Gallup: Almost Every Indicator Favors GOP, Making Election Trump’s to Lose

A new Gallup poll shows Republicans leading on nine out of 10 key issues the pollster uses to determine which side has an advantage ahead of the election. Gallup said the GOP trails only on the approval of Congress, and voters don’t like either party on that.

“The political environment suggests the election is Trump’s and Republicans’ to lose,” Gallup said. “Nearly every indicator of the election context is favorable to the Republican Party, and those that aren’t are essentially tied rather than showing a Democratic advantage.”

Party identification has traditionally been a strong indicator in predicting election outcomes, Gallup said, and this year, 48% say they are, or lean, Republican, versus 45% who are, or lean, Democrat — a GOP advantage not seen in decades.

Gallup said, “Republicans previously have not had an outright advantage in party affiliation during the third quarter of a presidential election year, and they have rarely outnumbered Democrats in election and non-election years over the past three decades.”

The second highly predictive measure is which party voters believe will better handle big problems. In this, too, Republicans outgun Democrats, by 46%-41%, mostly on the view they are better suited to handle the economy. The poll finds that respondents view the GOP as the party that will make American prosperous by a 50%-44% margin.

The GOP is also getting help because of voter dissatisfaction with the Biden administration. Gallup said, “Biden’s unpopularity could still affect the election to the extent voters transfer their frustrations with the Biden administration to Vice President Kamala Harris. For her part, 44% of U.S. adults approve of the job she is doing as vice president, down slightly from a 47% reading in August.”

The Gallup survey took place between Sept. 3 and 15, polling 1,007 people, and has a margin of error of ± 4 percentage points.

Kate McManus ✉

Kate McManus is a New Jersey-based Newsmax writer who’s spent more than two decades as a journalist

What Is Hezbollah, the Group Battling Israel in Lebanon ? Newsmax.com

After almost a year of trading fire, Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah are now engaged in ferocious confrontations that threaten to turn into a full-blown war.

Israel faces a much more formidable foe in Hezbollah than it faced in Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Many consider the Iran-backed group the strongest paramilitary force in the region — but the group also has political and social wings with considerable power in Lebanon.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has warned Israel that his group has new weapons and capabilities, and it has published surveillance drone footage taken deep inside northern Israel that showed the port of Haifa and other sites far from the Lebanon-Israel border. In the past few days, it has struck deeper into Israel than at any time in the past year.

Founded in 1982 during Lebanon’s civil war, Hezbollah was initially devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. It achieved that in 2000 following a long war of attrition that eventually forced Israel to withdraw. But it has continued its battle and seeks Israel’s destruction.

Shiite Muslim Hezbollah is part of a collection of Iranian-backed factions and governments known as the Axis of Resistance. It was the first group that Iran supported and used as a way to export its brand of political Islamism.

In addition to being an armed group, Hezbollah is also a political party with lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament and has had representatives in most Lebanese governments for decades. It also provides extensive social services, including running schools and health clinics, in southern Lebanon and other parts of the country where it has a strong presence.

In its early days, the group attacked U.S. interests, causing Washington to designate it a terrorist organization. Those attacks included taking U.S. hostages in Beirut and the infamous 1983 truck bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American service members.

“Iran’s support has helped Hezbollah consolidate its position as Lebanon’s most powerful political actor as well as the most-equipped military actor supported by Iran in the whole of the Middle East,” said Lina Khatib, the director of the SOAS Middle East Institute in London.

In 2006, Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli patrol and took two Israeli soldiers hostage in a cross-border raid. That sparked a monthlong war between Hezbollah and Israel that ended in a draw, but Israeli bombardment wreaked widespread destruction in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s objective was eliminating Hezbollah, but the Lebanese group came out stronger and became a key military and political power on Israel’s northern border.

Domestic opponents have criticized Hezbollah for maintaining its arsenal and for coming to dominate the government. Hezbollah’s reputation also suffered when it briefly seized a section of Beirut in May 2008 after the Lebanese government took measures against its private telecommunications network.

Hezbollah is the Arab world’s most significant paramilitary force with a robust organizational structure as well as a sizeable arsenal. It claims to have some 100,000 fighters

Hezbollah’s military capabilities have surged over the years, and it has played a key role in the Syrian civil war, helping keep President Bashar Assad in power there. It has also helped train Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, as well as Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Israel estimates Hezbollah has some 150,000 rockets and missiles, including guided missiles and long-range projectiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel.

Throughout its latest conflict with Israel, Hezbollah has gradually introduced new weapons to its arsenal.

While Hezbollah initially began launching anti-tank missiles and rockets, it eventually introduced explosive drones and surface-to-air missiles for the first time. Nasrallah said the drones are locally manufactured, and they have many at their disposal.

The group sustained a severe blow last week, when thousands of communications devices, used mainly by its members, exploded in different parts of Lebanon, killing 39 and wounding nearly 3,000, many of them civilians. The attack — an embarrassing breach of Hezbollah’s supply chain — is widely blamed on Israel.

Israel has recently also assassinated several of the group’s senior leaders, including a top military commander.

Born in 1960 into a poor Shiite family in the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud and later displaced to south Lebanon, Nasrallah studied theology and joined the Amal movement, a Shiite political and paramilitary organization, before becoming one of Hezbollah’s founders.

He became Hezbollah’s leader in 1992 after his predecessor was killed in an Israeli strike.

Idolized by many for presiding over Israel’s withdrawal from the south and leading the 2006 war, his image appears on billboards and on gadgets in souvenir shops in Lebanon, Syria and other countries across the Arab world. But he also faces opposition among Lebanese who accuse him of tying their country’s fate to Iran.

Nasrallah is also considered to be pragmatic, able to make political compromises.

He has lived in hiding for years, fearing Israeli assassination, and delivers his speeches from undisclosed locations.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Opponents of Hate Speech Sure Do Hate

Why are the people who scream the loudest about “hate speech” the ones most riddled with hatred and venom?

They say they hate hatred. They’re against hatred on principle. But what about their own hatred — of those they claim to hate? It’s self-refuting. But nobody ever calls them on it. Leftists live in a cultural, legal and political vacuum. They reinforce and agree with each other on absolutely everything. They shun those who even hint at crossing the Party line.

Often, anger and rage are a mask for fear and terror. Psychologically, many people would rather feel angry than petrified. Anger (rather than fear) makes them feel stronger, and like they haven’t been defeated. It’s perfectly understandable. However, the terror that many leftists feel at the prospect of living in a world where anyone — absolutely anyone at all, especially one as unapologetic as Donald Trump — disagrees with them now converts into rage and a desire to imprison people who dissent from the Party line … At this dangerous point, we enter the gates of some modern equivalent of Nazi Germany.

And if you try to object to any of this? You’re guilty of “hate speech.” Off with your head — or the twenty-first century equivalent that’s heading our way unless we stand up to it with all the passion, integrity and conviction we possess.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on X at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, @DrHurd on TruthSocial. Dr. Hurd is also now a Newsmax Insider!

Is Communism Cool ?

“A woman President? COOL!! It’s about time!”

How cool will it be when you’re in line at the grocery store because Kamala’s price controls distorted supply and demand mechanisms, creating shortages?

How cool will it be when inflation due to exponentially increased government spending leads to $500 buying what $5 bought back in 2018?

How cool will it be when you can’t shoot an armed home invader? “I don’t care,” you say. “I don’t like guns.” So how cool will it be when nobody can shoot a home invader, since Kamala has outlawed guns by executive order? Criminals will be in hog heaven. “I don’t care,” you say. “I can call the police.” What police? Walz defunded them in Minnesota. Kamala promises to do so nationally. And even if we still have police, they’re already weaponized against people who aren’t members of politically protected racial groups. And NOBODY will be protected against any violent illegal noncitizen. Illegals are the ultimate protected class.

How cool will it be when the government has outlawed speech it deems hateful, as Communist Party member Tim Walz has promised? “I don’t care,” you say. “I don’t like conservatives. We’re only censoring conservatives.” Oh, really? Communist Castro jailed most of the journalists who supported him, once in office. Castro belonged to the same Party that Kamala and Walz belong to. If speech is permitted only by the government’s approval, how long until your favorite musician, artist or movie producer is silenced for some stupid reason?

How cool is Communism, really? What are you asking for, you snowflake fools who plan to vote for openly Communist Kamala and Walz?

When you scream that you’ve lost all your freedom, and that your Starbucks lattes cost $150 apiece, and your video games go for $10,000 each under currency devalued by government-induced inflation, it will be too late.

How cool is that?

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on X at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, @DrHurd on TruthSocial. Dr. Hurd is also now a Newsmax Insider!

Harris’ Dream for American Workers a Nightmare

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic — and politicians’ ham-fisted response to it — dealt a cruel shock to employees and businesses in early 2020, working-age Americans, in greater numbers than ever before, have been fleeing states where their Right to Work isn’t protected.

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this summer confirm that the stampede of breadwinners and their families out of Big Labor’s stronghold states continued in 2022 and 2023, when COVID-19-related restrictions on business activities and school lockdowns were already mostly in the past. More than ever before, American employees’ “foot voting” is demonstrating they strongly prefer Right to Work over forced unionism.

Unfortunately, politicians like 2024 Democrat presidential standard-bearer Kamala Harris couldn’t care less about that. There is a huge disconnect between union boss-owned politicians like Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and the majority of Americans who get most of their income from paychecks furnished to them and/or their loved ones by private-sector businesses.

Just as the Biden-Harris administration has done for years, the Harris-Walz ticket is trying to justify its support for legislation corralling millions of additional workers into monopolistic unions by loudly claiming that doing so would somehow make those workers more prosperous.

Ms. Harris, Mr. Walz and their campaign propagandists are trying to bamboozle citizens into believing their claim is correct by grossly understating, or altogether ignoring, the regional cost-of-living difference between Right to Work states and forced-unionism states.

Downplaying or “forgetting” about this key issue enables them to conceal, or so they believe, the proven, economically disastrous effects of compulsory unionism. But the fact is, fewer and fewer Americans are being fooled.

The data show that, when they have a choice, working-age people prefer not to live in forced-unionism states, undoubtedly in part because they understand the fact that real incomes are higher in Right to Work states.

Considered together, Census age-grouped state population data for 2023 and comparable revised data for 2013 tell an important story. They show that, over the past decade, the total population of people in their peak-earning years (aged 35-54) for the 23 states that have never adopted and implemented Right to Work laws (which bar the termination of employees for refusal to pay union dues), fell from 43.66 to 41.62 million. That represents a 2.4% decline.

But in the 24 states that had Right to Work laws on the books the whole decade from 2013-23, there was an overall peak-earning-year population increase of 1.92 million!

And the correlation between forced-unionism status and peak-earning-year population decline is quite robust.

Among the 47 states that didn’t change their Right to Work status between 2013 and 2023, four of the five states suffering the most severe peak-earning-year population losses in percentage terms are forced-unionism. Meanwhile, top-ranking Utah (No. 1), Idaho (No. 2), and Texas (No. 3) are all Right to Work.

Had the peak-earning-year population in the 23 never-Right to Work states risen as much as the national average, they would have had roughly 1.4 million more such residents as of 2023.

And from July 2020 to July 2023, the last three years for which age-grouped population data are available, the trend of “foot voting” against forced unionism by people who have families to support has gotten much stronger.

Census data indicate forced-dues states lost roughly 658,000 “peak earners” to domestic out-migration over this three-year period. If this trend continues, these states are poised to lose another net 2.2 million breadwinners to Right to Work states from 2020 to 2030.

Harris’ radically anti-worker response to this manifest rejection of monopolistic unionism by its putative beneficiaries is to vow that, once she occupies the Oval Office, she will do everything within her power to see that Big Labor’s so-called “PRO Act” (H.R.20/S.567) is rammed through Congress so she can sign it into law.

The core provision in this enormous package of new special privileges for union bosses would effectively render meaningless all 26 Right to Work states currently on the books, and block all states from ever stopping forced financial support for a union as a job condition.

A future without Right to Work protections for private-sector employees anywhere in the U.S. might seem like a dream come true to union bosses. For ordinary Americans, however, it would be a nightmare.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the National Right to Work Committee. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.

Will Zelenski Face a Coup ?

COMMENT: You, sir, are the only one to tell the truth about this war with Russia. There are many Ukrainians with mixed families, and this war has not benefited Ukraine as one-third of the country has fled. Discontent against our politicians is rising here, as you have forecast. It would not be a surprise if there was a coup to change our leadership.

REPLY: You are correct. Our model has been projecting discontent with governments on a global scale. The EU elections turned to the right in a shock. Then, we saw upheaval in France—Britain overthrew the Conservatives. We see the same trend emerging in Canada and the USA.

This does not appear to be a left vs right surge. It appears to be more along the lines of just throwing the bums out – regardless of what their political affiliation might be. This trend is also rising in Ukraine. I have been getting this same sentiment from other Ukrainians.

The most curious thing is that there was an internal coup to assassinate Zelensky on May 7th, the turn on the ECM. He then fired his chief of bodyguards. While he tried to claim it was a Ukrainian plot orchestrated by Putin, the talk is that most of his bodyguards are now American because he does not trust Ukrainians. There is a risk of political upheaval in Ukraine starting next week and going into October.

Presidential elections were scheduled in Ukraine in March or April 2024. However, since Zelenskyy seized power and moved for martial law, which the Ukrainian parliament approved on February 24th, 2022, no elections have been held because Ukrainian law does not allow presidential elections to be held when martial law is in effect. It does not appear that Zelensky can retain power beyond June 13th, 2026, under any claim.

Yes, there is a rumor that a coup may take place in Ukraine, especially if they do not allow elections soon. Even an opposition Ukrainian member of parliament, Verkhovna Rada, has been said to express such discontent.

Zelensky’s presidential powers officially expired after May 20. The irony here is those who believe the propaganda claiming Putin is a dictator refusing to accept the Russian elections do not even want to discuss that Zelensky is a dictator suspending all elections as long as he maintains Martial Law.

Many in Ukraine think this is a senseless war, and the Donbas have been where Russians have lived for centuries. Is this merely a territorial grab worth destroying all of Ukraine? This is why some question the legitimacy of power in the absence of parliamentary and presidential elections. The concern is that Zelensky has ignored the Ukrainian Constitutional Court’s May 2014 ruling that the presidential term cannot be extended. Many are not satisfied because they feel that not only has Zelensky’s presidential term expired together with its legitimacy, but they also have no democratic process to vote on continuing the war. This is what has made many regard Zelensky as a dictator.

Plotting the ECM frequency from the start of this war, it interestingly projected April 2024, which was the ideal target when Zelensky would have had to stand for election. Now look at the next turning point – May 15th, 2025.

Let’s turn to Socrates’ cyclical forecast, and here, too, we see a major culmination of this trend. We have a major Panic Cycle in November; some believe that implies a Trump election, with a Directional Change in December. But I question if Zelensky will survive beyond the next turning point of May 15th, 2025.

Martin Armstrong

DEI is a Cancer on the Military

Today our military services face growing threats around the world while their ability to maintain a quality, well-trained, and capable force is at risk.  Our focus should be on readiness, warfighting, and especially selecting the best qualified leaders possible, not on recruiting Drag Queens to perform for service members and their families or promoting sex-reassignment surgeries.  Historically, our personnel systems have been built on merit, individual performance, and equal opportunity, aimed at selecting the best qualified. 

Over the past several years that focus on merit has been replaced by a system built on a Marxist ideology we know as Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The embrace of this divisive ideology by both our civilian and military leadership has had a significant negative impact on the Armed Forces. It has served to destroy unit cohesion, lower standards, and use race and gender to define outcomes. Even the West Points motto: Duty, Honor, Country, has been jettisoned from the school’s mission statement, all in the name of DEI. The personnel and readiness problems we face today, especially in recruiting and retention can be traced to the introduction of this ideology. A recent WSJ article highlighted a 30-year study done with over 800 companies that embraced DEI. They found it had no positive impact on the workplace. Not a surprise.

The public’s trust and confidence in the military is at an all-time low, while retention and recruiting rates have plummeted, with a shortage at one point of over 40k recruits — an unheard-of number. Parents and family members no longer encourage their children to serve. For the first time this includes military family members serving on active duty. The impact is to discourage young men and women from joining, especially middle-class males who traditionally have been the largest source of recruitment. I continually hear this expressed to me by the public.  This places our ability to successfully fight and win a major conflict at serious risk.

Young Americans join the Armed Forces to serve the country and accept the challenges that military service presents. They join to be part of a team and embrace our enduring value of selfless service over self. The DEI ideology is against everything our military values taught us. A report from the Center for Renewing America tells us that over 40 percent of Flag Officers serving today advocate for DEI as military policy. This is a troubling statistic.

Many former senior officers like myself, along with veterans and concerned civilians, can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch our individual services be subjected to this debilitating ideology and have organized in an effort to educate the public. Our organization, STARRS.US (Stand Together Against Racism & Radicalism in the Services) serves as a resource platform to inform the public and congress and to eliminate DEI/CRT from the Armed Forces. Our goal is a return to performance based on merit and equal opportunity.

In the end, the mission of the Armed Forces is to fight and win our nation’s wars. To do that requires that we instill a warrior ethos, not a woke ideology, into the young men and women who volunteer to join, who want to make a difference and are looking for a challenge. After all, it’s only the security and survival of our nation that’s at stake.

John Deyermond, Major General (ret.)

Why Do the Media Think Democrats Are Worth Cheating for ?

It would be helpful to voters to know that a “whistleblower” says ABC rigged last week’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But outside of conservative media, it’s being largely ignored, because the legacy press covers its own and as zealously as it does the Democratic Party. Whether the claims are true or not – the existence of the whistleblower remains unconfirmed – the mainstream media’s loyalty to Democrats is uncomfortably similar to the relationship Pravda had with the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

To quickly recap, the unnamed whistleblower said ABC agreed to fact-check Trump while ensuring “Harris would not face comparable scrutiny.” The plan was so detailed that “various people were assigned to fact check observations it was perceived candidate Trump would make during the debate.”

“In fact,” says the whistleblower, the “Harris campaign required assurances that Donald Trump would be fact-checked.”

These agreements were reached on calls that the Trump campaign was not a part of although all discussions regarding the rules and negotiations were supposed to include both sides.

The affidavit also says Harris was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions that would be asked, nevertheless “covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.”

There were also issues that could not be raised – Joe Biden’s health; Harris’ performance as San Francisco’s district attorney; her brother-in-law and “key campaign adviser” Tony West, who allegedly “fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers” – since they would reflect poorly on Harris.

“I have observed a pronounced bias against Donald Trump within ABC News,” the affiant continues, while also noting “many” ABC employees “questioned the clear bias that is well known throughout the company.”

The network denies the charges, which is expected. It’s not going to issue a statement that says, “Yeah, you caught us, we cheated for the Democrats.”

What gives the allegations more than a muted ring of truth is that the affidavit was filed, according to its contents, the day before the debate and the charges match the moderators’ actions. It was as if the whistleblower got a copy of the script. So much of what is asserted checks out with what everyone saw.

It also looks bad for the network because Dana Walden, a Disney co-chair who oversees ABC News, has been a close friend of Harris since the 1980s, and their husbands closer for even longer.

Furthermore, Linsey Davis, one of the ABC moderators – and co-conspirator, depending on whose point of view is being taken into account – and Harris are sorority sisters.

Trump would have fared better if the debate had been on another network, but he says the Harris team insisted that she would debate only on ABC. While it’s obvious why, it’s chilling to think that the cabalists aren’t terribly concerned about the striking conflict of interest. To them, it’s just another act of impropriety they will get away with.

But what else should we expect when 28% – that’s a staggering number – of Democrats say the country would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated?

One would think that despite the connections, there would be some fidelity to journalistic standards. But clearly that’s asking too much. At least for the left. Remember that Trump found out in 2015 that “his friendship with the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes did not spare him a mauling from Megyn Kelly, one of the moderators of the Republican candidates’ debate,” the Telegraph reminds us.

There are no ideologues in the West like those who pose as objective reporters and editors. At times some have internal struggles with the real journalist within. But the propagandist always wins.

We’ve seen this behavior in history’s bloody revolutions. The revolutionaries and their followers believe so deeply in their cause they’ve been willing to kill and destroy. (Of course, those at the top, the Lenins, the Castros, the Guevaras, the Sandinos, and the Ortegas are interested only in power. The revolution is a cover for their tyrannical ambitions.)

Anyone involved in politics in this country who believes in their party, their ideology, their agenda so completely that they feel that their ends justify whatever means they choose needs to back off and reassess. Get away from politics. Find meaning somewhere else, because a blind commitment to the Democrats’ efforts to establish single-party rule, its one and only truth, and its demand for conformity, is toxic to discourse and a threat to our republic.

Issues and Insights Editorial Board

President Biden’s Incredible Vanishing Act Reveals Who’s Really in Charge of the Government

President Biden’s Incredible Vanishing Act Reveals Who’s Really in Charge of the Government

The president of the United States, often referred to as the “leader of the free world” and the “commander in chief,” seems not to be his own man. President Joe Biden, who ostensibly wields the awesome power of the Oval Office, yielded to a loud pressure campaign demanding that he step aside in the 11th hour of a presidential race that Donald Trump seemed destined to win.

Jubilant fellow Democrats hailed Biden’s decision to step aside, but his move raises a far more ominous question: Who, exactly, is in control of the U.S. government?

The answer may surprise you.

It seems the answer may be former President Barack Obama. After all, Obama notoriously joked to late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that he wouldn’t mind having a “stand-in, a front man or front woman” in the White House, whom Obama could direct from afar using an “earpiece.” After all, pressure from Obama appears to have convinced Biden to drop out of the race.

Yet if Obama is pulling the strings from afar, he seems to be doing so rather loosely. Biden’s White House has echoed Obama’s policies, employing bureaucrats who once staffed the Obama-Biden administration, but they seem to be following the current trends on the Left more than Obama’s own slick messaging.

The real answer isn’t any one man but a vast network of left-wing nonprofits that work with administrative agencies to draft policy.

Remember that fancy Constitution you learned about in school, with its nifty checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of the majority? Well, forget about all that. Today, the administrative state writes the rules we all must live by, in conjunction with woke pressure groups.

It works like this. Congress passes a law such as the Clean Air Act, saying: “We need clean air. You, Environmental Protection Agency, you give us clean air.” The EPA then makes regulations, and if they’re too harsh, Congress theoretically can defund the EPA, but it usually doesn’t.

When making those regulations, the EPA will consult with a climate alarmist pressure group such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gina McCarthy, who headed the EPA under Obama, became president of NRDC after Obama left office and before she became the Biden White House’s national climate adviser.

Bureaucrats such as McCarthy come in and out of government, often finding a home in the woke pressure groups that influence federal policy. Sometimes, these pressure groups actually write official memos for federal agencies.

In 2009, a federal investigation into the Bureau of Land Management found that the agency was consulting with staff at the National Wildlife Federation, a climate group. The federation’s staff were writing and editing official bureau materials to promote the organization’s own policies.

The federal government often relies on such pressure groups for policy ideas, and these pressure groups in turn rely on a vast, left-wing funding network that often employs what many on the Left demonize as “dark money.”

Many conservatives are familiar with George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist whose Open Society Foundations directs money to all sorts of left-wing causes, most notably the “reform prosecutor” movement that imposes lenient sentences on criminals.

Yet Open Society is just one among many. Eric Kessler’s for-profit firm Arabella Advisors set up multiple nonprofits—most notably Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund—that direct millions to left-wing pressure groups, cloaking which donors are giving to which causes.

Big labor unions such as the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, and SEIU direct hundreds of thousands of dollars through these Arabella network nonprofits, as do teachers unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. These unions take workers’ hard-earned money and funnel it into activist groups that influence federal policy.

The end result is a behemoth, a monster I refer to as the Woketopus. It’s the subject of my forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

This Woketopus shoves its policy agenda into the administrative state on wide-ranging issues from immigration to labor policy, to LGBTQ+ activism, to “green” initiatives, and even to weaponizing federal law enforcement against its ideological and political opponents.

This Woketopus relies on Biden—and Vice President Kamala Harris—to enable its agenda, but it often works around these figureheads. In some cases, as on the issue of U.S. policy toward Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, it actively seeks to undermine the current president, becoming a “deep state” even against its preferred candidate.

So, who’s really in control of the U.S. government? A far-left network of donors, activist groups, and bureaucrats who use the government as a revolving door, going back and forth between woke nonprofits and the administrative state. It may sound far-fetched, but my new book has the receipts.

This Woketopus will be fine if Harris replaces Biden, but all bets are off if something else happens.

That’s why the switcheroo took place, and why Biden is less in control than he appears.

The Daily Signal