Tucker Carlson has revealed that during the brief Iran-Israel war earlier this year, Israeli soldiers were barging into U.S. military meetings at the Pentagon, issuing demands, and telling American officers what to do.
FOR YEARS, Democrats have unapologetically argued FOR putting illegals on Medicaid. Several Dem governors have already done it. Why lie about it now? The American people aren’t fooled. I don’t give an INCH on @cnn in my latest debate. pic.twitter.com/G99AjTZkCJ
Vice President JD Vance shrugged off liberal outrage over President Donald Trump sharing a meme video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero, saying he couldn’t understand claims that it was “racist.” The radical left truly has no sense of humor. Is it any wonder they always look miserable, mean, and nasty to anyone who holds different beliefs? Maybe if they learned how to laugh once in a while, they wouldn’t be so violent. A reporter asked Vance on Wednesday if Trump’s meme helped efforts to reach a government funding deal. “Oh, I think it’s funny. The president’s joking and we’re having a good time,” Vance replied. “You can negotiate in good faith while still poking fun at the absurdity of Democrats’ positions—and yes, even the absurdity of Democrats themselves.”
Then he added with a grin: “I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now, I make this solemn promise to you—help us reopen the government, and the sombrero memes will stop.” Vance appeared at a White House briefing on Wednesday to discuss the government shutdown, which took effect after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach a funding deal. The Trump administration blamed Democrats, saying they tried to sneak in healthcare for illegal migrants. Leftists denied it, of course. But given the left’s agenda, I’d bet the administration is right.Fox News reported the now-infamous meme appeared on Truth Social. The video showed Jeffries with a sombrero and mustache while mariachi music played in the background. Honestly? That sounds hilarious.
After Hakeem Jeffries lost it on MSNBC over Trump’s meme putting him in a sombrero, 47 went right back at him, this time with Trump popping up as part of a mariachi band.
Jeffries’ buddy, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, also made a cameo in the video. An AI-generated voice mocked Democrats for their “woke, trans agenda” and quipped that “nobody likes Democrats anymore.” Again—hilarious. The video, laced with profanity, mocked Democrats for pandering to illegal immigrants as potential new voters. Predictably, Jeffries and his liberal pals pulled the tired “racist” card. “Mr. P resident, the next time you have something to say about me, don’t cop out through a racist and fake AI video,” Jeffries fumed to reporters Tuesday. “When I’m back in the Oval Office, say it to my face.” Vance pushed back, blasting liberal media outlets for obsessing over the fact that the video was AI-generated.
“Hakeem Jeffries said it was racist, and I know he said that,” Vance noted. “And I honestly don’t even know what that means. Is he a Mexican-American who feels offended by a sombrero meme?” He laughed off the media’s pearl-clutching: “One of the major networks even showed the meme and solemnly announced it was AI-generated. But the guy had a curly cartoon mustache and a sombrero! Do you really think Americans believe Jeffries walked into the White House dressed like that? Give the country a little credit.”
Democrats assume Americans are both stupid and uneducated. It’s the very line of thinking that made them so arrogant as to believe they could get away with the destruction wrought during the Biden administration and still defeat Republicans in 2024. Once again, the perpetually offended Democratic Party exposed itself as the party of intolerance, anger, violence—and absolutely no fun.
The Russian military has modified its missiles to better evade Ukrainian air defenses, including US-made Patriot systems – often seen as a key linchpin of Kiev’s shield – the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing officials in Kiev and the West. According to officials interviewed by the FT, Russian missiles can now follow a normal arc before veering into a steep terminal dive or executing maneuvers that “confuse and avoid” Patriot interceptors. The outlet cited recent strikes against Ukrainian drone facilities as a strong indication that Russia has likely upgraded the Iskander-M mobile system and the air-launched Kinzhal.
One former Ukrainian official called the added maneuverability “a game changer for Russia,” the newspaper reported, adding that deliveries of US-supplied Patriot interceptors, essentially the only weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal capable of tackling Moscow’s ballistic missiles, are not coming as quickly as planned. The paper also noted that data released by the Ukrainian Air Force shows that the rate of interception of Russian ballistic missiles improved over the summer, reaching 37% in August, but then fell to just 6% in September. Ukraine shares data on Patriot battlefield performance with the Pentagon and weapons producers, according to the FT. Officials told the outlet that while efforts are being made to improve the Patriots’ performance, they often lag behind Moscow’s evolving tactics.
Ukraine’s Air Force flagged similar concerns in May. Spokesman Yury Ignat said that the ballistic trajectories of the Iskander-M missiles “have been improved and modernized” while the projectiles could fire off radar decoys. He also complained that Ukraine’s domestically designed air defenses are unable to shoot down most of the Russian missiles, while those produced in the West are used to cover key infrastructure and other high-priority targets. Moscow has repeatedly said its strikes only target military-related infrastructure, defense industry, and troop deployment bases and are never aimed at civilians.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is seeking to claw back decision-making power from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing diplomats familiar with the matter. Merz, increasingly critical of Brussels, wants Berlin to have greater influence over issues directly affecting EU members, according to one of the sources. He has already opposed von der Leyen’s proposals for new EU taxes and her plan to send peacekeepers to Ukraine, while also clashing with her over a tariff agreement with the US and climate regulations. “We must now put a stick in the wheels of this machine in Brussels,” Merz told business leaders on Friday, Bloomberg noted.
Ahead of an informal EU leaders’ summit in Copenhagen on Wednesday, he again pressed for a “fundamental correction” of what he described as excessive regulation. “It is simply too much,” he said, as quoted by the German Press Agency. The European Commission has introduced several measures to cut red tape this year, including the Defense Readiness Omnibus, aimed at streamlining EU defense market procedures. The initiative is part of von der Leyen’s broader effort to raise up to €800 billion ($938 billion) in investments for weapons and ammunition procurement by 2030.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has become the world’s first person to reach a net worth of $500 billion, according to Forbes. Musk’s fortune has been boosted recently by a rally in Tesla shares and soaring valuations of his private firms. Tesla stock jumped nearly 4% on Wednesday, adding $9.3 billion to Musk’s fortune and pushing it to $500.1 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List. Musk’s 12% stake in the carmaker is valued at $191 billion. Analysts credit the recent surge in Musk’s wealth to his renewed focus on business. Tesla shares have nearly doubled since April, when he first announced during an earnings call that he would step down from his post as head of US President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to devote more time to the automaker and his other business interests. Musk departed the agency after a rift with the president over a major tax-and-spending bill.
Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm said last month that Musk was again “front and center” after months of distraction. Days later, he bought nearly $1 billion worth of Tesla stock, signaling confidence as the company expands into AI and robotics. Outside Tesla, Musk’s space venture SpaceX was valued at $400 billion in an August tender offer, up from $350 billion in December. His 42% stake is worth $168 billion. Musk also owns 53% of xAI Holdings, the company formed when he merged his AI startup with X. Currently valued at $113 billion, reports suggest xAI could soon target $200 billion.
Musk has repeatedly set net worth records. He first topped Forbes’ list in January 2021 at $190 billion, hit $300 billion that November and crossed $400 billion in December 2024. He now outpaces Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the second-richest person, by $150 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses a different wealth tracking method, places Musk’s fortune slightly lower – at $470 billion – but still the highest among the world’s top 500.
A Norwegian-led training center for Ukrainian soldiers opened in southeastern Poland on Wednesday. Camp Jomsborg, constructed by engineers from Norway’s Brigade Nord in the town of Lipa, can host up to 1,200 troops at a time, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz wrote on X. He added that the base will focus on “developing drone capabilities.” Kosiniak-Kamysz stressed that NATO would also benefit from Ukrainian combat experience. “This is not a one-way street. An important element is that we will draw on Ukrainian experience. Right next to us is a drone launch strip,” he said.
Poland has been a key logistical and training hub for Western military aid to Ukraine since the outbreak of open conflict with Russia in 2022.Also on Wednesday, EU leaders agreed to create a “drone wall” along the bloc’s eastern flank, following Polish claims last month that Russian UAVs had violated its airspace. Estonia likewise alleged that three Russian fighter jets entered its airspace in September. Moscow dismissed both accusations as baseless and accused the EU of warmongering.
A week ago on September 23, President Donald Trump called President Vladimir Putin’s military power a “paper tiger”, and declared ”this is the time for Ukraine to act”.By that he said he meant “to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Five days later, the successor president, Vice President J D Vance, explained that deployment on the Ukrainian battlefield by NATO-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a 2,500-km range, is the next step he and Trump are considering. “Russia is really stalled,” Vance claimed, “The Russian economy is in shambles. The Russians are not gaining much on the battlefield… The Russians have refused to sit down in any bilateral meetings with the Ukrainians. They have refused to sit down in any trilateral meetings with the President…
The Russians have got to wake up and accept reality here… About Tomahawks, it’s something the President is going to make the final determination on. What the President is going to do is what’s in the best interest of the United States of America.” The scheme, Vance intimated, is to allow NATO member states with Tomahawk batteries – at the moment this means the UK and Germany – to deliver them to Kiev, or for other European states to buy the missiles from the US and send them on. This means that the crews operating the Tomahawk systems in the Ukraine would be British, German, or other Europeans. “What we’re doing,” Vance said, “is asking the Europeans to buy that weaponry that shows some European skin in the game. I think that gets them really invested in both what’s happening in their own backyard, but also in the peace process that the president has been pushing for, for the last eight months,” Vance said.
The skins at risk of Russian counterattack, Vance meant but omitted to acknowledge, would be European, not American. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded with the obvious followed by a placebo. “We have heard these statements. We are thoroughly analyzing them. Our military specialists are closely monitoring it.” “Even if it happens that the United States sends its Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, currently there is no cure-all that could be a game changer on the front lines for the Kiev regime. No magical weapons exist, and Tomahawk or other missiles simply won’t be a game changer.”
Then Peskov muffled a warning: “The question… is this: who can launch these missiles…? Can only Ukrainians launch them, or do American soldiers have to do that?” The answer is already obvious – Vance made it plain. The operators of the Tomahawks would be Europeans. Peskov’s questions also avoided Vance’s and Trump’s strategic point. They are now aiming to intensify the domestic damage they can inflict deep inside Russian territory – Moscow and St. Petersburg if they can — in the belief this will trigger loss of Russian morale and voter opposition to Putin. “This war is terrible for their economy,” Vance repeated several times, as has Trump. The Russians, Vance declared, “have to ask themselves how many more people are they willing to lose…for very little military advantage.”
What is happening from the Russian point of view which isn’t public?The US “understanding” from the Anchorage summit meeting on August 16 is no longer the Russian interpretation as Putin himself first explained it. “Hopefully, the understanding [singular] we have reached will bring us closer to this goal and open up the road to peace in Ukraine,” Putin said at his brief press conference after meeting with Trump. “We see that the US President has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve, that he sincerely cares about his country’s prosperity while showing awareness of Russia’s national interests. I hope that today’s agreements [plural] will become a reference point, not only for resolving the Ukrainian problem but also for resuming the pragmatic business relations between Russia and the United States.”
Escalation to Tomahawk attacks on the Russia hinterland is also not the “understanding” with the US which the Russian Foreign Ministry announced after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met at the United Nations with Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “The heads of the foreign offices exchanged opinions on the Ukraine crisis settlement as a follow up to the understandings [plural] reached at the Russia-US summit in Anchorage. The parties have reaffirmed mutual interest in the search for peaceful solutions. Sergey Lavrov emphasised our country’s readiness to adhere to the line developed by the Russian and US leaders in Alaska, including to coordinate efforts with the US side to remove the root causes of the Ukraine conflict. The minister stressed the unacceptability of the schemes intended to protract the conflict promoted by Kiev and some European countries. The parties compared their positions on the entire bilateral agenda including the prospects of restoring their socio-political contacts. They have reaffirmed the importance of using the impetus given by Russian and US presidents to the process of normalising bilateral relations.”
Speaking to Russian reporters, Lavrov then added: “We operate on the premise that everything we have heard from our US colleagues at the top and other levels tells us that they want to help us end this conflict by addressing and eliminating its root causes. There are no other countries in the Western camp that abide by such a position. I have no doubt that the US President is genuinely interested in this outcome. Some people are trying to have influence on him, but that’s another matter… The 2022 borders are off the table today. What we are now discussing are the borders as enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”
The “reality on the ground”, as Vance and Trump say they understand it on the battlefield, is plainly now not the reality on the ground as the Russian side sees it. The US is announcing that Russia the paper tiger has lost escalation dominance on the battlefield, and is vulnerable to even greater domestic insecurity than it faced three years ago, when the Special Military Operation began. If that was the “root cause” of the war, as Putin and Lavrov say they have explained to their US counterparts, Trump and Vance are now dismissing “root cause” as the basis for terms to end the war.
When Vance announced that the Tomahawk deployment will be decided “in the interests of the United States of America”, he meant to say that the Russian military and Putin have lost their power of deterrence. A Moscow source in a position to know says the General Staff will convince the President on the measures required to prove the Americans wrong. “I believe the Russians will secure victory using the Oreshniki rather than a massive ground offensive. But there is also a build-up many of us can tell. That is why Americans and Europeans are getting very nervous, threatening Russians with a direct confrontation unless they back off.”
John Helmer thinks that the Russian response to the ever-widening war that Putin has conducted will be the Oreshnik missile, which means good-bye to several European capitals, if not all of them. https://johnhelmer.net/when-tomahawk-meets-bear-the-hazel-tree-oreshnik-wins/
Washington giving missiles to Ukraine that can reach Moscow and St. Petersburg does not “normalize relations.” This is the path to war, not to peace. Such a gift of missiles would clearly indicate that the US military/security complex has taken policy away from President Trump and is continuing the war instead of peace negotiations, From John Helmer’s report, I conclude that Putin, Lavrov, and the Russian media are too naive, too unaware, too gullible, too unrealistic and too idealistic in the way they think about the West to comprehend the danger. I find it extraordinarily that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is so lost to reality that he actually said: “We operate on the premise that everything we have heard from our US colleagues at the top and other levels tells us that they want to help us end this conflict by addressing and eliminating its root causes.”
If the Russian government operates on this basis, Russia is definitely doomed. The “root causes” are NATO on Russia’s borders which causes Russian insecurity. To remove the root cause means to remove the source of Russian insecurity. For many years the combined West has refused Russia’s request to join NATO and Russia’s pleadings for a mutual defense agreement. Yet the Kremlin is still hopeful??!! Russia has experienced this feeling of insecurity since American President Clinton violated the word of the US government, thus making the US government untrustworthy to the world since the last years of the 20th century. Clinton violated the word of the George H.W. Bush administration that in exchange for the Soviet Union’s agreement to permit the reunification of Germany, NATO would not move one inch toward the Soviet borders. Clinton, little doubt well paid, moved NATO to Russia’s borders, and by doing so made the word of the US Government completely worthless. Yet Putin and Lavrov rely on Washington’s word !
For Putin and the Russian military command to permit a limited territorial conflict with Ukraine to continue for so long that it now approaches four years was a fantastic strategic blunder that is widening into World War 3. Putin is not responsible for the conflict. It was forced on him, but his response to the conflict–permitting it to endure and widen–was a massive mistake in judgment. I don’t know if anything can bring the Kremlin out of its stupor. Perhaps it might help if the Russians read this article: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/09/28/presidents-have-little-control-over-their-governments/
We are approaching the point where to avoid a world destroying nuclear war, Putin will have to surrender Russia. Putin, unlike the ruthless American Zionist neoconservatives, is capable of surrendering his country to save the world from nuclear war. But would the Russian nationalists permit him to do so? Are the Russian people willing to be the sacrificial lamb that saves the world from nuclear war by going into subservience to the Satanic West?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on CNBC to discuss the second full day of the government shutdown and the potential ramifications therein.Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is meeting with President Trump today to discuss the facets of the government that will be closed and for the duration therein. Secretary Bessent is asked if the furloughs will be a long-term feature of the backfire created by the Democrat strategy.Bessent reemphasizes he personally joined the Trump administration to shrink the scale of government spending, and the administration is not going to flinch on any CR agreement that backtracks on existing spending reductions.
18 years ago: At his Nobel Peace Prize speech in December 2007, Al Gore warns the Arctic could be ice free as soon as 2014.
Reality: The Arctic ice cap had 500,000 square kilometers of ice more in September 2025 than when Al Gore made this call in 2007. pic.twitter.com/xB6dYBsjN5
The @bankofengland, allegedly in public ownership, wants to hide from the public its plans for Digital ID and Central Bank Dystopian Control (CBDC), aka "Digital Pound".
This leaves us no option but to assume the worst of this technocrat digital Gulag system. https://t.co/Y8kFVZ1Zfv
Inevitably, CNN et al are talking almost exclusively about Trump seeking revenge when something like this happens. We’ll have to wait and see what it is about. An interesting detail is that they went to the trouble of asking a judge to sign off on the warrant. Which he did. That indicates there is at least something credible here.
In a bombshell of a development, federal agents conducted a raid on the Maryland residence of former National Security Advisor John Bolton on Friday morning, according to various breaking sources. One source connected to the investigation has described that the search was aimed at locating potentially classified documents that authorities suspect Bolton may still have in his possession. nThere are no indicators as of yet that Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, has been arrested or taken into custody. “NO ONE is above the law,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted to X Friday morning, but without giving direct reference to the Bolton house raid. “FBI agents on mission.”
According to NY Post, which first revealed the raid: Federal agents went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post. …The probe — which is said to involve classified documents — was first launched years ago, but the Biden administration shut it down “for political reasons,” according to a senior US official. The FBI are reportedly sorting through papers and boxes: rump has been a longtime fierce critic of Bolton, after Bolton had long ago started going after Trump. Just this week, Bolton was on CNN and prime news shows blasting Trump’s dealings with Putin and the Ukraine negotiations. “I don’t think there’s a peace deal anywhere in the near future,” he said while criticizing the commander-in-chief’s tactics while recently speaking to CNN.
Back in January Bolton had been among former top officials, and Trump adversaries, to get their costly security protections stripped. Axios also recalls that Bolton wrote in a foreword to his memoir that was published last year the words: “a mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be President.” Publication of the book had been delayed so that the White House could review its content for any potential security breaches or disclosure of sensitive information. Mainstream media is being quick to suggest the house raid is an act of retribution. “Bolton was vocal in his criticism of the president after working in the first Trump administration. Trump has aggressively used the power of the presidency to punish political foes,” Axios observes.
“We really don’t know if something that has occurred most recently, whether they uncovered something that they believe is sort of evergreen, that this is still a viable criminal case.“
After the FBI raided John Bolton’s house on Friday, legal expert Jonathan Turley noted that the allegations against Bolton could potentially result in years of prison if they are true. The Donald Trump-Kash Patel FBI reportedly raided Bolton’s home and office in search of classified documents. As my colleague Kevin Downey Jr. reported, Trump and co. have yet to confirm the report officially, but Patel and his deputy co-director Dan Bongino hinted on X that it was true and the raid was part of enforcing the law. Turley, when he commented, noted that allegations such as those leveled against Bolton could, if proved in court, lead to decades in prison.
Speaking to Fox News, Turley — who, after all, is left-leaning — would not commit to saying whether he thought the raid was justified, but he did explain how serious the crime is that Bolton seemed to indicate he had committed in a previous book. “It is intriguing here because these are long standing allegations that the book indicated were referenced classified material that he may have acquired while he was in the administration. We’re not clear as to what that is, but it would suggest that is could be national defense information,” Turley said. “The reason that’s important is that creates a heightened potential penalty. So you can have penalties that range from five to 20 years.” Bolton previously and briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser before turning on the president during his first term and becoming an aggressive and persistent critic.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley says John Bolton could be facing very serious prison time since the charges likely involve national defense:
"It could be national defense information. That creates a heightened potential penalty … 5 to 20 years."
Significantly, Turley continued, “20 years tends to be the sentences for concealing information, obstructing justice — simply having classified information can weigh in at about 10 years, and there are often multiple counts, because each of those documents could be charged separately. So there is a strange history here.” Of course, the raid is particularly interesting to Trump supporters because Bolton pontificated so self-righteously about the outrageous Biden FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, saying that no one is above the law. That is exactly what Patel posted on X Friday after the report came out of the raid on Bolton‘s home and office.
Turley added on Fox, “So you had these allegations coming out as early as the first Trump administration. Then there was an allegation that the Biden administration essentially scuttled a further look at this case, and now we have this new development.” Interestingly, Turley believes there might be a fresh reason to investigate Bolton, which the public has yet to see. He said, “We really don’t know if something that has occurred most recently, whether they uncovered something that they believe is sort of evergreen, that this is still a viable criminal case.“
Former US President Bill Clinton promised Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would consider membership for Russia in NATO, according to newly declassified documents. Clinton also claimed that the military bloc’s expansion would not threaten Moscow, the files show. The statements were made during a meeting between the two leaders in the Kremlin on June 4, 2000, according to White House minutes published on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University. “From the outset of the NATO enlargement process, I knew that it could be a problem for Russia. I was sensitive to this, and I want it understood that NATO enlargement does not threaten Russia in any way,” Clinton is quoted as saying.
“I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia.“ He added that he understood that “domestic considerations inside Russia” prevent this, but over time the country “should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.” According to the documents, Putin said he “supported” the idea. Last year, in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin said he had brought up the subject with Clinton. While Clinton agreed at first, he later dismissed the idea after talking to his team, the Russian leader said. Had Clinton agreed, it would have led to a new period of “rapprochement” between Moscow and the military bloc, Putin added. NATO has expanded six times since the two leaders’ conversation in 2000, adding 12 more countries during this time.
After “wave after wave of expansion… we were constantly told: ‘You shouldn’t fear this, it poses no threat to you’,” Putin said in June, adding that “they simply dismissed our concerns, refusing to acknowledge or even consider our position.” “We know better than anyone what threatens us and what does not,” he said. Moscow has cited Kiev’s ambition to join NATO as one of the core causes of the current conflict, which it views as a proxy war being orchestrated by the military bloc against Russia.
“One would like to believe so, but for now this tunnel looks more like a maze, one that the United States and Russia still have to find their own way out of – while also leading others out.”
Paul Craig Roberts reposts this article from Ivan Andrianov, Founder and CEO of IntellGlobe Solutions (https://igs.expert/), a “strategic consulting firm specializing in geopolitical risk analysis, international security, and political forecasting”. It is endlessly long, this is just a small part, but it’s interesting. The first mention I see of Exxon Mobil being allowed back in to Russian oil and gas. Putin and Trump have more on their minds than just Ukraine, namely economic cooperation.
Before turning to the high politics discussed at the summit in Anchorage, Alaska, it seems appropriate to point to two seemingly positive moments that somehow passed almost unnoticed. First, at the post-talks press appearance, Vladimir Putin read from a prepared text. Moreover, he skipped four pages, setting them aside. And second, Russia allowed America’s ExxonMobil to reclaim its stakes in the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project. The Russian president’s decree was published on August 15, the day of his meeting with Donald Trump. The document supplemented a decree that in October 2022 transferred the Sakhalin-1 operator into Russian jurisdiction; at that time, instead of ExxonMobil, the operator became LLC “Sakhalin-1”.
What does this tell us? Despite many media claims, one can state that not only the summit, but also the visit to Moscow by U.S. President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff – after which the decision for a personal meeting of the two leaders was announced – was preceded by serious preparatory work that simply cannot be done in a few days. Nor can one prepare a speech text in the thirty minutes that elapsed between the end of the talks and Trump and Putin walking out to the press. As for the return of the American energy giant’s stake in the oil project, given all the bureaucratic and legal formalities, I will venture to say it took more than a month.
So all that remains is to congratulate the negotiators of our two countries, who not only managed to set up this meeting, but also avoided premature leaks that could have given opponents of the Russian-American dialogue a chance, if not to derail the Alaska summit, then at least to complicate it. Such concerns existed on both the Russian and the U.S. sides. Now to how Russia’s expert and political circles assess the outcome of this meeting, which has already been called historic in both Washington and Moscow. I hope what is meant is that it will become a point of reference from which relations between our countries begin to return to normal.
As for the results of the summit, the prevailing view in Moscow is that they should be assessed as successful for both sides. The fact there were no sensations or “breakthroughs” is a sign of the seriousness of what occurred – an acknowledgment by both parties of the complexity of the situation. The sides’ positions have been laid out (to each other and, in fact, to everyone) and, I hope, are not subject to reversal. That is a result. The presidents of the two countries accomplished the minimum tasks they set for this meeting. Trump showed that he is, in effect, the only Western leader who can, in principle, conduct a constructive dialogue with Russia. At the same time, the U.S. president demonstrated to his Euro-Atlantic partners that the outcome of the West’s interaction with Russia depends on him – and on no one else.
Moscow demonstrated that its demands are recognized and that its security must be taken into account in all variants of a peaceful settlement. This is a fundamental breakthrough. Everything before this proceeded from the simple idea that the West would present Russia with certain conditions to which it was supposedly to agree. The conditions shifted, but the approach remained. Moscow has now achieved that a resolution is possible only through dialogue and with due regard for Russian interests. Another important point – voiced for the first time by both sides – is that European countries bear responsibility for pushing the Ukrainian conflict to a high level of escalation. More importantly, it was finally stated in earnest – not only by Russia – that achieving a long peace is far more significant than the terms for a short-term ceasefire, under cover of which the West will try to rearm the Ukrainian army. Trump said as much in a tough phone call with Zelensky and EU leaders.
In this context, two scenarios are forecast for the future development of relations between the Kremlin and the White House. The first – call it the optimal one – is that Russia and the United States resolve the central problem in their bilateral relations and reach an acceptable settlement on Ukraine. Then the remaining issues, including strategic stability, Arctic cooperation, and strategic arms reductions, can be handled quickly and easily. And cooperation in hydrocarbons would be arranged in the spirit of Trump’s favored deal-making. Putin opened the road toward resolving the hydrocarbons question with a decree on potential foreign stakes in the “Sakhalin” project.
The second option is that the conflict goes unresolved due to the actions of European countries and their destructive policies. In that case Trump will try to “jump out” of the conflict, but with serious political losses and without any noticeable economic dividends. And Russia will continue grinding down the Ukrainian army, pursuing by military means the objectives announced at the outset of the special military operation (SMO) and reaffirmed by Putin in June of last year.
Now, merely a week out from when Presidents Trump and Putin met in Alaska, the White House’s admirable peace efforts seem to be unraveling and even hopelessly stalled. Many independent-minded analysts had from the very start said that this conflict will ultimately be settled on the battlefield. The Wall Street Journal too seems to be coming around to this view: On Monday, President Trump boasted about quickly brokering peace to end the bloody Ukraine conflict. By Thursday, he was saying that Kyiv had no chance of winning the war without new attacks on Russia. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense,” Trump posted on social media. “Interesting times ahead!!!” His turnaround underscored the fading optimism about Trump’s latest push to end the war.
Indeed this is another example of the West trying to have its cake and eat it too, as Trump strongly hints that Ukraine must take the offensive while simultaneously lamenting that Putin and Zelensky are not getting together in a hoped-for summit. Trump is essentially saying Ukraine cannot win the war unless it launches attacks on Russia. “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump had explained further in his Truth Social statement. The WSJ in its analysis then turns to one of the big factors which is sure to stymie talks from Moscow’s point of view: security guarantees for Ukraine: U.S. and European officials are still negotiating the makeup of a peacekeeping force that would aim to deter future Russian attacks against Ukraine if a peace deal was reached. Even that idea was quickly rebuffed by the Kremlin and raised questions about Trump’s willingness to commit to a major role for the U.S. military.
With much of his plans still unrealized, Trump is confronted with the uncertainties that have dogged him for the past seven months: How willing is he to pressure Putin, and how far is he willing to go in backing Zelensky? As we highlighted before, the ‘logic’ of this is contradictory and will lead nowhere. Why would Russia agree to end its military operations if in the end NATO-like ‘security guarantees’ are to be given to Ukraine as a reward?…to quote Moon of Alabama. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reminded the US and its Western allies on Thursday that President Putin has “repeatedly said that he is ready to meet, including with Zelensky, if there is understanding that all issues that require consideration at the highest level have been worked out thoroughly” by experts and ministers.
To translate, Putin will only sit down with Zelensky if they are already at the goal line of having worked out a permanent peace deal. This has been reiterated in a Friday foreign ministry statement: LAVROV: PUTIN-ZELENSKY MEETING NOT PLANNED YET — KREMLIN SAYS SUMMIT POSSIBLE ONLY AFTER AGENDA IS AGREED. And as RT outlines further, “Moscow maintains that any lasting settlement must eliminate the root causes of the conflict, address Russia’s security concerns, and recognize current territorial realities, including the status of Crimea and the four former Ukrainian regions that voted to join Russia in 2022.” This means there must be the permanent neutrality of Ukraine, the formal ceding of territories, and that the Russian neighbor cease being militarized by NATO.
Reuters also describes, “Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters.” And per Bloomberg: “A full ceasefire or peace agreement in Ukraine remains unlikely this year, with even the prospect of a partial truce fading, according to JPMorgan emerging market and policy strategists.”
Moscow has agreed to consider a number of US President Donald Trump’s proposals to resolve the Ukraine conflict, but Vladimir Zelensky has rejected them all, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with NBC News on Friday. Trump put forward the initiatives following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, Lavrov said. “President Trump suggested after Anchorage several points which we share, and on some of them we agreed to show some flexibility,” Lavrov told NBC. According to the top diplomat, Trump brought up the proposals in his meeting with Zelensky and some of his Western European backers in Washington on Monday.
He clearly indicated, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelensky said no to everything. Lavrov added that the Ukrainian leader has also refused to rescind “legislation prohibiting the Russian language.” “Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit,” he said, but added that as things stand, “there is no meeting planned.” Trump suggested that the next stage of peace negotiations should be a one-on-one meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders before a potential trilateral peace summit. Zelensky “has to show some flexibility,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.
On Thursday, however, Lavrov said that Kiev is showing no interest in a sustainable peace with Moscow. He pointed to statements made by Zelensky aide Mikhail Podoliak, who said that Ukraine would seek to regain any territories “de facto” left to Russia in a peace deal, and that Kiev would seek to join a military alliance, even if not NATO. According to Lavrov, these goals are at odds with the joint peace efforts being undertaken by Putin and Trump. Moscow has long insisted on a peace agreement that eradicates the underlying causes of the conflict. It has demanded that Ukraine maintain neutrality, stay out of NATO and other military alliances, demilitarize and denazify, as well as accept the new territorial reality.
“..unnamed figures in Russia had suggested using the system against Kiev’s “decision-making centers,” but Putin refused. “Absolutely not,” was the Russian leader’s response [..] if such a strike had taken place, “there would have been nothing left.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin vetoed a proposal to strike the administrative center of Kiev with Moscow’s new Oreshnik missiles, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has said. The Oreshnik, Russia’s newly developed medium-range hypersonic missile system which can travel at speeds of up to Mach 10, has already entered serial production. The system, which analysts claim cannot be intercepted, can carry nuclear or conventional warheads, and release multiple guided warheads. Speaking to reporters in Minsk on Friday, Lukashenko claimed that unnamed figures in Russia had suggested using the system against Kiev’s “decision-making centers,” but Putin refused.
“Absolutely not,” was the Russian leader’s response, according to the Belarusian president, who added that if such a strike had taken place, “there would have been nothing left.” Putin has previously said that the West has been trying to provoke Russia into using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but noted that there has been no need for such measures. “I hope it won’t be necessary,” he said in May. The Oreshnik was first battle-tested in November 2024 when it struck Ukraine’s Yuzhmash defense facility in Dnepr. Its destructive power in conventional form has been compared by Russian officials to a low-yield nuclear strike.
Lukashenko stressed that Moscow is committed to a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict, recalling that Putin refrained from striking civilian targets in Kiev when Russian forces reached the city’s outskirts in early 2022, later withdrawing forces altogether. At the time, Moscow described the move as a goodwill gesture ahead of a potential peace deal, which Kiev declined to sign after being urged by the UK to continue fighting. Russia and Ukraine resumed direct talks in Istanbul in May 2025 and have since held three meetings. While no settlement has yet been reached, Moscow has maintained that it is open to negotiations. Officials stress, however, that any agreement must address the root causes of the conflict and reflect the new realities on the ground.
“Gabbard has been critical of the West’s hawkish approach to the Ukraine conflict, suggesting that it was caused by NATO’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”…
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has ordered all information about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations be withheld from US intelligence partners, CBS News reported on Thursday, citing sources. Several unnamed US officials familiar with the matter told the outlet that the memo, which is dated July 20, directed intelligence agencies to classify all relevant data and subject analysis as NOFORN – not to be shared with foreign partners, including members of the Five Eyes intelligence framework, which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. nThe reported memo strictly limits the distribution of such materials to the agency from which they originated.
However, it does not appear to bar the sharing of diplomatic or military operational intelligence collected outside the US intelligence community, such as security information shared with Ukrainian forces. CBS also cited several former US officials who warned the directive’s sweeping scope could erode trust between Washington and its allies built on open intelligence sharing. Others, however, disagreed, pointing out that such a move is not unprecedented in US practice and that withholding information in areas of diverging interests is common among Five Eyes partners. Gabbard has been critical of the West’s hawkish approach to the Ukraine conflict, suggesting that it was caused by NATO’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” regarding Ukrainian membership in the bloc.
The reported directive preceded the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Alaska on August 15. That meeting – to which neither Ukraine nor any of the US allies were invited – concluded without an agreement on a ceasefire or a peace deal, although both leaders praised the talks as constructive. In the days following the Alaska talks, Trump hosted Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and European leaders at the White House. Talks focused on finding a path to settling the conflict and security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump later told Zelensky that he had to “show flexibility” and reiterated that Kiev would not join NATO.
At the Washington summit on Monday, one guest stood out. The extended session of Euro-Atlantic leaders – hastily convened at the White House right after Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Zelensky – brought together the usual heavyweights: the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the heads of NATO and the EU. Yet seated at the same table was someone who, at first glance, hardly seemed to belong in that club of power brokers: Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb. To an outsider, it might have looked odd. Why was the Finnish leader invited when the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states were not? The answer lies not in protocol courtesy but in the role Stubb now plays. His presence was a nod to a man whose career embodies the whole project of “Euro-Atlantic solidarity” – a project now under strain since Trump’s return to the White House.
Stubb is a cosmopolitan in every sense: a Swedish Finn, married to a Briton, educated in South Carolina, Bruges, Paris, and London. A golfer who bonded with Trump on the green, but also a seasoned foreign minister in the late 2000s, Stubb has become a rare kind of adviser – someone Trump listens to on European security in an administration where career diplomats are almost absent. It is telling that the Washington summit did not produce a US ultimatum forcing Ukraine into a peace deal with Moscow. Instead, the focus was on designing security guarantees for Kiev – an alternative to NATO’s Article 5, since membership in the alliance is no longer on the table. And behind that shift, many suspect, stands Stubb. He is quietly becoming the architect of a new Western security system, built on an openly anti-Russian foundation.
In Washington, Stubb framed his vision in a phrase that quickly went viral: “We found a solution in 1944 – and I believe we can find one in 2025.” He was alluding to Finland’s peace treaty with the USSR after World War II, and suggesting that Ukraine could follow a similar path. But here’s the catch: Stubb’s version of “Finlandization” bears little resemblance to the original concept. In his model, Ukraine would follow Finland’s supposed example – joining the EU and NATO structures, becoming part of the Western economic and military infrastructure, and, in practice, turning itself into a forward operating base against Moscow. That vision assumes a militarized society, stripped of industrial potential, and defined by an ethnonational identity designed to fence out Russian influence through the Russian-speaking population.
This is not Finlandization. It is its opposite. The original model, coined during the Cold War, described something very different: a small country leveraging its geography to live in peace with its powerful neighbor. Finland, after 1944, accepted tough compromises – ceding 10% of its territory, declaring neutrality, abandoning the dream of ethnic exclusivity. The payoff was stability, prosperity, and the chance to serve as a bridge between East and West. Helsinki became a symbol of détente in 1975 when it hosted the CSCE Final Act, a milestone in Cold War diplomacy. Finland’s economic boom – from Nokia to Valio, from Stockmann to Tikkurila – was rooted in precisely that balancing act: trading and cooperating with both blocs, and especially with nearby Leningrad. Neutrality allowed Finland to spend less on guns and more on butter, and that choice paid off.
Could such a model have worked if, back in 1944, the Finnish leadership had doubled down on nationalism? Almost certainly not. It took Marshal Mannerheim’s pragmatism – and his readiness to compromise – to give Finland a viable future.
For decades the British and European governments regardless of party in power have allowed millions of unassimilable people of color to walk into the countries and abuse the white women while white taxpayers are given the responsibility for their housing and upkeep. The governments, and the professors of course, call what are in fact immigrant-invaders “migrants.” “Migrants” has a legal connotation to it, but there is nothing legal about the entry. You try it, white person. Try to walk into the UK or a European country without a passport and, if required, a visa, and visible means of support. So why is it OK for immigrant-invaders to do it?
In 1973 Jean Raspail described in The Camp of the Saints the total collapse of the French belief system and that of other white ethnicities that left the leadership classes in the West without the will to protect their peoples and their cultures. The same has occurred among Democrats in the US. The Democrats would not permit President Trump during his first term to close the border with Mexico. The Obama and Biden regimes not only left the border open, they also used taxpayers money to recruit immigrant-invaders and finance their trek into America. Very quickly white American business people created businesses that made money by providing upkeep at taxpayers’ expense for the immigrant invaders. These private profit-making operations are called “asylum accommodation programs.” In the US the pretense that the immigrant-invaders are just doing Americans a favor by rushing to fill jobs Americans would not take was put to the lie by the bus stations, airports, and hotels filled with immigrant-invaders living off the taxpayers’ wallet.
Some American communities have been overwhelmed by Democrat regimes depositing huge numbers of immigrant-invaders in their communities. This is also the story in Britain and Europe. The ongoing and increasing rapes and crime have finally sparked a rebellion in a number of British communities. The UK government is being forced to disperse the large numbers of young male immigrant-invaders warehoused in hotels into the wider community. The UK government is trying to commandeer thousands of residential houses so the immigrant-invaders can be dispersed and made less visible than the current concentrations. The rent, utilities, council tax, and repairs will all be paid for by taxpayers. And, of course, the provision of homes for the 109,343 “asylum seekers” who entered Britain in the year ending last March, a 15% increase from 2024, drives up rents and house prices, thus further burdening ethnic British. And still the UK government has no inclination to stop the overrunning of Britain by immigrant-invaders.
Yet this same government is so very concerned that Ukraine’s borders be protected by British taxpayers that the government has agreed to purchase billions of dollars of American weapons to send to Ukraine at British taxpayers’ expense to protect Ukrainian borders. It is the same all over Europe. How can this mindlessness of British and European governments be understood and explained? The only answer I can give is that the intellectual class destroyed the belief system. For decades white people have been denounced in university classrooms as racist exploiters. More recently these denunciations have entered the elementary schools. Affirmatory statements in support of Western civilization have disappeared from Western education. Today the program is multiculturalism, which means the replacement of white values and white culture with a tower of babel. And that is what every European country, the UK, Canada, and the US have become.
A tower of babel cannot be united and has no common purpose. It is these towers of babel that now find themselves arrayed against three powerful countries with far more homogeneous populations and, perhaps, enough self-belief to resist. In the US the only unified Americans are Trump’s MAGA-supporters. They are ordinary people fed up with the denigration and decay of their country. Hillary Clinton dismisses them as “Trump Deplorables.” In the UK and Europe anyone who represents the ethnic basis of the countries is dismissed and harassed as a “fascist.” Only France has a political party based on national ethnicity, and the leader of the party has been banned by the French establishment from running for office for five years. She was convicted on orchestrated charges that she embezzled European Union funds. If the conviction had failed, some other bogus charge would have been pulled out of the hat.
The British, European, and American societies are the weakest possible societies before dissolution. In the US the establishment is more opposed to Trump than to Russia and China. Societies as weak as the West cannot prevail in war. The cause that is driving the West to disastrous war is the agenda of the Zionist neoconservatives. This cause is known as the Wolfowitz doctrine of American hegemony. By American they mean Israel’s hegemony, for which American lives, money, and reputation have been used blatantly during the first quarter of the 21st century resulting in the destruction of five countries for Greater Israel, six if we include Palestine. Iran, number seven, is in waiting. For the neoconservatives, Iran is a more desirable target than Russia. Iran stands in Israel’s way, whereas Russia does not. What the so-called “Ukrainian peace process” is probably about is Trump’s withdrawal of the US as a direct participant so that Trump can focus the US on Iran for Netanyahu. If this is a reasonable interpretation, than progress in the Ukraine negotiations simply means more and wider war.
In New York, a court revealed that a leading citizen had cooked the books by inflating questionable figures without any support in reality. Moreover, his wild overvaluation was widely viewed as motivated by his self-aggrandizement. The final reported figures are so absurdly inflated that they were rejected in their entirety. In the end, he was off by over half a billion dollars. That man is Judge Arthur Engoron. After a New York appellate court unanimously threw out Engoron’s absurd half-a-billion-dollar judgment and interest against President Donald Trump, the irony was crushing. It was Engoron who seemed, as he characterized Trump witnesses, as having “simply denied reality.” It made his notorious reliance on an assessment of Mar-a-Lago as worth between $18 million and $27.6 million seem like good accounting. In the end, he could not get a single judge to preserve a single dollar of that fine.
For some of us who covered that trial, the most vivid image of Engoron came at the start. He indicated that he did not want cameras in the courtroom, but when the networks showed up, Engoron took off his glasses and seemed to pose for the cameras. It was a “Sunset Boulevard” moment. We only need Gloria Swanson looking into the camera to speak to “those wonderful people out there in the dark!” and announcing “all right, [Ms. James], I’m ready for my close-up.” The close-up was not a good idea, and, on appeal, it was perfectly disastrous. The court found little legal or factual basis for his fine. The purported witnesses not only did not lose a dime, but they testified that they made money on the loans and wanted new loans with the Trump administration. That did not move Engoron. From the start, he was speaking to those “wonderful people out there.”
You did not have to go far. In both the civil and criminal trials of Trump in New York, there was a carnival atmosphere in the street outside the courthouse. It was really not derangement as much as delirium. Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James had injected lawfare directly into the veins of New Yorkers. Pledging in her campaign to bag Trump (without bothering to name any crime or violation), James was elected based on her recreational rather than legal appeal. Yet, James could not have succeeded if she had not had a judge willing to ignore reality and cook the books on the fines. She needed a partner in lawfare. She needed Engoron. Even for some anti-Trump commentators, the judgment was impossible to defend and some acknowledged that they had never seen any case like this one brought in New York.
Judge David Friedman gave Engoron a close-up that would have made Swanson wince. He detailed how the underlying law “has never been used in the way it is being used in this case – namely, to attack successful, private, commercial transactions, negotiated at arm’s length between highly sophisticated parties fully capable of monitoring and defending their own interests.” He accused Engoron of participating in an effort clearly directed by James as “ending with the derailment of President Trump’s political career and the destruction of his real estate business.” Other judges said that Engoron’s fine was so off base and engorged that it was an unconstitutional order under the Eighth Amendment, protecting citizens from “cruel and unusual” punishments. So, Engoron not only inflated the figures but shredded the Constitution in his effort to deliver a blow against Trump.
Trump can now appeal the residual parts of the Engoron decision imposing limits on the Trump family doing business in New York. Some of those limits could be moot by the time of any final judgment. Ironically, if Engoron had shown a modicum of restraint, he might have secured a victory. During the trial in New York, I said that he would have been smart to impose a dollar fine and limited injunctive relief. That, however, required a modicum of judicial restraint and judgment. Instead, Engoron chose to walk down the stairway into infamy. He was off by half a billion dollars, which could put him in the Bernie Madoff class of judges. In other words, if he wanted to be remembered on that first day, Arthur Engoron succeeded.
Please everybody, extricate yourselves from the mud-wallow of cynicism. Naysayers arise and open your eyes! Sleepwalkers and black-pillers, smell the coffee and wake up! Sob-sisters dry your tears! We are marching into a promised land of accountability after all. Our country, you well know, has been sore beset under a long-running seditious coup orchestrated by an ever more insane Bolshevik-Jacobin syndicate of political reprobates seeking to erase every boundary between the real and the unreal since 2016, a year that now lives in infamy. All their malice and roguery has been focused on the odd figure who somehow rose to lead the opposition to their burgeoning color revolution, Mr. Trump, who, through some alchemy of fortitude, managed to evade their many-footed depredations — to get re-elected.
Of course, you’ve also noticed that psychological projection is the heart of the seditionists’ game. Whatever ploy or subterfuge they accuse you of, is exactly what they are doing. Their mainstay is the phrase conspiracy theory. Whenever one of their many turpitudes is carried out — such as a rigged election — your notice of it is labeled a conspiracy theory. In fact, their long train of activities to turn the country upside-down and inside-out has been one drawn-out seditious conspiracy. And that is liable to be precisely one of the charges lodged against them — but surely not the only charge.
You have seen news (anywhere but in The New York Times) that grand juries are being convened here and there to scrutinize a whole lot of bad behavior by a whole lot of officials who recklessly wielded their power, who betrayed the nation, who broke institutions, destroyed lives, careers, and households, and, as an added insult, attempted to make you swallow one patent absurdity after another — a Potemkin president, drag queens in the schools, a massive invasion of alien mutts across an open border, Saint George Floyd and “mostly peaceful protests,” math is racist, boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms — all in their campaign to destroy American cultural coherence while they seized totalistic political control and sniped their adversaries off the game board. (Just look how they destroyed Rudolf Giuliani, a heroic figure who saved New York City in the 1990s.)
Grand juries are a sign that something serious is up. Evidence is being gathered by a new FBI, no longer dedicated to just covering-up its past crimes. A sign of how serious this effort is: the hiring last week of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as Co-Deputy FBI Director. Mr. Bailey, you may recall, presided over the Missouri v Biden lawsuit (2022) about the “Joe Biden” White House’s efforts to coerce social media into censorship. The SCOTUS killed the case on spurious grounds for “lack of standing to sue.” But the government censorship crusade was a hallmark affront to the Constitution in the years’ long seditious conspiracy against the American people. It could even return as a criminal— not a civil — case this time, since censorship was so central to the overall coup.
The DOJ has just released transcripts and audio from two days of interviews last month with Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who said that President Trump was “never inappropriate with anybody” while he and Epstein were associates, and that her father was an intelligence asset. “Did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world?” asked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, Florida last month. “Absolutely never, in any context,” Maxwell replied. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said in another segment. Maxwell also said her father, the late Robert Maxwell, was an intelligence asset…
Ghislaine Maxwell CONFIRMS on tape she never witnessed President Trump doing anything inappropriate:
"I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. In the times I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects." pic.twitter.com/038wSnzS6v
Robert Maxwell, a media tycoon and former Labour MP, was notably given a state funeral in Jerusalem after ‘accidentally’ falling off his Yacht, the “Lady Ghislaine.” He was long speculated to have been a secret agent for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence office that is equivalent to the CIA. By proxy, that suspicion has led to speculation that the intelligence agency Epstein was associated with was the Mossad as well. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Epstein had connections to the [Israeli intelligence community],” said Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, whose investigative reporting was the reason that the Epstein case was reopened after it was buried by federal prosecutors in 2008. “Robert Maxwell certainly had those kinds of connections, and Epstein had a close relationship with Robert Maxwell.” Ghislaine, however, said that her father and Epstein never met.
So Maxwell says she never deliberately had contact with Mossad, then says she wouldn't know if Epstein did. But the clearest Israeli intelligence links in the story relate to Ehud Barak, who was the head of Aman, Israeli Military Intelligence, which is much bigger than Mossad. pic.twitter.com/S25qhvzNuO
She also does not believe Epstein killed himself. She also provided some tricky answers about Mossad… “I do not believe he died by suicide,” said Maxwell, who added that she has no idea who might have killed him. Also interesting is that Ghislaine admitted to being “part of the beginning process of the Clinton Global Initiative.”
Ghislaine Maxwell tells the DOJ she believes Jeffrey Epstein funded or arranged financing for the Clinton Global Initiative as well. pic.twitter.com/iOydUplfRU
Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante Ghislaine Maxwell has said she does not believe the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender committed suicide behind bars. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for trafficking women to Epstein, was interviewed by the Department of Justice last month due to renewed interest in the case. According to a transcript released Friday, Maxwell told investigators, “I do not believe he died by suicide, no.” She dismissed the idea that an outside party could have ordered a “hit” on Epstein, adding, “If it is indeed murder, I believe it was an internal situation.” When asked if Epstein could have been targeted because he possessed damaging information on powerful figures, Maxwell said, “I do not have any reason to believe that. And I also think it’s ludicrous.”
She added, “If that is what they wanted, they would’ve had plenty of opportunity when he wasn’t in jail.” Maxwell also denied that Epstein engaged in blackmail or kept a “client list” linked to sex trafficking. Epstein was found dead in 2019 in his cell at a Manhattan correctional facility while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Democrats, along with some conservative figures, have accused President Donald Trump of a coverup after FBI and DOJ reviews denied the existence of an “Epstein list.” Trump, who has said he ended his friendship with Epstein long before his 2008 conviction, described the accusations as part of a Democrat-led discreditation campaign.
Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante Ghislaine Maxwell has denied that the late financier and convicted sex offender blackmailed his powerful associates. On Friday, the US Department of Justice released audio and a transcript of Maxwell’s interview last month with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for trafficking women to Epstein, was questioned amid renewed speculation that Epstein kept a “client list” of individuals he was accused of trafficking women to. Asked whether Epstein maintained “a black book or a client list,” Maxwell replied: “There is no list that I am aware of.”
According to her, the claims originated in 2009 from Brad Edwards, a lawyer representing several of Epstein’s victims. “I’m not aware of any blackmail. I never heard that. I never saw it and I never imagined it,” Maxwell said. She also denied that President Donald Trump engaged in any improper conduct during his friendship with Epstein. “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” she said. Trump has maintained that he cut ties with Epstein long before his 2008 conviction and was previously unaware of the allegations against him.
This week, news emerged that the Trump administration has been setting new standards with regard to incoming immigrants. According to Axios, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will now take into account the “positive attributes” of migrants entering the country; such attributes can include community involvement and educational level. Instead of simply seeking to rule out those with records of misconduct, the new system seeks to screen for better immigrants — immigrants who will enrich America. Along the same lines, the CIS will now disqualify applicants who engage in or support “anti-American activity.” As USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser explained, “America’s benefits should not be given to those who despise the country and promote anti-American ideologies. … Immigration benefits — including to live and work in the United States — remain a privilege, not a right.”
Metrics for anti-Americanism include “circumstances where an alien has endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused the views of a terrorist organization or group, including aliens who support or promote anti-American ideologies or activities, antisemitic terrorism and antisemitic terrorist organizations, or who promote antisemitic ideologies.” Shockingly, there are those who are concerned about such standards. Presumably, America can’t be truly free unless we allow in those who support terrorist groups; one day, if we’re lucky, they can even run for mayor of New York or Congresswoman of Michigan. Such are the supposed blessings of liberty bestowed on foreigners by the free speech clause of our Constitution. Professor of sociology Jane Lilly Lopez of Brigham Young University told the Associated Press, “For me, the really big story is they are opening the door for stereotypes and prejudice and implicit bias to take the wheel in these decisions. That’s really worrisome.”
This, of course, ignores that there are evidentiary standards for any allegations of anti-Americanism; skin color or country of origin wouldn’t presumably be enough to bar someone on grounds of anti-Americanism. But for the left, the only excuse for a pro-American ideology must be some form of subtle racism. Meanwhile, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, objected that the new standards were reminiscent of McCarthyism. This ignores the fact that during the Cold War, America did in fact screen for membership in the Communist Party under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, and that refugees and immigrants were screened by American law enforcement agencies to ensure that they were not agents of a foreign power or sympathetic to America’s enemies.
Undergirding all of these objections is a simple and ugly proposition: that becoming an American requires no actual investment in America, and that America ought to be a gigantic agglomeration of disassociated populations. Such a proposition would have been de facto impossible before the rise of the welfare state; people immigrating to the United States generally left places with greater security for an America without security but with grand opportunity, which meant that new immigrants had to learn English, learn a trade, and embrace the Anglo-American cultural and legal traditions of the country in order to succeed. With the rise of an enormous and durable social safety net, the math suddenly changed: People could immigrate to the United States without assimilating in any serious way, and could maintain their pre-American cultures in toto. Multiculturalism, as a philosophy, can only survive if effectuated by a state that subsidizes fragmentation.
That process must now be reversed. And that can only be done by raising the bar to admission. Good immigrants make America stronger. Bad immigrants make it weaker. Treating all immigrants similarly isn’t just foolish; it’s dangerous. And the Trump administration is right for recognizing that root reality.
The social media conversation was triggered by an article in the Wall Street Journal which claimed Elon Musk was reconsidering, actually setting aside the third-party option, and was likely to back JD Vance as his 2028 presidential nominee instead. Factually, for those in the minority who are intellectually honest non-pretenders, the framework of the subsequent online discussion from that WSJ article was laughable. Personally, I wanted to ridicule anyone who was buying into the nonsense that Musk and the Tech alliance (Ellison, Thiel, Sacks, Andreesen, et al) had another option in mind other than Vance.
Silicon Valley is a singular organism when it comes to their collective interests. Palantir founder Peter Thiel has invested in JD Vance since 2013, and the PayPal mafia which includes Elon Musk have never diverged. There is no way Thiel, Musk and the Tech alliance are going to support anyone other than Vance. By the time we get to 2028 they will have a total investment of money and time that spans 15 years in Vance. JD Vance will be the Silicon Valley candidate. JD Vance knows this. As the conversation about bringing Elon Musk back into the Trump camp is triggered, it is not coincidental that JD Vance becomes the conduit. If JD Vance wants to be the presidential nominee in 2028, he will rely on Musk and crew; there is no other candidate for Silicon Valley.
On the night of September 7-8, 2025, nearly 7 billion people — about 85% of the world population — will witness a total lunar eclipse coinciding with a SuperMoon. pic.twitter.com/Dj7BsnnT4l
.@DavidSacks: “People are realizing that Trump's willingness to raise tariffs on countries as a threat to renegotiate better trade deals is working … Add it all up. It's effectively $2 Trillion of stimulus into the US but without money printing … so it's non-inflationary.” pic.twitter.com/hOdx5WrHK7
Tariffs may be criticized for other reasons, but it is extremely dangerous to say they will cause inflation.
1. Costs do not dictate final prices; it is the other way around (Menger imputation principle). 2. Tariffs do not suppose more units of currency in the system nor higher… pic.twitter.com/0o9jwA0uph
French President Emmanuel Macron is suing Candace Owens for claiming his wife was born a man. Candace joins us to present her evidence and explain why she’s looking forward to a legal battle.
(0:00) Brigitte Macron and the Lawsuit Against Candace (12:06) The Origins of Candace’s… pic.twitter.com/QDVMRzr6hn
There are quite a few storylines that will have people thinking, for example; Russiagate -or Ukraine-, I’ve been reading about that for ages, boring! But we’re going to have some very long stories, with details slowly seeping through. The resistance, from media and politics, to revealing reality, is enormous. That’s why things leak out bit by bit only, it’s a tooth and nail fight. But it’s as Tulsi says once again that this is the only way, and it’s the only chance we get. Imagine what would be going on right now if Trump had not won, or survived for that matter: we would never know any of it. Better to find out day by day. Politiics. intelligence and media is a very strong force when put together.
“This is not ‘doomerism’, this is reality when you pull back from the ‘tick-tock’ grifting clickbait.”
First things first. It might not be the popular thing to accept, but it is increasingly clear there is no way to get to any form of accountability or legal exposure for Russiagate or the manufacturing of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, anywhere near former President Barack Obama. The concentric circles of plausible deniability are just too extensive. Essentially, despite the evidence of the FBI participating in a manufactured investigation predicted on false pretenses, all now supported with hindsight evidence, the fact that key IC officials, namely CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented the illusion of credible concern, inoculates President Obama from scrutiny. As the Supreme Court noted, the President is protected from liability for “official acts” of his office.
Yes, we all know these officials knew it was a ruse; however, in 2016 the CIA and FBI were presenting the information to Obama and saying the investigative value was potentially plausible. As such, Obama would have been within his official duty to tell the IC officials to chase down the information (continue investigating it). Then, the January 5th, 2017, meeting documented by the infamous “by the book” Susan Rice memo, further inoculates President Obama for telling the IC officials to follow careful procedures as they continued investigating whether or not the Trump-Russia collusion was a factual concern. All of these elements lead to various tentacles of plausible deniability. No court is going to find criminal action within the decision-making, regardless of how ridiculous it may look in granular hindsight.
Are all the characters guilty of perpetrating a fraud for the expressed intent of a political narrative, yes. Are they criminally liable for it, extremely unlikely. The only criminal liability that appears visible is in the Mueller probe that came along in May 2017 to coverup the prior conduct. The Mueller/Weissmann special counsel perpetrated fraud in legal filings, lied to the FISA court, and manipulated evidence. As a result, we must ask ourselves what is the value in this ongoing reveal of information? Because they were willing participants in the overall operation, the MSM media will never admit their role or culpability in the ruse. That leaves an echo-chamber of alternate media combing through the granular releases and discovering the trail of evidence represented within the declassification.
Put all that alternative media together and you impact 25 to 40% of the public. The rest don’t really care, and/or dislike President Trump too much to really care that he was targeted by the Intelligence Community. This is not ‘doomerism’, this is reality when you pull back from the ‘tick-tock’ grifting clickbait. Worse still, it is clear the ‘tick-tock’ controlled release of information is in full swing again. When you hear John Solomon saying, “we are working to release more information,” it’s worth asking yourself who exactly is this “we” that Solomon is speaking of.
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I’ve come to the conclusion the “we” consists of those within the clickbait industry who seek to make a living from the endless discussion. Solomon is not a reporter, he’s a participant. Here’s another example, courtesy of Sean Hannity and Senator Lindsey Graham.
“To everyone involved in this hoax, the message must be clear: This is your legacy, your attempt to deceive the American people and destroy the man they elected to lead them. That is who you are..”
The United States of America has now spent almost a decade embroiled in “Russiagate,” and its citizens have been bombarded from both sides with theories, names, and anonymous quotes. But it all really comes down to one thing: Democrats lied, and half the country believed them. In the 24 pages of never-before-seen declassified files released Thursday, we saw in cold, calculated black and white exactly how the Clinton campaign crafted the lie that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. One email allegedly shows Leonard Benardo, vice president of the George Soros backed Open Society Foundation, writing in July 2016 that, “Julie [sic] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,” adding “Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
Julie is Julianne Smith, then a foreign policy adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. You know who the FBI is. Just two days later, Bernado would allegedly send another email. “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” it read. “That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.” Benardo would also allegedly write, and this is key, “The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue,” adding, “In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media…”
This all leads to a gem in the annex to John Durham’s Russia hoax probe, released Thursday, which concluded, “During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated ‘attic-based’ technical structures that are involved in cybersecurity…from where the information would then be disseminated through leading US publications.” The Clinton campaign knew all too well that their lackeys in the media would eat up this half-baked nonsense with a spoon, and probably win awards for it, which is exactly what happened. What the media wasn’t told at the time was that field officers in the CIA objected to the lies and were run over because, according to their then-Director John Brennan “it rings true.”
This ludicrous legal standard of “rings true,” was used to convince the FISA court to renew warrants on Trump officials, which was not only a free federal law enforcement fishing expedition, but created smoke and the appearance of fire.In December of 2016, in the dying days of the Barack Obama administration, intel reports were massaged to once again create the illusion that Trump was a traitor who became president only through Russian assistance.n Thus was launched Robert Mueller’s investigation, which would last for years at a cost of more than $30 million, but ultimately exonerate Trump. Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of this Kafkaesque trial by media and secret courts, people’s lives were destroyed, crushed by false allegations, legal bills and a process that was the punishment.
One of them is Michael Caputo, a long-time member of Trump’s orbit who I talked to on Friday. “It is precious little comfort knowing we were right, we need accountability, but even accountability doesn’t feed the bulldog,” he told me, which was to say the damage to him and his family cannot be undone. Accountability comes in many forms. Caputo may never get the perp walks by former Democrat officials that he understandably desires, but this dastardly lie concocted by Democrats to smear Trump and maintain power has at least been been exposed. According to a Suffolk poll in December of 2018, “Forty-six percent are convinced that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, while 29 percent said there was no such coordination, and 19 percent weren’t sure.”
Every serious person, whether Democrat or Republican, now admits that this simply was not true. What they must also then admit is that half of Americans believed the lie only because Democrats told it so deceitfully. It was Walter Scott who wrote in his 1808 poem ‘Marmion’, “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” But in this case, Democrats wanted the web, a web so dense with so many loose ends and round corners that the truth would be forever hidden. It was Shakespeare who wrote “the truth will out,” and so it has come out, albeit not before shaking a country to its core and crushing innocent lives.
Whatever else comes from the current investigation of Russiagate, one thing is now clear, ready to be etched in the stone of history: The Democrats invented the Russian collusion lie, they did it intentionally, and they suckered their voters into buying it. To everyone involved in this hoax, the message must be clear: This is your legacy, your attempt to deceive the American people and destroy the man they elected to lead them. That is who you are.
US Representative Tim Burchett has formally requested that billionaire financier George Soros and his associate Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), testify before Congress regarding their alleged involvement in the 2016 “Russiagate” affair targeting Donald Trump. In a letter sent Friday to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky), Rep. Burchett (R-Tennessee) urged the panel to call Soros and Benardo to a public hearing and to subpoena them if they refuse to appear voluntarily. The request follows the declassification of documents by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which reportedly link Soros’s OSF to a broader effort to discredit Trump’s presidential campaign and derail his first term in office.
“As you know, DNI Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified evidence of a conspiracy by former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the national security apparatus to manufacture and politicize intelligence to subvert President Trump and the will of the American people,” Burchett wrote. “Included in this evidence is a concerning email allegedly from Leonard Benardo… plotting to discredit the incoming Trump Administration.” Burchett emphasized the OSF’s ongoing influence in US elections and said the American public deserves answers. “Should they refuse the invitation, I encourage you to use subpoena powers. Americans deserve answers into the subversion of our institutions by malicious actors,” he added.
The newly declassified 29-page annex to Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report, released this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, alleges that the Clinton campaign, with help from OSF-linked figures, concocted the narrative of Russian interference to damage Trump politically. Emails attributed to Benardo reportedly detail efforts to disseminate unverified claims through FBI-adjacent tech firms like CrowdStrike and various media outlets. The FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane, its Trump-Russia probe, despite allegedly having obtained credible intelligence about the plot.
Critics argue that the agency’s failure to properly scrutinize intelligence pointing to a politically motivated smear campaign fueled years of disinformation, political polarization, and unjustified sanctions against Moscow. President Trump responded Friday by calling the affair “the biggest scandal in American history,” accusing the Obama administration of treason and vowing accountability. Moscow, for its part, has long denied meddling in the 2016 election and insists the Russiagate narrative was a fabricated pretext for confrontation.
The CIA’s infamous Cold War propaganda and psychological operation (PSYOP) program never died—it just turned inward. The question isn’t whether the government is manipulating Americans, but how they’re doing it right now—through intelligence leaks, media collusion, psychological tactics, and taxpayer-funded propaganda. That was the warning from U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during a searing July 31 interview, where she confirmed that intelligence insiders are actively using corporate media to manipulate the American people and sabotage President Donald Trump’s agenda—echoing the tactics of ‘Operation Mockingbird.’ Every major news organization or its parent companies, from FOX News to CNN, are owned by globalist-aligned asset managers like BlackRock, an offical partner of the anti-American-sovereignty World Economic Forum (WEF).
“There are people within the intelligence community who believe that their will is more important than the will of the American people,” Gabbard told conservative host Benny Johnson. “[They] will weaponize intelligence by leaking it to their friends within the mainstream media with the intent of undermining President Trump’s agenda.” Once a covert CIA program used to plant propaganda in foreign and domestic media, Operation Mockingbird infiltrated major U.S. newsrooms throughout the 1950s–1970s. It was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, where Congress revealed that the agency maintained relationships with hundreds of journalists to shape public perception. Today, Gabbard says, that same playbook is being deployed against Americans.
Only now, it’s fully digital, algorithmic, and taxpayer-funded. “They are subverting the will of the people and therefore undermining the Constitution,” Gabbard warned. Gabbard’s warning comes as Congress continues to uncover a parallel propaganda apparatus inside U.S. health agencies. A damning House Energy and Commerce Committee report released in October 2024 found that the Biden Administration spent $900 million in taxpayer funds on a COVID-19 propaganda campaign that intentionally misled the public. “The Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system,” said Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), accusing the CDC and NIH of using ads containing “erroneous or unproven information.”
The report revealed that: • The CDC exaggerated the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines beyond FDA authorization. • Messaging about mask effectiveness and COVID risk to children was “deeply flawed.” • Federal funds went to Big Tech companies to “track and monitor Americans,” prompting calls for stronger data privacy protections. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA) slammed the administration’s “Stop the Spread” campaign as scientifically baseless, saying it “misled the American public” and triggered a broader collapse in trust across all vaccine programs. “American trust in the CDC is at an all-time low,” said Subcommittee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY). Further validating Gabbard’s claims, behavioral scientists who advised governments during the COVID crisis have since admitted to weaponizing fear to coerce compliance—describing their actions as “unethical,” “dystopian,” and “totalitarian.”
Members of the UK’s ‘Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour’ (SPI-B), who advised the government’s COVID response, revealed that officials deliberately ramped up fear to push lockdowns the public might otherwise reject. “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government,” said SPI-B psychologist Gavin Morgan. “[P]sychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them,” another member confessed. One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in.”
Gabbard said her fight is not just about cleaning up rogue intelligence operators—it’s about reversing the normalization of psychological warfare on the American public. “To be able to turn the light on in places that have been dark for far too long, expose the truth, and drive accountability—that’s the only way we can actually shift this,” she said. She affirmed that Trump is fully aware of the deep-state sabotage being conducted through the media. “President Trump is enacting the very thing he promised the American people he would do in this election.”
SCARY: Tulsi Gabbard CONFIRMS That ‘Operation Mockingbird’ is STILL Ongoing inside the CIA and she is actively trying to Shut it Down.
Tulsi says Deep State intel agents are still actively colluding with left-wing media outlets to attack President Trump from within:
The Church Committee once warned that Mockingbird undermined the very idea of a free press.The playbook didn’t end, it just upgraded.Today’s propaganda apparatus now includes:
• Leaked narratives from intel to legacy media
• AI-powered censorship tools on social platforms
• CDC-funded influencer campaigns targeting youth
• Federal surveillance partnerships with tech giants
• Coerced public health compliance through fear psychology
The same government that once planted editorials in The Washington Post now quietly curates your news feed, flags dissent as misinformation, and suppresses debate under the guise of “public health.” Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation is historic: the top U.S. intelligence official has publicly stated that agencies under her own leadership are using media to manipulate Americans. Operation Mockingbird didn’t end. It simply changed targets. The American people are no longer just the audience of government propaganda. They’re the enemy.
“..the intelligence community’s [fake] new report, which ODNI and CIA clearly held back until the very moment Trump was certified President so his very first hours begin with him immediately tarred as illegitimate and possibly criminal.”
It’s hard to fathom the evil that led to creating fake intelligence to frame then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a Russian spy and traitor to his country. We’ve seen in recently declassified documents that Hillary Clinton didn’t do this alone. She commanded dozens, if not hundreds, of willing participants, including the George Soros foundation, President Barack Obama, the FBI, the weaponized intelligence agencies, and others, to bring Donald to his knees. Buried deep in the latest tranche of declassified documents called the Durham annex report, however, a deep state hawk has found something that is equally or more evil than changing intelligence to manipulate one election’s outcome. They created a way to take over elections in perpetuity. Mike Benz, a former State Department official in the Trump 45 administration who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, found what is tantamount to the Rosetta stone for the Censorship Industrial Complex.
And it’s right here: “The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel menace [sic] since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledged the fact [that] IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable.” In a series of posts on X, Benz laid out why this sentence from an email from a Soros Open Society Eurasian official told the story of how they planned to get Trump even after they’d lost the election. They magic’d up a system whereby elections would now become “critical infrastructure” run by the feds.
“It is no coincidence both the cooked crooked intelligence community report launching Russiagate and the DHS federal takeover of elections as “critical infrastructure” (citing the same-day Russiagate intelligence assessment) BOTH happened on January 6, 2017. That was the SAME day Democrats’ hail mary last-ditch plot to stop Trump’s election certification failed, and Trump’s win was certified. With no options left to stop Trump’s presidency, they didn’t even wait a day to launch what appeared to be their Plan B: if Trump can’t be stopped from becoming President, immediately hobble his presidency that same day the presidency was inevitable.”
When their efforts to halt the certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2017, didn’t work, they went to Plan B, “tak[ing] over state-level control of voting systems.” “And in fact,” he wrote, “that is exactly the time sequence of how it played out on January 6, 2017.” First, at 1:41pm, Congress certified Trump’s election win. Then, with Trump’s win now final and no hope left for the intelligence community to obstruct it, [T]hen suddenly, magically, the entire joint US intelligence community assessment drops just 4 hours later, with a report directly insinuating Trump’s win was illegitimate because Russia intervened to help Trump win.
Then, suddenly, magically, DHS just 30 minutes after that swoops in with a permanent unilateral federal designation that it has taken over state-level control of voting systems — which we’d had in this country for 230 years — citing the intelligence community’s [fake] new report, which ODNI and CIA clearly held back until the very moment Trump was certified President so his very first hours begin with him immediately tarred as illegitimate and possibly criminal.
8. And in fact, that is exactly the time sequence of how it played out on January 6, 2017. First, at 1:41pm, Congress certified Trump’s election win. Then, with Trump’s win now final and no hope left for the intelligence community to obstruct it, then suddenly, magically, the… pic.twitter.com/lffhPW8jtY
Benz says that the second- and third-order effects of this decision to change the rules and declare elections to be a “critical infrastructure” gave the deep state the predicate to federalize our elections for the first time since 1789. But it also did something else. In the name of keeping this “critical infrastructure” sacrosanct, it gave the ones and zeros embedded in the deep state carte blanche to censor anyone who had an opinion that questioned elections “When DHS created their Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency—we have ‘security’ in our name twice because we care so much about security—OK now we can control elections and ‘cyber’ in their name gave them a predicate to go after tweets and Facebook posts, and YouTube videos and TikTok videos and Reddit posts. It gave them the legal predicate to completely burn the U.S. Constitution.”
We at PJ Media and other conservative outlets felt the effects of this censorship. Suddenly, it was as if Lois Lerner were in charge of speech. People, mostly conservatives, were booted from Twitter 1.0. YouTube became a minefield of speech dragnets and censorship police. One social media company was shut down because posts by users were deemed dangerous. Suddenly, the news was sanitized to avoid getting canceled. The FBI began weekly meetings with Twitter and kept close tabs on other social media such as Facebook. Misinformation and disinformation police, called “fact checkers,” were deployed to censor speech. Entire university programs were set up to offer disinformation degrees. Universities began getting fat grants to come up with ways to creatively censor words, phrases, and stories that the woke mob refused to abide by.
The deep state and intelligence communities used the media to “prebunk” stories they knew would reverberate through political circles before the election, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story. Hillary Clinton can complain all she wants about 2016 being a stolen election, and the next federal election for president occurred in 2020, the one that the new cyber “expert” CISA director claimed was the “safest” one in U.S. history… because the feds were in charge. He wrote that the real January 6 insurrection occurred in 2017 when the deep state rigged the rules to depict Trump, as Hillary called him, an “illegitimate president.” And did it ever. That insurance policy paid dividends. Democrats arranged a special counsel accusing Trump of being a spy, the Ukraine hoax, two impeachments, and a partridge in a pear tree. It’s a miracle Donald Trump got anything done. That was the plan.
The left found and crowned their legal avenger: Jack Smith, their remedy in very fine suits to four years of Trump. In secret clubhouse meetings above their parents’ garage, the left whispered reverently about Smith’s independence, hailed his stoicism, and grasped him as a firewall between democracy and destruction. The right, however, looked at things differently. They saw Smith as a dogged, smirking prosecutor with a habit of filing charges just before primaries and playing a game of chicken with due process. Both sides, however, agreed on one thing: he was relentless. Now, that same man finds himself under federal investigation for potentially violating the Hatch Act, a statute meant to prevent law enforcement from becoming political tools.
Sen. Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused Smith of seeking to impact the 2024 election in his capacity as special counsel under the Biden-led Justice Department in a letter to the acting head of the Office of Special Counsel, Jamieson Greer, first obtained by Fox News Digital. “As the Office of the Special Counsel is tasked with ensuring federal employees aren’t conducting partisan political activity under the guise of their federal employment, you’re well situated to determine whether Smith broke the law,” the Arkansas Republican wrote. “Many of Smith’s legal actions seem to have no rationale except for an attempt to affect the 2024 election results – actions that would violate federal law,” he continued. That cringeworthy sound we’re not hearing? It’s the awkward silence of a media class that suddenly found itself unsure how to eulogize its white knight without tarnishing the cause.
If you forgot, here’s a quick review of the Hatch Act. This act was created to prohibit executive branch officials, such as a special counsel, from using their authority to influence elections. In this case, Jack Smith didn’t simply toe the line; he ran past it with banners flying. According to Sen. Tom Cotton, Smith timed court filings, manipulated trial calendars, and played strategic legal chess just as the 2024 campaign heated up. Smith did his bloody best to jam President Trump into a courtroom the day before Super Tuesday. If that’s not election interference, what is? The Office of Special Counsel’s Hatch Act Unit has confirmed they’re investigating Smith! OMG! Let’s examine the sequence. Smith dropped the documents case right after Trump won; he asked for appeals to be paused just as political winds shifted, and his final report was buried like bad leftovers, with Volume Two indefinitely sealed.
People defending Smith are calling this a legal strategy. But to most Americans, it appears to be weaponized prosecution. You don’t have to be a lawyer, or even a devotee of “Law & Order,” to understand when a ref tosses flags only when one team is on offense. We only have to watch long enough to see the pattern. Each time Trump’s team looked into Smith’s motivations, the same robotic chorus emerged, “No one is above the law!” Except now, the left treats that mantra as if it were a rhetorical one-way street. If you want that phrase to mean anything, then apply it when the hammer swings in the other direction. When one of your own wears the badge: Apply it! If Jack Smith was truly one of the neutral professionals they claimed he was, not only should he welcome the investigations, but he should demand them.
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but Jack Smith wasn’t defending democracy. He was playing defense for a political establishment that couldn’t stomach losing to Trump. Twice. Smith’s job wasn’t about preserving the rule of law; it was about wrapping it in legalese, delivering it on cue, and timing it for maximum political damage, which was the legal equivalent of leaking a scandal the night before the election.Smith helped turn the DOJ into nothing but a smirking caricature, one that flinched when Hillary bleached servers and looked the other way when Hunter forgot about his illegal purchase of a gun, and suddenly found courage when Trump appeared on the docket.And now, shockingly, Smith is the story. Not his targets, but him.
We need to make one thing perfectly clear: Smith and his team were already on life support when their case collapsed in early 2025. Remember what was happening: Trump had just won the presidency, the Department of Justice had forbidden prosecuting a sitting president, and the classified documents case had fallen completely apart. When Smith finally filed his final report, it vanished behind a redacted curtain. Unfortunately for Jack Smith, Senator Tom Cotton had not forgotten. And the OSC, if it had any spine remaining, shouldn’t either. Because, quite simply, if Smith used his badge to tip the scales, it isn’t a partisan scandal, it’s a constitutional one.
“Americans have seen behind the curtain, and no amount of op-ed space in The New York Times is going to let Brennan and Clapper gaslight the public into believing their actions were anything but politically motivated.”
With the Deep State’s lies about the Russia collusion hoax finally unraveling, panic is setting in, and some of the highest-ranking figures from the Obama administration, including Barack Obama himself, are now squarely in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. Two of the operation’s chief architects, former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper, just tried a last-ditch reputational rehab via a New York Times op-ed. But instead of saving face, they only reminded Americans why trust in the so-called “intelligence community” has collapsed to historic lows. Incredibly, their main defense against charges of politicizing intelligence was to point to the very thing they politicized: the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
They cited it like gospel, as if repeating it enough times would erase the growing mountain of evidence that it was crafted under political pressure, built on cherry-picked intel, and propped up by the now-discredited Steele dossier. It’s the equivalent of using a forged check to prove you’re not guilty of fraud. According to Brennan and Clapper, the ICA was beyond reproach simply because it claimed that Vladimir Putin had a “clear preference” for Donald Trump and ran a multi-pronged operation to help him win via hacked emails, social media posts, and internet trolls. But what they left out, conveniently, is that they helped write the script and bullied analysts into signing off on it.
They also wave around the name of special counsel John Durham like a magic shield, claiming that he “found no evidence of an Obama administration conspiracy.” Translation: nothing to see here, move along; just ignore the political pressure, the manipulated assessments, the hidden sourcing, and the whistleblower now confirming everything conservatives have said for years. The special counsel John Durham, who was appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term to investigate how the Russia probe was conducted, similarly found no evidence of an Obama administration conspiracy against Mr. Trump. But he affirmed the findings of the special counsel Robert Mueller, who conducted a separate investigation into the allegations, which found ample evidence of Russian interference in the election.
More recently, the C.I.A.’s Mr. Ratcliffe ordered yet another review of the 2017 assessment, which determined that its “level of analytic rigor exceeded that of most [intelligence] assessments.” Their attempted defense, however, falls apart upon review of the evidence. The newly declassified Durham annex reveals that the Clinton campaign coordinated with George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax during the 2016 election. Internal emails show Clinton approved a plan to link Trump to Russian hackers to distract from her own scandals, with help from Soros-connected operatives and DNC officials. They used cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike to plant the narrative in the media, hoping the FBI would amplify it. Which, of course, they did.
Americans have seen behind the curtain, and no amount of op-ed space in The New York Times is going to let Brennan and Clapper gaslight the public into believing their actions were anything but politically motivated. The newly released documents confirm what many suspected all along: the Obama administration was unhappy that the original intel downplayed Russia’s impact in 2016, so it ordered up the infamous January 2017 ICA, laced it with Steele dossier garbage, and forced it through the system. Thanks to courageous whistleblowers, we now know that Brennan and his inner circle strong-armed analysts into backing conclusions that they didn’t actually support. There was pushback, and for good reason: Everyone knew the dossier was pure fiction, a political hit job dressed up as intelligence. Brennan and Clapper see what’s coming. With the walls closing in, they’re not offering clarity; they’re trying to cover their backsides.
I’d like to talk about the economy here at the beginning of August. We’ve just finished July. We have some of the July reports, but mostly, they’re still from June. If you look at the three or four main categories that adjudicate the health or the malady of an economy, they’re pretty good. GDP came in at 3.0. That was not predicted to be that high. The inflation rate may have just come out for July. There are different reports, but it’s about 2.7%. It was 2.6% in May. January was 3.0%. For the year, it’s about 2.4%. So, inflation is still tolerable. It’s not growing—an annualized rate at 2.4%. So, you have a good GDP, you have a good inflation rate, you have a good jobs report. We’re at about 4.1% unemployment in the month of June. We picked up 150,000 new jobs—that wasn’t predicted.
As far as money coming into the Treasury and going out, we had a historical May. We’ll wait and see what June and July are like, but we actually had more money coming into the Treasury than the government spent. I want to gauge the reaction to this good news. Of course, we expect the Left to discount it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that these figures are all bogus, even though they’re from non-administration sources, government bureaucracies. We also had a member of Congress come on and say that Donald Trump fudged them. On the GDP, we had The Wall Street Journal say, that’s just because GDP is measured also by imports and exports, and we had fewer imports and more exports. But isn’t that good? But they said that was an aberration.
So, we’ve had people attack this. Most of the people said, as far as more money coming in than going out, that’s only because of May, and it will never be true again. Well, we’ve had Mays in 2024 or 2023, all the way back to 2017, the first year of the Trump administration. This was the only one in which we had more money coming in—a surplus. Then we get to the question of Jerome Powell. He’s the head of the Federal Reserve. Usually, the Fed cuts rates when they’re worried about political and economic instability, and that means, basically, a recession. Now, remember that The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and our main media organs all told us in May when Donald Trump was talking about “art of the deal” tariffs, “I’m gonna announce a high tariff, then negotiate down to 10 or 15%,” which is precisely what he did.
But nevertheless, they said at the beginning of August, midsummer, we were going to have high inflation or stagflation, bad job growth, static GDP, and a trade war along with a Wall Street collapse. Basically, a recession. Well, Wall Street stock prices are at historical highs. Every one of those predictions was wrong. So, if they were wrong and the economy is not booming but strong, why would Powell keep interest rates at that 4.5% fed rate that translates into almost over 6% and near 7% 30-year mortgages? After all, the Fed is supposed to lower rates when we have recession. With all this recessionary talk, you thought that he would lower rates. Now, he says he’s looking at the economy and he’s not lowering rates because he doesn’t yet see a recession?
But he’s been told that he was worried about the economy. If he’s worried about a trade war and tariffs and soft job growth—which was predicted but didn’t happen—why doesn’t he lower interest rates? And the fact is, that if you look at the interest rates that he did cut right before the 2024 election and his all-over-the-map attitude toward interest rates today, there is no logic. So, now he’s rejected the earlier prognosis that we were in a recession. It makes no sense. Why is this important? Why is this important when the Washington Post says that the numbers are rigged or we’re really not as strong as we think we are with GDP, or Powell can’t be consistent and adjudicate rates going up or down based on recession or boom?
We’re paying $3 billion a day in interest. A day. Our defense budget costs less—that trillion-dollar defense budget—than the interest payments, per year. Donald Trump is trying to cut taxes and deregulate and grow the economy without increasing the deficit he inherited at about $2 trillion. He thinks that eventually, an expanded economy will bring in new revenue—sort of supply-side economics—but in the short-term, he does not want to grow that deficit by giving tax cuts. So, what is he doing? He thinks the tariffs will bring in—without hurting GDP here or abroad—about a third of a trillion dollars. He thinks if he can decrease the interest rate by a point or a point and a half, he might get another third of a trillion—maybe cut the interest cost by $1 billion a day down to $2 billion from $3 billion. So, you’re about one-third of the way to cut the deficit. That’s pretty good when you had tax cuts.
That won’t happen if the interest rates stay high and the economy stays solid and doesn’t give you any reason or worry over an inflationary spiral, which it hasn’t so far. Bottom line, things are going very well. All of the experts were wrong, and yet the experts do not admit they were wrong. They say, “We were wrong,” privately, “but we’re going to be proved right because either we hope or we expect the economy to do poorly.” My guess is, even if the economy cools down and does poorly, Powell will not cut interest rates. He has a personal stake in this. He feels aggrieved. He feels he has to be vindicated and he’s stubborn and he will not show the same flexibility he did during the campaign year 2024.
Neither Ukraine nor its Western backers have any means to counter Russia’s newly deployed intermediate-range Oreshnik missile, Michael Maloof, a former senior Pentagon security analyst, told RT in an interview on Friday. Maloof noted that the Oreshnik could “easily shift the balance of power overwhelmingly in favor” of Russia in any conflict, including the ongoing hostilities with Ukraine. “Having a hypersonic [missile] for which there’s no defense currently… is astonishing. It absolutely alters that balance of power dramatically, for which the Ukrainians have no defense,” he said. He noted that while the US is working to adapt missile defense systems such as THAAD to counter hypersonic threats, these programs remain under development.
“There’s no operational ability at this point to deal with a hypersonic missile,” Maloof said, adding that the Oreshnik could reach its targets within mere minutes. The former analyst added that the missile also travels at a speed of over 7,000 miles (11,000km) an hour. “There’s no defense against that,” he said. The missile system, Maloof stated, has already been tested successfully in Ukraine in battlefield conditions. He was referring to a strike on Ukraine’s Yuzhmash military industrial facility in the city of Dnepr in November 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin said afterward that the missile’s warheads flew at speeds exceeding Mach 10 and could not be intercepted by existing air defenses.
The missile could also carry conventional and nuclear payloads and travel up to several thousand kilometers. According to Putin, the Oreshnik strike on Ukraine was a response to the country’s decision to use Western-supplied long-range missiles for attacks deep into Russia. On Friday, the Russian president said that the first serially produced Oreshnik missile system had entered service with the armed forces. He also noted that the question of supplying the weapons to Belarus, Russia’s key ally, will likely be resolved by the end of the year.
“Russian troops are pushing north in Zaporhyzhia, moving south through Sumy and Kharkiv, and advancing to the west, having already taken territory in Dniepropetrovsk. No pressure from Washington or Europe will alter this reality.”
Donald Trump made another move in his feckless game of global checkers today in Scotland, with the announcement that he is giving Russia a new, much shorter deadline of ten days to end the war in Ukraine. Trump warned that if President Vladimir Putin does not reach a deal by around August 7–9, the US will impose new sanctions and “severe tariffs” on Russia and countries supporting its war effort. Trump’s new deadline elicited a collective yawn in Moscow. Since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO), trade between the US and Russia has shrunk dramatically. In 2021, US exports to Russia totaled approximately $6.4 billion and US imports from Russia totaled about $29.7 billion. This resulted in a US trade deficit with Russia of about $23.3 billion for that year. In 2024, total trade in goods between the United States and Russia declined sharply due to ongoing sanctions, war-related restrictions, and other political measures.
US exports to Russia in 2024: bApproximately $526 million, marking a decrease of over 12% compared to 2023. Major U.S. exports included medical/technical equipment, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and some food and chemical products. U.S. imports from Russia in 2024: About $3.0–$3.27 billion, down more than 34% compared to 2023 and down over 75% from pre-war levels in 2021–2022. Key Russian exports to the U.S. were fertilizers (about $1.3 billion), precious metals (about $878 million), and inorganic chemicals (about $683 million). Energy imports have almost entirely ceased. Trump’s threat of new sanctions is just a blowhard bloviating… Ending shipments of fertilizers and precious metals is not going to hurt the Russian economy one bit. Thanks to the sanctions Biden levied in 2022, Russia’s economy grew to be the fourth largest in the world as measured by purchasing power parity.
Western propaganda that the Russian economy is failing–citing current growth of 1.4%–ignores the fiscal policies that the Russian central bank put in place in 2024 to cool inflation. But those measures were only temporary, with the central bank announcing a two percent cut in interest rates late last week. That means that Trump, if he is serious, will impose bone-crunching tariffs on China and India. Both countries appear unfazed by Trump’s bullying bluster. China in particular holds some very strong cards… Rare-earth minerals desperately needed by the US military industrial complex. I think this will be another Trump nothing-burger.
So why did Trump whittle down the deadline? One possible explanation concerns the rapid deterioration of the military situation for Ukraine. Russia is making rapid advances all along the line of contact and even Ukrainian media and social media outlets are expressing alarm. Is that what sparked Trump’s decision to shorten the time for Russia to agree to a ceasefire? Fifty day or 12 days, it does not matter. Trump has no leverage to compel Russia to agree to the ceasefire that the US and Europe want to be imposed. Russia is going to continue with its offensive and will take more territory in the coming weeks. Russian troops are pushing north in Zaporhyzhia, moving south through Sumy and Kharkiv, and advancing to the west, having already taken territory in Dniepropetrovsk. No pressure from Washington or Europe will alter this reality.
“Democrats aren’t just dragging their feet—they’re torching decades of Senate norms in a blatant attempt to kneecap Trump’s presidency. They don’t care about tradition. They care about power.”
After weeks of stonewalling from Democrats, the GOP is demanding action on dozens of President Trump’s pending nominees—and they’re signaling they’re ready to play hardball if they don’t get it. With the Senate set to leave town for a long recess, Republicans say enough is enough. Emerging from a closed-door lunch on Saturday, Republican senators made it clear they want the nomination backlog resolved by the end of the day. If Democrats won’t cooperate, they’re prepared to force the issue. “The immediate concern right now is can we figure something out,” Majority Leader John Thune told reporters. “If we can’t, then we will have to resort to other options, and we’ve got a lot of support for doing that.”
Translation? Republicans are done playing games. They’re ready to blow up Senate procedure if that’s what it takes to break the Democrat blockade on Trump’s nominees. Since January, not a single nominee has been confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent—a complete break from tradition. As Sen. Tom Cotton highlighted, 57% of Biden’s nominees got in without opposition. Even Trump’s first term saw 65% sail through. This time? Zero. Democrats are obstructing for the sake of “resisting” Trump—and the GOP’s finally had enough. This isn’t just gridlock—it’s deliberate sabotage. What we’re witnessing now is an unprecedented campaign of partisan obstruction. Democrats aren’t just dragging their feet—they’re torching decades of Senate norms in a blatant attempt to kneecap Trump’s presidency. They don’t care about tradition. They care about power.
Republicans are running out of patience—and fast. According to Politico, GOP senators are once again eyeing the so-called “nuclear option,” as Democrats continue to grind Trump’s nominees to a halt. While leadership originally expected any rules fight to come later in the fall, frustrations have boiled over as Republicans remain stuck in Washington with no resolution in sight. “We prefer to strike a deal,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said, but he added that if Democrats won’t budge, Republicans are prepared to change the rules. Naturally, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer defended the Democrats’ obstruction, accusing Trump’s nominees of being uniquely “flawed” and “unqualified”—a laughable claim from the same party that gave us people such as Xavier Becerra, Pete Buttigieg, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and a bunch of judicial nominees who didn’t seem to know anything about the law.
But at this point, Republicans know the game, and they may finally be ready to stop playing by the Democrats’ rules. As much as I believe in the idea of preserving tradition, Democrats have shown a willingness to rewrite the rules to suit their needs, and Republicans need to show they’re willing to fight fire with fire. Staff for Thune and Schumer are now quietly negotiating. Schumer made a counteroffer Friday night. But if you think that’s a sign Democrats are taking the threat seriously, think again. The deal they offered was a joke.
They offered to confirm a small batch of nominees now in exchange for unfreezing some funding, with another batch later—unless the administration submits another spending clawback. The whole thing would require unanimous consent on the Senate floor. Republicans shouldn’t bite. Democrats are offering crumbs while demanding the GOP surrender leverage on spending. It’s absurd. Republicans already have the power to jam these nominees through—no need to trade it away. Yes, preserving Senate norms is ideal. But Democrats burned that bridge long ago—nuking filibusters, gutting procedures, and tossing precedent out the window. They won’t honor any deal once they’re back in power.
Some countries have true, serious problems. Then there are countries that have national discussions over a buxom young white woman in a jeans commercial. This week, the internet—and the media more generally—exploded over a commercial starring actress Sydney Sweeney for American Eagle. The spot features Sweeney, lying seductively on the ground as she buttons her jeans, stating, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” The ad concludes with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” According to those who apparently have far too much time on their hands, this ad is reminiscent of Nazism. Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian lamented that the ad felt “regressive.”
A wide variety of colorfully haired and bewilderingly pierced TikTok users labeled the ad a “Nazi dog whistle,” presumably based on the idea that praising the genes of a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with an hourglass figure is somehow an ode to the Third Reich. Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic wrote, “(Sweeney’s) image has been co-opted by the Right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs.” Yes, we have now reached the point in American life that it is controversial to suggest that men like breasts; it is now apparently “right-coded.” This is patently insane.
But perhaps the insanity isn’t just a sign of a culture infected with terrible ideas, ranging from the mutability of gender to the evisceration of beauty standards to the willfully ridiculous attempt to treat the male sex drive as uniquely evil. Perhaps it’s a sign of a culture that has lost touch with actual, real problems in the world. A culture that is out of touch not just with reality, but with threat. For a while, such cultures can survive. After all, America is uniquely placed in the world: thousands of miles from any direct foreign policy threat, blessed by natural resources beyond those of any other country, heir to a robust tradition of Anglo-American law and custom that have generated an unprecedented level of economic prosperity.
But reality has a funny way of clocking such cultures back into reality. It turns out that history never stops moving, that threats never stop militating. And what’s more, a self-obsessed and shallow culture that worries about whether boobs in jeans ads are a return to Hitler makes itself uniquely vulnerable to such threats. A people who imbibe the stupidity that trauma amounts to taking mild offense at a dumb pun in an advertisement is a people utterly unprepared for the return of reality. The great German leader Otto von Bismarck once remarked, “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” We can only pray that Providence continues to protect us from our own idiocy as we sink ever deeper into social media reveries of borderline psychopathy.
For over a century, two dead advisors have shaped the way great powers view the world. On one side, we have Alfred Thayer Mahan—the American naval officer who believed sea power determined global supremacy. According to Mahan, controlling the oceans means controlling trade. If you control trade, you control wealth. If you control wealth… well, you get the picture. On the other side is Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who argued the exact opposite. Forget the seas, he said. Whoever controls the “World Island”—Eurasia—controls the world. Railways, rivers, pipelines, and land empires are what count. Not frigates and aircraft carriers. Mahan and Mackinder are no longer with us, but their ideas continue to influence the world today. And we’re watching it unfold.
It’s Mahan’s World… For Now. The United States and the United Kingdom—Mahan’s spiritual children—have long benefited from an ocean-based order. Ruling the waves built their prosperity and power. The British Empire’s reach was maritime. The U.S. Navy now patrols every major sea lane. The dollar reigns supreme because oil, commodities, and trade settle in greenbacks. That world—the Mahan world—is why Americans live like kings while land powers like Russia and China have spent decades playing catch-up. But Mahan’s world has limits. Especially when you try to keep your rivals bottled up in theirs. That’s precisely what the U.S. has tried to do with China. The First and Second Island Chains—stretching from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Guam and Indonesia—are like maritime prison bars hemming China in.
They prevent Beijing from turning its navy into a global force and restrict its access to the open Pacific. And that’s no accident. It’s U.S. policy. So what did China do? Simple: they pivoted landward. Hence, the Belt and Road Initiative. If the Americans and their allies can dominate the seas, the Chinese reasoned, then the answer lies in dominating the land. Ports, railways, roads, pipelines, dry docks, fiber optic cables, and power grids. Not just in Asia, but across Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and even into Europe. What Mackinder once called the “Heartland” is now becoming a Chinese-funded construction site. And then there’s Russia. After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the West slapped Moscow with every sanction it could think of. No dollars. No euros. No Swift. No tank parts. No semiconductor chips. No comfy Davos forums.
In effect, the West attempted to sever Russia’s ties to the global economy. Cut it off from the ocean-based system. And how did Russia respond? They doubled down on Mackinder. On land power. On rivers, specifically. If you watch the YouTube video How Russia Plans to Rule Eurasia by River—and I strongly suggest you do—it outlines Moscow’s plan to build out an internal network of rivers, ports, and rail links that integrate the entire Eurasian landmass. The Volga. The Don. The Ob. The Lena. Not names we normally associate with global trade, but maybe we should.
What’s emerging is a strategic marriage between Chinese capital and Russian geography.One has money and ambition. The other has territory, rivers, and a pressing need to stay relevant. Together, they’re laying the foundation for a new continental infrastructure—one that’s largely immune to the U.S. Navy, the EU’s bureaucracy, or whatever sanctions the White House dreams up next. Think about what that means. New trade corridors will be built from China to Europe, bypassing the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. Russian river ports will feed Chinese rail lines into Kazakhstan, Iran, and Turkey. They’ll have pipelines that carrier groups can’t blockade. Their digital infrastructure routed through friendly capitals, not Silicon Valley or Brussels. A Mackinder world. Built in plain sight.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, says Germany is digging its own grave. Her words came during an interview Weidel gave to Hungary’s Patriot Extra program, covered by Mandiner. According to the nationalist politician, the European Union has “completely degenerated,” does not represent nation states or sovereign peoples, and has now become a machine run by overpaid bureaucrats that only causes harm. Weidel says Germany’s economic decline is rooted in domestic decisions. High energy prices, the green transition, and the phase-out of nuclear power have made German industry uncompetitive, especially the automotive industry, which she says is being deliberately destroyed by Brussels regulations.
“All the bad rules were made in Brussels,” she said, emphasizing that the ban on internal combustion engines and environmental sanctions benefit China and American companies, not European workers. According to Weidel, Germany and Europe need a free market where everyone can produce and buy what they want. Weidel also said the German government was playing politics against the population, lying to people, and doing the opposite of what it promised. On Angela Merkel, the AfD leader said that she was “the first Green Chancellor, not the conservative leader of the CDU.” She also called current Chancellor Friedrich Merz a representative of the “losing side.” Weidel contrasted Germany with Hungary, praising Viktor Orbán for his “common sense” and as a role model for national sovereignists. “I can only congratulate Viktor Orbán, Hungary is doing much better,” she said.
“Hungary is the only one that clearly stands out and says: this cannot be done with us,” she said. According to Weidel, in Germany, on the other hand, there is an unstable government that is deliberately worsening the financial situation of the population in order to make people vulnerable. Weidel further stated that she believes Hungarians live relatively better than Germans, compared to the country’s economic performance. According to Weidel, “Everyone should leave the EU.” Weidel claimed Brussels is trying to build an “artificially created political product” against Viktor Orbán in the person of opposition leader Péter Magyar to interfere in Hungary’s internal affairs. However, Péter Magyar, supported by green and woke politicians and whom Ursula von der Leyen is feeding from the palm of his hand, is doomed to failure, she said, stating that Orbán will emerge from this fight stronger.
She sees similar interventions from Brussels in Romania and Germany, where the AfD is openly persecuted and even faces a potential ban. Weidel was particularly critical of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whom she called “openly corrupt,” specifically commenting on the SMS agreements made for Pfizer vaccine purchases during Covid. “I wonder where the commissions went?” she asked, adding that Von der Leyen and the Brussels elite were “only working to line their own pockets” and that the EU’s institutional system could not be reformed but must be completely rebuilt. In the interview, Weidel outlined what reforms an AfD government would introduce: immediate border closure and mass deportations; social benefits reform, i.e., only those who have paid into the system would receive support; tax cuts for workers; the return of nuclear energy and cheap energy sources; lifting the ban on internal combustion engines; radical reduction of bureaucracy.
“The whole Brussels superstructure is impoverishing us all,” she stressed, adding that the German people are increasingly angry because instead of a “brave new world,” they have been given a more expensive, poorer, and more vulnerable life. Weidel said Germany should return to the ideal of a strong, independent middle class, which Hungary represents in Europe today. According to Weidel, the European elections and the processes in Germany also show that people are fed up with globalist, centralized power. He believes that the restoration of national sovereignty, a strong middle class, and the free market are inevitable, even in the face of Brussels. “The question is whether Germany can still change or will it be completely absorbed by the Brussels deep state,” she told viewers.
RFK Jr. tells Tucker Carlson that before getting to know Trump he bought into the media narrative that Trump was a narcissist, when actually he understands now that Trump is one of the most empathetic people he's ever known. pic.twitter.com/PmzhdEHn9R
"If you sign up for Digital ID, it’ll be the last truly free decision you ever make."
Dr. Michael Yeadon, a toxicologist & former Pfizer executive, issues a dire warning: Digital ID isn’t convenience—it’s control. Once adopted, governments & institutions will recognize you only… pic.twitter.com/c8hHl8Dkxf
Thanks to the work of Bill Gates and other psychopaths, soon absolutely everything we consume from vegetables, to dairy, to meat will contain mRNA, whether we like it or not pic.twitter.com/9kww2qLbLs
Senator Kennedy Urges Trump to Take Charge of House GOP After Speaker Johnson’s CR Debacle
SENATOR KENNEDY: "I saw what you saw. I mean, it's a multiple vehicle pileup. I knew as soon as I saw the bill, it was going to be trouble. The thing was as big as a Costco. And Speaker… pic.twitter.com/DCxDqcPtII
Bad news: @JoeBiden is delaying his retirement to clean up his legacy. But with the election lost and Biden out to pasture — Democrats are leaking like a busted sink. In a bombshell report, over 50 Biden insiders told the @WSJ that Joe was even worse than we thought… Biden… pic.twitter.com/GgC8Fu7n1M
Update (1752ET): The first vote to kick the can down the road until 2027 has failed the House, by a vote of 174-235-1, with 38 Republicans voting ‘no’. The bill required 2/3 of the vote under a fast-track method, yet didn’t even clear a simple majority. Polymarket odds of a shutdown have spiked to 76% as of this writing * * * Update (1752ET): In what comes as a surprise to nobody, Democrats want their pork – and have said “Hell no” to the massively reduced spending package that Mike Johnson rolled out after conferring with the Trump team. “The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It’s laughable. Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters as he walked into a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday afternoon. In short, it’s doomed. “I’m not simply a no. I’m a hell no,” Jeffries then said at the closed-door meeting, Politico reports, citing three people familiar with the meeting.
That’s 38 Republicans voting to express no confidence in Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. A stunning rebuke for a guy who won unanimous support in conference just weeks ago. What a turnaround. He’s in very big trouble. https://t.co/bcOHiNWCTn
[..] With Friday’s government shutdown looming – and odds spiking after everyone figured out that the 1,547-page Continuing Resolution (CR) was full of Orwellian bullshit and other malarkey, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has gone to Donald Trumps team with hat in hand. The new plan will be a federal funding stopgap plan that includes disaster aid, pushing off the debt limit fight for two years, and a one-year farm bill extension, Politico reports, citing Republicans familiar with the discussions. No word on how close this comes to a “clean” bill, or how much of the aforementioned bullshit is gone – such as funding the Global Engagement Center, shielding the Jan. 6 committee from subpoenas, and funding new biolabs, but we guess we’ll find out. Also unknown is whether Democrats will support the plan.
“But Trump had made an 11th hour public demand that any stopgap bill should deal with the debt limit. Trump’s team is pushing for at least a commitment to lift the debt limit before Jan. 20. The level of disaster aid and whether it’s completely paid for is still unclear. The package would also likely include some additional economic aid for farmers, amid threats from rural Republicans to oppose any stopgap that doesn’t include the funding”. -Politico. In a closed door meeting on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Democratic lawmakers: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” citing JFK. Polymarkets odds of a government shutdown went from 15% yesterday to 49% this morning. According to Punchbowl News, here’s what happened, and what’s next;
At some point today, House Republicans and Democrats will likely have separate party meetings to chart their path forward. Democrats have announced their meeting for 9 a.m. We’ll talk more about them below. But make no mistake — this is Johnson and Trump’s mess to solve. And we’re inching toward a shutdown as government funding runs out at midnight Friday. Johnson was mostly MIA Wednesday, holed up in his Capitol office for hours without showing his face. Even the House GOP leadership team felt like they were being kept in the dark about what was happening. Late in the evening, Johnson met with Vance, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Rules Committee Chair Michael Burgess (R-Texas). Jordan and Roy are conservative hardliners. Diaz-Balart is a senior appropriator.
As Scalise left around 10 p.m., he told reporters “We’re not there yet” when asked whether the debt-limit boost would be part of any new government-funding plan. “A lot of things have come up,” Scalise added.A somewhat obvious play may be a funding bill with a two-year debt-limit extension. Why? Because Trump supports increasing the debt limit now. Given how volatile Trump was during his first term, there’s no guarantee he’ll do this again. (For what it’s worth, Biden administration officials estimate the debt limit won’t be reached until sometime next summer. GOP leaders were planning to handle it in a reconciliation bill). Trump is giving Johnson cover for the time being. It’s limited, however. Because Trump, once again, has put his party in a bind. There are probably dozens of Republicans who have never voted for raising the debt ceiling. Now Trump is forcing them to do so.
The US government is facing a partial shutdown after a stopgap spending bill pitched by lawmakers earlier this week was scrapped under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The current funding expires on Friday, and unless a bill is passed before that deadline, millions of US federal workers will be left without paychecks. The text of the new spending plan, known as a continuing resolution (CR), was released on Tuesday just days before the deadline. The package largely provides for the government to continue to spend at current levels for the next three months, giving the newly elected Congress time to work on more permanent federal funding. The 1,547-page bill includes a pay raise for lawmakers, $100 billion for disaster relief funding and $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, numerous provisions including foreign investment restrictions and new health care policies, among other authorizations.
US Republicans balked at the proposed package right after its release, slamming it as being too bloated and full of Democratic policy priorities. Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk – pitched by Trump as the head of his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a panel charged with finding ways to slash federal spending – launched an entire campaign against the package on X. “This bill should not pass,” Musk wrote early on Wednesday, repeatedly posting different versions of this call throughout the day and late into the night, making a total of more than 60 updates. He decried the bill as “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” and ultimately “one of the worst bills ever written.” Musk’s tirade sparked a virtual flashmob of disapproving statements regarding the bill, which culminated with condemnation by Donald Trump, who called it full of “Democrat giveaways.”
“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” he said in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance, posted on his TruthSocial account. Many observers noted that it was unusual for the incoming president and his team to tip the scales on legislation before officially coming into power. CNN and The Washington Post reported late on Wednesday that the bill had been killed, with Musk confirming it in yet another post on X.
“Your elected representatives have heard you, and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed!” he wrote, adding in another post that “no bills should be passed Congress until January 20,” when Trump takes office. It is currently unclear whether House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spearheaded the failed bill, will be able to come up with an alternative before Friday’s deadline. According to The Hill’s sources, Johnson could propose a “clean” CR, which would entail dropping the additional provisions included in the package, such as disaster aid and assistance for farmers. However, Johnson has not yet scheduled a vote on the bill.
I'm not sure if people have truly grasped the power of X.
The House was set to pass a BS spending bill.
After just a few hours of posting on X by Musk & X users, the bill was effectively killed… potentially saving the US taxpayer billions of dollars.pic.twitter.com/TbvGfLVFJ8
Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale expressed strong optimism for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative during his appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. The Palantir co-founder highlighted the “very bold” reforms being planned by co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, revealing that the DOGE team is already hard at work on strategic priorities. With over 100 people on board, the team is preparing to enact immediate changes, including staff removals and regulatory rollbacks.
SHAWN RYAN: We’re both pretty fired up about the [Trump administration]. Who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular?
JOE LONSDALE: I’m most excited about Elon, Vivek and the DOGE effort because this is something I’ve wanted to see for forever. I’m probably like one of the only guys in tech that’s done a lot in policy on the right, on the small government side for the last 10-20 years, and it’s like the world just shifted this way—like the vibe shift is exactly in line with stuff I’ve been thinking and talking about for a decade. I’m so excited about this.
SHAWN RYAN: How fast do you think they’re going to start cleaning this stuff up?
JOE LONSDALE: They’re already doing it, man. They can’t really officially do it yet, but they’re already making all the plans. There’s people working hard there. There’s guys picking me, ‘Joe, we need another engineer for this,’ ‘We’re trying to map this out,’ ‘We need more lawyers for this. They’re going right now as hard as they can and getting ready. It’s going to be really bold. I think the way Elon works in general is just like, “What can we do right now, and then what can we do next? Let’s just focus on what we can do right now.” So they have what’s called their ‘Day One priorities,’ and they’re just focusing and sprinting on everything they could do day one. I think they’re going to have a lot of stuff ready for day one.
They’re bringing in at least well over 100 people for the DOGE effort, and they’re going to put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs. There’s these policy placements that are all working with DOGE and being liaisons with DOGE. They’re going to come out of the gate with a bunch of general things—removing certain people, removing certain regulations. I can’t go into the details exactly of what they’re going to be doing, but it’s going to be really aggressive right from the start.” Meanwhile, Lonsdale stressed the need to rebuild America’s manufacturing base.
“I’m concerned in general that we don’t have an advanced manufacturing base that’s nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective it’s extremely dangerous and if we want to be ready—so in World War II it wasn’t that we had like a bunch of big defense contractors that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war.” “If we’ve basically gotten rid of a lot of that base and we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this; he shifted it back. I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree we need to fix this. But this is where the tariffs against China, if they’re done correctly, are not totally insane at all. It makes a lot of sense to me,” he continued.
"I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective it's extremely dangerous and if… pic.twitter.com/hd4q3wRrIP
The transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in 2016 went like every other presidential transition in modern history. The old administration had extended meetings with the new, and old agency heads and their staff trained the new ones. It was managed by Chris Christie and then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence. It was funded by the General Services Administration and the incoming team received emergency drills, confidential documents, security briefings, and training sessions on emergency protocols. The FBI was brought on board to vet all new hires. That’s because the incoming administration believed that the system worked. It had won and therefore would be in charge. That’s how it is supposed to work in the United States. The idea of this process is to ensure continuity in government from one administration to the other.
In normal times, all of this would be a good idea. The Founders set up a structural system of government with minimal functions, stable law, checks and balances, and established elections for president every four years to ensure that the chief executive served with the people’s consent. Most functions of government were handled by the states, in any case. There was never supposed to be a need for a fundamental regime change. We merely changed administrators and members of Congress. The rest was supposed to take care of itself, which is why it would seem to make sense that the old administration trains the new one, and a permanent staff of experts and civil service employees helps the new kids learn the ropes from those with experience. And yet here we are. The Trump administration’s mandate from voters is not just for a change in personnel.
The mandate is in fact for fundamental regime change within the framework of democracy. The administrative state, which is nowhere found in the Constitution, has over time developed far more power than elected leaders. That absolutely must change, as voters made clear in November 2024. It was yet another case, just like in 2016, of the candidate winning whom nearly the whole of mainstream media believed would not win, and of the whole of what anyone would call the establishment disfavoring the result. The victory was so overwhelming as to amount to a primal scream against government as usual. In this case, it makes no sense for the machinery that the incoming administration wants to overthrow to be in charge of the transition. Remember that this is not Team Trump’s first rodeo. Last time, it went along with all the protocols, funding, systems, and sessions.
The White House staff members went through day after day of lectures from government experts on how Washington works. They sat through intelligence briefings. They were schooled in protocols for the management of nuclear war, biological warfare, natural disasters, and pandemics. They put up with all the PowerPoint presentations, exhortations, manuals, lists, and introductions to people who really run the government. They assumed that once the president was sworn in, he would in fact be the president and those whom he appointed would be in charge.
[..] After leaving office in January 2021, the Trump team went to work trying to figure out what the heck had happened in the first term to cause everything to go so wrong, or, more specifically, what enabled the administration’s authority to be so thoroughly subverted from within. It concluded that the real problem began with the transition itself. That was when the permanent bureaucracy first asserted its power over the incoming administration. That’s when the deep state got its hooks in. This time, the team has a very different plan. It is being managed by trusted members of Trump’s inner circle. They have not allowed the General Services Administration to manage any aspect of the transition. They have done this by refusing to accept any money from any government source.
Instead, the transition has been entirely privately funded, with methods deployed to make sure that the funding sources are not tainted by deep state contacts. The explicit purpose has been to avoid subversion. It’s been the same with FBI vetting. The incoming Trump administration simply does not trust the process and for good reason. It was the FBI that had spied on the campaign and even raided Trump’s own home. Furthermore, it worked with other agencies to deploy myriad forms of lawfare for years.
This transition is without precedent. The permanent staff of government itself only became the U.S. norm starting in 1883, and it has grown every decade since. At some point in the past, the elected leaders became more like decorations than real rulers of government. The Trump administration cannot achieve its objectives with this status quo. This is the reason for this very different transition. It is a good sign and symbol of what might be coming. We might in fact experience a much-needed change of regime in Washington through exactly the system and process that the Founding Fathers set up. The second term of Trump seems determined to avoid repeating the obvious errors of the last time around.
The legal system has been very good to Donald Trump as he prepares to return to the White House, removing perceived enemies as prosecutors, dismissing charges and even awarding defamation damages. A Georgia appeals court decision to disqualify Fani Willis, the anti-Donald Trump Fulton County district attorney from prosecuting an election interference case against the once and future president marks only the latest victory for Trump in lawfare battles since the 2020 election. Recently, Trump also obtained a $15 million defamation settlement from ABC News after an anchor inaccurately and repeatedly claimed he was found civilly liable for “raping” E. Jean Carroll. The New York Post reported that George Stephanopoulos was repeatedly told by his executive producer not to “use the word ‘rape’” before going on the air to discuss Donald Trump but the ABC News anchor ignored the warning.
Early on in the Republican primary, Trump had to grapple with five cases brought by state and federal prosecutors that tied the former president to courtrooms as the election season kicked off. Now, with Trump still standing as the president-elect for the second time, the state-level cases appear to be embroiled in death throes and delays while the Justice Department’s special prosecutor moved last month to dismiss the two pending federal cases. As the cases die down and Trump prepares to take office in January, even some Democrats are even admitting that the slew of legal cases against him were either unfounded or a strategic blunder. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator John Fetterman, D-Penn., wrote in his first post to Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.
“Weaponizing the judiciary for blatant, partisan gain diminishes the collective faith in our institutions and sows further division,” he continued. Before the election, former Democratic presidential candidate and Congressman Dean Philipps called on New York Governor Kathy Hochul to pardon Trump in his state cases “for the good of the country.” Trump latest win came in the Georgia election interference case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that Willis and her deputies should be disqualified from prosecuting Trump due to the “appearance of impropriety.” “We reverse the trial court’s denial of the appellants’ motion to disqualify DA Willis and her office. As we conclude that the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case the assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed,” the Georgia appeals court wrote in the decision.
During several hearings on the case, Willis faced accusations of financial mismanagement and of carrying on an improper relationship with her chief prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade. The Fulton DA also laid the groundwork for prosecuting Trump before she had even taken office, according to Wade’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year. The judges wrote that the “remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.” This decision indicates that the proceedings in the case are likely to drag out even longer, already significantly delayed by the Willis accusations. Trump and his co-defendants have raised several other legal challenges on appeal including over the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Today, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team in the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump. The final collapse of the House of Willis came after months of her spending enormous amounts of time and money to try to stay at the lead of the high-profile case. Lawfare holds little value unless you are the lead warrior. For over a year, some have criticized Willis for her refusal to recuse herself. When her hiring of her former lover was first disclosed, Willis could have done the right thing for her office, the case, and the public. She could have recused herself and may have preserved her office’s ability to continue with the case. She was then given a further opportunity to do the right thing by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee who disqualified her former lover, Nathan Wade, and found an “appearance of impropriety.”
He, however, left it up to Willis to recuse herself after criticizing her conduct. Some of us noted that the finding did not jive with the order. If there was an “appearance of impropriety,” it would obviously continue with Willis remaining at the lead in the case. However, Willis let the case go dormant and committed her office to the fight to preserve her role. Now, the appellate court has forced her off the case and ordered a new office to take over any prosecution. The court ruled that “[a]fter carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office. The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”
The court admitted that Willis had forced the hand of the court by her refusal to do the right thing in the lower court. It recognized that “an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” Accordingly, it reversed McAfee and found that if “the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case, ‘the assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed.’” The opinion made clear that these cases cannot become the vanity projects of prosecutors. They are expected to do the right thing, even when the right thing does not come easily personally or politically.
The center of the case now shifts to another prosecutor who will have to decide whether it wants to continue the case and what (and who) to prosecute. As I have previously written, the Georgia case has viable crimes against others for offenses such as unlawful entry into restricted areas. The case against Trump was deeply flawed. It read like a legal version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon. As my friend and fellow analyst Andy McCarthy noted, this is the first racketeering case that any of us have seen where the strongest connection between the parties was being named in the charging documents.
A new prosecutor should drop the Trump charges and end this ridiculous lawfare enterprise. If not, the case will likely collapse by its own weight due to the attenuated racketeering theory or other legal problems, including the use of evidence barred under the recent presidential immunity decision. In the end, Willis was reelected by the voters of Atlanta who clearly accepted or supported the weaponization of the criminal justice system to target political opponents. The millions spent in the case were just treated as a cost of doing the business of lawfare. Hopefully, a new prosecution office will restore a modicum of integrity to the Georgia legal system. It is now time to end this circus as the ringmaster leaves the center ring.
The situation at The Washington Post is so dire that two candidates to run the paper — Cliff Levy of The New York Times and Meta’s Anne Kornblut, a former Post editor — both withdrew from consideration for the top newsroom job over the paper’s strategy, sources involved in the process tell us. The Post is scrambling to find a new executive editor, the chair once held by Ben Bradlee, amid shrinking paid readership and revenue. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis, handpicked by owner Jeff Bezos to save The Post, hasn’t impressed the candidates with his vision for the future, the sources tell us. One person involved in the search told us Lewis’ pitch was foggy and uninspiring. Levy, who pulled out last week, and Kornblut, whose conversations ended in September, declined to comment. Other candidates include current interim executive editor Matt Murray.
But it’s hard to imagine this monthslong process unfolding so publicly — only to end with the same guy in charge. A few candidates were asked to write six-page memos — a hallmark of Amazon culture — about their journalistic vision for the paper, using AI and how to grow The Post’s audience. Levy is a two-time Pulitzer winner who was an early advocate for digital innovation, and now is deputy publisher of two prized Times properties, The Athletic and Wirecutter. He started talking to The Post in August after the paper’s search firm, Egon Zehnder, reached out. Kornblut, who declined to move forward with the process after initial conversations, is Meta’s VP of global product content operations. She had a formidable newspaper career before moving to the Bay Area as a tech executive: She was a Washington correspondent for The Boston Globe and The New York Times before becoming a Washington Post reporter and editor for eight years.
Kornblut rose to deputy assistant managing editor for national news, where she was the lead editor on Pulitzer-winning coverage of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Matea Gold — a respected, popular managing editor many reporters wanted in the top job, and who conceived of and ran The Post’s Pulitzer-winning investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — announced last week that she’s moving to The New York Times as Washington editor, making her deputy to the bureau chief. There’s lots of anxiety in The Post newsroom right now about whether the paper is still committed to that kind of fearless accountability reporting. Axios confirmed that the search firm also reached out to Kevin Merida and Steven Ginsberg, two former Washington Post managing editors. Neither expressed interest in the role.
The big picture: Bezos has said little about what he wants for a revived Post. He is scheduled to dine with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago this week — two months after killing a Post endorsement of Trump’s rival, Vice President Harris. Bezos’ various business interests — Amazon and the Blue Origin space company — stand to gain or suffer from Trump’s presidency. The Post has announced no major shifts or innovations under the Lewis regime. Toss in a demoralized staff and invigorated labor unions, and you have a mighty challenge for the next top editor.
Between the lines: The Post has lost a ton of talent this last year, and several stars are talking to competitors about leaving soon. One hot rumor inside The Post: The Atlantic is licking its chops over political writers who are increasingly poachable. Other Posties are eying The New York Times, long known at the Post as “Brand X.” People involved in the process say Bezos has been mostly MIA at the Post, leaving matters to Lewis, who is unpopular in the newsroom.
Several people familiar with The Post’s search were baffled by the apparent absence of editorial vision or business strategy. “I’m not sure it’s salvageable,” one of them said.
Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other country has the capacity to resist his predictable antagonism with the same degree of strength and tenacity, and none arouses more hostility and outrage among MAGA Republicans. In short, China is guaranteed to put President Trump in a difficult bind the second time around: he can either choose to cut deals with Beijing and risk being branded an appeaser by the China hawks in his party, or he can punish and further encircle Beijing, risking a potentially violent clash and possibly even nuclear escalation. How he chooses to resolve this quandary will surely prove the most important foreign test of his second term in office.
Make no mistake: China truly is considered The Big One by those in Trump’s entourage responsible for devising foreign policy. While they imagine many international challenges to their “America First” strategy, only China, they believe, poses a true threat to the continued global dominance of this country. “I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Representative Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice as national security adviser, declared at a 2023 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us.”
As Waltz and others around Trump see it, China poses a multi-dimensional threat to this country’s global supremacy. In the military domain, by building up its air force and navy, installing military bases on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, and challenging Taiwan through increasingly aggressive air and naval maneuvers, it is challenging continued American dominance of the Western Pacific. Diplomatically, it’s now bolstering or repairing ties with key U.S. allies, including India, Indonesia, Japan, and the members of NATO. Meanwhile, it’s already close to replicating this country’s most advanced technologies, especially its ability to produce advanced microchips. And despite Washington’s efforts to diminish a U.S. reliance on vital Chinese goods, including critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, it remains a primary supplier of just such products to this country.
For many in the Trumpian inner circle, the only correct, patriotic response to the China challenge is to fight back hard. Both Representative Waltz, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, and Senator Marco Rubio, his choice as secretary of state, have sponsored or supported legislation to curb what they view as “malign” Chinese endeavors in the United States and abroad. Waltz, for example, introduced the American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020, which was intended, as he explained, “to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals and bring the U.S. supply chain from China back to America.” Senator Rubio has been equally combative in the legislative arena. In 2021, he authored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned goods produced in forced labor encampments in Xinjiang Province from entering the United States.
He also sponsored several pieces of legislation aimed at curbing Chinese access to U.S. technology. Although these, as well as similar measures introduced by Waltz, haven’t always obtained the necessary congressional approval, they have sometimes been successfully bundled into other legislation. In short, Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land. But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so nothing is a given. Some analysts believe that his penchant for deal-making and his professed admiration for Chinese strongman President Xi Jinping may lead him to pursue a far more transactional approach, increasing economic and military pressure on Beijing to produce concessions on, for example, curbing the export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, but when he gets what he wants letting them lapse.
Howard Lutnick, the billionaire investor from Cantor Fitzgerald whom he chose as Commerce secretary, claims that Trump actually “wants to make a deal with China,” and will use the imposition of tariffs selectively as a bargaining tool to do so. What such a deal might look like is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to see how Trump could win significant concessions from Beijing without abandoning some of the punitive measures advocated by the China hawks in his entourage. Count on one thing: this complicated and confusing dynamic will play out in each of the major problem areas in U.S.-China relations, forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated during his annual end-of-year press conference on Thursday that he has not spoken to US President-elect Donald Trump in over four years, and thus expects “there will be plenty to discuss” when their next conversation takes place. The comment came in response to a question from Keir Simmons of NBC News, who asked about the potential dynamics of a future meeting between the two leaders, suggesting that Russia’s position on the global stage has weakened and that Trump would have the upper hand in any talks. “I don’t know when we will meet because he has not said anything about it,” Putin said. “I have not talked to him for more than four years. Of course, I’m ready to talk anytime; I will be ready to meet with him if he wishes.”
The Russian leader went on to refute the notion of a weak Russia, saying that the US journalist and those paying his salary “really want to see Russia in a weakened state,” but as a “well-known writer once remarked: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’” “I believe that Russia has become significantly stronger in the past two or three years. Why? Because we are becoming a truly sovereign country, and we barely depend on anybody. We are capable of firmly standing on our own feet when it comes to the economy,” Putin said. The president highlighted Russia’s economic resilience and stated that the combat readiness of the Russian Armed Forces is among the highest in the world, with the defense industry rapidly expanding and producing essential military equipment.
“That is why I believe that Russia has largely achieved the state we wanted to achieve. It has grown stronger and become a truly sovereign state, and we will make decisions without regard to other people’s opinions, only with our national interests in mind,” he added. During a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, Trump declined to say whether he had spoken to Putin since winning last month’s presidential election, but indicated that he intends to do so at some point.
“We’ll be talking to President Putin, and we’ll be talking to representatives Zelensky and others from Ukraine,” he said. “We’ve got to stop it. It’s carnage,” referring to the almost three-year conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he could end the Ukraine conflict within “24 hours” of taking office by forcing “peace through strength,” but has not provided specifics on how he would do this. Putin previously stated that Trump’s remarks on ending the conflict “deserve attention” and expressed openness to talks with the president-elect. “Should there be an opportunity for a meeting with the newly elected President Donald Trump, I am confident there will be plenty to discuss,” Putin said on Thursday.
“Let them identify a target in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense systems there, and then we will strike it with an Oreshnik..”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has challenged the West to put their modern air defense systems up against Moscow’s new hypersonic Oreshnik missile in what would be a “technological duel.” During his annual end-of-year press conference on Thursday, Putin was asked to comment on opinions expressed by some foreign military experts suggesting that the Oreshnik can easily be shot down by Western missile defense systems. “Well, if those Western experts you mentioned believe that, they should suggest to their employers in the West and the US to conduct a technological experiment. For instance, a high-tech duel of the 21st century. Let them identify a target in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense systems there, and then we will strike it with an Oreshnik. Let’s see what happens. We are ready for such an experiment. Is the other side ready?” Putin asked.
The president explained that given the technical characteristics of the Oreshnik and the current missile defense systems deployed by the West, it would be impossible to stop the missile or its hypersonic warheads after it had been launched. Putin suggested that the results of such a “duel” would be of great interest to both Russia and the US, whose air defense systems are currently operating in Ukraine. Putin was also asked why the Oreshnik is named the way it is, to which he confessed that he doesn’t actually know.
The Russian military carried out the first-ever combat test of the Oreshnik on November 21, using it to destroy a Ukrainian military industrial facility in Dnepr with multiple hypersonic warheads. Putin said at the time that the decision to unveil the Oreshnik was made in response to Ukraine’s long-range strikes on internationally recognized Russian territory made with Western permission. Putin had previously explained that the Oreshnik can carry both nuclear and conventional warheads, which travel at ten times the speed of sound, making it impossible for Western air-defense systems to intercept them.
Russia’s Oreshnik medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile grabbed the attention of military observers the world over after it was fired at a major defense-related enterprise in Dnepropetrovsk days after the US and the UK okayed the launch of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles at targets deep inside Russia.The West is in denial about Russia’s Oreshnik missile that defense systems are powerless to counter, Michael Maloof, former senior security policy analyst in the Pentagon, told Sputnik.He pointed out that Russia’s multi-warhead, nuclear-capable Oreshnik has left the United States far behind.“The US not only does not have a hypersonic offensive system – it doesn’t even have a defensive system that has any hope of stopping Oreshnik and the new class of missiles that are coming out,” the veteran analyst maintained. While the US scrambles to be in the vanguard of such cutting-edge weapons systems, in effect it tends to “put all the bells and whistles on a system, overprice it and then fall behind,” said Maloof.
Washington is reluctant to acknowledge that both Russia and China have weapons systems that the US does not have, namely, hypersonic missiles. The pundit speculated that if the United States had remained in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a missile like the Oreshnik might not exist today. He observed that Russia’s clear demonstration of the missile’s unmatched capabilities serves as “another way of Putin telling Trump to maybe reconsider.”“I think in order to lessen the threshold of war […] and this would be a good start and, at least, beginning with the United States and Russia. And the other countries can follow suit,” said Maloof, adding: “It’s something that the world needs to really focus in on, recognize, and deal with constructively.”
Veteran Swiss diplomat Jean-Daniel Ruch has alleged that the US and UK “immorally” prevented Ukraine and Russia from sealing a truce back in April 2022 in the hope of dealing a blow to Moscow. The former official, who at the time served as Swiss ambassador to Türkiye, was in the country when peace talks were taking place. In Istanbul, Ukraine and Russia preliminarily agreed to a draft truce under which Kiev would have renounced its NATO membership aspirations, declared neutrality, and limited the size of its armed forces in exchange for international security guarantees. However, Ukrainian negotiators abruptly pulled out, with Moscow later claiming that then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had urged the Ukrainian leadership not to sign any accord and to “just continue fighting.”
While David Arakhamia, the Zelensky-allied MP who led the Ukrainian delegation, confirmed this in November 2023, Johnson still insists that the allegation is an “absolute steaming, stinking lie.” In an interview with the French-speaking Anti These media outlet on Sunday, Ruch recounted how the “West pulled the plug on the negotiations which were on course to produce a ceasefire.” According to the diplomat, it was clear already in April 2022 that “if the war continued… the dead would be counted at least in tens of thousands, more probably in hundreds of thousands.” Nevertheless, the “Americans and their British allies” intervened in the Istanbul peace talks and scuttled a ceasefire that “was within reach,” insisting on weakening Russia further instead, Ruch claimed.
The former ambassador described the move as “deeply immoral,” suggesting that Kiev is now unlikely to be offered terms as favorable as the ones proposed in 2022 in Türkiye. Speaking on Johnson’s role in those events, the veteran diplomat alleged that the former British leader “was in [Istanbul] on duty for the Americans” as he “doesn’t make this kind of decisions all by himself.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly expressed readiness to engage in dialogue with Kiev based on the draft agreement prepared in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, plus recognition of the “new territorial realities” that have taken shape since. According to the Russian leader, “the document did not come into force only because the Ukrainians were ordered not to do this. The elites in the US and some European countries felt the desire to seek Russia’s strategic defeat.”
The shocking assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, reverberates far beyond the streets of Moscow. On December 17, 2024, Kirillov was killed in a brazen bombing, an act the Russian government has denounced as terrorism. While the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) – Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB – via ‘anonymous sources’ cited in multiple media outlets, has claimed responsibility, labeling Kirillov a war criminal, the truth about his death is likely far more complex – and far more chilling. Kirillov’s death was not just an attack on a prominent Russian official; it was an attack on the truth. For years, he had been at the forefront of investigating and exposing alleged US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, claiming they were part of a broader Western biological warfare agenda.
His assassination raises a deeply unsettling question: Was this a deliberate effort to silence him and prevent his revelations from coming to light? Kirillov’s work was controversial, but his allegations deserved scrutiny. He repeatedly accused the United States of funding clandestine biological laboratories in Ukraine, purportedly operating under the guise of public health initiatives. According to Russian reports, these labs were involved in the development of pathogens that could potentially target specific populations, a claim Washington and Kiev vehemently denied. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Kirillov presented what he claimed were classified documents and intercepted communications proving the existence of such facilities.
He argued that the labs represented a serious threat not only to Russia but to global security. Though his assertions were often dismissed in the West as propaganda, they stirred debate and distrust among nations already skeptical of US military and scientific activities abroad. The timing and method of Kirillov’s assassination are too conspicuous to ignore. A bomb concealed on an electric scooter detonated as he left for work, killing him and his assistant. The sophistication of the attack suggests involvement by professionals with substantial resources. The SBU’s admission of responsibility and Russia’s subsequent arrest of an alleged Ukrainian agent may seem to provide a tidy explanation. However, there are reasons to believe that more powerful actors had a vested interest in Kirillov’s demise.
Kirillov’s investigations threatened to unveil a shadowy intersection of science, warfare, and geopolitics. If even a fraction of his claims about the US biolabs in Ukraine were accurate, they would implicate powerful institutions in serious breaches of international law, including violations of the Biological Weapons Convention. Such revelations would have provoked outrage among non-aligned nations and could have seriously undermined the credibility of the United States and its allies.
People in the European Union are being negatively affected by the marginalization of their national identities, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, arguing that a lack of national sovereignty affects all aspects of life in a state. Speaking during his year-end marathon Q&A session, Putin cited economic stagnation in Germany, claiming Russia’s economy is stable in comparison. One of the event’s co-hosts brought up a story that Putin told recently about a visit to Germany and how all songs performed at an event he was attending were in English. Putin said it was not completely true, since he brought a Russian band with him to be part of the entertainment at the birthday of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The visiting singers learned a native song on their way to Hanover as a gesture of respect to the host, he said.
”Sovereignty is a very important thing. It has to be on the inside, in the heart. I believe that the German people had this feeling of belonging to a homeland and sovereignty eradicated in them during the post-war period,” he mused. ”Who are the Europeans? They are all proud to be European. But they are first of all French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Europeans secondly,” he added. Attempts to tone down national differences in the bloc are affecting everything, including the economy, Putin argued. Russia puts a premium on its sovereignty and enjoys the benefit of deciding its own policies, he concluded.
Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has raised the alarm over Israeli officials floating the idea of replacing Palestinians with Jewish settlers in Gaza. The diplomat also accused the US of shielding Israel through its vetoes in the UN Security Council. Israel has been occupying the West Bank since 1967 in defiance of the international body’s decisions. Israel launched a massive military operation in Gaza following a deadly attack by Hamas militants on the country on October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 people dead and over 250 abducted. The heavy aerial bombardment and ground offensive by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has killed 45,000 Palestinians in the densely populated enclave, according to local Hamas-controlled health officials.
Speaking at a UN Security Council session on Wednesday, Nebenzia stated that the “Israelis continue to further their plans on building new [illegal] settlements in the West Bank,” as well as razing Palestinian homes on made-up pretexts. This, according to the Russian envoy, is precluding any chance of a negotiated settlement to the decades-long conflict. He also noted multiple instances of harassment and violence by Jewish settlers toward Palestinians, with the Israeli authorities allegedly turning a blind eye. “Against this backdrop, Israeli officials’ remarks on forcibly changing the demographics of Gaza with a view to ‘recolonizing’ the enclave are causing particular concern,” Nebenzia said. He went on to claim that Israel is abusing its legitimate right to self-defense by conducting indiscriminate military actions in Gaza, the West Bank, as well as Lebanon and Syria.
“To our huge regret, all efforts by the UN Security Council to impose a ceasefire and free the hostages have so far been blocked by the US,” Nebenzia said, citing Washington’s repeated vetoes of resolutions. As recently as this October, several Israeli ministers and settler activists held a rally near the Gaza border, with attendees calling for the removal of Palestinians from the enclave and repopulating it with Jews. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, said during the event: “What we have learned this year is that everything is up to us. We are the owners of this land.” May Golan, the minister for social equality and women’s rights, echoed this sentiment, pledging that “anyone who uses their plot of land to plan another Holocaust will receive from us… another Nakba” – a term used to describe the mass exodus of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine in 1948.
“Per a 2018 U.N. investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free..”
In the immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future – including whether it can survive as a unitary state or will splinter into smaller states as did Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, a move that ultimately led to a bloody NATO intervention. Moreover, who or what may take power in Damascus remains an open question. For the time being at least, members of ultra-extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appear highly likely to take key positions in whatever administrative structure sprouts from Bashar Assad’s ouster after a decade-and-a-half of grinding Western-sponsored regime change efforts. As Reuters reported on December 12, HTS is already “stamping its authority on Syria’s state with the same lightning speed that it seized the country, deploying police, installing an interim government and meeting foreign envoys.”
Meanwhile, its bureaucrats – “who until last week were running an Islamist administration in a remote corner of Syria’s northwest” – have moved en masse “into government headquarters in Damascus.” Mohammed Bashir, head of HTS’ “regional government” in extremist-occupied Idlib, has been appointed the country’s “caretaker prime minister.” However, despite the chaos and precariousness of post-Assad Syria, one thing seems assured – the country will be broken open to Western economic exploitation, at long last. Multiple reports show that HTS has informed local and international business leaders that when in office, it will “adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy, in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control.”
As Alexander McKay of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute tells MintPress News, state-controlled parts of Syria’s economy may have been under Assad, but corrupt it wasn’t. He believes a striking feature of the ongoing attacks on Syrian infrastructure from forces within and without the country is that economic and industrial sites are a recurrent target. Moreover, the would-be HTS-dominated government has done nothing to counter these broadsides when “securing key economic assets will be vital to societal reconstruction, and therefore a matter of priority”: We can see clearly what kind of country these ‘moderate rebels’ plan to build. Forces like HTS are allied with U.S. imperialism, and their economic approach will reflect this.
Prior to the proxy war, the government pursued an economic approach that mixed public ownership and market elements. State intervention enabled a degree of political independence [that] other nations in the region lack. Assad’s administration understood without an industrial base, being sovereign is impossible. The new ‘free market’ approach will see all of that utterly decimated.” Syria’s economic independence and strength under Assad’s rule and the benefits reaped by average citizens, as a result, were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the decade-long proxy war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions underline this reality – which has now been brutally vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.”
Per a 2018 U.N. investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class, and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school. A U.N. Human Rights Council report two years later noted pre-war Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 – 2011. Civilians’ daily caloric intake “was on par with many Western countries,” with prices kept affordable via state subsidy. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was “one of the best performing in the region, with a growth rate averaging 4.6%” annually.
President Putin commented on the state of the Russian economy at his traditional year-end press conference Thursday, projecting GDP growth of 2-2.5% in 2025, and attributing the economy’s growing strength to “sovereignty.” Sputnik asked a leading financial observer to list off the measures Russia has taken to survive the West’s sanctions onslaught. “To a large extent,” Russia’s economic stability “is the result of the strengthening of sovereignty, including projected onto the economy,” Putin said at Thursday’s annual Q&A session. “Sovereignty comes in different forms, including defense, technological, scientific, educational, cultural. This is especially important for our country, because when we lose our sovereignty, we lose statehood. That’s the most important thing,” Putin added.
Russia’s path toward economic sovereignty goes back over a decade, owing its success largely to the unprecedented sanctions war the West launched against Moscow in 2014, at the start of the Ukrainian crisis, veteran financial analyst Paul Goncharoff says. “Back in 2014 the ‘sanctions on steroids’ era began against Russia. With each following year the dose only increased,” with Russia eventually becoming “the most sanctioned country in history,” Goncharoff, general director of consulting firm Goncharoff LLC, recalled in an interview with Sputnik. Russia was able to overcome the sanctions pressure through baby steps, starting with timely investments in agricultural self-sufficiency to reduce dependence on imports, as well as “stimulating essential import replacements for machinery and technological items,” the observer explained.
Gradually, Moscow “realized that there were economically beneficial alliances to be made with countries that were to one or another degree impacted by restrictions from the West,” Goncharoff added, highlighting the priority eventually given to developing good economic relations with BRICS countries, the bloc’s expansion “and the use of sovereign currencies outside of the US dollar and Euro,” illuminating “the need and desire by many sovereign governments to get out of the ‘influence sphere’ of the G7, and their payments systems.” Russia’s strategy, particularly after its exclusion from the SWIFT banking system in 2022, proved correct, according to the analyst.
“Government fiscal income revenues from Russian imports have dropped in the West and increased in the East by tens of billions of dollars. Russia’s exports increased by US$31 billion after the West imposed the nastiest post 2022 trade sanctions. This has been a boon to the neighboring countries of Central Asia, Southeast Asia, India, MENA, Africa, and the Mercosur countries who now derive benefit from the Western-forced disengagement of Russia,” Goncharoff emphasized. Ultimately, Russia was able to find new partners outside the Western bloc by hitching its economic wagon to developing nations enjoying strong economic growth.
“All essential goods and services have been successfully replaced by Russian manufacture, or from what are now known as ‘friendly’ nations. The US Dollar is no longer used in settling international trade commitments, and with an understandably volatile transition, is gradually becoming systematized,” the observer said. “To sum it up: Import substitution, trade in local sovereign currencies, infrastructure changes toward the Global South and East, redirecting oil and gas to the Global South and East, and participating in the enhancement and expansion of BRICS as the new economic frontier all come together to have formed a successful series of strategic decisions which are ongoing and gathering strength,” Goncharoff concluded.
Tomorrow is a crucial day for the future of Europe. Matteo Salvini, who’s facing up to 6 years in jail for defending Italy’s borders and putting a stop to mass migration, will finally hear his sentencing.
The entirety of the Joe Rogan <> Marc Andreeseen podcast is fascinating, but please, please listen to this part.
The abuse of power within unaccountable (and arguably unconstitutional) federal agencies has become so extreme the stories are almost unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/wwwEifM41U
US President-elect Donald Trump is “not safe,” Russian President Vladimir Putin believes. The Russian president made the remarks on Thursday at a press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, following a two-day Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit. Putin said he was astonished by the way the US election campaign had unfolded, citing the “absolutely uncivilized methods used to battle against Trump, including repeated assassination attempts.” “In my opinion, he is not safe now,” Putin emphasized, noting that “various incidents have happened in US history.” Russia’s president praised Trump as an experienced and intelligent politician, saying he hopes the president-elect is “cautious and understands this.”
Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13 during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a bullet fired from around 150 meters away grazed his ear. The Secret Service responded by taking down the shooter, who was later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, a resident of a suburb of nearby Pittsburgh. Another would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, was arrested in September after he set up an ambush at a Florida golf course belonging to Trump.
On Wednesday, ABC News reported, citing court documents, that US federal authorities have arrested an Arizona man who allegedly threatened to kill Trump and his family via a series of Facebook videos, which he had been posting on a “near daily basis.” Putin said he was even more astonished that Trump’s political opponents had targeted the Republican’s family and children. He called such behavior “revolting” and indicative of the US political system’s decline, noting that even criminal groups would not resort to such methods. Putin said he couldn’t rule out that the Biden administration has been trying to create difficulties for Trump’s relations with Russia. Nevertheless, Moscow is “ready for dialogue with the United States, including with the future administration,” Putin stressed.
In remarks to Russian journalists on Thursday evening, President Vladimir Putin confirmed that missile and drone strikes against the Ukraine’s military infrastructure and the electricity grid carried out on Thursday, and also earlier in the week, are the retaliation the Defense Ministry foreshadowed for the November 23-25 ATACMS strikes on Kursk. Detailed target and damage reports by Russian military bloggers published between noon and 13:00 Moscow time, indicate that strikes by Kalibr and Kh-101 missiles, drones, and other weapons hit targets across the country’s electricity system, including the western regions of Rivne, Khmelnitsky, Volyn, and Vynnitsa. Power blackouts in the Ukraine were reported to be widespread from the line of combat in the east to the Polish border in the west, with up to eleven hours of power outage in Kiev where the temperature has dropped below freezing.
President Putin followed in remarks to Russian reporters at the conclusion of his two-day meetings in Astana, Kazakhstan, in a session posted by the Kremlin at 17:15. Asked several questions about the use of the Oreshnik missile in Russian retaliation for the ATACMS strikes on Kursk on November 23 and 25, Putin quipped that it is being saved for a rainy day. “It would be futile to target a minor objective with a hypersonic missile; that’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. However, we will utilise our entire arsenal against significant targets. As I have previously mentioned, we do not rule out the combat employment of Oreshnik on military-industrial facilities or command centres, including those in Kiev.”
The earlier ATACMS attacks, Putin said, “received a response today. Our Armed Forces have been executing retaliatory strikes over the past couple of days. Today, there was a comprehensive operation: 90 missiles were deployed alongside 100 unmanned strike vehicles. Seventeen targets within Ukraine were struck, encompassing military, military-industrial, and auxiliary facilities which support the armed forces and industrial defence enterprises. I wish to reiterate once more: we will certainly respond to such acts of aggression against the Russian Federation. The timing, methods, and weapons employed will be determined by the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense, as each target necessitates a specific approach and appropriate weaponry.”
Asked again about Oreshnik, “do you think these strikes on the [Kiev decision-making] centres are also possible with Oreshnik because nothing else seems to be able to get it?” Putin replied: “You know, in Soviet times there was that joke about weather forecasts. ‘The forecast is: Everything is possible today during the day.’ ” The president was followed on Thursday evening, Moscow time, by a detailed Defense Ministry bulletin announcing “in response to the strikes of the Kiev regime in the depths of the territory of Russia, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during this week carried out strikes on the locations of the systems of long-range western weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Details of the targets followed, including US and French military personnel reported killed while directing Ukrainian missile operations in bunkers at Kharkov and Odessa.
When it comes to state of the art Russian weaponry, what the inestimable Ray McGovern defines as the MICIMATT – the whole Hegemonic complex – seems to dwell in perpetual stupor. They had no clue about Kalibr, Sarmat, Khinzal, Zircon or Avangard before they were introduced. They had no clue about Oreshnik (‘Hazel”) before the 30-minute protocolar warning by the Russians, stating a missile test was coming, and it was not nuclear. The Americans assumed that would be just another ballistic missile test, as they happen routinely close to the Arctic. Even President Putin didn’t know Oreshnik was ready for its close-up until the last minute. And Kremlin spokesman Peskov confirmed that only an ultra-rarefied circle knew Oreshnik even existed. In a nutshell: the MICIMATT only sees what Russia shows off – and when it happens.
Call it a leak-proof vow of secrecy permeating the Russian military complex – which, by the way, is a massive state, nationalized company, with a few private components. And that offers the Russian government, in practice, better engineering, better physics, better mathematics and better practical, final results than anything across the self-important collective West. Oreshnik – a kinetic weapons system – is a certified game-changer when it comes to military technology and warfare in more ways than one: actually several. Simple physics tells us that by combining enough kinetic force and mass, utter devastation is guaranteed, comparable to a low-to-medium yield nuclear weapon. With the added benefit of no radiation. Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), under development by Russia (along with other systems) even before Trump 1.0 pulled the U.S. out of the INF treaty in 2019.
A few concise analyses have pointed out how Oreshnik can be fitted into intercontinental non-nuclear missiles. The Russians are being very diplomatic, not stressing that if Oreshnik is launched from the Russian Far East, it can easily reach most latitudes across the USA. Moreover, applying Oreshnik tech to tactical missiles – Putin late last week said this is already happening – also changes the whole tactical domain. The new game in town is Russia being capable of unleashing ultra-high-velocity kinetic weapons literally anywhere around the world – after warning civilians to abandon the area around the targets. And there’s absolutely no defense against it, anywhere. It’s quite predictable that the woke, arrogant/ignorant MICIMATT, as well as NATO and the whole, brainwashed collective West simply have no idea what just hit them, seemingly out of the blue. To be concise: a system with the destructive power of a tactical nuclear weapon but carrying the precision of a top sniper’s bullet.
Ergo, sitting duck billion-dollar aircraft carriers; the whole, 800-plus Empire of Bases; assorted underground bunkers; ICBM launch platforms; naval shipyards; not to mention NATO’s HQ in Brussels, the Aegis Ashore base in Redzikowo (Poland), the NATO joint force center in the Netherlands, southern NATO command in Naples – all these immensely expensive assets are fair game for non-nuclear Oreshniks capable of reducing them to dust in a flash after flying for mere minutes at over Mach 10. By now multitudes around the world are aware that Oreshnik may reach Berlin in 11 minutes and London in 19 minutes. Also that launched from southern Russia, Oreshnik may reach the U.S. air base in Qatar in 13 minutes; launched from Kamchatka in the Far East, it may reach Guam in 22 minutes; and launched from Chukotka, it may reach Minuteman III silos in Montana in 23 minutes. To quote the epic 1960s Motown hit: “Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”
The Russian military is selecting targets in Ukraine for further possible strikes using the country’s new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missiles, President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday. Potential targets for the missiles could be “decision making centers” in Kiev, the Russian leader warned, during a meeting with Moscow’s key regional allies in Astana, Kazakhstan. Military facilities could also be targeted, along with defense and industrial enterprises – “especially since the Kiev regime has repeatedly attempted to strike at facilities of national importance in Russia,” Putin explained. Moscow already has several Oreshnik missiles at its disposal and has begun the large-scale production of the advanced weapon system, he added.
Addressing his counterparts from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Putin reiterated that the first Oreshnik launch last week had been Moscow’s response to Western countries granting permission for Kiev to fire long-range weapons deep inside Russia. This made NATO member states directly involved in the conflict, he added. Last night, Russia launched around 90 missile and 100 drone attacks against military targets in Ukraine, he said. It came in response to Kiev’s continued attacks using Western weapons. More Oreshnik strikes may follow, he warned. “Oreshnik has no counterparts in the world, of course, and I believe none will appear anytime soon,” he said. “[The system has] dozens of homing warheads that attack their targets at Mach-10 speed… Their temperature reaches 4,000 degrees,” the president added. “Anything located in the strike center is obliterated into elemental particles, reduced to dust.”
Oreshik can destroy highly fortified targets buried deep underground, Putin said. A massive strike with such missiles would be comparable to a nuclear strike in its force, he added. We have several units ready for use now. Certainly, should the strikes with Western long-range weapons on our territory continue, we will respond, including by launching more combat tests of Oreshnik systems. Speaking at the CSTO meeting, Putin compared Russian systems with similar specifications to US ATACMS missiles and French/British SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles, which Kiev has used against Russia. Moscow’s weapons are superior in some aspects, and the country produces significantly more of them that the entire NATO bloc can, he claimed.
“..if a civilian evacuation warning is also issued, as Putin has foreshadowed, then one hour on Friday or Saturday will be what Putin has called the “danger zone”.
On Tuesday afternoon, November 26, the Russian Defense Ministry issued an unusual bulletin revealing that since the Oreshnik strike on November 21, the US had launched two ATACMS attacks across the Ukrainian border on Russian military targets in the Kursk region. The first of these on an S-400 air defence unit on November 23 had not been disclosed before. Both the November 23 and November 25 ATACMS strikes, totalling 13 missiles in all, had been partially intercepted. Russian casualties were suffered, including several fatalities. The Defense Ministry also telegraphed its punch. “Retaliatory actions are being prepared,” the bulletin concluded. Earlier that same morning, November 26, the airspace around the Oreshnik launch site at Kapustin Yar — east of Volgograd in the north of Astrakhan region — was identified for closure to civilian flights by an international notice to airmen (NOTAM).
The notice said the no-flight zone would start at 04:00 on Thursday, November 27, and continue until 20:00 on Saturday, November 30. Kapustin Yar was the launch pad for the first Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash plant at Dniepropetrovsk on November 21. The flight distance for that Russian missile from launch to target was 800 kilometers. If a second Oreshnik strike is being prepared at Kapustin Yar, the range to US and Ukrainian military bunkers at Kiev is within 1,100 kms; to the comparable military targets in Lvov, 1,600 kms; to the US-Ukrainian base at Rzeszów, on the Polish side of the border, 1,750 kms. The Oreshnik can strike targets at up to 5,000 kms, making it an “intermediate range”, not an “intercontinental range” missile.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 27, President Vladimir Putin arrived in Astana, Kazakhastan, for two days of talks. He is due to return from Kazakhstan on the evening of Thursday, November 28. Once the president is in Moscow, he will be in position to order, direct, and follow a retaliation strike by the General Staff against US and Ukrainian targets. If the strike flies at Oreshnik speed of Mach 10 to Mach 12, the operation will run from 5 to 9 minutes. If a 30-minute advance warning is sent to the US, and if a civilian evacuation warning is also issued, as Putin has foreshadowed, then one hour on Friday or Saturday will be what Putin has called the “danger zone”.
“In case of an escalation of aggressive actions,” Putin has said, “we will respond decisively and in mirror-like manner…It goes without saying that when choosing, if necessary and as a retaliatory measure, targets to be hit by systems such as Oreshnik on Ukrainian territory, we will in advance suggest that civilians and citizens of friendly countries residing in those areas leave danger zones. We will do so for humanitarian reasons, openly and publicly, without fear of counter-moves coming from the enemy, who will also be receiving this information.” The Defense Ministry has now confirmed the escalation by the US on November 23 and 25. Putin will decide his retaliation before Saturday evening.
Did Trump solve the border crisis two months before even being sworn in as the 47th president? Two days after surprising markets – and sending the peso plummeting – by announcing he would enact 25% import duties on Mexican goods if the country doesn’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants across the border.[..]? tariffs on Mexican goods in response to the flood of drugs across the porous southern border, best known for allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the US in the past four ears, Trump’s unexpected gambit may have already paid off. In a post on Truth Social network, Trump announced that after a “wonderful” conversation with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, she “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
He added that the two also talked about “what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States” concluding that it was a “very productive” conversation which of course, it would be, if indeed Trump – who again is still two months away from inauguration – managed to solve the US border crisis just 48 hours after using targeted tariffs as a bargaining chip. While it remains to be confirmed on the Mexican side if Trump’s recollection of the conversation is accurate, Trump’s announcement comes just hours after the legacy media reported that Mexico would take on a more aggressive posture, with the AP reporting that Sheinbaum had suggested that “Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own” and that while she was willing to engage in talks on the issues, drugs were a U.S. problem. “One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” Sheinbaum said, referring to U.S. automakers that have plants on both sides of the border.
She said Tuesday that Mexico had done a lot to stem the flow of migrants, noting “caravans of migrants no longer reach the border.” However, Mexico’s efforts to fight drugs like the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl – which is manufactured by Mexican cartels using chemicals imported from China – have weakened in the last year. Amusingly, Sheinbaum also said Mexico suffered from an influx of weapons smuggled in from the United States, and said the flow of drugs “is a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society” which judging by the libs ongoing reaction to Trump’s victory is pretty much spot on.As noted, there is still no official confirmation or full context of the agreement from President Sheinbaum’s side, but the market certainly reacted with the peso surging, and almost wiping out all losses from the past 48 hours after Trump’s first unveiled his 25% tariff threat.
If confirmed, this would be the second time Trump has managed to convince Mexico to suspend migrants from crossing its territory to enter the US. Back in 2018, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – a charismatic, old-school politician – developed a chummy relationship with Trump. The two were eventually able to strike a bargain in which Mexico helped keep migrants away from the border – and received other countries’ deported migrants – and Trump backed down on similar threats. While Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, has been seen as a stern leftist ideologue trained in radical student protest movements, and appeared less willing to pacify or mollify Trump, it seems she too has capitulated just 48 hours after Trump unveiled what was coming.
Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, revealed in a new episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that after an “alarming” meeting with Biden administration officials earlier this year was the moment he would have no other choice but to support Donald Trump. For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling spring meeting with Biden administration officials caused major concerns. During the meeting, officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.
“We had meetings [Biden officials] this spring that were the most alarming meetings I’ve ever been in. Where they were taking us through their plans, and it was – basically just full government – full government control – like this sort of thing, there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government, they told us. They said don’t even start startups – there’s just no way that they can succeed – there’s no way that we’re going to permit that to happen.”
In mid-July, Axios reported that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had donated to President-elect Trump’s campaign. At the time, their support was attributed to Trump’s pro stance on crypto and AI regulation. It’s another telling example of just how far-left Democrats in the White House spooked Silicon Valley heavy hitters, such as Elon Musk. Back to the podcast, Rogan asked Andreessen: “When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?” Andreessen responded: “You endorse Donald Trump.”
Andreessen told Rogan about the federal government’s rogue “Operation Choke Point.” He described it as a move by the Department of Justice that initially targeted marijuana businesses and gun manufacturers. He said under Biden, it was then weaponized to destroy political opponents, tech founders, and the crypto community.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who will play a role in the new Trump Administration as a co-head of the newly planned, informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission, has often floated proposals on his social media platform, X. On Wednesday, the entrepreneur asked his millions of followers if Congress should grant a recent $20 billion dollar funding request from the Internal Revenue Service by Biden Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, who said the extra funds were vital for running the tax collection agency. “The IRS just said it wants $20B more money,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Do you think its budget should be: Increased, Same, Decreased, Deleted,” he asked, in an attached poll. More than 60% of the users who voted in his poll called for the IRS’s budget to be “deleted.”
This is just the latest instance of Musk asking for public feedback on his policy proposals on X, which he acquired in 2022. Adeyemo’s plea for extra funding comes after Republican lawmakers were able to include a $20 billion cut to the agency’s budget in a federal funding stopgap bill in September, which is keeping the government funded until Dec. 20. Musk also called for slashing government regulations by eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is responsible for protecting consumers in the financial sector. “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk posted to X. The agency was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to regulate the sector.
President-elect Donald Trump met with Meta* CEO Mark Zuckerberg face-to-face in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on November 27, the New York Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. “Zuckerberg is attempting to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration in order to avoid criminal prosecution,” Ryan Hartwig, a Facebook* whistleblower and co-author of “Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship”, tells Sputnik. Trump has long been critical of Zuckerberg over reportedly restraining him and other conservatives on social media, withholding the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story, and orchestrating a “plot” against him in the 2020 election. Nonetheless, the two exchanged pleasantries during the recent encounter, according to the NYT.
“I think there may be some closed-door negotiations, however, given that Meta is a valuable tool for national security and surveillance of foreign countries, we may see a slight decrease in Trump’s rhetoric,” the pundit continues. “Hopefully there are penalties for Meta and Zuckerberg beyond just monetary fines. Influencing other countries’ elections is one thing, but domestic election interference is a very serious matter.” Hartwig expects Trump to proceed with social media regulations under section 230 during his second term in order to “remove Meta’s ability to remove or censor political content.” He also suggests possible changes in Meta’s executive leadership and even relocation of the company’s headquarters to Texas or another state “that isn’t an echo chamber for certain viewpoints.”
“These policy changes would include not removing any political speech and gutting most of its community standards,” the pundit highlights. And “more importantly, taking a stricter stance against minors on the platform and enforcing strict age verification,” Hartwig adds in an apparent reference to X owner Elon Musk lambasting Meta for “a massive child exploitation problem.”
The White House is pressuring Ukraine to increase the size of its military by lowering the minimum age of conscription from 25 to 18, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday. A senior Biden administration official said the outgoing administration wants Ukraine to start drafting 18-year-olds to expand the current pool of fighting-age males. The pressure from the US comes as polling shows the majority of Ukrainians want peace talks with Russia to end the war. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently hinted that the US was pressuring Ukraine to expand conscription, saying Ukraine’s biggest problem in the war was the lack of manpower.
“Our view has been that there’s not one weapon system that makes a difference in this battle. It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines,” Sullivan said on PBS News Hour last week. Last month, Serhiy Leshchenko, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Ukraine was under pressure from US politicians to lower the conscription age. “American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelensky to explain why there is no mobilization of those aged 18 to 25 in Ukraine,” he said. Zelensky signed a mobilization bill into law back in April that lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25.
A few weeks before the mobilization bill became law, Zelensky received a visit from US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who complained that not enough young Ukrainian men were being sent to the frontline. “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27,” Graham said. “You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.” The Biden administration’s push for Ukraine to draft younger men comes as it is doing everything it can to escalate the proxy war before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20. President Biden is seeking another $24 billion to spend on the conflict even though it’s clear there’s no path to a Ukrainian military victory.
The reaction to the reelection of Donald Trump in the media has ranged from histrionic to outright hysteria. MSNBC analyst and former Sen. Claire McCaskill wept openly on television as CBS News anchor John Dickerson got choked up on national television in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, still struggling to discuss the news days after the election. However, arguably the most perplexing responses came a few days ago when the New York Times ran a column from one of the advocates of the lawfare used against Trump since 2016. Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn has long been a favorite of the New York Times as part of what I have previously described as a counter-constitutional movement in higher education. As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, Moyn and others have insisted that the constitution itself may be the problem with America. In a previous New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” Moyn and Harvard Professor Ryan D. Doerfler called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
While the New York Times publicly condemned a U.S. senator for writing about the use of the National Guard to stop violent protests (as would be done at both the White House and the Capitol), it has published a long line of figures who have engaged in violent or extremist rhetoric from the left. However, this particular column may be worth the ink and hypocrisy needed to publish it. The New York Times long lionized those who brought raw partisan prosecutions against Trump and his allies, including efforts to cleanse ballots to deny citizens the opportunity to vote for the man who just won the popular vote. In his new column “Liberals Bet They Could Beat Trump With the Law, Moyn regrets the lawfare, not because it distorted the law and weaponized the legal system, but because it did not work. He even quotes Benjamin Wittes, who helped create the Lawfare website, which was used, in Moyn’s words, “to hem in Mr. Trump.” Wittes wrote, “I have no interest in recriminations.” Perhaps, but the public does.
The election—which handed both houses of Congress and the White House to the GOP—was arguably the largest verdict in history. However, it was not necessarily a verdict for Trump as much as it was against the lawfare and advocacy journalism that had been used openly for years. After all, the “Let’s Go Brandon!” movement developed at the start of the Biden Administration and was as much a criticism of the media and political establishment as it was Joe Biden — a type of “Yankee Doodling” of the governing elite. For years, these figures ignored the “recriminations” of some who objected to using the legal system for political purposes, particularly in the New York cases. To his credit, Moyn now admits that “the more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired.”
However, he remains remarkably uncritical of such tactics in the first place. Instead, he insists that these losses were due to simply “legalistic tactics.” Some of us call that the law. Moyn plays Shakespeare’s Othello in claiming to be “one that lov’d not wisely but too well.” The problem, he explains to the fragile Times readership is that they “rooted their opposition to Mr. Trump in the law since his first month in office.” He even refers to efforts early on to block Trump’s immigration policies. As soon as Trump came into office, he faced an acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, who ordered the department to stand down and not assist the new president in his immigration orders. I wrote at the time that the order was an outrageous and partisan act by Yates, who was planning on leaving in a matter of days.
While I criticized the initial Trump orders as poorly crafted (perhaps due to the lack of legal support) and in need of revision, I noted that he was likely to prevail on his claimed underlying authority. He ultimately prevailed after revising the orders. Yet, the New York Times and other publications again lionized Yates for an act that some of us view as unprofessional and arguably unethical. The problem with the lawfare campaign is that it did not just treat the law as an extension of politics, but treated the public as chumps. A large part of the public saw these cases for what they were: the use of motivated judges in favorable jurisdictions for political advantage. These same figures claim to be “saving democracy.”
The story the British government began telling in March 2018 on the road to the war, which the British and their allies are now losing in the Ukraine, is that Russian assassins, on a mission approved by President Vladimir Putin, tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a poison weapon they left behind. As story-telling goes, this one has been extraordinarily successful. Much more successful than the Anglo-American war against Russia. Most British people, all United Kingdom media reporters, and about one-quarter of the black cab drivers of London believe the story. This large group of people are being persuaded by a retired Court of Appeal judge named Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) not to notice that between the allegation of an unwitnessed attempt at murder by poison sprayed on a door handle on March 4, 2018, and the allegation of a death by poison sprayed from a perfume bottle on June 30, 2018, there is a gap of more than four months in time, and of almost fifteen kilometres in space.
The question for the judge is an obvious one: how did the murder weapon get from the one crime scene to the other without the murderer’s movement, presence or action; without leaving a single circumstantial clue; and without causing collateral damage, let alone poisonous contamination of anyone over such a long interval. In testimony to answer this question this week in a London meeting hall made up like a court, Hughes listened to the chief investigator of the crimes at the Metropolitan Police repeatedly admit he didn’t know how to explain the gap. In ten accompanying evidence exhibits, Hughes also accepted that the only way the sole witness called to explain the gap could do so was to coach him through ten separate police interviews, eight of them in just three weeks following the death of Dawn Sturgess, his girlfriend.
The witness Charles Rowley, according to his police record, is a criminal with multiple heroin possession convictions, a suspect in dealing Class A drugs, and a drug addict on methadone prescription. Para 31. Rowley was also on the press record as hustler for a million-pound payout. Rowley, the judge was told by the police, was classified by the MET as a Section 18 witness. That is to say, according to the exhibit of the police “Witness Interview Strategy – Charlie Rowley”, dated July 12, 2018, he was a witness “whose quality of evidence is likely to be diminished by reason of fear or distress”. Hughes made a record of accepting as admissible Rowley’s changing and contradictory explanations of how he came by the poison weapon. The judge also accepted as admissible the MET’s acknowledgement that they don’t know with confidence how the poison weapon had gone from one place to the other.
Their confidence was so low, the chief MET investigator told the judge, “we have not managed to secure sufficient evidence yet to present to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], sir, that allows them to charge with any offences linked to Dawn and Charlie’s poisoning,” — Page 6. Hughes’s counsel replied: “Yes, thank you. Moving on just a little bit.” . The policeman, Commander Dominic Murphy, also said: “I don’t think we will ever actually know and the reality is there are of course several hypotheses for where the Novichok could have been and where Charlie could have found it”; “I think it’s worth acknowledging, sir, that there are of course many possibilities still for where the Novichok would have been and how Charlie found it”; “I don’t think we can discount the box being anywhere during those periods, no. We cannot evidence where the box was from 4 March right through to the point at which it was in Muggleton Road [Dawn Sturgess’s home]”; “I should say as the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] for Operation Caterva I have seen no information or evidence to suggest that this is the case, but yes, of course it absolutely remains a possibility.”
“Thank you,” Hughes said. Hughes tried telling the policeman how to say what he wasn’t sure he saw. “He [Rowley] is coming from the direction of the bins. What is he carrying, do you think? A [Murphy]. I would imagine items he has recovered during the process. LORD HUGHES: Well, don’t imagine, Mr Murphy, come on. What does it look like?” The judge was so angry with the police officer, he stripped him of his commander rank. In the Anglo-American jurisprudence of murder trials, when the judge coaches the witness in front of the jury, the defence lawyer rises and objects. He then asks for the jury to be excused while he demands the judge retract, recuse himself, or dismiss the charges because the prosecution has failed to present a case to answer.
Hughes, however, is following the orders of the British Government, not English law. The orders are to fabricate the appearance of the case which the prosecution cannot make, in order to “identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.” Russian weapon, Russian crime, Russian culprits, Russian responsibility – those are the Hughes orders.
The European Union and a number of its member states’ governments are continuing in their quest to control media even more. The most recent move from the UK – to give an on screen seal of approval from the state in the form of a ‘Kitemark’ – was actually rejected by the House of Lords recently. This institution, made up of octogenarian buffoons – who mostly employ assistants to deal with their email boxes, such is the condition of their digital awareness – produced a report recently which they themselves ultimately rejected. The idea floated was that there would be some sort of regulator who would approve broadcast content with an on screen icon allowing viewers to see that the state had given it the thumbs up for being objective, unbiased and accurate.
At this point you might have fallen off your seat laughing at this notion, given that practically all of the UK’s entire fourth estate – large players as well as individual journos – are the most bigoted, biased and, at best, ill-informed group of media folk you are ever likely to meet in your lifetime, given what he have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. But the joke gets funnier. While we see over the last two years how out of touch the state is with how it is perceived, let alone its decisions to support the IDF in Gaza murder children and women or how it blindly supports Ukraine in its war against Russia, this idea that the humble citizens of the UK would place their trust in the government to direct them on the validity of media’s offerings is beyond parody.
How did the House of Lords even get to have a hand in all of this is remarkable in itself, but the idea of the Kitemark gives you an idea of the direction of where a further media crackdown is heading. Perhaps the old buffers, before their afternoon nap, were onto something when they rejected it, thinking that maybe it would open up a Pandora’s box and backfire on those who created it. Take the EU for example. What no British MEP, let alone Nigel Farage, who became an multimillionaire on the back of the Brussels beast he pretends to loath, is that this organization itself already spends hundreds of millions of its own taxpayers’ money on funding the biggest fake news operation for television ever known. Virtually all TV reporting which comes from Brussels is down with the production costs paid for by the EU, via is impressive state of the art studios and production teams all on hand to support the hapless Brussels correspondent.
If this grotesque subsidy were to be taken away, there would be almost no reporting on the EU at all, which would of course be a fine thing as what the so-called journalists are doing to show their gratitude to the brown envelope of course is very complimentary to the project. But back to the Kitemark. If we had such on screen logos to ‘direct’ viewers, how long would it be before the new eurosceptics in the bloc – Hungary, under the leadership of Viktor Orban – would insists that a new on screen logo should be seen by every report which comes from Brussels whose team have benefited from their entire report being paid for by the EU? If even the most supportive of EU voters were to see such a symbol they might ask themselves a perfectly reasonable question: how objective can these reports actually be? The House of Lords rejecting the on-screen Kitemark idea are thinking ahead of the game.
They are assuming that most people will switch off altogether watching those reports and move entirely to social media for their information. In reality, this has already happened on a large scale as any journalist will tell you if you want to know what’s really going on in Gaza or in Kursk, it’s going to be social media where you will go. The problem is the UK media model, once a respected beacon of its time which stood as an example to the rest of the world, is now entirely corrupted. It is rotten to the core and only serves one real purpose which is to keep the narrative from firstly, the U.S. and secondly the British government alive. Perhaps even funnier is the role of Sky News which has shown particularly on Gaza that it is the champion of fake news with its interpretation of the events entirely projected through the prism of the Zionists behind the genocide and their own depraved false narratives cooked up for western media, rather than for anything which comes close to raw, objective reporting of the events.
In a recent X post by Republican Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the senator wrote, “The censorship of the former Commander logo was a classic case of woke gone wrong. I applaud the Commanders & the NFL for their commitment to never censor the logo again.” Speaking to Fox News, Daines said, “The irony – they [woke left] were canceling Native American culture, as in the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] movement went way too far …” At a recent Energy & Natural Resources Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, Daines stated that there had been “good faith negotiations” with the NFL team to restore the logo of Blackfoot Chief John Two Guns White Calf, which had been in use for half a century.
In 2020, the NFL team succumbed to pressure from the radical left, promoting woke culture and forcing a name change from the Redskins to the “Washington Commanders.” Before the woke left unleashed cancel culture, the NFL franchise used Native American artist Walter “Blackie” Wetzel’s artwork of the Blackfoot chief as the inspiration for the team’s logo from 1972 to 2020.
[…] And just like that, the iconic logo, celebrating Indian Country, was memory-holed, as were many other logos. The nation is waking up from a terrible decade of toxic and nation-killing wokeism nightmare. As we’ve previously noted, the ‘Overton Window’ has shifted. For the sake of humanity, let us hope the woke mind virus—destructive by nature and detrimental to the nation—comes to an abrupt end. Woke ideology was never intended to succeed; its true purpose is to destroy. Even The New York Times and Bloomberg acknowledged a new Rutgers study showing that DEI initiatives transform individuals into being “hostile.”
Zelensky has purchased €88 million hotel in Courchevel ski resort in France. Courchevel is known to be wildly popular with billionaires, Hollywood celebrities and British royals. In case you were wondering how your tax dollars are being spent. Repost this So THEY KNOW that we… pic.twitter.com/8KNt2QrJDQ
Matt Gaetz is currently at Mar-a-Lago, helping build an "America First Army" to take over the DOJ.
"You and I have been very involved at Mar-a-Lago at finding patriotic Americans who want to do incredible service, not for themselves, for the country, and putting them in a… pic.twitter.com/KvsHeL20AB
The All In Pod highlights how Trump's MAGA movement attracted former Democrats such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy Jr., positioning itself as the forward-thinking political force driving progress.@friedberg: "It used to be that Democrats were… pic.twitter.com/G1TvsM4eE7
WATCH: Scott Jennings fires back at CNN panelists on Trump's deportation plan; "If you exit people that already have deportation orders from the court and you exit people who are violent criminals, that is no way shape or form going to hurt the economy." pic.twitter.com/Gmrs8N91iP
Listen to @lhfang explain how the huge junk food industry and its DC lobby are gearing up to sabotage @RobertKennedyJr's nomination and, if that fails, to sabotage the reforms he intends to implement for a less poisonous and toxic food supply:pic.twitter.com/2IbpJhITuY
President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22. “There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said. “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.” This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders. This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer.
Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border. Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.” “Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.” Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are talking directly to Trump & Co.”
Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.” Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex, now senator for Zaporozhye – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism, should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme Command for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!” A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts.
The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.” “Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.” Oreshnik in Russian means, literally, hazel nut or the wood of the hazelnut tree. In Siberia, the cognate expression “to give nuts” has the metaphorical meaning of inflicting punishment.
As Putin pointed out in his national address on the evening after the Oreshnik strike, it had been then-President Trump’s “mistake” in 2019 to unilaterally withdraw from the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF). Oreshnik is both the Russian reply and also a warning to Trump to correct his mistake. For the time being, the Financial Times, a Japanese propaganda outlet in London, reported a Norwegian graduate student as claiming “there certainly was no military value to it.” In Moscow, Izvestia, on which the BBC has relied for republication, reported “it is likely that we are dealing with a new generation of Russian intermediate-range missiles [with a range of] 2,500-3,000km (1,550-1,860 miles) and potentially extending to 5,000km (3,100 miles), but not intercontinental. It is obviously equipped with a separating warhead with individual guidance units.”
This means the missile is MIRV, comprising multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Close observation of the strike videoclips shows six of these releasing six munitions capable of penetrating deep underground bunkers. A salvo of thirty-six warhead detonations, altogether. Missile speed is reported to be between Mach 10 and Mach 11.
“..it was Trump 1.0 who withdrew the US from the INF treaty, in 2019. If the US had remained, Russia would not have been able to develop and use Oreshnik.”
Captain America believed it would intimidate Russkie Charlie with the “authorization” straight out of the Deep State for Ukraine to attack targets inside the Russian Federation with ATACMS. Such attacks had already happened in the past on Russia’s new territories. Still, two new ones were unleashed after the “authorization”, against Kursk and Bryansk; one with ATACMS, and the other with Storm Shadows. Then came the inevitable Russian response. What was that? New multiple hypersonics? Zeus? Superman? Deputy Chair of the Security Council, Dimitri “Unplugged” Medvedev, could not resist concise trolling; “So that’s what you wanted? Well, you’ve damn well got it!” Collective West rats were predictably scurryin’ all across the spectrum after watching what was first interpreted as a RS-26 “conventional warheads package” demo. Then President Putin went on the record.
Key takeaways: Western long-range weapons have been used against Russia, which retaliated with the new, medium-range, ballistic hypersonic “Oreshnik” system against the Yuzhmash factory in Dnipropetrovsk; additionally, the use of long-range weapons by the enemy cannot affect the course of the Special Military Operation (SMO). But this was the key relevant message Putin relayed to the Americans, NATO and the collective West: “We are conducting combat tests of the Oreshnik missile system in response to the aggressive actions of NATO countries against Russia. The issue of further deployment of medium-range and shorter-range missiles will be decided by us, depending on the actions of the United States and its satellites. The targets for destruction during further tests of our newest missile systems will be determined by us based on threats to the security of the Russian Federation. We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military installations of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions, we will also respond decisively and in a mirror manner. I recommend that the ruling elites of those countries that have plans to use their military contingents against Russia seriously think twice about this.”
The initial interpretation of this de facto game-changing move was that Russia had launched a single RS-26 Rubezh road mobile missile against the Yuzhmash missile production factory in Dnepropetrovsk, equipped with six independent, non-nuclear (italics mine) warheads, each in turn deploying other warheads (call it 6×6 = 36). That in itself changed the “essence” of the war in Ukraine, as Putin himself had previously recognized when it comes to the “authorization” for attacks by ATACMS. Putin’s speech established that Russia in fact used a completely new medium range (1,000 to 3,000 km) missile, the Oreshnik (“Hazelnut). Even US officials admitted it’s an “experimental” system; that implies they knew something about it. Putin himself also referred to “combat testing”. What is established beyond any testing, in Putin’s own words, is that “Hazelnut” may be sent as a gift to any target across NATO.
Oreshnik is as badass as missiles get. It may reach the UK in only 19 minutes; Brussels in 14; Berlin in 11; and Warsaw in 8 minutes. And, of course, traveling at over Mach 10, it simply cannot be intercepted by anything in the collective West arsenal. That includes the US. High destructive power is a given – already guaranteed by the surprise factor; you only know what hits you after you get hit (maybe). One potential option is that Oreshnik targeted secret underground workshops at Yuzhmash, where NATO had sent equipment and parts for short-range ballistic missiles (500 km to 1,500 km). In his four books and in his blog, the indispensable Andrei Martyanov has made it clear that “Russia has an overwhelming conventional escalation superiority” compared to the Hegemon. So, yes: this testing of an IRCM (a conventional missile) with hypersonic MIRVs (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles) may be just a demo – a preview of what else may be in store.
Martyanov: “NATO has zero capability to stop Russia’s long-range fires.” The “demo” also happens to be paired with a new shot at making war a relatively civil affair: Moscow will warn civilians of any impending Oreshnik strike. Those that won’t leave will do so at their own peril. As Martyanov remarked, “this is not anymore just SMO”. Indeed: for quite a while we have been way past a special military operation: this is a do-or-die NATO v. Russia hot war. Aggravated by the fact that the Hegemon’s ruling elites are congenitally incapable of stop escalating. Even the Oreshnik demo won’t stop escalation. A plausible scenario is that US military intel learned about an impeding Russian mid-range ballistic missile strike and then informed Kiev and NATO. Moscow then warned the US 30 minutes before the strike (that’s the norm, to prevent nuclear misunderstandings); the Americans not only confirmed it, but stressed there was no risk of a Russian nuclear attack on Kiev, now or in the foreseeable future.
Oreshnik in fact is a tacit demo that Russia does not need nuclear power to solve anything in the Ukrainian theater of war. So let’s assume that escalation has been controlled – for now. Yet we still have nearly two months of a completely deranged US administration in power. NATO’s congenital dementia suggests escalation will continue. The difference though is stratospheric: now they don’t know if Oreshnik handing them a business card comes with a nuclear bomb on or not. For all the inbuilt dementia of the current – exiting – administration, Americans who only understand the world via movies may have forgotten that it was Trump 1.0 who withdrew the US from the INF treaty, in 2019. If the US had remained, Russia would not have been able to develop and use Oreshnik. But now it’s hazelnut salad time, everybody; a great way to regulate blood pressure.
Soon after warning that Russia’s newly deployed ‘Oreshnik’ nuclear capable hypersonic missile is able to reach any European capital, at a top speed of Mach 10+ —which is significantly faster than a bullet—Russian state media issued the below ominous infographic. It touts that Eastern European capitals could be hit in a matter of a few minutes, and that Berlin is reachable in only 15. It lists capitals as far away from the Kapustin Yar rocket launch complex like London and Paris as reachable by the Oreshnik in just 20 minutes. This means if proverbial all hell broke loose and WW3 came to Europe, these populations would have very little time to reach shelter. On Thursday Moscow had shocked the world after six independent war heads of a new intermediate range ballistic missile were launched on the Yuzhmash missile plant in Dnipro Ukraine. Thus Putin has demonstrated that the West has crossed his ‘red lines’ after its long-range attack authorization granted to Kiev.
Russian media released a new graphic showing Oreshnik missile flight times to major cities in Europe pic.twitter.com/Ry7yLymK2n
According to more via a war monitoring site: Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) provided further details, stating that “Oreshnik” refers to a research project, while the operational missile system is named “Kedr.” Its known specifications include: • Six warheads, each carrying six submunitions. • A terminal phase speed exceeding Mach 11. If this is indeed a medium-range ballistic missile, as Putin suggests, its range could extend up to 5,500 kilometers. This would violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by the US and the Soviet Union to eliminate such missiles. Developing Kedr would thus signify Russia’s breach of this agreement. Vladimir Putin warned back in July, “Today, the development of such systems in Russia is nearing completion. We will take mirror measures to deploy them, taking into account the actions of the United States, its satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859663512093544452
A day after Russia’s attack on Ukraine with what were clearly big, very fast and new intermediate-range missiles, which many outlets initially reported to be an ICBM, the Kremlin is touting that it launched a cutting-edge hypersonic missile for which there is no defensive intercept capability. Russia says that Washington has now understood and been able to grasp Putin’s warnings and red lines more clearly following the missile strike a Ukrainian defense industry facility in Dnepropetrovsk Thursday morning. The new hypersonic weapon, dubbed ‘Oreshnik’ is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. “We have no doubt that the current administration in Washington has had the opportunity to familiarize itself with this announcement and understand it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. Putin had said the West’s escalation, seen this week in authorizing Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russia with US/UK-made weapons, makes Ukraine a “global” conflict.
He strongly hinted that this global aspect to the war means attacks on Western targets can’t be ruled out. The same day, the foreign ministry said a US missile base in Poland is a prime target. Peskov further called Putin’s message following the hypersonic attack “comprehensive, clear and logical.” The Russian leader has authorized the new missile to enter mass production. “The key message is that the reckless decisions and actions of Western countries — which produce missiles, supply them to Ukraine and subsequently take part in carrying out strikes on Russian territory — cannot go unanswered,” Peskov continued. On Friday Russian state media sources have begun publishing specs for the Oreshnik missile, claiming it flies at Mach 10, and can reach 5,500km in distance, or 3,400+ miles (as a medium-range weapon). Russia’s missile command has also informed Putin that the projectile is capable of reaching any European target…
The Pentagon has confirmed that the US was warned in advance about the "Oreshnik" missile attack via nuclear security channels. NOTICE: they did not warn the EU, so the pucker factor in the EU watching that ICBM launch must have been intense. Can you imagine?? pic.twitter.com/mfKfY58bn2
Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed on Friday the decision to begin serial production of the new Oreshnik ballistic missile system. The announcement came after the system was used in combat for the first time earlier this week in Ukraine. Speaking during a meeting at the Kremlin with the leadership of the Defense Ministry and defense industry representatives, Putin outlined that the Oreshnik missile system, one of Russia’s latest military advancements, is not a modernization of an old Soviet weapon. Instead, it is a new development based on cutting-edge hypersonic technology and modern materials. “It is the result of work done in the conditions of New Russia,” Putin said, highlighting that the system was created to meet contemporary defense needs.
Putin confirmed that several Oreshnik systems are currently undergoing testing in Russia, and that the decision to embark on mass production had already been articulated. “You can assume that the decision on production has been made. In fact, it is organized,” he added. More of the missile systems are expected to be delivered to Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces in the coming months. The first combat use of the Oreshnik missile took place on Thursday, when it was used to strike a Ukrainian defense facility in Dnepropetrovsk. The target was Yuzhmash, one of Ukraine’s largest defense-industrial facilities inherited from the USSR that produces missile equipment and other weapons.
Putin said the use of the missile was in response to Kiev’s attacks inside Russia with Western-supplied long-range weapons such as American ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles. The Oreshnik is described as a medium-range, hypersonic weapon designed for high precision strikes. According to the Defense Ministry, “all warheads” of the missile “reached the target” during this week’s deployment. The president praised the missile’s successful test and combat deployment, expressing admiration for the speed at which the system had been developed. Putin also emphasized the importance of continuing testing and increasing production rates. “I congratulate the military on the successful tests and support the adoption of the system,” he said.
“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a video posted to social media just day after winning reelection on Nov. 5. “Today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime.” Not mentioned by name, though alluded to, are the various non-profit and for-profit groups that have sprung up to battle “fake news” but typically target outlets that lean right of center. Those group include the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), Media Matters for America (MMFA), the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and NewsGuard. “When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large,” Trump also announced. With his bold pronouncements in mind, the following is Part 1 of a four-part series – a deep dive into some of the organizations to which he was likely referring.
Critics of their work say it leads to censorship and loss of advertising for the media outlets that dare challenge the legacy media’s approved narrative. Multiple outlets have published profiles of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the past 18 months, though only The Washington Post’s in June warranted a 20-page response from Kennedy that includes 78 footnotes. The letter, reviewed by Just the News, includes the expected complaints: The writer referred to Kennedy’s claims as “conspiracy theories” or as having been “debunked,” though he says they hadn’t been. Too many journalists do not “speak truth to power,” Kennedy wrote, but instead “serve as propagandists pouring concrete on official orthodoxies, and attacking dissent.” The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.
Peppered throughout the letter are references to something called the Trusted News Initiative, a global consortium of members founded in 2019 by the BBC that also includes the Associated Press, Reuters, Microsoft, Google, YouTube and The Washington Post. Its goal: combat disinformation. In the letter, Kennedy, nominated by Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, refers to TNI as a “clandestine industry partnership” and a “cabal” made up of “conspirators” whose mission is to label as “misinformation” any assertion that departs from pronouncements made by the Biden-Harris administration, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other bureaucracies. Examples of “misinformation” that proved to be plausible, if not true, include early claims that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China; that mRNA vaccines might not prevent infection or transmission of COVID-19; that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin might be effective in treating the infectious disease; and that a laptop left at a repair shop belonged to first son Hunter Biden.
One of Kennedy’s footnotes includes a quote from TNI Director Jessica Cecil, who said last year: “We don’t fact check; but once we learn from a partner that something is unreliable, that’s when we alert each other.” The TNI did not respond to a request for comment from Just The News, nor to its request that it reveal the names of outside donors or to clarify whether it gets – directly or indirectly – funds or directives from any government entity. Trump, in the Nov. 9 video, alluded to the latter when he vowed to end censorship, saying, “We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the Constitution.”
One of Kennedy’s footnoted accusations reads: “By depriving the public of complete scientific information, TNI may have had a calamitous impact on public health. Nearly 100 studies of ivermectin and 400 studies of hydroxychloroquine revealed that the drugs are safe and effective against COVID-19. TNI social media platforms nevertheless took the official position that these repurposed drugs were unsafe and ineffective.” He writes that TNI was doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies, given that “federal law prohibits the issuance of an Emergency Use Authorization for any vaccine if any approved drug is demonstrated effective against the target disease.” Kennedy’s letter notes that The Post reported that 70% of calls to one state’s poison control center involved ivermectin, when the real number was 2% (the newspaper ran a correction).
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s, R-Fla., withdrawal from consideration to serve as United States Attorney General and his replacement with Florida’s Pam Bondi has many scratching their heads and some forecasting trouble for his future Cabinet picks. Trump’s nomination of Gaetz shocked Capitol Hill. The conservative firebrand and die-hard MAGA supporter had previously rocked the lower chamber by leading the charge to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year. His reputation as an anti-institutional wrecking ball, moreover, scared establishment lawmakers stiff. More shocking than his nomination, however, was his withdrawal and speedy replacement with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Neither Gaetz nor Bondi were on most insiders’ shortlists for the post and more than a handful of Republican heavyweights have speculated that the Gaetz nomination may have been some sort of headfake.
Ostensibly motivating Gaetz’s withdrawal were his concerns that a contentious nomination process would needlessly distract from Trump’s agenda. But Gaetz had also faced a House Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct, of which Gaetz has vehemently denied. The DOJ previously declined to charge him after a years-long investigation, but senators wanted the panel’s findings. After Gaetz resigned from Congress, the committee chose not to release them. Purportedly, Gaetz did not have the votes for confirmation, with a handful of establishment Republicans standing firm in their opposition to him despite a Capitol Hill meeting between Gaetz and members of the upper chamber. While his replacement may have an easier path to confirmation than he did, Gaetz’s departure from the media cycle may prove a detriment to the success of Trump’s other nominees.
Defense Secretary designate Pete Hegseth, for instance, was briefly the subject of headlines over his own legal woes and allegations, though Gaetz’s nomination saw him draw the media flak away from Hegseth. An Army veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Hegseth earned two Bronze Stars and went on to become a host on Fox News. His issues speedily returned to headlines after Gaetz backed out of the nomination. More than a few analysts predicted Gaetz’s failure as a nominee and have suggested that Trump may have as well. “There’s always one” that takes the fall and “gives cover to the others,” one Republican strategist told Fox News, suggesting Gaetz was a “sacrificial lamb” for other nominees. Newsweek’s Josh Hammer, moreover, suggested that the nod may have been an example of Trump playing “4-D chess,” in reference to a 2016 notion that he was outthinking his opponents.
The essence of Hammer’s theory is that Trump’s nomination of Gaetz gave the congressman an excuse to leave Congress and thereby avoid the release of the ethics report, freeing him up for a possible 2026 gubernatorial run. Given how odious Gaetz was to Senate lawmakers, moreover, whomever Trump chose to replace him would seem more palatable. Hammer suggests that the short turnaround between Gaetz’s withdrawal and Bondi’s nomination signaled she may have been on deck for the job already. Under that theory, Trump would have helped a MAGA stalwart gear up to lead one of the most important Republican bastions while greasing the wheels for another stalwart nominee, who might otherwise have faced more intense scrutiny.
In late October, Trump declared that he and Gaetz have a “little secret” they would reveal after the election concluded. The clip of him saying so recirculated amid Gaetz’s nomination, though Trump never confirmed any link between the clip and the AG nod.
In another appointment with potential to shake up the federal health regime, Donald Trump on Friday nominated Dr. Martin Makary to lead the Food & Drug Administration. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University pancreatic surgeon and author of three New York Times bestsellers, has been critical of the government’s role in health care. The role requires Senate confirmation. Declaring that the FDA has “lost the trust of Americans,” Trump said Makary will “course-correct and refocus the agency,” to include “properly evaluat[ing] harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the childhood chronic disease epidemic.” Makary grew to national notoriety as one of several highly-credentialed physicians who pushed back on many elements of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Testifying before Congress, Makary said:
“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government. Misinformation that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity…that myocarditis was more common after the infection than the vaccine…that young people benefit from a booster…” While not broadly opposing Covid-19 vaccines, Makary condemned the Biden administration for pushing boosters on young patients for whom the virus presented a far lower threat, and has declared that heavy-handed vaccine mandates “created never-vaxxers.” He co-wrote a study that concluded that Covid vaccine booster mandates for college students created net harm, with adverse reactions like myocarditis in young men outweighing slim benefits from vaccination.
“It’s a no brainer that COVID came from the Wuhan lab.” – Dr.Makary, John Hopkins University pic.twitter.com/ePpuVUr6ih
Makary also ridiculed fear-mongering about the Omicron variant as “fueling…a pandemic of lunacy,” and urged a rollback in Covid testing in low-risk situations, saying, “If you test everyone in the United States, you will find a virus particle in the nose of some fraction of Americans forever.” That said, some feel Makary was too slow to question some elements of the Covid regime, and was initially too credulous about the benefits of vaccination. In June 2020, he touted the “liberating” qualities of “universal masking.” In March 2021, he tweeted, “The data show that vaccines confer near perfect protection against death and hospitalization from Covid.” With a $7 billion budget and 18,000 employees, the FDA has enormous influence over Americans’ lives, with regulatory influence over products that account for about a fifth of all US consumer spending.
Makary, who has degrees from Bucknell University, Thomas Jefferson and Harvard, would report to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr — if the controversial Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate or manages to achieve a recess appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has said the FDA is in need of a major trimming. “There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go—that are not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids,” Kennedy said earlier this month. In a more aggressive post to X in October, Kennedy said “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” and said that, for employees who were part of corruption that serves the pharmaceutical industry to the detriment of the public’s health, “I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
President Trump just nominated Dr. Marty Makary for FDA Commissioner…
So I just went and watched the first interview I found and this guy sounds awesome!
Watch this clip. He’s talking about all the same stuff as RFK Jr…
The Washington Post reports that Kennedy was influential in Makary’s selection, as Kennedy urged Trump to favor candidates that are not tightly linked to either the health care industry or government. Kennedy is said to consider Makary as a likeminded reformer. Much like Kennedy, Makary has harshly criticized the federal government’s approach to food and health, saying root causes of serious conditions are ignored in favor of simply prescribing drugs: “We are right now witnessing the largest uncontrolled experiment in modern health history…we have introduced tons of chemicals, pesticides, micro-plastics, ultra-processed foods, seed oils into the modern diet, altering the microbiome and no one talks about it. They’re too busy demonizing saturated fat and trying to defend the old food pyramid. They just replaced it with a food compass that’s almost worse…it says Lucky Charms is healthier than a steak.”
Makary’s new book is “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” Makary makes a case that government malpractice has been at the root of many modern health crises, from opioid addiction to peanut allergies to obesity and drug-resistance bacteria. Here he is recounting how the National Institutes of Health, on the basis of its own profoundly flawed study, wrongly discouraged doctors from prescribing hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, creating a reluctance that still persists today:
However tardy Makary may have been in challenging some public health approaches to the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems clear he is poised to shake things up at the all-too-powerful FDA. January 20 can’t come quickly enough.
Endless repetition by whore media and careless media turn lies into truth. Whatever media you read, you read that “Russia invaded Ukraine.” The lie is not limited to official narrative-controllers, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, CNN. Wikipedia, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, Telegraph, Guardian. It appears in alternative media, such as the Epoch Times and Breitbart. Indeed, the lie is repeated as fact almost everywhere, in the houses of Congress, the UK Parliament, Wall Street, European media and governments. The fact is there was no Russian invasion at all. Russian forces entered Donbas at the request of the two independent breakaway republics for help against the US-trained and equipped Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias that were about to invade Donetsk and Luhansk. The two independent republics requested Russia to return them to Russia in 2014 along with Crimea.
But Putin refused the republics, taking only Crimea because it is the site of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Instead Putin placed his bet on the Minsk Agreement, which kept Donbas as part of Ukraine. The enforcers of the Minsk Agreement, Germany and France, later admitted that the Minsk Agreement was used to deceive Putin while Washington created a Ukrainian army to conquer the independent republics and present Putin with political difficulties for failure to defend Russians from those whose forebears fought for Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In other words, it was a plan to discredit Putin, for his crime of dissenting from Washington’s hegemony. Putin’s refusal to restore Donbas to Russia in keeping with the overwhelming vote of the Donbas people subjected Donetsk and Luhansk to eight years of bombardment and many casualties while Putin stood by the Minsk Agreement.
Finally in February, 2022, with Washington, NATO, and the EU refusing Russia a mutual security agreement, and the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics facing invasion, Putin was forced to act to protect the Russian populations in the east and south of Ukraine that had been attached to the Ukrainian province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders for political and administration reasons. Donbas and Crimea were for centuries part of Russia, not Ukraine. Putin, a leader, rebuilding Russian confidence after the Soviet collapse, could not stand aside while Russian people were massacred by an American-provided Ukrainian army. Putin’s view of his intervention was very limited. It had nothing whatsoever to do with conquering Ukraine. His publicly announced “Special military operation” had to do only with driving Ukrainian forces out of Donbas. Putin made no effort to conquer Ukraine.
At the time I said his limited approach, particularly his intention to minimize both Russian casualties and casualties among the Ukrainian population, would leave the Ukrainian puppet government in place to continue the war despite Russian successes in clearing Donbas of Ukrainian forces. My prediction, and not Putin’s bet, proved to be correct. As I said would be the case, by not impeding Kiev’s ability to continue the war, Putin enabled a long-term war, now three years, during which Washington has managed to get the West involved up to the hilt. The latest being the Biden regime’s green light to missiles being fired by US and NATO personnel into Mother Russia. The recent US missile strikes into Russia crossed a red line that, finally, Putin was not prepared to ignore in his interest to avoid a wider war. Unlike the West, Putin does not want war. He did not want the conflict in Ukraine. Washington forced it on him. He cannot stand aside while an army created by Washington slaughters Russians.
Putin’s response to the missile strikes, which ignored his warning, was restrained. He merely demonstrated with a hypersonic missile that travels at mach 10 the fate of the West if the West’s attack on Russia continues. The question is whether the West heard the warning.. Putin’s past record of ignoring provocations in order to avoid widening the war has created the impression in the West that Putin’s warnings don’t mean anything as “Putin never does anything.” This conclusion is dangerously mistaken. It ignores that Putin, a humanitarian, ignores provocations in order to avoid widening the war, which has a terrible impact on innocent civilians and their hopes, and, if nuclear, on life on Earth. The West’s conclusion also ignores that provocations can become too severe for Putin to ignore. I believe that point has been reached.
If the irresponsible American establishment, deluded by its hubris and belief in its invincibility, continues to provoke Russia, Putin will run out of space into which to back up. At that point the Western world’s aggression could result in an unintended consequence. The problem before us is that the Western leaders are too lost in their false narratives to comprehend reality. It is not all their fault, because Putin encouraged their provocations by not standing up to them. But the aggression lies with the West, not with Russia. And Russia has been pushed as far as it is safe to push. If the pushing doesn’t stop, the world is going to end.
This week marks a fateful threshold for the world. In a grave announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the three-year proxy war in Ukraine has now reached a global dimension. The responsibility for this abysmal moment lies fully with the United States’ elitist rulers and their British accomplices. They are inciting global catastrophe in a desperate bid to save their hegemonic empire. Putin’s announcement on November 21 came only hours after Russia launched a retaliatory strike against Anglo-American aggression. Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic missile destroyed a munitions center in Dnepropetrovsk in central Ukraine. The conventionally armed missile – called Oreshnik – was deployed in combat for the first time. It delivered several warheads at Mach-10 speed. There is no air defense against such a unique weapon.
The Oreshnik attack was in response to the firing of long-range missiles by the United States and Britain on November 19 and 21 against the pre-conflict territory of the Russian Federation. There is no doubt that the U.S. and British forces were directly involved because, as Moscow has noted, the Ukrainian regime does not have the personnel or logistics capability to operate these advanced NATO weapon systems. The conclusion is stark. The world is on the cusp of World War Three, a war that would inevitably become a nuclear conflagration and precipitate the end of life on Earth. The evil facing humanity is staggering. Western barefaced lies to the public Ludicrously, or perhaps more accurately, fiendishly, Western politicians and media are condemning Russia for the escalation. Their accusations are in flagrant contradiction with the facts. The Western public is being lied to about the sequence and causes of war.
In a move beyond reckless, the United States and Britain attacked Russia with long-range missiles from the territory of Ukraine. The ATACMS and Storm Shadow weapons were aimed at Bryansk and Kursk Oblasts in Western Russia. The American missiles were shot down by Russian air defense, while the British Storm Shadow cruise projectile caused deaths in Kursk. That barrage marked an open act of war against Russia by the United States and Britain. Hence, the Russian leader commented that the proxy war in Ukraine had now taken on a global dimension. The American and British leadership went ahead with this aggression even after Russia had explicitly warned several weeks ago that the deployment of such weapons against Russian territory would be seen by Moscow as an act of war.
It also followed only hours after Russia revised its nuclear defense doctrine on November 19, defining that the use of long-range conventional weapons from the territory of a non-nuclear state (Ukraine) supplied by nuclear states (the U.S. and Britain) would constitute a joint attack, thereby giving Russia the right to retaliate with nuclear force. The situation has thus entered the realm of nuclear world war. Given the aggression initiated by the U.S. and Britain with their ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles, Russia has the legal right to hit those territories and any other territory of the NATO alliance. Russia chose not to do so – for now – limiting its Oreshnik’s target to the territory of Ukraine. What happens next over the coming days depends on the U.S. and its NATO partners. So far, the White House and Pentagon have sought to (irrationally) blame Moscow for escalation and are saying that the United States will continue to deploy long-range missiles from Ukraine against Russian territory. That remains to be seen if the insanity prevails.
“The American inaction was the best warning that could have been given to the Ukrainians. The Americans made it clear that they would do nothing to protect their proxy.”
November 21, 2024, will go down in Russian military history as the date of the first real combat deployment of the legendary and feared Strategic Rocket Forces of the Russian Federation (RVSN). Created in Soviet times, the RVSN is the independent branch of the Russian Armed Forces responsible for the arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, literally the “troops of the apocalypse” – responsible for firepower capable of causing a global catastrophe. Of course, the RVSN was involved in all the major nuclear tensions of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Norwegian Incident. Although it has remained on high combat alert several times, no actual military engagement has occurred until now. NATO, however, exceeded all expectations of escalation in its provocations against Russia and succeeded in turning the Ukrainian conflict into the most dangerous security crisis in history.
After the Western-Ukrainian side ignored repeated Russian warnings to cease long-range strikes against the Federation’s undisputed territory, Moscow had no alternative but to call in its most feared troops and authorize an unprecedented operation. The target chosen was a military equipment factory in Dnepropetrovsk. The weapon used was a new missile, previously untested in real situations – nicknamed ‘Oreshnik’. Luckily for the Ukrainians, no nuclear warhead was attached to the missile, which worked as a conventional weapon despite its surprising speed and high lethality. There are two main points to be understood from the attack on Dnepropetrovsk: on the one hand, this was a test for Moscow, which had the opportunity for the first time to use the Oreshnik missile technology in a real combat situation, confirming its absolute effectiveness. On the other hand, the attack was a kind of “last chance” for the enemy, as well as a major warning to Ukraine.
Moscow could have responded to the Ukrainian strikes on Bryansk and Kursk with nuclear weapons, as such a decision would have been fully in line with recent reforms in the Russian Nuclear Doctrine. However, once again mercy and a desire for de-escalation prevailed in the Kremlin’s decisions, leading to a warning being delivered to both NATO and Ukraine before the “final solution”. For NATO, the message was clear: there is no military technology available that can stop Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. If the decision to go nuclear is taken, the targets will be hit without the Atlantic alliance and its proxies being able to do anything to prevent it. For Ukraine, the warning was even deeper: Moscow made it clear that no one would “help” the neo-Nazi regime. Obviously, the Russian attack was noticed by the Americans in time.
There are thousands of observers involved in various monitoring projects whose specific task is to see such maneuvers and prepare a response in time for the event of a nuclear crisis. In other words, Washington saw that the attack was happening and did nothing. Perhaps the US held back from reacting out of fear. Perhaps it held back from reacting because it assumed the target would be Ukrainian. But in any case, there was no reaction. Washington did not issue an emergency plan for nuclear retaliation, even without any confirmation, until minutes after the targets were hit, that the Russian warheads contained nuclear material or not. In other words, the US, faced with dangerous uncertainty, chose to remain silent.
The American inaction was the best warning that could have been given to the Ukrainians. The Americans made it clear that they would do nothing to protect their proxy. If Russia launches nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Kiev will have to deal with the consequences alone. More than that, it must be emphasized that the Americans had no way of predicting whether the Russian strikes would target NATO or not, which is why the lack of an immediate retaliatory operation has an even deeper significance and calls into question even the “collective defense” of the Western alliance.
Russia is not considering another mobilization round as the country continues to rely on a strong stream of volunteers willing to join the military, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. Russia announced a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022, calling up some 300,000 reservists to man the Ukraine conflict front line. Despite rumors circulating in recent months of a new mobilization campaign, none have been announced while Russian officials have repeatedly insisted that there is no need for such measures. In an interview with RIA Novosti on Saturday, Peskov reiterated “that there is no talk of mobilization at all… There is no need.” He noted that Russian citizens “are very actively signing contracts with the Defense Ministry,” adding that the government has developed a program that provides substantial payments for those willing to enlist.
“These people are numerous – hundreds sign contracts every day and join the special military operation,” Peskov said, adding that volunteers undergo rigorous training before being sent to the front. The Kremlin spokesman was interviewed by Faina Savenkova, a 16-year-old intern journalist from the Russian city of Lugansk. At the age of 12, she was added to the notorious Mirotvorets “enemies of Ukraine” list after she urged the UN to protect children in Donbass from Kiev’s artillery strikes. In August, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted a significant increase in volunteers willing to defend the country after Ukraine launched its large-scale incursion into the border Kursk Region, during which multiple attacks on civilians were recorded. In July, the Defense Ministry said that more than 190,000 citizens had signed military contracts in 2024 alone, adding that an average of 1,000 people join the army each day.
The White House promises sprint efforts to preserve the “legacy” and “productive” work of outgoing US President Joe Biden, who failed to win re-election for a second term and spent more than a third of his first term in country residences and on the beach. “President Biden is focused on ensuring the remainder of his term is as productive as any other period in the last four years,” the White House press service said in a statement. It notes that the remainder of the current administration’s time “is a sprint to build on the historic progress we’ve made under his presidency.” According to the White House, Biden plans to work hard on a program to invest in the US, seek confirmation of judicial nominees, and “continue to strengthen our Alliances and partnerships.” The press service cites American media outlets that report on the administration’s efforts to preserve and protect Biden’s “legacy” from the incoming Republican administration.
Biden’s opponents counted the days he spent outside the White House, in suburban or beach residences, throughout his tenure. According to these data, the US president spent about 40% of his time in office on vacation. His term will be remembered for many embarrassments, slips of the tongue, and falls. Biden, who was planning to run for a second term, dropped out of the race only after a disastrous performance in the debates with Trump in the summer, but this decision was also caused by massive pressure from fellow party members; experts noted that Biden did not want to give up the fight, since he was sensitive to his place in history and the legacy he had left behind. The Democrats failed to retake the White House after Biden’s “productive period.” Donald Trump, who won the election, will take office on January 20.
US President Joe Biden is trying to strengthen Kiev as much as possible during his remaining time as head of the country before Donald Trump, who won the election, comes to power in late January, Bloomberg reported. This intention explains Biden’s latest decisions in the Ukrainian direction, including permission to use long-range missiles and approval of sending anti-personnel mines, the publication said. At the same time, the agency acknowledged that Biden’s options were very limited, since most of the remaining money for Kiev could only be used for weapons that are already at the Pentagon’s disposal. Thus, too much cannot be allocated, otherwise it will jeopardize the defense capability of the United States itself. According to the agency, the Biden administration considered a possible public call for an official invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, but decided that the likelihood of this call being successful would be too low.
Instead, the current US authorities are considering a number of bilateral agreements with Kiev in the security sphere. Russia believes that arms supplies to Ukraine hinder the settlement and directly involve NATO countries in the conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that any cargo containing weapons for Kiev would become a legitimate target for Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised speech on Thursday that Ukraine fired US-supplied ATACMS missiles and the UK’s Storm Shadows at facilities in the Kursk and Bryansk regions on November 19. Russia responded by launching a combined strike against a defense industry complex in Dnepropetrovsk on Thursday using the Oreshnik missile.
The conflict between Moscow and Kiev could be swiftly ended with no additional loss of lives if only NATO came to its senses and abandoned its belligerent policy towards Russia, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told Al Arabiya in an interview published on Friday. Allowing Ukraine to use long-range Western weapons for strikes into internationally-recognized Russian territory has made the US-led bloc a direct party to the conflict, said Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council. Kiev has launched several such strikes using US-made ATACMS and HIMARS systems, as well as British-made Storm Shadow missiles. Moscow responded by striking a military industrial facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (known as Dnipro in Ukraine) with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile equipped with a conventional warhead.
On Saturday, Paris officially confirmed that it had given Kiev the green light to use French-made SCALP-EG cruise missiles in long-range strikes against Russian territory. “The NATO member states have essentially got fully engaged in this conflict,” Medvedev said, commenting on the developments. The former president said that such nations should “understand” that they are currently at war on the Ukrainian side. “They are at war with the Russian Federation.” Not only do Western nations supply Kiev with weapons and financial aid, but they also provide targeting for Western-made missiles, Medvedev stated. Moscow has insisted that such systems cannot be successfully operated without the involvement of specialists from the nations that produced them. Under such circumstances, no developments can be ruled out, Medvedev warned, pointing to Russia’s recently updated nuclear doctrine that allows a nuclear response to a conventional attack by a non-nuclear state supported by a nuclear power, including a missile strike against Russian territory.
“Everyone who is currently stirring up the war hysteria, primarily within NATO, the US, and other states, should think about it,” the former president warned. When asked to elaborate on the potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia, he described it as a “realistic” possibility. At the same time, he said that Moscow would very much like to avoid that option. “There are no madmen in the Russian leadership,” he stated, explaining that the nation’s nuclear doctrine had been updated in accordance with modern deterrence needs. According to Medvedev, the Ukraine conflict could be swiftly and easily ended with no need for any additional losses. If NATO merely “stops fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, this conflict can be ended with no expenses for humanity. No new expenses, at least,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin should continue exercising “restraint” in his responses to the US-led proxy war against Russia waged by the Kiev regime, Jimmy Dore, political commentator and host of the Jimmy Dore Show, has warned. According to the progressive pundit, it is imperative that Putin wait until US president-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January before making decisions that could kick-start World War III. In an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Saturday, Dore was commenting on the latest decision by outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration to greenlight Kiev’s use of long-range US-supplied weaponry for strikes on undisputed Russian territory.
Moscow sees the US decision as an escalation that makes the US a direct party to the fighting. Remarking on the situation earlier this week, Vladimir Putin said that the “regional” Ukraine conflict has now “assumed elements of a global nature,” and warned of a backlash if tensions escalate further. “Joe Biden and the neo-cons in his administration have been constantly escalating war… What they’re trying to do is start a war that Donald Trump can’t stop,” Dore said, warning that the end-result of their actions could be a new world war. “The only hope we have is that Putin shows restraint, that he is the only adult in the room and that he can hold off somehow until Donald Trump becomes president,” he stated. Trump will be inaugurated in late January and has pledged to swiftly end the Ukraine conflict upon assuming office.
“That is why the establishment hate Trump… why they accused him non-stop of being a traitor and working with Putin – it was the only card they had to play, because he got elected on ending our foreign regime-change interventionist wars,” Dore said. “Trump is not a warmonger… He likes to find deals. He might be corrupt, but he’s New-York-city-real-estate-corrupt, not neo-con-warmongering-kill-people-for-money-corrupt,” the pundit claimed. Dore suggested that together, Putin and Trump would be able to bring an end to the Ukraine conflict, but cautioned that things could go wrong if the current US administration continues to take steps to escalate it. “Putin is a rational actor, but you never know how much NATO, Joe Biden and his neo-con administration is going to poke the bear,” Dore added.
Dünyanın en etkili avıları olan kedilerin refleks süreleri 20-70 milisaniye arasında değişirken yılanlarda 50-90 milisaniyedir.pic.twitter.com/vkjthiMujT
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