Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower .com,

(From The Sovereign Capitalist Letter #65. I was traveling at the time of the Coinkite vulnerability, surfacing a recurring theme around how to safely balance cold storage and emergency access when on the road).

Just when I thought the sentiment couldn’t get any worse, on July 29-30 reports began to emerge of “certain” Coldcards (which were supposed to be the industry standard of self-custody cold wallets), being drained of their funds.

The reports are true, and this has enormous implications, not just for Coinkite, the Canadian company who manufactures the Coldcard, but for the entire worldview of self-custody and perhaps even for Bitcoin itself.

“Not your keys = not your coins” has been the mantra of Bitcoin since the Genesis Block. Self-custody was The Way. Anything else was for “shitcoiners”, “suitcoiners” and general retards.

It is impossible to overstate how strongly the Bitcoin in-club feels about this. If you don’t self-custody – and until this happened, on a Coldcard by Coinkite – then you were not really a “true” Bitcoiner, you were just LARPing as one. A spectator in the land of the pureblood anarcho-capitalist cyberpunks.

(Admission: my BTC wasn’t on a Coldcard – but I had recently bought new one that I was planning to migrate to after the BIP-110 and eCash forks).

When Utopia arrives… only the self-custody maxis would be admitted – all else would be chattel and serfs under various permutations of slavecoins, CBDCs and (the worst of all) paper Bitcoin.

It all sounds very eschatological and in the earlier days of my journey, I would openly admit “Bitcoin is my religion” and only be half-kidding about it.

While this bear market has been a “mild winter” in terms of price action (only about ~ 50% off the all-time high), this has been one of the more self-destructive bear cycles in terms of Bitcoin culture and the movement in general.

None of it helped by the fact that the Coldcard flaw turned out to be real.

People who had done everything right, took their BTC off of the exchange, put it into an air-gapped Coldcard powered by a 9V-battery and thought they were safe, found their life-savings irrevocably drained away in an instant…

Via r/bitcoinOver the years I’ve recommended Coldcard to my readers a few times. We were traveling when the news broke but as soon as I corroborated the vulnerability, I put out an emergency bulletin to the mailing list.

At first it appeared as though the flaw was limited to older Mk2 and Mk3 models, but over the next couple of days Mk4 and Q1 series were also being drained – it just takes more computing power, and thus time, to crack the entropy on the later models.

What Happened – The Coldcard Firmware Flaw

As everyone here knows, a Bitcoin wallet address is a very long cryptographic private key that can be transmitted or stored in a human readable form via a 12- or 24-word seed phrase, consisting of words pulled from a word list (BIP-39) of possible values.

The words themselves are actually unimportant – they’re just there for humans to be able to read the values. The discrete value they comprise is what matters.

And because a given wallet address is secured by a private key derived from a seed-phrase, those words must be in order.

That makes the universe of possible values enormous:

• 12 words gives 2¹²⁸ possible valid phrases

• 24 words gives 2²⁵⁶ possible valid phrases

A 12-word seed space is a vastly larger number than every grain of sand on Earth or every star we can see in the observable universe.

A 24-word seed space is larger than the number of atoms in the entire galaxy, and approaches (but is generally a bit smaller than) the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe.

But that’s only if those words are generated from a truly random seed (entropy source).

Take an extreme example: simply picking the first 12 or 24 words from the BIP-39 word list isn’t random, and a wallet protected by such a seed phrase would be cracked in short order by a brute force computer.

The Coldcard ships with an onboard RNG (Random Number Generator) to generate your seed phrase, however their own documentation states that to achieve maximum entropy (randomness), you should also add some “external entropy” such as dice rolls – real, actual physical dice, rolled, 50 or 100 times – combined with the onboard RNG for maximal security.

Many people did not roll the dice, assuming that the onboard RNG would provide more than enough entropy for a secure seed phrase (remember those numbers above).

The problem was in Coldcard’s firmware itself, where the RNG generator turned out to be bypassed – resulting in extremely weak entropy – and thus, weak seed phrases.

This bug has been sitting there since November 2021 (the Coldcard firmware is open source/viewable),

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The follow-up tweet lays out what went wrong in the Mk4 and Q series:

“Mk4, Q, and Mk5 attempt to compensate at boot with secure-element input, but the reseed truncates it to 32 bits, sharply limiting the secret entropy it contributes – far below what wallets should have.”

It later came out that it looks like a developer simply disabled the RNG to workaround some compiler errors:

A new technical analysis by Core-Lightning dev ddustin suggests the 2021 COLDCARD vulnerability may have started while a developer was trying to connect three layers of the firmware: the wallet’s Python code, MicroPython’s C code, and the STM32 hardware random number generator.

The custom code appears to have conflicted with MicroPython’s existing implementation, likely triggering a compiler error.

The evidence suggests the developer then disabled the hardware RNG by setting MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG to 0, allowing the firmware to compile.

That change had an unintended consequence. When users created new wallets, the firmware no longer used the hardware random number generator. Instead, it fell back to MicroPython’s much weaker Yasmarang software random number generator.

There are people out there implying that any wallets drained are somehow on the Coldcard owners, because they didn’t add enough external entropy (read: they didn’t do enough dice rolls, or any dice rolls).

This is a fucking retarded take. It actually makes my blood boil.

No other Bitcoin hardware wallet requires the user to provide external entropy as a condition of the fucking thing working.

People buy these wallets because they purport to be an ultra-secure, self-contained Swiss-Bank-in-your-pocket solution for escaping the fiat treadmill and putting your life savings beyond the reach of The State. Full stop.

There is no asterisk beside those claims that “you have to jiggle your body and roll a bunch of dice dozens of times while waving a dead chicken over your head to add entropy or it won’t work”.

Except, on a Coldcard

go on… say it pic.twitter.com/JZS22uznfF

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) August 2, 2026

Actions to take: If you have a Coldcard, regardless of how you set it up – I would move all of my funds out of it.

What Does this mean for Self-Custody and for Bitcoin?

Indeed. That is the question.

I have been thinking long and hard about this, not to mention conducting a deep dive into the entropy generation on other wallets.

The gist is this:

Every other wallet I came across uses well-known methods for generating entropy that come off of the device itself (such as the the o/s level Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator – CSPRNG) and many of them combine that with several other sources of entropy – any given computing environment offers a few of those (clock speed jitter, etc), and in some cases, dedicated chips just for entropy generation.

But this still had me rattled: why bother worrying about a quantum attack on SHA-256 in 5 or 50 years, when you can just crack the entropy using Fable or Opus 5.6-sol today?

Fortunately, it turns out that is not the case. The Coldcard vulnerability was entirely exploitable, and discoverable, because of a series of bad decisions and programming bugs. It was not a case that entropy had been cracked, it was that insufficient entropy was generated in the first place.

This X post from another wallet provider lays out the reasons why, years ago, Coinkite switched their open-source licensing scheme as well as their own code in the Coldcard firmware – and how by doing so they set the stage for the disaster unfolding in front of our eyes today.

Also noting that @nvk (Coinkite’s CEO) deleted the tweets referenced above and has been dutifully scrubbing his timeline since all this broke out. Absolutely abysmal leadership.

All this to say – (because it bears repeating): the issue is not that AI could crack the entropy used to generate seed phrases. That would be game-over for Bitcoin.

What happened instead was that AI was used (at least once it became known that there was an exploit to be found) to uncover a flaw in entropy generation.

Very different.

That means the industry-standard wallets (Trezor, Bitkey, and software ones like Sparrow or Electrum) are fine – and I still feel OK typing that – in fact more so, after the rabbit hole I’ve been down these last 48 hours.

But there are some practical takeaways now, and some possibly unpleasant ramifications, at least for me, and I’ll lay them out frankly here, in no particular order:

1. Multi-sig self-custody is now the bare minimum.

   Wallets that require multiple signatures to spend – if you are handling it all yourself, you can still do solo multi-sig, where you require two-of-three signatures to originate an outbound transaction.What I will probably end up doing is prepping some docs or tutorials on getting that set up.

2. Institutional custody is a serious option, which should be considered.

   But it comes with trade-offs, one of which is that it’s very difficult to create a multi-generational custodial entity in a nascent space. You almost by definition need to fuse some venerable old tradfi institutions with cypherpunks.The reality is the institutions best equipped or positioned to do this, are not “Bitcoin-only”, which seems to matter to the hardcore maxis.But there’s another problem with that:

3. Most Bitcoin-only businesses are on their way to bankruptcy.

   If not this bear cycle, then the next one.This is because in the overall scheme of things, not enough people actually give a shit about Bitcoin to make a “Bitcoin-only” business viable over the long haul. This includes as many as 90% of the people (total guesstimate) who are actually allocated to Bitcoin.Most of them couldn’t care less about self-custody, retiring their bloodline, “everything divided by 21 million”, escaping the state, or any of the long string of maximalist purity tests.

   They want a double-digit CAGR, and to catch the next bull market updraft. That’s it. That’s the majority of people invested into Bitcoin. Reality check.

4. ETFs are fine.

   This needs to be said. Again, there are trade-offs (surprise!):You’ll miss out on the proceeds of any forks (the ETF sponsor will pocket those) and you’re very much inside the financial system. But they are a way to capture the upside of Bitcoin, hold for the long term, with total liquidity.

5. The right exchanges are also fine.

   Another blasphemy but it’s true. One thing I’ve been saying for years is that most people don’t want the hassles associated with self-custody. It’s a high bar and what most people really want is “PayPal for crypto”. And notice I didn’t say “Bitcoin”, I said “crypto” – another no-no word for “True Bitcoiners”, but the reality is that the mass adoption underway is of crypto.

   Bitcoin just happens to be a subset of that.I can envision setups where of the total allocation in a portfolio to Bitcoin, the majority is held via ETFs, while self-custody BTC is akin to our “Bug-out bag” component, along with a lightning wallet loaded up with some “walking around money”.

6. Bitcoin is not the apex asset.

    I have been wrong about this. It’s still a category-of-one in the digital asset space, it’s still digital sound money and a store of value, but it’s just another asset class across the possible choices one can allocate into.The maxi proposition that allocating to anything other than Bitcoin in one’s investments or savings is “retarded” is itself retarded. I remember seeing a tweet some time ago that just broke my heart, where some pleb took his daughter to Burger King for her fifth or sixth birthday and was thrilled that she understood why instead of buying her a birthday present he bought some Bitcoin.Horrible parenting. Buy your five-year-old a birthday present. Pay them for chores in Bitcoin. Don’t take them to Burger King, ever. Grow the fuck up. You’re supposed to be the adult here.

   The apex asset is business ownership. We can talk more about this, and we will.

7. Being 100% invested in Bitcoin or having all your life savings in Bitcoin is a mistake.

   Another mistake of mine, in the sense where I proudly declared that easyDNS holds 100% of its retained earnings in BTC. Others hold the sum total of their life savings in Bitcoin.This is a big mistake – which anybody who just had their life savings drained in under 20 seconds in this episode understands all too viscerally.

   Speaking for myself, I will be adjusting my allocation. Probably gradually, because I do think we’re “at bottom” in this cycle, so as we climb out of this bear market, I will be diversifying – likely more aggressively into cashflow-producing businesses.

   I’ll do this through a combination of collateralization in a (hopefully) up-trending market, and sales under the right circumstances.

   There are a couple of special situations I’m working on where it feels like the most sensible move is to create an investment partnership – so I will be cashing out some chips to seed that fund.

   I’m glad I still have gold and numerous investments outside of the Bitcoin and even crypto space. I’m also looking at more real estate. The market is in the toilet now so it’s a good time to buy – and this actually brings us to an important point:

   The Bitcoin maxi axiom that it’s always a good time to buy, never a good time to sell, and that Bitcoin is the only investable asset, forsaking all others, has to be abandoned by anybody who is serious about building wealth.

   I don’t care about passing the Bitcoin purity tests. Maybe I did in the past, which was also a mistake.

   Remember when Luke Gromen sold Bitcoin right near the top of the cycle and everybody in the Bitcoin space called him an idiot?

   Who are the idiots now?

   I’ll give you one guess.

   I’m not saying we should have sold when Luke Gromen sold, I’m observing that a professional investor applied his framework and made a determination on when he should sell – and that gave him optionality that none of us “pureblood Bitcoiners” have, as long as we’re trapped in this “never sell” / Bitcoin-only mentality.

Bitcoin maximalism is over. Bitcoin “culture” is over. Bitcoin influencers are over. Every popular hardcore Bitcoin figure has disgraced themself in some way.

Bitcoin will remain, beneficially stripped of the cult around it.

— nic carter (@nic_carter) August 2, 2026

If I could sum up the above list in one pithy tweet, it would be the opening image of this month’s edition, by way of Nic Carter, who also found himself excommunicated from The Bitcoin Cathedral for indulging in shitcoinery.

Sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here and get an executive summary of my new book: The Blueprint Survive & Thrive In An Overclocked Timeline. Sovereign Capitalist members get early access to the full book here.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via American Greatness,

Strolling through a major American urban metropolis, I noticed that the tightly packed homes and squat tri-level apartments and condos had tiny, browning “natural gardens” pocked with the usual virtue-signaling lawn signs setting forth their progressive secular creed’s commandments: “kindness always,” “hate has no home here,” etc.

Yet amidst this self-proclaimed bastion of love and tolerance, I quickly spied an ostensibly contradictory placard in many residential windows and, in fact, on the bumpers of many cars, both rust buckets and some upscale, socially responsible electric ones. Indeed, this sentiment was so prevalent that the host of a YouTube video touring the city’s neighborhoods casually expressed it as an aside and apologized for not stating it in a prior video.

What was this urgent statement needing to be publicly proclaimed to one and all by any and all means fair and foul?

It was “F— ICE.”

Being literal, initially the prospect left me cold.

Then I wondered if the sign maker had misspelled “DEI.”

However, upon reflection, I realized that ICE was the acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Despite the other lawn signs professing kindness, I immediately understood the f— in question was not to be construed as an act of love. Further, the people sticking these placards in their windows and onto their bumpers are clearly not an “ally” of ICE.

“F— ICE” did not have the ring of “Aux Armes!” or “¡No pasarán!” or even “земля мира и хлеб!” In fairness, though, I did notice the “F— ICE” sign. But I also would have noticed a dead skunk glued to a window or squished on a bumper.

In a sign of the times, once more, public profanity was conflated with sincerity and earnestness—and, of course, “hipness” and “edginess”; and, once again, the consequences of such selfish public virtue-signaling were ignored, if they were ever contemplated at all.

Did such virtue-signaling regressives understand their vehement, vulgar opposition could help foster dangerous and deadly attacks upon ICE agents whose only “crime” was enforcing the duly enacted laws of the United States? Or that it could help foment equally dangerous and deadly confrontations between ICE agents, illegal immigrants, and bystanders who deliberately interfere with agents in the course of their duties?

Did they understand that by abetting open borders they helped diminish and demean the hard work and sacrifices made by legal immigrants to the country? Or that in aiding illegal immigration (and usually opposing assimilation) they harm legal immigrants by diminishing their public safety, lowering wages and job opportunities, and straining the social safety net resources available to those who need them?

Perhaps they were unaware Zeale reported that, in the aftermath of violence regarding the enforcement of American immigration laws, two Catholic bishops did, in fact, grapple with the issue and concluded:

Acts that diminish or disregard the dignity of any person or group of people should never be normalized in our society,” Bishop Daniel Garcia and Bishop Brendan Cahill wrote in a July 20 pastoral reflection published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). “The dehumanization of immigrants, regardless of their legal status, is one such example of this; the vilification of law enforcement officers is yet another.

As the reporter, Elizabeth Ervin, makes clear, the two bishops are certainly not ICE apologists. Acknowledging their “pastoral concerns are distinct from what the civil law itself may permit,” the pair of clerics expressed their opposition to racial profiling and called for reforming immigration enforcement to ensure “accountability, transparency, and justice.”

Nonetheless, the bishops’ support for migrants regardless of their status and for reforming immigration enforcement did not lead them to demonize ICE agents. On the contrary: “We continue to affirm the legitimate role of civil authorities to implement the law in a humane manner and with respect for fundamental human rights, including the rights to life and due process. The power of the state must always be exercised within the limits of the moral law.”

Whatever one’s view of immigration and border security, only the worst among us can fail to recognize the above is an example of “civility.” And engaging in civil discourse with those who disagree with you is a far more conducive way to achieve change and consensus than spouting profanity in public to preen for your allies and alienate everyone else.

As the bishops remind us, “We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric, racial prejudice, and violence and for a renewed commitment to recognizing the inherent dignity of every person as a child of God.”

Sure, that might not fit on a windowsill or below a trunk, but that is no matter. Such truth is meant to be etched in the heart.

A major border and aerial incident has occurred between Ukraine and Bulgaria, and Bulgarian officials are outraged and demanding answers – ironically on the heels of a political shift regarding the Ukraine war wherein Sofia has stopped giving weaponry, citing its own stockpile shortages.

A Ukrainian drone on Saturday breached Bulgaria’s airspace and directly endangered vital energy infrastructure upon exploding in Bulgarian territory, regional media reports. These types of breaches of neighboring states’ territories and spillover from the Ukraine war has been happening with increased regularity of late.

Bulgaria’s defense ministry quickly pointed the finger at Kiev, saying the destroyed drone debris points to a weapon “widely used by the Ukrainian military.”

Despite the two countries by and large being ‘friendly’ – Bulgaria has summoned the Ukrainian ambassador for a meeting scheduled for Monday in response, AFP reports.

The Ukrainian government is seeking to defuse the situation, saying it remains “in close contact with the Bulgarian side to clarify the circumstances” of the incident. “We can say with certainty that the Ukrainian Armed Forces did not intentionally direct any assets toward Bulgaria,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman Georgiy Tykhyi said, noting that these incidents ultimately arise from the Russian invasion.

Thankfully there were no casualties, however…

According to Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev, the drone entered Bulgarian airspace from Romania before exploding 1,000 metres from a compressor station of the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline, near the former Kardam border checkpoint between the two countries.

“Noise made by the drone was detected by Romanian border police, and a loud explosion was subsequently heard by the ‘General Toshevo’ border police patrol,” he told a press conference.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev has expressed the main concern, saying the explosive payload the UAV carried was “significant”. But so far, Bulgarian officials have agreed that the incident does not look intentional.

Indeed, Ukraine insists it did not ‘intentionally’ target Bulgaria, an Eastern European NATO-member country, which Kiev has long sought to curry favor with.

Russian drones have also on numerous occasions breached European airspace. In prior recent instances of drones entering neighboring airspace, particularly in Baltic countries and also Poland, NATO jets were scrambled – and in some cases drones are safely brought down via electronic intercept means.

Russia has more frequently been accused of sending drones into EU airspace, after which threats & accusations fly from NATO ‘eastern flank’ leaders:

Looks like Russia tried to blow up a pipeline in Bulgaria with a drone today.

Moscow has ramped up its terror campaign in the EU with 6 incidents in 2 weeks:

🇷🇴 Romania – Fighter jets shoot down Russian Shahed drones over Romanian airspace 3 days in a row (July 24-26)

🇵🇱… pic.twitter.com/JwRB3Zf7S7

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 8, 2026

Each instance creates new tensions between Russia and NATO, and the typical accusations and threats then fly. The Kremlin has of late been especially alarmed at the Trump administration transferring 5,000 US troops from Germany to Poland, near Russia’s doorstep. But again, some of these drones in recent instances were found to be Ukrainian.

As expected, Iran is pressing hard to extract from Washington everything it can get – at a moment the Trump White House seems to be backing down from a heighted war over the Strait of Hormuz, given the serious risk of settling into a another years-long quagmire in the Middle East.

The US administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has appeared to back the Iran-Oman deal for the opening of the Strait, with President Trump and his officials having remained surprisingly quiet even as it has emerged that the deal outline is wholly favorable to Tehran’s conditions.

For example, as we’ve detailed Iran announced Friday that under the ‘finalized’ Oman-Iran scheme and ‘deal’ for management of the Hormuz Strait that “enemy countries” (read: US and Israel) may only transit the waterway after lifting sanctions and paying compensation for the war. US and Israeli-linked ships are currently banned and will be fired upon, Iran has warned.

The White House stayed mum even after that, and didn’t openly push back – nor did Trump fire off any angry Truth Social messages, but focused on some random domestic issues Friday. This even as there was a Friday story in Reuters saying that Washington even plans to lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports once the Oman deal is finalized:

“There ​is progress between Oman ​and Iran on the Strait, and ‌we ⁠expect a deal soon,” the official said. “Once the deal is announced to restore commercial ​shipping ​without ⁠impediments, the United States will lift the blockade ​of Iranian ports.”

And now the Iranians are piling on the demands even more, with on Saturday the NY Times reporting on the country’s top Iranian national security official’s remarks. The security chief has laid out a list of demands and stern set of further conditions.

“Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by state media laying out multiple requirements for reopening the strait,” reports the Times.

“He called for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country,”

While other Iranian officials have voiced similar demands, this could represent the ascendancy of the Islamic Republic’s so-called hardline faction within the context of the Oman negotiations. Zolghadr stated “These are the demands of the Iranian people who have been shouting for it relentlessly in the squares and streets for one hundred and sixty days.”

Iran state media has listed them out as follows (machine translation):

1. Never threaten Iran with any language or insult the sanctities of this nation.

2. End the war and aggression against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq forever.

3. Lift the naval blockade and withdraw its military forces (naval and air) from around Iran.

4. Pay the damages of the two wars of aggression and imposition on Iran without any reduction or reduction.

5. Lift the cruel and illegal sanctions against the Iranian nation.

6. Unconditionally release the frozen and stolen assets of the Iranian people.

The NY Times says there’s been no immediate response from the White House when it requested comment; however, it must be remembered that the US was slapping yet more sanctions on Iran within only the last several days.

While the dropping of sanctions seems realistic as part of a deal to end the war, getting the Trump administration to agree to pay compensation for the many billions of dollars in damage done is a very tall ask. But the Iranians no doubt now smell weakness and blood in the water, as the US bombs have fallen silent for over a week at this point, and after Trump reversed course (more TACO) last weekend on the planned ‘harder’ strikes.

Bessent strongly suggested in an interview published Friday that the Hormuz Strait’s reopening was imminent, delivered by a deal that would be finalized ‘today or tomorrow’. 

And yet, the Times underscores that:

Even before Mr. Zolghadr’s statement, Iranian officials had hinted on Saturday that the reopening of the strait was not imminent. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said that reopening the strait was “not contingent on the Iran-Oman negotiations.”

Iran is in essence saying this ain’t over & wants to extract its pound of flesh, also to ensure it is never attacked again…

Trump is not going to be able to walk away from his Iran war at his own choosing. He still has no idea the world of shit he’s in, unfortunately we’re all in. https://t.co/Gdd4FTpIDW

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 8, 2026

Additionally, on Saturday Iran’s army spokesman Amir Akraminia has been quoted by Al Jazeera as saying Iran’s new protocols in the Strait of Hormuz are “irreversible” and shall not be thwarted by the US. “The United States has no choice but to accept the existing situation; otherwise, it will incur costs far greater than those it has faced in the past,” Akraminia said.

In perhaps a good cop, bad cop approach to Washington, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has meanwhile issued a more balanced, less maximalist statement. He expressed that “the war must end at some point, and that his country is determined to adopt the memorandum of understanding as a basis, provided the US abandons the atmosphere of distrust it has created.”

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

The United Arab Emirates has managed to boost its oil exports to pre-crisis levels as early as June, as it has kept pushing crude through the Strait of Hormuz and outside it.  

The UAE, which left OPEC on May 1, has found workarounds to the blockage at the Strait of Hormuz. It has been shuttling crude through the chokepoint to load it on larger vessels outside the Strait, maximizing the use of its onshore pipeline to ship crude from the west to the east of the country, bypassing Hormuz, and shipping tankers through the Strait in dark mode.  

The UAE has managed to ship over June and July the most crude oil out of the Strait of Hormuz than any other Gulf producer, according to vessel-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

The UAE has also issued an unprecedented number of tenders to sell cargoes of millions of barrels of crude oil in recent weeks.

At the end of July, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company ADNOC issued its seventh tender offering crude from the United Arab Emirates since the beginning of June, expecting to sell millions of barrels of oil between August and October, both from within and outside the Persian Gulf.

ADNOC was offering cargo loadings from the UAE ports Zirku and Das Island inside the Persian Gulf, as well as the port of Fujairah outside the Gulf, or via ship-to-ship transfers offshore Fujairah or Malaysia.

The UAE is estimated to have produced 4.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in June, its highest output ever.

The UAE’s crude oil production jumped from 3.3 million bpd in May to 4.1 million bpd in June after the country left OPEC effective May 1, started raising output, and managed to sneak a lot of exports out of the Middle East even as the Strait of Hormuz was mostly blockaded for the first half of June, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The UAE has sought to adapt to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by sneaking tankers in dark mode through the Strait and increasingly offering to sell many of its crude grades for loading offshore Fujairah and at Sohar in Oman, outside the Strait.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Aug. 7 rejected the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) bid to dismiss charges brought by the Justice Department, saying the nonprofit failed to show that the prosecution against it was vindictive.

The department indicted the SPLC in April on 11 counts of wire fraud, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The organization was accused of defrauding donors by funneling millions of dollars to informants who infiltrated white supremacist and hate groups that it publicly opposed.

The SPLC filed a motion on May 26 seeking dismissal of the charges, arguing the indictment was vindictive and that the administration targeted it for exercising its First Amendment right to identify, report on, and criticize extremist hate groups.

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks rejected the motion after finding that the SPLC failed to provide evidence showing that prosecutors involved in the case were motivated by animus and that such animus had led to the organization’s prosecution.

“Our Republic recognizes different venues to vindicate different wrongs; federal courts are not the proper forum for airing political grievances. For that reason, the doctrine of vindictive prosecution places a heavy burden on the accused, and decades of precedent counsels against its application here.

“Two things can be true at once: critics are not constitutionally immunized solely because they speak frequently and prosecutorial decisions may be second guessed – if they evince some evidence of animus,” Marks wrote in a 36-page order.

The Epoch Times has reached out to both the SPLC and the Justice Department for comments and did not receive a response by publication time.

The indictment filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama accused the SPLC of secretly funneling more than $3 million in donated funds to leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance, between 2014 and 2023.

The indictment alleged that donated money, which was supposed to dismantle violent extremist groups, actually was being used, in part, to pay and benefit leaders in the exact groups the nonprofit alleged it was trying to take down.

“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” Kevin Davidson, then-acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, said in an April 21 statement.

“That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”

The SPLC denied the allegations and entered not guilty pleas on July 7. The nonprofit said in a May 26 motion that the prosecution was “driven by the White House and FBI leadership’s retribution campaign.”

Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called “a gift” last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP’s “anti-communist messaging is very effective.”

💥NEW: Hillary Clinton: “It’s not just about Michigan — but the Republican messaging is: ‘communist, socialist.’ It’s gonna be a VERY effective attack.” pic.twitter.com/PS6ObKoZli

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) August 7, 2026

The Democratic Party’s failure to formally denounce Piker and distance itself from his agenda…

Piker calls on his followers to “kill capitalists”:

Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:

“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”

Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 9, 2026

Piker: “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, Bitch.”

Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can “f*ck your sisters and daughters” to “destroy the white race”

I am demanding the Democratic Party voice PUBLICLY that they denounce Hasan Piker’s comments.

If they don’t, let this post be proof…

— Jack (@jackunheard) August 7, 2026

Piker: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.” 

Hasan Piker, sitting at a table with an LGBTQ+ flag, says: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.”

He’s actively campaigning with Democrat senate and gubernatorial candidates. pic.twitter.com/9QrtKqMKnl

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) August 4, 2026

Piker: “America deserved 9/11. I do not support the United States of America.” 

Hasan Piker: “America deserved 9/11. I do not support the United States of America.”

Currently campaigning with Abdul El-Seyed. pic.twitter.com/LDjizrQgVN

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) August 4, 2026

Piker: “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America.”

Hasan Piker: “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America.”

This is the same guy who praises Communist China every chance he gets, and he’s now the face Bernie, AOC, and El-Sayed want fronting the Democrat Party. Scary stuff. 😳 pic.twitter.com/Dr4enTuIhC

— 🇺🇸 David J. Urban 🇺🇸 (@DavidJUrban) August 7, 2026

…deserves considerable scrutiny.

🚨 Hasan Piker quotes:

✅ America deserved 9/11

✅ Go back to Auschwitz

✅ Let the streets run red with capitalist blood

✅ Racist comments about blacks and Asians

✅ Supports China, Russia, Cuba

✅ Supports Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis

— 🇺🇸 Jason Curtis Anderson (@JCAndersonNYC) August 8, 2026

Piker’s close proximity to DSA-aligned candidates, combined with anti-American rhetoric and revolutionary Marxism that is hostile to America’s political and capitalist system, has federal investigators examining the possibility that revolutionary activity is being supported by foreign subversion networks:

• Hasan Piker Says Quiet Part Out Loud, Maps Radical Left NGO Network To China-Based Marxist Financier
• Feds Subpoena Hasan Piker, CodePink Cofounder Over “Humanitarian” Trip To Communist Cuba
• Feds Nab Alleged Member Of “Sprawling” Cuban Communist Subversion Network Linked To Hasan Piker’s Havana Trip
• “Americans Deserve To Know”: State Dept. Report Details Cuban Espionage, Subversion, And Role In Rise Of Far Left

Piker is becoming such a liability for America’s left that a potential inflection point may have been reached.

JNS reports that the University of Washington has decided to cancel a scheduled Piker event. This taxpayer-funded institution offers extensive coursework shaped by Marxist, feminist, and other far-left frameworks while placing limited emphasis on capitalism. If even one of America’s most progressive universities now views Piker as a liability, it may signal the beginning of a broader retreat from America-hating communists who spread hateful and violent rhetoric among America’s youth.

“I’m happy that the University of Washington, for literally the first time ever, has made the correct decision to not have an America-hating communist spread his hatred and terrible ideology to young people at our taxpayer-funded universities,” Travis Couture, a Republican state representative, told JNS.

“Obviously universities are a place for First Amendment free speech, but someone who said that America deserves 9/11 and that capitalist blood should spill in the street should not be someone we are promoting with our tax dollars,” Couture said.

“Every elected official and taxpayer-funded organization should be asked to condemn socialism, communism and Democratic Socialists of America people like Hasan Piker,” Couture told JNS. “If they will not condemn those people, actions and extreme ideology, then they should be disqualified from serving the people of Washington state.”

The cancellation suggests that his political toxicity may now outweigh his usefulness in mobilizing socialist and Marxist candidates who campaign on positions that denounce America and capitalism and are deeply unpopular with mainstream voters.

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

President Trump on Friday urged U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “revisit” her decision to drop charges against an accused Reflecting Pool vandal after new photos shared on social media, showed clear signs of vandalism.

The Department of Justice dismissed the case on August 1 after the Department of the Interior had concluded there were many flaws with the renovation project, including  lining that appeared to begin peeling days after installation.

The president on Monday railed against the decision, telling reporters in the Oval Office that Pirro had “made a mistake,” and insisting “there was vandalism.”

Trump conceded that he was not “100 percent thrilled with the contractor,” but made clear that he was disappointed in Pirro.

“Frankly, I think she choked,” Trump said.

“Because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.”

“I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro!” Trump later fumed.

“Really disappointed with Jeanne Pirro! She folded like an umbrella! And people get away with things, and it’s a disgrace!”

The president, met with Pirro later Monday, according to Politico, and told reporters Tuesday night, he hadn’t yet made a decision on whether to fire her.

In an interview with NBC News Thursday, Trump reiterated that Pirro had made a “terrible mistake” and insisted “there was tremendous vandalism.”

Freelance photographer journalist Andrew Leyden shared the previously unseen photos of the damage on social media, Friday.

“Cuts in the expansion joints on the side of the Reflecting Pool are visible today after NPS removed a fence that has blocked the view since June,” Leyden wrote on X. “The contractor reported this to Park Police as vandalism but we have not been able to photograph until now due to the fences.”

Leyden, a photojournalist for The New York Times, has extensively documented the Reflecting Pool’s condition and has concluded that the damage stemmed from construction flaws rather than vandalism.

In his Truth Social post Friday, Trump reiterated his claim that the material was cut “300 feet or more” and people were seen on video “on their knees with their hands in the water” cutting the liner exactly where the photos show the damage. The president also launched an attack on the defense team, labeling notorious lead attorney Norm Eisen a “TRUMP DERANGED SLEAZEBAG” and “complete LUNATIC.”

Eisen, who served as special counsel during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, has filed or worked on over two dozen lawsuits against Trump.

Trump further alleged that the “gentleman involved,” former Olympian David Hearn, is a “big player” in ActBlue, the notoriously sketchy Democrat fundraising platform co-founded by Eisen. ActBlue is currently under active investigation by multiple congressional Republican committees over alleged fraudulent donations, illicit foreign contributions, money laundering, and obstruction of congressional probes.

Additionally, in October 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) petitioned the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to take immediate action to “close fundraising loopholes that jeopardize American election integrity” following his investigation into ActBlue.

“Now that people are able to see it up close, they are reporting pure VANDALISM at The Reflecting Pool,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Thank you Andrew Leyden for your observation!”

The material was cut right where the video tape showed, for 300 feet or more. People were on their knees with their hands in the water at the exact location of the “slashes.” Additionally, there were witnesses to the VANDALISM, and the flexible areas of the material were cut with a knife. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision, especially since it turned out that the “gentleman” involved is a big player in ActBlue, a disgraceful fundraising SCAM, and is represented by a TRUMP DERANGED SLEAZEBAG, Political Hack Lawyer, Norm Eisen, and CREW, a group that uses “charity” for political purposes which is, to the best of my knowledge, ILLEGAL! I have been beating Eisen, a complete LUNATIC, in Court for 10 years, or more. He just keeps coming, but I always WIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”