Stability has always been the main promise legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s monopolization of political power in Russia.

Restoration of stability was the winning slogan for Putin in 2012, in claiming the presidency back from his pliant stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev, who had tried to experiment with modernization. And Putin’s reelection in 2018 also utilized a stability-centered propaganda campaign.

Yet, presently, this “majority” has shrunk to statistical insignificance. A recent opinion poll shows that 59 percent of Russians expect and see a need for profound changes, and 31 percent concede that at least some change is necessary (Vedomosti, November 6).

Like it or not, the 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four – a referendum far beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democrat opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse.

Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, unfettered pushback against it.

I, for one, have grown weary of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), appearing on every other talk show bloviating about Spygate, Ukrainegate, Collusiongate, and all the wrongs committed against the Trump presidency and then doing nothing to fight back other than getting his face in front of the camera.

Lindsey, do your job or get off the pot -- call some hearings, as you promised, and go for the Democrat’s jugular.

Show that passion you showed during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when you went on an epic rant against that bevy of Democrat presidential wannabes who were raising the politics of personal destruction as they shredded the presumption of innocence all Americas are supposed to enjoy. A short trek down memory lane via Real Clear Politics:

What do you suppose the Alliance for American Advertising has in common with the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the American Society of Civil Engineers, or American Apparel and Footwear? Apart from beginning with the letter “A,” they are among the nearly 3,500 trades or firms that have dedicated lobbying operations in Washington, D.C.

And that doesn’t count the union headquarters located in D.C., from AFSCME (“We make America Happen”) to SEIU (“the nation’s most diverse union”) and beyond, they’re all there, hands out, telephones working overtime to get a little bigger slice of the government pie, made with 100 percent locally sourced materials, namely your tax dollars.

Donald Trump came to office promising to “drain the swamp.” He has made a little, mostly rhetorical, progress around the edges. But the swampiness of the swamp is deep and inveterate. He will never succeed in that stupendous sanitary engineering project until he removes the thing that attracts the swamp creatures to Washington just as a rotting carcass attracts flies and other necrophagites: centers of power and influence.

How to do it? Several people, including the president himself, have tentatively suggested a promising mechanism. Disperse the government from Washington to the heartland and beyond.

This week, Rep. Jim Jordan was officially moved to the House Intelligence Committee, from Oversight, in order to be part of the coming public interrogations of witnesses summoned by committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

Jordan is a pit bull, exactly what the committee needs among its Republicans.  It was in Pelosi's purview to refuse Jordan's appointment, and she did not.

Hmmm.  Is it possible that even she is sick and tired of Schiff's mendacity, his secrecy, his shutout of Republican questions, his witness tampering?  He even advised "witnesses" not to answer questions from Republicans.

"Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved.  And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality." 

Later on in his introduction to another piece he posted, he cites Freud in calling what leftists do "displacement," meaning that, in their minds, their anger is always caused by something outside of themselves, like injustice for example.  Leftists do not want to solve problems though, they want to "luxuriate" in them; they need problems to explain their anger.

These are among the several reasons why the Dems’ plot against plot if falling apart.

What a world we live in. A confidential asset of a hyper-political CIA director, handpicked by the director to spy on the Trump White House, is now called a “whistleblower.”

All the while the mainstream propagandists gaslight us by shrieking that Trump is the corrupt one, that Trump’s ideas are destructive as the economy soars and unemployment remains at 50 year lows. When the Washington Post intones that “Democracy dies in darkness” they evince no apparent awareness of irony. They’re knifing democracy to death every single day.

In the meantime, as our constitutional republic faces the wrecking balls of the Left and is asked to endure as they smash away at every norm that has made this country great, many Republicans find themselves conveniently absent from the action.

Let’s face it: Democrats’ embrace of thuggery over democracy is not normal.

Democrats have become the party of thuggery, from the top leaders abusing President Trump as a traitor and criminal, to the Antifa black shirts beating up Trump supporters in Democrat cities. The ginned up hysteria over Trump’s election has grown with Trump’s triumphant successes with the economy and national security.

The Democrat Party has veered far left very fast, without any pushback from within the party. Their voters have turned, seemingly overnight, from normal American citizens to a deranged mob after Trump’s blood. This weird transformation is normalized by blaming it on Trump himself, and the shock of his victory.

A moment’s reflection shows how superficial that derangement explanation is.

This summer at a conference at a well-known university, I sat down with the head of a new institute on campus who was  blunt. “At this point, if you can’t answer yes to a basic question, nothing else counts. Doesn’t matter where you stand on taxes, foreign policy, regulations . . .”

“What’s the question?” I asked.

 “Are you ready to fight?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug, “that’s it.”

The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship with them.  Now we fight.

Is the Left planning this for real?

[Note by JW: In President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation at the end of his two-term presidency (January 17, 1961), he warned of the dangers of a new “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry”:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Today, military historian Victor Davis Hanson warns of the dangers of a new Military-Intelligence Complex emerging on the Left.]

****

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers -- who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal in a “Seven Days of May” plot for real.

What does it mean after the House of Representatives — on an almost one-hundred-percent pure partisan vote, save for two Democrats who wisely demurred — decides to expand an impeachment investigation on what they claim to be serious charges when... the very next day... the stock market zooms to all-time highs, breaking records substantially on all major indexes, and black unemployment goes to all-time lows?

Well, the latter spells big trouble for the Democrats a year from now and the former means the investment world thinks impeachment is a bunch of horse hockey that will never happen (the Republican Senate will never convict Trump, not even envious Mitt) and the real news was the job figures.

And it's easy to see why both of those are true.

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In many places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases.  These are but a few of many examples that the once-golden state has reverted to a primitive premodern age.

The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.

Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.

“Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”  Spoken like a true Stalinist.

“I killed my parents so now I ask for mercy on the grounds that I’m an orphan.”

That's the canonical definition of chutzpah -- shameless effrontery -- and it summarizes the Democrat position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump.

The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign.

Now, THAT'S foreign interference. And those facts aren't in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, "Impeachment!"

The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:

Under Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has become NATO’s only non-democratic nation. It’s also NATO’s only Muslim-majority member. Erdogan has been trying to re-create Turkey as a new Ottoman imperial power. He feels no allegiance to Western-style democracy.

During the Obama administration, Erdogan snubbed the obsequious American attempts to promote Turkey as the cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy. President Trump should remember that and perhaps reconsider his own sometimes appeasing outreach to Erdogan.

Turkey opposes, if not detests, almost every American ally in the region, and befriends almost every U.S. enemy.  Here are prime examples.

The weekend raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker killed in Syria in 2015 while being held captive  and repeadedly raped by the sadistic ISIS leader.

After the U.S. confirmed Mueller’s death, President Obama issued a statement. “ISIL is a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla. No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”

Obama, however, did not bring those terrorists to justice; nearly five years later, it was Donald Trump who made good on that promise.  Obama and his top national security officials were too busy hunting down Trump campaign aides.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is only one of the Left’s many derangements

The term “derangement syndrome” has made it into everyday speech, thanks to the now-ubiquitous use of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term coined by Esther Goldberg back in 2015. But TDS is only one of the many derangement syndromes of our time.

The British conservative author and journalist Douglas Murray made derangement a central theme of his recent book, The Madness of Crowds. Writing in the Daily Mail, Murray contends, “We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant.”

In his book, Murray claims that in postmodern society’s retreat from the great narratives offered by religion, patriotism, and traditions of family and community, people have found new ideologies to absorb their passions: social justice, identity politics, and intersectionality – derangements all.

In a difficult period for our country, everyone is let down by commentary that relies on stale talking points.

Channeling Hillary Clinton’s latest podcast eruption, some pundits have lately returned to trying to keep Trump-Russia collusion alive, so let’s go through it again.

To give the complete Trump quote, he said during the 2016 campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In other words, a wisecrack any of us might have made playing off the insecurity of Mrs. Clinton’s email practices as well as the press’s hypocritical eagerness to traffic in Russian leaks.  Hear’s what’s really going on….

Message from Jack Wheeler:  Before you read Angelo’s excellent analysis, here is a report I just received hours ago from my son Brandon who is with Dave Eubank’s Free Burma Rangers.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 3:11 PM, Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan):

There is no ceasefire here - yes we were able to go and get people out 19, 20th Oct from Ras Al Ein and we thank God and you all for that but every day the Turk-supported FSA (Jihadist-ISIS mercenaries) attack SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) positions - with the FSA / Turkish proxy force attacking SDF now 4 kilometers south of Ras Al Ein / Sari Kani - we are taking heavy machine gun fire from FSA Gun jeeps (And also They have two captured Humvee )and now there are dismounted fighters on the assault shooting at our medical team) - as we move forward to find the SDF wounded , we can’t find them yet and pray we can - we have FSA troops on three sides of us now but were able to get out and will keep trying - earlier today there were three other attacks by the FSA- there is no ceasefire here.

We were pinned down by FSA attack but got out and then carefully we infiltrated back in and around the FSA and found the wounded missing man who was crawling away- we were able to get him out and treated his wound - he survived - this is just one example -- so not a ceasefire. 22 Oct 2019 Dave Eubank and Free Burma Rangers

Thank you and God bless you , Dave

 I am asking TTPers to pray for the safety of Brandon and those with him -- JW

Mao LeBron

Over the past several days, Americans have seen exactly how China uses access to its vast domestic market as leverage to coerce American companies thanks to a now-deleted tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in support of Hong Kong.

“Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Morey tweeted.

CCTV, China’s state television broadcaster, could not have been more explicit: “We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.”

NBA star LeBron James agreed, saying “We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negatives that come with that too.” He assailed Morey’s pro-Hong Kong tweet as “misinformed and not educated.”

Not all athletes agree, but far too many in business with China have made their loyalties crystal clear; and that is par for the course when it comes to dealing with Beijing’s authoritarian regime. It also does not even begin to describe the scope of the threat posed by the Chinese government and Communist Party.

Last Friday (10/11), U.S. President Trump and China’s Vice Premier Liu He announced a trade agreement that saw Washington suspend tariff increases while China agreed to purchase some $40-$50 billion of agricultural products, including pork.

Behind this development, the financial markets rallied; the Dow Jones rose some 320 points or 1.21 percent. Trump billed the agreement as “phase one” of a broader trade agreement, but behind the soaring rhetoric belies a key motivation for the deal:

The Chinese need pig imports.  Big time. Here’s why – and why Trump’s timing for making a deal is impeccable.

Erin Burnett-CNN. Anderson Cooper-CNN, Marc Lacey-NYTimes last night (10/15)

If there is one thing that Tuesday night's Democrat debate showed us—as if we didn't know it in the first place—it's just to what degree the media is in the tank for the Democrats.

They're not only in the tank—they built it, filled it with water up to the brim, and would turn up the temperature to boil Donald Trump alive if they could. And maybe they can.

You knew this from the outset when CNN's lead moderator Anderson Cooper, along with his compatriots, one from the New York Times, opened the festivities with a round of leading impeachment questions, giving each candidate in turn a chance to outdo each other in bashing Trump. Only Tulsi Gabbard equivocated slightly.

It went downhill from there.

For conservatives who watched the Democrat debate, it was like visiting Earth-2, as Drunkblogger Stephen Green so cleverly put it.  Conservatives probably could not endure these debates without Stephen Green's infusion of both facts and humor.

Each of those candidates on the stage seemed oblivious to the reality of the last three years — the fabulous economy, lowest unemployment in decades, international trade renegotiated to our benefit, millions no longer on food stamps.

Our military, eviscerated by Obama, is being repaired.  Manufacturing has been revitalized, and the border, despite the intransigence of the Democrats, is slowly being better controlled.  The wall is being built.

The Democrats are losing.  Trump and his supporters are winning.  As others have observed, the Left plays checkers while Trump plays 4-D chess.  He is way ahead of his opponents on every level, every issue.   And boy, was that apparent at that Dem debate last night.

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise.

Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democrat effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: “Democracy Dies in Bias.” How did journalism get here?

There is no logical Democrat explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democrat Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project.

After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the emoluments clause, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux-coup, the Comey memos farce, the “resistance” efforts outlined by the New York Times anonymous op-ed writer, the campaign finance violations accusations, Stormy, tax returns, whistleblowers, leakers, the Mueller 22 months charade, and now impeachment 2.0, what exactly is the point of impeaching Trump just 13 months before the election?

Here are the various rationales behind Trump’s Democrat and leftwing opponents’ latest “whistleblower” hoax. None of these scenarios are mutually exclusive.

Turkish jets bomb Kurdish town of Ras al Ain in Syria this morning (10/11)

President Trump has defended his shameful abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, declaring that "I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars" that have left America "bogged down, watching over a quagmire."

Listening to the president, Americans might think that we still have large numbers of U.S. troops fighting on fronts across the Middle East. We do not.  In fact, we now have three times more troops deployed in Spain (3,200) than we do in Syria (1,000).

Trump likes to say he "defeated" the Islamic State. Actually, the bulk of the fighting was done by our Kurdish allies, trained and supported by U.S. Special Operations forces.

We are depending on the Kurds to keep the Islamic State down. But if we allow Turkey to wipe out our Kurdish allies, who will be left on the ground in Syria to fight the Islamic State?  Answer: No one.

The important news of the day--far beyond the inevitable tedious impeachment jousting--is that John Durham's investigation of the provenance of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion has expanded, according to several administration officials.

Fox News previously reported that Durham would be reviewing the days leading up to the 2016 election and through the inauguration.

However, based on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, the senior administration officials said. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel.

[Note by JW: Word is that Rosenstein, Mueller, Brennan, Clapper, and former President Obama are all in Durham’s gunsights – and that he would not have requested additional staff and resources unless he had found wrongdoing and criminal activity.]

A blueprint for the deindustrialization of the U.S. is being revealed even now in (you guessed it) California.

Beginning early yesterday morning (10/09), a series of total power shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric began in every county of the Bay Area, along with a number of others to the north (the number of counties involved total 34).  The sole exception — as you might have guessed — is San Francisco.

The power cutoffs are complete, with no exceptions for hospitals, emergency services, phone networks, etc., the purpose being to eliminate all power flowing through overhead power lines in the affected areas in a clumsy, ill considered effort to prevent wildfires.

Vast areas of central California will be returned by fiat to the conditions of the 19th century.  Here’s why.

Strangest among all the many melodramas of the last two weeks were the blaring headlines that President Trump had dared to talk with the Australian Prime Minister—and referenced the role of foreign governments and in particular Australia in U.S. electoral politics in 2016.

Given the hue and cry of Democrats in the last three years, they should have been delighted that the president was peremptorily warning foreign nations to cease to currying favor with presidential candidates and asking them to hand over what information, if any, they had of past “collusion.”

In fact, they were outraged and once again returned to “collusion” charges, as if Trump were subverting the 2020 election.

I Accuse You of Doing What I Did! Unfortunately, projection is now an encompassing explanation for almost everything the Left alleges.

Buried somewhere in recent impeachment reporting was the real news that federal prosecutors are conducting an international dragnet to find the perpetrators of the Russia hoax. Last week, the Justice Department issued a statement:

A team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

It was later learned that Attorney General Barr was absent from Washington and could not answer questions because he was in Italy, where Josef Mifsud—the Western asset who plays a Russian collaborator in the Mueller Report—lives. Officials in the UK and Australia also have been contacted.

Obviously, the CIA is trying to get out ahead of its impending embarrassment by fabricating a scandal packaged as a whistleblower complaint suggesting, incredibly, that the president of the United States is not permitted to solicit foreign assistance in a criminal investigation.

Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.

“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said.  “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”

Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible.

Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution.

Consider it another way...

The classic Western film High Noon, released in 1952, offers a compelling analogy to the Trump presidency.

Set in New Mexico territory sometime in the late 1800s, it starred Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane and Grace Kelly as Amy.  Her character is a Quaker.  She had seen her brothers and father die by gunfire, so she is a pacifist.  The two of them marry in the first moments of the film but then learn that a man the marshal had sentenced to hang, but was released by an early version of an Obama-appointed judge, is coming to their town with three henchmen to kill Kane.

But not one of the townsmen will agree to help.  They are all cowards (Republicans) in fear of their lives, or they are friends and admirers of the outlaw Frank Miller and want to welcome him back to the town (Democrats).  Bottom line?

The Reliant, an action film coming to select theaters on October 24, is not a typical faith-based film and the secular community is taking notice.

It was made apparent when the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an R rating. Although it had no foul language or sex scenes, and less violence than Disney movies given a PG-13 rating, the screenwriter and producer of the film, Dr. J. P. Johnston, had to appeal to the MPAA to get it changed.

The hate mail the producers have received and the trash articles written by those opposed to the film’s nod to the right-to-keep-and-bear-arms is a hint of the size of the stronghold The Reliant is trying to tackle. The entertainment site, AV Club, wrote a review with the title, Watch Kevin Sorbo Fight Antifa in This Bat@#$% Trailer.

When the mainstream “powers that be” come out in full force against a faith-based film, that’s when you know this movie is going to have real impact.

Hong Kong demonstrators waving the flag of freedom

Hong Kong. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China from a podium overlooking Tiananmen Square 70 years ago today, October 1, 1949. This year’s celebrations, including in Hong Kong, were meant to pay tribute to Mao’s successor Xi Jinping.

But the people of Hong Kong have stood up. Millions have marched in protest of Beijing’s undemocratic control.  China is not as strong as it pretends. What the Communist Party calls its “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” has run its course.

On this 70th anniversary of communism’s ascendance in China, the irony is that the only legitimacy the Party has left comes from a growing economy. If China’s economy implodes, so does the regime’s legitimacy.

The China-U.S. trade war is an epochal event that can push China to the brink of collapse, especially if the U.S. links its values and human rights to its dealings with China.

U.S. Federal Prosecutor John Durham

Little notice has been given to a Justice Department press release issued the day the Trump-Zelensky conversation transcript became public.

That Justice Department statement makes explicit that the president never spoke with Attorney General William Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son” or asked him to contact Ukraine “on this or any other matter,” and that the attorney general has not communicated at all with Ukraine.

It also contains the following morsel:

“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”