Zero Rss

Before The First Switch Goes Dark

Authored by Madge Waggy,

Most people imagine that the beginning of a crisis announces itself with unmistakable spectacle. We picture fighter aircraft crossing national borders, emergency broadcasts interrupting television programs or financial markets collapsing within a single afternoon. It is an understandable expectation because history is usually taught through decisive moments rather than the countless ordinary decisions that quietly shaped them. Yet those who spend their careers inside engineering firms, logistics agencies, intelligence communities or infrastructure operators often develop a very different understanding of how the modern world changes. They learn that the first indication of an approaching storm is rarely dramatic. It is more likely to appear inside revised procurement schedules, altered technical standards, infrastructure assessments, budget reallocations or conference presentations attended by specialists whose work almost never attracts public attention. By the time newspapers discover a story worth printing, the people responsible for keeping societies functioning have often been adapting to it for years.

That quiet transformation has become increasingly visible throughout the past decade. Public guidance issued by organizations responsible for protecting critical infrastructure has gradually adopted a vocabulary that barely existed in mainstream discussion twenty years ago. Engineers now speak routinely about degraded environments, operational resilience, segmented industrial networks, manual recovery procedures, continuity during communications failures and prolonged operation without external support. None of those expressions should be interpreted as evidence that catastrophe is imminent. They reflect a practical reality familiar to every experienced systems engineer: sufficiently complex networks cannot be made invulnerable, only more resilient. As industrial automation, cloud services, satellite communications and artificial intelligence have become intertwined with electricity, transportation, finance and healthcare, protecting every connection has become less realistic than ensuring that essential services continue operating even when individual components fail.

The evolution of that philosophy became particularly noticeable during (May 2026), when the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency introduced CI Fortify, a genuine initiative encouraging operators of critical infrastructure to strengthen their ability to isolate essential operational systems, maintain continuity under degraded conditions and recover safely after sophisticated cyber incidents. Read on its own, the guidance appears entirely reasonable. Governments prepare for unlikely events because preparing after they occur is no preparation at all. Utilities routinely rehearse emergency procedures, hospitals conduct disaster exercises and telecommunications providers regularly test continuity plans. None of that should surprise anyone familiar with critical infrastructure. What deserves closer attention is not the existence of those preparations, but the remarkable consistency with which similar assumptions have begun appearing across sectors that once planned almost independently.

When Separate Warnings Began Pointing in the Same Direction

Viewed individually, the defining infrastructure events of recent years appear entirely unrelated. The cyberattacks that disrupted portions of Ukraine’s electrical grid during (2015–2016) demonstrated that industrial control systems could become direct targets during geopolitical conflict. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident in (2021) revealed how disruption affecting digital business environments could rapidly produce consequences extending far beyond computer networks. Public advisories released between (2023–2025) described persistent activity attributed to groups such as Volt Typhoon, focusing less on immediate destruction than on quietly establishing access to communications and infrastructure considered strategically important. Around the same period, numerous governments expanded investment in transformer manufacturing, emergency communications, domestic semiconductor initiatives, resilience exercises and continuity planning for sectors supporting essential public services. Each development possesses a logical explanation when examined independently. Together, however, they reveal something more interesting than any single incident ever could: institutions responsible for infrastructure increasingly appear to be planning for prolonged disruption rather than isolated emergencies.

That distinction matters because it changes the questions engineers ask. Traditional emergency planning assumes that neighboring regions remain capable of providing assistance. Severe storms damage one area while another sends repair crews. Flooding interrupts one transportation corridor while alternative routes remain available. Cyber incidents affecting individual organizations can often be contained with outside expertise, replacement hardware and unaffected communications. Planning for prolonged disruption is fundamentally different. It quietly assumes that assistance itself may become slower, limited or temporarily unavailable because multiple systems are experiencing strain simultaneously. Once that possibility enters the equation, resilience is no longer measured by how quickly help arrives. It is measured by how effectively critical services continue functioning before help can arrive at all.

Among specialists, this shift has inspired an increasingly sophisticated discussion about dependency rather than vulnerability. Modern civilization depends upon far more than electricity alone. Reliable electrical transmission supports telecommunications. Telecommunications synchronize banking, emergency services, transportation and logistics. Satellite timing enables countless digital systems that most people never realize depend upon it. Cloud computing has become deeply integrated into industries that once operated almost entirely through local infrastructure. Hospitals rely upon uninterrupted electrical supply while simultaneously depending on communications, pharmaceutical logistics, refrigeration, digital imaging and increasingly interconnected medical equipment. Every improvement introduced over the past two decades has increased efficiency, yet every improvement has also woven another thread into a fabric whose overall strength depends upon thousands of relationships functioning at the same time.

One veteran electrical engineer, speaking during a public infrastructure symposium several years ago, summarized that reality in a sentence that received polite applause before disappearing into the conference proceedings.

“The strongest systems are rarely the ones with the fewest weaknesses. They’re the ones that continue working after the first weakness has already been discovered.”

At the time, the remark sounded like little more than professional wisdom shared among colleagues. Read today, against the backdrop of evolving resilience strategies, it carries a noticeably different weight. The conversation surrounding infrastructure is no longer centered exclusively on preventing failure. Increasingly, it asks how societies continue functioning when failure, in one form or another, inevitably arrives.

The Hardware Beneath the Illusion

The digital economy has cultivated an extraordinary illusion: that civilization has somehow detached itself from the physical world. Financial markets appear to move through invisible algorithms, artificial intelligence exists inside distant cloud platforms, governments communicate through encrypted networks that seem to occupy no tangible space at all. Yet every byte crossing an ocean still depends upon glass fibers resting on the seabed. Every intelligent machine relies upon semiconductor fabrication plants that cannot simply be replicated in another country within a few months. Every modern city remains anchored to substations, transformers, switchyards and transmission corridors whose design has changed far less dramatically than the software now controlling portions of their operation. Beneath the elegant surface of digital civilization lies an industrial skeleton assembled over generations, and unlike software, steel does not receive overnight updates.

Engineers responsible for maintaining electrical transmission systems rarely describe the grid as a machine. They describe it as a living balance. Electricity exists only because generation and consumption remain synchronized across enormous distances every second of every day. A disturbance in one region does not politely remain where it began; the network responds instantly, redistributing stress according to immutable physical laws rather than human expectations. Decades of engineering have produced protection systems capable of isolating faults before they propagate, making today’s electrical grids remarkably reliable by historical standards. That reliability, however, often conceals the extraordinary precision required to sustain it. Millions of people experience nothing more dramatic than a light switch responding exactly as expected, never realizing that countless automated decisions have already occurred long before the room became illuminated.

Large transformers occupy a unique position within that ecosystem. They are simultaneously ordinary and irreplaceable. Most consumers never notice them, yet they quietly regulate the flow of electricity between generating stations and distribution networks serving entire metropolitan regions. Manufacturing one is neither simple nor rapid. Specialized steel, precision winding, insulation systems, exhaustive testing and carefully planned transportation all contribute to production timelines measured in months rather than days. Industry reports have repeatedly highlighted concerns surrounding global manufacturing capacity for these components, encouraging utilities to diversify suppliers and improve long-term planning. Those discussions are rooted in practical logistics rather than sensational predictions, yet they reveal something important about the modern age: resilience increasingly depends not only upon defending infrastructure, but upon preserving the industrial capability required to rebuild it.

The Architecture of Dependence

If electricity forms the nervous system of contemporary civilization, information has become its circulatory system. The overwhelming majority of international internet traffic still traverses undersea fiber-optic cables stretching silently across the ocean floor, linking continents through infrastructure that receives remarkably little public attention considering the volume of global commerce it supports. Satellite constellations contribute precise timing signals essential for telecommunications, navigation, banking and electrical synchronization. Cloud computing has concentrated immense computational capability within a comparatively limited number of facilities distributed across strategic regions. Individually, each system possesses redundancy and sophisticated safeguards. Together, they form an intricate architecture whose greatest strength lies in cooperation rather than isolation.

Infrastructure researchers frequently note that efficiency naturally encourages concentration. Manufacturers specialize where expertise already exists. Logistics hubs expand because traffic is already flowing through them. Data centers emerge where energy, connectivity and climate create economic advantages. The process is rational, incremental and almost invisible while it unfolds. Only much later does the resulting map reveal itself, showing how entire industries gradually clustered around a relatively small collection of indispensable locations. Such concentration is not evidence of negligence. It is often the inevitable consequence of decades spent optimizing performance, reducing costs and increasing reliability. Yet optimization introduces a subtle trade-off. Systems become extraordinarily capable during ordinary conditions while requiring increasingly sophisticated planning to remain equally capable during extraordinary ones.

This changing landscape has influenced resilience planning across numerous sectors. Public frameworks released during recent years increasingly emphasize continuity under degraded conditions, regional cooperation, diversified supply chains and the preservation of essential industrial capacity. Rather than assuming uninterrupted global logistics, planners have begun considering scenarios in which replacement equipment arrives more slowly, specialized expertise becomes temporarily scarce and communication between organizations grows less predictable. None of these assumptions requires a dramatic trigger. Natural disasters, geopolitical tension, technical failures or overlapping disruptions could all produce similar operational challenges. The common denominator is not catastrophe itself, but the recognition that interconnected systems recover according to the pace of their slowest critical dependency.

The New Currency of Strategic Competition

Competition between major powers has evolved alongside the infrastructure supporting modern societies. During much of the twentieth century, strategic advantage was often measured through visible indicators—industrial production, military hardware or territorial influence. The twenty-first century has introduced a quieter dimension in which resilience itself has become a form of national capability. Governments invest not only in stronger defenses, but in redundancy, domestic manufacturing, emergency communications, diversified energy sources and continuity planning designed to ensure that essential services endure even when conditions become unusually demanding. Those investments are rarely accompanied by dramatic public announcements because preparedness seldom attracts sustained attention during periods of relative stability. Nevertheless, their cumulative effect reveals an increasingly sophisticated appreciation for how deeply national security and civilian infrastructure have become intertwined.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to influence that relationship in ways still unfolding. Defensive systems already employ machine learning to identify anomalous network activity, prioritize alerts and assist analysts responsible for protecting vast digital environments. At the same time, researchers openly acknowledge that similar technologies can accelerate reconnaissance, automate portions of vulnerability discovery and increase the speed at which complex information is analyzed. Like previous technological revolutions, AI is unlikely to eliminate the importance of human judgment; instead, it is gradually compressing the time available for that judgment to be exercised. Decisions that once unfolded over days may increasingly require responses within minutes, placing greater value on preparation completed long before any incident occurs.

Perhaps that explains why resilience has become one of the defining themes of contemporary infrastructure planning. The objective is no longer simply to construct stronger systems. It is to ensure that societies retain the ability to adapt when conditions depart from expectations. Whether future disruptions arise from cyber incidents, natural disasters, geopolitical crises or combinations that no planner can fully predict, the institutions responsible for keeping modern civilization functioning appear to be converging upon a remarkably consistent conclusion. The most valuable capability may not be preventing every failure. It may be preserving enough stability that recovery remains possible before uncertainty has an opportunity to become something far more difficult to measure: a loss of confidence in the systems people once assumed would always be there when they reached for the light switch.

The Last Illusion

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of modern civilization is not its technological sophistication, but the confidence it has quietly cultivated in the permanence of that sophistication. Entire generations have grown up believing that electricity, communications, digital finance, satellite navigation and global logistics are constants rather than achievements maintained every hour by millions of interconnected decisions. We rarely stop to consider how many engineers, technicians, dispatchers and operators stand between ordinary life and extraordinary disruption because, on most days, their greatest success is remaining invisible. The world functions so consistently that continuity itself has become almost impossible to appreciate until it is interrupted.

History, however, has rarely been generous toward assumptions of permanence. Every era eventually discovers that the systems appearing strongest are often those that have simply not yet encountered the combination of pressures capable of exposing their hidden limits. That observation is not a prediction of collapse, nor is it evidence that disaster waits just beyond the horizon. It is simply the lesson repeated by complex societies across centuries. Stability is never a destination reached once and preserved forever; it is a condition renewed continuously through preparation, maintenance and adaptation. The documents now published by infrastructure agencies around the world reflect that understanding with increasing clarity. They speak less about preventing every conceivable failure and more about preserving the ability to function when prevention proves incomplete. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, resilience has replaced certainty as the defining objective.

Imagine, then, a future evening that arrives without warning and without spectacle. There are no air raid sirens, no dramatic broadcasts interrupting television programming and no unmistakable declaration that history has changed course. Instead, the first indications are so ordinary that almost everyone dismisses them. A district experiences an unexpected outage lasting longer than anticipated. Mobile networks become unreliable in another region. Freight movements slow because several digital systems require manual verification. Financial transactions begin taking a little longer to settle. Emergency maintenance teams receive an unusually high number of unrelated service requests within the same twenty-four-hour period. Individually, every incident possesses a perfectly reasonable explanation. Collectively, they form a pattern that remains invisible precisely because no single event appears extraordinary enough to command immediate attention.

Days later, normality gradually returns. Electricity is restored, communications stabilize, transportation resumes its familiar rhythm and public attention shifts toward newer headlines. For most people, the episode survives only as a temporary inconvenience, another brief disruption absorbed into the endless flow of modern life. Yet inside the control centers responsible for keeping those systems alive, the memory lingers differently. Engineers archive operational data, compare response timelines, revise contingency procedures and quietly alter assumptions that had remained unchanged for years. The infrastructure looks exactly as it did before, but the confidence surrounding it has subtly evolved. Experience has introduced questions that routine maintenance alone cannot answer.

Perhaps that is the quiet transformation history records most often and society notices least. Great changes seldom announce themselves at the moment they begin. More often, they emerge gradually, hidden within revised engineering standards, procurement decisions, emergency exercises and technical language that appears too mundane to deserve public attention. Years later, when historians search for the moment everything started to shift, they rarely find a single defining event. Instead, they discover countless ordinary decisions made by people who recognized that the world had become more complicated than it appeared from the outside.

The unsettling possibility is not that the lights may one day fail. Every electrical system eventually experiences interruptions, and every infrastructure operator plans accordingly. The more thought-provoking possibility is that one day the lights will return exactly as expected, the streets will fill once again with traffic, financial markets will reopen, phones will reconnect and daily routines will continue almost unchanged—while somewhere beyond public view, the people entrusted with maintaining those systems quietly acknowledge that the assumptions guiding them for decades are no longer sufficient. If such a moment ever arrives, the most profound change may not be visible in darkened skylines or silent cities. It may exist only inside the minds of those who understand that the next interruption will no longer be measured by how quickly electricity returns, but by how much confidence disappeared before it did.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 23:25

Saudi Arabia Turns Taiwan Into Drone Export Leader As Iran War Reshapes Warfare

New data show that Saudi Arabia purchased a record $47.2 million worth of small drones from Taiwan last month, underscoring how governments are beginning to rapidly procure suicide drones.

Bloomberg was the first to cite new data from Taiwan's Ministry of Finance showing that drone exports surged in June, driven by a record order from Saudi Arabia. The timing suggests Riyadh absorbed many hard lessons during the US-Iran conflict and is moving quickly to build stockpiles of one-way attack and interceptor drones.

The exported drones weighed roughly 7 to 15 kilograms - or up to 30 pounds - and in a recent report by Piper Sandler analyst Clarke Jeffries, these drones are considered Group 1 and Group 2.

Jeffries laid out three key insights about the rapidly changing defense landscape:

He also listed ways to profit from the drone industry as the wave of orders begins:

Read:

• "Only The Beginning": How To Profit From The Asymmetric Warfare Boom

It's not only one-way attack and interceptor drones that will be produced en masse globally, but also counter-AUS technology to defend high-value assets such as refineries, ports, data centers, and power grid infrastructure

.Related:

• US Military Races To Harden Strategic Nuclear Bases With Counter-Drone AI Shield

In the mergers and acquisitions space, DZYNE Technologies - a maker of drones, loitering munition-type systems, and counter-drone technology - was recently sold by its investors to Nasdaq-listed defense and industrial technology firm Ondas Holdings for a handsome profit.

To begin the week, Bloomberg reported that drone company Helsing completed a $18 billion financing round from investors, including Goldman Sachs.

Refer to our note above on how to profit from the asymmetric warfare boom, as this theme will continue.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 23:00

We Can't Control This: The Populist Tide Is Coming For Both Parties

Authored by Charles Bass and Richard Swett via RealClearPolitics.com,

Who was David Brat?

Many Americans have forgotten the name. We haven’t.

In 2014, David Brat, then a little-known economics professor, stunned the political world by defeating House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary in Virginia. At the time, most observers viewed the upset as an isolated event - a local revolt against an established leader who had lost touch with his district. In retrospect, it was something much larger. David Brat’s victory was an early warning shot. It signaled that a powerful populist movement was building within the Republican Party, one fueled by frustration, distrust of institutions, anger toward political elites, and a conviction among many voters that neither party was listening to them. Two years later, that same current helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency and fundamentally reshape the Republican Party.

As we watched with dismay the results of the New York Democratic congressional primaries, the memory of David Brat came floating back.

What happened in New York may prove to be a similar moment for Democrats. For years, political analysts have treated populism as primarily a Republican phenomenon. That was always a mistake. Populism is not an ideology. It is a political force. It can emerge from the left or the right. It thrives whenever large numbers of citizens conclude that the people running the country’s major institutions no longer understand or care about their concerns.

Today, both parties are confronting their own versions of that phenomenon.

The populism that has transformed the Republican Party often channels its frustrations toward immigration, globalization, cultural change, and government dependency. The populism now emerging within parts of the Democratic coalition directs its anger toward concentrated wealth, large corporations, and what it sees as entrenched political and economic power. The targets differ. The emotions do not. At its core, populism reflects a broad loss of confidence in elites – political, economic, academic, media, and corporate. Millions of Americans increasingly believe that the institutions that once commanded public trust are no longer delivering results, no longer accountable, and no longer responsive.

That sentiment has been building for years. The financial crisis damaged confidence in Wall Street. Endless political gridlock damaged confidence in Washington. Social media accelerated distrust of traditional news organizations. Rising housing costs, student debt, stagnant wages, and growing economic inequality left many younger Americans questioning whether the system works for them at all. When confidence in institutions erodes, voters look elsewhere.

They become more willing to embrace candidates who promise disruption rather than stability, confrontation rather than compromise, and sweeping change rather than incremental reform.

As former members of Congress who represented New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District from opposite political parties, we find this trend deeply troubling. American democracy has historically depended on a broad center. Progress came not because one side achieved total victory, but because competing interests eventually found common ground. The system was designed to reward coalition-building and compromise. Today, compromise is increasingly viewed as weakness.

Moderation is often treated as betrayal. Political incentives now favor outrage over persuasion and ideological purity over practical governance. That dynamic is affecting both parties.

The Republican Party has already experienced a dramatic populist transformation.

The Democratic Party may now be entering a similar period of internal upheaval.

Whether that process ultimately reshapes Democratic politics as profoundly as Trump’s movement reshaped the GOP remains to be seen. But the signs are increasingly difficult to ignore.

What concerns us most is that the underlying forces driving these movements are not going away. Neither party has yet found a convincing answer to the frustrations that fuel populism. Economic insecurity remains widespread. Institutional trust remains low. Political polarization continues to deepen. Younger voters are increasingly skeptical of traditional leadership. Social media amplifies anger faster than solutions. These are not temporary conditions. They are structural challenges.

As strange as American politics has seemed over the last decade, we should not assume we have reached the end of the story. We may only be in the middle chapters. The populist wave that transformed the Republican Party did not stop with Eric Cantor’s defeat. It gathered strength over time. The same could happen on the Democratic side.

We hope we are wrong. We hope both parties rediscover the value of practical problem-solving, responsible leadership, and the political center. Our country needs strong institutions and leaders willing to govern rather than simply mobilize outrage. But history suggests that once public confidence in elites begins to break down, the forces unleashed are difficult to contain. David Brat’s victory was not the cause of the populist transformation of the Republican Party. It was a symptom. What happened in New York may be another symptom. And if that is true, American politics is about to get a lot more unpredictable.

The tide is rising. We may not be able to control it. But we would be wise to understand it.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 22:35

GOP Uses Kavanaugh's Own Playbook To Take Another Swing At Birthright Citizenship

Last month, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship. Justice Kavanaugh joined that majority in striking down the order, but he also filed a separate partial dissent, and his reasoning did Republicans a favor.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Trump v. Barbara, a 5-4 decision joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Barrett, and Jackson, and leaned on the 1898 case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark to hold that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to "all children born in the United States and subject to its power."

Kavanaugh concluded Trump's order conflicted with an existing federal statute, not the Constitution or the 14th Amendment specifically. His complaint was narrower. Trump's order collided with a law Congress passed in the spirit of an amendment conservatives say was written mainly to secure citizenship for freed slaves and their children. Kavanaugh's fix was simple. Congress could rewrite the statute.

The Court today holds that the Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. I respectfully disagree with the Court's constitutional holding. In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute, 8 U. S. C. §1401(a). Congress could - consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment - amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.

Now the GOP is seeking to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants via the roadmap that Kavanaugh laid out. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) filed legislation on Monday called the Citizenship Act. It would strip automatic citizenship from children born in the United States to illegal immigrants and birth tourists by classifying their parents as "invaders" under federal statute, a designation drawn from the 2025 executive order President Trump signed declaring the crisis at the southern border an invasion.

Its text states that "any person who enters the United States without authorization or for the purpose of engaging in birth tourism is considered an invader," and it strips their children of automatic citizenship on that basis.

The bill leaves the Constitution untouched. The bill also finds cover from a source Republicans rarely quote approvingly. In the 2025 case U.S. v. CASA, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, confirmed in a separate opinion that "children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation" fall outside birthright citizenship. She stopped short of calling illegal immigrants invaders. Banks' bill closes that gap for her.

Beyond the Wong Kim Ark language, the bill rests on Article IV's requirement that the federal government "protect each state against invasion," and Congress' Article I power to "establish a uniform rule of naturalization," a direct challenge to blue-state officials who have floated their own citizenship rules.

The bill's supporting material goes further than the usual border-security framing. It notes that some Mexican nationals view northward migration as a means of reclaiming territory lost in the military conflicts of the 1840s, as formalized in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the agreement that made Texas and the surrounding Southwest part of the United States. It also cites Chinese birth tourism operations encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party as evidence that birthright citizenship has become a vector for foreign influence rather than a settled matter of domestic law.

"The Supreme Court's birthright citizenship decision was an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty, and we must do whatever it takes to save our country," Banks told Fox News Digital. He added, "I'm leading the Citizenship Act to reverse the effects of this consequential ruling and ensure the millions of illegal aliens that invaded our country can't continue to exploit our immigration system."

The Citizenship Act faces a much steeper climb than Kavanaugh's opinion ever cleared. Any immigration bill needs 60 votes to break a filibuster, and Democrats have shown zero appetite for handing Trump a win on birthright citizenship after fighting his executive order all the way to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh may have offered a roadmap, but the Senate remains a problem.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 22:10

Comfortably Bomb

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Hormuz update: Comfortably Bomb

Summary

• The US-Iran MoU appears to have collapsed sooner than we had thought.
• With both sides striking the other, US efforts will turn to ensuring energy can flow through Hormuz ‘the hard way’ via escorting ships through it.
• For now, markets are saying the US can ‘comfortably bomb’ and ‘there is no pain’ even if the ‘MoU are receding’, mostly due to finite SPR drains and low Chinese oil imports.
• That gives the US a window for action: if it can keep enough oil flowing through Hormuz, which is our base case, it underlines military action can move markets in a desired direction; if it fails, we face a far larger energy crisis with far less in the tank as mitigants - or a geostrategic reckoning.

We argued the June 17 US-Iran memorandum of understanding temporarily suited both sides but would last, at best, until the US midterm elections and would ultimately collapse due to its inherent contradictions over tolls, sanctions, Lebanon, and uranium. At time of writing on 13 July, the US and Iran have separately declared the “ceasefire” and “diplomacy” as over. Both were striking the other, albeit not yet all-out as at the start of the war. Typically, the IRGC has declared that the Strait of Hormuz is now closed - and the US that it is still very much open for business.

There is no pain

Regardless, the market response has been constrained. At Asian market open on Monday, Brent was only up around 4% to $79, for example (Figure 1). In short, markets continue to treat a new active conflict around the Strait of Hormuz as containable.

That’s the case for several reasons. First, inventory draws have eased immediate pressure. Second, China is keeping its oil imports subdued. Third, some energy workarounds have emerged. Lastly, there has been some demand destruction.

This is not a sustainable long-term dynamic, but for a few weeks, or months at most, the market may continue to say “there is no pain” in spot oil prices even if wide crack spreads were already telling another story on refined products before this latest fighting started.

The key question is if this is a temporary or a longer-term geopolitical issue: arguably it’s both. However, the US may be gambling it can resolve the Hormuz situation to the energy market’s satisfaction before things become critical.

MoU are receding

The Hormuz disagreement stems from the MoU’s Article 5, which stated:

“Upon the signing of this MoU, Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and de-mining by Iran, will be instated within 30 days. Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussions with other Persian Gulf Littoral States, in line with applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran took this to mean it controlled all of Hormuz, including outside its own territorial waters, and could toll maritime traffic there.

The US took it to mean that Iran couldn’t and set up an alternative toll-free route via Omani waters. Iran has since attacked ships using this alternative route. That was the proximate trigger for the latest rounds of US strikes on Iranian facilities on islands within Hormuz and along its coastline aimed at degrading Tehran’s ability to project control over the waterway; and of Iranian counterstrikes.

The MoU therefore collapsed over the easiest of its contradictions to resolve, tolls, which could have been relabelled as ‘fees’. That presents a daunting challenge for market optimism as it implies US-Iran tensions are here to stay on multiple fronts.

However, it also focuses the immediate problem –and US and Iranian attention– on physical control of Hormuz.

A distant ship smoke on the horizon 

The message from US CENTCOM is clear: “The Strait of Hormuz is open to all vessels seeking to lawfully transit the international waterway. US forces are positioned and prepared to ensure that freedom of navigation remains available despite unwarranted Iranian aggression, harassment, threats, and arbitrary declarations. Iran does not control the strait. Traffic is flowing.” In pledging this, the US aims to ensure that Hormuz doesn’t bother markets the way that it did earlier in the war. That implies: 

1. Taking out Iranian facilities in and along Hormuz so the threat to the southern Omani channel is diminished. 

2. Providing defensive cover for ships passing through from drones, missiles, small boats, and mines, etc.  

3. Shielding GCC allies, particularly their energy and critical infrastructure, but where stocks of missile interceptors are reportedly low. Very notably, Iran has so far not struck at these key GCC facilities again in recent attacks. That could suggest Tehran realises there are limits to what it can do to its neighbours if it also wants to offer alternative regional leadership ahead.  

These US tasks, mirroring the late-80’s Operation Earnest Will in the Iran-Iraq War's Tanker phase, may require help from the GCC and NATO. While US allies have been reticent to (publicly) act in this regard until now –and the Saudis blocked Operation Project Freedom with the same goal– that dynamic may change with the recent narrow avoidance of an energy crisis and the narrative that Iran alone is now blocking Hormuz.  

Moreover, it has been revealed that the US continued with a covert version of Project Freedom anyway without Saudi assistance. 

You are only coming through in waves 

It’s credible to assume US (and GCC/coalition) naval escorts with air cover could move substantial energy volumes through Hormuz via Omani waters even under duress. Recent operational data suggest the US military directly escorted tankers carrying significant amounts of oil successfully through the Strait. The US claims this was as high as 7 million barrels per day. Sustained throughput of meaningful amounts of oil and products via these military escorts appears theoretically feasible, albeit at higher costs from insurance premia and longer transit times. That turns a serious supply shock into a manageable disruption. 

At the same time, it’s realistic to expect that on top of a cancelled Iranian oil sanctions waiver, the US could reimpose its blockade on Iranian oil to increase economic pressure on it.  

We can also expect more efforts to build alternative supply chains and pipelines that avoid Hormuz as possible around it. None of them are a short-term palliative to match the Saudi East West pipeline to Yanbu, but in the longer run they will reduce Iran’s leverage even further.  

Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying 

President Trump has called the Iranians “liars” and “scum” and Iran has stated it wants “revenge” and to kill him. Both sides have made their red lines explicit and have shown they are prepared to enforce them kinetically. The most positive near-term path is continued tit-for-tat pressure, punctuated by attempts at limited talks that produce little beyond contradictory statements.  

Markets pricing for a resolution of this crisis from a diplomatic perspective or a ‘TACO’ are likely wrong. However, US hard power could also achieve the same benign outcome.  

I can’t explain, you would not understand 

Markets and analysts are rightly confused by all the contradictory signals being seen around this crisis: declining inventories, wide crack spreads, the renewed cut-off of Iranian oil, intensifying military action and perhaps more later – yet energy prices have not blown out. It perhaps helps to underline who has been winning and losing and who could emerge as the final victor and how. 

This is not how I(ran) am

Iran was heavily beaten militarily while exposing key US defensive weaknesses; then it was handed a win in peace negotiations due to energy market pressure on Trump; now, with oil prices contained, it has overplayed its weak hand and is under a new phase of US pressure: 

• Iran could potentially lose effective control of Hormuz. 
• Iran gets no sanctions relief as well as no oil sales if the US blockades it. 
• Iran gets no assets unfrozen nor a $300bn in FDI for an economy shattered by the recent war. 
• In Lebanon, peace progress has been on Israeli and Lebanese not Iranian/Hezbollah terms; 
• Iran’s proxy in Syria has been lost and is working on a pipeline to help Iraq avoid Hormuz; Iraq’s pro-Iranian militias are being constrained by the government; the Houthis remain quiet; and Hamas has agreed to cede power in Gaza, if not disarm. 
• Iran’s highly enriched uranium will clearly not be discussed, with reports Tehran is trying to rebuild its nuclear facilities. The US will have to address this too, but that perhaps via the air rather than boots on the ground, as in 2025. 
• None of that means the US is aiming at regime change even if Israel says it is. Yet, Tehran could find itself regionally shrunken, economically ‘caged’, and geopolitically ignored. 

But that’s only if the US wins the Battle of Hormuz. As repeatedly stressed, a US defeat or retreat would flip the script. That’s why we have continuously argued the US will use kinetic force (and, if absolutely necessary, radical economic statecraft in the energy sector, i.e., NAFTA > NAPHTHA) 

I have become Comfortably Bomb

Markets can therefore enjoy a form of geopolitical anaesthesia: “geopolitical risk equals higher energy prices” is not firing fully because so much oil has been injected into our global system.

The US SPR cushion could last a few more months at current rates of depletion; so could Japan’s SPR; and China has kept its oil import volumes subdued and has vast reserves. Indeed, there’s little logic --beyond a statecraft escalation vs the US-- for China to restart buying oil aggressively while the US undertakes military action to try to free up Hormuz which, ordinarily, would suit China. (The only caveat being that Iran has promised a ‘friends and family’ discount to Chinese ships on its proposed tolls.)

As such, the market seems to be telling the US to ‘comfortably bomb’ – but only on the unspoken assumption that its attempts to keep Hormuz open work. That is our geopolitical base case given the historical track record and the overall stakes.

However, if it fails, and/or if Iran steps up its attacks against GCC energy and infrastructure regardless of the regional bridges (and refineries and desalination plants, etc) that it burns, then we would face a serious global energy crisis, and with much less left in the tank as potential mitigants.

At the least, the US --with midterms looming-- would again have to pause until after them; and at the most, we could see the return of narratives heard a few months ago and still echoing in places - that the US is unable to use its military power to achieve its strategic goals, with enormous geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences.

The full implications of that thought should be enough to leave any strategist comfortably numb.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 22:00

Why Is China Advertising Insane War Drones On Facebook

The proliferation of low-cost suicide drones and interceptor drones appears to be accelerating as nation-states begin stockpiling these expendable platforms, reflecting a rapid and structural shift in modern warfare toward mass, attritable weapons.

More concerning is that some of these drones appear to be marketed far beyond traditional military channels and potentially sold to the highest bidder.

We have already identified what appear to be Chinese companies advertising advanced dual-use drone systems on Facebook, suggesting that drone warfare technologies could soon be easily accessible on the commercial market.

Various companies on Facebook appear to be marketing low-cost suicide drones and interceptor drones that look on par with those seen in Ukraine, as shown on Reels.

Here are some of those advertising videos featured on Reels:

When reaching out to what appear to be Chinese or Hong Kong-based drone companies selling advanced AI interceptor drones to anyone, you're greeted with a sales document:

Pricing sheet.

The central question is whether these exporters are complying with China’s Export Control Law and the 2024 regulations governing dual-use items. The potential national security risk is clear: low-cost drone systems could be acquired by criminal groups, terrorist networks, or other non-state threat actors with limited technical or financial barriers.

A possible early warning came from Mexico, where authorities recovered a fiber-optic drone. The discovery suggests that technologies refined on modern battlefields, such as in Ukraine, may already be migrating toward the US homeland and other allied countries.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 21:20

Cox Media Heir Turned Communist Financier Arrested In Spain, Faces US Extradition

Jim "Fergie" Chambers, the Communist centi-millionaire and heir to the massive Cox media fortune, was arrested in Ibiza at the request of the US Justice Department and is awaiting possible extradition on federal charges linked to "international money laundering… with the intent to provide material support to and resources to foreign terrorist organizations," according to The Grayzone on Monday, citing new details from the sealed indictment.

The indictment alleges that Chambers transferred funds from US banks to accounts in Tunisia with the intent to support foreign terrorist organizations.

The Grayzone notes that the sealed indictment has little evidence that Chambers has donated any money to "foreign terrorist organizations." It merely states "Chambers made numerous transfers of funds from banks in the US to banks in Tunisia," where he relocated in late 2023.

Chambers is the founder of the Babochki Collective and a major backer of Stop Cop City, Palestine Action US (later renamed Unity of Fields), and related legal defense efforts. He allegedly funded bail, legal fees, and direct-action campaigns targeting police-training projects and Israeli-linked defense firms, while also building networks with far-left activists.

To note: Mirah Wood sits at the center of Babochki Collective as an "Admin" and is the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America's (DSA) Internationalist Committee

A communist and convert to Islam from New York, Chambers has pledged to use his $250 million fortune to fund "revolutionary organizing."

The indictment also alleges that, after fleeing the US in 2023, he transferred about $7.5 million out of the country in order to seek opportunities to provide material support to Hamas, Middle East Eye reported.

There are numerous reports that Chambers has possibly supported or interfaced with designated terrorist groups, including Samidoun, which the US Treasury identified as a "sham charity serving as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization," and Middle East Children's Alliance, which has been cited by US and allied governments for links to the PFLP.

Additional US groups he has possibly supported or interfaced with include China-based Marxist Roy Singham's NGO sphere, including ANSWER Coalition, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Newsclick, as well as student and campus mobilization networks (such as Students for Justice in Palestine) and political prisoner advocacy groups. Chambers' own Berkshire Communists project in Massachusetts has served as a local hub for organizing and arms training within this network.

City Journal's Stu Smith wrote in a recent report, "Chambers is one of the main funders of America's radical Left. His money has flowed to a host of projects in the "anti-imperialism" organizing space," adding, "Chambers claims that he and Singham are effectively the two primary financiers of the US radical left." Despite this, the two have apparently been at loggerheads—a conflict that has now gone public."

🚨 Fergie Chambers, heir to the Cox media fortune and a major funder of militant pro-Palestine groups, was detained in Spain as the Trump administration seeks his extradition on federal charges carrying up to 30 years in prison.pic.twitter.com/4YrIyZSR8q

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) July 13, 2026

Chambers' arrest comes ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's planned meeting this Thursday of high-level officials from 60 nations that will begin to problem-solve how to curb transnational far-left terrorism across the Western world.

Rubio Convenes 60-Nation Summit To Confront Transnational Far-Left Terrorism https://t.co/lAnQqeBWYL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 11, 2026

Last month, Fox News' Asra Nomani reported that US Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is examining whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.

FIRST ON FOX: A federal grand jury is investigating China-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham over alleged financial improprieties involving $278 million that investigators say moved through his financial network over the past decade.

Federal investigators are examining… pic.twitter.com/cqqt9QthU6

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 29, 2026

Smith also noted, "Congressional scrutiny of the Singham network has recently intensified. Several House committees have sought documentation from affiliated organizations. Lawmakers have also referred The People's Forum to the IRS, urging review and possible revocation of its tax-exempt status, and have asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Singham under the Foreign Agents Registration Act."

Meanwhile, Calla Walsh, a former Democratic Party operative who worked for Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, met Chambers several years ago while working with Unity of Fields. She was recently seen on Iranian television praising slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as the "greatest anti-imperialist leader" of her lifetime.

"Ayatollah Khamenei was the greatest anti-imperialist leader to have lived during my lifetime," Walsh said.

Former Elizabeth Warren staffer who called for the United States to be abolished as justice for Khamenei, attended his funeral and called him one of the greatest leaders of her lifetime pic.twitter.com/WSzpzcpd1R

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 5, 2026

Walsh shared a message similar to that of the Democratic Socialists: "Death to America"...

Palestine Action US founder Calla Walsh attends Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral and calls him the “greatest anti-Imperialist leader” in her lifetime.

This is the brainwashing going on in the far-left, making them to unite with Islamists and terrorists. pic.twitter.com/N5o0Z3Wrv4

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 4, 2026

Oddly enough, the rhetoric from Chambers, Walsh, Marxist NGOs operating in the US, and the DSA all sounds similar.

Here's the DSA calling for revolution and the destruction of America from within:

Frank, Aaron, Hank and Sam are Communist insurgents, radicalized marxist revolutionaries hiding behind personal ideologies to justfy their 1A expressions of the right to promote the insurrection of the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America pic.twitter.com/XLzzjisOqd

— AnimalFarm1945 (Moshe) (@Farm1945A) July 6, 2026

Days ago, Mark Penn, the former chief White House pollster and strategic advisor to President Bill Clinton for six years, warned in a Wall Street op-ed titled "The Socialist Threat Is Real" that "Lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies and journalists should investigate the DSA to see if it is being funded by foreign governments and interests."

This all comes as Western leaders are trying to determine where a troubling pattern of left-wing revolutionary activity is originating, amid an alarming rise in far-left activists seeking to kill "capitalists."

Walsh is calling for revolutionaries to attend a rally in front of the courts in Ibiza on Tuesday, where Chambers is being held. 

Noise demo is planned tomorrow at the courts of Ibiza in support of political prisoner Fergie Chambers: https://t.co/q49PwHkKxa

— Calla (@CallaWalsh) July 13, 2026

Perhaps Rubio's upcoming meeting with leaders from 60 nations on Thursday can begin piecing together the puzzle of who is funding the activist groups seeking a communist revolution to destroy America from within.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 20:30

The Latest Model Cars: Big Brother Is Watching You

Authored by Alejandro A. Tagliavini via The Mises Institute,

Big Brother is a character in George Orwell's novel 1984, the entity that governs Oceania, through the tyrannical single party - the Ingsoc. No one knows about it, but it is omnipresent through telescreens with strong propaganda and controlling everything.

An article written by Steve Watson in Modernity.news, gives an account of how the surveillance state has found its new frontier: the dashboard of your car. What was once a symbol of American freedom and independence, automobiles are rapidly transforming into a high-tech cage that watches their every move and can override their decisions at will.

In a post shared on X, users detailed the multiple complaints about Subaru's improved "EyeSight" AI system, which is present in the latest models. According to drivers, the system gets quick glimpses beyond their intentions to plan their route. At the same time, Biden-era federal mandates were put in place to make this level of surveillance mandatory on every new vehicle by 2027.

They even catch a momentary glance to change a song or admire the landscape and activate constant alerts. Thus, its new Emergency Stop Assist with Safe Lane Selection function can detect an "unresponsive" driver and issue increasing alerts through sounds and vibrations at the steering wheel, and then take full control: automatically brake, reduce the vehicle's speed, direct it to the side of the road, and activate hazard lights.

This is not an optional trick but would be imposed by the state. It's being rolled out as standard "safety" technology, but drivers call it a domineering electronic babysitter who treats competent adults like children. It serves as a chilling preview of where the entire auto industry is headed under government pressure.

This type of intrusive surveillance is precisely the tool that a police state would dream of to exert total control over personal movements. If authorities achieve deeper integration with these systems, they could effectively decide when, where, and who can drive.

The launch of Subaru is just the latest sticking point in a broader push toward vehicle surveillance that goes far beyond basic security. A federal mandate - included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 - requires all new passenger vehicles sold in the US to include advanced drunk or drug-impaired driving prevention technology, starting with 2027 model years.

As detailed in the New York Post report, this means infrared cameras and sensors that constantly monitor eyes, faces, head position, and behavior for distractions, drowsiness, or deterioration, with the power to prevent the car from starting or limit its operation. It seems very appropriate, but it implies a great deal of arbitrariness if it comes into the hands of bureaucrats.

Manufacturers are already patenting and deploying even more aggressive systems, including biometric scans that analyze everything from gait to heart rate to AI face scanning, lip reading, and emotional monitoring. The problem is that the data won't stay in the car: it could make its way to insurers for risk scoring, law enforcement, or worse, to the knowledge of Big Brother: as cross-checks of drivers with police databases, before the vehicle is even allowed to move.

Authorities are already showing interest in using these tools as a weapon for broader travel restrictions. In Massachusetts, Democrats introduced a bill aimed at reducing vehicle miles traveled statewide to meet climate goals, pushing policies that critics say amount to limiting the distance people can drive in their own cars, clearly limiting their freedom.

Globalist agendas - usually driven by left-wing statists - on climate, excessive big-government intervention, and forced cooperation between business and state converge to strip away the last vestiges of personal autonomy on the roads. What starts as "safety features" and "environmental goals" ends with the car deciding personal freedom, to the point of deciding who can leave the garage.

It is not only the statists of the left who try to monitor in order to control, but also those of the right. For example, the president of Argentina has had meetings with Peter Thiel, surrounded by controversy over the publication of a manifesto by his surveillance company Palantir that summarizes the central ideas of the book The Technological Republic.

Beyond spying on all citizens, it urges the recovery of compulsory military service - a true modern slavery - and the development of weapons with artificial intelligence for states, with technologies for critical military and national security applications for the new era of deterrence built on AI (that) is about to begin.

"The only real answer is rejection: refuse to buy these guarded vehicles... and preserve the used car market as the last refuge of true driving freedom," concludes Steve Watson.

In short, whatever the outcome, you can be sure that, in the end, freedom and private enterprise will always prevail. Despite the fame they have, the truth is that even intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the Mossad, or the Chinese MSS are inefficient to the point of causing hilarity.

On the other hand, private initiatives are impossible to stop by governments that have been trying, even with the help of "private" sectors - the friends of power - such as banking and financial oligopolies protected by the states.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 20:05

These Are America's Most (And Least) Dangerous States

Where you live can significantly affect your likelihood of experiencing violent crime, with reported rates varying severalfold across the United States.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks every U.S. state and the District of Columbia by reported violent crimes per 100,000 residents between March 2025 and February 2026.

The figures include murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, using data from the FBI Crime Data Explorer.

Washington, D.C. and Alaska Top the Rankings

Washington, D.C. recorded the nation’s highest violent crime rate at 789 incidents per 100,000 residents.

D.C.’s rate is partly elevated because it is an entirely urban jurisdiction, unlike states that also include suburban and rural areas.

Rank State/District Violent crime rate per 100K people (Mar 2025–Feb 2026) 1 District of Columbia 789 2 Alaska 731 3 New Mexico 645 4 Arkansas 533 5 Tennessee 482 6 Kansas 465 7 Louisiana 461 8 Colorado 429 9 Missouri 428 10 Michigan 426 11 California 417 12 Montana 414 13 Oklahoma 408 14 New York 389 15 Arizona 379 16 Nevada 379 17 South Carolina 376 18 Maryland 353 19 Delaware 345 20 Texas 343 21 Alabama 335 22 South Dakota 322 23 North Carolina 316 24 Oregon 311 25 Washington 290 26 Indiana 289 27 Ohio 283 28 Georgia 281 29 Massachusetts 267 30 West Virginia 260 31 Florida 252 32 Illinois 250 33 Wisconsin 239 34 Iowa 239 35 North Dakota 230 36 Minnesota 224 37 Pennsylvania 222 38 Nebraska 222 39 Utah 220 40 Idaho 218 41 Vermont 212 42 Mississippi 207 43 Kentucky 207 44 Virginia 201 45 New Jersey 194 46 Hawaii 190 47 Wyoming 189 48 Rhode Island 143 49 New Hampshire 121 50 Connecticut 108 51 Maine 92

Alaska ranked second overall, with 731 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. The state’s elevated rate was largely driven by higher levels of rape and aggravated assault.

Meanwhile, New Mexico recorded 645 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, the highest rate in the contiguous United States.

South and Southwest See Higher Rates

The South and Southwest account for many of the country’s highest violent crime rates. Alongside New Mexico, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas all ranked in the upper half of the list, though the underlying factors vary widely by state.

For example, New Orleans has more murders per capita than any other city in the country, contributing to Louisiana’s rate of 461 violent crimes per 100,000 people, the seventh highest in the country.

More broadly, violent crime is shaped by a range of factors, including poverty, policing strategies, substance abuse, and population density.

Northeastern States Report the Lowest Crime Rates

The Northeast dominates the bottom of the ranking. Maine reported the nation’s lowest violent crime rate at just 92 incidents per 100,000 residents, followed by Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.

Several other Northeastern states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, also posted relatively low rates.

Although crime rates differ substantially across states, violent crime in the U.S. has generally declined over the past several decades. This makes today’s geographic differences more notable than the long-term national trend.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Mapped: U.S. Financial Crimes by State on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 19:40

South Carolina's Governor Appoints Lindsey Graham's Sister To Fill His Senate Seat

Update (1900ET): Gov. Henry McMaster (R-S.C.) appointed Darline Graham Nordone, the late senator’s younger sister, to take his place in the Senate until the election in November.

“Lindsey has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him,” Nordone told reporters at a press conference with McMaster on Monday afternoon.

“It is such a privilege to get to finish some of his important work, and I promise to work hard over the next several months to support the president and carry forward the efforts of my brother on behalf of the citizens of South Carolina and the United States.”

“To Lindsey, I miss you more than I can even put into words,” she added. “But I’m going to do this. I got it.”

As Chris Queen reports for PJMedia.com, Nordone’s name came up when President Donald Trump suggested that McMaster nominate her in a post on Truth Social: "I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina. This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

CNN reports:

Under state law, McMaster can appoint a temporary replacement to fill Graham’s vacant seat. But because Graham was up for reelection this year, his death will kick off a sprint primary election to replace him on the November ballot.

Ahead of the press conference, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Dana Bash that he spoke Sunday with both Nordone and McMaster.

“I’ll let the governor make an announcement about that, but that certainly in my view makes a lot of sense,” Thune said. “In many respects, it would be a way of extending Lindsey’s legacy here and certainly something that, if that’s what they decide to end up doing, I think there’d be a lot of support for it.”

NewsNation reports that Nordone hasn’t spoken publicly since her brother’s death until the press conference, noting, “Graham Nordone declined interview requests following the news of her brother’s death, saying it was ‘still too raw’ to come out and say anything yet.”

My friend and colleague Sarah Anderson wrote on Sunday night about the wonderful relationship Graham and Nordone have had with each other over the years:

After graduating high school, Graham's college years were wrought with tragedy. When he was just 20 years old, his mother died from Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was the one who had to break the news to his little sister. 

A little over a year later, his father died in his sleep after having a heart attack. Darline, who discovered their father dead, was only 13 years old at the time. Graham rushed home from school to comfort his sister. "Lindsey wrapped his arms around me and promised me he would always be there for me and always take care of me," she once said in an interview. 

He didn't have to do it. What young man, at the age of 21 or 22, with his whole life ahead, wants to put everything on hold and help raise a young girl and take over a family business? But that's exactly what he did. He came from college every single weekend to spend time with his sister and manage the bar. 

Like many others, I had my doubts about appointing Nordone, but as the day has drawn on, I realized that she’s a perfect caretaker for the seat since she’ll fulfill her brother’s vision. Then November's election can take care of itself. Knowing how red South Carolina is, I have no reason to worry whether this seat will stay in safe hands.

*  *  *

While plenty of jaws are still agape following Saturday night's shockingly sudden death of Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, scheming over his vacant seat is already well underway. With Graham having been a chief champion of the West's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and a zealous collaborator with Israel in promoting American warfare against Iran, it's not just South Carolinians who are concerned about their representation in Washington.  

There are two separate tracks in this succession drama. First, under South Carolina law, Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster must appoint someone to represent the state for the balance of Graham's fifth term, which runs through January 3.

As you watch the scramble for U.S. Senate in South Carolina...

Lindsey Graham was sworn on January 3, 2003, succeeding Strom Thurmond.

Thurmond took that seat on November 7, 1956.

That's only two Senators in nearly 70 years.

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) July 13, 2026

Separately, South Carolina Republicans must choose a new nominee for November's general election. Candidates can officially file starting July 21, with the window shutting on July 28. Then, a special primary election will be held on Tuesday, Aug. 11. If no candidate scores not just a plurality but a majority of the votes, the top two vote-getters would advance to a runoff election on Aug. 25. Before Graham's death, the Cook Political Report rated the Palmetto State "safe" for continued GOP control. It's doubtful that status will change no matter whom Republicans pick to go up against Democrat pediatrician Annie Andrews in November. In his 2020 re-election, Graham coasted to a 10-point win over his Democratic opponent.   

McMaster doesn't have a firm deadline for naming a temporary replacement, but choosing someone quickly gives him a potent opportunity to give someone a leg up in the primary race for the term that starts in January. As an alternative, he could go in the opposite direction and appoint a "caretaker" who has no ambition to hold the seat after the end of the year. McMaster, who is term-limited and will stop being governor in January, could conceivably appoint himself the interim senator, which would have Lt Gov Pamela Evette ascend to the governor's desk.  

With Graham's body still cooling, the man he trounced in the June primary -- businessman Mark Lynch -- wasted no time in announcing he will be a candidate in the special primary. On Sunday evening, Lynch committed $5 million to "finish the race we started." Amusingly, earlier in the day, Lynch had said, "today is not a day for politics." 

President Trump, whose endorsement is still powerful within the GOP despite his own crumbling popularity, declined on Sunday to tell NBC News whom he prefers for the seat. “I have somebody that I think would be great, but I don’t want to say it now because it’s just, you know, it’s too soon with Lindsey," Trump said. "I don’t want to even talk about anybody, but I do have somebody that I think is really good.”

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in…” pic.twitter.com/1AzRMPAEuc

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) July 12, 2026

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky are certainly among those most sorry to learn that Graham suddenly died. Graham was easily one of the most hawkish figures in Washington, and was constantly working with both foreign leaders to help keep US money and weapons flowing in their direction. In that light, they may have hoped that former South Carolina governor and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would pursue the seat. However, a spokesman told Politico's Alec Hernandez that Haley "has no plans to run for office at this time."

Other potential opponents for Lynch include: 

• Rep. Nancy Mace. She's poised to hand over her House seat in January, having foregone reelection for a failed bid for governor this year. She is actively considering a run for Graham's seat, according to Politico and The New York Times. Their reporting is reinforced by Mace's posting of a clip from Godfather III, in which Michael Corleone says the classic line, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

• Rep. Russell Fry. The 41-year-old Trump ally currently represents South Carolina's solidly-Republican 7th Congressional District. In un-Lindsey Graham fashion, Fry was one of a few dozen Republicans who voted in 2023 to direct President Biden to pull troops out of Syria within 180 days.  

• Rep. Ralph Norman. At 73 years old, the hard-right Norman is two years older than the dead Graham and would test America's growing fatigue with Congress being a gerontocracy. Norman reportedly called Trump on Sunday to discuss a potential endorsement. Trump was said to have replied, "Give me a week." Norman's expected to make some kind of announcement about his intentions on Tuesday, and South Carolina outlet FITS News says he's running. 

• Rep. Joe Wilson. Famed for yelling "you lie!" at President Obama during an address to Congress in 2009, Wilson's name has been circulating. However, on Sunday night he signaled that he wouldn't be running. "I was grateful to speak with President Trump today reminiscing about our mutual friend, Senator Lindsey Graham," Wilson tweeted. "I assured him my goal is to remain in the House to keep his two-vote majority for the American people!!!" 

• Lt Gov Pamela Evette. She tried for the governor nomination this year, but lost to Alan Wilson, son of firebrand Rep. Joe Wilson. In an odd move, Trump endorsed both of them for the GOP nomination. 

There could be a crowded field, which would elevate the chances that a runoff would be needed. Within about 30 hours of each other, America saw two Grahams exit their Senate races in a bad way -- Lindsey Graham via heart failure, and Maine Democratic hopeful Graham Platner via being on the wrong end of a sex-assault accusation. Between the South Carolina special primary election and Maine Democrats picking a new candidate at a rushed convention this month, the entertainment is stacking up for political junkies in the dog days of summer 2026. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 19:30

About 2,040 Pounds Of Cocaine, 5,800 Pounds Of Marijuana Seized At Sea

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

U.S. authorities have seized about 2,040 pounds of cocaine and almost 5,800 pounds of marijuana in three separate maritime interdictions carried out with international partners.

Action by JIATF-S and Costa Rican authorities led to the capture of a boat allegedly involved in drug smuggling. Courtesy of the JIATF-S

The most recent interdiction involved the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) South and Panama's National Aeronaval Service intercepting a go-fast vessel following a rapid aerial and surface pursuit, JIATF South said in a July 10 post on X. The operation led to the seizure of roughly 2,010 pounds of cocaine.

JIATF South, based in Key West, Florida, is an international alliance that monitors and facilitates the interdiction of drug traffickers in maritime and air domains. Operating across a 42-million-square-mile area, JIATF South involves cooperation from 13 domestic and 20 international partners. The task force seeks to disrupt the flow of illegal drugs and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.

In a second interdiction, JIATF South and authorities from Costa Rica cooperated to intercept a drug smuggling vessel and capture a pick-up boat that was fleeing, according to a July 9 X post. The operation led to the seizure of 3,672 pounds of marijuana, with four suspects arrested.

The third interdiction was a joint operation between JIATF South, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Dominican Republic partners that intercepted a vessel in the Caribbean Sea attempting to transport illicit cargo, the task force said in a July 8 X post.

Authorities seized 2,124 pounds of marijuana and about 30 pounds of cocaine, and detained two smugglers in this incident. A smuggling route operated by a major transnational criminal organization was disrupted.

Drug seizures have risen under the Trump administration.

In a June 18 statement, the CBP said it had seized 56 percent more drugs in the current fiscal year through May than during the same period in fiscal year 2024 under the previous administration.

In the four months between February and May, marijuana seizures averaged 37,033 pounds per month, which is 61 percent higher than the same period in the 2024 fiscal year.

For the month of May, the nationwide seizure of cocaine, marijuana, fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine was 32 percent higher than in May 2024.

"CBP remains on the frontline against drug smuggling, seizing dangerous narcotics before they reach American communities," the agency said.

Northern Border Drug Trafficking

Last week, a Canadian national was sentenced to 240 months in prison for leading a criminal organization that trafficked hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine valued at up to $17 million from the United States into Canada, according to a July 9 statement from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The issue of drug trafficking at America's northern border was highlighted by Michael J. Krol, Homeland Security Investigations' assistant director for domestic operations, during a June 30 House committee hearing.

"Unique to the northern border, the flow of illicit drugs reflects both inbound and outbound dynamics," Krol said.

A key concern "is the drug flow moving through the United States into Canada. Cartel-owned cocaine and other controlled substances are routed north for domestic consumption and onward shipment to Europe," he added.

During fiscal year 2024-25, the Canada Border Services Agency reported seizing roughly 7,700 pounds of cocaine, compared to 2,700 pounds seized during fiscal year 2020-21, Krol said.

During a May 12 Senate committee hearing, DEA head Terry Cole and FBI Director Kash Patel said they were working to disrupt new drug production facilities in Canada.

"We see more precursors coming into the Port of Vancouver, coming into Canada," Cole said.

Patel said that drug traffickers have gotten "smart" with improved security at the U.S. southern border, shifting operations to Canada.

The FBI was working with Canadian authorities to disrupt the production facilities that criminals have moved north, according to Patel.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 19:15

China Builds Full-Scale Model Of US Destroyer In Remote Desert

Security analysts poring over satellite photos of China have shared a surreal image: There's a detailed, full-scale replica of a US Navy destroyer in the middle of a remote stretch of Chinese desert. It's a vivid indication of the seriousness with which the Chinese government takes preparations for a potential war with the United States, perhaps over Taiwan.  

This highly-detailed, full-scale mockup of a US destroyer was recently assembled in the middle of a desert in northwest China (via Defense Security Asia)

Thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, the mockup sits amid the sands of a missile-testing range near Ruoqiang in Xinjiang Province. It's an exceedingly precise replica of a 510-foot-long US Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. That type of vessel is a core workhorse of the US Navy, and is involved in air defense, anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare and attacks on land-targets. A main player in Trump's Israel-allied war on Iran, it was likely an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that fired the Tomahawk missiles on Feb 28 that devastated a girls' elementary school in Minab, killing 168 people, mostly schoolgirls. Here's video of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the USS Michael Murphy, in action: 

Footage of the USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) launching five Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iran tonight. pic.twitter.com/nlsAMNhFMF

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 11, 2026

Adding to the mockup's realism, analysts told CNN that that it's bristling with antennas that are used to reproduce the destroyer's radar signature.  The same area of China is home to several flat, 2-D mockup of other US ships, portraying the outlines of destroyers and aircraft carriers as seen from above. Those mockups are mounted on tracks so they glide along the desert sea at the same speeds real US warships would use. 

Weeks ago, the mockup was discovered while it was still under construction (via Defense Security Asia)

As with any well-resourced military, mockups have long been a part of Chinese readiness training, to include building fake airstrips, highway interchanges and even an Eiffel Tower in their desert. The country has also built a 3D mockup of central Taipei, to include Taiwan's presidential office. However, according to open source intelligence analyst Joseph Wen of the Taiwan Inspiration Association, this is the first known instance in which China has built a detailed, 3-D replica of a warship. Wen is credited with being the first to discover the new mockup several weeks ago, while it was still being built. "The message that they are sending is China is always preparing for war," Wen told CNN.   

This mockup of central Taipei was discovered at the Zhurihe military training facility in Inner Mongolia in 2015 (via The Diplomat)

...just like the United States, which may see its already-enormous military budget grow 50% from about $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027 -- if Congress makes Trump's fever-dreams a reality.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 18:50

28.8 Million Queries: The AI Heist That Tripped No Alarms

Authored by Joseph Hoefer via RealClearDefense,

When we picture intellectual property theft, we picture a break-in. A hacker slips past the firewall, copies the source code, and disappears. So, when an American AI company tells Congress that China just pulled off the largest extraction campaign it's ever recorded, the natural assumption is that someone cracked the vault.

Nobody broke in. And that's exactly what makes this threat so difficult for Washington to address.

Last week, Anthropic told the Senate Banking Committee that operators affiliated with the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba ran roughly 28.8 million queries with its Claude models through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June. According to the company, the goal was not to steal the model. It was to harvest its answers, then use those answers to train a competing Chinese system at a fraction of the cost.

This technique is called distillation, and not all of it is sinister. Training a smaller model on the outputs of a larger one is a routine and legitimate practice when a company does it with its own systems. What Anthropic alleges is something else: unauthorized extraction from a competitor's proprietary service, carried out at industrial scale through fake accounts that violated its terms of use. The line between ordinary engineering and a national-security problem runs right through that word "unauthorized."

The unsettling part is how ordinary the attack looks from the outside. The operators signed up, gained access, and asked questions, millions of them, aimed at the model's most valuable skills: writing software and reasoning through complex tasks step by step. The model did precisely what it was built to do. No alarm tripped, because from the system's perspective, nothing went wrong. A determined competitor simply walked through the front door, at enormous scale, to approximate years of American research by learning from the model's outputs.

That is a genuinely new kind of problem, and it scrambles the usual playbook.

The instinct in Washington has been to treat Chinese AI gains as a hardware story. Keep advanced chips out of Beijing's hands, the thinking goes, and you slow its progress. That instinct isn't wrong. Compute is a real chokepoint... China keeps trying to smuggle chips and route around the controls, and tightening those rules is sound policy.

But chip controls were designed to stop someone from building a powerful model. They do nothing to stop someone from quietly copying the behavior of a model that already exists.

You can wall off the foundry and leave the storefront wide open. That is the gap distillation walks through, and it is why a hardware-only strategy, however necessary, cannot be the whole answer.

The stakes are not only strategic. Every successful extraction campaign compresses years of research and billions of dollars of private investment into millions of automated queries, undermining the incentives that made American frontier AI leadership possible in the first place. This is what intellectual property theft looks like in the age of AI: not stolen code, but a copied teacher. Alibaba is simply the first vivid example, and it won't be the last.

The encouraging news is that the government has already named the problem. In April, the White House science office issued a memo warning that foreign entities, mostly based in China, are running "industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems," and it committed the administration to better information sharing and defensive coordination with industry. The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill that would track these extraction attempts and authorize sanctions against the companies behind them. And in response to the Alibaba disclosure, Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) are pushing an amendment to this year's defense bill directing the Commerce Department to penalize Chinese firms caught doing it.

That bipartisan momentum is the right reflex. To work, the response must match the attack, and that means treating model extraction like any other strategic economic attack rather than a routine business dispute.

Two priorities follow. First, detection is a shared problem, yet companies fight it alone. The fake accounts and evasion patterns show up across multiple American labs, but legal uncertainty discourages competitors from comparing notes. Congress can give them clear permission to share threat signals with one another and with the government, the way banks already share intelligence on fraud. Second, deterrence must reach the storefront, not just the foundry. If a Chinese lab can lose access to American chips for smuggling them, it should face comparable consequences for systematically abusing American AI services to copy them.

America has spent years debating how to keep advanced AI out of China's hands. The harder question may be how to keep China's AI companies from quietly learning everything they can from the models we place online for the world to use. Last week's disclosure put a number on it: 28.8 million questions, asked through the front door. Washington has finally started looking at the right entry point. Now it needs to figure out how to lock it.

Joseph Hoefer is a principal and chief AI officer at Monument Advocacy, where he leads the firm's AI policy practice.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 18:25

Where It Costs The Most To Own A Car In America

Buying a car is only the beginning. Every year afterward, drivers face a steady stream of expenses—from insurance and fuel to repairs and taxes—that can add up to thousands of dollars.

Using data from LendingTree, Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld created this map comparing average annual car ownership costs across every U.S. state and Washington D.C., excluding car payments, revealing where those ongoing expenses place the biggest burden on drivers.

The Annual Car Ownership Costs by State

Here’s how annual ownership costs compare across the country.

Rank State or District Average Annual Cost of Car Ownership
2025 1 Nevada $6,119 2 Florida $5,682 3 Louisiana $5,663 4 Michigan $5,350 5 Colorado $5,151 6 Alabama $5,099 7 Arizona $5,060 8 Oklahoma $5,021 9 Georgia $5,014 10 Utah $4,977 11 Arkansas $4,947 12 California $4,900 13 Kentucky $4,862 14 Wyoming $4,859 15 New Mexico $4,855 16 Missouri $4,819 17 Mississippi $4,792 18 Indiana $4,787 19 Rhode Island $4,711 20 Texas $4,636 21 Montana $4,548 22 Kansas $4,542 23 North Dakota $4,540 24 Delaware $4,538 25 Tennessee $4,532 26 Illinois $4,521 27 South Dakota $4,493 28 Minnesota $4,435 29 Connecticut $4,419 30 New Jersey $4,413 31 Oregon $4,340 32 Nebraska $4,307 33 Washington $4,306 34 Maryland $4,302 35 New York $4,253 36 Pennsylvania $4,181 37 South Carolina $4,176 38 North Carolina $4,157 39 Iowa $4,146 40 Hawaii $4,114 41 West Virginia $4,102 42 Virginia $4,061 43 Wisconsin $3,963 44 District of Columbia $3,925 45 Massachusetts $3,834 46 Vermont $3,829 47 Idaho $3,781 48 Alaska $3,682 49 Ohio $3,544 50 Maine $3,543 51 New Hampshire $3,030 -- 🇺🇸 U.S. Average $4,507

Costs do not include car payments. Sales taxes combine state and local taxes, annualized over 6.5 years based on an average used car price of $27,177.

Annual ownership costs range from roughly $3,000 in New Hampshire to more than $6,100 in Nevada, meaning two drivers with the same vehicle could face a difference of more than $3,000 every year based solely on where they live.

Seven of the 15 most expensive states are in the South, largely because of elevated insurance premiums. Florida and Louisiana rank near the top for insurance costs, while California stands out for high fuel prices and repair expenses rather than insurance alone.

Why Some States Cost Thousands More Than Others

The price of a vehicle may be similar nationwide, but the cost of keeping it on the road can change significantly by state.

Insurance is often the biggest source of variation, ranging from over $3,400 annually in Nevada to around $1,200 in Maine. Premiums reflect everything from accident frequency and vehicle theft to repair costs, weather-related claims, and state insurance regulations. In 13 states, insurance alone accounts for at least half of total ownership costs.

Fuel prices, registration fees, and sales taxes add another layer. Drivers in states with longer average commutes or higher gasoline prices typically spend more each year, while repair costs can also differ depending on labor rates and vehicle demand.

Driving Is One of America’s Biggest Household Expenses

Transportation is one of the largest household expenses after housing, making recurring vehicle costs an important part of overall affordability. While consumers often focus on a car’s purchase price or monthly payment, insurance, fuel, repairs, and taxes can add thousands of dollars each year, and those costs depend heavily on where they live.

That burden is especially significant in communities where driving is a necessity rather than a choice. Beyond commuting, vehicles are essential for work, school, childcare, and everyday errands, making recurring ownership costs difficult to avoid.

As insurance premiums, repair bills, and maintenance costs continue to rise, the cost of keeping a car on the road remains a core part of the broader cost-of-living conversation alongside housing, healthcare, and utilities.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on America’s slowest depreciating cars.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 18:00

While The Political Circus Distracts Us, Flock Builds The Digital Police State

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

“You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

- George Orwell, 1984

While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus - cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle - the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward.

The government is watching.

It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support.

It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.

This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.

Enter Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread throughout thousands of American communities.

These cameras, which do much more than photograph license plates, represent the next evolution of the government’s public-private surveillance partnership.

They document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That information can then be placed in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.

Yet the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not come from the cameras alone.

It comes from artificial intelligence.

A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been.

AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.

With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.

This is how ordinary movements become potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a complete license plate number but also for partial plates and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make, model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifying characteristics.

A police officer might ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car observed traveling between two locations.

The artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database supplies the history.

The government receives a list of potential suspects.

This is no longer surveillance conducted by individual officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny.

Consider the scale of what is taking place.

License plate cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

Twenty billion.

That is not targeted policing. That is mass collection.

The overwhelming majority of those scans do not involve stolen cars, wanted suspects, kidnappings or violent crimes. They document ordinary people carrying out the ordinary activities of daily life: driving to work, taking children to school, visiting friends, attending church, keeping medical appointments, participating in protests or simply going home.

Yet each of those innocent journeys becomes part of a searchable police database.

At 20 billion scans a month, Flock is not searching for particular suspects and then attempting to follow them. It is recording the movements of everyone so police can decide later whom they want to follow.

That is the digital equivalent of assigning a government agent to trail every driver in America—and preserving the agent’s notes in case the government someday finds them useful.

Yet mass collection is only the first stage of the AI surveillance state. The next is merging those billions of observations with everything else the government and its corporate partners know about us.

Flock is also part of a much larger shift toward AI-powered “data fusion,” in which license plate records are combined with facial recognition results, surveillance video, police reports, social media activity, commercially purchased information, gunshot-detection alerts and other government databases.

The danger is no longer merely that one system can track a car. It is the merger of previously separate streams of information into a single system capable of mapping a person’s movements, relationships, habits and associations.

These systems increasingly do more than provide officers with information to evaluate. They assign significance to associations, flag supposed threats and generate investigative leads—often through proprietary algorithms that neither the accused nor the public can examine.

Artificial intelligence does not eliminate human prejudice, institutional bias or bad information.

It industrializes them.

Feed a flawed system inaccurate data, biased arrest records or constitutionally suspect surveillance, and AI can reproduce those defects at a speed and scale no individual police officer could match.

Once the computer labels someone suspicious, moreover, officers may treat the algorithmic conclusion as objective fact.

The machine accuses. The police act. The citizen is left to prove that the machine was wrong.

Despite the extraordinary reach of this technology, Flock continues to portray its system as a limited, carefully controlled crime-fighting tool.

Flock insists that its cameras collect information about vehicles rather than people, that agencies control access to their own data, that searches are logged and that information is generally deleted after 30 days. Yet these assurances largely amount to distinctions without a difference.

Vehicles are extensions of the people who drive them.

Track a vehicle long enough, and you know where its owner sleeps, works, worships, shops, socializes, seeks medical treatment and participates in political activity.

You know when someone leaves home, when they return, whom they visit and how often.

You may not know the contents of their conversations, but you know enough to construct an intimate portrait of their life.

That is surveillance.

It does not become less invasive merely because the government has outsourced the cameras, databases and algorithms to a private corporation.

Nor does it cease to be surveillance because police claim that the information may someday be useful in solving a crime.

Indeed, that is the sleight of hand that has allowed the surveillance state to expand so rapidly.

The government no longer has to install every camera, maintain every database or directly collect every piece of information.

It merely encourages private companies, businesses, homeowners’ associations, schools and individual consumers to create an interconnected surveillance ecosystem—and then asks for access.

This public-private arrangement allows government agencies to acquire capabilities they might never receive public approval or sufficient funding to build on their own.

It also makes accountability almost impossible.

When abuses occur, local police blame the technology provider. The technology provider insists that local police control the data. Federal agencies claim they merely requested access. Local officials say they were unaware that information could be shared beyond their jurisdiction.

Everyone points elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the American people remain under observation.

Flock has become especially controversial because its network can transform what appears to be a collection of local cameras into something far more powerful: a searchable surveillance system that permits law enforcement agencies to look far beyond their own jurisdictions.

Flock says data sharing among agencies is optional and controlled by its customers. Yet the entire value of such a system lies in its interconnectedness.

A camera in one town is a traffic-monitoring device.

Thousands of cameras connected through searchable databases constitute a movement-tracking network.

The danger is not simply that police might search for a stolen car.

The danger is that the system permits government officials to begin with a location, a description or a fragment of information and work backward until someone emerges as a suspect.

That reverses the traditional order of constitutional policing.

Under the Fourth Amendment, police are supposed to develop individualized suspicion, establish probable cause and then apply for a warrant to search for evidence connected to a particular person or crime.

Mass surveillance systems begin by collecting information on everyone.

In the process, every innocent person is treated as a potential suspect whose movements must be recorded just in case the government someday decides they are relevant.

This is guilt by algorithm.

It is also the same constitutional inversion at the heart of geofence warrants, which allow police to demand information identifying every cellphone that happened to be near a particular location at a particular time.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chatrie v. United States may signal that constitutional scrutiny is finally beginning to catch up with the surveillance state.

The case involved a geofence warrant used to obtain Google location records for cellphones near the scene of a robbery. Rather than beginning with an identified suspect, police demanded information about devices that happened to be within a designated area during a particular period and then worked backward to identify their owners.

The Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain an individual’s cellphone location history from a technology company.

That conclusion matters.

It rejects the government’s increasingly convenient argument that intimate information loses constitutional protection merely because a private corporation collected, stored or analyzed it.

The Court did not rule on Flock cameras or automated license plate databases. Nor did it decide that every geofence demand is necessarily unconstitutional. The justices left it to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause and particularity requirements at each stage of the search.

Nevertheless, the constitutional principle at the heart of Chatrie extends far beyond cellphones.

The government should not be able to evade the Fourth Amendment by outsourcing mass surveillance to private technology companies.

It should not matter whether the location trail comes from Google, Flock, a cellphone provider, a data broker or an interconnected network of privately owned cameras.

A detailed record of a person’s movements does not become less revealing because it follows a vehicle rather than a phone. The government should not be permitted to accomplish through Flock what it could not constitutionally accomplish by assigning police officers to follow millions of Americans everywhere they drive.

Indeed, Flock may present an even more troubling inversion of constitutional policing.

Geofence searches generally begin with a particular crime, location and period. Flock continuously collects information on millions of vehicles before any crime has occurred and before any individual is suspected of wrongdoing.

Police can then reach backward into that stored history and reconstruct a person’s movements.

The surveillance comes first. Suspicion comes later.

A warrant, when one is sought at all, may arrive only after the government has already built the database it intends to search.

Chatrie may provide constitutional ammunition for challenging this arrangement, but no single court ruling will dismantle the machinery of mass surveillance.

The technology is already embedded in thousands of communities.

The databases are already being populated.

The agencies are already connected.

And the companies profiting from this infrastructure will fight to preserve it.

Unfortunately, constitutional protections have rarely kept pace with the government’s appetite for surveillance.

The dangers are no longer theoretical.

Flock data has reportedly been used in investigations far removed from the serious violent crimes routinely invoked to justify these systems.

This is the inevitable trajectory of every surveillance technology. First, it is introduced as an emergency measure. Then it is justified as a crime-fighting tool. Then it is expanded to lesser crimes. Then it is used for administrative enforcement, political monitoring, immigration investigations and personal purposes.

Eventually, it becomes part of the background machinery of government—a permanent feature of daily life that no longer attracts attention because everyone has become accustomed to being watched.

That is how mission creep works.

Surveillance powers created to find kidnappers and violent criminals do not remain limited to kidnappers and violent criminals.

Databases built to locate stolen vehicles do not remain limited to stolen vehicles.

Government agencies cannot resist the temptation to use whatever power is available to them, especially when the use of that power is cheap, easy and largely hidden from the public.

The technology’s potential for error makes this even more dangerous.

License plate readers can misread plates, rely on inaccurate hot lists or associate an innocent vehicle with a crime. Once the system issues an alert, officers may treat the computer-generated result as fact.

The individual on the receiving end may be pulled over, surrounded by armed police, handcuffed, searched or detained before anyone discovers that the machine was wrong.

This is not justice. It is automated suspicion.

Flock is only one component of a surveillance ecosystem that includes doorbell cameras, facial recognition, drones, cellphone tracking, biometric databases and real-time crime centers.

The result is 360-degree surveillance.

A person may leave a home monitored by a smart doorbell, drive past a network of license plate readers, enter a business equipped with facial recognition, carry a phone broadcasting location data and return home along streets monitored by police cameras and private security systems.

At no point does the government need to physically follow that individual, because the infrastructure does it automatically.

Algorithms sort the information. Databases preserve it. Private companies monetize it. Government agencies search it.

All of this is taking place while the country remains locked in an endless partisan cage match.

Both parties have contributed to the Surveillance State. Both parties have expanded it. Both parties have exploited fear to convince the public that freedom must be sacrificed for safety.

The targets may change depending on who is in power, but the machinery remains.

Once the infrastructure exists, there is no guarantee that it will be used only against people you dislike or with whom you disagree politically.

That is the lesson Americans repeatedly refuse to learn.

A surveillance tool created by one administration will be inherited by the next. A database assembled for one purpose will inevitably be used for another. A system established to monitor “them” will eventually be turned against “us.”

Communities across the country are finally beginning to recognize the danger.

Some cities have terminated or declined to renew their Flock contracts. Others have paused deployments or demanded stronger restrictions on data sharing, retention and federal access.

This resistance is long overdue.

We cannot afford to become so distracted by the theater of politics that we fail to notice the architecture of tyranny being assembled around us.

The surveillance state does not care which party you support. It does not care whom you voted for.

It does not care whether you believe you have nothing to hide.

The cameras are watching. The databases are growing. The networks are connecting.

And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we act now, there may soon be nowhere left to go without the government knowing exactly where we have been.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 17:40

China's Memory-Chip Challenger Faces A Test Of How Far US Curbs Can Reach

ChangXin Memory Technologies is approaching a turning point.

The Chinese memory-chip maker has advanced far enough to draw interest from some of the world's largest technology companies, including Apple Inc., which has considered using its chips. But the same growth that has raised CXMT's commercial standing has also made it a more prominent target in the widening technology confrontation between Washington and Beijing.

The Pentagon has blacklisted the state-backed company over alleged links to China's military. In South Korea, prosecutors have accused several former Samsung Electronics employees of leaking proprietary information to CXMT. The company's expansion is also being watched closely by US officials seeking to prevent Chinese semiconductor manufacturers from gaining access to advanced equipment and expertise.

CXMT's success will depend not only on whether it can narrow the technological gap with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, but also on whether it can continue expanding without provoking restrictions severe enough to disrupt its supply chain.

That challenge has shaped the company from its earliest days.

CXMT broke ground on its first factory in Hefei in 2017, as another Chinese memory-chip project, sFujian Jinhua, was running into mounting pressure from the US. Washington's actions ultimately derailed Jinhua's rise, creating a cautionary example for Chinese semiconductor companies with global ambitions.

According to Taiwanese think tank DSET, cited by Bloomberg, Jinhua's collapse helped CXMT secure funding from both central government-linked and private investors. It also taught the company to proceed more carefully around the boundaries of US policy.

"This incident not only brought CXMT both central and private investment but also helped the company learn from Jinhua's downfall and carefully navigate around US red lines," DSET said.

That caution has become increasingly important as Washington has broadened its efforts to restrict China's access to advanced semiconductor technology.

In October 2022, the administration of President Joe Biden imposed sweeping export controls covering high-end chips, manufacturing equipment and technical expertise. The measures were intended to slow China's progress in artificial intelligence, supercomputing and other strategically sensitive fields.

CXMT remains unable to obtain the most advanced lithography systems used by its foreign competitors. Its access is largely limited to deep-ultraviolet equipment, which is less capable than the extreme-ultraviolet machines used by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron to produce their most advanced memory chips.

CXMT's first 12-inch DRAM memory wafers displayed at the 2024 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei.Source: Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images

That constraint is particularly significant in high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a class of chips that has become critical to artificial-intelligence infrastructure. HBM allows advanced processors to move large quantities of data rapidly, making it essential to the systems used to train and operate generative AI models.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron dominate the global market for those products. CXMT is trying to close the gap without access to the same manufacturing tools, placing greater pressure on its engineering capabilities and domestic suppliers.

Its strategy has been to reduce exposure to Washington by building a supply chain increasingly centered on Chinese companies. A domestic network can make CXMT less vulnerable to direct US controls, while also supporting Beijing's broader campaign to replace foreign semiconductor technology with local alternatives.

The approach does not eliminate CXMT's dependence on overseas equipment and expertise. China still lacks domestic substitutes for some of the most sophisticated tools used in chip production. But CXMT's progress suggests that export controls have not stopped Chinese companies from improving less advanced manufacturing processes or expanding production at scale.

The company has climbed to fourth place in the global memory-chip market, behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It remains substantially smaller and less technologically advanced than those rivals, but its emergence has begun to challenge an industry structure that has long been dominated by three companies.

CXMT is considering using about 30 billion yuan, or $4.4 billion, from a planned initial public offering to upgrade its technology and expand research and development, according to its listing application.

That investment would support Beijing's goal of securing a larger role in a sector increasingly treated as a foundation of economic and military power. Memory chips are essential to smartphones, computers and data centers, and the artificial-intelligence boom has made advanced products even more strategically valuable.

"Memory is a critical component in the AI infrastructure, and the US and China are the only two countries fueling the infrastructure boom," said He Hui, a Shanghai-based semiconductor research director at Omdia, in a comment to Bloomberg. 

China's restrictions on Micron have also created a commercial opening for CXMT. With one of the three dominant global suppliers facing limits in the Chinese market, domestic customers have stronger incentives to consider a local alternative.

"There are only three players - Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and China sanctioned Micron years ago, so this provides a great opportunity for CXMT," He said.

The company's founder, Zhu Yiming, brought experience from both the American and Chinese technology sectors. He studied at Tsinghua University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before leaving doctoral study to work in the chip industry.

In 2004, Zhu founded the company that would become GigaDevice in a garage in Milpitas, California, with $100,000 in angel investment. When the startup ran short of money, a manager at Tsinghua University's incubator offered funding on the condition that Zhu relocate it to China.

He moved to Beijing with slightly less than $1 million and formally launched GigaDevice in 2005. The company later became a major chip designer and listed in Shanghai in 2016.

By then, Zhu was preparing the venture that would become CXMT. His background helps explain the technical and commercial foundations of the company, but CXMT's current importance extends far beyond its founder.

The company is now a test of two competing strategies.

For Beijing, CXMT is evidence that sustained financing, domestic procurement and industrial policy can produce a viable alternative to foreign chip suppliers. For Washington, its rise raises questions about whether export controls are containing China's technological progress or merely encouraging Chinese companies to build around them.

CXMT's growing profile increases both its opportunities and its risks. Interest from customers such as Apple would validate its technology and give it greater international credibility. But deeper integration into global supply chains would also expose the company to more scrutiny over ownership, security and intellectual property.

The Pentagon blacklist and the South Korean leak allegations show how quickly commercial progress can become a geopolitical liability.

CXMT does not need to overtake Samsung, SK Hynix or Micron to alter the global market. Establishing a dependable Chinese source of memory chips would reduce Beijing's reliance on foreign manufacturers, strengthen domestic equipment suppliers and weaken one source of US leverage.

Zhu Yiming, second right, at GigaDevice’s listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Jan. 13, 2026.Photographer: Li Xukui/NBD/VCG/Getty Images Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 17:20

Mind Control: Duncan Trussell On How Social Media Algorithms Weaponize Trauma

Via VigilantFox.com,

Duncan Trussell tells Theo Von why the horrifying stuff the algorithm feeds you is not an accident, and explains what it does to your brain.

It starts with the phone in your hand.

Duncan Trussell tells Theo Von why the horrifying stuff the algorithm feeds you is not an accident, and explains what it does to your brain.

It starts with the phone in your hand.

TRUSSELL: "All of us are staring into these hypno-rectangles. The algorithm, at least my… pic.twitter.com/bPMgRdUReZ

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) July 11, 2026

TRUSSELL: “All of us are staring into these hypno-rectangles. The algorithm, at least my algorithm, it’s showing me horrible things, people in the midst of psychotic episodes, people in the forest drinking their period blood.”

VON: “It’s crazy dude. They’re definitely scrambling our brains. Because you’ll see like, genocidal killings of children, right?”

VON: “But then immediately it’s like 40% off these ASICS. It starts to confuse your brain, because your brain takes the depth of one that’s so deep and one that means nothing at all, and puts them all in the same plane.”

Then Trussell takes it somewhere darker:

TRUSSELL: “Public assassinations create trauma. Cultural trauma.”

TRUSSELL: “Did you notice, the Charlie Kirk assassination, everyone saw it before they shut it down. All of us had to watch that s**t happen. This produces trauma. The trauma response opens you up to conditioning. It’s the same thing kidnappers use. It’s the same thing people who torture you use.

“They freak you the f**k out so that you disassociate. You don’t want to be there. You go into a sad, foggy place. And then in that place, they show you the ASICS commercial. In that place, they give you some propaganda. In that place, they give you a solution so this will never happen again. This is a known technique for mind-controlling people.”

TRUSSELL: “It’s not just a power dynamic shift, it’s a cultural dynamic shift. Because they inject that moment with however they want to shift the tide.”

VON: “Wow…”

TRUSSELL: “So, Instagram, or any social media, is kind of doing this, but low-level.”

VON: “Microdosing it.”

TRUSSELL: “Yeah.”

Once you see the sequence, you can’t unsee it.

Full episode:

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 17:00

US Officials Say Iran's Ahmadinejad Was Mossad Asset, Met With Intel Chief In Hungary

Iran's former hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of all people? 

The New York Times is out with a bombshell report on Monday which alleges that Israel's Mossad has for years sought to cultivate him as an Israeli intelligence asset.

Flash90

The apparent multi-year effort to recruit and re-install Ahmadinejad as leader of Iran has come to nothing, at a moment his status and fate remains unclear amid the fog of war, and after a prior US-Israeli strike on his house during the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury resulted in him being whisked away from his Tehran neighborhood by his bodyguards.

The story, which cites US officials who are for whatever reason choosing this moment to 'leak' the insider info, begins in the following:

In early 2024, the rector of a university in Budapest received a startling request from a top Hungarian government official.

The official told the rector, Professor Gergely Deli, that Ludovika University of Public Service should hold a climate change conference and extend an invitation to an unlikely guest: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the widely reviled former president of Iran.

Even more shocking was the reason. The official told Mr. Deli that the conference was merely a front for Mr. Ahmadinejad to have secret discussions in Budapest with intelligence operatives from Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s avowed enemy.

Back in early March, there were even some (premature) headlines of his death, saying he was 'assassinated' at a moment he was under house arrest at his residence. Supposedly this is what 'freed' him, and since then his whereabouts are unknown.

However, regional reports say he did attend the funeral of slain supreme leader Ali Khamenei earlier this month, and was briefly spotted surrounded by guards while wearing a mask and heavy coat.

The Mossad plot goes all the way back to 2022, NYT detailed based on the sources, and the suggestion is that he played along - seeing some kind of foreign intervention as his path back to leadership over the country. His house arrest sprung from the Iranian government being suspicious of contacts with the Israeli government.

He received Israeli financial support to cover travel and accommodation expenses while going to meet with Israeli operatives in Europe - which Israel prioritized to such an extent that even then-Mossad Director David Barnea personally met Ahmadinejad in the Hungarian capital in 2024. The NYT says that the CIA was eventually read in to the high-risk plan.

But upon the start of Operation Epic Fury and the bombing of his home, Ahmadinejad reportedly soured on the plan - becoming distrustful of the Israelis - and saw it as unrealistic.

From Mossad's point of view, he could emerge as a controllable puppet and new 'face' of the Islamic Republic regime, despite is prior well-documented rhetoric calling for the destruction of Israel and advancement of Iran's nuclear program.

The more believable aspect to this whole alleged saga is that Ahmadinejad was top of the list of West-Israel 'favored' candidates to lead Iran after he personally praised President Trump in a 2019 interview, and argued for a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington.

"Mr Trump is a man of action," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. "He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted."

If Ahmedinejad was a Mossad asset, then everyone could be one?

This is like straight out of a movie. Mind blowing. https://t.co/RU9glcEGyG

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) July 13, 2026

Apparently some of the aspects which made him a candidate, or potential future US-Israeli puppet in Tehran (Delcy Rodriguez-style), was that he had been barred three times from running for president by Iran's unelected 12-member Guardian Council (in 2017, 2021, and 2024). Following his 2017 disqualification, he apparently flipped, becoming a highly vocal critic of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

This isn't the first time the NY Times has floated this story, but the publication is now seeking to fill in more details, apparently.

Amid the ongoing fog of war and heavy propaganda coming from all sides, this could simply by mythology - Hollywood script style - in order to continue sowing fragmentation, distrust, and discord among Iranian ranks. It wouldn't be the first time such a tall tale was spun for such purposes, and the whole thing ultimately will remain unverifiable, for likely at least years to come. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 16:40

Believe All Women - Unless They're Inconvenient

Authored by Frank Salvato via The American Spectator,

The political Left has spent years promoting the slogan "Believe All Women," using it as a powerful weapon against conservatives, especially during critical events like the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. But this mantra has never been about seeking justice or protecting victims; instead, it serves as a cynical tool for gaining power - a way to undermine opponents while conveniently overlooking the serial abusers, gropers, and predators within their own ranks.

When the alleged victims are conservative women, or when the accused belong to the "right" political party, the Left's proclaimed solidarity vanishes, replaced by silence, excuses, and even cover-ups. This hypocrisy is a fundamental aspect of a movement that prioritizes tribal loyalty over truth, power over principles, and narrative over the genuine suffering of women.

True protection for women requires consistency, evidence, and fairness - not selective blindness from those on the Left.

Take Joe Biden, the dilapidated standard-bearer of the Democrat Party. Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, came forward with detailed allegations that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 by pinning her against a wall and digitally penetrating her. There was corroboration for her claims, including a friend she confided in at the time and a 1993 call to Larry King's show in which her mother referenced the incident.

However, the mainstream media, which claims to support the #BelieveWomen and the #MeToo movements, downplayed the story, questioned Reade's credibility, and defended Biden. The New York Times and the Washington Post published skeptical investigations that minimized Biden's pattern of "inappropriate touching" with multiple women. When Biden denied the allegations, the Left largely shrugged it off and continued to support him.

In contrast, any conservative accusation is met with immediate, intense scrutiny. Reade's claims posed a threat to the favorable image of their presidential candidate, so the media largely ignored them. Women only seem to matter when their stories align with the cause.

Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York who was once celebrated as "America's Governor" during the COVID-19 pandemic, faced credible allegations of sexual harassment from multiple women, including former staff members. These women described a troubling pattern of unwanted advances, groping, and a hostile work environment. Cuomo resigned amid the scandal; however, many Democrats rallied to his defense, with some downplaying the allegations as mere political attacks.

The media, which called for resignations in response to lesser offenses by conservatives, treated Cuomo's downfall as a reluctant necessity rather than a justified outrage. Where were the #BelieveAllWomen and #MeToo movements during this situation? Nowhere - because Cuomo was a powerful Democrat.

Al Franken, a comedian who later became a Senator, faced accusations from multiple women regarding inappropriate touching and forced kisses during his career in entertainment and politics. Photos surfaced of him mock-groping a sleeping colleague. Although Franken resigned from his position, many prominent voices on the Left, including some feminists, expressed regret over the loss of what they considered a "good man" and questioned whether the response was proportional. The urgency for judgment, typically directed at Republicans, was replaced by concerns about due process - only when it was convenient for their side.

Keith Ellison, a Congressman from Minnesota and former deputy chair of the Democrat National Committee, faced serious domestic abuse allegations from his ex-girlfriend, Karen Monahan. Her son claimed to have witnessed a video showing Ellison dragging her off a bed by her feet while shouting obscenities and making threats. Medical records and text messages supported aspects of her claims of abuse. Ellison denied all the allegations, and many on the left largely ignored the situation. As a rising star in progressive circles, his actions went overlooked.

There was no sustained outrage or calls for investigation from the usual advocates. In contrast, conservative women making similar allegations would likely have faced heavy scrutiny. Monahan, Ellison's alleged victim, faded into the background.

Eric Swalwell, the California Democrat, continues to face mounting scandals. Multiple women, including a former staffer, have accused him of sexual misconduct, ranging from sending naked, unsolicited messages to rape while the women were intoxicated or incapacitated. One woman provided a detailed account of being assaulted in a hotel room, which is corroborated by texts and eyewitnesses. Although Swalwell has denied these allegations, the consistent pattern raises serious concerns about entitlement.

Despite this troubling situation, the partisan machinery that typically amplifies accusations against conservatives has reacted sluggishly. Swalwell remains prominent in Leftist and Democrat circles, and his ambitions have only recently faced setbacks.

Even Graham Platner, the Democrat Senate nominee in Maine challenging Susan Collins, exposes the farce. Platner enjoyed robust support from the progressive apparatus, including Bernie Sanders allies, as a populist veteran and oysterman - until Jenny Racicot, a Maine woman from the Left who had dated him, came forward with a rape allegation. She detailed how in 2021, an intoxicated Platner entered her home uninvited, ignored her repeated objections, and forced himself on her despite her clear refusal. Only after this credible accusation from within their own camp - reported by outlets like Politico - did the Democrat establishment and mainstream media, including the New York Times, finally cease their backing, with calls for him to withdraw flooding in.

Prior controversies, including other troubling claims about their relationship, hadn't stopped them. But a Democrat woman's direct rape accusation? That finally pierced the protective bubble. The selective timing reveals everything: their #BelieveAllWomen and #MeToo piety is reserved for enemies, not inconvenient allies.

Conservative women, such as those who were criticized during the #MeToo movement or attacked for supporting America First policies, find little support from the Left. The Kavanaugh hearings demonstrated the strategy: use unproven allegations against those who threaten the agenda, and then discard principles when they implicate allies. The media-Democrat complex doesn't genuinely "believe all women"; rather, it selectively supports women at the right time for political gain; for the political "kill shot." Victims who do not fit this narrative - whether they are Republican, conservative, or simply inconvenient - are often dismissed as liars, opportunists, or fabricators; dragged through the mud into the public square.

This hypocrisy undermines trust in institutions - especially the media - and the experiences of genuine victims. Real abuse exists and deserves serious investigation with due process, rather than being used for partisan gain.

The Left's #BelieveAllWomen and #MeToo movements were never based on principles; instead, they served as a performative tactic to consolidate power. They overlook crimes against conservative women because acknowledging those victims would expose the underlying hypocrisy. This mandate only applies when it supports the Marxist, identity-focused agenda that reduces women to mere props in a cultural battle.

True protection for women requires consistency, evidence, and fairness - not selective blindness from those on the Left who preach empathy while practicing ruthless expediency.

Their silence regarding their own predators speaks volumes: power always trumps principle.

Frank Salvato is a 30-year independent journalist focused on constitutionalism and threats to the free West.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 16:20

Appeals Court Revives Tylenol Autism Lawsuits Against Kenvue

A federal appeals court has breathed new life into litigation accusing Kenvue of failing to disclose alleged risks tied to taking Tylenol during pregnancy, reversing an earlier ruling that had effectively stopped hundreds of cases, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

On Monday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial judge went too far in throwing out testimony from three expert witnesses. The panel said the experts relied on recognized scientific approaches and that disagreements over how to interpret the available research should be weighed through the legal process rather than dismissed outright. The lawsuits will now return to the lower court.

The decision overturns a 2023 ruling that prevented roughly 500 claims from moving forward against Kenvue, the consumer health business that was spun off from Johnson & Johnson. Bloomberg Intelligence has previously estimated that the company could ultimately face thousands of similar lawsuits, creating the potential for billions of dollars in legal exposure.

Bloomberg notes that attorneys representing the plaintiffs said the appeals court recognized that their experts relied on legitimate scientific evidence. Kenvue countered that the ruling was procedural, not a finding that Tylenol causes autism or ADHD. The company continues to argue that the best available independent research has not established a causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Recall back in September we noted when President Donald Trump advised pregnant women to avoid Tylenol, bringing renewed public attention to a debate that has divided researchers.Even so, many medical experts and large reviews of existing studies continue to say the evidence does not demonstrate that acetaminophen use during pregnancy causes autism, ADHD, or similar developmental conditions.

"With Tylenol, don't take it, don't take it," Trump said last year, adding that the FDA would issue a notice to physicians over the risk of acetaminophen during pregnancy, and begin the process to make a safety label change. "I think we've found an answer to autism."

In October, we noted that in a Feb. 8, 2018, email obtained by The Epoch Times, Rachel Weinstein, director of epidemiology at Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen, wrote, “The weight of evidence is starting to feel heavy to me.”

Weinstein was emailing Jesse Berlin, Johnson & Johnson’s global head of epidemiology, about a review that concluded that nine studies suggested that use of acetaminophen—the active ingredient in Tylenol—by pregnant women was linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental issues in the women’s children.

The legal battle is unfolding while Kimberly-Clark works to complete its planned $40 billion purchase of Kenvue. The company has said it reviewed the potential litigation risks before agreeing to the acquisition.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 15:45