Cross-Examination

• OPEC’s October surprise — higher gas prices: OPEC is on the verge of an agreement to slash oil production by a million barrels a day. A production drop by that much has analysts estimating a rise in the price of oil from the roughly $80 per barrel it has been for the last couple of months up to $100 per barrel. Thanks to Joe Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies, Americans can expect to see prices at the pump once again start jumping. A recent study found that if Biden had not reversed Donald Trump’s energy policies, the U.S. would be producing roughly two to three million more barrels a day, which would contribute an additional $100 billion to the American economy. Furthermore, the U.S. would be in prime position to export even more natural gas to Europe. But Biden, beholden to the untenable Green Dream, has effectively worked to hamstring our nation’s ability to produce energy, and Americans will be paying for it just as the midterm campaigns head into the home stretch.

• Iranian revolution? The protesting and rioting in Iran ignited by the death of a 22-year-old woman while in police custody — she was arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly — has now been declared a “revolution” by protesters. As the protests have spread across the country, the Iranian regime has cracked down by killing roughly 60 people thus far. On Monday, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed the growing conflict on the U.S. and Israel. “This rioting was planned,” he insisted. “These riots and insecurities were designed by America and the Zionist regime, and their employees.” This revolution is similar to that of the Iranian Green Movement back in 2011, which Barack Obama essentially ignored. Will things be different this time? Not if Joe Biden follows Obama’s lead and puts a nuclear deal first. One student involved in these current protests declared: “This is far from over. We are not scared. We are outraged. We are furious. You know, these people think that we are the previous generation — that if they do this, we’re gonna just stop. We are not going to stop.”

• Biden’s DOJ defends Trump’s firing of Peter Strzok: Donald Trump is enemy number one for Joe Biden and company. Biden routinely makes clear that he thinks the greatest threat to America is “MAGA Republicans.” Thus it comes as somewhat of a surprise that Biden’s Justice Department is actually defending an action taken while Trump was president — the firing of disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok. Recall that Strzok was a central figure in the FBI’s investigation into both the Hillary Clinton email scandal and Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Thanks to his text messages, Strzok outed himself as being deeply biased against Trump with statements suggesting he would work to prevent Trump’s election. After these texts came to light, Trump’s DOJ fired Strzok in the summer of 2018. A year after his firing, Strzok filed a lawsuit against the DOJ alleging that “the decision to fire Special Agent Strzok in violation of his constitutional rights was the result of a long and public campaign by President Trump and his allies to vilify Strzok and pressure the [FBI] to terminate him.” Following his election, Biden’s DOJ inherited Strzok’s unresolved lawsuit. Rather than drop the case and capitulate to Strzok’s claims, Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to continue to defend the firing. This is likely because Strzok’s behavior was quite frankly indefensible. As then-FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, who fired him, observed: “It is difficult to fathom the repeated, sustained errors of judgment you made while serving as the lead agent in two of the most high profile investigations in the country. Your sustained pattern of bad judgment in the use of an FBI device has called into question for many the decisions made during both the Clinton email investigation and the initial stages of the Russian collusion investigation. In short, your repeated selfishness has called into question the credibility of the entire FBI.”

Headlines

• Battle for the House: These deep blue seats could flip red in November’s midterm elections (Fox News)

• “Pro-life” Herschel Walker allegedly paid for girlfriend’s abortion (Daily Beast) | Walker vows lawsuit after “flat-out lie” that he paid for girlfriend’s abortion (Washington Examiner)

• Judge smacks down Stacey Abrams’s bogus claims of voter suppression in 2018 election loss (The Federalist)

• Courts mostly siding with red states on election law changes post-2020 (Washington Times)

• Trump sues CNN for defamation, seeks $475 million in damages (Free Beacon)

• September border crossings to set new record (Free Beacon)

• Supreme Court to review tech companies’ liability under federal law (Washington Times)

• RNC accuses Google of sending election emails to spam, files FEC complaint (Daily Wire)

• Google removes anti-porn accountability apps Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You because they effectively detect porn usage (Not the Bee)

• UC Berkeley blasted for creating “Jewish-free zones” with pro-Israel speaker ban (NY Post)

• Suicides increased 4% in 2021 after two consecutive years of decline (Axios)

• San Francisco celebrates Chinese communism in flag-raising to honor founding of nation (Washington Times)

• North Korea fires ballistic missile over Japan (Washington Examiner)

• Ukraine advances in south after hammering Russians in northeast (Bloomberg)

• What really happened to the Nord Stream pipeline? (Tucker Carlson)

• Policy: The falling black incarceration rate: The disparity between whites and blacks has shrunk (City Journal)

• Satire: White House clarifies Biden’s “Where’s Jackie?” remark: “He was talking about Jackie Chan” (Genesius Times)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.