Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative October 2026 news and views
Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.
Oct. 5
Top Headlines
Oct. 5, 2026. And fighting it should be at the heart of the Democratic agenda. The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.
Oct. 5, 2026. Trump just told Americans: vote MAGA, or lose federal aid. The president says he’ll withhold money from states that don’t vote MAGA. That’s obviously illegal, and it’s pissing off a country already sick of his corruption.Breaking News
Special Report
Shown above are some of those convicted in a Republican-orchestrated 1972 plot to burglarize Democratic offices at Watergate complex in Washington, DC in advance of that year's presidential elections.
Oct. 5, 2026. Trump is channeling the late Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution in not only destroying Washington DC’s memorial to President John F. Kennedy (the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) and East Wing of the White House but ordering the Justice Department to investigate veteran federal prosecutors of President Richard Nixon for misconduct.News Roundups
Oct. 5, 2026. Trump is calling reporters “fake news” as his support among Latino voters collapses and his White House bans yet another outlet from Air Force One. A lab worker at a Russian plague institute is dead, Moscow keeps changing its story, and Trump is offering to help Putin. And Cornell students smashed windows at the university’s main administration building as new records show fraternity brothers scrambled to contain gang rape allegations.Oct. 5, 2026. The Epstein whistleblower who exposed the relationship between Trump’s Commerce Secretary and Epstein has died by suicide. Trump is calling American voting “corrupt” and lashing out at Fox News as new polls point to a Democratic wave, including Democratic leads in Senate races in Texas, Ohio and Alaska. Wounded soldiers and Gold Star families say Army leaders ignored warnings before the drone strike that killed six of their own in Kuwait. A former Army Secretary says he was pushed out after Pete Hegseth fired the generals modernizing the military. And Ken Paxton got caught on tape admitting his campaign is “all coming from DC.”More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Democracy Docket, Opinion: This time, take Trump literally, Marc Elias, Democracy Docket founder, Oct. 5, 2026. Earlier this year, The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after the 2020 election. His answer was chilling: "Well, I should have." Trump is telling us what he plans to do in this year's midterms. He is trying to rig the elections and subvert their results. While we have been able to stop him so far, there is no guarantee that we will continue to prevail in the weeks ahead.Yet despite the obvious signs of Trump's plan, too many reporters and pundits downplay it. They adhere to the false neutrality that has come to dominate legacy media coverage over the last decade.
Oct. 5, 2026. Here’s some news from Politico: Democrats’ House campaign arm is expanding its targets even further into Trump country, as the party grows increasingly bullish they will not just win, but win big next month.
Oct. 5, 2026. The horrendous September jobs numbers — only 29,000 new jobs (a fraction of the 84,000 expected) and unemployment up to 4.2% — tell only part of the story. With downward revisions, the economy actually lost 10,000 jobs in July and added just 133,000, not 162,000, in August (as Donald Trump touted in his rant-filled encounter with TIME magazine last week). Coupled with inflation, the soaring debt, and spiking energy prices, the Trump economy has become a nightmare for ordinary workers and consumers.
Oct. 5, 2026. The reality that he is soon going to be a lame-duck, irrelevant president is slowly creeping in on Donald Trump, who accused blue states of cheating in elections, and causing high gas prices.
Oct. 5, 2026. On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts." A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, left, a courageous reporter, a former Navy intelligence officer and a close colleague of this editor, broke the Hastert story in a three-part series in the fall of 2006 published on "The Wayne Madsen Report" naming the then-powerful House Speaker as a gay pedophile and hypocrite who presided over a "gay Mafia" of powerful Republicans in Congress who abused youths while winning elections as "family values" purists.
right, Oct. 5, 2026. Springfield, Ohio: They buried Pierre Damas Bel on Saturday. That night, Donald Trump came to town to take a victory lap on the policies that killed him.
Let me propose a second-hand interpretation of last Thursday’s hearing in the Broadview 6 case. Judge April Perry did what prosecutors (like she used to be) do: flip a useful witness against others.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Early yesterday morning, the United States Secretary of “War,” Pete Hegseth, stepped up to the podium at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and stood directly under a desecrated version of the Department of Defense seal.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Burst of Attacks in Gulf Heightens Fears Over Fragile Energy Trade, Lisa Friedman and Jenny Gross, Oct. 5, 2026. Strikes on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia came as the region’s exporters were getting more oil to the world market.More Global News
Drop Site News, CIA Report Warns Israel Could Head Toward Civil War, Total Collapse, Aída Chávez and Ryan Grim, Oct. 5, 2026. U.S. intelligence raises fears of civil unrest and state breakdown in Israel ahead ofOctober 27 elections. T
his article is being co-published with Capital & Empire. Israel is at risk of civil war or state collapse, a classified CIA assessment warns, as years of genocide in Gaza and war in Lebanon and Iran deepen political, economic, and social fractures within thecountry. The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence. 
Politico, Germany risks being drawn into ‘violent conflict’ with Russia, spy chief warns, James Angelos, Oct. 5, 2026. The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency also cautioned that NATO countries must beware of Moscow’s “little green men.”
Siobhán O’Grady, Liubov Sholudko and Yurii Shyvala, Oct. 5, 2026. Evacuation is almost impossible and food is running out in Russian-occupied Oleshky, a city menaced by mines and drones.More On #MeToo Experiences
Oct. 5, 2026. The Cornell “7” rape story has been excruciatingly difficult for me to talk or write about. This piece has taken me the better part of three days to write because every single time I sat down to do so, some piece of it dragged me back inside the worst night of my life.More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup
Wayne Madsen Report, Commentary: Suspicious deaths connected to Trumpstein continue, Wayne Madsen, Oct. 5, 2026. Latest “suicide” is linked to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
U.S. Inflation, Markets, Jobs, High-Tech
U.S. Media
Author Gerard Colby, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, reveals publishers’ dirty secret of how non-fiction books are commonly censored in America
By Charlotte Dennett
Imagine what authors go through, taking risks while exposing the rich and powerful, only to see their books die shortly after they are published. Their publisher may have told them “Too bad. Your book has had its run.”
Or, “Sorry, it just didn’t catch on.” This is not the kind of verdict authors want to hear, especially after spending years pouring heart and soul into researching and writing a book to inform an uninformed public.
The pain and suffering experienced by these truth-tellers is seldom acknowledged. They may have sacrificed career opportunities, building a family, buying a home, all for writing out of a sense of duty to the public’s right to know, often suffering financially and at great personal cost to their loved ones. What makes their ordeal all the more excruciating is that they often come to believe that their books’ “failure” is their own failure, not knowing that their publisher secretly deep-sixed the book before it had a chance to compete in the “free marketplace of ideas.”
There is a word for this book suppression practice. It is called privishing, which means “to privately publish a book so it “sinks without a trace.” It happens when the publisher deliberately shortens the book’s life span by cutting its 
advertising budget, the author’s book tour, and the book’s print run.
My husband, Gerard "Jerry" Colby (shown at right in a file photo delivering a lecture), and I discovered privishing while investigating what happened to his 586-page exposé, DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. The New York Times Book review hailed it on page one as “something of a miracle … sculpture hewn out of the side of a mountain.” This and other great reviews did not sit well with the family that had come to be known as the Merchants of Death: the du Ponts of Delaware.
The DuPont book, originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1974, is a unique, unauthorized 
history of the DuPont Company, the duPont family, and America itself. It quickly took off in Delaware, (famously described by Ralph Nader as the “Company State,”) with long lines of purchasers waiting outside bookstores to get a copy. The Wilmington Delaware Inquirer reported that “bookstores couldn’t keep the book in stock after the Wilmington Morning News carried a front page story about a telephone call criticizing the “most unflattering book about the chemical giant.” And then, suddenly, the book died.
Now, some 5 decades later, Colby recently was honored at the14th Annual Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. for his decades-long efforts at exposing privishing and trying to protect authors from this perfidious practice that can be ruinous to their careers
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Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, a member of the Press Club, presents the Pillar Award to Jerry Colby (Photo by Jerry Ashton, who won the Pillar Award in 2025 for exposing the predatory practices of the debt collection industry).
Seeing Jerry tell his story to an audience of whistleblowers and writers at the National Press Club was a wonderful moment in our 50 years together as investigative journalists. Never have I seen him happier for getting some well-deserved recognition for his book and the years of litigation that followed against his publisher and the subject matter of his book, Du Pont Company.
By Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen
Patrick Reynolds, who formed Congress Majority PAC with a mission of helping fellow civic reformers win congressional races, shares on the next District Insiders podcast his innovative strategies regarding forthcoming U.S. elections.
Hosts Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen explore with Reynolds what the public most needs to understand about his innovative strategy for U.S. Mid-Term elections.
Reynolds, right, describes why he’s leveraged his years at the forefront of anti-smoking legislation to raise awareness for solutions to climate change, for example, during a time when drought and wildfires loom.
Reynolds, widely known as the anti-smoking crusading grandson of cigarette company founder RJ Reynolds, started Congress Majority PAC in 2018, raising over $1.36 million from over 24,000 donors.
“We now have a top team in place for strategy, fundraising, compliance, and legal,” Reynolds says. Our ads pioneer a new direction in political advertising for Democrats.” Sample ads are here. Specifics are below:
Watch the Patrick Reynolds interview on District Insiders by clicking one of the links below:
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District Insiders on YouTube @districtinsiders, Amazon, Apple Podcast, PodBean, Spotify
Andrew Kreig
JIP Editor
The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) researches official misconduct
Broadcast and lecture audiences can count on the Project's director to deliver blunt, entertaining and cutting-edge commentary about public affairs, with practical tips for the millions of Americans caught up in unfair litigation or regulation.
Based in Washington, DC, Andrew Kreig is an accomplished fighter for the public interest. Learn from his decades of reporting, analysis and advocacy:
• Shocking tales of recent corruption, deception and cover-up by both parties in communities ranging from small towns to world capitals; and
• Practical how-to tips for reformers on action that brings real-world results.
To book guest broadcast appearances on your station, write:
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