Tea at Trianon: Four Fake Polling Firms Rigged the 2026 Primaries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 30, 2026

Four Fake Polling Firms Rigged the 2026 Primaries

From The Enterprise:

A voter who already suspects the polls are rigged against him will not be surprised by a bogus 22-point deficit. It will discourage him, and a discouraged voter stays home. In a primary, a fake poll ends candidacies, while in a general election it drains turnout from exactly the voters who had learned to distrust the polls in the first place.
Pollster Nate Silver insists the damage was small, and he has a number to back him up. Pulling Wedgewood out of his Michigan average moved El-Sayed’s lead by 0.6 points, from 3.6 to 3.0. The figure is accurate and also beside the point, since the average was never what the forgers were aiming at. The donor was. So was the reporter who asked McMorrow when she planned to drop out.
Deleting a fraudulent poll from an average cannot undo the campaign decisions and public perceptions it helped create. McMorrow cannot un-withdraw. Crowley’s donors cannot get back the week they spent hedging, and no correction on a polling tracker returns the money a Mississippi Democrat raised on a lie. Real money changed hands, real decisions were made, real markets moved, and harm like that is exactly what criminal law exists to address. (Read more.)