Via American Greatness,

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has told members of the press that members of Congress should be focusing less on arresting and deporting illegal alien criminals and more on slavery reparations.

Johnson was asked on Thursday about whether he would he would honor an invitation to appear with a handful of U.S. mayors before the U.S. House Oversight Committee to testify about so-called “sanctuary cities” like Chicago, New York, Denver and Boston.

Rather than answering the question, Johnson chose to play the race card instead and went off on a diatribe about slavery, reparations and how the U.S. today represents “what our country would look like had the confederacy won.”

🚨 CHICAGO MAYOR DEFLECTS FROM ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION WITH SLAVERY TALK—BUT IGNORES REAL SLAVERY HAPPENING TODAY

• What Happened:
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson tried to dodge the illegal immigration crisis by ranting about colonization and slavery.
• Instead of addressing… pic.twitter.com/YqPj3oJ3PB

— Shred Newz (@Shreddick0) January 31, 2025

According to the Chicago City Wire, Johnson insisted that the Oversight Committee should be looking at the White House rather than cities like his which have promised to protect illegal immigrant criminals from federal efforts to arrest and deport them.

Echoing a familiar theme of identity politics, the Chicago mayor told reporters, “If they want to have a real discussion about (illegal aliens) who are criminals, they should look at the very individuals who enslaved my people and colonized this land.”

The Chicago mayor also had strong words about the newly sworn in Trump administration, saying, “That White House is being ran in one of the most raggedy forms of government that I have ever seen,” Johnson added, “I will not be intimidated by some weak individual who won’t stand up who believes he’s a supreme being right now.”

Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Jim Comer (R-KY) invited Johnson to testify on Feb 11 and told reporters that if Johnson refuses, he may subpoena the mayor to compel him to appear under the threat of being held in contempt of Congress.

In that letter, Comer wrote:

Sanctuary jurisdictions and their misguided and obstructionist policies hinder the ability of federal law enforcement officers to effectuate safe arrests and remove dangerous criminals from American communities, making Americans less safe. Chicago is a sanctuary jurisdiction that refuses to fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. To provide much needed oversight of this matter, the Committee requests documents and information related to the sanctuary policies of Chicago.

The mayors of Boston, Denver and New York were also invited to appear before the Oversight Committee to account for the impact of sanctuary jurisdictions and “their impact on public safety and the effectiveness of federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.”

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Let’s start with the tale of an Empire bragging to the wind.

Mr. Disco Inferno orders OPEC and OPEC+ to lower the price of oil, because, in his mind, that may solve the war in Ukraine – as in forcing Moscow to the table because of dwindling energy revenues.

That in itself summarizes the level of garbage being fed to POTUS by his cornucopia of acronyms passing for intel.

Trump at Davos:

“I’m going to ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down the cost of oil (…) If the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately. Right now, the price is high enough that that war will continue (…) With oil prices going down, I’ll demand that interest rates drop immediately. And, likewise, they should be dropping all over the world. Interest rates should follow us.”

Quite predictably, OPEC+ – basically run by Saudi Arabia and Russia – said Nyet. Apart from the fact they don’t care much about interest rates, on the energy front they’ll keep doing what they have planned to do, including soon decreasing production, but at acceptable levels.

Standard Chartered, a major player, noted that OPEC has limited power to end the war immediately by reducing the oil price, with OPEC ministers considering this attempt at “strategy” as very inefficient and costly.

So much for imperial diktats.

The Chihuahua Strategic Victory Plan

As highlighted before, the U.S. – via fracking – has enough gas for domestic consumption, but not enough to export en masse to the EU, because of liquification problems. That explains why even buying more American energy for exorbitant prices, the EU de facto remains largely dependent on Russian LNG – and non-U.S. sources – since the sabotage of the Nord Streams, unveiled in detail by Sy Hersh.

Even at full capacity, the Empire of Chaos simply cannot deliver all the gas the EU needs; add to it virtually no investment in both badly needed extra exploration plus the infrastructure necessary to meet increased EU demand.

On the domestic U.S. oil market, things do get positively Kafkaesque. U.S. trucking – a massive service industry – is dependent on imported Russian diesel, which needs to be mixed with Made in America oil in order to be suitable for trucks.

Now cut again to Davos, which came and went barely registering a blip. Toxic EC Medusa von der Leyen told Davos that Europe had “substantially reduced”, and “in record time”, its dependency on Russian fossil fuels.

Nonsense. Europe’s energy reality is bleak. Russian LNG from Novatek is currently priced at around $4.5–$4.7 per MMBtu. That’s more expensive than pipeline gas but still much (italics mine) cheaper than American LNG.

Every industry pro from the Persian Gulf to Antwerp knows that Europe is now importing Russian LNG like it never did before. That’s it – or a dry death. In parallel, Russia will triple its LNG supply capacity by 2035. End result: whatever those “energy commissioners” in Brussels may come up with, Russia will remain essential when it comes to European energy security.

There are no limits – even stratospheric – for Eurocracy stupidity, which corrodes the system like a plague. The Europeans not only have managed to shut off their own gas pipelines but are still “investigating” the Nord Stream de facto terror attack.

End result: they are now importing more (italics mine) Russian gas, but by different means, from third-party suppliers, and paying a fortune.

This is what can be described as the Chihuahua Strategic Victory Plan.

U.S. Treasury sanctions Mr. Disco Inferno

Russia’s LNG exports hit a record high last year, growing by 4% – and delivering 33.6 million tons. The monthly record was 3.25 million tons in December 2024 – 13.7% more than November.

The largest Russian exporter is Yamal LNG: 21.1 million tons, 6% more than in 2023.

Now cut to proverbial American rumble, in the form of Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt ordering the “full termination” of Russian gas exported to Europe.

To hell with what nations like Hungary, Austria and Slovakia may think – and do need.

Pyatt told the Atlantic Council, “Today we are the largest LNG exporter in the world, and by the end of the Trump administration, we will have doubled what we’re doing today […] The decision has clearly been made in Brussels to get to zero [gas supplies from Russia] by 2027…and the United States strongly supports that goal.”

Oh dear. Do these people even read the basic headlines?

As reported by Politico, the EU is “devouring” Russian gas at unprecedented levels since the start of 2025, importing 837,300 metric tons of LNG just in the first two weeks of the year.

The Ukraine transit deal was shut off for good – at least for now – starting on January 1st. The action now is on the maritime routes.

Enter the U.S. Treasury with a new – what else – sanctions package against Russian oil trade, targeting up to 5.8 million barrels a day shipped by sea.

As it stands, the global oil market is experiencing a surplus of about 0.8 million barrels a day. Oil prices for 2025 should remain at around $71 for a barrel of Brent crude (as it stands, it’s $76.2). Not exactly what Mr. Disco Inferno wants.

So let’s assume these 5.8 million barrels of Russian oil – under stiff sanctions – would vanish from the global market. In this case we would have oil prices skyrocketing to an average of $150 to $160 a barrel. Once again, not what Mr. Disco Inferno wants: he vociferously promised – and keeps promising – a MAGA oil superpower, while lowering oil prices to max $50 a barrel.

According to Russia’s 2025 budget, oil is priced at $65.9 a barrel.

If the U.S. Treasury manages to work its magic and “disappear” with those 5.8 million barrels, Russian revenues would go up to around $88.2 billion, even considering much lower exports.

High oil prices hurt American competitiveness. So somebody should tell Mr. Disco Inferno this U.S. Treasury gambit is actually more negative to Trumpian dreams than to Russia.

Across Eurasia, Russia is sitting pretty, especially with its BRICS partners. Power of Siberia to China is on a roll, and Power of Siberia II should start operating by 2030. A boost on LNG exports to Iran is a done deal – especially after the signing of the strategic partnership earlier this month.

This year a deal will also be signed in Russia to transport LNG to Afghanistan via tanker convoys. Next step will be Pipelineistan: perhaps, finally, the necessary steps to build a variant of TAPI (the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline, but with gas coming from Russia.

The biggest customer for Russian LNG, apart from China, is of course BRICS partner India. It’s in the interests of Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and India to have a stabilized Pakistan – not an Islamabad remote-controlled by Washington, as in the current setup – for the final opening of Russian LNG routes to India. That will happen, in time.

As for the European chihuahuas, enjoy your “strategic defeat” fantasies. Keep yapping – and buying Russian LNG.

They’ve hacked everything else in the U.S., so why would we be surprised to find out that patient health data collected by Chinese-made health monitors was being sent, via ‘backdoor’ to China. 

Now China has access to Janet Yellen’s photos (god we hope there’s no nudes) and your blood pressure on a random Tuesday. 

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that Contec CMS8000, a widely used patient monitoring device, contains a backdoor that transmits patient data to a remote IP and downloads executable files, according to BleepingComputer.

Contec, a China-based healthcare tech company, produces various medical devices. CISA was alerted by an external researcher and, after testing the device’s firmware, found unusual network traffic linking to a hard-coded external IP tied to a university, not the company.

CISA discovered a backdoor in Contec CMS8000 firmware, enabling remote execution and full control of patient monitors. The device also secretly transmits patient data to a hard-coded IP upon startup, with no logs to alert administrators.

Though CISA withheld details, BleepingComputer linked the IP to a Chinese university, and the same address appears in other medical devices, including a pregnancy monitor. The FDA confirmed the backdoor also exists in Epsimed MN-120 monitors, rebranded versions of Contec CMS8000.

The BleepingComputer report says:

On analyzing the firmware, CISA found that one of the device’s executables, ‘monitor,’ contains a backdoor that issues a series of Linux commands that enable the device’s network adapter (eth0) and then attempts to mount a remote NFS share at the hard-coded IP address belonging to the university.

The NFS share is mounted at /mnt/ and the backdoor recursively copies the files from the /mnt/ folder to the /opt/bin folder.

The backdoor will continue to copy files from /opt/bin to the /opt folder and, when done, unmount the remote NFS share.

“Though the /opt/bin directory is not part of default Linux installations, it is nonetheless a common Linux directory structure,” explains CISA’s advisory.

CISA warned: “Generally, Linux stores third-party software installations in the /opt directory and thirdparty binaries in the /opt/bin directory. The ability to overwrite files within the /opt/bin directory provides a powerful primitive for remotely taking over the device and remotely altering the device configuration.”

“Additionally, the use of symbolic links could provide a primitive to overwrite files anywhere on the device filesystem. When executed, this function offers a formidable primitive allowing for a third-party operating at the hard-coded IP address to potentially take full control of the device remotely.”

You can read more of the technicals on the backdoor here. Oh, and go ahead and keep plugging your personal data into Deepseek, we’re sure that’s just fine. 

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

Prosecutors on Jan. 31 arrested a former senior Federal Reserve advisor, accusing him of stealing trade secrets from the agency that could allow China to manipulate the U.S. market.

John Harold Rogers, 63, worked for 11 years as a senior advisor for the international finance division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the main governing body for the U.S. central bank.

A federal indictment alleged that Rogers began working with Chinese conspirators since at least 2018. The Chinese handlers worked for the Chinese intelligence and security apparatus and posed as graduate students at a Chinese university, according to the filing.

Rogers, in the collaboration, allegedly solicited trade-secret information that included proprietary economic data sets, China tariff deliberations, and briefing books for specific board governors. He also allegedly solicited internal discussions and forthcoming announcements from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a 12-member body consisting of the seven Federal Reserve board of governors, the New York Federal Reserve Bank president, and four of the remaining 11 Reserve Bank presidents that rotate on an annual basis.

Such confidential information is economically valuable, prosecutors noted. By knowing in advance U.S. economic policy, such as federal funds rate changes, China can gain an advantage in selling or buying U.S. bonds and securities in a manner not unlike insider trading, prosecutors said in a Department of Justice (DOJ) statement.

The Federal Reserve’s international finance division is in charge of basic research, policy analysis, and reporting of areas such as foreign economic activity, U.S. trade and capital outflow, and developments in international financial markets and institutions, the agency’s website states.

Rogers is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and with making false statements. A judge ordered Rogers to be held until a detention hearing on Feb. 4, a spokesperson from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington told The Epoch Times. The charges carry a total of 20 years in prison on top of up to $5 million in fines.

“Let this indictment serve as a warning to all who seek to betray or exploit the United States: law enforcement will find you and hold you accountable,” said interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Edward Martin, who President Donald Trump appointed minutes after taking office on Jan. 20.

FBI assistant director in charge, David Sundberg, said his agency aims to protect U.S. national security interests.

“The Chinese Communist Party has expanded its economic espionage campaign to target U.S. government financial policies and trade secrets in an effort to undermine the U.S. and become the sole superpower,” he said in the DOJ statement.

Ed Martin speaks at an event in Washington on June 13, 2023. Martin is the current U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP Photo

Meetings Under Another Purpose

One of the Chinese handlers, identified in the indictment as co-conspirator 1, presented himself as a graduate student at China’s Shandong University of Finance and Economics who was interested in learning about sensitive U.S. fiscal policy to benefit the eastern Chinese province. He approached Rogers in May 2013 after creating an email that he used almost exclusively with Rogers and a handful of Rogers’s associates, according to the document. When Rogers shared that he was beginning a new project with a Chinese co-author on monetary policy, the co-conspirator allegedly invited Rogers to visit his research institute, offering to cover his airfare and hotel on the trip.

Court documents allege that Rogers took up the offer and visited China twice in 2017, telling the co-conspirator, on his second trip, that he wanted to stay in the same hotel, saying “That place was great!”

The co-conspirator purported to be working on an essay around May 2018 and requested information about the Federal Reserve’s policy measures and timetable, including its responses to China-related issues, the indictment alleges.

Rogers emailed his colleagues for input, including U.S.–China trade issues, Federal Reserve staff’s thinking on exchange rates, and views on the market-clearing price of the Chinese currency, prosecutors said. He boarded a Shanghai-bound flight days after. On May 10, 2018, Rogers emailed one document his colleague sent him to the co-conspirator, the indictment shows.

That September, the two began to discuss their meetings in more veiled terms, according to prosecutors.

At Rogers’s request, they allegedly described those activities as classes so they would appear “legitimate in the eyes of the Fed,” prosecutors noted.

Between then and February 2022, they discussed hosting about a dozen such classes in Chinese hotel rooms, according to message records the investigators intercepted.

Some of these meetings focused on forecasting Federal Reserve policy trends. One of them, initiated in late November 2018, was titled “the trend of U.S. monetary policy in 2019,” according to the indictment. The Chinese co-conspirator, the filing said, asked for an “official fed statement and presentation from current FOMC members.”

The “topic is perfect,” Rogers allegedly responded. He emailed a colleague for the “most straightforward way of accessing” Federal Reserve’s forecast data, as far back as 1994, the prosecutors said.

Rogers allegedly held the said “class” on Dec. 10, 2018, with a man identified as “Jack,” before meeting the Chinese co-conspirator for dinner. On Dec. 20, 2018, a day after a Fed interest rate hike, Rogers allegedly wrote to the co-conspirator alerting him to the change.

The Chinese co-conspirator’s response indicates Rogers had discussed the issue during the earlier meeting.

“Aha, just like what we talked about at dinner,” the co-conspirator wrote, according to the court document.

The pair talked about setting up three more “classes” in Shanghai and Beijing to cover “how the Fed will shrink the balance-sheet in 2019” and the U.S. economic situation in the first half of 2019 in the following months, according to the federal filing.

On June 19, 2019, five days after Rogers flew to Beijing for one of the meetings, the Federal Reserve announced it wouldn’t cut rates but cut the word “patient” in describing the monetary policy outlook, a hint for future actions.

“Same as you predicted!” the co-conspirator allegedly wrote to Rogers.

Rogers allegedly obtained or attempted to access at least six trade secrets for Chinese officials, according to the indictment. Among them were a briefing book dated October 2018 titled “International Economic Topics”; summary and assessment of a European Central Bank announcement dated March 7, 2019, labeled sensitive; a sensitive June 6, 2019 document that contains briefing notes to the Federal Reserve board, and spreadsheets containing proprietary information from the board, according to prosecutors.

The filing alleged that Rogers obtained the board governor’s briefing book, which contained a bold red warning “do not disseminate,” from a colleague by stating it was for his personal use as a “concrete example of ‘information flow.’”

Against his colleague’s request, Rogers allegedly forwarded the document to his personal account, court documents note. Rogers, in October 2018, also allegedly sent internal files on trade policy uncertainty and U.S. investment to the Chinese co-conspirator.

Rogers denied his China ties when the Federal Reserve Board Office of Inspector General investigated in February 2020. Asked in a recorded interview whether he had shared restricted board information with anyone outside of the board, Rogers allegedly responded, “Never.”

He insisted that he had refused money from the Chinese co-conspirator, according to the indictment.

“I set them straight. Don’t put this money in front of me,” he was quoted as saying.

The pair’s connection apparently continued after that, prosecutors say.

In February 2022, the co-conspirator messaged Rogers, inviting him and his wife to Shandong’s Qingdao City for a “class,” the court filing said.

“All related expenses will be covered by us, and we can pay for the class,” the co-conspirator allegedly said.

It’s unclear how or if Rogers responded to the message. But in August 2023, investigators said, Rogers emailed his former colleagues still with the Federal Reserve Board and asked for two internal Excel spreadsheets.

In 2023, Rogers was paid approximately $450,000 as a part-time professor at a Chinese university, according to the DOJ.

Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people from the internet using dating apps?

Well, look no further. Australia’s News.com.au profiled one such person this week, a young worker inside of a “mass scamming call center”. 

The person, named “Beard”, said that he “fled war-torn Syria for Dubai” and was desperately looking for work. Thinking he landed an advertising role, he told news.com.au he found himself at a “bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport”.

He was eventually held captive and forced to scam people for a living, the report says. 

Then he became part of a large-scale “pig butchering” romance scam operation, designed to swindle unsuspecting victims out of their money. News.com.au said this type of fraud devastates thousands of Australians annually.

Beard worked night shifts, 12 hours a day, six days a week, pretending to be a woman named Annie to deceive victims. The scam center housed over 1,000 workers, mostly foreign migrants from Africa and India, all controlled by a Chinese-run syndicate. Workers were confined to the premises, only leaving to buy food from vendors serving the scammers.

Victims, already catfished on dating apps, believed they were chatting with a woman who led a glamorous lifestyle. Beard’s job was to extract financial information and convince them to invest in cryptocurrency.

“It’s not the important information I give them,” he explained. “It’s the important information I got out of them.”

A real woman, half-Turkish, half-Ukrainian, was employed to take brief video calls to reassure victims they weren’t being scammed. “She had a line of people waiting for her to also talk to other victims.”

Beard typically juggled 12 victims at once before handing them over to another team that finalized the scam, the report said.

Despite working inside the operation, Beard never scammed anyone. Instead, he deliberately stalled conversations and warned victims about the risks of crypto investments.

Inspired by YouTube scam-buster Jim Browning, he secretly sent videos and photos from inside the scam center. When he finally decided to leave, he tricked the scammers into letting him go by claiming he needed to return home.

After he left, the scam center eventually shut down.

“The joke is that these scams gave me an incentive to work for them,” he concluded. “Like I had a bed, Wi-Fi, electricity, and water all covered. If someone gets a legal job with worse conditions, they’d be incentivized to go back to the scam centers.”

Authored by Connor Vasile via RealClearPolitics.com,

Despite his best efforts at saber-rattling, Colombia’s socialist president Gustavo Petro bent the knee and agreed to take in American deportation flights carrying Colombian nationals, after only a day of receiving tariff threats from President Donald Trump.

While America and Colombia have been long-time partners in coordinating anti-narcotics efforts, newly elected President Trump hit a sore spot this past Sunday after he commenced deportation flights to the South American country. While world leaders reasonably expected Trump to execute his immigration policy the moment he stepped back into the Oval Office, this knee-jerk resistance from Petro only exposes the corrupt and unbalanced relationship the United States has had with Colombia for the past four years under the Biden-Harris administration.

Under Biden, South and Central American countries had a free pass to send their citizens, freed criminals, and other migrants to America’s doorstep without repercussions. For the past four years, the Biden administration wrote a blank check to allow any and all migrants into our nation, without even a background check. This has led to a swelling of migrant gangs such as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, which has been busy at work committing violent crime – including murders and rapes – on American soil. Thanks to Biden’s “humanitarian policy,” countries like Venezuela have emptied their prisons and have encouraged migrants to pass through with the promise of attaining the “American dream” in the form of free cell phones, food, and even housing at the expense of the American taxpayer. There’s one issue: Trump is back.

With U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramping up deportation efforts of violent illegal aliens, the countries which for so long have benefited from the Democrats’ open-border approach are now forced to address the migrant crisis and take back the citizens they’ve abandoned time and time again. Colombia’s Petro is one of the first to actively resist Trump’s efforts to repatriate Colombian citizens, announcing: “From today on, Colombia is open to the entire world, with open arms.” Petro also tweeted out: “The U.S. cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals,” and “We are the opposite of the Nazis.”

Trump responded, declaring that an immediate 25% tariff on “all goods” coming into the States from Colombia will be enacted; in one week’s time, the tariff would be raised to 50%. Petro responded in the like, announcing his own 25% tax on American goods, if Trump keeps to his word: “Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world.”

The Inconvenient Truth: Tariffs Are Effective

Despite Petro’s poetic declarations, it appears he is all bark and no bite; within 24 hours of sparring with President Trump, Petro bent the knee and agreed to take in America’s deportation flights, ensuring that Colombia will, “facilitate the dignified return of the compatriots who were to arrive in the country this morning from deportation flights … [th]is measure responds to the Government’s commitment to guarantee decent conditions.”

In fact, Trump’s tariff threat was so effective, Petro quickly agreed to all of Trump’s terms regarding facilitating deportation efforts; so much for being “open to the entire world.”

Petro even offered his own presidential plane to pick up migrants in Honduras in a good faith effort not to disrespect American sovereignty again.

This nimble victory on migration policy isn’t just a nod to how effective Trump’s diplomatic strategy is on the world’s stage. It also highlights a fear establishment politicians and the legacy media have been dreading: Protectionism works.

While the talking heads of CNN, CNBC, NBC and others are quick to fear-monger and forecast the potential price hikes associated with hypothetical tariffs on foreign goods, they conveniently ignore one important aspect of announcing tariffs: leverage.

For the past four years, America has been the world’s laughing-stock. Under Biden, we have experienced war in Ukraine, renewed Chinese efforts to invade Taiwan, the funding of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and blatant spying on American soil. The world has taken American for granted, betting on a weak and ineffective commander in chief to do their bidding and continuously fund their morally questionable policies.

Protectionism Will Be a Diplomatic Strategy, Not an Economic One

With Trump back in the picture, the threat of tariffs shows that America means business after four long years of inept (and absent) leadership. While academics, “classical liberals,” and politicians decry Trump’s use of tariffs as “anti-democratic,” they fail to address tariffs in action. Trump needed only to voice the possibility of tariffs if Colombia did not take back its own citizens. Petro knows better than to spar head-to-head with Trump, as do most other world leaders; the threat of tariffs is sufficient to get countries to step in line. No actual tariffs need to be put in place if American foreign policy is respected. Colombia is the textbook case: Trump rescinded his order after Petro conceded.

In short, tariffs signal to allies and adversaries alike that we are serious about our policies and expect others to pay their fair share. Where have we heard this before?

China seems to already be following suit, having recently agreed to take back illegal immigrants in the wake of potential Trump tariffs.

Protectionism is back, but in a different way: It will be used to remind the world that it should respect America for the billions of taxpayer dollars the federal government disperses every year to subsidize foreign industries. Countries can no longer profit carte blanche off of an American welfare state. If they want fair and free trade relations with the United States, they must do their part to collaborate on important foreign policy matters like the repatriation of their own citizens. They should look to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and his success for inspiration.

Play fairly, or pay the price, it’s as simple as that. It’s what’s equitable in the end, anyway.

Only a few days ago the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, was questioning with some skepticism whether or not Donald Trump would actually follow through on his threats of 25% tariffs on most Mexican-made goods.  “We don’t think it’s going to happen,” Sheinbaum said at her regular morning press conference. “And if it does happen, we also have our plan.”

As of the 1st of February it appears that her doubts have been put to rest.  Donald Trump has reiterated that he is going to stick to his tariff plan and that it will not be incremental.  Around 80% of all Mexican exports go to the US, which means that the majority of their manufacturing base will be immediately hit with a drop in US retail demand.  Mexican business leaders say this will trigger a number of bankruptcies and higher unemployment in border cities.  

Sheinbam claims in a recent press conference that she has a ‘Plan A, Plan B and Plan C’ in the face of high tariffs, but what does she really mean?  What would Mexico’s response be, specifically?

First and foremost, Sheinbaum has threatened retaliatory tariffs on US exports to Mexico, her “Plan A”.  Around 15% of US exports end up south of the border, however, Mexico is far more export dependent than the US.  Only 10% of the US economy is based on exports while 43% of Mexico’s economy relies on exports according to the World Bank.  In other words, tariffs will hurt them a lot more than they’ll hurt America.  

Like most establishment media economists, Mexico also argues that the US consumer will have to eat the inflation in prices that comes with tariffs.  This is assuming, though, that there are no alternatives to the Mexican goods being imported.  Car parts, electrical equipment, oil and gas, fruits and vegetables are a few of the biggest markets for Mexican goods.  The US produces close to 90% of the food that Americans purchase and Trump has indicated that energy may be exempt from tariffs.

The Mexican President’s Plan B and Plan C are not so clear.  It is likely that Sheinbaum will seek aid from other Latin American governments, either to establish economic agreements to help lessen the pain of US tariffs, or as a means to put pressure on Trump through organized geopolitical sparring.  Most of these countries also have favorable trade imbalances with the US and none of them hold much international weight. 

The real leverage that Mexico has in harming the US is through mass immigration, which siphons hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars, untold billions in untaxed wages, untold billions in subsidies, hundreds of millions in foreign aid each year that’s meant to stop immigration – The list goes on and on.  Then there’s the inflation in housing and goods caused by the extra demand of tens-of-millions of illegals, along with the wage depletion caused by foreign workers taking around 30% less pay than the average American worker.

Of course, Mexico has already been allowing illegal immigrants to flood into the US for decades, so it’s not much of a threat anymore.

Mexico’s response to Trump’s tariffs will be to capitulate, the only question is how long will it take them to realize that this is their only option.  Sheinbaum behaves like most leftists/socialists in that she is often sarcastic, petulant and unruly in her rhetoric, but it’s all a show.  Once Mexico understands that their prosperity is entirely contingent on US benevolence, they will fold and then act like victims.  

Victims of normal trade restrictions and normal border laws that they have violated for years while feeding parasitically off the US.     

Authored by Fred Fleitz via American Greatness,

Former CIA Director John Brennan is angry that President Trump signed an executive order last week lifting his security clearances.

The president took this action because Brennan was one of 51 former intelligence officers who meddled in the 2020 presidential election by signing a letter they knew falsely claimed a damaging press story about a laptop owned by President Biden’s son Hunter was Russian disinformation.

Brennan indignantly asserted in an MSNBC interview that President Trump’s action was “bizarre” and said he misrepresented the laptop letter, claiming that based on their intelligence experience, the signatories were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

Brennan also said he needs to hold security clearances as a former intelligence officer so administration officials can consult with him on national security matters.

Brennan’s objections are absurd and justify the President’s executive order.

Brennan’s claims defending the laptop letter are patently false. The 51 former intelligence officers did not sign the letter as a well-intentioned initiative to warn the American people about a possible Russian attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. They knew this wasn’t true.

We know this because one of the principal organizers of the letter, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, testified during an investigation by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees about the letter’s purpose:

“There were two intents. One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue, and two, it was to help Vice President Biden.”

The House investigation also found that the letter signers were informed “of the intent of the statement prior to its publication, writing that the statement was meant to insulate Vice President Biden from serious electoral vulnerabilities created by his family’s influence peddling activities.”

This means there can be no doubt the laptop letter was an attempt by the 51 former intelligence officers to misuse their intelligence careers to provide political cover for Biden from damaging information that could have cost him the election.

They knowingly misled the American people to give Biden a talking point to discredit the laptop story during the final presidential debate, held on October 22, 2020.

There can be no doubt John Brennan knew about all of this.

Brennan also made the preposterous argument that he only held security clearances as a former CIA officer so he could be a resource for the U.S. government. He said in an MSNBC interview:

“The only reason I still had a clearance, as I have had for years since leaving government service, was for the benefit of the government. It was to facilitate classified discussions, should the CIA or any agency need to consult with me or other former directors and members of the intelligence community.”

I don’t doubt that the deeply incompetent Biden administration sought counsel on classified national security matters from disgraced former intelligence officers like John Brennan. However, there is zero chance that anyone in the second Trump administration will ever consult someone like Brennan on any issue.

Brennan omitted the real reason he and most other laptop letter signers held security clearances after they left their intelligence jobs—to make money.

High-level security clearances can be very lucrative for former U.S. government employees because they enable them to obtain highly paid contracts and jobs with defense firms and Beltway consulting companies that do business with intelligence and defense agencies. After intelligence officers retire, many retain their security clearances and return to their old offices as highly paid contractors.

Since resigning as CIA director in January 2017, John Brennan has worked for or advised several defense and intelligence contractors.

He served as Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC).

In addition, at least two signers of the Hunter Biden laptop letter, Michael Morell and Jeremy Bash, reportedly have made vast amounts of money working with “special purpose acquisition companies” (SPACs) created to cash in on surging investments by U.S. intelligence agencies in emerging technologies.

Holding a U.S. government security clearance after an intelligence officer resigns is not an entitlement, as John Brennan has implied. It is a privilege that should only be extended when it is in the interest of the U.S. government. Former intelligence officers who use their profession to meddle in elections and mislead the American people undermine our democracy and the U.S. Intelligence Community. They do not deserve the privilege of holding post-employment security clearances.

The Hunter Biden laptop letter scandal also has shed light on the corrupt practice of senior intelligence officers maneuvering to keep their security clearances to enrich themselves after they leave government service and not to promote the security of the United States. The Trump administration must investigate and reform this corrupt practice to ensure that only a limited number of former intelligence officers are permitted to retain their security clearances for urgent national security reasons and on a time-limited basis.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and the other signers of the Hunter Biden laptop letter betrayed their country and their professions by misleading the American people to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. They should not only be stripped of their security clearances but also barred access to all U.S. government national security buildings and facilities.

CIA employees should never again bump into John Brennan in the agency cafeteria.

David Asher, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the lead investigator of the State Department’s Covid-19 origins investigation during President Trump’s first term, appeared on Sky News on Tuesday. Asher disclosed that Australian spy agencies had previously collected signals intelligence concerning the origins of the virus in Wuhan, China. 

What Asher means by signals intelligence is the interception of voice, text, and other communications (e.g., phone calls, emails, and radio transmissions). Australian spy agencies conducted much of this in Asia, which the CIA later obtained. 

“I never thought the intel picture based on human intelligence, which is what the CIA has, but it was reasonably clear based on the reactions of senior Chinese leaders that something terrible had gone wrong inside Wuhan, specifically inside the Wuhan Institute of Urology and perhaps also the Wuhan University and the CDC … they shared certain programs together,” Asher told Sky News host Sharri Markson. 

He said, “I think there will be much more coming out – with CIA Director John Ratcliffe – who you interviewed previously – is adamant about declassifying information or releasing information that is already declassified. There is going to be signals intelligence and how much of that makes its way out – just trust me – there was a lot of it.” 

Sky News Markson asked Asher: “What do you mean by signals intelligence that hasn’t come out yet?” 

“Just picking up phone calls, picking up the emails, things like that … just messages between different people, I can’t comment on what they are, but it’s no secret we do this. Much of our collection is actually done in Australia, as you know,” Asher responded. 

He continued: “So your government is fully aware, which is another reason why they are really puzzled and dismayed that the Australian government, which has the same information … as we do, has been so passive, especially given the fact that your Prime Minister originally came out and said that we had to have an investigation.”

“It’s just sort of pathetic if you ask me,” Asher noted, who was referring to Western governments burying the Covid lab leak theory during the Biden-Harris administration. 

Asher’s interview with the Australian media outlet came shortly after the CIA released an assessment identifying the Wuhan lab as the most likely origin of Covid. It only took a change in administration for this conclusion to be made public. Our view is that the CIA knew all along – with high confidence – about lab origins. Meanwhile, former FBI Director Christopher Wray stated in 2023 that the virus “most likely” originated from the Wuhan lab.

Yet during President Biden’s first term, the radical leftists in the administration deployed the taxpayer-funded censorship blob to combat lab origins and maintain the official gov’t narrative that Covid originated naturally. 

Recall Zero Hedge was temporarily banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Google over ‘Covid conspiracy theories’ (when we first suggested in January 2020 that the fact there was a Level 4 virus lab in Wuhan.

Plus this.

And this. 

FAUCI DECRIES POLITICAL POLARIZATION IMPEDING U.S. COVID-19 RESPONSE: MEDIA pic.twitter.com/OIMiNbpNVA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 26, 2022

Asher also noted in the interview that Biden’s failure to disclose the true origin of Covid to the American people “is another indication how much Biden was in the pocket of the Chinese government.” 

Biden’s “financial interests with the Chinese are far greater than anyone ever understood. I think there’s going to be some sort of Department of Justice investigation related to that and as well as there is a congressional investigation going on,” Asher said. (hence the pardons)…

This is what federal investigators are looking at… 

Was Biden China’s Manchurian Candidate The Entire Time? https://t.co/NdxEXldOXt

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 21, 2025

Asher’s full interview: 

A mandate the American people gave Trump is transparency. Hopefully, that extends to Covid origins, ensuring accountability for those who funded and caused the pandemic so the world can move forward. Perhaps that’s why Trump is reportedly preparing to sign an executive order banning federal funding of gain-of-function research. 

This is a dark day in American history — at the State Department we knew something very bad was happening with an emerging pandemic in China, which the Chinese Communist Government refused to even discuss with us. However in retrospect, it is shocking that our own government… https://t.co/CC9h3A1rpm

— David Asher (@dasher8090) February 1, 2025

. . . 

Authored by G.B. Rango via Pirate Wires (emphasis ours),

The stadium is aroar with eighty thousand raucous attendees and casts a short shadow in the midday sun.

In the distance, peppered specks rise from nests unseen before gathering over the horizon like iron filings in a magnetic field.

Small payload drones, hundreds of them, race balefully forward; the orchestrated swarm twists and folds in hivelike unison as it approaches its target.

In response, nearer to the stadium, another group of drones ascends in concert and rushes to meet its hostile counterpart. The confrontation is swift, and casually anticlimactic, with only a few citygoers caring to notice the whir of propellers or the hissing and buzzing of the interceptors’ high-powered microwave pulses. The sky is clear once again, and the game goes on uninterrupted. This emergence and facile neutralization of drone threats is commonplace here, in a potential future.

This cross-section of a shocking and indeterminate future, and those to follow, are meant to demonstrate, and warn of, the transformational nature of an imminent drone-age shift. The widespread adoption of UAV technology, piggybacked on the inexorable AI surge, will significantly repaint both international power relations and the daily lives of regular people in a manner that few understand. With foresight, or the lack thereof, we will shape the trajectory of inevitable drone developments that are going to permeate every pore of society — from agriculture and medicine to policing and national security. Considering the possible ways in which this strange tapestry of a drone-led future might be stitched together is essential to remaining ahead of the proverbial eight ball. The alternative, ceding control to the whims of fate and chaos and bellicose adversaries, is untenable.

INFRASTRUCTURE & AGRICULTURE

Infrastructure development will undergo drastic change with the advent of advanced and ubiquitous drone technology. Construction sites strangely devoid of human laborers — instead populated by powerful heavy-lift drones, nimble inspector craft, and bipedal robots — will be more productive, efficient, and safe than ever before. Gargantuan cranes with arms outstretched, fresh metal glinting through measured pivots, rotate powerfully over the earth. These monumental, industrial beings are autonomous, assisted by dozens of seeing-eye drones whose data feeds into a shared machine intelligence. Despite these eventualities, the demand for human capital in the construction industry will not necessarily diminish; in fact, it might even become a bottleneck. Small handfuls of foremen will be able to run entire projects on their own, aided by autonomous systems, meaning that the number of concurrent structures being raised will be limited only by regulatory obstacles and the availability of these human overseers.

These scalable, autonomous construction sites remain the domain of the near future, with current drone technology focused primarily on the planning, inspection, and maintenance of infrastructure projects. Inspection of buildings, bridges, dams, and other structures is made safer, faster, and cheaper: no climbing, no unseemly scaffolding, no dangling humans. Drones can cut the cost of bridge inspections in half (a third of bridges in the U.S. currently need repairs) and reduce the need for construction rework by 80 percent. Issues like cracks, corrosion, and foundational weakness can be detected early by autonomous drones equipped with LiDAR sensors and ultrasonic probes, preventing small problems from snowballing into economic or human disasters. Sites will soon be equipped with their own stationed drones, autonomous and self-charging, that monitor infrastructural health continuously and provide project managers with real-time status updates.

In the coming age, farms will not sleep when the sun goes down; drones will work around the clock to protect crop yields and monitor livestock. Rustic family barns sitting bare on flat plains will look like nocturnal beehives, with luminous agents approaching for payloads before dutifully buzzing back into the dark. These small flying machines will flit nonstop through thousands of crop-rowed acres, addressing issues like pest treatment, disease, and water shortage on the individual-plant level. UAVs equipped with thermal sensors will both identify and quarantine sick animals to minimize spread. Others will surveil the property for thieves, monitor perimeter fencing for repair needs, and ferry supplies — like coils of fencing wire, small fuel tanks, and medicine — across the farm. On a more macro level, specialized atmospheric drones engaged in air quality monitoring and pollution research will gather data useful for, among other things, the optimization of land management. In 2023, Pirate Wires interviewed Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker, a company using cloud-seeding drones to increase rainfall over targeted areas like farms and watersheds. The reanimation of long-dead sci-fi dreams such as this will be a not infrequent occurrence.

Agricultural drones, leveraging techniques like precision spraying, have already reduced chemical usage by 47,000 metric tons and saved over two hundred million metric tons of water. Spot treatment by drones also increases yields, with one Washington farm reducing insect damage by 80 percent. Less conventional use cases, including herding livestock, picking fruit, and planting 40,000 reforestation seeds in a single day, are also on the rise. In locales where bees prove insufficient, drones are even beginning to serve as replacement mechanical pollinators. Falling variable costs and lower labor requirements will reframe global discussions about food scarcity, immigration, and agricultural subsidies, with smaller farms able to efficiently manage much larger plots of land and alter existing economic power structures. All told, the agricultural drone market is projected to reach $30 billion in annual revenue by 2030, radically reshaping food supply chains.

EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES

Consider also the impact that drone technology will have on emergency medical services. Imagine interstate traffic that is bumper-to-bumper for miles, futile beeping coming from some handful of the thousands of cars stuck in an inescapable, inchwise stop-and-go. One of these, an ambulance, is carrying a heart designated for a pediatric patient who, after waiting months for an organ match, will likely die without it. The child’s new heart must arrive within four hours of procurement to be viable, the sooner the better. Seeing the unexpected delay, the ambulance team quickly packs the organ into a secure payload and dispatches a quadcopter transport drone to the destination hospital. In all likelihood, hospitals of the future will preempt this obstacle entirely: traffic-monitoring drones will have already predicted the jam and apprised the hospital of the situation, at which point a UAV will fly high above the chaos and deliver the heart directly.

Over 46,000 organ transplants were conducted in the United States in 2023. Quicker transport times are associated with better patient outcomes, and the sort of major delay described above is not unheard of: In 2023, a pro-Gaza-ceasefire protest on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge blocked all westbound traffic for four hours. Three UCSF organ transplant deliveries were significantly delayed, one of which had to be rerouted over the Golden Gate Bridge. One transplant surgeon at UCSF noted that two other large transplant centers in the Bay Area, Stanford and CPMC, were “probably suffering from the same issues as well.” While no known complications have been directly attributed to the protest, the proliferation of drone technology will completely eliminate the transport-delay risks posed by such scenarios. Only three transplanted organs to date have been drone-delivered, a kidney in 2019 and a pair of lungs in 2021, but this will soon become standard protocol.

Remote and impoverished regions also stand to increasingly benefit from medical applications of this sort of drone transport technology: Zipline, an autonomous logistics company, partnered with both the Rwandan and Ghanaian governments to create large UAV distribution networks for blood, vaccines, and other medical supplies. The medical drone-delivery network in Rwanda alone has completed over 500,000 flights to date. India is already using drones to deliver medical supplies to areas in the Himalayas which are otherwise difficult to reach (between five and ten percent of India’s government-run primary healthcare centers are “nearly inaccessible” and prone to obstruction by natural disasters). Initiatives like these will expand globally to all similarly afflicted parts of the world.

SEARCH & RESCUE

In the relatively well-infrastructured United States, payload drones soaring over untamed terrain and conquering natural barriers to access are more relevant in search and rescue applications. A man lies at the bottom of a ravine, teeth gritted at the sight of wet, white bone protruding from his right shin. Looking up, he sees a sky crowded out by towering oaks. Listening, he hears only bird calls and the endless buzzing of insects. He knows that he is alone, and that he may remain that way for quite some time. His pack drone, a small but heavy-lift quadcopter that transports supplies between camping spots, soon notes that he did not arrive at the next checkpoint and sends for help. Hikers like these, lost or injured beneath densely forested mountain trails, will be quickly found by autonomous drone swarms, each unit communicating with the others to ensure that all ground is covered. Once the hiker is located, but before rescuers are able to arrive, drones will perform a condition assessment and rapidly retrieve any necessary interim supplies like water or bandaging.

Maritime efforts will work similarly, with larger boats serving as bases of operation for smaller drone swarms that can expand radially outward and aid in the geographic process of elimination. Larger Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with multi-day endurance will work in concert with these teams to survey vast areas of open sea for survivors and identify points of interest. The U.S. Coast Guard is already in the process of procuring these sorts of drones for both rescue and defense applications, awarding Shield AI, a company building cutting-edge drones (and the AI pilots that fly them), a $200 million contract for their V-BAT systems.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which struck in the fall of 2024, serve as a relevant example of current drone involvement in the provision of American emergency services. Drones were pivotal in the preparation for and response to these disasters, collecting storm data pre-landfall and assisting with search and rescue in the aftermath. As reported by Commercial UAV News, Anduril’s Altius-600 and Blackswift’s S0 were both deployed alongside Saildrone vehicles to gather critical preparatory data from the storms while they were still moving over the ocean. In North Carolina, after the devastation brought by Helene, UAVs with thermal imaging capabilities assisted with the location of people in distress. Even private drone operators stepped up: Jeff Clack of Bestway Ag, an agricultural tech company whose offerings include DJI drones, took matters into his own hands and used “heavy-lift drones to deliver… supplies to about 100 people who were cut off.”

FIREFIGHTING

In cases of search and rescue involving fires, UAVs that are able to navigate through heavy smoke and withstand extremely high temperatures will assist with the location and safe extraction of victims. Dealing directly with the prevention and extinguishing of wildfires will also look very different in the drone-led future: careful autonomous surveillance of fire-prone land by sophisticated UAVs will allow firefighting teams to put isolated blazes out before they spread uncontrollably. Drones are already useful for the execution and management of controlled burns, an important preventive measure, and will become increasingly so as the technology develops and is more widely adopted. During crisis scenarios, understanding the positional movement and relative hot spots of wildfires via drone-captured, real-time data allows firefighters and governments to make better tactical decisions.

Meanwhile, in the city, smoke billows from the southern face of a glass-paneled highrise, pouring outward into the sky through a window in its upper third. Rising up parallel to the structure are two thin shapes, each connected to a line which trails it like a string on a balloon. A small, unmanned helicopter rapidly enters stage left, already matching the elevation of the fire, and pauses for a moment before launching cryogenic projectiles into the blaze, recoiling with the force. The two hose-connected drones arrive seconds later and begin spraying fire-suppressing foam into the building’s opening. They then enter the site and search for survivors. The spread has been successfully contained, damage has been minimized, and no fatalities are reported.

This scene, soon to recur in all developed metropolises, is nowhere near a reality in the United States. In China, however, leaps have already been made in the development and implementation of these sorts of drones. For example, in the Shaanxi province, three hose-connected drones were used to put out a multi-story building fire (whether or not this was a pre-ordained test situation is uncertain). The Chinese Aerial Scooter Drone can rise two hundred meters in thirty seconds before launching fire-suppressing dry-powder bombs. XCMG Group’s AP35/G2 UAV can carry a payload of over a hundred pounds, in addition to towing foam hoses, and has been put to use in both forest fire and highrise settings.

In America? Fire-department use of drones is almost exclusively limited to the realms of surveillance and intelligence-gathering. In the wake of the recent Los Angeles fires, which have reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least twenty-four people and wreaked over $250 billion of economic damage, this lack of progress is even more concerning. Compounding this international delta is the fact that, across all “U.S. public-safety agencies,” ninety percent of drones in use are designed and manufactured by DJI, a company that was recently added to the Department of Defense’s list of “Chinese military companies.” While that number is from a 2020 survey, and steps are being taken to limit Chinese drone usage, the status quo remains largely unchanged.

FOREIGN DOMINANCE

The imbalance mentioned above is a microcosm of a much bigger issue: Chinese drone companies, for a host of regulatory and economic reasons, have dominated their American counterparts in both the U.S. and global markets. According to AUVSI, “companies based in China and subsidized by the Chinese government control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” DJI, far and away the largest Chinese drone company, was able to achieve this dominance through early market entry, favorable and asymmetric regulatory conditions, and funding in the form of substantial Chinese state subsidies and American venture capital.

DJI had its first commercial breakthrough in early 2013 with the Phantom 1. The consumer and commercial drone markets were still nascent at this time, which meant two things: one, that DJI was in a very strong position to capture and retain market share, and two, that FAA regulations around drones were still largely undeveloped and unformalized. Consumer operators were effectively unregulated, with the FAA originally deferring to a measure from 1981. The now-archaic Section 333 exemptions allowed businesses to conduct basic commercial operations, and DJI products accounted for 71 percent of these FAA exemptions by mid-2015 (since over two-thirds of purchased consumer drones were actually being used by businesses for commercial applications). By 2017, DJI accounted for 72 percent of the global drone market.

Chinese offerings struck a critical balance of quality and price that led to commercial viability; the American-made competition was too expensive, and much of the bleeding-edge American drone industry was focused on large, government-contracted defense UAVs that already preferred domestic supply chains and had less price sensitivity. In addition to the low materials and labor costs inherent to the Chinese manufacturing environment, China also provided the company with substantial state subsidies that, in combination with American venture capital funding from firms like Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia, gave them a major competitive edge. (In 2015, China debuted its “Made in China 2025” initiative, a push which included significant funding for DJI.)

REGULATION

While all drone products sold in the United States are technically bound by FAA standards, American drone manufacturers are subject to continuous regulatory scrutiny throughout the entire design and development processes. Chinese drone-makers, for obvious jurisdictional reasons, are instead under the supervision of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). Bilateral aviation agreements between the U.S. and China allow the FAA to defer to CAAC oversight, with FAA standards only applying upon import to the United States (e.g. compliance with Remote ID requirements). This leads to significant asymmetric regulatory barriers for American drone companies, like lengthy R&D-approval processes, restrictive test-site access, and complex “type certification” requirements akin to those for commercial aircraft, that compound their preexisting disadvantages. In one instance, Matternet, an American drone company, was required to get a type-certificate “similar to what Boeing would be required to produce a 737.” By the time they could get this from the FAA, the technology of their specified drone was less competitive in the market.

Now, in an attempt to minimize espionage risk and hamper the Chinese drone industry, America is increasingly turning to top-down protectionism. Successively restrictive versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), alongside waves of bans and procurement rules from the Department of Defense and others, are clamping down on the use of Chinese drones and components by federal agencies. The recent Countering CCP Drones Act, though it was not in the final 2025 NDAA due to concerns of economic fallout, would have put all DJI products on the FCC Covered List and effectively banned them. In a year, this decision will be revisited.

These protectionist measures, however, are an incomplete approach and have side effects. The current enforcement and future expectation of restrictions on Chinese-made drones has sent businesses and underfunded public agencies scrambling. Many cannot afford the cost delta between American and Chinese products, forced to decommission entire drone programs overnight, while others endure months-long waits for American-made replacements. Unmanned Vehicle Technologies, for example, an American drone and robotics dealer, waited 142 days for an order of two drones from a manufacturer in the United States. In that time, UVT “ordered and received approximately 270 drones from Chinese manufacturers.” Restricting Chinese drones is only half of the equation: America needs to unleash its own drone-manufacturing industry.

DELIVERED BY DRONE

Drone delivery is one of the incredible fields of the future that is particularly limited by the ponderous pace of FAA rulemaking. Streamlined approvals for Beyond Visual Line of Site (BVLOS) operations, essential to the expansion of drone delivery services, are contained within something called Part 108. This piece of regulation, of course, remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo hell well beyond purported statutory deadlines. While certain companies have been able to attain individual BVLOS authorizations through arduous lobbying, with Amazon finally receiving approval in May of 2024, many companies still face significant regulatory barriers. The process is highly fragmented and unstandardized, with the scope of approved BVLOS waivers ranging from high-flying free rein to still requiring a line-of-sight observer.

Amazon’s go-ahead will allow them to significantly expand their Prime drone delivery services — their new MK30 UAV offers “double the range and half the noise” of any previous Amazon drone. Zipline, mentioned earlier in connection with Ghana and Rwanda, is the biggest drone delivery service in the U.S. (over one million deliveries completed) and plans to cover 30 million people in ten states by the end of 2025. Wing, another large drone delivery service, hit 400,000 deliveries in January of 2025 and is expanding rapidly due to its partnership with Walmart. The world in which battalions of small servicecraft drop packages off on your doorstep, shaving delivery timelines even further, is just around the corner.

POLICING & THE STATE

For this reason, despite all of the bans, the continued dominance of DJI on price point means that local and state funds are still used to purchase predominantly Chinese drones: 80 percent of “law enforcement agencies that deploy UAS” use them. (On the state level, only Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Nevada, and Tennessee have passed resolutions addressing this.) The need for a strong domestic UAV-tech supply chain starts to become more obvious in this context. One of the most interesting current case studies in this area, offering a window into the future, is the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) “Drones as First Responder” (DFR) program. The department is using American drone technology from companies like Skydio and BRINC for tracking suspects, documenting crime scenes, and conducting pre-interaction surveillance. This sort of real-time aerial intelligence significantly reduces response times and gives officers situational information that can prevent unnecessary casualties.

The LVMPD follows strict FAA regulations that prohibit the weaponization of drones, a precedent which was set in part by Connecticut’s attempt (and subsequent failure) to lethally weaponize their police department’s drones. In November of 2024, the NYPD announced the launch of their own DFR program, reflecting a desire to replicate the successes of LVMPD and others. Drone-led policing capabilities will expand over time, with a continued introduction of autonomy, creating the potential both for vastly reduced criminal activity and, if we are not vigilant, authoritarian misuse.

In one such potential future, artificial intelligence networks and the vast deployment of autonomous drones have resulted in what some might describe as an oppressive surveillance state. This semi-totalitarian government has, at great cost, completely eliminated all traces of civilian crime. Before the balance of control tipped irretrievably, however, society was thriving and higher-trust than it had ever been. Litter was collected by servicecraft mere seconds after hitting the pavement. The incidence of homelessness had dropped precipitously after national borders grew airtight and drug transports were unable to operate without detection. Children ran about the city streets past dark, parents made unafraid. Some wealthier and more skeptical families employed private drone protection, but strong-handed regulatory measures eventually eliminated all non-governmental drone ownership, citing the potential disruption of “peace and safety,” a progression which ended in the near-total disarming of society.

NATIONAL SECURITY & WAR

National security, of course, is of paramount relevance in the discussion of drones. The nature of war is changing faster than it has at any point since the post-World War II nuclear proliferation, and drones are one of the major cruxes of this change. It is essential that America not rely on China for any segment of the defense supply chain, let alone UAS design and manufacturing, technologies parallel to AI that will determine international power balances in the second half of the twenty-first century (and beyond). Already, in the war between Russia and Ukraine, we have seen the emergence of so-called “kamikaze drones.” Iranian Shahed-136 UAVs, which Iran themselves used to attack Israel in April of 2024, are Russia’s primary weapon of choice for this tactic — reported costs are low for the units, only $20,000 each. Russia hopes to produce six thousand of them by mid-2025 in newly constructed factories.

Modified commercial DJI drones, strapped with explosives, are being used as weapons of war by both sides. Russia has been connecting fiber-optic cables to its human-operated drones, making them unjammable without requiring any advanced software or hardware. As one Ukrainian government advisor said, “This war is a war of drones, they are the super weapon here.” On January 14th, 2025, Ukraine launched an unprecedented series of deep drone strikes within Russian borders, hitting seven different regions and forcing “at least six cities to restrict their airspace.” Huge numbers of Ukrainian casualties are tied directly to drone-led attacks — and while drone swarms are not yet a part of this conflict, Ukraine predicts that this technology will enter the fray sometime in 2025 with the continuing integration of advanced AI into autonomous aircraft systems.

When it comes to UAS built for national security and defense applications, however, the United States is far from asleep at the wheel. Palantir’s VNav system, for example, is giving autonomous drones the ability to navigate with military precision in GPS-denied environments. Using stored satellite imagery and onboard compute, the AI is essentially able to plot its real-time trajectory and avoid drift by “reading a map.” Anduril’s Bolt family of drones, announced in October of 2024, are “man-packable” autonomous air vehicles (AAV) that are fully modular, can track and strike targets, and are available in munitions-equipped versions. The Pentagon also recently awarded Anduril a $250 million contract for their Roadrunner drones, reusable vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) units, and Pulsar systems, Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) units with counter-drone applications that can either stand on their own or be vehicle-mounted. Larger, plane-like vehicles are also a critical focus: ULTRA, developed by AFRL’s Center for Rapid Innovation (CRI) and DZYNE Technologies, is a three-thousand-pound reconnaissance drone with over eighty hours of endurance, and a maximum payload of over four hundred pounds, that is already flying missions in the Middle East. The roster of advanced American autonomous drone hardware, and complementary AI software, is far too large to cover in any meaningful way here. This, of course, is an important signal about how seriously we are beginning to address the existential risks before us.

SPACE & VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Integral to both national security and existential futures, and poised to catalyze the pioneering of sci-fi-like drone technology, is the final frontier: space. The applications of UAVs to the near-infinity on which our blue marble rests are early, but with time they will become both fascinating and essential. Things that are already happening, like drone-enabled launch site monitoring, the development of autonomous space-debris collection, reusable unmanned space planes like the X-37B, and the planned autonomous flight of NASA’s Dragonfly on a Jovian moon, are proof enough. Future possibilities are endless: drones of all shapes and sizes, putzing around space stations conducting fully autonomous maintenance and repairs. Reconnaissance drones spilling out from an opened hatch on a space-farer’s floating ship, falling into formation as they funnel toward the unexplored planet surface below. Only time will tell how far these evolutions can be pushed.

Below the arcing of stars and spirited space-adventuring of generations to come, the skies are clear — save the birds and an occasional transport drone passing silently overhead. Towering bio-hybrid buildings draped with verdant ivory, attended to by swaths of assiduous airborne robo-gardeners, look as if they might have emerged in search of sunlight from the earth itself. A period of peace, less fraught with tension than its Dr. Strangelove-type predecessor, has settled upon the world. This is not for want of bad actors, but for their inability to find secrecy.

The reconnaissance and intelligence operations of the Western nations are unrivaled; adversaries can say or do very little without it being known, and constantly evolving anti-surveillance drones make it very difficult for allies of these nations to be spied on. Emergent from the lattice of pseudo-satellitic drones, sub-orbital AAVs, and multi-tendriled UAS is an invisible, impenetrable dome of complete knowing. Totalitarian potentialities of such an advanced network are held at bay, at least in the States, by the relative affordability of, and legally protected access to, small UAS and counter-UAV systems. In select European nations, where private access to such technologies is being stripped, some claim to see shadows of authoritarianism seeping through cracks in the oracle bones.

Early domestic drone-tech innovations were not controversial or difficult to fund, given their national-security-mandated priority, and the ballooning pie of economic productivity that resulted from their natural proliferation formed a positive feedback loop. Wider implementation of better autonomous hardware led to more prosperity, which led to more research and development, which led to better and cheaper UAS. Small teams of engineers were able to erect incredible structures, like the aforementioned stalagmitic wonders, with more agency than ever before. They cut private residences into remote crags, built public housing projects that were as efficient as they were elegant, and ensured that each creation was beautiful in its own right.

The rise of autonomous farms greatly increased both crop yields and the percentage of arable land while eliminating unnecessary chemical exposure. Fresh produce became cheap and widely accessible. Open fields of soft green and amber, rustling with the light breeze, saw bovine droves herded by autonomous drones (voluntarily pursued, of course, by the enthusiastic prancing of cattle dogs). Resource extraction was faster, cleaner, and easier, which, alongside acceleration in the construction of small nuclear reactors, resulted in a preponderance of energy to power all of these initiatives. Crime rates across the nation were at an all-time low after law enforcement had increasingly partnered with preventive UAS, reducing the incentives of violence.

Now, with all of this having come to pass, there seems to be an almost palpable optimism, a sense that things can change, and that we have significant say in how they change. A weird coalition between humans and their hive-minded autonomous aircraft, once an unnerving prospect, now powers the world forward in ways that not even the most visionary among us could have seen in a crystal ball. This, or something else entirely, lies ahead of us — with courageous optimism, we step into drone-filled horizons.

— G. B. Rango