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Elon Musk Offers To Fund Lawsuit Against UK Police In Henry Nowak Stabbing Tragedy

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Elon Musk has stepped forward to hold UK police accountable in what appears to be one of the most disturbing policing failures to emerge from Britain in years.

The tech mogul publicly offered to bankroll a wrongful death lawsuit against officers who allegedly prioritized an attacker's claims of "racism" over saving the life of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.

Musk's intervention comes as harrowing bodycam footage from the scene plays out in Southampton Crown Court during the ongoing murder trial of Vickrum Singh Digwa, the 23-year-old man of Indian Sikh heritage accused of stabbing Nowak four times with a 21cm blade.

This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer! https://t.co/SwnHHYec1d

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

He followed up with another pointed question: "Has any action been taken against the police officers who handcuffed this boy and made him bleed to death in the street? Who are they?"

Has any action been taken against the police officers who handcuffed this boy and made him bleed to death in the street?

Who are they?

https://t.co/EkfCZcFNYD

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

In a further post, Musk declared: "Unconscionable. I am happy to fund a wrongful death lawsuit against these disgusting excuses for law enforcement. They damn well better have been fired."

Unconscionable.

I am happy to fund a wrongful death lawsuit against these disgusting excuses for law enforcement. They damn well better have been fired.

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

Nowak, a first-year accountancy and finance student at the University of Southampton from Essex, was walking home from a night out with university football teammates when he was attacked. Prosecutors say Digwa stabbed him four times after Nowak tried to escape.

When police arrived, bodycam footage captured Nowak leaning against a wall, supported by Digwa's father. The father told officers: "He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up."

Nowak repeatedly said "Can't breathe" and told them he had been stabbed. Instead of rushing medical aid, officers handcuffed the bleeding teenager while arresting him for suspected assault - based on claims from Digwa's family that Nowak had racially abused them. One officer responded to his desperate pleas about being stabbed with: "I don't think you have, mate."

Henry then passed out and died, drowned in his own blood.

Digwa's brother told the emergency call handler: "We just got attacked racially by some white person... Physically attacked my brother, we're Sikhs, we wear turbans, and he attacked my brother."

Videos shown to jurors captured Digwa and his brother accusing Nowak of a racial attack. Nowak denied it. Digwa was heard saying: "No one stabbed you bro, you're up. You're drunk." Digwa's father added: "He's pretending, a minute ago he was talking to you guys. Now he's trying to get up and going to leave."

Incredible how they're going with the defence of 'he said some mean words' (no evidence of any racial slurs anyway) as if this somehow justifies stabbing him four times then lying about it. https://t.co/KHOrS8R2cW

- Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 18, 2026

Digwa openly carried the large 21cm shastar - a ceremonial Sikh blade - in public, along with the smaller religiously mandated kirpan. Prosecutors noted questions over why the larger weapon was present.

Digwa denies murder. His mother, Kiran Kaur, faces charges of assisting an offender by allegedly removing the knife from the scene.

Musk's offer has ignited fury over what critics call two-tier policing - where accusations of racism against a native Brit appear to override clear medical emergencies. No officers have been named or disciplined publicly. As of today, no action has been confirmed against those involved.

This case has drawn parallels to failures where authorities appear more concerned with perceived slights than protecting life. Nowak was a young British student simply walking home. Digwa's legal team argues self-defence in the "heat of the moment" following the alleged verbal exchange.

Yet the bodycam evidence, now public through court proceedings, paints a picture of a dying teen ignored while his attacker's narrative took precedence.

Musk's willingness to fund a civil suit underscores a growing frustration with institutional inaction. The trial continues at Southampton Crown Court. Digwa denies the charges.

Henry Nowak's death should force a reckoning. When police treat a stabbed British teen as the aggressor based on unverified claims from the attacker's family - while he bleeds out saying he can't breathe - something has gone fundamentally wrong with priorities in law enforcement.

Religious exemptions allowing large blades in public, combined with a policing culture that appears to elevate certain accusations above immediate life-saving duties, leave ordinary citizens vulnerable.

Musk's intervention shines a light where so-called mainstream coverage has lagged. Justice for Henry Nowak demands more than a trial verdict - it requires naming those officers, holding them accountable, and ending the failures that let a young man die in the street while pleading for help.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 05:00

Shipping Turmoil Remains Largely Contained To Gulf, For Now

The world's most critical maritime energy chokepoint has now been closed for 12 weeks, leaving seaborne energy supply chains heavily disrupted. Still, one UBS analyst points out that the shock has yet to meaningfully spill over into broader global shipping outside the Gulf area, suggesting the disruption remains largely contained for now.

"It looks like non-energy related global shipping traffic is running just 4% below normal in May - a bit better than April," UBS analyst Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning titled "The State Of Global Shipping Disruption."

Kapteyn continued:

Limited signs of spillovers to non-energy shipping (so far)

In our April 30 note, we showed how global oil/gas shipping traffic had fallen by 13% from pre-Middle East conflict levels—closely matching the disruption through the Strait of Hormuz—and how the various regions were trying to reroute ships to find alternative energy supplies. Today's chart examines whether that energy shock is spilling over into broader shipping activity. A key question is whether fuel shortages are beginning to weigh on overall trade flows, providing an additional transmission channel to global supply chains. PMI delivery times have already lengthened by around 1¾ standard deviations, but it remains unclear how much reflects product shortages versus shipping constraints.

The chart shows our "momentum" measure of global shipping traffic—defined as tonnes of cargo multiplied by nautical miles traveled per day. We've aggregated the daily data at a monthly frequency (May is the average of the daily data month-to-date), and standardize using z-score over the full sample. Oil and gas shipping has continued to deteriorate, now around 4 standard deviations below normal. By contrast, non-energy shipping weakened through April (-2 standard deviations) but has partially recovered in May (now around -0.7 standard deviations). In level terms, non-energy related shipping/cargo traffic fell 5% in March (vs the prior 12m average) and 13% in April but is now back to just 4% below normal. In Asia—where energy shortages appear most acute—non-energy volumes were 10% below normal in April but are now running slightly above normal. In the Gulf, however, non-energy shipping remains severely disrupted (around 83% below normal), reflecting the broader impact of the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck on both energy and non-energy flows.

Meanwhile, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc recently warned on CNBC that a "new wake-up call" for global trade nears if the Hormuz chokepoint remains shuttered through June.

Then there was a note from UBS analyst Pierre Lafourcade last week that said, "Supply chain stress is rising at its fastest pace since the early pandemic."

The full note can be read by Professional subscribers here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Signs that energy-flow disruptions are spreading into the broader shipping complex remain limited for now, with the stress still largely contained to the Gulf region.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 04:15

No Deal Reached, Amid 'Fabricated' Mideast Media Reports; Trump Presses Nuclear Issue & Iran President Says 'Won't Back Down' Summary

• Al Arabiya issues dramatic retraction on prior 'deal reached' reporting.
• Iranian president vows to not back down, as Trump still vows to get nuclear material.
• AI Arabiya TV obtains what it describes as final draft of US-lran agreement, 
• Reuters reported that Ayatollah ordered that stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% remain strictly inside Iranian territory. Some Iranian officials then denied report to Al Jazeera.
• WH says make a deal or else... "they can face a punishment from our military the likes of which has not been seen in modern history."
• US Intelligence says Iran has reconstitute drone program, defense industrial base, "faster than expected" (CNN).

//--> //--> //--> Will the Iran ceasefire continue through June 15?
Yes 51% · No 50%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

*  *  *

No Deal Reached: Prior Reports 'Fabricated'

After something like eight hours - which unleashed significant moves in oil and markets - complete retractions are being issued, with words like 'fabrication' used, after which oil swings higher...

Iranian President: Won't Back Down

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has stated, "We will not bow our heads, our ministers and experts are working day and night, without a single day off." He added, per state sources: "We are willing to sacrifice as much as possible for the honor and pride of Iran, and we are not afraid of martyrdom."

And just like that...

Markets reversed earlier gains as Iran's President said on state TV that they won't back down in talks. The momentum then picked up when a "high-level source" told Al-Arabiya that the Pakistani Army Chief will not head to Tehran tonight.

The Pakistani were supposed to head to Iran only when the reach of an agreement was in sight, so this kind of denies the earlier reports of a US and Iran draft agreement.

US stock indices erased more than half of earlier gains. We've seen the same reaction in oil, FX and bond markets but now they are consolidating.

Still, Al Jazeera is reporting that "negotiators are very close to reaching a deal, and are currently working on a draft text. At the same time, another source told Al Jazeera that it is too early to judge whether a serious, final agreement is within reach."

IRNA has cited a Pakistani official who says the talks are "moving in the right direct" - though it's anyone's guess at this point. The prior reported draft did not take up the nuclear issue. Trump continues to press the nuclear issue:

US President Donald Trump has again pledged to seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium as part of any agreement over Tehran’s nuclear program.

“Look, we’re going to make sure they don’t have a nuclear weapon or we’re going to have to do something very drastic. I believe when it’s put to the people of our country, they will all agree we cannot let Iran get a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Asked whether Iran could retain its enriched uranium, Trump replied: “No, we will get it. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, we’ll probably destroy it after we get it. But we’re not going to let them have it.”

Oil Plunges on Final Draft of US-Iran Agreement Reached

Is this the one? While we've seen this rodeo before, oil is plunging on a Saudi media report which is positive for peace. Crude hits low of day...

Traders Circulate AI Arabiya TV obtaining what it describes as final draft of US-lran agreement: (CLICK TO SEE KEY PROVISIONS) - UNCONFIRMED

Key provisions include:

1) An immediate, comprehensive, and unconditional ceasefire on all fronts (land, sea, air)

2) Mutual commitment not to target military, civilian, or economic infrastructure

3) Cessation of military operations and instigating media warfare

4) Respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in internal affairs

5) Guaranteed freedom of navigation in the Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Sea of Oman

6) Establishment of a joint monitoring and dispute resolution mechanism

7) Launch of negotiations on outstanding issues within seven days

8) Gradual lifting of U.S. sanctions in exchange for Iran's adherence to the terms

9) Affirmation of compliance with international law and the UN Charter

Importantly, there's no mention of the nuclear issue.

"The agreement is stated to enter into force immediately upon formal announcement by both parties," the Al Arabiya report says.

Saudi’s @AlArabiya TV has obtained what it describes as the final draft of a prospective Pakistani mediated U.S.-Iran agreement, reportedly set to be announced within hours [It does not align with what I am hearing].

Key provisions include:
1) An immediate, comprehensive, and… https://t.co/qxpEDSX04a pic.twitter.com/M0D1hMCD8b

— Basha باشا (@BashaReport) May 21, 2026 Drones, Military Industrial Base Being Rapidly Restored Amid Extended Ceasefire

The Iranians have reportedly rebuilt damaged and destroyed defense industrial sites much faster than expected. That's according to US intelligence assessments cited in CNN, and based on anonymous officials. The Pakistan-mediated talks have been stalled, and each of the last several weeks has seen Washington issue updated peace conditions, only for Tehran to in return counter-issue its own demands. And round and round the indirect negotiation has gone, yet with no breakthrough, or not so much as a step forward.

But perhaps this was all a tactic to simply prolong the ceasefire? It allowed for Iran to rearm and regroup, after the prior 38-days of US-Israeli bombing. "Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments," CNN reports Thursday. "Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated."

One US official cited in the report has gone so far as to say "The Iranians have exceeded all timelines the IC had for reconstitution." In the recent past, White House officials themselves have admitted that the Islamic Republic is probably reconstituting. Trump in the meantime keeps saying he's 'days' away from reordering strikes amid Tehran's intransigence. According to more on Iranian efforts to prepare for the next potential round of fighting:

The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term.

While the time to restart production of different weapons components varies, some US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months, one of the sources, a US official, told CNN.

They already tried that. It did not work. https://t.co/1OEZ50d5st

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) May 21, 2026 Iranian Denials

Throughout the morning, and since the Reuters report was first issued, various unnamed Iranian officials are saying the Ayatollah gave no such order regarding taking enriched uranium removal off the table when it comes to potential negotiations. According to an Al Jazeera correspondent: 

A senior Iranian official denied to me reports that Supreme Leader Mujtaba Khamenei has issued a new order requiring enriched uranium to remain inside Iran, saying they are “propaganda by the enemies of the deal” The official added there are “no new order has been issued,” and that Tehran’s position has been consistent: Iran would downblend the material itself. “That is the subject of talks in the next stage,” the official said.

This will likely only fuel speculation of deep division within Iranian leadership ranks. Traditionally the IRGC reports directly to the Ayatollah, and is seen as the more hardline faction, ready to resist compromise and opt for a military response to US pressure.

Oil snaps lower on the denials... per Newsquawk:

In an immediate reaction, crude fell to the detriment of the USD and the benefit of equity and fixed benchmarks. Specifically:

• WTI Jul'26 fell from USD 102/bbl to USD 100.56/bbl.
• UST Jun'26 lifted from 109-00 to 109-04+.
• ES Jun'26 lifted from 7418 to 7433.

Ayatollah Orders Enriched Uranium To Say On Iranian Soil: RTRS

The illusion of a grand diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East is once again colliding with reality. The White House has been busy trying to paint a picture of a total capitulation by Tehran, which hasn't been demonstrated given its consistent position defying Washington's demands on the nuclear issue.

According to two senior Iranian officials speaking to Reuters, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has drawn a hard line in the sand, ordering that Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% remain strictly inside Iranian territory.

Office of the Supreme Leader, via Reuters

Reuters underscores that "Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei's order could further frustrate U.S. President Donald Trump and complicate talks on ending the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran."

"Israeli officials have told Reuters that ‌Trump has assured Israel that Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, needed to make an atomic weapon, will be sent out of Iran and that any peace deal must include a clause on this," the report continues.

The officials noted that within Tehran, there is deep suspicion that the ceasefire is in fact "a tactical deception by the US," designed to lull Iran into a "false sense of security... before the fighting resumes."

The fresh directive from from the supreme leader flies directly in the face of the narrative being spun by Washington and Tel Aviv, given Israeli officials maintain that President Trump explicitly promised Israel that Iran's highly enriched stockpile would be completely removed from the country as part of any negotiated settlement.

Trump has also recently proclaimed this publicly, for example in a phone interview with CBS News last month, wherein he confidently proclaimed that Iran "agreed to everything" and would cooperate fully to ship its enriched uranium out of the country.

Extraction of nuclear material would of course rely heavily on the assumption of total Iranian compliance, given Trump has also lately appeared to rule out out a hostile invasion force, stating, "No. No troops."

There seems to be widespread agreement among national security officials at this point that some kind of special forces op to covertly go in and take it would be tantamount to a 'suicide mission'.

According to more of what Trump (prematurely) proclaimed in the prior CBS interview: "Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we'll take it to the United States."

The reality is all along the two sides' positions have been very far apart, and largely unbending:

And on a potential deal: "We'll be getting it together because by that time, we'll have an agreement and there's no need for fighting when there's an agreement. Nice right? That's better. We would have done it the other way if we had to" - he sought to explain.

At the moment, Iranian officials are reportedly reviewing the latest updated US proposals for peace, having reportedly asked Pakistan for time to assess and study the American points for negotiations."

However, Khamenei locking down the 60% enriched uranium inside Iranian borders, and amid suspicion that the US ceasefire offer is but a Trojan horse to get the Islamic Republic to simply given up its potential last line of defense, doesn't bode well for the chances of a breakthrough anytime soon.

//--> //--> //--> Iran agrees to surrender enriched uranium stockpile by June 30, 2026?
Yes 18% · No 83%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

For the latest warning from the White House, via Stephen Miller: "Iran has a choice to make: they can either agree to a piece of paper that is satisfactory to the United States, or they can face a punishment from our military the likes of which has not been seen in modern history. That's the choice they face" - he told Fox News.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 04:15

Authoritarianism Doesn't Arrive With A Coup... It Arrives With A Login

Authored by Sam Lowry via dailysceptic.org,

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive with a coup. It arrives with a login, a compliance form, a penalty notice for keeping records in the wrong format. It comes with a quietly extended electoral term, a cancelled bank account, a prison sentence for a social media post. Each measure has a reasonable-sounding justification. The problem is the direction — and how far it has already travelled.

Power is migrating from the visible arena of democratic politics to the less visible world of systems — compliance regimes, regulators with elastic mandates and an expanding mesh of rules governing more of daily life than most people have yet registered. No single measure looks like tyranny. The problem is the cumulative direction and the speed at which it is moving.

None of what follows was in any manifesto. All of it is happening.

Regulating what you may own, burn and keep

Consider what it now means to own a home in Britain. From 2030, landlords will be prohibited from letting properties that fail to meet the government’s Energy Performance Certificate band C standard, with fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance. These are not derelict or dangerous buildings. They are perfectly habitable properties rendered unlettable not by any structural failure but by the Government moving the regulatory goalposts around them. The Government is consulting on extending the same requirements to owner-occupied homes by 2035, at which point the state would decide whether you may sell or mortgage your own home without first spending thousands on ‘improvements’ it has specified.

The reach does not stop at the front door. In Smoke Control Areas covering much of urban England, a council officer can issue you a £1,000 fine for burning the wrong fuel in your own fireplace. Since October 2024, keeping a single backyard chicken requires formal registration with the Animal and Plant Health Agency — home address, species, numbers, declared purpose — on pain of a £2,500 fine. The state now maintains a database of hen keepers and their motivations. The Government does not confiscate your property. It makes non-compliance progressively unaffordable until the choice becomes theoretical.

Regulating what you may drive, eat, drink and smoke

The same logic has been applied with equal enthusiasm to how you move and what you consume. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate requires 80% of new car sales to be electric by 2030, transferring the cost of Net Zero directly onto buyers.

For those who cannot yet afford an electric vehicle, Ulez zones, congestion charges and Vehicle Excise Duty rates designed to penalise older vehicles have quietly converted a private choice into a regulated privilege — with the bill adjusted according to how closely your car aligns with current Government policy.

Food and drink have followed. The sugar levy compelled manufacturers to reformulate products using artificial sweeteners — aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K — whose population-wide, long-term effects remain a matter of active scientific debate, the Government compelling the switch without accepting any liability for unintended consequences.

Calorie counts are now mandatory on menus, multi-buy promotions on unhealthy foods are restricted, alcohol duty has been reformed and the tobacco generation ban makes it illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone born after 2009. Each measure has a plausible justification in isolation. Together, they describe a state that has decided your lifestyle is a policy variable to be optimised without your consent.

Regulating what you may say, think, and joke about

Britain has no formal censorship, but it has developed something nearly as effective. The Worker Protection Act 2023, in force since October 2024, places a duty on employers to prevent harassment by third parties, including customers, producing a wave of conduct policies across the hospitality sector that effectively outlaw the kind of informal, occasionally ribald conversation that has characterised the British pub for centuries. The landlord must now consider whether his regulars’ banter creates a legal liability.

The Online Safety Act hands an unelected regulator the power to remove content deemed ‘legal but harmful’ — a category whose boundaries are left to Ofcom, an organisation that cannot be voted out. The same regulator’s approach to broadcast media tells you something about how it exercises that discretion. Ofcom has opened more than a dozen investigations into GB News since the channel launched, fining it £100,000 and placing it “on notice” for repeated impartiality breaches — including, in one instance, for failing to sufficiently challenge a guest who called climate change a hoax.

The BBC, by contrast, broadcast a Panorama documentary one week before the 2024 US Presidential election that edited Donald Trump’s January 6th speech in a way its own former editorial adviser later described as “a blatant distortion” — giving a wholly misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. The BBC’s internal standards committee was alerted in January 2025 and took no decisive action for 10 months. The director general and head of news eventually resigned. The BBC Chair issued an apology, describing the edit as “an error of judgement”. Ofcom opened no investigation. The regulator that pursues GB News across a dozen probes for technicalities around impartiality found nothing in the BBC’s year-long concealment of a deliberately misleading edit worth examining.

The Metropolitan Police’s Live Facial Recognition programme scans faces on public streets in real time. The Investigatory Powers Act requires internet providers to retain every subscriber’s full browsing history for 12 months, available to government agencies without a judicial warrant. You are observed when you walk down the street and when you go online — and what you say about either is subject to a speech regime that Freedom House formally downgraded in 2025 for the “proliferation of criminal charges and convictions concerning online speech, including speech protected under international human rights standards”.

According to Freedom of Information data from 39 of 45 police forces, cited by the Times in April 2025, police were making roughly 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. Those arrested are not, for the most part, dangerous extremists — they are childminders, pensioners and tradesmen whose posts, in any previous decade, would have been considered unremarkable expressions of frustration. Some received prison sentences. Others were investigated for months before charges were quietly dropped, a process that served as its own punishment. As MPs noted in Parliament last November, Britain is now more willing to imprison someone for a social media post than for a rape — a remark that lands rather differently when you recall that the Prime Minister overseeing all this was, as director of public prosecutions, the man who declined to pursue the grooming gang cases later documented by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

This selective enforcement extends to political opponents with a consistency that is difficult to attribute to coincidence. Nigel Farage — leader of a party that received four million votes at the last election and has since topped every national opinion poll — was simultaneously debanked by Coutts and subjected to smears about foreign state funding made under Parliamentary privilege, beyond the reach of defamation law. An independent investigation found he had been treated unfairly.

This week, the Commons standards watchdog opened a formal investigation into a £5 million personal gift he says he received to fund private security — security he required because the Home Office, under the previous government, had cut his state protection by 75%, leaving the leader of a major political party to fund his own safety. Reform UK argues the payment, made before Farage became an MP and intended solely for personal protection, falls under the Parliamentary exemption for purely personal gifts. Both Labour and the Conservatives, whose own MPs and peers have faced a quiet succession of expenses investigations and misconduct probes that have attracted a fraction of this scrutiny, are pressing the investigation.

The pattern — exhaustive pursuit of the opposition leader, institutional indulgence of the establishment — is by now entirely familiar.

Meanwhile, a recent survey found one in five British teenagers avoids sharing political opinions for fear of being cancelled, and nearly a quarter said they had been asked to stop voicing their views at school. A democracy that teaches its young that silence is the safest course is not building citizens. It is building subjects.

The anti-democratic march goes on

Sitting beneath all of this is a surveillance infrastructure that no one was asked to approve. This week’s King’s Speech confirmed the Government is pressing ahead with legislation to support digital ID, with the stated intention of making it available to those who want it by 2029. This formulation papers over the fact that, as a condition of employment, it will in practice be unavoidable.

The scheme — a single Government database linking your right to work, immigration status, tax record, health data and right to rent — was opposed by Big Brother Watch and three million petitioners, and promoted most energetically by the Tony Blair Institute, whose principal backer, Oracle, holds over £1 billion in UK Government contracts and is considered the frontrunner for the infrastructure work itself.

The King’s Speech also confirmed the European Partnership Bill — legislation to realign parts of British law with EU standards across food regulation, energy trading and carbon emissions. The mechanism is ‘dynamic alignment’: the UK must transpose and implement EU law in relevant areas, while having no vote on that law and no seat in the legislative process that produces it. In other words, the Government intends to bind this country to rules made in Brussels by people we did not elect, in pursuit of a relationship the British public voted to leave. It was not in Labour’s manifesto, it has not been put to the country, it is simply being done.

When ministers then announced in May 2025 that they intended to postpone elections in around 30 councils — extending their own terms without a public vote — and were forced to reverse course only after a judicial review by Reform UK and legal advice that the plan would likely be ruled unlawful, the instinct being revealed felt consistent with everything else: that democratic constraints are inconveniences to be managed rather than principles to be upheld.

It would be tempting to lay all of this at Labour’s door, but that would be too easy and not entirely honest. The Investigatory Powers Act was Theresa May’s. Rishi Sunak introduced the Online Safety Act. Making Tax Digital, the ZEV mandate, minimum EPC standards, the sugar levy and the Covid surveillance infrastructure, including vaccine passports, were all Conservative creations. The party that styled itself as the guardian of British liberty spent 14 years building much of the machinery that a Left-wing Government is now operating at full throttle.

The lesson is not that the Tories were secret socialists. It is that expanding state power has become the default response of any government seeking to appear purposeful — and the machinery, once built, does not ask about the politics of whomever operates it next.

The collapse of institutional trust

This Government has proved itself neither cautious nor neutral. It has used lawfare against dissidents and opponents with a brazenness unthinkable under any previous administration, directing the apparatus of state — police, prosecutors, regulators, quangos — consistently against those who dissent from the approved programme. Trust in the institutions that were supposed to remain above politics — the courts, the civil service, the BBC, the police — has collapsed accordingly, and not without reason.

A foreign power has not captured them; they have been captured from within, by a professional class that regards the management of public behaviour as its primary function and the instincts of ordinary citizens as a problem to be corrected.

Systems outlast governments. The toolkit remains when the party changes — which is what makes the question of succession so consequential. Angela Rayner, widely regarded as a leading contender should a Labour leadership contest emerge, has spent her career to the Left of Starmer on every question that bears on the relationship between citizen and state. Starmer, for all his Government’s record, may yet prove to have been the restraining hand. The Conservatives built much of this machinery. Labour is operating it at full throttle. Whoever comes next may remove the restraints entirely.

Recovery looks a long way off. Whether it is possible at all depends on whether enough people recognise what is being lost before the machinery becomes too entrenched to reverse. Free societies are not lost in a single dramatic moment. They are lost in the accumulated weight of a thousand reasonable-sounding justifications for why, just this once, the state knows better than you do.

We are well past the thousandth.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 03:30

From ISIS To Finance Bro: Syria's Sharaa To Attend G7 Summit In France

Syria continues stepping out of the geopolitical wilderness, now apparently onto the highest-stakes stage in international finance. Or rather, the reality is that Washington's post-Assad Al Qaeda in suits makeover of 'former' terror leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has reached its peak.

According to a Reuters report on Thursday, self-appointed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) is set to lead a national delegation to the G7 summit in France next month.

HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, now self-declared President, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani

The invitation marks the country's first-ever participation in the summit since the elite forum was founded back in 1975.

Citing three sources familiar with the matter, the agency confirmed that an invitation was officially hand-delivered to Syrian Finance Minister Mohammed Yisr Barnieh while he was attending the group's preparatory financial talks in Paris earlier this week. The main G7 summit is set to run mid-June, from the 15th through 17th in Évian-les-Bains, southeastern France.

A Syrian official speaking Reuters described that Damascus plans to heavily pitch its geography to the G7. This will likely center on leveraging the country's role as a "potential strategic hub for supply chains" amid the Iran war and Hormuz Strait crisis. 

"After the closure of the Hormuz Strait, pretty much all the neighboring countries in the region knocked on our door to get access to our Syrian ports," stated Mazen Alloush, the director of local and international relations for Syria's borders and customs authority. "They are making Plan B's in case the crisis goes on longer."

The over decade-long proxy war to oust Assad, which heavily involved the CIA and Gulf states, as well as Israel, has long been discussed as part of the 'pipeline wars' theme, and has for years been an open secret.

President Trump, who helped put Sharaa in power, and vouched for him when they first met in Saudi Arabia, is expected to attend the G7 summit.

But despite Damascus under Sharaa now being a willing puppet of Washington, economic relief for the war-ravaged Syrian population has remained illusory, as one Middle East outlet underscores:

Because Syria had been under crushing sanctions since the start of the 14-year war that began in 2011, many expected the economic situation to improve after Sharaa toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government and western nations began easing sanctions.

However, “attracting foreign investment and restoring normal banking ties ⁠have ​proven slower and more difficult than ​many officials had hoped,” Reuters noted. More than 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line and have suffered from major increases in the price of fuel, electricity, and food in recent months.

Gas prices have risen by nearly 50 percent in the past month, while the value of the Syrian currency has fallen against the dollar amid volatile price swings. In the past week, the Syrian pound depreciated from 13,400 liras per dollar to more than 14,700 liras per dollar, before ending at 14,000 liras per dollar.

The irony. Syria gets invited to the G7 while former member Russia is still banned. https://t.co/ca8rFPL1on

— David S. (@DavidS_Liberdad) May 21, 2026

All the while, looming large in the background is the fact that the Syrian government is now full of Sunni extremists, who have repeatedly targeted Alawites, Druze, and Christians for being "unbelievers". 

Thousands have died at the hands of ISIS-style Syrian government-linked military members, who have sought to cleanse the country of its ancient Christian and Alawite communities. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 02:45

Irrelevant Europe

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Europe is the ‘jungle’ now. No garden left to speak of.

Josep Borrell is a Spanish socialist who held several high-ranking positions in the European Union.  Until 2024, he was a vice-president of the European Commission and the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy.  In that capacity, he ran Europe’s External Action Service, which is the diplomatic body that executes Europe’s foreign policy decisions around the world.  He remains a man with a great deal of influence over European perspectives.

In 2022, Borrell created a bit of an international incident when he described Europe as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle.”  

“We have built a garden,” he told aspiring European diplomats in Bruges, Belgium.  “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.  The jungle could invade the garden.  The gardeners should take care of it.”

As the head of the European Defense Agency, Borrell’s comments made strategic sense.  As he said in that same speech, “The jungle has a strong growth capacity…Walls will never be high enough to protect the garden.  The gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world.  Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”

Borrell’s speech came seven years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s borders to millions of Islamic immigrants.  Originally touted as a humanitarian policy designed to temporarily shelter refugees from war-torn Syria, Germany’s generous welfare programs quickly became a magnet for young men across the Middle East and North Africa.  When Merkel declared on August 31, 2015, “We can do this,” she initiated an all-of-society “welcome culture” that quickly produced a full-blown migrant crisis for the whole continent.  Over ten years later, the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe has transformed school demographics and local politics, unleashed an explosion in sex crimes and anti-European violence, strained Europe’s hospital services and social safety nets, and exacerbated government debt.

Speaking after the “jungle” had already successfully invaded Europe’s “garden,” Borrell knew there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.  Merkel’s fateful decision to “welcome” Middle Easterners to Europe transformed cities and towns across Europe into the Middle East.  Borrell also knew that the European Union’s patchwork defense agency did not have the requisite military and espionage assets to effectively protect the continent.  So he tried to fashion his corps of young diplomats into a network of information and persuasion agents who could do Europe’s bidding around the world.

Borrell’s message got lost in the ensuing international kerfuffle over his “garden” / “jungle” division of the world.  From Russia to Canada, Africa to Southeast Asia, every self-described “foreign policy expert” took umbrage at Borrell’s bluntness.  Perpetually offended virtue-signalers hadn’t gotten so worked-up since President Trump had called Haiti a “shithole country” four years earlier.  Just as Conan O’Brien felt compelled to white-knight for Haiti’s dystopian, cannibal gangland by visiting a heavily guarded resort in the Caribbean country and recklessly encouraging vacationers to join him, legions of politically correct snobs from around the planet recorded social media videos from their country estates in which they turned tsk-tsk-ing into a veritable lingua franca for the vicariously aggrieved.

All the “very best people” denounced Borrell for promoting a scarcely disguised restoration of European imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and genocide.  Young international students enjoying university scholarships and living in Europe for free made sure to remind Borrell that “diversity is our strength.”  Borrell’s socialist comrades beat him over the head with Europe’s prime directive: multiculturalism über alles.  Mohammadbagher Forough, a random research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, publicly reprimanded Europe’s foreign minister thusly: “This kind of comment puts a serious dent in the enterprise of European strategic autonomy.  It upsets, at the most profound level, countries in the rest of the world, because of the history of colonialism.”

In other words, Europe’s “ruling class” and auxiliary straphangers condemned Borrell for daring to defend the beneficiaries of Western civilization.  He was encouraged by threat of high-culture social banishment to follow Chancellor Merkel’s example in supplicating before the migrant hordes.  The message was clear: Europe’s minister of defense cannot properly “defend” Europe unless he allows non-Europeans to take over the continent.  It was further proof that Europe is irreparably lost.

Since his departure from the European Union’s foreign policy perch at the end of 2024, Borrell has spent most of his time in public lambasting President Trump’s global leadership.  A staunch supporter of Ukraine who once threatened to “annihilate” the Russian army, Borrell has frequently defended the honor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by claiming that Ukraine’s holdover president is leading “the resistance” and “deserves respect.”  After President Trump described Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections,” Borrell called the “accusation” the “height of dishonesty.”  When President Trump and Vice President Vance took offense to Zelenskyy’s sense of entitlement and disregard for American taxpayers who have paid the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s government workforce, Borrell screamed on X, “Trump and Vance have put on a disgraceful show.  I am ashamed of that behavior.”

In response to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last year during which the vice president excoriated Europe’s crackdown on free speech and political dissent, Borrell lectured his erstwhile colleagues: “This is a declaration of political war against the European Union.”  Going further, Europe’s former defense minister declared, “Europe must stop pretending that Trump is not an adversary and assert its technological, security, and political sovereignty with clarity and strength.”

As much as I find Borrell’s socialist-globalist politics abhorrent, I respect his impulse to defend his fellow Europeans.  The problem is that the European Union is a governmental monstrosity — bureaucratically lethargic, ideologically suffocating, foolishly regulatory, unmoored from its stated principles, opposed to public debate, enamored with its empires’ past glories, and increasingly oppressive.  Eurocrats such as Borrell believed they could reconstitute European centrality in the world by constructing a “rules-based international order” and forcing every other nation in the world to bend to Europe’s will.  Brussels has long desired to rule the world through rule-making.

It turns out that depending on the United States for security, the Russian Federation for energy, and communist China for critical imports is not a blueprint for European strength.  To his credit, Borrell understands Europe’s dilemma.  He knows that the European Union “was not designed for the world in which we live today.”  Forced to watch President Trump remake the world without showing any deference to Europe’s globalist prerogatives, Borrell openly laments, “We are not very relevant to international politics.”

Can you imagine how difficult of an admission that is for Borrell to make?  He has been weaned on the notion of European superiority all his life.  Even as parts of the European continent careen toward civil war, Borrell still believes that Europe is the world’s idyllic “garden” and everywhere else remains wild “jungle.”  From Borrell’s perspective, not only is Haiti a “shithole country” but also the United States is, too.

Borrell finally realizes, however, that Europe survives only because the rest of the world permits it to endure.  When you depend upon the United States, Japan, India, China, Russia, and the Middle East to produce everything that Europe’s dying empire needs, then you have no leverage or real power in the world.  European imperialism is dead because Europe has no armies or navies to enforce its “rules-based” edicts.  European imperialism is dead because sane nations refuse to impoverish themselves in the name of carbon credit tyranny.  European imperialism is dead because Europe opened its doors to an Islamic invasion.

Europe is the “jungle.”  The “garden” is gone.  European hubris sealed its fate.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 02:00

Fake Wars & Higher Prices: What A "Multipolar World Order" Really Means

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

The world is changing. The once dominant imperial power of the United States is faltering, hollowed out by corruption, over-extended by hubris, eaten away by the cancers of hatred, nationalism and greed.

Even according to its own propaganda outlets, America has “become the villain”, is “Officially an Empire in Decline”, and we are witnessing its “final act”.

And, as we await the titan’s inevitable fall, the world is considering the future. Everyone is talking about the “multipolar world order” just over the horizon.

From “Pax Americana to Pax Multipolaris”.

This “Multipolar World” has been a political talking point for a long time, but it has been building momentum over the last few years, and noticeably accelerating since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for this multipolar order for years, and did so again last week. China’s Xi Jinping regularly does the same, most recently during his trip to South America in February. North Korea’s Kim Jung Il echoed these sentiments in April.

Xi and Putin signed a joint declaration on “building a multipolar world” this morning.

Two weeks ago, in a talk at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for “a post-imperial world [and] a resilient rules-based order in a new era of multipolarity”.

In a speech during his trip to China last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for “embracing a multipolar world order”:

“What is happening today is not a transfer of hegemony, but an increase in multipolarity — in both power and prosperity,”

Outside of politicians speechifying, the multipolar world order has become the main focus of the international think-tank circuit as well.

“Multipolarization” was the main topic of the Munich Security Conference Report in February 2025.

In December, the Tony Blair Institute partnered with the JPMorgan Chase International Council to publish a report called “World Rewired: Navigating a Multi-Speed, Multipolar Order”, which concludes in the foreword (written by Blair himself and Jamie Dimon of JPMC):

The world still offers enormous potential for those willing to engage constructively—to build coalitions, invest in innovation, and help shape the rules of the next era rather than simply react to them.

And then in March, the World Economic Forum published an (exceedingly dull) report titled “The Future of Materials Systems: Cooperation Opportunities in a Multipolar World”, which uses sentences like this…

In a multipolar world, agile interest-based cooperation will be decisive in shaping resilient, productive and sustainable materials systems.

That’s the traditional circle in which “multipolarity” is most discussed. Reports for alphabet agencies and non-profits, market predictions and risk assessments. Academic language that camouflages meaning in layers of surplus verbiage.

But multipolarity is not just the pet subject of presidents and thinktanks, it is a regular talking point across the media landscape.

America Can’t Escape the Multipolar Order

…said Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs, in December.

The European Times headlines “From unipolarity to multipolar reality – A new world order is fast emerging”, and is rather more measured:

Multipolarity itself is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently beneficial. Its ultimate impact will depend on how nations choose to exercise power, uphold international law, and cooperate in addressing common challenges.

In an interview with Politico titled “What the next world order looks like”, British author Rana Dasgupta says:

If we’re entering a multipolar world, that’s not very unusual. That’s the normal state of the world.

As you can see, the potential fall of our modern Rome isn’t terrifying to many of those who owe their money and position to that Empire, rather it is energizing or maybe “the normal state of the world”.

The US/Israeli war with Iran has been blamed for and/or credited with accelerating this long-awaited Imperial decline.

Two weeks ago, The Tehran Times headlines:

How the Iran conflict is catalyzing a multipolar world order

A report from The Middle East Council on Global Affairs frames the war in Iran as the US trying to stop the multipolar world from breaking free:

What is unfolding in Iran is not simply a war over the regional balance of power or nuclear containment. It is an attempt to rupture the geographic core of an emerging multipolar order designed to bypass Western dominance

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published this…

The Iran War Shows the Limits of U.S. Power – If Washington cannot adapt to the ongoing transformations of a multipolar world, its superiority will become a liability.

In many parts of the independent media there is an almost feverish anticipation.

America’s Empire will fall, and a shiny multipolar new world order will rise in its place, and it’s definitely going to be A Good Thing.

That’s the story.

But that’s all it is, a story.

What is the “multipolar world order”, really?

What multipolarity really means

The cultivated image of a multipolar world – minus the quotes – is that of global cooperation between free-and-equal sovereign nations, each pursuing the interests of their people without living under the cloud of Imperial hegemony.

“Equal and orderly […] inclusive, universally beneficial economic globalisation”, as Xi Jinping said in a February speech.

This was echoed, in greater depth, by Professor Wang Yiwei, who wrote a briefing titled “The Chinese Philosophy of an Equal and Orderly Multipolar World Order”, and describing how different the world would be under Chinese leadership – or rather, non-leadership:

China advocates an equal and orderly multipolar world and inclusive economic globalization. Among these, the core of an equal and orderly multipolar world is to adhere to the equality of all countries, big and small, oppose hegemonism and power politics, and effectively promote the democratization of international relations.

A less utopian view predicts a multipolar world districted into blocs or spheres of influence, but still more dynamic and potentially fair for being out of the Empire’s shadow. That was the original meaning of the phrase when it was first floated in the late 90s.

But neither of these reflect the looming reality, or the true intentions of the powerful people feeding the word to their talking heads.

That might be multipolarity, but it’s not “multipolarity”.

It’s amazing the difference a pair of quotation marks can make, isn’t it?

The powers-that-shouldn’t-be and their soulless meat puppets in the corporate, academic and political spheres have created an entirely euphemistic linguistic phraseology defined by the need for quotation marks.

Words and phrases that don’t mean what they pretend to mean.

“Climate change”, “hate speech”, “public health”.

“Terrorism”, “misinformation” and “sustainability”.

In our political landscape, these have ceased to be words with meanings and become both camouflage and conditioning.

A dishonest cross-breed of programming language and hypnotic suggestion; phrases designed to obfuscate reality on the one hand, and either mechanically call pre-programmed responses or elicit powerful conditioned emotional reactions on the other.

“Multipolarity” is one of those words. And it should always be put in quotes.

The truth behind the word is simple: A global franchise for an old system of control.

Party Politics Goes Global

Defenders of the “multipolar world order” narrative will often argue along the lines “surely a multipolar world is better than US Imperialism? Shouldn’t we welcome resistance to hegemony?”

That same argument has been deployed by climate change supporters, who claim “even if the climate isn’t changing, protecting the environment is still a good thing, isn’t it?”

The flaw in this argument is a failure to question the underlying assumptions and official definitions of these phrases.

Just because something adopts a nice-sounding name doesn’t mean that thing is nice.

Labour don’t support workers. The Democrats hate democracy.

State-backed corporate “environmentalism” is not about planting trees or saving animals, and globalist-backed corporate “multipolarity” is nothing to do with increasing national sovereignty or offering independence from a global authority.

The reality of a “multipolar world” will be a system of intertwining corporate and state institutions implementing authoritarian, anti-human policies and disguising an ideologically monolithic power structure behind an illusory veneer of “choice”.

We in the collective West are more than familiar with this model – it is the way our “democracies” function.

Two major teams, with near identical ideologies and taking orders from the same unelected powers, fiercely battling it out over the tiniest sliver of uncommon ground.

They pitch electoral battles over differences of iconography, phraseology or fractions of percentage points to distract from the fact they agree about everything that really matters, have no real power at all, and are at best replaceable widgets in a vast influence machine.

The point of these battles is to convince people that democracy exists, that they have a choice, and can affect change.

This lie works, and has done for decades.

“Mutlipolarity” is an expansion of that model – the control mechanism of fake binary left-right, red-blue, Coke-Pepsi partisan politics rolling out world-wide.

It’s the same exact method employed to the same exact end: Tribalism as a path to cognitive dissonance, thought termination and the death of objectivity.

Why This? Why now?

It’s worth remembering this faux-antagonistic version of “multipolarity” was not part of the long term plan.

It was obvious, almost from the very start, that the Covid “pandemic” was intended to be a great global unifying moment.

We were all supposed to realise how silly these disagreements across ethnic, national or religious lines were, and come together to beat back the common enemy. A threat to the world that untied the world, like in Independence Day.

We were meant to be using digital currency under a globally implemented social credit system by now. Owning nothing and being happy.

But it didn’t work.

The moment they attempted to remove the horizontal divisions created to control society, they only drew attention to the much greater vertical divisions. People suddenly became more aware of the centralized, unified nature of global power structures.

The grand plan to get Global Government through the gates inside the Covid trojan horse not only failed, but backfired spectacularly.

There was a need for a re-adjustment. A new approach.

International unity didn’t work and doesn’t sell, but an international binary might.

That’s the “multipolar world order”.

The Momentum of Real Division

None of this is to deny the existence of real divisions, or whitewash historic crimes. Obviously there are deeply felt, and entirely justified, anti-Imperial sentiments across the developing world, and within the dissenting circles of the developed world.

The USA has been an Imperial power for the best part of two centuries, and a global hegemon for almost forty years, and in that time it has carried out monstrous acts of colonial aggression, and destroyed millions of lives. We have covered many of them.

In pursuit of oil and gold they cut a bloody swathe across the Middle East, and churned South and Central America into political chaos over and over again.

Israel likewise – whether you consider them the power behind the US throne, or Washington’s catspaw in the Middle East – is a brutal apartheid state, that has torn up and spat out international law a thousand times over.

These are all true facts, and the multipolar narrative finds utility in them.

Just as domestic party politics parlays very real economic issues into shallow class-based resentments, or understandable concerns over uncontrolled immigration into reactionary xenophobia – so too does the “multipolar world” narrative prey on historical trauma and the desire for vengeance to embed partisan thought that erodes critical thinking.

The narrative harnesses the momentum of historical hatred to push itself forward.

Indeed, as I have previously said in interviews, the enthusiasm for this new model from the political classes in Russia, China et al. is entirely understandable. It is far better, from their point of view, to have a seat at the globalist table than be living with Uncle Sam’s nuclear gun at their temple.

It’s possible many of the people involved truly believe that a fake “multipolar world order” really does prevent a nuclear war, and is for the best.

Ironically, in their minds, “war” really does mean peace.

The Role of War

War is vital to the development of this multipolar model, in two main ways:

1. It disguises, discredits and/or distracts from, the revelation of globalist cooperation highlighted by the Pandemic.
2. It furthers, by other means, the “great reset” agenda.

It has other supplementary functions as well.

If “Multipolarity” is the global franchise of fake democracy, then war can be seen as a replacement for the ballot box.. We don’t have global elections (yet); so their role in the system is assumed by geopolitical struggles; trade deals or staged/limited “wars”.

Global unity government was and is a very unpopular idea, so its creeping implementation has to be disguised. Nothing disguises unity of purpose so well as armed conflict.

The sheer number of people who repeat some variant of the argument “how can they be on the same side, they’re shooting at each other!” is testament to the effectiveness of this strategy.

Nothing brings a populous together so well as a perceived external threat. History is replete with rulers who, faced with discontent at home, started a war to garner support. A state of being at war tends to unite people behind the government.

It’s the natural extension of this known tactic that two governments would agree to go to war in order to mutually benefit from this group-think dynamic.

This is international geo-political game theory, as explained in A Beautiful Mind. They both win if they agree not to truly compete.

Both sides have corrupt political classes, both sides have arms manufacturers keen to profit from chaos, both sides crave “emergency war-time powers” to crack down on domestic dissent.

So, we can see how the “war” individually benefits the rulers of each side in the short term. But, more importantly, the supra-national powers have a larger, longer-term agenda (see below) that is also served by the war.

War drives up prices, consumes resources, lowers the standard of living, justifies shortages and manufacturers scarcity.

These factors combine to a make a state of being – or appearing to be – at war vital to the planned breakdown and reconstruction of society.

This is not a new idea, the state has used the framing of war, or at least the threat of war, to boost national unity and increase state powers for centuries.

The new twist is that these “wars” are not real, they are – to one extent or another – staged.

All the wars a stage

We are living in the age of the unreal – The Perfidious Unreality of the New Normal – as we discussed with all those quotation marks.

We regularly live through “terrorism” that is no such thing, we hold “elections” where the voting is irrelevant, and we just had a worldwide “pandemic” without a disease.

It is only natural that warfare should be folded into a propaganda control system that increasingly relies on simply making stuff up.

Just as Western domestic “democracies” need “elections” to maintain the illusion of the system, so too does a “multipolar world” need “wars” to create the appearance of conflict.

These wars are not real.

Or perhaps “real” is not the best word to use – if you want we could say these wars are not honest, not true, not sincere.

But what does staged war mean?

Does it mean no bombs are being dropped or people killed?

No, as we have said many times: Be it in Ukraine or Gaza or Iran, there likely is death and destruction taking place – but that does not necessarily mean war.

As Catte says in her 2024 article:

Death isn’t the definition of war. Conflict is the definition of war.

Do a few air strikes or a thousand dead civilians mean the US and Iran are really enemies locked in an ideological struggle for survival? No. Of course not.

We know these governments and agencies do not care about their own people, let alone each other’s.

People were disposable when they were being nailed inside their houses, given illegal DNR orders or injected with toxic Pfizer goo, and they’re just as disposable when they’re being blown up.

It’s like a psychopathic, murderous sport. The players are real – maybe they’re playing to win or maybe paid to lose – but it doesn’t really matter, since the struggle is controlled by a league which sets the terms.

Numbers, times, places, rules and limitations are all agreed on beforehand.

And, just like sport, the fans cheering hate each other far more than the players playing do, everyone gets paid no matter who wins, and the whole thing is owned by a handful of billionaires who all go to the same parties.

What would a staged war look like?

Well, that’s a more complicated question.

The simple answer is “coordination”. Any kind of coordination – especially of scale or scope – means we can infer a certain amount of fakeness. After all, if the two sides can agree to have a limited war, they can agree not have a war at all.

There are a few more specific signs to look out for.

For example, both sides calling ahead to tell each other where they plan to bomb (or not bomb), so that people can be evacuated accordingly.

Or one army making it to the enemy capital inside a month, then turning around and leaving again for unknown reasons.

Or maybe pausing hostilities to carry out a polio vaccination drive.

Or perhaps vague or ever-changing victory conditions.

Or a pattern of airstrikes hitting empty or condemned buildings in such a way that aligns with pre-existing renovation plans.

Or repeated self-defeating or self-sabotaging behavior that seems to artificially halt progress or extend the conflict.

Or sudden, contradictory developments in the narrative that don’t logically follow.

Or apparent collaboration from combatants on strategies that further a globalist agenda.

…that kind of thing.

This is the logical extension of pre-existing modus operandi. The inevitable intersection of the war-for-profit model that is centuries old, and the age of simulacra described by Baudrillard in the 1980s.

What is the benefit of staged war?

The benefit of a staged war vs a real war is much the same as a fake pandemic vs a real pandemic – control.

A coordinated “war” can last as long as it needs to, pause or resume on command, kill as few or as many as necessary, and can’t ever accidentally result in nuclear annihilation.

George Orwell described it almost perfectly eighty years ago. Super-continents locked in eternal, and maybe even fictional, conflict. Warfare becoming “a purely internal affair”, not meant to be won but meant to be continuous.

An endless game and permanent chaos is how they win.

That’s our state of play, grumbling wars with vague victory conditions that neither army ever loses but both sides constantly claim to be winning.

Meanwhile, the price of energy is only going up, we’re being warned of fertilizer crises and food shortages and higher taxes.

Different Paths, Same Destination

Just as in domestic party politics, vociferous or violent disagreements between the parties belie a shared agenda pushed by the power that controls both sides of every apparent divide.

Even as their mutually-beneficial “wars” play out, reports and think-tanks talk up the need for “limited cooperation” or “regional multilateral projects”.

As they bash their soldiers together on one side of the world, they share technology, cooperate on environmental issues or buy gas and oil from each other.

And agree on major policy documents.

The whole world (minus the US, currently) has signed the Pandemic Treaty, or signed up to the United Nations “Pact for the Future”.

The BRICS nations all have globalist ties – recall BRICs was a term coined in a Goldman Sachs report in 2001 – and they all signed the Kazan Declaration in 2024. Supporting, among other things, the IMF, the WHO, Agenda 2030 and “sustainable development goals”. (Read Riley Waggaman’s great break down here)

The Kyoto Protocols, the Paris Climate Agreements, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are all backed by every one of our multiple poles.

Everyone on any of the supposed sides believes in the same things and shills the same foundational globalist lies such as climate change and Covid.

And, quirks of implementation or nomenclature aside, they all want the same things and push the same familiar shopping list of policies:

• Programmable Digital currency
• biometric Digital ID
• ending online anonymity
• Cashless society
• Censorship
• “Sustainable development goals”

The unspoken endgame of this collective horror show is easy to summarize: Techno-authoritarianism.

Hrvoje Moric has written about how multipolarity, as a model, is a form of global government.

A dystopian society where the state and mega corporations merge into a Thing-like monstrosity that has constant, real-time access to any and all data for pretty much everyone on the planet. That has the ability and facility to monitor – or control – every transaction, every journey, every message or phone call.

“Multipolarity” disguises this truth, and uses partisan thinking and ideology to draw fake or surface-level distinctions.

BRICS vs NATO, the US vs China, Israel vs Iran, Europe vs Russia, Belt and Road Initiative vs the India-Middle East-Europe Trade Corridor.

Pick a flag and wave it. Fake Wars & Higher Prices, all in the service of The Great Reset.

That is its purpose, and that is what “multipolarity” really means.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 23:25

Pentagon Delegation's Beijing Visit Held Up Over Gargantuan US Arms Package For Taiwan

China is using a Pentagon itinerary as structural leverage, and Taiwan remains front and center as the key geopolitical snag in bettering communications and relations between Beijing and Washington.

According to a Financial Times report published Thursday, China is actively holding up a proposed visit by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's under-secretary of defense for policy. The move is a transparent effort to pressure President Trump over a looming $14 billion weapons package for Taiwan.

Elbridge Colby, left.

While Colby had been actively discussing a summer trip to Beijing with Chinese officials, China has effectively frozen the process and logistics. Sources familiar with the talks report that Beijing has signaled it "cannot approve a visit until Trump decides how he will proceed with the arms package."

Trump admin officials have been quick to point out that Trump has approved "the sale of more weapons to Taiwan than any other US president." And so it appears that such bravado should come with a cost, in Beijing's apparent thinking.

And yet, Trump has repeatedly publicly touted his personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping as "amazing" - though his recent Beijing trip did nothing to ultimately produce a breakthrough.

Trump, upon returning from his trip earlier this month, stated that he "has not decided whether to proceed with the major weapons sale," injecting a fresh wave of strategic ambiguity over US support for the self-ruled island.

He also in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier had stated that he doesn't want "to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war" over Taiwan.

"I'm not looking to have somebody to go independent and, you know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war," Trump told Baier. "I'm not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down."

Taiwan remains critically important to Washington because it is not only a semiconductor production supernode, but also a geopolitical fortress against China and a potential flashpoint in US-China relations. But China hawks have questioned Trump's resolve and where he stands, related to the scenario of potential direct Chinse aggression against Taiwan.

Trump's rhetoric on Taiwan before and after his summit with President Xi has raised eyebrows in Washington...

Absolute betrayal. When asked about consulting Taiwan on weapons deals, Donald Trump completely dismisses them as a mere problem.

He immediately pivots to showering Chinese President Xi with massive praise. Washington will casually throw any ally under the bus for leverage. pic.twitter.com/JVhLGAydVl

— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) May 20, 2026

Geopolitical risk analyst Ian Bremmer has also lately weighed in. He has speculated: "This is Trump's perspective: the only thing that matters about Taiwan is the chips. Very different from the view of U.S. allies in the region: Japan, South Korea, and Australia."

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 23:00

Trump Admin Targets States' Medicaid Fraud Units

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

Vice President JD Vance said during a recent press conference that he was intensifying attempts to counter Medicaid fraud by investigating state-level units responsible for oversight.

States such as California and Hawaii seemed to lag behind others in combatting fraud, said Vance, whom the president picked in March to lead an anti-fraud task force.

“Now, we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively, but we also unfortunately have some states, mostly blue states, unfortunately, that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” he said.

In response, Vance said the administration would withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid-related payments to California and also consider withholding from other states.

The administration put each of the 50 states on notice with recent letters signed by Health and Human Services Inspector General Thomas “March” Bell. It focused on state-level Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCUs), which receive federal funding.

Letters also went to the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Here’s what to know about the units and Vance’s efforts.

Federal Grants at Stake

The letters threatened to take away all federal grants provided to a state’s Medicaid program if the state was not fulfilling its duties.

“It has become clear ... that many MFCUs have been happy to rake in taxpayer dollars without fighting fraud,” Bell stated in the letter. “And for too long, there has been a lack of leadership at HHS that has allowed billions of our fellow Americans’ dollars to flow out to State capitals to fund MFCUs to supposedly fight Medicaid fraud without any real oversight.”

He said that the units must comply with certain requirements to receive funding. Federal law requires the units to investigate and prosecute fraud, investigate patient abuse and neglect in Medicaid-funded facilities, and recover overpayments.

The units must operate statewide, employ investigators, auditors, and attorneys, and remain separate from the state agency that administers Medicaid. The law requires the units to either possess prosecutorial authority or formally coordinate with prosecutors.

Bell told the attorneys general that “your failure to do your job as head of the MFCU has put all of your State’s Medicaid funds in jeopardy.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office told The Epoch Times that the administration wrongly accused the state.

“That the new HHS-[Office of Inspector General] would send such a letter to all 53 MFCU’s in the nation, writing that ‘your failure to do your job as head of the MFCU has put all of your State’s Medicaid funds in jeopardy,’ is inconceivable and completely disconnected from the performance record of Michigan’s MFCU and the tremendous reporting our office makes in compliance with the federal government’s oversight,” Danny Wimmer, Nessel’s press secretary, told The Epoch Times.

“While some states have been, over the last year, singled out by the federal government for purported performance issues, Michigan has never been among them."

The federal government covers most of the costs for MFCUs for each state.

For example, the attorney general’s unit for Michigan received a $5.5 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that covers 75 percent of its funding. The state picks up the remaining 25 percent, or $1.8 million.

In 2024, the total cost of all these state-based units was $396 million, of which $297 million was picked up by the federal government.

Wimmer said Michigan’s MFCU went through a “rigorous” recertification process every year in which the HHS’s Office of Inspector General determined whether it was in compliance with regulations.

How Do Fraud Control Units Work?

The Social Security Act requires each state to operate an MFCU.

Cases usually start as referrals from other organizations, third parties, or from MFCU staff members who detect potential fraud from data mining.

MFCU staff review referrals to determine the potential for criminal prosecution and civil action. Besides fraud, abuse and neglect are also investigated.

In 2025, about 1 in 5 cases investigated by MFCUs nationwide were for abuse and neglect. There were 3,019 investigations nationwide into abuse and neglect compared with the 12,902 investigations into fraud.

For example, Pennsylvania’s MFCU this year investigated a case involving a 50-year-old woman who was convicted of failure to renew a resident’s medications, which led to a fatal seizure in 2021.

About 4 in 10 fraud convictions from 2015 to 2024 involved Personal Care Attendants, nonmedical professionals who provide daily living assistance to people with disabilities or chronic illnesses.

Wimmer said Michigan’s unit “submits extensive questionnaires and produces significant accountings and reports on various aspects of their operations, such as investigative efforts and fiscal operations.”

He added that HHS “conducts very thorough weeklong on-site audits every 5-7 years on state MFCUs, including ours, wherein they send a team of approximately 10 inspectors to audit the fraud control unit.”

Ed Haislmaier, an expert in health care policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that although licensed providers were involved in fraud cases, fraud on an “industrial scale” appeared to occur more often in non-specialized areas of health care where professional licensing is not required.

Those sectors often included providers who could receive approval for government funding without undergoing background checks.

“The lower the barrier to entry for a type of provider, the more likely you are to see this kind of fraud,” Haislmaier said.

Targeted States

While the administration reached out to every state, Vance highlighted three—Hawaii, California, and New York—that he said were not taking fraud seriously.

During his press conference, he noted how Indiana had many more prosecutions than New York.

Vance said it was “absurd” to think that the people of Indiana were just more likely to commit Medicaid fraud than the people of New York.

“What is happening is that the leadership in New York are just not taking the fraud issue seriously,” Vance said. “They are not using these antifraud control units to actually investigate and indict the fraud.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

HHS data revealed that Indiana had 951 investigations in fiscal year 2025 with 42 indictments and 32 convictions.

California, a top target for the Trump administration, had 1,052 investigations with 83 indictments and 43 convictions.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office criticized Vance on social media.

Newsom’s office said in-home support services have grown because California is keeping seniors and people with disabilities out of the more expensive nursing homes—the cost of a nursing home was $137,000 a year compared with $30,000 a year for in-home support services.

Newsom said the approach saved taxpayers money.

Hawaii’s Medicaid investigative unit had 484 total investigations in fiscal year 2025 but not a single indictment or conviction, according to federal data.

Hawaii’s state data showed that from 2021 through 2025, the state conducted a total of 2,779 investigations into fraud and abuse that resulted in just five convictions. All were reported in 2021. That would mean Hawaii has conducted 2,104 fraud and abuse investigations from 2022 through 2025 without a single conviction.

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez rejected Vance’s characterization of her state as not taking fraud seriously.

“Our Medicaid Fraud Control Unit has secured or helped secure more than $14 million in judgments, settlements and recoveries since 2021, filed recent criminal charges—and is actively working with federal and state partners to strengthen investigations and prosecutions,” Lopez said in a press release.

“We welcome accountability, but we will not allow the work of this unit to be mischaracterized as doing nothing.” 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 22:35

Toyota To Import Taiwan-Built Minivans To Japan Amid Factory Strain

Toyota will start shipping Taiwan-built Noah and Voxy minivans to Japan later this year, marking a rare shift in the company’s production strategy as mounting pressures strain the country’s auto manufacturing sector, according to Nikkei.

Production for the Japanese market is set to begin in October on a dedicated line at Toyota’s plant in northern Taiwan, according to Nikkei. While Japanese automakers have long sold foreign-built vehicles at home, those models were typically intended for overseas markets first. Toyota’s decision to create an offshore production line specifically for Japanese consumers is highly uncommon, particularly for two of its key domestic models.

The move comes as Toyota faces increasing difficulty expanding output inside Japan. Factory utilization is already near its limits, while labor shortages, higher material costs, and tighter compliance requirements have made domestic manufacturing more expensive and less flexible. Delivery delays for popular vehicles have stretched for months — and in some cases more than a year — forcing the automaker to suspend orders periodically as demand outpaces supply.

Nikkei writes that Toyota has committed to maintaining annual domestic production above 3 million vehicles to support employment and preserve Japan’s industrial base. At the same time, however, the company is increasingly relying on overseas operations to ease bottlenecks and reduce operational risk.

The Noah and Voxy are among Toyota’s strongest-selling minivans in Japan, with annual sales typically ranging between 70,000 and 80,000 units. To help meet demand, Toyota plans to build roughly 100,000 vehicles per year in Taiwan, focusing mainly on lower-cost variants. Production in Japan will continue in parallel.

The Taiwan facility already assembles models including the Corolla sedan and Yaris Cross through a local joint venture. For the fiscal year ending March 2026, the plant produced around 120,000 vehicles. Expanding output for Japan-bound minivans is expected to significantly increase overall production volumes.

Building a new automotive production line with annual capacity of 100,000 vehicles can require investments worth tens of billions of yen. Even so, Toyota appears willing to absorb those costs as domestic factories struggle to accommodate additional output. The company currently produces about 14,000 vehicles per day across Japan, leaving little spare capacity.

Pressure on the production system intensified after certification issues uncovered in 2024 prompted Toyota to tighten testing and regulatory oversight procedures, further constraining manufacturing flexibility.

Producing vehicles in Taiwan also introduces new challenges. The yen recently fell to its weakest level against the New Taiwan dollar in more than three decades, raising labor and operating costs for Japanese manufacturers there. Still, Toyota sees offshore production as necessary to stabilize supply and reduce delivery times.

Toyota president Kenta Kon has warned that persistent shortages are unsustainable, calling the situation “abnormal and critical.” The company fears prolonged waits could eventually push customers toward rival automakers.

Toyota is not alone in turning to reverse imports. Industry data shows sales of Japanese-brand vehicles built overseas and sold domestically climbed 19% last year to more than 111,000 units — the highest level in three decades. Honda is also preparing to bring an India-made EV into the Japanese market by fiscal 2028 as automakers increasingly seek lower-cost production bases abroad.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 22:10

"Marylanders Are Voting With Their Feet": Johns Hopkins Finds Blue State Exodus To Persist For Years

A new Johns Hopkins University survey shows that more than half of Baltimore respondents expect to move out of their current neighborhoods within three years, as the one-party-ruled state of Democratic Party queens and kings has failed taxpayers on affordability, law and order, and other basic issues commonly standard in red states.

The Hopkins survey, conducted from September to November 2024, found that 42% of Baltimore City residents want to leave the city entirely. Of those, 27% expect to stay somewhere else in Maryland, while 15% expect to leave the state, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Among the 58% of city residents who plan to remain in Baltimore, only 36% expect to stay in their current neighborhood, while 22% expect to move to another part of the city.

In Baltimore County, the urgency to relocate is also high, but most residents who want to move expect to remain in the county: 66% say they plan to stay.

Vice Chair of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, Republican Delegate Kathy Szeliga, explained the dire situation in Maryland, where a very real exodus is underway:

Every day, I hear from friends, neighbors, and constituents that they are considering or they are actually moving out of Maryland. It's not just the crushing taxes, unaffordable energy bills, and concerns about public safety; it's also the failing education system.

Governor Wes Moore is unable to deliver results or give people confidence that he can turn this state around, and so people are voting with their feet and leaving Maryland.

How bad is this exodus in Baltimore?

Well, the population of Baltimore City alone has collapsed 40% from its 1950s level, and deindustrialization, blended with half a century or more of toxic left-wing politics, has transformed parts of the city into an utter economic wasteland.

"There is no question that Governor Moore's policies on crime, affordability, and government competence make Marylanders want to flee the state," said Republican Delegate Robin Grammer, a founding member of the Maryland Freedom Caucus from Baltimore County.

Grammer added, "The Maryland Freedom Caucus has put affordability at the center of every fight in Annapolis, from electric bills to the increase in car registration fees. Marylanders are voting with their feet."

Related:

• "Billion-Dollar Ghost Town" Surrounds Under Armor Headquarters

• Downtown Baltimore CRE Crash Signals Deeper Fiscal Crisis Ahead

• Build It, And They Will Come? Not The Case At Baltimore's Harbor East Luxury Tower

• "Exponentially Deteriorating": Baltimore's Lawlessness Spreads Into Suburbs As Democrats Lose Control

Maryland is likely on track to become the California of the East Coast, as progressive policies over the last half century have epically backfired, unleashing crime and chaos, unaffordability, high taxes, and a deteriorating quality of life.

The end result of this left-wing experiment is a massive population collapse in Baltimore City and negative net domestic migration for the state. The city was once the beating heart of American industrialization, but it has now transformed into an economic wasteland run by unhinged left-wing politicians.

However, there is good news. The remaining residents who are sticking out the looming financial crisis, as well as a worsening power bill crisis, in the state and city are beginning to see these politicians for what they really are: left-wing activists. They are also beginning to understand that the pillaging and corruption must end. Hence, the rise of the Maryland Freedom Caucus.

Notably, Hopkins is considered a left-leaning institution, which makes the survey even more concerning for Maryland's Democratic leadership. Additionally, the state's top media outlet, The Baltimore Sun, is leaning more center-right under new ownership, suggesting that left-wing propaganda in print and on the airwaves no longer works. This shift may usher in new, common-sense ideas and welcome a new era of politicians unlike anything the city or central part of the state has seen in generations.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 22:10

Can Progressivism Be Overthrown?

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

For the last year and a half, Americans have been slammed with politics to the point that it has made vast numbers of people nearly crazy. Following the news, the blow-by-blow is not easy, and it is worse seeing coalitions form, collapse, reconstitute, form again, and be witness nonstop to what seem to be subversions, betrayals, duplicates, and disappointments.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the University of Texas at Austin, in Austin, Texas, on April 15, 2026. AP Photo/Eric Gay

We follow the polls, donate to candidates, listen to podcasts, cheer our friends and boo the bad guys, all in this exciting spectator sport. I'm told it's not really this way in Europe. Americans have a distinct sense of investment in the way our public life operates and we believe we can and should do something about it.

Do we really have a clear conception of the larger forces at work? I sense that what is lacking is a clear-headed theory about what is actually going on, that is the thematics of the larger struggle going on here.

Oh sure, there are plenty of people who will tell you that this is about stopping the attempt of Donald Trump to be like a king. My neighborhood was filled with "No Kings" yard signs, until the same households quietly took them down as they cheered the visit of King Charles of Britain.

Others say this is really a struggle between the two political parties, an argument about U.S. foreign policy interests, wrangling over personnel, and so on. I'm not going to discount other theories entirely but what they all lack is a bigger philosophical way to understand our times.

A Supreme Court Justice recently gave a spectacular speech, one of the most important - probably THE most important - in a century or more. I've rarely read anything so clear, concise, accurate, and incredibly truth-telling.

Those who understand the speech and its message are going to be better positioned to understand what is really going on in our times. Those who ignore this speech will continue to be mystified by the day-to-day headlines and roiling political news.

The author and speaker is Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most impactful voices of our times. It was delivered at the University of Texas, Austin, on April 15, 2026.

The core underlying message: Progressivism is falling apart or already is gone because it is contrary to the American idea. The remaining argument today that matters is what will replace it.

To understand the implications, we need to understand what Progressivism is, the role it played in remaking this country, its theory of power and expertise, why it was never consistent with American ideals, and why it is destined for the dust bin of history.

He begins with the historical context and the centrality of the Declaration of Independence. It "did not establish a form of government - that was the job of the Constitution that followed - but it stated the purpose of government. The Declaration made clear in unmistakable prose that the purpose of government is to protect our God-given inalienable rights, rights that all individuals equally possess."

"The ideas of the Declaration," he says, "were so powerful that our nation could not coexist with the contradiction created by the great evil of slavery. Those principles were so powerful that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and died in the Civil War to make men free. Those ideas have been so powerful that they convinced our nation to finally end segregation. They continue to be so powerful today that they have inspired people throughout the world to throw off the shackles of their oppressors."

As he says, the Founders were willing to commit everything with great courage to the cause of individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was not mere philosophy but life purpose, something for which they were willing to fight with courage and enormous risk and sacrifice. That decision shaped the American experience.

It is about a third of the way through where the speech gets hot and revealing of a history that very few students or adults today understand. He explained how the advent of Progressivism in the early teens of the 20th century effectively attacked and overthrew the vision of the Founders and the Declaration.

"At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream," he says. "The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th President, Woodrow Wilson, called it Progressivism. Since Wilson's presidency, Progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

"Progressivism was not native to America," he continues in ways that are consistent with everything I've read about this period. Indeed, some of the most influential intellectuals that emerged on the U.S. scene in that time had in fact done their graduate work in Germany, schooled in the dreams of technocracy and centralized social and economic management.

"Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck's Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe. Wilson called Germany's system of relatively unimpeded state power 'nearly perfected.'"

To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were "a lot of nonsense." Wilson redefined "liberty" not as a natural right antecedent to the government. Instead he saw liberty as "the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests." The government, as Wilson said, would be "beneficent and indispensable."

Progressivism, says Thomas, "requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights."

It was this period in history when the original design of the Constitution was mangled with a 16th Amendment that authorized the income tax and the 17th Amendment that turned the bicameral Congress into a unitary majoritarian body, thus empowering large cities over states. The central bank came along at the same time. The federal agencies grew and grew, with ever more power and invasions of rights.

Central to the Progressive vision was the exaltation of science, as understood by credentialed experts, at the expense of liberty. They believed that Darwin had demonstrated the dangers of unchecked procreation and sought to replace freedom with race theory, segregation, and eugenics. This wicked vision of the purpose of government mutated further in Europe with the rise of Nazism, fascism, communism, and the administrative state that effectively deleted people's government.

Justice Thomas explains all of this in bracingly brief form. It is an extremely satisfying read because he compresses hundreds of books into a short address. I frankly doubt that any Supreme Court Justice has dropped so many truth bombs in such a short space in the history of our country.

The central point: the entire vision failed. It did not give us a better managed society but social and economic stagnation, an overweening government ruled by supposed experts, invasions of our communities and families, and a crushing of individual liberty.

Make no mistake: all of this flowed from a philosophy of government that had nothing to do with the Founders' vision.

The system that displaced the Founders' structure is under pressure as never before today. Indeed, Progressivism is unraveling in our times because it has failed to live up to its promise, it breeds corporate corruption, it impoverishes people, and it is contrary to all our moral intuitions as a people.

"As we are gathered to celebrate this 250th anniversary of the Declaration," he concludes, "it may be tempting to do so as if we are passive spectators. It may be tempting to ... treat the Declaration like a shiny object or a keepsake, and listen to the sound of our own voices. ... What we must turn our attention to today is finding in ourselves the same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs."

His final message to students: "Each of you will have opportunities to be courageous every day, whether your calling in life is as a day laborer, a stay-at-home mom, a small business owner, an educator, an office worker, a judge, or a Senator. It may mean speaking up in class tomorrow when everyone around you expects you to live by lies. ... It may mean turning down a job offer that requires you to make moral compromises. One thing I know to be true: It will mean waking up every day with the resolve to withstand unfair criticism and attacks. These are the choices that will confront you, and you must decide whether to respond with timidity or with courage, as the signers of the Declaration did."

Hear, hear! This is a mighty and glorious speech in all its essentials, worthy of deep study and wide readership. Once you internalize the meaning of it all, and consider how the Founders confronted a system they too had to overthrow in order to realize the blessings of liberty, our task becomes very clear.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 21:45

“We Must Leap Forward Into New Energy” - Canaccord’s Inaugural Nuclear Nexus Conference 

A new report from Canaccord Genuity captures the main threads from the firm’s first Nuclear Nexus conference, where fission and fusion developers, academics, and investors gathered to confront the practical barriers to scaling nuclear power. 

The event highlighted a shared recognition that surging electricity demand from AI data centers “finds itself bottle-necked by the physical reality of the grid”, forcing a hard look at fuel supply chains, regulatory timelines, and technology choices that can actually deliver power this decade.

The forum set out to connect the established track record of fission with the still-developing promise of fusion. Participants framed the two paths as complementary: one centered on controlled separation to release energy at scale, the other on forcing materials together under extreme conditions to achieve the same goal. 

Canaccord’s summary presents this tension as more than rhetoric, noting that Western nuclear deployment has lagged for decades, while Asia and Russia have moved ahead, driving up costs and exposing fuel vulnerabilities.

Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte outlined the company’s Aurora Powerhouse, a liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor drawing on proven EBR-II technology and a build-own-operate model. He stressed the importance of securing a domestic HALEU supply chain through Idaho National Laboratory and Centrus, with longer-term options that include spent fuel reprocessing and access to government plutonium reserves suited to fast reactor designs. 

The discussion tied directly into broader concerns about Western dependence on foreign enriched uranium sources.

MIT professor Jacopo Buongiorno highlighted how the lack of recent construction experience in the West has roughly doubled nuclear build costs compared with earlier decades. He noted that small modular reactors are more likely to provide financing flexibility than dramatically lower electricity costs, and that HALEU supply remains a critical chokepoint. 

The contrast with rapid expansion in Asia and continued Russian export dominance was presented as a structural challenge rather than a temporary setback.

On the fusion side, UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Mike Gorley described the technology as fundamentally a large-scale thermal engineering problem rather than pure physics. A key constraint he flagged is the global shortage of Lithium-6, essential for tritium breeding and reactor performance. 

Several companies presented deployment timelines. Terra Innovatum’s SOLO microreactor is designed to run on either LEU or HALEU and incorporates inherent safety features that eliminate meltdown and explosion risks. The company is targeting a first-of-a-kind demonstration in 2027 and commercial units in 2028 under the NRC’s proposed Part 57 microreactor framework. 

Inertia is pursuing inertial confinement fusion and plans to begin construction of a 1.5 GW grid-scale plant in 2030 after solving manufacturing challenges for high-efficiency lasers and fuel targets. 

Newcleo is advancing lead-cooled fast reactors with MOX fuel and has partnered with Oklo to establish a U.S. MOX fabrication capability, addressing the domestic prohibition on commercial plutonium reprocessing.

MIT professors Dennis Whyte and Andrew Lo described their new Rutherford Energy Ventures vehicle as a diversified portfolio approach across the fusion value chain. They cited easier regulatory pathways for fusion compared with fission and immediate revenue potential from spin-off technologies as reasons the sector could reach system-level integration within the next decade, aided by hyperscaler demand.

TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, received a landmark NRC construction permit in March 2026 for its Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor in Wyoming. The company is on track for a 2030 startup and has signed a major agreement with Meta to develop up to eight additional Natrium units capable of supplying 4 GW of dispatchable power to data centers. 

Zap Energy is running a dual-track program that pairs a Z-pinch fusion reactor with a simpler sodium-cooled fission microreactor, planning to deploy the lower-risk fission technology in the early 2030s before scaling fusion later in the decade.

Panels on critical materials and isotopes pointed to persistent supply constraints for both medical isotopes and nuclear fuel components that are expected to last through the 2020s due to underinvestment and lengthy permitting. ASP Isotopes is commercializing laser-based enrichment, SHINE Technologies is generating near-term revenue from isotope production and fusion-fission hybrids, and Uranium Energy Corp is positioning its U.S.-focused uranium assets against a projected 1.9-billion-pound market deficit.

NuScale and its development partner ENTRA1 are advancing a six-plant deployment across the Tennessee Valley Authority territory, with four sites already identified. 

Participants noted that while evolutionary light-water designs are likely to lead near-term deployments, Generation IV reactors should play a larger role through the 2030s. Elementl framed itself as a technology-agnostic integrator focused on scaling proven light-water reactor projects to 100 GW by 2040 while hyperscalers such as Google provide early demand signals.

The report leaves the impression that the nuclear sector is entering a more dynamic period, but one still defined by practical constraints on fuel, regulation, and execution speed rather than by any single breakthrough technology.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 21:20

It's Not Iran Trapping Ships In The Hormuz, It's The Insurance Risk

Is the Iranian regime the immediate barrier to oil tankers seeking to exit the Strait of Hormuz, or is it fear of liability that's keeping shipping companies at bay?

The damage actually done to Iran's military and weaponry by US strikes is a matter of hot debate, but one aspect of the strikes that is relatively easy to confirm is the destruction to Iran's navy.  US Central Command indicates that around 92% of Iran's naval capacity has been sunk to the bottom of the ocean including at least 10 small submarines.  So far, the regimes ability to actually hit and destroy US ships is next to nil.

The much vaunted "mosquito fleet" of small and fast attack boats has proven to be ineffective against US operations in the Strait, with some naval ships traveling directly through the Hormuz without much trouble.  At bottom, Iran has no ability to enforce an effective "blockade" on the strait. 

The regime's containment is mostly restricted to the use of drones, which can be countered with US technology (jamming and counter-drone operations).  But Iran also understands that the volatility of the cargo and the insurance risk is the greater element working in their favor. 

In other words, no matter how effective US forces have been in destroying Iran's assets in the strait, the financial risk to oil shippers remains.  Insurance companies are the Trump Administration's biggest obstacle, not Iran's military.  Tankers will not budge because there are too many coverage gaps, including the dreaded environmental coverage gap.

Pre-conflict, the insurance premium baseline for the Hormuz was extremely low (0.25% of a ships total value).  Today, those premiums have spiked from 2% to 10%.  Major insurers including P&I clubs like Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard and London P&I issued cancellation notices for war-risk coverage in the Persian Gulf area, effective in March. Reinsurers pulled back, forcing repricing.  The costs are far too high and the risk outweighs the reward. 

Traffic in the strait dropped by 80% almost immediately because of the loss of insurance.  This created a self-reinforcing problem: Even with limited US naval guidance ("Project Freedom") or occasional Iranian-coordinated passages, commercial operators avoid the risk without affordable coverage.

Industry brokers and shipping executives assert that the costs cannot be managed, and they have decided to adopt a "wait and see" approach on negotiations. Marcus Baker, Global Head of Marine, Cargo & Logistics at Marsh notes that tankers remain “insurable, if you’re prepared to take the risk...” but he emphasized the massive cost barrier for most operators.  

Interestingly, Iran's latest negotiation salvo on the strait focuses on their own crypto-based insurance scheme.  It effectively amounts to a "protection racket", forcing companies to buy insurance from the regime in exchange for safe passage.  However, there have been few takers; most shippers don't trust Iran to ensure the safety of their vessels.   

The obvious first solution would be for the Trump Administration to offer US backed coverage for tankers traversing the Hormuz.  This already happened in March.

Early in the war President Trump directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide political risk insurance and financial guarantees for maritime trade in the Gulf region.  A maritime reinsurance facility was established offering up to $40 billion for hull & machinery, cargo, and in some expansions, liability risks. It partners with major insurers like Chubb and AIG.

The alternative coverage is reasonable, but there are some problems.  The US is not offering full coverage which includes environmental damages should an oil spill take place, along with other gaps which prevent shippers from taking the deal.  It also does not yet guarantee full escort protection for tankers traversing the strait, a factor which has been up in the air due to negotiations. 

Analysts at Moody's note that US government-backed coverage will not fully restart flows without broader liability protections.

In other words, if the Trump Administration wants to get ships moving out of the strait anytime soon, they will have to amend their insurance to cover all gaps including environmental risk.  And, they will have to provide a reliable escort system.  This can be easily accomplished with Littoral combat ships with anti-mine and anti-air capability and anti-drone tech that are able to operate in shallow and narrow waters.  These ships have some of the most advanced automated anti-drone systems in the world.  

Accurate details on negotiations with the Iranian regime are sparse.  Iran's propaganda operations on social media often contradict their own diplomatic statements.  It's important to keep in mind that the regime is concerned with looking weak to their own population, and the constant posturing online is often designed to keep their citizenry in line rather than frighten the US.

There are also questions as to who is actually in charge.  Iran's new "supreme leader" has not been seen alive since the decapitation strikes.  Theories suggest the IRGC has reanimated the corpse of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei through propaganda as a means to maintain a semblance of government authority. 

It may be that no one is really at the wheel in Iran and that current negotiations are nothing more than a stalling tactic while the remaining officials vie for power.  A deal may be close, but alternatives need to be considered.  All other factors aside (including Iran's stockpile of nearly 1000 pounds of 60% enriched Uranium which they openly admit to having), the Strait of Hormuz may require solutions outside of a deal with Iran.  And, those ships simply will not move without some impressive financial guarantees from the US.        

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 20:30

Electric Bills Could Be 2026 Election Shocker

Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If all politics is local, as former House Speaker Tip O'Neill said in tying politicians' fortunes to constituents' pocketbooks, then a voter's electricity bill is about as local as an issue can get, landing on kitchen tables every month.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

With electricity costs spiking for many of the nation's 133 million households, this local issue could determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress or Democrats seize one or both chambers in November's midterm elections.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, average residential electricity rates increased nationwide nearly 13 percent from April 2020 to April 2025. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, they've increased 6 percent.

Electricity prices are expected to increase, on average nationwide, by another 6 percent in 2026, the administration projects, and as much as 40 percent by 2030, warns economic development finance firm ICF.

The reason is simple: supply and demand. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. projected in its 2026 long-term reliability assessment report that electricity demand will increase in the coming decade by 70 percent more than what was estimated in 2024. Many analyses find that overall demand will increase 25 percent by 2030.

The surge is driven by the development of power-hungry data centers, artificial intelligence computing, advanced manufacturing, and "the electrification of everything," with the average home featuring up to 21 digital devices - all eating electricity all the time.

The solution is also simple: The nation's 2,896 utility companies must increase the electricity their power plants produce with the most abundant, least expensive energy sources. Meanwhile, the nation's seven major grid operators must add up to 7,500 miles a year to their 240,000-mile network of high-voltage transmission lines while also upgrading up to 100,000 miles of those live wires, through 2035.

But determining what solutions work best and what long-term investments to make is a complex $1 trillion challenge mired in partisan politics and buried in century-old federal, state, and local regulations.

Not only are utilities and regional transmission operators amping up from a standing start after nearly two decades of inertia, but many are scrambling to keep pace with swelling demand while also building out generation and transmission capacities to meet projected need.

The cost of these capital improvements is showing up in customers' electricity bills, leading to heightened scrutiny of investment decisions and generation choices, as well as spurring debate about how individual communities want to develop, all while meeting a Trump administration mandate to expand rapidly to win the "AI arms race" with China.

The focus and investment is long overdue, said Robert Bryce, a film producer and author of a widely read Substack on the grid and seven books on energy policies, including, "A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations."

"Given what we've seen in recent months, where both Republicans and Democrats are focusing on power prices, it's clear that the days of ignoring the electric grid - and its pivotal role in our society - are over," he told The Epoch Times. "That's a good thing."

Bills On The Ballot

Rising electricity, health care, gasoline, and grocery prices are components of the 2026 midterms' top issue - affordability, as voters question why they're paying so much for basic needs.

A sampling: Electricity bills were among primary concerns cited by 84 percent of 2,710 nationwide respondents in a January Climate Power survey. Eight of every 10 in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll of 1,426 voters that same month said "affordability" was their top issue, with 22 percent placing electricity just below gasoline and grocery prices. In a March Environmental Defense Fund poll of 1,000 Florida voters, 57 percent said electric bills are stressing household budgets.

Data center development is the lightning rod of this angst. In a January Pew Research Center poll of 8,512 adults, nearly 40 percent blamed data centers for higher utility bills. A February Politico national survey of 2,000 voters found nearly half see energy costs spurred by data centers as a top issue in congressional, state, and local elections.

How campaigns tackle "electricity inflation" will be pivotal in many of November's 33 U.S. Senate elections, especially in Maine, Michigan, and Ohio races rated as "toss-ups" by Cook Political Reports. Sixteen House campaigns, including 13 seats held by GOP incumbents, are classified as "toss-ups."

Assuaging voter anger over rising electricity bills will be among defining factors in many of these elections and will determine whether Republicans hold on to their 53-47 Senate majority and 217-212 House advantage.

"I have been writing about politics and energy for three decades," Bryce said. "I cannot remember another time when so many politicians, from all parts of the political spectrum, are talking about electricity."

Aron Solomon, chief strategy officer for campaign consultancy Amplify Inc., told The Epoch Times: "This is, honestly, shaping up to be one of the most interesting political issues of the 2026 cycle because electricity bills hit people in a very direct, and profoundly emotional way.

"Voters may not follow every inflation report or Fed decision, but they for sure notice when their monthly power bill suddenly jumps."

University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs professor Charles Bullock III said electricity bills are ripe targets for Democrats looking to unseat Republicans, who voters will perceive as responsible - fairly or not - for rising rates.

"When we get beyond the primaries and we move into the fall - and I could see this happening for a variety of offices - the Democrat accusing the Republican of not having done something to try to constrain energy costs" will be a standard pitch, he told The Epoch Times.

This tactic already proved itself successful in November 2025 with Democrats citing Republican policies for skyrocketing electricity bills in winning gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and in two Democrats unseating GOP incumbents in Georgia Public Service Commission races.

Blame Biden

There are well-defined partisan trenches on federal energy policies that voters believe manifest in their electricity bills. Those differences emerge starkly every spring and summer in congressional budget hearings.

The general gist is that Republicans say higher electricity bills are the residual fallout from President Joe Biden's "green energy" push that funneled billions into renewable energy and regulatory paralysis fostered by interpretative expansions of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act that induce litigation, prolong timelines, and add expenses to energy projects, including grid initiatives.

"There are few policy areas where reality asserts itself faster than it does in the field of energy," Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said during an April 21 hearing on the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2027 spending request.

"During the Biden administration, energy policy shifted away from reliability and toward favored sources, toward favored outcomes, and long, brittle supply chains that begin overseas. They assumed the system would hold together anyway, and it didn't."

In Trump's second term, his administration has tossed aside any "all of the above" pretense to aggressively champion "baseload" oil, gas, and coal production as well as nuclear energy development while rolling back environmental regulations and reviving the nation's refining and mining industries.

The president has orchestrated a "whole-of-government" focus on energy development, beginning with several day-one executive actions: declaring a national energy emergency, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, opening Alaska's "extraordinary resource potential" to development, and pausing federally permitted offshore wind projects he's derided as boondoggle "wind mills."

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum often reiterate that increasing natural gas and coal production and developing emerging nuclear technologies, rather than investing in "intermittent" renewables such as solar and wind, are key to scaling up the grid to accommodate data centers and other large load users. Both have said this is not only as an "affordability" consumer issue, but also as a national security imperative.

Wright has issued at least six emergency orders under the Federal Power Act to require retiring coal-fired power plants remain operable, if not actually operating, to ensure regional grids have capacity to generate electricity during peak demand, such as summer heatwaves and winter storms.

As of 2025, there were 401 coal-fired power plants in the United States, the last one coming online in 2013, according to America's Power, which advocates on behalf of the nation's coal-fired power plants. The Energy Information Administration documented in late 2024 that 173 of those units in 33 states were set to close by 2030, a pace accelerated by the Biden administration's Clean Power Plant 2.0 and Greenhouse Gas rules, which required them to trim emissions by 90 percent or shut down.

Once primary races are settled, when congressional Republicans and candidates face off against Democrats in 2026 general election campaigns, they will claim they inherited rising electricity prices from Biden policies. They will point to actions such as repealing power plant rules, scaling back environmental laws, trimming regulations, streamlining permitting, reinvigorating fossil fuel development, building nuclear reactors, and expanding the nation's 3.3 million mile natural gas pipeline network as ways to address energy affordability, which, they're certain to note, is more an issue in Democrat-led states than in GOP-governed states.

Blame Trump

Democrats' general election campaign pitch will claim the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are directly responsible for spiking electricity bills by ditching support for "all of the above" energy to exclusively favor fossil fuels while pulling the plug on assistance programs and renewable energy investments, especially solar, which has been the largest source of new electricity generation nationwide since 2020.

They point to initiatives adopted the last time Democrats held both chambers: 2021's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022's CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized billions in tax credits, low-interest loans, and grant programs incentivizing private investments in renewable energies, advanced manufacturing, and grid expansion.

Many Inflation Reduction Act initiatives and grants were suspended under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act adopted in partisan votes and signed into law by Trump in July 2025.

In October 2025, the administration canceled, or "clawed back," $8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act allocations for 223 renewable energy projects, nearly all in Democrat-led states.

"Satisfying a president's desire for political revenge or intimidation is not a lawful basis for terminating projects that were on track to help reduce soaring electricity prices," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Wright during the April 21 hearing.

"These cancellations on a political basis are a blatant betrayal of the communities, the workers, and the businesses counting on those investments to lower their energy costs, and now it is those communities, workers, and businesses who will pay the price regardless of their particular politics."

Although Congress appropriated $8.8 billion for home energy rebates in 2026 to purchase more energy efficient appliances and for "weatherization" upgrades, the Department of Energy has stalled implementation in nearly 40 states, he said.

"That's obstruction," Heinrich said, "and while these cost-saving programs are being obstructed, the department is taking actions that actively raise prices. This [2027] budget reflects the same lack of concern for the real costs facing hard-working families trying to keep the lights on and their vehicles on the road."

The department's spending request eliminates the Weatherization Assistance Program, "which saves households, on average, $372 every year," he said. "It also rescinds another $15.2 billion of [Inflation Reduction Act] funding - congressionally directed funds that are ready to go out the door to support grid reliability and help reduce electricity prices."

After primaries set November ballots, when Congressional Democrats and candidates square off against Republicans in 2026 general election campaigns, they will pledge to restore these programs, revive defunded projects that boost grid capacity, encourage "all of the above" energies - especially nuclear - while refunding grants that advance renewables, which 65 percent of 3,524 adults surveyed in March 2026 by Pew Research Center said they support, including 44 percent of Republicans.

An aerial view shows a 49.5-megawatt, three-level data center under construction in Vernon, Calif., on April 14, 2026. Rising electricity costs for many of the nation’s 133 million households could shape control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Mario Tama/Getty Images Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 20:05

The DNC Finally Releases Its 2024 Autopsy, And It's A Total Whitewash

The Democratic National Committee has released its long-awaited "autopsy" of the 2024 presidential election, and it is getting panned from all sides for being evasive, poorly constructed, and conspicuously silent on the two most consequential decisions the party made in 2024.

DNC Chair Ken Martin had been sitting on this report since late last year. He pledged transparency, then reversed course in December, saying he would not release it. The reversal created a slow-motion credibility crisis. NBC News described Martin as having "been pummeled in public for months" over the episode, and last week Kamala Harris herself called for the report to be made public. So Martin released it on Thursday, though not quite on his own terms. 

"When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over,” Martin said in a statement Thursday.

“I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on the report that was produced." 

Martin continued, "After last November's massive Democratic wins, I didn't want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize."

 The document was released in full, but no one seems to be satisfied with it.

NBC News reported that large sections are devoted to "a lengthy recap of modern American political history dating to the 2008 presidential election, historic fundraising and spending data from past elections, and more." The annotations flagged factual errors, including incorrect election results, and challenged claims that the annotators said were unsupported by evidence. 

When the report does engage with 2024, it leans on broad themes like an “inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters” that provided the GOP “with opportunities for advancement at the expense of Democratic growth, evolution, and ability to find common ground with seemingly disparate groups of voters from coast to coast, and the heartland Democrats tend to ignore.” It also claims that Harris failed to make her positions known and didn’t go far enough in attacking Trump, in an apparent attempt to avoid addressing the specific problems with the campaign. 

The report also claimed that state parties were underfunded and that Democratic infrastructure was too weak in key battlegrounds. However, that argument doesn’t align with the actual circumstances of the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign raised and spent more than $1 billion, giving her every conceivable resource advantage heading into the election. 

Despite the massive war chest, the campaign failed to win a single swing state. Rather than confront why all that money still couldn’t connect with working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the report leans heavily on vague complaints about “messaging” while largely ignoring the real problems that doomed her campaign.

CNN Senior Reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere pointed out what the report conspicuously omits. “It does not touch a couple of topics that a lot of people were very interested in, and thought were the reasons for this report not being out,” he said. “There's nothing about Joe Biden and what happened in the debate. There's nothing about Kamala Harris getting the nomination without any kind of primary process. And also there is nothing about the way that voters were responding to Gaza and how the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris policies and comments about it were hitting their minds.”

CNN just spent an entire segment proving the DNC autopsy is every bit as bad and evasive as we expected.

"There are a lot of things in that version that are incomplete, uh, and also it does not touch a couple topics that a lot of people were very interested in and thought were… pic.twitter.com/wxbsg5M8XB

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) May 21, 2026

Democrats themselves have not been kind.

 "It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney, because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) told CNN. "Obviously, it was the Joe Biden issue at the debate. It was the switchover to Kamala without a process. And, at the end of the day, Democrats weren't talking enough about affordability and the economy." 

Moskowitz added, “We're too afraid to tell them the truth. They know the truth. They saw the debate. They saw what happened."

BREAKING: Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz is calling the 2024 DNC Autopsy report "malpractice."

"It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly."

"We got SHELLACKED in the last election. I mean, we lost every single solitary swing… pic.twitter.com/RgRxbpdxVX

— Turning Point Action Rapid Response (@TPARapidRep) May 21, 2026

Former CNN commentator Chris Cillizza also bashed the autopsy.

“I was a BIG advocate for the DNC releasing the 2024 autopsy,” he wrote on X. “Having now read it, I can see now why there was so much resistance within some corners of the party to releasing it. It is an utter disaster. And a failure on virtually every front.”

He expressed his frustration in a video post.

“Takeaway number one: Joe Biden is almost not in this report,” he said. “So it's 192 pages long. Again, how many times and what section do you believe how much time is devoted to Joe Biden's advanced age? He was 81 years old in 2024. And the concerns that the public voiced over and over again to pollsters that he was too old to do the job and shouldn't run again. It's zero. There is no mention of Biden's age, the polling on his age, his infirmity physically and mentally that was on display, the hiding of Biden from the public. There's none of it.”

Cillizza continued, “In fact, I was so surprised that after I kind of scanned through the entire 192-page document, I did a control F, a find, and I searched for Biden's name because I figured I must have missed that section. No, I didn't miss that section. The only acknowledgement is this statement. Two sentences. ‘The debate obviously changed many things. The dial testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the president's performance in a post debate survey was scrapped.’ Okay, that's it. That's it about the debate, Biden's age, etc.”

"The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped." -- DNC Autopsy

WHAT? They canceled polling after Biden's disastrous debate performance? WHY???

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

A brutal chart from the DNC autopsy pic.twitter.com/fwfwREmxdH

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

"The White House did not position or prepare the Vice President. Had the White House explored and evaluated ways to leverage Kamala Harris earlier in the administration, perhaps it would have improved the President’s standing, and it certainly could have helped prepare her to…

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

The real autopsy, the one the DNC apparently declined to write, would grapple with candidate quality, a compressed general election timeline, unpopular policies, and the impact of covering up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and letting him implode on stage with President Trump.

Instead, the party hid behind clichés and generic excuses, ignoring what really went wrong.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 19:40

American Freight Revival Enters Next Phase As Illegal Alien Trucker Chaos Continues

Submitted by American Truckers United,

In a unanimous landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) does not protect freight brokers from state-law negligence claims when they carelessly hire unsafe motor carriers.

Landmark win for trucking safety this morning.

The Supreme Court rules UNANIMOUSLY against the broker that helped put the illegal alien who hit Dalilah Coleman on the road.

As a result of this decision, trucking brokers can be liable for negligently giving loads to illegal… https://t.co/0pYntFxiDx

— Senator Jim Banks (@SenatorBanks) May 14, 2026

The case, Shawn Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, et al., marks a seismic shift in the trucking industry. For the first time in years, brokers can be held accountable when their profit-driven shortcuts lead to deadly crashes. This is a massive victory for crash victims and the small- to midsize carriers who actually move America's freight.

American Truckers United (ATU) proudly filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the petitioner, exposing how blanket broker immunity had fueled a dangerous race to the bottom.

"It is implausible that Congress sought to immunize brokers from tort liability when their negligence leads to fatal or injurious motor vehicle crashes," our brief stated. "Any time the government provides immunity from suit, it picks economic winners and losers… There is no reason to believe Congress chose negligent brokers to be the winners."

🚨 The Supreme Court will soon rule in a blockbuster case that could impact liability for crashes involving unvetted carriers and truck drivers: Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II and C.H. Robinson. The trucking industry—and especially brokers—is watching very closely.

Freight… pic.twitter.com/csbNMFiRVu

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) March 10, 2026

The Broken System That Needed Fixing

For too long, freight brokers have operated with near-total immunity while sitting in the middle of every transaction, pocketing the spread between what shippers pay and what they actually pay carriers.  

Their incentive was brutally simple: hire the absolute cheapest truck possible — safety, maintenance, and regulatory compliance be damned.

Resulting in brokerage's share of the freight market exploding from roughly 6% twenty-five years ago to 29% today. Much of that growth came by flooding the market with cut-rate, often illicit capacity — including non-domiciled foreign drivers operating under lower standards that undercut responsible American operators.

Legacy American carriers shuttered at historic rates. Small fleets filed bankruptcy in droves. Mega-brokers and a handful of giant carriers captured massive new market share. The human cost was measured in wrecked trucks, ruined families, and lives lost on our highways.

A recent viral crash in California involving an illegal alien truck driver from India brought the issue back into sharp focus — and raised the obvious question: Which broker put that truck on the road?

🚨New Fatal Truck Crash in California! 2 people killed! Truck Driver "Manvir Singh" facing several charges including vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, resisting police, and hit and run.

More details to follow. pic.twitter.com/Q6hZOV8AwZ

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) May 20, 2026

And more. 

At least four Indian illegal alien truck drivers with CDLs have been arrested for allegedly causing deadly crashes that have killed multiple innocent people in different parts of the country.

Manvir Singh (CA)
Jashanpreet Singh (CA)
Harjinder Singh (FL)
Sukhdeep Singh (IN) pic.twitter.com/2ofd7QYSfp

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 21, 2026

The Turning Point

Back in December, momentum was already building toward meaningful reform. The Supreme Court decision has now cemented the recovery.

2026 will be "The Official Comeback Year of the American Truck Driver"!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to America's truck drivers and their families!

God is using this Administration to answer our prayers.

What started as a grassroots fight in Arkansas has become a… pic.twitter.com/qFyA5KOA9p

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) December 26, 2025

Spot truckload rates just hit an all-time record of $3.69 per mile. For the first time since 2022, the American trucker ecosystem is returning to profitability. The playing field is finally leveling.

Related:

• Flatbed Truck Rates Hit New Highs As These Drivers Fuel Boom

Videos circulating over the weekend showed foreign drivers suddenly struggling to secure loads — an encouraging early signal that the era of unchecked undercutting may be ending.

It took less than 24 hours for brokers to tighten the belt after the Supreme Court ruled that brokers could be held liable for carrier accidents WOW!

#Truckers #trucking #truckinglife @topfans pic.twitter.com/MEnvzcKkar

— GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE (@GOP_is_Gutless) May 16, 2026

What Comes Next

The Supreme Court has restored balance to this critical issue. Congress must now complete the work by promptly passing Dalilah's Law. This legislation would require the revocation of commercial driver's licenses held by illegal aliens and ensure that such licenses can never be reissued.

American Truckers United will continue fighting for safer roads, fairer competition, and real relief for asset-based carriers, hardworking American truck drivers, and the families of crash victims.

The Great American Trucker Revival is underway. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 19:15

Turkey Markets Crash After Court Unseats Opposition Head In Latest Erdogan Power Grab

Shortly after we learned that Turkey had sold virtually all of its Treasuries in March to defend the lira after the Iran war broke out, the country was thrown into fresh political turmoil on Thursday when a Turkish court removed the leader of the country’s main opposition party in a landmark ruling that triggered a stock market crash, including one marketwide halt, and could strengthen President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grip on power while further alienating foreign capital.

The Ankara appeals court annulled the results of the 2023 congress of the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials CHP, the party’s deputy chairwoman Gul Ciftci told Bloomberg on Thursday. The decision voids the election of Ozgur Ozel as CHP chairman. The party can appeal the ruling.

The decision reinstates the CHP’s previous administration, including former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who lost a presidential race to Erdogan in 2023. The ruling also effectively cancels all decisions made by the party since the 2023 congress, according to the verdict.

By further hollowing out the political opposition and hampering the CHP’s efforts to secure the release of Imamoglu, Erdogan’s most prominent political rival, the decision eases the president’s ability to tighten his grip on power. Imamoglu has been behind bars since March 2025. Although he’s the CHP’s presidential candidate for elections slated for 2028, he may not be eligible for the ballot due to the cancellation of his university diploma.

Turkish stocks plunged after the court decision, with the benchmark Borsa Istanbul 100 Index closing 6.1% down. The sharp decline triggered a market-wide circuit breaker. Five-year credit default swaps rose 12 basis points to 253 basis points, while the lira was little changed and trading at 45.6133 per US dollar as of 6:09 p.m. Istanbul time although with little reserves left to defend the currency, we expect a painful and sharp devaluation in the coming weeks.

“While the central bank still has enough reserves to maintain the current policy framework, the buffer is wearing thin,” said David Austerweil, emerging-markets deputy portfolio manager at Van Eck Associates Corporation.

The decision paves the way for a comeback by former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, potentially derailing CHP unity in the run-up to the next presidential elections, which is currently set for 2028 but expected earlier. According to Bloomberg, it may also hamper the party’s efforts to secure the release of jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s most prominent political rival.

The biggest impact, however, was on the Turkish markets which were already strained by the fallout of the Iran war. As reported earlier, to support the lira, monetary authorities offloaded almost all of the country’s US Treasuries in March.

They have also sold much of the country's gold reserves, tightened liquidity, made lira funding costlier and asked state-run lenders to intervene in the currency market. The ruling on Thursday will likely put further pressure on Turkish assets and send the lira into a tailspin.

Ironically, the decision came while Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek and Central Bank Governor Fatih Karahan were in London courting investors. Both figures have been trying to attract foreign investment since taking over Turkey’s economic management in 2023. Their efforts were hampered after the arrest of Imamoglu last year, which led to a foreign investor exodus.

Hundreds of CHP figures have been detained since the 2024 elections, including the leaders of large cities. More recently, Erdogan's regime detained the mayor of Bursa, the country’s fourth-largest city, on charges of corruption and launched a probe against Ankara’s popular mayor, Mansur Yavas, over the alleged misuse of state resources. Like Imamoglu, Yavas is also seen as a potential presidential candidate. Opposition figures have said such charges are politically motivated.

In September, a court removed the CHP’s Istanbul leadership over allegations of corruption and appointed Gursel Tekin - a former Istanbul party chief and ally of Kilicdaroglu -  as trustee, another move that unnerved markets and triggered a selloff.

“The decision is an opportunity to unite,” Kilicdaroglu wrote on X after the ruling, having effectively reclaimed the party’s leadership. He had published a video the day before in which he spoke about the need to root out “corruption” within the CHP.

The ruling “will dent further risk appetite for TRY carry trades,” said Guillaume Tresca, an emerging market strategist at Generali Asset Management SpA. “Turkey is a trickier position than before.”

Turkey's five-year credit default swaps - a barometer of risk sentiment and odds of sovereign default - rose 19 basis points to 261 basis points.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 18:50

We Are 6 Months From Global Food Shortages Because Farmers Are Facing A Quadruple Whammy Crisis

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

We have never faced anything quite like this. Diesel fuel and fertilizer have become far more expensive as a result of the conflict in the Middle East, and extreme weather is playing havoc with crops all over the planet. Here in the United States, we just experienced the driest first three months of a year in recorded history. No, that isn’t an exaggeration. Now a “Super El Niño” is coming, and that means that drought conditions are going to get even worse in many areas of the world. The “Super El Niño” of 1877-1878 resulted in widespread droughts that killed more than 50 million people, and now we are being warned that the upcoming “Super El Niño” could be even worse. Our farmers have never faced a “perfect storm” of this magnitude, and global food production is going to be way down in the months ahead.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is publicly warning that a severe global food crisis could strike about 6 months from now if something really dramatic does not happen…

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz could trigger a severe global food price crisis within six to 12 months unless governments act quickly, the Food and Agriculture Organization warned Wednesday.

Decisions now by farmers and governments on fertilizer use, imports, financing and crop choices will determine whether food prices spike later this year or in early 2027, the agency said.

I don’t know what national governments around the world are supposed to do.

They can’t create fertilizer out of thin air.

Thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, millions of farmers all over the northern hemisphere didn’t get the fertilizer that they needed for the spring planting season.

UNDP Administrator Alexander De Croo is telling us that as a result “many places in the world will have problems of food shortage” once harvest season arrives…

Food shortages are expected to hit many parts of the world from September or October following a fertilizer production plunge, the U.N. Development Program’s head said on Monday.

“In September, (or) October, many places in the world will have problems of food shortage,” as agricultural production is expected to be much lower following the fertilizer production slump resulting from high oil prices amid Middle East conflicts, UNDP Administrator Alexander De Croo said in an interview in Tokyo.

Even if fertilizer is available, many farmers simply cannot afford it.

In fact, one recent survey discovered that 70 percent of U.S. farmers could not afford to buy all of the fertilizer that they needed for the spring planting season because it has become so expensive.

Meanwhile, diesel has become painfully expensive as well.

Virtually all farm equipment runs on diesel, and as I write this article the average price of a gallon of diesel in the U.S. is sitting at about five and a half dollars.

But in California, the average price of a gallon of diesel has reached nearly seven and a half dollars…

According to AAA, the average price for diesel fuel in California is about $7.43 per gallon, which is $2.36 higher compared to last year. In Fresno, prices are slightly higher.

“In Fresno, you’re paying about $6.06 for a gallon of regular gasoline, but you’re paying $7.48 for a gallon of diesel,” Johnson said.

You may not care about what is happening in California, but you should because California produces more fruit and more vegetables than any other state by a very wide margin.

Drought is another major problem that U.S. farmers are dealing with.

In West Texas, the cracks in the ground caused by endless drought are big enough to swallow an entire human hand…

Scott Irlbeck crouched in a field of stunted wheat plants in a parched stretch of West Texas and slipped his hand into a crack wide enough to swallow it.

Last autumn, Irlbeck planted a crop that barely grew because rain never came. ​He now hopes his insurance adjuster will declare it a total loss so he will not need to spend money on pricey fuel to harvest it next month.

Coming into this year, the southwestern portion of the nation was experiencing the worst multi-year drought in at least 1,200 years.

And then the first three months of this year were the driest first three months of a year for the entire country ever recorded.

As a result, it is being projected that the winter wheat harvest will be a disaster…

Crop estimates underscore just how bad the situation is. Growers will see their smallest wheat crop in terms of production since 1972, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1.56 billion bushels this year, down 21% from 2025. That’s especially harmful to Kansas, one of the top overall producers of wheat in the U.S.

This year, only 22 million acres of winter wheat will be harvested, and the abandonment rate is above 32 percent…

Only 32.4 million acres (13.1 million hectares) of wheat were planted this year to begin with, and harvested acreage hit just 22 million, marking abandonment, which is when farmers stop tending to a crop before harvesting, at slightly above 32% of this year’s wheat crop, according to USDA estimates.

Just think about those numbers for a moment.

Our farmers simply gave up on nearly a third of this year’s winter wheat crop.

Wow.

Looking ahead, we are being told that the number of acres of wheat that U.S. farmers are planting in the spring will be the fewest “since record keeping began in 1919”…

U.S. growers were poised to plant the fewest acres of wheat since record keeping began in 1919, as high costs for fertilizer, seeds, and equipment have made it difficult to turn a profit.

In 1919, there were 104 million people living in the United States.

Today, there are more than 340 million people living in the United States.

It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that we are headed for trouble.

And now a “Super El Niño” is looming…

A “Super El Niño” may be on its way and could impact weather in the United States and worldwide for the next several months.

El Niño is described by the National Weather Service (NWS) as “a state where the water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator become abnormally warm.” These warmer waters trigger significant weather pattern changes across the globe.

One expert is warning that there is approximately a 50 percent chance that this “Super El Niño” will be the most powerful ever recorded…

“I would suggest there is roughly a 50 per cent chance of the event becoming the strongest in the historical record right now,” Paul Roundy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany, in the US, told BBC Science Focus. “A few weeks ago, I was suggesting maybe 20 per cent.”

In a previous article, I discussed the fact that the “Super El Niño” of 1877-1878 caused widespread global famines that resulted in the deaths of 50 million people.

So how many will die during the “Super El Niño” that will begin later this year?

According to the UN, the number of people around the world there were experiencing acute hunger was already at an all-time record high even before the war with Iran started.

Now global hunger is spiking, and when people get really hungry they get really desperate.

For example, just check out what is going on in Afghanistan…

Khwaja Ahmad barely gets out a few words before he starts sobbing.

“We are starving. My older children died, so I need to work to feed my family. But I’m old, so no one wants to give me work,” he says.

When a local bakery near the square opens up, the owner distributes stale bread among the crowd. Within seconds, the loaves have been pulled apart, half a dozen men clutching onto precious pieces.

This should break your heart.

One extremely hungry man in Afghanistan says that he is willing to sell his own daughters just so that he will have enough money to buy food…

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children – seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making unbearable choices.

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread’. But what can I give? Where is the work?”

This is what is already happening.

Six months from now, the level of desperation around the world will be so much worse.

We need the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened as soon as possible, but that simply is not going to happen.

The Iranians are never going to give President Trump what he wants, and they are preparing for the next phase of the war…

Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf claimed Wednesday that the U.S. is looking to “start a new war,” a report said.

“The enemy’s movements, both overt and clandestine, show that despite economic and political pressure, it has not abandoned its military objectives and is seeking to start a new war,” Ghalibaf said in a statement shared by Iranian media, according to The Times of Israel.

“Close monitoring of the situation in the United States reinforces the possibility that they still hope for the surrender of the Iranian nation,” he reportedly added.

The next chapter of this war is not going to look like the last chapter.

The IRGC is openly telling us that they are ready to attack “in places you cannot even imagine”…

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned on Wednesday that any new attack on the country would provoke them to spread the war beyond the Middle East, raising the stakes of diplomatic efforts to end the conflict.

In a statement reported by Iranian state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a powerful military force that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, said that if “aggression against Iran is repeated,” it would deliver blows “in places you cannot even imagine.”

The Iranians know that they cannot win the war by fighting symmetrically.

So they are going to use asymmetric tools to get the job done.

And some of those asymmetric tools will not be conventional.

When fighting erupts again, I expect things to get really crazy.

What this means is that the Strait of Hormuz is going to remain closed for a long time, and that is really bad news for farmers all over the globe.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 18:25

Daily Wire Names New CEO As Audience, Revenue Challenges Mount

The Daily Wire announced Tuesday that CEO Caleb Robinson is stepping down effective immediately and transitioning to a board role while retaining significant ownership in the company. Mike Richards, who joined as President and Chief Content Officer roughly a year ago, has been named the new CEO.

Robinson framed the move as a deliberate shift: "Stepping down as CEO of Daily Wire. Effective immediately, my new title is 'guy on the board who still owns a lot of the company.' Pay cut in stress. Raise in the important things."

pic.twitter.com/3D0hpjn3nJ

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) May 20, 2026

Earlier this month, Puck reported that The Daily Wire's audience is in freefall. Ben Shapiro's flagship show episodes, which once regularly drew several million viewers, now average around half a million. The company reportedly lost 80,000 YouTube subscribers in 2026 alone, described by analyst Kyle Tharp as "the steepest decline of any major political channel" this year.

A few days later, New York Magazine highlighted other warning signs, including Daily Wire YouTube videos garnering fewer than 10,000 views days after posting (a sharp contrast to the channel's more than 3 million subscribers) and mocked comment sections. While acknowledging poor business decisions such as feature films, the Pendragon Cycle fantasy series, and unusual merchandise lines, Barkan argued the deeper issue is the "collapse of Shapiro’s constituency," particularly among young and Gen-Z conservatives who once drove the company's growth.

In recent weeks the company carried out layoffs affecting a reported 42 employees - roughly 20 percent of headcount - concentrated at its Nashville production office. A Daily Wire source told Puck that the cuts were a "course correction after years of mismanagement and overhiring," while attributing part of the audience softening to platform algorithm changes that favor more partisan or conspiratorial content.

Sources close to the company described the cuts as a course correction after years of mismanagement and overhiring, and attributed any audience decline to platform algorithms that prioritize more-partisan or even conspiratorial content. But Ben’s competitors and other industry insiders suspect it has more to do with a “MAGA vibe shift,” and the growing unpopularity of his support for Israel and the war in Iran, among other issues. -Puck

A spokesperson told the outlet that the company had "made a difficult decision to restructure the organization, which included layoffs to a number of teams."

Internal Tensions and the Pendragon Cycle

Much of the strain traces back several years according to Puck. While the company hit strong revenue growth - Boreing told the outlet in late 2024 it was on pace to exceed $200 million annually - tensions grew between the co-founders over Boreing's ambitious creative projects.

Central to the rift was The Pendragon Cycle, a seven-episode Arthurian fantasy series. Boreing reportedly secured an eight-figure budget but ultimately spent nearly three times that amount. Sources said both Shapiro and Robinson initially signed off on the project but became disillusioned as costs mounted and Boreing took a leave to focus on it. This contributed to a deeper falling-out.

In late 2024 or early 2025, Robinson pushed to engage SPAC SilverBox Capital to explore strategic options, including a possible exit. Boreing reportedly opposed the move, viewing it as jeopardizing the company's mission. He stepped down as co-CEO in March 2025, officially to focus on creative projects. According to Puck's reporting, Shapiro and Boreing largely stopped communicating afterward, aside from a call following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Reactions from the Right

The Daily Wire's challenges and Shapiro's staunch pro-Israel positions have fueled sharp criticism from prominent voices in the populist/America First wing of the conservative movement.

Tucker Carlson has been among the most vocal. On a recent episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Carlson downplayed Shapiro's influence amid discussions on the Iran conflict:

"You wonder where the pressure's coming from... Those are clearly the spokesmen for the coalition applying pressure, but they're not in themselves powerful figures... Ben Shapiro's going out of business."

He further described figures like Shapiro and Mark Levin as occupying "the outer fringe of the outer fringe" with minimal real audience or constituency.

Megyn Kelly has pushed back against Shapiro's attacks while commenting on the layoffs. She has noted her own show's stronger performance metrics compared to Shapiro's and expressed a mix of schadenfreude and detachment. In one recent post, she highlighted her audience numbers dwarfing Shapiro's.

Candace Owens, who was terminated from The Daily Wire in 2024, has repeatedly mocked the company's troubles and accused Shapiro of relying on "fake" or purchased views. In a May 15, 2026 post reacting directly to the New York Magazine article, she wrote:

"As if the Ben Shapiro crash out over the New York Magazine article couldn't get more hilarious... Also Tucker is big in Pakistan? The cope here is beyond exceptional." (View post)

Owens has tied the decline to Shapiro's foreign policy stance and past internal conflicts.

As if the Ben Shapiro crash out over the New York Magazine article couldn’t get more hilarious.

Someone fed Ben Shapiro bad intel and he ran to his show to giddily report on it. 😂

To the express contrary, we actually just increased our production staff by 2.

Also Tucker is…

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) May 15, 2026

Other America First voices have amplified the "MIGA" (Make Israel Great Again) critique, accusing Shapiro and the Daily Wire of prioritizing Israeli interests over American ones. The New York Magazine piece echoed this sentiment, arguing that Shapiro's conservatism retains support among Republican elites but is being rejected by the future grassroots of the party - especially younger conservatives who view the Iran conflict as a costly quagmire tied to foreign policy priorities. Posts frequently reference Shapiro's consistent calls for strong U.S. support for Israel as a key driver of audience alienation.

Ben Shapiro's @benshapiro Pro Israel Empire Crumbles For America Last Stance

New York Magazine reports that Ben Shapiro's once-dominant position as the "king of conservative media" has collapsed in 2026.

The Daily Wire is undergoing major layoffs, its YouTube subscriber base… pic.twitter.com/iftvIEM7sH

— AMERICA 24 (@America24news_) May 15, 2026

Shapiro has pushed back forcefully, dismissing critics as part of a "woke right" and insisting the company is executing standard restructuring while expecting a strong advertising year.

Robinson's departure and Richards' ascension - the latter bringing extensive experience in scaled television production from Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune - come as the company attempts to stabilize. Daily Wire officials continue to emphasize its large subscriber base, daily content output, and enduring role as a major voice on the right.

The story reflects broader pressures in independent media: the difficulty of scaling personality-driven outlets into entertainment studios, platform volatility, and realignment within conservative audiences following the 2024 election - particularly around foreign policy and Israel.

Whether the latest leadership change and restructuring can reverse the recent audience and momentum losses remains to be seen. The company has not issued further public comment beyond Robinson's statement as of this writing. Developments are expected to be addressed directly on Daily Wire platforms in the coming days.

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Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 17:20