Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

Facing sharp scrutiny from the Trump administration over perceived left-wing bias, the Smithsonian Institution said Friday that it had temporarily removed a display on President Donald Trump’s two politically motivated impeachments.

The ultimate fate of the display remained uncertain for the foreseeable future, although a Smithsonian spokesperson maintained that the National Museum for American History’s exhibit on the American presidency eventually “will include all impeachments,” the Associated Press reported.

Smithsonian spokesman Phillip Zimmerman said the decision to restore the exhibit to its previous 2008 state stemmed from a need to update some of the details following a review in July of the museum’s “legacy content.”

The temporary installation on Trump that was added in September 2021 “was intended to be a short-term measure to address current events at the time,” he said.

The exhibit left intact displays on Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the two other presidents who have been impeached, as well as a display on the forced resignation of Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal.

House Democrats, led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, first impeached Trump in late 2019 amid claims that he had pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate the corruption of top political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

However, Joe Biden’s decision to issue a blanket pardon for his son in December 2024, prior to leaving the presidency, appeared to validate the longstanding concerns over Hunter’s illicit influence-peddling while on the board of the energy company Burisma.

Pelosi again led the charge to impeach Trump for inciting an “insurrection” following the U.S. Capitol uprising on Jan. 6, 2021.

Although Democrat majorities in the House advanced both impeachments, Trump was acquitted both times in the Senate.

Since regaining control of the White House in his landslide 2024 victory, Trump has been eager to settle scores within Washington, D.C.’s permanent bureaucracy and elsewhere.

He directly addressed the Smithsonian’s perceived bias in a March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which tasked Vice President Vice President J.D. Vance with ensuring that no funding went to “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

The Smithsonian’s announcement on Friday came as another publicly funded nonprofit under fire for its political bias announced that it was closing shop.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which bankrolled outlets like NPR and PBS through its congressional grants, announced its closure following Congress’s passage of the Rescissions Act last month, which clawed back some $9 billion in partisan public funding and spending excesses.

BREAKING: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down citing loss of federal funding. pic.twitter.com/JmmJ92J9NG

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) August 1, 2025

CPB stood to lose $1.1 billion from the rollback, according to NPR.

Leftists lashed out following the legislation’s passage, insisting—despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary—that it was nonpartisan and that its programming performed a critical service to the public interest.

“Parents and children, senior citizens and students, tribal and rural communities—all will bear the harm of this vote,” said Katherine Maher, NPR’s president and CEO, in a statement responding to the cuts.

Overnight and into the early Sunday hours, fresh clashes erupted in Syria in two flashpoint areas – one in the north and another in the south, the latter which saw a fragile truce break down between government troops under the Al-Qaeda linked government of HTS’ Jolani and local Druze militias.

The northern fighting centered in Aleppo province, where government-aligned forces and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who dominate much of the region and are backed by US forces – exchanged gunfire and artillery attacks.

Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS/former Nusrah/AQ) government has vowed (at least publicly) to uphold a shaky ceasefire in Sweida following violent clashes with Druze factions last month, which left hundreds dead.

But as horrific images of persecution and torture of minority groups emerged earlier this summer, it became clear that the jihadist troops under the government have been targeting Druze based on their non-Sunni identity, in ethno-religious genocide. Churches in this southern area have also been burned and destroyed.

This has brought Damascus under greater international scrutinty and spotlight, though Washington has tended to overlook the atrocities carried out also against Christians and Alawites. However, the US did oversee the initial truce which now appears in shambles due to this latest fighting.

The southern Syria region is poised to unravel, also as Israel appears engaged in more land-grab activity:

A security source told the outlet the armed groups had violated a ceasefire agreed in the predominantly Druze region, which has seen more than 1,000 killed in fighting over the past month.

Violence in Sweida erupted on 13 July between Bedouin fighters, Druze factions and government forces. Israel also carried out strikes on Syrian cities, claiming they were coming to the assistance of the Druze.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based anti-Assad monitoring group, the Sweida clashes left one Druze fighter dead and at least nine others wounded. The violence occurred at the Tal al-Hadeed heights, a strategic area overlooking neighboring Daraa province, the latter long being a hotbed of unrest.

In the north, the HTS-run Syrian Defense Ministry claimed that SDF rocket attacks injured three civilians and four soldiers. But this narrative was rejected by SDF officials.

Pentagon troops still occupy portions of northeast Syria, while Western intelligence agencies set the stage for Jolani’s (President Sharaa) rise…

Video from last night shows #CIA-backed Al-Julani militias launch rockets towards #Pentagon-backed Kurdish SDF militias positions in Deir Hafir, east of Aleppo, #Syria. pic.twitter.com/RqZEv7USUm

— Southern Africa Eye (@eye_southern) August 3, 2025

Meanwhile, in Quneitra province near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the Israeli military conducted another raid and there are reports of IDF convoys now situated a mere 11km from Damascus.

Authored by ‘eugyppius’ via ‘A Plague Chronicle’,

A brief primer on why the American empire exists, how it works, and Europe’s place in it…

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire.

Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

Trump’s greatest geopolitical ambition is to reorient American foreign policy away from Europe and the minor rivalry with Russia, towards East Asia and the far greater rivalry with China. This pivot entails a demotion of provincial Europe in the pecking order of empire. The Americans will want Europeans to pay more for their place in the broader imperial system, and they will be inclined to extend the Europeans fewer benefits. That is what a lot of the low-resolution MAGA rhetoric about free-riding Europeans adds up to, it is the meaning of Trump’s demands that European nations massively increase NATO spending, and it has been an important subtext in the tariff negotiations too. So far, NATO member states and the EU have folded to Trump’s demands with very little resistance, despite their extravagance.

The truth is that we could fund our own defence for less than 5% of our collective GDP, but this is as yet unthinkable, because European independence would spell the end of our present system. Basically, there can be no united Europe without the Americans. If and when the Americans leave, some European nations will pursue closer trade relations with Russia; others will oppose them in this. It has been four generations since any major European nation plotted an independent geopolitical agenda; the very idea is a nightmare for our rulers, and many of the resulting alliances would remind people of unfortunate early 20th-century geopolitical configurations. This is primarily why European leaders have developed such a fanatical obsession with the war in Ukraine. For the moment, the conflict defines Russia as an external threat and suppresses all discussions about the different national interests of EU member states. It is yet another way for Germany’s political class to practice their conventional self-effacement in favour of notional pan-European interests.

As in many other cases, Trump’s policies with respect to Europe represent the culmination of forces and trends that are much bigger than his presidency. The era of unchallenged American global hegemony is over with, and in this environment being a province of the American empire will just become a steadily worse deal for Europe as a whole.

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

The Overton Window has shifted, ads across corporate America are now embracing actual women with ‘assets,’ while liberals meltdown, claiming that every healthy, good-looking white person featured in an ad is a ‘Nazi.’

According to this woke TikToker, American Eagle is using Sydney Sweeney to promote fascist propaganda with her good jeans. pic.twitter.com/SuFzLOfGjQ

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) July 28, 2025

American Eagle Outfitters’ ad featuring Sydney Sweeney recently confirmed all we needed to know about where the Overton Window currently sits: center-right. It marks a shift from being artificially held on the far left for a depressing decade. As a refresher, the Overton Window defines what is considered socially acceptable. 

With Sweeney’s assets glorified in the AE ad titled ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,’ liberals are melting down again this weekend. This time, over her impressive ability to operate a handgun and the fact that she’s a registered Republican. 

On Friday, Taran Tactical Innovations’ official X account posted a video of Sweeney completing a close-quarters handgun drill that showed her ability to quickly and effectively engage targets at short distances. These drills focus on drawing, shooting, and reloading under pressure, as well as self-defense scenarios where speed and accuracy are paramount.

Do you think @sydney_sweeney has great SPLITS? Sydney shreds @TaranTactical ! @_Americaneagle @TetianaGaidar @chrysti_ane @megants @SydneySweeneyHD pic.twitter.com/heyd5tml29

— Taran Tactical (@TaranTactical) August 1, 2025

For some context, Taran Tactical is known for training Hollywood celebrities for film roles, particularly Keanu Reeves for his major part in the action movie series “John Wick.”

Keanu Reeves absolutely smashed his own shooting range records time after time as part of his training for John Wick 💪👏

🎥 FB: Taran Tactical Innovations pic.twitter.com/acD4cpY141

— LADbible (@ladbible) June 21, 2019

The icing on the cake for liberal tears this weekend has been the reveal of Sweeney’s publicly available voter registration records…

Sydney Sweeney is trending after BuzzFeed reported she has been registered as a Republican in Florida since 2024. pic.twitter.com/hvXgqUhJ3I

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) August 2, 2025

Body positivity is dead. Even Nike confirmed the shift. 

Being healthy, fit, and beautiful is in. America is healing after a decade of toxic wokeism.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A shady government outfit in the UK that was previously tasked with identifying and monitoring COVID lockdown dissenters has been repurposed to spy on critics of mass migration and so called ‘asylum’ hotels, the Telegraph reports.

The body, now known as the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) has been lobbying social media companies such as TikTok to take action against users who post what it describes as “concerning narratives” about immigration and ‘two tier policing’.

The unit operates within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and was previously known as the ‘Counter Disinformation Unit’ during the pandemic.

Wow. “Labour’s plot to silence migrant hotel critics. Emails reveal Whitehall ‘spy’ unit complaining to tech firms about content mentioning asylum seekers & two-tier policing”

This is WILD https://t.co/wDvNVhWVEJ

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) July 31, 2025

During the COVID lockdowns, the unit was tasked with pressuring social media companies to target and censor those critical of the stay at home orders and those questioning the mass vaccination of children. Discussions opposing vaccine passports were also flagged.

🚨EXCLUSIVE: A secretive government unit worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies.

Read the full article here: https://t.co/kWlMk735rW pic.twitter.com/XsbL3jDvAP

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 2, 2023

The rebranded outfit has now been flagging videos it sees as “exacerbating tensions” in Britain, particularly in August last year during the unrest stemming from the murder of three children by a second generation migrant in Southport.

The report contains examples of emails sent by government workers asking for the unit to investigate posts that are critical of migration, such as the one below to TikTok that expresses an ‘urgent’ need to monitor a post that highlighted a rejected Freedom of Information request about the location of asylum hotels, and a reference to asylum seekers as “undocumented fighting-age males”.

Another email shows that government officials warned TikTok that users were posting about “two-tier” policing at Southport rallies, amid accusations that white protesters had been treated more harshly by the police than ethnic minorities.

The government officials demanded that TikTok explain “any measures you have taken in response…as soon as you are able to”.

The Telegraph report adds:

A third example of “concerning content” flagged by the team was a video of Pakistani men celebrating on a street, posted on Aug 5 and captioned: “Looks like Islamabad but it’s Manchester”. The team claimed it had been shared “in order to incite fear of the Muslim community”.

The emails did not ask for the content to be removed, but requested that TikTok explained how it was dealing with it.

The report further notes that the emails came to light in materials obtained by the US House of Representatives’ judiciary committee, which issued a subpoena to TikTok to hand over messages “regarding the company’s compliance with foreign censorship laws”.

The US under the Trump administration has expressed concern that the British government is censoring social media, and cracking down on users who post content it deems as harmful.

US ‘greatly concerned’ about free speech in Britain as secretive Whitehall unit ‘spying’ on critics of migrant hotelshttps://t.co/IJhXYMeixj

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 2, 2025

These fears have only been heightened with the introduction of the so called Online Safety Act, which appears to be already being used as a tool for further censorship.

As we highlighted last week, X users in Britain are reporting that footage of rapidly growing anti-mass migration protests in the country is being blocked under the new law.

British users of X shared screenshots of messages that popped up while they attempted to view footage from the protests, which started in Epping after a migrant sexually assaulted a teenage girl and have since spread around the country.

News also broke of an “elite” police squad of officers tasked with monitoring spicy tweets about migration.

But they won’t stop burglars and thieves. Backwards. pic.twitter.com/Bas7F4MXb7

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) July 27, 2025

The Telegraph report states:

An elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots.

Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest.

The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots.

Elon Musk’s X has accused the UK of enacting “censorship” under the new law, noting “The Act’s laudable intentions are at risk of being overshadowed by the breadth of its regulatory reach. Without a more balanced, collaborative approach, free speech will suffer,”

Elon Musk’s X warns free speech under threat due to UK’s new Online Safety Acthttps://t.co/8n2f5Eojfh

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 1, 2025

A spokesman for the Big Brother Watch anti-censorship group has called for an immediate investigation into the British government’s National Security and Online Information Team, warning that an “unaccountable and secretive Government unit is spying on speech that is critical of the police and Government policies”.

“Legitimate concerns about racism and violence must not become a blank cheque for the monitoring and censorship of controversial speech, absent of any oversight or scrutiny,” they added.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Overnight chatter from UBS’ market desk centered on how the Swiss government was “caught completely off guard” by President Trump’s 39% tariff rate. European and U.S. equities tumbled (read pre-market note) this morning, but our focus here won’t be on comments from stunned Swiss officials or market gyrations on either side of the Atlantic; instead, it’s the Swiss watch market and where prices could be headed next. 

Switzerland’s watch exporters will face one of the steepest tariff rates globally. One sign of the trade fallout came earlier when shares of Rolex reseller Watches of Switzerland Group plunged 9.2% in London, with traders focused on how the tariffs could impact new watch sales.

The rude awakening of 39% tariffs on all goods imported from the Alpine nation got us thinking:

• What impact will this new trade policy have on the new and used watch markets in the U.S.?

• More specifically, how much of the tariff cost will U.S. importers absorb?

If the tariffs are passed on to U.S. consumers, it would mean higher prices for new Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Omega, and other Swiss watch brands.

Tudor Pelagos 39 unit watch spotted on the wrist of an RCMP ERT officers—Canada’s federal tactical team. Custom dial with ERT crest: 7 maple leaves, a boom stick, and cavalry sword. Only 83 made. Tactical lume. pic.twitter.com/zBelXudJOb

— Watches of Espionage (@watchesofespion) July 2, 2025

In our view, higher prices for new luxury Swiss watches would drive retail substitution demand toward the used market, and may even help support the recovery of the secondary market, which has been in a downturn since the post-Covid mania peak.

Even before the tariff announcement, Bloomberg Sundial data showed that Rolex prices were showing signs of a potential bottom. 

UBS analysts led by Zuzanna Pusz told clients last month that a meaningful recovery in the global luxury market might not occur until 2027. Read the report here.

Related:

• These Are The Best Military And Intelligence Unit Watches

. . . 

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared that a reinvigorated alliance of Central European nationalist leaders — including Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, Slovakia’s Robert Fico, and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš — could collectively stop the European Union’s next long-term budget in its tracks.

In a televised interview with Polish journalist Michał Karnowski for Telewizja wPolsce24, Orbán stated that the Visegrád Group — made up of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia — has the power to block the upcoming EU financial framework if they act together.

“The next European budget must be approved unanimously by EU member states,” Orbán said.

“We have elections in April next year. President Kaczyński and Prime Minister Morawiecki will return to power [in Poland]. Andrej Babiš will win in the Czech Republic in October, and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is strong enough to stay. Then the four of us, as the Visegrád Group, will be able to stop the crazy ideas contained in this project.”

Orbán’s opposition to the EU’s proposed 2028–2034 budget is rooted in his fierce resistance to what he calls its “Ukraine-centered” focus. Nearly one third of the proposed spending, he argues, would either go directly to Ukraine or be used to service EU debt accumulated to support Kyiv. In a recent speech, Orbán described it as “not a European budget, but a Ukraine budget,” and warned that its approval would divert vital resources away from EU member states.

He also reiterated that Hungary will not support the new EU budget unless frozen funds owed to his country are released. Those funds have been held up by Brussels over concerns about alleged rule-of-law violations in Hungary, which Budapest insists are fabricated because the Orbán administration will not conform to Brussels’ liberal agenda.

“Hungary will block the European Union’s proposed seven‑year budget unless the EU releases suspended funds,” Orbán told reporters earlier this month.

The Hungarian premier also repeated his warning that EU efforts to bring Ukraine closer to membership could drag Central Europe into direct conflict.

“If we admit Ukraine, we admit the war,” he said, arguing that current foreign policy thinking in Brussels is a threat to Hungary’s survival.

Speaking about Poland, Orbán praised former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and expressed hope that he would soon return to power.

“During the Law and Justice government, you achieved fantastic economic results,” Orbán said. “Prime Minister Morawiecki was one of the best Polish prime ministers I’ve ever known, also an excellent financial expert. Therefore, the Polish government has all the tools to build the greatest era of Polish success in history. If I were Polish, thinking about the future, I would be optimistic.”

He added that Poland’s size and political strength under the Law and Justice Party had helped shield Hungary from EU pressure in previous years. “Poland is larger than Hungary. Its political strength during the rule of President Jarosław Kaczyński’s party and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s government helped, for a time, reduce pressure from Brussels on Hungary. I remember this very well.”

Orbán also spoke positively about Czech politics, predicting a return to power for Andrej Babiš and his ANO party. The Czech Republic will hold parliamentary elections on October 3 and 4, and polls currently show Babiš’s party well ahead of its rivals. ANO has consistently led national surveys by double-digit margins, and Babiš, a former prime minister, is expected by many analysts to regain the premiership after the vote.

With a Law and Justice revival in Poland, Fico maintaining power in Slovakia, and Babiš likely to win in the Czech Republic, Orbán believes the Visegrád alliance could be reborn. “This election opens up an opportunity to renew Central European cooperation,” he said. “We call it the Visegrád Group, but we can call it whatever we want. The key is the cooperation, which has been a great success.”

He added that past V4 cooperation had served as a counterweight to the dominance of France and Germany in EU affairs, and said he welcomed recent developments, including Karol Nawrocki’s presidential election victory in Poland, as signs that the regional alliance is on the brink of revival. “We’ve opened a huge, powerful bottle of champagne. This is a historic victory,” he said.

Read more here…

After it became clear this past week that ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas have totally collapsed once again, with little hope of getting the warring sides back to the negotiating table, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have released more proof of life videos showing they still have captives who are alive.

Hostage Evyatar David appeared very emaciated in a clip that his family approved for publication (in Israeli media) on Saturday, which his family says is evidence that he is being deliberately starved.

David was kidnapped Reim-area Nova music festival during the Hamas/PIJ terror onslaught of October 7, 2023. This means he’s been in captivity over 660 days.

Times of Israel describes, “In the new footage, David is seen in a tunnel with a ceiling roughly as high as he is tall, crossing off dates on a calendar on the tunnel’s wall. He is unkempt and unshaven, and appears skeletal even in comparison with the February video, which was filmed during the last ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas, as Israel increased the flow of aid into Gaza. That deal collapsed in March.”

The prior aforementioned video shows that in comparison to the newest images his health and nutrition has declined rapidely. Probably his captors are deliverately starving him in order to ‘make a point’ about the mass hunger currently gripping the Gaza Strip.

Hamas featured David in a propaganda video saying “They eat what we eat, they drink what we drink.”

⚡️BREAKING: Al-Qassam Brigades released footage of Israeli captive Evyatar David:

“He hoped to be released by a deal.
The occupation government has decided to starve them.
They eat what we eat, they drink what we drink.
pic.twitter.com/OHo0K9GVWb

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) August 1, 2025

Separately, days ago Isalmic Jihad published a video of hostage Rom Braslavski, who has been held just as long as David, showing him looking pale and extremely thin while addressing the camera in an unknown location in Gaza.

Alarmingly, Islamic Jihad said the video was taken just before command leadership lost contact with those immediately in charge of Braslavski’s captivity. This suggests his fate is currently uknown, despite the proof of life video.

The same hostage was featured in an April video where he described experiencing “hell” – in which which he looked sickly.

Today, Palestinian Islamic Jihad released footage of Rom Braslavski.

Rom was kidnapped from the Nova music festival and has been held hostage in Gaza for close to 700 days.

Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Mark Carney would like to give Rom’s captors their own country. pic.twitter.com/4tBYtGuT3C

— Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) July 31, 2025

From the newest video released showing Braslavski lying down, appearing in pain:

These newly released videos, clearly intentionally timed for maximum political and psychological impact, have spurred new outrage among hostage victims’ families, who have been demanding meetings with PM Netanyahu and top Israeli leadership, in order to pressure the government to make a deal for an exchange.

Authored by Dr. Gary Sidley via DailySceptic.org,

While more and more people are becoming aware that masking healthy people is both ineffective and harmful – as illustrated by the current rarity of face coverings in community settings – pockets of pro-mask zealotry remain smouldering in certain sections of our society, constituting an ongoing risk of re-ignition in the future.

Health and social care is one such example – a hazard addressed in Smile Free’s recent film, Masking Humanity.

Another is our education system, where, for prolonged periods during the Covid event, headmasters and teachers cruelly muzzled our kids in schools.

Now, as a result of the sterling endeavours of the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) team – a fellowship of people promoting common law principles of truth, rights and sovereignty – a rare opportunity has arisen to land a telling blow against those in authority and thereby deter any future imposition of masks on our schoolchildren.

The Actions of the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ Fellowship

In brief, what the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) people have accomplished is to force a local council to explicitly admit that they never had the authority to mask children, nor to punish pupils for non-compliance. 

By doing so, there is now an opening for parents of children who were victims of the unlawful mask impositions during the Covid event to sue their local councils and, by doing so, land a blow that will ensure that those in positions of power within our education system think twice before ever pulling such a stunt on our nation’s children again. 

To achieve this victory required 17 months of dogged determination and persistence.

The sequence of events is detailed in a DoD flowchart.

The timeline can be summarised as follows:

• 14th of February 2022: The DoD submit a Freedom of Information request to Dumfries & Galloway Council asking for, “documented evidence of their authority to mask children”

• 4th of March 2022: Dumfries & Galloway Council respond that they had “complied with… regulations and guidance from the Scottish Government… and refutes any contention to the contrary”

• 30th of March 2022: Following a DoD request for a review, the Council reiterate its position that “it has followed all appropriate guidance & regulation” and provide links to several government documents. Given that these publications did not address their questions, DoD request arbitration from the Scottish Information Commissioner

• 18th of October 2022: The Council deny that any “enforcement” of masks had taken place

• 10th of August 2023: The Council accept that they did not hold information confirming their authority “to impose masks on other people’s children” and also acknowledge there was “no policy/guidance that permitted (granted authority) to headmasters/teachers… to ask pupils to leave school if they did not wear a face mask”

• 11th of August 2023: Following prompts (from the DoD) for further clarity, the Council also accepts that they had no authority to impose any other kinds of punishment for non-compliance with their mask requirements

The Implications of This Admission by Dumfries & Galloway Council

The rising number of us who recognise that the generic masking of healthy people does far more harm than good have been increasingly frustrated by the failure of our political elite to openly acknowledge this fact, and to provide the general public with reassurance that this restriction will for ever be condemned to reside in that cupboard labelled, ‘Crazy public health restrictions, never to be repeated’.

Unfortunately, this admission has not been forthcoming; it seems that the Government and their ‘experts’ hope we will all forget about this shameful period in our history. But now – thanks to the tenacity of the DoD team – there is a unique opportunity to land a telling blow against the establishment. 

The explicit recognition by Dumfries & Galloway Council that the imposition of masks onto other people’s children was an illegitimate act now renders every local authority in Scotland (and probably in the rest of the UK) vulnerable to being sued by the victims of this inhuman practice.

A legal precedent such as this would go a long way to ensuring that our children are never again bullied into wearing de-humanising masks by headmasters and teachers.

If you are a parent of a child who was harassed (or even harmed) by these policies, you may have the chance to prosecute your local council and – if successful – go a long way to protecting our future youngsters from this cruel restriction.

Is anyone out there willing to grasp the nettle?

Those interested in suing those culpable of muzzling our kids can find further details here, or they can email dod@declarationofdumfries.co.uk to discuss potential options. 

Via JonFleetwood.com,

The CIA’s infamous Cold War propaganda and psychological operation (PSYOP) program never died—it just turned inward…

The question isn’t whether the government is manipulating Americans, but how they’re doing it right now—through intelligence leaks, media collusion, psychological tactics, and taxpayer-funded propaganda.

That was the warning from U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during a searing July 31 interview, where she confirmed that intelligence insiders are actively using corporate media to manipulate the American people and sabotage President Donald Trump’s agenda—echoing the tactics of ‘Operation Mockingbird.’

Every major news organization or its parent companies, from FOX News to CNN, are owned by globalist-aligned asset managers like BlackRock, an offical partner of the anti-American-sovereignty World Economic Forum (WEF).

“There are people within the intelligence community who believe that their will is more important than the will of the American people,” Gabbard told conservative host Benny Johnson. “[They] will weaponize intelligence by leaking it to their friends within the mainstream media with the intent of undermining President Trump’s agenda.”

Mockingbird Reloaded: Intelligence Tools Aimed at Americans

Once a covert CIA program used to plant propaganda in foreign and domestic media, Operation Mockingbird infiltrated major U.S. newsrooms throughout the 1950s–1970s.

It was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, where Congress revealed that the agency maintained relationships with hundreds of journalists to shape public perception.

Today, Gabbard says, that same playbook is being deployed against Americans.

Only now, it’s fully digital, algorithmic, and taxpayer-funded.

“They are subverting the will of the people and therefore undermining the Constitution,” Gabbard warned.

From CIA to CDC: Government Propaganda Is Now a Domestic Industry

Gabbard’s warning comes as Congress continues to uncover a parallel propaganda apparatus inside U.S. health agencies.

A damning House Energy and Commerce Committee report released in October 2024 found that the Biden Administration spent $900 million in taxpayer funds on a COVID-19 propaganda campaign that intentionally misled the public.

“The Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system,” said Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), accusing the CDC and NIH of using ads containing “erroneous or unproven information.”

The report revealed that:

• The CDC exaggerated the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines beyond FDA authorization.

• Messaging about mask effectiveness and COVID risk to children was “deeply flawed.”

• Federal funds went to Big Tech companies to “track and monitor Americans,” prompting calls for stronger data privacy protections.

Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA) slammed the administration’s “Stop the Spread” campaign as scientifically baseless, saying it “misled the American public” and triggered a broader collapse in trust across all vaccine programs.

“American trust in the CDC is at an all-time low,” said Subcommittee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY).

Fear as a Weapon: Scientists Admit Psychological Manipulation

Further validating Gabbard’s claims, behavioral scientists who advised governments during the COVID crisis have since admitted to weaponizing fear to coerce compliance—describing their actions as “unethical,” “dystopian,” and “totalitarian.”

Members of the UK’s ‘Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour’ (SPI-B), who advised the government’s COVID response, revealed that officials deliberately ramped up fear to push lockdowns the public might otherwise reject.

“Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government,” said SPI-B psychologist Gavin Morgan.

“[P]sychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them,” another member confessed.

One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in.”

Gabbard: ‘This Is Why Trump’s Mandate Is Critical’

Gabbard said her fight is not just about cleaning up rogue intelligence operators—it’s about reversing the normalization of psychological warfare on the American public.

“To be able to turn the light on in places that have been dark for far too long, expose the truth, and drive accountability—that’s the only way we can actually shift this,” she said.

She affirmed that Trump is fully aware of the deep-state sabotage being conducted through the media.

“President Trump is enacting the very thing he promised the American people he would do in this election.”

You can watch the segment posted on Benny Johnson’s Twitter/X account (@bennyjohnson) below:

SCARY: Tulsi Gabbard CONFIRMS That ‘Operation Mockingbird’ is STILL Ongoing inside the CIA and she is actively trying to Shut it Down.

Tulsi says Deep State intel agents are still actively colluding with left-wing media outlets to attack President Trump from within:

“There are… pic.twitter.com/CZWMERFsa3

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 31, 2025

From Psy-Ops to Policy: The Full-Spectrum Control Grid

The Church Committee once warned that Mockingbird undermined the very idea of a free press.

The playbook didn’t end, it just upgraded.

Today’s propaganda apparatus now includes:

• Leaked narratives from intel to legacy media

• AI-powered censorship tools on social platforms

• CDC-funded influencer campaigns targeting youth

• Federal surveillance partnerships with tech giants

• Coerced public health compliance through fear psychology

The same government that once planted editorials in The Washington Post now quietly curates your news feed, flags dissent as misinformation, and suppresses debate under the guise of “public health.”

Bottom Line

Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation is historic: the top U.S. intelligence official has publicly stated that agencies under her own leadership are using media to manipulate Americans.

Operation Mockingbird didn’t end.

It simply changed targets.

The American people are no longer just the audience of government propaganda.

They’re the enemy.