Authored by Vince Quill via CoinTelegraph.com,

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino and market analysts pushed back against S&P Global’s downgraded rating of USDt’s ability to maintain its US dollar peg, saying that the ratings agency did not account for all of Tether’s assets and revenues.

The Tether Group’s total assets at the end of Q3 2025 totaled about $215 billion, while its total stablecoin liabilities were about $184.5 billion, according to Ardoino, who referenced Tether’s Q3 attestation report. He added:

“Tether had, at the end of Q3 2025, about $7 billion in excess equity, on top of the about $184.5 billion in stablecoin reserves, plus about another $23 billion in retained earnings as part of our Tether Group equity. 

“S&P made the same mistake of not considering the additional Group Equity, nor the roughly $500 million in monthly base profits generated by US Treasury yields alone,” Ardoino continued.

Source: Paolo Ardoino

S&P Global downgraded USDt’s dollar-peg rating to “weak”  on Wednesday, the lowest score on its scale, prompting fear, uncertainty, and doubt from some analysts about the company, which has become a critical piece of crypto market infrastructure.

Analysts debate Tether’s balance sheet fundamentals

Arthur Hayes, a market analyst and founder of the BitMEX crypto exchange, speculated that Tether is buying large quantities of gold and BTC to compensate for income shortfalls produced by falling US Treasury yields.

As the Federal Reserve slashes interest rates, the gold and BTC should go up in value, Hayes said, but he also warned that a steep correction in these assets could spell trouble for Tether.

“A roughly 30% decline in the gold and BTC position would wipe out their equity, and then USDt would be, in theory, insolvent,” he said.

Source: Arthur Hayes

Joseph Ayoub, the former lead digital asset analyst at financial services giant Citi, said he spent “hundreds” of hours researching Tether as an analyst for the company, and rebuffed Hayes’ analysis.

Tether has excess assets beyond what it reports, has an extremely lucrative business that generates billions of dollars in interest income with only 150 employees, and is better collateralized than traditional banks, Ayoub said. 

A fourth Russia-linked tanker was attacked in less than a week, marking a sharp escalation in strikes on commercial vessels tied to Moscow as the war in Eastern Europe nears its fourth year.

⚡️Photos from the Russian tanker MIDVOLGA-2, which was hit by a drone this morning near the Turkish coast

Preliminary reports suggest the strike was carried out by a fixed-wing drone, likely an FP-1. https://t.co/2k8jTmWGPR pic.twitter.com/bkhdVO7TWh

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) December 2, 2025

Bloomberg reports that the Midvolga-2, a Russian-flagged tanker hauling sunflower oil from Russia to Georgia, was hit by Ukrainian kamikaze drones about 80 miles off Turkey’s northern coast. Turkish officials said the crew of 13 was unharmed in the attack.

Russian tanker ‘Midvolga 2’ carrying sunflower oil ATTACKED by drones in the Black Sea — Turkish officials

All 13 crew members on board are safe. The ship is reportedly en route to Georgia pic.twitter.com/VegeZT5pvF

— RT (@RT_com) December 2, 2025

The incident is part of Ukraine’s intensifying and broadening attack on Moscow’s oil/gas infrastructure and shadow tanker fleet. 

On Sunday, the Russian paper Kommersant reported that the M/T Mersin tanker, hauling Russian oil, was attacked by Ukrainian drones off the west coast of Africa. This marks the first incident of its kind in the region and suggests a further broadening of the battlefield.

• Moscow Paper Claims Ukrainian Drones Hit Russia-Linked Oil Tanker Off West Africa

Last week, two Russia-linked tankers were hit by kamikaze drone boats. Here’s our reporting:

• Ukraine Releases Footage Of Kamikaze Drone Boats Striking Russian Shadow-Fleet Tankers

• Sanctioned Russia-Bound Oil Tanker At Risk Of Sinking After Mine Strike

Ukraine and its Western allies have spent the past several years targeting Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure with kamikaze drones and naval drones in an effort to pressure Moscow’s finances. This campaign, accompanied by sanctions, has yet to collapse Russia financially.

Attacks on Russia’s oil/gas infrastructure jumped to a record last month as the Trump administration rushes to end the four-year war.

With U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff coming off negotiations with Ukrainian officials this past weekend in Miami and now in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin about a possible peace deal, it appears Ukraine is making one final push to inflict maximum damage on Moscow.

The U.S. dollar has steadily lost value over the past century. According to Federal Reserve data, the purchasing power of one dollar today is equal to just a few cents in 1913 (the year the Fed was created).

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu tracks the decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar since the early 1900s, illustrating how inflation has eroded its value.

Data & Discussion

The data for this visualization comes from Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). It measures the “Purchasing Power of the Consumer Dollar” across all U.S. city averages, indexed to consumer prices.

The higher the index, the more purchasing power the dollar has. As the index declines, goods and services become relatively more expensive.

Inflationary Eras and Economic Shocks

Major inflationary periods can be identified by looking at the steepest drops in the chart. For example, World War I and World War II strained government finances, leading to massive increases in public spending and money creation, which pushed prices sharply higher.

Similarly, the oil shocks of the 1970s caused energy costs to spike throughout the world, feeding into broad-based inflation. In each case, rising prices significantly eroded the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

From Gold Standard to Fiat Currency

Until 1971, the U.S. dollar was backed by gold.

This system was ended by President Nixon because the U.S. was creating more dollars than it had gold to support. Furthermore, foreign countries were increasingly demanding gold in exchange for their dollar reserves.

While ending this system gave policymakers more flexibility to manage the economy, money creation became easier, as shown by this chart of the M2 money supply. M2 comprises the most liquid forms of U.S. money, including physical currency, checking deposits, plus near-liquid assets like small-value time (CD) deposits, retail money-market funds, and other readily convertible savings vehicles.

An expanding money supply can be healthy when it grows in line with factors like population, economic output, and demand for credit, but becomes inflationary when it outpaces real economic growth.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Gold Production by Region in 2024 on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by Jingduan Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

“Was I misled?”

That’s the question I hear most from my patients lately—asked with anger, exhaustion, and the quiet devastation of women who wonder if they lost years of their lives to menopause symptoms they were told were untreatable.

The answer came earlier this month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would remove “black box” warnings from hormone therapy products after 23 years. For many women, the reversal is an admission that arrives decades too late.

What Happened in 2002

In July 2002, preliminary data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) were published in JAMA, showing that combined hormone therapy (estrogen and progestin) increased the risk of breast cancer, stroke, and pulmonary embolism. Major media outlets interpreted early signals from the study as definitive danger, and the announcement led to an instant and dramatic decline in the use of hormone therapy.

Women who had been sleeping well for the first time in years suddenly poured their medications into the trash. Pharmacies fielded calls from panicked patients demanding immediate discontinuation. Primary care doctors, most of whom had never been trained deeply in menopause management, told their patients to “stop now and ask questions later.”

Women did stop, and many suffered in silence for the next 20 years.

The FDA’s Historic Reversal

On Nov. 10, the FDA announced that it is initiating the removal of broad “black box” warnings referencing risks of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and probable dementia from hormone replacement therapy products for menopause.

When FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary spoke publicly about the shift, he didn’t mince words. He said the media had frightened women away from a potentially life-changing therapy, and he noted the difference between estrogen-only therapy and synthetic combination regimens. He acknowledged, openly, that the “fear machine” had begun long before the scientific data had been fully understood.

He also said something that struck many women deeply: “After 23 years of dogma, the FDA is stopping the fear that has steered women away from this life-saving treatment.”

For many of my patients, that sentence felt like a validation they had waited half a lifetime to hear.

The Devil Is in the Details

The details that matter most sat quietly in the medical literature for years—in the 2002 article and the two follow-up studies published in 2011 and 2020 in JAMA.

The Study Population Was Older

Women recruited in the WHI study were all postmenopausal, aged 50 to 79 years, with an average age of 63—more than a decade past the onset of menopause. Most had not used hormones before, and many had cardiovascular risk factors.

The Hormones Were Synthetic

The adverse results found among older women taking combined conjugated equine estrogen and medroxyprogesterone acetate—both older, synthetic formulations developed in a different era—were generalized to all hormone therapy types and all age groups.

Estrogen-Only Therapy Showed Different Results

The estrogen-only group in the WHI study—women who had hysterectomies and therefore received estrogen without synthetic progestins—had a lower rate of breast cancer.

In the storm of fear that followed, no one wanted to hear nuance.

The Critical Factor

Yet even in the early 2000s, there were physicians who paused, confused because something about the reporting didn’t align with what they were seeing clinically. The hormones used in the WHI study weren’t the bioidentical estradiol and progesterone that many clinicians were already prescribing with good results. More importantly, the women who seemed to benefit most from hormone therapy were those who began it near menopause—not in older age.

Timing is critical. The body responds to estrogen very differently pre-menopause versus a decade post-menopause. After years of low estrogen, the blood vessels lose their flexibility, plaque accumulates, and metabolic changes settle in. The risk-benefit balance is fundamentally different for women who initiate hormone therapy at different ages.

This is what we in medicine now call the “timing hypothesis”—a concept that should have been central to every headline but was lost entirely.

And for two decades, women lived inside that headline and endured the consequences of fear and misinformation.

What Women Lost

The point is not that hormone therapy is perfect or appropriate for everyone. It’s that women were never given the chance to make an informed choice.

Women who begin hormone therapy earlier—ideally within 10 years of menopause—tend to experience improved sleep, reduced anxiety and irritability, and protection against bone loss.

Many report better cognition, improved cardiovascular markers, and enhanced sexual health and relationship well-being. Although spoken about more quietly, perhaps the most profound benefit is the simplest one: the return of themselves.

Takeaways

The new FDA guidelines do not signal a new fad or a sudden reversal. They mark a return to evidence-based medicine—the kind that millions of women should have received all along.

Hormone therapy is not appropriate for every woman, and it is not a cure-all. However, it is a powerful tool, and for the right woman at the right moment, it can restore a quality of life she thought she’d lost forever.

Our job now—as clinicians, as journalists, as a society—is to give women back what fear took from them: clarity, choice, and control.

Everything that follows in this series of columns will build on that mission.

Authored by T.L.Davis, 

A recent interview Tucker Carlson had with George Galloway, a long-time member of the British Parliament and with a show himself in Britain, who was recently detained at the border under terrorism charges for, apparently, the opinions broadcast on his show.

No nation has fallen quicker or more completely than Britain into the totalitarian mindset.

It’s why we highlighted this aspect of modern Europe into the film Deconstruction.

Britain, as long as it pursues the same oppression of free speech as the Soviet Union, can not be called or considered an ally of the United States.

This is what we have to decide as a people, the American people, who will and who will not be our allies. Governments, especially now, are poor judges of character. They will hold onto traditional alliances, when those alliances have long been strained, simply because they would be unsure of what that would do to international relationships. If we lose Britain, France and Germany as allies, what effect does that have on NATO?

My question, however, is what damage does continued alliances with nations who punish their people for what they have said, posted or broadcast do to international perception? Are we not tarnished by their brush? Yes. It also signals that the United States is not determined to uphold the right to free speech. That in order to maintain these alliances will betray their own people.

As Britain, France and Germany turn toward implementing a police state to support immigrants who rape and kill their sons and daughters, put protesters in jail and silence not only their own citizens, but any who arrive through the internet, can they still be considered allies of a free nation? No. So, how free is that “free” nation? It is not free as it supports and continues alliances with nations diametrically opposed, not only to free speech, but a series of democratic principles.

The battle taking place within the European nations draw a stark contrast to the Central and Eastern European nations, formerly Soviet client states, who distance themselves from European Union dictates that promote illegal migration and the silencing of objectors.

The whole idea of democracy comes from the idea that the people have a say in who governs them and the policies they impose. When freedom of speech is so blatantly outlawed and only approved narratives permitted, there is no democracy. I don’t know what sort of government Britain has, but it is not a democracy as it claims. Yes, I know it’s technically a Monarchy, but the King or Queen has nowhere near the political power they once held.

All of this centers around illegal migration, it’s where people like Keir Starmer intend to derive their power, in the end. If he supports the replacement population when it is unpopular to do so, they might look kindly on him when the Islamists take full control of the politics, but he is a useful idiot.

They continue to put forth the idea that a declining birthrate is the reason for the importation of these migrants, but if European and American birthrates are dropping, as it is in all Western societies, it would seem that the logical conclusion would be to outlaw abortion, not import rapists and murderers.

But that’s not the reason. It isn’t the birthrate, it’s an attempt to forever change politics that eliminates the right, the Christians. This point was made clear by Viktor Orban in the film Deconstruction that’s coming out soon.

Communists and Islamists work well together. They have the same goal, supremacy through murder and imprisonment of an uncompliant populace. Democracies must tolerate the naysayers, the critics, that’s the difference. It won’t be long and the UK will be an Islamic nation, just as Iran became an Islamic nation. Are they still allies of the US? If so, why are not all Islamic nations allies? Because Islamic nations are at war with the US. “Death to America” does not seem like the pronouncement of an ally. Will it be heard across Britain, while we still consider it a close ally? Of course.

The United States had better figure this out, too. The only true allies the US has in Europe are the Central and Eastern European nations.

They are also the ones that need more protection from Russia and China, because, as smaller economies, they can’t afford to be too choosy about who they do business with and the more that the United States can be a better economic partner, the stronger we will all be.

The world is changing rapidly and our government is incapable of keeping up with the pace. It has to be led by the people.

The film Deconstruction makes this point. 

Here’s a trailer that we’ve produced that gives one a sense of where we’re going with the message of the film.

It’s important, because a lot of changes are coming down the pike and if we don’t build some sort of resistance mechanism by which the people will have an increasing say in what policies our government promotes, all is lost. Governments can’t understand issues as quickly as the people can. When the internet came along, the government did not prevent corporations from using and selling information required to establish an account. They did nothing, now it’s just a land of pillage and plunder, unless one spends an inordinate amount of time protecting oneself from it.

AI is coming and the government is not in a position to be able to control it, or protect its citizens from being victimized. Already, I get AI solicitations for marketing my books. No human has read the books and has come up with the information about them. I delete those, even though they are quite complimentary about my work. I don’t want anything to do with AI, or as little as I can tolerate. I don’t want anything to do with AI film production, even though it can be a lot cheaper and quick to produce.

There’s value in simply rejecting what is obviously detrimental to the people. Who gains form AI? Just corporations. Yes, it might be slightly more convenient, but is that worth the ultimate sacrifice of a doomed economy, soaring electric costs and depleted water resources? Not to me.

The need to fight back is urgent. And I expect my warnings to go unheeded, as always. The average person is much too willing to give up, to not fight it when everyone in a position of power decides something. This was illustrated during the pandemic. A lot of us knew it was a false flag, that what they were saying was untrue, that masks didn’t help, that the vaccine wasn’t even a vaccine, but a DNA altering injection. Yet, everywhere I went, people just lined up and took it, accepted the ridiculous distancing and mask wearing.

We’re now in for a lot of that, because it was not ridiculed out of existence from the very beginning. That’s the power of the people, the ability to ridicule nonsense. Finally, slowly, the whole transgender nonsense is losing potency due to that very ridicule that we all possess naturally. Use it.

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

Gold is on a hot streak, up more than 50% to-date despite retreating from October’s record highs of $4,380 per troy ounce.

Driving global demand is the mixture of geopolitical tensions, a weaker U.S. dollar, and sticky inflation. In Q3 2025, central bank purchases were up 28% over the quarter, while inflows of gold-backed ETFs hit $26 billion.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, breaks down the total global supply of gold, both above and below ground, based on data from the World Gold Council.

All of the World’s Above and Below-Ground Gold

As of year-end 2024, the total above-ground stock of gold was 216,265 tonnes. Based on a gold price of $4,166 per troy ounce, all of the world’s mined gold is valued at $29 trillion.

When including identified underground gold, the total reaches 348,375 tonnes. All of the world’s gold together in a sphere would be about 107 feet tall, matching the approximate height of the White House from the south side’s lawn to the top of its flagpole.

The data table below breaks down all of the world’s above and below-ground gold and its value.

The world’s below-ground stock (gold that hasn’t been mined yet) is an estimated 132,110 tonnes, covering reserves and resources. Gold reserves are the part of underground gold resources (identified deposits) that are economically viable to extract at current prices.

Resources are not yet proven to be economically viable to mine and process.

How Much Gold is Left to Mine?

With most of the world’s gold already having been mined, only about 38% of the known gold supply remains underground, identified as reserves and resources.

At 2024’s pace of roughly 3,661 tonnes of gold production a year, that below-ground stock equates to just under four decades of additional output, assuming prices or technological advancements make resources economically feasible to mine in the future.

For investors, that mix of finite physical supply, ongoing central-bank purchases, and rising investment demand helps explain why this 107-foot sphere of gold now represents more than $47 trillion in combined above- and below-ground value at current prices.

To learn more about where the world’s gold is mined, check out this graphic which breaks down global gold production by region and country.

Via Remix News,

While Russia is routinely portrayed as a serious military power, as the war drags on, Russia is becoming more and more reliant on Chinese drone components to survive.

Now, China’s drone component supplier Wang Dinhua has just purchased a 5 percent stake in Russia’s Rustakt, a top drone manufacturer in Russia.

Rustakt is subject to sanctions imposed by both Ukraine and the European Union, reports Do Rzeczy, citing an article from FInancial TImes. 

Samuel Bendett, a drone expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted the growing cooperation between the Russian and Chinese military-industrial complexes, as well as Putin’s reliance on Chinese components for Russia’s growing drone needs.

However, this reliance is nothing new. 

Another Russian company, Aero-HIT, has also benefitted from this partnership, reportedly producing up to 10,000 drones per month this year.

It also plans to produce more advanced models.

China is generally considered the leading drone component manufacturer in the world, dominating much of the supply chain to the point that many of the components also purchased by the United States also come from China.

Ukraine has also discovered laser sensors manufactured by a South African company in Russian drones attacking its cities.

It remains unclear how products intended for civilian use ended up on the kamikaze drones, the independent Russian-language website The Moscow Times reported on Friday.

Laser rangefinders from several countries, including South Africa, have been detected in long-range drones modified from the Iranian Shahed, according to Vladislav Vasilyuk, a Ukrainian official responsible for sanctions policy.

Industrial lasers from South Africa’s Lightware are small and lightweight, making them suitable for installation in drones.

The supply of military equipment to countries engaged in armed conflict without the consent of the South African government is prohibited, but Lightware is not registered as a trader in ammunition or dual-use products or technologies.

Read more here…

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Modern western culture is an absolute anomaly in the history of human civilization. If one studies the principles and doctrines of nearly every other society and empire around the world, you will not find one that allows mass immigration of foreigners with contrary ideologies.

You will not find one that allows foreigners to migrate without strict assimilation and loyalty.

From the Arab states, to China, South Korea, and Japan (until recently), to India and beyond, every culture maintains a strict sense of supremacy. There is an absolute expectation that newcomers will adapt to political policies, belief systems, social norms, etc. Most of the world for thousands of years has operated in this way. Only the modern west deviates and only the west is chastised as “xenophobic” for establishing barriers to foreign influence.

The US in particular has been typecast as a “global melting pot”, even though the vast majority of immigration up until the last half of the 20th century was from other western nations with similar beliefs and traditions. The melting pot theory was largely promoted and glorified by socialist elites in the early 1900s and was not a value of the common American.

Israel Zangwill (a British-Jewish Broadway playwright and devout socialist/supporter of feminism) popularized the term nationally in 1908. Even then, he spoke specifically about various European cultures coming to America.

The “melting pot” was never about inviting millions of people from the third-world with utterly exclusive and hostile ideologies. This notion did not become popular until recently.

What happened? When did it become America’s “duty” to adopt the problem children of the rest of the planet? And why is western civilization the only civilization that is expected to be submissive to the concept of multiculturalism?

This topic is at the very root of nearly every political conflict raging today. The ICE raids, the foreign travel bans, the use of the National Guard to deter organized interference of deportations, the recent terror attack in Washington DC, the increasing calls by Democrats and woke activists for violent “resistance” – All of it goes back to the notion that America is SUPPOSED to welcome anyone and everyone, legal or illegal, from any part of the world regardless of the threat they might pose to our society.

Progressives, for various reasons, furiously insist that America is THE melting pot. That this is our national heritage and that anyone who says otherwise is a “fascist” trying to fundamentally change our cultural foundations.

NGOs and globalist foundations spend billions of dollars to facilitate mass immigration to the US, often in violation of the will of the voting public and the administrations in power. They also fund the majority of activist groups trying to disrupt deportations.

Global governance organizations like the UN spend vast sums of money to enable illegal immigration into the US, providing subsidies, maps, and legal advice to migrants seeking to sneak into America or exploit loopholes for temporary residency.

A number of foreign governments (mainly India and Mexico) lobby the US government to open the floodgates, expanding visa programs and allowing non-citizens to take American jobs, housing and other resources.

The “melting pot” has been poisoned with a rancid cocktail of nefarious agendas. Any positive vestiges of the ideal have been lost. Any value the melting pot might have once had is gone. All that is left is an army of parasites looking for blood; a swarm of mosquitoes rushing in to latch onto a vein. Few if any of these people or institutions care about the “American Dream”, they only see the US as an easy target ripe for conquest.

We have made ourselves an easy target. Our faith in liberalism has led us down a dark path of suicidal empathy. We naively assumed that “tolerance” is a virtue; it is not. Tolerance is a luxury – A luxury for the ultra wealthy and the extraordinarily dimwitted.

No other culture on Earth worships tolerance like westerners do, and there’s a good reason for that. In the case of the US, our ancestors already invested their blood and tears and treasure into this nation to make it the most wealthy and successful in the world. We have been living off their labors for generations.

The people that want to give that civilizational wealth away are people who lack respect for the trials and tribulations required to obtain it.

Another problem is that our tolerance often goes unappreciated because it is not a virtue for any other culture, either. The third world sees tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Many foreign social belief systems, from Judaism, to Hinduism to Islam, carry an ancient code of tribalism, an insider/outsider mentality of supremacy which is admonished in modern western thought but tolerated in immigrants.

For third worlders, a culture which is tolerant is fair game for exploitation and perhaps even invasion. You will consistently see foreign groups in the US argue that they are indeed American, but at the same time they will declare allegiance to their nation of origin. Their love of America is based on their love of the WEALTH they can derive from America. They’re laughing all the way to the closest Western Union.

Most have no interest in our principles and our heritage. They see America as an economic zone, a global commons with resources to be tapped. In other words, foreigners see immigration as a fishing business, a means to gain access to a largely unprotected wealth pool created by a culture with more historic merit and more success. They have been gathering their nets for quite some time.

In 2024 the US government under Joe Biden spent over $72 billion on foreign aid with another $26 billion in supplementals. India and Mexico transfer around $100 billion total in remittance from the US each year (foreign workers sending money back home). A number of officials with ethnic roots in these countries regularly argue in favor of continued visas and mass immigration while claiming it’s “for the good of Americans.”

Again, their loyalty is to their culture of origin first and America last.

For progressives and globalists immigration is also about wealth, primarily the redistribution of it from middle-class and upper-class Americans into foreign coffers. They see the common American people (conservatives) as a thorn in their side that needs to be removed. The draining of our buying power and living standards is a stepping stone to cultural deconstruction.

Mass immigration is a tool for social change. Multiculturalism erases national pride and the concept of protected borders. For if we are overwhelmed by the third world, who is going to care about maintaining the borders of our nation anymore? We might as well let the whole thing collapse, right?

They openly admit to this agenda, it’s not a secret. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Black-pilled nihilists will say that we’ll “do nothing”, but I’m not really interested in the opinions of conservatives who have given up. They are just as responsible for our troubles as progressives. They are weaklings and cowards.

Donald Trump’s recent declaration of a ban on third world immigration is at least bringing the topic to the average American dinner table. It’s been a long time since we had a real national reexamination of the “melting pot” idea. And, from my observations the use of mass deportations is gathering vast support among the American public.

I really don’t think officials living in the bubble of DC or mainstream journalists suffering from delusions of influence realize just how deep the anger goes when it comes to foreign exploitation and foreign influence over American society. I would suggest that there are tens of millions of patriots on the verge of walking out the door tomorrow to wage war on leftists and illegal immigrants should the obstructions of deportations continue.

The naysayers just don’t get how fed up people are becoming. Third world enclaves in places like Minneapolis and Dearborne don’t get it, either. Our tolerance is rapidly melting away, faster than the melting pot can be filled. The era of liberalism is over. The era of western multiculturalism is about to be stamped out. Mark my words, we are on the precipice of a reckoning.

* * *

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

A big Washington Post report issued Friday detailed allegations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” aboard an alleged drug boat in September.

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” the WaPo report reads. “The order was to kill everybody,” it quotes a Pentagon official as saying.

After that, “A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.“

From there, Hegseth’s ‘kill them all’ order was followed through with. “The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water,” the Post wrote based on its sources.

President Trump on Sunday addressed the allegations, which the report present as tantamount to ‘unlawful orders’ and a war crime, as he traveled back to Washington D.C. after the Thanksgiving weekend. Some Congressional leaders, mostly Democrats, have expressed outrage and vowed to look into the apparently standing orders.

Trump in his response declared that he has complete confidence in Hegseth in the top Pentagon post. While Trump said that he personally would have ordered a second strike on the boat, he explained, “I don’t know anything about it. He said he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.”

“He said he didn’t do it. He said he never said that,” Trump emphasized when asked specifically about the second strike. “He said he didn’t do it, so I don’t have to make that decision.” According to more from Trump’s response:

“Number one, I don’t know that that happened,” Trump said, when asked whether a hypothetical second strike would be illegal. “And Pete said he did not want them — he didn’t even know what people were talking about. So, we’ll look at, we’ll look into it.”

“But no, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike,” he continued. “The first strike was very lethal, it was fine, and if there were two people around. But Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence in him.”

A reporter asked the president if he was “saying there’s no second strike.” “I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’m going to find out about it. But Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”

Trump was asked “would you be OK if he did do it?”

Reporter: Can you talk a little bit about the strikes and controversy around Hegseth—

Trump: I don’t know anything about it. He said he did not say that.

Reporter: You don’t know if there was a second strike to kill the two men

Trump: He said he didn’t do it

Reporter: Would… pic.twitter.com/JvxUvnaeQJ

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 30, 2025

This is after Hegseth late in the day Friday had blasted the “fake news” Washington Post report, calling the series of strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats “lawful”. If Hegseth and Trump as commander-in-chief were to actually say they gave an order to “kill everybody” – such an order could open them up to international legal action related to war crimes, as it would be tantamount to openly admitting to giving orders to pursue extrajudicial killings. This is also given that any survivors of an initial strike would not be a threat, and they would likely be unarmed.