As wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to rage, Vertical Research Partners forecasts top weapon manufacturers will experience record cash flow during the coming years.
The analysis, which was commissioned by the Financial Times, reports, “The leading 15 defense contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52 billion in 2026,” with the “Five top US defense contractors are forecast to generate cash flow of $26 billion.”
The cash flow in 2026 will be double the 2021 numbers. The record numbers are part of an upward trend for weapons makers already benefiting from a surge in global military spending and conflict.
This had led to some controversial policies among these firms at home:
Companies had already directed billions of dollars into share buybacks before the recent flood of new orders; some took on extra leverage to do so. Last year was the strongest for buybacks by aerospace and defence companies in both the US and Europe for the past five years, according to data from the Bank of America, although levels remain far below those of other sectors.
…The large repurchases using taxpayers’ money by US contractors have prompted criticism among some lawmakers who have questioned whether companies are investing enough in new facilities and production. Executives have insisted they are boosting capital spending even as they return money to investors.
Washington is driving the worldwide arms race. The US military budget is about the same as the next ten countries combined. Additionally, under President Joe Biden, Washington funneled billions in weapons to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
The policy has led to massive wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon. Additionally, tensions in the South China Sea are boiling as Israel and Iran are on the brink of a potential direct war.
The White House is well positioned to deescalate many of the world’s conflicts. The US could push Israel and Ukraine to negotiate by leveraging Washington’s military aid to Tel Aviv and Kiev.
In the South China Sea, potential conflicts between China and Taiwan or the Philippines have been partially driven by Washington’s pledge to go to war against Beijing for Manila and Taipei.
The US has also given the Philippines and Taiwan hundreds of millions in weapons, further provoking China.
In a recent survey by Statista Consumer Insights, almost half of Americans said that they were likely or very likely to change their car make on the next possible occasion. Consumers appeared more loyal to their primary bank, smartphone brand, mobile carrier, home and car insurance as well as internet provider, with only around 30 percent saying they were likely to make a switch when it was next possible. At 27 percent, the internet provider was the least likely to be changed.
As part of the same survey, 86 percent said they were actually satisfied or very satisfied with their car make, showing that switching up carmakers has less to do with dissatisfaction and more with trying new types of cars. 80 percent also said they were satisfied with their internet provider. Almost half of respondents said they wanted to purchase a new or used car in the 12 months after the survey. The most commonly owned brands in the United States were Chevrolet and Ford, followed by Toyota, BMW and Honda, according to the survey.
The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse.
I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals.
The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in which economic systems of the industrialized world have made a hard turn against the whole ethos of voluntarism in the commercial sector.
Still, let’s pretend we can agree on a stable description of a capitalist economy. Let’s call it the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning.
It is, ideally, the economic system of a society of consent.
This is obviously an ideal type. So described, it is inseparable from freedom as such and forbids state planning, expropriation, and legal privileges for some over others. How does the status quo match up against that? In uncountable ways, our economic systems utterly fail the test, with all the results that one would expect.
What follows is a short list of all the ways in which the US system does not comport with some ideal type of capitalistic marketplace.
1. Governments have become a main customer of tech and media platforms, instilling an ethos of political deference and cooperation, resulting in surveillance, propaganda, and censorship. This happened gradually enough so that many observers simply did not notice the turn. They held onto their reputation as go-getting capitalist companies even as one platform after another fell to become minions of state power. It began with Microsoft, extended to Google, came to Amazon with its web service in particular, and made its way to Facebook and Twitter, even as taxes, regulations, and intense enforcement of intellectual property consolidated the entire digital-tech industry.
In the course of the change, these companies somehow still held onto their reputations as disruptors with a libertarian ethos, even as they were ever more deployed in service of regime priorities. When Trump took office in 2016, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and UK’s Boris Johnson seemed to be forming a populist resistance force, the crackdown began. With Covid lockdowns, all these platforms swung into action to feed public panic, silence dissent, and propagandize for untested and unnecessary shots of an experimental technology. The deed was done: all these institutions became faithful servants of an emergent corporatist empire.
Now they are full cooperators with the censorship-industrial complex, while the few outliers like Elon Musk’s X and Rumble are facing enormous pressure to conform and get on board. The CEO of Telegram has been arrested simply for not providing a backdoor to Five-Eyes governments, while NATO nations are investigating and arresting for the act of posting disrespectful memes. Digital tech is the most notable and thrilling innovation of our times and yet it has been browbeaten and distorted into a main tool of state power.
2. The US has a medical cartel that works with regulatory agencies and official institutions to impose poisons on the public, charge outrageous prices, cooperate with business cartels to block alternatives, and promote addiction and ill health. The interventions in the sector are legion, from licensing to employer mandates to mandated benefits packages to government funding to financial support from patent-protected and indemnified pharmaceutical companies that fund and control the very agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
The signs and symbols of market economics still exist but in a highly distorted way that makes independent medical practice nearly impossible. It’s not socialism and it’s not capitalism but something else, like a privately-owned medical cartel that works hand in glove with coercive power at public expense. And the coercion is not about promoting health but promoting subscription-based dependency on pharmaceuticals, which have evaded normal liabilities that would otherwise pertain in a genuine marketplace.
3. The US has an educational system that is mostly government-funded, blocks competition, forces participation, wastes students’ time, and pushes a political agenda of compliance and indoctrination. Public schooling in the US has late-19th century origins but the compulsory features came many decades later, alongside bans on teen work, and this later mutated into state-funded universities that enlisted ever larger shares of the population into the system, eventually saddling several generations into vast debt that cannot be paid. The families seeking alternatives end up paying many times over: through taxes, tuition, and lost income. State intervention into educational services is massive and comprehensive, blotting out all normal capitalistic forces and leaving comprehensive state planning.
The whole system is so bad that when the Covid lockdowns took place, teachers, administrators, and many students too welcomed the chance to give it all a rest. Many teachers have not come back and the system as a whole is now worse than ever, with private alternatives popping up everywhere and homeschooling now more common than ever. But even so, regulations and mandates prevent the full flowering of a market-based system, even though no sector is more obviously governed by markets as they were in most of human history.
4. Agricultural subsidies that build vast industries that crush smaller farming and capture the regulatory apparatus and foist bad food on the public. Anyone in farming knows this. The system has gone the way of these other sectors like tech and medicine to become heavily cartelized and working hand-in-glove with government regulators. Daily small farms are being driven out of business with compliance costs and investigations, to the point that even sellers of raw milk fear the knock at the door. In the name of disease mitigation, millions of chickens are being slaughtered and ranchers fear so much as one positive test of some infectious disease. This of course has further consolidated the industry which is ever more dependent on patented pharmaceuticals, insecticides, and fertilizers, the producers of which also get rich at public expense. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and so many others, speak about a public health crisis in the US, the food system from production to distribution plays a large role, which in turns feeds the medical cartel mentioned above.
5. A wildly complicated and confiscatory system of taxation that punishes wealth accumulation and blocks social mobility in all directions. The federal government alone has seven to ten major forms of federal taxation in main categories like income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and various fees. Depending on how you count them, there are 20 or more. This is remarkable given that only 115 years ago, there was only one source of federal financing: the tariff. Once the government got its fingers into incomes with the 16th Amendment – before that, you kept every penny you earned – the rest followed. And that doesn’t count state and local financing. They are deployed as methods of planning and control, with no industry immune from the need to bow and scrape before their taxing masters to grant abatements or breaks of any sort. The net result is a form of commercial and industrial servitude.
6. Fiat paper money floating exchange rates (born 1971) give the government unlimited funds, create inflation and currencies that never rise in value, and provide foreign central banks investment capital to make sure international accounts never settle. This new system has blown up government power, which expands without limit, and disrupted the normal functioning of international trade. Treasury debt floated by governments with central banks evades all normal market forces and risk premiums, simply because they are guaranteed by the power to inflate a public expense. This gives the politicians, warmongers, and totalitarians among us a blank check to do their dirty work.
It is precisely this regime change, together with the manipulation of interest rates, that has given rise to what is called financialization, such that big finance has eaten so much of what was once a healthy industrial sector in the US in which people actual made things for sale in the consumer marketplace. In the old days, the price-specie flow mechanism (described by every free trader from David Hume to Gottfried Haberler) balanced out accounts to ensure that trade would result in mutual benefit. But under the dollar-dominated fiat money system, US debt has come to serve as an infinite source of financing for international industrial buildup that has wrecked countless US industries that once thrived.
This is not free trade but paper imperialism and it ends in producing a backlash like we see in the US. The solution being offered is, of course, tariffs, which turn into another form of taxation. The real solution is a fully balanced budget and a shutdown of the Federal Reserve’s money spigot but that is not even part of the public conversation.
7. The court system invites extortionist litigation and can only be fought with deep pockets. Litigation these days is merely about playing the long game in a wicked match that can be over absolutely anything, real or imagined, that any would-be plaintiff can assemble into a court case. Business people, especially small ones, live in daily fear of this constant threat. And this has become the means by which DEI hiring standards have become normalized; they are instituted by risk-averse managers in fear of bankruptcy by litigation. The irony is that the real wrongdoers, such as pharmaceutical makers, are indemnified against legal action, leaving the courts as playthings for the rapacious.
8. A patent system that grants private industry production cartels and stops competition for everything from pharmaceuticals to software to industrial processes. This is a subject too big for this essay but know that there is a long history of free market thinkers who regarded the patent power as nothing but a tool of industrial cartelization, wholly unjustified by any standard of commercial freedom. “Intellectual property” is not property as such but the creation of fake scarcity by regulation.
One needs only read Fritz Machlup’s 1958 study to understand the fullness of the fakery here, or read what Thomas Jefferson said about the commodification of ideas: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
The corruptions that have resulted from the legislative manufacture of property in ideas cannot be overstated. In industry after industry, they have restricted competition, conferred privilege on would-be monopolists, hindered innovation, and truncated learning and innovation. This is obviously a hard subject but one impossible to avoid. In this connection, I highly recommend the sleeper of a monumental treatise by N. Stephan Kinsella: Legal Foundations of a Free Society. The capture of pro-capitalist thinkers by patent theory represents a serious breach in history and in the current day.
9. As for authentic property rights, they are weaker than ever and can be overridden or even abolished with the stroke of a pen, such that not even landlords can evict tenants or small business can be open for business. Such was common in poorer countries with despotic governments but such a system is now common in the industrialized West such that no business owner can be certain of his rights to his own enterprise. This is the devastating consequence of Covid lockdowns. It is so serious that the various indexes of economic freedom have yet even to adapt their metrics to the new reality. Obviously there is no capitalism as such if millions of businesses can be shut on the whim of public-health authorities.
10. A bloated federal budget supports 420+ agencies that lord it over the whole of commercial society, ballooning up compliance costs for entrepreneurs and creating vast uncertainty about the rules of the game. Slight attempts at “deregulation” cannot begin to fix the core problem. There is no product or service made in the US that is not subject to some form of regulatory diktat. If one happens to come along, such as cryptocurrency, it is beaten to pieces until only the most compliant firms survive the market competition. This has been going on in the crypto space since 2013 at least, and the result has been to convert a disruptive and stateless tool into a compliance-obsessed industry that serves mainly the incumbent financial industry.
Please consider all these factors the next time someone denounces the US system as the best example of the depredations of capitalism. It might just be marketing that is on the hot seat. Marketing to the consumer was a revolution in the use of resources but it too has been corrupted to serve the interests of power. Just because something is available in the consumer marketplace does not necessarily mean that it is a product of the voluntary matrix of exchange that would otherwise profit in a genuinely free market.
Again, I’m not here to argue about the meaning of a word but rather to draw attention to what everyone can surely agree is a hegemonic imposition on commercial freedom by state power, sometimes and even often with the willing cooperation of the dominant players in every industry.
I’m not sure that such a system has a precise name in the 21st century unless we want to go back to the interwar period and label it corporatism or just plain-old fascism. But not even those terms fully fit with this new mode of surveillance-based and digitized despotism that has descended on the US and the world, one that provides healthy rewards for private enterprise that links up with state power and brutal punishments for those enterprises which do not.
Series Of US-China ‘Cloak & Dagger’ Summits Led To This Week’s Sullivan Trip To Beijing
Despite the Biden administration’s recent attempts to talk tough on China, calling it a ‘strategic competitor’, both sides have been talking behind the scenes with an aim toward balancing relations, to ensure recent years of antagonism doesn’t veer into conflict.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan starting Tuesday is meeting over a period of two days with his Chinese counterpart, senior foreign policy official Wang Yi in the Chinese capital. “President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly,” Sullivan told Wang just ahead of the rare talks. Crucially this is the first trip by a sitting US national security advisor to China in eight years (since 2016).
Sullivan’s visit to the outskirts of Beijing where the meetings are being held will last until Thursday, and little is expected to be published or revealed in the aftermath. The immediate goal is the restoration of positive and more frequent communications, which broke down for most of 2022-2023.
“The key is to keep to the overall direction of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence, and win-win cooperation,” Wang has said. He called recent China-US ties “critical” but admitted the relationship has of late taken “twists and turns”.
China’s foreign affairs ministry in a separate statement said, “China will focus on expressing serious concerns, clarifying its solemn position and making serious demands on the Taiwan issue, the right to development and China’s strategic security.”
Also on the agenda is the expansion and normalization of military-to-military talks in order to avoid confrontation in places like the South China Sea, as well as efforts at de-confliction in the Taiwan Strait, along with discussion of Washington’s desire for China to crackdown on the development and distribution of chemicals that can be made into fentanyl.
High on Beijing’s agenda will be US tariffs, particularly those targeting Chinese chip makers. “The United States has continuously taken unreasonable measures against China in terms of tariffs, export controls, investment reviews and unilateral sanctions, which have seriously undermined China’s legitimate rights and interests,” the Chinese foreign ministry statement laid out.
Extensive piece in FT about the back channel discourse between the US and China lead by Sullivan and Wang Yi. The various relatively low-profile meetings set the stage for containing some of the tension in the Sino-American relationship creating some predictability.
Meanwhile,Financial Times in a fresh investigative report issued this week has described that leading up to this historic meeting, both Sullivan and Wang had met quietly to stabilize relations in ‘cloak and dagger’ summits around the world. This had reportedly gone on since 2023 in the aftermath of the Chinese spy balloon fiasco over the American east coast.
Celsius has repaid two-thirds of its eligible customers as part of its long-awaited bankruptcy proceedings. According to an Aug. 26 court filing, the bankrupt crypto lender has repaid approximately $2.53 billion to 251,000 creditors.
The amount represents approximately 84% of the $3 billion worth of assets owed by the defunct crypto lender to over 375,000 creditors.
The bankruptcy payments are a positive development for the expanding crypto industry. They coincide with the bankruptcy proceedings of the Mt. Gox exchange, which owed over $9.4 billion in crypto to 127,000 creditors. After 10 years, these creditors are finally beginning to recover their assets.
Not all creditors are actively looking to claim their cryptocurrency due to the small amount they are owed.
This is because of the remaining 121,000 creditors who have yet to claim their funds, around 64,000 have less than $100 worth of crypto, while 41,000 creditors are owed between $100 to $1,000, according to the filing:
“Given the small amounts at issue for many of these creditors, they may not be incentivized to take the steps needed to successfully claim a distribution.”
The bankruptcy administrator will retry distributing to these creditors via Coinbase every two weeks, while PayPal claim codes remain redeemable for credits at all times.
The administrator said it “attempted more than 2.7 million distributions in total for the approximately 372,000 currently eligible creditors.”
The company claimed that the pause was necessary to put it in a “better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations” after the price of its native token, Celsius (CEL) plummeted in 2022.
Its bankruptcy saw Celisus settle $4.7 billion in fines with the United States Federal Trade Commission alongside settlements with the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Its former CEO, Alex Mashinsky, was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors with various financial fraud, manipulating CEL’s price and misleading Celsius customers. Mashinsky has pleaded not guilty and is out on a $40 million bond pending trial in September.
New York State Anesthesiologist Pleads Guilty To Chloroforming, Assaulting Kid’s Nanny While She Slept
A New York State anesthesiologist has pleaded guilty to drugging and sexually abusing his family’s nanny while she was sleeping in his home.
60 year old Paul Giacopelli was indicted in March, and pleaded guilty last Wednesday, according to the NY Post. His lawyer commented that he has “assumed responsibility for his crimes, and now is focused on tending to his family.”
The Post report says that the victim would sometimes stay overnight at his house when watching his children so he could work at the hospital. She said there were four times in 2023 where she fell asleep, “woke up to a rag being held over her face, smelled chemicals and blacked out”, the Post writes.
After setting up a hidden camera, she caught Giacopelli assaulting her. She then brought the video to local police and he was questioned.
Giacopelli confessed to filling a rag with Sevoflurane, an anesthetic agent, according to the Post report. He also said he had a “chloroform fetish” and confessed to sexually assaulting the victim.
He said she was an easy target because she was a “heavy sleeper”.
Giacopelli also admitted to taking drugs, including fentanyl, from the hospital to his home, testimony revealed.
The state Board for Professional Medical Conduct has since barred him from practicing medicine. Giacopelli is set to be sentenced on November 20 and is expected to receive four years in state prison.
We should all stop celebrating Ivy League presidents resigning.
Last December, Liz Magill, then president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, resigned. This was the result of a public relations nightmare for the school, brought on by a rise in antisemitism on campus, widespread protests, and, of course, her disastrous performance in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee. While the right celebrated, I wrote a cautionary tale about their excitement. Now, as Ivy League presidents keep dropping like flies, the latest victim being Columbia’s chief administrator, Minouche Shafik, we should all remember that new management doesn’t fix a broken business model.
As was evident by Liz Magill and Claudine Gay’s viral appearances in front of Congress, the Ivies are plagued by a vacuous type of moral relativism. For decades, failing to prioritize intellectual diversity in the hiring of faculty and admission of students has led to declining quality in curriculum and campus discourse. Choosing to ignore warnings of long-time heterodox academics, the administrators hid behind lengthy “statements of open expression,” as ours was called at Penn. These sent free speech monitors to right-wing events where locations were decided based on the safety considerations of expected protestors and looked the other way as action was taken against faculty and students accused of “hate speech.” What they lacked was any real commitment to First Amendment principles.
One should certainly acknowledge these presidents have failed to do their jobs of maintaining their university’s image and securing donations, thus making a strong argument that they should be pushed out. Nevertheless, despite “three presidents down,” we have seen little to no substantive change at these universities. Less controversial interim presidents have followed, and with them fruitless committees investigating “hate” on campus like the task forces at Penn.
In the case of Columbia, the anti-Israel left celebrated Shafik’s resignation, citing her use of administrative power to punish (a small number) of Columbia students involved in the protests. Many on the right have suggested that “this is just the beginning,” and these resignations represent a reckoning against the powers that be in academia. In reality, all they do is take the heat off the universities, a heat which is absolutely vital to the type of change conservatives want and these schools need. In some instances, as has been evident in the response to the Columbia president’s resignation, this strategy of pushing out presidents seems to have emboldened left-wing actors who have substantial influence in university spaces to engage in a similar “naming and shaming.”
Fiery admissions of concern from well-known alumni at Harvard and Penn were crucial to the resignations of Magill and Gay. In their public statements against the universities, Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman cited a litany of concerns they had about the state of their alma maters, chiefly that they had become harbors of antisemitism. This problem was not solved by Magill and Gay’s absence, with the universities taking very little action against encampments this spring.
It makes perfect sense, of course, that the protests still occurred with new leadership because the problem is, in fact, much deeper. Most of these universities cost upwards of $80,000 a year, a burden that has strapped roughly 43 million Americans with student loan debt. Many of these individuals majored in social sciences and humanities, and they simply could not get a return on their education investment sufficient to pay back their debt.
While these students leave universities unable to find well-paying jobs in the careers they have pursued, they also leave unprepared for citizenship. Where liberal and civic education used to be at the center of advanced learning, creating individuals who were empathetic, in pursuit of the truth, and literate in history and government, today’s college graduates lack anything remotely resembling those qualities. A recent survey conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) showed a stunning lack of knowledge about the United States and its past, with just 28% knowing that the 13th Amendment freed the slaves.
None of this is particularly surprising, especially to those of us following the situation at America’s premier universities this last year. What is shocking, however, is how, in a country that prides itself on its free markets, an entire industry has been running for decades on a failing business model that delivers its consumers such a lackluster product.
By ridding ourselves of these university presidents, we only succeeded in removing an easy target of public criticism, a fact that allows the schools to deflect accountability. The focus of our ills now must be some obscure bureaucratic structure hiding behind veils of “academic freedom.” If concerned actors, alumni, and members of Congress alike are serious about seeing reform in higher education, they need to target the business model of higher education and not just keep looking for new management.
Our students and our country deserve better.
Lexi Boccuzzi is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. She is also a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where she founded a new heterodox student publication, The Pennsylvania Post. She often writes about culture, conservatism, electoral politics, and higher education as it pertains to Gen Z. Her work can also be found in City Journal and National Review. Follow her on X @lexiboccuzzi.
Special counsel Jack Smith filed an updated indictment against former President Donald Trump in Washington on Aug. 27 following the Supreme Court’s ruling that he enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” an Aug. 27 filing from the special counsel’s office reads.
“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”
The new indictment narrows the allegations against the former president by removing allegations involving his interactions with the Justice Department.
It no longer lists as a co-conspirator former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means.
Smith’s superseding indictment still contains four charges against the former president, including those from the financial reform law the Supreme Court addressed in Fischer v. United States.
Presidential Immunity
In Trump v. United States, a majority of the Supreme Court held that presidents enjoyed several tiers of immunity from prosecution: absolute immunity for acts that fall within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” a presumption of immunity for their official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion grouped the allegations into three categories: those surrounding Trump’s work with the Department of Justice (DOJ); those involving his communication with state electors and his communications on Jan. 6, 2021; and his urging Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the election results in the Senate.
Trump received absolute immunity from prosecution of the first category. For the second, the Court remanded the issue to the district court to determine whether his actions were official. His communications with Pence are “presumptively immune,” but the DOJ can rebut that presumption in court.
It’s unclear how much of the superseding indictment will survive. D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan will likely receive briefings from both the special counsel and former Trump’s legal team advocating their view of which charges should be dropped or maintained in the indictment.
The Supreme Court has left her with the task of parsing former Trump’s actions and determining which were official and which were unofficial.
Judge Chutkan has scheduled a status conference for Sept. 5.
Experts have told The Epoch Times that the prosecution will extend past the election. If Trump wins the presidency, he’s expected to withdraw the case. Even if he loses, however, the case could face additional appeal and potentially make its way back to the Supreme Court.
Last year, Trump’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss on statutory grounds and alleging that the initial indictment failed to “state an offense.” More specifically, it alleged the indictment failed to allege the type of deceit or trickery needed for the first count, which focused in both indictments on an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.
On Aug. 3, Judge Chutkan denied the motion without prejudice and stated that Trump “may file a renewed motion once all issues of immunity have been resolved.”
The superseding indictment came just a day after Smith asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to affirm the legitimacy of his office. Florida Judge Aileen Cannon had dismissed his classified documents case against Trump on the grounds that Smith’s appointment violated the constitution.
That case too could reach the Supreme Court where at least one justice — Justice Clarence Thomas — expressed concern about Smith’s office. That came in his concurrence for Trump v. United States. None of the other justices joined that opinion, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern about the special counsel’s power during oral argument on April 25.
Cannon limited her decision to the documents case, although it raised questions about the legitimacy of his other prosecutions.
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell
“The future’s becoming muddled. The lines of vision are narrowing. But now they’re desperate. All paths lead into darkness.” – Frank Herbert – Dune
Trying to decipher the path ahead becomes more difficult by the day. We are purposefully bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by the ruling class, designed to distract us from their real purpose, real agenda, and real plans to imprison us in their techno-gulag, eating zee bugs in our container sized hovels, using our government issued CBDCs to subsist, unless we dared to question the approved narrative – resulting in our social credit rating dropping into the domestic terrorist zone – getting us banned and shunned from society. This is the New World Order the Davos crowd has designed and will implement as a Great Reset, if they succeed in retaining and increasing control over the U.S. and the rest of the Western World in the next six months.
I know many bloggers/analysts depend on clicks, likes, and subscriptions to their websites/social media to make a living, so they constantly predict Armageddon within the next week, and it never happens. This “little boy who cried wolf” routine has resulted in even the critical thinking among us becoming complacent and unconcerned as we accelerate towards our dire rendezvous with destiny. We shrug off Ukraine invading Russia and bombing a nuclear power plant, while Belarus moves troops towards the Ukraine border, Putin bombs Kiev, and U.S. military equipment is employed by U.S. military personnel against Russia.
We discount the possibility of Iran actually mounting a devastating response against Israel, prompting an even larger response by Israel, and the U.S. getting drawn into the conflict with Iran, because we’ve been here before and nothing happened. And nothing may happen again in the next week, but Fourth Turnings NEVER de-intensify. There will be blood, death, and war on an enormous scale before this Crisis is resolved.
Personally, I believe the next six months will determine the course of humanity for the next century and beyond. I don’t think that is hyperbole when you step back and observe the big picture. It is so easy to get lost in the inconsequential minutia, because they want you lost in the inconsequential minutia, while the consequential decision-making is being done by the billionaire puppet-masters behind closed doors. This Fourth Turning is slated to reach its bloody denouement in or around 2032, based upon historical precedent. Of course, with nuclear arms, it could all end in the blink of an eye.
We are in an existential battle between good and evil, and unlike the movies there is no guarantee the good guys will win in the end. We are lost in a blizzard of lies, with super-elite factions vying for power and control over our lives. People who just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace, with the freedom to say and do what they want, are being bullied, tyrannized, surveilled, censored, taxed, and pushed to their limit by those pulling the levers of this society.
Most people are unwilling or unable to confront the brutal facts of our current reality. They cling to their normalcy bias, disbelieving and minimizing the unmistakable catastrophic threats staring them right in the face. As James Stockdale stated many decades ago, you can’t confuse faith we will overcome the evil forces we are confronting, with the discipline and tremendous sacrifices we will have to make in order to achieve victory over those evil forces. The normalcy bias crowd, with their heads planted firmly in the sand, will not be able to sit out this chaotic, violent, bloody installment of this Fourth Turning Crisis. Sides must be taken. Choices must be made. Engaging in distressing behavior will be required. The 2nd Amendment will need to be used in order to retain the 1st Amendment.
If ever Lenin’s quote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”, applied, it has been the six weeks since the Deep State/Invisible Government attempted to assassinate Trump in Butler, PA. Events have been happening at a breakneck pace and it is difficult to determine which incidents are being engineered and which are occurring naturally. As a died in wool conspiracy theorist, who needs new conspiracy theories because all of mine have come true, I believe most of what we have witnessed over the last several weeks has been engineered by competing super-elite factions vying for control over our government in a life-or-death struggle to rule over our demise as an empire in the throes of its death rattle.
As Dylan noted in the 1960s, times are a-changin. The waters of debt have grown, and we are sinking like a stone.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
With the national debt already above $35 trillion, generating $1.1 trillion of interest expense per year, our leaders continue to heap $6 billion of debt per day ($4.2 million per minute) upon our backs, destroy our standard of living through relentless Fed created inflation, wage undeclared wars across the globe, unblinkingly report provably fake economic data to maintain their Potemkin empire façade, conspire with the Fed and their Wall Street owners to push the stock market to all-time highs, before they pull the rug out at a time of their choosing. They know the ignorant masses are disinterested and/or incapable of understanding the machinations they use to keep the sheep calm, as they lead them to slaughter.
Last week they quietly reported that 818,000 jobs they reported as existing were entirely fake. They knew they were fake when they reported them, but you gotta do what you gotta do to maintain your wealth, control and power. A good rule of thumb is whatever the government reports as the unemployment rate or inflation rate, double it to get close to the real number. Using real numbers would reveal the country is in a recession and has been for over a year. You should always watch what they do, rather than what they say, to understand the truth.
Powell told the world this week he is going to cut rates in September and keep cutting. Why would he do such a thing when the stock market is at an all-time high, home prices are at all-time highs (75% higher than the 2006 peak), employment is at all-time highs, GDP is growing strongly, and inflation is still 50% higher than the Fed’s target? Because he knows the reported numbers are a lie and his bosses know reigniting inflation will drive their stocks higher and make their debt burden less burdensome. A catastrophic debt and asset collapse beckons. But the music is still playing, so everyone keeps on dancing.
Maybe they want the collapse to occur on Trump’s watch to put a final nail in his coffin, convincing the ignorant masses it was his fault, allowing them to overthrow his regime and introduce their new world order of CBDCs, social credit scores, 15-minute cities, bugs for you and caviar for them, Big Brother surveillance, and war with Russia and China. When they pull the plug on this shitshow of debt, the Great Taking will commence, and they expect the masses to beg to be saved. The Covid plandemic was the test run and the vast majority bowed down to fear propaganda and authoritarian measures in order to be “saved” by their all-powerful overlords. They will use the same game plan again.
Their diabolical plans are there for all to see, but most continue to stare at their iGadgets, conduct their fantasy football drafts, go further into debt buying shit they don’t need, gulping down the toxic chemicals marketed to them as food, believing voting for one of the two selected Uniparty options will change our course, and are all in on war against those evil dictators Putin and Xi. Is there a rhyme or reason to the events that have taken place over the last several weeks, and is the next three months already orchestrated with a pre-determined outcome? And, if so, is that outcome designed to generate a response from the various competing factions, which allows the true ruling elite to roll-out additional aspects of their totalitarian Great Reset agenda?
I’ve been trying to decipher what the hell is going on since the dementia dummy pretend president was purposely sacrificed on the debate altar on June 27 by his puppet-masters because they knew his pants shitting, child sniffing, and ice cream eating antics weren’t going to cut it this time around. They need the polls to be close enough that they can activate their cheating machine to steal the election again. Those fake mail-in ballots aren’t going to fill themselves in and be dumped into the collection bins at 3:00 am. It was clear Biden was going to lose in a landslide, so they needed to adjust their plans.
Plan A, the assassination of Trump before the RNC convention, failed by a half inch. There is no doubt in my mind the CIA/Secret Service/Deep State colluded to eliminate Trump, because they perceive his election threatens their continued control over the levers of power in this country and our European puppet regimes. They tried to replay the Oswald “lone gunman/patsy killed playbook”, and failed, but their regime media mouthpieces have buried the story, and no one seems to give a shit anymore, just like the Deep State likes it. You’re a conspiracy nutjob if you don’t buy their ridiculous narrative of feigned incompetence.
It became readily apparent their pretend game of Biden running again was a joke when their lackey co-conspirators in the media all turned on Slow Joe at the exact same moment. They were all given the memo to suddenly realize his mental capacities were non-existent after actively suppressing the fact he was a dementia ridden cadaver his entire time in office. Plan B has now been activated. The selection of the diverse, vacuous, cackler commie by the Deep State puppeteers, as the savior for the Republic, even though she is a truly dumb human being who has never had an original thought in her life, can only mean one of two things.
They are either so confident in their cheating operations in swing states they believe they can produce a redo of 2020 or they don’t want to win. The selection of tampon Tim over Josh Shapiro as VP points towards them not wanting to win. With Shapiro they would have had a much better shot at winning Pennsylvania, which they must win. There has been a monumental effort by the regime media to produce fake polls showing kackling Kamala ahead or even with Trump. This is an essential ingredient to stealing the election with fake and illegal immigrant mail-in ballots stuffed into ballot boxes by Soros paid flunkies.
Based on the amount of money they are spending here in Pennsylvania, with Kamala ads every three minutes, it appears the powers that be do want to install another dimwit puppet, who will do as they are told and say whatever the teleprompter tells them to say. With Kamala they can continue the destruction of the nation, pillaging the wealth, keeping the border wide open, promoting deviancy, shredding the Constitution, and instigating the onset of WW3 to keep the military industrial complex satiated.
They may be able to neutralize Trump, as they did during his first term with Russiagate, impeachments, and a scamdemic, but he isn’t nearly as controllable as the dimwitted cackler. They fear his potential retribution and unleashing of someone like RFK Jr. in a role as Attorney General or CIA Director. That would be too dangerous for the Deep State psychopaths. That is why they will try to assassinate Trump again if his lead seems insurmountable.
The other major development over the last several weeks is the fact we are actively fighting a war with Russia. Everyone knows we’ve provided a couple hundred billion in “military aid” to Zelensky, which is essentially funneled to U.S. arms dealers, after Zelensky and his nazi apparatchiks take their slice. But the invasion of Russia and the pinpoint drone attacks on bridges, oil refineries, nuclear power plants, and other civilian targets have been conducted with U.S. hardware, U.S. logistical planning, and U.S. drone operators.
The depleted Ukraine military is incapable of conducting operations on this scale and do not have the technological acumen to utilize the American technology. Therefore, U.S. personnel are conducting military operations against Russia, meaning we are conducting an undeclared war against Putin, and he knows it.
This has been the neocon plan since 2014. Lure Russia into military operations in Ukraine in order to deplete their military and their treasury. After two years of sanctions and $200 billion into the Zelensky black hole, Russia is winning, Ukraine has been bled dry by the U.S. and their puppet Zelensky, and the sanctions have crushed the EU economies. The U.S. blew up the Nordstream pipeline and continues to peddle utterly ridiculous tripe about some drunken Ukrainians blowing it up from their dinghy.
Putin has shown tremendous restraint in not annihilating Kiev and inflicting real pain on Ukrainian citizens. But I get the feeling his patience is wearing thin. The neocons, like Graham, Nuland, and the majority of corrupt psychopaths in Congress believe starting WW3 will somehow restore the glory of an empire accelerating towards full-fledged collapse. This belief is utter madness, from those who never fought in war and do not know the horrors of combat. They will gladly sacrifice our children to retain and expand their wealth, power and glory.
It seems like years of historic events have occurred in the last two months, and I fear the next three months will be wrought with events which will be discussed in history books decades from now, as we read about the Great Crash, Great Depression, and World War II today. Those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State, Oligarchs, Ruling Elite), manipulating and molding the minds of the masses, continue to use all means at their disposal to suppress free speech and retain their control by: arresting the CEO of Telegram, threatening Musk, extraditing Kim Dotcom, torturing Assange for years, forcing Snowden into Russian exile, censoring dissenters, and throwing people into prison for peaceful protests and exercising their right to free speech.
The basement dummy strategy they used to keep the public ignorant of Biden’s dementia in 2020 is being attempted again with Willie Brown’s whore, as they keep her hidden from journalists asking questions which would reveal her immense stupidity and inability to think on her feet. She was always much better on her knees.
Based on the Kamala’s record over the last four years regarding the BLM riots, support of Covid lockdowns and forced vaccinations, her Border Czar performance, her coverup of Joe’s declining mental faculties, association with the economic policies which have created massive inflation and ruined the lives of millions and picking a far-left lying looney toon as her VP, she should have zero chance of becoming president. But we know presidents are selected, not elected. And we know those counting the votes are all that matter in the end.
I know everyone wants their team to win and it does matter in the short-term whether Harris or Trump is in the White House for the next four years. But neither will keep the country from its ruinous destiny with history. All empires die, it’s just a matter of whether they collapse violently or just fade into the sunset. The American empire will go out with a bang, as it is run by narcissistic psychopaths bent on the destruction of mankind if it can’t rule the world.
Electing Trump may allow the catastrophic collapse to be paused for a moment, but there is nothing substantive he can do to reverse decades of poor decisions, and a teetering tower of debt poised to come crashing down at any moment, as the world loses faith in the USD. If the powers that be choose so, Trump may be the sucker holding the bag when they pull it. There really is no escape, as described by Ludwig von Mises many decades ago. With debt of $35 trillion and rising by a trillion every few months, our credit expansion has reached its limit. Collapse is inevitable.
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
The selection of Harris would continue the tragic course we have been on for the last four years, with her handlers completing their destruction of our society, culture and economic system. The next three months could see the onset of WW3, the latest heavily marketed plandemic (monkeypox, bird flu, covid variant 9.0, West Nile or some Gates mosquito virus), more assassination attempts, false flag terrorist incidents to create civil chaos, and if Trump wins – cities burning as the BLM and ANTIFA terrorists are activated by Soros and Obama.
I don’t know what will happen in the coming months, but I do know it will not be uneventful. Fourth Turnings always intensify towards violent upheaval, death, destruction, and clear winners and losers. No matter the outcome of this election, violence will follow as the losing side will not accept defeat. I expect civil war to be coupled with global conflict as we travel towards some type of climax and resolution by 2032, twenty-four years after this crisis was triggered in 2008 by the Fed and their Wall Street owners.
No matter how prepared you think you are for the dreadful challenges ahead, the level of violence likely to overwhelm the world will be shocking and disconcerting to even the most hardened and toughest individuals. Is anyone really prepared for their bank accounts to be drained by shadowy entities; empty grocery shelves; the power grid being down, attacks from within and from without; and hordes of armed gangs roaming the streets and countryside?
Chaos is going to reign, especially if Trump manages to defy the odds and be elected. Those who conspired against him are willing to destroy the world rather than face the consequences of their traitorous schemes. The end of an empire, which refuses to accept its pre-ordained fate, will not be pretty. The facts are unequivocally bad, and feelings, gender gibberish, diversity and inclusion bullshit, and what you are told to believe by the regime media and your glorious leaders, won’t matter when every day becomes a matter of life or death.
I stumbled across a Bob Dylan song from 62 years ago called Let Me Die in My Footsteps, which was inspired by the Cold War and the building of bomb shelters in the late 1950s to survive a nuclear attack. The lyrics are haunting and probably more applicable today than they were in 1962. My interpretation is that we have to keep living our lives to the fullest, speaking truth to power, understanding the propaganda spewed by our supposed leaders are nothing but lies, fear is their tactic to control us and push us towards war, and we might need to make a stand against tyranny and die where we stand.
Cowering in a bunker while the Deep State pillages our nation is not the choice of people who care about the future and are willing to fight for future unborn generations. Everyone is going to need to ask themselves whether they are willing to die in their footsteps for a greater cause. The answers will determine the future course of history. What kind of American are you?
I will not go down under the ground ’Cause somebody tells me that death’s comin’ ’round An’ I will not carry myself down to die When I go to my grave my head will be high Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground
There’s been rumors of war and wars that have been The meaning of life has been lost in the wind And some people thinkin’ that the end is close by ’Stead of learnin’ to live they are learnin’ to die Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground
I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see
When someone is pullin’ the wool over me
And if this war comes and death’s all around
Let me die on this land ’fore I die underground
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground
There’s always been people that have to cause fear
They’ve been talking of the war now for many long years
I have read all their statements and I’ve not said a word
But now Lawd God, let my poor voice be heard
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground
Parents Fight Back With Rising Use Of Religious Vaccine Exemptions For Their Children
Summer has officially come to a close. Families wrapped up beach and/or mountain vacations last weekend as kids now sit in the classroom, hopefully learning non-woke math and critical reading skills. A notable trend this school year is the increasing number of parents choosing to circumvent government-enforced vaccine requirements for their children through non-medical religious exemptions.
Local non-profit media outlet Maryland Matterscited new data showing an increasing number of parents have opted their children out of vaccination requirements through non-medical religious exemption. The trend surged after draconian requirements pushed by an overreaching government during the Covid era.
Here’s more on the data from Maryland Matters:
The number rarely rises above a percent or two of an incoming kindergarten class, typically accounting for no more than a couple hundred children per year. But that means that in the years since 2002, a total of more than 10,000 kindergartners have attended public and private schools without vaccination records, according to historical data from the Maryland Department of Health.
The rising percent of religious exemptions in recent years may point to increasing rates of vaccine hesitancy among families, said Daniel Salmon, a professor and director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“We’ve seen a post-COVID increase,” Salmon said. “With COVID … things got really polarized with more misinformation and disinformation. Vaccinations became a very political topic. And that’s not helpful.”
Maryland law requires doctors to inject children with several big pharma vaccines before they enter kindergarten (and many more after) to protect themselves and their classmates from transmissible diseases, such as polio, measles, and chickenpox, among many others.
Tracking vaccine hesitancy through the Maryland health data suggests parents are becoming increasingly aware of the potential concerns surrounding increasing government-mandated vaccinations for their children.
Here’s a straightforward breakdown of the vaccine hesitancy rise of Maryland parents via the media outlet:
The earliest data readily available from the state is from the 2002-2003 school year, in which 0.2% of kindergartners got a religious exemption, or about 126 kids out of roughly 63,000 entering kindergarten that year.
The rate increased steadily over the years: Ten years later, for example, about 0.6% of kids had religious exemptions, resulting in about 419 kids not receiving vaccinations in 2012-2013.
Religious exemptions spiked in 2019-2020 when 2.7% of kindergartners, or 1,641 kids, opted out of vaccination requirements. The COVID-19 pandemic went into full swing in the spring of 2020, so those families would have opted out prior to the the rise in cases in the United States.
Since the 2021-2022 school year, at least 1 percent of kindergartners in Maryland had a medical exemption – a couple hundred a year.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump criticized the number of childhood vaccines in a video with Robert F. Kennedy Jr in mid-July.
Whoops. Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump after the shooting. In the video Trump repeats his old (false) claims about childhood vaccines, suggesting the vaccine schedule causes injuries in babies. https://t.co/K4RWXfoudSpic.twitter.com/KZcSBVtxWE
The prevailing trend is that an increasing number of parents are opting their children out of government-mandated big-pharma vaccines. We wonder why… And maybe Trump is right.
