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Debt Rattle July 30 2026

Jul 302026
 
 July 30, 2026  Posted by at 8:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Girl Before A Mirror 1932


• New US Attack Wave On Iran Begins In Overnight Hours(ZH)
• Rand Paul Delivers a Cinematic Indictment of Fauci’s COVID Legacy (Queen)
• Paul Confirms Plans For Fauci Contempt Vote (JTN)
• Hawley Exposed Fauci’s 5th Amendment Charade, Then the Takedown (Margolis)
• ’Who the F**k Do You Think You Were?’ Moreno Destroys Fauci (Margolis)
• Senate Fan Girls for Zelenskyy then Advances Russian Sanction Bill 86-12 (CTH)
• Britain Backs Ukraine With New Electronic Warfare Cooperation (RFE/RL)
• Trump Admin Asks SCOTUS To Revive Mail-In Voting Order Ahead Of Midterms (AmG)
• DOJ and Trump Ask Supreme Court to Review $83.3 Million Carroll Verdict (ET)
• Trump Urges SCOTUS To Overturn E. Jean Carroll’s $83M Defamation Verdict (CNN)
• CNN Trump Midrerms Poll (CNN)
• Welcome to Socialism’: A Clinton Hand’s Stark Warning About Mamdani (Green)
• The Mamdani Grocery Grift (Turley)
• Laura Loomer Says There’s No Nazi Problem In Ukraine. What She Didn’t See (RT)
• The End Of Freedom – The Last Breath Of A Dying Continent (Adams)

 


 

 


 

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2082500161914257556?s=20

 


 


Losing Zerohedge support?!

• New US Attack Wave On Iran Begins In Overnight Hours

The United States has begun a new round of airstrikes in Iran in the night time and early morning hours (local), according to a senior US official to Axios. The extent of the bombings, or whether they will be sustained, remains unclear: Trump “is in an escalatory mood” but is still contemplating “the depth of that response.”, A senior administration official says – WSJ. Trump is apparently making good on his earlier Wednesday threat: President Trump has told Fox News that he is “going to beat the fucking shit” out of Iran in response to their attack on US forces in Jordan overnight. Speaking to Trey Yingst, he added “we’ll be hitting them hard, they’re going to get a beating.”


There was heavy US refueler activity in regional skies just ahead of the strikes’ commencement – as well as unconfirmed reports of explosions at Riyadh’s international airport, but the cause has remained subject to speculation. But with each attack on Iran, its forces tend to respond in kind against Gulf countries hosting US assets and bases. It is going to be a long night for the region, especially while bracing for the IRGC’s inevitable response.

US is quite clearly stuck, in search of a strategy…

Details of Trump-Netanyahu Meeting at Oval Finally Emerging
After on Tuesday President Trump hosted both Zelensky and Netanyahu in the Oval Office there were no big press conferences or readouts given. But on Wednesday some key statements have begun to emerge concerning what was discussed, but at this point only offered via the Israeli side…

To be expected, Iran and the nuclear question dominated the discussions, according to i24’s Ariel Oseran, with Israeli officials describing a White House focused on three possible paths forward. “Trump is weighing three options: a nuclear deal, maintaining and intensifying the economic blockade, or renewed military strikes,” one official said, adding, “We didn’t tell Trump Israel’s preference is a strike. Our preference is the outcome. The decision is ultimately his.”

…talk about stating the obvious. But Israeli still maintains that the situation is at tipping point inside Iran, which according to more independent ‘realist’ analysts seems highly dubious. Israeli officials argued that Tehran is under mounting internal strain. “Iran is under severe economic pressure” due to fuel and diesel shortages, roughly 90% inflation, and “the beginning of public protests.” They added, “We discussed increasing pressure on Iran, both economically and kinetically.”

On Iran’s leadership, officials said, “We know for certain Mujtaba is alive, but since Operation Rising Lion no one has seen him.” Regarding Iran’s military capabilities, they claimed, “Iran now has only 1,500–1,600 missiles left after we destroyed much of its production capability.” Expletives fly and Trump talks ‘tough’ – but this whole gambit has been a bombing campaign in search of a strategy…

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Today, Fauci is an 85-year old grandpa. You should have gotten to him when it mattered.

• Rand Paul Delivers a Cinematic Indictment of Fauci’s COVID Legacy (Queen)

We’ve seen it countless times: the dramatic courtroom scene. It could be an attorney, or it might be the person testifying. But someone in a courtroom delivers a stirring speech that makes the difference in a case or makes a statement altogether. The courtroom scene is a hallmark of scriptwriting. From To Kill a Mockingbird to A Few Good Men to countless episodes of Law & Order, writers love a good grandstanding courtroom speech. And on Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) delivered a takedown of Dr. Anthony Fauci that screenwriters could easily drool over.


Paul reminded Fauci and everybody watching and listening of the costs of Fauci’s COVID-19 policies: The COVID lockdown could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education, small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared, patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care, families were separated from dying relatives, workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs, worship assembly, employment, education, and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.

My own experiences during that period bear witness. My dad was in a hospital with cancer ravaging his body, with family unable to visit him (and a cellphone that went dead because a nurse misplaced his charging cable). By the grace of God, he came home with hospice, and we got to spend his last two days with him as a family. I was on staff at my church at the time, and even in the first state to open back up, we felt compelled to continue weird protocols for months “out of an abundance of caution” — a phrase I never hope to have to utter again.

We can’t ignore the damage that Fauci’s COVID policies did to businesses, churches, and even some families. Some politicians dutifully followed them for months and even years after the danger of the first waves of the pandemic was long gone.

Side note: Keisha Lance Bottoms, who famously declared that “Atlanta Isn’t Ready to Reopen—And Neither Is Georgia,” now wants to run the Peach State. The Atlanta mayor demanded that people wear masks outside long after Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) opened the state back up. We have to hold her accountable by making sure she never holds public office again.

Paul savaged Fauci for his word games on gain-of-function research: On May 11, 2021, you told the Senate the NIH has never, ever, and does not now fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When I gave you the opportunity to correct the record to reconsider the statement, you responded that you had never before lied to Congress. We were then told that only the government’s narrowest regulation of definition counted here. That you could define gain-of-function in one way in which this was not gain-of-function, in which all of the common sense of the world be thrown out…

The American people were not asking for a semantics debate over what is gain-of-function. They were asking, does common sense say this research was dangerous in Wuhan? They wanted to know whether their money funded experiments in Wuhan that made bad coronaviruses better able to infect humans. The answer is, yes.

Finally, and possibly most devastatingly, Paul pointed out that the biggest thing that Fauci and his league of arrogant scientists did was destroy trust in institutions — possibly rightly so, but it happened under Fauci’s watch nonetheless. “There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials that insist uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science. “I am the science!” as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned, because questioning them would undermine public trust. They have it backwards.

It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be YOUR MOST DAMAGING LEGACY. Trust can’t be ordered. It has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny. No government official is beyond accountability. And no public servant has the right to treat suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.”

Of course, we watched as Fauci pleaded the Fifth repeatedly. We gleefully enjoyed Paul ejecting Fauci’s attorney from the chambers. But it’s hard to imagine a more cinematic moment than those opening remarks from Paul. Good stuff.

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“The question on contempt will be voted on and then there’s the question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up,” he said.

• Paul Confirms Plans For Fauci Contempt Vote (JTN)

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Wednesday confirmed that his Senate committee would hold a contempt of Congress vote against Dr. Anthony Fauci after he invoked the 5th Amendment to avoid answering questions. “We believe… he didn’t need to hide behind the 5th Amendment and that maybe the 5th Amendment doesn’t attach when you have a pardon in place,” he told reporters. “The question on contempt will be voted on and then there’s the question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up.”


Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday and declined to answer questions, citing the 5th Amendment. Multiple senators, including Paul and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have questioned whether Fauci could legitimately invoke the 5th Amendment due to his pardon from President Joe Biden. Hawley opined that Fauci was improperly invoking the 5th Amendment to avoid answering uncomfortable questions about his increase in wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci declined to respond.

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“Fauci, while Americans were dying by the hundreds of thousands during the COVID-19 pandemic, directed his own staff to solicit cash prizes on his behalf..”

• Hawley Exposed Fauci’s 5th Amendment Charade, Then the Takedown (Margolis)

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) didn’t just question Anthony Fauci on Wednesday. He dismantled him methodically in front of the entire country, using nothing but public records, a Supreme Court precedent, and a series of questions so basic that a child could have answered them. Fauci had exactly one response prepared for every question senators asked him during the hearing: a canned invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights.The only problem is that Fauci doesn’t have Fifth Amendment protection anymore. President Biden pardoned him in the final hours of his term, which means that Fauci cannot legally “stand upon his privilege,” as the Supreme Court ruled all the way back in 1896.


Hawley knew that. He built his entire line of questioning around forcing Fauci to demonstrate it to the world, starting with the simplest possible setup. “Well, nothing says honesty like taking the fifth, huh, doc?” Hawley asked. “Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?” “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said.Hawley asked what color tie Fauci was wearing.Same answer. He asked what color the carpet was in front of him.Same answer again.

Three questions. Zero risk of self-incrimination. Three invocations of a constitutional right that, thanks to his own pardon, Fauci doesn’t legally possess anymore. That’s when Hawley reminded him.”Let’s just get one thing straight, you don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley said. “As you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown v. Walker, 1896. When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.” From there, Hawley moved from exposing the absurdity of Fauci’s stonewalling to laying out exactly why Fauci was hiding behind it. The answer, according to Hawley, is money.

Hawley walked through how Fauci, while Americans were dying by the hundreds of thousands during the COVID-19 pandemic, directed his own staff to solicit cash prizes on his behalf, using federal time, federal resources, and federal email accounts. Hawley named the staffers: Greg Folkers and Patricia Conrad, Fauci’s chief of staff and personal assistant. Both, Hawley said, spent government time chasing awards for their boss. One of those awards was the Dan David Award, worth $900,000. Hawley read from an email Folkers sent seeking help padding Fauci’s nomination. “I’m working on this nomination for the Dan David Award for Fauci,” the email read, according to Hawley.

“We need to beef up the COVID part. Do you have language in the can that you can share that delineates how we responded in new ways to COVID?” That wasn’t the only prize on the list. Hawley cited the Partnership for Public Service Award, the Adelson Prize, the Smithsonian Award, the National Academy of Medicine Award, and an award from the CDC Foundation, all pursued using federal employees on the taxpayers’ dime. “You turned your staff into a full-time application machine,” Hawley said. He noted Fauci’s staff didn’t stop at applying. They pressured federal ethics officials to approve the payouts. “We want to get to yes because Fauci wants the money,” one email read, according to Hawley.

Federal law bars government employees from soliciting cash awards or personal benefits, and it bars using subordinates to do it for them. Hawley cited the regulation by number, 5 C.F.R. Section 2635.205(b), and dared Fauci to explain how none of it applied to him. Fauci said nothing. He couldn’t.Hawley closed by putting Fauci’s fortune on the table. Fauci’s net worth now tops $12 million. His pension paid out more than $400,000 in its first year alone. Fauci built all of it, Hawley argued, while a million Americans died and he was busy chasing awards and sitting for glossy magazine profiles.

“You could sit for InStyle magazine, but you can’t answer questions for the American people,” Hawley said. Then came the closing blow. Hawley told Fauci that his silence spoke louder than any answer could have.”Silence is admission,” Hawley said. He accused Fauci of turning the pandemic into a vehicle for personal glory, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar” who “disgraced” his own profession. “You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime,” Hawley told him. “I hope you’ll go home and write that in your diary.”

I bet he will.

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“..I decided I’m going to give up my businesses, sell them all, run for office, run through the United States Senate. Here I am sitting in front of you, six years later, saying, who the f**k do you think you were for doing that? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country..”

• ’Who the F**k Do You Think You Were?’ Moreno Destroys Fauci (Margolis)

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) walked into Wednesday’s hearing wanting one thing from Dr. Anthony Fauci: an apology. He didn’t get one. Fauci came to Capitol Hill, read an opening statement, then refused to answer a single question that followed it. He wouldn’t even answer Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) question about whether a folder was sitting right in front of him. Moreno used his time to remind Fauci exactly what the last six years cost him personally, and what they cost the country.


“It was about six years ago, today that I decided I’m going to give up my businesses, sell them all, run for office, run through the United States Senate. Here I am sitting in front of you, six years later, saying, who the f**k do you think you were for doing that? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country,” Moreno said. He turned next to the colleagues who spent years defending Fauci in public. “I hope the voters of the United States of America watch the clips of every one of you doting on a guy who was more interested in being a celebrity than saving American people,” Moreno said. “You may have had a 50-plus-year legacy of public service, but it ends in total and complete disgrace.”

Then Moreno asked the only question that mattered. “Will you apologize, just apologize to the people who you harmed through your actions? Do you have the dignity to just say you’re sorry?” Moreno asked.”On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said.

Fauci repeated that one sentence over and over again through the rest of the hearing. Moreno asked about service members discharged for refusing the vaccine. Fifth Amendment. He asked about business owners who lost everything during the lockdowns. Fifth Amendment. He asked about parents who strapped masks onto toddlers too young to understand why. Fifth Amendment. He asked about families who buried relatives who trusted Fauci’s word on booster after booster. Fifth Amendment.

Moreno brought up the Ohio mother arrested for watching a football game with her family during the pandemic. Fauci answered the same way. By the end, Moreno stopped asking questions and started making a point. He noted that James Madison, the man who wrote the Fifth Amendment, once lived a few blocks from the hearing room, and wondered aloud what Madison would think of a public health official invoking it to dodge accountability for his own decisions. “It’s no secret why you have to hire the biggest dirtbag attorney on the planet,” Moreno said. “I hope you’re paying him well, and I hope that one way or the other, somewhere, sometime, you answer for your crimes.”

Fauci’s reputation was already shot by the time he showed up on Capitol Hill, but boy did he absolutely destroy his legacy today.

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“Senators, grown adults awaiting Zelenskyy’s arrival, clinging to every word, clamoring to be first in line for his reception, competing against each other for time standing next to him..”

• Senate Fan Girls for Zelenskyy then Advances Russian Sanction Bill 86-12 (CTH)

The behavior of the U.S. senators clamoring to be with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reflects a certain level of disconnect that needs to be witnessed to be realized. Senators, grown adults awaiting Zelenskyy’s arrival, clinging to every word, clamoring to be first in line for his reception, competing against each other for time standing next to him, the entire event was grotesque and creepy.



Shortly after the guided tour of the upper chamber, the Golden Child was carried on a gilded chariot into the viewing chamber while trumpets blared, senators took turns bringing forth their taxpayer funded indulgences, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen knelt down at his feet and peeled Zelenskyy’s grapes. Yeah, that’s the vibe. The “Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026” was then advanced by the Senate in an 86 to 12 procedural vote teeing up the bill for final passage in the Senate later this week. However, I would challenge people to READ THE BILL, it’s only 61-pages.

Within the bill you will note almost everything within the law is left to the enforcement discretion of the President; which normally would not be of great concern, however, given the punishment for violations – things may get sketchy depending on who is in office.A foreign person who “undermines the peace, security, political stability, or territorial integrity of Ukraine;” and/or “undermines the democratic processes of Ukraine,” will be in violation of the U.S. law and subject to fines, travel or visa restrictions. [Page 13, page 28] As a consequence, any person who may be critical of Ukraine -undermining the democratic process via criticism- can be punished by the U.S. President.

Page 36 applies a 100% U.S. tariff against the import of any country’s goods into the USA if that country purchase energy products from Russia (with qualifiers). The intent of that section is to stop China and/or India from purchasing Russian oil and gas. As noted by Politico, ‘the revamped bill expands the number of Russian entities that would be subject to mandatory sanctions — including Russia’s shadow fleet of ships ferrying oil — but it also grants Trump broad waiver authority.’ The House is in summer recess, so things may stall even if the Senate (very pro-Ukraine) passes the bill.

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Their thought: Once there is war with Russia, nobody will notice the mess they made domestically.

• Britain Backs Ukraine With New Electronic Warfare Cooperation (RFE/RL)

President Volodymyr Zelensky met British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on July 27 as he kicked off a key week of talks with officials around the world to bolster Ukraine’s defenses amid a rising civilian death toll from Russian air strikes back home. Zelensky became the first foreign leader hosted by Burnham since he took office one week ago following the resignation of fellow Labour Party member Keir Starmer. The two leaders met at the Portsmouth Naval Base on England’s southern coast as Burnham pledged his country’s “unwavering” support for Kyiv as the war with Russia runs well into its fifth year.


Zelensky said being the first foreign leader to meet Burnham was “an important signal of support.””We discussed our defense for Ukraine, it is important to have sufficient capabilities to protect lives both in the sky and at sea,” Zelensky wrote on social media after the meeting, adding the development of joint defense production was also touched upon.Burnham and Zelensky were later scheduled to meet some of the 200 Ukrainian military personnel who have been in Britain the past three weeks participating in a maritime security and counter-mine exercise in preparation for potential future Black Sea missions.

‘Stone Cloak’ System
Burnham announced the sharing of the intellectual property behind Britain s new Stone Cloak electronic warfare system, enabling Ukraine to produce the technology itself. The jammers, the size of a tablet computer, can be used to prevent Russian air defenses from tracking and targeting drones when attached to the projectiles, officials said.Downing Street pointed out that the United Kingdom’s support for Ukraine has reached 25 billion pounds ($33 billion) since Russia’s full-scale invasion of February 2022, including 16 billion pounds ($21 billion) in direct military assistance.

Following the London visit, Zelensky is scheduled to travel to Washington on July 28 for talks with US President Donald Trump. Zelensky is also expected to attend the funeral of US Senator Lindsey Graham, who died earlier this month. The Republican lawmaker was a vocal Ukraine supporter and had traveled to Kyiv for meetings with Zelensky days before his death.

Russia, Ukraine Exchange Deadly Strikes
Five people, including a child, were killed and eight injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Rostov region, local officials reported on July 27. Rostov Region Governor Yuri Slyusar said rescuers recovered bodies, two adults and one child, from the rubble of an apartment building hit by a drone, while emergency crews continue recovery operations and provide assistance to victims. Zelensky, in a post on X, said that Ukraine’s long-range strikes hit an export terminal in the Rostov region and oil facilities in the Yaroslavl and Udmurtia regions to reduce Russia’s ability to finance the war.

“Last night, our long-range sanctions were effective in the Rostov region. An export terminal approximately 250 kilometers from the front line was hit. Deep strikes also targeted oil facilities in the Yaroslavl region and the Udmurt Republic, which is 1,300 kilometers from Ukraine’s state border,” Zelenskyy wrote. Meanwhile, the death toll continued to rise in Ukraine, with the capital, Kyiv, coming under a Russian ballistic missile attack on July 26, authorities said, while other regions suffered air strikes during the day that led to at least six deaths.

In the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, a Russian drone struck a supermarket, killing two people and wounding 25, Ukraine’s emergency services said. “This is deliberate Russian terror that has no military justification,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram. Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said a glide bomb attack killed one person and wounded six in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya, which has been a frequent target of Russian bombardment.

In the frontline city of Slovyansk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, the Naftogaz oil and gas company said two of its employees were killed in a Russian attack while trying to help residents affected by an earlier air strike. One person was killed, and eight others were injured in a Russian strike on the town of Balakliya in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on July 27, regional authorities reported.Russia denies targeting civilian areas despite widespread evidence of such attacks that have killed thousands of people since the start of Russia s full-scale invasion.

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`What else can they do?

• Trump Admin Asks SCOTUS To Revive Mail-In Voting Order Ahead Of Midterms (AmG)

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to let the president’s mail-in voting executive order take effect ahead of the midterms, after a federal appeals court sided with Democrat-led states seeking to keep it blocked just months before Election Day.


Trump signed the order in March, directing the Postal Service to restrict delivery of mail-in ballots in states that refuse to hand over lists of eligible voters. It also orders the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to compile lists of verified absentee voters for the Postal Service to reference, and threatens to withhold federal funds from states that do not comply, part of a larger effort by the president to tighten a mail voting system he has long argued is vulnerable to abuse.

A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the order in June, ruling that its timing made it impossible for the Postal Service to propose the rule through proper channels and would deny Congress its required chance to weigh in. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling Saturday, rejecting the administration’s appeal and leaving the order blocked in the 23 states and Washington, D.C., that sued to stop it.

In Monday’s filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued the injunction improperly impedes the president’s authority over the executive branch, noting the Postal Service falls within it despite its independent structure. Sauer warned that further delay could make the order impossible to implement in time for November even if the administration ultimately wins on appeal. “Every day that the agencies are unable to take steps to carry out the Executive Order as to the November 2026 election makes it less likely that they will, as a practical matter, be able to implement any lists or rules that they ultimately finalize, even if they obtain appellate relief,” the filing states.

The order is one piece of a larger push by Trump to overhaul election security, an effort that has repeatedly run into resistance from federal judges. Trump has also urged Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which would restrict mail voting and require identification to cast a ballot, though the legislation has stalled on Capitol Hill despite mounting pressure from the president.

Trump devoted a primetime address earlier this month to laying out his concerns about election interference, releasing declassified documents alongside the speech. Trump used the address to direct federal agencies to investigate a Michigan get-out-the-vote operation and to examine whether intelligence officials withheld information about Chinese efforts to influence the 2020 election.

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“In the new petition, the Justice Department argues Trump’s 2019 White House statements denying the allegations were official acts protected by federal law.”: ”Trump may have to pay almost $100 million in damages and interest “for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House ..”

• DOJ and Trump Ask Supreme Court to Review $83.3 Million Carroll Verdict (ET)

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the U.S. Supreme Court on July 28 to intervene in the defamation dispute between President Donald Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll. The DOJ is arguing in the petition in United States v. Carroll that the federal government—not Trump personally—should be the defendant in the case that led to an $83.3 million verdict against Trump. At the same time, Trump’s private attorneys filed a petition with the high court in the case of Trump v. Carroll, asking the justices to review the same verdict, largely on grounds of presidential immunity.


The DOJ’s petition, a copy of which was obtained by The Epoch Times, focuses on the federal Westfall Act, which shields federal employees from personal liability for common law tort lawsuits arising from their government employment. Common law refers to the body of law developed over centuries by court rulings, as opposed to statutes passed by legislatures. A tort is a wrongful act or infringement of a right that gives rise to civil liability. When the U.S. attorney general certifies that a federal employee—including a president—was acting in an official capacity, the United States is usually substituted as the defendant, and the individual ends up being dismissed from the lawsuit.

The $83.3 million verdict arose from statements Trump made in mid-2019 while he was president, in which he denied Carroll’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s. Trump denied the claim in an official White House statement and again when speaking to reporters—statements the jury found defamatory. In 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr, who served in Trump’s Cabinet, certified under the Westfall Act that Trump’s statements were within the scope of his official duties. As a result, the case, which had been pending in New York state court, was transferred to federal court. Then in 2023, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, who served in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, took the unusual step of withdrawing the certification, the petition said.

This allowed the lawsuit to move forward against Trump personally, after which the jury found for Carroll, rendering the $83.3 million verdict. While an appeal was pending, Trump was reelected, and in April 2025, his attorney general appointee, Pam Bondi, recertified Trump’s conduct and made a motion to substitute the United States as the defendant in the case. The Second Circuit blocked Bondi’s recertification, an action the DOJ argues the court was not entitled to take. The DOJ also argues the Second Circuit misinterpreted the Westfall Act.

“This petition presents the question whether the Westfall Act contains an implicit timing restriction barring the Attorney General’s posttrial recertification. Such a restriction does not exist,” the petition said of Bondi’s action. If the United States replaces Trump as the defendant, Carroll’s defamation claim would almost certainly fail. The Federal Tort Claims Act, which covers lawsuits against the government, specifically excludes defamation claims. The DOJ urged the Supreme Court to take the case, arguing it raises potentially significant institutional stakes.

Trump may have to pay almost $100 million in damages and interest “for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House, defending against attacks on his fitness for office,” the petition said. Trump’s petition in Trump v. Carroll argues that the Second Circuit was wrong to treat presidential immunity like an ordinary legal defense that can be lost if not raised in time, and that the appeals court didn’t actually decide whether immunity protected Trump’s 2019 statements.

If the Second Circuit’s “mistreatment of Presidential immunity and the Westfall Act” are not corrected, there will be reverberations far beyond this case, as the threat of a single judgment for damages based on official acts will prevent presidents from “fearlessly” executing their duties, the petition said. The $83.3 million verdict is separate from a prior $5 million civil verdict Carroll secured in 2023. In that case, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s and for defaming her again in 2022 when he was out of office.

The Supreme Court recently declined to take up Trump’s challenge to the $5 million verdict, but Trump has asked the court to reconsider its ruling. It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up the two new petitions.

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“This is the first case in our nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a president for his conduct in office,”

• Trump Urges SCOTUS To Overturn E. Jean Carroll’s $83M Defamation Verdict (CNN)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to once again step into his messy legal brawl with magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, appealing an $83.3 million jury verdict for defamation on the grounds that, as president, he is immune from the litigation.The appeal, which has not yet been docketed at the high court, relies heavily on the court’s 2024 decision granting the president wide immunity for actions taken in office.


“This is the first case in our nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a president for his conduct in office,” Trump’s attorneys told the high court, according to a copy of the appeal reviewed by CNN. “Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the Second Circuit never even decided whether presidential immunity applies.” Trump told the justices that an appeals court decision in Carroll’s favor would “cause significant damage, not only to this president and future presidents” but also the nation.

In addition to raising the prospect that Trump should be immune from the litigation, Trump is also asking the court to review whether the United States government should be the defendant rather than the president. “Here, the president of the United States has been ordered to pay nearly $100 million in damages … for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House, defending against attacks on his fitness for office,” his attorneys told the court. The latest appeal comes weeks after the Supreme Court declined to take up a separate case from Trump in which the president is seeking to unwind a $5 million civil verdict that found he sexually abused and defamed Carroll at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases. The new appeal involves statements Trump made against Carroll in 2019, when he was president, that a jury found were defamatory and ordered him to pay $83 million in damages. A federal appeals court panel affirmed the damages award, finding it “reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts” and rejected several of Trump’s legal challenges. Among them, the appeals court found that Trump had previously waived any claim of presidential immunity and said the Supreme Court’s decision in 2024 involving presidential immunity did not alter their view.

The full 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to revisit that decision in late April. At that time, one of the appeals court judges who sided with Carroll wrote that Trump had first brought up his immunity claims far too late in the litigation.

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CNN hates Trump. So they make this of his polls.

Note: The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS from July 23-27 among a random national sample of 1,225 US adults drawn from a probability-based panel. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results have a margin of sampling error of ±3.2 percentage points.

• CNN Trump Midrerms Poll (CNN)

President Donald Trump, pictured in the Oval Office on July 21, during a meeting with the President of Lebanon
A record-high 73% of US adults say that President Donald Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, with just 27% saying he’s had the right priorities. That comes amid increasingly bleak views of the Iran war, stagnating economic unhappiness, and broad discontent about Trump’s approach to these challenges.Roughly two-thirds of Americans think that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions and that his military decisions in Iran have hurt the US. Around three-quarters say the president is not in touch with the problems ordinary Americans face in their daily lives.


Trump’s overall approval rating, 34%, matches the career low he last saw at the close of his first term, following the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Half of Americans now strongly disapprove of him, a high across his terms, with a record-low 15% strongly approving. Within his own party, his approval rating has hit a new low at 78% among Republicans, and just 19% of Republicans say they’re enthusiastic about the rest of his second term, down from 38% last spring. While his ratings are underwater across a range of issues tested, Trump sees his lowest numbers on a trio of interconnected issues:

Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters. With an increasing majority of Americans anticipating a long-term military conflict, only about one-quarter think Trump has a clear plan for handling the situation, down from 40% at the start of the war. And 62% now say Trump is not an effective world leader, up from 54% who felt that way early in his second term. Just one-quarter now say the war has been worth the toll in American lives and dollars, with younger Americans particularly skeptical.

On the most tangible economic fallout of the conflict in Iran, 74% of Americans say rising gas prices have caused them at least some hardship, up from 63% in March, with just under one-quarter believing the president has a plan to address the issue. And 71% say Trump hasn’t gone far enough in trying to reduce the price of everyday goods, up from 58% a year ago. There are few domestic bright spots for the president, whose issue approval ratings top out at 41% for handling voting rights and election integrity – one topic where his supporters have rallied most closely around him.

Just 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, a relative positive at the start of his second term, with 35% approving of his management of the federal government. Following two recent deadly ICE shootings, Americans say by a 20-point margin that the agency is making cities less, not more, safe. And amid the cyclospora outbreak and a surge in measles cases, they say by a 34-point margin that changes to health agencies like the FDA and CDC are leaving the public less, not more, safe.

Trump has never gotten high marks in polling as someone who’s in touch with the problems of ordinary Americans. In the latest poll, just 27% say that description applies to him, while about two-thirds say that he’s someone who does not put the good of the country ahead of his personal gain.

Those numbers reflect broad skepticism about the high-profile projects that would leave Trump’s mark on the nation’s capital. A 58% majority of Americans say they feel dissatisfied or angry about the construction projects Trump has undertaken in Washington, DC, including the effort to build a new White House ballroom and renovate the Reflecting Pool. Just 17% express positive feelings, with another 25% saying it doesn’t matter to them.

At the time of Trump’s second inauguration, nearly half of Americans thought it was at least somewhat likely that Trump would avoid conflicts between his family’s company and his work as president, but a scant 23% think he’s done so at least somewhat well. And 57% say it’s a bad thing that Trump earned more than $2 billion last year while serving as an elected official, including income from cryptocurrency holdings, royalty payments and property investments. Just 7% see that as a good thing, with 36% calling his earnings while president something that doesn’t matter much.

More than 6 in 10 say that Trump has gone too far in pursuing his personal business interests while serving as president and undertaking projects to remodel the White House and other Washington landmarks, with nearly as many saying he’s gone too far in making changes to cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian.

Construction on President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is seen on July 14. Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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Mamdani = taxes.

• Welcome to Socialism’: A Clinton Hand’s Stark Warning About Mamdani (Green)

Dem strategist Mark Penn took to X during the wee hours Wednesday morning to warn the public about “the lie of socialism” represented by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but it’s really a cry for help over what’s happening to his party. Before we get to that, however, you need to understand just what a colossal screw-up Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax really is. Because if what Penn says is correct — and apparently it is — it’s a colossal screw-up by design. And an oh-so-bitter taste of what New Yorkers are stuck with for the next three-and-a-half years.


In a piece headlined “Welcome to Socialism,” Penn wrote that Mamdani’s administration “with fanfare” released its list of “960,000 owners of real estate in New York City that have been determined they could owe the pied-a-terre tax because NYC computers have determined they own what was billed as a market value of $5 million or more.” So far, so socialist, right?But, Penn added, “there are only about one million residential tax lots in New York City so the first question is how did virtually every owner get put on the list?” Welcome to socialism, indeed.

“The answer is that you are subject to the tax in the first two years if your property has a “DOF valuation” of over $1 million. And so the $5 million figure was a fake,” Penn concluded. But here’s where we got to what Penn called “the interesting part” with understatement he must have choked on: “Once you are on the list you have to prove you should not be taxed by showing you are a resident. Or by challenging the valuation.””Good luck fighting the city bureaucrats on both of these counts. The individual litigation will be massive.” Socialism always starts with “soak the rich” but always ends with “stick it to everybody.” Mamdani is notable only for his speed.

But here’s what Penn missed in his piece.The New York Post reminded readers on Monday that “Mamdani threatened to raise city property taxes by a staggering 9.5% in February unless he was allowed to ‘tax the rich’ to cover a $12 billion budget gap that was later revised down to $5.4 billion.”The good news is that the hole in NYC’s budget got revised downward by more than $6 billion. The bad news is that “City Hall estimates the pied-à-terre tax would yield $500 million per year.” The worse news is that “Democratic city Comptroller Mark Levine’s office said the real figure would be closer to $340 to $380 million.” And the worst news is that critics of the tax say that it “could cause property values to plummet.”

“Add a tax of 4 to 6 per cent (yes condos are taxed that high now) a year of its DOF value to a condo or coop and that condo won’t be worth that much,” Penn explained. “And you can forget about out of town buyers. So this will destroy much of the home values that people have built up.” Mamdani’s brand of socialism is taxing everybody for unrealized gains on properties whose value Mamdani will destroy. Nifty, eh? He’s also the fresh new face of a Democratic Party that has grown so corrupt and stands for so little that Democratic Socialists in cities like New York have taken to wearing it like a skinsuit.

They even boast about it, and the most that even an old Clinton hand like Penn can do is whine about it on X. So the initial burst of pied-à-terre schadenfreude was over Mamdani supporters like Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, and Cynthia Nixon finding themselves on his Enemies of the People list. But today I’m standing in a puddle of my own schadenfreude as top-level Democrats like Penn come to realize just how badly the DSA takeover of their party is going to hurt them.

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“The plan is a multimillion-dollar version of the $5 gold watch grift. The chumps are New York taxpayers who believe that Mamdani can sell them produce at a discount of 30 percent below the market rate and not lose money. Indeed, this could end up the most expensive produce in the Big Apple.”

“The Mamdani con will cost New Yorkers millions, and most will thank him for it.”

• The Mamdani Grocery Grift (Turley)

Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s short stint as a faux president ended with an embarrassing acknowledgment that he could not, as promised during his campaign, arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So, this week, Mamdani the Grocer made a reappearance, with details on the five city-run grocery stores that he will open. But rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions.


What Mamdani described was a discount food bank dressed up as a grocery. Standing in front of blackboards saying “REDUCED 30%,” Mamdani sounded like a bodega hawker: “Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks” Here’s the most delicious part: the presser was a gimmick from beginning to end. The mayor promised that “The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line — not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.”

The Mamdani markets are new variations of an old New York grift: selling gold watches for $5. The dupes want to believe that somehow this street vendor, surreptitiously displaying watches inside his overcoat, actually found a way to sell “solid gold watches” for just a few bucks. The math simply does not add up for Mamdani. Most groceries have an average profit margin between 1% and 3%, one of the smallest margins of any industry. To promise a 30% discount below market rate that cannot be adjusted due to monthly market fluctuations is economically absurd.

It is not a description of a competitive grocery but a public charity. It is a quasi-food bank where taxpayers subsidize the cost. As usual, Mamdani turns this into a class war, demonizing business owners. He suggests that real grocery stores are simply price gougers hoarding windfall profits from consumers. He ignores that they must pay rent, upkeep and fees — all things the city-run stores may simply write off. He proclaimed, “May the most affordable grocery store win.”

Of course, the test is not which grocery is the most affordable, but which is the most sustainable. If you are willing to take a bath on sales, you can always offer the most affordable prices for as long as your excess cash holds out. In Mamdani’s case, he has the credit of New York City to draw on to compete against Mom-and-Pop bodegas.The subsidy, however, is only part of the costs. The average bodega owner must cover the fixed costs of renting a space, building the store, and complying with inspectors. Those are the fixed costs that must be internalized into the cost of produce to break even.

Real stores are competing in one of the tightest markets in the world and are grappling with a 33% nationwide increase in costs since 2019. Mamdani wants to use the stores to prove that socialism works as part of his effort to introduce New York to the “warmth of socialism.” We may never know the real costs of the Mamdani markets. According to the New York Post, the city plans to open an East Harlem location as its first store, at a reported cost of $30 million.

However, that is not the full cost. The Post also reported that the city had already appropriated $25 million to improve the first site. The city will lose millions that could have been acquired through a sale of the land or through rents to private companies. Those costs are left on other ledgers and not likely counted in the true costs of the Mamdani markets. The first store will not even open until 2027 despite the props behind Mamdani. The second Manhattan store will not open until 2029. That is three years and tens of millions of dollars for just the first two stores.

That is how Mamdani is promising New Yorkers savings of “$90 a month, or roughly $1,000 a year.” He is using the city to subsidize food under the guise of selling at low, but still profitable prices. Ironically, those who can take advantage of the subsidy at the first two stores in Manhattan will be anyone, including the privileged, wealthy New Yorkers whom Mamdani denounces for not paying their fair share. After all, everyone wants below-market-priced slices in the Big Apple.

The first city-run grocery, in East Harlem, will cost $30 million to build — and perhaps more. It will never need to pay this money back nor factor it into its prices. The “warmth of socialism” will cover it; that is, you. In reality, Mamdani will be selling apples at a far greater cost than any competitor, but those true costs will be buried in the city budget and paid for by the taxpayers. Indeed, the Mamdani markets are likely to prove the most expensive groceries in the city.

Mamdani, however, has never sweated the math or the means. He knows that the focus will be on the cash register price and not the true cost. Of course, there is a big difference between the gold watch grift and the Mamdani grift: buying a knockoff watch only costs chumps a few bucks. The Mamdani con will cost New Yorkers millions, and most will thank him for it.

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“Does Zelensky’s Jewish identity settle Ukraine’s neo-Nazi question?”

• Laura Loomer Says There’s No Nazi Problem In Ukraine. What She Didn’t See (RT)

US conservative activist Laura Loomer arrived in Kiev after years of denouncing Ukraine’s “Nazi apologists.” She met Vladimir Zelensky, apologized for articles she had written for RT and said Russian media had “bamboozled” her. During their interview, Zelensky rejected the accusation Ukraine’s politics is riddled with neo-Nazi influence: the conutry had elected a Jewish president and even adopted a law against anti-Semitism, he argued. Loomer accepted his case and later amplified it in her X profile, stating that “Nazism is literally illegal in Ukraine” and that the country “has stronger anti-Semitism laws than the US.”


Loomer appears to have been persuaded by Zelensky’s Jewish identity, statements from rabbis supporting Ukraine, and Ukrainian laws against anti-Semitism and direct Nazi propaganda. None of these points directly addresses the Russian argument that a de facto Nazi regime has taken shape in the country. But when Russians speak of Nazism in Ukraine, they don’t really mean only anti-Jewish hatred. Ukrainian nationalism, aside from its direct connections to Hitler’s Reich in the Second World War, was born and existed as an idea of ethnic exclusivity directed against a whole range of other peoples.

Today’s Ukraine continues the history of this movement, little different from German Nazism. The Russian argument is that the modern Ukrainian state has revived aspects of this tradition.nThis is not only being noticed by Russians: in recent years, Ukraine’s fascination with Nazi-style politics and the glorification of Nazi collaborators themselves has led to conflicts with other neighboring countries, including the recent scandal with Poland.

Ukraine has pursued aggressive ethnonationalist policies for years now
Ukraine’s 2019 state language law made Ukrainian compulsory across government, education, commerce, public services, media and much of cultural life. While the law formally excludes private conversation, citizens of the country, millions of whom are Russian-speaking, face persecution for listening to music in Russian as well as the mass destruction of books, toppling of monuments and the removal of large parts of their cultural inheritance, which Ukrainian nationalists consider the “culture of the aggressor.”.

Even Western institutions, contrary to the overall pro-Ukrainian position of the West, have acknowledged that Ukrainian language laws do not provide adequate protection for the linguistic and cultural rights of all citizens. Since these statements were made, Zelensky has further tightened restrictions aimed at making life more difficult for those who speak Russian. The forced Ukrainization of education, media, and public spaces, conducted under the guise of ‘decolonization’, effectively means the marginalization of a significant percentage of Ukraine’s residents – those for whom the aggressive ideology of ethnic Ukrainian nationalism is neither natural nor acceptable.


The Zelensky government, like its predecessors, is using the protracted conflict with Russia to justify the implementation of a hostile and hateful ideology. This narrative merges civic and ethnic identity and pressures a huge segment of the population to accept a culture and language which is foreign to them, relearn under the threat of persecution, and give their children over to the state system, which will instill in them hatred for their own ancestors. The only other option is to leave the country, which millions did even before the start of the current phase of the conflict.

[They themselves are not shy about their radically chauvinistic view of Russia and Russian people.] Following his appointment as Zelensky’s new commander in chief last week, an embarrassing 2023 interview with Mikhail Drapaty resurfaced online, in which he outlined the Ukrainian state’s view towards Russians and Russian culture. “We see that you cannot call them neighbors. It is a nation, together with its leadership, that has no right to exist. Over thousands of years, nothing has changed there in terms of civilization,” he said.

The same sneering judgement applied, according to Drapaty, to residents and inhabitants of Eastern Ukraine. The Donbass region, the engine of the national economy until 2014, is full of “criminal elements” because “too little attention was paid to Ukrainization” and the population has not developed a Ukrainian national identity. Military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov went further, commenting on the murder of Russian journalist Darya Dugina in the same year. “We will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world,” he said, “until the complete victory of Ukraine.”

Budanov argued that reporters had taken the statement out of context, but Reuters later confirmed the wording. Ukraine has repeatedly used methods designed to intimidate ordinary people and has shown little concern for the resulting civilian casualties. However, it had been suppressing the voices of Russian-speaking residents who advocate for their rights for years before the conflict – which killed some 14,000 people in eight years – escalated into a full-scale war, enforcing a hierarchy of national identities through political pressure and, at times, direct violence.

Ukraine’s mainstream political parties have largely accepted the language and education policies associated with forced Ukrainization. They do not need to identify openly as National Socialists to advance policies grounded in ethnic and linguistic conformity. Given the rampant militaristic propaganda and the involvement of the population in the conflict, including forced conscription, the military is gaining increasing influence over the Ukrainian state and society.

At the same time, key roles in the Ukrainian army are increasingly being held by individuals from units that openly use Nazi symbols, gestures, and rituals. Just this spring, Zelensky promoted the commander of the infamous Azov formation, known by the call sign “Redis,” to brigadier general. Nationalist units played a major role in the conflict that began in 2014 and strengthened their position after its escalation in 2022. Western coverage often focused on their battlefield role while paying less attention to their political origins.

Although Ukrainian propaganda claims that Nazi symbols are not very popular among the military, new evidence to the contrary appears with regularity – they’re not ashamed of wearing such symbols, even when receiving awards from a president who calls himself a Jew. .

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Not the present, but it is the future.

• The End Of Freedom – The Last Breath Of A Dying Continent (Adams)

They are killing us slowly. Not with bullets or blades, but with spreadsheets and algorithms, with policies drafted in climate-controlled rooms by people whose children will never shiver through a winter night without heat, whose pantries will never echo empty, whose futures remain secured behind gates we cannot approach.


In 2026, 333 million Europeans—more than the entire population of the United States—have fallen into energy poverty, a euphemism that cannot conceal the raw human suffering it describes, a bureaucratic term that sanitizes the screams of families watching their lives dismantled piece by piece.


Since 2021, utility costs have surged 47%, while wages stagnate in a cruel arithmetic that reduces families to penury. The numbers do not lie, even when governments do. Behind every percentage point stands a human being with a name, with memories, with children who ask why the heat does not work. Behind every data point lies a tragedy that statistics cannot capture—the sound of teeth chattering beneath thin blankets, the smell of cheap candles burning down to nothing, the silence of a home where conversation has stopped because speaking requires energy that hungry bodies cannot spare.

Look at these figures and understand that they represent flesh and blood. In Greece, 40% of households now face the impossible choice between heating and eating—a statistic that translates to grandmothers wrapping themselves in newspapers, to children doing homework by candlelight, to parents skipping meals so their sons might have warmth for one more night. The Greek winter of 2026 brought temperatures that dropped to -8°C in regions where insulation remains a luxury, where families huddle in single rooms wearing every garment they own, where the decision to turn on a heater for one hour means skipping dinner for three days.

Germany, once the industrial titan of Europe, now bleeds 15,000 manufacturing jobs each quarter, its factories darkening like dying stars. The Rhine Valley, which hummed with production for generations, now echoes with the footsteps of workers carrying boxes of personal effects, of security guards locking gates that may never reopen, of communities watching their purpose drain away like water into cracked earth. Energy bills now exceed rent payments by 23% across twelve member states, a reversal of economic reality that breaks families before they even begin, that ensures the poor remain poor and the middle class joins them in descent.

In Portugal, elderly citizens have begun collecting firewood in public parks, risking fines and arrest to secure warmth their pensions cannot purchase. In Poland, organized crime networks now control the black market for coal, selling inferior product at extortionate prices to desperate families who know that burning treated wood releases toxins but choose poison over freezing. The European Commission reports these trends as “energy market adjustments,” as if describing the migration of birds rather than the collapse of human dignity.

But the economic strangulation serves merely as prelude to a more comprehensive destruction. Step into any supermarket in Milan after 7 PM and witness the new normal: empty shelves where fresh produce once stood in abundance, security guards monitoring cooking oil purchases as if guarding gold reserves, elderly women weeping quietly beside discount bins where bruised vegetables wait for hands brave enough to claim them. The Italy that exported culinary culture to the world now imports 60% of its grain from nations that view food as geopolitical leverage, as a weapon more effective than any missile.

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Debt Rattle July 29 2026

Jul 292026
 
 July 29, 2026  Posted by at 10:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer Woman in Blue Reading a Letter 1662-3


• War Pause Holds, Trump Vows To Destroy Pickaxe Mountain If No Deal (ZH)
• Mediators Say US-Iran ‘Close’ To ‘Resurrecting’ Failed MoU Deal (ZH)
• US Forces Block Attempted Iranian Surprise Attack (Catherine Salgado)
• New British Defense Secretary: Europe “Shaken Out Of Complacency” By Trump (ET)
• Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Intends to Build Drone and Missile Factory in UK (CTH)
• Cuba Falling: A Lot Happened Last Week. Let’s Talk About It (Sarah Anderson)
• NYC: Begun, the Class War Has (Stephen Green)
• The Future of Artificial Intelligence Is a Choice, Not an Inevitability (Dornik)
• This Fauci Diary Entry Will Cause Your Blood to Boil (Matt Vespa)
• Rand Paul Releases Files of Serious Manipulation of COVID-19 Info (CTH)
• RFK Jr. Reveals the COVID Vaccine Secret Fauci Hid From Americans (Margolis)

 


 

https://twitter.com/TVNewsNow/status/2081870166606954953?s=20

 


 


“Trump has on Tuesday reiterated to Fox News that Iran understands it will never have a nuclear, and reaffirmed that the two sides are talking.”

• War Pause Holds, Trump Vows To Destroy Pickaxe Mountain If No Deal (ZH)

US-Iran attacks have remained paused, and oil prices have extended their declines, as President Trump has claimed Tehran and Washington are now having “very friendly talks” while at the same time suggesting negotiations might not be prolonged. “We are in very deep talks with Iran. If they don’t work out, we will go back to very strong military action,” Trump told Axios, as we highlighted previously.


But possibly the most promising development in terms of an off-ramp is that Oman has presented Iran with a plan backed by Gulf states to manage the Strait of Hormuz.This would reportedly include including collecting voluntary fees for using it, according to sources who spoke to Reuters Tuesday. The report notes that “The plan could serve as a basis to end the disruption to trade through the strait caused by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.”

However, this also to some degree represents the stalemated situation going back to square one, given the United States has consistently and vehemently opposed any fees being collected that would go to Iran. An immediate response from Tehran on the proposal has not been forthcoming, and talks could drag on for days related to the Oman plan. Already Tehran is adding some strict conditions regarding frozen or seized Iranian assets abroad, per Bloomberg citing state media:

“Any company or country that receives funds from Iranian assets will not be allowed to pass through the strait,” semi-official Tasnim news agency cites a spokesman for Iran s central military command as saying in response to recent US proposal.

Reuters provides more detail in the following: “The system would be analogous to one in place on Asia’s Strait of Malacca, where Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore ask ships to pay voluntary contributions to fund navigation, environmental protection and search-and-rescue operations.” “The Western diplomat compared it to a voluntary carbon tax for flights, where anyone buying a plane ticket can choose to tick a box if they want to pay to offset their emissions,” the report adds.

The Wall Street Journal has said this represents a “glimmer of hope” as fighting has halted since last Friday: A U.S. official and mediators said Iran and Oman were still far apart on some issues, including whether to charge fees for transit. But both sides said there was progress, marking the first glimmer of hope for diplomacy since President Trump ordered a new round of military strikes on Iran more than two weeks ago in response to Tehran firing on commercial vessels in the strait.

…The goal of the Iran-Oman talks is to agree on which route vessels can take through the 22-mile-wide strait. Conflict erupted earlier this month after the U.S. began guiding ships through the strait by hugging the Omani coast, while Iran wants vessels to cross through its territory.

In the meantime President Trump had laid out Monday while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One his view that there’s “plenty of time” to deal with Iran and that “we are talking right now..” He laid out that while “there’s a good chance that something could happen,” it remains that If not, “we go back to doing what we were doing two days ago.” Trump has on Tuesday reiterated to Fox News that Iran understands it will never have a nuclear, and reaffirmed that the two sides are talking.

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Feels like dancing. But not together. Not the same dance.

• Mediators Say US-Iran ‘Close’ To ‘Resurrecting’ Failed MoU Deal (ZH)

Update(11:35ET): Here we go again… despite no evident change in war posturing on either side, and despite shipping traffic still largely at a complete standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, Fox News is out with claims that the failed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) could be ‘resurrected’… bringing us back to the ‘deal is close’ constant headlines of earlier this summer (though of course the sides were never in reality close – and simply returned to a wider bombing campaign)…


“Mediators of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East believe the U.S. and Iran are close to a deal that would resurrect the failed memorandum of understanding, according to The Times of Israel,” Fox writes, based on the earlier Israeli media article. Negotiators from Pakistan, Egypt and Qatar have been haggling over an Oman-proposed Strait of Hormuz management plan. It will involve fee-collection and is backed by the Gulf states, supposedly. The timing of all of this interesting given Trump is currently hosting Netanyahu at the White House. More from Fox:

Iran and Oman — both of which are situated on the Strait of Hormuz — have reportedly signed off on the proposal advanced by the mediators.The two sources said the White House was waiting to make a decision until after President Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday. Meanwhile…

JMIC: DATA INDICATES ZERO TANKERS IN EITHER DIRECTION OF HORMUZ

Still, the return to deal ‘optimism’ has pushed oil prices down further – which is perhaps the entire point of US officials anonymously hyping that a deal is ‘close’ once again.

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“Khamenei’s regime..”? We don’t even know if the guy is alive. Stop saying that.

• US Forces Block Attempted Iranian Surprise Attack (Catherine Salgado)

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) troops thwarted an attempted surprise attack from the terrorist Iranian regime as Tehran doubles down on “death to America.” CENTCOM posted an update on X Tuesday afternoon. “At 5:45 p.m. ET today, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces launched multiple ballistic missiles from Iran in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces based in the Middle East. All Iranian missiles were successfully intercepted. U.S. forces remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness,” it apprised the public. Both American and Saudi forces are now conducting strikes on Iranian targets.


In fact, CENTCOM issued a press release on Tuesday about the U.S. and Saudi efforts to eliminate Tehran-tied terrorists in Iraq, where different factions and ethnic groups either enthusiastically support or bitterly resent the Iranian regime. The Iran-backed Iraqi jihadis were gunning for American troops and Saudi infrastructure. U.S. and Saudi fighter aircraft struck multiple terrorist logistics and weapons sites across eastern Iraq in a strong response to over 30 IRGC-directed aerial drone attacks in the last 72 hours. The unwarranted attacks against U.S. forces were not successful.

From February through April 2026, there were more than 600 attempted attacks on U.S. citizens and facilities by Iran-aligned terrorist militias in Iraq. This is why the U.S. will eventually have to take out the Iranian regime altogether, or we’ll never have peace. The Iranian regime is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, with more reach and proxies even than the Qatari dictatorship.

President Donald Trump periodically threatens total destruction of the Iranian regime. If he really has that firepower, why not do it? It will save lives and a great many years of such ineffective back-and-forth as we’re still experiencing. Four Americans died as a result of Iranian strikes this month. We don’t want any more casualties.Iranian leadership continues to bribe potential assassins for Trump while threatening dire deeds. For example, on Sunday, we had the following message from the supreme leader of Iran (or whoever is running his account):

And a few days before:

Khamenei’s regime just executed several more freedom protesters.

The Tehran terrorists are demonically vicious.

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Yeah yeah, flatter Trump.

• New British Defense Secretary: Europe “Shaken Out Of Complacency” By Trump (ET)

New British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting
Newly appointed British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said on July 26 that Europe will one day thank U.S. President Donald Trump for “shaking us out of our complacency” on defense spending Speaking to British broadcaster Sky News, Streeting said that he genuinely believes when this period of history is written, Europe will thank President Trump for shaking us out of our complacency and forcing us to stand on our own two feet and end the period of overreliance on the United States for defense.


Former Health Secretary Streeting was appointed to the defense role on July 20 by the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham after he reshuffled the Cabinet following the resignation of his predecessor Keir Starmer. What he’s said about Europe isn t unique to President Trump, the MAGA movement or the Republican Party. This has been a long-standing grain of U.S. frustration with Europe under Democratic and Republican presidents, Streeting said, adding that in the world we live in, it is right that we can act to secure ourselves.

Trump has repeatedly called on the UK and other European countries to spend more on defense and become less reliant on the United States for the continent s security. The push for NATO allies to do more to secure their own defenses came as the United States reoriented its defense and security priorities. Asked if he trusts Trump, Streeting said, “I don’t know him, but I do trust the United States,” adding that in his first week in the role he has had “a unique insight into just how close and integral that relationship [between the UK and the United States] is when it comes to defense and security.”

Discussing his conversation with U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Streeting said he was “clear that we’ve not supported offensive action in Iran and we won’t support offensive action [in] Iran,” but added that there are “plenty of things that we can and should do together when it comes to securing the Strait of Hormuz.” Streeting’s predecessor but one, John Healey, who now has the role of chancellor of the exchequer, the UK’s equivalent to treasury secretary, resigned his post last month in protest over the previous government’s reluctance to adequately fund defense spending, in a move that contributed to Starmer’s eventual downfall.

Healey announced his resignation in a highly critical public letter posted on X, in which he accused Starmer and the Treasury of being “unable” and “unwilling” to “commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” Burnham, in one of his first interviews since becoming prime minister, told the BBC he was “absolutely committed” to what was promised to NATO partners. The UK has pledged to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035, in line with a new NATO target.

Burnham said that when he appointed Healey to be chancellor he was “very aware of what he had said about the critical importance of defense spending and the position that he had taken about that.” “The first challenge facing us both is to ensure that the defense investment plan is fully funded and that’s the thing that’s right in front of us and we need to work that through as we go towards the budget later this year.” Burnham also stated that he would be prepared to publicly disagree with Trump if British and American interests didn’t align but added that he had had a good first exchange with the president, finding him to be “really warm.”

Trump, discussing his phone call with Burnham in a July 20 post on Truth Social, said he had a “very good conversation” with the new British prime minister. “We discussed many subjects, including the outstanding relationship we have had with the UK. We will be meeting in the not too distant future for topics of mutual interest,” Trump said, adding that Burnham “has got a big job ahead of him, but he will be able to do it and, of course, the U.S.A. will be there to help!” He added that they discussed “North Sea Oil, Trade, the Military Alliance, Demining of the Hormuz Strait, and many other topics,” and said the call “went very well.”

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In all they do, there is one purpose: bring Trump/US in to the war. They would love for Russia to bomb Portsmouth. How could Trump say no?

• Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Intends to Build Drone and Missile Factory in UK (CTH)

Watching carefully what Volodymyr Zelenskyy says, with an overlay of his contacts and travel itinerary, it appears the next phase in Ukraine weapon production will be to build missile and long-range drones outside Ukraine. That is to say outside the reach of proactive Russian attack. Zelenskyy travelled to Portsmouth, U.K., today for a meeting with newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Instead of meeting in London, the two met at a military base in Portsmouth, where 200 Ukrainian soldiers are currently completing maritime exercises.


In an interview with Sky News just before departing for the meeting, Zelenskyy noted the intention to use U.K. factories. In mentioning a joint U.K-Ukraine “drone deal,” Zelenskyy noted [15:32video] “I want to build a big factory in Britain, while offering new technologies and sharing with our partners.“I don’t think Zelenskyy was supposed to say that out loud.Zelenskyy noted the challenges for the U.K effort to support him essentially boils down to “money, intelligence and technology.”

With the EU providing Zelenskyy with funds from the seized Russian sovereign fund; essentially loans with no payback provisions as forfeiture of the fund is intended to be wrapped into any peace negotiation with Russia; Zelenskyy is positioning Ukraine to spend the EU (Russian) funds in the U.K to manufacture authorized Patriot Missiles, U.K Storm Shadow missiles and drones to expand the conflict with Russia. One thing is abundantly clear from the action over the past few weeks, Ukraine and EU/NATO are fully intending to expand the conflict with Russia and, if possible, pull the Iran conflict into the European dynamic. That’s why Ukraine attacked the Iranian vessels recently.

(You may need to use a VPN to watch this interview as the content was suddenly limited after it was on YouTube for a few hours. I suspect the note I made above is directly related to this content control.)

“LONDON — Andy Burnham pledged a “close partnership” between the U.K. and Ukraine Monday after Volodymyr Zelenskyy became the first world leader to meet Britain’s new prime minister. In a show of support, the pair toured a military base in Portsmouth, where 200 Ukrainian soldiers are currently completing maritime exercises. Burnham said his meeting with the Ukrainian leader was “warm” and that he intends to visit the country soon. “We will build this and we will work through the different issues that President Zelenskyy has, many of which we’ve gone into today,” Burnham said.

The meeting came as Britain announced it would share intellectual property to help Kyiv’s war effort. The new prime minister announced that the U.K. will share its “Stone Cloak” electronic warfare system — devices attached to drones to help them evade detection — helping Ukraine to produce the technology on a mass scale. (read more)

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Trump and Rubio won’t invade Cuba.

” You’re talking about a system that’s been in place since 1959. You talk about a country that’s suffered tremendously because of poor leadership and a bad economic model. You’re talking about a regime that’s survived all these years because they had a foreign sponsor, be it the Soviet Union or Hugo Chávez. They don’t have that anymore..”

• Cuba Falling: A Lot Happened Last Week. Let’s Talk About It (Sarah Anderson)

There’s been a lot going on with Cuba over the last week, and I promise you that every single day last week, I sat down to write about it, but my mind wandered onto the next shiny object — to Venezuela or El Salvador or Costa Rica or Nicaragua or the Georgia governor’s race. I’ve admitted in the past that I’m a little bored with all of it, and I feel like the way Iran has played out has distracted the Donald Trump administration from working toward liberating the Caribbean nation from the Castro regime and 67 years of communism.


The truth is it’s a complicated process. This isn’t Venezuela. We likely won’t have a clean and tidy(-ish) ending to the regime. You can’t just take out one guy, neutralize his cronies, cut off their revenue stream, and start over with Marco Rubio in charge. The Cuban regime is older, more decentralized, and designed to withstand such moves. The power lies within the Communist Party, the military’s economic empire (GAESA), and a deep security apparatus.

There’s also the media problem. The number of MSM fake news stories from anonymous sources about Cuba is exhausting, and it drives me insane how many prominent people report on them or share them as if they are fact. For example, for a while, there was this idea that the Trump administration’s goal for liberating Cuba was the end of this year. It was fun to buy into, and I didn’t find it all that outlandish pre-Iran, but Rubio put a stop to that kind of talk last week when speaking to the press.

“No, look, guys, global affairs are not like – we’re not a miniseries, like, you get in three episodes and it’s over,” he said. “I mean, global affairs are difficult. You’re talking about a system that’s been in place since 1959. You talk about a country that’s suffered tremendously because of poor leadership and a bad economic model. You’re talking about a regime that’s survived all these years because they had a foreign sponsor, be it the Soviet Union or Hugo Chávez. They don’t have that anymore. So it’s – these are complex things that take time, and obviously we’re prepared to do what we can do to effectuate a positive change in Cuba because it directly impacts our national security.”

He added: “It’s a failed state. But I’ve never laid out any timeline as to what change would look like or when it would happen. I wish it was tomorrow because they deserve it; the people of Cuba deserve a better future.” One thing Rubio did confirm — and Trump has hinted at this in the past — is that this is his project. “I work on this issue more than anybody else,” he said, and I think that’s fairly obvious. That said, let’s get to the news. The actual, factual, verifiable news.

The Big State Department Report
The biggest Cuba-related news from last week was the 100-page report from the State Department called “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” I haven’t reported on it yet for two reasons. One, I wanted to read it myself. Two, I’d already reported on some of it over the last year, so I felt like it wasn’t quite the bombshell the State Department wanted it to be. However, I’ve come around to realizing that it’s a good report because it centralizes the information in one location, it helps build a case against the regime for whatever comes next from Trump and Rubio, and it supports the administration’s current anti-far-left terrorism stance and actions it plans to take against it.

So I’m going to hit some highlights here. You can skim them or check out the entire report yourself. The report paints Cuba as what it is. Rather than calling it a failed dictatorship, it’s an ideological threat to the United States, as well as a threat to our national security. Rather than relying on military action against the U.S., it has used irregular warfare to infiltrate, including espionage, infiltration of U.S. institutions, recruitment of American activists, providing a safe haven for terrorists, and creating or supporting ideological networks designed to turn segments of American society against the U.S. government and system.

And not just in the United States, but in other Latin American countries as well — it’s trained groups that helped lead to the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979; supported Puerto Rican terror groups like FALN and Macheteros; and created alliances with Hugo Chávez. I’ve written about this in the past, but before he got into politics, Nicolás Maduro barely had a high school education. His only formal schooling was a year in Havana at Fidel Castro’s commie training camp.

Cuba essentially had spies within the U.S. government, like Ana Belén Montes, a senior Pentagon analyst, or Victor Manuel Rocha, a U.S. diplomat who was arrested in 2023 after working as an agent for Cuba for over 40 years. The regime especially liked to push black extremists, supported groups like the Black Panthers, and granted asylum to many black criminals, like Assata Shakur. It highlights the Venceremos Brigade, which has brought at least 10,000 U.S. citizens to Cuba since 1969 to identify potential activists, build relationships, and strengthen radical organizations.

It also highlights the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), which has a presence in 150 countries and direct ties to Cuban intelligence, as well as the National Network on Cuba, which is connected to groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, Communist Party USA, Code Pink, and the National Lawyers Guild. It also says that Cuba is a meeting point for countries and groups hostile to the U.S., like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Palestinian Marxist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah-linked networks, and members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.

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“Taxpayers will subsidize Big Grocery to help put mom & pop bodegas out of business, and make the city’s poorest residents more dependent on Big Government than ever.”

• NYC: Begun, the Class War Has (Stephen Green)

Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for city-owned grocery stores came into sharper focus on Monday after he announced the stores would have prices 30% “below typical retail prices” on a “core basket of goods.”“No exceptions, no gimmicks,” Mamdani promised Monday at a Campaign Against Hunger event in East New York. Spoiler: There’s no hunger to speak of in NYC. Poverty remains a leading indicator of obesity. Guess where Mamdani plans to build his first 30%-under-retail city-run grocery store.


Or I could just tell you. The first Bane Grocers (I made up the name) will open next year in The Peninsula in Hunts Point, in the South Bronx. The plan is to open four more, one in each borough’s poorest neighborhood.The really fun part is that bodegas are particularly dense in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, serving areas that big grocery stores would rather not. These are mom and pop operations getting by on razor-thin profit margins of about 2%. The solution to the city’s problem with its abundant and efficient grocery supply system (yes, you read that correctly) is to introduce city-run stores to undercut the abundant and efficient bodegas in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Despite their small size, bodegas operate just like any other grocery or convenience store. They sell staples at maybe a breakeven price, hoping shoppers will splurge on higher-markup items like Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal for the kids and a liter of Coke. They don’t make enough money to stay in business selling quarter gallons of milk. What happens to bodegas when customers start going to Bane’s because they can get that same quart of milk for $1.20 or so instead of $1.75? For starters, the bodegas can devote less precious fridge space to milk, or stop selling it altogether. Then maybe they watch those boxes of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs gather dust.

“The only reason to shop at a city-run store — which, if they’re like anything else the city runs, will be poorly managed and with customer service moving at Glacier Speed — is if they undercut the competition with subsidized prices,” I predicted just three weeks ago. That’s when the New York Post talked to bodega owners who claimed that Julie Su, Mamdani’s deputy mayor for “economic justice,” was demanding to know what their best-selling items were, and what their markup was.

If selling staples at 30% under market price puts bodegas out of business, Mamdani may very well engineer an actual problem — a scarcity of small local grocers. Less selection, too, as South Bronx shoppers find themselves having to make the longer trip to city-run Bane’s.If you’ve ever been to a state-run liquor store, you don’t need me to tell you about state-run selections. You’ll be allowed to choose from what they think you should choose from. The New York Post interviewed locals who had “questions about how the discount would work, what few items they’d have to choose from, and how much it would cost taxpayers to subsidize the lefty mayor’s scheme.”

But this is maybe my favorite part of Monday’s sharp focus. While the city will own Bane Grocers, the city won’t run it. Instead, as the Post reported, Mamdani “put out a request for proposals to private grocery chains to run the stores, asking potential bidders to estimate the figure themselves through an annual ‘Affordability Payment’ to cover the losses from selling below retail prices.” Translation: Taxpayers will subsidize Big Grocery to help put mom & pop bodegas out of business, and make the city’s poorest residents more dependent on Big Government than ever. “In the end, it all costs more, and you get less,” Juan Carlos Santiago — a refugee from Communist Cuba — told the paper about the life he escaped. “Thank God, here you can go to another store. Thank God!” But for how much longer?

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So far I’m not terribly impressed with articles about the future of artificial intelligence.

• The Future of Artificial Intelligence Is a Choice, Not an Inevitability (Dornik)

I have developed something of a reputation as the “anti-AI guy,” primarily because I refuse to join the technological priesthood in singing hymns to artificial intelligence while a handful of billionaires quietly purchase the printing press, the library, the factory, the surveillance camera, the public square, and eventually the human brain. In this new AI-dominated era, even simply asking who controls the machinery is considered an impolite interruption during the worship service.


I am not opposed to artificial intelligence as a technological tool. AI can help doctors identify disease, assist disabled people, accelerate scientific research, automate administrative work, strengthen cybersecurity, improve education, and dramatically expand the capabilities of entrepreneurs and creators. I use technology, I build technology, and I understand its extraordinary potential. My objection concerns the weaponization of AI, the centralization of its ownership, and the political and economic system that many of its most influential advocates openly describe as its destination.

The inevitability argument has become Silicon Valley’s favorite method of avoiding accountability. We are told that AI will eliminate most jobs, replace human decision-making, connect our brains to computers, monitor our behavior, restructure capitalism, and require some form of universal government income. Then, after announcing this revolutionary demolition of human society, its architects shrug and tell us that none of it can be stopped. One must admire the efficiency of building the bulldozer, choosing the building, starting the engine, and then explaining that demolition is simply a force of nature.

Elon Musk told the VivaTech conference in 2024 that, in a “benign scenario,” probably none of us would have a job. He predicted a “universal high income,” an abundance of goods and services, and a world in which the central human question becomes whether life retains meaning when computers and robots can perform everything better than we can. This is an extraordinarily revealing admission because Musk recognizes the problem of meaning while continuing to promote the economic conditions that would produce it. His imagined future bears a remarkable resemblance to WALL-E, except the floating chairs with screens would be replaced by brain-chip implants.

Musk has described Neuralink’s long-term purpose as creating a high-bandwidth brain interface through which human beings could become “symbiotic with AI.” Neuralink’s immediate medical work, including helping people with paralysis control computers, is genuinely promising and deserves recognition. The broader transhumanist ambition raises an entirely different category of questions. Once human thought becomes technologically accessible, the issues of privacy, consent, ownership, manipulation, security, and government access are no longer theoretical. They become constitutional emergencies taking place inside the human skull.

Sam Altman has been equally explicit about the economic transformation he expects. In his essay “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Altman wrote that the technological revolution would be “unstoppable,” that power would shift further from labor toward capital, and that society would require drastic policies to distribute the wealth created by AI. His proposed American Equity Fund would tax companies and privately held land, then distribute annual payments to citizens. The language is dressed in entrepreneurial optimism, but the governing premise is unmistakable: the productive economy will belong to an increasingly concentrated class of capital owners while the public receives a politically administered dividend.

Bill Gates has expressed the inevitability argument with unusual clarity. Writing about the development of powerful technology, Gates said that if he possessed a magic button that could slow development for several decades, he might press it, but “that button doesn’t exist.” He concluded that these technologies will be created regardless of what any individual or company does, driven by competition among nations, corporations, and individuals seeking profit, power, glory, and leadership. Gates has also suggested that AI could reduce the workweek as machines produce more goods and services with less human labor.

Larry Ellison has offered perhaps the most honest preview of how AI centralization could affect civil liberty. During Oracle’s 2024 Financial Analyst Meeting, Ellison described AI systems processing information from police body cameras, vehicle cameras, doorbell cameras, drones, and other recording devices. He predicted that “citizens will be on their best behavior” because everything would be constantly recorded and reported. That sentence should be engraved above the entrance to every congressional hearing on artificial intelligence because it perfectly captures the managerial worldview behind the coming surveillance state. Freedom is apparently much safer once every citizen behaves as though an invisible parole officer is watching from the cloud.

Work carries moral meaning beyond the production of goods. Even before sin entered the world, God placed Adam in the garden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Work was part of human purpose before it became burdened by the Fall. The Bible never treats productive responsibility as an embarrassing defect that humanity must engineer out of existence. A society that strips millions of people of responsibility, discipline, contribution, and the dignity of providing for others will not automatically produce a nation of poets, philosophers, and volunteer gardeners. Human beings deprived of purpose frequently become anxious, addicted, isolated, and easily controlled.

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“Fauci writes that the CIA had information from sources that the Chinese military had conducted unknown experiments in Wuhan, and that the CIA had information about a “super spreader” event in China in July 2020 in relation to “passage of a virus in a laboratory.”

• This Fauci Diary Entry Will Cause Your Blood to Boil (Matt Vespa)

Dr. Anthony Fauci was ‘America’s Doctor’ during the COVID pandemic. He’s now being exposed as an egotistical clown, which makes sense as the establishment press showered him with praise daily. When his science fiction was exposed, he said that people who attacked him were attacking science. That was the clue that something ugly was underneath, and now we have these diaries that paint this man as a psychopath. All bow before Lord God Fauci—nope.


The medical expert community should be ashamed for, among other things, engaging in this political effort to influence the 2020 election. And what a waste: Trump was elected again in 2024. With Fauci pardoned by brain-dead Joe Biden, his testimony tomorrow morning should be interesting since he can’t plead the Fifth so easily. Still, this journal entry, where he was briefed by the CIA about intercepted communications that might support the lab leak theory and then criticizes a CIA analyst for not understanding the science at his level, is truly disgusting. He’s a pretentious lefty in a lab coat, a Democrat with an MD, who spread nonsense while countless families suffered and many died alone. Bill Melugin has more:

Dr. Fauci writes in his diary that in June 2021, he received a (classified?) briefing from the CIA on the origins of COVID-19 while in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) at NIH, and reveals that the CIA told him they had intercepted Chinese communications in Wuhan, including indications that the Chinese had transferred pangolin viruses from Beijing to Wuhan.

Additionally, Fauci writes that the CIA had information from sources that the Chinese military had conducted unknown experiments in Wuhan, and that the CIA had information about a “super spreader” event in China in July 2020 in relation to “passage of a virus in a laboratory.” Fauci writes that the CIA briefer, who he names, was “almost pathetic in her naivety and obvious lack of appreciation of any of the science of what she was talking about.”

The fireworks begin at 8:30 AM on Wednesday morning. Also, remember this nonsense, where Fauci bashed Republicans over the vaccine, then spoke to some black families, and they told him to get his COVID juices out of their faces.

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“..,painting himself in somewhat of a god-like position and arbiter of all covid truth.”

• Rand Paul Releases Files of Serious Manipulation of COVID-19 Info (CTH)

Dr Anthony Fauci the White House Chief Medical Advisor during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak under Biden, and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, has been subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this Wednesday, July 29, about his role and activity during the outbreak. Senator Rand Paul has long argued that Dr Fauci misled the nation, and indeed the entire world, on the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak, and attempted to coverup the man-made components to the SARS-CoV-2 that created massive medical, social and economic turmoil.


Anticipating the testimony, Senator Rand Paul has released a massive dataset of records from Anthony Fauci that includes a personal diary written by Fauci during the timeframe in question. [FAUCI FILES HERE] The personal notes and records of Fauci indicate a serious intention to control all elements of what took place during the COVID-19 outbreak; painting himself in somewhat of a god-like position and arbiter of all covid truth.

The records released by Senator Paul are exhaustive and paint a disturbing picture of a medical bureaucracy who believed they were more important than any elected official. Dr Fauci led that bureaucracy with visions of grandeur and an ego fed by a compliant media apparatus who consistently portrayed Fauci as the guardian of all medical truth.

The exact opposite of that altruistic narrative comes through in the details within the FAUCI FILES. “Fauci’s personal diary reveals that as early as January 31, 2020, he was told by top virologists that the virus’s furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with about half the scientists on that initial call believing it looked “constructed.” Despite this early private uncertainty, Fauci spent the following years publicly and confidently dismissing the lab leak theory while insisting the science was settled. The diary also documents his private frustration and defensiveness over gain-of-function funding questions tied to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — even as he told Congress under oath that no such research had occurred.” ~ Rand Paul

It appears that Rand Paul gained much of the information for his release from ODNI documents previously, discovered, researched and released to congress by DNI Tulsi Gabbard. It also seems like Acting DNI Bill Pulte continued to declassify and release the files. President Trump realized on April 23, 2020, that he had been misled by the small group within the medical bureaucracy. Dr Fauci noted in his diary….

“[we] will be loved by the people we care about“… Who exactly was that?

The scale of the fraud orchestrated by Anthony Fauci is jaw-dropping. All those so-called scientists, perched up high in their ivory towers, flapping their mouths to lecture and mock anyone who dared have an opinion on that massive gain-of-function experiment they unleashed. They were not doing science at all; they were stroking their own egos the entire time. The hearing on Wednesday is likely to be very explosive; however, in accordance with the strategy of Democrats and Communists in both the House and Senate, there is a distinct possibility they may not attend the hearing in an effort to diminish the sunlight.

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“Fauci “had a pulmonary infarction, which is one of the adverse events that NIH, CDC and FDA said are expected from the vaccine. He never told anybody,” Kennedy said.”

• RFK Jr. Reveals the COVID Vaccine Secret Fauci Hid From Americans (Margolis)

For years, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective. What he never mentioned, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is that he may have suffered one of those “rare” adverse events himself, and he hid it from the country while publicly insisting such injuries weren’t happening. Kennedy appeared on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle to discuss the newly released diary entries that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made public, entries that document Fauci’s day-to-day life during the pandemic, on top of his disturbing obsession with himself and the power he wielded during the pandemic.


When Laura Ingraham asked whether there would be any accountability for the trillions of dollars lost, the ruined education of America’s children, and the shattered reputation of the public health establishment, Kennedy didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, and millions of people injured,” Kennedy said. “So he lied about masks, he lied about social distancing, he lied about the transmission, he lied about natural immunity, he lied about the capacity, as you just said, of the vaccine to prevent infection.”

Then came the bombshell. “He got vaccinated at a very, very public press conference in January of 2021,” Kennedy said, noting that five months later, the diary reveals, Fauci “had a pulmonary infarction, which is one of the adverse events that NIH, CDC and FDA said are expected from the vaccine.” “He never told anybody,” Kennedy said. “He got treated for it privately by the best doctors in America at the same time, he was telling everybody that was not an adverse event.”

Think about that for a second. The man who badgered every American into taking the shot, insisting it was perfectly safe, appears to have experienced one of the exact injuries his own agencies flagged, then quietly got elite private care while assuring the public that such reactions weren’t real. Ordinary Americans who reported similar problems got dismissed and mocked. Fauci got the best doctors in America.

The diary entries also reveal a man drunk on his own celebrity. Fauci mused that he could call himself the most famous and talked-about person in America without exaggerating. Kennedy said Fauci’s “focus was on promoting himself, on getting on TV and not doing public health.” While hospitals overflowed and small businesses died, “America’s doctor” was cataloging his own fame.

Kennedy knows firsthand what happened to anyone who challenged the Fauci narrative. Instagram suspended his account, a million followers and all, for supposed misinformation, including saying that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That claim has since gone from forbidden conspiracy theory to the leading explanation. The same fate awaited everyone else who questioned Fauci’s edicts. They got smeared as cranks while his assertions, which have since collapsed, went unchallenged by a compliant press.

We know firsthand here at PJ Media the risks that were involved in questioning the official narrative. We risked being censored and demonetized by Big Tech, which was coordinating with the Biden administration to control what the public knew.And what did we get from Fauci’s narcissism and drunken power? Kennedy pointed out that the United States recorded the highest COVID-19 mortality rate of any country in the world, about 3,000 deaths per million people. Under Fauci’s leadership, the wealthiest nation on Earth did worse than every other country.

He destroyed public trust in health agencies, and Kennedy argues the damage may never be undone. Of course, the legacy media deserves its share of the blame here. Kennedy described the press’s protection of Fauci as corrupt collaboration, and he’s right. We may have asked the hard questions, but the legacy media ran interference instead, torching their own credibility to shield “America’s Doctor.”

Fauci testifies before Congress on Wednesday about his diary and his handling of the pandemic. As PJ Media previously reported, if Fauci repeats his falsehoods under oath, he could face perjury prosecution.

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Debt Rattle July 26 2026

Jul 262026
 
 July 26, 2026  Posted by at 9:43 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  25 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The Bull state VII 1945


• Trump Pursues Diplomatic Off-Ramp As Omani Delegation Arrives In Tehran (ZH)
• Russia Guaranteed To Win Ukraine Conflict – John Mearsheimer (RT)
• Elon Musk Just Exploded One of the Left’s Favorite Smear Tactics (Spencer)
• The Real Reason Why The Media Hates Elon Musk (ZH)
• Trump Orders Signs Outside Smithsonian Warning Of Woke Exhibits (JTN)
• Will Trump be the First American Caesar? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Is Zohran Mamdani Mentally Ill? (Robert Spencer)
• Mamdani’s Netanyahu Arrest Plan Has No Legal Basis (Victor Davis Hanson)
• ‘Show Must Go On’: Trump Delivers Remarks at Correspondents’ Dinner (ET)
• Democrats Are Worried The GOP’s Cash Advantage Could Hurt Their Chances (ZH)
• Top NIH Official Wanted to Halt Research Into COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries (ET)

 


 

 


 


Let Oman try. For two days.

• Trump Pursues Diplomatic Off-Ramp As Omani Delegation Arrives In Tehran (ZH)

JPMorgan’s head of Global Commodities Research and Strategy, Natasha Kaneva, told clients: “In the previous round of escalations, negotiations were initiated once US gasoline prices reached $4.20 and became materially more urgent as prices neared $4.50. Oil may be a global commodity, but political tolerance for high energy prices remains overwhelmingly domestic.”


US Pauses Iran Bombing Campaign As Saudi-Houthi Red Sea Front Erupts
Brent crude surged 27% over two weeks to settle at $96.78 a barrel on Friday, briefly breaching $100 this past week as traders priced in a higher war-risk premium into energy markets amid simultaneous chokepoint threats to the Strait of Hormuz and the southern Red Sea.


Meanwhile, the US appeared to pause its 13-day campaign of daily overnight strikes against Iran. While there was no indication that the operational halt would extend into next week, the pause certainly reinforces the diplomatic signals highlighted in our US-Iran wrap on Friday. However, there was an escalation overnight with Saudi-led strikes on Iran-backed Houthi targets in Hodeida. This comes after the terror group attacked multiple Saudi-linked tankers in the southern Red Sea area.Houthis escalate with attacks against Saudi Arabia:

The confrontation threatens to open a second major front in the Gulf conflict. With traffic through Hormuz largely paralyzed, sustained Houthi attacks on Yanbu or ships entering Bab al-Mandab Strait could disrupt millions of barrels of Saudi exports, raise shipping costs, and further tighten physical markets.

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“No amount of Western weapons can overcome Moscow’s “massive advantage in air power,” the international relations expert has said..”

• Russia Guaranteed To Win Ukraine Conflict – John Mearsheimer (RT)

Russia is guaranteed to win the Ukraine conflict, and no amount of Western weaponry – including Patriot air defense systems sought by Kiev – can change that, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has said. Ukraine is “highly vulnerable” to Russian strikes that can cripple its economy and leave it a “dysfunctional” state, the University of Chicago professor told the Daniel Davis Deep Dive podcast on Thursday.


Kiev has relied heavily on Western military aid throughout the conflict, now in its fifth year. Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly pressed allies for more weapons, particularly Patriot systems, while blaming delays in deliveries for Ukraine’s battlefield setbacks. According to Mearsheimer, the belief that more Patriots or other Western arms can reverse the course of the conflict is an illusion. “The Russians are pretty much free to attack any target in Ukraine and they don’t have to worry at all about a Patriot missile or any other kind of missile knocking down the incoming missiles or the incoming drones,” he said.

With Russia enjoying a “massive advantage in air power” and Ukraine struggling with manpower shortages, “the Russians are going to win this war” and “Ukraine is going to emerge as a dysfunctional rump state,” he argued. Mearsheimer pointed to recent Russian strikes on the Ukrainian port of Odessa as evidence of Moscow’s strategy. “It looks to me like the Russians have basically cut off Odessa as a port of exit for Ukraine,” he said.

Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had struck fuel depots and port infrastructure in Odessa, Nikolaev, Izmail and Chernomorsk used to receive and store military cargo, claiming nearly 30 vessels serving the Ukrainian military were hit. On Thursday, Ukrainian outlet Strana reported that maritime traffic had effectively stopped, with no ships entering the country’s Black Sea ports the previous day. It said the Russian strikes were retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian Black Sea ports.

The attacks have made shipping to Ukraine increasingly risky, Strana added, noting that shipping giant Maersk recently suspended operations at the port of Chernomorsk. Mearsheimer also argued that the US conflict with Iran would further reduce European military and financial support for Kiev. “I think events in Iran and just the course of the war between Ukraine and Russia is creating a situation where Ukraine’s future looks highly bleak,” he said.

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The smear is labeling someone as far right. It’ll be a rebel name soon.

“That we should have secure borders? That we should have safe cities? That we should have sensible spending? Which of those three are far right fringe?”

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 32 books, including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, The History of Jihad, The Critical Qur’an, and Muhammad: A Critical Biography. His new books are Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani; Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It; and The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses.

• Elon Musk Just Exploded One of the Left’s Favorite Smear Tactics (Spencer)

Elon Musk has just dared to shine the light of truth and accuracy upon one of the left’s favorite weapons of propaganda and manipulation.Whenever mainstream media “journalists” want to make people dislike someone and reject whatever their victim may stand for, they start calling the person they want to destroy “far right.” The idea is to associate the victim with Hitler and fascism without saying anything that could end up being legally actionable, and the leftists have not hesitated to use the label for anyone and anything they don’t like, no matter how far from anything genuinely “far right” their target may be.


One notorious example is the media’s use of “far right” to try to defame everyone who dares to oppose its favorite religion, Islam, and to speak out against jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. And so the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who was a gay activist with leftist positions on everything except his refusal to accept the Islamization of the Netherlands and Europe, was “far right.” So is his political heir in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, whose party’s program aligns with the left on almost everything except its opposition to mass Muslim migration into Europe, and so he, too, is “far right.”

I myself believe in free speech, free enterprise, and free society, and reject racism, fascism, and the like, but when I started writing books about how Islamic jihad is a historic and present-day threat, I, too, became “far right,” and was placed on the blacklists of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, and defamed and deplatformed accordingly.

The whole thing has gotten so absurd that in a December 2024 article published in the aftermath of an Islamic jihad attack upon a Christmas market in Germany, the Daily Mail warned: “This Christmas market carnage will make a dangerous situation even uglier – and the Far Right will grow even stronger.” Yeah, that’s the biggest takeaway from a jihad attack that killed six people and injured over 300 others: the “far right” may take advantage.

The idea that anyone at all would have been worrying about the “far right” at that moment demonstrated how avid the establishment media is to divert attention away from Islamic jihad violence. If that required warning about a nonexistent threat and once again smearing people who were simply trying to stand against the prevailing madness, so be it.Now, however, Elon Musk has had enough. The Hill reported Friday that in a recent interview, The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes claimed that Musk “supports not just the populist right, but the far right — in fact, very fringe parties in some countries.”

Musk took issue with this characterization, saying: “No, I support the normal people. What you call the far right, falsely. Literally, you could go back 10 or 15 years and these policies were completely normal.” That was perfectly true, but Beddoes is a leftist, and so she took issue with it. She granted that “the center of gravity in this country has shifted, certainly the Democratic Party shifted to the left,” but then continued, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Then, says The Hill, “she said she was discussing figures such as Rupert Lowe, a member of the United Kingdom Parliament who leads the far right political party Restore Britain.”

Lowe wants to stop the mass migration into Britain that threatens to make the native people of the island into a minority in their own homeland before the end of this century. And so Musk responded: “It’s just normal people. Here are the principles, and tell me, which of these sound terrible. That we should have secure borders? That we should have safe cities? That we should have sensible spending? Which of those three are far right fringe?”

That’s what passes for “far right” today. If people in the various nations of the West want to preserve their own country’s culture and national character, that’s “far right.” If they don’t want to support millions of migrants who arrive and immediately go on welfare, that, too, is “far right.” If they don’t want to see their once-stable and prosperous countries become Third World hellholes, they’ve joined the “far right.” Musk told Beddoes that he wanted to “admonish” her, and the establishment media as a whole, for its “absurd characterization of the far right. It is false and misleading and nonsense.” Yes, that’s what it is, all right, and worse.

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” The front page headline for this very Economist interview was: “Should You Be Afraid Of Elon Musk?”

When Musk bought X, they lost their strangle hold. Of course they hate that.

• The Real Reason Why The Media Hates Elon Musk (ZH)

Some would say that Elon Musk is an enigma; a billionaire entrepreneur with a focus on green tech and environmental impact who used to support Democrat fixtures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, only to become one of the progressive establishment’s biggest opponents. What happened? As Musk readily admits, the progressive movement changed and he did not. One could argue that the progressive movement didn’t change, it just pulled the mask off and revealed the monstrous face underneath. Either way, anyone who saw that ugly face during the despotic insanity of the pandemic era and refused to adapt and embrace it was deemed an “enemy of democracy”.


Musk got a real good look and was clearly repulsed. After 2022 when Musk declared his total separation from the Democrats as the “party of division and hate”, the leftist media descended like so many flying monkey’s from a wicked witch’s castle. The attacks have been relentless. When Musk made a move to purchase Twitter and fundamentally disrupt the political left’s dominance of the social media landscape, they shrieked with rage and spit venom. It was glorious.

In a recent interview with The Economist the venom was on full display, but the tactics of media disinformation agents and provocateurs have become tired, repetitious, tedious. You could see Musk’s exasperation with the exercise. He’s heard all these leading questions and biased insinuations a thousand times before. Online and Swiss-owned far-left outlet Gizmodo published a hatchet job article covering the interview and described Musk as “melting down” over “normal questions”. This kind of gaslighting from the left is standard, and the projection is palpable. Gizmodo’s reaction is the true meltdown; they simply can’t handle the idea of the media being exposed for their dishonesty.

The most dishonest of people with the most nefarious of intentions often make accusations by disguising them as “questions”. The front page headline for this very Economist interview was: “Should You Be Afraid Of Elon Musk?” Musk has been directly and indirectly accused of promoting racism, fascism, sexism, and even genocide. Through DOGE and the much needed shutdown of the corrupt USAID institution, he is now accused of “killing millions” by withholding humanitarian funding.

https://twitter.com/mattvanswol/status/2080427381463118215?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2080427381463118215%7Ctwgr%5Efab28861c8ccf5dcbf54046d86a9fae1fa344e10%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmeltdown-real-reason-why-media-hates-elon-musk


The real agenda is embedded in this line of questioning. The global elites and the far-left present a false narrative of consensus – The notion that they represent the majority and the “majority” is very angry with Elon for his trespasses against the liberal order. Perhaps more than Twitter, they are specifically sensitive about the closure of USAID.

Why? Not because they care about poor little starving children with AIDS in Africa. It is questionable how many US dollars were actually going into these humanitarian projects versus the amount of dollars going into the hungry pockets of Democrat politicians and leftist NGOs. The reality that the media doesn’t want to address is that USAID was a central funding hub for the spread of woke ideology and propaganda around the globe.

Without endless cash supplied by USAID fraud, the multicultural and intersectional vision of the far-left is greatly hindered. Just look at how quickly, for example, Pride and transgender activist movements dissipated once federal funding through organizations like USAID dried up. What about mass immigration? Do Americans really need to be funding shelters and services for migrants traveling through Mexico seeking to enter the US illegally? Because this is what USAID was doing.

DOGE dislodged an organization that was a cancer on the entire world, including the US. This is what the media is truly upset about. And it should be noted that the US is not responsible for the well-being of the entire world. If people in third world countries can’t survive without US subsidies, maybe they should learn how.

But Musk’s most egregious crime was the leave the liberal plantation. Leftists are radical collectivists and they see each individuals personal success as a platform to serve the interests of the greater movement. Any individual who walks away from the collective and takes his platform with him is viewed as a traitor, but also a thief. Progressives see Musk as their property. They see everything he builds as their property. They believe that Musk owes them.


The assertion by Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes that her outlet and her comrades are “traditional liberals” promoting limited government and individual liberty is perhaps the most laughable claim a journalist has uttered in recent memory. The Economist is a globalist news platform, and was partially owned by the Rothschild family for decades, right up until March of this year when they sold their share.

The Economist aggressively promoted anti-freedom policies during the Biden Administration including mandatory vaccinations during Covid. They also supported, in theory, the idea of vaccine passports, which would have resulted in the most oppressive shift away from personal liberty in modern history. They consistently attacked people who opposed the mandates for “spreading misinformation” and defended the concept of government pressure on the public.

Of course, none of the mandates enforced by liberal governments proved to make any difference in the spread of covid, and the Infection Fatality Rate remain relatively static at an average of 0.23%. All that hysteria and tyranny over a virus that 99.8% of the population would easily survive.

Traditional liberalism in the media is long dead. It does not exist. It has been replaced by woke authoritarianism. This is why, as Musk notes, no one trusts the media and most people hate them. In 2025 over 70% of US adults said they have low trust or no trust in the mainstream media. These companies might have incredible amounts of money behind them, but it’s all irrelevant without the public trust.

Full interview again:

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National Museum of American History, to be precise.

The New York Times doesn’t like it at all.

• Trump Orders Signs Outside Smithsonian Warning Of Woke Exhibits (JTN)

The signs would even redirect potential visitors to places where American history is more accurately presented, according to the order, though it did not give examples of what those locations and resources would be. President Donald Trump escalated his battle against wokeness at the Smithsonian Institution on Friday, ordering his administration to place signs outside the National Museum of American History to warn visitors that some of its exhibits have been made “inaccurate.”


The signs would even redirect potential visitors to places where American history is more accurately presented, according to the order, though the order did not give examples of what those locations and resources would be.“Because the museum has failed to appropriately honor the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence during this 250th anniversary year of the founding of our country,” the order reads, government agencies “shall install temporary exhibits or signage on N.P.S.-maintained sidewalks, walkways, and land used by the public that corrects inaccurate information presented in the museum.”

The order comes after the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report on the museum, accusing its director of using the museum as a “political instrument” to accomplish her own ideological goals at the expense of the museum’s original mission.The museum was first approved by Congress in 1955 to tell the national story of the United States, to “place before” visitors “a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom and highlights the basic elements of our way of life.” The museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, defended the museum’s changes to American history, stating in a congressional hearing this week that the museum was representing history in all of its complexity, according to the New York Times.

“When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we don’t mean erasing it,” she said in her testimony. “We mean adding the evidence, the voices, the objects that earlier tellings left out so that more Americans can see themselves reflected in the national story.”House Republicans, however, accused her of hijacking history with woke ideology to suggest even Mickey Mouse was racist. The order also follows Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order aimed at purging “revisionist” and ideological materials from U.S. history references and exhibits at federally funded museums and sites.

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We’re supposed to think he wants to be.

• Will Trump be the First American Caesar? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Journalism as an honest career has been wrecked by journalism schools teaching that the purpose of journalism is to change society, not to report facts, by bought and paid for narratives that serve organized lobbies, by government and Israel Lobby censorship, and so on. When you read a news report today you not only cannot trust it, but the writing is so poor that often you cannot ascertain what the journalist is saying. I have done my best to understand reports I have read of the attempt of the US Congress to use the 1973 War Powers Act to stop Trump’s use of US lives and money to turn Iran into a second Gaza for Israel.


Normally, it would be reprehensible for the US government to sacrifice the lives of American military men and women in order to advance Israel’s agenda of Greater Israel. Why are Americans dying and paying for conquests for Israel’s agenda of Israeli rule from “the Nile to Pakistan?”Israeli-owned Trump pretends that the war he is forcing Americans to fight for Israel’s territorial expansion is being fought to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. This is a blatant lie, just like the one Colin Powell told the UN about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

Iran signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has not enriched uranium to the level that could be used for nuclear weapons. All investigatory agencies attest to this fact. Trump’s assertion that he is protecting Americans from “weapons of mass destruction” is identical to the lies the George W. Bush regime told when Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the UN to lie through his teeth about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” As the lie worked on dumbshit Americans before, Trump and his Zionist allies assume it will work a second time. Trump might be correct that Americans never learn from being repeatedly bamboozled. Americans fall for whatever is made to sound patriotic.

As best as I can tell from “journalists” who never learned how to write, the US House of Representatives voted 214-208 in favor of a War Powers Act Resolution to cease military action in Iran. This required some Republican help, such as Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who thinks the American people are more important than Trump’s service to Israel, and Republican Representatives Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, and Brian Fitzpatrick who apparently see it the same way as Massie. You can see why Israel spent $32 million to remove Massie from Congress. And dumbshit Americans think they are a sovereign nation. Only Russia and Venezuela interfere in American elections. Never Israel.

Initially the US Senate passed the War Powers resolution to halt Trump’s war against Iran, but the Republican supporters reversed it when Israel’s man–Donald Trump–confronted them. In the re-vote, the US Senate rejected the resolution to end the illegal and unjustified war 47-49.

The War Powers Act of 1973 was the US Congress’ last attempt to restrain the US executive branch from overriding the US Constitution, which requires a declaration of war by Congress before going to war. The executive branch had eased America into a war in Vietnam without Congressional approval. That Congress did not impeach and remove the president, who had voided his oath of office by his unconstitutional war, was the first sign that America, like the Roman Republic, was transitioning into a Caesarship. It was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, not Republican Richard Nixon, who was responsible for the Vietnam war.

Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, 100 percent.” What does Rubio know about the Constitution? Nothing. It is the Trump regime’s initiation of war without a declaration of war by Congress that is unconstitutional. What Mark Rubio is saying is that any limitation on the power of the executive branch is unconstitutional.

This theory of the American state has been developing for some time. In 1992 Terry Eastland published a book, Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency that argued that the three branches of government–executive, legislative, and judicial–were not exactly equal and that the executive branch held the upper hand. We have actually experienced America’s wars and restrictions on the US Constitution’s ability to protect American citizens consistently evade the Constitution for decades.

As I have made the case, America, the United States, is the Constitution. When the Constitution is shredded, so is America. Without the Constitution, America no longer exists as America. So now we have Caesar Trump, unconstrained by Congress, the Judiciary, and the people, at war with Iran in the service of Israel. This is the behavior of a Caesar, not the behavior of a US president as defined by the US Constitution who is sworn into office by his oath to protect the US Constitution. Trump protects Israel. Israel is not America. Trump does not protect America.

There is no attempt to impeach Trump, and there are no complaints from law faculties, from bar associations, presstitutes, organized interest groups, university presidents, corporate leaders, Christian denominations. Just complaints from a few of us whose voices won’t be heard above the noise of “Iranian Nukes.”

Is Trump Caesar or Octavian? Who will be the next Caesar?

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” Mamdani is a Twelver Shi’ite, an adherent of the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

• Is Zohran Mamdani Mentally Ill? (Robert Spencer)

Surprisingly, New York City’s Marxist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani admitted that the man who stabbed two people on the Upper West Side on Thursday “yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ during both attacks.” This was not, however, an indication that the mayor was ready to acknowledge the reality of Islamic jihad terrorism. Almost immediately after noting that the perpetrator screamed the jihadi war cry, Mamdani added: “The NYPD’s initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”


Ah, of course. Claiming that obvious Islamic jihadis are mentally ill is the common practice of authorities in Europe, and we have seen it in the U.S. as well. Officials don’t want to acknowledge the reality of Islamic jihad, as that would raise uncomfortable questions about why they’re doing so little (if anything) to stop the jihadis, and so they pretend that each and every violent Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” is mentally ill.

This may exonerate Islam for the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings, but it creates new problems of its own: Why do only Muslims seem to contract this particular mental illness? Why does it so often result in their being violent toward non-Muslims, rather than toward their fellow Muslims? With jihadis filling up mental hospitals, are the genuinely mentally ill people safe there?And in this particular case, it raises more problems for Zohran Mamdani himself, for the attacker has not one, but two belief systems in common with the boy mayor. Is Mamdani mentally ill, too? The mind reels.

The New York Post revealed Saturday that “the madman who screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while stabbing an Asian and Jewish man in separate harrowing hate attacks on the Upper West Side was a fan of Karl Marx, with police finding one of the communist author’s books inside his apartment.” Cops searching the apartment of Raul Morales found Marx’s writings, along with “two Qurans, a Jehovah’s Witness Bible, and a book on Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.”

The Jehovah’s Witness Bible aside, the Qur’ans and the Commie writings make it sound as if the police got lost, and ended up searching Gracie Mansion instead of Raul Morales’ place. For despite his denials, Mamdani is most certainly a Marxist. In late Feb. 2021,

Mamdani was a featured speaker at the online Winter Outreach Conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, and reminded his audience of “the end goal of seizing the means of production.” That is a quintessential Marxist imperative; Mamdani, amid all his claims that he is not actually a communist, has never retracted this statement, or addressed it at all.

Then there are the Qur’ans. What sect Raul Morales belongs to has not been revealed, but Mamdani is a Twelver Shi’ite, an adherent of the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has for 47 years now made no secret of its intention to make its oft-repeated chant of “Death to Israel” a reality, and the Qur’an that both Mamdani and Morales revere as the perfect and eternal word of Allah states: “You will find the Jews and the idolaters the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe.” (5:82)

Of course, not every Marxist or every Muslim is mentally ill, and sane and insane people can hold the same beliefs. Nevertheless, if the shoe were on the other foot, the media would be slavering to destroy Mamdani’s political career. Skeptical? Don’t be. Imagine if Mamdani and Raul Morales were both Christians and registered Republicans, and Morales had screamed “Jesus is Lord!” while stabbing people. Don’t you think the media would be spending all its days since that attack demanding that Mamdani condemn the attack in stronger terms and explain what he plans to do in order to stop Christian and Republican violence?

To ask such a question is to answer it. Yet in the present case, no journalist, not one, will dare to ask Mamdani if he is going to call on the mosques in New York City to start teaching against antisemitism and violent jihad. The very idea would be “Islamophobic,” and hence inconceivable. For the media, Morales’ alleged mental illness ipso facto means that Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with his screaming “Allahu akbar” while stabbing a Jewish man who was coming out of Jewish services. So what if he and Mamdani have the same beliefs? That doesn’t mean that Mamdani is insane, too. Of course it doesn’t. And most likely, Morales isn’t, either.

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But lots of sympathy.

• Mamdani’s Netanyahu Arrest Plan Has No Legal Basis (Victor Davis Hanson)

Sami Winc: So, let’s turn to the International Criminal Court. And [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani wants to enforce its laws in New York City. When Bibi Netanyahu shows up, he says he’s going to arrest him because they have a warrant out for Bibi for war crimes and crimes against humanity. I want to just note one thing about those war crimes.They are starvation as a method of warfare. They’ve been accusing the Israelis of stealing or subverting supplies that are supposed to go to Gazans. And we just had the U.N. admit that, in fact, it is Hamas doing that. So I’m not sure why we haven’t seen war crimes


Victor Davis Hanson: I’m really surprised. I know people are going to be shocked by this, but Mamdani, with that socialist smile and that oozy, unctuous personality, I thought he wouldn’t be so stupid to admit that he’s an absolute antisemite and hates Israel. Because any person who listened to his video and read what he wrote, the first question is, OK, you have a policy that anybody that you think, in your infinite wisdom, committed genocide can’t come into your city. He said, you can’t come into our city.

It’s not your city. You’re an interloper. You had about 11% of the resident population vote for you. And it’s not your city, I’m sorry. You may think it is. You’re the mayor for a while, but it’s not your city. And then the question everybody has is, though, I know our listeners are saying, well, of course, when the Palestinians come in, because they aided and abetted Hamas in many cases, you’re going to arrest them given Oct. 7. You’re going to arrest the Iranian delegation because they were responsible, that government, for killing 40,000 to 50,000 of their own well after Gaza. Oh, wait a minute, you’re not going to do that because members of your staff were secretly planning to meet with them as a friendly little chat.

Are you going to go after the Pakistani government? Because they have, they’ve killed a lot of people, a lot of people. They also had bin Laden, right, harboring the world’s greatest terrorist on their own territory and protected him. Are you going to go after the Chinese government? They’ve got a million people in a re-education—I shouldn’t say that—in a labor camp, concentration camp.

You’re going to go after the Muslim Azerbaijanis because they ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian, what, thousand-year enclave in Azerbaijan? No, you’re not going to do any of that because you’re an antisemite and you only want to focus on Jews. And so he looks–and then he, I don’t know, he’s–I’m not a lawyer, but most of our listeners aren’t lawyers, but they all know that a mayor in charge of the boroughs of New York can’t enforce federal law that says what? What is federal law? What federal law is–take a pause. Mamdani, there is a statute that we’ve signed onto that says that people who come to the U.N. that are authentic, genuine diplomats cannot be arrested by the United States.

You understand that? They cannot be. No. 2, do you really think the International Criminal Court has any jurisdiction? We’re not a signee to that court. They have zero, zero jurisdiction. Did you know that the head of the International Criminal Court was just fired for sexual harassment? It’s a corrupt organization.

Don’t you understand that? It has no authority in the United States. You have no authority to interfere with federal law. And I have a feeling that if all of that didn’t stop you and you went ahead and you called up the chief of police—she was standing right by him—and said, go get NYPD and cut off the Israeli motorcade. We’re going to put him in Rikers until we formally charge him. They wouldn’t do it. And so he knows that.

Winc: Did you notice that Rubio took the opportunity to say, Not only do we–everything you said about the International Criminal Court, but we want to dismantle the International Criminal Court?

Hanson: I hope so. We shouldn’t give a dime to the U.N. Actually, we should get the U.N.–they always give these platitude speeches, and then their diplomats, for the first and only time in their life, in the case of about 90 countries, come over here and they vote. You know, they vote in the General Assembly on resolutions, half of which, until recently, were just about condemning Israel. And you think, well, if you don’t vote in Somalia, and you don’t vote in Egypt, and you don’t vote in, I don’t know, you don’t have a fair vote in Uganda till recently, why would you vote over here? And what would that mean? The first time in your life you’d live it up. And they’re always getting caught for not paying parking tickets, speeding, because they have exemption.

And they’re always giving lectures to us about the Global South versus the Global North, about people of color. I’ve said that in print twice. Why don’t we take the U.N.—we don’t have to fund it. We just say to them, Go, take your pick. You could put it in Cambodia. You could put it in Peru. You could put it in Nigeria, and there would be among the people of the world, and you wouldn’t have to see those awful Americans anymore.

And they won’t do it, because they won’t be, after they make some denunciation of Israel on the floor of the Security Council or the General Assembly, they won’t, three hours later, walk down the street to NPR and be told, well, why did you say that speech, Ambassador Kinte-Wata? Well, you know. And that’s what they love. They love all the global media. They love the restaurants. They love the hotels. They love the Western lifestyle that they hang out all night at, and then they trash the United States during the day, and it’s just so boring. Just go away. You know what I mean?

I just say go away. I was the biggest supporter of legal immigration. I still am, but this latest iteration of all these people coming in here from third-world countries, and whether it’s the illegal 40,000 illegal truck drivers—those are illegal—or it’s people like [Melat] Kiros or [Darializa] Chevalier or [Rep. Rashida] Tlaib, their parents, first- or second-generation, or Mamdani or Pi—and they all lecture us, lecture us about how awful we are.

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‘Largest Group Of TDS Sufferers Ever Put Together’

“When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished…”

• ‘Show Must Go On’: Trump Delivers Remarks at Correspondents’ Dinner (ET)

President Donald Trump attended the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington on July 24. The event that was originally held on April 25 was abruptly canceled due to an assassination attempt against him. “I am delighted to be here,” Trump said as he began his speech, which lasted an hour. “Amazing people, a lot of people that I like. Some I don’t like at all, but I respect most of them. I must say that you do a great job, amazing job, and it’s an honor. As I said three months ago, the show must go on.”


Trump continued his speech with jokes and said, “This place is really the largest group of Trump derangement syndrome people ever put together.” The rescheduled gala took place at the Waldorf Astoria. During his speech, Trump said he is the most transparent president in history and took several jabs at the media, joking that many media organizations would be “broke” once he leaves the White House. “When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished,” the president said. He took direct aim at CNN’s Kaitlin Collins (and ‘Fake Tapper’):

“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins… I thought she had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.” CNN released a statement during Trump’s speech defending its reporters, writing in part:”Honest, accurate journalism may sometimes irritate politicians, but our right to report and present that reporting without government interference is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution.”He also joked that, in order to save the media, he would announce a fourth presidential run.

“That’s why tonight, to show just how much I care about the press,” Trump said, “I’m pleased to announce my intention – and this is somewhat of a scoop – my intention to run for a fourth term as president of the United States.”He then put on a “Trump 2028” hat, drawing laughs from the audience.


This was his first time attending the dinner as president, except for the April event, which was canceled after a shooting occurred just outside the main ballroom. Trump joked about the dinner itself, saying it was “far worse” than he expected. At the same time, he acknowledged that he and the reporters who attended the April dinner “went through a period of trauma” that created a unique bond between them. He said he would attend next year’s dinner. Throughout the speech, Trump occasionally praised the media, saying he respected most reporters and liked some of them. However, he also said that much of the coverage of his administration and policies had been unfair.

The president also criticized his opponents, targeting individual journalists before shifting to Democrats and other public figures. Trump rebutted the longstanding claim that he decided to run for president after former President Barack Obama mocked him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. He said Obama’s remarks were not a factor in his decision to enter the race in 2016. “I just decided that I wanted to make America great again. This had nothing to do with that dinner,” he said.


After Trump’s remarks, mentalist Oz Pearlman took the stage and performed mind-reading tricks for the audience, concluding the event. White House Correspondents’ Association outgoing President Weijia Jiang delivered the opening address at the dinner.

“Whatever may divide us, we stand together against political violence,” she said. “An assassination attempt on our president is an attack on democracy itself,” she added, drawing applause from the crowd. “Tonight, our message is this: We are back. We will not be intimidated.” The dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel on April 25 was interrupted when gunshots were fired outside the ballroom. Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old man from California, allegedly got past security with a shotgun and shot at a Secret Service officer who was wearing a bulletproof vest. Security officers quickly responded and arrested Allen. The officer was not injured, and no one else was hurt.

The Secret Service immediately evacuated Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and several Cabinet members from the venue. Allen is charged with attempting to assassinate Trump at the event. He also faces one count of transporting a firearm across state lines with intent to commit a felony and one count of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. He has pleaded not guilty. At the event, the White House Correspondents’ Association presented special awards to Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzales and to the staff of the Washington Hilton to honor their exceptional service during the shooting. The association plans to return to Hilton for next year’s dinner.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a black-tie gala attended by media personalities, business leaders, celebrities, lawmakers, and Cabinet officials to celebrate the Fourth Estate and White House reporters. The association said the logistical challenges in organizing a second dinner led it to scale back the event, resulting in a smaller gathering with a reduced guest list. The Washington Hilton’s ballroom can hold 3,000 people, while the Waldorf Astoria only fits 700.

As part of the enhanced security measures, each guest was required to present a unique QR code and a government-issued photo ID to get through the ticketing. The guests then went through layers of [..]security to access the ballroom. The White House Correspondents’ Association was founded in 1914 to protect press freedom and preserve journalists’ access to the White House. It held its first dinner in 1921, and the first president to attend was Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Full speech::

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Without a face to vote for, who will donate?

• Democrats Are Worried The GOP’s Cash Advantage Could Hurt Their Chances (ZH)

The Democratic Party heads into the midterms with generic congressional ballot polling and historical precedent on its side. It is nevertheless worried that the majorities it so desperately wants could still slip away.Politico reported this week that Democratic strategists increasingly fear their favorable political environment could be overwhelmed by a Republican cash stockpile that dwarfs their own.


Federal Election Commission filings through the end of June show the three main GOP national committees and their affiliated congressional super PACs sitting on a combined $657 million. Their Democratic counterparts held $334 million. Add President Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, which reported more than $400 million on hand several weeks earlier, and the Republican reserve runs to more than three times what Democratic Party committees and congressional super PACs can muster between them.

That gap matters more this cycle than it would have in any previous one. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in NRSC v. FEC that federal limits on coordinated party spending violate the First Amendment, overturning a 2001 precedent and freeing national party committees to spend without ceiling in direct coordination with their candidates. Committee money that once had to be routed through independent expenditures can now be aimed straight at a race.

Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson, an adviser to former Gov. Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign in North Carolina, calls the imbalance the central threat to his party’s hopes this cycle. “What is putting the House majority and the Senate majority, nationally, in danger is the Republicans’ massive stockpile of resources that they’re putting together to push back,” Jackson said.


He warned that the spending gap could erode the advantage Democrats have built everywhere else. “If you get outspent five to six to eight to one, that can alleviate the environmental advantage that Democrats have this cycle,” Jackson said.

The committee-level numbers are lopsided almost everywhere. The Republican National Committee reported $128 million in cash against $16 million for the Democratic National Committee, which is also carrying $18 million in debt. The National Republican Senatorial Committee held $55.9 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s $41 million. The National Republican Congressional Committee held $92.7 million to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s $79 million.

The super PAC gap is wider still. Senate Leadership Fund, the leading Republican Senate super PAC, reported roughly $112 million more on hand than the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC. Congressional Leadership Fund, its House counterpart, held about $51 million more than House Majority PAC.

The national totals obscure a more complicated picture in the marquee Senate races, where the money runs the other way. Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff holds roughly $40 million more on hand than Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico has nearly $20 million more than Attorney General Ken Paxton. In North Carolina, Cooper is about $17 million ahead of former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley. In several of the contests that will decide both chambers, individual Democratic candidates are burying their opponents even as the national party apparatus falls behind.

The picture inside the party gets messier once primary season is factored in. A wave of insurgent challengers aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America has forced sitting Democratic incumbents into costly primary fights this cycle, draining accounts well before anyone gets near a Republican opponent.

Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Lauren French rejected the idea that the committee gap tells the whole story. “Republicans can crow all they want about getting massive checks from donors and businesses and billionaires, but we’re going to win because we have the actual support from people who are voting,” French said.

Other Democratic strategists are less confident that grassroots enthusiasm can offset a structural disadvantage. Jesse Ferguson argued that the media environment itself has made the shortfall more expensive than it would have been in past cycles. “Too many people think that fragmentation of media meant more efficiency and spending less. Wrong – it means you have to spend more,” Ferguson said. The proliferation of streaming platforms, social media, and other digital outlets has driven up the price of political advertising, strategists say, raising the stakes for whichever side can deploy the deepest reserves of outside money.

What should worry Democrats most is that the Republican advantage has barely been touched. Trump political director James Blair said last month that Republican spending would begin “very soon,” without offering a timetable. The fear on the Democratic side is that the bulk of MAGA Inc.’s $400 million war chest is being held back deliberately, to be dumped into competitive House and Senate races in the closing weeks – at the exact moment undecided voters start paying attention and Democratic committees have the least room left to answer.

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“It is gut-wrenching to read these emails. Our lives were in Dr. Nath’s hands, and we were carelessly tossed away without a care…”

• Top NIH Official Wanted to Halt Research Into COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries (ET)

Top officials with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) expressed misgivings about researchers with the agency studying people with neurological issues after they received COVID-19 vaccines, according to newly released emails. Dr. Avindra Nath, a senior investigator with the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, was studying people with post-vaccination neurological problems in 2020 and 2021. In an email on April 10, 2021, he sent a draft of a paper to the institute’s director, Dr. Walter Koroshetz, that outlined what he had found.


“Early recognition and treatment with corticosteroids can reverse the symptoms,” Nath wrote. The following day, the institute’s director sent the manuscript to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who at the time was director of another NIH institute.“There have been steady slow stream of reports to me of post vaccination neurologic conditions, seem to be mostly peripheral nerve disorders … maybe an occasional spinal cord issue,” Koroshetz told Fauci. “Avi has been collecting a bunch. He has a report sent out to publish. Hard to know not due to chance but are timed to the vaccination.”

Another NIH employee sent the manuscript to then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Lawrence Tabak, a second top NIH official, and shared that the New England Journal of Medicine rejected the paper. “What do you make of this?” Collins wrote in response. “The draft letter doesn’t explain how these 32 patients were referred—leaving one to wonder whether this is common or rare.” Koroshetz told Collins that many reports had been lodged with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and that Nath had been attracting referrals because he had appeared on a podcast to discuss neurological problems following COVID-19 vaccination.

Koroshetz also said that Nath, and another employee at his institute, had suffered tinnitus after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, and that Nath had hearing loss. Collins said the approach taken by Nath’s team was “very troubling,” adding, “collecting anecdotes and then trying to build a case isn’t scientifically compelling—and will have the main consequence of feeding vaccine hesitancy and social media overreaction.” Tabak wrote privately to Collins, telling him, “I don’t understand why Walter does not shut this down.”

“While the emails do not prove that Collins, Tabak, or Fauci expressly ordered Nath to abandon the manuscript, they raise serious questions about whether NIH leadership viewed its potential effect on vaccine confidence as a compelling reason to suppress its publication,” the Informed Consent Action Network, which released the missives on July 22, said in a statement.mCollins, Fauci, and Nath did not return requests for comment by the time of publication. Tabak could not be reached. The paper was never published in a journal. It was released as a preprint, or without peer review, in May 2022, more than one year after Nath sent it to Koroshetz.

Dr. Danice Hertz, a retired gastroenterologist who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine shortly after it was authorized in 2020 and suffered severe problems, was one of the patients who was examined by Nath’s team. “I have always believed that Fauci must have told Nath to stop talking to us, as we were all abruptly dismissed from Nath’s care without explanation. Now I know that my suspicions were true,” Hertz told The Epoch Times in an email after reading the newly released missives.

“It is gut-wrenching to read these emails. Our lives were in Dr. Nath’s hands, and we were carelessly tossed away without a care. This is unlike any medical care that I have ever witnessed in my 33 years practicing as a gastroenterologist. Shame on them. This deep corruption needs to be exposed.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/2080971332880085476?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2080811807233720817?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 20 2026

Jul 202026
 
 July 20, 2026  Posted by at 9:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


Marlon Brando screentest 1951


• US-Iran Tit-For-Tat Spirals Towards Broader Conflict (ZH)
• Trump Has Just Weeks Left to Finish the Iran Conflict (Victor Davis Hanson)
• The DSA and the Myth of Scandinavian Socialism (Turley)
• DSA Using Vehicle of Democrat Party to Install Communist Government (CTH)
• Socialist Playbook: “Secret Nazis” Are Fine If They Advance Agenda (ZH)
• The “New Soros” Whose Street Cred Could Rise If Spain Blocks Extradition (ZH)
• UN Ambassador Throws Cold Water on Mamdani’s Plan to Arrest Netanyahu (Margolis)
• Is Trump Grooming Marco Rubio As His Successor? (Eric Florack)
• Ukraine Could Suffer Military Defeat – Senior Commander (RT)
• Both Russia and Iran Are At War, and Neither Knows It (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Roger Waters Calls Out West For Banning RT (RT)
• Trump Has Paid Carroll $5.62M, $83.3M Defamation Judgment Still Pending (JTN)
• Border Czar Tom Homan Discusses Value of ICE Body Cameras (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/JFKJrResearch/status/2078545899240980590?s=20 https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2078545569212244071?s=20

 


 


The US should know who they’re fighting: the Revolutionary Guard or the ayatollahs.

• US-Iran Tit-For-Tat Spirals Towards Broader Conflict (ZH)

The escalation pathway in the renewed tit-for-tat conflict between the US and Iran is becoming increasingly alarming and has been underway for eight days. US forces reportedly struck Qeshm Island and the southern Iranian cities of Shadegan, Sirik and Hajiabad, while Tehran retaliated with drone and missile attacks targeting US bases and critical infrastructure across Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, according to Bloomberg, citing Iranian state media.


The latest escalation could open the door for Israel to rejoin the fight. Itamar Ben Gvir, an Israeli security cabinet minister, told listeners on Israeli radio that he hoped President Trump would strike Iran hard. Iran’s latest attacks moved beyond military targets to now civilian infrastructure, which has been troubling. Kuwaiti Ministry of Electricity warned earlier today that its power and desalination plants have come under attack for the second straight day by Iranian projectiles.

https://twitter.com/AJENews/status/2078806014715961755?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078806014715961755%7Ctwgr%5Ecb83079d195ed7b47d046250b9140292c8d21e46%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fus-iran-tit-tat-spirals-towards-broader-conflict

US Central Command described the latest US strikes as seeking to reduce Tehran’s offensive capabilities on the Strait of Hormuz that threaten commercial shipping and “swiftly punish” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces behind the Jordan attack that killed two US soldiers and left another missing in action.

By now, the interim ceasefire deal signed by the US and Iran is in flames, as US forces have renewed their blockade of Iranian ports and the Trump team has tightened sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports…

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“.. and then go home and say to our allies Iran is now mostly inert. They have no air force. You in the Gulf, you have 600 combat frontline aircraft. You have missiles. You have missile defense. ..”

• Trump Has Just Weeks Left to Finish the Iran Conflict (Victor Davis Hanson)

We’re approaching 140 days since we first attacked Iran on Feb. 28 of this year. And we only really had … people call this a war, but it’s basically 40 days of actual bombing, tit for tat, followed by 100 days of negotiations interspliced with some tit-for-tat exchanges of missiles and drones. But for the most part, we have negotiated. Now, we know the strategy of both sides. The strategy of our president was he wanted to stay in power, meaning he wanted to have control of Congress. Otherwise, his initiatives and agenda will be ossified if the Democrats take over the House. They will impeach him if they take over the House, and he’s protected against conviction by running the Senate.


But if he should lose the House or Senate, in other words, if things would blow up, he would be in deep trouble. So, his point was always to make sure that Iran did not have the ability to produce a nuclear weapon and did not have the ability to launch missiles all over the Gulf and did not have the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. But the negotiations interrupted that cycle in which Iran also had a strategy, and their strategy was, “If we can drag this conflict out and punctuate it with missile launches and ride out the retaliations, which would be proportional or symmetric, we can run the clock out all the way to the midterms.

“If we do, the Democrats will take over the House of Representatives, and maybe they will not allot money to continue Trump’s war. And more importantly, maybe this will be the start of a new government in 2028, and we’ll be home free as we were with [Joe] Biden and [Barack] Obama.” So, that was their strategy: Drag it out, drag it out. Who won? Well, we’ll see about the denouement, but for now, Iran has been able to survive because we stopped full-scale fighting almost 100 days ago, and these tit-for-tats have been ineffectual in the sense they have not stopped the missile barrages to the Gulf states, and they have not given us control over the Strait of Hormuz, and we do not have control of the enriched uranium.

So, where are we now? We still have the same pressures on Donald Trump. We’ve got less than four months now until the midterms, but the economic news has been surprisingly good. Inflation, at a per-month rate, is at a historical low almost, and unemployment is about 4.2. GDP is strong at 2.3, 2.4. The stock market is high. The full effect of tax cuts and greater energy production and deregulation are starting to be felt, along with foreign investment. So, Trump thinks that, along with the redistricting and the Supreme Court ruling on gerrymandering, he might have a chance to upset the historical reality that 39 of the last 41 midterms have gone to the out party. So, he still thinks he has a chance, and he still wants to conclude operations and go home, and the Iranians know that.

So, where are we now? I think we can see what he’s doing. The last four days he’s had very, very strong strikes. Some of his critics have said on the right, “Well, you’re hitting all of these dock works and these small mosquito fleets and the fuel for missiles. “Why didn’t we do that earlier?” Well, we didn’t do it earlier because we were negotiating and we were measured and proportionate. And to deal with the Iranians now, you have to be unmeasured and disproportionate.

So, what we are seeing now is a full-scale effort to destroy all of their military abilities. And that would mean going to the factories, the industrial complex that makes these missiles, find where their launchers are, find their drone fields, clear the corridor near the strait of all of their anti-aircraft ability, their missiles, their drones, and their small fleet of vestigial boats that they use to mine the strait and attack tankers. Clear it all out. Do this for a week or two weeks and then stop and see if they want to concede. If they do not want to concede, then I think you would have another week of dual-use targeting.

And that would mean they were going to bring in the B-2s and hit Pickaxe Mountain, seal the areas under suspicion of harboring enriched uranium, hit the bridges, hit some of the power grid, and then go home and say to our allies Iran is now mostly inert. They have no air force. You in the Gulf, you have 600 combat frontline aircraft. You have missiles. You have missile defense. You can defend yourself from an inert Iran. You Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans, Taiwanese, you all want to use the Strait. We don’t. But we’ve cleaned it out now, and all you have to do is send a couple of vessels each.

And under our leadership, we always have forces in the Persian Gulf. We have frigates. We have a carrier that rotates in and out. We will help you organize the ability and the willpower to keep the Strait open.


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“.. the Scandinavian socialism myth is so enticing that I expect Scandinavians must wonder where they can also find it.”

• The DSA and the Myth of Scandinavian Socialism (Turley)

In 2015, the Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen observed, “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. Likewise, Social Democratic Minister of Finance Kjell Olof Feldt stated: “That whole thing with democratic socialism was absolutely impossible. It just didn’t work.”


As I discuss, these countries are not only committed to capitalism but also ranked among the most free-market economies in the world. These countries are also very different from the United States: “When socialism was tried in larger nations in Europe, such as France under FranAois Mitterrand, it failed, and capitalist measures had to be restored. In 2025, the populations of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are approximately 5.9 million, 10.6 million, and 5.6 million smaller than many American states. “

The DSA and the American left, including many in the media, continue to sell the public a bill of goods on the success of Scandinavian socialism. Ironically, it is the type of disinformation that the left often cites to justify greater censorship. Despite denials from these very countries, socialists in the United States continue to spread this false claim that there is a socialist paradise over the ocean where collectivists labor in picturesque Nordic fishing villages.

The promulgation of such myths is a central feature of Marxism. Lenin stressed that “we must not confine ourselves exclusively to propaganda in the narrow sense of the word.” Stalin likewise warned that “If our Party propaganda for some reason or other goes lame…then our entire state and Party work must inevitably languish.”

The fact is that socialism has repeatedly failed throughout history. The only way to get a people to embrace it is to rewrite that history. That is precisely what we see not only in the United States, but in the recent claims of incoming British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who condemned the privatization policies of Margaret Thatcher: “The country surrendered control of the essentials — housing, water, energy, transport — and left people exposed to higher costs.” What he does not mention is that she followed the collapse of socialist policies under Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1977–78 during the so-called “winter of discontent,” which I also discuss in the book.

Chevalier is a true believer who has praised Marxism and the concept of “seizing the means of production.” She won her primary despite comments bragging about her using the American flag to wipe her hands and criticizing the dating of white women as Black and Arab men “Fetishizing ugly colonizer women.”

Given that history, the adoption of the Scandinavian socialism myth is par for the course. Like Zohran Mamdani, she is rallying young, disillusioned, college-educated voters who are told that their struggles stem from the failures of the free market. Instead, they are offered free stuff and the illusion of an economic nirvana where lattes and Pilates are virtually costless.

Indeed, the Scandinavian socialism myth is so enticing that I expect Scandinavians must wonder where they can also find it.

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“Martha MacCallum Interviews DSA Co-Chairman Gustavo Gordillo …”

• DSA Using Vehicle of Democrat Party to Install Communist Government (CTH)

This is a very alarming conversation to be taking place in modern America. Alas, all things political have devolved into this current stage where Communism is represented by young voters as the preferred manner of government. Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo, having previously outlined that attachment to the Democrat party is only purposeful as a vehicle to gain political power, discusses the end game of DSA for installing communism within the United States. The DSA platform is disturbing, but generally in alignment with the Bernie Sanders and AOC model.


(1) Eliminate the United States Senate as a legislative body. (2) The House of Representatives then selects the President and Supreme Court justices. (3) All illegal aliens are given citizenship and amnesty. (4) All border enforcement is halted; there are no more USA boundaries. (5) The Dept of War (Defense) is dissolved completely. (6) The government, now controlled by the House of Representatives, determines who can have wealth – and how much. (7) Climate Change is the legislative priority – no more fossil fuel use.

Gustavo Gordillo’s family fled Peru due to a communist revolution. In the video below Martha MacCallum challenges DSA Chair Gordillo to explain how the DSA platform is expected to work. Gordillo explains the immediate DSA demand to control housing (govt), control food distribution (grocery stores), give free daycare for children, and create affordability for lower income citizens/aliens by taking the wealth from the high-income earners and giving the wealth to the lower income group.

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“White DSA Member Inadvertently Exposes Socialist Playbook: “Secret Nazis” Are Fine If They Advance Agenda.”

• Socialist Playbook: “Secret Nazis” Are Fine If They Advance Agenda (ZH)

Far-left podcaster and Democratic Socialists of America member Emma Vigeland appeared to inadvertently expose the far-left movement’s ends-justify-the-means political calculus: Even a “secret Nazi” would be acceptable if the candidate advanced a national socialist agenda. Vigeland, a former field reporter, producer, and commentator for The Young Turks and identified as a DSA member, also co-hosts The Majority Report with Sam Seder. She explained on a separate Vox podcast that she doesn’t care if a progressive or socialist candidate has “Nazi” skeletons in their closet.


“I am wary of over-focusing on an individual’s personal character over their platform. You know, I’ve said this before. I don’t really care if say like Bernie Sanders or AOC go home and they’re a secret Nazi, but they go out and they vote for the right things. Like we’re talking about politician,” the DSA member said earlier this month.Vox host Astead Herndon was astonished by Vigeland’s remarks, and asked: “You don’t care?”

Why is anyone surprised anymore? This comes after the political collapse of DSA’s Graham Platner, who had a large “Totenkopf” tattoo- a symbol associated with the Nazi SS.

What the internet had to say:

[..] DSA’s nation-killing agenda to collapse America:

The DSA is such a liability for the Democratic Party that a prominent Bill Clinton insider took the time to write up a Wall Street Journal op-ed that said: “Lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies and journalists should investigate the DSA to see if it is being funded by foreign governments and interests.”

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“.. the communist centimillionaire and heir to the Cox media fortune..”

• The “New Soros” Whose Street Cred Could Rise If Spain Blocks Extradition (ZH)

The federal government is well underway with a multiagency and multinational effort to combat the alarming rise of far-left revolutionaries. This was most evident on Thursday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed delegations from 65 countries. Meanwhile, Jim “Fergie” Chambers, the communist centimillionaire and heir to the Cox media fortune, is apparently “one step closer to extradition” on federal charges linked to “international money laundering… with the intent to provide material support and resources to foreign terrorist organizations.”


Chambers is a major funder of America’s radical Left and has been described by pro-Palestinian activist Laith Marouf as “the new Soros.” Marouf warned that Chambers could gain significantly more influence and “street cred” if Spain refuses to extradite him to the U.S. City Journal investigative analyst Stu Smith provided additional color on Marouf’s recent conversation, offering readers a clearer view of the major financiers and influence networks operating across the radical Left:


As left-wing activists demand “Freedom for Fergie,” Laith Marouf is refusing to join them. Marouf says he opposes Chambers’s extradition to the United States but warns that an unsuccessful prosecution could merely give the multimillionaire more “street cred.” Citing conversations he claims to have had with current and former intelligence agents, including Syrian and Spanish sources, Marouf alleges that Chambers has been positioned as “the new Soros” and is using his fortune to capture radical English-language media around the world. “He basically bought all the landscape of progressive media and is funding all of them,” Marouf said, alleging that Chambers’s donations allow him to influence those outlets’ political positions.

Marouf also accused Chambers of threatening his life and attempting to destroy his reputation. He said he does not wish imprisonment or death on Chambers, but he will not join those demanding his release. “I will sit on the side as an observer, watching the game of the American white elite beating each other up.” Marouf argues that Chambers is using inherited “blood money” to purchase credibility within the Palestine movement. “No, I don’t want Palestine in his mouth,” he said. “I don’t want Palestine to be associated with Fergie Cox.”

The broader Left has largely rallied behind Chambers, leaving Marouf as a rare dissenting voice. His definition of “progressive media” is unclear, but his broader warning about Chambers buying influence across the radical English-language media sphere rings true. And if Spain refuses extradition, Marouf may be right that the ordeal will only give Chambers more “street cred.”

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/2077744491776102460?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2077744491776102460%7Ctwgr%5E89719d8257eb651d0ca597f094364650d04c681b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmeet-new-soros-whose-street-cred-could-rise-if-spain-blocks-extradition

Smith has previously noted, “Chambers is one of the main funders of America’s radical Left. His money has flowed to a host of projects in the ‘anti-imperialism’ organizing space,” adding, “Chambers claims that he and Singham are effectively the two primary financiers of the US radical Left.” Despite this, the two have apparently been at loggerheads—a conflict that has now gone public.”

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/2059018248478146896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2059018248478146896%7Ctwgr%5E89719d8257eb651d0ca597f094364650d04c681b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmeet-new-soros-whose-street-cred-could-rise-if-spain-blocks-extradition

Following Rubio’s “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” at the State Department on Thursday, where he addressed delegations from 65 countries on combating far-left extremism, the signal is clear: The Trump administration is positioning for a broader fight against transnational Marxist revolutionary networks, reminiscent of the Western counter-subversion campaigns waged seven decades ago.

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You’d almost wish he tried. But in realty, it’s just about scoring cheap points.

• UN Ambassador Throws Cold Water on Mamdani’s Plan to Arrest Netanyahu (Margolis)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants everyone to believe he’s holding all the legal cards this September, threatening to have the NYPD slap handcuffs on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the moment he sets foot in Manhattan. The problem is that he can’t. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz wasted no time shredding Mamdani’s threat, making clear the mayor has no power to detain a foreign head of government protected under longstanding international agreements. “Mayor Mamdani. Here’s why your threat to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu in New York City during UN General Assembly is not going to happen,” Waltz said.


Waltz then walked through exactly why Mamdani’s fantasy falls apart. “The United States is not party to the Rome Statute that underlies the International Criminal Court. The UN Headquarters Agreement grants diplomatic protections to visiting heads of government. Head-of-state immunity applies, and federal authority trumps any local mayor’s wishes,” he said. So, contrary to Mamdani’s ego and rabid antisemitism, a big-city mayor doesn’t get to override federal law, international treaties, and diplomatic immunity because he dislikes a foreign leader’s foreign policy.

Netanyahu is expected to visit New York in early September for the UN General Assembly, and Israeli officials are just as unimpressed with Mamdani’s posturing as their American counterparts. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, turned the tables on Mamdani entirely. “If anyone should be arrested, it is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani,” Danon said. Danon didn’t stop there, accusing Mamdani of abandoning his actual job to chase headlines at Israel’s expense. “Mamdani is failing to govern New York. Instead of focusing on his responsibilities as mayor and confronting the rising wave of antisemitism in his city, he has chosen to incite hostility and generate headlines by attacking the State of Israel,” Danon said.

Danon made clear none of Mamdani’s chest-thumping changes anything. “It will not change a thing. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will come to New York, address the United Nations General Assembly with pride and stand before the world to state Israel’s truth and its unwavering right to defend its citizens,” he said. Mamdani isn’t backing down, even though he admits he might not have the authority to do what he’s promising. He told The New York Times his administration is still examining whether New York City has any legal basis to detain Netanyahu at all.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said, echoing the same talking point he leaned on throughout his mayoral campaign. He went further, calling Netanyahu “a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” and claiming that view is shared by “many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.” Mamdani admitted he doesn’t actually know if he can order the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of government, saying he’s “in an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department. He insisted, though, that he wouldn’t invent new legal authority out of thin air. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said.

How noble of him. Netanyahu has brushed off Mamdani’s threats before and shown no sign of altering his travel plans. He’s also accused Mamdani of siding with Hamas, the terrorist group whose October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel started the war Mamdani keeps invoking to justify his crusade.

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He doesn’t have to.

“A decade ago, he’d have been a lousy fit to carry Trump’s coalition forward. Today, he fits the part.”

• Is Trump Grooming Marco Rubio As His Successor? (Eric Florack)

I’ve been watching the relationship between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio lately, mostly due to a long string of commentary, both in my feeds and in my mailbox. Several people in recent days have started asking the same question: Is Trump grooming Rubio as his successor? My hip-shot response would be: Meh…. I wouldn’t object if that was the case. Rubio certainly seems a credible candidate. But, let me say up front—I have my doubts that’s a conscious choice on Trump’s part. But I get why people are asking. Let’s dive in.


Here’s the thing: this examination says as much about Trump’s leadership style as it does about Rubio. And Trump’s leadership style calls to mind a line from General George S. Patton: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” It seems to me that Trump sings harmony with Patton on that one. Unlike most presidents, he doesn’t micromanage. Instead, he:
• Sets broad objectives — “secure the border,” “get a better trade deal,” “end this war” — and skips the tactical playbook.
• Hands trusted advisers real latitude to execute.
• Obsesses over outcomes and how they play in public.
• Steps in personally only when something becomes politically or personally important to him.

Former Cabinet officials and aides tell the same story: Trump wants competing viewpoints on the table, picks a lane from the choices given, and then expects his team to drive in it. He’s not the guy poring over hundred-page policy memos or running agencies from the weeds. Never has been. So let’s look at what’s actually going on between Trump and Rubio. A few things stand out:

• Rubio’s portfolio keeps growing. As secretary of State, he’s literally everywhere on foreign policy, and Trump keeps handing him the delicate diplomatic assignments nobody else gets. Give someone enough rope, and people start measuring him for a crown.
• The relationship has thawed considerably. Remember 2016? Trump spent that primary calling him “Little Marco” and making it personal. Fast forward to today, and the two have built something that actually works. Trump praises Rubio’s performance far more than he knocks it — that, alone, is a genuine rarity in Trump World.
• Rubio has evolved. He’s shed the establishment-conservative label and rebuilt himself as an America First guy on immigration, China, trade, and national security. A decade ago, he’d have been a lousy fit to carry Trump’s coalition forward. Today, he fits the part.
• The succession question isn’t going away for at least a year and a half. Trump can’t run again; the Constitution says so, which means Republicans are already scanning the bench for an heir. Any Cabinet member with a high enough profile gets viewed through that lens whether they like it or not. Certainly Rubio qualifies on that point.

All of that said—I’m still skeptical this is a deliberate succession play on Trump’s part, at least not yet. Is it possible that Trump’s quietly positioning Rubio? Sure. The evidence fits that story just fine. Give a guy the State Department, hand him the hard diplomatic assignments, praise him publicly more than you criticize him — do that long enough, and of course people start drawing a line from Point A to Point B labeled “heir apparent.”

But here’s what that theory conveniently ignores: Trump doesn’t tend to groom people. He uses their abilities toward his own policy ends. He never has cared much for legacy-building or dynasty-planning — the man barely plans past next week’s news cycle, let alone the 2028 primary. To my mind, what actually explains the Rubio relationship is far less cinematic than a “Lion in Winter” style succession plot. In Rubio, Trump has found someone competent, someone who executes without whining, someone who doesn’t leak to the Washington Post the moment his feelings get hurt. That’s it. That’s the whole story. In Trump World, that alone is enough to earn a guy the keys to half the foreign policy apparatus.

And there’s a simpler explanation still sitting on the table, one nobody seems to want to entertain: maybe Trump just hasn’t decided. Maybe, indeed, probably, he doesn’t see the need to. After all, presidents aren’t obligated to anoint a successor, and Trump in particular has never operated on anyone’s timetable but his own. The trust he’s placed in Rubio could, down the road, calcify into something more deliberate — a real endorsement, a real torch-passing. But “could eventually” isn’t “is now.” Until Trump says the word himself, or until Rubio starts acting like a man measuring the Oval Office drapes, the rest of us are just reading tea leaves and calling it political science.

I’ll believe the succession theory when I see it. Right now, all I see is a president who found a guy who gets the job done. To the degree that qualifies Rubio for being the next POTUS, well, that stands on its own. Trump seems willing to allow the primary process to work that one out.

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“The army is becoming increasingly ineffective as it suppresses initiative and downplays failures, Sergey Sobko has warned”.

• Ukraine Could Suffer Military Defeat – Senior Commander (RT)

Ukraine could suffer defeat in the conflict with Russia, as the military command structure is growing increasingly rigid and ineffective, Brigadier General Sergey Sobko warns. His remarks were echoed earlier by former Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov, who was controversially relieved of his post by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky earlier this week – which triggered mass protests across Ukraine. In a post on Facebook on Friday, Sobko, the chief of staff of the 11th Army Corps, wrote that the Ukrainian military is in urgent need of reform, “otherwise we may be defeated.”


“Professional discussion is often perceived as disloyalty, and initiative as a threat,” he said, adding that this tendency has discouraged commanders from “taking risks for the sake of success.” Sobko also suggested that commanders are being promoted based on “personal loyalty” to their superiors, as opposed to competence and professionalism. He also called out what he described as a growing trend within the Ukrainian military toward micromanagement and downplaying failures in reports.

Sobko’s criticisms echo those made by former defense chief Fedorov. In the wake of his dismissal earlier this week, the 35-year-old technocrat confirmed that he was at loggerheads with Ukraine’s top military commander, Aleksandr Syrsky, whom he accused of blocking his efforts to modernize the army and make it more technology-oriented. At a press conference on Thursday, the former minister said, “we faced a complete blockage of all our initiatives.” He also claimed that Syrsky made an ultimatum to Zelensky, demanding that Fedorov be removed from office.

On Friday, the Financial Times, citing anonymous sources, also reported that Fedorov’s push to make corruption-plagued procurement procedures in the defense sector more transparent did not sit well with the top brass either. The firing of the defense minister, which came as part of a broader government reshuffle, has sparked protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. Apart from demands that the defense chief be reinstated, some demonstrators have also called for Syrsky’s dismissal. The FT quoted an unnamed senior Ukrainian defense official as saying,

“Syrsky hasn’t got a sense of how he’s going to win,” and that his “theory of victory is simply to hold out as long as you can and mobilize more people.” In a separate piece on Saturday, the FT, citing an anonymous senior official in Zelensky’s administration, claimed that the Ukrainian leader is considering firing Syrsky. According to the outlet, Zelensky is consulting military commanders over the weekend, looking for a potential replacement. Over the course of the conflict, Syrsky has earned the nickname ‘the Butcher’ for his perceived willingness to disregard heavy casualties.

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PCR doesn’t move.

• Both Russia and Iran Are At War, and Neither Knows It (Paul Craig Roberts)

Russia is at war with Washington and Europe, a war that has vastly widened, but Putin thinks Russia is engaged in a Special Military Operation confined to the battlefront in Donbas. Iran is at war, an existential war, with Satanic Israel, but the Iranian leadership thinks they are responding to an American “illegal military intervention.” All of Iran’s invective, threats, and vows are directed at Satanic America. Not a word about Satanic Israel, the cause of the conflict. America is just Israel’s proxy, as Ukraine is the West’s proxy against Russia. As neither Russia nor Iran understand that they are engaged in existential wars, neither has a war plan to achieve victory.


Iran’s policy is to inconvenience the American empire with an oil shortage and vows to escalate Iran’s tits to America’s tats. Russia’s policy is called TiT–Trust in Trump. John Helmer reports that the instructed Russian media and foreign policy analysts, who I suspect are financed by oligarchs, believe what they have invented as “the Anchorage spirit” has “given Russia a lot” by removing the US from direct participation in the conflict.

The implied hopes are in vain. What Trump has done is to turn over to Europe the arming of Ukraine with high-tech drones made in Germany that Ukraine, with US guidance and targeting information, is using to severely impact Russian oil production and refining, and to target and kill Russian civilians. Thus, the West has taken the war home to Russia. Currently, there is severe gasoline rationing in Crimea and long lines in some other Russian locations, and currently according to reports Russia is importing gasoline and diesel fuel from India. As for “trusting in Trump,” there are reports that Trump is considering allowing Zelensky to produce the US Patriot and Tomahawk missiles in Ukraine to provide more long-range weapons for strikes deep into Russia.

Russians have fled their summer holiday in Crimea where drone attacks are an everyday occurrence. St. Petersburg was under attack during the recent international meeting in the city, and Moscow’s mayor just reported that Ukraine, a.k.a., the West, launched 1,900 drones targeting Moscow in the past week. Russia is having to use its munitions to protect its capital, not to attack the enemy.

Putin, who insists that the conflict is limited to Donbas, refers to the increasingly successful attacks deep inside Russia as “terrorist actions.” Thus, Putin refuses to acknowledge them as acts of war, which relieves him of responsibility to do what Russian war doctrine requires. For example, Russian war doctrine at a minimum requires Russia to destroy the site of the German production of drones for Ukraine. In actually, Russian war doctrine requires a devastating nuclear attack on the United States. But as Washington knows that there is no threat from pusillanimous Putin, Washington knows Putin will not comply with Russia’s war doctrine. Putin proved this when he dismissed Washington’s attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force and on his home in an assassination attempt as merely “terrorist actions.”

Among the consequences of Putin’s denial of reality is the joining of NATO by Scandinavian countries that previously remained neutral, and the change in long-standing policy of Finland and Latvia to host on their territory on Russia’s border American nuclear weapons. So, it is clear as day, it is indisputable, that Putin’s idiotic pretense that Russia is not really at war, only involved in a Special Military Operation in Donbas, is leaving Russia exposed to a much wider war. The Russian media and oligarch-sponsored “experts” describe the rising threat to Russia as a “successful negotiation.”

The Iranians, who had an equally strong upper hand as the Russians, have also thrown away their advantage. Once the Iranian government on the verge of total victory threw their victory away by rescuing their enemies from defeat by agreeing to a ceasefire, Iran left the door open for future conflict. Ayatollah Khamenei stated: “The enemy must not sense any sign of weakness from us.” But it is signs of weakness that Iran sends.

Iran sits on its butt and permits American attacks, some of which are devastating on civilian infrastructure and civilian lives. Only then does Iran respond with disabling attacks on Washington’s bases in the Persian Gulf oil Sheikdoms and Jordan. This is nonsensical. A country that realized it was at war, would strike and wipe out the enemy bases from which it would be attacked. Not sit there and suffer the damage, as if it needs an excuse to respond.

But Iran only responds, after suffering destruction, to attacks. Iran has no war plan to defeat its enemies. This is a failure of Iranian leadership. And Russia’s is the same. The unwillingness of the two attacked countries to deal with reality is leading to two large wars.

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“The Pink Floyd co-founder has also slammed UK and EU elites for openly pushing for war with Russia..”

• Roger Waters Calls Out West For Banning RT (RT)

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has lambasted Western governments for pushing for war with Russia and banning RT in order to freely disseminate the warmongering “propaganda of the ruling class.” Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, published on Friday, Waters expressed dismay that “some people in the governments of the United States of America, and the UK, and the European Union are making blood-curdling, bloodthirsty noises about” a potential military conflict with Russia. The Pink Floyd co-founder noted that EU nations, including Germany, are rapidly increasing their military spending and funneling taxpayers’ money “into a big piggy bank in order to fight the Russians.”


“The Russians don’t want to invade Europe. What are they talking about?” he said, arguing that certain interest groups may be paying Western politicians to promote warmongering narratives and thereby justify outsized military expenditure. Instead of antagonizing Moscow and silencing voices that challenge Western “propaganda,” the musician-turned-activist said that “we have to be cooperating with the Russians.” “It sort of breaks my heart that I can’t watch RT anymore. ‘Cause it’s banned. You can’t watch Russia Today,” he said, recounting how the Russian broadcaster was taken off the air across much of the West following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

“So we live in a very difficult time where it may be, unless you, with your audience – or me with my tiny voice – can join with our brothers and sisters and pull together the ordinary working people all over the globe, and we can make the voice of the choir so loud that we can drown out the propaganda of the ruling class,” he said. Waters has long been a critic of Western military support for Ukraine, telling RIA Novosti last November that officials in the UK and the EU “don’t make any pretense that they care about” ordinary Ukrainians. Their endgame is to use the “corrupt Nazis” in Kiev, who will then “help them strip the country of all its assets and stuff the money into their pockets,” the musician said at the time.

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Legal disgrace.

• Trump Has Paid Carroll $5.62M, $83.3M Defamation Judgment Still Pending (JTN)

Supreme Court filings this week confirm that E. Jean Carroll has received roughly $5.62 million from President Donald Trump after the justices late last month declined to hear his appeal of the civil judgment in the case. But the court’s action resolves just one chapter of the long-running legal battle – leaving a separate $83.3 million defamation judgment pending. Trump is expected to ask the high court to review that case, which his attorneys argue raises broader questions concerning presidential immunity and the scope of official presidential speech.


The high court’s June 29 ruling, revealed Tuesday in the filings, is connected to the 2023 civil court verdict in which Trump was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll, a writer, in the mid-1990s and defaming her after she publicly accused him. The court’s ruling also left the civil court verdict intact and clears the way for Carroll to collect the judgment, plus accrued interest, after years of litigation.

Allegations and Civil Trials
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, first publicly accused Trump in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan during the mid-1990s. The allegation appeared in an excerpt from her memoir published by New York Magazine. Trump denied the accusation, saying he had never assaulted Carroll and describing her claims as a “hoax” and politically motivated.

Carroll subsequently filed two civil lawsuits.
The first, filed in 2019, alleged Trump defamed her by denying the assault and accusing her of fabricating the allegations. The second, filed in 2022 under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, included a battery claim based on the alleged sexual assault and additional defamation claims. During the 2023 trial, jurors heard testimony from Carroll, several corroborating witnesses, and two other women who accused Trump of similar misconduct. Prosecutors also introduced the 2005 Access Hollywood recording in which Trump described grabbing women without their consent.

The jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, although it rejected Carroll’s rape claim under New York’s legal definition in effect at the time. Jurors awarded Carroll $2 million for the sexual abuse claim and $3 million for defamation. In a separate trial in January 2024, another jury awarded Carroll the $83.3 million after concluding that Trump continued to defame her through statements made after the first verdict.

Supreme Court Declines Review Trump appealed the $5 million judgment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, arguing that the trial court improperly admitted testimony from other accusers and the Access Hollywood recording. After the Second Circuit affirmed the verdict, Trump petitioned the Supreme Court for review in November 2025. The justices considered the petition during their June 25, 2026, conference before denying certiorari four days later without comment or recorded dissent. Because the high court declined review, the Second Circuit’s decision remains in effect.

Trump’s attorneys later filed a petition for rehearing, arguing that the Court should reconsider the case because a forthcoming petition challenging the separate $83.3 million judgment may present presidential immunity issues under Trump v. United States (2024). Rehearing petitions are rarely granted. Following the Supreme Court’s denial, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered the release of the escrowed funds. Despite emergency efforts by Trump’s attorneys to delay payment, the judgment was ultimately satisfied.

Trump Continues to Denounce the Cases
Throughout the litigation, Trump has been unyielding in his public statements. He has repeatedly called Carroll a “liar,” dismissed the allegations as fabricated for book sales or political gain, and portrayed the entire process as election interference and “weaponization” of the justice system. On Truth Social and in interviews, he has labeled the cases “hoaxes,” “con jobs,” and part of a pattern of politically motivated attacks. Even after the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump vowed to continue fighting, framing it as resistance against what he calls Democrat-funded lawfare. His spokesperson echoed these sentiments, declaring that “the American People stand with President Trump” in demanding an end to such cases.

The $83 Million Judgment Remains on Appeal
Although Carroll has now collected the $5 million judgment, the larger $83.3 million award remains under appellate review. The Second Circuit affirmed that judgment earlier this year, and Trump is expected to file a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court. His attorneys are expected to argue that statements made while he was president are protected by presidential immunity or should be treated as official conduct under the Westfall Act. Enforcement of the larger judgment has been stayed after Trump posted a bond securing the award while his appeal proceeds.

Whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the second case remains uncertain. Some legal observers have suggested that immunity questions could present a more substantial issue for review than the evidentiary challenges raised in the first appeal, while others note that the Court’s refusal to hear the earlier case may signal reluctance to revisit the litigation. For now, the Supreme Court’s denial leaves the first judgment final while the parties continue to litigate the remaining appeal. The Carroll cases remain among the most closely watched civil proceedings involving President Trump, touching on questions of defamation law, presidential immunity, and the limits of civil liability for public officials.

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“.. members of Congress saying ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency. I think that- I actually think that emboldens some people to say, “I’m not going to comply with ICE.”

• Border Czar Tom Homan Discusses Value of ICE Body Cameras (CTH)

The worst thing to ever happen to the reputation of black culture in America was the introduction of police body cameras to highlight the behavior of African Americans to the world. Frequent travelers will note that foreign discussions no longer include curious questions about racism in America. With black Americans putting themselves on full cultural display, the world now understands the connection between black culture and antisocial behavior.


The same concept applies to ICE officers wearing body cameras. As each incident unfolds, people can see the severity of the antagonism faced by the law enforcement officers doing what the overwhelming majority want to see done. Deport all illegal aliens, cancel all H1Bs and put Americans first! WATCH:


[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: And we’re back with President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan. Welcome back to Face the Nation.

TOM HOMAN: Thanks for having me.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Mr. Homan, we saw that two immigrants were shot in the span of a week. There was that one in Maine that was fatal just days after another one in Houston. We also saw that man fleeing agents in Florida who then was struck and killed by a tractor trailer. I know you’ve been trying to keep the department out of the headlines ever since that streak in Minnesota that was deadly. How do you respond to those who say what’s happening now looks like very little has changed?

TOM HOMAN: Well, you know, first of all, we’ll wait and see what the investigations- how they play out, right? Because, you know, I don’t want to get ahead of investigations on who’s at fault, what exactly happened. Because we all know when the investigations happen, there’s going to be cell phone video, there may be city cameras, and of course, then you got witness statements and affidavits from the officer, and- and witnesses. So, we got to let the investigations play out. So, I don’t want to really comment on investigation themselves, but you know, I think, you know, Markwayne Mullin, you know, took some action, and in concern of the safety of the agents and- and how we do operations, and- and that’s why he did that, you know, that- that- that pause on- on enforcement on vehicle stops.

But you know, I- my concern is I’ve never- I’ve done this since 1984. My concern is I think a lot of the rhetoric that you see every day, especially in sanctuary cities, and at these protests that- resist, members of Congress saying ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency. I think that- I actually think that emboldens some people to say, “I’m not going to comply with ICE.” And I think no matter what people think of ICE, no matter what you think of immigration law, you should always comply with law enforcement.[..]

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Doubling human life expectancy https://twitter.com/Yerocode0/status/2078464147432300625?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 19 2026

Jul 192026
 
 July 19, 2026  Posted by at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Fall of Icarus 1558


• CENTCOM Says US Forces Launch New Strike On Iran (ZH)
• Two American Servicemembers Killed in Jordan, One Missing (CTH)
• Two American Troops Killed by Iranian Missiles on Jordan (ZH)
• Iran Formally Declares MoU Deal Is Dead – Expands Target List (ZH)
• The War Must Go On: NATO Plans For No Endgame (Kirill Kalinin)
• Canada PM Blames US Climate and Energy Policy for Canada Wildfires (CTH)
• As AG, Todd Blanche Will Finally Seek Justice for Dems’ Dirty Lawfare (Hammer)
• Circuit Court OK’s USPS Change With Big Mail-In Ballot Implications (Salgado)
• Will We Have an Election This Year? (Ted Noel)
• Why Fox News Is So Silent About Trump’s Election Fraud Speech (Pinsker)
• The Mayor Has One Guy He Really Wants to Arrest (Robert Spencer)
• The Supreme Court’s AI Collision Course (Boyle)
• James Carville Accidentally Admits He’s a Lunatic (Matt Margolis)
• Hawaii Supreme Court Issues Unhinged Screed Denouncing US Supreme Court (Turley)

 


 

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2078200916860436830?s=20 https://twitter.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/2078218832804487407?s=20 https://twitter.com/Chicago1Ray/status/2078314113319510432?s=20

 


 


Early morning.

• CENTCOM Says US Forces Launch New Strike On Iran (ZH)

CENTCOM said US forces struck Iranian missile and radar systems stationed along the Strait of Hormuz, further dismantling Tehran’s surveillance and strike capabilities while eroding its ability to control the maritime chokepoint. “Today at 6 p.m. ET, U.S. forces began launching new airstrikes against Iran at the Commander in Chief’s direction,” CENTCOM wrote on X. CENTCOM added, “The strikes are designed to further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night.”


State Department Issues “Worldwide Caution”
Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, which killed two U.S. service members and injured others, are likely to trigger a major U.S. retaliation.

https://twitter.com/defense_civil25/status/2078577724927713320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078577724927713320%7Ctwgr%5E2bf192b1f487795ab3e047ecf02032cdc69d1327%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fkuwait-pounded-iranian-barrage-oil-and-desalination-plants-come-under-attack

Israel’s Channel 14 reported late Saturday that President Trump instructed CENTCOM to “open the gates of hell” on Iran.

https://twitter.com/c14english/status/2078569750355988920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078569750355988920%7Ctwgr%5E2bf192b1f487795ab3e047ecf02032cdc69d1327%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fkuwait-pounded-iranian-barrage-oil-and-desalination-plants-come-under-attack

The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide caution, warning: “Due to heightened tensions in the Middle East, the security environment remains complex, with the potential for unforeseen escalation.”

Will tensions ease before the NY futures open on Sunday evening?

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Dead troops. That’s a red line, alright.

• Two American Servicemembers Killed in Jordan, One Missing (CTH)

According to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) four Americans were wounded, two killed and one missing following a ballistic missile and drone attack upon Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan last night.
TAMPA, Fla. — On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. Additionally, one service member is currently missing. Four American service members were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals. They have since been discharged. Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty. Out of respect for the families, CENTCOM will withhold additional information, including the identities of the fallen warriors, until 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.


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“The incident raises the number of U.S. service members killed in the war to 16.”

• Two American Troops Killed by Iranian Missiles on Jordan (ZH)

Footage has been widely circulating over the past half-day showing massive Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Jordan. Iran said it targeted a US base there, and took out various aerial and radar assets, and caused casualties among American troops. But the Pentagon has been radio silent on the extent of potential damage, until now: US officials are reporting that two American service members were killed in the overnight Iranian attack. According to emerging details in Axios:


Two U.S. service members were killed and more wounded in an Iranian ballistic missile attack on an airbase in Jordan on Saturday, military officials said. This is the first time U.S. troops have been killed since the fighting resumed two weeks ago. The incident raises the number of U.S. service members killed in the war to 16. On Saturday at least two Iranian ballistic missiles hit the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, which hosts U.S. troops and fighter jets. CENTCOM posted to X, officially confirming the news: “On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. Additionally, one service member is currently missing in action.”

The statement has noted additional injuries: “Four American service members were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals. They have since been discharged. Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty,” CENTCOM said.

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“Given President Trump has apparently just ordered dozens more aerial refueling planes to the region, the conflict looks to continue going up the escalation ladder ..”

• Iran Formally Declares MoU Deal Is Dead – Expands Target List (ZH)

It is now “official”: the Iranians have declared that the signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United States is dead. Tasnim is reporting Saturday that Iran will no longer fulfill its MoU obligations amid alleged repeat US violations. The past weeks have seen each side hurl warnings and threats to pull out, while attaching conditions that must be fulfilled. But after what is now a full week of renewed fighting, it has been effectively torn up, with negotiations no longer happening. Al Jazeera is citing a top Iran official’s precise statement on suspending the MoU in the following:


“Previously, we have seen again and again Iranian officials accusing the US of violating the MoU and also putting some conditions if the aggression continues. What we’re seeing is Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, who is also head of the Iranian technical negotiating team, saying that in practice, the US has violated all the commitments and suspended the MoU entirely. “We also likewise have suspended all of our commitments as a result; we are no longer implementing those commitments,” he added. So, officially, this is the first time the Iranians are saying the MoU is over and they’re not going to implement any clause. ”

Given President Trump has apparently just ordered dozens more aerial refueling planes to the region, the conflict looks to continue going up the escalation ladder for at least the next week or longer. Each side will seek to impose more economic and military pain, while waiting for the other to blink. Battle of narratives over damage and retaliation:

https://twitter.com/MonitorX99800/status/2078279287707140360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078279287707140360%7Ctwgr%5E95ec1cba7e4e198ebc83eb3aca28109d2e19ba36%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fkuwait-pounded-iranian-barrage-oil-and-desalination-plants-come-under-attack

Saudi Arabia has come under attack by Iranian missiles in the last 24 hours, the kingdom is confirming on Saturday, in a major escalation given that this is a first since near the start of the war several months ago. According to Reuters: “The Saudi civil defense early on Saturday issued two early warnings for Al-Kharj city and Yanbu to be alert to “potential danger,” but it later says the danger has passed in both areas, without providing details on the danger that triggered the warnings.

A US official tells the Axios news site that Iran targeted an American military base in Saudi Arabia with a ballistic missile, the first time that the Islamic Republic has directly attacked the kingdom in four months. Locations in Jordan and even Syria have also been hit in recent salvos, but the US military has downplayed these attacks – and there’s a battle of narratives over just how destructive these have been amid the fog of war. Kuwait also reeling from stepped-up attacks…

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“Long-term military support for Ukraine has become a routine policy, showing Brussels and Washington don’t see peace as an option.“

• The War Must Go On: NATO Plans For No Endgame (Kirill Kalinin)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s recent summit in Ankara has produced a decision that demands scrutiny. NATO member states have committed to providing Ukraine with military assistance worth 70 billion euros for 2026. This is not an emergency measure. This is the institutionalisation of a permanent war budget – a subscription, if you will, to ongoing military confrontation.


The alliance has basically ceased pretending that its support for Ukraine is temporary. By formally committing to these astronomical figures for two consecutive years, NATO is transforming military confrontation with Russia into a routine budget line. European leaders are now casually discussing the maintenance of approximately 70 billion euros per year as part of a sustained, multi-year commitment. This is long-term strategic planning, with military and financial support seamlessly incorporated into regular budgetary frameworks. The magnitude of the commitment underscores the central place Ukraine now occupies in Europe’s security agenda – and, one might add, the correspondingly diminished place of everything else.

Consider the comparison with development assistance to Africa. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures for 2024, net bilateral Official Development Assistance from OECD Development Assistance Committee members to the entire African continent amounted to US$42 billion, of which US$36 billion went to sub-Saharan Africa. The EU institutions themselves allocated approximately US$7.5 billion in bilateral ODA to African countries, while US$23.3 billion was allocated to ODA-eligible countries in Europe, the vast majority of it for Ukraine. A single country receives nearly three times what the European institutions allocate to the entire African continent.

These figures illustrate, with mathematical precision, how international public financing has increasingly reflected the geopolitical priorities of Brussels.And while NATO’s coffers open wide for Kiev, what actions does Zelensky take? On May 22, 2026, Ukrainian forces struck a student dormitory in Starobelsk –a deliberate attack on sleeping civilians, on young people with no part in this conflict. Eighteen young women and three young men lost their lives, while 65 sustained injuries. Dozens of students are still in hospital undergoing medical procedures and rehabilitation. The Kiev regime continues, with impunity, its never-ending drone strikes against Russian cities, residential neighbourhoods, and energy infrastructure. The West, of course, remains silent. No condemnation. No outrage.

On July 10, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Special Representative for Crimes Committed by the Kiev Regime, briefed the international community on yet another chapter of Ukrainian war crimes, this time in the Kherson region. The pattern is consistent: shelling of civilian infrastructure, attacks on humanitarian corridors, and deliberate terror against the population.

Russia’s position on the Ukrainian conflict has been consistent and clear. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed his preference for a political-diplomatic settlement, but always with due regard for Russia’s vital national interests. Ukraine has been weaponised as a battering ram in the West’s confrontation with Russia, with blatant disregard for the Ukrainian people themselves. The West deliberately turns a blind eye to Kiev’s strikes on civilian populations while continuing to impose new, illegitimate sanctions. Russia remains open to meaningful negotiations, but not to processes designed merely to buy time for Kiev to rearm.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been equally forthright. Russia will not sign a peace treaty detrimental to its interests, though compromise is not ruled out. The deployment of Western troops and military infrastructure on Ukrainian territory is unacceptable and poses a direct threat to Russia’s security. Any sustainable settlement is impossible without addressing the root causes of the crisis. Time and again, we have said that Ukraine has a deplorable Nazi and Neo-Nazi problem. Nobody believed us. Yet this is something that the Polish government is only now starting to recognise, judging by the recent diplomatic rift between Warsaw and Kiev.

Polish officials have explicitly warned that Poland will block Ukraine from joining the European Union until the historical issues surrounding the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army are fully resolved. Let me remind readers that, during World War II, the above-mentioned organisations were complicit in the Volhynia and Galicia massacres, as well as other numerous killings of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, and Byelorussians.

Coming back to the present day, Russia needs lasting agreements, not temporary reprieves that allow the Kiev regime to regroup. The Russian side has proposed practical steps, including raising the rank of the Ukrainian delegation heads and establishing working groups on humanitarian, political, and military issues. This is not intransigence, it is a serious approach and a determination to put an end to this conflict. We are ready to engage, but we will not be drawn into a charade. Russia endured eight years of provocation before the Special Military Operation began, and it has now spent more than four years resisting Western efforts to inflict upon it a so-called “strategic defeat.”

The 70 billion euro commitment is clear. NATO is not preparing for peace. It is preparing for perpetual confrontation. It is institutionalising war as a strategic instrument with the full support of European governments that, as President Vladimir Putin repeatedly observed, have assumed the role of vassals rather than acting as fully sovereign states.

Russia remains prepared to listen to sensible and reasonable proposals, but it will not be naive. The record of Western duplicity speaks for itself. I am sure our African friends know this better than anyone else.

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Canada’s not killing its ecoomy for nothing. It only works if you kill yours too.

• Canada PM Blames US Climate and Energy Policy for Canada Wildfires (CTH)

President Trump pointed out Canada’s forestry mismanagement and their failure to follow through with previous promises of investment that have led to catastrophic wildfires now producing smoke streams making U.S. Northern cities and states live under dangerous conditions. Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked about the U.S. government position, and he immediately hit back by saying the cause of Canada’s wildfires is ‘climate change’ and President Trump’s unwillingness to support the Paris Climate Treaty has created the problem that Canada is now dealing with. In short, according to the official policy of the Canadian government, their wildfires are caused by Trump’s refusal to accept global “climate change” policies. WATCH:



It should be noted that Canada clutches its pearls, claiming the USA should send “support” to assist Canada fighting wildfires instead of blaming them for mismanagement. However, reciprocity is a big problem. Most of the firefighting takes place as an outcome of private-public contracts for costs. {SOURCE} The Canadian government blocks U.S. companies from fighting fires in Canada because the Canadian government wants to only pay Canadian companies and workers. U.S. firefighting is not allowed to assist in Canada and get reimbursed.

Conversely, the Canadians quickly want to come to the U.S. to fight fires because the USA reimburses firefighting companies at a higher rate than Canada. The USA has no federal restrictions on Canadian firefighting assistance. Canadian firefighting professionals would rather fight forest fires in the USA because they make more money. There is no incentive for U.S. firefighting professionals to volunteer their time and effort without getting reimbursed; which is the position of Canada. In essence, come to Canada and fight our fires for free because we will only pay Canadians. However, also, let our Canadian firefighters come to the USA and make money. It is a very Canadian argument.

“TRUTH SOCIAL – “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable! I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result. This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”


Last point(s). First, Canadians have no idea about how the reimbursement rates work and how their government refuses to set reciprocal standards for firefighting payments and subsidies. Canadians make emotional arguments because they genuinely do not understand the process and government system. The government likes them to remain uninformed.

Second, Prime Minister Mark Carney makes his “climate change” blame argument in French because he doesn’t want to be put on blast by an American alternative media system who have caught on to his duplicity and will make his insanely insufferable arguments go viral. Canadians cannot argue on substance because they are intentionally misinformed by their govt. Carney continues to manipulate communication tools (in this example language) as part of the long-standing Canadian propaganda system.

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“As legal eagle Jonathan Turley said on Fox News, Blanche is one of the most qualified attorney general nominees in the history of the Justice Department.”

• As AG, Todd Blanche Will Finally Seek Justice for Dems’ Dirty Lawfare (Hammer)

It’s easy to forget, but from 2022 through 2024, Democrats engaged in some of the most reckless, republic-destabilizing actions since their partisan forebears fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. In colluding to prosecute then-former (and future) President Donald Trump on sham legal grounds across four different jurisdictions and three separate prosecutors, Democrat-Lawfare Complex thugs acted in a manner more befitting tribal warlords of a third-world hellhole than elected officials in the greatest country on earth. They crossed a line that never should have been crossed, effectuating the old Stalinist creed, attributed to Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”


Many have conveniently forgotten or moved on, but we are still learning more about the Democrats’ depths of lawfare depravity.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have learned more about so-called special counsel Jack Smith, the one-man wrecking ball who brought the twin federal probes against Trump in Washington, D.C. (the 2020 election case) and Florida (the classified documents case). Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that Smith’s own henchmen may, ironically, have committed the same classified documents offenses for which Smith prosecuted Trump. Grassley also revealed Smith obtained text messages from 44 Republican members of Congress — despite the fact that Smith has explicitly denied doing exactly that.

That looks an awful lot like perjury. And perjury is actually just the tip of the iceberg. There are myriad other crimes that Smith and his primary colluders — namely, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis — likely committed. For instance, federal law criminalizes conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is an awfully good match for the lawfare cabal’s coordinated assault on Trump and the rule of law.

There has thus far been no accountability for Democrats’ debilitating lawfare. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, to her credit, oversaw the indictment of scandal-plagued former FBI Director James Comey, but the case was dismissed on bogus procedural grounds. The same thing happened to the Bondi Justice Department’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who in 2018 had sought statewide office in the Empire State on a Beria-esque platform: James said her run for office was motivated by a desire to hold “that man in the White House” accountable. Forget about securing the blessings of liberty or meting out justice. For some, it’s just “orange man bad” all day long.

Enough already. These scoundrels must pay for the havoc they unleashed upon the American people and the torch they took to our rule of law. Democrats drone on endlessly about “norms,” but their lawfare cabal blew up countless norms and laughed about it — and then conveniently forgot it all ever happened. But that’s not how it works. Only with real accountability and justice for those who acted so wrongly can we ensure this lawfare never happens again. And in light of the new Grassley revelations, Rabbi Hillel’s famous question comes to mind: “If not now, when?”

Fortunately, Todd Blanche, Trump’s acting attorney general, who just had his confirmation hearing to take the job permanently, is the perfect man to secure real lawfare justice for the American people. Blanche has a sterling resume for the nation’s top law enforcement job. As legal eagle Jonathan Turley said on Fox News, Blanche is one of the most qualified attorney general nominees in the history of the Justice Department. He prosecuted violent crimes for eight years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. More recently, he served as Bondi’s deputy attorney general, which means he ran the department on a day-to-day basis.

Even more significant is what Blanche did between those stints at S.D.N.Y. and Main Justice: He represented Trump as the president’s lead criminal defense attorney at the very height of the Biden-era lawfare. That shows Blanche is principled. That shows he has moral courage — far more, frankly, than the crusty barnacles of the conservative legal establishment. But even more important, it means Blanche lived firsthand through the Democrats’ lawfare hell on earth. If anyone wants accountability now, it’s Blanche. And he knows where the bodies are buried. Americans deserve justice for the Democratic lawfare that almost destroyed the republic. Todd Blanche will help us get it. He should be swiftly confirmed.

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“Nearly every voter in California casts a ballot by mail ..”

How do you reform that?

• Circuit Court OK’s USPS Change With Big Mail-In Ballot Implications (Salgado)

The Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the United States Postal Service can move ahead — for now — with a rule change with major implications for mail-in ballot reform and state compliance with federal review. The court granted the motion for stay in the case of the NAACP v. USPS, based on the strength of the appellants’ arguments. In other words, the court agreed that USPS is likely to win its case based on the Constitution and on the timeframe which the Postal Service has to implement a framework for ballots ahead of the midterm elections.


Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the central district of California, posted, “This ruling is a win for election integrity and would have significant implications for states like California that refuse to submit their voter rolls to verify compliance with federal election laws.” The decision came July 17, the day after President Donald Trump revealed disturbing evidence of mass election fraud in the United States, both from domestic actors and foreign governments. One of the areas where Trump emphasized that our election system is extremely vulnerable to manipulation is through mail-in ballots.

All the USPS is attempting to do is to demand from states certain data and certain envelopes related to mail-in ballots in order to ensure a more secure chain of custody and fewer opportunities for falsified ballots. The NAACP is screeching and wailing about it, but all it is doing is displaying its own determination to facilitate fraud. The only reason one would be horrified at a requirement for submission of voter lists and serialized ballot barcodes is if one knows there is some hanky-panky ongoing, and wants to ensure it continues.

The exact quote from the circuit court decision is below: “Appellants have made a strong showing that they will likely succeed on two of their arguments. First, their proposed rule is likely neither constitutionally nor prudentially ripe for review … Next, appellants have demonstrated irreparable harm on the ground that absent a stay, the district court’s injunction ‘will render [them] unable’ to ‘issue and implement a final rule in advance of the November 2026 general election.’ … Finally, on this record, any countervailing harm to appellee and the public does not outweigh appellants’ success on the two ‘most critical’ stay factors.”

This is very important language going forward, because the D.C. Circuit Court, of all places, has lent legitimacy to arguments in a case that could be crucial as the Trump administration seeks to close fraud loopholes for the midterm election this November. In California, for instance, mail-in ballots dominate elections. And we all saw how that played out with the recent contested Los Angeles mayoral race. Below is from the newly declassified documents that the Trump administration published this week:

We can only pray that the Trump administration ends up winning this case. Otherwise, Democrats and Chinese commies will keep stealing more and more elections.

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“Given the massive amount of fraud that Trump revealed (and that slipped by most people), it’s questionable whether we’ve actually had any elections recently.”

• Will We Have an Election This Year? (Ted Noel)

President Trump gives a great stump speech. But when he’s trying to educate America about critical issues like election integrity, he sucks. Sorry, but it’s the truth. That’s why I’m calling this session of the “Make Elections Safe Again” (MESA) seminar to order. Take your seats and pull out your writing tools. While you’re at it, let’s have a Simultaneous Sip in memory of Scott Adams. The President laid down a lot of factual materials. But they were scattered like Jenga blocks. Let’s put them into a meaningful order. Our first stop must be China.


The FBI, CIA, and DHS are releasing a pot full of data that the ChiComs have gotten hip-deep into our election apparatus. They have complete records of 220 million American “voters.” We’ll explain those scare quotes momentarily. But given that we have around 340 million people in the US, that’s close to two-thirds of everyone here. And that raises our first Red flag. The voting age population of the US is about 261 million. The typical registration rate for voting-age adults is 70-85%. 85% of 261 million is 221 million. Interesting. If we use the highest registration rate, then every likely registrant is in China’s database. Every. Last. One.

But something stinks with that arithmetic. You see, the “voter eligible” population (VEP)—yes, that number is different from “voting age”—is only 239 million. Take that stirring spoon out of your eye for a moment. And wipe the coffee off your shirt. The 22 million difference includes legally present aliens—visa holders, green card residents, and so on. We don’t actually know how many illegals are in it, or if that number is even bigger. But it’s a lot, and when we look at the VEP, apply that huge 85% registration number to it, and hit ENTER, there may be as many as 203 million actually eligible registered voters.

Before you spill your coffee a second time, put it down and consider this. That arithmetic means that China has at least 17 million fraudulent voter registrations in its hacked data. The number of fraudulent voter registrations known by China is larger than the population of forty-six states. Only New York, Florida, Texas, and California are larger. That’s not a problem. That’s a disaster. And America is being swept away by the flash flood. It’s time to get real. That 17 million number is a best-case calculation. If we use the 70% registration rate, it could be as high as 61 million. That’s more than the voter-eligible population of California, Texas, and New York…combined.

You read that right. This isn’t a disaster; it’s a nuclear catastrophe because if China is able to hack our systems to get all that data, it’s able to hack in to write new data. Could that many vote switches swing a key election? I wonder… Eighteen states have refused to grant voter roll access to the Feds, and in the most comprehensive analysis of state-by-state data, they have a total of 120 million voter-eligible adults, with 100 million registered, for an 83% registration rate. Reading the data differently can lead to the conclusion that these Democrat-run states have more voters than adults. Something is very rotten in Denmark.

Let’s move to Trump’s statement that we know of at least a quarter million non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. It turns out that this is just four states!

DHS Document (highlight added).


We must wonder what the number would be if all states shared their data with the feds. Add in the 400,000 dead people known to be on the rolls, and anyone with an IQ above room temperature must wonder if it’s possible to have an election anywhere. Which raises a key question: What is an election? Democrats scream about “losing our democracy!” I won’t debate the issue of democracy versus. republic. But we do have democratic elections at many levels. Unfortunately, very few of them are actually elections. Six years ago (have I been writing for AT that long?!?!), I wrote that:

An election is a process of counting votes for candidates. Only valid, lawful votes may be counted. A valid lawful vote is:
• Cast by an eligible, properly registered elector as prescribed by laws enacted by the state Legislature.
• Cast in a proper form as prescribed by laws enacted by the state Legislature.
Any process that does not follow these rules is not an election. Anything that proceeds from it cannot be regarded as having any lawful import.

Let’s start at the beginning. To be eligible, you must be consuming oxygen, at least 18 years of age, a US citizen, and a resident of your voting district for a period that the state defined. That means that something north of two million registered names are already known or reasonably estimated to be ineligible. That’s enough to invalidate pretty much any election, since every fraudulent vote cancels out an eligible voter.

Next, your “vote” indicates your preference on a given issue. It can be who should assume a particular office or whether a given voter initiative should pass or not. That “vote” must be indicated in a manner that the state legislature requires. And that preference must be presented to voting officials in the time window the legislature set. (No, California’s insane “count forever” system is not the subject of this essay.) Again, if a ballot arrives from an improper person or in an improper manner, it also cancels out the vote of a real voter. As I said six years ago:

Most commentators suggest that a process of collecting pieces of paper with marks on them is an election regardless of errors, omissions, and even deliberate malfeasance. This is a mistake. Imagine a golf tournament where every bad shot by one player gets a do-over, but the competing player has to follow USGA rules in detail. One player gets to drop freely out of hazards, but the other has to tackle every embedded ball as it lies. The result is a travesty.

“The same thing applies to elections. If there are a handful of improper votes, we can suggest that there was in fact an election, perhaps tainted, but the election wasn’t materially harmed. But when the people charged with managing the election decide to ignore the law, whatever process they supervise is not the process defined by the law. Therefore, it is not an election. This leaves us with two problems. First, how do we protect actual elections? This involves multiple issues. Trump’s initiative to prevent mailing ballots to non-voters is a good start and should succeed in the appellate courts. Next, states need to clean up their voter rolls. Finally, mail-in voting should be restricted to those who are unable to vote in person.

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“One of the longterm consequences of Fox News settling its lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million is that FNC programming will avoid discussing voter fraud.”

• Why Fox News Is So Silent About Trump’s Election Fraud Speech (Pinsker)

This is a major new story, because the PR implications are enormous: America’s #1 conservative media outlet is AWOL in the election fraud debate. Which means, if Republicans are going to win the PR argument, we must do it without Fox News as a counterbalance to the mainstream media. After President Donald Trump’s primetime address on voter fraud on Thursday evening, the media noticed something curious: Fox News Channel was ignoring the story.


Mediaite: Fox & Friends Completely Ignores Trump’s Election Speech — Doesn’t Mention It Once in 3-Hour Show “As other networks picked apart President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to the nation early Friday morning, Fox News went in a completely different direction. Fox & Friends produced not one mention of the president’s address from the night before, during which the commander in chief once again attempted to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections — pointing a finger at Venezuela and China.

Instead, the regular lineup of co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones discussed the latest campaign of U.S. airstrikes against Iran, the air quality crisis choking much of America, disastrous flooding in Texas, the World Cup, and a “phenomenal” speech — by Marco Rubio. Near the end of the three-hour show, the F&F crew turned it over to America’s Newsroom host Dana Perino for a preview of the 9 a.m. show. In it, she also did not mention the speech.”

Mediaite wasn’t the only outlet that noticed this omission. Over on CNN, Brian Stelter told viewers, “And here’s maybe the best tell of all: Fox News did not spend much time on this after the speech. They moved on right away. Fox News barely talking about this speech this morning. That tells me some of Trump’s allies in MAGA media know this might not be a winning issue for him.” Actually, it tells me Brian Stelter — CNN’s “chief media analyst” — knows a helluva lot less than I do about how the news media actually functions. Here’s the CNN clip:

Other left-leaning outlets adopted similar talking points. The New Republic: Trump’s Favorite News Show Totally Ignores His Election Fraud Speech “President Trump’s rant to the nation about election fraud Thursday night was full of inaccuracies, previously known information, and claims unsupported by evidence. On the biggest conservative TV network, Fox News, which Trump watches regularly, no one is giving it much attention Friday morning. […] Laura Ingraham didn’t even discuss the speech, even though Trump was scheduled to speak just two hours later. Jesse Watters gave it a passing mention at the end of his show, prioritizing one of his correspondents interviewing people in bathing suits at Central Park. Sean Hannity gave the speech a small amount of discussion and said his show would look into it in the coming days.

The Nation’s sub-header told its readers, “Not even Fox News buys Trump’s new lies, but they will be used to undermine the midterms.” From the article: “Surprisingly, there are some lies so outrageous that even Sean Hannity is reluctant to endorse them. […] “In fact, [Trump’s] speech was so disgracefully packed with lies that even some of the president’s most loyal lapdogs decided to keep their distance from it.” […] The lukewarm response from flunkies like [Hannity] is telling. They were right to want nothing to do with the speech.

The left-wing media is pushing this interpretation because it directly undermines President Trump’s argument and credibility: “Not even Trump’s ‘flunkies’ at Fox News believe this nonsense! The president is lying again!” It was a clever way to score political points.But the truth, alas, is even darker and more disturbing. About two years ago, I pitched a cybersecurity expert to a prominent Fox News producer. S/he is someone I’ve worked with since Barack Obama’s first term. (For obvious reasons, I don’t want to reveal his/her name, but he/she produces one of FNC’s most high-profile Monday through Friday TV shows.)

The topic I pitched was cyber vulnerabilities in U.S. voting machines. The producer sent me a one-sentence reply: “I like it – but We don’t touch election fraud in any capacity.” Nothing else needed to be said. Unless you’re a total moron (or CNN’s “chief media analyst”), you could read between the lines: One of the longterm consequences of Fox News settling its lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million is that FNC programming will avoid discussing voter fraud. The topic appears to be forbidden. Fox News shuns it like the plague. (Or like Taco Bell’s lettuce.)

Which means, FNC’s silence on Trump’s voter fraud claims isn’t an editorial decision; nor does it mean that the president’s speech was “so disgracefully packed with lies that even some of the president’s most loyal lapdogs decided to keep their distance from it.” And it absolutely, positively, 100% doesn’t mean what Brian Stelter told CNN’s viewers was the “best tell of all” — that “some of Trump’s allies in MAGA media know this might not be a winning issue for him.”

[..] the biggest, most influential conservative media outlet in America, by a yuuuge margin, is still Fox News. If FNC doesn’t have a free hand to fight back, Republicans have lost an important PR asset. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case: For legal and business reasons, Fox News cannot rally public opinion on this issue; apparently, it’s been censored and defanged. Which means we’ll have to win the election fraud argument without FNC’s help.

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”The Mayor Who Wants to Empty Prisons and Defund the Police Has One Guy He Really Wants to Arrest.”

Mamdani thinks he’s the president.

• The Mayor Has One Guy He Really Wants to Arrest (Robert Spencer)

Zohran Mamdani, the Marxist Twelver Shi’ite mayor of New York City who wants to empty out the prisons, defund the police, and replace cops with social workers, has suddenly become a law-and-order guy. While he wants all manner of thugs, felons, and psychopaths menacing the law-abiding citizens of his once-great city, the callow authoritarian does have one man he is determined to put behind bars: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


The New York Post reported Saturday that Mamdani “says he’s still weighing whether he can arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister is scheduled to visit the Big Apple in September.” The mayor, whose hatred for Israel burns with such intensity that he says that he entered politics because of the alleged plight of the Palestinians, wants to arrest the Israeli prime minister for several key reasons. Foremost among them is the fact that if he does arrest Netanyahu, he will become the foremost hero of the left and the forces of jihad worldwide. His place in the pantheon of renowned leftists will be ensured. Everywhere he goes and whatever else he does throughout his lifetime, adoring sycophants will be ready everywhere to grant him his every wish.


Mamdani’s pretext for attempting to gain this heroic status is the International Criminal Court’s Nov. 2024 arrest warrant for Netanyahu. He said when it was issued that as mayor, he would have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York City. Yet Mamdani’s road to supplanting Che Guevara as the communist on all the t-shirts faces several formidable obstacles: neither the U.S. nor Israel recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, and the arrest warrant itself increasingly appears to have been a cynical ploy on the part of Muslim prosecutor Karim Khan to divert attention from sexual misconduct charges that he himself is facing.

Then there’s the fact that actual experts in urban warfare have examined the IDF’s record and found that it actually succeeded in reducing the number of civilian casualties beyond even what the Americans accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite Hamas’ relentless efforts to drive up the number of civilian casualties for propaganda purposes.

Mamdani, however, may be a millennial, but he is no slacker. He is not giving up that easily, and “is in an ‘active conversation’ with authorities ahead of Netanyahu’s trip to Manhattan for the UN General Assembly.” Despite the lack of evidence against Netanyahu, Karim Khan’s manifest corruption, and the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction, the boy commie remained defiant, saying: “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in the Hague. He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court.”

That and $9.82 will get you a cup of coffee in a jihadi coffee house in Brooklyn, but Mamdani was ready to meet objections with an argument from authority (logically, kids, that’s the weakest of all arguments): “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.” Many people can be wrong, as we have seen in numerous totalitarian states, the two elections of Barack Obama, and much more, but don’t expect an up-and-coming young Marxist of the caliber of Hizzoner to take any note of that.

Mamdani did admit, at very least, that he “wasn’t sure if he had the authority to order the NYPD to cuff Netanyahu, but that he would act as aggressively as the law would allow.” He’s badgering his aides and hapless city employees now to see if he can slap the cuffs on the Israeli prime minister for the crime of defending Israel against the inexorable jihad: “The mayor is in ‘an active conversation’ with the city’s Law Department over the matter, he said.” Mamdani declared: “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.” Oh, that’s a relief!

Mamdani might also want to arrest the Israeli prime minister because Netanyahu has his number. “I think he should look at who he’s condemning, who he’s praising. He’s condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values. Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre [on Oct. 7, 2023], the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust.” Indeed. Netanyahu even added the irrefutable coup de grace: “And in fact I think secretly, he hates America.”

It ain’t even all that well-kept a secret, Mr. Prime Minister. Here’s hoping that when you come to the Big Apple, you can stay out of the slammer.

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Do we also give AI models personhood? Decide now!

• The Supreme Court’s AI Collision Course (Boyle)

Imagine a tight House race in a swing state. In the final weeks of the campaign, a new super PAC begins spending heavily against the incumbent. It runs ads on local television and reaches individual voters with highly tailored texts. The messaging is hard-hitting and seems to be swaying the electorate. None of it traces back to the opposing campaign.


It also doesn’t trace back to any human operative. The super PAC is funded by a single LLC whose donor cannot be identified, and its spending decisions are being made by an AI agent that has been given a budget and a political objective and is now operating without any meaningful human direction. The “consultants” placing the ads are software. The text messages were crafted by the AI.

This is not a hypothetical we will face in some distant future. The technology already exists. A wealthy person, foreign government, or corporation that wants to influence an election without ever exposing themselves to scrutiny could set up such a campaign operation today. And under the Supreme Court’s current campaign finance doctrine, the states and Congress may have little power to stop it.

The AI industry has emerged as one of the largest forces in American politics. Super PACs funded by AI companies and their investors have raised well over $100 million to shape the 2026 midterms, backing candidates in both parties who share the industry’s preferred approach to regulation, and attacking those who don’t. So far, their ads rarely mention artificial intelligence at all. They talk about issues like immigration, corruption, and cost of living, and it isn’t obvious to the average viewer that these ads were funded by a multi-billion dollar industry with its own unspoken legislative wish list.

But there’s a deeper, less-obvious dynamic operating in the background. The constitutional doctrine that currently protects the right of these companies to spend millions in our elections is the same doctrine that will be asked to protect something even stranger: The “speech” of artificial intelligence itself.

Modern campaign finance doctrine has been established, affirmed, and extended by Supreme Court decisions over the last 50 years. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), it held that raising and spending money in political campaigns is tantamount to speech itself, and, therefore, that most legislative efforts to address the influence of money in elections would be subject to strict judicial oversight. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) extended this framework to corporations, and then, most famously, Citizens United v. FEC (2010) extended it further to independent spending.

The court’s campaign finance jurisprudence was not built with artificial intelligence in mind, but its logic isn’t confined to the campaign finance context. If “speaker identity” does not matter for corporations and unions and super PACs, why should it matter when it comes to AI platforms?

It is thus easy to envision the Supreme Court concluding that AI-generated output is protected speech. Indeed, serious legal scholars are already arguing so. These scholars are not distorting the court’s doctrine, but simply following it to its logical conclusion. As John Ehrett and Brad Littlejohn recently warned, “The logic of the Court’s caselaw pushes forcefully in a single direction: Toward constitutional protections for everything AI, and beyond.” It is only a matter of time before an AI company, facing a regulation or decision it would rather not live with, asks the court to make that conclusion the law of the land. (This isn’t hypothetical; an AI company has already raised a First Amendment defense against a wrongful death lawsuit.)

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“I don’t want to argue that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, because I know they did.”

• James Carville Accidentally Admits He’s a Lunatic (Matt Margolis)

On Thursday, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address laying out new evidence of multiple security breaches in U.S. elections, breaches he says a self-proclaimed “shadow government” and the Biden administration concealed from the public. The left had a collective hissy fit, and ABC, CNN, and NBC all refused to carry the speech on their regular news programming. James Carville went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and blasted the networks for the blackout. Before you give him any credit for this, wait until you hear his reasoning; it tells you everything. “I think the president of the United States acting loonier than a tune is newsworthy,” Carville said.


“I don’t think we should have hidden that from the American people.” Blitzer, apparently sensing this was a strange hill for a Democrat to die on, asked whether Carville really believed Trump deserved even more publicity. Carville confirmed he did. “I think the mistake was made by the networks not to show it in its entirety, so people could see him in full and understand just how far this man has gone down the road,” he said. “I would say there was nothing normal about [the speech],” Carville added. “You can do it with clips, and you can get people on, but there’s nothing like people sitting there, watching the whole thing, to tell them what’s really going on.”

So according to Carville, a president who questions the integrity of American elections (with evidence) is a lunatic, and the country deserves to see the lunacy uncut and unfiltered. Fine. Let’s apply that standard to Carville himself. This is the same man who has spent a quarter-century insisting the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. In fact, just days before Trump’s address, he repeated the claim on his own podcast.

“Now, let me give you a brief history of 21st century American presidential politics, and I’m going to tell you the truth, and this is the gospel truth. You can go ahead and question about it. It’s s**t,” Carville said. “In the year 2000, it was Al Gore and George W. Bush. Al Gore clearly won Florida. They stopped the recount. The Supreme Court just decided an American election throughout the will of the people. The only reason, the only reason that that race was close enough for Scalia and Rehnquist and company to steal, you understand I get this straight, well, because Ralph Nader ran. That’s right. There was an attack from the left.”

Al Gore “clearly won Florida”? This has been settled for decades, and he most definitely did not win. Carville refers, of course, to Bush v. Gore, in which the Supreme Court stepped in to halt the endless recounts as Gore’s campaign kept trying to rewrite the counting rules until the numbers came out the way it wanted. Carville also conveniently forgets that — say it with me — every single recount of that election showed Bush won the state. Every one of them.

Then there’s 2016, which Carville treats as settled science on par with the laws of physics. Last year, during an interview on NewsNation, he said, “For God’s sakes, man, I’m 80 years old. I don’t want to argue that the earth is round. I know it’s round. I don’t want to argue that gravity is real. I know it’s real. I don’t want to argue that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, because I know they did.”

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Does every state have its own Supreme Court?

• Hawaii Supreme Court Issues Unhinged Screed Denouncing US Supreme Court (Turley)

[..] the Hawaii Supreme Court just issued a truly shocking opinion that unleashed a torrent of rage and recrimination against the majority of the United States Supreme Court, including suggesting that they are de facto racists. The opinion by Justice Todd W. Eddins is devoid of judicial restraint and decorum. The fact that other justices would join in such an unhinged screed is a disgrace to the court and the Hawaii bar. The case itself raised an issue of the admissibility of evidence at a criminal trial, which the court found denied the defendant a fair trial due to later scientific developments.


The issue raises some interesting questions of the standard that applies to such challenges. (While unanimously vacating the conviction, the court actually divided 3-2 over the standard). The majority ruled that the false-evidence standard applied under the state constitution when prosecutors knowingly present untrue testimony, holding that all that is required is that there is a “reasonable possibility” that the challenged evidence influenced the vote of any juror. Reasonable minds can disagree on that standard, but the opinion suddenly veers off into a completely gratuitous and irrelevant attack on the integrity of the United States Supreme Court.

Equally troubling is that legal pundits like Mark Stern (who covers the Supreme Court for Slate) have heralded Eddins as “the one judge who has the guts” to denounce the Court. Eddins writes a chest-thumping diatribe about how his court “takes no instruction” from the “hubristic originalists” on the Supreme Court. Of course, it has been 210 years since Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) held that the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over state court rulings. It has been roughly 170 years since the Court ruled in Ableman v. Booth (1858) that state courts cannot overrule or obstruct judgments of the federal courts.

Justice Eddins and his colleagues are not declaring a judicial insurrection but rather a form of passive aggression, a pledge to minimize any orders from a Court described as “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.” He was asserting the separate authority under the state constitution to render opposing opinions, presumably when those decisions do not contravene federal rights. Eddins asserted that the majority of justices “systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity. He proclaimed that their attack on democracy itself does not chart the course for the Hawai’i Constitution.

The opinion quickly becomes nothing short of a rave: What this court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawai’i’s Constitution takes no instruction from it. Eddins then vents on a variety of cases, including the Dobbs decision, that he describes as the Supreme Court’s imperious ideology that has gutted the rights of citizens. Unlike the Supreme Court, Eddins declares that his court will “follow principles, not agendas” and take “no guidance” from “the Supreme Court’s imperious ideology.” He included broadsides against the Supreme Court barring racial gerrymandering and other forms of racial discrimination, including a disgraceful claim that “The Roberts Court sees only white.”

In rejecting what he claims as his colleagues seeking to apply a standard imported from the demonized Supreme Court, Eddins dramatically declared that this court needs no part of this. The Hawai’i Constitution was built to stand on its own. And so it does. It was the most substantive declaration since Sen Cory Booker’s “I am Spartacus” moment. The Hawaii Supreme Court will not truly stand on its own. It is part of a constitutional system that requires adherence to binding precedent, even rulings that Eddins finds obnoxious. Obviously, the state can impose its own constitutional values so long as it does not contravene federal rights and jurisdiction, which are quite broad. The rest comes off as using a judicial opinion to virtue signal.

For some of us who value federalism, there is no question that state courts have the authority to protect state constitutional values that do not violate the federal Constitution. Ironically, it is the conservative majority that is most likely to defend that state authority. However, Eddins could have made that point without the vituperative and injudicious attack on his federal counterparts who hold different jurisprudential views. Notably, Eddins cited Justice Jackson as the model of true fealty to the law. He is not the first state supreme court justice to do so, as discussed earlier in a case from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Since her confirmation in 2022, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has established a legacy that is fast becoming one of the most radical in the Court’s history. Her sole dissents have drawn sharp criticism from conservative and liberal colleagues. These federal and state Supreme Court opinions are a glimpse into what awaits the country if Democratic leaders carry out their threat to take over the Supreme Court by adding four liberal justices in the image of Justice Jackson.

Nevertheless, pundits like Stern are lionizing Eddins for his pledge to use his court to resist: “When state judges refuse to carry that project any further than federal law requires, the machinery of judicial supremacy begins to jam. Eddins has shown his colleagues exactly where to stick the wrench.” Nothing says judicial restraint like a good wrench throwing. It is not even the Calvinball jurisprudence of Justice Jackson. Justice Eddins reduces our judiciary to the level of Rip Torn’s Dodgeball:

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https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2078314173402914839?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle Quatorze Juillet 2026

Jul 142026
 
 July 14, 2026  Posted by at 9:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Claude Monet The Japanese Bridge 7 1924


• Trump Formally Notifies Congress Of Iran War Resumption (ZH)
• Carrot and Stick (James Howard Kunstler)
• British MP Exposes Secret Society Behind UK’s Lurch Toward Socialism (HUSA)
• Prescription for a Socialist Workforce (Daniel McCarthy)
• Mamdani’s Affordability Agenda Flops As NYC Rents Surge To Record Highs (ZH)
• Will Far-Left Influencers Face Charges in Rallying America’s Enemies? (Turley)
• Without US, Credit Rating for EU Sovereign Countries Will be Lowered (CTH)
• Open Borders Are a Death Sentence to Western Nations (J.B. Shurk)
• American Democracy Has Proven Itself to Be a Fraud (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Evidence Mounts of Noncitizens Reaching Voter Rolls, Casting Ballots (JTN)
• Lindsey Graham Was A Monster, But Not Exceptional (Amar)
• Hunter Biden Wins Defamation Suit Over ‘Iran Bribery’ Claims (RT)
• The Absurdity of the Hunter Biden Defamation Case (Turley)

 


 

https://twitter.com/BrandieWithABee/status/2076280641084112964?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGA__Patriot/status/2076369354485109139?s=20 https://twitter.com/NanLee1124/status/2076144616383103029?s=20

 


 


Trump wants no war,

• Trump Formally Notifies Congress Of Iran War Resumption (ZH)

WH Formally Notifies Congress War has Resumed
We are very far past the little “excursion” the administration talked about in the earlier phases of Operation Epic Fury, per reports late this afternoon and early evening: President Trump formally notified Congress last week that the U.S. has resumed military strikes against Iran, providing the Pentagon an extra 60 days to utilize U.S. forces in the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) theater absent congressional approval. Trump told lawmakers in a 2-page letter on Friday that U.S. strikes resumed against Iran on July 7, alerting legislators in line with the War Powers Act, which stipulates the commander-in-chief has to inform Congress within two days of the military conducting kinetic action abroad.


President Trump is still insisting that the US won’t get sucked into a ground war, akin the Iraq or Afghan wars. “United States ground forces are not involved in these strikes. These strikes are limited, measured, planned and executed in a manner designed to minimize civilian casualties,” the president wrote in the letter. Overnight reports say Iran has in turn renewed its retaliation on Gulf allies hosting American bases, especially Bahrain.

Pentagon Announced 3rd Night of Major Strikes
In case anyone had doubts that the region has witnessed a return to full-scale US-Iran war, CENTCOM has announced that it has begun launching the third consecutive night of strikes on Iran in the overnight hours (local):


This as President Trump has claimed Monday that the US had a “deal with [Iran] two days ago” but that Tehran wanted “to negotiate it further”. However when asked by a reporter whether he thinks a negotiated settlement is no longer possible Trump responded: “I never reached that conclusion.” He explained his beleif that the “most effective” way to put pressure on Iran is va a combination of a blockade and “hitting them”. Earlier he and the Pentagon announced that a full blockade of Iranian ports is back on.

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“Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war?”

“Persian kings did not build empires by being naive about deception; they practically invented the genre.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas

• Carrot and Stick (James Howard Kunstler)

Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war? They wish it into existence. The wishing is necessary to put across the talking points that President Trump and his advisors don’t have a plan, don’t know what they are doing, that the USA is persecuting and oppressing Iran for no good reason.


We pounded Iran over the weekend for a very good reason: Iran needs to learn the hard way that there are consequences for breaking agreements. For instance, at around 7:15p.m. local time, Iran fired a projectile at the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, managed by Dubai-based Global Feeder Shipping, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed it was “a warning shot,” but it was a direct hit on the ship’s engine room, disabling the vessel. The crew had to abandon ship in lifeboats — and were soon rescued by a combination of other commercial ships and Omani navy vessels. One crew member went missing.

Hours after the attack, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. And soon after that, President Trump asserted that the Strait was open to commercial traffic, with US forces positioned to ensure freedom of navigation, contradicting Iran’s announcement of closure “until further notice.”

It’s not the President and his advisors who are confused, it’s the situation, and for a good reason: Iran’s leadership is confused. It’s as if Mr. Trump has to stand between Abbott & Costello doing their Who’s on First routine. All the while the IRGC fulminates and fires what remains of its ordnance at ships and other countries in the region, Iran’s putative civilian leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, are talking desperately on the phone to mediators in Qatar and Pakistan about how to implement “technical issues” in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

All of this indicates that Iran’s leadership is badly split between its civil government and the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) forces that operate as a competing Mafia-style command structure with an attached military of its own, separate from Iran’s regular army. The major discord between the two entities is that the civil government would apparently like the conflict with America to resolve in a way that will allow their country to salvage its economy and return to normal relations with the rest of the world, while the IRGC remains obdurately bent on jihad, no matter what it means for their country and its people.

The problem with jihad is that it must be waged against all infidels, meaning the people of Western Civ — a major part of the rest of the world — and now even many states around the Persian Gulf region who have joined President Trump’s Board of Peace — Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan — that might qualify as targets of jihad, too. Why? Because Israel was one of the initial signatories, making the Board of Peace a creature of The Great Satan (the USA) and Little Satan (Israel).

Of course, a key precept in jihad is taqiyya, which prescribes lying and deception in the service of jihad, which further suggests that, for the jihadist IRGC, there can be no real understanding in the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran’s civil government signed. Taqiyya requires the IRGC to lie, which it has demonstrated it is determined to do. . . like, firing missiles at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after it promised not to. How can such conduct possibly produce mutual understanding?

And so, if you picture the negotiations as a carrot-and-stick type process, you see that Iran’s IRGC is oblivious to carrots. Only the stick might avail, and Mr. Trump is obliging them with it. By the way, rumors circulated the past twenty-four hours that the IRGC’s newest commander, Ahmad Vahidi, was killed in his bunker by an American bomb over the weekend. True? Dunno. We’ll probably learn soon enough. Vahidi became the IRGC Commander in March of this year after his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was successfully blown up. Who’s available to step-up into the job now? I guess we’ll find that out soon enough, too.

Speaking of targets, we also learned that President Trump was targeted for assassination by Iran (surprise surprise) upon leaving last week’s NATO confab in Turkey — Israeli intel informed him — necessitating that switcheroo between the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar, and the good old baby-blue Air Force One just recently retired from service going all the way back to Bush One. The old plane had better defensive weaponry aboard, our officials explained.

If I were president of our country, at this point in the quarrel with Iran, I’d consider just dropping Graham Platner over Tehran. And if that fails to get their minds right, follow-up with Rosie O’Donnell and Ana Navarro.

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US, UK,->Socialism. Takes some getting used to.

• British MP Exposes Secret Society Behind UK’s Lurch Toward Socialism (HUSA)

The stunning transformation of Great Britain in recent years – from a beacon of decorum and stiff upper lips to a cautionary tale of wokeness run amok – has been blamed on everything from socialism to satanism. However, Rupert Lowe, a member of the British Parliament and founder of the organization Restore Britain, said the reality may be even more sinister.


In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he said a shadowy group of elites known as the Fabian Society was deliberately trying to wreck the country. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Fabian Society, but if you go and have a look at it, it was basically most of the Labour Party for many, many years,” Lowe said, referring to England’s leading left-wing party, the equivalent of U.S. Democrats.

America’s Left may be facing a similar identity crisis as it tries to shake off the subversive influence of the Justice Democrats, Democrat Socialists of America and other fringe elements that are pushing neo-Marxist ideas. But the British version has been around for nearly 150 years. The club, founded in 1884, was a direct reaction to the philosophy of Karl Marx (who died a year earlier in London). Rather than forcing a collectivist government as Marx suggested, through class struggle — which generally led to uncomfortable outcomes for aristocrats — the society advocated for a socialist society to take root slowly and incrementally.

It was the brainchild of intellectuals including the man who first created “My Fair Lady” heroine Eliza Doolittle — playwright George Bernard Shaw. Science-fiction visionary H.G. Wells also counted himself a member. “It’s the most extraordinary organization,” Lowe told Rogan. “Their emblem is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as if that doesn’t tell you what they’re doing.”Among the beliefs it endorsed was eugenics, the idea of breeding out unwanted attributes through various means, scientific and otherwise.

While the Nazis would go on to run with the idea — and ultimately help to effect its demise — the Fabian Society also was rumored to have inspired author George Orwell, whose dystopian 1984 (written in the late 1940s) was set exactly 100 years after the society’s founding.

According to Lowe, not all of the society’s ideas have vanished entirely. Rather, some of them simply evolved into a modern political framework. “Everyone should look at the Fabian Society, because that runs deep through the veins of Labour,” he said. Writing for The Telegraph, former Fabian research director Stephen Pollard sought to dismantle the claims by attacking Lowe as a conspiracy theorist. However, his argument may have only helped to make the case for some that “basically what it wants to do is destroy all good and create a dependency culture.”

After defending ideas like eugenics as having been widely accepted in their time, Pollard insisted that the current society was more concerned with selling magazine subscriptions than world domination. Many of its policy papers now deal with addressing the nation’s housing crisis. “To take that and conclude that they are in fact part of a secret cabal dedicated to destroying Britain is not so much misguided as a sign that someone is truly away with the fairies,” he claimed.

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“In 1990, manufacturing was the top employment sector in most states[..] Today, healthcare is the nation’s biggest employer..”

• Prescription for a Socialist Workforce (Daniel McCarthy)

America has a socialism problem, and it’s bigger than most citizens realize. When candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America win Democratic party primaries, or New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani hails “the warmth of collectivism,” socialism’s advance is obvious. But it’s making gains in other ways, too, especially in the transformation of America’s workforce — which is coming to be chiefly employed in a sector one step removed from outright government control: healthcare. In 1990, manufacturing was the top employment sector in most states, including New York and California. Today, healthcare is the nation’s biggest employer and is No. 1 in almost every individual state — New York, California, Texas, even Pennsylvania.


When Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of Americans for Health Freedom, posted a chart on X last weekend illustrating this revolution in American labor, it went viral, garnering more than 2.5 million views and eliciting hundreds of follow-up comments. Many noted America hasn’t changed from a nation of makers into a nation of caregivers: Healthcare employment is growing less because we’re adding doctors and nurses than because we’re adding far more administrators. The health workforce contains an army of bureaucrats whose jobs are based on keeping up with government regulation. nThis is the 21st-century twist on socialism: Instead of government owning industry outright, it forces industries to remodel themselves in the shape of Washington’s own bureaucracies.

Healthcare isn’t the only victim of this — compliance bureaucracies and human-resources departments set up to address mountains of federal, state and local regulations have taken root everywhere. But healthcare is special: It’s not only more heavily regulated than other fields, it’s tied to the massive entitlement systems of Medicare and Medicaid, and a host of lesser programs as well. The socialists who are an increasingly powerful bloc in the Democratic Party aren’t content with the slow conversion of American healthcare into a quasi-public sector, however. They’re eager to expand Medicare into “Medicare for All,” and many still dream of outright nationalization of medicine, on the model of Britain’s National Health Service.

Whether the takeover occurs gradually through regulation or suddenly at a stroke, the consequences of merging of healthcare and government are monumental for social values as well the economy: Progressives see gaining power over medicine as a shortcut to winning battles over abortion, euthanasia, biological sex and gender, and much else. And the more Americans are made dependent on government — for their health or their jobs — the less free they are to vote against the people running the system. The Trump administration’s efforts to bring back manufacturing jobs are, among other things, an attempt to restore balance and freedom to our economy.

Tariffs that stop foreign producers from flooding the American market are just a first step, one that has to be coupled with creating a competitive environment for domestic firms. A multiplicity of domestic producers keeps prices down — and gives workers a choice of employer, as companies must compete to offer the best wages and benefits. Workers well-paid in the private sector, whose jobs are helped by protection but not merely a byproduct of government regulation — like the growing healthcare bureaucracy — are secure enough to exercise political choice, too. Yet too many old-guard Republicans and libertarians are so repulsed by tariffs that they fail to see how much worse the alternative is.

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Won’t he just go crazier?

• Mamdani’s Affordability Agenda Flops As NYC Rents Surge To Record Highs (ZH)

New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and his radical-left lieutenants in City Hall promised voters free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, cheap housing, and much more. Yet the dream of a left-wing utopia has not materialized. In fact, rents in the NYC metro area just hit a record high.New data from The Corcoran Group, a major residential real estate brokerage founded in NYC, shows that rents in the metro area have climbed to a new record high. Manhattan’s median rent rose 8% from a year earlier to $5,295, while Brooklyn reached $4,350, also up 8%, according to the report. Manhattan’s vacancy rate narrowed to 1.49%. In Queens, Rego Park posted particularly sharp increases, with one-bedroom rents up 12% and studio rents up more than 20%.


“Manhattan renters are chasing a shrinking pool of available apartments, and the result has become predictable — record rents. Available listings dropped 16% year-over-year in June, while the borough’s median rent climbed to a new high of $5,295 . Leasing activity clocked in 7% below last year’s pace due to the lack of inventory, causing competition to remain fierce. Additionally, June marked one year since implementation of the FARE Act, a milestone that may still be influencing pricing trends, particularly within the non-doorman market. Across the board, quality apartments are commanding a premium, and renters have little room to negotiate,” Corcoran COO Gary Malin wrote in the report.

Malin continued, “Brooklyn’s rental market is also rewriting the record books. Median rent jumped 8% year-over-year to an all-time high of $4,350 and apartments spent 30% fewer days on the market. This steep annual decline underscores how tight the market has become, with flat inventory and strong demand strong causing available units to rent far faster than a year ago. While lease signings were lower on an annual basis, activity picked up from May as renters moved quickly to secure apartments ahead of the busiest stretch of the summer season. Throughout the borough, competition.”

City Comptroller Mark Levine commented on the new report, saying, “NYC’s housing affordability crisis is at DEFCON 1. We need to push harder on every front to address our housing shortage.” “Update zoning, invest more City $ in affordable units, lower the time & cost City bureaucracy imposes on construction, get 1000s of vacant regulated units back on the market. We need bold action. This is a crisis,” Levine added.

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Turley attacks Max Blumenthal.

• Will Far-Left Influencers Face Charges in Rallying America’s Enemies? (Turley)

On July 4, 1916, Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles — 25 years before she would go to Japan and become known as the infamous Tokyo Rose during World War II. Roughly one hundred years later, Calla Walsh, 21, has stepped forward as a type of Tehran Rose, cutting propaganda films for one of the most blood-soaked regimes in the world. Walsh appeared at the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and praised him as the “greatest anti-imperialist leader.” Walsh is not alone. Other young Americans have rallied to the anti-American cause. That includes Jackson Hinkle, who appeared on a stage in Tehran, cheering on a crowd chanting “Down with America.”


It also includes Max Blumenthal, 48, the son of Sidney Blumenthal, the columnist who became notorious as the “attack dog” for Bill and Hillary Clinton. While supporting a regime that denies free speech and other human rights to its citizens, they are protected in the U.S. in voicing unpopular views, including denouncing their own nation. The question is where the line is between that and criminal conduct. Walsh, Hinkle and Blumenthal fit a pattern not just as young and privileged radicals, often downwardly mobile from their parents’ careers and accomplishments, but also as voices groomed by U.S. media culture for years.

Walsh was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Boston University English professor Chris Walsh and Mary Sullivan Walsh, an instructor with Harvard’s Extension School. She was raised a progressive Brahman. The media fawned over the radical college dropout as an exciting new voice. The New York Times gushed over her, and Teen Vogue published her screed in favor of socialism.She would work on the campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. (Her work on the campaigns drew gushing reviews in The New York Times and Boston Magazine).

Hinkle was also celebrated by the media after he embraced socialism and then communism. Born in San Clemente, California, he was named one of “The 17 Most Inspirational Kids of 2017” by Reader’s Digest. As with Walsh, he was featured in Teen Vogue as an inspirational young activist. In a Los Angeles Times article, he was described by a source as “the kind of guy who gives you hope about the future … Jackson is fearless and well-informed.” Today, he is a vocal supporter not only of Iran’s regime but also of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its war against Ukraine.

The scion of the Democratic establishment, Blumenthal attended the exclusive Georgetown Day School in Washington and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. His connections gave him immediate access to elite publications. He wrote books denouncing Israel and espousing increasingly radicalized values. He also wrote far-left columns for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Liberal websites, including The Nation, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, featured his work. He is viewed as an apologist for regimes fighting the U.S., often dismissing atrocities committed by countries such as Syria and Russia. (His father, Sidney Blumenthal, sent Hillary Clinton roughly two dozen of his son’s columns. Hillary responded with such praise as “Max strikes again!” and “He’s so good.”)

All three are examples of today’s radical chic in media and higher education, all given platforms as influencers. And there are thousands like Walsh, Hinkle, and Blumenthal. Indeed, our colleges are cranking out radicalized young people who have a paucity of job prospects but an abundance of rage. Recently, a Fourth of July event captured this culture in Chicago. The event featured Bill Ayers, a former professor, former fugitive, and one of the founders of the domestic terrorist organization, the Weather Underground.

The other speaker was Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a chaired professor in the African-American Studies department and a writer for the New Yorker. Taylor delighted the young audience by saying that they were all part of the “F— the U.S.” crowd and called on others to reject “the idea of loving a nation state, which is what patriotism is.” She repeatedly returned to the theme that borders are “deadly” and “borders kill people,” denouncing all borders as “a tool of death and destruction.”

Walsh’s emergence as a face of Iranian propaganda raises striking parallels to Toguri, who was arrested and convicted of treason after World War II. She was actually just one of several women who participated in the infamous propaganda radio programs for the Japanese military. The difference is that Toguri, whom President Gerald Ford later pardoned, may have been an unwilling participant in the programs. Unlike Walsh, Toguri was effectively trapped in Japan after the U.S. refused to recognize her citizenship, preventing her from returning home to California.

Toguri was effectively destitute, subjected to cruel treatment by the Japanese. She insisted that she had been coerced into reading anti-American scripts and that even then she refused to attack the United States in her programs. Walsh was not just a willing participant; she is a raving anti-Semitic ally to the Iranians — and seemingly any country that can do harm to the U.S.

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“Moodys: Without U.S Military Leading Europe,…”

“EU Sovereign Countries” have no armies to defend themselves.

• Without US, Credit Rating for EU Sovereign Countries Will be Lowered (CTH)

Essentially this notice can be summarized as follows: If you really end the Marshall Plan, credit rating agencies will have to lower their credit rating for all of Europe due to increased financial risk. Now, tell me again how Europe is not living on the back of America.


LONDON, July 13 (Reuters) Progressive U.S. disengagement from European security affairs is negative for Europe’s sovereign credit ratings, Moody’s said on Monday, due the increased defence costs the region’s governments will now face.

A summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)) in Turkey last week saw its 32 member countries agree to shift the balance of responsibility for Europe’s defence to the alliance’s European members, and away from the United States. The (U.S.) disengagement is credit negative for European sovereigns, a report by two of Moody s top rating analysts said. It said the credit effect would depend on how the shift was managed in the coming years

When it comes to irony, Emmanuel Macron has, quite possibly, the world’s worst timing.

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“Governments have refused to respect the wishes of their citizens…”

• Open Borders Are a Death Sentence to Western Nations (J.B. Shurk)

As simmering conflicts between Western citizens and Western governments boil over the next few years, we must never forget how we got to this point: Elected officials and irremovable bureaucrats occupying permanent administrative roles have refused to respect the wishes of the citizens whom they ostensibly represent and serve. From the United States to the United Kingdom, citizens have demanded that their governments secure national borders and end the steady flow of illegal aliens into their communities. From France, the Netherlands, and Germany to Australia and New Zealand, citizens have demanded that their governments arrest and remove Islamic immigrants who are guilty of rape, murder, or other violent crimes.


With the exception of President Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration law and deport illegal alien criminals (despite formidable resistance from the courts, leftist NGOs, and Establishment politicians from both the Democrat and Republican Parties) in the United States, no Western official has done anything to remedy the scourge of unlawful mass invasion in a deliberate, meaningful, and effective way. Instead, Western governments hide from their citizens the true number of illegal immigrants living among them. Western governments hide from their citizens a full accounting of the crimes committed by foreign nationals who should never have been permitted entry in the first place.

Mass illegal immigration is not a new problem. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law in 1986. Defended by both political parties as a way of combating illegal immigration while providing long-term lawbreakers legal status, it effectively awarded millions of foreign nationals amnesty. Politicians convinced the American people to support this trade-off: In return for citizens’ reluctantly permitting the government to reward the unlawful behavior of foreign immigrants who had no right to reside in the United States, the government would protect citizens by cracking down on future illegal immigration and punishing businesses that hired illegal immigrant workers. The U.S. government never lived up to its side of the bargain.

Instead, U.S. officials have lied to their citizens for forty additional years. Until President Trump entered office, U.S. borders were not secured. Businesses were rarely punished for hiring illegal aliens. Unbeknownst to most American citizens, State and federal welfare programs continued to add illegal aliens to their taxpayer-funded dole rolls. School districts in both cities and small towns continued to enroll illegal alien children. Hospital emergency rooms continued to overflow with illegal alien patients seeking “free” medical care. American jobs — especially blue-collar jobs — continued to go to illegal aliens because employers could pay foreigners less, avoid state and federal taxes, and use the threat of deportation as exploitative leverage over their workforces.

Illegal alien workers continued to place downward pressure on hourly wages. Illegal aliens continued to place upward pressure on the costs of housing, energy, and household necessities. Sometime in the ‘90s, American politicians and government bureaucrats began admitting to Americans that there were roughly eleven million illegal aliens inside the United States. For the next thirty years, politicians and bureaucrats repeated the same “eleven million” figure as if no net-increase in immigration had occurred. Anybody living in small-town America knew this to be a demonstrable lie. In the nineties, local school classrooms were made up almost entirely of American kids who grew up speaking English in households whose families had been living in the United States for generations.

As each year passed, those same classrooms were increasingly filled with kids whose parents had come from all over the world, and even small school districts were forced to hire staff who could attend to the needs of an increasingly foreign student body unfamiliar with basic English. Former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has said repeatedly that there are more than one hundred million illegal aliens residing in the United States. In other words, roughly one out of every three people living inside the borders of the U.S. is a foreign national unlawfully here. If those foreign nationals are employed, then they are likely guilty of identity fraud and committing a number of additional state and federal crimes.

Of those committing identity fraud, many are using social security numbers stolen from American citizens. Illegal aliens who steal Americans’ identities adversely affect citizens’ credit scores, tax obligations with the IRS, and background checks. Illegal aliens who fraudulently vote by claiming to be American citizens steal votes from actual American citizens. Foreign nationals who illegally vote in American elections deny American citizens legitimate representation and undermine Americans’ constitutional form of self-government.

In 1986, lawmakers from both parties promised an end to illegal immigration. Instead, tens of millions of new illegal aliens have continued to arrive. In return for grudgingly acceding to the government’s desire to provide a one-time gift of amnesty to those foreigners whose first act in the country was to break our immigration laws, Americans continued to lose jobs, pay more for everything, and be defrauded by identity theft. Even worse, they were forced to watch as foreign cultures transformed their schools and towns. They were forced to watch as foreigners successfully ran for political office and pushed foreign policies and beliefs upon American citizens.

New York City has a Muslim mayor from Uganda who has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for only eight years. Minneapolis has a Muslim member of Congress from Somalia who became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of seventeen.

Roughly 4% of Congress are foreign-born naturalized citizens, while 15% of Congress have at least one immigrant parent. A third of the judges occupying prestigious and powerful positions on the D.C. District Courts were born in foreign nations. These numbers are going in one direction — up!

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In some instances, for sure.

• American Democracy Has Proven Itself to Be a Fraud (Paul Craig Roberts)

In my younger days conservatives and libertarians contrasted government unfavorably with private business. Government consisted of black hat guys and business of white hat guys. If government won, tyranny would be the result. If business won, liberty would stay alive. Conservatives and libertarians saw power as something that government wanted, but not business. There was no room for power in private life where business governed by competition competed for the consumer’s dollar. In the business sector, the people were king. In the government sector bureaucracies wrested power away from the people.


This was the narrative, and the US Chamber of Commerce kept it alive. For awhile I thought this way myself. Liberals reinforced the narrative, because they always wanted more power for government to rein in private sector wrongs. Liberals were perceived by conservatives and libertarians as wanting to transfer power from citizens to government regulators. It didn’t take me long to see that this narrative had problems. If it were true, what explained the success of business lobbies that lined K Street in Washington, D.C.? You didn’t have to open your eyes very wide to see, for example, agri-business use an alleged oil crisis to collect a federal corn subsidy to dilute gasoline with 10% of ethanol made from corn.

The federal regulatory agencies that were created in the 1930s all ended up in the hands of the business interests that they were supposed to regulate. Think, for example, of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which the pharmaceutical industry turned into a shill for its interests. The way modern capitalism works, if capitalism it still is, is by corporate pacs purchasing with political campaign contributions the House and Senate and then handing to committee chairmen laws that they want passed. As a person who has served on House and Senate staffs, both personal staffs and committee staffs, I have experienced the process.

Some years ago Congress passed a law, pretending to show its opposition to big business, that if a corporation paid an executive more than one million dollars, it could not be deducted as a business expense unless the pay was “performance related.” To be performance related means it has to result in higher profits, which supposedly serve shareholders but in fact are given to executives and boards in “performance bonuses,” the main source of their pay, and to shareholders in the form of higher stock prices. Once this law was passed, anything that reduced costs increased profits and thereby executive pay.

The easiest way to increase profits is to lower labor costs. There are four ways of doing this. One is to move manufacturing jobs offshore where labor is cheaper. Another is for corporations to claim falsely that there is a shortage of American labor and to get H1-B and L-1 visas approved to bring in cheaper foreign labor to displace American workers. Another is to replace humans with AI and robotics. Another is to move back office operations and consumer service to countries where wages are low. The most visible are the work visa entrants into the United States.

When the corrupt US Congress passed the law that enables US corporations to fire their US work force and replace it with imported non-American labor, a few members who still represented Americans instead of corporations put into the law that the visa programs depended on corporations being unable to find American workers.

There were unlimited amounts of American workers available , including those abandoned by US corporations who took their production for US markets offshore to lower paid foreign labor. But American law firms rushed to hide the availability of American workers. For example, the law firm Cohen & Grigsby used a marketing video to demonstrate how the firm could enable clients to evade the restrictions on replacing their American workers with imported foreigners on work visas. Hire us, said the law firm’s marketing manager, and we promise “not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”

My book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, published by Clarity Press 13 years ago exposed the scheme that the US President, the US House, the US Senate, the US whore media, and the US whore economics profession perpetuated in order to transfer the earnings of middle class blue collar American workers into multi-million dollar bonuses for corrupt US corporate executives in the form of totally fake “performance bonuses.” The only “performance” was the success of the lie, aided and abetted by such US firms as Cohen & Grigsby. Wall Street shared with corporate executives the responsibility for replacing US workers by threatening corporations with takeovers if they did not take advantage of opportunities to lower labor costs.

The latest news is that Microsoft after receiving approval for thousands of visas for foreign workers laid off 6,400 Americans in order to make room for their foreign replacements. The difference in labor costs go directly into the pockets of the Microsoft executives. Clearly American Capitalism No longer serves American citizens. Why haven’t Americans organized boycotts of their products. Why do Americans support firms that force social costs on them?

Economists who shill for jobs offshoring and work visas claim that it is necessary if US corporations are to compete. However, the US market is large enough to support successful companies, and it was the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China that transferred the technology and business know-how that gave rise to foreign competition. Think about it, even today what competition does Microsoft and Apple, for example, have?

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Individuals. Nothing of any scale.

“..as DOJ speeds crackdown Trump DOJ has secured about two dozen noncitizen voting arrests, prosecutions or convictions in the last few months, with about another 90 more cases under investigation.

• Evidence Mounts of Noncitizens Reaching Voter Rolls, Casting Ballots (JTN)

A small town Kansas mayor born in Mexico. A Filipino senior citizen living in Hawaii. Two Pakistani men residing in New Jersey. An Aussie in Louisiana. And a Chinese student studying at the University of Michigan. They all have one thing in common. Each has been charged in the last year with illegally voting in U.S. federal elections as foreigners, part of a sudden wave of prosecutions led by the Trump Justice Department for a crime that used to be among the rarest in the federal court system.


The Trump Justice Department has secured about two dozen non-citizens voting arrests, prosecutions or convictions in the last few months alone, with about another 90 more cases under investigation, officials told Just the News. And all 50 states were sent notices this month that election officials can and will be prosecuted too if they allow non-citizens to vote.

“It isn’t just bad policy to let non-citizens vote in federal elections, it’s a crime. And this Department of Justice will intend to prosecute that crime if these election officials, having been informed that they are non-citizens on the voter rolls, knowingly allow those people to vote, enable their enrollment on the voter rolls, are passive in the face of this knowledge, etc. This is not some idle threat,” Assistant Attorney General for Ciril Rights Harmeet Dhillon told the Just the News, No Noise television show.

DOJ officials have found three major problems in policing states’ voter rolls ahead of the 2026 election: hundreds of thousands of dead people still eligible to vote, tens of thousands of illegal aliens on the rolls and scores of foreigners having gone beyond registering to, in fact, vote in a federal election, which is illegal. Dhillon, the top election cop inside the DOJ, believes the numbers of foreigners illicitly voting in elections is probably higher but has been frustrated that U.S. Attorney offices across the country haven’t made illegal voting a larger priority until just recently. “

We are trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon because there isn’t a culture of U.S. attorneys going after these,” she explained. That’s changing with the sudden explosion of cases.Just before the 250th American birthday celebration, three non-United States citizens in Florida confessed to having knowingly voted in federal elections despite not being eligible to do so. Federal law requires voters to be American citizens to vote on the federal level, but some states and cities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

The three non-citizens voted in Florida and two of them – one from Cuba and the other from Haiti — admitted to voting in 2020 federal elections. The third, a Brazilian, voted in a federal election in 2024 after becoming a lawful permanent resident. “Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship,” U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “Federal law is clear: only United States citizens may vote in federal elections. These defendants admitted that they knowingly violated that law.”

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“Normal people would be ashamed to be seen with him, dead or alive; Western elites are boasting of how close to him they were.. “

• Lindsey Graham Was A Monster, But Not Exceptional (Amar)

Lindsey Graham is dead. And if we were to apply the old Spartan and then Roman adage “about the dead, nothing but the good,” then this is where this text would have to end. Some readers may find this shocking or unkind. But it is a fact that there is no way to write about the intriguingly sudden end of the long-term US senator from South Carolina in a ‘balanced’ manner and stay honest. Graham was an almost cartoonishly evil man and since he was also very powerful, his moral depravity made a big difference to the lives of all too many.


Downplaying that fact out of misplaced piety would be perverse; it would mean to disrespect the many victims of perfidious and brutal US and, in fact, Israeli policies of vicious violence and outrageous injustice that Graham promoted with every fiber of his being for his whole political life. During the Gaza genocide, when challenged specifically about the Israeli mass killings of civilians, including women and children, Graham launched into what can only be called a psychopathic rant comparing the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with American warfare against Germany in Japan in World War II (an intriguing comparison in and of itself, but that is another matter) and drawing the conclusion that Gaza should be flattened, including with nuclear weapons.

Gaza has been flattened, and to his dying day, Graham never showed an ounce of compassion for those slaughtered by his Israeli friends and did everything he could to support that slaughter. That is, of course, also why internationally wanted war criminal – really genocidaire – Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to offer his public condolences.

Speaking of Graham’s obvious subservience to Israel, the senator was, unsurprisingly, also a great fan of going to war with Iran, tirelessly calling for attacking it as violently as possible. He spread the Orwellian lies that Iran was about to pose a nuclear threat to the US and that its ballistic missile arsenal was a tool of reckless aggression, all to produce domestic support for yet another criminal American war. Himself addicted to hiding his foul character behind a bigoted and utterly fake Christian piety, Graham compared Iran’s leaders to Hitler and called them “religious Nazis,” thereby not merely offending brave men towering above him in moral and intellectual terms, but also helping to drum up propaganda for murdering them.

It is an irony of history or, maybe, divine justice that he lived just long enough to see the US follow his insane and corrupt advice and suffer a geopolitically catastrophic defeat for it. Yet Graham was a monster long before the Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran. He was obsessed with brutalizing as many other countries and societies as possible. He could not see an opportunity for a war and not do his worst to make it happen. Graham’s record of warmongering is so extensive that it is hard to reproduce it in its entirety. Just shortly before his end, he had been calling for more US violence in Cuba, Lebanon, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Yemen – apart, obviously, from his eternal compulsion to scream for, in effect, more dead Palestinians and Iranians.

In true American fashion, if being Graham’s target was terrible, being his ‘friend’ was no better. Ukraine has come to stand for that experience. Even while pretending to be its ardent supporter, Graham was always among those most brutally open about using Ukraine and its people for the geopolitical and commercial interests of the US. He praised opportunities to rob Ukraine of crucial raw materials and he clearly considered pumping money into its ultra-corrupt Zelensky regime a great deal as it produced dead Russians (and, he failed to mention, Ukrainians, too, of course).

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Apparently, there’s some case playing out right now. Why only RT reports on it, I do not know.

”The son of the previous US president was awarded $1.7 million in damages in his dispute with Trump ally Patrick Byrne..”

“..Biden brought Byrne to court over repeated claims that he sought an $800 million bribe from Iran during his father’s presidency “..

• Hunter Biden Wins Defamation Suit Over ‘Iran Bribery’ Claims (RT)

A US federal judge on Friday awarded Hunter Biden $1.7 million in damages in a defamation suit against Patrick Byrne, former Overstock.com CEO and outspoken backer of US President Donald Trump. The lawsuit had been dragging on since 2023, when Biden brought Byrne to court over repeated claims that he sought an $800 million bribe from Iran during his father’s presidency. Byrne alleged that in exchange for the massive payout, Biden promised to get some $8 billion in Iranian funds unfrozen and to ensure a softer stance in nuclear talks with Tehran.


While Byrne has insisted he believed the allegations to be genuine, he failed to “provide to this court, throughout the course of litigation, any documentary evidence that could allow a reasonable person to believe the story to be true,” the judge said in his ruling. Moreover, the court found “ample evidence” indicating the defendant knew the claims were false but spread them nonetheless. The claims disseminated by the defendant “went far beyond mere negligence,” and the former CEO acted with “intentional misrepresentation” and “conscious disregard,” continuing to spread the claims even after he was sued by Hunter and encouraging social media users to propagate them further.

“The evidence is clear and convincing that [Byrne] has engaged in intentional misrepresentation with conscious disregard towards [Biden’s] rights,” the judge wrote in the ruling, which awarded Hunter $1.7 million in punitive damages. The legal team of the ex-president’s son hailed the ruling as a “complete vindication” for their client against the “false statements” made by Byrne. “As found by the court, Byrne had no basis to say that Hunter had any involvement with Iran whatsoever,” Hunter’s attorney Bryan Sullivan said in a statement.

Over the past years, Biden has been embroiled in assorted legal troubles and claims to have racked up a massive debt primarily stemming from court fees, even despite his father granting him a pardon for convictions on federal gun and tax charges in the last days of his presidency. Byrne is no stranger to controversy either, being one of the central figures of the scandal involving Russian gun activist Maria Butina, with whom he admitted to having an intimate relationship. Butina was ultimately convicted of “conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent” and expelled to Russia after serving a prison term.

The affair prompted Byrne to step down from his executive role in 2019, with the businessman focusing primarily on political activism ever since. He has strongly supported US President Trump, including by backing the allegations that the latter was cheated out of the 2020 election win, as well as bankrolling legal efforts to challenge the outcome.

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Before I saw the RT coverage, I wrote:

Jonathan Turley omits to explain why he is dealing with this right now. Isn’t this 2-3 years old? Is there a new case we should all know about?

• The Absurdity of the Hunter Biden Defamation Case (Turley)

I have taught torts, including defamation for over 30 years, but I have never seen the like of the Hunter Biden defamation case. The defendant made defamatory statements and then just refused to appear. That led to an equally bizarre $1.7 million award by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson of the Central District of California to Biden, consisting of just $1 in nominal damages and the rest in punitive damages. Here is the most interesting line of the opinion: “the damage to Plaintiff’s reputation is difficult to calculate.” It may be the single greatest understatement in the history of judicial opinions.


However, the court also noted “Plaintiff does not seek actual damages above a nominal amount.” That means that Hunter Biden’s counsel, in a default case, elected not to argue for compensatory damages due to loss of reputation. Why would he do that? It might be that he has little reputation to lose and that opening up that part of the case was fraught with perils. However, it also created a potential major appellate issue. His counsel was making it clear that they were litigating purely for punitives.

For Hunter Biden, this is a much-needed windfall. His art sales notably collapsed with the value of currying favor to the Bidens. He is reportedly being pursued by creditors, including former counsel. The question is whether the award will stand. For many critics, Hunter Biden is virtually ‘libel proof” as an individual who has no reputation to lose. However, as we have previously discussed, that status is reserved for the most reviled personalities who cannot be defamed due to the lack of any positive reputation.

Judge Wilson, a Reagan appointee, admits in his opinion that determining reputational harm to someone like Biden is difficult to do and further recognizes the argument that “prior tarnishing of Plaintiff’s reputation may reduce the reprehensibility of Defendant’s conduct.” The case involves a claim by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne that Biden took part in an $800 million bribery scheme involving Iran and failed to defend his claims in court. Hunter Biden has long been accused of influence peddling that generated millions for him and his family. I have been one of his longest critics as part of a corrupt family enterprise.

However, this claim was not one of those that his critics, and Congress, focused on during the Biden years. There is no evidence that he took a bribe or payment in a quid pro quo for releasing the money to Iran. The lawsuit was part of a flurry of such actions brought against Biden’s critics. Most were later dismissed, but played a part in the scorched-earth campaign of Biden. I was even threatened with such an action after criticizing his counsel and financial backer, Kevin Morris. As Biden dropped the other lawsuits, this one continued to be litigated. It was an easy kill. Byrne simply did not defend himself and defaulted. That left the matter to Judge Wilson, who was clearly irate.

The opinion recounts an extraordinary pile-up as Byrne sought to replace lawyers: “Defendant initially attempted to replace Mr. Murphy with three new lawyers: Eric Neff, Tom Yu, and Stefanie Lynn Lambert Junttila. ECF Nos. 290, 291, 292. Ms. Lambert was not a member of the California Bar, and her application to appear pro hac vice was denied2 due to her recent history of unethical conduct, which gave the Court reason to doubt she would abide by the Court’s rules and practices. ECF No. 295. When Defendant learned that Ms. Lambert was not qualified to represent him in this case, Defendant also instructed Mr. Neff and Mr. Yu to remove themselves.

Moreover, Defendant himself, now unrepresented, still failed to appear at trial. Accordingly, the Court issued an order to show cause why it should not enter default judgment against Defendant and ordered the parties to return the following day. At that hearing, on July 30, 2025, Defendant again failed to appear. Mr. Yu, who was not authorized to represent Defendant at trial, argued on Defendant’s behalf for a continuance, in lieu of default judgment.”

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https://twitter.com/Dogetothemoon/status/2076398023652065674?s=20 https://twitter.com/DrcharlieWardQ/status/2075984789392261450?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 12 2026

Jul 122026
 
 July 12, 2026  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Joan Miró Caballo, pipa y flor roja (Horse, Pipe and Red Flower) , 1920


• Iran Rejects US Talks As Mojtaba Calls For ‘Vengeance’ (ZH)
• US Orders Iran To Declare Hormuz Open, Toll-Free…Or Else (ZH)
• Trump Finds a New Way to Enrage Leftists and Jihad Enablers (Robert Spencer)
• Why Trump Is Right to Warn Americans About Communism (ET)
• The Return of Socialism and the GOP’s Golden Opportunity (Josh Hammer)
• From Musk to Truth Social: Critics Say Biden SEC Targeted Trump’s Allies (JTN)
• Why Patriot License Will Be Useless For Ukraine (RT)
• Muhammad Tops Baby Boys’ Names In England And Wales For Third Straight Year (ZH)
• Are the Walls Closing In On Gavin Newsom? (Matt Margolis)
• Who Made Zohran Mamdani Secretary of State? (Silvio Canto, Jr.)
• Mamdani Inadvertently Hands ICE a Target Map To Catch Illegals (ZH)
• Mamdani Vows To Update Immigrant Map After Backlash (JTN)
• Volkswagen Will Slash Half of Models After Losing Market Share to China (CTH)
• Citizen Kane at 85: Still Hiding in Plain Sight (Charlton Allen)

 


 

 


 


Why oh why does even Zero Hedge fall into the trap of putting words in Mojtaba’s mouth, when they can’t prove he actually said them? You’re creating a character while the real Mojtaba could well be dead ssince February. It’s sloppy.

NOTE: Lindsey Graham just died.

• Iran Rejects US Talks As Mojtaba Calls For ‘Vengeance’ (ZH)

Iran has thrown Trump’s ultimatum and Saturday deadline right back at Washington, saying that instead it is the United States that must first meet the agreed-upon conditions in order to normalize shipping and energy transit in the Strait of Hormuz.


Fars news agency reports Saturday that Iranian leadership is demanding that the US implement “agreed-upon understandings” before any talks take place. While the White House has declared the ceasefire to be ‘over’ – it has also indicated ongoing contacts and talks with Iran via mediators. But this appears to have been reduced to simple ultimatums being shuttled between capitals by Qatari mediators. There are no actual sit-down talks on the horizon after two rounds of fresh tit-for-tat attacks broke out this past week.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) itself is barely alive at this point, also with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, separately announcing that Tehran could stop honoring the MoU if US attacks continue. “Should the United States continue to violate its obligations under the MoU, Iran will no longer be bound to fulfil its obligations under the MoU,” Iravani told reporters at UN headquarters. But he did make clear that Iran is still committed to the agreement “provided that the United States fully and faithfully complies with its own obligations.”

President Trump has meanwhile continued to issue his own warnings and threats. He said Friday that the US military would “completely decimate” Iran if its leaders attempted or carried out his assassination. He took it a step further in an overnight Truth Social Post, saying he has 1,000 missiles “locked and loaded” – aimed at Iran – should he be targeted by Tehran’s agents. Strangely, the US President signed off with his puzzling “praise be to Allah!” reference – perhaps mockingly or sarcastically.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei still hasn’t been seen in public after the Feb.28 US-Israeli airstrikes took out his father, killed members of his family, and reportedly badly wounded him. Mojtaba is said to be observing a private memorial for his slain father, and made no known appearance at the week-long funeral processions and burial. But on Saturday he did call for revenge in a rare public message. “It is our certain and undeniable duty that this revenge be carried out,” he said.

“We pledge to avenge your pure blood and the blood of all the martyrs of these two [recent] wars by taking revenge against the criminal, disgraceful murderers,” the Ayatollah also stated. “This vengeance is what our nation is demanding, and this must definitely be done.” He issued a series of statements tinged with Shia Islamic references. His words contain repeat vows to enacting vengeance, including this not so veiled threat to kill Iran’s enemies:

As for the big picture of where things stand, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who authors “The Escalation Trap,” has pointed out that that the millions of Iranians who took to the streets last week to attend the late Ayatollah’s funeral demonstrate growing nationalist resolve. He explained that this only makes further escalation more likely later this summer, as public sentiment gets hardened against the US.

“The balance of military capabilities did not change over the weekend,” Pape said. “The balance of political will shifted.” Referencing the now unraveling ceasefire and negotiations process, Pape is predicting: “The pause appears to be another stage in the escalation process rather than the beginning of de-escalation.”

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Favorite words in Tehran: “US Orders Iran”.

• US Orders Iran To Declare Hormuz Open, Toll-Free…Or Else (ZH)

The US is back to setting deadlines, coupled with new military threats, apparently. Judging by this week, which marked a dangerous return to guns-a-blazing in the Persian Gulf, it seems Trump is ready to back these warnings with new bombing raids. The only question will be the extent to which the Islamic Republic escalates in return. So far it has shown willingness to ‘answer’ US attacks with its own missile and drone launches, against US and allied bases and facilities among the Arab Gulf states.


Axios newly reports (…just after market-closing on Friday, it should be noted), that if Tehran doesn’t declare the complete opening of the Strait of Hormuz and safe passage to all ships by close of Saturday, then the… or else! “The Trump administration is demanding that Iran publicly acknowledge that the Strait of Hormuz is open and pledge to stop firing on commercial ships,” the report says. The US has also renewed calls for Iran to immediately hand over its “nuclear dust” – amid the warnings. Axios reports the message was conveyed “directly” and “through regional mediators” – citing three officials.

Both sides have already accused the other of severely violating the terms of the MoU. And US Treasury issued fresh sanctions on Tehran Friday, which violates the ‘no new sanctions’ clause of the memorandum. So the MoU is clearly on life support as it is. Diplomacy is still moving on some fronts: “Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi are expected to meet Saturday in Muscat to discuss the Hormuz crisis,” Axios continues. But here’s the deadline:The U.S. officials said they expect Iran to issue a statement after Saturday’s meeting in Oman.

Iran has not appeared in the mood to ‘compromise’ or admit defeat on any level, and so the world might witness yet more waves of US attacks by Saturday night and into Sunday. A big question remains is whether Israel will continue sitting on the sidelines. Recent reports suggest Washington has been behind the scenes pressuring the Israelis not to act against Iran unilaterally. But the Netanyahu government remains a big wild card in all this.

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“Praise Be to Allah”

• Trump Finds a New Way to Enrage Leftists and Jihad Enablers (Robert Spencer)

If you go open up a window for a minute (assuming you’re running the air conditioner, fellow American), you’ll hear the leftists yet again howling with rage. As he has done so many times in the past, President Donald Trump has driven them up the wall, this time by mocking their favorite religion. He did it late on Friday night, at the end of a message threatening harsh retaliation of the Islamic Republic of Iran succeeded in assassinating him:


“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME! Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran – PRAISE BE TO ALLAH! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This was the second time he said it. Back on April 5, Trump wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This time, professional Trump-hater Aaron Rupar was ready to pull out the 25th Amendment playbook for yet another orgy of self-righteous partisanship dressed up as sober concern for our nation’s welfare: “This is total insanity. Words fail to explain how anyone let alone a plurality of voters thought giving an obviously demented person control of the most powerful government in the world was a good idea. We will be lucky to come out the other side of this alive.”

In its news roundup for Saturday, July 11, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) huffed that “Trump, repeatedly during the war and its uneasy ceasefire, has invoked the name of God in Arabic, as well as threatened to destroy Iran’s very civilization.” Pompously referring to itself in the third person, the unsavory group continued: “The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nationwide advocacy group, has in the past criticized Trump’s ‘deranged mocking of Islam.’”

Indeed it did. On April 5, the Hamas cheerleaders at CAIR issued a press release complaining not only about Trump’s alleged “deranged mocking of Islam,” but about his supposed “indifference to human life and contempt for religious beliefs.” They accused him of a “a long pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies that have dehumanized Muslims at home and abroad,” and added that “the casual use of ‘Praise be to Allah’ in the context of violent threats reflects a disturbing willingness to weaponize religious language while simultaneously denigrating Islam and its followers.”

Now, wait a minute. CAIR has never lacked for chutzpah, but this is really over the top. They’re knocking Trump for issuing violent threats in the context of saying “Praise be to Allah”? Do they expect their audience to be wholly ignorant of the fact that Muslims have screamed “Allahu akbar” (Allah is greater) while in the midst of committing literally hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of violent jihad attacks?

Those jihadis went Trump one better, as they were actually committing acts of violence while praising Allah, not just threatening to do so. CAIR, however, has never deigned to take any notice of that, much less to issue indignant press releases demanding that the jihadis stop “hijacking” their religion. (That’s because, of course, it isn’t hijacked at all, and the jihadis are acting in accord with its violent teachings.)

Instead, CAIR reserves its ire for Trump, and with good reason: the more Trump skewers the Islamic foundation of Iran’s belligerence and aggression, the more people will come to realize that all the hogwash they’ve been fed for twenty-five years about Islam being peaceful is actually false. The more they’ll realize that Islam is actually at the center of global conflicts, and that those conflicts will never be resolved as long as that fact is ignored.

In light of that, it’s clear that CAIR and its leftist comrades are enraged at Trump because with his gentle mockery, he is giving away their whole game. It’s hard to keep up a pose of aggrieved victimhood when everyone knows that the religion to which you loudly proclaim your devotion teaches endless war against those who are outside the fold. Trump has caught on. Others will follow.

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“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America.”

• Why Trump Is Right to Warn Americans About Communism (ET)

Early this month, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered increasingly forceful warnings about what he sees as a growing communist threat within the United States. During what will be his final years in office, Trump appears more determined than ever to defend the principles of American liberty against the influence of Marxist ideas. Employing rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he declared on July 3: “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land.” On Independence Day, the president reinforced his message, stating: “The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked.”


“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen. It’s like a cancer—you’ve got to cut it out, you’ve got to cut it out fast.”

Predictably, Trump’s remarks were greeted with widespread cynicism by political opponents and media pundits. For decades, establishment intellectuals have dismissed concerns about communism as misguided rhetoric designed only to gin up a public reaction. Some implied that Trump was stoking ideological division and indiscriminately branding progressives, social democrats and advocates of government intervention as communists. Others argued that there is no significant communist movement in America and that the real threat to democracy is the president himself.

Yet dismissing Trump’s warnings would compel us to ignore some of the most important lessons in modern history.

First, communism has the worst human rights record of any political ideology in the world. From the Soviet Union to the Republic of China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere, communist regimes have imprisoned, tortured, and executed millions of their own citizens. Repression of political opponents was not just an unfortunate side effect of the transition to communism; it became an essential feature of regimes that concentrated absolute power in a single party. Recent episodes of political violence in the United States should remind us that revolutionary transformation is not necessarily a peaceful process.

Second, socialist economic systems have consistently failed to produce prosperity. Karl Marx envisioned a society in which the abolition of private ownership would eliminate exploitation and create abundance.The historical record tells a very different story. Central planning repeatedly produced shortages, inefficiency, and stagnation. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward contributed to one of history’s worst famines. Even today, North Korea remains among the poorest and most isolated countries on Earth.

Third, Marxist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the liberties guaranteed by the American Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, an independent judiciary, and a free press all place limits on state power. Classical communist theory, by contrast, envisions a society in which the state ultimately controls the major institutions of economic and social life. History demonstrates that governments seeking such control rarely tolerate independent churches, schools, universities, newsrooms, enterprises, or political opposition.

Fourth, failed communist ideas are constantly reintroduced wearing attractive new clothes. Few progressives openly advocate establishing a Soviet-style state. But fashionable concepts, such as capitalist exploitation, class struggle, revolutionary transformation, and the unfair division of society between oppressors and oppressed, have enormous influence in American schools and universities. Marxist critical theory should shape intellectual debates in ways that require careful examination rather than automatic assent.

Fifth, experience shows that free societies become most vulnerable when they forget history. As the generation that experienced the Cold War dies away, younger Americans have little knowledge of communist repression. To many students, communism appears to be an interesting philosophical theory rather than a tyranny that governed one-third of humanity throughout the twentieth century.

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“..42% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66% hold a positive view of socialism.”

• The Return of Socialism and the GOP’s Golden Opportunity (Josh Hammer)

The Democratic Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president — and not in a good way.


In 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and advocate for illegal alien suffrage. Clinton famously called for abortion to be “safe and legal but rare”; today, Democrats prefer to “shout your abortion” as a perverse badge of honor. On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to define the union under federal law as one man and one woman; today, Democrats struggle to even tell us what a woman is, and polyamory now lurks as the next frontier in social experimentation.

But of all the issues where the Democratic Party has moved sharply to the left since the Clinton era, perhaps none is more notable than economic policy. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” And he acted on that impulse too: Clinton signed the most transformative welfare reform law in a generation, deregulated Wall Street, slashed taxes on capital gains, and ended his presidency by presiding over consecutive balanced federal budgets. Clinton was greatly assisted by the dot-com boom and a fiscally conservative Congress, but facts are still facts.

When it comes to economic policy, today’s Democratic Party looks absolutely nothing like its more moderate 1990s-era forebear.

What began as an incipient Barack Obama-era trend toward big government has now, during the post-Joe Biden era, emerged as a strong majority sentiment. A Gallup poll last September found that 42% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66% hold a positive view of socialism. Leading kingmakers in today’s Democratic Party are (literal) Soviet Union-honeymooning communists, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), or leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). And the singular party top dog right now is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is fond of quoting Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” speaks of the “warmth of collectivism,” and is now implementing city-owned grocery stores across the Big Apple.

That is some serious intellectual whiplash.

Hold aside that communism is the single deadliest ideology in the history of mankind — responsible, historians estimate, for nearly 100 million deaths. Hold aside, as well, that socialism and communism have resulted in horrific resource scarcity and immeasurable immiseration everywhere they have been attempted. At the most basic level, socialism is simply contrary to human nature. Men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor, provided those fruits do not undermine the common good. And it is natural, contrary to the basic tenets of socialism, to value the flourishing of one’s family and tribe over that of the polity — let alone the whole world. As Dennis Prager has often noted, socialism violates two of the 10 Commandments: do not steal, and do not covet.

Republicans are presently confused about what exactly they should run on, as they begin to make their case to the American people before this fall’s midterm elections. Inflation, while dramatically reduced from its catastrophic Biden-era peak, is still stubbornly higher than it ought to be. The Trump administration is, at least for now, unwilling to finish the campaign it launched against Iran. Republicans have a great story to tell on the issue of crime, but they seem uninterested in telling it. The administration has had tremendous success on stanching illegal immigration, but the GOP’s consultant class frets that a focus on immigration would hemorrhage the gains the party has made with Latino voters.

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“Musk himself warned this would happen after he announced he would no longer vote Democrat.

“Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he said in May 2022.

• From Musk to Truth Social: Critics Say Biden SEC Targeted Trump’s Allies (JTN)

On January 14, 2025, just six days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second, non-consecutive term, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk, who was entering the administration with Trump as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).


The allegation? Musk violated securities laws when he purchased Twitter in 2022 because he allegedly filed paperwork about the purchase 11 days too late. The investigation into Musk’s purchase began almost as soon as he announced he was buying Twitter, now X, in 2022, which ended Democrats’ stranglehold on free speech on the platform. After the purchase, Musk’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, were also investigated by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. Musk himself warned this would happen after he announced he would no longer vote Democrat.

“Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he said in May 2022. The SEC alleged that Musk failed to disclose his stake in Twitter when it surpassed 5% after he purchased stock in early 2022. He disclosed his stake once it reached 9% in April 2022, which the SEC argued allowed the billionaire to underpay for shares by $150 million. Musk eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it X. Earlier this month, it was revealed that a federal judge approved a settlement between Musk and the SEC for $1.5 million, to be paid for by a trust attached to the X owner.

Truth Social: “This inexcusable obstruction”
Musk is not the only political figure to face an SEC investigation. Trump himself has faced the SEC recently – also under the Biden administration – when his Truth Social media platform began a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC). When the merger was announced, the SEC began investigating, and a federal grand jury in New York issued subpoenas for DWAC’s board of directors, arguably causing the company’s stock price to drop. The merger was slow-walked, alleges Truth Social. “The SEC has stalled its review of our planned merger with DWAC, having failed to act despite DWAC having filed its registration statement more than four months ago,” the company said in a statement in September 2022.

“This inexcusable obstruction, which directly contradicts the SEC’s stated mission, is damaging investors and many others who are simply following the rules and trying to expand a successful business. In light of the obvious conflicts of interest among SEC officials and clear indications of political bias, TMTG is now exploring legal action against the SEC. Despite the increasing weaponization and politicization of government agencies, Truth Social will continue its expansion plans, supported by the unprecedented levels of user engagement on the platform.”

Pattern of SEC hiring under former Clinton CFO raises questions
Republicans pointed to former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s hiring of former Democratic operatives to staff the agency, and his former work as CFO for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, where, according to congressional testimony, he had final approval authority for the campaign’s payments for the discredited Steele Dossier, as evidence the agency was biased against Republicans. Gensler is a former investment banker who served as the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2021 to 2025.

“You seem to have a very troubling pattern of hiring, at an impartial regulatory agency, a lot of people who seem to have a vendetta against the former president, and I fear, and I worry that that has implicated itself and affected the policy of the SEC,” then-Sen. J.D. Vance told Gensler at a Senate hearing in 2023. “You can make a pretty good argument that the SEC was using its enforcement powers to silence the chief political rival of the current president,” Vance added. “It looks more and more like not an impartial regulatory body protecting investors and consumers but a regulatory body that is using its power to silence political rivals of the current President of the United States.”

The merger was eventually cleared by the SEC in February 2024, after members of DWAC were charged with insider trading and the company was fined $18 million for allegedly misleading investors. A year later, Trump’s media company merged with a fusion energy company.

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“The production rollout will likely face nearly impossible technological and security challenges, multiple experts argue..”

Permission from Trump is just one obstacle.

• Why Patriot License Will Be Useless For Ukraine (RT)

President Donald Trump has told Vladimir Zelensky that the US is willing to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot missile interceptors – one of the few weapons in Kiev’s foreign-sourced arsenal capable of shooting down state-of-the art Russian missiles. “We’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” Trump said, seated beside Zelensky at the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, on Wednesday. “This way he can’t complain that we’re not giving him enough. I said, ‘Make them yourself,’” Trump added. He called the undertaking complex but voiced hope that Kiev would work it out quickly.


While significant on paper, the pledge sparked a lot of skepticism among defense analysts who pointed to numerous technical, legal, and security hurdles, while dismissing it as a mostly symbolic gesture or even a political trap for Zelensky. Here is why a Patriot license offer seems to be dead in the water.


What regulatory approvals does the license require?
While announcing the offer, Trump admitted he had not yet discussed the plan with Lockheed Martin or RTX – the two main companies that actually build the Patriot system. The defense firms haven’t commented on the issue either. However, even if the companies were wholeheartedly willing to help meet Trump’s pledge, any transfer of Patriot production technology falls under strict US export-control laws and congressional oversight. The Pentagon, State Department, and Ukraine would also have to agree on what exactly Kiev would be permitted to build, where, and under what kind of oversight.

US defense security rules further require any foreign facility handling classified missile technology to have vetted personnel and secure information-handling systems in place before production can begin at all. Ukraine would then need to test-run new lines and train technical crews from scratch – steps that typically stretch the process out over years, not months. According to the US-based magazine Responsible Statecraft, the licensing venture “would create substantial risks to US national security by making it easier for competitors to get access to sensitive information.”

What other countries have Patriot licenses?
Of all US allies and partners across the globe, only two – Germany and Japan – are licensed to produce Patriot missiles, and their example serves as a cautionary tale of the hurdles Ukraine faces.Japan, a highly technologically savvy country, was granted the license in 2005, and it took the country three years to test PAC-3 interceptors, which are produced in cooperation between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Japan currently churns out an estimated 30 missiles a year – an amount widely deemed completely inadequate to meet the standards of full-scale war – and lacks a full production cycle of its own.

Germany’s example is even more telling: the US granted Berlin the Patriot license in 2022 after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Four years later, it still has not built a single missile, while factory construction only started in late 2024.

What industrial issues does Patriot production face?
Even if every legal and political hurdle were cleared overnight, the production setup is incredibly difficult. In a post on Facebook, Ukrainian defense expert and economist Oleg Belinsky said that any plans to start production within a few months “crash into the laws of physics and mathematics.” While a license can be signed in a day, building a factory and procuring all of the equipment would take at least five years, billions of dollars in investment, and integration into the US military supply chain, which relies on hundreds of contractors, he said.

The hardest part of the missile, according to Belinsky, is not its electronics but its solid-fuel engine. Dozens of components have to be blended in exact proportions, then vacuum-treated to remove microscopic air bubbles, before being consolidated for weeks under strict temperature and humidity control. The finished charge is then X-rayed for the smallest internal cracks. mIf even a single parameter is off, the missile is scrapped because even a microscopic crack can make the fuel burn too fast and cause the engine to explode on launch. Producing components pure enough to meet that standard requires an entire chemical industry that Ukraine does not currently have, Belinsky said.

Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin echoed the assessment, telling news.ru that Ukraine does not have the necessary resources for production and that the only viable option is to set up production facilities abroad. While noting the difficulty of creating solid-fuel engines, Bloomberg also pointed to challenges linked to building small steering motors, which enable the Patriot interceptor to maneuver effectively in the thin upper atmosphere.

“Production is already constrained by existing supply-chain bottlenecks,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told Bloomberg. “Even if Ukraine builds a production factory, it still needs to build the network of suppliers. That is a significant defense industrial base challenge.”

Is the Patriot license a political ploy by Trump?
The overture of the US president – who has been reluctant to finance Ukraine – to Zelensky looks like a “cruel offer” that “seems interesting, but is less interesting than it seems,” Tiago Andre Lopes, an assistant professor of International Relations at the Law Faculty at Lusiada University, told CNN Portugal. He argued that Trump’s real purpose was to shift blame onto Kiev: if Ukraine fails to produce missiles despite holding the license, Washington can say the Patriot shortfall is Kiev’s fault, not its own. “In six months or a year, when the Ukrainians say they don’t have Patriots, Trump will respond, ‘no, I gave you the license; why aren’t you producing them?’ Lopes said. “From the point of view of altering the status quo in the war in Ukraine, in the short and medium term, this doesn’t change a thing”: “It’s not money, it’s not defensive capacity, it’s not offensive capacity, it doesn’t change anything.” Agostinho Costa, a military expert at CNN Portugal, also noted that the offer in no way heralds a change in the Trump administration’s stance on the Ukraine conflict: “The European Union pays, the US supplies, Ukraine executes.”

How will Russia respond to a Patriot license?
Western military experts in unison argued that even if Ukraine were to somehow weather all technological challenges, any Patriot facility on Ukrainian soil would become a top priority target for Russian strikes the moment it broke ground. Russia has consistently targeted Ukraine’s defense facilities, including a plant producing elements of the Flamingo cruise missiles.

“If I were doing it, I would have the Ukrainians build the factory in Poland,” William Alberque, a senior fellow at the Pacific Forum, told Bloomberg. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a prime target. They’ll never be able to construct it.”.

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I don’t want to live in acountry where this is the case.

• Muhammad Tops Baby Boys’ Names In England And Wales For Third Straight Year (ZH)

Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data released today shows Muhammad – including variant spellings – has once again claimed the top spot as the most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. This marks the third consecutive year Muhammad has led the boys’ chart, continuing a trend that has drawn significant public attention and debate about demographic changes. The ONS figures for 2025 births confirm Muhammad’s dominant position. In previous years, when spellings are combined, it has frequently outranked traditional English names like Oliver and Noah.


Commentators have linked the sustained popularity to the UK’s growing Muslim population, which now makes up a significant and increasing share of births in many areas. Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe responded strongly to the news, posting: “Muhammad has comfortably topped the list for the most popular boy name for the third year running. You can call me Islamophobic, I really don’t care… This is awful and demonstrates the rapidly changing demographics of our country.”

Lowe, who recently chaired an independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report, has highlighted concerns about integration, cultural shifts, and failures in addressing grooming gangs. His report estimates that at least 250,000 young, mostly white British girls have been victims of systematic abuse by predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming networks over decades, with institutional cover-ups exacerbating the crisis. The report and Lowe’s comments tie into broader discussions about rapid demographic transformation, with critics arguing that names like Muhammad’s dominance reflect communities that have not fully integrated and, in some cases, parallel issues seen in grooming gang scandals where perpetrators often shared similar names and backgrounds.

While many celebrate Britain’s multiculturalism, others like Lowe warn of parallel societies and strain on social cohesion. The baby name data is often cited alongside grooming gang reports as evidence of deeper cultural challenges.Full ONS rankings for 2025 are expected to provide more context on rising and falling names across both genders.

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“Poor baby”.

• Are the Walls Closing In On Gavin Newsom? (Matt Margolis)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) wants you to believe he’s the victim. Last month, when Newsom announced that the U.S. Department of Justice had him and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, under criminal investigation, he insisted it was lawfare and that President Donald Trump was just going after him because he’s likely to run for president in 2028. And he’s really trying to play the victim here. He told reporters that “federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends, and former employees, not because they found a crime, because they’re simply trying to find one.” He claimed agents were “demanding records” and “abusing the grand jury process.” He did not name a single person involved or specify what records agents actually wanted.


Poor baby.

What he doesn’t want people to know is that the investigations originated in Sacramento and began during the Biden administration, with at least one thread reaching into Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s taxes and the nonprofits she runs. Investigators are reportedly digging into the finances and fundraising of those nonprofits and their ties to companies with business pending before the California government. And boy, does it look like the walls are closing in on him. According to Jessica Van Laar at our sister site RedState, Newsom has lawyered up, and despite claiming to be the victim of lawfare with nothing to hide, he’s been stonewalling the investigation.

His legal affairs secretary filed a sweeping Freedom of Information Act request against the DOJ, on the taxpayer’s dime, and Newsom told a Thursday press conference that he and his wife hired private counsel. However, he wouldn’t name the attorney.

Then there are the tax returns Newsom promised and never delivered. On June 19, his spokeswoman said his office was “working to prepare” his 2021 through 2025 returns “for transparency,” insisting “unlike Donald Trump, the Governor has nothing to hide.” When a reporter pressed him at the press conference, Newsom said, “I already have. I’ve given 20 years of my taxes, yes. I know you love taxes. Donald Trump… when’s he releasing his taxes?” Asked whether he was different from Trump, he answered, “I am, because that’s why I’ve released all my taxes for decades, and you will have all those new tax returns, because I have no reason why you haven’t gotten them already, so I have no problem…”

That’s not quite true.

Newsom has released full returns only for 2017 through 2020, and only because state law required them before he could appear on the 2022 primary ballot. He filed an extension on his 2021 taxes just to limit himself to four years of disclosure. California journalists have asked for more ever since and gotten nothing but the state-required Form 700, which has drawn him multiple fines over omissions. His returns from 2010 through 2016 remain largely undocumented.

Gee, I wonder why. It’s almost as if he’s hiding something. As for the “poor and innocent” people Newsom says agents are harassing, he won’t name them, either. Newsom’s office said in mid-June that he expected subpoenas, adding, “The Governor looks forward to it.” None have arrived yet. But the more Newsom postures for cameras instead of releasing his taxes, the more it looks like a man trying to get ahead of bad news, not one with nothing to hide. Has anyone ever told him that it’s not a good look to act guilty?

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“Mamdani gets way too big for his britches and sticks his nose into State Department business.”

• Who Made Zohran Mamdani Secretary of State? (Silvio Canto, Jr.)

A senior official in Communist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration tried to hold an official meeting with the Iranian regime’s ambassador to the United Nations. Commissioner Ana María Archila, head of the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, had scheduled the meeting for July 7 at 11 a.m. at 2 United Nations Plaza with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the UN.Two other senior officials from the office were also set to attend, according to calendar invitation screenshots reviewed by City Journal and confirmed by multiple sources, including a State Department official.


The meeting was called off only after the U.S. State Department, which had not been informed in advance, stepped in and met with the Mamdani administration to “clarify acceptable conduct,” according to City Journal. Archila reportedly did not even tell Mamdani she had arranged the sit-down. She was later reprimanded and ordered to cancel it. A spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs issued the predictable damage-control statement: “This meeting did not and will not take place.”

Well, we are happy to hear that it will not take place. Nevertheless, how arrogant can the mayor’s staff be? Why try to arrange a meeting with Iran anyway? Is that where their loyalties lie? My guess is that we will see more incidents like this in the future, especially when running New York City proves more difficult on the job than during the campaign. The mayor’s policies are already controversial and it’s only a matter of time before people realize that his election was one giant mistake. There won’t be free buses or “bodegas”!

So the mayor needs to find another audience, especially given the anti-Israel sentiments in his party. Also, he will try to become the voice of the Third World, particularly given his views on illegal immigration. Don’t be surprised if he starts attending “migrant conferences” around the world looking for something to do after failing to do the job he was elected to do. Zohran, citizen of the world? Yes, that’s the goal.

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“.. and his band of far-left anti-American clowns..”

• Mamdani Inadvertently Hands ICE a Target Map To Catch Illegals (ZH)

Far-left New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly denounced capitalism while promoting a socialist reconstruction of the metro area, sparked uproar this week after releasing a map highlighting 30 migrant enclaves while omitting historic Italian, Irish, and Jewish communities. The map includes areas such as Little Palestine, Little Pakistan, Little Yemen and Little Guyana, but leaves out Little Italy, Irish enclaves including Woodlawn and Sunnyside, and Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Jewish Borough Park.

But perhaps the Democratic Socialists of America mayor and his band of far-left anti-American clowns, who spend more time trying to erase and rewrite history in typical Marxist fashion, inadvertently created one of the greatest gifts for President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ryan James Girdusky of the 1776 Project PAC wrote on X, “This is actually a map of where ICE needs to conduct raids.”

[..]Mamdani’s immigrant map appears less like a celebration of New York’s diversity and more like a Marxist ideology that divides residents into competing identity blocs. Before the socialist takeover of City Hall, there was a simpler civic identity: New Yorkers were New Yorkers.

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“The comment comes after the New York City Council’s Italian Caucus accused the Mamdani administration of “erasing” Italian-Americans..”

• Mamdani Vows To Update Immigrant Map After Backlash (JTN)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Friday he will update a new immigrant community map that failed to include Jewish communities and the iconic Little Italy neighborhood, following backlash over the omission. Mamdani, a Muslin, attributed the omissions to the previous administration and defended the “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” map as not being a definitive list because it identified only 30 immigrant communities across the five boroughs.


“This map was originally created by the prior administration in 2023, and when we inherited it, we added a few additional neighborhoods,” Mamdani, also a democratic-socialist, said at an unrelated press conference. “It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic enclaves that call our city home,” he continued. “We’re going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that … including Little Italy.” The comment comes after the New York City Council’s Italian Caucus accused the Mamdani administration of “erasing” Italian-Americans, calling the map “incomplete at best and insulting at worst,” according to the New York Post.

Mamdani’s claim that the map was created by former New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration was also inaccurate because it created detailed illustrations for the city’s annual Immigrant Heritage Week, not a map of communities. Criticism of the map also gained traction on social media for also failing to include Jewish and Irish communities, and is part of the city’s Neighborhood Passport campaign tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, according to Fox News.

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“The only way to avoid this issue is to protect the domestic market.”

• Volkswagen Will Slash Half of Models After Losing Market Share to China (CTH)

The European auto industry is a case study on how short-sighted trade policy goals, results in consequences. Previously, German auto companies like Volkswagen entered into trade agreements with China and began manufacturing their vehicles with immediate financial success in the market. However, it did not take long for Chinese auto companies to reverse the engineering and begin to deliver the same quality vehicles at much lower prices.The Chinese then stop purchasing the Volkswagen vehicles and purchase the cheaper version, while simultaneously begin exporting those same vehicles into the home market from where the technology originated. Today, with a double-digit decline in production, Volkswagen announces they will cut almost half of their brands due to diminished sales.


BLOOMBERG – BERLIN — Volkswagen reported weak sales numbers on Friday, a day after the giant German automaker announced plans to slash the number of models by nearly half as sales plunged, particularly in China. The Wolfsburg, Germany-based company said group sales fell 8.6 per cent in the second quarter to just under 2.1 million vehicles, with sales in China alone plummeted by more than one-third. After a board meeting on Thursday, Volkswagen said its “fundamental realignment” over the last three years had reached its next phase, announcing plans to streamline the model lineup by up to half, without providing specifics.

CEO Oliver Blume laid out plans to make VW faster and more competitive through less complexity, focused technologies, better alignment across regional markets and reduction of overcapacities, among other things, citing an “increasingly demanding environment.” Among its main brands, the core Volkswagen unit saw deliveries of slightly over 1 million vehicles in the second quarter, a drop of 14 per cent from a year earlier. Deliveries at Audi declined 8 per cent and those at Porsche fell 18 per cent. (read more)

Maybe Canada will take note, likely they will not. The only way to avoid this issue is to protect the domestic market. As soon as you open your market to this claimed reciprocity (panda face), it will not take long until the mask drops, and you notice the dragon face behind it. https://twitter.com/ryangerritsen/status/2075009373466775732?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2075009373466775732%7Ctwgr%5Ea86f44a2cc6577d04947dce042b0029a16e38855%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconservativetreehouse.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F07%2F10%2Fvolkswagen-will-eliminate-almost-half-of-production-brands-after-losing-market-share-to-china%2F

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A Revolutionary Masterpiece.

“Orson Welles’s film may no longer shock us the way it shocked audiences in 1941—but only because so much of modern cinema learned to speak its language.”

• Citizen Kane at 85: Still Hiding in Plain Sight (Charlton Allen)

After the wildly inventive War of the Worlds broadcast took America by storm, Orson Welles and his merry band of theatrical and radio troubadours landed a movie contract. They came to film armed with the habits of another medium: sound, rhythm, atmosphere, narrative fragmentation, and a showman’s instinct for misdirection. A good friend of mine, who shares my love of classic cinema, recently observed that “Rosebud” is about as subtle as Chekhov’s gun. She is right, of course. It is not exactly hidden in the wallpaper.


But if “Rosebud” is obvious, it is also a little misleading. The mystery of Citizen Kane is not really the mystery of Rosebud. It is the mystery of Kane himself. Kane dies in the opening sequence, whispering that famous word. The film then pivots to a reporter trying to reconstruct him by speaking with the people he left behind. Each person provides a piece of the puzzle, but the pieces never quite fit together. And Citizen Kane is a political allegory as well—one that feels strikingly modern. Kane is a particular American archetype: the political liberal—“liberal” being the film’s own word for him—as media baron, the self-appointed tribune of the people who claims to speak for the common man while reserving to himself the right to tell the common man what to think.

Kane makes the point plainly enough: press barons can move from reporting events to shaping them, from shaping them to distorting them, and from distortion to outright fabrication. What begins as journalism can become manipulation with scarcely a pause in between. Charles Foster Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” is full of high-minded promises, almost ostentatiously altruistic in tone. Yet the tragedy of the film is that Kane spends the rest of his life, knowingly or not, eviscerating nearly every principle he once proclaimed. Voters, readers, friends, wives, and employees all become supporting players in the great production of Charles Foster Kane.

And then there is Welles himself. Yes, we know the trajectory did not continue upward in a straight line. Orson Welles never again quite stood on the same summit he reached with Citizen Kane.But then, what exactly should we expect from a man who had already conquered the two great mass-entertainment mediums of his age before, by today’s standards, he was even old enough to rent a car? Once a man has scaled Olympus twice by twenty-five, it seems a little unreasonable to fault him for never doing so again.

As a member of Generation X, my first sustained exposure to Welles was not as the boy wonder of the Mercury Theatre or the auteur of Kane, but as the older, heavier, and at times besotted figure hawking cheap California wine on television. It was difficult, seeing that version of Welles, to imagine that he had once been a singular titan of American entertainment—an artist of swaggering ambition and transformational confidence. But he was.

Perhaps the mistake is expecting a life to continue rising after such an ascent. Most people are fortunate to produce one work of lasting consequence. Welles produced several before many of his contemporaries had fully found their footing. What came afterward may have been uneven, unfinished, compromised, or misunderstood. None of it diminishes what he had already done. My taste in cinema and art has certainly evolved in the decades since I first saw Citizen Kane, especially since that winter of ’96, and perhaps that is one reason the film struck me differently this time.

It is one thing to encounter it young, when one is mostly aware of its reputation and perhaps dimly aware of its daring. It is another thing to see it again after years of watching more movies, reading more history, and thinking more seriously about politics, myth, memory, and ambition. Now Kane no longer appears merely as “the famous old movie everyone says is great.” It appears for what it is: a masterpiece of American art, and a work whose fingerprints are still all over the culture that followed it.

That, in the end, may be the surest measure of Welles’s achievement. He made a film so radical that later generations can watch it and fail, at first, to notice how radical it was—because the rest of the medium spent the next eighty-five years catching up to it. It is time to give the old film its due, along with the never fully resolved architect of the masterpiece. Cinema owes Orson Welles a debt that can never be repaid. American culture—yes, there is such a thing—does too.

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https://twitter.com/ns123abc/status/2075739020789760078?s=20 https://twitter.com/MorEdge_Insight/status/2075708670675923076?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 6 2026

Jul 062026
 
 July 6, 2026  Posted by at 9:36 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  27 Responses »


Nicolas Poussin A Dance to the Music of Time 1634-36


• Elon Decimates Mamdani’s Speech – DeSantis Drops in Off the Top Rope (Arama)
• The Obamas and Clintons on the Monsters Taking Over Their Party (Derek Hunter)
• No, The Framers Would Have Hated the Billionaire Tax (Turley)
• Mamdani’s Thermostat Moment Draws Conservative Backlash (JTN)
• The Most Important Initiative to Save Our Country’s Future (Margolis)
• This Rubio Video Might Be the Most Patriotic Thing You See All Year (Margolis)
• “What Then Is The American, This New Man?” (Turley)
• America at 250: Restoring America’s Greatness (Victor Joecks)
• Russia and US Bear ‘Special Responsibility’ For Global Security – Putin (RT)
• Trump Calls Putin on US Independence Day (RT)
• Putin Invites Trump To Visit Russia In ‘Constructive’ July 4th Phone Call (ZH)
• Russia’s Buffer Zone On Ukrainian Border ‘Expanding’ (ZH)
• Trump: ‘Netanyahu Knows Who The Boss Is’ After Phone Call (ZH)
• UK Government’s SHOCKING Bid to RIG YouTube Algorithm (MN)
• British People Are ‘Crying Out’ For Change – Vance (RT)

 


 

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2073483665712308279?s=20 https://twitter.com/HomanNews/status/2073500616148554089?s=20 https://twitter.com/VividProwess/status/2073580119453520007?s=20

 


 


“Mamdani has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker..”

• Elon Decimates Mamdani’s Speech – DeSantis Drops in Off the Top Rope (Arama)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech for our nation’s 250th birthday has gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism. It was pretty awful on the whole. But there was one particular part on Friday that got a lot of attention, in which he lambasted America, attacked Elon Musk, and demonized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).


The swipe against Musk was particularly nasty, saying children go hungry while the world’s first trillionaire (Musk) “hungers for more.” In that you can see the evil of the radical left – to demonize the people who are actually achieving and whipping up envy and class warfare. But Elon Musk responded, decimating Mamdani with one simple fact.

“Mamdani has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker,” Musk declared.

Bingo. Mamdani is basically a nepo baby who had wealthy parents and went to an expensive private school, whose work history could be described as “light,” at best. He worked briefly as a “foreclosure counselor” for an advocacy organization whose purpose was “organizing and advocating for systemic changes.” Oh, and he was a “rapper” before he went into politics. It’s sort of laughable for Mamdani to talk about “calloused hands,” given his work history. But it’s symptomatic of the champagne socialists we’ve seen.

Mamdani isn’t even worthy of mentioning Musk’s name, given all that Musk has achieved with all of his companies. He creates wealth, employs more than 160,000 employees, and contributes things no one else can, such as with SpaceX and Neuralink. His real “crime”? He supports President Donald Trump. Notice you don’t hear any of these leftists coming for Reid Hoffman or George Soros, the guys who contribute to Democrats. That’s the real problem here. The Democrats think they have the right to seize money from Musk because how dare he be so rich? Regardless of whether they are, themselves, rich.

But Elon wasn’t the only one who found some problems with what Mamdani said. So did Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). He laid a big smackdown on Mamdani for being “regressive.

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2073215994848481717?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2073215994848481717%7Ctwgr%5Ea9971bbcfd2070ef5673c0b8d869eac483b51928%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fnick-arama%2F2026%2F07%2F04%2Felon-musk-decimates-mamdani-250-speech-with-a-simple-fact-then-ron-desantis-drops-in-from-top-rope-n2204002

“When I see the Mamdanis of the world, they’re basically offering these ideas, they claim they’re progressive. They’re really regressive. They are things that the founding fathers rejected,” DeSantis declared, talking about how rights come from God and how these ideas fly in the face of the principles of limited government on which our country was founded. The governor added: “Their ideas have failed throughout history. And we have a chance now with 250 to look back and say — we’re inheritors of an awfully good legacy. We got lucky to have the Founding Fathers pledge their lives, fortune, and sacred honor the way they did when they did it!”

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“That’s what makes the lack of comment from “leaders” on the left about the goose-steppers taking over so curious.”

• The Obamas and Clintons on the Monsters Taking Over Their Party (Derek Hunter)

As the Nazis took over Germany, they were a minority party that no one really took all that seriously. Hitler was crazy, but his ramblings weren’t thought of by most Germans or the political establishment as foreshadowing. People today forget they were not a majority, as history tends to obscure reality for the sensational. Communists in Russia and China (or anywhere they destroyed, really) were a minority, too. But you should never underestimate the ability of a distinct minority to bring about massive devastation, as once radicals gain power they tend to wipe out their opposition and move quickly to consolidate control.


That’s what makes the lack of comment from “leaders” on the left about the goose-steppers taking over so curious. There are a few people commenting – Rahm Emanuel has said some common-sense things, mostly about the messaging and issues these nuts are focused on – but the people who really matter on the left are silent. Where are Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack and Michelle Obama?

Bill Clinton famously had his “Sister Souljah moment,” when the rapper opined that maybe black people should take a break from killing each other and kill white people for a while. She meant it as a commentary on how the media didn’t really pay attention to the scourge of black men killing other black men, something still true today (including to “Black Lives Matter”); she just did it in a way that could easily be taken out of context and exploited by an opportunist politician.

Enter Bill Clinton. He criticized Souljah for her rhetoric and gained a lot of positive media coverage in the 1992 election. It was dishonest because, well, did I mention it was Bill Clinton? It did, however, prove that Clinton could speak out against things other people in his party were doing. While Hillary, Barack and Michelle never really spoke out against their party, the concept is obviously one that applies to them too.

As the communist element of the left worms its way through the party, you’d think Democrats would care – you’d think they would be concerned with an anti-American element of their party seizing power. Granted, they may not care about the policies – there’s such a fine line between what socialists, fascists and communists want to do that it doesn’t really matter; the blood starts flowing over who gets to lead and what to do with the people who won’t obey.

The electability of Democrats is on the line. If these people don’t care about the country, which we all knew they didn’t, it’s one thing; but we know they care about their party. The American public will not vote for communists. Well, most of the American people will not vote for communists. Sadly, there is a growing percentage of the public who have no memory of the Cold War and the horrors of communism, who’ve also been “educated” by a bunch of granola-crunching leftists with every flag ever created hanging in their classroom except the American flag. These people’s understanding of communism is on paper, all theoretical, and they are convinced it will work.

Hey, I wouldn’t care if these people left the country and started their Utopia on some island somewhere – as they murdered each other for power and eventually starved to death, I’d watch the livestream – but they’re looking to do it here. With that, I have a problem. You’d think the people who stand to be eaten first when the liberal mob comes to dine on the rich might, if only for that reason, try to head that off at the pass. You’d be wrong. Just like you’d be wrong if you thought they’d speak out about their party heading down a path of either violence or electoral defeat.

Maybe they don’t care because they’ve made their fortunes and Secret Service protection affords them a sense of immortality, or maybe they are down with what the new emerging leaders in their party are looking to do. But one thing is certain: they don’t care. If they’d cared, they would’ve said something by now. If they cared, they would say something now. It’s all well and good if the damage is confined to the Democrat Party, because who cares, right? But these radicals are looking to destroy the country as well, which you’d think might bother people who’ve led incredible lives because of the country’s existence. If you’d thought that, you’d be wrong.

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“.. the constitutional system referenced by Mr. Newsom makes a federal wealth tax unconstitutional.”

• No, The Framers Would Have Hated the Billionaire Tax (Turley)

Was James Madison the Zohran Mamdani of his time? Gavin Newsom appears to think so. In joining the growing number of Democratic leaders supporting a wealth tax, the California governor claimed that the U.S. Constitution and our Founders were all about wealth distribution: “The system America’s founders built,” he said, “was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades.”


The only problem with this argument is that it is utterly and demonstrably false. The Madisonian democracy is designed to avoid the concentration of political power, not the concentration of wealth. The Founders were great believers in capitalism and the free market. In my recent book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the economic philosophy of the Founders in exploring the history and future of this unique republic. This isn’t simply the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but also the anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which the Founders embraced.

Many of the Founders were themselves quite wealthy, including banker Robert Morris Jr., who was known as the “Financier of the Revolution” and would be a billionaire today. Our revolution was the first true Enlightenment revolution, heavily influenced by writers such as John Locke, who believed in a natural right to property. That right came not from the government, but from God, and “excludes the common right of other Men.”

That Lockean principle was manifest in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was a basis for the Declaration of Independence. It extolled “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” James Madison drafted protections from government seizure of property, including the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires compensation for any property taken by the government. The Constitution not only protects property, but was later amended to allow for income taxes rather than wealth taxes.

Far from supporting a wealth tax, the constitutional system referenced by Mr. Newsom makes a federal wealth tax unconstitutional. Mr. Newsom’s recent endorsement of a national wealth tax was likely meant to blunt the outrage over his opposition to the resolution to create a state Billionaires’ Tax on the coming November ballot.

California has reportedly lost trillions of dollars in the exodus of billionaires and other wealthy taxpayers fleeing the high taxes and class politics of the state. Mr. Newsom knows that this draining of wealth spells doom for his state, which is already grappling with a massive, growing deficit. He offered a curious argument for opposing the state wealth tax: “You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do.”

The argument suggested that most citizens are effectively a captive population to be culled by California leaders, dupes who are unable to escape a state with a deadly combination of some of the highest taxes and highest living costs in the nation. Unions and others pushed the Billionaire Tax to avoid budget cuts and fund the state’s runaway expenditures, from pension funds to projects such as the infamous high-speed train to nowhere. To deal with California’s reverse Gold Rush, drafters made the proposed Billionaire Tax retroactive to claw back money from those who have escaped.

The national Billionaire Tax pushed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) seeks to cut off any escape for the wealthy short of leaving the country. When she ran for president, Ms. Warren warned the wealthy that she was coming for “your Rembrandts, your stock portfolio, your diamonds and your yachts.” Of course, this assumes that the wealthy would be little more than passive prey in a hunt by the Internal Revenue Service. That is precisely what socialists thought in France decades ago, before an exodus from the country that, along with other socialist policies, brought it to near economic ruin. It was later rescinded.

Nevertheless, wealth taxes make for great politics. What is concerning is that, in addition to a wealth tax, Democratic leaders like Ms. Warren are pledging to pack the Supreme Court if they retake power. A packed court with an insistent liberal majority would let the Democrats push through measures that would otherwise be declared unconstitutional, including a wealth tax.

Congress could then gradually lower the level of wealth needed to trigger the tax, opening up the homes and estates of citizens as an untapped reservoir of money for the taking. “You’re next” could then apply not just to office holders but to property owners in a push to redistribute wealth. That strategy may well unfold in coming years, but it will be the realization of a Mamdanian, not a Madisonian, system.

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“Set your air to 78 degrees? Bless your hearts New York City!! American energy should be so strong and plentiful that you never have to set it above 70 if you don’t feel like it.”

“Jimmy Carter’s turn down your thermostat and put on a sweater,” Holmes said about Mandani’s idea. “American dream.”

• Mamdani’s Thermostat Moment Draws Conservative Backlash (JTN)

New York democratic-socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdi’s suggestion that city residents turn up their thermostats to 78 degrees during the heatwave this July 4 holiday weekend to help conserve energy has drawn sharp criticism from essentially every corner of the conservative movement – with some members even going so far as to compare the mayor’s comment to Democrat President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 “sweater speech.”


“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool,” Mamdani wrote Wednesday on the social platform X. “Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can.” He also wrote: “A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand – and get through the heat – together.” The backlash was quick and came from everybody from former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to at least six former (and perhaps future) Republican presidential candidates, to GOP Reps. Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are, respectively, either leaving Congress in the next several months or left in the past several months.

Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, suggested Thursday on X that Mamdani’s idea reflects “the reality of big government socialism’s inability to solve problems.”He also wrote: “Telling New Yorkers to set their air conditioning at 78 degrees is an open admission of the failure of the left to provide enough inexpensive electricity that people can be comfortable even in hot weather.” Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said Mamdani’s request is “proof that communism is (unfortunately) alive and well.”

Said Greene: “This is the worst campaign ad for the Democrats. Set your air to 78 degrees? Bless your hearts New York City!! American energy should be so strong and plentiful that you never have to set it above 70 if you don’t feel like it.” Even Dave Portney, a media personality who founded Barstool Sports in 2003 and endorsed GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in 2024, got into the act, posting on social media, “78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy.”

While they focused on attacking Mamdani, Josh Holmes, chief of staff for Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell when he was Senate Republican leader, and others recalled the Carter speech, which the president delivered while wearing a sweater and sitting by the White House Library fireplace. Carter, a Democrat, asked Americans in the televised speech to conserve energy by lowering their thermostats to 65°F during the day and 55°F at night in winter. Later that summer, he urged them to set their cooling systems to 78°F.

“Jimmy Carter’s turn down your thermostat and put on a sweater,” Holmes said about Mandani’s idea. “American dream.” A couple of years ago, The Washington Post recalled the moment with a story headlined: “Jimmy Carter wore a sweater – and ignited years of Republican backlash.” The conservative- and libertarian-minded Bill of Rights Institute once called Carter’s decision, about two weeks into his presidency, to first tackle energy, as part of a large attempt to fix an overall struggling U.S. economy, a “costly mistake.”

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“.. a generation graduating without a working knowledge of the country they’re inheriting.”

“We’ve gotten much more proficient at telling the negative stories and forgotten to tell many of the positive stories.”

• The Most Important Initiative to Save Our Country’s Future (Margolis)

America’s 250th birthday is here, and so much that has led up to this moment has made it clear we have a lot of work to do to restore pride in this country… for those on the left. And an answer is underway. The Department of Education and the America First Policy Institute launched the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to address a problem most Americans already suspected: kids don’t understand how their own country works. The coalition partnered with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and officially launched on Sept. 17, Constitution Day, the anniversary of the Constitution’s signing in 1787.


National Assessment of Educational Progress data show that only 23% of eighth graders scored at or above proficiency in civics. That’s a generation graduating without a working knowledge of the country they’re inheriting. It’s no wonder socialism is becoming so popular among young people. They don’t understand why our system is superior. “One of the first things we did was kind of a diagnostic on where we are in civic education, and that was kind of the sobering news,” Michael Shires, vice chair of education opportunity, higher education and senior policy officer at the America First Policy Institute, told The Center Square. “The numbers would say that we’re not doing a very good job of passing that along to the next generation.”

Shires has a theory for how this happened. “A big part of how we got here is we just stopped telling the stories of what was good about America,” Shires said. “We’ve gotten much more proficient at telling the negative stories and forgotten to tell many of the positive stories.” So the coalition is telling those stories again, at scale. Under the motto “Know America. Love America,” the group has run more than 100 events, including K-12 teacher summits, student competitions, lectures, classroom resources, and a 50-state “Trail to Independence Tour,” tracing how each state joined the Union. Recent polling shows the share of Democrats who say they’re “extremely” or “very” proud to be American cratered from 85% in January 2001 to just 29% in 2026. Republicans held steady at 90% across those same 25 years.

This can be fixed.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the mission comes down to something simple. “Every young American understands the beauty of our nation and is equipped with the civic knowledge required to contribute meaningfully to its future,” she said.

The coalition includes dozens of organizations working with the Department of Education, among them First Liberty Institute and Turning Point USA. First Liberty Institute President Kelly Shackelford told The Center Square just how deep the knowledge gap runs. “There are so many polls, for instance, like 71% of Americans don’t even know what the three branches of government are,” Shackelford said. “And one of the more disturbing polls is that a large percentage of the students don’t even love their country. And it’s because they don’t know what their country is.”

Shires doesn’t want the 250th anniversary to be a one-off celebration. “We don’t want July 5 to be the end of this conversation,” he said. And despite the noise on cable news and social media, Shires said Americans still feel good about where they live. “Despite what you see in the news headlines and the networks and the social media and everything else, for most people in their lives, they’re excited that they’re in America, that it’s a place where they can thrive and make their own choices and pursue their dreams,” he said.

Initiatives such as this can deprogram young people who have been brainwashed to hate our country. Let’s hope it expands and continues.

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“Their homes burned, their land ransacked. Every last pound and shilling to their name poured into the patriot struggle. Some would die as paupers. But that was a price that each and every one of them was willing to pay.”

• This Rubio Video Might Be the Most Patriotic Thing You See All Year (Margolis)

America turned 250 years old this week, and of course, the left’s knight in socialist armor had something to say. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the occasion with an insulting America 250 address he delivered from George Washington’s actual desk. He used the moment to describe his own country as an “arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.” He accused federal agents of “terrorizing our streets” and warned that the nation’s founding ideals “are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”


That he made such a speech at the desk of George Washington is such an insult. In his speech, he framed his own government as an authoritarian regime that needs to be endured. Make no mistake about it, that is not patriotism, no matter what flowery language he used.

President Donald Trump took a sharply different approach at Mount Rushmore on Friday. He spoke of American exceptionalism, something that the likes of Mamdani don’t believe in. He also warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land” and didn’t soften the message for anyone. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” Trump said. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.” He drew the line without apology. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” Trump said. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Another message you need to hear came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who posted a video Saturday, narrated in his own voice, laying out exactly why this country is worth loving without qualification. “250 years ago today, a small band of men gathered in Philadelphia and declared war on the most powerful empire on the earth,” Rubio said. “They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of their posterity.”

“Many of them would lose everything in the Revolution,” Rubio continued. “Their homes burned, their land ransacked. Every last pound and shilling to their name poured into the patriot struggle. Some would die as paupers. But that was a price that each and every one of them was willing to pay.” He then tied the founders to something larger than themselves. “America has never been merely a proposition,” Rubio said. “It has always been a real and living civilization. A unique and distinctive people unlike any other nation or people in the history of the world.”

He continued, “America is an exceptional nation because Americans are an exceptional people. We are a people born on the edge of the known world. We are a frontier nation. From the hardy pioneers on the Oregon Trail to astronauts transcending the limits of Earth itself, America made the frontier a principle of national life. The men who built our country were heroes, among the greatest and most noble that the world has ever seen.”

Rubio closed his video with a line every American should be able to say without flinching. “This is the greatest nation on Earth,” he said. “That has been true for 250 years. And with God’s grace, it will be true for the next 250 as well.” That’s the difference between a party that has stopped loving this country and an administration still willing to say so out loud. Mamdani wants Americans to see their nation as an arena where the powerful crush the weak. Rubio wants Americans to see it as the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever produced.

Because it is.

This country has had 250 years to prove itself, and it’s earned the right to be proud of what it has built. Never apologize for loving America, and never apologize for being proud of everything it has accomplished.

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The American was the first man not beholden in some way to one sort of king or another.

• “What Then Is The American, This New Man?” (Turley)

Across the country today, Americans are celebrating a common article of faith: the belief that a free people can govern themselves under rights given to them not by the government but by their creator.


Two hundred fifty years ago, the Republic was founded as the first major Enlightenment Revolution. The Enlightenment had started roughly 100 years earlier. Many in Europe had long argued for a society based on the writings of figures like John Locke. But it would happen thousands of miles away, among a collection of colonies where a people came together and put those principles to the test. They believed that they were entitled to rights of free speech, free exercise, and property as human beings, not as subjects.

We became the fascination of Europe among writers and intellectuals who could not understand how the world’s first Enlightenment Revolution could be brought about by a people with little connection to each other or the land; with no calcified class structure or fixed institutions. It led one Frenchman, who wrote under the name John Hector St. John, to ask, “What then is the American, this new man?” In my book, Rage and the Republic, I ask whether we can answer that question today. Who were we then, and who are we now?

In 1776, two revolutions were developing in America and in France. One would become the world’s oldest and most successful republic The other, in France, would become “the Terror,” in which tens of thousands would die on guillotines and in the streets. The true miracle of Philadelphia was the creation of a system that could harness the self-destructive powers of a democracy. The framers, and particularly James Madison, would create a constitutional system that forced moderation and compromise through checks and balances.

Many wanted a less restrained democratic system, but the Framers understood that such systems stretching back to ancient Athens had become little more than what Benjamin Rush called a “mobocracy.” In France, such voices prevailed. They unleashed a blood-letting that would ultimately even devour the Jacobins themselves. They first turned on the wealth and aristocrats, then on the priests and then each other. It would lead French journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan to write that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

Those voices are with us today. Many, including Democratic and socialist leaders, are denouncing the Declaration and the Constitution as tools of repression. This week, various Democrats went public to call for radical revolutionary changes or criticize our founding. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used an occasion with newly admitted citizens to trash the country, oligarchs, ICE, and our “arena of supremacy.”

Socialist Mamdani described a virtual hellscape of a country run by “oligarchs who buy elections” as “children go to sleep hungry.” He added, “We see monopolies that dominate every industry, and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”

Mamdani mocked the narrative of the republic, telling the new citizens that “the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.” Others joined the celebrations with their own condemnations. Pennsylvania socialist Chris Rabb, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, has joined the chorus of critics.

Speaking at “America at 250 — Trump Fascism, Historical Erasure, and the Battle Over Truth” in Philadelphia, the unopposed Rabb lashed out at a country built on “stolen land and stolen labor.” He also mocked the “lofty” “screeds” that “were notoriously catering to a performative aspect of collective genius that purposely erased indigenous and black peoples.” He denounced this country as based on harmful “myths” supporting white supremacy and fascism: “Fascism is not new. These systems of harm are built into the very fabric of this nation.”

Others, such as former MSNBC host Joy Reid, declared that black Americans don’t celebrate the Fourth. Reid dismissed celebrating what she called “MAGA America” which she described as “sad, pathetic, boring.” Others, like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), used the anniversary to praise Cuba as the true model of success (something Mamdani had also done in his inaugural address). Blue states — Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Pennsylvania—declined to participate in the 250th anniversary celebrations on the Mall.

In Massachusetts, a historic church ended its long-standing celebration of the Fourth of July to focus on the “on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness.” This is the home of John Adams and other patriots. Adams wrote his wife Abigail that this day would be “celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”

We are seeing not a constitutional crisis but a crisis of faith. Polls show that fewer than half of Democrats are now proud to be Americans. For many of us, this day remains, as Adams described it, that day of deliverance. These are revolutionary times, but we remain a revolutionary people who believe that free speech and other rights belong to us as human beings. Our belief in individual rights and the free market built the greatest engine of prosperity and freedom in the history of the world. Many of these critics cite our flaws, including slavery, in a country based on inalienable rights. But what the framers gave us was a system that allows an imperfect people to form a “more perfect union.”

It was here that citizens could pursue their own manifest destiny. It is here that a black minister could speak on our National Mall about his unrealized dream and galvanize a nation to fight for the civil rights of every American.

It is here that an African American, and the child of a Kenyan, could become president.

It is here that the son of Vietnamese immigrants could rise this year to be Navy Secretary.

It is here that a black child growing up in a home with a dirt floor and no plumbing could become one of the longest-serving justices of the Supreme Court.

It is here that a people could survive economic meltdowns, global wars, and natural disasters, based on the simple belief that we share a common article of faith: “E pluribus unum” — “out of many, one.”

“What, then, is this American?” Look around you.

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“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

• America at 250: Restoring America’s Greatness (Victor Joecks)

The pages of tomorrow’s history are written by today’s decisions. History is littered with failed republics and democracies. The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Democracy in ancient Greece turned into an aristocracy. This didn’t just happen in ancient history. In 1961, a new constitution in Venezuela divided the government into three branches. But in 1999, Hugo Chavez swept to power and rewrote the country’s constitution. He eventually became a dictator.


The Founding Fathers were well aware of the fleeting nature of our form of government. In 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powell asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” For context, in Federalist 39, former President James Madison defined a republic as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”

The term “democratic republic” references the role that popular elections play in selecting some of our leaders. But the Founding Fathers held a much dimmer view of democracy by itself. In Federalist 10, Madison observed that democracies “have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Even as America celebrates her 250th birthday, there are plenty of reasons to wonder about the country’s future. America has abandoned her Christian heritage. Government-funded schools teach children to hate America and Western Civilization more broadly.

Birth rates have generally been below replacement level for decades. You can see the fruit of those trends. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democrat congressional nominee from New York City, founded a group that seeks “the total eradication of Western Civilization.” Chants of “Death to America” have rung out on college campuses and the streets of New York City. Muslims are openly plotting to turn America into a Muslim country. But concerning trends are not outcomes. Americans still have the freedom and ability to change course. The most important thing is for America to return to her Christian roots. Listen to our Founding Fathers, not the misinformation taught in most modern history classes.

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Thomas Jefferson wrote. A version of that quote is on the Jefferson Memorial. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” George Washington said in his farewell address. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

You can’t force people to become Christians. But students should learn historical truths, not skewed leftist narratives. Institutions should also elevate and honor other pillars of America’s past — like the ideas of Western Civilization and the family. Part of this requires political action. You can’t win the war of ideas when the government subsidizes the losing side. America needs leaders who will act vigorously to defend America’s values. That includes deporting immigrants who hate America.

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“The Russian president has congratulated Donald Trump and the American people on 250 years of independence..”

• Russia and US Bear ‘Special Responsibility’ For Global Security – Putin (RT)

Russia and the United States bear a “special responsibility” for maintaining global security, President Vladimir Putin has said while congratulating his counterpart Donald Trump on the 250th anniversary of American independence. In a letter published by the Kremlin on Saturday, Putin wished Trump and his family “health, well-being and success,” and the American people “happiness and prosperity,” while describing the signing of the US Declaration of Independence as “an important milestone in world history.”


He also emphasized the countries’ shared history and special responsibilities as nuclear powers. “We were allies in two world wars, together freed humanity from the horrors of Nazism, and later played an important role in laying the foundations of the modern world order. Today, Russia and the United States, as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, bear a special responsibility for ensuring global security and stability,” the message reads. Putin also recalled that Russia had supported the North American colonists in their struggle for independence from Britain 250 years ago.

During the American Revolutionary War, Empress Catherine the Great refused Britain’s requests to send Russian troops to fight the colonists and later established the League of Armed Neutrality, which challenged London’s naval blockade and was widely seen as favoring the American cause. Since Trump returned to office last year, Moscow and Washington have renewed high-level contacts after years of strained relations. Putin and Trump met in person last August and have held several phone calls discussing the Ukraine conflict, the Middle East, and broader bilateral ties. However, several outstanding issues, including Ukraine-related sanctions and diplomatic property disputes, have not yet been resolved.

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The US and Russian leaders spoke for nearly 1.5 hours ..

• Trump Calls Putin on US Independence Day (RT)

US President Donald Trump called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to discuss the Ukraine conflict, the situation around Iran, and the prospects for restoring bilateral ties, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said. The conversation took place on Saturday, as the United States marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. According to Ushakov, Putin personally congratulated Trump and the American people on reaching the milestone, after sending a formal message to the White House a day earlier. The call lasted one hour and 25 minutes, Ushakov said, describing it as “businesslike and highly constructive.”

Ukraine conflict
Putin briefed Trump on what Ushakov described as the real situation on the ground in Ukraine, saying Russian forces were advancing along the entire line of contact and taking “one settlement after another.” Putin described the liberation of Konstantinovka, a key Ukrainian stronghold, as an important step toward establishing full control over the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The Kremlin aide said Moscow expects the remaining fortified areas still held by Kiev’s forces to be taken as well.

Putin reiterated Moscow’s preference for a political and diplomatic settlement, provided that Russia’s core positions are taken into account. At the same time, he accused Kiev and its European backers of seeking to prolong and escalate the conflict, including through “terrorism against civilians.” Trump, according to Ushakov, again confirmed his readiness to help bring the hostilities to an end and seek a peaceful settlement. He also argued that ending the Ukraine conflict as soon as possible could unlock “enormous prospects” for mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and the US, the Kremlin aide said.

Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will continue mediation efforts and are ready to visit Moscow “at a convenient time,” Ushakov added. The two leaders also discussed the situation around Iran, where a public farewell ceremony is being held for slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Putin expressed hope that the negotiation process based on the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran would help produce mutually acceptable, long-term solutions to key issues, Ushakov said. The Russian president also reaffirmed Moscow’s readiness to provide practical assistance to efforts aimed at de-escalation and stabilizing the region.

Trump thanked Russia for what he described as its balanced position and constructive proposals, according to the Kremlin aide. Turning to bilateral ties, the presidents emphasized the importance of continuing contacts, including with regards to military-political and economic issues. The leaders also pointed to the upcoming launch of a joint Russian-American crew to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome as a symbolic example of cooperation between the two powers.

The two presidents stressed the importance of preserving the shared pages of Russian-American history. Putin reminded Trump of Russia’s contribution to the emergence of American statehood, while both leaders highlighted the alliance between Moscow and Washington during World War II. Trump mentioned that he personally admires St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, while Putin wished the US success in hosting the ongoing FIFA World Cup, citing Russia’s own experience as host in 2018.

What’s next?
According to Ushakov, Moscow initiated the previous phone call on June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, while this time it was the American side that proposed speaking on the day of the 250th anniversary of US independence. The presidents agreed to remain in contact and hold another call in the near future, according to Ushakov. Putin also reminded Trump that he has a standing invitation to visit Moscow.

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Standing invitation.

• Putin Invites Trump To Visit Russia In ‘Constructive’ July 4th Phone Call (ZH)

A nearly 90-minute phone call between Presidents Trump and Putin on July 4th could signal shifting White House priorities, as it tries to find permanent offramp and settlement in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, but also as the Ukraine war seems to be fast heating up again. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said in comments made public Sunday that Trump offered Putin to help find a solution to the war in Ukraine. “The American president once again confirmed his readiness to work towards a rapid end to the fighting and find solutions to overcome the crisis,” Ushakov said of Trump’s call. He called conversation “business-like and quite constructive.”


The spokesman further stated that Russia sought “a political-diplomatic resolution of the conflict, with due account of Russia’s fundamental approach.” But Ushakov also lashed out at the Zelensky government, accusing it and its European allies of “counting on extending and even escalating the conflict, and on terrorism against civilians.” This referred to the fact that Ukraine’s repeat drone strikes deep inside Russian territory have severely damaged energy infrastructure, as well as hit residential buildings and areas, resulting in casualties.

Ushakov further described that in the call Putin “depicted the real situation on the battlefield where the Russian armed forces are confidently advancing, liberating one locality after another.” Putin had also apparently renewed his initial Alaska Summit invitation for Trump to visit Russia, where further bilateral dialogue can take place, Axios noted. Trump on Saturday had also held a call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, who later said on Telegram the talk was “very good”. Zelensky stated that “There is a real prospect to end this war and American resolve will have a crucial meaning.”

Zelensky and Trump are expected to continue the discussion at the upcoming NATO Summit in Ankara, set for July 7-8. Zelensky had further taken the opportunity to highlight some of the latest weapons support from Washington: “We are grateful to the United States for all the assistance we have received – from Javelins and Patriots to political support – and we deeply value that America stands by us in defending our independence. I am grateful to every American heart that cares about the future of Ukraine, Europe, and everyone around the world for whom freedom matters,” he said.

Currently each warring side disputes the degree to which Russian forces are advancing. Supporters on either side have even been issuing contradictory battlefield maps, and the fog of war is thick.

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“Our troops are advancing,” Peskov continued. “No one here should have any doubt that our military is proceeding systematically, and we are seeing concrete results.”

• Russia’s Buffer Zone On Ukrainian Border ‘Expanding’ (ZH)

Russia has announced that one key measure that will be taken in response to Ukraine’s ramped-up drone attacks on Russian territory, including last month’s major strikes on the Moscow area, is the significant expansion of the border ‘buffer zone’ between the waring countries. “A security buffer zone on the Russian-Ukrainian border is conditioned by the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and the Russian military is engaged in this process systematically reaching the appropriate progress,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday.


In essence this is the Kremlin saying that Russian forces plan to permanently take over territory deeper into Ukraine. “Based on the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and in order to insure the safety of our citizens, we are setting up a security zone, or the so-called, buffer zone,” Peskov continued. “This buffer zone is being created systematically. We do register significant results regarding the terms of our troops’ advancing.” “There area should be no in no one doubts that it would will be serve to extend the necessary area ensuring our security,” he added.

“Our troops are advancing,” Peskov continued. “No one here should have any doubt that our military is proceeding systematically, and we are seeing concrete results.” He cited the taking of Konstantinovka: “This is a milestone, it is the most important step towards taking the common fortified area of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk,” he claimed according to TASS. President Putin has of late been taking steps to strongly signal he’s committed as ever to completing the war aims of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ – despite reports of nationwide fuel shortages, and also a full-blown gasoline supply crisis in Crimea.

The Kremlin released footage on Friday evening of the 73-year old Russian leader visiting an auxiliary command post to meet with the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Putin wore a military uniform, which Russian state sources described as a sign of his resolve to “finish off the terrorist neo-Nazi vermin”. [English-language RT’s response: “…seems to desire for that security zone to begin on the Polish border.”

https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Frussias-buffer-zone-ukrainian-border-expanding-result-worsening-drone-attacks-kremlin

The scene appeared aimed primarily at the West, which has been questioning Moscow’s resolve due to the now frequent Ukrainian drone hits on sensitive energy infrastructure.President Trump has also lately appeared to pivot back to wanting the resolve the Ukraine conflict, while still seeking permanent offramp regarding to the Iran war crisis.

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“Trump is said to have told Netanyahu “you’re fucking crazy’” while demanding Lebanon truce: “I’m saving your ass..”

• Trump: ‘Netanyahu Knows Who The Boss Is’ After Phone Call (ZH)

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could meet as early as next week after the US leader returns from the annual NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. That’s what Trump told Axios on Saturday after a Friday phone call, wherein the Israeli PM congratulated the American leader on the 250th Independence Day of the United States. Trump said something very interesting in the wake of the call: “We get along very good. [Netanyahu] knows who the boss is,” he told Axios. US-Israel relations have been deeply strained of late, given deep Israeli reluctance on the US-Iran MoU signing, as well as the US-mediated ceasefire in Lebanon.


Israel fears that the end result to a hasty peace could be a nuclear-armed Iran, and some Israeli leaders have gone so far as to say military action must not stop until there’s true regime change. “During their conversation, the Prime Minister said that the United States is a guarantor of global freedom, and that Israel greatly values the close relationship between the two nations. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump agreed to meet soon in the United States,” Netanyahu’s office said of the Saturday call. On the issue of controversy over the US-Israel relationship and the push to launch Operation Epic Fury, Axios provides the following: “

Many of Trump’s closest advisers think that Bibi was wrong about everything,” a U.S. official said. Trump lashed out at Netanyahu over Israel’s escalation in Lebanon in a phone call last month, calling the prime minister “crazy” and accusing him of ingratitude. The tensions have deepened a broader Republican schism over Israel and the war, with MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson accusing Trump of being beholden to Netanyahu. Indeed there seems of late a concerted White House effort to dispel this narrative. It seems that Trump is at least now more conscientious about it, given he’s publicly seeking to assure Americans that Bibi “knows who the boss is.”

A prior Trump-Bibi call in June didn’t go so well. At that time reports based on US officials indicated that President Trump ripped into Netanyahu, cussing at him and the president essentially ‘steamrolled’ him – angry over breaking the Lebanon truce and demanding that Israel’s military not attack Beirut. Trump is said to have told Netanyahu “you’re fucking crazy’” while demanding Lebanon truce: “I’m saving your ass,” he also reportedly said. Israeli officials have sought to downplay these negative reports…

Since then, the US has essentially forced Israel to acknowledge the Lebanon ceasefire – though it should be noted that the IDF occupation has been allowed to continue in southern Lebanon – and direct exchanges of missile fire between Tehran and Tel Aviv has been silenced.

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” calling the targeted media “trustworthy” is a misnomer when people have already abandoned it.”

• UK Government’s SHOCKING Bid to RIG YouTube Algorithm (MN)

In a brazen move that reeks of authoritarian control, the UK government is pushing plans to seize influence over YouTube’s recommendation system. Their goal is to prioritise content from the BBC, and other state backed propaganda machines, while burying independent journalists and creators who dare challenge the official narrative.


This isn’t subtle nudging – it’s direct engineered suppression, which they’re dressing up as “protecting democracy” from so-called disinformation. As public trust in legacy media plummets, the establishment’s response is to rig the game rather than earn back credibility. YouTube itself has warned creators about the proposals. The platform alerted users that new rules could force it to give privileged positioning to approved outlets, limiting growth for everyone else and reshaping what millions see daily. Independent voices who built audiences by speaking truth to power now face algorithmic exile.

GB News’ Alex Armstrong labelled the move “an act of pure tyranny, designed to control you, your family and your friends on an industrial scale.” The Free Speech Union described the move as “beyond dystopian.”

People fled to platforms like YouTube and X precisely because of the BBC’s documented biases on mass migration, Net Zero, and more – biases even internal BBC reports have acknowledged. Now, the government wants to drag that failing model into your feed by law. Technology and free speech lawyer Preston Byrne slammed it as the British government seeking to “influence and control the marketplace of ideas.” Lord Toby Young highlighted the absurdity in The Spectator: calling the targeted media “trustworthy” is a misnomer when people have already abandoned it. Forcing platforms to promote it won’t restore trust – it will confirm the desperation.

The Free Speech Union also linked the development to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s exit from X, where she cited threats to democracy all while her department advances state-favoured content rules. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen over and over: label dissent as dangerous, then legislate your preferred sources into prominence. The Mercian News pointed out the BBC’s own admission that only around 30% of the public trusts national news organisations, with over 50% trusting social media more. Forcing exposure won’t fix that – it exposes the contempt for audience choice.

Even some on the left, like the Labour Digital Rights Network, have criticised the hypocrisy of engineering a sanitised internet while claiming to fight Big Tech.

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“The carousel of six prime ministers in recent years proves something is “very broken” about UK politics, according to the US vice president”.

• British People Are ‘Crying Out’ For Change – Vance (RT)

The constant churn of British prime ministers shows that the UK political system is badly failing the public, US Vice President J.D. Vance has said, warning that ordinary people are “crying out” for real change. Britain’s problem is bigger than any single leader, as the succession of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer points to deep dysfunction in a system that is no longer delivering for the public, Vance suggested in an interview with The Sunday Times.


“What I see is six prime ministers in the last few years. What that says to me is that something is very broken about British politics and that people are really crying out for significant structural change,” Vance said. He added that the country has “been failed by its leadership for a long time” and “can do a lot more than it’s currently doing.” Starmer announced last month that he would step down as prime minister and Labour leader after less than two years in power, following a revolt inside his own party. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is widely expected to replace him after winning a by-election in Makerfield.

Vance said he did not know much about Burnham personally, but stressed that Washington would work with whoever leads one of America’s “closest and most important allies.” The vice president’s comments, published on the 250th anniversary of the US declaration of independence from Britain, come after months of unusually blunt criticism of London from Washington. US President Donald Trump recently said Starmer had “failed badly” on migration and energy. Earlier this year, he said Starmer was “not Winston Churchill,” as relations soured over London’s hesitation to support the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Vance was especially outspoken when he condemned the brutal stabbing of British teenager Henry Nowak last month, arguing that it would not have happened had European elites “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.” Downing Street responded by accusing foreign politicians of trying to “interfere” in British democracy and “stir up division.”

The vice president rejected the idea that such criticism amounted to hostility toward Britain, insisting that “it comes from a perspective of love and admiration… even though sometimes what we say is provocative.” Vance made a similar argument at the Munich Security Conference last year, when he accused European governments of opening the “floodgates” to migrants while restricting free speech and hollowing out democratic norms.

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Debt Rattle July 5 2026

Jul 052026
 
 July 5, 2026  Posted by at 10:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Edward Hopper Room in Brooklyn 1932


• Semiquincentennial (Greg Byrnes)
• My Love Letter to America (Catherine Salgado)
• Burning Down the House (James Howard Kunstler)
• ‘Gave Iran Week Off Because We’re Nice’: Trump (ZH)
• Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Outrages the Media (Spencer)
• Survey: Democrats Turning Heavily in Favor of Socialism (Turley)
• America Turns 250. How Much Does It Owe Russia? (RT)
• Putin Is Destroying Russia (Paul Craig Roberts)
• ‘The Crisis Is Deep’: The View From Russia As Fuel Shortages Worsen (AlJ)
• New York’s Heat Wave Exposes the Cost of Political Fantasy (Manney)
• Ron DeSantis Has a Couple GREAT Questions For Zohran Mamdani (Doug P.)
• Congresswoman Labels Hillary Clinton ‘Deplorable’ (JTN)
• After Importing 50 million Migrants, Europe Declares a “Housing Crisis” (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/HistoryBoomer/status/2073510103496413234?s=20

 


 


Love the word.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n” is the most famous line of the poem.

• Semiquincentennial (Greg Byrnes)

Revolutionary greetings, fellow Americans, on our semiquincentennial. How odd it is that we who disdain revolution celebrated it. Some may consider this an irony of history. In fact, it is built into the new system of government from its birth in 1775 through the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. The first year of the American Revolution was 1775, at least on the battlefield. And without that battlefield, all the talk in that hot summer in Philadelphia would’ve gone nowhere. Like millions of other Americans, on this day, I also salute our forebears who fought in the Revolution. According to a book I read, 75 of my family members were under arms, most lowly grunts.


One actually made it into one of those majestic paintings hanging in a museum. He is near a mounted George Washington treating a wounded Lt. James Monroe. The lieutenant survived and later declared a doctrine that people debate to this day. George Bailey and Paul Harvey, call your offices. Of course, the important person in the picture is Gen. Washington: No Washington, no revolution. Or even worse, no Washington, and we get an American version of the French Revolution! That would’ve been a double calamity.

Americans talk about the Civil War, that unpleasantness between North and South. But they forget the first civil war was between loyalists and what we now call patriots. So hats off to their descendants today, whether living in the United States or Canada. Since things turned out so well, all is forgiven. bIn high school, our summer reading assignment included books on the revolution by Kenneth Roberts. Arundel and Rabbel in Arms from the revolutionary point of view, and Oliver Wiswell from the loyalist point of view. In grammar school, we read Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. Good books, as I recall, and conducive to understanding both history and patriotism.

The hidden warning in the American Revolution is government debt. With massive debt and the tragedy of compound interest over generations, England was desperate for money and decided the colonies were a ripe chicken to pluck. Mismanagement of debt and hubris led to their fall. Have we learned the lesson? The founding fathers were, dare I say it, a bit nuts as creative geniuses tend to be. The two most opposite extremes were John Adams and Thomas Paine.

Paine was a radical anti-clerical atheist who relied on Satan’s speech and other gems in the epic poem Paradise Lost in his writing, including Common Sense. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n” is the most famous line of the poem. No wonder the Catholic Church placed Milton on the Index of Forbidden Books.

And there was Adams, who, as the revolution loomed, didn’t get cold feet but felt something of a cold chill at the prospect that this revolution would lead to a destructive form of democracy. He feared control by a mobocracy like the ones that destroyed every other republic in recorded history, especially if radicals like Tom Paine were to take control. In fact, Paine eventually did join the French Revolution. Adams took a different course. Ever the rival of Thomas Jefferson, Adams was of the opinion that the true Declaration of Independence was actually on May 15, 1776, when the Continental Congress passed “the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.“

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1,000 of these.

• My Love Letter to America (Catherine Salgado)

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a new nation came into being, utterly unique in history, conceived in liberty, acknowledging only one king (God), and destined to become the greatest country upon earth.


From George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan, from Alexander Hamilton to U.S. Grant, from Frederick Douglass to George Patton, from John Fitzgerald to Davy Crockett, America has produced some of the greatest men in history. Brilliant leaders, thinkers, statesmen, generals, inventors, scientists, and writers fill the annals of our history. We the People of the United States alone can say that our nation arose not out of conquest or power grabs or ethnicity, but out of noble principles and fundamental truths about human dignity.

I love America more than anything except my faith, and it is tragic that this has become for many Americans a sappy or an offensive statement. At one time, not so long ago, a majority of Americans were proud to say publicly how much they loved this nation. Now it seems as if most Americans (especially young Americans) either hate America or couldn’t care less. Some major U.S. cities are holding no significant public July 4 events. Democrats gripe about every event that is happening. Traveling across Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia in the last few days, I have seen far more ads for the World Cup than for America 250. What happened to the patriots of yesteryear?

I ask this because it has shocked and saddened me how few people I know, especially Gen Z, share my excitement about America’s 250th birthday. What a magnificent achievement, what a historic day this is! In 1776, a couple dozen men in the Continental Congress voted for independence, knowing only a third at most of the colonists were patriots, knowing Britain was the most powerful empire in the world, knowing how impossible seemed their chance of success. In 2026, America is the most powerful, prosperous, and influential nation on earth. God has given us so many blessings, and it behooves us to be grateful.

Unlike any other country, America alone lived up in principle (though not always in practice) to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14ff, Luke 19:12ff). America uniquely took into account God’s affirmation that seeking a king besides Him is sinful and foolish (1 Samuel/Kings 8). If other modern countries have attempted a republican form of government, it is in imitation of us and our Biblically-influenced system.

From my earliest childhood, I learned how remarkable and marvelous it was to be American. My grandfather and mother taught me many patriotic songs and tales of U.S. heroes. My father and mother both emphasized the honor of wearing a U.S. military uniform. My siblings and I acted out battles of the American Revolution during the long summer days. In college, I researched the anti-American propaganda I heard and found the truth even more compelling than I had supposed. When I grew up and could afford to travel, I wanted to go to every American museum and historic monument I could reach.

From Mount Vernon to Gettysburg to Tombstone to San Antonio to West Point to Trenton, everywhere I found the tales of great and good and dynamically original Americans, pioneers and revolutionaries and warriors. Yes, there have always been those who wish to destroy America from within, particularly the Democrat Party, and they have sometimes made America fall from its ideals. But my family was right to teach me to take pride and joy in being American, in living in a country that always strives for liberty even when it falls short.

Being American is a defining part of my identity. I only wish I could say I have sacrificed and accomplished something for the U.S., because like many young Americans now, I enjoy the blessings without the trials the previous generations endured. I hope if ever a trial comes, I can be as brave as the men and women of past generations. Without America, the world plunges into hopeless tyranny and chaos. Living here is a gift and being a citizen here a privilege. May God bless America, now and always.

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“I forgot to get napkins. I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” —Darializa Avila-Chevalier, primary election winner, New York’s 13th Congressional District.

• Burning Down the House (James Howard Kunstler)

Who are all these Democratic Socialists of America, anyway? “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” one of their spoxes declared on Instagram in 2024. Hmmmm . . . . I wonder if you can be a little more specific. Like, including democracy and socialism, two western civ constructs? Kind of looks like a baby / bathwater situation, followed by burning down the house where the baby lived. Do we get a chance to debate this proposition in the midterm election? Likewise, a St. Paul, Minnesota, school board member, one Chauntyll Allen offered the following policy recommendation on the We Love Our Dog Park Facebook page:


A bad moon is rising on our nation’s 250th birthday. The country is in a rancid mood. You begin to see what happens when political ideas are carried to their last limits. Question is: does all this add up to a winning party platform? You must suppose that higher-ups in the Democratic Party are asking themselves the question now. What do Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer think when they see these Angels of Death on the march (or in flight) over the midterm battlefield?

Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Melat Kiros are going to Congress to link arms with “The Squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — and they will bring their cargo of DSA policy ideas with them: racial, gender, and social justice; abolish ICE (no more deporting anybody); defund the police; end incarceration (no more jails); free housing and medical care; green this-n-that; government ownership of business; abolish the Senate and the electoral college; pack the SCOTUS. . . .

The platform apparently has a lot of appeal to a certain demographic — which, I suspect, includes the many young recent graduates of the diploma mills who are pissed-off that Mr. Trump & Company are methodically shutting down the NGOs that were supposed to furnish these young race-and-gender studies majors with cushy, six-figure jobs doing “activism.” Alas, that pathway is increasingly blocked and the country only needs so many baristas. What to do then? Take it to the limit! Be communists. . . with all that entails. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.

his new gen of Democratic Socialists is arguably worse than the Confederates of 1861. Those Rebs only wanted to secede from USA and go their own way in one corner of the land. They didn’t want to piss on Johann Sebastian Bach, Leonardo DaVinci, Jane Austen, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as they walked out. The Democratic Socialists of our day are fully aligned with their avatars: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, who operated human meat-grinders at scale to tamp down the opposition. Not a great look to align with the great mass-murderers of history.

It must be agony for Schumer and Jeffries. Eradicate Western Civ. . . ? Piss on white people’s corpses. . . ? Are they really going to get behind that? No-o-o-o-o. But they will try to wriggle around this steaming pile for some weeks to come until it is obvious that the Democratic Party has blown itself up, hoisted itself on that old petard. It may be too late for the party’s old guard. No matter how many rain-dances Elizabeth Warren does, nothing will put out this dumpster fire.

Another question for the months ahead: can that party control its increasingly maniacal street warriors, the Antifas, the Pink Pistols, the Transgender Armed Defense forces, and whatever remains of BLM. There is still a lot of money in circulation for public demonstrations and disruptions from George Soros and other sponsors. And apart from that are the forces of jihad, with their own foreign patrons. Gawd knows how many jihadis came into the country during “Joe Biden’s” orchestrated alien invasion. Not just a few, you can be sure.

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“References Ayatollah Funeral In Rushmore Speech”

• ‘Gave Iran Week Off Because We’re Nice’: Trump (ZH)

On Friday President Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore to kick off the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, and in it he confirmed that everything regarding Iran – whether on the military or diplomatic fronts – have been paused to allow for the Islamic Republic to bury its late supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Trump said Washington “knocked the hell out of Iran” and that the country was “dying to settle”. He also made comparisons between the lengthy Iran conflict and the brief US operation to overthrow Maduro of Venezuela.


“We beat Venezuela in one day, and we knocked the hell out of Iran,” he said. That’s when he claimed that the current US posture and pause in action is all about allowing the Iranians time to conduct a week-long funeral for the slain Khamenei, killed during the opening day of Operation Epic Fury. “We gave them a week off for a funeral because we’re nice,” he said. The funeral ceremonies began in Tehran on Friday, with government representatives from dozens of countries paying respects, and with the public multi-city procession in full swing on Saturday, amid a heavy Iranian security presence.

While the US administration is touting its Iran ‘excursion’ as a ‘win’ – the reality is that it is looking more like a quagmire with each passing week. Iran is no closer to abandoning its nuclear program, it is proclaiming its own control over the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian protocol, and its ruling clerics and IRGC military apparatus are firmly in place. Trump and White House officials had from day one vowed a rapid engagement, saying repeatedly it would end ‘fast’ – and had even initially touted that regime change would be imminent – but now it’s been 127 days since the conflict’s start.

Trump in his Rushmore speech didn’t dwell long on the Iran (mis)adventure, but moved on rather quickly to themes of American exceptionalism. “Americans honor excellence; we admire boldness; we respect ambition,” Trump said. “We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters and in every human endeavor Americans see an unfinished competition.

“What is strong can be made stronger. What is fast can be made faster. What is great can be made greater than ever before. And that’s what’s happening with America.” He continued: “Show us a mountain, and we’ll just climb it. Show us an ocean and we’ll just cross it. Show us a problem and we will just solve it. Show us a task the world calls impossible and Americans will get it done.”

There’s a rich irony in Khamenei’s public funeral starting on the very day, July 4th, that America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding. The founding fathers warned the young Republic that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” John Quincy Adams famously warned, “She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

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“Like Nothing Since the Days of Reagan “

• Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Outrages the Media (Spencer)

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on Friday to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our nation, President Donald Trump sounded the alarm: “As we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack.” He observed that “a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”


There was no doubt whatsoever that what he was saying was true, and that thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, communism is indeed resurgent in the U.S. The establishment media confirmed this by falling easily back into its old Cold War habit of sneering at foes of communism as if patriots were fabricating the threat entirely, or at very least wildly exaggerating it in order to advance their own agenda.

The New York Times report was dripping with so much contempt that you’d think it was the good old days again, when they were sneering at Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Trump,” sniffed the Gray Lady, “read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looked on. He said the word ‘communism’ so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.” You’d think Trump had done something really gauche like ask Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall. (Back in 1987, when Ronald Reagan actually called on Soviet top dog Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, the Times complained that the president was “using this speech to portray Moscow as the villain in the arms race.”)

Trump, the rootless cosmopolites continued, was — horror of horrors — “not subtle.” He declared that communism was “‘the enemy of July 4, 1776.’ He called it a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor and even 9/11. He name-checked Karl Marx.” As well he should, for Marx is the intellectual godfather behind the communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s petulant 250th anniversary remarks, in which he whined that “the powerful” view America as “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.”

Trump didn’t address Mamdani’s remarks directly, but he made it very clear that he knew what they represented: the politics of envy and hatred, which leads to social upheaval, total government control, and the state’s enslavement of its citizens. “These are not mere political disagreements,” Trump said, “like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country.”

Speaking accurately about communism in a way that the New York Times hasn’t done since its Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Walter Duranty covered up Stalin’s Ukrainian famine, Trump said that it was “the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.” He added: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

That is undeniable, both because communism is an internationalist system that rejects all nationalism, and because it considers allegiance to anything but the international working class (which is in reality the bosses of whatever communist system is at hand) to be an unacceptable attachment to bourgeois capitalism.

Continuing in his classic Trumpian fashion, the president said that “the Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work. Communism is a loser. It always was, and it is. Right now, it’s a big loser. Look at the people that are promoting it.” Trump has called a lot of people losers over the years, and in this case his usage may seem odd, given the fact that Democratic Socialists of America candidates have just won some impressive victories, and the Marxists appear to be on the march in America.

Trump is, however, entirely correct. Communism is an ideology for losers, as it punishes the productive for their productivity and rewards the thugs who manage to seize and hold power, all while presenting itself as the triumph of social justice and equality of rights for all. Only losers would fall for that lie, and only slaves would submit to it, and Trump doesn’t want to see America become the land of either one.

“Tonight,” the president said, “we gather on the eve of one of the most extraordinary days in the history of the world. Tomorrow we mark 250 years of glorious independence and 250 years of majestic American freedom – nothing like it.” Indeed there isn’t. And now that we have come this far, it would be a world-historical tragedy to lose it all to the most obviously failed ideology in the history of the world.

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“While 85 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents said that they would not vote for socialists, 62 percent of Democrats said that they would.”

• Survey: Democrats Turning Heavily in Favor of Socialism (Turley)

For many of us who were raised in liberal, Democratic families, the infusion of socialist, anti-free-speech, and anti-Semitic elements into the party has been alarming. The party was always in favor of social welfare programs but remained ardently committed to free markets and free speech. Now, we have CNN anchors openly questioning whether candidates are too Jewish-looking for the Democratic base as socialists sweep away establishment candidates. A recent poll reaffirmed that trend with a vast majority of Democrats saying that they are prepared to support the socialists.


A recent Economist/YouGov survey asked respondents, “Would you ever vote for a candidate who identified as a “Democratic Socialist?” While 85 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents said that they would not vote for socialists, 62 percent of Democrats said that they would. Among self-described liberals, the percent of support for socialism soars to 73 percent. For Kamala Harris supporters, 64 percent would support socialists.

Even more alarming is the preference of Democrats for socialism over capitalism. Some 34 percent choose socialism while only 22 percent choose capitalism. Overall, 58 percent of Democrats view socialism in general “favorably.” It is not surprising that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders went on YouTube this week to proclaim that “we are on the verge of the political revolution” that they have long sought to fundamentally change our system. In Rage and the Republic, I discuss this shift toward socialism:

“Much of the anti-capitalist movement is composed of young people who have never lived under a socialist or communist government. Popular politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have made socialism chic, alongside wealthy celebrity adherents such as Lawrence O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, and Sarah Silverman. There is a superficiality to many in this movement of wealthy celebrities wearing socialism on their designer sleeves. In one of the most glaring disconnects, Ocasio-Cortez attended the ritzy Met Gala (where tickets cost tens of thousands of dollars) wearing a designer dress with ‘Tax the Rich’ in large letters. It perfectly captured America’s armchair socialists, a commitment that often seems more performative than philosophical.”

Democratic establishment figures are maneuvering to stay ahead of the mob, many offering the far left the Supreme Court as bona fide. Others are staying silent as anti-Semitic figures fill their ranks. Some politicians are struggling to curry support with the growing socialist movement. Rep. Dan Goldman, who inherited a massive fortune as a trust baby, unwisely promised to help subsidize his campaign from his family fortune. With the addition of three homes, Goldman looked like the Richie Rich of the Democratic Party and lost by over 30 points.

Others are trying to downplay their wealth, from Rep. Ro Khanna, who reportedly has half a billion dollars from his wife’s inheritance, to Gov. Jay Robert “J.B.” Pritzker, who also inherited his fortune. Pritzker assured the mob that he is a different kind of billionaire, pointing at Trump billionaires as the rightful targets (not him with $4.3 billion). Notably, votes for socialists are not coming from blue-collar workers but from young, college-educated voters. These younger voters never experienced or watched the collapse of socialist systems in the last century. For them, the promise of the Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism.”

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“The forgotten story of how the Russian Empire helped the US survive two defining crises..”

• America Turns 250. How Much Does It Owe Russia? (RT)

On July 4, the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence. Americans will honor the Founding Fathers, the Continental Army, and France’s decisive contribution to victory over Britain. But one foreign power that also helped shape the fate of the young republic has largely disappeared from popular memory. Twice in American history, first during the War of Independence and later during the Civil War, the Russian Empire took diplomatic and naval steps that helped the United States survive moments when its future was far from certain. Both times, St. Andrew’s flag flew on the side of the American republic.


The weapon that nearly strangled the American Revolution
When people think of the American Revolution, they usually picture battles at Lexington, Saratoga, or Yorktown. Far less attention is paid to the struggle at sea. Yet Britain’s greatest advantage over the rebellious colonies was not simply the Royal Navy itself, but its ability to wage economic warfare across the world’s oceans. In the eighteenth century, a maritime empire lived or died by commerce. Merchant fleets carried not only wealth but also food, weapons, military supplies, and the resources needed to sustain both armies and colonies. Disrupting those shipping lanes could cripple an opponent without winning a single decisive naval battle.

One of the most effective tools for doing so was privateering. Privateers occupied a legal middle ground between naval officers and pirates. Governments issued them letters of marque authorizing privately owned vessels to capture enemy merchant ships. Unlike pirates, privateers operated under state authority, bringing captured cargoes back to friendly ports, where the proceeds were divided between the state and the shipowners.

The system allowed maritime powers to wage commercial warfare on an enormous scale without maintaining prohibitively expensive fleets. Privateers could also stop neutral merchant ships if they were suspected of carrying goods destined for the enemy, particularly military supplies. As the American War of Independence expanded into a broader European conflict following the intervention of France and Spain, this increasingly drew neutral shipping into the fighting.

Russia, despite remaining outside the war itself, found its merchant vessels among those affected. Russian ships carrying grain and other cargoes to Mediterranean ports were increasingly intercepted by both regular warships and privateers. What had begun as Britain’s campaign against its enemies was gradually becoming a threat to neutral commerce across Europe. By the late 1770s, Catherine the Great concluded that neutrality meant little unless it could be defended. The stage was set for one of the most consequential diplomatic interventions of the American Revolution.

By 1778, Russia had already begun looking for ways to protect its merchant shipping. St. Petersburg proposed that Denmark jointly escort commercial vessels sailing to Russian ports, hoping to shield neutral trade from the growing conflict. The following spring, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden each dispatched naval squadrons to patrol northern waters while issuing declarations defending the rights of neutral commerce.The effort, however, failed to stop the seizures. Spain, despite being aligned with revolutionary France against Britain, continued intercepting Russian and Dutch merchant ships carrying grain to Mediterranean ports.

On February 28, 1780, the Russian empress responded with one of the most important diplomatic initiatives of the eighteenth century: the Declaration of Armed Neutrality. bIts message was simple. Russia had respected the rights of neutral commerce throughout its own wars and expected the same treatment in return. If Russian merchant ships continued to be stopped or their cargoes confiscated, the empire would defend its maritime rights by force. Any attempt to seize Russian vessels now carried the risk of war with one of Europe’s great powers.

The declaration established several principles that would reshape maritime law. Neutral ships were to enjoy free navigation between the ports of belligerent states. Enemy goods carried aboard neutral vessels were to remain protected unless they constituted military contraband. Blockades would be recognized only when they were physically enforced by naval forces rather than proclaimed on paper. Most importantly, Russia pledged to back these principles with armed squadrons rather than diplomatic protests alone.

Catherine’s initiative quickly evolved into something far larger than a Russian policy. Denmark and Sweden joined almost immediately, effectively closing the Baltic to unrestricted operations by the warring powers. Over the following years, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and the Kingdom of Naples also adhered to the convention. Even France, Spain, and the United States broadly accepted its principles, although they never formally entered the league. Britain, whose naval strategy stood to lose the most, remained the only major power to reject it. The greatest beneficiary, however, was neither Russia nor the European neutrals. It was the thirteen rebelling colonies.

Without the principles established by the Armed Neutrality, Britain would have enjoyed far greater freedom to isolate American ports and choke off the overseas trade on which the revolutionary economy depended. By limiting London’s ability to interfere with neutral shipping, Catherine’s declaration made such a blockade far more difficult to sustain. The young republic still had to win its independence on the battlefield, but the sea became a far less effective weapon against it. For a nation celebrating 250 years of independence, this remains one of the least remembered international chapters of the American Revolution.

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Yeah yeah.

• Putin Is Destroying Russia (Paul Craig Roberts)

Yulia Shapovalova, Moscow correspondent for Al Jazeera, reports that Pusillinamous Putin’s ever-widening war has, as I said it would, expanded deep into Russia far from the Donbas battlefield. Shapovalova reports “The crisis is deep,” as civilian fuel shortages worsen. Ukraine’s successful strikes on Russian refineries and fuel storage have imperiled supply and resulted in gasoline rationing throughout the country and long lines as Russians wait hours for their rationed supply. What Putin has achieved is a reduction in Russians’ confidence in their government.


Russia has had to halt export sales of gasoline and jet fuel, and lower the fuel grade standards for gasoline. In Crimea, a state of emergency has been declared. Concerns are being expressed that to insure adequate fuel supply for agricultural harvesting could result in industry shutdowns. Russia has had to purchase 80,000 tons of gasoline from India and hopes to be able to import 400,000 tonnes of gasoline each month from wherever Russia can get it. This clearly will not help the Russian balance of payments, which the pro-American Russian bank director will use for more punishment for Russians.

Confronted with a genuine crisis, what is Putin’s response?v“I would say it is not critical,” says Russia’s failed war leader. Little doubt that Russia’s population’s response to Putin is “not critical for who?” “Not critical for those of us who cannot rely on transportation because you refuse to win a war?” “Not critical for those of us whose choices might be to be laid off from our jobs or face a food shortage?” “Not critical to those of us who will face more punishments from your central bank director to pass the cost of the Russian trade deficit you are causing to us?”

Clearly, Putin and his incompetent Kremlin entourage are, while in the middle of an ever-widening and ever-unsuccessful war, destroying the confidence of the Russian people in the Russian government. The American Zionist Neoconservatives seem to have Putin in their camp, aiding and abetting Washington’s hegemony. Why would Putin do this? Why would he be allowed to do this?

Recently I asked, tongue in cheek, “Is Putin an Unaware Agent of the West,” and linked to Gilbert Doctorow’s article raising a similar question. Both articles were translated and published in a Russian newspaper, which served notice that the Russian media is no longer reticent and is asking pertinent questions. We are now half way into the fifth year of Putin fighting a war that he has shown no intention of winning.

The cause of such extraordinary failure is difficult to discern. Is the cause the alliance of Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s main negotiator, with the Russian billionaire oligarchs and the West and the advice of Putin’s pro-West central bank director who intentionally left $300 billion of Russian bank reserves where the West could seize it? Have pro-Western forces in Russia made it difficult for Putin to represent Russian interests?

I can’t say, but at least this is an explanation why a militarily powerful country would fail to win a conflict with a third rate military power after 4.5 years, much longer than it took Stalin’s Red Army to defeat the mighty German Wehrmacht. Putin now ranks as the worst failure of a military leader in world history.

Frederica Marsi, also a correspondent for Al Jazeera, reports: “Ukrainian drone attacks on energy infrastructure are intensifying fuel shortages in Russia, triggering a rare admission from President Vladimir Putin of the gravity of the situation. In unusually candid public remarks to a meeting of senior officials on Sunday, Putin explicitly acknowledged that Ukrainian strikes had led to fuel rationing.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/30/how-severe-is-russias-energy-shortage-because-of-ukrainian-strikes

But what Putin refuses to acknowledge is that the Ukrainian strikes on Russia are war. Putin calls increasingly successful Ukrainian strikes on Russia, aided and abetted by NATO and Washington, “terrorist attacks on our civilian targets and infrastructure.”

In other words, Russia is not at war. Russia is merely experiencing terrorist attacks. Like the US attack on the Nord Sea Pipeline. Like the US attack on the Russian strategic bombing fleet. Like the US attack on Putin’s home intended to kill him. There is no war here folks. Just terrorist actions.

As Putin has redefined war as random terrorist acts, he doesn’t have to win a war, just ration gasoline, run up the Russian trade deficit with gasoline imports, accept Russian civilian casualties as a result of “terrorist activities,” and do nothing to win a war. The failure to win the war is demoralizing the Russian people and discrediting Russia as a military power, a discrediting that is bringing on a much larger and more dangerous war with the West, a war that will be nuclear.

So readers, tell me, why is Putin destroying Russia’s military reputation and leaving the Russian people ever more open to attack? What can possibly explain the total failure of such a powerful military force as Russia to win a war with a third rate power after 4.5 years? The only possible answer is the total failure of Russian leadership.

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‘I would say it is not critical’: Putin

• ‘The Crisis Is Deep’: The View From Russia As Fuel Shortages Worsen (AlJ)

Russia faces a severe fuel deficit as Ukrainian drone strikes knock out a significant portion of its refining capacity. With continuing war in Ukraine and agricultural harvesting under way, the government is scrambling to re-route supplies, maintain price caps and enforce export bans to prevent further domestic shortages. Long lines at petrol stations are now a common sight throughout the country, including in the prosperous capital Moscow. People wait for hours to fill up their cars. In some places, the pumps are completely dry. There is a sense of patience but also mounting anxiety in the air.


“I’m deeply frightened by the uncertainty and the lack of understanding where the situation is heading,” a woman named Irina, waiting to fill up her car in Moscow, told Al Jazeera. Igor, another Moscow resident, said: “I think things can get out of control if the crisis causes major industries to shut down.” Analysts predict that increased fuel prices will mean higher transportation costs followed by significant price hikes for goods and services. Stanislav Mitrakhovich, an expert at the National Energy Security Fund at the Russian Financial University, said the crisis is “deep, yet for a long time, Russian authorities were unwilling to acknowledge it”.

He added that the Russian response has led to “greater public distrust” of authorities and, consequently, triggered panic buying. b“Indirect evidence indicates that Ukrainian drone attacks have disabled about a quarter of Russia’s oil refining capacity,” he told Al Jazeera. “Seasonal demand has also contributed to the problem. The crisis has led to rising fuel prices and local shortages, as some regions simply lack oil refineries.” The situation is “even worse” in regions close to the combat zone, he said. “Measures to restrict and ration fuel sales have long been in place there.”

To tackle the problem, Russia has imposed fuel rationing. Sales are often limited to about 20-30 litres (about 5-8 US gallons) per vehicle, and drivers must pump fuel strictly into vehicle tanks. Filling jerry cans is largely prohibited. Earlier, the government banned petrol and jet fuel exports. Officials are now weighing a ban on diesel exports, too. Authorities have loosened fuel-quality regulations, temporarily allowing lower-grade fuel for the domestic market. In Russia-controlled Crimea, a state of emergency has been declared.

As the approaching agricultural harvesting season relies on a steady stream of diesel, authorities are prioritising farming allocations to prevent a hit to food security. To offset the domestic shortfall, Moscow has sought fuel imports from neighbouring countries, such as Belarus, as well as Asian markets. Moscow has shipped in 60,000 to 80,000 tonnes of petrol from India, according to industry sources cited by the Reuters news agency. Russia reportedly plans to import 400,000 tonnes of petrol monthly from various countries.

‘I would say it is not critical’: Putin
While Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledges the crisis, he appears reluctant to end the war in Ukraine and insists the situation is under control. “These attacks on our facilities certainly create problems, that is obvious. We are currently seeing a certain shortage, though I would say it is not critical,” he said. “First and foremost, we have to rapidly and significantly increase production of air defence systems that are most in demand. We must also continue to improve them … Repairs at refineries must be completed more quickly.”

Ukraine is seizing its opportunity. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has authorised a 40-day military and intelligence campaign, aimed at pressuring Russia into ending the war. Mitrakhovich said the way the crisis unfolds from here depends on what’s more effective: Ukraine’s drone strikes or Russia’s air defences.

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How will Mamdani fix the grid?

• New York’s Heat Wave Exposes the Cost of Political Fantasy (Manney)

A grandmother in Queens didn’t need a lecture about her thermostat; she needed electricity. Con Edison temporarily shut off electric services Friday to about 9,800 residential and commercial customers in Southwest Queens after extreme heat and heavy demand damaged equipment. bThe affected neighborhoods included Howard Beach, Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, and South Ozone Park.bThe company said the move was meant to allow quicker repairs and prevent longer, wider outages. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had already asked businesses and residents to set thermostats to 78ºF and hold off on running major appliances until early morning or late at night.


“I am asking every New Yorker to make a heat plan before the worst of this weather arrives,” said Mayor Mamdani. “The best protection against extreme heat is air conditioning. If you don’t have it at home, know now where you’ll go to stay cool. Check in on your neighbors, especially seniors, and if you see someone outside who appears to be in distress, call 311 so we can get help to them. This administration is using every tool we have to keep New Yorkers safe, but the strongest city is one where neighbors look out for one another.”

“We have deployed every resource this city has, but our most powerful tool isn’t a forecast or a cooling center. It’s a New Yorker,” said NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Christina Farrell. “The neighbor who knocks on the door, the family member who calls to check in, the stranger who stops to help. This holiday week, we are asking every New Yorker to look out for one another so that no one faces this heat alone. Visit nyc.gov/beattheheat or call 311 to find a cooling center near you and get the resources you need to beat the heat.”

City Hall said temperatures could feel as hot as 112ºF during the historic holiday weekend heat wave. The mayor’s office also opened more cooling centers, extended pool hours, and expanded outreach to vulnerable New Yorkers. Conservation during a heat wave can be reasonable; families understand the strain. Most people will turn a dishwasher off, delay laundry, or nudge the thermostat up a few degrees if it keeps the lights on for a sick neighbor down the block.=v The insult comes when political leaders preach sacrifice after years of treating reliable energy like a dirty habit.

New York doesn’t have an ideology problem when the air is mild and the lights are on. It has one when the heat index climbs, the grid strains, and ordinary people are told to sweat through a crisis while the political class poses as noble managers of scarcity. Con Edison said heat, humidity, and higher demand from air conditioners strained the system. By Thursday night, crews had restored power to nearly 31,000 customers affected by scattered outages since the heat wave began. They were still working to restore service to about 5,000 customers in Staten Island, 5,000 in the Bronx, and 6,000 in Queens.

The company later said the heat wave was one of the most intense in more than a decade, with dangerous temperatures topping 100ºF. Crews worked around the clock repairing underground cables in sweltering conditions. bCon Edison told customers to defer major appliances between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m., use only one large appliance at a time, and set air conditioners to the highest comfortable temperature.

Gov. Kathy Hochul also urged New Yorkers to conserve electricity if safe, setting air conditioners between 75ºF and 78ºF and avoiding unnecessary appliance use. Her office said state officials were coordinating with Con Edison, NYISO, and New York City leaders so large energy users could switch to other fuel sources where possible. From the governor’s statement: “New York State is in the midst of a prolonged heat wave, and we’ve been carefully monitoring our electrical grid to ensure it is able to withstand the increase in energy usage and keep New Yorkers safe.

“My team has been coordinating with Con-Ed, NYISO and New York City leaders to ensure all large consumers able to switch to other fuel sources have done so to reduce their usage. Due to the increase in energy demand and unexpected load challenges, I am also calling on New Yorkers to do their part to proactively conserve electricity if safe to do so by setting air conditioning units between 75 – 78 degrees and avoiding unnecessary appliance use. These small steps can go a long way. “While we are asking for New Yorkers to voluntarily conserve power, it’s critical to stay safe in this dangerous heat: stay hydrated, reduce time outdoors and find a cooling center near you, especially if you’re a senior citizen or have health concerns.

“I thank New Yorkers for taking these steps to reduce their usage and helping us keep the power on and protect the most vulnerable in our community.” The problem isn’t one emergency request; it’s a governing culture that sees command as competence. Set the thermostat here, delay the appliance there, dim the signs, open a cooling center, and ask families to absorb the failure politely. If the power returns, politicians claim management; if the grid buckles, residents are told they didn’t sacrifice enough.

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Trump should step in.

• Ron DeSantis Has a Couple GREAT Questions For Zohran Mamdani (Doug P.)

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered a speech about America’s 250th, and it was a patriotic tribute in appreciation of the freedom we all enjoy as citizens.

Just kidding!

Comrade Mamdani’s speech was exactly the kind of thing we were expecting from the socialist darling of the Democratic Party:

The American pride was palpable. Well, not really:

That’s… something. If Team Mamdani was going after a “hostage video” vibe they nailed it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has a couple of questions for Mamdani and his America-bashing pals:

Right? https://twitter.com/IsaiahLCarter/status/2073196564588163325?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2073196564588163325%7Ctwgr%5Eba6cb3cf6922af1b3f429ac3af248e965988fa1f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fdougp%2F2026%2F07%2F04%2Fron-desantis-has-a-couple-of-fair-questions-about-zohran-mamdanis-airing-of-grievances-about-the-us-n2429892

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They sure are scared of Bill Pulte.

• Congresswoman Labels Hillary Clinton ‘Deplorable’ (JTN)

Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, is turning Hillary Clinton’s most infamous phrase against her, sharply criticizing the former First Lady’s suggestion that spy agency workers resist Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and keep intelligence from him. “I’m going to use Hillary Clinton’s own words: deplorable,” Miller/Meeks told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Thursday. “That is disgusting behavior from a former secretary of state, from a former first lady, from a former senator.”


The Iowa congresswoman emphasized that President Donald Trump should have “every tool in his tool box” when it comes to national intelligence, especially given that the threat level is high as the United States hosts the World Cup and the 250th anniversary of Independence Day. “We need to have all ears to the ground to prevent tragedies from happening, such as the 9/11 tragedy,” Miller-Meeks said. In a “Democracy Docket” podcast on Wednesday with host Marc Elias, Clinton said Pulte’s appointment was “deeply insulting to the intelligence community” and that he lacks intelligence experience after Elias questioned her concerns regarding Trump’s replacement of Tulsi Gabbard with Pulte.

Gabbard announced in May she would be stepping down from the position to help care for her husband as he battles cancer. Clinton questioned why a lawsuit hasn’t been brought, stating she believes Pulte is “manifestly unqualified under the statute to hold that position.” The former First Lady has a tenuous relationship with the intelligence community given that the FBI in 2016 found evidence that she and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” “It certainly is unconscionable that she would say this,” Miller-Meeks said of Clinton.

Clinton said on the podcast that the DNI has access to all the nation’s spy secrets, that people should be “worried about everything” with Pulte in the position and that she hopes there are “career and even political appointees in various of the agencies that are slow-walking or refusing to share information with Pulte.”

After assuming his position, Pulte quickly followed through with Trump’s wish to lay off staffers within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.Other Democrats have criticized Trump for appointing Pulte, namely, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). “You’re going to turn the keys of all of our intelligence agencies over [to] somebody so grossly unqualified who’s shown he’s willing to take information and misuse it — secret information,” Warner said last month on Fox News.

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“The majority of the EU citizens did not want this migrant influx..”

• After Importing 50 million Migrants, Europe Declares a “Housing Crisis” (CTH)

The EU President Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Ireland to deliver remarks as Ireland takes their turn in managing the bureaucratic affairs of the EU Commission. As part of her speech to the audience, von der Leyen notes one of the biggest challenges facing the EU is a housing and affordability crisis. In the last 10 years, Europe has intentionally allowed around 50 million migrants to arrive and claim asylum. The majority of the EU citizens did not want this migrant influx. EU leadership is now declaring a “housing crisis” created by their own migrant policies. WATCH:



At this point in history, the European leadership is just making fun of European citizens.

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Debt Rattle Fourth of July 2026

Jul 042026
 
 July 4, 2026  Posted by at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  27 Responses »


Claude Monet Water lillies 1914 – 1917


• 250 Years of Fighting for Liberty (Ashley McCully)
• US At 250: Why America Has Been So Successful And Can It Continue (ZH)
• Mamdani Gives 250th Anniversary Speech (Robert Spencer)
• UK Labour Party Proves Why America Was Right to Ditch Parliament (Queen)
• The AI-Quantum Race Is About Who Governs the Future (Jeff Dornik)
• World’s Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse (ZH)
• Secret Service Missed 102 Warnings Before Trump Assassination Attempt (ET)
• Tulsi Gabbard Outlines the Mechanics of the Deep State (CTH)
• FBI Mole Wore Wire Inside Newsom’s Inner Circle: Lawyer (ZH)
• Need Another Reason to Loathe Michelle Obama? (Matt Margolis)
• Chancellor Friedrich Merz Delivers Statement to German Workforce (CTH)
• Germany’s Rotten Center Is Heading For A Reckoning (Amar)

 


 

 


 


I very much like she includes Dr. King as someone who fought for liberty in America.,

• 250 Years of Fighting for Liberty (Ashley McCully)

The pursuit of freedom has inspired every step of America’s journey and, as we all reflect on what the last 250 years have produced, it is imperative that we view our history through the lens of liberty. America’s story is vastly different from other countries because our definition of freedom is vastly different. From individual colonies to our 47th president, the United States is founded on the idea that our rights come from God, not government. For more than three centuries, we have fought to preserve this belief, and if we want to keep it, the fight will continue for at least another three.


Consider the colonists. They endured filthy, deadly conditions to cross the Atlantic to find freedom. Monarchies consolidated power and exercised it tyrannically, limiting how people could and could not worship God, imprisoning, beating, or fining anyone who did not comply. Rigid European class structure mandated that anyone born in poverty would die in poverty because there was no reason the upper crust should tolerate individualism. These people finally broke free of the Crown only to be hounded and taxed an ocean away, so they fought back with the greatest breakup letter of all time.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
—The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

It’s straightforward: our rights come from God, and men form a government to protect those rights, not to issue or infringe upon them. After winning the Revolutionary War, America’s quest for freedom was only beginning. Yes, we were no longer under the jurisdiction of the Crown, but we did have to secure our sovereignty on the world stage. We wanted to regroup economically, so we opted to stay out of the British-French trade squabble, but neutrality soon became impossible. The British, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped as many as 9,000 American sailors, claiming they were British deserters and forcing our ships into their ports, requiring us to pay their duty tax. Not even 30 years after we threw off the yoke of tyranny, they were after us again, so we fought back in the War of 1812.

“There shall be a firm and universal Peace between His Britannic Majesty and the United States, and between their respective Countries, Territories, Cities, Towns, and People of every degree without exception of places or persons. All hostilities both by sea and land shall cease as soon as this Treaty shall have been ratified by both parties as hereinafter mentioned.”
—Treaty of Ghent, December 24, 1814

Finally free to sit at the grown-up table in world affairs, the United States set out to make its fortune, and it did, on the backs of slaves. Chattel slavery robbed men and women who were created in the image of God—the same God who supposedly endowed all of His creation with inalienable rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence — of their freedoms and dignities. The North and the South both willingly engaged in the slave economy, but enough people understood how egregious and contradictory the practice was and fought back.

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”
—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

It would be more than two years before the Civil War came to an end and the last remaining slaves in Galveston, Texas, were notified of their freedom. We added the 13th Amendment to our Constitution, finally and forever abolishing slavery in America. We added the 14th Amendment to afford those born into slavery in America the status of citizens. The 15th Amendment granted citizens the right to vote regardless of the color of their skin.

Women were the unsung heroes of the American abolitionist movement and, once they saw freedom secured for black people, they continued to cast off their own chains. Fighting against assumptions of intellectual ineptitude and the idea that women were far too busy in the home to cast well-informed votes, women pushed themselves across the finish line in 1920 with the 19th Amendment, giving them the right to vote.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has taken from her all right in property, even to wages she earns…
—The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, July 20, 1848

Close readers will pick up the thread of freedom shifting ever-so-slightly from rights in life to rights in politics. It is this shift, wherein the government begins to issue rights to participate, that we must pause and reflect, especially when it comes to questioning the next 300 years of freedom in America.

Regardless of laws declaring a person’s right to vote, pervasive Jim Crow laws were unofficial statutes designed to keep black people down. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. picked up the thread and moved it back toward rights in life. The Civil Rights Movement in America reminded us that God does not only care about votes, but about how His children are treated. We watched growing numbers of citizens link arms and peacefully march across bridges, endure dog attacks and fire hose boundaries, sit in chairs they were supposedly not good enough to sit in, and people fought back.

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1964

Today we are still fighting for freedom, at home and abroad. Brave men and women wearing the cloth of a sometimes-grateful nation work to protect us from terrorists who seek to kill us for no reason other than that we are not one of them. God-fearing patriots stand up every day for the unborn and their right to be born. Good guys with guns have to remind politicians and special interest groups that the right to keep and bear arms is not about hunting. As AI increases and privacy is decreasing, it is up to us to come together and protect that which no one has a right to: intrusion of personal information and space.

The definition of freedom has never changed; it has always come from God and will forever need to be protected against government. Our lives, though, have changed substantially, and we are facing new threats to our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We have a constitutional republic, if we can keep it—if we want to keep it. No one said this road would be easy, but we all know in the core of our selves that freedom is worth its price.

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The world was ready for it.

• US At 250: Why America Has Been So Successful And Can It Continue (ZH)

So what has caused this incredible success?


The first reason, and one of the most critical historically, has been the US’ political and institutional stability. Clearly, there have been moments of intense turmoil, most notably with the Civil War in the 1860s. Its historical path also should not be over-romanticised, with US territorial expansion during the 19th century having many similarities to that of the Old World colonial empires. Nonetheless, the US is incredibly rare in that its political system is recognizably the same over the last 200 years. This relative stability and early development of property rights provided a fertile environment for long-term investments, which in turn has aided economic growth over the centuries.

The second reason is its geographic advantages. The US possesses vast arable land, navigable rivers, large coastlines, and access to two oceans. It therefore found itself more insulated from the destructive effects of the world wars, with productive capacity not impacted in the same way. Moreover, the country borders Mexico and Canada, who in both population and GDP terms are much smaller than the United States, meaning it didn’t face the security risks that many European powers faced over the 19th and early-20th centuries.

The third reason has been its abundance of energy resources, particularly relative to Europe. In large part a corollary of its geographic strengths, this energy abundance has given the US several advantages. First of all, lowering costs for households and industry, which has helped the economy be more resilient against geopolitical shocks. Moreover, with the US becoming a net energy exporter in recent years, it also strengthens the external position.

The fourth reason for the US’ relative success was that its main competitors in Europe were deeply affected by the world wars and wider political turmoil. Their productive and financial capacity was severely degraded, with the destruction causing huge loss of life as well. Even among those who survived, many scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs left for the US in the first half of the 20th century. Whilst not a US “success” as such, this meant that on a relative basis, the US’ divergence widened considerably. Indeed, in the first half of the 20th century, the US economy grew by 5.7 times, Germany by 3.4 times, the UK by 2.0 times, and France by 1.8 times.

The fifth reason for the US’ outperformance is scale. It has a large domestic market of over 300m people, with high average incomes, a common language, and low internal barriers to trade. This has given firms the ability to reach a large-scale domestically before expanding abroad. Indeed, it is notable that 8 of the world’s 10 largest firms are based in the US, whereas none are in Europe.

The sixth reason is the structural advantage of the US Dollar, which remains dominant in global trade and FX reserves. This dollar demand matters because it lowers borrowing costs and raises demand for US Treasuries. In turn, it leaves the US with an exceptional capacity to run bigger fiscal and external deficits without facing a funding crisis, and expands the geopolitical leverage that the US possesses. This has been dubbed the “exorbitant privilege”, and has been a major advantage in recent decades.

The seventh reason is financial depth. The US has a large banking system, but also a wide range of non-bank financing, which means startups have access to other sources of capital. In fact, in the decade from 2013 to 2023, annual venture capital financing was 0.7% of GDP in the US, compared to just 0.2% in the EU. This financial depth is important because innovative firms can often be loss-making for lengthy periods, so countries with bigger pools of patient risk capital are better placed to commercialise new technologies.

The eighth reason is its self-compounding advantages in education and research. The US has many of the world’s strongest research universities, including 7 of the top 10 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2026. Moreover, this research also has an economic angle, as scientific discoveries feed into startups, workforce training and industrial scale-ups. In turn, this becomes self compounding, because top global talent is attracted to the US, and ensures it remains at the forefront of new sectors such as artificial intelligence.

The ninth reason is its pro-business architecture, including a greater tolerance of business failure than many European systems. For instance, Chapter 11 reorganisation is designed to preserve and restructure viable firms rather than liquidate them. This more positive approach to business failure ties into the empirical literature, which suggests that more debtor-friendly and efficient insolvency frameworks are associated with greater entrepreneurship and innovation.

The tenth reason is adaptability. The cultural acceptance of failure and capacity to reinvent itself have boosted US ability to adapt to the changing world. This has allowed it to navigate repeat boom-and-bust cycles, as well swings of the policy pendulum – between openness and isolationism, between protectionism and free trade – without threatening overall the institutional stability we highlighted above. And while capitalism has been a key underlying driving force, it is pragmatism rather than ideology that have driven continued success over time.

It is also important to note that these advantages do not play out individually, but are mutually reinforcing, with the interaction between them allowing the US to benefit from network and externality effects that few if any countries can match.

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He talks like it’s his annniversary.

“America, in Mamdani’s view, is a sad place where heartless, racist, xenophobic plutocrats rule the roost ..”

• Mamdani Gives 250th Anniversary Speech (Robert Spencer)

New York City’s Communist Twelver Shi’ite Mayor Zohran Mamdani has bestowed upon a waiting world his speech commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, and it is just as small, petty, grievance-laden, fantasy-based, and angry as you’d expect a speech from a man who hates America to be.


The visual effect was even worse, as Mamdani delivered the speech while seated at a desk that seemed to be turned the wrong way around, while surrounded by a social studies-book array of glum-looking, unsmiling, unhappy people, all black and brown and hijabed and whatnot and all forlornly holding small flags of the country their mayor despises, with a single grim-faced white guy standing in the back (as is his place). But even if one didn’t avail oneself of the joys of watching Mamdani, who was just as grim as his prop companions, what the young Commie mayor said was bad enough.

America, in Mamdani’s view, is a sad place where heartless, racist, xenophobic plutocrats rule the roost and oppress the rest of us to the degree that you wonder why anyone from elsewhere would want to immigrate in the first place. Mamdani does hold out some hope in the end, saying that the foes of these cruel tyrants can throw off their yoke and remake this unhappy land in their own image. And that, of course, is just what Mamdani has set out to do.

Mamdani began by painting a verbal picture of the “land, lush and teeming with life” to which newcomers arrived, only to encounter “men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage” and “tenements rife with squalor.” As you’d expect, he claimed that the Declaration of Independence established “the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill,” with no indication of how marvelously it has fulfilled them already, or how it has inspired the world in doing so.

The mayor goes on to fill in all the expected blanks, telling the story of how a freed slave made a new life for himself, thereby showing America to be “a place each of us has the power to make.” Immigrants poured into America, not yet seeing “the nativism they would face — the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand.” Still, they kept coming.

Mamdani goes on to mock and misrepresent the idea of American exceptionalism, and here he begins to claim that “we are told” a series of things that few people, if any, have ever been told. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.” On the contrary, in less fractious days, we were told that we were “richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” because we were a uniquely just society in which anyone could make something of himself.

Mamdani, however, couldn’t possibly admit that without betraying his Marxist ideas, which tell him that America is inherently oppressive, and his Islamic beliefs, which tell him that only a Sharia society is truly just. And so instead, he claims that “the powerful” view America as “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

This is pure leftist rage fantasy. Who ever says any of that? Can Mamdani produce even one “powerful” person who says even one of those things? Donald Trump doesn’t (contrary to leftist claims). Elon Musk doesn’t. Mamdani would be hard pressed to substantiate his smear here, and he prudently refrains from naming any names as he continues to lambaste these imaginary capitalists: “How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.”

Apparently hoping you won’t notice how divisive his hateful speech really is, he goes on to slam his fantasy foes for supposedly fostering “division.” This apparently involves wanting sensible immigration controls, so that the country isn’t overwhelmed with criminals, terrorists, and people who do nothing but put an added burden upon American citizens: “And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted — but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.” Persecutes, i.e., by not letting them in and paying for their every need.

Mamdani then goes on to offer a frankly Marxist vision: “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.” By all means, the wealth this trillionaire has earned must be confiscated! “We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”

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We’ve read about this Andy Burnham guy as a leader for 2+ weeks now, but he hasn’t shown his face.

What’s wrong with him? Something must be.

• UK Labour Party Proves Why America Was Right to Ditch Parliament (Queen)

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our last day as colonists on Friday, the UK is giving us a huge reason to be glad that we got out from under the crown and the parliamentary system. The current leadership turnover in the Labour Party makes our republic look more sensible than ever. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is stepping down as leader of the Labour Party — and as prime minister along with it — and the frontrunner to replace him is newly minted Member of Parliament Andy Burnham. My friend and colleague Stephen Green pointed out that Burnham stands to drag Labour further to the left and take the UK along with him.


The trouble is that Burnham has been awfully quiet on policy. As Michael Gove and Madeleine Grant put it on The Spectator’s Quite Right! podcast, Burnham acts like he can lead a major political party on vibes alone. Charles Moore writes at The Spectator: “The British constitution is an admirably flexible thing, so I would not claim that Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign, and the coverage thereof, is unconstitutional, but it is certainly unseemly. Why did a BBC helicopter follow his train from Manchester to London (which arrived, of course, late) as if he were Lenin heading for the Finland Station? And why was he allowed to pre-empt his result with a mass selfie with about 200 of his supporting MPs in Westminster Hall?

He is merely a new Member of Parliament, until he isn’t. Turning the place into his stage set is a way of intimidating possible challengers. If he is challenged, he will surely still become leader, but the point of a challenge is to force him to say what he means to do. So far, no one – not even, one suspects, Andy Burnham – knows what Andy Burnham stands for.” Moore suggests that Burnham might abandon the UK’s horrific net zero climate policy. The biggest blowback to that might happen at home; Burnham’s wife is on the board of an NGO and an EV company executive who expresses a “passion for sustainability and the green economy” and for “championing the fair and accessible transition to electric vehicle ownership.”

In a Spectator column, Grant likens Burnham’s campaign launch to the sickly sweetness of Tony Blair’s campaign. The optimism of this leadership challenge is at odds with the way many Britons feel about the state of their nation. “His promise of ‘a new era of possibility’ was a lot of style – mingled with some inevitable Burnhamite sentimentalism: ‘hope in every heart and good growth in every postcode,’” she writes. “It made me long for a gun in every hand and a cyanide capsule in every drawer.” Ross Clark has plenty of daggers for Burnham in a Spectator column. He sees Burnham as a different sort of throwback.

“Whoever thought of putting him in a grey outfit against the backdrop of a grey door for [Monday] morning’s speech in Manchester certainly wasn’t thinking of injecting a bit of colour into national life,” he writes. “It was like watching Harold Wilson: the last PM before colour TV was introduced to Britain.” Clark also has his doubts that Burnham’s big vision will get many people excited (although I wouldn’t mind something like this in the U.S.):

Burnham’s big mission for the country – to devolve power to the regions and localities – also wasn’t exactly calculated to set pulses racing. Rightly or wrongly, few things can be relied upon to provoke a yawn in British life than local government. Just look at the turnout in local elections and the increasing tendency for the electorate to use them as little more than a referendum on national government. It was, after all, the local elections which finally did for Keir Starmer and put Burnham in the position he is now.

If Burnham can really make the British public excited about local government, he will have achieved something genuinely impressive, but I would say he has an uphill task.

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Quantum computing is not a reality, despite what the article suggests.

Which is good, because we’re nowhere near ready.

“.. whoever gets there first could lock in “irreversible strategic superiority.. ”

• The AI-Quantum Race Is About Who Governs the Future (Jeff Dornik)

President Donald Trump’s June 22, 2026, executive orders on quantum computing should be understood for what they are: not a shiny technology announcement, not a photo-op for the federal innovation class, and not another soothing Washington press release telling us that “America remains competitive,” which is usually government-speak for “we found the cliff and are now forming a task force to admire it.”


Executive Order 14413 directs the federal government to accelerate quantum innovation, commercialization, deployment, manufacturing, and national-security applications, while Executive Order 14412 warns that large-scale quantum computers in adversarial hands will threaten widely used cryptographic systems and enable hostile actors to collect encrypted American data now and decrypt it later. The White House’s companion post-quantum cryptography effort requires federal agencies to prioritize migration of vulnerable cryptographic systems with the objective of mitigating quantum risk by December 31, 2030.

That is the right level of urgency, because quantum computing is not merely faster computing, and artificial intelligence is not merely better software. AI is already becoming the decision layer of the digital world, shaping what people see, how companies operate, how banks assess risk, how governments investigate threats, how militaries plan, and how institutions increasingly outsource judgment to machines that speak with the confidence of a consultant who has never once been interrupted by reality. Quantum computing, once mature enough for practical cryptographic and scientific use, becomes an amplifier for problems that classical computers cannot solve at a useful scale.

Put them together, AI as the mind and quantum as the accelerator, and the winner does not simply build a better tool, but actually builds the operating system for global power.The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has already noted that nations that integrate quantum with AI-driven research platforms will compound their advantages exponentially, and that the country achieving quantum supremacy in quantum computing and AI will gain disproportionate and likely enduring advantages in intelligence collection, encryption, precision targeting, materials science, energy, medicine, and the digital economy.

The Commission also warned that whoever gets there first could lock in “irreversible strategic superiority,” especially because current global infrastructure remains exposed to attacks on public-key encryption. That is why this is an all-or-nothing race. America is not competing against a friendly research consortium at a science fair where everyone claps politely and shares their grant proposals over room-temperature coffee. We are competing against the Chinese Communist Party, a regime that does not have our Constitution, our courts, our churches, our independent press, our civil society, our due process traditions, our free-speech protections, or our national gift for holding seven hearings before deciding whether a light switch is racist.

China can centralize resources, compel cooperation, absorb civilian research into state priorities, hide its most sensitive work, and deploy technologies against its own people without any meaningful legal restraint from the governed. Human Rights Watch reports that under Xi Jinping, there is no independent civil society in China and no freedom of expression, association, assembly, or religion, while critics and human rights defenders are persecuted.

The technological edge is narrowing because China has made quantum a state priority and is building the infrastructure to match. CSIS reports that China’s superconducting, photonic, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom quantum computing efforts are moving from laboratory prototypes toward commercial use, with Chinese systems including Zuchongzhi, Origin Wukong, and Tianyan-504 supported by universities, research centers, state-linked firms, and companies such as China Telecom Quantum Group and Origin Quantum. The Special Competitive Studies Project has also noted that China has made quantum computing a strategic priority since the 14th Five-Year Plan, with government funding showing China’s strategic prioritization of quantum technology at a projected $15 billion compared to $4 billion in the United States.

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Never enough money for never enough electricity (power).

“Virginia’s “Digital Gateway” project, a mega site roughly twice the size of New York’s Central Park with city-sized power needs.”

Zero Hedge take from almost a year ago.

• World’s Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse (ZH)

Up until now, when it comes to real estate, Blackstone was best known in recent years for dumping many of its trophy office properties – which in the aftermath of work from home never recovered their projected cash flow potential – at a huge discount. Now, it may be pulling a page from its old, pre-Lehman playbook by calling the top in yet another commercial real estate segment: data centers.


Two days ago we reported that Blackstone was selling its stakes in a trio of data centers across Northern Virginia for $3.5 billion, cashing out of part of a bet it made less than three years ago. According to Bloomberg, Digital Realty Trust would pay $1.2 billion of cash and offer $2.3 billion of its shares (which the PE giant has largely cashed in by now) to Blackstone funds; in exchange, the data center company will acquire Blackstone’s 80% interest in two 96-megawatt data centers in Manassas, Virginia, and a 50% interest in a 96-megawatt center in nearby Sterling.

We said that “the question is why did Blackstone decide to pull the cord now, just as fresh doubts are creeping whether the Mag 7s will continue funding the AI expansion with virtually unlimited capex.” Two days later we have an answer. The digital ink is barely dry on its Virginia data center sales, and we learn that Blackstone’s QTS (QTS Realty Trust) is again quietly fading its AI exposure by walking away from plans to build its portion (which at this point is the only portion left after its partner already pulled out days ago) of a 2,100-acre data center campus in Virginia – also known as Prince William Digital Gateway which would house as many as 37 data-center buildings – handing a win to residents who fought for years to topple the project.

QTS’s proposed facility at 9400 Godwin Drive in Manassas


The data center developer had planned to transform more than 800 acres in Northern Virginia’s Prince William County, a project that would have spanned 22 million square feet, making it the largest data center campus in the world. Located on the edge of an historic Civil War battlefield and on what used to be land protected from development, the project ignited strong pushback from homeowners and has been stalled by lawsuits.

As part of Wall Street’s broader push into data centers, investment has poured into Northern Virginia, which is considered the country’s largest data center market, and is better known as “Data Center Alley”. But in a strategic U-turn, in recent days QTS executives decided that it isn’t worth pressing forward in court, the Bloomberg sources said. The firm’s attorneys plan to inform the court of their decision as soon as this week, the people said, asking not to be named discussing non-public information. QTS’s rapid growth has made it a poster child of how private equity has fueled the data center industry’s breakneck expansion. Those ambitions are colliding with public anxiety over strains to electricity grids and home prices from AI data centers.

The retreat may be the final blow to Virginia’s “Digital Gateway” project, a mega site roughly twice the size of New York’s Central Park with city-sized power needs. The initiative was supposed to bring in some $100 billion in spending and create one of the world’s largest technology corridors. Not any more. The project had sparked contentious, drawn-out public hearings. A clerical blunder related to a key zoning meeting created setbacks for developers. Already, Brookfield-backed Compass Datacenters, which was supposed to build on more than 800 acres at the site, had pulled out in May. The U-turns by both firms, Bloomberg writes, amount to one of the most dramatic retreats by developers from a data center project.

It’s a reminder of how tech firms’ race for the computing infrastructure to support AI advances is increasingly facing the same bottlenecks, from power shortages to supply crunches, we have been warning about for the past two years and which Citadel Securities warned about just yesterday. Organized opposition is mounting, forcing firms and developers to be more deliberate about where they choose to build. This is precisely what we warned one year ago would happen as more grassroots organizations pushed back against the relentless data center rollout. At least we haven’t gotten to the arson stage (yet).

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Paint me skeptical. I can take missing 1 or 2 warnings, maybe even 5. But 102?

“The Homeland Security Department report lists communications failures and security lapses that led up to the gunman opening fire from a rooftop.”

• Secret Service Missed 102 Warnings Before Trump Assassination Attempt (ET)

The U.S. Secret Service missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, including missing more than 102 radio transmissions warning of a suspicious person, a Department of Homeland Security report concluded. The report, released on July 2 by the department’s Office of Inspector General, chronicles a series of communication failures, inadequate planning, limited intelligence sharing, and security lapses that combined to create the conditions that allowed gunman Thomas Crooks to open fire from the roof of a nearby building during a July 13, 2024, campaign rally in Butler. Crooks was fatally shot by a Secret Service agent.


Among the report’s most significant findings was that Secret Service members did not receive 102 radio transmissions “that local law enforcement officers in a separate communications room received concerning an increasingly intense search for a suspicious person. Instead, we found that the Secret Service received only five phone calls and three text messages about Crooks. As a result, Secret Service members did not alert President Trump’s protective detail about concerns of a suspicious person.” The Secret Service would have delayed Trump’s speech or removed him from the stage had they been aware of the search for Crooks, the report stated.

The report also said the Secret Service failed to detect a drone that Crooks flew over the rally site about two hours before the shooting. Investigators said the agency’s counter-drone system was inoperable because of a malfunction, and the lone operator assigned to the event lacked sufficient training to repair the equipment. The system remained offline while Crooks flew the drone for nearly nine minutes, allowing him to survey both the stage and the rooftop he later used to carry out the attack.

The report also found serious communication breakdowns between the Secret Service and local law enforcement. The Secret Service never received three radio reports from law enforcement that Crooks had climbed onto a roof with a rifle. The inspector general also found that classified intelligence concerning a long-range threat to Trump was not shared with the Pittsburgh field office or agents responsible for planning security at the rally. The report said broader dissemination of that intelligence likely would have resulted in additional security personnel being assigned to the event.

Investigators further concluded that the Secret Service failed to ensure the American Glass Research complex, where Crooks launched the attack, was secured by state and local law enforcement. In addition, the agency did not use available resources to block the rooftop’s line of sight to the stage, despite recognizing it as a potential vulnerability. The inspector general issued seven recommendations to improve protective operations. The Secret Service agreed with all of them, and the report said some have already been implemented while others remain in progress.

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I wonder how Tulsi now views what’s becoming of her work.

• Tulsi Gabbard Outlines the Mechanics of the Deep State (CTH)

Former Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, gives a speech outlining the mechanics of the Deep State and how the people within it operate. At around 3:30 of the presentation, Gabbard gives a specific example of the attitude of the employees on assignment to the ODNI. Obviously, I am not certain, but Tulsi seems to be describing the FBI liaison desk within the DNI as she explains how this federal government employee refuses to participate in the DNI request. Listen and you gain an appreciation of the challenge that exists for any appointed leadership. WATCH:


There is no apple; it’s all worms!

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This goes back to 2024, and the Biden FBI. So of course Newsom accuses…Trump.

• FBI Mole Wore Wire Inside Newsom’s Inner Circle: Lawyer (ZH)

A mole working for the Biden FBI was secretly recording Gavin Newsom’s inner circle before the agency expanded its corruption probe into the California governor and his wife, according to a bombshell report by the NY Post. Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Sacramento consultant and Newsom appointee – no known relation to John Podesta – secretly taped conversations for the FBI as early as June 2024, while Joe Biden was still in the White House, according to McGregor Scott, the former US attorney now representing Dana Williamson. Williamson, 53, ran Newsom’s office as chief of staff until late 2024; in May she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to federal agents.


Federal prosecutors accused Williamson and others of orchestrating a scheme to siphon roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account which belonged to former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra -disguising the payments as legitimate consulting fees while routing the money to benefit Becerra’s former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie. According to Podesta’s attorney, she was placed in charge of overseeing the account in question – but did not know the payments were improper. Becerra is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as governor. “Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not,” said Williamson’s lawyer and former US attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott.

“A lot of people received letters essentially informing us that there were certain periods of time where the FBI was given access to follow phone calls,” said assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), who said he was among those who received a letter even though he had never spoken with either Podesta or Williamson. “I don’t know how these investigations work, but it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community to see what they could find.”

A separate source with knowledge of the matter said they knew of four Sacramento insiders who also received FBI notifications confirming they had been recorded.= One recipient told the source: “Dude, I got this f—ing letter. I never even met with Dana Williamson!” “Their curiosity was that they never even met with Dana Williamson, so they were wondering what this is all about,” the source said. “And now you have the answer.” -NY Post. News of the wire comes just over two weeks after Newsom claimed that the Trump administration is punishing him because he may run for president in 2028.

“They’re demanding records, they’re abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets, he’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president, because he hates that I’ve consistently called him out over and over again for his lies and deceit,” Newsom said, before sending a mass email asking for political donations. Sources close to the investigation, however, told The Post that the feds have spent the past year digging into Newsom, his staff, and his wife’s taxes after whistleblowers reportedly dropped the dime that led to the probe. Williamson’s attorney told the outlet that his client declined to cooperate because she didn’t have anything on Newsom.

Podesta – a former staffer for the late Dianne Feinstein, is a longtime Democratic power broker who remains on California’s State Compensation Insurance Fund board – to which Newsom appointed her in January 2020. She also held senior positions in Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, and served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. While she hasn’t been charged with a crime, her attorney identified her as an uncharged co-conspirator in the Williamson indictment.

Of note, Podesta is still getting paid $60,797 by the state while cooperating with the FBI, while she sits on the Insurance Fund Board. nCampaign finance records show Becerra’s committee making $10,000 monthly payments to ‘Podesta Company’ during 2023 and 2024. During this period, Williamson – while Newsom’s CoS – shared confidential info with Podesta regarding a corporate client that has now been identified as Activision Blizzard.

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FYI.

• Need Another Reason to Loathe Michelle Obama? (Matt Margolis)

I’m sure you don’t, but I’ll give you one anyway.


Michelle Obama has spent years selling herself as America’s warm, approachable former first lady. Remember the whole “when they go low, we go high” thing? We knew then it was just an empty slogan, because whenever she had a chance to prove she’s the bigger person, she just proved the opposite. According to a Daily Mail report, Barack Obama’s wife personally torpedoed Cheryl Hines’ return to the small screen when Larry David’s new HBO series, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America, began casting. The show premiered last week. Higher Ground, the production company the Obamas own, produces it.

Hines, 60, spent all 12 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm playing Larry David’s wife, and having her return for the new show made sense. But apparently, Obama couldn’t handle the fact that Hines is married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. According to unnamed sources cited by the Daily Mail, that was disqualifying. One insider claims that Obama wanted Kennedy’s wife banned from the cast outright because she is “all-MAGA, all-the-time.” Another source says Obama reacted sharply when production staffers who knew Hines from Curb floated the idea of bringing her back.

According to one insider, Obama’s message was simple. “She’s not one of us,” she reportedly said. Funny thing is, Hines is most definitely a leftist herself. She spent decades as a reliable Hollywood liberal long before she ever said “I do” to Kennedy. None of that bought her a pass. In Obama’s world, being married to someone in the Trump administration gets you blacklisted. A third source confirmed to the Daily Mail that the exclusion had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with Hines’ perceived politics, tied to her marriage and her proximity to Trump’s circle. Obama reportedly stayed out of the writers’ room and never touched a script. But casting, including guest stars, was hers to control. She used that control to keep Hines off the set.

An insider says Hines felt devastated when she learned producers had cut her, and who could blame her? She reportedly believed that David could look past his own politics for the sake of a 12-season friendship. Another source says that David didn’t have that option. Michelle made the call, and David felt that he had no room to overrule her. David has made his own politics abundantly clear. He’s a rabid leftist who despises Trump. Could he have fought for Hines? Probably. But it may not have done any good, and he shouldn’t have had to fight for Hines anyway.

In the end, this just gives us another reason to loathe Michelle Obama, who says, “when they go low, we go high,” one day, then blacklists an actress over her husband’s Cabinet post the next. That’s the opposite of going high. Hines has learned the hard way just how horrible her side is. Back in November, she told Bill Maher that while Republicans have treated her with basic kindness and respect (even when RFK Jr. was running as a Democrat), her fellow Democrats reacted with spite and the urge to exile anyone who steps out of line. Hines indeed has become living proof that the party that preaches “tolerance” has become a cult of cancellation, while the people they demonize are the tolerant ones.

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He’s dragging the country to its grave. It is too late.

“Merz was shocked not only by the technological capability, but also by the Chinese industrial work ethic and capabilities of the workforce.”

• Chancellor Friedrich Merz Delivers Statement to German Workforce (CTH)

This next storyline needs context to understand appropriately what just happened. In February of this year, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz travelled for the first time in his business and life to China. Merz a lawyer by training, worked in business and corporate life doing mergers and acquisitions (Blackrock), but had never been to China. Despite his upward climb in German politics, his worldview was always dominated by an internal acceptance that Germany was the industrial heart of the European Union.


Chancellor Merz believed that Germany was unrivaled within industrial manufacturing, particularly in aeronautics and mechanical engineering (auto sector). So, when Merz went to China -while he held no trade capabilities as an outcome of the EU collective controlling everything- he also had no idea what Chinese industrial capacitary actually looked like. To say Chancellor Merz was stunned by the advancements in robotics and industrial manufacturing within China would be an understatement. Merz was shocked not only by the technological capability, but also by the Chinese industrial work ethic and capabilities of the workforce.

Merz returned to Germany and immediately began discussing how Chinese industrial capacity was far beyond anything he previously estimated. Merz was shook. His reaction was, essentially, the #1 industrial nation within the EU confronting a reality of years of industrial complacency. Immediately he began talking about how things in Germany must change; how the German workforce must immediately start to get serious about productivity and production capacity. That was late February and early March.

Today, Friedrich Merz announced a series of reforms, radical modifications within the German industrial workforce. German workers are no longer allowed to call in sick. The German government will now adopt a policy to make sure all workers report to their jobs, or else. The German workforce may not like this at all. There is a certain, shall we say, “Fascist irony,” when you think about mandated private sector productivity compliance and the relationship with official government policy.

Germany’s coalition government has announced a wide-ranging package of pension, tax and labor reforms aimed at boosting economic growth and strengthening competitiveness. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the measures would create jobs, reduce bureaucracy and preserve key social welfare protections. The 34-point plan includes income tax relief for low- and middle-income households as well as a gradual increase in the retirement age.

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Expect fighting in the streets.

“As the AfD heads to its party congress in Erfurt, Germany’s collapsing mainstream braces for protests, panic, and a deeper political rupture..”

“..every sixth German is at risk of poverty.”

• Germany’s Rotten Center Is Heading For A Reckoning (Amar)

In the summer of 2026, Germany is a punch-drunk country reeling from harsh knocks, many of which are self-inflicted. In the short term, it has just suffered a humiliating defeat at the UN General Assembly, where it was punished for Berlin’s brazen arrogance, political provincialism, and last but not least, steadfast support for Israel and its crimes, including genocide. At the World Cup, the German team was booted out of the tournament early and crushingly. To make things worse, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz felt this was just the right moment to release some X posts apparently meant to be reassuring but stunning the nation by their cack-handed ineptitude and sheer disconnect with reality.


Why settle for a mere national depression if you can trigger a raging s**t-storm in addition? Germany’s fundamentals are also thoroughly catastrophic. According to Handelsblatt, Volkswagen, a traditional flagship of the German car industry at the core of the national economy and national pride, is stuck “in the greatest cost and structural crisis in decades.” Around 100,000 jobs are on the chopping block. And yes, that is representative of the economy as a whole.

The country’s birth rate – at 1.35 children per woman – is the lowest since the mid-1990s, which reflects the mood of anxiety and pessimism across the country. Even Germany’s public (de facto state) broadcasters, not known for unbiased reporting or serious criticism of the powers that be, are admitting that poverty is becoming entrenched. In what was once a country of economic success and optimism, according to official statistics, every sixth German is at risk of poverty.

And all of the above is happening under a succession of textbook-centrist governments, based on coalitions of parties and politicians that share a fundamental lack of convictions (apart from the blind urge to fight Russia again), egotism, careerism, and a coldhearted indifference, if not disdain, for the worsening problems and hardships that shape the lives of ordinary Germans. At this point, the latest iteration of centrist uselessness warming seats in Berlin unites deeply unpopular Social-Democrats (SPD) – 12% in the polls – and widely scorned mainstream conservatives (CDU/CSU) – 22% and falling. No wonder that a whopping 53% do not trust any political party, while an abysmal 77% are dissatisfied with Merz.

It is this catastrophic decline, ruling fecklessness, and national frustration that will really be at stake in what is soon going to happen in the eastern German city of Erfurt, where the AfD (Alternative for Germany) will hold its party congress July 4-5. Ahead of the meeting, Germany has the jitters. While the AfD is expecting hundreds of party delegates as well as guests, the authorities are predicting that 35,000 to 70,000 protesters will gather as well. That is a significant number by any measure. But it is even more impressive – or concerning – if you consider that Erfurt is historic (with one of Germany’s oldest universities) but not big, with a population of not quite 220,000.

It is extremely unlikely that all the anti-AfD protests about to converge on Erfurt will remain peaceful. While calling for calm, the local authorities and police are clearly trying to prepare for disturbances and violence, including blockades and worse. Bjoern Hoecke, the key representative of the AfD Right and the powerful leader of the party in Thuringia, where Erfurt is located, may have been a touch hyperbolic when speaking of “civil war-like conditions.” Yet leaked documents show that Thuringia’s police are warning of thousands of violent activists who they believe will stage firebomb attacks from roofs, accept severe injury and death among their targets, and even execute an “endgame scenario” of storming the AfD congress.

The police union is concerned about not having enough officers on the ground. Whatever happens in Erfurt, it is already clear that the scene has been set for some big symbolic showdown theater. According to centrist and mainstream narratives, the battle lines are as Manichean as the best of Tolkien: Here, the forces of Mordor of the AfD, widely labeled as hostile to democracy and the constitution if not outright fascist; and there, the Hobbit forces of light of conformist protest, civil society, and a wholesome resistance that knows its place. If the latter features serious violence as well, then that will be written off as the exception, and ultimately the fault of the AfD.

So much for the childish story you will hear a lot about in the mainstream media.

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https://twitter.com/MrJohnJnr/status/2072671824870084962?s=20 https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/2072645371432522193?s=20

 

 

 

 

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