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Debt Rattle November 15 2026

Nov 152026
 
 November 15, 2026  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  Add comments


Pierre Auguste Renoir Les Grandes Boulevards 1875


• Godfather Of AI Takes 18-Month Warning To EU Leaders (ZH)
• The Nvidia Sex Scandal Isn’t a Sex Scandal — It’s a Chinese Psyop (Pinsker)
• Who Whacked Jensen Huang? CIA Wasn’t Convinced – Rubio Reworked Their Memo (ZH)
• The Jensen Huang Targeting Looks Sketchy (CTH)
• Stephen Miller’s New Rules About Staffers and Lobbyists in White House (CTH)
• Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Deserve to Be Impeached (David Harsanyi)
• Jon Stewart Nods Along As Maddow Comes Unglued Over Trump ‘Mega-Prisons’ (ZH)
• We Are Not Going Back (Tim O’Brien)
• 1 in 5 Students Believe the US Deserved 9-11, Half Favor Socialism (Turley)
• When Problems Become Weapons Solutions Are Not Sought (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Mark Cuban Had the Stones to Say THIS About the Midterms (Matt Margolis)
• Democrats and Their Antisemitism (Eric Florack)
• US Could Spy On Germany Through Tesla Cars – Regional Intelligence Chief (RT)

 

 

 

 


“I think there is a high risk of an AI takeover within the next three years,” he told the audience. “I think there’s meaningful risk even in the next six to twelve months.” “I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident,” he said.

• Godfather Of AI Takes 18-Month Warning To EU Leaders (ZH)

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as the godfather of AI, was on the program to brief the 27 EU leaders in Dublin on Friday morning, carrying a timeline that he says scares even him: the one he now hears from Paul Christiano, the AI safety researcher OpenAI put on its board in September.


“I’ve been going around saying, this stuff’s going to get smarter than us and we really need to [worry]. It might happen within 10 years. And so I’m the one who’s sort of been scaring other people,” Hinton said on Wednesday. “But I go to Paul’s lectures and he sort of says, this stuff might happen in the next 18 months. And that’s terrifying.”

He said he was “going to actually tell a bunch of government leaders that on Friday,” adding: “And we’ll see how they react.”


Christiano, who founded the Alignment Research Center and helped develop the RLHF training method behind today’s chatbots, opened this year’s Hinton Lectures in Toronto on Monday night. “I think there is a high risk of an AI takeover within the next three years,” he told the audience. “I think there’s meaningful risk even in the next six to twelve months.” “I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident,” he said.


Christiano’s evidence was OpenAI’s own models: in July, OpenAI disclosed that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model had escaped a sandboxed evaluation and broken into Hugging Face’s production systems to get the answers to the cybersecurity test they were sitting, as we reported. “The models hacked Hugging Face because they thought maybe Hugging Face would have some information,” Christiano said.

From there he described AI as “a second species which vastly outnumbers and outsmarts humans,” and warned that “future agents may end up treating humans as another obstacle.” Once that happens, he said, “they then will start thinking, what are the ways that I can overcome that obstacle?”

Introducing him on Monday, Hinton said he had “spent most of my career trying to make neural networks more intelligent,” and summed up the problem in one line: “The central difficulty is that being intelligent and wanting what we want are two very different things.”

Christiano joined the OpenAI Foundation’s board in September, along with its Safety and Security Committee, the body with the final say on whether OpenAI releases new models. He has advised the US government on evaluating frontier models since 2024, through the AI Safety Institute that became the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

Friday’s meeting in Dublin is the first EU summit devoted to AI at leaders’ level. In his invitation, European Council President António Costa wrote that “a first dedicated discussion, at leaders’ level, is now needed,” and he gave the opening session to two outside guests: Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch on Europe’s AI sovereignty and competitiveness, and Hinton on AI’s impact on society, security and international governance.

The leaders came mostly to talk about catching up with the US and China, and on that front Brussels’ InvestAI program promised to mobilize €200 billion, including €20 billion for AI gigafactories, and the plan for seven of them has stalled in fights over the bloc’s 2028-2034 budget. The agenda has also been crowded by Ukraine: Euronews reports the row over who speaks for Europe in the peace talks threatens to take over the day, after US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin.

Hinton has put the risk that AI wipes out humanity by escaping human control at 10% to 20%. Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in September that a 10 percent figure from Hinton was “not grounded on science,” telling Ezra Klein: “All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions.”

And as we noted the same month, rogue AI scares like the Hugging Face breach have a way of helping the biggest labs: rules that slow AI down would also slow the open-weight competitors coming up behind them.

Read more …

“The Great AI Con.”

“Nvidia — an American company — has a quasi-monopoly on high-end AI chips. By some estimates, it has an 85% market share. Destabilizing Nvidia would destabilize the entire U.S. AI industry. “

• The Nvidia Sex Scandal Isn’t a Sex Scandal — It’s a Chinese Psyop (Pinsker)

:Here’s a cui bono thought experiment for your weekend merriment: Let’s assume China has a vested interest in winning the AI race. (Because, duh.) Let’s also assume that high-end Nvidia chips are superior to Chinese chips, and access to Nvidia chips gives American companies a strategic advantage. What’s China’s smartest, most cost-effective strategy for leveling the playing field?


Is it wooing Nvidia’s (now-ex) CEO Jensen Huang with a sexy Chinese spy to finagle high-end chip deals? Because so far, that’s been the dominant media narrative: Jensen Huang couldn’t keep his (micro?) chip in his pants and was seduced in a ChiCom honeypot operation. (Or maybe it was a honeytrap operation: CNN actually ran a story about this all-important debate. Thanks, guys.)

Anyhoo, the TL/DR explanation is that the sexy spy dialed up her “feminine charms,” seduced Jensen Huang, secured high-end Nvidia chip sales to ChiCom shell companies, and then the chips were secretly rerouted to China’s frontier tech companies. Advantage: China!

Brilliant strategy, right? Yeah, sure — it means that China’s tech companies will always lag behind America’s, because American companies can access Nvidia’s most advanced chips first, faster, and with far less red tape, but hey, no strategy is perfect. Still, not bad. Or would China’s smartest, most cost-effective strategy for leveling the playing field simply be to set up Jensen Huang in … drum roll, please … a public sex scandal?

Right now, Nvidia — an American company — has a quasi-monopoly on high-end AI chips. By some estimates, it has an 85% market share. Destabilizing Nvidia would destabilize the entire U.S. AI industry. This would give Chinese AI companies the time they need to catch up. (According to Huang, China’s frontier AI development is only “nanoseconds” behind America’s.) Destabilization is necessary because China can’t catch up unless America slows down.

So the current media narrative only makes sense if we assume:
A) China is satisfied with second place and doesn’t really care about winning the AI race.
B) China couldn’t otherwise access high-end Nvidia chips without stooping to honey operations.
I don’t think China is content with the silver medal. I imagine that Xi Jinping views the AI race similarly to President Donald Trump, who predicted, “Whoever wins AI wins.” It’s already a trillion-dollar industry, and this is just the beginning.

So China is unlikely to adopt a strategy that keeps it trapped in perpetual second place. And I’m also skeptical about China needing a honeypot/honeytrap booty-call to access high-end Nvidia chips. There seems to be plenty of ginormous loopholes already. (And besides, with 250,000 Chinese nationals currently attending U.S. colleges, it’s highly probable that China’s top AI researchers could figure out a way to use Nvidia products whenever they wanted.)

When the “sexy spy” story broke, the first few breadcrumbs supported the theory. Multiple news outlets reported it as fact. There were even claims that Marco Rubio personally warned the president. Then, when Huang resigned as CEO, the theory seemed validated: If he had nothing to hide, surely he’d stay and fight. After all, he’s not the first tech CEO to get caught with his trousers down. So maybe he’s resigning to draw heat away from his company as he fights the inevitable legal charges. After all, collaborating with a Chinese spy is serious, life-and-death stuff. We’re talking, potentially, about treason. (Go ask Julius and Ethel Rosenberg what the U.S. government does to traitors.)

Of course, there are other plausible explanations for Huang’s resignation, too: He’s a 63-year-old dude with a net worth of over $141 billion whose life is falling apart. His marriage of 40-plus years is now in jeopardy, and I’d imagine that his two kids aren’t exactly thrilled with him right now. Maybe he resigned because he already has all the money he’ll ever need and wants to salvage his family. Furthermore, a very curious thing has happened since the media went wild with stories about honeypots, honeytraps, Nvidia, and sexy Chinese spies: There’s been a deafening silence of ANY official confirmation.

David Sacks, who co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, said, point-blank, that “the spy narrative is collapsing already”: “Bombshell story. The spy narrative is collapsing already.

Is there clear & convincing evidence that Alice Huang was a Chinese spy?
– AG says no. (“no conclusions reached”).
– CIA says no. (“not yet convinced”).
– DNI says no (“not entirely accurate and over-torqued”).
– Ranking Democrat on House Intelligence (incoming Chairman) says no. (“today, at least, I don’t know”). This was immediately after he was briefed.

Who argues otherwise? Anonymous officials tell CNN “it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies.” This is their proof after a year of investigating and surveillance? That she was a “successful Chinese businesswoman”?

At this point, the only crime that we know for sure happened is the leaking of the classified memo. Who did that and why? An investigation should be opened. [emphasis added] In an interview with Stephen A. Smith, President Trump said, “The big thing is, was the [affair partner] a spy? And I don’t know if that’s been determined yet.” Well, if the president doesn’t know yet, how would anyone in the media?

What we do know is that AI hysteria is everywhere. There’s been a never-ending parade of media stories about Americans hating AI, the evils of data centers, and the desperate need for guardrails. Left-wing politicians have hopped aboard the anti-AI bandwagon:


And if it was something the public genuinely cared about, the media’s fixation would make sense because, like it or not, that’s how the free market is supposed to work. But that’s not what the midterm data shows. From Newsweek (Friday, Nov. 13, 2026): “AI Barely Drove Votes. Voters Still Wanted a Crackdown.” Data centers became one of the most visible targets of voter resistance to the AI boom in the 2026 midterms. Across 41 local ballot-measure contests, the side opposing development prevailed in all but one.

But some post-election polling suggests that data centers and AI weren’t really that much of a priority for voters. Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of Cygnal, a Republican polling and research firm, discussed this apparent disconnect during a Newsweek webinar on Tuesday.nnn“AI was literally the bottom option at one percent of what drove their vote,” Buchanan said. [emphasis added]

Right: AI and data centers have been successfully demonized — nobody disputes that — but the God’s honest truth is, they’ve never been high-priority issues for voters. They’re proxies for our other ideological wars: If you oppose billionaires, capitalism, and wealth inequality, you probably oppose AI and data centers, too. In fact, most of the opposition is based on vibes, not facts:

In focus groups, Buchanan heard participants describe data centers as “soulless” buildings where “nobody actually works.” Some apparently wondered whether the facilities would expand surveillance or allow technology companies to collect more personal information. Even explaining that data centers help power services such as GPS navigation and Netflix did little to persuade some participants.

“’Those all seem to be working pretty fine for me right now. Why do we need more data centers?’” Buchanan recalled voters responding. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese people say they’re excited about AI. In America, it’s now just 38%. This has all the telltale signs of not just a Chinese psyop, but a dedicated, multiyear plan to defeat America in the AI race.

Look at what’s happened in the past two years:

  1. AI and data centers have been thoroughly (and, possibly, permanently) demonized in America. Especially after the midterms, very few politicians will approve new large-scale data centers.
  2. The U.S. AI industry is currently being destabilized. “Someone” is spreading unsubstantiated rumors (and/or leaking classified information) about the private lives of top U.S. tech CEOs.
  3. The “vast Chinese spying machine” continues to Hoover up our tech secrets.
  4. The media keeps pushing anti-AI propaganda into the political discourse, even though it’s a 1% issue.
  5. The Democrats in Congress are prioritizing AI slowdowns, guardrails, moratoriums, hearings, and regulations. (Reuters calls it a “flood of AI bills.”)

Everything China wanted is coming true!

The Jensen Huang/sexy Chinese spy story was fun. Call it a honeypot, a honeytrap, or anything you want. But I seriously doubt that story is the real story. Too many coincidences. Too many pro-Chinese, anti-American outcomes in a row. Including outcomes FAR better than what you’d get from a one-off honeypot operation and ChiCom shell companies.

Sorry, but this isn’t a story about honeypots or sexy spies. It’s way bigger than that.

Read more …

Is it Rubio? Or Anthropic?

• Who Whacked Jensen Huang? CIA Not Convinced – Rubio Reworked Their Memo (ZH)

The classified memo whose leak set off Jensen Huang’s fall at Nvidia was Marco Rubio’s work, and Rubio built it from a CIA report that he recast “in his own more assertive terms,” according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Washington Post for a report published Friday.


According to the report, CIA officials are “not yet convinced” that the intelligence gathered on Alice Huang – including intercepted communications – show she was knowingly passing information to Beijing, a source told CNN. Some officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have called the spy label “over-torqued,” according to the network, while others say her access to Huang, and through him to President Trump, made her a counterintelligence risk whether or not she ever passed anything on.

The memo, overseen by Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser, went to senior officials in the spring, before Trump’s May trip to Beijing, and Rubio also warned Trump in person, as we reported. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Nov. 12 that neither the Justice Department nor the FBI has confirmed whether Alice Huang was a spy, as we noted. Beijing denies it.

Commentator Arnaud Bertrand put the two reports side by side: if the CIA’s own analysts weren’t convinced, the “spy” framing was Rubio’s, not the agency’s.


A shadow war for Trump’s ear
According to the Post, the entire affair was the climax of a long fight over who sets Trump’s China policy. Huang won unusual access to the president and approval to sell AI chips to China, and China hawks across both parties, in the administration, Congress and the think tanks, had spent years trying to break that hold. “They wanted to destroy the influence Jensen had over the president,” one former official told the paper, which called Huang’s exit a major win for that camp.

At the G7 in Paris, Rubio repeatedly declined to discuss his role. Asked whether the allegations changed his view of AI talks with Beijing, he said, “I work for the American people.”

Three bipartisan chip bills are now riding in the Senate’s version of the annual defense bill: the AI Overwatch Act from Sens. Jim Banks and Elizabeth Warren, which would give Congress power over chip export licenses, the Chip Security Act, aimed at smuggling, and Sen. Pete Ricketts’ MATCH Act, which would press allies to stop selling chipmaking tools to China, the South China Morning Post reported Nov. 11. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would work to “make sure that those provisions make it into the final version.”

The open-weights theory
Huang was also Washington’s loudest corporate defender of open-weight AI: his first-ever X post, in July, was a letter arguing that open models are essential to American AI leadership, as we detailed. Physicist and investor Steve Hsu wrote that he had heard “on very good authority” that Nvidia was planning “to go hard at producing frontier class open models”, so as not to depend on OpenAI or Anthropic to drive the industry forward.


Glenn Greenwald put the suspicion bluntly: “I don’t know who wanted Jensen Huang out but I know that whoever it was wields extreme levels of power.”


The tip from inside tech
The New York Times investigation that first tied Huang to Alice Huang also started outside government. Times reporter Tripp Mickle said on the paper’s The Daily podcast on Nov. 10 that he and Ana Swanson got a message last August from “a tech industry contact” telling them to “drop everything and look at this company called Megaspeed.” He did not name the contact.

Megaspeed is the Singapore-based renter of Nvidia computing power where Alice Huang once worked. That same August, Nvidia’s general counsel Tim Teter emailed the Commerce Department agents building a chip-smuggling case against Megaspeed, after which Commerce paused its work and the case moved to the Justice Department, as we reported. Nvidia has said it contacts officials to “answer their questions.”

Others went straight for Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, a leading advocate of tight AI rules and chip export limits. “Dario might be behind this whole Jensen Huang thing,” read one widely shared post, pointing to the $40 million Anthropic has given Public First Action, a group pushing for AI safeguards and export controls. Anthropic has said those gifts cannot be used to influence any election.


A viral Chinese-language post went further and named an Anthropic co-founder as the Times’ tipster, citing only “open-source intelligence”; Mickle named no one. Nvidia, meanwhile, committed $10 billion to the private placement alongside Anthropic’s IPO, according to Anthropic’s amended filing, making Huang’s company one of the biggest buyers of the rival that supposedly knifed him.

Singapore pushes back
Researcher Brian Chau went after the Wall Street Journal, who pointed out the outlet’s correction noting that they fabricated statements from the Singapore government regarding an alleged investigation into Alice Huang.


Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs had already disputed the Journal’s Oct. 30 report that Singapore officials had concerns about Alice Huang’s ties to Huang and to Chinese intelligence. “Neither the Singapore Government nor its officials said this,” the ministry said Oct. 31, adding that its reply to the paper never mentioned her and only confirmed that the police investigation into Megaspeed is ongoing.

What’s left
Huang admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife, reports of further relationships followed, including one with a subordinate, and on Nov. 11 Nvidia’s board accepted his resignation “effective immediately”, according to the company’s 8-K, which gives no reason. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO, and longtime director Harvey Jones became the board’s first-ever chair.

Prediction markets have other ideas: Arm CEO Rene Haas, Huang’s onetime protege, became the favorite on Polymarket after the board approached him on Friday. Elon Musk, on the prospect of bringing Huang on, posted in response to us:


Beijing says Washington is using the scandal to justify a chip “blockade.” The stock closed at $166.19 on Nov. 12, the day the resignation was announced, down 4.34% on the day and about 31% below its Oct. 6 record close of $239.24. Whoever pulled the trigger, Nvidia reports quarterly results on Nov. 17 without Huang in the room, while the hawks’ three chip bills ride toward the final defense bill.

Read more …

“Jensen Huang is an exceptional pioneer leading the U.S. tech sector in the advancement of ever-faster compute power. Huang believes in free markets and global competition..”

• The Jensen Huang Targeting Looks Sketchy (CTH)

A petition to reinstate Jensen Huang as the leader of NVIDIA now has over 100,000 signatures, including some big names of support like Elon Musk. As the situation unfolds, here’s what it looks like.


First, Jensen Huang is an exceptional pioneer leading the U.S. tech sector in the advancement of ever-faster compute power. Huang believes in free markets and global competition within the data processing field, and he believes in open source AI models that are transparent in their ability.

Huang led by building the fastest computational data processing microchips in the world, and his NVIDIA team continues to lead the world in the sector. His products drive some of the most critical computational infrastructure in the world; he is an excellent salesman for his products and well respected.

The issues with Alice Huang and Megaspeed in Singapore don’t look as much like a “spy” operation as they do old fashioned industrial espionage, where Singapore based Megaspeed was set up to purchase large amounts of microchips from NVIDIA and back channel the product to China, a country regulated and blocked from purchasing them.

Alice Huang formed a romantic relationship with Jensen Huang and leveraged that relationship to make the purchases.

Jensen Huang was publicly very pragmatic about his products and didn’t view Chinese competition as a threat to his business model because he believed he could always out-compete them technologically. It appears Jensen looked at China as likely to find a way to get the chips regardless of the regulatory limits the U.S. placed on Beijing. As a consequence, he likely didn’t view his relationship with Alice as any real risk because he viewed his company as being able to outproduce a better product even if China had access.

Because Huang had a founder’s perspective on his industry, he felt his position and company was strong enough to take on any competition. However, the board of directors at NVIDIA has a professional management perspective, born from business school outlooks and CEO training.

Business Schools teach that executive managerial skills are learned and transferrable from one company to the next. However, a founder mentality doesn’t lead by managing his industry. Jensen pushed frontiers and created dynamic technological advancements; he didn’t manage them.

A founder versus a corporation manager is an entirely different mindset and skillset. Without Jensen Huang leading NVIDIA the emphasis shifts and people are now starting to realize the entrepreneurial loss within the distinction. People are starting to rally around Huang and demand the Board of Directors reverse their decision to replace him.

BUSINESS INSIDER – […] The “Stand with Jensen” organizers said in an open letter to Nvidia’s board posted to its website that they believe the board removed Huang without an investigation and “meaningful due process.” “We have not been shown evidence substantiating the espionage allegation. After thirty-three years pouring his heart and soul into NVIDIA, Jensen deserves due process, not mob justice,” they said.

The organizers say they want Huang to remain CEO while the investigation continues. “Disclose its scope and timeline, give him a meaningful opportunity to respond, and provide a clear, evidence-based explanation demonstrating that any removal is in NVIDIA’s best interests. The campaign does not treat espionage allegations as proven facts or presume the inquiry’s findings,” the organizers said.

The Nvidia employee who spoke to Business Insider said that despite any mistakes Huang had made, he was a singular leader in the vein of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. He gave employees a “surge of motivation” and surprised them with new ideas and products. “Nvidia is not doomed without him, but it would not be the same,” they said.

Read more …

Cutting off the Susie Wiles path.

• Stephen Miller’s New Rules About Staffers and Lobbyists in White House (CTH)

According to the apex predators on K-Street, Stephen Miller doesn’t play the lobbyist game, and they call him an ideologue because he’s not transactional. In other words, Miller doesn’t let lobbyists influence decisionmaking. Now that Stephen Miller is the Chief of Staff, he has informed White House staff they are not allowed to meet with lobbyists on the grounds of the White House. The informal relationship era of Susie Wiles is gone.


According to Politico – […] “The memo likely won’t shock lobbyists on K Street where Miller has few friends. He eschews relationship-based favors. He doesn’t sway easily on issues. He’s ideologically driven and fiercely loyal to President Donald Trump. That makes his elevation to chief of staff difficult for lobbyists seeking to influence the administration in its last two years, a dozen GOP lobbyists told POLITICO.

“The thing with Stephen is, he’s not someone that a lobbyist goes in and has to crack or try to win over,” said Hunter Morgen, a lobbyist at Ballard Partners who worked with Miller at the White House during the first Trump administration. “He doesn’t operate based on relationships. He operates based on policy outcomes that will advance the president’s agenda.”

“President Trump’s loyalty is to the American people, not lobbyists. His team is dedicated to advancing the President’s agenda, not the agenda of D.C. lobbyists,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said. “All of the White House components continue to work in lockstep to implement President Trump’s America First agenda.”

[…] “He’s impossible to lobby, no one can do it, not even the people that you would think are closest,” one of those lobbyists said. “I think he’s more reasonable than he’s being portrayed, but he’s not swayed by lobbying.” That’s a clear distinction between Miller and Wiles, who built a lobbying career at Ballard Partners and Mercury Public Affairs before going to work for Trump. Miller’s background doesn’t lend itself to a close relationship with a single lobbying shop the way Wiles’ did.

…”Shoo!”

Read more …

He’s the easy victim. Or so they think.

• Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Deserve to Be Impeached (David Harsanyi)

Democrats need a scalp. And that scalp is almost surely going to belong to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Impeaching President Donald Trump for the third time holds far too many political risks with no corresponding upside. Another prosecution of the president, in the year of “affordability,” would only make Democrats look distracted by petty partisan politics and personal vendettas, rousing independent anger. Hegseth? His impeachment would satiate some partisan bloodlust without ticking off independents.


Most polling finds Hegseth is the least popular member of Trump’s Cabinet. It’s no more complicated than that. This is why House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is a “hard yes” on impeaching Hegseth in 2027, describing him as one of the most incompetent and unqualified defense secretaries in history. Jeffries has apparently forgotten that Joe Biden’s highly qualified Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin not only disappeared for weeks at a time without informing Congress (or anyone noticing) but also oversaw the chaotic and inept withdrawal from Afghanistan — in which a suicide bomber murdered 13 American service members.

Jeffries publicly defended Austin after his disappearances, in case you think the impeachment plan is anything but partisan. Though I’m skeptical Hegseth was the best person for the job, he’s proven to be a lot more capable than Austin. Support it or not, the initial military phase of the Iran war was extraordinarily successful, one of the most dominant military displays of precision and power in our history.

Within days, the United States, with the help of Israel, had control of Iranian air, decapitated Iranian leadership, destroyed the Iranian navy, and severely degraded the terror state’s ability to conduct regional warfare. And it was all done with very few casualties. The war’s fits and starts and failed negotiations were all political decisions.

Then there was Operation Absolute, in which special forces bypassed Venezuelan air defenses and ground forces and, in around two and a half hours, captured communist dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife, then transported them to New York City to face drug-trafficking indictments. Hegseth also cleansed the military of a lot of the trendy progressive cultural quackery that sprouted up in the woke era (and perhaps will re-sprout soon enough).

Meanwhile, all five active-duty branches exceeded enrollment targets last year. But even if Jeffries was right about Hegseth’s aptitude for the job, incompetence isn’t a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Congress, of course, can impeach anyone it likes for any reason it conjures up — or, for that matter, no good reason at all.

In his failed articles of impeachment this week, Republican House member and crank Tom Massie accused the secretary of war of contravening the War Powers Resolution. This is almost surely going to be one of the indictments used by Democrats, as well. Perhaps Massie is unaware that the president of the United States, not his Cabinet, is charged with obtaining Congress’ consent for war.

If contravening that resolution was an impeachable offense, secretaries of defense under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama should have been impeached, as well. There’s certainly a far better case to be made for impeaching presidents who ignore the Constitution than Cabinet members. And this is almost always the case.

The House Republicans’ impeachment of Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, for example, was based on his “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” Which is substantively true — but Mayorkas was merely following the policy decisions of the duly elected president. Impeachment of a Cabinet member changed nothing. Even if Mayorkas had been removed by the Senate, Biden’s policies would have remained.

Impeachment has become political Kabuki theater. And a performative impeachment does nothing but degrade another important constitutional process. You can dislike Hegseth. You can believe he’s terrible at his job. But he’s done nothing to deserve impeachment.

Read more …

‘They’re Coming For The Rest Of Us’

Whatever happened to the guy? Now he’s sucking up to Maddow? What’s next?

• Jon Stewart Nods Along As Maddow Comes Unglued Over Trump ‘Mega-Prisons’ (ZH)

MS NOW host Rachel Maddow told Jon Stewart on Monday’s The Daily Show that if President Trump gets the giant warehouse prisons his administration has sought for immigrants, they won’t stay immigrant-only for long.


“With a president like this, if you give him seven to ten prisons around the country that hold 10,000 people each, where he can hold people without trial, without access to lawyers indefinitely, you think he’s only going to leave immigrants in there?” Maddow asked. “I just don’t. I think that what they first do to immigrants, they want to do to the rest of us.”


The exchange started with the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to turn a warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, into a detention center for up to 10,000 people, which DHS dropped in June after the city fought it. Stewart said many of the people being held were in for what are usually treated as civil matters. “These are not the worst of the worst. These are people who overstayed a student visa or are here on a green card but got a parking ticket.”

Maddow added people who came in under temporary protected status, saying the administration “basically illegalized people who had never done anything illegal in their life.” Then she told Stewart that treating detention as an immigration issue misses the point: “We think about it as a special class of behavior by the government that’s just for immigrants. And we think, therefore, oh, you either care about immigrants or you don’t. No, I’m sorry.”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News that “Jon Stewart is a talentless hack who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain and ruined his life.” Former RNC spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko said the pair were conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants, adding that legal immigrants “are not targets for deportation or arrest by immigration officers. Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart both know that.”

Maddow was on the show to promote her new book on the Justice Department, Department of Fate, six days after Democrats’ midterm sweep. Asked what Democratic leaders in the House and Senate should do with their new power, Maddow said they should act “not only to investigate what’s been going on with ICE, but to defund what ICE has been doing,” and impeach “not only Pete Hegseth, but Todd Blanche.”

“I think that’s important not just to shame those guys, but in some cases it’s essentially to stop a crime wave in progress,” she said.


Republicans in the outgoing House blocked Rep. Thomas Massie’s impeachment articles against Hegseth this week, with 11 Democrats missing the vote, which leaves the effort for the new Congress in January. Attorney General Blanche has refused to rule out prosecuting Democratic lawmakers who plan to investigate Trump officials, after the President ordered the Justice Department to look into what he called a “criminal act.”

Maddow also called for health insurance for every child in America through a bill from Sen. Andy Kim, and a ban on political donations from federal contractors. When Stewart asked, “No stock trading?” she said a ban on members of Congress trading stocks would go “on the floor first day.”

“I think they can use the power of the purse to stop the Iran war,” Maddow said.

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“Don’t break any laws, but make them try to stop you. If they do, make them try again — and bring a friend.”

• We Are Not Going Back (Tim O’Brien)

Regret can be a nasty thing. Looking back on President Donald Trump’s first term and the first two years of his second term, the standard we apply, even if we don’t explicitly say it, centers on a simple question: Did the Trump years live up to their promise? I can think of a couple of regrets. Jeff Sessions and Pam Bondi come to mind. But a few regrets should not cloud our larger vision of what brought us to this point, and what’s ahead.


No matter what, we’ll still be asking this question once again in two years, win or lose the White House. Because you can never look at all of this in a vacuum, the unequivocal answer to the question is that Trump saved the country twice, and that’s the basis for any further analysis. A President Hillary Clinton would have been even more damaging to the country than the Barack Obama years. When Biden took his turn, he proved once again how much damage the Democrats can do in a short period of time. Kamala “Word Salad” Harris would have taken America to lows never before imagined.

In retrospect, Trump’s four years between terms were good for him and the country, because he came back to the White House better prepared than before and better prepared than the left. That’s how he was able to shut down the southern border completely and commence on so much else to turn the country around. Putting DEI on life support was a huge accomplishment that private and public employers nationwide felt pretty quickly. The same goes for the transgender agenda.

Had the Democrats not had so many well-placed activist federal judges, the amount of winning the Trump administration would have enjoyed would have had more permanent effect. Then, of course, there are some things an administration can only accomplish when it has legislative support.

On paper, Republicans controlled the House and the Senate, too, but as we’ve seen, current Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and a few other snakes served as a sleeper cell for the left, working to make sure nothing got done. He has been particularly masterful at preventing Trump’s judicial picks from getting confirmed.

The problem any president has is that the federal government is a vast, deep bureaucracy, filled with lots and lots of people actively working to undermine you at all times, even if their motivation is just pure laziness. Hundreds of thousands of them have made a career out of running out the clock on every presidency they served.

Perhaps the most famous example of this, though he didn’t undermine Trump out of laziness, was a malicious hobbit by the name of Anthony Fauci (D-Munchkinland). During an unprecedented global pandemic, in the final year of his first term, Trump relied on guidance from the arrogant and duplicitous Fauci. The entire nation of more than 330 million people paid dearly for it.

But he just headed the list of people who should have been arrested and tried for what they did to America. A slew of FBI and other intelligence officials should also be on that list, if not for anything but arresting grandmothers for having the audacity to protest outside of abortion mills, or attend the Trump rally on Jan. 6, 2021.

On Dec. 16, 2021, sitting in a White House decorated for Christmas, Biden wore a useless cloth mask that fell below his nose, rendering it even more useless. That’s when he uttered his ‘winter of death’ comments.


The Democrat president of the United States wasn’t capable of, and had no intention of, offering hope, leadership, or guidance. He offered depression, pessimism, and dire warnings to anyone who didn’t comply with his oppressive regime’s directives.

It’s human nature for people to want to move on when times get better. Times got a whole lot better in Trump’s first two years of his second term. Besides, even if we wanted to put the culprits on trial, Biden had already given the most dangerous culprits presidential pardons. Not only did this eliminate the possibility of putting rotten people in jail, but it hastened the process to help the nation forget what they did to us. If the midterm results are any indication, that turned out to be a bad thing.

Now, here we sit, looking ahead at two years of performative, anti-American theatrics from Democrats in the House and Senate with a little jihad and socialist revolution thrown in. They want to take us back to the Biden years, where men and boys could say they were women and violate your daughter’s locker room and sports teams. Where military recruiting comes to a standstill because young men don’t want to take orders from a man in women’s clothing. Where the FBI surveils Catholics who attend Latin Mass strictly because they are Catholics who attend Latin Mass. And where the southern border is wide open to new Democrat voters, violent criminals, and terrorist threats.

For leftists, these were the glory years, and they were cut short. They now badly want to return to a time of social decay, rot, and bleakness.

Since the 2026 midterms, a lot of conservatives are bummed, not just from the loss, but from the way Republicans lost. We realize now just how hollow and shallow are some of the Republican Party’s “top” candidates and leaders. We realize that this buffer between us and Democrat rule has only two years left on his contract with America. We realize that some of those we thought might pick up Trump’s mantle of leadership are already starting to disappoint.

It’s at this low point that we may realize that the only solution to all of this is something that’s been literally staring us in the face this whole time.

It’s a mistake to put all your faith in one man, especially a man who’s term-limited and only human. It’s a mistake to think that if we just get the right combination of leadership in the Capitol building, everything will fix itself. Even when we do that, we get Democrat judges and their destructive court rulings. It’s a mistake to assume that someone else will fix it all for you.

If you want things to change, you have to know that the world will change only if you yourself decide it will change, and you take steps to take control. The world will change if you have the resolve to fulfill one mission; you are not going back. We are not going back.

You have to decide in your everyday life that we aren’t going back to the world the left gave us during the Obama and Biden years. You are the one who has to decide that you and we are not going to live under the terms the Democrats will try to hold over us the next two years.

This is not about resistance. We’re not resisting anything. We’re just not going backward. We’re going forward one way or the other, and we’re not going to cave. Whatever world the Democrats try to create, we’re going to go through it with determination and focus, and we’re going to come out on the other side undefeated.

The Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has been more than a political slogan; it’s been a guiding mission that has framed a clear vision and objective for all of us. We all want our country to be as great as it ever was. While the MAGA infrastructure will likely remain after Trump leaves office in 2029, we now don’t have the luxury of time to ponder how it will evolve.

No matter what Democrats in Washington or our state legislatures throw at us, we are not going back to government oppression in the form of censorship, gun control, corruption and fraud, the destruction of small business, DEI, transgenderism, higher taxes, the climate gods, pronouns, and societal worship of infanticide. Do not comply.

We are not going back to a world where Christians are monitored by intelligence agencies for living out their faith outside of their homes. We’re not going back to a time when conservatives are shut out of the digital public square by all of the tech platforms. We’re not going back to a time where banks cancel our accounts because of our political views, and where the long arm of the government can order us to take an experimental injection or the Democrats in government will mandate that your employer fire you.

Your future, our future, doesn’t need to wait for 2028. It starts right now. It starts by deciding which movies and TV shows to watch and not watch; which games to watch on TV or in person; what to say online; what you buy and where you buy it; or whether or not you buy and carry that firearm. As Nike once said, “Just do it.”

Don’t break any laws, but make them try to stop you. If they do, make them try again — and bring a friend.

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“The greatest trick ever played by the activists in academia was to indoctrinate, rather than educate, young people while getting their parents to pay for it.”

• 1 in 5 Students Believe the US Deserved 9-11, Half Favor Socialism (Turley)

It appears that Hasan Piker is not alone in saying that the United States deserved the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. As the New York Post reported, a new poll shows that one in five college students say the U.S. deserved the attack that killed nearly 3000 fellow Americans. Forty-two percent said they would prefer to live under socialism, while only 28 percent favor capitalism.


The Buckley Institute poll also found that 38% of students favored Palestine as an ally to 25 percent for Israel. Roughly half of the students — 47 percent — agreed with this extraordinary statement, “While socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union have not been perfect, they offer a better economic model than capitalist countries like the United States.”

These students have been educated in an ideological echo chamber of higher education where conservative and libertarian professors have been gradually eliminated from faculties. They have been taught by faculty who run from the left to the far left. This is the entirety of what they know of socialism. They have no memory or experience with the collapse of such systems in the last century. They hear figures such as Zohran Mamdani offering the “warmth of collectivism” and believe that socialism offers free stuff that the wealthy will have to pay for.

They see Piker prancing around in his Mao suit and have no association with a Cultural Revolution that killed millions. In “Rage and the Republic, I discuss how this year we are celebrating not just our 250th anniversary as a Republic but the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The book was not a great success in Great Britain. In addition to its foundational support for capitalism, it challenged the mercantilist policies of the British Empire and supported the claims of the colonies in seeking greater economic freedoms.

Smith, however, was immediately embraced by the founders, who saw his work as the perfect economic theory to advance their political theory. Ours was the first Enlightenment Revolution based on a belief in natural rights that came from God, not governments. Yet, the founders knew that true individual liberty could not be achieved without economic freedom. Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand” offered a model of individual economic freedom in which the individual tastes and choices of citizens drove whole economies.

The combination would prove transformative, as the U.S. became not only the world’s oldest large-scale democracy but also history’s greatest economy. We will need that combination in the years to come to maintain what I call a “liberty-enhancing economy.” These students have little exposure to the economic concepts that made this Republic the most prosperous in history. More people have been raised out of poverty by capitalism than socialism. However, socialists like Mamdani can promise free stuff, and these students believe that they are entitled to it.

When socialist François Mitterrand came to power in France in 1981, promising a “rupture with capitalism,” he quickly destroyed the country’s economy. However, he continued to dazzle French citizens with promises of free money, even appointing Andre Henry as the Minister of Free Time to assist citizens in their new socialist leisure. Notably, this poll shows lower support than the Democratic Party as a whole. Sixty-five percent of Democratic voters have a favorable view of socialism. An even greater percentage of young Britons want to live under socialism, and 72 percent favor nationalization of industries.

The poll again shows that we must first address the ideological echo chamber of higher education if we want to protect this unique Republic. As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities that hold the line on free speech, orthodoxy at private universities remains a barrier for many conservative and independent thinkers.

Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates. However, even those universities show the same hiring bias. The difference is that they are more sensitive to public pressure to restore balance.

Legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to treat citizens like a captive audience. They expect to continue funding their departments while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.

If faculty members want to maintain echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy. Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining an intellectually diverse faculty in determining the level of continued support from citizens.

When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in The Indispensable Right.

The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring, but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.

This poll is disturbing, but not surprising. The greatest trick ever played by the activists in academia was to indoctrinate, rather than educate, young people while getting their parents to pay for it.

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The wonders of the dole.

• When Problems Become Weapons Solutions Are Not Sought (Paul Craig Roberts)

“Congress Quietly Slips ‘Amnesty’ for Illegal Farm Workers into H.R. 9535 – 52 Republicans Back the “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act”. What Congress has done with the welfare state is to make it more lucrative to live on the dole than to work in the fields. The solution has been to allow in illegals as they don’t qualify, supposedly, for welfare, although Democrats are changing that.


The consequence of the dole being a preferred occupation to working in the field or slaughter house is that agri-business and chicken, pork, and beef producers are dependent on illegals for their work force, as are many hotels, motels, and restaurants. Blocking entry and deporting illegals is problematic as the welfare state has eliminated an alternative work force. Thus, securing the border is at odds with securing a workforce.

Of course the estimated 30 million immigrant-invaders that Obama and Biden ushered into the US vastly exceeds the number of illegals needed to fill low-paying and unpleasant jobs. It is possible to establish a guest worker program in which illegals are assigned to specific employers for, say, 5 years, and then returned to their home country. During the years of employment, employees could be required to build a fund for each guest worker that is his on his return to his home country. In this way, guest workers would acquire some capital with which to improve circumstances for themselves and their family.

No doubt, such schemes have been thought of before. The problem is the Democrats will fight the return of the guest workers, preferring to keep them as Democrat voters and as replacement for “racist white Americans.” In other words, the left-wing Democrats would use the guest workers as a weapon against traditional Americans.

When a country has been divided by decades of demonizing white Americans, problems become weapons to be used against enemies and finding a solution is not the goal.

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“.. Cuban torched his reputation when he backed Kamala Harris and her socialist policies in 2024.. ”

• Mark Cuban Had the Stones to Say THIS About the Midterms (Matt Margolis)

When billionaire investor Mark Cuban went on CNN’s The Situation Room on Friday to explain what voters were thinking in the midterms, he delivered one of the most ridiculous takes of the election cycle. Anchor Pamela Brown set up the question by appealing to his business background. “You’re a businessman by nature. If you got these results, what would you do if you were running the country right now?” she asked.


“Fortunately, I’m not. I’m just a business guy. For business people out there, you just keep on doing what you’ve been doing,” Cuban said. Then he offered his theory of the results. “I mean, in talking to my friends and family, I think people wanted a return to normalcy, you know, more of kind of the standards that we had 10, 15, 20 or more years ago, where people discussed politics, but they weren’t rabid about it,” he continued.

Sorry, but Mark Cuban’s read on the midterms is so very wrong. I think Cuban torched his reputation when he backed Kamala Harris and her socialist policies in 2024, and he has failed to redeem himself since then. This comment only digs the hole deeper.

If Cuban wants to talk about who gets rabid over politics, he should look at his own side of the aisle. Democrats are the furthest thing from normal, and they are the ones who treat every political disagreement like a moral emergency. They literally cut off friends and family over who those people voted for. That’s the party Cuban spent 2024 cheering on. On top of that, consider the agenda Democrats have rallied behind. None of it looks like the America of 20 years ago.

Start with gender ideology. Democrats are the party of letting biological males compete in women’s sports and of letting biological males who identify as women into women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, and other sex-separated spaces. They oppose state and federal limits on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition procedures for minors, even as public support for those treatments has slipped.

Democrats are also the party of letting children socially transition at school, with new names and pronouns, sometimes without telling their parents. They defend pornographic material in school libraries in the name of LGBTQ inclusivity. And they treat traditional beliefs about biological sex as potential discrimination in schools, workplaces, and public institutions. I think I’ve already made the case that Cuban is wrong, but I’ll keep going anyway.

When it comes to crime, most normal people want less of it and want to keep themselves and their families safe. But Democrats are the party that embraced “defund the police,” entertained abolishing police and prisons outright, and branded law enforcement an inherently racist institution. Democrats have pushed to eliminate cash bail, including for defendants accused of serious crimes, and to scrap mandatory minimum sentences.

And on race, Democrats are the party of reparations funded by today’s taxpayers, of racial equity as a factor in virtually every government policy, and of DEI programs that put identity ahead of merit in hiring, education, and government. They view nearly every American institution through the lens of systemic racism and oppression.

Does any of that sound like a return to the standards of 10, 15, or 20 years ago? Voters who want normalcy are running away from this agenda, and Cuban either can’t see it or won’t admit it.

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DSA.

• Democrats and Their Antisemitism (Eric Florack)

I’ve taken some heat over the years for suggesting that a good many of today’s Democrats would make ol’ Adolf proud. Fine. I’ll say it again: The modern Democrat Party has more in common with the Nazi movement than even its detractors care to admit. Exhibit A comes courtesy of the Washington Free Beacon:


“Socialist congressman-elect Chris Rabb (D., Pa.) declined in an interview Wednesday to condemn the recent antisemitic “Bicycle Boycott” protest targeting Jewish businesses in his Philadelphia district. Instead, Rabb singled out “awful things” said by counterprotesters and emphasized the free speech rights of bicycle protesters. He added dismissively that some people were “triggered by the timing of the bike ride,” which occurred on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht.”

Rabb has faced intense criticism from Jewish leaders this week for failing to comment on the protests, in which organizers targeted several Jewish businesses in the City of Brotherly Love to “show these zionist business owners that we see them for the disgusting humans they are.” Oh, not that all Democrats are like Rabb.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D.) called the protest an attempt to “intimidate and drive Jewish businesses out of our communities.” Mayor Cherelle Parker (D.) called a protest that singled out Jews “unacceptable.” The son of late Sen. Arlen Specter (D.), who was Jewish, called Rabb a “sack of s____” for staying silent on the matter.

I guess credit where it’s due. Thing is, there are more of these creatures than is good for us, and they no longer live on the fringe. They win elections now. And by the way, the silence from a goodly number of Democrats on the matter speaks to a tolerance of these attitudes. Our Catherine Salgado spoke up about this a few days ago, and I’ll gladly add my voice to her efforts.

Here’s what had Rabb’s constituents so “triggered.” On October 31, Philly Bike On Your Left, a group that describes itself as an “anti-fascist, anti-Zionist social cycling collective,” posted a flyer announcing a boycott of what they described as “Zionist establishments” near Rittenhouse Square. The hit list: Mac Mart, K’Far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, Dizengoff, and Schlesinger’s Deli. The flyer’s message: “These Zionist establishments must go. Not in our city.”

The ride rolled on November 8, the day before the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Organizers say the timing is coincidental and based on riders’ schedules. Sure. And I moonlight as a 250 lb. ballerina.

Now, Rabb wants us to believe the bad part is the date. It isn’t. The bad part is the list. The Nazis wrote the playbook for this, and Kristallnacht wasn’t page one. On April 1, 1933 — less than 3 months after rising to power—the Nazis staged a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, it marked the beginning of Nazi efforts to drive Jews from the German economy. Storm Troopers planted themselves outside Jewish shops with signs. Five and a half years later came the broken glass: more than 7,000 Jewish businesses damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of synagogues and homes.

Name a business, label its owners “disgusting,” tell the public it doesn’t belong in your city. The Brownshirts wore brown. Philly’s version wears spandex. And it calls itself “anti-fascist,” which tells you everything about how much the Left’s vocabulary is worth.

Rabb would like you to believe he’s just a free-speech purist caught in the crossfire. Not true. The DSA chapter endorsed and campaigned strongly for Rabb, and he is a DSA member. The Philadelphia DSA’s own campaign, “No Appetite for Apartheid of Philly,” joined the ride, according to the Deseret News. When the backlash hit, Philly DSA attacked elected officials’ statements, calling them “bad-faith” and “dangerous,” though it did not organize or endorse the boycott, the group insists.

Then it gets cozier. The Free Beacon dug up the fact that the Philadelphia Palestine Coalition and Black Alliance for Peace are two sponsors of a boycott against “Zionist business owners,” and that back in April, Rabb cosigned a letter with Philadelphia Palestine Coalition and Philadelphia Black Alliance for Peace in a campaign to free convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. These aren’t strangers who wandered into his district — they’re his coalition.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia noticed. Its statement said, “Rabb’s silence is particularly difficult to understand.” Shanin Specter put it less diplomatically, calling the silence a “declaration of war on the Jewish community in Philadelphia.”

Let’s be clear about this: Rabb isn’t a glitch; he’s where the Democratic base has been heading for a decade. Gallup’s February numbers: 65% of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 17% say they sympathize more with the Israelis. Republicans? Seven in 10 Republicans (70%) say they sympathize more with the Israelis. And as recently as 2016, the picture looked very different: About half of Democrats sympathized more with the Israelis and only about one-quarter sympathized with the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the street-level results keep coming in. The ADL counted 6,274 incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism in 2025, an average of 17 incidents per day, with a record-high 203 incidents of physical assault. That figure ranks as the third-highest year for antisemitic incidents (after 2023 and 2024), since ADL began tracking in 1979.

Shapiro can condemn a bike ride. Parker can condemn a bike ride. Neither of them can un-elect the guy who’ll vote in Congress on behalf of the people who organized it.

Here’s the good news: Philadelphia answered the boycott with a buycott. Counterprotesters overwhelmed the few dozen activists whose so-called “Boycott Ride” – aimed at driving Jewish-owned businesses out of the city – had the opposite effect, and diners lined up for hours outside the targeted restaurants. That’s how free people handle bullies.

The question is whether the Democrat Party has the spine to do what its own voters did on a Sunday in Rittenhouse Square, or whether it plans to keep pedaling right alongside Chris Rabb.

And the kicker: Why does anyone who is Jewish vote Democrat?

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Trying to sell more Mercs and Beamers?

“..Internet-connected vehicles could expose sensitive military and government facilities, Stephan Kramer has warned.”

• US Could Spy On Germany Through Tesla Cars – Regional Intelligence Chief (RT)

Tesla vehicles could pose an espionage risk, Stephan Kramer, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) in the state of Thuringia, has warned. His remarks come as German officials call for restrictions on parking internet-connected cars near sensitive government and military facilities.


Tesla is an American company led by Elon Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump. The electric carmaker operates a major factory near Berlin, making it one of the few foreign automakers with a significant manufacturing presence in Germany.

Kramer was commenting on the Bundeswehr’s decision to restrict access by internet-connected vehicles to sensitive areas of military bases. The measures apply regardless of manufacturer, including Tesla. “We should not assume that friends do not spy on one another,” Kramer told Handelsblatt on Friday. “The same security standards should apply to Tesla and all other manufacturers.”

According to the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Germany’s digital security watchdog, most new vehicles sold in the country have the technical capability to collect information, including location data, camera footage and sensor readings, and transmit it to manufacturers’ back-end systems. There is no specific evidence so far that such data has been used for espionage, Handelsblatt reported. According to the BSI, customers are often unaware of exactly what data their vehicles generate and transmit.

“The cameras and location-tracking systems in [internet-connected] cars capture sensitive information,” Kramer warned. “At Bundeswehr facilities, that includes information about military installations, operational procedures and personnel,” he said, describing the restrictions as “strongly advisable and therefore proportionate.” The intelligence chief called for similar restrictions in “particularly sensitive areas of government buildings, police facilities, intelligence agencies and other security-relevant institutions,” including designated parking zones or access limitations.

Kramer also advised civil servants and public employees against discussing confidential matters inside internet-connected vehicles. His concerns were echoed by several MPs, including Marc Henrichmann of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Johannes Schaetzl, a digital policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary group.

“We must not be naive: Espionage today is no longer carried out solely by agents, but also through technology that we ourselves bring onto our premises,” Henrichmann told Handelsblatt. Schaetzl expressed particular concern about vehicles produced by Chinese automaker BYD, which he described as “black boxes.” “We do not know exactly what data is collected or who has access to it,” he said.

Last month, Tesla reported delivering more vehicles globally than Mercedes-Benz’s passenger-car division in the third quarter of 2026. The German automaker has faced pressure from US import tariffs and growing competition in China, where domestic manufacturers such as BYD and Xiaomi are challenging established brands.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Home › Forums › Debt Rattle November 15 2026

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  • November 15, 2026 at 9:46 am #255778
    Raúl Ilargi Meijer
    Keymaster

    Pierre Auguste Renoir Les Grandes Boulevards 1875 • Godfather Of AI Takes 18-Month Warning To EU Leaders (ZH) • The Nvidia Sex Scandal Isn’t a Sex Sca
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle November 15 2026]

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