Just before I went on air with Tucker last night, word came that the directors of the FBI and National Intelligence needed to rush onto our screens right now with an emergency news conference on "election security". In a country where judges extend mail-in deadlines at random and postal workers dump completed ballots in the trash and multiple vote forms are sent unsolicited to addresses of foreign nationals, "election security" is a joke of which all US citizens should be ashamed. As I've said on Rush and elsewhere, the looming chaos of November 3rd is a conscious choice.
Nevertheless, this brace of national-security hotshots, John Ratcliffe and Christopher Wray, somehow felt obliged to seize the nation's telly screens and inform Americans that Iran and Russia were spreading "disinformation", a hitherto foreign-intelligence concept now domesticated, mainstreamed, and turned on the American people every two years:
The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S. officials...
The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as "voter files," some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were "in possession of all your information" and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.
After the last half-decade, my instinct is not to believe a single word the FBI says about anything, and to support any candidate who vows to dissolve the bureau and start from scratch. Setting aside the Strzok-Page-Comey-McCabe stuff, this is a national police agency that devotes more resources to investigating a Nascar garage-door pull-rope than to a Hunter Biden laptop bursting with oligarch money-laundering and alleged kiddie porn: I would be surprised if such bizarre priorities could get them elected as village constable in the average New Hampshire township. Yet we are now assured, at a time when Big Social are more powerful than any government on the planet and are openly suppressing one of the two presidential campaigns, that the big problem is mullahs posing as "Proud Boys".
Yeah, sure, whatever.
~The revealing line in the Washington Post story above is the one about "data from digital databases known as 'voter files', some of which are commercially available". Because thirty-one states have not merely "voter registration" per se but "voter registration" as Democrat, Republican or independent, there is as a practical matter no such thing as a "secret ballot" as that term is understood in the rest of the "free world". My postmistress, for example, knows from the election flyers she puts in the boxes each morning which way pretty well everyone in town votes. So do the parties, so do the grifter consultants, so do a multiplicity of other groups selling the info back and forth on such a scale that it would be the work of moments for Russia, Iran or the South Sandwich Islands to get a piece of the action. Maybe even China, a "foreign actor" conspicuous by its absence in the so-called "emergency" announcement last night.
America could rid itself of such shenanigans by moving to a system of genuinely secret ballot. Chances of that happening? Don't make me laugh. The Deep State, the media, and Jeffrey Toobin's poor overZoomed penis are all prepping the battle-space for chaos-as-coup-cover on November 3rd.
~Funniest line of the night, which had me and my makeup lady convulsed in laughter, was when Byron York came on just after the super-spooks and remarked that Iran and Russia were planning to "sow discord".
In America? Hey, take a number and get in line, you loser ayatollahs. Antifa, #BLM, Pennsylvania judges, Facebook, Twitter, woke corporations, 1619 peddlers, Wendy's burners, Macy's looters, China-shilling basketball players, lockdown-crazed governors, virtue-signaling rural Vermont school boards ...and way way way down the back a grand ayatollah from Qom wishing his Proud Boy bovver boots and Fred Perry shirt didn't clash with his turban.
~When the intelligence bigshots announced their concerns about "foreign actors" interfering in the US election, I confess my first thought was of Sacha Baron Cohen, a British subject and practising thespian whose silver-screen set-up of Rudy Giuliani was yesterday seized on with glee by the Blue Cheka.
This is the problem with attempts to criminalize "disinformation": Anyone on the planet under any normal understanding of freedom of expression is entitled to promote his view of the US elections, whether it's a London luvvie or an Isfahan imam. The fevers about "disinformation" are intended to destroy confidence in the election process itself - indeed, in perceived reality itself - and are far more disturbing.
~I am informed (by an EIB executive honcho thanking me for my ballyhooing the day before) that the special Rush/Trump edition of America's Number One radio show a fortnight ago attracted an audience of fifty million listeners. It was certainly a unique and memorable conversation and more than deserving of such a spectacular audience.
What's amazing, however, is that, if you believe the polls, that number is more than all the Trump voters in the republic. For example, on a turnout model of approximately 120 million voters (and I wouldn't be surprised if it were well south of that), last week's New York Times poll has no more than 49 million Americans voting for Trump; last week's Harris poll for The Hill finds no more than 48 million willing to plump for him.
Is it really the case that a couple of million Biden voters tuned in to Rush just to have their low view of the Trumpster confirmed?
Or is it that the polls are total bollocks?
Yesterday Obama campaigned for the week-lidded Joe in Philadelphia. If the Biden campaign believed the polls, Barack would be stumping in Texas - or Wyoming.
~After the "emergency" news conference, Tucker and I mused on masks - and on Covid as useful cover for this weird election. Click below to watch:
~We opened The Mark Steyn Club three-and-a-half years ago, and I'm thrilled by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. My only regret is that we didn't launch it eighteen years ago, but better late than never. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
Oh, and if you're a Welshman or Victorian seriously chafing under house arrest without end, there's no better way to cock a snook at the lockdown than by booking a berth on our Covid-delayed Third Annual Steyn Cruise sailing the Med next autumn - and with the Trump-pardoned Conrad Black, Michele Bachmann, John O'Sullivan and Douglas Murray among our shipmates. We'll be attempting some seaboard versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Tales for Our Time, our Sunday Poem and other favorite features. If you're minded to give it a go, don't leave it too late: as with most travel and accommodations, the price is more favorable the earlier you book - and, if the lockdown ever does gets lifted, why use your newfound freedom of movement just to visit the county fair or see X-Men 47 at the reopened multiplex when you can bestride the world like a cruising collossus?
I'll be back here tomorrow with the weekend edition of The Mark Steyn Show. Hope you'll tune in.
