Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

The fall of the Roman Empire is often presented as symbolic of the slow but steady decline of the western world today, and it’s true, this comparison might be more accurate than many people realize. The disastrous collapse which escalated over the course of the 5^th century was driven by economic crisis, a split of the empire into eastern and western halves, government reliance on foreign mercenaries for security, uncontrolled mass immigration, and ultimately, barbarian invasion.

When the western empire failed, Rome was plundered and centuries of human innovation and progress were lost in the flames. It’s an element that modern historians often gloss over – Each time the west has fallen, incredible knowledge that took generations to discover was dispersed into the ether. Each time, the human species was set back for centuries.

Many lives were sacrificed and ancient cities were destroyed, but the loss of time is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. It took another 400 years for the western world to reconstitute under Christian rule, but barbarians attacked again in the form of Muslim hordes in the 9^th century. It’s almost as if the grasping, predatory hands of useless ravagers are always lurking in the shadows, waiting for the west to rise from the ashes.

History is, of course, nuanced and complex, but some patterns are patently obvious and the attempts to sack Rome, Europe and greater Christendom repeated regularly over the course of a thousand years. Western civilization endures, succeeds, creates wonders, creates wealth and advances human invention. Then, the third world invades in an effort to strip whatever wealth was amassed.

There have been other civilizations, or attempts at civilizations beyond the west which suffered similar fates. The fall of the Bronze Age empires is a perfect example; a calamity of human history very similar to the fall of Rome, if not more mysterious. There was the collapse of China’s Han Dynasty in the 3^rd century due to corruption, rebellion and foreign invasion by Mongolian tribes. The collapse of the Gupta Empire in India, triggered by Hunnic barbarian incursions, etc.

However, only the west survived in the long run and only the west is still targeted for demolition in the modern era. I would break this pattern down into two distinct forms of human endeavor or states of existence…

The Tribes Of Order: People who build, invent, create, persevere, maintain and seek to survive through merit, self discipline and industry. (Ayn Rand might refer to this group as the “producers”).

The Tribes Of Chaos (Barbarians): People who survive through brutality, piracy and deceit; those who live by stealing from the tribes of order. They wait until wealth and abundance is accumulated by others and then strip it away when given an opportunity.

Why do barbarians do this? Well, because it’s far easier to smash and steal than it is to plan and innovate. Some might argue that the mentality is genetic.  Some would argue it’s a product of culture. Others assert it’s a product of low IQ or low capacity for creative thinking. I’m inclined to believe that it’s a mix of all of these things.

How The West First Solved The Barbarian Problem

I believe there is a distinct and identifiable moment in history when the barbarian plunder of the west went into decline, and that was the First Christian Crusade in 1096 AD.

This was, in a way, the act of self defense through “colonization”. That is to say, the pattern of pillaging stops whenever the west takes forceful action to colonize the third world. In terms of the crusades, instead of allowing the barbarians to loiter on the doorstep of Europe and take territory whenever they pleased, the Holy Crusades sought to push them back and defeat them on their home turf.

Centuries later after the Muslims were mostly contained, European exploration led to colonies across Asia and Africa, civilizing cultures with the barbarian mindset. The insatiable desire to hijack the accomplishments of the Tribes of Order was countered by simply GIVING these people western accomplishments…and taking by away their ability to project power.

When the west expanded to take over management of the third world, the invasions ceased and the third world was introduced to the wealth of modernization without having to steal it. One could easily argue that western colonization was a net positive for the world. It’s not a coincidence that far-left ideologues and communists demonize it so frequently; they do this because they know colonization works. They use it themselves.

The Return Of The Barbarian Hordes

It is entirely predictable that, as the west embraces liberalism and socialism, the third world invasions have returned. We are the only culture that feels “shame” over our historic successes, so much so that many people are convinced we deserve punishment for the colonies of the past.

The biggest factor in this program of shame is the globalist agenda to erase national borders and identity through multiculturalism. However, I think it’s important to understand that the globalists are not forcing third worlders to immigrate to the west; these people WANT to come here and the globalists are simply opening the gates to let them in.

Why do they travel from countries where their culture is dominant? Why come to Europe or the US where their values are not aligned, their languages do not function and their tribal thinking is incongruent? Again, you can take the man out of barbarism, but you can’t take the barbarism out of the man. They come here because they see an opportunity to plunder the west after centuries of being thwarted. It’s a behavior that’s hard-wired into their gray matter.

I outlined this dynamic in my article “The Third World Is Forever Chasing The White Man”, in which I examined the habit of third world populations to constantly scratch for a piece of the first world instead of improving their own conditions at home. I also touched on the habit of leftist minorities to appropriate western culture and pretend they built it first (How often, for example, has Somalian Democrat Ilhan Omar falsely claimed that America was built by Muslims?).

These people do not want to develop their own accomplishments, their own stories, their own discoveries – they want ours. It’s the barbarian mindset.

I am reminded of a fascinating discussion by African commentator Franck Zanu, who presented his theory on why he believes African societies will “never develop” without the aid of western colonization. He noted that African languages have no word for “maintenance” – The concept simply does not exist in their vernacular.

It’s a deeply profound observation on the difference between the third-world and the west. The act of maintenance is a key element that defines the Tribes of Order. Without maintenance, no civilizational legacy can be constructed. Instead, human beings continue to clamor in the dirt, or wait around for someone else to build and maintain a system that they can latch onto and feed off of.

This problem is the underlying lesson in the documentary “Empire of Dust”, in which Chinese engineers travel to Africa to build roads and infrastructure, only to be consistently thwarted by a lazy population that seeks only to get paid for doing as little as possible.  In many cases, they sabotage their own construction efforts to drag out the process.  As a culture, they see no value in working to build something of lasting importance, and the Chinese engineers are left bewildered.

The evidence is endless within the very African nations that were once colonized.  Billions upon billions of dollars in infrastructure was handed over to them, and in countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), they let it all rot instead of maintaining it. They don’t understand the riches that follow an ordered nation, they think only in terms of wealth that can be looted in the midst of chaos.

But what does any of this have to do with the leftist movements plaguing the west today?

Communism/Marxism Is Organized Chaos

It sounds contradictory, but the philosophy of communism is a form of “organized chaos”, or engineered chaos to achieve a particular agenda. I would attach globalism to this equation because globalism is, ultimately, a desire for a globally centralized form of communism that operates on similar mechanics.

And who does this philosophy most appeal to in the west? Usually it’s the aimless ideologues with little or no ability to survive in a world where merit and strength are valued (woke activists, feminists, DEI advocates, etc.). And, people who consider themselves the “have-nots”. Useful idiots and emotional spastics who have been convinced that all the failings of their miserable lives are the fault of a rigged system.

They’re convinced that society has stolen achievements away from them, that the cards are stacked against them, that the shining city on the hill is laughing at them. If only the system was forced to be “more equitable”, if only wealth was properly redistributed, they would be rich, famous and successful.

So, the political left taps into this narcissistic desire for unearned distinction. It tells people, for the good of humanity, they must burn everything to the ground to get what they want. They are barbarians in first-world clothing; born within the gates, but barbarians all the same.

This is where communists and third worlders seem to intersect. They are part of the same “Tribe of Chaos.” This is why leftists are so desperate to open borders to mass immigration. This is why the policies of far-left Democrats seem to aid plunder by migrants (like Somalian scammers in Minnesota or California). This is why leftists seem to be obsessed with enabling the Islamic invasion of Europe.

It’s all about chaos and the fleecing of societies that value order. The globalists are also members of the chaos tribe, but they think of themselves as straddling the line between. Their vision of a “new world order” can only be achieved through the destruction of the old world, the erasure of the past, the rewriting of history and memory and morality. They are grotesque pillagers of time.

If they get their way, the barbarian mindset will become the norm. People of order and merit (the producers) will be perpetually enslaved to the whims of parasites. It will be a never-ending cycle of struggling industry followed by collapse, back to the dark ages but condensed down to a terrible science. We will work to build and build again while the hands of the horde rush in to knock it all down and pick the bones clean.

Without aggressive action to safeguard our own tribe, nothing we create will ever belong to us.

China is undertaking a vast effort to reshape its western frontier, transforming Xinjiang and Tibet from remote borderlands into strategic hubs for industry, energy, tourism and trade, according to a new lengthy report from Financial Times.

Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing is pouring investment into highways, railways, renewable energy projects, manufacturing bases and tourism infrastructure across a region that covers nearly a third of China’s territory. Officials see the west not as a distant hinterland but as a frontline for economic growth, national security and connectivity with Eurasia.

The strategy serves several goals. It aims to integrate Xinjiang and Tibet more deeply into China’s economy, strengthen border security, expand access to critical resources and energy, and make western China a more important link in global supply chains. Analysts say this could also reduce the effectiveness of future Western sanctions by increasing the regions’ economic importance.

The transformation is most visible in Xinjiang. Tourism has surged, with record visitor numbers drawn to ski resorts, scenic villages and newly built infrastructure. International hotel chains are rapidly expanding in the region, while exports, manufacturing and state-backed investment continue to grow. For many Chinese visitors, Xinjiang is increasingly marketed as a safe and attractive destination rather than a politically sensitive region.

Yet the economic boom has not been accompanied by a rollback of state control. Human rights groups say the surveillance systems, security apparatus and policies that followed the mass detention of Uyghurs remain firmly in place. Critics argue Beijing is pairing economic incentives with continued social control and cultural assimilation.

The FT writes that Tibet is undergoing a similar transformation. Massive hydropower projects, transmission networks and mineral extraction plans are positioning the region as a future energy hub. The flagship Yarlung Tsangpo dam could become the world’s largest hydropower project, supplying electricity far beyond Tibet. Supporters see these developments as engines of growth; critics warn of environmental damage, pressure on local communities and risks to downstream countries.

At the same time, rights groups and researchers say policies promoting Mandarin-language education, migration and “ethnic integration” are accelerating the assimilation of Tibetans and Uyghurs into mainstream Han Chinese society. Beijing rejects such criticism, saying it protects minority cultures while promoting development and national unity.

Taken together, the projects signal a long-term effort to remake China’s west. Roads, railways, factories, power plants and tourist attractions are reshaping the region’s economy and its role within China. But the transformation is occurring alongside an extensive security system, raising questions about whether development is being used not only to modernise the frontier but also to cement Beijing’s political control over it.

The market may be in full-blown face-ripping bubble mode, and software stocks are now gripped in by a category 5 gamma squeeze hurricane, but not even that is helping the ongoing debacle that is private credit.

The flagship private credit fund of Cliffwater, a fund which has was slammed by redemption requests in the past quarter as the private credit crisis came to a fore, has again gated investors by capping redemptions at 5% in the second quarter after investors looked to pull more than three times that amount, or 17% of shares, Bloomberg reported, in a sign of relentless pressure on the $1.8 trillion market.

The $31 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund informed shareholders Tuesday that they’d get about one-third of their requested money back, according to a letter seen by Bloomberg. The prior quarter, investors got back around half of the roughly 14% they asked for, with the vehicle choosing to cap withdrawals at 7%.

Shortly after Cliffwater’s decision in March, S&P Global Ratings lowered its outlook on the interval fund to negative from stable, warning that the 5% redemption threshold is “an important guardrail.”

“Our repurchase program is intentionally designed to provide shareholders with periodic liquidity that aligns with the fund’s long-term investment strategy and its underlying assets,” Cliffwater CEI Stephen Nesbitt said in the letter to investors. And by periodic liquidity he meant far less liquidity than investors hoped to recovery. 

The firm previously said that the fund, which has delivered a roughly 9.4% annualized net return since it was formed in 2019, has enough liquidity to meet 5% redemptions for more than a year without selling a position or an asset. After a second straight quarter of gating that may be tested very soon.

Cliffwater has become something of an unlikely giant in the private credit market by raising money at a rapid clip and deploying it across both direct loans and funds that do such lending themselves. Other non-traded business development companies are set to report the results of their second-quarter tender offers in the coming weeks. In the previous period, some like Blackstone’s BCRED went to extraordinary lengths to let investors cash out (all for nothing as the looming redemption flood will overrun even the giant fund), while other funds at Apollo Global, BlackRock and Blue Owl enforced their 5% caps.

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Authorities charged four suspects on June 1 with felony drug distribution violations after finding a hidden tunnel used by drug runners inside a retail store in San Diego County that led into Tijuana, Mexico.

Investigators also seized more than a ton of cocaine worth about $45 million in connection with the subterranean tunnel, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Homeland Security’s Tunnel Task Force in charge of the operation.

“For these defendants, it wasn’t a light at the end of the tunnel. It was lights and sirens,” said U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon.

Federal agents with the tunnel task force started surveilling a Buy 4 Less warehouse on the 2400 block of Roll Drive in San Diego in late December 2025 after they became alerted to suspicious activity at the location, according to prosecutors.

A group of seven or eight “employees” at the Buy 4 Less showed up regularly at the store, but very few customers were seen coming in and out of the location, investigators said.

The supposed employees were seen taking multiple suitcases out of the store and into vehicles or walking the suitcases, which appeared to be empty, across the border into Mexico, according to the court complaint.

Investigators say that on May 29, a man loaded three large, heavy items into a white van that left the warehouse and parked on a street near a mechanic shop. Another man on a bicycle was seen looking around and into parked cars, allegedly conducting counter-surveillance for the van, investigators said.

Federal agents watched as people removed three deep freezers from the first van and placed them into the bed of another truck, then load the deep freezers with packages, according to court documents.

After the vans were loaded onto a truck, the truck left and parked a short distance away. Another man took the truck keys and drove away.

San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies with a K9 police dog stopped the truck and were alerted to the presence of a controlled substance by the canine officer.

After the traffic stop, the agents watching the warehouse saw two other men take heavy boxes out of the Buy 4 Less and load them onto a second truck, which was then driven away. Another sheriff’s deputy with a police canine stopped the second truck.

The traffic stops led federal agents to discover 851 packages of cocaine with a combined weight of more than 1 ton inside the two trucks and van.

The subterranean passageway, stretching from Tijuana, Mexico, to the purported retail store near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry known as “Buy 4 Less,” shown in this photo, is estimated to be about 1,933 feet long, 55 feet deep, and 4.5 feet in height, with a ventilation system and electricity. U.S. Department of Justice

The drug seizures also allowed federal investigators to obtain a signed judicial warrant to search the Buy 4 Less, where they found the exit point of the subterranean tunnel hidden beneath the floor of a storage room inside the store, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego.

The tunnel is about 55 feet deep and extends about 1,064 feet from the Buy 4 Less to the U.S.–Mexico border. Agents estimate it continues another 800 feet to another entry point in Mexico.

The tunnel was accessed using a sophisticated hydraulic lift and was equipped with ventilation and electricity, and was up to 4.5 feet tall in some areas, according to investigators.

Trucks coming from Mexico enter the United States at an inspection station after crossing the border in Otay Mesa, Calif., on April 1, 2025. Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

The drug bust and tunnel discovery are expected to impact the cartel’s drug pipeline into California.

“This investigation and seizure represent a significant blow to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego Kevin Murphy.

Charged in the case were Gregorio Epifanio Hernandez Lopez, 29, of San Diego; Brandon Escalante Sandoval, 26, of Mexico; Jose Jimenez, 32, of San Diego; and Antonio Cortez, 18, of Mexico.

Hernandez Lopez is charged with conspiracy to use a cross-border tunnel and conspiracy to import controlled substances. All defendants are charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego said the tunnel is one of 99 discovered in the Southern District of California since 1993 and the first since 2022.

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,

Do we really believe in freedom?

Or do we only believe in freedom when it applies to people who agree with us?

Do we trust people we fundamentally disagree with to remain free citizens?

Or do we believe they must be controlled through laws, censorship, surveillance, or social pressure because they are too dangerous to be trusted with liberty?

That question sits at the center of what I am most interested in during this moment in history, the 250th year of the American experiment.

Because when I look around, it increasingly feels like both sides are drifting in the same direction while packaging it differently.

Each side frames the other as dangerous, radical, and incapable of self-governance. People on the left often believe the right is racist, authoritarian, anti-science, and driven by extremism. Many people on the right believe the left is hostile to faith, hostile to biology, hostile to free speech, and willing to use institutions to socially engineer society.

If you genuinely believe those things about your political opponents, then freedom starts to feel dangerous.

And once freedom feels dangerous, control starts to feel justified.

For me, the COVID-19 pandemic broke the illusion.

I suddenly realized I could no longer clearly see what the political left still offered someone like me. I watched censorship expand rapidly. I watched speech become conditional. I watched people lose jobs and platforms for asking questions. I watched mandates imposed alongside liability protections and dissent treated as danger.

I watched mandates destroy livelihoods.

I watched small businesses close while major corporations consolidated wealth and power. I watched people who had spent decades building restaurants, gyms, farms, salons, and family businesses suddenly deemed “nonessential.”

I wasn’t reading about these policies. I was living under them.

At the same time, I was living in a state that increasingly felt hostile to the practical realities of my life. Everything started feeling harder. More permits. More taxes. More hoops. More social pressure. It felt harder to make a living, harder to farm, harder to build, harder to protect my family, and harder to simply live outside institutional approval.

Socially, it also became harder to honestly say what I believed without risking professional or personal consequences.

This week, I heard arguments celebrating the fact that Democrats overwhelmingly voted against liability protections for chemical companies accused of poisoning Americans. Many people presented that as evidence that one side cares about ordinary people while the other protects corporations from accountability.

But that moral high ground becomes more complicated when you remember that many of those same political voices supported mandating a vaccine under an emergency authorization, with liability protections already built into the system. At the same time, dissent around those policies was aggressively silenced.

And the reality is that we are still learning about the long-term effects, trade-offs, and consequences years later.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

That is simply how medicine and biology work. Scientific understanding evolves over time.

The George Floyd era accelerated another version of this same instinct.

Suddenly, institutions across America were pressured to publicly demonstrate ideological “purity” around race, gender, identity, and social justice. Diversity, equity, Indigenous representation, and LGBTQ+ inclusion became not just social values but institutional litmus tests in many professional environments.

In some cases, executives, journalists, professors, and employees lost their positions not because they had committed crimes or acts of hatred, but because they failed to meet ideological expectations during a moment of intense cultural pressure.

And once again, people became afraid to say the wrong thing out loud.

But now I watch similar instincts emerge from the political right under different circumstances.

There are increasingly subjects people feel afraid to discuss openly because they fear losing jobs, reputations, platforms, or financial access. Concerns about extremism, hate speech, anti-Semitism, immigration, terrorism, and national security are all increasingly used to justify expanded speech restrictions and surveillance powers.

And to be fair, some of those fears are real.

But history shows that societies rarely surrender freedom all at once. Usually, it happens piece by piece, each side justifying control because they believe the other side is simply too dangerous to remain fully free.

Many people argued I should have stayed and fought politically where I was. But I didn’t.

I moved to Central Texas. Honestly, I needed to breathe a little.

And yet, even now, as I watch the country continue to fracture, I try very hard not to become tribal myself. I try to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

At the core of it, I still believe in freedom.

But that realization leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: If I truly believe in freedom, then I have to believe the people around me deserve freedom, too—even when I deeply disagree with them.

Otherwise, what I’m actually asking for is not freedom, but power for my side and restriction for theirs.

Maybe the real test of a free society is not whether we support freedom for people we agree with.

Maybe the real test is whether we still support it when we don’t agree with each other.

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

Leftists often claim that when someone of celebrity status appears with Donald Trump, it gives Trump “legitimacy.”  This is the common rationale they use to justify their insane cult-like behavior – Their habit of using mobs of mindless activist zombies in order to frighten people with status away from openly identifying as conservative.  The truth is, the political left is a paper tiger, an astroturf movement with no power, blustering with false bravado.   

In reality, celebrities do not give Trump legitimacy.  His landslide election victory gives him legitimacy.  

The radical left is a one trick pony, constantly repeating the same lies and exaggerations in the belief that if they lie long enough those lies will eventually become part of the popular zeitgeist.  For example, a white sports star has a positive interaction with Trump and the progressive media conjures a narrative that he is alienating his minority team mates because shaking hands with Trump is the same as shaking hands with “racism.”

This tiresome strategy is being used once again on New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart after he appeared on stage with Trump at a New York political rally.  Leftist journalists assert that Dart shaking hands with Trump is the same as shaking hands with Hitler.  The engineered controversy led to a couple of the QB’s teammates expressing discomfort over the event. 

Thankfully, the opinions of Dart’s teammates are meaningless and he has every right to stand on stage with whoever he pleases.  At present, it seems as though other Giants players understand that they don’t have to align politically in order to play a football game. 

Linebacker Abdul Carter (a Muslim) initially voiced discomfort with the optics of the event, according to multiple reports. Dart said he discussed the issue directly with Carter and brushed off any rumors about beef between the two players.  For those who don’t like Dart’s promotional appearances, frankly they can shut up and stew in their salty snowflake juices about it.

The media, though, is never going to shut up about it because their job is to create controversy out of thin air.

Some outlets think Dart needs to be cancelled (as if the political left has any power to cancel anyone anymore).  Sports media site SB Nation claims that Dart’s freedom to meet publicly with Trump does not mean he has the freedom to avoid “criticism” (persecution).  It’s the same incessant woke argument of “cancel culture vs consequence culture.” 

Their version of events displays an insufferable seething; something that might have been more familiar back in 2020.  One has to wonder, do these people ever grow out of their childish delusions of grandeur?  And the answer is no, no they do not.  But we still examine such left-wing crash-outs because they give us insight into the thought processes of progressive authoritarians.  As SB Nation asserts:

“Freedom is pretty great, isn’t it? Here in the United States we love to talk about freedom. The people who love to talk about it the most, who bathe in the idea of American exceptionalism, tend to be those who rarely (if ever) travel abroad. They love to speak about the world in platitudes, always through the lens that the God-loving USA is free, and nowhere else is.  It’s a refrain the majority of Western foreigners find hilarious. Folks in the U.K? They’re free. Europe? Free as well. Australia, Canada, New Zealand — yeah, they’re free.

There are 20 nations broadly recognized as having freedom of expression, with the USA ranking third behind Denmark and Norway. Sure, all those nations might not let you brandish a firearm in public or hurl hate speech at people — but denying that doesn’t make them “un-free.””

Yes, it does make those countries unfree.  If any viewpoints including the truth can be labeled “hate speech”, then the populace does not have free speech.  If the government can put people in prison over jokes and online memes, then those people are not free.  In the UK, around 12,000 people each year are arrested for using restricted speech online.  Most of these arrests are for basic and factual criticisms relating to mass immigration and migrant crime. 

This is not freedom.  

The US is the only country in the world with freedom of speech codified into constitutional law.  It is the only country in the world where the government is restricted from making laws referencing public speech.  SB Nation uses their false narrative of “speech vs hate speech” to launch into their attack on Jaxson Dart.  This is how these people rationalize their totalitarian behavior.  SB Nation continues:

“We’re having this discussion on a sports website because sports are, and always have been, inherently political. It’s impossible to divorce the two, as much as you might want them to be separate…”

For the political left, everything is political.  From movies to TV shows to commercials to video games to comic books to beauty pageants to sports.  Leftist activists believe they should control the platforms of famous people and exploit those platforms for propaganda.  When a celebrity steps out of line, the struggle session begins. 

During the Biden Administration normal people could not escape left-wing politics because they injected their woke ideology into everything.  Sports are not political in the slightest, but progressive movements have tried to force wokeness into them at every turn. 

“Dart made a choice by grinning on stage with the sitting president, one who happens to be historically unpopular, the most divisive in modern history, and largely reviled in both New York and New Jersey, the states the New York Giants represent.

Dart was absolutely free to introduce Trump, he’s free to support him – and personally, I don’t want to see him lose his job for exercising his freedom.  That crucially doesn’t mean Dart should be free of any criticism or allowed to dance away from his decision…”   

A classic woke deflection: “We don’t want to see this man cancelled, but he should be cancelled…”  At no point do the people at SBN explain why it’s a bad thing for a Giants QB to meet with Donald Trump, other than leftists in New York “don’t like Trump” and they think Trump is vaguely racist, even though they can’t come up with a single legitimate example of racism. 

“Dart has spoken as well, but limited his remarks on the appearance to a pre-written statement and has not taken any questions. Even in an instance where a white athlete started the drama, it’s become incumbent upon his black teammates to answer the lion’s share of questions about their teammate. Unfortunately, this is par for the course…”

Trump’s policies have nothing to do with Jaxson Dart.  The man is not political and his views are not up for scrutiny simply because he likes a President that leftists hate.  Jaxson Dart does not answer to The View.  He does not answer to SB Nation.  He does not have to answer to his teammates, and his teammates don’t have to answer to the media. 

As much as the activist mob might want to make Dart pay for escaping the liberal plantation, none of them has the power to do anything to him.  There comes a point when leftists need to accept that they are impotent.  Their cancel culture heyday is long gone and the culture of sane normality is leaving them far behind.      

Peace talks appear stalled, or even halted completely – despite President Trump’s denials – and the US Department of Treasury is still swinging hard, as part of the ongoing effort to bring about economic collapse in Iran and ‘solve’ the Hormuz Strait shipping crisis.

In the latest installment of Washington’s economic whac-a-mole, the US on Tuesday unveiled sanctions on Iran’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange – and several others, for allegedly enabling the Iranian government and blacklisted state institutions to thwart US and EU sanctions.

The largest platform, identified as Nobitex, is believed to have assisted in allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into Iran’s central bank and the ⁠Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as a sanctions work-around and parallel financial system.

“While Iran’s economy is in free ⁠fall, the regime has chosen to co-opt digital asset technologies for its own corrupt agenda, including evading sanctions and transferring wealth out of the country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated in announcing the new action.

“Following the commencement of U.S. combat operations in Iran, Nobitex played a role in protecting and moving assets and funds out of Iran to shield regime ‌wealth despite ​internet blackouts,” the statement added.

Nobitex rejected that it has direct government connections and denied that it has been assisting state institutions. It also said it did nothing to conceal the identities of the owners.

As for ownership, Reuters has documented:

…Nobitex is controlled by two brothers from one of Iran’s most ​powerful families, with close ‌ties to the new supreme leader. The two are members of the Kharrazi family, one of the most influential dynasties ‌in the Islamic Republic. Corporate records show that when the exchange started, the brothers were listed under a surname rarely used by members of the family.

The brothers were named by the Treasury as Seyed Mohammad ‌Ali Aghamir Mohammad Ali ⁠and Seyed Mohammad Aghamir Mohammad Ali, who were also subject to individual sanctions, along with the exchange’s chief executive officer, Amir ⁠Hossein Rad.

Last Friday Bessent detailed how the US has seized a total of $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency assets to date as part of the economic component of President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury.

During a speech before the Reagan National Economic Forum, Bessent stated:

“Just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now and might not realize their wallet had been grabbed.”

Assets are held “on behalf of the Iranian people” – he described, while framing that the Iranian government had ‘stolen’ the money from the Iranian populace.

Did this action help fuel BTC’s crashing well below $68K on Tuesday?

Today’s sanctions against Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex target the Iranian digital asset exchanges responsible for at least 72% of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025.

Remember that much of the crypto going into Iran has flowed through Binance over the years. With… https://t.co/5SiHwTTGVC

— Max Meizlish (@maxmeizlish) June 2, 2026

As we’ve featured before, for ordinary Iranians – roughly one in six of the population – crypto served as a vital lifeline. Facing relentless rial depreciation (down nearly 90 percent since 2018), chronic inflation of 40 to 50 percent, and frequent power blackouts or internet shutdowns during protests, citizens turned to Bitcoin and stablecoins like U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins (USDT) on the Tron network to hedge savings, facilitate remittances, and move value when traditional banking failed. Spikes in Bitcoin withdrawals to personal wallets often coincided with domestic unrest and regional conflicts.

Yet this parallel financial system has also become a powerful tool for the state. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) steadily tightened its grip on Iran’s crypto flows. IRGC-linked addresses received more than $3 billion in 2025—up from over $2 billion in 2024—with their share rising to more than 50 percent of total Iranian crypto inflows by the end of 2025. These figures represent conservative lower bounds based only on identified and sanctioned wallets.

Washington in the meantime is still entertaining dreams of sparking some kind of anti-regime uprising based on applying the economic squeeze to the Iranian system, but apart from unrest back in January, this has utterly failed to materialize. 

Now that attention within the AI revolution has one again firmly turned toward the cost-benefit equation (i..e., ROI) of tokens (see “From Singularity To Tokenomics: The AI Narrative Just Hit A Serious Snag“) in particular, and the trillions behind the AI spending rollout in general, and we say once again because every few months we get some iteration of the following report from Goldman published almost two years ago today…

… we have more bad news: according to a global survey by Bain, cost savings from automation are broadly falling short of projections. Which means that those expecting big savings from their investments in artificial intelligence, which is most companies, will be disappointed. 

The missed targets “should be making executives uncomfortable,” since many of them are approving increased spending for artificial intelligence on the basis of expected savings, the consulting firm said in a report shared exclusively with Bloomberg News. The problem is there are little actual savings to speak of. 

The survey, completed in April, was based on responses from executives at 951 companies with more than $100 million in revenue, across nine sectors: retail, technology, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, consumer products, energy, financial services, telecom/media/entertainment and insurance.

It found that among companies measuring their AI cost savings, the largest share (40%) realized reductions of 10% or less. Predictably, most had been expecting to see far more meaningful improvement, especially since they spent far more than that on the new technology. 

Here’s the part that Bain found the most troubling: 44% of large companies that are funding their next wave of AI spending are basing those investments on the last round of savings – savings that haven’t yet materialized. 

“The prior wave underdelivered. The savings pool is smaller than assumed,” Bain warned. “And the investment case for the current wave was sized against projections rather than actuals.” Kinda like the bubble in AI forward earnings: based on projections – which as any intern can tell you can flip on a dime – rather than actuals. 

“Self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline. In reality, it is a circular bet with a structural leak,” the firm cautioned, and concluded that “The technology worked. The value didn’t arrive.”

Whether driven by hope or FOMO or a blend of both, the AI boom is exposing divides between promise and reality. An MIT research report last year showed that 95% of corporate AI pilots fall flat and concluded that the “primary factor keeping organizations on the wrong side of the GenAI Divide is the learning gap, tools that don’t learn, integrate poorly, or match workflows.” 

So Bain’s latest survey wasn’t the first evidence of AI underdelivering so far on expectations. And it’s not likely the last either.

But the Bain report isolated a different problem: “Despite a decade of investments in data modernization running well into hundreds of billions of dollars globally, the No. 1 reason AI programs underperform is that companies cannot reliably get access to their own data,” Bain said.

“Companies that don’t validate their reinvestment math against what automation actually returned, rather than what it was supposed to return, are compounding risk rather than managing it” the Bain report concluded, confirming what many have already sensed: virtually nobody has done effective ROI analysis amid a technological rollout that has already soaked up more than $1 trillion in capital, the return on which appears to be modest at best. 

Bain’s prescription: Instead of waiting to structure all of their data to make it ingestible by AI, companies should start with what’s available to feed into the models, and then use AI to help sort out how to structure the rest.

Meanwhile, companies that were meeting their savings targets reported running into barriers with data structure and accessibility at even higher rates than those missing their targets, but they were less likely to report organizational challenges such as insufficient budgets or competing priorities.

Adding fuel to the fire, a comparable report from Gartner found that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. 

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” said Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. “This can blind organizations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production. They need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology.”

As such, Gartner recommends agentic AI only be pursued where it delivers clear value or ROI, noting that “Integrating agents into legacy systems can be technically complex, often disrupting workflows and requiring costly modifications. In many cases, rethinking workflows with agentic AI from the ground up is the ideal path to successful implementation.“

“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” said Verma. “They can start by using AI agents when decisions are needed, automation for routine workflows and assistants for simple retrieval. It’s about driving business value through cost, quality, speed and scale.” 

The problem, it now appears, is that virtually nobody has done an actual ROI analysis. But with token costs now soaring…

… the time has finally arrived, and as enterprises pull back in horror from the “great promise” of the agentic black hole, one can easily understand why both OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are extrapolating their burst in agentic revenue in perpetuity, are rushing to go public before the market once again does the ROI math.