Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 8 to permit it to withhold billions of dollars in foreign aid previously authorized by Congress.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the justices to pause a ruling by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who ordered the federal government to spend about $4 billion in previously appropriated funds.

The money is earmarked for foreign aid and United Nations peacekeeping projects.

The emergency application was filed in two cases, Trump v. Global Health Council, and U.S. Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalitions.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the new application that this is the third time in this case that Ali “has issued an unlawful injunction that precipitates an unnecessary emergency and needless interbranch conflict.”

In February, Ali gave the federal government 36 hours to pay roughly $2 billion in invoices for past foreign-aid work, which Sauer called “an impossible task,” and one that the judge lacked authority to order. The Supreme Court ended the dispute by granting an administrative stay, a court order that gives the justices more time to consider a matter.

After the deadline was lifted, the government paid “virtually all of the contested amounts,” Sauer said.

Next, Ali issued a “novel injunction requiring the government to obligate tens of billions of dollars in foreign-aid appropriations on the theory that failing to do so constituted an unlawful impoundment in violation of the Constitution and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974,” Sauer said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit lifted that injunction and that court allowed its ruling to come into effect on Aug. 28, Sauer said.

Now that its original theory has been “decisively rejected,” the district court precipitated a new emergency “by issuing a version of the same injunction near midnight on September 3,” Sauer stated.

Again, the district court is forcing the government to obligate about $10.5 billion in foreign-aid funding that was due to expire on Sept. 30, according to Sauer. But now the government has been left “with even less time for further review or compliance, with even more deficient legal theories,” Sauer said.

Sauer said the government already intended to obligate $6.5 billion of that funding by Sept. 30, but Ali’s order regarding the remaining $4 billion “raises a grave and urgent threat to the separation of powers,” a constitutional doctrine that divides the government into three branches to prevent any single branch from accumulating too much power.

After the D.C. Circuit canceled Ali’s injunction, the president proposed rescinding that $4 billion in funding under the Impoundment Control Act. Under fast-track procedures, Congress has 45 days to consider the rescission request and during that period the president cannot be required to spend the money, Sauer said.

Ali’s new injunction would compel the Executive Branch to begin “obligating those funds at breakneck speed to meet the September 30 deadline, even as Congress is considering the rescission proposal” and before Congress’s 45 days to do so elapse, Sauer said. A panel of the D.C. Circuit denied by a vote of 2–1 a stay of the judge’s order late on Sept. 5, Sauer added.

Also on Sept. 8, Global Health Council and other litigants that want the $4 billion to be released filed a brief opposing the government’s application for an administrative stay of Ali’s order.

“The government’s theory that the agencies need not comply with enacted legislation mandating that they spend funds, because the President has unilaterally proposed legislation to rescind those statutory mandates, would fundamentally upend our constitutional structure,” the brief reads.

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will act on the government’s application.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Santa Monica, the liberal coastal enclave in Southern California, is poised to declare a “fiscal emergency” as its financial troubles mount, according to a report by The Los Angeles Times.

The city’s budget has been strained by a staggering $229 million in settlements related to sexual abuse claims against former police dispatcher Eric Uller, with an additional 180 claimants still seeking compensation. Uller was accused of sexually abusing over 200 children, primarily underprivileged Latino boys, from the 1980s to early 2000s. Arrested in 2018, Uller committed suicide before his trial.
The Los Angeles Times reports:

Services in Santa Monica are also suffering, according to the report. During the COVID-19 pandemic, city leaders slashed the city’s budget and eliminated hundreds of positions. City services haven’t been restored to pre-pandemic levels, and several capital projects remain unfunded.

Santa Monica’s recently approved budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year expects expenditures of $484.3 million, but $473.5 million in revenue, according to the Times.

City officials have largely avoided comment ahead of a critical meeting, but agenda notes reveal that concerns about Santa Monica’s precarious finances have been escalating since March.

“I’m afraid that we’re careening towards bankruptcy, and I’m worried that we’re thinking a little small here,” Councilmember Dan Hall warned at the time. “Unless this council takes very bold action, we’re not going to cost-correct.”

The severity of the crisis has already forced Santa Monica to abandon plans to host beach volleyball events for the 2028 Olympics, underscoring the depth of the city’s financial distress.

A study released in October concluded that hosting the 2028 Olympics as a venue city would result in a net financial loss of $1.45 million for Santa Monica, further complicating the city’s strained budget, the Times said.

If approved, the financial emergency would authorize Santa Monica City Manager Oliver Chi to “take all necessary steps to address, alleviate, and mitigate this emergency,” according to the proposed measure.

The average household income in Santa Monica stood at $176,289 in 2023. In the 2020 Presidential Election, Los Angeles County, which includes Santa Monica, voted approximately 71% for Joe Biden compared to 26% for Donald Trump.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The left weighs in on anything that Trump is against, which drives it to lionize criminals like Abrego Garcia, champion open borders, and oppose increased oil and natural gas production.

And they are against anything Trump is for.

So often, they did not care much about big-city crime rates, supported biological men’s usurpation of women’s sports, and opposed taking out the Iranian nuclear threat.

However, recently, some former and, no doubt, current Trump opponents now seem to support both what Trump is for and what he is against—at least in a few areas.

So this past week, Donald Trump hosted some of the richest, most powerful—and most liberal—high-tech CEOs in the country at the White House.

Their shared goal ostensibly is to ensure U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, cryptocurrency, and nearly every other breakthrough field that has both sparked global competition and involves U.S. national security.

In this regard, Trump seems to be channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, during the early years of World War II, enlisted his ideological foes, mostly the nation’s CEOs, to rearm the virtually defenseless U.S. He tasked them to jump-start the moribund American economy to produce in a matter of months the best and most plentiful ships, planes, vehicles, communications, and new military technologies.

Despite their ideological differences, both FDR and Trump knew that only private enterprise could rearm and reboot the nation, and only if the captains of industry were infused with patriotic zeal, guaranteed freedom to innovate and adapt, and able to make a profit on their investments, would they become partners with and not adversaries of the government.

So last week, Trump assembled Michael Kratsios, the administration’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, along with David Sacks, the billionaire investor and Trump’s cryptocurrency and AI czar. Joining them were Big Tech CEOs like Google’s Sundar Pichai, Arvind Krishna of IBM, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Elon Musk was not there, though he said he was invited but had a scheduling conflict.

Their joint challenge is to ensure that the U.S. dominates these emerging fields and thereby ensure American prosperity and national security.

A subtext follows that China must not be allowed by hook or crook to steal U.S. research and development breakthroughs and thereby take a lead in these fields. The CEOs are tasked with investing their huge profits inside the United States to ensure jobs for Americans and, to the greatest degree, minimize offshoring and outsourcing whenever possible.

Trump’s duty, in turn, is to reassure the CEOs that under his watch, the government will not pick winners and losers but let them all compete on a level playing field. They will be protected by the government both from European Union ankle-biting regulatory interference and censorship and Washington’s own efforts to micromanage them into stasis. That is the quid. The quo is that the tech leaders must awaken a somnolent U.S. to the technological revolutions underway that will determine the fate of nations in the second half of the 21st century—and then begin producing state-of-the-art products that lead to a more secure and richer U.S.

We should remember what FDR accomplished. World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. At that point, the U.S. military was smaller than those of eighteen other nations. The U.S. Army was less than 200,000 soldiers in size, with only 125,000 sailors in the Navy. In contrast, the German military was already over 1.5 million strong. Its soon-to-be wartime ally, Japan, had under arms 2.5 million combatants, and Italy had another 1.5 million soldiers.

On maneuvers, the American army was short on rifles and used broomsticks. Even after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. lacked both the quality and quantity of German planes, tanks, and artillery. The Japanese Navy roughly matched the American but enjoyed advantages since it was not responsible for a two-ocean deployment, as were the Americans in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Its fighters, torpedoes, and destroyers were deemed superior to their American counterparts.

Yet when the war ended four years later, the U.S. military was well over 12 million soldiers in size. Its navy had more ships and tonnage than all the navies of the world combined.

The U.S. Army Air Forces were larger than all the air forces of the world combined. It possessed the most lethal weapons of the war—the atomic bomb, the massive B-29 bomber, and an array of thousands of superb fighter planes. The Navy grew to over 125 fleet, light, and escort aircraft carriers. At the end of the war, American battleships, carriers, submarines, fighter aircraft, and transport vehicles were the most numerous and best in the world. By 1945, the American gross domestic product was likewise larger than all the economies of all the belligerents combined.

How did the U.S. go from an isolationist and disarmed country mired still in the Great Depression to the most powerful and best-armed nation in world history—and in less than four years?

The neo-socialist president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pivoted. He abandoned the New Deal statist control of the economy and instead unleashed the captains of industry to rearm the United States in the way that they thought best.

FDR tasked General Motors president William Knudsen to round up corporate CEOs, allot them areas of industry, and then, with Roosevelt’s blessing, turn them loose.

Roosevelt appointed his former political enemies to a variety of boards—the War Production Board, the Office of Production Management, and the National Defense Advisory Commission. The great corporations responded. Charles Wilson of General Electric, Henry Kaiser of Kaiser Steel, and Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company quickly built new factories or recalibrated older ones into huge weapons industries.

Soon, Henry Ford was building one B-24 bomber an hour at the huge Willow Run plant in Michigan. Kaiser launched a Liberty cargo ship every few days in his West Coast shipyards. By war’s end, the industrialists had built 300,000 planes and over 14,000 warships and cargo vessels.

Roosevelt’s message to the once-hostile industrialists was simply to employ their initiative, expertise, and resources to outproduce the enemy and to catch up and surpass their head start in the quality of arms. He gave them wide latitude to profit, fast-tracked zoning and building permits, and urged them to use their initiative and coordinate with each other. The only real order was to make better and more plentiful weapons than the Germans, Italians, and Japanese combined.

And they did just that and left a model for our own generation to follow—if it proves as publicly spirited, patriotic, united, and capable as their grandfathers who won the war.

Authored by Lika Kobeshavidze via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE),

In the last few years, everything has changed for college students. Applications capable of writing assignments suddenly became a part of everyday life.

What is the real impact of artificial intelligence (AI)? Is it a convenient tool for personalized learning or a path to academic dishonesty?

Out of nowhere, AI became students’ best friend.

A tool created in 2022 is now a daily habit. Professors may see dishonesty, but students see efficiency. Is AI additional help or a shortcut to avoid learning?

The real problem is a decline in educational standards. Will over-reliance on AI make students smarter, or does it come with darker consequences?

According to a new study by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the latter might be true.

Researchers found that writing essays with ChatGPT can lead to “cognitive debt” and a “gradual decline in the quality of written assessments.”

Over four months, MIT researchers asked 54 adults to write essays in three groups: those who used ChatGPT, those who used a search engine, and those who used only their own skills. The team tracked brain activity and analyzed the writing to see how engaged participants were. The results were interesting: those who relied on AI showed much less brain engagement and even struggled to remember their own quotes. When later asked to write without AI, they performed the worst of all.

The study was small, with only 18 participants making the final round, but it raises a big question: Does over-reliance on AI make it harder to think for ourselves?

Artificial intelligence is still a relatively new tool. But its rise has created major challenges for academic integrity. This skepticism is not new; people had similar concerns when digital calculators emerged. They were also seen as “easy fixes.” But, in the 1970s, exams were redesigned to match a new reality; instead of calculating by hand, students were expected to use calculators and solve complex problems.

The real challenge is that the institutions haven’t updated their standards or don’t even know how. Teachers still assign the same tasks and expect the same outcomes as five years ago, ignoring the fact that a powerful new tool now exists.

It is essential that current and future generations can think critically and creatively and solve problems. However, AI reshapes what this means. Writing essays by hand is no longer the only way to demonstrate critical thinking, just as long division doesn’t automatically prove numerical skills.

Already, 89 percent of US college students admit to using ChatGPT for homework, despite its limitations. Adaptation is urgent. Some universities, like Stanford, Barnard, and New York University, have begun offering AI literacy courses, where students learn to evaluate the consequences of AI and understand when not to use it.

Europe is taking a slightly different path. The European Commission’s guidelines emphasize transparency, accountability, and fairness in AI education. Instead of banning the tool, they are trying to integrate it into the learning process. Students may use AI to brainstorm ideas, correct grammar, or support research. The goal is for students to understand how it works, its risks, and capabilities.

Asia, however, is the leader of integration. In South Korea and Singapore, students use AI in classrooms and in assessments. Singapore, through its second National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS 2.0), has positioned itself as a global leader. The plan outlines 15 steps over the next 3–5 years to advance AI in manufacturing, finance, healthcare, education, and public services.

AI is a huge part of today’s world. No matter how much universities or schools wish it never existed, it seems like it’s here to stay.

Just as calculators handle our calculations, AI can support learning.

But the real problem is not reliance on AI, but misuse.

Pretending that this technology doesn’t exist or banning it weakens education.

This is not 1955; not all the students write exams by hand. They need to be challenged and taught how to use AI responsibly and ethically.

In fact, mastering AI should be part of academic success.

Ignoring it leaves students unskilled, unprepared, and ultimately less competitive.

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

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The Trump administration has plans to target more businesses with immigration enforcement operations after it carried out one at a Georgia Hyundai plant and detained hundreds of illegal immigrants, border czar Tom Homan said on Sunday.

In an interview with CNN, Homan said that the White House is planning to focus more on companies to see whether any illegal immigrants are working at their worksites.

“We’re going to do more worksite enforcement operations,” Homan told the “State of the Union” program, responding to a question about the enforcement operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials at the Hyundai battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, on Sept. 4.

“No one hires an illegal alien out of the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, undercut the competition that hires U.S. citizen employees.”

He said that such practices drive wages down for American workers.

South Korea’s government has since signaled that it would move to pick up around 300 South Korean nationals who were detained after the operation. U.S. federal agents arrested about 475 workers. The South Korean government has expressed regret about the arrests and the release of the footage showing armored vehicles and ICE operatives shackling and detaining the workers.

“What ICE is doing every day on these operations and this worksite enforcement operation also helps us give a secure border, because those who are thinking about coming to the United States illegally know that … this administration is applying consequences,” Homan also said on Sunday.

In the interview, Homan did not say what businesses could be targeted in the ICE operations.

For months, Homan has warned U.S. companies that they could be subjected to ICE operations, telling reporters at the White House in June that the agency may perform operations at farms and hotels to root out illegal immigrants there.

“I mean, we will concentrate on worksites on a prioritized basis just like we do at large operations,” Homan said at the time. “We’ll prioritize those who have a criminal nexus.”

Weighing in on the Hyundai plant arrests, President Donald Trump said in a social media post that more companies investing in the United States should move to “hire and train American workers” while having them bring in “your very smart people” to work legally.

Trump made the post shortly after telling reporters he would look at what happened but that the incident had not harmed the United States’ relationship with South Korea.

Hyundai said in a statement last week that none of the detained workers worked directly for the automotive company, adding that it has “zero tolerance” for illegal activities.

“Hyundai is committed to full compliance with all laws and regulations in every market where we operate,” the Seoul-based company said.

“This includes employment verification requirements and immigration laws. We expect the same commitment from all our partners, suppliers, contractors, and subcontractors.”

The firm added that it will “continue to invest” in the U.S. market to “create thousands of jobs” while in “full accordance” with immigration laws, according to the statement.

As the third anniversary of ChatGPT’s launch quickly approaches, Nvidia’s market value has surged more than tenfold, leaving institutional investors pondering whether the AI data-center buildout nationwide is merely hype or if there is actually substance.

Hyperscalers have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, capital expenditures that will soon need to demonstrate clear returns; failure to do so risks undermining the lofty valuations for the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks.

On Monday, Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius published a note with new insights into the bank’s quarterly AI adoption tracker through September. The report indicates that while AI investment continues to accelerate, adoption rates at large firms are starting to slow down. 

Hatzius said the AI adoption growth rate slowed to 9.7% of U.S. firms using AI in the third quarter, up from 9.2% in the second. 

Finance and real estate had some of the largest gains, while educational services reported a decline. Meanwhile, broadcasting and publishing are expected to experience the fastest adoption over the next six months. 

Labor market effects are still muted, according to Goldman’s chief economist. He noted that job displacement is emerging across tech, design, and customer service. AI roles made up 28% of IT job postings, while AI was cited in layoffs affecting 10,375 workers since the previous update. Goldman expects that full AI adoption across corporate America could displace 6% to 7% of all workers. 

More charts from Hatzius’ note: 

ZeroHedge Pro subscribers can access the full note and additional charts in the usual place. 

Furthermore, a must-read from DB analyst Adrian Cox:

• The Summer AI Turned Ugly: Part 1

• The Summer AI Turned Ugly: Part 2

.  .  . 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Mayor Brandon Johnson has long been as popular as Ebola in Chicago, a politician who has continued to spend wildly while virtually chasing businesses from the city. Johnson was brought to power with the support of the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) and proceeded to approve bloated contracts and pensions demanded by the CTU. Now, both Johnson and CTU have lost a fight to secure a $200 million loan to avoid the need to reduce the budget or staff.

A bill has come due, and Johnson is claiming that the criticism by some of his closest allies is due to racism.

Johnson fired the head of the school board and packed the board with his allies in order to secure the loan. However, in the end, his allies could not sign off on what would be a disastrous short-term, high-rate loan to plug the hole in the budget.

Chicago politicians have repeatedly yielded to the CTU on massive pension deals to secure the union’s support and contributions in elections. The pensions have triggered financial crises for years. Johnson’s solution was familiar: just borrow more money at ruinous rates to kick the can down the road. In the meantime, the public schools (despite a $10.2 billion budget) continue to fail students, particularly minority and poor students, in a system producing dismal performance and proficiency levels.

The $10.2 billion budget, approved by 12 of 20 board members, closes a $734 million deficit but does not include a loan, which the mayor’s office sought to cover the pension payment and other unexpected shortfalls.

After the pandemic, money from the Biden Administration ran out, and Johnson actually had to balance the books. That would have involved confronting the CPS staff and the powerful union. Instead, Johnson wanted to sign off on another loan. When the former head of the board floated cutting back on the budget and staff, Johnson and the CTU forced him out.

Even the CPS staff was raising alarms over Johnson’s new math approach to loans. They noted that this loan would be signed without any promise of future revenue. In other words, it would just push the CPS and city closer to insolvency through “crisis borrowing.” The result would be a cascading failure, with expected credit downgrades, despite the fact that CPS bonds are already rated at junk status due to past overborrowing to plug budget gaps.

Johnson, however, thinks that money magically appears with loans and that he can simply continue to borrow his way out of any budget shortfall.

It was too much even for the city council, which has approved overspending for years.

Johnson responded in signature fashion and accused his own allies, many of whom are minorities, of effective racism:

“When you put a Black man in charge of a city, all of a sudden everybody wants to be an accountant.”

Of course, one does not have to be an accountant to see that borrowing almost a quarter of a billion dollars for a system near bankruptcy is irrational, especially when it involves a high-rate loan with no revenue stream to support the added burden. It is like a citizen spending wildly on a credit card without any means to pay the principal, let alone the interest.

The difference is that Johnson is risking insolvency for an entire city, suppressing creditworthiness and increasing the costs of future loans.

CPS itself teaches personal finance subjects to students, though it is so heavily laden with jargon that it is hard to tell it from a social studies class. The course description on “educating for equity” seems geared more to balancing societal shortcomings than personal budgets:

“Financial Education begins with students’ identities and memberships in our communities, extends into disciplinary inquiry-based, culturally sustaining instruction that educates for broad economic inclusion, mobility, critical examination of existing systems, and financially secure individuals and communities.”

In the meantime, Chicago is now facing a $1.15 billion shortfall and Johnson is calling for increasing taxes on the wealthy and businesses despite the fact that Chicago is losing both businesses and residents. The incoming citizens are largely immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, in the sanctuary city. That has driven expenditures even higher for the city while it loses businesses and residents needed for its tax base.

As a Chicagoan, I have no illusions about the city politics. There has never been reasonable fiscal policies in the city in my lifetime. However, Johnson has moved from the dismissive to delusional in ignoring the economic realities growing in the city.

When Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey isn’t flying his UH-60 Blackhawk, driving his Mark V Special Operations Craft at high speeds on the open water around Newport Beach, California, or playing with $20,000 night-vision goggles, he’s about to become a whole lot more occupied with a new toy: a single-person eVTOL, referred to as the “Formula One racing car for the sky.”

On Saturday, eVTOL startup Jetson released a video showing Palmer receiving his Jetson One and flying the single-seat aircraft around an open field.

“This historic milestone marks the beginning of Jetson’s global rollout and a bold leap forward in personal aviation. The Jetson ONE unit was delivered to a facility in Carlsbad, California, where Jetson’s Founder and CTO Tomasz Patan and CEO Stephan D’haene assisted in person with the unboxing and pre-flight checks” to Palmer, Jetson stated.  

Jetson continued, “Palmer Luckey, a passionate and experienced aviator, did complete the ground training under 50 minutes prior taking effectively the controls for his first low-altitude flights. A record, demonstrating Palmer’s unique understanding of advanced technologies.”

Palmer owns a Blackhawk helicopter named “Shamu” – just like the orca whale at SeaWorld. 

This is my Blackhawk: pic.twitter.com/RJx1PRzWUB

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) November 26, 2023

He’s obsessed with military vehicles. 

Should I pick up and restore one of these babies?

(United States Coast Guard CB-OTH) pic.twitter.com/78xLNWlA2U

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) August 27, 2025

. . . 

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I try to play it down the middle and be a centrist most of the time—I really do. I can admit that it feels like conservatives have outrage over nearly everything nowadays, and it can feel excessive.

Every time conservatives blow up over something like Cracker Barrel making slight changes to its logo—an idea I’ll admit I’ve even written about—we risk becoming the very party that is outraged by everything. It’s the old adage in action: “when you point one finger forward, three point back at you.”

But even bearing that in mind, there are some situations that make me truly livid in a way a logo change at Cracker Barrel never could. What transpired over the last few days with the death of Iryna Zarutska, and the media’s astounding lack of coverage on it, is one such instance.

By now most people know the story. On August 22, 2025, 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was fatally stabbed on a Charlotte light rail train by 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., a homeless man with a long criminal record including more than 10 arrests. She died at the scene, and the grotesque act was caught on surveillance video for the whole world to see.

Today, the story is more becoming about the media’s lack of coverage of the incident. No major mainstream media outlet reported on the horrific incident.

After a decade of lecturing the American public about injustice, an innocent woman dies as a direct result of progressive policy and all of a sudden, the “activists” in the media for some reason don’t have a single word to say about it.

The very party that is obsessed with immigration and the mainstream media machine that perpetuates their propaganda accordingly, somehow can’t muster up a coherent opinion about a migrant being senselessly murdered? Why could that be?

Where are all the “journalists” with the Ukrainian flags in their profiles? Where are all the women’s rights advocates screaming about how this is the patriarchy’s fault?

Where the f*ck is…well, everybody?

The fact that not a single major news outlet covered this gruesome murder—with the exception of Axios, which ran a piece that instead focused on surveillance cameras instead of the crime itself—is outrageous.

Even people on the left should have trouble doing the mental gymnastics necessary to justify ignoring this take. But at this point, who knows?

Regardless, the bad news is that the legacy mainstream media has been fully exposed as a corrupt cesspool with a deeply progressive agenda, catering to the Democratic Party and whoever is paying for ad space.

The good news is that this latest shining example of just how anti-American and disgusting the media has become may finally force the free market—and the country itself—to acknowledge it and demand real, long-lasting change.

Last week, a story broke that CBS was considering hiring Bari Weiss for a metric f*ckton of cash — up to $200 million is the number that is being reported.

This could represent the first of many recruitments of journalists who defected from the legacy model to go out on their own. I’ve often praised outlets like Substack for offering a democratized model that pays real journalists what they’re worth and provides a release valve for reporters still interested in the truth.

What this CBS rumor shows is that, whether by free market capitalist force or common sense, these age-old institutions are realizing that people still want the truth and journalists with integrity.

Journalists like Bari Weiss, Seymour Hersh, Catherine Herridge, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and many others who were abandoned by the legacy model are on the cusp of again being recognized for their actual value as truth-tellers. Their willingness to step away from tradition, once seen as a risk, now looks like proof of their integrity. Ironically, these are the very people the legacy media will be forced to turn back to when they realize their audiences want — and will pay for.

This trend accelerated during the election campaign season when the media ran cover for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Trust—even among centrists and Democrats—was lost. Now, the lack of coverage of this latest murder, an incident that would have been front-page news everywhere if the races were reversed, has likely eroded what little integrity the media still had.

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This is one of those rare cases where outrage over the lack of coverage will surpass the coverage itself, and rightly so. The fact that Brown had been arrested and released more than a dozen times before committing this horrific, videotaped crime lays bare the consequences of regressive Democratic policies. Judges and magistrates so incompetent as to allow this man back on the streets should be investigated, if not charged, for gross negligence that cost an innocent woman her life.

It’s unthinkable to look for a silver lining in such a barbaric act, but I truly believe that if Iryna Zarutska’s tragic death becomes enough of a worldwide story, she could be remembered as the turning point where the American media was finally held accountable and forced back toward true journalism. That would be a sense of justice that our legal system obviously failed in a massive way to provide.

This is the very system and country Zarutska believed in enough to make her home, risking everything to be here. The least we can do is honor the trust she placed in us by demanding change, speaking loudly about the justice system and media that failed her, and working to ensure this never happens again. And while there’s more than enough outrage to go around – and in this case truly justified – it’s the hope for change that brings me to honor Iryna in this piece today.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

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One month after we reported that US consumers appeared tapped out following the first consecutive 2-month stretch of declines in credit card balances, moments ago the Fed published the latest monthly consumer credit data and once again it was a bit of a brainteaser. That’s because after several months of weak credit creation, July saw the second highest monthly increase of 2025 with a total of $16.0 billion in credit, up almost double from the revised June print of $9.6 billion (vs the unrevised number of $7.4 billion), and well above the $10.2 billion median estimate. 

Boring, as usual, growth in non-revolving credit (which is basically auto and student loans) eased back and after 3 consecutive prints at or just shy of $10 billion, the July increase of $5.534 billion was the smallest since February, bringing the total to a new record high of $3.749 trillion. 

While we won’t have a detailed breakdown between the two components until the end of Q3, we remind readers that the increase that in Q2 was driven in roughly equal contributions from student loans (+8.1BN) and auto loans (+$6.1).

As usual, the surprise was in the big jump, and sudden reversal in the recent slowdown in credit card debt, which in July surged by $10.5 billion from the upward revised $807 million June (a number which previously was negative).

And just like that the acute slowdown – if not outright decline – in credit card debt which we saw starting in February 2025 and which led to a sizable decline in May (and before the revision, in June), is now over thanks to the biggest monthly increase in credit card debt of 2025, which pushes the total to the highest level since Nov 2024 when we saw a major drop off in credit card balances.