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Germany Braces For AfD Election Breakthrough In Saxony-Anhalt

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Germany Braces For AfD Election Breakthrough In Saxony-Anhalt

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt head to the polls on Sunday, followed two weeks later by elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. With the right-wing Alternative for Germany leading the national polls, the elections could be the opening act of an 18-month period in which Europe “lurches to the right,” as Nomura analysts explained last month.

UniCredit’s chief German economist, Dr. Andreas Rees, told clients on Friday: “Three state elections in just 14 days will test Germany’s government coalition and its reform plans. While political noise is likely to increase, we expect the push for structural reform to remain on track.“

The polling chart compiled by Rees’ team shows the rising popularity of the AfD and the pressure facing Germany’s establishment parties. The AfD leads nationally at roughly 28%, compared with 21% for the CDU/CSU and 12% for the SPD. In Saxony-Anhalt, the gap is far wider, with the AfD polling near 41%, versus 23% for the CDU and just 8% for the SPD. However, CDU/CSU leads over AfD in Berlin. 

Rees touched on this Sunday’s big election in Saxony-Anhalt, which could quite possibly usher in AfD leadership:

On Sunday, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will head to the polls; two weeks later, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the city-state of Berlin will follow. Formally, these are state elections with regional specifics and differences. Politically, however, three elections within 14 days will probably be viewed as a report card for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, at a time when the government is trying to move from fiscal firepower towards structural reforms of the pension system, the labour market and bureaucracy.

THE DATA

The starting point is uncomfortable for the conservative CDU/CSU alliance and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the latest nationwide opinion polls, the right-wing AfD stood at about 28%, ahead of the CDU/CSU with around 21%, while the SPD came in at just 12%. Recent polls for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the election federal policymakers may watch most nervously, even put the AfD at around 41%, far ahead of the CDU, which is polling at 23%. The SPD is currently only at around 8%. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD also leads clearly, while the SPD is holding up considerably better. In Berlin, the race is highly fragmented, according to opinion polls.

OUR VIEW

Sunday’s election outcome in Saxony-Anhalt could grab most of the headlines. At current polling levels, the AfD does not have an outright majority. But with several parties, including the SPD, hovering around the 5% threshold, relatively small shifts in votes could translate into larger changes in seats and potentially open the path to an AfD-led government, the first one in a federal state. However, from an investor perspective, there is one question that matters more: what does this all mean for the federal government in Berlin?

  1. The CDU/CSU-SPD coalition will continue. Even poor results would give neither the conservatives nor the Social Democrats a good reason to leave the government. A weak CDU performance could strengthen demands within the Union for a tougher profile on migration, security and economic competitiveness. A poor SPD result in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the prime minister is a Social Democrat, however, would intensify pressure on the party to defend its social-policy priorities.
  2. The structural reform agenda remains (largely) intact. At the beginning of July, the CDU/CSU and the SPD agreed on a 34-measure reform package spanning pensions, labour-market rules, competitiveness, taxation and bureaucracy reduction, with key measures intended to pass the Bundestag by the end of this year. Politically, abandoning these reforms after strong AfD results would be difficult for either party to defend. Mr. Merz could argue that voters are punishing weak growth and insufficient change, while the SPD needs to demonstrate that reforms can be combined with social protection.
  3. A more-fragmented Bundesrat could not block large parts of the reforms. Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin together hold 11 of the Bundesrat’s 69 votes. However, the federal states’ leverage differs substantially across individual reforms. For instance, the envisaged tax cuts for low- and middle-income households, financed by tax hikes on top-income earners, require the Bundesrat’s consent. Core pension and labour-market reforms, meanwhile, are generally not dependent on Bundesrat approval.

Overall, we expect more political noise in the next few weeks, but not political paralysis in Berlin. A few reform measures may be diluted or delayed beyond year-end 2026, but the broader reform push is likely to remain on track.

The rise of the AfD in the polling data is not a surprise. It is a closely watched political theme we have been tracking, and one that has quite clearly terrified German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has fear-mongered about the potential for AfD victories.

The problem with Merz’s AfD fear angle is that Nomura counters it, arguing that markets are welcoming populist right-wing political parties and are more concerned about left-wing regimes that “desire to increase spending, often paid for through higher borrowing or higher taxes, which are likely to shut the engine off of already stuttering economies.”

Here’s the EU election roadmap over the next 18 months, according to Nomura:

The shift to the right is happening across the West.

Brazilian socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s lead over right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro has imploded. If Bolsonaro can pull off a victory next month, that would cement the continent’s shift from nation-killing left-wing socialism to right-wing common sense.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/05/2026 – 07:35

Meanwhile In Ceuta…

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Meanwhile In Ceuta…

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Viral footage out of the invaded Spanish enclave of Ceuta shows a bottlenose dolphin calf came in close to the sand at Playa del Trampolín in Ceuta this week, disoriented and still alive. A group of men who entered illegally in the July surge pulled it from the water, hoisted it like a prize, and – according to local reporting, a conservation complaint, and Telecinco – one of them bludgeoned it in the head with a stick.

An Ecoservicios worker in high-vis tried to stop the handling. Voices on the clip can be heard shouting “No! No! You can’t eat it! It’s a dolphin!” The animal was killed. Some of the men then moved off toward the breakwater with the body.

The conservation group DAUBMA took photographs, clips and social-media stills to the Guardia Civil and asked for animal-cruelty and protected-fauna charges. Alvise Pérez’s Se Acabó la Fiesta filed at Ceuta’s court on the same facts. A petition by Nadia García Gómez put it in writing: the calf was “brutally pulled from the water… handled as if it were an object and violently struck on the head.”

Spanish citizens must now share their city with savages who treat a dolphin like a piñata.

They likely have a lower IQ than the animal they pulled out of the sea and bludgeoned. They are predatory scum acting solely on chemical instinct, completely lacking in empathy, judgement or respect for anything other than their own worthless existence.

El Trampolín is not a postcard cove anymore. It is the same strip that has held thousands of arrivals since late July, when more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into a city of roughly 84,000.

Madrid still talks as if most of them “went home,” yet the reality is that reed shacks, rotting food and human waste have sat on that shoreline for weeks. The calf swam into that hell and couldn’t escape.

One of the men in the circle was filming the spectacle on what looks like an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The “destitute asylum seeker” kit keeps getting more expensive.

DAUBMA says the calf reached the shallows alive, was dragged out, was struck, and shows a bleeding wound under one eye while people on the tape try to wipe the blood. It called the case “extrema gravedad ambiental” and asked the environmental prosecutor to take it. Bottlenose dolphins are protected under Spanish and EU law.

A day earlier the animal-rights party PACMA shared a clip showing a migrant in Ceuta immobilising a park goose, bagging it, legs bound, a fish already in hand. A bystander intervened and the bird was dropped. The man left the scene.

PACMA issued a statement condemning “any act of violence, capture or manipulation of an animal, regardless of who commits it, their nationality, origin or administrative situation,” while adding that there is “not enough information to affirm that the incidents with animals were motivated by hunger.”

As we highlighted in mid-August carers who feed Ceuta’s street-cat colonies said sites by the desalination plant and in Huerta Téllez, Carmelitas, Príncipe, Sidi Embarek and Punta Blanca had emptied after the migrant camps spread over the same ground. Volunteers described dead cats found cut or missing half a body, and pigeons and gulls half-eaten near the settlements.

Conservative influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek points out that while everyone is rightly disgusted over the dolphin incident, European children are being raped and killed by migrants relentlessly, and it’s beginning to become little more than background noise.

“It took a dolphin calf,” she wrote. “That says something about the way our society views the value of human children.” She also pointed to the Lindsay Clancy case in the United States – a mother who strangled her three children and was immediately wrapped in feminist excuse-making. Murder a dolphin instead, Vlaardingerbroek noted, and that chorus disappears.

The situation in Ceuta remains dire. Playgrounds that used to hold Spanish children are smeared with excrement. Beaches that held families have become open latrines. Mothers cannot let their daughters outside without a male escort.

Ceuta’s chief prosecutor, Silvia Rojas, told Spanish media that 23 sexual assaults – nine of them against children – had been recorded since the late-July surge, almost one case a day. Police unions speak of women and girls clinging to vans near the CETI because stepping away results in assault, and being dragged into the hills.

Locals have had enough. In late August residents tore beach camps apart, threw gear into the sea and chanted that if the men would not leave, Ceuta would throw them out. Police put a cordon between Spaniards and the shacks and used rubber bullets on the people who live there.

The revolt did not stay inside the enclave. Marches spread across the peninsula.

Sánchez went to Congress and called it “absurd to think that the government knew and did nothing.” He boasted of returns “within 72 hours” and a €309 million emergency package. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has claimed “practically the entirety” of those who entered have gone back to Morocco.

Video from El Trampolín a month later still shows tents, wrecked shoreline and a city that looks sacked. Tent camps billed for 1,500 cannot accomodate 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/05/2026 – 07:00

How To Tackle Domestic Extremists’ Foreign Enablers

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How To Tackle Domestic Extremists’ Foreign Enablers

Authored by Daniel McCarthy via The Epoch Times,

Left-wing terrorism is a serious problem in the United States, though for political reasons it doesn’t receive anything like the attention right-wing violence gets.

When most people think of violence connected to abortion, they imagine attacks on abortion clinics – yet lately, pro-abortion extremists have been firebombing crisis pregnancy centers across the country.

These centers help women who want to have their babies or who are undecided about having an abortion: In other words, women who are making a choice, just not the choice supposedly “pro-choice” abortion advocates find acceptable.

So a group calling itself “Jane’s Revenge,” referring to the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, has declared war on anyone who might choose life.

A report in the left-wing Guardian newspaper, headlined “Pro-choice militants are attacking ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ across US,” documented terroristic attempts at intimidation from New York and North Carolina to Wisconsin, Texas and Washington state in the past several years.

The paper noted: “The methods have been extreme: vandals have thrown molotov cocktails, committed arson, damaged property and made threats.”

Jane’s Revenge issued a statement demanding “anti-choice establishments” shut down in 30 days or face further violence.

That was in 2022 – yet the group continued operating, until its website went dark just days ago thanks to a Trump administration crackdown on terrorist infrastructure.

Jane’s Revenge and various other radical organizations, including antifa groups, were part of a network relying on web services provided by Italy’s “Autistici/Inventati,” or A/I Collective.

According to the State Department, the A/I Collective “builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world,” providing technology “designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks, built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share target information and tactics, and carry out violent attacks – all while remaining anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law.”

The collective has been facilitating leftist provocations for years.

But on Aug. 26, the State Department struck back, officially deeming the A/I Collective a “specially designated global terrorist.”

The designation means sanctions can be imposed on domestic individuals and financial institutions that do business with the foreign group, as well as restricting any of the collective’s assets that are under American jurisdiction.

Results were immediate: radical sites shut down.

“Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism,” the collective complains in a media statement. “Protesting is not terrorism.”

Yet all too often, it is: Groups like Jane’s Revenge consider terrorism a legitimate form of protest.

And antifa organizations specialize in using protests as cover for carrying out acts of mayhem.

Indeed, that’s the grand strategy – to tear down American society, which is capitalist and “fascist” in the left’s eyes, by exploiting the freedoms our “capitalist” Constitution protects.

Legend has it Lenin once said capitalists would sell communists the very rope they would use to hang them.

Today’s militant left is counting on capitalists and constitutionalists to provide them the legal protections they need to incite and perpetrate violence.

But the Trump administration refuses to play along.

The State Department’s action is long overdue:

Americans should not have had to wait for a Republican administration like this one before government acts to dismantle the infrastructure that supports intimidation and violence.

Foreign interests like the A/I Collective are often suppliers of that infrastructure:

America’s domestic extremists are not simply isolated local loonies who spring up at random in our own communities – they’re connected to and coordinated with international networks.

The networks encourage cross-pollination and collaboration:

A/I Collective, the State Department notes, provides services to European “anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands” as well as to the domestic “anarchist cell responsible for waging a violent campaign to prevent the construction of a law enforcement training center in Atlanta, Georgia.”

The violent left is a transnational movement, and the Trump administration is right to see it in the same light as other networks that support or engage in terrorism.

Domestic sites and groups using A/I Collective resources have published calls for “direct action” against the nation’s immigration laws – and the officers responsible for enforcing them.

That includes publishing pamphlets urging activists to shine laser pointers at Customs and Border Protection helicopters, intending to blind pilots and potentially cause them to crash.

Other sites “dox” ICE agents, providing personal information on immigration-enforcement officers to allow activists to harass them at home – or to firebomb their homes, if they take inspiration from groups like Jane’s Revenge.

This is not protesting, and it’s not certainly not democratic: These are attempts by a radical fringe to do through intimidation and violence what they can’t do at the ballot box.

Going after the foreign enablers of far-left violence and threats is a first, common-sense step in defending the very principle of self-government.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 23:25

The Politics Of Measles

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The Politics Of Measles

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times,

By the middle point of 20th-century American history, measles was widely considered a rite of passage for kids. You get it and you shake it off. You earn lifetime immunity. This was true of every generation just before mine.

For the previous century, measles had become ever less dangerous with sanitation and nutrition. By the time the vaccine came along, it was fully controlled and only very rarely led to hospitalization. The protocols were taught in every school and understood by all classes.

I was apparently part of the first generation to receive the inoculation. It was convenient, but not necessary simply because society had systems and traditions in place to manage it well. How much difference did the shot make in driving infection to zero? Some, surely, and this added to the prestige of vaccines.

That said, I did get chicken pox as a natural infection and recall well what it was like. That no longer happens except in a few communities. I was the last to experience this and I’m happy to share the experience.

My parents came to me excitedly and said we were going to a party. I found myself among a group of kids I did not know and we played and played for hours. Then we left. That was fun, I thought, but a bit confusing. The next day, I woke up with itchy red spots.

My parents cheered. Their plan had worked. I recalled feeling great confusion. Why were my parents celebrating my sickness? It seemed very odd. They had their reasons. They knew the science.

They explained to me how the immune system works and why it is best that I get this when I’m young rather than old. My immunity would be durable and be boosted later in life as my own kids caught the normal childhood infections, which in turn would protect me from the related infection of shingles.

There is this tendency now to treat these strategies as paleolithic as compared with syringes and fluids in the childhood vaccination schedule. Actually, we should look back on these days as the height of serious science. My parents knew exactly what they were doing and it taught me a valuable lesson as a kid. I learned about the high complexity of the immune system that needs exposure as training.

Eventually, of course, the chicken pox vaccine came along and many others as well, resulting in a vast mixture of combined shot after shot. Industry profited. Human health suffered. The Trump administration is trying to fix the problem. Industry doesn’t like that. It is calling in favors from politicians to stop the return to science.

This takes us to the wild drama now playing itself out in Pennsylvania. In April of this year, the media and the governor’s office started going on about a measles outbreak. It was centered in Lancaster and Lebanon counties – both with sizable Amish and Mennonite populations.

The framing here matters. The Amish and Mennonite communities routinely expose children, just as my parents did. It is not an “outbreak” but an application of sophisticated science.

The health of this community ranks among the highest. The most common health issues affecting children in the United States are nearly absent among the Amish, including autism, obesity, diabetes, ADHD, and so on.

Nonetheless, Pennsylvania set up 91 pop-up clinics around the infected community and jabbed kids with more than 4,000 doses using the MMR shot that many people connect to the rise of autism. Forty more clinics are planned.

In science, you have the control group and the tested group. The Amish are the control and keep revealing that there might be a better way. Eliminate the control and you eliminate the embarrassment. This is precisely what both Pfizer and Moderna did after their own tests of the COVID shot: they pushed it on the saline group following first results.

In Pennsylvania, opposition arose to this push for industrial inoculation, and understandably so. In the post-COVID era, trust in public health is depleted to near zero.

Here is where the current drama picked up. On Aug. 14, a newborn child died in Strasburg Township, Lancaster County. The cause of death was later given by the county coroner: lacerated/ruptured spleen, massive blood loss. The postmortem used the PCR test (which detects presence, not infection) and found measles in utero. Obviously, this baby could not otherwise have been vaccinated. It is pointless to call a baby unvaccinated for measles, just as it is ridiculous to observe the infant is illiterate.

A week later, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two “measles-associated” deaths in Lancaster County: unvaccinated residents, they said. They claimed these were the first measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. There were no other details given: nothing about the cause of death, nothing about ages, nothing about anything.

Governor Josh Shapiro announced two deaths caused by measles. Not merely associated or related, but caused. The media ran with the story, using the language of causation. He called the deaths preventable and tied them to lack of immunization. He highlighted his clinic campaign and told reporters that Secretary Kennedy had called to offer help with the outbreak to which he responded:

“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”

It was at this point that the narrative fell apart. The CDC called. The governor’s office could give no more information. The Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons spoke out and said that the coroner’s office has zero deaths with measles listed as immediate cause; one person died with measles, not from it.

No one could find out anything else about this supposed second death. The coroner’s office said it had no such death at all. RFK, Jr. said what everyone was thinking: the second death “may even have been altogether fabricated.” Meanwhile, all available evidence confirmed that the baby died of traumatic spleen laceration and the spleen was not enlarged/inflamed.

Even the mainstream media started getting frustrated at this. You cannot whip the public up with measles fears based on wholly fabricated data. When asked about this, Shapiro deflected:

“I think the Department of Health has made clear that they’ve shared all the information that they are permitted under state law to share, and that those two deaths were measles related. … I don’t think it serves the interest of public health or slows the spread of this outbreak for me to get into a back-and-forth about conspiracy theories that are showing up online.”

Much of the mainstream media has now dialed back its claims but the New York Times has still not corrected its story from Aug. 25: “Two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania have died from measles, as a large outbreak there continues to spread.”

That sentence in the paper of record is factually incorrect. It’s my personal guess that the reporter would like to make a correction but these people are hemmed in by editors and committees. At this point, to change the wording would be to admit a significant breach.

We are no longer a naive people. Whether the media comes around or not, the real story is already out there.

What concerns me is that we have now several generations who know not what I was taught as a kid, that routine exposure is a necessary and safe way to deal with normal childhood infections that are not deadly and easily treatable. A measles case is not a disaster; it is protective, both broad and durable. Superior to a vaccine? Every expert has to admit that it is. In private, they do.

We have gone so crazy with vaccination that a whole generation of medical professionals and industry leaders have been cajoled into saying that potions can replace the immune system. There is an ocean of money at stake in these decisions. Chicken pox parties are lacking in profit just as is natural immunity generally.

Demonizing religious communities is not a good path for public health and neither is raging against any changes to the childhood schedule. The parents of Pennsylvania, Amish or not, should be left alone. It’s ghoulish for the state to plot the elimination of the control group.

As for my parents, they were wiser than the faculty of Harvard and Yale and the executives of pharmaceutical companies. They knew then what we need to rediscover now. Potions and jabs are not an automatic pathway to health and actually do much to compromise and sometimes end it. We need to rediscover this wisdom we mistakenly left behind.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 22:35

Warner Bros. “Lanterns” Series Is Another Whiny Woke DEI Disaster

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Warner Bros. “Lanterns” Series Is Another Whiny Woke DEI Disaster

Comic book content is largely dead in Hollywood.  Not because audiences don’t want to see it anymore (Spider-Man: Brand New Day brought in nearly $2.4 billion in global box office, absolutely crushing Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey film), but because the studios have turned most of these franchises radioactive with woke politics.  

James Gunn’s DCU projects for Warner Bros. have proven this over and over again.  His girl-boss version of Supergirl was an abject failure largely because of the woke undertones of the film.  One would think these people would learn their lesson, or at least care enough about making money to change their behavior.  There are two problems, though…

First, activists always double down.  They do not learn.  They can be forced to shut up and do their jobs properly if studios apply pressure, but left to their own devices they will inevitably inject everything they touch with propaganda.  They can’t help themselves, they’re ideological fanatics.

Second, sometimes studios want to change course and steer away from DEI cultism because it rarely makes any money.  But, a lot of the projects in their line-up started production years ago when Hollywood still thought that every American was going to be reeducated into the woke fold.  Meaning, they now have all this content slated for release which started development back in 2022-2023.

Such is the case with the Warner/HBO series “Lanterns”, a modern take on the comic book series “Green Lantern”.  The show went into development in 2022…and it’s obvious.  The crux of the story?  A black man (John Stewart) is set up to replace a white guy (Hal Jordan) as the great hero.  Stewart’s family was essentially ruined by Hal Jordan when Stewart’s father failed a test of fear for the Lantern’s powerful ring.  Hal Jordan ends up taking the ring instead. 

You see, the fear that prevented John Stewart’s black father from earning the ring of a heroic Green Lantern was not his fault.  He grew up with constant fear because of “white supremacy”.  In other words, the black community’s failures are once again deflected and foisted upon a nefarious white conspiracy to hold them back from greatness.  It’s all the ridiculous 2016 to 2020 BLM talking points packed into a 2026 comic book show.

The story is apparently meant to be a combination of the legacy comic and the gritty True Detective series (yes, right off the bat we’re entering low IQ narrative territory with this idea).  The comic book setting aside, the writers and creators of the series have been very vocal about their intentions with the story and they openly admit – This is about the black man finally taking back what is “rightfully his” after the white man “stole it” from him. 

Showrunner Chris Mundy described the series as being “about replacement,” with Hal as the aging figure who should “step aside” and out of the way of the younger and more competent John Stewart.

Keep in mind, many studios are cleaning house today and kicking a lot of their DEI hires to the curb, but this process is slow and there’s no guarantees that they will ever be able to return to decent storytelling anytime soon.  So, in the meantime they’re still stuck with a bunch of talentless minority and LGBT writers they hired to gain virtue points and ESG loans. 

Most of the middle-aged white guys with imagination and merit were cast out. 

It is therefore ironic that the entire basis for the Lanterns series is the fallacy that minorities are rejected because of their skin color and “cultural experiences”, rather than a lack of merit.  When, in Hollywood, this has been the exact case with DEI hiring pushing out white male actors and writers with talent for the past decade (unless they are gay).  

The inferiority complex of activist writers is apparent in the stories they obsessively tell – Build up a popular white hero into a washed up strawman who is then easy to tear down.  They can’t surpass their pale skin peers in the real world without outside help, so they have to beat up artificial white men in artificial worlds.    

At bottom, minority groups in the west have been hand fed, enjoying promotions and positions of influence within politics, the corporate world and entertainment media.  Many of these people where hired despite not having the ability or intelligence to do the job.  They were hired to fill an ethnic quota, and that is all.  And, this trend shows in the steady decline of media and numerous other sectors of western society.  

Lanterns may be nothing more than a meaningless superhero show being used as a vehicle for black leftists to cry about not being good enough, but it gives us another window into the warped mind of the opposition.  What do we see in through that window?  A group that will never take responsibility for themselves and their own problems.  They will always blame someone else.  Which means, there’s no reason to hold their hand anymore.  It’s a waste of time.   

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 22:10

How Neoliberals Fueled The Rise Of Socialism

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How Neoliberals Fueled The Rise Of Socialism

Authored by Connor O’Keeffe via Mises Institute,

The rising popularity of politicians on the American left who either explicitly identify as socialist or, at least, don’t shy away from or disavow the term appears to be causing genuine concern within the Washington establishment.

That is, of course, entirely justified. Socialism is profoundly unjust and destructive.

These days, the socialists like to present their entire ideology as nothing more than having a bit of empathy for those in need or an interest in seeing everyone “have” access to services like modern healthcare.

Look any deeper, though, or ask some follow-up questions, and the truth will eventually surface. What the socialists actually want is a massive increase in government interventionism that would see nearly every aspect of life politicized and the remaining productive components of the economy hollowed out into a zero-sum lobbying battle to claim some of the diminishing loot of a much larger, more powerful, and tax-happy federal government.

Any step towards socialism needs to be energetically opposed by everyone who cares about the rights and material well-being of everyday Americans.

However, the concern we’re seeing from the neoliberal and neoconservative establishment is frustrating. Because the political order that they have built and preserved over the last half century has made the growing popularity of this kind of “democratic socialism” all but inevitable.

Scholars like Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and Patrick Newman have written extensively about how the powerful, centralized federal government that we live under today originated in the so-called Progressive Era in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And, importantly, it was not grassroots reformers who spurred the growth of the federal government at the time, but well-connected business interests.

The narrative many of us were taught in school of government officials reluctantly giving themselves more power over the economy at the turn of the century to placate a public demanding an end to laissez-faire capitalism is merely a convenient creation myth to justify what has always been a scheme to use state power to redistribute wealth from the broader public to a small caste of well-connected families and firms.

As nearly all of human history makes clear, these sorts of crony, state-empowered redistributive schemes tend to be rather unstable.

That’s in part because people typically aren’t all that pleased when it starts to become clear that the government is transferring some of their wealth to people that are already far wealthier – requiring the opinion molders of the political class to frequently scramble to find some new way to excuse the policies making up the racket.

But also, the government doing things like warping credit markets to benefit certain industries or launching unnecessary wars to enrich weapons companies and empower foreign leaders who are good at lobbying has plunged the country into several economic and geopolitical crises.

So far, the American political class has done a remarkable job using these crises to greatly expand and accelerate their self-enriching redistributive rackets. But every crisis is unique. Different situations have required different responses.

Which brings us to the rise of what’s often called the neoliberal “Washington consensus.”

The political establishment’s well-known embrace of neoliberalism in the 1980s was primarily a response to the events of the 1970s. For much of that decade, the country was forced to endure a prolonged period of high price inflation that was caused by the Federal Reserve’s extensive money printing in the 60s and early 70s to help finance the Vietnam War and Johnson’s Great Society programs. That economic chaos was then intensified by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC oil shocks, and Nixon’s wage and price controls.

As we’ve seen in the past few years, inflation alone is more than enough to create strong public demand for political change. But in the 70s, previous credit expansion combined with the government’s persistent unwillingness to allow the economy to correct itself also resulted in a stagnant economy. And that combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth, or “stagflation” as it’s come to be known, was considered economically impossible by Keynesian economists.

So the high inflation, low economic growth, and real-time collapse of Keynesianism – the school of thought the political class had been using to justify its economic interventionism – meant change was coming. Also, by the mid-to-late 1970s, the so-called New Left movement, which had started as student protests against the Vietnam War in the 60s, had descended into a highly disturbing mix of lethargic drug use and outright terrorism.

Into that vacuum stepped Milton Friedman.

The nerdy, quick-witted, suit-sporting economist was a perfect foil to the radical, convention-flouting far left much of the country was growing tired of. Friedman’s ability to quickly, thoroughly, and politely eviscerate left-wing economic arguments in a highly entertaining fashion made him a star on the talk shows of the day. And, unlike the Keynesians, Friedman’s monetarism seemed vindicated by the stagflation.

Thanks in large part to Friedman, the neoliberals took hold of the culture enough to prompt the left-leaning Carter administration to deregulate many parts of the economy including the railroad, airline and trucking industries.

And then, of course, came Ronald Reagan.

Together with Friedman and his fellow Chicago School economists and foreign leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and his political successors supposedly rolled back all the reforms made since the Progressive Era, ushering in an age of “market fundamentalism,” or unfettered capitalism. They helped bring about the modern “Washington consensus” that the government ought not meddle in the economy at all, which we’re told is only just now – four decades later – starting to face some pressure from figures like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

At least, that is the narrative that both neoliberals and their opponents have settled on. But it is a lie.

The rise of neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s was, to be sure, a real ideological shift. The Friedmanites did come to dominate the economics discipline and political culture in very much the same way Keynesians had decades before.

However, the actual implementation of those free-market ideas was nowhere even close to what the establishment’s narrative would have us believe.

Virtually all the deregulation that occurred during the Reagan presidency had actually been passed during the Carter administration. It was only because the changes were phased in during the Reagan administration that made it seem like the new president was deregulating the economy. In fact, he was doing no such thing.

The same goes for tax cuts. As Murray Rothbard explained, the much-heralded Reagan tax cuts that were passed in 1981 were more than offset by tax increases that same year. The administration then spent years raising taxes even more in the name of “closing loopholes.”

And all of that was necessary to help fund the massive increase in government spending that took place throughout the Reagan years. The so-called Reagan revolution was truly, to paraphrase Rothbard, an acceleration of statist intervention, rolled out under the cover of free-market rhetoric.

There was, however, one area where the Friedmanites did see their policy prescriptions implemented in a genuine and lasting way: monetary policy.

Unfortunately, when it comes to monetary policy, the Friedmanites entirely abandon their support for markets and instead advocate for government central planning. These new establishment-approved neoliberal economists believed – not only in a fiat monetary system controlled entirely by a government central bank – but in a highly active, inflationist central bank.

Friedman himself even wrote a famous book with Anna Schwartz that used questionable econometric methods to argue that the Great Depression happened because the Federal Reserve had not been printing enough money.

Unsurprisingly, the political class was a lot more than willing to implement a Friedmanite program that gave them more power over the economy rather than less. And so, it was in the realm of monetary policy that the largest expansions of both state power and the crony rackets it’s utilized for took place under the new neoliberal paradigm.

First, the Fed was leaned on to print money to help pay for the hawkish foreign policy of the post-1980 Republican Party. And then, especially under the Chairmanship of the late Alan Greenspan, the central bank began to directly prop up the financial sector.

The evolution of Wall Street from one of many options for investing one’s savings to essentially being the nerve center of the entire economy was not the result of some natural change in saver preferences; it was the consequence of government policy. Specifically, Greenspan’s Fed helped prop up Wall Street with a steady supply of easy money and cheap credit to artificially boost the sector, paired with extensive bailouts for these firms whenever the good times ran out.

This was, in effect, a major escalation of the kinds of crony rackets the federal government had been carrying out since the Progressive Era – all justified by Friedman’s monetarist apologia for government money printing.

And that gets to the core of it. The Friedmanite, Reagan-led neoliberal revolution did not end economic interventionism, it rebranded it. And the financialized economy was that new brand. Getting rich on Wall Street became the epitome of capitalism. The rising stock market was the new metric for economic strength. And the Fed’s money printing became the economy’s lifeblood.

In the decades since, that Fed-enabled racket has expanded dramatically and has seeped far beyond the financial sector. It has allowed the political class to supercharge the rackets built up over the last century – which, remember, the neoliberals never did away with – transferring far more of our wealth to that small caste of well-connected cronies.

And yet, thanks in large part to the neoliberals of the past and present, this highly-interventionist system where the government is actively warping the market to benefit those already on top is called – and truly considered by many to be – genuine, free-market capitalism.

That isn’t true. It’s a trick – a trick meant to mislead us so that whenever a new economic crisis strikes, we reflexively conclude the crisis happened only because the government isn’t involved enough in the economy. And that is the mindset that has made so many normal, everyday, non-ideological people open to the arguments of these self-described democratic socialists.

The neoliberal and neoconservative establishment has done much to carry out this trick. They shouldn’t be surprised that it’s working.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 21:45

Pimco’s Top-Performing 60/40 Fund Bets AI’s Next Winners Are In Asia, From Chips To Rare Earths

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Pimco’s Top-Performing 60/40 Fund Bets AI’s Next Winners Are In Asia, From Chips To Rare Earths

Emmanuel Sharef, who oversees Pacific Investment Management Co.’s flagship Balanced Income and Growth Fund, spoke with Bloomberg about how the next leg of the artificial-intelligence boom could be concentrated in Asian stocks and beyond. 

Wealthy clients in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and mainland China have been piling into the $19 billion fund, which has outperformed 97% of its peers during the past three years.

The fund is underweight most hyperscalers and members of the Magnificent Seven as soaring AI capital expenditures increase debt loads, pressure free cash flow, spark credit concerns, and make already eye-popping valuations much harder to justify. 

“We’re underweight the majority of hyperscalers at the moment and we’re underweight the majority of the Mag seven just given their high valuations,” Sharef told the outlet earlier this week.

He continued, “You don’t necessarily need to own the most expensive stocks to capture a particular theme or a particular market trend.”

The 60/40 Balanced Income and Growth Fund has been moving further down the supply chain toward companies that build data center components and has become overweight in Asia, where it sees stronger earnings growth, cheaper valuations, and greater exposure to the companies that should be viewed as the building blocks of a data center.

That infrastructure includes semiconductor components, cooling systems, cable interconnects, optical equipment, power supplies, construction machinery, and industrial metals.

“The AI capex build-out is enormous,” he said. “It would imply significant demand for semiconductor components for chips, cooling equipment, cable interconnects, optical equipment, power supplies, construction equipment, metals, all of the things that go into building a data center.”

The fund’s 60% stock allocation gained exposure to AI last year by plowing billions of dollars into firms such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Sharef also highlighted a theme we’ve been developing: the importance of exposure to mining and materials companies tied to data-center construction and global rare-earth supply chains.

“Chinese resource extraction and materials companies are quite significant, not just for the data center buildup, but also for rare earths,” he added.

Sharef’s call to gain exposure to rare earths and critical materials reinforces a theme we have been developing: the AI trade is ultimately constrained by access to the physical inputs required to build chips, data centers, and power infrastructure. Rare earths and other critical materials are becoming a crucial component of the next AI trade as Chinese suppliers restrict some shipments to the US and US companies accelerate efforts to secure alternative sources beyond Beijing’s reach. 

The takeaway from Sharef’s conversation with Bloomberg is that the next AI winners will be on an ex-US basis, mostly in Asia. 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 21:20

AI Tax Increases Are Like The Tractor Tax Proposals Of Old

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AI Tax Increases Are Like The Tractor Tax Proposals Of Old

Authored by Bruce Thompson via RealClearMarkets,

President Ronald Reagan famously described Washington politicians’ solutions to every problem as “if it moves, tax it.” That is exactly what many in Washington today want to do with artificial intelligence.

As Wall Street Journal chief economic commentator Greg IP wrote recently, a growing number of experts believe there is “a simple answer to AI job losses.” Tax it. His column described a petition signed by 1,000 economists, including 17 Nobel laureates, pleading for higher taxes on AI to prevent “large scale” job losses.

Reagan knew what he was talking about. He grew up in the Midwest in a small town surrounded by farms, and he surely remembered a time when politicians wanted to tax tractors, a new technology driving change. In the early 1900s, the tractor was revolutionizing farming, and politicians were pushing proposals to tax the tractor and prevent the loss of farm jobs. Rep. Willian Connery, a Massachusetts Democrat and Chairman of the House Labor Committee, was a leading advocate of taxing tractors and other labor-saving machines to stop mass unemployment.

The introduction of tractors was the most revolutionary change in our history, affecting millions of jobs and driving millions off the farm. Between 1910 and 1960, nearly 10 million farm workers lost their jobs and 25 million people left their farms for the city. The benefits of the tractor were enormous. Farm production soared, food prices dropped, and the U.S. provided enough food to feed people around the world.

The farm revolution transformed the American economy, creating growth, and increasing prosperity. Millions of farm workers were freed from back-breaking labor and found better jobs in the city. An NBER study called tractors the “engine of growth” and estimated they doubled per-capita GDP and created millions of jobs.

AI promises a bright future of technological and scientific progress, increased productivity, and a more prosperous economy. Like many changes in the past, there are concerns about the impact on jobs. But taxing AI would be just like taxing tractors, a futile knee jerk reaction to change.

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of terrible tax ideas floating around Washington. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a 50% tax on the equity of AI companies. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have proposed new taxes on data centers. House Democrats have proposed a new tax on AI computing powers, and others have proposed a tax on robots. If it moves, they want to tax it.

None of these tax increases are a good idea. Raising taxes on AI would slow investment, curb innovation, and only help our foreign competitors. Just like a tractor tax, a new AI tax would only slow new technological advances that will benefit everyone.

Rather than taxing AI, Washington should focus on assisting those jobs which have been most affected by automation, such as entry-level jobs. Congress should consider targeted tax incentives for entry-level employment, including payroll tax relief and job training for junior workers. Helping young workers get started is a much better response to the AI revolution than trying to stop it with a tax increase.

Bruce Thompson was a U.S. Senate aide, assistant secretary of Treasury for legislative affairs, and the director of government relations for Merrill Lynch for 22 years.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 20:55

Online Betting Adoption Goes Parabolic: First-Timers Triple, Gen Z Overtakes Millennials, And Football Season Hasn’t Even Begun

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Online Betting Adoption Goes Parabolic: First-Timers Triple, Gen Z Overtakes Millennials, And Football Season Hasn’t Even Begun

Online betting is off to the races – and this summer the adoption curve started looking like a hockey stick.

According to a new analysis by Bank of America – which can see every ACH, debit and credit card payment its customers make to and from sportsbooks, horse-racing platforms and prediction markets their own customers make: 

  • Roughly 5% of BofA customers sent money to an online betting platform in July.
  • The number of online bettors is up 40% since the start of the year.
  • The number of first-time bettors in June and July was more than triple the January level.

The bank credits the summer spike to the World Cup and “promotions and buzz” around prediction markets, and fair enough: every adoption curve has a catalyst. What matters is what the base looks like once the catalyst passes, and here the seasonal pattern is instructive. First-time users jump with every major sports season, and the 2025 football season – which the bank defines as September through February, so it sweeps in the NFL, college ball and most of the NBA and NHL – produced 22% more first-timers than the year before. Each season enrolls a larger freshman class. The class that enrolled this summer was three times the size of January’s, and it arrived right before the busiest stretch of the calendar.

Nor is this something people try once and forget. Per a CivicScience survey cited in the note, 34% of online sports bettors wager weekly and 23% bet daily; fewer than one in five are the several-times-a-year Super Bowl crowd. That is the engagement profile of a social app, not a lottery ticket.

The turning point

By generation, Gen Z (48%) and Millennials (40%) accounted for 88% of online betting activity in July. Gen X managed 9%; Baby Boomers, 3%. And as recently as this spring, Millennials were the larger group. Gen Z overtook them this summer – a shift BofA describes as a “turning point” in the composition of online bettors.

BofA defines Gen Z as anyone born after 1995, which means the oldest members are turning 30 this year and the cohort came of age alongside legal, app-based sports betting. BofA points out that younger consumers have consistently been first to adopt every emerging digital platform – crypto, BNPL, online marketplaces – and that betting appears to be following the same script.

When it comes to income – betting activity is split almost evenly across terciles – 37% lower, 34% middle, 29% higher.

Oh it’s investing!

According to a BofA survey conducted in March, 20% of respondents said they consider sports betting a form of investing, with Gen Z twice as likely as everyone else to say so. Across every generation, buying event contracts on a prediction market was more likely to be classified as investing than placing a sportsbook wager.

Prediction markets have listed contracts on almost anything – whether a politician sips water on camera during a speech, how many flu cases the year will bring – dressed in the language of derivatives: standardized, exchange-traded, resolved at a point in time. BofA notes that prediction markets, crypto, retail trading and sports betting all share “community participation and real-time pricing,” which is a polite way of saying they share a user interface. To a generation raised on the Fed put, zero-day options and a community tab, a football game is simply another underlying.

And then there’s  the red tape…

Naturally, the regulators have noticed – and, naturally, their first move is a jurisdictional fight. The CFTC’s position, per BofA’s public-policy team, is that certain event contracts traded on federally regulated exchanges are derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act and therefore federal turf. State and tribal regulators counter that contracts tied to sports and entertainment are gambling with extra steps and belong under existing state gaming, licensing and consumer-protection law. Lawmakers from both parties and both chambers have filed bills. The CFTC has also opened a rulemaking on perpetual futures and issued an advisory warning event-contract venues away from sweepstakes-style rewards and prizes “based on pure chance” – the sort of promotional program that helped fill the summer’s freshman class – and, per BofA Global Research, is trying to draw a brighter line between prediction markets and sportsbooks by targeting in-house market making, incentive programs and “casino style odds.”

None of it slows adoption. Arguing over whether a contract is a “derivative” or a “wager” is an argument over who gets to regulate and tax the growth, not whether the growth happens. By the time the rulebook is written, the users will already be there. Most of them already are.

And it’s not even football season yet…

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 20:30

Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back To The Dark Ages

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Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back To The Dark Ages

Via The Daily Signal,

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world.

Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period.

Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts.

There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime.

But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne.

I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sofia was created, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses was a product of the medieval period, even if, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched.

Now let’s switch to the modern period.

All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips.

The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI.

Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley.

You look at the homeless camps all over our major cities. People are just out in the open fornicating, urinating, defecating, injecting drugs. There’s tons of feces that has to be removed, and it’s so strange in this modern medievalism.

We have sophisticated researchers who go into a hospital in Chicago or go to a cancer center in San Francisco and have to check the bottoms of their shoes to make sure they don’t have feces as they go into their space-age laboratories.

It’s really funny. In the medieval period, public hangings and beheadings were sort of public events that people flocked out to see. Is that any different than our glorification of murderers?

And there is a difference. Luigi Mangione, they named an opera after him in California. The killer of Charlie Kirk brought people jubilation. I won’t even get into Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became every woman to the feminist left.

At least in the medieval period, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was being punished. In the post-medieval period, we are glorifying that murderer, and that’s really striking.

And so, what I’m getting at is we are the most regulated, the most advanced, the most modern, the most scientific society in history, even as we can’t solve problems that were solvable, and the medieval period would have died to know the solutions that we have in our hands to make sure we have clean water, to make sure there is no crime, to make sure there is no disease, to make sure that people don’t defecate on the street. But we don’t do it. We willingly don’t do it.

Now, the question to finish is why?

We have an elite that has embraced a very toxic ideology throughout history, and that is mandated, government-sanctioned equality of result. And they have divided, therefore, to further that ideology, the world into victims and victimizers, an arbitrary classification, sometimes based on class, but increasingly on race.

And once they identify someone as a victim who’s not responsible for his plight, then it’s the duty of the society to allow him to express himself. If you have a lot of teenagers who want to loot a jewelry store, then you say they were hungry and they needed food.

If you see homeless people living on the street, then it was because of something the majority culture did to them.

And the result of that is when people engage in very dangerous antisocial behavior, an elite will tell the rest of us that they’re not subject to law enforcement or they’re not subject to the laws that apply to the rest of us.

But there are two really pernicious addenda here.

No. 1, the people who do this on the left, who believe in this mandated equality and a binary of victim and victimizer, are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. Nancy Pelosi‘s home is not surrounded by homeless people. Jane Fonda doesn’t have to trip over people injecting drugs when she walks outside her door. The Hollywood stars in Malibu who champion the homeless have very clear security. You can’t get near their homes.

In other words, we, the lab rats, are those upon whom they experiment.

And there’s another reason as well. It’s not just that they experiment on us – and this ideology is not applicable to itself – but more importantly, they believe that they are morally superior because most of them are agnostics or atheists. They have lost their God, but they have found it in a post-Enlightenment caring, abstract though it may be, for victims.

And when you put this religious element to it, because it makes no sense to allow medieval diseases and medievalism to dominate your cities in crime, filth and homelessness, but they do it.

They feel morally superior, and it gives them meaning in their life in a way that we, the majority, find not morally superior, but morally repugnant.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2026 – 19:15

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