Leland Vittert’s War Notes: Going After the System 📰

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NewsNation Chief Washington Anchor and On Balance host Leland Vittert was a foreign correspondent for four years in Jerusalem. He gives you an early look at tonight's 9 p.m. ET show, delivered straight to your inbox.

📖 Buy now! If you care about America and our place in the world, you must read Robert Sherman's new book, "Lessons from the Front."

Why 🌎: Both the war in Ukraine and the ongoing conflicts in Israel and the Middle East will define the first part of this century.
- 📖 Sherman spent months on the ground in each place and delivers a perspective that's impossible to get from reading tweets or watching TV.
  - He mixes great storytelling, international intrigue and the unique perspective you can only get by being a foreign correspondent.
  - I should know; I used to be one, and I'm in awe of Sherman's book.
- Order now: Click here to order now.
  - It's out of stock on Amazon and Barnes and Noble because it's so popular, but you will be first in line when it gets back in stock, or you can get the audio version!
Promotion 🚨: Sherman just got named NewsNation's international correspondent.

Watch tonight 📺: Robert Sherman joins us from yet another frontline — this time at the military base in Puerto Rico, where U.S. troops are staging for possible military escalation in Venezuela.

See you in New York 🗽: Well, Massapequa Park to be exact.

Speaking from the pulpit 📺: Of the nearly 170 interviews I've done for "Born Lucky," "Personally Speaking with Msgr. Jim Lisante" is among my favorites.
- ⛪️ He graciously invited me to address his parish — Our Lady of the Lourdes in Massapequa Park, New York.
- 🎤 I'll speak at 10:30 a.m. ET mass on December 14.
- Nervous 😨: I have never spoken at a church before — yikes!
If you can't make it, "Born Lucky" is still available on Amazon ahead of the holidays. At its core, "Born Lucky" is a message of hope.

Going After the System 📰

🎥 In every journalist's favorite movie, "Spotlight," the editor of the Boston Globe charges his reporters with "going after the system."

Watch the trailer here.
⛪️ The "system" in this case was the Catholic Church that covered up sex abuse.
In Minnesota (and possibly other states), the system will be politicians who turned a blind eye (or worse) to massive welfare fraud.
💰Even Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison can't be so incompetent that they missed a "charity" growing faster than Nvidia.
📰 In the meantime, CBS News reports those profiting from the schemes did little to hide their new wealth with trips to the Maldives and fancy cars.
The system allowed this to happen.

🚨 What system? The University of Minnesota now has a lab to study the "whiteness pandemic."

No, I am not kidding — click here to read more.

Watch tonight 📺: We'll talk to Dave Kansas, former executive vice president for Minnesota Public Radio and now contributor for The Free Press, about the "system" in Minnesota.

Maduro Pressure Campaign 🌎

💣 President Trump wants to win a war with Venezuela without going to war.

Bad for Trump 🚨: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro knows Trump doesn't want to go to war.
- Maduro knows the longer he holds out, the more he can extract from Trump.
  - 🦷 Maduro says he is "prepared to break the teeth of the North American empire if necessary."
💰 So, Trump is trying to pressure Maduro by turning off his money supply (oil and drugs) while offering him a way out.
- Go figure 🚢: Today, the White House said to expect more tanker seizures, but they are not an escalation.

But why? Krystal Kaufman argues in The Hill the United States wants rare earth minerals in Venezuela.

📱 As a Reuters article outlines, rare earth minerals are "in everything from iPhones and washing machines to the F35 fighter jet. They are also used in electric vehicles (EVs), medical equipment, oil refining, and other military applications such as missiles and radar systems."
🛢️ Others say it's about the oil
🌎 Others profess it's to impress the Cuban and Venezuelan exile communities in Miami.

Watch tonight 📺: Chris Cillizza and retired Brigadier General John Teichert will discuss whether President Trump can win a war without firing a shot.

Dumpster Fire 🔥

💬 "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," said Mark Twain.

The same might be said of the "death" of Trump's control over the Republican Party.

🎙️ "The Daily" podcast from The New York Times posted an episode this morning called "The Cracking of the Trump Coalition." It seems The New York Times is downright gleeful to be reporting on this fracture, as if they've decided it's proof of the president's weakness that he drove someone like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., out.

But 🚨: There is a civil war inside MAGA right now

⏰ MAGA influencers are spending more time fighting MAGA than they are Democrats.
🚨 By the way, this is how BLM, wokeness and everything else died — because they started fighting each other.

Zoom out 📷: Charlie Kirk's death left a massive vacuum in the right-wing media ecosphere.

🎙️ Then began the Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes bromance … followed by the trashing of Carlson for cavorting with a Nazi enthusiast
🥊 Next came a war between Mark Levin, Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
🎤 And now, Erika Kirk is finally now trashing Candace Owens for championing conspiracy theories over Charlie Kirk's death.
- Turning Point USA is planning a live-streamed rebuttal against all of Owens' allegations on Dec 15. It was originally requested by Erika Kirk that Owens join ... they are moving forward without her.
- 📺 Listen to Erika Kirk go after the people pushing these conspiracy theories.
  - "You know what I thought? I thought these people were human."
- Eyal Yakoby posted on X the list of who Candace Owens has alleged killed Charlie Kirk:
  - Israel
  - Bee cult
  - The deep state
  - TPUSA
  - FBI
  - Trap door
  - Mormons
  - Britney Spears
  - Egyptian Plane
  - Trump admin
  - Erika Kirk
  - The feds
  - Charlie's friends
  - Kash Patel
  - Macrons
  - MKUltra
  - Military

Watch tonight 📺: Mark Halperin will discuss whether MAGA is breaking up with the America First movement. More importantly, he'll answer if Trump has — as The New York Times hopes — lost control of the Republican Party.

Time Magazine's "Person" of the Year 💻

🚨 Time Magazine will probably soon be written entirely by AI — maybe that's why the editors picked the people behind AI as the "Person of the Year."

Thought bubble 💭: Once AI takes over, will it show mercy to those who loved it?

🤖 "Terminator" and "I, Robot" warned of this — everyone laughed, but it is starting to become our reality.

📰 Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., opines in The New York Times, "We risk going backward, with President Trump saying on Monday that he will sign an executive order that will replace state laws with 'One Rulebook' that the public has never seen."

Watch tonight 📺: Jay Edelson, who is representing the estate suing OpenAI over the murder-suicide that killed Suzanne Eberson-Adams. We've talked to him about a similar lawsuit before.

📰 As The New York Post article outlines, the lawsuit claims "ChatGPT's masters stripped away or skipped safeguards to quickly release a product that encouraged Soelberg's psychosis and convinced him that his mom was part of a plot to kill him."

WATCH ON BALANCE WEEKNIGHTS AT 9P/8C

Every night during On Balance, Leland Vittert asks "why?" about the most pressing matters of the day, with an intellectual, balanced and sometimes irreverent take on the news.

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