Via Remix News,

Germany’s left have long claimed that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a threat to democracy, and due to this claim, they argue the party should be banned entirely. Although banning parties is typically reserved for authoritarian regimes, this outcome remains a very real possibility in Germany, and a local election in the city of Ludwigshafen just showed what such an outcome could look like in practice.

Incredibly, the main candidate for the AfD, Joachim Paul, was banned from running in the mayoral election. The method used to ban him could become widespread and now represent — despite what the left claims — the true threat to democracy in Germany.

Using an expert opinion from the powerful domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), commissioned by Social Democrat (SPD)-led Interior Minister of Rhineland-Palantinate, Paul was banned through the courts. It was a backdoor method that three separate courts upheld after numerous appeals by the AfD” ‘s lawyers.

“Election night without the blue bar. And without an alternative! Remarkable: low voter turnout and a relatively high number of invalid votes. I thank everyone who has supported me in the last 6 weeks! Many heartfelt thanks!” wrote Paul on his X page.

#Ludwigshafen: Wahlabend ohne blauen Balken. Und ohne Alternative! Bemerkenswert: niedrige Wahlbeteiligung und relativ hohe Zahl ungültiger Stimmen. Ich danke allen, die mich in den letzten 6 Wochen unterstützt haben! Vielen lieben Dank! 🙏🤝 pic.twitter.com/mxmLGeBA13

— 𝗝𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 𝗠𝗱𝗟 (@JoachimPaul_AfD) September 21, 2025

Notably, Paul was leading in the polls before he was removed entirely from the ballot. Nobody replaced him on the ballot either, meaning the AfD was not represented by anyone in the election.

Now, the turnout in the mayoral election has reached an all-time low of just 29.3 percent. In 2017’s mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, the then-SPD candidate Jutta Steinruck won with 60.2 percent participation.

That means voter turnout was cut in half from that election.

That is not all. For those who did vote, many of them appear to have submitted “spoiled” ballots. A record-high number of ballots were ruled invalid, at 9.2 percent. Eight years ago, that number was just 2.6 percent.

In the final totals for this most recent election, in which Paul was banned, Klaus Blettner (CDU) and Jens Peter Gotter (SPD) have advanced to the runoff vote. Blettner received 41.2 percent of the vote and Goter 35.5 percent. Another SPD candidate, Martin Wegner, received 15.7 percent, and Volt candidate Michaela Schneider-Wettstein received 7.6 percent.

However, to claim that whoever wins the second round of voting now has a “mandate” from the people in a fair democratic election is questionable, if not outright laughable.

Still, the liberal media and establishment politicians will either be silent about what happened in Ludwigshafen or openly cheer it on, despite 70 percent of voters choosing simply not to vote, and many who did protested with invalid votes.

This entire operation, a true victory for “democracy,” was orchestrated by AfD rival parties from start to finish. Outgoing Mayor Steinruck, while serving as chairwoman of the electoral committee, initiated the expulsion. All parties in the city are represented on the electoral committee — except the AfD.

The only party to reject the move in the committee was the Free Democrats (FDP). All others backed the unprecedented move. It was in their electoral interest, after all. Eliminating the democratic competition through bureaucratic backroom deals is now de facto a reality in Germany.

Paul says he is not giving up and told the media that he has initiated further legal action, the very same day voters headed to the polls.

“We are determined to contest the election. Whether after the first round or after the runoff is up to my lawyers,” Paul told the German Press Agency.

Other courts have already rejected Paul’s attempts to gain a spot on the ballot before the election, with all of these courts telling him he must pursue legal actions after the vote was already concluded.

Party co-leader Alice Weidel has criticized the mayoral race as well.

“Only 29.3% of the Ludwigshafen residents participated in the mayoral election, from which AfD candidate Joachim Paul was excluded. A democracy thrives on the freedom of choice — but that wasn’t even granted to the citizens,” wrote Weidel.

Nur 29,3% der Ludwigshafener nahmen an der Wahl des Oberbürgermeisters teil, von der AfD-Kandidat Joachim Paul ausgeschlossen wurde. Eine Demokratie lebt von der Freiheit der Wahl – doch die hat man den Bürgern gar nicht erst gelassen. pic.twitter.com/aauwsnAs1a

— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) September 21, 2025

However, her and her party’s protests are certain to have little influence on how this new weapon is used. In fact, the only remedy may be through the courts, the same ones that have many judges actively hostile to the AfD.

In contrast, the outgoing mayor, Steinruck, says banning a candidate through a bureaucratic process, one that has never been used before, is simply the “rule of law.”

“There are rules. We, as the electoral committee, have obviously adhered to these rules. There are now three court rulings that confirm this.” She said the fact that people are “questioning” the rule of law makes her “sad.”

“We all have to continue working on this in the future,” Steinruck added.

AfD remains at record high

This move comes at a time when debate over a ban on the entire AfD continues to rage. The AfD currently stands at between 26 percent and 27 percent in national polls, and could even reach 30 percent within the next year.

Of course, the party may also fall from this polling high. However, the federal government remains deeply unpopular, and the core issues of a faltering economy, sky-high immigration, exploding crime, troubled schools, soaring debt levels, and a disastrous energy policy are not going away.

The ground is ripe for the AfD to remain a competitive party.

Pressure for an outright ban will grow more intense as the party grows more popular, but if that is not achieved, more and more AfD candidates may simply be eliminated from participating in elections altogether via the method used to eliminate Paul.

The precedent has now been set.

Read more here…

Amid mounting speculation that Europe can fund at least part of its gargantuan fiscal commitments with seized Russian assets, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a Sept 21 interview with CBS News that confiscating frozen Russian assets would constitute a violation of international law. 

Recall that at the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, G7 countries froze approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank assets, with about two-thirds held by the Belgian clearinghouse Euroclear. At the same time, Russia was kicked out of the global dollar cross-border payments network, SWIFT. The decision to weaponize fiat currencies sparked a historic meltup in gold and led to the disconnect of gold with such traditional drivers of the price as real yields. 

In any case, European governments and G7 allies have been exploring ways to generate revenue from these immobilized funds without outright seizing them, which would have legal and political ramifications.

But Macron, already facing a political crisis at home, has put a lid on these discussions. 

“You cannot seize these assets from the (Russian) Central Bank even in such a situation. And I think it’s a matter of credibility, and it’s very important that our countries remain… and do respect the international laws,” Macron said, clearly unaware where the price of gold has gone in the past 3 years and that it is now far too late to worry about “credibility.”

“So we will respect international law. We are predictable, and we will not do all impossible things with these frozen assets.”

Brussels has been reluctant to confiscate assets outright due to potential fiscal and legal pitfalls. Instead, it uses the profits generated by the assets to fund Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction via the $50 billion G7 loan and a separate EU program. In recent months, there have been mounting calls for the EU to pursue more radical ways of using the profits for Ukraine’s benefit, such as through riskier investments.

Earlier in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU could provide Ukraine with a reparations loan funded by cash balances associated with the frozen Russian assets.

Authored by Roman Kireev via The Mises institute,

The Scandinavian model is often misrepresented as a humane and efficient form of socialism. In reality, it is a distinctly coercive and oligarchic form of statism.

While the system preserves the formal legality of civilized concepts like human rights, justice, and private property, in practice, it operates on a Marxist-fascist foundation: it systematically violates the individual through taxation, regulation, and bureaucratic entrapment—leaving only a small, politically-connected class permitted to engage in a narrow, state-sanctioned form of commerce.

By the late 19th century, Scandinavian states had come to realize that they could not operate the machinery of production and commerce themselves—at least not in the ambitious new state-socialist style of their continental counterparts. More plausibly, they faced a deeper structural limitation: they lacked a native middle class to take over, yet sat atop vast, underexploited natural resources.

The result was pragmatic: delegate production to politically-favored actors, both foreign and domestic, who would extract and commercialize resources in exchange for tribute, loyalty, and compliance. In essence, the state outsourced its revenue generation to a politically-connected class of industrialists and resource exploiters through administrative privilege and legal monopoly.

This structure was not built by the Western myth of socialist compromise—peaceful violence. It was built by a fusion of Marxist redistribution and fascist favoritism—a system where the state does not outright abolish private enterprise formally, but does so in practice by licensing it selectively, rewarding obedience, and suppressing independence.

The only challenge that remained was how to present this system as orderly, stable, and socially justified. And there was pressure to construct the myth quickly: waves of emigration were draining the countryside of labor and talent, as individuals fled poverty and rigid class structures in search of opportunity abroad. To stop the bleeding, Scandinavian states offered not only economic incentives, but an ideological narrative—a promise of stability, security, and equality that could keep individuals invested in a system built on coercion and quiet obedience. Thus was born the myth of Scandinavian socialism.

The average citizen in Scandinavia owns no capital, produces nothing independently, and functions as a maintenance technician in this vast and dying bureaucratic apparatus. His reward is not profit, ownership, and autonomy, but the promise of state pension, welfare entitlements, and state-managed insurance. In return, he accepts his role in the machinery—with no means or incentive to escape it.

Let us be clear: Scandinavia is not a society of free men cooperating in liberty.

It is a command economy, masquerading as a hybrid—funded by 19th-century taxation, designed to pacify a docile population, and structured to preserve entrenched oligarchic power.

The good news is that today, the system is failing.

The foundational spoils are dwindling. Competitiveness is eroding. The population is aging. The machine groans under its own weight.

The bad news is that, in the face of collapsing revenue and unsustainable obligations, Scandinavian states will soon turn to their final recourse: the nationalization of wealth, the confiscation of private capital, and the full realization of the Marxist impulse they have always harbored.

Why wouldn’t they rank happy?

Europe’s military landscape is rapidly evolving, shaped by both historical rivalries and modern-day conflicts. As tensions persist—particularly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—military spending and troop numbers have surged across the continent.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, breaks down the estimated size of military forces across Europe in 2025. It covers both active personnel and total military strength, which includes reserves and paramilitary units. The data for this visualization comes from GlobalFirepower. Countries are also categorized by NATO membership.

Russia and Ukraine Tower Over the Rest

Russia leads with 1.3 million active personnel and over 3.5 million total military personnel, the largest force in Europe. Ukraine, bolstered by wartime mobilization, has about 900,000 active troops and 2.2 million total personnel.

Combined, these two non-NATO countries account for more military manpower than all of Western Europe combined.

NATO’s Largest Armies: Turkey, Poland, and the UK

Among NATO countries, Turkey leads with 355,200 active troops, followed by Poland (202,100) and the UK (184,860). These nations have steadily expanded their forces in recent years, reacting to regional instability and NATO commitments.

France, Italy and Germany also maintain sizable active forces.

Small Countries, Big Reserves

Several smaller countries maintain large total military forces relative to their active troop numbers. Finland, for example, has 24,000 active personnel but nearly 948,000 total military personnel due to its substantial reserve system.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Charted: Ukraine Is Russia’s Third Deadliest War on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

The government is finally admitting the truth: it wants to launch a universal digital ID dubbed “Britcard” — despite the fact it’s a smartphone app.

Regular UK-based readers of this site can’t say they weren’t warned. On July 5, 2024, the day Keir Starmer became UK prime minister with a massive majority despite winning just 33.8% of the entire vote share, we ran a piece titled “Will a Keir Starmer Government Make Digital Identity a Reality in the UK?” Our conclusion was that it would try its damnedest (and probably make a giant pig’s ear of it, given UK.gov’s long history of IT disasters).

The reason we knew this was two-fold:

1. Just about every country on the planet, from the poorest to the richest, from BRICS partners to NATO members, including even the US itself, is hurriedly trying to erect a nationwide digital identity system. The United Nations, its strategic corporate partner, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank have been pushing for digital ID for years.

2. The government of the UK, like Ireland and the US, was always going to face a more uphill struggle since it does not have a national ID card system. However, Starmer was always going to follow the lead of his tech-infatuated mentor, Tony Blair who tried (but failed) to bulldoze through a national ID system when he was PM. As we predicted in May 2024, Blair would end up wielding an inordinate amount of influence over the Starmer government:

Many of the key positions in a Starmer government will be filled by members of the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which has spent the past four years purging the party of its genuine left-wing politicians and members, including former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach. As the veteran US journalist Robert Kuttner writes, Starmer “has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair” and his modestly named non-profit foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI)….

As we noted at the time, the beauty of this arrangement for Blair is that he would be able to continue expanding the influence of his global political consulting empire, which is currently helping to define the future of post-genocide Gaza without apparently consulting the Gazans on the matter, while also pulling the Starmer government’s strings — presumably to benefit primarily his consultancy’s VIP donors, the most important of whom is the US tech mogul (and world’s second richest person) Larry Ellison.

Reality has, if anything, exceeded our worst fears. In early September, The New Statesman asked: “Is This Keir Starmer’s Government or Tony Blair’s”. The article notes that “[t]here is no comparable example of a past prime ministerial court dominating a successor’s.”

Indeed, the only real political set back Blair has suffered in the past 15 months was the recent firing of his close friend and former colleague Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the United States due to Mandelson’s former close ties to Jeffrey Epstein, which were already common knowledge even on his appointment as ambassador.

As noted in our previous post, one of the reasons why Blair’s quiet return to political power could be so key to the UK’s future is his near-total obsession with digital and AI technologies:

Blair’s Digital Nirvana

There is an almost evangelical zeal to Blair’s faith in digital technologies, including biometrics. …Blair’s prescriptions are, unsurprisingly, technocratic. They include promoting the full gamut of “digital public infrastructure”, or DPI, currently being rolled out in countries across the Global South, often with World Bank loans and financing from billionaire philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar.

Blair has repeatedly called for the development of a digital identity system in the UK, after trying but failing as prime minister to introduce an identity card system in the country. In a speech at the World Economic Forum’s 2020 cyber attack simulation event, “Cyber Polygon”, he told the event’s participants that Digital Identity would form an “inevitable” part of the digital ecosystem being constructed around us, so government should work with technology companies to regulate their use.

Fourteen months on, the Starmer Government is finally admitting the truth: it wants to launch a universal (and probably soon to be mandatory) digital identity system. That system already has a name: “Britcard”, despite the fact it’s essentially a smartphone app. The political pretext for launching “Britcard” will sound eerily familiar to US readers: iIlegal immigration. From the FT:

Sir Keir Starmer is pressing ahead with the introduction of digital IDs, with an announcement expected as early as his party conference this month, as the British prime minister tries to show he has a credible plan to reduce illegal migration.

Officials said Starmer was determined to plough ahead with launching a digital ID scheme, despite Sir Tony Blair’s costly and failed attempt to roll out compulsory ID cards in the 2000s.
The announcement may come at Labour party conference later this month, according to two people briefed on the matter. They cautioned that the finer details of the scheme were still being ironed out and that the timeline could change.

One of the models being looked at would involve giving a digital ID to every person with a legal right to be in Britain — either through citizenship or legalised immigration status, according to one of the people.

The digital ID programme’s “efficacy depends on everyone having them”, they said, otherwise the government would have to contend with a combination of paper and digital systems.

Civil rights groups argue that a mandatory digital identity is unlikely to have much impact on illegal immigration — most other European countries already have national identity systems in place, some even have government-controlled digital identity systems in place, but many of them are struggling with similar problems with illegal immigration as the UK. At the same time, digital identity systems pose serious threats to broader human rights.

“Any digital ID system designed to reduce irregular migration will not solve the problem its proponents suggest, but would pose a host of wider human rights questions,” says Sam Grant, Director of External Relations at Liberty. “There are many countries that have mandatory ID systems, and it’s been shown there is no clear correlation between irregular migrant population, underground economies and ID policies.”

In 2022, the NYU School of Law warned in its report, “Paving the Digital Road to Hell: A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID“, that the emerging infrastructure for digital identity in Global South countries, financed by the World Bank, has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and political rights.”

The Role of Labour Together

Interestingly, the Starmer government’s proposed plans for a “progressive” (I kid you not) Britcard appear to be borrowed directly from a paper put together by Labour Together, a neoliberal think tank closely aligned with the government. Here’s the abstract to that paper:

For a progressive society to work, it needs to be able to collectively agree who is allowed to join it. Because it will exclude those who cannot join it, it needs to give its members proof that they belong. The UK doesn’t do this. Our conflicted historic approach to issuing identity credentials has led to a situation that represents the worst of both worlds. We currently can’t effectively stop people from living and working in our country illegally. Nor can we efficiently support legal citizens and residents to exercise their rights.

This paper makes the case for the introduction of BritCard: a mandatory national digital identity that would be issued free of charge to all those with the right to live or work in the UK, whether they are British-born nationals or legal migrants. The BritCard would be a verifiable digital credential downloaded onto a user’s smartphone, which could be instantly checked by employers or landlords using a free verifier app.

Labour Together was founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street. As with the TBI, its supporters hold top jobs in Starmer’s cabinet. Labour Together also played a key role in toppling Jeremy Corbyn from the party’s leadership, helped along by money provided by City of London financiers like Lord Myners, the former Rothschild director, and Trevor Chinn, the high-profile Jewish businessman.

Much of that money was undisclosed and Labour Together is now facing serious questions about its financing, as set out by the upcoming book The Fraud. From The Times:

The Fraud is expected to raise questions about Morgan McSweeney’s leadership of the think tank Labour Together and its failure to declare donations worth hundreds of thousands of pounds…

While McSweeney was in charge of the group, Labour Together failed to report donations of more than £700,000 made by venture capitalists and businessmen.

It included £147,500 when McSweeney was running Starmer’s campaign to become Labour leader in 2020, while remaining company secretary of Labour Together.

These revelations have prompted accusations from Labour’s opponents that the prime minister of the United Kingdom may have been brought into office by an illegal slush fund.

Now Blair and McSweeney are apparently working together to build the political case for digital identity. According to a recent editorial in The Observer, “a new internal paper by the Tony Blair Institute on the role of technology in government, commissioned by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, is understood to be ‘forceful’ in pressing the case for digital ID as a way of meeting voters’ demands and heading off the threat from Reform UK.”

But while the government believes that the UK public’s innate fear of immigration, much of it stoked by politicians and the media, will finally get the government’s digital ID legislation over the line, the ultimate ambitions for digital identity are far bolder. From the FT piece:

Earlier this year, former technology secretary Peter Kyle announced the creation of a new gov.uk app that will allow Britons to access thousands of public services on their smartphones.

He also announced that by the end of the year, the government would launch a new digital wallet that will allow people to hold driving licences and veteran ID cards on their smartphones.

A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to using tech to make it easier for people to interact with the state, learning from other countries on how best to deliver this for citizens.”

As we have previously reported, a full-fledged, government-backed digital identity system could end up touching just about every aspect of our lives, from our health (including the vaccines we are supposed to receive) to our money, to our business activities, our private and public communications, the information we are able to access, our dealings with government, the food we eat and the goods we buy.

As the now-infamous WEF infographic makes clear, life without digital identity could become very cumbersome indeed.

If governments like the UK’s, Australia’s and the EU are successful in imposing all-encompassing online age verification systems on their respective populaces, biometric-empowered digital identity could soon become our gateway card for using the Internet.

Digital identity systems are also a necessary prerequisite for the roll out of central bank digital currencies, as we have documented many times before. CBDCs are not only traceable forms of digital money, meaning they could be used to track who spends what, where, and when, but also programmable, allowing money to be restricted for specific uses. Expiry dates could also be imposed as well as accounts blocked based on user behaviour or location.

Inherently Exclusionary and a Potential Bonanza for Hackers

While often touted as a tool for social and financial inclusion, the reality is that digital identity systems are inherently exclusionary. As the World Economic Forum admits, while verifiable identities “create new markets and business lines” for companies, especially those in the tech industry that will help to operate the systems while hoovering up all the data, they also (emphasis my own) “open up (or close off) the digital world for individuals.”

As one FT reader wrote in the comments thread, “the basic idea is to make compulsory owning a smartphone and carrying it at all times.”

There are also major security concerns about all the additional data that would be harvested by and for the digital identity system. The UK has already suffered hugely costly data breaches in recent years, including the Afghan data leak whose total expected cost the government is currently unable to calculate but is likely to run into the billions.

As we warned in May, the government’s cavalier approach to security for its rapidly expanding digital governance and identity systems should be enough to give all UK citizens pause. According to a new poll, two-thirds of UK citizens do not trust the government to keep their data secure. What is perhaps most surprising is that one-third of the respondents said they do:

🆔”On top of a digital ID scheme being a civil liberties disaster, it would also represent a significant cybersecurity risk.” – @M_feeney

63% of Brits do NOT trust the government to keep their digital ID data secure, a @YouGov poll we commissioned reveals.

Read⤵️… pic.twitter.com/8SOg9EPuUw

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) September 22, 2025

Another FT reader, mirroring these fears, warned that digital identity in the UK government’s hands would be a colossally expensive IT failure:

It will be intrusive, with you being demanded to prove your identity in far more situations than now.

It will be a nightmare for the many many people who will experience errors in the system.

It will experience mission creep, with more and more data stored on it, allowing all kinds of unwelcome social engineering in the future.

Forget about lurid authoritarian fantasies. Imagine what your least favourite actually existing government could do with it.

In the case of Starmer’s still somewhat fledgling government, since coming to power just 14 months ago it has (and this is a constantly growing list):

• Unveiled plans to further expand the use of live facial recognition technology, on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force. Authorities are apparently testing affixing permanent facial recognition cameras in certain part of London, which is already one of the world’s most surveilled cities.

• Called for the creation of digital health passports for NHS patients, prompting a backlash over concerns about digital privacy and the possible sale of patient data to third-party companies — a policy that Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague lobbied for just before the elections.

• Introduced new powers to automate spying on bank accounts. The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill will force banks to spy on people’s financial movements all the time, on the premise of looking for potential indicators of welfare fraud or errors, including the government’s own mistakes. As Big Brother Watch’s Director Silkie Carlo notes, the government already far-reaching powers to go after genuine fraudsters: “This will simply turn Britain’s once-compassionate welfare system into a digital surveillance system.” 

• Announced plans to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2025, carrying on Rishi Sunak’s controversial Digital Pound plans, with a “blueprint” expected by Christmas.

• Launched an ever-escalating crackdown on lawful speech. Journalists and hundreds of  campaigners have been arrested for opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza — a genocide that Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, denies is even occurring. A pro-Palestine NGO has been designated as a terrorist organisation. The Online Safety Act has been passed, threatening to obliterate online privacy and restrict online content. British authorities have also tried to weaken encryption and have even experimented with artificial intelligence to review asylum claims.

Even the New York Times recently asked whether Britain had gone too far with its digital controls under Starmer, describing the country’s embrace of digital surveillance and internet regulation as “one of the most sweeping” of any Western democracy. If your national government is drawing flak from the NYT for “surveillance overreach”, it means it probably crossed the line a long, long time ago.

As we’ve noted before, this accelerating shift towards digital authoritarianism is a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” — as broad economic conditions deteriorate, public disaffection grows, and AI-enabled technologies advance, the temptation among governments to exploit these new surveillance and control systems is irresistible while the potential benefits for Big Tech are also huge. That said, the UK is most certainly at the sharp edge of this trend. 

Authored by William Anderson via The Mises Institute,

The images are hard to watch: A young woman, Iryna Zarutska—a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee—is sitting in her seat on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail, engrossed in her phone as she is riding home after work. A black male, Decarlos Brown, sits behind her and he suddenly stands up and quickly stabs her with a large pocketknife.

A few minutes later, she is dead, having bled out in the rail car, another young black male trying to comfort her and stop the bleeding with his shirt. Her killer mutters something about getting “the white girl” and steps off the train at the next stop, only to be quickly arrested.

There are numerous angles to this story, and they cut across nearly every debated social issue in this country from race to lenient judges to safety on public transportation.

(At least this case doesn’t involve gun control, since the killer used a knife.)

It turns out Brown had been arrested 14 times and had recently been released without bail after an arrest, despite concerns from Brown’s attorney who suggested to the judge that his client be given a mental examination.

Race certainly enters the picture as the judge in question, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, is black and agreed to release Brown if he would sign a statement promising to appear at his next court date, which he did. The mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, also is black and, in the immediate aftermath of the killing, barely mentioned the victim but poured out most of her sympathy for the alleged killer, claiming that the “system failed” Brown and that more law enforcement would be ineffective, stating, “We will never arrest our way out [of] issues such as homelessness and mental health.”

To make things worse, the black advocacy organization, Black Lives Matter, had an inflammatory post on its website that hinted the killing was justified, given past injustices against black people. In short, it is not outlandish to say that this case was a prime example of anarcho-tyranny, in which government refuses to enforce its laws to protect its citizens and then turns the governing apparatus against people who are law-abiding. However, black people themselves can point to being on the other end of anarcho-tyranny when law enforcement officials and the courts refused to protect them or even charge whites who openly murdered blacks, much less convict them, the Emmett Till case in Mississippi being one of the most publicized examples (and there are many others). In other words, there has been plenty of governmental wrongdoing to go around, and it has happened for a long time, weakening trust in the institutions of law enforcement and justice.

There is plenty of evidence that the response to crime from municipal governments run by progressives is inadequate and often outright delusional. Commenting on the Charlotte killing in Quillette, Jukka Savolainen writes that identity politics plays a large role in how progressives respond to these kinds of incidents:

People are murdered every day in America, but not every murder is treated as newsworthy. Some are amplified into morality plays about “systemic racism” while others are dismissed as isolated tragedies, and this discrepancy generally follows an identitarian script dictated by a perverse view of social justice. When George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer in 2020, his face appeared on murals from Berlin to Nairobi. Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown also became household names following their deaths at the hands of American law enforcement. But Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver—both of whom were white victims of lethal police force—remain largely unknown in the public imagination. The difference is not the brutality of the incidents, but the racial frame within which they are reported.

He continues:

The Zarutska murder also fits a depressingly familiar pattern of preventable urban violence, particularly after the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. The “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots that engulfed American cities in the summer of 2020 left an extremely destructive political legacy: demoralized police departments, slashed budgets, the election of prosecutors who de-emphasized basic law enforcement, and a broader climate of impunity. The results soon became apparent: a historic spike in crime, including homicide, shoplifting, and menacing behavior on public transportation. Even as crime rates have begun to decline from their 2020–21 peak, low-level disorder persists—open drug use, fare evasion, and a pervasive sense that the authorities have lost control of public spaces.

The Charlotte video captured that climate in miniature. As Kat Rosenfield has argued, “we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same.” In practice, the taboo against insisting on order and decency has meant abandoning shared spaces—trains, platforms, sidewalks—to the most disturbed and dangerous people among us. The Daniel Penny saga, meanwhile, taught bystanders a cruel lesson: if you intervene, you may be punished, so the safest course is to do nothing.

Dangers from Crime Are Intensified in Government-Owned Spaces

Rosenfield’s “shared spaces” really are government-owned places like parks, public transportation such as trains, subways, and buses, or are created when governments attempt to impose progressive non-enforcement policies on private businesses such as retail stores when it comes to shoplifting. The former often involves life-threatening situations like stabbings or shootings, not to mention armed robbery and menacing by young people who know others are afraid of them.

Large-scale shoplifting deteriorates the quality of life in a community, as widespread retail theft is not a “victimless” crime, despite what progressives might claim. Likewise, when a random encounter in an urban government space like a commuter train can turn deadly, the ramifications are enormous for a society. Yet, thanks to a combination of progressive ideology and the indifference that accompanies government entities when it comes to carrying out responsibilities, it is unlikely that we will see anything done to deal significantly with these problems, especially given the fact that most large US cities are governed by left-leaning progressives who believe that law enforcement of any kind is inherently racist.

The last time that public transportation in New York City was considered relatively safe for its ridership was during the mayoral terms of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and their administrations were under constant fire from progressives for aggressive policing, especially in the subways. Progressives especially objected to police arresting people for “turnstile hopping” instead of paying fares:

Whether police should intervene when individuals break what are perceived to be minor rules — like hopping the turnstile, smoking in the subway, and playing music from a speaker in a public place — has been an ongoing debate for as long as I’ve been alive. Progressive police critics helped drive a movement to de-emphasize public order enforcement which culminated with prosecutors and politicians adopting non-enforcement policies and decriminalizing such offenses.

Yet, many, if not most, people who engage in criminal behavior in the public transportation entities are fare jumpers, including Decarlos Brown. Because progressives believe that fare jumping is linked more to poverty than social deviance (they call arresting jumpers as “criminalizing poverty”), they object to any enforcement of fares. In fact, Zohran Mamdani—who almost certainly will win New York City’s mayoral race in November—wants to eliminate city bus fares and would do it with the subways if they were not run by New York’s state government. Thus, one can imagine that, in a Mamdani administration, fare jumping will become even more common—and, likewise, public transportation and public spaces will become even more unsafe.

This is not a call to bring back the stop-and-frisk actions by police that caused a lot of social discord, especially among black New Yorkers that seemed to be the ones stopped the most. Moreover, writers on this page have not backed off being critical of police behavior and have pointed out that police have no legal obligation to protect people. Nonetheless, when this kind of indifference by the authorities combined with progressive ideology that is highly tolerant of social deviance and accepts at least some criminal violence, it becomes open season on law-abiding people who find themselves in public transportation venues or other government-owned spaces.

Conclusion

In the past few decades, progressives have come to dominate large city governments, and they have openly practiced their ideology, especially when it comes to protecting people from violent crime. Progressives believe that since all police are fundamentally racist, then it logically follows that police protection is a form of white privilege, and, therefore, illegitimate.

This situation is not going to change any time soon. Progressive Democrats dominate municipal politics and, given the electoral climate in cities like Chicago and New York, both of which have highly-progressive governments, one can surmise that vulnerable people will continue to be victims of predatory, violent behavior by people who have no reason to fear the authorities and will not face condemnation from the political classes.

The US Air Force’s first F-47 stealth fighter is now in the manufacturing phase, with a planned rollout in 2028, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin revealed Monday.

“The team is committed to getting the first one flying in 2028,” said Allvin. 

“In the few short months since we made the announcement, they are already beginning to manufacture the first article,” he continued, referring to the first test aircraft. “We’re ready to go fast,” he said. “We have to go fast.” 

During a speech at this year’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association in Maryland, Allvin announced that Boeing began work after being awarded a $20 billion contract in march. 

The new stealth fighter will replace the F-22 Raptor as the primary fighting aircraft in America’s fleet. The program was briefly paused by the Biden administration, only to be revived under President Donald Trump – who announced the aircraft at a White House briefing, including its F-47 designation, a nod to the 47th president.

“Nothing in the world comes even close to it, and it’ll be known as the F-47,” said Trump. 

As the Epoch Times notes further, while much about the aircraft remains highly classified, it is expected to incorporate cutting-edge stealth technologies, integrate artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and operate alongside semi-autonomous drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft. Concept graphics released by the Air Force in May suggested a combat radius of more than 1,000 nautical miles, or about 1,150 miles; and speeds exceeding Mach 2—twice the speed of sound, or over 1,500 miles per hour.

That same post suggested that the Air Force plans to buy at least 185 F-47s, which would match or exceed the size of the F-22 fleet.

“It’s the platform that, along with the rest of the system, is going to ensure [air] dominance into the future,” Allvin said, who is set to retire but will remain chief of staff until a successor is confirmed.

Boeing did not respond to a request for comment. The defense contract giant is also competing in the U.S. Navy’s F/A-XX program to develop a next-generation carrier-based fighter. A rendering the company recently released of its F/A-XX concept bears notable similarities to the images released so far of the F-47.

Monday’s announcement was made amid an intensifying race between the United States and China to field the world’s first operational sixth-generation combat aircraft, a weapon seen as critical in the contest for air superiority.

On Sept. 3, during a massive parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, China unveiled new carrier-based fighter variants, including the J-15T, adapted for electromagnetic catapult launches, and the upgraded J-15DH and J-15DT electronic warfare aircraft.

The event also showcased the J-35, China’s second fifth-generation fighter. State broadcaster CCTV reported this week that both the J-35 and the carrier-based KJ-600 early warning and control aircraft had completed catapult launch and recovery trials aboard the Chinese navy’s newest aircraft carrier, Fujian.

China is also believed to be working on sixth-generation fighters. Photos and videos circulating online suggest two prototypes—unofficially dubbed the J-36 and J-50—feature a three-engine, tailless design reminiscent of the U.S. NGAD.

At the same Maryland conference, U.S. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink appeared to mock Beijing’s efforts to reverse-engineer U.S. designs after showing a rendering of the F-47.

“I expect some of the Chinese intel analysts are spending a lot of time looking at this picture,” Meink said. “Good luck.”

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

You have doubtless seen the price of beef at the store. It is shocking, outrageous really, ticking up higher and higher each week. When all this began four years ago, many people assumed that prices would settle back down after the crisis ended. That has not happened. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Checking in on the CPI for ground beef, we were shocked to see double-digit rates of inflation. The price of beef steaks in five years has gone up fully 50 percent and keeps rising.

Right now, the beef inflation rate is running at an astonishing 12.4 percent.

The price of ground beef has fully doubled in 10 years.

This isn’t just government data. Industry sources are showing beef prices running far ahead of other groceries.

This is happening just as more science is showing how essential beef is for human health. It is not the only good meat but it contains the most of what we need for health, weight control, energy, building muscle, and organ strength. There is growing market demand for everything from ground beef to steaks.

The growing demand is coinciding with a 50-year decline in the size of herds. Feedlot reports: “The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) released its Cattle report on January 31st. The total of all cattle and calves on January 1, 2025, was estimated at 86.662 million head, about 0.5 million fewer than the previous year. This marks the 6th year of contraction for aggregate beef and dairy cattle inventories and the 11th year overall of the current cattle cycle—the cyclical expansion and contraction of the national cattle herd over time. The cycle is influenced by the combined effects of cattle prices, input costs that drive cow-calf producer profitability, the gestation period for cattle, the time needed for raising calves to market weight, and climate conditions.”

This could become a huge problem for the Trump administration. If inflation in food prices and beef in particular keep going like this, there is a genuine risk to the presidency and the entire Republican Party. People who are not actually very political tend to judge the party in power by how much they have to spend at the grocery. If they find themselves switching from beef to rice and beans, they will blame the ruling party regardless.

So far, it does not appear to be a priority with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to address this huge problem with anything more than the status quo. This has to change.

I would suggest a three-point agenda for the Trump administration. It needs to be enacted immediately to keep this problem from spinning out of control.

First, there needs to be emergency deregulation of any existing barriers that keep farmers and other middle sources from getting product to the stores.

Two main regulatory bodies deal with this problem: the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Vast paperwork and technology are required just to track the sourcing and every state has rules on storage and more. It’s a system worthy of a Soviet-style central plan. All these are clogging up supply chains such that many bureaucrats are intervening at each stage.

All these regulations consolidate the industry into only the largest players who know the ropes and can navigate the bureaucracies. All these rules need to be relaxed so that sellers can work directly with wholesalers to assure safe and good products. Fixing this problem could even require a fast executive order, backed by legislation.

Second, there must be focus on the problem of the USDA’s strict monopoly on processing meat. This adds dramatically to time and expense, and pointlessly so. Farmers must have the absolute right to on-site processing followed by sales of all sorts. The entire USDA system must be crushed and competition in meat processing permitted. The monopoly must end.

The PRIME act needs a quick passage. It stands for Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act. This act would: Allow states to permit the intrastate sale (within state borders) of custom-slaughtered meat—such as beef, pork, or lamb—from these facilities to consumers, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and other food service outlets. Meat would no longer require full federal USDA inspection for intrastate transactions. This would allow genuine farm-to-table meat, vastly reduce costs, and immediately increase supply on the shelves.

In addition, this would reduce the costs of slaughter and incentivize a bolstering of herds, relaxing existing price pressure.

Third, all meat imported from abroad should be exempt from tariffs and quotas that are currently increasing wholesale and retail pricing. This should be done in the name of saving the American diet, and maybe even saving the Trump presidency. I get that Trump believes that tariffs are necessary to protect the U.S. industry, but right now they risk pillaging the U.S. consumer. These tariffs should not apply to meat in a time of crisis.

The laws governing meat in this country are ancient, dating even from 1906. They were put in place to help large industry players in a time of grave doubt about the safety and cleanliness of the industry. Contrary to myth, the industry fully supported the regulations because they knew for sure that they would consolidate the industry and bolster consumer confidence. Unfortunately, the new rules bogged down the local farmer and added costs. All these many years later, they are still in place but serve no real function.

The remaining independent beef farmers in this country need the freedom to sell directly to stores and restaurants and to customers. People would absolutely love the chance to buy directly, knowing exactly the farmer and rancher they are supporting. The existing system does not allow this.

The Trump administration needs to place an urgent call to The Beef Initiative, founded in 2021 to make “food more localized, redundant, and secure. We serve our community by providing market access to producers and consumers who understand the importance of food integrity.”

There are many such organizations and knowledgeable farmers. Joel Salatin of Polyface must be a top consultant to guide the White House.

Such efforts are completely consistent with the agenda of MAHA. Currently, prioritizing this is not on the agenda but it must be. The last thing we need are price controls or an angry public that can no longer afford real beef.

No one wants the fake product being pushed by those who favor “lab-grown meat” or the “impossible burger,” much less the agenda to eat bugs instead of cows, chicken, and pigs. So far, inflation in beef has not been so terrible as to make it forbidding to the average family. That is changing and quickly.

The Trump administration dealt well with the egg crisis by increasing supply and stopping the hen slaughter. Egg prices are down substantially. The same needs to happen with cows now.

The process of gaslighting is not limited to abusive personal relationships, it can also happen between groups of people within the same society.  For the past decade at least, the progressive movement and the Democrats have consistently abused the American public to the verge of rebellion, then, they pull back just enough to defuse tensions.

They did it with the BLM and Antifa riots, dealing out around $2 billion in property damage in cities across the US, injuring thousands of police officers and killing dozens of innocent bystanders.  Conservatives and moderates stood back, for the most part, until the Kyle Rittenhouse incident in August of 2020.  When leftists sought to prosecute the young man for defending himself from a mob that was trying to murder him – When they falsely labeled him a “racist” and a “terrorist”, the line was crossed. 

Those who track BLM and Antifa will note a steep drop off in activity after August of 2020 (just before the elections).  Democrats then claimed that the protests were not violent at all.  They were “Fiery but mostly peaceful”, and anyone who opposed them must be a racist. 

They did it during the pandemic lockdowns, relentlessly driving forward with the idea of perpetual mandates and calling for the government to force conservatives to comply with vaccinations using vaccine passports, economic leverage and even legal repercussions.  They accused conservatives as “domestic terrorists threatening Democracy”. 

They joyfully cancelled numerous conservative and moderate commentators, erasing them from social media.  They cheered for the silencing and censorship, using Covid as an excuse to silence their political opponents. 

Once again, as talk of civil war began to spread like wildfire across the web and it became clear that many Americans were not going to continue down the path of censorship and medical tyranny, suddenly the Democrats backed away.  Then they claimed conservatives were “exaggerating” the circumstances of the mandates.  In other words, the abuses of power “never happened”.  

In recent months there has been a string of politically motivated mass shootings all perpetrated by leftist assailants, and once again the public is being gaslit.  Democrats made these attacks possible after ten years of carefully crafted hysteria.  The constant lies about conservative “fascism” have created a generation of mental patients organized and weaponized by the Democrat Party and Antifa related groups.

The same people widely and openly celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, are now calling for a “tone shift” from Donald Trump and Republicans.  They say, Trump’s rhetoric is irresponsible and that what the country needs now is to “unify”.

But is it possible to unify with people that want to destroy you and everything you believe in?  Though perhaps half-joking, Trump’s speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial injected somber reality in the face of calls for peace and Kumbaya. 

Trump went so hard at Charlie Kirk’s memorial.

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”

pic.twitter.com/f1Xs2rwWCT

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) September 22, 2025

It’s important to remember that a majority of Democrats in congress refused to support a resolution rejecting political violence, and Democrats refused to allow a moment of silence in congress just after Kirk’s death. 

The left has long used violence to push the Overton Window to their side of the political spectrum, and each time the populace reacts with anger and calls for a response, the left slinks back to the shadows and accuses people of “perpetuating division”. 

CNN recently noted in their polling that Democrats are facing serious headwinds in the midterm elections (maybe cheering for the death of Charlie Kirk is not the best idea if they hope to take Congress in 2026).  Republicans lead in every major category despite assertions that Trump’s approval rating is “underwater”.

However, as with all progressive media outlets, CNN follows the revelation with propaganda, arguing that it’s Trump’s job to unify the public and beg for peace.  It is, in fact, the Democrats job to beg for peace, since they created the atmosphere of violence in the first place.  It is also their job to cool the rhetoric and pursue a calmer discourse since it is their party that is desperate for a win in 2026.  

They have not done this.  They puff up like peacocks instead and pretend as if they’re the good guys.  

Trump didn’t create division in the US, it was already there and has grown exponentially since the woke movement began.  There can be no reconciliation until the political left decides to stop gaslighting and take responsibility for their trespasses.  It is their job to repair the divide, not Trump’s.