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Debt Rattle August 15 2026

Aug 152026
 
 August 15, 2026  Posted by at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  27 Responses »


Giotto Legend of St Francis, Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo c.1297-1299


• Bessent: US Readies Economic Isolation of Iran “Like Never Seen Before” (ZH)
• The Mohammunist Manifesto—Trojan-Horsing Society’s Institutions (Milli Sands)
• ‘Woke 2.0’ Will Be More Radical, More Antisemitic, Less Tolerant (Rick Moran)
• Things Get Spicy (James Howard Kunstler)
• Hakeem Jeffries Will Take a Baseball Bat to the Supreme Court (Turley)
• The Great Decline Of Britain (Modernity News)
• Trade Court Rules U.S. President Can Set De Minimis Rules/Rates (CTH)
• Lavrov: Why Ukraine Conflict Cannot Be Halted Along Contact Line (TASS)
• Anthony Fauci and the Collapse of Scientific Authority (Jason Locasale)
• Fauci’s COVID-19 Critics Are Looking Vindicated (Victor Davis Hanson)

 


 

https://twitter.com/eagameover/status/2087973109634637940?s=20

 


 


Squeeze.

Nobody did anything for 47 years. Now you can’t solve it in one afternoon.

• Bessent: US Readies Economic Isolation of Iran “Like Never Seen Before” (ZH)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Newsmax Thursday night that the Trump administration will announce unprecedented economic measures against Iran next week, signaling that a sharp escalation in economic warfare is just ahead as negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz remain stalled. The warning comes as Tehran-linked Houthi rebel forces resume attacks on Saudi Aramco energy infrastructure, raising concerns that the conflict is spreading geographically and pushing Brent crude futures higher.


Bessent told Rob Schmitt of Newsmax: “And, you know, at the president’s orders, we have raised the level even again, and watch this space for more announcements coming next week because we are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country. And I think the reason we are succeeding is because it is a one-two punch. People say, well, you know, Cuba lasted a long time. Venezuela lasted a long time. Venezuela immediately crumbled when we put the blockade on. So, it will be a combination of economic isolation like the world has never seen before and the continued blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that will keep anything from going in or out of the Iranian ports.”

By the midpoint of this week, we explained that, with US-Iran talks stalled, President Trump was more than likely to “opt for economic siege warfare, as the US military campaign is on hold.” Trump recently told Axios that he is “low-keying it” with Iran. “We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” he said.

Washington has imposed roughly 2,200 sanctions-related designations on Tehran since 2018, according to Jeremy Paner, a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed who tracks Iran’s energy industry. The scale of the existing sanctions architecture underscores the challenge facing the Trump administration as it seeks to exert additional leverage on Tehran. “If 47 years of sanctions haven’t broken Tehran’s will, more of the same is unlikely to produce any changes,” according to a Bloomberg Economics report led by Jennifer Welch. She noted that the most likely scenario is that Trump stays on the same path as before, maintaining sanctions and the blockade.

The Trump administration’s accelerated pivot toward economic warfare, rather than renewed strikes on Iran’s missile and drone capabilities along the Hormuz chokepoint or an operation against Kharg Island, likely reflects growing concern over the “perfect storm” developing in refined-products markets. With the global diesel crisis intensifying and crack spreads approaching $100 level, further strikes risk triggering a severe supply shock to the fuel that powers global industries. It would also be a political disaster if gasoline and diesel prices at US pumps soared even higher with just 81 days left until the midterm elections.

Read more …

“When they are weak, communists and Muslims create seemingly durable pluralist partnerships that they then ruthlessly destroy once they achieve power.”

• The Mohammunist Manifesto—Trojan-Horsing Society’s Institutions (Milli Sands)

In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, inequality before the law, a binary world, monopoly rule by the elites, controlling the totality of society, and transitional-phase slaughter. Here we explore the game plan to infiltrate society and co-opt its machinery.


Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both construct power through organizational methods designed for times when they are still too weak to take over a society. These organizations and alliances present the illusion of pluralism and non-partisanship, building parallel institutions, cadre formation, ideological training, cells, and tactical alliances while the movement lacks the strength to dispense with partners or legal cover.

These methods are not secondary to the ideologies’ goals of acquiring total power. Instead, they are the practical means by which a totalizing doctrine accumulates force independent of the surrounding order’s permission structure.

The founding Islamic case is Medina. Before Muhammad held territory, he built the community through da’wa—invitation and conversion—and by pairing each Meccan emigrant with a Medinan host in bonds of brotherhood that cut across existing tribal lines. The mosque was the organizing center: worship, political assembly, arbitration, and coordination binding recruits to the community before it controlled anyone. In 622, he arrived as an invited arbiter with a small band of refugees, no army, and no economic base.

The Constitution of Medina, preserved in Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, organized the believers as a single community (umma wahida) apart from other people and included Medina’s three Jewish tribes—Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza—under collective obligations for blood-money, ransom, mutual defense, and referral of disputes to God and Muhammad, while stating that the Jews have their religion and the Muslims have theirs. The document created a bounded political body whose internal norms took priority.

Once strength arrived, the provisional Jewish partners were discarded, though not uniformly. In 624, the poet Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf of Banu Nadir, who had incited against Muhammad in verse, was assassinated on his order. The Banu Qaynuqa were expelled that same year, and the Banu Nadir followed in 625. Then, after the Battle of the Trench in 627, the Banu Qurayza were executed according to the traditional account.

Abdullah ibn Ubayy, the Khazraj chief who led Medina’s hypocrites and whose defection of three hundred men cost Muslim lives at Uhud, posed a far graver threat, yet Muhammad declined to kill him, citing the risk of alienating the whole Khazraj tribe. Ibn Ubayy died naturally in 631.

The sources report these outcomes without stating a general rule behind them, but the pattern across the four cases is nonetheless consistent with an instrumental calculation rather than a doctrinal one. That is, eliminate an isolated target and use restraint when the political cost is too high. Within five years, every organized power center in Medina that had not converted was gone.

Read more …

Can she refuse to be the head of the snake?

• ‘Woke 2.0’ Will Be More Radical, More Antisemitic, Less Tolerant (Rick Moran)

Several PJ Media writers have commented on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to put a new suit of clothes on “woke” in order to hide the stench of hate, intolerance, hysteria, and lunacy associated with it. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,'” said Ocasio-Cortez with a laugh during an interview with ABC News host Jonathan Karl recently.


All the lives ruined by idiotic and even false charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other avenues used by the left to attack people they disagreed with can never be forgotten. People lost their jobs, their families, and their future employment prospects for being a little too familiar with a female co-worker. (I’m not dismissing rape, assault, or sexual harassment in any way, shape, or form, so don’t even go there.) The fact that almost all of these “targets” were on the right only proves this was a politically motivated movement meant to shut people up and close off debate on critical national issues.David Harsanyi remembers.

“The revolution will be sanitized,” he writes in an op-ed published in the New York Sun. “Yet as I remember it, ‘Woke One’ was a high-tech progressive jihad that relied on intimidation, public shaming, and economic ruin to dictate what words and ideas were permissible in the public square.” Harsanyi recognizes that most thinking adults change “their views as they learn and grow.” I am a different person at age 72 than I was at 25 in 1979. What has changed in me is my storehouse of knowledge, which has expanded exponentially. I am far more informed and cognizant of the issues today than I was back then.Some of my positions have been altered; most have not. Harsanyi believes that if a politician changes their mind about an issue, we are owed an explanation.

Harsanyi: “Only days after Democrats took a beating in the 2024 election, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez removed “she/her” pronouns from her social media accounts, which doesn’t exactly scream of authenticity. So, is using your “preferred pronouns” crazy? Is adopting pronouns that don’t match your “gender assigned at birth” crazy? Is using nonbinary pronouns crazy? Is performing “gender-affirming care,” needless life-altering surgery on confused children that destroys their development, crazy? Is it crazy to let biological males play in girls’ sports? What part was crazy?”:

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was a gung-ho supporter of virtually every ideological element of the past 10 years. “Woke,” she once argued, was nothing more than a term pundits used as a “derogatory euphemism” for “civil rights” and progressive notions of “justice.” Does Ms. Ocasio-Cortez now oppose DEI initiatives and racial quotas? Does she support Black Lives Matter, a movement that sparked the most expensive and prolonged domestic destruction in American history, including looting, rioting, arson, and homicide? BLM is an objectively racist movement that judges people on color rather than achievement. Is that crazy?


So many questions, so few answers forthcoming. I feel fairly confident that major media won’t be asking any of those questions, accepting her “woke was crazy” explanation and taking it at face value, and will do everything in their power to elect this radical nitwit the next president of the United States. Does she denounce the “Green New Deal” that she toured the country trying to sell? Following the introduction of the Green New Deal resolution in February 2019, AOC headlined and participated in multi-city tours to build public and political support for the proposal.

Organized by the youth-led climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, this nationwide campaign featured over 250 town halls and events across the country. AOC served as one of the primary headline speakers at major stops alongside allies like Sen. Ed Markey and Sen. Bernie Sanders. In the years following, she continued to headline national tours, town halls, and advocacy pushes organized by progressive and environmental networks (such as the Green New Deal Network) to promote federal climate investment, job creation, and environmental justice policies. What was the “Green New Deal?” ”

Let’s not forget, Ocasio-Cortez hatched a “social justice” environmental policy that not only called for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production by 2029 but also for replacing every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats and 99 percent of cars — in America. Her Green New Deal would have compelled us to “retrofit every building in America” and build “high-speed rail at a scale” that would eliminate all air travel. The plan offered government-guaranteed “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension,” “safe, affordable, adequate housing,” and “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work.

I’m not sure if that’s Woke One — but it’s definitely crazy. If Ms. Ocasio-Cortez abandons the ideas she championed to deal with an alleged crisis that could destroy the Earth in 10 years, now three years and counting, what does that say about her ability to evaluate crises and offer practical solutions moving forward?”

That was like, far-out hippie crazy, amiright? For me, the bat-guano crazy policy ideas are just noise. It’s the ruined lives, the people whom woke broke and discarded for the most minor of indiscretions or transgressions, that stand out. In retrospect, it was eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union show trials of dissidents, where the unlucky soul had to stand in the dock and endure wildly exaggerated lies, insults, and “testimony” that had little to do with the truth. If they were lucky, they were sent to the gulags in Siberia for 10 years. If not, they ended up an uncounted statistic of Communism’s inhumanity in the name of “social justice.”

As most commenters have suggested, “Woke 2.0” won’t be much different from “Woke 1.0,” except that, given where the Democratic Party is today compared to a decade ago, Woke 2.0 will be far more radical. Josh Kraushaar of Jewish Insider believes that Woke 2.0 will be far more openly antisemitic. “By focusing on a foreign policy issue that is less impactful to many Americans than the economy or crime, they’re hoping they won’t suffer as much backlash as they did when they alienated a broad swath of the electorate with outside-the-mainstream proposals that affected people’s day-to-day lives,” he writes.

“When AOC is talking about the latest iteration of woke, this is what she’s referring to,” Kraushaar adds. “Bashing Israel and a tolerance for antisemitism wasn’t really part of the woke equation in the first iteration of the left’s social justice activism. It’s now a litmus test in this new era, with major implications for American Jews.” And major implications for the rest of us.

Read more …

“The left are incompetent biotrash who purge everyone too attractive, too capable or too intelligent to uncritically accept their retarded worldview.” —Aimee Terese on “X”

• Things Get Spicy (James Howard Kunstler)

The Jihad for Lunch Bunch Sends Greetings to Infidel America

And so, all of a sudden, having failed to subvert or assassinate the president they abhor, and foil his attempt to repair our country, the combined forces of the Democratic Party, the seditious news media, and a traitorous government bureaucracy resort to communist jihad in their crusade to wreck the USA. That’s a great combo, all right: history’s worst system for managing human affairs paired with a cult of bloodthirsty conquest. They’d decapitate the Beach Boys singing Fun, Fun, Fun if they could time-travel back to 1964, and stuff anyone who objected into a gulag.


There’s a sort of last-gasp feeling about all this. Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman el Sayed put it nicely the other day when he said of his opponents, “When they go low, we go lower.” True dat. And you can see where things go from here: election clean-up comes on no matter what, SAVE Act or not, probably via a comprehensive PDJT National Security Executive Order yet to be declared. There’s already a fair chance that SCOTUS will clear the way for the US Postal Service to regulate “uniform standards” for the distribution of mail-in ballots (from a March, 2026 previous exec order #15399 — “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Cue the communist jihadis to stage street-actions (a.k.a. “riots”) this fall in their captive cities and states. Since they can’t win elections without massive fraud, they will opt to do whatever is necessary to make the election impossible, and chaos is their go-to tactic in this contest of wills. The catch is, the communist jihadis are still a very small demographic. The president is not going to allow a replay of the savage and ridiculous 2020 BLM riots. This time around, they get briskly squashed.

If the big red states like California, New York, and Illinois try something funny, like refusing to open polling places and allow the election to happen, then you will see Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and JB Pritzker marched straight into jail. The USA will temporarily become FAFO-land. The Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844) is still on-the-books. It defines the Communist Party (or a party that quacks like one) to be “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”

The scene begins to look like a civil war or a state of siege, constraining the president to use the military to enforce civil order where the civil authorities have failed, demurred, or revolted. It would be extraordinary and nauseating, but arguably necessary to purge the extreme political illness that holds the nation in thrall. This disease has been allowed to worsen and rage for ten years. We are good and goddam sick of it.

As for Jihad, the first amendment prohibits religious persecution, of course, but under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, (8 U.S.C. § 1189) the State Department can designate political groups as “foreign terrorist organizations.” Nominees for that might be: the Muslim Brotherhood and any of its offshoots, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim Students Association (MSA / MSA National), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and others, if their spokespeople have called for the establishment of Sharia law, or advocated jihad for the purpose of capturing territory here in the USA.

While the aforesaid so-far-hypothetical events spool out around the election, something else pretty big will probably get underway this fall: the long-awaited commencement of prosecutions against former government officials (and perhaps some current ones) for their parts in the ten-year-long coup against the two-term president Donald Trump, as well as the criminal operations conducted under the sham president “Joe Biden” between those two terms.

That would have to include Dr. Anthony Fauci — with his active criminal referral already in-process at DOJ — and many of his colleagues at the public health agencies who perpetrated the Covid op. New scandalous details about it emerge from Dr. Fauci’s captured communications from the period 2020 to 2025. This week you learned that he hid crucial facts from the public about the Covid vaccine causing an alarming rate of miscarriage among pregnant women who received the shots. It’s right there, in black and white, in his texts and emails between himself and former CDC director Rochelle Walensky.

It’s also interesting to see that former FBI director Christopher Wray is coming back on the radar screen after lying low for eighteen months. You know he was involved in almost every aspect of the ten-year-long coup. He took a hand-off of the RussiaGate baton from James Comey in May of 2017 and ran with it through a dozen related ops including the FISA abuses, the Steele Dossier, Lawfare against Trump appointees (the abuse of Rudy Giuliani and others), fake impeachment # 1, the Jan. 6 capitol riot, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and much more. He probably lied to Congress a dozen times. You have to wonder how many trips he has been summoned to make to the grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. No leaks from down there. . . everything is sealed.

So, while the summer breeze still wafts over the barbeque in the briny air, and an unnerving stillness persists, forces are moving and roiling under the surface. Enjoy at least the appearance of calm seas while you can because it’s going to roughen up in the weeks ahead.

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It’s hard to take him serious.

• Hakeem Jeffries Will Take a Baseball Bat to the Supreme Court (Turley)

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has struggled to pander to the mob to secure power in the midterm elections, including brandishing a baseball bat on social media to show his radical bona fides. With Democratic Socialists chanting “you’re next” when seeing Jeffries, he continues to struggle to stay in front of the mob. This week, he doubled down on his pledge to throw the Supreme Court to the mob if they make him the next Speaker of the House of Representatives.


After the recent gains by far-left candidates in states like Minnesota and the near victory of Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, Jeffries came out to reaffirm his intent to radically change the highest court. According to the Washington Times, Jeffries declared, “There’s a variety of different options that are on the table, and I think that we can’t foreclose any single one of them.” He added that the “conservative, right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has become basically a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party.”

He promised to make far-left Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) the driving force behind changing the Court, including possible 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices and expanding the Court to create an instant liberal majority. Notably, none of these figures were claiming that the Court was fundamentally flawed until it ruled against them, particularly in cases that impacted their political power such as declaring racial gerrymandering to be unconstitutional.

What is interesting is that the liberal justices reject this narrative, reminding citizens that the Court has delivered major losses to the Trump Administration. Indeed, President Trump has routinely attacked conservative justices for ruling against him and his Administration. In addition, polls show that the majority of the public supports virtually all of the recent major rulings, including the ban on racial gerrymandering. It is only the Democrats who oppose those rulings and are now demanding a hostile takeover of the Court.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has called for packing the Court because it does not follow her views and those of “widely held public opinion.” I have pushed back on that rationale, given the Court’s function as a countermajoritarian institution. However, this poll even challenges the flawed rationale for court packing. So Jeffries is promising that the work of James Madison will be undone by the likes of Jamie Raskin and Elizabeth Warren. To have these calls on our 250th anniversary is crushingly ironic. Other leading Democrats have lined up to pledge to fundamentally change the Court, which has played a key role in making this the oldest and most stable republic in history.

It is simply about power. Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”

I have called it the Nike School of Constitutional Law. Democratic leaders are pledging to “just do it” to appease the mob. Of course, some of these measures would be challenged if done without constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court would then have to rule on the effort to pack or limit its members. The expansion can be done by legislative vote. Although most Americans oppose court packing, Democrats view control of the Court as essential to pushing through a radical agenda to change the political system to their advantage.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur. In Federalist 10, Madison discussed the destructive impact of factions in forcing through opportunistic changes to advance their interests:

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” We are witnessing the same factional politics being pushed by leaders who believe that they can ride a rage wave into power. They have a greater likelihood of causing lasting damage to our system than guaranteeing their own lasting power. History is not on their side. Today’s revolutionaries are often tomorrow’s reactionaries in an age of rage.

Read more …

This can’t be only Britain?!

• The Great Decline Of Britain (Modernity News)

Britain’s streets are rotting in plain sight. Road signs coated in years of grime, pavements choked with weeds, blocked drains, overflowing bins and potholes have become everyday features of life in what was once a first-world country. Local authorities, funded by rising council tax, routinely fail to deliver the most basic maintenance. Ordinary people – including schoolchildren – are now having to do the job themselves. All across the length and breadth of the country, from London squares to provincial roads, citizens are cleaning signs, restoring bins and clearing litter because the people paid to do it will not.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/2080011153485259231?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2080011153485259231%7Ctwgr%5E2070d33f71eca78f35908c6fecbcf97dcffa25f0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fgreat-decline-britain


The pattern is unmistakable: a country in visible decline, where the basics are abandoned while public money flows to ideologically driven schemes. James Melville has documented the decay repeatedly. Rubbish everywhere, weeds forcing their way through pavements, endless potholes, blocked road drains and filthy signposts appear in image after image. He notes that people are paying higher taxes yet receiving less, with local councils failing on core infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/2087055707799502863?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2087055707799502863%7Ctwgr%5E2070d33f71eca78f35908c6fecbcf97dcffa25f0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fgreat-decline-britain

Another recent video shows conditions that simply do not belong in a first-world nation, asking whether the decline is reversible. Another focuses on a council that has left basic service standards unmet. Volunteers have stepped into the gap, proving that all it takes is a step ladder, cleaning spray and sponge to make filthy almost illegible road signs clear again.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1990733427209846982?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1990733427209846982%7Ctwgr%5E2070d33f71eca78f35908c6fecbcf97dcffa25f0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fgreat-decline-britain
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Temu cannot flood the US with trinkets.

• Trade Court Rules U.S. President Can Set De Minimis Rules/Rates (CTH)

This would seem like a no-brainer, but multiple nations are so dependent on abusing the de minimis process the multinationals actually sued the United States for eliminating the $800 de minimis tariff exception. On August 29, 2025, the U.S. government eliminated the de minimis threshold for all countries via Executive Order 14324, making the rule apply regardless of origin. Chinese companies like Shein and Temu are subject to paying import taxes to ship cheap products into the USA.


Truth Social – BIG WIN today at the U.S. Court of International Trade on one of the most DESPICABLE loopholes in American Trade Policy — The so-called “de minimis” exemption.

For years, Foreign Shippers could send packages worth up to $800 into our Country, DUTY FREE, NO TARIFF, far less scrutiny. It became a giant loophole for TARIFF Cheats — and a Pipeline exploited by Fentanyl Traffickers, Counterfeiters, and other Criminals shipping dangerous and illegal products into America. The numbers were staggering. In 2024 alone, de minimis cost America an estimated 10.8 BILLION DOLLRS in foregone TARIFF Revenue, and an astonishing share of narcotics and counterfeit seizures came through the de minimis channel. So, we CLOSED IT. With the stroke of my mighty pen — NO AUTOPEN!!! — we ended this ridiculous giveaway, and made Foreign Goods play by the rules. The Importers sued. Today, THEY LOST. The Court ruled that the President had the Legal Authority to rescind this so-called “privilege.”

America is now SAFER, our Workers are better protected, and BILLIONS in TARIFF Revenue that used to slip through this loophole can instead help pay for our Great Military, Tax Relief, NO TAX ON TIPS, and NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY. AMERICA FIRST TRADE — AND AMERICA FIRST LAW ENFORCEMENT!

~ President Donald J Trump.

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“Sergey Lavrov stressed that Moscow will not stoop to Kiev’s methods but will take much tougher measures to destroy everything that fuels the Ukrainian military machine from the West”

Russia has said they will use nukes if that is needed to defend themselves. Nobody has more or better nukes than they do.

• Lavrov: Why Ukraine Conflict Cannot Be Halted Along Contact Line (TASS)

The Ukraine conflict cannot stop along the line of contact as this would erase the feat of the fathers and grandfathers who defeated Nazism, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Vesti. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to again meet with US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and businessman Jared Kushner. The question is what proposals they would bring to the Kremlin. Lavrov also said Moscow had asked the US State Department to comment on reports of Washington’s involvement in strikes by the Kiev regime on civilian targets deep within Russian territory. TASS has compiled the foreign minister’s key remarks.


Witkoff and Kushner’s visit
Putin is ready to meet Witkoff and Kushner again. The question is what proposals they would bring to the Kremlin: “If they have been given such trust then they have influence on Trump and he trusts them. We are not refusing to talk to them. If they come they know that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to meet them again. The question is what they will come with.”

Kiev’s terrorist attacks
The Kiev regime “boasts proudly” about terrorist attacks against Russian civilians: “After each such terrorist attack, regime representatives proudly boast on social media and other platforms about how ‘great’ the strikes were, hitting a beach, a dormitory for future teachers and other purely civilian facilities.”

Ways to settle the Ukraine conflict
The conflict in Ukraine cannot be halted along the line of contact as this would “erase the feat of our fathers and grandfathers” who defeated Nazism: “This cannot be considered. It is not about anyone’s comfort today. Our people are suffering and dying in these terrorist attacks. It is about our responsibility for Russia’s thousand-year history.”

Moscow will not stoop to Kiev’s methods but will take much tougher measures to destroy everything that fuels the Ukrainian military machine from the West: “We will not stoop to Kiev’s methods, but we will toughen our own measures to dismantle everything the West uses to sustain its military machine. We are already doing so, and they are beginning to feel the pressure.” More and more voices from across the region are “calling for an immediate halt”: “That will not be an option. We need to stop only once there is a long-term, reliable and sustainable settlement.”

Resurgence of Nazism in Europe
“Metastases of Nazism” are appearing in German society under Chancellor Friedrich Merz who openly speaks of the need to make Germany Europe’s leading military power again: “Does he understand what the word ‘again’ means in this case? I am not sure.” The European Union has portrayed itself as the “Fourth Reich” and is blackmailing Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic by exploiting his commitment to European integration: “The pressure is brazen and outrageous. They act as if they are already the ‘Fourth Reich.'”

US role in the Ukrainian conflict
Moscow has asked the US State Department to comment on reports of Washington’s involvement in Kiev regime strikes on civilian targets deep inside Russian territory: “We sent a number of questions to the State Department asking it to comment including on intelligence data and on the fact that the US is much more strongly involved in organizing and carrying out strikes deep inside the Russian Federation against civilian targets. We will await a response.”

Moscow “is not giving ultimatums” to Washington.

The West’s silence
The public silence of countries whose interests were affected by Kiev regime attacks on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) is telling: “When we asked if they would tolerate this, they (the countries whose interests were affected – TASS) said no and said they were sending signals to Kiev. Apparently, US Vice President JD Vance sent a signal to Vladimir Zelensky over the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. The Turkish officials also told us they had urged the Ukrainians not to target the consortium. But everyone is silent publicly. That is telling.”

In response to these appeals the Zelensky regime did not promise to stop the attacks: “He promised to stop attacks on vessels that have nothing to do with the Russian Federation. Apparently, that explanation was considered acceptable.”

Turkey’s interest in Black Sea stability
Turkey is genuinely interested in ensuring stability in the Black Sea: “Turkey wants to be a NATO member with the bloc’s largest army and maintain ties with the European Union. At the same time, deep down Ankara understands that it will never be admitted to the EU. It wants good relations with Russia because we have many economic projects and much in common in our history: the Caucasus and the Black Sea. Turkey is genuinely interested in keeping the Black Sea stable.”

Relations with Serbia
EU representatives promise Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic that they will reduce his country’s long wait to join the European Union and speed up accession talks in return for recognizing Kosovo’s independence and joining sanctions against Russia: “Vucic has bravely withstood this pressure for years.”

Russia would like to hear Serbia’s reaction to comments by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Michael Martens about the killing of Russians: “I saw that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was simply stunned. Of course, we would like to hear some reaction from our Serbian friends given their enormous contribution to the victory over Nazism.”

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“Academics celebrated a dishonest science administrator, exposing the decay of the biomedical enterprise.”

• Anthony Fauci and the Collapse of Scientific Authority (Jason Locasale)

Anthony Fauci is now facing intense scrutiny. His diaries, emails, and testimony have raised fundamental questions about what he knew, what he then told the public, and how he exercised authority during the pandemic. Many outside of academia read these documents and view this moment as his fall from grace, while universities and medical institutions seem willing to ignore this new evidence and continue to celebrate Fauci as a heroic public servant with unmatched scientific authority.


Academics’ unconventional viewpoint cannot be ignored. Fauci matters not only because of his individual conduct, but because he exposes the institutions that produced, empowered, and continue to protect him—Georgetown rewarded him with a prestigious position after he retired from the government in his 80s.

The pandemic did not create the dysfunction inside biomedical science. It placed a magnifying glass over science institutions that had been decaying for decades. Grant politics, unfounded hype, administrative expansion, scientific gerontocracy, institutional self-protection, and the punishment of dissent were already pervasive. Fauci enabled the public to watch those forces operate through one person on television every day. Biomedical institutions did not create a single Fauci. They created thousands. The pandemic spotlight simply made one of them famous.

What the diaries reveal
Fauci’s diaries offer an unusually revealing account of how he understood his role during the pandemic. Written as notes toward a future autobiography, they show what he considered important enough to preserve about those years.The diaries undermine the mythology of a reluctant scientist who was unexpectedly thrust into politics and celebrity. They reveal a bureaucrat celebrity preoccupied with attention, status, prominent relationships, TV appearances, reputation, his own place in history, and cash money.

His interest in how he was portrayed, whom he met, who praised him, and how his public image was developing consumes far more attention than any serious engagement with the complex science of COVID-19 and the pandemic. The office shrine, the concern with his portrait, the meticulous record of his fame, and the diary itself as material for an autobiography all expose the same fixation.

Those self-curated notes reveal his priorities. Science is less as an intellectual pursuit than as the credential supporting the public performance. The related emails and documents complete the picture. Fauci sought nominations for cash prizes from influential friends and used federal employees to help him win those awards. These awards were then presented publicly as independent acknowledgments of merit.

One of the most important revelations in the new documents was the distance between private uncertainty and public certainty. Fauci and those around him privately discussed scientific possibilities that they publicly dismissed and even attacked as conspiracies. The authors of the Proximal Origin paper privately assigned a laboratory origin for the COVID pandemic as a substantial probability, then helped present that possibility to the public as impossible.

The same pattern appeared in pronouncements about masking, vaccine transmission, and other major pandemic questions. The issue is not hindsight. The issue is presenting uncertain claims as settled truth while privately recognizing that the evidence was unresolved.

Authority substituted for scientific judgement
Fauci projected an image of authority, and for too many, image alone was sufficient. His title, confidence, and media presence substituted for careful engagement with data.. Masking, for example, involved questions of aerosol physics, fluid mechanics, particle size, droplet formation, airflow, filtration, leakage, and fit. These are concrete scientific and engineering questions. But Fauci’s own diary finds that he showed no interest in working through the scientific complexity before making definitive public pronouncements. We can read in his own words that Fauci approached scientific disagreement more like a party in an adversarial legal proceeding than a scientist. Once an institutional position had been adopted, contrary evidence became an obstacle and dissenting scientists became opponents to defeat. The objective shifted from determining what was true to defending political ground and preserving authority.

This is the opposite of a scientific temperament. A good scientist is skeptical, including of his own conclusions. He is comfortable acknowledging uncertainty and may spend days thinking privately through a problem. He does not need a camera, a slogan, or the appearance of omniscience. Fauci illustrates the difference between projecting authority and possessing a curious, scientific mind.

Scientific credentialism
Fauci majored in classics before earning an MD when medical education was driven by rote memorization and provided little formal preparation for scientific research. His degree was a clinical credential to treat sick people, not a degree for lab research. When he entered laboratory research, molecular immunology was not yet a developed science and when academic physicians could obtain laboratory directorships early in their careers. He then became an NIH administrator at a relatively young age.

The issue is not that he began his career before modern technologies existed. Every older scientist did. The relevant question is whether an aging scientist continues learning, adapting, and making discoveries as the field develops. The best scientists remain intellectually active later in life because they master new technologies and continue challenging themselves and their own field. Unfortunately, too many establish their careers by being in the right place at the right time, then coast for another twenty or thirty years through networks that make adaptation unnecessary.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Fauci had spent decades as a bureaucrat, dealing with budgets and manuevering through arcane government policies—far removed from frontline science. Nothing in that history made him a universal authority on masking, vaccine transmission, population epidemiology, viral evolution, or every other field on which he pronounced. His real expertise was navigating institutions, consolidating authority, cultivating relationships, and projecting the image of a scientist to the public.

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“And Fauci called them The Three Stooges. That was what he said. These are The Three Stooges”

• Fauci’s COVID-19 Critics Are Looking Vindicated (Victor Davis Hanson)

Jack Fowler: I think we should leave [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. The news stories that have come out the last few days of some of his text messages and phone records. And only 11, I think only 11 messages have been released by Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. They’re very troubling about the Moderna vaccine for pregnant women. This seems like a big stinking lie there. But I’m sure more information will come out in the next day or two, and I would hope that you, Victor, and the great Sami Winc would take that on as more information comes out.


Jay Bhattacharya is just one of the greatest guys, as you know, and he is running the National Institutes of Health. And he went on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, and Margaret Brennan, who is the host of the show, tried to essentially make him a stand-in for the right wing responsible for a murder that happened a year ago. And he’s such a good man. His studies early on about what COVID was really happening, of course, were rejected. And he was vilified by Fauci, as you know, and many people at Stanford, actually. But anyway, what’s your thought, Victor, of that performance, more so on Margaret Brennan and the media and—

Victor Davis Hanson: She’s not very bright. I think JD Vance, that was another one of her victims that he eviscerated. You know what I mean, when she was a moderator. It was either him or [President Donald] Trump. She’s pathetic. And the idea that, of all the people who work in the Trump administration, there’s not a more magnanimous, kinder person than Jay. He’s soft-spoken. He’s polite. He’s very principled. And his crime was, very early on, along with [Martin] Kulldorff and Dr. [Sunetra] Gupta from Oxford, they just said, as Scott Atlas was doing from the inside, they were doing from the outside, the Great Barrington Declaration.

And all he was trying to say, and Margaret Brennan did not want to bring that up or defend the opposite Fauci view, is three or four things. The vaccinations may have initial value for people who are immunocompromised or are elderly, but they do not stop being infectious or being infected, and we should keep that in mind in a cost-benefit analysis. And keeping all of these children out of school for two years will ruin the education system and have lasting damage to it and to the students.

Three, we’re gonna destroy a lot of small businesses, entrepreneurial families. We’re gonna increase child abuse cooped up in apartments, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse. There’s going to be … We have told the American people they need to get a breast exam every four years, a PSA every year, a colonoscopy. These are not gonna take place, and people are gonna die at a higher rate from cancer and heart problems because of this, and they laid it all out.

And Fauci called them The Three Stooges. That was what he said. These are The Three Stooges. And then he tried to vilify them because he knew in his dark heart that he had transferred money to break U.S. law that said no gain-of-function research was allowed in the United States. I should say to skirt it by surreptitiously funding it in China on the stupid idea that they would share the results with Fauci. And then a whole league of co-conspirator scientists were either going and visiting there or giving them instrumentation or expertise remotely.

And so, he had helped birth this monster, and yet a lot of his efforts were to suppress it. You know, [Robert] Redfield, the head of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], is on TV now almost every day, and he’s basically … And he’s no left-winger. I mean, he’s basically saying no one was closer to Anthony Fauci. And they say, “Well, what happened?” He said, “Well, he had some involvement with gain-of-function research, and he was wedded to the idea that he would say and do anything to get people vaccinated, and that caused calamity and death.”

He said that, essentially. You know, Jay was treated terribly by Stanford University, and it was kind of strange that at the time this thing broke out, you could argue that the three most prominent scientists, doctors, medical public health experts in the entire United States were right at Stanford University. There was Jay Bhattacharya, whose publication record was sterling. I’ll enlarge that. I’ll say four. And he was issuing warnings not to shut down the economy. Then there was Scott Atlas, who was writing the same thing, but in greater scientific depth in some cases, and talking about it from a public policy point of view.

And they were both talking about natural immunity. And they never said, “Don’t take the vaccinations.” They said, “You make that choice, not a mandated government choice, based on the information that you must have, that we have, in a cost-benefit analysis.” And then there was John Ioannidis, and he was the one that broke wide open the Theranos scam that you could get a drop of blood and suddenly test for, like, 17, 20, 50 maladies. That whole $8 billion fiasco, which a lot of my colleagues were on the board of, unfortunately. And he did that. And he wrote from the very beginning that this is more like the flu than Ebola, basically.

And then there was Michael Levitt, I think that’s his first name, and he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. And he looked at the data, and he said very early on, “This has to be lab-orientated.” And then there was the former Stanford professor. Now, I think he’ll probably, I think, I don’t know if it’s announced, but Redfield said it the other day, so I don’t feel reluctant to say it, that he’s gonna be Fauci’s replacement. We’ve had him on the show. And he said from the very beginning, based on the scientific examination of the genomes and everything, that this could not be naturally created in the wilderness, so to speak. It had to be concocted.

Those four people, especially the first three— Fowler: Steven Quay, by the way. You didn’t mention his name. So, Steven Quay. Hanson: Yeah, Steven Quay, a former Stanford professor, and he had created gadolinium, the dye in the MRI, while he was a professor and researcher. But the thing I’m getting at is, you had right on the campus Bhattacharya, Atlas, Ioannidis, right there, three of them. And they were at the forefront of the opposition to Fauci. And they were very different. Sometimes Scott was a lot more outspoken. Jay was more soft-spoken. They were very complementary. They got along wonderfully.

But what was the reaction of the university to all of them? They went after Scott because he was courageous and actually joined the Trump administration as their COVID czar and fought relentlessly with [Deborah] Birx and Fauci. And they censored him. And then, when they found the evidence, they were so embarrassed that when there was a motion to rescind the censure, they wouldn’t do it, the faculty. They hated him so much. And Jay, they ostracized, ostracized. I was at a meeting once when he was discussed, and I won’t discuss what happened, but it was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.

And Ioannidis, he had been Stanford’s prize catch, came from Greece. He was one of the best immunologists, public policy people, and epidemiologists there was, and all of a sudden they were saying that he was second-rate. And they’ve never apologized to them.

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Debt Rattle June 29 2026

Jun 292026
 
 June 29, 2026  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  49 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky Palace rains in Venice by moonlight 1878


• Iranian Media Calls for Atomic Bombs as Official Says ‘We Are at War’ (Salgado)
• How Crazy and Radical the Democratic Socialist Program Really Is (Spencer)
• The Democratic Socialists of America New York Communist Program (CTH)
• Hakeem Jeffries Surrenders to the Socialists (Margolis)
• Joe Biden Barely Manages To Find His Way Offstage At Dem Gala (NYPost)
• Joe Biden: The Perfect Symbol of Today’s Democrat Party (Florack)
• USMCA Status – Canada in Recession, Mexico GDP Grows Double Expectations (CTH)
• Sadiq Khan Said There Were NO Grooming Gangs In London (MN)
• Police Believe There Are 4,000 Sex-Exploitation Gang Cases in London (Salgado)
• Becerra Details an ‘Assembly Line’ for Migrant Children (Salgado)
• The Supremes Help Ensure Border Security vs Liberal Justices (Von Spakovsky)
• Supreme Court Expected To Rule On Cook, Elections, And Trans Athletes (ZH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2071389101304230307?s=20 https://twitter.com/JamesBradleyCA/status/2071056181804793924?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2071324215790186722?s=20 https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2070922295976288467?s=20

 


 


Why Trump wants to make sure they don’t have nukes.

• Iranian Media Calls for Atomic Bombs as Official Says ‘We Are at War’ (Salgado)

The Tehran terrorists are not hiding their genocidal intentions toward America. The advisor to peace deal negotiator and Majles speaker Mohammad-Baquer “Death to America” Ghalibaf (or Qalibaf) declared on June 10 that negotiations buy time for the Iranian regime that is simply allowing temporary recovery for the next round of fighting. Citing Qalibaf, Mahdi Mohammadi declared that “you must never forget that you are at war … negotiations are a tool of the struggle.” He added, “We have no illusions about peace with America.” A couple weeks later, on June 28, a new report surfaced that Iranian state media is openly insisting the government should and will seek nuclear weapons.


The Hormuz Letter noted that Iranian media is justifying this nuclear advocacy by blaming President Donald Trump for threatening to wipe out the regime, threats which Trump, of course, did not end up enacting. The reality is that the murderous mullahs just want to justify the decision they always planned to make, which was to keep on with their endless jihad. And they were never really sincere about ending their nuclear program, either.

Speaking of which, the Middle East Media Research Institute translated Mohammadi’s interview on Iranian TV. Ghalibaf’s advisor bragged that the Iranian regime “control[s] the Strait of Hormuz,” where the regime continues to attack shipping up to this weekend. Mohammadi used some typical extravagant boasting, such as “the entire world is on its knees before the Islamic Republic,” and “[our] enemy is humiliated and defeated,” but he also made it clear where the regime stands on war versus peace.

“In your toolbox, you have missiles, UAVs, intelligence, and security capabilities, the Resistance” which means the many terrorist proxies like Hezbollah “your allies, and you also have the negotiations,” Mohammadi explained. “If you look at it this way, there is no problem [with negotiations]. But you must never forget that you are at war… the important thing is to get the concession at the beginning.” Continuing to elucidate why the Iranian regime pressed for major concessions even though they never wanted a deal, Mohammadi told the interviewer:

We should get something substantial right at the start, because we know — at least that’s how I see it — that the whole thing will fall apart. Fine, let it fall apart. The important thing is to get something substantial at the start. I have said this explicitly in the past. We need time and resources. We are at war. We will use the negotiations as a tool to buy time and acquire resources. We have no illusions about peace with America.

The real problem is that too many American politicians have illusions about peace with the terrorist Iranian regime.

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It truly is extreme, aka the only territory the Democrats confidently call their own.

• How Crazy and Radical the Democratic Socialist Program Really Is (Spencer)

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are on the rise. They just triumphed in New York, and are sending Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, along with Brad Lander, a former DSA member, to Congress, where they will join DSA stars Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Ditzville) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Islamic Rage). Another DSA luminary, Zohran Mamdani, is mayor of New York City, and it is looking increasingly as if the DSA has done an Invasion of the Body Snatchers move on the Democrat Party, occupying its body and replacing its soul. The DSA is now the Democrat mainstream.


Emboldened with all this success, the DSA is loudly and proudly proclaiming what it is all about, hoping to draw more suckers into the big top. The socialists are making it clear that their program is far more comprehensive and far-reaching than most people realize; they’re hoping to do nothing less than re-create Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China in the United States.

This is no exaggeration. The superlative investigative journalist Stu Smith recently published in City Journal a long expose of the DSA’s new platform. Smith revealed that “earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was ‘Workers Deserve More!’, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals.”

The “Workers Deserve More!” document, as Smith describes it, a blueprint that, if implemented, would without any doubt lead to the total destruction of the United States. “The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,’ defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’”

Among the “carceral forces of the capitalist state” that would be abolished would be ICE and the police, so that criminals and terrorists would be streaming across the border and the American people would have no one to protect them. The idea of scrapping the Senate and making the executive and judiciary subject to Congress would be to place political power in the hands of the House, which the most populous (and far-left) areas of the country would control.

The “Workers Deserve More!” document also said that its goal was to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” You know, like the German Democratic Republic (that was the official name of Communist East Germany, one of the most repressive regimes the world has ever known) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

In a series of X posts, Smith augmented his City Journal with more from the “Workers Deserve More!” platform, each bit more radical, and more destructive if implemented, than the last. The DSA would even move to implement a fully communist state: It would “establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.”

Wealth taxes! Why, Gavin Newsom is already there. And that’s just another indication of how this socialist madness, that has failed in so many countries, is become mainstream in ours, where people should know better, but apparently (after years of miseducation) do not.

The DSA’s forthrightness is something of a departure from recent practice. Old Joe Biden, after all, ridiculed the idea that he was a socialist during the 2020 campaign, only to allow those who were running his regime to take a decisively socialist and authoritarian course. Barack Obama likewise campaigned as a calm, moderate, centrist, only to become the most divisive, far-left president the nation had ever had up to the time he took office.

Yet as the DSA grows in power and influence in the Democrat Party and the nation in general, it seems to be confident that Americans will love its plan. No one should be fooled, however. If we are unfortunate enough to inaugurate a DSA president on Jan. 20, 2029, all the aspects of the DSA program that are currently being covered up will return in force, and be inflicted upon the American people. There is no doubt about that at all.

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Can you imagine?

• The Democratic Socialists of America New York Communist Program (CTH)

Barbara Boyd discusses three Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani winning upset victories in New York congressional primaries, framing the results as part of a long-term cultural project rather than a purely economic platform. She argues the DSA’s internal education centers on communist theorist Antonio Gramsci and his strategy of revolution through cultural “hegemony,” citing a deleted Instagram post from a group tied to one winner that called for the “total eradication of Western Civilization.”


Boyd highlights a newly published DSA platform proposing major constitutional changes, then links Gramsci to the Council on Foreign Relations’ “post-Trump world” series, noting CFR fellow Charles Kupchan opens with a Gramsci quote and attacks reindustrialization and tariffs. She claims British imperial networks historically sponsored Marx and later Gramsci, using communism and counterculture against rivals, and urges promoting Trump’s “American System” economics and an optimistic national culture ahead of the midterms.

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“.. no one in the party is safe from this hostile takeover. Not even leadership. And what did Jeffries do? He congratulated them.”

• Hakeem Jeffries Surrenders to the Socialists (Margolis)

The Democrat Party has a socialism problem, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) just made it worse. Last week’s New York City congressional primaries delivered a troubling result for anyone who thought the Democrat Party had hit peak radicalism: it hasn’t. Far-left candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, backed by Democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), knocked out two Democrat incumbents. Far-left Democrat Brad Lander also won his primary.


At the watch party for the socialist winners, the crowd made its intentions clear. When Jeffries appeared on a TV screen, supporters broke into chants of “You’re next!” It’s clear the socialists are gunning for his seat, which means no one in the party is safe from this hostile takeover. Not even leadership. And what did Jeffries do? He congratulated them. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this post on X Saturday.

Seriously? The crowd at that watch party had just threatened to oust him on live television. Now he’s bending the knee to them, posting a glowing congratulation that frames “far-right extremism” as the threat to confront while saying nothing about the DSA affiliations, the far-left policy positions, or the fact that the winners’ supporters just signaled they’re coming for his job. He even treated these primary wins as equivalent to general election victories, which, in New York City, they essentially are.

I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. When CNBC host Joe Kernen asked Jeffries on camera about the “You’re next!” chant and about the rise of socialist candidates in his party, he did what Democrats always do: he pivoted immediately to President Donald Trump.

No pushback. No acknowledgment of the problem. Just the standard deflection. This is a tell. Either Jeffries genuinely doesn’t see the socialist takeover of his party as a threat worth confronting, or he’s too afraid to say so. I’m not even sure which is worse. I’ve written before that this tension between the socialist wing and the rest of the party has serious implications for the midterms and 2028. Socialism may sell in deep blue cities, but it doesn’t play in the suburban districts Democrats need to win a majority. Every DSA-backed candidate who locks up a safe seat in New York City drags the national party brand further left and hands Republicans a hammer to use in competitive races everywhere else. And establishment Democrats are either unwilling to stop it or too afraid to.

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Elder abuse.

• Joe Biden Barely Manages To Find His Way Offstage At Dem Gala (NYPost)

Former President Joe Biden was back onstage at a Democratic Party gala to excoriate President Trump Saturday – but needed a little help figuring out just how to exit. Biden, who got pushed out of his reelection bid by fellow Democrats in 2024 following his debate disaster against Trump, defended his record and blasted his successor during his speech to the Maryland Democratic Party’s Fight Back & Win summit near Baltimore. He ripped Trump for the “deliberate distraction – destruction of NATO” and hammered Trump’s White House ballroom as a “vanity project.”


At his speech’s conclusion Biden delivered a familiar refrain about the nation’s ability to overcome challenges – then sought an assist to find out which way to leave the stage. He turned to the side seeking guidance, then pointed in two different directions to ascertain the best route. Once he had it sorted out, he walked away from the stage with his back to the audience. His appearance at event, held at the Live! Casino & Hotel in Hanover, Maryland, came just days after he appeared at the grand opening of the Barack Obama presidential library in Chicago.

At that event, a bewildered looking Biden was left awkwardly onstage at its conclusion. “Where’s my granddaughter?” he shouted while walking up to the podium as it ended. At other times, he was guided by former first lady Jill Biden. Biden, 83, relied on a teleprompter during his Saturday night remarks, squinting at times as he read his verbal blasts at his rival, who he defeated in 2020, only to relinquish the White House in 2024. He coughed loudly several times early on. “Have you noticed that Americans are saying the economy under the Biden administration is a hell of a lot better than under Trump?” he told party faithful in the deep blue state.


“It’s not just his vanity projects – tearing down the East Wing of the White House making room for his ballroom. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center. Building an arch in his own honor. Even hiring his own pool guy to fix the reflecting pool. Woah – what a loser,” Biden said to applause. He called it “simply stunning to me” that Trump made “billions of dollars” as he returned to the White House, saying “he has no shame.” Biden’s successive awkward exits come after a long history during his presidency of mangling stage directions, as he did famously at a G7 photo-op in Italy in 2024.

He made no reference to the ideological fight going on in his party after democratic socialists prevailed in three New York primaries. The former first lady has been upping her media profile as she promotes her new book, where she revealed she at first thought Biden might be “having a stroke” during his 2024 presidential debate disaster.Hunter Biden, meanwhile, has launched an active social media profile where he has been promoting his art and taking on his dad’s critics, at one point challenging Donald Trump, Jr. to a cage match while blasting the UFC fight staged on the South Lawn of the White House.

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“They’re fresh out of ideas, and fresh out of people to represent those ideas.”

There.s a contradiction somewhere in there.

• Joe Biden: The Perfect Symbol of Today’s Democrat Party (Florack)

Honestly, Joe Biden is an 83-year-old man who probably should be home with his grandchildren, not being trotted out in front of a partisan crowd in Maryland to read attacks off a teleprompter and then wait for someone to point him toward the exit. On a purely human level, there’s something genuinely sad about that picture. No, what this is about is the Democrat Party machine — the political apparatus, the party operatives, the media figures, the staffers, consultants, and loyalists who spent the better part of four years looking America dead in the eye and insisting that Joe Biden was sharp, capable, fully in command, and absolutely fit to serve another term as President of the United States.


And today, they insist on trotting him onto a stage to show the world just how wrong they were. These are the people who called you a liar — or worse, a conspiracy theorist — for suggesting that Biden wasn’t sure what planet he was on. The people who buried the story, spiked the footage, and escorted skeptical reporters right out of the conversation.

These are the same people who are now, with a straight face, putting this man back on a stage. Think about what that actually required. I mean, this is really the saddest part…. Think about the number of people involved in this process. Someone booked him. Someone wrote the speech. Someone set up the teleprompter. Someone stood offstage and waited to guide him out when it was over. And at every step of that process, not one person in that operation apparently stopped to ask whether any of this was a good idea — for the party, for the country, or for the man himself. The show must go on. The attacks on Trump must be delivered. The base must be fed.

The Democrat Party has a long and well-practiced tradition of putting the pursuit of power ahead of everything else, including basic honesty about the condition of the people they’re asking you to trust with the nuclear codes. We watched it happen in real time through 2023 and 2024—the insistence, the gaslighting, the furious pushback against anyone who raised questions. And then the debate happened, and the curtain came down, and suddenly everyone who’d been telling you Biden was fine remembered they needed to wash their hair.

But now he’s back. Squinting at the teleprompter. Coughing. Waiting for someone to show him the way out. What’s the reasoning behind this? It’s simple enough; they’ve got nothing else to offer. They’re fresh out of ideas, and fresh out of people to represent those ideas.

Think about that for a moment. The Democrat Party—the party that controls most of the major media institutions, most of the universities, most of the cultural apparatus of the country—their big move on a Saturday night in Maryland is to dust off an 83-year-old man who can’t find the exit and point him at a teleprompter. That’s the best they’ve got. That’s the headliner. The best symbol for the self-proclaimed party of young ideas is an 83-year-old with, sadly, the mental capacity of a wheel chock.

Are you kidding me? Where’s the next generation? Where’s the compelling vision they keep claiming they have? Where’s the candidate who walks into a room and makes people believe something? The answer is both simple and revealing. They don’t have one.

I’m to the point now of concluding that this 83-year-old mushroom brain is the ideal symbol for the party. They’ve spent so many years building a party around identity checklists, approved narratives, and the politics of grievance that they’ve completely lost the ability to produce a leader who can actually lead. What they can produce is someone who will, in an almost reliable fashion, say the right things in the right order to the right interest groups—and when that person can no longer reliably do even that, apparently the answer is to keep sending him out anyway, teleprompter and spotter included, because the alternative is admitting they have nothing at all to offer.

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Carney’s ideology is very expensive for his people. Do they know?

• USMCA Status – Canada in Recession, Mexico GDP Grows Double Expectations (CTH)

You might remember recent reports outlining how the economy of Canada has slipped into a recession, posting two consecutive quarters with a negative GDP outcome. There are multiple reasons for this shrinkage, but the dominant factor is, well, quite frankly, Canadian politics and economic policy.


Meanwhile, in Mexico the opposite is happening. Mexico’s economic activity grew 1.2% in April from the prior month, the national statistics agency said, compared with a revised increase of 0.6% in March and beating a forecast of a 0.9% increase in a Reuters poll of analysts. {source} It is not coincidental to see the Mexican economy performing well, while the Canadian economy is contracting. Despite their identical proximity to The United States, each nation is currently executing a fundamentally different set of economic policies.

The Canadian government has been exceptionally combative with the U.S.A, leading to friction, tariffs and economic back-and-forth measures between the two nations.The Mexican government has expressly understood the nature of their dependency, admitted it, taken no action to diminish it, and purposefully set out to align itself with the interests of America. Canada is combative. Mexico is collaborating.

It seems unlikely that the three nations can agree on major economic policies, as a trilateral partnership would need alignment in core areas like energy policy. Canada’s energy policy is fundamentally separate from those of the U.S. and Mexico, and this is an issue that can’t be resolved through a trade agreement alone. A large part of Mexico’s economy relies on remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S. sending money back to their families. As long as the U.S. job market stays strong—and it’s only getting stronger in the industries where many Mexicans work—Mexico will continue to benefit from America’s economic growth.

One datapoint that points to the USA-Canada disconnect comes in the auto sector. The Center for Automotive Research (CAR) reports that Canadian vehicle production dropped 15 percent year-over-year through April. It’s understood that factories in Canada built approximately 64,000 fewer vehicles through April than the year prior, while US production rose by roughly 44,000 units, or 1.2 percent. Auto manufacturing companies in Canada operate there as part of the business plan to sell vehicles into the USA. As Canada increases friction with the USA, which is setting up a dynamic of U.S. withdrawal from the USMCA, those auto manufacturers will increasingly shift production from Canada to the U.S. market.

It appears that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s response to this predictable auto-sector outcome, is to flip those production facilities into venues for Chinese EV production (BYD and Geely). However, Democrats and Republicans are united in alignment with President Trump on this issue and Chinese EVs will not be permitted entry into the USA. This is a very big point of friction. Right now, no company in their right mind would invest in Canada against the backdrop of a potential USMCA withdrawal by President Trump. This is creating a scenario where our old nemesis, the U.S Chamber of Commerce, is spending tens-of-millions in Washington DC to purchase the votes and support of congress to retain the trilateral deal.

Right now, every multinational corporation in the world is looking closely at the White House as the July 1st deadline approaches. Almost none of them can fathom what will happen if the U.S. announces the intention to fully exit the USMCA and triggers a six-month withdrawal process. Despite what many have falsely claimed, it was specifically written into the original trade terms that if any of the three countries announce an exit to the trilateral agreement, they can fully exit six months later. If the USA makes this announcement -whenever they make this announcement- a literal economic doomsday countdown begins for Canada.

Mexico would not really be too disturbed by the announcement as both USTR Jamieson Greer and his Mexican counterpart have been negotiating on a bilateral basis for over a full year. However, for Canada the ramifications are so astronomical, it is almost impossible to fathom what might happen when 80% of their total exports face an unpredictable future. The leverage President Trump carries are so formidable, the only thing that compares in scale is the ‘elbow’s up‘ ego of Prime Minister Carney. ‘Splodey heads is an understatement. Canadians are so unprepared it’s jaw dropping. Make that exit announcement and as soon as reality sits-in, the Canadian dollar could collapse.

Read more …

“.. the force’s existing load of around 2,000 sexual offences a month. ‘

• Sadiq Khan Said There Were NO Grooming Gangs In London (MN)

The London mayor who once insisted there was “no indication” of grooming gangs now faces explosive new scrutiny after a police review uncovered thousands of previously sidelined child sexual exploitation files. The Metropolitan Police has identified more than 4,000 potential child sexual exploitation cases across London that may require reopening. These stem from roughly 12,000 reports dating back to 2010, with about one in three previously closed after police or prosecutors took no further action.


The cases have now been referred to the National Crime Agency under Operation Beaconport for urgent assessment.

This development directly contradicts Sadiq Khan’s past public statements. In January 2025, appearing before the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee, Khan repeatedly dodged questions from Conservative member Susan Hall about the scale of grooming gangs in the capital. He claimed his understanding from regular police briefings was that there were “no reported cases and also no indication of the grooming gangs” she was concerned about. When pressed on how many such gangs operated in London, he asked her to clarify what she meant by the term.

https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/2071186451383910409?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2071186451383910409%7Ctwgr%5Eea2bc72b7653237ca01eada41547b579e87f1f93%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmodernity.news%2F2026%2F06%2F28%2Fsadiq-khan-said-there-were-no-grooming-gangs-in-london-police-investigating-4000-cases%2F

Critics now describe the position as gaslighting. Hall called the scale “utterly disgraceful,” noting it represents 4,000 young girls raped and sexually abused while authorities looked the other way or actively resisted scrutiny. Khan’s team now claims he has always supported leaving “no stone unturned.” The gap between that line and his earlier blanket denials has not gone unnoticed. This London revelation fits a wider, years-long scandal of institutional failure and political cowardice. Earlier this year we detailed how even the BBC exposed the scale of grooming activity in the capital under Khan’s watch.

Separate investigations laid bare mini-mart operations where vulnerable children were plied with alcohol and cigarettes in exchange for sexual abuse. Illegal shops were caught handing out free vapes to kids in return for sexual favours. And the weary response from parts of the establishment often boiled down to telling victims and the public to simply “get over it.”

Read more …

Sadiq Khan says zero, the police say 4,000. No possible error or overlap. Therefore, time for Khan to go. Or the police. One of the two.

“Great Britain has become, or at least is well on the way to becoming, a sharia state. “

• Police Believe There Are 4,000 Sex-Exploitation Gang Cases in London (Salgado)

London’s Metropolitan Police have found evidence suggesting there are thousands of child sex exploitation gangs or offenders in London.London is reportedly majority Muslim now (which tallies with my experience there), but even if that is in reality an exaggeration, it’s obvious the UK capital has a serious problem with Islamic rape gangs. Just in London, there are up to 4,000 grooming gang cases that authorities have tried to cover up.


Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, who released the bombshell report on grooming gangs that identified 250,000 British girls and women as victims, indicated that between 87% and 95% of such sexual criminals are Muslim men. In other words, the mass child exploitation and rape gang crisis in England is almost entirely a result of mass migration from Muslim-majority nations. That is not surprising given that Islamic sacred texts endorse pedophilia, rape, and sexual slavery. But the current mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is also Muslim. Now, some Muslims do not follow the encouragement to sexual crime in their sacred texts, but will Khan address the rape-gang crisis any more now than he did before? Somehow I expect not.

In fact, according to GB News, Khan previously and emphatically asserted there was “no evidence” that grooming gangs were operating in London. Scotland Yard’s new findings indicate how wildly false that was. Sir Sadiq Khan is facing fresh scrutiny over his previous claims about grooming gangs in London after the Met Police identified more than 4,000 potential child sexual exploitation cases that could now be reopened… Roughly one in three cases [of 12,000] are now flagged for potential reinvestigation after police or the Crown Prosecution Service previously decided to take no further action.

And yet before the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee in 2025, Khan asserted, “My understanding from speaking to the police, and she will appreciate, I have done on a regular basis, is and I choose my words carefully for the reasons she will understand there are no reported cases and also no indication of the grooming gangs that she is concerned about in London.” It is likely his critics who accused him of a cover-up were correct. Notably, on Saturday, a Somali-born man drove a car into a crowd in London. The overwhelming majority of victim-based crimes in the UK do not result in a charge. On the other hand, thousands of British citizens have ended up in handcuffs for social media posts.

Great Britain has become, or at least is well on the way to becoming, a sharia state. Many of the British people are opposed to it and awake to the danger, but unfortunately, just as in many states here in the U.S., the communists in charge of the government are willing to take many tyrannical measures to ensure they never lose power. And it is even more difficult to change leadership in a country with a parliamentary system as Britain has. The UK is held captive thanks to suicidal woke idiots and fundamentalist Muslims.

Read more …

Women or children, our societies make a mess of protecting both. There is a price to pay for that.

• Becerra Details an ‘Assembly Line’ for Migrant Children (Salgado)

Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is calling attention to allegedly leaked audio of his Democrat opponent and former Biden HHS secretary urging staff to traffic illegal alien kids the “way you do an assembly line.”


The clip features two unidentified women discussing the comments of Xavier Becerra, who as head of the Department of Health and Human Services under the previous administration oversaw a gargantuan network of unaccompanied migrant minors passed off to barely vetted sponsors. We now know that many of these sponsors were unrelated to the children and exploited them, sometimes for sexual purposes. The allegedly leaked audio sheds some light on Becerra’s attitude, as he saw these vulnerable children as a sort of product, not as individual humans. Hilton indicated he has more information about to become public.

Some of the HHS employees were so bothered by the exploitation and trafficking of the young kids that they filed a complaint letter against Becerra, per the clip.

The leaked audio is reportedly from an internal meeting where Becerra seemed to be railing against his staff for — as he perceived it — moving too slow in passing unaccompanied alien minors (UACs) along. If the audio is of Becerra and staff, it contains the acknowledgment that the kids could be in a trafficking situation, but that isn’t supposed to be important.

“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plant, he would have never become famous and rich,” the alleged recording of Becerra states. “This is not the way you do an assembly line …We need to get discharges up. Every time we have to go to the Hill [Congress] and explain why we’re spending so much money when most people are struggling to spend a little bit of money for the kids on a daily basis, we try to explain how we’re spending more than $1000 a day for kids who may not even have the legal right to be here? Not me.”

While we cannot absolutely confirm the authenticity of this shocking audio, we can find evidence of Becerra callously refusing to address evidence that his agency was placing children with pimps and strip clubs. That interchange with a congressman appears to have come from Becerra’s 2024 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity regarding UACs.

Rep. Thomas Tiffany (R-Wis.) cited evidence of trafficking in HHS’s UAC pipeline. “One of the little girls was forced into prostitution by someone who claimed to be her aunt, because there [were] no checks being done… It revealed that children were pimped out by their aunt, which it turns out the aunt wasn’t even related to the child’s so-called aunt. Are you familiar with that story that was in there?” Tiffany asked.

Becerra stuttered in response, “There are a number of, uh, incidents that are reported in that, uh, that Florida report. Some of them I can probably recall better than others. Some of them I would challenge and dispute, but, uh, that one I don’t remember.” So Tiffany pressed, “And do you remember the teenage girl that was in a house with unknown men with no private bedroom for her?” And “Are you familiar with the sponsors that utilize a strip club in Jacksonville as an address for where this child, where a child should be settled?”

Becerra didn’t have a good defense. Because for him, the children were not vulnerable kids needing protection; they were merely part of his assembly line to further the mass migration policies of the Biden administration.

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“.. she chastised the majority for its “illogical interpretation” of the law and its “fixation” on the word “in.”

• The Supremes Help Ensure Border Security vs Liberal Justices (Von Spakovsky)

You really have to hand it to Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. When it comes to trying to stop lawful immigration enforcement, they are willing to twist the law and themselves like pretzels to please the open-borders crowd.


There really is no other way to read their dissents in the three important immigration cases decided by the Court in the last two weeks. Their dissents are also very revealing because they spend a great deal of time criticizing the policies in each case, apparently forgetting that they are not policymakers but judges tasked with one job: determining whether the policy implemented by the executive branch (whether they like it or not) is within the authority granted by the Constitution or federal law.

They abandoned that role in each of these cases. Mullin v. Al Otro Lando was an easy case to decide. During the Obama administration, the number of aliens mobbing ports of entry overwhelmed immigration agents. The administration put in a metering system that only allowed a certain number of aliens to be processed and to claim asylum. Other aliens were prevented from crossing the border and the Trump administration continued that system. The aliens remaining in Mexico sued claiming they were unlawfully prevented from entering the U.S. and still had a right to assert asylum. Unfortunately, some lower federal courts issued injunctions agreeing with them.

But as the six-member majority of the Supreme Court said on June 25, the statute providing aliens with the ability to claim asylum only applies to aliens “arriving in the United States.” It should be obvious to anyone with any common sense – which seems to exclude the three dissenters – that you don’t arrive “in” a location until you actually arrive in the location. The Court held that under the plain text of the statute and the ordinary, everyday meaning of arriving “in,” aliens still in Mexico can’t claim a right to enter the country and claim asylum because they never arrived “in” the U.S.

But in a dissent by Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, she chastised the majority for its “illogical interpretation” of the law and its “fixation” on the word “in.” She claimed the word “in” doesn’t really mean “in” and that anyone arriving on “our doorstep” is the same as being “in” the country. In addition to this illogical interpretation, she and her comrades spent much of their time discussing the supposedly terrible consequences of the majority’s decision, claiming it will cause “more people [to] die,” a totally outrageous claim that has no basis in fact.

But most importantly, the rightness or wrongness of the policy has absolutely nothing to do with the question that was before the Court. The issue was whether implementing this policy is within the authority of the administration under the language of the statute. It clearly is, something the three liberals refused to acknowledge.

Mullin v. Doe was a similarly easy case to decide, at least for the majority and anyone who can read plain English. In 1990, Congress gave the president, acting through the secretary of Homeland Security, the authority to provide temporary lawful status to aliens whose countries have been hit with natural disasters and other problems. Syrians were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 2012 and Haitians in 2010. The Trump administration ended TPS for both groups in 2025, but federal courts once again issued injunctions telling the president he couldn’t do that.

But the TPS status has specific language barring all judicial review of any determination to grant or end TPS. The Court’s six-member majority enforced this provision, concluding that it wipes out all claims of statutory violations (which the Syrians made) although it does not bar constitutional claims (which the Haitians made). The Court dissolved the injunctions against the termination of TPS for both the Syrians and the Haitians. .

Read more …

A full agenda before summer recess.

• Supreme Court Expected To Rule On Cook, Elections, And Trans Athletes (ZH)

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide in the coming days whether President Donald Trump can remove Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook from her post – an extraordinary step that would mark the first presidential firing of a Fed official since the central bank’s founding in 1913 and directly test the institution’s independence from political interference.


The justices, who hold a 6-3 conservative majority, signaled skepticism during January arguments toward Trump’s authority to oust Cook. The Federal Reserve Act requires that governors be removed only “for cause,” a term Congress left undefined and without procedural details. Trump cited unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud – which Cook has denied and called a pretext for her removal over monetary policy disagreements. Cook has remained in her role while the case proceeds. No president has attempted such a firing in the Fed’s more than century-long history.

This dispute is one of three pending cases examining the outer limits of presidential power under Trump. The others involve his removal of a Federal Trade Commission member and an executive order limiting birthright citizenship. The court has already delivered Trump victories in two immigration cases this week and has frequently sided with the administration in emergency rulings, though it rejected his sweeping tariffs in February.

Firing Federal Officials
The justices appeared ready during December arguments to uphold Trump’s firing of Democratic FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter over policy differences. Lower courts had ruled that Trump exceeded his authority. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Court to overturn the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which has protected heads of independent agencies from at-will removal. While the Court has narrowed that precedent in recent decades, it has stopped short of overruling it. Conservative justices have expressed sympathy for the view that statutory tenure protections encroach on the president’s constitutional powers. The Court previously allowed Trump to remove Slaughter while the case continues.

Election-Related Cases
Two election disputes remain as Republicans seek to retain congressional control in the November midterms. During March arguments, conservative justices expressed skepticism toward a Mississippi law – challenged by Republicans and supported by the Trump administration – that permits mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted if received up to five business days later. A lower court invalidated the provision. A ruling striking down the law could encourage stricter voting rules nationwide.

Trump issued an executive order in March restricting mail-in ballots across the country, but a federal judge in Boston blocked its implementation on Thursday. In December, the Court heard a Republican-led challenge – involving Vice President JD Vance – to federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates. Some conservative justices appeared open to the First Amendment arguments against the restrictions, while the liberal justices seemed inclined to preserve them. A lower court had upheld the limits.

Transgender Athletes
In January arguments, the conservative majority signaled it is prepared to uphold laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools and universities. The states argue the measures protect fair competition for women and girls; critics see them as part of broader efforts to restrict transgender rights.

Geofence Warrants
The Court also heard April arguments in a Virginia case examining whether law enforcement’s use of “geofence” warrants – which sweep up cellphone location data from areas near crime scenes to identify potential suspects – violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. The Supreme Court’s term, which began in October, typically ends in late June or early July. With seven cases still unresolved and the next round of decisions expected Monday, the coming days will bring clarity on these high-stakes disputes.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/cb_doge/status/2071050540096573634?s=20 https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2071362283356463168?s=20 https://twitter.com/DiogenisSinopis/status/2070949496138199462?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 2 2026

May 022026
 
 May 2, 2026  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The girl with the wine glass (Dame en twee heren) 1659


• Trump Issues Letter Rejecting Congressional Oversight For War (ZH)
• Trump’s ‘Assurances’ To Americans as GOP Members Start to Scramble (ZH)
• Iran’s Brutal Test Of Endurance (ZH)
• Indictment-O-Rama (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Comey Memos and the Appointment of Robert Mueller (CTH)
• Another DOJ Investigative Case Against James Comey Happening in Virgina (CTH)
• James Comey Knew EXACTLY What ‘86 47’ Meant (Robert Spencer)
• New Footage of Trump Assassination Attempt Released (Matt Margolis)
• The Real Reason the Democrats Hate President Trump’s Ballroom (Tim O’Brien)
• Remember That Half the Country Once Hated Lincoln (Stephen Kruiser)
• House Ends 76-Day Shutdown (Sarah Anderson)
• Hakeem Jeffries Denounces the Supreme Court as “Illegitimate” (Turley)

 


 

https://twitter.com/BoLoudon/status/2049927123083657272?s=20

 


 


Does a president need to ask permission for a ceasefire?

• Trump Issues Letter Rejecting Congressional Oversight For War (ZH)

Trump Letter: Doesn’t Need Congressional Approval As Ceasefire Has ‘Terminated’ Conflict


In an acknowledgement that his anti-Iran Operation Epic Fury has indeed hit 60 days, President Trump has issued a formal letter to Congress which argues he does not need their authorization for war. He is arguing the current ceasefire has in effect ‘terminated’ the conflict. Below are his main points via NBC [emphasis by ZH]:

• “On April 7, 2026, I ordered a two-week ceasefire. The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote in the letters, one of which went to the House and one of which went to the Senate.

• “Despite the success of United States operations against the Iranian regime and continued efforts to secure a lasting peace, the threat posed by Iran to the United States and our Armed Forces remains significant,” the president added in the letter, promising to keep congressional leaders updated on further developments in Iran.

• “I have and will continue to direct United States Armed Forces consistent with my responsibilities and pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive,” the president wrote in his letter.

In fresh Friday words to reporters, President Trump says he is not satisfied with the latest proposal from Iran. He further stated that these negotiations “are not getting there right now.”

His main points via Newsquawk:
• Iran wants a deal, but i am not satisfied.
• Iran has no military left.
• Talks with Iran are by phone.
• Made strides in talks with Iran.
• Not sure we are going to get to a deal.
• Not happy with Italy or Spain on Iran.
• Iran leaders do not get along with each other.

Bessent Lists 5 Pressures Iranian ‘Rats’ Facing
US Treasury Secretary Bessent takes to X on Friday to again call Iranian leaders “rats” – which won’t bode well for restarting stalled negotiations. He’s busy boasting on the economic damage unleashed by the ongoing US naval blockade, writing: “It is very difficult for rats in a sewer pipe to know what’s going on in the outside world. Some color for the Iranian Leadership as they literally sit in the dark.” He then lists out the following:

1. The United States has complete control of the Strait of Hormuz.

2. There is a hard currency, i.e. U.S. dollar, shortage.

3. Food and gasoline rationing are in place.

4. The entire international community has turned against you.

5. The BLOCKADE will continue, until there is pre-February 27 Freedom of Navigation.

He also shared a WSJ article proclaiming that the Iranians have ‘failed’ to roll back the US military blockade, and that supposedly the clock is ticking on the government’s ability to rule…

Israel To Renew Bombing if Nuclear Issue Not Dealt With
The Netanyahu government is signaling that it will restart the bombing campaign if the nuclear issue is not resolved. It should also not be forgotten that ‘denuclearizing’ Iran by force has been a multi-decade priority of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hardliners of Israel. These are the latest warnings out of the Israeli military establishment on Friday: An Israeli military official says that if Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% is not removed from the Islamic Republic, the entire latest war will be considered “one big failure.” Israeli officials have said that this stockpile is sufficient for 11 nuclear bombs.

And the Times of Israel underscores further, “The senior officer says that if, as part of negotiations between the United States and Iran, no agreement is reached to remove the uranium stockpile and halt enrichment in the country, the achievements in the 40 days of fighting will have been for nothing.” So this means that “If the nuclear objective is not achieved, then everything we did in Iran will be one big failure. The evil Iranian regime can pounce on the nuclear program,” the official emphasized. And then the threat…

The officer adds that “if the uranium is removed from Iran through diplomatic means, we have done our part.” However, if that does not happen, Israel would need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve the objective, they say. Already Israel has demonstrated its immense influence over the decision to go to war in the first place.

Read more …

Susan Collins (R-Maine) votes with Adam Schiff. Dump her!

• Trump’s ‘Assurances’ To Americans as GOP Members Start to Scramble (ZH)

The Iran war and Hormuz closure remains a game of geopolitical chicken, where each side believes it can inflict more pain on the other while being the one to outlast. But Iran, while being subject to a years long sanctions regimen and recent large-scale US-Israeli bombing campaign, does not operation on 4-year and 2-year election cycles. With next fall’s midterms staring Congressional Republicans in the face, there this increasingly uncomfortable trend: The average price of one gallon (3.8 litres) of gasoline in the United States has reached $4.30, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), up from less than $3 before the February 28 start of the US-Israel war on Iran.


President Trump addressed this in fielding questions in the Oval Office on Thursday,telling reporters that gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as the Iran war ended. “The [price of] gasoline and the oil will go down rapidly once the war’s over,” he stated confidently – “like a rock,” he added.

However, the war is about to hit 60-days on Friday and America’s overall strategy and timeline remains anything but clear. Instead, Trump is insisting the Iranians have “nothing” in terms of a military, and yet the crisis in global energy remains, and Operation Epic Fury is still on, the extended uneasy ceasefire notwithstanding…

Meanwhile, an interesting argument (below) from Hegseth this week, as Congress is supposed to vote on a formal war authorization once any foreign conflict hits the 60-day mark, per US law. And the first Republican Senator has ‘switched’ and broken ranks with GOP leaders on Trump’s Iran war and Congressional authorization: Centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Thursday broke ranks with Republican leaders and most GOP colleagues by voting for a war powers resolution sponsored by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to halt military actions against Iran, the first Republican senator to change her position on curtailing President Trump’s military authority.

Rand was over there getting lonely defending the Constitution, but the longer the Iran conflict persists – and Americans feel it at the pump – the more Republican members will likely peel off: Collins joined Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in voting to advance a resolution to withdraw U.S. military forces from the conflict with Iran unless Congress votes to authorize the use of force. She and Paul voted with most Democrats for a motion to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but it still failed by a vote of 47 to 50. It marked the sixth time that Senate Republicans have defeated a resolution under the 1973 War Powers Act to halt further military operations against Iran.

Amid chatter that Israel could be preparing for renewed attacks on Iran, and as Trump is said to be mulling more limited strikes – but while at the same time the USS Gerald R Ford is returning to the United States after a record deployment – Iran is signaling it is ready for a long war and can endure the US naval blockade for a long time to come. However, there are also unconfirmed reports out of Pakistan that another draft peace proposal could be presented by Tehran as soon as this weekend. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has newly said Thursday the blockade is effectively an “extension of military operations” by Washington, despite the extended ceasefire declared by Trump.

Also on Thursday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that the US administration gameplan seems to be to drive Iran into economic ruin, in hopes of triggering some kind of uprising toward regime change. But this was the exact same ‘prediction’ and gameplan in the opening days of the war – which never materialized. One the one hand his below message on X seems to gloat over imposing widescale misery over the bombed-out country, while on the other claiming to help and support the Iranian people, saying they “deserve a new era”.

As we reported earlier, Iran’s currency on Wednesday collapsed to a record low, plunging to 1.8 million rial per dollar amid the prolonged US-Israel war and uneasy ceasefire, also as surging global energy prices hit the economy. The rial began sliding sharply two days prior to this after weeks of artificial stability. In the early phase of the war that kicked off on February 28, the currency held steady due to a near-total halt in imports and limited market activity.

“We think the price was worth it” vibes…

Read more …

The hardship will be dumped upon the people. Don’t let’s forget they killed some 40.000 of their own people even before the US got involved.

• Iran’s Brutal Test Of Endurance (ZH)

Iran’s economy is undergoing one of the most brutal stress tests in its modern history. Official annual inflation has surged to 50% according to central bank figures released shortly after the ceasefire, while the year-on-year rate reached as high as 67% through mid-April, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rial has crashed to a record low of 1.8 million to the dollar, roughly two million workers have lost their jobs, and the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues to throttle the country’s oil exports and critical imports.


Reconstruction costs from bombed infrastructure are estimated near $270 billion – alarmingly close to the country’s entire annual GDP of roughly $341 billion last year. What was already a sanctions-battered, mismanaged economy now confronts a grinding “no war, no peace” stalemate. Tehran is wagering that it can hunker down and endure a protracted war – allowing it to outlast American pressure. The early data and on-the-ground reality suggest that wager is being tested to its limits.

The human impact is immediate and visible in everyday Tehran life. A 56-year-old housewife described to Najmeh Bozorgmehr of the Financial Times how a simple block of cheese rose from 5.2 million rials to 6.7 million rials (about $5.09) in a single week. Comparable jumps have struck rice, eggs, chicken, red meat, and other staples. A popular Peugeot 207 has climbed from 18 billion rials to 25 billion since the conflict began, while officials are preparing to authorize a 40 percent increase in government-mandated cement prices.

The cost of living has soared, with the annual inflation rate reaching 67% in the month through mid-April from the same period a year earlier, according to Iran’s central bank. The subsidized price of red meat, which was mostly imported through sea routes, has gone up to the equivalent of around $3.60 a pound, beyond the reach of most in a country where the minimum wage is around $130 a month. -WSJ

Business consultant Siamak Ghassemi publicly advised Iranians that anything short of a near-doubling of wages would fail to offset the cost-of-living explosion. One small petrochemical-dependent factory outside the capital has already dismissed nearly a third of its workforce. A clothing business owner reported recent costs running 150 percent above sales, bluntly concluding, “This is not sustainable.”

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“Pam Bondi’s era —which paved the way by restructuring the DOJ and navigating the Epstein disclosures— is over. We’re in the Blanche era now.”—Jeff Childers

Indict-O-Rama rolls lightly off the tomgue. Indictment-O-Rama sounds constructed.

• Indictment-O-Rama (James Howard Kunstler)

You might be pleased to know that today’s May Day street actions — rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, demonstrations, and a broad economic blackout (”No Work, No School, No Shopping”) — planned and coordinated by hundreds of activist orgs, is styling itself as “Workers Over Billionaires.”


How do they figure that, exactly, considering the Lefty-left Resistance movement is entirely funded by. . . billionaires? You know. . . George and Alex Soros (the Open Society Foundations), Neville Roy Singham (the People’s Forum, Code Pink), Hansjörg Wyss (the Wyss Foundation), Reid Hoffman (Forward Majority Action, Crowdpac), Sir Chris Hohn (the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation), Alan Parker (Arabella Advisors, Environmental Law Institute) . . . .

Some 3,000-plus actions are planned today in cities all over the country. Last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries framed the Lefty-left’s strategy as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” Will the party’s foot soldiers do his bidding and get frisky out on the streets today. . . a little lootin’ perhaps. . . a fire here and there? Is May Day, as promised by its sponsors, the gateway into another Summer of Love (mostly peaceful riots)?

We’ll have an idea by day’s end. Meanwhile, the Lefty-left’s business-class lounge, the Democratic Party, has suddenly caught a case of the jim-jams over this week’s 6-3 SCOTUS ruling on the racial gerrymandering of Congressional districts, which is: no more snake-shaped districts through the bayous, cotton fields, pine Islands, palmetto scrubs, and Cypress hammocks of deepest Dixieland for the purpose of creating majority-black seats. Observers forecast the loss of up to nineteen Democratic House members going into the 2028 election. It’s not clear how the Party’s billionaires might be able to fix this.

Also, this week, interesting developments in the Lefty-left’s retirement clubhouse. The law (the DOJ’s Eastern District of North Carolina) finally caught up with Jim Comey’s prank of one year ago when he posted on Instagram a curious arrangement of seashells on a Carolina beach saying “86 47.” The cryptic message — “cool shell formation,” Mr. Comey said in the caption — was universally understood to mean get rid of the forty-seventh POTUS, Donald Trump. Because the former FBI Director was well-versed in mob lingo from prosecuting gangsters, it appears he knew exactly what the code stands for: the instruction to go whack somebody. Hence, the question: was Mr. Comey issuing such an instruction to the Lefty-left rank and file?

Mr. Comey suddenly finds himself in a sort of brand-new crossfire hurricane. Turns out, an investigation (said to be at the “pre grand jury stage”) was launched lately in the DOJ’s Eastern District of Virginia concerning Mr. Comey’s use of a “cut-out” messenger, Columbia U professor and BFF Daniel Richman, for leaking a confidential conversation with President Trump to reporter Michael Schmidt of The New York Times back in 2017. This was Mr. Comey’s notorious disclosure in a Trump Tower consultation with the new president that a video existed of Russian whores peeing on a bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel for Mr. Trump’s amusement. It was, of course, a kick-off for the FBI’s totally fake RussiaGate campaign.

It’s also widely expected that the former FBI Director will be one of the many former officials fingered in the DOJ’s RICO case out of the Southern District of Florida. The grand jury is already seated and hearing the evidence in a Fort Pierce federal courthouse. That case is predicated on the chain of legal attacks against Mr. Trump, running back a decade, amounting to an ongoing coup, a comprehensive campaign of legalistic chicanery disguised as legality designed to overthrow the chief executive.

Observers have started trying to pre-bunk the seashell case, saying there are six ways to Sunday that Mr. Comey can explain it away. Don’t be so sure about that. Mainly, what the DOJ has to demonstrate is Mr. Comey’s mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”), a fundamental concept in criminal law that refers to the mental state or intention a person must have when committing a nefarious act, in order to be held criminally liable. Expect to see bales of written evidence on that.

The beauty of the seashell case is this: It’s quite straightforward and uncomplicated. There might be little room for Mr. Comey’s lawyers to create procedural delays, such as dragging out discovery issues. Which means that in this case Mr. Comey will get exactly the speedy trial that the US Constitution calls for. . . meaning, the courtroom showdown could take place before the midterm election.

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It’s all one big anti-Trump soup.

• The Comey Memos and the Appointment of Robert Mueller (CTH)

I apologize for the deep weed details, but this stuff will soon become critical. If James Comey is indicted for leaking the “Comey memos” suddenly the door opens wide to see how the Robert Mueller appointment was a coordinated ongoing ‘conspiracy’ effort to target Donald Trump. Back in June 2017 CNN (and other media) filed a FOIA suit to gain the Comey memos. As the lawsuit progressed through a lengthy battle -where the Mueller team did not want to turn over those memos- Mueller’s lead FBI agent, David Archey, made sworn declarations to the court. Those statements became known as the “Archey Declarations”. Inside those declarations agent Archey provided a specific outline of the FBI and the memos.


There are two sets of documents that outline a very specific picture. Robert Mueller’s lead FBI Agent David Archey made sworn declarations to the court. However, at the time of his sworn statement, Archey did not have knowledge of an inside FBI “whistleblower” who provided information to DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. There is a distinct conflict within the IG Horowitz report on James Comey (and memos) [Available Here] and the David Archey declarations. However, beyond the conflict there’s an even more alarming picture of how Robert Mueller was deployed, when all the information is overlaid in a timeline. A very clear picture emerges; very clear.

Note the date: Agent Archey states the “investigative team” came into full possession of the Comey memos: “on or by May 12th, 2017,”…

The “investigative team” would be Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and then James Baker as lead counsel for the group. The “Director’s staff” would be James Rybicki, who is identified by Archey as having “maintained” possession of the memos. This “small group”, particularly Comey’s Chief of Staff, James Rybicki, is the center of the team. This team is also confirmed by the IG Horowitz report. This team had the memos on May 12th, 2017.

Now we move into the aspect where the motives and ideology become clear as we look at the IG custodial record of the memos, as outlined by the Supervisory Special Agent in charge of Comey’s documents within the IG report, compared to the Archey declarations.The FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in charge of Comey’s document retrieval is the “whistleblower” who eventually went to the IG. I’ll explain why and how below; and to make understanding easier we shall use “SSA Whistleblower” to describe him.On May 10th, the Comey memos were not in Comey’s office [per IG report]. At the time of the search and review of Comey’s office there were no hard copies found by SSA Whistleblower.

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We should have 100 of these cases. So people can read every day what a piece of crap he is.

• Another DOJ Investigative Case Against James Comey Happening in Virgina (CTH)

In the first case against James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress, there was no dismissal; instead, the judge rejected US Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s involvement. After that, the statute of limitations ran out. However, if the report below is accurate, this would represent the third currently active investigation against former FBI Director James Comey, and Lindsey Halligan might get the last laugh.


The first investigative notice to Comey was in mid-March from the Sunshine State. Essentially the ‘conspiracy case’ being reviewed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida The second investigative case was in North Carolina, where a grand jury released an indictment for threats against President Trump. Now, Bloomberg is reporting on a third investigation against Comey for leaking classified documents to his friend and special government employee, Daniel Richman.

BLOOMBERG – […] The investigation is tied to his dissemination of documents to Columbia University Law Professor Daniel Richman, the individuals added. If successful, it would be the Trump DOJ’s third time indicting Comey since last fall. […] It hasn’t been decided if the department will present an indictment to a grand jury in Eastern Virginia, where Comey resides, or if the case could be pursued in a different location—such as in Richman’s home of New York. It doesn’t really matter whether New York or the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), either location would be the third state where the disgraced former FBI Director Comey would have to defend himself. Again, I remind everyone of ‘pressure points’ in Lawfare.

If the EDVA/NY case proceeds it is based around James Comey leaking his memos to his friend Daniel Richman. In addition to being a close personal friend to James Comey, Daniel Richman is part of the Lawfare network and close friends with Benjamin Wittes, another member of Comey’s tribe. The evidence of this leaking operation is solid, very solid. The only defense James Comey holds in this matter is to claim his memos were not ‘classified’ material.

In fact, several months ago I was told the reason Comey was not yet indicted was due to an internal debate within the DOJ as to the classification status of the Comey memos. To wit I replied, “there is a profound irony in this question the DOJ is asking itself.” You see, in the Mar-a-Lago documents case Jack Smith appealed the ‘classification’ ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon when she appointed a “Special Master” to review the documents and determine the classification status.

The DOJ/FBI Special Counsel, previously said to the Florida court they would not reveal the content of the Mar-a-Lago document information because it was “classified” under “national security” grounds. You might remember President Trump’s legal position was to make the content public because Trump said there was no classified material.To reconcile the issue, during discovery phase Florida Judge Cannon appointed a Special Master to review the “classified” documents. The FBI and Jack Smith balked at the demand and filed an appeal with the 11th Circuit to keep the Trump defense from reviewing what Jack Smith said were “documents marked classified.”

Smith didn’t want the documents made public or revealed to President Trump, so the DOJ/FBI position was that the documents were too sensitive (TSCI) with “national security” implications. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the “classification status” of the Mar-a-Lago documents was whatever the national security apparatus of the federal government (DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community) said it was. The judicial branch could not interfere in the classification status applied by the executive branch.

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“.. the line between speech and crime is – it should be clear, but it’s fuzzy.”

• James Comey Knew EXACTLY What ‘86 47’ Meant (Robert Spencer)

James Comey, former FBI director, former deputy attorney general, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is a friend of presidents and kings, an admired figure who presents himself as a voice of reason and morality, and a pillar of the Washington establishment — or, as the Mafia would put it, a made guy. Surely he would never do something so lawless and undemocratic as threaten the president of the United States, would he?


That’s what Comey contends in response to charges that he was issuing a veiled threat to the president when he posted on his Instagram account a photo of seashells arranged to say “86 47.” “86” is a well-known expression for getting rid of someone, and whether or not Comey meant that Trump should be gotten rid of by assassination, it was an extraordinarily irresponsible statement for him to make at a time when leftist calls for violence against Trump and his supporters are distressingly common.

Those calls have now resulted in three assassination attempts against Trump, and no one knows how many more there will be, but in this climate, only a fool would say that the president will finish out his term without any more attempts to kill him. Comey took the photo down on the same day that he posted it, and explained: “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”

However, the idea that the former director of the FBI actually “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. That is clear from a potboiler crime novel, FDR Drive, that Comey wrote, or that was more likely ghostwritten for him.

In an unwittingly revealing May 2025 interview with NPR to plug the book, Comey explained that his novel was “about a right-wing podcaster who is trying to motivate his followers to engage in acts of violence against the targets of his vitriol. And it’s about my protagonist, Nora Carleton, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, trying to figure out, how do we stop the violence? And is there a way to hold this podcaster criminally accountable for what he clearly knows he’s doing? And that’s the trick because the line between speech and crime is – it should be clear, but it’s fuzzy.”

All right. So here’s the intrepid FBI director explaining that he wrote a book about a “right-wing podcaster” (after all, who else do leftists think is evil these days?) who “is trying to motivate his followers to engage in acts of violence against the targets of his vitriol,” but he is apparently doing so in a veiled manner, because Comey adds that “he clearly knows” what he’s doing. Comey’s novel, he says, is all about “the line between speech and crime.”

And then Comey would have us believe that he posted a photo on his Instagram account that many of his followers would understand as a call to engage in an act of violence against the target of his vitriol, but that poor, naïve Comey himself didn’t know what he was doing? Sell me a bridge while you’re at it, why doncha?

This becomes all the clearer when the NPR interviewer asks Comey about the “line between free speech and violent incitement and domestic terrorism, ideologically motivated violence,” and Comey says he has had to “grapple with that very issue throughout my career.” Yet he expects us to believe that he didn’t pause to ponder even for a moment whether posting “86 47” might constitute violent incitement and domestic terrorism.

That’s what he’s insisting: “I took a picture and posted it ’cause I thought it was a clever political thing. Never occurred to me that someone would try to say it was associated with violence. I actually still don’t see that. But I took it down because I don’t want – I mean, this is my Instagram account, for God’s sakes. I don’t want anything on there to be associated with violence, even if I don’t get it.” And he didn’t think anyone else would get it, either: “Yeah, I’m not worried, ‘cause there’s no world in which this is an actual threat.”

Of course. So here is a guy who published a novel about veiled calls to violence, claiming that he didn’t know what he posted was a veiled call to violence, despite the fact that it’s common parlance. Sure, Comey. I’ll bet you would still insist you were acting in good faith regarding the Russia hoax, too.

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“The video also includes footage from the day before the attack. Allen can be seen walking the same corridor where the shooting would later occur ..”

• New Footage of Trump Assassination Attempt Released (Matt Margolis)

The friendly fire theory just got buried — on video. For days, questions swirled about whether a Secret Service agent wounded at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had actually been hit by fellow agents in the chaos. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro put that narrative to rest Thursday night. Pirro released new, high-quality security video from the Washington Hilton Hotel showing 31-year-old Cole Allen charging through a Secret Service checkpoint during the April 25 dinner, where President Trump was scheduled to speak. The footage, she noted, had already been submitted to U.S. District Court.


“Today, we are releasing video already provided to U.S. District Court showing Cole Allen shoot a U.S. Secret Service officer during his attempt to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Pirro said in her X post. “There is no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.”

The new video is a significant upgrade from the grainy footage that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. When slowed to 35% speed, it captures something the earlier clips couldn’t clearly show — Allen, armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, opening fire at close range on a Secret Service agent as he blows past the magnetometer. Multiple agents return fire almost simultaneously. The wounded agent took buckshot to the chest but was protected by his bulletproof vest.

The video also includes footage from the day before the attack. Allen can be seen walking the same corridor where the shooting would later occur, stopping in the hotel gym to chat with an attendant, and studying the layout. Prosecutors say this is part of a weeks-long pattern of deliberate planning — Allen allegedly researched the event, booked his hotel room nearly a month out, tracked Trump’s schedule in real time on the day of the attack, and even watched a live broadcast of the president’s arrival moments before making his move.

NBC News has more: Investigators believe the man charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump shot a Secret Service officer who was wearing a ballistic vest, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case. Investigators have determined that the Secret Service Uniformed Division officer was not struck by friendly fire from another member of law enforcement, the sources told NBC News on Wednesday. […]

The officer, who was taken to a hospital, was released over the weekend. Allen was charged with discharging a weapon but has not been formally accused of assaulting a federal officer. A law enforcement source said work continues analyzing Allen’s devices, including desktop and laptop computers from his California home, as well as his phone, a laptop and hard drives recovered from his guest room at the Washington Hilton hotel. While Allen already faces federal charges of attempted assassination, prosecutors have signaled that additional charges may follow as the investigation continues.

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Because it’s Trump’s Ballroom

• The Real Reason the Democrats Hate President Trump’s Ballroom (Tim O’Brien)

In the grand scheme of things, a White House ballroom seems to be too trivial a thing to create the level of controversy this one has. There are many reasons the Democrats are attacking the project, but there is only one reason that drives all the hate you’ve been seeing. Sure, the preservationists might say the new ballroom is not in keeping with the way the White House has been designed and carefully modified over the years. Others might take issue with its look, saying it’s too oversized and dwarfs the main building. The aesthetics don’t work for them. Still others say it’s about the money—that taxpayers don’t need to spend a single penny on a project that was never needed in the first place.


These are all fair opinions if held sincerely, but the Democrats are never sincere, so when they express these concerns, it’s all just noise to hide the real reason they despise the idea of President Donald Trump building a new ballroom at the White House. They hate the ballroom because Trump is building it, and once it’s complete, it will be a lasting legacy of the 45th and 47th president, even if he never steps foot in it as president. It’s the Trump ballroom, and it will always be known as just that.That is why the Washington Post, the newspaper that brought you the Watergate investigation, is devoting as much ink and resources to a ballroom story as it did to make “Woodward and Bernstein” household names.

That Washington Post pull quote is pure propaganda. Sure, no one likes waiting in line, but they still have to do that no matter the size of the room. And no one likes going to a White House state dinner and then being crammed in so tight that they feel like they’re sitting in coach in a Spirit Airlines seat, either. Suppose a Democrat takes the presidency two, six or 10 years from now. They can try to erase Trump’s name from the project. They can rename it the Michelle Obama Dance Room and Aerobics Studio, the Lenin Grand Hall, or the Mamdani Mosque. It won’t matter. Everyone will still know it as the Trump ballroom, because it was Trump’s idea and he built it.

And that’s what bothers the Democrats most. Trump gets the last word and the last laugh. Trump has made many good arguments for building the ballroom. It’s embarrassing to be the world’s foremost superpower and be forced to erect tents on the White House lawn to hold events. As Trump noted immediately after the latest attempt on his life, a White House ballroom would provide necessary security for many events the president hosts or attends, which, for current logistical reasons, must take place off-site. By the way, the photo of Princess Diana and John Travolta below was taken in the White House East Wing entranceway, and it could only accommodate 150 people standing.

One of the funny things about the Democrat campaign against the ballroom in the wake of the latest assassination attempt on Trump is that many leftists are pointing out that the Washington Hilton, which hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, has the capacity for over 2,600 attendees, while the planned White House ballroom is designed to hold 650–1,000, and so they say the new ballroom is too small.

At the same time, they say the new ballroom is too big and will overpower the main house.

So, which is it: too small or too big? This is how you know how unserious the Democrats are when it comes to the ballroom. They mean nothing of what they say. All they know is that if Trump is doing it, they’re against it. And they’re willing to go to the wall to defeat it. But the truth is, Trump is several steps ahead of them. The project is well underway. The East Wing is demolished. The project must be finished now, no matter how much negativity the left tries to attach to it. F

rom a public relations and a political standpoint, that’s really all the left is trying to do. It’s the same thing they have been doing to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the same as what they did during those “summer of love” riots back in 2020. They start the chaos. Their billionaire funders pay for the chaos and orchestrate it, and they blame Trump for making them do it. If you want the chaos to stop, you have to get rid of Trump. It’s classic Democrat blackmail.

Since they can’t stop construction of the new ballroom in the end, they want to make enough of a mess of it so they can say that Trump made the mess. Then their narrative will be that they had to clean up after him.mIronically, the more they fight Trump on this, the more closely the ballroom will be associated with his name for decades or longer. Since the ballroom will be a very nice feature, that will only help Trump in a legacy sense. In the end, there will be a big, beautiful White House ballroom one day soon enough. It will be known as the Trump ballroom. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

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“President Trump is on the right side of history. He knows it. We know it. Now they just have to keep him safe. ”

• Remember That Half the Country Once Hated Lincoln (Stephen Kruiser)

Oh, the emotions in the United States of America here in the Year of Our Lord 2026! There’s despair. There’s anger. There’s…well, there’s mostly anger. Heck, I tend to be dead inside and the partisan political acrimony has even been getting to me. In a recent VIP column, I wrote that I was taking a brief break from my workday habit of perusing the Opinion sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post because I’m starting to worry about that kind of crazy being contagious.


That followed a week or two of me venting in various ways about the state of things in American politics. Then I remembered something very important: I’m rather enjoying President Trump’s second term. Seeing the Democrats rend their garments over everything that he does isn’t something I should let get me frustrated. It’s kind of a schadenfreude-filled bonus.

As I began to return to my typical Zen-like state, I decided it would be fun to trigger the lefties by writing a column that not only likened President Trump to President Abraham Lincoln, but likened today’s Democrats to the seditious secessionists (say that three times fast) of the Civil War era. I know I’m not the first conservative pundit to do this. Honestly, I’m surprised at how long it took me to get around to it. I have a lot of lefty trolls and a kajillion prog followers on X; I really should be thinking of triggering them more often.

Even though the circumstances are obviously different, finding parallels between what’s happening now and the America of the 1860s isn’t difficult for conservatives, mostly because we’ve all read history books. I am in no way saying that things are as severe right now — families aren’t killing each other from opposite sides of a war. I just can’t help but think that there are some similarities between the political climate then and now.

Today’s Democrats may not want to secede from the Union in the way that the South did back in the day. They’re far more insidious. The progressive dream that drives modern Dems involves the absolute shredding of any parts of the Constitution that pertain to real liberty. Free speech as we know it will be gone. Gun rights will be gone. Due process? See ya. Goodbye Electoral College, hello every president being elected by California, New York, and Illinois. The execrable 16th Amendment will, of course, be safe.

As I have written many times, they will still be calling it the United States of America, but it won’t resemble the country that we love. True, it’s not secession, but they’re still trying to break up the country in a different way. Now considered the greatest president in American history, Abraham Lincoln was unpopular with a lot of people when he was in office. See if this sounds familiar: during the presidential election of 1864, Lincoln faced intra-party opposition from Republicans who were dissatisfied with his handling of the war. The GOP has had its whiny turncoat problem since its earliest days.

While the Southerners pretended they had a new country, they were all still Americans in the eyes of Lincoln and the Unionists. Because they were. A note for the pedants out there: I know that the Southern states didn’t really make up half the population. I’m an opinion writer, not a journalist, and I sometimes take creative license to make a headline fit. Whatever the exact number, quite a lot of people had Lincoln Derangement Syndrome. You all get the sentiment, though.

When we are talking about support for a president, we’re never really considering the entire population anyway, just the electorate. Right now, a good chunk of that electorate really, really, loathes President Trump. The amazing thing about this second term is that he is not getting distracted by that at all. That’s one of the reasons that the Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers are getting more unhinged by the minute. They’re still spitting nails because they couldn’t put him in jail in 2023 or 2024.

President Trump shares an important quality with President Lincoln: resolve. We can throw vision in there for good measure as well. Both are essential for a leader in troubled times. We may not be at war with each other like we were in the 1860s, but these are most definitely troubled times. Once again, the trouble is coming from the people who are trying to destroy the Republic and are consumed with hatred for the president who is fighting to preserve it. President Trump is on the right side of history. He knows it. We know it. Now they just have to keep him safe.

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Does anyone still wonder why?

• House Ends 76-Day Shutdown (Sarah Anderson)

It only took 76 days.


On Thursday, the United States House of Representatives unanimously approved a Senate-passed bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will soon end the shutdown that began on February 14 — the longest partial government shutdown in the history of the country. All it needs now is for Donald Trump to sign it into law.

The chamber approved the bill via voice vote and with “little fanfare,” according to CBS. It’s important to note that it does not fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). However, Republicans advanced a separate budget reconciliation package that will provide those agencies with funding for the next three years using only GOP votes. The shutdown only impacted DHS, including critical agencies like the TSA, Coast Guard (civilians), FEMA, Secret Service, USCIS, CISA, ICE, CBP, and more, leaving many of them struggling to pay employees.

Tens of thousands were furloughed, and many worked with delayed pay. Others quit. The shutdown led to long security lines at airports, as well as unpaid bills, delayed contracts, and cyber planning gaps, according to the White House. Shortly before the vote, we learned that active-duty Coast Guard members were using flashlights to see because they couldn’t pay their electric bills. Some were going into debt because they were not receiving payments for their reassignment moves. They were putting money on credit cards and taking out loans. We also had to cancel numerous national security exercises.

The shutdown was triggered by the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by Border Patrol agents in Minnesota earlier this year. Democrats in Congress refused to fund DHS until Republicans agreed to new oversight rules and restrictions on border agents. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson calls it a win for Republicans.

“We got the budget resolution passed. This is very, very important because that will ensure that border security and immigration enforcement will continue today and well into the future, despite Democrat attempts to re-open our borders and protect criminal illegal aliens from removal. The net result of passing our reconciliation bill is that ICE and CBP are funded for three years, and Democrats got absolutely nothing for their political charade and shenanigans out of that.”

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Let ’em try.

• Hakeem Jeffries Denounces the Supreme Court as “Illegitimate” (Turley)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais took 36 pages to explain why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is about combating intentional racial discrimination, not allowing racial gerrymandering. However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrapped it up in one word: “illegitimate.” Jeffries was not speaking of the case, but the Court. The man who would become the next Speaker of the House if Democrats retake power in November has joined other radicals in denying the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court.


Just for the record, the Supreme Court did not strike down Section 2, but said that neither the law nor the Constitution allows legislators to manipulate district lines to guarantee that candidates of a particular race will be elected. It was written not to give any race an advantage, but to prevent a state from creating a disadvantage to voters based on their race. The Act prevents any State from intentionally drawing districts “to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” This is a matter upon which people of good faith can disagree. Many of the justices have been long opposed to racial criteria in areas ranging from college admissions to voting districts.

Chief Justice John Roberts stated it bluntly in 2006 that “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Like others, Roberts abhors racial discrimination but declared in another case that “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”You will find no such distinctions in much of the press where experts declared the death of equal voting laws in America. UCLA Law Professor Richard Hasen dispenses with any nuance and simply ran a Slate column titled “The Slaying of the Voting Rights Act by the Coward Alito.” For years, liberal law professors have been trashing conservative justices, including Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who called them “partisan hacks.”

However, the name-calling has mutated into a movement to scrap the Court or the Constitution, or both. Chemerinsky wrote a book recently titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.” There was, of course, no such movement during the decades with a liberal majority that set aside an array of long-standing cases. It was only when a stable conservative majority emerged that law professors declared the Court illegitimate or dangerous, with many calling for packing the Court with an instant liberal majority once Democrats retake power. I discuss some of these voices as the “new Jacobins” in my book Rage and the Republic, figures echoing the radical concepts or means used in France before what became known as “The Terror.”

Law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale have called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Last December, they published a column titled “It’s Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced.” They insist that citizens must be rid of this meddlesome court: “remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.”

Many Democrats realize that the public is rather attached to both the Constitution and its core institutions. That is why various Democratic politicians and pundits have been pledging to pack the Court once they are back in power. Some have suggested that, if they are going to change the political system and retain power, they will have to do it with the help of a compliant Court.

Democratic strategist James Carville stated matter-of-factly, “They’re going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That’s going to happen, people.” He added recently, “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” To do that, you must first delegitimate the Court. You must attack both the individual justices and the institution itself. You need true rage to get a people to tear apart the core institution of a Republic on its 250th anniversary. Now you have the next possible Speaker of the United States declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate because he disagrees with its interpretation of the law.

What these figures do not mention is that the majority of opinions by the Supreme Court are unanimous or nearly unanimous. A comparably few cases break along strict ideological 6-3 lines. Indeed, just last week, it was President Donald Trump who was denouncing the conservative justices as disloyal and weak for, again, ruling against his Administration. It is not the voting record nor the underlying interpretations that are motivating this campaign of delegitimation. It is power. Former Attorney General Eric Holder explained it most clearly recently in pushing the packing plan after the Democrats retake power: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power, if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”

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https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2049822208969617893?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2049961728314589207?s=20

 

 

 

 

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