On the Eve of Election
With three days till polls open, statistician Nate Silver gives Donald Trump a 51.1% chance of winning at least the 270 electoral votes necessary to become the second U.S. president in history to serve two non-consecutive terms. Many polls put the election at a statistical tie.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris made her closing pitch to voters from the same place at the Capitol where Trump gave his last speech before the January 6 riot. But President Biden stole her thunder and gave Trump a massive gift. More on that below.
Already, this is the most expensive election in history. The Wall Street Journal says the total number spent on federal elections will be around $15.9 billion, nearly a billion more than the last record.1
The Mainstream Media Is Losing
Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast (#1 on nearly all charts) last Friday and made an episode nearly three hours long. As of November 1, it has 43 million views on YouTube alone, despite allegations of “deboosting” by Google.
Trump has been making the rounds of independent podcasters, while mostly leaving appearances on mainstream media to JD Vance. On the Rogan interview alone, according to Axios, “He’s gotten more views than he could have with a dozen or more appearances on Fox, CNN and MSNBC combined.”
Harris went on Alex Cooper’s hit podcast and got more views than CBS’s “60 Minutes” and ABC’s “The View” combined.
And finally, in a break from a 36-year tradition, The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, announced last Friday that it would not endorse a candidate this election.2 The order came directly from Bezos, who rarely gets involved with the operations of the paper. In response, a third of the editorial board resigned, and the paper has hemorrhaged over 250,000 subscribers.3
In response, Bezos wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, lambasting the paper and giving his reasoning for the decision. “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose…. I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance…. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he wrote.4
Big media does not cherish its loss of influence. Axios said the quiet part out loud: “The mainstream media’s dominance in narrative- and reality-shaping in presidential elections shattered in 2024.”5
Many have argued for years that the media crafts the narrative and thereby reality itself according to their decided agenda. The media itself now seems to be admitting this.
World Conflicts Not Simmering Down
Information has surfaced that Israel warned Iran of its attack last weekend, and the scale of damage, while significant, seems to be limited. Iran will reportedly strike at Israel again, as Iran also seeks a defensive cooperation agreement with Russia.6
And speaking of Russia, North Korean soldiers are reportedly moving into combat position to help Russia in its war in Ukraine. The U.S. has turned to China, asking them to exert influence in Pyongyang to stop North Korean troops from fighting for Russia.7
But this comes after a report that China has hacked multiple U.S. telecommunication firms in order to obtain sensitive information of interest to national security. “It is much more serious and much worse than even what you all presume at this point,” a top congressional Democrat told reporters. “It is one of the most serious breaches in my time on the Intelligence Committee.”8
Draining the Swamp and Taking out the Garbage
President Biden has been unwittingly helping former President Trump’s campaign. And Trump, grateful for the help, is acing it on photo-of-the-week.
At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, opening insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe delivered a groaner, “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Democrats and the media went on the attack. For a couple of days they nearly forgot the “Trump-Is-Hitler” storyline. But then, right in the middle of Kamala’s closing pitch to voters delivered in Joe Biden’s front yard, Biden set off a bomb.
On a Zoom call with Latino activists, speaking about Trump’s rhetoric, Biden dismayed his party with these words, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters; his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The news came as Trump was on stage in an area of Pennsylvania known to have a number of Puerto Rican migrants. Trump sprang into action, the next day delivering a press conference from the cab of a garbage truck, and afterward wearing the waste management safety vest on to the stage for his rally. “Remember Hillary: she said ‘deplorable’ and then she said ‘irredeemable,’ right?” he said to the crowd. “But she said ‘deplorable’; that didn’t work out. Garbage, I think, is worse, right?”
Other Reports
This week’s job report, expected to show 100,000 jobs added, showed only 12,000 jobs created.9,10
Steve Bannon, the strategist largely responsible for Trump’s 2016 win, is now out of federal prison. “I’m far from broken. I’ve been empowered,” he said.11
The Daily Mail has alleged that Walz had a secret relationship with the daughter of a CCP official in China spanning 1989 to 1992.12
A whistleblower has come with a report that in 2016 the FBI embedded two honeypots in the Trump campaign in an off-the-book secret operation that took place before Crossfire Hurricane. The report illuminates gaps previously in the story of the FBI’s activity in the 2016 election.13
Molly Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist, has written detailing her experience on a CNN set at the beginning of the Trump/Russia collusion dossier in 2016. What she claims she saw indicates that CNN knew the story had been leaked from the U.S. government and was not the product of foreign intelligence, as was reported.14
In Case You Needed to Smile
You Can’t Drink Olive Oil Anymore at Starbucks: We considered leading with this one. If you’re in love with the olive-oil-infused beverages at Starbucks, the news is dreadful. Their new CEO is pulling a slick one and simplifying the menu. And slurping olive oil is one of the first things to get axed.15
Monkeys Will Never Type Shakespeare: Scientists have now concluded that it is actually impossible for a monkey, given an infinite amount of time, to ever type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Known as the “infinite monkey theorem,” the thought experiment has often been used to explain principles of probability in discussions of, among other things, creation and evolution.
A new peer-reviewed study has found that this task would take a monkey longer than what science hypothesizes would be the lifespan of the universe based on heat death theory. There is a 5% chance that a single chimp could type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. The researchers claim that the probability of a chimp typing a simple sentence such as, “I chimp, therefore I am” in its entire lifetime would be one in 10 million billion billion.
The study showed that if every one of the roughly 200,000 chimps in the world was enlisted to type at the rate of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out Shakespeare’s works. Yet, somehow the 37 trillion cells in the human body evolved by accident?16
