The Patriot Post® · Wednesday: Below the Fold

Election

• Undemocratic Pelosi decided Trump would never be president again: One day, probably in the not-too-distant future, we won’t have 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi to kick around anymore. But until then, we’ll continue to point out her treachery and hypocrisy. Pelosi recently admitted that she hasn’t spoken to Joe Biden since she forced him out of the presidential race. “Not since then, no,” she said when asked. “But I’m prayerful about it.” Pelosi explained that she shivved him to protect his legacy: “I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she lied. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that … the election was on.” But here’s the really interesting part: Pelosi, that self-styled Protector of American Democracy, apparently thinks her vote outweighs those of the nearly 14 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden in the Democrat primaries earlier this year: “Elections are decisions,” she said. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity.” Remind us again who the “existential threat to our democracy is.”

• Georgia judge halts mandatory hand-counting of ballots on election night (Washington Examiner)

• Noncitizens will vote in November; the only question is how many? (Issues & Insights)

• Kamala’s legion of lying liars: As desperation has set in with Kamala Harris’s campaign, she has changed both her tone and her tactics. On one front, she’s gotten nastier toward Donald Trump. “It makes you wonder,” Harris sneered at a rally on Sunday in North Carolina: “Why does his staff want him to hide away? … Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?” To claim that Trump is “weak and unstable” doesn’t pass the giggle test, as anyone who merely observes him in action can tell. But then there’s the lying. “On Monday,” as PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes, “the Harris-Walz campaign shared a deceptively edited video purporting to show Trump frozen and confused on stage at a town hall event, which they claimed caused people to ‘pour out’ of the event early.” It was nothing of the sort. Even ABC News and Axios debunked this claim. The truth? “Former President Trump resorted to having songs played for over half an hour at his Pennsylvania town hall after two separate medical emergencies interrupted the event, which was cut short on Monday night.”

• Trust in mass media is at a new low: poll (Daily Wire)

• Butler shooting victims break their silence: Democrats and their media brethren have tried mightily to normalize the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, but there’s no normalizing the death of a heroic 50-year-old father and husband named Corey Comperatore, nor the nearly fatal wounds suffered during the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt by 57-year-old David Dutch and 74-year-old James Copenhaver. “I was more mad about it than anything,” said Dutch. “I was in the service, went through a war, didn’t even get a scratch. And yet, go to a rally, and you get shot at in the crowd.” As for Copenhaver, he says he realized something was wrong when “I saw part of my sleeve go away and heard [gunshot noises].” As Fox News reports: “Copenhaver was shot twice: one bullet tore into his tricep [sic], while the other is still lodged in his body, leaving him with nerve damage — something likened to somebody ‘taking a cigarette and burning right’ in his leg. The bullet that struck Dutch split his liver. He compared it to getting hit with a ‘sledgehammer right in the chest.’” Asked if he thought the Secret Service failed, Dutch was rightly unequivocal: “Oh yes, big time.”

• Trump promises ‘readjustments’ to make taxes ‘fair to everybody’ in town hall focused on women (Washington Examiner)

• Biden’s economy: 7-Eleven to close almost 450 locations in North America (PJ Media)

• Ted Cruz and Colin Allred clash over abortion, trans athletes and Jan. 6 in feisty Texas Senate debate (NBC News)

• North Carolina governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over report about posts on porn site (Associated Press)

National Insecurity

• Child sex-trafficking reports have tripled under Biden/Harris: America’s fastest growing criminal enterprise is sex-trafficking, fueled by the Biden-Harris de facto open border policies. Children are the biggest victims of this border malfeasance. The irony is that the Biden-Harris administration justifies its border policies based upon concern for the downtrodden, people who are supposedly fleeing terrible living situations in their own countries. The truth is that the open border has become an industry of exploitation. Traffickers are usually Mexican or Salvadoran gang members. They work to entice women and girls into migrating to the U.S. under the promise of better-paying jobs. They then extort them by loaning them funding to get into the U.S., only to force them into prostitution upon arrival in order to pay off their debt. One undercover informant who runs a nonprofit dedicated to bringing down sex-trafficking rings, Shepherd’s Watch, explained just how bad the situation is, stating, “If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes. It’s that easy.” Far from helping migrants, sanctuary city policies have only protected these criminal sex-trafficking outfits, ensuring that the real victims continue to be victimized.

• Mysterious drones swarm U.S. military bases: It’s been more than 18 months since a red zeppelin made its way across American airspace, picking up valuable intelligence from directly above some of our most sensitive military sites. But the Biden-Harris administration doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons from its disastrous projection of weakness toward the Communist Chinese. As Fox News reports: “A mysterious fleet of drones entered restricted airspace and swarmed a U.S. military base along the Virginia coast for 17 days late last year, stumping the Pentagon. … For several nights last December, U.S. military personnel reported witnessing a fleet of unknown unmanned aircraft breach restricted airspace over a stretch of land at Langley Air Force Base along Virginia’s shore, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The drones would start to arrive about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset each night.” One would think a series of such incursions would spur our nation into action, if only to identify the culprits. One would think. Despite White House meetings, however, we still know next to nothing about this squadron of drones and who’s piloting them.

Politics

• Battle of the R&D weather idiots: After Hurricane Helene ravaged western North Carolina and parts of other states, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene offered this assessment: “Climate change is the new Covid. Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.” A week later, MTG doubled down: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” But according to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Helene was because of “climate change,” the Left’s now- ubiquitous but dubious assertion that all climate disasters are man-made — which has as much credibility as MTG’s government-made claim. AOC insisted: “The hurricane ‘machine’ is climate change. Cooler ocean temperatures slow hurricane development. As temps rise, more hurricanes grow. The Gulf of Mexico is a major location for warming water.” That may be accurate, but then she concluded, “The people who bear responsibility are fossil fuel companies and the politicians they buy.” Uh, no. Both MTG and AOC have yet to explain how the rains that caused the 1916 Asheville flood, which was equally devastating, was either government-made or man-made. Waiting…

• NYT falls for ridiculous Jew-hating hoax: In an effort to paint the Israel Defense Forces as inhumane killers and victimizers of Palestinian children, The New York Times published an op-ed titled, “65 Doctor, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza,” which details claims from medical professionals of children with various gunshot wounds received at the hands of the IDF. “I saw many children,” one doctor claimed. “In my experience, the gunshot wound was often to the head. Many had non-curable, permanent brain damage. It was almost a daily occurrence to have children arrive at the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.” The piece includes three X-ray images of children’s heads to back up these claims, but these X-rays are the stuff of hoaxes. They purport to show a child’s head with a rifle bullet lodged inside, but what becomes quickly evident is both the lack of obvious trauma to the head from the entry of the bullet as well as the lack of any deformation of the bullet itself. If the evidence provided is a clear hoax, then what does that say about the overarching claim of the IDF targeting and shooting Palestinian children?

• NYC Mayor Adams fallout: The Justice Department’s screws are tightening on New York City Mayor Eric Adams following him being charged with bribery and fraud last month. While Adams has remained defiant, claiming that he is innocent and that he is a victim of politically motivated lawfare for his criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s migrant crisis, members of his staff are clearly less convinced. On Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Phillip Banks III became the latest to announce his resignation. According to Adams, “He stated he wants to transition, do some other things with his life and he doesn’t want this to be a constant burden on the work that we’re doing in this city. I wish my good friend well.” Banks joins a list of other members of Adams’s office to jump ship, which includes his chief counsel, city schools chancellor, the police commissioner, and a senior advisor.

World

• Ukraine’s defense industry is booming: As the Ukraine war grinds on toward its third year since Russia’s invasion, the war-ravaged country has put up a fight few thought possible. It has been a costly war for both sides, with Russia suffering the most military casualties it has seen since World War II. Given the war and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly running with hat in hand to NATO and the U.S. begging for more military aid to continue to fight to save his country from Vladimir Putin, one might be shocked to learn of an industry in Ukraine that is booming. That industry happens to be Ukraine’s defense industry. Ukraine’s weapons factories have massively ramped up production numbers, especially for ammunition. During the first half of 2024, Ukraine produced 25 times more artillery and mortar shells than it did in all of 2022. This year, Ukraine is on track to produce four million drones. Much of the reason behind Ukraine’s ability to ratchet up its defense industry is its history during the Soviet era of being a major weapons production region for the Soviet Union. The war has served to reverse the decline in that industry, and once again, Ukraine is pumping out war weapons.

Misc.

• 243 dead, 92 people still missing in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene (NBC)

• Biden-Harris admin paves way for bureaucrats to take gender-confused kids from “non-affirming” parents (Daily Caller)

• California moves to provide surrogates to gay male couples in the name of ‘fertility equality’ (Post Millennial)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.