Authored by Jason Ditz via Antiwar.com,

A week after ordering the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to prepare for a “long-term stay” in occupied southern Lebanon, Defense Minister Israel Katz has now also ordered them to escalate the rate at which they’re destroying what is being framed as “Hezbollah infrastructure” across the south.

The issue with this is the same as it’s been throughout the war, that Israel’s definition of Hezbollah infrastructure generally boils down to civilian infrastructure at large, with a particular emphasis on the municipalities where Shi’ite Muslims live, but by no means restricting the attacks just to them.

Officials aimed to frame the tiny Shi’ite villages that the IDF already occupies as “Hezbollah fortresses,” and presented the ongoing demolition of those villages as “engineering activity.” Much of that engineering involves explosions, whether it’s heavy artillery fire on the villages or increasingly the deployment of incendiary white phosphorus munitions to set fires in the villages and the surrounding area.

Katz has made clear that a number of the villages in the southernmost parts of Lebanon will simply have to “disappear,” and with tens of thousands of homes destroyed in recent months, there are a number of villages which it can be said simply no longer exist.

But Israel has allowed a handful of non-Shi’ite villages to remain in that area, but living under the occupation leaves those villages in a very tenuous situation. Local leaders in Kfar Chouba reported that the IDF warned them that if anyone in the village was armed, the entire village population would be expelled and the buildings destroyed. So far, that hasn’t happened.

But obeying the occupiers doesn’t mean the villagers can live as they would in peacetime. The village’s economy is based heavily around farming and olive orchards, but the Israeli troops regularly restrict villagers’ access to those lands. There’s no formal rule given to the villagers as to where they’re allowed or not allowed at any given time, and even the southernmost parts of the village are “no go” areas, with IDF troops reportedly setting up operations within buildings in that part of the village.

Further north, Israel continues to heavily attack the Ali Taher Ridge, though in the past few days they haven’t made any serious attempts to advance on the ground into the area. Israel reportedly sees the ridge as strategically valuable, as it overlooks much of the northern part of Nabatieh District, the northernmost part of Lebanon that Israel intends to occupy, at least at this point.

Authored by Trita Parsi via Antiwar.com, reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi’s Substack.

The Trump administration believes it has turned the tables on Iran. Washington assesses that the rerouting of maritime traffic through the Omani corridor, combined with a global shift away from Persian Gulf oil, has reduced the effectiveness of Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, the U.S. blockade has sharply constrained Iran’s ability to sell its oil. The result, in Washington’s view, is a status quo that imposes greater costs on Iran than on the United States.

That calculation changes the strategic equation. Rather than being forced to accommodate Iranian demands, President Donald Trump now believes he can afford to wait Tehran out. For the first time since the war began, the White House has concluded, time is working in America’s favor.

Assuming that assessment is correct, the more important question is what Trump intends to do with this newfound leverage. If Washington interprets Iran’s vulnerability as an opportunity to extract capitulation rather than to negotiate a durable settlement, the result is more likely to be another round of war than an end to the conflict. Tehran has already demonstrated that when confronted with a choice between surrender and escalation, it will choose the latter. Giving Iran the same choice again is therefore unlikely to produce a different outcome.

The only way to turn this unexpected shift in the balance of leverage into a political victory is through diplomacy. If Washington’s assessment is correct, it now has an opportunity to use its leverage to secure a compromise that addresses its core interests while giving Tehran sufficient reason to accept an agreement. If, instead, the administration pursues maximalist demands, it risks converting a moment of leverage into another cycle of war.

Historically, however, Washington has tended to make precisely this mistake. Whenever U.S. policymakers have concluded that time and leverage are on their side, they have often treated Iranian weakness not as an opening for compromise, but as an opportunity to seek capitulation. The danger is that Trump will repeat that pattern. He will mistake leverage for victory and turn a potentially favorable negotiating position into the continuation of the tragedy that is US-Iran relations.

Trump failed militarily, but thinks he can win economically

America has run out of military options. The clearest indication is that the Trump administration has stopped striking Iranian targets even as Tehran continues to attack ships transiting the Strait. On Monday, an Iranian attack killed a sailor aboard a vessel using the southern corridor. Yet Washington did not respond militarily – even though the second round of the war began precisely because the administration had declared that it could not accept Iran firing on ships.

According to Reuters, U.S. forces have used virtually all of their global stockpile of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) during the five-month Iran conflict. Moreover, roughly 65% of Patriot interceptors, 38% of THAAD interceptors, and almost half of the Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missiles have been expended.

The depletion of these stocks appears to have forced Trump to abandon its pursuit of a military knockout and instead shift the burden of economic pressure onto Tehran. That strategy, in turn, appears to be producing results faster – and to a greater degree – than the administration anticipated.

In the American description of events, this success is mainly due to three factors: New, much larger ships are being used that carry primarily crude oil. These VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carrier) can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil. In comparison, other oil tankers can transport between 350,000 and 1 million barrels.

Before the outbreak of the war, approximately 21 million barrels of petroleum and crude oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis. These were carried by 65 to 80 tankers. Roughly the same amount of oil transition through the strait can now be achieved by only ten VLCCs a day. And given that the vast majority of ships transitioning through the Strait in the Southern Corridor have their transponders off, this traffic has not been noted by outlets tracking the traffic.

Secondly, demand for Persian Gulf oil has significantly dropped as numerous economies have started to transition to other sources of supply. Brazil, for instance, has increased its exports and started to serve markets that previously relied on Persian Gulf oil. Most importantly, Beijing appears to have deliberately reduced its oil consumption to prevent prices from remaining above $100 a barrel and thereby aggravating the risk of a global recession.

Third, the war has created economic incentives strong enough to attract ships and crews willing to assume substantially greater risks. The growing volume of traffic through the Southern Corridor, despite the obvious dangers, is evidence that these incentives are surprisingly powerful.

Unlike its earlier illusions about the blockade as a guaranteed knockout blow against the Iranian theocracy, Washington no longer expects economic pressure to produce a quick surrender. Instead, the administration appears to be betting on a slower process of economic strangulation that will eventually force Tehran to capitulate. Faith in a knockout blow has given way to the more fragile hope of prolonged strangulation.

Tehran isn’t worried – for now

Iran’s calculation is effectively the opposite of Washington’s. Tehran doubts the United States can sustain the flow of VLCC traffic through the Strait and believes Trump will have little choice but to return to the Islamabad MOU within the next two to three weeks. Trump may have made progress on oil exports, but LNG and many petrochemical products, including fertilizers, remain unable to leave the Persian Gulf.

Tehran also appears to believe that it retains the ability to halt the VLCC traffic, but is deliberately refraining from doing so for now. The calculation is to avoid escalation while waiting to see whether the United States’ depleted military options ultimately compel Trump to return to the MOU.

In short, Tehran does not appear overly concerned – for now. But that could change. If Trump refuses to return to the MOU, or succeeds in turning the balance of economic pain against Iran, Tehran will face a far harsher reality. Just as Washington underestimated Iran’s resilience, Tehran may have underestimated the both resilience of the global economy and Trump – the former’s ability to shift away from oil and the latter’s craftiness in finding non-military ways to effectively reopen parts of the Strait.

Between surrender or escalation, Iran will almost certainly choose escalation. Even if Trump has gained the economic upper hand, Tehran still believes it holds a military advantage. Its options range from more aggressive attacks on VLCCs to strikes on Emirati pipelines that bypass the Strait, and potentially to renewed escalation in the Red Sea.

Indeed, it was precisely Trump’s erroneous assumption that Iran would choose surrender over war that helped drive the United States toward escalation in the first place. Washington’s recurring search for Iran’s breaking point has repeatedly produced escalation rather than capitulation. There is little reason to expect the pattern to be different this time.

The US-Iran tragedy

Herein lies the tragedy of the lethal dance between Washington and Tehran. America’s winner-take-all approach makes agreement unacceptable when Iran has the momentum. When the momentum shifts to Washington, the United States comes to believe that nothing short of Tehran’s full capitulation is palpable.

Because Iran fears surrender more than war, the cycle oscillates between economic pressure and military escalation, interrupted only by brief and often fragile periods of diplomacy. Put simply, the structure of the situation favors war.

This is particularly visible today as neither side is investing in any real diplomacy with the other. Tehran’s “diplomacy” is to simply wait for Trump to return to the MOU, while Trump has barred U.S. officials from engaging with Iran and committed himself instead to economic warfare.

When you don’t negotiate when you’re weak, because you are weak, and you don’t negotiate when you are strong, because you are strong, then war becomes the baseline.

Trita Parsi is the Executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”

Authored by Jonathan Turley via Jonathan Turley,

We have seen protesters on the left around the country mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk, even reenacting his murder. Hate traffickers like Jennifer Welch have even justified his assassination. It is all shocking and depressing, but none reached the level of Hasan Piker leading a huge crowd in mocking Kirk and his faith. Before he was murdered, Kirk debated Piker and called him a “socialist hypocrite.” What is shocking is not the utter depravity and cruelty of Piker, but the ecstasy of the crowd in relishing the death of someone with opposing views. It is part of the conditioning in what I have previously called an “age of rage.”

In the video, Piker leads the crowd in the meme song “We Are Charlie Kirk” at a stop of his “Fear& LIVE” tour, including such lines as “We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name.” His co-hosts and the crowd seem to be laughing with joy.

Joining him at this hatefest at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco on August 21 were reportedly Will Neff, QTCinderella, and AustinShow.

Hasan is wearing his now-signature Mao jacket as the young crowd and his co-hosts laugh hysterically. It is the very essence of this movement to desensitize people, particularly young people, to violence and hate.

In Rage and the Republic, I wrote about this national ragefest. It allows people to hate completely and without thought to the humanity of those being hurt. What people will not admit is that they like it. Rage is addictive, and it is contagious. Just look at the crowd in San Francisco, and you will see the addictive quality of uncut, undiluted hate:

Piker, Will Neff, QTCinderella, AustinShow, and these fans have every right to spread hate. It is protected speech just as KKK and neo-Nazi groups are allowed to promulgate their own hateful values.

What is exasperating is how hatemongers on the left want to enjoy hate speech while accusing others of hate and intolerance. They do so by excusing their actions or views by demonizing those who disagree. Democratic leaders continue the false claim that democracy is dying in America and that this may be our last free election. While made over multiple elections, the claim of the imminent death of democracy (unless they are elected) does not appear to register with their supporters.

Recently the rhetoric has reached hysterical levels. Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon has compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “modern-day slave catchers” and the government is “literally trying to kill us.”

It is a narrative that allows you to speak like a Nazi while claiming to be fighting Nazis.

Piker thrilled the crowd by mocking a murdered man over his faith and his death. It is more than being simply classless. It is commodifying rage. Piker is reportedly raking in a fortune as are other hatemongers like Jennifer Welch. They traffic in rage to a nation of rage addicts.

It is a scene that only reaffirms the work of Kirk who sought to expose the hate and intolerance of the left, particularly on our campuses. Kirk infuriated many by challenging them to debate. There is no room for reason in an age of rage. Those who try to introduce opposing views on campuses are cancelled or attacked.

Recently, a group of pro-life teenagers were kicked out of the Wydaho Roasters coffee shop in Idaho by an owner who found their presence intolerable. At universities, faculty members have attacked displays and even students in righteous rage. One professor who pleaded guilty to assaulting pro-life students was not only attained on the faculty but even honored by another school.

Civility, and even humanity, become signs of weakness in these times. They gravitate to figures like Abdul El-Sayed who has campaigned with Piker and promises to “choke out” Republicans and refers to moderates like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D) as ogres to have their heads cut off and put on pikes.

The American left has found their berserkers, the old Norse warriors who were known to fight in a virtual violent trance. The new berserkers offer the chance to hate completely and without remorse or reflection. Over time, supporters are conditioned to disregard even the murder of those with opposing views. As shown in San Francisco, assassination becomes nothing more than a sing-a-long in an age of rage.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

Authored by Almonty Industries CEO Lewis Black [emphasis our own], 

Plenty to delve into with this edition: a stockpile order nobody can fill, two factory shutdowns that should be on your radar and the awkward truth about how few tungsten projects will ever produce a single tonne. It’s a busy one. In we go.

Cash in hand but no one’s selling

Earlier this year America’s strategic stockpile did something that should have been routine and instead caused a small panic. The Defense Logistics Agency – the people who hold the national reserve – went out to the market asking what tungsten would cost. Not an order. Just a question: what’s the price?

The market recoiled. There was no spare material to be had, prices were already climbing and here was the US government signalling it might step in and buy at scale. The existing consumers – the people who turn tungsten into the things the military needs – were not pleased about a state-backed competitor showing up. The complaints landed and the request quietly went nowhere.

Because a government agency isn’t allowed to move the market it’s buying in – its own mandate forbids shoving the price around with taxpayer money. So the buyer who most needs the material legally can’t buy it at scale without breaking its own rules. Worse still: the day the DLA puts out an open call for tungsten, it’s told every adversary exactly where the soft spot is. You need the munitions, and you’re advertising that you can’t make enough of them.

The problem is that 30 years of cheap and outsourced can’t be undone in two. It’s like eating fast food every night for decades – inexpensive, easy, you feel fine, until you’re at the doc being told you have terminal health problems. Reshoring is like going back in the kitchen: the shopping, the prep, the washing up. A pain. But the alternative is worse.

There’s tungsten in the world. There just isn’t much the Pentagon can legally get its hands on – non-Chinese, uncommitted, deliverable at scale. The little the West produces is spoken for. Ours is sold years out. That’s not me dodging the point – that is the point. When even the producers are sold out, there’s nothing left for anyone to stockpile.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 14 August, 2026

The response to my last note surprised me. After 20 years in tungsten, I have rarely seen this much interest in the metal – which tells you how hot the price and supply situation has become.

There is still little activity on the tungsten spot market, and so no clear price trend can be seen. Some data providers report slightly lower world-market prices, others keep their figures unchanged, and Chinese domestic prices are even rising. In general, the APT price in the West remains above 3,000 USD/mtu WO₃.

Image via Cantor Fitzgerald: 

Slowly, more downstream companies are realizing that it is not only raw-material prices going up – the whole industry is in a real supply crisis.

The situation in Japan is especially severe. From last year, the tungsten trade between China and Japan came almost to an end, and since the start of 2026 no APT at all has been delivered from China to Japan. That has put Japanese hardmetal and tool producers in serious trouble.

In reaction to the missing Chinese raw material, Japan significantly increased its scrap imports over the last twelve months. Now, however, the USA – one of its main sources – has stopped the export of tungsten-containing scrap by imposing export restrictions. Some market participants say there is not yet enough recycling capacity in the US to process all the scrap it generates, so that without exports there could be an oversupply at home, and pressure on domestic scrap prices.

Some European and US tool producers are also complaining about shortages of raw material. Most confirm that, although they have had to raise their prices, demand for their products has not dropped – which is not surprising: nobody stops building cars or aircraft simply because the tools cost more. It confirms that tungsten demand, at least in the short and mid term, is not elastic to price.

We are in for a very interesting fall and winter.

Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik’s tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.

Running on empty

While everyone watches the defense story, you need to keep an eye on semiconductors too. There’s a gas called tungsten hexafluoride – WF₆. It’s what lays down the microscopic tungsten wiring inside advanced memory chips, the kind the entire AI boom is built on. No WF₆, no advanced chips.

Two Japanese producers, Kanto Denka and Central Glass, made about a quarter of the world’s supply between them. Past tense. As of the first of July, they stopped. Not an accident on the factory floor – they ran out of the pure tungsten powder they need, the powder comes from China, and China stopped letting it leave the country in 2025. The Japanese producers ran on stockpiles until the stockpiles were gone. Then so were they.

Samsung and SK Hynix are now scrambling to qualify new suppliers – normally a year-and-a-half job they’re trying to do in a hurry – and prices for the gas are being talked about 70 to 90 percent higher for the back half of the year.

So who’s filling the gap? China. A Chinese producer has already announced it’s expanding WF₆ capacity by a thousand tonnes a year. So: China restricts the raw material, the producers who depend on it go dark, and Chinese producers expand to serve the customers those factories just lost. Starve the competition, inherit the market. I’m not saying anyone drew it up that way. I’m saying it works whether they did or not.

Tungsten stopped being a mining story a while ago. It’s a memory story, an AI story, sitting a link or two up from almost everything you’re told is the future. It took two factories few people have heard of going quiet to show it.

Everyone’s got a tungsten project. Almost nobody’s got a tungsten mine.

Ask the strategic metals crowd to name the projects riding to the rescue and you’ll get a list that comprises real resources, mostly run by serious people.

Then ask which is producing tungsten today, and the room goes quiet. There’s one that went into administration a while ago, which wiped some of its permits, and it’s been clawing them back ever since. Even now it’s in a phased restart and the financing is still not closed. Elsewhere, there are some former Soviet holes in the ground that Moscow never finished, (China’s already taken the best one), and the New York Times had plenty to say about that operation. Then comes the investment decision, engineering, construction, commissioning. Nobody’s buying tungsten from there this decade.

I’ve bored you before on why tungsten resists going from deposit to metal, so I won’t again. What’s crucial is that Sangdong is processing – not next year, not after a study, running. When the whole field is measured in “targeted for 2027,” being the one name in the present tense is the difference between a supply chain and a slide deck.

Behind the Q2 numbers

I try to make this something more than just a company newsletter, but we reported Q2 this fortnight, the numbers are public, and they say something about the market, not just us. Revenue up 498 percent on the same quarter last year, and the business turned from burning cash to making it. One caveat I’ll flag myself: the headline $182m net income is mostly a non-cash accounting gain on our convertibles – real under the rules, but not money through the door. The operating number is the one that counts, and it’s finally real.

None of it came from Sangdong. Through the end of June the mine was still commissioning – it’s only been fully operational since July 1, after the quarter closed. So every dollar of that 498 percent came from existing operations at record prices.

What I’m reading

Tungsten leads critical mineral price gains

In the last edition I said tungsten wasn’t like the other critical minerals we all get lumped in with. Here’s the chart that proves it. Visual Capitalist ranked 27 of them by price move, using IEA data, and tungsten came out on top at 622 percent – more than three times the next metal on the list.

Scale is the easy story to sell

Two of the world’s biggest drug companies, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb, reportedly talked about merging into one giant. The deal itself is normal enough. The reaction is the interesting part: AstraZeneca’s shares fell on the news. Investors looked at two big companies becoming one bigger company and asked the question the press release never does: what does the combined firm do well that neither could do alone? More revenue, more staff, more assets – none of that answers it. It just adds up to size. The Guardian has the story.

The AI boom sees a wobble

Almost every advanced chip in the world is made using machines from one Dutch company, ASML – nobody else could build them. Last week China reportedly built its own, breaking the monopoly. Markets panicked: chip shares fell worldwide, South Korea’s main index dropped 11.5 percent in a day, and Nvidia fell more than five percent and lost its place as the world’s biggest company to Apple. Sound familiar? It’s the concentration problem I keep going on about with tungsten – too much of something critical in one country’s hands, and everyone downstream exposed when that grip looks like slipping. Read more here.

Opinion

Ask a room of investors why tungsten matters now and you’ll hear one word: defense. Rearmament, drones, munitions, the bunker-buster headlines. It’s the stock answer. It’s also nowhere near the whole story.

Around 60 percent of US tungsten goes into cemented carbides – cutting tools, drill bits, the wear parts that chew through rock and steel. That’s the US Geological Survey’s number. Globally it runs close to two-thirds, a figure S&P Global’s recent market report puts in the same range. Defense and semiconductors matter – they’re why governments suddenly care – but by volume they’re the smaller part.

Defense demand is political. It moves with budgets and elections and it can stall the moment the headlines do. Industrial demand doesn’t work that way. As Michael notes above, when tool prices rise the buyers don’t stop – nobody halts a car plant because the cutting tools got more expensive.

So watch the geopolitics, but don’t mistake the loudest demand for the largest. The metal is going into the most ordinary work imaginable, and that’s why it isn’t getting cheaper.

*   *   * 

Related Reads: 

• China’s Tungsten Chokehold Turns Almonty Into a Critical-Metal Lifeline
• Taiwan Tech Insiders Warn Beijing’s Germanium Squeeze Is Hitting Production

Whether the chokepoint is tungsten, germanium, or other critical materials, China’s tightening grip on supply has brought our decoupling theme into sharp focus. 

As Western governments accelerate efforts to reduce their dependence on Beijing, companies that control scalable, non-Chinese sources of critical minerals, processing capacity, and secure supply agreements are well positioned to become dominant players in the emerging industrial order.

Assets once thought of as just conventional mining operations are quickly becoming essential ex-China supply channels capable of bypassing Beijing and supporting Western defense, semiconductor, and advanced-manufacturing demand.

 Almonty vs. Tungsten Prices 

Yet, as Almonty Industries CEO Lewis Black emphasized above, tungsten is not solely a defense metal. It is also a critical input for the infrastructure powering the AI boom. Wall Street has yet to realize this fully – but they will. 

With Israel’s standing in the United States crumbling, America’s leading pro-Israel organization has become a focal point of anger among those who think the US government is putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. Political candidates have started seizing on this, attacking opponents who are backed by that group — AIPAC. So for, that’s largely been a phenomenon in the Democratic primaries, but now — in a jarring indication of AIPAC’s ballot-box toxicity — staunchly pro-Israel GOP Senate hopeful Mike Rogers has asked AIPAC not to spend money on his general election campaign.  

Rogers, a former US representative who chaired the House intelligence committee from 2011 to 2015, has been a stalwart backer of US aid to Israel, and was one of 12 federal legislators honored in 2015 by the US-Israel Security Alliance for his work to arm the Israel Defense Forces. 

Having won the Republican primary, Rogers faces Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed in the general election. El-Sayed is an outspoken critic of Israel and US support for Israel, which is why AIPAC blew through $30 million in a failed attempt to secure the Democratic nomination for the Israel-catering Haley Stevens. In that campaign, El-Sayed deftly portrayed Stevens as beholden to Israel. Stevens had given him all the ammo he needed; indeed, the El-Sayed campaign created a website that did nothing but show this cringy Stevens performance on a continuous loop: 

Rep. Haley Stevens: “In the United States Congress, I will continue to fight for the people of Israel!”

“Israel comes to me in my dreams!” pic.twitter.com/flVVYp3EWP

— AIPAC Tracker (@TrackAIPAC) June 9, 2026

When his primary victory was nearly in hand, El-Sayed taunted AIPAC, saying, “AIPAC, if you’re listening, come back and burn it again” in the general election. AIPAC was poised to start running an already-produced commercial for the November race when Rogers talked to AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin in Los Angeles last week, Axios reports. The next day, the commercial was put on ice. 

The extraordinary move by the Rogers campaign is a humiliation for AIPAC, which has long been nearly omnipotent in securing lopsided congressional votes on pro-Israel bills, and in installing pro-Israel legislators while ousting those who dare to offer even mild criticism of Israel. While AIPAC has hit “pause” on its effort in the Michigan Senate campaign, angry AIPAC officials want back in. 

Rogers’ allies are urging AIPAC to use indirect ways to influence the race, so that AIPAC’s backing isn’t used against Rogers. One technique under discussion is telling AIPAC donors to give their money to a pro-Rogers super PAC rather than AIPAC, Axios reported. The Rogers team has also floated the idea of directly hiring AIPAC’s political strategists. However, not wanting to own up to the fact that it has become political poison, AIPAC wants a visible role in the race, with hopes of notching a big win that reinforces the group’s power as other politicians stake out their positions on Israel. Things have gotten so icy between the Rogers camp and AIPAC that other GOP players are attempting to intermediate, including Jewish Republican donors. 

According to a recent Fox News poll, 55% of the Michigan electorate want US aid to Israel to stop altogether. The state has one of the larger Arab American populations, and from election to election, it’s demonstrated mobility across the Red-Blue divide. Outraged over the Biden administration’s blank-check support for Israel’s devastation of Gaza, the most heavily-Arab precincts in east Dearborn went for the self-described “peace candidate” Donald Trump in 2024, with 45% voting for Trump, 29% for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and only 16% for Biden’s VP Kamala Harris.

Authored by Rainer Zitelmann via RealClearMarkets,

What personality traits distinguish successful entrepreneurs? This question has occupied academic research on entrepreneurship for decades, with scholars examining the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurial success.

When we want to understand or recognize something, we often do so by making comparisons. About 200 years after the birth of Christ, the Greco-Roman historian and philosopher Plutarch wrote a collection of parallel biographies of famous figures from Greek and Roman history. By comparing their characters, decisions, and lives, he sought to reveal similarities and differences and thereby arrive at a deeper understanding of each individual.

The American economist and entrepreneur Greg Autry has followed this model. In his book “Barons and Bros”, he presents four pairs, each consisting of a living entrepreneur and an entrepreneur from the 19th century.

Many readers will be familiar with five of the names: SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin founder Richard Branson, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and railroad and shipping entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt. In addition, Autry has chosen Monty Ward, the pioneer of mail-order retailing; Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun; and Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality company Oculus.

Formal education played hardly any role. Only two of these eight successful entrepreneurs completed a university degree, and only one of them – Musk – studied economics, among other subjects. The inventor Hiram Maxim, who received 122 U.S. patents and 149 British patents and developed, among other things, the first automatic fire sprinkler, attended a one-room schoolhouse for only five years. Richard Branson is dyslexic and left school at the age of 16.

In my dissertation The Wealth Elite, for which I conducted in-depth interviews with 45 wealthy self-made entrepreneurs, I reached a similar conclusion: there was no correlation between performance at school or university and the level of wealth these individuals later attained. Those who had excelled at school or university were generally not among the very wealthiest later in life.

For these entrepreneurs, implicit learning – “learning by doing” – and the implicit knowledge acquired through this process played a much more important role. Six of Autry’s eight heroes were already engaged in entrepreneurial activities as teenagers, learning skills that would later contribute to their success. This, too, corresponds to the findings of my dissertation: What was striking was the way the future wealthy entrepreneurs earned money while still at school or university.

Typical student jobs in which they simply worked for an hourly wage were the exception. There is little doubt that these experiences shaped the young people who later became entrepreneurs. They learned how to organize, sell, and think entrepreneurially. Without even being aware of it, they acquired the implicit knowledge that is so important for successful entrepreneurs and investors. Their early entrepreneurial experiences were the best possible preparation for becoming self-employed later in life.

Most of the entrepreneurs featured in Autry’s comparisons would probably never have made careers in large corporations because they were often difficult personalities, unwilling or unable to conform and subordinate themselves to others. All of them were undoubtedly outstanding salesmen and networkers. Again and again, Autry describes his heroes making “cold calls” – contacting strangers they did not know but who were important to their plans.

How often have you tried to write to or call an important person you did not know?

All the heroes in this book suffered major setbacks. Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX repeatedly came close to bankruptcy, and many of Branson’s companies failed.

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Facebook after the company acquired his business because he was considered politically “too right-wing.” Vanderbilt suffered a major defeat in the so-called Erie War and, in his unsuccessful attempt to gain control of the Erie Railroad, at one point lost around $7 million – the equivalent of perhaps $170 million today.

Andrew Carnegie experienced one of the greatest crises of his life during the bloody Homestead conflict of 1892; the confrontation permanently damaged his reputation as an employer sympathetic to workers.

Perseverance alone does not explain their success. What matters is the combination of perseverance, a willingness to experiment, and the ability to learn from mistakes. The crucial skill shared by Autry’s heroes was their ability to recognize opportunities where other people saw none. This corresponds to the insights of the great economist Israel Kirzner, whose theory of entrepreneurship places the entrepreneur’s “alertness” to new opportunities at its center.

In his definition, the “pure entrepreneur” is a decision-maker whose entire role consists of discovering previously unnoticed opportunities.

When it comes to the personalities of Autry’s heroes, one thing stands out: they were all nonconformists – in the sense described by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. According to Schumpeter, the entrepreneurial type does not regard the fact that something has never been done before as an argument against doing it. Inhibitions that constitute firm boundaries for the behavior of others do not constrain him in the same way.

He draws different conclusions from the circumstances around him than the mass of static economic actors. He does not care much how others judge his enterprise – and often even takes pleasure in swimming against the current. All of this applies without qualification to the people portrayed in this book.

And there is something else that stands out: Autry’s entrepreneurs think very, very long term. Not in months, and not even in years, but in decades. This sets them apart from the overwhelming majority of people.

There is almost no theory in Autry’s book, and that is a good thing. His accounts are vivid, entertaining, and full of anecdotes. “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” This statement would drive most academics to despair, but it comes from Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world. The entrepreneur’s knowledge is different from the academic’s knowledge – something intellectuals will never understand.

This book could only have been written by an author who is both a scholar and an entrepreneur himself, and who therefore possesses a kind of knowledge superior to that of the pure academic.

Autry has met all of the entrepreneurs featured in the book who are still alive – some only briefly, others more closely. I have read many biographies of Musk, Bezos, and Branson, and of course I was already familiar with Vanderbilt and Carnegie. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from this book and read it in one sitting. As a reader, I am already looking forward to Autry’s next parallel biographies, since he announces that he intends to write more.

Anyone interested in entrepreneurship will learn more from this book than from many years spent studying business administration.

In June, Skyhorse Publishing will release Rainer Zitelmann’s book “New Space Capitalism.”

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump is asking a federal judge to reject the BBC’s attempt to subpoena three members of his family as part of discovery in his defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.

Trump’s attorneys filed a memorandum Aug. 21 opposing the BBC’s request for permission to use alternative methods to serve subpoenas on Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner.

Trump’s lawyers accused the BBC of attempting to transform what they described as a narrow defamation case into a broad investigation of the events surrounding Jan. 6, 2021.

The lawsuit concerns a BBC documentary in which the BBC spliced together portions of the president’s Jan. 6 speech, delivered nearly 55 minutes apart, while omitting his statement that supporters should march “peacefully and patriotically” to the U.S. Capitol.

The BBC apologized for the editing but said it was an unintentional error and does not meet the legal threshold for defamation.

Trump’s filing says the BBC chairman acknowledged that the editing created a “mistaken impression.”

According to Trump’s attorneys, the BBC sought 126 document requests and approximately 150 requests for admission from Trump, and issued subpoenas to 47 family members, former officials, political associates, and federal agencies.

The court ruled Aug. 6 that the lawsuit did not permit the BBC to “relitigate and discover every aspect” of Jan. 6 or seek discovery from “any and all individuals” with knowledge of the events. The judge directed the parties to conduct a meaningful conference to resolve remaining discovery disputes.

Trump’s attorneys argue the BBC filed its latest motion eight days later, without following that process.

They also contend the BBC is seeking authorization to serve subpoenas that have not been presented to the court. The filing says the BBC has not submitted revised document subpoenas or proposed deposition subpoenas detailing what the three family members would be required to provide or testify about.

Trump’s attorneys also argued that additional depositions would be redundant because all three were previously interviewed by the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Those interviews totaled 585 pages and addressed subjects the BBC says it wants to explore, according to the filing.

The filing particularly challenges the effort to depose Kushner, saying that he was outside the country during Trump’s speech and the subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump’s attorneys asked the court to deny the BBC’s motion, arguing the broadcaster has failed to justify its proposed ways to deliver the subpoenas and failed to comply with the court’s Aug. 6 discovery order.

The BBC declined to comment in response to an email from The Epoch Times seeking comment.

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

A court on Aug. 18 effectively ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for the last of 13 nationalities that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) targeted during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In total, more than a million foreign nationals living in the United States with such deportation protections are now up for removal.

The 13 countries included Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, Burma, Somalia, and Ethiopia.

In June, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to end the status for Syrians and Haitians and did so with reasoning that applied to cases involving other nationalities as well. Some lower courts initially resisted Trump’s revocations, but by Aug. 18, each of those judicial blocks had fallen.

Here’s what we know about what this means and what’s next.

Are Mass Deportations Coming?

DHS and legal experts say the more than one million foreign nationals previously covered by TPS are now, technically, illegal aliens.

The first deportation flight to Haiti since the Supreme Court ruling departed on Aug. 20, carrying more than 160 individuals. Among those removed were former TPS holders and Haitians who served prison sentences in the United States, according to Haitian officials.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who worked on immigration issues, told The Epoch Times that few options remained for the foreign nationals to challenge their deportations.

“That designation is gone. That protection disappears,” Rahmani said. “Now, that doesn’t mean a million people get deported. … They still have to go through the normal removal proceeding.”

He said that some could self-deport or be removed under orders that were in place before they received protected status.

DHS did not respond to requests for more information on enforcement of the TPS revocations for more than a million foreign nationals.

After the Aug. 18 decision, DHS urged foreign nationals to self-deport – take a free flight home and a $2,600 check – or be removed.

“For decades, TEMPORARY Protected Status was used as a [de facto] amnesty program. Those days are OVER. Those with terminated TPS are now in our nation ILLEGALLY. They must leave now or be swiftly DEPORTED,” said the DHS on X.

Court Battles

The DHS secretary has authority to decide when a country merits a TPS designation.

The secretary is also required to periodically review and extend or revoke the status, which is meant to be granted for countries affected by armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary or temporary dangerous conditions. If the DHS secretary finds that conditions in a designated country no longer warrant protected status, they can terminate it.

Lawsuits seeking to block the terminations, which were done under then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, alleged the administration failed to follow proper procedures, including reviewing conditions in these countries, before terminating the protections.

Some judges agreed, before the Supreme Court issued a decision over protections for Syrians and Haitians in which a majority of justices agreed with the administration’s argument that federal judges lacked authority to review the department’s TPS determinations. They noted a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that bars judicial review and clarified that it applied even to procedural challenges, like those brought under the Administrative Procedure Act.

While some countries’ terminations were already in effect, others were still blocked when the Supreme Court ruled.

Some of the lower court judges overseeing those remaining cases were accused by DHS of dragging their feet in issuing orders that comply with the high court’s ruling.

DHS special counsel James Percival began posting on X a daily reminder of each judge who had not followed the Supreme Court precedent. He singled out District Judge Brian Murphy, who oversaw Ethiopia’s case, for waiting more than 50 days to lift his administrative stay on the country’s TPS termination.

Although the final judicial block fell on Aug. 18, appearing to be the last breath of the legal challenges against TPS terminations, there remains a small chance that at least one case could be revived.

Lawyers jointly representing Nepalese, Honduran, and Nicaraguan former TPS holders are attempting to amend their initial lawsuit with a new bare animus claim alleging that the Trump administration’s efforts to end protected status were unconstitutional “because they were motivated by explicit animosity and a desire to harm TPS holders,” an Aug. 20 court filing said.

Lawyers for the federal government argued in their own court filing that the plaintiffs “do not have any prospect of victory.”

They pointed to an Aug. 7 decision in Burma’s TPS lawsuit that rejected a similar attempt to amend the challenge with a bare animus claim.

“There is a distinction between bare desire to harm TPS holders and animus against TPS policy,” wrote District Judge Matthew Kennelly of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. “The Supreme Court’s reasoning in [the Syria and Haiti case] points to the latter, not the former.”

District Judge Trina Thompson for the Northern District of California, overseeing the Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua case, had not ruled on the matter at the time of this publication.

Judge Murphy, overseeing Ethiopia’s case, denied the plaintiff’s motion to postpone termination of TPS but granted their motion to amend their complaint with a new ultra vires claim, arguing then-Secretary Noem acted beyond her authority in ending protected status.

Regardless, Rahmani said he believed any further challenges or appeals would likely have very little success considering the Supreme Court’s decision.

“They can sue, but they’re probably gonna lose,” he said. “It’s been pretty clear the executive branch can remove these protections.”

How TPS Was Granted

Protected status can be designated for six, 12, or 18 months at a time and must be periodically reviewed by the DHS secretary to ensure a country is still experiencing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary or temporary conditions.

Some of the 13 countries were initially granted TPS due to armed conflict, like a bloody civil war in Syria that prompted the United States to grant its citizens protected status in March 2012.

Other countries were designated under TPS after devastating natural disasters, including a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal in 2015, and Hurricane Mitch that ravaged Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998.

Somalia remained under protected status the longest out of these 13 countries – since September 1991. Three decades of armed conflict and instability warranted extensions of TPS across multiple U.S. administrations.

About 170,000 Salvadorans living in the United States are set to become the 14th nationality to lose their deportation protections on Sept. 9. The country has remained under TPS since March 2001 after catastrophic earthquakes.

The Debate

Advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration’s efforts, arguing that some of the 13 countries remain war-torn and unsafe for their nationals to return to. Some judges who oversaw TPS cases wrote words critical of the policy changes in new orders to overturn their previous blocks.

District Judge Allison Burroughs, overseeing Somalia’s case, noted in her order lifting her previous block that Somalis once under TPS face a humanitarian crisis in their home country. She described the foreign nationals as “productive members of our communities who have lived here for years, built a life here, worked here and raised their families here.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, urging him to reinstate protected status. She said the deportation of foreign nationals from the state’s workforce will have a “heavy impact” on a myriad of industries.

“By knowingly and cruelly forcing thousands of families to leave our country and return to their home countries, regardless of any ongoing or worsening humanitarian crises, the White House is committing a reckless and inhumane act,” Hochul wrote.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) demanded that the Senate return to session to pass a bill that would extend TPS specifically for Haiti, where she said, in an Aug. 21 post on X, has an “ongoing humanitarian crisis.”

The lower chamber already passed the legislation earlier this year in a 224-204 vote.

Meanwhile, federal officials have said TPS is meant to be temporary and has never been designed as a pathway to obtaining permanent U.S. citizenship.

Foreign nationals could attempt to claim asylum, Rahmani noted, which is very difficult to do now in the United States.

Asylum claims are designated for foreign nationals with a well-founded fear of persecution or torture in their home countries.

Rahmani said some foreign nationals could fight their deportation on the grounds that they are married to an American citizen – as long as it’s a “bona fide marriage” and not fraudulent.

Marriage is the quickest and easiest way for a foreign national to gain status, he said.

Some may self-deport, taking DHS’s offer of a free flight and a $2,600 check, Rahmani said, but others may continue living in the United States “under the radar,” as enforcing the end of TPS for more than a million foreign nationals will take time.

“I expect that a lot of people who don’t have legal status to be here, they’ll continue to remain here, live in the United States unlawfully,” Rahmani said. “It’ll be up to DHS to find them, apprehend them, and remove them.”

The narrative of the innocent black kid standing up to “white bullies” is falling apart.  Karmelo Anthony, age 19, was convicted in June 2026 of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf (who was also 17 at the time) by fatally stabbing him in the chest during a confrontation at a high school track meet in April 2025.  A Collin County jury sentenced him to 35 years in prison. Anthony claimed self-defense; arguing that Metcalf “shoved him” and that he was protecting himself.

Anthony’s family raised $634,000 from gullible liberals on claims self defense and racism, but their story started to fall apart early in the trial.  His conviction was met with outrage by progressive commentators and Democrat politician who continue to assert that Anthony should be freed from prison.  Efforts were immediately launched for a new trial.

However, Kaufman County Judge Michael Chitty (appointed after the original trial judge was recused) denied the motion in a brief order after a two-day hearing, stating he had reviewed the motion, record, evidence, arguments, briefs, and case law.

During the new-trial hearing, previously excluded character evidence was discussed that was kept out of the original trial.  Under an informal “gentleman’s agreement” between prosecutors and defense, this evidence was omitted and focus was limited to the day of the incident in order to avoid “inflaming racial tensions”.  

This new evidence included text messages and notes from Karmelo Anthony expressing extreme violence.  Examples included messages about stabbing someone and “licking the blood off the blade.”  There were threats toward an ex-girlfriend, including a photo of a knife and Anthony saying he was “low key on the verge” the day he murdered Austin Metcalf. 

There were also reports of Anthony stalking his ex-girlfriends, other threats of violence, school disciplinary issues involving fights, jokes about school shootings, and related content.

These revelations help to paint a picture of a warped individual that seemed to be looking for an opportunity for a violent encounter.  This helps to explain why Anthony invaded the tent of an opposing high school team and refused to leave – He may have wanted someone to confront him, and that person just happened to be Austin Metcalf.  Had it not been Metcalf it’s likely that Anthony would have simply killed someone else down the road.

Defense lawyers say they plan to appeal the case to the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas.

The incident became a flashpoint for racial tension in the US, with leftists and black activists celebrating the murder of Metcalf as “payback” for the “crimes of white America.”  It’s a trend which has been gestating for many years due to woke ideology and the concept of social and financial “reparations” in the name of righting the wrongs of the past by punishing white people today.  

The case also brought many misconceptions about self defense law to the surface and proved that, sadly, far too many people are ignorant of how these laws work.  Deadly force cannot be used without a legitimate threat to life and limb.  Feeling insulted because someone call you out for bad behavior, or being shoved out of a tent, is not legal grounds to murder that person.

Ultimately, the Karmelo Anthony case once again exposed a dangerous disconnect between black culture and the rest of America.  Their seething obsession with “respect” that they have not earned is leading the black community down a path to disaster.    

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via Modernity News,

The World Health Organization (WHO) says evidence that a person is actually sick is not required for a “laboratory-confirmed” human influenza infection with “the potential to cause a pandemic” to trigger mandatory international reporting.

“Evidence of illness is not required for this report,” WHO states in its latest Influenza at the Human-Animal Interface assessment, which covered July 8 through August 7, 2026.

WHO says countries must “immediately notify WHO of any laboratory-confirmed case of a recent human infection caused by an influenza A virus with the potential to cause a pandemic.”

Then, immediately afterward:

“Evidence of illness is not required for this report.”

The statement raises an obvious question: If evidence of illness is not required to set off a chain of events that could trigger authoritarian international pandemic response, what evidence is required?

WHO points to a “laboratory-confirmed” finding.

But WHO’s own influenza laboratory manual shows that such determinations are made using real-time RT-PCR tests.

But PCR does not directly observe a virus.

It measures fluorescence (the amount of light emitted) from test chemicals mixed with a sample.

WHO describes PCR methods using fluorescent dyes and probes carrying a fluorescent reporter and quencher.

But fluorescence can also increase through unintended pathways, potentially contributing to a false-positive reading.

Those pathways include reagent cross-reactions, probe cleavage or degradation, reporter or quencher detachment or degradation, optical cross-talk, and changes in reporter – quencher behavior caused by heat – which PCR intentionally applies to the sample over and over during testing.

WHO’s manual confirms that PCR repeatedly heats the test material, including to 95°C, and that real-time PCR results are evaluated by whether fluorescence rises above a threshold.

It also explicitly acknowledges background signal, contamination, and false-positive results.

The implications are difficult to ignore.

WHO is saying evidence of illness is not required at the gateway to its pandemic-potential reporting system, while the “laboratory-confirmed” evidence that can substitute for illness may itself rest on light readings susceptible to false-positive signals.

Bottom Line

The world saw what can follow a pandemic determination during COVID-19: lockdowns, business and school closures, masking and distancing mandates, travel restrictions, and vaccination requirements.

WHO now says “Evidence of illness is not required” for certain “laboratory-confirmed” infections with pandemic potential to trigger international reporting.

If nobody has to be sick, and “laboratory confirmation” can ultimately rest on a fluorescence reading, what evidence of actual disease must exist before governments begin exercising pandemic powers?