Prediction market Polymarket applied for a license to offer U.S. users margin trading, enabling them to place bets with less upfront capital, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Polymarket’s U.S. affiliate, Coming Home GBA LLC, filed for a futures commission merchant license with the National Futures Association, Bloomberg said, citing a company representative. Polymarket will also require authorization from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for changes to its rulebook that would allow trading without fully collateralized positions.
Prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi offer yes-or-no wagers on the outcomes of events, such as weather, sports and elections. Margin trading lets investors open positions with less upfront capital, a practice common in traditional markets. Kalshi received clearance to offer margin trading in March.
Polymarket’s application comes as prediction markets continue to grow. Volumes hit $51 billion last year and are on pace to reach about $240 billion in 2026. Wall Street broker Bernstein recently said it expects volume to rise to $1 trillion by 2030 as the sector evolves from niche wagering into wide-based “information markets” spanning sports, crypto, politics and the economy.
Polymarket’s application follows a marketing campaign it announced Wednesday to convince policymakers, regulators and potential users that it is trustworthy. Four years ago, the company agreed to stop serving U.S. customers as part of a $1.4 million settlement with the CFTC, which alleged it had offered unregistered event-based derivatives.
Polymarket did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment.
Better Off? How Generational Progress Slowed In The US
Bettering yourself financially or at least giving your children the opportunity for a more prosperous future has driven people to emigrate to the United States for generations. But is the next generation still better off in this day and age?
Gen X achieved a similarly low increase of median household incomes over Baby Boomers at 16 percent.
This is in contrast to the post-war generation, which at age 36-40 earned 27 percent more than the Silent Generation.
For this generation growing up during World War II, the number still stood at 34 percent on average.
Taking as a baseline the Greatest Generation, which was born between 1900 and 1927, the Silent Generation earned 34 percent more, while Boomers made a cumulative 70 percent more, Gen X took home 97 percent more and finally Millennials brought in 133 percent more than the Greatest Generation even when adjusted for inflation.
The data also shows that the Silent Generation worked 14 percent more hours than the generation before and Boomers worked another 14 percent more.
However, working hours have been relatively stable for generations since.
While the numbers show that average income wealth rose in the United States over time and that more people gained access to at least a middle-class life over the decades, this doesn’t mean that everybody is necessarily making more than those who came before.
A study published in 2017 and widely reported then showed that only 50 percent of people born in 1984 made more than their parents at age 30.
For those born in 1940 and turning 30 in 1970, this number had still been above 90 percent.
There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was there. Someone held the public trust, and someone else tried to buy it, and you could at least tell the two apart.
That wall is gone. The financier no longer waits in the corridor. He holds the office. He signs the checks. He is the buyer and the seller, the regulator and the regulated, the public interest and the private portfolio, fused into a single man in a single suit, and the arrangement is entirely legal, which is the whole problem.
One of these men may already be familiar from a previous article. His name is Friedrich Merz.
The chancellor was the warm-up act
From 2016 to 2020, Merz chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm, the local office of the largest pool of private capital on earth – a fact confirmed, without embarrassment, by his own party’s foundation. Then he climbed back into politics, and in March 2025, as chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene – the constitutional amendment that exempted defense spending from Germany’s debt brake. The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone. German military spending rose 24 percent in a single year to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe, and BlackRock held stakes in the very contractors – Rheinmetall, Hensoldt – that the money would flow toward.
He broke no law. He simply spent four years learning, from the inside, how the machinery paid out, and then went and pulled the lever. The arrangement was a particular kind that no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule.
It reads as a German problem only until you cross the Atlantic. There the same face turns up in an American suit, several of them, installed not adjacent to the war machine but at its controls.
The banker who became the Navy
Consider John Phelan, who until March 2025 had no connection to the military beyond a seat on a charity board. His career was money: he co-founded MSD Capital, the private investment firm that managed the personal fortune of Michael Dell, and later founded his own firm, Rugger Management. He gave Trump’s joint fundraising committee $834,600 in April 2024. Months later he was nominated to run the United States Navy, and in March he was confirmed, handed a $263.5 billion budget and command of nearly a million sailors and Marines.
Before his confirmation, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to him about the obvious. He had recently earned over $5 million in capital gains from Palantir, a defense-software contractor that took in $541 million from the Pentagon in fiscal 2024 alone, and whose relationships Phelan’s own acquisition vehicle had once advertised. She asked him to divest his defense holdings and to recuse himself, for four years, from matters touching his former clients and employers, noting that a dozen Biden appointees had voluntarily gone beyond what the ethics laws required. Phelan declined to make the stronger commitment. He was confirmed anyway, 62 to 30, with eleven Democrats joining every Republican in the room.
The man overseeing the Navy’s shipbuilding budget was, weeks earlier, a private investor with money in the companies the Navy buys from. Nobody hid it. It was printed in his disclosures and read aloud at his hearing, and it changed nothing.
The private-equity takeover of the Pentagon
Phelan is the modest case. The full expression of the thing sits one floor up, in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, where Stephen Feinberg runs the day-to-day of the entire department.
Feinberg co-founded Cerberus Capital Management and led it for thirty-three years; in his own sworn testimony to the Senate he put the firm’s portfolio at over $65 billion. He was a major Trump donor, and by the time he was confirmed in March 2025 he was, at a listed minimum net worth of $2 billion, the wealthiest official in the administration. What he has built since is not influence over the Pentagon. It is ownership of its investment arm.
Feinberg has surrounded himself with a circle of advisers drawn from his old firm. The group includes former Cerberus managing director John Gallagher and a deal team led by Cerberus alumnus George Kollitides – who was, until 2015, chairman and chief executive of Remington, the gunmaker Cerberus owned. Industry executives nicknamed the squad “Deal Team Six,” a joke on the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden, and Kollitides told a Milken Institute audience he found the name both fun and fitting while explaining that economic warfare has been a part of all successful nations for thousands of years. A Stanford professor watching this described it plainly: private equity has just acquired its largest organization.
The organization it acquired writes checks the size of nations. Under Feinberg, the Pentagon stopped merely buying weapons and began buying companies. It took a $400 million preferred-equity stake in the rare-earth miner MP Materials, enough to make the United States government the firm’s largest single shareholder at roughly 15 percent – ahead, as it happens, of BlackRock. It put $1 billion into an L3Harris rocket-motor unit slated to go public in 2026. Stakes in Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, and ReElement Technologies followed, a portfolio that a group of House members warned was locking federal policy to the fortunes of individual firms – picking winners, and by definition creating losers.
Whose companies get the contracts
Here is where the fusion stops being abstract… Feinberg signed an ethics agreement before confirmation. He would divest from Cerberus and recuse himself from matters involving the firm. But the fine print left the door open: he could transfer his Cerberus holdings into trusts benefiting his adult children, a maneuver legal under conflict-of-interest law but one ethics experts say hollows out its purpose, and he could keep contracting with Cerberus for administrative services. That contract was meant to end in April 2026. In January, he reversed course and extended it with no end date. The financial relationship between the deputy secretary of defense and the private equity firm he used to run now continues indefinitely.
Meanwhile the department began handing out contracts for Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense shield, a program that has already ballooned to an estimated $185 billion. The Pentagon at first refused to name the companies winning the work. When it finally released a list, at least four of the winners turned out to be owned or partly owned by Cerberus: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology, and NetCentrics. The department still will not disclose what those contracts are worth, and by law is required to announce only those above $9 million.
Does Feinberg personally pick the contractors? The department says he has no direct responsibility for Golden Dome acquisitions. But the general who runs the program, Michael Guetlein, described his own chain of command without ambiguity: I report to the deputy secretary and only to the deputy secretary, he said. He is the only official who can tell me no. The man who can say no to the entire missile-defense program is the man whose old firm owns the companies being paid to build it, and whose family may still profit from that firm’s returns. No single email needs to be produced. The architecture does the work.
The recruiting pitch says it out loud
For anyone wondering how normal this has become, the sales brochure settles it. To staff its new investment operation – an “Economic Defense Unit” meant to deploy up to $200 billion over three years – the Pentagon hired the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, whose recruiting deck went hunting for bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.
The pitch promised recruits unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow — whatever you need, you can get. It offered salaries reaching $600,000 through a government-aligned nonprofit, against a federal average near $100,000. And it described the job not as public service but as a two-year secondment leading to exceptional exit opportunities, including the chance to launch a new fund with members of the team. Come into the government, use the access, leave richer, on the strength of relationships built on the public payroll. This is not a leak of something embarrassing. It is a document written to attract people, on the assumption that the merger of private profit and public office is the perk.
A former assistant director on the White House technology-security staff, reading the same deck, warned that an effort this size has the potential to distort national-security-critical industries in ways he did not think anyone had seriously contemplated. There is, he added, obvious potential for truly egregious corruption. But corruption is almost the smaller point. Corruption implies a rule being broken. What is happening here is a rule being dissolved.
The same men, both shores
Line them up. Merz chaired an asset manager and then commanded the German rearmament that manager profits from. Phelan ran a billionaire’s money and then took command of the Navy that buys from the companies he held. Feinberg ran a private equity empire and then took the Pentagon’s second chair and filled the building with his former partners. Different countries, different uniforms, one profession and one move: from owning the assets of war to commanding the state that pays for them.
The line worth repeating from Merz’s own story turns out not to have been about Germany at all. The buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer. Every European budget hardens Moscow’s conviction that it is being encircled, which justifies the next budget, around and around, while the men who profit count their dividends and call it security. That was true of one chancellor. It is true of an entire class of men who have stopped seeing daylight between the public interest and their own book, because across their whole careers there never was any.
The old fear, the one Eisenhower named in 1961, was that the military-industrial complex would acquire unwarranted influence over the government. That fear is quaint now. Influence is what you need when you are standing in the corridor. These men are not in the corridor. They are behind the desk, and the desk has a checkbook with no ceiling, and the recruiting brochure is on the table telling the next banker that whatever he needs, he can get.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
Europe Votes Against Thought-Policing ‘Chat Control’, Brussels Passes It Anyway…
On Thursday in Strasbourg, 314 Members of the European Parliament voted to reject the return of “Chat Control,” the legal regime allowing tech companies to scan the private messages of roughly half a billion Europeans.
So naturally, the scanning regime won – thanks to a ‘quirky’ voting procedure in Brussels that allowed legislation to survive even though most MEPs who cast a vote opposed it. That should alarm anyone who still believes the word “parliament” is supposed to mean something.
Losing by Winning
The vote took place at second reading, under an urgent procedure pushed through just two days earlier by Parliament’s largest bloc, the centre-right European People’s Party.
At second reading, the arithmetic is rigged toward passage. Rejecting or amending the text does not require a majority of votes cast. It requires an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs: 361 votes.
That means every absent MEP and every abstention effectively counts in favor of the law.
This is how “DEMOCRACY” works in Europe:
⛔️ 314 vote AGAINST mass surveillance.
✅ 276 vote FOR it.
MASS SURVEILLANCE WINS.
Then the same bureaucratic hypocrites travel the world lecturing everyone about democracy and their so-called “European values.”
On Thursday, 607 members voted: 314 to reject, 276 to proceed, and 17 abstained. Another 113 were not in the chamber. The rejection therefore fell 47 votes short of the required threshold. A clear majority of voting MEPs opposed the measure – and the measure became law again anyway. Not coincidentally, the vote was scheduled for the final sitting day before Parliament dispersed for its summer recess, when absenteeism is at its annual peak.
The path to this outcome is as important as the result. Parliament had already rejected an extension of these same rules on 26 March. The regulation then expired on 3 April. In any functioning democratic system, that would have been the end of it. Instead, the Council returned on 2 July with essentially the same text, repackaged as a new proposal. Then, on 7 July, the EPP secured an urgency procedure by a narrow 331-to-304 vote, bypassing committee scrutiny and setting up Thursday’s vote under second-reading rules.
Marketa Gregorova, the Greens/EFA negotiator on the file, accused the EPP of violating Parliament’s own rules of procedure and abusing its position to force a re-run of a question the chamber had already answered. She was right to do so.
This is actually quite unbelievable.
Did you know that Nazis never won an over-whelming majority? They gained rule through such exceptions.
When a legislature can be made to vote on the same question repeatedly, under progressively worse rules, until it produces the desired answer, the word “vote” begins to look decorative.
What was revived on Thursday is “Chat Control 1.0” – the ePrivacy derogation first adopted in 2021 – not the broader permanent proposal commonly known as Chat Control 2.0.
The revived regime permits, rather than requires, providers such as Meta, Google and Microsoft to scan private messages, emails and uploaded images on unencrypted services for child sexual abuse material. It will now run until April 2028, unless permanent legislation replaces it first.
Parliament did manage to push through two concessions. Amendments exempting end-to-end encrypted services passed with 369 and 362 votes, carried by an unusual coalition spanning liberals, the left and parts of the right. That matters: Parliament is now formally on record against breaking encryption.
But as civil-rights campaigner Patrick Breyer notes, the victory is partly symbolic. Providers cannot meaningfully scan end-to-end encrypted content in the first place without undermining the encryption itself.
The more revealing vote was the one that failed. An amendment to restrict scanning to individuals actually identified as suspects by the judiciary won a clear plurality, 322 to 255. But because it also needed 361 votes, it died.
In other words, a majority of voting MEPs wanted scanning limited to actual suspects. Europe got suspicionless scanning of everyone instead.
Migrants continue to treat Britain’s streets, parks, and waterways like a personal hunting ground, with fresh footage exposing the grim reality of unchecked mass immigration.
A disturbing new video circulating on X shows a woman – widely identified in comments as a migrant – seemingly actively hunting birds.
She uses a sheet to capture a seagull perched on a gate or property edge. After securing the bird, she looks around for more prey, scanning the area as if on a deliberate hunt.
— WeGotitBack ??????????? (@NotFarLeftAtAll) July 9, 2026
When locals spot her and begin filming while questioning what she is doing with the bird, she gestures dismissively – as if to say “what’s your problem?” and implying this is totally normal behaviour and none of their business.
The clip has sparked widespread outrage, with many slamming the trespass and illegal taking of wildlife.
This is sick. We don’t want this barbaric and cruel shit in our country!
— Nicola Beaumont. ? (@PsychBeaulogy) July 8, 2026
ALL gulls (commonly called seagulls) are fully protected in Britain by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it illegal to kill, injure, or handle them, or to destroy their active nests and eggs.
This woman needs locking up…FOLLOW OUR LAWS OR BOG OFF ???? @BBCNews…
There have been further suggestions that the woman was actually “rescuing” the bird, but many are not buying that explanation.
? WOMAN WAS RESCUING SEAGULL, NOT STEALING IT
A video I shared yesterday of a woman catching a seagull in a blanket, was Not what it looked like, the woman in question was actually concerned for the small seagull after it has fell off the roof previously, as you can see in… https://t.co/X4ae0MxvCRpic.twitter.com/36ONNaUHu6
This does not align with the original video which shows a bird with an adult size wingspan, not a fledging who is unable to fly. The bird the woman was wrestling into the sack/blanket would have been able to fly. What this means now I cannot say, but something is amiss here.
Fair play, but a juvenile gull that size does not need ‘rescuing’. You can see in the original video that it tries to fly away from her. It was already fledged. pic.twitter.com/Hp2xzuaVYt
You have to be an idiot to see that first video even with the idea in your head that she is trying to help it, and still think she is trying to help it.
I see nothing in this video that refutes the first one. The woman is not present in this one, & it’s a different gull. As a wildlife biologist, I can say that she did NOT handle the gull like someone w/ its welfare in mind. Have you been threatened into issuing this statement?
This latest incident fits a clear pattern. Migrants have been repeatedly filmed hunting pigeons, with their bare hands in UK streets, and even using fishing rods to try and catch them.
Similar scenes have played out with protected swans and ducks across the UK and Ireland, where migrants set traps and butcher birds in public spaces.
The depravity doesn’t stop at birds. On the continent, a Nigerian migrant was caught cooking a cat in a public park next to a children’s playground, drawing fury from locals.
These cases echo reports from Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian migrants faced accusations of snatching and consuming local wildlife, including ducks and geese in parks.
Residents described scenes of animals being grabbed by the neck, decapitated, and taken for food – claims that amplified national debate over mass migration’s impact on communities and norms.
British wildlife laws under the Wildlife and Countryside Act strictly protect many of these species. Yet enforcement seems inconsistent when it involves certain arrivals who show little regard for local customs, laws, or basic animal welfare.
Locals filming these confrontations repeatedly highlight the same point: these individuals have housing, clothing, and food provided, yet they hunt urban birds as if in a survival scenario from their countries of origin.
The cultural clash is undeniable. Britain, long a nation of animal lovers with strong traditions of protecting wildlife, now contends with behaviors that treat public spaces as open butcheries. Pigeons and seagulls in cities scavenge in polluted environments, raising health risks from diseases, but that hasn’t deterred the hunters.
This is a visible symptom of failed open-border policies that prioritize globalist ideals over national cohesion and rule of law. While politicians lecture about tolerance, everyday Brits watch their parks and streets transformed, and communities on edge.
Mass immigration without assimilation imports incompatible practices that erode Britain’s way of life. Strong borders, enforced laws, and putting citizens first aren’t radical – they’re essential to preserving what remains of civilized society.
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.
Erdogan Taunts Israel & Greece After Trump Hands Turkey F-35, Sanctions Win
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has responded to ongoing Israeli and Greek objections to the possible US sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey by mocking the Turkish enemies and rivals.
Opposition to the potential stealth fighter transfer raised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis “has no place in my world,” Erdogan said in his characteristically bellicose manner.
“Hopefully, when the F-35s are delivered to Turkey, the whole world will say America kept its promise,” Erdogan said at a Wednesday closing news conference for the NATO summit hosted in Ankara.
Netanyahu told Fox News on Monday that “Turkey is a great country, but it’s governed by a man who calls openly for the annihilation of Israel” – in reference to Erdogan. “He occupies half of Cyprus, a NATO country. He’s threatening Greece, another NATO country, and he talks openly about conquering Jerusalem.”
The Israeli leader also said that giving Ankara F-35s or fighter jet engines would “upset the power balance in the Middle East, which is ultimately guaranteed by Israeli air superiority and also by, I think, by America’s posture in the Middle East.” He’s been urgently requestion that the White House reign in Erdogan and his provocative rhetoric.
However, Israeli pressure did nothing to sway Trump while the US President was in Turkey. Trump strongly signaled he’s ready to go through with the sale of F-35s, saying of Erdogan, “We are great friends”.
What’s more is that Trump declared – to the surprise of US Congress (who will want a word on this) that he’ll be removing US sanctions which were imposed on Turkey during his own prior administration:
In response to that purchase, Washington in 2020 imposed sanctions on a major Turkish defense company and removed Turkey from the F-35 stealth fighter jet program, where Ankara was also a production partner.
“We’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” Trump told reporters just before his meeting with Erdogan during a visit to Turkey for a NATO summit. He added that his secretary of state and Treasury secretary were working on the issue.
In the moment, Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked a bit surprised, while President Erdogan beamed with a sense of victory…
Erdogan gives a thumbs-up as Trump lifts sanctions in real-time. Rubio has a WTF?!? look that can’t be denied. pic.twitter.com/XnGIkvyIOs
— Christopher Leonard (@ChrisLeonardATL) July 8, 2026
Later, Erdogan voiced that in reality the United States is “not enforcing any sanctions against us” and that “by and large, those measures have already been lifted.”
He said of his top national security officials, “They have all witnessed firsthand that these sanctions are not being applied to Türkiye. So, we have no such problem. And whenever an issue does arise, Mr. Trump, thankfully, returns our call within 24 hours whenever we reach out to him. Within that same 24-hour period, we receive the response we need.”
The Turkish foreign ministry has also hit back at recent Israeli statements, saying, “The baseless allegations recently circulated by Israeli officials in a coordinated manner and with calculated timing are part of a disinformation campaign.” The statement added: “Netanyahu and his partners in crime deliberately distort any criticism directed at them and seek to divert attention through a systematic propaganda effort.”
The time has come for Europeans to declare their independence from ruling-class tyranny.
We made it to our two-hundred-fiftieth birthday, America. What’s next? Let’s get back to work, so that our descendants can celebrate one thousand.
Making sure the American Experiment endures is work, after all. Protecting American ideals from our ideological enemies is never easy.
Well before our nation declared independence from Great Britain, the American system repudiated the whole “ruling class” hierarchy that — to this day! — still oozes from the infected abscesses of the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe. After we fought two world wars in the twentieth century to save Europe from itself, we spent the Cold War period in a bit of a kumbaya stupor during which Americans often equated the beliefs of Western nobles with those who founded and built the United States.
But Europe and America have never been the same. The people who built America left Europe behind for good reasons. They rejected Europe’s aristocratic allegiances, its feudal social structures, and its false pretension that blue-blooded “elites” are divinely and innately empowered to rule over everyone else. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are not merely documents establishing America’s political separation from Britain and the legal foundations for its new government. They are revolutionary statements of America’s intent to remove itself from the generational enslavement upon which monarchies, ruling classes, and feudal systems depend.
Taken together, the Declaration and Constitution assert fundamental truths that governments throughout human history have tried to obscure from their peoples. Those truths include the recognition that all of us are equal before God; so-called noble aristocrats are not divinely given or entitled to receive more power or privilege than the common man. Furthermore, our rights come from God, not the government. Aristocrats, government officials, elected representatives, and bureaucrats cannot give us what only God provides for our well-being and happiness. Additionally, because governments are artificial creations constructed by imperfect human beings, they are legitimate only when the people who live under those governments consent to their structure. Governments that exercise power in defiance of the will of the people are unjust governments utilizing illegitimate powers. Finally, when governments deny the people their God-given rights, fail to keep the public safe, undermine their citizens’ happiness, usurp powers belonging to the people, abuse the public, or threaten the lives and liberties of citizens, the people have a right — nay, a duty! — to overthrow those governments and replace them with new governments more likely to protect the people’s lives, liberties, and God-given rights.
These assertions didn’t just repudiate the British Crown. They repudiated the legitimacy of governments throughout the world. Princes justified their powers over common people as expressions of God’s will. Claiming to be God’s direct emissaries on Earth, noble aristocrats considered themselves the arbiters of what rights and liberties common people might enjoy. The American Revolution rejected these premises as outright lies. Princes are endowed with the same rights as commoners. Rights and liberties come from God, not ruling class elites!
In other words, America’s War for Independence was also a war that threatened systems of power throughout the world. If legitimate government powers come directly from the people, then the whole feudal hierarchy is inverted. Rather than a pyramid with a king or queen on top who allocates certain powers to a small royal court of lords who allocate a few powers to vassals who allocate a tiny portion of those powers to peasants who remain in indentured servitude, the Declaration of Independence asserts that power arises from the base of the pyramid with the people and that government authorities merely borrow the people’s power as temporary custodians obligated to secure and advance the public’s will. Nothing at the top of the pyramid is legitimate unless the bottom of the pyramid consents. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, America turned the world upside down.
Do any of these American convictions describe Europe today? Does the unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen behave as someone who derives her power from the consent of those Europeans she insists upon governing? Do the digital censorship laws that prevent citizens of the United Kingdom and the European Union from freely communicating with each other protect their God-given rights and liberties? Do the growing swarms of European bureaucrats writing endless rules and regulations inside unaccountable government institutions appear to respect the people’s inherent powers? Do Europe’s open borders policies provide European citizens with security, safety, and happiness? If the answer to these questions is “no,” then don’t common Europeans have the right and duty to overthrow their governments and form new institutions committed to their protection and the preservation of their freedoms? Otherwise, aren’t most of the bureaucracies and government institutions of Europe wholly illegitimate?
It is easy to see why governments around the world don’t spend much time teaching young students about the Declaration of Independence or the American Revolution. If they did, most citizens would immediately recognize their own forms of government as oppressive, harmful, unjust, and resentful of God’s authority.
This is why European political “leaders” refuse to talk about rights and freedoms and instead drone on about “democracy.” It is difficult to explain how rights and freedoms can be inalienable when governments insist on defining, redefining, or abridging them whenever those in power find it necessary or convenient to do so. “Democracy,” on the other hand, stands for nothing other than the dangerous proposition that fifty-one cannibals can vote to eat forty-nine of their neighbors. “Democracy” can even be twisted to mean that a couple dozen European Commissioners are entitled to choose a European Commission president who is somehow entitled to write laws for all of Europe. Such an arrangement undermines all safeguards for Europeans’ inalienable rights and liberties. Describing fascism, socialism, or monarchy as “democratic” does not lend legitimacy to despotic forms of government.
To this day, Europe’s leaders don’t understand America. Or they understand, but they pretend that America embraces European “values.” Or they look down upon America as some kind of wild mongrel that makes a good guard dog but remains incapable of appreciating the dignified sensibilities of European “elites.” The noble gentry who spread their cancerous ideologies from Brussels do their best to groom and domesticate America while expecting us to pee on the rug at any time. Europe’s entrenched aristocracy prefers for the unruly American dog to stay outside.
Part of the reason we are “unruly,” though, is that our political instincts are foreign and threatening to a European feudal structure that demands total power for the few and no power at all for the many. Europe’s bureaucrats prefer Karl Marx to Thomas Jefferson. Europe’s aristocratic “elites” prefer declarations of dependence to America’s Declaration of Independence.
The future is not a battle between the so-called “democratic” West and the authoritarian regimes of the world. The future is a battle between feudal forms of government and an American system that recognizes governments as legitimate only when they are used to protect each individual’s God-given rights. Both in Europe and the United States, the war against government tyranny and for human freedom will continue to rage. European and American “elites” will do everything they can to foster public dependence upon government. European and American citizens who wish to be free must declare their independence from Big Government.
There are those alive today who believe that Big Government cannot be beaten. That’s natural. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, few believed that America’s Declaration of Independence would lead to the British Empire’s defeat. The war for human freedom never truly ends. Every generation must fight to secure their God-given rights. When governments forfeit the people’s consent and undermine the people’s freedoms, they are rendered illegitimate. There is but one public remedy: revolution.
The arrests of foreign spies “means our tech stays home and our defense secrets stay locked down,” a video shared by Patel on X said. “But the FBI didn’t stop there. They forced 62 removals of Chinese spies in 2026 alone.”
The video added that this has shattered the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) deep cover operations against the United States.
The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report in February 2025 detailing multiple cases of espionage conducted by the CCP in the United States since 2021.
The cases, spread across 20 U.S. states, involved the transmission of sensitive military information to Beijing, stealing trade secrets to benefit the regime, transnational repression schemes targeting Chinese dissidents, and obstruction of justice. Every 12 hours, the FBI opened new cases to counter Beijing’s intelligence operations, according to the report.
The report noted that the CCP’s theft of U.S. intellectual property amounts to roughly $4,000 to $6,000 annually per American family of four after paying taxes.
In one prominent case, a senior adviser to the State Department was arrested in October 2025, accused of taking thousands of top-secret documents and meeting with Chinese officials. The individual allegedly downloaded and saved documents related to U.S. fighter jets and weapons capabilities.
On Jan. 12 this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a former U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced to 200 months in prison for spying for Beijing.
The person had access to sensitive national defense information about the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Essex, such as its weapons, propulsion, and desalination systems. These ships are a “cornerstone of the U.S. Navy’s amphibious readiness and expeditionary strike capabilities,” according to the DOJ statement. The sailor sold critical information to a Chinese intelligence officer for $12,000.
More recently, on June 4, the DOJ announced that a U.S. citizen pleaded guilty to acting as an agent for China. The man, who lived in China, would travel to the United States to meet with individuals who could provide him, and ultimately the Chinese Ministry of State Security, with important information.
Digital Threats, Cartels
The video shared by Patel also said that the FBI has been successful in countering cyber threats.
On Jan. 8, the FBI issued an alert warning about a North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat group targeting American entities with a QR code phishing scheme to steal sensitive information. As of last year, threat actors from the group targeted academic institutions, think tanks, and U.S. and foreign government entities.
Last month, the DOJ said that 13 internet domains backed by suspected Chinese agents were seized by authorities. The domains were used to target Americans with security clearance to access classified government information.
The FBI is now targeting cartels as foreign terrorists, which has led to around 4,800 cartel members getting arrested, the video said.
Despite the ongoing crackdown, cartels are shifting drug trafficking tactics. During a Senate committee hearing on May 12, top law enforcement officials raised concerns about some Mexican cartels moving operations to Canada in order to manufacture and distribute fentanyl.
Terry Cole, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said there have been “significant seizures” of fentanyl in Canada over the previous months.
At the hearing, Patel said: “The drug traffickers got smart with the securitization of the southern border and moved it up there [to Canada]. So we’re tackling that with our seize partners.”
Fiber-Optic Kamikaze Drone Found In Mexico Signals New Drone Threat South Of Border
The global proliferation of low-cost suicide drones is setting off alarm bells across the US military and among national security officials and experts. The race to harden high-value assets in the homeland, from military bases and airports to power substations, crude oil refineries, stadiums, and data centers, is already underway as officials fear the next major threat could come from a cheap drone equipped with a warhead.
The latest warning that Ukrainian-style drones are just south of the US-Mexico border comes from a new report by the Mexican newspaper El Sol de Durango, which states that Mexican federal forces discovered an unjammable fiber-optic kamikaze drone during a raid on a compound.
The raid took place at a compound in the Dolores del Río neighborhood, located deep inside north-central Mexico, about 500 miles from the US border and about 560 miles from Mexico City by road.
The Mexican Army and National Guard secured the perimeter of the compound, while Durango’s regional federal prosecutor’s office and other law enforcement agencies found the fiber-optic suicide drone, guns, ammunition, ATVs, and other vehicles.
The operation stemmed from a citizen complaint received by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR ) through the Single Window for Attention (VUA), in which a member of the National Guard (GN) reported potentially criminal activity at the aforementioned address. In response, the Federal Public Prosecutor (MPF) requested and executed a search warrant for the location.
During the operation , supported by agents of the Federal Ministerial Police (PFM) and the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), authorities seized an explosive device , two magazines and 78 rounds of ammunition of various calibers, a drone, two ATVs, and four vehicles . The perimeter was secured by personnel from the Mexican Army ( Sedena ) and the National Guard (GN).
The importance of this find is that fiber-optic kamikaze drones, once largely confined to major war zones across Eurasia, from the Russia-Ukraine conflict to the Gulf area, now appear to be spreading worldwide.
Even more troubling, this drone was found roughly 500 miles south of the US-Mexico border. The discovery points to one unavoidable conclusion drawn from today’s conflict zones: the US must supercharge the hardening of high-value assets against this drone threat (read here).
Military bases, airports, power substations, refineries, ports, data centers, and other critical infrastructure are entering a whole new risk environment in which cheap drones can cause outsized damage.
We recently penned a note for readers on how to profit from the “asymmetric warfare boom.” Read the note here.
Federal immigration agents are now working alongside state troopers at commercial truck weigh stations across the country as the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on illegal commercial drivers, according to U.S. Border Czar Tom Homan.
Appearing on Fox News on Tuesday, Homan said the Department of Homeland Security is partnering with the U.S. Department of Transportation and state law enforcement agencies to identify commercial drivers who are operating trucks with improperly issued commercial driver’s licenses.
“We’ve got a lot of people we’re looking for,” Homan said. “Actually, some states we’re actually working weigh stations with the troopers, trying to get these people as they’re coming through.”
Homan said more than 28,000 non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses have been revoked nationwide and acknowledged that obtaining driver records from some states has complicated enforcement efforts.
“We’re working very closely with many states,” Homan said, adding that DHS is coordinating with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy while the Department of Justice pursues legal action against jurisdictions that refuse to share driver information.
Enforcement expands beyond paperwork
The latest announcement builds on a series of recent commercial vehicle enforcement operations by state agencies focused on licensing violations, unsafe equipment, hours-of-service compliance and immigration-related offenses.
Last week, FreightWaves reported that law enforcement agencies in Texas, Arizona and California had expanded commercial vehicle inspections targeting unqualified drivers and unsafe trucks. Those operations resulted in immigration arrests, equipment citations and drivers being placed out of service.
Homan suggested the latest federal effort goes beyond revoking licenses by focusing on locating drivers who remain behind the wheel after their commercial driving privileges have been canceled.
According to Homan, DHS agents are working directly with state troopers at weigh stations to identify those drivers during routine commercial vehicle inspections.
Arizona stop highlights safety concerns
The enforcement push comes as Arizona authorities continue reporting cases involving commercial drivers operating without required credentials.
In a Facebook post, the Arizona Department of Public Safety said on Tuesday a Highway Patrol Commercial Vehicle Enforcement trooper stopped a hotshot truck on June 26 along State Route 202 near Arizona State University after discovering numerous violations.
Investigators said the driver lacked both a commercial driver’s license and a required USDOT medical certificate. Inspectors also found that none of the trailer’s brakes were functioning, meaning only the tow vehicle could stop the fully loaded 14,900-pound trailer.
Arizona troopers also cited exposed hubcaps and a missing emergency brake cable before placing the driver and vehicle out of service.
