Jan 11

Today’s News 11th January 2024

  • "Globalist Tempter Tantrum Looms": Luongo On Where Do We Go From Here In 2024, Part 2
    “Globalist Tempter Tantrum Looms”: Luongo On Where Do We Go From Here In 2024, Part 2

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    When I hit the streets back in ’81
    Found a heart in the gutter and a poet’s crown
    I felt barbed wire kisses and icicle tears
    Where have I been for all these years?
    I saw political intrigue, political lies
    Gonna wipe those smiles of self-satisfaction from their eyes
    — Marillion, White Feather

    In my last post, Part I, I asked the question, “Where do we go from here…” knowing that we have political upheaval in the West we haven’t seen in the US since the 1860’s. Joah Bii-Den! fulfilled his promise to divide the country further with a speech commemorating the riot at The Capitol that sounded better in the original German (H/T Dennis Miller).

    The general theme of my first five observations on where things are headed in 2024 build off the basic premise that Davos et.al. would rather burn the world to the ground than give up their perception of control over it.

    Like in 2023’s prediction post the controlling idea of inflation returning in the second half of the year informed most of my commentary, this Globalist Temper Tantrum is central to my thinking this year.

    And believe me, I will be happy to be wrong about this. Happier than I can fully express in words.

    That temper tantrum, however, is now facing the natural opposition from, for lack of a better term, normal people. So, bound up in these predictions will be the idea of the counter-revolution as people come into their own, master their fear of the establishment, and stride forth with purpose. I’ve seen it building for years across the West. 2024 is, I believe, where these two titanic societal forces meet on the battlefield and determine humanity’s future.

    It will come down to how hard will they beat us while we decide just how ungovernable we will become. History tells me people always win over systems.

    #6 – Political Upheaval in the Heart of Globalism

    For years I’ve been developing the idea that the European Union is the model for Davos’ more perfect technocratic union. It’s built on many of the ideas put into practice in the 20th century in the USSR and China.

    It’s one of the controlling ideas of everything I write about on Gold Goats ‘n Guns. Globalism isn’t just an idea, it is a religion and a process to be methodically implemented over time. This is a multi-generational thing. It doesn’t mean that anyone is actually in charge of anything, it means that there are people pulling levers as if they are in charge of everything.

    So, what’s been building for years in Europe has been wholly predictable as there are wildly different cultures, histories of inter-tribal wars, language barriers, and differing legal constructs all embedded deeply within the DNA of the people who live there.

    Hungary is off the reservation and takes control over the European Council Presidency in July. The Netherlands held massive farmers’ protests which ended in snap elections and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) winning. The heart of the EU is seizing at the exact moment when the EU is pushing to consolidate political and economic power.

    The European Parliamentary elections won’t likely change anything ultimately as the European People’s Party (EPP), currently the largest party in that body, will win again. There won’t be any change at the nominal top. It’s digging into the details of what is happening in Germany, however, that is the key to seeing what comes next.

    Because the EU rests on the idea of a Germany willing not only to lead the EU, in a kind of political Fourth Reich, but also spending what’s left of its soul as Germany to make that happen.

    I was expecting to write about Germany’s political woes in this post before I heard about their trucker’s revolt that’s going on as I type. The current coalition government is unwieldy. It’s polling numbers are actually worse than US Democrats’ at this point.

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    And under anything close to normal circumstances, the German government would have already collapsed. But it hasn’t because it is still under orders not to give in. The Traffic Light Coalition’s job now is to ram through what they can before state elections later this year.

    Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia all go to the polls to elect new governments in 2024. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to sweep them, polling in the mid-30’s in those three states. Predicting an AfD win in those states is no challenge. Neither is predicting the roadblocks in front of them entering into any coalition government.

    What is hard to predict is whether those roadblocks will succeed in stopping the populist juggernaut building in the former East Germany. Because if AfD wins a big enough victory in those states then that will preclude the kind of back-stabbing that Angela Merkel engaged in after Thuringia’s vote in 2020. Review my coverage on this from 2020. The effects on the CDU were profound, causing real and deep divisions within the party. You can see that the seeds to defying Merkelism (which is just Davos’ wishes) should sprout this spring into full blown political revolt.

    This is why there is a new CDU splinter group trying to head AfD off at the electoral pass, in the hopes of draining some of its support. Meanwhile AfD are preparing thousands of meals for the farmers protesting peacefully for a saner future. Winning of hearts and minds, exactly as I exhorted them to do when they first crossed the 16% Chasm.

    If AfD enters the governments of those three states it gives them veto power over 12 of the 69 votes in the German Upper House, the Bundesrat. The Greens will still have a massive veto majority. The question then is will that translate into a collapsed coalition for Scholz and snap elections later this year.

    With the FDP voting last week to stay in the coalition, despite serious questions as to the vote’s legitimacy (where have we heard this before), the answer right now is no. But Mark Rutte was forced out of office in the Netherlands. Never say never.

    #7 — Japan will Strengthen the Yen, Nikkei Will Soar

    Per my last discussion with Francis Hunt, The Market Sniper, we came to the conclusion that Japan was one of the most interesting fulcra on which the global financial system rests. When former Bank of Japan chief Haruhiko Kuroda shocked markets in December 2022, at his last meeting, by widening the band on the bank’s yield curve control (YCC) policy to 0.5% it was a harbinger of big changes coming.

    When the new guy, Kazuo Ueda took office he slow rolled those changes, disappointing markets that, as always, got way ahead of themselves. For most of 2023 I commented on Japan saying that the BoJ would re-enter the global game of monetary policy poker, after being the fish at the table for three decades.

    The standard analysis of Japan is that they are screwed because of their insane debt-to-GDP ratio. But, in a world where all the first world economies are running massive deficits I have to ask the question as to why Japan gets singled out?

    Japan is in the same position as the EU: an energy importer that needs to exit QE because the Fed has done so and has to contain inflation. For Japan, however, inflation burbled up slower than it did in the US and Europe. This is why Ueda has been able to slow roll his changes to monetary policy, with the YCC cap on the 10-Year JGB now a ‘soft’ 1%, up from Kuroda’s 0.5%.

    Now, you can argue, rightfully, that 3% inflation in Japan is a far more important political issue than 4% or 5% here, but the point still stands, they have a much different problem than we’ve had.

    As we enter 2024, the Q4 “Buy All the Things” Rally will attenuate across all asset classes. A stronger yen will tame inflation, especially at moderate energy prices, while also allowing the BoJ to begin shrinking its balance sheet. Japan will adopt Powell’s monetary policy.

    Once rates rise above 1% on the 10-year JGB, the breakout and consolidation we’ve seen in the Nikkei 225 will end and a new rally will begin on the rotation trade. My target for the yen to hit 125 this year, with the Nikkei following along rallying towards 45,000.

    #8 — Soft Secession in the US and Canada

    In Canada the two themes of Climate Change and Sovereigntism came together beautifully in the form of a good ‘ol fashioned North American tax revolt. In the US states are openly defying the Federal government on immigration (Texas) and health policy (Florida declaring the vaccines dangerous).

    Last fall in Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith invoked the Sovereignty Act to tell Ottawa to stuff their new energy grid regulations and demands up their ass. Right after that, in Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the province will stop collecting the carbon tax on both natural gas and electricity.

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    It will be met with indifference by Justin Tru-DOH! and the unfortunately-named (Freeland?) “Nationalist” bitch who actually runs the show there, but it won’t matter.  

    This is how you express your sovereignty. This is how you say, no. Simply just say, we’re not collecting the taxes and sending them to Ottawa. And, given that these two provinces provide the lion’s share of the tax revenue they have a lot of leverage.

    You can expect to see a lot more of this going forward; open defiance of the central government.  Number #6 is about Europe, but it’ll be expressions of state sovereignty and the return of Federalist principles that will make the difference.

    Now, that said while this is a very good thing for Canada, it may not be for the US.

    No one gives a damn about Canadian bond yields except the Canadian government.  It’s not like the loonie and CGB’s are the backbone of the global financial system.  

    A state standing up to a corrupt central government over something as important as this is a direct attack on the validity of the central government and, by extension, its government bond markets/currency. Danielle Smith understands this. It’s why she went straight to the jugular in Ottawa.

    This will put upward pressure on bond yields as Alberta takes one step after another towards financial and regulatory independence. Given the way the Bank of Canada has comported itself, Smith and Moe have more friends than you may think.  

    Expect Ottawa and Davos to strike back. But, again, like in Germany, if the attack fails and Smith wins this round, it will mark the beginning of the end of the central government in Ottawa.

    Secession from Ottawa would be devastating to the British Crown, Davos, and all these freaking globalist ghouls.

    Like Syria was to the Middle East — telling the OPEC nations someone could stand up to the US — Alberta standing up to Ottawa makes Saskatchewan stronger.  It makes, by extension states like Idaho in the US stronger as well.

    20 states in the US are organizing and introducing their versions of the Sound Money Act, making gold and silver transactional currencies. New Hampshire is first this week to present it to the legislature.

    But, on the flip side, now consider California trying the same thing during a 2nd Trump term, but this time over the exact opposite, refusing to give up their mandated insanity for anyone doing business in California and threatening to break off.  

    That achieves the WEF goal of breaking the US bond market, creating political doubt over the very markets that prevent them from running the table and consolidating power in the West under Europe’s control.

    I know I’ve made these points before but it’s important to keep tying current events to the general thesis of who’s agenda does which event serve and why.  Alberta isn’t California for a lot of reasons, but the big one is whose debt-ox is gored by their acts of rebellion.

    #9 — Removing the Putinator?

    In April, Russia goes to the polls. 2023 ended with many bangs, escalations against Russian civilians with western-supplied weapons. 2024 continues this trend. Nothing about the war in Ukraine is over, even though most people want it over, especially Ukrainians, Russians and the people paying the bills for this globalist culling of Slavs.

    Putin will win re-election. Of that there is no doubt. What also is not in doubt is the Neocon crazies continuing to degrade his position through attrition and embarrassment. Putin is no immune to political fatigue, despite what some folks may believe. Yes, he’s made a strong case to the Russian people that this is a civilizational war with the West. But everyone tires of seeing their sons come home in body bags.

    He’s fighting a war against people who do not care about anyone except themselves. They will sacrifice us all to their ends. Like Trump, they will do anything to stop him from stopping them. So, we cannot rule out the possibility of one of these assassination attempts against Putin succeeding.

    The point of the civilian bombings is to empower the hard core reactionaries in the Kremlin who feels Putin is too soft. Martin Armstrong has written extensively about this and I’m hard-pressed to disagree with him about this part of the story.

    Putin’s temperance in the face of Neocon insanity has changed a lot of hearts and minds over the past two years. I run into new people all the time who I wouldn’t expect to see this and they offer to me that we’re damn lucky he’s running Russia.

    Every crazy infrastructure attack — NS2, Kerch Bridge, supply ship in port, civilian bombing — radicalizes a few more Russians but also breaks the spell about the evil Putler for many in the West.

    Armstrong has targeted his Economic Confidence Model’s turning point as May 7th, the day of Putin’s next inauguration. Will this be the time GCHQ finally gets their man?

    Even if Putin survives and takes office, something is likely to happen surrounding Ukraine this summer that will ensure the war goes into 2025 and beyond.

    Sec. of State Antony Blinken met with Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman to keep the Israeli/Gaza situation from metastasizing further. Is Blinken suddenly becoming anti-war after ginning up three different major conflicts in as many years?

    Hellz no. He’s a neocon through and through. Any ‘pause’ in any conflict is simply an admission that we’re not prepared for escalation today, so let’s have a ‘ceasefire’ so they can reload. Or are people still confused about what the Minsk Accords were all about?

    Putin understands that when the West, especially British-aligned US actors, offer a ceasefire that means it’s time to step up operations, not down. This is why Russia pressures Ukraine across the entire front, probing for weaknesses, degrading their capabilities.

    Ukraine will look like it’s on the back burner in 2024, but it will be the biggest poison pill for whoever is president in 2025. It will leave Putin with few options but to continue focusing his economic output on it.

    #10 — No Recession in 2024

    The hardest part of making predictions in a chaotic world isn’t just that the data is faulty, it is that the past isn’t much of a guideline beyond what you can expect from the main actors. We understand how the Fed views the economy. We know what the Globalists’ goal structure looks like. We can even know how a lot of these things meet and interact.

    What we don’t know is how the people will react to them and what their overall behavior will be. And that, ultimately, is what decides whether there will or won’t be an economic contraction. Recessions are very technically-defined things. Two consecutive quarters of contracting spending, GDP contraction.

    In the real world it’s far more complex and difficult. Last year I stuck to the technical definition of a recession and was right. GDP growth never went negative. Deficits are high, while the Fed is doing QT Congress is outspending the Fed’s balance sheet improvements. Something will give in 2024.

    Barring a six-sigma event, which so far we have avoided in the capital markets, there won’t be a recession in the US in 2024 either. We needed one of those in 2023 to set the stage for this year. We didn’t get one. We may get one this year, but that would set up for the big event in 2025.

    Think the repo event of 2007 setting up Bear Stearns, then Lehman Bros. The Repo seizure in September 2019 setting up the COVID crisis, the attack on Oil prices, the CARES Act and the return to the zero-bound in 2020.

    There needs to be that inciting incident beforehand to get the main event later, with at least a six-month lag effect. We’re still at least three months from the Reverse Repo Facility running out of money and then there will still be months of set up before the banks have a crisis of reserves.

    So, with that said, and even if fiscal ‘sanity’ begins to take root in Washington as we approach the election this November, there is too much money still floating around to see spending go negative. Sorry, folks, but in the GDP game, no ticky, no washy. You have to have the spending stop to get the recession.

    We may buy hookers, blow, and South American revolutionaries with it… wait, this isn’t the 80’s…

    We may buy Pornhub subs, Cheetos, and Ukrainian Naht-sees with it, but it’s still spending.

    The question is what will we buy that money, not Hunter Biden.

    If the Fed cuts rates a little bit (50-75 bps in 2024), begins talk of tapering QT even starting in Q3, then we’ll see things get tougher, but not so much that spending retards overall. The quality of the spending will go down the value chain, towards lower-order good (food, shelter, etc.). But the spending will still be there.

    I’m with Joseph Wang on this, per his latest interview with Blockworks. Lower rates, as we’ve seen in the mortgage markets, will improve Main St.’s balance sheets to the point where we can and will muddle through. Inflation will still be higher than anyone wants. It may suck, but from a household spending perspective, so what?

    That won’t necessitate something radical from the Fed. What will is a sovereign debt crisis from a major government collapsing. But, I still maintain that is much more likely somewhere other than the US (despite Obama’s gaslighting) first. When Reuters is running articles like this:

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    That’s where you should be looking. If you want your black swan event to undermine this call just think about what Europe will do to prevent Viktor Orban from running the European Council for more than the normal six-month term.

    *  *  *

    All of the trends highlighted last year are still happening this year. The US dollar is still stronger than anyone expected. De-dollarization is still happening, it’s just that De-euroization of global trade happened first (in 2023). Iraq is now openly hostile to US military presence there. US troops in Syria are coming under increasingly heavy fire in retaliation, I think, for the UK and Ukraine attacking civilians in Belgorod.

    And the Globalist soul-sucking vampires still bear their fangs, and make pronouncements of how much blood we owe them. But, the less said about Ursula Von der Leyen the better at this point.

    I will wear your white feather I will carry your white flag
    I will swear I have no nation but I’m proud to own my heart
    We don’t need no uniforms, we have no disguise
    Divided we stand, together we’ll rise

    *  *  *

    Join my Patreon if you want to become #ungovernable

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 23:40

  • How Much Of The World Is Covered By Croplands?
    How Much Of The World Is Covered By Croplands?

    Over the last 50 years, the world’s human population worldwide has grown exponentially.

    And, as Visual Capitalist’s Adam Symington details below, this population explosion brought greater food production needs with it, through livestock breeding, cropland expansion, and other increases in land use.

    But how evenly is this land distributed globally? In this graphic, Adam Symington maps global croplands as of 2019, based on a 2021 scientific paper published in Nature by Peter Potapov et al.

    The World’s Croplands

    Croplands are defined as land areas used to cultivate herbaceous crops for human consumption, forage, and biofuel. At the start of the 21st century, the world’s croplands spread across 1,142 million hectares (Mha) of land.

    Some of these croplands have since been abandoned, lost in natural disasters, or repurposed for housing, irrigation, and other infrastructural needs.

    Despite this, the creation of new croplands increased overall cropland cover by around 9% and the net primary (crop) production by 25%.

    Africa and South America Lead Croplands Expansion

    In 2019, croplands occupied 1,244 Mha of land worldwide, with the largest regions being Europe and North Asia and Southwest Asia at around 20% of total cover each.

    Interestingly, even though Africa (17%) and South America (9%) held lower percentages of the world’s croplands, they saw the highest expansion in croplands since 2000:

    South American nations including Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay witnessed a steep rise in crop production between 2000 and 2007. Agricultural growth in the region can be attributed to both modern agricultural technology adoption and the production of globally demanded crops like soybeans.

    A similar expansion in croplands within Sub-Saharan African countries at the start of the 21st century continues to persist today, as producers ramp up crop production for both exports and to try and alleviate food scarcity.

    Much of these the world’s croplands were once forests, drylands, plains, and lowlands. And this loss in green cover is clearly seen across Africa, South America, and parts of Asia.

    However, some regions have also witnessed tree plantations, orchards, and aquaculture replacing former croplands. One such example is Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, and indeed Southeast Asia was the only region that saw an overall decline in cropland cover from 2000 to 2019.

    Moving Towards Sustainable Agriculture

    The expansion of croplands has also come at a cost, destroying large stretches of forest cover, and further contributing to wildlife fragmentation and greenhouse gas emissions.

    However, hope for more sustainable development is not lost. Nations are finding ways to improve agricultural productivity in ways that free up land.

    As global demand for food continues to increase, agricultural expansion and intensification seem imminent. But innovation, and a changing climate, may elevate alternative solutions in the future.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 23:20

  • Hospital Diagnostic Errors Send Nearly 1-In-4 Patients To ICU, Study Finds
    Hospital Diagnostic Errors Send Nearly 1-In-4 Patients To ICU, Study Finds

    Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Diagnostic errors in U.S. hospitals are sending nearly one in four patients to the intensive care unit, according to the results of a new study.

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    In the cohort study conducted by a team from UC San Francisco and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, it was found that 23 percent of patients either received incorrect diagnoses or experienced delays in diagnosis. Of these cases, 17 percent resulted in temporary or permanent harm to the patient.

    The study’s results are published in the January edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

    To determine diagnostic errors, the research team looked at 2,428 records of patients who had been admitted to 29 hospitals across the United States in 2019. A little over half of the patient records were male (54 percent), and the average age of the patient was 63.9 years old. Roughly two-thirds of the patients were white.

    Patient cases were reviewed by two physicians trained in error adjudications. The physicians evaluated medical records for the presence or absence of diagnostic errors or underlying process issues or faults. Any records marked for fault were then reviewed more closely to determine what, if any, harm was caused as a result of the error.

    The physicians had to agree on their assessment of the error and harm caused before finalizing their review; a third physician resolved any disagreements.

    In total, 550 patients experienced a diagnostic error. Of these, 436 patients suffered temporary or permanent harm or death as a result of the error. Among the 1,863 patients who died, diagnostic errors were found to contribute to 121 of those deaths, accounting for nearly one in 10.

    In 116 cases, diagnostic errors resulted in extended hospital stays. The most significant risks for diagnostic error were identified as issues in patient assessment and problems related to the ordering and interpretation of tests.

    “Results from our study provide impetus for rapid exploration and testing of interventions seen to reduce diagnostic errors and harms associated with ICU transfer and deaths by targeting gaps in test selection and interpretation and physicians’ ability to debias and rethink diagnoses as high-priority areas,” the research team concluded.

    Case Studies Show How Errors Lead to Harm, Longer Hospital Stays

    In a case involving assessment error and patient monitoring, a patient with group B strep infection in their foot was admitted to the hospital. The care team primarily focused on the patient’s meningitis and did not have a plan for treating the foot infection. Consequently, the patient was transferred to the intensive care unit due to poor blood flow and underwent surgical debridement of their foot.

    In another case related to testing, a patient on long-term anticoagulation therapy was admitted to the hospital with a hematoma just days following a bone marrow biopsy. The care team resumed anticoagulation therapy on the patient’s fifth day, which exacerbated the patient’s pain and led to tachycardia, a condition characterized by a heart rate exceeding 100 beats per minute. The patient remained in this state for an additional nine hours until CT scans revealed interventional radiology was required.

    In a case involving misdiagnosis, a patient who was admitted to the hospital with severe aortic stenosis died after the care team failed to recognize that the patient was in shock. The research team observed that the hospital utilized surgical services to triage the patient, who was experiencing tachycardia, instead of opting for critical care or medical services.

    According to the study, “problems related to testing, such as choosing the correct test, ordering the test in a timely fashion, or correctly interpreting the results and problems with assessment, such as recognizing complications or revisiting a different diagnosis, appear to be the most important targets for safety improvement programs.”

    The research team noted their study failed to capture the constant pressure on hospital care teams, such as workload and staffing shortages, which likely influence the professional standard of care.

    An October 2023 report from Kaufman Hall, a health care consulting firm, confirmed that two-thirds of hospitals across the United States are operating below full capacity due to staffing shortages. Additionally, 70 percent of these hospitals report that patients remain in emergency rooms due to a lack of staffing or bed capacity.

    The report includes responses from 106 hospital and health system executives.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 23:00

  • Chinese FDI Inflows Hit Multi-Year Lows
    Chinese FDI Inflows Hit Multi-Year Lows

    The Chinese economy has thrown up several red flags in 2023 and now foreign investors are losing confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.

    In the following graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao shows foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have hit multi-year lows, using data accessed via the Peterson Institute for International Economics and sourced from China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE)

    ℹ️ FDI occurs when an investor in one country acquires significant and lasting financial interest in a foreign enterprise. This data includes the IPO value of Chinese companies in foreign markets.

    Foreign Investors Hit “Sell” on China in 2023

    Aside from a broadly slowing economy, the Peterson Institute’s analysis highlights other key reasons why FDI inflows have scaled back so dramatically this year.

    Firstly, geopolitical tensions (in the form of an escalating chip war) between the U.S. and China are worrying foreign investors—many of them American-headquartered companies with a presence in China, holding back on investments in local companies.

    Secondly, the closure of due diligence firms (which allow foreign investors to make informed decisions on Chinese companies) along with a new national security law aimed at restricting cross-border data flows have disincentivized foreign investors from betting big if they wanted to.

    Meanwhile, huge spikes in FDI inflows between 2018 and 2021 indicate the success of Chinese companies listing on American securities exchanges, which SAFE includes in its data. However, crackdowns from both Chinese and U.S. securities regulators in 2022 turned the tap off briefly. Despite the restrictions being since removed, new listings have not bounced back.

    Another Red Flag for the Chinese Economy

    The Peterson Institute’s comparison of gross and net FDI flows found a nearly $100 billion shortfall—which means foreign firms are selling their Chinese investments, adding yet another red flag for the economy.

    This slowdown is now having a ripple effect across the region—for Japan, South Korea, and Thailand’s economies—whose export sectors rely on substantial Chinese demand. Nations in sub-saharan Africa will also feel the pinch as Chinese sovereign lending continues to fall, already past the lowest it’s been in two decades.

    Meanwhile, on a broader scale, Chinese growth contributes to one-third of world economic growth, which means the global economy will miss growth projections made last year—when economists had a more optimistic view of the world’s second-largest economy.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 22:40

  • America's Fiat Money Gestapo: The Untold History Of The Secret Service
    America’s Fiat Money Gestapo: The Untold History Of The Secret Service

    Authored by Joshua Glawson via The Mises Institute,

    There is an untold story in American monetary history. Some are reluctant even to discuss it.

    I’m referring to the US Secret Service’s very own role in the destruction of sound money in America.

    As constitutional, sound money in the form of physical gold and silver coins—whether minted privately or not—became an annoying impediment to expanding the size and power of the federal government, central planners began circulating unbacked paper proxies and formed a Gestapo-like police agency to enforce the scheme.

    Founded in 1865, toward the tail end of the American Civil War, the Secret Service originated as a branch of the US Treasury Department.

    The primary job of this federal police force was to prevent others from counterfeiting the U.S. currency, which had just been nationalized through acts of Congress via the National Currency Act of 1863 and the Coinage Act of 1864.

    Together, these acts formed what are commonly known as the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864.

    These Washington, DC laws imposed taxes with a levy court system and implemented direct taxation. This led to the country’s first income tax. The government also strengthened the establishment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which had conveniently begun operation in 1862. Conjointly, these propped up the new federal fiat currency system.

    From around 1837 through part of the Civil War, currency issuance and banking in America had been directed by a more decentralized network of states and free banking institutions. These entities issued banknotes that could be cashed in for standardized gold or silver coins or traded for goods and services.

    During the Civil War, however, both sides issued their own banknotes to help fund their respective war efforts, often unbacked by the two monetary metals.

    The Union pushed forth greenback fiat currency in Demand Notes and United States Notes. At the same time, the Confederates printed fiat greybacks in the forms of Confederate Dollars and Confederate Treasury Notes.

    The number of fiat dollars in a bank and region in the new era would be largely based on population rather than gold and silver reserves, which is one reason the Union continued to encourage immigration both for fiat monetary support and war efforts.

    The Union pushed to expand American territories through these Acts to increase population and issuance of government fiat money.

    Since the Union and Congress sought to impose a federal fiat legal tender currency system that did not rely on tangible value and voluntarism, they needed enforcement of those laws. Those supporting laws included income taxes and establishing the IRS. The war, economic strife, and competition between currencies created various types of “counterfeit” currency.

    Government officials made haughty claims that one in three fractional gold or silver coins at that time were counterfeit and did not contain their original gold or silver weight. By decreasing the amount of gold or silver in a coin, a counterfeiter could turn a profit.

    Yet, these government hypocrites had no qualms about mandating that unbacked fiat currency must be considered legally equal to gold and silver coinage. Nor did they object to the illicit profit this enabled the central government to rake in.

    Sadly, the US Supreme Court notoriously affirmed this devious scheme when deciding the “Legal Tender Cases,” considered by many legal scholars (including present-day Justices on the high court) to have been wrongly decided.

    As such, the government changed the definition of money and citizens could henceforth be compelled to accept non-redeemable paper as equal to gold or silver coins.

    On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation establishing the Secret Service to combat counterfeit money—the non-government type, that is. Later that same day, Lincoln was assassinated, and he died on April 15.

    From 1865 to 1901, the Secret Service’s main mission was to bust private counterfeiting operations. In 1881, President James Garfield was assassinated—interestingly, not too long after publicly advocating for a return to the gold standard.

    Then, in 1901, with the assassination of President William McKinley, and under the new presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the Secret Service was given the additional task of defending US presidents. (McKinley’s assassination occurred a year after he signed the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which halted bimetallism by diminishing the monetary role of silver.)

    The Secret Service grew from its original role of helping to ramrod a new fiat currency standard into a much larger police force that also protects the US presidents.

    A full 50 years before the Christmas Eve passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Congress had already set in motion a plan to rob our nation’s monetary system of its gold and silver, slip a fiat currency into circulation, promote fractional reserve banking, stamp out state and private banknotes, strengthen the IRS, and spawn the Secret Service to help enforce it all.

    The solution is to return to a free market for money—a system of competition where gold and silver are permitted to circulate alongside other forms of payment—and to remove government force from the equation.

    May the best currency win.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 22:20

  • Trump Says Georgia Case "Totally Compromised" After Allegations Of DA Fani Willis' "Improper" Romantic Relationship
    Trump Says Georgia Case “Totally Compromised” After Allegations Of DA Fani Willis’ “Improper” Romantic Relationship

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday called the Georgia election interference case against him “totally compromised” and insisted it should be dropped after a bombshell court filing accused the lead prosecutor in the case—District Attorney Fani Willis— of having an “improper” romantic relationship with her top Trump prosecutor.

    Former President Donald Trump in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2022, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. 14, 2023. (Chandan Khanna, Christian Monterrosa/AFP via Getty Images)

    A co-defendant in the case, former Trump attorney Michael Roman, on Monday filed a motion in court alleging that Ms. Willis had an “improper” relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor, and that she financially benefitted from their alleged relationship.

    Mr. Roman alleged that Mr. Wade, who has played a significant role in the case against President Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants, paid for vacations with Ms. Willis while using Fulton County funds that his private law firm had received.

    President Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case and has called it a “witch hunt” meant to derail his 2024 White House run, said on Tuesday that Mr. Roman’s court filing revelations mean that Ms. Willis and the case are both “totally compromised” and so the case should be dropped.

    “You had a very big event yesterday as you saw in Georgia where the district attorney is totally compromised. The case has to be dropped,” President Trump said on Tuesday after a hearing in Washington over presidential immunity arguments in a separate case against him.

    “They went after 18 or 20 people … She was out of her mind. Now it turns out that case is totally compromised,” the former president continued.

    Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media at a Washington hotel, on Jan. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

    “It’s illegal. What she did is illegal. So we’ll let the state handle that, but what a sad situation it is,” President Trump added.

    Ms. Willis’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, though a spokesperson for her office told media outlets that she would “respond through appropriate court filings.”

    ‘Improper Relationship’

    Ms. Willis brought the case against President Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a law drafted to fight organized crime.

    The indictment accuses President Trump, and 18 others, of being part of a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn the Georgia results of the 2020 presidential election by unlawful means.

    President Trump and his co-defendants have denied any wrongdoing, with the former president previously calling the case a “witch hunt” and accusing Ms. Willis of corruption.

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. 14, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    Mr. Roman, who faces seven charges in the Georgia election interference case, served on President Trump’s 2020 campaign as director of Election Day operations.

    In Monday’s court filing, Mr. Roman cited “discussions with individuals with knowledge” about Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade allegedly being “romantically involved” before the special prosecutor was brought onto the case by Ms. Willis.

    “Sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship during the pendency of the special prosecutor’s divorce proceedings,” states the filing, which also accuses Ms. Willis of bringing Mr. Wade on as a special counsel without obtaining proper government authorization.

    The filing further states that Mr. Wade allegedly had a “lack of relevant experience” although he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the county.

    More Details

    Mr. Roman’s filing also accused Ms. Willis of having potentially committed “an act to defraud the public of honest services” due to what he called an “intentional failure” to disclose her alleged relationship with Mr. Wade, which she “personally benefitted from.”

    Records obtained by a local media outlet show that Mr. Wade was paid over $650,000 in legal fees since January 2022 and that the district attorney is the one who authorizes it.

    Mr. Roman’s filing alleges that checks sent to Mr. Wade from Fulton County and vacations that he purchased with Ms. Willis could amount honest services fraud, which is a federal crime.

    “Willis has benefitted substantially and directly, and continues to benefit, from this litigation because Wade is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute this case on her behalf,” the filing states.

    Mr. Roman’s filing states that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade could be prosecuted under a federal racketeering statute.

    Besides the public comments President Trump made on Tuesday in response to Mr. Roman’s filing, he also took to Truth Social to post that the case “should be immediately dropped” and that Ms. Willis should apologize.

    Earlier court filings by President Trump’s co-defendants have alleged that Mr. Wade’s work is “void as a matter of law” because he allegedly failed to file his oath of office paperwork in time to formally join Ms. Willis’ team.

    Ms. Willis’s office did not respond to an earlier request for comment on the circumstances of Mr. Wade’s appointment.

    Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 21:40

  • ISIS Kills At Least 14 Syrian Soldiers In Palmyra Bus Attack
    ISIS Kills At Least 14 Syrian Soldiers In Palmyra Bus Attack

    Via The Cradle,

    ISIS militants attacked a military bus in the Syrian desert on Tuesday, killing at least 14 Syrian army soldiers, the anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported.

    “At least 14 members of the regime forces were killed” and several others wounded “in a bloody [ISIS] attack on a military bus” in the desert near the ancient city of Palmyra, SOHR said.

    Getty Images

    The organization has carried out few attacks in recent months but has stepped up its activities recently. ISIS also killed nine Syrian army soldiers and allied fighters in an attack on military posts in the eastern Syrian desert last week, according to the British-based monitor.

    ISIS also claimed credit for a terror attack in Iran last week which killed 91 pilgrims visiting the grave of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general assassinated by the US in Iraq in 2020 and who spear headed the war against ISIS.

    ISIS and its spin-off, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (previously the Nusra Front), are widely viewed as Israeli-US proxies. The groups played a crucial role in sparking a war in Syria to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad and to divide Iraq for the sake of establishing an independent Kurdish state able export oil to Israel. 

    The terror attack in Iran came amid a broader US and Israeli campaign to target leaders of the Iran-aligned ‘Axis of Resistance’. 

    One day before the attack at Soleimani’s grave, Israel assassinated top Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut. On January 5, the US targeted Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi, a leader of Harakat al-Nujaba, which is part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). On January 8, Israel assassinated a top Hezbollah commander Wissam al-Tawil in southern Lebanon.

    ISIS carried out a major attack in Iran in June 2017, targeting both the Iranian Parliament and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, killing 16.

    In October 2022, ISIS militants opened fire on visitors to a important Shiite holy site in the city of Shiraz, killing at least 15 and wounding dozens.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 21:00

  • Speaker Johnson Pledges To Stand 'Shoulder To Shoulder' For 'Defense Of Taiwan'
    Speaker Johnson Pledges To Stand ‘Shoulder To Shoulder’ For ‘Defense Of Taiwan’

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) met with Taiwan’s US envoy at the US Capitol on Tuesday, after which he vowed to continue supporting the Taiwanese people against Chinese aggression.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) meets with Taiwan’s representative to the United States, Alexander Yui.

    “We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taiwanese people,” Johnson told reporters, adding “We certainly want to help in the defense of Taiwan, which is very important. We want to deter the Chinese Communist Party and any military provocations. The U.S. stands with our friends.“

    Johnson met with Envoy Alexander Yui, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the United States – a meeting which undoubtedly pissed off CCP authorities in Beijing, particularly after Yui said that he looks forward to “further strengthen[ing] our rock-solid friendship,” to which Johjnson replied: “We have an important relationship, and we want to strengthen that.”

    As The Epoch Times notes, the CCP has been harassing Taiwan leading up to the democratic island’s upcoming presidential vote on Saturday – launching several balloons and a rocket containing a satellite over the island’s airspace. Taiwan’s foreign minister described the incidents as part of a larger pattern of aggression designed to sway voters ahead of the election.

    Recall in August of 2022 when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, the CCP launched several missiles around Taiwan and cut off all military communications with the United States.

    The Chinese Communist Party claims that Taiwan is a rogue province that must be united with the mainland by any means necessary. The regime has never actually controlled any part of the island, however.

    For its part, Taiwan is self-governed by a democratic government and oversees one of the world’s most successful market economies. Out of respect for China’s position, the United States does not maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The United States and Taiwan do share robust informal ties, however, including economically and militarily.

    It is unclear at this time what the response will be from Beijing concerning Mr. Johnson’s meeting with Mr. Yui.

    “It sure does raise interesting questions about what their intentions are; what their goals are,” said White House National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby, who added that the Biden administration remains committed to supporting free and fair elections in Taiwan.

    Taiwan’s armed forces hold two days of routine drills to show combat readiness ahead of Lunar New Year holidays at a military base on Jan. 11, 2023, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)

    “We want to see a free and fair and transparent election, and we’re willing to stand by and work with whoever the people of Taiwan elect to their government.”

     

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 20:40

  • Congress Takes Step To Hold Hunter Biden In Contempt
    Congress Takes Step To Hold Hunter Biden In Contempt

    By Zachary Stieber of Epoch Times

    Members of Congress on Jan. 10 approved a report and resolution that recommends holding President Joe Biden’s son in contempt.

    A U.S. House of Representatives panel voted approve the report and resolution, which says that Hunter Biden, 53, violated federal law by refusing to appear for a deposition behind closed doors.

    The vote was along party lines. No Republicans voted no and no Democrats voted yes. Republicans currently control the lower chamber, so have more members on each panel. The full House is set to take up the matter at some point in the future.

    Mr. Biden declined to sit for a transcribed interview in December 2023, insisting he would only answer questions in public.

    Federal law states that when people who are subpoenaed by Congress refuse to testify or provide requested documents, Congress shall refer the matter to U.S. prosecutors. The people who defy congressional subpoenas can land a prison term of one to 12 months and a fine or $1,000.

    Two former advisers to ex-President Donald Trump have been convicted by juries of violating the law for refusing to comply with subpoenas.

    The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve the report. The House Oversight Committee was also scheduled to hold a vote, but lawmakers were still marking its report and resolution up more than six hours after its markup started.

    Markups involve discussing proposed legislation, proposing amendments, and voting on amendments.

    Mr. Biden “blatantly defied two lawful subpoenas,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said earlier on Wednesday.

    “What we’re doing here today is showing the country that Hunter will not receive special treatment due to his last name. It’s very, very simple. And he will be held to the same standard that every other American citizen would be expected to do,” added Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.).

    Democrats spent much of the hearings talking about President Trump. Some said they supported Mr. Biden refusing to testify in private, pointing to comments Mr. Comer made that invited witnesses to choose whether to testify in public or private.

    Mr. Comer said the votes were about the subpoena and that Mr. Biden could speak in a public hearing after testifying behind closed doors.

    Mr. Biden made a surprise appearance during one of the hearings, sitting briefly with his lawyers before departing.

    Republicans are seeking to speak to Mr. Biden regarding his business dealings and his father’s involvement with them. They’ve obtained evidence showing bank transfers between one of Mr. Biden’s companies and the president, among other records.

    Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, flanked by Kevin Morris, left, and Abbe Lowell, right, departs a House Oversight Committee meeting in Washington on Jan. 10, 2024.

    “Our investigation has produced significant evidence suggesting President Biden knew of, participated in, and benefited from his family’s cashing in on the Biden name,” Mr. Comer said.

    Mr. Biden told reporters in late 2023 that “my father was not financially involved in my business.” He sat in on part of one of the hearings on Wednesday, but did not attempt to speak.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week that Mr. Biden makes his own choices.

    “We don’t have anything else to share beyond that,“ she said. ”He’s a private citizen, and he makes his own decisions.”

    She declined to say whether President Biden spoke with his son before or after his appearance in Congress.

    Mr. Biden’s appearance sparked anger.

    “You are the epitome of white privilege, coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told Mr. Biden. “What are you afraid of?”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 20:20

  • US Beef Output Slides As Blizzard Disrupts Midwest Meat Plants
    US Beef Output Slides As Blizzard Disrupts Midwest Meat Plants

    A powerful winter storm swept across the country’s midsection on Monday, dumping more than a foot of snow in some areas and shutting down highways in several Midwest states. Adverse weather conditions also closed major meatpacking plants.

    Bloomberg reports two major beef packers idled operations in Kansas this week as blizzard conditions left workers unable to traverse roadways. 

    Cargill Inc.’s Dodge City, Kansas plant suffered a power outage, and 50 workers were stranded on a nearby highway due to road closures. 

    “We realize that some employees got stuck on the road outside the plant. We are working with local authorities and have hired tow truck drivers to assist them and other motorists,” Cargill said in a statement.

    Tyson Foods meatpacking plant in Holcomb, Kansas, canceled shifts on Tuesday, the company said in a statement. On Monday, employees were given hot meals and shelter because roadways were too dangerous for travel. 

    Fierce winter weather likely impacted the number of cattle slaughtered in the US on Tuesday, coming in at 94,000, compared with figures one year ago of 128,000, according to US Department of Agriculture data. This is also the lowest slaughter number of the new year. 

    “When meat plants close, protein prices can start surging if supplies run thin. Meanwhile, farmers may face lower prices for their livestock with demand for the animals disrupted,” Bloomberg noted. 

    This week’s disruption at some major beef plants in Heartland appears to be short-lived. However, a massive shortage of the nation’s cattle herd has driven retail beef prices to record highs. 

    The beef industry is facing persistent challenges. It may be time for automated plants.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 20:00

  • Canadian Police Arrest Conservative Journalist On Trumped-Up Charge Of Assault
    Canadian Police Arrest Conservative Journalist On Trumped-Up Charge Of Assault

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    We have been discussing the rapid decline of free speech protections in Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

    A vivid example of the increasing authoritarian approach was evident this week with the arrest of David Menzies, a reporter for Canada’s conservative Rebel News Network. Menzies was attempting to interview Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland when her security clearly manufactured a criminal charge in front of cameras.

    Menzies was attempting to ask Freeland about Canada’s refusal to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) as a terrorist organization.

    Freeland continues to walk as Menzies attempts get an answer by walking backwards.

    As he stays with Freeland, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) stands in his way and the result is a slight bump. The officer then immediately carries out an arrest with an eventual charge that Menzies assaulted him.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Trudeau has had a long running feud with Rebel News.

    Last week, we discussed the irony of how a Russian dissident was denied Canadian citizenship due to a conviction in Russia for speaking against the Ukrainian war (from Canada). Since Canada has the same criminalization of speech laws, Maria Kartasheva was pulled from her ceremony pending further investigation into whether she is a criminal practitioner of free speech.

    The arrest of Menzies raises the same comparison to the approach of governments like Putin’s to critics.

    Note in the video below how the officer positions himself directly in the path of Menzies as he walks back with his back to the officer.

    You can judge for yourself on what countries come to mind:

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 19:40

  • White House Backs Legislation To Seize Frozen Russian Assets For Ukraine Reconstruction
    White House Backs Legislation To Seize Frozen Russian Assets For Ukraine Reconstruction

    It seems this is how President Joe Biden hopes to circumvent the Congressional hold-up and get badly needed funds to Ukraine, at a moment Zelensky is berating allies and warning that Western ‘hesitation’ will embolden Putin…

    “President Joe Biden’s administration is backing legislation that would let it seize some of $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to help pay for reconstruction of Ukraine, a shift as the White House seeks to rally support in Congress to further fund the war against Vladimir Putin’s forces,” Bloomberg reports Wednesday. The hope is that this would help keep the lights on and salaries paid in the war-ravaged country, as well as help with post-war reconstruction.

    A yacht belonging to Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik at the Don Diego port, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. AFP/Getty Images

    This follows a memo by Biden’s National Security Council being sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in November which indicated the administration would welcome “in principle” legislation allowing it to confiscate the funds.

    If approved the plan would funnel Russia’s seized central bank and other sovereign assets (such as some oligarchs’ superyachts) which have been “immobilized” in Western nations to hand over to Keiv.

    The Financial Times previously aptly described the potential drastic move as constituting “a radical step that would open a new chapter in the west’s financial warfare against Moscow” – also as certainly Moscow will see it as an act of brazen theft.

    Thus it seems the general atmosphere of war fatigue and the sudden drop-off in funding for Kiev has clearly prompted Washington and G7 partners to “get creative.”

    The controversy over the potential move along with potential blowback was highlighted by The New York Times last month:

    Until recently, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen had argued that without action by Congress, seizing the funds was “not something that is legally permissible in the United States.”

    There has also been concern among some top American officials that nations around the world would hesitate to keep their funds at the New York Federal Reserve, or in dollars, if the United States established a precedent for seizing the money.

    Federal Reserve Bank of New York

    Along with pressing defense needs, Ukraine reportedly is severely struggling to keep basic state services afloat, including paying teachers, civic workers, and maintaining pensions – among other things.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 19:20

  • Some House Republicans Willing To Force Government Shutdown After Eagle Pass Border Visit
    Some House Republicans Willing To Force Government Shutdown After Eagle Pass Border Visit

    Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Following a visit to the southern border last week, some House Republicans urged their colleagues to treat the situation at the border as a major national security risk and to be willing to force a government shutdown to get Democrats and the Biden administration to accept stricter immigration policies and border security measures.

    Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) speaks at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on July 25, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Around 60 House Republicans visited the west Texas border town of Eagle Pass last week. Speaking with NTD’s “Capitol Report” on Tuesday, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) said that the trip marked his fourth visit to the U.S. southern border and that he agreed to go once again to see “how bad the conditions had evolved over the last year.”

    “We have major, major problems and I continue to say this is an imminent national security threat,” he said.

    Mr. Rosendale noted reported preliminary estimates that U.S. border personnel recorded about 302,000 encounters along the U.S. southern border in December, which would represent the busiest month on record for border officials.

    Mr. Rosendale said that upon arriving in Eagle Pass, he also learned that border officials in that sector were working to process about 10,000 illegal immigrants, of whom 200 were deemed individuals of special interest “meaning that they weren’t sure exactly where they were from, they weren’t sure what exactly their intentions were when they arrived here.” He said these 200 special interest individuals and the broader group of 10,000 illegal immigrants were ultimately “whisked off and distributed around the country” before border officials could perform additional vetting efforts.

    The Montana Republican said he learned border officials have identified members of up to 168 nationalities who’ve attempted border crossings, including Chinese nationals and people from Middle Eastern countries. Even more concerning, he said, is the approximately 2 million “gotaways” that border officials have estimated have been able to cross into the United States without being stopped. Mr. Rosendale said some of these “gotaways” have even been observed wearing sophisticated camouflage suits to avoid being detected.

    “If it is so easy to cross the Rio Grande and Eagle Pass Texas and get a new pair of shoes, clean underwear, and a basically a bus ticket or a flight ticket to go anywhere in the country that you want, why would you go through all the work to sneak in under the cover of night? How bad of a criminal do you have to be?” Mr. Rosendale wondered.

    Mr. Rosendale said that if even a fraction of the 2 million gotaways intend to cause harm to the United States “they can wreak havoc across the nation with our national security.”

    Looking beyond the national security concerns, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said the influx of people at the southern border still puts a strain on the United States and border communities in particular.

    “People are trying to understand why, if you’re a resident of Eagle Pass, you might be waiting in the waiting room of the ER, because illegal aliens, who aren’t supposed to be in your community, are going ahead of you in line. You may be wondering why there’s five ambulances in Eagle Pass, but one of them is dedicated solely to dealing with the illegal aliens who are coming across the border,” Mr. Biggs said. “And people are fed up with it in that community.”

    Republicans Weigh Shutdown Fight

    Mr. Rosendale said the various official Republican visits to the southern border may indicate that Republican awareness of border security concerns is rising, but expressed doubts about whether they are willing to take a stand on the issue.

    “I think when Jan. 19 rolls on, and we are faced with funding government or doing something about securing our southern border, at that point, that’s where I’m drawing the line and say ‘until we can see the numbers reduce that are crossing into our country illegally from the southern border, I’m not willing to fund the balance of the federal government,” he said.

    Mr. Rosendale said Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans benefits would continue to be funded in a partial government shutdown, while about 15 percent of the government budget would go unfunded if Congress doesn’t agree to a new budget or continuing resolution by Jan. 19 when the current round of government funding runs out.

    “That is a small price to pay, and if we can use that as leverage to secure our nation’s borders, I think that we absolutely should be doing so,” he said.

    Mr. Biggs said several officials and advocates Republicans had met with during their visit to Eagle Pass had “begged” Republicans in Congress not to fund the federal government until the Biden administration commits to greater efforts to enforce existing border security policies.

    “If you’re going to get this administration to actually enforce the law, you’re going to have to reduce their funding in the programs that they want to have funded, which is a twofer because we spent way too much money as it is. But the second thing is they would be incentivized to actually enforce the law,” Mr. Biggs told “Capitol Report.”

    In a letter to colleagues last week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Republicans had the opportunity to tie their border security demands to a measure to temporarily fund the government last fall, but said his “more conservative” colleagues in Congress “were instrumental in shooting down” the effort.

    Mr. Roy said the decision not to tie border security to that earlier government funding measure was a “disastrous mistake, and as equally tiresome and problematic as the excuses Republicans typically give about fearing ’shutdown.’ Thus, this letter is directed to all of us, for while Democrats own the crisis and abuse of our laws, we Republicans own the failure to force a response to that crisis.”

    Asked to respond to Mr. Roy’s letter last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Ala.) told CBS News that Republicans aren’t threatening to shut down the government over their border security demands, but that House Republicans “understand this is a critical issue.”

    Republicans in both the House and the Senate have already attached their demands for border security to a more than $100 billion supplemental spending request submitted by President Biden this fall. The president’s supplemental spending proposal linked several billion in new border and immigration funding to his other spending priorities, like continuing to fund Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia.

    Mayorkas: Border Crisis is on Congress to Resolve

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas paid his own visit to Eagle Pass on Monday, during which he placed the responsibility on Congress to alleviate the “tremendous stress on our broken immigration system” and fund “our under-resourced facilities.”

    Mr. Mayorkas argued that lawmakers should approve President Biden’s spending supplemental, arguing that money will allow the Department of Homeland Security to hire more Border Patrol agents, as well as asylum officers and immigration judges to adjudicate a backlog of more than 3 million immigration cases that has built up over the years, and to fund new facilities to detain people arriving at the border.

    “We will continue to do everything we can, and we will continue to enforce the law, but we need Congress to make the legislative changes and provide the funding that our frontline officers so desperately need,” he said.

    The DHS secretary’s remarks come as the Republican-led House Committee on Homeland Security is set to consider whether he should be impeached.

    Mr. Rosendale suggested the Mr. Mayorkas had simply made his visit to Eagle Pass in order to win support in the oncoming impeachment deliberations.

    “He was trying to deploy a PR stunt to try and generate a little bit of support so that his impeachment wouldn’t move forward,” Mr. Rosendale said. “The problem is that he has demonstrated that he has no regard for the law whatsoever. He has not only violated our laws and allowed the southern border to be in the state of an invasion by anybody’s description, but he’s also stopped [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] from doing their job once all these illegals do arrive in our country, keeping them from performing raids and removing and deporting the illegals once they come upon them.”

    During his Monday press remarks, Mr. Mayorkas rejected allegations that the DHS is not enforcing the existing immigration laws. He claimed the DHS has removed, returned, or expelled the majority of people it has encountered at the southern border over the course of the Biden administration, and that more noncitizens without a basis to remain in the United States were removed in the five-month period since May of 2023 than in any other five-month period in the last decade.

    “We are doing everything we can, within a broken system, to incentivize noncitizens to use lawful pathways, to impose consequences on those who do not, and to reduce irregular migration,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 19:00

  • Is Honda's New EV A Copy Of The 1980s Lamborghini Countach?
    Is Honda’s New EV A Copy Of The 1980s Lamborghini Countach?

    It could be just us, but Honda’s new electric vehicle, called “Saloon,” unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, seems to mirror the designs of the Lamborghini Countach from the mid-1980s. 

    With that aside, Honda’s new EV will feature “new advancements in design, automated driving, connected technologies, performance, and battery efficiency,” according to a Honda press release. 

    The Japanese company expects the Saloon to be released in North America in 2026. Autoblog Autocar quoted the designer Toshinobu Minami as saying the new EV would keep “90% of this appearance,” including gullwing doors, for the production model.  

    Honda has previously laid out plans for EVs and fuel-cell vehicles, which will comprise 40% of its new vehicle sales by 2030, 80% by 2035, and 100% by 2040. 

    As of January, Honda does not offer full EVs in the US (only hybrids). The move into full EVs comes as US EV sales for the fourth quarter of 2023 slowed, growing by only 1.3%. The slowdown comes after 5% gains in the third quarter and 15% in the April-through-June period. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 18:40

  • The White House's Infrastructure Goals Risk Disruption… By The White House
    The White House’s Infrastructure Goals Risk Disruption… By The White House

    Authored by Michael Ireland & Michael Johnson, Michael Philipps via RealClear Wire,

    For Americans to start seeing evidence of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) taking shape in their hometowns, the construction industry will need the building materials to do the work. But should a newly proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) particulate matter (PM) standard take effect in the next few weeks, those materials might not be readily available over the course of the next few years. 

    The actual proposed reduction may seem small, but it would be an enormous change if put into practice. Meeting this change would not only hurt local communities, but it would also thwart the Biden Administration’s flagship IIJA goals.

    To comply with the lower standard, U.S. manufacturers may have to cut back hours of operation, which would lead to fewer construction materials being produced, potential layoffs at manufacturing plants and inevitable delays in construction.

    In other words, if the Administration chooses to move forward with the new EPA standard, it could be hindering its own plan to revamp the nation’s infrastructurea $550 billion agenda — and the opportunities to provide building materials would be punted to the U.S. construction industry’s competitors overseas. The supplies in other countries would likely be ready and in abundance, as the U.S. enforces some of the strictest emissions regulations in the world, and America’s manufacturers follow them or are shut down.

    Those in the nation’s construction industry do care and continue to take action to improve the environment and the air we breathe. For decades, the U.S. cement, concrete, and aggregates industries have spent millions on state-of-the-art technologies to adhere to EPA standards and yield more sustainable products.  

    Currently, the U.S. cement industry contributes only a 0.1% share of the PM emissions being targeted, and through the efforts of regulated industry and government officials, PM emissions have been reduced by 37% during the last two decades. This downward trend will continue through programs already on the books, including the PM standards EPA retained in 2020.  

    Our industries have invested heavily in efforts to make our products more sustainable because of one simple truth: we are aware of how much society depends on these materials essential in construction, and we know life would be completely disrupted without them. These materials are not frivolous or luxury items that only accommodate some of the population. They are not a fleeting architectural fad that is in vogue today and outdated tomorrow. They are likely the foundation of the home or building where you currently sit, the sidewalk under your feet, and the roads and bridges you rely on to get you where you need to go. 

    For centuries, U.S. construction materials have proven to be resilient, reliable, and strong. We checked those boxes long ago. This is why our industries are focusing now, more than ever, on making them more sustainable. 

    The IIJA promises $550 billion in construction projects by 2026, which means manufacturers will need to supply tens of millions of tons of their products for those projects to happen. If anything, there is a need for greater investment in U.S. building material production capabilities.

    The nation’s manufacturers are well-regulated. They have been for decades. Costly new regulations would negatively impact the U.S. construction industry, ramp up sales in the U.S. for foreign competitors, and we would all witness the same presidential administration that worked so steadfastly to champion the IIJA become the very administration to stifle it.

    ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ ­­­­Michael Ireland is President and CEO, Portland Cement Association. 

    Michael Johnson is President and CEO, National Stone Sand and Gravel Association. 

    Michael Philipps is President, National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 18:20

  • Don Lemon Announces Launch Of New Show On X
    Don Lemon Announces Launch Of New Show On X

    It’s funny how after you’re fired for being an authoritarian left-wing lunatic, it’s only then that you’re proud to fall back on the first amendment to pull yourself up by your bootstraps…

    Speaking of which, disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon looks like he’s going to be getting his own show back, this time on X. 

    In a post published on Tuesday, Lemon wrote on his X account: “I’ve heard you … and today I am back bigger, bolder, freer! My new media company’s first project is The Don Lemon Show.”

    Clearly, he hasn’t heard us, because he wouldn’t be launching a new show in the first place if he had. 

    “It will be available to everyone, easily, whenever you want it, streaming on the platforms where the conversations are happening,” he wrote, suggesting his show would likely follow the same model as Tucker Carlson’s show on X. 

    Lemon praised X in his comments, saying his show would be “first on X, the biggest space for free speech in the world.”

    Recall, back in April of last year, Lemon was fired from CNN. He said on Twitter at the time: “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN.”

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    He added: “I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network.”

    For a review of his rocky (to put it mildly) controversies at his former network and largely failed morning show, here’s a trip down ZH headline memory lane:

    How long before the rest of the journalists that have been dragging Elon Musk’s name through the mud and taking every shot possible at X come crawling back to the billionaire and the platform to launch their next projects? Paging Brian Stelter…

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 18:00

  • "Politics Is So Confusing Right Now" – Dems & Reps Have Switched Sides & Now Half Of Voters Identify 'Independent'
    “Politics Is So Confusing Right Now” – Dems & Reps Have Switched Sides & Now Half Of Voters Identify ‘Independent’

    Authored by Peter Savodnik via The Free Press,

    The Great Scramble

    Democrats and Republicans have switched sides—and nearly half of voters now call themselves independent. Peter Savodnik meets the politically homeless…

    In 2016, Shelle Lichti voted for Donald Trump. She got tons of blowback from other gay people who thought she’d betrayed them.

    She was 45 at the time, and she’d been doing things her own way since she was 11, since she was adopted by the big Mennonite family in Missouri, and ran away, and came out, and became a trucker, hauling beef and pork across the American hinterland in a rainbow-painted eighteen-wheeler. 

    It had been tough being a woman. And a lesbian.

    But she’d forged a new life for herself. 

    She had built a portable home in the back of her truck—with the kitchenette, the curtains, the warm little lights, the generator, and her bed on the lower bunk, and all her clothes, first-aid gear, and dry goods in the top bunk—and she’d traversed an array of politics and religions. (She was into Buddhism—the calm, the focus. “I choose to say I have faith, but I’m not religious,” Lichti said.) She liked to listen to audiobooks—she was into Nora Roberts, the romance novelist—and she loved to turn up Sia when she was “laying down some miles,” which meant going for hours and hours, not stopping, pushing on to wherever she was going.

    “Everybody is on their own ride,” Lichti tells The Free Press. “We have to respect that.” (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

    What she had learned from riding around the country in her little home in her big rig was you never knew as much as you thought you did about other people. “Everybody is on their own ride,” she said. “We have to respect that.”

    Over the years, she noticed the homophobia had waned, but it had gotten harder to make a living, mostly because of the influx of truckers, most of whom were from Somalia and the Middle East.

    “I don’t have a problem with them—they’re out here making a living for their families,” Lichti said. But with the new truckers, it was harder to get a raise. “When I started”—in 1993—“I made 19 cents a mile. Now, I barely make double that.”

    Shelle Lichti works on her truck, The Rainbow Rider, on December 10, 2023 in Joliet, IL. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

    It wasn’t just Lichti who was struggling. It seemed to her like the country was falling apart. “A lot of roadside motels and hotels look like crack houses,” she said. “Not enough people coming through.” On top of that, she said, Main Streets everywhere had been devoured by Walmart, Costco, Amazon. “The billboards on Route 66”—the 2,500-mile highway connecting Chicago and Los Angeles—“are mostly gone.” 

    Then, in June 2015, Trump announced his presidential bid, and the bluster, the fireworks, the who-gives-a-fuck about sticking to your talking points—that was refreshing in the face of all the decline.

    A lot of her gay and lesbian friends thought she’d gone crazy. “I was like, ‘If you want to unfriend me because of my beliefs, then you’re no better than the people that hate on us,’ ” Lichti said.

    But after Trump got into office, Lichti started to see the world differently yet again. Trump seemed too nasty in his rhetoric, like a “toddler,” she said. 

    Then, she learned her son was transgender, and it seemed like a dangerous time to be trans or Muslim or Mexican. “My son’s own twin brother has blown him off,” she said.

    Then came Covid, George Floyd, the riots. And Trump didn’t seem to make life any better for truckers, Lichti said. “It got even worse.” 

    By Election Day 2020, she said, “I wanted anybody but Trump.” Lichti voted for Joe Biden.

    More than three years later, she doesn’t know what to believe. She says she feels unmoored. She considers Biden a “seat-filler.” She doesn’t care for Democrats. She kind of cares about climate change, and she’s pro-choice, and she’s heartbroken about the people dying in Ukraine and Gaza, but she doesn’t think it’s America’s problem, and she can’t stand the kids in the LGBTQ+ movement with their “20 zillion acronyms.”

    She said she isn’t a “conservative” or “progressive,” and definitely not a Democrat or Republican. 

    “Our society has made it to where we’re supposed to fit in a certain mold,” she said. “A lot of us, you know, well, it’s like taking a plus-size girl and trying to squeeze me into a size 2. Just not gonna work.”

    Lichti rejects labels like “Democrat,” “Republican,” “progressive,” and “conservative.” “Our society has made it to where we’re supposed to fit in a certain mold,” she said. “It’s like taking a plus-size girl and trying to squeeze me into a size 2. Just not gonna work.” (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

    Shelle Lichti is hardly alone. 

    Nearly half of Americans now identify as independent—not necessarily because they’re centrists, or moderates, but because neither party reflects their views.

    That’s because, over the past several decades, the parties have switched places, leaving tens of millions of voters unsure about what they stand for or where they belong, Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A Time to Build, about reviving the American Dream, told me.

    Levin described two axes in American political life—one right-left, and the other insider-outsider. Traditionally, the party of the right has been the party of the inside—the establishment—and the left has fought for those on the outside—the poor, the disenfranchised.

    “But in the twenty-first century, they’ve switched sides,” he said. “Democrats are the elites, and Republicans feel like they’re fighting the establishment.”

    One way to think about it, said Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, was geographic: “From Lincoln to Reagan, New England, the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes, and the western states were the Republicans, and now they’re the Democrats—while the interior was all the Democrats, and now they’re the Republicans.” 

    This switch has “created a huge amount of confusion, because it’s happened without either party recognizing it,” Levin added. “Republicans have gotten pretty comfortable with it, while Democrats are very uncomfortable being the insider party.”

    That’s because it’s “political suicide” to acknowledge you’re the party of the elite, Thomas Edsall, a New York Times columnist who has reported on national politics for a half-century, told me. 

    “Democrats are elite, but they can’t say it,” Edsall said.

    Consider that, in 2016, the median home price of a Hillary Clinton voter was $640,000, while that of a Trump voter was $474,000. In 2018, Democrats took control of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the country—all of them on the coasts, mostly in New York and California. Of the top 50, they held 41. 

    And, increasingly, Democrats recruit their future leaders—their ideas—from a handful of universities that cater to the American elite.

    From 2004 to 2016, 20 percent of all Democratic campaign staffers came from seven universities: Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Berkeley, Georgetown, Columbia, and Yale. By contrast, the University of Texas, Austin; Ohio State University; and University of Wisconsin–Madison provided the most Republican staffers.

    The reasons for the Great Scramble are legion and stretch back decades, if not longer: the breakup of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, the end of the Cold War, globalization, the internet, the decline of organized religion and the two-parent family, the forever wars, the opioid and fentanyl crises. 

    “Things are definitely in flux,” Michael Lind said.

    *  *  *

    What I know for sure is that I first glimpsed it on Election Night 2022, at a “victory party” in Phoenix for Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

    Lake’s supporters seemed to fall outside the old left-right construct. Racially, economically, ideologically—they didn’t fit the preconceived categories. 

    My surprise was obvious when I interviewed a Latina in her fifties in an Iron Maiden t-shirt. 

    How was it, I asked, that she supported a candidate who had run against more Latinos coming to America? Had she not seen Lake’s campaign manager’s “racist tweet” a few weeks before? 

    That’s when she started lecturing me about “gangbangers coming here” and then “Big Tech” and “Big Pharma,” but also her friend’s biracial daughter and Martin Luther King Jr., and why Washington should “pump trillions” into the rural parts of the country decimated by fentanyl and cheap overseas labor. 

    Our conversation wasn’t that dissimilar to a conversation I had several months later with a Democratic bundler in Brentwood—he’s worth, I’m told, about $400 million—who was going on about how “the climate and AI are everything” (he thought the former was the end of us, and the latter was our salvation), and how he was “scared shitless about the gender stuff.” When I asked him whether he’d be supporting Biden in 2024, he said, “Of course,” but then he added, “As for the other fucktards”—he meant younger, more progressive, down-ballot Democrats—“no way, no can do.”

    There were other weird signs: the Democratic poll, in November, showing that the base of the party—including blacks, Latinos, college women, and millennials—prefers Trump to Biden; GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley saying government shouldn’t bar minors from transitioning; Senator John Fetterman, once lionized by progressives, insisting “I’m not a progressive,” while touting his support for Israel and calling for tougher border controls—prompting Helen Qiu, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for New York City Council, to call Fetterman a “Christmas Miracle.”

    Compounding our confusions about the Great Scramble is the language we use to talk about politics—to describe the country we want to live in.

    “Our language is impoverished, left over from the French Revolution, with us just saying ‘right’ and ‘left’ and what we think we mean by that,” Oklahoma City attorney Jason Reese, who has spent 25 years in GOP politics, told me. 

    In the 1980s, when he was a kid, Reese was a Reagan Republican. He believed in capitalism, and thought the Soviet Union was evil, and the unions, like liberals and high taxes, were a relic. His mom called him “Alex P. Keaton,” after the Family Ties character.

    But in 1992, just as conservatives were triumphing over everyone—with the USSR now dead, and China and India embracing market economics, and the Democrats, under Bill Clinton, morphing into moderate Republicans—the movement suffered its first shock. So did Reese.

    “Ross Perot was the catalyst for this,” he said, referring to the third-party candidate blamed by many Republicans for President George H.W. Bush’s loss to Clinton. “He broke up that old Republican coalition.”

    It was Perot who suggested there was a contradiction baked into Reagan’s GOP: while the party embraced free trade and free markets, he argued those policies threatened working-class voters who had recently flocked to it. 

    Perot was especially upset about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which, he said, would lead to a “giant sucking sound going south”—as blue-collar jobs moved from the United States to Mexico.

    That proved prophetic.

    Reese saw the political shift happen in his own extended family, in Kentucky and Texas. In the early 1990s, he said, they cared a lot about abortion. By the 2010s, they were talking nonstop about jobs and immigration.

    That colored his own thinking. Today, Reese said, he’s an “economic nationalist” who backs tariffs and a higher minimum wage, and a “foreign policy realist” (meaning, no more wars unless they must be fought), and he’s skeptical of capital punishment. 

    This confusion also extends to the left, which includes “liberals” and “progressives” and people who believe in minimizing economic disparity and people who think talking about economic disparity is racist. 

    Obama was the “perfect distillation of liberalism,” Tyler Harper, a comparative literature professor at Bates College who has written on politics and identity, and supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, told me. 

    “Progressives,” Harper said, are the people who think racial identity reigns supreme and have no serious objection to capitalism.

    “I don’t think they’re left-wing in any substantive sense at all,” Harper said of progressives. He saw progressivism and “corporatism” as “natural allies.”

    Exhibit A: the $8 billion U.S. companies spend yearly on DEI training. 

    “We desperately need a new vocabulary,” he said.

    That is how Priyanka Wolan feels—unsure of how to describe herself or what she believes. 

    She had immigrated to the United States from India with her family when she was eight, and she had always leaned Democratic. 

    It’s not that she doesn’t know what she believes. She is definitely pro-choice, but she also wants to curb “unauthorized immigration.” She thinks the new gender politics is insane, but she believes strongly in defending civil liberties. And she’s giving her four daughters a traditional homeschool education that includes Latin and classical music. 

    Priyanka Wolan first realized she wasn’t on the left when she started homeschooling her daughters. (Jenna Schoenefeld for The Free Press)

    The trouble is that all of these things do not fit together into one party or camp or label.

    We were having dinner at the house in the hills of Los Angeles that she and her husband, Alan, share with their daughters. My 9-year-old and hers had become friends in an after-school math program.

    “The present-day conservative movement doesn’t align with my life experience in the way I used to think the Democratic platform did, but the Democratic Party no longer aligns with that either,” Wolan said. 

    “The first time I realized I wasn’t on the left was when I started homeschooling, and people were like, ‘This isn’t supporting public education, what’s wrong with public education?’ ” she said. “That’s when I started to see, ‘Oh, I’m not falling into line.’ ”

    But then, in 2019, she started to feel the tug of identity politics, and it was like a whirlpool. She and Alan, who is Jewish and 18 years older, had always been “sparring partners.” Now, it felt more personal, as if she, a “brown woman,” were facing off against whiteness and the patriarchy.

    During the summer of 2020, “it became really difficult for us to have a conversation,” she said. He thought defunding the police was idiotic, and worried about illegal immigration and crime. “I remember saying at one point,” she continued, “ ‘You know what, let’s not talk politics. You’re never going to understand me, because you’re white, a man, privileged’—all the jargon.”

    Priyanka Wolan at her home in Los Angeles, CA. (Jenna Schoenefeld for The Free Press)

    She added: “At one point, I remember my dad saying, ‘You’re not doing a service to yourself or your kids when you’re constantly thinking in terms of your identity. We didn’t come to America for you to think this way.’ ”

    It was other moms who made her rethink things, albeit unwittingly. They didn’t approve of what she was teaching her girls: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, the poetry of Robert Frost, Mozart sonatas.

    “At the height of the decolonization narrative, people would say, ‘Why are you teaching them this? This is the Western canon,’ ” Wolan, 42, said. She was surprised. She wanted her daughters, as she said, to “have it all”—the most rigorous liberal-arts education that would not only get them into a top college but enable them to think critically.

    It wasn’t that her views had changed. She mostly believed in the same things she always had. “I’m liberal in the old sense of the word—the not believing whatever you’re told to believe,” Wolan said. 

    When I asked Wolan whether it was hard being politically homeless, whether it would be easier to join one of the available tribes, she half-smiled and said it wasn’t so tough fending off criticisms of homeschooling or deciding who to vote for. (She can’t vote for Biden again; she’d probably vote for Vivek Ramaswamy, if he wins the GOP nomination.) The hard thing was getting comfortable with people knowing her husband supported a candidate who everyone she knew thought was evil.

    “I didn’t want people knowing he was for Trump,” Wolan said of Alan. “It took me a while to get to the point where I thought, ‘You know what, he’s allowed to have whatever opinions he wants.’ ”

    *  *  *

    Brian Lasher, a retired Navy commander and high-school history teacher in Erie, Pennsylvania, could not care less whether people know he plans to vote for Trump. Not that he’s excited about it. He thinks Trump’s “an asshole.” 

    But he has to vote—he hasn’t missed an election since he first voted, in 1980—and he doesn’t believe in voting for protest candidates. He wants his vote to count. (In 1992, he voted for Ross Perot. “That’s a vote I regret,” Lasher said. “Clinton is the best Democratic president of my lifetime.”)

    His father came from a family of Calvin Coolidge Republicans—“He refused to have an FDR dime in his pocket”—and his mother was religious and liberal. 

    He was raised Lutheran, and he is pro-life, but he thinks there need to be exceptions, and he is worried about inflation, and he thinks we have to stop illegal immigration—“human trafficking is grotesque”—but he supports legal immigration—“some of the best students I’ve had were immigrants”—and it is obvious the poles are warming, but it is also obvious we shouldn’t do away with oil and gas. “That’s just suicidal,” Lasher, 62, told me. 

    During the lockdowns, he’d watched his students disappear into their screens. The school couldn’t make them turn on their cameras, so almost all turned them off. Usually, he had no idea whether they were even there.

    Anyway, the “institutional rot” was everywhere, he said, and everything that came out of D.C. reflected as much—not only the Covid protocols and deficit spending, but Russiagate, which he called “bullshit,” and the corruption. He meant the Clinton emails, the Hunter Biden pay-to-play thing, all of it.

    If it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running for the White House as an independent, might win Pennsylvania, he’ll vote for him.

    But generally he’s pessimistic about things. “We’re seeing extremes in both parties drive America toward an abyss,” Lasher said. 

    He recalled Christmas 2007. He was in Baghdad with the Navy, and he was at dinner in the mess hall at Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Guard Palace, and General David Petraeus’s chief chaplain was talking about the new “religious reconciliation initiative.”

    Lasher was asked to be the chaplain’s note-taker, and the two of them spent the next six months hopscotching around Baghdad meeting Shiite and Sunni religious leaders talking about why they hated each other, and what could be done to stem the violence. 

    “We were at the house of a sheik, he was a Shiite, and he was explaining the differences between the Iranian Shiites and the Iraqi Shiites.” The sheik said he was going to Iran in three weeks, and he asked, “Is there some message you want me to deliver to the Iranians?” 

    After a moment, Lasher recalls saying, “I told him to tell the Iranians that our symbol is the American eagle. In its talon are either arrows or the olive branch. The choice is theirs. ‘Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’ He responded, ‘Yes! Yes! This is what I have been preaching all my life. I will tell them this.’ ”

    Later, after Iraq, after he came home, after the polarization and anger in America seemed to billow out of control, he would often remember that night in Baghdad, the competing forces. 

    “We have far more that brings us together than separates us,” he said. 

    Sometimes that’s hard to remember. He wants to be hopeful. He’s a big fan of Catherine Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention. George Washington’s “Farewell Address” is his favorite speech.

    But those stories, those pieces of the sacred American past, feel far away. People no longer listen to each other, he said. “We’ve tuned each other out.” It’s like everyone is shouting into a Tower of Babel, unaware of who they’re shouting at, or what they’re angry about. 

    “A lot of that, I fault the media for,” he said. “They’re not being honest about the people they report on.”

    Rory Fleming, 23, is majoring in history at Yale University. He said college and Covid have pushed him politically to the right. (Christopher Capozziello for The Free Press)

    Rory Fleming, a 23-year-old senior at Yale, agreed that no one really knows who they’re screaming at.

    “Ever since 2016, it’s been like whiplash,” he told me. 

    In 2016, he was in high school, and he knew a lot of kids from Guatemala and Venezuela and Paraguay, and he understood why they felt targeted. He found Trump noxious.

    But then he got to Yale, which “has been the opposite experience,” Fleming said. “It’s pushed me to the right.”

    The big thing was Covid, the lockdowns, how the university went all in with masking and shutting down campus life. 

    For Fleming, just like Shelle Lichti, everything came into focus in the summer of 2020. That was when the upside-downness revealed itself.

    “I really felt that for the first time in July 2020, when my friend and I took this 45-day, cross-country road trip,” he said.

    “New York was shut down, and I remember getting to North Dakota, where there were ‘no mask’ signs everywhere. They were reacting against what they felt was authoritarianism, and they weren’t wrong. There was something about the Democratic reaction that was authoritarian.”

    Rory Fleming thinks the United States needs to be strong, and he respected that Trump “carried a big stick.” (Christopher Capozziello for The Free Press)

    Post-whiplash, it was hard to know where he belonged. 

    Fleming believes the government should be spearheading the “green revolution”—starting with renewable projects in places like West Virginia—and he is pro-choice, and pro-civil liberties, and he thinks the United States needs to be strong. “That was something I did respect about Trump’s presidency,” Fleming said. “He carried a big stick. We shouldn’t have Houthi rebels with drones firing missiles in the Red Sea. Terrorists should fear the United States, and I don’t think they are right now.” 

    He recalled his semester abroad, in Dublin, and being at a pub with friends, all foreigners, and someone making fun of the United States. “I remember saying, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are that it’s us, and not China or Russia running the world,” he said. 

    No one argued with that.

    What’s confusing, Fleming said, is that so many Americans don’t get this. 

    Lichti agrees.

    “Politics is so confusing right now,” she said. “The people that stay in their camps, that pretend or don’t know it’s not confusing—they’re the ones who are really confused. For me, saying you’re confused is being honest.”

    *  *  *

    Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Read his last article, “I Was Wrong About John Fetterman,” and ​​follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 17:40

  • Blinken Slams South Africa's Genocide Case Against Israel As 'Meritless' & 'Galling'
    Blinken Slams South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel As ‘Meritless’ & ‘Galling’

    A key aspect of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit and press conference in Israel on Tuesday was to make a strong show of condemning South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, set to start at The Hague this week.

    The US top diplomat blasted the case filed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as “meritless” and described the whole initiative as “galling” – also saying that it will be a distraction while world powers need to be focused on achieving lasting peace in Gaza.

    Getty Images: President Cyril Ramaphosa with the delegates of Organisations supporting the Liberation of Palestine at Chief Albert Luthuli House on December 18, 2023, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

    “The charge of genocide is meritless,” he said. But then in the same press conference he admitted that the “daily toll on civilians in Gaza, particularly children, is far too high.”

    The first hearing in the case will be held Thursday, focused on South Africa’s 84-page application to the ICJ , which describes Israel’s military campaign as “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part” of the Palestinian population of Gaza.

    White House national security spokesperson John Kirby last week said initially, “We find this submission meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact, whatsoever.”

    Israel has gone on a full-court diplomatic press pushing back against the case. There’s not much that the court can enforce in terms of action regardless, but a ruling against Israel would be a huge reputational black eye.

    Starting last month, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a blistering rebuke in response, rejecting the filing “with disgust” and called Pretoria’s accusations a “blood libel” – essentially saying the South African government’s charge is being fueled by antisemitism.

    Israel had also blasted Pretoria for sympathizing with terrorists who massacred civilians:

    “South Africa’s claim has no factual and judicial basis and is a despicable and cheap exploitation of the court,” the ministry says in a statement. “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.”

    The ministry blames Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by attempting “to carry out genocide” on October 7, when terrorists from the Strip killed some 1,200 people and took around 240 hostages after invading southern Israel.

    “We call on the International Court of Justice and the international community to reject the baseless claims of South Africa out of hand,” the response statement said further.

    Below: Israel is now tailoring its messaging in response to growing outrage and pressure…

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    But Global South countries in particular are likely to support the case. Russia and China too have been deeply critical of Israel’s large-scale bombardment of densely populated civilian areas of the Gaza Strip. The death toll has soared past 23,000 killed, according to Palestinian sources.

    * * * 

    Below is a note and review on the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) long-running ties with the PLO…

    South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has deep ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), stretching back to its former leader and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. The ANC aligned itself with the PLO and other revolutionary causes while Mandela was in prison; after his release, Mandela was a vocal supporter of the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat, saying in 1990 that “we identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination.”

    Decades later, that sentiment remains in the South African government, and for many ordinary South Africans who see their struggle against colonialism and apartheid in the Palestinians’ plight and decades-long struggle for self-determination. That’s particularly salient in an election year for South Africa as the ANC and its leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, struggle to stay the dominant power there.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 17:20

  • The First Amendment, Brought To You By Pfizer
    The First Amendment, Brought To You By Pfizer

    Via The Brownstone Institute,

    Pfizer now claims the right of a corporate sovereign, arguing that states have “no legitimate interest in regulating” the company’s commercial speech while demanding the power to censor Americans’ newsfeeds.

    The call for pharmaceutical supremacy came in Pfizer’s response to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s suit alleging that Pfizer committed fraud and “conspired to censor public discourse.”

    Pfizer embraces its merger with the state when convenient, arguing that it cannot be held liable for misleading the public on its Covid vaccine because the company “acted pursuant to its contract with the United States Government.”

    The court documents insist that the PREP Act, invoked by President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, provides complete immunity for Pfizer’s Covid products.

    While the PREP Act prevents citizens injured by the company’s vaccines from recovering money damages in court, it does not nullify state laws concerning fraud.

    Pfizer’s affinity for the state is reserved for the expansive legal favoritism awarded to Big Pharma, achieved through decades and billions of dollars in lobbying efforts.

    The company insists that “The State of Texas has no legitimate interest in regulating Pfizer’s truthful, non-misleading speech concerning the benefits of receiving the Covid-19 vaccine.” Further, the brief calls Paxton’s suit an “attempt to punish Pfizer for spreading truthful, FDA-approved information educating the public regarding the Covid-19 vaccine.”

    At no point, however, does Pfizer respond to Paxton’s detailed allegations that the company’s information was not truthful, but was instead a lucrative marketing campaign designed to “deceive the public.”

    The filing does not deny Paxton’s detailed allegations that Pfizer “coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers,” including a former FDA Director, and “conspired to censor the vaccine’s critics.”

    Pfizer Board Member Scott Gottlieb “persistently contacted senior persons at Twitter and…other social media platforms, in a clandestine effort to silence challengers to Pfizer’s deceptive scheme to promote sales and use of its vaccine products,” including targeting doctors who touted natural immunity, according to Paxton’s suit.

    Further, Paxton alleges that Pfizer, led by CEO Albert Bourla, “affirmatively intimidated vaccine skeptics to perpetuate its scheme to confuse and deceive the public.”

    The company makes no attempt to refute these allegations. Instead, the brief cites its government contracts as carte blanche to take any actions related to Covid.

    Pfizer thus not only claims to work in tandem with the State, but it asserts a sovereign power unshackled from the restraints of constitutional law. The First Amendment allows its executives to usurp citizens’ freedom of speech but prevents prosecution of the company’s lies, according to this theory.

    This is an attempt to close one of the few existing (possible) legal avenues to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable. No doubt that the Biden administration, and all the kept federal agencies, will agree with this.

    When the courts stop working to hold the powerful accountable, where are the victims to turn next? How can we claim to live in a representative democracy when its citizens’ paths for the redress of wrongs are deliberately closed for the benefit of its most powerful institutions?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/10/2024 – 17:00

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