Here’s the real surprise: Fluctuating temperatures and ferocious summer storms may be valuable economic indicators in the gold market.
In times of uncertainty, investors flock to all that glitters, driving supply down and boosting price—especially when that uncertainty turns political.
“Gold’s carbon profile and decarbonization potential may reinforce or amplify gold’s role as a safe haven asset, risk hedge and store of value during periods of market stress,” according to the World Gold Council.
“This lends further credence to our analysis suggesting that gold’s long-term returns may be more robust than those of many mainstream asset classes in the context of a range of climate scenarios.”
It’s not just weather that has investors pricking up their ears. In fact, price volatility is far more closely linked to how global leaders and public discourse respond to climate events.
A 2023 study found a strong correlation between return volatility and two types of climate change risk: transitional (i.e., the political and social move toward green energy) and physical (actual devastation caused by climate events). Researchers found that gold prices fluctuate more in the face of green energy policy, and less under severe weather conditions that aren’t widely discussed.
That’s likely because no one knows exactly what to believe. Despite alarmist media reports, life so far remains largely uninterrupted by climate change. But if politicians really believe we’re heading for “submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow”—to quote former President Barack Obama—they must also believe they’re doing humanity a favor by burning up paper money in a slow-fire of inflationary “green” policy. In politics, not climate itself, lies the real uncertainty that drives investors to make sharp, aggressive moves in the market.
“President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history—an agenda that is lowering energy costs for hardworking families, bolstering America’s energy security, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, and strengthening community-driven climate resilience across the country.”
Particularly during an election year, legislation presents a major “transition risk,” and that’s where gold comes in.
A second reason for gold’s price fluctuations when harsh weather hits the news and policy stage is its role in decarbonization, the process of reducing potentially climate-altering emissions from industrial manufacturing.
Mining is notoriously emissions-heavy, but as the World Gold Council points out, there’s potential to develop eco-friendly methods that could be especially pertinent to gold.
“It is credible that gold mining might reach net-zero by 2050,” report authors wrote.
“The opportunity for sectoral decarbonization [in gold mining] is clear, concentrated and, compare[d] to many sectors, relatively simple and accessible.”
Suppose resources do become scarce. In an economy where governments and citizens alike are scrabbling for a healthy food and water supply, basic industrial metals, and functional transportation, paper money will be the last “store of value” on anyone’s mind—except for stoking fires. Gold stands a better chance of survival should global tensions escalate, whether the cause is climate, pandemics, or war.
The 2023 study suggests that during times of real physical risk attributable to climate change, gold prices tend to hold steady. That’s a sign to watch out for—and an economy to invest in early.
“We note that an increase in climate risk has no definitive effect on the economy until the component of climate risk being considered [i.e., discussed in political circles] is factored in,” according to the 2023 study authors.
“An increase in news coverage of the physical risk factors [for example] will create a societal concern which can impact investor sentiments and consequently the entire economy.”
Labour’s proposed policies aim to accelerate the UK’s energy transition while relying heavily on the taxation of oil and gas profits to fund these initiatives.
Potential tax increases and a phase-out of new oil and gas drilling licenses could discourage investment and lead to a decline in the UK’s energy sector.
Labour’s plans could have broader implications for the country’s overall economy and its reputation as an energy investment destination.
The UK’s Labour Party just scored a massive victory that could have huge implications for the country’s oil and gas sector. This will be the party’s return to power after 14 years as opposition. It will also be a double-down on the energy transition. And it may end the country’s reputation as an energy investment destination.
When it comes to the energy transition, the two main parties in the UK don’t really differ much—except in the scale of their commitments to replacing oil, gas, and coal with wind, solar, and EVs. Labour, unsurprisingly, is the more ambitious transition champion. And now it will get a chance to try the policies it said in a manifesto that would turn the country into a clean energy superpower.
“To deliver our clean power mission, Labour will work with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030,” the party said in its manifesto, adding that it would keep a reserve of gas-fired power plants as backup and ensure a “phased and responsible transition” for the North Sea oil industry.
Yet according to those active in the North Sea, what the manifesto says and what it would actually deliver, are two very different things.
Both the Conservatives and Labour see the UK’s oil and gas industry as a source of money to be spent on the transition. The windfall profit tax that the Tory government introduced in 2022 in response to the huge profits energy companies were making was only the start. A year later, the levy was raised from the original 25% to 35%. This tax was then, earlier this year, extended until 2029.
With the windfall profit tax, oil and gas companies’ tax burden comes in at 75%—a rate that most industries would agree is not really conducive to investment growth. Indeed, it is not. In fact, the chairman of one British energy company that has worked in the North Sea for years compared the investment climate in the country to that in a war zone.
“We had no idea what was going to happen during the civil war in Libya but we did at least know that when the war ended, whoever was victorious was going to want the oil,” Serica Energy’s David Latin said a week ago, as quoted by The Telegraph.
“In the UK there’s this cloud hanging over the industry that no one wants us anymore.”
In this, Latin is not entirely accurate. The Labour government may not want the oil and gas industry, but it would need it in order to be able to fund its transition plans for the next term of parliament. Those would cost close to 24 billion pounds, which is equal to some $30 billion, and oil and gas industry taxes would constitute a leading source of income.
Not only this, but Labour has vowed to do away with what it has called “the unjustifiably generous investment allowances” for oil and gas companies. These probably refer to a relief mechanism provided by the Sunak government, which allowed companies reinvesting their profits in oil and gas production to claim tax relief at the rate of 91% of every pound they reinvest. With no relief and a 78% tax burden, there will hardly be any energy companies investing in future oil and gas production in the UK. Instead, they are looking elsewhere for growth.
Investing in the UK could soon become uneconomical, said the chief executive of Ineos Energy days before the UK vote.
David Bucknall based his prediction on the Labour Party’s tax plans and said that because of those plans, Ineos was looking to expand in the U.S. and Denmark.
The Conservatives and Labour were trying to outdo each other “in how much pain you can put into the industry”, he said, as quoted by the Daily Mail, adding that “If you take away investment allowances and pile on windfall taxes, it’s very easy to make things uneconomic.”
On top of the higher tax burden, the Labour plan also involves canceling the issuance of new oil and gas drilling licenses for the North Sea.
With no new licenses available and a prohibitively large tax bill on profits with no relief in sight, it would be a miracle if there is a functioning oil and gas industry in the UK in five years.
This would be a problem for transition plans.
Essentially, Labour plans for the energy industry are to use oil and gas producers as cash cows to fund the transition away from oil and gas. But over-taxation would either kill or force companies to relocate—meaning the cash cow would disappear. And so would the cash it was previously generating for transition plans.
‘Doing My Goodest Job’ To Beat Trump – Warner Rounds Up Senate Dems Against Biden After Disastrous ‘Redemption’ Interview
On the heels of his flub-filled Fourth of July, President Biden’s Friday appearances did nothing to reverse his humiliating march to a seemingly inevitable exit from the 2024 presidential campaign. The day brought more head-scratching misstatements and garbled lines on the campaign trail, along with a much-anticipated primetime ABC interview that prominent Democrats called “sad” and “chilling.”
Perhaps most significantly of all, however, more Democratic legislators called for Biden to leave the race — and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is reportedly organizing a meeting with his peers with a goal of building a united plea for Biden to quit.
According to anonymous sources cited by the Washington Post, Warner and allies are weighing various means of intervening, including a meeting at the White House with Biden. While the count of House Democrats who’ve urged Biden to quit climbed to four on Friday — as Illinois Rep. Mike Quiqley made his feelings known on MSNBC —no sitting senators have yet crossed that line. However, per the Washington Post:
There’s a growing consensus among Senate Democrats that the situation with Biden at the top of the ticket is untenable, and senators are trying to determine the best way to relay that message to an insulated president. Some senators don’t think Biden has people around him who are giving him an accurate picture of the fallout.
Tellingly, a Warner spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny the reports about his machinations, instead saying, “Like many other people in Washington and across the country, Senator Warner believes these are critical days for the president’s campaign, and he has made that clear to the White House.”
While Warner — the chair of the Senate intelligence committee — maneuvered on Capitol Hill, Biden spent the day in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which he officially won in the last election by only 20,682 votes. At a rally at a middle school gymnasium in Madison, Biden added to his ever-growing stack of gaffes, confidently predicting he’d beat Donald Trump “again in 2020”:
BIDEN (VERY CONFUSED): “I’ll beat Donald Trump! I will beat him again in 2020!” pic.twitter.com/ke2sNRyw75
Proving again that not even a teleprompter can assure Biden’s reasonably error-free delivery of a speech, he also said, “We’re gonna protect our children from getting weapons of war off our streets!”
BIDEN: “We’re gonna protect our children from getting weapons of war off our streets!” 🤔 pic.twitter.com/nypHhfRB4s
Friday’s main event was Biden’s sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Though it was pre-recorded after his middle-school-gym rally before airing in a primetime special, ABC said it showed the entire interview without edits.
As we’d predicted, Stephanopoulos, who’s demonstrated all the worst tendencies of big-media leftists, played this interview relatively straight. He challenged Biden’s previous attempt to blame his debate performance on jet lag from travel that ended a dozen days before the event. He confronted Biden with pointed quotes from a New York Times report, where sources claimed his mental lapses have become more frequent. He also asked pointed follow-up questions when Biden was evasive.
At one point, however, Stephanopoulos sounded like an empathetic family member gently confronting an elderly person with the hard truth about their condition, telling Biden:
“I’ve heard from dozens of your supporters over the last few days…They love you, and they will be forever grateful to you for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. They think you’ve done a great job as president, a lot of the successes you outlined. But they are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to go with grace, and they will cheer you if you do.”
One of Biden’s worst moments of the interview came in response to what may have been the simplest question. Asked if he’d watched the debate afterwards, Biden said, “I don’t think I did, no.” Stephanopoulos’s follow-up question about when Biden realized the debate wasn’t going well triggered a particularly incoherent reply:
“The whole way I prepared, nobody’s fault mine. Nobody’s fault, mine. I, uh, prepared what I usually would do, sitting down as I did, come back with foreign leaders or National Security Council for explicit detail.
And I realized about partway through that, you know, I quoted The New York Times had me down 10 points before the debate, 9 now or whatever the hell it is. The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I couldn’t, I mean, the way the debate ran, not — my fault, no one else’s fault — no one else’s fault.”
“Did you ever watch the debate afterwards?”
BIDEN: “I don’t think I did.”
“Did you know how badly it was going?”
BIDEN: *incoherent rambling*
“It seemed like you were having trouble from the first question in…”
Biden repeatedly rejected any possibility of his dropping out of the 2024 contest, and assured Stephanopoulos that Congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will not call on him to quit. He suggested it would take divine intervention: “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”
Biden also insisted that, contrary to a wide variety of polls showing Trump is ahead, the race is actually a tight one. Stephanopoulos persisted in painting a dim picture of his prospects, but also threw Biden a memory lifeline:
Biden claims he’s not behind in the race, then forgets which polls he’s citing until George Stephanopoulos rescues him — and insists his humiliating debate performance didn’t negatively impact him pic.twitter.com/2jXu8R4rx8
When Stephanopoulos pressed him to commit to taking a “full neurological and cognitive evaluation,” Biden, pointing to his presidential duties, replied, “Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.”
“The fact is, that may be true, but 75% of the American people think…he fails,”countered former Biden adviser David Axelrod in a post-interview appearance on CNN. He also said he found some of the interview “sad.”
Biden’s Democratic detractors seized on one of his answers in particular. Stephanopoulos asked Biden how he would feel if, against so many demands for him to quit, he stayed in the race and then lost to Trump. Biden replied, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all, and I did the goodest [sic] job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Biden: Democracy itself is on the ballot and if Trump wins America is literally over!
Also Biden: “If Trump wins in November, I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and did the goodest job I know I could do, that’s what it’s all about.” pic.twitter.com/wfKT5nliCX
Former Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro called that line “the most chilling” of the interview. “That’s not good enough for the American people…What people want is to have confidence that whoever Democrats put up can win this election…The overwhelming impression that I got from this is you have a president that’s basically in denial…about the decline people can clearly see.”
As for the funniest moment of the interview, our vote goes to when Biden cited his modest crowd at the middle school gymnasium — estimated in the hundreds — as a sign of his campaign’s strength. He then asked who else could draw a crowd like that. Stephanopoulos couldn’t help but answer what was meant to be a rhetorical question:
ABC: “What’s your plan to turn the campaign around?”
BIDEN: “You saw it today … how many (incoherent) drew crowds like I did today?”
ABC: “I don’t think you want to play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw BIG CROWDS!”
ABC‘s after-interview panel discussion among the outlet’s talking heads had a decidedly grim tone, starting with Jonathan Karl:
“There was nothing in this interview that is calming nerves of jittery Democrats who fear that Joe Biden is on a trajectory to lose this race…to Donald Trump. In fact, for some of those people, the interview is raising new concerns. Particularly the fact that he is unwilling or unaware of the fact that he is in a dire situation…that he is losing.”
The network’s Martha Raddatz said administration officials tell her Biden is listening most to a “tight inner circle” that’s “telling him he can win, that he needs to keep going. This, of course, includes his wife, Jill, who is lashing out at those who want him to get out of the race.”
On the other side of the tug of war, current and former elected officials aren’t the only ones with high potential to steer Biden toward the exit: Major Democratic donors’ faith is also crumbling. “Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous,” Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who’s given $20 million to Democrats in recent years, said in an email to the Times.
“We had been talking to [Biden’s] team about doing a fundraiser, but I cooled off on it,” an anonymous Arizona donor told ABC News. “I struggled to get other people involved. People were not bullish on Biden. Now, it is a ‘hell no’.”
The Austrian capital has come first three years in a row thanks to its high scores in the categories of stability, infrastructure, education and healthcare.
The Danish capital of Copenhagen and the Swiss city of Zurich are the next two cities to round off the podium.
Although both of the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne and Canada’s Vancouver remain in the top ten, all three cities have seen their infrastructure scores drop due to their respective housing crises. For this reason, Toronto in Canada fell to rank 12 in 2024.
At the bottom of the list come Damascus in Syria, Tripoli in Libya and Algiers in Algeria.
The Ukrainian city of Kiev also features in the bottom 10, having been added back to the index last year after it was removed due to Russia’s invasion in 2022. It ranks 165th, with a score of 26.8.
The study is based on the “Global Liveability Index“, which determines and compares the varying quality of life of each city’s residents, grouped under five subcategories: infrastructure, healthcare, culture and environment, education and stability. The full list comprises 173 cities.
By Stefan Koopman, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank
To no one’s surprise, Labour won the UK election. Less than five years after Boris Johnson’s decisive win over Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives experienced their worst defeat in history.
Constituencies that were once considered secure Tory bastions have turned away from them. At the same time, a surge of smaller parties and independents has created a complex and divided political landscape. Indeed, Labour’s victory looks to be largely driven by a widespread desire to oust the Tories rather than a strong endorsement of its own policies. Nonetheless, Keir Starmer’s efforts to make Labour electable again after the years of Corbyn have worked out in their favour. In less than five years, he has restored trust in Labour on a number of key issues, including fiscal policy.
With 34% of the vote, Labour looks to have secured almost 64% of the 650 seats in the UK parliament. It’s clear they understood the central truth of the British electoral system: the popular vote is less important than the geographic distribution of the vote. The Tories, ending up at just c. 120 seats, warn that such a “super majority” would give Starmer’s Labour unchecked power. It is, however, important to note that the UK has no such thing as a super majority. Parliament is sovereign and can enact any legislation through the normal legislative process, regardless of whether the majority is 10 or 200. Britain has no special categories of legislation beyond the reach of a regular majority and even then, a simple majority would suffice to scrap such legislation. The real issues lie in the over-empowerment of the executive, the lack of constitutional checks and balances, and the distortions caused by the electoral system. However, a majority is a majority.
That said, landslides like this can be risky, with potential opposition emerging from within an overly large parliamentary party. Many Labour MPs will have little hope of promotion due to the limited number of government positions available, and numerous junior MPs will likely realize they are at high risk of losing their seats in 2028/29. This outcome is unlikely to be repeated. Labour has secured such a broad and geographically efficient vote that maintaining this coalition of voters seems impossible. At the constituency level, seats are tighter than at any point since 1945. This could lead to policy inertia, especially given Starmer’s cautious and calculated approach. This, we think, may also limit significant progress on EU-UK trade relations.
Labour mostly looks inward when it tries to tackle the pressing issue of economic growth. The current planning system, which allows local communities to block development, has hindered the construction of much-needed housing and infrastructure and is up for deep reform. Labour now has the parliamentary majority to do so, but the relatively slim majorities on a constituency level suggest that there is not as much political headroom as some polls have suggested.
Despite its plans to boost economic growth through political stability and expedited investment, growth may not come quickly enough to avoid difficult fiscal decisions. The pressure on real departmental spending is already very high, as the Tories had postponed many tough decisions to a post-election Budget, knowing they were likely to lose the election and thus not have to own these cuts. As the population ages, many budgetary choices will become more challenging, not easier. This makes it hard to envision Labour making cuts to balance the books and meet the rule that debt should be declining as a share of national income after five years. Consequently, it will be difficult to achieve Labour’s ambitious goals, including reducing NHS waiting lists and hiring more public sector workers, without raising taxes or changing the fiscal rules.
However, the shadow of Liz Truss – who has lost her seat – still looms over Westminster. Her policies of unfunded tax cuts are not ones that other politicians want to be associated with. Shadow Chancellor Reeves has emphasised the importance of market-friendly and prudent budget management and has been reluctant to discuss any changes to the fiscal rules. It’s also why this election was, from the market’s perspective, a non-event. A lot of water will flow through the Thames before politicians in Westminster dare to take bold fiscal action. Eventually, however, this will become inevitable to lift the UK out of its low-productivity, low-growth quagmire.
The first article of this series chronicled the FBI’s mid-2000s program to stage neo-Nazi rallies around the country as a means to conduct surveillance and recruit potential informants.
Those rallies were just the beginning of a sweeping multi-state investigation, Headline USA can reveal.
Indeed, after an FBI informant was exposed in 2007 for organizing a Nazi rally in Orlando the year before, the bureau launched another operation in the same area. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the FBI set up a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group to infiltrate Florida’s right-wing underground.
Federal agencies are known to have used motorcycle front groups cases against targets such as the Hells Angels for drug- and gun-trafficking investigations. However, Headline USA is unaware of such a tactic being employed in a politically charged domestic terrorism case until Primitive Affliction.
This publication has also found that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had a personal interest in Primitive Affliction, which ran from about 2007 to 2012. Indeed, Mueller was briefed daily on the operation during its final stages, according to a newly unearthed performance review of one undercover cop on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
OK I’ve been promising docs that ties then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to these post-9/11 PATCON-like ops.
Here’s a performance review of an undercover FBI officer in Primitive Affliction, which was centered around a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group.
Because Primitive Affliction collapsed with no terrorism convictions, the case never grabbed the national spotlight. However, a deeper look at the case reveals infiltration and entrapment techniques used by the FBI in 1990s investigations against the Aryan Nations, as well as more recent cases such as the 2020 militia conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
Mueller did not respond to an email about Primitive Affliction. The FBI declined to comment.
Reviving the Aryan Nations
In the 1980s and 90s, the Aryan Nations rivaled the Ku Klux Klan as the face of “white hate” in America—and for good reason, having been linked to numerous bank robberies, the assassination of a Jewish radio host and the Oklahoma City bombing, along with other crimes.
But by the mid-2000s, the Aryan Nations was largely decimated by numerous arrests and civil litigation. The group had splintered into various factions around the country. One of its remaining leaders, August Kreis, was desperate to consolidate power.
Working out of a South Carolina mobile home with a man named Joshua Caleb Sutter—who was a known FBI informant since 2003—Kreis attempted several publicity stunts to put his name on the map.
For example, at one point Kreis pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and claimed to seek an alliance with Muslim jihadists. Sutter, who was Kreis’s “minister for Islamic liaison,” also reportedly posted a “message of solidarity and support” to Saddam Hussein on the Aryan Nations Web site. (If Sutter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he made headlines in 2021, when it was revealed that he earned more than $100,000 from the FBI while running a Satanic publishing house.)
When that didn’t work in attracting new members or donations, Kreis began plotting with another Aryan Nations member, Robert Killian. Like Sutter, Killian turned out to be undercover law enforcement—Killian an undercover cop on the FBI’s JTTF.
An avid motorcyclist living in Orlando, Killian had been hanging out at a local Outlaw biker bar while posing online as a member of the Aryan Nations. Using the name “Doc,” by 2007 he had risen to become the Aryan Nations Florida state administrator—which, ironically, gave him power to vet applicants. The Orlando Sentinel later described Killian as the Aryan Nations’ “top recruiter.”
Apparently, someone in the FBI had the idea of merging a domestic terrorism case with a biker case. Killian planted the idea in Kreis’s head to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS.
For Kreis, a biker gang posed the opportunity to attract publicity, gain members and increase revenue for the Aryan Nations.
But first, they needed bikers. To that end, Killian convinced an Outlaw biker named Brian Klose to become the leader of the 1st SS Kavallerie. According to people familiar with the matter, Killian was able to convince Klose to leave the Outlaws by playing to his ego. Keeping with the neo-Nazi theme, Klose was named “Fuhrer” of the new group.
Klose would come to regret his decision to leave the Outlaws for what turned out to be an FBI front group.
With Klose surrounded by a gaggle of informants and undercover cops, the 1st SS Kavallerie clubhouse was open for business. According to internal law enforcement records, there were at least four undercover employees and an untold number of informants who infiltrated the group, along with numerous wiretaps and other “sophisticated techniques.”
Kelly Boaz a.k.a. ‘Kevin Post’
One of the key undercover agents from Primitive Affliction was Kelly Boaz, a local Orange County cop who, like Killian, had earned a spot on the FBI’s JTTF—receiving specialized training from the ADL and SPLC, according to their personnel records.
Boaz earned a JTTF assignment despite a scandal-plagued career with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, where he was the subject of more than a dozen internal investigations since joining in 1989, several involving allegations of excessive force.
Meet undercover FBI officer Kelly Boaz, who features in Part 2 of The Hidden History of Robert Mueller’s Right-Wing Terror Factory
Boaz posed as renegade Black Pistons bomb-maker “Kevin Post” in Primitive Affliction
In December 1999, for example, Boaz was involved in a predawn raid where another officer shot a suspect. Months later in August 2000, Boaz was at the center of another controversy when he shot and killed an unarmed thief at a shopping center.
He was cleared of wrongdoing in both incidents, but his supervisor was reportedly demoted and his racketeering squad was disbanded. A civil lawsuit was filed against him and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office over the December 1999 incident, but the case was eventually dismissed.
Despite Boaz’s controversial past, the FBI relied on him to build a complex case against a supposed network of white supremacist terrorists.
Boaz, who declined an interview request, entered Florida’s neo-Nazi scene sometime after the Orlando neo-Nazi rally organizer, FBI undercover operative David Gletty, had his cover blown in the media—as detailed in Part 1 of this series.
According to court records, Boaz was introduced to the Outlaw bikers and the 1st SS Kavallerie in 2009 by his colleague, Killian. By then, Boaz had already infiltrated the Black Pistons biker gang and was posing as one of its members, a renegade bomb maker named “Kevin Post.”
For nearly the next three years, Boaz and the FBI built their case.
During his investigation, one of his informants purportedly learned about another right-wing group in the area called the American Front. Operation Primitive Affliction eventually expanded to the Russia-linked American Front, which will be the subject of Part 3 of this series.
In both cases, Boaz made extravagant claims of the drug deals and terroristic plots he witnessed in his roughly three years as an undercover biker/bomber. He also claimed that his life was threatened when an Outlaw biker put a firearm to his head and accused him of being law enforcement.
Mueller likely heard similar reports. A glowing performance review for Boaz said the case “was briefed to the FBI Director daily during the executions of the disruptions.”
But a deeper look at the evidence produced in court casts doubt on Boaz’s claims, as well as the FBI’s entire case.
Kavallerie Collapse
“Biker Gangsters Busted after Three-Year Probe,” the Orlando Sentinel reported on March 31, 2012.
Two nights earlier, Boaz and the FBI had rounded up the targets of Primitive Affliction. One of those arrested was a woman named Deborah Plowman, who was at her home near Chicago when more than a dozen armed agents swarmed her on March 29, 2012. According to Boaz, he saw Plowman take pills at an Outlaw bikers party several years earlier.
After spending the night in jail, Plowman was told she needed to travel to Florida to face drug-trafficking charges—or else, she’d face extradition. Baffled, Plowman professed her innocence.
She was telling the truth.
On April 19, 2012, Plowman turned herself into law enforcement in Florida to be interviewed by Boaz. It didn’t take long before Boaz realized that he had the wrong person arrested.
“Boaz asked [Plowman] if she has ever used the nickname or has ever been called ‘Sin,’ to which she replied with a ‘no,’” Plowman said in a lawsuit she filed later over the wrongful arrest.
“Defendant Boaz immediately began to break out into a sweat upon viewing and questioning [Plowman], realizing he caused the wrong person, [Plowman], to be arrested in his undercover operation, instead of ‘Sin’ [Kristy Pryzbylla].”
It turned out, Plowman was married to someone Boaz had been investigating, and the undercover agent somehow confused her with Pryzbylla. Plowman quickly hired a lawyer, who blasted Boaz in the Orlando Sentinel for his carelessness.
“Had Boaz pulled her drivers license, he would have known it wasn’t her, and he’d made a huge mistake,” Plowman’s then-attorney, Jerry Theophilopoulos, said at the time. “In all my 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like what they did to Deborah Plowman.”
Plowman had her charges dropped in May 2012, and she eventually won $30,000 from Boaz in a civil lawsuit.
Boaz’s sloppy police work would continue to rear its ugly head as the fruits of Primitive Affliction moved through the courts.
The other defendants—including the “Fuehrer” Klose, Ronald Cusack, Carlos Eugene Dubose and Harold Johnson Kinlaw—were initially charged with violent crimes, such as bomb-making and soliciting murder. However, prosecutors later dropped most of the charges related to violence, instead reaching deals with the defendants to plead guilty to drug charges.
Assistant State Attorney Steven Foster reportedly said at the time that prosecutors were willing to strike plea deals with alleged white supremacist extremists because they were following the “Al Capone theory of prosecution”—referencing how federal authorities jailed the notorious mobster for tax evasion instead of his countless violent crimes.
“We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group.
However, one of the Outlaw biker defendants, Dubose, fought his charges.
It was a good thing he did.
A retired U.S. Marine, Dubose’s crime stemmed from when he cracked his skull in a motorcycle accident. Down and out on his luck and looking for cash, Dubose took another blow in life when an FBI informant arranged for him to sell his prescription painkillers to an undercover officer.
Initially charged with selling more than 28 grams of Oxycodone pills, Dubose could have spent the rest of his life in prison. But when he started receiving pre-trial discovery, he noticed something: An FBI report showed he only gave the undercover officer 9 grams of pills—a crime that carried the far lesser max sentence of seven years imprisonment.
After successfully diminishing the severity of his drug charge, Dubose decided to plead guilty to that lone count. But he continued to vociferously deny any involvement in a bomb plot—a charge that stemmed from a conversation he had with Boaz, aka renegade bomb maker “Kevin Post,” nearly three years earlier in 2009.
To Dubose’s point, the Feb. 27, 2009, conversation he had with Boaz/Post never developed any further over the next three years. And a transcript of the conversation shows Dubose choosing his words carefully when talking about “hypothetically” building a pipe bomb: “We’re not lookin’ to do anything. It’s just a matter if we start to go to war with somebody,” Dubose told Post/Boaz at the end of the discussion.
Florida prosecutors admitted that Boaz’s one recorded conversation didn’t contain smoking-gun evidence of bomb plots, but they claimed there were other discussions where Dubose made such plans.
Even though there were no recordings of those other purported conversations—and even though Dubose never possessed or attempt to build a bomb—the judge accepted the narrative of Boaz and the government. He tossed the motion to dismiss, and Dubose took a plea deal soon thereafter.
Gun to the Head?
Boaz’s credibility would be challenged once more at Dubose’s April 21, 2014, sentencing hearing, where the undercover agent claimed to have had a weapon pointed at his head.
During the hearing, defense attorney Harold Uhrig asked Boaz the obvious question: If Dubose pointed a gun at him, why didn’t the government mention that before?
“I’ve gone through about 600 pages of transcripts, reports, supplemental reports, I don’t find it anywhere mentioned in there. Are you telling me that there’s some information that y’all did not disclose to us?” Uhrig asked Boaz.
Boaz insisted that he did report the gun-pointing incident to the FBI for “intelligence gathering,” but he didn’t tell the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Boaz also admitted that he didn’t have any documentation proving that he reported the alleged incident to the FBI.
After Boaz’s dubious testimony, the judge still sentenced Dubose to five years imprisonment for both the drug trafficking and bomb solicitation charges.
The judge did admit that the available evidence “somewhat” supported Dubose’s version of events.
However, the judge noted that Dubose did talk about having a bomb “in the event of a war.” Therefore, “the Court finds, viewing the evidence in its totality, that [Dubose intended] to obtain a destructive device for the purpose of injuring or causing damage to persons or property,” the judge said, allowing the government to somewhat save face after a disastrous case.
The judge sentenced Dubose to five-year concurrent sentences for the drug and bomb charges.
While prosecutors were able to secure some convictions from the 1st SS Kavallerie investigation—Klose is still in prison on felony drug trafficking charges—they fared even worse in the American Front case, thanks in part to more Boaz blunders.
Bizarre developments would continue to occur outside the courtroom, too. As they prepped for trial around 2013, Boaz and several other government officials would begin receiving strange threats, purportedly from a neo-Nazi fugitive on the run in Mexico—the subject of Part 3 of this series.
Visualizing The Growth Of (Legal) US Sports Betting
The global sports betting industry has grown exponentially over the last few years, with a significant share of that growth coming from the United States.
GGR is the total amount of money wagered minus winnings. For example, if a player wagers $1,000,000 at a casino and wins $900,000, GGR would be $100,000.
Sports Betting Still a Young Industry
Sports betting in the U.S. was first legalized in May 2018, after the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992. PASPA had effectively outlawed sports betting nationwide.
Since 2018, gross gaming revenue has jumped from $400 million to $11 billion in 2023.
Betting is particularly big in Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania due to early legalization, robust regulatory frameworks, and strong sports cultures.
Nevada, boosted by Las Vegas, generated over $5 billion in commercial gaming revenue (including other casino revenue streams) over the first four months of 2024, while New Jersey and Pennsylvania each generated over $2 billion.
According to the American Gaming Association, 38 states (and DC) have legalized sports betting to date.
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which shows the top NFL teams by revenue.
In a bizarre op-ed, Huffington Post writer Kaivan Shroff suggested that the President Joe Biden and his campaign should consider using artificial intelligence to dupe the American people into voting for him.
Shroff began by noting that “the stakes” of the election “cannot be overstated” because the future of democracy “hangs in the balance,” rhetoric which, he assured the reader, “is not hyperbolic.”
.@HuffPost published an essay by a lefty nutter arguing that Biden’s campaign should deceive the public with AI videos (i.e. faked) of the president that make him speak well and look youthful.
Kaivan Shroff argues that the threat of Trump’s victory is so great that fake content… pic.twitter.com/do571SCDUH
It is “the greatest moral and ethical imperative for those who care about American democracy” to defeat former President Donald Trump, he opined.
As a result, the ends justified the means, even if that entailed continuing the campaign’s ongoing efforts to gaslight low-information voters into thinking Biden is fitter and healthier than he is, but with additional assistance from AI to more “effectively reach the voting public.”
It is not entirely clear that the campaign hasn’t already been relying on this tactic in what have appeared to be the president’s more lucid moments on camera.
While admitting that using AI to present a smoother, more well-spoken Biden could be deceptive, Shroff ultimately concluded that such deception would be worthwhile if it led to a Biden victory.
“We must ask the question, are augmented AI videos that present Biden in his best form―while sharing honest and accurate information―really more socially damaging than our information ecosystem’s current realities?” Shroff wrote. “I think not.”
Such conversations seem to be inevitable for the left after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, for which his defenders have thrown out every excuse in the book as Trump surges in swing state polls.
On Wednesday, for instance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed Biden’s jet lag from a flight weeks before the debate, along with a cold that he allegedly had.
Is this a Saturday Night Live skit?
Reporter: “How is it possible that Joe Biden would suffer from ‘jet lag’ two weeks after he got back from his trip…?”
Karine Jean-Pierre: “It’s the jet lag AND also the cold, right?”
“It’s the jet lag and also the cold–it is the two things that occurred,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a Tuesday press conference.
Biden cronies have also used AI as an excuse in the past—but for the opposite end, to accuse Republicans of the threat of spreading disinformation by altering the audio in Biden’s special counsel interview with Robert Hur.
It was the basis of that interview that prompted Hur not to pursue charges, concluding Biden was unfit to stand trial for the felonies.
However, Attorney General Merrick Garland cited executive privilege in insisting that he was under no obligation to release the audio file. House Republicans held him in contempt of Congress and subsequently filed a lawsuit that could result in legal consequences for Garland under the next administration.
Leftists afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome have become increasingly unhinged when faced with the prospect of a Biden candidacy, proposing ever more drastic, dangerous and anti-democratic courses of action to counter the will of the people.
A Pennsylvania lawmaker named Matthew Croyle went viral for all the wrong reasons on Wednesday after authoring a post on X that suggested leftists with Trump-supporting relatives kill them now before they have the chance to strike first.
Meet Matt Croyle.
He is an elected official in Pennsylvania.
Even worse, he’s a state constable.
After being exposed for posting threatening messages about Trump supporters, he deleted his X account.
Fitch, Moody’s Ratings, and S&P Global Ratings recently reaffirmed Maryland’s coveted triple-A credit rating. However, Moody’s downgraded the state’s outlook from stable to “negative,” citing significant concerns about looming structural deficits due to Annapolis’ out-of-control education spending. And while education spending soars, test scores are going in the wrong direction.
“The negative outlook incorporates difficulties Maryland will face to achieve balanced financial operations in coming years without sacrificing service delivery goals or adding to the weight of the state government’s burden on individual and corporate taxpayers,” Moody’s wrote in the report last month. This is the first time the credit rating agency has issued a negative outlook for the state since 2011, several years after the GFC meltdown.
A looming fiscal cliff is primarily driven by edu programs, including the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reforms. When the reform was passed, the genius progressive lawmakers in Annapolis did not pass a funding mechanism.
“It’s a self-created hole,” Republican State Senator Justin Ready told investigative journalist Chris Papst of Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore late last month, adding, “I’m disappointed but not surprised that we were downgraded to negative.”
Senator Ready’s district includes Carroll and Frederick Counties, located west of Baltimore. Several years ago, he attempted to warn leftist lawmakers in Annapolis that education spending would spark fiscal turmoil. However, his warnings were ignored while progressives were more focused on pushing woke policies.
“We have a very high-taxed state and local governments, and so we were concerned. We saw this as being unsustainable, an unsustainable increase,” said Ready.
He continued, “Education spending was always increasing. This is just putting a rocket ship on it without the kind of accountability that’s needed.”
Maryland’s fiscal projections show an expected $1 billion budget deficit by 2025, $1.3 by 2027, and more than $3 billion by 2028. Soaring deficits are a function of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, also called the Kirwan Plan, which pumps $30 billion in taxpayer funds into public education over ten years and then adds $4 billion per year after that.
Papst offers some very troubling news for residents:
“In order to pay for it, according to those statistics, the state would have to either increase the personal income tax rate by 39% or raise the sales tax by 89% or increase property taxes by 535%.”
For years, Democrats in the state have advocated for increased education spending but rarely address test score performances that are heading in the wrong direction, an issue even the Washington Post could no longer ignore:
Over the years, Papst’s team has led an effort to uncover fraud and corruption in the state’s public school systems.
— 1776 Project PAC | Text 1776 to 76176 (@1776ProjectPac) February 14, 2023
Some folks on X have called soaring education expenses a grift by the Democratic Party that loots taxpayers and enriches teachers’ unions that only fund progressive causes.
It’s your freedom, job security, safety – the democrats failed on issues most important to Marylanders. Throwing more money to fund Teachers Unions while kids perform worse in public schools is a recipe for disaster which was in place for 50+years in Baltimore. pic.twitter.com/xFvow2MdC7
Union bosses insist that we pay for only govt (union-run) schools. Results prove just how bad an idea this is.
Baltimore public schools have chronic absenteeism. Taxpayers spending $21K/student there — 4th highest spending for a big school district.https://t.co/dSuBO2TfVt
The union that helped create the system in Baltimore where more than a dozen schools have zero students who can do basic math while spending one of the highest amounts of money per student, support this rich, white, savior complex having progressive because he opposes standards. https://t.co/cXL2GmA3oU
Why more Marylanders aren’t demanding accountability from progressives in Annapolis transforming the state into what could soon be the next Illinois is troubling.
On Thursday, the Philippines said the US was pulling out a new missile system it deployed to the Southeast Asian country for annual military exercises.
The US sent the Typhon missile system for the Balikatan exercises, which were held in April and May. The Typhon is a controversial launcher since it would have been banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a treaty between the US and Russia that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2019.
The INF prohibited land-based missile systems with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles. The Typhon can launch nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of about 1,000 miles. It can also fire SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away.
Philippine Col. Louie Dema-ala told AFP that the US planned to withdraw the Typhon from the Philippines following the military exercises.
“As per plan… it will be shipped out of the country in September or even earlier,” he said. “The US Army is currently shipping out their equipment that we used during Balikatan and Salaknib (exercises).”
China strongly condemned the deployment of the Typhon system, which US officials have acknowledged was developed to prepare for a future conflict with Beijing over Taiwan or the South China Sea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin also recently mentioned the deployment. He made the comments when calling for Moscow to follow the US and develop missile systems previously banned by the INF.
“We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said last week.
“Today it is known that the United States not only produces these missile systems, but has already brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. Quite recently it was announced that they are in the Philippines,” the Russian leader added.
