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Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

Some of the shine on the disinformation industry has gone dull in recent years, as many misinformation experts having been caught trafficking in misinformation themselves, or exposed for their ties to intelligence agencies. This should not come as a shock.

It’s a basic tenet of “mirror politics” and practitioners of propaganda to accuse others of the very same actions they plan to commit.

In late 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post reported on a leaked document discussing a secret project by Democratic Party operatives that falsely accused Republican candidate Roy Moore of support by Russians, while he was running in a tight race for the Senate in Alabama. The scheme linked the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts on Twitter and drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the New York Times reported that the leaked documents stated.

The documents linked a relatively unknown company called New Knowledge to the Alabama disinformation campaign, although New Knowledge’s chief executive Jonathon Morgan said the company was not involved, and he worked on “Project Birmingham” in his personal capacity. Morgan also reached out at the time to Renee DiResta, a self-styled expert on disinformation, who told the New York Times she disagreed with such tactics, and later joined New Knowledge sometime, but only after Project Birmingham ended.

New Knowledge later changed names to Yonder, while DiResta joined Stanford University as an expert in disinformation. However, New Knowledge could not stop landing in the media spotlight.

2) New Knowledge filled w/ former NSA agents who explained the game to Betsy Depuis while out for drinks:
NSA cannot violate the Constitution, so they hire contractors to do their dirty work of spying on Americans and censoring them. pic.twitter.com/IngIwmHQCw

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) May 1, 2024

In early 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi released a “Twitter Files” drop about “Hamilton 68,” a public dashboard created by New Knowledge. Hamiton 68 tracked hundreds of Twitter accounts to monitor the spread of purported pro-Russian propaganda online, but screenshots of emails sent by former Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, voiced alarm that the dashboard was creating, not tracking disinformation.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Roth wrote.

The “Hamilton 68” dashboard had spurred dozens of stories in major media outlets that accused conservatives of trafficking in Russian disinformation, but when Twitter looked into the dashboard’s accuracy, they found it was garbage in, garbage out.

Former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts headed the Hamilton 68 dashboard and Jonathon Morgan of New Knowledge had helped to build it, along with J.M. Berger at the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), housed by the German Marshall Fund.

“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops,” one Twitter official wrote of Hamilton 68.

The internal Twitter emails were so damaging that the Washington Post later posted corrections to multiple stories that reported on Hamilton 68 and its findings.

But every story about disinformation elites caught creating disinformation contains critical missing facts and minor elements of disinformation planted by the very experts being exposed. New Knowledge is no different.

Starting a month ago, I began discussing what the media got wrong about New Knowledge and Hamilton 68 with Betsy Dupuis, a former New Knowledge employee who worked on Hamilton 68. Dupuis tells me she was fired from New Knowledge after expressing misgivings upon discovering the company that branded itself  “the world’s first platform for defending online communities from social media manipulation” was itself engaging in blatant social media manipulation.

To back up her claims, Dupuis provided internal documents and photos from her time at New Knowledge, as well as screenshots of texts messages. Some of those we are publishing today.

New Knowledge poached Dupuis from another company and set her to work improving the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was planned as a product for groups aligned with the Democratic Party. The development was underwritten with a year of funding by the Center for American Progress, a think tank and lobby shop run by party political operatives.

Dupuis says she enjoyed her work updating Hamilton 68, but she became concerned when people in the office discussed the “Alabama Project” and she began wondering if this had anything to do with Roy Moore, a Republican candidate running for Senate. When she had joined the company, Jonathon Morgan had assured her that New Knowledge would only monitor, never create disinformation.

But then several former employees from the National Security Agency (NSA) joined New Knowledge.

Out for company drinks, former NSA employees explained to Dupuis how agencies get around federal laws that ban the U.S. government from spying on and censoring Americans: they contract with companies like New Knowledge to do their dirty work. By the time New Knowledge announced they had secured a Department of Defense contract to create automated disinformation, Dupuis had had enough.

She met with Jonathon Morgan to discuss her concerns and was fired days later.

Speaking with me from her home in Austin, Dupuis says that neither Jonathon Morgan, nor Stanford’s Renee DiResta have come clean with journalists about what happened in Alabama to create disinformation during an American election. But she says she is tired of being scared and the time has come for her to speak up. “Silence doesn’t buy you safety, Dupuis says. “People will still come after you because of what you know.”

“I just kept quiet, until now, because I didn’t want to be accused of spreading a conspiracy theory,” Dupuis tells The DisInformation Chronicle. “After I was fired, I was just like, ‘You know what? This is so crazy. Nobody's ever going to believe me. I'm never going to talk about this again.’”

Jonathon Morgan did not return multiple requests for comment sent to his current job and personal cell phone number. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

*  *  *

THACKER: What caused you to get fired at New Knowledge?

DUPUIS: When they hired me, they said that we would never do disinformation. And I felt the grounds I'd been hired on had been violated. So I went to Jonathon Morgan, who was the CEO. I had a good relationship with him, or at least I thought I did.

I told Jonathon, “Hey, this is unethical. I'm concerned about this.”

I knew there were other people who were also concerned, very disturbed about what was going on, but I didn't bring them up.

I told Jonathon, “You said we would track disinformation, but we wouldn't do disinformation.”

And he told me, “If we don't do it, somebody else will.”

Which sounds like a very classic James Bond villain. What a great way of revealing your evil plan.

THACKER: This conversation happens on a Friday, night. Then what happens to you on Monday?

DUPUIS: Well, I went home, and at this point, I really didn't want to work there anymore. I had already been talking to friends about this, and I went out to the lake with a friend.

I got a message from Sandeep Verma that I needed to come in at—I think it was 8 a.m.—which is really early in tech time. This was very confusing, so I asked if they wanted to do it remote, but I was told I needed to come in early on Monday.

They had hired this really young women to be, I think it was VP of Marketing, but also HR. She was a nepo baby: her parents had given her a bunch of money to start a fashion line that failed. And now she's an executive at my tech company.

She and Sandeep are there, and Sandeep… I don't know, he was trying to look really positive, but he looked sad also.

He said, “We're letting you go. We no longer need the position. We're going to give you a month severance if you sign this NDA.” I had to sign the NDA right there on the spot, before I left, or else I wouldn’t get severance.

I told him, “I left another job to come to this company.” He said he knew, and then I signed it and left. If they want to come after me for doing this interview, I was coerced to sign the NDA.

I felt pressured to sign it. I didn't really have a choice because of how insane things were. What am I supposed to do? Not take the severance, and not be allowed to collect unemployment because I refused to sign their agreement and then maybe tell people that there's a conspiracy going on.

THACKER: Right?

DUPUIS: What happened was so crazy. Things that people would not believe is true.

DUPUIS: I'm mid-thirties, so that puts me smack dab in the middle of millennial territory, and I grew up with internet. I was one of those kids that learned to make their own web pages and interact with the internet even before Myspace.

THACKER: When I started at UC Davis in 1994, that was the first year that University of California students were required to have an email. I learned how to type having discussions on a UC Davis chat group.

When people started to come out with this idea, about seven years back, that they had discovered there was “disinformation” on the internet, I was like, “Wait, I've been on the internet for decades. From the very beginning I saw people behave like assholes and throw crap up on the internet.”

DUPUIS: Well, there was this progression from “Do not use anything from the internet for any paper; it has to be from Ebsco or Britannica. Some trusted encyclopedia.”

You were supposed to vet sources. Now with Gen Z kids, they don't even know what plagiarism is.

THACKER: So you started off at around age ten. You're on the computer, but it was still kind of a thing for weird dudes in the basement.

DUPUIS: I kept it kind of a secret, and then MySpace came out when I was in high school. But the internet was still for nerds. I gave up pursuing a career in programing because my parents had read a bunch of articles in newspapers saying that the internet was a fad.

THACKER: But you still got involved.

DUPUIS: I got into photography in high school, and I started shooting for iStockphoto which was an early internet start-up in online stock photography. Before them, you had to order a stock photo catalog.

I was doing work for them when I was teenager making like $1,000 a month, which for a high school kid is a hell of a lot of money. I could rent an apartment $300 at the time. I thought this is going to be my job. And then the stock market crashed in 2007 and everything went away.

So, I went to college and studied art, and when I graduated the market still really sucked.

I went to go visit some friends during South by Southwest—the big music festival in Austin—to see about jobs and opportunities in 2012.

I was like, “I’m moving here.” I was kind of homeless for about a year, worked for a few random start-ups, and became part of this industry.

THACKER: But then you land your dream job at New Knowledge.

DUPUIS: I would not say it was a dream job. I was really skeptical of this company to begin with.

THACKER: You’re this young woman working in the tech industry in Austin. Why New Knowledge?

DUPUIS: I was at an oil and gas data analytics company that owned some old data sets which are very valuable. My title was software engineer, but I was working mostly as a designer, building the front end of the software. I was designing a dashboard that allowed you to build reports and interface with their data. It wasn't super advanced stuff.

It was fine, but then New Knowledge reached out to me on Angel List and, when I met with them, they were immediately ready to hire me.

I think New Knowledge was interested in me because, “Oh, you can do some of the programing, but then you can also know how data works and can do the data visualization stuff.”

I think that's what I was qualified to do for New Knowledge, but I wasn't really qualified to do this disinformation stuff.

THACKER: Did you research them to find out what they were all about?

DUPUIS: I'd never heard of them before and the politics they were involved in. My way of looking into politics was going on Facebook and subscribing to every spectrum of political ideology: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, whatever. I just read whatever because I wanted to see what everybody was thinking.

Politics was not a big deal to me, but I would casually absorb things. I knew that Russian disinformation was in the news, and stuff about Trump.

THACKER: Of course, you knew about Russian disinformation and Trump, because that's all the media wrote about for four years.

DUPUIS: Yes. But it wasn’t something I really followed. I just wanted to have intelligent conversations about what was in the news.

New Knowledge told me they do all this stuff with disinformation. Jonathon had some State Department role under the Obama administration. Sandy was a friend from high school or something from their time in Houston. He was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO.) I guess you know how that works, right?

THACKER: Well, no. From what I understand about the tech industry, people get these jobs they’re not really qualified for, but they know someone, or have some weird skill that nobody else has in the office. The programming guy who likes talking to people can suddenly become head of marketing.

I get the sense that titles are very nebulous in tech start-ups.

DUPUIS: Sandy had a degree, and I think he was serious about being a tech guy. But I don't think he had the work experience to be a CTO. But that's often the case at start-ups.

They told me about their funding and trying to get all these contracts with companies that were doing this disinformation thing. I had a vague idea about this stuff from what I was reading about Trump and just from being online for so long.

People make stuff up.

But they said they were going to build this AI tool and I was kind of skeptical.

I previously worked at a company that had done some AI thing back in 2013. A lot of times people tell you they have artificial intelligence to do some chore, but it’s really just a bunch of humans doing all the work. Which is really expensive.

Eventually, you get found out

THACKER: There’s a lot of nonsense and pretense in tech. Amazon dropped their "Just Walk Out" AI technology which automated what you bought. It was really just 1,000 workers in India acting as remote cashiers.

DUPUIS: These companies pretend to have computer automated intelligence, but it's a sham. Real people do the work it because they don't know how to make software good enough to automate the task.

So I was a little bit skeptical of that, but they had all these PhDs so maybe they could make it work. I asked, “Hey, will you guys ever want to do disinformation?”

And they said, “No, it's completely against our ethics.” I also asked if they were only going to point out disinformation whenever Republicans do it, or when both sides do it.

And they said, “We're bipartisan. In fact, we have Republicans that we've worked with for a long time.”

THACKER: How was their business set up? Who was funding them?

DUPUIS: DARPA. Jonathon had gotten his seed money from DARPA, and he had actually been through several iterations of trying to get the company off the ground. Apparently, a whole other set of co-founders had left the company. I can’t remember why.

He had a podcast called Partially Derivative and some nonprofit organization called Data for Democracy.

There was a weird thing with people in the office, people that weren't in the office, people working as contractors. Some of the contractors had this aura around them. The same as what I've heard of Renee DiResta: “We're just really passionate about disinformation!”

One contractor was just involved in building scrapers.

THACKER: Explain what scraping means. I think it means an automated system to go out and collect or scrape data off the internet, instead of doing it manually.

DUPUIS: Instead of having a person go and copy/paste everything from a website, you use a computer that collects all the data.

I knew someone who had a scraping company that the State Department, FBI and other agencies use, and they could have saved a lot of money using him. Instead, they hired this contractor to learn how to scrape Twitter.

Twitter kept denying New Knowledge access to scrape, because it costs them money when you’re pulling too much data, and they didn't have an established partnership. New Knowledge was using a lot of their bandwidth.

THACKER: Tell me about working on the Hamilton 68 disinformation dashboard.

DUPUIS: We eventually had a meeting with J.M. Berger with the German Marshall Fund. There were other people on the Zoom, but the German Marshall Fund had done this dashboard and I was supposed to redesign it.

It was ugly and looked like a programmer designed it. I was supposed to repackage it into a better dashboard and allow them to sell that as a product. They were going to sell it to the Center for American Progress.

THACKER: Just to let readers know, the Center for American Progress (CAP) is a Democratic Party think tank and lobby shop. They're most famous for being the ones who basically ran Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Simon Clark is a former member of CAP who now chairs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a bogus “disinformation group” that works closely with the Biden Administration.

According to your notes from the time, the lead on this dashboard redesign at CAP was Casey Michel, who worked at their news site, Think Progress. Another was Andrew Weisburd, who was working at the German Marshall Fund and is now at Microsoft’s Threat Context.

And in the dashboard deliverables you were given, it says that J.M. Berger, who also had ties to the Brookings Institute, was developing the communities or lists of people to track.

What did the German Marshall Fund want you to make better?

DUPUIS: The dashboard was called Hamilton 68 because it had something to do with Alexander Hamilton, some paper he wrote, or something esoteric. You know how people name something after some esoteric fact to make it sound important?

THACKER: Right.

DUPUIS: The German Marshall Fund owned Hamilton 68, which was something Jonathon Morgan had built for them. I think with his previous business partners.

J.M. Berger was there because he was somehow involved with the Center for American Progress getting their own version. They were going to launch it on Think Progress, which was CAP’s news organization, but is now defunct.

I wrote specifically in my notes that Center for American Progress was giving us 12 months of funding. I don't know what that meant in terms of actual money.

THACKER: I’m gonna guess that Center for American Progress won’t tell me how much funding they were putting out for this. (The Center for American Progress did not respond to questions asking how much money they provided to upgrade Hamiltion 68 and whether they still use the system.)

DUPUIS: My job was to take Hamilton 68 and repackage it with a better design. I think I did a good job of it.

THACKER: What did this upgraded Hamilton 68 allow them to do?

DUPUIS: They could observe emerging trends on Twitter, trending hashtags, trending topics and track what people were linking to.

Click here to continue reading...

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

More than a dozen former Defense Department officials, generals, and admirals filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing against former President Donald Trump’s presidential immunity arguments.

It comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the former president’s assertions that he should enjoy immunity from prosecution for activity that he carried out while he was president. The former president invoked that argument after he was accused by federal prosecutors of attempting to illegally overturn the 2020 election results.

The amicus brief’s signatories include former CIA Director Michael Hayden, retired Admiral Thad Allen, retired Gen. George Casey, retired Gen. Charles Krulak, and more.

They claimed that granting President Trump immunity against criminal claims could lead to activity that put U.S. national security at risk.

“The notion of such immunity, both as a general matter, and also specifically in the context of the potential negation of election results, threatens to jeopardize our nation’s security and international leadership,” their brief stated. “Particularly in times like the present, when anti-democratic, authoritarian regimes are on the rise worldwide, such a threat is intolerable and dangerous.”

The arguments submitted by President Trump will “risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world,” the group added.

The former secretary of Defense under President Trump, Mark Esper, was critical of their submission to the Supreme Court, arguing during a CNN interview that he “would prefer to see retired admirals and generals not get involved.”

But President Trump’s lawyers have contended that the president’s office cannot function without immunity from the threat of prosecution because it could “incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents,” arguing that such a phenomenon is playing out right now after the former president was indicted multiple times last year.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier issued a ruling against President Trump’s arguments that he should be declared immune from prosecution. The appeals process, meanwhile, has put on hold the former president’s trial in Washington.

“A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents. The threat of future prosecution and imprisonment would become a political cudgel to influence the most sensitive and controversial presidential decisions, taking away the strength, authority and decisiveness of the presidency,” according to President Trump’s filing issued last month.

The former president last October sought to have the charges dismissed based on his claim of immunity. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected those arguments in December.

“Even if some level of Presidential malfeasance, not present in this case at all, were to escape punishment, that risk is inherent in the Constitution’s design,” President Trump’s attorneys also wrote to the high court.

“The Founders viewed protecting the independence of the Presidency as well worth the risk that some Presidents might evade punishment in marginal cases,“ they said, adding that the Founding Fathers were ”unwilling to burn the Presidency itself to the ground to get at every single alleged malefactor.”

Special counsel Jack Smith has pushed for the U.S. high court to reject the former president’s claims of immunity, telling the justices that President Trump’s actions that led to the charges, if he is convicted, would represent “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government.”

“The effective functioning of the presidency does not require that a former president be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” Mr. Smith wrote this week. “To the contrary, a bedrock principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law including the president.”

The signatories to the amicus brief include retired Army Gens. George Casey and Peter Chiarelli, retired Air Force Gens. John Jumper, Craig McKinley, and Charles Wald; retired Marine Corps Gens. Carlton Fulford, Charles Krulak, and Robert Magnus; retired Navy Admirals Steve Abbot, Samuel Jones Locklear, John Nathman, Bill Owens, and Scott Swift; and retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen.

Several former civilian Pentagon officials signed onto the brief. They include former Army Secretary Louis Caldera, former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe, and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.

Backing President Trump, several GOP-led states filed a petition to the Supreme Court arguing that the justices should reverse the appeals court’s decision and grant the former president immunity in the cases.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

There’s a great deal more to becoming rich than buying the right investments and hoping for the best. The most important element in your strategy to win the battle for investment survival is your own psychology. You’ve heard that your attitude helps your health and your golf score; it’ll also improve your earning power.

It’s not enough to liquidate your past financial mistakes. It’s more important to liquidate counterproductive attitudes, approaches, and methods of dealing with problems. The results that someone gets in life are an indication of how sound his approach toward life is. A sound philosophy of life gives good results. People with chaotic, unproductive, unhappy lives usually don’t have anyone to blame but themselves. They rarely have a strategy for living and thus have no foundation on which to build a strategy for investing.

There’s plenty of good advice available on the subject. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Ben Franklin’s autobiography, Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, and Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics are all helpful.

One of the important things about the Greater Depression is that it will give you a chance to put your philosophy of life to the test. Almost anyone can get by in good times, but the years to come will separate the real winners from losers. Many will taste the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat firsthand; they won’t need the vicarious pleasure of Saturday afternoon TV sports to experience life.

There is, of course, no guarantee that just because you’ve developed a workable strategy that you won’t still be a casualty in the battle for financial survival. There is such a thing as plain bad luck. But, as Damon Runyon said, the bread may not always go to the wise, nor the race to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—but that’s the way to bet.

Tilt the odds in your favor by developing pro-survival attitudes, and the law of large numbers will take care of the rest.

There are, of course, an almost infinite number of valid attitudes. Anything that works for you is as good as anything that works for me. But since the next step in the strategy (consolidation) deals with gathering physical goods, I don’t want to leave any false impressions.

You may be able to salt away ten bags of silver, a thousand Krugerrands, and enough food to open a restaurant chain, but that’s not nearly as important as knowing how to get them all back again if you should lose them for any reason.

That’s one thing no one can ever take away from you, and you can never lose: your attitude towards life.

Scrooge McDuck had the right attitude.

One of the most formative stories I’ve ever read was an Uncle Scrooge comic written in 1953 by Carl Barks at Walt Disney Studios.

It finds Scrooge McDuck at play in his binful of money, diving and wallowing in it, doing what he likes best. As he leaves his bin to go out for his daily routine, it turns out that his nephew, Donald Duck, has decided to play a prank on him by putting a fake newspaper on the park bench with the headline “Coins and Banknotes Now Worthless!…Congress Make Fish the New Money of the Land.”

Scrooge sees it and is stunned. All his cash is worthless. He plops against a tree thinking that he hasn’t even one little minnow with which to buy a crust of bread. By the next frame of the comic book, however, the courageous old duck has picked himself up and is ready to get back in the race, saying, “Well, there’s no cause crying over bad luck. I’ll get a job and start life all over again.”

Soon we find him down at the waterfront talking to a fisherman. He offers to paint the man’s boat for a sackful of fish. Scrooge earns his fish and takes them to a clothing store where business is bad. He trades the fish for a raincoat. Back at the waterfront, he trades the raincoat to another fisherman for two sacks of fish.

Since the fish are getting heavy to carry around, Scrooge trades the two bags to a farmer for an old horse, then trades the horse for ten sacks of fish.

By the end of the day, Scrooge has a mountain of fish: three cubic acres’ worth. As much of the new money as he had of the old. He looks at the cold, clammy fish and asks himself…how to count the new money? By the pound or by the inch? How to keep it? And how to spend it before it goes bad?

Sorrowfully he realizes that fish isn’t as nice to play with as his old money. Fish don’t feel good and they smell bad.

All of the sudden, he doesn’t want to be rich anymore. He hires a trucking fleet to take the mountain of fish to Donald, who always wanted to be rich. Donald’s house is buried under dead fish.

Donald’s joke backfired, but Scrooge proved his point: You can start from scratch if you have the right attitude and come out ahead if you play your cards right.

Scrooge didn’t have a fish to his name when he had to start over, a lot less than you’ll have if you liquidate all your unneeded possessions. They’re costing you money, and tying you down. Transform the junk you’ve accumulated into cash, which you can redeploy the way Scrooge McDuck might.

The next step in your plan is to start earning to add to your grubstake—that is, create more money. It was key to Scrooge’s second fortune, and it’s key to yours.

But it’s necessary to have the skills necessary to provide goods and services to others. Scrooge made his fish fortune by his skills at business, but there are thousands of others.

Gaining Skills

One of the most important parts of taking control of your life as a step to prospering in the years to come is to educate yourself and gain skills. That means a lot more than just logging eight years in high school and college. Going to college is one thing, but learning to make money is something else. Most people today appear to believe going to college is necessary for getting ahead. It’s not. It may actually be a hindrance.

A lot of people seem to think that simply going to college will bestow an education. In reality, all most people get is a diploma, which is very different. Eric Hoffer, the San Francisco longshoreman who never completed high school but has written such profound books as The True Believer, is an outstanding example of the difference between going to college and getting an education.

Practical, marketable skills are often better acquired in trade schools, through self-teaching efforts, and through experience working from the bottom up in a field. A lot of teachers who finished first in their class couldn’t run a successful hot dog stand and are hardly in a position to help their students learn survival skills.

It would be a tragic mistake to devote all your resources to accumulating gold, hoarding commodities, devising clever tax schemes, and speculating, to the neglect of much more basic intangibles. The government may negate a lot of your efforts through its inflation, taxes, and regulations. And even if you overcome them, market risk—a bad judgement, an unexpected development, a failed brokerage house—can wipe you out. As can fraud, theft, a fire, or a war.

And in the environment coming up, all of those things and many others like them could be greater dangers than they have been in the past. The only thing that’s permanently secure is what you carry in your head: your attitude, your knowledge, your skills.

Who knows what skills may be required in the years to come? What you’re doing now, be it teaching school, practicing law, laying brick, or selling insurance, may be in low demand. But preparing French cuisine, fixing autos, keeping books, or offering financial counsel may be in high demand. Or perhaps the other way around.

The single wisest thing you can do with your money is not buy gold. It’s to take courses and acquire knowledge in other fields, as unrelated to what you are now doing as possible. Anything related to science, and particularly, technology would seem especially suitable. Computer science, medicine, mechanics, agriculture, and electronics are all going to remain in demand.

In the TV series Star Trek, the supremely knowledgeable Mr. Spock bailed the crew out as often as anyone. It’s hard to imagine him unemployed, for that reason. More knowledge can only increase your understanding of the way the world works now, and if it stops working the way it presently does, you’ll be able to continue. It will then no longer be the end of the world if you lose your present job.

And a lot of people will.

*  *  *

Most people have no idea what really happens when an economy collapses, let alone how to prepare… How will you protect yourself during the next crisis? Legendary speculator Doug Casey’s latest report will show you exactly how. Click here to get it now.

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

China’s communist regime is engaged in a worldwide campaign of cybercrime and leading experts believe that the United States is failing to respond swiftly enough to counter the threat.

“In the current era of cyber, it’s all about speed,” retired Army Col. John Mills told The Epoch Times.

“You have to presume a breach, and that the threat is inside. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s all about speed of identification, speed of ejection. The U.S. government is not good at that.”

All signs indicate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its proxies are engaged in a robust and global cybercrime campaign that aims to both destabilize the regime’s foes and position itself for a potential war with the United States.

“This is an extraordinary threat,” said Mr. Mills, who previously served as the director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs at the Department of Defense.

A cache of leaked documents that surfaced in late February implicated the regime’s direct involvement in overseas cyber espionage.

The documents belonged to a criminal hacking group called I-SOOn, which masquerades as a legitimate business in China, apparently with the regime’s blessing.

The leaked files revealed the group’s infiltration into government departments in India, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as NATO organizations.

Files included product manuals, marketing materials, employee lists, chat records, financial information, and details about foreign infiltration efforts.

Some of the documents that were verified by the Associated Press show that the majority of the group’s clients are based within China’s regional security bureaus and the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security.

Mr. Mills said the revelation was “predictable,” and that CCP authorities have a long history of conducting illicit tasks in addition to their formal duties.

“The CCP and the government, which is one [and] the same thing, knew these people were moonlighting. This is part of the culture of corruption [in China],” Mr. Mills said.

The I-SOOn leaks surfaced amid a wider flurry of CCP-backed cyber activity, in which the regime successfully infiltrated both U.S. critical infrastructure and the defense ministry of the Netherlands.

Volt Typhoon, a malware used to infiltrate U.S. systems and target critical infrastructure, was discovered last year, having been implanted as part of a wider effort to pre-position for a military conflict. The malware also threatened the physical safety of Americans by targeting water, energy, rail, airline and port traffic-control systems, according to intelligence leaders.

Casey Fleming, CEO of the risk advisory firm BlackOps Partners, said that the Volt Typhoon initiative was part of the CCP’s strategy of unrestricted warfare through which it aims to secure military advantage over the United States through non-military means.

“The CCP is hyper-focused on weakening the U.S. from all angles to win the war without fighting,” Mr. Fleming told The Epoch Times.

“This is what World War 3 looks like. It’s the speed of technology, the stealth of unrestricted warfare, and no rules.”

Chinese-Made Spying Tools

The more recent I-SOOn leaks also shed light on the tools Chinese cybercriminals are deploying to infiltrate, undermine, and exploit the regime’s rivals.

Its services included a tool for infiltrating users’ accounts on social media platform X, including the ability to access phone numbers, email accounts, personal messages, and real-time activity even if users have enabled two-factor authentication.

Likewise I-SOOn sold access to a custom suite of remote-access Trojans—malware capable of infecting Android, IOS, and Windows devices—which could, at times, alter registry files and collect GPS data, contacts, media files, and real-time audio recordings of conversations.

The Android version of the Trojan also had the capability of dumping all messages stored in major Chinese apps including QQ, WeChat, Telegram, and Momo.

Notably, the I-SOOn documents also revealed the existence of portable devices for “attacking networks from the inside,” including options to embed the malware in cellphone batteries, power strips, and circuit boards.

Similar devices could be outfitted with special equipment for operatives working abroad to establish safe communication with mainland China.

Mr. Mills said the regime is exploiting its advantage in the manufacturing domain to achieve dominance in cyberspace. China-based hackers are using manufacturing vulnerabilities in how devices connect and share data with one another.

And by smuggling malware into the United States with Chinese-made goods, he said, such devices could be used to penetrate the United States’ most critical infrastructure, as the Volt Typhoon malware was designed to do.

Mr. Mills said that the sheer diversity of systems used by different infrastructures in the United States makes it very difficult for the U.S. government to develop effective solutions to Chinese infiltration.

“The Internet of Things and critical infrastructure—that is still a very porous, vulnerable area,” Mr. Mills said.

Read more here...

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

In recent years, “van life’, “car life” and “tiny homes” have all become extremely hot topics on social media.  Millennials and Generation Z have been particularly eager to try out these “minimalist” lifestyles.  At a time when home prices have risen to absurd levels and the cost of living has become exceedingly oppressive, it can be very tempting to adopt a low cost way of life. 

But it is also important to understand that the elite are very much encouraging these trends.  If they could get most of us happily living in tiny homes and electric vehicles, they would be very pleased.  You see, the truth is that the smaller our living spaces are, the less carbon emissions we will produce, and that is precisely what they want.

Today, millions of Americans cannot afford to purchase normal homes, and so more of us than ever are turning to “tiny homes”.

A “tiny home” can be anywhere from 100 to 400 square feet, and today Airbnb has thousands of such listings.

It has been reported that 55 percent of tiny home owners are women, and 56 percent of all Americans say that they would actually consider living in a tiny home.

The biggest appeal of living in a tiny home is the cost.  It has been estimated that the average cost of a tiny home is just $52,000, and that is “87% cheaper than the average price of a typical U.S. home”…

The average cost of a tiny home is $52,000, 87% cheaper than the average price of a typical U.S. home. Building or buying a tiny house requires far less capital than a standard house. This significant price difference allows more Americans to achieve homeownership without taking on a burdensome mortgage.

If you are very stressed financially, I can definitely understand why such an option would seem appealing.

It is certainly not easy to live a typical middle class lifestyle in today’s world.

One woman that now lives in a 300 square foot home made from straw bales and cob says that her life “looks radically different” compared to when her family was living in a large four bedroom house…

Ten years ago I was living a typical suburban life on the outskirts of Denver. My husband, Casey, and I were both teachers. We lived in a four-bedroom house with a small yard where our two kids liked to play.

Today our life looks radically different. We live entirely off the grid in a 300-square-foot home that we built from straw bales and cob, a natural building material made from soil, water, and other organic matter. We rely on solar power for electricity and rain collection for water, and we use a drop toilet to create “humanure” — compost made from human waste.

If this is what makes her happy, good for her.

But don’t let the elite push you into such a lifestyle.

The elite have been promoting the concept of tiny homes for a very long time.  For example, the following comes from the official website of the WEF…

Interest is surging in tiny homes – livable dwelling units that typically measure under 400 square feet. Much of this interest is driven by media coverage that claims that living in tiny homes is good for the planet.

The reason why they love tiny homes so much is because they believe that they are good for the environment.

In fact, the same article that I just quoted above claims that for those that moved into tiny homes “ecological footprints were reduced by about 45% on average”…

I found that among 80 tiny home downsizers located across the United States, ecological footprints were reduced by about 45% on average. Surprisingly, I found that downsizing can influence many parts of one’s lifestyle and reduce impacts on the environment in unexpected ways.

“Van life” is another lifestyle that has become extremely trendy in recent years.

At one time, people looked down on those that “live in a van down by the river”, but now literally millions of Americans are doing it…

“Van life” or “van living” is a term that is becoming more popular around the country. People packing up their lives, moving into a mobile unit and exploring the states.

According to Yahoo Finance, the number of American van lifers has increased by 63% over the last couple of years, going from 1.9 million in 2020, to 3.1 million in 2022.

I was stunned when I first saw those numbers.

Needless to say, not having a mortgage or a rent payment is a big plus.

But there are a lot of negatives to such a lifestyle.

For one woman, regularly using public restrooms was something that she just couldn’t get over when she tried “van life”…

I pulled into a Shell gas station in my rented Ram ProMaster campervan.

Once parked, I headed into the convenience store and beelined to the bathroom.

Inside, there was an impossible-to-describe stench. Toilet paper covered the restroom floor, and pee covered the toilet seat. I used the bathroom as fast as humanly possible.

I certainly can’t blame her.

Most public restrooms along our major highways are simply disgusting.

And as the number of Americans living in their vans has multiplied, many communities have grown tired of them.  Here is just one example…

The city of St. Petersburg is working to erase so-called eye sores downtown.

Thursday afternoon, city leaders will take a closer look at “van life” and where drivers can set up camp.

This comes after many complaints came into the city from residents within the city limits who say oversized RVs, large busses and conversion vans are taking up too much space and for too long.

Unfortunately, as economic conditions deteriorate more Americans than ever will be choosing to live in their vehicles.

In fact,”car life” is now being hailed by many on social media as an even cheaper alternative to “van life”…

YouTuber Michael Hickey – likely kicked out of his parent’s basement – built a bed in his 2009 Kia Rio. He said this option allows him to “live rent-free” and travel the country.

In the video, Hickey said the best parking lots to sleep in are ones owned by Cracker Barrel restaurants. He purchases groceries from supermarkets and prepares them right there in the parking lot on a portable stove.

As for showering, he uses a network of Planet Fitness gyms to exercise and shower.

To make money, he works side-gigs, such as DoorDash and Instacart.

Hickey is not alone. Tons of other Gen-Zers post their stories of living in cars on YouTube.

Did you ever imagine that we would see a day when being homeless and living in your vehicle would be considered “trendy”?

But this is where we are at.

Millions of those at the bottom of the economic food chain are trying to make the best of a very bad situation.

Unfortunately, life in America is going to become a lot more harsh during the very painful years that are ahead.

So what will young people start doing once “van life” and “car life” become too expensive?

There is only one more step down, and that is living in the streets…

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Authored by Terri Wu and Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Through the back door of a New York City building, some of the most potent American business leaders were smuggled in for a tabletop exercise simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The secrecy made it look like they were “in a witness protection program because they were so concerned about retaliation from the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who hosted the exercise in September 2023.

“If this retaliation is how the CCP will treat business partners in peacetime, think about how it would act in war—and the ramifications to our economy, especially our critical supply chains, including pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, in a Taiwan invasion scenario,” Mr. Gallagher told The Epoch Times.

The idea of the tabletop simulation stemmed from his exchanges with financial executives.

One told him there is “zero” chance that the CCP will invade Taiwan. Another said the United States will never sanction China, even if it invaded the self-governed island.

“It’s clear that, in many cases, Washington and Wall Street are living in two different worlds. One is the real world, the other a fantasy land,” said Mr. Gallagher.

The New York City simulation didn’t focus on military conflicts but on areas of economic warfare such as shipping routes, supply chains, and money transfers.

“We saw that if China were to invade Taiwan, the losses across our financial system would dwarf the write-downs taken at the outset of the Russia–Ukraine war. The entire U.S. economy and banking system would be imperiled,” Mr. Gallagher said.

“Equity markets would drop precipitously as global shipping lanes closed, shipping insurance premiums skyrocketed, supply chains broke down, and the specter of global conflict grew. Americans would see their pensions shrink and their bank accounts hemorrhage cash.”

The wargame participants—financial, pharmaceutical, and mining executives—walked away from the simulation with a different understanding: The United States must immediately prepare an economic contingency plan to reduce critical supply chain dependence on China and curb Beijing’s access to U.S. funds to support its aggressions.

In addition, the United States can’t afford to rely on economic means alone to deter China from taking Taiwan by force; credible military deterrence is a must-have.

“I think the executives who took part left aware of the danger, but many remain afraid to speak out,” Mr. Gallagher said.

Restricting U.S. outbound investment to China is a top priority of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, also known as the Select Committee on the CCP.

When such investments help Chinese companies develop technology that the regime then uses to advance its military capabilities, the panel views it as the United States funding its own destruction.

With bipartisan support, the Senate has passed language addressing this issue, initially as an amendment to the 2024 annual defense act. A similar bill passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) left the language out of the yearly defense act that was passed in December 2023; an updated version for a House floor vote is expected this year.

In addition to addressing China-related economic security issues, several of the select committee’s Taiwan policy recommendations were included in the 2024 annual defense act, including a new program of military cybersecurity cooperation with Taiwan and increased congressional oversight of weapons sales to the island to reduce backlog.

Bipartisan Product

Since its launch last January, the Select Committee on the CCP has demonstrated a rare bipartisan culture on the Hill.

Chairman Gallagher and the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), have spoken in lockstep during hearings and often held press conferences together.

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), a committee member, said the two leaders have been accommodating to different views.

The group’s economic policy recommendations released in December had the endorsement of all but one member.

“Our product is a consensus work product,” Mr. Johnson told The Epoch Times.

Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), another select committee member, also credits Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi for leading “the most substantive, bipartisan work in Congress.”

In an email to The Epoch Times, she highlighted a roundtable event the panel held in her home state of Iowa regarding the CCP’s agricultural theft as an example of how the panel used “firsthand knowledge” and “real experiences” to “craft the policy blueprint to ensure the U.S. is competing with China rather than enabling their malign and destructive behavior.”

The committee’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed by its subject of focus: the CCP.

Chinese propaganda articles label the committee an “anti-China pioneer” and often report its action as another “restless move.”

A September 2023 paper published by China’s Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy warned that the committee might transform into a “center coordinating China policies for all parts of the U.S. Congress.”

The article warned that the panel could raise the American public’s awareness of the China threat, which it labeled “misinformation.”

To some committee staff members, criticism from the CCP is an endorsement of their work. A sign in their office says: “Have we worked harder than our CCP counterparts today?”

A Deal Contingent on Taiwan

Since the inception of the Select Committee on the CCP, Mr. Gallagher has repeatedly warned that the current timeframe is the “window of maximum danger” related to Taiwan.

However, some analysts don’t view military conflict over Taiwan as inevitable.

If regime leader Xi Jinping sees hope in a “peaceful unification” of Taiwan, he may be incentivized to hold off an invasion, said Bonnie Glaser, a managing director for the German Marshall Fund think tank.

Shi Shan, a China expert with decades of journalist experience both in the mainland and in Hong Kong, said that view was “correct in theory.” He uses an alias to avoid reprisals from the CCP.

Mr. Shi has learned from CCP insiders that Xi has to deliver Taiwan to his Party within a certain timeframe in exchange for his lifetime CCP leadership—a prize, that if achieved, would elevate him to the level of Mao Zedong, who established communist China in 1949 and drove his political enemies to Taiwan.

Xi began his third term last year after removing the two-term or 10-year limit in China’s Constitution. The constitutional amendment was passed in March 2018. At the 19th Party Congress a year ago, Xi persuaded CCP senior leaders to extend his reign by promising them Taiwan, Mr. Shi said.

In his 2024 New Year address, the 70-year-old communist leader reiterated that the unification of China is a “historical inevitability.”

Mr. Gallagher and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, said that when authoritarian dictators warn the world about their plans, we should heed them.

Mr. Shi told The Epoch Times more about Xi’s inflexible internal situation.

“Xi is preparing China for a war with Taiwan. Because of that, the Party needed a leader beyond the previous term limit. If he gives up on the goal, the disagreeing forces within the Party will hold him accountable because he has made himself an exception and made the economy suffer. He has so much on the line that he cannot change his course.”

Xi has been working toward the goal for a while.

Read more here...

After coming up short, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his top aides are reportedly having internal discussions over when and how he should drop out of the 2024 presidential race, according to Bloomberg, citing people briefed on the campaign's conversations.

The discussions are fluid, with the governor and his wife, Casey, as the final decision-makers, but one possibility is to leave the race before voting starts in New Hampshire on Tuesday, January 23 to avoid an embarrassing third-place finish. -Bloomberg

According to a new poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire, DeSantis has just 6% of the state's Republican vote, vs. Trump at 50% and Haley at 39%.

Speaking of CNN, Jake Tapper is hearing the same thing as Bloomberg...

Sources tell me Gov Ron DeSantis is about to suspend his presidential campaign -- imminently.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 21, 2024

That said, ABC News is reporting that DeSantis' team is 'pushing back' on speculation that he may soon suspend his White House bid, after the Florida governor canceled high-profile scheduled appearances on NBC, CNN and WMUR, a New Hampshire TV station. He was also slated to spend most of the weekend campaigning with his allied super PAC, Never Back Down, but is instead returning to New Hampshire on Sunday for an event in Manchester.

"The media hits were canceled due to a scheduling issue and will be rescheduled. The governor will be traveling Sunday morning with the campaign and has public events scheduled Sunday evening through Tuesday in NH," campaign spokesperson Bryan Griffin posted Saturday on X.

The media hits were canceled due to a scheduling issue and will be rescheduled.

The governor will be traveling Sunday morning with the campaign and has public events scheduled Sunday evening through Tuesday in NH.

— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) January 20, 2024

Developing...

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman spontaneously ripped into fellow Democrat James Carville, telling the seasoned pundit and former Bill Clinton '92 lead strategist to "shut the fuck up" about President Biden's increasingly dim prospects for re-election.     

The most slovenly goon to ever grace the Senate leveled his profane attack in a Politico interview published on Wednesday. Politico reminded him that, a few months back, he'd predicted Biden would win Pennsylvania's 19 electoral college votes -- but that Biden's standing in the Keystone State had slipped, with Trump leading in multiple polls. 

After first saying there's plenty of time between now and the election and that's he's not worried, Fetterman opened fire on the 79-year-old quasi-reptilian election sage from Louisiana:   

"While there are Democrats that are being very critical about the president. ... I’ll use this [as] another opportunity to tell James Carville to shut the fuck up.

Like I said, my man hasn’t been relevant since grunge was a thing. And I don’t know why he believes it’s helpful to say these kinds of things about an incredibly difficult circumstance with an incredibly strong and decent and excellent president. I’ll never understand that."

When Politico gave Carville a chance to respond to Fetterman's fusillade, he fired back with dry wit:

Asked if he’d like to respond, Carville said other Democratic senators “apparently haven’t gotten the memo yet” that he’s not relevant. “His colleague Sen. Casey asked me to host a fundraiser with him last week,” he said. “Sen. Brown asked me to go to Cleveland to campaign with him.” Of Fetterman, he added: “I’m glad he’s feeling better.”

Last winter, Fetterman was hospitalized for six weeks over his severe depression. He'd previously suffered a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign, in which he officially defeated Donald Trump-endorsed TV doctor Mehmet Oz. 

In September, Carville dropped his own F-bomb to warn fellow Democrats against keeping Biden on the top of the 2024 ticket.

“Let’s assume the election was November the third of this year and the candidates are Joe Biden, the Democrat, Donald Trump, Republican Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan, No Labels, and Cornel West. Trump would be a betting favorite. If I told you I would give you even money, you would not take that bet. All right. And so somebody better wake the fuck up!"

James Carville "Let's assume the election was November 3rd. Trump would be a betting favorite. Somebody better wake the fuck up"

Bill Maher calls Joe "Ruth Bader Biden" pic.twitter.com/H6UznJJRLu

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) September 25, 2023

Carville's outline of the 2024 field had a glaring omission: independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who's grabbing a hefty 22% share in three-way polling against Biden and Trump, and beating both of them outright among independents, according to Quinnipiac.  

A December Bloomberg/Morning Consult Pro survey found Trump is beating Biden in seven surveyed battleground states: North Carolina (+11), Georgia (+7), Wisconsin (+6), Nevada (+5), Michigan (+4), Arizona (+3) and Fetterman's Pennsylvania (+1). The survey used a ballot that included Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein.  

In his Politico interview, Fetterman also took a swipe at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he'd previously described as "running for president right now" but without the "guts to announce it." Fetterman said it's odd for Newsom to debate DeSantis, and to "make a very splash visit to China when the leaders are actually coming to your very own state" or to "[make] donations to obscure South Carolinian politicians." 

Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Next year's competition for control of the U.S. Senate will be a critical battle as Democrats defend more seats than Republicans.

The Democrats currently control the upper chamber by the slimmest of margins, 51–49.

Whoever wins the Senate will control the legislation before the floor, as well as accept or reject judicial and executive nominees, who help shape policy.

Democrat strategist Mark Mellman predicts the Democrats could keep the Senate if the GOP puts up the same candidates that lost in crucial races in 2022. But, he told The Epoch Times, things are up in the air until the primaries are over.

The following are the nine crucial races that could determine who will take control of the Senate come Jan. 3, 2025.

1. Arizona

In this swing state, it could ultimately be a three-way race between incumbent independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat Rep. Reuben Gallego, and former journalist and 2022 GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Other Republicans in the primary include Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, business consultant George Nicholson, and mechanical engineer Brian Wright.

President Joe Biden won The Grand Canyon state by just 0.3 percentage points in the 2020 election.

Ms. Lake is dominating the GOP primary, according to polling averages by RealClearPolitics.

However, most polls show both Ms. Lake and Mr. Lamb losing out in the general election to Mr. Gallego—who has been in the House since 2015. Ms. Sinema, the incumbent, is polling below 20 percent. The former Democrat switched her affiliation to independent in December 2022.

"I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington and formally registering as an Arizona Independent," Ms. Sinema stated in a post on Twitter at the time.

2. Ohio

While Republicans have won Ohio in the past three of five presidential elections, incumbent Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown won re-election in 2018, at the same time the GOP expanded its majority in the Senate.

Mr. Brown, who is known to be a blue-collar Democrat, is running for re-election, setting up a potentially tight race. He has been in the Senate since 2007.

Republicans who have declared a run include Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, state senator Matt Dolan, and former car dealership owner and 2022 Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.

Mr. Moreno has been endorsed by Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), while Mr. Dolan has been endorsed by Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy Haslam and his wife, Dee.

On his Truth Social platform on Dec. 19, former President Donald Trump endorsed Mr. Moreno, saying "a successful political outsider like Bernie" is needed to beat Mr. Brown.

Despite Mr. LaRose's lack of major endorsements, he is leading in the GOP primary, according to current polling averages by RealClearPolitics.

President Trump won the Buckeye State by about 8 percentage points in 2020, roughly the same as his 2016 win over Hillary Clinton.

Most polls show Mr. Brown leading in a general election matchup, according to FiveThirtyEight.

3. Pennsylvania

Incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey is running for re-election, but could face a tough race against David McCormick, who is the only Republican that has declared.

Mr. McCormick has garnered endorsements from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mt.), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the fundraising arm of the Senate GOP.

Mr. McCormick narrowly lost the 2022 GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania to Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor that went on to lose the general election to Sen. John Fetterman, a progressive Democrat.

President Biden won the Keystone State by 1.17 percentage points in 2020.

Early polls show Mr. Casey leading Mr. McCormick in a general election matchup.

4. Montana

This red state could be a Republican pickup as the expected nominee, retired Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, could unseat incumbent Democrat Sen. Jon Tester. 

Mr. Tester won re-election in 2018 by 3.55 percentage points against now-Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Republican, who has also expressed a possible run.

President Trump easily won the Treasure State in 2020 with close to 57 percent of the vote.

There has only been one poll conducted for this race in the past few months, from Emerson, which showed Mr. Tester leading Mr. Sheehy by 4 percentage points.

5. Nevada

Democrat Sen. Jacky Rosen is running for re-election in a state President Biden won in 2020 by just 2.39 percentage points.

Republicans who have jumped into the primary so far include Army veteran Sam Brown, who suffered burns to his face from a roadside bomb during his service in Afghanistan in 2008; and former state assemblyman Jim Marchant, who unsuccessfully ran for secretary of state in 2022 and Congress in 2020.

Mr. Brown has received endorsements from Sen. John Thune from South Dakota, as well as Americans for Prosperity, the largest conservative grassroots organization in the United States.

President Biden narrowly won the Silver State by just under 2.4 percentage points in 2020 whereas President Trump lost it by almost that much in the 2016 race.

The most recent poll, commissioned by the NRSC, shows Mr. Brown trailing Ms. Rosen in a general election head-to-head by 5 percentage points.

6. West Virginia

With Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin not running for re-election, it is likely the Mountain State will flip to the GOP.

Gov. Jim Justice is the early favorite and likely winner, with big endorsements coming in from President Trump and Mr. McConnell.

Mr. Justice does, however, face a handful of other candidates in the primary, most notably Rep. Alex Mooney.

The only Democrat in the race at the moment is U.S. Marine Corps veteran and political organizer Zachary Shrewsbury.

President Trump overwhelmingly won the state in 2020 with almost 69 percent of the vote.

There have been no polls conducted since Mr. Manchin announced in November he will not seek a third term, but he has floated the idea of an independent run for president.

7. Michigan

Democrat Sen. Debbie Stabenow is running for re-election, but she's up against Rep. Elissa Slotkin in the primary, who is winning in any matchup against the GOP candidates, according to the latest polling averages from FiveThirtyEight. Actor Hill Harper is also in the Democrat primary.

The race is still considered a likely tossup as the GOP field includes former Reps. Mike Rogers and Peter Meijer, as well as former Detroit Police Chief James Craig.

President Biden won the Wolverine State by 2.78 percentage points in 2020.

8. Wisconsin

Incumbent Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin is running for re-election, after winning her second term in 2018 by almost 11 percentage points.

Republicans who have entered the race include county supervisor Stacey Klein; Rejani Raveendran, a 40-year old college student who is the president of her university Republicans chapter; and retired Army Reserve Sgt. Maj. Patrick Schaefer-Wicke.

Notable Republicans—including former Gov. Scott Walker, Reps. Mike Gallagher, Tom Tiffany, and Bryan Steil—have declined to throw their hat into the ring.

President Biden narrowly won the Badger State by 0.63 percentage points, or 20,682 votes, in 2020.

No up-to-date polls about the race have been published, but it's looking like a tough hill to climb for Republicans.

9. New Jersey

This race is more about which Democrat will win the seat if embattled incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez can't hold onto it.

Mr. Menendez, who has been in the Senate since 2007 and in Congress since 1993, is facing federal corruption-related charges.

He faces big primary challengers in Democrats Tammy Murphy, wife of Gov. Phil Murphy, and Rep. Andy Kim.

Read more here...

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: As we approach the end of the year, let’s take a step back, look at the Big Picture, and put 2023 into perspective so we can better understand what may come next.

Significant financial, economic, political, cultural, and geopolitical developments occurred in 2023.

On the cultural front, 2023 may be the year that the tide started to shift against the woke insanity.

BlackRock’s Fink dropped ESG. Woke movies continue to bomb at theaters. Bud Light, Target, and Disney continue to feel the pain of deliberately alienating their customer base.

What’s your take on the cultural developments in 2023?

Doug Casey: There are always reactions to major trends. These things are worth noting, but considering the virulence of the woke movement, the reaction has been tepid. There’s always a rearguard fighting for things as they are. And that’s wonderful because the Wokesters want to overturn the entire culture much the same way as the Jacobins overturned it in revolutionary France, the Bolsheviks overturned the culture in Russia, the Red Guards in China, or Pol Pot did in Cambodia.

The Wokesters are potentially just as dangerous because their way of thinking is everywhere in the West.

They’re similar to the movements I’ve just mentioned in that they’re stridently against free speech, free thought, free markets, tradition, and limited government—nothing new there. But they’ve weaponized gender and race as well. They’re virulent, humorless, and puritanical. They see themselves as the wave of the future, but they’ve only repackaged the notions of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.

My view is that the Wokesters hate humanity and hate themselves. They’re dishonest, arrogant, and entitled. Look at the current scandal involving the diversity-hire presidents at Harvard, Penn, and MIT. They’re shameful embarrassments. The fact their boards of trustees installed these fools shows how deep the rot goes.

The Woke have ingrained psychological/spiritual aberrations.

They don’t just control academia, finance, entertainment, and the media. They also dominate the State’s apparatus. Which means they basically have the law on their side.

Perhaps ESG is being de-emphasized by Blackrock, the new vampire squid, but that’s only because they fear losing money more than they value their beliefs. The more pernicious DEI remains a major cultural trend.

Where will it end?

Wokism is more than a passing fad. There’s a good chance it will end with a violent confrontation between people who have culturally conservative views and those who want to destroy Western Civilization and upset the nature of society as we know it.

International Man: 2023 was a year of major geopolitical developments.

It became evident to even the mainstream media that the war in the Ukraine was not going well for NATO.

There was also the Hamas attack and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Azerbaijan defeated Armenia to reclaim a long-disputed territory.

Saudi Arabia welcomed Syria back into the Arab League, ended the war in Yemen, restored diplomatic relations with Iran, joined the BRICS countries, and expanded its economic ties with China.

These are just a few of the most prominent geopolitical events of 2023.

What do you make of the geopolitical situation and where things are heading?

Doug Casey: The end of US hegemony over the world in all areas is becoming obvious. The world resents being bullied and controlled by Washington, DC.

They realize that the US government is bankrupt and is living entirely on printed money. Its military is bloated and more expensive than the US can afford.

While it’s bloated, it’s also being gutted, unable to recruit new soldiers and sailors. It’s easy to see why that’s the case. They see pointless wars fomented everywhere. The type of people who traditionally join the military are disgusted by the woke memes circulating through the services. White males, who have always been the backbone of the military, are appalled at being actively discriminated against.

US hegemony is ending financially, economically, and militarily.

It’s obvious when you see that Biden and Harris, two utterly incompetent, ineffectual fools, are the nominal heads of the government. Not to mention all the degraded and psychologically damaged people in the cabinet. Of course, nobody has any respect for the US anymore.

The US hegemony of the last hundred years is on its way out. And as the old order changes, there are going to be upsets. The US will leave a vacuum that will be filled by other forces.

In fact, the US Government is the biggest danger to the world today. It’s not providing order. By sticking its nose into everyone else’s business everywhere, it’s promoting chaos. Its 800+ bases around the world are provocations. The carrier groups that it has wandering around are sitting ducks with today’s technology. The US is the main source of risk in the world, not safety.

US military spending is really just corporate welfare for the five big “defense” corporations, which build weapons suited for fighting the last war or maybe the war before the last war. For instance, a missile frigate or destroyer guarding a carrier might carry 100 vertically-launched anti-aircraft missiles at $2 million each. Each missile might succeed in shooting down a $10,000 drone. But what happens when the enemy launches 200 drones at once? The chances are the US loses a $2 billion destroyer, if not a carrier.

The US government is finding that they’re not only disliked but disrespected by countries and people all over the world. They’re increasingly viewed as a paper tiger. Or the Wizard of Oz. When they lose the fear factor, it’s game over.

International Man: In 2023, the US continued the trend of more political polarization.

What were the most consequential events on the US political front, and what do you think comes next?

Doug Casey: Let me reemphasize that the Jacobins who control Washington, DC, have the same psychological makeup as past revolutionaries I’ve mentioned.

These people are incapable of changing their minds or reforming. I think they’ll do absolutely anything they can to retain power.

Meanwhile, traditional Americans in red states see that Trump is being railroaded with lawfare to derail his campaign. They’re angrier than ever, justifiably. The red people and the blue people really hate each other at this point—and can’t talk to each other.

The country has been completely demoralized as traditional values have been washed away. It’s now very unstable.

The coming election, should we actually have one, will be not just a political but a cultural contest. Culture wars are especially dangerous in the midst of a financial collapse and economic collapse.

International Man: The projected annual interest expense on the federal debt hit $1 trillion for the first time in 2023.

Americans are still paying for the rampant currency debasement during the Covid hysteria as the price of groceries, insurance, rent, and most other things continued to rise in 2023.

It looks like a recession is on the horizon.

What are your thoughts on economic developments in 2023 and your outlook for the months ahead?

Doug Casey: As an amateur student of history, it seems to me that the US has been moving away from the founding principles that made it unique for over a hundred years. I’m 77. I’ve watched it happen firsthand for much of that time.

The trend has been accelerating.

The country is heading towards a massive crisis because it’s lost its philosophical footing. The result is going to be a really serious depression. I call it the Greater Depression.

The spread between the haves who live in multi-million dollar houses and the have-nots who live in tents isn’t new. After all, Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” What’s new is that the middle class is being impoverished. What’s left of the middle class is deeply in debt—student debt, credit card debt, car loan debt, mortgage debt. And if they’re not lucky enough to have a house with mortgage debt, they’re renting. And rents have gone up so rapidly that if the average guy has an unforeseen $500 expense, he can’t pay it.

That augurs poorly for consumption. It’s said, idiotically, that the American economy rests on consumption. It’s idiotic because it should be said that it rests on production. But I’m not sure the US produces that much anymore.

Most of the people who “work” basically sit at desks and shuffle papers. Few actively create real wealth.

On top of that, the country is vastly over-financialized.

The bond market has already largely collapsed, but it can get a lot worse as interest rates head back up to the levels that they were in the early 1980s and beyond.

Much lower stock prices are in the cards, both because of high interest rates and because people won’t be consuming such massive quantities of corporate produce.

The real estate market rests on a foundation of debt. It can easily go bust as interest rates go up. We’re already seeing this with office buildings across the country. And, of course, these office buildings are financed by banks. Banks are going to see a lot of defaults on loans they’ve made.

Meanwhile, bank capital invested in bonds has eroded because bond prices fall in proportion to the degree rise in interest rates, which have gone from close to zero to 5% or 6%. If banks had to mark their loans and capital investments to the market, most would already be bankrupt.

Can the government paper all these things over by printing yet more money? I suppose.

But at some point very soon, the dollar will lose value very rapidly; it will be treated like a hot potato. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

International Man: This year, we saw the price of gold hit a record high, uranium reached $81.25 per pound, and Bitcoin more than doubled as it entered a new bull market. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up around 21% year to date as of writing.

What are your thoughts on what happened in the financial markets in 2023 and what could come next?

Doug Casey: Unfortunately, the US central bank, the Fed, has a gigantic amount of influence over the markets.

They can employ “quantitative easing,” which means printing money—and “quantitative tightening,” which means decreasing the money and artificially raising interest rates.

They have many hundreds of Ph.D. economists on staff, but all these people operate on phony Keynesian theories of the way the world works. The consequences of building an economic system on a foundation of paper money and gigantic amounts of debt are potentially catastrophic.

At this point, the economy’s on the razor edge. If they push the print button and hold it down too long, we could go into a runaway inflation. Or, to tamp down inflation, they might raise interest rates and contract the money supply, which might set off a 1929-style credit collapse.

We’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis at this point. And I don’t believe it’s a question of a soft landing or a hard landing. It’s a question of how devastating the crash landing will be.

I hope they can wring one more cycle out of all this because I personally prefer good times to bad times, even if they’re artificial good times, because the bad times are going to be very real.

*  *  *

Doug Casey’s forecasts helped investors prepare and profit from: 1) the S&L blowup in the ’80s and ’90s, 2) the 2001 tech stock collapse, 3) the 2008 financial crisis, 4) and now… Doug’s sounding the alarms about a catastrophic event. One he believes could soon strike. To help you prepare and profit, Doug and his team have prepared a special video. Click here to watch now.

Authored by Matthew Smith via Doug Casey's Take substack,

The Great Depression was a well-executed plan to seize assets, impoverish the population, and remake society. What comes next is worse...

A recent book by David Webb sheds new light on exactly what happened during the Great Depression. In Webb’s view, it was a set up.

Webb is a successful former investment banker and hedge fund manager with experience at the highest levels of the financial system. He published The Great Taking a few months ago, and recently supplemented it with a video documentary. Thorough, concise, comprehensible and FREE. Why? Because he wants everyone to understand what’s being done.

The Great Taking describes the roadmap to collapse the system, suppress the people, and seize all your assets. And it includes the receipts.

You Already Own Nothing

Webb’s book illustrates, among other things, how changes in the Uniform Commercial Code converted asset ownership into a security entitlement. The “entitlement” designation made personal property a mere contractual claim. The “entitled” person is a “beneficial” owner, but not the legal one.

In the event a financial institution is insolvent, the legal owner is the “entity that controls the security with a security interest.” In essence, client assets belong to the banks. But it’s much worse than that. This isn’t simply a matter of losing your cash to a bank bail-in. The entire financial system has been wired for a controlled demolition.

Webb describes in detail how the trap was set, and how the Great Depression provides precedent. In 1933, FDR declared a “Bank Holiday.” By executive order, banks were closed. Later, only those approved by the Fed were allowed to reopen. 

Thousands of banks were left to die. People with money in those disfavored institutions lost all of it, as well as anything they’d financed (houses, cars, businesses) that they now couldn’t pay for. Then, a few “chosen” banks consolidated all the assets in the system.

Centralization and Systemic Risk

As Webb shows, the cake has been baked for years. But this week came a sign it’s coming out of the oven. Last Monday, Bloomberg admitted that measures taken to ostensibly “protect the system” actually amplify risk.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, G20 'leaders' mandated all standardized Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs), ostensibly to reduce counter party risk and increase market transparency. The best known CCP in the US is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which processes trillions of dollars of securities transactions each day. 

Before 2012, OTC derivative trades were bi-lateral and counterparty risk was managed by parties to a transaction. When doing business directly with other firms, each had to make sure it was dealing with reliable parties. If they had a bad reputation or were not creditworthy, counterparties could consider them toxic and shut them out of trades. This, according to the wise G20 leadership, was too risky.

With the introduction of central clearing mandates, counterparty risk was shifted via CCPs away from the firms doing the deal to the system itself. Creditworthiness and reputation were replaced with collateral and complex models. 

Brokers, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, corporations, insurance companies and other so-called "clearing parties" participate in the market by first posting collateral in the form of Initial Margin (IM) with the CCP. It's through this IM and a separate and much smaller Default Fund (DF) held at the CCP that counterparty risk is managed.

To ‘Mutualise’ Losses

Shifting risk from individual parties to the collective is a recipe for trouble. But, as explained in a recent report from the BIS, it's worse than that. The structure of CCPs themselves can cause "Margin Spirals" and "wrong-way risk" in the event of market turbulence.

In flight-to-safety episodes, CCPs hike margin requirements.  According to the BIS,

"Sudden and large IM hikes force deleveraging by derivative counterparties and can precipitate fire sales that lead to higher volatility and additional IM hikes in so-called margin spirals."

We've already gotten a taste of what this can look like.  Similar margin spirals "occurred in early 2020 (Covid-19) and 2022 (invasion of Ukraine), reflecting the risk-sensitive nature of IM models."

Government Bonds as a source of trouble

The second area of systemic risk is the dual use of government bonds as both collateral and as underlying assets in derivatives contracts. Volatility in the government bond market can lead to a demand for more collateral underlying the derivatives markets precisely when government bond prices are declining. Falling bond prices erode the value of the existing IM.  Collateral demands skyrocket just as the value of current and would-be collateral is evaporating.

Again, the BIS:

Wrong-way risk dynamics appeared to play a role during the 2010–11 Irish sovereign debt crisis. At that time, investors liquidated their positions in Irish government bonds after a CCP raised the haircuts on such bonds when used as collateral. This led to lower prices of Irish government bonds triggering further haircuts, further position closures and ultimately a downward price spiral.

Designed to fail

The BIS doesn’t admit it, but Webb says the CCPs themselves are deliberately under-capitalized and designed to fail. The start-up of a new CCP is planned and pre-funded. When that happens, it’ll be the “secured creditors” who will take control of ALL the underlying collateral.

Once more, the BIS:

…to mutualise potential default losses in excess of IM, CCPs also require their members to contribute to a default fund (DF). As a result, CCPs are in command of large pools of liquid assets.

That “large pool of liquid assets” is the full universe of traded securities.

In a market collapse, the stocks and bonds you think you own will be sucked into the default fund (DF) as additional collateral for the evaporating value of the derivatives complex. This is “The Great Taking”.

Buffett’s famous line rings true: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”  Most of us are on the verge of learning that we’re the ones without any clothes.

If you haven’t read “The Great Taking” or watched the documentary, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink and watch it now: