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Authored by Jack Philips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Supreme Court’s chief justice on Monday told an event that criticism of the court should be relegated to its decisions and not the nine justices themselves.

Chief Justice John Roberts attends the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 7, 2023. Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/Getty Images

While speaking at Washington’s Georgetown University, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the Supreme Court “has obviously made mistakes throughout its history, and those should be criticized, so long as it is in terms of the decision.”

Roberts said that criticism of the highest court should not be based on “ad hominem” arguments or attacks “against the justices” themselves, referring to the logical fallacy where an argument is dismissed based on the character or background of the individual making that claim.

“I just think that doesn’t do any good. The harshest critics are usually colleagues, if it’s the sort of thing where there are dissents. So it’s something we’re used to,” he continued. “And again, it’s a good thing. We’re not immune from any criticism. And there are many, many instances in our history where it’s been effective over time in leading to a better result.”

The comment from Roberts marks the third time in nearly as many months in response to criticism about the Supreme Court.

In a rare written statement in March, Roberts appeared to respond to President Donald Trump’s public suggestion to impeach a federal judge who had blocked his administration’s deportations of accused Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times at the time. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Following U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s initial ruling against the administration’s use of the 1798 law to deport accused gang members, Trump wrote that the judge wasn’t elected as president.

A senior adviser to Trump, tech billionaire Elon Musk, also commented on the judge’s stymying the administration’s agenda. In a post on Feb. 25, Musk wrote that the only way to allow the agenda to move forward is to “impeach judges,” responding to an article that said El Salvador’s president did the same starting in 2021.

Trump hasn’t been critical of the Supreme Court and has indicated that he will follow orders from any court. Since the start of his administration, numerous lawsuits have been filed against his administration, particularly in relation to his immigration enforcement, spending cuts, and efforts to downsize and reshape the federal government.

And last week, Roberts said during an event in Buffalo, New York, that the judiciary needs to maintain its independence in order to check executive or congressional power.

The judicial branch’s independence is “the only real political-science innovation in our Constitution,” Roberts said. Elaborating, he said that “in our Constitution … the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down … acts of Congress or acts of the president.”

“And that innovation doesn’t work if … the judiciary is not independent. Its job is to … check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence,” he said.

In his recent remarks and written statement, Roberts did not mention Trump, nor did he mention any other elected official.

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

The Trump administration is taking aim at automatic engine start-stop systems—technology installed in millions of U.S. vehicles to reduce fuel use and emissions—with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin signaling plans to roll back incentives for the feature that he says drivers despise.

People wait to drive through the Holland Tunnel into New York during morning rush hour in Jersey City, N.J., on March 8, 2023. Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

“Start/stop technology: where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy,” Zeldin wrote in a May 12 post on social media. “EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.”

Zeldin’s announcement comes amid a broader shift under President Donald Trump, whose administration has moved aggressively to dismantle a range of environmental rules it says put pointless burdens on energy producers, manufacturers, and consumers.

While the EPA doesn’t require start-stop systems, it has granted automakers fuel economy credits for adopting the technology. Zeldin’s post suggests the agency may eliminate or revise those incentives, though officials have yet to announce formal policy changes.

The EPA declined to provide details of any plans to revise or eliminate existing incentives in response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times.

Start-stop systems are designed to automatically shut off a vehicle’s engine when it stops—at a red light, for example—and restart it when the driver releases the brake. Proponents say the technology helps reduce emissions and saves drivers money at the pump by improving fuel economy. Critics say that it’s annoying, unnecessary, and sometimes difficult to disable. In most vehicles, drivers must press a button to turn the feature off each time they start the car.

The feature became increasingly common under fuel efficiency rules implemented during the Obama administration, expanding from fewer than 1 percent of new vehicles in 2012 to about 45 percent in model year 2021, according to EPA data. The agency notes on its website that start-stop systems can improve fuel economy by up to 5 percent, with the biggest benefits under stop-and-go city driving.

An Obama-era regulatory impact analysis from 2012 estimated that start-stop systems can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent, depending on vehicle type and size, compared with baseline models. The systems have helped cut nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to The Battery Council International.

Zeldin’s remarks come as the Trump administration pursues a sweeping deregulatory agenda across multiple agencies.

On May 9, Trump directed agencies to rescind federal water efficiency standards for household appliances such as showerheads, toilets, dishwashers, and washing machines—calling them relics of a “radical green agenda” that reduced performance and increased costs.

“The federal government should not impose or enforce regulations that make taxpayers’ lives worse,” Trump wrote in a memo, saying the rules made appliances less useful, more prone to failure, and costlier to fix.

The Department of Energy has also begun rolling back efficiency rules for outdoor heaters, decorative hearth products, and other miscellaneous appliances. In each case, the administration says it is eliminating unnecessary regulations and restoring consumer choice, while environmental advocates say the changes could undermine years of progress on conservation and fighting climate change.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Energy is returning to common sense–and that means giving the American people the ability to choose which heaters they use in their own backyards,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a May 2 statement. “To date, rescinding or delaying unnecessary consumer regulations such as this have saved the taxpayers nearly $24 billion–and we’re just getting started.”

The EPA’s expected rollback of incentives for start-stop systems would mark another high-profile pivot away from the climate policies of previous administrations.

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via the DisInformation Chronicle,

A brief flurry of media reports last month criticized letters sent to medical journals by Edward R. Martin Jr., the former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who questioned whether journals have become “partisans in various scientific debates.” One liberal academic called the letters “fascist tactics” designed “to intimidate academic journals” triggering similar allegations across the media.

“Experts worry this will have a chilling effect on publications,” reported the New York Times, noting that an obscure journal called CHEST had been targeted.

“DOJ questions science journal about bias, triggering free-speech concerns,” reported the Washington Post, adding that three major publishers of medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs, said they had not received letters, while publisher Springer Nature chose not to comment. NPR reported last week that the New England Journal of Medicine had in fact received a letter as had the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA.

The DisInformation Chronicle has learned that the actual target of Martin’s letters is the Nature Springer journal Nature Medicine, publisher of a highly controversial paper “Proximal Origin” which has faced charges of corruption and calls for retraction. A source inside the Department of Health and Human Services said Trump officials suspect the paper is a quid pro quo, written by the authors to dismiss the possibility of a lab accident and who then received a large grant months later from Tony Fauci.

The existence of the Nature Medicine letter has not been previously reported and is being made public for the first time. After Martin lost support among Republicans to be confirmed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, President Trump picked him to head a new Weaponization Working Group inside the Justice Department.

Follow the science

Published in the third month of the COVID pandemic and arguing “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the “Proximal Origin” paper became a handy tool for NIH officials and virologists attempting to dismiss as a “conspiracy theory” claims that the pandemic could have started in a Wuhan lab funded by Fauci. Nature Medicine’s editor-in-chief, Joao Monteiro, tweeted that the paper “put conspiracy theories” about the pandemic’s possible lab origin to rest.

NIH Director Francis Collins promoted the “Proximal Origin” paper weeks after Nature Medicine published it on his March 2020 NIH Director's Blog, and Fauci then seized upon the paper during a televised White House briefing a month afterwards.

“There was a study recently that we can make available to you,” Fauci said during the White House briefing, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists look at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of species from an animal to a human.”

The paper would go on to become one of the most heavily cited scientific papers in 2020. The Nation reported in 2023 that “Proximal Origin” had been accessed online more than 5.7 million times and more than 2,000 media outlets had cited it. ABC News, for instance, ran an article titled “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes Covid-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.’”

But by then, cracks had already appeared.

Follow the money, follow the documents

Emails made public through freedom of information act requests and by congressional investigators in 2022 showed that the papers’ authors had run it past funders—Francis Collins and Tony Fauci at the NIH, as well as with Jeremy Farrar, who was then at the Wellcome Trust. In one example, lead author Kristian Andersen with the Scripps Research Institute emailed the three funders thanking them for their “advice and leadership” and offering them a right to comment and give suggestions.

Further emails and internal slack discussions calling into question the credibility of “Proximal Origin” became public in the summer of 2023 following a congressional hearing. During the hearing, Republicans charged that Tony Fauci had helped orchestrate the paper’s publication. However, Democrats countered by releasing a report that found Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar helped “organize and facilitate” and “led the drafting process of the paper.”

“Jeremy, Dr. Farrar has been an amazing leader,” wrote “Proximal Origin” co-author Robert Garry of Tulane University in an email released by House Democrats. “Should be author.”

When questioned about his email during a House deposition, Garry agreed that Farrar should have been listed as an author.

According to Nature’s editorial policy, “A specific role for the funder in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, should be disclosed.” However, the paper failed to note the involvement of either Fauci or Farrar, and Nature Medicine has refused to follow its own ethics guidelines.

News sites the Racket and Public co-published a slack message Andersen sent to his “Proximal Origin” co-authors on April 16, 2020, a month after Nature Medicine published the paper in March 2020.

“I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote his co-authors, a month after publishing the paper that concluded the virus was not a laboratory construct. “We also can't fully rule out engineering (for basic research).”

Days after the congressional hearing, the group BioSafety Now wrote a letter to Nature Medicine, signed by over 50 scientists, demanding retraction of “Proximal Origin.” The letter cited an investigation published by The Nation reporting on internal emails by the “Proximal Origin” authors that showed they didn’t even believe what they wrote in the paper.

“The main issue is that accidental release is in fact highly likely,” the Nation reported that Andersen wrote in a message to co-authors some weeks before Nature Medicine published the paper. An online campaign by BioSafety Now has since garnered over 5,700 signatures petitioning Nature Medicine to retract the paper.

In his letter to Nature Medicine, Martin wrote that he has been told that some journals “have a position for which they are advocating due to advertisement (under postal code) or sponsorship (under relevant fraud regulations).”

The letter also asks, “How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?”

A source close to the investigation said this question pertains to a grant Fauci awarded Andersen and Garry several months after they published “Proximal Origin” dismissing the possibility of a lab accident. Allegations that this grant was a bribe from Fauci have dogged Andersen for several years, accusations which he dismissed under oath during the July 2023 congressional hearing.

“There is no connection between the grant and the conclusions we reached about the origin of the pandemic,” Andersen wrote in sworn testimony to Congress. “We applied for this grant in June 2019, and it was scored and reviewed by independent experts in November 2019.”

The Intercept later reported that Andersen “knew that was false.” NIH records show the grant to Andersen wasn’t finalized until May 21, 2020, two months after Andersen published “Proximal Origin” in Nature Medicine.

In a guest essay earlier this month for The DisInformation Chronicle, an NIH infectious disease researcher wrote that the “Proximal Origin” authors left a gaping hole in their analysis by failing to account for a common method to manipulate viruses called “serial passaging.”

“And because they didn’t discuss this very common laboratory practice, they did not ‘disprove’ a laboratory origin for the virus,” the NIH research official wrote. “I have no idea how ignoring something so obvious could make it pass peer review and get published in a prestigious journal like Nature Medicine.”

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Via The Brownstone Institute,

The following is Jeffrey Tucker’s Foreword introduction to Debbie Lerman’s new book, The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup.

It was about a month into lockdowns, April 2020, and my phone rang with an unusual number. I picked up and the caller identified himself as Rajeev Venkayya, a name I knew from my writings on the 2005 pandemic scare. Now the head of a vaccine company, he once served as Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, and claimed to be the inventor of pandemic planning. 

Venkayya was a primary author of “A National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” as issued by the George W. Bush administration in 2005. 

It was the first document that mapped out a nascent version of lockdowns, designed for global deployment. 

“A flu pandemic would have global consequences,” said Bush, “so no nation can afford to ignore this threat, and every nation has responsibilities to detect and stop its spread.”

It was always a strange document because it stood in constant contradiction to public health orthodoxies dating back decades and even a century. 

With it, there were two alternative paths in place in the event of a new virus: the normal path that everyone is taught in medical school (therapeutics for the sick, caution with social disturbances, calm and reason, quarantines only in extreme cases) and a biosecurity path that invoked totalitarian measures. 

Those two paths existed side-by-side for a decade and a half before the lockdowns. 

Now I found myself speaking with the guy who claims credit for having mapped out the biosecurity approach, which contradicted all public health wisdom and experience. His plan was finally being implemented. Not too many voices dissented, partially due to fear but also due to censorship, which was already very tight. He told me to stop objecting to the lockdowns because they have everything under control. 

I asked a basic question. Let’s say we all hunker down, hide under the sofa, eschew physical meetings with family and friends, stop all gatherings of all kinds, and keep businesses and schools closed. What, I asked, happens to the virus itself? Does it jump in a hole in the ground or head to Mars for fear of another press conference by Andrew Cuomo or Anthony Fauci? 

After some fallacy-filled banter about the R-naught, I could tell he was getting exasperated with me, and finally, with some hesitation, he told me the plan. There would be a vaccine. I balked and said that no vaccine can sterilize against a fast-mutating respiratory pathogen with a zoonotic reservoir. Even if such a thing did appear, it would take 10 years of trials and testing before it was safe to release to the general population. Are we going to stay locked down for a decade?

“It will come much faster,” he said. “You watch. You will be surprised.”

Hanging up, I recall dismissing him as a crank, a has-been with nothing better to do than call up poor writers and bug them. 

I had entirely misread the meaning, simply because I was not prepared to understand the sheer depth and vastness of the operation now in play. All that was taking place struck me as obviously destructive and fundamentally flawed but rooted in a kind of intellectual error: a loss of understanding of virology basics. 

Around the same time, the New York Times posted without fanfare a new document called PanCAP-A: Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted. It was Venkayya’s plan, only intensified, as released on March 13, 2020, three days before President Trump’s press conference announcing the lockdowns. I read through it, reposted it, but had no idea what it meant. I hoped someone could come along to explain it, interpret it, and tease out its implications, all in the interest of getting to the bottom of the who, what, and why of this fundamental attack on civilization itself. 

That person did come along. She is Debbie Lerman, intrepid author of this wonderful book that so beautifully presents the best thoughts on all the questions that had eluded me. She took the document apart and discovered a fundamental truth therein. The rule-making authority for the pandemic response was not vested in public-health agencies but the National Security Council.

This was stated as plain as day in the document; I had somehow missed that. This was not public health. It was national security. The antidote under development with the label vaccine was really a military countermeasure. In other words, this was Venkayya’s plan times ten, and the idea was precisely to override all tradition and public health concerns and replace them with national security measures. 

Realizing this fundamentally changes the structure of the story of the last five years. This is not a story of a world that mysteriously forgot about natural immunity and made some intellectual error in thinking that governments could shut down economies and turn them back on again, scaring a pathogen back to where it came from. What we experienced in a very real sense was quasi-martial law, a deep-state coup not only on a national but on an international level. 

These are terrifying thoughts and hardly anyone is prepared to discuss them, which is why Lerman’s book is so crucial. In terms of public debate about what happened to us, we are barely at the beginning. There is now a willingness to admit that the lockdowns did more overall harm than good. Even the legacy media has started venturing out to grant permission for such thoughts. But the role of the pharmaceuticals in driving the policy and the role of the national-security state in backing this grand industrial project is still taboo. 

In 21st-century journalism and advocacy designed to influence the public mind, the overwhelming concern of all writers and institutions is professional survival. That means fitting into an approved ethos or paradigm regardless of the facts. This is why Lerman’s thesis is not debated; it is hardly spoken of at all in polite society. That said, my work at Brownstone Institute has put me in close contact with many thinkers in high places. This much I can say: what Lerman has written in this book is not disputed but admitted in private. 

Strange isn’t it? We saw during the Covid years how professional aspiration incentivized silence even in the face of egregious violations of human rights, including mandatory school closures that robbed children of education, followed by face-covering requirements and forced injections for the whole population. The near-silence was deafening even if anyone with a brain and a conscience knew that all of this was wrong. Not even the excuse that “We didn’t know” works anymore because we did know. 

This same dynamic of social and cultural control is fully in operation now that we are through that stage and onto another one, which is precisely why Lerman’s findings have not yet made their way to polite society, to say nothing of mainstream media. Will we get there? Maybe. This book can help; at least it is now available for everyone brave enough to confront the facts. You will find herein the most well-documented and coherent presentation of answers to the core questions (what, how, why) that all of us have been asking since this hell was first visited upon us. 

Authored by Gigi Foster via The Brownstone Institute,

[Here is the text of my TedX talk in Australia, October 2024, which the sponsor refused to post]

Every four years, when I was growing up in the US, my mother and father would go to the polling booths and cancel each other out. They’d come home and say as much, with a smirk. Then they’d clink their glasses and have “cocktail hour” together, and enjoy the end of another day of married life in each other’s arms.

Mom was a lifelong Democrat and Dad a lifelong Republican. Back then, people firmly positioned on opposing sides of politics could talk to one another – and even, apparently, marry each other and produce kids! Do you think that is common today? The “cancellation” my parents joked about 30 years ago has, today, become no laughing matter.

Diversity is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. Despite outward appearances, the person right next to us typically does NOT share exactly the same beliefs, perspectives, or assumptions that we hold. Look at that person now, being aware of this reality. Shock horror! You are not sitting next to a mental clone of yourself! Well, thank god for that, some of you may be saying. How boring would the world be if no one we met could teach us anything new?

I have grown all my life, as have you, by being exposed to new and different ideas, methods, and mindsets. At a societal level, all growth in quality of life ultimately comes from innovation. Innovation in turn can be seen as the manifested potential of diversity: the discovery of an idea or an approach that’s different from what is circulating in the mainstream. This is one of the crowning lessons of my home discipline of economics.

Yet individual and societal access to the potent and progressive power of diversity of thought was acutely damaged during the Covid era. 

This damage was done by the mainstreaming – by politicians, bureaucracies, large companies, the media, whole professions, academic disciplines, and even families – of a single accepted view on many Covid topics. On the subjects of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, it was made very clear by those in authority that one way was correct, and alternatives were wrong. Not only were other views wrong, but anyone who challenged the mainstream view on lockdowns, masking, or especially mass Covid vaccination was labelled as a danger to public health, a tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist wedded to wacko, fringe ideas. Probably a prepper. Or a cooker. Maybe a “religious nut-job.” Almost surely a “far-right” adherent, and probably racist to boot.

In short, there was denigration, gaslighting, and suppression of dissenting (that is, diverse) voices on those topics, with this suppression of a core societal strength done in the name of preserving the health and strength of society.

That sounds ironic, but actually it’s a well-worn playbook from history.

This is the same trick that has been pulled in other historical tragedies, from the Cultural Revolution to the rise of the Third Reich. 

In the case of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese citizens were urged by those in authority to “smash the four olds” – referring to old habits, old customs, old culture, and old ideas – and instead to “cultivate the four new,” which allegedly would rejuvenate the great nation of China by accelerating the “proletariat revolution” after the tragic failure of the Great Leap Forward that left tens of millions dead or starving. The Great Leap itself was the ideological progeny of the Chinese authorities, rather than a grassroots movement – and naturally those authorities never directly admitted its failure. 

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese citizens – weakened by the tragedy of the Great Leap – dutifully sacrificed what they and their ancestors had previously been taught for centuries to revere. Ancient temples were destroyed, shopkeepers and others associated with “old ideas” like capitalism were denigrated and abused, and even elderly people were assaulted and killed, just for being old. 

Such actions ran strongly against traditional Chinese values, so performing such actions and aiding and abetting those who performed them was a significant sacrifice in terms of morality, and even personal identity, for many Chinese people. Individuals who did not conform with the mainstream line were socially excluded or punished in other ways. Of course, the result of the Cultural Revolution was not a successful, nationally rejuvenating revolution, but even more death and destruction.  

In the case of the rise of the Third Reich, those in authority preyed upon the economic and moral suffering of the German people after the Great War. As National Socialism rose to prominence in Germany, Jewish people, those with sympathies for communism, and others were demonised as “enemies of the state.” 

The sacrifice eventually asked of the suffering German citizens, allegedly in order to strengthen the “fatherland” that they loved, was essentially to dehumanise other human beings. The Biblical phrase “He who is not with us is against us” was used to implicitly encourage the quashing of dissident views and those who held them. 

This nudge to see dissenters as dangerous was coupled with heavy censorship, such as book-burning and criminalising the act of listening to foreign radio stations, and the creation and promotion of state propaganda that mainstreamed the accepted viewpoint, including through films like Triumph of the Will. Of course, the result of the Nazis’ reign was not a strengthening of Germany but rather total defeat, moral bankruptcy, and international humiliation.

In both of these tragic historical cases and in the more recent tragic case of Covid policy, the pattern is this: People in authority assert that the many sacrifices they are proposing are necessary to preserve and enhance the nation, simultaneously quashing any alternative views. Those who object are denigrated and despised as not caring about the nation, or about whoever or whatever is supposedly receiving the benefits of the sacrifice. 

Think about how this pattern played out in the Covid era. 

Do you remember calling anyone a ‘granny killer’ in the Covid era – or being called one yourself? I do. From March 2020 onwards, I advocated against lockdowns, seeing how costly they were to health and wealth, and seeing no scientific evidence of their medical efficacy. 

But for years, I was insulted and denigrated in mainstream circles by those following the standard Covid policy lines. I was called a granny-killer and a “neoliberal Trumpkinaut death cult warrior.” I received death threats and, worse, people made memes about me. (I don’t really know what this one means, but the Harry Potter fans in the audience might.) 

I was defamed on Twitter even though I’ve never had a Twitter account. I was smeared as being anti-health and anti-“saving lives,” and these smears were used in attempts to get me to shut up about the costs of the lockdown policy that was being promoted in the mainstream as the ONLY way to preserve health and save lives. 

Well, I didn’t shut up, and four years on after the start of the madness, hundreds of books, academic papers, and tragic personal stories now confirm I was right: the Covid lockdowns didn’t save lives, but were instead a massive human sacrifice induced by fear, politics, and money. The lockdowns did not lead to victory over Covid, but rather to a weakened nation with more debt, less societal strength and cohesion, and less health than before Covid. I’ve written here in detail about the massive damage inflicted on Australia, and particularly Australian youth, by Covid lockdowns. 

The well-worn playbook is as follows: when populations are weakened, such as by severe economic distress or a great fear of some external threat, the people in charge advocate for policies that happen to be good for them politically and turn out also to be destructive to society (something often admitted in history books only much later), while wrapping their policies at the time in the “red threads” of altruism, pro-sociality, strengthening the nation, or preserving health, as a sales pitch to the weakened population. The implicit message is “If you really love something, you should be willing to sacrifice for it, and this is the sacrifice that is now required.” 

Why does this work? For two reasons: fear and love.

First, it works because fear makes us forget about everything except the feared object, weakening our ability to reason and think for ourselves, making us easy targets.

Second, it works because our love for things outside ourselves – including our country, our parents, our children, and our gods – is a powerful motivator of our thoughts and our actions, and so we are vulnerable to being manipulated by it.

Understanding love is crucial in explaining human behaviour, which is why I co-wrote a book about it over a decade ago. Love is the most important thing in the world: it is the building block of societies, and the ultimate source of joy and meaning. If we are not careful, we can be manipulated by our loves when we are fooled into believing that some sacrifice is needed in order to preserve the welfare of something we love. If we can be convinced of that, then we will often willingly make the sacrifice.

People’s fear, combined with their pro-social connection to one another and to their society, was used during the Covid era as it has been at so many other points in history to manipulate them into supporting policies that actually, in the long run, harmed that society. When told that we had to lock down, mask up, pull our children out of schools, and mass-vaccinate against Covid, many Australians willingly went along with these enormous sacrifices, because of their fear and their love. 

That is a testament not only to the power of fear, but to how much we love each other. Yet tragically, our loves – including our children, our parents, and the nation of Australia – were greatly harmed by these policies. If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, I have co-authored this book with Paul Frijters and Michael Baker, The Great Covid Panic: What happened, why, and what to do next, published in 2021.

My loving advice to you today – the one thing I want you to take away from my talk – is to be alert to those in authority who would manipulate you by exploiting your loves. This manipulation usually starts with an implicit request that you sacrifice some moral principle, some right, or some assumption that you previously took for granted as patently obvious, with that sacrifice supposedly going to benefit something that is universally loved. 

That universally-loved beneficiary might be planet Earth – in the case of green energy subsidies, the “net-zero transition,” and the sacrifice of ignoring the fact that cheap, dense fuels are critical to human thriving and a key ingredient in lifting people out of poverty. It might be people’s desire to find the truth – in the case of internet censorship and denigrating some views as “misinformation” or “disinformation,” thereby ironically sacrificing the right to decide for yourself what is true. It might even be women as a group – in the case of the #metoo movement and the sacrifice of denigrating half the human race as dangerous sex predators whose “toxic masculinity” threatens women.

In all such cases, ask yourself: Is the proposed sacrifice truly going to help the alleged and universally loved recipient? Would people in power directly benefit in some way from this sacrifice, politically or monetarily? Am I being manipulated by my loves into being just another nodding head, helping those in positions of authority to weaken my society?

The most powerful antidote to this clear and present danger is the seeking out, preservation, and uplifting of diversity of thought. Allowing dissent holds the power to reveal false promises for what they are.

How can you personally promote diversity of thought, and nurture an environment in which open dissent is possible?

You can promote and celebrate forums where people are allowed and encouraged to think, discuss, critically analyse, and ponder aloud together, respectfully, confidently, and joyfully, becoming closer to one another as they do, sharing their common humanity without the crutch of also sharing beliefs and perspectives.

You can support alternative schools of thought, like this one called Academia Libera Mentis that has just started up in Belgium. 

You can be part of Big Dialogues about contemporary social, economic, and political issues, dialogues that help us rebuild a society capable of discussing meaningful ideas with one another, across aisles of perspective, belief, experience, and mindset. 

You can join a grassroots movement focused on restoring the respect that used to be embedded in Western culture for individual freedom – including expressive and academic freedom – and the scientific method, using which people have horse-raced competing ideas since the Enlightenment.

Initiatives like these help restore our societies by honouring our deep and powerful diversity. They help to fend off and thwart the constant manipulation attempts of elites hungry for power, while building respect and nurturing progress for all. They help us build robust red threads – bonds of love for one another based not on conformity with “right-think,” but on the joy of discovering who others truly are, and expanding ourselves by contemplating and revelling in their differentness.

What will always win in the end is love, joy, confidence, tolerance, and an unshakeable belief in the infinite potential of every unique individual in the human species. But these precious things will only win in our lifetimes if we live and breathe that love, joy, confidence, tolerance, and belief, while purposefully rejecting the attempts of the powerful to manipulate and divide us by destroying our diversity. This is what eternal vigilance looks like.

It looks like nuclear power is once again becoming popular not just in the U.S., but globally.

This morning it was reported that Taiwan’s legislature passed a bill Tuesday easing restrictions on nuclear power, signaling a policy shift driven by rising energy needs and growing geopolitical tensions, according to Bloomberg.

The amended law allows nuclear plants—previously capped at 40 years of operation—to renew licenses for up to 20 years at a time, either before or after expiration, according to Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu.

Energy security has become critical for Taiwan as it struggles to reduce reliance on nuclear power while meeting the soaring demands of its chip industry and managing dependence on imported fossil fuels amid escalating pressure from Beijing.

Bloomberg writes that just days before Taiwan’s last reactor is set to shut down on May 17, lawmakers passed a bill signaling a potential return to nuclear power. While the closure will proceed, the move reflects a global shift back to nuclear energy as a low-carbon solution to rising demand.

Premier Cho Jung-tai said his cabinet wouldn’t oppose restarting decommissioned reactors if the law passes, but safety reviews—estimated at 3.5 years by state-owned Taipower—would delay any restarts.

Reviving nuclear power could reduce Taiwan’s dependence on imported liquefied natural gas, which is vulnerable to disruption amid rising tensions with Beijing, and help meet a projected 13% increase in power demand by 2030, driven by AI growth.

As we have continued to report, accelerating power demand growth from AI data centers has sparked a nuclear power revival in the US. 

For those who missed it, in our note "The Next AI Trade" from April 2024, more than one year ago, we outlined various investment opportunities for powering up America, most of which have dramatically outperformed the market since then.

Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee has released a gripping new book that meticulously exposes Apple’s deeply troubling ties with China, revealing how these connections fueled the communist regime’s rise to a global manufacturing powerhouse.

(Nikkei Montage / Reuters)

In an interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss, McGee revealed key insights from his new book, Apple in China, detailing Apple’s complex relationship with the country.

Presently, approximately 155 million Americans own an iPhone - a remarkable figure that McGee contends would have been unattainable without Apple’s substantial investments in China.

“I think it’s fairly straightforward that China is the only place on the planet that has the tech competence in terms of manufacturing capability, certainly the price, the cost, the quantity, the scale,” McGee told Weiss. My novel argument is that it has those skills because Apple built them there, right? It’s not that China offered something to Apple. Apple didn’t find these skills in China; it shipped people over by the plane load and created them.”

.@PatrickMcGee_ lays out how Apple helped China become a manufacturing superpower:

"The number of people they trained in China since 2008 is 28 million people—larger than California's labor force."

"Apple is investing in China at twice the annual spend of the Marshall Plan." pic.twitter.com/PHDHLSBHKz

“And so it’s this another layer of nuance that Apple is dependent on the very capabilities that it created. And I think this is like the biggest untold story in tech over the last 25 years. And like, my jaw was on the floor as I talked to 200 people and sort of unraveled it all. But I mean, some of the numbers— anytime you’re dealing with Apple, the numbers are just crazy. And so the two numbers that really stick out at me are that the number of people they have trained in China since 2008 is 28 million,” the Apple in China authored continued.”

“That’s larger than the labor force of California. And the investments they were making in China by 2015 were $55 billion a year. And that’s such a large number that I couldn’t find any corporate equivalent,” he added. “I had to go to nation-building efforts, and I took the Marshall Plan, the most famous nation-building effort ever, converted it to 2015 dollars, and you realize that Apple’s investing in China twice that of the annual spend of the Marshall Plan. And the Marshall Plan was for 16 countries.”

McGee outlines Apple's production hurdles and economic incentives that propelled this transformative shift, which he compares to a geopolitical event as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“I have these chapters in the book where they're trying to build iPods and the Sunflower iMac. You might remember it; it sort of looks anthropomorphic, like a Pixar lamp. It's really sexy, and my God, is it a complicated product to build,” McGee said. “And so Apple's trying to do it in Taiwan, but with the help of Singapore, Japan—you know, basically all of Southeast Asia, including China. But the more you're doing things a little bit in China and comparing the costs, the flexible demand of labor, and just the armies of affordable labor, the more it looks like China is the way to go. And they just rapidly begin to consolidate in 2003.”

Author @PatrickMcGee_: The West “sleepwalked” into making China a global powerhouse.

Corporations like Apple “were setting up the world’s most sophisticated supply chain—and made the rookie and calamitous mistake of putting all their eggs in one basket. And that basket… pic.twitter.com/ASZTatTikm

“So, the sort of fun line I have is that in 1999, zero products from Apple were being made in China. By 2009, virtually all of them were. And that transition, I compare to a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it took place over many years. And it's one that I don't think we've really grappled with or understood,” the author added.

Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has significantly deepened its investment in China, most notably through a secretive $275 billion, five-year agreement signed in 2016 with Chinese officials to bolster the country’s economy and technological capabilities, The Information reported in 2021. The deal, aimed at mitigating regulatory threats, included commitments to build new retail stores, research and development centers, and renewable energy projects, while fostering partnerships with local suppliers like Foxconn and enhancing China’s supply chain infrastructure.

President Donald Trump has been pushing Apple to move its manufacturing away from China, primarily through aggressive tariff policies aimed at incentivizing U.S.-based production. Since his first term, Trump has consistently advocated for Apple to bring iPhone and other product manufacturing to the United States, famously vowing in 2016, “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China.”

Apple has responded by shifting production for U.S.-bound iPhones to India and iPads, Apple Watches, and other products to Vietnam, with Cook confirming that by 2026, most iPhones sold in the U.S. will be made in India.

In February 2025, Apple announced a commitment to invest over $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, aimed at strengthening domestic manufacturing and advancing semiconductor production.

On May 19, 2025, Coinbase will officially join the S&P 500 - widely regarded as the most trusted, most tracked equity index in the world. With over $5 trillion in assets benchmarked to it, the S&P 500 isn’t just a measure of corporate strength - it’s a gravitational center of global capital allocation.

And starting next week, it will include a Bitcoin treasury company.

Coinbase currently holds 9,267 BTC on its balance sheet, valued at $963.8 million at today’s price of $104,000 per Bitcoin, making it the 9th largest public corporate Bitcoin holder globally.

As Nick Ward reports for BitcoinMagazine.com, this marks a quiet turning point for Bitcoin in capital markets - one that reframes the treasury conversation and reshapes how companies think about index eligibility, institutional flows, and balance sheet strategy.

The Most Passive Flows in Finance Just Found Bitcoin

Coinbase’s addition to the index means something profound: millions of investors will soon have indirect exposure to Bitcoin—and they didn’t choose it.

Because the S&P 500 is tracked by passive strategies, funds and institutions must purchase Coinbase stock in proportion to its index weight. If Coinbase is assigned even a 0.20% weighting, that implies more than $10 billion in net inflows from index-tracking vehicles.

This is not speculative capital. This is mandatory exposure—capital governed by rules, not conviction.

And for the first time, those rules lead directly to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Treasuries Are Now Index-Eligible

For years, Bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet was treated as a novelty—or worse, a liability. But Coinbase’s inclusion signals something different: Bitcoin exposure is now compatible with the highest standards of institutional eligibility.

It’s a powerful validation for public companies already holding Bitcoin—and a strategic consideration for those that aren’t. Index inclusion is not reserved for fiat-only treasuries. Coinbase’s addition confirms that sound operations and a Bitcoin-aligned balance sheet are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, they may now be complementary.

Strategy May Be Next to Join The S&P 500

Coinbase may be the first S&P 500 company with a Bitcoin treasury—but it likely won’t be the last.

Strategy ($MSTR), formerly MicroStrategy, is widely viewed as the next potential candidate. The company meets many of the S&P 500’s baseline criteria:

• It is U.S.-based and publicly listed on the Nasdaq.

• It has sufficient free float and market capitalization.

• Its last four quarters of GAAP earnings are positive.

And perhaps most notably: Strategy is the largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world—by far.

As of today, it holds 568,840 BTC, currently worth $59.16 billion.

Its balance sheet is no longer just Bitcoin-heavy - it is Bitcoin-native. If admitted, Strategy would represent an even deeper exposure to Bitcoin inside the world’s most influential index.

This matters. Because it signals that Bitcoin is becoming a foundational component of corporate capital formation—not an outlier.

From Signal to Strategy: A New Corporate Playbook

Coinbase’s entry - and Strategy’s potential follow-on - reinforces an emerging thesis: a Bitcoin treasury can enhance a company’s capital profile—not detract from it.

Here’s why:

• Visibility: Index inclusion provides perpetual exposure to new capital.

• Flows: Passive funds are forced buyers—providing liquidity and price support.

• Perception: Bitcoin is no longer a reputational liability—it’s becoming a marker of long-term vision and resilience.

In this context, treasury strategy becomes a capital markets strategy. Holding Bitcoin isn’t just about hedging inflation or diversifying reserves—it’s about aligning your company with where capital is flowing.

BFC Perspective: The Bridge Has Been Crossed

From a Bitcoin For Corporations standpoint, this is not just news—it’s a case study in what institutional acceptance looks like.

Coinbase has:

• Navigated the public markets as a Bitcoin-native company,

• Maintained a material Bitcoin treasury position, and

• Demonstrated that such positioning is not a barrier to index inclusion—it can be a feature.

And Strategy, with its commanding treasury and growing influence, may soon follow—cementing Bitcoin’s place at the core of U.S. corporate indices.

This should embolden public companies and pre-IPO candidates alike. It’s proof that Bitcoin alignment doesn’t isolate you from the traditional system—it can embed you deeper into it.

This is the BFC thesis in action: Bitcoin-native capital structures are compatible with institutional legitimacy.

What Comes Next: Bitcoin Is Entering the Core Portfolio

With Coinbase’s S&P 500 inclusion and Strategy potentially next, the implications are clear:

• Bitcoin is no longer confined to speculative portfolios.

• Bitcoin treasuries are now appearing in default asset allocations.

• The passive indexing era is now passively onboarding Bitcoin—whether the end investor realizes it or not.

For CFOs and capital allocators, the takeaway is simple: Bitcoin on the balance sheet is no longer a bet - it’s a bridge. To the index. To the allocators. To the long game.

With Coinbase joining the S&P 500, Bitcoin exposure is entering the core of institutional portfolios—not through a financial product, but via a public company’s balance sheet. As Strategy positions to follow, this marks a broader shift: Bitcoin treasury strategy is becoming part of the mainstream capital structure.