Whistleblower Says CIA Hid 2020 Election Threats To Help Biden

For years, Democrats and the mainstream media treated 2020 as settled history: the system worked, the election was secure, and accusations of fraud were conspiracy theories.

However, a newly declassified intelligence memo, paired with fresh whistleblower allegations, points in a less convenient direction. 

Behind the scenes, U.S. intelligence warned well before the 2020 election that core election systems were more exposed than the public was told, especially the vast digital repositories that hold voter registration data. Making matters worse, according to former senior cyber official Christopher Porter, intelligence leaders then kept those warnings from public view because airing them could have benefited President Donald Trump and complicated the push to portray Joe Biden’s eventual victory as unquestionable.

On January 15, 2020, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced an assessment warning that foreign adversaries could compromise U.S. election infrastructure in the coming presidential election, which has just been declassified. The memo specifically called out Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other non-state actors. Analysts did not claim they had evidence of a specific plot to alter votes nationwide, but they did say the threat was real, technically plausible, and serious enough that senior intelligence officials personally briefed President Trump at the White House in February 2020. 

What worried analysts most was not some Hollywood-style rewrite of every ballot cast in America. “We assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites, are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes,” the NIC assessment warned. 

Intelligence analysts believed vote tabulators and reporting systems had weaknesses, especially machines without paper backups. Despite this, they judged it would be hard for foreign adversaries to change the certified national outcome through direct machine compromise alone. That was never the same as saying the systems were secure in any ordinary sense. It meant large-scale outcome manipulation looked difficult, while localized disruption and perception management looked much easier. 

Despite the warnings of threats, after the election, senior officials pushed the opposite narrative, assuring Americans that 2020 had been a model of resilience.

In mid-November 2020, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council’s executive committee issued the now-famous statement declaring that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” Chris Krebs, then running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), later testified that he approved the statement and regarded it as the consensus view of the election-security community. That tidy line proved politically useful. It also sat awkwardly beside an internal intelligence record showing that multiple foreign actors had the capacity to exploit the very systems officials were publicly celebrating.

Porter, who prepared the January 2020 memo in his role overseeing cyber intelligence, says the contradiction was not an accident. “What is shocking is how uncontroversial some of these findings are to professionals—it is no secret that China and Iran compromise election equipment for a variety of intelligence purposes, nor was it controversial at the time that these systems had technical vulnerabilities,” he said. He goes further, alleging that bureaucratic and political considerations shaped what the public was allowed to know. “Every agency concurred on these findings, but because it was seen as potentially aiding the President’s reelection campaign, there was an active effort to damage him politically by refusing to share the declassified report with the public.”

Another way to put it was that the truth would have undermined faith in Joe Biden’s eventual victory. That is the heart of the whistleblower claim. 

According to Porter, Trump personally ordered the information declassified because he believed election integrity demanded it. But Porter said that CIA leadership refused to release it.

“The President of the United States personally ordered this information declassified and shared with the public because he thought election integrity was so important to our country. Despite this, CIA leaders at the time refused to release the declassified report,” he said. He also alleges the resistance did not end there. “Years later, when he was reelected, CIA went so far as to claim that the report had never been declassified. Even the record of its declassification had been removed from the system,” he said. Porter describes that as an extraordinary breach of normal intelligence practice, adding, “It is important for people to recognize that this is not normal behavior by the Intelligence Community—most officers would never do something like this.”

 Intelligence reports later concluded that China gained access to voter registration databases in multiple states before the election. A confidential FBI counterintelligence source also reported in summer 2020 that Beijing was attempting to interfere to aid Biden, including through a scheme involving fake U.S. driver’s licenses shipped into the country. Those reports did not become part of the public understanding in real time. Iranian hackers were not indicted until November 2021. Chinese penetration of voter data emerged publicly only after documents surfaced in March 2026. By then, the “most secure in history” line had already hardened into civic catechism.

The intelligence community’s inspector general, Christopher Fox, has opened a full investigation into whether Porter’s warnings were buried and whether he faced retaliation for pressing agencies to follow Trump’s declassification order. That review arrives alongside earlier findings from the intelligence community’s analytic ombudsman, who concluded in January 2021 that some analysts downplayed China’s role because of their disdain for Trump and reluctance to bolster his China policy.

None of this proves that foreign actors changed the 2020 outcome through hacked machines. But it tells us that senior officials knew election systems had meaningful vulnerabilities, but went out of their way to sell to the public a more politically convenient story.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/21/2026 - 17:20
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Whistleblower Says CIA Hid 2020 Election Threats To Help Biden

All The Dream-Houses Of The Left

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.

Pseudo-Heroes

It is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality.

In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made little effort to hide.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, at last, the Left’s “real thing,” the white working-class liberal stiff who could win back the hoi polloi—although he couldn’t get his story straight on whether his Nazi tattoo was an accident or supposed proof that he was brainwashed into Nazism by the toxic US military.

Tim Walz was also hailed as the Left’s Mr. Everyman, a truck-driving street fighter, although he is now in anti-American socialist Spain, at a time of war, libeling his own country and American soldiers as being in the service of a fascist cause.

Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly a mere eccentric autodidact, wannabe insider, and generous party host, though a bit too eager to use his girls to buy his way into liberal academic and intellectual circles.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a lovable genius gadfly, a billionaire slob, but with a big and timely checkbook for radical causes.

Jussie Smollett was to be the next George Floyd rallying cry, if only his ridiculous lies were not so ridiculous.

And George Floyd—multi-felon, ex-convict, past home invader who once stuck a pistol in a woman’s stomach, arrested while passing counterfeit bills, high on drugs, and resisting arrest—became the innocent martyr who died at the hands of diabolical, murderous police and set America afire.

Erasing Joe Biden

Along with such a pantheon, somehow the Democrat borg also fantasizes that the historic legacy of the Biden years has been squandered by Trump—as if the country suffers from collective amnesia.

But any sane person knows that Biden served as a waxen effigy, puppeteered by the radical Left to serve as a moderate veneer over the most radical agenda in modern memory.

In just four years, Biden’s handlers obliterated the southern border, admitting 10–12 million unvetted aliens, including an estimated 500,000 criminals, apparently as a demographic booster shot for their otherwise unpopular agendas.

Almost daily, we read of Americans assaulted, raped, and murdered by illegal aliens—stories almost always smothered in the left-wing media.

Rampant multibillion-dollar theft of US entitlement money by foreign nationals or recently naturalized citizens from Minneapolis to Los Angeles is also daily fare. The nihilistic Biden years of open borders have cost the nation untold amounts in blood and treasure. Yet the Left’s answer is to attack ICE officers attempting to enforce federal immigration law.

Stranger still is the contrast between protesters who seem to be mostly affluent, suburban white women. The latter, for some reason, seem to be free between 9 and 5 on workdays, to spit on, scream at, and obstruct ICE officers—whose ranks are working-class and 45 percent non-white.

All this is called progressivism: impeding the deportation of violent criminals who prey on poor neighborhoods, lacking the security that the protesters take for granted in their own protected enclaves.

The Biden puppeteers enriched and empowered theocratic Iran by lifting sanctions. They did little to nothing when Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen serially attacked US installations and ships.

The Biden years saw near-record gas prices, 9 percent hyperinflation, all-time high crime spikes, and a president who even Democrats now admit was non compos mentis. He was toppled as a candidate for reelection by a coup of Democrat backroom politicos, but only after a disastrous debate. In his place, they and donors appointed a mostly inert Kamala Harris as nominee, who, as a 2020 presidential candidate, had failed to win a single delegate.

Iran Fantasies

The Left has created another fantasy world out of the current six-week Iran war.

When Trump warned on a Monday that the Iranian regime might face terrible punishment for its continued drone and missile attacks, he was libeled as a modern Nazi exterminator, hellbent on mass death. When on Tuesday Iran relented and asked for negotiations, Trump suddenly became smeared as a TACO naif, apparently too eager for peace. Each day, the Left tries to think up a new argument for American defeat, even as Iran suffers more one-sided damage. Their idea is to embolden Iran to hold out, in hopes that Trump—under constant left-wing assault, international pressure to lower gas prices, and his own restive Congressional allies—will fold and then be trashed by the Left as a TACO again.

More preposterously, the Left has peddled the fantasy that Trump’s demands for Iran to surrender its nuclear material (mostly hyper-enriched during the Biden administration) copied the Obama Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran deal.

But who could deny that, under Obama, the deal empowered Iran to rearm even more rapidly with lifted sanctions, nocturnal cash transfers, and the unfreezing of its assets?

The frenzied armament and empowerment of Iran either terrified or impressed the Obama administration enough to hatch the wacky idea of envisioning a Shiite crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Gaza. Such terrorist regimes would “balance” the moderate Arab states and democratic Israel in “creative tension.”

And the message to Iran was not nuclear disarmament, but slow, graduated nuclear armament, albeit of the sort to be completed during an administration to come.

In contrast, Trump’s deal was with an obliterated, prostrate Iranian military. The US fleet was in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade of Iran. More than 300 US combat aircraft could render Iran a medieval mess with impunity, should it persist in its terrorist agendas.

Begging a fully armed and defiant Iran merely to postpone its acquisition of a bomb is not the equivalent of dictating to a flattened Iran a series of demands that, if unmet, will lead to its veritable destruction—after it had already suffered the loss of a half-century investment in a half-trillion-dollar arsenal and military infrastructure.

In the surreal left-wing narrative, the more Iran lost its air force, navy, most of its missiles and drones, its command and control, its subterranean arsenals, its nuclear production facilities, and its factories that turn out weapons of war, the more the Democrat-media nexus declared the war lost and the Americans—after six weeks and 13 lost lives—to be trapped in a quagmire analogous to the war in Vietnam (eight years of war with 58,000 dead, 150,000 wounded).

Impeaching Pete Hegseth?

Examine another fantasy: the charade of a Democrat effort to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on silly charges of supposedly aiding an unauthorized war against Iran, war crimes, reckless handling of classified information, obstruction of Congressional oversight, abuse of power, politicization of the military, and conduct bringing disrepute to the US and its armed forces.

Each of these writs is either false or more aptly applies to the Biden and prior Democrat administrations.

Note that Hegseth, in a single year, fixed the years-long crisis of falling enlistment that he inherited. He has now even exceeded recruitment targets by emphasizing that soldiers should concentrate on combat effectiveness and not fixate on race, sex, or sexual orientation.

His Pentagon oversaw the summer 2025 destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities (with no fatalities), the military extradition of Nicolás Maduro and the recalibration of a once-rogue Venezuela (with no casualties), and the current six-week war that had destroyed the military capability of a once-feared, 93 million-person theocratic Iran (with 13 fatalities so far).

Hegseth has rebooted procurement with emphasis on far more excellent weapons rather than too few superb ones. Compare that to the prior secretary, Lloyd Austin, who went medically AWOL without informing the White House that he was incapacitated for 3–4 days in the ICU. He oversaw the Pentagon’s historic misadventure in Afghanistan and the constant attacks on US soldiers in the Middle East that went unanswered and emboldened Iran’s terrorist proxies. No Republican called for his impeachment.

The war in Iran is not “unauthorized”; it has not exceeded the 90-day limit under the War Powers Act. However, Barack Obama’s seven-month unauthorized bombing of Libya, under the Democrats’ current logic, really was a “war crime,” as was his “unauthorized,” months-long predator assassination campaign on the Afghan border that killed 500, including four US citizens.

The Congress that wants to impeach Hegseth should extend its gaze to Joe Biden’s 30-year unlawful possession of unsecured and classified documents and his use of them with an unauthorized ghostwriter who subsequently destroyed subpoenaed tapes with impunity.

The military has been depoliticized. That is, it no longer serves as a fast-track laboratory for the Left to try out its radical theories—transgenderism, racial tribalism, and unconstitutional racial prejudiced preferences.

Resuscitating Lawfare?

Finally, for over a decade, the Left has waged a coordinated, often extralegal effort to destroy the campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump. What lawfare did the Left not sanction?

The first impeachment hinging on the hearsay evidence on an unnamed pseudo-whistleblower who connived with the prevaricator Adam Schiff—with the acquiescence of a partisan inspector general?

The Russian collusion hoax orchestrated by the past and present Obama FBI and CIA?

The laptop disinformation campaign, to use the government to censor the news and promulgate the lie of a Russian-concocted Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of an election?

The unconstitutional effort to de-ballot Trump in 25 blue states?

The SWAT-like, staged raid on the then-ex-president’s home at Mar-a-Lago to find some 100 classified documents from more than 11,000 confiscated?

The pervasion of the legal system to wage four years of lawfare in five civil and criminal courtrooms?

Despite all that, we are now warned by Democrats like Susan Rice that when the Left regains power, they are going to restart their vendettas to punish their enemies.

An unbalanced politico, James Carville, advises the Democrats to keep quiet about their real plans upon returning to power: to pack the court to destroy the 157-year, nine-justice Supreme Court; to end the 66-year, 50-state Union with two new blue “states,” Puerto Rico and Washington, DC—all to obtain in an instant four new left-wing senators; and to kill off the 220-year-old Senate filibuster.

Carville is upset that the decade-long lawfare against Trump failed. So now he advocates expanding the warping of the justice system to charge Trump’s family and friends.

What is the one constant theme in this alternate left-wing universe?

No Democrat outlines an immigration agenda, a way to round up Biden’s criminal illegal alien entrants, an energy plan, a way to balance the budget, an anti-corruption agenda to stop the multibillion-dollar looting of the federal and state welfare systems, or a new strategic plan abroad. Instead, the party creates alternate realities that demand changing the system itself rather than working within it to appeal to the American voter.

Living with daily delusions and shrieking at Trump demons raging in their collective heads is no way to run a country.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/21/2026 - 16:20
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All The Dream-Houses Of The Left

Things Get Interesting-er

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.”

- VDH

Wednesday the US / Iran ceasefire expires. It has been an interesting two weeks. The US used it to negotiate an end to hostilities, resupply our ships in the Arabian Sea, do maintenance on our ships and warplanes, dismantle Iran’s banking conduits, and blockade Hormuz to shut down the regime’s remaining income flow. The Iranians used it to jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo. They also tried to dig out the entrances of their bombed caves and tunnels to unearth whatever’s left of their hidden missile launchers. Our satellites watched everything they did and mapped the coordinates.

Negotiations? So far, not fruitful, if termination of hostilities and surrender of Iran’s uranium is the goal. We’re not even sure the Iranians we’re negotiating with have any real authority to make a deal. Iran’s government at this point is a hash of conflicting factions: the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), which is a large Jihadi mafia that happens to own half of Iran’s economy and controls its advanced missile and drone weaponry; the regular Army (Artesh) which would theoretically defend against a ground invasion, but otherwise just stands by; and the civilian government represented by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibef — none of whom seem to hold any real decision-making power.

America’s negotiators, led by Veep Vance along with Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner, will land back in Islamabad, Pakistan, today (Monday, April 20).

Our deal is still on the table.

It’s pretty straightforward:

• the aforementioned uranium plus a twenty-year halt of nuclear activities with no path toward a weapon;

• full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz;

• an end to Iranian support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis;

• phased-out sanctions and access to frozen assets;

• and cessation of hostilities.

Events over the weekend argue that Iran is not finished playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.

They tried to run the Hormuz blockade on Sunday with an incoming cargo ship, the Iranian-flagged M/V Touska. The USS destroyer Spruance, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, blew a hole clean through its engine room and then seized the vessel. Its cargo remains undisclosed for now.

Iran claims that it has closed the Strait of Hormuz. The US said it was already closed via the US blockade (we closed it harder). Iran can’t surreptitiously move any oil out to sell to China or run supplies into the country. Iran will lose about $500-million a day and China will lose the majority of its oil imports. China will jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo over that, while the IRGC will lose its last remaining income stream, meaning no pay for anyone. Let’s see if that prompts an attitude change.

If Iran can’t move its oil, it will soon reach the limit of its oil storage capacity, meaning it will have to shut down its oil wells.

If that happens, the hydrology is such that water invasion of the underground strata will permanently damage the oil fields. Iran is between a rock and a squishy place.

That might be enough to force a deal in the hours ahead.

President Trump has made it clear that the time for Iran jerking-around the US is over.

So then, it’s back to Power Station and Bridge Day (blowing them up).

That would be extremely unfortunate for the ordinary Iranian people.

They are unarmed and helpless to resist the maniacs of the IRGC who would allow Power Station and Bridge Day to happen, who, in effect, don’t really care about the ordinary people of Iran.

However, the regular Iranian army, the Artesh, does have weapons (they are the army and armies are generally armed).

Perhaps they will use them to put the insane jihadi IRGC out of business.

After all, the Artesh’s mission is defense on-the-ground of the Iranian homeland, and just now the biggest threat to Iran is the IRGC.

I guess we’ll have to wait on that and watch.

Meanwhile, interesting developments back on America’s home front: All of a sudden, pieces are moving around the game-board of the ongoing and long-running color revolution that the Trump administration is trying to stop.

By color revolution I mean the Democratic Party and its Deep State cadres’ efforts to transform our country into a matrix of crypto-Marxist racketeering operations — and to evade responsibility for the damage already perpetrated dating back to at least 2016.

The FBI Director, Kash Patel, said explicitly on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning news show that his agency has amassed hard evidence of fraud in the 2020 elections and to expect arrests presently.

(Hmmmm, maybe not so “baseless” after all.)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has prepared to move Colorado political prisoner Tina Peters out of the state lockup and under protection in a federal facility.

It is rumored that the move is due to Ms. Peters’ imminent transformation into a witness for a federal case against Colorado election officials.

AG Blanche has also hired Joseph diGenova, former US Attorney for the DC District, as an assisting counsel to US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones in the Southern District of Florida, who, as you know, is running a grand jury down there.

Mr. diGenova, 81, has mapped the events and time-lines necessary to make a solid “grand conspiracy” case against the well-known posse of color revolutionists who perpetrated a series of hoaxes, frauds, and malicious prosecutions on our country and on thousands of innocent citizens (including the current occupant of the White House and his lawyers and associates). Like I said, things get interesting-er.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 16:20
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Things Get Interesting-er

Open Sesame

Submitted By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

This week’s market behavior had a mythical, almost magical tone to it.

In Arabian Nights, Ali Baba was able to open a cave of riches by uttering the phrase “Open Sesame.” Markets responded to any and every sort of connotation of “The Strait is Open” by rewarding participants with riches. We started this week bright and early, kicking off Bloomberg TV, and then moving on to Bloomberg Radio, and Tom Keene’s Best Ideas.

At the time we were all trying to understand what “Blockade” meant. How and what was the U.S. going to do in terms of a blockade? Markets were jittery, but somehow, from almost the get go, markets seemed to take the combination of U.S. and Iranian snippets to mean the Strait was Open.

I am not sure how accurate this data set on Bloomberg is (TRHBTKCD index) given all the conflicting stories of what has transited or not, what is running without transponders, etc. But traffic remains subdued.

We have argued that a ceasefire benefited the U.S. more than Iran and that there were some very strong possible outcomes from U.S. efforts in the region. I underestimated how quickly and how big those good outcomes would be reflected in the market.

While “any option” still seemed viable, markets had moved on to not only is a deal close, but it will also be the best possible deal. A deal where Iran not only stops pursuing a nuclear weapon, but they would also provide the U.S. with all of their enhanced uranium.

As the weekend progresses, it is unclear how realistic this type of deal is. There are once again competing narratives about the Strait.

Weirdly, unless you are trading futures, you can skip the “green dot” Sunday night, as time and again, the Sunday night price action has done little to predict how markets would behave once the U.S. opens.

Just How Magical Was “Open Sesame”?

Last weekend, we went with More Than Just Iran. Academy had delivered so much content on Iran, that we wanted to highlight some of the other issues (and opportunities) facing the market.

Software.

Software conclusion – Problem Solved.

IGV (software ETF) rose 14% on the week. ARKK which I use as a “proxy” for disruption, also rallied by 15%. INTC (one of the few individual tickers I’ve been vocal about in reports and the media) said “hold my beer” as it rallied 35% in less than 2 weeks! QTUM (quantum ETF) was up 25% and didn’t sell off as much in the first place – which makes some sense as investment into this area is only increasing.

Private Credit.

While the rebound hasn’t been as strong in private credit (and private credit-related companies) it started to rebound earlier. We liked it “for a trade” as it had seemed to be oversold and was trading “ok” even when bad news hit the tape.

We use BIZD to reflect BDCs more broadly. It has risen “only” 9% since April 1st and despite the rally is still below its post-Liberation Day lows.

GPZ (which has seen AUM pop from just over $100 million when we first mentioned it, to over $250 million, predominantly through inflows) is an ETF that I use to highlight the performance of “alternative asset managers” which includes companies with heavy exposure to private credit. It hit the low back on March 12th, and is up almost 20% since then.

OWL, which has arguably been at the epicenter of the Private Credit discussion, rose 20% in just a week as it put its low in just last Friday.

Private Credit. While not “solved,” this market has been stabilizing for some time. Yes it was propelled higher last week, along with almost everything else, but that seemed to be only “part of the story.”

Rare Earths, Critical Minerals, and Uranium.

This one “confuses” me a little bit more than some of the others. Presumably, the war was going to lead to some sort of slowdown and would decrease the need for rare earths (REMX) and Uranium-related companies (URA). Maybe, but war, and more importantly, the replenishment of arsenals, probably isn’t that bad for rare earths and critical minerals.

On uranium, I guess the case could have been made about slowing global demand, but I’m really not sure why an oil shortage was bad for nuclear. One seemingly logical conclusion is that oil, once again highlighting geopolitical risk associated with it, would spur investment into nuclear. It didn’t seem to do that. I’m not sure why Iran handing over enriched uranium and possibly creating a lower risk environment in the Middle East is so good for uranium? I’m long, but can’t really say I understood the price action for the past few weeks.

Rare Earths, Critical Minerals, and Uranium. I guess the “problem” was “solved” but not sure why there was a problem in the first place?

Treasuries

The Treasury market started performing better a few weeks ago and that has continued. We argued that while the initial response to the war would be higher yields, that had become overdone. Now the 10-year has hit our “target” of 4.25%. Our target is for 4.25% on 10s to be the midpoint of the range. If anything, that range might need to be moved lower.

The market is pricing in slightly better than a 50/50 chance of 1 cut this year. While the affordability issue (the way most non-economists now see inflation) will make it difficult to cut, I think the market will have to start pricing in at least one cut ahead of the midterms.

Treasuries. A problem, which was overdone, no longer seems to be a problem, which makes sense.

Bottom Line

Dog-years represent roughly what a dog’s age would be if it was human. 

Market participants need to define Trump-years. There has been no slowing of news flow. I see no reason why that would change. In fact, if Iran starts taking up less of the administration’s time, look for the pace of headlines impacting other sectors, relationships, countries, trade, production, jobs, etc. to increase. It seems that I should be able to weave in One Thousand and One Nights into this section, as it fits the Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves theme, but I couldn’t figure out a clever way to do it. It has been a long week! A long month! And even a long year! (Is that the Friend’s theme song?)

Look for lower yields (that seems slightly contrarian here, I think).

I continue to be “pound the table” loud in favor of being heavily overweight the ProSec themes.

I was nowhere near as optimistic on the broad stock market rally as I should have been. Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, it still seems a bit “magical” (or “mechanical”) how well markets behaved in light of the actual headlines. Not the perception of headlines, but the actual headlines. The “Open Sesame” magic that “solved all problems” makes some sense, but positioning may have played a much larger role than we’d like to admit. The faux liquidity of the current trading environment seems to amplify moves.

Let’s hope markets are right and we are near the end. (The exact phrase we used in last weekend’s report).

Things almost seem “too good to be true” but as of now the ceasefire remains intact and other headwinds are being addressed/resolved/ignored which supports the market.

My biggest fears for the economy and risk markets remain affordability, jobs, and the “working poor.” That fear is why I continue to think yields drift lower.

Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 17:30
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Open Sesame

Catching Print? New Feminist Trend Proves They Have Smooth Brains

For decades insecure women have used feminism as a vehicle to crusade against "body shaming" and male objectification - Which is essentially a war on men who dare to have beauty preferences. 

Nearly every feminist movement has roots in female physical insecurity, from the "fat positivity" movement, to the "slut walk" protests, to diversity requirements that are eliminating attractive women from popular media, to the "inversion" movement in which average women deliberately make themselves uglier "in rebellion" against the men who were never interested in them in the first place. 

It's no secret that female insecurity rules almost everything women do politically.  One could say that feminism is essentially the weaponization of female insecurity as a means to gain power over society.

The latest trend to spew from the bowels of feminist activism is called "Catching Print" - Activists claim men are objectifying and shaming women, so women should objectify and shame men...by staring at and rating men's junk.  The problem is, these people don't seem to understand that the vast majority of men simply don't care.

    

The trend is, of course, going viral on cesspool sites like TikTok, and it is being popularized by leftist media sites like Cosmopolitan.  But, it does offer a perfect opportunity to peer into the mentality of the lowest common denominator and understand why marginalizing them is necessary.   

The idea that men are worried about what grotesque feminists think of them is a desperate fantasy.  However, these dumpy ladies have that problem covered; they simply pretend as if men are up in arms about the trend and scrambling to hide the bulge in their pants from prying eyes.  As always, feminists build a strawman on social media and then tear him down.  It's sad, but this makes them feel powerful.  

Men sit with their legs spread for a reason - They're never worried about who is looking.  If anything it would appear that activist women are jealous of modern men's ability to remain indifferent to women's judgements.  And, to be clear, the idea of women trying to shame men into conformity is not new. 

Narcissistic females have been using shaming as a manipulation tactic since the dawn of time.  Almost every man in the world has been accused of having a "small unit" by a woman who was trying to distract from the fact that she is wrong.  Women invented body shaming, mostly to undermine other women out of jealousy.  Men's brains do not operate in the same manner. 

What feminists call "body shaming" is often nothing more than men have standards and preferences in who they date.  In the liberal west, women are applauded and rewarded for having extreme and often absurd preferences (6 feet, 6 figure income, 6 pack abs).  Men are demonized merely for not dating fat chicks.

As for the idea of creepy men staring at women, all men know that this is subject to circumstance.  If she finds the man attractive, it's not creepy for him to leer.  If she doesn't find the man attractive, well, she should probably get over it or avoid going out in public.  We have seen endless examples of what feminists consider "creepy", which includes men doing nothing more than glancing in their general direction. 

It's time for the ladies to understand and accept the fact that they don't get to dictate who looks at them in public.  By extension, men really don't care if women stare at them or the bulge in their pants.      

A key element of the feminist agenda requires women to pretend as if they are constant victims, crying about oppression that simply doesn't exist.  They then mobilize their smooth-brained movements to attack men for this fake oppression and "flip it".  In other words, feminists falsely claim bad behavior by men as an excuse to justify their own bad behavior.  It's a classic Marxist maneuver. 

However, this old tactic is not working anymore.  The methodologies of feminists have been exposed in recent years and men are wise to the game.  Female shaming techniques hold no power and men are shrugging off the attacks.  Today, men are more likely to whip out their "print" and slap a feminist in the face with it than actually care about her opinion.    

Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 15:45
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