Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The Swedish Social Democratic Party has approved a new integration strategy that aims to forcibly diversify the country’s residential areas, pushing for what party officials call a “socio-economic mix” of Swedes and migrants in housing developments.

The policy, adopted at the party congress ahead of the 2026 general election, includes proposals to limit immigration to vulnerable areas and to use housing construction to engineer a more integrated society.

“We are serious about the fact that we intend to break segregation and use housing policy as an engine in that work,” said Lawen Redar, the party official responsible for designing the new platform, as cited by Aftonbladet.

Redar described the shift as a “U-turn” in the party’s approach, acknowledging that past strategies had failed.

The new policy includes scrapping the right of asylum seekers to choose their own accommodation and banning municipalities from placing new arrivals in already struggling districts. Instead, migrants will be relocated to wealthier areas in an effort to engineer demographic diversity and “repay the integration debt,” as the party put it.

Jonas Attenius, a senior party official newly elected to the executive committee and chairman of the municipal board in Gothenburg, emphasized the long-term nature of the project. “Yes, we need to mix the population in the long run. I usually say ‘in a generation’. This is long-term,” he said. He argued that integrating migrant families into more prosperous neighborhoods would be key to breaking entrenched segregation.

But critics have described the plan as ideological social engineering. Richard Jomshof, a member of parliament for the right-wing Sweden Democrats, responded sharply:

“No, we don’t need your forced mixing. What we need are closed borders and a return migration (policy) worth the name. But sure, you socialists can mix as much as you want, just pack your bags.”

On the contrary, the Sweden Democrats announced last month they will campaign in the 2026 general election on a pledge to stop migration to the country.

The plan comes amid growing concern over crime and integration failures in Sweden’s suburbs, many of which are dominated by immigrant populations. In recent years, the country has faced a wave of gang-related violence, including record numbers of explosions and shootings, often tied to second-generation migrant youth. Some suburbs now rank among the most dangerous areas in Europe.

Despite the backlash, Social Democrat officials are confident the new approach will not alienate the party’s newer, affluent urban supporters — voters it began attracting after the 2022 election, in part due to the collapse of the traditional center-right Moderates.

“I’m convinced of that,” said Attenius. “But again, this requires a strict migration policy.”

Attenius also issued an apology to migrants who had been concentrated in struggling districts. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry for doing that. Now it is time for the whole of society to take over.”

Read more here...

Authored by Julio Rivera via American Greatness,

By now, the apocalyptic whispers that once belonged solely to science fiction are starting to sound more like realistic forecasts. Artificial intelligence, once hailed as the great liberator of human productivity and ingenuity, is now moonlighting as a con artist, data thief, and spy.

The machines are rising, yes—but they’re not doing it alone. As we embrace AI with reckless abandon, it’s not the code that’s dooming us. It’s the carbon-based lifeforms behind the keyboard making forehead-slapping mistakes. If civilization does collapse under the weight of digital warfare, it’ll be a joint project between rogue AI and good old-fashioned human idiocy.

Let’s talk about the Rise of the Machines, 2025 edition—not in the form of Terminators with glowing eyes, but as lines of sophisticated code hell-bent on manipulation, infiltration, and destruction. Whether we are willing to accept it or not, AI-powered cyberattacks are becoming disturbingly common and alarmingly sophisticated.

We’re seeing the proliferation of deepfake scams, hyper-personalized phishing attacks, and AI-assisted password cracking that make traditional defenses look as flimsy as a paper umbrella in a hurricane.

Take the case of deepfake fraud, where criminals now impersonate CEOs and executives with astonishing accuracy. These aren’t your cousin’s sloppy Photoshop jobs. These are full-motion, pitch-perfect, AI-generated replicas of real people, used in schemes to authorize fraudulent wire transfers, manipulate employees, or simply throw entire organizations into chaos. It’s not just unsettling. It’s an outright weaponization of trust—an erosion of reality itself.

And don’t forget AI-generated phishing emails. These aren’t the hilariously broken English scams from 2006. AI now writes flawless prose, mirroring the tone and style of your boss, your bank, or your kid’s school, tricking you into clicking that one wrong link that detonates ransomware across your organization like a digital IED. The machines aren’t playing chess anymore—they’re playing you.

But even as AI’s capabilities soar into dystopian territory, the greatest cybersecurity threat isn’t machine intelligence. It’s human incompetence. You could hand someone the most secure system in the world, and they’ll still manage to set it on fire with a reused password or a click on an “urgent invoice” from a Nigerian prince.

A report by NinjaOne drives this point home with a sledgehammer: nearly 95% of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error. Think about that. Not Skynet, not Chinese cyber commandos or North Korean hackers in basements—but Steve in Accounting, who uses “123456” as his password and clicks on pop-ups promising free iPhones.

The attack vectors are depressingly mundane: downloading unsafe software, failing to update systems, weak passwords, falling for phishing scams, and misconfigured security settings.

It’s like locking your house with a deadbolt and then leaving the window wide open with a neon sign that says, “Come on in!” And yet, these mistakes are committed daily in both small businesses and Fortune 500 firms alike.

Compounding this mess is the cyber climate we find ourselves in. While the Biden administration made a lot of noise about cybersecurity (including a 2021 executive order that read like a cyber-fantasy novel), the reality has been more bark than bite. The cyber talent shortage identified during his term is still here. In fact, it’s worse.

Across the board, we are woefully understaffed. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for example, is running with fewer hands. Meanwhile, budget cuts threaten to kneecap already stretched-thin federal cyber teams. But here’s the catch: this isn’t a dig at DOGE. Frankly, it’s not the government’s fight alone.

In an era where the bureaucracy is clearly not nimble or robust enough to be the cyber bodyguard of every business, school district, and hospital, it’s time for individuals and private entities to shoulder the digital shield. The idea that Uncle Sam can magically protect every database, email server, and Wi-Fi-enabled lightbulb from hostile AI is, quite frankly, a joke—and not a funny one.

So, where does that leave us?

It means that responsibility, like it or not, is decentralized. Your small business, your city council, your local school, and yes, your grandma’s Wi-Fi router all play a role in national cyber resilience. Everyone from the CEO to the intern must realize that the click of a mouse can ignite a digital inferno.

This isn’t paranoia. This is math. The AI-fueled cybercriminals don’t sleep, don’t blink, and don’t need to take lunch breaks. They can run cyber threats around the clock, generating thousands of enticing money-related phishing schemes per second or trying billions of password combinations while sipping binary lattes. The only thing stopping them is us—and right now, “us” is losing.

The solution isn’t some magical new firewall or sexy blockchain band-aid. It’s basic digital hygiene. It’s updating software. It’s using multi-factor authentication. It’s protecting social media accounts and credentials. It’s training staff not to download every sketchy app they’re offered, like over-caffeinated lab rats. It’s investing in AI-powered defense tools to fight fire with fire—automated threat detection, behavioral analysis, and predictive breach detection. In other words, if the machines are evolving, so must we.

But none of this works without awareness. The greatest virus we face isn’t malware. It’s apathy. Too many Americans still treat cybersecurity like flossing—important, sure, but something they’ll get around to eventually. Meanwhile, AI doesn’t wait. It doesn’t procrastinate. It hunts.

So yes, the rise of the machines may well usher in the end of civilization—but only if we stand by and let it happen. The antidote isn’t panic. It’s preparation. It’s competence. It’s proper AI oversight. And it’s waking up to the fact that we are all soldiers in a quiet war where the front lines are firewalls, not foxholes.

Because at the end of the day, the machines aren’t coming to destroy us.

We’re just really, really good at destroying ourselves.

When it comes to its trade war with the US, Brussels is quick to parade just how anti-Trump it is, how unfair US trade practices are (just ignore the fact that Europe was far more protectionist for decades) and how much it loves free trade, honest. But in Europe's growing trade war with China (you don't really hear much about it because the media would rather public attention be soaked up by the far less important transatlantic feud, and away from the far more important Chinese trade war) thing are rapidly disintegrating. 

As Rabobank's Michael Every points out, the "We Love Free Trade" EU just used its International Procurement Instrument for the first time to freeze Chinese medical devices out of its public procurement markets for five years unless China opens its market to EU equivalents. As Every notes, "that’s economic statecraft with muscle, underlining that there are lots of tools in the mercantilist toolkit besides tariffs."

In response, Beijing took some time away from its constant criticism of US trade policy to also criticize as protectionist the European Union’s plan to curb Chinese medical device manufacturers’ access to public procurement contracts, and vowed to take action to protect the country’s interests, Bloomberg reports.

China urged the EU to handle any differences through dialog and cooperation to safeguard trade relations, the Commerce Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. “China will closely monitor the EU’s follow-up actions” and will take measures to protect the rights and interests of Chinese enterprises, the ministry said.

Beijing’s comments come after EU member states overwhelmingly agreed to the curb, which would represent the first use of its International Procurement Instrument, a 2022 law that’s meant to promote reciprocity in access to public procurement markets, and represents a unique slant on how creative mercantilists can and will get when their markets are threatened. It allows the EU’s executive arm to impose various restrictions on firms seeking to participate in procurements, ranging from score adjustments in tenders to an outright ban from public contracts above €5 million ($5.7 million).

The dispute adds another irritant to relations and comes just as Beijing seeks to shore up ties with the EU, positioning itself as a more reliable partner as Donald Trump alienates the bloc over issues from tariffs to defense. In reality, when it comes to capturing market share, the only thing mercantilists are "reliable" in doing is slashing prices to boost exports. 

Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao is due to meet with EU trade officials early this month in Paris, where he may address the bloc’s trade grievances including a lack of fair access to China’s own procurement market. European leaders will travel to Beijing for a summit next month with their Chinese counterparts. 

“At first glance recent EU moves relating to China seem a bit contradictory, reviving senior level interaction while taking measures against unfair imports,” said Wendy Cutler, a former senior US trade negotiator now at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“But, in light of different types of pressures from member states, Brussels needs to navigate carefully when it comes to China,” she said. “It has no choice but to look for avenues of cooperation while sending a clear signal that the EU will stand up for European companies that are facing unfair competition.”

Only problem is that from China's point of view, the competition is completely fair, and it will retaliate accordingly.

Indeed, a Chinese business lobby group warned earlier that EU’s plans would hurt trade ties and the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU expressed “profound disappointment” over the move, according to a statement on Monday.

“Its targeted application against Chinese enterprises sends a troubling signal—not only adding new complexity to China-EU economic and trade relations, but also contradicting the EU’s stated principles of openness, fairness, and non-discrimination in market access,” said the organization, whose members include the Bank of China, Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. and BYD Co.

“Beijing appears to be sending a warning to all advanced economies that actions against China will have consequences,” said Gerard DiPippo, associate director of the RAND China Research Center. “The odds of an EU-China rapprochement are lower than some speculated after the trade war with the US started.”

Which, of course, will be music to Trump's ears, even if it will be difficult for the mainstream media to explain to its naive audience how the global trade war which it had repeatedly portrayed as "Trump against everyone", was really "everyone against everyone."

In response to a question on the EU’s move, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian on Tuesday called on the bloc to stand by its commitment to market rules. 

The EU launched an investigation into China’s procurement of medical devices last April, with the probe finding in January that Beijing discriminated against foreign firms. Consultations failed to find alternative solutions, Bloomberg previously reported.

The Chinese commerce chamber argued that market reciprocity must be based on “an accurate understanding of historical and practical realities.”

“For years, European medical device companies have enjoyed significant access to the Chinese market, playing a key role in supporting the modernization of China’s healthcare system and achieving substantial growth,” it said. “The EU’s current decision fails to acknowledge this context and undermines the spirit of balanced engagement and mutual benefit.” 

Authored by Josh Stylman via Substack,

The world's a screaming match—doctors, economists, influencers, all clawing for their slice of truth. Nobody's listening, and nobody's seeing the whole damn picture. We have more information than ever, but we're dumber where it counts, stuck in a loop of shouting past each other. This isn't just politics or algorithm nonsense; it's the cult of specialization—our worship of experts who know everything about nothing. Doctors pushing Covid shots didn't see the fraud. Economists missed the heist. Engineers built surveillance without blinking. Each turned their screw, blind to the machine they were feeding—a Moral Assembly Line where systemic evil thrives. The system's not broken; it's built to break us, and we're all complicit until we start connecting the dots. As I explored in The Illusion of Expertise, we've confused credentials with wisdom, compliance with intelligence. Now we see the deadly consequences: we're not failing because of bad experts—we're failing because specialization itself has become the operating system of institutional evil.

A Society Talking Past Itself

Step into any barroom debate, X thread, or YouTube comments section, and it's chaos—facts flying, no one landing. We've outsourced our brains to specialists who slice reality into bits too small to mean anything. A cardiologist can't talk vaccines. An economist reduces geopolitics to models, blind to the real forces at play. Everyone's got their PhD in one inch of the world, and we're dumber for it. Specialization doesn't just fracture understanding; it's the architecture of control, ensuring no one sees the crimes—medical fraud, wealth theft, digital chains—unfolding in plain sight. We're not arguing because we're stupid; we're arguing because the system keeps us siloed, complicit, and clueless.

Medical Blindness: Expertise Without Vision

In my medical freedom work, I've seen doctors—smart, caring people—trapped in their own expertise. One, a family physician friend of mine, said VAERS was the "gold standard" for vaccine safety but when I asked about Covid shots, he admitted he never looked even though he was recommending them to patients. He assured me that if it was a problem, the FDA would do something. He didn't know it reported over 30,000 Covid shot deaths by 2023, or that underreporting was rampant. Meanwhile, journalists mocked "half the country eating horse paste," dismissing a drug that had been administered to billions of humans, whose inventor won the Nobel Prize, that's on the World Health Organization's list of most essential medicines, and is known to have very few side effects. People who had never heard of ivermectin were parroting the notion that it was horse paste. These weren't idiots; they were cogs in a machine built by the Rockefeller model of medicine, which, since the 1900s, turned healers into assembly-line technicians—prescribe, cut, bill, repeat.

During Covid, this enabled a fraud of historic scale. This isn't just about doctors being wrong—it's about a system that rewards institutional obedience over critical thinking. The shots got Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) on rotten data: trials rigged to show symptom relief, not transmission prevention; myocarditis risks buried; long-term safety ignored. Most people don't realize that if there were effective treatments for Covid, these experimental drugs couldn't have been approved under emergency authorization—but that's exactly what happened. Whistleblower Brook Jackson, a Pfizer trial manager and modern-day Erin Brockovich, exposed unblinding and falsified records in 2021. Her story revealed massive crimes that should be criminally prosecuted, but instead it's languishing in the courts while doctors didn't read her BMJ report and media publications never told her story—they trusted the FDA's "safe and effective" stamp. A restaurant owner I know enforced mandates even after it became clear the shots didn't stop transmission, still trusting the authorities despite rules that made no sense—customers had to mask walking to their table but could remove them while sitting, as if the virus respected dining etiquette. She wasn't malicious; she was compartmentalized, her role so narrow she couldn't see the crime—a coerced, harmful rollout sold as salvation.

Covid: A Masterclass in Fragmented Fraud

Covid was a crime scene where every expert played their part, blind to the whole.

Medical Compartmentalization

The fraud started with PCR tests. Kary Mullis, PCR's inventor, said in the 1990s it's not a diagnostic tool—it amplifies anything, not just active virus. His voice would have been important during the pandemic since the whole thing was based on his invention. Sadly, he died in August 2019.

Yet it was used to inflate cases, driving fear and lockdowns. Public health ignored immunologists warning of weakened immunity from isolation. Doctors, trusting the CDC, didn't question flawed tests or mandates. The shots were the centerpiece: trials manipulated (Naomi Wolf's team at Daily Clout documented this), adverse events like myocarditis suppressed, and EUAs granted only because alternatives like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) were demonized. A 2020 Henry Ford Health System study showed HCQ cut mortality when used early, but the FDA smeared it as 'dangerous.' A hospital administrator I’m friendly with enforced deadly protocols—Remdesivir and ventilators—that harmed patients. Overwhelmingly, people died in hospitals, not at home. Curious. He followed "protocols," not committing a crime—or so he thought.

No one read the data; no one minded the store. In fact, FDA advisor Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, openly admitted: "We're never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That's just the way it goes." They were experimenting on children in real time, and saying it out loud.

Economic Compartmentalization

Lockdowns crushed small businesses while Amazon and Pfizer raked in billions—a $4 trillion heist disguised as relief. Economists, buried in GDP models, missed the human toll. Gold bugs and bitcoiners warned of inflation and a widening wealth chasm, but they weren't credentialed economists, so no one listened. Even many libertarians abandoned their framework, supporting medical tyranny over individual liberty. Stimulus checks, sold as aid, prepped the ground for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), but economists didn't study monetary control. They enabled theft, oblivious to their role.

Psychological Compartmentalization

Lockdowns spiked depression, addiction, and child developmental delays, yet behavioral scientists were absent from task forces. Public health dismissed mental health as "non-essential." A school counselor I know saw teen suicides soar but had no policy voice. She saw the damage but still enforced closures, believing she was following "expert" guidance. The trauma wasn't her department.

Technological Compartmentalization

Engineers built vaccine passports and contact-tracing apps, sold as "public health." They didn't ask how these fed The World Economic Forum’s digital ID plans or CBDCs' programmable money. A tech developer I met saw his app as "innovation," not surveillance infrastructure. His job was to code, not question geopolitics. Each layer deferred upward, building a control grid no one claimed. Innovation divorced from consequence is how surveillance states are born in beta.

"Just Doing My Job": The Moral Assembly Line

Specialization doesn't just split knowledge—it splits guilt. This is the Moral Assembly Line: everyone turns a screw, no one owns the machine, and when it crushes lives, they say, "It wasn't me." In the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann scheduled trains, not murders. During the MKULTRA experiments, psychologists dosed subjects with LSD, just following CIA orders. During Covid, doctors pushed shots, HR fired the unvaccinated, and journalists parroted identical phrases across every network—'safe and effective,' 'no one is safe until everyone's safe.'

Video via Matt Orfalea

Friends enforced vaccine requirements at parties, thinking they were protecting people, not coercing choice. No one felt like a criminal, but the outcome was fraud, harm, and eroded freedom. Evil hides by breaking itself into pieces too small to feel.

The Design of Disintegration

This is by design. Universities churn out specialists, not synthesizers—papers, not questions. The corruption runs deeper than most realize. Universities don't just churn out specialists—they create a credentialed class psychologically invested in defending the system that elevated them, even when that system causes harm. Medical boards punish doctors who stray, like those who prescribed ivermectin. Funding rewards obedience, not curiosity. Peer review is peer pressure, silencing dissent. Algorithms on X, Instagram, and TikTok feed you your niche, not the truth. This creates epistemic capture: experts know only what their field allows. A virologist might doubt a shot's efficacy but not its funding. A journalist might report mandates but not trial fraud. They're cogs in a machine they can't see, ensuring we stay complicit and clueless.

Blind Spots of the Highly Educated

Specialization blinds even the sharpest to the big picture. Doctors enforcing passports didn't see their connection to Agenda 21's population tracking framework from 1992. They didn't connect apps to CBDCs, which the Bank for International Settlements piloted to control spending. Local health officials in my area justified apps as "stopping the spread," unaware they fed systems that could lock accounts for non-compliance. Why? Geopolitics isn't their field. The World Economic Forum's Great Reset is public, yet most doctors never read it. Intelligence without context isn't just useless—it's a weapon for power.

The most educated became the most complicit. While PhD epidemiologists enforced lockdowns and cardiologists pushed shots, plumbers and mechanics saw through it immediately. They didn't need peer review to recognize bullshit—they fix things that actually work. The people who make stuff understood: if the solution doesn't match the problem, something's wrong. Meanwhile, the credentialed class defended every policy failure because their status depended on institutional trust.

The Mockingbird Media: Silencing the Truth

Media seals the trap. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to shape narratives, never died—it's alive in today's censorship. Vaccine injury stories, like those in Anecdotals, a documentary I produced with talented filmmaker Jennifer Sharp, were banned from YouTube. She poured her soul into showing real people—mothers, teachers, children—harmed by shots, but algorithms erased it.

The silence runs deeper. My friend Pamela lost her stepson, Benjamin, to the shot. He worked for Stephen Colbert, who mandated it for his staff. Pamela begged her stepson not to get it, but he needed to keep his job. A young man, dead from something sold as "safe and effective"—killed by a mandate from the same man who turned vaccines into dancing entertainment. While Colbert's show produced the cringe-worthy "Vax-Scene" skit with dancing syringes, real people were dying from his workplace requirements.

Pamela screamed from the rooftops, but no reporter would touch her story. Yet you can be sure—if her stepson had died from Covid, they'd have been fighting for the exclusive. Instead, we got montages of "safe and effective" while they buried the bodies. The people trying to warn us sounded crazy because the media made them invisible.

Pamela's story, as tragic as it is, isn't rare. I personally know dozens. We all have stories. The true number is totally unknown. What makes it worse? It's accelerating. As more shots get pushed on the vulnerable, as boosters become routine, the Pamelas will multiply, their stories will remain untold, and the machine will keep grinding forward.

Journalists didn't cover these stories—not their beat. The public stays clueless, fed a media diet of propaganda. This isn't incompetence; it's control, ensuring we only see what the system allows, keeping us talking past each other.

Covid wasn't an exception—it was a perfect example of how compartmentalized systems commit coordinated harm. But the same pattern repeats everywhere: in finance, education, climate policy, and tech. Everyone plays their role. No one owns the outcome. Let's widen the lens.

Beyond Medicine: Complicity Everywhere

This pattern is universal, enabling harm while absolving guilt.

• Finance (2008): Traders chased derivatives, missing the housing bubble. Contrarians warned, but they weren't "in the room." They weren't stealing—they were working, blind to the crash.

• Education: School boards implemented Common Core without consulting child development experts, or administrators pushed digital learning without understanding its psychological impact on students.

• Climate: Climatologists model emissions while ignoring weather modification. Policy experts implement Davos agenda while ignoring that those pushing green policies don't live by them. No one owns the dysfunction.

• AI/Tech: Engineers build addictive algorithms, ignoring polarization. CEOs chase profit, not sociology. They fracture society, feeling nothing.

• Military: Analysts tout drones, ignoring cultural fallout. Bureaucrats plan wars without local knowledge. No one's a war criminal—just a professional.

The Generalist: Breaking Free from Spectator Culture

We need generalists—people who refuse to be watchers in their own lives. Before industrialization, healers and polymaths wove together physical, spiritual, and social knowledge. Today, we're consumers of expertise, not creators of understanding. We've become a spectator culture, watching life happen while trusting someone smarter has it handled. But the price of convenience is competence. We can't change a tire, grow food, read a study, or think without calling an expert. The more educated we are, the more we defer to credentials over judgment.

E.O. Wilson's consilience—uniting knowledge—isn't academic; it's survival. Nassim Taleb saw fragility (though he was tragically wrong about Covid); Ivan Illich saw institutional harm. They knew outsourcing thinking is outsourcing agency. We must become intellectual sovereigns, thinking across fields, seeing patterns specialists miss. A doctor should understand pharmaceutical economics. An economist should grasp human psychology. Pattern recognition is what separates participants from observers, thinkers from consumers of thought. It's how you stop being a cog and start becoming a sovereign.

Escaping the Machine: From Cogs to Sovereign

This isn't politics—it's cognition. We've become passive observers, outsourcing not just tasks but basic thinking. We can't fix a car, preserve food, or question a medical mandate without feeling unqualified. A generation ago, people solved problems themselves. Now, we call authorities, and the smarter we think we are, the more we defer. But what happens when the system leads us astray—not through the malice of its participants, but through the malice of its designers? The doctors recommending drugs, the engineers building apps, the journalists reporting stories—they're not evil. But the system they serve was designed by those who are.

Specialization has made us passive, watching life happen while trusting the credentialed. But they're cogs too, trapped in a machine they don't see. Understanding this reveals the deeper architecture: specialization connects to other systems of manufactured dependency—fiat currency that separates us from real value, digital convenience that erodes our capabilities, spectator culture that makes us passive consumers. Each system reinforces the others, creating a web that requires seeing the whole picture to break free.

The way out is radical responsibility. Stop outsourcing your thinking. The path forward begins with recognizing that what we've been taught to value as 'expertise' has been weaponized against us. Questioning institutional narratives isn't a sign of ignorance but a necessary act of intellectual sovereignty. When an expert tells you something, ask: Who benefits? What's hidden? What would another field say? Read outside your lane—doctors, study economics; economists, learn biology. Check primary sources yourself—read Brook Jackson's BMJ report, examine VAERS data, trace the funding. Follow researchers like Catherine Austin Fitts, who documented how the government has misplaced $21 trillion—not million, trillion—with no accountability. This isn't normal corruption; this is systemic looting that makes you wonder what they're really building with our money. Connect with those who think differently. The goal isn't to master everything, but to see the spaces between experts—where truth hides—and to know who to trust.

The Incalculable Cost: Generational Harm and the Illusion of Reform

The damage is generational, hiding in plain sight. MAHA celebrates that the White House quietly removed Covid shots from healthy people's schedules, but critics rightfully point out the deeper problem: there's lots more coming on the vaccine schedule. Yes, the trend line may be in the right direction, but how many more unsuspecting people are going to suffer between now and then? Those who don't understand this system is rotten to the core will still listen and get injected. More immunocompromised people getting jabbed, more unhealthy kids having their genetic code rearranged and their immune systems weakened. I appreciate that maybe there's a political game going on, but I don't understand what we're talking about—we're talking about people's lives. The system worked perfectly—create the illusion of reform while continuing the harm to the most vulnerable. It's in VAERS, with over 30,000 deaths reported; in insurance data showing rising claims; in stories like Pamela's that never make the news. The system distributed the harm so widely no one can see it whole.

Nobody's minding the store. So we have to.

Be the generalist. See the system. The truth depends on it. The future won't be saved by the most credentialed. It'll be saved by those who can see clearly—and refuse to look away.

This week a 49-year-old naturalized American citizen has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison, after confessing to traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State.

Lirim Sylejmani pled guilty to terrorism charges in December, and was sentenced by a federal court on Monday.  Sylejmani had attended an ISIS training camp beginning in November 2015, after moving from Kosovo to Syria with an intent to joint the terror group. "The defendant will spend a decade in prison thinking about the betrayal to this country," US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in a statement.

Illustrative: ISIS terrorist on top of abandoned Syrian jet, via BBC/Getty Images

UPI writes that "Prosecutors said he changed his name to Abu Sulayman al-Kosovi and trained alongside other recruits to be an ISIS soldier following his arrival in the Middle Eastern country. His training included instruction on using AK-47 rifles, PK machine guns, M-16 rifles and grenades."

According to the Defense Post:

When the Kosovo-native was 23, he found refuge in the United States after fleeing a genocidal regime. Sixteen years later, he decided to join one.

Sulejmani is one of hundreds of American citizens believed to have joined Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014. But as the Trump administration transfers dozens of high-priority ISIS suspects from makeshift prisons across northeast Syria as U.S. troops levels draw down...

But the unspoken irony and contraction here is that he had joined the Syrian battlefield at a time the West was "looking the other way" as thousands of international jihadists joined the fight to topple Assad (a fight that the CIA and Pentagon were supporting covertly). NATO member Turkey had essentially opened the border, a 'jihadi highway' into Syria as part of the covert effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

The other irony is that the US has just embraced Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani), who himself was at one point early in the Syrian proxy war a personal emissary of ISIS terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Apparently some kinds of terrorism are OK, according to Washington's regime change playbook...

Jolani is also well-known for being the founder of Syria's initial al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al Nusrah, which has since morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which rules from Damascus in the wake of Assad's overthrow in December. HTS has even spent a long time on the US terrorism list, though the $10 million bounty which had been on Jolani's head has recently been removed by the FBI and US Treasury.

As for Sulejmani, he had long been held in an prison near Hasakah run by the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Thousands of suspected ISIS fighters were held there for years, amid efforts to send foreign fighters to their respective home countries for prosecution.

Lirim Sulejmani, via The Defense Post

Sulejmani had actually asked to be deported to Kosovo, due to it being largely Islamic and a small country, but that didn't happen. Kosovo was recognized as a nation by the Bush administration, after it was forcibly peeled away from Serbian control following years of war as well as NATO military intervention.

Meanwhile, Syrian AQ founder al-Sharaa is planning to travel to New York in December to address the United Nations...

“Moderated” Al Qaeda leader to address UN General Assembly in New York in September.

What a time to be alive.
https://t.co/uQOil90Mxl

Confused Americans might rightly be asking: what was 20 years of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) really all about? What was it all for?

By James Varney and RealClearInvestigations.com,

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals—not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines—pose no threat current to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent—or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Some renewable supporters acknowledge Mills’ point. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which supports government-funded research on recycling panels and turbines, said the “circular economy” Mills referred to has yet to materialize.

“With the existing energy infrastructure, a lot of end-of-life questions have never been addressed,” the Alliance’s executive director, Logan Burke, told RCI. “It may be that those costs have to be embedded in the front-end, but somehow we need to make the market circular. How do we find that market at the end of their useful life?”

Just how many panels the U.S. will dispose of or retire each year is also unclear. No clearing house keeps track of national figures, according to Meng Tao, an energy engineering professor at Arizona State University and a consultant on renewable waste issues.

The estimates can vary widely. Solar panels generally have a life expectancy of 25 years, but factors like damage and system upgrades make the number of panels coming out of circulation each year impossible to ascertain. In 2021, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which did not respond to a request for comment, estimated that between 3,000 and 6,000 panels would be retired annually through 2026.

Critics say even the high end of those numbers seems suspiciously low given the hundreds of millions of panels now in use and tens of millions yet to come.

The problem will not be confined to the U.S. Several European countries are further down the NetZero road than America, and in March, the European Union estimated it “will cumulatively amass 6-13 and 21-35 million tons of (solar) waste by 2040 and 2050, respectively.” The waste coming from wind turbines will be even greater, the EU said, sounding a hopeful note that recycling renewables will become more prominent.

“Both PV [photovoltaic] and wind power infrastructure waste streams require special handling and recycling methods that are not widespread in Europe today,” the EU wrote.

The U.S. accounts for roughly 10 percent of the waste, according to several experts, and Tao estimated the U.S. would be producing roughly 2 million metric tons of solar waste a year by 2043, but other studies have a much higher figure. A 2019 study in renewable energy predicted roughly 10 million metric tons of solar waste between 2030 and 2060.

“Solar waste will grow exponentially in the next 20 years,” Tao said. “Globally, we produced 20-25 million tons of solar panels in 2023. They will come offline in roughly 20 years. That is 20-25 million tons of solar waste a year in 2045.”

The Institute for Energy Research puts the potential mountain even higher, pointing to studies that put the 2050 figure at 78 million tons.

For now, 90 percent of this detritus goes to landfills. And the panel fields and towering turbines must be dismantled, trucked away, usually by diesel-powered vehicles, and then sent to landfills or ports, where they are shipped to poor, developing countries. Fossil fuels may foul the air, but renewables may pollute the ground.

There has been promising research, most of it government-funded, on making components like turbine blades more recyclable, but the Trump administration appears unlikely to continue such funding. Such a shift under Trump would put the onus for developing more recyclable, renewable equipment on the private sector.

But the recycling industry as a whole has never been dynamic. Indeed, the last few years have seen widespread admissions that the recycling revolution that has led Americans to separate their trash into various categories has been a bust.

The push to make renewable waste renewable has smacked up against basic questions of profitability, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University.

“The recycling industry overall is not one that has blossomed in the last 50 years; it’s just not a booming industry,” he said. “You’re going to need enormous amounts of installations and this stuff is made to last, made tough, which is the enemy of recycling. So it’s all still a big challenge and I think there are a lot of unanswered questions or we’ll be left with a lot of stranded assets.”

Tao agreed that, absent more profit, the recyclable future for renewable equipment is dim.

“We still don’t have a perfected technology for recycling them, we’re not there yet,” he said. “We’re trying to see how the industry will move forward, but there are multiple challenges, including the fact it is not profitable.”

Renewable energy champions insist all this will mean big business, perhaps as much as $2.7 billion in solar recycling in 2030, according to one estimate. But for now, it isn’t. Clark said his company clears about $5 from each panel.

It isn’t only the lagging technology and market pressures. At root, there isn’t much in the panel worth recycling. There are tiny amounts of silver and copper, along with some silicon, but those wafers are deep within a compressed sandwich of glass and other elements. Crushed glass has some limited value in construction, but extracting the small amounts of valuable components is an intensive, high-tech process, Clark said.

Ausubel said he thinks the smaller residential solar market can probably handle itself and that the real work will be disposing of millions of panels in the sprawling fields. Because unraveling the panel’s crunched knot is difficult and expensive, it only makes sense to recycle panels in the thousands, and the residential solar market is of less interest, Clark said.

“It’s like mining that way,” he said of the process. “The way they are assembled, stacked, with the cells intertwined and wired together amid sheets of plastic, resins, glue and the like.”

And all leaching cannot be prevented. While the hazardous materials contained in each solar panel, like its valuable elements, are slight, they could present a long-term problem. Even if a landfill strictly adheres to EPA regulations, the leaching from potentially millions of panels poses health risks that Tao compared to mercury poisoning.

Laws mandating recycling have proved difficult to enforce.

“To date, no single regulatory framework has been developed to serve as a North Star for renewable energy project end-of-life planning, leaving a patchwork of federal, state, and local policies and regulations to sift through—and leaving project owners and developers, as well as landowners and other interested parties, to fend for themselves,” a 2024 report concluded.

For example, Washington passed a law mandating solar panel recycling in 2017, but it has yet to be enforced. Currently, the law is set to take effect on July 1, but the Department of Ecology opposes that date in part because manufacturers and consumers have proved reluctant to pay the recycling costs, crimping the solar market there.

“The state’s clean energy transition is facing a setback if the law goes into effect on July 1, 2025,” the department said. “If the law is unchanged, it would disrupt the supply and cost of panels available for sale in Washington.”

The question of who will pay to dismantle the panels, transport them to landfills or recycling centers, or even, in some cases, ship them abroad has been left unanswered in most states. Lobbyists for wind and solar projects, eager to keep costs low, along with lawmakers captivated by the concept of a NetZero future, have left the market too lightly regulated, said Jason Isaac, founder and chief executive of the American Energy Institute, which supports “abundant, affordable and reliable energy.”

In many cases, when highly regulated power companies look to build a new plant, laws require them to set aside money in bonds or escrow accounts to cover or defray decommissioning costs, Mills said. That is not always the case. A recently decommissioned coal mine in northern Louisiana may cost $300 million to break down, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which says those costs will probably be borne by ratepayers. But Isaac and Mills believe financial decommissions requirements have been either ignored or insufficiently funded in the renewable market.

Some state legislatures, like Louisiana’s, are moving to address that vacuum and prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the cleanup bill.

“The goal is to not leave the state or a farmer with a field of broken solar panels by putting in cradle-to-grave assurances of bonding requirements,” said H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute, a group skeptical of apocalyptic global warming scenarios. “We need to treat these like any other energy source.”

In April, Burnett testified in Baton Rouge on just such a law, prompted in part by a solar field in Livingston Parish that has been damaged over the years by hurricanes. In 2022, the legislature passed a bill requiring a bond from renewable project builders, but the specifics of that have not been promulgated, leaving new projects in limbo, said Rep. Brett Geymann, a sponsor of the new bill.

“No existing projects here have required decommissioning, unless that’s part of a private contract with a landowner,” he said.

A small number of solar panels are even finding a secondary market in places like Haiti, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere, Clark said. Groups like Brighten Haiti, which did not respond to a request for comment, take replaced panels that still have some life in them to that impoverished island, although some said that amounts to misguided philanthropy.

“It’s sort of a ‘nice’ way of dumping, really,” Tao said. “Because those places have no clue what to do with it in the end.”

All of these issues are outweighed by the carbon emission reductions renewable energy represents, according to other experts. Paul Gipe, a California-based energy analyst and proponent of wind, said concerns about renewable waste are overblown and advanced by enemies of NetZero goals.

“Solar panels are mostly glass, so glass is easy to recycle,” he said. “Wind turbines are mostly metal; again, easy to recycle. Most of the concern about ‘recycling’ is fear, uncertainty and doubt from the usual suspects.”

It’s true that turbines, which have a lifespan of about two decades, are mostly metal, but they nonetheless present their own set of end-of-life problems. While most of it may be recyclable, breaking down and transporting the gigantic contraptions on land or offshore requires tremendous labor—and energy. The thousands of tons of concrete that make up their bases will likely remain in the ground or on the ocean floor in some form for decades, according to Mills and others.

Blades on offshore turbines today can be as long as a football field, and the structures are equal to 10-story buildings, with those offshore sitting on an ocean floor slab as big as a city block.

“These offshore things are not renewable and not clean—it takes boat loads of equipment out to the sites to build and maintain them, and it will take boat loads to bring it all back,” said Robin Shaffer of Protect Our Coasts, a grassroots group that began fighting a since-scuttled offshore project in New Jersey.

What’s more, bankruptcies among European companies have begun to mar the renewable wind landscape as surely as the towers, a trend that could continue or accelerate as the Trump administration stops the federal spigot.

“The government has let them off the hook by shaping their policies around climate activism,” Shaffer said. “They’re not putting down escrow money for decommissioning and someone’s going to have to come along and remove them, or we’ll be staring at these rotting towers in the ocean.”

The blades are so big that they are usually broken into three pieces when decommissioned, and the giant chunks of fiberglass, resin, and composite materials go to landfills or warehouses.

Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.

“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”

Authored by Oscar Zarrage Perez via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Last week, Ross William Ulbricht, at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, gave a speech about the principles of freedom, decentralization and unity.

Ross Ulbricht started by talking about his experience in prison and the price difference when he got into prison compared to now.

“When I launch Silk Road, buying a whole bitcoin will set you back less than a dollar,” said Ross.

“Pocket change. Can you imagine that? Now they are worth over $100,000 each.”

“Bitcoin’s power comes from the fact that any one of us can mine if we choose to, and any one of us can generate addresses if we choose to,” stated Ross.

“Any one of us can send bitcoin to anyone else. We are all on equal footing with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, we are all free.”

Ross told everybody to stay united and that if we are together we will be able to accomplish anything.

“When I was put in prison for life. I was isolated and weak. I was stripped of everything. Had nothing to give everyone, but you didn’t abandon me. You didn’t forget me. Wrote me letters. You raised money for my defense. When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slender and smearers and in the end when I didn’t know if I would ever get out from behind those thick iron bars. We even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future.”

Ross ended his speech by saying, “please never see each other as enemies. Those that oppose decentralization and freedom love it when we are divided. Stay united. As long as we can agree that we deserve freedom and that decentralization is how we secure it. Then we can be united. We can have each other’s backs. Just like you had mine.”

“Freedom, decentralization and unity,” said Ross. “Stay true to these principles and the future is ours.”

Ross Ulbricht’s Journey: From Life Sentence to Presidential Pardon

Ross Ulbricht became a controversial figure after launching Silk Road in 2011, an online marketplace that used Bitcoin for anonymous transactions. While the site was unfortunately used for selling illegal drugs, it also served as Bitcoin’s first real-world use case, showcasing the power of decentralized, censorship-resistant money.

In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to double life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

His punishment quickly became a symbol of government overreach for many in the tech and the Bitcoin world.

Critics argued that his sentence far exceeded the limits of justice, especially considering the nonviolent nature of his crimes.

His pardon, announced shortly after Trump returned to office, is seen as a strong move to honor campaign promises and support Bitcoin’s values of personal freedom and resistance to government overreach. It sparked celebration throughout the Bitcoin community but also reminded advocates that the fight for justice is far from over.

Ten years ago to the day, I was sentenced to die in prison. Instead I gave my first public speech in freedom.

I wore a red tie as an homage to @realDonaldTrump, the man who saved my life. pic.twitter.com/WWp0vL3C9T

Back on April 14 when bond yields were soaring in the aftermath of Trump's liberation day amid speculation that China or Japan were selling some of their US paper to stabilize their currency, a selloff which was compounded by the concurrent unwind of the massive $2 trillion basis trade, Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent appeared on Bloomberg TV to ease fears of a wholesale unwind of the US bond market. In the interview, among other things, Bessent revealed that he has breakfast with Powell every week, and also said that if the Fed does nothing, he might take matters in his own hands, and since the Treasury has a "big toolkit" one of the things it could do is "up the Treasury buybacks" (to prop up Treasuries, in lieu of QE). 

Six weeks later, with the Fed sidelined and unwilling to do anything to ease the plight of US treasuries which continue to trade at dangerous levels - the 30Y is flirting with a 5% level - it appears this is what Bessent has done.

At 2pm on Tuesday afternoon, the Treasury announced the results of its latest Treasury buyback operation (which some had likened to a QE lite because it effectively monetizes Treasuries in the open market, similar to the Fed's POMO operations, and similar to stock buybacks). While the operation itself was not remarkable - the Treasury had been holding these these more or less weekly since April 2024 - the size of it was: at $10 billion, this was the largest Treasury buyback operation in history.

Here is a snapshot of all historical Treasury buybacks in the past year: the trajectory is clear.

Source:

And while the maturity range of the cusips accepted for buyback was of low duration, in the interval between July 15, 2025 and May 31, 2027, we are about to see sizable increases in the total buyback size of longer duration treasuries. 

Sure enough, tomorrow at 2pm, the Treasury will complete a buyback focusing on Treasuries maturing in the 2036-2045 interval, i.e., 10-20 year paper, and the maximum amount to be redeemed will be $2 billion, up 100% from the last such buyback on May 6, when the maximum amount to be redeemed was $1 billion. In fact, the last time there was a treasury buyback anywhere close to today's amount was in mid/late April when Treasuries were tumbling and when someone had to step in and cushion their fall since Powell was nowhere to be found.

Which begs the question: with the political Federal Reserve - which had no qualms cutting rates two months before the election but refuses to do so now that core PCE has slumped to the lowest level since the covid crash, is Bessent finally stepping in to rein in the Treasury market, and is Yellen's Activist Treasury Issuance strategy which dominated bond buying for much of 2023-2024, about to be replaced with Bessent's Activist Treasury Buyback strategy until such time as the Fed finally does something. 

Authored by James Bovard via The Brownstone Institute,

Biden administration policy-makers hated you more than you knew. 

From the start of the Covid pandemic, I warned that the feds were vilifying anyone who failed to kowtow to the latest commands. In October 2023, I wrote: “Federal bureaucrats heaved together a bunch of letters to contrive an ominous new acronym for the latest peril to domestic tranquility. The result: AGAAVE—’anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism’—which looks like a typo for a sugar substitute. The FBI vastly expanded the supposed AGAAVE peril by broadening suspicion from ‘furtherance of ideological agendas’ to ‘furtherance of political and/or social agendas.’ Anyone who has an agenda different from Team Biden’s could be AGAAVE’d for his own good.” 

Vague, catch-all federal definitions became a Pandora’s box that permitted politicians to denigrate vast numbers of Americans as dangerous extremists. The House Weaponization Subcommittee warned in 2023 that “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative” that domestic violent extremism is “the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified a December 13, 2021, report by the National Counterterrorism Center. Gabbard’s version had a more honest title than the original version: “Declassified Biden Administration Documents Labeling COVID Dissenters, Others as ‘Domestic Violent Extremists.”

What did it take for Biden’s Brain Trust to covertly condemn people? Simply warning that “COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, especially for children, are part of a government or global conspiracy to deprive individuals of their civil liberties and livelihoods, or are designed to start a new social or political order.” After government lockdowns had destroyed millions of jobs, only the paranoid would fear the government would ever violate their liberties or subvert their livelihoods. No wonder that a top federal official told Newsweek in 2022: “We’ve become too prone to labeling anything we don’t like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist.”

Biden policy-makers pretended that the surge in criticism of Covid policies was proof of the psychopathology of the president’s opponents. But in September 2021, Biden dictated that 100 million Americans working for private companies must get the Covid vaccine. The official counterterrorism report stated that it anticipated that “the threat will continue at least into the winter, as many of the new COVID-19 mandates in the U.S…are implemented, including US workplace vaccination policies that carry disciplinary or termination penalties.” The Supreme Court struck down most of that vaccine mandate as illegal in January 2022, but not before it had profoundly disrupted legions of lives and businesses, as well as American health care. 

The official report warned that “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists…characterize COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as evidence of government overreach.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito characterized the Covid dictates as “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But that wasn’t “overreach” – it was simply public service. 

Criticisms of Covid policies were turbocharged by the failure of the Covid vaccines. In early 2022, the effectiveness of the Covid booster shot had fallen to 31% – too low to have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Though most American adults had gotten Covid vaccines, there were more than a million new Covid cases a day in January 2022. Most Covid fatalities were occurring among the fully vaxxed. Studies showed that people who received multiple boosters were actually more likely to be hit by Covid infections.

So obviously, the Biden administration had no choice but to demonize any and all Covid critics. A confidential 2022 Department of Homeland Security report detailed pending crackdowns on “inaccurate” information on “the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines,” among other targets. A few months earlier, Jen Easterly, the chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, declared: “We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.” Plenty of Biden administration officials considered it “really dangerous” to permit people to assert that Covid vaccines were failing. 

The National Counterterrorism Center report noted: “The availability of a vaccine for all school-age children might spur conspiracy theories and perceptions that schools will vaccinate children against parents’ will.” In the same way that some states and many school systems have sought to enable children to change their gender without their parents’ knowledge or consent? The report also warned that “new COVID-19 mitigation measures – particularly mandates or endorsements of vaccines for children – will probably spur plotting against the government.”

The FDA knew that Covid vaccines sharply increased the risk of myocarditis – an inflamed heart – in young males but the Biden White House browbeat the agency into fully approving the Covid vaccine anyhow. New York Governor Kathy Hochul sought unsuccessfully to mandate vaccines for all schoolkids in the Empire State even though her State Department of Health reported in May 2022 that the Pfizer vaccine was only 12% effective for children during the Omicron surge. The Biden administration included Covid vaccines in the semi-mandatory regimen for young children despite the vaccine’s failure and perils. 

Portraying doubts on Covid policy as a warning sign of domestic violent extremism unleashed the FBI to target anybody who howled against mandatory injections or the near-total destruction of their freedom of movement. 

That report is also a reminder that “extremism” has always been a flag of political convenience. In Washington, anyone who doesn’t worship government is considered an extremist. How far did officialdom go in smearing the American people? 

In September 2022, President Biden made history with the first prime-time presidential speech with a backdrop inspired by the movie V for Vendetta and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Biden raved that his opponents were practically assassins waiting to finish off American democracy. A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with where the majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” This is a definition of extremism that could put the federal crosshairs on practically anyone who visits this website.

Actually, the feds used definitions of extremism that extended far beyond Covid controversies and undermined the First Amendment. Biden’s FBI targeted conservative Catholics who preferred to hear the Latin-language version of the mass, claiming they were potentially violent extremists. An FBI analysis portrayed rosaries as extremist symbols. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) stretched its “suspicious behavior” definition, warning banks to track “‘extremism’ indicators that include…the purchase of books (including religious texts),” according to a House Judiciary Committee report. Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained that the federal government “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

That December 13, 2021, National Counterterrorism Center report may be only the tip of the iceberg of federal mischief. We may soon learn of more direct federal machinations to vilify, undercut, or silence Covid critics.

Biden-era crackdowns and the newly declassified report should spur Americans to ask: What if the government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?

An earlier version of this post was published at The Libertarian Institute