed Democratic insiders and donors unfit and unable to continue as their presidential candidate—as if he were a dethroned Third-World usurper.

It further wondered how those who staged his removal had no problem allowing him, in his debilitated state, to continue as America’s commander-in-chief until January 20, 2025.

They demonstrated their priorities that focus on retaining power, not the welfare of the nation or the will of over 14 million Biden primary voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris, until Biden’s forced abdication, was judged by these same backroom fixers as too incompetent to ever be commander-in-chief and thus for three years a good reason why Biden apparently was not forced out earlier.

Now nominal Vice President Harris is on the campaign trail nonstop, while Biden has taken the most vacation time off and worked the shortest workweek in presidential memory.

The world again wonders who is in charge, what they believe, who is a friend, and who is an enemy.

Greetings, y'all. The title of this week’s missive comes from a song by Rick Springfield, “Don’t Talk to Strangers.”

I find it unconscionable that we somehow believe that we should enter into negotiations and talks with Islamic jihadists, also known as terrorists.

This past Labor Day weekend again evidenced why that is a futile pursuit.

Six hostages who were taken during the heinous raid into Israel last year on October 7th were found dead in a tunnel system under the city of Rafah.

Their names are HerschGoldberg-Polin (23), Carmel Gat (40), Alexander Lobanov (32), Almog Sarusi (27), Eden Yerushalmi (24) and Ori Danino (25).

Two of them were young women, and one of them was an American citizen.

These barbaric animals, Hamas, forced them to make propaganda videos before they were executed — shot in the head at close distance — which they are now releasing.

So, why do we talk to individuals who have as their charter the elimination, eradication, and extermination of an entire group of people because they are Jewish?

What was also quite disconcerting was Joe Biden’s warning to Israel not to enter Rafah. What did he and the Biden administration know?

Ceasefire? I am waiting for someone to explain why.

The arrest of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s former aide Linda Sun this week has shown the vulnerability of state governments in navigating Chinese interference attempts while Beijing is actively targeting them, top intelligence experts say.

Sun worked at the New York State (NYS) government for more than ten years during Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Hochul’s tenures, including as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff.

She was arrested and charged on Sept. 3 with violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy. Her husband Chris Hu was also arrested and charged with separate offenses.

Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from China when she was five, was accused of doing the bidding of four Chinese Consulate officials and two Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents.

This included blocking communications between the NYS government and representatives of Taiwan, screening the governors’ messages to keep out references of Taiwan’s official name and human rights atrocities against the Uyghur people, smuggling a Chinese consulate official into a private NYS government conference call, and providing unauthorized invitation letters for Chinese provincial delegates to fraudulently obtain U.S. visas—for monetary and other benefits worth millions of dollars, mostly via her husband’s business.

The case has exposed a glaring security problem, according to two intelligence experts who both held a number of senior national security roles in government.

In theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States.

Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview”—a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate.

During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed.

Translated, that means for the next 70 days, she will advocate for popular policies antithetical to her own values, which will inevitably resurface after the election once the current façade fades away.

She is a Berkelyite who, as attorney general of California, had a proud far-left tenure. The lifelong large corpus of Harris’s left-wing enthusiasm and causes are only now being unearthed.

Unlike other leftists, she really was a proud, woke radical and wanted everyone else to be one as well—broadcasting her leftism as openly as she is now cloaking it.

In one respected survey, Harris’s voting record was rated as the most left-leaning in the United States Senate.

If she voted to the left of the admitted hardcore socialist Bernie Sanders, what exactly does that make her?

They say history repeats itself. Properly forewarned, it doesn’t have to.

As Americans prepare to write a pivotal history for the ages this November—one way or another—it might be helpful to take a quick look at an earlier moment in time when a much divided, fractured world faced a pivotal challenge with one man at the barricade and the rest of the world too complacent to help.

Constantinople, the city that Constantine the Great founded in 330 AD and that the Theodosian walls later protected, stood as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for 1,000 years.

Although the rising Ottoman empire, by 1500, would stretch from the modern states of Algeria to Yemen to Hungary, in 1453, Constantinople was still Christian and a major thorn in the side of Muslim Sultan Mehmed II. He planned to fix that.

By late May, after besieging the city for two months and making no headway, Mehmed prepared to retreat. A small number of his advisors suggested giving the siege one last day before they withdrew. Mehmed agreed, and on May 29, the Ottomans threw everything they had at the city. Constantinople’s defenders repulsed the first three Ottoman assaults, and the Ottoman generals despaired at the prospect of defeat.

But then one of the great turning points in history happened.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. 

The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress.

The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet.

The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury.

Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it.

We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies.

It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.

Dozens of Wagner mercenaries were killed and a Russian helicopter was destroyed in an ambush by al-Qaeda-allied rebels in Mali.

Nikita Fedyanin, the editor and owner of the Grey Zone Wagner Telegram channel and a leading Kremlin propagandist, was also killed in the attack in the Sahara Desert.

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-linked group, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Wagner convoy near the desert town of Tinzawatene on the border with Algeria.

In one video, an Arab man, who appears to be a commander, can be seen inspecting a captured vehicle as Tuareg fighters, wearing flowing robes, turbans and sunglasses, celebrate.

The amount of gaslighting that the Leftmedia is doing to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris in her new status as the likely presidential nominee of the Democrat Party is insane.

The legacy media’s latest attempt at memory-holing is to assert that conservatives were the ones inaccurately labeling Harris the “border czar.”

It was the Leftmedia itself that first hailed her as such.

Before that, though, in March of 2021, President Joe Biden said, “I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that … are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”

Kamala Harris was tapped to be in charge of overseeing the border and “stemming the migration to our southern border.”

It was a job she completely failed at (though it’s obvious that the influx of illegals was the goal of this administration).

Much to the chagrin of the Democrats and their media allies, immigration is the top issue for the majority of Americans this election.

I have attended about a half-dozen national conventions, Republican and Democratic, and watched at least a dozen more.

And I can say two things: 1) They have all generally bored me. 2) The 2024 Republican National Convention didn't.

The RNC not only held my interest, it often moved me emotionally.

But both Trump and the Republican Party made one big mistake — a mistake I noted on my radio show during the convention and have pointed out for decades.

Virtually all the convention speakers focused their attention on President Joe Biden. The audience did the same, as when it would chant, "Joe must go."

For decades, I have pleaded with Republican office seekers to focus their attacks at least as much on the Democratic Party and the Left as on their opponent.

Not doing so at the convention has come back to bite them — just three days later. Now, "Joe did go." So, all the time and effort devoted to attacking Biden was utterly wasted.

I have never understood why Republicans always concentrate their fire on their Democratic opponent while ignoring virtually any mention of the threat posed by the Democratic Party and the Left.

Cyberattacks have truly become the digital equivalent of natural disasters -- sudden, catastrophic, and terrifyingly inevitable.

The recent CrowdStrike update debacle, which triggered a global meltdown affecting multiple critical sectors, was a glaring example of this modern reality.

Imagine hospitals unable to access patient records, emergency services offline, airports grounded, and banks in utter disarray.

This isn't the plot of a dystopian novel, but the grim reality faced by the world over the weekend following the compromised CrowdStrike update.

Reports on the ground detailed a scene of unprecedented chaos that unfolded as critical sectors went dark.

Experts suggest that this catastrophe likely stemmed from skipped checks during the update process -- a simple oversight with disastrous consequences.

It's a scenario eerily reminiscent of the infamous SolarWinds hack, where the attackers exploited the software update mechanism to infiltrate numerous high-profile organizations, including U.S. federal agencies.

Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations in the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies?

Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years.

Russian collusion did not work.

Christopher Steele was a fraud.

Robert Mueller came up empty.

The Alfa Bank ping caper was a myth.

The Russian laptop disinformation was a lie and ruined the reputations of the “51 former intelligence authorities” who sanctioned it.

The first Trump impeachment was a strictly partisan vote, activated when Trump lost the House and Mueller had come up empty.

Only ten Republicans impeached Trump a second time; the Senate again acquitted then-private citizen Trump.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has declared that the “decolonization of the Russian Federation is a necessary condition for sustainable peace” and that Russia is pursuing a “policy of genocide” in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not begin “suddenly” but was the logical result of the neo-imperial evolution of post-Soviet Russia’s politics and a lack of action from the West against this expansionism.

The decolonization of Russia will be a long process and should not be reduced to an ethnic conflict of “non-Russians against Russians,” which could lead to war throughout Eurasia.

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

That quotation comes from Macbeth.

The Thane of Cawdor had just been executed for treason, and the king’s son described his virtuous repentance on the block.

That phrase popped into my mind when I thought of all the Democrats sincerely praising Biden for pulling (or being pushed) out of the presidential race in the same way they’re now sincerely praising his presidency.

They’re not being hypocrites. Biden was great for the Democrat party and is now, by leaving, continuing to be great.

A prominent topic that economics students anywhere cannot avoid is market failure.

Students everywhere are taught that the free market is inherently unstable and causes problems that can only be fixed through legislation and regulation.

As a result, most of those who take an economics class come out of it believing that the state helps counter the shortcomings of the free market.

However, the concept of market failure is fallacious as it is based upon faulty economic reasoning.

Belief in market failure is often complementary with seeking to promote politically desirable goals rather than to promote economic growth.

First, a free market operates on freedom of association and property rights. Therefore, for any transaction or exchange to be conducted on a free market, it must be voluntary.

Further, if both parties agree on an exchange, then both parties must assume that the exchange is beneficial to themselves.

Whenever consumers buy a product, they value the product more than the money they pay for it. Similarly, the store sells them the product since it values the money earned more than the loss of the product that they sell to consumers.

It may be the case that one party is mistaken and ends up not preferring the exchange retroactively, but this is not a determining factor in the choice to transact.

Through this process, value is created through free markets. As people are free to interact and exchange, they make mutually beneficial trades that benefit both parties.

In early World War II, on Nov. 30, 1939, a Soviet-Russian army invaded Finland in a surprise massive attack.

The Finns were eventually outnumbered nearly 3 to 1. The population of the Soviet Union in 1940 was 50 times larger than that of Finland.

Finland’s former anti-Soviet ally, Nazi Germany, had sold it out under the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which made Germany and Russia de facto allies.

Finland’s other allies, particularly France and Britain, were slow in giving aid. Both were unsure whether Finland had any chance of survival.

And they were further confused as to whether their archenemy Germany was friendly or hostile to Finland.

Yet for nearly the next four months, the Finns fought ferociously. They were led brilliantly by their iconic general and commander-in-chief, Carl Mannerheim.

By March 1940, however, the brave but exhausted Finns were being slowly ground down.

Soon they were facing abject defeat—even after courageously inflicting nearly 500,000 Russian casualties, 10 times the number of their own dead, wounded, and missing.

Finnish ferocity shocked Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

“It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Those are the ill-timed words Joe Biden used in a political call to action days before the attempted assassination of  Donald Trump, which our team covered in real time.

There is no direct association between those words and the attempt on Trump’s life other than they characterize Biden’s caustic campaign rhetoric asserting that Trump is a grave existential threat to “democracy.”

Biden, whose administrative record is littered with a plethora of domestic and foreign policy failures, has centered his whole campaign on the diversionary theme of saving our nation from the Trump threat, and his low-information voters are sucking it up.

As I have noted, the proliferation of Biden’s faux “democracy” rhetoric is very deliberate in its obfuscation about the founding tenets of American Liberty.

When he autocratically demands that you “support democracy,” he means the statist authoritarian rule of democratic socialism, now the foundational platform of his Democrat Party.

That reveals Biden and his leftist Demo cadres are the real threats to our Republic and Liberty.

Given that Biden’s notion of “democracy” is the antithesis of our nation’s founding tenets, in that context, in fact, Trump is an enormous threat to Biden’s statist authoritarian “democracy.”

What follows is a mix of observations and analysis regarding the attack on Trump by Biden, his leftists, and a radicalized assassin.

[TTP:  The news is out that President Trump’s VP pick is J.D. Vance (see Monica Showalter’s article in American Thinker) but this writer has some very important points to make about the Veep position regarding the future.]

President Trump will be announcing his running mate within the next few days, and opinions are flying about the qualities he should seek in his next vice president.

Experience, state of origin, race, sex, loyalty, and past comments regarding President Trump are all factors voters are focusing on when deciding their preferred candidate to round out the Republican ticket.

The common goal is to draw turnout from as many typically non-Republican voting demographics as possible. However, the most consistent theme is that many seem to believe that Trump needs to pick someone who can be his successor.

This belief may be based in ignorance.

Executive Summary:

• Moscow’s forces in Ukraine face increasing problems with the military, both at the front and at home. These issues are bound to affect Russia’s ability to fight in the coming months.
• At the front, Russian commanders are dealing with fragging, desertions, and corruption. At home, Moscow has been compelled to offer larger bonuses to recruit more men and has even asked Russians to turn in their privately owned guns.
• Public hostility is growing toward veterans of the war, who are committing violent crimes upon their return. These are precisely the people Putin says will become Russia’s new elite.

For quite a considerable amount of time, the topics of job creation and unemployment have been central to every political campaign in almost every country.

It hasn’t been without good reason, either, since job security is one of the most important factors in a person’s career. Therefore, a candidate who can promise to create more jobs and sustain job growth would appear on paper to be the better candidate.

However, there are few policies that promote greater havoc than job-creation programs. This should not be a surprise since the state is ultimately not responsible for financing jobs, so it need not worry about profit or loss.

Politicians are inclined to include job-creation programs in their promises because they are often popular with voters.

After all, if there are more jobs in the economy, unemployment will be lower, and there is a greater likelihood that workers in the country will not fall on hard times.

Since nearly every household has a member of their family who works, job-creation programs have nearly universal appeal.

If a politician can position themselves as a job creator, they garner a massive boost toward their odds of being elected.

Thus, they all aim to one-up each other with what they promise to voters. Unfortunately, in this case, competition does not lead to better results.

Is Great Britain once again going in the opposite direction of the European Union?

Right-wing parties swept EU elections last month, but the British Tories are out.

After 14 years at the helm, Britain’s Conservative Party lost in a landslide as the left-wing Labour Party cleaned up, seizing at least 410 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

It was a bruising defeat for the Tories, as their former majority has been reduced to just 121 seats. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Furthermore, Labour’s victory wasn’t so much a mandate as it was a repudiation of the Tories and their recent lackluster leadership amid a slowing economy still trying to recover from the COVID pandemic.

Now, Labour will take up the reins, with its leader, Keir Starmer, becoming the country’s new prime minister.

Chief among their challenges will be turning around a struggling economy without further ballooning an already high national debt.

Furthermore, Labour’s win is not as big as it appears.

Many people who know anything about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE, or ATF for short) will know they started off as a “harmless” tax collecting agency that eventually turned into a law enforcement agency in its own right.

In other words, they evolved from a bunch of glorified robbers with mechanical calculators and spreadsheets into a gang of violent thugs with guns and badges.

This transformation became obvious to the world in the famous Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) incidents, both having had heavy ATF involvement and with the latter event culminating in an open massacre of the Branch Davidians that included women and children.

Later as they have cooled their trigger fingers, the ATF’s side gig of deliberately allowing guns to flow into Mexico for “tracking purposes” was exposed in the Fast and Furious scandal after two of these guns turned up near the scene of the killing of Brian Terry, a border patrol officer, in 2010 (a whole of lot of good this “tracking” did).

In more recent years, ATF’s favorite pastime has been to send several car-loads worth of thugs LARPing with full tactical gear to raid and intimidate American licensed gun dealers for supposed infractions of federal firearms laws and confiscate their property.

People of a certain age will remember the name “Donald Segretti.”

In the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon, this youthful campaign aide made the phrase “dirty tricks” part of the American political lexicon.

Segretti’s mischief included sending embarrassing letters under the names of Nixon’s political rivals.

Although his dirty tricks had little or no effect on the election’s outcome, Segretti served four and a half months in prison.

With Segretti’s four and a half months as a baseline, the 51-plus dirty tricksters who conspired successfully to get Joe Biden elected president in 2020 would seem to deserve no less.

Confident to a fault about the Democrat control of the media, 51 intel officials signed on to the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory.

A very interesting study appeared last week by two researchers looking into the pandemic policy response around the world. They are Drs. Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel of Stanford and Harvard, respectively.

Their ambition was quite straightforward. They wanted to examine the effects of government policy on the virus.

In this ambition, after all, researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of information. We have global data on strategies and stringencies. We have global data on infections and mortality.

We can look at it all according to the timeline. We have precise dating of stay-at-home orders, business closures, meeting bans, masking, and every other physical intervention you can imagine.

The researchers merely wanted to track what worked and what did not, as a way of informing future responses to viral outbreaks so that public health can learn lessons and do better next time.

They presumed from the outset they would discover that at least some mitigation tactics achieved the aim.

Technology is about to accelerate because Chevron deference is over and regulators can't just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible. This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let's do three examples and two visuals.

THREE EXAMPLES:

1) Genomics. Did Congress explicitly give FDA authority to regulate genetic tests in a bill like Kefauver-Harris (1962) or PDUFA (1992)? No, it did not.

But in the early 2010s, FDA attacked 23andMe and forced them to take personal genomic tests offline.

Implicitly, this was under Chevron.

2) Nuclear power. Did Congress explicitly give EPA and NRC the authority to implement ALARA? No, it did not.

But these agencies came up with this "as low as reasonably achievable" standard, forcing nuclear energy to become as expensive as other energy sources by spending all the cost-savings on "safety."

Implicitly, this was under Chevron, too.

3) Cryptocurrency. You guessed it. Did Congress explicitly give the SEC authority to regulate crypto? No, it did not.

Cryptocurrencies didn't exist when the 1933 and 1934 acts were written. However, the SEC says it has regulatory authority over crypto, even when Congress is deliberating on bills to the contrary.

Implicitly, that claim of SEC authority too was under Chevron.

In other words: if a regulator can't point to the law that gives them the power, they may not have the power. And you might be able to win in a court of law.

The U.S. State Department said that recent remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting he would supply North Korea with weapons are “incredibly concerning.”

Earlier this week, in a visit to North Korea, Mr. Putin suggested that weapons supplies to the isolated, communist country would be a similar response to the West arming Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war with Russia.

The Russian leader also warned South Korea against supplying arms to Ukraine.

In comments at a news briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the Russian president’s comments about possible arms supplies to Pyongyang. “It’s incredibly concerning,” he said in response.

“It would destabilize the Korean Peninsula, of course, and potentially ... depending on the type of weapons they provide, might violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia itself has supported,” he added.

The spokesman said the United States “will continue to work with our allies in the region” such as “South Korea, Japan, others ... to respond to the threat posed by North Korea.”

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

For as long as I can remember, the Left has been sneering at anyone who points out that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.

They find the notion almost as unsophisticated and fascistic as flying a revolutionary-era flag. Others dismiss the democracy/republic debate as pedantic or a semantic distraction. They shouldn't.

The other day, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan tried to make Trump fans who repeat this factual contention look like a bunch of dumb, lockstepping authoritarians.

To explain the problem, CNN even recruited "democracy" expert Anne Applebaum, who noted that, "America is a democracy. It was founded as a democracy ... the word 'democracy' and the word 'republic' have often been used interchangeably. There isn't a meaningful difference between them ..."

Sure there is.

Normally, the self-important, gazillionaire libs of the All In Podcast can be tiresome. But their recent 49-minute Trump interview demands watching, as a window into Trump's agenda, particularly in the economic realm.

Trump's remarkable ability to magnetically pull disparate constituencies into his orbit is proceeding exponentially.

Consider Bitcoin. He has made it mandatory for participants in that sector to support him, otherwise the Janet Yellens and Elizabeth Warrens will outlaw its existence.

Or his tax-free tips proposal, attracting millions of service workers -- a proposal that drew laughter from 80 elite CEOs Trump recently met behind closed doors. Trump will laugh all the way to the November polls.

Trump has adopted politically astute positions for issues across the board. Democrats are trying equally hard to drive away as many constituencies as possible, an extraordinary political moment.

Trump practices unification; Democrats excel at division. When Trump warns what will happen if he is not elected, no one doubts him.

Contrast Trump’s continuous stream of nuance and substance below with fake “news” accounts of his meeting with CEOs: [They] “said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map.”

The reality is quite different.