House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was in Jerusalem on Monday where he deliver an address to Israel’s parliament, and he focused on an anti-China message, a somewhat rare emphasis given the occasion marking the Jewish state’s 75th independence day.

He warned Beijing lawmakers that Beijing acts as “thieves” while calling for the close US ally to scrutinize Chinese investments in the country.

“While the [Chinese Communist Party] may disguise itself as promoters of innovation, in truth, they act like thieves. We must not allow them to steal our technology,” McCarthy said. 

“I’m glad that Israel has put into place a process to review foreign investments. I strongly encourage Israel to further strengthen its oversight of foreign investment, particularly Chinese investment, building on the steps that you first took in 2019,” he added.

2019 was a reference to Israel establishing a foreign investment oversight mechanism amid US officials warning of the dangers of Chinese companies’ expanding role in sensitive technology and infrastructure industries.

China already operates the Haifa port terminal, a major international shipping hub for Israel, after in 2015 its state-owned Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) won the tender to oversee it for 25 years. The US military from there voiced concerns about American submarines and warships docking in Israel. 

McCarthy also called out China as among severe human rights violators:

“There is no clearer example than the U.N Human Rights Council – which has passed over 90 anti-Israel resolutions since 2006, yet has turned a blind eye to true human rights violations by Iran, North Korea, and China.”

“My colleagues and I in Congress will continue to stand with Israel. ”

“And we will increase pressure on the United Nations to end these outrageous attacks.”

China recently held itself out as a mediator seeking Israeli-Palestine peace, after recent flare-ups in fighting centered on Al-Aqsa Mosque as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

However, Washington and much of the West have looked cynically on these moves by Beijing, also as it pushes its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine.

Via The Cradle,

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, and Iran have formally asked to join the BRICS group of nations as it prepares to hold its annual summit in South Africa.

In total, 19 nations have expressed interest in joining the emerging-markets bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, according to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to the group.

“What will be discussed is the expansion of BRICS and the modalities of how this will happen… Thirteen countries have formally asked to join, and another six have asked informally. We are getting applications to join every day,” the South African official told Bloomberg earlier this week.

BRICS will hold its annual summit in Cape Town during the first week of June. The foreign ministers from all five member states have confirmed their attendance.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg revealed that BRICS is expected to soon surpass the US-led G7 states in economic growth expectations.

Per their analysis, while G7 and BRICS nations each contributed equally to global economic growth in 2020, the western-led bloc’s performance has recently declined. By 2028, the G7 is expected to make up just 27.8 percent of the global economy, while BRICS will make up 35 percent.

The estimations came just a few weeks after the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s State Duma, Alexander Babakov, revealed that BRICS is working on developing a “new currency” that will be presented at the organization’s upcoming summit.

BRICS member states account for over 40 percent of the global population and around a quarter of the global GDP.

The interest from Global South nations to join the bloc comes at a time when more and more governments move away from the US dollar.

The greenback has become more unreliable for dollarized economies due to rising interest rates regulated by the US Federal Reserve (FED) and the bank’s weaponization of the dollar through financial sanctions.

In addition, the west – especially Europe – is facing a growing energy crisis resulting from sanctions targeting Russian energy markets due to its invasion of Ukraine and the US sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline.

A new war of words has erupted between Hungary and Ukraine, after President Zelensky in an interview last Friday questioned Hungary’s ‘friendship’ with Russia. 

Zelensky had charged that Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban had been displaying “inappropriate behavior” for a NATO member, suggesting it shouldn’t be consulted on important defense matters such as whether Ukraine should be let into the alliance.

“It seems to me that confusion reigns among the Hungarian political elite. This is a very strange situation. Can a NATO country simultaneously be with Russia and against NATO?” Zelensky had posited.

In response, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Zelensky has no right to weigh in on Hungary’s decision-making, stressing his nation and people have already paid a high price for the conflict, even including losing Hungarians, a reference to ethnic Hungarians living in Zakarpattya Oblast in western Ukraine.

“Fortunately, he is not the one to decide this,” the foreign minister said in reference to Zelensky’s words. “The Hungarian people have already paid an extremely high price for this war.”

Szijjártó then took sarcastic tone, reminding Ukraine of everything it has already done: 

“If this statement (by Zelensky) means: ‘I respectfully thank the Hungarians for letting in and taking care of more than a million refugees from Ukraine, and I respectfully thank you for continuously sending aid,’ then they are welcome, and can count on us in the future as well.”

Among the more recent controversial stances of Viktor Orban has been to say that Hungarian authorities would not arrest President Vladimir Putin. He said this in March after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader over alleged human rights violations connected to the war in Ukraine. This despite Hungary’s having signed and ratified the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the first place.

Hungary’s stance has generally been to condemn the Russian invasion, while at the same time resisting a number of EU sanctions measures, particularly related to energy, as well as pushing both sides to negotiate peace. Orban has been a rare European leader who has broken from NATO consensus while maintaining open and positive communications with the Kremlin.

Authored by Conor Gallagher via NakedCapitalism.com,

The New York Times had quite the interesting piece buried in its science section on April 28. Titled “U.S. Wires Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts,” it claims sensors “can detect‌‌ bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker.” More:

In part, the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine 14 months ago, experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

First off, what would possibly be the Russian rationale for using nuclear weapons?

They’re winning in Ukraine, and the West is running out of ammo. 

Second, about those “experts.” To expand on their worries, the Times links to an October piece titled “Russia’s Small Nuclear Arms: A Risky Option for Putin and Ukraine Alike.” In it, we get this:

The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.

So the experts are anonymous. Who is running this operation? The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), which is the Nation Nuclear Security Administration’s arm that deals with emergency response functions.  The Times also notes the following:

Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of “Defusing Armageddon,” a 2009 book on the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, reported that it often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.

The Times’ April 28 piece gets more bonkers from there. There’s this:

Public knowledge of such defensive planning, nuclear experts say, can deter Moscow by letting it know that Washington can expose what is called a false-flag operation.

For instance, Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance. But in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker.

So Russia would conduct a false-flag operation in order to risk accomplishing what Kiev would want to accomplish with its own false flag?

Again, what would Moscow have to gain? It’s steadily winning the war and depleting western stockpiles.

But for the inhabitants of the alternate universe where Russia is on its last legs it all makes perfect sense. Speaking to that audience, the Times again invokes “nuclear experts” and “western experts” who are presumably the same aforementioned anonymous officials, and they put an ominous spin on Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive:

Nuclear experts say such defensive precautions could face their greatest test in coming weeks as the Ukrainian army launches its spring offensive. China has leaned on Russia to discontinue its nuclear saber rattling and Mr. Putin has not recently invoked a nuclear threat. But Western experts worry that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal, and they worry that fresh setbacks could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger.

One of the many alarming aspects of all this is that these “experts” certainly must know that the idea “that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” is complete fantasy, yet they’re peddling it anyways. Why? That’s an ominous thought.

Russia was warning NATO back in October that Ukraine might detonate a “dirty bomb” and blame Moscow. Washington, Paris, and London dismissed it all as “transparently false.”  Instead the West has continued to insist that Moscow might do so. The Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence state that Russia would not use a nuclear weapon of any kind unless the country is attacked using weapons of mass destruction or faces a conventional attack so severe it threatens the country’s existence.

Could Kiev create a dirty bomb? The US GAO admits it’s not hard to find the materials and build a dirty bomb. Ukraine returned all its Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990, but still has stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Dirty bombs can also be made out of byproducts from nuclear power plants of which Ukraine has several. According to Russia, it would be no problem for Kiev to build such a weapon:

Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops chief Igor Kirillov warned that Ukraine has the technological prowess and ample radioactive material reserves to build a dirty bomb. This includes some 1,500 tons’ worth of spent nuclear fuel from the country’s three operating nuclear power plants, and 22,000 spent fuel assemblies stored at the defunct Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s waste repositories, including Uranium-235 and Plutnoium-239 – the primary fissile isotopes used in nuclear weapons.

…Furthermore, the officer stressed, Kiev has the scientific know-how allowing it to easily build a dirty bomb, including the legendary Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology involved in the creation of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Nuclear Research, which operates the BBP-M research reactor.

The Times’ piece has virtually no information on what the deployed sensors actually do. Presumably they would detect radiation and then a forensics team would try to determine the origin of the weapon. Thing is, there are already institutions for that.

The European Radiological Data Exchange Platform, which monitors radiation levels, already covers Ukraine. According to its website, it “consists of data exchange mechanism and presentation website for radiological monitoring data which is collected and shared by 39 participating countries in almost REAL TIME.” But it is not a rapid alert system, and while the EU has one of those, it only covers member states.

The IAEA, on the other hand has its EMERCON system for radiological or nuclear emergencies and which does cover Ukraine. And the IAEA can help prepare for the investigation into a nuclear incident:

The IAEA supports States in developing technical capabilities by providing: Technical assistance, including, upon request, to prepare for the conduct of a nuclear forensics examination in the context of the investigation of a nuclear security event. Important considerations involve procedures to collect and preserve evidence and properly sequence non-destructive ahead of destructive analysis in the laboratory.

Additionally, the IAEA notes that there are international organizations that provide various forms of nuclear forensic support, including the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, INTERPOL, and the Nuclear Forensics International Technical Working Group. But the US apparently does not want to rely on these international institutions.

The US is apparently going with its own team. So should such a weapon be used in Ukraine, would the US Nuclear Emergency Support Team be able to determine who did it? It’s hard to tell – but probably not with any certainty.

The Times piece has few details on how the process works, saying only that it developed rapidly after 9/11, has some secrets, and “its outlines are publicly known.”

The Times then links back to two articles – one from 2004 and another from 2006. They’re fairly similar and both describe the process of identification this way:

The basic science relies on faint clues — tiny bits of radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of evidence can help identify an exploded bomb’s type and characteristics, including its country of origin.

While tracking a missile from the blastoff point is not difficult, tracking unconventional devices, such as a dirty bomb that uses ordinary explosives to spew radioactivity, can be a major challenge. Both articles described “federal experts” participating in drills to establish the origin of a weapon. From the 2004 piece:

In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were broken into teams and given radiological data from two old American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he said.

While hyping that apparent success, the 2004 piece noted that success was only partial. The Times also mentioned that there were numerous complexities involved that made attribution less of a sure thing, including “that knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it.” And there’s this:

Experts agree that such detective work can prove difficult. For years, the International Atomic Energy Agency has struggled with limited success to identify the source of highly enriched uranium, a potential bomb fuel, found by the agency’s inspectors on Iranian nuclear gear.

According to the IAEA, forensic investigations are rarely slam dunk cases:

Nuclear forensic analysis and interpretation involve a deductive and iterative process, as depicted in Fig. 2. Implementing the analytical plan produces results that can be compared with information on existing or known materials, and such comparisons lead to interpretation, which puts the analytical results into context. The comparative process involving analytical results and known material information is iterative because each successive comparison may provide new information that can identify further analyses or comparisons that, in turn, may uncover additional signatures that will help to identify the material more precisely.

This comparative process may also be deductive because it can be used to progressively exclude particular processes, locations or other origins as possible sources of the material. For example, comparisons of analytical results from seized nuclear material with known production processes will identify likely production processes that could have made the seized material, as well as those processes that could not have made the seized material. Additional comparisons with other existing production processes or analytical measurements will serve to narrow the list of likely production processes responsible for the production of the seized material.

Fig. 2

But American officials claimed in the Times articles from 2004 and 2006 that scientific advancements were being made in the US, which would make identification more accurate.

Have they advanced enough? And maybe the real question is, who would trust the US’ conclusion? Would it matter?

Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who helped found the Pentagon’s part of the US effort to trace an explosion, told the Times back in 2004 that the identification effort would be crucial in ”dealing with the desire for instant gratification through vengeance.”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via DailyReckoning.com,

“When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned – Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas… we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.” 

– Paul Craig Roberts

The weird part the news media isn’t telling you about World War Three is that America’s main enemy in this struggle is… the US Government itself!

America is looking like that crazy person on the street, punching himself in the head. How else do you explain this epic act of national self-destruction?

The “Joe Biden” regime is “standing up for our democracy” by trying to silence all and any public speech about what it does in the world and how it treats its own citizens. Meanwhile, the entire scaffold of American life crumbles and you are supposed to not notice it’s happening. The funny part is that the Democratic Party thinks this is an election strategy. The funniest part of the funny part is that we bother holding elections at all.

You understand, “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for president again, in the same way that he’s only pretended to be president the past two years. Are we to believe, for instance, that the old zombie has become a fervent Maoist? Or that he follows any known structured political philosophy at all, other than cashing checks from favor-seekers from all  over the world?

“Joe Biden” is pretending to run — no matter how preposterous it seems — because his handlers know that only a titanic pretense of political strength can stave off the reveal of his family’s awesome criminality and the fall of everyone hitched to that broke-down wagon.

So much for the funny stuff. Things are getting to the point where we stop laughing. It’s only a question now of how the calamity rolls out. There are so many more parts to our national fiasco and they are all out-of-hand in the most disastrous way.

The Ukraine Fiasco

The Ukraine project is a big part. It was prodigiously stupid to provoke a war at Russia’s door-step and the side we backed, the corrupt Zelensky regime, has already lost. You just don’t know it because the American news business is a joke on the American public. It reports nothing honestly.

Ukraine is the last in a string of hapless military adventures that has exhausted America’s credibility in the world, especially as regards our military superiority. (Think: Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile.) There will be many unexpected consequences of the Ukraine screw-up. One will be the crack-up of NATO, which has only been a false front for American military power.

Germany couldn’t fight its way out of a duffle bag with what it’s got, and it is supposedly Europe’s leading economic power. The sad truth is that it will stop being any kind of power without the cheap Russian natural gas it was running on, and later this year Germany will be in a panic to try and restore its horribly damaged trade relations with Russia to get that natgas.

Since NATO’s essential mission is to oppose Russia on everything, that will be the end of NATO. Europe will return to what it has always been: a region of squabbling national interests. Let’s hope Europe does not become again the slaughterhouse it was in the last century.

You Go Broke in Two Ways

The failure of the Ukraine project could easily stimulate a collapse in Europe’s banking system, which would instantly spread to America’s banking system as obligations dissolve and payments stop.

The net effect of all that will be the vanishing of a whole lot of capital, including the money in bank accounts, the money invested in stocks and bonds, the money lodged in pension plans, and the money controlled by insurance companies.

As I’ve mentioned before — it’s worth repeating — you can go broke two ways: you can have no money, or you can have money that’s worthless. We’ve been steadily following the latter path through the “Joe Biden” years, but we’re close to simply not having money at all. Being broke will get Americans’ attention. And the first place they’ll look is the party in power.

Multiple scandals have finally caught up to “Joe Biden” and are escaping the formidable suppression apparatus erected by the Deep State’s legal department. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself is now directly implicated in obstruction of justice by an IRS whistleblower.

Election Interference?

The allegation is that Mr. Garland interfered in the case against Hunter Biden in the Delaware US attorney’s office and lied about it to Congress. On top of that comes a new allegation, with hard documentary evidence (testimony by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell), that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arranged, as “Biden” campaign officials in 2020, for fifty-one intel officers, including five retired CIA directors, to sign a phony letter denouncing the Hunter laptop as a Russian disinfo project, knowing it to be untrue. A case can be made for that amounting to election interference.

All that is fairly fresh news. For many months, it’s been known that Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has possession of bank records that show more than a hundred instances of the decanting of millions of dollars from foreign lands into various Biden family accounts.

Doesn’t look good. Looks impeachable. Will DOJ try to stonewall everything? Yeah, probably.

A Civil War Strategy

On top of all that, observers are reporting that more than ten thousand illegal immigrants a day will be crossing into the USA from Mexico in the weeks ahead. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Dept. of Homeland Security and Mr. Blinken’s State Department have made arrangements with international NGOs working through the UN, to systematically conduct these immigrants across the border, furnishing them with pre-cooked phony asylum documents.

This week, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced legislation to allow unrestricted immigration to any person claiming to be LBGTQ. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How is any of this a re-election strategy?

It’s not. If these matters are not adjudicated, it will be a civil war strategy.

An earthquake swarm rattled the Salton Sea region of Southern California and the US-Mexico border over the weekend, with seismic activity reaching up to 4.5 magnitude, as reported by The Sacramento Bee. 

US Geological Survey data shows the first quake struck around 12:08 p.m. local time Saturday in Heber near the US-Mexico border, about 60 miles south of the Salton Sea, measuring 4.1 magnitude. There were dozens of tremors reported after the initial shock. 

Then on Sunday morning, a 4.5 magnitude quake struck 4 miles west-southwest of Niland and just east of the Salton Sea, USGS data showed. Dozens of tremors were reported as well. 

According to a USGS intensity map, the quakes were felt in Palm Desert, Indio, El Centro, and Mexicali. 

Last month, a series of earthquakes shook Pacifica in Northern California. Earlier this year, Los Angeles experienced a quake, and Humboldt County was hit in December. 

As for the state’s southern region, it remains to be seen whether these swarms signal the potential for larger quakes. 

Authored by Ben Weingarten via RealClear Wire,

Decoupling from Communist China in every strategically significant realm, from the capital markets to defense and pharmaceutical production, and information and communications technology is imperative if we are to counter its hegemonic ambitions and persist as a free and independent nation in something more than name.

Banning TikTok – a ubiquitous social media platform that masquerades as a proliferator of harmless dance videos while doubling as a likely tool of Chinese Communist Party surveillance and data harvesting, and certain tool of its information warfare, under de facto if not de jure CCP control via Beijing-based parent ByteDance – would logically be part of any such decoupling, and manifestly in the U.S. national interest.

But arguably the most prominent congressional effort putatively aimed at achieving a ban of TikTok, the bipartisan RESTRICT Act, raises concerns that the cure may be worse than the disease – to the extent it even ameliorates it.

If past is prologue, key language in the bill hiding in plain sight would seem to legitimize the very heretofore lawless targeting of domestic dissent under which Americans have suffered in recent years – undermining the values and principles the bills’ supporters purport to cherish.

Under the bill, one could easily see the likes of a Twitter, or any other platform or service out of favor with authorities nuked, or at minimum under existential threat.

The RESTRICT Act broadly authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to “review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries.”

Among other provisions, it calls on the Secretary to “take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” any of a number of “undue or unacceptable” national security risks arising from a slew of transactions past or present, including “any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service” to which entities tied to China or several other countries, or subject to their jurisdiction, have an interest.

The leading co-sponsors of the RESTRICT Act, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, and South Dakota Senator John Thune, a Republican, frame it as “a holistic, rules-based” effort “narrowly tailored to foreign-adversary companies” that is “more likely to withstand judicial scrutiny” than other proposed bills for combatting TikTok – bills that arose in part because the courts stymied President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban the application using existing executive authorities.

Some critics, including China hawks, contend that despite the broad authority the bill grants the Commerce Secretary, it may not ultimately lead to a TikTok ban. The bill does not explicitly call for the banning of the application. Nor does it mention it, or any other application, by name – rather listing broad categories of software and hardware that could be probed under the bill, linked to several foreign foes, including among them China.

Others liken the legislation to the Patriot Act, just for the digital age. This is not meant to be a compliment. They argue that the RESTRICT Act threatens civil liberties – namely free speech – in the name of security by granting the government sweeping powers to crush communication platforms under the guise of ill-defined risks with extensive criminal penalties. The vaguer the language, more pervasive the powers, and fewer the checks and balances, such critics surmise, the riper the opportunity for government to overreach.

While the bill’s backers may argue otherwise, the fears of those left and right who believe the legislation opens the door to censorious mission creep are well-founded. The danger becomes self-evident when one juxtaposes the roots and results of the mass public-private censorship regime imposed upon Americans in recent years, and the bill’s language.

Under said censorship regime, America’s national security apparatus and public health authorities, often government-linked and/or funded academic and research “counter-disinformation” organizations, and Big Tech have colluded to suppress dissenting views from prevailing Ruling Class orthodoxy on a plethora of contentious issues under the guise of public safety and health.

“Digital wrongthink generates real world harm,” the regime argues.

The speech-stiflers have exploited, if not helped fuel a moral panic over mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) – this notwithstanding that such censorious authorities have often proven the most powerful and pervasive propagators of false or misleading information – which they claim threatens American democracy, to justify their actions.

The moral panic has its roots in claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election that proved at minimum highly overblown – with national security authorities framing the threat as primarily a foreign one, which put them on ostensibly stronger footing when it came to their surveilling, policing and/or out-sourcing of policing of speech on social media platforms.

The Capitol riot fanned the flames of the moral panic. Authorities claimed that the greatest threat to the homeland now emanated from, effectively, MAGA terrorists, and that it was dangerous MDM on elections that incited them. Such Wrongthink could incite domestic violent extremists to lash out, including at critical infrastructure, compelling a whole-of-society response.

Authorities, in truth, had already been targeting domestic Wrongthink, particularly on elections, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential contest – operating on the logic that questions about the election process and results represented, or could represent a threat to critical infrastructure including election infrastructure.

The shift in focus from foreign adversaries to domestic Wrongthinkers, and on an ever-growing array of issues, including under an elastic definition of infrastructure, can be seen in the evolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a key cog in the censorship regime.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, it only made sense that the censorship regime would expand to include policing speech antithetical to whatever authorities believed it imperative for Americans to believe, on matters from the pandemic’s origin, to masking, and vaccine efficacy.

The Biden administration would codify the combatting of domestic MDM, and countering “the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories” in a bid to enhance “faith in government” and “American democracy” as a strategic imperative by way of its June 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Bear this background in mind – to say nothing of how government has used the most tortured of legal readings to justify its targeting of Wrongthinkers from ex-presidents, to engaged parents, to the pious, running roughshod over the First Amendment in the process – as we look at the language of the RESTRICT Act.

The bill empowers authorities to neutralize risks including those stemming from applications that could: have “catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure” of the U.S.; “interfer[e] in…the result or reported result of a Federal election;” or pose a risk of “coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary that are designed to undermine democratic processes and institutions or steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States.”

Now consider a hypothetical post-RESTRICT Act world.

Imagine there is a U.S.-based social media platform on which Americans are raising questions about and criticizing the RESTRICT Act. At the same time, foreign adversaries, including the PRC, by way of its mouthpieces, are raising the same objections. Might authorities conclude that the proliferation of such ideas could lead to the bill’s repeal, leaving America open to “catastrophic effects on…critical infrastructure” – as evinced by the adversaries’ similar propaganda, one who seek a return to the infrastructure-threatening status quo?

Now, imagine that on that same platform, Americans are posting memes instructing people to vote for U.S. presidential candidates by texting fictitious phone numbers, and that hundreds or even several thousand people might be messaging accordingly. Might authorities conclude the platform is being used to “interfer[e] in…the result…of a Federal election?”

Lastly, imagine Americans are also using this hypothetical platform to raise questions about and criticize America’s continued involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Russian mouthpieces are leveling similar arguments. Russians have been accused of engaging in criminal influence efforts using social media platforms before, including those impacting our politics. Might authorities conclude the platform poses a risk of enabling “criminal activities by a foreign adversary…designed to…steer policy in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary” by getting Americans to exert political pressure on their leaders to curtail American support for the war?

“But,” one might ask, “why would such a platform fall under the RESTRICT Act if it’s U.S.-based?”

Well, recall that the bill covers any of a slew of transactions in which a foreign adversary or affiliated entity is involved, or to which it is subject to the jurisdiction, “including through an interest in a contract for the provision of the technology or service” in question.

Might the company be targeted on grounds, however tenuous, of having taken a small investment from a person or entity who can be linked to an adversary government, or from a larger fund with ties to an adversary government, or for having used a subcontractor otherwise affiliated in some form or fashion with, or operating under the jurisdiction of an adversary government?

The hypothetical scenario we have conjured up is actually quite real. On Twitter you will find a whole raft of content critical of the RESTRICT Act. On Twitter Douglass Mackey posted the kind of meme described – one for which he was convicted of a federal crime and faces up to 10 years in prison. On Twitter, you will find many critics of U.S. involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War – a platform that Russians used to allegedly “commit federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system” during the 2016 election.

What of Twitter’s ties to foreign adversaries? Well, among the co-investors in Elon Musk’s take private of Twitter is cryptocurrency exchange Binance, a company initially based in China, which put up $500 million in equity. Who knows, perhaps there are other links that could be found between Twitter and China, for example via a contractor or subcontractor with which it works or has worked. And this is to say nothing of Musks’s more significant exposure to China by way of Tesla.

The Biden administration, which has seemingly had Musk in its sights since he became interested in purchasing Twitter, and certainly post-acquisition and the release of the Twitter Files, reportedly will not be investigating Musk’s Twitter purchase under existing authorities via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Might that change under a RESTRICT Act that the White House has championed – this despite its disavowal of the idea that it wishes to decouple from China, and Democrats’ embrace of TikTok as a platform?

If this scenario sounds far-fetched, you are not being nearly imaginative nor cynical enough in this era of sophistry and illiberalism.

America should ban TikTok, but the means must not do more damage than the ends do good.

The prudent and judicious move would be for Congress to take a second look at any of several more tightly-written and straightforward bills aimed squarely at combatting TikTok – that is, if it is really serious about combatting the CCP, rather than granting authorities power-hungry presidents might use to emulate the CCP in silencing domestic opponents.

First BuzzFeed, now Vice: one by one all the woke “media giants” of the new normal are going broke.

Just two weeks after we reported that BuzzFeed News – which was instrumental in spreading fake news to get us suspended on twitter – was shuttering it not filing for bankruptcy just yet, today the NYT reports that the woke left’s disruptor darling and former “multi-billion media empire” Vice, which once upon a time charmed giants like Disney and Fox into investing hundreds of millions before its stunning crash-landing, is preparing to file for bankruptcy.

According to the NYT, the filing could come in the coming weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to discuss the potential bankruptcy on the record.

The company has been looking for a buyer, and still might find one, to avoid declaring bankruptcy. More than five companies have expressed interest in acquiring Vice, according to a person briefed on the discussions. The chances of that, however, are growing increasingly slim, said one of the people with knowledge of the potential bankruptcy.

A Vice bankruptcy filing would be a fitting ending to the tumultuous story of Vice, a new-media Phoenix that rose out of the ashes with its iconoclastic, counterculture facade, then quickly sought to supplant the media establishment before persuading it to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2017, after a funding round from the private-equity firm TPG, Vice was worth $5.7 billion. Around this time, the company realized that for the money to keep flowing, it would need to curb its rebellious ways and quickly turned woke, losing most of its fans in the process.

As a result, the company is now worth a fraction of the money it managed to squeeze out of existing media giants, and is now facing bankruptcy.

When Vice files, the company’s largest debtholder, hegde fund Fortress, will likely end up controlling the company. Vice could continue operating normally and run an auction to sell the company over a 45-day period, with Fortress in pole position as the most likely acquirer.

Unlike Vice’s other investors, which have included Disney and Fox, Fortress holds senior debt, which means it gets paid out first in the event of a sale. Disney and Fox, which have already written down their investments to zero, are getting wiped out.

“Vice Media Group has been engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives and planning,” Vice said in a statement on Monday. “The company, its board and stakeholders continue to be focused on finding the best path for the company.”

Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal more than two decades ago. Over the years, it blossomed into a global media company with a movie studio, an ad agency, a glossy show on HBO and bureaus in far-flung world capitals. Disney, after investing hundreds of millions in Vice, explored buying the company in 2015 for more than $3 billion.

The deal never materialized, but the interest from Disney forced a comprehensive culture revolution within Vice, which lost its rebellious appeal and instead scrambled to appeal to woke snowflakes – the group that represents the core decision-making process at Disney – and not surprisingly, it lost virtually all of its readers and viewers in the process.

After it failed to convince a strategic partner to acquire it, Vice eventually succumbed to a bearish market for digital media companies. The company has been trying for years to turn a profit but has consistently failed to do so, losing money and repeatedly laying off employees.

Last week, we reported that Vice was closing its Vice World News, a global reporting initiative that covered world conflict and human-rights abuses. The closure of the world news operation was a blow to employees who saw the division’s aggressive coverage as in keeping with Vice’s roots in gonzo journalism, established when co-founder Shane Smith would report from risky destinations like North Korea.

As it has sought a buyer in recent months, Vice has dealt with turnover in its leadership ranks. Nancy Dubuc, the company’s former chief executive, left this year after nearly five years at the company. Jesse Angelo, the company’s global president of news and entertainment, also left the company.

Smith founded Vice with Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes in 1994 as a magazine. He sold out his core vision of Vice in the coming years just so he could buy (and then sell) the legendary Beverly Hills Cop mansion for $50 million. In 2008, McInnes left Vice in 2008 and went on to found the Proud Boys. He has yet to sell out.

News of Vice’s coming bankruptcy reached as far away as El Salvador, whose president Nayib Bukele had a laconic comment.

It seems like Soros’ money also rans out 😂 https://t.co/SAcjuLKsZl

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) May 2, 2023

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he would attempt to shut down the FBI and replace it with another entity if he’s elected president.

During an interview with “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ramaswamy, a businessman, suggested that he does not want to “defund the FBI” after host Chuck Todd suggested it.

“I didn’t say defund the FBI. I said shut down the FBI and replace it with something new,” said Ramaswamy on Sunday. “I think it’s a new apparatus built from scratch that actually respects the law instead of making it up.”

“So you’re going to replace the old FBI with a new FBI?” Todd asked in response. “With a new institution built from scratch to carry out federal law enforcement,” Ramaswamy said, “because the existing FBI, the people who work there, have worked there for so long they’ll be getting in their own way.”

“I personally believe someone who’s running to actually run the executive branch of the government, when you have a bureaucracy whose culture becomes so ossified, every once in a while, you need to turn it over,” he told “Meet the Press.” He added: “We need federal law enforcement, but that institution has, in a bipartisan way, become so, I think ossified in its own norms, in its own corruption, that we need to rebuild it from scratch and have something new take its place.”

When Todd suggested that Ramaswamy wants to “replace the old FBI with a new FBI,” Ramaswamy stated: “The problem is there’s people who have worked there for decades.”

“What I say is, if I’m the U.S. president and I can’t work for the federal government for more than eight years—which I think is a good thing—then none of those bureaucrats reporting in to me should either,” he added. “There’s people who have worked there for decades,” he said.

Republicans in recent years have become increasingly critical of the FBI, accusing the agency of targeting the political opponents of Democrats while not investigating actual criminals. Former President Donald Trump has perhaps been the chief critic of both the FBI and the Department of Justice and said both agencies have engaged in a longstanding witch hunt to politically wound him.

Read more here…

Starting today, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s mortgage pricing adjustments will increase fees for borrowers with high credit scores while reducing costs for those with subpar credit scores. This upside-down policy is blatantly socialism, and one can’t help but wonder if anyone in the Biden administration learned anything from the subprime mortgage meltdown that occurred more than a decade ago. 

As part of the Biden administration’s plan to make housing affordable for everyone (we’ve seen this story before), upfront fees for loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be adjusted based on the borrower’s credit score. Borrowers with high credit scores will pay more in fees, while those with lower credit scores will pay less. 

The Wall Street Journal cited data from Evercore ISI that shows borrowers with credit scores between 720-759 who make around 15-20% down payments will see loan-level pricing adjustment (LLPA) costs rise by .750%. Inversely, under the new adjustments, risky borrowers with a credit score below 639 and who put down only 5% of the value of their home will only have to pay 1.750%, compared with 3.750% under old rules. 

Backlash over LLPA changes prompted the FHFA to publish a statement last week, calling such concerns “a fundamental misunderstanding.” The Biden administration ensures the new changes are meant to help those with poor credit scores obtain homes amid the worst housing affordability in a generation. 

According to the FHFA, the new adjustments will redistribute funds to reduce the interest rate costs paid by risky borrowers. This sounds like socializing home buying to us. 

Even more alarming is data from the American Enterprise Institute found that default rates of Fannie/Freddie owner-occupied 30-year fixed-rate purchase loans acquired in 2006-2007 were between 39.3% and 56.2% for borrowers with credit scores between 620 and 639 and less than 4% down payments. Those with credit scores between 720 and 769 and 20% down payments had default rates between 4.2% and 8.8%. 

The Biden administration is subsidizing irresponsibility, rewarding failure, and discriminating against people with high credit scores.

Meanwhile, 27 states revolted against Biden’s mortgage redistribution rule to subsidize risky borrowers… 

BREAKING: 34 state financial officers from 27 states have signed-on to a letter to the Biden Administration demanding that they end their new mortgage equity program, which forces buyers with good credit to pay higher rates to subsidize loans for riskier borrowers. pic.twitter.com/P8RHbj0zzf

— Will Hild (@WillHild) May 1, 2023

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) blasted Biden. 

.@SenatorTimScott slams new federal mortgage rules punishing Americans with good credit scores and urges voters to ‘reverse the curse’ of the Biden administration.https://t.co/15mnVVO7F8 pic.twitter.com/8gXOuQANcq

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 1, 2023

“Punishing responsibility—that’s the Biden way,” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). 

Biden’s mortgage scheme will cost homeowners an extra ~$30k for having a high credit score.

Punishing responsibility—that’s the Biden way.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 1, 2023

“While the changes may not be as bad as some headlines suggest, it still seems illogical to essentially penalize fiscally responsible borrowers in an effort to assist less qualified borrowers,” Federal Savings Bank loan officer Lewis Sogge told us. 

There’s no logic here, just progressive bureaucrats enacting policies that may ultimately lead to another future crisis.