Authored by Aaron Kheriarty via The Brownstone Institute,

Here’s the video link to my recent talk at Hillsdale College on AI and Transhumanism. I’m including below the text of the speech if you prefer to read rather than watch it.

AI and Transhumanism

Hackable Animals

My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man chock full of big ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: “Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.” In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin.” He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted by the population during covid:

We now see mass surveillance systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin… Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood pressure; what is our medical condition?

Harari is clearly a man who wants to… get under your skin. He just might succeed. Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical: “Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer human life.” As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a balloon.

Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from Professor Harari will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams: “Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the supermarket, that’s my free will—that’s over.” Harari explains that to hack human beings you need a lot of computing power and a lot of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI. In a hundred years, he argues, people will look back and identify the Covid crisis as the moment “when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin—which I think is the most important development of the 21st Century, which is this ability to hack human beings.”

People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become surveillance “listening devices”, and indeed, the microphone can be turned on even when the device is turned off. But imagine a wearable or implantable device that, moment-to-moment, tracks your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance, uploading that biometric information to the cloud. Anyone with access to that data could know your exact emotional response to every statement made while you watch a presidential debate. They could gauge your thoughts and feelings about each candidate, about each issue discussed, even if you never spoke a word.

I could go on with more quotes from Professor Harari about hacking the human body, but you get the picture. At this point you may be tempted to dismiss Harari as nothing more than an overheated, sci-fi obsessed village atheist. After years binging on science fiction novels, the balloon of his imagination now perpetually floats up somewhere above the ether. Why should we pay any heed to this man’s prognostications and prophesies?

It turns out that Harari is a professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold over 20 million copies worldwide, which is no small shake. More importantly, he is one of the darlings of the World Economic Forum and a key architect of their agenda. In 2018, his lecture at the WEF, “Will the Future Be Human?” was sandwiched between addresses from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. So he’s playing in the sandbox with the big dogs.

In his WEF lecture Harari explained that in the coming generations, we will “learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds,” such that these will become “the main products of the 21st Century economy: not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds.” The few masters of the economy, he explains, will be the people who own and control data: “Today, data is the most important asset in the world,” in contrast to ancient times when land was the most important asset, or the industrial age when machines were paramount. WEF kingpin Klaus Schwab echoed Harari’s ideas when he explained: “One of the features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing; it changes us,” through gene editing and other biotechnological tools that operate under our skin.

Even the dreamy-eyed Harari admits there are some potential dangers with these developments: “If too much data is concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split not into classes but into two different species.” That would not, one supposes, be a good thing. But all things considered, he is more than willing to take these risks and forge ahead with this agenda. To be fair, Harari does not advocate for a future totalitarian state or rule by all-powerful corporations, but hopes to warn us of coming dangers.

In an exceptionally naïve proposal, however, Harari believes that the obvious problems posed by a tyrannical biosecurity state can be solved with more surveillance, by having citizens simply surveil the government: “Turn it around,” he said in a talk at the Athens Democracy Forum, “Surveil the governments more. I mean, technology can always go both ways. If they can surveil us, we can surveil them.” This proposal is—not to put too fine a point on it—incredibly stupid. As most of us learned in kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right.

The WEF made waves a few years back by posting on their website the slogan, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.” Although the page was later deleted, the indelible impression remained: it provided a clear and simple description of the future envisioned by Davos Man. As the WEF savants predict, at the last stage of this development, we will find ourselves in a rent-only/subscription-only economy, where nothing really belongs to us. Picture the Uberization of everything.

To get a sense of this future, imagine the world as an Amazon warehouse writ large: a mandarin caste of digital virtuosos will call the shots from behind screens, directing the masses below with the aid of ever more refined algorithmic specificity. The prophetic Aldous Huxley foresaw this Brave New World in his 1932 novel. These changes will challenge not only our political, economic, and medical institutions and structures; they will challenge our notions of what it means to be human. This is precisely what its advocates celebrate, as we will see in a moment.

Corporatist arrangements of public-private partnerships, which merge state and corporate power, are well suited for carrying out the necessary convergence of existing and emerging fields. This biological-digital convergence envisioned by the WEF and its members will blend big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Schwab refers to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will follow and build upon the first three—mechanical, electrical, and digital. The transhumanists—who we will meet in a moment—have been dreaming of just such a merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds for at least a few decades. Now, however, their visions are poised to become our reality.

Mechanisms of Control

The next steps in hacking human beings will involve attempted rollouts—which we should vigorously resist—of digital IDs, tied to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans or face IDs, demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial transactions, and bank accounts. These will be combined with Central Bank Digital Currencies, giving governments surveillance power and control over every one of your financial transactions, with the ability to lock you out of the market if you do not comply with government directives.

Using biometrics for everyday transactions routinizes these technologies. We are conditioning children to accept biometric verification as a matter of course. For example, face IDs are now used in multiple school districts to expedite the movement of students through school lunch lines. Until recently, biometrics such as fingerprints were used only for high-security purposes—when charging someone with a crime, for example, or when notarizing an important document. Today, routine biometric verification for repetitive activities from mobile phones to lunch lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools used in transactions. We are instrumentalizing the body in unconscious and subtle, but nonetheless powerful, ways.

Those with economic interests in creating markets for their products (whether vaccines, digital surveillance hardware and software, or harvested data) will continue to deploy the carrots and sticks of access to medical care and other services to strongarm acceptance of digital IDs in underdeveloped nations. In developed nations they will initially use a velvet glove approach of nudges, selling digital IDs as convenience and time-saving measures that will be hard for many to turn down, like skipping long TSA security lines at airports. The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you’re about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the line.

Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new social experiment, digital IDs—tied to private demographic, financial, location, movement, and biometric data—will become mechanisms for bulk data harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. We should resist—including by opting out of the new face ID scans at TSA airport screening checkpoints, which we can still legally do.

Once fully realized, this surveillance system will offer unprecedented mechanisms of control, allowing the regime to be maintained against any form of resistance. This technocratic dream would entrench the most intransigent authoritarian system the world has ever known—in the sense that it could maintain itself against any form of opposition through monopolistic technological and economic power. The suppression of dissent will happen in large part through the system’s financial controls, especially if we adopt Central Bank Digital Currencies. Try to resist or step outside the system’s strictures and the doors to markets will simply close. This means that once this system is in place, it could prove almost impossible to overthrow.

Microwaved Eugenics

Harari—who I cited extensively at the beginning of this talk—is among the more prominent members of a new species of academics, activists, and “visionaries” that refer to themselves as transhumanists. These folks aim to use technology not to alter the lived environment, but to fundamentally alter human nature itself. The goal is to “upgrade” or “enhance” human beings. This is both possible and desirable, as Harari explains, because all organisms—whether humans or amoebas or bananas or viruses—are at bottom just “biological algorithms.” This is the old materialist, social Darwinist ideology turbocharged and techno-upgraded with the tools of gene editing, nanotechnology, robotics, and advanced pharmaceuticals. Transhumanism is microwaved eugenics. There is nothing new under the sun.

The 20th-century eugenicists referred to disabled persons as “useless eaters.” Echoing this rhetoric on multiple occasions, Harari has puzzled over the question of what to do with people in the future who will refuse AI-mediated enhancement—folks he refers to as “useless people.” “The biggest question maybe in economics and politics in the coming decades,” he predicts, “will be what to do with all these useless people?” He goes on to explain, “The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.”

Harari suggests one possible solution to the problem of what to do with useless people: “My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games.” Well, at least we have a head start on that, a fact that does not escape Harari’s attention: “You see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their time with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs,” he explains. This is where Harari predicts those who refuse to be hacked for AI-enhancement purposes will find themselves.

Encountering Harari’s thought was not my first brush with the transhumanist movement. Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at Stanford University sponsored by the Zephyr Institute on the topic of transhumanism. I critiqued the idea of “human enhancement,” the use of biomedical technology not to heal the sick but to make the healthy “better than well,” i.e., bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, etc. The event was well attended by several students from the Transhumanist Club at Stanford.

We had a cordial discussion, and I enjoyed chatting with these students after the talk. I learned the symbol of their student group was H+ (“humanity-plus”). They were exceptionally bright, ambitious, and serious young men and women—typical Stanford students. Some of them had read their Plato in addition to their Scientific American. They sincerely wanted to make the world better. Perhaps there was a closet authoritarian or two among them, but my impression was that they had no interest in facilitating world domination by oligarchic corporatist regimes empowered to hack human beings.

Nevertheless, I got the impression that they did not comprehend the implications of the axioms they had accepted. We can choose our first principles, our foundational premises, but then we must follow them out to their logical conclusions; otherwise, we deceive ourselves. These Stanford students were not outliers, but representative of the local culture: transhumanism is enormously influential in Silicon Valley and shapes the imagination of many of the most influential tech elites. Proponents include the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, Harvard geneticist George Church, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, and other notables.

The Transhumanist Dream

Returning to Harari’s 2018 talk at the WEF, he admits that control of data might not only enable human elites to build digital dictatorships, but opines that hacking humans may facilitate something even more radical: “Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself.” With his Davos audience warmed up he then waxes to a crescendo: “This will not just be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, it will be the greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life four billion years ago.”

Which is, of course, a pretty big deal. Because for billions of years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life, as he explains: “All of life for four billion years—dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, humans—all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and to the laws of organic biochemistry.” But not anymore: all this is about to change, as he explains:

Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design—not the intelligent design of some god above the cloud, but our intelligent design, and the design of our clouds: the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud—these are the new driving forces of evolution. At the same time, science may enable life—after being confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds—science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm.

The opening sentence here perfectly echoes the original definition of eugenics from the man who coined the term in the late 19th Century, Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin: “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly [evolution by natural selection], man may do providently, quickly, and kindly [evolution by our own—or by the cloud’s—intelligent design].” But what is Harari talking about in that last sentence—life breaking out into the inorganic realm?

It’s been a transhumanist dream from the dawn of modern computing that someday we will be able to upload the informational content of our brains, or our minds (if you believe in minds), into some sort of massive computing system, or digital cloud, or other technological repository capable of storing massive amounts of data. On this materialist view of man, we will then have no more need for our human body, which, after all, always fails us in the end. Shedding this mortal coil—this organic dust that always returns to dust—we will find the technological means to… well, to live forever. Living forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes the transhumanists’ eschatology: salvation by digital technology.

This project is physically (and metaphysically) impossible, of course, because man is an inextricable unity of body and soul—not some ghost in the machine, not merely a bit of software transferable to another piece of hardware. But set that aside for now; look instead at what this eschatological dream tells us about the transhumanist movement. These imaginative flights of fancy have obviously moved well beyond the realm of science. Transhumanism is clearly a religion—indeed, a particular type of neo-Gnostic religion. It attracts adherents today—including educated, wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents—because it taps into unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. It is an ersatz substitute religion for a secular age.

That Hideous Strength

I cannot emphasize enough the importance for our time of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. Lewis once remarked that his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength, the third installment in his “space trilogy,” was The Abolition of Man in fictional form. Those who have learned from Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would do well to also read That Hideous Strength, an underappreciated entry in the dystopian fiction genre. Back in 1945, Lewis foresaw Yuval Harari and his transhumanist ilk on the horizon. He brilliantly satirized their ideology in the novel’s character of Filostrato, an earnest but deeply misguided Italian scientist.

In the story, a cabal of technocrats take over a bucolic university town in England—think of Oxford or Cambridge—and go to work immediately transforming things according to their vision of the future. The novel’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, is recruited away from the university to the technocrats’ new institute. Mark desires above all to be part of the progressive set, the “inner ring” that is steering the next big thing. He spends his first several days at the N.I.C.E (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments) trying in vain to ascertain exactly what his new job description entails.

Eventually, he figures out that he has been retained mainly to write propaganda explaining the Institute’s activities to the public. Somewhat dispirited—he is a scholar of the social sciences, after all, and not a journalist—he sits down at lunch one day with Filostrato, a member of the N.I.C.E. inner circle, and learns a bit about this scientist’s worldview.

It happens that Filostrato has just given orders to cut down some beech trees on the Institute’s property and replace them with trees made of aluminum. Someone at the table naturally asks why, remarking that he rather liked the beech trees. “Oh, yes, yes,” replies Filostrato. “The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed.” Filostrato explains that he once saw a metal tree in Persia, “so natural it would deceive,” which he believes could be perfected. His interlocutor objects that a tree made of metal would hardly be the same as a real tree. But the scientist is undeterred and explains why the artificial tree is superior:

“But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.”

“I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing.”

“Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”

When asked if he means that there would be no vegetation at all, Filostrato replies, “Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.” Someone wonders what the birds will make of it, but Filostrato has a plan for them too: “I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

Mark replies that this sounds like abolishing pretty much all organic life. “And why not?” Filostrato counters. “It is simple hygiene.” And then, echoing the rhetoric of Yuval Harari, we hear Filostrato’s soaring peroration, which would have been right at home in World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos:

“Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?… And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath…. And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms—sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions…. After all, we are organisms ourselves.

“I grant it… In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that, we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mold—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”

Someone interjects that this last part does not sound like much fun, but Filostrato responds, “My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away…. Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilization becomes possible.” Keep in mind that this was written decades before the invention of in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies, as well as the sexual revolution that brought widespread acceptance of the oral contraceptive pill. As Lewis reveals at the end of the novel, however, the N.I.C.E is not controlled by brilliant men of science but is ultimately under the sway of demonic forces.

In both the real character of Harari and the fictional character of Filostrato we find men who embrace, indeed celebrate, the idea that human beings can shed the messy business of organic life and somehow transfer our bodily existence into sterile inorganic matter. We encounter in both characters the kind of man who wants to bleach the entire earth with hand sanitizer. Were we not nudged, perhaps a bit too far, in the direction of Filostrato’s dream during covid, as we attempted to fully disinfect and sanitize our lived environments, and transfer all our communications to the digital realm? Have we not also moved in this direction by spending more waking hours glued to screens in a virtual world than interacting with people in the real world, while reams of behavioral data are extracted from our every keystroke and click for predictive analysis by AI?

Organic matter is alive, whereas inorganic matter is dead. I can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is, in the last analysis, a philosophy of death. But we must grant that it has become an influential philosophy among many of today’s elites. In one way or another, all of us have been seduced by the mistaken notion that by massively coordinated vigilance and the application of technology, we could rid our lived environments of pathogens and scrub our world entirely clean—perhaps even thwarting death.

As the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out, philosophies that begin from faulty premises not only fail to achieve their purpose, they inevitably end up producing the exact opposite of their stated goals. Transhumanism aims at superior intelligence, superhuman strength, and unending life. 

But because it is grounded in an entirely false notion of what it means to be human, if we recklessly embrace the transhumanist dream, we will find ourselves instead in a nightmare dystopia of stupidity, weakness, and death.

Via The Libertarian Institute

The US kicked off its largest annual military drills alongside the Philippines days ago this week, simulating a full-on war with China. A total of 17,000 troops from 20 countries participated in the drills, dubbed Balikatan 2025, including 9,000 American soldiers and 5,000 Filipino servicemen.

US Marine Corps Forces Pacific commander Lt. Gen. James Glynn said this year’s drills "will showcase a full battle test, the purposeful integration of real world security situations relevant to the region with live, virtual and constructive training opportunities that will give the Philippines and the US a collective opportunity to demonstrate capabilities across all domains, across all services and all forces."

Illustrative/AFP

A statement from the Philippine military likewise said that the exercises would simulate a "full-scale battle scenario." Many nations sent observers to the Philippines for the drills. For the first time, Japanese soldiers were full participants in the war games.

General Romeo Brawner, chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, noted that Balikatan would take place in the northern Philippines, near the South China Sea and Taiwan. "Across the vibrant expanse of Luzon, Palawan, the Visayas and Mindanao, we will assess our readiness in all domains," he said.

The South China Sea and Taiwan are flashpoints in a potential conflict between the US and China, which sees the island as part of its own sovereign territory.

A press release from the US Navy explained that the war games were proof that Washington would honor its defense treaty with Manila. Balikatan is a "testament to the ironclad alliance and enduring friendship between the Philippines and the United States," it said.

Chinese and Philippine vessels have collided around disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea on several occasions in recent years. While the incidents have not led to direct hostilities, Washington often restates its pledge to go to war on Manila’s behalf as a warning to Beijing not to attack the Philippines.

Along with additional participants in the drills, Balikatan 2025 will feature integrated air and missile defense. This includes one of the first live-fire tests of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS), a short-range anti-drone platform.

EXERCISE BALIKATAN | Division Tactics Drill Boosts Maritime Interoperability in Balikatan 2025

Naval forces from the Philippines and the United States successfully conducted a Division Tactics (DIVTACS) drill on 26 April 2025, 21 nautical miles west off the coast of San Felipe,… pic.twitter.com/qqbyjDLdtL

During Balikatan 2024, the US deployed the Typhon launcher – a covert system that is concealed in a 40-foot shipping container and fires Tomahawk and SM-6 missiles – to the Philippines. In a major provocation to Beijing, Washington kept the system in the country’s north, where it was capable of striking Taiwan or even mainland China. A Typhon launcher will be deployed again for this year’s Balikatan.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer warned states of losing federal funding if they fail to comply with President Donald Trump’s directives on rewarding illegal immigrants with tax dollars, according to an April 25 statement issued by the Department of Labor.

“Our nation’s unemployment benefits exist solely for workers who are eligible to receive them,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote in a letter addressed to state governors.

“To qualify for unemployment, one must be able and available to work, actively seeking work, and be legally authorized to accept employment in the United States. Unemployment benefits are not a handout for those in our country illegally.”

The secretary reminded all states that failing to fulfill existing legal obligations will result in the loss of federal funding through the Title III UI administrative grant.

The warning is pursuant to presidential memorandum, “Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits,” and executive order 14218, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders.”

Chavez-DeRemer also reminded states of an earlier communication by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, based on which, states can access the DHS immigration database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), at no cost and use it to verify the immigration status of benefit claimants.

This is a “critical tool” to ensure “illegal immigrants do not access our nation’s unemployment benefits,” said the labor secretary.

“As a result of this change, I instructed the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to send a letter to all State Unemployment Insurance Administrators urging them to immediately start using SAVE for every initial and continued claim filed by an individual who indicates that they are not a U.S. citizen,” he said.

The SAVE database is aimed at helping agencies at federal, state, local, and tribal levels to confirm the immigration status and citizenship of individuals before issuing benefits.

A presidential memorandum signed on April 15 directed multiple federal agencies to take steps to prevent ineligible people, such as illegal immigrants, from receiving social security benefits.

An executive order issued on Feb. 19 asked agencies and departments to take action to ensure that “no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens” and to “prevent taxpayer resources from acting as a magnet and fueling illegal immigration to the United States.”

According to a Department of Government Efficiency finding released earlier this month, 6,300 illegal immigrants on the terror watchlist had been receiving Medicaid and unemployment insurance.

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have been met with challenges.

On April 24, a federal judge issued an order blocking the administration from stripping federal taxpayer funding for cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies with regard to illegal immigrants.

State and local governments with sanctuary policies block or restrict local officials from enforcing federal laws such as those related to immigration.

The lawsuit was filed by over a dozen cities that would be affected by the cancellation of federal funding for “sanctuary” cities.

In his order, the judge said the administration’s attempt amounts to a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers principles and banned the government from any further funding cuts.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or food stamps.

On April 24, the Department of Agriculture asked states to take steps to this effect.

States were asked to check the identities of people who apply for SNAP, collect their social security numbers, and verify their legal status in the United States.

Harmeet Dhillon - Trump's hand-picked choice to lead the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has been taking a wrecking ball to the woke government entity - forcing out 'a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities' that have radically altered its mandate, NBC News' swamp scribe Ken Dilanian reports.

Harmeet Dhillon

"It’s been a complete bloodbath," one senior DOJ lawyer told Dilanian. Other sources said that over a dozen senior lawyers - "many with decades of experience working under presidents of both parties," have been reassigned, while others have resigned in frustration after they were shuffled around.

Dhillon kicked the hornet's nest last week - issuing a series of memos outlining the shifting priorities, which include (gasp!) "Keeping Men out of Women's Sports," and "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling."

"This is a 180 shift from the division’s traditional mission," one former senior official said - declining to be named "in fear of retaliation."

"These documents appear to have been created in a vacuum completely divorced from reality," the former official continued. "The division can only enforce statutes that have been passed by Congress, and these orders seem to contemplate division attorneys’ executing on work that fundamentally departs from the division’s long-standing mission."

Translation:

Dhillon, meanwhile, said the changes were no different than what happens anytime there's a change in administration, along with a quest for efficiency.

"Each new administration has its own priorities, and allocates resources accordingly," said Dhillon. "The Trump administration is no different. When I assumed my duties as Assistant Attorney General, I learned that certain sections in Civil Rights had substantial existing caseloads and backlogs, and that formed the basis of temporary details to assist those sections in getting, and staying, caught up."

10 'current and former officials' in the Civil Rights Division told NBC News that several division chiefs have been transferred to roles unrelated to their legal backgrounds, including handling complaints, as well as the office that handles public requests (lol). So, customer service.

"Every presidential administration has its own policy priorities," said former employee Stacey Young, who spent 18 years in the division before resigning in January, "but I don’t think there’s any precedent for an administration almost completely refocusing the civil rights division’s enforcement priorities the way this one has."

So sad.

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Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

The true scandal of current American fiscal governance needs be commented on. Or, better still, hammered upon good and hard.

To wit, the American electorate apparently doesn’t give a shit about runaway government spending because as a practical matter the overwhelming share of voters don’t pay the taxes to fund it. Aside from social insurance taxes, which most payroll taxpayers still believe to be a premium for a government-sponsored retirement annuity, the bottom 90% of households fund only a tiny fraction of Federal spending.

That’s right. The bottom 145 million US income tax filers (out of 161 million total filers) currently pay just $500 billion in Federal income taxes. That’s barely $3,500 per return and even then approximately 50 million of these returns owe zero taxes or actually get tax credit refunds for taxes they haven’t paid!

In the grand scheme of things, therefore, direct tax payments by the bottom 90% of income tax filers amounted to only 12% of Federal spending in FY 2024 outside of social insurance trust funds. To wit, Federal spending ex-social insurance was $4.82 trillion in FY 2024 and upwards of $4.3 trillion of this was paid for by the top 10% of income tax payers, corporations, minor excise and import duty payers and borrowing—of which there was $1.8 trillion of the latter in FY 2024.

Needless to say, the top 10% got soaked good and hard, paying $1.538 trillion of Federal income taxes and as a practical matter nearly the entirety of the $530 billion corporate income tax, which in today’s globally competitive world gets mainly pushed back to shareholders. In effect, $2.1 trillion or 43% of Federal spending outside of social insurance is paid for by the top 10%.

Needless to say, that’s just plain unfair and economically counter-productive, too. The current marginal rate for top bracket taxpayers is 40.8% when you include the Medicare surcharge and the so-called NIIT  (net investment income tax). That’s already extortionate because in a free society there is no way that the government should grab 40% of anyone’s income—especially since that’s only the Federal take, which can easily grow to 50% after state and local income and property taxes.

Moreover, when the TCJA act of 2017 expires at year-end 2025, the top marginal rate will jump to truly confiscatory rate of 43.4%, and well beyond 50% in most states after state and local levies are layered on.

In short, America desperately needs to raise more revenues to fund even a downsized government after the DOGE treatment. But the income tax is more than tapped out, and 90% of the public is getting a hall pass on the latter.

Accordingly, what needs to happen is a sweeping reform, which would shift the Federal revenue base overwhelmingly to consumption and sales tax levies. That would ensure that the economic damage is limited and that 100% of the voting public would have skin in the game and feel the pain of spending via commensurate tax extractions. Then they might well demand fiscal sanity from their elected representatives in a manner that rarely occurs under the current defective fiscal regime.

We will elaborate more on the needed sweeping tax base reform in Part 2, but suffice it here to say that not only is the current Federal income tax grossly unfair to the productive classes and tapped out as a practical matter of revenue generation, but it is also unadministratable. Accordingly, more than half of the massive 100,000 man IRS bureaucracy could be eliminated even without a sales/consumption tax replacement, while upwards of 90% could be eliminated if the income tax were mainly substituted by a sales tax.

Needless to say, we are not talking about just bureaucratic nannies and meddlers in the case of the current 83,000 IRS employees—-a figure which is heading for 102,000 by the end of the decade under the still unrepealed Biden revenue grab. In the ranks of what amounts to a small city’s worth of Federal bureaucrats are also a goodly phalanx of tax cops, gumshoes, enforcement lawyers and tax filing proctologists.

So the question recurs: What has generated this massive bureaucracy in the first place, and what fundamental policy shifts are needed to cut the IRS headcount by 50% (42,00 jobs) and upwards of $5 billion of compensation and other operating costs?

The answer starts with calling the IRS’ bluff.  When you look at the actual tax filing data it is damn evident that the Deep State bureaucrats are faking mightily when it comes to their massive staffing demands. We discovered the scam way back in our OMB days while jousting with the Treasury Department over the sacred cows in its budget. But nothing is different 40-years later—so here’s the smoking gun that points the way.

In the most recent complete tax-year (2022) there were 161.336 million individual income tax returns filed, which reported $14.83 trillion of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). But fully 146.045 million of those filings, which reported $10.025 trillion in AGI, did not claim any itemized deductions.

Moreover, among these non-itemizers about 97 million owed taxes and used the standard deduction to calculate taxable income and the amount owed before tax credits. And another 49 million standard deduction users owed no Federal income taxes at all due to low taxable income or child and other tax credits.

In short, you absolutely do not need a giant IRS bureaucracy—and, indeed, hardly any labor-intensive operation at all—to administer the IRS code in the case of 92% of annual tax filings and the overwhelming share of US income taxpayers. That’s because virtually all the relevant data for completion of these non-itemized filings is machine readable and available on other IRS reporting systems, as shown below.

For want of doubt, here is the entirety of the tax computation for a couple earning wages at the US median income of $80,000, using the $13,850 standard deduction for a joint return and claiming two $2,000 child tax credits. The fact is, with today’s technology 99.999% of the work of processing, examining and adjusting (if necessary) non-itemized tax returns of this type should be accomplishable by IRS computers, with nary a bureaucrat’s finger-prints evident in the whole shebang.

That’s especially the case because the overwhelming share of the $10 trillion of AGI among non-itemizers is for wages and salaries reported to the IRS on W-2s; and, also, for interest, dividends, rents, royalties, independent contractor earnings, stock sales, pensions, annuities, IRAs and taxable Social Security earnings—all of which are also reported by the payers of these amounts on Form 1099s.

In the illustration below, any alert machine—to say nothing of an AI-enabled one rigged-up by Elon & Co.—could cross check the W-2s, calculate the taxable income, apply the three relevant tax brackets, deduct the $4,000 of child credits, verify the tax liability of $6,243 and subtract the taxpayer’s withholding amounts to determine whether a payment or refund was required.

All in literally a nanosecond. Presto!

Step-by-Step Calculation of $80,000 Wage-Earning Couple With 2 Kids And The Standard Deduction

1. Gross Income: $80,000
2. Standard Deduction: $13,850 (for married filing jointly in 2023)
3. Taxable Income: $80,000 – $13,850 = $66,150

Tax Liability Calculation

1. Taxable Income: $66,150
2. Tax Rates:
   • 10% on income up to $22,000
   • 12% on income from $22,001 to $38,600
   • 22% on income from $38,601 to $66,150

Tax Calculation

• 10% on the first $22,000: $22,000 * 0.10 = $2,200
• 12% on the next $16,600: $16,600 * 0.12 = $1,992
• 22% on the remaining $27,550: $27,550 * 0.22 = $6,051

Total Tax Before Credits: $2,200 + $1,992 + $6,051 = $10,243

Child Tax Credits

• 2 Child Tax Credits: $2,000 per child
• Total Credits: 2 * $2,000 = $4,000

Tax Liability After Credits: $10,243 – $4,000 = $6,243

So how in the world can they justify 83,000 bureaucrats and a budget of $16.1 billion when the overwhelming share of returns involve what can be aptly described as “machine work 101”?

The answer, purportedly, lies in the balance of filings—the 15.29 million itemized returns. But even here the overwhelming bulk of the relevant income items and deductible expense items are not so complex or opaque at all. Indeed, they too are available on other IRS reporting systems and are machine readable at the individual taxpayer ID level.

Specifically, in 2022 the amount of AGI reported on these itemized returns was $4.809 trillion or about 32% of total AGI. But within this total there was included the following amounts which are all machine readable from W-2s and 1099s:

• Wages and salaries: $2,345 billion.
• Taxable interest: $78 billion.
•  Taxable dividends: $230 billion.
• IRAs: $110 billion.
• Pensions and annuities: $176 billion.
• Taxable Social Security $82 billion.
• Unemployment benefits: $3 billion.
• Subtotal: $3.024 trillion.
• Above Income As % of AGI on Itemized Returns: 63%.

When it comes to verification on a machine-readable basis, the above income items are all check, check and check. This means that when you combine the above machine-readable AGI amounts from itemized returns with the $10.025 trillion reported on non-itemized returns, it works out to 88% or $13.049 trillion of the $14.834 trillion of total AGI reported for 2022.

None of this AGI should require any significant labor-intensive administration, examination, adjustment or enforcement. The IRS computers should be aware of every dime of AGI from the above categories and whether it was filed accurately by the taxpayer or in need of the proverbial IRS-ordered “adjustment”.

So it is hard to figure out why on the AGI/income side of the equation there is a need for anything remotely like the headcount and budget magnitudes shown below. For instance, the 22,000 headcounts in “enforcement” and “compliance” should be as idle as the proverbial Maytag repairman when it comes to standard deduction returns and the machine-readable sources of income filed on itemized returns. In these instances, there is nothing material for taxpayers to cheat on that wouldn’t be flagged by a properly programmed computer instantly upon filing.

And the same is true in the case of the 33,000 headcounts in “taxpayer services”, “operations support” and “administrative support”. Virtually none of these bureaucrats are needed to process the $10 trillion of AGI on the 146 million non-itemized returns and the $3 trillion of AGI on 15 million itemized returns that is already reported independently by the underlying payers of these income sources.

To the contrary, that’s work for 24/7 machines, not 6.5 hours per day (after civil service required breaks and lunch) government bureaucrats who get 35 vacation, personal leave and sick days per year, on average. And a high share of whom in the post-pandemic era don’t deign to come into the office even on workdays, anyway!

Breakdown of IRS Budget and Headcounts By Function:

For want of doubt, here are the other arguably more complicated categories of AGI reported on itemized returns. But even in these cases, there is plenty of work for the machines to do with respect to examination and verification. For instance, $845 billion or nearly half of the total below is owing to capital gains. But that source of income is already reported by issuers on Form 8940 and Schedule D of 1040s. So Elon’s machines should be on top of that, as well.

At the end of the day, most of the complexity and opacity of the IRS code relates to the $106 billion of net profits reported for business and professional income and the $704 billion reported by sub-chapter S corporations. Here the complexity arises not just from gross income reporting, but more especially from the timing and amounts of allowable business expenses incurred in getting to the net profits figures shown below.

Still, the total amount of AGI involved in these two sources at $950 billion is just 6.5% of total AGI. Even if returns with heavy sub-chapter S or professional and business earnings involve a lot of digging, checking, reconciling and verifying by humans, it is hardly likely to be anything close to 83,000 bureaucrat’ worth.

So, yes, there may well be 2,650 pages of IRS code and another 9,000 pages of IRS regulations, and the whole thing may have 25 times more words than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But when it comes to the overwhelming bulk of income tax filings and the AGI reported on them, 98% of this legal labyrinth is largely irrelevant. It’s unfortunate existence is merely cited as a smokescreen to justify a massive, unnecessary tax collection bureaucracy.

Other Sources of Income Reported on Itemized Returns in 2022

• Business and professional profits: $106 billion.
• S-corporation net income: $704 billion.
• Capital Gains: $845 billion.
• Property sales: $26 billion.
• Rents and royalties: $20 billion.
• Estate and trust income: $29 billion.
• Gambling income: $29 billion.
• Other, net: $5 billion.
• Total of above: $1.785 trillion.

Nor does the itemized deduction side of the ledger change the picture. Upwards of 91% of itemized deductions, which amounted to $669 billion in 2022, were accounted for by the first five line-items shown below. These are largely machine readable based on standard reporting forms that originators of these deductions are required to file with the IRS.

For instance, mortgage interest deductions are reported on Form 1098; charitable contributions are reported in Form 990 and deductions for state and local taxes paid are available from IRS information sharing reports by the states. Yet in 2022 these three deductions alone amounted to nearly $500 billion or 75% of the total.

Major machine-readable itemized deductions in 2022:

• Medical deductions after floor: $93 billion (gross deductions of $121 billion less $28 billion floor effect).
• Taxes paid deduction: $125 billion.
• Mortgage interest deduction: $147 billion.
• Investment interest deduction: $23 billion.
• Charitable contributions deduction: $222 billion.
• All other itemized deductions: $59 billion.
• Total Itemized Deductions: $669 billion.

In short, upwards of 90% of the AGI reported in 2022 for all returns was machine readable from independent reporting sources and more than 90% of itemized deductions were also machine readable. Accordingly, the preponderant share of income and deduction data coursing through 161 million annual income tax filings is essentially riding in a self-driving vehicle. The work of processing, assessing, validating and adjusting it, where necessary, does not likely require more staff than the current headcount of the Capitol Hill Police (2,400).

Moreover, even a few small intelligent changes in the IRS code would narrow even further the number of returns and amounts of AGI that need labor-intensive review and verification. For instance, among the 15.29 million itemized returns filed in 2022, the overwhelming share were at the lower and moderate ends of the income scale where disputed deduction amounts are inherently limited.

2022 Distribution Of Itemized Deduction Returns By AGI Level:

• $100,000 and under: 5.755 million (37.6%).
• $100,000 to $500,000: 8.076 million (52.8%).
• $500,000 to $1,000,000: 0.903 million (5.9%).
• $1,000,000 and over: 0.558 million (3.7%).
• Total Itemized Returns: 15.292 million (100%).

As indicated above, 13.831 million of itemized returns, or more than 90%, reported AGI of $500,000 or lower–including 5.8 million at $100,000 or lower.

In turn, these $500,000 and under filings reported an aggregate of $1.960 trillion of AGI and $475 billion of itemized deductions. So a “variable standard deduction” allowance of roughly this ratio—24% of AGI— for currently itemized returns up to $500,000 would be revenue neutral. But by eliminating upwards of 90% of itemized deduction filings, an income based “variable standard deduction” would also surely reduce the need for several thousands of examiners, service personnel and overhead managers, as well.

After all, there are only 1.461 million returns with AGI of $500,000 or higher, which reported the amounts shown below for 2022. We absolutely do not believe, for instance, that you need a bureaucracy of 83,000 to examine $213 billion of itemized deduction taken by the wealthy, when $126 billion of these were owing to charitable contributions and $41 billion to investment interest deductions.  That’s nearly 80% of the total deductions taken by the wealthy, yet every dollar of this is machine readable and verifiable because it is reported independently to the IRS by the charitable institution recipients and interest-receiving banks, respectively.

Likewise, 71% of the $2.78 trillion of AGI is due to W-2 salaries ($931 billion), investment interest ($62 billion), ordinary dividends ($170 billion), capital gains ($774 billion) and rents and royalties ($40 billion). As indicated previously, all of these items are also reported to the IRS separately and are machine readable by its computers at the taxpayer ID level.

So even in the insane nest of complexity which is the US tax code as it applies to the wealthy, the case just isn’t there to justify the egregiously padded payrolls at the IRS. Not even remotely—and that’s before taking a legislative scalpel to the tax code with the aim of drastically broadening the base and flattening the rates.

Key Tax Data for The 1.461 Million Filings with AGI of $500,000 or Higher:

• Total AGI: $2,780 billion.
• Itemized Deductions: $213 billion.
• Other Adjustments: $86 billion.
• Taxable Income: $2.481 billion.
• Taxes Paid: $708 billion.
• Itemized Deductions as % of AGI: 7.6%.
• Taxes Paid As % of Taxable Income: 28.5%.

So can the DOGE find a way to cut the IRS staff by upwards of 50% and 42,000 bureaucrats at a budget savings of $5 billion per year? We’d say, yes, just dig into the rich drove of data in the IRS Data Book for recent tax years and the degree of the current scam will become more than evident.

In that context, DOGE might well consider a technologically modern version of the old postcard-based approach to simplification of the Federal income tax. Thus, there is no reason why upwards of 150 million filers with AGIs under $500,000 could not simply receive an “E-Card” from the IRS at their personal email address in which the IRS machines have already done all the work. The E-Card would:

• Calculate and sum all sources of AGI.
• Apply the standard deduction and child credits.
• Compute the tax liability owed.
• Calculate the amount of either payment or refund due after crediting taxpayer withholdings.
• Provide an option to “accept” the E-Card outcome or elect to file different amounts in the regular way.

Again, based on the IRS filing data it is likely that at least 90% of E-Card recipients would check the “accept” box and be done with tax time, with no expense on their end and no IRS bureaucrats on the other end.

Our confidence in the conclusion is based on these considerations from the 2022 IRS data. Only 4.7% of the 120 million returns with AGI under $100,000 claimed itemized deductions and the amount of AGI on these returns was just 7% of AGI on all returns under $100,000.

Summary of Filings with AGI of $100,000 or Under:

• Returns With No Taxes owed: 47.048 million returns with $922 billion of AGI.
• Standard Deduction Returns: 66.865 million returns and $3.424 trillion of AGI.
• Itemized Deduction Filers: 5.755 million returns with $345 billion of AGI:

Likewise, 1.88 million or 22% of filings in the $100,000 to $500,000 range used itemization, but it is likely that the aforementioned variable standard deduction approach would limit the number of itemizers very sharply.

Finally, even without sweeping tax reform and the substitution of tariff and consumption taxes for the income tax, as has been vaguely proposed by President Trump, a huge share of the $550 billion that taxpayers now absorb to figure and file their taxes and contest with the IRS bureaucracy could be readily and substantially reduced.

Of course, the prospect of 42,000 IRS agents and hundreds of billions of filing and record keeping expenses should be more than welcome.

*  *  *

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Russia's top military leaders as well as President Vladimir Putin have on Saturday declared the full liberation of Russia's Kursk region, after Ukrainian forces invaded and occupied huge swathes of it starting last August.

The final fight was for the village of Gornal, which lies on the Ukrainian border. Fighting on the vicinity of the settlement became fierce earlier this month, and the tide was definitely in Moscow forces' favor after the capture of a key monastery complex. Russian forces accused the Ukrainian army of using the monastery as a military forward operating position.

The damaged St. Nicholas Monastery in Gornal. Source: the Russian Orthodox Church Department for External Church Relations

Putin in a Saturday video address thanked Russian service members "who took part in defeating the neo-Nazi groups" who for over six months held hundreds of square kilometers of sovereign Russian territory. He declared the utter 'failure' of the invasion attempt.

"The Kiev regime’s adventure has completely failed, and the huge losses suffered by the enemy, including among the most combat-ready, trained and equipped, including by Western models of equipment… will certainly be reflected along the entire line of combat contact," he said.

Chief of the general staff Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, informed Putin that the military had "completed the defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces that attacked the Kursk region."

At the height of the cross-border offensive which began last August, Ukraine's military had seized just over 530 square miles, but regional reports beginning last weekend said that significant figure was down to less than just 20 square miles. Gornal was the last Ukrainian holdout in Russian territory.

President Putin's video announcement:

'I congratulate all personnel of all military units that took part in the defeat of neo-Nazi formations that invaded Kursk' — Putin

'The defeat of the neo-Nazi regime is approaching' https://t.co/qEfZI7b4gE pic.twitter.com/bZImKeVHtW

The operation to retake Kursk had clearly become more highly prioritized by the Kremlin over the last couple months, and likely Putin wanted to achieve its full liberation quickly as talks with the US are underway in order to avoid negotiating an exchange of territory. What little leverage Zelensky had regarding Kursk has now been effectively quashed. 

The timing seems intentional as the White House has admitted that Zelensky holds none of the cards. This without doubt puts Moscow in even more control both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“This is not normal.” Those words from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., are undeniably true after the arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan. However, the reason it is not normal is far more debatable. Dugan is accused of becoming a lawbreaker in seeking to obstruct an effort to arrest a man wanted by federal authorities. If true, that is manifestly not “normal.”

As soon as the news of the arrest was reported, Democrats declared another constitutional crisis. Klobuchar added that the arrest “is a drastic move threatening the rule of law” and a “grave step and undermines our system of checks and balances.”

That is a curious claim unless Klobuchar believes that the officers are lying. If not, Klobuchar is suggesting that a judge should be allowed (or at least not held accountable) for actively shielding a wanted person and facilitating their evasion of law enforcement.

Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., also condemned Dugan’s arrest, stating, “If [FBI Director] Kash Patel and Donald Trump don’t like a judge, they think they can arrest them. This is stunning — we must stand up to this blatant power grab. Republicans: How is this not a red line for you?”

Yet, what is the “red line” for judges if the allegations are true? This judge is accused of conduct that has resulted in charges for other citizens. The judicial robe is not some form of invisibility cloak that allows judges to engage in alleged criminal acts.

The Wisconsin media is reporting:

Sources have told the Journal Sentinel that ICE officials arrived in Dugan’s courtroom on the morning of April 18. When they went to the chief judge’s office, Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor.

If true, that would be an active effort to help the suspect elude police who were carrying out a lawful function.

According to the criminal complaint, Flores-Ruiz allegedly attacked three individuals after an altercation with his roommate about playing loud music. Flores-Ruiz allegedly struck his roommate approximately 30 times with a closed fist and then attacked his girlfriend and a third person. Some of the injuries required hospital treatment.

The evasion of police at the courthouse required officers to chase down Ruiz, which could have resulted in a more serious confrontation on the street.

This is not the first time that a judge has been accused of participating in or directing such obstruction.

I previously wrote about the case of Massachusetts judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph who was charged with allegedly helping an illegal immigrant evade ICE agents in April 2018. Joseph and court officer Wesley MacGregor were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting and obstruction of a federal proceeding.

I was critical of the handling of the case. While Joseph was suspended for three years, charges were dropped in 2022 during the Biden Administration.

The Dugan case occurred at the same time that a New Mexico judge was arrested for harboring an unlawful immigrant and an alleged TdA gang member.

Former Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano and his wife were arrested on Thursday. Notably, Cano reportedly admitted to officers that he smashed the phone of Cristhian Ortega-Lopez after the 23-year-old was arrested in a raid at the judge’s home.

As I said on Fox last night, I am perplexed by Democrats rushing to denounce the arrest of Dugan before we know whether these allegations are supported. If she escorted the suspect to a non-public door to facilitate his escape, that is conduct and would constitute a shocking abandonment of judicial ethics. She can certainly use her authority to address matters properly before her in the form of judicial orders, but actively assisting in an escape is well beyond the pale.

I have often criticized the reckless rhetoric directed against judges, including those who have ruled against the Trump Administration. We need to maintain our civility and respect as we work through these often difficult questions.

However, that works both ways. Judges have to reinforce respect for the judiciary in their own conduct. That includes showing restraint and respect in relation to the countervailing powers of the Executive Branch. It certainly includes avoiding actions that could be viewed as criminal or unethical in resisting this Administration.

That is also a “red line.”

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the author of best-selling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” 

*  *  *

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

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his dismay on April 25 after a new report found that more than two-thirds of U.S. military reserve personnel are overweight.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth participates in a morning physical training session with troops stationed in Warsaw, Poland, on Feb. 14, 2025. DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza

Washington-based think tank American Security Project (ASP) published a white paper this week that found that nearly 68 percent of reserve troops are overweight or obese.

In 2018, when the Department of Defense last surveyed obesity rates in the reserve military components, it found that around 65 percent of reserve troops were considered overweight or obese.

“The number of young adults interested in military service remains sufficient to maintain current force strength. However, as overweight and obesity disqualify thousands of applicants each year, services are incentivized to violate body composition enlistment standards to meet recruitment goals,” the new ASP report reads.

Hegseth took to social media platform X on Friday to call the report’s findings “completely unacceptable.”

“This is what happens when standards are IGNORED — and this is what we are changing. REAL fitness & weight standards are here,” the defense secretary said. “We will be FIT, not FAT.”

HEGSETH: "Troops... need to be fit, not fat." pic.twitter.com/qhZuLwM3Hn

Fitness standards remain a multi-faceted challenge for the military.

The Army rolled out its Future Soldier Preparatory Course in 2022 as a means of helping prospective recruits meet the minimum fitness and academic standards to serve. The Navy launched a similar preparatory course in 2024.

While pre-ascension courses can help prospective recruits get in shape to serve, the ASP report raises concerns about current active and reserve component members.

“Although the reserve component’s obesity-related challenges are similar to those in the active component, commanders and policymakers will not be able to combat these trends with a uniform approach,” it reads.

The report notes that reserve components face unique challenges in keeping their troops in shape.

“Armed with far less data and public attention, the reserve component faces an uphill battle reconciling complex systems of duty status-dependent health care benefits, a force spread all over the world and across 54 states and territories, and critical medical records siloed between DOD and private providers,” it reads.

Last month, the defense secretary ordered a military-wide review of fitness standards.

Hegseth had been outspoken about his concerns with fitness standards in the military even before taking on his current role as the defense secretary. Several of his past comments have focused on whether women should serve in combat roles.

During his confirmation process, senators asked Hegseth to elaborate on his views on women in combat and other issues concerning military fitness standards.

“It’s not about the capabilities of men and women, it’s about standards,” he said.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte after meeting with President Donald Trump and Norway’s PM Jonas Gahr Støre on Thursday proclaimed that all Western leaders, including Trump, are on the same page viewing Russia as a "long-term threat" to NATO territory.

Rutte was optimistic about Trump helping to potentially end the Russia-Ukraine war, saying that "huge steps" have lately been made which put the onus on Russia to respond by displaying positive action or making concessions.

But it's clear there's a lot of tensions and discomfort in the Western military alliance given the optics of more US pressure being brought to bear against Ukraine and Zelensky in particular. This has been seen in the back-and-forth over the fate of Crimea.

Trump on Wednesday unleashed immense criticism on the Ukrainian President for his rejection of a US plan that would given recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula. Trump had said on Truth Social in reference to Zelensky,  "if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired"... and "He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country."

It's clear that Rutte's trip to Washington was in large part about lobbying Trump to take the pressure off Zelensky. A prior Financial Times  report had said Rutte would urge the White House "not to force Ukraine to accept a peace deal against its will."

Presumably this message was also conveyed in the NATO chief's meetings with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz on Thursday. 

A NATO official had told FT, "The key message is making the Americans understand what’s at stake." Western officials and mainstream media have at times described Trump's latest messaging on the conflict as outright 'pro-Russian'. Trump had said Thursday that Russia's main concession to Ukraine is not taking over the whole country, which were viewed as highly provocative remarks.

Meanwhile, Trump told reporters Friday, "We’re meeting with Putin right now as we speak" - in reference to Steve Witkoff being in Moscow. "We have a lot of things going on, and I think at the end, we’re going to end up with a lot of good deals, including tariff deals and trade deals, but we’re going to try to get out of war." He added that he thinks "we're pretty close" to achieving a peace deal.

Among other things the Russian side has demanded the cessation of Western arms and ammo to Ukraine, but Washington wants Ukraine to be able to maintain the ability to react forcibly, which contradicts Moscow's desire for the full demilitarization of the country.

* * *

Meanwhile, independent journalist and political commentator Michal Tracey has a strong note of caution regarding where things actually are regarding progress on Ukraine peace...

The most generous interpretation of Trump's negotiating strategy thus far is that he's made relatively cost-free conciliatory gestures to Russia, which Putin has to some degree reciprocated. This makes sense, as the party against whom US military assets have been arrayed is Russia, and there had been little or no high-level US/Russian contact for several years.

In order to achieve a settlement to the war, there would have to be some "detente" with Russia, as the cut-off in contacts between 2022-2025 was a huge historical aberration. Even during the most fraught Soviet days, never had there been any comparable cut-off in contacts between the world's leading nuclear powers. Trump has simultaneously taken a publicly aggressive line toward Ukraine. This also makes sense, as Ukraine is a US client state, and it's over Ukraine that the US has leverage -- not necessarily Russia.

The Biden Administration's incessant mantra had been "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine," thereby purporting to displace US policy agency onto Ukraine, despite the US obviously having the ultimate agency as arms supplier, intel-provider, NATO leader, etc. Trump has shifted that fictional "agency" calculus.

But leaving aside the public gestures and diplomatic posturing (while important), the policy status quo to a large extent persists. US sanctions have not been adjusted. Aside from a brief interruption in March, US arms continue to flow to Ukraine. Europe is re-militarizing, however fitfully. Ukraine has no credible plans to take back major territory currently occupied by Russia. Thus the principal concession that would have to be obtained at this point, in terms of the underlying power dynamic, is from Russia.

Freezing the conflict along the current lines had been previously denounced by Putin as intolerable. Now we hear that the outline of the Trump proposal includes not just freezing the current lines, but allowing Ukraine to control significant parts of what Putin has declared to be eternal territory of the Russian Federation. Along with the US taking control of the Zapohirizia nuclear plant (also located on territory annexed by Putin.) Russia would further be required to abandon its original war aim of "demilitarizing" Ukraine, although it's possible that this provision could be subject to technical modifications.

All the while, there's no indication that US/EU/NATO would cease arming Ukraine under the "ceasefire" framework. If anything, the armament could intensify, as Norway's prime minister pledged in a meeting today with Trump. It's very easy to imagine Russian "milbloggers" and hawks being utterly infuriated if Putin were to accept the terms proposed by Trump -- at least as they have been publicly reported. It could easily be spun as a capitulation by Russia.

US recognition of Crimea might be a nice side perk, but it may not have much direct bearing on the core grievances that gave rise to the 2022 invasion. Russia has never been in serious jeopardy of losing Crimea, so US recognition in practice would be a mostly legalistic change. In totality, it makes little sense for Trump to publicly antagonize Putin at this time. (Notwithstanding his "Vladimir, STOP!" post, which is pretty mild all things considered.) Whether the public gestures are sufficient for Putin to accept ceasefire terms that could be easily spun as a capitulation remains in considerable doubt -- but it's not IMPOSSIBLE that a settlement of some sort could be achieved, if Putin is willing to significantly scale down his 2022 war aims.