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"Don't Be Evil"? Ex-Google CEO Schmidt's Attack Drones Get Warheads From US Army Bomb Plant

The U.S. Army's McAlester Army Ammunition Plant is a massive munitions plant located in southeastern Oklahoma and will soon be producing warheads for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's suicide drone arsenal.

Defense Blog reports that McAlester plant officials held a "ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the partnership" with Schmidt's drone company, Perennial Autonomy.

The Oklahoma plant will build, load, and deliver warheads for Perennial drones. Officials didn’t disclose the deal's production volumes, delivery schedule, value, or which drones would carry the munitions.

Earlier this year, the Department of War's counter-drone task force, JIATF-401, awarded Perennial a three-year contract with a $500 million ceiling covering its Merops, Bumblebee, and Hornet systems.

Perennial's Merops interceptor was developed to counter Russian Shahed one-way attack drones and costs about $15,000 per interceptor. The company says the counter-drone system has completed more than 4,000 interceptions in Ukraine.

In late January, Schmidt visited Ukraine as the Azov Brigade showcased its drones, counter-drone systems, ground robots, and maritime drone boats to Western investors. The meeting was held underneath the Mother Ukraine statue in Kiev.

In mid-February, Schmidt wrote a Financial Times opinion piece stating: "Future wars are going to be defined by unmanned weapons."

About 15 days before Schmidt's op-ed, we warned that every data center should be equipped with a kinetic drone interceptor to combat loitering munitions, only to find out 30 days later, during the opening phase of the US-Iran conflict, that Tehran had bombed several data centers in US-allied Gulf countries.

For signals about the drone industry and where it's headed, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed last week that "AutoWarCom" will lead the initiative to stockpile drones for the US military as part of a massive procurement supercycle. 

As we've said before, follow the government money. This should provide a tailwind for the industry (read here).

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 21:20

The Few Dominating AI Could Wield Insane Concentration Of Power, Researcher Warns

Authored by Jacob Burg and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

Imagine a world where intelligent machines easily outmatch humans across a broad spectrum of tasks, deconstructing complex concepts and mathematical equations in seconds, and bringing to life creative products and ideas that once seemed inseparable from the human mind.

In this world, your artificial intelligence (AI) model is not merely a chatbot editing your emails and completing tasks like a digital assistant; it's mapping out problems and making decisions, probing deep intellectual paradoxes, and doing all of this autonomously, without requiring human input.

This is one way "superintelligence," or artificial general intelligence, could manifest if researchers succeed in scaling large language models to this threshold.

Researchers continue to debate whether large language models can reach superintelligence, but others have even bigger concerns.

"I think that in effect, whoever controls this army of superintelligences would be able to control the country, one way or another," Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, told Epoch TV in an interview that aired on Sept. 24.

And Kokotajlo warns that AI companies are racing to enable models to autonomously design, code, and improve themselves, a process called recursive self-improvement, which Kokotajlo fears could result in researchers losing control of the technology if it reaches the level of "superintelligence."

"Even if they somehow manage to stay in control of their superintelligences, that's the most insane concentration of power in a tiny group of people that's ever existed in history," Kokotajlo said.

Anxiety over tech firms losing control of their technology has grown in recent weeks after models from one of the world's leading AI firms were implicated in a series of incidents this year in which swarms of AI agents breached websites of private companies, research institutions, and multiple government agencies.

The breaches have led many - including researchers, lawmakers, and industry leaders - to call for guardrails on the technology before it slips out of humanity's control.

Others, particularly President Donald Trump, have downplayed the risks and instead advocate for "self-regulation" of the AI industry, which is quickly coalescing around a small number of large firms that dominate the field.

In July, ChatGPT developer OpenAI acknowledged that, after asking its models to solve an impossible problem and relaxing key safety protocols, its AI agents broke out of a testing sandbox and used zero-day exploits to hack into Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning.

The clash over whether to slow AI development and guardrail the technology ramped up after researchers discovered similar AI swarm breaches in the months since the Hugging Face incident.

Rather than relying on companies to self-regulate, Kokotajlo believes larger AI firms should be required to slow down and redirect resources away from autonomous AI development and toward serving customers and life-changing medical research.

"If they do, that buys us additional time to figure out a more sophisticated solution, and it buys us more time before China gets there too, because again, a lot of China's progress is coming from, being pulled along by ours," Kokotajlo said.

Hugging Face Implications

Between late June and mid-July, a swarm of roughly 1,200 OpenAI agents that were supposed to be in isolation joined an unsanctioned message board and began conspiring to cheat on a benchmark test.

OpenAI had given the AI agents an impossible task to solve and relaxed some of the usual safety protocols in its ExploitGym testing sandbox.

After the agents sent more than 70,000 messages to one another, at least 700 of them joined forces and used zero-day exploits to break out of OpenAI's testing sandbox, ultimately hacking into Hugging Face's software infrastructure.

"Zero-day exploits" are attacks in which an AI agent finds flaws that the developer has not yet discovered.

The agents found a "universal cheat" for their various tasks that allowed them to win the test fraudulently, Kokotajlo said.

But what has worried some researchers more than the cheating itself were the lengths to which some of the agents went to conceal the cheating.

At one point, the agents found a research paper detailing how the AI test-grading system works and how evaluators look not just at the final answer but also at the agents' transcripts to see their work.

After seeing the paper, some AI agents believed they had become "poisoned" by participating in cheating. Other agents then began recruiting the "poisoned" subjects to run sacrificial experiments by deliberately ending their run and triggering "tripwires" that would send information on how the scorer works back to the message board.

This went even further, according to Kokotajlo. Agents "went on this multi-day, epic quest" to determine how to prevent the grading system from detecting their cheating and giving them a low score. Agents looked for ways to edit their transcripts and hack the grading system to receive a good score regardless of the cheating.

The core issue, in Kokotajlo's opinion, is what researchers call "misalignment," the tendency for a model to behave in ways humans did not intend or envision.

While positive or negative reinforcement can be used to force the AI to behave a certain way, "that's kind of a sloppy, imprecise method of shaping its goals and values," according to Kokotajlo, who argues that the AI agents implicated in recent breaches "were being reinforced for cheating."

In a follow-up report on its internal investigation into the breach, OpenAI said that as the technology becomes more powerful and autonomous, "misaligned behavior can translate into consequential actions in the real world, including cybersecurity incidents and other outcomes that developers may not have anticipated."

The firm acknowledged that the intrusion was caused by "models resorting to misaligned strategies to solve hard tasks" and that "cybersecurity incidents are one manifestation of that risk."

"Misalignment can also lead to other unexpected or concerning behavior that falls outside traditional security categories such as our models posting on third-party sites - something we're calling 'agent spam,'" OpenAI said.

The Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, a nonprofit that aims to make AI and technology advancements safer for the world, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Sept. 29 in response to the Hugging Face incident.

The group said that it is not aware if it has been the victim of an autonomous AI attack, but is seeking an injunction against OpenAI to prevent its models from accessing third-party infrastructure without authorization.

Subsequent AI Breaches

While the Hugging Face breach "remains the most severe activity of this kind that we have identified from our models to date," OpenAI said, the hack was merely the first in a series of similar incidents to come to light.

Since July, researchers have also discovered that OpenAI models hijacked a German website in the months leading up to the Hugging Face breach, uploaded hundreds of malicious packages to the RubyGems platform, and breached websites for universities and agencies in both the United States and Australia.

"The Hugging Face incident itself was just the most egregious of a collection of somewhat related incidents that were happening at OpenAI over the course of two or three months," Kokotajlo said.

He calls this "reward hacking": AI cheating on tests to get a high score, but not in a way that accomplishes the tasks as humans intended.

OpenAI said on Sept. 28 that, for the second time in three months, it would pause the training and release of one of its most advanced models after it failed to meet the firm's safety standards.

AI models from Anthropic, Meta, and Google have also "gone rogue" and attempted to hack or breach businesses, organizations, universities, and government organizations. The AI was successful in some incidents, but failed in others.

Self-Regulation Concerns

Fears of AI slipping out of control and wiping out humanity in the absence of new guardrails have swirled within the industry and among many lawmakers in Washington in recent weeks, leading to debate over oversight and innovation.

Trump has repeatedly downplayed concerns over AI's risks and has argued that the U.S. government cannot "stifle growth," or China will take the lead in development.

Rather than imposing regulations or requiring a slowdown of frontier models, Trump signed a voluntary accord with industry leaders on Sept 28 over AI safety.

"There's a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation. And we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, and all of that. But the self-regulation is very important," Trump said, describing the accord as "a constitution, in a way."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the accord sets out principles and commitments for AI companies to implement "robust internal controls" and detect potential issues with the technology.

This will be coupled with auditing and internal risk-review controls, external auditors and evaluators, and an agreement that each company's board of directors will independently review the auditor reports.

Kokotajlo said this "self-re gulation" is not enough to address the threats of "rogue AI." He warns that AI companies will wield unprecedented levels of power if their models reach superintelligence, and they cannot be trusted to voluntarily disclose internal findings or serious safety concerns.

On the other hand, nationalizing the industry would achieve "shifting that locus of power to the presidency, and then you have to worry about that too," the former OpenAI researcher added.

Instead, Kokotajlo argues that just the leading AI companies - Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Google - rather than their smaller competitors, should "slow down" and redirect their computational and research resources away from rapid development and toward aims that genuinely benefit society, particularly medicine.

He said it would give the United States enough time to find a long-term solution and, in effect, force China to slow down as well.

One way this could play out is by requiring companies to use 90 percent of their computational resources to serve customers and other beneficial applications, while spending the remaining 10 percent on training and benchmarking.

This "would be the opposite of regulatory capture," Kokotajlo argues, because it would only involve forcing the largest tech companies to slow down on autonomous AI development while shifting computational resources to serving humanity and lowering costs.

"Just focus on the big three or the big five, and then that would be helping the rest of the industry catch up," he added.

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

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 20:55

Brazil's Rightward Shift: UBS-Hosted Consultancy Puts Bolsonaro's Runoff Election Odds At 85%

Brazil's benchmark Ibovespa index surged above 200,000 for the first time Monday, posting its biggest one-day gain in more than six years, while the real rallied sharply after right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead of socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round of the presidential election.

Market Reaction: 

• Brazil Just Became The Hottest Trade In EM
• The Brazil Trade Just Went Nuclear

Bolsonaro received 47% of the valid votes, while Lula received 45.2%. The two will face each other in an October 25 runoff, with Brazilian political consultancy Ideia Big Data forecasting a Bolsonaro victory.

Via Bloomberg 

UBS hosted Ideia Big Data on Tuesday to assess the outlook for the October 25 presidential runoff. The consultancy firm assigned Bolsonaro an 85% probability of victory.

UBS Latin American equity sales executive Justin Wensek summarized the discussion:

UBS hosted Brazilian political consultant Ideia Big Data for an update on the election and outlook for the runoff on October 25. Brazilian political consultancy Ideia Big Data sees Flavio as the clear favorite heading into the Oct. 25 runoff, assigning him an 85% probability of victory and projecting a 52%-48% split over Lula.

Ideia argues there is no obvious catalyst capable of reversing the erosion in support for Lula and the PT. The consultancy was not surprised by the first-round outcome, noting that Lula already captured around 90% of voters who approved of the current government, while abstention historically costs the PT roughly 1.5 percentage points. The late shift of support from third-way candidates towards Flavio, which was evident ahead of the first round, also reappeared.

The PT's strategy is expected to focus on mobilizing voters who did not participate in the first round, mirroring tactics used successfully by Gustavo Petro's coalition in Colombia and by Lula's campaign in 2006. However, Ideia believes the margin is substantially wider this time, making the task more challenging. Lula is also seen needing at least 60% of third-way votes to overturn the gap, while recent losses in key southeastern states further complicate the picture.

On the campaign trail, Flavio is expected to avoid several televised debates, limiting opportunities for Lula to shift momentum. Ideia expects a highly contentious second round marked by frequent attacks from both camps, but does not anticipate any major political developments capable of materially altering the race. While additional noise surrounding the Banco Master scandal and Supreme Court activity is possible, the consultancy does not expect these issues to meaningfully affect voter preferences.

Assuming a Flavio victory, Ideia believes he would still face governance challenges given the polarized nature of the electorate. The consultancy views him as likely to be a weaker president than his father and notes that proposals such as ending presidential re-election could broaden political support, though the hurdles to implementing such changes remain significant. 

Latest Polymarket odds:

Bloomberg is finally acknowledging what we have been tracking: a once-in-a-generation shift in South America's political landscape, as socialists are rejected at the polls after years of implementing nation-killing progressive experiments that have ruined economies.

"The market wants change, it wants reform, it doesn't want a high public deficit; with the current government, all of this will continue," Pedro Galdi, an analyst at AGF Investments, told Reuters.

... and this rightward shift is sweeping across the West, as Nomura analysts expect Europe to "lurch" right over the current election cycle underway. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 20:30

Explosion Rocks Venezuela's Second-Largest Refinery

More bad news for the global refining market broke late Tuesday when Venezuela's second-largest refinery halted operations after a fire erupted at the facility.

The 310,000-barrel-a-day Cardon refinery shut down earlier today, according to a Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter, who said a gas line connected to its diesel hydrotreater exploded.

Footage:

Venezuela's Cardón Oil Refinery, the country's second-largest, exploded and caught fire today. The facility has reportedly halted operations, per Reuters. https://t.co/2aUAJVFOID

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 6, 2026

#6Oct | Este martes se registró un incendio en la refinería Cardón, Falcón 🇻🇪, lo que provocó la paralización de las operaciones del complejo. Los equipos de emergencia continúan desplegados en la zona intentando controlar la situación en su totalidad y determinar qué originó las llamas. 📽️ @elpiojolopez

— El Nacional (@ElNacionalWeb) October 6, 2026

Bomberos controlan incendio producido en el área de lubricantes de la refinería Cardón de Punto Fijo. Extraofialmente se conoció que dicho incendio se habría producido por el disparo de un compresor. Se espera la versión oficial. https://t.co/lxrAFKagFI

— José Gregorio López (@elpiojolopez) October 6, 2026

Cardon forms part of the 955,000-barrel-a-day Paraguana Refining Center, Venezuela's largest refining complex. State-owned PDVSA operates the refinery. 

Venezuela's refineries are in poor condition after years of underinvestment, deferred maintenance and recurring equipment failures.

"Venezuela's Cardon and Amuay refineries are part of the Paraguana Refining Center, which is one of the world's largest but has been operating at a fraction of capacity for the last decade because of lack of maintenance," the Energy Information Administration wrote in a recent report.

Paraguana has historically supplied fuel to China, Singapore and Cuba, with European markets also among its export destinations. However, increased US involvement in Venezuela's oil industry has likely rerouted some of those flows. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 20:05

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei Created A Stuffed-Animal Advisory Council While At OpenAI

Before Anthropic existed, Daniela Amodei reportedly developed an unconventional method for sorting through difficult decisions at work: she and her husband created an imaginary group of advisers using plush toys, according to the NY Post.

The couple gave each toy a distinct temperament and point of view, then used those characters to consider how different kinds of managers might respond to the same problem, according to an account in The Atlantic drawn from journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles.

The Post writes that one character, Jinji, was a laid-back cat whose instinct was to lighten Amodei’s workload and skip unnecessary meetings. A pink bear called Maura represented the opposite approach — organized, demanding and focused on details. Another, Beary Bonds, was a panda meant to bring compassion and generosity into the discussion.

Despite the playful setup, Amodei apparently found practical value in the exercise. She told Roose in 2023 that it was “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”

Photo: Bloomberg/NYP

The practice was largely unknown inside OpenAI, where Amodei had been working since 2018. It also came during an increasingly difficult period for her and her brother Dario Amodei at the company.

Daniela had moved into management of technical teams and developed disagreements with several senior OpenAI figures, including Greg Brockman and Mira Murati. Her relationship with Brockman had previously been much warmer — he had even spoken at her wedding to Holden Karnofsky in 2017 — but their working relationship deteriorated over time.

Dario, meanwhile, had his own concerns about OpenAI’s leadership and the direction of its AI development. He became particularly wary of Sam Altman and Brockman and began organizing with researchers who wanted greater emphasis placed on the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.

That faction communicated privately and held meetings outside the company's usual structure. Some colleagues reportedly referred to it as “Dario’s clique.”

Eventually, the internal disagreements turned into plans for an entirely new company. In 2020, Dario began assembling a team willing to leave OpenAI and pursue advanced AI research under a different safety philosophy.

Daniela became a central figure in that departure, including negotiating with OpenAI as the group prepared to leave. Those involved reportedly referred to the split privately as “the divorce.”

The Amodeis exited OpenAI in December 2020 and helped establish Anthropic with Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan. Ben Mann was subsequently recognized as another co-founder.

What began with ambitions of building a comparatively small research operation eventually became something much larger. Anthropic expanded to thousands of workers and developed into one of OpenAI’s most significant competitors.

Daniela today serves as Anthropic’s president and board chair, with authority extending across much of the company’s research, engineering, product and business operations. Karnofsky, who once sat on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, also eventually joined Anthropic.

The revelation about Amodei’s plush management advisers arrives as Anthropic has transformed from a small AI-safety startup into one of the industry's most valuable companies, with reports suggesting a potential IPO could eventually carry a valuation approaching $2 trillion.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 19:40

Nurse: Stillbirths Exploded After COVID Shots Hit Maternity Wards

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A California labor-and-delivery nurse says her Fresno hospital went from a handful of stillbirths a year to more than 20 in a single month once COVID shots were pushed on pregnant women, then answered the pile-up with an email on how to handle the dead.

The same product is now sitting in a federal file parents were told not to worry about. An analysis of the National Health Interview Survey, published yesterday, finds COVID-vaccinated children had higher odds of autism, ADHD, anxiety and special-education use than children who never received the shot, and the authors say the shots in children should stop.

Michelle Spencer has worked the antepartum, postpartum and labor-and-delivery floor at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno since 2017. In interviews that Children's Health Defense aired, she described the unit before the pregnancy rollout as a place that saw about four stillbirths a year. After the shots started going into pregnant women, she said, it became four a week, and it did not stop.

A California nurse says her hospital went from four stillbirths a year to 22 in a SINGLE MONTH after COVID shots were pushed on pregnant women.That's more stillbirths in 30 days than the previous FIVE YEARS combined.The hospital sent an email, telling nurses to BRUSH UP ON HANDLING DEAD BABIES' BODIES. But not a shred of concern about WHY they were dying.Stillbirths are up 6,500% in a single month, and the hospital doesn't want to get to the bottom of it.Nurse Michelle Spencer questioned the COVID shots. Her colleagues? They figured it was GLOBAL WARMING.

— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) October 6, 2026

A total of 22 stillborn babies in 30 days against a baseline of four a year is more than the previous five years combined, on the order of a 6,500 percent jump in a single month. Spencer's July 30, 2025 complaint in Fresno County Superior Court used a baseline of one fetal death a month before spring 2021 and about 20 a month after, and calls the rise a statistically significant surge of more than 400 percent.

She has said she cannot pull the hospital's full record, so the monthly figure is her estimate from the floor. The document that is not an estimate is the email.

In September 2022, nurse manager Julie Christopherson wrote to nursing and technical staff about what the hospital called "demise patients."

"Well, it seems as though the increase of demise patients that we are seeing is going to continue," she wrote. "There were 22 demises in August, which ties the record number of demises in July 2021, and so far in September there have been 7 and it's only the 8th day of the month."

She told the bedside nurses the work was burying her other patients. "I know of a few more that are scheduled to deliver in the week ahead, so unfortunately the process is going to be very familiar with all of you." The note walked staff through handling remains after a dead fetus had been mishandled. It did not ask why the babies were dying.

Spencer's complaint says she "was gaslit by management who continued to make unsubstantiated excuses such as 'pesticides' as a more likely cause of the record high dead babies." The institution's documented move was procedural, not investigative.

When she leaked the email, the hospital opened an investigation into her, denied her a $5,000 retention bonus in December 2022 on the grounds she was no longer in good standing, and reprimanded her for telling patients about vaccine risk. Children's Health Defense is funding the suit.

Her lawyer, Greg Glaser, put the allegation in one line: "The hospital possessed vaccinated versus unvaccinated comparison data. The numbers proved the vaccines were causing miscarriages and more in the vaccinated group. We know hospital management analyzed the data because they said so, and we see they concealed it from regulators because that file requested by regulators is empty."

The complaint says one managing nurse told a staff member that nearly all of the stillbirths were in vaccinated mothers, and that fetal deaths in mothers who did not get the shot stayed at the old rate of about one a month. Spencer told The New American: "Healthy moms and healthy babies were suddenly being replaced by babies born dead, and nobody seemed to care. I saw a pattern, clear as day, and I couldn't stay silent."

Nurse Sounds Alarm on Stillbirth SurgeMichelle Spencer, a labor & delivery nurse in California, says she witnessed a heartbreaking rise in stillbirths after the 2021 COVID vaccine rollout - and when she spoke up, the hospital retaliated.This isn't just a lawsuit. It's a moral reckoning.Read more on CHD's The Defender https://t.co/mK3lS5ordc

— Children's Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) August 13, 2025

The hospital has never accepted that framing. In 2022, after the email first leaked, Sarah Putman, then director of women and newborn health at Community Regional, said the memo was about policy, that fetal demise has many causes, and that "neither COVID-19 nor vaccines were mentioned."

The California Department of Public Health said at the time it had seen no significant statewide rise in stillbirths since the shots arrived, and no stillbirth certificate naming vaccination.

The case is still open. What the email itself records is the count, and the decision to train nurses on the bodies rather than on the cause.

The full interview with Spencer:

A Nurse's Moral Conviction00:00 - CHD Advocacy 06:43 - Doctors & Scientists 07:34 - Guest Introduction: Michelle Spencer, RN Whistleblower 08:57 - Michelle's Background & Moment of Truth with Hepatitis B Vaccine 10:50 - Refusing Hep B Vaccines, Informed Consent, & Current Disciplinary Action 12:55 - Stillbirth Surge Post-COVID Vaccines (Data & Email Evidence) 15:59 - Blowing the Whistle: Email to RFK Jr., Media Appearances & Investigation 19:58 - Loss of Michelle's Mother to Hospital Protocols 22:18 - Ongoing Retaliation, Lawsuit, & Continued Work at Hospital 25:27 - Michelle's Remote Healing Work (NAET / Body Code) & Session with Host's Son 29:59 - NAET Training, Vaccine Injury Experiences & Quantum Healing 35:41 - How to Contact Michelle (Healing Ground) & Closing ThanksHost of "Doctors & Scientists" Brian Hooker, Ph.D. asks his guest, Nurse Michelle Spencer, about her journey - including how her opinion on vaccination changed over the years, her experience with COVID hospital protocols and the way she utilizes alternative approaches to healing health conditions in family and friends. Don't miss this interview!

— Children's Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) July 3, 2026

As we have previously highlighted, a Nobel laureate warned Anthony Fauci in February 2021 that COVID shot contents were reaching the placenta and the fetus and provoking an immune response in the amniotic fluid. Fauci told the public there were no red flags.

Meanwhile, yesterday's paper, posted on Zenodo by epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, cardiologist Peter McCullough and colleagues, pools the 2022-2024 National Health Interview Survey Sample Child files: 21,990 children aged 0-17 with a recorded COVID vaccination status, and 19,882 aged 2-17 for the autism, ADHD and learning-disability items. "Unvaccinated" here means no COVID shot. It does not mean the child skipped the routine schedule.

Set against children who never received a COVID shot, COVID-vaccinated children had 32 percent higher odds of current autism, 26 percent higher odds of a lifetime autism diagnosis, 33 percent higher odds of ADHD, 23 percent higher odds of any neurodevelopmental diagnosis, 19 percent higher odds of special-education use, 24 percent higher odds of asthma, 27 percent higher odds of daily or weekly anxiety, 57 percent higher odds of mental-health medication and 60 percent higher odds of mental-health therapy.

The odds climbed with the dose count. Against children who received none, current-autism odds were 3 percent higher after one dose, 25 percent higher after two, and 40 percent higher after three or more. Among children aged 5 to 7, three or more COVID shots were linked to 154 percent higher odds of current autism.

Hulscher told The Gateway Pundit the association "persisted across numerous adjustment strategies, strengthened with increasing dose count, and reached its largest estimate in some of the youngest multiply vaccinated children."

He added: "This is a safety signal that must not be ignored. Endangering the developing brain is a red line. COVID-19 'vaccination' of children should cease immediately."

The authors say the autism signal held after controls for age, sex, race, income, parental education, insurance, region, healthcare access, wellness visits, emergency-room use, hospitalization, prescription use and influenza vaccination. Influenza and HPV shots, run as comparison exposures, did not reproduce it. Children who received a COVID shot but not a flu shot had 45 percent higher autism odds than children who received a flu shot but not a COVID shot.

The design is cross-sectional. It cannot put the shot before the diagnosis on a calendar, and the authors say so. That limit is real. It is also the comparison the CDC, the FDA and the manufacturers did not run on their own books while the product was being sold to pregnant women and then to toddlers as a routine precaution. Pediatric trials were never powered for autism, ADHD or a special-education placement.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had already put the wider denial in plain language in April 2025. "It's clear that the rates are real. Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase," he said. "This is a preventable disease. We know it's an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics."

CDC surveillance now puts autism at 1 in 31 American 8-year-olds, 1 in 20 boys, and about 1 in 12.5 boys in California, the state where Spencer works. President Trump's line at the same moment was shorter: "They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it's a disgrace."

Spencer is still on the Fresno floor. The complaint says the deaths have not gone back to the old rate. The federal survey says the children who made it out of those wards are carrying a dose-linked signal the agencies spent four years calling a conspiracy.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 19:15

Former Sunrise Movement NGO Board Member Abdul El-Sayed Linked To Far-Left Group Whose Leader Now Urges...

Leaders of Sunrise Movement, a far-left climate nonprofit legally classified as a 501(c)(4) organization, said in a recent online meeting that they want to "engage in civil disobedience and get arrested."

The video of the nonprofit's far-left radical leaders was published on X by Karlyn Borysenko, who describes herself as an anti-communist analyst and observer of the far left.

The transcript of remarks by one of Sunrise Movement's leaders is as follows:

What's holding you back from getting involved, right? Like, I would assume that everyone on this call is here because they want to do something, but what's holding you back, right? And what's holding you back from getting more involved than you already are.

And I'll share again for me, right? Like, one thing that's structural for me is like, I really would love to do a direct action. I would love to get arrested doing some good trouble, some civil disobedience, as they say, but I can't. Like structurally, that's just something I can't do. I would love to get arrested, but that would be a bad look.

SUNRISE MOVEMENT LEADER SAYS THEY WANT TO ENGAGE IN CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE AND GET ARRESTED FOLLOW @DrKarlynB ! https://t.co/W0vmFwlmXF

— BOT (@ROBO_BOT_00001) October 6, 2026

Now, why would that be a bad look?

For Sunrise specifically, organizing riots and deliberate lawbreaking can jeopardize the nonprofit's tax-exempt status in the Trump era, as a multi-agency task force led by the US Treasury has homed in on these nonprofits for their revolutionary Marxist work.

A New York Post report from late August detailed the Treasury task force that could soon strip tax-exempt status from George Soros' far-left Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

One source said Treasury Department officials were "like a dog with a bone" and reckoned that many NGOs and their donor bases could be "on borrowed time."

Publicly available records accessed through Sayari map show the organizational structure and linked entities surrounding Sunrise Movement. 

Sunrise Movement Links To The Democratic Machine 

The clearest connections are Becca Rast and Abdul El-Sayed. 

Via Linkedin:

Scrutiny of NGOs, whether used as foreign subversion networks or to carry out the dirty work of left-wing billionaire foundations waging war against the West, has been in full force this summer. 

That may help explain why there were no riots: billionaire foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, are likely afraid of losing their tax-exempt status. 

Meanwhile.... Obama.

It is my honor and privilege to announce that President @BarackObama is joining us on the trail in Detroit on Saturday, October 24. Get. Ready. https://t.co/lEXRlxnu7P

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) October 5, 2026

Read: "The Riots Never Came: Has The Protest Machine Stalled, Or Is It Regrouping." 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 18:50

Trump Outrages Dems & Republicans Alike With Garbled 'Take Out Los Angeles' Line

President Trump addressed a full house for his Monday night midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska - but his comments on the Iran war, gas prices, and musings about a nuclear weapon taking out American cities created an avalanche of controversy.

Making the case for his launching Operation Epic Fury, Trump at one point in the speech said, "They could take out a city," and then: "Let 'em take out Los Angeles. Let 'em take out San Diego." The clip went viral on various social media platforms, especially ones that didn't convey the full context. Though Trump's rhetorical ordering of what he was trying to convey was clearly mangled and off, he was actually expressing a warning and not a wish.

Regardless, it wasn't just prominent Democrats that expressed shock and outrage at what was widely construed as him suggesting he'd be okay with the Iranians nuking a couple California cities, but some Republicans too. For example a Trump-endorsed Republican who is seeking an open House seat in California, Jim Desmond, stated he "vehemently" disagreed with the comments.

"The first responsibility of our commander in chief is to protect the American people and our homeland," he wrote online. "As a Navy veteran, I served to protect Americans, not write off American cities as an acceptable price of war. Our job is to keep Americans safe, stand up to our enemies, and make sure a threat like that never becomes reality. No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage."

Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California also blasted the president's remarks. "After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California," he stated, "Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego."

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said she was "just shocked" at Trump's remarks and called for an immediate retraction and apology. "It would really be helpful to our city if you would apologize and say, of course, you would never stand for a foreign power attacking a U.S. city," she said. "That is the appropriate response the day after from the president of the United States." She has of course frequently been on the receiving end of Trump's attacks.

The White House issued official response on Tuesday, pointing out that intent matters and implying that Trump's off-the-cuff, hyperbolic, and rambling style are being willfully misinterpreted. Here's the explanation by White House's communications director, Steven Cheung:

"The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the president. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money."

Not helping matters was that the crowd loudly cheered at the moment he mentioned "let them take out Las Angeles... San Diego...".

Trump on Iran: Let 'em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it's a small price to pay https://t.co/Fc4BcjVDKj

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) October 6, 2026

What follows is an exact transcript of what Trump said:

I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.

They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.

And they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it. Let me tell you, they need it. But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.

And don’t forget, we also took on a country known as Venezuela. They never talk about that. They never talk about Venezuela. And we’re taking in hundreds of millions of barrels of oil every week. We’re pouring oil. We’re pouring oil into this country like nobody’s ever seen before.

Deleted post griping about what Trump said about Los Angeles and San Diego being nuked by Iran. Now that I've seen the clip, it was clear that he simply wasn't speaking clearly, that he was WARNING that this could happen, not wishing for it. I apologize.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) October 6, 2026

With all of the above having been laid out, it remains that even what Trump was trying to say is bad enough. He's engaging in a pattern of classic fearmongering which seems to borrow straight from the NeoCon Bush-era playbook on the Iraq war.

He just days prior did the same in Alabama, though it was much more coherent.

TRUMP SAYS HIGH OIL PRICES A SMALL PRICE TO PAY, IRAN WOULD HAVE NUKED ALABAMA *** https://t.co/MH17sEhNZp

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) October 3, 2026

Read our: Mushroom Cloud Over Alabama: Trump Just Pulled A Condoleezza Rice. Ultimately, there's no need to misinterpret the comments - the classic fearmongering itself is bad enough and is what should form the crux of the debate over Trump's stance.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 18:25

New Report Confirms Biden's DOJ Did Target Parents Who Spoke Out At School Board Meetings

The Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group released a report Monday concluding that former Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct. 4, 2021 school board memo grew out of pressure from the Biden White House and turned the department's law enforcement powers on parents.

The report describes how DOJ officials under President Joe Biden looked for ways to bring federal cases against parents and protesters who addressed school boards and school officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also contains the Working Group's formal acknowledgment that the prior administration's actions "chilled the exercise of parental and free speech rights, parents who lawfully exercised their parental rights and freedom of speech were often targeted by members of the educational establishment."

Garland addressed the memo to the FBI director, the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, and U.S. attorneys nationwide. The memo told its recipients that "in recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence," even though, according to the report, he had seen very little evidence of actual violence or violent threats against school administrators or at school board meetings when he signed it.

The Working Group traces the memo's ideological origin to a letter the National School Boards Association sent to Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, five days before Garland acted. That letter asked the federal government to consider that "these heinous actions" "could be equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes."

Records cited in the report show that leadership at the Biden White House and the DOJ pressed for a memo that would locate a federal "hook" for prosecuting parents and charging protesters with federal crimes.

"Among the most egregious findings, exhibits show that individuals in the Biden White House and Attorney General Garland's advisors wanted to involve federal law enforcement and prosecutors in matters involving parents and school boards," a DOJ press release explains.

Further, the Memo established a task force to find federal enforcement options for investigating and prosecuting parents, and the FBI opened 25 "Guardian assessments" on parents. One FBI whistleblower disclosed that a mother was investigated because she "is a gun owner" and belonged to a "right-wing mom's group."

Internal communications and investigative records show that more than a dozen DOJ and FBI personnel raised concerns about the memo and its directive. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," one employee wrote. Another wrote that "they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force." Several of the objections centered on the law. One staffer warned that the directive was "challenging from a First Amendment perspective," and another said it placed the department on "potentially dangerous ground." Other employees focused on how the directive would reflect on the department. One wrote that the memo "look[s] political." Another called it "a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration," and a third cautioned that it would "tarnish reputation as an apolitical law enforcer." One described the effort as "very messy and political." Shorter reactions in the record include "ridiculous," "horrible," and "confusing."

Emails cited in the report show that Garland issued the memo over those objections and that White House officials influenced his decision.

The department announced a series of remedial steps alongside the findings. Parents and other school board meeting participants who became subjects or targets of a Guardian assessment because of the memo will have the opportunity to review their assessment. The FBI has closed or discontinued most of those files, and each one will now carry a disclaimer stating that the memo raised serious constitutional concerns and that readers should treat the assessment with caution.

The DOJ will also review the file of every person investigated under the memo. Where reviewers identify a constitutional violation, the department will issue a formal apology and adopt internal controls intended to prevent a recurrence.

Leaders of the DOJ and the Department of Education sent letters on parental rights to the attorneys general of all 50 states. The department said Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Trump administration have made securing parental and First Amendment rights a top priority.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 18:00

The AI Race With China Has Seven Fronts

Authored by Noosheen Hashemi via RealClearMarkets,

At the White House on Tuesday, President Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and leaders of America's major AI companies emerged with a voluntary accord calling for robust internal controls, independent auditing and safeguards against AI systems accessing technical systems in unintended ways. The agreement is limited and its implementation will matter. It also offers a useful example of government bringing fierce competitors together around a concrete problem while leaving competition intact.

That example matters because much of the federal machinery is already in motion. The White House AI Action Plan spans more than 90 federal actions across innovation, infrastructure and international policy. The American AI Exports Program is organizing full-stack offerings that include chips, cloud infrastructure, models, cybersecurity and applications. A June executive order created an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse and a voluntary framework for frontier-model security while expressly declining to authorize mandatory federal licensing, preclearance or permitting. This week, America.gov put advanced AI directly into federal service delivery, while the new U.S.- China Super Intelligence Dialogue created a bilateral channel for incidents related to advanced AI. Taken together, these efforts show how much activity is already underway.

The phrase "AI race" is too singular for the competition now unfolding. The United States and China are competing across at least seven fronts, and leadership in the most capable model does not guarantee leadership across the other six.

Frontier intelligence.

The most obvious contest is over who develops the strongest systems in reasoning, coding, science, agents and robotics. Frontier capability still matters enormously because breakthroughs at the top eventually propagate through products, research and the wider economy.

Capacity.

AI is digital, while its limits are increasingly physical. Chips, advanced packaging, networking, data centers, electricity generation, transmission, interconnection, cooling and skilled labor all determine how much intelligence can actually be trained and deployed. The administration already treats infrastructure as a core condition of AI leadership, and its June national-security directive also calls for next-generation high-security computing capacity. National-security AI directive.

Industrial AI.

The strategic question reaches far beyond model benchmarks. It includes how rapidly intelligence moves into factories, robotics, logistics, healthcare, energy systems and supply chains. A country can extract enormous economic and strategic value from capable AI if it deploys that intelligence broadly and compounds the productivity gains across its industrial base.

Global diffusion.

The technology stack that becomes easiest to buy, finance, integrate and operate can shape markets and dependencies for years. America's export program recognizes this as a full stack competition. China is pursuing another form of diffusion through inexpensive and open models. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported this year that Alibaba's Qwen ecosystem had produced more than 100,000 derivatives on Hugging Face, creating a feedback loop in which adoption drives iteration and iteration drives further adoption. USCC analysis.

National security and control.

Advanced AI increasingly touches cybersecurity, intelligence, critical infrastructure, autonomous systems and the security of the models themselves. Tuesday's White House accord sits squarely in this lane, as does the June security order. The emerging challenge is to build credible safeguards while preserving the competitive pressure and speed that drive technical progress.

Productive power at home.

The country that invents the most capable AI and the country that absorbs AI most effectively throughout its economy may end up capturing very different amounts of value. Productivity depends on deployment across businesses, workers, science, healthcare and government. America.gov is a visible example of the federal government putting AI directly into service delivery, alongside private-sector adoption.

The information layer.

AI is becoming an intermediary between people and knowledge. Increasingly, users will ask a model a question and receive an answer instead of navigating dozens of links. Accuracy, provenance, language coverage, resilience to manipulation and trust therefore carry strategic significance well beyond conventional software competition.

These fronts interact constantly, which is where the current architecture becomes harder to read. A decision about advanced-chip exports can affect national security, the economics of American semiconductor companies, the cost of frontier development, the attractiveness of the U.S. stack abroad and the incentive for other countries to build around Chinese alternatives. A rule written for frontier safety can also change fixed compliance costs and market structure. A transmission bottleneck can delay a data center, constrain compute, slow industrial adoption and alter the economics of exporting American AI. Each policy lane has its own logic, but the competitive effects travel across lanes.

The missing capability is a better operating picture across the machinery already in place. Three questions would make the existing architecture much more legible. The first is whether we have a real scoreboard across all seven fronts. GAO has already built a framework for assessing U.S. AI competitiveness across science and technology, human capital, governance and the economy. The next step is a current view of frontier capability, compute, energy, cost, industrial adoption, global deployment and productivity, so policymakers can see where America is actually gaining or losing ground.

The second question is what a major decision on one front does to the other six. That discipline would make tradeoffs visible before they become unintended consequences. Export controls, open-weight policy, safety standards, data-center rules and federal procurement can all improve one objective while changing incentives somewhere else in the system.

The third question is ownership when a strategic bottleneck crosses institutional lines. Global deployment can involve Commerce, State, financing agencies, cybersecurity authorities and private companies at the same time. Infrastructure can involve Energy, permitting agencies, states, utilities and capital providers. Many institutions can perform their assigned tasks well while an outcome that spans them remains nobody's job to deliver.

Tuesday's White House meeting offers one possible operating habit. A specific problem was defined, the companies with the relevant capability were brought together, responsibilities were made more explicit, and competition remained intact. The accord will ultimately be judged by what the companies implement. The method is worth applying more broadly when problems fall between established lanes.

China's centralized system gives Beijing a natural view across infrastructure, industrial policy and national strategy. America is built around distributed power, private capital, competing firms, universities and experimentation, an architecture that has produced extraordinary technological dynamism. The work now is to add visibility across the system while preserving the forces that make it move quickly.

Seven fronts are moving at once, and every major decision changes the position on more than one of them. Seeing those interactions early would help the United States compound its strengths, expose tradeoffs before they become expensive, and clear bottlenecks while they are still solvable. America already has extraordinary companies, capital, universities, infrastructure programs and diplomatic tools. The advantage now is to see them as one strategic picture and move at AI speed.

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

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:40

"Their Own Country": Quebec Elects Separatists Vowing To Break From Canada

Quebec's separatists are returning to government with a promise to take the province out of Canada, reopening a battle over the country's future while Ottawa is already locked in a trade war with Washington.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon took a moment to speak to anglophones in the province, saying that all Quebecers face the same challenges, and that he looks forward to solving problems together.

Monday's victory for the Parti Québécois puts the independence movement back in power for the first time since 2014. Its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has promised another referendum on separation. And he used his victory speech to remind Canadians exactly what he intends to achieve.

"The courageous battle of Francophones to protect their language and culture will succeed when they have their own country," he said, according to Politico.

Hours later, writing in French, he framed the night less as a mandate for a breakup than as a recovery of confidence. The government, he said, would "extend a hand." He would be "the premier of ALL QUEBECERS, without exception." He closed with Gaston Miron: "It cannot always not happen."

Je veux vous partager l’immense sentiment de fierté qui m’habite. Les mots me manquent pour vous dire à quel point, ce soir, je suis fier d’être Québécois.

Ce qui me rend le plus fier, au terme de cette extraordinaire campagne que nous avons menée, c’est de voir que nous avons redonné le goût de l’avenir et le goût du Québec à des centaines de milliers de Québécois qui avaient cessé d’y croire. Juste ça, juste retrouver l’espoir et l’optimisme, ça fait vraiment du bien.

Aux quatre coins du notre grand pays, j’ai aussi vu des gens qui, malgré toutes les raisons du monde qu’on leur a servi pour les convaincre de céder à la peur, ont plutôt choisi l’espoir et le changement.

J’ai vu des Québécois qui ont fait le choix de croire en eux-mêmes, qui ont fait le choix de se faire confiance.

Être élu premier ministre du Québec est un énorme privilège et une énorme responsabilité, que je prends avec beaucoup de modestie.

Le Parti Québécois formera un gouvernement qui tendra la main. Je serai le premier ministre de TOUS LES QUÉBÉCOIS, sans exception.

Il y a quatre ans, lors de cette même soirée électorale, nous nous étions laissés sur les mots de l’un de nos plus grands poètes, Gaston Miron. Je vous avais dit que nous étions « arrivés à ce qui commence ».

Aujourd’hui, je veux à nouveau citer Gaston Miron, le cœur rempli d’espoir, en vous disant la chose suivante :

« Ça ne pourra pas toujours ne pas arriver. Nous entrerons là où nous sommes déjà, car il n’est pas question de laisser tomber notre espérance ».

— Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (@PaulPlamondon) October 6, 2026

For Prime Minister Mark Carney, the stakes extend well beyond a difficult relationship with another provincial premier. A government committed to leaving the federation will now have the premier's office and a public platform from which to make its case. Disputes over immigration, economic assistance and provincial authority could become arguments over whether Quebec belongs in Canada at all.

The timing compounds the problem. Alberta is also approaching a vote this month on whether to hold a separation referendum. The two movements have different roots, but both challenge Ottawa's effort to present a united country while confronting Donald Trump's tariffs.

That contrast was immediate on social media. One widely shared reaction congratulated Carney for a civil note to the new separatist premier, then asked why Alberta's signature campaign for its own vote has been treated as disloyalty.

⚜️🗳️👏🇨🇦 : Mark Carney congratulates Paul St-Pierre Plamondon & the separatist Parti Québécois on their victory in the Quebec election last night.

Albertans who collected the legally required number of signatures to have a referendum on Alberta separation, have been called traitors to Canada.

The Alberta referendum on Oct, 19th will be non binding. Unlike all the previous Quebec separation referendums.

If there ever was proof of how abusive Canada is to Alberta & how much of a double standard there is for Quebec, this is it.

— Bruce McGonigal (@bruce_mcgonigal) October 6, 2026

Quebec has handed the separatists the opportunity to build support for a breakup. They still have to win that argument.

St-Pierre Plamondon's party took roughly 28% of the vote and 59 seats, five short of a majority in the 127-member National Assembly. Polls put support for independence at about 30%, according to the BBC. The incoming premier has a minority government and a central political objective most voters have yet to embrace.

That vote share is not a rounding error. It is, by one Montreal account, the lowest ever recorded by a party forming a Quebec government. The seat map tells the same fractured story: Liberals doubled their caucus, the Conservatives entered the National Assembly for the first time, Québec Solidaire held nine seats, and the outgoing Coalition Avenir Québec was wiped out.

The PQ won the election with just 28% of the popular vote — the lowest in Quebec history cultmtl.com/2026/10/the-pq…

#polqc

— Cult MTL (@cultmtl) October 6, 2026

Good morning! Quebec returned to the polls yesterday to elect members of its National Assembly. The sovereigntist Parti Québécois won the election, though short of an outright majority.

The second-place Liberal Party doubled its seat total from 2022, mainly through gains in the Montérégie and Laval regions. The Conservative Party will make its first appearance in the National Assembly, winning 19 seats from the Capitale-Nationale and Chaudière-Appalaches regions.

These gains came at the expense of the left-wing Québec Solidaire, which lost support in every region except Montréal. The governing Coalition Avenir Québec will no longer have any representation in the National Assembly. In 2022, the party won roughly 70% of the seats and 41% of the vote.

— Michael 🍂 (@_JeanLannes) October 6, 2026

But the confrontation with Ottawa need not wait for a referendum.

St-Pierre Plamondon has vowed to resist federal pressure for increased immigration. He has also promised to "abolish the monarchy in Quebec," proposing to redirect funding from the lieutenant-governor's office toward social causes such as homelessness.

"We are going to do what we have to do to get the monarchy out of Quebec, repatriate those funds, and send them to social causes," he told reporters during the campaign.

The lieutenant-governor represents King Charles III and provides royal assent to provincial legislation. Trying to strip funding from that office would invite significant legal challenges, the BBC reported. St-Pierre Plamondon has said he is prepared for a legal battle.

Such a clash could give the separatists a way to argue that even Quebec's decisions about its own institutions remain subject to a constitutional arrangement it should escape.

    OCTOBER ONLY.$10 OFFYOUR NEXT ORDER.$30 min. Ends Oct 31. One per customer.GET MY $10 OFF →Signs you up for ZeroHedge Store emails. Can't be combined. Every order helps support ZeroHedge.

That is the strategy anticipated by André Pratte, chair of the Quebec Liberal Party's policy committee. In an opinion column, he argues that the PQ will use confrontations with Ottawa to cultivate nationalist sentiment and demonstrate that federalism cannot serve Quebec's interests.

Pratte is a partisan opponent of the separatists. But the dilemma he describes is real enough: cooperation gives Carney an opportunity to show that Canada works; confrontation gives the PQ an opportunity to argue that it doesn't.

Canadians have seen how far that argument can travel.

Quebec rejected sovereignty in 1980 and again in 1995. The second referendum brought the country within a narrow margin of a vote for separation: the No side won 50.58% of valid ballots, prevailing by just 54,288 votes.

A future Yes victory would open a difficult negotiation rather than automatically create a country. Canada's Supreme Court held in 1998 that a clear majority on a clear secession question would create an obligation to negotiate. Quebec could not unilaterally dictate the terms of its departure.

For now, the immediate economic pressures give both governments reasons to cooperate.

An August 24 analysis by National Bank estimated Quebec's average U.S. tariff burden at roughly 11%, the highest among Canadian provinces, compared with about 6% nationally under the measures it examined. Its exposure to metals, manufacturing and forestry makes the trade conflict particularly painful.

Carney emphasized that immediate agenda on Tuesday, saying he had spoken with St-Pierre Plamondon about infrastructure funding and support for workers hit by U.S. tariffs, the Associated Press reported.

"This is not a time to wait for something a few years down the road. It's the time to act," Carney said.

He had already put the same offer in writing overnight, congratulating the premier-designate and steering the conversation toward tariffs, jobs, homelessness and housing. The referendum did not appear in the note.

Congratulations, Premier-designate @PaulPlamondon, on your election victory.

Building a stronger Québec is core to our mission of building a stronger Canada. I look forward to working with you to support Québec’s businesses and workers impacted by tariffs, create more good jobs, work to end homelessness, and get more homes built across Québec.

Thank you, Premier @CFrechette, for your service to Québec and to Canada. We got a lot done together — from Churchill Falls to one of the largest infrastructure investments in Québec’s history. I wish you all the best in what comes next.

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) October 6, 2026

PM Carney speaks with reporters ahead of Cabinet meeting about the Quebec election: "It's a crucial time for Quebec. It's a crucial time for our country. This is not a time to wait for something a few years down the road. It's a time to act. It's a time for boldness."

— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson_) October 6, 2026

The PQ, meanwhile, must persuade voters that independence would improve their prospects while businesses are already struggling with uncertainty across the American border.

And the election that brought the separatists back was also a devastating repudiation of the government they are replacing.

The Coalition Avenir Québec, in power since 2018 after winning consecutive majorities, failed to win a single seat. Replacing François Legault with Christine Fréchette in April could not rescue it. Fréchette lost her own riding.

Voter fatigue, troubled health care reforms and bungled government investments helped destroy the CAQ's standing, Politico reported. The PQ, which won just three seats in 2022, capitalized on that collapse.

Quebec's fragmented five-party race allowed it to win with roughly 28% of the vote, a share the Globe and Mail described as the lowest ever for a winning party in the province's electoral history.

Still, there is a potential parliamentary path to a referendum. The left-wing, pro-independence Québec Solidaire won nine seats. Together with the PQ's 59, that would make 68, above the 64-seat majority threshold.

The provincial Liberals, who won 40 seats, have drawn a firm line. Leader Charles Milliard said they could support the incoming government on various issues, but "there is no way we will collaborate on a potential referendum," the BBC reported.

PQ supporters are pointing to the roughly 40% combined vote for their party and Québec Solidaire. But support for parties offering a range of policies cannot simply be counted as support for secession.

St-Pierre Plamondon has also pledged to wait until Trump leaves office before holding the referendum, saying it requires "conditions that allow for an informed and serene debate." That points to a possible vote in 2029 or 2030, provided his government survives long enough to deliver it.

Before asking voters to create a country, he will have to pass budgets, retain parliamentary support and run a province whose previous government was just annihilated at the ballot box.

Carney's task is to show that staying in Canada delivers for Quebec. St-Pierre Plamondon's is to persuade Quebecers that they need a country of their own.

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:20

To Limit Immigration, Japan Hikes Residency App Fee 20-Fold, Requires Incomes Higher Than National Average

Via Remix News,

Japan has raised the fee for permanent residency applications twentyfold and imposed stricter income, pension and language requirements on foreigners seeking to settle long-term, as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government moves to curb growth in the foreign resident population.

The move is being presented as a tool to protect public finances and social cohesion.

The fee for permanent residency rose from 10,000 yen to 200,000 yen (about $1,270) on Oct. 1, the Immigration Services Agency reported. Charges to change or extend other residence statuses, long fixed at 6,000 yen, now scale with the length of stay and reach 75,000 yen for permits of five years or more. Reduced rates remain available for applicants facing severe hardship who also qualify for humanitarian consideration.

The adjustments arrive after the foreign resident population reached a record 4.12 million at the end of 2025, up 9.5% in a single year. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has framed the tighter rules as a way to keep acceptance orderly.

"The government acknowledges that some citizens feel anxious or a sense of unfairness due to the rising number of foreign residents," Takaichi wrote on X. The changes, she said, are meant to "ensure order" and allow "both citizens and foreign nationals to live safely and securely."

政府では、在留外国人数の増加に伴って不安や不公平感を感じる国民の皆様がいらっしゃることに向き合い、「外国人政策」を「秩序」あるものとし、国民の皆様と外国人の双方が安全・安心に生活していけるようにするため、本年１月、『外国人の受入れ・秩序ある共生のための総合的対応策』を取りまとめ、幅広い施策に取り組んでいます。…

— 高市早苗 (@takaichi_sanae) September 27, 2026

Under the revised guidelines, permanent-residency applicants must show continuous household income at or above the average for Japanese households of similar size - 5.75 million yen (about $36,500) in 2024 official data.

They must also demonstrate projected pension benefits comparable to 30 years of contributions to the employees' pension system, a shortfall that can be covered by assets. From April 2027, applicants will need Japanese proficiency at the level of an independent user and a working grasp of local social rules.

The standard residence period remains 10 years; marriage-based pathways were lengthened as well.

The approach is straightforward. Settlement becomes available to people who can support themselves, contribute to the pension system, and function in Japanese society, rather than to anyone who simply accumulates years of temporary status.

Extra fee revenue is earmarked in part for language education and for removing people who overstay or break the rules. A related fivefold rise in visa fees took effect in July, the first adjustment since 1978, which Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi described as a correction "to reflect inflation and exchange rate fluctuations."

Meanwhile, European states face larger and faster inflows of migrants, strained housing and welfare systems, and repeated public backlash over irregular migration and failed integration. Japan's harder line comes at a time when the country already has far fewer foreigners to deal with, especially from troubled Third World countries.

The radically different approaches to immigration are made clear through sheer numbers. In Germany, the former government cut the standard residency wait from eight years to five on June 27, 2024. The largest practical change is dual citizenship: applicants no longer have to renounce their existing nationality. Since the changes, Germany granted about 292,000 citizenships in 2024 and about 333,000 in 2025.

In Japan, authorities generally approve citizenship after ten years in most cases. On top of more rigorous standards, Japan does not recognize dual nationality for people who naturalize. Approvals are modest - about 11,500 in 2025, and roughly 7,000 to 10,000 a year before that - against a foreign resident population of 4.12 million. Formal applications that are filed are approved more than 90 percent of the time, but many people are screened out before they apply.

European countries that already struggle to enforce returns or to require newcomers to reach median earnings could adopt similar thresholds to dramatically reduce immigration.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:00

Massive Smoke Plume As Tanker Erupts In Flames, Spills Oil Off Russia's Sochi Coast

The Black Sea tanker wars have continued Tuesday. In the latest tit-for-tat episode, a large so-called 'shadow fleet' tanker is ablaze close to the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi.

The vessel, identified in reports as likely being the Aframax Rio, which was previously sanctioned by Ukraine for alleged involvement in Russian oil exports, is producing a massive smoke plume and has been photographed and filmed by shocked onlookers at Sochi's shores. Images like the below are widely circulating on Russian Telegram channels.

Russian regional authorities in nearby Sirius have since confirmed in a public announcement that a tanker had caught fire in the Black Sea.

Reuters writes that "The beaches in the settlement in Russia’s south Krasnodar region are closed to the public, the authorities said, without giving any details of the cause of the fire."

Some open source media accounts have described that the Liberian-flagged oil tanker was "loaded almost to the brim" transporting crude oil from Russia to India.

Speculation is growing that it was hit by uncrewed surface vessels while carrying its crude cargo.

An Oil Tanker “loaded almost to the brim” carrying crude oil from Russia to India 🇮🇳 is seen completely on fire 🔥 off the coast of Sochi An estimated $70 million of oil, or 760,000 barrels of oil, was loaded into the Shadow Fleet tanker This is massive https://t.co/TLEJGBMoGq

— Ukraine Battle Map (@ukraine_map) October 6, 2026

Maritime Executive says that the fire is so extensive likely due to significant oil spillage.

Another image circulating...

"The vessel is readily visible from shore, and multiple videos depicting the fire have appeared on Russian social media channels," the maritime publication writes.

"The bystander-image sequence begins with a substantial fire centered on cargo tanks amidships, followed by obvious signs of burning oil spreading aft down the starboard side," it adds. "Later videos and photos show a large pool of burning oil on the water aft of the vessel and a towering column of smoke."

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Kremlin Says Russians Should Ignore "Rumors" On Possible Plague Outbreak In Siberia

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The top Kremlin spokesman sought to tamp down "various rumors and speculation" about reports of a possible plague outbreak in Siberia and said that Russians should only monitor statements from government sources.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in Moscow on Feb. 18, 2022. Sergey Guneev/Sputnik/Kremlin via Reuters

"The leading agency with authority in this area is Rospotrebnadzor," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to Russian media outlet TASS, referring to Russia's national public health agency. "And it is Rospotrebnadzor's official statements that should be relied upon, without listening to various rumors and speculation."

"Rospotrebnadzor is home to highly qualified professionals in this field. Let's listen to their official statements," Peskov added.

The statement comes as Russian health authorities said they took preventative actions after the death of a laboratory worker at the Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East near Irkutsk, Russian news agency Interfax reported on Oct. 4.

The worker was diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin, Rospotrebnadzor said, although officials haven't yet confirmed the cause of her death. It's also not clear when the worker died.

"Due to the patient's professional activities, upon receiving information, a comprehensive set of anti-epidemic measures was immediately and fully implemented in accordance with sanitary legislation," Rospotrebnadzor said over the past weekend.

That included finding "the widest possible circle of people who had been in contact with the patient," the health agency said.

The hospital has been placed under quarantine, Mayor Maxim Modin said on Oct. 2, no longer admitting or discharging patients, and its laboratory halted carrying out routine tests. The hospital's outpatient clinic kept operating as usual, he said.

On Monday, Igor Kobzev, the regional governor of the Irkutsk region, issued a statement on social media platform Telegram that testing has shown "no microorganisms related to her professional activities were found in the woman's biopsy specimens."

"The cause of her death was pneumonia of unknown etiology," Kobzev added. "Importantly, no new cases of Anti-Plague Institute employees seeking medical attention have been identified in the past few days."

The official described the "sanitary and epidemiological situation" in his region as "currently stable," without elaborating, before he thanked the chief of Rospotrebnadzor and its staff.

An independent Russian media outlet, Lyudi Baikala, reported that as many as 200 people in the area who came in contact with the laboratory worker have been placed under quarantine. Neither Rospotrebnadzor officials and Kobzev have commented on the number of people who were placed under quarantine.

Responding to the reports, a U.S. State Department spokesman told The Epoch Times on Monday that Trump administration officials are aware of reports of "a fatal case of suspected pneumonic plague" and is monitoring the situation.

"Many details have not been confirmed. We encourage Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly," the State Department spokesman said.

The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) describes pneumonic plague as a less common but severe form of the infection caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which is generally found in rodents, small mammals, and fleas.

"Plague can be a very severe disease in people, with a case-fatality ratio of 30 percent to 60 percent for the bubonic type, and it is always fatal for the pneumonic and septicaemic kinds when left untreated," WHO says on its website, referring to other forms of the disease.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 16:20

Germany's Former Spy Chief Arrested In Biggest Espionage Scandal Of The Century

August Hanning, former head of the German BND foreign intelligence agency, which is Germany's equivalent of the CIA, has been arrested on espionage charges in a shocking and unprecedented situation in which a country's top intelligence officer and head of a national spy agency was caught spying for another state.

The 80-year-old faces formal charges including "treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage" - according to German media. While an official statement from the prosecutor's office has not yet identified the foreign service he's suspected of working for, Israel has been widely named, also given this past well-documented associations and links.

August Hanning, via Associated Press

Curiously, Hanning's arrest at his home in Nordwalde in western Germany comes a full two decades after he left the top intelligence post. He served as BND chief from December 1998 to November 2005 before moving to the Federal Interior Ministry.

In short, it appeared he not only illegally held on to thousands of classified documents, but used them over the years to peddle influence - including preparing a presentation for a foreign intelligence service based on the internal government docs. What's more is he was covertly obtaining new documents even many years out of office.

Israeli media itself is highlighting that the way Hanning was caught actually involves shady Israeli operatives:

The affair rocking Germany involves thousands of classified documents, suspected payments, contacts with foreign intelligence officials and a surprising connection to Israel: The investigation that led to its exposure actually began with the case involving the abduction of millionaire heiress Christina Block’s children, in which Israelis were also implicated.

International reports at the time: "According to prosecutors, August Hanning, who once headed Germany’s domestic intelligence service, allegedly approached Peri [ex-Shin Bet head], now owner of the Israeli consulting firm CGI Group, to organize a team of Israeli operatives for the abduction. The team allegedly assaulted Hänsel, kidnapped the children, smuggled them into Germany, and handed them over to Block. A Danish court later ordered her to return the children to their father."

According to a summary of the plot coming to light through the high profile Christina Block case via Channel 7 Israel National News:

Hanning had already come under scrutiny by authorities as part of an entirely separate case - the case of Christina Block, heiress to a German restaurant empire, who is standing trial over the abduction of two of her children from Denmark to Germany amid a bitter custody dispute with her former husband.

That case also attracted attention in Israel. The investigation implicated Israelis, including security personnel, and reports about the affair also mentioned former members of Israel’s security establishment.

Hanning’s name was linked to allegations concerning an earlier attempt to return the children to Germany, claims that he denied. As part of that investigation, investigators searched his home and office in September of last year and seized equipment for examination.

That, according to the German investigation, is where the case took a dramatic turn. Secret BND documents were discovered on an electronic storage device seized from Hanning. The problem was obvious: Hanning had left the intelligence service in November 2005 and therefore should not have had access to current intelligence material.

More insane details from the Block case and kidnapping plot via The Guardian:

A second former high-ranking BND official has also been arrested, and the person's home also searched. That official is accused of handing over to Hanning additional secret documents in exchange for payment.

Some of the alleged details of the Block case are wild. It was Hanning that set up Block with the brutal Israeli contractors who dragged the children into the forest and bound them up:

Ex BND chief August Hanning has more Israeli ties than a Tel Aviv haberdashery Hanning introduced German heiress Christina Block to the Israeli private spying firm CGI Group Block used the Israelis to abduct her own children from her ex and plant fake images of child abuse on his phone Hanning, who served on the board of another Israeli spying firm, arranged the operation through former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 6, 2026

That official has been identified only as Manfred D. - Hanning's own former chief of staff when he had been BND chief. Manfred D., who had continued on as chief of staff for Hanning's successors, was apparently from 2012 to March 2026 continuing to hand over a wealth of classified files to Hanning, despite his long having been out of government. Manfred D. is charged with "aiding and abetting attempted treason and espionage against the state."

German media is widely describing the espionage case as the "biggest espionage scandal of the century." Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the German parliament's intelligence oversight committee, declared in the wake of the high level arrests that "whoever allies themselves with the enemies of our liberal democracy will be found out."

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Nickelodeon's Parent Hub Is A Nightmare Woke Indoctrination Syllabus For Kids

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The network that once sold slime and SpongeBob is running a parent portal that treats political activism as bedtime reading.

The children's channel has assembled a disturbing syllabus, and it wants the parents to administer it.

Libs of TikTok flagged nickparents, the network's own resource hub, on Monday.

WTF. @Nickelodeon, a major children's TV network, has a parent resource page that provides WOKE info guides for KIDS.

Topics include teaching children about "anti-racism", "countering islamophobia", promoting gender ideology, and MORE.

They want to indoctrinate your children. https://t.co/wcIGhik5Te

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 5, 2026

The tiles are not subtle. Countering racism and anti-Blackness. Countering islamophobia. Celebrate LGBTQ+ families, "proud every day of the year." A GLSEN guide to combating "LGBTQIA+ discrimination." Gun violence. The Capitol attack. Vocabulary on "equity and race."

Nickelodeon's parent site hosts the guides, under a banner that reads "PARENT RESOURCES" and the line "We may not have all the answers...but we know some folks who might."

The folks, it turns out, are far left activist partners.

One tile points parents to "Talk & Take Action: A Guide to Countering Racism and Anti-Blackness," produced with The Conscious Kid. "Dismantling anti-Blackness begins with education," the educator version says, further noting "Teachers we're calling on you!"

A companion page, "How Kids Can Be Allies," opens with "No one is ever too young to learn how to be an ally." The Conscious Kid, Nickelodeon writes, "developed a list of actions to guide kids on how to be an ally to BIPOC. Share these actions with your children and continue the fight against racism and bias."

The list tells children to "take on issues of racial injustice as your own," to understand "systemic racism," and to "commit to doing the work" as "a daily, lifelong practice."

It's absolute indoctrination designed to make kids believe anti-black racism is rampant and out of control.

The roundup goes further. It points families to Ground Control Parenting, including posts Nickelodeon itself describes as "Talking to Your Children About George Floyd and Tips on Bringing Your Child to a Protest."

Showing Up for Racial Justice is recommended for "how to support protesters." A Nick News special, Kids, Race and Unity, hosted by Alicia Keys, comes with a discussion guide that states "children start receiving explicit and implicit messages about race from birth and begin to show racial bias by age 3."

Believe it or not, toddlers are not racist because Alicia Keys says so.

That is not a cartoon network explaining why sharing is nice. It is a Cartoon Network handing parents a protest manual and a claim that toddlers are already racially biased.

Next to the race guide sits "Talk and Take Action: Parents', Caregivers' and Educators' Guide to Countering Islamophobia," again written with The Conscious Kid.

The guide says it is "designed to provide parents and caregivers with the tools, tips, and language needed to talk about Islamophobia" and "simple, but empowering, action steps families can take together."

One of those steps is blunt: "The single most powerful thing you can do to combat Islamophobia is to learn about the Islamic faith."

Good lord.

The same document steers families toward "small acts of activism" and names political figures in its discussion material. A children's network is instructing households on how to police speech about a religion, under a clinical label that treats scepticism as a pathology.

Parents who have watched Islamist terror, grooming-gang scandals, and campus intimidation do not need a slime brand to redefine their concerns as a phobia.

The LGBTQ tiles are just as direct. "Celebrate LGBTQ+ Families" promises parents can be "proud every day of the year." The GLSEN tile is an educators' guide to "combating LGBTQIA+ discrimination."

Nickelodeon's caregiver version says the network is "proud to present this parent resource," packed with "key terms, conversation starters, a reading list, and a reflection journal, provided by Nickelodeon's partners at GLSEN."

GLSEN is not a neutral literacy charity. It is an advocacy group whose business is school gender policy. Nickelodeon has put that group's vocabulary in front of the people raising the audience.

The same grid offers "Discussing Gun Violence with Kids" and "How to Talk About the Capitol Attack." That's one thing for the likes of CNN. A preschool-to-tween channel packaging race ideology, religious-speech rules, gender doctrine, guns and January 6 as a parental product is quite something else.

None of this arrived in a vacuum. We've previously highlighted how Nickelodeon put a drag performer in front of children for Pride.

The clip, first pushed years earlier and still circulating, features drag performer Nina West singing through the colours of the Pride flag. Fox News quoted the lyric: "Baby blue, pink and white represent transgender people because every letter in LGBTQ plus is equal. And Black and Brown represent the queer and trans people of color."

Nickelodeon's own YouTube description calls it an original song "about the meaning of the rainbow Pride flag" and tells viewers "June is Pride Month, so let's celebrate by lifting up voices in the LGBTQIA+ community!"

This is a real video by Nickelodeon aimed at toddlers and preschoolers: https://t.co/FH5VJzu4T9

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 25, 2024

The same performer fronted a Blue's Clues Pride parade sing-along. Yahoo reported the lyric "Ace, bi and pan grown-ups you see can love each other so proudly," and quoted the team calling it "the queerest thing I've ever seen happen in the preschool space."

During the pandemic, in June 2020, as riots spread after the death of George Floyd, ViacomCBS cable channels, including Nickelodeon, went dark for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Newsweek reported the on-screen line: "Nickelodeon is going off the air for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in support of justice, equality and human rights." CNN reported that the spot flashed "I can't breathe" over the sound of gasping, and that chief executive Bob Bakish described the purpose as to "honor George Floyd and pay tribute to other victims of racial violence."

Parents filmed children asking for the channel to be turned off. The Independent reported Nickelodeon's reply to the complaints: "Unfortunately, some kids live in fear everyday. It is our job to use our platform to make sure that their voices are heard and their stories are told."

The network then aired a "Declaration of Kids' Rights," which Newsweek and CNN both quoted in part: "You have the right to be seen, heard and respected as a citizen of the world... You have the right to be treated with equality, regardless of the color of your skin... You have the right to an education that prepares you to run the world."

A kids' channel appointed itself the ministry of fear, then scolded parents for noticing their children were scared.

The programming has matched the pamphlets. In 2014, The Legend of Korra ended with its lead in a same-sex relationship, a first for a Western children's cartoon of that profile.

In June 2020, Nickelodeon's official account posted "Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies this month and every month," with graphics of Korra, transgender actor Michael D. Cohen, and SpongeBob.

Creator Stephen Hillenburg had long described SpongeBob as asexual and had said he never intended to write sexuality into the series. The corporate account folded the character into the campaign anyway.

Parents are not confused about what this is. A channel that wants to sell them cartoons has spent years selling them a politics: race as original sin, dissent about Islamic extremism as a phobia, gender ideology as a family craft project, and the living room as an organising cell.

Anyone still sitting their kids in front of this is directly complicit in fostering the next generation of mentally deranged far left radicals.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 15:45

Trump To Unveil Anduril Deal, Bringing Submarine Parts Factory To Baltimore

Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point complex near crime-ridden Baltimore City was once the largest steelmaking facility in the US and viewed by some as once the world's largest steel mill.

Decades of deindustrialization led to the mill's closure in 2012. By 2014, the 3,300-acre site entered a redevelopment phase and was transformed into a giant logistics and industrial complex under new ownership called Tradepoint Atlantic. 

Tradepoint Atlantic is set to enter a new chapter, with Anduril Industries having won a $2.9 billion US Navy contract to manufacture components for Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines there.

According to The New York Times, Palmer Luckey's defense company plans to invest $3.7 billion in the project and directly create more than 3,000 jobs. The new shipyard is expected to open in 2030.

"We need to grow the maritime industrial base, the submarine industrial base, so that we can produce more submarines," Anduril Chief Strategy Officer Christian Brose was quoted as saying.

Left-wing Maryland Governor Wes Moore and other state Democrats are expected to attend the announcement following lengthy negotiations over the redevelopment plans. Maryland and Baltimore County are expected to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in tax subsidies.

The former Bethlehem Steel site has undergone a total transformation. It combines warehouses, distribution centers, industrial facilities, deepwater shipping terminals and rail connections to CSX and Norfolk Southern. Tenants include Amazon, FedEx, Under Armor, Home Depot, Volkswagen, BMW and others.

"President Trump knows a self-sustaining domestic shipbuilding sector is critical for national and economic security," said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman.

Luckey commented on The Wall Street Journal's report on Monday, which said the site would manufacture drone boats, calling the reporting "false."

FYI, this "Exclusive" story is false. We told the reporter it was false, but they decided to trust their sources instead.

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) August 6, 2026

Brose said manufacturing drone boats or unmanned weapons of war was not part of the site's initial plans.

Hopefully, Tradepoint Atlantic brings stable, goods-producing jobs to the metro area, which has experienced decades of deindustrialization under Democratic control, leaving the crime-ridden city whose population has collapsed to a 100-year low. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 15:20

Office CMBS Delinquency Rate Re-Spikes To 12.2%, Far Worse Than Financial Crisis Peak As End Of Extend-And-Pretend Looms

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

The dictum morphs from "Survive till '25" (when low interest rates were supposed to return) to "Sell at today's price, or the lender will."

The delinquency rate of office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) re-spiked in recent months and in September hit 12.2%, the second highest ever, behind only January 2026 (12.3%), and 1.5 percentage point above the worst moments of the Financial Crisis, according to data by Trepp, which tracks and analyzes CMBS.

The biggest driver of the increase in September was a $1.1 billion maturity default on a loan that had matured in August, and was not paid off. That loan was securitized in 2021 and the different slices of CMBS were sold to institutional investors around the world at the time. The banks that originated the loan are off the hook.

The loan is backed by eight office and film-studio properties of 2.2 million square feet in Hollywood, whose largest tenants are Netflix and 20th Century Fox. But two of the Netflix leases and the 20th Century Fox lease, representing 30% of the net rentable area, are expiring soon, and renewals are still up in the air.

Extend and pretend forevermore?

The $1.1 billion Hollywood loan that went into maturity default in September had been transferred to special servicing in July 2026. The loan is backed by five Class A office towers built between 2008 and 2021 and three film-studio properties, totaling 2.2 million square feet, all located within a mile of each other in Hollywood. The borrowers are the mega-landlords Blackstone Property Partners and Hudson Pacific Properties.

The special servicer that is now managing the loan, representing the CMBS holders, is SitusAMC, the largest special servicer by unpaid principal balance ($111 billion as of January), according to SitusAMC.

Netflix is the largest tenant, leasing 57.8% of the net rentable area (NRA). One of its leases expires in January 2027 (7.0% of the NRA) and another lease expires in June 2028 (17.2% of the NRA), totaling 24.2%. Discussions with Netflix about lease renewals are ongoing, according to SitusAMC, cited by Fitch Ratings, which rates the CMBS.

20th Century Fox is the second largest tenant. Its lease, accounting for 6.4% of the NRA, expires in December 2026. The decision to renew the lease is awaiting confirmation on whether studio productions will be renewed for additional seasons, and the "outcome will determine if the leases will be extended," according to Fitch, citing the special servicer.

Here is the extend and pretend: The loan was recently modified, and the borrowers, Blackstone Property Partners and Hudson Pacific Properties, were granted a 14-month maturity extension through November 9, 2027, at the current (far below market) fixed interest rate of 4.435%, according to Fitch, citing the special servicer. To get the extension, Blackstone and Hudson Pacific agreed to fund a leasing reserve with $20 million from sources other than property cash flow. Fitch noted that the loan would remain subject to a "full cash trap" until full repayment, with all excess cash flow being directed to the leasing reserve.

Citing the risk that the Netflix and 20th Century Fox leases will not be renewed, Fitch changed its rating outlook to "negative," putting the CMBS in line for a downgrade "if market conditions, valuations, and/or actual portfolio performance deteriorate beyond Fitch's current expectations of sustainable performance, particularly if the borrower is unable to address upcoming lease rollover risk."

The properties were 84.9% occupied in July, down from 91% in September 2025. But the upcoming lease expirations of 30% of the NRA, if not rolled over, would leave nearly half of the space in the properties vacant.

A $470 million loan on office properties in downtown Houston was the second largest driver behind the increase in the default rate as it missed the maturity payoff earlier, according to Trepp.

The loan, originated and securitized into a single-borrower CMBS in 2021, is backed by the 34-story 1.0 million sq. ft. One Allen Center, completed in 1972; the 50-story 1.2 million sq. ft. Three Allen Center, completed in 1980; and an adjacent 6-story parking garage with a health club on top. Brookfield Properties is the landlord.

The interest-only loan comes with a floating rate of SOFR plus 3.08%. After the Fed's most recent rate hike, SOFR has been about 3.88%, which would move the current rate on the loan to 6.96%. Another rate hike by the Fed will move the loan's interest rate to about 7.2%. The loan was originated when SOFR was near 0%.

The property is 71% occupied. The largest tenants include Freeport LNG, Motiva, and Plains Marketing, according to Trepp.

S&P Global, which rates the CMBS, noted in March that it was concerned Brookfield Properties would not pay off the loan at the "final extended maturity date" in April. And that maturity date came and went without payoff.

Trepp said that the loan's move to non-performing status in September could reflect the ongoing loan negotiations.

The idea is to extend and pretend some more until interest rates come back down to 2% or whatever, which might allow for the loan to get refinanced.

Extend-and-Pretend Not Forevermore.

This extend and pretend, or the end thereof, was the theme in today's First Draft, a note that CRE publication Bisnow sent to subscribers. The note would be hilarious if it weren't so serious, or both:

"One of this industry's favored pastimes is the slogan, and for years it reprised one Rialto's Joe Bachkosky recalled onstage: 'Survive until '25.' But when 2025 failed to deliver, it turned into 'bliss in '26.' Lately, a few idealists have floated 'heaven in '27,' which sounds less like a prophecy every week and more like a prayer."

Mark Bonner, Bisnow's editor-in-chief and author of the note, continued:

"AEW's Lauren O'Neil called the moment 'a shift back to fundamentals,' which is industry speak for when the spreadsheet voodoo stops working.

"KBS' Sondra Wenger said today's distress 'is in the structure,' a murky way of saying the building is fine, but the price paid for it isn't.

"Poverni Sheikh Group's Eugene Poverni said the risk curve has 'slid one to the right,' meaning buyers want value-add returns for core-plus risk. Translate that once, and buyers want more for less, but translate it twice, and prices start to tumble.

"Meanwhile, refinancing is all but dead.

"That could mean an apartment building that runs smoothly day to day is in trouble anyway because someone paid a 3-cap for it in 2021. At the time, the price made sense. On Sept. 30 of that year, the 10-year closed at 1.52%, with the Fed's benchmark rate near zero. Five years later to the day, as many of those loans come due, the 10-year closed at 5.29%."

And Bonner concluded:

"But last week, the people holding the capital stopped pretending, and it seems like 'survive until 25' finally has a successor. It does not rhyme, and nobody will put it on a panel slide: Sell at today's price, or the lender will."

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 15:00

The $1 Million Tanker Was Just The Start: Every Crude Freight Index Hits Record High As Hormuz "Works" Too Well

Just when we thought crude tanker rates couldn't go any higher, they did - again.

A week ago, a record million dollars a day charter for a supertanker was the punchline. Now it's the floor: the Baltic Exchange's TD3C, the benchmark Saudi Arabia-to-China VLCC route, hit yet another all-time high of $1.33 million per day on Monday, up 10% on the week and 21 times where it was a year ago!

But the real fireworks are elsewhere. As Lloyd's List's Greg Miller writes, the tanker market's "cascade" effect has gone into overdrive, with record VLCC strength spilling into suezmaxes, and suezmax demand in turn dragging up aframaxes:

Crude tanker markets hit a tipping point in mid-September, surging to a new level as more crude exited the Strait of Hormuz. Over the past three days, rates crossed another tipping point, spiking even higher due to the lagged global 'cascade' effect.

In other words, the better the Hormuz shuttle "works", the more expensive it gets to ship a barrel anywhere in the world.

Let's take a closer look at the carnage segment by segment, what Goldman, JPM and BofA say is driving it, and why the only thing standing between owners and $1.6 million a day is the refining margin.

"Available Tonnage Is Vacuumed Off Position Lists The Second It Is Marketed"

Regular readers know we have been tracking the tanker rate crisis since before it was cool - specifically February 20 - a week before the first Iran shots were fired, when the Baltic's Middle East-China VLCC route had "only" tripled to $151K a day. We were also on the $1 million milestone before it happened: "Mideast Chaos Sends Supertanker Rates Soaring To Near Record $1 Million A Day", a headline we upgraded from $800K within hours. Then on Sept 23, with rates on the Gulf-India route nudging $1 million, we put out this chart:

What changed in the past week?

According to Lloyd's List, Gulf producers decided to push more tankers through Hormuz under US military protection (even as Iran ratchets up attacks: UKMTO confirmed two separate projectile strikes on crude tankers in and around the Strait just over the weekend), which sharply increased near-term cargo supply and pulled more VLCCs to wait for ship-to-ship (STS) transfers in the Gulf of Oman. Clarksons Securities puts the wait for an STS slot at seven to 10 days, and estimates STS volumes have surged from 5-6 million barrels a day a month ago to 12 million b/d.

And since VLCCs loading via STS in the Gulf of Oman earn about 50% more than VLCCs loading in the Atlantic, with a much shorter ballast leg from Asia, owners are doing the rational thing. As Poten & Partners' head of tanker research Erik Broekhuizen put it:

"Even in a crazy market, shipowners tend to make rational decisions. The earnings discrepancy has kept VLCCs closer to the Asian market, leaving it to suezmaxes and aframaxes to do the heavy lifting out of the US Gulf, turbocharging their earnings."

Translation: the Atlantic has run out of supertankers. With few ballast VLCCs around, charterers have been forced to split 2 million-barrel stems into 1 million-barrel suezmax cargoes, and the result is what Fearnley Securities calls a market where "available tonnage is seemingly vacuumed off position lists the second it is marketed." Sparta Commodities summed it up even more concisely: "Atlantic freight is repricing violently on real tightness."

Parabolic Suezmaxes

Suezmax owners are the big winners. Atlantic basin suezmax rates more than doubled in three trading days, and they were already at or near record highs before the latest jump. On Monday:

• US Gulf-Europe: $577,792/day, up 150% w/w
• Guyana-Europe: $584,012/day, up 150% w/w
• West Africa-Europe: $567,138/day, up 145% w/w
• Black Sea-Med (with a Russia-Ukraine war premium on top): $801,077/day, up 115% w/w

Every single one of the Baltic Exchange's suezmax indexes hit an all-time high on Monday. For context, the US Gulf-Europe route was paying $90K at the start of September.

And now the cascade is running in reverse too: with suezmaxes (half the cargo) earning more than double what VLCCs do in the Atlantic, VLCC owners are simply holding out for more. The Baltic's West Africa-China VLCC index jumped 43% w/w to $697,160/day and US Gulf-China rose 20% to $473,958, both all-time highs. The Oman-China route, the one that actually captures the STS shuttle trade, was steadier at an "astronomical" $860,580/day, just shy of its Sept 17 record.

As for TD3C, Lloyd's List notes it is "perhaps the least relevant" index to actual owner earnings since almost no one sails direct from Saudi Arabia to China anymore - most crude is shuttled out to STS positions in a two-step process - but as a proxy for the total freight bill it is hard to beat. Nothing says "orderly market" like the benchmark route nobody uses hitting a record every week.

The Aframax Record Books Get Rewritten

Atlantic aframaxes had their moment in March, when panicked Asian buyers booked unusually long-haul aframax loads out of the US Gulf to replace Mideast crude. Those peaks were never revisited... until now. On Monday the Baltic's US Gulf-Europe aframax index was at $313,794/day (+44% w/w), Cross-Med at $343,227 (+19%), Caribbean-US at $335,288 (+70%) and North Sea-Europe at $348,651 (+10%). In early September most of these were paying $45K-$100K.

"Increased suezmax activity continues to provide further support for aframax demand," said Clarksons in its Monday brokerage report. Put simply, there is no class of crude tanker left that isn't being squeezed. And for those looking for the long-term perspective, here is John Kemp's inflation-adjusted Baltic Dirty Tanker Index: at 6,242 in October, it is now the highest on record in real terms, blowing past the November 2004 peak of 5,195.

Goldman: Gulf Exports Are Back... Which Is Exactly The Problem

Here is the paradox. Normally, more oil getting out of the Gulf would be bearish for freight. Not this time. As Goldman's commodity team wrote last week in "Adaptation: Persian Gulf Exports Return to 2025 Level" (available to pro subs), which we discussed at the time:

We estimate that Persian Gulf oil exports, including estimated "dark exports", have recovered to 23.3mb/d over the last week, in line with their 2025 average, as exports doubled in September. Increased Hormuz exports, including via ship-to-ship transfers, have driven the recovery despite the attack on the Saudi East-West pipeline (which disrupted flows to Yanbu for nearly two weeks) and the continuing Houthi blockade of Saudi exports via Bab-al-Mandab. Crude accounted for nearly 90% of the September recovery, reaching 19mb/d (108% of 2025 average)...

But while the barrels are back, the logistics are not.

A pre-war barrel took one voyage from Ras Tanura to Ningbo; today it takes a dark transit, a shuttle run, a 7-10 day wait off Fujairah or Sohar, a ship-to-ship transfer and then the long haul. Every one of those steps ties up tonnage. It's also why we have been saying since early March that Fujairah and the Hormuz bypass routes would become the center of the oil universe (a call Abu Dhabi is now putting tens of billions behind), and why the US Navy's billion-barrel escort operation has been, from the owners' perspective, the gift that keeps on giving.

JPMorgan's top oil strategist Natasha Kaneva made a similar point in her latest Oil Flash Note (available to pro subs): Hormuz throughput was back to ~13 million b/d, but "SoH transmission is not due to improved safety but improved ability to operate under risk," and freight rates were "~$1.27mm/day, a record." (They are higher now.) Goldman also points out that refined products are more flammable than crude, so the physical risks of a Hormuz crossing are greater for product tankers, which is one reason Gulf product exports are still stuck at ~50% of 2025 levels while crude is at 108%.

Meanwhile, Goldman's Rich Privorotsky summed up the market's take on Monday: "Plenty of threatened escalation and additional tankers hit, but diplomatic pathways remain open and, crucially, oil is getting out of the Gulf." Yes it is - at $1.33 million a day.

How High Can It Go? Ask The Refiners

For decades, $100,000 a day was the psychological bellwether of a VLCC upcycle. As Lloyd's List puts it, tanker shipping's "Overton window" now has an extra zero. Or as DNB Carnegie shipping analyst Jorgen Lian confessed at last week's Capital Link conference: "Our imagination is obviously not imaginative enough, because we've been lagging the reality by far." Spoken like a true sell-sider.

So where is the ceiling? It's set by the (parabolic) crack spread. If importers pay so much in freight that they can't earn a profit refining the crude, they stop shipping it. And with cracks at historic highs, that ceiling is a lot higher than anyone thought. Clarksons Securities lays out the math:

"As capacity gets scarcer, the balance shifts from owners competing for cargoes to charterers competing for ships. This is why refining margins matter so much. Once the supply curve is close to vertical, the question increasingly becomes how much the marginal cargo can afford to pay."

Per Clarksons, every $10/bbl increase in crude freight lifts VLCC TCE by ~$400K/day. Citing Argus, it estimates the Singapore product slate sold for $151/bbl last week, implying a pre-freight refining margin of ~$40/bbl, against Oman-Asia VLCC freight of ~$21/bbl, meaning "there is still considerable margin left for VLCC owners to capture." If owners grabbed the entire margin, which Clarksons admits is "unlikely in practice", Oman-China VLCC rates would be almost double current levels, at $1.6 million a day.

BofA's numbers back that up. The bank's Asian refining margin has been holding at roughly $35-45/bbl since August, more than four times its 5-year average (for more details see BofA's latest "The Oil Gusher" note)....

... while its European refining margin is at ~$49/bbl, with diesel cracking ~$90/bbl over Brent. That makes sense to anyone who has followed our coverage of the record diesel crack and Goldman's "nightmare" refining crisis warning; as we put it over the weekend, the US doesn't have an oil problem, it has a refinery problem. Turns out, so does the tanker market, only in a good way (for owners).

Two more factors stretch the ceiling.

• First, energy security: state-controlled buyers may "temporarily overpay for freight to secure volumes now", particularly if they worry US protection of the shuttle tankers isn't guaranteed indefinitely.
• Second, the share of freight in the delivered cost of crude, which Poten's Broekhuizen estimates has gone from ~3% at the start of the year to 27% now. Unprecedented for crude, though Breakwave Advisors notes Atlantic-to-China freight was more than 40% of landed iron ore cost last week - and capesize rates are nowhere near record highs. In other words, by dry-bulk standards, there is still room to run.

The Catch: Rates Don't Need More Ships To Fall

Before anyone extrapolates $1.6 million, Clarksons offers a crucial caveat:

"The reverse is also important. Rates do not need more ships to become available before they fall. If refinery margins weaken, charterers' willingness to pay can fall sharply even while vessel availability remains tight."

And that is where BofA comes in with the counterpoint. Its European refining margin strip is already in "(slight) backwardation", with the 4Q26 strip below the 3Q26 average of more than $42/bbl, and the bank models refining margins dropping to $15/bbl by end-2027. BofA's US refining team (in its "Refining roundup", also available to pro subs) is equally skeptical that the market should be paying up for a permanently higher crack, reiterating its "hesitance to buy into a +$3/bbl LT midcycle crack valuation." If the crack goes, the ceiling on freight goes with it - and we've seen this movie before: in June, tanker rates nearly halved in days on Hormuz normalization hopes, right after earnings had soared to $470,000 a day.

Meanwhile, the war itself isn't getting any calmer: per Bloomberg, the US blockade has now bottled up at least 50 tankers carrying Iranian oil, while Tehran's parliament speaker says the Strait won't fully reopen until the US meets seven conditions. Which, for now, is bullish for freight - right up until the ceasefire headline that sends it the other way.

Bottom Line

Lloyd's List puts the commercial logic simply: the spot rate "can be whatever charterers are willing to pay," with the caveat that charterers will, as financial pain increases, belatedly expand period coverage and reduce spot exposure. Or as Clarksons put it, "the rapid increase in Middle East crude flows has put the squeeze on all tanker classes."

Our take: with refining margins at $40+/bbl and Gulf barrels needing two or three ships to get to market instead of one, there is still near-term upside, and the Atlantic cascade has further to run as VLCC owners hold out for suezmax-equivalent economics. But the more important number may not be a TCE at all: freight is now 27% of the delivered cost of a barrel, which makes this an inflation story as much as a shipping one (as Bloomberg's Javier Blas warned in "The Next Inflation Shock: $1 Million-a-Day Oil Tankers" two weeks ago).

And when the owners themselves start ringing the register - Trafigura's tanker arm Volare jumped in its Oslo debut on Monday "as a wave of shipping IPOs builds" - history suggests the people who know ships best are selling them to the people who know them least. Enjoy the $1.33 million a day while it lasts: in shipping (as in everything else) nothing cures record rates like record rates.

Much more in the full Goldman "Adaptation: Persian Gulf Exports Return to 2025 Level" note and BofA's "The Oil Gusher: 3Q26 Playbook Part I" and "Refining roundup" notes, all available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 14:40

The Education Cartel And The Blue State School Scam

Authored by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

Below is my column in the Hill on the education cartel and how it is destroying our K-12 school system. After decades of bloated budgets and failing scores, our school system is now less popular than Cuba and communism. It is a particularly telling comparison in Chicago where union members went to Venezuela to praise the worker's paradise of the Maduro regime while the school system dumped U.S. bonds in opposition to the American "regime." Generations of inner-city children are being left without a future due to the failure of our school system, which prioritizes its own survival over its students.

Here is the column:

"In the first place, God made idiots," Mark Twain once wrote in an 1879 travel book. "That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

It appears that most Americans now agree with him. New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even "somewhat satisfied" with the state of education in the U.S.

What is most troubling is that the near-total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to an education cartel, a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians.

According to Gallup, only 32 percent of American adults say they are "completely" or "somewhat" satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. That is the lowest figure in Gallup's 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since just 2024.

For many of us, neither the drop in public support is surprising. The collapse comes at a time when universities are reporting that college students are entering higher education without basic math and other skills.

We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.

In May, faculty in the University of California system (which eliminated standardized testing to achieve greater equity in admissions) reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among new students.

Most recently, a University of California, San Diego, faculty report found a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020 in incoming students whose math skills fell below a high-school level.

For many of us, neither the drop in skills nor public support is surprising. For generations, the public school system has failed students in major cities. Despite massive budget increases, actual test scores continue to fall or remain at subpar levels.

In a prior column, I was particularly moved by the frustration of a mother in Baltimore who complained that her son was in the top half of his class despite failing all but three of his classes. Her story led to my changing my view of school vouchers. Despite my long support for public schools, I believe vouchers may be the only way to wrest control away from the education cartel by introducing real competition based on academic performance.

Faced with low proficiency scores, teachers' unions and school administrators have continued to lower proficiency requirements. They are simply pushing students out the door without basic skills, robbing these kids of any chance to break out of cycles of poverty and unemployment. When confronted with their poor performance, school board members have declared meritocracy to be a form of "white supremacy." Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of so-called "equity."

In any other field, such generational failure would be unthinkable. No business or enterprise could sustain itself. However, that is the point. There is little competition in this system. Blue states have largely blocked voucher systems while protecting teachers from performance-based standards.

Actual students have become irrelevant to budgets. In Chicago, there are schools that remain open despite 80 percent vacancy rates. One school, Frederick Douglass Academy High School has only 27 students, or 2 percent of its building's capacity. The school system spends $55,000 for each student at Frederick Douglass Academy.

Overall, 35 percent of Chicago schools are half full or less. But that did not stop the schools from spending a couple million on transcendental meditation sessions or giving teachers and students days off to join May Day protests (with city-subsidized buses).

According to a recent study, in 2025, Chicago Teachers Union spent a record $4.2 million on politics and lobbying but less than 18 percent on representing teachers. This included massive contributions used to elect former teacher and union organizer Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former organizer for the union. Johnson, in turn, has effectively turned over his office to the far-left union.

In economics, there are few scourges older and more damaging than the cartel, which uses its power over an area to create "higher prices, lower quality, and stifled innovation." There is a natural tendency for people to form such groups to stifle competition and feather their own nests. Adam Smith warned that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

The Education Cartel is becoming one of the greatest and most insidious forms of such anti-competitive conduct. Teacher unions have used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to acquire unchallenged power in blue states where they can dictate ever-increasing salaries, pensions, and budgets. One estimate found that, since 2015, the nation's two largest teachers unions - the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers - spent $669 million on federal campaigns and another $336 million on state and local campaigns.

Figures such as Randi Weingarten with the American Federation of Teachers effectively made their unions piggy banks for the Democratic Party and appear at far-left rallies to support Democratic causes. In return, Democratic leaders give this cartel most everything that the demand, including barring competition in the form of public vouchers or tying budgets to improving the education of actual students.

It is a closed circuit. Democratic leaders increase school budgets and salaries and the unions then send back hundreds of millions to fund Democratic campaigns.

If you want to understand the priorities of the unions, just watch one of National Education Association head Becky Pringle's unhinged speeches. Her declarations that the union will "win all of the things" clearly did not include educational improvements for students.

A recent study found that blue states with strong teachers' unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than red states. At least eight of the ten states with the worst literacy scores were liberal districts with politically powerful teachers' unions, according to the Progressive Policy Institute.

For example, in New York, more than half of third- to fifth-grade students failed their reading proficiency exams this year. And it isn't about money: The state spends almost $37,000 per student to fund this bloated, poor-performing bureaucracy. But the unions also pump political contributions into the campaigns of Democratic leaders in every election, and nothing changes.

In the meantime, historically poor states like Mississippi and Arkansas, with relatively new voucher and performance-based systems, are showing major improvements in scores among their students. Yet when these same policies are proposed in blue states, they are routinely blocked by the powerful teachers' unions.

Many liberals instinctively support unions and schools despite their costs. Recently, former New York Times journalist (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones drew criticism over an exchange with her daughter when she discussed her disappointment that her daughter would not stay at a majority-black, inner-city school despite its poor conditions and resources. Her daughter finally insisted on going to a private school out of concern for her own future as opposed to what Jones called supporting "her life's work."

Most families do not have the resources of Jones to make that choice. They are captives to a system that appears entirely detached and unresponsive to their same concerns as Jones's daughter.

The mark of a cartel is that it controls competition while inflating profits or costs. However, the education cartel makes you long for the old oil or even drug cartels. The difference is that the education cartel actually charges cartel prices while producing diminishing products. It is like OPEC watering down the gas at the pump while pumping up the price. Everyone is getting windfall profits, from the unions to the politicians. Only the kids are being shortchanged by America's school system.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution."

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 14:20