Evidence is growing that the tyrannical regimes of China, Iran, and Cuba are not only financing protests in American streets, but actively directing them.

The Network Contagion Research Institute, whose work in these areas has been indispensable for years, recently published another groundbreaking study that blows the lid off how this foreign network operates.

The report indicates that an Iranian influence node that takes orders from the Islamic Republic regime, the House of Latin America, conducts what NCRI calls “high-impact domestic U.S. influence operations.”

“For nearly two decades,” NCRI says, HOLA “has functioned as a primary bridge between the Iranian regime, Latin American socialist governments, and U.S. anti-war coalitions, with its American-based operatives acting as undeclared agents of a foreign government on U.S. soil.”

It gets much worse. HOLA, it says, “has now formally merged with Neville Roy Singham’s Chinese Communist Party-linked Tricontinental network to form a unified Iran-China operation targeting the United States from the south.”

Neville Roy Singham is an American who lives in Shanghai, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and uses the nearly $800 million he made in the 2017 sale of a tech consulting firm to fund communist causes worldwide.

All of this means that “Iran and China have now merged their U.S. influence operations into a single machine,” the report says.

This means that many of the protests in America aren’t organic, but actually Kabuki street theater perpetrated by a red-green alliance of communist and Islamist groups. Less well known is the involvement of malign foreign interests....

In France, more than half a million people poured into the streets as mobs of radical left rioters, students, labor unions, and antifa thugs rampaged through historic districts, burning government buildings and bringing the country to a "point of no return," according to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

“Behind all this, there is obviously a political battle to wage,” Mr. Lecornu said.

The ancient city hall in Limoges, a classic example of neo-Renaissance and Louis XIII-style architecture, was burned to the ground overnight, along with other symbols of the national government.

Other city halls were attacked "from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where masked infiltrators broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic," reports the New York Times.

Lecornu is pointing the finger at the radical left, which has been on the front lines of the protests since students began demonstrating in mid-September against unequal funding for poor districts, poor school conditions, teacher shortages, and school days of up to 10 hours in the classroom.

Once the far-left radical party France Unbowed joined the protests, the riots began, and the stated reasons for the unrest changed. Now, the protests ostensibly include opposition to the budget cuts being proposed by Emmanuel Macron's government, as well as the cost of living and other affordability issues.

“It’s also time to choose sides,” Lecornu said. “Either you are in the camp of the Republic, and therefore of law enforcement — and of those who protect people and property and enforce the laws — or you are on the side of the rioters.”

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said more than half a million people took part in the protests, including 110,000 in Paris.

The leader of France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is blaming Macron and his government, saying the violence was "due to incompetence or a worst-case strategy to create a party of order that would make people forget his failure in public finances.”

Mélenchon, like all radical leftists who benefit from violent protests, gave a tepid response to the mayhem, refusing to condemn it outright, stating that “those who share our fight have no place in looting, in pillaging."

“Regardless of the 'responsibilities of those in power',” he said on Saturday night, the left “must refuse to take part in actions without political meaning and contrary to our methods.”

There is deep political meaning in burning government buildings and destroying property. And the "methods" the rioters are using are tried-and-true radical left tactics used for at least the last 150 years all over the world.

“We witnessed scenes of methodical looting that have nothing to do with social demands, nothing to do with the thousands of demonstrators who marched peacefully throughout the afternoon. It’s absolutely tragic," said the deputy mayor of Paris, Lamia El Aaraje.

The Washington Post:



Marine Le Pen, head of the conservative National Rally, must be very careful. She's leading in the polls for next year's presidential election, but is dealing with historic and cultural headwinds. So far, her comments on the riots have mostly been supportive of the government while blaming Mélenchon and France Unbowed for the riots.

"Protest organizers had hoped that the demonstrations on Saturday would lead to a convergence between the student demonstrations that have roiled France since September demanding better school conditions, and a broader social movement that addressed a wider array of concerns, including the rising cost of living," reports the Times.

Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, says that "France is suffering from a crisis of liberal democracy, a crisis of fiscal mismanagement, and a crisis of youth disaffection," according to Fortune magazine.

“But the fiscal crisis is the most dangerous, underlying many of the country’s woes and threatening to bring it to ruin,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday. “France, truly, is on the brink.”

I don't think the analyst is overstating the threat to France. It's not just the riots. It's the lackadaisical response to the unrest from the establishment that makes this a potential existential crisis. The French elites don't seem very interested in saving themselves.

That can only lead to tragedy.

On the menu today: On the other side of the world, a government-run lab with past ties to bioweapons research has an accident and records the sudden death of a researcher, and an authoritarian state that I loathe begins an extensive response, including quarantines, while insisting everything is fine and there’s nothing for the public to worry about. If you’ve been reading this newsletter since, oh, April 2020, you know that’s my personal Bat-Signal. Read on.

Tracking the Irkutsk Infection

Late last night, Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stated reports of a death from plague in the Russian city of Irkutsk:



As you might guess, Russian authorities don’t issue a “don’t worry, no plague here” statement unless people are worried that there is a risk of plague.

The Moscow Times is an independent media entity that covers Russia from Amsterdam after media censorship laws made continuing their work from within Russia impossible. The Moscow Times reported Friday, October 2:



Tsydenov’s post was later edited to read “the woman who may have died of plague.” Similarly, “on October 3, the city administration in Baikalsk, in the Irkutsk region, urged people not to travel to Shelekhov “because of unofficial reports that a person in Shelekhov had been diagnosed with plague.” It later deleted the post. The national television channel REN TV also deleted five social media posts about the spread of plague in Shelekhov.”

When posts warning about a contagious disease just disappear with no correction, that’s just so reassuring, isn’t it?

Irkutsk, the city, is the capital of Irkutsk Oblast, a state in south-central Russia, part of the Siberian Federal District, not too far from the Mongolian border. The “Republic of Buryatia” is an adjacent federal subject that is also part of the Russian Federation; a stretch of Buryatia is between Irkutsk and Mongolia....

Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton continues to release videos exposing the extent of human trafficking when his Democrat opponent, Xavier Becerra, was HHS secretary and in charge of bringing unaccompanied migrant children into the United States under Joe Biden.

Becerra lost track of over 330,000 illegal alien children during the Biden open borders crisis. There is video of him complaining to his staff that they were not cycling children through fast enough, comparing the process to an “assembly line.” Basically, HHS would hand kids off to anyone who simply claimed to be a relative. It was all about rushing massive amounts of young foreigners into the United States, regardless of how many of them ended up with traffickers. One contractor who remembers how many children tried to fight being handed off to strangers is speaking out.

The interviewer asked, “Do you believe that under Becerra, some of the girls that were under your care might have now been sexually or labor trafficking inside the United States?” The whistleblower answered, “Yes, I believe it did happen. Like, 100% believe it. And possibly worse, honestly.”

The whistleblower introduced himself as Tarek Kadourah and explained that he “was a site supervisor for MVM, the summer of 2021. MVM received a contract with Health and Human Services, [for] kids that were rescued, obviously. Their job was to make sure that they were fed, kept healthy, and then transported to sponsors. But that transportation part is where we came in.”

Kadourah was a liaison. “Out of the four site supervisors, I was the one on site every day from morning till night, directly liaison between Health and Human Services and the White House,” he clarified. “I was a middleman. So I oversaw everything.” It didn’t take him long to realize something was very wrong and that, far from rescuing kids from traffickers, he was part of a process to hand them off to traffickers.

“The children always seemed to look like they were scared, and uncomfortable, and vulnerable when they were supposed to be safe,” Kadourah recalled. “To me, those kids look like — there's no other way to say it — they were still being trafficked.”

The interviewer asked him what federal immigration agents thought about what was happening. “They were worried, because, I mean, they felt like they were accomplices in a human trafficking operation,” Kadourah said. One agent “was telling me every time he was dropping off some of those kids, they would immediately cry and refuse to get in a van or the vehicle of that sponsor at the drop-off site.”

Kadourah asked the agent whether the children explained why they reacted that way. “And they said they didn't know who those people were. And I, when I said, ‘Well, you know, the agents had paperwork from HHS, saying that, Hey, this person was somehow related to that child, uncle, aunt, sister, whatever, right?’ None of it was verified.”

MVM was supposedly taking the contracts under the understanding that all of the illegal alien children were going to verified sponsors. But Becerra’s machine didn't meet that expectation. “Health and Human Services was giving us paperwork that was not frickin’ verified. All they were doing was pick up phone calls, and say, ‘Oh, okay, you're so and so's uncle,’ whatever, and then stamping it and moving it forward. They were treating it just like Becerra said, like an assembly line. That's exactly how it ran,” Kadourah exclaimed.

The federal agents were “noticing a pattern. When it's not just one or two children crying, refusing to get in a vehicle with strangers, but it's like 20, 30 of them crying, saying, ‘We don't know who these people are. That's not my aunt, uncle.’ That raised a lot of red flags, and I think that's when they completely shut me out,” Kadourah remembered. There was no room in the assembly line for any person with a shred of conscience.