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.        

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

YouTube creators who were removed over their views concerning COVID-19 or the 2020 election can rejoin the service, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, said in a Sept. 23 letter.

Rules in place prohibiting some discussion of COVID-19 and the election were lifted in 2023 or 2024, Google said through its lawyers.

“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID-19 and elections integrity,” it stated. “Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”

People whose channels were suspended or taken down included Dan Bongino, the current deputy director of the FBI.

The company said it values conservative content creators and recognizes they regularly land compelling interviewers with politicians, business leaders, and others.

Google described the COVID-19 pandemic as an unprecedented time that forced online platforms to “balance freedom of expression” with moderation of content “that could result in real-world harm.” The situation was complicated by top officials in the Biden administration pressuring the company to take action against certain COVID-19 content “that did not violate its policies,” it said.

“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content, and the Company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds,” the company stated.

YouTube’s medical content policies evolved throughout the pandemic, as health authorities changed their guidance, the company said. The company is now allowing a wide range of content on COVID-19 and elections.

“In contrast to other large platforms, YouTube has not operated a fact-checking program that identifies and compensates fact-checking partners to produce content to support moderation,” the letter states. “YouTube has not and will not empower fact-checkers to take action on or label content across the Company’s services.”

The letter was sent to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

“Whether you were an established YouTube presence with a massive following like Dan Bongino or just were starting out to express political views there, YOU will have an opportunity to come back onto the platform if you were censored for engaging in political speech,” Jordan wrote on X. “This is another victory in the fight against censorship.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in 2024 that the company was pressured by top Biden administration officials “to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.” Ultimately, he wrote, it was up to the company to take down or leave up the content.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg added later.

Documents released in a court case filed by states against the federal government showed that White House lawyer Dana Remus, among others, were involved in the effort to pressure large technology companies to crack down on alleged misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Supreme Court later dismissed the case, finding the states did not show they were directly harmed by the efforts.

Nonprofit conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has held its first campus event since the Sept. 10 assassination of founder Charlie Kirk.

The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities hosted the event on Sept. 22, which was scheduled before Kirk’s death, and held one day after his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. 

“This event was originally supposed to be a conversation between me and Charlie,” said conservative commentator Michael Knowles, who hosted the Monday event – which featured an empty chair on the stage for Kirk, draped with a white T-shirt with the word “freedom” on it – the shirt Kirk was wearing when he was killed. 

According to TPUSA college enterprise director Chris Gaffrey, the event opened with “the entire crowd standing together, hand over heart, singing God Bless the USA.”

“It was powerful. It was patriotic. It was a reminder that this movement is alive and stronger than ever. These people LOVE Charlie Kirk,” he wrote. 

🚨 This is The Turning Point Tour kicks off tonight at @UMNews, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination and it began with the entire crowd standing together, hand over heart, singing God Bless the USA. 🇺🇸

It was powerful. It was patriotic. It was a reminder that this… pic.twitter.com/jRxp0HnoFJ

— Chris Gaffrey (@politicalcmrg) September 23, 2025

As the Epoch Times notes further, all attendees were required to go through a security screening with metal detectors, according to the university’s event website. Water bottles, signs, banners, and other displayable items were prohibited inside the auditorium.

The tour’s next scheduled stop is on Sept. 24 at Virginia Tech, featuring journalist Megyn Kelly and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, according to a Turning Point USA social media post.

The tour will then continue at Utah State University on Sept. 30, featuring podcaster Alex Clark, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), former Congressman Jason Chaffetz, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.

Kirk was shot and killed during a tour stop at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. Authorities later arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as the suspected gunman.

During the memorial service honoring Kirk on Sept. 21, which drew tens of thousands of people, Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, said in her speech that she forgave the suspected gunman.

“That young man, I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate,” she said. “The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

Erika Kirk has vowed to carry on her husband’s legacy. She was appointed CEO and board chair of Turning Point USA on Sept. 18 following Kirk’s death.

Authored by Ana Kasparian via RelalClearInvestigations,

As it emerges from bankruptcy, Bed, Bath & Beyond has announced plans to open 300 new stores in the next two years – though not a single one will be in California, the state that used to be a center of its operations.

The home goods retailer, which once operated 90 stores in California – the highest number in any state – is seeking a fresh start in business-friendly Southern states. Its first location opened in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 2024 under the new name “Bed Bath & Beyond Home.”

“California has created one of the most overregulated, expensive, and risky environments for businesses,” the company’s executive chairman, Marcus Lemonis, said in a statement on X. “It’s a system that makes it harder to employ people, harder to keep doors open, and harder to deliver value to customers.”

In response, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who seems poised for a presidential run in 2028, mocked Lemonis’ complaints. “After their bankruptcy and closure of every store, like most Americans, we thought Bed, Bath & Beyond no longer existed,” Newsom stated in an X post. “We wish them well in their efforts to become relevant again as they try to open a 2nd store.”

Bed, Bath & Beyond, however, is not an outlier. It’s another sign of the slow withering of one of the most diversified and robust economies in the world, backed by a relatively well-educated workforce drawn to the many cultural and recreational charms of the mountainous, coastal state. But that’s no longer enough for the hundreds of companies that have relocated their headquarters from the Golden State in response to the rising costs of doing business there. Unaffordable housing for employees, the nation’s most generous minimum wage, sky-high taxes and fees, and some of the most stringent regulations in the country are among the reasons Tesla, Charles Schwab, and Chevron – the oil giant that was founded in Los Angeles in 1879 – and hundreds of other companies have moved their operations to other states. 

One result: California posted the highest unemployment rate of any state in July. This, in turn, is creating a doom loop crisis for the state’s indebted and fraud-ridden unemployment insurance fund. As employers are expected to shoulder the growing tax burden necessary to cover the fund’s obligations, more businesses are leaving the state altogether and taking jobs with them, compounding the problem. 

In January 2024, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) warned that the unemployment fund’s “benefit payments exceeded state payroll tax contributions by $1.3 billion in 2023,” and the imbalance would balloon “to $1.6 billion annually in 2024 and 2025.” 

California is also indebted to the federal government to the tune of $22 billion as a result of a loan Sacramento took out at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to help the state cover unemployment payments. This problem is exacerbated by mismanagement. Sacramento doled out $55 billion in fraudulent payments and overpayments during the pandemic due to poor oversight, leading the LAO to declare the unemployment insurance fund “structurally insolvent.” 

Bleak Reality for Workers

Newsom regularly touts California as the fourth-largest economy in the world due to its gross domestic product (GDP) of $4.1 trillion. But that metric conceals the increasingly bleak reality for the state’s workers. California has seen a 45% increase in unemployment since August 2022, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The institute’s economists argue that California’s official 5.5% unemployment rate is likely higher because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts anyone who works one hour per week as employed. The official unemployment rate also “does not capture those Californians who have stopped looking for work because the prospects are slim or those working part time when they’d rather be working full time,” the institute reports.

A far more detailed measure, known as U-6 according to the BLS website, which combines “total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers,” suggests more than 10% of California’s workers may be unemployed, the highest of any state. The number jumps to 11.5% in Los Angeles County. 

Taking the U-6 metric into account, more than 2 million working-age California residents are either unemployed, underemployed, or have simply given up on finding a job. More positions are drying up, too. California lost a total of 54,800 private sector positions in the first three months of 2025, accounting for the largest decline in the nation. An increase in public sector jobs by many debt-burdened local governments and the state helped offset some of the decline. RIGHT?

Experts attribute some job losses to larger economic forces that California has little control over. The state has historically had higher unemployment relative to the national rate due to its younger workforce, which translates to greater job turnover. And the rise of artificial intelligence is hitting Silicon Valley’s workforce particularly hard. An estimated 36,000 Californians who work in the information industry lost their jobs in 2024 alone, partly due to the rise of AI. 

Several California-based tech companies, including Google, Meta, and X, cut tens of thousands of positions as the industry increasingly pivoted its focus toward AI to save on labor costs. AI replaced 30% to 50% of the workers at San Francisco-based Salesforce, according to CEO Marc Benioff, and the company cut 1,000 jobs in software engineering and customer support this year alone. Microsoft, which has campuses in the Bay Area, is reporting similar trends, with AI now writing 30% of the company’s code. Nationally, an estimated 10,000 jobs were lost to AI within the first seven months of 2025, according to a recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

President Trump’s trade war with China is adding to California’s employment woes. The state is the biggest U.S. importer of Chinese goods, forcing its companies and consumers to absorb a 30% tariff on most goods. As a big agricultural and technology exporter to China, California businesses also face a reduction in revenue from the tariffs imposed by the world’s second-largest economy. 

As the global trade war also poses risks to the broader U.S. economy, the outlook for California only darkens, with economists expecting the state’s job market to worsen in the coming months. 

Policies Lead to Job Cuts

Economists and business executives such as Lemonis, however, often cite state and local policies and the high cost of doing business as the catalysts for job cuts, business closures, or relocations to other parts of the country. At 8.84%, California has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the nation, and it’s applied uniformly and without graduated brackets. Every dollar of a company’s taxable income is subject to the same tax rate.

The individual income tax rate for S corporations is at an even higher 13.3%. California also requires corporations to pay an annual franchise tax of $800, in addition to a sales and use tax of 7.25%.

California’s lawmakers are now offering special tax incentives to entice production companies to bring film and television jobs back to Hollywood. The BLS reported that the state lost around 40,000 jobs in motion picture and video production in 2024, and entertainment unions report that 40% to 50% of their members are jobless. The jury is still out on whether expanded tax credits are having any impact yet.

Some economists also argue that employers are leaving the state as a result of California’s wage requirements. Employment at limited-service restaurants fell by 3.1% one year after California raised hourly wages for fast food workers from $16.50 to $20 per hour in April 2024, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Underscoring the doom loop narrative, not all of the 22,600 lost jobs were strictly due to the new policy. Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN that his own analysis pointed to California’s population loss, slower economic growth, and rising fast food prices.

Minimum Wage Woes

Selvin Martinez, who works at a Wienerschnitzel in San Jose, told CNN that while he appreciates the pay bump to $20 an hour, the restaurant is now scheduling him to work fewer hours per week. The same goes for Edgar Recinos, who works at a Los Angeles Wingstop and lobbies his employer for more scheduled hours. 

Despite this track record, the state is making it more expensive to hire people in the massive tourism and hospitality industry, which has never fully recovered from COVID-era shutdowns. A new ordinance in Los Angeles increases wages for hotel and airport workers in steps from $25 an hour in July 2026 to $30 in July 2028, two weeks before the Olympic Games begin in L.A.

The Los Angeles Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress attempted to repeal the ordinance through a ballot initiative. “It’s clear that the ordinance will jeopardize jobs, push hotels to the brink of closure, severely cut tax revenue the city desperately needs,” the group said, adding that it will “leave the city grossly unprepared for the 2028 Olympic Games.”

Business owners say crime is yet another factor leading to closures, particularly in Los Angeles, Oakland, and downtown San Francisco. American Eagle closed its flagship store in San Francisco’s Westfield Mall, citing more than 100 “significant security incidents”  involving firearms and threatening behavior between 2020 and 2023 that impacted customers and employees. Whole Foods and Nordstrom have also exited the city center, partly because of theft and safety issues. 

In Oakland, fast-food franchisees have locked dining rooms, keeping only drive-thru windows open after staff were threatened or assaulted. In-N-Out Burger announced it was leaving Oakland entirely and closed its store permanently in March 2024, marking the first such closure in the chain’s 75-year history. The company blamed persistent car break-ins, robberies, and theft.

Many critics blame these problems on what they consider soft-on-crime policies implemented by progressive district attorneys and state leaders. 

Unemployment Insurance Strained

Even before COVID-related layoffs took a financial toll on California’s unemployment insurance program, its fund was already operating at a deficit after being underfunded for years. 

The state’s LOA had warned about the problem in a report dating back to 2016. Last December, the office projected that the state unemployment program would operate at a $2 billion deficit each year from 2025 to 2030. 

Although “the state has, in the past, failed to build robust reserves during periods of economic growth, it has never before run persistent deficits during one of these periods,” the LAO report stated. It proposes either raising payroll taxes, cutting unemployment benefits, or a combination of both. 

The unemployment program is funded by employers paying an average of 3.5% in payroll taxes on the first $7,000 of each employee’s annual wages. While most states have updated their taxable wage base to keep their unemployment programs solvent, California hasn’t updated its since 1983. The LAO recommends increasing the taxable base from $7,000 to $46,800. 

“The state has had multiple opportunities to fix this system, and each time, it’s chosen to kick the can down the road,” said Rob Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable. 

The state’s need for $18.5 billion in federal loans to cover the program’s obligations during the pandemic turned out to be a costly move. Higher interest rates over the last several years mean that California now owes the federal government more than $22.7 billion, representing the largest unemployment loan balance in the country. 

Now the burden of that loan shifts to employers since the state failed to repay the debt within two years. This year, all businesses began paying a fee of $21 per employee, regardless of whether they work full- or part-time, and the fee will significantly increase until the state pays off its federal debt. 

“The state has never paid any money towards the principal, nor has it created any sort of credit or benefit for smaller businesses facing this significant federal tax hike,” said McGeorge School of Law Professor Chris Micheli.  

Michael Bernick, former director of the Employment Development Department, warned that California’s leaders are repeating the same mistakes. “We have a system that is guaranteed to collapse in every downturn,” he said. “Without serious reforms, California will continue to borrow billions, pass the costs to employers, and weaken confidence in state governance.”

With business taxes likely to keep rising, prompting more jobs to leave the state, California is facing one of its toughest economic challenges in many years. Newsom terms out in 2027, and a new business-friendly governor in a state that has elected many of them could be part of its rebound. But in the short term, with liberal majorities in control of state politics, it’s hard to see any viable route to restoring the California Dream. 

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

Years ago, Doug Casey stated, “When empires die, they do so with surprising speed.”

At the time, that comment raised eyebrows, yet he was quite correct in his observation.

Ernest Hemingway made a similar comment when a character in his novel The Sun Also Rises was asked how he went bankrupt. The answer was, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Again, this sounds cryptic, yet it’s accurate.

Any empire, at its peak, is all-powerful, but the fragility of an empire that’s in decline is hard to grasp, as the visuals tend not to reveal what’s soon to come.

Great countries are built upon traditional values – industriousness, self-reliance, honour, etc. But empires are distinctly different. Although it may seem to be a moot point, an empire is a great country whose traditional values have led it to become unusually prosperous. There are many countries, both large and small, that are “great” in their formative values, but only a few become empires.

Yes, the prosperity is brought about through traditional values, but a great country becomes an empire only when its prosperity is sufficient to allow it to branch out – to invade other lands – to plunder their assets and subjugate their peoples.

We tend to grasp, through hindsight, that this is what made the Roman Empire possible. And we accept that the Spanish Empire was created through its invasion of the Americas and the plundering of pre-Columbian gold.

And we understand that the tiny island of Britain achieved its empire by covering the world with colonies that it had taken by force.

In every case, the pattern was the same – expand, conquer, plunder, dominate.

As a British subject, my childhood understanding was that previous empires had come about through nefarious pursuits, but I was encouraged to believe that the British empire was somehow different – that my forefathers sailed the seven seas to liberate distant populations. That, of course, was nonsense.

The British empire is now long over, and the current empire is the United States. Around 1900, the then-great country of the US sought to achieve empire and, at that time, its president, Teddy Roosevelt, was insatiable in his desire to conquer foreign lands, both near (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba) and far (Hawaii, Philippines, Japan).

The results of his efforts were mostly successful, and although the countries taken were not called colonies, they were certainly intended to be vassal states. And there can be no question the US government’s methods were no kinder than that of the Huns. Some locations, like Hawaii, went fairly peacefully, whilst others, like the Philippines, required brutal slaughter on a grand scale.

And such tactics change the nature of a “great” country.

Yes, it does allow it to become even greater, in terms of domination, but it ceases to be great in terms of its values.

In most cases, this plants the seeds of empirical collapse. The empire, even as it’s growing, is rotting from within, with deteriorating principles and morality – the very traits that created it.

This, in turn, causes the empire to develop a habit of subjugation – even over its friends and allies abroad – those countries that got on board to take part in the prosperity. While, to some extent, these loyalties by other nations are genuine, they are treated as lesser nations, eventually causing resentment of the empire.

As such, in the latter days of the empire, ally nations become toadies. Their hatred for the empire is palpable, but they maintain their obeisance, grudgingly.

Empires are built upon monetary prosperity. We can understand that an empire, in its heyday, attracts all and sundry to its shores. It builds up the ability to dictate to others since the whole world hopes to gain favour. But, towards the end of the empirical period, it’s resented by all those who were once genuine allies.

In its latter days, an empire becomes hollowed out. It’s burdened with a costly and top-heavy government. The middle class is expected to provide largess to the masses through bread & circuses, providing fealty for the political class. Traditional values are largely gone, and “everyone seeks to live off everyone else.”

At this point, the empire is a mere superstructure – one that’s becoming increasingly unsound. Importantly, the prosperity that made empire possible is replaced by the illusion of prosperity – debt.

Concurrently, the political class becomes increasingly tyrannical in order to hold the collapsing edifice together. In the final stages, tyrannical efforts increase in both frequency and magnitude in order to maintain the subjugation of the masses for as long as possible.

It may be beneficial for the reader to read this last line again, as this development is the most recognizable symptom of the final stage prior to the collapse of empire.

This final period is not only difficult to cope with, it’s highly confusing for those living within a dying empire.

The edifice still stands. With each election, the electorate hopes that somehow, a champion will spring forth and “put everything back the way it was.”

But it’s important to note that, historically, this never occurs. Whilst the average citizen hopes in vain for his political leaders to “wake up” and stop all the nonsense, he fails to grasp that, to the political leader, the most important pursuit is power. He cares not a whit for the well-being of the populace.

The political class has no intention of relinquishing even a small amount of power for the good of the people he was elected to represent.

Historically, in every instance, every empire has collapsed from within. Once the apple is truly rotten, it cannot be un-rotted.

And so, if we’ve been observant in the recent years and decades, we’ll acknowledge that the present empire has already passed its sell-by date. Its political structure is wholly corrupted on both sides of the aisle; the economy is doomed due to unpayable debt; the population has become unproductive, and it’s now in the process of alienating its former friends through increasingly desperate measures.

And here, we return to our opening paragraphs.

In its final stage prior to collapse, the empire sells out its toadies and is therefore no longer of any benefit to them. Suddenly, the empire becomes a liability. And, at this point, those who have had to tolerate the indignity of being toadies look forward to a fall, even a partial one, by the empire.

At present, the US empire maintains an illusion of dominance, but it cannot withstand a test. A defeat in warfare, a collapse in finance, the loss of the dollar’s reserve currency status, or any one of a host of triggers that are now looming would be sufficient to drop the US to one knee overnight. All that’s needed is for one of the triggers to be pulled.

It matters little what the event will be; it’s sufficient to understand that we are now drawing quite near and that the event is unavoidable. 

Historically, when an empire dies, all the notes suddenly come due. 

The political class of any empire arrogantly depends upon allies to do as they’re told, yet, when a decisive blow is dealt to the empire, those who had once been loyal allies are now as ready to abandon the empire as rats would abandon a sinking ship.

When this happens, the crutches that the empire has been counting on to hold it up pull away quickly. The collapse will have occurred “gradually, then suddenly.”

Once this is understood, the question for the reader becomes where he wishes to be when the edifice falls; whether he has prepared an alternative situation that will increase the likelihood that he will survive the debacle with his skin on.

*  *  *

Like every empire before it, the US is straining under the weight of debt, corruption, and overreach. History shows these trends don’t reverse—they end in collapse. The coming financial crisis could be the trigger that brings the illusion of prosperity crashing down. That’s why New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team have prepared a timely guide outlining what happens when empires fall—and how you can protect yourself before the reckoning arrives. Click here to download your free PDF now.

In a dramatic reversal from his previous stance where he urged Zelensky to seek a ceasefire with Putin promptly as recently as a month ago following his summit with Putin in Alaska, on Tuesday afternoon President Donald Trump said that Ukraine should go on the offensive against Russia and reclaim all occupied territories.

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

The president said that, with backing from Europe and NATO and enough time and patience, it is “very much an option” for Ukraine to drive Russian forces out and restore its borders.

“Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win,” Trump wrote. “This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like ‘a paper tiger.’”

Trump said Russia’s faltering economy, shortages at home, and growing public discontent could tip the balance further in Ukraine’s favor. He described Ukraine as having “Great Spirit” and growing stronger as the war drags on, while warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin faces “BIG Economic trouble.”

“This is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump wrote, adding that he wishes both countries well, and that the United States would continue to supply weapons to NATO “for NATO to do what they want with them.”