Category: Audio Posts: Selected Articles

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Dozens of Georgians stood in tearful silence in a central square near parliament last week to mourn Kesaria Abramidze, a transgender actor and model who was stabbed to death the previous day in her apartment.

Alongside flowers and candles, some carried banners that read, “Hate kills.”

Some in the conservative South Caucasus nation see a direct line between violent attacks, such as the one on the 37-year-old Abramidze, and a sweeping measure that severely restricted LGBTQ+ rights which was given final approval by parliament a day before the slaying. Activists fear the measure could increase hate crimes.

The bill, introduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party, includes bans on same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples and public endorsement and depictions of LGBTQ+ relationships and people in the media. It also bans gender-affirming care and changing gender designations in official documents.

The events were a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of LGBTQ+ people in the country of 3.7 million where the Orthodox Church wields significant influence.

“We have been saying all along, all these months, that laws like this are going to cause violence and are going to increase the number of people that are physically attacked,” Tamar Jakeli, the head of Tbilisi Pride, told The Associated Press at the vigil.

“We are quite desperate, honestly,” Jakeli added. “We don’t know how we can survive in this country under this law, under this government.”

Concerns about Russian influence

Because the measure echoes similar laws in Russia, some Georgians fear they are being drawn further into Moscow’s orbit after more than three decades of independence following the collapse of the USSR.

Authorities in both countries believe the laws protect “traditional family values” from what they call dangerous foreign influence.

Georgian Dream introduced the anti-LGBTQ+ bill shortly after parliament adopted a law in June that requires media and nongovernmental organizations to register with authorities if they get more than 20% of their funding from abroad. This is similar to a Russian measure that the Kremlin uses against its critics and other dissenters.

For years, Moscow has sought to bring Georgia back under its influence, fighting a brief war in 2008 over a breakaway province. The decade-long rule of Georgian Dream -– a party created by shadowy billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia -– has raised concerns it is acting in concert with the Kremlin.

Many ordinary Georgians supported Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in 2022. But Georgia’s government refused to impose sanctions on Moscow, barred Kremlin critics from entering the country, and accused the West of trying to drag Tbilisi into the conflict.

Georgia’s “foreign influence” law ignited mass protests, with critics saying it threatened democracy and jeopardized Georgia’s bid to join the European Union.

Georgian Dream pressed ahead anyway, approving the anti-LGBTQ+ bill. The measure still could be vetoed by President Salome Zourabichvili, long at odds with the party, but it has enough seats to override her the same way it did with the foreign influence law.

The EU’s criticism and Georgia’s response

After the foreign influence law passed, the EU halted Georgia’s effort to join the bloc that began in 2022 and froze some financial support. The U.S. also imposed sanctions on government officials and parliament members.

The anti-LGBTQ+ measure further deepened that rift. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said it “will undermine the fundamental rights of the people, increasing discrimination and stigmatization.”

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze replied that such criticism “will not benefit the image of the European Union within Georgian society.”

“In our perception, Europe represents transparency, traditional, Christian values. For centuries, Georgians have strived toward Europe because we were united by shared Christian traditions and culture,” Kobakhidze said, arguing the measure protects families and minors.

It is seen as a populist step to win conservatives’ support in the Oct. 26 parliamentary election in which Georgian Dream seeks to maintain its dominance.

“They are just using the same methods and means and tools Russia is using -– to somehow … take people’s attention (away) from the real problems and create a new enemy somewhere within the society, and then defeat that enemy that doesn’t really exist,” said Giorgi Davituri of the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information in an AP interview.

A setback for the vulnerable LGBTQ+ community

The sweeping restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and representation mirror those adopted in Russia over the last decade, packaged into one crippling blow.

Some of them, like the ban on same-sex weddings, cement existing Georgian law that defines marriage as a “voluntary union between a man and a woman.” Others, like the ban on gender-affirming medical care or changing one’s gender in documents, drives an entire social group, such as trans people, to the fringes.

“Everybody is really under threat, but trans people are the most vulnerable,” said Tbilisi Pride’s Jakeli, because the legislation bans “any kind of physical intervention which is needed for trans people to continue living.”

Giorgi Gogia, associate director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, told AP the legislation’s impact may be far-reaching, limiting multiple rights, including to health care, peaceful assembly and education.

It’s at odds with Georgia’s laws that ban discrimination based on gender identity, among other things, Gogia said.

More dangerously, it “perpetuates already existing negative stereotypes about LGBTQ+ people in the country and encourages hate speech, and could lead to further violent incidents,” he said.

Gogia pointed to the stabbing death of Abramidze, even though he believed it’s unlikely the developments are directly linked. A 26-year-old man was detained, and police opened an investigation on a charge of “premeditated murder committed with particular cruelty and aggravating circumstances on gender grounds.”

Abramidze was famous in Georgia as “a symbol of the freedom and fight and a very strong woman,” said Taki Mumladze, a director, actor and screenwriter.

Mumladze, who co-wrote and starred in a movie depicting a same-sex relationship and later directed a play about it, told AP the killing shocked Georgians, whatever side of the issue they were on.

Georgia was “very, very homophobic” at one point, she said, recalling anti-gay demonstrations two years ago on the day her movie premiered.

Such protests are common in the country. Last year, hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in Tbilisi, forcing its cancellation, and tens of thousands marched in the capital this year to promote “traditional family values.”

But Mumladze said attitudes had begun to change in recent years, thanks to NGOs educating society and providing support for the LGBTQ+ community. She says her own conservative, religious parents saw her movie and play, and really liked both.

“So I felt very good. And now with this law … even my art will be forbidden,” she said. “It’s crazy that the government is trying to stop this progress.”

She and Jakeli are pinning their hopes on the upcoming election.

“We are mobilizing for the elections,” Jakeli said. “We are urging everybody to go and vote, go and vote for Georgia’s European future, which also includes human rights for all, including us.”

Added Mumladze: “I hope with the elections we will change this because if not, we will lose this country for a long, long time.”

—-

Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia.

__

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

In 2014 Dan Geer, a computer security analyst, gave a speech at the RSA Conference, an annual gathering of cyber-security specialists, titled: ‘We Are All Intelligence Officers Now’. It described the ways in which computers were insinuating themselves into every aspect of life, the resulting haemorrhage of data, and the change in what it meant to be a collector of intelligence. In his talk, Geer asked: ‘Is it possible that in a fully digital world it will come to pass that everyone can see what once only a director of national intelligence could see?’

Fast forward and it is possible to see Geer’s vision being realised. For a flavour of this, consider an episode that unfolded in 2021. Analysts noticed that CCTV cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were digitally talking to crucial parts of the Indian power grid – for no apparent reason. On closer investigation, the strange conversation was the deliberately indirect route by which Chinese spies were interacting with malware they had previously buried deep inside the Indian power grid. The analysts were in a position to observe this because they had been scanning the entire internet to find command and control (C2) nodes – such as the offending cameras – that hackers tend to use as pathways to their victims.

The attack was not foiled by an Indian intelligence agency or a close ally. It was discovered by Recorded Future, a company in Somerville, Massachusetts, which claims to have knowledge of more global C2 nodes than anyone in the world, and which it uses to constantly disrupt Chinese and Russian intelligence operations. The firm, like others, also scrapes vast amounts of data from the dark web – a part of the internet that can only be accessed using special software – collects millions of images daily, extracts visible text to find patterns, and hoovers up corporate records.

The Chinese intrusion serves as a microcosm for intelligence in the modern age. The cameras in Taiwan and South Korea are among more than one billion around the world, forming a metastasising network of technical surveillance – visual and electronic, ground-level and overhead, real-time and retrospective – that has made life far harder for intelligence officers and the agents they need to develop, recruit and meet. That those cameras could be used to sabotage India’s electricity supply shows how digital technology has enabled covert action on a grand scale; what previously required front companies, physical infrastructure and agents carrying tools of sabotage can now be done virtually. That this could be watched in near real-time by a private company illustrates the revelatory quantity and quality of data that oozes out of the digital world. Intelligence is being democratised – blurring the boundary between what is secret and what is public.

As society has migrated to the internet, so have its secrets, and, therefore, so has intelligence. Consider the deep web, a part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines, and the dark web, which requires specialised software to access. They offer a degree of anonymity attractive to a variety of unsavoury people: terrorists, paedophiles, drug dealers, and cyber-criminals. But that anonymity is superficial.

Consider the example of Flashpoint, a so-called threat intelligence firm. Its original work involved building fake personas, such as an analyst pretending to be a jihadist, to infiltrate extremist groups online and gather information about their plan – a form of virtual human intelligence. It now normally deals in data. By tracing extremist groups’ cryptocurrency ‘wallets’, for instance, you can spot anomalous movements that might hint at an impending attack. This kind of intelligence can be semi-secret: tucked out of sight, accessible but often ephemeral. Joseph Cox, a journalist, notes that administrators of criminal and hacker chat rooms on Telegram, a social media platform, frequently wipe messages in one channel and establish another. ‘It really is like missing a whispered conversation in the bar.’ Collecting those messages requires vigilance or automation.

If one approach is to observe what is happening out there – on the internet, on the deep and dark week, in particular places – then another is to combine that with what is happening inside one’s own networks  – ‘in host’. The firms that build key hardware and software – Google for email, Microsoft for operating systems, and Amazon for cloud computing, to name a few – have unprecedented and unmatched insight into the traffic moving over their networks. The result is that these companies are, in one sense, the largest signals intelligence agencies on the planet. Microsoft tracks more than 78 trillion ‘signals’ per day.

These companies observe not just the traffic on their own networks but, like counter-intelligence services, map and track the activities and signatures of their adversaries, including state-linked hacking groups known as advanced persistent threats or APTs. It was Microsoft, not the American government, which publicly revealed that ‘Volt Typhoon’, a Chinese hacking group, had targeted American critical infrastructure since at least 2021, including water and energy facilities, probably as preparation for wartime sabotage. The fact that Western cyber-security companies have been involved in the defence of Ukrainian networks from the earliest days of the war means that they also see some Russian cyber threats that Western agencies might not be aware of.

Private intelligence companies are not unconstrained, however. They are subject to the law. They may not break into buildings, as domestic security services can. They may not breach computer networks in violation of hacking laws, as a cyber intelligence agency might do. Many of them are also proprietorial and cagey about protecting their methods, data and clients. Yet the open nature of the private sector can also be an advantage. Thomas Rid of Johns Hopkins University has noted that counter-intelligence work was once ‘highly secretive’ and ‘cloistered in small teams and communities’ – think of the CIA’s notorious James Angleton, a spycatcher who became a reckless paranoiac.

What changed in the 2010s was the maturation of ‘digital counter-intelligence’, most notably in the field of cyber threat intelligence. Companies began openly countering Russian and Chinese hacking, often publishing their findings in great detail. The debate, explains Rid, became ‘more evidence-based and far less secretive’. These companies were often hunting the same groups of hackers from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran and they created a community of learning and tradecraft, in which different parts of the jigsaw could be put together. People often moved between firms, but also between intelligence agencies and the private sector, bringing know-how with them.

All this is an opportunity for spycraft. For one thing, it expands collection capacity. Take the example of the Falklands War. America found that its spy satellites, designed to watch the Soviet Union, were in the wrong orbit to point at the South Atlantic (‘Nobody ever thought there’d be a damn war in the Falklands for God’s sake’, noted Robert Gates, later the CIA director). The private sector has since solved that problem. The spectacular growth of the commercial satellite industry allows states to enjoy near-blanket coverage. Britain has gone from buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of commercial satellite images every year to multiple millions. Other examples abound. In Gaza, for instance, Israel’s armed forces and signals intelligence units have used private firms, including Google Photos, to assist with facial recognition of Palestinians.

A second advantage is that secrets acquired by non-secret agencies can be shared more widely. In space intelligence, for instance, according to the historian Aaron Bateman, the United States rarely shared satellite images with its NATO allies except Britain. In some cases it did not acknowledge certain sorts of satellites, such as those which collected radio emissions or which used synthetic aperture radar, even existed. That began to change in 1991 during the first Gulf War. But it is now routine for governments to buy and publish high-resolution satellite images to expose malfeasance by an adversary.

Governments can also tip off outside analysts to look for certain things that they want to be publicised, and those analysts often stumble on intriguing things themselves. In August 2021, there were rumours that China was building new ICBM launch sites. Decker Eveleth, a young analyst, looked for them using common sense: they would be on flat land, and far from American radars in Japan and South Korea. Having slogged through satellite images of Inner Mongolia without luck, he found what he was looking for in next-door Gansu: 120 missile silos under construction. Open-source analysts later found the same telltale grid pattern in a remote part of Xinjiang.

Intelligence agencies offer recruits the allure of working for organisations with a sparkling history, a mandate for public service and a licence if not to kill then to break domestic and foreign laws in service of the state. The drawbacks have grown more prominent. ‘It’s a hard sell to anybody who’s in a leading AI lab to join the intelligence community and then be told you’ll have to wait a year to get a security clearance,’ says Jason Matheny of RAND. The chasm in salaries is another issue. Working conditions are a third. ‘We cannot offer certain conditions that are taken for granted today,’ notes Bruno Kahl, the head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. ‘Remote work is barely possible… and not being able to take your cellphone to work is asking much from young people.’ When Joe Morrison of Umbra, a radar satellite start-up, was asked by Western officials why they ought to work with commercial unclassified satellite vendors, his reply was both glib and truthful: ‘Access to talent that likes to smoke weed.’

The most radical interpretation of all these changes is that Western intelligence is broken and needs to start again from scratch. ‘The UK intelligence community (UKIC) is facing an existential challenge,’ argued Lucy Mason, a former British defence official, and Jason M, a semi-anonymous serving intelligence official, in a paper published by the Alan Turing Institute, a research centre in London that works closely with the intelligence services, in November. ‘It is being out-competed by providers of open-source intelligence and data companies.’ The authors proposed a completely new model ‘away from one where national security is done only by some cleared people in highly centralised, closed, organisations, to one which is open, collaborative, and joined up by design’.

This is probably going too far. To be sure, non-secret sources are increasingly important. Open source contributed around 20 per cent of British defence intelligence ‘current processes’, noted General Jim Hockenhull, then chief of the service, in late 2022, ‘but the availability and opportunity means that we’ve got to invert this metric.’ The same appetite exists in the non-military intelligence world. ‘If I’d gone and collected all of China’s military procurement records, I’d probably have got an OBE,’ says a former British intelligence officer. ‘The fact that they were, for many years, just sat there in open source just completely bypassed everybody.’ A flourishing trade in personal location data harvested by advertising brokers from apps on mobile phones is a rich seam for state agencies around the world. In April 2024 America’s communications regulator levied $200m in fines on the country’s largest telecoms firms for selling such data without permission to firms who then sold it on again.

There are limits to private-sector intelligence. The fact that public data can answer many questions that would once have required secret intelligence does not mean they can answer all such questions. Open sources did shine a light on Russia’s military build-up before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Nonetheless, only states had access to the most incriminating evidence, such as intercepts of Russian war plans and indicators that Russia was, for instance, moving blood plasma to the front lines at a crucial moment in mid-January 2022. No commercial or public source has established Russia’s development of an orbital nuclear weapon, Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles to Russia, or Iran’s computer-modelling work relevant to the design of nuclear weapons – all recent stories in the public domain that are based on secret intelligence collected by states.

The second problem is that it is misleading to think about open and secret sources as two separate things, kept apart from one another. Sometimes the former can substitute for the latter, at least to a reasonable degree. Public estimates of losses of Russian military equipment in Ukraine appear to be pretty accurate. But public data is often most useful and revealing when it is fused with something that is non-public, or secret. The problem is that bridging the unclassified (the ‘low side’, as government officials call it) and the classified (‘high side’) world is both technically and institutionally difficult. Consider, for instance, the case of a spy agency which has its own data on the movement of Russian intelligence officers, perhaps acquitted by tracking phones or devices. It may wish to juxtapose that with a publicly available database of visa or travel records – perhaps one leaked on the dark web.

‘What’s actually sensitive is the question you ask,’ says a person familiar with this sort of operation. ‘As soon as the question comes from the high side down onto the low, that question is detectable and the data you pull up is detectable.’ In other words, interrogating the public dataset can reveal what you do or do not know about  Russian spies, perhaps tipping them off. But pushing all the data up onto the high side is too expensive because cloud computing built to handle highly classified data is a scarce resource for all but the very wealthiest of governments. Western agencies are still grappling with this problem, with many reformists frustrated at the slow pace of change in their organisations. ‘If you’re not willing and able to engage with the world of data’, complains the insider, ‘you just cannot be efficient, and your costs go up’.

The third issue has to do with the legal and ethical challenges that arise when states are competing over access to data and its exploitation. China has long seen the acquisition of data as a key resource in its strategic competition with America and the wider West. In 2015 Chinese hackers stole more than 22 million American government security clearance records held by the Office of Personnel Management. In 2017 they acquired the records of 148 million Americans and 15 million Britons from Equifax, a credit reporting agency. In 2021 they targeted Britain’s electoral commission. In February 2024 files leaked from iSoon, a Shanghai-based firm that hacks and then sells data to Chinese government entities, showed the range of its ambition: immigration data from India, phone logs from South Korea, and road-mapping data from Taiwan.

This activity spans a broad range. Much of it is traditional intelligence gathering. Some of it enables China to catch Western spies. Both of those things are no different to what Western spy agencies would do in the other direction, but it also offers other possibilities. ‘Building databases of society has been [Chinese] intelligence… methodology since the 1930s,’ writes Peter Mattis, a China expert and former CIA analyst. ‘Start with the broadest possible data on individuals, then filter and target them for intel and influence.’ Some people would like the West to learn from this approach. ‘If we do not find a way to merge the great capabilities of Western governments and the private sector to defend our own values and interests’, argues Duyane Norman, a former CIA officer, ‘these adversaries will continue to close the gap.’

That is easier said than done. Democracies tend to impose stringent requirements on the sort of thing that may or may not be collected. In Britain the intelligence agencies do collect ‘bulk personal data’, but if they want to ‘retain or examine’ it then they must jump through a few hoops: they need to get a warrant and then show that getting, keeping and using it is proportionate to some specific aim. It is not enough to believe that it might prove useful. Some data is thus ‘more easily accessed and used by the private sector than by government organisations’, write Lucy Mason and Mr M, the authors of the paper published by the Alan Turing Institute.

American spies are similarly constrained. It is ‘hard or impossible’ to ‘identify and scrub’ data on Americans from large datasets, notes Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at CSIS, a think-tank, making it hard to comply with the law. American agencies are thus ‘far behind private sector entities with no such restrictions’, she says. One former European intelligence official observes that the VENONA project, a celebrated Allied effort to collect and slowly decrypt Soviet wartime intelligence transmissions, which eventually revealed a number of Soviet agents in the West, would not have been possible under the law as exists today in some European countries.

In 2013 the disclosures by Edward Snowden, a disgruntled contractor working for America’s National Security Agency, prompted an intense and unexpected public debate over the activities of intelligence agencies and their ability to collect, if not actively read, vast amounts of phone, internet and other traffic. In the decade since, much has changed. The majority of internet browsing and personal messaging now takes place with the protection of end-to-end encryption, making it harder for spies to read what they might intercept. More data is also being encrypted ‘at rest’ – on devices, and in use. That trend, too, has been driven by the private sector, as large tech companies – Apple, Google and Meta, above all – have embraced encryption and user privacy in the face of opposition from law enforcement agencies around the world.

At the same time, daily life relies more than ever on digital technology: more things run on software (fridges, cars, phones), those things have a greater array of sensors (GPS receivers and radio transmitters) and they are increasingly connected, often over the internet, allowing data, often embodying our most personal secrets, to flow to and fro. The paradox of the modern world is that, while we have more means to keep our data secret, there is so much more data to contend with and so many more places from where it can seep out into the world, where a sprawling ecosystem of private intelligence can collect, analyse and use it.

“Your invasion is in your own interests,” he said. “Yours alone. To expand your mafia state into a mafia empire. An empire built on corruption.”

He added, “Mr President, I speak not only as a Briton, as a Londoner, and as a foreign secretary.

“But I say to the Russian representative, on his phone as I speak, that I stand here also as a Black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved.

“Imperialism: I know it when I see it. And I will call it out for what it is,” Lammy said.

Storm Shadows push

Lammy’s address comes as Ukraine continues its intense lobbying push to win approval to use long-range Western missiles — including British-made Storm Shadows — on targets deep inside Russia.

At present they can only be deployed within Ukraine. The U.K. supports their use, but U.S. backing is required.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington on Thursday as he presents his “victory plan” to defeat Putin.

Speaking to reporters as he headed to New York, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made clear that long-range missiles are up for discussion as world leaders gather — but appeared to downplay their significance.

“We will have discussions about a whole range of issues, and we will listen carefully to what President Zelenskyy’s got to say,” Starmer said.

“I don’t think [the] victory plan will be about a sole issue like long-range missiles, it will be about a strategic, overarching route for Ukraine to find a way through this and succeed against Russian aggression,” he added.

Sam Blewett contributed to this report.

At his campaign rally in Iowa this week, Donald Trump once again broke new ground, becoming the first leading presidential candidate to find it necessary to insist he had never read the most infamous book of the 20th century.

“I never read ‘Mein Kampf,'” Trump said, referring to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto (“My Struggle”) that provided the philosophical basis for Nazi Germany and, ultimately, the murder of more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

This was the first time Trump had invoked Hitler’s name and the title of his memoir at a political rally, but there have been multiple reports over the years of Trump expressing a keen interest in, even admiration for, Hitler’s rule over Nazi Germany.

In the past, he’s actually acknowledged owning a copy of the book.

Trump’s denial that he had read Hitler’s memoir came after he has made a series of incendiary remarks in recent weeks referring to his political opponents as “vermin” and saying illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

There’s no question that language echoes that Hitler used to describe his enemies, but there may have been some question about whether Trump knew he was using the same words Hitler used to justify his murderous and genocidal rule of Nazi Germany.

Now, after backlash that his words echoed Hitler’s, however, there is no doubt.

“They said Hitler said that,” Trump said Tuesday after he again told the crowd in Iowa that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.

After insisting Hitler used the words “in a much different way,” Trump went on to make the “blood” reference again. “It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

In other words, Trump’s response when criticized for using Hitler’s language was to acknowledge the criticism and then to use it again. Whether he is telling the truth about not ever reading “Mein Kampf,” there have been multiple reports of Trump privately admiring Hitler.

As president, Trump reportedly complained that America’s military leaders were not “totally loyal” to him, telling his chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”

As reported in “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kelly responded by pointing out Nazi generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

And as I reported in “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party,” Trump boasted to a Republican congressman that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had told him there was “only one” leader in history who had attracted crowds as large as Trump.

“She told me she was amazed at the size of the crowds that came to see me speak,” Trump told the Republican congressman. “She said she could never get crowds like that. In fact, she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.”

The Republican congressman, a close ally of Trump’s, couldn’t tell whether Trump knew that Merkel was referring to Hitler, who, of course, attracted massive crowds throughout his rule of Nazi Germany.

“And I’m thinking,” the congressman told me while recounting his interaction with Trump, “you knew who she is talking about, right?”

Back in 1990 — decades before he got into politics, Trump reportedly acknowledged owning a copy of “Mein Kampf.” The admission came in an interview with Vanity Fair shortly after his divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Here’s what the magazine reported:

“Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of “My New Order” in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade.”

Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner asked Trump if his cousin had given up a copy of the book to him. She wrote this is how Trump responded:

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew,” Trump told Brenner.

Brenner then asked Marty Davis whether he gave Trump a copy of the book.

“I did give him a book about Hitler,’ Davis told her. “But it was ‘My New Order,’ Hitler’s speeches, not ‘Mein Kampf.’ I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

Brenner then wrote that Trump told her: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

In other words, Trump’s denial in Iowa that he had read “Mein Kampf” was not the first time he has denied reading Hitler — or the first time there was reason for him to issue such a denial.

ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl is the author of three books on Donald Trump: “Front Row at the Trump Show,” “Betrayal” and “Tired of Winning.”

The America of Trump’s Father: an Aspirational Fascism
Reigned in New York

Wayne Madsen

October 2, 2019

One
might have been confused about America’s actual loyalties
during the brewing years of World War II if they happened to
live in the greater New York City region. New York and its
suburbs in Long Island and New Jersey had a vibrant
community of first- and second-generation German Americans,
the latter having included Fred Trump, Sr., a rising star in
real estate and retailing.

Also active in the New York-New
Jersey region was the German American Bund or
“Amerikadeutscher Bund,” an organization that supported
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party and the goals and aspirations of
the “New Germany.” The Bund had been created in May 1933
on the orders of German Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. The
first Bund leader was German immigrant Heinrich “Heinz”
Spanknöbel, who initially called his group the “Friends
of New Germany.” In fact, the “Bund” was nothing more
than an overseas extension of the German Nazi Party and it
took its orders directly from Berlin.

The Bund only
accepted as members Americans of German descent. In 1936,
the Friends of New Germany morphed into the German American
Bund in Buffalo, New York. The group’s leader or
Bundesführer was Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German immigrant and
Nazi Party member, who received US citizenship in 1934. The
general belief is that Kuhn was one of many Nazi members
dispatched abroad in the 1930s by the nascent German Nazi
Party to act as Nazi “eyes and ears” in the United
States, Canada, and other countries. These recent
immigrants, who would become Bund leaders across America,
were later involved in espionage for the German Gestapo and
military intelligence Abwehr before and during World War
II.

The Bund established its national headquarters at 178
East 85th Street in the heavily German neighborhood of
Yorkville in Manhattan. It mirrored the Hitler Youth in
Germany by establishing several Nazi youth camps, most
notably Camp Nordland, Camp Will and Might, Camp Bergwald in
New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in Sussex County on Long Island
in New York, and Camp Highland in upstate New York, outside
of the town of Windham.

The height of the Bund’s
activities was a February 20, 1939 rally at New York
City’s Madison Square Garden. It drew some 20,000 Bund
members and Nazi supporters. One German American who did not
hide his far-right views was Fred Trump, Sr., the father of
Donald Trump. On May 31, 1927, Fred Trump was arrested by
police while participating in a Ku Klux Klan march in his
home borough of Queens in New York. The elder Trump was
publicly known to be a racist and he refused to rent his
apartments in Queens and Brooklyn to African Americans. In
1927, there were few organizations for far-right extremists
like Fred Trump to join. One was the KKK, which had its
roots in the post-Civil War Reconstruction South. Another
was Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s overseas
“Fascisti,” which was primarily composed of Italian
immigrants to the United States. By the early 1930s,
far-right wingers in the American North were fast to embrace
the Nazis and Kuhn’s Bund was able and ready to answer the
call and begin recruiting to its ranks. Fred Trump’s FBI
file – which includes the 1927 arrest at the KKK march –
appears to be missing his pre-war and immediate post-war
year activities. The file does not resume until the 1960s,
when the FBI began monitoring the elder Trump’s
association with Mafia syndicates in New York.

It is known
that “Old Man Trump,” the appellation given him by folk
singer Woody Guthrie in a 1950 song by the same title,
continued his racist ways after the war. Guthrie, who had
the misfortune of renting a unit in the Trump-owned Beach
Haven Apartments in Brooklyn, penned the following lyric:
“Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower. Where no black folks come
to roam. No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my
home!” It is also interesting that after the war, Trump
insisted that he was of Swedish descent. In fact, Old Man
Trump’s father, Frederick Trump, was an immigrant from
Kallstadt, Bavaria. It was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh,
a Nazi sympathizer, who stressed his Swedish descent to
defend against charges that he was a supporter of Hitler.
However, in both cases – Old Man Trump and Lindbergh –
there was no question of their sympathies to the racial
policies of Hitler and the “New Germany.”

Old Man
Trump’s home and businesses sat in the midst of Bund
activities and businesses that supported the Bund. One of
the most popular newspapers among the German American
community in New York and New Jersey was the Bund’s “The
Free American and Deutscher Weckruf,” published from 1935
to 1941 in both English and German.

The newspaper served
to rally the Nazi cause in New York and New Jersey. The
paper advertised New York theaters like the Tobis, 86th
Casino, 79th Street, and Bijou that screened propaganda
films fresh from the studios of Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl. Nazi Germany’s cultural inundation of the
United States was a personal project of Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels.

In 1933, Trump opened the Trump Super
Market in Queens at the corner of 78th Street and Jamaica
Avenue. Since it was the first store of its type in Queens,
it was an immediate success. Considering Old Man Trump’s
political viewpoints, it is very likely that he purchased
wholesale products, including meats from Bund butchers and
German baked goods from Bund bakers, of which there were
several in New York City for his store. Several German
American-owned area businesses, including Maier’s Pork
Store and Ehmer’s Pork Store, both on “Dritte Avenue”
(Third Avenue) in Manhattan, and dairies like Karsten’s
Milch of The Bronx and Astoria in Queens and Erb’s German
Sweet Shop in Manhattan, kept the advertising-dependent
“The Free American and Deutscher Weckruf” flush with ad
revenue. Even large corporations like Philco, a manufacturer
of radios, Texaco, Olympia Typewriter, and Simmons Mattress
Company advertised in the Nazi newspaper. Nazi propaganda in
German was broadcast on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays
from the studios of WBNX, first located in The Bronx and
then moved to New Jersey.

Old Man Trump rented thousands
of his apartment units in Jamaica Estates in Queens and
Brooklyn to white Americans only. Bund supporters cheered
Hitler for refusing to shake the hand of black American
Olympian Jesse Owens after he won four gold medals in the
1936 Berlin Olympics. Considering Old Man Trump’s previous
membership in the KKK, he was undoubtedly cheering
Hitler’s snub of Owens, along with the Bund in New York.
Old Man Trump also suspiciously volunteered, after dodging
the World War II draft, to construct Navy barracks and
garden apartments in at least three highly sensitive Navy
ports in Chester, Pennsylvania; and Norfolk and Newport
News, Virginia. All three ports saw thousands of American
and Canadian troops embarked for combat in North Africa and
Europe. Some of these troop ships fell prey to German
U-boats, which received intelligence on the Allied ship
movements from Nazi agents in the very same port areas where
Old Man Trump so “generously” bid on construction
contracts with the Navy.

Today, Donald Trump, who has
championed concentration camps for asylum seekers and
homeless people, torn babies from their parents, and praised
neo-Nazi marchers in Virginia, echoes the political vitriol
of his father’s era Bund. Today, Trump is fond of
demonizing Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. In
Trump’s father’s era such venom was directed by the Bund
against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the late
President Woodrow Wilson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
(who was sometimes referred to as “Frank Rosenfeld”),
and prominent Jews, including New York US Representative
Samuel Dickstein and Bernard Baruch, all of whom were
labeled as pro-Bolshevik “internationalists.”

Donald
Trump now uses the pejorative term of “globalists.” The
same groups of “socialists,” “Communists,” and
“Jews” singled out for attacks by the Bund are today
targeted by Trump and his supporters under almost identical
labels of “socialists,” “Communists,” and
“globalists.” In Old Man Trump’s Nazi-imbued New York,
the Soviet Union was condemned by Nazis as a Jewish
Communist enterprise. The Bund paper published lists of Jews
in charge of various Soviet republics and regions, naming,
for example “Jude” (Jewish) officials in charge of
Abkhazia, Ajaria, Azerbaijan, Bashkiria, Byelorussia, Far
East Federation, Dagestan, West Siberia, Southwest Region,
Kirghizia, Karelia, Crimea, Kirov Region, Gorky Region,
Moldavia, Mari Region, Nenets Region, Omsk Region, Orenburg
Region, Stalingrad Region, Sverdlovsk Region, East Siberia
Region, Tatarstan, Ukraine, Chechenia, and Yakutsk Region.
The list appeared to be a future execution list for the
Nazis. The Bund championed Hitler’s dream of a Russia
“cleansed” of “Jewish Bolsheviks.”

Donald
Trump’s recent September 24 speech before the UN General
Assembly was no different than the “America First”
rantings of Lindbergh before audiences consisting of people
who shared the racist beliefs of Old Man Trump. His son,
Donald, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches of Hitler on his
bed stand for a reason. Old Man Trump must have instilled in
his family business heir a strong belief in the causes of
the Nazis and the Bund.

After the Bund was declared an
enemy organization in 1941 and the Allies defeated the Axis
powers in the war, Old Man Trump began currying favor with
New York’s Jewish community, making donations to Jewish
philanthropies, including those involved with creating the
State of Israel in Palestine. Just as other Nazis, including
Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, tried to assume benevolent
post-war profiles – even living among expatriate German
Jewish communities – Old Man Trump became a close friend
of Binyamin Netanyahu and other top Israelis and New York
Jewish community leaders. Just as Old Man Trump was not
really fooling anyone in pre-war New York, his son is not
fooling anyone today with his fascist tendencies masked as
“Making America Great Again.” These policies are driven
as much by Trump family Nazi ideology as by political
expediency and personal
greed.

ends

© Scoop Media

On Saturday evening, when the New York Times released its explosive report that Donald Trump had claimed a $915 million loss on his 1995 taxes and possibly hadn’t paid federal taxes in the 18 years that followed, it was a clear sign that the election had entered a new phase. Though the revelation itself was astounding, the timing was anything but: Less than a day into the new month, 2016’s first “October surprise” had arrived.

Political history is littered with the charred remains of such late-in the-election bombshells that scramble political calculus just as the stakes are at their highest. An “October surprise” can be happenstance or deliberately orchestrated; international (e.g. the outbreak of war) or domestic (e.g. a massive economic rally). Sometimes it’s personal, with a long-hidden skeleton spilling out from a candidate’s closet. It can save a political campaign as quickly as it can wreck one. And occasionally, it can even decide an election and set the course of the nation.

With four weeks left in the October and one surprise down already, it’s quite possible that there will be shockers yet to come—with Russian hackers, Donald Trump’s penchant for controversy, Julian Assange on the prowl, Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and a precarious scenario in the Middle East, it is anyone’s guess.

And when the next October surprise is revealed, it will join a rich history of last-minute revelations. Some wreaked havoc on elections and upended races, others reinforced the inevitable. Some were manufactured and expertly timed, others were the product of happenstance. But hearing them is enough to sober up even the most confident election observer: an election isn’t over until it’s over.

1840: Just Another Electoral Fraud

Late into his campaign for reelection, President Martin Van Buren had a trick up his sleeve that he thought would secure him a second term in office: Federal prosecutors planned to charge top Whig politicians in New York with a “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” in which they paid Pennsylvanians to travel to New York and fraudulently vote multiple times in the state’s 1838 elections. The prosecutors, members of Van Buren’s Democratic party, did not announce the charges until mid-October, aiming to maximize the indictment’s electoral impact. Democratic newspapers jumped on the story, running sensationalist headlines like, “A Gigantic Plot to Elect Harrison By Fraud” and “Sound the Alarm. Your Liberties Are In Danger.”

At first, the Whigs denied the accusation, but then one of the voter-fraud scheme’s organizers admitted to the charges. The electorate’s reaction, however, was not as explosive as Van Buren hoped: They simply assumed that the Democrats were up to the same shenanigans, even though the Whigs were the only ones prosecuted. Van Buren lost the election by six points.

1880: A Forged Letter

On October 20, 1880, the New York Truth published a three-sentence letter purportedly written by Republican nominee James A. Garfield. The note, addressed to an H.L. Morey of Lynn, Massachusetts, voiced support for Chinese immigration to the U.S., and expressed the opinion that employers had the right “to buy labor where they can get it the cheapest.”

The published letter came in the context of widespread xenophobia among white Americans, and both the Democratic and Republican platforms—as well as Garfield himself—had endorsed restrictions on Chinese immigration. The Morey letter threatened to paint Garfield as duplicitous and jeopardized his support in western states whose white citizens were particularly fearful they would lose their jobs to Chinese immigrants.

While Democratic operatives quickly distributed half-million copies of the Morey letter, Garfield was slow to defend himself—due, in part, to the fact that he was initially unsure whether or not he had authored the letter. Penmanship experts began scrutinizing the correspondence to determine its authenticity, and reporters made their way to Massachusetts to track down the addressee, an unknown H.L. Morey of Lynn. Reporters never found Mr. Morey, and after examining the letter himself, Garfield felt confident it was not his handwriting and publicly announced that it was a fake.

Even with Garfield’s eventual denial, the scandal hurt him politically. What was supposed to be a clear Republic victory became a close race. Garfield beat his opponent by only .02 percentage points in the popular vote, and he lost California, the state most affected by Chinese immigration. After the election, the letter’s author was revealed to be Kenward Phillip, a New York Truth journalist who was later arrested and indicted for fraud.

1884: “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”

In 1884, James G. Blaine, the Republican presidential nominee from Maine, attended a GOP meeting in October when a Presbyterian minister named Dr. Samuel Buchard accused the Democrats of representing “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” — that is, alcohol, Catholics, and the Confederacy.

Blaine didn’t object, a silence he later claimed was because either couldn’t hear the comment or wasn’t paying attention. But that didn’t matter: the public furor that followed cost Blaine thousands of votes from anti-prohibitionists, Roman Catholic immigrants, and southerners. The comment energized Irish voters in New York to vote against Blaine in droves, likely costing him the state—and with it, the election.

1912: A Bottomless Ticket

President William Howard Taft’s doomed 1912 reelection campaign faced difficulties from the beginning: not only did Democratic New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson represent an electoral threat, but Theodore Roosevelt, Taft’s Republican predecessor, split off from the GOP to run on the Bull-Moose ticket, splitting the allegiances of Republican voters nationwide.

One week before Election Day that November, Taft endured a final blow: His vice president, James S. Sherman, died of Bright’s disease while at home in Utica, New York. More than three million Americans ultimately voted for the deceased vice president, although it was decided beforehand that Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, would receive the votes in Sherman’s place. In the end, it didn’t matter: The Taft-Sherman campaign would receive a mere eight electoral votes, finishing far behind both Wilson, the victor, and Roosevelt.

1920: Black Warren G. Harding and FDR’s Investigation Into Homosexuality

It seemed inevitable that Warren G. Harding would be elected president, but in the weeks before the election, his campaign was dismayed by the spread of a rumor that Harding had “Negro blood.” When Mrs. Harding heard about the rumor, she reportedly wept until she was red-eyed. The charge came from William E. Chancellor, a famously racist professor at Wooster College. Harding’s advisers were worried the falsehood would hurt their candidate among white racists in southern states, and went to great lengths to prove Harding’s European ancestry. It was, in a sense, the 1920 version of the modern “birther” conspiracy theory.

While the Harding campaign was busy trying to prove their white credentials, the Democratic ticket was embroiled in its own scandal. Before accepting the vice presidential nomination that year, Franklin Roosevelt was the assistant secretary of the Navy. In that capacity, Roosevelt had authorized an investigation of homosexuality at a naval facility in Newport, Rhode Island. The investigative unit, which directly reported to Roosevelt, told its members to participate in homosexual acts in order to gain firsthand evidence that would stand up in court.

When Roosevelt learned of the investigative unit’s methods, he canceled the operation, but when the operation’s details went public, Roosevelt came under fire as the official who authorized the unit’s mission. John Rathom, a prominent newspaper editor from Providence, led the charge against FDR, and in October, Rathom additionally alleged that Roosevelt had allowed 83 seamen convicted of “unnatural acts” to return to duty. The accusation proved baseless, but the incident did little to help the Democrats stop Harding from taking the White House in November.

1940: FDR Loses the Black Vote, Then Wins it Back

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt was worried about holding onto the black vote as he competed for an unprecedented third term in office. As Europe descended into war, FDR came under criticism from African-American leaders for enabling the military’s continued segregation. He was facing a general-election opponent, Wendell Willkie, with a strong civil rights platform. To cap it off, less than a month before the election, an FDR press aide named Stephen Early kneed a black police officer in the groin outside of Madison Square Garden in New York City, a move seen as both an attack on a black professional and an example of the double-standard treatment afforded to Washington insiders.

To mitigate the political damage, Roosevelt responded with an October surprise of his own: Days before the election, Roosevelt promoted Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. to brigadier general — the first African American to reach that rank – and announced the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II’s famous group of African-American military pilots.

The ploy largely worked, and Roosevelt won with 55 percent of the popular vote, losing only in white-collar, Protestant communities.

1964: International Events Trump a Sex Scandal

The term “October Surprise” came into popular use in 1972, but the election of 1964 experienced one of the most surprising Octobers in electoral history. It started out on October 7, when LBJ top aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for disorderly conduct with another man in the Washington D.C. YMCA, which the Toledo Blade later described as “so notorious a gathering place of homosexuals that the District police had long since staked it out with peepholes for surveillance.” Within two days, someone in the FBI had leaked the story to the RNC. “For 24 full hours, Republicans and Democrats alike held their breath to see how the nation would react,” wrote the Toledo Blade, analyzing the election a year later. “And perhaps the most amazing of all events of the campaign of 1964 is that the nation faced the fact fully – and shrugged its shoulders.”

LBJ escaped the sex scandal in part because October wasn’t yet over, and the Jenkins incident would soon be swept aside by even greater surprises—this time on a far more consequential stage. On October 14, one week after Jenkins’ arrest, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power by his hardliner colleagues in the USSR. In the two days that followed, the United Kingdom’s Labour Party won a majority in parliament and the People’s Republic of China conducted its first nuclear weapons test. Amid international tumult, Goldwater’s inflammatory rhetoric seemed even less appealing than it already had. In November, President Johnson won in a landslide.

1968: Nixon Derails LBJ’s Vietnam Peace Talks

William Casey, a Nixon aide later credited with coining the term “October Surprise,” was suspicious that as the 1968 election raged, President Johnson would try to engineer a last-minute peace deal in Vietnam in an attempt to throw the election to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Casey was right to be suspicious—shortly before the election, LBJ announced a halt to bombing and the start of new peace talks between Saigon and the Viet Cong. In the polls, Humphrey briefly pulled ahead of Richard Nixon.

When Nixon heard of Johnson’s maneuvering, he responded by reaching out to South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu through backchannels, encouraging him to not attend peace talks and assuring him that if Nixon won the presidency, South Vietnam could expect stronger support from his administration than it would get from Johnson or Humphrey.

It’s difficult to know if Nixon’s outreach influenced President Thieu’s decision, but Nixon got what he wanted: Three days before the election, the South Vietnamese withdrew from the peace talks, and Humphrey lost his momentum. By that point, LBJ had learned that Nixon was interfering in international affairs and had began wiretapping the Nixon campaign. Humphrey chose not make Nixon’s actions public, however, and lost to his Republican opponent on Election Day.

1972: Nixon (Prematurely) Announces Peace Agreement in Vietnam

Four years later, President Nixon still hadn’t fulfilled his campaign promise to end the Vietnam War. A timely breakthrough came on October 8, when North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris suddenly agreed to U.S. conditions for peace.

National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger rushed from Paris to Washington for a press conference scheduled for October 26. On October 22nd, things began to fall apart: South Vietnam told Kissinger they would not accept the agreement, and North Vietnam subsequently took offense to Kissinger’s request for more time to persuade Saigon and publicly accused the United States of duplicity. None of that stopped Kissinger from attending the scheduled press conference, however, and proclaiming that “peace is at hand.” The announcement pushed Nixon even further ahead in the polls, and won the election with more than 60 percent of the popular vote. The peace negotiations, however, fell apart in December 1972, and the Vietnam war would continue for another two-and-a-half years.

1980: Iran Holds Carter’s Campaign Hostage

In the Carter-Reagan election, October Surprises entered the world of conspiracy theories. As the story goes, Ronald Reagan was worried that a last-minute deal to release the American hostages in Iran would give President Jimmy Carter the support he needed to win reelection. Then, days before U.S. voters cast their ballots, Iran announced that the it would not release the hostages until after the election.

Allegations quickly took root over the cause of Iran’s statement. Jack Anderson of the Washington Post claimed that President Carter had been planning a military operation to save the hostages, hoping it would save him the election. Others alleged that Ronald Reagan had made a secret deal with the Iranians to postpone the hostage release and rob Jimmy Carter of victory.

That November, Reagan defeated Carter, and Iran continued to hold 52 Americans hostage, releasing them mere minutes after Ronald Reagan completed his inaugural address in January 1981. Political figures and hostages themselves demanded a probe into the timing of the incident, but Congress didn’t bite until later, when two congressional investigations found no evidence of a conspiracy between Reagan and Iran. Still, a few high-profile figures, including former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr, stand by the allegations of a secret Reagan-Iran deal to this day.

1992: A Poorly Timed Iran-Contra Indictment

The Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the money to fund an anti-communist militia in Nicaragua, came to light in 1987, but by the fall of 1992, it was still fresh enough to cause electoral trouble for Republicans.

Just four days before the Bush-Clinton-Perot election, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh indicted former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for lying about his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Republicans fumed, accused Walsh of timing Weinberger’s indictment to damage President Bush’s re-election chances, even though Walsh himself belonged to the Republican Party. In November, Bush lost the election, but before he left the Oval Office, he pardoned Weinberger.

2000: George W. Bush’s DUI

George W. Bush and Al Gore were tied in national polls in the days leading up to the 2000 presidential election, but then Fox News Channel broke the biggest scandal of Bush’s campaign: 24 years earlier, Bush had been arrested for a drunk-driving in Maine.

Though the Bush campaign told reporters that the incident was so long ago that it would do little to change voters’ minds, ten years later, Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote that he believes the scandal cost Bush five states. Though many would question that math—and it’s difficult to argue with a counter-factual—Rove believes that without the DUI news, Bush would have won the popular vote and the mess in Florida would have been avoided.

2004: A New Bin Laden Video Boosts Bush

On October 27, 2004, Osama bin Laden released a video claiming responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and calling President Bush a dictator who repressed freedom by means of the Patriot Act.

The video renewed public interest in national security and aided Bush. By targeting Bush for criticism, Bin Laden cast him in the role of his enemy—a title that Americans would welcome—while reiterating criticisms of the Patriot Act that many of Bush’s domestic political opponents had made.

2008: A Market Crash Causes McCain’s Unforced Errors

In October 2008, the stock market’s decline accelerated, joblessness reached a 14-year high, and the global economy teetered on the brink of disaster. Americans were beginning to feel the effects of the Great Recession, driving up Bush’s already-high unpopularity as his tenure in the White House came to an end.

The economic downturn spelled the end of McCain’s candidacy. In the months prior, the senator had been struggling to relate to the economic grievances of voters: In an August 2008 interview with POLITICO, McCain couldn’t recall how many houses he owned, promising “I’ll have my staff get back to you.” Then in September, he paradoxically declared that “the fundamentals of our economy our strong” while simultaneously recognizing the “tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street.” In an effort to appear steady at the helm, he suspended his campaign to return to Washington to focus on the crisis — a move that backfired, making him look ineffective and unable to take on more than one task at a time.

Obama capitalized on the moment and McCain’s gaffes, propelling him through the campaign season’s final stretch and to the White House.

2012: A Secret Video Tape

Hurricane Sandy has been falsely labeled an October Surprise during the 2012 election, but it fails to qualify because it was not a human-caused event. The real surprise of that fall 2012 was the September release of a secretly recorded tape of Mitt Romney belittling nearly half of America while speaking to wealthy donors at a closed-door fundraiser.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has responsibility to care for them,” Romney said at a private, high-dollar fundraising event.

The Obama team quickly made the audio recording the center of a swing-state ad blitz that aired through October. In an interview with David Letterman shortly after the clip surfaced, President Obama quipped, “My expectation is that if you want to be president, you’ve got to work for everybody, not just for some.”

Not even Romney could deny how bad it was for his campaign. “That hurt,” Romney told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in an interview four months after the election. “There’s no question that hurt and did real damage to my campaign.”