Month: August 2024

Authored by Victor Joecks via American Greatness,

The book “1984” is supposed to be a warning. Today’s leftists are using it as an instruction manual…

George Orwell’s classic novel is set in a dystopian world where Big Brother controls the population through information control and surveillance. See if any of this sounds familiar.

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

During her career, especially when running for president in 2020, Kamala Harris took a number of radical positions. She praised efforts to defund the police. She once insinuated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was comparable to the KKK and suggested the agency should be rebuilt “from scratch.” She wanted to decriminalize border crossings. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal. She supported a mandatory gun buyback program, eliminating private insurance and reparations. She was in favor of banning fracking and plastic straws.

Those policies play great in San Francisco, but not in battleground states. Not to worry. She’s flip-flopped on at least five major policy positions since becoming the presumptive nominee.

Instead of exposing this duplicity, the national mainstream media is participating in it.

“Harris is calibrating her policy pitch for going to battle with Trump,” the Associated Press wrote about her reversals.

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump happened just over three weeks ago. The iconic photo of a bloodied Trump defiantly standing and pumping his fist went viral. Outside of conservative sites and social media accounts, it’s barely been seen since. The national media has largely moved on, eager to fluff up Harris.

Less than two weeks ago, pro-Hamas rioters stormed Washington, D.C., to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to Congress. They tore down U.S. flags outside of Union Station and raised Palestinian flags. They burned an American flag, vandalized monuments and assaulted park police. Charges against some of the few people arrested have already been dropped.

An easy prediction: You’ll hear less about these two stories than Trump’s out-of-context “bloodbath” remark and Jan. 6. It’s like events that would make Trump look heroic and hurt the left never happened.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten …”

You can see this happening in real time. Last week, I googled “Trump rally.” The top result was “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta.” The same thing happened to Elon Musk and many others.

Recently, Meta AI refused to acknowledge that Trump was almost assassinated. Meta is the parent company of Facebook. It inaccurately labeled a fist-pumping photo of a bloodied Trump as “altered.” When people used Google to search for information on Trump’s attempted assassination, its auto-fill wouldn’t even suggest his name.

Both companies claim they weren’t trying to rig search results. Those excuses would be more believable if almost all mistakes like these didn’t go in the same direction.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Illegal aliens are merely undocumented migrants. Men who claim to be women are women. People voting for Donald Trump are a threat to democracy. Ramming scissors into the skull of an 8-month-old preborn baby and sucking her brains out is health care. Israel is the oppressor for defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Diversity requires ideological conformity.

2024 looks a lot like “1984,” but you get to help write the ending. Choose wisely.

According to Statista’s Consumer Insights, more than half of Americans have ordered groceries online for delivery in the past 12 months before the survey was carried out between July 2023 and June 2024. 53 percent said they had ordered items to their house in this way.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The most popular category of food ordered online for delivery was one fitting this rather lazy method of shopping: snacks and candy at 24 percent.

However, all categories of groceries ordered online for delivery were very close together. The healthier fruits and vegetables category follows close behind at 23 percent, ahead of frozen food and rice & pasta, both at 22 percent. A similar number of Americans had ordered breakfast cereal, meats & sausages as well as dairy and bread.

The survey also showed that Walmart was the most popular store to order groceries from online, followed by Amazon, Costco and Instacart.

Submitted by Alastair Crooke,

The signposts are there for all to read: The West — in deliberately overlooking such explicit markers — cannot then complain, or escape, the ensuing consequences.  

No, the ‘tin ear’ is not some new western derangement — a unique mass collapse of sanity — that we are living through. It is something worse: a return to a dogmatic, authoritarian version of truth which dissident physicist Eric Weinstein complains has (in the West) also destroyed true science — ignoring and silencing its most important dissident voices, whilst amply rewarding Science’s frauds.

Consider: Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the US Congress on 24 July saying, in an unrelieved Manichaean mode, that the West is facing an “axis of evil” (Iran and allies), which the US must join in destroying. It was a call to participate in civilisational war.

His invitation was celebrated with 58 standing ovations from US legislators.

Netanyahu returned home to a disaster in the Druze community on the Golan. Missile fragments had struck, killing and wounding many children playing football (the exact circumstances are still not clear). Western rationality however is perfectly capable to deduce firstly that Majdal Shams lies in Occupied Syria; secondly, that the Druze community there remains overwhelmingly Syrian (rejecting Israeli citizenship) and largely pro-Syrian. And that they are neither Jews nor Israelis. The West seemingly cannot however, adduce the further very obvious conclusion: Why on earth would Hizbullah intentionally attack a Syrian community on Syrian land that largely is sympathetic to the Resistance?

They wouldn’t. Yet these obvious facts are completely ignored by a rationality that, as Weinstein suggests, actively prefers fraud to truth. Spokesman Kirby said Hizbullah had attacked children in northern Israel. 

Israel’s Defence minister repeatedly says:

“We don’t want war”. Western leaders parrot the same meme: No-one wants war. ‘We are fully confident that Israel’s response will be constrained and limited to military targets’. The White House: “In our view, there is no reason for some dramatic escalation in southern Lebanon and there is still time and space for diplomacy”.

So what then occurs?  Two major assassinations: one in Beirut and the other in Tehran (i.e. to a guest on Iranian sovereign territory).  Western leaders express their ‘concern’.  The Hamas target in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh, as the Qatari PM noted, was the key Gaza hostage negotiator.  

This too will be overlooked, though Netanyahu’s intent to weave together Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran into a single ‘axis of evil’ cloth – thus speaking to his Join-Session of Congress thesis – must be evident even to a blinkered Washington.

Recall the new ‘equation’ that followed the assassination of a senior IRGC official in the Iranian Consulate in April 2024: Henceforth Iran will respond directly — and directly from Iran. Washington says it does not want war with Iran, yet the latter explicitly was what Netanyahu advocated. Did the legislators miss his point?

For nearly ten months, Israel has been unable to stabilize the situation along the northern border and allow for the return of displaced Israelis to their homes. Even if the Beirut strike doesn’t lead to wider war, restoring a negotiated stability on the Lebanese border is now beyond reach – as is too, a Gaza hostage deal. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side”, Qatari PM al-Thani ruefully observed.

So too ‘overlooked’ in the West, will be that which happened in Israel on the same day the assassinations later took place: Right-wing vigilantes descended from their settlements, storming two military IDF bases. The anarchic scenes of mass break-ins, fomented by several members of the ruling coalition, some of whom took part in the forcible entries, sparked angry condemnation from Defence Minister Gallant. 

The invasions were supported by one minister and several Knesset members seeking to free reservists that are suspected of aggravated abuse and forcible sodomy against a Palestinian detainee. According to a security source, the injured detainee was taken to a hospital with severe injuries, including to an intimate body part which left him unable to walk.  

“The spectacle of military police officers coming to arrest our best heroes at Sde Teiman is nothing less than shameful”, said Ben Gvir, whose ministry controls the Israel Police and Israel Prison Service, said of the storming of the IDF post. 

Yet the wider picture as related by Yossi Melman is:

“What is happening on the part of the nationalistic messianic Right with the backing, winking or silence of ministers and MKs of the Right is a “putsch”.  The youth coming down from the hills of the ‘State of Judah’ to act with the same violent methods – used against the Palestinians – (but now) are being used against the state of Israel.  MK Limor Son Har-Malech (Otzma Yehudit) said: “The people of Israel will fight against enemies from outside and enemies who try to destroy us at home” [those such as the Advocate General seeking to investigate the torture being practiced Sde Teiman]. The concept of the knife in the back and the betrayal at home echoes the voices in Germany after WWII”.

Again, overlooked but not in the news: The situation at Sde Teiman was widely-known and said to be “more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”.  A UN report has detailed how Palestinians arbitrarily detained faced torture and mistreatment. The vigilantes from the settlements nevertheless described those committing the anal rape as “heroes” — and cast the IDF investigators as fifth columnists.  Reports suggest that the perpetrators at Sde Teiman enjoy high level protection. 

This account of systematic torture followed earlier revelations that the Israeli army had marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system, called Lavender, with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties.

In the same vein, Right-wing Cabinet ministers celebrated the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on social media Wednesday morning, as: “This is the right way to purge the world of this filth”, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, tweeted:

“No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these dead men walking. The iron fist that will strike them is the one that will bring quiet and a modicum of comfort, and strengthen our ability to live in peace with those who seek peace. Haniyeh’s death makes the world a slightly better place”.

What then is this ‘truth’ that the West ignores and silences reality, whilst amplifying its narrative frauds? It is that the Israel which they presume to understand is now something very different. And that it has an epistemology at odds with mechanistic rationalism.

An eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet — and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state. No one was arrested for the attack and take-over of the two bases. They do not dare.

Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, had this to say in a video interview on the forces taking over in Israel:

“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’?  Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse”.

“My hair stands on end when I say that – as he said it. I learned and grew up in the house of Holocaust survivors and ‘never again’. It is Mein Kampf in reverse: Jewish supremacy: and therefore [Smotrich] says: “My wife won’t go into a room with an Arab”.  It is anchored in ideology. And then actually what he aspires to – as soon as possible – is to go to a big war. A war of Gog and Magog. How do you start the flames?  A massacre like the [1994] Cave of the Patriarchs?  Baruch Goldstein is a student of this Rabbi. Ben Gvir has hung up Goldstein’s picture [in his house]”. 

“This is what goes into the decision-making process in the Israeli government”.  

Rabbi Dov Lior has been described by Netanyahu as the “élite unit that leads Israel”, because of his influence and control over the settler forces. The 1948 Irgun, drawing heavily on the Mizrahim, is being reborn?

Isn’t it time that the western ruling structures raised their eyes from their reverie, and read the runes that manifest all around them?  Some serious players don’t think as you westerners do; they seek Gog and Magog (the prophecy that “the children of Israel” will be victorious in the battle of Armageddon). That is what you risk.

Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,

Stress on the body caused by racism may cut African American women’s lives short, according to a recent study by neuroscientists at Harvard and Emory universities.

Their research, published in the journal JAMA Network Open in June, found a connection between “higher self-reported racial discrimination” and “DNA methylation age acceleration” among black women.

“Racism steals time from people’s lives – possibly because of the space it occupies in the mind,” lead researchers Negar Fani and Nathaniel Harnett wrote in an article this week at The Conversation.

Fani is a professor at Emory and Harnett at Harvard, both in the areas of psychiatry and neuroscience. Both also receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to the article.

“Aging is a natural process. However, stress can speed up the biological clock, making people more vulnerable to aging-related diseases, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes and dementia,” they wrote.

In their study of 90 black women in the U.S., they found that those who reported being “more frequently exposed to racism showed stronger connections in brain networks involved with rumination and vigilance,” Fani and Harnett wrote.

“We found that this, in turn, was connected to accelerated biological aging.”

The scholars wrote:

Racial discrimination is a ubiquitous stressor that often goes unnoticed. It might look like a doctor questioning a Black patient’s pain level and not prescribing pain medication, or a teacher calling a Black child a “thug.” It is a constant stressor faced by Black people starting at an early age.

Rumination – reliving and analyzing an event on a loop – and vigilance, meaning being watchful for future threats, are possible coping responses to these stressors. But rumination and vigilance take energy, and this increased energy expenditure has a biological cost.

Their study found changes in two different parts of the brain that were caused by stress linked to racial discrimination.

“These brain changes, in turn, were linked to accelerated cellular aging measured by an epigenetic ‘clock,’” they wrote.

According to their findings, these “higher clock values indicate that someone’s biological age is greater than their chronological age. In other words, the space that racist experiences occupy in people’s minds has a cost, which can shorten the lifespan.”

Fani and Harnett said they plan to conduct more research on aging and racism in the future. Among other things, they said they want to explore “how different types of racial discrimination and coping styles influence brain and body responses.”

As to the purpose of their research, Fani and Harnett said a greater understanding of the issue can lead to better therapeutic and prevention measures, including “programs that target implicit bias in physicians and teachers.”

The US is preparing to play Air Force for Israel’s skies as it deploys a dozen F-22 stealth raptor jets to the Middle East region. This change in ‘force posture’ was not debated in Congress (nor is it even really being debated on the mainstream networks), despite that clearly US service members could soon find themselves in the middle of a war between Iran and Israel.

The White House has issued a fresh warning to Tehran on Thursday as it is said to still be gearing up for a strike on Israel in retaliation for the July 31st killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at a residence in Tehran. The new warning from Washington includes both negative economic consequences and threats of destabilizing actions directed against the newly elected government of Masoud Pezeshkian.

“The United States has sent clear messaging to Iran that the risk of a major escalation if they do a significant retaliatory attack against Israel is extremely high,” a US admin official told The Wall Street Journal.

The official further said that Tehran has been put on notice over “a serious risk of consequences for Iran’s economy and the stability of its newly elected government if it goes down that path.”

Is this a threat of regime change? To the ears of Iranian officials, it will sure sound like it given the country on its eastern border and the country on its western border were both regime-changed by Washington.

Currently, the consensus among US national security officials is that Hezbollah is likely to play a much bigger and coordinated role in any potential Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel:

Officials also don’t know for sure whether Hezbollah plans to attack at the same time in a coordinated offensive with Iran or separately. Hezbollah has a large arsenal of missiles that can reach Israel and the concern is that the group and Iran might attack at the same time to try to overwhelm Israel’s missile defenses. 

“Last time we got more of a heads up, and this time people are making their best guesses,” said a third U.S. official. 

But while the US mainstream media narrative remains that it is exclusively Iran and its regional allies that are the regional ‘aggressors’ against Israel and the US, the fact remains that it is Israel which has attacked close Tehran ally Syria literally hundreds of times over the past years.

You will find more infographics at Statista

And more recently, Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus (the aftermath which is pictured above). Nation-states did not attack each other’s embassies even during World Wars I and II, and the strike on the diplomatic complex was unprecedented in history as an intentional act prior to Israel’s April 1st operation in the Syrian capital.

Authored by Stephen Anderson via The Mises Institute,

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon, who later was pardoned of all Watergate crimes by President Gerald Ford. The Watergate break-in occurred at the Democratic National Committee headquarters office in June 1972 at the Watergate building in Washington, DC, during a presidential election year. The Nixon Administration exerted great effort to conceal its involvement in the break-in. The United States Department of Justice and press reporters (Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward) found five people involved in the break-in received thousands of dollars of hush money from the Committee to Reelect the President, which was the fundraising organization of President Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Many of Nixon’s administration staff were convicted of federal crimes, leading to their being sentenced to federal prison from the Watergate scandal. President Nixon used presidential powers to obstruct the Watergate investigation which pundits claim led to greater public cynicism and distrust of the federal government. The response of Washington’s political elites, naturally, was to further expand centralized power.

Members of Congress claimed that Watergate evils came from the misuse of presidential campaign donations used in the break-in cover-up. One “solution” to solve these election finance evils and rein in presidential power excesses was to expand federal power through legislation into federal election finances.

One post-Watergate legacy was the passage of new federal election finance laws and the creation of a new agency to enforce, finance, record, and regulate them. This law was passed by Congress in 1974, creating the Federal Election Commission (FEC). One FEC function is to dole out federal taxpayer money to congressional, senatorial, and presidential election campaigns, which incentivizes federal election control.

These new laws required candidates, political parties, and political action committees that were raising and spending money in federal elections to file periodic campaign finance reports subject to FEC audit and enforcement. When a campaign chose to receive federal tax dollars for their federal election campaign, one requirement was accepting campaign contribution limits from nonfederal sources and hold to campaign spending limits.

Mises Institute executive editor Ryan McMaken, in a Mises Wire article in October 2016 entitled “Decentralize the Elections,” described the history of states administering elections for federal offices and the methodical takeover of elections by the federal government over time. Presidential candidates began receiving federal funds for their campaigns from the 1971 campaign finance law, and funds distribution expanded in 1974.

The stated intent of federal taxpayer financing for presidential campaigns was to level the candidates’ playing field and remove the major party nominees’ need to seek political contributions during the general election. Taxpayer funding and the increased campaign fundraising demand included Congressional candidates. Expanded federal funding allowed more presidential candidates to run and extended the campaign season, with increased fundraising pressures on each candidate. Major party nominees spend much of their time today raising campaign cash for their parties, despite the fact that the alleged reason for government campaign funding was to eliminate the need for such fundraising.

The federal government’s campaign-funding intervention resulted in a presidential candidate’s campaign depending on federal taxpayer dollars to function. This long-term federal intervention has led to higher campaign costs with candidates chasing money.

The FEC board is composed of six members, with three affiliations each from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Each member is nominated by the president and confirmed by a Senate majority for staggered six-year terms. A presidential campaign contributor can be nominated by the president to the FEC board as a favor for past sizable campaign contributions.

The board needs four sitting members for a quorum to conduct agency business. FEC board functionality in the twenty-first century is partisan with each side pointing fingers at each other on alleged federal campaign financial wrongdoing. Sometimes the board only had three sitting members, so a quorum was not attained, and agency decisions halted. Some members remained after completing their six-year term when no nominee was confirmed to replace them.

For all the lessons supposedly learned from the Watergate scandal, the only real lesson is that so-called reform in Washington is little more than bait-and-switch. While Congress passed a number of post-Watergate laws that supposedly reined in what progressives were calling Nixon’s so-called imperial presidency along with its phantom campaign funding, the power of the executive branch has grown exponentially in the past five decades, and campaign spending has grown with it.

No doubt, the usual suspects in the media will be praising the Watergate reforms and claim that Congress rescued the nation from Richard Nixon’s lawlessness and set the country on the right path again. The truth is that whatever executive power Nixon abused probably would seem trivial when compared to what happens regularly today in the White House.

Via City News Service,

The Board of Supervisors voted Aug. 6 to expand its “Breathe” guaranteed-income program to provide financial stipends to more than 2,000 non-minor dependents in the foster care system.

Holly Mitchell, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, speaks to the media in Los Angeles on April 1, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

In addition to the stipends, the foster dependents will also have access to career and education counseling, financial empowerment training, housing and other programs as recommended by the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs’ Center for Financial Empowerment.

The Breathe guaranteed income program began as a pilot project in March 2022, providing monthly $1,000 payments to 1,000 in-need residents.

Last year, the board agreed to expand the program to include 200 former foster care youth adjusting to life outside the system.

“While Breathe’s initial expansion supports 200 former foster youth, the continued support of transitioning foster youth can provide essential financial stability during such a critical and pivotal time in their lives where data has demonstrated the risks youth exiting care face, including homelessness to justice system involvement,” according to a motion by Supervisor Holly Mitchell.

According to the motion, funding to expand the program is available through the state’s Flexible Family Support funding. The FFS funding requires that recipients use the money for specific purposes, defined as “extracurricular and enrichment activities that are designed to enhance the foster child or non-minor dependant’s skills, abilities, self-esteem, relationships, and overall well-being and healing.’’

Noting that L.A. County is home to the largest population of youth living in foster care, Mitchell on Tuesday called guaranteed income a “powerful and effective way to truly disrupt poverty.’’

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also spoke out in favor of the idea, saying foster youth often have the worst outcomes when transitioning out of the system, including homelessness, dropping out of schools, poor health and poverty.

“By offering financial support combined with career and education counseling, financial literacy, housing and benefit access support, we‘ll begin to provide stable transition out of care,’’ Horvath said.

The expansion will provide support to two groups of people in the foster system between ages 18 and 21:

— The first group will be 1,000 people aged 18 and 19, providing them $500 monthly stipends for 18 months, along with access to career and education counseling, financial empowerment training, and other supportive services.

— The second group will be 1,000 individuals between ages 19 and 21 who are likely to age out of foster care during the 18-month program, providing them with $1,500 quarterly stipends, with the final payment provided in the quarter in which the person turns 21. They would also be provided access to counseling and other supportive services.

To enact the expansion, the board approved through the motion a $4 million increase to a contract with Strength Based Community Change— the program administrator– which will also evaluate the program’s impact and how recipients are using the funds.

It also backed a roughly $15 million expansion in the contract with MoCaFi, which distributes the debit cards used in the program and also distributes the stipends to those cards, to cover the costs of the payments.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Authorities in the UK are now arresting people for posting “inaccurate information” on social media, according to a new report.

Sky News reports that a woman has been arrested by Cheshire Police for posting “inaccurate information on social media” about the attacker who stabbed three girls to death in Southport last week.

The 55-year-old woman was arrested near the northern town of Chester on “suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false communications.”

Chief Superintendent Allison Ross gave a statement explaining how the post is alleged to have “fueled” the protests and riots in the UK over the last week, which she asserts started as a result of “malicious and inaccurate communications online.”

JUST IN – UK authorities begin to arrest citizens for social media posts “containing inaccurate information.”pic.twitter.com/Mc4QYk5D3V

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 8, 2024

Ross said the arrest was a warning to others about “the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy” and that “we are all accountable for our actions.”

UK police are now arresting people for being wrong on the Internet. Let that sink in.

Presumably, the woman will now be thrown in prison along with people who attended the protests, such as Steven Mailen, who has been jailed for 26 months for “shouting” at police officers.

We’re literally releasing 500 prisoners early so we can imprison blokes like this for 26! (Twenty Six) months for aggressively shouting at coppers. Not many will have huge sympathy for these rioters but you’re insane if you can’t see how ridiculous this is. https://t.co/RCa8plOKHX

— Fox (@foxblade98) August 8, 2024

As we highlighted earlier, head of the Met Police Sir Mark Rowley warned that “keyboard warriors” could be hit with terrorism charges for inciting riots online, even if they are living abroad.

Brits have also been warned that merely retweeting information about the riots could lead to criminal charges.

Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, told Sky News that people do not even need to personally post the content themselves to be deemed to be committing an offence.

Parkinson said social media users could be guilty of “incitement to racial hatred” if they post “insulting or abusive” content that is “likely to stir up racial hatred.”

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Bodycam footage from local Pennsylvania police reveal that in the moments after last month’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump, an officer says he told the Secret Service to cover the warehouse used by shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“I f—ing told them that they needed to post guys f—ing over here…I told them that f—ing Tuesday,” said a Butler Township officer in audio captured by his body-worn camera and obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

“I talked to the Secret Service guys. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re going to post guys over here,’” the officer continues.

The footage paints a more complete picture of the anger and frustration moments after Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to fire eight shots at the former president from an AR-style assault rifle. A spectator was killed, two others were injured, and Trump suffered a bullet wound to the ear. The Journal obtained the videos under a public-records request Thursday.

A police officer in one of the videos at one point refers to a suspicious individual who had been lost by authorities. The unidentified officer referred to “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for earlier. He was creeping people out.” 

The officer’s account, which was broadcast over radio channels, was captured by one of the body cameras. “He was watching people out in the woods by the water tower. I’m not sure he is the gentleman down or not,” the officer says.

Around 10 minutes after the shooting, another officer says to a fellow officer “I thought you guys were on the roof. I thought it was you. I thought it was you.”

To which “No” can be heard in response.

“What the fuck! Why were we not on the roof? Why weren’t we?” the officer replies.

As the Epoch Times notes further, the footage also shows the moment an officer with the Butler Township Police Department tried to get on the roof of a building where suspected gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was perched. Another officer helped lift the responding officer to the roof after rally attendees alerted police that there was an individual on the roof near the rally where Trump was set to speak.

BREAKING: Bodycam video just released shows a police officer being lifted up to the roof of the AGR building, interrupting Thomas Crooks just seconds before he started shooting to assassinate President Trump at the Butler rally. pic.twitter.com/NVU0yR515w

— Dapper Detective (@Dapper_Det) August 8, 2024

In the clip, an officer is seen moving toward a building before another officer tries to hoist him onto the roof. The officer is then seen trying to climb onto the building before he drops down.

Only officers’ hands are seen as he tries to get onto the roof in the video, which does not show Crooks.

“If I’m interrupted, and I move my gun, you are going to have to reassess that whole situation at this point, so yes, you can make a case that those two officers saved the president’s life,” Slupe told the paper.

He then asked, “Can you imagine 10 seconds before that? That the president was looking straight ahead and where that bullet could have potentially landed.”

More than three weeks after the assassination attempt, federal officials have not disclosed the Crooks’s motive. So far, few details have emerged about the suspect, and his family has not issued a public statement responding to the incident.

It shows an officer with the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit standing next to a dark-suited man, who appears to be a Secret Service agent, according to a press release from Grassley’s office.

In the clip, at least three other law enforcement officials can be seen, although it is not clear exactly how many were present on the roof when the footage was filmed.

On the ground next to them appears to be the body of Crooks. Although the shooter’s body has been partially blurred in the video, a long trail of blood on the roof can be seen.

The Beaver County officer and the purported Secret Service agent can be heard discussing the timeline of events they believe led up to the assassination attempt, including whether the man lying on the ground next to them is the same man seen in a photo sent out by a member of Beaver County’s sniper team.

“So, this is the guy … that the sniper saw,” the agent says.

“Yes, a Beaver County sniper seen [sic] and sent the pictures out, this is him,” the officer replies.

The Secret Service agent then asks whether or not an abandoned bike that was found in the area belonged to the shooter.

“We don’t know,” the officer responds.

The Beaver County officer then shows the agent photos on his phone.

“I don’t know if you got the same ones I did?” the officer asks the agent, referring to the photos.

“I think I did, yeah, he’s [the shooter] got his glasses on,” the agent replies.

That footage shows law enforcement talking about a need to use a drone to secure and inspect a water tower that was onsite, according to his office.

A de minimus improvement in (the incredibly noisy) initial jobless claims was all it took to enable the machines to run stocks higher, bond yields followed suit (higher) along with another ugly auctions (30Y). Crude, bitcoin, and gold also rallied (despite the dollar being basically flat).

For some context on the size of the labor market ‘surprise’ in today’s claims data… here is the macro surprise index…

Source: Bloomberg

Before we get into the color, of particular note is the fact that rate-cut expectations have now retraced all of the post-payrolls spike (with the shift still biased more into 2024 than 2025)…

Source: Bloomberg

Nasdaq was the day’s best performer (best day since Feb 2023) and the S&P’s gain was the best day since Nov 2022…

Stocks, broadly speaking, remain notably lower from payrolls still…

Of particular note, Nasdaq’s surge was very technical – ramping up to yesterday’s high and then fading back…

The Dow and S&P 500 stalled at critical technical levels too.

Dow at 50DMA…

S&P at 100DMA…

Mag7 stocks bounced to yesterday’s highs too, but remain down on the week and down from pre-payrolls…

Source: Bloomberg

VIX slid lower once again (but remains above yesterday’s lows)…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, before we leave equities, Goldman’s trading desk notes volumes were down (-15% vs this past week) and S&P top of book (liquidity) continues to be very poor sitting around the 4mm level (YTD average closer to 13mm).

• LOs 4% better for sale (selling macro hedges, pockets of tech and semis on strength, and cons discretionary vs buying industrials, fins, and utes).

• HFs +1.4% better to buy (buying ETFs, info tech, and industrials vs selling cons discretionary, HC, and Utes)

Treasury yields surged higher once again, now back above the pre-payrolls level (for all but the 2Y yield)…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y yield surged up to 4.00% (and 2Y moved above it)…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended very modestly lower…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold rallied back above $2400…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices extended their rebound today (erasing the payrolls plunge) as tensions in Ukraine and the MidEast picked up once again…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin ripped higher today, touching $60,000 and erasing the Jump-Trading liquidation from Sunday night…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, as we noted earlier, the rise in rates led to the implied odds of a US recession jumping much higher. But in the UK and Europe they are still relatively low.

Source: Bloomberg

The question is – how long can that divergence remain? Either US odds have to decline or UK and EU recession odds have to rise.