What England Can Teach Us About 'Democratic Socialism'

Authored by Stephen Moore via The Epoch Times,

If you want to see modern-day socialism in action, look no further than to the other side of the pond at not-so-jolly old England. The story of Britain’s decline is a warning signal to those here in the States who are thrilled by the warm embrace of socialism.

Right now, the Brits are having the same debate about the merits of socialism as we are in our major cities and blue states. In England, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party is out. But instead of turning to the right, it appears the UK will swerve further to the collective ownership of the left. Andy Burnham—the former socialist mayor of Manchester—is next in line. God save the queen.

As Greg Ip of The Wall Street Journal reports, “Burnham’s socialism is the real deal. He wants the state to control more of the means of production. ... (H)e advocates public ownership of water, housing, energy and transportation.”

Burnham calls it “business-friendly socialism.”

Sure.

That will make the trains run on time.

What short memories.

After World War II, the Brits experimented with creeping socialism for more than three decades. The Labour Party handed over to public bureaucrats and unions the means of production: the Bank of England, the coal mines, the airlines, iron, steel, and phone service, to name a few. Prices soared, nothing worked, unemployment lines lengthened, and the Brits got a lot poorer.

Britain’s share of world output fell by half, from more than 10 percent to less than 5 percent. About the only thing Britain had going for it was four lads from Liverpool called the Beatles, who singlehandedly brought deep pride back and caused a mini-stimulus. But in the 1970s, the downturn worsened.

We interrupt this story with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She saved the kingdom by slashing taxes and privatizing everything she could get her hands on. It was the precursor to Reaganomics.

That didn’t last long. Now it’s Thatcherism in reverse—just as the left in America wants to reverse the Reagan and Trump legacies of deregulation, lower taxes, and sound money.

What seems to be driving this leap toward “democratic socialism” on both sides of the Atlantic is a middle-class fury over inflation. The idea of free food, housing, child care, and health care is alluring.

But prices have risen not because of a failure of capitalism. It was mostly caused by massive money printing, widespread shutdowns of private industry, retail businesses and schools, and stay-at-home orders during COVID-19. Government became the provider, and the leap forward in state expenditures was never entirely extinguished.

In both the United States and in England, the “affordability crisis” is mostly in government-owned, government-operated, or heavily regulated businesses. In the U.S., that’s health care, education, and college tuition. In Britain, it’s those industries plus energy, housing, and child care.

There is an infestation of socialism in Britain that has sucked the dynamic and wealth-producing spirit out of the UK.

We need a socialism vaccine in America.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/03/2026 - 05:30

Ukraine Plans To Hyper-Innovate Humanoid Robot Soldiers

At the start of February, we pointed out that "humanoid warfare nears" and suspected these war bots were headed for Ukraine for testing. 

That hunch was confirmed by early March, after a TIME Magazine article reported that Foundation Robotics, a U.S.-based startup developing humanoid robots for industrial and military applications, had recently sent two Phantom MK1 robots to Ukraine for testing. 

Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation... 

The modern battlefield across western Eurasia has become the world's AI weapons lab, where drones, autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and ground bots are being stress-tested in real time. 

For any 'war unicorn' startup trying to validate AI-enabled killing machines, Ukraine has become the proving ground, and soldiers on the front lines will quickly tell these startups whether their products work or not - that's the part of hyperinnovation that people aren't seeing yet, but it is becoming visible as low-cost AI killing systems begin to spread across the world. 

Last month, we were the first to debut a new video showing the Phantom MK1 robot operating a mobile light mortar system during a live-fire training exercise in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Now several Ukrainian news outlets, including United24 Media, say that Ukraine plans to launch a grant competition to develop humanoid robots for military use, part of a broader push to automate the front line and reduce battlefield risk for its troops.

Here's more from the report:

Ukraine will launch a grant competition focused on developing humanoid robots for the needs of the Defense Forces, Brave1 head Andrii Hrytseniuk said during the Brave1 Advantage event, attended by a Militarnyi correspondent on July 2.

The main goal of the initiative is to robotize as much of the first line of contact as possible and reduce risks for Ukrainian service members.

According to Hrytseniuk, the project follows a wider global trend, as humanoid robotics is rapidly developing in the United States and China.

At the initial stage, Ukrainian developers are expected to focus on simpler platforms that can gradually receive more advanced functions.

Unlike the global civilian humanoid robot market, Ukraine's program will focus strictly on defense needs and military use cases.

Meanwhile, CNBC finally caught up in the reporting ... 

With Phantom MK1 robots reportedly making their debut in Ukraine earlier this year, Foundation could be emerging as one of the leading humanoid robotics players for the modern battlefield among Western militaries.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/03/2026 - 04:45

Europe's Climate-First Policies Fuel Resistance To Air Conditioning As More Than 1,300 Die In Heat Waves

Via American Greatness,

Europe continues to rely on alternatives to air conditioning even as deadly heat waves claim lives across the continent.  Officials argue that expanding air conditioning is not a long-term solution.

France’s record-breaking heat last week has been linked to about 1,000 deaths, most involving elderly people.

According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Europe has recorded more than 1,300 excess heat-related deaths since June 21.

Despite experiencing fewer hot days than many other regions, it also records the highest number of heat-related deaths per capita.

A 2007 study found that air conditioning can reduce heat-related deaths by 75%. Even so, only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning, compared with roughly 90% of homes in the United States.

Rather than expanding air conditioning, many European officials have focused on alternative strategies, including public cooling stations and other measures designed to reduce heat in densely populated historic cities.

Ine Vandecasteele, an urban adaptation expert with the European Environment Agency, said widespread air conditioning is not the preferred solution.

“My honest response is I don’t think that should be the solution anywhere,” Vandecasteele told CBS News.

“It is an immediate response, which can support essentially those who may be vulnerable in hospitals, or in very short term can help. But in the longer term, what happens is, installing more air conditioning actually emits more heat into our environment, so it will actually increase the speed of warming.”

Higher energy costs have also discouraged broader adoption of air conditioning across much of Europe.

Italy has taken a different approach than many of its European neighbors.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, about 56% of Italian homes had air conditioning as of 2024.

European Union data also show Italy accounts for roughly one-third of the bloc’s electricity consumption for air conditioning.

Italian officials have also distributed wearable devices in Rome to monitor elderly residents, who face the greatest risk during periods of extreme heat.

Public attitudes toward air conditioning also differ from those in the United States. A recent survey in France found that one in six respondents said they would rather endure the heat than increase air conditioning use for environmental reasons.

Vandecasteele said she was not surprised by those findings. “We’re not doing this for us,” she said. “We’re doing this for the future generations.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/03/2026 - 04:00

Canada Was A Liberal Paradise... Until The Liberals Took Over

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

• two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
• five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once

Most people can only manage one.

The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.

The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?

The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:

“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.

Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…

…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.

You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.

That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.

But nothing that we do are actual remedies.

Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.

A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.

The elephant in the room: Immigration

Immigration was our masterpiece.

For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.

We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.

That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.

Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.

Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.

Then we changed the filter.

The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.

The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.

Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.

Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:

This is a screening argument, and nothing else.

When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.

Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.

Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.

The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.

People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.

True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.

This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.

For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.

Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.

Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A bakery on a corner is culture. A hiring rule keyed to race is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.

Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.

For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:

Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status.  A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.

And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.

We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.

The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.

A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.

The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.

We had this one in the bag.

Now, not so much.

Happy Canada Day.

If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 23:25

US Fentanyl Crisis Eases But Remains Dominant

According to the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. drug overdose deaths have come down from the peaks of the past years while remaining at high levels.

Recent figures suggest a notable decline to around 70,000 annual fatalities in 2025, following a peak of nearly 110,000 in 2023.

Still, synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, continue to be the main driver of overdose mortality, involved in more than half of the U.S. cases and underscoring the scale and persistence of the crisis.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz shows in the chart below, the role of synthetic opioids has grown dramatically over the past decade... 

You will find more infographics at Statista

In early 2015, fentanyl and related substances were involved in just 12 percent of all drug overdose deaths. This share rose steadily in the following years, surpassing 50 percent by early 2020 and reaching around two-thirds of overdose deaths by 2021-2022, as the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the situation.

At its peak in 2023, synthetic opioids accounted for roughly 70 percent of all overdose fatalities in the country, highlighting how decisively fentanyl has overtaken other drugs, in part because its extreme potency makes it cost-effective to mix into other drugs, thereby increasing the risk of overdoses.

The underlying trend reflects both a sharp increase in deaths linked to synthetic opioids and a relative stabilization, or even decline, of fatalities involving other substances. 

Deaths involving fentanyl surged from fewer than 6,000 per month in early 2015 to more than 75,000 annually by 2023 (12-month rolling totals), while deaths linked to other drugs remained broadly flat or declined slightly over the same period.

However, the latest provisional CDC data point to a potential turning point.

Throughout 2024, overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids declined from around 72,700 in January to below 50,000 by December (rolling totals), bringing their share of total overdose deaths down to about 60 percent.

While this marks a notable improvement, fentanyl remains at the center of the U.S. overdose epidemic.

Public health experts attribute the recent decline to a combination of factors, including expanded access to naloxone (a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses), increased public awareness, intensified prevention efforts and shifts in drug supply.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 23:00

The 4 Percent Rule Is Showing Its Age: Smarter Withdrawal Strategies For 2026

Authored by Peter Daisyme via Due,

The 4 percent rule has guided retirement planning for three decades. The idea is simple: withdraw 4 percent of your savings in year one, adjust that dollar amount for inflation each year after, and your money should last about 30 years. It is a useful starting point and a great mental shortcut. But the person who created it has spent recent years telling people it is far more flexible - and often more generous - than the rigid version most savers cling to.

Experts say the best retirement withdrawal strategy adjusts to changing conditions. oneinchpunch/shutterstock Where The 4 Percent Rule Came From

Financial planner William Bengen introduced the rule in 1994 after crunching decades of historical market data. He wanted to find the highest withdrawal rate that would have survived even the worst market conditions of the 20th century, including the Great Depression and the brutal 1970s. The answer he landed on was about 4 percent, and the figure stuck so firmly that it became gospel.

The crucial detail that gets lost is what "survived the worst case" actually means. Bengen was not describing the typical retirement - he was describing the single most unfortunate starting year in history. For the vast majority of retirees, a portfolio drawn down at 4 percent not only lasted; it grew substantially.

What The 4 Percent Rule Gets Right - And Wrong

The rule's strength lies in its simplicity and conservatism. It forces you to think in terms of a sustainable withdrawal rate rather than a lump sum, and it builds in a margin of safety. The weakness is that the same conservatism can leave you underspending for decades and dying with a fortune you never enjoyed.

"The 4 percent rule - or the newer version of the 4.7 percent rule - is the worst-case scenario. It's really designed for only the most conservative person to use in retirement planning."

That is Bengen himself, quoted by Bankrate. With broader diversification across asset classes, he has argued that retirees may be able to start with withdrawal rates closer to 4.7 percent in some circumstances. In other words, the famous 4 percent figure is better viewed as a conservative baseline than a hard spending limit.

Why 2026 Calls For A Flexible Approach

A fixed percentage ignores what is actually happening around you. Markets rise and fall, and inflation eats into every dollar you pull out. Bengen has called inflation retirees' "greatest enemy" for exactly this reason - a few bad inflation years early in retirement can do lasting damage to a portfolio. Morningstar's ongoing research has landed on a more cautious starting figure in some years, underscoring that there is no single magic number that works in every environment.

The real risk hiding behind the 4 percent rule is called sequence-of-returns risk. If the market drops sharply in your first few years of retirement while you are also withdrawing, you sell assets at depressed prices, and your portfolio may never fully recover. The same average return delivered in a different order can produce wildly different outcomes. That is why when you retire and how you adjust matter as much as the percentage you choose.

A Real-World Look At Sequence Risk

To see why flexibility matters so much, picture two retirees who both start with $1 million and both average the same 7 percent return over time. The only difference is the order of those returns. The first retiree hits a string of strong market years right after retiring; the second runs into a steep downturn in years one and two. Even though their average returns are identical over the long run, the second retiree is withdrawing money from a shrinking portfolio at the worst possible moment, locking in losses they can never fully recover. Years later, the first retiree may have more money than they started with, while the second is watching their balance dwindle.

That is sequence-of-returns risk in plain terms, and it is the best argument against rigidly withdrawing a fixed inflation-adjusted amount no matter what. A retiree willing to trim spending modestly during the early bad years dramatically improves their odds of never running out.

Three Withdrawal Strategies Worth Considering

Instead of locking yourself into one rate, build in flexibility. These approaches all reduce the odds of running dry while letting you spend more when conditions allow:

• Guardrails: Start near 5 percent, then trim spending in down years and give yourself a raise after strong ones.
• The bucket approach: Keep one to two years of expenses in cash so you never sell investments during a downturn.
• Dynamic spending: Tie withdrawals to portfolio performance rather than a rigid inflation adjustment, so your spending breathes with your balance.

Each acknowledges a simple truth: real retirees do not spend the exact same inflation-adjusted amount every year for 30 years. They flex, and a strategy that flexes with them is more realistic and usually more efficient.

How To Set Your Own Number

Your personal safe rate depends on several factors the rule of thumb ignores:

• Your retirement age and realistic life expectancy.
• How much of your spending is covered by guaranteed income, such as Social Security or a pension?
• Your asset mix and your tolerance for spending cuts in a bad year.
• Whether leaving a large inheritance is a goal or a non-issue.

A 70-year-old with a pension and modest spending can safely withdraw far more than 4 percent. A 55-year-old early retiree with no other income should probably start at a lower level. The number is personal, which is exactly why a one-size-fits-all rule eventually breaks down. The healthiest approach is an annual check-in where you review your balance, spending, and remaining time horizon, and then adjust. Early in retirement, when sequence risk is highest, these reviews matter most.

Don't Forget Taxes In Your Withdrawal Plan

Your withdrawal rate is only half the equation; the order in which you tap your accounts matters too. Pulling money tax-efficiently - generally from taxable accounts first, then tax-deferred accounts like a traditional 401(k), and finally Roth accounts - can stretch your savings meaningfully further than withdrawing haphazardly. Required minimum distributions, the taxation of Social Security, and Medicare premium thresholds all interact with how much you withdraw and from where. A retiree who coordinates withdrawals with taxes can often support a higher effective spending rate than one who ignores them, simply by keeping more money out of the government's hands. It is one more reason the rigid 4 percent rule is just a starting point rather than a complete plan.

The Bottom Line

Treat the 4 percent rule as a floor for planning, not a ceiling for spending. Run your own numbers, account for your guaranteed income and time horizon, stay flexible enough to adjust in volatile years, and revisit the plan annually. Done right, you avoid both nightmares: running out of money too soon and reaching the end of a long life having denied yourself a retirement you could easily have afforded. If you want a deeper framework, our retirement planning guide can help you pressure-test your assumptions before you stop working.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 22:35

FBI Mole Wore Wire Inside Newsom's Inner Circle: Lawyer

A mole working for the Biden FBI was secretly recording Gavin Newsom's inner circle before the agency expanded its corruption probe into the California governor and his wife, according to a bombshell report by the NY Post. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, Alexis Podesta

Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Sacramento consultant and Newsom appointee - no known relation to John Podesta - secretly taped conversations for the FBI as early as June 2024, while Joe Biden was still in the White House, according to McGregor Scott, the former US attorney now representing Dana Williamson. Williamson, 53, ran Newsom's office as chief of staff until late 2024; in May she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to federal agents.

Federal prosecutors accused Williamson and others of orchestrating a scheme to siphon roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account which belonged to former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra -disguising the payments as legitimate consulting fees while routing the money to benefit Becerra's former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie. According to Podesta's attorney, she was placed in charge of overseeing the account in question - but did not know the payments were improper.

Becerra is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as governor. 

"Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not," said Williamson's lawyer and former US attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott. 

"A lot of people received letters essentially informing us that there were certain periods of time where the FBI was given access to follow phone calls," said assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), who said he was among those who received a letter even though he had never spoken with either Podesta or Williamson. 

"I don’t know how these investigations work, but it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community to see what they could find." 

A separate source with knowledge of the matter said they knew of four Sacramento insiders who also received FBI notifications confirming they had been recorded.

One recipient told the source: “Dude, I got this f—ing letter. I never even met with Dana Williamson!”

“Their curiosity was that they never even met with Dana Williamson, so they were wondering what this is all about,” the source said.

“And now you have the answer.” -NY Post

News of the wire comes just over two weeks after Newsom claimed that the Trump administration is punishing him because he may run for president in 2028. 

"They're demanding records, they're abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. Donald Trump isn't just coming after me because of my mean tweets, he's coming after me because I'm considering running for president, because he hates that I've consistently called him out over and over again for his lies and deceit," Newsom said, before sending a mass email asking for political donations. 

Sources close to the investigation, however, told The Post that the feds have spent the past year digging into Newsom, his staff, and his wife's taxes after whistleblowers reportedly dropped the dime that led to the probe. Williamson's attorney told the outlet that his client declined to cooperate because she didn't have anything on Newsom. 

Podesta - a former staffer for the late Dianne Feinstein, is a longtime Democratic power broker who remains on California's State Compensation Insurance Fund board - to which Newsom appointed her in January 2020. She also held senior positions in Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, and served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. While she hasn't been charged with a crime, her attorney identified her as an uncharged co-conspirator in the Williamson indictment.

Of note, Podesta is still getting paid $60,797 by the state while cooperating with the FBI, while she sits on the Insurance Fund Board. 

Campaign finance records show Becerra's committee making $10,000 monthly payments to 'Podesta Company' during 2023 and 2024. During this period, Williamson - while Newsom's CoS - shared confidential info with Podesta regarding a corporate client that has now been identified as Activision Blizzard.

Williamson’s plea agreement states that she was captured in a June 2024 wiretap strategizing with the co-conspirator about how to respond to a Public Records Act request involving the state’s litigation against the company. Williamson and Podesta exchanged text messages on the issue, according to court records. Podesta has not publicly commented on the matter. -NY Post

Hoover, the Republican assemblymember, told The Post: "All of this stuff just raises so many questions ... "What is going on in this administration? What types of conversations are being had? I think the entire case should be really concerning for the general public. It’s really raising a lot of mistrust."

"I think it underlines how problematic this current administration is. [Newsom] is someone who wants to run for president of the United States. It’s really disappointing to see that this is the level of our politics."

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 22:16

Green Hypocrisy. The Case Of Baltimore's Bresco Waste-To-Energy Incinerator

Authored by Geoffrey Pohanka via RealClearEnergy,

One definition of hypocrisy is pretending to have beliefs, values, or virtues that your actions do not match. In simple terms, it means saying one thing and doing another.

On June 4th, 2024, Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed executive order 01.01.2024.19, Implementing Maryland's Climate Pollution Reduction Plan. It stated Climate change poses an existential threat to the economy, natural resources, and public health for every Maryland resident. Maryland communities, particularly historically marginalized and overburdened communities, are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Maryland's Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 set ambitious climate goals for the State, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% by 2031 and obtaining net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The Climate Pollution Reduction Plan estimates that the implementation of new climate policies will generate up to $1.2 billion in public health benefits, $2.5 billion increase in personal income for Marylanders, and a net gain of 27,400 jobs between now and 2031.

Clearly an ambitious plan to take on climate change that some describe as the greatest single threat to human existence. But how serious are the green advocates in Annapolis in taking on one of the single largest CO2 emitters in the state, and one that can't possibly be missed while driving the interstate through Baltimore.

I am talking about that large smokestack along I-95 in downtown Baltimore. This is the Bresco waste incinerator, the waste-to-energy plant that burns up to 2,250 tons of Baltimore's municipal trash every day. The Bresco incinerator is the 10th largest incinerator in the country, the largest single polluter in the city, and accounts for 36% of its total air emissions. Bresco's one smokestack emits more NOx into Baltimore's air than ever other stationary industrial source in the city combined, some 75% of the total releases. It is also one of the largest NOx emitters in the state. The NOx emissions are so large that closing the facility would be equal to taking over half the cars off Baltimore's roads. Every year, the incinerator emits more sulfur dioxide into Baltimore's air than all the cars and trucks on the road eight times over. It is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, releasing 690,033 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Lead emissions have totaled over 10,000 pounds since the plant began operations in 1985. The plant emits between 60 and 120 pounds of airborne mercury annually. This is over 30 times more mercury emissions per unit of energy produced than regional coal plants.

Maryland is a member of RGGI, the regional greenhouse gas initiative, that caps and taxes CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants. According to a Baltimore Sun article, RGGI is equivalent to a 44% tax on fossil fuel power plant revenues and has, at least indirectly, caused most of the State's coal power plants to become uneconomic to operate and voluntarily close. Though the plant does generate usable steam for heating and cooling of 255 downtown businesses and electricity for up to 40,000 homes, the Bresco incinerator emits roughly double the amount of greenhouse gases per megawatt hour of energy produced than each of the largest coal power plants that had operated in Maryland.

One important goal of Maryland's Climate Pollution Reduction Plan is to protect historically marginalized and disproportionately impacted populations from pollution. Yet 114,000 people living just a few miles from the incinerator, are exposed to its pollution daily. In a clear case of environmental injustice, Baltimore's most economically and socially vulnerable neighborhoods are more affected by air pollution from sources like Bresco than Baltimore's wealthy neighborhoods. Bresco is located in South Baltimore among predominantly low-income and Black communities. The combination of emissions from Bresco and local vehicle traffic have proven to be a toxic mix. South Baltimore is unfortunately home to some of the most polluted air in Baltimore City. As a result of this, South Baltimore has the highest hospitalization rates for asthma. The communities closest to Bresco also suffer from lower life expectancies. This all means that the communities Bresco affects most directly are also the communities least able to manage the health damages that Bresco causes. A report determined that the Bresco incinerator was responsible for $55 million in health problems a year for people living near it.

Considering the many environmental challenges this plant presents, one would logically be shocked to learn that not only is this plant not on the chopping block, it has been heavily subsidized by the State of Maryland. Since 2011 Maryland has classified waste-to-energy incineration as a Tier 1 renewable energy source under the Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires electric utility companies to source a portion of their energy from renewable energy sources. Between 2012 and 2022, over $100 million in subsidies have been granted to the two in-state trash incinerators to maintain operations, despite emissions of more greenhouse gas per unit of energy produced than other power sources and including coal power.

Very recently the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation ending the "misclassification" of trash incineration as renewable energy and will end subsidizing companies that burn trash, instead redirecting these funds toward investments more green sources of energy generation such as solar energy. This does not mean that Bresco's future will be in peril. When speaking with an important Maryland State Senator, I asked is it not better to put trash in a landfill instead of incinerating it? His response what that methane emissions from landfills was a greater menace to the environment the CO2 generated from burning waste. Perhaps he is unaware that modern landfills have the technology to capture methane before it enters the atmosphere and using it as a renewable resource. Studies have also shown that while methane has a powerful short-term impact on the climate, there is very little of it and it quickly dissipates once released into the atmosphere.

The latest word is that the 41 year old Bresco incinerator will likely continue to operate through the mid-2030s, according to a Maryland Department of Public works report.

Geoffrey Pohanka, Chairman, Pohanka Automotive Group, Capitol Heights MD

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 20:55

These Countries Have The Highest Percentage Of Female Population

Across most of the world, men and women are present in nearly equal numbers.

Yet in a handful of countries and territories, women make up well over half the population, creating some of the world’s largest gender imbalances.

This visualization, created by Harris Saleem via Visual Capitalist, ranks the countries and territories with the highest female share of the population using the latest available World Bank data.

Longer female life expectancy is a major factor, but migration and age structure also shape these demographic patterns.

Where Women Make Up the Largest Share

Hong Kong leads the ranking, with women accounting for 54.9% of the population. Moldova, Macao, Latvia, and Armenia round out the top five, each with female population shares above 53%.

 

Many countries on the list are in Eastern Europe or are island territories, where aging, migration, and historical mortality patterns can all have an outsized effect on the population mix.

 

Although the differences may appear small, they are significant at the national level. A female share above 53% can represent hundreds of thousands, and in larger countries millions, more women than men.

Why Some Countries Skew Female

In many developed economies, the answer often comes down to longer life expectancy. Women tend to outlive men globally due to biological advantages and lower exposure to certain high-risk behaviors and occupations. As populations age, this longevity gap becomes more visible.

Healthcare improvements also play a role. While better medical care has increased life expectancy for both sexes, women generally retain a longevity advantage that becomes more pronounced in older populations.

Migration can also reshape gender balances. In some countries, working-age men leave for jobs abroad, increasing the share of women who remain. In others, male-dominated immigration has the opposite effect.

When the Pattern Reverses

Not every country skews female. Some Gulf states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have large male immigrant workforces, pushing their populations heavily male.

Meanwhile, parts of South Asia and China have historically seen male-skewed populations, partly reflecting son preference and imbalanced sex ratios at birth. National gender ratios are ultimately shaped by a combination of health, aging, migration, and social factors.

To compare the other side of the demographic divide, check out Countries With the Highest Percentage of Male Population.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 20:30

Feds, LAPD Announce Major Human Trafficking Sting In LA

Authored by Evgenia Filimianova via The Epoch Times,

Federal authorities have arrested 10 people in a major human trafficking investigation, with prosecutors saying the individuals targeted children and adults along South Los Angeles' Figueroa Corridor, marking the second large federal operation in the area in less than a year.

Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli speaks as Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell (R) and Special Agent in Charge Kenny Cooper of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Los Angeles Field Division, look on at a press conference announcing an arrest in the Palisades Fire investigation in Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2025. Mario Tama/Getty Images

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, alongside Homeland Security Investigations, the Los Angeles Police Department, and IRS Criminal Investigation, announced the arrests on July 1.

A 65-count superseding federal indictment, returned June 25 and unsealed July 1, alleges that members and associates of the Hoover Criminal Gang (HCG) controlled much of the sex trafficking and prostitution activity along the Figueroa Corridor between February 2021 and June 2026.

Prosecutors said the indictment identifies 51 alleged victims.

Nine defendants were arrested on July 1, while another defendant was taken into custody on June 29.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said the arrests were intended to disrupt one of the city's most persistent trafficking operations.

"Sex trafficking of young women and children ranks among the worst criminal offenses our office prosecutes - truly the lowest of the low," he said.

Essayli added that officials hope the arrests will "break the cycle of crime and abuse in one of L.A.'s most notorious human trafficking corridors."

Gang Members Charged

Federal prosecutors said six newly charged defendants are alleged members or associates of the HCG. They face charges that include racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking of minors, sex trafficking through force, fraud, or coercion, drug trafficking conspiracy, and money laundering.

The indictment also charges Mukeshkumar Rambhai Ahir, 45, the manager of the Stadium Inn & Spas motel in South Los Angeles, with financially benefiting from the alleged trafficking operation.

Prosecutors allege that between September 2024 and January 2026, Ahir deposited more than $64,000 that he knew came from the gang's alleged sex trafficking activities.

They also allege he structured deposits by making smaller cash transactions to avoid federal reporting requirements. Those allegations have not been proven in court.

According to the indictment, gang members allegedly recruited vulnerable girls and young women through social media and face-to-face contact, focusing on minors, runaways, foster youth, and people facing financial or emotional hardship.

The suspects allegedly promised luxury lifestyles before using intimidation, violence, and drugs to maintain control over victims. They also allege that victims were forced to surrender all money earned from commercial sex work and were punished if they refused.

Federal prosecutors also announced separate indictments against three additional men accused of sex trafficking in unrelated cases connected to the broader enforcement effort.

Those cases involve allegations of trafficking minors between the ages of 15 and 17, as well as adults, through force, fraud, or coercion. Two of those defendants were arrested on July 1, while another was arrested on June 24, according to prosecutors.

If convicted, some defendants face mandatory minimum prison sentences of 15 years and could receive life sentences under federal law.

Meanwhile, the 11 defendants charged in the original federal indictment announced in 2025 have pleaded not guilty. Their trial is scheduled to begin on March 18, 2027.

Investigation To Continue

LA Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the operation represents more than a series of arrests.

"We are dismantling the criminal enterprises that profit from human trafficking, rescuing victims, and reclaiming the Figueroa Corridor for the community that has always deserved better," he said, according to the July 1 announcement.

During the news conference, McDonnell said the operation builds on "Operation Broken Blade," which began in August 2025.

"We promised results. Today, we're here to show them," McDonnell said.

He added that investigators "will continue with the relentless enforcement" and would not surrender the community to criminal organizations.

The investigation was led by Homeland Security Investigations, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the U.S. Attorney's Office, with assistance from several state and local agencies and victim support organizations, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Saving Innocence.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 20:05

Jill Biden's Memoir Sales Appear To Be Manipulated By Bulk Sales

Former First Lady Jill Biden's memoir, View from the East Wing, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list on June 21. But how much of its sales were genuine sales from interested readers is unclear.

Former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden speaks with journalist Paola Ramos (L) at the Sixth and I temple and venue on June 3, 2026 in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. while promoting her new book, "View from the East Wing: A Memoir”.Tom Brenner—Getty Images

In fact, when the book appeared on the bestsellers list, it came bearing a dagger (†) symbol, the small mark the Times attaches when retailers report bulk purchases mixed in with regular sales. A book doesn't earn that symbol by accident. It earns it because the paper suspects something other than organic demand is propping up the number.

Whatever propped it up didn't hold.

The book slid to No. 3 the following week, then vanished from the list entirely. Circana BookScan, the retail data source most of the publishing industry actually trusts, tells an even blunter story: the memoir dropped from No. 2 to No. 5 to No. 16 on its hardcover nonfiction chart across successive weeks. By the week ending June 20, it had moved just 3,221 print copies, bringing its total U.S. print sales to 29,539. For a book marketed as a cultural event timed to a midterm cycle Democrats are already sweating over, those numbers look thin.

Statistician Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, noticed the pattern immediately.

It debuted at #1 on the NYT due to astroturfed bulk orders (not my opinion it got the infamous † indicating this) and is now *completely* off the list 2 weeks later. Very rare for a "#1" to fall that fast. Virtually no one except political reporters are actually reading it. https://t.co/dUU8kswlDN

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 27, 2026

However, not everyone in publishing sees a scandal. Lauren Cobello, founder and CEO of Leverage with Media PR, a firm that specializes in launching bestselling books, offered a more forgiving read. "I don't think there is anything sinister about it," Cobello said. "I think it's a strategy, a smart strategy for how people are engaging their network so that they can get more books in the hands of their readers." Cobello explained that bulk orders frequently come from bookstores hosting author appearances or conferences, where hundreds of copies get purchased ahead of an event, and that such sales stay legitimate even when the Times flags them.

She extended Jill Biden the same benefit of the doubt. "She probably had bulk purchases, but because she's on a book tour, that would make sense," Cobello said. "The bulk purchases are linked to her book tour." Cobello also pushed back on the idea that the book cratered outright, noting it kept a spot on the USA Today bestseller list after exiting the Times rankings. "It wasn't a complete flop," she said.

However, plenty of bestselling authors go on book tours without their books being flagged by the New York Times for bulk sales, suggesting Jill Biden's book relied on bulk purchases to a degree that stood out.

The paper relies on a proprietary formula rather than raw sales totals, which is exactly the kind of opacity that invites suspicion when a book behaves this strangely. A Times spokesperson told The New York Post that "when The Times has reason to believe that sales of a book include a mix of organic and bulk sales, the book's best-seller ranking is accompanied by a dagger."

In other words, the paper knew something looked off and slapped a warning label on it rather than fixing the ranking itself.

Bulk orders can hijack a bestseller list that's supposed to measure genuine reader appetite rather than the buying power of whoever wants a title to look popular. When one buyer scoops up hundreds or thousands of copies in a single transaction, that stack of books doesn't reflect individual readers choosing to spend their own money. It reflects one entity writing one check, then distributing the copies elsewhere, often to people who might not have purchased the book otherwise.

Bestseller ranking gives a book cachet and credibility, generating press coverage, media bookings, and momentum that might never have materialized organically. While Jill Biden arguably didn't need such publicity to get media attention, a legitimate lack of interest in the book would have been humiliating for the Biden brand.

There is nothing illegal about this practice, and companies do it for employee gifts, and campaigns do it for rallies. In fact, politicians' gaming book sales is nothing new. Forbes reported in 2021 that at least six senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), appeared to use campaign donor money to buy their own books in bulk.

Biden's publisher, Gallery Books, for its part, is sticking to the victory-lap script. "Gallery is thrilled with our publication of Jill Biden's memoir 'View from the East Wing,' which has spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list," a spokesperson told The Post, adding that "sales have been driven across retailers with a launch that included national media coverage and in-conversation events at venues partnered with independent bookstores."

It is not known how much of an advance Jill Biden received for the memoir. Joe Biden reportedly received $10 million for his presidential memoir, which still lacks a release date.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 19:40

Alive And Kicking: News Of Woke's Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Authored by John Murawski via RealClearInvestigations,

Just a few years ago, wearing a sombrero on Halloween could get you banished from polite society for the social crime of "cultural appropriation." Nutrition experts argued that preventing obesity was a form of racialized "fatphobia," even as scientific names of songbirds were purged in a moral campaign presumably aimed at white supremacy. Meanwhile, a slew of studies and papers and articles argued that punctuality, excellence, and other forms of professionalism are "the systemic, institutionalized centering of whiteness."

Today, as universities are dismantling their DEI bureaucracies, corporations are scaling back antiracism training, and academic trigger warnings and diversity pledges have become punch lines rather than cudgels, it is tempting to believe that the excesses of the woke movement have not just peaked but are a thing of the past, a passing fever dream of a peculiar era.

Such thinking, however, underestimates the power and persistence of "wokeness," which was never a spontaneous outburst of moral righteousness born of COVID lockdowns and rage over George Floyd's death, but a philosophy and a worldview that were decades in the making.

The success of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in recent congressional primaries in New York and mayoral races in Los Angeles and the District of Columbia underscores the enduring appeal of a leftist moral framework that casts American society as a Machiavellian struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Although the DSA's ascendancy in Democratic Party politics is a relatively new phenomenon, RCI's analysis of high-profile issues that have defined the movement in recent years - from slavery reparations and polyamory to transgender advocacy and anti-colonialism - reveals that this dogma is still percolating through the culture, with some new outbreak almost every week. These deeper currents indicate that the DSA is not a driver but a reflection of wokeness - a worldview that continues to make advances and succeeds at the ballot box.

Major League Baseball's official condemnation this month of San Francisco Giants players who wore caps with Bible quotes on Pride Night is one example of enforcing ideological conformity that harkens back to the Great Awokening of 2020. A recent newspaper headline, "Minneapolis City Hall dances into Pride Month with a drag show," is further evidence of woke's staying power.

Cultural Paradigm

In some ways, the social justice activists and politicians who envisioned diversity, equity, and inclusion as the pillars of American society have moved on to flirting with the moral imperative of micro-looting, lionizing Luigi Mangione for murdering a healthcare company executive, and celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.

However one understands wokeness, it is not a mere hodgepodge of slogans and sporadic Twitter mobs. It is, instead, a cultural paradigm shared by millions of people in the West who espouse the inherent moral supremacy of the underdog and doubt the moral legitimacy of their own societies. These ideas have been honed in volumes of academic scholarship and backed by nonprofit funding over the past half-century, and they are increasingly codified into law and policy (see accompanying sidebar article).

"People have the idea that it's a fad. They don't understand the antecedents and the roots," said Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University who specializes in political philosophy and moral psychology.

"The moral grammar of the movements we call wokeness comes out of political liberalism," Hill said. "Liberalism is ultimately a perfectionist and utopian project. It's a never-ending project."

Liberalism assumed its modern form in the 1960s, Hill said, when liberals abandoned the ideal of individual rights for group rights, in response to persistent Jim Crow-era discrimination. This shift led to a commitment to "radical egalitarianism," in which discrimination and injustice are measured not by individual bigotry but by unequal group outcomes, and "the state has a responsibility to rectify those disparities." Supporters refer to this commitment in a variety of ways - leveling the playing field, positive discrimination, or dismantling structures of oppression.

"Gestating Parents"

The critique of racism actually intensified after American society committed to fighting it - progressive scholars have described the scourge as "systemic racism" and "racism without racists" - expanding into a broader assault on other institutions and social norms, such as colorblindness, binary gender, colonialism, capitalism and other supposed legacies of European culture.

John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguist and longtime social commentator on race, said on a podcast this month that "the era of a particularly abusive kind of wokeness" - where opinions and speech were policed by the "excommunicator" and the "defenstrator" - has peaked in academia and in the arts. McWhorter said this militancy is "applied to different subjects" now - such as the Israel-Palestine debate, and in transgender advocacy.

"It's obvious that the leaders of the trans movement, especially since '20, have taken on that prosecutorial, anti-reasoning attitude," McWhorter said. "And I hate to say that a lot of them are still doing it, and they're modeling that on what they hoped would work in 2020 and 2021."

The continuing wave of social justice consciousness-raising will sound familiar to anyone who has been following the issue. State governments in states controlled by Democrats remain committed to establishing slavery reparations programs. The city of New York has issued a 375-page equity plan that sounds as if it were written in 2020 by Ibram X. Kendi - the bestselling author who argued that "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." And academic conferences by groups like the Modern Language Association and the American Academy of Religion continue to indulge in agitprop chic, featuring such topics as "Unpacking White Dominance" and "Structural Violence and Gendered Resistance."

In the realm of gender politics, the normalization of polyamory is making inroads in municipal governments and in progressive churches. New York State this month replaced the words "mother" and "father" in the state's family law with "gestating parent" and a "non-gestating parent." Biological males who say they are girls continue winning trophies in girls' high school sports. And a federal court recently ruled that a biological male with fully intact male genitalia who identifies as a woman must be granted access to an all-women's nude spa (see sidebar).

Even the Daughters of the American Revolution has been swept up in the rapid social changes. The patriotic heritage group has voted to continue granting membership to transgender daughters who were born as sons.

Core Beliefs

The persistence and strength of this activism is underscored by the fact that it is happening as the Trump administration, Republican-controlled states, and conservative legal advocates are doing everything they can to stop these ideas from spreading. President Trump has threatened to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding to institutions that don't comply with his demands to remove DEI, antisemitism, and other social justice activism from the curriculum. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the nation's leading medical schools for allegedly giving black applicants racial preferences over whites and Asians. Conservative states and a number of private universities have resumed using standardized tests in college admissions. Alabama and Texas have essentially put the state university systems in receivership in a bid to stop professors from teaching Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory to undergraduates.

But not all is as it seems. Some colleges that use standardized testing have different cutoffs for Asians, whites, and African Americans, based on proxies such as school district or other "holistic" indicators. Universities have slashed DEI programs, but subsequently a number of them were forced to fire diversity officers who were caught on camera bragging that their campus is still fully committed to DEI, and university officials have merely rebranded, not eliminated, race-based and queer-advocacy programs.

The core philosophical premise of wokeness is that social structures and cultural norms privilege some groups and harm or oppress others, creating power asymmetries and inequitable outcomes. Specific to the United States and Europe, males, heterosexuals, whites, and Christians continue to hoard power, privilege, and resources, benefitting from unfair advantage. The way to address this unjust dominance is through redistribution - by affirmative action, by diversity programs, by inclusive language, and by education that emphasizes the imperceptible workings of privilege and power - in order to equalize group outcomes. The criteria expand over time for what counts as harm and oppression, so that even challenging progressive beliefs or questioning black and queer peoples' "lived experience" becomes an offense against the moral order. Meanwhile, the number of victimized identity groups multiplies, creating an endless mission creep that inevitably leads to culture wars and political conflicts.

Reparations for African Americans and descendants of slavery are one of the original progressive social justice commitments. For decades, it was a pipe dream of black activists, but in recent years, it has been taken seriously by policymakers. At least five states and more than a dozen cities have created task forces or commissions to study slavery reparations, according to the Associated Press, and there have been more than 460 reparations initiatives in this country, from commemorations to restitution. This year, Maryland became the latest state to vote in favor of studying slavery reparations for African Americans, establishing a 23-member reparations commission to formulate an apology, assess collective responsibility, and calculate monetary compensation. Last fall, California became the first state to create a Slavery Descendants Bureau to certify black beneficiaries who will receive reparations in "recognition and healing for the savagery of forced human slavery in the United States." Internationally, the United Nations General Assembly recently passed a reparations resolution declaring the European enslavement of Africans as the "gravest crime against humanity."

Racial equity advocates are keeping a low profile to evade unwanted attention from the Trump administration. One can only assume that these activists have not abandoned their goals, but are merely biding their time. However, they have not completely exited the public stage, as evidenced by an ambitious equity plan issued by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Office of Equity & Racial Justice. Among the plan's statements: "New York's history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression." The 375-page document lauds Black Lives Matter, honors George Floyd, celebrates "intersectionality," and describes racism as a "public health crisis." Citing "grave injustices," "atrocities," "other forms of violence" committed against "Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other People of Color, women, religious minorities, immigrants, people who are LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities" over the centuries, the plan declares: "Because racism is a race-explicit system, anti-racism requires race-explicit strategies."

Land Acknowledgements

Another front in the progressive playbook is the recognition of reparations for indigenous tribes that were displaced by European settlers. The wish list for this movement runs the gamut from reciting "land acknowledgments" at public gatherings to the Land Back movement's pursuit of sovereignty over ancestral lands.

The movement's ethos is captured in the science journal Nature, a once-prestigious and now highly politicized publication in print since 1869, which ran a piece last summer written by eight indigenous scholars advocating for an "indigenous agenda in science" rooted in indigenous "lived experience."

"White scholars must recognize, read and cite Indigenous scholarship," the essay says. "But they must also engage with it in deep, relational ways and be open to fully understanding its messages, even if it makes them uncomfortable - especially, we argue, if it makes them uncomfortable."

The scholars echo the spirit of Ibram X. Kendi and critical race theorists who insist that political neutrality is a myth, and that reluctance to endorse their cause is tantamount to endorsing white supremacy:

"Scientists must also attend to their own racism," the scholars state. "It is not enough to be non-racist. Structural issues and inequities exist in the Western academy. Those who avoid engaging with racism and colonialism in scientific works and spaces merely promote the status quo."

Transgender politics has now eclipsed racial equity as a rallying point for progressives. Trans "rights" has been a core commitment for Democrats at least since 2012, when then-Vice President Joe Biden first declared that trans rights is "the civil rights issue of our time," a claim Biden repeated over the years and turned into the moral cornerstone of his presidency while in the White House.

The list of the movement's demands is encyclopedic in scope. It includes puberty blockers with few questions asked, cross-sex hormones for adolescents, and access to sex-change surgeries. Activists also insist on the constitutional right of biological males who identify as women to access women's sports, changing rooms, and other facilities. Hundreds of K-12 schools ban "misgendering" and conceal student gender transitions from parents if the student requests it. These positions are underpinned by years of scholarship in queer theory and gender theory, which question the moral and scientific legitimacy of binary gender and biological sex (see sidebar).

Of the many political conflicts involving transgender advocacy, one involves Catholic nuns in New York who operate a care facility for dying cancer patients. The nuns were threatened with fines by state authorities who demanded that the nuns assign transgender patients to rooms based on stated gender identity rather than biological sex, even over the opposition of a roommate. The state also says the nuns must use patients' preferred pronouns, including when the patient is not present, or presumably even alive. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have sued New York state officials in federal court to seek an exemption from state policy.

Polyamory Rising

Closely related to transgender activism is the push for full legal recognition for polyamory. Consensual non-monogamy is said to be as central to queer identities and the queer "lived experience," so that discriminating against polyamory becomes a proxy for discriminating against LGBTQ+ people.

The mainline Presbyterian denomination, PCUSA, considered a proposal this summer on whether its clergy should be required to be monogamous or if they can engage in consensual extramarital relations or non-monogamous sex. Notably, the denomination did not reject the idea outright, but referred it to further study.

The queer-affirming group, More Light Presbyterians, released a statement saying that enforcing monogamy is tantamount to discrimination and that a Presbyterian vote for monogamy "will inevitably be experienced and enacted as an attack on queerness."

The normalization of polyamory continues generating breathlessly supportive coverage from elite media that legitimizes and glamorizes free love: Scientific American ("An anthropologist's detailed research shows polyamorists focus on intimacy and honesty, not sleeping around"), Los Angeles Times ("People in polyamorous relationships fight 'shame,' demand legal protections"), and The Guardian ("Polyamorous Americans are celebrating new laws establishing their 'inherent worth and dignity'").

Not everyone in the world of arts and letters is so sanguine about the imminent demise of a protean ideology that seems to have nine lives. As the sombrero-flaunting novelist Lionel Shriver has observed: "This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won't be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete's foot comes right back?"

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 19:15

Billionaire Governor Pritzker Embraces Socialist Candidates As The Future Of The Democrat Party

It's a common and almost inevitable component of communist history that the leaders of proletariat movements always end up becoming some of the wealthiest people in those movements.  The idea of "equity" is a fantasy; every society no matter how "progressive" has an elitist class with more money and more power than the common citizen. 

Socialist and communist societies have some of the most egregious power gaps imaginable; they even reinstate archaic systems of hereditary succession.  Just look at North Korea or the "princeling" (taizidang) system in China which favors the descendants of founding revolutionaries.  The notion of an economic Utopia where outcomes are equalized and no one has to struggle is a fantasy sold to the masses by clever elites seeking unfettered control. 

Someone always comes out on top, and it's usually the same money-players that leftists claim to be fighting against.

For example, Democrat Socialist and rising Democrat star Zohran Mamdani comes from an affluent family with a net worth in the tens of millions.  Socialist and Islamist influencer Hasan Piker is worth $8 million alone, but his family is affluent with extensive corporate and political connections.  Ilhan Omar's husband listed their net worth at up to $30 million before they suddenly revised it down to $95,000 in the face of voter backlash.  She is currently facing a DOJ investigation into her odd financial history.

The point is, these are not working class people who experience the struggles of the everyday laborer.  If they have not always been rich, they have at the very least always had a family safety net of considerable wealth.  Enter Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (a billionaire), who jumped on the Democrat Socialist train this week in an interview with CNN.

JB Pritzker says embracing Socialism is how Democrats are going to win elections:

CNN: "In New York, three candidates who identify as Democratic Socialists won their primary campaigns...Do you think that's good?"

PRITZKER: "That is the recipe for winning in 2026 and beyond." pic.twitter.com/HSyGaRRYEN

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 1, 2026

On CNN's "The Source", Pritzker defended progressive/Democratic Socialist candidates as the "recipe for winning" for the Democrat Party going into the future.  His statements come just as news hit that Kamala Harris has been in touch with Zohran Mamdani for months in preparation for the 2028 election cycle.  Meanwhile, new polls show that 32% of Democrat voters openly support socialist candidates.   

The trend is clear; the political left is either doubling down and embracing radicalism, or they are simply revealing their true nature.  The Democrat Party is riding the socialist wave and the extremists are in charge.  

Pritzker went on to suggest that Donald Trump's concerns over the radicalism of socialist candidates are unfounded and a "sign of dementia".  This is coming from the same man who outright denied that Joe Biden was showing signs of cognitive decline in the lead up to the 2024 elections, calling Biden "completely mentally sharp" during personal meetings.  

Pritzker, confronted with the potential hypocrisy of an ultra rich politician supporting his party's shift into open socialism, suggested that he's actually "one of the good billionaires".

Bernie: There should not be billionaires.

Mamdani: I don’t think we should have billionaires.

Pritzker: That doesn't mean me! pic.twitter.com/7aHhbObFqJ

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 1, 2026

At bottom, there is a large contingent of billionaires and ultra-wealthy elites backing the Democratic Party and, like Pritzker, none of them are worried about socialist ideology taking over.  Why?  Because they know what the leaders of every communist revolution have known - That they will end up in charge regardless, and militant activists are nothing more than useful idiots paving the way for the elites to gain even more power.      

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 18:50

Building Codes For Energy Conservation Can Increase US Home Costs By $14,000: DOE

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

States that adopt the updated 2024 International Energy Conservation Code could see building costs for a typical single-family home go up by $14,000, the Department of Energy (DOE) warned on June 26.

The International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) is a model code developed by the Washington-based International Code Council (ICC) for setting minimum energy efficiency requirements for commercial and residential buildings.

While the ICC doesn’t mandate its code, states and local jurisdictions can choose to mandate the code in their building standards. The IECC is the most adopted across the United States as it is recognized in federal law as the national model energy code for low-rise residential buildings.

The DOE takes part in the ICC’s consensus process to update energy efficiency provisions of the IECC. The code is revised once every three years.

Regarding the latest IECC codes published in 2024, the DOE has determined that adoption of the code “would increase residential construction costs by more than $9.2 billion annually compared to the 2006 code levels, adding more than $127 billion in cumulative costs nationwide.”

The IECC model regulation forces “American families to pay thousands of dollars more upfront for a new home, while projected energy savings may take decades to materialize. In most states, estimated payback periods exceed 10 years, with some exceeding 20 years—locking American families into decades-long repayment timeframes and restricting consumer choice.”

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the 2024 IECC contains several provisions related to energy efficiency, including heat or energy recovery ventilation systems; installation of energy-efficient appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, and clothes washers; and the deployment of renewable energy resources on building sites.

In March 2024, when the 2024 IECC codes were approved by the ICC’s Board of Directors, the ICC said that the new codes were anticipated to improve energy efficiency for commercial buildings by roughly 10 percent, and for residential buildings by around 6.5 percent.

On Feb. 15 this year, the DOE sent a letter to the ICC, raising “serious concerns” about the trajectory of the IECC.

The purpose of IECC is to provide model building codes that can be adopted to provide energy efficiency gains for communities. However, in recent years, IECC has expanded its scope to focus on areas such as energy generation infrastructure requirements and greenhouse gas emissions. This shift risks undermining existing DOE objectives, the letter said. 

The department’s priorities for building energy codes involve ensuring affordability for American households and businesses, and safeguarding consumer choice to opt for their preferred appliances and equipment.

The DOE urged the ICC to return its codes to its traditional focus on building energy efficiency that would provide both “clear cost savings and beneficial efficiency advances” to consumers.

In its recent statement, the DOE said it encouraged the ICC to omit requirements related to onsite energy generation and greenhouse gas avoidance, which raise construction costs.

“This analysis shows how unnecessary regulations and ineffective building codes have drastically increased housing costs with little to no benefit for homeowners or communities,” Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said.

“Standard-setting bodies should take note: we prioritize the American homeowner and will not allow erroneous building requirements to push homeownership out of reach.”

The Epoch Times reached out to ICC for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Ensuring Housing Affordability

The DOE said in its recent statement that it would continue implementing President Donald Trump’s March 13 executive order titled “Removing Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Home Construction.”

In the order, Trump wrote that unnecessary regulatory barriers and “onerous mandates” have delayed construction and driven up the cost of new homes, making housing less affordable for Americans.

One of the provisions in the order directed the Secretaries of Energy, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Agriculture to take “appropriate action to reform and, where appropriate, eliminate unduly burdensome or costly energy-efficiency, water-use, or alternative-energy requirements regarding housing.”

This shall include reviewing and revising residential building energy codes, energy efficiency standards for certain new construction, and energy conservation standards for manufactured housing.

In a March 13 statement, HUD said that regulatory costs make up almost $94,000 in the final price of a new single-family home, with green energy mandates in building codes alone raising construction costs by $30,000.

As such, cutting red tape, including “onerous” energy and water requirements and “woke” green building codes, will boost housing stock and bring down the cost of newly built homes, the department said.

In April, HUD and the Department of Agriculture rescinded a policy related to energy standards, which HUD said would have pushed home construction costs by $20,000 to $31,000.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 18:25

Feds Nab Alleged Member Of "Sprawling" Cuban Communist Subversion Network Linked To Hasan Piker's Havana Trip

Readers have been well ahead of both the federal government and the mainstream news cycle in asking whether there is a "Cuba connection" behind the radicalization of the Democratic Party and its aligned billionaire-funded nonprofit universe.

What was once dismissed as speculation is now beginning to look more like a foreign influence operation, one tied to an alarming rise of anti-American socialist networks that openly seek to dismantle capitalism and the American way of life.

Even mainstream Democrats are now sounding alarms over the socialists hijacking their party. Meanwhile, the federal government appears to be putting more pieces of the complex puzzle together, only now recognizing that some of these radical networks may be connected to foreign influence campaigns aimed at subverting the country from within.

On Wednesday, the State Department revealed that the three Cuban nationals were detained by federal agents after Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated their legal status.

Carlos Antonio Lloga Dominguez, his wife, and his son are now in federal custody pending removal, according to the press release.

The department accused Lloga Dominguez of spending more than a decade working for the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, or ICAP, which Washington describes as Cuba's top influence and intelligence front group in the U.S.

And where have we heard ICAP before? Let's revisit our December 2025 note in which we pointed out:

According to a defected Cuban intelligence officer and corroborating intelligence reporting, legacy Castro-aligned groups such as the Venceremos Brigade and the National Lawyers Guild have been controlled by Cuba's Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) since at least the 1980s. That influence is exerted through ICAP (the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples).

ICAP is an official Cuban government organization, founded in 1960, that promotes international solidarity and cultural exchange. On paper, it organizes delegations, volunteer brigades, educational tours, and international conferences that oppose U.S. sanctions and support Cuba's political system. It appears benign - almost quaint.

But declassified CIA documents dating back to the Cold War describe a consistent operational method: foreign recruits were brought to Cuba for training in intelligence tradecraft or guerrilla sabotage and were received by DGI officers posing as ICAP officials. ICAP functioned as the intake valve - political cover for intelligence operations designed to cultivate long-term assets rather than short-term spies.

What exists today is not a single organization but a complex ecosystem.

ICAP sits at the center, functioning as a coordinating hub. Orbiting it is the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a deliberately loose coalition that links 77 organizations of activists, nonprofits, and campaigns while minimizing legal exposure or clear command structures. The National Lawyers Guild serves as the lawfare and agitation arm, training protesters, facilitating delegations, and litigating against U.S. institutions under the guise of civil rights.

Funding and infrastructure come from the Neville Roy Singham Network, a web of organizations tied to Chinese Communist Party-aligned capital that provides money, logistics, and professionalized organizing capacity. Public narratives are amplified by legacy anti-war organizations like CODEPINK and the ANSWER Coalition, which are also now under the Singham umbrella. They frame U.S. foreign policy as illegitimate while defending authoritarian adversaries. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) functions as the political activation channel, translating activist energy into electoral and legislative influence on behalf of the Cuban regime.

Last month, Rubio sanctioned ICAP under Executive Order 14404, calling it a central node in a Cuban intel and influence network that claims links to more than 2,000 organizations across 150 countries.

The State Department said ICAP has maintained close ties to Cuban intelligence, noting that its current president, Fernando González Llort, was convicted in the U.S. for his role in the Wasp Network, a Cuban spy ring uncovered in Florida in the late 1990s.

Bloomberg noted that Lloga Dominguez was one of the individuals who brought far-left streamer Hasan Piker and parts of the Neville Roy Singham Network on a recent trip to Cuba.

It should be noted that Piker, the unofficial spokesperson for the DSA, has told millions of his followers "to kill capitalists. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood."

Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:

“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”

Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 9, 2026

Related:

• How Bad Is Foreign Influence In America's Nonprofit Universe?

Alongside its Cuba focus, the Trump administration is also investigating China-based billionaire and self-described Marxist Neville Roy Singham over allegations that his NGO networks have helped sow chaos and propel far-left, anti-American movements across the U.S.

Related:

• Troubling Pattern Of Left-Wing Revolutionaries Targeting "Capitalists" Raises Alarm Over Youth Radicalization

Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, launched an investigation into whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the pieces of the puzzle are coming together very quickly, giving readers a rough framework for understanding why the radical left has become so radical and why its rhetoric often sounds as if it were not organically born in the U.S.

That is because these movements may be operating within or adjacent to foreign influence networks with one main objective, as the DSA itself lays out: the destruction of the US.

With Democrats increasingly alarmed that socialists and Marxists are hijacking their party, Republicans may now have a simple and highly recognizable target: communism. For the first time in decades, the GOP has a message that can cut across partisan lines, because most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still broadly understand one thing: communism is bad.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 18:00

Japan's Biggest LNG Buyer Creates Standalone Trading Arm

Authored by Michael Kern via OilPrice.com,

Japan's JERA is creating a wholly-owned subsidiary to develop and manage its LNG, upstream, low-carbon fuels, and shipping businesses, the biggest Japanese LNG importer and largest power producer said on Wednesday.

The new company, JERA Global Energy Solutions (JERA GES), will be the Japanese utility giant's response to increasingly volatile and complex energy markets. JERA GES will be a vertically integrated LNG company which can quickly respond to the market needs while maintaining security of supply for Japan as its highest priority, the company said.

JERA GES, which will be headquartered in Singapore, will focus on "developing a stable and diversified long-term LNG portfolio that balances supply sources with market opportunities, while advancing lower-carbon fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen," JERA said, adding that they will maintain close coordination with JERA's power generation and domestic energy market functions as Japan's biggest utility will look to enhance the country's energy security.

GES will gradually take over JERA's existing long-term LNG and lower-carbon fuel business activities according to a planned transfer schedule to keep continuity for existing business relationships.

Amid the current volatility and disarray in global LNG markets, JERA last month signed a contract for the supply of liquefied natural gas with Malaysia's state major Petronas for a period of 20 years, starting in 2028.

Japan is one of the most energy import-dependent countries in the world, with a lot of its oil and gas previously coming from the Middle East. The war-related disruption in export flows has prompted Japan to rush to secure alternative supplies.

The Petronas deal is for 2 million tons of liquefied gas annually, adding to earlier supply deals agreed by JERA. The company, which is the largest buyer of liquefied natural gas in the world, last year presented plans to triple its purchases from the United States alone to as much as 5.5 million tons annually. That would have been a 10% increase on its current imports from the U.S., making up a third of its total LNG purchases.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 17:40

World's Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out

Up until now, when it comes to real estate, Blackstone was best known in recent years for dumping many of its trophy office properties - which in the aftermath of work from home never recovered their projected cash flow potential - at a huge discount. Now, it may be pulling a page from its old, pre-Lehman playbook  by calling the top in yet another commercial real estate segment: data centers. 

Two days ago we reported that Blackstone was selling its stakes in a trio of data centers across Northern Virginia for $3.5 billion, cashing out of part of a bet it made less than three years ago. According to Bloomberg, Digital Realty Trust would pay $1.2 billion of cash and offer $2.3 billion of its shares (which the PE giant has largely cashed in by now) to Blackstone funds; in exchange, the data center company will acquire Blackstone’s 80% interest in two 96-megawatt data centers in Manassas, Virginia, and a 50% interest in a 96-megawatt center in nearby Sterling.

We said that "the question is why did Blackstone decide to pull the cord now, just as fresh doubts are creeping whether the Mag 7s will continue funding the AI expansion with virtually unlimited capex."

Two days later we have an answer. 

The digital ink is barely dry on its Virginia data center sales, and we learn that Blackstone’s QTS (QTS Realty Trust) is again quietly fading its AI exposure by walking away from plans to build its portion (which at this point is the only portion left after its partner already pulled out days ago) of a 2,100-acre data center campus in Virginia - also known as Prince William Digital Gateway which would house as many as 37 data-center buildings - handing a win to residents who fought for years to topple the project. 

QTS's proposed facility at 9400 Godwin Drive in Manassas

The data center developer had planned to transform more than 800 acres in Northern Virginia’s Prince William County, a project that would have spanned 22 million square feet, making it the largest data center campus in the world. Located on the edge of an historic Civil War battlefield and on what used to be land protected from development, the project ignited strong pushback from homeowners and has been stalled by lawsuits.

As part of Wall Street’s broader push into data centers, investment has poured into Northern Virginia, which is considered the country’s largest data center market, and is better known as "Data Center Alley" 

But in a strategic U-turn, in recent days QTS executives decided that it isn’t worth pressing forward in court, the Bloomberg sources said. The firm’s attorneys plan to inform the court of their decision as soon as this week, the people said, asking not to be named discussing non-public information.

QTS’s rapid growth has made it a poster child of how private equity has fueled the data center industry’s breakneck expansion. Those ambitions are colliding with public anxiety over strains to electricity grids and home prices from AI data centers.

The retreat may be the final blow to Virginia’s “Digital Gateway” project, a mega site roughly twice the size of New York’s Central Park with city-sized power needs. The initiative was supposed to bring in some $100 billion in spending and create one of the world’s largest technology corridors. Not any more. 

The project had sparked contentious, drawn-out public hearings. A clerical blunder related to a key zoning meeting created setbacks for developers. Already, Brookfield-backed Compass Datacenters, which was supposed to build on more than 800 acres at the site, had pulled out in May. 

The U-turns by both firms, Bloomberg writes, amount to one of the most dramatic retreats by developers from a data center project.

It’s a reminder of how tech firms’ race for the computing infrastructure to support AI advances is increasingly facing the same bottlenecks, from power shortages to supply crunches, we have been warning about for the past two years and which Citadel Securities warned about just yesterday.

Organized opposition is mounting, forcing firms and developers to be more deliberate about where they choose to build. This is precisely what we warned one year ago would happen as more grassroots organizations pushed back against the relentless data center rollout. At least we haven't gotten to the arson stage (yet).

between exploding electricity bills and lack of jobs for grads, a new luddite revolution is coming - they will be burning down data centers within a year

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 25, 2025

To account for the costs of such build outs, Virginia recently passed a budget with an energy consumption tax on data centers, and more states are threatening moratoriums on new development. Data centers - and how their costs and benefits are shared - are now emerging a major swing issue in the lead up to the US midterm elections. These hurdles raise questions for investors over whether the AI build out can keep going at this pace. 

For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS’s pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments.

As Bloomberg recalls, hundreds of proponents and critics showed up at a 27-hour zoning hearing in 2023 to lobby authorities on the project. After county officials narrowly voted to approve the conversion of agricultural and semi-rural land for data centers, community organizers and residents pursued lawsuits.

The outcome of the meeting - and whether the county properly advertised the event - was at the center of legal challenges. The lawsuits hinged on one detail: The first two newspaper notices publicizing the hearing weren’t separated by at least six days, as state and local codes required at that time. While it is unclear if Blackstone agents had tried to "grease" the zoning board's palms to quietly fast-track the data center, in the end the outcome was catastrophic to the builders. 

In March, Virginia courts upheld an earlier ruling that the zoning approvals were invalid because the public notices for the meeting fell short of rules.

Opponents of the Digital Gateway data center project rallies at Manassas Battlefield Park.

“While we still believe this project offered significant benefits for the region and our neighbors, recent legal actions and compounding regulatory hurdles have effectively closed a viable path forward,” Compass Datacenters President AJ Byers said in a statement following the ruling.

After Compass bailed on the project, that left QTS as the lone developer. It was the only party that petitioned for an appeal of the case in Virginia’s Supreme Court.

Originally, the firm’s executives were concerned about the prospect of setting a legal precedent on the back of an administrative oversight. After Compass’s retreat, QTS lost a partner who would share the costs of upgrading various utilities needed for the massive developments, said one of the people familiar with the matter. QTS decided it was not worth proceeding with the project.

Blackstone, which acquired QTS in 2021, is a major financier of data centers, with a portfolio of more than $150 billion of such assets around the world. 

The increasingly bitter political and grassroots pushback against new data center construction explains why Blackstone has been getting cold feet just as the AI bubble is peaking, first selling existing data centers and now walking away from upcoming projects.  A recent Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.

Half of opponents mention data centers’ excessive use of resources, including 18% each mentioning their use of water and energy. Sixteen percent mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution.

About one in five opponents are concerned with the impact on local quality of life, including increased population, increased traffic and preferring that the land be used for other purposes. A similar share mention potentially negative economic consequences, including higher utility bills, cost-of-living increases, and the cost of building the data centers (which could involve the use of taxpayer funds).

Most of the remaining opposition stems from general or specific concerns about artificial intelligence.

Blackstone, which manages more than $1.3 trillion, bills itself as the largest global provider of data centers, and also owns some of the utilities that power them. It acquired QTS in 2021 and bought Australian computing provider AirTrunk in 2024. In May, the firm held an initial public offering for Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust Inc., its data center acquisition vehicle, which aims to buy already built and leased properties benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom.

And now that the protest movement knows how to push back against uninvited Wall Street occupants, thanks to the BlackStone capitulation, expect an exponential increase in legal (and other) attempts to hinder the rollout of data centers across the US, assuring that the AI supercycle, which is already years behind schedule with just half of the data centers meant to be built in progress and on time, will expect to see an avalanche of delays and cancellations assuring that the return on debt-funded capex will be even less as eventual launch dates gradually move ever further into the unknown future. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 17:20

US Nuclear Regulator Proposes Changes To Nuclear Safety Standards

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

A U.S. nuclear regulatory agency proposed sweeping reforms July 1 to modernize nuclear reactor licensing and safety practices, shifting away from a global radiation measurement standard after 50 years.

The cooling towers for units 4 (L) and 3 (R) are seen at Plant Vogtle, operated by Georgia Power Co., in east Georgia's Burke County near Waynesboro, Ga., on May 29, 2024. Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File

The regulatory changes are expected to make it faster and easier to build more nuclear reactors to meet increased energy demands.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an independent federal agency that oversees licensing and regulation of nuclear energy and radioactive materials, expects the changes will streamline regulations without lowering safety standards.

"NRC's regulations have not kept pace with new technologies and our energy needs," Chairman Ho Nieh said in a July 1 statement. "This proposed rule strips out rigid frameworks and unnecessary conservatism to accelerate the safe deployment of new reactors and expand existing capacity across America."

The effort is part of President Donald Trump's executive order, "Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," signed May 23, 2025, calling for his administration to reform the agency's regulations and operations to achieve dominance in the global nuclear energy market.

The order also sets out goals to quadruple American nuclear energy capacity from about 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts in 2050.

To get there, the order calls for adopting science-based radiation limits and reconsidering reliance on the decades-old framework of the linear no-threshold model for radiation exposure and the "as low as reasonably achievable" (ALARA) standard.

"Those models are flawed," Trump's order stated.

The agency was directed to consider adopting determinate radiation limits and consult with the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Changing the model would represent the first major shift in U.S. nuclear policy in half a century.

Critics say that the deregulation could prioritize economic growth over public health.

Changing the radiation model has drawn criticism from nuclear safety expert Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Last year, Lyman told the agency in July 2025 there was "absolutely no technical or practical basis" for changing the agency's use of the ALARA principles in its radiation protection regulations.

A report last year by the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions found the change would be a step in the right direction for nuclear energy.

Using ALARA standards is enormously costly, raising the price of building and operating nuclear plants by billions of dollars, the 2025 report found. The standards have also created public phobia and misinformation that "any radiation is harmful," according to the report by the coalition's Nick Loris and Prasanna Pydipalli.

Other countries - France and South Korea - are shifting toward threshold-based models using data collected from worksites but haven't yet made the change, the report found.

The coalition concluded that adopting the new threshold standard for radiation would unleash the potential of nuclear innovation.

"By moving from outdated fear-based models to proportionate, risk-informed regulation, the U.S. can lead the next era of safe, reliable, clean, and globally competitive nuclear energy," Loris and Pydipalli wrote.

The commission issued proposed rules to modernize reactor oversight and radiation protection, and issued draft text to reshape its environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The agency's proposed changes would give nuclear power plant operators more flexibility in evaluating radiation doses to workers and the public using more up-to-date methods.

Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers representing 13 million workers, commented on the announcement.

"Building more nuclear reactors here at home is how we secure America's energy future and unleash American energy dominance," Timmons posted on X on July 1.

The U.S. Department of Energy's "Reactor Pilot Program shows what is possible when policymakers embrace innovation instead of standing in its way," Timmons said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the budget request for the Energy Department on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 13, 2026. Manuel Balce Ceneta, File/AP Photo Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 17:00

Warren Pushes Progressive Agenda In Senate Primaries As Schumer Prioritizes Path Back To Majority

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are engaged in a high-stakes contest for influence over the future direction of Senate Democrats, with the Massachusetts progressive working to reshape the caucus through targeted primary support while the New York leader focuses on expanding the map to retake the majority.

Warren has thrown her weight behind several challengers who have explicitly said they would not support Schumer remaining as leader if Democrats regain control. She has framed her involvement as a response to voter demand for bolder action on economic issues and systemic change, pointing to recent primary successes by candidates aligned with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as evidence that the party's base is ready for a sharper break from the status quo.

In comments to The Hill, Warren highlighted the outcomes in New York's House primaries, where three Mamdani-backed candidates prevailed against establishment-backed incumbents. She described the results as a reflection of broader voter sentiment rather than isolated events. "It says more about the state of voters. Voters want change. They want people who have clear ideas about how to make their lives better and to know that they will fight for them," Warren said.

Those New York victories were widely viewed as setbacks for the Democratic establishment. The wins featured strong showings by progressive and democratic socialist candidates and included moments of open frustration with party leadership, such as crowds at victory events chanting "You're next" when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on screen. Warren had endorsed Mamdani during his successful 2025 mayoral bid; Schumer did not publicly support him.

Watch as supporter chant "You're Next" at Hakeem Jeffries during Claire Valdez' victory party last night after all three Mamdani-endorsed socialists won their Congressional races.

The Democrat Party is now the Party of socialism - and the establishment Dems can't put that genie… pic.twitter.com/anlIZFq0n7

— Conservative Brief (@ConservBrief) June 24, 2026

Schumer, a prolific fundraiser, has concentrated on recruiting and backing candidates he believes have the best shot at winning competitive general elections. A spokesperson for the leader emphasized that his sole priority is "taking back the Senate" to block President Trump's agenda and deliver results for Americans, arguing that recent recruitment efforts have created a credible path to majority status that few anticipated a year ago.

The friction between the two senators has become harder to downplay. Democratic strategist Steve Jarding noted that successful Warren-backed candidates would likely serve as "soul mates" on key issues, elevating her standing within the progressive wing of the caucus.

An anonymous Democratic senator aligned with Warren described to The Hill growing unease among progressives that Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand are too closely tied to corporate interests. The senator singled out Gillibrand's role in advancing cryptocurrency deregulation legislation as particularly problematic and questioned Schumer's recruitment of 78-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills to challenge Sen. Susan Collins. The source called Mills a "conservative, business-oriented Democrat" lacking grassroots energy at a moment when the party's base wants the system disrupted, drawing parallels to concerns raised after President Biden's 2024 debate performance.

Warren has endorsed multiple Senate primary candidates who have distanced themselves from Schumer's leadership, including Graham Platner in Maine, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in Illinois, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow in Michigan. She has also backed Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Zach Wahls in Iowa, neither of whom has committed to supporting Schumer. Schumer, by contrast, backed Mills in Maine and Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan.

In Iowa, the super PAC VoteVets - historically aligned with Schumer - spent roughly $10 million supporting Josh Turek, who defeated Wahls. Schumer and Gillibrand issued a joint statement celebrating Turek's nomination as putting the seat "firmly in play" for November.

Warren has supplemented her candidate endorsements with substantial fundraising, contributing a total of $800,000 to state Democratic parties in six battleground states this cycle: Alaska, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio.

She has defended her choices, particularly her support for Platner, arguing that he connects directly with Mainers struggling economically and is committed to fighting corruption and lowering costs in Washington.

Despite the visible tensions, most Democratic senators do not expect Warren to mount a formal challenge to Schumer's leadership after the midterms. She is seen primarily as a policy advocate rather than someone positioned to manage a large and diverse caucus. A Warren spokesperson confirmed she "has no interest in being the Senate Democratic leader." When asked directly about the possibility, Warren laughed softly and replied: "I want to do everything that I can to help working families. We need a Democratic Party that's ready to be in the fight."

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 16:40

Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan Sues Trump, Admin Officials Over Allegedly Vindictive Investigations

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

Former CIA Director John Brennan is seeking a court order requiring the Trump administration to retain records related to allegedly vindictive investigations into him and his involvement in probing alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 23, 2017. Alex Wong/Getty Images

While the Justice Department hadn't formally brought an indictment against Brennan, his lawsuit noted that it had undertaken grand jury investigations in recent months. He accused prosecutors of abusing their authority and said there was reason to believe the administration wasn't preserving records as required under law.

Brennan said the judge's order was necessary to preserve his constitutional rights and evidence that he could use to prove vindictiveness in a would-be prosecution.

"This Administration has adopted a policy of using criminal process and prosecution to punish the President's perceived adversaries," Brennan's legal team wrote in the court filing.

"It is against this backdrop that former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan ... is being vindictively singled out for investigation and prosecution."

The lawsuit filed by Brennan's legal team on Wednesday names President Donald Trump, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other government officials as defendants.

A Justice Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times, "While we cannot comment on the existence, or lack thereof, of an investigation, it is certainly rich that John Brennan is accusing anyone of a 'retribution campaign.'"

Brennan's lawsuit focused on two investigations. One centered on an alleged conspiracy to deprive Trump of his rights by probing alleged Russian interference. Another was related to statements he made to Congress regarding an intelligence community assessment of Russian influence during the election.

Brennan's legal team said Justice Department officials have "taken steps that clearly violate well-established norms and limitations on prosecutorial conduct" as part of the Trump administration's investigations.

"Those overreaching actions have violated Director Brennan's constitutional rights and will serve as the basis for challenges to any resulting charges, including motions to dismiss any indictment on the grounds that it is the result of selective and vindictive prosecution," they wrote.

The lawsuit noted that the examination of prosecutors' emails, texts, and other communications would allow the courts to determine if decisions were based on legitimate law enforcement concerns or an effort to "selectively" and "vindictively" prosecute the former CIA director.

"There is a very real risk, however, that some of these materials and communications will no longer exist by the time any such challenges are filed and the court hears them," the lawsuit stated.

Brennan's legal team cited technology changes that it said do not ensure the routine preservation of communications and "ample evidence in the public record" of Trump administration officials failing to meet legal obligations to preserve records as the two reasons for its concern.

The lawsuit said the Trump administration is obligated to preserve records and evidence that would be relevant in a potential challenge if Brennan were indicted. Brennan's legal team pointed to both the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act as regulations covering many of the communications and materials involved in the two investigations.

Brennan was previously referred for criminal prosecution by the House Judiciary Committee over his connection with an investigation that was launched in 2016 into suspected Russian influence on Trump's presidential campaign. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in October 2025 that Brennan allegedly "knowingly made false statements during his transcribed interview" in May 2023 and that his testimony on the 2016 investigation into Trump included "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact."

In the House Judiciary Committee's criminal referral, Jordan wrote, "Brennan falsely denied that the CIA relied on the discredited Steele dossier in drafting the post-election Intelligence Community Assessment."

Brennan previously accused the Trump administration in December of attempting to judge shop, a practice used to file a lawsuit in a court with a judge likely to give a favorable ruling. The former CIA director asked U.S. Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida to prevent U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed the classified documents case against Trump in 2024, from being involved in future proceedings.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 16:20