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Escobar: The New Great Game, Revisited

Authored by Pepe Escobar via 'Geopolitics Prime' substack,

It took only a few Yemeni missiles on Saudi refineries to wake up “leadership” vectors of the Ummah; not over 100,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza by the death cult.

The Mecca Sunni NATO pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan remains a puzzle. Or dodgy sub-standard theatre – complete with photo ops and sparse intel sharing. The full text has not been released. Everything is quite vague, only stressing “collective deterrence”.

Against whom, it’s in the eyes of the beholder. All options – Eretz Israel, US-Israel, India (in case of attacking Pakistan) – might apply. The operative concept is “might”. Add to it Turkiye’s myriad NATO constraints: a viper’s nest in itself.

Significantly, Turkiye informed Iran before signing the Mecca deal. Extra layers of spin even promote Iran joining the deal in a later stage, as Riyadh in theory rejects military strikes on Tehran, and Iran might be covered by Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, flanked by Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, right, signing a joint defence agreement in Mecca, on August 7, 2026

Geography, once again, will dictate matters. Turkiye will remain in NATO – because Turkish elites are essentially Atlanticist. Saudi Arabia would have to perform miracles to extricate itself from the US security umbrella – and Indian labour. Pakistan’s priority is China and the New Silk Roads, plus the IP gas pipeline from Iran. Mecca is essentially Deterrence Theater.

A different, more intriguing scenario would point to the instrumentalization of Greater Turan – a key Turkiye objective – to the benefit of the US/Zionist combo. That would point to a neo-Ottoman remix, now reconfigured as the leadership of comprador Arab affairs. As in Ankara recreating the Ottoman hierarchy with itself at the center – as a matter of “saving” Zionists and Salafis from themselves.

It seems that the Mecca spark came from MbS himself (no one really knows, as things in Riyadh are so opaque). As Riyadh is being deprived of exporting oil via the Red Sea by Yemen – and might even lose their oil wells if things get rough – why not bet on benign neo-Ottomanism?

Why the US can never lift sanctions on Iran

Oil export routes through and around the Strait of Hormuz. Source: International Energy Agency, February 2026.

Meanwhile in Iran, under a revamped – by Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), the solidified consensus is that Tehran will never compromise, especially under the current “no war, no peace” status.

Washington would have to meet a set of very harsh conditions before the Strait of Hormuz reopens, including:

1. The end to US threats and “insults”;

2. Permanent end to US wars against Iran and its allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq;

3. Lifting of the American naval blockade and withdrawal of all US forces;

4. No less than $300 billion in compensation for war damages;

5. Lifting of all sanctions;

6. Unconditional release of all frozen assets;

7. Iran’s right to charge up to 7% on cargo transit;

8. A ban on US and Israeli vessels;

9. A 20% violation toll on ships if conditions are breached.

Call it an intimation for a US surrender: a capitulation on every front – from “follow the money” to military expulsion, end of sanctions and total Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Even grains of sand across the Old and New Silk Roads are aware that humongous US debt is avid for new mechanisms to be fed with control over natural resources – from oil and gold to rare earth minerals. And these natural resources must be priced in US dollars and the petrodollar.

Iran – the key crossroads of Eurasia – has absolutely everything the US needs. Yet it’s sovereign, independent and intimately aligned with the Russia-China strategic partnership.

So this has all the makings of a Forever War. Washington will never lift sanctions on Iran. That’s politically – and geoeconomically – impossible. And Washington, whoever is in power, will never accept Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, administrative fees included, because that seals, in practice, the imperial failure to use economic sanctions as its “diplomatic” tool of choice.

The result is that some of the serious consequences of the war unleashed on February 28 are already quite clear. Those include the possible financial destruction of the GCC, complete with the collapse of their ruling regimes; Yemen’s nearly inevitable geographical expansion; virtually complete international isolation of the death cult; a massive global economic crisis in tandem with a US financial crisis; and Iran’s accession to the status of prominent West Asia power, prominent Eurasia power, and prominent Global South power.

All that implies a massive geoeconomic game-changer facilitating a much faster rise for BRICS – and BRICS+ – complete with the solidification of Shanghai as the ideal solution for Global South capital to secure their savings.

Watch out for the “Eurasian Axis”!

The Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder and Piracy will not take any of that lying down. So the chessboard will continue to be destabilized even in nodes that in theory are controlled by the Sovereign Independents.

Enter the Caspian Sea – a key node of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), one of the premier connectivity corridors of 21st century pan-Eurasia trade, linking BRICS members Russia, Iran and India to Central Asia while bypassing Western sanctions and NATO-controlled maritime chokepoints.

Hybrid War in the Caspian perfectly fits the imperial scenario of provoking negative systemic fallout expanding beyond Russia and Iran all the way to China and Europe. After all China regards the Caspian as a key connectivity channel between Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects and Central Asia and Europe.

So the Caspian could become the apex of a geopolitical divide near the center of Eurasia, contraposing Washington/Tel Aviv/Kiev to the BRICS/SCO Sovereign Independent civilization-states.

Enter, once again, Turkiye – now as the possible missing link in the Zionist axis drive to connect both wars (NATO on Ukraine, US/Israel on Iran): after all they are the one and same war from the beginning.

Still it will be a hard sell to seduce Sultan Erdogan to go after Russian and Iranian strategic assets in the Caspian, even indirectly via Azerbaijan. An even more complex replacement would be Kazakhstan, which for all of its “multi-vector” policies is a full SCO member, a full Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) member and a BRICS+ partner.

Turkiye’s actions should be ultimately measured by the official drive to strengthen the Organization of Turkic States (OTS; Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are both members) and what they might come up with to try to choke Iran’s geopolitical maneuvering.

Leaders of the Organization of Turkic States at an informal summit in Turkistan, Kazakhstan, May 15, 2026

Once again: it’s all about how they will play the Greater Turan card across the Caucasus and especially Central Asia, with their vast reserves of oil, uranium, lithium and critical minerals.

Moscow is carefully observing it all, with extreme discretion. Incidentally, last November Kazakhstan became the first Central Asian “stan” to join the Abraham Accords, in connection with a massive US-Kazakhstan minerals deal.

History Repeating is always quirky: we’re back to the original, late 19th century Russia-Britain Great Game. MI6 after all fully supports Greater Turan – as a premier counterpunch to the Three Sovereigns, Russia, Iran and China. Or what Trump has recently defined, for the first time ever (Elbridge Colby whispering in his ear?) as the “Eurasian Axis”.

At the National Museum in Astana, Kazakhstan, there’s a flashy panel representing all Turkic peoples, over 40 ethnic groups. Uygurs are in the mix, as well as Kazakhs and Azeris. But to translate that into Turkiye moving as a great player across Eurasia – complete with support from fake mythological narratives – is a whole new ball game.

The whole drive is not more sophisticated than creating a market for outright Turkic nationalism, with the Central Asian “stans” incorporated at best as junior partners.

Mecca as a Hail Mary pass

As the imperial pressure over The Three Sovereigns won’t relent, interlocked signature moves make all the difference. For instance: China investing in the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan as an extra road to reach Iran.

The Wakhan Corridor at Afghanistan’s eastern edge, where a proposed highway would create a direct land connection with China.

It’s The Great Game all over again: the Wakhan Corridor came out of nowhere at the end of the 19th century to “protect” British India from Russia’s advances in Turkestan. It connects with China’s Xinjiang for only 70 km or so, as I saw during my Pamir Highway travels before Covid.

This is one of the most high-altitude strategic borders on the planet. Only 5 months ago, Beijing came up with a new county in Xinjiang, Cenling, overlooking the border. Everything in this mountain wilderness is run from Kashgar, where the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) begins.

Translation: on top of the China-Iran railway – previously bombed during the war on Iran by the Americans – this is an extra overland path from China to Iran bypassing the maritime routes, susceptible to Trump’s blockades.

China, in trademark win-win mode, will go all the way betting on both options simultaneously: CPEC, via Pakistan, and the Wakhan, via Afghanistan.

To round up our travels across selected spots of the New Great Game: in the end everything will be decided in West Asia. And that brings us back to the Mecca Sunni NATO pact.

This sharp analysis points to Mecca as a Hail Mary pass linked to the current sore lack of petrodollar recycling by the petro-monarchies – the mechanism propping up that monster, unpayable US debt; the pyramid of derivatives; and Wall Street’s solitary AI mega-bubble.

And this is what’s really driving the imperial desperation to settle something, anything with the Persians.

Because Iran has defined the prime geoeconomic battleground for the RICs (Russia, Iran, China, the new Primakov triangle), much more efficiently than endless BRICS discussions: the collapse of the GCC petrodollar racket.

Without this racket, a financialized neo-colonial empire run by remote control is absolutely impossible.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 23:25

Where The World Is Burning In 2026

As of August 1, 2026, wildfires and landscape fires have burned 112.3 million hectares of land across the globe, an area roughly the size of South Africa.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Sofie Gilbert, uses data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) via Our World in Data to show where that burning is concentrated in 2026 as of August 1.

The data includes prescribed burns, agricultural burns, and uncontrolled wildfires.

Africa Is the Epicenter of Global Fire Activity

More than half of the world’s burned land so far in 2026 is in Africa.

The data table below shows the land area burned for every country as of August 1, 2026:

RankCountry or TerritoryArea Burned in Hectares
(YTD to Aug 1, 2026)ShareRegion 1🇨🇩 Democratic Republic of Congo13,611,12612.1%Africa 2🇦🇺 Australia11,801,65010.5%Oceania 3🇦🇴 Angola7,473,0346.7%Africa 4🇸🇸 South Sudan6,955,0226.2%Africa 5🇨🇫 Central African Republic6,017,8815.4%Africa 6🇲🇲 Myanmar4,325,7023.9%Asia 7🇮🇳 India4,029,7043.6%Asia 8🇷🇺 Russia3,335,0293.0%Europe 9🇬🇳 Guinea3,250,9922.9%Africa 10🇿🇲 Zambia3,213,6872.9%Africa 11🇻🇪 Venezuela2,977,4662.7%South America 12🇳🇬 Nigeria2,807,2002.5%Africa 13🇹🇭 Thailand2,669,5502.4%Asia 14🇱🇦 Laos2,641,3212.4%Asia 15🇺🇸 United States2,371,2072.1%North America 16🇨🇳 China2,265,0572.0%Asia 17🇨🇦 Canada2,031,7541.8%North America 18🇧🇷 Brazil2,030,2091.8%South America 19🇪🇹 Ethiopia1,851,1311.6%Africa 20🇬🇭 Ghana1,763,3951.6%Africa 21🇰🇭 Cambodia1,525,3121.4%Asia 22🇲🇱 Mali1,490,6981.3%Africa 23🇨🇲 Cameroon1,435,3731.3%Africa 24🇹🇩 Chad1,309,1551.2%Africa 25🇲🇽 Mexico1,264,8231.1%North America 26🇸🇩 Sudan1,203,1581.1%Africa 27🇸🇳 Senegal1,187,5911.1%Africa 28🇹🇿 Tanzania1,048,6630.9%Africa 29🇨🇴 Colombia891,9850.8%South America 30🇲🇿 Mozambique787,0660.7%Africa 31🇿🇦 South Africa784,6470.7%Africa 32🇸🇱 Sierra Leone731,5350.7%Africa 33🇲🇬 Madagascar687,0860.6%Africa 34🇨🇬 Congo677,3540.6%Africa 35🇧🇫 Burkina Faso553,7190.5%Africa 36🇧🇴 Bolivia546,4900.5%South America 37🇦🇷 Argentina545,3040.5%South America 38🇺🇬 Uganda519,6010.5%Africa 39🇮🇩 Indonesia488,3650.4%Asia 40🇨🇮 Cote d'Ivoire451,5270.4%Africa 41🇰🇿 Kazakhstan429,5200.4%Asia 42🇵🇾 Paraguay405,6690.4%South America 43🇧🇯 Benin343,4160.3%Africa 44🇭🇳 Honduras320,8840.3%North America 45🇨🇱 Chile304,9830.3%South America 46🇻🇳 Vietnam283,6380.3%Asia 47🇵🇭 Philippines237,1680.2%Asia 48🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea228,4400.2%Oceania 49🇹🇬 Togo208,9050.2%Africa 50🇳🇮 Nicaragua205,3060.2%North America 51🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau198,4970.2%Africa 52🇿🇼 Zimbabwe191,3330.2%Africa 53🇨🇺 Cuba181,7210.2%North America 54🇪🇸 Spain179,6770.2%Europe 55🇬🇹 Guatemala171,3980.2%North America 56🇧🇼 Botswana170,8550.2%Africa 57🇱🇷 Liberia170,4280.2%Africa 58🇳🇵 Nepal156,2150.1%Asia 59🇺🇦 Ukraine154,2020.1%Europe 60🇳🇦 Namibia145,0110.1%Africa 61🇧🇩 Bangladesh143,9820.1%Asia 62🇮🇷 Iran119,4920.1%Asia 63🇬🇦 Gabon103,4190.1%Africa 64🇨🇷 Costa Rica98,0350.1%North America 65🇩🇿 Algeria97,9850.1%Africa 66🇬🇲 Gambia97,6640.1%Africa 67🇫🇷 France96,0500.1%Europe 68🇳🇪 Niger87,0000.1%Africa 69🇵🇰 Pakistan80,4850.1%Asia 70🇮🇹 Italy69,0500.1%Europe 71🇮🇶 Iraq65,8260.1%Asia 72🇰🇪 Kenya62,4590.1%Africa 73🇲🇳 Mongolia60,4470.1%Asia 74🇲🇼 Malawi57,6400.1%Africa

Much of this reflects deliberate seasonal burning. Across sub-Saharan Africa, fire is a long-standing tool for clearing land, managing pasture, and preparing fields for planting. Even so, the scale is striking: Africa has recorded roughly 26 times as much burned area as the United States so far in 2026.

The Democratic Republic of Congo leads all countries with 13.6 million hectares burned, an area roughly the size of England. Angola follows at 7.5 million hectares, South Sudan at 7.0 million, and the Central African Republic at 6.0 million.

Major Fire Seasons Beyond the Global Leaders

Burned-area totals alone do not measure wildfire severity or risk, particularly because the GWIS dataset includes agricultural and prescribed burning. Still, several countries outside the global leaders have experienced significant uncontrolled wildfires in 2026.

Spain has experienced one of the year’s most severe fire seasons. Driven by extreme heat and drought, wildfires had scorched approximately 180,000 hectares as of August 1, an exceptionally high total for this point in the season. A massive fire in Ávila became the largest in Spanish history, and with simultaneous fires raging across France, combined evacuations across both countries surpassed 300,000.

Canada has recorded 2.0 million hectares burned as of August 1, with fires active across multiple provinces. The 2026 season follows the country’s record-breaking 2023 season, which burned approximately 15 million hectares according to Natural Resources Canada, seven times the historic national annual average.

The United States has recorded 2.4 million hectares burned, with Oregon and Washington experiencing some of the most severe ongoing fires. More than 100 large wildfires were actively burning as of early August, driven by drought conditions affecting more than a quarter of the country’s land area.

As four decades of U.S. wildfire data show, the number of fires has declined over time while the total land burned has increased, pointing to fires that are fewer but more intense.

Australia Stands Apart in the Southern Hemisphere

Outside Africa, Australia has recorded the largest burned area at 11.8 million hectares. That ranks second globally behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and accounts for nearly all of Oceania’s 11% share.

The data table below shows a regional breakdown of land area burned in 2026 so far:

RegionArea Burned in Hectares
(YTD to Aug 1, 2026)Share Africa61,870,30055.1% Asia19,733,18217.6% Oceania12,061,71410.7% South America7,813,3777.0% North America6,804,9056.1% Europe3,992,4043.6% World112,275,880100%

Asia accounts for 18% of global burned land. Myanmar leads the region at 4.3 million hectares, followed by India at 4.0 million. Thailand, Laos, and China each add between 2.3 and 2.7 million hectares.

South America contributes 7% of global burned land, led by Venezuela at 3.0 million hectares and Brazil at 2.0 million. Europe accounts for just 3%, with Russia responsible for most of the region’s 3.3 million-hectare total.

If you enjoyed this graphic, check out How Much CO2 do Wildfires Contribute Globally? on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 23:00

All ICE Enforcement Officers In Maine Equipped With Body-Worn Cameras, Sen. Collins Says

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times,

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Friday that all Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Maine have been given body-worn cameras and trained how to use them.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents walk outside the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, Calif., on July 27, 2026. Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images

Acting ICE Director David Venturella announced on Aug. 8 that federal agents would be equipped with body-worn cameras by the end of the month in a move to increase "transparency and accountability."

The cameras are a key measure that congressional Democrats demanded during a months-long dispute earlier this year over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In an Aug. 13 post on X, Collins said that she was pleased that as of 2 p.m. on Thursday, all ICE officers in Maine "have been equipped with body-worn cameras and trained in their use."

Collins said that when she spoke to Venturella last month, he committed to deliver body-worn cameras to ICE agents across the country by the end of August.

"I urged him to prioritize Maine, and they have arrived more than two weeks ahead of schedule," she added.

Democratic lawmakers have demanded that ICE be reformed following the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal agents during operations in Minnesota earlier this year. Alex Jeffrey Pretti and Renee Good were both shot and killed by ICE agents in January.

According to a notice published by the DHS on Aug. 10, ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on gloves that can deliver electric shocks for its agents.

The devices, known as CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are expected to be delivered by March 31, 2027, according to the notice.

The notice refers to the gloves as "conductive distraction and de-escalation" devices, which ICE seeks to buy for Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement Removal Operations officers and agents.

The device manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, stated on its website that the devices were designed "to supplement existing tools for law enforcement, corrections, security, EMS [Emergency Medical Services] and the military."

The devices must be applied directly to a person's skin and are ineffective when applied through clothing or hair, according to the user manual. No more than two gloves should be used at a time, with each application lasting not more than 15 seconds, it stated.

A DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times by email at the time that ICE aims to ensure its officers have the tools and equipment they need to safely arrest and remove "criminal illegal aliens" from the country.

"Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards," the spokesperson said.

In an Aug. 7 statement, ICE said it arrested more than 1,200 illegal immigrants across Georgia under Operation Safe Community-Atlanta, which targeted illegal immigrants with criminal histories, including charges of aggravated assault, sex crimes, assault and battery, and crimes against children.

The Trump administration is also imposing heavy fines on illegal immigrants.

In a July 23 statement, DHS said that more than $84 billion in civil fines have been imposed on such individuals. This includes a $998-per-day charge levied on any illegal immigrant who does not leave the country despite a final order for removal.

"Under President Trump and Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, DHS is working faster than ever before to remove criminal illegal aliens from our country," assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement at the time.

"Our message to illegal aliens is clear: LEAVE NOW. If you don't, you will face the consequences, including fines, arrest, and deportation. Illegal aliens have a choice," she added.

Tom Ozimek, Troy Myers, Jack Phillips, and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 22:35

Forget Reminding Young People About 'Boat People': South America's Rejection Of Socialism Is Happening In Real Time

Andy Laperriere, Piper Sandler's head of US policy research in Washington, wrote in a note on Thursday that explained both parties are moving left on economic policy as populist measures gain support across the political spectrum. His big-picture view is that "hard-left and socialist candidates" are damaging the Democratic brand primarily through deeply unpopular positions on open borders, defunding the police, and transgender politics. In effect, the party's socialist class is willing to sacrifice broader electoral viability to defend nation-killing policies that most voters reject.

Policies with cross-party support include a $15 federal minimum wage, a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates, restrictions on Wall Street's purchases of single-family homes, and expanded government intervention lowering drug prices.

Even Republican voters back several of those proposals by wide margins, suggesting the post-election policy threat to markets will extend beyond Democratic control of Washington.

Here's where the numbers are striking: About 80% of Republicans support banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, 79% favor capping credit card rates, and 75% back a $15 minimum wage. Across all voters, 63% support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires, while 59% favor government-provided health coverage.

Laperriere pointed out that President Trump and JD Vance have helped move Republicans away from Milton Friedman-style free-market economics by framing trade, corporate power, and economic transactions in increasingly zero-sum terms.

Laperriere said Democrats face a different kind of problem, noting that the party's socialist and progressive economic proposals are often popular, but its positions on policing, immigration, and gender remain deeply unpopular. Only 29% of voters support abolishing ICE, 24% back transgender athletes competing outside their biological sex, and 11% favor abolishing the police.

Laperriere noted that two-thirds of Democratic voters now hold a favorable view of socialism, partly because younger folks have no lived memory of Soviet bread lines, the Berlin Wall, or the Vietnamese "boat people" who fled communism.

Furthermore, as we've outlined, the failed socialist experiment in South America has resulted in a once-in-a-generation shift to common-sense right-wing leaders, with Trump-backed Abelardo de la Espriella taking power in Colombia just a week ago. 

The political shift has extended far beyond Colombia. In recent years, voters across Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador have either rejected socialist governments or moved decisively against far-left parties.

Laperriere argues that younger Democratic voters lack any living memory of the "boat people" and therefore have little historical context for understanding how socialist and communist systems fail. But the warning signs are not confined to the Cold War era; rather, years of left-wing governance in South America that have coincided with currency crises, persistent inflation, capital flight, institutional deterioration, and rising crime that resulted in failed states, such as Venezuela and Cuba, are more than enough to show youngsters that socialism has failed - yet again. Latest figures show that there are nearly 800,000 illegal aliens from Venezuela in the US - and we wonder why ... 

More from Laperriere:

We want to make two related points in today's piece. First, voters across the political spectrum are more open to progressive/populist economic ideas than perhaps most investors think – and both parties (if Vance is the GOP nominee) are going to increasingly offer the voters leftof-center economic policies. The hard left and socialist candidates are not swimming upstream when they call for higher taxes on the wealthy, price controls, and more government entitlements. It's their ideas on the police, the border, and gender identity that will hurt them politically. Second, Democratic voters are fed up with their own establishment for two main reasons: a sense their leaders are feckless when it comes to challenging Trump and the fact that a significant and growing share of the Democratic voting base is hostile to Western civilization. 

We argued in our recent piece, A Policy Bear Market, that both parties increasingly evince an open hostility or at least a wariness to free markets. As we noted in that report, JD Vance is running against Milton Friedman and market fundamentalism. President Trump has tapped into a growing sense that the system is rigged – and over time has convinced more Republicans this is true. He has a zerosum view of economic transactions in which one side is, in his words, getting screwed. It's true there has always been economic populism on the right, and as we often noted you could call it 'populism' because it's popular. It's popular to say we won't touch your benefits, to make the other guy pay higher taxes, and to scapegoat other people for the price you have to pay for drugs, gasoline, or anything else. But as the table below shows, a lot of ideas we generally associate with the left end of the political spectrum enjoy broad or at least considerable support among Republican voters. The move to the left on economic policy isn't limited to Democratic voters.

And of course there has been a seismic shift to the left among Democratic voters. We noted in a recent piece that two-thirds of Democratic voters have a favorable view of socialism. Part of the reason is it has been a long time since ordinary voters have seen socialism in practice. Ask a group of people who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s what 'boat people' means and most of them will be able to tell you it's people who got on leaky boats (or put their children on them) to flee communism and seek a better life. It's most associated with immigrants from Vietnam but also Cuba and other places. See President Reagan's brief 1982 Christmas radio address for a moving story of US Navy sailors rescuing some Vietnamese in a desperate situation to get a sense of the phenomena. 

During the Cold War, socialism didn't have much purchase with voters because images of desperate people fleeing communism, the bread lines in the Soviet Union, and the fact that the guns mounted on the Berlin Wall pointed inward were there for all to see. There were a few exceptions (like Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union), but it was obvious to most voters that socialism doesn't work.

But the Berlin Wall fell more than 35 years ago and socialism is rarely practiced anywhere in the world today. Ask a younger group of people what 'boat people' means and you get blank stares. A whole generation of people have grown up having seen nothing of the kind. Instead, a generation of young people has been taught in many schools (especially elite ones) that America (and Western civilization more broadly) is racist and rotten. This view is held disproportionately among young and highly educated white voters. 

This is the coalition that is fueling the insurgent campaigns that have taken out most Democratic House incumbents who have lost their primaries this year. They hold not only progressive or even socialist economic views; they are hostile to Western civilization. They view borders and the police as the vestiges of racism. As the table above shows, these views (in contrast to some of their economic views) are wildly unpopular. Francesca Hong, who narrowly lost the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor this week, posted a few years ago that we should cancel Thanksgiving because it is "celebrating colonialism." We couldn't find a poll result for cancelling Thanksgiving, but imagine defending that in a general election. 

Nonetheless, she received more than 38% of the vote this week. That may be roughly the share of the Democratic primary electorate (which is much smaller than the Democratic general electorate, but nonetheless picks the candidates) that is hostile to Western civilization. Along with frustration with their leaders for being ineffective at challenging Trump, Democratic voters have been in a mood to vote out incumbents. The chart on the following page shows that 10 incumbents have been defeated in primaries this year, the most in a non-reapportionment year (in which incumbents end up running against each other or in territory they haven't represented before) going back to the 1950s. Most of the incumbents who have lost were Democrats who lost to younger, more left-wing candidates. The turmoil in the Democratic Party has a lot of similarities to the forces that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in 2016. 

As a quick aside, of course there are other explanations for the shift to the left on economic issues. Corporate profits account for a larger share of GDP. Wealth is increasing faster than incomes, and that disproportionately benefits the wealthier people who hold assets. A decade of zero rates – and the return to more normal rates – has priced many younger people out of the housing market. There was the spike in inflation. There has been a steep decline in manufacturing employment during the past several decades (though not manufacturing output). And so on.

Regardless of the causes, the bottom line for investors is both parties are moving to the left on economic issues. The socialists and the progressive left have taken unpopular positions, but it's their social agenda that is likely to sink them politically. Many of these more left-wing economic policies are popular (including among many Republicans) and may be become law down the road.

Yet the nonprofit ecosystem of billionaire-backed foundations, far-left NGOs, Democratic Socialists of America activists, and progressive corporate media has little incentive to highlight the political shift across the Americas. The political backlash undermines the core narrative that capitalism is inherently destructive and that socialism will succeed if implemented correctly next time.

The Trump administration could exploit that vulnerability by expanding its messaging around Latin America's rightward turn. The objective would be to remind younger voters that socialism has miserably failed, and that its consequences always end in disaster: inflation, currency crises, capital flight, institutional decay, soaring violent crime and rising insecurity.

Related read: South America Just Rejected Socialism. So Why Is North America Buying It?

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 22:10

Judge Drops Case Against 6 Nevada Republicans Accused Of Falsifying 2020 Election Result

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

Six Nevada Republicans, who were accused of submitting a certificate falsely declaring President Donald Trump had won the state's 2020 presidential election, will not face a trial after a judge dismissed the case against them on Aug. 13.

Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald walks on stage before speaking ahead of then-Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nev. on Jan. 27, 2024. John Locher/AP

Nevada Judge Mary Kay Holthus ruled in favor of the defendants, who were Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, Nevada GOP Vice Chairs James DeGraffenreid and Durward Hindle, Clark County GOP Chair Jesse Law, and Douglas County GOP officials Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford - who, as a Democrat, will challenge Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, in November's election - brought charges of forgery and "offering a false instrument for filing or record" against the six, who all pleaded not guilty.

In December 2023, Trump suggested that the indictment was politically motivated and tied to the Biden administration.

Trump won in Nevada by a large margin in 2016, but lost the election in 2020.

The 2020 election, conducted under the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, was marred by allegations of electoral fraud.

After the Nov. 3, 2020, election, the six Republican electors gathered outside the Nevada Legislature to sign a certificate giving the state's six electoral college votes to Trump. The ceremony was broadcast online, and the video footage was used by the prosecution as evidence in the case.

It would later emerge that Biden had won Nevada by more than 30,000 votes.

The case brought against the six Nevada defendants centered on their intent in submitting the certificate.

Prosecutors argued that the defendants intended for the certificate to be recognized as Electoral College votes by then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had to determine who had won the election on Jan. 6, 2021.

Defendants Said It Was 'Political Theater'

But the defendants said signing the certificate online was an act of "political theater" designed to publicize their concerns about alleged electoral fraud.

They said they had no intent to deceive a government agency but were preserving their rights to challenge the official election results.

"Testimony presented to the grand jury established that the submitted certificates were not treated as Nevada's official electoral certificates and were not accepted for filing or acted upon by the receiving agencies," she wrote in her ruling.

"Rather, the evidence demonstrated that the documents were recognized for what they were and returned because they could not be accepted.

"The Court further finds the public and political nature of Defendants' conduct significant in evaluating whether the evidence supports an inference of fraudulent intent.

"Defendants repeatedly explained the purpose of their actions during the televised ceremony and in contemporaneous communications."

Holthus said she concluded that the state had "failed to present sufficient evidence establishing the essential elements of the offenses charged."

Three similar cases in Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia have previously been tossed.

Nevada Attorney General to Appeal

Ford's office said it plans to appeal Holthus's ruling.

McDonald's defense attorney Richard Wright, in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times, said Holthus's order was "well reasoned."

"This hasty, premature announcement of an intention to appeal [by Ford] reeks of continuing a politically motivated and legally doomed prosecution," Wright wrote.

He accused Ford of wanting to continue a "harassment" and "waste of expensive prosecutorial resources."

The Nevada decision came on the same day Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in the 2024 general election, and one U.S. citizen accused of registering her noncitizen spouse to vote.

The charges follow a state review of 38 suspected cases of noncitizen voting or related conduct from 2009 to 2025.

Donald Trump supporters protest the Nevada vote outside Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nev., on Nov. 5, 2020. Ronda Churchill/AFP via Getty Images Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 21:45

Trump's DOJ Will Reportedly Support End Of National Firearms Act After 92 Years

Why do Americans protected by the 2nd Amendment still need to get permission and approval from the ATF to have a rifle with a barrel under 16 inches, or a particular brand of stock, or a suppressor that, in most cases, doesn't silence a firearm at all but simply makes shooting it easier on a person's hearing?  Why, for 92 years, have citizens had to pay for a tax stamp and send their fingerprints to the government for guns that should be considered a constitutional right?

This is largely due to the National Firearms Act of 1934, passed under the highly overrated Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.  The law became a permanent annoyance to every gun owner in the US and a lucrative revenue stream for federal agencies; at least, until now.  

Finally, after nearly a century, the law is being erased.  But how?  

The legality of the NFA relies heavily on the existence of a $200 tax stamp.  The government did not ban covered items outright in order to avoid a clash with 2nd Amendment protections.  Instead, they added a tax to various firearms and related accessories, then made the processing of the tax and approval on the purchases an arduous affair.  Until the Trump Administration stepped in, NFA approval on any particular item could take up to a year. 

This clunky process was deliberately designed to dissuade citizens from purchasing certain firearms and attachments.  For people suspicious of government lists, the fingerprinting and applications made them not want to bother.  Possession of any of the items covered under the NFA is considered a serious federal crime with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

However, when Congress passed Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" in 2025, this included a provision which lowered the NFA transfer tax to $0.  With the tax stamp gone, the legal loophole which made the NFA possible was eliminated.  Now, an army of legal challengers have brought their case to federal courts to remove the NFA entirely, and they have succeeded (for the most part).

Expectations within the gun community were reserved (gun rights advocates have long waited for this moment and remain anxious that the DOJ will try to ruin the party with an appeal).  But, this does not seem to be the case.  Trump's DOJ missed the first 7-day deadline for an appeal.  They also have another 60-day deadline, but reports suggest that the DOJ has no intention of interfering with the court's ruling. 

Rumors are swirling that Trump was personally involved in the DOJ decision to support the removal of the NFA by refusing to appeal.  Reportedly, according to Rep. Andrew Clyde who has been leading the charge on the legal fight, Trump has confirmed that there will be no further DOJ challenges to the NFA decision. 

So what does this mean?  The federal government will be issuing guidance over the next 60 days on how FFL holders and gun shops can proceed with the transfer of items listed in the NFA.  At first, coverage is limited to the plaintiffs involved in the court ruling (and their customers), however, the DOJ has the power to nationalize the court's decision, effectively making the NFA null and void for everyone everywhere (this is now a likely outcome).

This means, suppressors, short-barreled rifles (SBRs), short-barreled shotguns (SBSs) and other items could be purchased without tax stamps, fingerprinting and wait times.  A basic background check (Form 4473) will remain in place.  It may take another couple of months, but it appears that the NFA is effectively dead thanks to the Trump Administration.  Gun owners had to suffer for nearly a century, but the long battle is ending.  

Meanwhile, the Hughes Amendment is still a problem, preventing the sale or transfer of machine guns made after 1986.  But it's all about winning one fight and moving on to the next, and the end to the NFA is an epic accomplishment; one which most gun owners never thought they would see in their lifetime.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 21:20

House Committees Detail Harvard Ties With Chinese Entities In New Report

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on March 29, 2026. Learner Liu/The Epoch Times

The report, released by the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee, alleged that Harvard created a nonprofit called Harvard Global to circumvent federal requirements for disclosing foreign donations to higher education.

According to the report, Harvard Global initially stated on its website that it could serve as a "proposal applicant and awardee" for awards the university was unable to accept for legal or financial reasons. The nonprofit later removed the language after the committees sent Harvard a draft of the report.

"Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That's unacceptable, especially given Harvard's history of failing to comply with these requirements," Education and Workforce Committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement.

The committees identified 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities, including a "Seven Sons" university, the report stated.

The "Seven Sons of National Defense" is a group of elite Chinese universities directly subordinate to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates China's defense sector.

The House committees alleged that Harvard-affiliated researchers have worked with "Chinese universities that, as a matter of policy, conduct extensive weapons research and development and hold top-secret security clearances with the PLA [People's Liberation Army]."

The report cited a 2023 research paper on magnetic materials co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher at China's National University of Defense Technology - which the U.S. government has placed on its entity list as a threat to American national security.

"From allowing violence against anti-China protestors to collaborating with entities linked to the PLA, Harvard has made serious mistakes and must act now to prevent more," said Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the Select Committee on China.

Moolenaar called for reforms at Harvard aimed at ending CCP influence on campus and safeguarding U.S. research.

Harvard University did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

The report came after the Justice Department (DOJ) announced on July 20 that it was investigating whether Harvard violated Title VI by excluding American students from financial aid programs funded by China-based sources.

Universities are required by federal law to report gifts and contracts from foreign sources that exceed $250,000 in a year. Harvard had disclosed nearly $4.5 billion in foreign funding, of which $630 million came from sources based in China - the university's largest source of foreign funding - the department said.

According to the DOJ, Harvard appears to accept funds from China-based sources that require the university to establish financial aid programs "with preference given to students from particular countries."

Bill Pan contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 20:55

Russia Admits Renewed Petrol Shortages After Recently Claiming Situation Was Stabilized

Russia has shut down one major refinery at Orsk, around 800 miles from the front line, for six months after it came under drone attack this week. It has also suffered more terminal outages due to continued attacks on a vital Black Sea energy port.

"Crude oil exports from Russia's Sheskharis terminal at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk were suspended on Friday following a ​drone attack, three sources familiar with the matter said, adding ‌to disruptions at one of the country's key export outlets," Reuters reports.

In a rare moment, the Russian government acknowledged that some regions of the country face new petrol shortages. "The situation remains tense in several regions of the country regarding fuel supplies to service stations," the government newly confirmed in a Friday social media post.

Getty Images

Oil companies are "taking the necessary measures to increase deliveries to the most vulnerable regions," the official and somewhat rare statement added.

Krasnodar Oblast regional governor Venyamin Kondratyev separately stated, "The situation regarding petrol supplies at service stations has become complicated."

Oil companies "have again started imposing restrictions on the amount of fuel supplied and reduced service station opening hours," he continue.

"This is causing concern among the region's residents and visitors," the governor added, describing that he's urging external help to rush fuel supplies to the region.

Clear signs of the renewed crisis began emerging this week, including extremely long lines at fuel pumps. According to eyewitness accounts in one regional source:

Gas stations in at least 12 Russian regions are once again reporting hours-long lines for fuel, according to a count by the news outlet 7×7. The regions include Krasnodar Krai, the Voronezh, Kaluga, Rostov, Ryazan, Tambov, Tula, Saratov, Smolensk, Penza, and Ulyanovsk regions, as well as Primorsky Krai.

Purchase limits have also returned. The Sochi city administration announced August 11 that gas stations in the region had imposed limits “due to logistical disruptions in fuel supply,” and it asked local residents and tourists to “refrain from using personal vehicles whenever possible” to ease the strain on gas stations.

In the Orenburg region, Governor Yevgeny Solntsev reported a “difficult situation with fuel.” Starting August 12, gas stations there capped purchases at 30 liters (about 8 gallons) of gasoline and 60 liters (about 16 gallons) of diesel and adopted an “odd-even” system: drivers with license plates ending in an even digit can fill up on even-numbered days, while everyone else fills up on odd-numbered days. Solntsev also promised to bring in police officers “to coordinate the situation at gas stations.”

It was only two weeks ago that Kremlin officials declared that the crisis - which was very evident earlier this summer especially in Crimea - was abating and that supplies were headed back toward being fully operational.

Reports that shortages have even hit remote Arkhangelsk...

Gasline shortages have reached ruZZia’s Arkhangelsk, 1400km from Ukraine.

Also everyone staying silent about how there are massive lines at all the gas stations in Moscow again, even though there's supposedly gas available? pic.twitter.com/4HH6ZkK60p

— Claretta Nijhuis (@NijhuisClaretta) August 14, 2026

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak had said at the end of July, "The situation is gradually stabilizing, a number of oil refineries became operational again. The balance is better now, and the situation at fuel filling stations has considerably improved, including when it comes to supplying agricultural producers," Interfax quoted him as saying.

But that assessment now appears to have been premature, also as Ukrainian long-range drone strikes continue pounding vital Russian energy sites.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 20:30

Patriots Won't Let Communists Take America

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

 Meet at the Liberty Tree...

This chapter in American history could be titled, “The Bad Guys Keep Winning Because They Suffer No Consequences for Their Treachery.”

Islamo-fascists and communists have taken over the Democrat Party and threaten to take over the U.S. Congress.  

Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has been brought to justice for conspiring with parts of the Intelligence Community to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.  The same Ukrainian and British Intelligence agents who helped orchestrate the first ridiculous impeachment against Trump (ostensibly set in motion because the president asked Volodymyr Zelenskyy why Joe Biden’s son was making tens of thousands of dollars each month as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company) continue trying to instigate an all-out war between the Russian Federation and the United States.  The mainstream media and globalist politicians want us all to forget that they used COVID as an excuse to roll out totalitarianism around the planet — justifying widespread censorship, lockdowns, mass surveillance, deadly chemical injections, and the abrogation of God-given rights in the name of “public health.”  Our scientific institutions refuse to say clearly that COVID was most likely engineered in a Chinese bio-lab with funding from U.S. taxpayers that Dr. Anthony Fauci had redirected to assist his friends and business associates overseas.  Nobody has been prosecuted for any of these crimes, just as nobody was prosecuted when President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder used the ATF to arm Mexican drug cartels, the IRS to target conservatives, and the USA PATRIOT Act to spy on political enemies (including all of the Republican presidential candidates for the 2016 election).

During the Obama and Biden administrations, Christians were prosecuted for being faithful servants of Christ.  Parents were put on domestic terror watchlists for objecting to radical infusions of “transgenderism,” pornography, and race-based discrimination in their children’s public school curricula.  The Democrat Party nationalized healthcare, used USAID budgets to subvert foreign elections, and redirected trillions of taxpayer dollars into “climate change” slush funds for domestic and foreign political allies.  The Obama-Biden regime defamed police officers as inherently racist and disparaged all white Americans as inherently “privileged.”  Decades of solid improvement in race relations in the United States were thrown out the window, as Democrats told their voters that white, heterosexual males deserve to be vilified and attacked.  For fifteen years, Antifa goons, BLM rioters, Islamic supremacists, and other violent left-wingers have burned down neighborhoods, destroyed churches, looted businesses, terrorized motorists, and harassed, threatened, and murdered ideological adversaries.  Instead of reporting on years of leftist domestic terrorism, corporate news talking heads still pretend that President Trump’s MAGA voters are the biggest threat to the United States.

It is easy to list the long train of abuses that have been committed against us and lose hope for the future.  Particularly because nobody has been held accountable for any of the serious crimes listed above, a lot of American patriots have begun to wonder whether our country can even be saved.  It can be saved.  But doing so will require Americans to get their minds right about the struggles ahead.

I often ask American patriots who express premature defeat whether they would give up so easily if this were 1776, rather than 2026.  My point is two-fold: First, we are most definitely living through a critical period of American history when, just as was true during the time of our Founding Fathers, the fate of our country rests in our hands.  Second, the odds that we shall succeed in saving America today are at least as high as they were two-hundred-fifty years ago.

Sometimes the people who are most proud of America’s past accomplishments are too quick to throw in the towel when it comes to America’s future.  But the origin story of the United States is epic because it was so unlikely.  The Boston Massacre was in 1770.  The Boston Tea Party occurred three years later.  By the time the Second Continental Congress declared Independence from Great Britain in ’76, American colonists were still sharply divided over the merits of war.  The Revolutionary War continued until ’83.  The Articles of Confederation, ratified in ’81, was superseded by ’89.  When the Founders drafted the U.S. Constitution, they effectively tabled the peculiar institution of slavery, knowing that the issue would collapse the Union.  During the 1790s, the heavily indebted United States endured severe economic troubles, and many members of Great Britain’s Parliament expected to reacquire their former colonies just as soon as interstate squabbles and economic calamity doomed the young nation.  When the British captured and burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814, they nearly succeeded.

When Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty began meeting at the Green Dragon Tavern in 1765, do you think they knew it would take fifty more years to secure America’s Independence for posterity?  Do you think John Hancock, Paul Revere, or any of the Bostonians who met around the “Liberty Tree” would have cared?  Their preserved correspondence to other patriots throughout the colonies reveals two things above all else: (1) They knew that they were the underdogs, and (2) they relished the fight.  They leaned into their political and moral principles.  They defended their convictions.  They embraced righteous indignation.  “[W]ith a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence “mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Those extraordinary men risked absolutely everything to go up against the greatest empire in the world.  Few outside of the American colonies believed they would prevail.  A healthy contingent of British elites predicted that the colonies-turned-states would fight among themselves and dissolve the Union within a short number of years.  Some Americans with Loyalist sympathies continued to expect a return of British rule until the conclusion of the War of 1812 seemed to finally put the matter to bed.

I do not expect today’s American patriots to become Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, Caesar Rodney, or John Paul Jones.  I do not expect Americans to step into the shoes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin.  But I do expect Americans to respect their country’s past enough to remain confident, steady, and determined as we fight the battles to come.  Because, frankly, the threats we face today pale by comparison to the threats that our ancestors were able to overcome.  What one man can do, another can do.  What one generation can accomplish, so can the next.

We humans have this psychological “glitch” when it comes to being the “underdog.”  When we feel that the challenge before us is almost too great to be met, some of us become even more committed to prevailing.  Once we’ve won, however, we begin to take our victories for granted.  We start to assume that things were always meant to turn out the way they did.  Yet, strangely, the first sign of trouble weakens our resolve.  As soon as some other scrappy opponent starts banging down our door, we begin to worry that everything will be lost.  We forget that we used to be the ones banging down doors.

What I would like to remind my friends is that we American patriots have an advantage that this militant generation of communists and Islamo-fascists will never have: This is our country, and there are tens of millions of us who will never allow enemies of freedom to conquer it.  I don’t care how many “black-pill” pessimists scream, “The end is nigh.”  They are wrong.

Our enemies took over the universities.  They took over the Deep State.  They see total victory within their sights.  But they’ve never seen American patriots actually fight.

We are not sheep for the wolves to devour.  We are the hunters who scare the wolves away.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 20:05

ICE Roundup Of Haitian Migrants Begins In Ohio

It all started with complaints from residents in Springfield, OH that a surge of Haitian migrants was causing chaos and an odd disappearance of local wildlife and pets.  City officials and local companies where shipping the migrants in by the thousands and giving them jobs.  NGOs arranged for extensive handouts including housing, food and cash. Initially, all of this was done while avoiding any discussion with the community at large. 

The surge started after 2021, but the Biden Administration denied that such a plan existed.  Within a few years, Springfield's Haitian population grew from a couple thousand to over 15,000 migrants.  That's nearly 25% of the total population of the city.  This does not happen without government coordination.

When Donald Trump dared to address the issue in a debate with Kamala Harris, the media and Democrats exploded with outrage.  But Trump's assertion that the migrants were "Eating the dogs and eating the cats" in Ohio likely helped to win him the presidency.  His position echoed a growing concern among native citizens over the rapid invasion of the third world into the US and the fact that most of these people will never assimilate into American standards.

This problem is about the be rectified, with ICE officially operating in Ohio.  The Haitian round-up has begun.  With the latest Supreme Court decision, TPS designations can now be terminated by the Trump Administration. Many migrants exploiting TPS are being called in by ICE to turn in their passports and wear an ankle monitor.  These are people who will likely be deported in the near term.  NGO's are already trying to preempt deportations by mobilizing well funded left-wing activists.

🚨 JUST NOW: Hundreds of liberals are showing up to the ICE office in Ohio where HAITIAN MIGRANTS must check in as they face deportation...

...nearly EVERY SINGLE ONE IS A WHITE LIBERAL!

Just look at the crowd. At least 80% is old and white.

Every single time. The suic*dal…

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 9, 2026

The most common argument against deportations is the claim that Haiti is a "violent and dangerous place" and sending migrants back would be the same as "sending them to hell."  The counter-argument is simple:  Why would Americans want to import hell into their own backyard?

There are currently over 300,000 Haitian migrants across the country that were, up until 2026, enjoying Temporary Protection Status (TPS), making it legally impossible to deport them.  The recent changes could affect all of these people and set the stage for mass deportations for the majority of them.  Media propaganda in favor the "poor oppressed migrants" will be rampant as this process unfolds.

Haitian Migrants in Ohio Who Lost Temporary Protected Status Are BREAKING DOWN in TEARS After Being Fitted with ANKLE MONITORS

Notice all of the media cameras there to capture the moment?

Staged and performative.

Temporary means temporary.

They all must go home.…

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 9, 2026

Local leaders and employers in Springfield have long interfered with the enforcement of immigration rules and credited the Haitians with the "economic revitalization" of the region.  Native residents continue to disagree with this claim.

In reality, the surge of cheap labor allowed manufacturers to avoid hiring locals who cost more.  Democrats ran Springfield for decades (until 2024 when they were finally voted out), and ran the city into the ground. They were happy to flood the city with Haitians in the expectation that eventually these people would become full citizens and vote left-wing for the rest of their lives.

Make no mistake, the importation of third world migrants by Democrats is undoubtedly an agenda to transplant a loyal voting block to replace more conservative American citizens.  Conservatives and many independents are celebrating deportations as a reversal of a horrific multicultural scheme that benefited progressives at the expense of the wider public.    

 

Around 52% of all Haitian households are on some form of welfare, including SNAP and cash assistance.  An army of NGOs operate to provide aid to these groups and help them game the system.  The TPS framework has long been abused; many migrants under TPS are only supposed to reside in the US for 18 months but end up staying for a decade or more.

Haitian migrants send an estimated $4 billion to $6 billion each year in remittances to Haiti. These funds make up nearly 20% to 25% of the country’s gross domestic product.  Time and time again, we see third world immigrants using the US as a cash cow to support the economy in their country of origin rather than assimilating.  They view America as an open market to be raided, not as a new and better home.  

This is why the majority of US voters continue to support deportation efforts.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 19:40

Your Grandfather's Military Is Dead

Authored by Byron King and Sean Ring via DailyReckoning.com,

You may have already seen some of what I’m about to share in The Daily Reckoning. But given what we’re focused on here and the sheer amount of money now moving into this corner of the defense industry… I think it deserves a second look.

The drone itself is only part of what’s happening here. Building a military around unmanned systems requires an enormous industrial ecosystem underneath it like chips, sensors, batteries, rare-earth magnets, software, machine tools and, most importantly, the factories capable of producing these systems at scale.

That’s the side of this story Byron has been looking at.

So with that, I’ll pass it over to Byron to show you just how much the battlefield is changing and what this massive buildout could mean for investors…

We’re out of time. The future is now.

I’m talking about drones, which are no longer an exotic military sideshow, tucked away in research labs while the so-called “real warriors” plan the next campaign. Like phalanxes of marching soldiers, or guys riding horses into battle, that era is over. Drones are now the latest – and likely decisive – military thing.

The Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, Coast Guard, law enforcement and even firefighters are in the drone business. If it can fly, float, roll, crawl, loiter, listen, jam, scout, strike or blow itself up at the right place and time, it belongs in the new, unmanned order of battle.

Think of drones the way old-timers once thought of radios, radar, GPS, precision navigation or night vision. First, they look like clever add-ons, bolted to the airframe, deck plates, or a rack in the back of a truck. Then they become force multipliers. Over time, they become doctrine. Finally, they become table stakes.

Air Power Gets Less-Manned

Begin with air power. The Air Force has been “droning” for years, whether it used that word or not. Cruise missiles, decoys, loitering munitions, anti-radiation weapons and electronic attack packages have blurred the old line between aircraft, missiles and science fiction sky-robots.

A loitering munition can search, wait, attack or return if there is nothing worth killing. MALD, the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, spoofs air defenses. HARM, the high-speed anti-radiation missile, hunts radar systems. Together, these tools show where air combat has gone: aircraft, missiles and semi-autonomous or autonomous systems now occupy the same battlespace.

MALD missiles. Credit Raytheon/RTX.

In other words, the drone is no longer a science and engineering experiment. It has become a business model for modern war, and a rebuke to past planning processes, acquisition timelines and chronic risk aversion, all designed for a slower world that is long past.

The Pilot Becomes a Mission Commander

Here’s the next step: collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA. These are unmanned aircraft that function via artificial intelligence (AI), built to fly alongside manned fighters, bombers, surveillance birds and tankers. They carry sensors, scout ahead, jam radars, haul missiles, absorb enemy fire or hit targets where commanders do not want to risk a living, breathing pilot. But the key part of a CCA is not the airframe; it’s the autonomy stack that lets the machine sense, decide, maneuver and cooperate inside a larger combat network.

For years, a small community of defense visionaries argued that war would become faster, cheaper, more distributed and driven by autonomous systems and AI. They were called too commercial, too theoretical, too Silicon Valley-ish. Turns out, though, those guys were right.

Now the Air Force has moved CCA from PowerPoint Dreamland to contracts, flight test and production. The air service is not just buying drones. It’s moving toward a procurement model in which hardware and mission software can be competed and upgraded on separate timelines. A future F-35, F-47 or B-21 will not fight alone. It will fight inside a moving code-cloud of sensors, shooters, jammers and electromagnetic tricks.

Drone is my copilot and wingman. Future notional CCA. Credit US Air Force.

And the central question is not whether a pilot is comfortable with an autonomous wingman. Broadly, that decision has been made and now the issue is how the overall package works in wartime, especially when ideas cycle through in days and weeks (and as we’ll discuss below, this is one of many lessons from Ukraine).

Trust in new technology is not an immediate and warm feeling; it must be earned. So, before anyone trusts an AI-driven CCA, the software, communications and cyber defenses must survive deception, electronic attack, GPS denial, spoofed data, degraded links and every other dirty trick a thinking enemy will throw at them.

The old Pentagon way of buying and building new weapons was to fund new ideas on the margin while protecting legacy programs of record. But that luxury is gone, which is why CCA is not just an aviation story. It’s a validation story, a software-assurance story and a network-resilience story.

Manned or unmanned, every aircraft is now a node in a large kill chain. If the network is hacked, delayed, spoofed or denied, the airplane’s performance becomes almost secondary.

The Navy Builds Mother Ships

Characteristically, the Navy took longer to get there, but it is getting there. In the mid-2010s, Northrop Grumman’s X-47B proved that an unmanned aircraft could launch from and land on an aircraft carrier; no small trick, considering that carrier aviation is one of the most demanding operating environments on earth (as I know from first-hand Navy experience).

Navy X-47B autonomous drone in 2015. Credit U.S. Navy.

The actual, experimentalX-47B aircraft (image above) went into storage; but over time, the idea behind the program morphed into Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray, an unmanned carrier-based refueling aircraft.

And okay, aerial refueling may sound boring, but it’s not (again, ask me how I know). Because tanking is range, range is reach and reach is combat power. Meanwhile, MQ-25 lays the command-and-control foundation for a future carrier air wing full of unmanned systems.

Follow that drone-style logic into non-carrier shipbuilding. New vessels are being built with dedicated space to store, fuel, prepare, arm, launch and recover unmanned systems — not just aerial drones, but surface and underwater drones too. In other words, a modern warship is no longer your granddad’s gray hull, stuffed full of guns, missiles and sailors. It has become a mother ship for both controlled and autonomous drones.

USS Somerset (LPD-25) can carry aerial, surface, subsurface drones. Credit U.S. Navy.

Whether launched by air, surface ship or submarine, drones can scout or attack. Underwater drones can map, listen, lay sensors, hunt mines, shadow submarines or perform missions too dangerous or dull for real people. That creates opportunities not just for traditional shipyards, but also for suppliers that can build unmanned vessels cheaply, quickly and at scale.

Ukraine Shows the Future

This is where Ukraine enters the story as a brutal laboratory and testing-range for drones. Small FPV (first person view) drones, long-range strike drones, loitering munitions and improvised systems have changed the character of the battlefield.

Drones watch trenches, spot artillery, attack armor, cut logistic lines, strike air bases and force both sides to move, hide, jam the other guy, and adapt fast. In fact, the life cycle of a drone’s usefulness is not years or months. It can be weeks, days, even hours or minutes because the enemy watches, learns, jams, copies and counters.

One critical lesson from Ukraine is that drones are not just warfighting tools. They are product development under fire.

Production Wins Drone Wars

For investors, the market angle is that drones are not just weapons. They are complex, moving AI learning systems. They require software updates, signal processing, anti-jamming tricks, antennas, batteries, motors, optics, tactics, operators and constant verification.

A drone unit is part air arm, part artillery observer, part radio shack, part machine shop, part software lab and part test range. The side that manufactures faster, ships quicker, assembles more efficiently, tests more realistically, updates software faster and repairs better gains the warfighting edge.

The Factory Is the Front

Now we get to the hard part. You don’t win a drone war with a boutique defense-industrial base. You win it with production, and not by the dozens, hundreds or thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

For this vast scope of buildout you need carbon fiber, fiberglass, aluminum, titanium, specialty steels, small engines, propellers, batteries, rare-earth magnets, chips, cameras, antennas, LIDAR, software, test ranges, machine tools and skilled workers. And you need mines, mills, refineries and factories… especially factories.

This is why the new defense companies are talking like mass production industrialists. For example, Anduril’s Barracuda family is built around software-defined, mass-producible autonomous air vehicles. The selling point is not just range or payload. It’s fewer tools, fewer parts, faster assembly and a supply chain designed for scale; to “make it rain missiles,” so to speak.

Mass drop of Anduril “Barracuda” drones. Credit Alex Hollings/You Tube.

In a high-end war, the current arsenal of “exquisite” weapons will be consumed faster than Congress can hold hearings about why the armed forces are out of them. Gold-plated systems designed like hand-sewn, bespoke Saville Row suits may be impressive. But that’s not how to win a modern war against a capable foe.

Follow the Supply Chain

All of this does not mean the old defense primes will go away. Far from it. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon/RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Huntington Ingalls, L3Harris and others in that arena still have customer relationships, classified program access, integration muscle, product lines, assembly and est facilities, workforce depth, access to capital, and of course entre to Congress.

But the drone boom is opening cracks in the castle wall. Legacy primes have checkbooks and technical benches that can scale. But startups can move faster. The likely winners will combine Silicon Valley speed with Detroit-style production, along with Pentagon-grade technical authority and combat reliability. In other words, the procurement establishment can no longer afford to treat the new crowd as a kiddie-table sideshow.

Watch shipbuilders too. The Navy’s future is not just buying more big gray hulls. The sea service is building out a mixed fleet of crewed ships, unmanned surface vessels, underwater drones, autonomous mine hunters, maritime sensors and launch-and-recover platforms. That points toward demand for steel, engines, electrical systems, autonomy packages, rugged communications, modular payload bays, shipyard capacity and repair yards.

Along these lines, one company that is both legacy but also quite nimble is Huntington Ingalls (HII). It’s worth a longer writeup all on its own, but not here. The takeaway is that HII builds nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and large numbers of surface ships, while is also has an aggressive program of drones called Romulus and Remus; the former being surface drones and the latter for underwater. The company is definitely working to secure long-term Navy business.

(Note: HII is not an official recommendation and we won’t track it here in Strategic Intelligence. But it’s a solid company for long term investors.)

On the other side of the planet, China understands all this about drones and the industrial base. Indeed, China has spent decades building the upstream and downstream muscle behind modern war: ore deposits, mines, mills, refineries, critical minerals, rare-earth magnets, batteries, electronics, components and final assembly. China’s shipyards alone are nothing less than astonishing.

Back here in the U.S., we’re just at the point of broad realization that every drone needs a supply chain before anyone can even think about finding a target. Carbon fiber, chips, magnets, batteries and sensors do not emerge from policy papers. They come from industrial systems that have yet to be built out in America.

All of this also puts rare earths and battery metals on the front page of defense investing. Neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium are magnet words. Magnet words are motor words. Motor words are drone words. Add lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum and tungsten, and suddenly the drone story is also a mining story, a refining story, a battery story and an industrial metals story.

And no, we’re not tossing out the old platforms. Submarines are still war-winning weapons. Just as aircraft are critical weapons. Plus missiles, tanks, ships, satellites and radars. But ore in the ground is a weapon too. Refineries are weapons. Machine tools are weapons. Battery plants are weapons. Software libraries are weapons. Assembly lines are weapons.

Here’s the takeaway: in the new age of drone warfare, the factory is not behind the front. The factory is the front.

The Investment Lesson

Here’s the investment lesson: Drones change tactics because they put eyes, ears and explosives everywhere. They change operations because commanders can coordinate fires, movement and logistics with persistent surveillance and rapid feedback. And they change strategy because nations must plan for production depth, electronic resilience, data dominance and supply-chain sovereignty.

Follow the money and you’ll find it flowing toward autonomy, software, sensors, counter-drone systems, batteries, rare earths, machine tools, cyber resilience and the old-fashioned industrial base that still wins wars.

Modern war is industrial war, now fought at software speed. Stockpiles matter, but stockpiles run down. Production keeps armed forces in the fight, and logistics keeps production relevant.

So, while we’ve been discussing drones, don’t confuse the shiny moving thing with the whole story. The real story of a drone is the stack beneath it: motor, magnet, battery, chip, sensor, code, secure network, factory, mine and ore in the ground.

This is where the next great defense trade begins: not with an aircraft on a runway or a ship cutting a wake, but with the magnets, batteries, tools and factories that make drone war possible.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 19:15

Berkshire Adds Google, Delta, Trims BofA, Kroger As Abel Taps Into Record Cash Hoard

While nowhere near as tumultuous as the transformational first quarter in Berkshire's post-Warren Buffett era which saw over a dozen names rotated in and out, in the second quarter there were a few notable changes under Berkshire's new CEO, Greg Abel. 

In a quarter in which Abel spent a net $20 billion on other equities, and repurchased about $4.5 billion of its own stock, leaving it with $365.5 billion of cash at midyear, down from a record $397 billion at the end of March, Berkshire added to its holdings in Alphabet and Delta Air Lines as Greg Abel began tapping into the company’s massive cash hoard. 

After years of relatively subdued deal activity under Buffett, who often bemoaned lofty market valuations, Abel oversaw back-to-back multibillion-dollar transactions in the period.

He spent $6.8 billion to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home, a typical value bet, while also handing $10 billion to Alphabet to support its investments related to artificial intelligence as part of the company's unprecedented ATM offering; the deal represented a new area for the conglomerate which had historically stayed away from most tech names. Here are the other transactions disclosed changes in the Berkshire 13F:

New positions:

• D R Horton (DHI), a tiny new stake worth $580K as of June 30

Raises:

• Alphabet (GOOGL) 48.1MM shares added, or $21.1BN, to $37.8BN as of June 30, making it Berkshire's 3rd largest holding,
• Delta Air Lines (DAL), 17.5MM shares added, or $2.7BN, to $5.4BN
• Lennar (LEN), 3.1MM shares added, to $315.9MM, to $1.2BN
• New York Times (NYT), 553K shares added, or $$169.5MM, to $1.1BN
• Macy's (M), 4.3MM shares added, or $118MMM, to $173.0MM

Cuts:

• Bank of America (BAC), 30.2MM shares sold bringing total down to 483.4MM shares worth $27.5BN as of June 30
• DaVita (DVA), 1.2MM shares sold bringing total to 28.9MM shares worth $6.4BN 
• Kroger (KR), 11MM shares sold bringing total to 39MM shares worth $2.2BN 
• Ally Financial (ALLY), 2MM shares sold bringing total to 27MM shares worth $1.2BN
• Capital One (COF), 4.2MM shares sold bringing total to 3MM shares worth $602MM
• Nucor (NUE), 2MM shares sold bringing total to 1.9MM shares worth $413MM 

Exits:

• Entire position in Constellation Brands (STZ) for $95MM as of March 31. 

Full breakdown:

Source: Edgar

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:50

State Department Revokes Over 175,000 Visas Of Foreign Nationals Accused Of Crimes

Via American Greatness,

President Donald Trump’s State Department has revoked more than 175,000 visas held by foreign nationals accused of crimes since the start of last year, officials said this week, marking one of the administration’s most sweeping efforts yet to remove dangerous individuals from the country.

State Department officials said the majority of revocations targeted foreign nationals accused of assault, drunk driving, theft, drug crimes, fraud, immigration violations and threats to national security.

A significant share of the revoked visas also involved allegations of child abuse, sexual assault, embezzlement and reckless driving.

Among the cases cited by officials, one foreign national lost his visa after being charged with rape and sexual battery of a victim who is mentally disabled. Another had a visa revoked following charges of felony kidnapping, human trafficking and sexual exploitation of a minor.

Other cases included a foreign national arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest with violence, drunk driving and domestic violence, as well as individuals charged with sodomy of a child, aggravated sexual battery, and possession of more than a dozen counts of child sexual abuse material.

One foreign national was arrested for driving with heroin in the vehicle and a blood alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

A U.S. embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 visas held by so-called birth tourist parents who officials said traveled to the United States primarily to give birth so their children would obtain American citizenship.

Officials also flagged financial crimes among the revocations, including a foreign national accused of orchestrating a Medicaid scheme that billed more than $5 million for fake services under the guise of a legitimate healthcare business, and another who fabricated company revenue and forged letters to swindle investors and clients while using the false claims to fraudulently obtain a visa.

A foreign national who came to the United States to teach young students was arrested and had his visa revoked after being accused of sexually assaulting one of them.

Several foreign nationals lost their visas after publicly celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, including one who wrote that “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain” and another who said Kirk “died too late.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also moved against foreign nationals deemed threats to national security, revoking the visa of a Cuban national with ties to the communist regime and of Iranian nationals connected to the Iranian government.

Officials additionally revoked the visa of a Laotian child sex offender previously pardoned by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, as well as a Kuwaiti national accused of expressing a desire for violence against Trump and referring to Americans as the “enemy.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:25

US Accuses Chinese Exporters Of Masterminding "Great Transshipment Scam"

Back in mid-2025, when Trump's renewed trade war with China was all the rage, we said that much of this was hot air and theatrics for the simple reason that many Chinese exporters would find easy ways to evade US tariffs thanks to "transshipments", or using intermediary countries as fake points of origin ...

Why China exports tumbled to the US and rose everywhere else? One word: transshipments pic.twitter.com/y9Pg2ML5ZX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 10, 2025

... and none more so than Vietnam, which quickly emerged as the central nexus in US tariff evasion.

Record Vietnam transshipments by China pic.twitter.com/SBCsRrWLeh

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 8, 2025

It appears the Trump admin finally got the memo, and on Thursday it released a sharply worded report accusing Chinese exporters of orchestrating a system of “illegal transshipment” through more than 40 third countries to dodge US tariffs, branding the practice “The Great Transshipment Scam”.

The 25-page document confirms what we reported for much of 2025, and claims Chinese firms systematically diverted goods through lower-tariff jurisdictions since the US kicked off its trade war with China in 2018.

It alleges that exporters use limited assembly, relabelling, repackaging, re-invoicing and false country-of-origin declarations to disguise Chinese-origin products and secure more favourable tariff treatment on entry into the US.

The White House report said that Chinese exporters have “increasingly routed goods through third countries … where limited assembly, finishing, repackaging, relabelling or documentation changes could create the appearance of a different national origin.”

“For years the great transshipment scam has led Communist China to launder its exports through more than 40 countries, rob our treasury of tens of billions of dollars, and steal the paychecks of American workers,” said Peter Navarro, the White House senior counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing.

“This report rips the mask off.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington said that Beijing opposed the “overstretching of the concept of national security” and the use of state power to suppress Chinese enterprises”. It also warned that any “unilateral actions or agreements concerning transshipped goods must not target or harm the interests of third parties.”

“We firmly oppose any party seeking to strike a deal at China’s expense or engaging in baseless economic coercion that severely infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of relevant enterprises and gravely disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains,” embassy spokesperson Liu Chang said adding that “should such situations arise, China will resolutely take necessary measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”

The 40 countries named as participants in the China-linked “Great Transshipment Scam” include major US trading partners such as Canada and Mexico, as well as allies such as Japan, South Korea, the European Union and Israel. Most Southeast Asian countries are also on the list, among them Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are also named.

The findings come amid tit-for-tat economic actions between Washington and Beijing and one month before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Washington for a leader-level summit with US President Donald Trump.

The report cited a range of third-party estimates for the annual value of goods involved in illegal or suspect transshipment, spanning roughly US$40 billion to US$303 billion. 

Assuming $75 billion in annual illegal transshipment, the administration estimates that roughly 450,000 American jobs have been displaced and up to $150 billion of GDP has been lost. These figures are described as model-based illustrations rather than observed counts.

Applying illustrative tariffs of between 25 to 45%, the report estimates annual US revenue losses in the “tens of billions of dollars”.

The report says that the administration will increase the use of artificial intelligence to monitor trade and spot transshipped goods, an initiative it calls the “Detective Border”.

The publication coincides with Washington’s efforts to close what it sees as a major loophole in its tariff regime.

Mexico has drawn particular scrutiny because of its free trade pact with the US and rising Chinese investment and flows of Chinese-made components into Mexican factories. Those concerns are now central to the ongoing joint review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). The US has declined an automatic 16-year extension of the pact, citing issues including concerns over Chinese transshipment.

Navarro termed Mexico as “one of the biggest transshippers,” where China uses the USMCA “tariff rates of nothing” and “sneak stuff in”. 

“Communist China has engaged in an extremely sophisticated set of actions that are designed essentially to transship and thereby evade the tariffs,” Navarro added.

As SCMP notes, an analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a lobby group for the US manufacturing industry, estimated that about US$14 billion in Chinese trade was diverted and transshipped to the US after the 2025 tariff escalation, with Asean countries accounting for the majority.

Washington has already moved to tighten the rules. A 2025 framework agreement with Vietnam imposed a 40 per cent tariff on goods deemed to have been transshipped, twice the rate applied to ordinary Vietnamese-origin shipments. Similar anti-transshipment provisions have been included in other bilateral arrangements and executive actions targeting indirect shipments.

Asian manufacturing hubs such as Vietnam and Thailand are also under growing scrutiny. Trade data earlier this year showed a roughly $112 billion gap between China’s reported exports to the US and arrivals recorded by US Customs and Border Protection, a discrepancy widely seen as a sign of large-scale tariff circumvention.

Although the report concludes that it “is too early to determine the net effect of the Administration’s tariff and anti-transshipment policies”, it serves as a reminder that the tariff heat remains on.

In July last year, an executive order extended a 40% penalty tariff to goods that US Customs and Border Protection determines were transshipped to evade duties. The penalty is imposed on top of any country-of-origin tariff. The administration has also begun publishing lists of countries and facilities linked to suspected tariff evasion schemes. 

The White House report came a day after Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, urged Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to intensify the crackdown. In an August 12 letter, Moreno called the practice “a deliberate scheme by foreign manufacturers, overwhelmingly based in China, to falsify where their goods are made, launder them through a third country, slap on a new label and dump them into the American market.”

He said that Chinese auto parts routed through Thailand had affected manufacturing in Ohio.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:00

Democratic Party Committee Advances Resolution Demanding ICE Be Abolished

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,

Democrats have edged closer to vowing to end Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Federal agents monitor protesters in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 4, 2025. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

At its summer meeting in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 13, the Democratic National Committee's Resolutions Committee approved a resolution that calls for the abolition of ICE, an agency at the center of the Trump administration's immigration law enforcement effort.

It could be approved by the full DNC as Democrats mull their message ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The resolution, which passed 25 to 12, was introduced by Michele Johnson, a DNC committeewoman from Louisiana.

In 2024, the website of the New Orleans Democratic Socialists of America described Johnson as a member of its chapter.

"The DNC urges Democratic members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and enacting immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship, protects workers, and ensures dignity for all impacted people," the resolution reads in part.

The resolution cited the deaths of ICE detainees and allegations of poor conditions at detention facilities.

An amendment from Idaho's Terri Pickens that would have changed the word "abolishing" to "completely restructuring" was withdrawn.

At the meeting, Johnson said she wanted to go beyond merely calling for reforms.

She said "abolition may feel intimidating or radical," but the death of anti-ICE protester Renee Good in a Minneapolis confrontation with ICE agents and other incidents, as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's call for 3,000 arrests per day, helped motivate her desire to eliminate the agency altogether.

"No amount of tinkering at the edges will make the culture change," she said, alleging that the agency "treats all individuals with my skin color and darker like criminals."

The resolution touched off a spirited debate among the Democrats present, with some urging reform rather than abolishment.

Marge Hoffa, the DNC's Midwestern regional vice chair, noted that the DNC previously passed resolutions advocating ICE reforms, including during the same meeting, that fell short of pushing to abolish the agency.

That reform resolution came from the DNC's current chairman, Ken Martin, who, like Hoffa, is from Minnesota.

"We shouldn't contradict ourselves by also introducing a resolution that would now call to abolish something that we have [a] well-established track record of calling to be drastically reformed," Hoffa said.

Ada Briceño, a Californian, voiced support for the resolution, noting that her family and friends included people illegally present in the United States.

"I don't trust this organization, this ICE, with my life, or anybody else's life," she said.

Texas's Jeff Strater said he backed the resolution without amendments.

"I am fully aware that this body has passed resolutions reforming ICE - I voted for them - but I'm also here today to vote in alignment with my state Democratic Party," he said.

Natalie Baldassarre, the national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, criticized the resolution.

"If Democrats had any backbone they'd vote down this dangerous proposal and put American citizens first," she said in a statement, adding that ICE under President Donald Trump has mostly targeted alleged or convicted criminals.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 17:40

Investors Sue Selena Gomez Over Mental Health Startup

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Singer and actor Selena Gomez was sued Thursday by investors who say the “Only Murders in the Building” star committed fraud by failing to fulfill duties to build and promote her mental health startup.

The plaintiffs invested nearly $1.2 million in Wondermind Global, which was launched in 2021 to help users improve their “mental fitness.”

Investors said they put money into the startup believing that Gomez’s involvement would drive growth. Her role as head of marketing was presented as central, and the sheer size of her social media audience—500 million followers—was part of the pitch.

They argue that Gomez and other company leaders did not deliver any of what they had promised, including a mobile app.

“There was no legitimate enterprise in the works, much less a lucrative one,” the plaintiffs said.

They said the company failed to meet “even its most basic obligations, such as timely paying its employees and vendors.”

The lawsuit maintains that shortfalls left no real business. The investors describe an enterprise that never got off the ground.

Investors said they were assured Gomez would actively promote the venture as head of marketing and “chief impact officer.”

The complaint alleges she signed a contract but largely failed to perform those duties.

“Gomez purported to sign a contract obligating her to perform and then ignored it,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also names Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, a co-chief executive, and former business partner Daniella Pierson as defendants, along with Wondermind Global itself. Court papers allege the defendants overstated the company’s 2022 valuation at $95 million and claimed partnerships with firms such as JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity that never existed.

Plaintiffs maintain they remained unaware of operational shortfalls—including late payments to employees and vendors—until a September 2025 article in The Cut described the company’s collapse and related internal conflicts. Teefey previously disputed aspects of that reporting in a statement to media outlets. Pierson, who departed in 2023, denied the claims against her in a statement to news outlets on Thursday and said she welcomes the chance to present financial records.

Representatives for Gomez and Teefey could not be reached for comment.

Wondermind debuted in 2021 to offer newsletter-based mental health resources. The case was brought in Delaware federal court. It seeks a jury trial, repayment of the nearly $1.2 million investment, additional damages, and attorney fees.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 17:00

Flock Blinks: Surveillance Giant Slashes Data Retention After 50 Jurisdictions Walk, Cams Destroyed

Flock Safety, the startup that blanketed America in automated license plate readers (ALPRs), announced Thursday that it is dialing back its expansive platform. The company is significantly shortening its data retention windows, requiring police to justify every search, and allowing cities to block neighboring jurisdictions from querying their cameras for immigration enforcement.

Not even (paid?) damage control by Bari Weiss' The Free Press could salvage the situation. 

Today I found out that the person behind this pro-Flock propaganda piece put out by The Free Press, is Bari Weiss.

This is the same Bari Weiss that suppressed a 60 minutes piece on Jeffrey Epstein's banking relationships.

It turns out that, under Bari's leadership, the story… https://t.co/5KGGdca8TI

— Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) August 5, 2026

And with the 'Get the Flock Out' movement in full swing, more than 50 agencies and municipalities have canceled, suspended, rejected, or simply unplugged their Flock contracts since January, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock. In July, Republican members of Congress filed at least two bills aimed at severely restricting the systems.

Others haven't waited for legislation. A Guardian investigation documented 33 destruction incidents across 23 states - cameras smashed, sawed off their poles, or hauled away entirely. One activist told AFP he has personally disabled roughly 30 devices and posts instructional videos to some 500,000 Instagram followers, while the DeFlock America Facebook group has grown past 600,000 members crowdsourcing camera locations and disabling techniques. In Oregon, six poles were cut down and a note left at the base: "Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks."

Fusion centers are now monitoring the surveillance state's opponents. Intelligence bulletins obtained by 404 Media through public records requests show law enforcement tracking anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram accounts, flagging "extensive and ongoing chatter on social media" about methods to "physically destroy Flock LPR cameras," and instructing departments to increase patrols around camera sites.

New Policies

Flock operates roughly 120,000 cameras nationwide, recording the plate numbers, makes, models, and bumper stickers of practically every car that passes. Thousands of law enforcement agencies across 49 states can search that data and share it seamlessly across jurisdictional lines.

According to CEO Garrett Langley's announcement, the platform is undergoing several major structural shifts:

• Retention Drops to Seven Days: Default data retention is shrinking from 30 days to just seven. Longer holds will now require data to be explicitly tied to an active case number as evidence.
• Mandatory Case Numbers: Every search query must now be labeled with a criminal case number to proceed.
• Automated Audits: A tool that flags abnormal search behavior is now mandatory for all law enforcement customers. If tripped, the system automatically locks users out pending an internal review.
• Jurisdictional Firewalls: Cities can now restrict what outside agencies are allowed to search their cameras for. Langley noted, "City A could allow City B to search its cameras only for a stolen vehicle, missing person, or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement."

So, cities can choose not to help ICE catch illegals.

That feature exists for a reason. 404 Media found Flock's lookup tool aided at least 4,000 immigration-related searches between Trump's inauguration and May 2025 - including queries run in states that had banned local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.

The policy shift also comes on the heels of a glaring security failure. Langley disclosed that a glitch discovered in December 2025 left some of Flock's AI-powered pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras exposed to the public internet. "For a brief period of time, third parties were able to access live streams and footage from those cameras," Langley admitted, attributing the breach to a vendor's network configuration error before adding, "We are accountable."

Meanwhile, earlier this month a North Carolina police officer was arrested for allegedly using Flock's plate readers to track her boyfriend's ex-wife. So random cops abusing Flock systems has been another issue. 

An issue at scale, it turns out. The Washington Post reported this month that it found nearly 50 instances of officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many of them tracking current or former romantic partners or family members. Four Richmond County Sheriff's Office employees have been arrested and fired since June for personal searches. This week, six Savannah Police Department employees - including four officers - were fired for searching friends and family and letting an outside agency use the city's cameras. Savannah says it caught them using Flock's audit function - the one that only became mandatory on Thursday.

Bipartisan Backlash

The movement against Flock doesn't break down cleanly along party lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, and ordinary residents at local town halls have converged on the company.

While ALPR technology isn't new, Flock's hyper-aggressive expansion and easy-to-use search interface made the surveillance uniquely visible. The backlash unites left-leaning advocates concerned about over-policing and civil rights with right-leaning advocates concerned about constitutional privacy and government overreach.

As one surveillance-law scholar told the Associated Press, the "growing community backlash" aimed specifically at Flock has captured a profound cultural shift: people don't want their daily movements tracked.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:40

Forget CDOs, Meet CCOs: This Isn't A Tech Cycle... It's 2008 With Silicon

In July, the appropriately-named 'Groundbreaker' website laid out a structural diagnosis that most of the market still refuses to confront: the AI boom is not a technology cycle. It is a credit-driven real-estate-like cycle whose financing architecture depends on the second derivative.

Levels (backlogs, gigawatts, revenue, token usage) and the first derivative (growth rates) remain the only numbers anyone watches.

The second derivative - the acceleration of that growth - is where regime change actually lives.

Structures built on the assumption of perpetual acceleration do not require a collapse in demand or a decline in absolute spending to break.

They break when growth merely stops accelerating.

That is the 2008 mechanic, not the 2000 one. And the collateral of this particular cycle is not houses. It is compute.

Six weeks later, Nvidia has made the thesis explicit.

With the $1.8 trillion off-balance-sheet time-bomb still ticking, 'Collateralized Compute Obligations' are the biggest red flag so far...

This week the company signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to stand up independent “compute financing platforms” designed to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital.

The pitch is no longer subtle: Nvidia’s GPUs are now an investable asset class. Chips can be housed in special-purpose entities, pledged as collateral, and financed against the cash flows they are expected to generate - exactly as buildings or toll roads once were.

Jensen Huang has said the quiet part out loud: technology chips have become collateral.

Residual-value support from Nvidia itself (capped, for now, at 25% on certain deals) sits in the background, the modern equivalent of a residual guarantee in a leveraged lease.

This is not a side deal or a customer accommodation. It is the formalization, at half-a-trillion-dollar scale, of the very architecture the July note described: hard assets, long-duration debt, take-or-pay economics, and a financing stack that only remains solvent while the underlying growth rate continues to accelerate.

The bond market and private credit are no longer merely funding the build-out. They are being invited to treat the GPUs themselves as the primary security.

The second derivative was always the only number that mattered. Nvidia has now put a $500 billion price tag on the claim that the market still refuses to watch it.

Here's Groundbreaker's full note from July: (subscribe here)

The Second Derivative: Why No One Understands the AI Boom

The market misremembers 2008. That same blind spot sits at the center of the AI boom.

Ask a portfolio manager what caused the 2008 mortgage crisis and you will hear a tidy causal chain: lax underwriting produced loans that should never have been made, home prices crashed, borrowers found themselves underwater, they defaulted, and the securities written on top of those loans detonated. Prices fell, therefore borrowers defaulted. It has the great virtue of sounding obvious. It is also, as a matter of sequence, wrong. It is the same error the market is making right now about the AI boom.

The subprime machine did not run on prices. It ran on the change in prices, and more precisely on the change in that change. The canonical product of the era - the 2/28 and 3/27 hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage - was not designed to be repaid on its stated terms. It was designed to be refinanced.

A borrower took a low “teaser” rate for two or three years. The implicit underwriting assumption, shared by originator and borrower alike, was that the loan would never reach its reset: rising home values would manufacture equity, the borrower would refinance into a fresh teaser and the clock would start again. The structure was a treadmill, and the treadmill was powered by appreciation. It worked spectacularly while it worked. Nearly four in five subprime hybrid ARMs originated in 2003 had been refinanced away by the end of 2006.

Now watch the timing. National home-price appreciation did not crash in 2006. It decelerated. The year-over-year rate of gain, which had run in the mid-to-high teens through 2004 and into early 2005, began bleeding off - still positive, still printing green, but slowing. Prices were higher than they had ever been. And yet, with prices at their peak and still rising, subprime delinquencies inflected upward.

Delinquencies turned up in 2006 - while appreciation was still positive. The price decline came later.

This is why the popular causal story is, in economist Didier Sornette’s phrase, “right mechanically” but “wrong because it takes the fall in house prices as exogenous” - as though the decline simply arrived one day, a meteor from outside the system. It did not arrive from outside. The deceleration was endogenous to the structure; the structure required ever-accelerating prices to keep refinancing its way out of its own reset schedule, and no series accelerates forever.

The second derivative was always going to roll over. When it did, the first derivative followed it down through zero, negative equity spread from the margin inward, and the defaults the market insisted were caused by “falling prices” had in fact begun a year earlier, when prices were still rising but had stopped rising faster.

II. A Short Theory of Derivatives

Let the relevant quantity be S. Three numbers describe it. The level is S itself: how big the thing is. The first derivative is the velocity, S′: how fast it is growing. The second derivative is the acceleration, S″: whether that growth is itself speeding up or slowing down. Markets are instrumented to observe the first two and almost entirely blind to the third. Sell-side models forecast levels. Momentum strategies trade the first derivative. Virtually nobody builds a position around the second derivative.

Yet the second derivative is precisely where information about regime change lives, for a structural reason. When financing embeds a growth assumption - a reset that presumes refinancing, a covenant that presumes rising cash flow, a commitment sized to presumed expansion - the assumption is satisfied not by the level being high but by growth being sustained. Sustained growth at a declining rate still satisfies the headline (“revenue grew 40%!”) while quietly violating the embedded premise (“…but the incremental capacity we committed to assumed it would grow 70%”). The gap between what the headline shows and what the structure needs opens silently.

There is a window - call it borrowed time - between the moment the second derivative rolls over and the moment the first derivative crosses zero. During that window everything looks fine. Revenue is at record highs. Growth is still positive. The press releases are triumphant. And the machine is already broken; it simply has not been told yet.

Borrowed time is dangerous in exact proportion to the convexity of the instruments riding on top of S. A long-dated equity multiple is roughly linear in expectations; it can deflate slowly and reflate, the way the dot-com index took two years to bottom and many survivors simply de-rated. A leveraged credit structure is negatively convex: it earns a fixed coupon on the way up and absorbs unbounded loss on the way down, and its covenants are step functions, not smooth curves. This distinction - between an equity story that can drift and a credit story that snaps - is the difference between 2000 and 2008. It is also the difference between what the market thinks AI is and what AI actually is.

III. The AI Boom is a Credit-Driven Real Estate Cycle

Open any AI bull or bear note and observe what it argues about. It argues about levels - how many billions of revenue, how many gigawatts, how large the total addressable market - and about the first derivative - is growth 200% or 150%, is enterprise inflecting, are tokens-per-minute rising. The bears say the levels are unsustainable; the bulls say the growth justifies them. Both camps are staring at S and S′. Neither is watching S″. And the entire financing architecture erected over the past twenty-four months is a bet on S″ - on the acceleration of demand continuing - dressed up as a bet on the level.

This matters because the dominant analogy in everyone’s head is the wrong one. “Is AI a bubble like dot-com?” is the question being asked, and it produces dot-com answers: maybe the leaders survive and the laggards wash out; maybe multiples compress; maybe we get a 50% drawdown and a recovery. That framing is a category error.

The year 2000 was an equity-multiple event - too much optimism priced into stocks with thin balance sheets and almost no debt. The pain was real but it was equity pain, and equity is patient capital that can simply be marked down and held. The AI build-out is structurally different. It is increasingly financed not by selling overpriced equity but by contracting future cash flows and borrowing against hardware - take-or-pay capacity deals, GPU-collateralized term loans, off-balance-sheet vehicles, asset-backed notes sold to insurers. That is not the architecture of 2000. That is the architecture of 2008.

There is a deeper misclassification beneath the 2000-versus-2008 question, and it is the one that does the real damage. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its actual anatomy is that of a credit-driven real estate cycle - which is precisely why the 2008 mechanics apply - and the two break for entirely different reasons.

Technology cycles are driven by innovation and adoption; their risks are obsolescence and competition; they live or die on whether the product is wanted, and they can de-rate slowly as the future is repriced.

Real estate cycles are mechanical: leverage, hard assets, occupancy - debt-financed construction at scale, commercial leases disguised as take-or-pay contracts, and long construction lags that guarantee supply arrives after demand has turned. Walk down the AI build-out and every feature is a property development in disguise: a data center on entitled land, financed with debt against the structure and leased to tenants on take-or-pay terms. This is not a software business that happens to own servers. It is a real estate business that happens to compute.

Real estate cycles break the same way every single time. Not when demand collapses - it rarely does - but when the rate of demand growth decelerates against the fixed supply the boom has just finished building. The second derivative again, in the one asset class where it has been studied for a century.

And the credit machine does not de-rate gently. It refinances or it seizes. The instruments that seize - take-or-pay leases, GPU-collateralized term loans, asset-backed notes - are each negatively convex. Within this machine, the financing mechanics diverge: the pure-play neoclouds borrow non-recourse debt against a specific tenant’s take-or-pay and collapse into seizure when the tenant can’t pay. The hyperscalers fund with corporate bonds and operating cash flow; for them, a tenant default means impairment and margin compression, not seizure. Oracle sits between them: corporate-funded but dangerously concentrated.

The distinction matters because the seizure and the impairment are two different wounds, inflicted by the same deceleration, and both are hiding inside the same $2.1 trillion backlog. But to price the credit quality of that book, we must look past the total headline RPO to the core structural exposure. Across the big four platforms, the RPO that Wall Street values as forward revenue is, in reality, a concentrated credit exposure to a handful of cash-burning frontier model labs and specialized AI tenants.

The hyperscaler has, in economic substance, extended a concentrated infrastructure credit facility to tenants with no independent operating income. If those tenants default, the backlog evaporates into non-cash impairments, leaving the corporate balance sheet to absorb the fixed costs of customized, rapidly depreciating capital assets.

IV. The Loan Book Nobody Calls a Loan Book

Look past the compute scarcity narrative and see these agreements for what they really are. A frontier lab signs a contract promising to pay a counterparty tens of billions of dollars, over several years, for compute it has not yet consumed. The counterparty - Oracle, CoreWeave, a hyperscaler - books that promise as backlog and borrows against it, raising debt to pour concrete and rack GPUs. Reduce the arrangement to its skeleton and it is a loan: the counterparty advances capital in kind - a building full of chips - against the borrower’s commitment to pay it back, with interest and principal amortization baked directly into the take-or-pay rate. The data center is the collateral. The lab’s contracted payments are the debt service. And the structure performs only so long as the borrower can keep funding those payments - which, for a company with no profits, means only so long as it can keep raising money.

This is precisely why the analogy is 2008, not 2000. AI capital expenditure is not a capital budget. It is a loan book. Leases in form; debt in substance. The capex is the funded principal; the contracted backlog - the remaining performance obligation, in the filings - is the lease receivable. When a hyperscaler or a neocloud reports a record capex figure, the financial press reads it as confidence, as proof of demand. Read it instead as origination volume. Each gigawatt of committed build is a loan extended to whichever tenant has signed the take-or-pay beneath it, and the credit quality of that loan is precisely the credit quality of the tenant. The market is celebrating loan growth and calling it revenue growth.

V. The Borrower With No Income

Every subprime cycle has a borrower who could only refinance, never repay. In this one, that borrower is OpenAI.

OpenAI has committed to pay for compute on a scale without precedent in corporate history: multi-year, take-or-pay capacity contracts whose aggregate obligations run to the hundreds of billions of dollars. Against them sits an operating business that does not yet earn a profit - revenue real, large, and growing quickly, but short of covering the company’s own cash burn and nowhere near covering the contracted payments.

Those payments are therefore not serviced out of earnings. They are serviced out of financing, and financing, for a borrower in this position, is available on a single condition: that each new round price above the last.

For OpenAI the up-round is not a measure of progress; it is the funding event itself -the mechanism by which the prior period’s commitments are paid and the next period’s are made signable. The markup is the cash flow.

A company funded by its own appreciation is solvent not in proportion to how high the mark stands but in proportion to how fast it is still rising - because a burn rate is an accelerating schedule, indifferent to the size of the last round. Each new phase of compute expansion demands an exponentially larger cash injection. When the step-up compresses from 1.91× down to 1.23×, the math breaks: the valuation can print a record at the precise moment the company’s capacity to fund its structural deficit is contracting. This is not a paradox; it is the arithmetic of a borrower whose liquidity is bound to the first derivative of its own price.

And that value is set by the very capital providers who need it to keep rising. OpenAI’s most recent round - reported at roughly $122 billion of fresh capital - set its valuation near $852 billion, with the same names underneath it: Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia, Amazon. These are the counterparties whose compute the proceeds will buy. The mark goes up because money came in; more money comes in because the mark went up. The appraiser, the lender, and the buyer are the same three people, passing the same dollar in a circle and marking it higher on each pass. It works gloriously - for a while - for exactly the reason the 2/28 worked: as long as the mark keeps rising, the lab can refinance.

Measured as a level, OpenAI’s valuation is the most remarkable appreciation in the history of private markets - roughly $86 billion in early 2024, then about $157 billion, $300 billion, $500 billion, and approximately $852 billion by the spring of 2026. Measured as a rate of change, the same series inverts: the round-over-round step-up ran 1.83×, 1.91×, 1.67×, 1.70×, and falls to roughly 1.23× implied by the reported public-offering target. Private marks are inherently lumpy - negotiated, episodic, set by a handful of insiders - so no single step is decisive. But the trend is unmistakable: it bends down, and it bends hardest at the one mark set by the deepest, most unforgiving pool of capital - the public market. The implied IPO step-up is both the lowest in the sequence and the hardest to negotiate, and it is the one the structure must actually clear. This arithmetic is also the most probable explanation for OpenAI’s recent IPO delay.

This deceleration is not arbitrary. It reflects the two structural headwinds directly attacking the revenue growth the marks require: token efficiency and Chinese open weights. The industry’s central optimization project - routing simple queries to cheap models and trimming ‘thinking’ tokens - has eroded the token-per-task tailwind that padded revenue. Meanwhile, Chinese open-weight models have repriced the commodity middle of inference to near-zero, capturing over 60% of OpenRouter tokens at a fraction the price. Revenue still grows - adoption is real - but the rate of growth is precisely what is under attack, and the rate is what the next mark needs to clear.

VI. The Lender’s Backlog

Move up one level, from the borrower to the lenders. The credit they’ve extended takes a specific form: remaining performance obligations - RPO - the contracted revenue a company has under signed agreement. The backlog. Wall Street loves backlog; it reads as visibility, as demand pulled forward and locked in.

On the hyperscaler balance sheets that backlog has swelled into the hundreds of billions apiece, and every quarter the growth in RPO is presented as proof that the demand is real and the buildout justified. The larger the backlog, the more secure the story: a company does not build a gigawatt on a hope, it builds it against a contract.

An RPO is not a liquid asset; it is a forward contractual commitment - a promise of future payment in exchange for future compute. And a multi-year commitment is worth exactly the creditworthiness of the entity on the other end of it. When that entity is investment-grade and cash-generative, the backlog is what it claims to be: high-quality visibility, merely deferred. When that entity is a pre-profit company that loses tens of billions a year and can pay only by continuously refinancing its own equity valuation, the backlog is something else entirely. It is a subprime commitment, used to justify massive, un-depreciated capital expenditure, reported to shareholders as structural strength.

Now price the credit quality of that book. Of roughly $2.1 trillion in aggregate contracted backlog across the four big platforms, about half - on the order of $1.05 trillion - is owed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft’s book is about 49% these two names; Oracle’s is 54%, with roughly $300 billion owed by OpenAI alone; Google’s is 43%; Amazon’s is 51%.

The hyperscaler has, in economic substance, extended a concentrated, unsecured loan to cash-burning tenants. The RPO that Wall Street values as forward revenue is, in reality, a credit exposure to borrowers with no operating income.

Here the bulls raise their strongest objection. Yes, they say, the frontier labs burn cash now - but so did Amazon, so did every great compounding business in its infrastructure-building phase. Burn is investment; the labs will grow into profitability; the borrower of today is the cash machine of tomorrow. Half right. There is no single frontier-lab borrower. There are at least two, and they are not the same credit.

Anthropic is a speculative-grade, but highly insulated, credit. Its revenue is ~80% enterprise - sticky, recurring, contracted seats - and its unit economics are firmly above water, generating $1.70 of revenue for every dollar of compute. Burn converges to a manageable ~9% of revenue by 2027 as gross margins normalize.

More importantly, Anthropic’s liabilities are protected by a classic 2008 “monoline wrap” maneuver. In the ~$35B Apollo/Blackstone TPU facility, Anthropic’s paper borrows the rating of its investment-grade backers: Google guarantees lease shortfalls, and Broadcom guarantees the residual value of the silicon on the ~$31B senior tranche. The co-signers are standing behind the bills and protecting Anthropic’s counterparties.

OpenAI is the “naked” borrower, making it the weakest and most volatile credit in the ecosystem. Its revenue mix is fragile - ~60% consumer. With burn hovering at a crushing ~57% of revenue through 2027 and cumulative cash destruction marching toward $115B by 2029, OpenAI has no path to positive cash flow this decade.

Worse, OpenAI has no real co-signer. While the market long priced in an implied Microsoft backstop, Microsoft stripped away every structural strut in April 2026 - ending the revenue share, dropping exclusivity, and surrendering its right of first refusal to supply compute. Microsoft kept its 27% equity upside but walked away from OpenAI’s bills. SoftBank, the other great OpenAI backer, is itself now trying to raise a $10B margin loan against its OpenAI stake - offering a personal guarantee after lenders balked at the collateral. Even the co-signer has no co-signer.

Microsoft’s own behavior is the signal. The most informed counterparty in the complex - the one that saw OpenAI’s books from the inside for years - has recognized the credit risk. Rather than building its own compute on fifteen-year leases that outlast the chips, it foresaw the commoditization of frontier models and committed over $60B to neocloud providers through shorter, five-year capacity agreements: renting at the peak to avoid owning through the trough. That is not a bet on OpenAI’s durability. It is a lender shortening duration on a borrower it has decided not to underwrite - the same subprime credit this section describes, priced by the party that knows it best.

The critical divergence here is counterparty risk. When an investor or lessor underwrites Anthropic, they are ultimately looking through the structure to underwrite the pristine balance sheets of Google and Broadcom. The credit risk is synthetically lifted to investment-grade. When underwriting OpenAI, there is no look-through. Counterparties are exposed to a naked, standalone start-up sitting on an underwater unit economic model. Without a parental balance sheet, OpenAI is entirely dependent on a continuous refinancing treadmill - servicing each old obligation with the proceeds of the next, larger equity raise. That is the counterparty risk hiding inside roughly half of the $2.1 trillion backlog the market has priced as bankable.

VII. The Reflexive Flip

The take-or-pay contracts are the structural foundation - the collateral that makes the borrowing possible. But they are not a passive constraint. The Nash equilibrium is what pushes the hyperscalers to sign those contracts in the first place, and to sign them at ever-larger scales. The race does not bypass the loan book; it writes the loan book. To justify the next gigawatt of spend, a hyperscaler needs the next gigawatt of backlog - so it pushes its tenants to commit further forward. The $2.1 trillion backlog is not a pre-existing limit on the arms race; it is the arms race’s own paper trail. The contracts are the collateral; the race is the demand for more collateral.

Once that collateral is signed, it must be converted into infrastructure before the cash arrives. That conversion - the act of turning a signed contract into a live data center - is what drives the capex machine. And that machine is now consuming cash faster than the backlog can validate it.

The year the cash runs out - capex converges on 100% of operating cash flow.

Aggregate capex as a share of operating cash flow ran near 30% in 2022, roughly 42% in 2023, about 50% in 2024, and approximately 60% in 2025; on consensus spending it reaches 100% in 2026. Above that line, by definition, every marginal dollar of capacity is funded not from internal cash but from the balance sheet - debt or equity. The “fortress balance sheet, self-funded” story is true only below 100%, and the consensus path crosses 100% this year. The fortress is not being defended; it is being spent.

Past 100% of cash flow, accelerating capex means borrowing more, faster, every quarter, against a rating that only has so many notches left. Hyperscaler debt issuance has to climb steeply over the coming year - the bond market becomes the marginal funder of the entire build.

Why are hyperscalers betting over 100% of operating cash flow on an uncertain return?

Because, until now, they have been paid to. Capital expenditure has gone vertical: roughly $150 billion in 2023, $226 billion in 2024, $410 billion in 2025, an estimated $725 billion in 2026, and approaching $1.1 trillion in 2027. As a level, it is the largest private capital-formation event in history. As a first derivative, the growth rates read +51%, +81%, +77%, +52%. And as a second derivative, the acceleration peaked at roughly +30 percentage points into 2025 and has turned negative: about −4 points, then about −25. The level is at records. The velocity is still high. The acceleration has already rolled over.

There is a recursion here that the headline numbers obscure. Hyperscaler capex in this cycle is not primarily a response to AI demand. To a substantial degree, it is the demand. The labs’ revenue is, in large part, hyperscaler spending recycled - cloud credits, compute commitments, equity-funded consumption. Nvidia’s revenue is hyperscaler capex. The neoclouds’ revenue is hyperscaler capex, levered.

Strip out the spending and the demand it manufactures, and the organic, capex-independent demand is a fraction of the headline figure. Which means the single most important growth rate in the system is the second derivative of hyperscaler capex - and it has already gone negative while every level chart still points to the sky.

The reflexive flip - the market reprices the payoffs and the dominant strategy inverts.

The capex arms race is a Nash equilibrium, but a conditional one: it holds only while the market rewards the next dollar of spending as a call option on growth. In that regime - the boom regime - the dominant strategy for every hyperscaler is to spend, because the alternative is to be the one player who blinked and ceded the future. Mutual escalation is stable precisely because the market applauds it. Each CFO spends because every other CFO is spending and the multiple rewards the spender.

Morgan Stanley caught the psychology exactly when it described 2027 capex estimates leaping thirty percent in a single quarter, toward $1.1 trillion, as the dynamics of an auction. An auction is the right frame, because in an auction the price is set by the most optimistic bidder and the act of bidding is itself the signal - the applause, the proof of seriousness. Keynes’s beauty contest, with chips: you are not spending on what you think the compute is worth; you are spending on what you think the market will reward you for being seen to spend.

That equilibrium is not anchored to anything physical. It is anchored to a belief - the market’s reading of what the next dollar of capex means - and beliefs reprice. The flip comes the first time a hyperscaler announces a capex cut and its multiple expands on the news rather than contracting. The instant discipline is rewarded instead of punished, every payoff on the board rewrites. Spending, formerly the dominant strategy, becomes the move that gets you punished alone; holding, formerly surrender, becomes the move that gets you re-rated. The Nash equilibrium inverts from “everyone spends” to “everyone cuts” - and because it is a coordination equilibrium, the inversion is not gradual. The first mover rewarded for cutting gives every other CFO both the cover and the incentive to follow, and discipline cascades as fast as the spending it replaces. The day the market cheers a cut is the day the arms race ends.

Goldman’s head of Delta One trading put it as plainly as it can be put:

“The first hyperscaler to signal that it can slow the pace of spending will likely see its share price rewarded (and will crush semiconductor stocks). If that happens, others will take notice. That is the reflexivity that ultimately stalls the capex cycle - not a lack of demand, but investors deciding that incremental returns on the next dollar of spend are no longer attractive.”

The cruelty of the flip is what it does to the contracts. In the boom regime, a signed take-or-pay commitment is an asset to everyone who touches it: forward demand for the hyperscaler, bankable backlog for the neocloud, collateral for the lender. In the repriced regime, the identical contract is a liability for all of them simultaneously.

The lab cannot fund the payments it locked in; the hyperscaler holds a receivable from a visibly distressed counterparty; the neocloud is left servicing debt against data centers it financed on a contract now worth less than the debt. This is negative convexity wired directly into the demand side: the same instrument is an asset on the way up and a liability on the way down, and the transition between the two states is a repricing of belief, not a change in the underlying hardware. Nothing physical has to break. The market only has to change its mind.

It lands hardest on the frontier labs, who can carry these contracts only by raising more capital - and the flip closes that window. What follows is not a clean default but a negotiation - volumes cut, schedules stretched, contracts restructured. The contracts do not vanish; they reprice - beginning with the borrower who needs the next round most.

VIII. Who Blinks First

Every reflexive cascade needs a first mover. So which hyperscaler cuts first? Who blinks?

The instinct is to say the weakest balance sheet, and the instinct is wrong. The first to cut will be the one with the best information, the credibility to reframe the cut as strength, and the balance-sheet room to be rewarded rather than punished for it.

Zuckerberg holds dual-class control. He has run this exact playbook before and was rewarded with a tripling of the stock; and of all the hyperscalers Meta has the weakest direct monetization of its AI capex - no public cloud to sell the capacity into - which makes its spend the hardest to defend and the easiest to cut. The only reason it has not cut yet is the Nash equilibrium - Zuckerberg is waiting for the market to tell him it is safe to stop spending.

The others array predictably. Google will not blink - it builds TPUs at a structural cost advantage and reports a cloud backlog north of $460 billion, so it benefits if rivals retrench. Oracle cannot blink: at roughly 86% of sales going to capex, with a balance sheet stretched around Stargate, its stress will surface as a credit event. Amazon may have its hand forced from the other direction - free cash flow already turning negative under the build. Negative free cash flow is the kind of thing capital markets eventually vote on, whether management calls the election or not.

The numbers tell the same story. Morgan Stanley pegs hyperscaler investment-grade leverage at roughly 1.8 turns of gross debt - double what it was a year ago and now higher than the entire energy sector. That figure does not count the hundred-billion-plus parked off the balance sheet in the vehicles. What stands in its place is a leveraged, hard-asset, refinance-dependent balance sheet - and the marginal gigawatt, the thing cut first, is the most discretionary line on it.

IX. The Blast Radius

Let’s say OpenAI is subprime, the regime shifts, belief reprices, the capital window slams shut, and a hyperscaler cuts that marginal gigawatt to protect its own leverage. Who is exposed?

OpenAI is the single largest customer - by direct contract or one counterparty removed - of very nearly every name that sells into the AI build. Oracle’s contracted backlog is more than half OpenAI; CoreWeave’s book - once its Microsoft-routed capacity is traced through to the underlying tenant - runs to roughly two-thirds OpenAI; SoftBank’s commitments, through Stargate, are almost entirely OpenAI.

This is precisely the structure that made 2008’s senior tranches lethal: thousands of individual mortgages, geographically dispersed, statistically independent - until the one macro variable they all depended on, national home prices, turned, and the correlation the models had assumed away revealed itself to be one. Here the single variable is not home prices. It is whether OpenAI can clear its next mark. That is why chip stocks fell when OpenAI signaled it may delay its IPO from 2026 to 2027.

A correlation of one is invisible until it is tested. Then it is a transmission line. When the borrower at the center cannot clear its next mark, the loss does not stay put - it runs the length of the chain, into every counterparty that booked its commitment as demand. The naked borrower is not merely the weakest credit in the complex. It is the credit the complex is wired to.

Each major supplier’s AI book, by share ultimately tied to OpenAI. No counterparty is all-OpenAI - but OpenAI underlies a piece of every one, directly or through look-through exposure routed via another party.

That correlated exposure is now being securitized. In May 2026, CoreWeave closed its DDTL 5.0 facility - $3.1 billion, issued through a bankruptcy-remote financing subsidiary. CoreWeave disclosed that the underlying capacity serves two large, non-investment-grade customers: OpenAI and Cohere. But the distinction that matters is structural: DDTL 5.0 was the first publicly syndicated GPU-backed facility, built to trade in the secondary market. The paper has left the originator’s balance sheet and entered the broad credit complex - the distribution step, the moment originate-to-distribute stops being a metaphor.

The DDTL isn’t serviced by OpenAI’s earnings; it’s serviced by OpenAI’s ability to keep raising, which is underwritten by the AI capex narrative continuing to compound.

X. The Refinance of Last Resort

Trace the refinancing chain to its end and you arrive at the public market. Private capital is deep but finite: SoftBank, the sovereign funds, the hyperscalers, the megafunds - each can absorb a round or two, but the labs’ burn is measured in tens of billions a year and compounding, and at some point the only pool of capital large enough to keep refinancing it is the one the index funds and the retail bid sit in.

The IPO is not an exit in this structure. It is the refinancing of last resort - the final, deepest teaser into which the whole edifice expects to roll once the private rounds can no longer carry the burn. Which is why news of OpenAI’s delayed IPO matters far more than the market initially understood.

The terminal refinance carries a trap the private rounds did not. To reach the public pool the borrower must file an S-1 - and the S-1 discloses exactly the fragility that made the refinance necessary: audited losses, customer concentration, the full $600 billion-plus of take-or-pay obligations laid out for any reader. The document that unlocks the capital is the same document that prices the risk.

OpenAI needs the market’s money and cannot fully afford the market’s scrutiny - the bind of a company whose story is better than its statements.

Now do the arithmetic the delay is hiding. The step-up from roughly $852 billion to the reported >$1 trillion target is the next hurdle - barely 1.23×, the lowest step-up in the entire sequence, and far below the 1.7×–1.9× multiples that funded the prior burns. It must do two incompatible things at once: clear at a level the public market will actually pay, and raise enough to retire a cumulative burn approaching $115 billion. The implied step-up cannot do both: the price that clears the market does not retire the burn, and the price that retires the burn does not clear the market. The refinance of last resort is failing quietly - pricing below the mark the structure requires, and waiting.

XI. How It Breaks

The trigger is narrow and specific: the next mark fails to clear at the required step-up - not a collapse, merely a deceleration below the threshold the structure needs. This is the 2006 dynamic replayed: the velocity rolled over while the level was still climbing.

From there the sequence runs in order:

(1) The terminal refinance prices below the required mark - the step from about $852 billion to more than $1 trillion does not clear, or clears at a level that cannot retire the burn; the delay is the signal. 

(2) The borrower pulls back on compute commitments to conserve cash - and a pull-back on a take-or-pay obligation is a covenant breach against the provider whose debt is collateralized by that commitment. 

(3) The breach lands first and hardest on the neoclouds - CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe - whose entire business is the spread between borrowed money and resold compute. A neocloud is not a business so much as a spread trade with no balance sheet to warehouse the risk: when the spread inverts, it is insolvent by definition, not by choice. Oracle, corporate-funded but dangerously concentrated, takes the next blow - its impairment deeper than the hyperscalers’, but it does not seize; it bleeds. A hyperscaler can fund a missed payment out of Search, or Windows, or Retail; the neocloud has no second cash flow. 

(4) Credit freezes across the complex: RPO reprices from forward demand to counterparty risk, GPU-backed notes cannot roll, the originate-to-distribute machine seizes. 

(5) Equity decimates - negative convexity in reverse, capex repriced from option to cost, multiples compressing across every name in the chain. 

(6) The strong survive: the best-capitalized actors with the least exposure buy stranded data centers for pennies and backstops the leases that must endure.

A necessary concession: I do not know when. The trigger could be quarters away or further; the borrowed-time window between the second derivative rolling over and the first derivative crossing zero can stretch further than any short-seller’s patience. There are three stretches that can extend it: a larger-than-expected private round, a sovereign or strategic backstop that postpones the terminal refinance (like an Intel-style federal equity stake), and the hyperscalers’ continued ability to lever up - borrowing against the very backlog this article has described.

The last of these is the most powerful near-term stabilizer, because the hyperscalers have real balance sheets, real cash flows, and real access to debt markets. But it is not infinite. Investment-grade leverage across the group has already doubled in a year and the rating agencies have only so many notches left. The sequence above is not a calendar; it is a mechanism, conditioned on a single variable - whether growth decelerates below the rate the refinance requires. But with OpenAI’s IPO already delayed, the clock is ticking.

XII. The Strongest Case Against This

Grant the bulls their strongest case: demand is real, backlogs are exploding, inference is in its infancy, and the risk of underbuilding a generational platform is acute. Supply is locked years out, and even skeptics see paths to $1.4 trillion in annual capex. I take this case seriously - but it does not save the structure.

Every bull claim is about the level or the first derivative: backlogs, inference ramping, supply growth. Not one speaks to the second derivative. I do not need demand to fail. I need the rate of capex growth to flatten - and a structure this levered and dependent on perpetual acceleration breaks on the flattening alone. Grant every level argument. Housing demand was real in 2006 - and the financing detonated on deceleration, not the level.

There are three bull cases to address.

• First, the fortress balance sheet. Hyperscalers generate enormous cash flow; a tenant impairment is absorbable. This misses the wound. The impairment is accounting; margin collapse is structural. AI capacity carries a massive fixed-cost base - depreciation, power, interest - that does not flex when a tenant defaults. Utilization drops, but opex does not. Revenue falls, yet costs remain anchored to the peak build. The same operating leverage that supercharged profits now destroys margins on the way down.

• Second, the cross-subsidization defense. If AI margins crater, Search and Windows cash flows carry the division. The rebuttal is the conglomerate discount. Investors buy hyperscalers for growth, not to subsidize perpetual losses. If AI consumes tens of billions without profitability, consolidated ROIC declines. A high-ROIC growth compounder that becomes a low-ROIC capital-intensive operator loses its growth premium and trades down to a utility multiple. Worse, legacy cash cows are not infinite engines. Search faces structural erosion; Retail operates on thin margins; Windows is mature. Using shrinking profits from declining units to fill vacancies is not patient capital - it is value destruction. The conglomerate trades as a utility with a venture capital problem, commanding a lower multiple.

• Third, the physical rebuttal: if OpenAI defaults, the provider re-leases the capacity. This is the “housing never loses value” argument of 2006. An OpenAI default will not occur in isolation - it will coincide with a broader deceleration, meaning hyperscalers bring gigawatts online into a softening environment. You do not re-lease into a glut; you compete on price, and the clearing price falls below the debt-service coverage ratio. The replacement tenant, facing the same decelerating demand, will demand a 30–50% discount and a shorter commitment, turning a long-duration, high-yield asset into a distressed instrument. Re-leasing merely transforms a clean default into a prolonged vacancy crisis - the same mechanism that turned 2007’s subprime “re-performance” hopes into a five-year grind.

The bulls and I do not disagree about AI. We disagree about which derivative the structure is written on. They are watching the level. I am watching its acceleration. That is not a difference about technology. It is a difference about arithmetic - and arithmetic, eventually, does not take opinions.

XIII. The Number Nobody Watches

Three errors, stacked, recreate 2008. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its financing is the machinery of a credit-and-real-estate cycle. It is watching the level and the velocity while the structure breaks on the acceleration. And it is treating a concentrated, single-borrower loan book as though it were diversified forward demand. Each error alone might be survivable. Together they reconstruct, feature for feature, the conditions of the last great credit event - the same negatively convex structures, the same originate-to-distribute plumbing, the same correlation-of-one hiding inside the appearance of diversification, the same blindness to the one derivative that matters.

The law from the opening sections holds, unchanged: any structure whose serviceability depends on refinancing into growth does not need a decline. It needs only a deceleration. That deceleration is already happening.

The market remembers 2008 backwards. The defaults didn’t come when prices fell. They came when prices stopped rising faster - and this build-out is engineered, with exquisite precision, to break on the one number nobody watches.

The Second Derivative...

*  *  *

And, as we noted yesterday the credit market is reading the tea-leaves of plunging Token Costs...

...while the equity market remains blinkered by the propaganda.

Can 'Collateralized Compute Obligations' (CCOs) keep the (second derivative alive) game going for a little longer (like CDOs in 2006-2009) or will investors baulk?

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:30

Influential Wife Of Anthropic CEO Pitched Post-Conviction Epstein On 'Luxury Porn' Company, And Claude Has No Idea

Anthropic has filed confidentially for what could be the largest public offering in history. Yet, one of the most influential voices shaping its chief executive holds no official position at the company, appears in no regulatory filings, and has been quietly scrubbed from the internet. She also pitched a porn company to Jeffrey Epstein - less than two years after he got out of prison for sex trafficking minors.

Her name is Cami Clark, wife of CEO Dario Amodei. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday, she has spent five years operating as a strategic adviser to the head of a company now seeking public capital at a valuation north of $2 trillion - all without a title, a salary, or formal disclosure.

Cami Clark and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at a summit in New Delhi in February. Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

Her marriage to Amodei has been scrubbed from Claude too... Ask Anthropic's own chatbot about Amodei's marital status, and Claude replies that it "doesn't seem to be clearly confirmed."

Someone actively worked to keep it that way. Amodei's Wikipedia page did not mention his marriage until this summer, and it still omits his wife's name. Google searches for his wife instead return photographs of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who co-runs the company. Citing its own analysis and a person familiar with the matter, the Journal reports that targeted efforts have been made to erase references to Clark online.

In 1999, at the age of 20, she married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, who had designed buildings including the city’s Atlantis Casino Resort. They divorced three years later. On a now-defunct personal website, Clark said she dropped out of architecture school in 1999. 

...

Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, which described itself as a “revolutionary porn company.” Named for Eddice Munson, Clark’s maternal grandmother, it aimed to emphasize sex positivity in a male-oriented porn industry, and carried the tagline: “intellectually promiscuous.”  -WSJ

And she would pitch that company to Epstein... 

The emails

What was scrubbed from the web is now partly a matter of federal record. Clark appears in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department.

On March 3, 2011, literary agent John Brockman - the man who spent years introducing Jeffrey Epstein to scientists and Silicon Valley executives - emailed Epstein from a Wired party where he was the guest of honor.

"You should connect for dinner with my girls - Cami and Michele - who I met last month in Munich," Brockman wrote. "They're in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women's market." He included a link to their site, eddice.com.

Clark replied to Epstein directly that night, copying her business partner, Michelle Capocefalo.

"Hello Jeffrey! We would love to have dinner with you this evening. Does that work for you?" She included her cell number.

A year later, she circled back. Epstein didn't remember her.

"Cami Clark, John Brockman introduced us last year at Ted," she wrote on March 8, 2012. "We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?"

"yes,, a loud gong," Epstein replied.

"Hahaha I was going to say, you would be the first person ever that didn't remember us," Clark answered.

Epstein wrote back that he was "in the caribeanc until april. as you recall i live here" - a reference to Little St. James - "but am willing to look at whatever you think viable."

"Hahaha I was going to say, you would be the first person ever that didn't remember us :)" https://t.co/fvCv0oPiwt pic.twitter.com/mEeiMsKyAJ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 14, 2026

She pitched him on investing. Per the Journal, he declined: "Can't do sex TV." Clark then pivoted to a second venture, a social dieting app for women. The correspondence ran for roughly two years, during which she invited him to a Manhattan housewarming party and connected with him on LinkedIn.

Jeffrey Epstein was released from custody in July 2009 after pleading guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution. Brockman's introduction came in March 2011 - twenty months later.

Epstein was a registered sex offender at the time, and his conviction was highly public. The Journal explicitly notes his status in its account of the exchange.

Her blog "Eddice" was taken down long ago. But on the internet everything lasts forever...https://t.co/jREzpDWmwv https://t.co/acpnwcVngF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 14, 2026 Sounding Board

Clark does not work at Anthropic, officially. According to people close to the company who spoke to the Journal, she functions as a sounding board and strategic adviser to Amodei. She sits in the front row at his public appearances and networks with investors at Davos and the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. When Narendra Modi convened AI executives in New Delhi this year and restricted each to a single guest, Amodei brought his wife.

She also brought Anthropic one of its earliest and most consequential investors. Clark dated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt from 2011 to 2014, before she met Amodei. She introduced the two men, and Schmidt - by then investing in startups - participated in Anthropic's $124 million Series A in May 2021.

She later tried to convert that relationship into a formal position.

Michelle Capocefalo and Clark at a gallery event in New York in 2010. RYAN MCCUNE/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

In February 2021, Clark pitched Schmidt on an investment vehicle called the Mother of AGI Fund. Per a 40-page proposal reviewed by the Journal, its stated purpose was to be "an elegant solution to formalize Cami's involvement in Anthropic (Dario's company), manage Eric's investment," and invest across the broader AGI ecosystem. Daniela Amodei and other co-founders opposed it, and the proposal went nowhere. Clark and Amodei married the following year.

More recently, Clark has been carrying the company's political water - telling political insiders that Anthropic's mission is to protect America and that the company is not as "woke" as critics claim. This pivot follows the Trump administration designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk after Amodei refused to lift restrictions on the Pentagon's use of Claude - a designation the company is currently challenging in court. At Sun Valley in July, she lunched with Ivanka Trump and spoke with Jared Kushner, whom Amodei had previously approached about investing.

What about the S-1?

While none of the above is illegal, Anthropic is no longer a private startup answerable only to a handful of venture funds willing to stomach idiosyncratic risk. It filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1 and is reportedly targeting an October listing. Investors told the Financial Times the valuation could exceed $2 trillion, which would make it the largest public offering ever conducted.

Registration statements require the disclosure of related-party arrangements and material influences on management. An unpaid, untitled adviser who introduced a lead investor, proposed a fund to formalize her stake, and carries corporate political messaging is precisely the kind of dynamic institutional buyers expect to see disclosed before they price a book.

So is the fact that someone - particularly someone who actively sought Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in a porn business after he was convicted for sex trafficking minors - has been made difficult to find. Anthropic's entire commercial premise relies on being trusted with a technology it readily admits is dangerous. That pitch justifies an enormous premium to enterprise customers and, soon, to public shareholders. It rests entirely on the proposition that the company is more careful, more transparent, and more institutionally sound than its competitors.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:30

America Enters FAFO-Land: Election Sabotage & Blue-State Mutiny As Communist Jihad Escalates

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Things Get Spicy

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

- Aimee Terese on “X”

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

The Jihad for Lunch Bunch Sends Greetings to Infidel America

There’s a sort of last-gasp feeling about all this. Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman el Sayed put it nicely the other day when he said of his opponents, “When they go low, we go lower.” True dat.

And you can see where things go from here: election clean-up comes on no matter what, SAVE Act or not, probably via a comprehensive PDJT National Security Executive Order yet to be declared. There’s already a fair chance that SCOTUS will clear the way for the US Postal Service to regulate “uniform standards” for the distribution of mail-in ballots (from a March, 2026 previous exec order #15399 — “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Cue the communist jihadis to stage street-actions (a.k.a. “riots”) this fall in their captive cities and states. Since they can’t win elections without massive fraud, they will opt to do whatever is necessary to make the election impossible, and chaos is their go-to tactic in this contest of wills. The catch is, the communist jihadis are still a very small demographic.

The president is not going to allow a replay of the savage and ridiculous 2020 BLM riots. This time around, they get briskly squashed.

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

The scene begins to look like a civil war or a state of siege, constraining the president to use the military to enforce civil order where the civil authorities have failed, demurred, or revolted.

It would be extraordinary and nauseating, but arguably necessary to purge the extreme political illness that holds the nation in thrall. This disease has been allowed to worsen and rage for ten years. We are good and goddam sick of it.

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:20