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Electric Bills Could Be 2026 Election Shocker

Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If all politics is local, as former House Speaker Tip O'Neill said in tying politicians' fortunes to constituents' pocketbooks, then a voter's electricity bill is about as local as an issue can get, landing on kitchen tables every month.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

With electricity costs spiking for many of the nation's 133 million households, this local issue could determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress or Democrats seize one or both chambers in November's midterm elections.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, average residential electricity rates increased nationwide nearly 13 percent from April 2020 to April 2025. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, they've increased 6 percent.

Electricity prices are expected to increase, on average nationwide, by another 6 percent in 2026, the administration projects, and as much as 40 percent by 2030, warns economic development finance firm ICF.

The reason is simple: supply and demand. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. projected in its 2026 long-term reliability assessment report that electricity demand will increase in the coming decade by 70 percent more than what was estimated in 2024. Many analyses find that overall demand will increase 25 percent by 2030.

The surge is driven by the development of power-hungry data centers, artificial intelligence computing, advanced manufacturing, and "the electrification of everything," with the average home featuring up to 21 digital devices - all eating electricity all the time.

The solution is also simple: The nation's 2,896 utility companies must increase the electricity their power plants produce with the most abundant, least expensive energy sources. Meanwhile, the nation's seven major grid operators must add up to 7,500 miles a year to their 240,000-mile network of high-voltage transmission lines while also upgrading up to 100,000 miles of those live wires, through 2035.

But determining what solutions work best and what long-term investments to make is a complex $1 trillion challenge mired in partisan politics and buried in century-old federal, state, and local regulations.

Not only are utilities and regional transmission operators amping up from a standing start after nearly two decades of inertia, but many are scrambling to keep pace with swelling demand while also building out generation and transmission capacities to meet projected need.

The cost of these capital improvements is showing up in customers' electricity bills, leading to heightened scrutiny of investment decisions and generation choices, as well as spurring debate about how individual communities want to develop, all while meeting a Trump administration mandate to expand rapidly to win the "AI arms race" with China.

The focus and investment is long overdue, said Robert Bryce, a film producer and author of a widely read Substack on the grid and seven books on energy policies, including, "A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations."

"Given what we've seen in recent months, where both Republicans and Democrats are focusing on power prices, it's clear that the days of ignoring the electric grid - and its pivotal role in our society - are over," he told The Epoch Times. "That's a good thing."

Bills On The Ballot

Rising electricity, health care, gasoline, and grocery prices are components of the 2026 midterms' top issue - affordability, as voters question why they're paying so much for basic needs.

A sampling: Electricity bills were among primary concerns cited by 84 percent of 2,710 nationwide respondents in a January Climate Power survey. Eight of every 10 in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll of 1,426 voters that same month said "affordability" was their top issue, with 22 percent placing electricity just below gasoline and grocery prices. In a March Environmental Defense Fund poll of 1,000 Florida voters, 57 percent said electric bills are stressing household budgets.

Data center development is the lightning rod of this angst. In a January Pew Research Center poll of 8,512 adults, nearly 40 percent blamed data centers for higher utility bills. A February Politico national survey of 2,000 voters found nearly half see energy costs spurred by data centers as a top issue in congressional, state, and local elections.

How campaigns tackle "electricity inflation" will be pivotal in many of November's 33 U.S. Senate elections, especially in Maine, Michigan, and Ohio races rated as "toss-ups" by Cook Political Reports. Sixteen House campaigns, including 13 seats held by GOP incumbents, are classified as "toss-ups."

Assuaging voter anger over rising electricity bills will be among defining factors in many of these elections and will determine whether Republicans hold on to their 53-47 Senate majority and 217-212 House advantage.

"I have been writing about politics and energy for three decades," Bryce said. "I cannot remember another time when so many politicians, from all parts of the political spectrum, are talking about electricity."

Aron Solomon, chief strategy officer for campaign consultancy Amplify Inc., told The Epoch Times: "This is, honestly, shaping up to be one of the most interesting political issues of the 2026 cycle because electricity bills hit people in a very direct, and profoundly emotional way.

"Voters may not follow every inflation report or Fed decision, but they for sure notice when their monthly power bill suddenly jumps."

University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs professor Charles Bullock III said electricity bills are ripe targets for Democrats looking to unseat Republicans, who voters will perceive as responsible - fairly or not - for rising rates.

"When we get beyond the primaries and we move into the fall - and I could see this happening for a variety of offices - the Democrat accusing the Republican of not having done something to try to constrain energy costs" will be a standard pitch, he told The Epoch Times.

This tactic already proved itself successful in November 2025 with Democrats citing Republican policies for skyrocketing electricity bills in winning gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and in two Democrats unseating GOP incumbents in Georgia Public Service Commission races.

Blame Biden

There are well-defined partisan trenches on federal energy policies that voters believe manifest in their electricity bills. Those differences emerge starkly every spring and summer in congressional budget hearings.

The general gist is that Republicans say higher electricity bills are the residual fallout from President Joe Biden's "green energy" push that funneled billions into renewable energy and regulatory paralysis fostered by interpretative expansions of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act that induce litigation, prolong timelines, and add expenses to energy projects, including grid initiatives.

"There are few policy areas where reality asserts itself faster than it does in the field of energy," Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said during an April 21 hearing on the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2027 spending request.

"During the Biden administration, energy policy shifted away from reliability and toward favored sources, toward favored outcomes, and long, brittle supply chains that begin overseas. They assumed the system would hold together anyway, and it didn't."

In Trump's second term, his administration has tossed aside any "all of the above" pretense to aggressively champion "baseload" oil, gas, and coal production as well as nuclear energy development while rolling back environmental regulations and reviving the nation's refining and mining industries.

The president has orchestrated a "whole-of-government" focus on energy development, beginning with several day-one executive actions: declaring a national energy emergency, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, opening Alaska's "extraordinary resource potential" to development, and pausing federally permitted offshore wind projects he's derided as boondoggle "wind mills."

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum often reiterate that increasing natural gas and coal production and developing emerging nuclear technologies, rather than investing in "intermittent" renewables such as solar and wind, are key to scaling up the grid to accommodate data centers and other large load users. Both have said this is not only as an "affordability" consumer issue, but also as a national security imperative.

Wright has issued at least six emergency orders under the Federal Power Act to require retiring coal-fired power plants remain operable, if not actually operating, to ensure regional grids have capacity to generate electricity during peak demand, such as summer heatwaves and winter storms.

As of 2025, there were 401 coal-fired power plants in the United States, the last one coming online in 2013, according to America's Power, which advocates on behalf of the nation's coal-fired power plants. The Energy Information Administration documented in late 2024 that 173 of those units in 33 states were set to close by 2030, a pace accelerated by the Biden administration's Clean Power Plant 2.0 and Greenhouse Gas rules, which required them to trim emissions by 90 percent or shut down.

Once primary races are settled, when congressional Republicans and candidates face off against Democrats in 2026 general election campaigns, they will claim they inherited rising electricity prices from Biden policies. They will point to actions such as repealing power plant rules, scaling back environmental laws, trimming regulations, streamlining permitting, reinvigorating fossil fuel development, building nuclear reactors, and expanding the nation's 3.3 million mile natural gas pipeline network as ways to address energy affordability, which, they're certain to note, is more an issue in Democrat-led states than in GOP-governed states.

Blame Trump

Democrats' general election campaign pitch will claim the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are directly responsible for spiking electricity bills by ditching support for "all of the above" energy to exclusively favor fossil fuels while pulling the plug on assistance programs and renewable energy investments, especially solar, which has been the largest source of new electricity generation nationwide since 2020.

They point to initiatives adopted the last time Democrats held both chambers: 2021's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022's CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized billions in tax credits, low-interest loans, and grant programs incentivizing private investments in renewable energies, advanced manufacturing, and grid expansion.

Many Inflation Reduction Act initiatives and grants were suspended under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act adopted in partisan votes and signed into law by Trump in July 2025.

In October 2025, the administration canceled, or "clawed back," $8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act allocations for 223 renewable energy projects, nearly all in Democrat-led states.

"Satisfying a president's desire for political revenge or intimidation is not a lawful basis for terminating projects that were on track to help reduce soaring electricity prices," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Wright during the April 21 hearing.

"These cancellations on a political basis are a blatant betrayal of the communities, the workers, and the businesses counting on those investments to lower their energy costs, and now it is those communities, workers, and businesses who will pay the price regardless of their particular politics."

Although Congress appropriated $8.8 billion for home energy rebates in 2026 to purchase more energy efficient appliances and for "weatherization" upgrades, the Department of Energy has stalled implementation in nearly 40 states, he said.

"That's obstruction," Heinrich said, "and while these cost-saving programs are being obstructed, the department is taking actions that actively raise prices. This [2027] budget reflects the same lack of concern for the real costs facing hard-working families trying to keep the lights on and their vehicles on the road."

The department's spending request eliminates the Weatherization Assistance Program, "which saves households, on average, $372 every year," he said. "It also rescinds another $15.2 billion of [Inflation Reduction Act] funding - congressionally directed funds that are ready to go out the door to support grid reliability and help reduce electricity prices."

After primaries set November ballots, when Congressional Democrats and candidates square off against Republicans in 2026 general election campaigns, they will pledge to restore these programs, revive defunded projects that boost grid capacity, encourage "all of the above" energies - especially nuclear - while refunding grants that advance renewables, which 65 percent of 3,524 adults surveyed in March 2026 by Pew Research Center said they support, including 44 percent of Republicans.

An aerial view shows a 49.5-megawatt, three-level data center under construction in Vernon, Calif., on April 14, 2026. Rising electricity costs for many of the nation’s 133 million households could shape control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Mario Tama/Getty Images Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 20:05

The DNC Finally Releases Its 2024 Autopsy, And It's A Total Whitewash

The Democratic National Committee has released its long-awaited "autopsy" of the 2024 presidential election, and it is getting panned from all sides for being evasive, poorly constructed, and conspicuously silent on the two most consequential decisions the party made in 2024.

DNC Chair Ken Martin had been sitting on this report since late last year. He pledged transparency, then reversed course in December, saying he would not release it. The reversal created a slow-motion credibility crisis. NBC News described Martin as having "been pummeled in public for months" over the episode, and last week Kamala Harris herself called for the report to be made public. So Martin released it on Thursday, though not quite on his own terms. 

"When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over,” Martin said in a statement Thursday.

“I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on the report that was produced." 

Martin continued, "After last November's massive Democratic wins, I didn't want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize."

 The document was released in full, but no one seems to be satisfied with it.

NBC News reported that large sections are devoted to "a lengthy recap of modern American political history dating to the 2008 presidential election, historic fundraising and spending data from past elections, and more." The annotations flagged factual errors, including incorrect election results, and challenged claims that the annotators said were unsupported by evidence. 

When the report does engage with 2024, it leans on broad themes like an “inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters” that provided the GOP “with opportunities for advancement at the expense of Democratic growth, evolution, and ability to find common ground with seemingly disparate groups of voters from coast to coast, and the heartland Democrats tend to ignore.” It also claims that Harris failed to make her positions known and didn’t go far enough in attacking Trump, in an apparent attempt to avoid addressing the specific problems with the campaign. 

The report also claimed that state parties were underfunded and that Democratic infrastructure was too weak in key battlegrounds. However, that argument doesn’t align with the actual circumstances of the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign raised and spent more than $1 billion, giving her every conceivable resource advantage heading into the election. 

Despite the massive war chest, the campaign failed to win a single swing state. Rather than confront why all that money still couldn’t connect with working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the report leans heavily on vague complaints about “messaging” while largely ignoring the real problems that doomed her campaign.

CNN Senior Reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere pointed out what the report conspicuously omits. “It does not touch a couple of topics that a lot of people were very interested in, and thought were the reasons for this report not being out,” he said. “There's nothing about Joe Biden and what happened in the debate. There's nothing about Kamala Harris getting the nomination without any kind of primary process. And also there is nothing about the way that voters were responding to Gaza and how the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris policies and comments about it were hitting their minds.”

CNN just spent an entire segment proving the DNC autopsy is every bit as bad and evasive as we expected.

"There are a lot of things in that version that are incomplete, uh, and also it does not touch a couple topics that a lot of people were very interested in and thought were… pic.twitter.com/wxbsg5M8XB

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) May 21, 2026

Democrats themselves have not been kind.

 "It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney, because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) told CNN. "Obviously, it was the Joe Biden issue at the debate. It was the switchover to Kamala without a process. And, at the end of the day, Democrats weren't talking enough about affordability and the economy." 

Moskowitz added, “We're too afraid to tell them the truth. They know the truth. They saw the debate. They saw what happened."

BREAKING: Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz is calling the 2024 DNC Autopsy report "malpractice."

"It sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn't even do the autopsy correctly."

"We got SHELLACKED in the last election. I mean, we lost every single solitary swing… pic.twitter.com/RgRxbpdxVX

— Turning Point Action Rapid Response (@TPARapidRep) May 21, 2026

Former CNN commentator Chris Cillizza also bashed the autopsy.

“I was a BIG advocate for the DNC releasing the 2024 autopsy,” he wrote on X. “Having now read it, I can see now why there was so much resistance within some corners of the party to releasing it. It is an utter disaster. And a failure on virtually every front.”

He expressed his frustration in a video post.

“Takeaway number one: Joe Biden is almost not in this report,” he said. “So it's 192 pages long. Again, how many times and what section do you believe how much time is devoted to Joe Biden's advanced age? He was 81 years old in 2024. And the concerns that the public voiced over and over again to pollsters that he was too old to do the job and shouldn't run again. It's zero. There is no mention of Biden's age, the polling on his age, his infirmity physically and mentally that was on display, the hiding of Biden from the public. There's none of it.”

Cillizza continued, “In fact, I was so surprised that after I kind of scanned through the entire 192-page document, I did a control F, a find, and I searched for Biden's name because I figured I must have missed that section. No, I didn't miss that section. The only acknowledgement is this statement. Two sentences. ‘The debate obviously changed many things. The dial testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the president's performance in a post debate survey was scrapped.’ Okay, that's it. That's it about the debate, Biden's age, etc.”

"The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped." -- DNC Autopsy

WHAT? They canceled polling after Biden's disastrous debate performance? WHY???

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

A brutal chart from the DNC autopsy pic.twitter.com/fwfwREmxdH

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

"The White House did not position or prepare the Vice President. Had the White House explored and evaluated ways to leverage Kamala Harris earlier in the administration, perhaps it would have improved the President’s standing, and it certainly could have helped prepare her to…

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) May 21, 2026

The real autopsy, the one the DNC apparently declined to write, would grapple with candidate quality, a compressed general election timeline, unpopular policies, and the impact of covering up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and letting him implode on stage with President Trump.

Instead, the party hid behind clichés and generic excuses, ignoring what really went wrong.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 19:40

American Freight Revival Enters Next Phase As Illegal Alien Trucker Chaos Continues

Submitted by American Truckers United,

In a unanimous landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) does not protect freight brokers from state-law negligence claims when they carelessly hire unsafe motor carriers.

Landmark win for trucking safety this morning.

The Supreme Court rules UNANIMOUSLY against the broker that helped put the illegal alien who hit Dalilah Coleman on the road.

As a result of this decision, trucking brokers can be liable for negligently giving loads to illegal… https://t.co/0pYntFxiDx

— Senator Jim Banks (@SenatorBanks) May 14, 2026

The case, Shawn Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, et al., marks a seismic shift in the trucking industry. For the first time in years, brokers can be held accountable when their profit-driven shortcuts lead to deadly crashes. This is a massive victory for crash victims and the small- to midsize carriers who actually move America's freight.

American Truckers United (ATU) proudly filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the petitioner, exposing how blanket broker immunity had fueled a dangerous race to the bottom.

"It is implausible that Congress sought to immunize brokers from tort liability when their negligence leads to fatal or injurious motor vehicle crashes," our brief stated. "Any time the government provides immunity from suit, it picks economic winners and losers… There is no reason to believe Congress chose negligent brokers to be the winners."

🚨 The Supreme Court will soon rule in a blockbuster case that could impact liability for crashes involving unvetted carriers and truck drivers: Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II and C.H. Robinson. The trucking industry—and especially brokers—is watching very closely.

Freight… pic.twitter.com/csbNMFiRVu

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) March 10, 2026

The Broken System That Needed Fixing

For too long, freight brokers have operated with near-total immunity while sitting in the middle of every transaction, pocketing the spread between what shippers pay and what they actually pay carriers.  

Their incentive was brutally simple: hire the absolute cheapest truck possible — safety, maintenance, and regulatory compliance be damned.

Resulting in brokerage's share of the freight market exploding from roughly 6% twenty-five years ago to 29% today. Much of that growth came by flooding the market with cut-rate, often illicit capacity — including non-domiciled foreign drivers operating under lower standards that undercut responsible American operators.

Legacy American carriers shuttered at historic rates. Small fleets filed bankruptcy in droves. Mega-brokers and a handful of giant carriers captured massive new market share. The human cost was measured in wrecked trucks, ruined families, and lives lost on our highways.

A recent viral crash in California involving an illegal alien truck driver from India brought the issue back into sharp focus — and raised the obvious question: Which broker put that truck on the road?

🚨New Fatal Truck Crash in California! 2 people killed! Truck Driver "Manvir Singh" facing several charges including vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, resisting police, and hit and run.

More details to follow. pic.twitter.com/Q6hZOV8AwZ

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) May 20, 2026

And more. 

At least four Indian illegal alien truck drivers with CDLs have been arrested for allegedly causing deadly crashes that have killed multiple innocent people in different parts of the country.

Manvir Singh (CA)
Jashanpreet Singh (CA)
Harjinder Singh (FL)
Sukhdeep Singh (IN) pic.twitter.com/2ofd7QYSfp

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 21, 2026

The Turning Point

Back in December, momentum was already building toward meaningful reform. The Supreme Court decision has now cemented the recovery.

2026 will be "The Official Comeback Year of the American Truck Driver"!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to America's truck drivers and their families!

God is using this Administration to answer our prayers.

What started as a grassroots fight in Arkansas has become a… pic.twitter.com/qFyA5KOA9p

— American Truckers United (@atutruckers) December 26, 2025

Spot truckload rates just hit an all-time record of $3.69 per mile. For the first time since 2022, the American trucker ecosystem is returning to profitability. The playing field is finally leveling.

Related:

• Flatbed Truck Rates Hit New Highs As These Drivers Fuel Boom

Videos circulating over the weekend showed foreign drivers suddenly struggling to secure loads — an encouraging early signal that the era of unchecked undercutting may be ending.

It took less than 24 hours for brokers to tighten the belt after the Supreme Court ruled that brokers could be held liable for carrier accidents WOW!

#Truckers #trucking #truckinglife @topfans pic.twitter.com/MEnvzcKkar

— GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE (@GOP_is_Gutless) May 16, 2026

What Comes Next

The Supreme Court has restored balance to this critical issue. Congress must now complete the work by promptly passing Dalilah's Law. This legislation would require the revocation of commercial driver's licenses held by illegal aliens and ensure that such licenses can never be reissued.

American Truckers United will continue fighting for safer roads, fairer competition, and real relief for asset-based carriers, hardworking American truck drivers, and the families of crash victims.

The Great American Trucker Revival is underway. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 19:15

Turkey Markets Crash After Court Unseats Opposition Head In Latest Erdogan Power Grab

Shortly after we learned that Turkey had sold virtually all of its Treasuries in March to defend the lira after the Iran war broke out, the country was thrown into fresh political turmoil on Thursday when a Turkish court removed the leader of the country’s main opposition party in a landmark ruling that triggered a stock market crash, including one marketwide halt, and could strengthen President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grip on power while further alienating foreign capital.

The Ankara appeals court annulled the results of the 2023 congress of the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials CHP, the party’s deputy chairwoman Gul Ciftci told Bloomberg on Thursday. The decision voids the election of Ozgur Ozel as CHP chairman. The party can appeal the ruling.

The decision reinstates the CHP’s previous administration, including former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who lost a presidential race to Erdogan in 2023. The ruling also effectively cancels all decisions made by the party since the 2023 congress, according to the verdict.

By further hollowing out the political opposition and hampering the CHP’s efforts to secure the release of Imamoglu, Erdogan’s most prominent political rival, the decision eases the president’s ability to tighten his grip on power. Imamoglu has been behind bars since March 2025. Although he’s the CHP’s presidential candidate for elections slated for 2028, he may not be eligible for the ballot due to the cancellation of his university diploma.

Turkish stocks plunged after the court decision, with the benchmark Borsa Istanbul 100 Index closing 6.1% down. The sharp decline triggered a market-wide circuit breaker. Five-year credit default swaps rose 12 basis points to 253 basis points, while the lira was little changed and trading at 45.6133 per US dollar as of 6:09 p.m. Istanbul time although with little reserves left to defend the currency, we expect a painful and sharp devaluation in the coming weeks.

“While the central bank still has enough reserves to maintain the current policy framework, the buffer is wearing thin,” said David Austerweil, emerging-markets deputy portfolio manager at Van Eck Associates Corporation.

The decision paves the way for a comeback by former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, potentially derailing CHP unity in the run-up to the next presidential elections, which is currently set for 2028 but expected earlier. According to Bloomberg, it may also hamper the party’s efforts to secure the release of jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s most prominent political rival.

The biggest impact, however, was on the Turkish markets which were already strained by the fallout of the Iran war. As reported earlier, to support the lira, monetary authorities offloaded almost all of the country’s US Treasuries in March.

They have also sold much of the country's gold reserves, tightened liquidity, made lira funding costlier and asked state-run lenders to intervene in the currency market. The ruling on Thursday will likely put further pressure on Turkish assets and send the lira into a tailspin.

Ironically, the decision came while Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek and Central Bank Governor Fatih Karahan were in London courting investors. Both figures have been trying to attract foreign investment since taking over Turkey’s economic management in 2023. Their efforts were hampered after the arrest of Imamoglu last year, which led to a foreign investor exodus.

Hundreds of CHP figures have been detained since the 2024 elections, including the leaders of large cities. More recently, Erdogan's regime detained the mayor of Bursa, the country’s fourth-largest city, on charges of corruption and launched a probe against Ankara’s popular mayor, Mansur Yavas, over the alleged misuse of state resources. Like Imamoglu, Yavas is also seen as a potential presidential candidate. Opposition figures have said such charges are politically motivated.

In September, a court removed the CHP’s Istanbul leadership over allegations of corruption and appointed Gursel Tekin - a former Istanbul party chief and ally of Kilicdaroglu -  as trustee, another move that unnerved markets and triggered a selloff.

“The decision is an opportunity to unite,” Kilicdaroglu wrote on X after the ruling, having effectively reclaimed the party’s leadership. He had published a video the day before in which he spoke about the need to root out “corruption” within the CHP.

The ruling “will dent further risk appetite for TRY carry trades,” said Guillaume Tresca, an emerging market strategist at Generali Asset Management SpA. “Turkey is a trickier position than before.”

Turkey's five-year credit default swaps - a barometer of risk sentiment and odds of sovereign default - rose 19 basis points to 261 basis points.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 18:50

We Are 6 Months From Global Food Shortages Because Farmers Are Facing A Quadruple Whammy Crisis

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

We have never faced anything quite like this. Diesel fuel and fertilizer have become far more expensive as a result of the conflict in the Middle East, and extreme weather is playing havoc with crops all over the planet. Here in the United States, we just experienced the driest first three months of a year in recorded history. No, that isn’t an exaggeration. Now a “Super El Niño” is coming, and that means that drought conditions are going to get even worse in many areas of the world. The “Super El Niño” of 1877-1878 resulted in widespread droughts that killed more than 50 million people, and now we are being warned that the upcoming “Super El Niño” could be even worse. Our farmers have never faced a “perfect storm” of this magnitude, and global food production is going to be way down in the months ahead.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is publicly warning that a severe global food crisis could strike about 6 months from now if something really dramatic does not happen…

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz could trigger a severe global food price crisis within six to 12 months unless governments act quickly, the Food and Agriculture Organization warned Wednesday.

Decisions now by farmers and governments on fertilizer use, imports, financing and crop choices will determine whether food prices spike later this year or in early 2027, the agency said.

I don’t know what national governments around the world are supposed to do.

They can’t create fertilizer out of thin air.

Thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, millions of farmers all over the northern hemisphere didn’t get the fertilizer that they needed for the spring planting season.

UNDP Administrator Alexander De Croo is telling us that as a result “many places in the world will have problems of food shortage” once harvest season arrives…

Food shortages are expected to hit many parts of the world from September or October following a fertilizer production plunge, the U.N. Development Program’s head said on Monday.

“In September, (or) October, many places in the world will have problems of food shortage,” as agricultural production is expected to be much lower following the fertilizer production slump resulting from high oil prices amid Middle East conflicts, UNDP Administrator Alexander De Croo said in an interview in Tokyo.

Even if fertilizer is available, many farmers simply cannot afford it.

In fact, one recent survey discovered that 70 percent of U.S. farmers could not afford to buy all of the fertilizer that they needed for the spring planting season because it has become so expensive.

Meanwhile, diesel has become painfully expensive as well.

Virtually all farm equipment runs on diesel, and as I write this article the average price of a gallon of diesel in the U.S. is sitting at about five and a half dollars.

But in California, the average price of a gallon of diesel has reached nearly seven and a half dollars…

According to AAA, the average price for diesel fuel in California is about $7.43 per gallon, which is $2.36 higher compared to last year. In Fresno, prices are slightly higher.

“In Fresno, you’re paying about $6.06 for a gallon of regular gasoline, but you’re paying $7.48 for a gallon of diesel,” Johnson said.

You may not care about what is happening in California, but you should because California produces more fruit and more vegetables than any other state by a very wide margin.

Drought is another major problem that U.S. farmers are dealing with.

In West Texas, the cracks in the ground caused by endless drought are big enough to swallow an entire human hand…

Scott Irlbeck crouched in a field of stunted wheat plants in a parched stretch of West Texas and slipped his hand into a crack wide enough to swallow it.

Last autumn, Irlbeck planted a crop that barely grew because rain never came. ​He now hopes his insurance adjuster will declare it a total loss so he will not need to spend money on pricey fuel to harvest it next month.

Coming into this year, the southwestern portion of the nation was experiencing the worst multi-year drought in at least 1,200 years.

And then the first three months of this year were the driest first three months of a year for the entire country ever recorded.

As a result, it is being projected that the winter wheat harvest will be a disaster…

Crop estimates underscore just how bad the situation is. Growers will see their smallest wheat crop in terms of production since 1972, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1.56 billion bushels this year, down 21% from 2025. That’s especially harmful to Kansas, one of the top overall producers of wheat in the U.S.

This year, only 22 million acres of winter wheat will be harvested, and the abandonment rate is above 32 percent…

Only 32.4 million acres (13.1 million hectares) of wheat were planted this year to begin with, and harvested acreage hit just 22 million, marking abandonment, which is when farmers stop tending to a crop before harvesting, at slightly above 32% of this year’s wheat crop, according to USDA estimates.

Just think about those numbers for a moment.

Our farmers simply gave up on nearly a third of this year’s winter wheat crop.

Wow.

Looking ahead, we are being told that the number of acres of wheat that U.S. farmers are planting in the spring will be the fewest “since record keeping began in 1919”…

U.S. growers were poised to plant the fewest acres of wheat since record keeping began in 1919, as high costs for fertilizer, seeds, and equipment have made it difficult to turn a profit.

In 1919, there were 104 million people living in the United States.

Today, there are more than 340 million people living in the United States.

It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that we are headed for trouble.

And now a “Super El Niño” is looming…

A “Super El Niño” may be on its way and could impact weather in the United States and worldwide for the next several months.

El Niño is described by the National Weather Service (NWS) as “a state where the water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator become abnormally warm.” These warmer waters trigger significant weather pattern changes across the globe.

One expert is warning that there is approximately a 50 percent chance that this “Super El Niño” will be the most powerful ever recorded…

“I would suggest there is roughly a 50 per cent chance of the event becoming the strongest in the historical record right now,” Paul Roundy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany, in the US, told BBC Science Focus. “A few weeks ago, I was suggesting maybe 20 per cent.”

In a previous article, I discussed the fact that the “Super El Niño” of 1877-1878 caused widespread global famines that resulted in the deaths of 50 million people.

So how many will die during the “Super El Niño” that will begin later this year?

According to the UN, the number of people around the world there were experiencing acute hunger was already at an all-time record high even before the war with Iran started.

Now global hunger is spiking, and when people get really hungry they get really desperate.

For example, just check out what is going on in Afghanistan…

Khwaja Ahmad barely gets out a few words before he starts sobbing.

“We are starving. My older children died, so I need to work to feed my family. But I’m old, so no one wants to give me work,” he says.

When a local bakery near the square opens up, the owner distributes stale bread among the crowd. Within seconds, the loaves have been pulled apart, half a dozen men clutching onto precious pieces.

This should break your heart.

One extremely hungry man in Afghanistan says that he is willing to sell his own daughters just so that he will have enough money to buy food…

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children – seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making unbearable choices.

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread’. But what can I give? Where is the work?”

This is what is already happening.

Six months from now, the level of desperation around the world will be so much worse.

We need the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened as soon as possible, but that simply is not going to happen.

The Iranians are never going to give President Trump what he wants, and they are preparing for the next phase of the war…

Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf claimed Wednesday that the U.S. is looking to “start a new war,” a report said.

“The enemy’s movements, both overt and clandestine, show that despite economic and political pressure, it has not abandoned its military objectives and is seeking to start a new war,” Ghalibaf said in a statement shared by Iranian media, according to The Times of Israel.

“Close monitoring of the situation in the United States reinforces the possibility that they still hope for the surrender of the Iranian nation,” he reportedly added.

The next chapter of this war is not going to look like the last chapter.

The IRGC is openly telling us that they are ready to attack “in places you cannot even imagine”…

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned on Wednesday that any new attack on the country would provoke them to spread the war beyond the Middle East, raising the stakes of diplomatic efforts to end the conflict.

In a statement reported by Iranian state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a powerful military force that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, said that if “aggression against Iran is repeated,” it would deliver blows “in places you cannot even imagine.”

The Iranians know that they cannot win the war by fighting symmetrically.

So they are going to use asymmetric tools to get the job done.

And some of those asymmetric tools will not be conventional.

When fighting erupts again, I expect things to get really crazy.

What this means is that the Strait of Hormuz is going to remain closed for a long time, and that is really bad news for farmers all over the globe.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 18:25

Daily Wire Names New CEO As Audience, Revenue Challenges Mount

The Daily Wire announced Tuesday that CEO Caleb Robinson is stepping down effective immediately and transitioning to a board role while retaining significant ownership in the company. Mike Richards, who joined as President and Chief Content Officer roughly a year ago, has been named the new CEO.

Robinson framed the move as a deliberate shift: "Stepping down as CEO of Daily Wire. Effective immediately, my new title is 'guy on the board who still owns a lot of the company.' Pay cut in stress. Raise in the important things."

pic.twitter.com/3D0hpjn3nJ

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) May 20, 2026

Earlier this month, Puck reported that The Daily Wire's audience is in freefall. Ben Shapiro's flagship show episodes, which once regularly drew several million viewers, now average around half a million. The company reportedly lost 80,000 YouTube subscribers in 2026 alone, described by analyst Kyle Tharp as "the steepest decline of any major political channel" this year.

A few days later, New York Magazine highlighted other warning signs, including Daily Wire YouTube videos garnering fewer than 10,000 views days after posting (a sharp contrast to the channel's more than 3 million subscribers) and mocked comment sections. While acknowledging poor business decisions such as feature films, the Pendragon Cycle fantasy series, and unusual merchandise lines, Barkan argued the deeper issue is the "collapse of Shapiro’s constituency," particularly among young and Gen-Z conservatives who once drove the company's growth.

In recent weeks the company carried out layoffs affecting a reported 42 employees - roughly 20 percent of headcount - concentrated at its Nashville production office. A Daily Wire source told Puck that the cuts were a "course correction after years of mismanagement and overhiring," while attributing part of the audience softening to platform algorithm changes that favor more partisan or conspiratorial content.

Sources close to the company described the cuts as a course correction after years of mismanagement and overhiring, and attributed any audience decline to platform algorithms that prioritize more-partisan or even conspiratorial content. But Ben’s competitors and other industry insiders suspect it has more to do with a “MAGA vibe shift,” and the growing unpopularity of his support for Israel and the war in Iran, among other issues. -Puck

A spokesperson told the outlet that the company had "made a difficult decision to restructure the organization, which included layoffs to a number of teams."

Internal Tensions and the Pendragon Cycle

Much of the strain traces back several years according to Puck. While the company hit strong revenue growth - Boreing told the outlet in late 2024 it was on pace to exceed $200 million annually - tensions grew between the co-founders over Boreing's ambitious creative projects.

Central to the rift was The Pendragon Cycle, a seven-episode Arthurian fantasy series. Boreing reportedly secured an eight-figure budget but ultimately spent nearly three times that amount. Sources said both Shapiro and Robinson initially signed off on the project but became disillusioned as costs mounted and Boreing took a leave to focus on it. This contributed to a deeper falling-out.

In late 2024 or early 2025, Robinson pushed to engage SPAC SilverBox Capital to explore strategic options, including a possible exit. Boreing reportedly opposed the move, viewing it as jeopardizing the company's mission. He stepped down as co-CEO in March 2025, officially to focus on creative projects. According to Puck's reporting, Shapiro and Boreing largely stopped communicating afterward, aside from a call following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Reactions from the Right

The Daily Wire's challenges and Shapiro's staunch pro-Israel positions have fueled sharp criticism from prominent voices in the populist/America First wing of the conservative movement.

Tucker Carlson has been among the most vocal. On a recent episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Carlson downplayed Shapiro's influence amid discussions on the Iran conflict:

"You wonder where the pressure's coming from... Those are clearly the spokesmen for the coalition applying pressure, but they're not in themselves powerful figures... Ben Shapiro's going out of business."

He further described figures like Shapiro and Mark Levin as occupying "the outer fringe of the outer fringe" with minimal real audience or constituency.

Megyn Kelly has pushed back against Shapiro's attacks while commenting on the layoffs. She has noted her own show's stronger performance metrics compared to Shapiro's and expressed a mix of schadenfreude and detachment. In one recent post, she highlighted her audience numbers dwarfing Shapiro's.

Candace Owens, who was terminated from The Daily Wire in 2024, has repeatedly mocked the company's troubles and accused Shapiro of relying on "fake" or purchased views. In a May 15, 2026 post reacting directly to the New York Magazine article, she wrote:

"As if the Ben Shapiro crash out over the New York Magazine article couldn't get more hilarious... Also Tucker is big in Pakistan? The cope here is beyond exceptional." (View post)

Owens has tied the decline to Shapiro's foreign policy stance and past internal conflicts.

As if the Ben Shapiro crash out over the New York Magazine article couldn’t get more hilarious.

Someone fed Ben Shapiro bad intel and he ran to his show to giddily report on it. 😂

To the express contrary, we actually just increased our production staff by 2.

Also Tucker is…

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) May 15, 2026

Other America First voices have amplified the "MIGA" (Make Israel Great Again) critique, accusing Shapiro and the Daily Wire of prioritizing Israeli interests over American ones. The New York Magazine piece echoed this sentiment, arguing that Shapiro's conservatism retains support among Republican elites but is being rejected by the future grassroots of the party - especially younger conservatives who view the Iran conflict as a costly quagmire tied to foreign policy priorities. Posts frequently reference Shapiro's consistent calls for strong U.S. support for Israel as a key driver of audience alienation.

Ben Shapiro's @benshapiro Pro Israel Empire Crumbles For America Last Stance

New York Magazine reports that Ben Shapiro's once-dominant position as the "king of conservative media" has collapsed in 2026.

The Daily Wire is undergoing major layoffs, its YouTube subscriber base… pic.twitter.com/iftvIEM7sH

— AMERICA 24 (@America24news_) May 15, 2026

Shapiro has pushed back forcefully, dismissing critics as part of a "woke right" and insisting the company is executing standard restructuring while expecting a strong advertising year.

Robinson's departure and Richards' ascension - the latter bringing extensive experience in scaled television production from Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune - come as the company attempts to stabilize. Daily Wire officials continue to emphasize its large subscriber base, daily content output, and enduring role as a major voice on the right.

The story reflects broader pressures in independent media: the difficulty of scaling personality-driven outlets into entertainment studios, platform volatility, and realignment within conservative audiences following the 2024 election - particularly around foreign policy and Israel.

Whether the latest leadership change and restructuring can reverse the recent audience and momentum losses remains to be seen. The company has not issued further public comment beyond Robinson's statement as of this writing. Developments are expected to be addressed directly on Daily Wire platforms in the coming days.

* * *

Psst, need anything? We run a tight ship but your support is always appreciated. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 17:20

US Deploys Aircraft Carrier To Caribbean As Trump Admin Pressures Cuba Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. military command operating in the Western Hemisphere said on May 20 that an aircraft carrier strike group entered the Caribbean Sea, as the Trump administration heaps pressure on the Cuban communist regime.

In a post on X, U.S. Southern Command said that the USS Nimitz is now in the Caribbean and released video footage of the carrier group. Southern Command did not provide more details about why the carrier group traveled to the region.

The Nimitz, it said, "has proven its combat prowess across the globe, ensuring stability and defending democracy from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf."

The Nimitz, commissioned in 1975, carried out joint naval exercises with the Brazilian Navy off the coast of Rio de Janeiro last week, the U.S. Embassy in Brazil said in a May 14 statement.

On May 20, the Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed a criminal indictment against former Cuban leader Raul Castro, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a video in Spanish urging Cubans to reject the country's communist leadership.

According to the DOJ indictment, Castro was indicted in connection with the 1996 downing of civilian planes operated by Miami-based exiles. Castro, now 94, was Cuba's defense minister when the planes were shot down, killing four people.

The charges against Castro, the brother of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, drew pushback from the country's current leader, Miguel Diaz-Canel, in a post on X.

"This is a political maneuver, devoid of any legal foundation, aimed solely at padding the fabricated dossier they use to justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba," Diaz-Canel wrote.

This year, U.S. President Donald Trump has been ratcheting up talk of regime change in Cuba and said he would potentially initiate a "friendly takeover" of the country if its leadership did not open up its economy to American investment and kick out U.S. adversaries.

When asked what will happen next for the U.S. embargo on Cuba on Wednesday, Trump said, "We're going to see." He added that the U.S. government is ready to provide humanitarian assistance to what he described as a failing country.

Trump said that "there won't be escalation" between the United States and Cuba, adding, "I don't think there needs to be."

"Look, the place is falling apart. It's a mess," Trump added. "They've really lost control of Cuba."

In Cuba, there is no food, electricity, or energy, Trump said, adding that the U.S. government will have to act to assist the country.

Earlier this month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba to meet with the country's top officials, a visit that came as the country's energy minister said the island has completely run out of fuel and that its power grid is in a critical state.

In January, the U.S. military launched an operation in Venezuela that captured its president, Nicolas Maduro, an ally of the Cuban regime, and took him to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges.

Since September 2025, the U.S. military has been launching strikes against suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in what the military calls Operation Southern Spear.

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) sails in the Arabian Sea, on May 3, 2026. Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 17:00

DOJ Probe Widens: Minnesota Daycare Owner Charged, While Convicted Fraudster Gets Nearly 42 Years

A Minneapolis daycare owner has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, adding another case to Minnesota's widening public-benefits fraud scandal.

Fahima Egeh Mahamud, 50, CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center, allegedly submitted more than 13,000 false claims to Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program between 2022 and 2025, according to prosecutors. Thousands of those claims required families to make co-payments before the daycare could receive federal reimbursements.

BREAKING: Minneapolis daycare owner featured in Nick Shirley’s video Fahima Egeh Mahamud, CHARGED with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly stealing over $4.6 million through false claims to federal and state programs pic.twitter.com/OJ6plcQ7lq

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 21, 2026

Prosecutors say Mahamud falsely certified that those family co-payments had been collected, allowing her daycare business to receive roughly $4.6 million in improper reimbursements.

The case is not Mahamud's first encounter with federal fraud investigators. She was separately charged in February with wire fraud over her alleged role in the Feeding Our Future meal-fraud scheme, the sprawling Minnesota case in which federal prosecutors say taxpayer money meant to feed children during the pandemic was diverted through sham meal sites, inflated meal counts, rosters, invoices, and kickback arrangements.

In that earlier case, prosecutors alleged that from December 2020 to July 2021, Mahamud claimed to serve tens of thousands of meals to children each month at the Future Leaders site, when the site allegedly served only a fraction of those meals.

An attorney for Mahamud could not be reached for comment. Mahamud and all other defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.

A Wider Minnesota Fraud Crackdown

The daycare charge comes as Minnesota faces a widening federal crackdown on alleged fraud across multiple state-administered programs. AP reported that, after former Feeding Our Future leader Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison, federal authorities announced a new batch of charges against 15 people accused of stealing from social-service programs administered through Minnesota's state government.

AP said the new cases involve roughly $90 million across seven state-managed Medicaid programs. Those cases include Mahamud, whom AP identified as the former CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center. Prosecutors allege her organization was reimbursed about $4.6 million for services tied to people who did not make required co-payments.

🚨 HOLY CRAP! The Trump DOJ has just announced a MASSIVE $90M FRAUD BUST in Tim Walz's Minnesota, with criminal charges being slapped on 15 defendants

This involves 7 STATE-MANAGED MEDICAID PROGRAMS totally plundered by fraudsters — one program has $0 LEFT! 🤯

Tim Walz knew!… pic.twitter.com/KottcIOU2K

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 21, 2026

The New York Post reported that Justice Department officials described the latest Minnesota charges as involving the two largest Medicaid fraud cases ever brought in the district, including what officials called the "largest autism fraud scheme ever." According to the Post's account of the DOJ announcement, prosecutors said the schemes involved fake diagnoses, billing for services that were not provided, and the exploitation of programs intended for vulnerable people.

Autism Program Targeted In Alleged $40 Million Scheme

One of the most explosive allegations involves Minnesota's Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program, known as EIDBI, a Medicaid-funded autism services program for children and young people.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that one alleged scheme was worth more than $40 million and involved kickbacks to parents who fraudulently used autism centers to obtain autism diagnoses for children regardless of medical necessity, followed by billing for services that were not actually provided.

That's nice and all Kash, but...

Still in congress

Still free

Still has millions of hard earned TAXPAYERS money stolen from our children and grandchildren pic.twitter.com/vR26CqcW2n

— Roger Sunderlin (@RogerSunderlin) May 21, 2026

That allegation shifts the Minnesota story from ordinary benefits fraud into something much darker: children, disabled patients, and struggling families allegedly being treated as billing instruments inside programs that were supposed to help them.

The Justice Department had already been building toward this moment. In December, federal prosecutors announced additional charges in autism and housing fraud cases, including allegations that a Minnesota autism provider paid cash kickbacks to parents, submitted inflated Medicaid claims, billed for services not actually provided, and obtained millions of dollars from Minnesota's Department of Human Services and related payors.

Housing And Home-Care Programs Under Scrutiny

Federal prosecutors have also zeroed in on Minnesota's Housing Stabilization Services program, a Medicaid benefit designed to help people with disabilities, seniors, people with mental illness, and people with substance-use disorders find and maintain housing.

According to the Justice Department, the program had low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements, making it vulnerable to fraud. The program's costs exploded from an expected $2.6 million annually to more than $21 million in 2021, $42 million in 2022, $74 million in 2023, and $104 million in 2024.

In one housing case, two Pennsylvania men pleaded guilty to traveling repeatedly to Minneapolis to defraud the Housing Stabilization Services program, according to the DOJ. Prosecutors said they stole about $3.5 million for services they falsely claimed to have provided to roughly 230 Medicaid beneficiaries and even used ChatGPT to generate fake client notes when insurers asked for documentation.

Feeding Our Future Casts A Long Shadow

The overlap among these cases is what has made the Minnesota scandal so politically explosive. What began with Feeding Our Future has expanded into child care, housing services, autism therapy, home supports, and other Medicaid-funded programs.

According to AP, Bock's Feeding Our Future network involved phony distribution sites, fake lists of children supposedly being fed, kickbacks, and lavish spending on international travel, real estate, and luxury vehicles. Bock was convicted last year of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery and sentenced this week to nearly 42 years in prison.

Bock blames Minnesota officials for not catching the fraud, telling CBS: "We relied on the state," adding that local officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, would often visit the meal sites. "We told the state, this site is going to operate at this address, this time, and this number of children. The state would then tell us that's approved."

👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻👂🏻
WORTH A LISTEN
Aimee Bock from behind prison is naming names in the Minnesota fraud scandal… which she believes was no surprise to local Democratic leaders. pic.twitter.com/UfrKsvJNjV

— Andrew C ™️ (@Sheckyi) January 23, 2026

The Justice Department has described Feeding Our Future as the single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country. Prosecutors said the scheme stole roughly $250 million from a federal child nutrition program that was supposed to feed children during the pandemic.

Future Leaders Early Learning Center was also one of the Minneapolis daycares referenced or featured in YouTuber Nick Shirley's viral December video examining possible fraud in the system. The video helped push the issue into national politics and drew attention from federal officials already scrutinizing Minnesota-administered benefits programs.

Washington Freezes Funding And Demands Answers

The fallout has reached Washington. The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Jan. 6 that it had frozen access to certain child care and family-assistance funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, citing concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs.

According to the HHS announcement, the freeze applied to three programs: the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Social Services Block Grant.

Minnesota has also faced specific Medicaid funding pressure. AP reported that the Trump administration notified the state it was deferring an additional $91 million in Medicaid funding because of concerns about fraud vulnerabilities in state-run but federally funded social-service programs. That came on top of hundreds of millions of dollars the administration had already withheld earlier this year.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the additional deferral was tied partly to high-risk service categories and partly to concerns about payments for ineligible recipients. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called the move political retaliation, while state officials said they have been taking aggressive action to stop fraud and recover improper payments.

The Oversight Question

The numbers explain why the issue is not going away. Minnesota receives about $185 million in child care funds each year from the Administration for Children and Families, according to HHS officials cited in earlier reporting. The latest cases raise basic questions about how federal money was monitored, how providers were verified, why warning signs were missed, and how alleged fraud was able to spread across so many programs before federal investigators stepped in.

The scandal now appears to be less about one daycare, one nonprofit, or one program than about a broader failure of oversight. Prosecutors are no longer describing isolated cases of paperwork abuse. They are alleging networks of providers, recruiters, shell companies, fake records, kickbacks, inflated claims, and programs designed for children, disabled people, and low-income families being turned into taxpayer-funded revenue streams.

For Minnesota, the political problem is obvious. For taxpayers, the question is simpler: how many more programs were treated this way, and how much money is gone?

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 16:40

Exit Taxes Won't Save Failing States

Authored by Vance Ginn via TheDailyEconomy.org,

When a state starts floating an exit tax, it is telling you something more important than any campaign slogan: the people running the place know their model is not working. 

They may not say it that way. They will call it fairness, responsibility, or making the wealthy “pay what they owe.” But the meaning is the same. 

If families, entrepreneurs, and investors are leaving, the state can either ask why its policies are pushing them out, or it can try to tax them for escaping. An exit tax chooses punishment over reform. 

I understand why these proposals resonate with some people. If you are watching wealthy residents relocate while governments still face bills for schools, roads, pensions, and other commitments, it is easy to feel like the people with the most mobility are ducking the tab. 

That frustration is real. It deserves a serious answer. But an exit tax is not a serious answer. It is a confession that lawmakers would rather cling to a failing fiscal model than fix the spending, regulation, and tax policies that made people want to leave in the first place. 

That is why the current trend is so revealing.

In California, proposals have centered on taxing billionaire net worth, including wealth that often exists on paper rather than in cash. In New York, the push has extended to a new surcharge on high-value second homes in New York City.

In Washington, lawmakers have already enacted a “millionaires’ tax.” These policies differ in form, but not in spirit. They all send the same message: if government has made your state too expensive, too hostile, or too unpredictable, it may still try to claim part of your future anyway. 

The economics are worse than the politics. Supporters talk as if wealth is a pile of idle cash sitting in a vault, just waiting to be skimmed. It is not. Wealth is usually tied up in businesses, shares, property, and future earnings. 

Taxing net worth or unrealized gains means taxing value that often has not been sold, realized, or converted into cash. That can force asset sales, dilute business ownership, weaken investment, and change behavior long before the tax collector ever gets a check.

 A Hoover Institution analysis of California’s proposal found that once likely migration responses are considered, the measure could leave the state with a negative net present value of about $25 billion. That is the real lesson: politicians score the tax statically, but the economy does not sit still. 

And that is before you get to the broader evidence. The OECD has noted that recurring net wealth taxes have become much less common across advanced economies because they tend to raise less revenue than promised while creating large compliance costs, avoidance incentives, and economic distortions. Countries tried them. Many backed away. 

A recent NBER study on Scandinavian wealth taxation found that higher top wealth-tax rates reduced the number of wealthy taxpayers and that many of those taxpayers were business owners whose departure reduced investment, employment, and value-added. 

That is the part too often ignored in political talking points. When a state drives out a founder, investor, or employer, it is not just losing one tax return. It is losing future jobs, future capital formation, and future opportunity for everybody else too. 

Defenders of exit taxes still fall back on one argument that sounds morally satisfying: these taxpayers benefited from state infrastructure, legal protections, and markets while they lived there, so the state deserves one final cut

But that argument quietly rewrites the relationship between citizen and government. It turns moving into a taxable offense. It says the state retains a lingering claim on your success because you once lived under its jurisdiction. That is a dangerous principle in a federal system built on mobility and competition.

 Even in the international arena, exit taxes are controversial, complex, and tied to specific movements of assets or functions across borders. Importing that logic into state tax policy is not modernization. It is escalation. 

The problem is not just that these taxes are bad economics. It is that they usually do not stay narrow. Politicians sell them as a tool aimed only at billionaires or luxury homeowners — policy aimed at an applause line. But when the revenue falls short, the scope expands. 

One-time wealth taxes become annual property surcharges. “Billionaire” thresholds are expanded to target millionaires and eventually the middle class. “Temporary” taxes become permanent fiscal architecture. New York’s pied-à-terre proposal is a good example of how quickly the logic expands once the principle is accepted. 

Frédéric Bastiat warned us to look not just at what is seen, but at what is unseen. We see the tax revenues. That’s a small, visible victory compared to the investment that never happens, the entrepreneur who builds elsewhere, jobs that never arrive — the unseen costs compound. 

Exit taxes are built on ignoring all of that. 

Claiming an exit tax frames mobility as theft, when it is often a rational response to bad governance. They do not restore prosperity. They steal the opportunity to prosper by doubling down on the very policies that made growth harder in the first place. 

If lawmakers want to deter departures, the answer is not a fiscal trap door. It is better policy: lower taxes, lighter regulation, spending restraint, and a serious effort to make their states places where productive people want to stay.

Real economic renewal is more difficult than yet more taxation, but it is also the only approach that works. Exit taxes will not save failing states. They only confirm why people wanted to leave. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 16:20

Trump Posts Article Laying Out: "Here's How To Crush Tehran In Three Moves"

President Trump on Thursday posted to Truth Social a New York Post article which was first published over two weeks ago, on May 1st, with the headline "Here's how to crush Tehran in three moves."

Trump's new social media post, issued without additional comment, comes just after news of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei having drawn a hard line in the sand, ordering that Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% remain strictly inside Iranian territory. So now the world awaits what's next at a moment the White House has renewed threats of massive military strikes if Iran doesn't quickly come to the table and conform.

The NY Post article had straight-faced and without a hint of intended irony proclaimed: "President Trump has the upper hand." That statement was issued on day 63 of Trump's Iran war. Today is day 83.

What did the interim look like as the world's most powerful military force has been unable to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, amid constant threats to take new, bigger military action - but which never actually materializes (at least not yet) no matter how many times the Iranians reject Washington's terms?

The below timeline and outline, stretching from last week into this one, basically illustrates the weekly Trump pattern that's been on display going back many weeks at this point: 

• Wed: Iran wants a deal. They called us 
• Thu: We are looking at proposals
• Fri: We might be close. Very close
• Sat: Iran knows what to do
• Sun: OBLITERATION. TOTAL. COMPLETE. They have 24 hrs. 
• Mon: The storm is coming 
• Tue: I'm giving it more time

This is what 'winning' looks like according to the NY Post, apparently. The publication also feels itself in a position to give 'advice' and guidance to the White House on executing a war. "His best path forward is to pursue three lines of effort in parallel," author Richard Goldberg (of Foundation for Defense of Democracies) wrote. It must be remembered that very recently a former senior official from FDD Action, the think tank's lobbying arm, joined Trump's Iran negotiating team - his name is Nick Stewart.

Here are the three:

1. Sustain the blockade and accompanying economic warfare to destabilize the regime’s hold on the state;
2. Remake the world in America's energy dominance image to mitigate long-term price impacts while undermining China's global ambition to defeat the United States;
3. Order the US military to forge a path through the Strait of Hormuz to restore freedom of navigation on our terms not Tehran’s.

...if only simply ordering a military "path through" was that easy!

NurPhoto via Getty Images

"You might call the latter Operation Epic Passage — a combined naval and air mission of self-defense that offers escort to tankers and restores freedom of navigation, all while making clear to Tehran the devastating consequences of breaking cease-fire," Goldberg, who openly boasts of his close ties to the Israeli government, also wrote. He further offered the mission name of "Blockade Plus".

After the opening days and weeks of Operation Epic Fury, when it became clear that the large-scale US and Israeli bombardment would not produced regime change in Iran, pundits widely questioned whether the Trump White House actually had a plan, or long-term strategic vision for the military mission. 

And now, after more than 80 days in, the public gets Trump posting a NY Post article by a hawkish FDD writer, which seems more focused merely on ways to mitigate the blowback and 'make the best' of a failed regime change operation, in the wake of the administration's constantly evolving stated goals.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 15:50

Rickards: Investing In A World In Turmoil

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

To say that the world is in turmoil to an extent not seen since the 1960s is an understatement.

The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year. The war in Iran continues with no end in sight, despite Trump’s optimistic talk. NATO may be nearing the break-up stage as Trump pulls U.S. troops out of Germany.

Energy prices are soaring, inflation has accelerated sharply again, consumer confidence has fallen sharply, debt is at an all-time high and supply chains are breaking down.

Yet the major U.S. stock indices are at or near all-time highs.

What accounts for record stock prices amid almost unprecedented turmoil?

There are a number of key factors supporting stocks. The most obvious is the AI frenzy. This has two aspects. The first is that AI applications can improve productivity. The second is that the build-out of data centers with the most advanced semiconductors has led to a $1 trillion capital investment tsunami as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI providers build their server farms.

The next factor is related to the first and is often called the picks-and-shovels trade. The idea is that those who benefit in a gold rush are not the gold miners but the merchants who sell tools, clothes, supplies and other goods the miners need.

In the AI gold rush, the winners are electricity suppliers, builders, hardware manufacturers (semiconductors and servers) and small towns where the server farms are located. These suppliers will do well today whether AI lives up to its promise or not.

Passive Aggression

Another major factor is passive investing. An enormous amount of U.S. wealth is held in 401(k)s, IRAs and assets under management by wealth managers.

Relatively few of the account holders (or, for that matter, wealth managers) really understand active stock investing or risk management. Instead, they buy index funds, ETFs or other equity basket products that track the stock market itself or a specified segment.

When money is put into these index funds, the manager buys the stocks in the index. That buying pushes stock prices higher. That attracts more money, more buying and more gains in a positive feedback loop that drives stocks even higher. No Ph.D. is required. You just buy the index, sit back and enjoy the ride.

FOMO and TINA

Two other factors related to the passive investing feedback loop are fear of missing out (FOMO) and the idea that there is no alternative (TINA). It’s difficult to show up at a cocktail party or the country club when all of your friends are touting their stock gains and you’re not in the market.

It’s also difficult to put money in 4% cash equivalents or assets like gold when stocks seem set to deliver 10% returns as far as the eye can see.

FOMO and TINA have nothing to do with fundamental stock analysis. But they are real and powerful drivers of human behavior.

It’s not all fairy dust, however. There are actual fundamental drivers behind stock gains. Corporate profits are coming in strong (despite some high-profile missed estimates). U.S. energy self-sufficiency will keep the lights on in the U.S. and help prevent 1970s-style gas lines — even if we are not immune to the impact of higher prices.

That’s the argument for higher stock prices despite global problems. What could possibly go wrong?

Unrecognized Risks

The greatest threat to higher stock prices is that the market has not fully discounted the impact of the war in Iran and the unprecedented disruption in the supply of oil, liquid natural gas, nitrates for fertilizer, helium, sulphur, aluminum and other critical inputs.

The reality of these shortages has not hit home (with the exception of higher prices for gasoline and oil), but that does not mean the coast is clear.

An enormous amount of oil supply was already on vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the war began. That “floating supply chain” took weeks to be delivered to end users. That process has now been completed; the last deliveries have been made. There is nothing else on the way.

Major manufacturing nations like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China are now using up reserves. These may last another month or so. The critical point at which reserves are gone, no resupply is on the way and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed grows nearer by the day.

Even if the strait reopens tomorrow, the current shortages will raise prices, disrupt supply chains and possibly lead to a global recession. Markets seem to be ignoring this possibility in favor of a narrative that says the strait will reopen soon and all will be well.

Great Expectations (for AI)

Eventually, it may also occur to markets that AI is not producing any revenue. It’s consuming $1 trillion in capital and promising untold riches, but those riches have yet to materialize. AI is a powerful technology and it’s here to stay. But that does not mean it will be particularly profitable. It may even hurt growth if hundreds of thousands of skilled workers are laid off.

There are serious reasons to believe that AI will not be that productive at all. Output errors (called “slop”) not only cast doubt on the reliability of AI, but are also populating the internet, which AI itself uses as a training set for new applications.

More slop in the training set means even less reliable output than earlier versions. The dream of superintelligence (artificial general intelligence, AGI) is out of reach because of the inability of engineers to code abductive logic.

If the AI bubble bursts (which I expect), it will not only hurt the Mag 7 stocks but also the picks-and-shovels plays around it.

The Private Credit Canary

A separate trigger for a market meltdown is the crisis in private credit. Funds sponsored by top managers like Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, Morgan Stanley and others are severely limiting investor withdrawals.

Complicating matters further, if fund managers try to sell assets quickly, there may be very few buyers unless the seller agrees to slash the price dramatically — sometimes by half or more compared with the stated “book value.”

Supporters of private credit say that this private market is only worth about $4 trillion and that even 20% write-offs will not jeopardize the system. But this calculation ignores the impact of leverage and the effects of contagion. Losses in private credit can trigger runs on mid-tier banks, which then spread to funds that hold those mid-tier bank stocks and so on.

The Dark Side of Passive

But the greatest threat to the stock market may be the dominance of passive investing.

The same buying dynamic that drives stock prices higher can work in reverse. A market drawdown can cause investors to sell their index funds. This causes fund managers to sell the underlying stocks, which takes down the indices, causing more selling by investors and so on.

While passive investing can push markets higher gradually, it can also drive them lower with startling speed and violence.

What’s an investor to do? The positive story for stocks is real, but the downside potential is equally real. The solution is to hedge by diversifying your portfolio. Keep some stocks, but also maintain a slice of cash, a slice of gold and medium-term U.S. Treasury notes.

Gold is the everything hedge. Treasury notes are secure and will rally when the recession goes into high gear. Cash will give you the option to go shopping for bargains when everyone else is dumping stocks.

TINA and FOMO are not your friends. Diversification is.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 15:40

Rubio: Diplomacy Will Be Rendered 'Impossible' If Iran Enacts Hormuz Toll System

Iran has been seeking to significantly expand the area around the Strait of Hormuz over which it claims military control by this week advancing the newly-created government agency of the "Persian Gulf Strait Authority".

The agency quickly published a map proclaiming "Iranian armed forces oversight" across more than 22,000 sq km (8,800 sq miles) of the Hormuz waterway. Now, all transit through the strait "requires coordination with and authorization from the Persian Gulf Strait Authority" - the new entity announced.

Of course, Washington has made clear that international vessels must not comply with Iran's rules. Yet Tehran is Wednesday into Thursday claiming some 'victories' in this regard. 

The Iranians say they are in active discussions with Oman to establish a permanent toll system for maritime traffic passing through the strait, according to Iran’s ambassador to France, Mohammad Amin-Nejad.

"Iran and Oman must mobilize all their resources both to provide security services and to manage navigation in the most appropriate manner, prevent pollution, and simply strive to establish an order so that global trade is not subject to disruptions. This will entail costs, and it goes without saying that those who wish to benefit from this traffic must also pay their share," Amin-Nejad said, as cited in Bloomberg.

Amin-Nejad further asserted the potential costs would be "clear, transparent, reasonable, and logical" - though the system is not yet in place. An initial toll proposal, which some companies may have already paid in order to get their stranded vessels out, was reportedly up to $2 million per tanker.

Iran is also touting that China and and South Korea have been in direct communication to arrange passage of their ships:

Iran continues to control the flow of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz for political and propaganda gains as the war of words continues over the peace negotiations. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy is claiming to have increased the flow with Chinese tankers and the first South Korean tanker permitted to make the transit, while many other vessels continue to wait.

...The IRGC Navy released a statement claiming that in the past 24 hours, a total of 26 vessels safely transited the Strait of Hormuz. It said this included tankers as well as containerships and other vessels. It asserted, however, that they were all “under the coordination and security support” of the IRGC Navy. They said all the ships making the transit had obtained prior authorization and required close coordination with the IRGC. 

...South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced May 20 that its first tanker had been able to make the transit carrying about two million barrels of crude bound for Ulsan. It said there are 25 other South Korean-flagged vessels still caught in the Persian Gulf, but it was significant after Iran refused transit a month ago to another South Korean tanker that was reportedly bound for Pakistan.

If Tehran can attract each country to make separate deals for the passage of their ships, this will be hailed as a 'win' for Iran and its Hormuz protocols. 

But the US and its regional allies are not buying into Iran's narrative, with the UAE having described Iran's claims of control as "nothing but fragments of dreams."

And importantly, on Thursday US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz would render a diplomatic deal unfeasible and that the US remains "very upset with NATO" their response to the Iran crisis. He said: 

"A toll collection system in the Strait of Hormuz will make a diplomatic deal impossible."

"We are very disappointed with NATO allies, we will discuss the issue of troop deployment at the upcoming meeting."

Some vessels are paying Iranian authorities more than $150,000 for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, sources told Reuters. The US has warned that such payments might trigger American sanctions but some ship owners are paying anyway https://t.co/87HQZcBDcr pic.twitter.com/nuc7UXaFX9

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 21, 2026

But at this point, Tehran doesn't look to be in a rush to complete a deal. Trump could be ready to indefinitely withhold new military strikes, and Iran is busy rearming and regrouping. Also, as enough time passes with the stalemated situation in place, Tehran is likely to convince more countries that they have no choice but to deal with the Islamic Republic directly.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 15:20

Democrats Move To Block Trump's $1.776 Billion 'Anti-Weaponization' Fund

Via American Greatness,

Congressional Democrats are moving to shut down President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, escalating a political fight over compensation for Americans who say they were targeted by politically motivated prosecutions and federal lawfare.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is introducing legislation aimed at preventing any federal money from being used to create or distribute payments through the fund.

According to a copy of the bill shared with Axios, the legislation states that “no Federal funds may be used to create or make payments” tied to the Trump administration’s Anti-Weaponization Fund.

The fund emerged from a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service after the president sued the agency over the leaking of his confidential tax returns during his first term.

Under the settlement framework, individuals claiming they were victims of politically motivated prosecutions or government abuse would be able to seek compensation.

Potential applicants could include January 6 defendants and others who were unfairly targeted by federal authorities.

Raskin is reportedly considering using a discharge petition to force a House vote if Republican leadership blocks the measure from reaching the floor.

At the same time, some establishment Republicans are also voicing opposition to the fund. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick told reporters Wednesday that he would “try to kill” the program.

“We’re going to write a letter to the [attorney general] to start, but we’re considering a legislative option,” Fitzpatrick said.

Supporters of the fund argue it represents a long-overdue effort to compensate Americans harmed by politically driven prosecutions and abuses of government power.

Critics, meanwhile, claim the program would improperly use taxpayer money to compensate individuals tied to controversial investigations, including those connected to the January 6 Capitol protest.

Two law enforcement officers who were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have already filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the fund entirely.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 15:00

Marcus Lemonis Fires Back On X Over Claims Camping World Spiraling Toward Bankruptcy

America's largest RV dealer and service chain, selling new and used motorhomes, travel trailers, and more for outdoor living, has been under pressure over the past several years as high interest rates have crushed RV demand.

An X user with the handle "Roger" laid out his thesis on why Camping World is next on the list to "file Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $3.5 billion of unpayable debt," adding, "West Marine (one of the largest boat suppliers in the US) just filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, holding over $1 billion in debt."

Camping World $CWH expected to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $3.5 billion of unpayable debt.

West Marine (one of largest boat suppliers in US) just filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy today holding over $1 billion in debt.

RV and Boat Bankruptcies. The signs are clear. pic.twitter.com/hBUvxQ5sWJ

— Roger (@rdd147) May 21, 2026

Camping World Revenues and Liabilities

Roger added, "RV and Boat Bankruptcies. The signs are clear."

Same boat as West Marine. Camping World is in Final stages of screwing the landlord to pay the debt holders. pic.twitter.com/25KTtPlZcq

— Roger (@rdd147) May 21, 2026

Shares of Camping World have been locked in a brutal bear market since peaking near $45 in late 2021, with the stock now down about 86% as of Thursday. The sell-off has pushed shares back toward Covid-era lows, as high interest rates continue to choke off RV demand and corporate America as a whole warns that consumers have significantly dialed back on big-ticket items (read here).

Responding on X to Roger's bear thesis on Camping World was none other than Marcus Lemonis, CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond, co-founder of Camping World, and TV personality.

Lemonis said Roger's view that Camping World was sliding toward bankruptcy was "totally false."

Totally false

— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) May 21, 2026

Roger then responded to Lemonis: "Explain. Why are liabilities rising, in particular lease obligations? Paying debt holders and not rent is end-stage preparation. See West Marine. Couldn't pay its leases."

Explain. Why are liabilities rising, in particular lease obligations?

Paying debt holders and not rent is end stage preparation. See West Marine. Couldn’t pay its leases.

Honestly happy to hear an assessment pic.twitter.com/7uzCrIdtq2

— Roger (@rdd147) May 21, 2026

Roger ended with: "Honestly, happy to hear an assessment."

The CEO just entered the chat and bodied you. You shorting the company or?

— Brandox (@AngelsKill) May 21, 2026

Here is Wall Street's view on Camping World:

And the fact that Marcus Lemonis felt compelled to respond to a random X user raises its own set of questions.

False. Do your research

— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) May 21, 2026

The stock is 21% short, equivalent to about 12.5 million shares, with 2.7 days to cover. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 14:40

Getting An 'A' At Harvard Will Be Tougher Starting In 2027

Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,

Two thirds of faculty vote to approve cap on A grades for undergrads...

Harvard University faculty gave an emphatic “yes” to capping A grades in a vote Wednesday amid concerns about grade inflation and academic rigor at the prestigious institution.

Approximately 70 percent voted to approve the 20-percent cap on As in undergraduate courses, The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, reports. Nearly 700 professors participated in the vote. The measure will go into effect in the fall of 2027.

Harvard psychology Professor Steven Pinker praised the decision in an X post Wednesday, calling it “a big step in combatting the grade inflation that has been dumbing down our courses, conveying the wrong message to students, and making universities a national laughingstock.”

Another professor, political scientist Max Abrams at Northeastern University noted the impact of the decision on other higher education institutions. 

Harvard isn’t just some university. Many universities look to Harvard to inform their own decisions. I am strongly in favor of Harvard’s moves to reduce grade inflation. When everyone gets an A there is no signal. pic.twitter.com/Tpb4enuADA

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) May 20, 2026

Other scholars called for their Ivy League institutions to follow Harvard’s lead.

Along with limiting As, the faculty also approved a measure by a large majority “to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors,” according to The Crimson.

A third measure within the proposal did not pass. It would have allowed professors “to petition to opt out of the A cap” if the grading for their course is on an “unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis,” the report states:

When the proposal was first introduced in February, its architects pitched the A cap and percentile-ranking system as paired reforms: the ranking system would prevent students from avoiding larger or more difficult courses in search of better grades under the cap.

After pushback, the subcommittee separated the measures into distinct votes, delayed implementation by a year to fall 2027, and added a “satisfactory-plus” designation for courses that chose to opt out of the system.

In the weeks before the vote, some faculty also pushed for a more complicated alternative to the“20 percent plus four” formula that would have tightened limits in smaller courses. But that amendment failed to make it onto the final ballot after faculty favored the original formula in a preliminary poll.

All three proposals came from a Harvard faculty committee in response to a report that found 60 percent of all undergraduate grades are now As – a 35 percent increase compared to 20 years ago.

In a statement after the vote Wednesday, the committee said the change will help restore integrity to the institution.

“This matters for our students above all,” they stated. “A Harvard A grade will now tell them, as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved. An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”

Despite widespread concerns about grade inflation, Harvard students overwhelmingly opposed the cap, American Council of Trustees and Alumni fellow Steve McGuire pointed out on X. 

Now get rid of student course evaluations. pic.twitter.com/2xql1bW49U

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 20, 2026

One petition launched by a freshman claimed that the grading reforms would be “racially harmful,” The College Fix reported in April.

Concerns about grade inflation have arisen at other institutions as well, including Yale and Columbia universities and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Additionally, some professors say they are under pressure not to fail students.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 13:40

The News-to-Death Ratio Strikes Again

Authored by Carl Henegan and Tom Jefferson via The Brownstone Institute,

There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a “news-to-death ratio” of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period.

If that sounds absurd, it is, and yet very little has changed.

Take the current hantavirus scare. A cruise ship, the MV Hondius, sits off Cape Verde. There are 7 cases in total (2 confirmed, 5 suspected) and 3 deaths, including a Dutch couple and a German national. Passengers have been confined to their cabins while evacuations and disinfection efforts are organised. It is, undeniably, a dramatic story: a floating Petri dish, a whiff of quarantine, and a hint of the exotic.

In the past week alone, there have been at least 10 to 15 unique news stories, generating hundreds of articles. For a disease that, in normal times, struggles to attract even a single weekly mention, this represents a surge bordering on the hysterical.

And yet it is worth stepping back for a moment and asking, what are we actually looking at?

Hantavirus is a rare disease. In the United States, which diligently tracks such cases, there have been 890 laboratory-confirmed instances since 1993. In the UK, the situation is even less clear: from 2012 to early 2025, only 11 domestically acquired symptomatic cases have been recorded. Surprisingly, nine of these cases were not linked to cruise ships or exotic travel, but rather to a more mundane source—exposure to “pet fancy rats” or rodents bred as reptile feed.

This is not a pathogen ready to spread through the Home Counties. However, the rarity is not the issue; visibility is.

Diseases that afflict the poor, quietly and persistently, rarely command attention. Tuberculosis killed 1.23 million people globally in 2024. Over a million deaths every year, largely concentrated in less affluent parts of the world. It is one of the most lethal infectious diseases known to medicine, and yet it barely registers in the Western news cycle.

Why? Because TB is familiar, it is slow; It lacks narrative flair, and it does not trap well-heeled passengers in their cabins while helicopters circle overhead.

If you want coverage, you need something else entirely. You need novelty, uncertainty, and above all, proximity to affluence. A cruise ship outbreak ticks every box: a disease with a balcony suite.

This is the uncomfortable truth behind Rosling’s ratio: the media does not report risk, it reports drama. And drama requires context that audiences can imagine themselves in.

A rodent-borne virus in some remote rural setting barely registers. Put that very same virus aboard a cruise ship with buffet queues, balcony cabins, and a passenger list that looks uncomfortably like the readership, and suddenly it becomes headline news.

The result is a profound distortion of public perception. We are invited to worry about the improbable while ignoring the inevitable and reality. A handful of hantavirus cases generates dozens of headlines; a million tuberculosis deaths pass with barely a murmur.

If we were to apply Rosling’s lens to the present moment, the imbalance would be obvious. Three deaths linked to a suspected hantavirus cluster have produced hundreds of reports in a matter of days. Meanwhile, tuberculosis continues its relentless toll with scarcely a fraction of that attention.

The modern “news-to-death ratio” may not be precisely 8,176-to-1, but the underlying pattern remains intact.

The lesson here isn’t truly about hantavirus; instead, it’s about how we collectively determine what is significant.

Diseases associated with poverty—those that are endemic, predictable, and devastating—often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instill fear in the right audience or in the right way. No one is interested in the thousands of cholera deaths that are too remote, too ordinary, and lack the dramatic impact that draws interest. What commands attention are diseases that puncture our sense of safety, the kind that can slip past the gangway and make themselves at home on a cruise ship.

This post was written by two old geezers who live in a world where risk is misread, priorities are skewed, and the arithmetic of attention bears little resemblance to the arithmetic of death.

Republished from the authors’ Substack

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 13:00

Jane Street Accused Of Using Terra Telegram Backchannel Before UST Crash

Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

A newly unsealed court filing in the Terraform Labs bankruptcy case alleges Jane Street used a private Telegram channel with former Terraform intern Bryce Pratt to obtain nonpublic information before the collapse of TerraUSD. Pratt is currently a systems developer at Jane Street. 

The channel, called “Bryce’s Secret,” allegedly gave the quantitative trading firm a backchannel to Terraform insiders as Jane Street unwound exposure to TerraUSD (UST) shortly before the algorithmic stablecoin lost its dollar peg in May 2022, according to the filing. “Jane Street used Bryce’s Secret chat group and other backchannel sources of non-public information to front-run trading that hastened the collapse of Terraform,” the filing states.

The claims renew scrutiny of who profited from Terra’s $40 billion collapse, one of the crypto industry’s largest failures, and could test how traditional insider trading and market manipulation theories apply to decentralized finance markets.

On Feb. 23, Todd Snyder, Terraform’s court-appointed administrator, sued Jane Street, its co-founder Robert Granieri, and employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang in Manhattan federal court, accusing them of “misappropriating confidential information and manipulating market prices.” 

Two months later, Jane Street filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Terraform attempted to “extract cash from Jane Street to foot the bill for a fraud that Terraform itself perpetrated on the market,” Cointelegraph reported on April 23.

A spokesperson for Jane Street told Cointelegraph that the lawsuit was a transparent attempt to “extract money when it is well-established that the losses suffered by Terra and Luna holders were the result of a multi-billion dollar fraud perpetrated by the management of Terraform Labs.”

Terraform Labs court filing in the lawsuit against Jane Street. Source: cloudfront.net

Curve trade raises new UST concerns

The timing of a particular UST trade has raised more concerns, suggesting potential access to insider information by an unknown entity.

On May 7, 2022, Terraform quietly withdrew about $150 million in UST from the Curve 3pool liquidity pool.

Less than 10 minutes after Terraform’s withdrawal, Curve 3pool saw its largest single swap of $85 million, precipitating a steep sell-off in UST, which the filing said “ultimately led to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem.”

The heavily redacted filing does not identify the entity behind the swap.

Terraform Labs court filing in the lawsuit against Jane Street. Source: cloudfront.net

Snyder seeks to recover alleged wrongful gains from Jane Street, plus compensation for additional damages to distribute to Terraform creditors and investors who lost funds in the 2022 collapse.

Jane Street is the world’s leading quantitative trading firm by net trading revenue, with $39.6 billion generated in 2025, reported Reuters.

Cointelegraph reached out to Terraform’s court-appointed administrator for comment but had not received a response by publication.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 12:20

"Drills Are Intended To Send A Signal": Russia Holds Massive Nuclear Drills On Land, Sea And Air Alongside Belarus

Trucks carrying intercontinental ballistic missiles rumbled over forest roads, atomic-powered submarines set sail from Arctic and Pacific ports, and crews scrambled into warplanes as Russia and neighboring Belarus held the final stage of their joint nuclear drills Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the maneuvers in a video call with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. “The use of nuclear weapons is an extreme, exceptional measure for ensuring the national security of our states,” Putin said, according to AP.

Lukashenko earlier inspected Russian short-range nuclear-capable Iskander ballistic missiles at a military unit involved in the drills and declared: “I dreamed about this machine a long time ago.”

The three-day drills that began Tuesday come amid a surge in Ukrainian drone strikes. including on Moscow’s suburbs that killed three people and damaged several buildings and industrial facilities. The strikes made it harder for officials in the Kremlin to cast the conflict in Ukraine — now in its fifth year — as something so distant that it doesn’t affect the daily routines of Russian civilians.

Drills involve wide array of nuclear weapons

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the exercise involved 64,000 troops, over 200 missile launchers, more than 140 aircraft, 73 surface warships and 13 submarines, including eight armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. The drills focused on the “preparation and use of nuclear forces under the threat of aggression,” it said.

The maneuvers also practice cooperation with Belarus, an ally that hosts Russian nuclear weapons. Russian arsenals in Belarus include its latest intermediate range nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile system.

A Yars ICBM is seen during drills of Russia's nuclear forces in Belarus (Russian defense ministry).

Along with nuclear-tipped ground- and submarine-launched ICBMs, the maneuvers featured a broad assortment of short- and medium-range weapons.

Unlike the intercontinental missiles that can destroy entire cities, tactical nuclear weapons intended for use against troops on the battlefield are less powerful. They include aerial bombs and warheads for short- and medium-range missiles and artillery munitions.

The Defense Ministry said the Russian armed forces test-fired Yars and Sineva ICBMs, as well as medium-range sea-launched Zircon and air-launched Kinzhal missiles, noting that all missiles hit their designated practice targets. Belarusian troops test-fired a short-range Iskander ballistic missile inside Russia.

Putin has repeatedly reminded the world about Moscow’s nuclear arsenals since the war in Ukraine started in February 2022 to deter the West from ramping up support for Kyiv.

In 2024, the Kremlin adopted a revised nuclear doctrine, noting that any nation’s conventional attack on Russia that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country. That threat was clearly aimed at discouraging the West from allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with longer-range weapons and appears to significantly lower the threshold for the possible use of Moscow’s nuclear arsenal.

Russia's new Sarmat ICBM is being test launched at an unspecified location in Russia (Russian defense ministry).

The revised doctrine also placed Belarus under the Russian nuclear umbrella. Putin has said that Moscow will retain control of its nuclear weapons deployed in Belarus, which borders Ukraine and NATO members Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, but would allow its ally to select the targets in case of conflict.

Drills come as Ukrainian drones spotted in the Baltics

The maneuvers are held amid an increase in drone activity in the Baltic nations. On Tuesday, a NATO jet shot down a Ukrainian drone over southern Estonia. Ukraine apologized for that “unintended incident,” without specifying what had happened.

On Wednesday, an emergency announcement about a drone flying over Belarus prompted residents of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, including top officials and lawmakers, to take shelter and led to a brief closure of its airport.

Ukrainian drones targeting Russia’s Baltic ports and energy facilities have recently crossed or come down in NATO territory on several occasions. Amusingly, instead of blaming the source, Ukraine, Western officials blamed Russian electronic jamming of the drones.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service said Tuesday that Ukraine is preparing drone attacks against Russia from the territory of the Baltic countries and warned of retaliation It alleged Ukrainian military personnel had been deployed to Latvia and warned that the country’s membership in NATO wouldn’t protect it from “just retribution.” Latvian authorities said the allegation was not true.

Last month, the Russian Defense Ministry published a list of factories in Europe that it said were involved in producing drones and their components for Ukraine. It warned that attacks on Russia involving drones manufactured in Europe are fraught with “unpredictable consequences.”

Some commentators interpreted the bellicose statements from Moscow and this week’s exercise featuring short- and medium-range nuclear weapons capable of reaching targets in Europe as part of Kremlin efforts to discourage Western allies from bolstering support for Ukraine.

Asked what message the nuclear exercise was intended to send, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that “any drills are intended to send a signal,” but wouldn’t elaborate.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 12:00

US Targets Hamas Support Networks

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is sanctioning four individuals associated with a pro-Hamas flotilla that is trying to access Gaza in support of the terrorist group, the department said in a May 19 statement.

Hamas terrorists secure an area before handing over an Israeli American hostage to a Red Cross team in Gaza City on Feb. 1, 2025. Photo by SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

The flotilla is organized by the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), which has been classified as a specially designated global terrorist by the United States.

"The PCPA was established with funding from Hamas's International Relations Bureau and Hamas directs its activity through the placement of Hamas officials throughout the organization, including its executive body, the General Secretariat," the Treasury said.

"So-called humanitarian flotillas that are organized by or supporting designated parties represent a significant compliance risk for financial institutions. Sanctioned terrorist groups continue to maintain significant influence over maritime flotillas to Gaza."

The four individuals sanctioned by the Treasury include a Spanish member of the PCPA's General Secretariat, who is a central figure of the flotilla; the acting secretary general and president of the PCPA, who is from Jordan; a Belgium-based European coordinator for the Samidoun organization; and a Samidoun coordinator from Spain.

Samidoun is a front organization for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the State Department has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Both the PCPA and Samidoun act on behalf of sanctioned Palestinian terrorist organizations, the Treasury said.

In addition, OFAC sanctioned several members of Muslim Brotherhood networks who are aligned with Hamas.

All property and interests in property of the sanctioned individuals that are in the United States or in control of U.S. persons are effectively blocked and must be reported to OFAC. The sanctions prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions involving the property or interests in property of those who are sanctioned.

"The pro-terror flotilla attempting to reach Gaza is a ludicrous attempt to undermine President Trump's successful progress toward lasting peace in the region," Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said. "Treasury will continue to sever Hamas' global financial support networks, no matter where in the world they are."

State Department spokesperson Thomas Pigott said in a May 19 statement that OFAC has targeted three enablers - the flotilla organizers, Muslim Brotherhood members, and Samidoun members - who he said are used by Hamas to sustain its position in Gaza, engage in terrorist violence, and finance its operations.

OFAC's action exposes how Hamas exploits purported civil society organizations, diaspora groups, and religious institutions "to advance its malign agenda while claiming humanitarian objectives," according to the spokesperson.

"Under President Trump, the United States remains committed to supporting efforts to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East," he added. "We will continue to use all available tools to counter those who support terrorism and obstruct the path to a peaceful resolution of the conflict."

Hamas-UN Ties

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are aiming to eliminate a U.N. agency accused of employing Hamas terrorists, according to a May 19 statement from the office of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). The agency being targeted is the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

In February 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning funding for UNRWA. According to the order, the agency has reportedly been infiltrated by members of foreign terrorist organizations, with employees from the organization being directly involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

UNRWA has dismissed these allegations. In a September 2025 fact sheet, the agency said that claims of some members of its staff in Gaza having links with Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are false and that it has "not received any information, let alone any evidence, from the Israeli Authorities or any other Member State" about such accusations.

In a May 18 letter to Trump, Cotton and 24 colleagues asked that the administration take "decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA and eliminate it from the UN budget."

"Any aid organization in Gaza or otherwise must be demonstrably free of ties to terrorism and committed to transparency, accountability, and peace," they said in the letter. "We must ensure this failed system doesn't continue reinforcing the conditions that have fueled terrorism for generations. The time to act is now."

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 11:40

Turkey Liquidated Almost All Of Its US Treasuries In March To Defend Crashing Lira

Two months ago, at the end of March, we reported that Turkey was aggressively dumping its gold reserves in a panic scramble to obtain dollar funding, which Erdogan's regime was using to keep the Turkish lira from crashing, and to also pay for energy imports which had suddenly soared in price as a result of the Iran war.

The violent selling by Turkey (and other emerging markets) was behind the brutal plunge in gold prices, which tumbled by more than $1000 from near all-time highs at the start of the war to the low 4000s by the time Turkey had done selling much of its gold. 

Then earlier this week, we got another confirmation of Turkey's wild liquidation spree when the latest central bank data showed that Turkey’s foreign reserves had their biggest monthly decline on record in March, as the Iran war triggered global selloffs in emerging market assets and strained the lira.

According to balance-of-payments data, Turkey's official reserves cratered by $43.4 billion in March. Part of the decline reflected state intervention to offset portfolio outflows. The current-account deficit, meanwhile, widened to $9.7 billion in March from $7.3 billion in February as a result of soaring commodity prices.

A major energy importer, Turkey has been hit hard by higher oil and gas prices caused by the effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting disruptions to world supplies of crude and refined products. Meanwhile, global banks have started changing their formerly favorable outlook on the lira, citing the exploding current-account deficit. Should inflation pressures persist, Turkey will have no choice but to pursue another accelerated devaluation of the Turkish lira. 

“As international institutions continue to raise their average oil price forecasts for 2026, disruptions in supply chains and ongoing regional tensions — and their potential negative impact on transportation and tourism revenues — keep upward risks alive in year-end projections” for Turkey, said Istanbul-based economist Haluk Burumcekci.

Turkish central bank Governor Fatih Karahan said last week that the ratio between the current-account deficit and gross domestic product would be “below historical averages” this year while acknowledging the upside risks.

Yet as we said in March, while selling gold is a step of clear desperation for Turkey which had put in much efforts in recent years to build up a substantial gold stock, it is understandable for a regime that suddenly finds itself in a dollar funding crisis, the bigger question is did Turkey do the same with its holdings of Treasuries which are far more liquid and thus far less likely to move the market even when facing a sizable liquidation. 

The answer, we learned today, is a resounding yes.

According to Bloomberg calculations based on US Treasury data, Turkey sold almost all of its US Treasuries in March as it stepped up efforts to support its currency during the first month of the Iran war. The amount of Treasuries held by Turkey crashed to just $1.8 billion by the end of March, down from $16 billion the previous month, the data showed. The figure includes securities held by the central bank and other Turkish entities, including corporates.

The decline coincided with a selloff in Turkish markets after the Middle East conflict erupted, sending oil prices sharply higher. The central bank moved immediately to prevent a crash in the lira by tightening funding conditions and selling off foreign exchange and gold assets. Its interventions also included swapping gold from reserves, although now that it has also dumped the bulk of its last ditch dollar reserves, those swaps will almost certainly end up forcing Turkey to hand over whatever gold was pledged. 

Turkey’s Treasury holdings were as high as $21 billion in February 2025 after the country spent a year rebuilding reserves. They had peaked about a decade ago at $80 billion, before steadily declining as relations with the US soured over a range of political and geopolitical disputes, and as Turkey consistently sold reserves to maintain a smooth devaluation of the lira. 

Despite the interventions, the lira has remained under pressure as the war drags on. Last week, the central bank raised its year-end inflation target to 24% from 16%, after data showed annual inflation accelerated to 32.4%. Turkish bonds have also suffered steep losses, with 10-year yields hitting record highs of 35.75%.

And now that Turkey has no more gold or Treasurys with which to defend the currency, expect a sharp and painful death in the currency which has gone from less than 10 against the dollar five years ago to a record 45.6 today..

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 11:20