The Narativ | Know Sooner
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Russia stopped threatening American elections this week and started working one. A Kremlin propaganda crew posted a fake video on Tuesday accusing James Talarico of abusing a student, in the Texas Senate race Elon Musk is paying for. Someone built an X account in September under a real man's stolen name and photo, waited a month, then posted a talking face: a former student telling the camera that his sixth-grade English teacher in San Antonio assaulted him in 2012. The teacher he named is Talarico. Fifteen bots shared it at once, a right-wing account with 185,000 followers picked it up, and by Wednesday it had more than 500,000 views. San Antonio police have no report. The real man whose face was stolen told Lead Stories the person in the video was "not me." Graphika, which tracks these operations, said on Wednesday with high confidence that the Kremlin crew that ran the same story against Tim Walz in 2024, Storm-1516, made it. Musk's money arrived first.
Steve Witkoff sat three hours with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Wednesday and called him a humanitarian. By nightfall Russia was hitting Kyiv. Putin gave one man. Stephen Hubbard, 74, a former teacher, had been jailed in Russia since 2022 on a sentence of nearly seven years for allegedly fighting for Ukraine. He reportedly pleaded guilty. His sister told Reuters he held pro-Russian views and would never have picked up a rifle at his age. Witkoff answered: "You, too, are a humanitarian, sir, and I commend you for that." Trump wrote that there was no swap and the United States gave nothing in return. The giving came earlier.
Benjamin Netanyahu told his army Wednesday night to bring down the government of Iran. He will face voters on Tuesday. "There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all: overthrow the regime in Iran," he told a graduating class of officers. The job has a date, and it is not Netanyahu's. The Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. and Israeli militaries have drawn up plans for a short, heavy round of strikes on Iran after the American midterms on Nov. 3: energy sites, nuclear sites, the missile and drone stocks.
Trump's government spent the week going after Democrats one at a time, and a federal judge had to stop the door-knockers. The targets are all on one side. Since September, Homeland Security Investigations agents have turned up at homes in nine states and asked whoever answered whether they are a citizen and whether they voted. No federal database says who is a citizen. The agents knocked anyway.
Raúl Torrez sued Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer and his accountant on Wednesday. The Justice Department won't help him. Torrez is New Mexico's attorney general. The proof he needs sits in the Justice Department's files, and the department is keeping it. It has brought no charges from the millions of pages it released.
Trump called Sundar Pichai and asked for the Atlantic Ocean. Pichai said no. Google had said yes to him twice before, and the reason it stopped at three is the whole story.
The world is really dancing to Putin's tune. Before 2015 it was unthinkable that an adversary like Russia could interfere in an American election this openly, with the proof on the table, and that we would still be there, calling Putin a humanitarian and handing him oil, gas and diesel deals, while we hammer the ally he is attacking for defending itself. Nobody doubts Trump's ties to Putin anymore. The new part is the silence. The American military and the defense establishment have given up on a cyber counteroffensive, and that leaves our elections, and Democrats in particular, open in a way nobody could have imagined a few years ago. Todd Blanche buries the Epstein case and goes after Omar and Lucas, while Rogers and AIPAC go after El-Sayed. That is Russian-style weaponization of the courts against an election. We used to keep a 60-day window before a vote. It is gone. In Russia they arrest an opposition figure whenever they feel like it. Putin's hand runs through every story on this page, the ones that look unconnected included, Omar and Epstein among them. What it adds up to is the criminalization of American politics, and it exists only because Putin and Trump are so tight.
