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Debt Rattle August 1 2026

Aug 012026
 
 August 1, 2026  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , ,  Add comments


Jackson Pollock Shooting Star 1947


• US Pulls Troops, Patriot Systems From Northern Iraq Amid Iranian Attacks (ZH)
• Trump Announces Deal for Hamas to Disarm While Israel Withdraws from Gaza (CTH)
• Alex, I’ll Take ‘Peace Deals That Ain’t Gonna Happen’ for $400 (Stephen Green)
• Trump Pauses Notion of Giving Ukraine Patriot or Tomahawk Missiles (CTH)
• John Cleese Drops Truth Bombs About Islamic Culture (Catherine Salgado)
• Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor (Aaron Hanscom)
• Other European Leaders See Spain’s Invasion and Panic (Catherine Salgado)
• The Media Takes the Fifth (Jonathan Turley)
• The Curse It Is Cast (James Howard Kunstler)
• Don’t Forget the Role the ‘Scarf Queen’ Played in the Fauci Cabal (Tim O’Brien)
• What’s Next for Fauci? (Eric Florack)
• Senate Schedules Contempt Vote for Fauci (ET)
• This Liberal Says Democrats Will ‘Deserve to Lose’ in November (Margolis)

 


 

 


 


Seems to be part of an old plan, no cigar.

• US Pulls Troops, Patriot Systems From Northern Iraq Amid Iranian Attacks (ZH)

There are new reports Friday of more US troop pullback initiatives in the wake of the last couple weeks of US-Iran fighting, and Iranian ballistic missile and drone strikes which have targeted American bases with increased regularity, especially in Jordan and Kuwait. One regional media publication freshly reports, “The United States military has started to draw down its last remaining forces from Iraq stationed in the vicinity of Erbil’s airport in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, well-placed sources with close knowledge of the process confirmed to Al-Monitor.”


Significant US anti-air defenses are also being pulled back, given they and their radar systems have increasingly been targeted. “Patriot mobile air-to-surface air-defense systems that detect and shoot down incoming missiles, drones and other airborne enemy equipment have already been removed from the military compound, the sources said, without providing further details,” Al Monitor continues. mThe pullback from the Iraqi Kurdistan region reportedly began last week and is still in progress, given all the heavy equipment has to be pulled out.

The missile batteries are expected to be ‘redeployed’ – but this could be further away from within the vicinity of Iran and the Persian Gulf, such as in Israel. Al Monitor notes: Regional officials described the pullout as routine and in line with the US commitment to withdraw all its forces from Iraq by a Sept. 30 deadline that was agreed with Baghdad. However, coming amid sustained attacks by Iran and its Shiite proxy militias, and on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in particular, the withdrawal has left the Kurds feeling badly exposed.

It’s not just Iran which has targeted US personnel and assets in Iraq, but Iraqi Shia paramilitary units have at times targeted Erbil facilities going back years: While the Patriot systems were deployed to protect US forces, the Kurds have benefited immensely from the security umbrella as well. Erbil’s airport has come under constant attack from Iran and Iran-backed militias since the start of the Iran conflict in February, including this week. US interceptors successfully deterred at least 95% of those attacks, the sources said.

The bulk of Iranian and militia attacks have targeted armed Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in the Kurdistan Region. However, the Erbil compound has also been targeted multiple times. The Patriots have an operational range of between 60 to 100 miles (100-160 kilometers). Iran’s strategy seems to focused on permanently pushing US forces back in the region, while expanding the scope of the war, in what some analysts have called ‘horizontal escalation’. One writer calls this a process of ‘debasification’:

In contrast to the previous hot phase of the war, in which Iran targeted bases across the entire theater simultaneously, this wave started with the targets close to Iranian shores, and has progressed steadily to the Israeli border. After destroying much of the radar network protecting regional US Axis bases in the previous hot phase of the war, Iranian planners have prioritized targeting fuel storage, drone hangers, refueling tankers, and barracks. The American response has been to pull assets back ever further from Iran, to bases in Israel and Jordan. We’ll call this process debasification. Iran’s debasification strategy takes advantage of the inherent asymmetry between the vastly different force structure and capabilities of Iranian rocket forces and US Axis air forces.

Iraq’s north has long been a place where US forces can feal more at ease with ‘friendly’ Kurdish groups, rather than the dwindling presence in the rest of the country. But the Kurds have also come under immense pressure within the Iraq war, especially given headlines alleging they were ready to support an Iranian Kurdish uprising inside the Islamic Republic.

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We’re sceptical.

• Trump Announces Deal for Hamas to Disarm While Israel Withdraws from Gaza (CTH)

According to the announcements:


• Hamas agrees to gradually surrender weapons in exchange for Israeli troop withdrawal, under a phased plan announced by Donald Trump.

• Verification & Oversight: A verification committee will monitor disarmament and troop withdrawal, with weapons stored under a new Palestinian administration.

• International Mediation: Agreement brokered by Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the US-led Board of Peace, aiming to enable Gaza reconstruction and humanitarian access.


PRESIDENT TRUMP – Via Truth Social – “Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY. This agreement is a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people. At the same time, Israel will have the security it deserves, with Gaza no longer used as a base for terror attacks.

This is a major milestone in the implementation of the Trump 20-Point Plan. The agreement will be carried out in carefully structured phases. As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors. One year ago there was a violent raging war, humanitarian crisis and hostages kept in brutal captivity. We have made historic progress and there is still much work to do.

I want to thank the mediators—Egypt, Qatar, and Türkiye—for their important efforts, and especially my outstanding team, whose tireless work made this historic breakthrough possible. The threat that emerged from Gaza on October 7 will NOT be allowed to rebuild! Under this agreement, Gaza will finally be in the hands of a new Palestinian government that serves its PEOPLE.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL ON THIS AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!

DONALD J. TRUMP

Optimism for the proposal/plan is primarily driven by the fact that Turkey, Egypt and Qatar are coordinating the terms and conditions for the disarming. From the Palestinian perspective, the U.S. and Israeli influence upon the Board of Peace is mitigated and balanced by the presence of Turkey and Egypt as pragmatic insurance. This is a very tenuous agreement with multiple points of potential collapse, not the least of which is the Israeli government refusing to permit a stabilizing police force Netanyahu doesn’t control.

(VIA MSM) – […] Based on the premise of “zero trust”, each stage of the plan is supposed to be verifiable and should be accompanied by Israeli withdrawal. But hours after the deal was agreed, an Israeli air strike wounded several Palestinians in Gaza. Under the ceasefire agreement of last October, the IDF was given control of about 53 per cent of Gaza but has since expanded its territory to include an estimated 60 to 70 per cent of the territory. “An agreement has been reached regarding the issue of weapons. Furthermore, an agreement has been reached on a gradual withdrawal of [Israeli forces] from the strip,” a Hamas official said.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas negotiating team, told Al Jazeera. “We will not take any action regarding disarmament prior to Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip.” This appeared to contradict Mr Trump’s statement, which said: “As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw…” However, an official familiar with the negotiations told The Telegraph that Hamas understood “disarmament” to refer to the end of the process. By contrast, “decommissioning” would involve Palestinian security forces storing the weapons, meaning that if Israel reneged on its commitments under the deal, Hamas could take back the weapons.

“The idea, in theory, is that all this can be reversed. That way you can agree to a process which is staged and verifiable,” the official said. It is understood, however, that precise practical details of how and where the weapons would be stored have yet to be agreed, but under the agreement they could not be transferred to Israel. The UK, principally through Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, has been a strong behind-the-scenes proponent of the “Northern Ireland-model” of decommissioning. Israel has not yet commented formally on the agreement, but a US official said the Jewish state was “very sceptical” about Hamas complying.

Israeli officials were reported on Friday as saying that the country did not agree with the “shape” of the agreement, and had conveyed its concerns to Sir Tony Blair, who is working for Mr Trump’s board of peace on the issue. The deal also depends on the creation of a Palestinian police force. However, a Western official said that while much of the preparatory work had been done in identifying recruits, Israel was dragging its feet in allowing training to take place. (read more)

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I would trust neither Hamas nor Israel.

• Alex, I’ll Take ‘Peace Deals That Ain’t Gonna Happen’ for $400 (Stephen Green)

President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace laid out its comprehensive 15-point plan for the Gaza Strip on Friday, following Trump’s announcement Thursday that Hamas has agreed to disarm. The Board includes representatives from 28 founding nations, including a few questionable picks like Belarus (effectively Russia), Qatar, and Turkey. When I read that Hamas has agreed to lay down arms, I automatically presumed it was only because they’d found better places to stash them. Still, let’s look at the deal and see if there’s anything in there that might work.


The first point lays out that plan’s ambitious goals aimed at “ending the cycle of destruction, securing the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza Strip, restoring normal life, enabling Palestinian governance, reconstruction, security, recovery and economic development, rehabilitating damaged sectors and facilitate launching a credible political path that achieves self-determination and Statehood.” The devil, as always, is in the details.

Point 2 calls for “the cessation of military operations” by both sides, so that the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) “shall enter the Strip and start to assume its responsibilities” for governing the territory. Then there’s point 3, which says that the International Verification Committee (IVC) must verify each step before both sides move on to the next.Points 4 and 5 call on Hamas to turn over governing authority to NCAG, and for NCAG to “maintain the continuity of civilian institutions and public services” and basically to act as a decent government. There’s also the matter of $400 million in international funds it’s supposed to spend wisely.

Points 6 through 11 all deal with security in the Strip, and that’s where the details get particularly devilish.

The quick and dirty version is that NCAG will run civilian affairs according to Palestinian law and “good governance standards,” and if you have doubts about compatibility, so do I. New police will “undergo a comprehensive vetting,” and “all police weapons shall be transferred to the responsibility and authority of NCAG upon its entry into Gaza and the assumption of its missions.” Heavy weapons, military production sites, depots of weapons, and tunnels will all be decommissioned. The process of transferring authority to NCAG (and security to the International Stabilization Force [ISF]) will be done in stages and linked to a phased Israeli withdrawal.

There’s also a “Social Peace Agreement” that seems to involve deradicalizing Hamas terrorists that the peace plan insists on referring to as “militias.” In fact, neither “terror” nor “terrorist” appear in any of the 15 points. There’s also the little matter of the value of any “social peace” that’s “signed in accordance with Palestinian norms and laws.” But I digress. Points 12-14 involve the ISF and withdrawal of Israeli forces. ISF “shall monitor compliance by all parties with the ceasefire, train the Palestinian police, secure the protection and delivery of humanitarian assistance and essential supplies into Gaza Strip, and support the NCAG, at its request, in any other non-policing mission,” but NCAG handles all internal policing.

The last point is reconstruction, supervised by the Board of Peace and NCAG, assuming things ever get that far. Short-term, you have to doubt whether Hamas will actually disarm or just put on a pretense by giving up some weapons while stashing the rest even deeper underground. Looking further out, you have to wonder whether NCAG or even ISF will become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Hamas, just like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) did.

And I’m having an impossible time getting past the absurdity of the Social Peace Agreement. Probably better just to let Israel do now what they’ll probably have to do later anyway and fully root out Hamas themselves.

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“It should be remembered that both the U.K and Ukraine were part of the political system attempting to remove President Trump from office.”

• Trump Pauses Notion of Giving Ukraine Patriot or Tomahawk Missiles (CTH)

CTH is very happy to see President Trump pause his consideration of giving Ukraine Patriot and Tomahawk missile system technology and licenses. As noted by President Trump there is always a possibility of those systems being used against the USA if the conflict shifts and Ukraine becomes our enemy.

Germany and Ukraine have been asking for Tomahawks (offensive missile systems), while mostly Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been requesting the Patriot (defensive) missiles. Both systems are closely guarded, held and maintained by strict security protocols in the U.S. military arsenal. President Trump responded to the question during his Camp David cabinet meeting (prompted):

Zelenskyy likely did himself no favors when he announced his intention to build missile and drone factories in the U.K. No doubt several Trump administration officials noted that statement and contrast it against Zelenskyy’s requests. It would be exceptionally risky for the USA to allow Patriot and Tomahawk systems to be built in the U.K. as the secrecy behind the technology would certainly leak and our strategic advantage lost. It should be remembered that both the U.K and Ukraine were part of the political system attempting to remove President Trump from office.

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This is better when written by women.

”Islamic sacred texts endorse pedophilia and rape of non-Muslims. They also promote jihad, domestic abuse, sex slavery, honor killings, and other horrific evils.”

• John Cleese Drops Truth Bombs About Islamic Culture (Catherine Salgado)

Western civilization’s self-immolation is no joke. Comedian John Cleese of Monty Python fame just made a completely accurate but incredibly daring argument you’ll rarely find a celebrity making: not all cultures are morally equal. Cleese posted July 30 in response to an X poll about his possible motives, “I’m not a racist. I’m a culturalist[.] I believe some cultures are superior to others.” He went on, “For example, I prefer cultures that do not encourage wife beating, paedophilia, clitorectomies, stoning and constant inflation of the male ego[.] I am also aware of the difference between Islamoscepticism and Islamophobia.”


He ended with a point that he has probably had to make many times to his former friends and colleagues: “Notice that hate does not come into this. Only moral preferences.” Unfortunately, most Western celebrities have become incapable of moral distinctions.The scenes from Spain right now are proof enough of how suicidal Western immigration policies have become.

The British mass migration crisis likewise made international headlines recently over bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s death and the rape gang inquiry. Nowak was a young Polish-British boy who bled out on the ground while pleading for help. UK cops cuffed him, sneered at him, and listened empathetically to his murderer’s fake story of racism. The rape gang inquiry found that 250,000 British girls and women have been victims of the gang abuse, with the overwhelming majority of perpetrators being Muslim. One Welsh girl was raped 1,000 times, which is almost unimaginable.

Islamic sacred texts endorse pedophilia and rape of non-Muslims. They also promote jihad, domestic abuse, sex slavery, honor killings, and other horrific evils. These are the facts behind Cleese’s comments. I also particularly applaud Cleese’s clarification because he more eloquently expressed a point I have made before. For instance, if America or England or Spain offered to welcome in some of the persecuted Nigerian and Syrian Christians, or the Persian freedom fighters who draw their inspiration from America, or the Israeli Jews so persecuted in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, I would understand it (provided we have some clear vetting and a numbers limit).

We have many of the same basic moral principles in Western civilization as all the above-mentioned people have, even if our music and food and village traditions are different. But it is obvious that almost any country that is overwhelmingly Muslim or Communist will train most of its citizens or subjects to honor values completely at variance with ours. I, too, am a culturalist. Nor are all cultures morally equal.

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Spain -and Sánchez- claim this morning that almost all of the 60,000 have returned to Morocco.

• Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor (Aaron Hanscom)

Search for “traitor” on X this week, and one man will flood your timeline: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The reason? Shocking images of thousands of migrants from Morocco crossing the border and flooding into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. The head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta told the Associated Press that the border had “totally collapsed.” After watching video footage of migrants breaking through fences to get into the city, one would be justified in using the word “invasion” to describe what’s happening. Indeed, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the rising populist/conservative Vox party, called it just that and wrote that “Pedro Sánchez is its main promoter and guilty of all its consequences.”


The migrants don’t disagree. Video footage captured some of the arrivals chanting, “Viva Pedro Sánchez!” or “Long live Pedro Sánchez!”


Their gratitude to the Socialist prime minister is due to his mass amnesty plan, which received 1.2 million applications by its June 30, 2026, deadline. As I wrote in So, How’s Spain’s Mass Amnesty Working Out?, “Sánchez, of course, looks at every new immigrant as a potential future voter who won’t care about the mind-boggling corruption within his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). As increasing numbers of Spaniards take to the streets to demand the prime minister’s resignation, Muslim migrants are among his most loyal supporters.”

In that article, I linked to a video of a Muslim store owner with a poster of Sánchez on his wall who says Muslims who become citizens are “100%” going to vote for the prime minister because of his support for Palestine and Iran. This is why I’ve called him the West’s most hostile leader toward Israel. (The Gazans who celebrated Spain’s World Cup victory would agree with me.)Elon Musk dubbed Sánchez something else: a traitor. After the prime minister defended his amnesty plan in April, Musk wrote on X, “Dirty Sánchez is guilty of high treason.” Sánchez responded cheekily at the time, “Mars can wait. Humanity can’t.”

How’s that humanity working out? Juan Jesús Vivas, the president of Ceuta, said the current situation was an “absolute humanitarian and social emergency.” Reuters reports that Vivas also said that facilities for unaccompanied minors were operating at 2,400% of capacity and that 60 bodies had been recovered at sea over the previous few months. As for the fate of Europe’s citizens, Abascal said Sánchez had “opened the doors of Europe to all dangers.” He described the prime minister’s high treason more vividly than Musk did: “For every rape, every stabbing, and every slash to the pockets of Spaniards to keep them afloat… there is a direct culprit: the mafia boss desperately calling in more hitmen to stay in power.”

Sánchez, who is mired in corruption scandals, can’t go out in public now because, as Abascal says, everyone knows he doesn’t defend Spain’s interests and is only interested in holding on to power. (Watch him get heckled here as he visits areas affected by Spain’s wildfires.) The lower house of the Spanish parliament called on the prime minister to resign last month in a non-binding vote, but he somehow remains in power as one of Europe’s great political survivors.

Could these images of the border invasion be the last straw for Sánchez? Hundreds of Spanish citizens are reportedly already taking to the streets of Ceuta to protest, and they aren’t alone in their anger at the prime minister. I’ll end with several prominent voices echoing what Musk said several months ago: Sánchez is a traitor.

English freedom fighter Tommy Robinson:

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet:

Political journalist Eric Daugherty:

Actor and comedian Rob Schneider:

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60,000 Moroccan men? i doubt it. But African men.

• Other European Leaders See Spain’s Invasion and Panic (Catherine Salgado)

To survive or not to survive, that is Europe’s question. What is happening in Spain with up to 60,000 Moroccan men rushing the borders of Spanish territory over a couple of days is actually what has happened to almost every single Western nation, just sped up and condensed into a small timeframe. But even some European leaders who have overlooked the crisis till now are panicking as they watch the literal invasion of Spain by Muslim men.


Spain is part of the Schengen Area, a group of countries that agreed to cut down on almost all of their border restrictions for individuals in the member countries, allowing for travel without passports. But given the horrific scenes unfolding in Spain, Italian and Finnish representatives, among others, are suddenly realizing the dangers of this system. Dutch Party for Freedom Chairman Geert Wilders posted the following:


Visegrád 24 reported Friday on the Schengen Area countries that are already rushing to complain about how the influx into Spain’s North African territory could affect them. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has been a critic of the mass migration crisis before, said the other member nations should expel Spain from the Schengen visa-free zone as she worries about Italy’s borders from the gargantuan horde of Muslim illegal aliens. “Italy will not stand idle,” Meloni warned.

Her initiative is already backed by Finland, Czechia, and Denmark — forming a bloc of four states with Italy. France has already introduced border controls with Spain. “Spain has completely failed to protect the external Schengen border. This cannot continue. Countries that do not fulfill their obligations cannot remain members of the Schengen area,” the Finnish minister stated. Commentator Eyal Yakoby reported that Austria also wants Spain booted.

It’s incredibly ironic that France, where the government habitually tries to cover up for the massive explosion of migrant-caused violence, is even on board with some border safeguards. Just last month, French President Emmanuel Macron was joining with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to bash Meloni’s repatriation policies. Now that Sánchez’s idiocy led to a full-on invasion, maybe French elites are backtracking?

The tens of thousands of Moroccans who invaded Ceuta and Melilla broke into homes, trashed businesses, and set cars on fire. I have yet to see almost any women among their ranks. It is entirely accurate to say this was a military-style invasion by an entirely male force, likely religiously influenced, and they took over without firing a shot. It took the Spanish almost 800 years to drive out the last Muslim invasion, and this time the enemy just had to show up.

Maybe this could finally be the wake-up call that idiotic European oligarchs need.

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“The Media Takes the Fifth and Denounces Those Questioning Fauci as an “Assault on Science”

• The Media Takes the Fifth (Jonathan Turley)

Lodovico Carracci St. Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima

As I wrote yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci was not the only one taking the Fifth yesterday on his record during the pandemic. The media effectively invoked the same privilege to avoid self-incrimination for their years of deifying the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Across the cable networks, hosts and guests were going into vapors as Republican senators pummelled Fauci over his COVID policies and the glaring contradictions found in his diary entries. Some, like Dr. Scott Ratzan, echoed Fauci’s own prior claim that any questioning of his judgment was an attack on science.


Once again, Fauci had every right to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. That does not mean that it was the right thing to do. Fauci already had a pardon that notably extended back to 2014 when his agency approved gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China. Any prosecution would be difficult in light of the pardon. It would not be impossible since he could be charged with perjury for any false statements. Yet, that was the same threat that existed during countless prior hearings for Fauci.

So what was the difference now? The answer is found in diary entries and other evidence that contradicts Fauci’s public statements on subjects ranging from the lab theory to school closures. It is not that Fauci would have been tripped into false answers but that he did not have any obvious answers to some of these criticisms. Instead, Fauci invoked the privilege 111 times. That fell short of Vito Genovese’s record, who invoked the privilege 150 times.

Rather than address the long list of criticisms and contradictions for Fauci, the media rallied around the scientist. Fauci was portrayed as something akin to the St. Sebastian of Science, taking barbs and arrows for his faith. It did not matter that over 1.2 million people died, an economy shut down, and millions of children prevented from going to school based on these alleged errors. Fauci would remain silent rather than risk being charged with false testimony.

On CNN, Dr. Scott Ratzan repeated Fauci’s much-maligned claim in June 2021 that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” Yesterday, Ratzan declared: “This is an assault on science and scientists, and unfortunately, Dr. Fauci is in that seat. 38 years of service to the country, one of the best known scientists for infectious disease, unfortunately, has taken a lot of heat…”It was a maddening statement, repeated by many, that treated Fauci as inviolate, if not infallible. Fauci was wrong about issues that produced tragic costs for this country. When confronted about policies such as school closures, he insisted he had never recommended them while privately admitting he had.

Fauci owes the public explanations, including millions who lost loved ones. Instead, he refused to take the risk of being accused of perjury. Fauci is no Sebastian. Notably, Sebastian remained silent in public to conceal his faith, but when discovered by Diocletian, he remained faithful. The price was to be shot through with arrows, but he somehow survived. After being nursed back to health by Irene of Rome, he immediately confronted Diocletian in public and denounced his abuses. For that act he was beaten to death with clubs and tossed into a sewer.

Fauci spoke endlessly in public and remained silent only when asked to address the contradictions in his diaries and the costs of his alleged errors. What is also frustrating for many is the reappearance of figures who toed the line on prior narratives about masks, the virus’s origin, and other issues. They are now claiming victimization in being asked to account for evidence that they were wrong. As Dr. Scott Atlas has laid out, many of those who abused dissenting scientists faced no repercussions after those scientists were largely vindicated in later research.

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“I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done.” —Dr. Anthony Fauci, recorded for TV in 2022.

“They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?”

• The Curse It Is Cast (James Howard Kunstler)

However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become. You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too — a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything. You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020. You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed. And much more.


And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-fuckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil — as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago — and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.

Dr. Fauci ran his own titanically corrupt fiefdom out of the nation’s public health complex. Half-a-million a year wasn’t enough for — let’s call him what he was — an executive bureaucrat. He doled out millions in grants to universities, drug companies, and putative public service orgs, and extracted his vig, about a million bucks in prize money during the Covid-19 episode, not counting his share of royalties from drug patents. A modest million. He must have thought: who will even notice. . . who would ever be bothered by that tiny number when Congress, the Federal Reserve, and everybody else is drowning in numbers with so many zeros it gives them tachycardia just to glance at the balance sheet.

Plus, the thoroughly dishonorable news media was busy making Dr. Fauci a rock-star. He had everything but the stadiums. The grand old gals of Hollywood were going all moist over him. “Julia Roberts sent me flowers today,” he typed into his government-issue diary. Barbra Streisand called him on the phone. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA,” He gushed. His work resulted in the deaths of millions and the injury of millions more. Neverminding that, he carefully tracked and marveled at his burgeoning fame:

“Big front-page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post, [Dr. Fauci wrote]. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”

Did Dr. Fauci know that his work-product, the Covid-19 episode and the operations around it, were aimed at setting up conditions to get President Trump bum-rushed out of office in favor of the vacant and pliable tool that was “Joe Biden?” Did others on the White House Covid Task Force know how that would work? Did they know who or what they were in league with?

Anyway, it didn’t turn out as well as they’d planned, of course. The four years of “Joe Biden” only proved how much that coalition of Deep Staters, globalists, and domestic riffraff hated the old American republic and its pain-in-the-ass Constitution. But when they foundered in 2024 — when old Joe-from-Scranton finally gave away the game on that fatal debate stage — and the party had to stuff his idiot veep into the nomination, the Democratic Party crossed an event horizon into total detachment from reality, where they remain to this day.

So then, where did the Democratic Party get the idea that going balls-out Bolshevik-Jacobin would be their salvation after what they already did to try to wreck our country? And by Bolshevik-Jacobin I mean the marriage of murderous envy with civic psychosis. The line it is drawn; the curse it is cast, Dylan prophesied half a century ago. They’re in your face now. Just listen to them. They mean it. They want all your stuff and they want you dead. They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?

Yet great forces unseen just now are driving the nation to an autumn reckoning, and the main thing to be reckoned is the survival of the USA as a functioning republic with the credibility of law restored and the demons of lawfare crushed. The possibility of legislated election reform slips away day by day, it’s true. But, please understand, this president will not allow the coming election to get pounded down a rathole. If nothing else, we are going to get an intervention under a national security executive order, on the president’s constitutional duty (and his oath) to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

The ensuing fight over this will be short and decisive. These mad dogs will be put down, as mad dogs must be. We are going to take our country back. Depend on it.

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“She traveled the country in the summer of 2020 to lobby governors and state health officials to institute strict guidelines on masking and reducing the sizes of indoor gatherings ..”

• Don’t Forget the Role the ‘Scarf Queen’ Played in the Fauci Cabal (Tim O’Brien)

Rush Limbaugh called her “the scarf queen” in reference to her failed attempts to humanize herself through a common female fashion accessory – her trademark scarves that she wore when she conducted White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefings in 2020. She is Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump in his first term, finishing in that role once Trump was safely out of office and the Biden regime had taken control.


You may remember her as the taller, handsome woman who often appeared alongside Anthony Fauci at press briefings and task force events. She was tapped to serve on that task force after serving as the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, which was considered an ambassador-level job within the State Department. From 2014 under President Barack Obama through 2019-2020, she had overseen American programs whose stated purpose was to counter the global spread of HIV. Before that, she ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) global HIV/AIDS division. Only in the federal government can failure give you upward mobility.

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Birx painted herself as a heroine for what she framed as balancing Trump administration skepticism over COVID-19, politics, media narratives, the need to treat millions of Americans, and the effort to prevent or mitigate the spread of the virus. In that book, Birx admitted that she was integral to the effort to extend the initial lockdowns beyond the “15 days to slow the spread.” “No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them”, she wrote.

Technically, Birx was a Trump insider. He relied on her, Fauci and their team to give him the advice he relied upon to make critical national decisions. But as we’ve seen with Fauci, who clearly worked against Trump and his administration, Birx was more discreet but still a kindred spirit.

She played a major role from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 with the “15 days to slow the spread” messaging theme and related policies. Those policies, which she advanced, included limiting group gatherings, social distancing, and the closure of churches, gyms, places of employment, restaurants and bars, but not, curiously, liquor stores. She pushed for policies to keep asymptomatic people trapped in their homes under lockdown. She advocated for the quarantine of an entire household if just one member tested positive for COVID-19.

And she was aggressive in her push to test everyone, including those with no symptoms. More than anyone else on the White House task force, Birx championed mask-wearing in spite of existing evidence that the masks would prove ineffective at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. She pushed to mask indoors and even at home.

She traveled the country in the summer of 2020 to lobby governors and state health officials to institute strict guidelines on masking and reducing the sizes of indoor gatherings they would permit. She did all of this while at the same time, leftist governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf were out encouraging people to join large groups of “peaceful protestors” to support Black Lives Matter. At the time, she expressed worry, but even on pandemic grounds, she did not condemn those “peaceful protests.”

Because of Birx and Fauci and their people, you couldn’t go to a funeral for a family member; you couldn’t visit loved ones in the hospital; your kids couldn’t go to school; you couldn’t go to church or work; you couldn’t gather in full for Thanksgiving or Christmas; you had to cancel that wedding and that elective health procedure because “group size.”

She took particular issue with White House advisor Scott Atlas, who took an entirely different stance on managing the pandemic. Atlas rejected the Birx/Fauci approach of masking, testing, and the arbitrary “six-feet social distancing” requirements. He correctly advocated for testing just those with symptoms or who were clearly sick. He wanted to manage the nation’s response to COVID-19 until herd immunity could take over, which is how most epidemics throughout history had been effectively handled. Isolate those with symptoms, treat them with all the means at your disposal, and get to herd immunity as quickly as possible.

More to the point, Atlas subscribed to something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which stated: “We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.” Medical doctors and public health professionals who openly advocated for the declaration were widely canceled by the left and the Birx/Fauci cabal. In fact, social media platforms broadly censored that declaration and those who supported it. Birx tried to get Atlas kicked off the White House task force.

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“..several Democrats on the panel rushed to Fauci’s defense mid-hearing. Clearly, they’re not interested in the truth of the matter. ”

• What’s Next for Fauci? (Eric Florack)

What’s next for the guy who managed to make Josef Mengele and Jack Kevorkian both look like amateurs by comparison, Anthony Fauci? There are several possibilities here, and I’ll try to cover all the ones I can foresee. I warn you that like many of my deep analytical dives, this is going to get a little messy. So, stay with me here. Understand that I make no claims to actually covering all possibilities, of course, but here’s how I see things at the moment.


Sen. Rand Paul has scheduled a committee vote for August 5, on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer a single question. Fauci invoked the Fifth more than 100 times during the hearing—some reports say 111, which is either a constitutional strategy or a new Olympic event—and the vote will almost certainly break down along party lines, since several Democrats on the panel rushed to Fauci’s defense mid-hearing. Clearly, they’re not interested in the truth of the matter.

Several GOP members, Sen. Josh Hawley chief among them, argue Fauci has no valid Fifth Amendment claim in the first place, since Biden’s pardon already grants him immunity from criminal prosecution. The idea being, you can’t incriminate yourself with testimony if there’s no crime left to charge you with. Our own Matt Margolis caught the moment yesterday, quoting Hawley directly: “Let’s just get one thing straight, you don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley said. “As you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown v. Walker, 1896. When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.”

Paul himself called this legal theory “untested,” saying it would likely have to be decided by a court. Far be it from me to correct Sen. Paul, but I doubt that very much. The test happened already—in 1896, in fact—under the name Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591. I’m interested that Paul didn’t know that, and also that Hawley hadn’t mentioned it to him.

Here’s the short version of the Walker case review, for anyone who skipped that week of law school. Walker, a railroad officer, got subpoenaed to testify before the Interstate Commerce Commission about rate-fixing collusion. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth, even though a federal immunity statute already promised nothing he said could be used against him. Walker’s position was that statutory immunity wasn’t good enough—that only a pardon, or the total impossibility of prosecution, could strip him of the right to stay silent. He got held in contempt, and the case climbed to the Supreme Court.

The question the court had to settle: does the Fifth Amendment protect against self-incrimination itself—any admission that makes you look bad—or only against testimony that could actually convict you of something? By a 5-4 vote, the Court sided with the government. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the majority, held that the privilege tracks the risk of prosecution, not the risk of embarrassment.

Once that prosecution risk disappears entirely—by statutory immunity, or by pardon—the constitutional basis for silence disappears with it. A pardoned witness, Brown wrote, “stands, with respect to such offense, as if it had never been committed.” He didn’t pull that out of thin air, either—he grounded it in English common law and the Aaron Burr treason trial, so the “untested” label doesn’t even survive contact with the 19th century, let alone the 21st.

The logic holds up fine today: the Fifth protects against testimony that could convict you. Erase the possibility of conviction, and there’s nothing left for the privilege to attach to.

A later case, Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79, brushes up against this, though I doubt it changes the outcome here. Burdick was a journalist Woodrow Wilson tried to pardon specifically to force him to testify. Burdick refused the pardon outright and got held in contempt anyway for pleading the Fifth. The Court sided with him, ruling unanimously that a witness can still refuse to testify if he declines the pardon offered to him. Crucially, that doesn’t help Fauci—everyone knows he’s already accepted his. And we also know he was campaigning for it to be granted.

Fauci’s team is left arguing the pardon only covers conduct through the date it was signed, so any new admission could expose him to fresh charges. That’s a shaky proposition at best, resting on three narrow legs: First, anything Fauci says today that amounts to a new offense—perjury, false statements to Congress—isn’t covered by a pardon issued before he said it, and it revives full Fifth Amendment protection for those specific answers. Second, a presidential pardon covers federal offenses only; it does nothing to block state prosecution under the dual-sovereignty doctrine, and I’m already seeing chatter that a few state AGs are circling this exact opening. Our Catherine Salgado touched on this.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier evidently was keeping an eye on the proceedings, because after the hearing on Wednesday, he posted on X, Fauci’s lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable. My office is launching an investigation into Dr. Fauci. It’s past time we get the truth of what happened during COVID. Third, the pardon addresses criminal exposure and nothing else—it says nothing about civil suits, and sworn testimony today becomes fair game as an admission in any civil case where Fauci’s a party or witness. That last one may be the real engine behind the blanket silence, whatever the pardon technically covers.

Bottom line: Hawley and Paul had the stronger textbook argument in the room. For conduct squarely inside the pardon’s window, Fauci’s blanket Fifth Amendment invocation doesn’t rest on solid ground—not against better than 130 years of precedent, anyway.

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He was the boss of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. Far too long.

• Senate Schedules Contempt Vote for Fauci (ET)

The Senate has scheduled a vote on holding Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Aug. 5 will consider a contempt resolution for Fauci. The resolution has not been released as of yet. If the panel approves the resolution, then it will be sent to the Department of Justice with a recommendation to prosecute Fauci, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chairman of the Senate panel, said during an appearance on CBS on July 30.


Paul has previously requested prosecution of Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress, but federal prosecutors have not brought any charges to date. Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, read an opening statement at a hearing of the committee on July 29, then refused to answer any questions. Fauci said he was following advice from his lawyers and invoking his right under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which protects people against self-incrimination.

Paul noted at the end of the hearing that a preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden issued in early 2025 covers Fauci for any crimes he may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014, through Jan. 19, 2025. Paul asked Fauci whether he, at any point during the time period the pardon covers, destroyed any federal record or instructed others to. Fauci declined to answer, pointing to the Fifth Amendment. “My question was limited to the period of your pardon only. I find your objection unsupported,” Paul said. bFauci said in his opening statement that Paul is obsessed with calling for his prosecution.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said.Some senators said the situation called to mind what transpired with Lois Lerner, an IRS official who read an opening statement while appearing before a congressional panel in 2013 before refusing to answer any questions. The House of Representatives voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress.

Congress more recently approved contempt resolutions against Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, onetime advisers to President Donald Trump. The men were convicted of contempt and spent time in prison. bPeople convicted of contempt of Congress can land a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison term of up to 12 months. Several legal experts told The Epoch Times that Fauci wrongly invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to some of the questions.

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The only chance they have is to not play by the rules.

• This Liberal Says Democrats Will ‘Deserve to Lose’ in November (Margolis)

Democrats have a socialism problem, and even one of their own on Fox News’s The Five isn’t pretending otherwise. On Thursday, Harold Ford Jr., who is far and away smarter than Jessica Tarlov, ripped into his party for propping up socialist candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.


Ford didn’t hedge. His argument was straightforward: the Democrat Party has drifted so far from ordinary voters that its own candidates no longer resemble what the country is asking for. “Because the American people are not being ambiguous at all about what they want,” Ford said. “They want lower prices; they want not-forever wars. They want their kids to have better futures and an opportunity to achieve the American dream.”

Ford then turned to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the democratic socialist who has spent years boosting candidates well to his left. Ford summed up the platform creeping into his party’s fringe in a single breath. “No prisons, no borders, pro-Hamas, no Senate,” he said. He added that he’d never once heard Sanders personally endorse those positions, and that’s exactly the problem. “Senator Sanders, you have to denounce them,” he said.

Ford made clear he doesn’t think Sanders actually believes in abolishing prisons or police. “I don’t believe you’re for no police; I don’t believe you’re for no prisons,” he said. “You are better than that.” His demand was simple: Democrats who reject the radical fringe need to say so loudly instead of letting it define the party for everyone else. Ford then pointed to El-Sayed, who is trailing badly in a race Democrats can’t afford to lose. “We’re 15 points behind with the fellow in Michigan, who probably is a nice guy, but he doesn’t deserve to be in the U.S. Senate if he can’t win,” Ford said. He was careful to note he wasn’t shilling for Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), El-Sayed’s Democrat rival.

“We Democrats will deserve to lose if these are the people that we put up to run in the fall,” Ford concluded. Ford is right that nominating unelectable ideologues in the name of purity is a losing strategy dressed up as principle. He’s also right that a party that can’t manage a firm no to abolishing prisons, abolishing borders, and cheering Hamas has a branding problem that no amount of spin will fix. Where I part ways with Ford is with his implication that this is a fringe problem rather than a party-wide one. The far-left positions he described extend well beyond a few primary long shots.

Democrat leadership has tolerated, indulged, or quietly embraced those positions for years, and pretending otherwise lets the party off far too easily. Still, his larger point stands. Democrats have almost everything working in their favor heading into November: a favorable midterm map, an energized base, and a president whose approval numbers give them plenty to campaign against. If they still manage to lose because they couldn’t resist nominating candidates who can’t win a general election, they will have earned every bit of that defeat.

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Home › Forums › Debt Rattle August 1 2026

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  • August 1, 2026 at 9:25 am #246309
    Raúl Ilargi Meijer
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    Jackson Pollock Shooting Star 1947 • US Pulls Troops, Patriot Systems From Northern Iraq Amid Iranian Attacks (ZH) • Trump Announces Deal for Hamas to
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