American innovation requires our energy sector to use all available resources, but Generation Z apparently wants to limit its potential.
Pew Research Center discovered that 43 percent of Gen Z respondents support phasing out oil, natural gas, and coal. Climate change is their top concern, and any energy source that doesn’t (purport to) resolve it is scorned.
Yet, by distancing the country from fossil fuels, Gen Z is weakening America’s ability to compete. Fossil fuels are vital for domestic economic stability, as they boost state revenue and public offerings. Internationally, energy dominance is crucial for safeguarding national security and shaping foreign policy objectives. Only a holistic approach to energy can unleash American brilliance and save Gen Z from the setbacks of canning fossil fuels.
Resources for the Future found that, between 2015 and 2019, fossil fuels generated an average of $138 billion per year for U.S. local, state, tribal, and federal governments. Thriving mining industries in Texas, Alaska, and North Dakota account for at least 10 percent of their respective state gross domestic product; in Wyoming, fossil fuels represented up to 65 percent of the state budget. With their profits, fossil fuel companies donated $700 million to twenty-seven colleges and universities over the past decade. Along with investing in infrastructure and high energy density, these resources are the crux of enterprise and keep our institutions running.
From engineering to refinery management, the fossil fuel sector creates jobs for the next wave of industrial workers: 32 million positions and $909 billion in labor income. As older workers retire and new technologies emerge, there is a demand for younger, tech-savvy talent that will minimize these jobs’ unfavorable reliance on physical labor. In a national environment where many in Gen Z struggle to find work yet expect higher salaries, the nonrenewable energy sector offers competitive wages, transferable skills, and occupational choice.
Filling and enhancing those roles is essential for lower energy prices. The Department of Energy (DOE) revealed last year that natural gas is the most cost-effective residential energy source available. Electricity was almost four times more expensive, meaning homes that used electricity for heat during wintertime paid roughly 75 percent more than those that used gas. As 38 percent of Gen Z witnessed their household cut back on a utility due to energy costs, and one-fourth of Gen Z apartment renters desire energy-efficient appliances, the DOE news is sobering for climate activists. Fossil fuels are affordable, appealing, and not a significant threat to the environment.
The United States has achieved remarkable energy independence through domestic fossil fuel production, positioning us to compete effectively overseas. Under the first Trump administration, America produced more energy than it consumed for the first time since 1957, reducing reliance on geopolitical rivals. The feat slices the approximately $700 million sent daily to potentially unstable or hostile nations and redirects it towards investing in our military. This matters to Gen Z, as 65 percent cited terrorism as a critical threat to the United States over the next decade.
Nearly half of Gen Z also believe America should take an “active” part in world affairs, and the United States needs a full arsenal for conflict mitigation. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a crucial security buffer as the world’s largest publicly known emergency oil supply. With strategic releases and sales during the 1991 Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War, the U.S. has historically lessened the severity of these events by offsetting supply shortages and maintaining open transportation and defense sectors. Indeed, the capacity to project power globally, which aligns with Gen Z’s policy preferences, depends heavily on secure access to fossil fuels.
Embracing oil and gas is essential in the wake of armed escalation and a newly enacted ceasefire between Israel, Iran, and the United States. Commerce and energy cooperation shifts America’s role as a broker of shared infrastructure and trade interests. Major American energy companies, including Chevron and Exxon, are already involved in East Mediterranean projects. The Atlantic Council has proposed constructing a “Gas Peace Corridor” that could link Iran’s vast South Pars gas field with neighboring countries, including Israel, via new pipelines for mutual benefit. The Gaza War is a hot-button issue for Gen Z and cooperation to meet energy needs with production could reduce further conflict while lessening humanitarian tragedies and economic shocks.
Imperfect as they are, the benefits of nonrenewable fuels are undeniable, and Gen Z is coming around. Two-thirds of Gen Z want to have fossil fuels in our national energy portfolio, and around 80 percent support the development of new-generation nuclear energy to complement other sources. A balanced, pragmatic approach to energy will preserve America’s domestic and global standing today, and directly fuel Gen Z’s future success.
Gabbard To Release More Obama Russiagate Files, ‘Cannot Fathom’ How Durham, Mueller Missed Evidence Of ‘Years-Long Coup’
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says she’ll release more information next week to follow up on her bombshell declassification of documents that show “overwhelming evidence” of the Obama administration laid the groundwork for the years-long Trump-Russia collusion investigation after President Trump won the 2016 election.
“We will be releasing more detailed information about how exactly this took place, and the extent to which this information was sought to be hidden from the American people, hidden from officials who would be in a position to do something about it,” Gabbard told Fox News‘ Maria Bartiromo. “Accountability is essential for the future of our country, for the American people to have any sense of trust in the integrity of our democratic republic.”
“Accountability, action, prosecution, indictments for those who are responsible for trying to steal our democracy is essential for us to make sure that this never happens to our country again,” Gabbard continued.
— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) July 20, 2025
Gabbard told host Maria Bartiromo; “I really cannot fathom” how special counsels Robert Mueller and John Durham missed evidence of this “years-long coup against President Trump.”
“There is no rational or logical explanation for why they failed,” she said, adding “The only logical conclusion that I can draw in this … is that there was direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred and who was responsible and the broad network of how this seditious conspiracy was concocted and who exactly was responsible for carrying it out.”
Among other things, Gabbard’s team unearthed a Sept. 12, 2016 intelligence community assessment that “foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks” on election systems.
At the time, Russia was being accused of setting up troll farms and hacking the DNC email servers (Seth who?).
And of course, once legitimized by the Obama administration, a steady stream of leaks suggesting that Russia was behind Trump’s 2016 victory started appearing in the Washington Post and other outlets in “sweeping and systemic fashion.”
Mueller, of course, found ‘insufficient evidence’ that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, while Durham – appointed by Bill Barr (son of the guy who hired Jeffrey Epstein for a teaching job & then oversaw Epstein’s death as AG) – accomplished nothing more than a strongly worded letter about the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe.
“I don’t know what excuse there is for those who supposedly investigated this previously, whether it was Durham or others, that they were not able to put together the dots and ultimately show the truth to the American people,” said Gabbard, who then stressed that AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel will need to now gather up evidence and decide whether to press charges. (lol. lmao even)
BREAKING: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said, “We have whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork” — inclg intelligence analysts who worked on Obama and Brennan’s fraudulent ICA and are “disgusted” by what happened — and their affidavits will be provided to DOJ
“There must be indictments of those responsible, no matter how powerful they are and were at that time, no matter who was involved in creating this treasonous conspiracy against the American people. They all must be held accountable,” Gabbard continued. “For the American people to have any sense of trust in the integrity of our democratic republic, accountability, action, prosecution, [and] indictments for those who are responsible for trying to steal our democracy is essential for us to make sure that this never happens to our country again.”
Democrats Continue To Flounder As Approval Ratings Sink To All Time Lows
How low can they go? Democrat Party politicians are proving that the gutter is truly the limit and even their own voting base has little regard for their leadership.
According to recent polling by Quinnipiac University, just 19% of voters questioned give Democrats in Congress a thumbs up on how they’re handling their duties, with 72% disapproving. The poll also revealed that 39% of registered Democrats approve of the way their party representatives in Congress are handling their jobs, with 52% disapproving and 9% not offering an opinion.
Donald Trump was hit in the same poll with 63% of voters disapproving of his handling of the Epstein files and Republicans in Congress did not do well either. However, Trump and Republicans still received 77% approval from their voter base; nearly double that of Democrats.
The data follows a similar trend in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released on Monday that found that only 4 in 10 respondents approved of the job that the Democratic Party is doing, a slight drop from June.
Polling in March by CNN and SSRS found that the Democratic Party’s favorability rating among Americans stands at a record low. Democratic-aligned adults, 52% to 48%, say that the leadership of the Democratic Party is currently taking the party in the wrong direction.
Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% – a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021.
The progressive media argues that the Democrat base wants party leaders to “confront Trump’s agenda more aggressively” and “fight harder”. More moderate Dems note, though, that the party was in steep decline well before Trump won the 2024 election and returned to office.
A October 2023 Gallup poll showed the Democratic Party’s overall approval at 37%, a record low at that time, and this was at the height of Democrat power and influence in government. The bottom line? Democrat policies are wildly unpopular and their embrace of the radical woke movement did irreparable damage to their optics.
The adoption of far-left ideological goals, the promotion of transgender ideology among young children, the application of racist DEI policies in government institutions, not to mention the party running Kamala Harris, perhaps the worst candidate ever fielded in a presidential campaign – All of these decisions and more have left moderates and independents in confusion and disgust. These are the very voters the Dems need to make gains in 2026.
Democrats are looking to the 2026 mid-term elections with the desperate hope that the controversy over the Epstein files and Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will stick long enough for them to make significant gains in the House and Senate and erase the narrow margin Republicans currently hold.
The problem is that, even with a contingent of MAGA in revolt against Trump’s recent decisions, conservatives and moderates are still enraged by the Democrat Party’s handling of the country during the Biden Administration. So enraged that they would be willing to forgive almost anything in 2026 just to keep the leftists from returning to power. The Dems are greatly underestimating how much hate they have garnered in the last four years.
Some time over the Christmas holidays, I experienced what I called a moment of “existential clarity” about AI and it’s ramifications – when I realized that in the not-so-distant future, it was entirely possible that most of easyDNS’ customers would be autonomous AI-driven agents rather than people.
Our internal project to completely rebuild our UX (still ongoing) was close to a quarter in, and it occurred to me that we could be building a bridge-to-nowhere. Why are we creating more elegant ways to render forms that input hostnames and their respective rdata when:
you could probably just tell the backend what you want for your domain functionality to be and it can generate the requisite zonefile to facilitate it, and then
not long after that every API is going to sit behind an MCP server and it’ll all be done agentically via automated endpoints anyway.
What was the point? This question still bothers me, but we continue to toil away at the UX rebuild, because even though this is where everything is headed, there will still be a temporally long-tail of copy-pasting IP addresses into forms (in the meantime I spend my spare time vibe coding alternative ways to convey DNS and metadata to a zonefile rendering engine. I can see why this isn’t totally a thing yet, but it will be.)
Recently, I started reading John W. Munsell’s “Ingrain AI” – it hits the ground running, with the introduction titled “Every CEO’s Nightmare”, wherein it lays out the “productivity” induced death-spiral many companies may be blundering into, should they be pursuing AI merely as a cheat-code toward hyper-efficiency.
In our case, it’s a definite “no” on 1, “yes” on 2 for the question posed, but even if that’s the case, any companies following the same path as easyDNS may not necessarily reduce headcounts but they will most likely slow down hiring.
I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll reiterate it here: I don’t believe for minute that AI is conscious, self aware or sentient and I don’t think AGI ever happens – but it is a revolutionary breakthrough in natural language processing. I think it was YCombinator’s Andrej Karpathy, in his famous “Software In the Age of AI” keynote who quipped “the most popular programming language of the future will be… English”.
With this, every single person on your team acquires strange new super-powers. In a recent Bombthrower post I called it a “cognitive exo-skeleton” (see: “Is ChatGPT Intentionally Driving You Into Psychosis?“) . It’s like Iron Man’s suit for your brain, except they’re available for a few dollars per month, per employee – turning every single person on staff into a productivity super-soldier – what CEO in their right mind would eschew that?
Forced Acceleration
This all comes with an imperative, and we didn’t really get a choice whether or not to put our hand up for it. If anybody has followed my other writings on Bitcoin and the decentralized revolution, you’ll know that a major theme of my thinking has been that the root cause of mass psychosis and generalized anxiety in the world today – including conspiracy theories and ever increasing polarization – is the accelerating rate of change.
It’s “Future Shock” writ large, to use the Alvin and Heidi Toffler phrase from their books in the 70’s, 80’s. It’s actually, “Future Shock squared” – accelerating acceleration, I and created a neologism “tachyosis” (using chatGPT, as it were) to describe the dynamic:
Tachyosis (n.)
A state of recursively compounding acceleration — where systems evolve faster than they can stabilize, perception fragments, and causality begins to blur. Considered the experiential threshold of the kinematic continuum.
“Civilizations in tachyosis cease to distinguish between signal and noise — they become pure velocity.”
Some think that it’s ironically office jobs, clerks and white collar functions on the chopping block first, with physical work enjoying some wiggle room until the robots come, but even that is moving faster than most realize:
4mo ago:
We bought a used forklift & strapped an Ai kit to it
4mo later:
We’re moving hundreds of pallets a day in a customers warehouse
Yesterday I got 3 requests totaling 100+ forklifts
What it means is that, yes, everybody gets a massive brain boost. Having the sum total of all historic and current human knowledge, available at zero marginal cost, changes the game, but it also means that all of that productivity boost has to a happen at a higher level of mental abstraction.
We’re now entering a period where anything that can be formalized will be automated: any roles and functions that can be encoded into Standard Operating Procedures are all going to be rendered as markdown, fed into LLMs and executed agentically.
All of that work gets taken off our plates – so we all have to move up the scale to the next level of cognitive processing.
This has happened before. The Canadian W R Clement, in his ground-breaking book Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide To the New Renaissance attributed the entire Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution to the cognitive shift that took hold in humanity with the discovery of perspective in art:
But that took place over centuries.
The next big shift, in terms of mental abstraction, occurred with telecommunications – when “cyberspace” became “the place you were when you were the phone”. I think it was Jon Parry Barlow who made that analogy around the same time US senators were trying to wrap their heads around the internet as “a series of tubes”. You see the juxtaposition there quite clearly as that shift played out over decades.
The same type of shift is happening now, except it’s occurring at the tachyotic pace: Acceleration is itself accelerating across multiple dimensions – AI is coding more AI, which is the development that led me to surmise that The Singularity Has Already Happened.
Forkbombing Reality
AI is now coding AI, and sooner or later we will no longer know where human-generated code stops and AI-generated code begins. Given the natural advantage that GPUs have over our clunky brains, we can safely surmise that, over time, the proportion of AI-generated code will asymptotically reach for everything, while the ratio of human-generated code slides into exponential decay. This has probably already started.
In computer systems there’s a quick-and-dirty way to bring the host to its knees and that’s to run a “fork bomb” that does nothing other than split off two copies of itself… each of which does the same, ad infinitum…
What we’ve done with AI is we’ve created a kind of hyper-intelligent fork-bomb of self-iterating software.
And there’s really no telling where all this is going or how it’s going to stop.
“@grok, how does anybody even position themselves for this?”
I might literally type that into my app after this post is done to see what it says.
Munsell’s advice to CEO’s:
“You need to:
Quickly upskill your entire team in AI integration
Unify AI adoption across all departments
Accelerate past competitors in operations and innovation
Avoid pitfalls like job displacement by aligning AI with human creativity
Build a workforce that’s empowered, not threatened, by AI
This isn’t a suggestion — it’s an urgent necessity. Every day you delay building an AI-first culture, your competition pulls further ahead. AI won’t wait for you to catch up. If you want to thrive in the future economy — and avoid the nightmare scenario — you must make AI central to your business now.”
My advice to everybody else is to take radical, personal action to come to grips with these changes. Get up to speed on these tools, use them to improve your search, work and filtering regimens, and think about ways to improve your personal productivity and expanding your own optionality by leveraging AI.
The world we’re headed into, is one where you should worry less about being replaced by AI and think about career risk you’re taking on from being unable or unwilling to use AI.
Doing that moves your mindset away from AI being some external force that you’re subjected to and shifts it toward being that cognitive exoskeleton you can harness for yourself regardless of what happens to your external circumstances.
We’re all going to have to “Learn To Vibe”.
Coda
As advertised, after this post was published I uploaded it to @Grok and typed that literal prompt.
‘Betrayal Of Every American’ – Barack Obama Now Squarely In Russiagate Crosshairs
New disclosures from a Tulsi Gabbard-led working group point directly to the top, as the legacy of “Hope and Change” begins a plunge to the ocean floor…
As Matt Taibbi writes for Racket News, Barack Obama entered national politics with a smile that looked like Hope and Change. Amid rumors of family discord and disarray within the political party he once led, his face has hardened. He lately looks bitter, resentful, exhausted by the act.
In the wake of reportsreleased by fellow Hawaiian and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, he also has a new problem. It once seemed a lock that Obama would be remembered as the winsome hero of Shepard Fairey’s portrait, but Gabbard’s documents place him at the center of an unprecedented act of political sabotage, committed in his last Oval Office days as a humiliated lame-duck in the winter of 2016-2017. The new Director of National Intelligence is targeting Obama’s legacy and maybe even his freedom, detailing a “treasonous conspiracy committed by officials at the highest level of our government,” announcing that everyone involved “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
All week, Washington buzzed with rumors about imminent document releases, but what came out wasn’t what many expected. Gabbard’s documents show the Obama White House overruling months of reports downplaying Russian interference and ordering subordinates to set a time bomb of manipulated intelligence, with the aim of trying to, as Gabbard described it, “usurp” an incoming president. No longer a tertiary character, Obama is now “center square” in the Russiagate scam, as one source put it.
Mainstream press outlets like the New York Times and Politico have already run pieces quoting Democratic Party mouthpieces shrugging off Gabbard’s reports as “baseless” and an attempt to “change the subject,” but coverage may not matter, as the investigation into the Trump-Russia hoax is no longer about trying to change hearts and minds. Multiple sources say Gabbard’s team is focused on “accountability” by gathering evidence for court-ready cases. The matter may soon need a special prosecutor, putting Obama in the same position Trump occupied in the first two years of his presidency, on the run from a high-profile fox hunt.
The information from Gabbard’s office was not the only news on the Russiagate front. This investigation is not just about “ten-year-old news,” as has been a common talking point, but may also involve never-reported Biden-era issues. A source close to the investigation said yesterday that the DOJ is focusing on conspiracy charges and looking at conduct “from 2016 to 2024.” Another with ties to the administration said “President Trump’s national security team is looking at evidence that members of his 2024 campaign were spied on as well.”
All of that is yet to be determined.
…
Not everyone in Trumpworld is thrilled with the new developments. The failure of senior intelligence officials who served in Trump’s last term to find and/or release these documents has a number of high profile figures upset. “So much corruption,” said one disgusted former Trump official. Another expressed skepticism that anything of significance would come of these investigations, and pointed to Special Counsel John Durham’s ill-fated probe: “It’s always something.” Thanks to the investigation kicked off by this ICA and the subsequent probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, there are people who went to jail, fell ill, went through family crises, and dealt with other serious problems. As a result, there are a lot of eyes on this investigation, and high expectations. Failure for Gabbard’s team to deliver real consequences would bring heavy criticism from both sides.
Gabbard’s team seems to understand they will be judged on the “accountability” question, and remain determined to continue.
As we detailed earlier, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has declassified documents revealing “overwhelming evidence” showing how then-President Barack Obama and his national security team laid the groundwork for what would become the years-long Trump-Russia collusion investigation after President Trump won the 2016 election.
Americans will finally learn the truth about how in 2016, intelligence was politicized and weaponized by the most powerful people in the Obama Administration to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump, subverting the will of the American people and undermining our democratic republic.
Here’s how:
For months preceding the 2016 election, the Intelligence Community shared a consensus view: Russia lacked the intent and capability to hack U.S. elections.
But weeks after President Trump’s historic 2016 victory defeating Hillary Clinton, everything changed.
On Dec 8, 2016, IC officials prepared an assessment for the President’s Daily Brief, finding that Russia “did not impact recent U.S. election results” by conducting cyber attacks on infrastructure.
Before it could reach the President, it was abruptly pulled “based on new guidance.” This key intelligence assessment was never published.
The next day, top national security officials including FBI Dir James Comey, CIA Dir John Brennan and DNI James Clapper gathered at the Obama White House to discuss Russia.
Obama directed the IC to create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even though it would contradict multiple intelligence assessments released over the previous several months.
Obama officials immediately leaned on their allies in the media to advance their falsehoods.
Anonymous IC sources leaked classified information to the Washington Post and others that Russia had intervened to hack the election in Trump’s favor.
On January 6, 2017, just days before President Trump took office, DNI Clapper unveiled the Obama-directed politicized assessment, a gross weaponization of intelligence that laid the groundwork for a years-long coup intended to subvert President Trump’s entire presidency.
According to whistleblower emails shared with us today, we know Clapper and Brennan used the baseless discredited Steele Dossier as a source to push this false narrative in the intelligence assessment.
These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate.
This betrayal concerns every American.
The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again.
I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve.
Illegal Migrant Accused Of Decapitating Illinois Woman Captured By ICE
The problem of leftist activist judges is growing more worrisome by the day, and one has to wonder how may crimes these officials have facilitated in their efforts set criminal illegals free and “stick it to Republicans”.
Immigration authorities in Chicago have arrested a Mexican illegal immigrant this week accused of decapitating a missing Illinois woman.
Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, 52, of Waukegan, Illinois, was arrested in April and charged with concealing a corpse, abusing a corpse and obstruction of justice, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Gonzalez reportedly claims that the victim, 37-year-old Megan Bros, had “died of an overdose” at his home.
However, instead of reporting the death to authorities, Gonzalez allegedly broke her cell phone and is accused of abusing the corpse, decapitating her and storing her body in a storage container of bleach on his property (The kind of precaution a murderer might take to hide evidence, though the suspect has not yet been charged with murder).
Megan Bros was reported missing by her family in February and she was found dead on the suspect’s property in April, two months later. Immediately after his first court appearance, Lake County Judge Randie (Rhonda) Bruno released Mendoza-Gonzalez from custody. ICE was apparently not informed of the release despite the man’s illegal status.
Bruno ran in the Democratic field in Illinois in 2019 for a judicial position. In her “Beyond the Bench” bio, Bruno notes great admiration for communist activist Nelson Mandela and she believes in:
“Treating everyone with kindness, respect, dignity, and sensitivity. To remember that everyone is going through some personal struggles which may not be outwardly apparent and to give people grace and space…”
Antioch Mayor Scott Gartner criticized laws that allowed Gonzalez to be released, stating:
“I was shocked to find out literally the next day that the person that they had arrested for this had been released from prison under the SAFE-T Act less than, detained less, I think, than 48 hours…There’s other extenuating circumstances in this case. Not only the type of crime, how long the crime was concealed, the fact that the person that was arrested for this is not a U.S. citizen, and, you know, can maybe [flee] the country.”
Luckily, the suspect was recently apprehended by ICE in a Chicago market and remains in custody. The incident highlights an ongoing trend of hundreds of “catch and release” cases among leftist judges in sanctuary cities across the US.
Numerous illegal migrants charged with heinous crimes have been set free before going to trial or they have enjoyed greatly reduced sentences and are allowed to return to the general population. Immigration authorities are kept out of the loop, which allows migrants to freely commit offenses with impunity knowing the consequences will be limited.
Full Assault On The Media Machine: Trump Slashes USAID
Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
After fierce internal disputes and the resignation of Elon Musk as a government advisor, the United States has now entered a new phase of fiscal consolidation. On Friday, the House of Representatives cleared the way for the first major round of budget cuts. And it’s a heavy hitter.
If you believe the steady drumbeat of European media coverage, the U.S. is on the verge of sovereign default. At first glance, the numbers do indeed resemble a fiscal horror show: After the devastating Biden years, federal debt has ballooned to 120 percent of GDP. The current deficit stands at a glaring 6.5 percent. In the coming months, $9 billion in outstanding debt must be refinanced—Washington has little room to maneuver.
What’s routinely omitted in media coverage, however, is the fact that the U.S. remains the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, and can, if necessary, print its way out of the mess. Europe’s hope for a premature American collapse—as both a justification for its own policy failures and a welcome distraction—will likely end in bitter disappointment.
Targeting the Media Machine
At first glance, it might seem odd that President Trump prioritized sweeping tax cuts over budget discipline. But look more closely, and the move reveals itself as part of a deliberate offensive strategy. In Trump’s America, the motto is: green light for the private sector first, then clean house in the bureaucratic stables.
Anyone seriously doubting that Americans are capable of implementing fiscal cuts has not yet grasped the political force of the Trump administration.
Even Elon Musk—the founder of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created to deepen budget reform efforts—lost patience with the slow grind of bureaucracy and quit in frustration. But in the bigger picture, that’s a mere footnote.
Because now, it gets serious. Building on DOGE’s groundwork, the first multi-billion-dollar rescission package is now being deployed: NPR reports that $9.4 billion in spending will be slashed with the stroke of a pen.
Trump’s first real punch in the fight over federal expenditures goes straight to the heart of the left’s media apparatus—USAID. Though nominally a humanitarian agency funding foreign aid projects, USAID has functioned in practice as a massive subsidy engine for the progressive media ecosystem operating worldwide. That era now appears to be over.
This propaganda leviathan stretched its tentacles across the globe, reinforcing and exporting the globalist green-left agenda that Europeans know as the Green Deal, the “green transformation,” or the politics of open borders.
The End of Ease
Like in Europe, paternalistic structures have gradually taken hold in America—but better camouflaged, given the poor reputation of state control in the land of liberty. Media outlets bankrolled by USAID opened the floodgates to government messaging, constructing a vast machine to manipulate public opinion. How else could the American public be kept in the dark for four years about Joe Biden’s mental decline?
Such a sustained deception requires close coordination between political and media actors, with the latter willingly co-opted into state control.
That Trump is starting his fiscal consolidation by targeting the beating heart of this media leviathan is no coincidence. Trump 2.0 is not a mere replay of 2016. Inside the White House, they’ve got the enemy and its structures clearly in their sights. The intensity of the trade battles with Brussels shows Trump has identified the core of green-socialist globalism exactly where many suspected: Brussels, London, and Davos.
And Trump appeals to those yearning for freedom, for open markets—including in the media—with steadfast resolve. With the stroke of his pen, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—America’s equivalent of ARD and ZDF—has been stripped of its $1.1 billion in federal funding. The blow to PBS and NPR is severe. A historic day for freedom of speech—and a precedent Germany can only dream of.
In Germany, a self-absorbed, taxpayer-funded media aristocracy holds the reins—merged with political power into a unified cartel of opinion. In contrast, in the U.S., a single signature is enough to start dismantling media manipulation, climate-hysteria weather maps, and perverse woke pedagogy—as if the madness had never happened.
Future generations will ask how it was possible that taxpayers funded such a cynical, parasitic opposition with their own money—day after day—broadcast into their homes, where they were lectured with hypermoralistic fervor.
A Long-Overdue Clear-Cut
But those same generations will also hold in their hands a manual of libertarian reform—a playbook for liberation from neo-feudal control. In the offices of the statists and central planners—in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin—this development is being watched with alarm.
Once the message of Milei’s success in Argentina or Trump’s reforms in the U.S. spreads, it will trigger a wave of uncomfortable questions.
Driven by the spirit of liberty, future citizens will demand the return of what defines sovereign individuals: the right to property, to free expression, to personal autonomy. They will demand a lean state—a mere administrator of essentials—that neither educates nor intrudes upon individual lives.
That’s the dream. But on the road to the Isles of the Blessed, hard work lies ahead. Budget reform will require a lumberjack’s resolve. And the axe is already swinging in the White House.
The cuts don’t stop at domestic public media. Trump’s government is also dismantling its overseas media empire. That includes defunding over 1,000 journalism-related NGOs worldwide that previously received USAID support. In the U.S. alone, up to 19,500 USAID employees and contractors could lose their jobs. These are the days of reckoning.
New Game, Open Space
Germany’s media landscape is crying out for a Trump moment. Not cosmetic reforms like trimming the number of directors or merging Phoenix with Arte—but radical privatization: sell ARD and ZDF, dissolve Deutschlandradio, abolish the public broadcasting fee. What is good will survive. The bloated media nobility must be released into the wild, forced to prove itself on the open market by delivering quality. Anything else is rent-seeking—living off the backs of actual contributors.
This isn’t neoliberal cruelty—it’s the spirit of true democracy. A state that monopolizes public discourse is a parasitic oppressor, an anachronism in civilized society. Its narrative dominance kills open debate.
The New Media World
And yet, resistance is growing in Germany. According to a 2023 poll by INSA, 38 percent of Germans supported scrapping the current public broadcasting system altogether. Rejection was especially high among young adults, who now get their news from X, YouTube, podcasts, and independent formats.
By late 2024, a follow-up survey by Focus found that only one-third of Germans under 30 viewed public broadcasters as credible and trustworthy—while 37 percent had completely lost trust in them.
The writing is on the wall: The state media’s air supremacy is melting faster than the feverish “climate Armageddon” they so love to hype.
The emerging media landscape will redefine the public sphere. The desperate counterattacks by legacy broadcasters—and the aggressive regulatory efforts from Brussels targeting platforms like X and Facebook—are nothing more than rearguard actions.
Public opinion is formed in the free interplay of ideas—in a space that centralized institutions can neither control nor belong in.
By attacking the public media machine, NGOs, and the entire progressive media-industrial complex, Trump is showing he understands how the narrative game of our time really works. And as a master of new media himself, he won’t struggle to turn the dismantling of statist storytelling into political victory.
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About the author: Thomas Kolbe is a German graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
Manhattan Shooting: Border Patrol Agent Shot In Face, Suspects Described As “Hispanic Males”
An off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent was shot in the face while walking through a park in New York City. Initial reports describe the suspects as “Hispanic males,” and one has been arrested. Authorities say the incident appears to have been a botched robbery, though, given the Democratic Party’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Border Patrol and ICE agents, a targeted attack cannot be ruled out. At this time, nothing is conclusive.
Local media outlet amNewYork’s Dean Moses reports that the off-duty Border Patrol agent was shot in the face inside Fort Washington Park in the early morning hours of Sunday.
Moses continued:
Officers from the 33rd Precinct rushed to the greenspace directly below the Washington Bridge after a 911 caller reported that a man had been shot.
Upon arrival at the scene, cops discovered the victim, a 42-year-old man, with gunshot wounds to his face and arm. One of the bullets entered his cheek, sources familiar with the case reported.
EMS responded and transported the victim to Harlem Hospital, where he is listed in stable condition and expected to survive.
X account Viral News NYC reported:
The suspects are described as two Hispanic males who fled on a scooter. In a shocking twist, one of the alleged suspects walked into the 44th Precinct with multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. That individual is now in custody. The second suspect remains on the run.
. . .
Meanwhile, chaos is erupting across the city tonight. Police scanners are flooded with reports of robberies, many involving suspects described as Hispanic males on scooters. The pattern suggests another violent crime wave may be hitting New York City.
🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨
A Border Patrol agent was shot in the face near the George Washington Bridge, sending NYPD and emergency units rushing to the scene. The suspects are described as two Hispanic males who fled on a scooter. In a shocking twist, one of the alleged suspects walked… pic.twitter.com/8tauCy2brH
NYPD scanner confirms the Border Patrol agent was shot in the mouth.
BREAKING: NYPD scanner confirms that a Border Patrol Agent was shot in face by two moped-riding Hispanic males just hours ago near the George Washington Bridge in NYC. pic.twitter.com/qIWxRWFF8m
Moses noted, “The victim was not in uniform at the time, and sources believe the shooting stemmed from an attempted robbery.” However, the investigation is still in its early stages.
More concerning, the Department of Homeland Security warned ICE agents faced an 830% increase in assaults from January 21st to July 14th compared with the same period in 2024. This is primarily because Democratic members of Congress have unleashed a dangerous anti-ICE propaganda campaign.
Jason Curtis Anderson from NYC-based One City Rising puts the chaos into perspective:
America is facing a multi-front war, and the safety of our borders is one of the most critical. Our nation’s sovereignty depends on it. Yet in recent years, an activist class has convinced too many Americans to oppose even the idea of border enforcement—without understanding the dark consequences of their virtue signaling.
The truth is staggering: over 500,000 children trafficked during this administration, 60% of women are sexually assaulted during the journey, 70,000 pounds of fentanyl flooding our communities from cartels fueled by Chinese precursors, and nearly 400 terrorists caught trying to cross—while thousands more slip through undetected. For every human life trafficked, cartels collect $8-12,000 in blood money, earning billions annually from human suffering.
If our borders were secure, fewer women and children would be brutalized, less poison would flow into our cities, and fewer terrorists would be plotting to kill us. But despite this, the hard left still sees law enforcement—not the cartels—as the only villain in this story. Last night’s shooting of a Border Patrol agent in New York is yet another reminder that when we vilify those sworn to protect us, we empower those who seek to destroy us.
Watch: Delta 767 Engine Erupts Into Flames After LAX Takeoff
Last month’s deadly Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner crash remains very vivid in the public’s memory, especially after dramatic footage went viral on X. Those fears were reignited Saturday when a Delta Air Lines Boeing 767’s engine caught fire during takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport.
“The Boeing 767 engine caught fire shortly after takeoff around 2 p.m. Video from the ground captured the flames coming out from one of the engines. The flight landed safely after returning to the LAX runway,” aviation watcher account Breaking Aviation News & Videos wrote on X.
A Delta Air Lines flight bound for Atlanta made an emergency landing Friday at LAX after a reported engine fire, officials said.
The Boeing 767 engine caught fire shortly after takeoff around 2 p.m. Video from the ground captured the flames coming out from one of the engines.… pic.twitter.com/fm8ilJtzrk
— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) July 19, 2025
Data from the aviation tracking website Flightradar24 shows the aircraft was a 24-year-old Boeing 767-432 (ER).
Flightradar24 shows DAL446 initiated an emergency return to LAX and landed safely minutes later.
Delta told local media outlet ABC 7 that Flight DAL446 had 226 passengers and nine crew members on board and was en route to Atlanta. The airline said a mid-air incident occurred involving the left engine.
No details have been released on whether the incident was caused by a bird strike or a mechanical issue.
Catch up on the latest Air India crash information:
For many Americans, talk of a crackdown in Europe on “hate speech” and “misinformation” may seem a faraway issue, but legal experts say that Europe’s online censorship laws could affect Americans, too.
Starting July 1, social media companies and internet service providers operating within the EU that do not comply with laws that ban content deemed illegal there could be fined up to 6 percent of their global revenue, according to the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
The European Commission states that the DSA, originally passed in 2022, “protects consumers and their fundamental rights online by setting clear and proportionate rules.” On July 1, the DSA integrated its Code of Conduct into the act, requiring online platforms and search engines to comply with the censorship laws of all member states or face punitive fines.
Proponents of the DSA state that the law was passed in response to escalating cases of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim statements in Europe.
Meanwhile, critics, like Virginie Joron, a French member of the European Parliament, have called it a “Trojan horse for surveillance and control.”
“What was sold as the Digital Services Act is increasingly functioning as a Digital Surveillance Act,” Joron told attendees at a May conference hosted by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Joron accused the European Commission and some parliamentarians of having “seized upon the DSA as a political tool to control speech, particularly targeting platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram.”
The concern among policy experts is that Europe’s speech laws could compel online platforms to institute restrictive policies worldwide, in order to comply.
“The DSA generally cannot directly compel technology companies to censor American speech, but it creates an incentive to do so,” David Inserra, a fellow for free expression and technology at the Cato Institute, told The Epoch Times.
“At some point, companies may find it easier just to change their policies to align with more restrictive laws, thus having American speech effectively regulated by Brussels—thus the name the ‘Brussels effect.’”
Vague Laws Give Regulators Broad Discretion
Legal analysts say that the Digital Services Act is open to political manipulation because of its imprecise language regarding what is illegal for people to say, as well as a complex and ever-changing array of online speech prohibitions.
“Through very vague and loose definitions of illegal content and ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation,’ this becomes a blueprint for restricting speech online,” Adina Portaru, senior counsel for ADF International, told The Epoch Times.
“If you take the narrow definition of ‘hate speech—incitement to hatred—then you realize that, once again, whoever has the power to define ‘hatred’ is the one who defines if you are breaching the law or not.”
According to a September 2024 analysis by Therese Enarsson, a European attorney, “the DSA provides a very broad legal definition for illegal content,” which it defines as speech that does not comply with the laws of the EU or any member state.
“Similarly to illegal content, the DSA does not attempt to define what constitutes hate speech,” Enarsson states. “This is unfortunate, seeing that platforms must adapt their systems to combat such speech.”
This means that content posted by someone in Romania would have to be taken down if it conflicts with speech laws in France, creating a lowest-common-denominator threshold for suppressing content.
The DSA also states that it “specifically recognises the role of trusted flaggers to identify and flag hate speech online and to allow action against it”—a role that’s analogous to the collaboration between “fact-checkers” and social media companies in the United States to police online speech.
“We’re speaking about Europe, but of course we can also speak of situations whereby you have an American citizen posting something here in the U.S. and with the internet being an online environment globally, somebody can flag that in Europe, and according to the DSA, that speech will be removed from the entire platform,” Portaru said.
In addition, this process of flagging and fact-checking often includes a left-leaning bias, studies show. A 2023 survey of 150 “experts on misinformation” published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found that nearly 85 percent of the respondents were on the political left.
Germany Leads, Other EU Nations Follow
Within Europe, analysts say, Germany has led the charge against online “hate-speech” crimes.
In June, German police officers carried out early morning raids on 140 residents throughout the country who were investigated for such activities. The action was part of Germany’s 12th annual “day of action against hate-posts.”
The number of hate-speech prosecutions in Germany increased from 2,411 in 2021 to 10,732 in 2024, according to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which coordinated the “day of action.”
The Brownstone Institute, a conservative think-tank, reported in October 2024 that “Germany submitted by far the most reports on content entailing ‘negative effects on civic discourse or elections,’ yet another category of speech that is clearly not illegal per se but that is deemed ‘harmful’ enough under the DSA regime to require suppression.” The assessment was based on an analysis of periodic content suppression reports that are required to be submitted under the law.
Inserra stated in a July 3 Cato report that such an environment has resulted in Germans feeling increasingly “unable to express their opinions, with multiple polls finding around 44 percent of Germans expressing such concerns, up from 16 percent in 1990.”
Other countries in Europe have followed Germany’s lead. Periodic police sweeps similar to Germany’s “day of action” have taken place in at least a dozen other European countries, according to Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency.
And in a high-profile case in Finland, Päivi Räsänen, a member of parliament, was charged with hate crimes for posting Bible verses online regarding human sexuality. Räsänen was first charged in 2021; the case is now before Finland’s Supreme Court.
Speaking to European leaders in February, Vice President JD Vance stated: “The threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
Censoring Americans
Some experts say Europe’s speech laws could end up regulating Americans and beyond.
“The European Union has wielded its Digital Services Act (DSA) to restrict the speech not just of Europeans but especially of Americans and other English-speakers,” John Rosenthal, an analyst of European politics, wrote in an op-ed earlier this year.
In August 2024, European Commissioner Thierry Breton threatened Elon Musk, owner of X, with reprisal over Musk’s intention to broadcast an interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, which Breton stated posed “a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content,” in violation of the Digital Services Act.
This followed the initiation of “formal proceedings” by the EU against X in December 2023, in which European officials charged that the American company had failed to sufficiently combat “illegal content” and “information manipulation.”
In January, Belgium’s French-speaking broadcaster RTBF chose to delay the live airing of President Trump’s inaugural speech by several minutes to give reviewers time to block any statements that they deemed “racist, xenophobic, or hateful.”
“Online speech is global, and if online platforms are restricting Americans’ speech to satisfy the demands of a foreign government, which is precisely what is happening under the DSA, then the First Amendment is a dead letter,” Rosenthal told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. government needs to take specific action against the DSA—to get it repealed or to ensure that U.S. companies do not comply with it; otherwise, free speech is dead.”
Inserra concurs.
“At the very least, American policymakers should condemn such censorship for what it is,” he said. “They should support American companies who find themselves facing increasing regulatory and censorial pressures.”
Rosenthal argues that controlling political speech was among the core motivations for passing the Digital Services Act.
“The initial impulse came from two shocks in 2016: first, the Brexit vote in the UK and then, four months later, the election of Donald Trump in the USA,” Rosenthal said. “The EU elites could not accept that either result was the product of rational choices on the part of voters; rather, in their view, they had to be the product of voters being ‘misinformed.’”
“It was at this point that they began to frame online ‘misinformation’ as a problem that online platforms would have to address,” he said.
Upon taking office in January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting the U.S. government from restricting online speech, stating that the Biden administration had “trampled free speech rights” by pressuring tech companies to suppress online speech that the federal government did not approve.
“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” Trump stated.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would impose visa bans on foreign nationals whom it deemed to be censoring Americans.
‘Hateful’ versus ‘Harmful’ Speech
The Code of Conduct in the Digital Services Act bans both “hateful” and “harmful” speech.
For the latter category, which includes speech that government officials deem to be “misinformation” or “disinformation,” the DSA allows online service providers to restrict the visibility of posts versus taking them down or suspending users.
“This is what Elon Musk is referring to when he says ‘freedom of speech is not freedom of reach’—i.e. you’re allowed to say it but the algorithm will prevent the broader public from hearing what you say,” Rosenthal said.
Musk posted in November 2022 on Twitter, which became X in 2023, that the “new Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
“Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”
In most cases where EU authorities have flagged posts on X as objectionable, X has responded by restricting visibility, rather than taking the posts down, Rosenthal said, based on his analysis of the “transparency reports” that EU officials publish periodically.
The prohibition of “harmful” speech has curtailed the information the public could see online regarding issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. According to performance reports required to be provided to EU regulators, X suspended 11,230 accounts under the company’s COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy between 2020 and 2022, the Brownstone Institute reported. This policy was discontinued in November 2022, shortly after Musk purchased the company.
One issue with this approach is that whereas users are generally aware that their content has been removed, they may not necessarily be aware that tech companies’ algorithms are simply blocking others from seeing it.
In line with Europe, Canada, another close ally of the United States, has also recently taken steps to curtail perceived hate speech.
