As a writer, I’m supposed to tell you about how fantastic and gee-whiz dazzling all our new gadgets are. As readers, you’re supposed to leave comments saying things like, “I just can’t imagine how we ever got along doing business before I could use a tiny pocket computer to pay my bills, turn my air conditioning on, and check the milk in the fridge!”

Nah.

When Captain Kirk congratulates him on his handiwork, Scotty grins and says, ‘The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.’

Modern technology is baloney. It’s overly complicated. It depends on too many computer programs and apps; there are too many digital “providers” in the pipeline of what used to be simple transactions.

Take a walk with me as I do battle in two different theaters — the real analog world and the fake virtual version. One battle is satisfying. The other makes me want to ignore the government safety warnings on my mop bucket and insert my head in the water.

First, I attempt something I have done hundreds of times before: log into my small company’s bank account and pay a freelancer. Then I tackle something I know considerably less about: repairing a broken gas furnace. Guess which one takes longer?

Pay mal

Nothing will convince you of how bad modern tech is better than trying to do the banking you have done all your life.

Every month I update the books for the small company I co-own with my friend and business partner. Together we put out “Disaffected,” a weekly cultural commentary show. We hire freelancers to do work for us like cutting up clips of shows for short-form video. Part of my bookkeeping is paying these freelancers through the bank.

I log into National Bank. Or I think I do. After entering my username and password, the screen is hijacked by a never-before-seen display telling me to stop what I’m doing and follow its instructions. I do mean “told,” too. No please, no thank you. A series of imperative commands that read like this:

Gather your government identification and be prepared to take a selfie.Open your phone (reader, I’m on a stationary computer) and tap the icon displayed on your screen to confirm your identity.Follow the instructions on your phone to photograph your government identification. Photograph the front and the back.Follow the prompt on your phone to take a selfie.Wait for your identity to be verified by AI.

Being ordered to comply with a brand-new set of steps without even the pretense of “asking” already has me irritated.

Tech tyranny

Worse, National Bank does not tell me the reason for any of this. I find out at the end that National Bank has kept this secret because it is forcing me to do something it knows I would refuse to do unless compelled to: “set up a passkey.” Passkeys are the latest must-have “security” feature because apparently mere passwords aren’t good enough.

Yes, I know. There’s some very good reason for this, I will be assured. I don’t care.

I spend two and a half hours trying to comply with the commands National Bank is giving me on my computer screen and also the orders it is giving me on my phone. You have to have at least two computers on your person at all times now in order to be allowed to transact business.

The phone contradicts the computer screen. The interface changes the terminology it uses randomly, leaving me confused about what function I’m agreeing to. Though I follow all the steps to the letter, it takes five attempts at “taking a selfie” for the AI to process the transaction. And every time it fails? It erases all my progress and sends me back to the very beginning to do each step all over again, in sequence.

All I’m trying to do is pay a $200 freelancer fee and enter a note in my checking account. Two and a half hours. I could do this in three minutes with a pen, a check, an envelope, and one handwritten line in a ledger. No, I do not think the ability to do this electronically brings me a benefit big enough to justify this digital Tower of Babel.

This is almost everything now, everywhere, all the time. In my town you can’t even park on the street without downloading an app and using your fingers on a teensy little touch screen to enter a credit card.

Back to the Before Times

Contrast this with repairing a broken gas furnace. The furnace is a 35-year-old unit that is built rugged and requires no electricity (except for the fan that circulates the hot air), a must in a rural area that gets frequent blackouts in winter storms. But the automatic fan isn’t running automatically.

My handy sister and I look up the model and talk to an AI (this is something they’re actually good for) to figure out the problem. I buy what I think is an old-fashioned analog thermostat. It seems likely the old one has gone bad.

The new thermostat looks just like the simple mechanical kind I remember. But it’s an imposter — a modern piece of tech in analog “drag.” Flip it over and it’s full of electronic circuitry.

And it doesn’t work. Why? Because it is designed for a 24-volt control system, while my furnace uses a millivolt system.

OK, time to pivot. I put back the old thermostat, but change out the copper wire connections. Success! It kicks the main burner on. But the fan is still running constantly instead of cycling with the heat.

Hands on

The AI (Claude) says the problem is most likely a faulty fan-limiter switch. Here’s the part where it gets fun. This is an analog switch. That means it is made out of physical material that responds to the environment in ways that you can see, touch, and intuit.

We order the new switch from a mom-and-pop stove company for $11. The simplicity is the beauty. It’s just a palm-sized device with a very thin convex metal disk; it looks like an opaque copper contact lens. It works by flexing one way or the other depending on whether the furnace is firing and heating up the disk or shutting off so that the disk cools and flexes in the opposite direction. This flexing opens and closes the electrical circuit that runs the fan.

We put the switch in and turn on the furnace with the old analog thermostat, and it works like a dream. The fan goes on and off automatically, just as it should. This furnace does not do anything “less” than the most expensive modern digital appliance on the market today. It just does the job simply with parts that humans can put in themselves and make sense of.

That’s the reason I avoid a $300 service call from an HVAC company — the kind of service call I would dread even more with a computerized furnace.

RELATED: Kodachrome and 4 other things I want back from the 20th century

Robert Alexander/Getty Images

Scotty knew

Chief engineer of the starship Enterprise Montgomery Scott sums the problem up in the 1984 motion picture “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”

Captain Kirk and crew need to steal the battle-damaged Enterprise to rescue Spock when Starfleet won’t allow them to do it. The problem? They’ll be outrun by the latest high-tech starship Excelsior, equipped with super-duper-even-faster “transwarp” drive.

Scotty pulls a couple of key chips out of the Excelsior’s guts, leaving it dead in space so that the Enterprise can get away. When Captain Kirk congratulates him on his handiwork, Scotty grins and says, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

We have overthought the plumbing in modern devices. It’s not that digital technology is “bad.” It’s that we’re using it stupidly. Remember the recent story about Samsung “smart” refrigerators turning into expensive bricks because of an internet-based software problem?

If you didn’t live in 2026 with me, you would say I was lying because it’s so absurd. In South Korea, some of Samsung’s high-end refrigerators with built-in “smart” wireless technology shut down and stopped cooling because of a bad software update.

So long as we keep buying these jacked-up robots, companies are going to keep making appliances more complicated, less repairable, and less reliable. Will we wise up? Maybe. I have two friends who go feral with excitement over every new product Google or Apple puts out. They immediately install “smart bulbs” in every lamp of their houses as soon as they’re available.

One year later? Both friends rip them out in frustration after realizing that an “on/off” switch works better than training an AI to understand “turn on the living room light and only the living room light.”

​Consumer technology, Government id, Modern technology, New gadgets, Online banking, Small business, Smart appliances, Star trek, Tech tyranny, Technology criticism, Starship enterprise, Lifestyle, Home repair, Analog, Diy, Hvac, Intervention, Tech 

Companies have been charging consumers different prices based on their location and what kind of lifestyle they lead.

Price fixing is illegal, but bulking customers into regions or basic categories isn’t.

‘They pushed back and said it wasn’t discrimination.’

After an investigation into how McDonald’s prices its Big Macs, for example, by the region where a restaurant is located, questions quickly arose as to whether or not companies were using AI algorithms to determine how much money customers are willing to shell out for any given food product or service.

Although McDonald’s said that “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac or ⁠any other menu item,” it seems it doesn’t need to.

According to author Sarah Westall, sophisticated data sweeps figure out prices based on region and can help businesses set the max price they can charge for an item to consumers in a defined area.

Westall, a computer scientist and systems design expert, told Blaze News exclusively that credit card use, browsing, and location data contribute to an “extensive” set of analytical data that has companies telling their franchisees exactly how to set their prices.

Prices can be “personalized” and “tailored” to the user at a personal level too, especially on apps.

For example, Westall cited another investigation that prompted grocery app Instacart to stop offering technology that allowed grocery retailers to charge shoppers different prices for the same groceries at the same time.

“Instacart was shown to differ the price on groceries depending on how much they think that you would pay for it,” Westall claimed. “So they were seeing up to 23% difference in a groceries, eggs, milk, you know, basic needs. That’s where it gets kind of, ‘what are you doing here,’ right? That you’re really manipulating prices on basic needs. I don’t think governments would appreciate that.”

RELATED: Lawsuit alleges McDonald’s is rigging its prices based on location — and algorithm

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Instacart said it was running short-term, randomized A/B pricing experiments that “were never based on supply or demand, personal data, demographics, or individual shopping behavior.”

Westall, though, thinks things are getting “pretty insidious” in terms of how companies are determining pricing based on consumer desperation, something she has been adamant about informing the public on.

“If ‘they’ decide that they want to charge you more because you’re looking for a baby thermometer at midnight or if you’re stranded on the side of the street … things can get pretty ugly.”

To show just how bad things already are, Westall pointed to a 2012 Wall Street Journal investigation that found by simply using a Mac computer, consumers would be fed ads for luxury hotels.

At the time, the WSJ found that a company called Orbitz was tracking online activity to figure out that Mac users would spend 30% more on hotels than Windows users.

Moreover, Westall said, tutoring service Princeton Review knows that “Asians are 1.8 times more likely to spend more money on tutoring because they care about education.”

That data point was exposed by ProPublica, with Princeton Review replying that its pricing was based on the “costs of running its business and the competitive attributes of the given market.”

The company also argued that areas that had higher prices also had members of the “financial services industry, people who tend to vote Democratic, journalists and any other group that is more heavily concentrated in areas like New York City.”

RELATED: When your desperation becomes part of the price

POOL PHILIP REYNAERS/BELGA MAG/Belga/AFP/Getty Images

“They were charging them thousands of dollars more,” Westall went on. “They pushed back and said it wasn’t discrimination. They said we were basing it on zip code,” but the fact remained that there were “more Asians in that zip code.”

That being said, Westall reiterated that the profit incentives when using AI to analyze data has become a “gold mine,” reminding consumers that there is a ~50% increase in profit when companies price based off user data.

The author urged readers to not give up their data so easily at stores or online, including their name, email, and zip code.

Performing basic privacy protection — without even being too tech savvy — is the least anyone can do.

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​Ai pricing, Instacart, Mcdonalds, Mac, Princeton review, Tech 

Certain candidates across the country are earning the support of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — and they all have one thing in common.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales points out that the organization “has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the governor’s office here in the state of Texas,” because “their goals are to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s mastership of the world.”

“They’ve made it entirely clear. When your goal is to forcibly impose Sharia law, you, as it turns out, are incompatible with the Western world, definitely incompatible with the United States,” Gonzales says.

“In the meantime, CAIR, I guess, wanted all of its terrorist-adjacent supporters who can vote in the midterms to know who to vote for. They wanted to send out a friendly voter’s guide. And just to give you an idea, because every organization that is able to give endorsements obviously has a position on specific policies, they obviously are advocating for something,” she explains, before revealing their “policy positions” on their website.

“Since 9/11 the Muslim Community has been an easy target for Civil Rights abuses. CAIR Action works to ensure that Civil Rights abuses no longer occur,” CAIR’s website says.

“So our people killed over 3,000 innocent Americans, but let us explain how we’re the victims here,” Gonzales comments.

Another policy platform, CAIR’s website says, is “ending national security overreach.”

“The National FBI watchlist, no-fly lists, and other forms of security overreach have targeted and undermined our community’s [sic] time and time again. CAIR Action aims to restore these fundamental constitutional rights,” it reads.

“Is the FBI putting you on a watch list and the no-fly list and all these other lists because you’re a member of the community, or are they just responding to members of the community’s terrorist ties?” Gonzales asks.

“If we’re all being honest, I think we all know which one of those options it is,” she adds.

Gonzales then shares another policy platform on the website: “We support free speech in all spheres of our lives, especially within our education system.”

“We will work to ensure that our constitutional rights are also protected within our schools,” the website reads.

“If you’re living in the state of Texas and you’re paying attention to the Islamic conquest, we know exactly what that translation is. It’s just taking over our schools with Muslim prayer rooms where they get to leave class multiple times a day and go pray to Allah,” Gonzales says.

CAIR also released a nationwide endorsement list of candidates.

“At the top of the list here in the state of Texas, we have, of course, James Talarico as the preferred candidate for the terrorist organization CAIR. Wow. Big shocker there,” Gonzales says.

“You see, Ken Paxton has been extremely outspoken about stopping Sharia and the Islamic takeover. He’s actually used his office as attorney general to go after some of the things that they are doing that are outside the scope of, you know, legal anything,” she continues.

“In fact, what you will find as you scroll through this list of preferred and endorsed candidates, you will find that it’s the Democrats. These are the Democrats. The Democrats are CAIR’s preferred candidates,” she adds.

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​Cair, Sharia law, James talarico, Texas, Council on american islamic relations, Blazetv show 

Cybersecurity threats are emerging left and right, with the most prominent event happening last week in what experts call Black October. However, while that web meltdown took most of the oxygen out of the room, Microsoft was tracking another event that affected hundreds of companies around the globe.

Days before the php2shell threat hit its peak of hysteria online, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence team was focused on a major event that directly attacked enterprise systems. It found that a Chinese hacking group called Storm-0940 weaponized an agentic AI testing platform named ARTEX to launch automated attacks on hundreds of companies worldwide, intending to steal data.

ConnectWise admits that it doesn’t know which partners were hacked or if any data was moved.

Even worse, the attack led to bad actors accessing some companies’ cloud backup systems, which contained sensitive encrypted data locked behind privileged access. It only took three hours for the automated attacks to breach cybersecurity measures — far fewer than the 5-10 hours that security experts typically need to crack a system.

The speed and efficiency of the attack further outlines how AI poses an existential risk to online infrastructure that is either outdated, unsecured with the latest software, or riddled with zero-day vulnerabilities that have yet to be discovered.

One of the groups affected by the attack was ConnectWise, an IT management software company that provides a list of services, including remote monitoring and management for company servers, laptops, and desktops; remote access features to offer help-desk support; and cloud backup and recovery for critical business data. Some of the partners on its website include Swarovski, Bic, and Panasonic, though the full client list includes more than 20,000.

In short, ConnectWise is directly integrated into the digital fabric of its partners with access to devices, data, and everything else hackers would love to take for themselves. That means that attackers who want to get to ConnectWise’s partners don’t have to go to each company and hack them individually. They can simply target ConnectWise itself to obtain a treasure trove of data.

RELATED: How to protect yourself and your data during the PHP web meltdown

amgun/Getty Images

According to Microsoft, the Chinese-state hackers used AI to implement a supply chain attack on the OAuth app that protects ConnectWise Cloud Backup, the service that contains client cloud backup data. Once inside, hackers reportedly tried to change the system privileges to broaden data access. However, Microsoft notes that there’s currently no proof that client data was actually accessed or taken — just that hackers broke into the system.

ConnectWise was quick to respond. The company revoked the certificates connected to Cloud Backup to cut the hackers off. This rendered their supply chain attack null and void. ConnectWise also confirmed that its clients’ cloud backup archives are still securely encrypted, so if hackers did move data out of ConnectWise’s system, it should still be safe. The company has found no evidence so far that any of the archives were taken.

That said, a lack of evidence doesn’t necessarily mean a crime didn’t occur. ConnectWise admits that its systems aren’t built to track its clients’ saved data. As a result, it doesn’t know which partners were hacked or if any data was moved. Instead, ConnectWise customers are compelled to review their own data for signs of tampering.

The ConnectWise breach is just one piece of a broader emerging situation where AI bots scour every corner of the web, looking for unknown flaws to exploit. At this point, no one is safe — businesses, infrastructure, and private citizens. Still, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. We surfed the web and compiled a robust list of ways you can protect yourself, your accounts, and your private data from the PHP meltdown and any other major cybersecurity event that could unfold over the coming months and years.

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​Security, Cybersecurity, Cyberattack, Artificial intelligence, Tech 

British establishmentarians have notched another win in their long-standing effort to take Tommy Robinson off the board.

Government officials and woke clergymen have condemned him; Islamic terrorists have allegedly threatened him; multiple social media platforms have banned him; he has been subjected to at least one unlawful, politically motivated arrest; he has been imprisoned for filming outside a court; and he was even told to stay clear of an entire city.

‘The entire establishment is against him.’

While Robinson has endured these and other challenges, he may ultimately go down for doxxing a pair of journalists who doxxed his family.

Tit for tat

In August 2024, the Daily Mail published reports about Robinson’s family trip to a resort on the outskirts of Ayia Napa, Cyprus.

Robinson was on the publication’s radar because of his commentary about the July 29, 2024, butchery of three little girls and attempted murder of 10 others at a dance studio by the teenage son of Rwandan migrants.

In addition to sharing pictures of where Robinson was with his daughter and other family members, the Mail provided sufficient information to identify the location — including the general location of the resort, how many stars the resort had, as well as the name of a restaurant on the premises.

RELATED: UK admits rape almost guaranteed among inbound asylum-seekers — then cops lock down town to allow another shipload

Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty Images

Following the Mail’s Aug. 4 report, Robinson tweeted, “My kids are crying, we come here so I could spend some quality time with them. Now they are scared people are coming here to get them. The daily Mail have purposely doxxed the exact location of my family. How can they be allowed to do this.”

Robinson — who allegedly received threats after the Mail’s reporting — retaliated by sharing images and information about freelance reporter Andrew Young and Daily Mail editor Jacob Dirnhuber.

In an Aug. 6, 2024, post featuring an apparent image of Dirnhuber, Robinson wrote, “This is Jacob, he likes to locate & endanger families. Jacob & the rest of the daily mail journalists who were involved in endangering my children have today been located. I look forward to hearing on camera your justification for doxxing my children’s location.”

While content to share images of Young and Dirnhuber, Robinson underscored at the time that he would not “show their families pictures or put out their address.”

Police confirmed that while cropped photos shared online by Robinson showed members of one journalist’s family, their faces were not visible.

Prosecuted

Robinson, 43, was convicted on Wednesday of two counts of harassment causing violence.

The anti-extremism activist whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon “weaponised social media and subjected two journalists to a campaign of harassment, which caused them serious fear of violence,” said Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division.

Ferguson said that evidence presented at trial “showed that he targeted the victims directly and indirectly through social media and by telephone. He also published images relating not only to them, but also their families.”

“There are legitimate and established routes that can be pursued by people who have concerns or complaints about their treatment by the media,” a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said in a statement on Wednesday. “In this case, Lennon chose not to follow any of these and, instead, issued various threatening online posts in the knowledge that they would almost certainly lead to his followers to target and intimidate those journalists.”

Robinson faces up to a decade in prison and will be sentenced on Dec. 16.

Robinson noted on X that he will “walk out of prison with my pride, dignity & morals,” adding that he is still glad that he “never revealed any of the innocent people’s images or addresses.”

He also called the “whole f**king thing insane” and the Daily Mail “f**king wankers.”

A spokesman for the Daily Mail welcomed the conviction and stated, “Yaxley-Lennon’s behaviour was reprehensible and had grave consequences for our reporters and their families.”

“Through his actions, Yaxley-Lennon sought to undermine our right to hold him to account,” continued the spokesman. “We stand by our journalists and their freedom to report legitimately in the public interest.”

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, said of the conviction, “It is my view that the system has, again, treated him unfairly. We live in dark times.”

Lowe further expressed his conviction that “the entire establishment is against him.”

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​Tommy robinson, Daily mail, Restore britain, Rupert lowe, Politics 

Much like the government, school boards can bury a lot in thousands of pages of agendas and budget documents — but artificial intelligence is changing that.

Moms for Liberty co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich introduces AWARE, a new AI-powered platform designed to stop schools from making changes that could not only harm their children, but their families.

“So you’re a parent. What if every time, you know, your school board tried to sneak in a gender policy or a DEI crap in their agenda because that’s what they do. They dump it in, they do it quickly, and then they bury it, and you don’t know about it,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn explains.

“What would happen if every time they tried to do that,” he continues, “your phone pinged and alerted you?”

And that’s exactly what Descovich has created.

“We have harnessed the power of AI to solve a problem,” Descovich tells Glenn, adding, “We have leveled the playing field.”

“For decades, the radical left educational institutions have really had the advantage. We launched five years ago, and I feel like we’ve been running like crazy to catch up to all the money and all the power and all the information that they have. We’ve been playing whack-a-mole all over the country,” she explains.

“And now, through M4L AWARE, we have a dashboard right here at our national headquarters where we can see everything. We can see the trends, we can see what’s going on, and we’ve built the infrastructure over the last five years to be able to deliver this locally to what’s happening at your most local district,” she continues.

Descovich tells Glenn that through this program, they’ve found “things as interesting and peculiar as a school district deciding the night before they’re going to have a school board meeting at 6:00 a.m. the next morning.”

“Our system, AWARE, scrapes the systems every 12 hours, all the school boards across the country, and it delivers it to our inbox. It’s incredible because it ranks them too,” she adds.

The system is only two weeks old, but they’ve already found “a million dollars buried in a $40 million budget for putting telehealth services in all the schools in a school district.”

“Schools are becoming almost mental health centers, you know this, with social emotional learning. They’re putting therapists in schools and then billing the parents’ insurance. Kids have access to mental health services at schools without parental permission,” she explains.

“That is a gross violation of parental rights,” she says, noting that telehealth is even being put in elementary schools.

“That means your child can get on a phone at the school and talk to a therapist without the parent ever knowing what type of therapist, what the therapist is discussing with them,” she continues.

“It’s mind-blowing,” she adds.

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​Artificial intelligence, Moms for liberty, Tina descovich, Parental rights, Telehealth, Public schools, Blazetv show 

Neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, won a majority in Israel’s election Tuesday.

As of Thursday morning, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, alongside its religious and nationalist allies, are projected to secure 53 seats. Former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, alongside its anti-Netanyahu allies, won 48 seats.

‘If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.’

With 61 seats needed to govern, neither leader can govern without convincing smaller parties to defect. Both blocs have sworn off cooperation with the Arab-led Ra’am and Joint List, which nabbed 19 seats total.

Arab turnout hit roughly 80%, about 25% higher than 2022, according to Israeli business publication Globes.

Netanyahu released a statement Wednesday accusing the Arab parties of voter fraud.

“The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state through serious criminal offenses of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries, and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters,” Netanyahu said.

Overall turnout reached a 27-year high of 77.7% as of Thursday, according to the Central Elections Committee.

“There hasn’t been such a nationwide voter turnout since 1973,” committee Director-General Dean Livne said, according to the Times of Israel.

Though active-duty soldiers’ and diplomats’ ballots are still being counted, it is unlikely that the few remaining ballots will move the needle.

RELATED: Feds arrest 6 alleged fraudsters in Maine health care scandal

JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Anyone hoping to replace Netanyahu “will, in fact, need to turn to us,” Arab Joint List Chairman Yousef Jabareen told Israeli radio Oct. 13. His conditions include a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, JNS reported.

“An Eisenkot government is a government that is controlled in fact by Abbas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” one Likud ad warned, according to JNS.

Netanyahu posted advertisements on election day warning that Arab and Muslim turnout could drown the right-wing vote.

Though Israel is the subject of frequent global interest, especially with regard to the Gaza war and associated campaigns, these are not political fault lines in the country itself. Most major parties oppose a Palestinian state and believe the anti-terrorism campaign should continue.

Other controversial subjects dominated campaign season in the Jewish state. Whether the military draft exemption should be continued for the Haredi, also known as Ultra-Orthodox, is a major question on the ballot this election.

More than anything, the election is seen by many Israelis as a referendum on Netanyahu himself, who has served as prime minister on and off for nearly two decades.

President Donald Trump gave Netanyahu his full endorsement leading up to Election Day.

Trump called Netanyahu a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” on Truth Social Oct. 18 and tied future American action against Iran to his re-election.

“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.

RELATED: Flávio Bolsonaro arrives in Miami amid fears of political persecution, declares victory in presidential election

DAN BALILTY/AFP/Getty Images

Trump promoted Netanyahu again just a week later and two days prior to polls opening.

“Vote for Bibi Netanyahu for Prime Minister, we have to finish the job that we started!” Trump posted Sunday. Netanyahu personally requested the second endorsement, Axios reported.

Netanyahu pushed for a joint strike on Iran before the vote, but Trump “did not give a green light,” CNN reported, citing U.S. and Israeli sources. The prime minister’s office called the report “fake news.”

Ultimately, Israeli President Isaac Herzog is responsible for selecting a prime minister.

Once results are certified Tuesday, Herzog will choose the candidate he believes has the best chance of forming a government. The Herzog-tapped politico then has 28 days, plus a possible 14-day extension, to form a ruling coalition. If no coalition is formed, Israelis will return to the polls with Netanyahu presiding over a caretaker government.

“I don’t think the president of the United States or anybody else can intervene in my discretion,” Herzog told MS NOW when asked about Trump’s endorsement..

Netanyahu remains on trial on corruption charges. Herzog “would not currently grant” his pardon request and offered to mediate plea talks instead, the Times of Israel reported in May.

Netanyahu, after 16 years in office, has a contingent of die-hard supporters.

“There’s no one who can replace Bibi,” said Zohar Hindi, a voter near Maale Levona, according to the Times of Israel.

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​Benjamin netanyahu, Donald trump, Election, Politics, Prime minister, Voter fraud