Key Events This Week: Central Banks Galore

This week is all about central banks in general, and specifically the Fed decision on Wednesday which will see the continuation of the US rate cutting cycle that started exactly a year ago (two months before the election) and got as far as one 50bps and two 25bps cuts (after Trump won), with the last being 9 months ago now (after Trump won, again).

The Fed is not the only big central bank meeting this week with the Bank of Canada also meeting on Wednesday with the BoE and Norges Bank on Thursday, and the BoJ on Friday being the other main ones deciding on rates. Markets are pricing in an 85% probability of a Canadian cut, a 61% of a Norwegian one but minuscule probabilities of a change in Japan or the UK. Overall, Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid calculates that there are 16 global central banks deciding on rates this week with Brazil and Indonesia on Wednesday the largest of the rest, with markets expecting both to stay on hold.

Other highlights through the week are speeches from the likes of Lagarde and Schnabel from the ECB today; US retail sales, industrial production, and the NAHB index, alongside the UK employment data, Canadian CPI, the German ZEW survey and a 20yr UST auction tomorrow; US housing starts and permits, and UK inflation on Wednesday; the US Philly Fed, jobless claims and a 10yr TIPS auction on Thursday; and Japanese CPI, German PPI and UK, French and Canadian retail sales on Friday (full day by day calendar of events below).

Previewing the Fed now: markets are pricing in 26bps worth of cuts and haven't ever gone beyond 29bps (just after payrolls 10 days ago) for this meeting. So, assuming no big surprises, this FOMC is all about the signalling via the statement, Powell's press conference, and the SEP. Last week, DB economists changed their view to 75bps worth of cuts this year, 25bps at each of the remaining meetings. This path would leave the fed funds rate at 3.5-3.75% by year end, consistent with their view of neutral. The weaker labor market data and slightly lower inflation than they anticipated has led them to this view, but they don't expect further cuts in 2026 although the risks are on the downside, and much might depend on how the Fed leadership and board composition evolves. Markets are pricing in 141bps of cuts by next December, so significantly above DB's forecasts, with Goldman among the most vocal banks expecting continued rates cuts next year. 

Taking a closer look, DB economists believe that the median dot of the updated SEP will likely show 75bps of total reductions for 2025, 25bps more than in June. However, there is likely to be differing views within the committee. On the dovish side there could be three calling for a 50bp cut and possibly one or two voting for no change. It has the potential to be the first meeting where three governors dissent since 1988, and the first with dissents on both sides since September 2019.

Powell’s discussion of the labor market is likely to sound materially different compared to the July meeting and closer to his communications at Jackson Hole, but he could still allude to some of the slowdown in job gains reflecting supply-side dynamics driven by immigration policies. His tone on inflation will likely be more dovish as although August CPI was somewhat hotter than expected the details from PPI and CPI point to a more subdued reading on core PCE later this month, likely in the 20-24bps range. Overall the meeting's most important theme will be what it signals going forward. 

Courtesy of DB, here is a day-by-day calendar of events

Monday September 15

• Data: US September Empire manufacturing index, China August retail sales, industrial production, home prices, property investment, Germany August wholesale price index, Italy July trade balance, general government debt, Eurozone July trade balance, Canada August existing home sales, July manufacturing sales
• Central banks: ECB's Lagarde, Kocher and Schnabel speak

Tuesday September 16

• Data: US August retail sales, industrial production, import price index, export price index, capacity utilisation, September New York Fed services business activity, NAHB housing market index, July business inventories, UK July average weekly earnings, unemployment rate, August jobless claims change, Japan July Tertiary industry index, Germany September Zew survey, Eurozone September Zew survey, July industrial production, Q2 labour costs, Canada August CPI, housing starts
• Central banks: ECB's Escriva speaks
• Auctions: US 20-yr Bond (reopening, $13bn)

Wednesday September 17

• Data: US August building permits, housing starts, UK August CPI, RPI, July house price index, Japan August trade balance, Canada July international securities transactions, New Zealand Q2 GDP
• Central banks: Fed decision, BoC decision, ECB's Lagarde, Muller, Escriva, Cipollone and Nagel speak
• Earnings: General Mills

Thursday September 18

• Data: US September Philadelphia Fed business outlook, August leading index, July total net TIC flows, initial jobless claims, Japan July core machine orders, Italy July current account balance, ECB July current account, Eurozone July construction output, Australia August labour report
• Central banks: BoE decision, Norges Bank decision, ECB's Lagarde, Guindos, Escriva, Nagel and Schnabel speak
• Earnings: FedEx, Lennar
• Auctions: US 10-yr TIPS (reopening, $19bn)

Friday September 19

• Data: UK September GfK consumer confidence, August retail sales, public finances, Japan August national CPI, Germany August PPI, France September manufacturing confidence, August retail sales, Canada July retail sales
• Central banks: BoJ decision

Looking at just the US, Goldman writes that the key economic data releases this week are the retail sales report on Tuesday and the Philly Fed manufacturing index on Thursday. The September FOMC meeting is this week. The post-meeting statement will be released at 2:00 PM ET, followed by Chair Powell’s press conference at 2:30 PM.

Monday, September 15 

• 08:30 AM Empire State manufacturing survey, September (consensus 4.9, last 11.9)

Tuesday, September 16 

• 08:30 AM Retail sales, August (GS +0.2%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.5%); Retail sales ex-auto, August (GS +0.3%, consensus +0.4%, last +0.3%); Retail sales ex-auto & gas, August (GS +0.3%, consensus +0.5%, last +0.2%); Core retail sales, August (GS +0.3%, consensus +0.4%, last +0.5%): We estimate core retail sales increased 0.3% in August (ex-autos, gasoline, and building materials; month-over-month SA). Our forecast reflects sequentially slower measures of card spending growth. We estimate headline retail sales increased 0.2%, reflecting a decline in auto sales.
• 08:30 AM Import price index, August (last +0.4%): Export price index, August (last +0.1%)
• 09:15 AM Industrial production, August (GS -0.1%, consensus -0.1%, last -0.1%); Manufacturing production, August (GS -0.2%, consensus -0.3%, last flat); Capacity utilization, August (GS 77.4%, consensus 77.4%, last 77.5%): We estimate industrial production declined by 0.1% in August, as declines in non-auto manufacturing, natural gas, electricity and mining production outweighed a modest rebound in auto production. We estimate capacity utilization edged down to 77.4%.
• 10:00 AM Business inventories, July (consensus +0.2%, last +0.2%)
• 10:00 AM NAHB housing market index, September (last 32)

Wednesday, September 17 

• 08:30 AM Housing starts, August (GS -3.0%, consensus -3.7%, last 5.2%); Building permits, August (consensus +0.6%, last -2.2%)
• 02:00 PM FOMC statement, September 16-17 meeting: We expect the FOMC to lower the fed funds rate by 25bp at its September meeting, followed by 25bp cuts at the October and December meetings and two additional cuts in 2026 for a terminal rate of 3-3.25%. We expect the statement to acknowledge the softening in the labor market but do not expect a change to the policy guidance or a nod to an October cut. We expect the median dot to show just two cuts in total in 2025 to 3.875%, though by a narrow margin, two more cuts in 2026 to 3.375%, one cut in 2027 to 3.125%, no change in 2028, and an unchanged longer-run or neutral rate of 3%. In the 2025 economic projections, we expect the median to continue to show 1.4% GDP growth, a 4.5% unemployment rate, and 3.1% core PCE inflation, all close to or in line with our own forecasts.

Thursday, September 18 

• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended September 13 (GS 236k, consensus 240k, last 263k): Continuing jobless claims, week ended September 6 (last 1,939k): After fraudulent unemployment insurance applications in Texas drove the national series sharply higher last week, we forecast a retrenchment in initial claims to their two-week-ago level of 236k.
• 08:30 AM Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index, September (GS 2.5, consensus 3.0, last -0.3)

Friday, September 19 

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled. 

Source: DB, Goldman

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 10:05

"Trump Inherited A Turd Of An Economy" - Ed Dowd Warns Of 'Panic Rate-Cut Cycle'

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com had a storied Wall Street career.  He got out of Enron and Lucent long before they crashed and burned. 

A few of the many other more recent correct calls Dowd has made include:  interest rates topping and heading lower (they did), housing tanking and going lower (happening now), massive fraud propping up the Biden economy with illegal immigration (20 million brought in by Biden Admin) and the BLS just restated job creation numbers for 12 months ending in March. 

The restatement revealed an eye popping 911,000 jobs were fake.  Dowd said just after the 2024 election that “Trump inherited a turd of an economy.”  Now, Dowd says, “Trump has to deal with a turd of a disaster.” 

On the phony jobs number alone, Dowd says,

“You could say this is statistical fraud or bureaucratic incompetence.  Let’s say it’s both.  It such an egregious 7 standard deviation. 

3.4 standard deviation is the chance of lightning hitting you at least once in your lifetime.  It’s not likely.  7 deviation is suggestive of fraud–full stop.”

All the frauds propping up the Biden economy isn’t causing inflation now–just the opposite.  Dowd says,

“The housing market is rolling over because people can’t afford them.  What was keeping a floor in the housing market were rents by the illegal aliens.  That’s all going the wrong way.  Trump is deporting people, and we closed down the border.  Our housing report that we put out a month ago . . . all the indicators are rolling over, and we are going to have a housing recession.  We are going to see inflation go lower because housing is 36% of the economy.  We expect to see a sub 2% print on inflation.”

What about the Fed cutting interest rates next week? 

Dowd says, “They cut rates in the Great Financial Crisis starting in 2007.  Our stock market did not bottom until 2009.  This is the beginning of what I think is the ‘panic rate cut cycle.’"

"We are going to see the Fed cutting rates all the way down into this asset deflation that we see coming in this panic rate cut cycle. 

Cutting into slowing growth does not cause assets to reinflate.  They are behind the curve, and they are going to be cutting all the way down as we deflate.”

Dowd still likes gold and says his clients are acquiring gold and land, not crypto. 

He also says there are big problems coming in the not-so-distant future from China and Europe. 

Dowd says his forecast of the world going into a “very deep recession” will come true soon.

There is much more in the 54-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with money manager and investment expert Ed Dowd, author of the updated book called “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023” for 9.13.25. 

Dowd contends the “sudden deaths” and disabilities are still happening at epidemic levels.  Now, there are 6 million Americans permanently disabled from the CV19 injections!!

*  *  *

Just like Ed Dowd - Sharp, Solid, Incredibly effective

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 09:33

Watch: Drone Erupts Over Israel's Southern Airport, Now Under Repeat Attack

This weekend saw a lot of drone action out of Yemen against Israel. This included Houthi military leadership claiming that three drones struck Ramon Airport in the southern city of Eilat, while a fourth allegedly hit a military installation in the Negev region.

The Houthis claimed all drones successfully reached their targets, but dramatic footage was published from Israel of the inbound drone attack, with at least one being blown up during a daytime raid - perhaps contradicting the Houthi claims. For example, below is the moment a Houthi drone erupts over near Ramon Airport.

Moment Houthi drone ERUPTS over Israel

IDF says UAV shot down near Ramon Airport, which had been hit by drone last week pic.twitter.com/fWkBIXK5OJ

— RT (@RT_com) September 14, 2025

Israeli media indicated that sirens were activated in the nearby town of Be'er Ora following the launch of an interceptor missile by the Iron Dome system, which successfully destroyed the large UAV, still leaving concerns over falling debris.

Israeli leadership did not acknowledge any destructive drone impact at Ramon. This is unlike last week, where there was clear damage left at the southern airport, after at least one drone made it past Israel's anti-air defenses.

The airport has since opened up after making repairs, only to see itself once again come under Houthi assault. An elderly man had been injured in that prior attack.

Israel's YNet on Sunday reported that "four days after the strike on Ramon Airport and less than 24 hours after the Israeli military bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, the rebels are continuing to launch drones toward Israel."

Last Wednesday say another IDF retaliatory attack on Yemen, which it said were Houthi military camps where operatives were gathered, as well as a strike the headquarters of the terror group’s propaganda division, and a fuel depot. Scores were reported injured and killed in this latest aerial raid.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera points out that last week Israel attacked six countries, among them Qatar (targeting the Hamas leaders in Doha) - which is a first. 

"The attack was part of a wider wave of Israeli strikes extending beyond its immediate borders, and marked the sixth country attacked in just 72 hours and the seventh since the start of this year," the publication writes.

This included strikes on Lebanon and Syria as well, at a moment Washington is pressuring the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah. But so long as the Israeli strikes on south Lebanon continue, Hezbollah says it is not gong to disarm. The Houthis are also refusing to relent in their Gaza-related aggression on Israel and in the Red Sea.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 09:25

Was The Current Madness Birthed In The University?

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

America is currently sick.

The young conservative organizer and media personality Charlie Kirk was just murdered in a political assassination by a 22-year-old ‘anti-fascist’ and trans advocate, Tyler Robinson. As planned, he eliminated the most astute and successful political activist in a generation. Indeed, Kirk may well have ensured that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by not just increasing his youth vote by 6 percent since 2020 but, more importantly, by margins in the swing states of 15-24 percent, ensuring Trump’s victory.

No sooner was he killed than thousands on left-wing social media erupted in celebration—among them scores of teachers and professors. Their venom was eerily reminiscent of their earlier canonization of left-wing murderer Luigi Mangione. Recall, Mangione was the spoiled nepo baby who lethally ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thereby, he became an icon to the Left as a social justice warrior fighting the evil capitalist system, which had so enriched himself and his own family.

Such utter moral bankruptcy was on display as well by the social media praise of Palestinian activist Elias Rodriguez (“Free Palestine”), after he brutally murdered a young Jewish couple at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. Rodriguez supposedly showed the world how to deal with Zionists—reifying the hateful rhetoric that pervades the modern campus.

Was that ghoulishness confined to such anonymous left-wing nuts and fringe trolls?

Not really.

MSNBC’s guest “analyst,” Matthew Dowd, casually raised an asinine suggestion that the lethal shot came from a Kirk supporter firing off a round. And then, in Pavlovian fashion, he blamed the assassination of Kirk—on Kirk himself—for being an unapologetic “divisive” activist.

Dowd, who was subsequently fired by an embarrassed MSNBC president, only took his cue from anchorwoman, the untouchable Katy Tur, who first editorialized Kirk as a “divisive” figure. By her logic, would that mean that, say, a Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani would also be divisive? What does Joe Biden, by Tur’s logic, deserve after labeling half the country as “semi-fascists” or reducing them to “garbage,” “chumps,” and “dregs”—or boasting he’d like to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up?

Does Tur mean that anyone deemed “divisive” then should naturally expect what befell Charlie Kirk?

Yet, in truth, Charlie Kirk was an upbeat, happy warrior not unlike William F. Buckley in his youth, willing to politely debate political opponents without anger and bias.

The multimillionaire socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, who once claimed that the Trump “dictatorship” was worse than what she had fled from in her native Somalia, claimed the slain Kirk mourners were “full of sh-t” in a long, incoherent rant. Such creepy examples could be easily multiplied, such as the accustomed lunacy of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She now claimed that those who block gun control legislation could not blame others for inciting the violence: i.e., Charlie Kirk should have expected to reap what he sowed.

A dense AOC seems clueless that not even her fellow leftists seriously advocate confiscating bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifles of the sort that the assassin used to kill Kirk. Perhaps it might be wiser not to try to hunt down and round up 500 million guns in America, but rather to enforce existing unenforced gun laws that prohibit felons, the mentally ill, and domestic terrorists (“anti-fascists”) from possessing them.

Just prior to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a video had been issued of a 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, brutally murdered on public transit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her throat was slashed by one Decarlos Brown, an African-American, 14-time felon, recently and prematurely released from custody.

The horror followed the now familiar left-wing script. The left-wing mayor, Vi Lyles, immediately tried to stop the release of the transit video, lest it cause anyone or anything to be blamed. Then she followed with the usual DEI boilerplate that excuses evil: do not judge the homeless, arresting people solves nothing, and the murder was merely “tragic,” as if there is no culpability, just bad luck or fate.

As expected, most of the media suffocated the murder story. After all, it upset the dominant racial narrative that must remain unquestioned. We have been told for decades that systemically racist Americans prey on victimized blacks, and thus, Ibram X. Kendi-style antiracism—de facto stigmatizing and demonizing whites—is needed to stop racism.

The left knows that black males, age 15-40, commit well over 50 percent of the most violent crimes in America, while comprising about 3 percent of the population. They know it and privately navigate accordingly, but few speak of it, and none seem to have answers to it. So the topic remains taboo.

Any “tragedy” that highlights that fact—such as the murder of Ms. Zarutska or the recent brutal strangling of Auburn retired professor Julie Schnuelle by a young black man with a felony record who was released back into the public—must be suppressed. So too we rarely hear of the recent murder of the elderly Queens couple by the alleged career felon and released criminal Jamel McGriff. He robbed them, he tied them up, he murdered them, and then he torched their home. And on and on the crime continues, the narrative continues, and we dare not say a word.

In our post-Daniel Penny world, three young black people, sitting just feet away from Zarutska, witnessed Decarlos Brown slit her throat—and did nothing. Perhaps they were afraid, we were told. Perhaps, we were advised, no first aid could have staunched such horrific wounds. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Nonetheless, when Zarutska was staring out at eternity in her death throes, bewildered that someone or something had just ended her life, none of the three lifted a finger to help her—or even console her in her final moments. Instead, the killer, blood dripping from his person, calmly walked off the train unmolested. And even then, in his absence, there was no effort of any of the nearby witnesses to tend to the dying Zarutska. Instead, they sidestepped her and left her behind on the train as she lay gasping her last breaths.

The killer, Decarlos Brown? He can be heard on the video mumbling twice, “I got that white girl.” Yet we were told either that the video was doctored, or too unclear, or irrelevant. If accurate, it demolished the media elite’s insistence that Decarlos Brown had not a racial thought in his mind.

Instead, we were to listen to media analyst Van Jones pontificate that the late Charlie Kirk should have been ashamed for connecting Decarlos Brown to racist hatred. Perhaps Van Jones should reconsider. He should review the entire narrative of how Zarutska found herself a target of a killer. Brown was a 14-time felon. He was out on cashless bail. The magistrate Teresa Stokes, who freed him, had no law degree. Such a “judge” had never taken, much less passed, a bar exam.

She owned an out-of-state alternative treatment center and was involved in another local one. In a prior sane world, magistrates had law degrees. They had been certified as competent by the bar exams. They followed conflict-of-interest protocols that prohibited them from even indirectly profiting from their judicial decisions.

But again, that narrative too is passé, given the power of diversity, equity, and inclusion to exempt norms and protocols for the supposed greater collective good.

From where does all this hatred, violence, and moral vacuity arise? Why did the shooter inscribe his bullets with “anti-fascist” messaging, cruel taunts, and trans jargon?

Is the hatred caused by the media, who talk about toxic “whiteness” nonstop? Is it the collateral damage from the racial obsessions of a Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid, and septuagenarian Al Sharpton, now ending his racialist career where he started it?

Or is the promulgator the Democratic Party and the Left, out of power, impotent, and angry that their superior intelligence and morality are not properly appreciated by 51 percent of the people? Who put a photoshopped Trump on a New Republic cover as Hitler?

If a General Milley (“now I realize he’s a total fascist”) or a General Kelly (“certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure”) calls a current or ex-president a fascist, and presidential candidate Kamala Harris agrees (“a president…who admires dictators and is a fascist”), then does an unhinged 22-year-old “anti-fascist” college student feel the popular culture might approve of his own efforts in dealing with “fascist” Trump supporters?

Milley, Kelly, Harris, and the rest can call anyone a fascist but without ever defining the term.

Did Trump suspend immigration law to let in 12 million illegals? Did he invite into the DOJ or White House the prosecutors Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, and the revolving door Michael Colangelo to coordinate lawfare against an ex-president?

Is Trump ignoring the improper usurpation of executive power by left-wing lower-court judges or instead appealing their decisions through lawful channels?

Did he hire a foreign national to undermine his presidential rival with a fake dossier?

Did he round up “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people to warp the election?

Did he pardon his entire criminally minded family and then cover it up by in absentia outsourcing to his aides the pardoning of hundreds of criminals through an autopen? So please define fascism before smearing a president and lowering the bar of the acceptable.

What is the point of the past violent braggadocio of Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, posing with a baseball bat, or huffing that he will take the “fight” against the Trump agenda “to the streets?” Was he merely following on the earlier example of Rep. Maxine Waters, who urged supporters to whip up a crowd and physically confront Trump officials in stores and restaurants?

Why are congresswomen kickboxing and punching the screen as they video their seriousness to assault Trump?

What does now-campaigning California Governor Gavin Newsom mean when he promises, “It’s not about whether we play hardball anymore—it’s about how we play hardball. We are going to fight back, and we’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.” What would a potential third assassin think of that promise?

If the governor of the largest state in the union wants to bloody the face of the President of the United States or physically attack his opponents (“We’re gonna punch these sons of b‑‑‑‑es in the mouth”), then might lesser underlings and sympathizers try to outdo that?

Or, finally, is the culprit for the madness found ultimately in the elite university? Who, after all, mainstreamed the idea of racial re-segregation in dorms and graduation ceremonies and taught America that racial essentialism is part of the new tribal America?

Who ignored court rulings and civil rights legislation in their arrogance to recalibrate admissions by race? Who taught the anti-Jewish assassin Elias Rodriguez his hatred of Israel and his pro-Hamas zealotry, and who influenced Luigi Mangione, an honors graduate, to despise “capitalist” CEOs?

Where did the practice of identifying one’s pronouns at the end of memos start, or demanding that biological males could compete in women’s sports, and demonizing anyone who objected that there were still two, not three, biological sexes?

Where did the critical race theory and critical legal theory that empowered Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Cashless Bail, and all the laws that assured the public that thefts less than $950 were not really thefts?

From where did the new anti-Semitism come, and so strangely after the slaughter of October 7—if not from the campus?

Where else in America were young Jews fleeing to a library with the mob pounding on the windows? Where else are Jews roughed up by a thug who is subsequently given an award by their university? Where did demonstrations arise on behalf of those who murdered 1,200 on October 7?

Why, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, are so many teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats so eager to gloat over and cheer his death? Who taught them that?

Are universities critical to America’s prosperity and security now only in terms of the sciences, math, engineering, and medical schools?

As for the humanities? They scarcely exist at the elite universities as we once knew them. Either de facto or literally, they have been overwhelmed and distorted by endless studies-courses, DEI radicalism, 90 percent leftist faculties, and suppression of free thought and free expression.

Where did the envisioning of violent crime as the fault of a flawed society, the institutionalization of modern racialism, chauvinism, and essentialism, and the empowerment of militant transgenderism that in so many insidious ways has filtered throughout society—if not originally birthed in the university—come from?

Those sins of commission are force-multiplied by those of omission. Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education.

The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that.

Sadly, in all these recent horrors, the ideology behind them—the premise that either birthed or appeased them—was birthed in modern higher education.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 09:00

Futures Rise To New Record High As Musk Trade Sends Tesla Soaring

Equity futures are at fresh record highs, erasing a modest dip earlier in the session when a probe found that Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws in China in a 2020 deal. That killed the mood at the start of a big week, with the Fed expected to make the first of a series of rate cuts, however the mood was promptly lifted again just after 6am ET when Elon Musk bought $1BN in TSLA stock sending the market cap soaring by over $100BN and lifting stocks to new all time highs. As of 8:00am ET, S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures were higher by 0.2%. In premarket trading, Nvidia shares fell as much as 2.9% after China said it violated antitrust regulations after its acquisition of Mellanox. The surprise announcement came as US and Chinese officials headed into a second day of wide-ranging negotiations in Madrid over tariffs. Mag7 names are mixed with AAPL, AMZN, and GOOG up 90bp-108bp; TSLA soared 8% after Musk purchased $1bn of stock, his first open market purchase since February 2020. European stocks advanced in a rally led by luxury shares. US / China trade talks enter a second day today. Commodities are mixed with Energy up and Ags / Metals down. Today’s macro data focus is Empire Mfg ahead of tomorrow's Retail Sales and Weds' Fed meeting. 

In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are higher: Tesla (TSLA) surges 7% after Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of Tesla shares on Sept. 12, according to a filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission. Nvidia (NVDA) slips 1.6% after China ruled that the company violated anti-monopoly laws with its 2020 deal to acquire Mellanox. Other peers are all green (Alphabet +1.2%, Microsoft unch, Apple +1%, Amazon +1.3%, Meta Platforms +0.2%).

• Auto and industrial chipmakers such as Texas Instruments (TXN) and ON Semiconductor (ON) slip after China launched two investigations targeting the US chip sector as trade talks between the two countries went on in Madrid. Texas Instruments -2%, ON Semiconductor -2%
• Corteva Inc. (CTVA) rises 1% after the WSJ reported that the company is considering separating its seed and pesticide businesses into separate companies,
• Hain Celestial (HAIN) falls 14% after the food company reported net sales for the fourth quarter that missed the average analyst estimate.
• Hims & Hers Health (HIMS) falls 2.8% after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said a widely watched TV commercial by the telehealth firm earlier this year breached the agency’s regulations.
• Smurfit WestRock (SW) shares are up 3.7% after UBS initiates coverage for the packaging company with a buy rating on “significant” organic growth potential.
• VF Corp. (VFC) gains 3% after agreeing to sell the Dickies brand to brand management firm Bluestar Alliance for $600 million in cash.

Nvidia slipped 2.1% in premarket trading after Chinese regulators said that the chipmaker had violated anti-monopoly laws. Tesla rose nearly 6%. The Nvidia announcement landed as US and Chinese officials entered a second day of trade talks in Madrid, ratcheting up the pressure on Washington during sensitive negotiations.

“At this moment of the cycle, bad news just doesn’t stick,” said David Kruk, head of trading at La Financiere de l’Echiquier. “We’re about to enter a cycle of rate cuts with strong EPS growth, that’s a really great cocktail.”

The Fed won’t be the only major central bank in focus. Policy decisions from the Bank of Canada on Wednesday, the Bank of England on Thursday, and the Bank of Japan at week’s end will round out a packed calendar for half of the world’s 10 most-traded currencies. The key question this week is whether the Fed will push back against market wagers on a string of cuts extending into next year when officials gather on Wednesday. Traders are almost fully pricing reductions at each of the next three meetings, betting the Fed will lean toward supporting a softening job market even as inflation remains above target. 

Meanwhile, options traders aren’t betting on volatility to resurface this week, even with Friday’s $5 trillion triple-witching expiration looming as well. Instead, the spotlight will also rest on upcoming employment data for hints on how fast and deep the Fed will have to cut. Options markets are pricing in a 0.78% move for the US nonfarm payrolls report Oct. 3 and 0.72% for Wednesday’s Fed rate decision. 

“The week ahead for risk could be a bumpy ride, especially if the Fed deliver a message that lands hawkish,” said Michael Brown, research strategist at Pepperstone Group Ltd. “I still see the path of least resistance as leading higher, with economic and earnings growth solid, calmer tones prevailing on trade, and a looser monetary stance helping to juice things along.”

Tesla shares jumped as much as 7.3% in premarket trading. If the gains carry over into the regular trading session, the stock will return to positive territory for 2025, having recovered from a 45% decline as of early April. Musk, 54, last bought Tesla stock in the open market in February 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. He offloaded more than $20 billion of the company’s shares in 2022, the year he acquired Twitter.

Europe's Stoxx 600 is up 0.4% with most sub-indexes in the green. Luxury names LVMH and Kering lift the CAC 40, up 0.9%, with French and Italian stocks outperforming peers. Sainsbury shares gained as much as 6.3% after terminating talks to sell its Argos unit, while AstraZeneca shares fell after Handelsbanken cut the stock to hold from buy. Turkish stocks, bonds and lira climb after a key court decision on the opposition party was adjourned.  Here are the biggest movers Monday:

• Rubis shares jumped as much as 9.6% in Paris trading, to the highest since June 2024, after Bloomberg reported on Friday that CVC Capital Partners and Trafigura are said to be among potential bidders for the French fuel distributor
• Dassault Aviation gained as much as 4.2% while Saab falls as much as 4.5% after the Times of India newspaper reported the Indian Air Force has proposed buying 114 “Made in India” Rafale fighter jets
• French equities extended gains, outperforming broader European peers, as investors remained focused on the political outlook. Fitch Ratings downgraded the country’s credit rating last week
• Sainsbury shares rose as much as 6.3%, following a weekend in which the UK supermarket chain said it was in talks with Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com to sell its Argos unit, before terminating discussions a day later
• Flow Traders advanced as much as 7.4%, the most in seven months, after being upgraded by analysts at Oddo BHF as they raised their EPS estimates and said the trading platform should deliver another good quarter
• Lundbergforetagen rose as much as 3.4%, the most since April, after Swedish business daily Dagens Industri named the Swedish investment group its stock pick of the week, saying it will be a solid performer in the coming years
• AO World surged as much as 15% after the electrical retailer upgraded the mid-point of its annual profit guidance and launching its first-ever share buyback
• AstraZeneca fell as much as 3.9%, the most since Aug. 1, after Handelsbanken cut its recommendation on the drugmaker to hold from buy, noting the bank’s outlook for $76 billion in 2030 sales is lower than the company’s target of $80 billion
• Orsted fell as much as 7.6%, before paring the losses, after the Danish wind-farm developer announced the hotly-awaited terms for its DKK60 billion ($9.4 billion) rights issue
• Virbac shares dropped as much as 9.3%, the most in more than five months, after the animal health company reported a decrease in adjusted net income for the first half-year. Analysts also noted the drop in gross margin
• S4 Capital fell as much as 14%, hitting a record low, after the advertising firm’s first-half revenues fell, margins contracted and it trimmed like-for-like net revenue guidance for the full year

Earlier in the session, Asian equities extend September’s impressive performance as Chinese tech stocks continue pushing higher. The ChiNext index rallies more than 2% on CATL surge and Hang Seng Tech Index jumps more than 1%. Mainland indexes are in the green despite softer Chinese data. Kospi ekes out a modest gain after South Korea scraps capital gains tax plans on stocks. Taiex and ASX 200 indexes nurse small losses. 

In rates, treasuries are mixed as US session gets under way after plying small ranges during Asia session and European morning, keeping yields within a basis point of Friday’s closing levels. Bunds and gilts outperform, with French bonds in focus after Friday’s downgrade by Fitch. US session has few calendar events Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s 20-year bond auction and Wednesday’s Federal Reserve policy announcement. US 10-year near 4.07% is less than 1bp higher on the day with bunds and gilts in the sector outperforming by 2bp and 2.5bp; French bonds also outperform, unwinding losses that followed the Fitch downgrade. French bonds rise broadly in line with European peers despite Fitch downgrading the country’s credit rating.

In FX, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index edges lower, trading in a narrow range, while sterling outperforms, trading at the highest since July. The pound led major currencies higher against the dollar. The yen strengthens to around 147.40/USD

In commodities, oil prices nudge higher with Brent trading above $67.40 barrel. Gold steady at around $3,641/oz.

The US economic data slate includes September Empire manufacturing at 8:30am New York time. Ahead this week are August retail sales, industrial production and housing starts.

Market Snapshot

• S&P 500 mini +0.3%
• Nasdaq 100 mini +0.2%,
• Russell 2000 mini +0.5%
• Stoxx Europe 600 +0.3%,
• DAX +0.3%,
• CAC 40 +0.9%
• 10-year Treasury yield little changed at 4.06%
• VIX +0.4 points at 15.17
• Bloomberg Dollar Index -0.1% at 1196.95,
• euro +0.1% at $1.1746
• WTI crude +0.3% at $62.88/barrel

Top Overnight News

• Trump said the Fed chair is incompetent and is hurting the housing market, while Trump added that he has three people he likes a lot for Fed Chair.
• Trump's administration on Sunday renewed its request to an appeals court to fire Fed Governor Cook.
• Trump said on Monday he would call a national emergency and federalize Washington, D.C. after Mayor Muriel Bowser said its police would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. CNBC
• Treasury Secretary Bessent was reported on Friday to have interviewed 4 of the 11 Fed Chair candidates, and had interviewed BlackRock's Rieder, who was said to have climbed the ranks of contenders for the Fed Chair role, according to Bloomberg.
• OpenAI plans to share 8% of its revenue with Microsoft (MSFT), while it is expected to gain USD 50bln from cutting the revenue share with Microsoft and partners, according to The Information. In relevant news, xAI is cutting staff by about 500 workers with the Co. laying off about a third of its data annotation team.
• Vaccine advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected this week to consider softening or eliminating recommendations for some routine childhood immunizations — which doctors say could significantly depress vaccination rates and trigger more infectious disease outbreaks. Politico
• US companies reportedly put the brakes on hiring after Trump’s tariffs hit, with industries most exposed to the increased costs due to trade wars launching a wave of job cuts, according to FT.
• China’s economic growth falls short of expectations in Aug, including retail sales at +3.4% (vs. the Street +3.8% and down from +3.7% in Jul) and industrial production at +5.2% (vs. the Street +5.6% and down from +5.7% in Jul), sparking speculation that the gov’t could expand stimulus going forward. RTRS
• China said Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws with its 2020 acquisition of networking gear maker Mellanox. Nvidia shares fell premarket (NVDA -2% premkt). BBG
• Axios reported on Friday that many of the claims were fake regarding the massive spike in jobless claims on Thursday that heightened labor market fears and was “a result of attempted fraudulent unemployment filings in Texas.”
• South Korea's top trade envoy, Yeo Han-koo, is heading to the United States on Monday for follow-up tariff negotiations, the trade ministry said, as the countries struggle to overcome obstacles to finalise a trade deal agreed in July. BBG
• Indian trade negotiators are scheduled to visit the U.S. this week as the two countries try to get their relationship back on track after weeks of heated rhetoric and 50% tariffs on India. WSJ
• A Russian drone entered Romania’s airspace and was tracked by its air force for nearly an hour before leaving, the country’s defense minister said on Sunday, condemning Moscow’s second breach of Nato territory within a week. FT
• Gold held near a record and MLIV expects it’ll remain attractive amid potential Fed easing, a weaker dollar, ETF inflows and central bank buying. BBG
• TSLA +6% in pre... Elon Musk has purchased about $1 billion worth of Tesla shares on Sept. 12, according to a filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission. The purchases coincided with Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm speaking with Bloomberg News about the merits of a pay package for Musk that could be worth upwards of $1 trillion if the company achieves a series of ambitious milestones linked to market value and performance. BBG

Corporate News

• Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of the carmaker’s shares, according to a regulatory filing.
• China ruled that Nvidia Corp. violated anti-monopoly laws with a high-profile 2020 deal, ratcheting up the pressure on Washington during sensitive trade negotiations.
• Orsted A/S plans to sell new shares at a 67% discount as the offshore wind developer works to rebuild investor confidence after a bet on the US market went wrong.
• Banco Sabadell SA’s chairman called on rival BBVA SA to significantly increase its offer if it wants it to be considered, less than a week after rejecting a $18 billion takeover bid the board said was too low.
• Swiss lawmakers will on Monday vote on a second attempt to delay new rules for bank capital quality which are set to lift UBS Group AG’s capital requirements by some $3 billion.
• ANZ Group Holdings Ltd. will pay a A$240 million ($160 million) fine after admitting misconduct across its institutional and retail divisions, the culmination of a months-long investigation by the corporate watchdog into one of the country’s biggest lenders.
• Singapore’s GIC Pte is in talks to sell its stake in US landlord Yes! Communities Inc. to Brookfield Asset Management in what could be one of the biggest exits for the sovereign wealth fund in years, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Trade/Tariffs

• US Treasury Secretary Bessent said the US and China made good progress on technical details; Chinese counterparts have an "aggressive ask"; if there is no TikTok agreement, then it will not affect overall relations. Not willing to sacrifice national security.
• USTR Greer said they are close to resolving the TikTok issue with China. Wants a good relationship to be maintained with China.
• US President Trump posted on Truth Social that "When Foreign Companies who are building extremely complex products, machines, and various other “things,” come into the United States with massive Investments, I want them to bring their people of expertise for a period of time to teach and train our people how to make these very unique and complex products, as they phase out of our Country, and back into their land."
• US President Trump said China is paying a lot in tariffs and talks with China in Spain are going well, while he also commented that they are still negotiating on TikTok and may let it die, but it depends on China.
• China’s Commerce Ministry said it is to immediately open an antidumping investigation into certain US analogue chips and began an anti-discrimination investigation into US measures against China in the integrated circuit sector.
• US Treasury said talks with China regarding TikTok and trade began in Madrid on Sunday, while talks will resume today.
• Wall Street executives working on the TikTok deal said President Trump will announce another operating extension this week as the last one concludes on September 17th, although this could change, while the fate of the app is tied to the US-China trade talks and China is using it for leverage, according to Fox’s Gasparino who cited sources that noted it is easier for Trump to just extend the deadline and continue with negotiations.
• US official said the Chinese delegation came into the talks in Madrid with a fundamental misunderstanding of the US' position regarding TikTok.
• The lack of progress in US talks with China on tariffs and fentanyl is said to have reduced the chances of a Beijing summit, and it is more likely that a Trump-Xi meeting will be a lower-profile event at the APEC forum in South Korea during October, according to FT. Furthermore, it was noted that China had made a formal invitation to President Trump for a state visit to Beijing, but the White House has yet to respond amid difficulties in making headway on trade and fentanyl.
• US added 32 entities to the restricted trade list on Friday, including 23 from China, while other entities added to the list were based in countries including India, Iran, Turkey and the UAE, according to the Federal Register.
• South Korea’s Finance Ministry declined to confirm specific measures currently in discussion regarding an FX swap with the US, while it is in talks with the US to minimise any impact on the FX market from the US investment package. In relevant news, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said US Deputy Secretary of State Landau expressed regret over the recent immigration raid on South Korean workers.
• Indian trade official said the next round of India-EU trade talks is scheduled for 6-10 October in Brussels.

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks traded mixed with the region somewhat cautious ahead of this week's flurry of central bank updates and as participants digested disappointing Chinese activity data, while Japanese participants were away for a holiday. ASX 200 marginally declined amid weakness in the healthcare, mining and financial sectors, in which the latter was pressured by losses in Big 4 bank ANZ after it admitted to widespread misconduct related to incorrectly reporting bond trading data and agreed to pay AUD 240mln in penalties. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were kept afloat with the Hong Kong benchmark lifted by tech strength after China announced an antidumping investigation into certain US analogue chips and began an anti-discrimination investigation into US measures against China in the integrated circuit sector, while US and Chinese officials also began talks on TikTok and trade in Madrid on Sunday. Nonetheless, the gains were limited as participants also digested disappointing activity data.

Top Asian News

• China's stats bureau said the economic operation was generally steady in August and they are facing many uncertainties, while it was noted that the external environment is very severe and uncertainties are rising, and some firms are having difficulties in operations. NBS said China will expand domestic demand and boost consumption and promote a rebound in prices, as well as stated that employment is generally steady with jobless rates expected to ease as college graduates find jobs. It also stated that China will further stabilise the economy and stabilise employment, and that more efforts are needed to support the property sector, but expects Q3 economic operations to maintain a stable trend as macro policies gain traction.
• China MIIT aims for vehicle sales to rise around 3% Y/Y to about 32.3mln this year, while it was also reported that Hong Kong is in talks with several Chinese EV makers to establish local EV manufacturing.
• South Korea's Foreign Minister will visit China from September 17th to 18th and will discuss plans including Chinese President Xi's visit to South Korea in October.
• Australian Foreign Minister Wong said Australia and China will hold high-level talks in Beijing this week.

European bourses (STOXX 600 +0.5%) are broadly firmer across the board, in contrast to an overall mixed session in APAC trade. Price action this morning was initially only upward, however, while benchmarks are still firmly in the green, they waned from best in tandem to the general pullback seen on the China-NVIDIA update. European sectors hold a strong positive bias, with only a couple of sectors residing in negative territory. Consumer Products takes the top spot, largely boosted by gains in Luxury names following the disappointing Chinese Activity Data, which has increased calls for the country to implement further fiscal stimulus. Financial Services is found in second spot; UBS (+1.3%) gains following reports via the NY Post which reported that the Co. could move to the US as it seeks to avoid new capital requirements in Switzerland.

Top European News

• ECB's Kazimir said they must not change policy because of small deviations from the inflation target. Monetary policy must remain nimble, need to take a meeting-by-meeting approach.
• UK Chancellor Reeves plans to scrap VAT on energy to lower bills and told cabinet members that ‘all options were on the table’ for a budget giveaway to ease the cost of living, according to The Sunday Times.
• UK government announced over GBP 1.25bln of inward investment from US finance companies which will create 1,800 UK jobs, while the deal lines up GBP 20bln in trade between the two countries, including an expected GBP 7bln commitment from BlackRock (BLK) to grow in the UK.
• UK government announced over GBP 1.1bln in joint government and industry investment for the maritime sector.
• ECB’s Kocher said the rate-cutting cycle is either over or very close to the end, and the central bank can keep its interest rates steady at 2% for the time being, provided there are no major shocks, according to FT.
• Exit polls from the election in Germany’s bellwether state of North Rhine-Westphalia showed German Chancellor Merz’s Christian Democrats won with 34% of the votes, although support for the far-right AfD tripled with 16.5% of the votes, according to The Guardian.
• Italy’s Economy Minister said the government is to confirm its GDP growth estimates in the upcoming Budget plan, while he added that the Italian banking sector must consolidate to face challenges posed by giants such as Amazon and others that will compete for their market share.
• Fitch cut France’s sovereign rating from AA- to A+; Outlook Revised to Stable from Negative, and raised Portugal’s sovereign rating from A- to A: Outlook Revised to Stable from Positive, while S&P raised Spain’s sovereign rating from A to A+; Outlook Stable.
• German Economy Ministry said Germany must expand grids, renewable energies and decentralized flexibility at the same time; must maintain and expand unified and liquid energy markets. Must support hydrogen ramp-up pragmatically and cut back over-complex regulation. Fixed feed-in tariffs for new renewable energy installations will be abolished.

FX

• DXY is choppy with a negative bias and within a tight range, with weekend macro newsflow somewhat overlooked as traders zeroing in on the FOMC policy announcement due mid-week - with a 25bps cut priced in a 95% and a 50bps at 5%, and with ~70bps of cuts priced in through to year-end. Sticking with the Fed, weekend reports suggested that documents showed Fed Governor Cook declared her Atlanta property as a vacation home in documents, indicating it would not be her primary residence, which contradicts mortgage fraud allegations. DXY resides in a narrow 97.497-97.702 range.
• EUR is underpinned by mild USD weakness with no obvious reaction seen on Fitch cutting France’s sovereign rating from AA- to A+, with the outlook revised to Stable from Negative. In Germany, exit polls from the election in the bellwether state of North Rhine-Westphalia showed Chancellor Merz’s Christian Democrats won with 34% of the votes. Ahead, EUR focus could be on commentary from ECB's Schnabel at 12:30 BST/ 07:30 ET. EUR/USD resides in a 1.1716-1.1751 range at the time of writing
• USD/JPY is subdued against the backdrop of a fragile USD this morning, whilst overnight, there was an absence of Japanese participants due to Respect for the Aged Day. Political uncertainty lingered ahead of the LDP election on October 4th - it was reported that Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi will announce on Tuesday his intention to run in the leadership race. USD/JPY remains heavy with reports this morning suggesting China ruled that NVIDIA (NVDA) violated anti-monopoly laws after concluding a prelim investigation, which ups the pressure on Washington during sensitive trade negotiations in Spain. USD/JPY trades on either side of its 21 and 50 DMAs (at 147.57 and 147.65 respectively) in a current 147.32-147.81 range.
• GBP is underpinned by the mostly positive risk tone across Europe, albeit with the FTSE 100 hampered by its domestic currency strength. Over the weekend, the UK government announced over GBP 1.25bln of inward investment from US finance companies which will create 1,800 UK jobs. On the domestic fiscal front, UK Chancellor Reeves plans to scrap VAT on energy to lower bills and told cabinet members that ‘all options were on the table’ for a budget giveaway to ease the cost of living, according to The Sunday Times.
• Antipodeans are both holding a mild upward bias amid the mostly positive risk tone in the market and USD weakness at the time of writing.
• PBoC set USD/CNY mid-point at 7.1056 vs exp. 7.1213 (Prev. 7.1019)
• Canadian PM Carney said the budget deficit will be ‘substantial’, meaning bigger than it was last year due to US tariffs, while he announced a new federal agency with CAD 13bln to build affordable housing.

Fixed Income

• USTs started the week on the backfoot but have traded with an upward bias throughout the European morning. Officials from China and the US have begun the second day of talks in Spain. A lot of the focus has been on TikTok while overnight the FT reported that the lack of progress in US talks with China on tariffs and fentanyl is said to have reduced the chances of a Beijing summit. Most recently, China's Market regulator is continuing its antitrust investigation into NVIDIA; an update that hit the risk tone and lifted USTs back to a 113-08 high; currently in a 113-02 to 113-08 band. Focus ahead on the appointment process for Miran, who looks set to be eligible to partake in this week’s meeting, assuming the votes progress without incident.
• Bunds are in the green, by just over 15 ticks at best. While firmer, the 128.73 peak is someway shy of Friday’s 129.09 best which, in turn, is someway below last week’s 129.44 peak. Specifics a little light so far. For Germany specifically, August WPI came in at 0.7% Y/Y (prev. 0.5%), Destatis highlights that this is primarily due to higher prices for food, beverages and tobacco products. Elsewhere, exit polls from NRW in focus as Chancellor Merz’s CDU won with 34% of the vote, while support for AfD tripled to 16.5%.
• Gilts are marginally outperforming into a week packed with UK data and then the BoE on Thursday. At best, higher by 17 ticks in a 91.14 to 91.41 band. Specifics are a little light since the Gilt open. However, newsflow beforehand was focused on various investment details with the Government announcing over GBP 1.25bln of inward investment from US firms, a deal for SNRs involving Centrica and a GBP 1.1bln maritime scheme; all ahead of this week’s US state visit by President Trump. Elsewhere, The Sunday Times reports that Chancellor Reeves intends to scrap VAT on energy with all options on the table for a budget giveaway to ease the cost of living situation.

Commodities

• Crude is modestly firmer against the backdrop of a softer USD and following recent comments by US President Trump that he is willing to impose sanctions on Russia, but noted that Europe has to toughen sanctions and should stop purchasing oil from Russia. WTI currently resides in a USD 62.52-63.24/bbl range while Brent sits in a USD 66.78-67.52/bbl range.
• Spot gold is flat despite a softer dollar ahead of this week's central bank meetings and with the spotlight on Wednesday's FOMC. Spot gold currently resides in a USD 3,626.46-,3646.95/oz range
• Base metals trade mixed with the upside contained as participants digested the latest Chinese activity data, which fell short of expectations. China’s economy showed signs of slowing in August, with weaker retail sales, industrial production, and investment, rising unemployment, and a struggling housing market. Slowing export growth and persistent deflation added pressure on Beijing to introduce near-term stimulus measures, according to data from the NBS. 3M LME copper holds above USD 10k/t and resides in a USD 10,053.97-10,102.00/t range at the time of writing.
• EDF said it has received a strike notice for Wednesday September 17th 20:00BST to Thursday September 18th 20:00BST.
• Iraq signed a joint operation agreement with TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy LNG, according to the Iraqi PM.
• Egypt signed three new agreements for investments worth more than USD 121mln for oil and gas exploration in the Western Desert, Suez Gulf and north of Sinai.
• Ecuador’s government is withdrawing its diesel subsidy and will redirect funds to social programs.
• Thailand reportedly mulling tax on gold trades to slow the THB rally, according to Bloomberg; follows, Thai PM saying they need to urgently address the strong THB.
• Indonesia's Mining Minister is targeting an increase in the ownership of Freeport (FCX) Indonesia by over 10%.

Geopolitics: Middle East

• Israeli PM Netanyahu said getting rid of Hamas chiefs living in Qatar would rid the main obstacle to releasing all hostages and ending the war in Gaza.
• Hamas said on Sunday it suspended talks on a prisoner swap with Israel after accusing Israel of targeting its negotiating delegation in Doha last week.
• Qatar’s PM said Israel’s attack will not lead to anything but aborting de-escalating efforts, and Israeli ‘practices’ will not stop Doha from its Gaza mediation efforts with Egypt and the US to end the war.
• Iran's top security body warned on Sunday that EU threats to reinstate UN sanctions on Iran could jeopardise efforts to restore international monitoring of the country's nuclear program, according to Economic Times.
• Afghan Foreign Ministry said US officials held talks in Kabul over Americans detained in Afghanistan.

Geopolitics: Ukraine 

• Russia's Kremlin says NATO is fighting Russia, that is a certainty; obvious that NATO is de facto involved in this war; has provided direct and indirect support to Kyiv.
• Chinese Commerce Ministry firmly opposes US secondary tariffs over Russian oil purchases; said will take measures to safeguard legitimate rights and interests.
• Russia's Deputy Chair said "Allowing NATO countries to shoot down Russian drones over Ukraine means war between NATO and Russia", via Sky News Arabia
• US President Trump said he is ready to impose major sanctions on Russia when all NATO nations have agreed and started to do the same thing, and when all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia. Trump said NATO is placing 50%-100% tariffs on China, to be fully withdrawn after the Russia-Ukraine war ends, while he added that China has strong control, and even grip, over China and these powerful tariffs will break that grip. Trump later commented that he is willing to impose sanctions on Russia, as well as stated that Europe has to toughen sanctions and should avoid purchasing oil from Russia.
• G7 Finance Ministers discussed options to increase pressure on Russia to end its war against Ukraine and agreed to accelerate discussions to further use immobilised Russian sovereign assets to fund Ukraine, while they also agreed to explore other mechanisms that would allow further increasing financial support to Ukraine. Furthermore, they discussed a range of possible economic measures, including further sanctions and trade measures such as tariffs.
• Ukrainian President Zelensky posted on Friday that they can confirm the Russian offensive operation on Sumy had been completely thwarted by their forces.
• Ukraine’s Defence Minister said Ukraine will need at least USD 120bln next year for defence efforts.
• Ukrainian military said Ukraine attacked Russia’s Kirishi oil refinery, while the regional governor said the refinery sustained a fire, which was put out.
• Russian troops struck control points, launch sites and storage sites for long-range drones in Ukraine, while Russian troops captured Novomykolaivka in eastern Ukraine, according to TASS. Furthermore, Russia’s Defence Ministry said early on Sunday that Russia had shot down 361 Ukrainian drones over the past day, while it also stated that Russia test-fired a Zircon hypersonic cruise missile at a target in the Barents Sea during ’Zapad’ exercises.
• Polish and allied aircraft were deployed on Saturday in a “preventive” operation in Poland’s airspace because of a threat of drone strikes in neighbouring areas of Ukraine, and the airport in Lublin was closed, while the alert lasted about two hours, according to The Guardian.
• Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets after a Russian drone entered Romania’s airspace on Sunday, while the drone was tracked by the Romanian air force for nearly an hour before leaving.
• Russian Defence Ministry said Russian forces take control of Olhivske in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, according to Ria.

Geopolitics: Other

• US, Japan and the Philippines held joint maritime exercises in the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone in the South China Sea from Thursday to Saturday.
• Chinese military conducted ‘routine’ cruises in the South China Sea and said it will continue to defend China’s sovereignty in the South China Sea, while it also stated that the Philippines must immediately stop provoking incidents and must stop escalating tensions in the South China Sea.
• Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said the Pakistani Deputy PM received a call from US Secretary of State Rubio and they both expressed satisfaction over a positive trajectory of US-Pakistan ties, as well as discussed recent developments.
• Venezuela said a US Navy destroyer intercepted and boarded a Venezuelan tuna vessel on Friday in waters in Venezuela’s economic zone, while its government demanded that the US stop targeting Venezuelan vessels, which it said places the security and peace of the Caribbean at risk.

US event calendar

• 8:30 am: Sep Empire Manufacturing -8.7, est. 5, prior 11.9

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

Clearly this week is all about the FOMC conclusion on Wednesday and the likely continuation of the US rate cutting cycle that started exactly a year ago and got as far as one 50bps and two 25bps cuts, with the last being 9 months ago now. We'll preview the meeting below but it's not the only big central bank meeting this week with the Bank of Canada also meeting on Wednesday with the BoE (preview here) and Norges Bank on Thursday, and the BoJ (preview here) on Friday being the other main ones deciding on rates. Markets are pricing in an 85% probability of a Canadian cut, a 61% of a Norwegian one but minuscule probabilities of a change in Japan or the UK. By my count there are 16 global central banks deciding on rates this week with Brazil and Indonesia on Wednesday the largest of the rest, with markets expecting both to stay on hold.

Other highlights through the week are speeches from the likes of Lagarde and Schnabel from the ECB today; US retail sales, industrial production, and the NAHB index, alongside the UK employment data, Canadian CPI, the German ZEW survey and a 20yr UST auction tomorrow; US housing starts and permits, and UK inflation (preview here) on Wednesday; the US Phili Fed, jobless claims and a 10yr TIPS auction on Thursday; and Japanese CPI (preview here), German PPI and UK, French and Canadian retail sales on Friday. See the full day by day calendar of events at the end as usual.

Previewing the Fed now and markets are pricing in 26bps worth of cuts and haven't ever gone beyond 29bps (just after payrolls 10 days ago) for this meeting. So, assuming no big surprises, this FOMC is all about the signalling via the statement, Powell's press conference, and the SEP. In their preview note on Friday (“Fed Notes: September FOMC preview: Back (to back?) to risk management school “), our economists changed their view to 75bps worth of cuts this year, 25bps at each of the remaining meetings. This path would leave the fed funds rate at 3.5-3.75% by year end, consistent with their view of neutral. The weaker labour market data and slightly lower inflation than they anticipated has led them to this view, but they don't expect further cuts in 2026 although the risks are on the downside, and much might depend on how the Fed leadership and board composition evolves. Markets are pricing in 141bps of cuts by next December, so significantly above our forecasts.

Our economists believe that the median dot of the updated SEP will likely show 75bps of total reductions for 2025, 25bps more than in June. However, there is likely to be differing views within the committee. On the dovish side there could be three calling for a 50bp cut and possibly one or two voting for no change. It has the potential to be the first meeting where three governors dissent since 1988, and the first with dissents on both sides since September 2019.
Powell’s discussion of the labour market is likely to sound materially different compared to the July meeting and closer to his communications at Jackson Hole, but he could still allude to some of the slowdown in job gains reflecting supply-side dynamics driven by immigration policies. His tone on inflation will likely be more dovish as although August CPI was somewhat hotter than expected the details from PPI and CPI point to a more subdued reading on core PCE later this month, likely in the 20-24bps range, according to our economists. Overall the meeting's most important theme will be what it signals going forward.

Asian markets are starting the week mostly higher with a weak monthly data dump from China, encouraging hopes of further policy stimulus.  As I check my screens, the KOSPI (+0.41%) is edging higher trading at a record high while marking its 10th straight session of gains after South Korea’s Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol indicated that the government will scrap its previous plan to raise taxes on stock investments. Meanwhile, the Hang Seng (+0.29%), the CSI (+0.82%) and the Shanghai Composite (+0.22%) are hoping for fresh stimulus. The S&P/ASX 200 (-0.21%) is bucking the regional trend while Japanese markets are closed for a holiday which also means US Treasuries aren't trading yet. US equities futures are up less than a tenth of a percentage point.

Coming back to China, retail sales expanded by a modest +3.4% y/y, falling short of analysts' +3.8% forecast and declining from July's +3.7% increase, signaling persistent weakness in domestic demand. Similarly, industrial output growth softened to +5.2% in August, down from +5.7% in July and reaching its lowest point since August 2024. Year-to-date fixed-asset investment saw a significant slowdown, growing by just +0.5% compared to +1.6% in the January-July period, and missing economists' +1.5% projection. See our economists' view of the numbers here and the implications for policy.

Recapping last week now, and equities continued to advance, largely driven by optimism surrounding interest rate cuts and strong performances from tech stocks. The S&P 500 rose +1.59% (-0.05% Friday) while the NASDAQ achieved new record highs on each of the five trading days, ending the week up +2.03% (+0.44% Friday). This performance was bolstered by Mag 7 stocks advancing +3.20% (+1.67% Friday) and a standout performance from Oracle (+25.51%; -5.09% on Friday) amidst news of a $300bn deal with OpenAI and a strong outlook for its cloud business. European equities also saw gains, with the Stoxx 600 up +1.03% (-0.09% Friday), the DAX up +0.43% (-0.02% Friday), while the CAC 40 advanced +1.96% (+0.02% Friday) as Sébastien Lecornu took over as the new prime minster and will now seek to pass a budget through a fractious parliament. Fitch downgraded France late on Friday from AA- to A+ with a stable outlook. At the same time, they upgraded Portugal to A from A-, while S&P upgraded Spain from A to A+, all with a stable outlook. The rating moves are in line with our strategists long held convergence view, but the upgrade of Spain was a welcome surprise. especially as it's now three notches ahead of where Moody's rate it. They are likely to be forced to play catch up soon.

On the data side, significant downward revisions of -911k to US payroll data and softer weekly initial jobless claims reinforced the view of a softer labour market, strengthening the narrative for Fed easing. On the inflation side, a softer US PPI at -0.1% mom (vs. +0.3% expected) provided reassurance regarding inflation trends which was then followed by a stronger August CPI print of +0.4% (vs. +0.3% expected), though its details pointed to a moderating impact of tariffs and the read through to PCE of the week's data was softer than expected. On Friday, the University of Michigan 5-10yr inflation expectations came in at 3.9% (vs. 3.4% expected), but this data has long been questioned because of the extreme partisan responses, while consumer sentiment fell to 55.4 (vs. 58.0 expected). All that left curve flattening as the main theme for US Treasuries. The 2yr yield rose +4.8bps (+1.4bps Friday), after briefly hitting its lowest level in 3 years on Monday, while 10yr yields were down -0.9bps (+4.5bps Friday) to 4.07% and 30yr yields fell by -7.8bps (+2.7bps Friday).

In Europe, the ECB kept its deposit rates on hold at 2% for a second meeting in a row, with President Lagarde’s signal that policy was "in a good place" suggesting a higher bar for another rate cut. That left markets pricing only 10bps of further easing by mid-2026 (-9.0bps on the week) and contributed to a sell-off in government bonds, with 2yr bund yields +8.9bps higher (+3.2bps Friday) and 10yr yields up +5.3bps to 2.71% (+5.9bps Friday).

Oil prices experienced sizeable volatility, with Brent crude up +2.27% over the week (+0.93% Friday) amid increasing concerns over potential new Western measures targeting Russian oil as well as Israel’s strike against Hamas’ leadership in Qatar. Gold prices also surged by +1.57% (+0.25% on Friday) to a new record high of $3,643/oz, benefiting from the increasing likelihood of Fed rate cuts and its traditional role as a safe-haven asset.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 08:46

Tesla Soars After Musk Buys Billion Dollars Worth Of Stock 

Tesla shares are on the verge of a technical breakout - something that unhinged Democrats (CC: Tim Walz) must be absolutely furious about - after a new SEC filing revealed that Elon Musk went on a Friday shopping spree, snapping up roughly $1 billion worth of stock. The move has boosted Tesla's market cap by $100 billion, a savvy squeeze on the shorts.

According to a newly filed SEC document, Musk purchased 2.5 million shares through a series of trades valued at about $1 billion.

The billion-dollar purchase comes as shares broke out of an ascending triangle on Friday and are now trading near record highs. As of Monday morning's premarket trading, the stock was up 8.3% around the $428 level.

While Elon's purchases could be tied to creating momentum to break shares to the upside, we must remind readers that the purchase comes days after Larry Ellison briefly surpassed Musk to become the world's richest person, following a massive jump in Oracle's stock. 

We dared Musk to come up with something even more outrageous than Ellison…

not bad response https://t.co/BySZDHlElp

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 15, 2025

And, oh boy, did he. 

said another way, Musk's $1BN purchase of TSLA stock pushed his net worth higher by $15BN https://t.co/IHX0IYEvPI

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 15, 2025

Here's the latest from the Bloomberg Billionaire Index (as of Friday's close). 

Musk clearly enjoys the title of being the world's richest - and what better way to mint $100 billion in market cap than with just $1 billion in stock purchases? Now does Ellison have a trick or two of his own... 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 08:20

China's Top Market Watchdog Rules Nvidia Violated Antitrust Law 

Currently, the Trump administration's top priority is securing a trade agreement with China. Beijing has recently signaled its goodwill by indicating intentions to purchase 500 Boeing commercial jets. But early Monday, just ahead of the U.S. cash session, news broke that China had ruled Nvidia in violation of anti-monopoly laws. If that's any indication of sentiment surrounding trade talks between the two superpowers, the optics here don't look great. 

U.S. equity futures were muted early Monday, with Nvidia shares down 2% in premarket trading after China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) ruled that the company violated anti-monopoly laws in connection with a 2020 deal.

The agency gave no details beyond a one-sentence statement. Here are more details via state-run media Xinhua News Agency:

China's top market watchdog announced Monday a decision to launch further probe into Nvidia for anti-trust violations after a preliminary investigation.

The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in an online statement that Nvidia had violated China's anti-monopoly law and a 2020 decision by the market regulator on Nvidia's acquisition of Mellanox Technologies.

In 2020, the SAMR conditionally approved the acquisition after an antitrust review that began in 2019. The deal was subject to multiple restrictive conditions due to concerns that the merger could exclude or restrict competition in global and Chinese markets for GPU accelerators, dedicated network interconnect equipment, and high-speed Ethernet adapters

Commenting on the new development coming out of China, Goldman analyst Shubham Ghosh, based in Hong Kong, told clients, "Sino-US trade talks are ongoing, and China's probe into Nvidia finding they violated the Anti-monopoly law has created some uncertainty."

On a separate desk, UBS analyst Nicola Brion, based in the UK, told clients, "The Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.4% Monday with cyclicals broadly outperforming defensives. Semis are leading gains up 1.6% despite headlines around China's preliminary findings of Nvidia violating antitrust regulations." 

Shares of Nvidia are down 2% in premarket trading in New York. On the year, shares are up 32%. The chart below shows that upside price action has stalled since mid-August. The $180 level is the current resistance. 

. . .  

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 08:05

US Official Warns Of New Deadly Synthetic Opioid From China

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,

U.S. authorities are warning of a new synthetic opioid from China that can be up to 50 times more potent than fentanyl.

Nitazenes pose an emerging threat as they are more resistant to naloxone, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses. They are often mixed with other drugs and delivered in the form of counterfeit pills mimicking drugs such as Xanax or Percocet, according to authorities.

Frank Tarentino, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) New York Division, said that the presence of nitazenes coming from China has been increasingly prevalent on the illicit drug scene.

“Here in the United States, we have found it in heroin, methamphetamine, in some cases fentanyl, and more alarmingly, we have now seen it pressed into pills,” he said in a Sept. 10 interview with NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.

“What we have seen is that these cartels, these transnational criminal organizations that are operating on a global scale, are intentionally lacing their drugs with fentanyl and now nitazenes to increase the high, to increase the addiction, to make more money.”

Tarantino said that traffickers are selling counterfeit prescription drugs such as oxycodone on the streets, online, or on social media. He warned that the only safe place to buy prescription drugs is through a legitimate pharmacy.

Chinese companies and Mexican cartels are turning to nitazenes, a cheap synthetic opioid, particularly as pressure mounts on fentanyl production and distribution.

Some cartels have shifted to nitazenes due to a recent crackdown on fentanyl precursor chemicals coming from China, noted Sally Sparks, a public information officer with the DEA’s Houston Division.

“We are also seeing street-level drug dealers mixing it with the fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine,” she told The Epoch Times via email.

President Donald Trump made tackling the fentanyl crisis a signature issue during his administration, moving to impose tariffs on China and Mexico while declaring Mexican Cartels terrorist organizations to fight the influx of the deadly drug.

Congress passed the HALT Fentanyl Act, which Trump signed into law in July. It permanently classifies fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, thus increasing penalties for possession and distribution.

President Donald Trump speaks before signing the HALT Fentanyl Act in the East Room of the White House on July 16, 2025. Nathan Howard/Reuters

Like fentanyl, nitazene production has been tied to China.

In one instance, nitazenes were allegedly imported into the United States and Mexico by a China-based company and its employees, according to a 2023 U.S. Department of Justice press release announcing eight indictments.

“Drug traffickers typically mix protonitazene and metonitazene with other opioids, such as fentanyl, to create new and more powerful cocktails of dangerous opioids,” the release stated.

Depending on their production methods, these drugs can be up to 50 times stronger than fentanyl and heroin, according to the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission.

Nitazenes were relatively unknown until recently, except for researchers studying opioids. They began showing up as pressure on fentanyl manufacturing and distribution intensified.

This class of drugs was developed in the 1950s and emerged in 2019 on the illicit drug market in Europe before spreading to the United States and beyond.

Dr. Stephen Loyd, director of the Office of Drug Control Policy in West Virginia—the epicenter of the national fentanyl crisis—described nitazenes as an emerging threat, similar to how xylazine, an animal tranquilizer sometimes mixed with fentanyl, was viewed a few years ago.

“The nitazenes are the kind of drug de jure to do that,” Loyd told The Epoch Times, adding they are the “next step” for drug dealers.

Greater amounts of naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdose, have been needed to save people from nitazenes because of their potency, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Drug overdose deaths, mainly attributed to fentanyl, decreased by some 25 percent across the country from February 2024 to January 2025, according to provisional data from the CDC.

However, drug overdose remains the top cause of death for those between 18 and 44 years old, according to Dr. Allison Arwady, director for the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, who spoke at the National Conference of State Legislatures Summit in August.

Loyd noted that the recipes for some of these synthetic opioids, which are cheap to make, are available on the internet and that the only thing drug cartels need to produce them is a skilled chemist.

Most of West Virginia’s overdoses can be attributed to more than one drug, he said. Heroin, for example, likely has fentanyl or nitazenes, he said.

“They blend this ... basically in bullet blenders that you get from Walmart,” he added.

Nitazenes have been connected to more than 18,000 fatal and nonfatal EMS encounters for overdose across the country from Jan. 1, 2023, to April 30, 2025, according to the National Drug Early Warning System.

States on the East Coast, such as Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, appear to be particularly hard hit.

But recently, nitazenes have grabbed headlines in states such as Texas.

The DEA Houston Division has seen a spike in the number of fatal drug poisonings related to nitazene, more specifically N-pyrrolidino protonitazene (pyro) during the past 18 months, Sparks said. 

Pyro is 25 percent more potent than fentanyl, she added.

Agents have seized drugs laced with nitazenes in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.

“We’re mainly seizing pills pressed to look like legitimate prescription drugs like hydrocodone and Percocet,” she said.

This year has seen 11 deaths associated with nitazene in the Houston area, Sparks said.

The victims’ ages range between 17 and 59 years old. Also, in rural East Texas, a 16-year-old girl died of a drug overdose in July that authorities suspected was fentanyl, but turned out to be pyro.

Loyd said there will always be a new illicit drug on the horizon. Efforts to stop the cartels are needed, but treating people for addiction is the only real solution.

“You’ve got to treat people and decrease demand. If you don’t do that, the supply will meet the demand 100 percent of the time,” he said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 06:30

"It's A Sign Of Oppression!" - Austria Plans Headscarf Ban For Girls Under-14 In Schools

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix news,

The Austrian government will move ahead this week with plans to ban headscarves for girls under 14 in schools, a measure officials frame as promoting equality.

In an interview with Bild cited by Welt, Integration Minister Claudia Plakolm of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) said, “I want girls, regardless of their religion, to have the same opportunities in our free and Western society. And that’s why I see the headscarf for girls under 14 as a sign of oppression.”

The proposed law sets out a staged response to violations: first, a conversation with the girl concerned, then with her parents, followed by possible involvement of youth welfare authorities. Repeated breaches could result in administrative penalties. Plakolm stressed that the measure would apply only in schools and educational institutions, not in public spaces.

“Public space is rightly a very well-protected area, and that’s something that probably wouldn’t stand up in a constitutional court,” she said.

The minister also linked the proposal to broader changes in Austria’s migration and integration policy.

She said the government plans a “three-year integration phase” for asylum seekers and migrants, during which they will receive only an integration allowance rather than full social benefits.

“There will be no social assistance during this integration phase, but only an integration allowance, and the amount will depend on how willing people are to fulfill their integration obligations,” Plakolm explained.

The move follows an announcement made by Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr (NEOS) in June for newly arriving children and teenagers to undergo a one-semester integration course prior to starting school.

Under the new system, children will first attend a semester-long orientation class where they will acquire basic German language skills to facilitate communication, fundamental school skills, such as writing, using scissors, and following classroom etiquette, and social values, including respect, equality, and tolerance.

The opposition Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) insisted the move manages the symptoms and fails to address the root cause of mass immigration.

A previous headscarf ban in elementary schools, introduced in 2019 by a coalition of conservatives and the Freedom Party, was struck down by Austria’s Constitutional Court. Plakolm argued that the new version comes with accompanying measures aimed at helping young women live self-determined lives. She emphasized that “the new law is not a measure against Islam.”

Austria’s Muslim community has previously clashed with Plakolm over her rhetoric. In July, the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) said it was “deeply disturbed” after she described the headscarf as a “symbol of oppression” that must not be permitted in schools. The group warned at the time that her remarks threatened religious freedom and stigmatized Muslim girls.

The move comes amid mounting tensions in Austria’s schools. In October last year, a survey by the Vienna teachers’ union found rising difficulties linked to mass immigration, with many children facing language barriers and some schools reporting extreme incidents.

According to the Kronen Zeitung, these included assaults on teachers, requests from parents that staff wear burqas, and even mock executions staged by pupils. One middle school headmistress described the problems but requested anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 02:00

"It's A Sign Of Oppression!" - Austria Plans Headscarf Ban For Girls Under-14 In Schools

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix news,

The Austrian government will move ahead this week with plans to ban headscarves for girls under 14 in schools, a measure officials frame as promoting equality.

In an interview with Bild cited by Welt, Integration Minister Claudia Plakolm of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) said, “I want girls, regardless of their religion, to have the same opportunities in our free and Western society. And that’s why I see the headscarf for girls under 14 as a sign of oppression.”

The proposed law sets out a staged response to violations: first, a conversation with the girl concerned, then with her parents, followed by possible involvement of youth welfare authorities. Repeated breaches could result in administrative penalties. Plakolm stressed that the measure would apply only in schools and educational institutions, not in public spaces.

“Public space is rightly a very well-protected area, and that’s something that probably wouldn’t stand up in a constitutional court,” she said.

The minister also linked the proposal to broader changes in Austria’s migration and integration policy.

She said the government plans a “three-year integration phase” for asylum seekers and migrants, during which they will receive only an integration allowance rather than full social benefits.

“There will be no social assistance during this integration phase, but only an integration allowance, and the amount will depend on how willing people are to fulfill their integration obligations,” Plakolm explained.

The move follows an announcement made by Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr (NEOS) in June for newly arriving children and teenagers to undergo a one-semester integration course prior to starting school.

Under the new system, children will first attend a semester-long orientation class where they will acquire basic German language skills to facilitate communication, fundamental school skills, such as writing, using scissors, and following classroom etiquette, and social values, including respect, equality, and tolerance.

The opposition Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) insisted the move manages the symptoms and fails to address the root cause of mass immigration.

A previous headscarf ban in elementary schools, introduced in 2019 by a coalition of conservatives and the Freedom Party, was struck down by Austria’s Constitutional Court. Plakolm argued that the new version comes with accompanying measures aimed at helping young women live self-determined lives. She emphasized that “the new law is not a measure against Islam.”

Austria’s Muslim community has previously clashed with Plakolm over her rhetoric. In July, the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) said it was “deeply disturbed” after she described the headscarf as a “symbol of oppression” that must not be permitted in schools. The group warned at the time that her remarks threatened religious freedom and stigmatized Muslim girls.

The move comes amid mounting tensions in Austria’s schools. In October last year, a survey by the Vienna teachers’ union found rising difficulties linked to mass immigration, with many children facing language barriers and some schools reporting extreme incidents.

According to the Kronen Zeitung, these included assaults on teachers, requests from parents that staff wear burqas, and even mock executions staged by pupils. One middle school headmistress described the problems but requested anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/15/2025 - 02:00

Rockwell: The Unique Evil Of The Left

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell,

[Originally published July 18, 2016.]

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. ... The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. ...

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. ...

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. ...

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 23:20

Rockwell: The Unique Evil Of The Left

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell,

[Originally published July 18, 2016.]

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. ... The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. ...

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. ...

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. ...

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 23:20

'The Science': Catastrophic Failure & Unforgivable Arrogance

Via Camus,

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic.

They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance.

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic. They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance. They imposed… pic.twitter.com/sHC7zYw1Fx

— Camus (@newstart_2024) September 12, 2025

They imposed moronic policies: forced masks, mandated vaccines, and the utterly idiotic 6-foot social distancing rule that turned out to be a complete joke.

They shuttered schools with zero regard for the devastating consequences to children.

They lied about COVID’s origins and banished all dissent, colluding with tech giants to deplatform anyone who questioned their orthodoxies—many of which were later proven completely false.

The result?

The United States suffered one of the highest death tolls in the world.

The experts we were commanded to venerate without question failed radically.

Their failure wasn’t just due to error, but to deep-seated arrogance and systemic deceit.

Now, the same institutions wonder why the American people have lost all trust in them.

They continue to act with insularity, as if their decrees still come from Mount Olympus.

But the public has seen the truth: our ruling class is not scientific—they are political and self-preserving.

Their unaccountability is the greatest scandal of all.4

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 21:35

Florida To Investigate Teachers Found Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida’s Department of Education announced on Sept. 11 that it will look into public school teachers who, on social media, celebrated or justified the assassination of Turning Point USA CEO and founder Charlie Kirk.

The Florida Historic Capitol sits near the 22-story New Capitol building, which together are part of the Capitol Complex in Tallahassee, Fla., on July 26, 2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas sent a letter to school district superintendents telling them that he would be investigating after it was brought to his attention that some educators had posted “despicable comments on social media regarding the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

“These few are not a reflection of the great, high-quality teachers who make up the vast majority of Florida’s educators,” he wrote.

“Nevertheless, I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.”

Florida’s Department of Education told The Epoch Times in an email that the commissioner was prepared to use all of his power to hold educators responsible if the investigation proves they should not be in a classroom based on their behavior.

That power includes revoking their educator certificate.

“Although educators have First Amendment rights, these rights do not extend without limit into their professional duties,” Kamoutsas said.

“An educator’s personal views that are made public may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve.”

The commissioner cited Rule 6A-10.081 of the Florida Administrative Code (F.A.C.), titled “Principles of Professional Conduct for the Education Profession in Florida,” which holds the state’s certified educators to a set of ethical guidelines.

Kamoutsas said that a teacher could violate that rule if his or her conduct “causes a student or his or her family to feel unwelcome or unwilling to participate in the learning environment.”

He also cited sections of two Florida statutes that authorized the commissioner to discipline and sanction the certificate of an educator who “upon investigation, has been found guilty of personal conduct that seriously reduces that person’s effectiveness as an employee of the district school board.”

“Teachers are held to a higher standard as public servants and must ensure their conduct does not undermine the trust of the students and families they serve,” the commissioner said on X.

“We will hold teachers who choose to make disgusting comments about the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk accountable. Govern yourselves accordingly.”

The official action came after several voices across social media were raised to flag and speak out against people justifying or even cheering the assassination of the conservative influencer.

The social media app BlueSky was required to speak out against some of its users’ comments.

“Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky’s Community Guidelines,” the company said. “We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone.

“Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we’re committed to fostering healthy, open conversations.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis praised Kamoutsas’s actions to hold the state’s teachers accountable.

“Celebrating the assassination of a 31-year-old father of two young kids is disturbing; that teachers would be among those who do so is completely unacceptable,” he said.

Since that announcement, several people began posting screenshots on X of teachers they caught publicly celebrating the assassination, and tagging Florida leaders and the respective school districts.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization known for defending First Amendment rights on school campuses across the country, to get its take on this move by the Sunshine State.

Senior Program Counsel Stephanie Jablonsky told The Epoch Times in an email on Sept. 12 that while public school teachers retain their First Amendment right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, they do not have unlimited protection. However, the actions could be seen as unconstitutional if termination of employment is solely based on the disapproval of a person’s opinion.

“If their off-the-clock speech genuinely undermines their ability to perform their duties or causes serious disruption in the workplace, discipline might be justified,” she said. ”But punishment based solely on disapproval of an employee’s private views is generally unconstitutional, and that’s what seems to be driving a spate of employment investigations and punishments in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder.

“The assassination of Kirk as he spoke with students on a college campus was a shocking betrayal of our national commitment to free speech and open debate,” she added. ”Now’s the time to redouble our commitment to those fundamental values, not erode them by punishing people for their personal views.

“Free speech means protecting even the speech one finds repugnant.”

Florida was named No. 1 in education freedom for the fourth year in a row by the conservative Heritage Foundation on Sept. 9.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 21:00

These Are The Largest Immigrant Groups In America

The U.S. has long been a top destination for immigrants seeking better opportunities. As of 2023, nearly 48 million people in the country were born abroad, representing 14% of the country’s total population.

In this visualization, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu breaks down the largest immigrant groups in America by nationality, highlighting the top 10 countries from each region.

Note that this analysis covers legal immigrants only. Check out our previous post to see a similar breakdown of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.

Data & Discussion

The data for this visualization comes from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). It shows the number of foreign-born U.S. residents by country of origin, as of 2023.

Americas: 25.3M Immigrants

Mexico stands out as the dominant source of U.S. immigrants, with nearly 11 million as of 2023. Historical ties, geographic proximity, and longstanding migration channels are major factors.

Several other Latin American countries rank highly, including El Salvador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Asia: 14.9M Immigrants

After the Americas, Asia & Oceania is the next largest source of U.S. immigrants.

India (2.9 million) is the second-largest country source after Mexico, while China (2.2 million) and the Philippines (2.05 million) also rank in the top five.

Fact: In 2024, Indian students accounted for nearly 30% of all international students in the U.S.

Europe: 4.8M Immigrants

While Europe was once the primary source of immigrants to America, its share has declined over time. The combined European total remains substantial, though spread across many countries.

Africa: 2.8M Immigrants

Africa is the region with the least amount of immigrants living in America.

According to historical MPI data, the annual number of new permanent residents from Africa has grown slowly and inconsistently. This could be due to closer ties between Africa and China.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Why Did Asian Immigrants Come to the U.S.? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 20:25

Images, Words, & Narratives Matter

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.” – Captain – Cool Hand Luke

It is fitting that I use a quote from a communist to begin this article because it is the communist ideology of hate, murder, and propaganda that has led us to this point of no return. Charlie Kirk was right. America will never be the same. It might not even closely resemble the America at the start of this century by the time this period of upheaval and crisis resolves itself, with the shedding of much blood and death on a scale not seen since World War II. Charlie Kirk was Cool Hand Luke’d for daring to challenge the status quo and daring to question the psychopathic powers that be in this prison planet of our own making.

The senseless slaughter of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were the opening salvo in a new U.S. civil war, which is likely to spread to the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Australia and wherever else the globalist elite have planted the seeds of revolution through importing Muslim hordes, criminalizing whiteness, glorifying deviancy, outlawing free speech, bankrupting nations, and promoting WW3. The chaos, confusion, vitriol and mayhem is not happening by chance. It is being manufactured by those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State) as a means to their end game – Digital IDs, CBDCs, Social Credit Scores, 15 Minute Cities (Gulags), Great Taking leading to the Great Reset, and the depopulation of millions with the dehumanization and subjugation of the survivors.

What is happening is not a bug, but a feature in the new world order they envision. The last couple weeks certainly meet Lenin’s criteria of decades happening, as the whirlwind of tragedy, anger, threats, retribution, legacy media lies, political posturing, international coalitions forming into war-like postures, all capped off by the cold blooded murder of “that white girl” by a feral psychotic dangerous black man set loose by a black woman pretending to be a judge, and the assassination of an earnest young christian conservative man who was trying to sway minds and hearts through debate, evidently by an ANTIFA inspired transgender dropout loser who spent his life online with other losers.

I say evidently because I don’t believe anything the government or media tells me. There are dozens of unanswered questions regarding this 22 year old Tyler Robinson as the shooter. Based on what we have been told by the authorities regarding Thomas Crooks, the 20 year-old Butler assassin, I don’t expect any truthful revelations regarding Kirk’s assassin. An official narrative will be concocted, fed to the MSM mouthpieces, and devoured by the ignorant masses as the truth. Questioning the official story will be shouted down as conspiracy theories, even though the conspiracy theorists are now 40 – o versus the official stories over the last decade. Our lives don’t matter, but narratives do matter to those pulling the strings.

Even worse was the complete blackout of Iryna’s murder by the far left dying legacy media. The alt-media forced the world to witness the consequences of left wing policies of encouraging crime and refusing to lock up dangerous black men. False narratives are all the left have. The dying legacy left media live up to Huxley’s observations regarding the truth:

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley

Personally, the images of that beautiful helpless girl staring in stunned terror at the savage beast who just slaughtered her because she was white, and the instantaneous death of Charlie with the blood pouring out of his neck wound have disturbed and haunted me for this entire week. I haven’t been able to sleep. I feel like I’ve been going through the motions at work and at home, as a feeling of foreboding envelopes my consciousnesses. I’m sure others have a similar feeling.

The last time I felt this way was the week following 9/11. I knew the world had changed and the change was not going to be good. The world has once again taken a turn for the worse. There will be no reconciliation between the right and the left. There will be no peace. There will be no turning the other cheek and coming together as a nation. Unification is impossible. You will be required to choose a side, because the violence has only just begun. It will only intensify from this point until there are clear winners and losers.

That young refugee from Ukraine was going home from her shift at a pizza joint. It’s ironic that she would have still been living peacefully in Ukraine if the U.S. had not initiated the hostilities by overthrowing the democratically elected government in 2014, as the neocon/Deep State plan to overthrow Putin by goading him into WW3 was hatched. The millions of deaths and casualties in Ukraine are directly attributable to the dastardly actions of Obama, Biden, Nuland, Graham, McCain and the rest of the warmongering bastards that instigated this war. That racist feral dog that murdered Iryna in cold blood shouldn’t have been on that train either. The left wing communist DAs and judges who released this violent unhinged savage 14 times have her blood on their hands. Both seats should have been empty, but that image of savagery will now encourage a race war.

I know every right leaning talking head, twitter influencer, blogger and politician has been mourning the death of Charlie Kirk on social media at a deafening crescendo, trying to outdo each other in their level of tributes, video compilations, and pictures of his wife and children. He is being treated as a Jesus-like martyr, with connotations of JFK’s Camelot lost. Some said he was destined to be president within the next decade. Maybe so, but we will never know.

Truthfully, until he was murdered this week, I knew very little about the man. I knew he was a popular right leaning commentator, but I had never heard him speak or followed him on twitter. I pretty much lumped him with the other right wing influencers, who make a living off tweets, podcasts, youtubes, and blogging. Everyone’s gotta make a living somehow. They are in a constant battle for likes, retweets, impressions and eyeballs. I’m always suspicious about whether they are paid to support a certain point of view or actually believe what they say.

He was 31 and I’m 62. His Turning Point USA organization was geared to mobilize idealistic young conservative people to embrace conservative family values. After 17 years of trying to change hearts and minds, my site generally attracts cynical old dudes who despise the government and media, knowing change through the ballot box is a fruitless venture. The best we can do now is tribe up with like minded people, gather our preps, make sure we are heavily armed, and buy more ammo. Nothing I’ve seen in the last couple weeks tells me to do otherwise. This train is moving too fast towards the bend, and derailment is a certainty.

From what I could gather, Charlie was an intelligent, loving Christian family man, who loved spirited debates with those who had opposing points of view.

His debating skills were clearly top-notch.

The left wing loons in the media, on college campuses, and in politics despised him because he was more intelligent and articulate in presenting his viewpoint, as they shrieked at, threatened and cancelled those who supported him. The brainwashing of our indoctrinated youth by left wing communist ideology has convinced millions to actually believe Kirk, Trump, Musk, Carlson, etc., are nazis and fascists – deserving to be murdered for their cause. Their warped ideology kills.

Kirk’s Turning Point USA non-profit is essentially a rounding error compared to the Soros NGOs, Gates Foundation, and USAID grifts funding chaos and hate across the land. I checked their 990 Tax return and total donations were $85M, with Kirk’s annual compensation around $400k. Pelosi makes more than that with one insider stock trade. He surely also made significant income from Twitter, podcasts, books, etc. But, he wasn’t what I would call a grifter.

His views pretty much aligned with mine on most major issues – Ukraine war, the Israeli genocide, bombing Iran for Israel, abortion, tranny degeneracy, woke indoctrination in schools, 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, covid vaccines, masks, Snowden & Assange, and the Deep State . He did not deserve to die and making him a martyr will ultimately backfire on those celebrating his murder. Cancellation goes both ways, they are finding out.

More people have now read and watched his speeches/debates in the last few days than would have ever been introduced to his views over their lifetimes. His death has created more anger and desire for retribution than I’ve witnessed in the course of my life. Will it be a Boston Tea Party/Fort Sumter moment, triggering a revolution/civil war? Time will tell, but we know one thing for sure, Fourth Turnings never de-intensify. I would say in this past week we have experienced an intensification of our ongoing crisis, with the bloodiest and most intense years yet to come. Tragic iconic photos from my lifetime have marked turning points for the country, and I believe the two photos above will sadly mark a new turning point of death and destruction.

I was six months old when my government murdered JFK. The images from the Zapruder film are disturbing and sad, but the murder of our young president because he threatened the CIA/FBI/Deep State changed the course of our country to the detriment of all but those constituting the Deep State and their billionaire benefactors. Our young have been dying, while those running the show have utilized all the propaganda tools at their disposal to breed hate and fear. Keeping the masses focused on their differences, ensures they don’t all realize the true enemy are those pulling the strings and manipulating the masses, as described by Edward Bernays.

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before
Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before

Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

And history hides the lies of our civil wars
D’you wear a black armband when they shot the man
Who said, “Peace could last forever”?
And in my first memories, they shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

Two tragically iconic photos during the Vietnam War were turning points in convincing average Walter Cronkite watching Americans we should not be there, sacrificing our young men, killing women and children, and turning our military against college students protesting against another war fought by the poor to benefit the rich. The American empire has degenerated into Murder Inc., spreading death and destruction across the globe to enrich the military industrial complex and the parasite politicians fueling the war machine with our tax dollars, while burdening our children with an unpayable debt.

So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall in D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’ for their promised land and
I don’t need your civil war
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

The photos of the World Trade Center towers on fire shortly before collapsing into their footprint became the defining moment of this century, thus far. We know the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who used the moron baby Bush to kick-start their agenda by pushing through the pre-written Patriot Act, ushering in the ever expanding surveillance state, have seized control of government and set us on a path to destruction. We’ve been spilling blood across the globe, while adding debt at a hyper-sonic pace, based upon lies, corrupt leadership, and at the behest of a globalist billionaire death cult. And here we stand at the brink of a civil war and global conflict, with unknown but likely terrible consequences.

Look at the shoes you’re filling
Look at the blood we’re spilling
Look at the world we’re killing
The way we’ve always done before
Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
And I don’t want to hear no more
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

We are currently in an existential battle between good and evil. The murderous bastards who killed Iryna and Charlie were the personification of evil, motivated by the satanic urging of the Soros, Gates, Obama, Clinton cult of death. The Democratic party is infested with evil men and women, hellbent on the destruction of our country through the promotion of depravity, social chaos, and rampant criminality without consequences. The real deplorables in this country who cheered Kirk’s death and felt sorry for the black devil who slaughtered “that white girl” are evil. The despicable excuses for journalists in the far left propaganda media are evil.

All of these people are your enemy. Many of your neighbors, coworkers and family are your enemy. They would not shed a tear at your death. We have passed the point of no return. I wish I could visualize a near term positive outcome, but that is impossible after this week. As another old time cynic declared a century ago, normal people need to hoist the black flag.

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken

A current day cynic, and someone the left would also like to kill,  captures my thoughts exactly. I will not unite or let bygones be bygones with people who wanted me to die for refusing the covid jab and would spit on my grave based upon my views on the Constitution, unwarranted wars, the welfare state, surveillance state, government spending, and the degeneracy of the left. We are already at war, but most don’t realize it yet.

We’ve tried to live in peace, minding our own business, turning the other cheek, and hoping the crazed leftists would fade away, because their ideas are evil and insane. We just wanted to be left alone, but they forced millions to get jabbed with Big Pharma poison under threat of being fired, hoisted their transgender deviancy upon our children, indoctrinated our young with communist bullshit in government schools, opened our borders to third world invaders, burned our cities while making a drug addicted black criminal their fake martyr, placed low IQ diversity stooges in key positions of power, encouraged criminality with no consequences, stole elections, and now they are killing the best of us. It is now time for all normal people to channel William Munny and do whatever is necessary to defeat the evil forces opposing us. Words matter, but actions speak louder than words.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 19:50

DEA Seizes 7500Kg Of Coke, Arrests 617 Members Of Sinaloa Cartel In Global Operation

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last week that it had arrested 617 members of the Sinaloa cartel in a global operation.

The week-long operation aimed to dismantle the Sinaloa cartel, which has been flooding the United States with fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin, the DEA said in a statement.

In addition to the 617 arrests, the DEA seized narcotics, including 480 kilograms of fentanyl powder, 714,707 counterfeit pills, 2,209 kilograms of methamphetamine, 7,469 kilograms of cocaine, and 16.55 kilograms of heroin.

As Alicia Márquez reports below for The Epoch Times, the DEA also seized more than $11 million in currency, over $1.6 million worth of assets, and 420 firearms.

“These results demonstrate the DEA’s unwavering commitment to protecting the American people,” DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said.

“Every kilogram of poison seized, every dollar confiscated from the cartels, and every arrest we make represents lives saved and communities defended.”

“The DEA will not rest until the Sinaloa Cartel is completely dismantled,” he added.

The operation was carried out by DEA agents in 23 domestic field divisions and seven foreign regions from Aug. 25 to 29.

“There are tens of thousands of Sinaloa members, associates, and facilitators operating worldwide in at least 40 countries who are responsible for the production, manufacture, distribution, and operations related to the trafficking of dangerous and deadly synthetic drugs,” according to the statement.

“This coordinated action was a combination of the DEA’s increased focus on law enforcement, intelligence, and national and international collaboration, using all resources at its disposal to degrade the Sinaloa Cartel’s command and control.”

In February, the Trump administration, through the State Department, designated the Sinaloa cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization, along with seven other Mexican and Latin American organizations.

Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch dismissed the idea that the Sinaloa cartel is finished.

“No, no, the Sinaloa Cartel has never had a leader as such, that is, there have always been several leaders,” Harfuch said at an Aug. 27 press conference.

Harfuch also spoke about the structure of the Sinaloa organization.

“It is a cartel that has, let’s say, several branches. One of them was Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, another was ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, then El Chapo’s sons, El Guano, who is also El Chapo’s brother, and another, ‘El Chapo Isidro,’” Harfuch said, following Ismael Zambada García’s guilty plea in the United States.

On Aug. 25, Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to two counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and use of weapons, after more than five decades of criminal activity.

Zambada admitted to participating in a drug trafficking operation that for years brought large quantities of illicit substances, including cocaine and heroin, into the United States.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 19:15

Oregon Is Hiding The Truth About Child Sex Changes

Authored by Paul Terdal via RealClearPolitics,

Here’s a question my home state of Oregon could easily answer: How many kids have received gender transition surgeries in the last 15 years? The state has this data and is required by law to give it to me. Yet instead of doing so, officials are now telling me that they’ve been illegally selling Oregonians’ health information for years. It’s a head-turning argument, but it’s also false. It shows how desperate the state is to avoid answering my question.

I have been a volunteer health consumer advocate for more than 20 years. I have led the development and passage of laws that guarantee insurance coverage of evidence-based autism services, end discrimination against disabled patients seeking organ transplants, and strengthen the insurance commissioner’s enforcement authority. I am also a lifelong Democrat, and as transgender medicine has come into vogue in recent years, I’ve worked to help my state implement evidence-based standards that protect kids.

The key to my work is the Oregon Health Authority’s “All Payer All Claims” database, which has detailed information about health transactions for more than 92% of the state’s population. By law, this data is available to the public, and to protect patients, it’s fully compliant with federal privacy laws and regulations. There is no way to identify any individual patient, full stop.

The Oregon Health Authority makes this data available for purchase, and a few years ago, I purchased access to the 2019 data for a federally funded study. I found that while Oregon had estimated that only about 175 patients would obtain taxpayer-funded gender transition services at a total annual cost of no more than $200,000, more than 7,585 patients had done so at more than 100 times the initial cost estimate. That included 160 children using “puberty blocker” drugs and approximately 370 children taking cross-sex hormones. There were also 33 biological girls who had mastectomies – including some as young as 15 – and two 17-year-old girls who had their uteruses and ovaries removed.

I found this concerning since the Oregon Department of Justice had declared in a February legal filing that “genital surgery is not performed on transgender minors”. Yet the state’s own data confirmed that children really do undergo genital surgery that leaves them permanently sterilized. I publicized my findings late last year.

In February, I contacted the Oregon Health Authority to express interest in a new research project. At first, they offered me 10 years’ worth of data – 2011 through 2020. This would have been invaluable in tracking the recent rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses, the age and other medical conditions of patients who pursue a gender transition, and the types of treatment they received.

Yet when I told officials that I wanted to study “gender-affirming treatment” over that decade, their reaction quickly shifted. From internal emails that I obtained under Oregon’s public records laws, my routine request was immediately flagged for review by senior executives. They were deeply concerned about the political “risks” of providing me with this data.

The first idea they debated was requiring me to sign a new contract that would prohibit me from publishing detailed results of my analysis. Then, they considered just purging all records related to gender dysphoria. They concluded that they didn’t have the legal authority to do that. They ultimately settled on another concerning – and telling – approach. The Oregon Health Authority told me that the state database was out of compliance with federal privacy laws. Therefore, it couldn’t be released to me or anyone else.

This claim falls flat on so many levels. Oregon has been selling this database to dozens of organizations for 15 years. Customers have included academic researchers, journalists, and even computer companies seeking data to train artificial intelligence tools. If this database were illegal, someone would have flagged it by now – not least the state’s lawyers.

More to the point: If Oregon really believed that the database was out of compliance with federal laws, the state would be required to notify the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It would also be required to inform the news media and each and every one of the millions of individuals affected. Yet the state has made no such move. The Oregon Health Authority hasn’t even notified those of us who already possess the data, nor have they tried to recall it. If their lawyers really say they’re not in compliance, those same lawyers would tell them to begin the notifications immediately.

I’m left with one undeniable conclusion: Oregon is withholding the data to prevent me from researching – and telling the public – about the prevalence and practice of gender medicine in my state. That is a severe violation of my constitutional rights under the First Amendment, and in August, I filed a federal lawsuit to vindicate my rights.

I’m appalled to see this kind of authoritarian behavior from my own Democrat-led state government. My fellow liberals wouldn’t tolerate this from a Republican administration, and I refuse to tolerate it from my own.

Paul Terdal is an advocate for health consumer rights and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 18:40

"He Was A Savant": How Charlie Kirk Challenged And Inspired A Generation Of Rising Political Influencers

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.

Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, speaks at the High School Leadership Summit, a Turning Point USA event, at George Washington University in Washington on July 26, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.

Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.

He continued this mission until the very end.

“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.

Thorderson rose from the Turning Point USA chapter president at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now, Thorderson is a sitting member of the Utah Republican State Central Committee. He attributes his trajectory, in large part, to Kirk’s personal mentorship.

“I really got to view him as a mentor and as a personal friend, as he would invest in me one-on-one, on many occasions,” he told The Epoch Times.

Thorderson is among many whose political voices Kirk amplified since co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012.

“I owe my entire political career to Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post the day after Kirk’s death.

“I would quite literally not be in office today if it weren’t for him. Even when my own party was working against me, Charlie endorsed me and campaigned to help me win election.”

Luna’s communications director, David Leatherwood, also came into his own, politically, through Turning Point USA and Kirk’s personal support.

Leatherwood, 37, a self-described gay conservative, first met Kirk in 2017.

“I met Charlie at one of his campus tours in Fort Lauderdale, and we actually filmed a video together where he said that he, you know, supports the gay community, and that e pluribus unum, represents all Americans,” Leatherwood told The Epoch Times.

“And ever since that day, he was always supportive of me, and he invited me to be an ambassador for his organization.”

Raising Young Conservative Voices

Hallie S., 26, from Gainesville, Florida, credits Kirk’s organization with helping her and other conservative students at Santa Fe College be more outspoken with their views.

“I’ve always been more conservative. I was raised conservative, but was never big about speaking up, especially in Gainesville, which is such a liberal area, and you never know how people are going to react,” she said.

Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, speaks at the High School Leadership Summit, a Turning Point USA event, at George Washington University in Washington on July 26, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Hallie said she was able to revamp the College Republicans chapter at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, thanks in large part to the influence of Kirk and Turning Point USA.

“Charlie Kirk was a huge portion of that. He had a huge impact on politics on college campuses, especially in Santa Fe,” she told The Epoch Times.

“You had all these students that were like, ‘wow, my conservative values are being represented in a way that really had never been represented before.’”

Kelly Shackelford, a First Amendment attorney and president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said he invited Kirk to speak at a fundraising event in Houston, Texas, shortly after discovering the young influencer.

“Typically at fundraisers, everybody’s 60-and-older,” Shackelford told the Epoch Times.

“And so I wanted to encourage these older people that there are younger people who are coming behind them, and it’s not going to die with them.”

Making an Online Presence

With much of his content shared online, Kirk’s influence spread beyond the numerous college campuses he visited over the years and reached millions online.

Tucker, a teenager who requested his surname not be revealed due to fear of retaliation, told The Epoch Times that Kirk was among a limited number of political influencers whose content he liked to engage with.

“I don’t really like watching political stuff. I mean, it'll come up like on TikTok or something like that, and I just scroll past it,” Tucker said.

“But when I saw his stuff, I would always click on it cause it was always interesting and he was just somebody that you could look up to.”

During an interview on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast in March, the Democratic governor confessed that his 13-year-old son wanted to skip school for a chance to meet Kirk.

Gunnar Thorderson and Charlie Kirk share a photo together backstage, during an October 2020 event. Courtesy of Gunnar Thorderson

“Literally last night, trying to put my son to bed, he’s like, ‘Dad I just—what time, what time is Charlie gonna be here? What time?’” Newsom said.

“And I’m like, ‘dude, you’re in school tomorrow.’”

Leatherwood said he was comforted knowing how many moments of Kirk’s life were captured on camera, preserving his thoughts and views.

“The beautiful thing about today and modern technology and our access, our access to media, is that, you know, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of him speaking. And those will live on, and I think they'll actually memorialize his legacy in an even greater way than people can anticipate,” he said.

Driving Debate

Kirk made debate a core component of his mission. As he visited college campuses around the country, he often did so with a pop-up tent emblazoned with the words “prove me wrong,” and he offered up a microphone to those with differing points of view to confront him directly through dialogue.

“He went from campus to campus, engaging with students that he didn’t really view as the enemy ever. It was just that he felt they needed to be educated and that they needed to have proper discourse,” Thorderson said.

“And it was through that that they would end up being convinced of our ideas.”

Not all of Kirk’s interlocutors were swayed by his arguments, but they credited him for allowing a discussion.

Charlie Kirk and Cenk Uygur speak together on day three of the America (AM) Fest hosted by Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Ariz., on Dec. 21, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

“I stand by so little of everything that [Kirk] said, but one of the things he stood by was conversation,” Hunter Kozak said in a video post the day after Kirk’s death.

Kozak, 29, is a student at UVU and was the last person to debate with Kirk before he was shot.

Kirk was just minutes into what was meant to be the first stop of his latest campus speaking tour when he was assassinated.

Dean Withers, who had debated Kirk, broke down in tears while filming a livestream on Sept. 10, as he learned Kirk had been shot. Addressing his initial reaction, Withers filmed another video that evening, acknowledging his disagreements with Kirk.

“Does that mean I think he deserved to lose his life? No. Does that mean I think his two young children, who were in attendance at the event where he was shot, deserved to watch their father die? No. Does that mean I think they deserve to grow up without him? No. Does that mean I think that his wife, who was also there, deserved to lose her husband? No,” Withers said.

“And honestly, if you answered yes to any of those questions, there’s a very clear line drawn between me and you. I don’t want your support, and I don’t support you either.”

Living Beyond Politics

Throughout his stardom as a conservative political influencer, Kirk frequently looked beyond politics and emphasized his Christian faith.

Speaking with The Epoch Times, Thorderson recalled a morning when he and Kirk were traveling for an event and went for a workout in the hotel gym. It wasn’t long before their exercise turned philosophical.

“I remember at the time, I was struggling with my own faith and kind of just playing devil’s advocate with him,” Thorderson recalled.

“And he was just so steadfast in his faith and impressive with his knowledge. And that was a moment where I didn’t feel like he was necessarily preaching to me, but really just trying to connect on a personal level and trying to see me where I was at.”

Students and other supporters holding a vigil to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk sing "Amazing Grace" at the University of Florida in Gainesville, on Sept. 11, 2025. Courtesy of Natasha Holt

At other points, Thorderson described Kirk being able to hold a knowledgeable conversation on matters beyond politics and articulate a connection back to his core values.

“He was a savant,” Thorderson said.

Thorderson also recalled having the chance to know Kirk when the Turning Point USA leader was getting to know his wife, Erika.

“He just always valued family and wanted to start a family. And that was just, even before he had kids, that was a core value for him,” Thorderson said.

Kirk leaves behind his wife Erika and two children.

John Haughey, Savannah Pointer, Nanette Holt, and Natasha Holt contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 17:30

National Guard Deployment Planned For Memphis, Says Trump

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump announced that the National Guard would be heading to Memphis to deal with crime.

Armed National Guard members patrol the National Mall in Washington on Aug. 27, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The president made his comments on Sept. 12 during an interview with Fox News, saying that the administration would take on crime in the Tennessee city, and possibly others, such as New Orleans.

During his comments, Trump said that Memphis is “deeply troubled,” and added that the national guard presence would fix the problem, “just like we did in Washington.”

The president also said he sees New Orleans as a city in “really bad shape,” and that Gov. Jeff Landry wants him to act.

“The governor wants us to go in. We'll do that too,” Trump said.

The announcement comes just over a month after the Aug. 11 federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington.

As of Sept. 10, more than 2,300 arrests have been made by federal and local partners in Washington, and more than 220 illegal firearms have been seized, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump previously said Chicago could be the next major city to face a federal crime crackdown.

He said the National Guard could “solve Chicago within one week.”

“After we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also,” Trump told reporters at the time inside the Oval Office, referring to his efforts in Washington to crack down on crime.

“Chicago’s a mess. We’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 16:20