Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

MSNOW CLOWN SHOW: Mika Blasts Trump for Questioning LA Mayor Race, Panel Then Floats Conspiracy Theories About Republicans Stealing the Midterms

MSNBC may have changed their name to MSNOW, but it’s still the same downright ridiculous network it has always been.

This morning, host Mika Brzezinski tore into President Trump for questioning the Los Angeles mayor race, implying that Trump is pushing conspiracy theories, even though millions of Americans agree with him and think the process has been completely mired in voter fraud.

Then, moments later, her panel launched into an entire segment speculating about how Republicans are going to try to steal the midterm elections.

You see how that works? Raising questions about something that is actually happening in front of our eyes is dangerous misinformation. Yet they are free to speculate about fantasy fraud that hasn’t happened.

Heads they win, tails you lose. Every single time.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: President Trump amplifying baseless claims of election fraud in California. This continues as vote counts show his endorsed candidate, Spencer Pratt, has been defeated in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Trump took to social media yesterday, writing in part, quote, “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had. Rigged elections.” Here we go again…

That’s how California counts its ballots every year. I’ll speak slowly for those who are confused…

But I think the bigger picture is, there seems to be some sort of preparation going on here. That’s just my analysis. But it doesn’t feel good looking ahead to the midterms, the way these Republicans are behaving.

WILLIE GEIST: You’re not alone in that thought, by the way, Mika…

JIM VANDEHEI: Yeah, I mean, it really sucks for democracy. This is the stuff you see happen in a broken country, in a Third World country, where they’ve not been able to govern effectively. Every time you call into question whether or not our elections are valid, you weaken the soul of the country…

JONATHAN LEMIRE: What they’re doing is laying the groundwork.

MIKA: Yeah, what’s really going on?

LEMIRE: Two different plays they could take while claiming conspiracies as we look towards November’s midterms. They could claim irregularities, they can claim conspiracies and actively take measures to interfere with the vote.

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Viral Influencer: How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire’s close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposes on his own fraught relationships with women.

On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates’ efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, “What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?”

Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world’s largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meeting held on federal property.

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Did Iran Establish a New Equation in the Middle East Through Its Attacks on Israel?

It remains unclear whether Iran’s effort to establish a new equation in the region has truly succeeded — an equation in which, for the first time, Iran would directly strike Israel if Israel attacks Lebanon.

What is clear is that recent events suggest the strategic landscape may be shifting. Israel chose to defy President Trump and carry out strikes against Iran. Yet according to both Iranian and American sources, those Israeli attacks appear to have been deliberately calibrated to inflict limited damage, perhaps reflecting U.S. pressure to avoid a broader escalation.

Iran, for its part, responded by striking Israel once more after the Israeli attacks. The full extent of the damage caused by Iran’s two rounds of attacks remains unknown, however, due to extensive Israeli military censorship. As a result, outside observers still lack a complete picture of the military and strategic consequences of these exchanges.

The real test of whether a new regional equation has emerged may not lie in what has already happened, but in what comes next. Specifically: Will Israel strike Beirut again?

Even if it does, Israeli decision-makers will now have to factor in a cost that did not previously exis t— the likelihood of a direct Iranian response against Israel. For decades, Israel enjoyed near-complete freedom of maneuver in much of the region. It could bomb targets in Lebanon at will without facing meaningful costs imposed by third parties. That assumption may no longer hold.

At the same time, the United States has signaled clearly that it no longer intends to be an active participant in Israel’s confrontation with Iran. The White House has, for instance, stated that it did not partake in Israel’s defense this time around. This would be a first and a very alarming development for Israel, if true. Washington’s desire to avoid direct involvement has become increasingly evident, even as it continues to support Israel in other ways.

Taken together, these developments suggest that a new strategic reality may be in the making. The picture remains murky, and it is far too early to declare that a durable deterrence framework has been established. Much will depend on future Israeli actions, Iranian responses, and the degree to which both sides internalize the risks of escalation.

But if Israel now has to weigh the prospect of direct Iranian retaliation before striking Lebanon, then something important has changed. Whether that change proves temporary or enduring remains to be seen.

The next question is whether this emerging equation can be translated into renewed momentum for U.S.-Iran diplomacy.

The Iranians believe that their action demonstrated to the US that the value of the Memorandum is so low that Iran is willing to risk a complete collapse of diplomacy. The hope is that Trump yields on what appears to be the last sticking point in the talks, which is the release of $12 billion of Iranian frozen assets.

Trump, on the other hand, may calculate that the exchange of fire demonstrated both the cost to Iran if full-scale war were to break out again, as well as Trump’s ability to impose certain restraints on the Israelis. As a result, the Iranians should feel confident in Trump’s ability to deliver on his end of the bargain and not insist on the release of the assets at the outset of the MOU.

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Crime Doesn’t Pay, But US Government Grants Do

InSight Crime, a thinktank which claims to fuse “investigative journalism with academic rigor,” accuses Nicaragua’s government of “hiring assassins” to hunt down and kill opponents abroad. This bold accusation is based on no more than “circumstantial” evidence, strongly suggesting political motivation. This fact-impoverished rush to judgment reflects a more general bias of the US-aligned corporate press, which seeks to demonize Nicaragua and its Sandinista political leadership.

The focus of the thinktank’s article is the death of Roberto Samcam, a former Nicaraguan army officer, exiled in Costa Rica. He was assassinated by gunmen in his home in a gated community in the capital, San Jose, on June 19, 2025. InSight Crime says he was killed because he was “fomenting regime change” in Nicaragua. Supposedly linked to this crime are two failed attempts to murder a Nicaraguan associate, Joao Maldonado, also exiled in Costa Rica and – like Samcam – an opponent of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

So far, almost a year after Samcam’s murder, the authorities have made four arrests in the case. All the arrested are Costa Ricans and none have been brought to trial. Keny Navarrete, a Nicaraguan criminal incarcerated in Costa Rica, is said to have coordinated the assassination. Navarette, who has no known connection to Nicaragua’s government, has been serving multiple sentences in Costa Rican prisons since 2016: supposedly he was able to orchestrate the crime from his prison cell.

Samcam’s criminal record 

InSight Crime notes in passing that both Samcam and Maldonado were “charged with crimes” in Nicaragua, but nevertheless the author, Steven Dudley, asserts that “Samcam was not a criminal.” Curiously for a prize-winning crime investigator, Dudley completely ignores the real violent crimes carried out by Samcam, Maldonado and the groups they led in the Carazo region of Nicaragua in 2018, during a coup attempt against its Sandinista government. An email to InSight Crime asking why he omitted Samcam’s backstory received no reply.

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U.S. Secretly Deployed Paratroopers to Israel

When the Pentagon announced that the 82nd Airborne was deploying to the Middle East in March, it concealed a key detail: some of the paratroopers were headed to Israel, as revealed in an Army deployment order I obtained.

A military source involved in war planning tells me the deployment is tied to new U.S.-Israeli joint contingency plans, completed since February, for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.

The 82nd Airborne Division is the Army’s premier quick reaction force, trained to parachute into hostile territory.

By keeping the deployment quiet, the Pentagon headed off public debate over a joint U.S.-Israeli operation inside Iran — a prospect many considered plausible at the time, amid a fever pitch of mainstream reporting on a potential ground invasion. The secrecy also sidestepped what’s euphemistically called “host nation sensitivities.” A joint U.S.-Israeli operation raises thorny questions for America’s Gulf Arab “partners,” especially over logistical support — hence the 82nd, which could launch directly from Israel without any Gulf state’s consent to use its territory.

The Army deployment order, issued April 7, 2026, directs elements of the 2nd Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment — the storied “Geronimo” battalion — to deploy to Israel on “temporary duty.” The Israel deployment has not been previously reported.

The Pentagon has never acknowledged it; in public it has said only that the 82nd was bound for “CENTCOM,” the military’s term for U.S. Central Command, the combatant command responsible for the entire Middle East. The press echoed the vague terminology, suggesting the unit was headed to existing U.S. bases in Kuwait or Qatar.

Asked about the number of troops deployed to Israel and their mission, the Pentagon referred my request to CENTCOM, which at the time of publication had not yet responded.

In late March, the New York Times reported that senior military officials were “weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division … to support U.S. military operations in Iran.” The forces would come from the division’s Immediate Response Force — a brigade of roughly 3,000 soldiers able to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Those forces, the Times noted, “could be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub.”

The groundwork had been laid weeks earlier. The Army abruptly pulled the division’s 300-member headquarters from a planned exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana, officials told the Times, so the command element wouldn’t be “caught out of place if the balloon went up.” The Aviationist reported that the division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, and his command element had been ordered to deploy, and tracked a string of flights leaving Pope Army Airfield, which serves Fort Bragg, for the Middle East.

When the Pentagon finally did talk about the 82nd publicly, it took pains to keep Israel out of it.

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All It Took Was a Single Non-Woke Word for This Man’s Life’s Work to Come to the Brink of Ruin

A Danish man spent years building a clothing company. Over the years, he fashioned, through hard work, careful study, trial and error, attention to trends, and sheer perseverance, a popular clothing brand. In the last few days, however, he has come to the brink of ruin, and of seeing all his labors come to naught.

No, his place of business wasn’t robbed or burnt down. He wasn’t defrauded. He didn’t lose all his money at the gaming tables, or succumb to drug use. What threatens to destroy his life’s work is that he told a truth that many people might admit behind closed doors, but that hardly anyone would ever say publicly. Tobia Sloth said it. All it took was a single word. And now he is paying the price. But that doesn’t make what he said any less true.

The Danish-language news outlet Nyheder reported Sunday that “a single comment from the director has caused problems for a Danish clothing brand. The popular clothing brand Norse Projects – and not least its founder, Tobia Sloth – has ended up in a regular s**tstorm.”

It all started with a silly icebreaker-type survey at LinkedIn: “A Linkedin user asked on the platform what you would remove from Earth that would make it better if you could only choose one thing.” The expected answers came flooding in, but not from Tobia Sloth: “While just under a thousand users have answered everything from ‘nanoplastic particles from the biosphere’ to ‘rainforest destruction’ and ‘mercury-based gold mining,’ Tobia Sloth’s one-word response was without further explanation.”

That one word? Hide the kids, cover the dog’s eyes, and then I’ll tell you.

To the question of what he would remove from the Earth in order to make it a better place, Tobia Sloth answered: “Islam.”

Nyheder notes, with admirable understatement, that Sloth’s “answer has struck many a chord – both in Denmark and in the USA, where Norse Projects has a large customer base.” In other words, the usual suspects are beside themselves with spittle-flecked rage, and “they criticize the company for being built on a racist foundation.”

Racist? What? Islam is not a race, and there are Muslims (and jihadis) of all races. But “racism” is the primary, if not the only, sin that a human being can commit, as far as the left is concerned, and so pretty much anything the left dislikes these days counts as “racism.”

You don’t like getting blown up or having some guy screaming “Allahu akbar” stab you at random on the street? Then you’re a racist. You don’t like the idea of making women cover their hair and in some cases even their faces, even in the most stifling heat, on pain of being beaten if they don’t? Yep: racist. You’re not a fan of institutionalizing discrimination against and harassment of people who hold a different religious faith from your own? You’re practically Bull Connor.

And so now Tobia Sloth is looking at the very real prospect of professional ruin: “The criticism has already caused Tobia Sloth to apologise, but it is not certain that the apology is enough to save the company’s reputation, assesses a branding expert.” When the woke mob gets enraged at you, it stays enraged until it extracts its pound of flesh. “Although Tobia Sloth’s comment was quickly deleted from Linkedin, it has gotten people both in Denmark and internationally to the keys with massive criticism of Norse Projects and its founder.”

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Northern Ireland Erupts After Sudanese Asylum Seeker Charged in Brutal Stabbing — Migrant Houses Torched as Angry Crowds Take Over Belfast 

Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Belfast on Tuesday night after a Sudanese asylum seeke was charged with a brutal knife attack that left a local man with serious injuries.

The protests erupted after footage of Monday night’s attack circulated widely online, sparking further anger against mass immigration.

Police deployed armored vehicles as crowds gathered in several parts of the city.

Some vehicles were set on fire during the unrest, including a bus, while clashes broke out between protesters and officers.

There were also reports of protesters breaking into migrant houses and setting them ablaze.

The victim, a man in his 40s, suffered severe injuries to his eyes as well as slash wounds to his face and back. Police later recovered a kitchen knife from the scene.

Video footage showed members of the public confronting the attacker before police arrived. Senior officers later credited those bystanders with helping save the victim’s life.

The suspect, identified as a 30-year-old Sudanese national, has been charged with attempted murder, possession of a bladed article in a public place, and making threats to kill.

He is due to appear before Belfast Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday.

Police said the man was granted leave to remain in the United Kingdom in September 2023 after claiming asylum.

He had arrived in Belfast from Dublin earlier that year after flying into Ireland from Paris.

The incident comes amid growing public fury over the Labour government’s refusal to stop mass immigration as well a series of high-profile violent crimes involving migrants across Britain.

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Woke Canadian lawmakers fly into hilarious rage after conservative asks country’s top scientist to define a woman

Liberal members of Canada‘s parliament desperately tried to silence a conservative member when he asked the country’s chief science advisor to define a woman.

At a recent meeting of the parliament’s Standing Committee on Science and Research, conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Vincent Ho asked, ‘What is the definition of a woman?’

The simple question immediately sparked outrage with other members of the committee, who jumped down Ho’s throat and seemingly attempted to prevent Chief Science Advisor Mona Nemer from replying. 

Ho asked the scientist: ‘Before you became chief science advisor, you were a molecular geneticist by training, right? So you know a thing or two about X and Y chromosomes. So, I wanted to ask you, what is the definition of a woman?’

Immediately, Liberal Party of Canada MP John-Paul Danko took issue with the question and said: ‘Point of order, chair. Point of order.’ 

A point of order is a formal request to enforce chamber rules addressed to a speaker or committee chair, and it is typically issued when MPs believe there has been a breach of procedure.

‘It is pride month, in understanding Order 18, which prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language,’ Danko continued, before Committee Chair Salma Zahid interrupted him and said: ‘This is getting into debate.’ 

Undeterred, Danko raised his voice and said, ‘Where this question is going is highly offensive. Highly offensive. I ask the member to withdraw his comments.’ 

Zahid, who is also a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, then repeated, ‘This is getting into debate. I will deal with it. MP Ho, I would request to be respectful of everybody.’

The conservative MP explained that he was asking the question because the Census asks people to state their gender and sex, and he wanted to understand the chief science advisor’s ‘view on this.’ 

Another Liberal Party of Canada MP, Taleeb Noormohamed, then also raised a point of order and said: ‘The witness is here in her capacity as the chief science advisor. 

‘Her opinion on any matter as an individual is actually not relevant to her mandate. And so if the question is in the scope of her mandate, I would be interested to see if Mr Ho could rephrase the question… within the context of her mandate.’ 

Zahid accepted the point of order and asked Ho to reframe his question, to which the conservative MP replied, ‘I just want to hear the answer.’

After a bit more back and forth, Nemer, the chief science advisor, was finally able to answer Ho’s question. 

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DHS Says It Has ‘Zero Tolerance’ for Protesters’ ‘Verbal Assaults.’ Here’s What the Law Says.

Protests over poor living conditions for detainees at Delaney Hall immigration detention center erupted over the weekend, leading to the arrest of over 80 people, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. Some of the protesters arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are accused of assaulting law enforcement officers, obstruction, and threats. But questions remain about whether the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) enforcement policies violate the First Amendment and chill speech on the ongoing public debate over immigration policies.

The crackdown on protesters is not surprising given Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s statements during congressional hearings last week, in which he took a hard line against violent protesters. During a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on June 3, Mullin testified that he is “OK with protest,” so long as it is done “in a peaceful way, in a legal area.” However, Mullin asserted, he has “zero tolerance” for individuals who “verbally assault our officers,” “go after our vehicles,” or “assault our property.” “You assault one of our officers, we will find you. We will arrest you,” he continued. 

While Mullin is right that the destruction of government property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers are both federal crimes, there is no such thing as “verbally assaulting” an officer under the law, Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), tells Reason.

Under the First Amendment, individuals are free “to criticize, mock, or disparage law enforcement officers” who “have no greater right than anyone else to be shielded from offense or criticism,” Terr explains. “In fact, the Supreme Court has recognized that properly trained officers are expected to show even more restraint than the average citizen when confronted with provocative or challenging speech.” 

“The First Amendment’s broad protections are essential to preserving the public’s ability to criticize and hold accountable those entrusted with enforcing the law,” Terr says, which is why speech is generally protected “unless the speech falls into one of the narrow categories of unprotected expression.” 

One such category includes true threats, defined by the Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

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