The two major presidential campaigns are certainly taking on very different characters, aren’t they? Yes, there are polls saying all kinds of things. Kamala Harris is up in Georgia, Donald Trump is up in Wisconsin … whatever. By now, you should know that the polls don’t really mean much. Polling as an industry has taken a beating from societal trends. A better prognosticating tool than the polls, now that we’re just about 10 days out from the Nov. 5 election, is the words and actions of the candidates. Those will tell you how it’s going. And the two sides are throwing off dissimilar shades of light, which is the subject of at least some of this edition of the 5QT. 1. Kamala’s Calling Out the Crazies It’s not that this is something new. In fact, we’ve had this ever since the beginning of the 2024 presidential campaign. But the “assassination prep” verbiage coming off Team Kamala is at a level of overdrive we haven’t seen just yet. My last column talked about that idiotic smear article by pond-scum hack Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, and how utterly unpersuasive it was that John Kelly was trotted out to accuse Trump of something he’d never bothered to mention in five and a half years of making allegations against his former boss. This had very little chance of moving the needle, because it was so obvious a Hail Mary pass and frankly it wasn’t all that big a deal even if Trump had said he wished he could have some loyal subordinates. In any event, as soon as the Atlantic ran with that bilge, the whole of the Propaganda Press spread it as wide and thin as they could, and then Harris used it to trash Trump as Literally Hitler You Guys. John Daniel Davidson at the Federalist summed this up awfully well: This is not just the normal heated rhetoric that comes out in the final weeks of a close presidential election. This is something else. It is at least a tacit call for violent resistance, for insurrection, and even for a third assassination attempt against Trump. It’s hard to overstate how reckless and dangerous this is two weeks before an election that Harris appears to be losing. Having staked out this rhetorical ground, what is she supposed to say if she loses the election? How is she supposed to concede? Will she come out and say, “Sorry everyone we tried hard to save America but now you must all live peacefully under the new Hitler?” She’s not going to say that. She can’t now. She’s going to call for resistance. “Patriotic resistance,” she might call it, but it will be coded as a call for street violence or worse. After all, you don’t just accept a Hitler-like, fascist regime. You fight it any way you can. That rhetoric led to a couple of assassination attempts on Trump (that we know of). After the first one, the Democrats staged a coup that replaced Joe Biden, who had been the chief merchant of assassination prep, with Harris. Make what you want of that timing, but the ginning up of the crazies to get Trump hardly abated at all. RedState’s Teri Christoph notes you’re simply seeing a continuation of what they’ve been trying to put together all along: The subtext isn’t hard for us sane people to grasp, namely that Kamala is sinking fast and isn’t capable of stopping it, but her words aren’t meant for us; her words are meant for her unhinged base in the hopes that they’ll see the words “Trump” and “Hitler” and take action. All of this despite the fact that Donald Trump was president for four years and nary a Nazi-like tactic was deployed during all of that time. The Atlantic article and Kamala’s “literally Hitler” rhetoric are trial balloons being floated for the next few days to see just how much outrage they can gin up ahead of her “closing argument” scheduled for next Tuesday. Kamala will reportedly make her last-ditch appeal to voters from the National Mall near the White House, and you can bet she, her advisors, and the Democrat Party elite are salivating over the idea that this fallacious line of attack will finally be Donald Trump’s undoing, whether literally or figuratively. Expect her speech next week to be filled with violent histrionics about Donald Trump being a “threat to democracy” because that’s all she’s got. Unless, of course, one of her followers decides to take matters into their own hands, as we’ve seen twice over the last few months. Let’s be honest here: Kamala would rather not have to do the hard work of being a good candidate who wins the election on her merits, and she doesn’t have the time or ability to pull off that feat, anyway. Someone else is going to have to save her at this point, and that’s what this most recent news cycle is all about. Davidson notes that what’s being laid in isn’t a winning electoral strategy; there probably isn’t one with a candidate this bad and a public so disgusted with the Democrats’ performance over the past four years. Instead, it’s a Hail Mary of a different, much more undemocratic kind. It’s a call for violence — either before the election, in hopes that three times’ the charm for a Trump assassination, or after, when the Antifa and BLM trash gets dumped out into the streets of the big blue cities to ring in another Trump presidency. Which has been my greatest fear all along, and it’s getting harder to deny the leadership of the Democrat machine is aiming for just that. 2. Tucker’s Duluth Manifesto On the other hand, Turning Point USA put on a raucous, spirited rally for Trump in Duluth, Georgia, this week at which there were several excellent speakers, including TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk and this guy (the whole speech runs 20 minutes and you really do want to block out the time to watch it): Carlson is correct on every point, and the imagery of a disappointed father coming home to bring discipline to an unruly household is particularly appropriate. This country has been utterly devoid of leadership for the past four years, and the problem is so acute that, as Carlson notes, it literally makes no difference who the Democrats nominate for president because everyone knows the nominee is a puppet. America is being run by a machine made up of faceless bureaucrats, political donors, scummy politicians, and radical operatives of various stripes, people who have a toxic contempt for the society they purport to rule and especially for the people in it. And that machine had succeeded for some time in attempting to marginalize the country’s majority into believing that we were somehow deviant or inferior. As Carlson notes in the speech, this fraud is melting away and the majority isn’t tolerating these radical aggressions against our cultural, political, and economic standards anymore. Which is why, as he notes in his opening, you have RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard lining up behind Trump, and the psychopaths Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol lining up behind Harris. People for whom political power is the be-all and end-all of life will pursue any path to it, and Cheney has certainly proven that. The whole speech is such a tremendous summation of the argument for Trump that, as Brandon Morse said, it didn’t just get the crowd going but actually inspired everybody who heard it. It’s full of righteous indignation, certainly. Every good political campaign at a time when three-quarters of the American people are dissatisfied with the nation’s direction should have a healthy dose of righteous indignation. But Carlson’s tour de force/summary argument for Trump is also loving, hopeful, and proud of the America that seeks to emerge from this torpid, underperforming doldrum the ruling class has imposed on us. You couldn’t get a clearer contrast between the two sides than you’ve seen this week, and you couldn’t get a stronger moral argument for sending Harris, Biden and the machine packing. 3. On Jen Rubin… Interestingly enough, of the handful of emails I received after yesterday’s column, it happened that my reference to Jen Rubin, who threw a fit over the fact that there wasn’t more of a media firestorm over that stupid Atlantic hit piece, was what generated the most reaction. Three separate people wrote to express agreement with my characterization of Rubin as an idiot, and to urge me to go a bit further. I don’t think this is because Rubin is a particularly important figure in her own right. I think it’s because she has come to represent something that is important. Let’s face it, Rubin is merely a Beltway moron. But she’s the Beltway moron version of a vast swath of middle-aged unmarried (or divorced) “career women” who spend their barren personal lives in a state of barely managed desperation and who will believe every psyop narrative thrown at them by the Propaganda Press to perpetuate that unhinged, arrogant, unaccountable, and anti-introspective mindset. Rubin says things every day that are provably untrue and is incapable of self-examination. If it was just Jen Rubin, there would be no reason to care. But that mindset is what creates the D+37 single female demographic. And our culture is being calibrated to perpetuate and grow that contingent. Men don’t want anything to do with the Jen Rubins of the world. And rightly so. But if you make enough of them, you’ll have tons of Democrat voters and no children. And your society will collapse. Jen Rubin, and what she represents, might literally be the destruction of America. And the machine is out to manufacture clones of hers by the millions. People get this, if perhaps instinctively, and that’s why she’s so unnerving to so many. 4. Anybody Surprised About Doug Emhoff? Do we have to call this utter douchebag the Second Gentleman? What we’ve all known for a while is now out in the open: Doug Emhoff‘s ex-girlfriend has spoken exclusively to DailyMail.com claiming that he slapped her in the face so hard she spun around at a 2012 celebrity event in France. The woman, a successful New York attorney, is remaining anonymous, but decided to speak out after Emhoff, Kamala Harris‘s husband, denied the claims through a spokesman. Emhoff’s accuser, who DailyMail.com is naming only as ‘Jane’, initially declined to comment on the record. But Emhoff’s denial, and his alleged hypocrisy by claiming to be a feminist in media interviews, finally became too much for her. ‘What’s frightening for a woman that’s been on the other end of it, is watching this completely fabricated persona being portrayed,’ Jane said. ‘He’s being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking.’ Remember when Jen Psaki, the utterly asinine former White House press secretary who was given a show on MSNBC, said with a Stepford expression on her face that Emhoff was “redefining masculinity?” Good times. Do you think this is enough of an embarrassment that it ends Psaki’s career? In a sane country, she’d be off the air the minute the Daily Mail’s expose’ dropped. But that’s not what we’ve got. 5. And Now, for Some Glorious, Gratuitous Schadenfreude A little something to put a smile on your face as we head into the weekend. It’s David Axelrod in the wake of Harris’ horrendous performance during Wednesday’s CNN interview, and he’s beside himself as he bails out of Team Harris: When you're a Democrat and you lose David Axelrod… you're losing pic.twitter.com/dkgmuXwWFx — kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) October 24, 2024 Have a great weekend, everybody! And don’t forget — the final episode of From Hellmarsh With Love will drop here at The American Spectator on Saturday morning! The post Five Quick Things: Assassination Prep vs. ‘Dad’s Home’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Of everything churning in the political soup this election cycle, biological men playing in women’s sports is one of the biggest affronts to common sense and one of the easiest layups for conservatives to gain the votes of right-thinking Americans. It’s up there on the “Incomprehensible Index” alongside the inability to define a woman. The political needle is moving on the transgenders-in-sports issue. However, it is almost a religious issue for the Left. Men in women’s sports is the latest battlefield in the Left’s attack on traditional societal values and, arguably, the most destructive. It is an attack on the most basic human distinction — that between male and female. Allowing men to play in women’s sports has become a required tenet of the Left’s ideology — a prerequisite for membership in the liberal elite and a hill to die on. But, as I said, the political needle is moving. According to the Wall Street Journal, some Democratic Senate candidates in close races are getting hit hard on the issue. In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown is being attacked in an ad for letting “transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.” He voted down an amendment by Sen. Tommy Tuberville that would have stripped funding to schools that allowed men to participate in women’s sports. Senate Democrat incumbents in Wisconsin and Montana are also feeling the heat. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes: An ad in Wisconsin says Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin “voted to let biological men into women’s sports.” Republican challenger Eric Hovde gets spontaneous applause when he raises the issue at campaign events. In Montana, an ad says Sen. Jon Tester “voted to let men compete against our girls,” and “those aren’t Montana values.” The proliferation of these arguments against so many Democratic incumbents suggests it’s resonating with the public. Also, Sen. Ted Cruz unveiled blistering ads that accuse his opponent, Colin Allred, of supporting biological men playing women’s sports and boys using women’s locker rooms. If this issue is not a guaranteed political winner, then there is no such thing. The issue polls better than almost any other in this election cycle. Gallup polling in 2023 reported that 93 percent of Republicans believe athletes should play only on teams that match their “birth gender” — this is up from 86 percent in 2021. Among Democrats, support for teams determined by “birth gender” is 48 percent — up from 41 percent. And finally, 67 percent of Independents believe “birth gender,” rather than “gender identity,” must determine which teams athletes compete on. Overall, 69 percent of Americans agree that people should play on the team that matches their biological sex, up from 62 percent in 2021, while only 26 percent of Americans are willing to allow athletes to play on teams that matched their gender identity. (LISTEN FOR MORE: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 84: Transgender Sports Concerns Surprise Democrats) Recently, on The Faulkner Focus all-women town hall, Donald Trump took advantage of this polling trend and indicated support for banning the participation of biological men in women’s sports. On the legal front, a number of college swimmers, volleyball players, and runners brought a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in March. They allege that the governing body of the NCAA violated their Title IX rights by allowing men to compete against them in athletic events. The pushback against liberal orthodoxy is happening more and more where you would most expect it — on the playing field. Collegiate swimming brought the issue to the fore in 2022 with the Lia Thomas scandal. Thomas, a biological male and a good (not great) male swimmer, transitioned and became a “female” champion by winning the 500-meter freestyle race at the women’s NCAA championship. Since Thomas’ “triumph,” sports like cycling, track and field, and boxing have all featured biological men winning championships in women’s events. Women’s volleyball has recently been enjoying an astronomical rise in popularity — over-the-air networks and sports-only cable networks are featuring regularly scheduled matches. But transgender controversies are now plaguing it as well. Five schools have canceled women’s volleyball contests against the San José State University Trojans. Although most of the schools have not given a specific reason for the cancellation, the Trojans feature a transgender player. The 6 foot, 1 inch tall outside hitter Blaire Fleming is gaining national attention for the speed with which he spikes the ball. Boise State University, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Southern Utah University have all opted out of contests against San José State University. Just last week, the players on the University of Nevada, Reno team voted not to compete in their Oct. 26 match against the Trojans. The University of Nevada players did give their reason for canceling: “We demand that our right to safety and fair competition on the court be upheld. We refuse to participate in any match that advances injustice against female athletes.” The university, however, went to great pains to distance itself from the decision, releasing a statement saying, “[T]he players’ decision does not represent the position of the University …. [and] the University intends to move forward with the match as scheduled.” As odd as it seems, this is a breakthrough. Female college athletes are standing up for the integrity of women’s athletics. Demanding no men on the court, on the field, in the pool, or in the ring seems like a no-brainer. But the pressure from their peers — all indoctrinated college students who exert extreme social pressure to comply with the transgender ideology — must be enormous. Adding to the social pressure is the unrelenting pressure coming from the woke world of sports journalism. Dan Zachsheske, writing at Outkick, highlights the pushback he received for asking University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley what she thinks of men suiting up with women basketball players. The response from the media group-think has been similar to this tweet from Lindsay Gibbs: “Dawn Staley says trans women should be allowed to play women’s sports. … What an incredible statement of inclusivity from Dawn. Wow.” (RELATED: Great Coach Stumbles on Transgenders in Sports) However, more female athletes are braving the recrimination of their peers and the liberal media by standing up for the integrity of women’s sports. A high school runner in Washington State is speaking out. A high school soccer team in New Hampshire voted to cancel a match against a team with a biological boy. In a rare turnabout, a golfer who identifies as transgender refused to compete in the women’s league going forward after realizing “that biological realities are real and competitive advantages will always exist despite what number of years you’ve transitioned or whatever surgeries and hormones you’ve done.” The golfer followed that up by saying, “[M]y place is not in women’s sports.” The Wall Street Journal calls biological males competing in women’s sports a “sleeper issue” in this campaign. Why such a flagrant attack on common sense — much less women — has been allowed to “sleep” is a testament to the lack of imagination, or courage, on the part of Republicans. Let’s hope they can wake it up in time to gain significant traction in this election cycle. READ MORE from Tom Raabe: If Trump Wins… Harris–Walz Campaign Hires Activist to Woo Religious Voters How a Church Fought Back Against a Liberal Takeover — And Won The post Men in Women’s Sports Is Becoming a Major Political Issue appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

?BREAKING: Ukraine Invaded By North Korean Troops In Potential End To 1953 Ceasefire NATO’s Proxy War Has Officially Escalated Out of Control Threatening To Engulf The Planet In A New World War Follow Alex Jones @AJNlive For Emergency Updates pic.twitter.com/rwQUUAXXxG — Alex Jones Network (@AJNlive) October 25, 2024

?BREAKING: Trump considering ending ALL Federal income taxes and replacing them with tariffs If he does this, he will go down in American history as the greatest President since George Washington pic.twitter.com/P0OhnhDi6h — DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) October 24, 2024

by Paul Bois, Breitbart: Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reportedly gave $50 million to a nonprofit organization supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Three sources confirmed to the New York Times that Bill Gates donated to Future Forward, though he reportedly wanted the donation to remain private, considering he often does not endorse presidential candidates. Social media in support […]

from Sputnik News: The BRICS bloc adopted the final declaration of its Summit in Kazan on Wednesday. The document outlined the group’s push to make bold reforms to global institutions, strengthen cooperation and respond collectively to global crises. Sputnik asked leading Asia and Europe-based international relations experts for help decoding the declaration. TRUTH LIVES on […]