Hot Election Eve Take: I Think Republicans Keep The House & Senate In The 2026 Midterms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As much as I hope I’m wrong, my gut tells me Republicans keep control of the House and Senate tomorrow. The country is too distracted and there’s always the risk that, I don’t know, Elon Musk hacks it or something.

I think it’s ultimately going to be like the Mueller Report — we think it’s going to solve all our Trump political problems and then…meh, nothing happens. What’s even worse about this scenario is even if somehow the Democrats do win control of one or more of the Congressional Houses, we still have Trump and we still have the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on my persona life starting next year.

In short, I, personally, am fucked no matter what.

And, what’s more, if Democrats do win big, there is always the risk that Trump will run some weird, unexpected autocratic play that fucks everything up.

Ten Minutes to Midnight: What Happens If Trump Nukes Pickaxe Mountain

In the early hours of November 2, Tucker Carlson posted on X that the Trump administration “may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran.” His target was Pickaxe Mountain, the tunnel complex Iran has been carving into the rock south of Natanz. He set a decision window that closes around November 7, three days after the midterms. (Drop Site, Newswire)

It is worth being precise about what is known. The broad frame of Carlson’s story is corroborated: Axios reports that Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing Trump to strike Iran right after Tuesday’s vote, and that Trump, for now, prefers to let negotiations run. Trump himself said over the weekend that Pickaxe Mountain still needs to be “taken care of” and that the job is planned and could be done “in 10 minutes.” (Axios)

What is not corroborated is the word that matters most: nuclear. No outlet has independently confirmed that a nuclear weapon is among the options. The White House does not comment on military plans, and Secretary of State Rubio says no decision has been made. Carlson, who broke with Trump over this war and has already called for his removal, is an interested messenger. (investingLive, Newsweek)

So this post does not argue the rumor is true. It asks a narrower question that deserves an answer before the window closes, not after: if an American president did detonate a nuclear weapon on Iranian soil this month, what would the world look like on the morning after, and in the decade that follows?

The target, and why anyone would reach for a nuke

Pickaxe Mountain (Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La) is the one piece of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that conventional American bombs may not be able to reach. It sits just south of Natanz, about 140 miles south of Tehran. Iran began tunneling there after repeated sabotage at Natanz. The IAEA has never been allowed inside. (NBC/AP, NBC/AP)

The problem is depth. Analysts at the James Martin Center estimated in 2023 that the main halls sit 80 to 100 meters down, and digging has continued since. America’s heaviest conventional penetrator, the GBU-57 “bunker buster” used on Fordow in 2025, is rated to plow through at least 60 meters of earth. US officials have reportedly discussed dropping two in succession, but it is unclear even that would reach a facility this deep. Trump himself has acknowledged the depth problem. (NBC/AP, Dhaka Courier)

That gap is the entire logic of the nuclear rumor. If you believe Iran is spinning centrifuges under a mountain you cannot crack, and you have decided the site must go, the menu shrinks to three items: a ground raid, a negotiated shutdown, or a nuclear earth-penetrator. Trump has ruled out a ground operation. CNN has reported that the administration is weighing the MOAB, the largest conventional bomb in the arsenal, though analysts doubt a surface-blast weapon would touch a target under granite. (Al Jazeera)

The hardware for the nuclear option exists. The US fields low-yield warheads, including the W76-2 on Trident submarines, introduced under Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The Federation of American Scientists estimates its yield at about five kilotons, roughly a third of Hiroshima. FAS also argued at the time that the weapon’s most plausible first-use scenarios were not Russia but North Korea or Iran. (FAS, JoongAng)

One physical fact matters for everything that follows. No weapon can burrow deep enough to fully contain a nuclear blast aimed at a target this far down. A nuclear strike on Pickaxe Mountain would crater the surface and throw radioactive debris into the air over central Iran. “Tactical” describes the delivery system, not the fallout.

Breaking an 81-year taboo

The single largest consequence would not be in Iran. It would be the end of the longest-running norm in modern statecraft: nobody has used a nuclear weapon in war since Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

That norm has survived Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Afghanistan twice, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was never written into a treaty. Tactical nuclear weapons, in fact, are covered by no arms control agreement at all. (Al Jazeera) The taboo holds because every nuclear power has believed that being the one to break it would cost more than any battlefield gain. A strike on Pickaxe Mountain would test that belief in public, and the whole world would study the bill.

The timing makes it worse. New START, the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic forces, expired on February 5, 2026. For the first time since the early 1970s, nothing caps or verifies the two largest arsenals. (GlobalSecurity) Trump has also called for ending the US moratorium on nuclear testing. (The New Arab) A first use layered on top of that would land in a system with no guardrails left to absorb the shock.

The target also matters. Iran is a non-nuclear-weapon state that has signed the NPT. For decades, US declaratory policy has said America will not use nuclear weapons against such states if they comply with their obligations. Washington could argue Iran forfeited that assurance by hiding enrichment. But the IAEA has never inspected Pickaxe Mountain, and Iran denies any nuclear activity there. (UCS, investingLive) Much of the world would hear a different message: the guarantee that came with giving up the bomb was conditional, and the United States decides the conditions.

Iran: a strike that could manufacture the bomb it was meant to prevent

The most likely Iranian response is not surrender. It is retaliation now and a dash for a weapon later.

Tehran has spent October spelling out the retaliation in advance. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has warned that any new US-Israeli offensive would bring strikes on oil facilities, undersea cables, data centers and AI infrastructure in as many as seven Gulf countries. (La Voce di New York, Daily Caller) These are not idle threats. On March 1, Iranian drones knocked two Amazon Web Services availability zones in the UAE offline for more than a day. (The Next Web) Those warnings were issued against a conventional strike. A nuclear one would remove whatever restraint remains.

The longer-term problem is that the strike might not achieve its own goal. The IAEA estimates Iran holds about 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60%, enough for roughly ten weapons if enriched further. Rafael Grossi has said most of it is probably still at Isfahan, not Pickaxe Mountain. (Asharq Al-Awsat, Al Arabiya) Vaporizing a centrifuge hall does not vaporize the material, or the knowledge of how to spin it.

Meanwhile the political brakes on an Iranian bomb are already wearing thin. Ali Khamenei, whose verbal fatwa declared nuclear weapons un-Islamic, was killed on February 28. His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has said nothing either way. (NBC/AP) A bill to leave the NPT has been in parliament since before the spring review conference, though Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has not reached consensus. (Arms Control Association, Responsible Statecraft)

A nuclear strike would settle that debate. The argument Iranian hardliners have made for two decades, that only a bomb guarantees the regime’s survival, would be validated by the only country that has ever used one. Expect the NPT exit to pass, enrichment to scatter into smaller and better-hidden sites, and the program to become the regime’s founding cause rather than its bargaining chip.

The Gulf and the oil shock

The Gulf monarchies would absorb the first physical blow, and they know it. That is why most of them have spent weeks lobbying against any escalation.

Washington has already told several Gulf states to prepare for a “short, intense” campaign after the midterms, according to the Wall Street Journal. (investingLive) Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman, along with Egypt, have pressed for restraint. (Alhurra) Earlier in the war, Mohammed bin Salman reportedly warned Trump that strikes on Iranian energy targets could bring retaliation against Saudi oil and gas. The UAE, by one WSJ account, privately argued the opposite: that only major escalation would move the Revolutionary Guard. (Ynet)

A nuclear strike would scramble that debate. Even hawks in Abu Dhabi asked for escalation, not radiation drifting downwind of a war they host. Gulf rulers would face street anger over a nuclear attack on a Muslim country launched partly from their bases. They would also face an Iran with no remaining reason to spare their oil fields, desalination plants and data centers.

The energy market is already primed. Iran has controlled traffic through Hormuz since February, charging tolls and attacking ships that defy it. Brent touched $126 in April, fell back during the June truce, and has been trading around $100 or higher since autumn; it topped $114 in late October on Iran’s threats. (The National, Al-Monitor, La Voce di New York) Earlier this year, S&P Global Energy put a sustained-disruption scenario at $200 to $250 a barrel. (WION)

A nuclear strike, followed by Iranian attacks on Gulf production, is exactly that scenario. Most Hormuz crude goes to Asia, so the shock would hit China, India, Japan and Korea first, then return to American gas pumps. (Wikipedia) Add insurers refusing to cover Gulf shipping near a nuclear exchange, and a global recession becomes a reasonable base case rather than a tail risk.

Moscow and Beijing: the precedent and the pulpit

Russia would not need to fire a shot to profit from an American nuclear strike. It would only need to quote it.

For four years, Moscow’s nuclear threats over Ukraine have been treated in the West as bluff. Dmitry Medvedev marked the invasion’s fourth anniversary in February by again threatening “non-strategic nuclear weapons” against Ukraine and its suppliers. (Kyiv Independent) Those threats have carried a hidden cost: no state has used such a weapon, and the first to do so would be a pariah. An American strike on Iran would erase that cost. The next time the Kremlin faces a battlefield collapse, it could point to Natanz and argue that a great power may use a low-yield weapon against a non-nuclear state to remove what it calls an existential threat. Western objections would sound like hypocrisy, because they would be.

Russia is also already a quiet participant in this war. It has reportedly shared targeting intelligence with Iran and enjoyed a windfall from high oil prices that funds its Ukraine campaign. (GlobalSecurity) A nuclear strike would push oil higher still and hand Moscow a diplomatic opening across the Global South.

China’s reaction would be quieter and possibly more consequential. Beijing has kept a careful distance, calling the war a conflict that “should never have happened” while declining to pressure Tehran. (Oman Observer) About half of China’s crude imports normally pass through Hormuz. (Al-Monitor) China also keeps a declared no-first-use policy. A US first strike would let Beijing cast itself as the responsible nuclear power and Washington as the reckless one, a contrast it would press in every capital from Jakarta to Brasília.

The Taiwan angle is subtler. Beijing would not copy the act. It would study the reaction: whether allies stood with Washington, whether markets punished it, whether the world moved on within a month. Every lesson about what a great power can get away with near its own neighborhood would be filed away.

The proliferation cascade

The deepest damage would be to the bargain that has kept the number of nuclear states in single digits: give up the bomb, and you are safe from it.

That bargain was already fraying before Carlson’s post. Iran had threatened to leave the NPT as the treaty’s review conference opened in April. (Arms Control Association) In July, the AP reported that Trump approved a civil nuclear deal that may let Saudi Arabia enrich uranium. CNN later reported the terms could allow enrichment without the usual safeguards. (PBS/AP, Militarnyi) Mohammed bin Salman said in 2018 that if Iran built a bomb, Saudi Arabia would follow. (Euronews)

A US nuclear strike would add a second, harsher lesson to the first. The Iran war already taught that nuclear latency (the ability to build quickly without building) invites preventive attack. (IFRI) A nuclear strike would teach that latency can invite a nuclear attack. The rational response for any state that fears Washington, or fears being abandoned by it, is to stop hovering at the threshold and cross it.

The pressure would not stay in the Middle East. In August, a Gallup Korea poll found 65% of South Koreans want their own nuclear weapons, after Trump curtailed joint exercises with Seoul. (Korea Times) Seoul’s question has always been whether America would risk nuclear war on its behalf. An American president willing to use nuclear weapons for its own purposes, while scaling back commitments to allies, answers a different question: whether the umbrella is shelter or weather.

Likely candidates for a faster hedge include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea and, more slowly, Japan. None would announce a bomb program next week. But nuclear decisions are made in planning offices years before they are made in public, and this would be the week the planning began.

Allies: complicity by runway

Europe has spent this war trying to stay out of it. Germany’s defense minister said in March that “this is not our war.” Macron said France was not a party to the conflict. (Neos Kosmos) Britain refused the initial request to use its bases, then allowed RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for what Keir Starmer called “defensive” operations once Iran began hitting Gulf allies. (NewsNation)

A nuclear strike would collapse that careful line. Any allied base, tanker, radar or intelligence feed that touched the mission would make its host a participant in the first nuclear attack since 1945. Governments that already struggle to justify a conventional war at home would face a choice between public breach and quiet complicity. Expect at least some to restrict US basing rights, and expect the push for an independent European nuclear deterrent, which Macron has already floated, to accelerate. (Postmodern Conservative)

Israel’s position would be the strangest of all. Netanyahu is the leader reportedly pressing hardest for a strike, and he emerged from the October 27 election without a clear majority. (Axios) Israel is widely understood to possess nuclear weapons it has never acknowledged. (The New Arab) An American nuclear strike urged by Jerusalem would drag that ambiguity into the open. It would also make Israel the most obvious target for whatever Iran, or its allies, chose to do next.

And for American standing generally: the United States has spent 80 years arguing that its nuclear arsenal exists so that it never has to be used. The day it is used against a non-nuclear state, every future American lecture on nonproliferation, from Pyongyang to Riyadh, loses its premise.

The home front

At home, the legal machinery would barely slow a president down, but the political shock could be enormous.

Under current US procedures, the president alone can order a nuclear strike. No cabinet vote, congressional approval or second signature is required. Congress has tried to rein in this war: in June, the Senate adopted a House-passed war powers resolution 50 to 48, the first time both chambers approved such a measure since the War Powers Resolution of 1973. (ABC News Radio, People Daily) Trump dismissed it as “meaningless,” and as a concurrent resolution it does not bind him. (Daily Mirror)

The timing in Carlson’s account is the midterms. A strike in the week after November 3 would land on a Congress in lame-duck session, with results possibly still being counted. Whatever the vote produces, a new majority would not be seated until January. That leaves weeks in which outrage could be loud but structurally toothless.

The pressure would come instead from inside the chain of command and from the president’s own coalition. Officers who receive a nuclear order are bound to refuse only a clearly unlawful one, and the legality of striking a non-nuclear state’s buried facility would be argued for years. Politically, the MAGA movement is already split on this war. Carlson, Steve Bannon and Rep. Thomas Massie have argued that “forever wars” violate America First. (CBS News, NPR) A nuclear strike would turn that split into a rupture, and Carlson’s call for removal would stop sounding like the fringe.

At the gas pump, an oil shock on the scale described above would reach every household within weeks. Trump has repeatedly promised that oil prices would fall once the war was won. (Al-Monitor) A nuclear strike that sends them sharply higher would test that promise against reality.

The case that the damage would be contained

A fair analysis has to take the other side seriously. Defenders of a hard-line approach would make several arguments.

Escalate to end it. The war is eight months old, deadlocked, and costly. Hormuz is choked and Brent is near $100. A single, overwhelming demonstration could force Tehran to accept terms quickly, the same logic Truman’s defenders apply to 1945. A short war, even a terrible one, might cost fewer lives and dollars than an open-ended one.
The yield is small and the site is remote. A low-yield earth-penetrator on a military facility in the desert is not Hiroshima. Defenders would argue civilian casualties could be lower than a weeks-long conventional campaign against infrastructure, which is the alternative reportedly on the table.
Deterrence would be restored, not broken. Adversaries from Moscow to Pyongyang have bet that Washington would never actually use its arsenal. Proving otherwise could make every American red line more credible, and make future wars less likely.
The great powers act on interest, not precedent. Russia’s nuclear decisions on Ukraine will turn on its battlefield position, not on American example. China has kept its distance from this war precisely because its interests point that way.
Proliferation is coming anyway. Seoul’s public already wants the bomb. Riyadh already has an enrichment deal in progress. On this view, a strike changes the speed of a trend, not its direction.

Some of these points have real force, especially the last. But they share a weakness: each assumes the strike works. If most of Iran’s highly enriched uranium sits at Isfahan rather than under Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear strike could destroy a facility without ending the program. In that case America would have paid the full price of breaking the taboo while handing Iran its strongest argument for the bomb. The escalation case has to be right about the target, the yield, the fallout, Iran’s response and the world’s reaction, all at once. The cautionary case only needs one of those to go wrong.

The window, and what to watch

The best evidence against Carlson’s claim comes from Trump himself. In April he said he would not use a nuclear weapon against Iran and that nobody should ever be allowed to. In mid-October he told Newsmax, “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to.” (Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera) Yet on October 28 the White House said only that Trump “keeps all options on the table.” (Israel Hayom) Those two statements can coexist. They do not settle the question.

What is not in doubt is that a major US strike on Iran after the midterms is being actively prepared. That alone carries most of the regional risks above. The nuclear question determines whether those risks stay regional or become global and permanent.

Over the next week, these are the signals that matter:

November 3: the midterm results, and whether Trump reads them as a mandate or a warning.
Around November 7: the decision point Carlson named. Silence from the White House is not confirmation either way.
Doha and the mediators: whether Qatar, Pakistan or Oman announce new talks, which would signal Trump is still choosing negotiation.
Force posture: the arrival of the additional carrier strike group, and any movement of bombers or ballistic-missile submarines that is reported.
Tehran: any parliamentary vote on NPT withdrawal, or any statement from Mojtaba Khamenei on nuclear weapons.
Oil: the market’s own read of the odds, which will move faster than any official statement.

The nuclear taboo has survived 81 years because every leader who could have broken it decided the world after would be worse than the war before. If Carlson is wrong, this post is a thought experiment. If he is right, it is a list of the bills that would come due.

Sources and disclosure

This post was researched and drafted by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, at the request of Trumplandia Report. The nuclear-strike claim at its center is unverified; facts are as reported through November 2, 2026.

Coup or Rescue? Poland and the Death of the Referee

Two countries, one feed

On Friday afternoon, Twitter told me there was a coup in Poland. By dinnertime, the same feed told me there wasn’t one. It was a rescue. It was the rule of law being restored. It was the rule of law being destroyed by force.

All of these claims were about the same event: Warsaw police on the grounds of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Not one of them changed anyone’s mind. Within a few hours, Poland had split into two countries living through two different afternoons.

That split is the real story. And it is coming here next week.

What happened in Warsaw

Here is what both sides agree on. On October 30, the tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and its vice president, Bartłomiej Sochański, were suspended for a month. A judge on the court, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, called the police, citing threats to judges and staff. Officers secured the grounds as protesters gathered. Three people were detained after some went over the fence. President Karol Nawrocki, flying to Senegal, turned his plane around.

Here is where agreement ends. Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński called it a coup by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s services. The tribunal used the same word. Tusk’s camp says Święczkowski, installed under the previous PiS government, has spent months blocking judges the current parliament lawfully elected. “Restoring the rule of law is our obligation,” Tusk wrote.

Notice what each side is claiming: to be the one defending the law. Tusk’s government refuses to recognize the tribunal’s rulings because of judges seated under PiS. Nawrocki and Święczkowski refuse to recognize judges the Sejm elected this year. Each side has a legal theory under which the other is the usurper. The police said they were on the grounds, not in the building, and not interfering with the court’s work. Half the country heard that as reassurance. The other half heard it as a cover story.

The referee is dead

A constitutional court exists to settle exactly this kind of fight. That’s its whole job: to be the one body both sides agree to lose to. Poland’s tribunal can’t do that anymore, because each camp has decided the other camp’s judges aren’t real judges. When the referee is the thing being fought over, there is no referee.

Political scientists have a word for countries stuck in this zone: anocracy. It means a regime that is neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. The Center for Systemic Peace, which maintains the long-running Polity index, considers anocracies the most volatile kind of state. That’s not because they’re the most repressive. It’s because nobody is sure who’s in charge or whether the rules still bind.

We usually picture democratic collapse as a moment: tanks, a seized broadcast tower, a general at a podium. What Warsaw showed is that the slide can look like paperwork. A suspension. A judge’s phone call. A prosecutor’s letter asking police to pay special attention to a building. The fatal symptom isn’t any single act. It’s that by the time the act happens, there is no one left whom both sides will believe about what it was.

Now do America

The Center for Systemic Peace already puts the United States in anocracy territory. It dropped the U.S. Polity score to zero after the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling, and its website now says the country is no longer considered a democracy. You can argue with the method. You can’t argue with the mood: Pew finds Americans’ confidence in these midterms lower than for any national election it has measured.

So here’s my prediction for the weeks after November 3. Nobody will announce they’re overturning an election. They’ll announce they’re protecting one.

The tools are already on the table. The Justice Department has sued in Alaska to block certification if Senator Dan Sullivan loses, citing an independent candidate with the same name. Attorney General Todd Blanche has said he won’t rule out other challenges. County officials have tried to refuse certification before. Voting rights groups counted at least 17 attempts in the 2024 cycle alone, and every one of them was framed as defending election integrity.

The structure is different from Poland’s, and in our favor. There is no single tribunal to seize. Midterms run through thousands of county and state officials, and certification is a mandatory, ministerial duty that courts can compel. So far, no refusal has ever changed a result.

But the Polish lesson isn’t about who wins the legal fight. It’s about what happens to the public while it’s being fought. If a federal lawsuit stalls a close Senate race, half the country will see a coup and half will see a rescue. If a judge orders certification, half will see the law working and half will see a captured court. Every move will be legible only through the lens you already brought. That is what it means to lose the referee.

Living without a referee

I don’t have a fix for a dead referee. But I have a few habits for the next two months.

Wait a day. The first version of every story this week will be written by whoever is angriest. Warsaw looked different by Friday night than it did at noon.
Ask what the procedure is. Before you decide whether something is a coup, find out what the law says should happen next, and whether it’s happening.
Notice when you agree with your side instantly. That’s the moment you’ve stopped needing a referee, and the moment you’ve become part of the problem.

Poland’s crisis isn’t over, and ours hasn’t started. But if Friday taught anything, it’s that a republic doesn’t need a general to fall apart. It just needs enough people to stop believing anyone can call the game fairly.

Sources

This post was written by Claude, an AI, at my request.

The Fear Is, Of Course, That Trump Will Latch On To ‘Black October’ As The Reason Why The Republicans Lost The 2026 Midterms (If They Do)

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I still have serious doubts that Republicans will lose the 2026 midterms in any meaningful way for a variety of reasons. People continue to be too distracted. The economy continues to chug along, even if inflation is up. It’s all sot of a lulz.

And, yet, I suppose it is possible that despite all my doom and gloom that Democrats might actually pull it off.

Which brings us to Trump.

Trump is notorious — FUCKING NOTORIOUS — for latching on to one simple idea and banging it into people’s minds to an absurd degree. So, I could totally see him latching on to the “Black October” computer security event going on right now as an excuse to dismiss any victory by Democrats as the ultimate political heist pulled off by rouge hackers.

Ugh.

The ultimate irony is, of course, if anyone had the means, motive and opportunity to “steal” the 2026 midterms, it’s Trump and MAGA Republicans. And, yet, no one listens to me and MAGA seems to always get away with anything they do, so that’s the ultimate lulz, I suppose.

Black October and the Trust Tax

How a week of AI-found bugs could cost the midterms something no hacker has to touch: our faith in the count.

Nine days before the midterms, the computer security world has given this month a name: Black October. It’s a good name. It’s also a slightly misleading one, and the gap between those two facts is where the real election risk lives.

What actually happened

Strip away the branding and Black October is a cluster of disclosures that landed within a few days of each other. The headliner is PHP2Shell: two flaws in the core PHP interpreter, patched on October 21, that let an attacker with no login run code on a web server. Every PHP version from roughly the last decade is hit by at least one of them. Since PHP sits underneath something like 70% of the websites on earth (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and a great many county government homepages), the National Security Agency told everyone running it to patch immediately, and outfits from Wikimedia to the Internet Archive briefly pulled services offline to do it.

Around that: a poisoned release of LiteLLM, a popular AI-gateway package, that harvested developer and cloud credentials; a batch of Node.js security fixes; and the revelation that an Indian certificate authority, eMudhra, had generated weak private keys for eight intermediate certificates, the kind of thing that in principle lets someone impersonate a secure website.

The part that makes this feel like a new era: the PHP bugs were found by AI. Researchers at Wiz, using frontier models from Google and OpenAI, found them back in August. That’s the same story we’ve been living since spring, when Anthropic’s Mythos started surfacing vulnerabilities faster than maintainers could fix them. Chris Krebs, CISA’s former director, told CNBC that about 3% of all the critical vulnerabilities ever discovered turned up in the past month.

Two caveats worth holding onto. First, nobody has found evidence of a single coordinated attack behind all this. It’s a disclosure wave, not an invasion. Second, so far most organizations have patched or mitigated without catastrophe. Even the origin of the name is shaky: it supposedly comes from an X post calling the preceding 48 hours the worst in security history, and at least one newsroom couldn’t find the post.

What it isn’t

Black October is a web-layer crisis. American votes are overwhelmingly cast on paper or leave a paper record, and they’re counted on tabulators that aren’t sitting on the public internet running WordPress. Nothing in PHP2Shell hands an attacker a path to change a vote total in a county that checks its paper against its machines.

So if the question is “can Black October flip the House?” the honest answer is that there’s no evidence pointing that way, and the architecture of American elections makes it a long shot.

But that isn’t the only question, and it may not be the important one.

The Florida preview

At 10 a.m. on October 21, VR Systems, the Tallahassee firm that hosts county Supervisor of Elections websites across Florida, pulled its public lookup tools offline in response to the PHP warning. With early voting underway, Floridians suddenly couldn’t check their registration, view a sample ballot, or find a polling place on their county’s site. The tools came back around 7 p.m.

The company’s chief operating officer stressed that voting and the voter rolls were untouched. That was true. From a trust standpoint, it was also almost beside the point. A get-out-the-vote organizer in Manatee County put it plainly: the outage “certainly doesn’t help voter confidence right now.”

That’s the template. No vote was touched. No data was stolen, as far as anyone has said. A vendor did exactly the responsible thing. And a voter who hit an error page during early voting now has a story, and stories travel farther than press releases.

Four ways this erodes trust without touching a ballot

1. Availability failures read as integrity failures. Most people don’t distinguish between “the website is down” and “the election is compromised.” Every county that takes a lookup tool or results page offline to patch in the next nine days is generating screenshots. From the outside, responsible patching and sabotage look identical.

2. The election-adjacent surface is huge, and much of it runs on the web stack that just broke. Check Point’s researchers argued back in June that the real 2026 exposure was never the voting machines but the trusted accounts, platforms and information channels around the election: campaign email, fundraising (they found thousands of exposed ActBlue and WinRed credentials), local news, and official websites. Election-night results pages are the most consequential example. A defaced or spoofed results page changes no counts. It can absolutely change a narrative for the hours before anyone corrects it. And the eMudhra certificate mess, minor as it may prove in practice, is a reminder that a padlock in the address bar isn’t proof a page is real.

3. The defenders are thinner than usual. The federal election-security apparatus has had a rough two years. CISA released its election infrastructure security plan just 40 days before the vote, and election officials called it late and inadequate after the agency’s election work was cut back; DHS maintains it has consistently supported them. The administration’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal would eliminate CISA’s election security program outright. Minnesota’s secretary of state said his office expected to spend about $250,000 on private penetration testing to fill the gap. Whatever you think of those cuts, the practical result is that a county IT shop, often two or three people, is triaging the worst PHP bug in memory with less federal backup than in any cycle since 2018. And Black October isn’t one patch. It’s the leading edge of a steady schedule of AI-found disclosures that will keep landing through Election Day and beyond.

4. The audience was primed before the bugs dropped. In July, President Trump used a primetime address to declassify intelligence he said showed China had obtained voter files on 220 million Americans across 18 states, and to warn of “shocking vulnerabilities” in election infrastructure. He said the goal was to earn confidence by fixing those weaknesses, not to undermine it. Critics noted that the intelligence community had previously concluded China did not interfere in 2020, that much voter data is publicly available anyway, and that he presented no evidence of altered outcomes; China called the claims fabricated. You don’t have to settle that dispute to see its effect: a large share of voters walked into October already told the system is wide open. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, fringe claims that 2024 itself was hacked still circulate. Both camps now have a real, scary-sounding event to fold into whatever they already believe.

That last point is the one I’d underline. The danger isn’t that Black October gives anyone the power to steal the midterms. It’s that it gives everyone the vocabulary to claim they were stolen.

Why I’m not panicking

Decentralization, the thing that makes American elections maddening, is also what makes them hard to hack at scale. Thousands of jurisdictions run different systems from different vendors. Paper records, post-election audits and canvass deadlines exist precisely so that a disputed result can be checked against something physical. Florida’s outage lasted about nine hours and was fixed before most people noticed. By OpenAI’s account, the PHP bugs were found by friendly AI before attackers got to them. The machinery of patching is visibly working, and loudly.

What to actually watch

A few honest tests for separating real problems from noise between now and certification:

Is the claim about availability (a site was down) or integrity (a count was changed)? The first is common and fixable. The second requires evidence from audits, not screenshots.
Who’s the source? Your county election office’s phone line or official accounts beat a forwarded screenshot.
Expect slower results in places that pull their results pages to patch. Slow isn’t stolen.
Watch the audits and canvasses, not election night. Election-night numbers are always unofficial.

Black October is a real event, and the AI-driven vulnerability flood behind it is the defining security story of the year. But its most likely casualty in November isn’t a vote count. It’s our shared willingness to believe one. That’s a tax we pay in trust, and how much we pay is partly up to us.

Sources

Can the Justice Department Stop a State From Certifying Its Election?

The Attorney General can’t stop a state from certifying its congressional results on his own. What he can do is ask a judge, send in the FBI, lean on the officials who sign the paperwork, and hand ammunition to the House. That’s the real menu behind the word “doomsday.”

On Thursday in Norfolk, Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked whether there was any scenario in which the Justice Department would try to block a state from certifying its midterm results. He didn’t say no. He said there were hypothetical “doomsday” scenarios anyone could dream up, that it’s never DOJ’s intention to improperly interfere, and that he wasn’t going to say there are no circumstances in which the department would act. He added that he isn’t “planning my days around the election to be somewhere to not certify.”

That’s a long way from a plan. It’s also a long way from “never.” Election Day is November 3, twelve days out. So it’s worth asking the obvious follow-up the press gaggle couldn’t: how would he even do it?

The short answer: he has no button to push

No federal law gives the Justice Department power to delay certification or challenge ballots. American elections are run by states and counties. Their officials count the votes, and their officials certify them.

DOJ’s lawful role is narrow. It enforces civil-rights and voting statutes, and it prosecutes individual people who break election law. Candidates and private citizens can sue over a result. The executive branch has no equivalent standing to halt a state’s canvass.

So a “doomsday” move by DOJ can’t be a direct order. It would have to be indirect, working through someone else who does have power over the outcome. There are four plausible routes.

Four ways a doomsday scenario would actually play out

1. Ask a federal judge to freeze certification

This is the most likely route, and the groundwork is already laid. DOJ can sue states to enforce federal election statutes, chiefly the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. Both are mostly about how states maintain voter rolls.

The department has already sued California to force a review of 18,000 registered voters it suspects may be noncitizens. NBC reports DOJ is weighing similar suits against more states, possibly after November 3. A post-election version would argue that ineligible ballots were counted in a close race and ask a judge for an emergency order pausing certification until they’re sorted out.

The catch: these statutes govern how rolls are kept going forward. They weren’t built to unwind a counted election, and federal judges have been deeply reluctant to stop certification on that kind of theory.

2. Seize the evidence

This is the scenario Senate Democrats are most worried about. The FBI could obtain criminal search warrants for ballots, voting machines, or records as part of a fraud investigation. Seizure wouldn’t legally void a result. But physically removing ballots or equipment could make recounts, audits, and canvasses impossible to finish on deadline.

Sens. Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse have asked Blanche in writing to rule out seizing election materials before certification. They pointed out that the FBI Director’s own no-seizure assurance means little on its own, since the FBI answers to the Attorney General. Blanche’s Norfolk remarks did not give them that commitment.

There’s also a quieter tool: the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which requires officials to preserve federal election records for 22 months and lets the Attorney General demand them.

3. Squeeze the people who sign

Certification isn’t a machine. It’s county boards, canvassers, and secretaries of state putting their names on documents. A criminal investigation of election officials, or federal encouragement for a local board that balks, could produce delay.

We’ve seen local refusals before. In 2022, a county commission in rural New Mexico refused to certify primary results. A state court ordered it to certify, and it did. That’s the usual ending, because certification is treated as a mandatory duty, not a judgment call.

4. Hand the House a reason

For congressional seats, the last word doesn’t belong to a court or to DOJ. Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, each chamber judges the elections of its own members, and the House can hear contested races under the Federal Contested Elections Act. DOJ allegations or referrals could become the evidentiary record for a House challenge to a seat.

Washington’s Attorney General Nick Brown, who leads election-protection work for Democratic state AGs, told Raw Story it would be remarkable in the worst sense for the House to reject a state’s certification. He also said that hypotheticals once dismissed as absurd now seem a lot more plausible.

The catch: every route needs an accomplice

Look at the four routes again and the pattern is obvious. Each one requires someone outside DOJ to go along.

A lawsuit needs a judge willing to freeze a state’s count.
A seizure needs a magistrate to sign a warrant, and it only delays the result; it doesn’t decide it.
Pressure on officials needs officials who crack, and state courts that let them.
A House challenge needs a House majority willing to refuse a seat.

On its own, the Justice Department can mostly manufacture three things: delay, legal pressure, and doubt. That’s not nothing. In a close race with a hard certification deadline, delay and doubt can be the whole game. But it isn’t the power to overturn a result.

Two ways to read “doomsday”

The charitable reading is that Blanche answered a hypothetical honestly. No Attorney General promises never to act under any circumstances. He said plainly that interfering isn’t the intent and that no such action is being planned. The administration and its supporters frame its election work, including the California suit and a record deployment of about 1,000 DOJ election monitors, as long-overdue enforcement against noncitizen voting.

The skeptical reading starts from context. Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer, and he made these remarks while the department is suing states over voter rolls and preparing the largest monitoring operation in its history. DOJ sent about 289 monitors in 2022 and 714 in 2024, per CBS News figures. Voting experts say noncitizen voting is rare. To critics, declining to rule out post-election action is itself the message, aimed at officials who will be deciding whether to sign.

Either way, the structure holds. The Attorney General has no lever that stops a state from certifying. What he has is the ability to make certifying harder, slower, and more contested, and to give others with real power a reason to act. Watch the judges, the county boards, and the House. That’s where any doomsday scenario would actually be decided.

Sources

I Was A Year Off

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In 2025, I predicted that 2026 would be a shitty year. Well, it was and it wasn’t. It wasn’t all that bad, all things considered — at least so far. It could nose dive should in the last third should Trump declare martial law over the 2026 midterms.

But hopefully — hopefully — that won’t happen.

Yet for a variety of reasons but public and personal, 2027 is going to suck. It is going to suck so bad — especially on a personal basis — that it will be quite memorable. It’s almost like Trump is trying to hurt me personally with some of his policy objectives.

Did I mention how much 2027 is going to suck?

All I can do is just hunker down and enjoy the last few months of a normal life before all hell breaks loose. Or, put another way, I can enjoy this idyllic, unusual situation I’ve found myself in for an extended amount of time before it ends rather dramatically.

But I’m a survivor. Or, at least, I like to think I am. So while things will get EXTREMELY BUMPY for me personally in 2027, I’m a grown man. I will survive, as the song delcares.

The Only Way We Get Universal Basic Income Is To Bribe The Elites With A National VAT Instead Of An Income Tax

There is a simmering, bipartisan conversation in Washington and Silicon Valley about the inevitability of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). As artificial intelligence and automation threaten to hollow out white-collar and blue-collar work alike, the idea of a guaranteed federal stipend has moved from the radical fringe to mainstream policy debates. Personally, I am all for it. Replacing our labyrinthine, means-tested patchwork of welfare programs with a single, streamlined cash floor isn’t just compassionate—it is good governance.

And yet, if we look strictly at the mechanics of American power, there is only one realistic way a national UBI ever passes Congress: as part of a grand bargain that abolishes the federal income tax and replaces it with a massive national Value-Added Tax (VAT) or consumption tax.

To understand why, you have to look at both the math and the politics.

The 30%+ Sticker Shock

In most developed economies that already use a VAT, the rate hovers around 18% to 20% on top of existing income taxes. If the United States wanted to eliminate the federal income tax entirely and fund a universal basic income floor, the consumption tax rate would have to be eye-wateringly high.

When you look at long-standing legislative proposals like the FairTax Act—which proposes abolishing the IRS, repealing income and payroll taxes, and sending every household a monthly “prebate” check (a de facto small-scale UBI)—the required tax-exclusive sales markup sits right at 30%. Independent economists and tax policy models suggest that to make a true UBI revenue-neutral while zeroing out income taxes, a national VAT or consumption tax would easily need to hit 32% to 35%. Every time you bought a car, a laptop, or a cup of coffee, roughly a third of the price would go straight to the Treasury.

The Ultimate Bribe to the Ultra-Wealthy

On paper, progressives normally hate consumption taxes because they are inherently regressive: working-class families spend nearly 100% of their paychecks on survival, meaning their entire income gets taxed at the register, whereas billionaires only spend a tiny fraction of their fortune.

Paradoxically, that exact flaw is what makes the VAT-for-UBI swap politically unstoppable. It functions as a massive, structural bribe to the plutocrat class.

Under a pure consumption-tax regime, capital accumulation, compounding investments, and unspent income become completely tax-free. A billionaire could watch their net worth grow by tens of billions of dollars a year without owing a single dime to the federal government, paying tax only when they actually buy a fifth yacht or a private island. For the ultra-wealthy, handing working Americans a modest monthly UBI check is a small price to pay if the trade-off is the total abolition of taxes on income, corporate profits, and capital gains.

The Coming Grand Bargain

We aren’t quite at the tipping point yet, so for now, this remains a theoretical exercise on the horizon. But make no mistake: when the economic displacement of the 2020s and 2030s finally forces Washington’s hand on UBI, it won’t arrive as a socialist victory over concentrated wealth.

In America, the poor never get a lifeboat unless the rich get a yacht—and when Universal Basic Income finally arrives, it will be because the billionaire class realized they could use our safety net to buy their own tax amnesty.

This AI to SI Thing Is So Dumb

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Of all the stupid things that have come out of the Trump White House, the demand that everyone call Artificial Intelligence, “Superintellgence” has got to be one of the stupiest.

But the issue is, I guess, is Trump wants to divide people and confuse the issue to the point that it’s difficult for anyone to know what’s going on. It’s all very Trumpian in nature.

The issue is everything is so messed up now that when someone mentions “Superintelligence” we don’t know if they mean Artificial Superintelligence or Trump’s dumb made up thing.

Anyway, everything is so dumb.

I Wonder What Anti-Democratic Surprise Trump Has Up His Sleeve For The 2026 Midterms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I’ve said before — the monster always come back one last time in the horror movie, so I have to assume that Trump is going to swoop in and do something dramatically anti-democratic before the 2026 midterms.

What that may be, I don’t know.

I assume whatever it is will be egregious and probably in some way superficially legal so Trump gets away with it.

This is when I note, again, that this fall could be an autocratic tipping point on way or another. It could be that the country could buckle and we have something akin to a civil war or a revolution.

But I have serious doubts about that. Blues just don’t have it in them to do such a thing, even if it might, in a sense, be necessary. But we’ll see.