Israeli military knew how Hamas planned to take hostages weeks before October 7: report

 Israeli military knew how Hamas planned to take hostages weeks before October 7: report (msn.com)

• The IDF knew about Hamas' plans to attack just weeks before October 7, Israeli broadcaster Kan reported.
• The IDF's Gaza Division had intel on Hamas' training and hostage-taking strategies, Kan reported.
• According to Kan, IDF intelligence officials even predicted Hamas would take 200-250 hostages.

The Israeli military knew about Hamas' plans to attack southern Israel weeks before October 7 — even how many hostages the militant group planned to capture, according to a report from Israeli public broadcaster Kan.

The Israel Defense Force's Gaza Division reportedly distributed an internal intelligence document on September 19, 2023, outlining the details of Hamas' planned raid, according to Kan.

The document, which Kan reportedly saw, states that the IDF had observed Hamas conducting a series of trainings where militant fighters practiced attacking both Israeli military stations and civilian kibbutzim communities.

The IDF also knew, according to the document viewed by Kan, that Hamas trained its units on how to capture hostages and how to guard them once they were taken back to the Gaza Strip.

The IDF's Southern Command and Gaza Division also wrote in the document, according to Kan, that they expected Hamas to take between 200 and 250 hostages. The officials even had intel on how Hamas intended to treat the hostages in certain extreme circumstances and what rules Hamas set for executing hostages, Kan reported.

Israel mistakenly believed, the Times of Israel reported, that Hamas would never be able to get past its high-tech border security — an "Iron Wall" composed of concrete, tunnels, and razor wire, complete with remote-controlled machine guns, that was installed two years before the attack.

That oversight prevented top Israeli intelligence leaders from doing anything about the internal report detailing Hamas' plans, Kan News reported.

And it wasn't just a few weeks before October 7 that Israel reportedly knew about Hamas' plans.

More than a year before the attack, Israel had a 40-page document detailing, play-by-play, exactly how Hamas would attack the southern border, The New York Times reported last year. But, Israel never took Hamas' plans seriously, assuming the militant group would never get past Israel's defenses, the Times reported.

Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage, many of whom are still being held in captivity.

The exact number of hostages Hamas took is unclear, but Israel has estimated it was around 240, with about 116 still in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Israel's subsequent airstrikes and war against Hamas in Gaza have killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, many of whom are women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities.

I Can’t Stand These Democrats, Part 4

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

Democrats are really big in the “has-been” community out in Hollywood. It’s kind of telling that the “celebrities” most vocal in their support of their agenda haven’t had a hit in the lifetime of the first-time voters, but you have to take what you can get, I guess. And what Democrats can get is Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Robert DeNiro, and their contemporaries – “stars” people need to explain to them why they’re stars. That brings us to this week's Democratic Party shill: Martin Sheen.

Honestly, Martin Sheen? Yep. 

Why Martin Sheen? It’s pretty simple, really. 

First, Democratic Party donors are old, so Martin Sheen resonates with them. 

Second, as long as there is a single cast member left alive from “The West Wing,” Democrats will fantasize about it. While that show was fairly boring, and nothing at all like how politics really is, Democrats have dreams about how smart they are and they think that show was smart. 

Hilariously, it’s what they imagine the Clinton White House was like – a bunch of people who have all the answers and know exactly what to say at every moment. It’s what they imagine they are like. 

The reality is none of them have a clue about how the government works, they dream that there’s always a government answer and it works. But as long as they suffer that delusion, anyone from that show will cause dumb people to dip into their wallets and subsidize multimillionaires playing make-believe with our lives.

Since March 31st, Democrats have sent out 9 emails from Martin Sheen, with an additional 3 emails from others asking if I’d seen the emails from Sheen. 

Of the emails, 5 came with the subject line, “A message from me.” They all open with, “My name is Martin Sheen, though you may remember me as President Bartlet from The West Wing.” Each of them, all the time. 

They are then followed by an email with the subject line, “re: if you have a minute,” like you’d emailed Sheen back and he was now responding. “It's Martin Sheen. As a former ‘acting’ president of the United States, I’d like to talk about what your support could mean for the country you and I both love.”

With all those emails, Democrats couldn’t even bother coming up with something original for each, they just recycled everything. 

They are just right to the chase, “But if you only have a minute, all I'll ask is that you donate $5 (matched to become $15) to help defend our Senate majority and make a difference for our real president's Democratic agenda,” they say in paragraph 2. 

Paragraph 3 reads, “I've said before that acting is what I do for a living, but activism is what I do to stay alive. $5 may not sound like a lot, but I've seen time and time again that each of us pitching in a little will make a BIG difference together -- and right now, my friends at the DSCC need that exact kind of help from Democrats like us.”

Sheen has an estimated net worth of $60 million asking for money from people on fixed incomes with the promise that somehow voting for people who’ve done nothing for them their whole lives will suddenly become a worthwhile endeavor. 

“Here's why: Republicans are just two seats away from retaking the Senate, and they're willing to spend millions to erase our razor-thin Democratic majority. The future of our country could be decided by critical races in battleground states like Nevada, Ohio, or Pennsylvania,” Sheen continues. The problem is he’s right, but only in one way. If Republicans win, your life will likely be whatever you make of it, or at least have a better shot at being like that. If Democrats win, they will continue to force their will on people the way Joe Biden forced his way on low-level staffers. That’s how Democrats roll. 

He concludes his begging with, “We can't leave anything to chance. Everything from health care to climate change is on the ballot and Democrats simply can't win without your support to out-raise, out-organize, and out-campaign the Republicans. This request is so important that for a limited time, a group of donors will personally triple your gift. So please, Derek, join me by rushing $5 (becomes $15) to defend our Democratic Senate majority and keep moving America forward.”

That request is so important that each and every time he’s made it they’ve broken out the magic unicorn that eats one $5 bill and poops out three of them. That’s how you tell they’re serious.

After Martin Sheen, I’m not sure where they go. Ed Begley Jr. likely supports RFK and no one would know who Ron Perlman is, and any other leftist has-been’s name escapes me right now. But they’ll be rich too, and they’ll be just as out-of-touch because, for reasons unknown to me, that appeals to Democrats. It appeals to something in them that does not hit normal people, and why we need to beat them because what appeals to them is not only stupid, but underneath it is dangerous. 

And we Know, On the Fringe, and more- June 17

 

Joe Biden Reminds Us To Buy Guns and Ammunition

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

That crusty old pervert and would-be dictator of ours, Joe Biden, told us the other day – as he does every chance he gets – that our firearms are useless to defend our freedom because he has F-15s. I think he misses the point that the Founders – oh, how our leadership has declined from greatness to the staggering, stumbling, incontinent clown show we have today – intended that we be able to protect ourselves from people like him, not to mention the criminals that he tolerates and encourages. Here’s the thing about senile people – they can’t hide what they really think. They blurt what they really think. And he really thinks that happily turning the military upon us if we defy him is a viable option.

Some weak people will deny this hard truth, but this is not coming from some crazy guy with a plot sandwich board on a street corner screaming about impending doom. This is the observation of somebody who’s listening. The alleged President of the United States is threatening to kill other Americans with modern combat weapon systems for refusing to obey him. Don’t let anyone tell you that you are crazy for noticing.

A lot of us have noticed. In a sense, Americans have already voted with their Visa cards. Americans are buying millions of guns every month. There may be more guns than there are Americans, including our invited and uninvited guests flooding in after Joe Biden threw open our borders to every Third World peasant and aspiring terrorist around the globe. There’s a term for when there’s at least one gun for every single citizen. That term is “a good start.”

But we own nowhere near enough guns. In fact, the bare minimum number of firearms for an individual is three: a solid handgun, a solid shotgun, and a modern combat rifle. We can debate all day about the right pistol or shotgun—in fact, people do debate all day about that—but just buy simple and effective weapons in both categories. I’m sure the comments will be full of your advice, and much of it will be good.

The rifle is the most important component of a Prepared Citizen Equipment Package. A rifle is the tool of a soldier, and every healthy and law-abiding citizen needs to be a soldier. You can tell that’s the critical part by the way Democrats desperately want to ban “assault rifles,” because by banning “assault rifles,” they effectively ban citizen-soldiers, which in turn has the effect of eventually banning citizens. It creates serfs. What they want is for America to be like Europe, full of obedient drones who occasionally grumble but mostly anesthetize themselves watching the Eurovision Song Contest as they lose more and more of their rights. Our ruling class would love a situation where our cops arrested you for unlawful tweeting like in formerly Great Britain.

We’re not going to go down that way. We are going to be citizens, not serfs.

I want to make assault rifles – real assault rifles – mandatory for every citizen, but in the meantime, you need to go get one of the civilian versions the Democrats want to ban. The purpose is so that you are ready for combat if the time comes. You have the right to fight thugs trying to rape and/or murder your family and aspiring tyrants who want to turn you into happy campers at the rainbow gulag. That you are armed and capable of defending yourself is a key deterrent to crime and tyranny. It also ticks off the pinkos – gun ownership by free Americans scares the scowling wine women and shames their femmy male-identifying life partners – which is reason enough to buy guns and ammo.

Go get armed and help establish the lead-throwing facts on the ground that make gun banning and confiscation impossible. Becoming adequately armed is not particularly expensive – probably $2500 at a minimum, not including ammunition and training, but it’s an investment in your safety and freedom. And it’s an investment you should make. With a little luck, it never pays off and you’ll never have to use your arsenal. But there will come a moment for some percentage of us when we must, and then the capability to defend yourself and others becomes priceless.

The fact that the Democrats have thrown open our border to import an entirely new electorate that it feels will be more obedient to its commands has put us all in grave danger. Just last week, the FBI took a break from arresting people for illegally praying to lock up eight people from Tajikistan with links to ISIS who had been allowed into the United States by the Democrats. Their specific brand of terrorist is ISIS-K, who you last heard of when some of their goons went into a theater in Moscow and butchered 140 people. Don’t think that can’t happen here. It absolutely can – and likely will. I’ve written about it in my new novel, The Attack.

Unarmed Americans are extremely vulnerable to uneducated, low-IQ religious fanatics with simple armaments going on mass murder sprees, not to mention other kinds of terrorist operations. We saw that tactic at the Pulse nightclub, where a Democrat donor’s son, who was ISIS-connected, murdered about 50 people at a gay venue. The lying regime media did its job, which is to protect the interests and pursue the agenda of the garbage ruling class, by going the Full Norm McDonald. They wanted to blame normal people for being armed, but normal people never do these things. They stop mass killers with their guns. This was a scumbag jihadi Muslim fanatic who hated gay people, despite protests of the Queers for Palestine crowd, and he wanted to kill as many gay people as possible. 

If a couple of the victims had been armed, maybe this guy could’ve been stopped. Or maybe not. But here’s the thing. If you’re armed, you have a chance to fight. If you’re unarmed, you’re going to die. Don’t believe the police are necessarily going to come and save you. The first guy the cops took down at Uvalde was not the killer but a distraught cop who wanted to go in to try and save his wife while the rest of those cowards refused to help.

The fact is you are your own first responder. We are all our own first responders. You need to get guns. You need to get ammunition. You need to get trained. And you need to get your mind into the mental headspace where you are ready to take decisive action should the situation arise. 

It goes without saying that part of your training is to understand the legal aspects of deadly force. This is vital for your protection and for the protection of others. Being armed is a huge responsibility. Having guns is essential. So is ensuring you use them only as a last resort where lethal force is appropriate and lawful. Learn the law in your venue before you arm yourself.

Laws vary from state to state, and your political activism should be to make them better to protect lawful citizens. We all saw that in New York when a former Marine intervened to protect New Yorkers, he ended up in prison. I guess New Yorkers have made their choice – let regular citizens die. Oh well. But even in states that aren’t actively pro-criminal, we have to work to improve the laws. In Texas, for example, it took over a year to pardon the guy who shot an Antifa scuzz threatening him with an AK47. Texas should change its laws to prevent local Soros DAs from prosecuting innocent citizens, as well as empower its governor to pardon the victims of these injustices. The bottom line is you need to study the law and know the law, but you also need to use good sense. The best outcome is you never use your weapon. You don’t ever want to get into a situation where you have to use a gun. You want to avoid it. You want to de-escalate. You want to walk away if you can and run if you need to. Only idiots look for trouble. A gun is a last resort, but sometimes you get to the last resort. And if our situation in this country keeps spinning out of control, skiing down the slippery slope at light speed, you may get there sooner than you think.

Buy guns and ammunition.

Be Prepared for Chaos

posted by Clarice Feldman at American Thinker 

I suggest you start preparing for a great deal of left-wing civic violence, supply disruptions (including food shortages) and widespread urban chaos. I say this because it is my sense that the Democrats, deep state, and their media enablers are all in rough shape and have no other way out but to fall back on their usual criminal methods of retaining power.

I find it impossible to believe that President Biden will be the Democrat nominee, and if he is, that he can win. What do the Democrats do? They certainly can’t substitute Kamala Harris for Biden; she’s tanked in opinion polls even lower and faster than has Biden. There are no nationally known non-geriatric substitutes in the wings, save for California governor Gavin Newsom, whose record for screwing up is at least as bad as Biden’s. Youth and a good haircut can only go so far outside Newsom’s home state. Even liberals are now conceding the West Coast has lost its way and become dysfunctional, and who is a better avatar of West Coast progressives than Newsom?

In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asks if they have lost their way. He decries the lack of sensible governance, arguing that good intentions aren’t enough and good governance has demonstrably been lacking: 

[M]y take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes. [snip]

Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.

For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools -- including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.

The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering. [snip]

One of the passions of the left, drawing partly on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” has been that if a policy leads to racial inequity, then it’s racist even if it wasn’t meant to be. But by that standard, West Coast progressivism abounds in racism.

We in the West impeded home construction in ways that made cities unaffordable, especially for people of color. We let increasing numbers of people struggle with homelessness, particularly Black and brown people. Black people in Portland are also murdered at higher rates than in cities more notorious for violence, and Seattle and Portland have some of the greatest racial disparities in arrests in the country. [snip] It’s absolutely true that good intentions are not enough. What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and the best path to do that is a relentless empiricism -- which clashes with the West Coast’s indifference to the laws of economics.

The basic reason for homelessness on the West Coast is an enormous shortage of housing that drives up rents. California lacks about three million housing units, in part because it’s difficult to get permission to build. [snip] Public sector efforts to build housing are often ruinously expensive, with “affordable housing” sometimes costing more than $1 million per unit, so the private sector is critical. Yet one element of progressive purity is suspicion of the private sector, and this hobbles efforts to make businesses part of the solution. Business owners who earn an income from their company are effectively barred from serving on the Portland City Council. [snip]

Without opposition party oversight, problems aren’t always fixed expeditiously. 

His experience is largely in Portland, but the Portland experience is as relevant to all of Newsom’s California. 

Here’s Jillian Michaels, a fitness guru who’s a lesbian, daughter of a Jewish woman and an Arab father, and an adoptive mother of two children -- one black and one part Hispanic -- on why she moved to Florida from her home state of California:

"I hold a million cards in your game of woke victimology poker. And when I leave California, maybe you've lost your f---ing mind. Just maybe! Like when you have me running from home, maybe it's gone way too far." She says she can’t stand Newsom as for the laws under his governance she displays utter contempt:

"Some of these laws that are passing here are absolutely f---ing mind-boggling," Michaels said. "In relation to crime, protecting our kids, like, we're decriminalizing everything, which arguably I would probably be okay with but we're not regulating any of it. So it's like, okay, you're gonna decriminalize sex work but only so women can loiter on the streets, not to keep them safe, not to have them pay taxes, not to make them, you know, regularly check for STDs, not to take away the pimps out of the equation. Like if you made that argument to me, I'd be like, ‘well, yes, of course.’ I could be liberal! I could go there with you! I grew up this way!  Or the fact that a 12-year-old child can be put on off-label cancer drugs to irreparably change their body. Again, if my son came to me and said, ‘Mom’ -- or my daughter -- 'I think I'm trans.' I'd say okay, you know, like, you want to dress this way. You want me to call you whatever the heck you want, dress, fine. Explore it. I love you. I'm cool, do you as long as we're safe, but we're not changing your body until it's fully developed. I'm sorry. Conversation's over. Can't get a f---ing tattoo!

So, even someone you’d suppose would ignore the dysfunctionality of the West Coast left finds it a bridge too far.

I think I’m not far off the mark when I suggest that the Democrat-run institutions and cities, which regularly are tolerating, if not encouraging, violent demonstrations by demonstrably linked green, pro-Palestine, Antifa gangs, are setting the stage for November’s elections, with the federal government’s apparent connivance. There’s no indication that the FBI is seriously investigating these groups for criminal behavior or even foreign influence. No one seems to be stopping the road and highway blockages and as the left’s election prospects grow dimmer, I see them upping their game.

Of course, using the easily mismanaged and hacked electronic voting machines they will make every effort to rig the results. But the gambit best used in 2020 -- changing (illegally) the voting rules on the pretext of a pandemic -- seems less likely this time around. And the Republicans say they are upping their game to minimize election cheating. Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump reports, that she and the RNC are working to raise a veritable army of “over 100,000 poll watchers and over 500 lawyers” to “deploy” at election sites across the country in November. “

The economy stinks, the administration’s foreign policy endeavors have been counter to American interests and made the world more dangerous. Although many blue cities are not reporting crimes to the FBI, we all have eyes and can see that urban crime is out of hand now as the Democrats defund the police and no-bail policies are in effect. Moreover, just as Biden is about to announce even more benefits to illegal immigrants, the tide against his open-border policies is continuing to crest to flood stage. His grassroots support is slim, while Trump’s keeps growing. In sum, I see no nationally known Democrat who can alter that or who can persuade voters that he or she is capable of undoing the mess this administration has put us in. So, what remains: chaos, disruptions and more unpunished criminal behavior. Buckle up and start stocking up on essentials.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

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The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

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This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

The Guy Who Organizes Ballot Counting, Says Election Results Will Not Match Polling

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

Hopefully readers here know exactly who James Clyburn is and what his function consists of within the Democrat party election process.

Remember, elections are no longer about “votes,” modern elections are about “ballots”.  The election winner is not the person who gets the most votes. The election winner is the person who collects, submits and counts the most ballots.   The contest for electoral victory is who gains the most ballots, not votes.

That said, at the end of the ballot harvesting operation in the key state counties for Democrats, there are precinct workers who are then tasked with counting those ballots.

The number of ballots needed to change the outcome of the election, is essentially the determining factor in how many ballots the precinct workers in the key districts count.

Most of the regional precinct workers in the key counties that change the elections, are affiliated with and originate from the AME church network.

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, has precinct level ballot counting election operations (poll workers) in the key counties [Fulton (GA), Wayne (Mich), Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (PA), Clark (NV), Maricopa (AZ), Dane (WI), etc.]  The ballot counting doesn’t need to happen all over the state, just at the key urban county level.

The DNC operation (Obama/BLM network) concentrates heavily on the ballot harvesting.  However, when they turn those ballots over to the county level precinct workers, that’s where the AME church network and South Carolina Representative James Clyburn come into play. {GO DEEP}

The DNC no longer focuses on controlling the Secretary of State or Attorney General approach.  With the George Soros machine running the District Attorney level angle the democrats only need to concern themselves with the precinct level poll worker support.  Clyburn’s AME network is protected by the willfully blind George Soros DA’s.   It’s a one-hand washing the other-hand proposition.

One Politico reporter plays the pretending game with James Clyburn in a recent interview.  The reporter, just like you, me and Catherine Englebrecht, know exactly how this election manipulation game is rigged, but they maintain the pretenses within the questions.

Once you know exactly how the outcomes are reached in those counties, then the remarks by Clyburn take on the accurate context.  [TRANSCRIPT HERE]

QUESTION: I know you get asked this question a lot, but I’m going to ask it as well. And that is this series of polls this year that show Donald Trump doing a whole lot better with Black voters than he did in 2020.

The May New York Times/Siena swing state poll showed 23 percent Black support for Trump. He won 8 percent according to the exit polls in 2020.

And then the Wall Street Journal broke down an interesting gender divide in April. This was a national poll, and it showed that 30 percent of Black men said they’ll vote for Trump versus 12 percent in 2020 and 11 percent of Black women versus 6 percent in 2020.

This is a big shift. I don’t think you can deny that these polls are showing something. What do you think that Biden needs to do to turn this around?

JAMES CLYBURN – I don’t think he needs to do anything but what he’s doing. I think Joe Biden is doing exactly what he needs to do to win reelection. Something is amiss with the polling. I call your attention to the recent polls in Maryland. The African American woman [Angela Alsobrooks] running for the United States Senate nomination — the Sunday before the election, one poll had her five down, the other poll had her seven down — and she won by 13. How do you explain that? That’s 20 points.

Clyburn is saying the quiet part out loud, but the media pretend they don’t know what it means. Essentially, the AME networked county level “ballot counters” successfully ran the election operation and lifted Angela Alsobrooks to victory. Voting did not matter, counting ballots did.

JAMES CLYBURN cont… “So I have no idea what’s going on with polling these days. But I do know this, the polls did not have [Jon] Ossoff, nor [Raphael] Warnock winning Georgia. And then both of them won. The polls did not have [Lucy] McBath getting 87 percent in that district. But she did.

Anybody who believes that Donald Trump will get 30 percent of the Black male vote or 12 percent of the Black female vote — I got a bridge down there on Johns Island I’ll sell you.” (LINK)

Clyburn knows his network can essentially run the ballot counting operation without fear or concern because George Soros has put the DA’s in their pocket.  And, with the media cooperating, if anyone raises an objection or notices something sketchy, the ballot gathering group have the RACE CARD to immediately play.

If another 20 million actual American people vote for Donald J Trump the system has an offset.  The millions of illegal aliens who have entered the country are generating millions of additional ballots that might be needed.    The illegal aliens don’t need to vote, they just need to generate ballots by registering their physical presence in the correct state or county as needed.  The ballot collection and ballot counting groups will do the rest.

This is the challenge to overcome in the 7 to 11 counties where the 2024 operation will be executed.  The ballot fraud operation is not a massive conspiracy or large-scale enterprise, it is less than a dozen counties strategically located in key states.

Democrats have the U.S. Dept of Justice.
Democrats have the United States postal service.
Democrats have the key state Secretaries of State.
Democrats have the United States US Attorney General.
Democrats have key state Attorneys General.
Democrats have county level District Attorneys.
Democrats have BLM foot soldiers (Ballot Harvesters).
Democrats have AME precinct workers (Ballot Counters).
Democrats have illegal alien names for ballots.

Democrats do not have voters.

Trump Reveals the Two Democrats He Plans to Oust

Sarah Arnold reporting for Townhall 

Former President Donald Trump revealed the two red-state Democrats he wants to boost from Congress if he gets reinstated to the White House. 

Democrat Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) were at the top of Trump’s list of who he wants to kick out of Washington in 2024 because they “opposed everything I did while I was president, and now they are talking like Republicans.” 

The topic emerged during Thursday’s meeting with Trump and GOP allies in Washington, where there was “tremendous unity in the Republican Party.” 

Earlier this year, Brown told Politico that he is "not going to run away from Biden,” adding that he would "run my own race" and "my own brand.” 

When asked about Trump focusing on Tester's seat in 2024, a spokesperson for Tester said the former president "signed more than 20 of Jon Tester's bills into law.” 

Jon Tester does what’s right for Montana. That’s why when President Trump was in office, he signed more than 20 of Jon Tester's bills into law to help veterans, crack down on government waste and abuse, and support our first responders," Monica Robinson, spokesperson for Montanans for Tester, told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

Brown has also been hit by his GOP opponent for his record of voting with President Biden nearly 100% of the time. When asked about Trump's comment, the senator's campaign told Fox News Digital that Brown "worked with President Trump" during his administration.

“Sherrod will work with anyone when it's right for Ohio and worked with President Trump to renegotiate NAFTA and pass legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs and make sure law enforcement officers have the resources they need to keep themselves safe and keep fentanyl out of Ohio communities," a campaign spokesperson for Brown told Fox News Digital in a statement. Via Fox News Digital. 

U.S. Senate Republican candidate in Ohio and businessman Bernie Moreno also accused Brown of being a Biden cheerleader. The communications director for the Bernie Moreno campaign said that the Ohio congressman votes with Biden on 99 percent of issues and “consistently sells out Ohio workers.” 

“Brown has supported every single reckless spending package that has resulted in rampant inflation, voted for Biden's attacks on American energy in favor of green energy schemes, and enabled Biden's open-border invasion. We look forward to exposing his left-wing record and sending him packing in November,” the Moreno spokesperson said. 

Our National Divorce May Already Be Quietly Happening

posted by Jeff Charles at RedState 

The concept of a “national divorce” has been bandied about more often over the past decade. Many Americans, concerned about the nation’s political and cultural climate, have at least considered the possibility that the country might have become divided to the point that some type of separation is inevitable.

There have been numerous reports in recent years of people moving from blue states to red states due to the politics and policies of the governments they seek to escape. To a lesser degree, left-leaning Americans have also been packing up and moving to blue bastions.

Some, however, are saying “a plague on both your houses” and going off the grid, according to a new Deseret News report. The article details the journey of Philip Gleason, a 74-year-old former general contractor who founded Riverbed Ranch, a community out in the boonies of Utah. The community, founded in 2019, is a self-sufficient settlement in which residents can live off the grid.

The former contractor purchased over 1,000 acres of land with a mission to cultivate a community brd on self-reliance and cooperative living. “We’re not preppers or doomsayers,” he told the news outlet. Instead, he and his cohorts seek an ideological escape from the cultural changes in American society.

In 2021, Gleason became the first resident. He and his wife drove out a camper from their home in Orem and took up residence. By the second summer, five other families had bought parcels and moved out; by the next, 35 had. Now, over 130 of the ranch’s two-acre plots are sold, about half of them occupied full-time.

The vision is as ideological as it is practical. Prospective shareholders purchase a plot and commit to live a self-sufficient lifestyle — growing your own crops, pumping your own water, building your own house. Each resident has his own reason for joining. Some, Gleason says, are drawn for health reasons — they want to grow their own clean food. Others seek safety, “away from the craziness.” Gleason reasons that most people are drawn by some combination of the two. “They just want a safe place to raise family and food,” he said.

The “craziness,” Gleason admits, was a major factor for his own move. “We seem to be undergoing a cultural revolution in the U.S.,” he said. “When we first came out here, we thought it might be too far away.” He shifted his truck into park, turning his face to meet my eyes. “Now, with everything that’s happening, we wonder if it’s far enough.”

Gleason and his community have lost faith in America’s institutions, and they are far from alone. Gallup has chronicled a sharp decline in trust for institutions – especially the government.

Last year, Gallup recorded significant declines in public confidence in 11 of the 16 institutions it tracks annually, with the presidency and Supreme Court suffering the most. The share of Americans expressing a great deal or fair amount of confidence in these fell 15 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

Folks like Gleason might still be considered to be on the fringe end of society in 2024. However, Riverbed Ranch is not the only off-the-grid community. Indeed, there are several others across the country.

This trend is a more radical version of what could already be happening in the nation today, and it could be how the national divorce concept manifests in the real world. Such an outcome would not likely involve states seceding from the union but more migration to rural and other remote areas. Some folks, even in red states, could decide they are done with their state and local governments and figure it would be better to move out to places where they are most likely to be left alone.

This is not simply a theory. The numbers show that more people are migrating to rural areas of the country – especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not only being driven by political concerns, but potentially worries about the possibility of political violence. In these turbulent times, it is not unreasonable to think that America’s political environment could devolve into something uglier than what we are seeing now.

In fact, these two reasons, among several others, drove me to move to rural Louisiana in April.

In essence, the national divorce could already be happening, and it has nothing to do with secession. Instead, people are simply going to areas where their privacy and rights will be less infringed upon. Moreover, there are plenty of bastions separate from the impact of the culture war that is growing ever more prevalent. The question is: What will America look like ten years from now?