Authored by Mark Nayler via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE),

Europe is once again talking about forming its own defense alliance. The idea of a European army—discussed on and off since the early days of the Cold War—was revived in February by Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president claims that Donald Trump’s retraction of military support for Ukraine and ambivalence towards the EU shows that the bloc urgently needs its own military unit. Zelenskyy has reignited a debate that has failed to generate consensus within Europe, despite its long history.

Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is the latest EU leader to echo Zelenskyy—and according to a YouGov poll conducted in 2022, 64 percent of Spaniards are on his side. On March 28, he announced that Europe needs its own defense force to combat “old imperialist impulses in Russia,” especially in light of reduced support from the US. He called for a military force “with troops from all 27 member countries, working under a single flag with the same objectives.” Sánchez also wants greater economic integration within the bloc, and recently proposed a debt mutualization scheme—which has caused division along similar lines as the idea of a 27-nation army.

Despite Sánchez’s crusading rhetoric, one suspects there’s a self-interested motivation behind his call for an EU army. He is under intense pressure from both the EU and the United States to increase Spain’s defense spending; but anti-military sentiment in the country is strong, and he governs in partnership with Sumar, a leftist alliance that opposes increased investment in arms and troops. By claiming that EU defense is a collective, rather than national, responsibility, Sánchez no doubt hopes to deflect attention from his own difficulties.

The EU does collaborate on defense to some extent. At any one time, at least one multinational Battle Group, consisting of 1,500 troops, is on standby. These reached operational capacity in 2007, but according to the multinational military headquarters Eurocorps, “issues relating to political will, usability, and financial solidarity have prevented them from being deployed.” Precisely the same problems would arise within an EU army, of course—but on a much larger scale. There is also the European Maritime Force, formed in 1995 by Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal to conduct sea control, crisis response operations, and humanitarian missions. Advocates of an EU army argue that while these collaborative forces are an important pillar of the bloc’s defense, they are not equipped for long-running conflicts. They also claim that the EU is too dependent on the US for protection—a point on which Trump 2.0 completely agrees.

The notion of an EU army was first suggested in the early 1950s as a way of building capability against the Soviet Union without rearming West Germany. Proposed by the French government, it would have consisted of the EU’s six founding members—France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, West Germany, and Belgium. A treaty creating the European Defence Community was signed in 1952, but never ratified; instead, West Germany joined NATO and the Western Union, a military alliance formed in 1948, and the idea was shelved.

This decades-old idea was revived in 2016. Then, as now, a perceived threat from Russia was intensified by the sudden withdrawal of a military heavyweight. Following the Brexit referendum, in which 52 percent of the UK opted to leave the EU, the prime ministers of Hungary and the Czech Republic called for a European army. They were joined by Ursula von der Leyen—then Germany’s defense minister—who said that Europe needed a “Schengen of defense”—a reference to the continent’s border-free Schengen Area, made up of 29 nations (four of which are outside the EU). Jean-Claude Juncker, her predecessor as president of the EU Commission, had said a year earlier that the EU needed its own army in order to “convey a clear message to Russia that we are serious about defending our European values.” Whenever those are perceived to be in danger, the old idea of an EU army is reanimated.

Since Brexit, it has steadily gained traction. The idea was endorsed in 2018 by Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, and French president Emmanuel Macron. A furious Trump, at that point halfway through his first term, saw it as an act of ingratitude towards NATO: “They were starting to learn German in Paris before the US came along,” he tweeted (a misleading reference to World War II). Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission since 2019, has called for a “European Defence Union,” and last month unveiled “Rearm Europe”—a five-year plan quickly rebranded “Readiness 2030,” after Spain and Italy complained that the original title was too militaristic. (Sánchez didn’t explain how that objection sits with his demand for an EU fighting force, presumably armed with more than goodwill.) Von der Leyen plans to mobilize €800 billion for the bloc’s defense over the next five years, by which point some analysts believe Russia could be ready to attack a member of NATO or the EU. Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, also supports the idea of an EU army.

But Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign affairs chief and vice president of the EU Commission, claims that it’s not necessary. What’s more important, she says, is that the bloc’s 27 armies “are capable and can effectively work together to deter our rivals and defend Europe.” She is supported by Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, who is adamant that an EU army “will not happen,” and Denmark, which has historically seen NATO as the continent’s primary defense mechanism. During its membership of the bloc, the UK opposed the idea of an EU army for the same reason, arguing that it would unnecessarily duplicate NATO.

One of the major practical difficulties is how a 27-nation army would be funded. The issue of mutual financing has also arisen over the EU’s call for members to increase their national defense budgets—and there is no agreement there, either. Rather than the cheap loans suggested by von der Leyen as part of the “Readiness 2030” plan, heavily indebted southern nations such as Spain and Italy favor common defense bonds, or grants similar to those distributed during the pandemic. The suggestion has revived a long-standing grievance amongst wealthier northern members such as Germany and the Netherlands, which are reluctant to fund joint initiatives: “No Eurobonds,” said Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof after a meeting of EU leaders in late March. Another possibility, as recently suggested by France’s economy minister, is increasing taxes, especially on the wealthy.

Sánchez claims the EU should reconsider the idea of a joint army because its individual members have been unable to find common ground on defense. But that same problem would likely prevent the creation of an EU fighting force. Since their formation almost twenty years ago, none of the EU’s Battle Groups—which typically consist of troops from three or four countries—have been activated. This hardly suggests that the bloc is ready to form a 27-nation army, controlled from Brussels and entering battle under a blue-and-gold flag.

The OPEC price war has made landfall in the US.

Following our report earlier that Saudi Arabia has declared a new price war on OPEC+ quota-busters such as Kazakhstan, and non OPEC+ members such as US shale producers, today after the close Diamondback Energy, the largest independent oil producer in the Permian Basin, made a historic pronouncement today when it said that production has likely peaked in America’s prolific shale fields (something we also mentioned earlier in the day) and will decline in the months and years ahead after crude prices plummeted.

Separately, the Texas company trimmed its own full-year production forecast Monday, and said that it expects onshore oil rigs across the entire US industry to drop by almost 10% by the end of the second quarter and fall further in the months after.

“This will have a meaningful impact on our industry and our country,” Diamondback Chief Executive Officer Travis Stice wrote. “We believe we are at a tipping point for U.S. oil production.”

The outlook from Diamondback, one of the industry’s most prominent producers, marks a key shift for expectations within the sector. Before oil prices started plunging last month, most banks and research firms had forecast US shale production would grow this year and next before plateauing later in the decade. The Permian, they said, was apt to peak in the late 2020s or early 2030s depending on prices.

Not any more.

As Bloomberg notes, the US shale fields have been the engine behind the surge in US crude output over the past 15 years, making the country the world’s top producer and largely energy independent, much to the horror of OPEC. The ability of companies like Diamondback to quickly bring new wells online using hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, has bedeviled OPEC. But the prospect that shale may now have reached its peak and is facing years of painful decline, poses a huge threat to US President Donald Trump’s goal to turbocharge fossil fuel production.

While analysts and pundits have long said repeatedly that US shale is poised to peak, the industry had managed to prove them wrong by innovating and driving output to fresh records year after year. 

So the assertion by Diamondback that the moment has finally come is extremely noteworthy.

“Today, geologic headwinds outweigh the tailwinds provided by improvements in technology and operational efficiency,” said Stice, who will step down as CEO at the company’s annual shareholder meeting later this month.

US oil futures, pricing in a global demand recession, have dropped about 20% since the start of April when Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs that triggered a global trade war. At the same time, OPEC and its allies have surprised markets with plans to increase oil supplies more than expected later this year in response to internal bickering, and particularly the unwillingness of some members such as Kazakhstan to comply with set production quotas.

It’s led to frustration spilling out both privately and in public comments from America’s oil bosses. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to reassure the industry during a visit to Oklahoma last month, saying turmoil from the president’s trade war is likely to be fleeting.

“We can’t help but wonder if the last ‘letter to stockholders’ written by outgoing CEO Travis Stice was intended as much for government leaders in Washington, DC as it was for FANG shareholders,” Tim Rezvan, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients.

Diamondback said the number of crews fracking wells, which it estimates has fallen 15% this year, will continue to shrink as shale operators dial back amid unprofitable oil prices. 

The company now expects to produce about 488,000 barrels of oil per day this year, when taken at the midpoint of its new guidance released Monday. That’s less than 1% lower than the roughly 492,000 barrels-per-day view it gave three months ago.

The driller is the latest US operator to announce cutbacks in recent months. EOG Resources and Matador Resources are also dialing back activity, while Nabors Industries said that shale producers plan to cut 4% of their drilling rigs by the end of the year, citing a survey of nearly half the industry.

For the immediate future, Diamondback is cutting three drilling rigs and one of its frack crews, leading to a total of $400 million slashed from its budget this year, Stice said, the clearest indication that US output is about to fall off a cliff, because if the most efficient and lowest cost producers have no choice but to throttle output what does that leave for the smaller, less efficient frackers?

“We are taking our foot off the accelerator as we approach a red light,” Stice said. “If the light turns green before we get to the stoplight, we will hit the gas again, but we are also prepared to brake if needed.”
 

A few short years ago, US intelligence under the Biden administration targeted ZeroHedge, accusing us of ‘mis-/mal-/dis-information’ for what was in reality us merely taking an independent, critical view of Washington policy regarding the Russia-Ukraine war and the Covid-19 pandemic. We were promptly smeared, de-monetized by Google, briefly banned on Twitter (now X) and generally sneered at by the mainstream media, with accompanying ill-informed hit pieces. 

We took this as a badge of honor, given we simply asked questions which the majority of non-DC beltway commemorati, i.e.: normal middle Americans, wanted to know. Fast-forward to President Trump taking the White House, and times have drastically changed, especially seen in the fact that America’s Commander-in-Chief actually regularly and openly engages with the press – something which was missing in action during four years of sleepy Joe Biden. Major events and the obvious questions and angles which most of the American public naturally thought should be subject of frank open debate and inquiry were not even asked, as the State Dept and White House press pool MSM members were regularly rewarded for posing ‘safe’ questions on which there was ‘establishment consensus’. This is how “access” typically works in the beltway swamp after all.

Again, times have changed and with that welcome shift comes your very own ZeroHedge correspondent, recently admitted into the White House press pool under the administration’s new media policy. Finally the people can have a voice, outside the domineering ‘gatekeeping’ of the likes of CNN, NBC, ABC, Washington Post, and the list goes on. 

Exhibit A: on Monday “Tyler Durden” engaged directly with the president, first expressing appreciation that Trump broke the MSM gatekeeping stranglehold over who is allowed into government briefing rooms, and then asking the kind of question high on ZH readers’ minds. Watch: 

🚨 NEW: ZeroHedge @zerohedge gets to ask Trump a question!

ZH: “Two and a half years ago the Nord Stream pipeline blew up. You said Russia did not blow up its own pipeline. Will you launch a formal investigation into who blew it up?”

TRUMP: “If I asked certain people I could… pic.twitter.com/3fKLljrVwD

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) May 5, 2025

“If you can believe it they said Russia blew it up,” Trump initially acknowledged in response to our question on whether two-and-half years after the Nord Stream pipeline bombings, the US administration would open up a formal investigation into whodunnit. 

“Well probably if I asked certain people they would be able to tell you without having to waste a lot of money on an investigation,” the president said. “But I think a lot of people know who blew it up, but I was the one who blew it up originally because I wouldn’t let it be built, and then when Biden got in he allowed it to be built.”

Here, President strongly suggested that based on classified intelligence he knows exactly who was behind the September 26, 2022 covert operation which ended in the Baltic Sea explosions and major leaks which took the vital Russia to Germany natural gas pipelines permanently offline. Of course, with no investigation whatsoever (a serious European inquiry didn’t even begin till the following year), Western mainstream press coalesced around the dubious “Russia bombed their own pipeline!” narrative.

That’s when Trump as an aside tipped his hand related to his strategy for leveraging the price of oil to bring Moscow to the negotiating table. “But I think Russia with the price of oil right now, oil’s gone down, I think we’re in a good position to settle – they want to settle, Ukraine wants to settle. If I weren’t president nobody would be settling,” he explained.

“They’re losing 5,000 people,.. think of it here we’re talking about football… they’re losing 5,000 people on average a week,” he continued. “Mostly Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers… not including people that are killed by missiles going to areas they shouldn’t be. It’s a very terrible thing and I’ve think we’ve come a long way.”

Whodunnit?

In early 2023, famed journalist and Pulitzer price winner Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report which concluded that the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.

Hersh, relying on unnamed national security sources, describes months of discussions and back-and-forth involving the Biden White House, CIA, and Pentagon. The report says planning was in the works all the way back to December 2021, with a special task force formed under the aegis of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report, entitled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline reads. “The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022,” it continues.

In parallel, an interesting Ukrainian ‘rogue ops’ narrative emerged, reported in the Wall Street Journal and some other outlets long after the explosions. In that version the scheme was dubbed a Ukrainian “public-private” partnership as it involved military officers reportedly being financed from these private sector sources. Some top Ukrainian special-operations officers were recruited, and the crew set out “armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines.”

The Ukrainian ‘rogue’ covert sabotage and CIA narratives aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. But Trump’s response to ZH should put the ‘Russia destroyed its own vital and economically lucrative pipeline’ storyline to rest.

View President Trump’s full response to ZeroHedge pressing him on an independent US Nord Stream investigation here:

Meanwhile, Trump characterized Putin’s WW2 Victory Day unilateral 3-day ceasefire proposal as a positive initial step toward peace – despite Zelensky this weekend rejecting it as but “theatrics”…

“President Putin just announced a three-day ceasefire, which doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot if you knew where we started from.” He concluded: “We had a president that for three years didn’t speak to Putin and it all shouldn’t have happened – this is a war that should have never happened.”

“And you are going to be very disappointed when you find out the real number of people that were killed – it’s far greater, many times greater… it’s very very deadly horrible war,” the president added.

Question 2: Anthrax

We also asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr today about the 2001 Anthrax attacks, an event he has long-discussed as possibly being a false flag staged by the Bush-Cheney admin:

Bravo @zerohedge asking about the anthrax attacks pic.twitter.com/APPkXfioVw

— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) May 5, 2025

Prior remarks by Kennedy outlining the anthrax attacks… (in-depth dive into the attacks to follow soon on ZH):

Robert Kennedy Jr tells Jimmy Dore that anthrax was mailed to the two senators trying to block the Patriot Act in 2001, and the FBI discovered that the anthrax came from the CIA lab in Fort Detrick: pic.twitter.com/CxxPQSnric

— Epstein’s Sheet. 🧻 (@meantweeting1) June 23, 2023

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Bangladesh’s increasing alignment with China and Pakistan could imperil India’s Great Power plans…

Bangladeshi Major General (retired) A.L.M. Fazlur Rahman, who serves as chair of the National Independent Commission of Inquiry investigating the 2009 Bangladesh Rifles massacre, posted on Facebook that Bangladesh should occupy India’s Northeastern States if India goes to war with Pakistan. He later explained that preparing for this scenario might deter India, which could in turn prevent Pakistan’s possible defeat, thus averting the existential threat that India would then pose to Bangladesh.

The incumbent government, which came to power after last summer’s US-backed regime change, distanced itself from his post but the damage to bilateral trust was done. Rahman’s words followed interim Bangladeshi leader Muhammad Yunus’ scandalous comments about India’s Northeastern States during a trip to China earlier this year. They were analyzed here at the time as a veiled threat to once again host Indian-designated terrorist-separatist groups if India doesn’t make concessions to Bangladesh.

This year’s two territorial controversies thus far were preceded by Yunus’ special assistant Mahfuj Alam sharing a provocative map on X in late December that made claims to surrounding Indian states, with these sequential developments altogether ringing alarm bells in Delhi about Dhaka’s intentions. Although each were “plausibly deniable” in that no official territorial claims were made, the trend is unmistakable, and it’s that the new Bangladeshi authorities are weaponizing fears of this scenario.

From their ultra-nationalist perspective, this is a pragmatic means to rebalance what they consider to be Bangladesh’s lopsided relations with much larger India, but it risks backfiring by heightening Delhi’s threat perceptions with all that entails. In the current context of India signaling that it might launch at least one surgical strike against Pakistan in retaliation for last month’s Pahalgam terrorist attack, Indian military planners can’t confidently rule out that Pakistan might coordinate its response with Bangladesh.

To make matters worse, Rahman also wrote in his two posts that Bangladesh “needs to start discussing a joint military system with China”, which lays claim to India’s Northeastern State of Arunachal Pradesh. Seeing as how there’s always the possibility that another Indo-Pak war could lead to China intervening on Pakistan’s side, which Indian military planners call the two-front war scenario, this latest twist could lead to a three-front war as the incumbent Bangladeshi government aligns closer with both against India.

India already felt that it was becoming encircled by China over the past decade, but this might soon evolve into a siege mentality if ties with Bangladesh continue to worsen due to its officials’ rhetoric. The new regional security system that’s taking shape as Bangladesh de facto incorporates itself into the Sino-Pak nexus could decisively shift the balance of power against India. In response, India might intensify the military dimension of its strategic partnership with the US, albeit more on the US’ terms than before.

India cherishes its strategic autonomy, which is why it’s thus far declined to participate in the US’ multilateral containment of China, but that could change if the US informally makes more military-strategic support of India depend on this. 

Amidst its increasing encirclement that might soon evolve into a siege mentality as explained, India might feel that it has no choice but to concede to this so as to avoid being coerced into concessions by China, either scenario of which could imperil its Great Power plans.

Two weeks ago, when we first reported that as a result of the ongoing Trump trade war with China, “chinese factories are shutting down, laying off workers“, we said that as a result of this war of attrition in which the outcome of every incremental clash and battle will be used just as aggressively for media propaganda, “the fact that any marginal pain will be amplified as trade war weakness will mean that Beijing will do everything in its power to prevent the full extent of the shutdowns from being revealed.”

Sure enough, fast forward to today when the WSJ reports that whereas “not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China… then it started to disappear.“

Regular China-watchers know very well that when it comes to local “data” reporting, China’s fabrication and goalseeking skills are second to none, and even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a rank amateur compared to Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics, which tramples over actual econometric reporting with the glee of a bull in a, well, China shop. It’s why nobody actually believes any of the propaganda released by Beijing, and instead independent, private (and very expensive) third-party services for data collection and analysis are used to measure accurately the current state of China’s economy.

So imagine how bad it must be when instead of simply making stuff up, China decides that the easier approach is simply to no longer report the fake data. The best example is surely the data on Chinese youth unemployment which hit a record 22% in the summer of 2023… at which China decided to simply stop reporting it altogether.

In the US, bad data is just
“seasonally” massaged and birth/deathed until it is +300,000.

In China, they just stop reporting it.

*CHINA TO STOP PUBLISH DATA FOR YOUTH JOBLESS RATE pic.twitter.com/uNdAYho9wo

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 15, 2023

Curiously, China halted reports on its youth unemployment just weeks after we quoted Goldman China strategist Maggie Wei (full note available to professional subs), who said that “Chinese youth unemployment rates tend to be higher than overall unemployment rates as this group appear particularly vulnerable to economic downcycles, likely due to a lack of experience.” In other words, when it comes to early indicators of economic collapse, this is it…. And more importantly, such an indicator would also telegraph to China’s millions of unemployed young men and women that there are millions more like them, and that all they have to do to fix their plight, is to demand change in Beijing and stage a youth insurrection. Which, of course, is the single biggest nightmare for China’s communist party.

But it’s not just youth unemployment: according to the WSJ, land sales measures, foreign investment data and countless other unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years, while data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone.

In all, “Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors”, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

In most cases, Chinese authorities haven’t given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world’s second biggest economy has “stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles, spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative.”

Or, precisely what we said when we warned in April that “Beijing will do everything in its power to prevent the full extent of the shutdowns from being revealed.”

China’s National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing some numbers related to unemployment in urban areas in recent years. After an anonymous user on the bureau’s website asked why one of those data points had disappeared, the bureau said only that the ministry that provided it stopped sharing the data.

The “mysteriously” disappearing data, which is there one day, and gone as soon as it gets ugly, has made it impossible for people to know what’s going on in China at a pivotal time, with the trade war between Washington and Beijing expected to hit China hard and weaken global growth. Plunging trade with the US has already led to production shutdowns and job cuts, but of course, without actual data to confirm or deny the true state of the economy, Beijing can rely on propaganda and state media, both of which it rules with an iron fist and an impenetrable reality distortion firewall.

Of course, getting a true read on China’s growth has always been tricky. Many economists have long questioned the reliability of China’s headline gross domestic product data, and concerns have intensified recently. Official figures put GDP growth at 5% last year and 5.2% in 2023, but some have estimated that Beijing overstated its numbers by as much as 2 to 3 percentage points; in some cases speculation is rife that China’s economy is actually contracting, and how can it not be when the largest asset of China’s middle class. real estate, has been in a persistent shock for the past five years with Beijing unable to kickstart growth as it already has too much debt.

To get what they consider to be more realistic assessments of China’s growth, economists have turned to alternative sources such as movie box office revenues, satellite data on the intensity of nighttime lights, the operating rates of cement factories and electricity generation by major power companies. Some parse location data from mapping services run by private companies such as Chinese tech giant Baidu to gauge business activity.

One economist said he has been assessing the health of China’s services sector by counting news stories about owners of gyms and beauty salons who abruptly close up and skip town with users’ membership fees.

None of this is news to regular Zerohedge readers: Back in 2007, the late former Chinese premier Li Keqiang famously told the U.S. ambassador in 2007 that GDP data for a Chinese province he governed at the time were “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable. Instead, he said he kept track of electricity consumption, rail-freight volumes and new bank loans.

Official GDP figures were “for reference only,” he confided to the ambassador, according to the cable. Li died in October 2023.

Meanwhile, Chinese “data”, at least the type that is still reported, magically goalseeks to the centrally-planned mandates of the Communist Party, never veering as much as 0.1% from where it “should” be: China’s official GDP growth of 5% in 2024 exactly – and hillariously – matched the target the government had set the previous year. 

Economists privately dismissed the figure, with one telling the WSJ it would have been more credible if authorities had released something lower. Retail sales, construction activity and other data painted a considerably weaker picture, they noted. Bank of Finland and Capital Economics have generally found bigger swings in GDP than what China reports—and its estimates are lower than official figures in recent quarters. But of course, admitting even more weakness would promptly push the tide of trade war against China, and that is something Beijing – which is locked in an existential for Xi Jinping clash with Trump – simply can not afford to do.

Shocking nobody, in December a prominent Chinese economist at state-owned SDIC Securities, Gao Shanwen, said at a conference in Washington that China’s economic growth “might be around 2%” the past few years, adding, “we do not know the true number of China’s real growth figure.”

China’s leader Xi Jinping ordered that Gao be disciplined and he has been banned from speaking publicly for an unspecified period. The Securities Association of China warned brokerages in late December to ensure their economists “play a positive role” in boosting investor confidence.

For its part, China’s statistics bureau has defended its data practices, saying that data quality has improved over the years and that it has taken steps to ensure accuracy and investigate any misconduct during collection. Nobody outside of China believes that, but many – in their blind Trump derangement fury – will blindly parrot it, facilitating the spread of Chinese propaganda offshore.

In February, Goldman Sachs came up with an alternative way of measuring China’s economic growth by crunching figures such as import data, which can be read as proxies for domestic spending. The thinking was that trade data get published frequently and is hard to fudge, since China’s trading partners also report those numbers.

That approach implied that China’s growth in 2024 averaged 3.7%. Using a different method, Rhodium Group, a New York-based research outfit, said growth was closer to 2.4% in 2024, or less than half the reported growth!

But reality does not matter when – as we said two weeks ago – presenting an image of stability, no matter how fake and manipulated, is paramount for China’s Communist Party, especially now, with many middle-class Chinese worried about the future and the country entering uncharted territory in its competition with the U.S.

Often, the data that goes missing involves areas of high sensitivity or headaches for Beijing, such as the property market, whose collapse in recent years wiped out billions of dollars of household wealth and triggered protests by frustrated home buyers. To this point, one data series that hasn’t been banned yet, but soon will be, is China’s consumer confidence. It has never been lower.

As reported here previously, during the boom years, China’s developers furiously bought up land from local governments at sky-high prices. The transactions poured money into local governments’ coffers and signaled future development plans, a key driver of the economy. At one point China’s real estate market was the single largest asset on planet earth, as this Goldman chart from 2021 showed. 

And then the crash came: the downturn began in 2021, after Beijing tightened credit on the sector, resulting in a domino effect which culminated with the bankruptcy of such property giants as Evergrande and Country Garden, and the collapse of Vanke. With home sales falling and real-estate developers going bankrupt, a Chinese think tank called Beike Research Institute released a report in 2022 that found the average housing vacancy rate among 28 Chinese cities was far higher than the average in the U.S. and other places, a sign of oversupply.  

The report drew attention because China doesn’t release an official vacancy rate, and property analysts were trying to figure out how badly developers had overbuilt. A few days later, Beike retracted the report and apologized, saying that some of the data had errors. Analysts said they believed the group pulled the data under government pressure.

That’s when the official data started disappearing too.

Figures show the value of land sales plummeted 48% in 2022, a big problem for heavily indebted local governments, which suddenly lacked funds to pay salaries or carry on with infrastructure projects. That data disappeared at the start of 2023.

Then, by mid-2023, much of the talk locally revolved around the dismal job market for young people. Many of the students finishing college didn’t have job offers, and viral social-media posts showed them dressed in caps and gowns splayed out motionless on the ground, interpreted by many as a form of silent protest.   

Around that time, the official youth unemployment rate hit a record 21.3%. Zhang Dandan, a Peking University economist, made headlines saying she thought China’s true youth unemployment rate might be as high as 46.5%.

Then, as noted above, in August 2023, Beijing announced they would simply stop releasing the youth unemployment rate, saying they “needed to revisit” how they calculated the figures.

Hilariously, five months later Beijing began releasing a new data series. The real youth jobless rate, it said, was 14.9%, or about half of what the previous series had reported.

Officials said the new data series excluded nearly 62 million people who were studying full-time in universities, and so shouldn’t be counted as jobless. That, of course, make zero sense to economists. Statistics typically count anyone actively looking for a job as unemployed, including full-time students.

Alas, since the cover up is usually worse than the crime, by this point China had little to lose and things only got worse.

In April 2024, China’s stock market was teetering as economic worries deepened. Foreign investors dumped more than $2 billion of Chinese stocks over a two-week span, spooking domestic individual investors.

China’s two major exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen abruptly announced that they would stop publishing real-time data on inflows and outflows of foreign investors. The Shanghai Stock Exchange said in a statement that it was aligning its practices with other international markets, which don’t disclose real-time trading data of specific groups of investors.

After authorities stopped publishing the real-time data in mid-May, the CSI 300 benchmark index continued its decline for four consecutive months, until authorities announced a blitz of measures to support the country’s weakening economy in September. Amusingly, while Beijing has repeatedly vowed and jawboned it would stimulate the economy and markets, it has yet to actually do so, for one simple reason: China has no fiscal space, with total Chinese debt at historic levels as Beijing already used up its debt quote in the past 20 years to boost the economy while borrowing from the future.

In response to Trump tariff hikes, China vows to unleash much more stimulus, as it has every week for the past 3 years.

Luckily, at 330% debt/GDP China has lots of fiscal space for stimulus

Oh wait… pic.twitter.com/UmJL9ZwjnQ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 7, 2025

Some data are still publicly available but harder to get. Beijing passed a law in 2021 that caused data providers to make certain information, such as corporate registry data and satellite images, accessible only in mainland China.

Meanwhile, formerly trusted Chinese data provider Wind Information started to limit international users’ access to certain data sets, such as online retail shopping figures and land-auction records, in early 2023. That led one economist at a foreign bank in Hong Kong to start making regular weekend trips to the neighboring mainland city of Shenzhen to download data, the economist told the WSJ.

Also gone in recent years: official figures on Chinese toll road operators’ year-end debt balances and the number of new stock-market investors.

And who can forget the absurd lengths Beijing went to during covid to cover up the economic devastation in the aftermath of the Wuhan virus spread. China stopped publishing national cremation data after it ended its controversial zero-Covid policy to contain the virus in late 2022, a move analysts estimated could lead to between 1.3 million and 2.1 million deaths. The government also censored discussions about the impact of the virus on social media.

Last but not least, the country’s sharp drop in fertility has also become a major economic liability… and the data pointing to it is gone, too. In the mid-2000s, an economist named Yi Fuxian questioned the accuracy of China’s population data and argued that tuberculosis vaccinations were a better measure of population growth because every newborn in China is required to be vaccinated. In 2020, only 5.4 million such vaccines were administered, according to data compiled by the private Chinese think tank Forward Business and Intelligence. Chinese authorities said the country recorded 12.1 million births that year. 

Sure enough, a year later, the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control discontinued the weekly data release of tuberculosis vaccines administered, along with other vaccine data.

One can only imagine the true extend of demographic devastation in China… well, literally. Because there is zero data to actually analyze it.

Some information that has disappeared defies explanation. Data providing estimates of the size of elementary school toilets stopped being released in 2022, then resumed publication in February. Official soy sauce production data stopped appearing in May 2021, and hasn’t returned.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

If you consume protein, you’re now a right wing MAGA extremist bro, according to Vanity Fair.

Yes, really.

A recent article the moribund magazine published asks “Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein?” and provides the answer “blame MAGA,” further referring to “podcast bros” and RFK Jr.’s health push as reasons why protein is popular.

WHY ARE THEY PROTEIN SHAMING pic.twitter.com/QpleQ8Fpuv

— Declaration of Memes (@LibertyCappy) May 4, 2025

It couldn’t possibly be to do with the fact that you need protein to survive though could it?

The article states “For decades, an American protein mania has been building. This year, it may be hitting its peak,” noting that everywhere you look there are articles about protein intake and suuplementation.

The piece goes on to quote an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who states “I don’t have a good sense on what’s driving that right now, other than if it’s just the usual manosphere—or manomania, here in the United States.”

It adds that “One thing he’s noticed: More men than women arrive at his office interested in protein.

Ah, so it’s also a gender thing to be interested in getting enough protein.

Why are Liberals so anti-protein???

— FreedomHealth (@LaughlandMorgan) May 4, 2025

The fact that it is an essential micronutrient that provides the building blocks of muscle, bone, and skin is by the by, apparently.

That is leftist brain rot summed up

— Dan Keller (@DanTJMAJWC) May 4, 2025

You can imagine the instruction to the writer from the editors…

Media bosses: “Find something that white conservatives like and write a story about it.”

That is how protein and bowling become racist.

— Exposer of Donkey Fazoo (@Ionoclast50) May 4, 2025

They’re literally discouraging you from getting protein.

Because a soy boy populace is a controllable populace….

— Chyck Justice 🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@Chyck_Justice) May 4, 2025

They want you weak.

Anything good for you became problematic. This only happens so consistently when it is intentional. Who would want you to reject all the things that are good for you? Someone who wants you weak so that you can be destroyed. https://t.co/5RwhFC2boo

— Occidentally (@occidentally) May 4, 2025

And, don’t forget, it’s “gendered.”

Gendered how? I know both men and women who have protein heavy diets

— Southern Belle (@SBelleofAL) May 4, 2025

The gender studies major claims that a random innocuous thing is—*gasp*—GeNdErEd!! ERMAHGERD!!

— Susan Davis (@RealApexKaren) May 4, 2025

Pure insanity.

Protein is not “gendered.” Everyone needs it to live. Also, the writer is nuts. https://t.co/b16nJOvk17

— MarsColony (@MarsColony01) May 4, 2025

File this along side exercise is right wing and not being obese is bigoted.

What’s right-wing today? Today, going to the gym is right-wing.
According to the Guardian, having personal responsibility and working hard to better yourself may make you less of a fat leech who blames society for all your problems. Indeed. pic.twitter.com/qdCsgz9dTt

— Leo Kearse – on YouTube & GB News (@LeoKearse) June 5, 2024

*  *  *

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.

Harvard University will no longer be eligible for government grants, the White House informed the acclaimed scandal-plagued, institution on May 5. Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday night to inform the university that it is not eligible for federal grants until it makes significant changes to its management, the official said.

Dear @Harvard: pic.twitter.com/XmMimXfkX0

— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) May 5, 2025

The letter cites low public confidence in higher education, Harvard’s continued racial profiling, and takes issue with the virtually untaxed status of Harvard’s significant financial endowment.

“Perhaps most alarmingly, Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans”, McMahon wrote, before advising the university to no longer seek Federal grants, “since none will be provided.”

“The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard’s consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.”

On Friday, President Trump threatened to go after Harvard’s tax-exempt status: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he wrote in a social media post.

Two weeks earlier, Harvard filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing its freeze on research funding is unconstitutional and “flatly unlawful” and called on the court to restore more than $2.2 billion in research dollars.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education sent Harvard a list of demands, including combating anti-Semitism on campus and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, that the university needed to fulfill or risk losing billions in federal funding, the Epoch Times reported

In its response, Harvard said it was “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

The Trump administration then froze $2.26 billion from the university, with nearly $9 billion in funding set aside for Harvard put under review.

The administration had also pushed for Harvard to disclose information about potential foreign ties, with the Department of Homeland Security threatening to remove the university’s ability to enroll foreign students.

Weeks later, Harvard released two reports describing how Jewish, Israeli, Zionist, Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students all reported feeling marginalized or targeted over their identities and views after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the campus protests that followed.

“Especially disturbing is the reported willingness of some students to treat each other with disdain rather than sympathy, eager to criticize and ostracize, particularly when afforded the anonymity and distance that social media provides,” Garber wrote in a letter to the campus community.

Trump suggested on April 30 that his administration would no longer give government grants to Harvard if it did not agree to fulfill his demands to eliminate DEI and combat on-campus anti-Semitism.

“A grant is at our discretion, and they are really not behaving well. So it’s too bad,” Trump said.

Harvard has sued the administration to unfreeze its funds, and Garber said on Friday that it would be “highly illegal” for Trump to compel the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status.

“If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax-exempt status, it would … be highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move,” Garber told The Wall Street Journal.

“The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions.”

On Monday, the White House official announcing McMahon’s letter took issue with recent Harvard data showing that less than 3 percent of surveyed faculty identify as conservative, and suggested the school could do more to bring diverse viewpoints to campus.

The official also accused the university of abandoning rigor and academic excellence, citing a plagiarism scandal involving former Harvard President Claudine Gay. All future funds to the university will be at the Trump administration’s discretion, the official said.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has issued a dire warning about the United States’ chronic disease crisis, declaring that poor nutrition is fueling a healthcare cost surge that threatens to bankrupt the nation. 

During a recent Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined plans to reform the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) with Rollins, targeting sugary drinks and junk food that the USDA chief argues drive an unprecedented obesity epidemic.

 “We have 13 nutrition programs. Listen to this number. This is going to astound you. In America today, through USDA—this is not all the other agencies, this is just here at USDA—we spend $370 million a day on nutrition programs,” Rollins told All-In podcast host David Friedberg in an interview released Sunday. “So, not just SNAP, but food banks and all of the other ones. That’s just USDA. That is a stunning number. We’ve got to do better.”

.@SecRollins tells @friedberg the USDA spends $370 million daily on nutrition programs: “You can’t solve this through government regulation.”

“You can solve it through nutrition, empowering our farmers, and getting good food into these programs.”pic.twitter.com/CNwCHecLMo

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) May 5, 2025

The stakes are extraordinarily high, with Rollins pointing to alarming health trends that she warns pose an existential threat to the nation’s future, disproportionately harming the country’s most vulnerable and low-income populations. 

“Why are billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on sugary drinks and junk food in our supplemental nutrition program for food-insecure, lower-income populations? This contributes to an obesity and chronic disease epidemic unlike any developed country has ever seen. 74% of our adolescents would not pass the military readiness test today. This is a massive challenge facing America,” she told Friedberg, adding, “Taxpayers fund junk food and sugary drinks at the front end, leading to diabetes and other issues, while the back-end costs of treating chronic diseases are bankrupting states through Medicaid.”

Brooke Rollins joined David Friedberg to discuss her role as Secretary of Agriculture.

The highlight: her conversation on how she and RFK Jr. are working to remove sugary snacks and drinks from SNAP.

“Why are billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on sugary drinks and junk… pic.twitter.com/rCxJxVh0MR

— End Tribalism in Politics (@EndTribalism) May 5, 2025

Kennedy, a longtime champion of the Make America Healthy Again movement and a fierce critic of industrial food interests, is closely aligned with Rollins in transforming the nation’s food supply. “In the first administration, health care was under my portfolio in domestic policy. As conservatives, we’ve long discussed how to make America healthy again, focusing on the cost to the health care system,” Rollins said. “Enter Bobby Kennedy—while we don’t agree on everything, we align on most things. I was with him yesterday touring farms and discussing nutrition and agriculture. The opportunity for the agriculture and health leads to work together daily to solve this is key. You can’t solve it through government regulation, but through nutrition, empowering farmers, and getting good food into these programs.”

Last month, Kennedy unveiled a plan to eliminate eight artificial food dyes and colorings from the U.S. food supply by the end of 2026, collaborating with food companies to ensure a seamless transition.

ABC News reported: Federal officials are taking steps to pull the authorization for two rarely used synthetic food colorings — Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B — within the coming months. In addition, the six other petroleum-based dyes that federal health agencies are seeking to eliminate by the end of next year are Green No. 3, Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 1 and Blue No. 2.

“I just want to urge all of you, it’s not the time to stop; it’s the time to redouble your efforts, because we have them on the run now, and we are going to win this battle,” Kennedy said of the historic move. “And four years from now, we’re going to have most of these products off the market, or you will know about them when you go to the grocery store.”

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearEducation,

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.

In addition, for decades Harvard discriminated based on race. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), the Supreme Court held that the university’s race-conscious admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Yet despite losing in the highest court of the land, Harvard maintained DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs that classified, and doled out and withheld, benefits based on race.

Beyond the proximate cause of the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to reshape Harvard lies the longstanding cause. For decades, Harvard has betrayed liberal education. It has offered undergraduates a shambolic curriculum: Instead of concentrating on the essentials of an education for freedom – the American experiment in ordered liberty, the defining events and seminal ideas of Western civilization, and basic knowledge of non-Western civilizations – professors lard the curriculum with courses revolving around their arcane research interests. And for decades, Harvard has politicized the humanities and social sciences, promoting a progressive – and often radical – ideology that puts advocacy for left-wing social change ahead of understanding the basics of ethics, economics, culture, society, and politics.

Harvard’s hospitability to antisemitism and its race-conscious policies justified aggressive White House measures to compel the university to abide by its legal obligations or lose federal financial support. The university’s decades-long debasement of liberal education magnified the White House’s sense of urgency. But Trump administration remedies adopt a cavalier attitude toward the law and overlook the federal government’s limited competence.

The week before Harvard filed its lawsuit, City Journal published essays by Manhattan Institute senior fellows Heather MacDonald and Christopher Rufo assessing Trump administration endeavors to reform Harvard. While agreeing that reform was vital, the two eminent commentators on higher education differed over the government’s tactics.

A searing critic of universities’ war on free speech and discrimination disguised as diversity, MacDonald nonetheless worries in “The White House’s Clumsy Attack on Harvard” that the Trump team has overreached. “The administration calls for oversight of faculty hiring to ensure ‘viewpoint diversity,’ though the legal basis for such authority is unclear,” writes MacDonald. “Its demand for a ‘critical mass’ of intellectually diverse faculty is either a wry joke or unintentionally ironic. After all, the notion of a ‘critical mass’ of ‘diverse’ students was one of the flimsy concepts the Supreme Court used for decades to justify racial admissions preferences.”

In contrast, Rufo wants to fight fire with fire. In “The Right Is Winning the Battle Over Higher Education,” he argues that the left transformed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into “a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.” Now, maintains Rufo, the right must use civil-rights law to achieve its original purpose – to establish “a framework grounded in colorblind equality.” He insists that “racial discrimination is wrong whether it targets whites, Asians, and Jews or blacks and Hispanics.” And he urges the Trump administration to “use every tool at its disposal to ensure that America’s elite universities adhere to the principle of colorblind equality.” But Rufo overlooks the Trump administration’s proclivity to reach for constitutionally and congressionally prohibited tools, and its penchant for unwisely, if lawfully, extending federal authority.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s lawsuit argues that the Trump administration overreached in the legal sphere.

Harvard’s first major allegation might be a close call. According to the university, the government’s freezing of funds and demanding of sweeping reforms of admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance unconstitutionally burden Harvard’s free-speech rights. The Trump administration will probably argue that its demands do not impair Harvard’s speech but rather give the university a choice. Harvard can say what it likes and do as it pleases and, consequently, lose federal funding, to which there is no constitutional entitlement. Or Harvard can adopt measures that would make the university worthy of taxpayer dollars.

Harvard is likely to prevail on the second major allegation, which is that the Trump administration disregarded the congressionally established procedures for withholding approved federal funds. The facts are clear: The Trump administration froze federal funding for Harvard without taking the statutorily prescribed steps for suspending or terminating signed contracts and approved grants.

A court battle would bloody both parties.

Needed, therefore, is an out-of-court settlement. In dealing with the proximate cause of the showdown, a reasonable settlement should ensure that Harvard abides by civil-rights law and that the Trump administration respects constitutional and statutory limits on executive-branch power. In handling the longstanding cause, a reasonable settlement should reduce indoctrination at Harvard in favor of liberal education while obliging the government to honor the university’s academic freedom and institutional independence.

Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz has provided an excellent proposal that provides an appealing compromise concerning the longstanding cause of the Trump-Harvard showdown. In “Trump vs. Harvard: A Negotiated Solution,” which appeared online at National Review on April 21 (the day Harvard sued the Trump administration), Kurtz highlights Harvard’s “lax handling of disruptive demonstrations and antisemitic harassment” and its “pervasive leftist bias.” At the same time, Kurtz expresses skepticism about the Trump administration’s demand that Harvard place itself “into a de facto federal receivership.” But Harvard and the Trump administration, Kurtz optimistically contends, could agree to a compromise based on “model legislation called General Education Act (GEA), a limited version of which just became law in Utah, and which is likely to be considered by other states in 2026.”

A co-author of the model GEA, Kurtz sketches a modified version for Harvard. It would create within Harvard a “School of General Education, where the governing dean and the newly recruited faculty are committed to a traditional ‘great books’ approach.” While Harvard undergraduates could earn a degree in general education, “[t]he distinctive feature of this plan is that the new School of General Education is put in charge of teaching a set of great books and Western Civ–focused courses required of every student at the university in question.” Whereas the Trump approach involves intrusive federal monitoring – and Democrats would remove it immediately upon regaining the presidency – the school of general education, once established, would be difficult to abolish.

Everyone could claim victory. The Trump administration could claim credit for impelling Harvard to invest in liberal education. Harvard could take pride in maintaining its independence. Harvard students could acquire precious knowledge of their civilizational heritage while learning to exchange conflicting opinions in a spirit of curiosity, civility, and toleration. Higher education in America could adopt as a model the liberal-education reforms instituted by the nation’s oldest and most famous university. And citizens could draw inspiration from the White House’s and Harvard’s cooperating to achieve compromise and conciliation that advances the public interest.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

During Tyson Foods’ earnings call on Monday, Brady Stewart—head of the company’s beef and pork supply chains—offered fresh insight into what may be the emerging bottom in U.S. cattle supplies, which have fallen to their lowest levels in over 70 years. His comments came in response to a question from one Wall Street analyst.

Barclays analyst Benjamin Theurer asked Stewart about the overall environment in the beef industry:

So it feels like you only had a small volume drop-in the quarter that could almost be explained by just the leap year and some of the calendar effects. So just wanted to understand a little bit better what you’re seeing in terms of supply of cattle and the cost of that into your operations and how you think about the earlier signs maybe as to some of the heifer retention? Is that building or not? So how should we think about just these throughout the cycle? Are we at the bottom or is it just still too early to tell? That would be my first question. 

Stewart explained that while cattle supply remains down year-over-year, record-high animal weights are helping to offset the decline in volume. He added that the U.S. cattle industry is likely at or near the bottom of its inventory cycle, with herd levels now at a 73-year low.

Here’s the executive’s response to the Barclays analyst that provides valuable insight for consumers, ranchers, and everyone in between tracking the nation’s cattle supplies:

Ben, I think it’s important to note that cattle on feed from a weight perspective are extremely heavy. We’re at record weights throughout the business as well. So we’re seeing some weight that is offsetting from a volume perspective, some of the lower headcounts we’re seeing as the supply has been obviously lower than year ago.

Relative to heifer retention and I would just say this and Curt has mentioned this before, if we’re not at the bottom relative to cow inventories, we can definitely see it from here as well. And I think a couple of reference points behind that certainly would be we’ ve seen an extreme drop almost 18% in beef cow harvest numbers.

And then secondary to that is we have seen a drop relative to heifer on feed, which means if the heifer are not on feed, they’re being retained by farmers and ranchers as well. And we’re seeing a 4% drop in heifers year-over-year as well. So I think the signs are really aligning to a rebuild to start to occur. And from a liquidation standpoint, really seeing the bottom at this point as well.

At the start of the year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual Cattle Inventory report revealed that the nation’s cattle supply had fallen to a 73-year low, totaling about 86.6 million head.

At the supermarket, USDA data from the end of March showed the average price for a pound of ground beef reached yet another record high of $5.79.

Commenting on Stewart’s remarks is The Beef Initiative founder, Texas Slim, who said:

“Rebuilding the herd takes more than forecasts—it takes proof of work. Ranchers holding back heifers aren’t chasing trends; they’re investing in land, genetics, and legacy. That 18% drop in beef cow harvest isn’t a collapse—it’s a recalibration. If this is the bottom, it’s the kind only real producers can build from.”

Slim said: 

“Rebuilding America’s cattle herd will take years—and critically, it must include the participation of mom-and-pop ranchers across the country. The current model, dominated by four multinational meatpackers, is unsustainable—on national security grounds.” 

And continued:

“The most effective way to support this rebuilding effort is one order at a time through the ZeroHedge Rancher Direct Store. Last week’s launch, in partnership with ZeroHedge, was a major success. Now, with the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (MAHA) movement gaining momentum, the connection between independent ranchers and consumers is set to grow stronger than ever.” 

Each order puts working capital into America’s mom-and-pop ranchers offering clean MAHA beef. 

Support America.

Support small ranchers.

Support the Heartland.

It’s time for a food revolution.

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